Hegel’s Recovery of Aristotelian Act

More than any other author, Robert Pippin has contributed to an understanding of the central role of Aristotelian act or “actuality” (energeia ) in orienting the thought of Hegel. (For general background on what is at stake here, see Actuality, Existence; Is and Ought in Actuality).

Hegel is the first modern philosopher to explicitly engage with Aristotle in a constructive way, and he does so informed by a broadly Kantian perspective. Though he is occasionally unfair to each of them, Kant and Aristotle are his two principal inspirations, and he very seriously aims to combine their respective insights. In the ways that Aristotle and Kant have been respectively stereotyped, this might seem a quixotic enterprise, but I think the past year’s posts here have provided ample indications that on the contrary, it may be exactly what philosophy needs.

In his book Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life (2008), Pippin particularly develops an ethical dimension of Hegelian Wirklichkeit or actuality — which Hegel identifies with Aristotelian energeia — as the counterbalance to our subjective impulses and our unreflective, immediate sense of self (see Actualization of Freedom; Hegel on Willing). This in itself does not yet capture all the teleological dimensions of act pointed out by Gwenaëlle Aubry in her analysis of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but it accurately captures and sustains Aristotle’s own point that a person’s deeds are a more reliable indicator of character than her words.

In Hegel’s Realm of Shadows (2019), Pippin greatly expands the scope of his treatment of Hegelian actuality, based on a groundbreaking in-depth analysis of the marriage of Aristotle and Kant achieved in Hegel’s Logic.

On the Kantian side, Pippin emphasizes the fundamental orienting role of reflective judgment in Hegel’s view of “logic” (see More on Reflection; Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity; Reflection, Judgment, Process; Hegel on Reflection; Reflection and Dialectic; Apperceptive Judgment.)

What is actual for Hegel is always a matter of Kantian reflective judgment, and never a simple matter of putative facts. Kant and Hegel more explicitly develop the role of reflective judgment than Aristotle does, but we have seen that a kind of reflective judgment can reasonably be said to be the more specific ground of Aristotelian wisdom.

On the explicitly Aristotelian side, Pippin in an exemplary way points out the many ways in which Hegel uses Aristotle to help resolve Kantian problems. Especially important for this is Hegel’s removal of the qualifications in Kant’s endorsement of internal teleology, and his explicit return to a more full-bloodedly Aristotelian way of treating it (see Hegel’s Union of Kant and Aristotle; Essence and Explanation; “The” Concept?; Unconditioned Knowledge?; Life: A Necessary Concept?; The Logic’s Ending).

Internal teleology has nothing supernatural about it, but it represents an alternative to mechanistic or reductionistic styles of explanation. As Aristotle puts it, it is about explanation in terms of “that for the sake of which”, which allows for a deeper and more rounded understanding of the why of things, which is what explanation for both Aristotle and Hegel is about, first and foremost. And act or actuality is the key orienting term in Aristotle’s teleology.

On Reason

Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel all give reason an ethical mission that goes far beyond what formal logic can do. Formal logic has immense value in specialized contexts like the engineering of systems, but does not necessarily or directly yield any philosophical insight. As Aristotle said, it is a tool and not an independent source of knowledge.

As Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, a wide variety of such technical tools can also indirectly serve to sharpen a hermeneutic understanding. But for that to be possible, a hermeneutic project must already be underway.

Nevertheless I would argue that for Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel among others, such a project is precisely what “reason” primarily amounts to. More than anything else, reason is constituted by reflective interpretive judgment. Only secondarily is it concerned to deduce consequences from premises. Every such deduction either implicitly presupposes reflective interpretive judgments about meaning, or simply assumes that meanings are already somehow pre-given.

But reason at its core is the ramified and expansive understanding of meaning, as well as the process of aiming at and achieving such understanding, and the putting of that understanding into practice. And “reasonableness” is a matter of an emotional constitution that allows judgments to be made without bias or prejudice or excessive self-centeredness, so that one’s actions reflect and manifest this kind of understanding.

Hegel on Ethics and Religion

Hegel had complex views on the relation between ethics and religion, and his thought on these matters evolved over time. As a teenager, he was impressed by writers of the German moderate Enlightenment, and immersed himself in the literature of classical antiquity. He graduated from the Lutheran seminary at Tübingen (where his roommates were the future philosopher Schelling and the future poet Hölderlin), but was reportedly very critical of the way theology was taught there.

Hegel’s earliest work is principally concerned with religious and social themes. He develops a critique of what he there calls “positive” religion, which he sees as putting excessive emphasis on particular representations, doctrines, and institutional forms. As a source for spiritual renewal, at this stage he looks mainly to the classical Greeks. He does not yet share Schelling and Hölderlin’s enthusiasm for Kantian philosophy. But a bit later, he begins to engage with Kant, and to move away from his earlier more unconditional classicism. In the works of this period, he interprets the teachings of Jesus as anticipating Kantian ethics, while also emphasizing love as a fundamental motivator. Now he begins to interpret Christianity and Kantian philosophy as the two main elements of a major historic spiritual advance beyond what was achieved in classical Greek culture.

