In order to gain knowledge of divine circularity in the simplest way, we will start with how human beings come to understand the divine, rather than how the divine understands itself. The question this essay takes up: to what extent is human participation in the divine contemplative? And, as a corollary, to what extent does the contemplative life exclude the “merely human” life (i.e., the political, familial, etc.). Lear formulates this problem by asserting that, according to Aristotle, the philosopher reaches a point where he must choose between the higher life of the divine and the lower life of the human. I will argue that this dilemma can and should be avoided in order to remain consistent with the general drift of Aristotle's thought, and that divine participation and political interaction can be mutually complementary.
The argument will proceed along the following lines: First, we will examine Aristotle's account of thinking as it relates to the actuality of form. Second, we will examine Aristotle's prime mover, with an emphasis on the account from the Metaphysics. After this we will be in a position to critique Lear's position about the impossibility of a life that is both political and contemplative. Aristotle's epistemology differs very importantly from post-Cartesian epistemology in that he does not sharply divide the thinker and the object of thought. Whereas dualism holds that the object of thought stands outside the mind and gets replicated within the inner space of the consciousness (and thereby reduces truth to the “accuracy” of the mental image to the external object), Aristotle instead holds that in reflective thought the thinking of an object and that object itself cannot be distinguished (De Anima II:1 413a4-7).
Aristotle's epistemological position depends on his ontology; the highest actuality of a thing lies in the thinking of it, rather than in “the thing itself” apart any apprehension of it.
Aristotle famously distinguishes between the form and matter of a substance, and the form generally corresponds to the thing's actuality, while the matter corresponds to the thing's potentiality. A substance, though it always shows the wholeness of its form in a way, nevertheless often fails to manifest it explicitly. If we think of the frog Lear uses as an example, we see that “Kermit” manifests his frog form to different degrees at different times. When Kermit was a tadpole his frog-nature was not as actual as it is when Kermit grows to be a full-grown adult frog; when Kermit sleeps, he does not actualize his frog-nature to the degree he does when he hops from lily pad to lily pad (Lear, 118). According to Aristotle, Kermit never fully actualizes his frog-form, although he possesses it (and has being by virtue of it) at all times, for Kermit cannot understand what it means to be a frog. However, this does not mean that frog-form cannot be fully actualized; frog-form gets most fully actualized in the active contemplation of what it means to be a frog. Kermit's frogness is potentially what the mind makes actual in the contemplation of the nature of frogs. This ought not be construed as saying that the frog-form is an inert potentiality which the mind actualizes, for form is actuality and mind does not act upon it so much as receive it. As Lear observes, since we cannot distinguish between the object of thought (frog-form) and the thinking of it, we can say that in the mind frog-form thinks itself—contemplation is the “self-understanding of the frog form!” (Lear 131). The highest actuality of a form is the contemplation of that form, and therefore mind cannot be said to be incidental to nature as a whole, but in some sense constitutive of it. One must take care here to avoid construing Aristotle as an idealist in the modern sense; for the mind which constitutes the world is not in any straightforward sense a human mind.
The contemplation carried out by human beings relies on perceptual, inner-worldly engagement with the things thought of. Thus, though active thinking brings out the full actuality of, for example, Kermit's frog-nature (or, probably more accurately, provides the space within which Kermit's frog-nature can fully express itself) human contemplation depends upon the things encountered in order that it might happen at all. However, human beings stand out from nature as the only sub-lunar beings who possess the ability to think. Aristotle regards this ability to think as not merely human, but as divine. If the being of things cannot be separated from their highest actuality, and the highest of actuality is thinking, then the being of things establishes itself in the activity of contemplation. But if contemplation belongs to human beings alone, and human beings depend so heavily on things in order to think them, Aristotle's ontology begins to appear quite frail.
