The Place of contemplation in Aristotle´s Nichomachean Ethics.

Amelie Oksenberg Rorty.

Sometimes he intimates that practical affairs might well be ordered so as to give the greatest opportunity for such
Theorizing (1177a12-18; 1145a6-11)

I want to suggest a way of reading Aristotle that shows how the contemplative and the comprehensive practical lives need
not be competitors for the prizes of a life well-lived. Properly understood, they not only perfect and enhance each other,
but provide the conditions for one another´s fullest development 1

I want to save Aristotle form at least gross elitism –though certainly not its subtle forms –by suggesting that it is only in a
bad polity that the contemplator is not also characteristically a good man, and only in a bad state that the prizes of
contemplation are its other-worldiness.

I.

Theoria is the self-contained activity par excellence. Not only is it done for its own sake, but it is complete in its very
exercise: there is no unfolding of stages, no development of consequences from premises. It is fully and perfectly achieved
in the very act (1177b1-5). The contemplator is no more interested in explaining than he is in nobility or serenity.

It should also be possible to contemplate the unchanging form of what does change. Species meet that requirement; they
have no external telos: they are eternal and unchanging (1035b3-1036ai; 103oa6-1031a14). Even when the definition of a
species is a pattern of a temporal life, that pattern can be comprehended in one timeless.

The minimalist view treats definitions as the terse formulae of the essential properties of the species (the important
debates about whether essential properties are analytically necessary, and whther necessity is to be construed de re or de
dicto do not affect our argument here.

The expansionist view of definition allows the explication of the various activities directly implied by the essential
properties to be part of the definition, and therefore to be contemplatible (73a34-73b15)

Both minimalist and expansionist definitions can be apprehended in a single act of thought, either in intuition, as the
beginning of scientific knowledge, or in theoria, as a complete and self-contained activity.

If eternal objects can be contemplated, and if species are eternal objects, humanity and its proper ends can be
contemplated.

II

It means among other things, “really knowing” what one is doing. This sort of understanding need not, of course, be
articulated. Characteristically, it is expressed in action.

When actions are processes, they are geared to the appropriate external telos; when they are energeiai, they are properly
understood, under the right description with the appropriate intrinsic telos.

Virtues does not consist in short-cutting the stages, leaping to the final good for each process; rather it consists in getting
the stages properly nestled.

(Dynamis-kinesis)/(kinesis-energeia) Aristotle resists treating processations as potentialities, because he wants to

preserve the intentionality dependence of action descriptions.

Two people can be doing the same thing –discussing philosophy, passing legislation, writing poetry or kneading dough-
may be performing virtually the same physical motions and saying virtually the same thing, but performing different
actions. One virtually the same thing, but performing different actions. One person may be performing it as an activity, the
other as a process structured and motivated by external goals. Although philosophy is essentiality an energeia, it can be
done with different intentions by different practitioners: one person may be doing philosophy is essentially energeia, it can
be done with different intentions by different practitioners: one person may be doing philosophy as a way of achieving

1
Nagel has argued, symptomatic of a deeper problema –the problem of whether the species is defined by its
best capacities or by the range of its essential natural potentialities –the account I give is meant to provide
an Aristotelian resolution to that indecision as well.
fame, another as a way of engaging in intellectual combat. Because the true philosopher does the activity for its own sake,
for the sake of thinking-what-is-real. The philosopher does not pile up truths as a miser hoards gold.

Truth-seeking as an energeia treats truths as intrinsic to the activity, not as an end-product.

This knowledge of what to do and how to do it –a knowledge of how the ends of human action are to be realized in a
particular situation, is the knowledge that the phronimos has. The general understanding ends is expressed in particular
choices, not by mechanically applying rules, or grinding out syllogisms.

The practical syllogism is the articulation of the phronimos knowledge; but the phronimos is no necessarily efficient at
generating conclusions of a train of reasoning; that reasoning is the formal cause implicit in his action.