I take the Phenomenology of Spirit to contain the best statement of Hegel’s mature views in this area, and will save that for last here.

His later lectures on the philosophy of history are very accessible, but in some ways extremely misleading. In general, Hegel popularizes and simplifies a lot in his lectures. And while today his so-called Philosophy of History is the best known example of this old genre, it is very much a genre piece. “Philosophies of history” particularly dedicated to valorizing the contributions of the nascent German nation had become commonplace in Germany since the late 18th century. University professors were civil servants who were expected as a condition of their employment to contribute to what might uncharitably be called propaganda supporting German nationalism and its state-sponsored religion. The most notorious characteristics of Hegel’s Philosophy of History in fact have much more to do with this obligatory social context than with the distinctive philosophy that Hegel develops mainly in the Phenomenology and the Logic.

Overly simplified formulations in the philosophy of history lectures are the main source for very common but deeply mistaken claims that Hegel sees world history as straightforwardly governed by a single linear and universal teleological unfolding (e.g., of “the realization of the consciousness of freedom”) that is either ordained by God, or itself constitutes God. As someone very interested in the details of Aristotelian teleology, Kantian “internal” teleology, and Hegel’s use of them, I see such a simplistic and overly strong historical teleology as completely incompatible with the principles Hegel defends in his main philosophical works.

Hegel does indeed see genuine progressive development within history, and not a mere succession of accidents as Aristotle was more inclined to do, but contrary to the common stereotype, this does not constitute or correspond to a global development of “History”, as if Hegel thought that History were itself an independent thing in its own right in the Aristotelian sense. History is just a summation of many largely independent developments, a very weak form of unity. Even in the philosophy of history lectures, Hegel points out what he considers to be instances of retrograde development — from better to worse — such as the transition from the Greek world to the Roman world.

If history for Hegel had the strong unity claimed by the stereotype, this would be logically incoherent. But for Hegel himself it poses no problem, because he has no commitment to such a strong unity. He emphasizes that the independence of Aristotelian independent things is not absolute, but he agrees with Aristotle that it is with the independent things that we should be principally concerned, in our attempts to understand history as in anything else.

In the philosophy of history lectures, Hegel is polemically concerned to contrast the modern “German world” — as the embodiment of freedom, genuine community, and progress — with the old “Roman world” of imperial absolutism, bureaucratic administration, and negation of the individual. Martin Luther is presented as the original hero of the German world, and Kant as his successor. Luther’s founding gesture is interpreted as the assertion of the priority of individual conscience over institutional authority, and thus as consistent with moderate Enlightenment.

Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion also aim primarily at an edifying popular presentation. There he among other things gives a sympathetic account of core elements of common Christian doctrine and symbolism, and eventually argues for the superiority of offenbare or “revealed” religion over other forms that he discusses with more limited sympathy. But at the same time, he seems to radically reverse the traditional understanding of revealed religion. For Hegel, offenbare means out in the open, intelligible in the light of day, not anyone’s private preserve. These again may seem to be compatible with the traditional meaning. But the kind of unconditional authority traditionally claimed for revelation is effectively ruled out by Hegel, who considers all appeals to unconditional authority to represent a low state of ethical development.

In some measure, what Hegel means by offenbare was Luther’s point too. Luther did after all translate the Bible to German so that more people could read it for themselves, and advocated that they do so. But for Luther, the text of the Bible is simply given to us by God as literal truth. He promotes a new direct authority of the literal text in the common tongue as a replacement for the mediating institutional authority emphasized by the Catholic Church. But for Hegel, no truth in the full sense of the word can depend on authority for its validation; the authority of a text can only derive from judgments about the content it articulates; and all such judgments could in principle be contested anew. Truth is a matter of intelligibility that should be understandable by anyone, never the special province of some particular authority. Hegel sees that behind emphasis on divine authority — as opposed to, say, goodness or love — lie strong claims on behalf of some human authority.

In Hegel’s Phenomenology, these issues are touched upon from multiple points of view. What corresponds to the later Roman world is particularly associated with the religious point of view of what Hegel calls the unhappy consciousness, which emphasizes the extreme transcendence of an eternal and infinite monotheistic God, while devaluing worldly life. In general, Hegel’s portrayal of this kind of religion is unfavorable. Yet the unhappy consciousness is also said to have a progressive aspect, insofar as its new notion of the infinite God potentially leads to a questioning of the ultimateness of all finite representations, and thereby also to a questioning of any representation that is supposed to be simply given to us. Hegel explicitly suggests that the development of “negative” theology in the new monotheistic setting of the later Roman world leads in principle to the questioning of finite representations.

Later in the Phenomenology, Hegel at length and in several stages criticizes what happens when purely individual notions of Reason are applied to these matters. First comes the naive activist who unilaterally judges everything in the world by her own principles, and finds the world to be lacking. In part this has to do with uncharitable interpretation, even though there also really are plenty of things that are wrong with the world. But the main problem with this point of view is its complete lack of Socratic self-questioning. It focuses simply on the vigorous assertion of one’s own conclusions. Though this does involve a glimmer of self-consciousness, it is only a glimmer. The essentially reflective character of what Hegel means by self-consciousness is fundamentally lacking.

