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Interim Recap

We are still slowly walking through Gwenaëlle Aubry’s groundbreaking fresh reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the second edition of her Dieu sans la puissance (2020). She highlights neglected aspects of the rich meaning of Aristotle’s key terms dynamis and energeia, which I learned in the Latin-based English of potentiality and actuality.

On the one hand, these are central to Aristotle’s account of motion. Aristotle identifies dynamis as the immanent source or principle of motion in natural things. He calls motion itself an incomplete energeia, and the entelechy of a dynamis. But in so doing, he also gives these terms a modal sense that he indicates is more primary than the sense having to do with motion.

That is to say, the Physics already effectively identifies in-act and in-potentiality as modalities of saying something “is” something. To be something in-act is to fully — immanently and concretely, as expressed in actions and interactive behavior — be that thing.

The Physics and other works on nature also already subordinate motion and sources of motion to causality by ends. Aristotle’s general approach to explanation leaves room for mechanical explanation (relativized to the level of hypothetical necessity), but avoids determinism, by subordinating mechanical explanation to explanation in terms of the realization of ends, which may occur in more than one way. For example, an animal is generally determined by a need for food, but the specific ways it will seek or find it on a given day are largely governed by “accidental” conjunctions of circumstances. Hypothetical necessity allows for a kind of play or maneuvering room in the working out of results.

Most recently, we saw that dynamis for Aristotle is always relative to something. Being something in potentiality derives its meaning from what it is to be that something in act. This reflects the priority of actuality that Aristotle always insists upon. If in the register of doing we call dynamis a power, this must be understood in a narrow sense as the power to do something definite. In the case of a “rational” power (one associated with a being capable of deliberation), it is understood as the ability to optionally do or not do some definite thing. More fundamentally, every particular potentiality is a potentiality to be some definite thing, or to exercise some definite way of being.

Since the same being may have many such powers or capabilities, potentiality as a modality is effectively multiple. We never have just one potentiality, but rather a field of potentiality consisting of multiple alternative real possibilities and capabilities.

The relativity of dynamis says that there is never a blank slate, or a completely undetermined situation. Things are not rigidly predetermined, but nothing ever just happens in a completely arbitrary way either. Looking backward, there is always an immanent explanation and a reason why things turned out the way they did.

Next in this series: Act in Process

The Relativity of Dynamis

“Up to the end of Theta 5, even though the end of Theta 3 had initiated the ontological inquiry, it is principally the kinetic dunamis [potentiality] that we have explored. The first lines of Theta 6 close this first moment: now that we have treated dunamis in relation to movement, it is necessary, writes Aristotle, to take an interest in energeia [act]. We note anew the dyssymmetry already raised: it is the study of energeia, not of dunamis, that presides over the extension of energeia as of dunamis from the kinetic sense to the ontological sense.”

“Energeia and dunamis will be initially characterized as two distinct sides of one thing of huparkhein, of existing. They are thus designated as two distinct modes of being, where the difference, nonetheless, can be known only through their opposition. This opposition constructs in-potentiality as relative to energeia [act as “in-a-work-ness”, or something realized in a work] — thereby rejoining the definition of dunaton in Theta 3 as that of which the act can exist (huparkhe he energeia). Thus, the in-potentiality is to be understood as that of [the statue of] Hermes in the wood, or that of the half-line in the whole line, because the one and the other can be separated…, or again as the way in which someone knows something without contemplating it, if it can be contemplated. If in-potentiality thus finds itself characterized only relatively to energeia, the latter in its turn is not explicitly defined, but implicitly identified with what is separated in the first example (the Hermes and the half-line), and with the exercise in the second (contemplation)” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 130, my translation throughout). 

“Theta 8 will show, in conformity with what Theta 3 already affirmed, that it is the ontological sense [of dynamis and energeia] that is primary: it thus appears that movement can be called energeia insofar as it is taken as the manifestation of being, or again of the work, or again of the end. It is indeed the kinetic sense that will appear as an extension of the ontological sense, and of a more determinate sense by virtue of which act is not only another name for being, but for being in the end” (p. 132).

Aubry points out that the last lines of Theta 6, which somewhat confusingly emphasize a distinction between whether an end is immanent or not, have been regarded by leading scholars (including Werner Jaeger and Miles Burnyeat) as an addition to the text.

