Politics, Music, and Contemplation in Aristotle's Ideal State
David J. Depew (1991)
In Keyt & Miller, eds., A Companion to Aristotle's Politics, Oxford: Blackwell.

[The following long excerpt is from DEPEW-1991, pp. 358-359...]

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Those who pursue an exclusively political life typically mistake means for ends, treating virtue as an instrumental good useful for acquiring external goods such as power, money, and reputation, which they regard as ends. Contemplation, precisely because its value does not increase with the addition of instrumental value, and because its adepts have a strictly functional attitude toward necessities, is far less subject to this confusion. Thus if one construes contemplation as antithetical to the active life, and if one's conception of virtue does not extend to the contemplative virtues, one must become insensitive to the distinction between the inherently and the instrumentally good, on which in turn rests the distinction between mere life and political life, and thus one's ability to reflect coherently on a best state. If, however, a self-defined man of action accedes to the proposition that contemplation is an activity, even if it has no utilitarian worth - indeed, precisely *because* it does not - his conception of excellent activity will enable him to distinguish well between inherently good and instrumental aspects of politics, and a fortiori between the latter and the values of the despot.

This puts the matter psychologically and prudentially. But Aristotle means to make the point a conceptual and normative one. In the Eudemian Ethics he says: "The majority of those engaged in politics are not correctly designated politicians, since they are not truly political. For the political man is one who purposely chooses noble actions for their own sake, whereas the majority embrace the political life for the sake of money or excess." (I.5.1216a23-27, trans. Rackham) The lesson of the present argument in the Politics is the same. A person will count as genuinely political only if he regards both kinds of virtue as connected to happiness through noble activity done for its own sake. This analysis does not, it is important to note, depend on the degree to which the genuinely political person is himself able to participate in contemplative activity. It is sufficient that he love learning for its own sake, pursue it as far as possible, and honor those whose learning penetrates further than his own. [PSA: compare Pericles and Anaxagoras, or Hermias / Antipater and Aristotle] At the same time, an appreciation of genuine political life, so understood, requires that one whose own way of life is centered on contemplation own his political identity and the political context within which his leisured way of life arises. He must reject the apolitical intellectual's view that political life is, as such, an impediment to happiness and his contention that apolitical intellectualism is the "only philosophical way of life" (VII.2.1324a29). The civic life which the genuinely political person and the politically open intellectual jointly share can itself, then, be called "philosophical" with some justice. For when the soi-distant activist is open to contemplation, and the intellectual to political engagement, learning and contemplation can be pursued vigorously within the framework of a social life devoted to all forms of intrinsically worthwhile activities, and contemptuous of an overestimation of the merely instrumental, rather than of the political as such. The received distinction between the contemplative and political lives is not rendered void by this analysis. It is, however, reconceived in such a way that the latter is not the only kind of active life (VII.3.1325b17-21), and the former is not the only kind of philosophical life (VII.2.1324a29). The two lives arise within a common framework and diverge only as a function of each citizen trying to realize his own highest capabilities (VII.14.1333a29-30).

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