Much later still comes the Kantian/Fichtean moral self, which has a much more reflective character, and recognizes that it is bound by duties. But this moral self is still limited to a strictly individual point of view on what ought to be universal. Hegel thinks that ultimately, even the best — most sincere and open-minded — unilateral moral judgment by an individual involves an untenable hubris (the excessive pride commonly highlighted in Greek tragedies). As Brandom points out, one of the great lessons of the Phenomenology overall is that moral judgment should not be unilateral — anyone judging someone else must also confess and ask for forgiveness. This should in turn make us more forgiving of others. For Hegel, moral judgment is the province of participation in the universal community of rational beings, under conditions of mutual recognition. Only thus can individual and narrower community prejudices be overcome.

In between, Hegel discusses the relations between Enlightenment and faith. Here he is mainly concerned to defend faith against overly broad or unilateral Enlightenment critiques that, e.g., simply identify religion with superstition or a conspiracy of priests and kings, as if it had no relation at all to ethics.

Toward the end of the Phenomenology, as a resolution of the issues he has pointed out with the alleged self-sufficiency of the Kantian/Fichtean moral self, he develops an account of the essence of religion as having to do most fundamentally with promoting mutual recognition in a community. As I put it before, religion and the notion of something greater than ourselves for Hegel play an essential role in keeping individual conscience honest. This applies not only to some ideal philosophical religion we might imagine, but also to concrete, imperfect historical religion in real communities. Hegel now suggests that in this way, even concrete historical religion, in spite of its reliance on particular representations, helps us to overcome the limitations inherent to the individual moral self.

In a final turn, Hegel argues that religion and philosophy are in a way concerned with the same subject matter. The difference is that religion as usually understood assumes and works from particular representations of what is universal, whereas philosophy for Hegel aims to approach the universal in a universal way, and in this sense constitutes the “truth” of religion. To approach the universal in a universal way for Hegel necessarily involves beginning from the concrete. But it also involves letting the thought of that concrete actively explicate itself through reflection, rather than attempting to ground it in something said to be simply given to us, or to be justified by pre-existing authority.

In more traditional language, I am tempted to say this amounts to treating something like a negative theology that nonetheless does not turn its back on the world as taking precedence over all positive theology that presupposes particular representations. Negative theology and its analogues hold that no positive assertions we are capable of formulating about the divine should, strictly speaking, be held to be true, but that the divine can nonetheless be approached by saying it is not this, and it is not that. Giving precedence to this over the positive theology that presupposes particular representations has generally not been regarded as an orthodox position (unless perhaps we consider certain schools of Buddhism), but it is one whose possibility is suggested by the very existence of something like a negative theology.

Historically, anything like a negative theology has usually been associated with very strong insistence on the transcendence of the divine. If by analogy we apply the term to Hegel (which to my knowledge he never did himself), it must be with the proviso that for him its object would not be a transcendence, but rather something like the ultimate ethical intelligibility of life (which, we might say in an Aristotelian way, of all things properly knowable by us “most deserves to be called divine”), viewed as compatible with the recognition that many things in life are not as they ought to be, and need to change.

Normative Attitudes

Robert Brandom sees Kant and Hegel as both working to reconcile the modern notion that normative statuses depend on normative attitudes with a genuine bindingness and objectivity of normativity. The key point that he associates with modernity is the idea that normative statuses are not somehow pre-given. As I would put it, the normative statuses of things depend on complex reflective judgments involving many elements.

Brandom’s language about attitude-dependence is intentionally broad enough to encompass all the forms of modern subjectivism, which is the opposite evil to traditional groundings of normative statuses in pure deliverances of authority. At its most primitive level, it expresses the idea that everyone judges for herself, which is indeed a popular sentiment in modern culture. Expressed this way, without qualification, it makes it impossible to separate right from wrong. Brandom seems to want to say that even this vulgar subjectivism or voluntarism is historically progressive compared to the traditional “authority-obedience model”; I tend to think they are equally bad.

The real positive lesson that Brandom extracts from this, though, is something to the effect that everyone deserves a seat at the table in inquiries about the good. He does not himself support the view that everyone gets to judge everything for herself.

Indeed he points out that the very best version of this individualist view — Kant’s theory of the autonomy of moral subjects — is criticized by Hegel as one-sidedly individualistic. Kant complements autonomy with a strong emphasis on respect for others, but according to Brandom, Hegel also thinks that Kant effectively treats both autonomy and respect as principles that themselves do not depend on any normative taking of things to be such-and-such; i.e., at a meta-level Kant still treats autonomy and respect as the same kind of givens that he recommends we avoid depending upon in all our particular judgments. With his theory of the coming-to-be of genuine objective oughts through processes of mutual recognition, Hegel is able to show a genesis of autonomy and respect, as themselves instances of the same kind of normative taking involved in particular judgments.