She notes that in Theta 8, “we will read that movement can be considered as a form of energeia insofar as, in certain cases, it can serve as an end…. Far from being opposed to energeia as that which does not have its end in itself to that in which the end is immanent, kinesis will be presented as a form of energeia insofar as it can serve as an end, which leads us to suspect the last lines of Theta 6″ (p. 133).

“As was already the case in Theta 5, we are here formulating restrictive conditions, which rule out saying that any matter whatsoever is in-potentiality for any form whatsoever. In-potentiality is only said of a determinate matter in relation to a determinate form. More precisely, in-potentiality indicates the very possibility of the relation of such a matter to such a form. Even in formulating the conditions of the equivalence dunamis–hyle posed by the analogy, Theta 7 thus justifies the formula of Eta according to which ‘the proximate matter and the form are one and the same thing, the one in-potentiality and the other in act’.”

“If in-potentiality names the capacity of matter to acquire a determinate form, the division of dunamis from hyle is no less maintained, at the same time as it is given measure. In effect, for the products of tekhne [art] as well as for the phuseis [natures], we can establish a common criterion: the uniqueness of change. Potential is thus distinguished from the indeterminate possibility in virtue of which any matter whatsoever could [supposedly] acquire any form whatsoever. But it is also distinguished from the actual….”

“If Theta 7 prolongs the analyses of Theta 5, a change of perspective is also evident: in effect, the question posed is no longer to know only of what a thing is capable, dunaton, but for what it is in-potentiality, dunamei…. A double displacement is marked here: first, the distinction between active power and passive power, with which we began, is effaced before the notion of in-potentiality…. [And second,] the notion of in-potentiality thus serves to name, beyond the distinction between active power and passive power, the very possibility of the interaction of an agent and a patient with a view to a determinate change.”

“In what follows, we will ask not only when a thing is in-potentiality for another, but when a thing is in-potentiality in another: in so doing, we ask not only about in-potentiality as a principle of change, but about in-potentiality as a mode of being” (p. 134, emphasis in original).

“This transition will be completed in chapter 8….”

“The text [of chapter 8] opens with a redefinition of dunamis…: this new definition, which is more expansive, is in effect formulated in such a way as to include natural beings…. In the same way, natural beings are defined in Physics II as ‘having in themselves a principle of motion and rest’. Nature can thus be said to belong to the same genus as dunamis, since it is an immanent principle of movement. Thus redefined, dunamis will be envisaged in the order of immanence more than in that of transitivity: we thus integrate the results of the previous chapter, which defined in-potentiality at the conjunction of the active and the passive, and beyond this distinction. The extensive definition of dunamis thus marks the definitive adoption of a new point of view, in virtue of which potentiality [puissance] will no longer be considered in the order of the correlation of agent and patient, but in its relation to act. Dunamis will thus appear as the principle of a movement that can take place within something, which is essentially teleological [finalisé] (even if it can have no other end than itself), and which is a transition from a certain non-being to full reality” (p. 135, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Interim Recap

Potentiality and Contingency

“[T]he rational powers are powers for two contrary effects: but two contraries cannot be actualized at the same moment by the same power. What is thus necessary (ananke) — but this time by a logical necessity, dictated by the principle of non-contradiction — is that there intervenes, in addition to dunamis, another principle: desire or deliberated choice, orexis or prohairesis, which chooses between the two contraries.”

“We can thus reformulate the definition so that it serves for the dunaton kata logon: it is necessary (ananke) when that which is capable according to reason [what was called a rational power] desires something for which it has the power, that it does that thing. The necessary sequence begins this time from the power insofar as it is modified by desire and/or by choice — and thus by liberty. It remains that, here again, the attribution of such a power implies the taking into account of the circumstances of its effectuation. According to this new determination, that is possible which is decided or desired by the agent, and which the circumstances allow (which its deliberation must take into account)” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, pp. 127-128, my translation throughout).

Aristotle doesn’t literally offer a new definition of possibility at this point, but the effect is similar. In Sachs’ translation, he says that one having a rational power too “has the potency in the sense that it is a potency for acting, and this is not in every situation but when things are in certain conditions…. [E]ven if one wishes and desires… to do contrary things, one will not do them, for… there is no potency for doing them at the same time, since a thing will do the things it is capable of in the way that it is capable of them” (Metaphysics, book Theta ch. 5, p. 173).

