Before proceeding to Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality and act in book Theta of the Metaphysics, Aubry surveys pre-Aristotelian usages of the Greek word dynamis (or dunamis, as Aubry romanizes it). This detour adds further fascinating nuances to her already very rich discussion. (She also surveys Aristotle’s uses of dynamis in other works besides the Metaphysics. I will treat that part in a separate post.)
The meaning of dynamis in Homer and Hesiod is contested. A 1919 study by Joseph Souilhé concluded that it meant physical force in Homer, and royal or divine power in Hesiod. But a 2018 study by David Lefebvre concentrates on the phrase kata dunamin [“in accordance with” dynamis], and concludes on the contrary that already in Homer and Hesiod this is an expression of the Greek “sense of measure” and “wisdom of limits”. Aubry says that according to Lefebvre, for Homer and Hesiod, “To act kata dunamin is to act within the limits of a nature” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 95, my translation throughout). Lefebvre sees in Plato a tension between a descriptive use of dynamis related to knowledge and definition, and a normative one related to what is proper to a given nature.
Turning to her own analysis of Plato, she says that in book V of the Republic, “dunameis are designated not as a sense of being, but as a genus of beings (genos ti ton onton); they are that by which ‘we can do what we can do, and in general every other thing can do precisely what it does’…. Dunamis is strongly associated with power and action. It does not help us say what a thing is, determining its distinctive properties, but rather what it can do, and what it does” (p. 96).
“This couple of power and action is associated neither with notions of latency and manifestation, nor with potentiality and effectivity” (p. 97). The thought here seems to be that Platonic power and action are more synchronic and in-the-moment than diachronic and involved with development.
On the other hand, already in Plato dynamis “is articulated to an ergon [work]” (p. 96). This is of the utmost importance. As we will see, for Plato ergon is not just any arbitrary product or outcome. It has an ethical significance.
“[Republic book I defines ergon] as either that which a thing is the only one capable of accomplishing, or that which it accomplishes better than all the others, and articulates it strongly with the notion of excellence, arete. As D. Lefebvre underlines, the articulation of dunamis to ergon, understood as a proper function allowing the deployment of an excellence, comes in play against the notion of indeterminate, non-normed power, the tyrannical or political ‘omnipotence’ to which the orators aspire, and of which, like book I of the Republic, the Gorgias presents a critique” (p. 96n).
Plato was extremely concerned to avoid the unprincipled political abuses of tyrants, and to combat the analogous unprincipled abuses of discourse by the Sophists. Neither the tyrant nor the Sophist nor the apologist for arbitrariness respects the good or the truth.
“In this articulation of the dunamis to the ergon, which nonetheless remains timid (the term ergon is not used, but only the [related] verb apergazetai), and is associated neither with a causal model nor with an ontology, one can already recognize a teleological and normative determination of power (here univocally characterized as active), in play against the idea of an undifferentiated and non-normed power” (pp. 96-97).
Plato thus partially anticipates Aristotle’s more developed teleological view.
In the Theaetetus, “Dunamis appears… as a power as much of possession as of usage, and not according to a progressive schema comparable to what Aristotle elaborates in De Anima [book] II [chapter] 5, where a native power (that for example which every human has to understand grammar) is transformed into a hexis [acquired disposition] by study, then can be exercised in an energeia, but according to a reversible and alternating schema” (p. 97).
Plato seems to emphasize a kind of symmetry in the relations between active and passive power, which makes them reversible. Aristotle subordinates this to the asymmetrical relation between act and potentiality, but it is important to recognize that he is not simply substituting an asymmetrical relation for a symmetrical one. Rather, he is fully accepting the symmetrical one, but then, so to speak, wrapping it in the asymmetrical one.
It is worth dwelling on the Platonic moment in its own right. There is already something quite profound in a truly symmetrical view of activity and passivity. Certainly there is also what might be called a vulgar view of activity and passivity that doesn’t recognize any symmetry between them at all. But that is not Plato’s view.
