What Is Contemplation? An Interview With Michael Chase

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science:

Michael Chase (PhD EPHE, Ve Section, Paris-Sorbonne, 2000) is Senior Researcher at the Centre Jean Pépin (UMR 8230-École normale supérieure) of the CNRS (National Center of Scientific Research), Paris-Villejuif, France, as well as Visiting Professor at the Universidad Panamericana, Mexico City (2019–2021) and Adjunct Professor at the University of Victoria, Canada. He works at the intersection of Greek, Arabic, and Latin philosophy, and has published widely on ancient Greco-Roman philosophy, Greek and Latin Patristics, and medieval Latin and Arabic philosophy. A former student of Pierre Hadot, he has translated a half-dozen of Hadot’s books into English.

Chase’s interests are broad, multicultural, and interdisciplinary. In addition to his work on the thought of Hadot, he is interested in interactions between contemporary science and ancient philosophy, the transmission of Greek philosophy to the Islamicate world, and comparative ancient and contemporary philosophy in general. His current projects include critical editions of two Arabic philosophical texts (Avicenna, Notes on the Theology of Aristotle, and the Arabic translation of Alexander of Aphrodisias, On the Intellect). He is currently working on a monograph on meditation-style methods of attention management in ancient Greek, Islamic, Jewish, Byzantine, and medieval Latin thought.

An excerpt from, “What Is Contemplation? An Interview With Michael Chase” By James MacNee, Journal of Contemplative Studies, June 27, 2024:

JCS: I’ll start by asking you, what is contemplation?

MC: It’s a very tough question because it has many, many meanings. Since my main training has been in Greek philosophy, I think of the Greek equivalent, theōria. And theōria, unfortunately, is also a word that has an awful lot of meanings. It can mean to observe, to examine, and it can even mean to go on an embassy. But for me, the most relevant meaning is in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where he says that theōria is when an incorporeal entity, like the human mind, thinks of any other incorporeal entity, whether it’s an intelligible form or anything else, then the two of them—the mind and its object—become identical. For Aristotle, this is the case always for the gods; the gods are always in this state of theōria, but humans can maintain it only for very short and intermittent periods.

In this sense, theōria is a kind of contemplation that eliminates the distinction between subject and object. This is the highest happiness possible for human beings, says Aristotle. But, for Aristotle, the goal of philosophy is to be able to achieve this state, even if it’s only temporary and occasional. One of his followers, Alexander of Aphrodisias says: whatever you do, be darn sure that you achieve that state at least once in your life, or else you will not become immortal.

JCS: So, do you think of the state itself as contemplation or the kind of behavior that evokes such a state?

MC: Good question. For Aristotle and all his successors, it’s certainly the state itself. I should point out that this theory had an incredibly large influence. It was influential in the subsequent Greek tradition, Neoplatonism, but also very influential on the Arabic tradition. When Arabic works, which had preserved Greeks works that had sometimes been lost in the original, were translated back into Latin beginning in the 12th century, these translated works were highly influential on and in the Latin scholastic traditions. In this view, the goal of philosophy was what was called intellectual felicity. In other words, this theōria is an insight in which the distinction between subject and object disappears. Later thinkers taught that it was brought about by conjunction with the agent intellect, but that’s just an elaboration of Aristotle’s original idea. 

But to answer your question: theōria is usually conceived as the endpoint, and to reach this goal, it’s not like you can retire into a corner and say, “Oh well, I think I have a few spare 15 minutes here I think I’ll contemplate.” Contemplation-as-theōria is the end result of a very long process of philosophical development and study. For instance, the Neoplatonists who took over this idea from Aristotle believed that contemplation was the endpoint of a program where you started off by reading all of Aristotle, his logic, his ethics, his metaphysics, and then you read a selection of 13 dialogues by Plato, culminating in the Timæus, which gave you all knowledge about the physical world, and then the Parmenides, which gave you knowledge about the gods and their hierarchical order and the highest principles. After you go through that philosophical program, which takes years of course, then you might be in a position to enjoy this kind of contemplation-as-theōria.

JCS: You touched on this already a little bit, but how does contemplation intersect with your research? How is contemplation relevant to your research?

MC: First of all, I think that this elevated sense of contemplation is not the only one there is. There are other meanings, and I like to think of them as analogous to and in some cases almost identical with meditation. Both of these ideas, this contemplationist theōria and meditation, point to ways we make use of a cognitive faculty that we don’t usually use. Going back to the Greeks, the kind of thought that we usually make use of to live our everyday lives is called dianoia or discursive thought, where you go from premises to conclusions. It’s a kind of thought that takes place in time, and it’s rational. It’s perfectly adequate for allowing us to live our daily lives. But when it comes to achieving some kind of knowledge of the higher principles, it’s not adequate anymore. So, there was this other faculty, which the later Neoplatonists sometimes called “the one in us” or the “flower of the intellect,” and that is the faculty that we have to mobilize or activate in order to be able to cognize the higher principles.

But now as far as my own interests are concerned, I want to see what these higher cognitive faculties might be that both the Greeks and other people believe that we must mobilize. I think what meditation and contemplation-as-theōria have in common is that they both presuppose the idea that somehow or another we have to quiet this constant self-talk, the chatter that we constantly exercise in our dialogue with ourselves, which the Buddhists call “monkey mind.” Basically, this kind of self-talk, sometimes called “rumination,” can be useful in some contexts, but it has a couple of problems. One is that it distracts us; it’s usually based on regrets about the past and worries about the future and therefore distracts us from the present, which is the only possible locus for our happiness. According to the Greeks, the present is the only thing that actually exists, therefore either we’re going to be happy in the present or we’re not going to be happy at all. Second, this self-talk tends to reinforce our egotism; it tends to reinforce this default opinion that the world revolves around us that therefore justifies us in evaluating everything that happens to us in terms of its benefit or disadvantage to us. This rumination or self-talk that constantly goes on in our minds reinforces those tendencies. 

So, I think of meditation and contemplation as techniques for at least temporarily quieting this constant rumination that distracts us. I’m interested in cross-cultural studies of these phenomena. I see some interesting parallels between several different cultural traditions. I received my training in the Greco-Roman tradition, but in medieval Islamic thought and (the little I know about) Buddhism, there are a lot of analogies with the techniques that are used to quiet this discursive thought and thereby achieve some other kind of cognition of some other kind of reality.

Video Title: Michael Chase: Philosophy as a Way of Life and Contemplative Studies. Source: IFILNOVA Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Date Published: January 27, 2025. Description:

Michael Chase talked about “Philosophy as a Way of Life and Contemplative Studies” at the “Mapping Philosophy as a Way of Life: Final Conference” that took place between October 16th and 18th, 2024.