Aristotle diverges from transcendental idealism in the sense that he does not believe reality to be divided into the phenomenal and the noumenal in such a way that mind must impose its processes upon the noumenal in order to make it intelligible as phenomena. Rather than attribute to the mind this kind of computational conversion process, Aristotle regards the reality of the things which we think of as already constituted in mind, and therefore human minds participate in a Mind which transcends the shortcomings of composite beings. Mind does constitute the reality of nature (as its full actuality) in a way which encompasses the whole of the cosmos, and this mind Aristotle calls the unmoved mover.
At this juncture we would do well to consider the relation of actuality to potentiality, for, as stated above, the full actuality of a substance is the contemplation of that substance, and so when Aristotle posits the unmoved mover he declares the being of the cosmos to be pure actuality. Put another way, the being of the cosmos cannot be separated from the source of its actuality—which is the unmoved mover. This view requires that actuality be ontologically primary to potency, and if this proves false, Aristotle's doctrine of the unmoved mover stands in immediate peril.
In Metaphysics Λ:6, Aristotle makes a brief argument for the primacy of actuality(1): “But surely if [potentiality takes precedence over actuality] there would be no beings at all, since it is possible to be capable of being and yet not be.” (1071b27-29) If the being of inner-worldly beings were constituted by potency, then these beings might exist or else they might not, but no reason accounts for their existence. This relies partly on the cosmological argument found in the eighth book of the Physics (258b26-259a8) which, briefly summarized, asserts that a series of ontologically contingent beings (that is, beings which admit potentiality) cannot be explained simply by explaining each thing in the series by the thing which comes before it in the series, and therefore that the series can only be explained by a pure actuality. Motion consists of the change in a substance from potentiality to actuality – for this argument to work it is rather essential that we not think of motion as the relative movement of extended substance in abstract space – and while one composite substance might cause another composite substance to be actualized in a certain way, this does not explain why anything has become actual in the first place. The whole infinite series of movers may as well not have been, and therefore even an infinite series of contingent things cannot explain the existence of the whole—which itself admits of potency. While an individual in the series of causes might be explained by the individual before it, this does absolutely nothing to explain why the series as a whole exists, when it might just as well not have. We might ask, with Leibniz, why not rather the nothing? Therefore, composite beings as well as the totality of composite beings, cannot account for their actuality, and so any account must include a necessary being(2); an account of existence as a whole presupposes the primacy of actuality.
The cosmological argument indicates something more basic concerning the nature of actuality and potentiality: that actuality cannot only be called prior to potentiality for purely a posteriori considerations (something exists rather than nothing), but also by virtue of what actuality and potentiality are. Thus, even for schools of thought, such as that represented in the Upanishads, which would not accept the basic tenets of Aristotelian physics which make his argument binding, if one only considers actuality (form) or potentiality (matter) it becomes evident that potentiality must depend on actuality if one hopes to have any sort of intelligible ontology. In the ontic sense, of course, actuality does depend in a way upon potentiality; in the case of tangible things, for example, we usually see that things must be able to be x before they actually become x. However, when we consider potentiality and actuality as such, we find that potentiality is only insofar as it is a kind of actuality—otherwise it would be nothing at all. David Bentley Hart summarizes the point nicely:
The foregoing treatment of thinking and form, actuality and potency, puts us in a position from which we can begin to attack the central question of the essay: to what extent can human participation in the divine be purely contemplative? Obviously, insofar as we think, we participate in the divine (our mind becomes like the divine Mind), but we might inquire more closely into how we participate as humans in the divine.
