Author: Christopher Brinkley

Explanation by Constituents?

In Lambda 4, “The great opposition set up in Lambda 1 between the [Ionian philosophers of nature] and the Platonists continues to operate: here, as in Lambda 2, it is the [Ionians] who are targeted in the first instance; it is in effect against them that it is necessary to establish the irreducibility of a principle to a material element” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, pp. 171-172, my translation throughout).

Aubry recalls that already in book capital Alpha, the Ionians are criticized for making the material elements of bodies the only principles and causes. The constituents of things are not a sufficient basis for explanation in general.

Aristotle’s examination shows that “distinct material realities can at the same time have different elements and identical principles. It is certain that color, for example, is not materially constituted from heat and cold; one can nonetheless distinguish that which relates to the form (the white), the privation (the black), and the material (the surface). The notion of a principle thus exceeds that of element, understood in the sense of a material constituent, and allows an account in identical terms to be given of realities that are distinct and diversely constituted” (p. 172, emphasis in original).

“But the notion of principle also adds to that of element the taking into account not only of immanent causes, but also exterior ones, and in particular the cause of motion” (p. 173).

She quotes Aristotle, “It is clear that a principle and an element are different, that both are causes, … and that the cause of motion and rest is a certain principle” (ibid).

“This formulation works both against [the Ionians] and against the Platonists. In redistributing the three terms… principle, element, and cause, it points out the respective weaknesses of each of these adversaries: for the [Ionians], the confusion between principle and element; for the Platonists, their distinction between principle and cause, and particularly the incapacity to think the Ideas as causes of motion. Against the first, it is a matter of disclosing immanent principles that are not reducible to material elements, which can be posed as identical by analogy in different realities; against the second, it is a matter of identifying a principle that is transitive and that acts as a cause” (ibid).

Next in this series: Principles of Substance

Separate Form?

“Lambda 3 goes on to show that form cannot be separate” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 168, my translation throughout).

I have always been rather baffled by interpretations of book Lambda that claimed to find evidence there that Aristotle finally revives the notion of separate form he so thoroughly refutes elsewhere.

“The first object of Lambda 3 is to examine the well-foundedness of the Platonic arguments in favor of the separation of form — or its pretension to the status of ousia [“substance”]. The permanence of form in generation can be invoked in support of such a thesis” (ibid).

“[F]orm, even if it well fits the Platonic criterion of ousia that is permanence, does not meet the specifically Aristotelian criteria. Here the appeal will be to that of tode ti, of being a ‘this'” (ibid).

“[T]he text opens with a new formula of change, which, contrary to the previous ones, takes into account its cause” (ibid).

As Sachs renders the full passage that she cites in part, “For with everything, something changes, by the action of something, and into something: that by the action of which it changes is the first thing that sets it in motion, that which changes is the material, and that into which it changes is the form. For it comes into being either by art or by nature, or else by fortune or chance. And next after this is the fact that each independent thing comes into being from something that has the same name (for this is true both of natural independent things and of the rest). Now art is a source that is something else, but nature is a source that is in the thing itself (since a human being begets a human being), while the rest of the causes are deprivations of these” (Metaphysics, p. 233).

Aubry notes that this language appears to be a bit of a regression, since matter has already been superseded by potentiality in Lambda chapter 2. But she explains that chapters 2 and 3 constitute a pair concerned respectively with matter and form, and chapter 2 did not yet address form.

She points out that Aristotle goes on to mention three kinds of substance, among which form is conspicuously not included. “What are enumerated are matter, which is only in appearance a tode ti; phusis [nature], which is at the same time a tode ti and a hexis [acquired disposition]; and finally, the composite, or individual realities, the kath ekasta like Socrates and Callias. Where we might expect the term form, we instead find that of phusis, which will be qualified again as hexis. For phusis is precisely a form realized in a matter, stabilized as hexis at the end of a process. Such an enumeration already signals that form as such cannot be counted as ousia, and cannot be separate, in the sense that it does not exist apart from the composite” (p. 169).

“In Zeta 8, it was already the intervention of the criterion of tode ti that allowed it to be established that form does not exist apart from (para) the composite, and thus to reject as superfluous the hypothesis of the Platonic Forms, since, at least in the case of natural beings, it is indeed an individual — and a concrete composite — that engenders another. But besides Zeta 8, it is necessary to refer equally to Eta 1…. Eta 1 makes intervene, in addition to the criterion of tode ti, the criterion of khoriston, which, as we have underlined, is equally present in Lambda 1. The examination established that matter is only a tode ti in-potentiality, dunamei; while form is only [a tode ti] insofar as it is to logo khoriston [separate according to the formula, or in speech]; and only the composite is khoriston haplos [separate simply]” (pp. 169-170).

“Like the criterion of khoriston and even dissociated from it, the criterion of individuality indeed leads to only counting the composite of matter and form as ousia” (p. 170).

“[I]n the case of art, there can be form without matter, but the form thus considered is nothing but tekhne [art] itself, that is to say in fact the form such as it is conceived and envisioned by the artisan. In the case of phusis, the principle of synonymy, the permanence of one same form transmitted from one individual to another, is sufficient to explain how we are led, as Plato did, to assert that there exist distinct forms of natural substances. But we can conclude from this neither that they are separate, nor that their character is that of tode ti and of ousia.”

“This would presuppose that the forms exist apart from and independent of composites, and in particular that they are capable of pre-existing as well as perhaps surviving them. But in truth, the existence of the formal cause is simultaneous with that of the composite. Certainly health is distinct from the healthy, and sphericity from the bronze sphere, but health and sphericity do not have full existence, that is to say do not exist as ousia except as instantiated in the cured patient, the completed sphere” (ibid).

“At the end of the whole formed by Lambda 2 and 3, we are indeed in possession of a positive result: matter, conceived kata dunamei, can be extended from the corruptible sensibles to the eternal sensibles; but also a negative result: form cannot be separate. Each of these results already contains elements of a response to the guiding questions posed in Lambda 1: whether or not it is possible to unify the principles of substance; and the nature of the separate. One term is still missing: that of energeia, in which will reside the definitive response to these two questions” (p. 171).

In discussing Lambda 2, she emphasized the substitution of potentiality for matter. Here in passing she suggests that alternatively, we could consider that matter has been redefined along with potentiality. But which alternative we endorse is really just a question of the optimal use of words. The old understanding of both matter and potentiality has been left behind.

Next in this series: Explanation by Constituents?

Potentiality in the Stars

“Lambda 2 marks the irruption in Metaphysics Lambda of the notions of dunamis and energeia, at the same time as the passage from doxographic examination to the thetic moment” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 165, my translation throughout). Aristotle’s distinctive concepts of potentiality and act had been absent from chapter 1’s preliminary survey of the opinions of others, but as soon as he begins to elaborate his own proper theses, they reappear.

“Lambda 2 proceeds also to a substitution: that of the couple dunamei/energeia for the triplicity of matter and the contraries. It is necessary to note — and this is an essential point — that here in what is their first occurrence in Lambda, these notions intervene straightaway under their dative form, and as a division of being: ‘For, since being is double, everything changes from being in-potentiality to being in-act’…. the dative form marking the ontological sense more specifically” (ibid).

Aristotle is not abolishing matter in the modern sense. Replacing stuff with a modality like potentiality would seem rather odd, but that is not what is occurring here. Hylomorphism means that any kind of “stuff” must already be body — and thus for Aristotle must be a “composite” of form and matter. He never treats form and matter as discrete parts of a thing, and repeatedly insists that they can only be separated by abstraction. Aristotelian matter in itself has always struck me as principally specifying a kind of primordial adverbiality and relationality involved in any embodiment.

Here he is moving yet further away from the “grammatical prejudice” of an underlying thing in which properties inhere. The whole dialectical development of the concept of “substance” (ousia) in the Zeta-Eta-Theta sequence and book Lambda precisely involves moving beyond the notion of something “underlying” that we naturally begin with in thinking about how things persist through time. Here we see a related movement beyond the abstraction that Aristotle calls matter, which was the initial candidate for something underlying.

