Returning to Gwenaëlle Aubry’s landmark new reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, last time I covered her preliminary roadmap of book Lambda, in which Aristotle discusses the first cause and its relation to the world. Here I will focus on her discussion of chapter 1.
As is common in Aristotelian treatises, Lambda begins with a survey of the opinions Aristotle deems most important and relevant in this area — namely the “physical” approach of the Ionian philosophers of nature, and the “logical” one he attributes to the Platonists. Aristotle will borrow from both, and criticize both.
At the same time, Chapter 1 outlines a program of investigation that will be pursued over the course of the book. This consists of four questions:
1) How are cause (aitia), principle (arkhe), and element (stoikheion) distinguished, and how are they related?
2) Are there principles common to both eternal (astronomical) and corruptible (earthly) sensible substances?
3) How are we to understand the meaning of unmoved substance?
4) Are there principles common to unmoved substance and to eternal and corruptible sensible substances?
The Ionians and the Platonists agree, each in their own way, that it is principally of “substance” (ousia) that we investigate the principles and causes, though they interpret substance differently. Aristotle retrospectively interprets both the Ionians and the Platonists as reaching toward his own notion of substance and its role — i.e., as dwelling on questions about what things are, and about why things are the way they are.
It is the “things” in life that are of primary interest, because to a greater or lesser degree they all have persistence, and therefore also have recurring relevance in their own right. Mere transient events only have relevance to meaning and deeper truth insofar as they may be claimed to show something about recurringly relevant things.
Aubry points out that in book Lambda, it will not be a question of demonstrating the primacy of substance and of independent things over those other “things” that are attributed to them. Something like book Gamma’s argument for the methodological priority of inquiry into relatively independent things seems to be presupposed. Nor does Lambda ask what substance is, as book Zeta does. The specifically Aristotelian sense of substance’s defining criterion of “separateness” — embodied in the relative independence of some but not all of what we call “things” in the broadest sense — which was a major result of Zeta, is recalled in the opening lines of the chapter here, and is thus integrated into Lambda’s inquiry from the beginning. But Zeta’s investigations are also deepened here by a new connection with book Epsilon’s emphasis on causes and principles, so that we now also ask, what are the causes and principles of substance? Moreover, questions raised but unanswered at the end of Zeta about unmoved substance will eventually be addressed here.
Aristotle contrasts the Ionian view of the world of becoming as a certain (material) whole with that of the Platonists, who treat it as a pure succession of phenomenal instantiations of immaterial Forms. The Ionians recognize as principles only the elements of bodies, thus putting all intelligibility on the side of matter. The Platonists recognize only immaterial Forms as principles, and hold becoming as such to fundamentally lack intelligibility.
“Going forward, the opposition between holists and episodics does not outline the alternative according to which the arguments of Lambda will be deployed, but rather, conversely, that which it will be necessary to overcome” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 161, my translation throughout).
In a second contrast between the Ionians and the Platonists, the Platonists associate substance exclusively with what is logically universal (katholou; literally “according to the whole”), but the Ionians associate it exclusively with concrete individual things (kath ekasta; literally “according to each”). Aristotle will bridge this gap too, by posing the first cause as not itself a logical universal, but rather as a unique thing, to which all other things universally have a broadly similar constitutive relation.
Finally, Aubry refers to the passage, “And the former kind belongs to the study of nature (since they include motion), but this kind belongs to a different study, if [ei] there is no source [principle] common to them” (Metaphysics, Sachs tr., p. 231). Scholars have debated the significance of Aristotle’s ei here.
“The translation [of the ei] adopted here [and independently by Sachs] results in a hypothetical meaning, ‘if’, but another reading gives it a causal meaning, ‘since’. Such a divergence is far from being minor. The traditional causal reading of the ei in effect founds a scissionist interpretation of metaphysics, which will be divided between the science of sensible substances, or physics, and ‘another science’, having for its object the unique substance that is separate [in the Platonic sense of separation from matter], which going forward will be identified with theology…. As well as a scissionist reading of metaphysics, these lines invite a hybrid reading of Lambda according to which it is necessary to distinguish between a treatise on sensible substances, and a treatise on substance that is separate [again in the Platonic sense]. Such an interpretation amounts to abandoning any project for a general ontology — eventually only leaving place for a unification from above, that is to say by theology, applied to [the emphasis on causes and principles from] book Epsilon chapter 1″ (Aubry, p. 163).
She cites a survey of this issue by David Lefebvre, but does not directly identify sources for the traditional interpretation. Since the dispute is about a detail of the Greek text though, I would presume that these are traditionally minded modern scholars, and not medieval writers.
“On the other hand, the hypothetical reading of ei leaves open the possibility that there exists a common principle [of sensible and Platonically “separate” substance], and, going forward, also a common science of all the substances, sensible and separate. Nonetheless, this hypothetical reading admits in its turn of two distinct interpretations: one could understand that the common science of all the substances is to be identified with physics; or again that it is the alternative ‘physics’/’different science’ that is itself conditioned by the [presumed] eventual absence of common principles, but that under the hypothesis that such principles exist, this partition can be superseded, to the profit of a unique science of substances — a unique science that can be reduced neither to physics nor to theology” (p. 163-164).
The key point that should be emphasized is that Lambda aims to sketch the basis of a unified account of all substance.
I would go somewhat beyond the scope of Aubry’s argument here, to also question the traditional talk about “sciences” in this context. Aristotle himself simply speaks of knowledge (which we could gloss, following the broader of his usages, as an interpretive account grounded in reasoned explanation). This presupposes rather less than either the ideal of foundational demonstrative science bequeathed to later traditions by Alfarabi, or the whole elaborated apparatus of empirical science, with which “science” is identified in most modern contexts.
I also question the identification of Aristotle’s more specific “ousiology” or account of substance with “ontology”, or the alleged science of being. Properly speaking, we owe the latter to successive post-Aristotelian elaborations, principally by Avicenna, Duns Scotus, and Christian Wolff — however often these elaborations get retrospectively read back into the Aristotelian text. Aristotle does indeed refer without prejudice to the question whether knowledge of being “full stop” is possible, but his eventual answer is the more limited one that a general reasoned account of ousia is possible. I think it shows the original naive question about being to have been badly posed. That way of posing it leads to other nonsensical, non-Aristotelian questions that imply category mistakes, like “why is there being?”
Finally, I give more weight to the fact that the term “metaphysics” is never used by Aristotle, and was only first applied to the collection of treatises we know by that name by an editor, long after Aristotle’s death. I prefer Aristotle’s own term “first philosophy”.
But I do very strongly agree with Aubry that book Lambda is intended to develop what could reasonably be called a general ousiology, embracing both sensible and Platonically “separate” substance; and moreover, that this ousiology has a fundamentally axiological or value-oriented character.
Next in this series: Potentiality in the Stars
The Postmodern Peripatetic 