Made for Happiness by Jean Vanier

Author:Jean Vanier
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2017-07-28T14:40:29+00:00

The Ultimate Final Cause

What kind of vision is Aristotle ultimately seeking? First he seeks to broaden his perspective, to extend it beyond familiar things, towards the highest, most divine realities. Nature has an extraordinary abundance of things to offer that are passionately interesting to study. There is also the sky with its heavenly bodies, the movement of which has something divine about it. Aristotle never limits his inquiry to man; there are things nobler than him. It is as if man were borne along by the universe. Man is mortal, and the stars and the universe are eternal.

. . . it would be strange to think that the art of politics, or practical wisdom, is the best knowledge, since man is not the best thing in the world. (NE 1141a20–22)

. . . for there are other things much more divine in their nature even than man, e.g. most conspicuously, the bodies of which the heavens are framed. (NE 1141b1)

The ancient Greeks had not reached the level of knowledge of our astrophysicists, but they were fascinated by the motion of the heavenly bodies, by their very regular movement, which seemed inalterable: a simple movement — displacement about the sky — that seemed to escape the cycle of “generation and corruption” of realities here below. All these things made them think the heavenly bodies were among the eternal realities. Man, too, is endowed with movement, not only with locomotion, but with all forms of “becoming”: growth, intellectual progress, but also corruption and death. The stars are simpler in the manner in which they move; they seem incorruptible, immortal. What is more, they constitute the world, in that, without the stars, the sky would collapse, whereas man can pass away without affecting the world. All this makes Aristotle think that the stars are the highest and most divine realities among visible things.

Through the practice of contemplating the stars, the intelligence learns to see further. It progresses in contemplation.

The intelligence must also learn to see each thing in its deepest dimension, which is to say from the point of view of its end. Where is it going? What is its good? These are the questions that the intelligence must ask if it wishes to grasp a thing at its source. Aristotle thinks the human mind is capable of this; he must himself have undergone a very powerful intellectual experience of the source of being. He came to the understanding that the source of everything is the good towards which it tends, and that consequently true knowledge sees things from the point of view of their end. The evolution of a flower is understood in relation to the end at which it aims: the bearing of fruit. But things are not isolated. There is an order in the universe that holds everything together. In the end the flower returns to the earth, because everything is in a state of movement, and that is another good. To learn to contemplate is thus also to get used

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