“Lambda 2 takes metabole [change] as its primary object. It proposes an analysis appropriate to all kinds of change, and in particular both substantial change and change of position…. More precisely, it is a matter of identifying the principles common to all sensible and movable substances, whether they are eternal [astronomical] or corruptible [earthly]. For it is the intervention of the notion of dunamei and its substitution for that of matter, that makes possible this unification of the principles of sensible substance” (ibid).

“The text finds a precise parallel in book I of the Physics, where the same three formulae succeed one another: the contraries and their subject; matter, form, and privation; and finally, the formula according to power and act, kata ten dunamin kai ten energeian. Nonetheless, in Physics I the last is mentioned as having been treated elsewhere with more precision. Still it reappears at the end of that book, in the context of a critique of the Platonic theory of matter: Plato erroneously identifies matter with non-being, with evil and privation…. That which desires the positive contrary must be matter, as distinct from one and the other contrary. Matter must therefore be distinguished from privation: the latter is in itself the principle of corruption. On the other hand, if we consider it according to power, kata ten dunamin, matter is unengendered and incorruptible” (pp. 165-166).

“The last lines of book I of the Physics considerably clarify chapter 2, but also 3, of Lambda, in that they designate two distinct modes of approach to the material and formal principles: the perishable forms are in effect called ‘physical’, and the study of the others is deferred to first philosophy. But this distinction applies also to matter: in fact, we distinguish equally between corruptible matter and incorruptible matter. For unengendered and incorruptible matter is identified with matter considered kata dunamin, or according to a point of view that, without having been explicitly named, has nonetheless been distinguished from the physical point of view” (p. 166).

Modern physics and chemistry speak of an ultimate conservation of matter.

“The fact is that over the course of Lambda 2, the couple of in-potentiality and act is substituted for the triad of matter and the contraries. Thus change is no longer presented as the transition of matter from one contrary to another, but as a passage ‘from being in-potentiality to being in-act’. For to treat it thus is to underline, as the end of Physics I already has against Plato, that even in the case of generation, metabole does not have for its principle absolute non-being, but being in-potentiality. And it is also to underline, this time against [the Ionian philosophers of nature], that in-potentiality in its turn is for a determinate being” (pp. 166-167).

“But beyond these polemical stakes, the substitution of the couple of in-potentiality and act for the triad of matter and the contraries makes possible a formula of change that is valid for all the movable substances, whether they are corruptible or incorruptible” (p. 167).

“Thus conceived, kata dunamin or again dunamei, matter appears no longer as a physical component but as a metaphysical principle, valid as much for the corruptible sensibles as for the eternal sensibles” (ibid).

A component suggests something mutually exclusive with other components, while a principle affects the whole of something. Potentiality is neither a component nor an underlying thing.

This “marks a progress from Theta 8: in fact, there energeia is found attributed to the eternal sensibles, but dissociated from dunamis, since the latter was understood as the power of contradiction, and treated as definitional of the corruptible sensibles. Now we discover that it is not only act, but also in-potentiality that… admits an extension from the corruptible sensibles to the eternal sensibles” (ibid).

The “power of contradiction” would be a power to be or not to be something. Unlike earthly things, Aristotle sees the stars as moving in an unchanging way, and as not changing in their being in doing so. Since they are involved in motion from place to place, I was previously surprised by Aristotle’s remark in Theta 8 that seemed to say that eternal sensibles have no potentiality. Now we see that after all they do have potentiality, in the way that he has redefined it here.

Next in this series: Separate Form?

Physics and Theology

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

Desire, Image, Intellect

In the previous post, we saw an argument developed by Giorgio Agamben that for the great medieval Italian poets Dante and Cavalcanti, there is a very close connection between love, imagination, and intellect, and that in this they were inspired by the controversial views of the great commentator Averroes in his Long Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. Taking Agamben’s essay as a point of departure, Jean-Baptiste Brenet explores Averroes’ critique of his Andalusian predecessor Ibn Bajja on the relation between intellect and imagination.

Ibn Bajja is historically important for his very strong notion of the role of imagination in the constitution of a human being. He develops this as an elaboration of the Greek commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias’ view that the so-called material intellect is a “pure preparation”, and is purely immanent in a faculty of imagination that is ultimately grounded in the body. Alexander’s view partly anticipates modern empiricism. Averroes’ criticisms of Alexander and of Ibn Bajja partly anticipate some contemporary criticisms of empiricism.

Brenet begins by recalling Aristotle’s statement in book Lambda of the Metaphysics that the first cause “moves as the object of love” (quoted in Agamben and Brenet, Intellect d’amour, p. 35, my translation throughout). Following Alexander, Averroes repeats that “Every thing is related to the prime mover as the lover to the loved” (ibid, emphasis in original).

According to Brenet, Averroes holds that “[T]he human, in tending toward the prime mover, only achieves her desire in acquiring in a complete way her initially extrinsic intellect.”

“This idea here of mental acquisition is an Arabic concept, and not a Greek one” (ibid, emphasis added). It seems to have been Alfarabi who particularly developed the distinction between intellect “in habit [hexis]” and intellect fully “acquired”. In the tradition that Alfarabi founded, the “acquired” intellect is sometimes said to result from a human being’s “conjunction” with a transcendent “agent intellect”. Unlike Alexander, who identified the agent intellect (nous poietikos, literally “doing or making intellect”) with the intellect Aristotle associates with the first cause, Alfarabi and the subsequent Arabic tradition treated it as a distinct metaphysical entity subordinate to the first cause.

The sense of the distinction between “in habit” and “acquired” seems to oppose a common level of achievement and actualization to an extraordinary one, or perhaps an ordinary empirical psychology to a normative ideal.

Averroes in his early works generally follows Ibn Bajja on this issue, but later develops his own unique position.

“In [Averroes’] Compendium of the Metaphysics, he too recalls that that which moves the lover is nothing but the form (sura) of the beloved that we bear within ourselves. What form? Not the absolute intelligible that the lover’s intellect apprehends, but that singular one that her imagination summons: her phantasm” (p. 36).

Aristotle separately says that the first cause moves as the object of love, and speaks of the large role of imagination in what we might call the psychology of thought. Ibn Bajja and the early Averroes thoroughly merge these two considerations.

“When we say that the intellect moves itself toward the object of love, we should not see a metaphor that translates the tendency toward accomplishment. To describe the process of intellectual acquisition, Averroes poses that ‘we move ourselves toward the conjunction’ (dicimur moveri ad continuationem), and with him this recovers a veritable physics of thought…. or more precisely, cinematics…. Certainly, he says, we find a celebrated manner of apprehending movement, which consists in making it ‘a path toward perfection’, this path being distinct from perfection itself (via ad perfectionem quae est alia ab ipsa perfectionae). But there is another way, ‘more true’, according to which ‘movement […] does not differ from the perfection toward which it tends, except by the more and the less […]. Movement in effect is nothing other than the engenderment, part by part, of this perfection (generatio partis post aliam illius perfectionis)” (p. 37, emphasis and bracketed ellipses in original).

We have recently seen that Aristotle himself treats all motion as a kind of entelechy.

“Fascinating thesis, where movement is nothing but the thing itself in its partial realization” (ibid). He quotes Averroes, “To go toward heat is in a certain way heat itself” (ibid). He continues, “This is the model that applies to thought. To move oneself toward the conjunction is to go toward the complete intellect, that is to say to become it, part by part, being it more and more” (ibid).

As individuals we approach this completeness not by perfectly realizing some one particular thought, but primarily by simultaneously realizing many thoughts, from multiple perspectives. Spinoza seems to have been influenced by this, as well as by Averroes’ critique of the image.

Brenet also says that Averroes implicitly references Alexander’s remarks in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (surviving Arabic fragments of this lost work having been recently translated to French) on the simultaneous continuity and discontinuity observable in the process of a body of water’s freezing. Averroes applies a similar combination of continuity and discontinuity to thought. Brenet suggests that Averroes compares arriving at determinate thought to a process of “freezing”, and suggests that Alexander’s model of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity holds good for the history of concepts and sciences as well.

