Misfortune and the Contemplative Life
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In this article, I consider Aristotle’s discussion of the contemplative life as a response to the fundamentally destabilizing menace of misfortune and an uncertain future. Beginning with a recapitulation of how that menace emerges in NE I, 10, I then investigate how several passages in NE X, 6-9 can be read as responding to it. The perfect completeness of contemplative activity is contrasted with the necessary incompleteness of purposive, practical activities that always aim at something beyond themselves, even when they also happen to be ends in themselves (e.g., political virtues such as courage and justice). I closely analyze how the happiness of the contemplative life is supposed to be more durable and continuous than other human activities, including practical activity within a political context. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of intellect in De Anima III, I argue that since the characteristic activity of intellect (νοῦς), intellection, is invulnerable to harm in its engagement with its objects, this confers a kind of divine blessedness on the contemplative life. Yet even a life characterized by contemplation, to the extent that the human being is a rational animal, remains exposed to misfortune to an unsettling degree. This tension between the human being’s highest actualization as intellective activity, a perfection that seems to finally unite human being and divinity in the carrying out of a divine and blessed human life, and the human being’s animal, mortal nature, embodied, exposed to harmful influences in its environment, subject to suffering, is treated in the light of Homer’s story of Odysseus’ stay on Calypso’s island (Od. 5) to argue that ultimately such a blessed life requires too high of a price and that we should, like Odysseus, reject the possibility to become divine if that means losing everything that makes human life precious and irreplaceable.
Abstract
In this article, I consider Aristotle’s discussion of the contemplative life as a response to the fundamentally destabilizing menace of misfortune and an uncertain future. Beginning with a recapitulation of how that menace emerges in NE I, 10, I then investigate how several passages in NE X, 6-9 can be read as responding to it. The perfect completeness of contemplative activity is contrasted with the necessary incompleteness of purposive, practical activities that always aim at something beyond themselves, even when they also happen to be ends in themselves (e.g., political virtues such as courage and justice). I closely analyze how the happiness of the contemplative life is supposed to be more durable and continuous than other human activities, including practical activity within a political context. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of intellect in De Anima III, I argue that since the characteristic activity of intellect (νοῦς), intellection, is invulnerable to harm in its engagement with its objects, this confers a kind of divine blessedness on the contemplative life. Yet even a life characterized by contemplation, to the extent that the human being is a rational animal, remains exposed to misfortune to an unsettling degree. This tension between the human being’s highest actualization as intellective activity, a perfection that seems to finally unite human being and divinity in the carrying out of a divine and blessed human life, and the human being’s animal, mortal nature, embodied, exposed to harmful influences in its environment, subject to suffering, is treated in the light of Homer’s story of Odysseus’ stay on Calypso’s island (Od. 5) to argue that ultimately such a blessed life requires too high of a price and that we should, like Odysseus, reject the possibility to become divine if that means losing everything that makes human life precious and irreplaceable.
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