Action versus Contemplation: Why an Ancient Debate Still Matters

by Jennifer Summit, Blakey Vermeule

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” Blaise Pascal wrote in 1654. But then there’s Walt Whitman, in 1856: “Whoever you are, come forth! Or man or woman come forth! / You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the house.”
 
It is truly an ancient debate: Is it better to be active or contemplative? To do or to think? To make an impact, or to understand the world more deeply? Aristotle argued for contemplation as the highest state of human flourishing. But it was through action that his student Alexander the Great conquered the known world. Which should we aim at? Centuries later, this argument underlies a surprising number of the questions we face in contemporary life. Should students study the humanities, or train for a job? Should adults work for money or for meaning? And in tumultuous times, should any of us sit on the sidelines, pondering great books, or throw ourselves into protests and petition drives? 
 
With Action versus Contemplation, Jennifer Summit and Blakey Vermeule address the question in a refreshingly unexpected way: by refusing to take sides. Rather, they argue for a rethinking of the very opposition. The active and the contemplative can—and should—be vibrantly alive in each of us, fused rather than sundered. Writing in a personable, accessible style, Summit and Vermeule guide readers through the long history of this debate from Plato to Pixar, drawing compelling connections to the questions and problems of today. Rather than playing one against the other, they argue, we can discover how the two can nourish, invigorate, and give meaning to each other, as they have for the many writers, artists, and thinkers, past and present, whose examples give the book its rich, lively texture of interplay and reference.
 
This is not a self-help book. It won’t give you instructions on how to live your life. Instead, it will do something better: it will remind you of the richness of a life that embraces action and contemplation, company and solitude, living in the moment and planning for the future. Which is better? Readers of this book will discover the answer: both.

Genres: Philosophy, Self Help, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

Published May 6, 2020

Reviews

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a debate my best friend and I had in high school. It led to me pursuing the sciences, and her pursuing the arts. We then both switched streams, embracing the mixing of action and contemplation, and raising neither above the other.

This book is more academic than I expected. We debate the true purpose of education, and the current divide between arts and sciences.

I enjoyed the many retellings of the fable of the ant and the grasshopper.

I also enjoyed the positively Durkheimian quote from Charles Taylor: “the secularization of the public sphere has not led to privatization, social marginalization, or disappearance of the holy, but to its dispersal, and even multiplication”.

[Graeme · Rating 2 out of 5]

As someone who has spent too much time thinking about the question of whether action or contemplation is more choice-worthy, I found this book fairly underwhelming and sloppy.

There are some interesting discussions of various polarities at work in modern life (e.g . Science vs. Humanities), and Summit and Vermuele do a reasonably good job showing why these distinctions are problematic, for lack of a better word. However, they do not do enough work in laying out the original stakes of the action vs. contemplation debate in Aristotle, and so tend to have a fairly amorphous understanding of both action and contemplation. For example, they seem to conflate contemplation with reflection, while only obliquely noting, that traditionally contemplation was understood to be a species of reflection, but one that was unique in having no end beyond itself. For example, late in the book they associate the generative research of universities with contemplation. This is deeply wrongheaded as the publish or perish system has made it so that despite the pretense of academics, academic research is more closely allied to action in the classical distinction than contemplation. Research is justified as a form of knowledge production, rather than as theoria which is bound up with wonder and the intellect properly grasping reality and becoming one with it.

They also try to tie the distinction between contemplation and action to the parable of the grasshopper and the ant. However, this once again is at best a questionable interpretation of the distinction between contemplation and action. Aristotle, in his treatment of contemplation and action is quite clear in saying that contemplation is not amusement or play, and yet Summit and Vermuele write as though amusement and play were contemplative. Aristotle's point is that amusement and play are activities that we engage in towards the end of either properly being at leisure, or so that we are able to continue to act/work. Amusement and play are never, for Aristotle a proper form of leisured activity that aligns with the contemplative. Furthermore, it is not clear if the grasshopper in the parable represents properly leisured activity under the Aristotleian understanding or play or a mix of the two, so the applicability of this parable is questionable at best.

This relates to another issue that Vermuele and Summit elide. Aristotle distinguishes between activities that have intrinsic value, that cannot be pursued for that reason and activities that can be pursued because they are inherently worthwhile. It is incoherent to pursue research or to write a book because those activities are intrinsically worthwhile, because the object of research or writing is an object beyond the activity. Even though it may be true that research and writing are intrinsically worthwhile activities. The problem is that Vermuele and Summit continually run the two types of activities together without dealing with their fundamental differences.

In light of the proceeding, I found the book interesting, but for me, it mostly missed the mark in getting at anything new or interesting about the distinction between action and contemplation. If you're interested in action vs. contemplation I'd read Aristotle, Arendt or Pieper rather than this work. However, the books is a decent take on some of the pathologies of modernity more broadly, it just overreaches in trying to too closely align these pathologies to the action vs. contemplation debate.

[Ben Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

A few really insightful passages but hit or miss in other sections. The authors claim not to take a stance in the ancient debate between the merits of action vs. contemplation but their PhD. level training in literature skews towards the liberal arts/contemplative.

I wanted to read this book to find ways to use my own liberal arts education to take action and was somewhat disappointed that I did not find this information (although the authors clearly state in the introduction this is not their goal, they rather set out to provide historical context to the debate.)

One major question that lingers is whether the literary world and the act of writing really counts as action or is merely recorded contemplation? The authors claim that the fable of the ants and the grasshopper validates storytelling as a means of practical moral education but I felt this remained unclear.

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Which life is the good life? Is it the life of action (vita activa) or the life of contemplation (vita contemplativa? Of course the good life is one which finds balance and allows each to enhance the other. That's the short version. It's a good version.

[Bryan Olin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked the authors' thesis and found their sources very compelling, but it was a bit too focused on education for my tastes. I particularly enjoyed the parts dealing with Hannah Arendt, George Eliot, and Herman Melville.

[BeckyT · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would recommend this book mainly for its 2nd chapter, "The action bias and the human condition."

[Mills College Library]

128.4 S9559 2018

[Blaine Welgraven · Rating 2 out of 5]

A meandering, unfocused work, that somehow manages to feel too long despite barely surpassing 200 pages.

[Brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first half was promising but the second half goes off the rails.