“From Ibn Bajja, Averroes takes [the idea] that our concepts of things are composites. If they are, as universals, abstracted from matter, they conserve a form of materiality in that they only exist for us as applied to the images from which they are extracted. The concept is not simple, pure. It bears the mark of its concrete origin, and is first conceived only through this. That is to say, [the concept] only occurs in relation to the image which is its source, to the point of including this in its nature. That every thought is the thought of something signifies not that it aims at a noematic content, but that it is the thought of an image, of the intelligible of an image, and that necessarily the two, like all relational things, coexist while thought lasts. There is no concept but in presence of its image, with it, just as there is no son in act except by and from a father in act” (p. 38).

This is emphasizing the role of psychological immanence in thought, as distinct from thought’s objectivity, a transcendent object, pure structure, or an ideal concept in itself.

“In this composition, the required image plays the role of matter, not only as furniture, but in the sense that it is a point of support that must be integrated into the grasp of what is supported there. This is what the text repeats, that the concept is related to the imagined form, that it is attached to it, coupled. Copulatio in Latin translates Arabic irtibat, which designates a bond, like the rope that holds an animal. The universal only appears to humans in the copula to the image (from which proceed, moreover, language and speech). In its first aspect, thought thus presents two united sides, or better, occurs as their very ligature” (p. 39).

In more modern terms, even if thought primarily resides in inference rather than in some presented content, a psychologically immanent “content” corresponding to the image is nonetheless what gives it a point of application. Averroes emphasizes the role of immanent presentation in the form of images in the genesis of thought, while refusing to grant them normative status.

“That which is constitutive in the human, who is neither god nor angel, is a predisposition to think, and this, insofar as it is not mixed, necessarily has an anchorage. This pure mental aptitude is not floating, absolutely separated. It has its place, exists only as preparation of a subject, which, according to Ibn Bajja, can only be the image. By this, Averroes thinks Ibn Bajja means not only that imagination constitutes the substrate of which intellect as a power has need in order to exist, but that it is also, via the disposition of which it is the bearer, that in which thought in act is realized. The reading, which takes in a maximal sense the intermediary (mutawassit) status of the imagination, is dizzying. This would not only be the support of the faculty of thought, nor indeed, by the active images, the correlate of conception, but… the very space of intelligibilization, the place of the happening of the intelligible” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Averroes, after having been seduced, contested this, bequeathing to scholasticism an exclusively negative portrait of his first master. The image in the intellect moves, it is not moved; it is subiectum movens, and not recipiens. What Ibn Bajja loses is the equivocity of the very notion of the power of thought. If we mean to designate the capacity for universalization, a universality latent but virtual, initially this works well for the image, which conceals an intelligible charge of multiple ‘states’ (ahwal) close to the universal immediately susceptible of becoming concept. But if we dream of the power to receive thought, which the tradition calls the ‘material’ intellect, this no longer works. Reading Ibn Bajja, writes the final Averroes, ‘it seems […] that he wanted to say that the material intellect is the imaginative faculty insofar as it is prepared for the entities that are in it conceived in act, and that there is no other faculty serving as subject for these intelligibles outside of this faculty’. But he was wrong. The image is only the landmark and the subject-mover, and not the subject-substrate (that which leads it to invest the body). Thought cannot realize itself in the place from which it is pulled, even though it depends on it, and if there must be an intermediary, a diaphaneity of the intelligible, and then a receptacle for what is extracted from the image, this can only be an intellect adjoining but substantially distinct (‘separated’), this ‘possible’ intellect about which Cavalcanti as a poet will repeat that in it ‘as in a subject’ (come in subiecto) the form ‘takes its place and its abode'” (p. 40, emphasis and ellipses in original).

For a general orientation to the point of view Averroes is expressing here, Brenet turns to Hannah Arendt, summarizing part of the argument of her Life of the Spirit.

“To think, she explains, consists in a retreat, withdrawing oneself from place, not from where one is, from the quotidian space of worry and noise, but from all place, from all space, from spatiality itself. For thinking has for its object ‘essences’, and essences, as generalities, products of a de-sensorialization or of a stripping away of matter, offer themselves subtracted from spatial qualities: ‘In other words, the “essential” is what applies everywhere, and this “everywhere” which gives to thought its characteristic weight, is in terms of space a “nowhere”. The thinking me which moves itself among the universals, the invisible essences, is strictly speaking found nowhere: it is a non-citizen of any state, in the strongest sense of the term — that which explains perhaps the precocious development of a cosmopolitan mentality among the philosophers'” (pp. 40-41).

“Cosmopolitan” literally means “citizen of the cosmos”, indeed an appropriate epithet for a philosopher. Thought is nonspatial in the sense that it cannot be reduced to “seeing” an image, as something immediately there in a place. He notes that she particularly singles out Aristotle as having understood “that this status of being a non-citizen is the state of nature of thought” (p. 41).

To be a “citizen” of the cosmos , or of the universal community of rational animals, makes one to an extent a “non-citizen” of one’s particular community. It is also to be capable of detachment from the immediacy and naturality of imagination in experience.

Brenet quotes Albert the Great’s summary of the views of Ibn Bajja. “They say that there is no possible intellect in the human that is the subject of the intelligibles insofar as they are intelligible, because for them the form thought (forma speculationis) […] cannot have a subject in which it is found, given that it is universal, that is to say valid everywhere and for all time — but if it had a subject, it would be necessarily individuated, since every form is individuated and determined by its subject. From this they concluded that what we call possible or potential intellect is that which is potentially the thinking (speculativus) intellect, and that this is the image (phantasma) in the imagination (phantasia)” (ibid, ellipses in original).

“Without following Avempace [Ibn Bajja], many ‘Averroists’ contemporary to Dante and Cavalcanti also insisted on a form of implantation of thought by the image. This is the case with Antonio di Parma, medical doctor and philosopher, whom the two poets could have read or crossed paths with. The problem for him is not to conceive of the non-place of the universal, the atopia of the concept as such, that which is in evidence. Inversely, it concerns a being-there that makes of thought, in spite of the substantial separation of the intellect, something other than a cosmic phenomenon without relation to the incarnate personality of the thinker. The solution is in the image. Thought indeed is abstracted from the image, it is pulled from it, but this does not mean that it ‘leaves’ (leaving us at the same time), as if intellectual abstraction corresponded to a transit of the form, from the place that is the image (where it is intelligible potentially), to another place (the intellect, where it would be in act). For the universal form there is no other place, since by the way properly speaking it ‘does not go outside of us’ (non exit extra nos) when we abstract. And not only does the intellect ‘think nothing outside of us’ (non intelligit extra nos), even if it is separated, but since thought does not happen somewhere else than there where the image is transmuted, it is ‘in us’ (in nobis) that it happens, so to speak, in place. Thought does not migrate, it is not exported, and the atopism of its being promotes the immanence of its fabric. The image, homeland of thought” (pp. 41-42).

But if the image is the homeland of thought, for Averroes and his many Latin followers it is not thought’s destiny.

“These philosophers nonetheless did not make the image their last word. The individual thought that conjoins the universal to the phantasm from which it is extracted is only a form of thought in mid-course, characteristic of the apprenticeship by which physical knowledge proceeds from the punctual experience of things. A human of this sort accedes to the true, but always in mediate fashion, in a dependency on the body that keeps the ‘thing itself’ at a distance. ‘The one who attains the theoretic rank, writes Ibn Bajja, certainly regards the intelligible, but through an intermediary, like the sun appearing in water, where what we see in the water is the image and not [the sun] itself’. The intelligible linked to the image, as a consequence, is like the sun reflected in water, or in a mirror, that is to say also an image, that it is necessary to go beyond if we intend to approach reality as closely as possible.”

“To express this going beyond, Averroes uses a strong term: abolition” (pp. 42-43, emphasis in original).

Brenet quotes Averroes: “The form of the intellect in habitus is corrupted and destroyed, and nothing remains but the material intellect” (p. 43, emphasis in original).

“Finally, the image and that which it founds are reduced to nothing, leaving the power alone faced with the full act” (ibid).

This is indeed strong language, almost ascetic in character. But the emphasis is not on a rejection of worldly being, but on a detachment from overly specific representations as they spontaneously arise. The goal is not abstraction or suppression of passion, but true universality.