All power or potency for Aristotle is the power to do something definite, and every power to do something definite is capable of doing it only under certain conditions. Consequently, there could be no such thing as an indefinite or unlimited power.

The emphasis on contraries in the case of rational powers is a little confusing, but it seems to be a further consequence of the notion that all power is definite. He seems to consider deliberation about the use of definite powers as revolving around the question whether to use them or not, which does thus acquire a kind of binary flavor. But it seems to me that a being having multiple powers might also deliberate about which of several to apply in a given situation.

What is really essential here is that rational power belongs to beings that deliberate. This is what makes it “rational”. And Aristotle sees a kind of “rational” (rather than physical) necessity that a being that desires or chooses something and has the power for it, will do it. But because it incorporates deliberation and choice among its conditions, this kind of necessity is not that of determinism. It is a hypothetical necessity that is compatible with contingency.

Returning to Aubry’s argument, “Proairesis [choice based on deliberation] thus intervenes as a principle of contingency, capable of inaugurating a necessary causal sequence. If the circumstantial definition of the possible leaves no place for logical possibility but tends to identify possible and potential, on the other hand the distinction between potential and actual is maintained.”

“But to this it is necessary to add — and this is what Theta 8 will do — that power considered in itself, and not in relation to its effect, is a principle of contingency. Every power, taken not as principle of action but in opposition to act, considered thus in its ontological determination and not only a kinetic one, is the place of an essential indetermination” (p. 129).

So by a sort of dialectical twist, Aubry momentarily attributes a kind of determinism to Aristotle, and then refutes it two pages later. On pedagogical grounds, I don’t favor the deliberate construction of unnecessary dialectical surprises, just as I don’t stylistically favor the kind of construction that first seemingly makes an unqualified statement, then adds qualifications later on. If a statement will later be qualified, it is good to give some indication of that up front. But in context this a minor point, and partly a personal preference of mine that Aristotle doesn’t follow either. The thing to emphasize here is that Aristotle simultaneously argues for an essential contingency in all power that is incompatible with determinism, and at the same time for the role of a hypothetical, delimited necessity that is compatible with contingency.

“It is on this essential contingency of power that the antideterminist argument of On Interpretation rests. Aristotle there distinguishes not only, like in Theta 4, the impossible from the false, but the possible from the true: of certain possible propositions, one cannot say in advance whether they will be true or false…. The possible is thus distinguished at once from the actual, the necessary, and the true” (ibid).

She summarizes Aristotle’s famous discussion in On Interpretation of the sea battle that may or may not happen tomorrow. At the most obvious level, this has to do with human deliberation and choice.

“But again Aristotle gives this another extension: if the future depends on decision and on human action, it is also true, and this time in a general (holos) manner, that ‘in all that which does not act always, there is a possibility of being and of not being. This indetermination in virtue of which the future must be called contingent, and the propositions concerning it neither true nor false, also affects events involving irrational powers” (p. 130).

Here we come full circle, to Aristotle’s rejection of strict determinism in the action of natural powers as well rational ones.

Next in this series: The Relativity of Dynamis

An Aside on Necessity

“The question remains to know whether a thing can be called possible, or again in-potentiality, when it will never be the case. In other words, can the possible designate the unreal, that is to say that which, while not being contradictory, is not and will never be the case? It is to this question that Theta 5 responds: the text opens with a new division of dunamis, according to which it is innate (for example, sensation) or acquired (by practice, like the art of playing the flute, or by study. It also recalls the distinction between rational and irrational powers” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 126, my translation).

Aubry notes that Aristotle introduces a new definition of the possible (dynaton). “The possible is in effect relative to actual circumstances: that which is possible is so kai pote kai pos, at a given moment and in a certain way…. Aristotle has a tendency to think the possible not as that which can be conceived, and is non-contradictory, but as that which can be: in other words, he does not distinguish neatly between logical possibility and real possibility, and in effect resists calling possible that which, while being capable of being in the sense that it is non-contradictory, will never be. In virtue of this new definition, one indeed calls possible that which, if all the conditions are present, must be actualized, and indeed must necessarily be actualized. The formula is one of determinism” (p. 127).