I’m not completely happy with Brandom’s choice of the thin term “attitude” in this context. I would prefer to say, for example, that normative statuses depend on reflective judgment. Attitude by itself says nothing about its derivation; an attitude just is what it is, and might be entirely arbitrary. But I suspect that Brandom implicitly has in mind something like a complex propositional “attitude”. Then on his view of what it is to be a proposition, necessarily we are in the space of reasons, and subject to all of its dialogic give and take, just by having such an attitude.

Wisdom and Judgment

For Aristotle, the ultimate aim of a talking animal as such is wisdom, which cannot be separated from ethical sensitivity and concern for others. This wisdom might be characterized as an excellence in reflective judgment or interpretation.

There has, however, come to be a traditional view of what is called judgment — especially common in early modern logic — that reduces it to the grammatical form of predication (“A is B”), and its truth to a matter of simple correspondence to fact, which is presumed to be independently knowable. Predication on this view aims to be a kind of authoritative saying of how things are, grounded in putatively immediate truth that is not supposed to depend on any kind of normative inquiry or process of interpretation in order to be known. Things just factually are certain ways, and judgments are conclusions produced immediately that are supposed to correspond to the facts. Judgments are either right, and thereby count as objective; or wrong, and to be dismissed as merely subjective. But in neither case do they involve any depth of engagement or extensive activity. They are “shallow”.

This dogmatic way of thinking, criticized by Kant and Hegel, is utterly alien to the kind of spirit of rational inquiry promoted by Plato and Aristotle, who thought that assertions should be grounded in reasons shareable and discussible with other humans, and not on vain claims of immediate insight. But both this reductive use of “judgment” for the mere immediate production of a representation, and the reduction of truth to a correspondence to presumed fact, have often been wrongly characterized as Aristotelian, when they are really of much later origin.

I would suggest that the very idea of better or worse judgment, or of judgment as something of which there could be an excellence, is incompatible with the shallow black-and-white view of judgment as simply right or wrong. Judgment as activity is anything but an immediate production. It is an extensive and intensive activity of interpretation and reflection.

The contemporary American philosopher Robert Brandom writes, “Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea…. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for…. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from unminded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental” (Reason in Philosophy, pp. 32-33; see Kantian Intentionality).

Over the course of many posts, we have seen not only that what Aristotle calls nous and gets translated as “intellect” is an activity and not a stuff, but also that it is intrinsically concerned to seek the better in each instance. The highest good for Aristotle is not a pre-given content, but the result of a truly consistent aiming at the better in life, where what is better is intelligible, and once again not pre-given, but expressible in terms of reasons that any human can share in evaluating.

A important notion of responsibility is also implicit in Aristotle, as when he points out that the freedom of ethical beings is not an arbitrary license, but is commensurate with the taking of responsibility. For Aristotle, unfree beings have no responsibility insofar as they are unfree. It is free beings capable of real deliberation and choice that have responsibility.

On the other hand, at a top level Aristotle prefers to stress the affirmative values of friendship, love, and reciprocity over the constraints of responsibility. For Aristotle, an ethically serious person guided by affirmative aims will turn out to be responsible in her actions. Kant was more distrustful of our affirmative aims, as possibly biased by our individual impulse, and therefore tended to emphasize duty and responsibility as more reliable motivators for ethical action. Aristotle has the more optimistic view that there can be such a thing as desire that is consistent with reason about what is better. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; The Goal of Human Life).

The Universe

“From the first lines of Lambda 10, the question of the good and of its relations with the universe is explicitly posed: should the good and the best (to agathon kai to ariston) be conceived as something separate (kekhorismenon), existing in itself and by itself, or as the very order (taxin) of the whole?” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 200, my translation throughout).

“We know from now on that there exists a separate substance, that it is act and not form, that it is identical to the good, and that it acts as an end: from this, it is already apparent that the universe can be neither totalized via its reduction to a unique material principle, as the [Ionian] holists maintain, nor conceived [in the manner of the Platonists] in an episodic manner as a disjunctive series…. The universe indeed constitutes a totality, but this is not exclusive of an order that admits of degrees…. It remains to know whether the good is to be identified with this taxis or is separate from it” (pp. 200-201).

“But these options are not exclusive: the good can be conceived at once (amphoteros) as the very order of the universe and as separate from it, in the way that the good of an army resides in its order as well as in its strategy. It is nonetheless necessary to recognize between these two modes of the existence of the good a relation of anteriority, such that the order depends on the strategy, and not the strategy on the order” (p. 201).

“The problem is thus posed to know in what such an order consists, which is at the same time determined by the principle and serves as its manifestation. Already applied in Lambda 8 to the hierarchy of the spheres and their movers, the term taxis is from now on applied not only to the eternal sensible substances, but also to the perishable sensible substances (animals, plants)” (ibid).

“This order receives a triple characterization: first, it operates in a horizontal way between the different substances…; all these are then ordered in relation to something unique…; but finally, they are not so related in the same way…. We have indeed a relation at the same time univocal and diversified…. It tends nonetheless toward one same end, and proceeds from one same principle” (ibid).

“But we discover now that it is just insofar as [the unmoved substance] is separated that it is the principle of the order and of the distinctive movements of sensible substances…. And we can think the principle or the Good at once as separate and as constituting a taxis, an ordered and related totality” (pp. 202-203).