“The notion of Entbildung in the ‘mysticism’ of Meister Eckhart is not without support — under the veil of sermons — from the Averroist idea of the effacement or the annihilation of phantasms. Entbilden is to dis-imagine, and this de-figuration imposes itself on the soul, to render it available to the highest truth” (pp. 43-44).

Meister Eckhart has become famous in popular spirituality as a mystic, but he was also the third German master of theology from the University of Paris after Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg, and held important positions in the Dominican Order. Scholars increasingly emphasize the importance of his philosophical work. Brenet quotes from Meister Eckhart’s commentary on the gospel of John:

“This is why certain philosophers affirm that the agent intellect, which they call a separate substance, is united with us in the images (nobis uniri in phantasmatibus) thanks to its light that illuminates and penetrates our imaginative faculty by that illumination, and when this intellect is multiplied by multiple acts of intellection, it unites itself finally with us and becomes for us our form (tandem nobis unitur et fit forma) in such a way that we perform the works proper to that substance, which is to say that we intellectually know the separate beings, as these last know themselves. And according to these philosophers, this intellect is therefore in us an acquired intellect (iste est in nobis secundum ipsos intellectus adeptus)” (p. 44).

Someone might object that this passage only seems to refer to the Arabic tradition in a general way. References to Arabic philosophers are not exactly uncommon in scholastic theology. But I think Brenet’s implicit argument here is that the reference to the imaginative faculty in the passage suffices to establish that the philosophers mentioned are not just Arabic but specifically Andalusian in the tradition of Ibn Bajja, and this in turn allows us to safely infer that the reference is to Averroes, because it was overwhelmingly through translations of Averroes that the Latin-speaking world gained knowledge of the Andalusian tradition. In presence of such a reference, it seems unlikely that Eckhart’s explicit talk about “dis-imagination” is a mere coincidence.

“Why this abolition of the image?… Even if their competition was necessary and must expand, the images need to disappear because our current intellect, that of abstract thought, disengaged from the world, is never transmuted. There is no great work in the individual intelligence, no alchemy. The possible does not turn into the necessary, the transitory into the incorruptible, and the intellect in habitus must finally be corrupted in order to allow to subsist, under its collapse, only the in-itself universal and timeless power of thought that is the intellect called material” (p. 45).

“But the destroyed images have been indispensable (as a path, otherwise desired, that it is a question of traveling, and not as an impurity that it would be preferable to immediately get rid of)…. The image allows the power of thought to accede, not first to the act but beneath that, to its own power; in actualizing it, it opens it up to its essential capacity” (p. 46, emphasis in original).

“If it has to build its power (for it does not at first have it, being at first only an aptitude), our intellect must also increase its scope, to the point of maximizing it, and it is by the image that it can do so. The image that the human desires, in which and by which she desires, is for the person the space of the appropriation of thought. It is like the mark made on the concept that not only individualizes it, but imputes it and attributes it” (ibid).

“In his Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, which the Latins could read, Averroes recalls the progress of the material intellect toward the acquired intellect, and of the first he writes: ‘if this intellect strips itself of all potentiality, when human perfection is realized, it is necessary that its act, which is not itself, annihilates itself (yubtilu; destruatur)’. Stripping, then ruin of the fruit of the stripping. Intellect must divest itself of its power in actualizing itself in the thoughts of the world, then obliterate this actualization solidary with the images of things…. It is on this intentional nihilism, of which the image is the paradoxical operator, that felicity depends” (pp. 46-47).

Nonetheless, “The theory of thought by ‘conjunction’ is founded on a doctrine of desire, which raises the subalternate question of moral action. There is never thought except by desire” (p. 47, emphasis added).

Brenet recalls that in book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains choice by orektikos nous (desiring intellect) “or” orexis dianoetike (reflective desire), “and such a principle is a human” (quoted, ibid). Averroes in turn speaks of cogitatio — the cogitative faculty of the soul, responsible for deliberation — sometimes in terms of discursive reasoning and sometimes in terms of imagination, but it should be understood as both simultaneously. “The principle of the human is only made effective in the crossing and the permanent division of these two dimensions” (p. 48).

The claim is that without ever becoming exempt from desire, “[T]he intellect of the human can have as object not only the abstract intelligible but the separate intelligible, universal in itself” (ibid, emphasis in original). “For Averroes, convinced of the necessity of this thought that is literally supernatural (though operated in the world here below, and by the force of reason alone), the question is not one of knowing whether our intellect accedes to the pure intelligible, but of establishing how it does so, how it can do so, what is the power that will make it capable of this” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This worldly and rational “supernatural” is a technical consequence of Aristotle’s narrow identification of the natural with terrestrial materiality. I prefer to use the term “natural” in a more expansive way, as including both astronomical entities and the whole scope of Aristotelian teleology.

“Why are all the individuals not already thought ‘in’ the thinking intellect, in the way that Augustine held that all humans have sinned in Adam? The solution again draws on the image” (p. 50).

“We have said that there are two dispositions to think in the human. The first is that which her images procure; … the second follows on this, and is its reward. This is the disposition toward the supreme thinkable, which occurs when the intellect has been taken to the limits of its capacity by the cumulative effect of all kinds of images” (p. 51).

“As for the philosopher, the beatific thinker, she is intellectually subtracted from time, and as Ibn Bajja says, that of her which is eternalized does not ‘redescend’.”

“In spite of all this, knowledge does not remain without a body. Each singular body that wears out and perishes in its images must be constantly relayed if the resulting universal is to be a constant event…. [T]he body in its phantasms is dead. Long live the immense Body” (p. 53).

“While Dante wrote his Monarchy to defend in the name of Averroes the existence of a ‘multitude’ allowing all its power to be activated, the theologian Thomas Wylton in Paris wrote an ‘Averroist’ text also maintaining that what the intellect completes is always in the first instance the species and not the individual: ‘the first perfectible of the material intellect is not Socrates or Plato, nor is it the universal abstracted by the intellect, but human nature itself, which in itself and in relation to quiddity is one in all its supports, even though it is numerically distinct in them. Insofar as it is one in this manner, it is the first perfectible of the material intellect, and as such it is — if we speak of a determinate singularity within a species — neither numbered nor singular: one may call it singular, but [only in the sense of] a vague singularity‘” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Brenet has written an entire book on Wylton.

“It appears, but as a vague individual, of which we perceive only that it is some animal, or some human, an aorist, the indeterminate individual of which what follows must show the figure or the face” (p. 54, emphasis in original).

“The phantasm is abolished, indetermination advances, the images return. Desire resumes” (ibid).

Love’s Intellect

The main theme here is an unexpectedly close relation between love and a broadly Aristotelian notion of intellect. We will also see another perspective on the crucial Aristotelian concepts of potentiality and act, and perhaps shed further light on Aristotle’s telegraphic remarks about how we have knowledge of “privations” or negations of things.

I’ll be devoting two posts to the small pamphlet Intellect d’Amour (2018), introduced by the great contemporary scholar of medieval philosophy Alain de Libera, in which leading specialist in Averroes and Latin Averroism Jean-Baptiste Brenet translates an Italian essay by Giorgio Agamben, and presents a related essay of his own. This post deals with Agamben’s part.

While I have little sympathy for Agamben’s quasi-Heideggerian reduction elsewhere of “Western metaphysics” as a whole to a fundamental error for which Aristotle is supposedly to blame, his essay here is focused and interesting. The medieval Italian poet and philosopher Guido Cavalcanti (1255?-1300) — a close associate of and influence on the great Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy — is now generally understood to have been inspired by Italian Averroist philosophy (see Italian Aristotelianism). The dominant interpretation of Cavalcanti, however, has been that of Bruno Nardi, who emphasizes a fundamental discontinuity between Cavalcanti’s exaltation of love in both its spiritual and its erotic dimensions, and his Averroist views on intellect. Agamben, Brenet, and de Libera all seem to agree in turning this interpretation on its head.

Dante and Cavalcanti are both commonly associated with the historically shadowy group of poets known as the fedeli d’amore (love’s faithful). The fedeli were apparently influenced by the poetry and music of the troubadours, who developed the Western medieval tradition of courtly love, and also used it as a spiritual metaphor, somewhat along the lines of Plato’s Symposium. Sources of the troubadour tradition are disputed by scholars and likely were multiple, but an Arabic or specifically Sufi element has been repeatedly suggested.

