Abstract

This short book, a German translation of an unpublished English version, with 95 pages of text and 114 of notes, consists of three main chapters: I. The nature of the complete human life is similar to the nature of God's; II. The activity of the complete human being resembles that of God; III. The function of god in the Nicomachean Ethics. Its author tries to show that it is possible to assign, in a strictly Aristotelian way, a metaphysical ground to Aristotle's ethics. His treatment of this topic is not as interesting as the topic itself, for he not only tends to believe that a precise understanding of the terms in which a passage is couched is the equivalent of its understanding, but he restricts the issue to the theoretical life of EN X, and Aristotle at the end of Book I distinguishes between ethical and dianoetic virtues. Dudley, however, wishes to show that the unmoved mover of Met. XII is not only the model for the highest human activity but is also the object of that activity at its peak. Although he is well aware that Aristotle never gives a proof that the unmoved mover is unique, he tends to dismiss all talk of "gods" as signs of "dialectical" passages, from which Aristotle's own doctrine is distinguished by the use of the singular. The 55 unmoved movers are not so readily brushed aside; but the real difficulty lies elsewhere. Dudley grants that the human intellect cannot understand god thinking himself ; he does not raise the question whether Aristotle thought the highest human activity would cease to be such if Aristotle were mistaken about god. Consequently he does not see that god thinking himself cannot be the model for human thinking if it consists in thinking god thinking himself, for to deny the difference would be to identify god with a momentary state of the human mind. Human thinking, moreover, has to come to the highest principle; the highest principle thus is known as a cause before it is known as a being in itself. This is essentially the difference between the unmoved mover of Physics VIII, which is never an ousia, and that of Met. XII. Dudley is indifferent to this difference. Human thinking, if it could complete itself, would comprehend more than god and alone think the being of the beings together with the being of the highest being. If Dudley had started from the beginning of the Ethics, where Aristotle remarks on the vast difference between proceeding from rather than to the principles, he would not have had to face this absurdity.--Seth Benardete, New York University.