Anyone can experience luck. In his Physics, Aristotle gives a famous example of chance: a man who is owed money visits some place for an entirely different reason (say, goes to the marketplace to buy pomegranates), by accident runs into the man who owes him money, and is able to collect it. Getting back his money is the fulfillment of an end goal for the man (a final cause, or a “for the sake of which,” in Aristotle’s terminology), but it resulted from an event undertaken for a different goal—that is, getting the pomegranates—that had an entirely accidental relationship with what happened. In going about the business he set himself on, he got his money back as an accidental bonus. This form of luck happens inconsistently.

But Aristotle explores the possibility of a second kind of lucky person in the Eudemian Ethics. This one is consistently lucky, succeeds without recourse to rational deliberation, especially thrives in risky pursuits and in matters where, although skill is decisive, a lot of luck is involved—for example, in military affairs or piloting a ship. Aristotle has no doubt they exist, but the lucky are an odd group of people. They do something that seems impossible. They succeed by chance “always or for the most part,” while chance seems to have as part of its definition precisely that it does not happen always or for the most part. Fascinatingly, he frames it as a question of internal desire. Consistently lucky people somehow have an urge toward what is good for them, just what they should, when they should, and how they should.       

Aristotle marks his attempt to account for the second class of luckiness as a kind of stretch. He says it would be “beyond human wit” to discover the cause:

Since we observe that some people are lucky irrespective of all knowledge and correct reasoning, it is clear that something else should be the cause of their luckiness. Whether that luckiness exists or not, which desires what it ought and when it ought, there might not be a human reckoning of this.

He considers three possible causes: wisdom, a personal demon, and nature. He quickly rules out the personal demon. Some people claim that a certain guardian angel or daimôn guides the decisions of lucky people directly: “the lucky man has a good daimôn as his pilot.” He dismisses this model; it is simply absurd for Aristotle that the divine would show particular favor to a foolish person, rather than to the best one. He also rules out wisdom as the cause of consistent luckiness, because it is precisely empty-headed people who are lucky, and they cannot give an account of their success, which they would be able to do if it had arrived from wisdom.

Aristotle then makes a further claim. It is not just that luckiness can’t be explained by wisdom, but that lack of wisdom is a prerequisite for it. That people succeed in being fortunate consistently is for Aristotle correlative with their having an absence in higher-order intellectual activity, in just the area in which they are lucky:

Furthermore they are clearly senseless—not that they are concerning the rest of things…—but they are senseless precisely in things in which they are lucky. For in seafaring it is not the most skillful who are lucky, but just as in the fall of dice, one man throws nothing, and a different man throws a roll that corresponds with a naturally lucky man.

Aristotle turns to his final proposal. He asks whether the consistently lucky are so by nature, and this possibility detains his attention longer. He starts by considering whether consistent luck comes from a naturally inclined disposition and compares it to the case of people who have sharp eyesight. This capacity is due to a individual’s physical nature, and perhaps the case of consistently lucky people is like this. Their ability would be some quality of their natures, the knack to desire just what they should, when they should, and how they should. He says that many people think this is the case. This runs into a problem: we would then need to say that men who are lucky are not so on account of luck, but just because their natures are a certain way, and this would mean there is no such thing as luck.

But this is not acceptable to Aristotle because he is sure that luck exists, independent of nature—on the model of our example of serendipity in the marketplace—and if luck were a knack due to a natural disposition, one could then make a technê out of it. But there is no technê of luckiness. The kind of phenomenon he is looking at, he clarifies again by invoking dice, is when something happens “many times in succession to someone, not because it ought to happen this way, but it would be like always throwing dice in a lucky throw.” But this is not acceptable to Aristotle because he is sure that luck exists, independent of nature—on the model of our example of serendipity in the marketplace—and if luck were a knack due to a natural disposition, one could then make a technê out of it. But there is no technê of luckiness. The kind of phenomenon he is looking at, he clarifies again by invoking dice, is when something happens “many times in succession to someone, not because it ought to happen this way, but it would be like always throwing dice in a lucky throw.” 