Agamben’s essay points out that a particularly mysterious phrase bianco in tale obiettò cade (something like “white falls into this objection”) in Cavalcanti’s poem Donna me prega appears to be intended to recall the Latin cecidit albedo in exemplari in Averroes’ Long Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. In the poem, Cavalcanti has just said that love cannot be understood in terms of vision.

Agamben notes that in the passage where the corresponding phrase appears in Averroes, Averroes is more broadly addressing how we know the privations of positive terms. In the context of vision, Averroes poses “blackness” as a privation of “whiteness”, somewhat like modern science calls blackness an absence of color. Agamben quotes de Libera’s remark in his partial French translation of Averroes’ work that “Every privation is effectively known negatively, by preliminarily positing something and then negating it” (p. 13, my translation throughout).

The “white” in Cavalcanti’s poem recalls the white by which the black is known as a privation. Following the passage Cavalcanti refers to, the Latin translation of Averroes says “And it is necessary that this faculty of knowledge perceives the privation in perceiving itself as being in potentiality, when it is in potentiality, since it perceives the one and the other of itself, that is to say being in potentiality and being in act. And such is the case with the material intellect” (quoted, p. 19).

Here we have among other things a fascinating connection between self-apprehension and negation. I imagine Hegel nodding in approval here.

“Averroes affirms that, in knowing obscurity, the material intellect knows itself insofar as it is in potentiality, and that, reciprocally, for the material intellect, to understand itself is equivalent to knowing obscurity and privation. One sole and same faculty — the material or possible intellect — knows obscurity and light (obscuritatem et lumen), power and act, form and its privation. As de Libera notes, this signifies that ‘privation is attached to the very essence of intellect’, and indeed also — the consequence is inevitable — that obscurity — non-thinking in act — is an integral part of intellect and is consubstantial with it ” (pp. 19-20).

Here I think also of Socrates’ comment that wisdom involves recognizing what we do not know. In a sense, this kind of recognition of privation is just as much a part of knowledge as any positive content.

“The idea that obscurity, which for him constitutes an essential part of the amorous experience, in no way implies an exclusion of knowledge, could not but fascinate Cavalcanti. On the contrary, since one sole and same faculty — the possible or material intellect, where love has its dwelling place — knows equally well the darkness and the light, equally well the form and its privation, having the amorous experience of obscurity thus also necessarily signifies having the experience of the pure power of intellect” (p. 20).

In passing, Agamben refers here to his major thesis in this essay, that the material intellect is where love has its abode for Cavalcanti. We also see an example of the Aristotelian thesis that rational knowledge of one of a pair of opposites necessarily entails knowledge of the other.

“In this perspective, it is possible to divide the philosophers into two great classes or families. According to the one group, what defines humans is the act of thinking, and the latter are indeed like the angels, always in the act of thinking; according to the others (the Averroist tradition in which Cavalcanti as well as Dante are inscribed by right), what defines humans is not the act, but the power of thinking (humans do not think continually, which is to say they think in an intermittent way — not sine interpolatione [without interpolation], as Dante says” (pp. 20-21).

In our thinking, we who are not pure act depend on this “power of thinking” that begins as something external to us.

Agamben recalls that Averroes calls the material intellect a fourth kind of being (neither form, nor matter, nor a composite). “It is this perception of its own obscurity by the material intellect, essentially divided in its being, which becomes for Cavalcanti the place of the experience of love” (p. 22). “If the attempt to think, apropos of the material intellect, the existence of a pure power as a fourth genus of being leads Averroism to an aporia from which it is not easy to escape, it nonetheless furnishes, and precisely through that, the elements of another conception of subject than that which has prevailed since Descartes…. Otherwise said, Averroism thinks the subject as the subject of a power, and not only of an act…. Averroes suggests that the material intellect should be considered more as a place… than as a matter” (p. 23).

Agamben’s language seems overly loose here, in that it blurs together act in an Aristotelian sense and agency in a modern sense, but he nonetheless makes an important point. The “Cartesian subject” is indeed commonly conceived more or less exclusively in terms of its agency in the modern sense. Both the mechanist and the voluntarist dimensions in Cartesian thought mitigate against taking the key Aristotelian concept of potentiality seriously (and conversely, taking potentiality seriously makes both mechanism and voluntarism untenable).

The modern notion of agency is distinguished by the fact that from the outset, it is conceived as not having any inherent relation to a contrasting term like potentiality, that would condition and limit it. By contrast, Aristotle only arrives at the thesis that there can be such a thing as pure act after a long dialectical development, starting from the cases where act is only analytically distinguishable from potentiality. The common modern approach short-circuits all of this. Aristotelian act and agency in the modern sense are thus two different things. But Agamben correctly points out that any finite “subject” that is the subject of a conditioning power (or capability, as Paul Ricoeur more felicitously puts it) will be fundamentally different from the modern stereotype of a one-sided subject-agent.

“The great invention of Cavalcanti, of Dante and the other poets of love, is to situate love in the possible intellect without reservation. As the song says, and for once clearly, the possibile intelletto is the subject — or the quasi-subject (come in subietto) — the loco [place] and the dimoranza [residence] (the mansio [house]) of the veduta forma [form seen] that produces love…. [L]ove (as the ‘form seen’, veduta forma, which gives birth to it) is in the possible intellect as in its proper place” (p. 24).

The thought here seems to be that the feeling of love follows from the apprehension of a form or image as having characteristics that make it in itself lovable. According to Agamben, for Cavalcanti and Dante, the possible aka potential aka material intellect is the “quasi-subject” of love. At the same time, the possible intellect is not so much a discrete entity as a “place” that is not really a discrete place either, but a kind of ubiquitous structural relation.

Agamben cites a line from Dante speaking of “women who have love’s intellect”. He comments, “[B]etween intellect and love the connection is essential” (ibid).

“The modern specialists, each convinced that they think with their own brain — when to all evidence they on the contrary think according to the common paradigms imposed by the doctrinal system in which they are inscribed — experience such distress before the Averroist theory of the unique intellect, that they do not understand what should nonetheless be evident, namely that the speculative node of the question, so to speak the experimentum crucis [cross test] of Averroism, does not consist in the division between individuals and intellect, but — once the division is affirmed — in their conjunction, which the Latin translators render by the technical terms copulatio and continuatio. In this conjunction between the unique material intellect and singular individuals, the essential mediating function is accomplished by the intentiones ymaginatae, that is to say the phantasms of the imagination” (p. 25).

“Nonetheless, not only does the imagination operate as an intermediary between individuals and the intellect, but it is also for Calvalcanti the object and at the same time the subject of amorous passion” (p. 26). “Cavalcanti and the poets of love take the coincidence between love and imagination so far that they personify the phantasms” (p. 27).

This is saying that imagination is both the object and the subject of love, as well as what individualizes intellect.

Agamben points out that Averroes strongly underlines Aristotle’s statement that only the combination of intellect and desire moves us. “It is this singular fusion between intellect, desire, and imagination that it is also necessary to understand in the ‘love’s intellect’ of Dante…. Love is not a substance, it is — as [Cavalcanti’s] song says in its overture — an ‘accident’ that indetermines the three substances intellect, imagination, and desire, and puts them fiercely in tension” (p. 29).

“[F]or intellection to be ‘acquired’ and become ‘proper’ to the individual, in effect it does not suffice that the forms be imagined, but it is necessary that they be desired and willed…. [T]he phantasm by desire makes the intelligible proper to the subject. Thought belongs to me because it has been imagined and desired” (p. 31).

“The great invention of Cavalcanti and the poets of love is to make love the place par excellence of the adeptio [acquisition] of thought by the individual” (p. 32).

Whom and what we love are of decisive importance to who we are, as well as to what we hold to be true.

Agamben notes that Dante also drew political consequences from his Averroist view of intellect. He quotes Dante’s treatise on monarchy: “Since the power of thought cannot be integrally and simultaneously actualized by a single human or by a single particular community […], it is necessary that there be in the human genus a multitude through which the whole power is in act” (p. 33, ellipses in original).