For the subtle initiates in the metaphor of the Theaetetus (in contrast to those non-initiates who count as being only what they can hold in their hands), Aubry notes that Plato says “the whole is movement […]; there are two forms of movement, each of infinite extension, but the one having the power to act, and the other to undergo” (quoted, pp. 97-98, ellipses in original). “It is at the same time, thus, that vision and the white are born, and they are not white and vision until that encounter: for something is an agent only by encountering a patient, only patient by encountering an agent, and that which in this encounter is agent can in another become patient” (p. 98).
Plato explicitly points out that what is an agent in one encounter may be a patient in another. The example of vision and the white also highlights the interdependence of what the moderns call subject and object.
“Power to act and power to undergo are at the same time relative to one another and reversible…. Active or passive dunamis is nonetheless articulated, beyond the epistemological context of the discussion, to an ontology: a paradoxical ontology, since, presented as subtle in that it reconciles being with becoming, it results in the negation of being to the benefit of becoming” (ibid).
Plato is famous for emphasizing eternal forms, but dialogues like Theaetetus and The Sophist invalidate many clichés about his broader views. This has the effect of bringing Plato closer to Aristotle.
“It is nonetheless in the Sophist that the ontological dimension of Platonic dunamis is most readable” (ibid). There the character known as the Eleatic Stranger (who expresses views contrary to — and to me far more interesting than — those of the historic Eleatics like Parmenides and Zeno) says “That which possesses a power, whatever it be, whether to act on no matter what other natural thing, or to undergo — even in a minimal degree, by the action of the weakest agent, and even if this occurs only once — all this, I say, really exists. And as a consequence, I pose as the definition that defines beings that they are nothing else but power” (quoted, pp. 98-99).
And again, this does not mean arbitrary power. Plato is after all the one who first said that the Good is the highest principle of all, even though Aristotle criticizes him for failing to explain how this works.
Aubry recounts that in the allegory of The Sophist, the Friends of the Earth are generally materialist, but accept the reality of virtues and vices. They therefore accept the Stranger’s definition of being as power, and this leads them also to change their minds and accept that the soul is a being too, since it is that in which virtues and vices are present. The Friends of the Forms on the other hand continue to resist the conclusion that “in ousia itself, insofar as it is known, and not only in in genesis, movement and passion occur” (p. 99). Aubry goes on, “but the Stranger and Theaetetus in their turn refuse what follows from that refusal: that being ‘solemn and sacred, stands immobile'” (ibid).
The Eleatic Stranger here is explicitly rejecting the historic Eleatic view of being, and at the same time Plato is implicitly rejecting the semi-Eleatic view of the “Friends of the Forms”. Aristotle indeed attributes to Plato the mistaken view that the forms are independent things, but he also says that Plato was initially influenced by the Heracliteanism of Cratylus, who is known for saying that you can’t step in the same river once, because it is always changing. There is no evidence that Plato was ever a Parmenidean. (Aristotle’s sharpest anti-Platonic remarks seem to me to be directed at Platonists, and perhaps at Plato’s successor Speusippus in particular.)
“Dunamis appears here as an instrument directed at the same time against the ‘materialists’, an extension of the notion of ousia to the incorporeal insofar as it posesses the power to act and to undergo, and, against the ‘idealists’, an inclusion in ousia, insofar as it is the object of knowledge, of traits considered by them to be characteristic of genesis: passion and movement” (ibid, emphasis in original).
Plato clearly wants to reject both the materialism of the Ionian pre-Socratics and the static One Being of Parmenides.
“From this brief examination of the principal places where Platonic dunamis is elaborated, one can conclude that the Aristotelian concept is found there ‘in potentiality’, by way of the normative articulation of dunamis to ergon, the distinction between capacity and effectivity, the project of an ontology unifying being and becoming, but only under the form of fragmentary and broken anticipations, which it remained for Aristotle to articulate and to systematize” (p. 100).
Next in this series: Ethical Roots of Aristotelian Dynamis
The Postmodern Peripatetic 