Aristotle introduces another way of talking about nature as the cause, beyond the particular natural disposition of this or that person. This sets him on a hunt for the source of lucky people’s opportune desires, and into some of his broadest consideration of human desire in the corpus. He takes a perspective so broad, in fact, that he opens up an even further dimension to the question—the background of all motion in the universe in general. Lucky behaviors might work out the way they do, he proposes, because of the way actions in the whole cosmos in general tend to work out.

In Aristotle’s psychology, all living things have a soul. But souls have different degrees of complexity in different forms of life. At the highest level, he puts soul’s intellectual function, which manifests uniquely in humans. It is responsible for self-conscious discursive reasoning. Next comes the motive aspect, which all creatures that possess the capacity for physical movements have. This function of the soul acts on desires that emerge from the soul’s next layer, the appetitive faculty, the center of all desires, whether from rational thoughts, inclinations, or irrational passions. These desires are regularly formed in interaction with a lower faculty, the perceptive capacity, which is present in creatures that can perceive things. At the lowest order sits the nutritive soul, which is responsible for the simplest urges, visible in all living things, for nutrition and reproduction. Plants have only this lowest order.

Aristotle begins his consideration of fortuitous desires by considering them against all the urges toward action that produce motion in humans. He wonders:

Aren’t there impulses in the soul, some from reasoning, others from irrational inclination? And aren’t the ones from irrational inclination prior?

Aristotle tells us what the prior irrational inclinations aim for by nature: a simple urge for pleasure. He links this to his general principle that nature itself always reaches for the better.

All this begins to suggest to him another way in which nature could be behind consistent luckiness. Lucky people are operating more in the way that features of the natural world (which mostly do not have the capacity for rationality) generally operate. That is, via a system of subrational natural impulses that orients them toward the good:

If some are well-suited by nature, just as singers sing, although they don’t have knowledge, in this way they are naturally well-suited and they follow their impulse without reason, in the direction in which they are naturally oriented, and they desire what they ought, when they ought, and how they ought—these people succeed, although they are senseless and irrational, just as also people sing well although they are not able to teach it. These are the sort of people who are lucky—whoever without reason succeeds for the most part. It turns out that the lucky would be so by nature.

He clarifies what he means here by deepening the contrast with normal self-consciously guided human actions:

Some acts are performed from impulse, and others, if people choose to do them, are not, but are the opposite. We claim that they have been quite lucky when they succeed, both in the case of acts from impulse, in which they seem to have reasoned poorly, and again in those done by choice, if they wished for a good thing different from or less than they got.

The consistent kind of luckiness is not an epiphenomenon of rational self-aware choice. People behave precisely without engaging their rational minds at all, and without self-consciously pursuing any particular goal. Aristotle has in mind a case like a ship’s pilot entering an unknown port and twitching on the tiller at just the right times to avoid submerged rocks. A person in this situation will succeed without thought and instead because his actions are aimed the right way, at the right time.

The trajectory into rudimentary nature is anchored by the salience of the term impulse. It is a rare category for Aristotle. Over his corpus as a whole, the soul’s movements that he discusses most are the result of self-conscious factors, whether thoughts or passions. They are divided into classes situated in the volition center, including wish, desire, and passion. These are the central features of the systematic doctrine of his ethics and his theories regarding human action. In the corpus he typically reserves the term impulse, by contrast, for a different class: automatic or involuntary urges. Urges like these emerge in all creatures, from plants all the way up to us. They appear far down the chain of being, and are a particularly embodied process. They are so rudimentary as to only be at the cusp of cognition. It is not surprising that a whole range of involuntary actions are designated impulses in the Aristotelian Problemata: the movement of sweat out of the pores, bedwetting, yawning, sneezing, hiccupping, and the stuttering of melancholics. He also uses the term regularly at an even lower rung in his ontological ladder: the concept marks the tendency of fire to move up and a stone to move down. In the case of humans, these gravitational principles toward certain motions are humming away not because we desire them by rational choice, a passion, or a wish. They are just built into our sheer existence as substances in the world. And so, when Aristotle tells us that the starting points, at the most rudimentary levels, of any of our psychic chains emerge from impulse without reason, he is placing them within this class—just at the threshold of cognition itself.