Dante’s universalist aspirations distinguish him from Cavalcanti, who was deeply involved in factional intrigue. For Dante, “‘our’… accompanies and precedes ‘me'” (p. 34).

Book Lambda: Introduction

“Book Lambda of the Metaphysics responds to the exigencies defined in book capital Alpha: to pose the good as a principle; and to determine its proper mode of causality as being that of a final cause, and not an efficient or formal cause. These two exigencies are resolved in a single proposition: the principle is act, and is without power. Act here receives its full signification: it is act and not form that is the mode of being of separate substance; but act also serves to name the good as a principle” (Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 153, my translation throughout).

We saw last time that pure act (energeia) for Aristotle — unlike any being in subcelestial nature — has the character of unmixed necessity. This is true because pure act is the only thing that fully is what it is. It is the admixture of power (dynamis) and in-potentiality (dynamei) in other things that is the source of their contingency, as not being pure act.

“If the concepts of dunamis and energeia simultaneously unify ousiology and integrate theology into it, they also bear all the singularity of the Aristotelian thought of being, and within it of the first being, insofar as the latter is conceived not as an excess of power, but as the reality of the good” (p. 154).

Ousiology would be an account of ousia, or what we call “substance” from the Latin. Again, the first cause is not first in the sense of time, but first in the sense that all other things depend on it. The whole point of calling it pure act is to separate it from the contingency of the dependent things that have power and potentiality.

The very idea of an “excess of power” is utterly alien to Aristotle. We saw before that he understands power as always being power for something definite. Only those things that also have a dependency on something outside of themselves have this kind of “power” at all, corresponding to an unrealized in-potentiality. This “power” and potentiality are the mark of their contingency, not of implacable might.

It is Plato and Plotinus who on the other hand associate superlative power with the Good or the One. But Aristotle criticizes Plato for failing to explain how the Good acts as a cause. Then Plotinus later attempts to answer Aristotle’s criticism by adapting and dwelling upon the novel theme of the excessive character of the One’s power that first emerges in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

“To read book Lambda in a unitary manner, and to find this unity in ontology, that is to say in the sense of being that dunamis and energeia express, is not at all to deny or to minimize its theological content. It is on the contrary to affirm the unity of metaphysics, against the onto-theological readings that scission it between a science of common being and a science of the first being. It is also to recognize a continuity among the different treatises that have come down to us under the name of the Metaphysics” (p. 156).

“The date of composition of book Lambda is debated by commentators. But it is necessary in any case to distinguish between the historical question of its editorial status and that of its conceptual relation to the other books of the Metaphysics, with regard to the problems to which responds to, displaces, or resolves, the analyses that it deepens” (ibid).

“The problems treated in the central books [Zeta–Eta–Theta], and most especially in book Theta, seem to us to be decisive. In Lambda, the elucidation of [1] the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia that orients Theta in its entirety; [2] the analogical relation between them in Theta 6; and [3] the anteriority of act over in-potentiality subsequently developed in Theta 8, furnish the conceptual basis as much for the analogical unification of the principles of substance, as for the principal position of ousia energeia” (ibid).

“Massively mobilized in Lambda 6 and 7, [the notions of dunamis and energeia] are absent from the introductory chapter that constitutes Lambda 1, as from the analyses of Lambda 3, and little present in Lambda 8 and 10. Nonetheless, the successive and modulated interventions of dunamis–energeia (or — and it is necessary for us to ask ourselves about this variation, of their dative form dunamei–energeia) over the course of Lambda serve each time to respond to the different questions raised in Lambda 1, which serve as the program for the book in its entirety: what is a principle (notably in its difference from an element, stoicheion, or a cause, aitia)? What are the principles common to sensible substances? What is the nature of separate substance (is it a form or not)? Finally, and these two questions are intrinsically linked, in what way is separate substance a cause, and are there principles common to all substances, sensible or separate?” (p. 157).

Here Aubry notes that while still maintaining his own preferred sense of “separate” ousia (separate as subsisting with relative independence with respect to other things) as distinct from that of Plato (separate as independent of matter subject to becoming), Aristotle nonetheless in this part of the text turns to ask questions about substance that is separate in both of these senses.

“Going forward, we will be able to extract a unitary principle for all substances, sensible or separate, that is not reducible to the unity of the material composite; and at the same time to maintain, under the auspices of this unity, a hierarchy that is not episodic or disjunctive” (p. 158).

What makes the hierarchy of substance not episodic or disjunctive in Aristotle is the explanation he provides for the mode of causality of the end and the good as that for the sake of which.

“Lambda 2 will thus substitute the notion of in-potentiality for that of matter, in order to extend it, beyond the corruptible sensible substances, to the eternal sensible substances. This positive result is followed in Lambda 3 by a negative, but decisive, result, since we will establish, against Plato, that form cannot be separate. In Lambda 4, it is this time against its reduction to an element [i.e., a constituent in the material sense] by those who wrote about nature, that the notion of principle will be redefined” (ibid).

For Aristotle, a principle of something is never reducible to a constituent part of it, and what any given thing “is” is always more than a mere sum of its parts.

“The veritable pivot of book Lambda, chapter 5 goes on to integrate these various results, negative as well as positive: the extension of dunamis to the eternal sensibles; the exclusion of form from consideration as the mode of the being of the separate; the distinction between principle and element; and going forward, [chapter 5] brings two fundamental responses to the questions posed in the introductory chapter: separate substance must be conceived as act and not as form; and dunamis and energeia are, by analogy, the principles common to all sensible substances” (ibid).

“On this basis, the central concern of chapters 6-10 will consist in determining and exploring the mode(s) of relation between separate substance and the other substances. Lambda 6 having demonstrated that separate substance as ousia energeia is the condition of the movement of the other substances, it remains to identify its mode of causality as being that of the end (Lambda 7) and of the good (Lambda 9), but also the way in which this causality operates in the case of the eternal sensibles (Lambda 8), and, finally, the whole universe (Lambda 10)” (ibid).

The whole universe coheres intelligibly, both insofar as it realizes the good, and insofar there are also explanations when things fall short or go wrong. The world we live in is not a mere whole made up of discrete parts, as the pre-Socratic writers on nature tended to assume. Neither is it the mere sequence of disconnected episodes that follows from the Platonic sole emphasis on what Aristotle calls formal causes.

Next in this series: Physics and Theology

Book Theta: Summing Up

We’ve reached the end of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s chapter on book Theta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. At this point, with the textual analysis complete, she pauses to reflect on what this all means. I for one have been extremely impressed with the quality of her argument, upon this rather close examination in which we have been embarked. Here her conclusions seem to follow with ease. I’ll keep my comments to a minimum here, and mostly let her speak for herself.

“The movement of book Theta, such as we have attempted to trace, appears to us… as having for its object to subtract dunamis from the logic of force” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, pp. 145-146, my translation throughout).

“Theta 8 also justifies the etymology of the very terms, of Aristotelian invention, energeia and entelekheia, in posing the identity between act, ergon (function or work), and end…. Act says something more than ousia: not only subsistence, but being-in-the-end…. Thenceforth, dunamis and energeia are not only opposed as that which can be to that which is fully, or as the potential to the actual. They are articulated as oriented movement — tendency — toward its end” (p. 146).

“Act, for this reason, no longer appears only as another name for the composed ousia, but for ousia as such, and power, univocally characterized as the power of contraries, is designated as the principle of a fundamental contingency” (ibid).

“The notion of act is charged with an axiological significance [one having to do with value], the same that it already had in the Protrepicus where it made its appearance. If the identity of act and good is not explicitly posed in Theta (as it will be on the other hand in book Lambda), it is nonetheless presupposed by the identification between act, end, and ergon” (ibid).

“If the birthplace of the notion of energeia is ethics, and if this notion thereafter passes to ontology, it is indeed for founding an axiological ontology which in its content pronounces the identity of being, the end, and in the same way the good” (ibid).

“Going forward, what is proper to the ontology of dunamis and energeia seems to us to reside in that it allows being to be thought otherwise than as power and otherwise than as presence. Being, in the way that dunamis and energeia express it, is not only that which is there, not only that which acts [agit]” (p. 147).

(In the front matter to her second volume, Aubry says clearly, “Act is not action. Act does not act [L’acte n’agit pas].”)

