Aristotle onEudaimonia,Nous, and Divinity

Abstract

AbstractEver since antiquity Aristotle’s interpreters have puzzled over the respective roles he assigned in his ethics to practical and theoretical rationality. No one doubts, however, that he regarded the essence of the human self as the godlike capacity of intellect (nous). This chapter argues that the divinity of nous pertains to reason’s contributions to happiness throughout the Nicomachean Ethics. Hence the work is not bifurcated, as commonly supposed, into the political goal of moral virtue and the intellectual end of contemplation. The latter is the highest human function, but it should be regarded as ancillary to the mainly practical thrust of Aristotelian ethics.