Desiring Aristotle. Philosophy as a life direction

Abstract

Although Aristotle emphasizes sophia, contemplative excellence, as the most felicitous accomplishment, and even the fullest realization, of the human being as such, the fact remains that the human being savors it only intermittently. The human still is an animal, zoon, and belongs in the unstable flow of the passions, in the mutability and caprice of chance, and in the unpredictability of becoming. The human is inhabited by impulses, desires, appetites. It is moved by them and unable to govern them at will. The phenomenology of such movements is articulated through the language of epithymia, thymos, pathos, eros, orexis. The essay focuses on the theme of desire and on the primordiality that Aristotle acknowledges in this element constitutive of the human and of its mystery.