C.D.C. Reeve is one of the great masters of classical philosophy. In his latest work, Action, Contemplation, and Happiness, Reeve offers the lover of Aristotle a feat of erudition. In an opening passage that brings to mind Edmund Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations, Reeve straightway notes the necessity, when rereading a thinker so long-studied as Aristotle, of taking up the text naively and afresh: “the best way forward is to go back to the beginning and start over” (p. ix).  Reeve admits “this is a naïve book, which allows Aristotle’s philosophy to emerge in its own terms” (p. ix). The book takes up central questions in Aristotle’s texts and attempts to do so in a purposively holistic manner, with the result of redrawing the map of the Aristotelian world from the new naïve position of reference. Reeve requests the reader too approach the book holistically: that is, “see the journey through to the end . . . before deciding” whether to accept this new mapping of the Aristotelian world (p. x). 

Holistic the study certainly is. It focuses on action and contemplation, which for the Stagirite are functions of the soul that involve desire, perception, and understanding. Each of these functions in turn involves the transmission of form—form transmitted from the world to the soul (perception and understanding); and form transmitted from the soul to the world (desire and action). Thus Reeve sets out to explore the intricacies of the processes by which Aristotle conceives these form-transmissions to occur. Since soul itself is a form and since soul inhabits and moves, not only human beings but the entire universe (as pneuma), Reeve’s exploration takes him from the farthest reaches of the cosmos to the inner reaches of the human being, into the city and into the life of virtue. In this journey, we discover our human consonance with the logic of the universe, since in the thinking of Aristotle, the macrocosmic universe and the microcosm of the soul involve similar processes and similar explanatory devices.

First the natural world is explored, in terms of the transmission of form to or from the soul. Aristotelian ontology maps a continuous scale of beings, from inanimate beings to animate beings; though the latter have souls and the former enjoy only the motivating life force of pneuma, the two kinds of beings differ only minimally from each other in Aristotle’s account. Reeve follows the trail of “starting-points” whih he sees as critical to Aristotle’s ontology. Up to the heavens Reeve escorts us to rediscover that primary of all starting-points, Aristotle’s “prime mover.” God is indeed a living being, dwelling in the primary heaven, but Reeve discovers in the naïve lines of Aristotle’s Metaphysics that the “prime mover” fact about God is not an essential aspect of His being; “prime mover” is not an essential definition of God. God is not essentially a kind of mover but essentially a kind of understanding, an eternally active understanding whose object is that only object worthy of constant divine contemplation—Himself. The relationship of pneuma to the bodies it enlivens is then explored, and animals are distinguished from humans in that the movement of animals is on the order of automata. In animals, movement is shown to be a function of pneuma, a constituent of the blood originating in the heart, the body’s “starting-point.”

Desire, perception and understanding are then considered, showing how these control action, contemplation and truth. Theoretical wisdom is exposed as the most rigorous form of scientific knowledge which treats of the most worthy things, and it is further described as that virtue that ensures truth in contemplation of those things. Next Reeve moves to the estimable virtues, excellences of character, which is the domain of practical wisdom, and practical wisdom emerges as the realm of action-related truth. Finally, Reeve arrives at the question of what constitutes the happiest human life, which is revealed as the telos (ideal target or goal) of practical wisdom. We learn, in contrast to the speculations about God and the heavens in the Metaphysics, that human happiness is not arid intellectualism or uninterrupted contemplation of excellent things in separation from the world, as many readers may have expected from the description of God’s activity. Rather and surprisingly, the happy life turns out to be the “complete” life that “cannot exist apart from external goods,” though Reeve notes that happiness does not consist in these goods but in the full life that includes these goods but is actively engaged in “living in accord with virtue” (p. 247). Education labors in the interest of this end (p. 253) and philosophy, as the science engaged in the exploration of starting-points, is a science of a highest order. Theology, which follows God’s example in contemplating only God, is the highest science for its pointed study only of divine things, sticking to the same “single simple pleasure” in which God engages. Human beings, on the whole, are hardly able for long to follow God’s example because we are changeable creatures always in need of novelty, even in the objects of our thought, so boredom sets in and draws us away from the dedicated contemplative life. Therefore, argues Reeve, “the fault line in human nature seems to coincide with the divide between action and contemplation” (p. 268).

Action, Contemplation, and Happiness is a rich study that will satisfy the classical scholar’s craving for the profound delights of complex exegesis. It is not for the faint of heart, nor for the novice scholar, unlearned in the Ancient Greek tongue. But philosophers and classicists at a distinguished level of preparation are in for a rare treat. This book is suitable for graduate level studies of Aristotle or scholars in the field.

© 2013 Wendy C. Hamblet

Wendy C. Hamblet, Ph.D., Professor, North Carolina A&T State University.