Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Divine thinking must be eternally about itself, for any other subject
would sully the divine purity. Thus, god's telos, contained in its activity
of thinking, is clearly known because of its simplicity.
It is important for Aristotle and many others that the reality that
human thought and divine thought share is this energeia. But there is no
question that Aristotle's human is in fact an enmattered form, and there
is no activity independent of that cause or origin (arche). While divine
thinking is of itself, human thinking must have an object; we necessar-
ily think about something that has its epistemological source in experi-
ence. Nevertheless, throughout the human thinking of an object is the
activity of thinking itself, and here the descriptions of human thought
and divine thought match. For example, energeia in both god and
humans is life, pleasure, and self-awareness—that is, the awareness of
activity or energeia as what one is doing. This similarity can lead to a
perhaps too enthusiastic reading of the role of Aristotle's god as final
cause and a sense that the blessed person of the
Nicomachean Ethics
somehow escapes the normal human condition; but that reading is
wrong. Human thought, even in its best moments, is always enmattered,
never the pure activity of divine thinking. Thus, the activity of human
thought contains an end or telos that is complicated by its enmattered
origins. The challenge of human thinking is found in both what it thinks
about and what it does in thinking about this object of thought. Unlike
divine thought, when humans think about themselves, they think about
complex things they have learned about through experience, and they
may respond to those complex things in many ways. There is no direct
analogy between the simplicity of the activity of divine thinking and the
complex activity of human thinking, nor any persuasive hope that human
thought can be divine. Hence, due acknowledgment of the role of matter
in human thinking, or as well, human nature, is necessary to get our
understanding of human thinking right, and in so doing to get the nature
of human nature complete.
Aristotle's god thinks only of itself (process) because that is what
is most (Aristotle suggests) noble. But it can be objected that the
absence of matter in god, and the consequent absence of death and the
possibility of failure, strips god of thoughtfulness and moral life, and
would do the same for us. The eventuality of our death (the most
cataclysmic consequence of our enmattered nature) and, along the way,