“Dunamis, we have said, is reducible neither to active power nor to passive power, but must be thought as the possibility of a movement toward act. As for act, it expresses not only presence, but being-in-the end and the good as realized or (when it excludes in-potentiality) as real: substance having realized its essence as good, or essentially good substance. Act thus appears as the ontological name of the good. It expresses the unity of being and value, the conjunction of the ideal and the real. Every act is a perfection, however ephemeral it may be — a place of absoluteness, an inalienable achievement. That is in act which, however weak it may be, was successful — that in which an Idea is here and now, even for a brief instant, incarnated. The Aristotelian good, we recall, is not an abstract universal, a Form without substantiality, or an empty ideal: it is, for each being, a possibility that is proper to it, and that can be effectuated. An axiological ontology, the ontology of act appears also as an ontology of non-scission” (ibid).

She notes that Pierre Aubenque, with whom she studied, wrote about both scission (a cut) and mediation in Aristotle in this context, but tended to emphasize the scission. She also sees both as important, but prefers to emphasize the mediation.

“In a sense, our reading only modifies this accentuation. But at the same time, far from seeing in the thought of Aristotle a metaphysics of inachievement and a wisdom of limits, we see an ontology of perfection, which also carries with it an ethics of surpassing: what is important is not that being is not immediately perfect, the human not necessarily divine, but that by way of the notion of in-potentiality, they are posed as capable of being so, by way of the notion of act as having being, even fugitively” (p. 147n).

“Aristotle nonetheless thinks the difference of being and the good at the same time as their identity. It is in-potentiality that serves to name this difference, this division. If it does not have being absolutely, neither is being in-potentiality an absolute non-being. It is at the same time in the mode of not yet and of always already: being in-potentiality is to be awaiting what we will be. But it is also, since in-potentiality is for a determinate act and becoming, to carry its becoming and its end in itself: being in-potentiality is being able to become what one is. If in-potentiality expresses the division between a being and what it has to be (its act, indeed, in which reside also its end and its good), it also expresses the possibility of annulling that division. In-potentiality at the same time poses distance and its crossing: if it expresses difference, it is as a provisionally differentiated identity. Indeed no more than the good is an empty ideal (or a Form-Idea) is in-potentiality an indefinite desire doomed to unfulfillment” (p. 147).

“In this way, Aristotle avoids the misfortune of scission. But he nonetheless does not fall into the naivete of immediacy. With dunamis is introduced the mediation of time, of movement, and even, with dunamis meta logou in the human, of liberty” (p. 148).

Here she gives the Greek for what is traditionally translated as rational power. More literally, this is “power after logos“, which more clearly captures the dependency of such power on the logos associated with deliberation.

“This division introduces the possibility of encounter, of error, of accident. An ontology of non-scission, the ontology of in-potentiality and in-act also leaves a place for the thought of failure or messing things up. If act poses the good and the end as real, and in-potentiality as to be realized, the passage from in-potentiality to act is never assured. The potential cannot be called a future actual, and the actualization of in-potentiality is never necessary, since it can be suspended by deliberated choice, or interrupted by accident” (ibid).

“Finally, the distance between act and in-potentiality leaves a place not only for difference, but for alterity [otherness]” (ibid).

She goes on to give some conclusions about causality.

“[E]fficiency is not suppressed…, but subsumed under finality: alterity is required as a moment of this progress toward self” (ibid).

“Efficiency nonetheless is only a means for finality, and transitive causality is only a means for immanent development. For the articulation of dunamis and energeia has something else remarkable in that it allows the efficacy of the end and the good to be thought. We have seen that in-potentiality is not thought in the order of force. It is nonetheless the source of a movement, or of a change, which has for principle the form as end, or act. For the end does not act, at least in the sense that it is not an efficient cause…; if it is, it is only metaphorically, kata metaphoran. The end indeed is efficacious without being efficient. If it acts, or has an effect, it is not as an efficient cause, in implementing an active power, it is a cause as act and end of in-potentiality. We could say, going forward, that if act names the mode of being of the good and the end, in-potentiality names its mode of action” (pp. 148-149, emphasis in original).

“The correlation of in-potentiality and act also allows the specificity of final causality as causality that is effective but not efficient to be thought” (p. 149).

This, she recalls, was one of the projects laid out in book Alpha, where Aristotle insisted on his originality with respect to the causes.

“For to identify this causality implies precisely to think the good neither as power and efficient cause, in the manner of Love or Intellect [as Empedocles and Anaxagoras respectively held], nor as in-potentiality, in the manner of the separate Forms. Plato in the Republic attributed dunamis to the Good: but if we want to think the power of the good, it is necessary to think it not as dunamis, but as energeia, and as the end of in-potentiality” (ibid).

“It is indeed in the articulation of dunamis to energeia that the secret of the power of the Good resides, that ‘daimonic force that makes it so that things are disposed in view of the better and the more perfect’, and to which Socrates in the Phaido relates his quest” (ibid).

“Going forward we understand that book Alpha of the Metaphysics, which we can read in part as an echo of this text from the Phaido, encompasses Socrates and Anaxagoras in the same critique: to succeed where they both failed, it is necessary to understand that the power of the good is daimonic or divine precisely in that it is not a power” (ibid).

Here of course she uses “power” in two different senses.

Then, as I have also emphasized, hypothetical necessity is central to Aristotle’s notion of explanation. Here we have Aristotle’s answer to questions about freedom and determinism.

“Hypothetical necessity governs both the facts of nature and those of choice. It is indeed as compatible with contingency as it is with the frequency or modality of natural phenomena such that their regularity can be interrupted by accident” (p. 150). She cites book II of the Physics.

“[Hypothetical necessity] nonetheless does not hold good as a simple heuristic concept, or a simple ‘as if’, but indeed as a constitutive principle, since in-potentiality inscribes in the very heart of beings, natural as well as artificial, the efficacity of the end and the reality of act” (p. 151).

Next I’ll take a look at her chapter on book Lambda.

Next in this series: Book Lambda: Introduction

Grammatical Prejudice?

In several of his works, Nietzsche attacks the “grammatical prejudice” or “superstition of logicians” in positing a doer behind the deed. For example:

“‘[T]he doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed — the deed is everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed: it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect. Scientists do no better when they say ‘force moves’, ‘force causes’, and the like” (Genealogy of Morals, 1st essay, section 13, Kaufman tr., p. 45).

One of the more obvious targets of this polemic would seem to be a certain stereotypical Aristotelianism. Such a view would take Aristotle’s more superficial characterization of “substance” [ousia] as the “underlying thing” as a final truth. As Nietzsche points out, this view has very wide diffusion, and has come to be regarded as common sense.

We have seen in some detail, however, that in his more advanced thought in the Metaphysics, Aristotle explicitly inverts this popular prejudice, and makes act [energeia] the criterion of what is a substance most of all [ousia malista]. As Goethe said, “In the beginning was the deed”.

Contrary to Nietzsche though, this does not make of substance a mere fiction. For Aristotle, substance is ultimately a result rather than a starting point. It turns out to be a derived concept, rather than an elementary one as may first appear. But as a result and as a derived concept, it has legitimate use.

Even the great 20th century Thomist Etienne Gilson suggests in his Being and Some Philosophers that we should think of being as a verb rather than as a noun. I too keep harping on the fact that all the many “senses of being” Aristotle enumerates in book Delta of the Metaphysics are senses of the connective “is”. But this is not the end of the story either.

The next thing we should notice is that what Aristotle principally enumerates and emphasizes in book Delta and elsewhere are the senses of being in which we say something “is” something (else) in accordance with one of the categories. These are transitive (connective) senses of “is”, associable with the formation of propositions that could be evaluated as true or false. Behind Aristotle’s talk about being is a guiding concern with normative saying and intelligible explanation of what properly speaking “is” the case. With his Thomistic roots, Gilson on the other hand emphasizes an intransitive sense of being as “existing”.

In numerous passages in the Metaphysics, Aristotle does indeed use “being” in an intransitive way, but my contention is that this is by way of summary or a kind of shorthand, which should be understood as presupposing and referring back to something like the enumeration of senses of being that we actually find in book Delta, all of which I would contend are transitive.