Perhaps the corollary to the thematic question will be best to deal with first. As mentioned above, Lear declares that “Man must be pulled in contrary directions: toward a political life within society and toward an anti-social life of contemplation,” and holds that Aristotle maintains the harmonious ethical life ought to be abandoned if possible for the higher, divine life of contemplation (Lear, 312). This argument seems to obscure a crucial difference between the the way in which the divine contemplates and the way in which human beings contemplate. God, not being a composite being, needs no engagement with things to begin thinking about them; rather, the intelligibility which renders things thinkable to humans gets constituted in God's thinking. Although when humans actualize their capacity to think they participate in the divine mind, they do not participate in the same way that God does—the thinking belongs entirely natural to God, while it does not belong entirely naturally to men. Humans can contemplate only what they encounter, and therefore, for humans, the importance of inner-worldly engagement with things cannot be ignored. Human beings certainly can exercise the contemplative life without company, while the social life is impossible under the same circumstances, but men cannot contemplate entirely apart from composite existence. A frog must at some point have been present for a human to contemplate what it means to be a frog, a tree must at some point have been present for a human to contemplate the form of a tree, and so on. It might be said that after a certain level of interaction with the objects of contemplation one no longer needs them and can go off to solitude to contemplate, and while this might be true of things, plants, and non-rational animals (which I am suspicious of), this cannot be said of human beings; for while it seems that whatever Kermit the frog can never exceed Kermit's frog-form – in other words, when one knows the form of frog, nothing remains left to know that Kermit himself might add – it seems that the human form remains so inexhaustible that a point will never be reached at which a finite mind will have achieved sufficient knowledge of the human form that it can leave to go off to solitude so that it might contemplate. Simply by virtue of human limitations the point Lear theorizes will inevitably be unreachable; knowing at least one form – the human form – cannot take place apart from the everyday engagement with particular substantiations of that form. This may not be a satisfactory answer, because it might be the case that the human form can be known by the solitary simply through his contemplation of the things around him—after all, the solitary still has himself. However, Aristotle's ontology maintains that a thing reaches the divine through its actuality as the particular kind of thing it is (for insofar as it manifests its form, it participates in the divine mind); therefore human beings participate in the divine insofar as they become more the kind of thing they are, and while this includes the rational faculty by which humans imitate God especially, one cannot ignore that this is one (especially privileged) aspect of the human form and that the animal and social aspects of man also fall within the human form—man is a political as well as a rational animal. Thus, if one intends to understand the human form by reflecting on himself, it seems that, in order for this self-reflection to capture the fullness of the human form, one must participate wholly in all aspects of what it means to be a human being—and this obviously must include the political dimension.
Now we have gained the position from which we can answer the original thematic question concerning the extent to which human participation in the divine is contemplative. The kind of motion which characterizes the divine is circular motion, because in circular motion there is no distinction in motion away from... and motion towards... Lear claims that the philosopher reaches a point where two different ways invite him in different directions, towards the social or political life or towards the solitary or contemplative life. Although I have argued these are not entirely mutually exclusive, it must be admitted that they still go in different directions; the one towards the purer divinity, the other towards the more ambiguous life possessed by a human being. However, one also should note that both of these are, in their own way, pathways to the divine by different routes. The more one becomes the kind of being one is, the closer one comes to pure actuality, and therefore engaging in animal and social life, though it may appear to be leading away from the divine, is an expression of the divine as actuality. The way which at first appears to be a more direct way to the divine in fact incorporates the ordinary types of human engagement. Despite the different directions the two pathways start out in, they meet in a sort of complimentary circularity, one less inherently stable than divine circularity, surely, but that is to be expected for a composite being, and so we can conclude that while contemplation may permeate the whole of human life and the participation of human life in the divine, it does not have to do so in a way that excludes the more mundane aspects of life, but instead takes them up into the context of a full, balanced human life.
___________________________
1Aristotle makes the fuller argument in Book Θ, Chapter 8 of the Metaphysics.
2“Necessary being” must be taken in an analogical sense here; neither Mind as Aristotle imagines it nor God as the Christian tradition later imagines it can be construed as having “being” in a univocal sense with circumscribed beings.
3. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing Co. p. 224
The argument will proceed along the following lines: First, we will examine Aristotle's account of thinking as it relates to the actuality of form. Second, we will examine Aristotle's prime mover, with an emphasis on the account from the Metaphysics. After this we will be in a position to critique Lear's position about the impossibility of a life that is both political and contemplative. Aristotle's epistemology differs very importantly from post-Cartesian epistemology in that he does not sharply divide the thinker and the object of thought. Whereas dualism holds that the object of thought stands outside the mind and gets replicated within the inner space of the consciousness (and thereby reduces truth to the “accuracy” of the mental image to the external object), Aristotle instead holds that in reflective thought the thinking of an object and that object itself cannot be distinguished (De Anima II:1 413a4-7).
Aristotle's epistemological position depends on his ontology; the highest actuality of a thing lies in the thinking of it, rather than in “the thing itself” apart any apprehension of it.
Aristotle famously distinguishes between the form and matter of a substance, and the form generally corresponds to the thing's actuality, while the matter corresponds to the thing's potentiality. A substance, though it always shows the wholeness of its form in a way, nevertheless often fails to manifest it explicitly. If we think of the frog Lear uses as an example, we see that “Kermit” manifests his frog form to different degrees at different times. When Kermit was a tadpole his frog-nature was not as actual as it is when Kermit grows to be a full-grown adult frog; when Kermit sleeps, he does not actualize his frog-nature to the degree he does when he hops from lily pad to lily pad (Lear, 118). According to Aristotle, Kermit never fully actualizes his frog-form, although he possesses it (and has being by virtue of it) at all times, for Kermit cannot understand what it means to be a frog. However, this does not mean that frog-form cannot be fully actualized; frog-form gets most fully actualized in the active contemplation of what it means to be a frog. Kermit's frogness is potentially what the mind makes actual in the contemplation of the nature of frogs. This ought not be construed as saying that the frog-form is an inert potentiality which the mind actualizes, for form is actuality and mind does not act upon it so much as receive it. As Lear observes, since we cannot distinguish between the object of thought (frog-form) and the thinking of it, we can say that in the mind frog-form thinks itself—contemplation is the “self-understanding of the frog form!” (Lear 131). The highest actuality of a form is the contemplation of that form, and therefore mind cannot be said to be incidental to nature as a whole, but in some sense constitutive of it. One must take care here to avoid construing Aristotle as an idealist in the modern sense; for the mind which constitutes the world is not in any straightforward sense a human mind.
The contemplation carried out by human beings relies on perceptual, inner-worldly engagement with the things thought of. Thus, though active thinking brings out the full actuality of, for example, Kermit's frog-nature (or, probably more accurately, provides the space within which Kermit's frog-nature can fully express itself) human contemplation depends upon the things encountered in order that it might happen at all. However, human beings stand out from nature as the only sub-lunar beings who possess the ability to think. Aristotle regards this ability to think as not merely human, but as divine. If the being of things cannot be separated from their highest actuality, and the highest of actuality is thinking, then the being of things establishes itself in the activity of contemplation. But if contemplation belongs to human beings alone, and human beings depend so heavily on things in order to think them, Aristotle's ontology begins to appear quite frail.
Aristotle diverges from transcendental idealism in the sense that he does not believe reality to be divided into the phenomenal and the noumenal in such a way that mind must impose its processes upon the noumenal in order to make it intelligible as phenomena. Rather than attribute to the mind this kind of computational conversion process, Aristotle regards the reality of the things which we think of as already constituted in mind, and therefore human minds participate in a Mind which transcends the shortcomings of composite beings. Mind does constitute the reality of nature (as its full actuality) in a way which encompasses the whole of the cosmos, and this mind Aristotle calls the unmoved mover.
At this juncture we would do well to consider the relation of actuality to potentiality, for, as stated above, the full actuality of a substance is the contemplation of that substance, and so when Aristotle posits the unmoved mover he declares the being of the cosmos to be pure actuality. Put another way, the being of the cosmos cannot be separated from the source of its actuality—which is the unmoved mover. This view requires that actuality be ontologically primary to potency, and if this proves false, Aristotle's doctrine of the unmoved mover stands in immediate peril.