The universe is held together by the good or the ideal — a principle separate in both the Aristotelian and the Platonic sense, but acting only as a final cause or object of desire — and by the desires and aims of all beings — which in themselves indirectly also aim at the ideal. But nothing “enforces” the good or the ideal at a cosmic level. As a consequence, no evil in the world is cause for doubting the reality of ultimate good.

This concludes my direct treatment of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s detailed analysis of Aristotle in her second edition. When I first encountered her work, I was delighted to see someone vigorously arguing that the first cause is indeed just a final cause, and putting major emphasis on potentiality and act. In the course of working through this, I have improved my own understanding of numerous details. Her book has another 100 pages on what happens to all these issues in Plotinus, which I will pass over for now.

Beginning of this series: Aubry on Aristotle

The Ideal

“The last two chapters of book Lambda adopt a new point of view toward the divine: the latter is no longer in the first instance considered as energeia [act], but as good” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 197, my translation throughout).

“The question of the good is nonetheless raised in an indirect way in Lambda 9, by means of an inquiry into nous, or intellect. Here again, the text inscribes itself in the continuity of Lambda 7, and in two ways: first, because the intelligible and the good are identified through the mediation of substance and energeia; then also because the god was described there not only as act, but as an activity of thinking, and as being at the same time the thought of the best, and this thought or contemplation was described as the best and most agreeable” (pp. 197-198).

“Lambda 9 precisely poses the question whether the value of thought comes from its object, or from its very exercise. The response to this question is conditioned by a double premise, which directly articulates the two determinations of ousia energeia [substance as act] and of ousia ariste [the best substance, or ideal substance]: noesis or intellection is the best ousia, he ariste ousia; and as such, it cannot be dunamis. It can have no other object than itself, which would determine its activity of thinking and thus be superior to it; and in the same way, if it were dunamis and not energeia, maintaining the continuity of the activity would be hard. Finally, if it thought of an object other than itself, then it could equally well think different objects, not only the good but ‘something taken randomly'” (p. 198).

“As result, the two initial hypotheses must be eliminated: the value of thought cannot be derived from its object (at least, if the latter is exterior to it, and if it depends on it to be in-act). But no more than this can it be derived only from its activity, taken independently of its object: for thought and the activity of thought also pertain to the one who thinks the worst. If the value of thought can be derived neither from an (exterior) object, nor only from thought’s activity, it is then necessary to say that thought has value not due to what it thinks, but because in itself it thinks. Thus the prime mover ‘thinks itself, if it is true that it is the most excellent, and its thinking is thinking of thinking'” (ibid, emphasis added).

Thinking of thinking, or contemplation, can also be characterized as reflection. I would suggest that what more specifically makes thought thinking itself the best substance is its character of pure reflection. I think that intelligence is fundamentally reflective — a matter not of unexplainable direct apprehension, but of the elaboration of mediation, or of repeated refoldings of a self-referential thread. To be reflective for a human is also among other things to be indefinitely inclusive of new perspectives, while aiming to combine them in a unity of apperception. In the case of the first cause, this unity would be under the modality of always-already.

“But this again leaves open two possibilities: once we have excluded that the value of thought comes only from its own activity, or from an exterior object, we can again ask whether it comes from an object that is immanent to it, or from the very immanence of this object; in other words, does thought think itself because it is the best, or is it the best because it thinks itself? This is the sense of the question posed: ‘And again, if thinking and being thought are two different things, in virtue of which of these two terms does the good (to eu) belong to thought?” (pp. 198-199).

“The response consists in showing that in certain cases, which do not only concern the divine intellect, there is an identity between knowledge and its object — thus we respond to the objection… according to which the knowledge of self is only a parergon, a supplement or an accidental effect, of the knowledge of the object. This identity applies in the case of the practical sciences when they treat of an essence considered as independent of matter, and for the theoretical sciences or intellection, [this identity of knowledge and the known] is itself their object. It remains to know whether this object is indivisible or composed. The response proceeds by way of a new comparison, this time between the human intellect and the divine intellect” (p. 199).

“The passage admits an ethical reading: it is a matter of saying that the human intellect, insofar as it is the thought of composed beings (of matter and form, or of in-potentiality and act), does not have an immediate access to the good, to eu, but only attains the best, to ariston, in time, and as a being different from itself, on allo ti” (ibid).

“In effect it inherits from a decisive premise, which is that nous [intellect] is ousia ariste, the best substance. This proposition is supported in Lambda 7 by the identification of the intelligible, the good, and substance…. This premise, like the resurgence of the notions of the good and the best in the last lines of chapter 9, goes in the direction of an objective, and indeed also ethical, or more so axiological, reading of the text. Certainly thought is of nothing but itself; but if it thinks itself, this is because it is identical with the good” (p. 200).

Next in this series: The Universe

Eternal Sensibles

Metaphysics Lambda chapter 8 returns to a consideration of astronomical entities as eternal sensible substances. While this “appears to be an insertion of physics (or of astronomy) into the metaphysical discourse” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 194, my translation throughout), Aubry sees it as fulfilling part of the program laid out in Lambda 1 for a unified account of the principles of all substance.

