The Place of Contemplation in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty
In Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics
University of California Press, 1980

"There is nothing about the practical life which prevents its also being contemplative, and even enhanced by being contemplated. Indeed, Aristotle remarks (1140b7-11) that men like Pericles are thought to possess practical wisdom because they have contemplative understanding of what is good.... Properly conceived, theoria completes and perfects the practical life." (RORTY-1980b, p. 377)

"I shall argue that the range of contemplation is wider and its effects more far-reaching than has generally been allowed. In particular, we can contemplate the moral life in activity as well as the starry heaven above. It is only in a corrupt polity that the contemplative life need be otherworldly, and only in a corrupt polity that the policies promoting the development and exercise of contemplative activity would come into conflict with those establishing requirements for the best practical life." (RORTY-1980b, p. 378)

"Aristotle shows how virtuous friendship enables a person of practical wisdom to recognize that his life forms a unified, self-contained whole, itself an energeia." (RORTY-1980b, p. 378)

"While objects that do not change at all are paradigmatic cases of what is contemplated, it is also possible to contemplate the unchanging form of what does change. Species meet that requirement: they have no external telos: they are eternal and unchanging (1035b3-1036a1; 1030a6-1031a14). Even when the definition of a species is a pattern of a temporal life, that pattern can be comprehended in one timeless whole. The definition of a species gives not only the criteria for membership but also the essential attributes whose actualization is the ergon of the species (1034a5; 1016b33; 1032b1; 1139a16-20)." (RORTY-1980b, p. 379) [PSA: this is clearer if we understand eidos as a way of being.]

"In principle, then, the most general ends of human life, insofar as these are defined by the species, can be contemplated. For living creatures the formal and final causes coincide: our general ends are the actualization and the exercise of the basic activities that define us. If eternal objects can be contemplated, and if species are eternal objects, Humanity and its proper ends can be contemplated." (RORTY-1980b, p. 379)

"When Aristotle says that the true thought and the right desire of a good prohairesis are homologoi - when they have the same logos or reason - he means that the ends that determine the phronimos' operative desires are ends that do correspond to, or are specifications of, the ends that are established by the essential attributes of the species." (RORTY-1980b, p. 383) [PSA: see also LEAR-2004, p. 107.]

"Thinking, too, in its various forms, including theoria, is not merely a mental activity, although it certainly is at least that. It is, in every sense of the word, a realization of our potentialities (1166a17; 1169a2; 1178a2-8)." (RORTY-1980b, p. 387)

"Most realizations of the soul are also physical realizations.... It is not that matter suffers a change by being bombarded by stimuli; it rather becomes what it *is* by doing its real work." (RORTY-1980b, p. 387)

"Self-sufficiency has of course nothing to do with isolation or even with self-development. A self-sufficient life is one whose activities are instrinsically 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 to or promotes self-development but because it is part of a self-contained, fully realized life (1097b7-20)." (RORTY-1980b, p. 389) [PSA: note here again that it is the *life* that's self-sufficient or whole, not the *person*.]

END