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Full Idea
The circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy of gods. ...Still, everyone supposes that they live and are therefore active. ...Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production, what is left but contemplation?
Gist of Idea
The gods live, but action is unworthy of them, so that only leaves contemplation?
Source
Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics [c.334 BCE], 1178b), quoted by Christine M. Korsgaard - Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value 8 'Finality'
Book Ref
Korsgaard,Christine M.: 'Creating the Kingdom of Ends' [CUP 1996], p.235
A Reaction
Is the ideal life for a human being to be paralysed by injury, and hence capable of nothing except godlike 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] |