“Before being elucidated in Metaphysics Theta as a sense of being, dunamis appears in the physical texts as the instrument of the thought of change and action. It is thus thought in the order of the correlation not of the in-potentiality to act, but of active power to passive power. The model is the mechanistic one of efficiency. This model is nonetheless subsumed under another, which for the correlation active dunamis / passive dunamis, substitutes that of dunamis to energeia, thus integrating the schema of efficiency under that of finality. The definition of movement and its characterization as the common act of the mover and the moved appears as an essential moment of this integration: it invites us to see in kinesis [motion] not only the result of the interplay between two powers, one active and the other passive, but the transition between two states of being. Interaction thus appears only as the means for actualization, the play of powers as the occasion of the realization of the in-potentiality” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 103, my translation throughout).
This all seems very sound. I would add only two more nuances. First, not only is so-called efficient causality or Aristotle’s notion of “sources of motion” subsumed by final causality, but it also subsumes mechanistic “action” under a broader notion of “means”, as in the example from the Physics in which the art of building is what is most properly said to be the source of the motion of building a house. Aubry herself also speaks of interaction as a “means for actualization”.
Second, she speaks here of interaction because Aristotle analyzes even the most unilateral, mechanistic physical “action” as a special kind of interaction between active and passive powers. Although Aristotle would also agree with Kant against Leibniz that there is real interaction between things, that is not at stake in the contrast here. For Aristotle, all action is really a kind of interaction in the special sense mentioned above, but I think what he means primarily to contrast with actualization is action as such, not interaction as such. I would thus suggest the friendly amendment “action appears only as the means for actualization”. On the other hand though, she is emphasizing the fact that all action for Aristotle is really interaction, which is also extremely important.
In On Generation and Corruption book I, Aristotle describes cyclical transformations of the four elements. Aubry notes that the elements are there said to have neither forms of their own nor any principle of autonomous movement. The reciprocal action of the elements is explained in terms of active and passive dunamis.
“[A]ction has for effect an assimilation of the patient to the agent; but always in the case of a material agent, it can entail a passion in return…. If dunamis determines the agent as well as the patient, it is indeed according to a reversible schema, and in a relation of co-implication” (p. 104).
“This first formula, which accounts for action by the correlation of an active dunamis and a passive dunamis, is nonetheless succeeded by another, which substitutes for the pair of powers that of in-potentiality and of act” (ibid).
“The agent is no longer solely determined as active, but as in act…. As for the patient, it is not only passive, but in-potentiality. If there can be action of the one on the other, it is because the effect is already present, dunamei [in potentiality], in the patient: fire, for example, can only heat that which is already hot-in-potentiality” (ibid).
She quotes from book II: “That which is hot in-act is cold in-potentiality, and that which is cold in-act is hot in-potentiality, so that, at least if they don’t equalize themselves, they transform themselves the one into the other” (p. 105).
She continues, summarizing “This cycle obeys the principle of the best, and has a finality of its own” (ibid).
“All the same, the elements are deprived as much of active power as of spontaneity. Their movement toward a place should not be understood on the model of action, or of the interaction of an active power and a passive power, but on that of actualization, and of the correlation of the in-potentiality and the in-act” (ibid).
“The case of elemental change indeed appears as an example of the substitution of the model of actualization for that of interaction, and of the model of finality for that of efficiency. Aristotle starts from the place where mechanistic explanation seems the most justified: the first elements, the original impulses of matter. But precisely, these are not, like the dunameis that fill the khora [receptacle] of [Plato’s] Timaeus, brute and disordered forces: they are passive powers, deprived of self-motion and of spontaneity, but which nonetheless are principles of movement, and have an orientation or a tendency. Between them and their act, the active power, efficiency, only intervenes as an exterior cause; it is nothing more than the occasion for their actualization” (p.106).
Far from serving as the primary model for causality in general, efficient causality in Aristotle only provides occasions for more essential causes or reasons why to operate. It is always only a means for something, a kind of circumstantial catalyst.
On the Soul book II distinguishes “two degrees of dunamis. The first, according to ‘the genus and the matter’ is a non-exercised native capacity — that in virtue of which every human is capable, simply insofar as she is human and possessed of reason, of understanding grammar; the second is a capacity already employed, exercised, the effectuation of which requires no supplementary apprenticeship, but simply the will and the absence of obstacles…; and finally entelechy, or the actual exercise of knowledge” (p. 107).
“The case of perception, like that of elemental change, must be conceived as a transition from second dunamis to entelechy. This kind of alteration (alliosis) neither affects nor destroys the nature of the subject, but on the contrary is ‘a progress toward itself and toward entelechy'” (pp. 107-108).
“Nonetheless, in the case of the apprenticeship of knowledge, the passage from first dunamis to second dunamis should also be conceived as alteration-amelioration…. More than on the distinction between two degrees of dunamis and between movement (kinesis) and change (metabole), it seems it is necessary to insist on that between two types of alteration, the one privative and the other positive. This distinction underlines once again that the intervention of the efficient cause and of the external agent can serve as the occasion of an immanent progress” (pp. 108-109).
“In the transition between the model of interaction and the model of actualization, the definition of motion as the common act of the mover and the moved also appears as an essential moment” (p. 109).
“In Physics III, movement is defined as the entelechy of that which is in-potentiality as such…. Movement, otherwise said, is the act of the dunamis of a being not as such, but as mobile: the process of fabricating a statue is not the act of the brass as brass, but of the brass insofar as it becomes a statue. Immediately proposed, this definition is designed as a sort of default; of movement, in effect, one can say neither that it is privation, nor power, nor act; it is necessary, ultimately, as difficult as this may seem, to define it as an incomplete act, energeia ateles, in opposition to a simple act, energeia haple” (ibid).
“Movement indeed manifests the power of a being whatever it is, that is, independent of what it is, [independent] as well as of that by which such a being can become other than it is…. Movement is indeed the the entelechy of a power as such, since being a power is being a principle of movement, but the power is always the power of a being that by that movement becomes what it is. As consequence, the distinction is not between two powers, but between becoming as the being of power, and the being in view of which there is becoming” (p. 110).
“If the analysis of movement makes appeal to the distinction between mover and movable, and indeed between agent and patient, this distinction nonetheless finds itself relativized: in fact… the mover moves in being itself moved — since there exists also, Aristotle points out, an unmoved mover. The agent indeed is at the same time patient, and the patient in its turn can become agent, so that everything is both agent and patient, poietikon kai pathetikon. But to this it must be added that act is the same in the agent and the patient” (ibid).
“The duality of agent and patient, or of mover and moved, is reabsorbed thus, according to the point of view specified, into that of in-potentiality and in-act. In-potentiality, to dunamei, recovers active power and passive power equally well: it is a point of view taken on both powers insofar as they in principle belong to one and the same movement, or again, insofar as they are the subject of one and the same accomplishment” (p. 111).
Nothing in the real world is ever purely active or purely passive. It is hard to overstate the significance of this.
“In the same way that book III of the Physics subsumes the correlation of powers under movement as the act of the in-potential, book Theta of the Metaphysics places movement under energeia, understood this time not as ateles [incomplete], but as identical to the telos [end]” (ibid).
Next in this series: Reading Metaphysics Theta
The Postmodern Peripatetic 