“Thoroughly interrogating [the principle’s] relation to the other substances allows the efficacity of the act without power to be shown” (p. 195).

Modern people are not generally used to thinking of the causality of a substance in relation to another substance. We are taught to approach causality in terms of events leading to other events, or to states of affairs. Aristotle on the other hand is less concerned with explaining particular events or states of affairs than with the much more general and multifarious question of why things are the way they are. He argues that “substance” (ousia) and final causality play the pivotal role in any account of the way things are.

Aristotelian substance is far from being simply the “kingdom of nouns”. For Aristotle no more than for Kant is the what-it-is of things a simple primitive that is just given to us. The “identities” of things are consequences of an involved process, and not a starting point. A substance is explained by its characteristic act, which can be further explained as aiming at a kind of entelechy. These can only be discovered by indirect means, through thoughtful interpretation.

“First, it is a matter of establishing against the Platonists that the principle is a cause, that it has efficacy, and in particular is able to explain the movements of the different substances, of which the theory of Ideas had failed to give an account…. Secondly, it is a matter of identifying the causality proper to the Good, while showing that the Good acts, not insofar as it has a dunamis, as suggested by the formula of Republic book VI, but insofar as it is energeia…. Finally, and this time against the Platonic episodism, it is a matter of marking not only that the Good is efficacious insofar as it has no power, but also that the separate substance is not disjoint from the other substances, though it has a primacy over them: or better, separation if it is conceived as being that of act and no longer that of form, determines the ordering, the very taxis of the ensemble of mobile substances” (ibid).

I am fascinated by this suggestion that the separate first substance is “not disjoint from the other substances”, and that “separation” is also a connecting link. Aristotle wants to emphasize the extent to which the astronomical substances are connected to the first cause by the nature of their ordering. Lambda 10 will extend this to earthly substances.

(We have seen the enumerated criticisms of Platonism before. While agreeing that Aristotle’s formulations in these areas represent a major advance, I also continue to find great value in many of Plato’s other insights.)

“It falls to Lambda 8 to show, against the Platonists, that if we conceive the principles and the separate substances as acts and not as Forms, we can give a complete and precise account of movement: not only that of the sphere of the fixed stars, but also those of the other spheres and planets” (p. 196).

The connection between astronomy and first philosophy that Aristotle works so hard to establish strikes me as poetically beautiful, but I don’t know what to do with it philosophically, except in the very broad sense that astronomical phenomena do affect earthly things, and represent a more inclusive cosmic whole of which our earth is but a part. I am personally inclined to de-emphasize this aspect in favor of his other characterizations of the first cause as the good, and as thought thinking itself. But on the other hand, his idea that the first cause moves other things as a final cause but not as a direct agent seems extraordinarily well argued, and incredibly fruitful and auspicious.

“But now is posed the problem of the relation between the unmoved prime mover and the others. These are ordered according to a hierarchy (taxis) , which follows that of the celestial movements. It appears nonetheless that this hierarchy is also ontological: unlike the first among them, which Lambda 7 had ended by identifying with god, the other unmoved movers are neither characterized in Lambda 8 as pure energeia, nor as identical with the first intelligible and with the best. Of them, it is said that they are immutable and eternal, but also impassible, and that ‘they have on their own attained the supreme good’…. This is insofar as they are ends, telos. Thus, unlike the prime mover, the others are not ends insofar as they are already themselves the good, but insofar as they have attained the good” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“But since it is said of them that they have attained the good, we can suppose that they have been in movement, and indeed that they have been in-potentiality: if the prime mover is always already an act without power, we can suppose that they are powers fully actualized and stabilized in their end” (p. 197).

This is an ingenious solution, within the context of Aristotle’s desire to link astronomy to first philosophy.

Next in this series: The Ideal

Ideal Life and Ours

We are halfway through Aubry’s discussion of Metaphysics book Lambda, chapter 7. From this point, she says that the text becomes less of an argument, and more rhetorical and descriptive. Aristotle compares the “way of life” (diagoge) of the divine with “ours”. His discussion here largely follows the much more developed one in book X of the Nicomachean Ethics. Toward the end of Aubry’s section, she also critically scrutinizes the more particular basis of claims that the first cause of book Lambda is not only a final cause but also an efficient cause.

(Though it is much longer than this post, for greater insight and a fuller context on Aristotle’s view of this relation between the human and the divine, I would highly recommend reviewing Ethics book X in The Goal of Human Life.)

Now “it is no longer only a question of movable and perishable substances, but more concretely, and for the first time, of the human subject” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 189, my translation throughout).

“From the outset, the divine diagoge is characterized by comparison with the human condition, as being ‘like the best’ that is given to us, but also by opposition to it, since what is accessible to us ‘for a brief period of time’, mikron khronon, is for god continuously, aei [always]. The same opposition is found below, between the happy state god enjoys always, aei, but we enjoy only sometimes, pote” (ibid).