In the case of consistent luckiness, actions and good outcomes that are typically only achievable via our self-conscious rationality wind up resulting from the lower order, impulse-driven system. Just after Aristotle admits “there might not be a human reckoning of this,” he starts in a new direction, by telling us there is in fact a way to explain it: perhaps lucky people’s “self-conscious desire is not operating according to its natural function, but it is disabled by something.” The consistently lucky person is here a stripped-down version of the human creature.

With the system of normal desire hampered, it must be some more rudimentary system that lies underneath it that is now initiating events. This raises the interesting question of where the preconscious, nonrational impulses come from. He first considers whether luck could be the source:

Is luck the cause of this very thing, of desiring what one ought when one ought? Or will it then be the cause of everything? For then luck will also be the cause of thinking and of deliberating, for a person certainly did not deliberate because of having deliberated earlier, and having deliberated about that—no, there is a certain starting point; nor did he think after having thought before thinking, and so on to infinity. So it turns out that thought is not the beginning of thinking, nor is deliberation the beginning of deliberating. en what else is except fortune? With the result that everything will be from chance.

Though this is an unsavory result that he moves away from quickly, it is clear that what he is after will be the actuator of all our chains of reasoning and desire. The infinite regress argument has provoked the deeply interesting question: what causes us to think the things we do in the first place. Our strings of thought can’t spring up ex nihilo, and so there must be a starting point. When he considers luck as a candidate for this starting point of any thought or desire that we might have, the outcome is not persuasive, since then “everything” will be from chance, and luck obviously does not rule the cosmos. Then all would be chaos.

So he abandons fortune as a candidate, and the argument takes its next fascinating turn:

Is there some beginning beyond which there is no other, and is this beginning, on account of its being the way it is, able to produce this sort of effect [i.e., consistent luckiness]? This is the thing we are seeking, What is the starting point of motion in the soul? It is quite clear. Just as in the whole universe it is a god, also it is in the soul.

Throughout Aristotle’s corpus, one candidate for a starting point is our self-conscious discursive thought. After all, Aristotle consistently correlates contemplation with the divine. And deliberative thought is almost always a completely adequate explanation of where our motions come from. So, it may seem sensible that in claiming that the divine is the ultimate starting point, he is claiming that thought is the starting point. However, he has already ruled this out, and he does so again:

Well, in a certain way the divine in us moves everything. But the beginning of reasoning is not reasoning but something stronger. What then could be stronger than even knowledge except god? [It can’t be virtue,] for virtue is a tool of intelligence. And on account of this, as I was saying earlier, they are called lucky who, if they follow their impulse, succeed although they are irrational, and to deliberate is not helpful to them. For they have the sort of a starting point which is something stronger than intelligence and deliberation (others have reasoning; but the lucky people do not possess this); they have divine inspiration. But they are incapable of this [thinking and deliberation]: for it is by being without reason that they strike the mark.

The unmistakable central claim is that god ultimately serves as the starting point of all of our motions, and it is because god is in this role that the fortuitous outcomes result for the rare human that is consistently lucky.

But what is the mode by which god is supposed to be operating here? Scholarly debate in recent decades has tried to discern whether Aristotle means that the divine starts our motions via our intellects (the “god in us”) or whether it does so independently. The consensus has settled on the hypothesis of independent divine involvement—but without much more specification as to precisely its mode.

A free-floating divine operation would be a very strange idea for Aristotle. He has already ruled out that the divine would act in an ad hoc fashion. How else might it be involved? The most widely held positions in the current scholarly discussions of divine involvement in nature do not yield much help at all. He cannot mean that the divine is involved because the fixed stars desire the Prime Mover. This is too narrow; it accounts only for their circular motion. Equally unhelpful would be a proposal that he means that, in some general way, since the divine is the indirect cause of all kinetic motion in the universe, via the movements of the heavens, it is also the ultimate indirect source of the motions that result in lucky psychic movement. Such a claim is much too broad to be of value.