In Metaphysics Λ:6, Aristotle makes a brief argument for the primacy of actuality(1): “But surely if [potentiality takes precedence over actuality] there would be no beings at all, since it is possible to be capable of being and yet not be.” (1071b27-29) If the being of inner-worldly beings were constituted by potency, then these beings might exist or else they might not, but no reason accounts for their existence. This relies partly on the cosmological argument found in the eighth book of the Physics (258b26-259a8) which, briefly summarized, asserts that a series of ontologically contingent beings (that is, beings which admit potentiality) cannot be explained simply by explaining each thing in the series by the thing which comes before it in the series, and therefore that the series can only be explained by a pure actuality. Motion consists of the change in a substance from potentiality to actuality – for this argument to work it is rather essential that we not think of motion as the relative movement of extended substance in abstract space – and while one composite substance might cause another composite substance to be actualized in a certain way, this does not explain why anything has become actual in the first place. The whole infinite series of movers may as well not have been, and therefore even an infinite series of contingent things cannot explain the existence of the whole—which itself admits of potency. While an individual in the series of causes might be explained by the individual before it, this does absolutely nothing to explain why the series as a whole exists, when it might just as well not have. We might ask, with Leibniz, why not rather the nothing? Therefore, composite beings as well as the totality of composite beings, cannot account for their actuality, and so any account must include a necessary being(2); an account of existence as a whole presupposes the primacy of actuality.
The cosmological argument indicates something more basic concerning the nature of actuality and potentiality: that actuality cannot only be called prior to potentiality for purely a posteriori considerations (something exists rather than nothing), but also by virtue of what actuality and potentiality are. Thus, even for schools of thought, such as that represented in the Upanishads, which would not accept the basic tenets of Aristotelian physics which make his argument binding, if one only considers actuality (form) or potentiality (matter) it becomes evident that potentiality must depend on actuality if one hopes to have any sort of intelligible ontology. In the ontic sense, of course, actuality does depend in a way upon potentiality; in the case of tangible things, for example, we usually see that things must be able to be x before they actually become x. However, when we consider potentiality and actuality as such, we find that potentiality is only insofar as it is a kind of actuality—otherwise it would be nothing at all. David Bentley Hart summarizes the point nicely:
...While, in the realm of the ontic, the possible is in some sense a wellspring of the actual, this necessarily finite order requires a kind of conceptual inversion, which renders its logic infinite, if one is to think of being as such, for even possibility – whether one conceives of it as abstract forms or simply concealed “ecstasies” -- must first be... One must also recall that “necessary” here does not mean a first cause in the ontic sense, but the transcendent “possibility of possibility” (which must be infinite actuality). Anyway, even to think of the possibility as “higher” than actuality is covertly to think of it as actual... (3)When one posits possibility as higher than actuality, error arises from the confusion in terms, because actuality has more being by virtue of what it means to be actual. The arguments above demonstrate this both a posteriori and a priori. Thus, we can now take the unmoved mover as the sheer actuality that acts as the source of being for all inner-worldly beings or – what is the same – the Mind in which the highest actuality of the forms gets constituted.
The foregoing treatment of thinking and form, actuality and potency, puts us in a position from which we can begin to attack the central question of the essay: to what extent can human participation in the divine be purely contemplative? Obviously, insofar as we think, we participate in the divine (our mind becomes like the divine Mind), but we might inquire more closely into how we participate as humans in the divine.
