Contemplation versus Activity

In previous readings of Aristotle, I’ve been confused by the difference between action as the human good, like he says in the first book, and contemplation, in the last book.  I looked into that more for my paper, and found an interesting article by Stephen Bush which claims that contemplation, being a divine activity, is not the actual human good but the divine good, and the human good is what Aristotle says in the first book.  I’m going with the argument in my paper, instead of exploring it more deeply; anyone who is interested can read Bush’s article, I don’t have room.  But I do think it’s worth talking about a bit more.

I wondered if action has to be different from contemplation, but I think it does; the active happy life Aristotle describes in the first book is full of friends and relationships and life things like wars and money and political status, while in the last book he kind of says all that is supporting role stuff only good insofar as it enables the main goal of contemplation.  Contemplation, he says, is a divine activity activating the divine part of our soul, the intelligence, and not using but functioning somewhat despite the appetites and stuff we have to deal with on a daily basis.  This would seem to fit Bush’s argument.

But if contemplation is the divine activity, not the human one, why should we pursue it?  Everything has its characteristic activity is one of the principles Aristotle establishes in Book I.  It would seem that pursuing the characteristic activity of another type of being is wrong for us.

I think Aristotle would respond that since the gods designed humanity with intelligence, even though there are goods that we can pursue that realize all the different parts of our natures, we were meant to use the intelligence to connect to the source of that.