But there is another possibility. The divine functions throughout nature as the final of final causes, providing a kind of atmospheric voltage that sparks each thing to aim to fulfill its particular “good,” such as nature has constructed it, always or for the most part. Let’s us call this the impulse hypothesis.

According to the account of luckiness, 1) people need to be empty-headed; 2) when in this state, the higher-order centers that initiate motion are not operative, just bare impulses; and 3) to explain how these might incline toward good outcomes requires the divine. And, just so, the impulse hypothesis makes room for a very narrow mode for the divine to be involved in the workings of the deep structure of all events in nature. According to it, movements from potentiality to act are precipitated via the Prime Mover. While nature sets out the circuits for these movements, the divine provides the voltage that actuates them. Further, like a vector that has both force and direction, this impetus to actualize has a consistent direction. It does not precipitate just any kind of actualizing of any kind of potential. It veers toward the good, always or for the most part.

Outside of describing the motions of the heavenly bodies, Aristotle mostly has no need to appeal to this hypothesis in his explanations of specific events. But the phenomenon of consistent luckiness requires it. It is an example of the general principle articulated by the impulse hypothesis at work in that specific part of the terrestrial natural world that is the human organism. Without the impulse hypothesis, we do not have an explanation for why bare impulses of substances in even rudimentary natures (in this case, ourselves as organisms) vector toward the good. With it, we do. In such a state we are akin to plants sending roots toward water.

We gain some further benefit by examining this phenomenon of consistent luckiness with respect to his carefully drawn categories of accidental and nonaccidental events, in which the category of luck is articulated in the rest of his corpus. As we saw above, his main axes for that question are technê/luck and natural/spontaneous, and we can take these categories one by one. There is no question of these actions falling under a technê, of course, and the discussion rules this out explicitly. But further the consistent kind of luckiness should, strictly speaking, no longer count as “luck” according to the taxonomy set out above. The category pertains only to goal-directed human action (praxis) which is accompanied by an accidental benefit. In the case of consistent luckiness, Aristotle has specifically ruled out the idea of any particular praxis, and instead speaks of benefits accruing to a human considered as a hunk of the natural world, without engaging any particular volition. The proper term for fortuitous outcomes in nature, divorced from purposeful human praxis, is the spontaneous. The fact that these people operate entirely outside of self-conscious goal-directed action argues that these events would fall under that larger term. But as a final consideration, there is at least some reason to think that such phenomena would qualify as being “according to nature.” When he explores three possible causes of consistent luckiness (wisdom, a personal demon, and nature) the first two are ruled out quickly. The latter is ruled out, in the sense of a natural disposition, but then returned to, and the treatment lacks conclusiveness with respect to whether his explanation is, strictly speaking, to be classified as within nature. Interpreting through the impulse hypothesis provides a clarifying vantage as to why.

The explanation of consistent luckiness is found to be attributable to an organizing principle behind nature as a whole (so in that sense natural) that is not exactly part of nature but prior to it (and in that sense not natural). Remember, Aristotle first rules out imagining a certain kind of natural disposition causes lucky behaviors, meaning some people would have natures that result in luckiness. He reasons that then there would be no such thing as luck, because it would be subsumed into a natural process (but luck does exist), and one could make a technê out of it (but one can’t). Rather it derives from the underlying principle, god, that keeps nature actualizing its potential, toward the good. Lucky people are under the guidance of a nonvoluntary system, operating at the level of a physical organism and achieving outcomes that veer toward the good. Therefore, consistent luckiness, strictly speaking, breaks the rubric by which Aristotle typically measures accidents. It is strange behavior, indeed, and can only be explained by recourse to a layer of causation that lies behind all movement in the universe, both the “natural” and the “spontaneous.”

Adapted from Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity by Peter T. Struck. © 2016 by Princeton University Press. Reprinted by permission.

Explore Luck, the Summer 2016 issue of Lapham’s Quarterly.