She quotes Aristotle, “The [divine] act is pleasure” (ibid). Plato in the Philebus suggests that the divine has a neutral state, but for Aristotle “god is the only living thing that at the same time has access to the most pure pleasure and always knows its enjoyment. If the human also has access to the pleasure of contemplation, she does not know it in a continuous enjoyment, for she is composed of two natures such that each for the other is against nature” (p. 190).

If I may be allowed a shallow comparison, this theme of divine pleasure makes me liken the condition of thought thinking itself to that of a blissful Buddha.

“In book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, the continuity of divine pleasure is referred to the simplicity of the divine nature which, because nothing is mixed with it or hinders it, always exercises the same activity and finds in it a complete pleasure. The text of Lambda itself is content to associate pleasure and energeia. And where one might expect an exploration of the contrast between the transience of human pleasure and the perpetuity of divine pleasure, the next proposition proceeds on the contrary to underline their similarity. More precisely, the fact that the divine act is pleasure is given as the cause (dia touto [through this]) of the fact that for us every act is pleasure, whether it is a matter of walking, of sensation, or of thinking” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“We can see here a first illustration of the mode of action of the unmoved final cause as it has been determined above: we have immanent ends and aim at our own acts; it remains that through the latter, we also aim at the continuity and indeed the pleasure that attach par excellence to the divine act” (ibid).

“The following lines do no more than deploy the identity between act and pleasure, in formulating the conditions that make a certain act (thought or contemplation) pleasant. That the divine act indeed consists in thought is presupposed (or simply induced from the pleasant character of contemplation for us): above, the god has been assimilated to the intelligible, or to the noeton, but not to thought, noesis. For the act of thought to be pleasure, it is necessary that it be in-act, that is to say that intelligence is in effective possession of the intelligible” (pp. 190-191, emphasis in original).

“[T]hought in itself is thought of the best in itself, from which we deduce that the divine theoria [contemplation] is not only more agreeable, ediston, but also the best, ariston” (p. 191).

(Here again we are reminded how extremely different this is from modern notions of thought as “value free”, which seems to assume that all values are prejudices. We do not have to suppress questions of value in order to be fair and objective. Objectivity and fairness in the real world involve openness, but not a completely relativistic free-for-all. Fairness and objectivity are themselves values.)

“After the identity between act and pleasure, we pose that between act and life, zoe. This time, it is nonetheless clear that this identity only applies to one particular act: that of intelligence. It seems on the other hand that it applies to every act of intelligence, whether it be human or divine. Of the divine act, insofar as it is energeia kath autein [act directed toward itself], we say nonetheless that it is not simply life, but ‘the best life, and eternal'” (p. 191).

I was a little surprised that she says only the act of intelligence is to be identified with life. But she does not say that only the act of intelligence presupposes life, but rather that it is the only one to be strictly identified with it. Life for Aristotle is not reducible to some bare fact like a heartbeat; it involves purpose, and the best realization of purposes involves intelligence. That this applies to the human is no surprise. And if we accept that there is meaningful sense to thought eternally thinking itself, it is also no surprise that for Aristotle this would be the best life.

“It appears nonetheless that in the passage, [energeia] no longer designates a way of being but a way of acting: we no longer say that god is in act, but that god has an act. If this distinction between act and activity is at work, the text nonetheless invites us to surpass it: the activity of god in effect comes down to its character of being in-act. Thus, if god’s activity is thought, and self-thinking, this is, as Lambda 9 will make precise, because god is the good; and if the act is continuous, this is because as act without power, god is without movement or change. The notion of life, zoe, intervenes precisely at the junction of the ontological sense and the practical sense of energeia, serving thus to name the activity of that which is act by itself” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“More decisive seems to be the reiterated distinction between the continuous activity of being in-act, and the discontinuous activity of beings mixed from act and in-potentiality. The latter (or, at least, ‘we’) have access to an activity of the same nature as that of the divine: thought, pleasure, and life. What makes the difference between the theos and ‘us’, is indeed not the nature of the activity, but its duration (continuous/discontinuous) and its value (the activity of god is the best, and indeed also the most pleasant” (ibid).

“This characterization initiates the transition from the ontological approach to the prime mover, governed by the notion of energeia, to [Aristotle’s] axiological approach, governed by the notion of the good, which energeia in its most determinate sense nonetheless also includes. Against the Pythagoreans and [Plato’s successor] Speusippus, we thus repeat that the best and the most beautiful are arkhe [principles or sources]” (p. 192).

“From here the question is posed whether dunamis, more than a mode of being, designates here a mode of action: indeed whether the final cause must also be conceived as an efficient cause. The fact is that we have seen that the schema of efficiency, such as it is expounded notably in On Generation and Corruption, presupposes that the agent is in-act. Further, this schema is extended so as to be applicable to impassible and incorruptible realities: in their case, there can be action without reciprocal contact (they touch without being touched, move [other things] without being moved); and insofar as they are without matter, they are not affected by the action they exercise (the medical art heals without being healed)” (p. 193).

