Aristotle on the Uses of Contemplation

Traditionally, Aristotle is held to believe that philosophical contemplation is valuable for its own sake, but ultimately useless. In this volume, Matthew D. Walker offers a fresh, systematic account of Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good. The book situates Aristotle's views against the background of his wider philosophy, and examines the complete range of available textual evidence (including neglected passages from Aristotle's Protrepticus). On this basis, Walker argues that contemplation also benefits humans as perishable biological organisms by actively guiding human life activity, including human self-maintenance. Aristotle's views on contemplation's place in the human good thus cohere with his broader thinking about how bio-organisms live well. A novel exploration of Aristotle's views on theory and practice, this volume will interest scholars and students of both ancient Greek ethics and natural philosophy. It will also appeal to those working in other disciplines including classics, ethics, and political theory. -------------------- "How Can Useless Contemplation Be Central to the Human Good? 1.1 An Introduction to the Utility Question For Aristotle, philosophical contemplation, or theôria, is, in some sense, the ultimate end for human beings. Contemplation is that for the sake of which our rational actions aim. The power to contemplate also has a special position in the human soul – for Aristotle, an integrated system of life-functions. Contemplation is the authoritative, or dominant, function for the sake of which the human soul’s subordinate functions (e.g., nutrition, perception, and practical reasoning) exist. As the telos of our rational actions and of our other life-functions, contemplation is, for Aristotle, the main organizing principle in our kind-specific good as human beings. On standard readings of Aristotle, contemplation has another, striking feature: it is thoroughly useless. Choiceworthy for its own sake, and lacking subservience to any higher functions, contemplation is free and leisured. Its proper objects eternal and divine, contemplation does not concern itself with pressing issues in the contingent realm of human affairs. Unlike other life-functions, it seems, contemplation makes no contribution to human self-maintenance.1 Standard readings of Aristotle’s remarks on contemplation’s uselessness are partly correct. On Aristotle’s account, contemplation’s objects are eternal and divine. Contemplation is not directly concerned with practical affairs. Nor does contemplation subserve any functions higher than itself. No higher functions exist in the human soul, after all, for contemplation usefully to subserve. So, Aristotle provides good reason to think that contemplation is, somehow, a useless activity. But consider some of Aristotle’s other views. Nature, Aristotle insists repeatedly, does nothing in vain. Perishable living organisms possess only useful parts and functions, which benefit their lives as whole. In particular, the authoritative functions of plants and nonhuman animals both characterize the lives of these organisms and constitute a useful means by which these organisms maintain themselves. Such functions are authoritative by guiding and directing the lives – and self-maintenance – of such organisms. Plants and nonhuman animals live by these functions. In doing so, such perishable organisms maintain and activate themselves as the kinds of organisms they are. Such organisms thereby approximate the eternal persistence and activity of Aristotle’s god, the Prime Mover. By construing contemplation as altogether useless for human selfmaintenance, then, standard readings have unattractive implications. Contemplation, on such readings, proves both troublingly inert and detached from the rest of human life. On such readings, Aristotle’s remarks on contemplation stand in worrisome tension with the core commitments of his natural teleology. Aristotle’s defense of the contemplative life, such readings imply, conflicts with his view that nature supplies organisms only with useful parts and functions – parts and functions that conduce to an organism’s self-maintenance and enable the organism, as far as possible, to approximate god’s imperishable, active way of being. Standard readings, in short, render Aristotle’s account of the human good strangely discontinuous with his general account of the good for living organisms. And standard readings leave us with questions. If contemplation offers no benefits for maintaining the whole system of psychic functions constitutive of the human soul, then why, on Aristotle’s view, should human beings ever possess the power to contemplate in the first place? Does nature not operate in vain by providing human beings with useless contemplative capacities? Instead of benefitting human beings, might not such capacities count instead as psychic appendages that waste resources, and interfere with functions, necessary for our self-maintenance? If contemplation does not guide or direct our other life-functions, how – if at all – is it authoritative within the human soul? One might hold, of course, that contemplation is simply the best activity in which we can engage. Hence, one might infer, when nature supplies us with contemplative powers, nature does not work in vain. And that inference could well turn out to be sound. But on Aristotle’s view, I contend, that will be so only on the condition that contemplation fully enables us to approximate the divine – a task that includes contemplation’s facilitating the stable persistence of our all-too-mortal lives. Aristotle’s remarks on contemplation generate the utility question: if contemplation is useless, how can it be central to the human good? In what follows, I explore and answer this question. In the first half of the book, I make a fuller case that the puzzle that I have just sketched indeed poses a real problem for Aristotle. In the second half, I offer a systematic response to the utility question, and I articulate a revisionary, broadly naturalistic reading of contemplation’s place in the human good. Against standard readings, I argue, contemplation of the eternal and divine actually is useful in the lives of rational animals. Contemplation is an integral function within the economy of human life-activities. Most controversially, I argue that, for Aristotle, contemplation actively guides and benefits the basic nutritive-reproductive (or threptic) functions required for self-maintenance. Aristotle’s defense of contemplation is consistent with his general account of the good for living organisms, and continuous with his account of the good for plants and nonhuman animals. His defense coheres, rather than conflicts, with his core teleological commitments. Some, perhaps, may resist the thought that Aristotle faces the puzzle that I have just articulated. Yet even these readers can accept the account of contemplation’s usefulness that I develop. Even if such readers deny that contemplation must be useful in the way I argue, they can still accept that contemplation can be useful. For these readers, I offer a textually grounded account of how contemplation can play a more active role in human affairs than standard readings have proposed.