The intellectual component of an action is its formulation: the phronimos knowledge of the proper ends of actions is not
based on reasons; it is the ground of further deliberation, rather than reached by deliberation.

Rules that are independent of actions and yet guide them. The difference between theoretical and practical reason is not
that practical reason applies thought to actions, but that it provides the intentional form ingredient in the action.

The virtues have an understanding of basic human activities and how they constitute the ergon of the species, but they do
not have a set of rules that generate decisions (if that were so, episteme could replace phronesis).

What does all this tell us about what contemplation can add to the moral life? Why isn´t phronesis enough?

Well I suggest that this is just the difficulty: despite implicit knowledge of human ends, the phronimos grasps those in the
particular; his knowledge of the good is expressed in the appropriate action done in the right way, in the mean that suits
each situations. It is in his actions that the phronimos specifies and articulates his knowledge of the general human ends.
(1144b1-1145a11)

The phronimos is presumably aware of this virtue, and derives pleasure from it; but he does not necessarily know why his
virtues are virtues, need not have a theoretical understanding of the connection between his virtues and the energeiai that
constitute a well-lived life.

Theoria can complete and perfect and the practical life, making it not only self-justified but self-contained because its
grounds are contained within it. But theoria does not make a person into a phronimos.) The phronimos who has also
contemplated the species has perfected his knowledge: he sees why the essential energeiai that are the activities of the
virtuous are self-contained as exercises of the basic potentialities of the species.

The philosopher explicates and analyzes the knowledge implicit in what the phronimos does. By analyzing the ends of
human life, the moral philosopher determines the activities and processes that constitute a well-lived life (1094ai-
1094b11). Proving that an action-type (for it is course action-types rather than individual action-tokens that concern us)
qualifies as a self-justified, self- contained complete and perfected energeia involves showing that it is a specification of a
natural species defining activity (1170a16-19)

Ethics is not a science. There is, for one thing, a large range of variation within the species, constituting distinctive
characteristic virtues. This is one of the reason that ethics is not a branch of psycho-biology. (…) we can only hope for a
reasonable, but not a scientific description (1094b11-27)

First of all, it is clear that in the Ethics Sophia is the virtue corresponding to theoria: it is the virtue of the intellectual part
of the soul. But Sophia is not merely one among the virtues that are ingredient of a happy; contemplating humanity and
the energeiai that are its proper functions and perfect and fulfil that life.

How then are we to deal with Aristotle´s denial that political and practical affairs are fit subjects for sophia? When
Aristotle denies the applicability of sophia to practical affairs, he is resisting its assimilation to phronesis, arguing against
Platonists who would unify the intellectual and the moral virtues. But while sophia cannot take the particular as its
objects, and cannot be a substitute for the development of proper habits, there is no reason why it cannot take the general
ends of human activity, defined as they are by the essence of the species, into its scope.

Of course the contemplator is not, as contemplator interested in the moral consequences of his insight into human nature;
nevertheless, the contemplator qua person can be, and is.

III
While this may tell us what contemplation can contribute to an understanding of the moral life, and even to its perfection,
have yet to see why the contemplative life is the most prize worthy, the happiest as well as the best. To see this, we must
sketch some of Aristotle´s more difficult views about thinking and the thinker.

Thinking, too, in its various forms, including theoria, is not merely a mental activity, although it is certainly at least that. It
is, in every sense of the word, a realization of our potentialities (1166a17; 1169a2; 1178a2-8)

When we are engaged in intellectual thought, no particular part of us is actualized as the sort of flesh it potentially is.

It is the actualization of a potentiality in an activity, with the added and difficult characteristic that in thinking, the mind
becomes identical with its objects. For Aristotle, the object of thought are neither the efficient causes nor the products of a
process. The divinities, the stars, he species do not strike our minds.

An analogy, rather far-fetched one to be sure, may help us to see how Aristotle´s view that the mind is active in thinking
can be reconciled with his claim that nous becomes identical with the forms of its objects (430a14-25; 431a1-8).