“According to this enlarged model, efficiency — and indeed also the dunamis poietike [power to do or make] seems to be compatible with actuality, but also with immobility, immateriality, and impassibility. The question nonetheless remains whether it is also compatible with the final cause” (ibid).

Previously, she pointed out that book VIII of the Physics does once apply the phrase dynamis apeiron [unlimited power] to the prime mover. This is indeed the passage appealed to by those who want to make the prime mover an efficient cause. The basis for this appeal is that Lambda 7 does briefly recall the argument of Physics VIII that the prime mover is without magnitude or parts.

But she has explained that in Physics VIII, what she calls the ontological sense of dynamis is completely missing, and the context is a long polemic against the Platonic notion of self-motion. Along with the fact that any reference to unlimited power is completely absent from the Metaphysics, and that the “unlimited” power of the prime mover in Physics VIII is not said to be unlimited in all respects but only in relation to time, she argues that this in no way intended to undo Aristotle’s many consistent affirmations that the first cause is pure act without power. This seems entirely reasonable to me.

“That the prime mover is a final cause, [the first half of] Lambda 7 has clearly established. To this must be added that the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia mobilized by the argument of Lambda 6 implies not only… that energeia is anterior to dunamis, but that it is anterior as end” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Otherwise said… the final character of the causality of the prime mover is already posed, even in ontology, via the exploration carried out in Theta 8 of the asymmetrical relation between energeia and dunamis. As a result, the problem is not whether the prime mover is an efficient cause more than a final cause, but whether it can even be an efficient cause at the same time as it is a final cause. For on this point On Generation and Corruption is explicit: ‘to d’ou heneka ou poietikon‘, ‘the final cause is not efficient’. Thus ‘health is not efficient, except in a metaphorical sense’, that is to say in the sense in which, insofar as it is an end, it sets off an action that aims at it, but in which it is not itself the agent (it is not health that cures, but the medicine or the remedy). In the same way, we can say of the end that it moves [other things]; but we must not confuse that which moves [other things], kinoun, with that which does, poiein, or with the efficient cause as principle of movement, arkhe kineseos: if it is true that the efficient is also a mover, it is not true that every mover is efficient” (pp. 193-194, emphasis in original).

For this last, she cites On Generation and Corruption again.

“In the same way that the ontological sense of dunamis is incompatible with the characterization of the prime mover as pure energeia, its kinetic sense is incompatible with its characterization as a final cause” (p. 194).

Next in this series: Eternal Sensibles

Plato and Aristotle on Religion

Aristotle’s statements about “god” have sometimes troubled both religious people and non-religious people. For the believers they seem to say too little, and yet for nonbelievers they seem to say too much. But views that generate opposite complaints might be taken to represent a happy medium of sorts. In this troubled world of ours, so full of religious strife, the generous and optimistic spirit of Plato and Aristotle has much to be commended.

I use the lower case “god” to translate Plato and Aristotle’s ho theos, which can also be rendered “the god”. Many have read an incipient monotheism into this term.

In the course of their philosophical work, Plato and Aristotle address many issues relevant to religion, without attaching themselves to any particular creed or orthodoxy. Conventional Greek religion in their day was more concerned with ceremonial observance than with specific belief. Plato nonetheless criticizes the very human foibles attributed to the gods in Greek mythology, and generally rejects argument from authority in favor of shareable reasoning. For Plato, worthiness of the designation “god” implies a virtual identity with the good, the true, and the beautiful. A god would, for example, be incapable of jealousy. Aristotle shares this positive perspective, and does not speak about mythology at all, except in a literary way.

Reception of Plato and Aristotle in the Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin traditions was largely filtered through the complex history of neoplatonism. At the same time, neoplatonism — and especially the work of its founder, Plotinus — greatly influenced later theology. Although Plotinus was nominally a polytheist, his philosophy focuses intensely on the relation of all things to the One. Augustine in his Confessions describes his reading of Plotinus as a halfway point toward his conversion to Christianity. During the Islamic Golden Age, an Arabic paraphrase of Plotinus circulated under the title Theology of Aristotle.

After the Roman Empire became officially Christian, the emperor Julian briefly attempted to overthrow Christianity, while claiming support from the later neoplatonic philosophy of Iamblichus. Iamblichus’ Athenian successor Proclus treats the works of Plato as themselves divinely inspired, while also broadly embracing the polytheisms of all nations. Proclus wrote a Platonic Theology as well as an Elements of Theology, and championed a theological interpretation of Plato’s dialogue Parmenides at great length. The Athenian neoplatonic school was eventually closed by the Christian Roman emperor for its persistent advocacy on behalf of pagan traditions.

The Alexandrian neoplatonic school under Ammonius sought to distance itself from the Athenian school’s advocacy of paganism, while at the same time shifting its curriculum to focus much more on Aristotle rather than Plato. Ammonius’ students included both the Christian John Philoponus and the pagan Simplicius, who between them authored the majority of the surviving Greek commentaries on Aristotle. Without endorsing all the details of either of their work, I find it inspiring that they were able to coexist within the same school.

Religion and politics both need more dialogue and less denunciation of the other. Plato and Aristotle and discussions of their work have much to teach us along these lines.