Perhaps the corollary to the thematic question will be best to deal with first. As mentioned above, Lear declares that “Man must be pulled in contrary directions: toward a political life within society and toward an anti-social life of contemplation,” and holds that Aristotle maintains the harmonious ethical life ought to be abandoned if possible for the higher, divine life of contemplation (Lear, 312). This argument seems to obscure a crucial difference between the the way in which the divine contemplates and the way in which human beings contemplate. God, not being a composite being, needs no engagement with things to begin thinking about them; rather, the intelligibility which renders things thinkable to humans gets constituted in God's thinking. Although when humans actualize their capacity to think they participate in the divine mind, they do not participate in the same way that God does—the thinking belongs entirely natural to God, while it does not belong entirely naturally to men. Humans can contemplate only what they encounter, and therefore, for humans, the importance of inner-worldly engagement with things cannot be ignored. Human beings certainly can exercise the contemplative life without company, while the social life is impossible under the same circumstances, but men cannot contemplate entirely apart from composite existence. A frog must at some point have been present for a human to contemplate what it means to be a frog, a tree must at some point have been present for a human to contemplate the form of a tree, and so on. It might be said that after a certain level of interaction with the objects of contemplation one no longer needs them and can go off to solitude to contemplate, and while this might be true of things, plants, and non-rational animals (which I am suspicious of), this cannot be said of human beings; for while it seems that whatever Kermit the frog can never exceed Kermit's frog-form – in other words, when one knows the form of frog, nothing remains left to know that Kermit himself might add – it seems that the human form remains so inexhaustible that a point will never be reached at which a finite mind will have achieved sufficient knowledge of the human form that it can leave to go off to solitude so that it might contemplate. Simply by virtue of human limitations the point Lear theorizes will inevitably be unreachable; knowing at least one form – the human form – cannot take place apart from the everyday engagement with particular substantiations of that form. This may not be a satisfactory answer, because it might be the case that the human form can be known by the solitary simply through his contemplation of the things around him—after all, the solitary still has himself. However, Aristotle's ontology maintains that a thing reaches the divine through its actuality as the particular kind of thing it is (for insofar as it manifests its form, it participates in the divine mind); therefore human beings participate in the divine insofar as they become more the kind of thing they are, and while this includes the rational faculty by which humans imitate God especially, one cannot ignore that this is one (especially privileged) aspect of the human form and that the animal and social aspects of man also fall within the human form—man is a political as well as a rational animal. Thus, if one intends to understand the human form by reflecting on himself, it seems that, in order for this self-reflection to capture the fullness of the human form, one must participate wholly in all aspects of what it means to be a human being—and this obviously must include the political dimension.
Now we have gained the position from which we can answer the original thematic question concerning the extent to which human participation in the divine is contemplative. The kind of motion which characterizes the divine is circular motion, because in circular motion there is no distinction in motion away from... and motion towards... Lear claims that the philosopher reaches a point where two different ways invite him in different directions, towards the social or political life or towards the solitary or contemplative life. Although I have argued these are not entirely mutually exclusive, it must be admitted that they still go in different directions; the one towards the purer divinity, the other towards the more ambiguous life possessed by a human being. However, one also should note that both of these are, in their own way, pathways to the divine by different routes. The more one becomes the kind of being one is, the closer one comes to pure actuality, and therefore engaging in animal and social life, though it may appear to be leading away from the divine, is an expression of the divine as actuality. The way which at first appears to be a more direct way to the divine in fact incorporates the ordinary types of human engagement. Despite the different directions the two pathways start out in, they meet in a sort of complimentary circularity, one less inherently stable than divine circularity, surely, but that is to be expected for a composite being, and so we can conclude that while contemplation may permeate the whole of human life and the participation of human life in the divine, it does not have to do so in a way that excludes the more mundane aspects of life, but instead takes them up into the context of a full, balanced human life.
___________________________
1Aristotle makes the fuller argument in Book Θ, Chapter 8 of the Metaphysics.
2“Necessary being” must be taken in an analogical sense here; neither Mind as Aristotle imagines it nor God as the Christian tradition later imagines it can be construed as having “being” in a univocal sense with circumscribed beings.
3. David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth. Grand Rapids: Eerdman's Publishing Co. p. 224
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