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I n t r o d u c t i o n The Active and Contemplative Lives It is therefore not so trivial a matter, as it seems to some, whether philosophy starts out from a fact or an act. —Fichte, Foundation of the Entire Doctrine of Scientific Knowledge John William Miller provides us with a philosophy of the act that is the basis for and ingredient to the active life.1 This is a life of deeds and legislation, power and responsibility, as well as originality and fate. It is a way of life that looks askance on the divine and the eternal and elevates the political and mortal. The active life is inseparable from history and various modes of historical understanding including remembrance, fabrication, and narration. A philosophy of the act, or actualism,2 necessarily takes up all of these elements. It is a form of metaphysics that, in seeking a reflective apprehension of the conditions of one’s endeavors and the order of one’s world, turns not toward the eternal but rather to the temporal. Actualism is a philosophy of persons, a philosophy interested in making the actual “shine” and establishing the “eloquent presence” of the authoritative individual (MS 191). “The acknowledgment of the actual,” Miller writes, “is also the recognition of the individual” (DP 160). The concern with the active life is of course an ancient one. The term descends from Aristotle’s distinction between bios politikos and bios theoretikos.3 Yet the difference between the life of shared words and deeds enacted in the political community and the life of intellect and wonder exemplified in the life of the mind was noted prior to Aristotle’s naming of these two lives. Presocratics such as Parmenides considered the qualities and aims of these two lives. Plato assessed democracy in the Republic, found it wanting, and supplanted it with the autocracy of philosophy. Following on the Greeks, the Romans picked up on the current of Platonism and appropriated the distinction stated as a difference between vita activa and vita contemplativa. The Fathers of the Christian Church and their medieval descendents adapted the distinction to suit their monotheistic interpretation of the origin and aims of human existence. With the advent of modernity, the terms themselves began to fall out of use but the importance of the distinction was preserved as its logic, fraught with tension, was worked out 1 over the centuries with contemplation giving way to action even as the meaning of action itself was redescribed. The development of that logic determined the proximate heritage of our contemporary period of historicism, naturalism, postmodernism , and skepticism. The active life and its complement, the contemplative life, establish a basic system of concepts and distinctions forming the texture of our contemporary experience . As Hannah Arendt has masterfully shown,4 not only can the history of philosophy be written in their terms but an examination of the contemporary mind also can be fruitfully undertaken by considering the tensions and implications of these two modes of human being. The fact that the terms active life and the contemplative life have now fallen out of use is important. For Miller’s interest in appropriating a distinction that has long ceased to flourish in our explicit discourse might suggest that his philosophical project is an exercise in antiquitarianism. Nothing could be further from the truth. In crafting a philosophy that sets the human deed in the place of prominence , Miller is, certainly, undertaking a work of philosophical retrieval. Just as was the case for Arendt, however, Miller’s interest in the ancient heritage of the idea (and the actuality) of action is neither nostalgic nor scholarly. The aim is to reanimate a concept that has never ceased to function in our basic understanding of our world and ourselves. It is a gross misunderstanding to suppose that, if an idea or term has ceased to be current, its existential logic has also lost energy or even become moribund. It is not too large a claim to state that the idea of the active life cannot be dissociated from Western civilization. Moreover the idea cannot be separated from the practices and institutions of democracy. There may be no greater irony, then, in a day when democratic institutions have achieved such prominence and influence, that the concept of action receives relatively little attention in strictly philosophical discourse as well as broader public debate.5 The active life presupposes the irreducible originality of words and deeds (MS...

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