Will and Curiosity

By proposing that Intellectual Virtue is the highest virtue, Aristotle seems to imply that Curiosity, i. e. the desire to know, is not only a universal human drive, as he asserts at the outset of the Metaphysics, but the pre-eminent one. However, whereas his ideal of Knowledge is thought-thinking-itself, at the end of that paragraph in the Metaphysics, he clarifies that Curiosity often seeks to bring to light "the differences between things", which seems antithetical to the private, self-sufficient homogeneity of the ideal. Now, as developed here previously, Will is the principle of Diversification in Experience, so Curiosity entails Will. On that basis, Aristotle's privileging of Intellectual Virtue seems, with respect to the rest of his theory of Knowledge, as anomalous as it is with respect to his notion of Practical Virtue, which entails that the locus of the fulfillment human Rationality is the public association with others.