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Full Idea
The lower animals have no share in happiness, being completely incapable of contemplation.
Gist of Idea
Lower animals cannot be happy, because they cannot contemplate
Source
Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1178b25)
Book Ref
Aristotle: 'Ethics (Nicomachean)', ed/tr. ThomsonJ A K/TredennickH [Penguin 1976], p.333
A Reaction
I've heard it suggested that the recipe for human happiness is to be good looking and rather dim. Very few people can be seriously good at contemplation.
| 18231 | Anaxagoras said a person would choose to be born to contemplate the ordered heavens [Anaxagoras] |
| 18229 | Only contemplation is sought for its own sake; practical activity always offers some gain [Aristotle] |
| 104 | Contemplation (with the means to achieve it) is the perfect happiness for man [Aristotle] |
| 5272 | The intellectual life is divine in comparison with ordinary human life [Aristotle] |
| 105 | We should aspire to immortality, and live by what is highest in us [Aristotle] |
| 18232 | The gods live, but action is unworthy of them, so that only leaves contemplation? [Aristotle] |
| 110 | Lower animals cannot be happy, because they cannot contemplate [Aristotle] |
| 111 | The more people contemplate, the happier they are [Aristotle] |
| 621 | Contemplation is a supreme pleasure and excellence [Aristotle] |
| 4012 | The Stoics rejected entirely the high value that had been placed on contemplation [Stoic school, by Taylor,C] |
| 7071 | Life and rationality are pointless if we can only contemplate the freedom of our own ego [Jacobi] |
| 18233 | Contemplation is final because it is an activity which is not a process [Korsgaard] |
| 18226 | For Aristotle, contemplation consists purely of understanding [Korsgaard] |