Each of the human excellences requires some external resources and necessary conditions. Each also requires, more intimately, external objects that will receive the excellent activity. Generosity involves giving to others, who must be there to receive; moderation involves the appropriate relation, in action, to objects (food, drink, sexual partners) who can fail to be present, either altogether or in the appropriate way. Even intellectual contemplation requires the presence of suitable objects for thought. But this condition, as Plato saw, would rarely, if ever, fail to be met on account of contingencies of circumstance. For something can be an object of thought whether it is physically present or not; as long as there is a universe there will be many things to contemplate everywhere; and, finally, as Aristotle adds, thought can be its own object.

We can see, then, that although all human activities and therefore all candidates for inclusion in a plan for the good human life are in some way relational, some are very much more self-sufficient than others. Aristotle, like Plato, judges that contemplative activity is, among the activities available to us, the most stable and individually self-sufficient (EN 1177a25–1177b1, 1178a23–5). Even though he rejects the extremes of the good-condition view, he might, then, like Plato, try to shore up the self-sufficiency of the good life by making those most secure activities its primary, or even its only, components.