The only apparent exception in Delta is none other than being in the sense of in-act and in-potentiality. This occurs at the very end of the enumeration, and can reasonably be interpreted as shorthand for the longer expressions used earlier. Moreover, the detailed discussion of being in-act and in-potentiality in book Theta is about something (transitively) being something definite in-act or in-potentiality. In Delta, I think the brief mention of being in-act and in-potentiality is to be understood as wrapping a modal dimension around the more basic saying of “is” in the senses of the Categories. (Here I have passed over other senses of being that Aristotle himself says are less important, but none of these corresponds to what the scholastics and the moderns call existence either.)

Perhaps Gilson is right that Aquinas can be read as a sort of “existentialist”. But relatively speaking, I think Aristotle himself is closer to the analytic and continental philosophers who have emphasized the importance of language, meaning, and discourse. (See also Being as Such?.)

Act as Separable

“At this point in Theta 8, we have completed, by the mediation of the terms telos [end] and ergon [completed work], the justification of the equivalence between the superior terms of the analogy, energeia [act], kinesis [motion], and ousia [“substance”], just as we have justified that between the inferior terms, dunamis [power] and hyle [matter]. But in so doing, we have also subsumed one analogical relation under the other, by showing in the correlation dunamis–kinesis a particular case of the correlation hyle–ousia: power serves as a means for matter to attain the form posed as end, and indeed as a means for the coming to be of substance as unity of matter and form, movement itself being able to serve, in the case of transitive activities, as end and as realization of essence. We have thus completed the transition from the kinetic sense to the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia, and at the same time established the priority of the ontological sense over the kinetic sense.”

“The end of Theta 8 nonetheless begins another process: this no longer aims at showing the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia, but at extending their field of application beyond the corruptible sensible substances” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 141, my translation throughout, Becker number citations to the Greek text omitted). 

Aristotle regards the stars as eternal (or more precisely, sempiternal) sensible beings, because on a human time scale their motions and other characteristics appear to be unchanging. From this perspective, he understands not only the first cause but all astronomical entities in terms of pure act (energeia), without any admixture of power (dynamis), or of being that is only in-potentiality (dynamei). But these are still sensible beings subject to motion, so they occupy an intermediate place between terrestrial things and the first cause.

This association with eternity and pure act goes along with his view that unlike terrestrial things, the stars move by necessity. Again, for Aristotle this just means always in the same way. Here he does speak of “what cannot not be”, but I think this is only a consequence of his definition of necessity. It is a reflection of the logical truth that if we say something always occurs in a certain way, then we are committed to saying it cannot not occur in that way, simply because “always” implies “never not” — and not anything stronger than that.

Aristotle’s argument, which ultimately aims to draw conclusions about the first cause from an analysis of things closer to us, is made somewhat easier by the existence of this intermediate case of eternal sensible substances in his conceptual schema. But it does not seem to me that any of his arguments about pure act really depends on this common-sense assumption that the stars are eternal.

Even if we have a different conception of astronomical entities, according to which they just exist on a much longer time scale than terrestrial things, the conceptual distinction of a separable pure act remains available to us. (Hegel, for example, develops a version of it that has no connection to astronomy, and instead appeals only to the lasting ethical and cultural achievements of rational beings.) (See also Grammatical Prejudice?.)

“Act can in effect only be attributed to the eternal sensible substances on the condition of being dissociated from dunamis, redefined as the power of contradiction (in the same way, it will only be able to be extended in book Lambda to the simple substance on the condition of the exclusion of movement). But insofar as Theta 6 introduced it as indissociable from its correlation with in-potentiality, it is the very understanding of the notion of act that seems to be called into question: how do we understand energeia without in-potentiality? What kind of act is it that is no longer the unity of matter and form in the end? Can we under these conditions maintain its identity to ousia?”

“These questions will only find a definitive response in book Lambda. Theta 8 is content to begin the process of the extension of energeia: the notion is in effect applied to the eternal sensible substances. For this application allows us to extract yet another sense, and a more fundamental one, of the anteriority of act according to ousia: if act is anterior to in-potentiality according to ousia, this is also because, contrary to in-potentiality, it characterizes such substances. For these are more so substances than the perishable sensible substances” (ibid).

In the analysis of things around us that are in becoming, we see the underlying modalities of in-potentiality and in-act functioning in an interdependent way. But if we look at in-potentiality and in-act just as modalities, only one depends on the other. That is just what the priority of act is intended to convey.

Aubry sees a new distinction introduced here for the first time. Aristotle first explicitly mentions that dynamis may have effects that are not only contrary but contradictory, and at the same time specifies in-potentiality is a mode of being that can be resolved to act in contradictory alternative ways. But it seems to me that this has been implicit from the moment that talk about potentiality for contraries was introduced. And in the bigger picture, Aristotle’s whole insistence on the priority of act over potentiality and the asymmetry in the relation between them seems to have been designed from the start to support considerations of the independence of act from potentiality.

There could be no potentiality without something being in act. But it is very clear that for Aristotle, the relation of potentiality to act is asymmetrical. By contrast, activity and passivity are completely symmetrical, so it is impossible to have the one without the other. But potentiality depends on act, whereas act seems to be the very thing that makes something an ousia malista, or what is most of all a substance. The criterion for this is precisely “separability” or independence relative to other things. Potentiality seems ubiquitous to us because it is a necessary component of all the terrestrial things we are accustomed to, not because act in principle has any dependency on it. Or such seems to be Aristotle’s argument.

Aubry already emphasized in her reading of book Zeta that for Aristotle, what distinguishes ousia malista is its separability, or ability to have being on its own. But Zeta’s discussion focuses on perishable sensible substances, and therefore on applying this kind of separability to concrete composites of form and the familiar kind of (non-celestial) matter. Here for the first time Aristotle explicitly addresses eternal sensible substances.

“The correlation of in-potentiality and act is here broken: act is no longer presented as the end and the principle of dunamis, but as excluding it. Energeia and dunamis name opposed modes of being, where one is proper to the necessary, as that which cannot not be, the other to the contingent, as that which can be or not be. Dissociated from dunamis, energeia remains on the other hand associated with kinesis [motion]: in effect, the eternal sensible substances are in movement. But movement in their case is not the transition from one state of being to another, or from in-potentiality to act: exclusive of in-potentiality, it is confounded with their very act — by which we indeed verify that for certain beings kinesis can serve as telos [end] and as manifestation of being. Finally, dissociated from in-potentiality, this movement remains no less associated with matter, or at least a certain kind of matter” (pp. 142-143).

“[E]ven though the correlation of in-potentiality to act has been broken among the eternal sensible substances, it operates again between these and the corruptible sensible substances” (pp. 143-144).

“[A]ct can be not only another name for the ousia composed of matter and form (or for matter as realized in a form, the form in a matter), but for ousia as such. Act thus comes to name a superior degree of being, which, insofar as it is exempt from in-potentiality, is characterized by necessity, understood as the impossibility of not being” (p. 144).

“In-potentiality, as being able to be or not be, names an inferior degree of being, which characterizes contingency, but remains no less correlated to act in a relation of dependency that also marks act’s anteriority according to ousia” (ibid).

Aristotle’s text does clearly suggest that astronomical entities are somehow superior to terrestrial things, and it relates this superiority to the notion that they are purely in-act. But a modern understanding of astronomical entities expressed in Aristotelian terms would be that contrary to what Aristotle thought, they are not in fact purely in-act.

There is, however, an alternate basis for vindicating the “superiority” of the celestial over the terrestrial. The cosmos is inconceivably more vast than the earth, and for modern science too causally subsumes and includes it, analogous to the way that Aristotle thought it did.

Since childhood I have felt a fascination for the vastness of space and time, that could include distant galaxies and dinosaurs. Completely unlike Pascal’s famous terror at being so small in this vastness, I experienced this with only the profound wonder that Aristotle identifies as the beginning of philosophy.

Even if we do not regard astronomical entities as eternal sensible substances, I think Aristotle for his part would have no trouble endorsing Kant’s expression of the two great wonders, “the starry heavens above and the moral law within”.

Next in this series: Book Theta: Summing Up