That truth is integral to the activity of thinking, and not a by-product of it, and that the formal causes of thought appear
within the activity itself, and not simply outside it, efficiently causing resemblances or simulacra within the mind.

The “objects” of contemplation are the best and most perfect substances. So by and in contemplation one becomes
actively identical with the formal character of those substances.

As contemplative persons, thinking the species, humanity, and its essential energeiai, we realize those energeiai fully,
being not only practically virtuous as the phronimos is –virtuous on each occasion as the occasion requires.

The contemplator of humanity becomes a unified whole, a self-contained, self-justified actualized humanity, his essential
and perfected life. Such a contemplator not only lives his life, he is that life as an eternal and unified self-contained whole.

IV

To see why this identity of thought and thinker contemplating humanity is not only a good thing, but the best and indeed
the most pleasant component of the fully happy life, we need to consider the pleasures and fruits of friendship.

Self-sufficiency has of course nothing to do with isolation or even with self-development. A self-sufficient life is one
whose activities are intrinsically worthy, have their ends in themselves, are worth choosing regardless of what may come
of them. Aristotle is not concerned to justify friendship because it conduces or promotes self-development, but because it
is part of self-contained, fully realized life (1097b7-20)

What does Aristotle mean by saying that friends share the activities of life? And how can the mutual mirroring of friends,
observing (theorein) one another´s virtues conduce, as Aristotle claims, to a sense of one´s own life, and to one´s pleasure
in one´s own life (1169b33-1170a3)?

For human being, Aristotle says, to live well, is to perceive well and to think well. These are natural energeiai: their
exercise is paradigmatically pleasurable. (1170a 16-20)

We are not yet on that account aware that we are substances, and so are not yet aware of ourselves as possible objects of
contemplation. In contemplating humanity, we become formally identical with it; and of course we recognize ourselves to
be a members of the human species. But neither of these gives us the reflective awareness –the sense- of ourselves as
humanity. Friendship provides that sense of ourselves existing as a substance; it supplements the identity assured by
contemplation, and to some extent, sets the stage for it.

Because we are better able to observe (theorein) our friends than ourselves, we come to see not only the activities they
perfom, but come to see those activities as ordered by the proper form of whole life. Our friends not only model the
virtues for us, enabling us to see our own reflected in theirs; by sharing the ordering activities that are our lives, we come
to be aware of their existence, not only in one activity after another, but in one, ordered self-contained life, itself an
energeia.

It is because sharing activities with our virtuous friends leads us to see their lives as a unity.

Through virtuous friendship, we move from the paradigmatic pleasures to the pleasure of a human life as one energeia, the
pleasure of our existence as humanity. (…) But we did not sense ourselves as substances, did not take pleasure in the
energeia of our life-as-human-life. (…)
 V.

Contemplating the species is not sufficient condition for virtue; it seems not even to be a necessary condition. If thinking
noble makes the mind noble, it does not thereby make us act nobly.

It is of course as a political problem that this emerges most sharply, and it is for this reason that the discussion of politics
follows the discussion of contemplation in Book X.

He hopes that the two courses will coincide, that as decisions to promote peak exercises of human faculties are those that
will also promote their best exercise in the course of a whole life, so also political decisions to promote the best
development of contemplators are also those that promote the flourishing of virtuous non-contemplators.

But sometimes of course, the contemplative and the practical lives diverge, and the political system that supports one
seems at odds with the other. Such conflict is a symptom of practical and perhaps also of scientific failure: the real nature,
the proper definitions of human energeiai are misunderstood by common opinion and common practice.

When they conflict, the palms are given to the contemplative life, because the independence of intellectual from the moral
virtues allows contemplation to continue in the midst of political disaster and practical blindness. Because many of the
moral virtues are interdependent, and because their exercise often involves social and political activity, it is difficult to
lead an excellent practical life when basic energeiai are misconceived.