Decision and Action

Aristotle has a lot to say about decision and action. Primary to his discussion is that decision is essential to virtue. Important to my own life, I find that action is where things truly happen. My experiences in life have shown me that good thoughts are fine, but unless acted upon, they only exist in the mind. By taking actions to create an existence in the world, I find that life is fulfilled in the delivery of the actions one takes. Regarding this insight, one of the most powerful passages I have read in Nicomachean Ethics is as follows:

The remaining possibility then is some sort of action of the [part of the soul] that has reason. One [part] of it has reason as obeying reason; the other has it as itself having reason and thinking. Moreover, life is spoken of in two ways [as capacity and as activity], and we must take [a human being’s special function to be] life as activity, since this seems to be called life more fully. We have found, then, that the human function is activity of the soul in accord with reason or requiring reason. (Aristotle, ed. Irwin, 1999, p. 8-9)