Euclid of Megara (not to be confused with the geometer) was a student of Socrates who combined Socratic and Eleatic ideas. He reportedly claimed that virtue is knowledge of the Parmenidean One Being, which he also identified with the Good, God, reason, and mind. At a time when Megarians were banned from Athens for some reason, he is said to have entered the city disguised as a woman in order to listen to Socrates. He was present at Socrates’ death, and afterwards offered refuge to Plato and others in Megara. Socrates reputedly rebuked him for arguing more for the sake of winning than for the truth, but Euclid was said to have been very concerned with moral virtue. Plato credits him with having written down an actual conversation between Socrates and Theaetetus, which became the basis of Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus.
Euclid’s students were mainly interested in logic and argument. Some of them apparently founded a separate school, known as the Dialecticians, which developed a form of propositional logic. This latter group is considered to have been the major source for Stoic logic.
In chapter 3 of book Theta of the Metaphysics, Aristotle criticizes Megarian arguments that there is no distinction between power and act. Aubry quotes Aristotle’s restatement of the Megarian claim, “It is when a thing acts that it can act, but when it does not act, it cannot act” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 122, my translation throughout).
Independent of Aristotle’s development of a normative and teleological dimension of act that plausibly extends even to physical motion, he is also very concerned to carefully distinguish between power and its exercise. Thus he had to confront the Megarians, who argued that there is no such distinction.
Later writers of quite varying persuasions have wittingly or unwittingly developed variants of this Megarian position. Nietzsche, for instance, explicitly denied the reality of anything that is not actual. Any kind of argument for complete determinism has a similar effect, as does theological occasionalism, which subsumes all becoming under the model of creation.
“Against this thesis, it is necessary to affirm not only the distinction of act and power but, more precisely, that with a given act can coexist not only the power of which it is the effect, but the power for another, opposed, act” (ibid).
Aubry noted a bit earlier that the emphasis on contraries in the discussion of rational powers is rather accidental. The more general point — expressed at the level of potentiality rather than power — is that potentiality includes multiple alternate possibilities concretely grounded in the same state of actuality. The more specific notion of contrariety only comes into play because — due to the fact power is consistently understood by Aristotle as power to do or undergo something definite — related deliberation may be conceived as about exercising a power or not.
She quotes Aristotle, “It is possible for a thing to be capable of being and nonetheless not be, or capable of not being and nonetheless be” (ibid).
This, it seems to me, is an unavoidable presupposition of any coherent account of becoming. It is again also the foundation of Aristotle’s account of human freedom. This way of approaching freedom is greatly to be recommended, because it avoids both the dubious and dangerous concept of a separate faculty of will distinct from reason, and the worse concepts of arbitrary will, or will as “superior” to reason.
“The critique of the Megarians indeed carries a double, and paradoxical, positivity: it invites us to think at the same time becoming in relation with dunamis, and energeia in relation with being. In doing this, it indicates also the double stakes of the inquiry: to think becoming and being at the same time; to determine the mode of their articulation.”
The dynamis–energeia pair is what uniquely enables Aristotle to think of being and becoming in a non-opposed way, though this is far from exhausting its significance.
“The extension from the kinetic sense of energeia to the ontological sense is presented as a deepening: otherwise said, and in conformity to what Theta 1 noted already, it is the ontological sense that is primary. In effect, if we have a tendency to consider that energeia is manifested above all in movement, this is insofar as we take it as an index of being” (p. 123, emphasis in original).
“For not to be in act but to be capable of being so, is also a mode of being: that which in-potentiality names. Of certain things that are not, but are nonetheless capable of being, one says thus that they are dunamei” (pp. 123-124).
Here we have a good example of the explicitly dative grammatical form of dynamis (dynamei) that she finds to be associated with Aristotle’s distinctive notion of being in potentiality. These are things that have being potentially, or are potentially thus-and-such. Here the emphasis is all on “things” in a state of potentiality, or potential “states of affairs”. Potentiality (as distinct from actuality) is the modality in which these have being and are said. This is indeed clearly different from a power to do, cause, or undergo.
“That which is in-potentiality, nonetheless, is not, ‘because it is not an entelechy‘” (p. 124).
We do not say of that which is in-potentiality that it “is” simply, or in an unqualified sense.
At the link above, I suggested that entelechy is probably the most important guiding concept of the Metaphysics. I have also suggested that entelechy serves as a kind of explanation for how ousia or (substance or essence, or what Sachs calls “thinghood”) works. In turn, Aristotle uses ousia to help disambiguate and organize what is meant by the various ways in which we say something is something. In the quote above, he directly uses entelechy as the criterion for what we do and do not say “is”. It is vitally important that he appeals to this much more nuanced concept, instead of referring back to the blunt instrument of a common-sense notion of existence or reality. For Aristotle, being, existence, or reality is not an explainer; instead, it needs to be explained.
Nonetheless, Aubry points out that here, Aristotle does not explicitly invoke the normative aspect of entelechy. We are still primarily investigating the more common “kinetic” sense of dynamis and energeia that accounts for physical motion. The aspect of entelechy that is to the fore is therefore that of the continuing activity that constitutes a substance as something persisting, or a motion as ongoing.
Next in this series: Potentiality and Possibility
The Postmodern Peripatetic 