La contemplazione come attività migliore: Aristotele e la trasformazione della cosmologia platonica

Abstract

This PhD thesis proposes an approach to the question of the relationship between human being and cosmos in Aristotle. My point of departure is the very allusive nature of the references to the cosmos and the heavenly entities as objects of contemplation in the Ethics – particularly within the arguments that lead to the identification of theoretical activity with supreme human happiness. My questioning concerns the meaning of these references: i.e., the status of the cosmos in Aristotle’s conception of human happiness. I show that, regarding this question, he deliberately departs from Plato. Beyond the recovery of a constellation of Platonic themes (coming in particular from the Timaeus, where they are articulated around a cosmological vision) Aristotle proceeds to a de-cosmologisation of ethics, redefining in an original way the ethical implications of the relationship between human beings, the cosmos and the divine. In the first part, I examine the Protrepticus, arguing that the question of the statute of the cosmos as object of contemplation is conceptually framed by the thesis of a secondarisation of object relative to activity, put into play by Aristotle, in his definition of contemplation’s highest value. In the second part, I examine the motif of the contemplation of the cosmos in the Timaeus, taking into account four patterns of relationships between the human being and the cosmos, which correspond to as many modes of relation to the divine: domination, kinship, understanding and assimilation. In the third part, I examine the famous determination of theōria as an identity between the intellect and the intelligible of Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII7 and 9. I argue that this thesis contains a criticism of Plato’s conception of the intellect: conception that undermines the value of contemplation in regards to the value of its object. I then use this analysis to show that in EE VIII3 Aristotle implicitly critically answer to some cosmological position of Plato’s.