She immediately goes on to explain how Aristotle limits this determinism to irrational or natural powers, as opposed to rational ones. I would supplement this with another distinction.

In the bigger picture, even in the natural realm I think that for Aristotle, there is no strict predetermination of the overall unfolding of events. An animal gets its food in one way and not another on a given day, but this is in part due to “accident” in the ways that things come together.

The case Aubry is speaking about here is a hypothetical consideration of what would be really possible, at a given moment, and given a complete definition of the applicable circumstances. In this case, which by hypothesis is fully specified, Aristotle wants to say there should be a determinate answer, which should be subject to hypothetical necessity.

But in the case in which we consider what is really possible, this is not hypothetical, because we are not working from a hypothesis at all. Neither is there any “if”, nor are we “given” anything specific. We do not have a complete specification of the applicable circumstances. So here the conditions for hypothetical necessity do not apply. If we cannot even say what the hypothesis is, we cannot claim to draw a necessary conclusion. Accordingly, what is really possible cannot be answered in terms of hypothetical necessity.

Hypothetical necessity is a viable kind of claim because it is specific and delimited in its scope of applicability. It is also all that is needed to explain the successes of science and engineering. Given certain definite things, we can say with confidence that something definite will happen. We can iteratively improve our hypotheses and level of confidence as we go.

What is necessary for Aristotle is just what always follows. The applicability of “always” in a generalization about the natural world (as distinct from, say, mathematics or formal logic) is a question of fact. No implacable force stands behind it. And what always follows is implicitly bounded by our knowledge. “Always” simply means we have never encountered an exception. If we did, we would need to look for additional conditions to explain the new case. Necessity belongs in the register of a certain kind of intelligibility of what happens, not in the raw occurrence of events.

What I mean to have been explaining here is that if Aristotle appears to endorse a limited “determinism” with regard to natural powers, the terms in which this is expressed further limit it to a notion grounded in hypothetical necessity. The reason this is so important is that hypothetical necessity is fully compatible with the absence of predetermination, whereas determinism is commonly associated with predetermination. I would prefer to simply say that natural powers can be analyzed in terms of hypothetical necessity. And it turns out that Aubry refutes this appearance two pages later.

Next in this series: Potentiality and Contingency

Potentiality and Possibility

“At the conclusion of Theta 3, we had recognized in dunamis at the same time the condition of becoming and a mode of being, and in energeia the mode of being that is opposed to it and which characterizes, beyond movement, all that which is effective. In defining what is in-potentiality as that which is not in-act, we have also distinguished it from non-being, in characterizing it as that which can be in act. Now we need to pursue the examination of what is in play in this division, or the modality of the relation of the in-potentiality to act” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 124, my translation throughout, with Becker number citations to Aristotle’s Greek text elided).

“The discussion of Theta 4 concerns neither dunamis nor what is dunamei, but rather the dunaton. This term nonetheless can designate both the possible and that which has power, or the capable, just as much as adunaton can designate the impossible as well as that which lacks power. In Theta 3, the dunaton had been defined in terms of dunamis as ‘that for which nothing makes it impossible for the act (energeia) to exist, when it is said to have power (dynamis)'” (ibid).

Clearly, dynamis, dynamei, and dynaton all have related etymologies. My Greek isn’t strong enough to just casually read Aristotle’s original the way I can mostly read Aubry’s French without a dictionary, so this is a bit of an eye-opener. This is why Aristotle’s discussions of what we render by English words that have different etymologies are so closely related.

Because the English words do not have this visible relation to one another, it is easy to be confused by the ways in which Aristotle relates the corresponding Greek terms. For years, I have been puzzled by English translators’ seemingly random alternations between respective uses of power, potentiality, and possibility for what was supposed to be the “same” concept in Aristotle. Aubry’s highlighting of the Greek words tells me I should have long ago studied this more carefully with the side-by-side Greek and English texts in the Loeb edition. The translators’ alternations are probably not random at all, just not commented upon. We are not dealing here with things confusingly said of one same concept, but rather with things more clearly said about each of several related concepts. This is just the kind of disambiguation that Aristotle himself pioneered.

“Book Delta defines [the possible] differently, as that of which the contrary is not necessarily false; that which is true; that which can be true. Thus characterized without relation to dunamis, dunaton no longer means having power, but possible. Delta opposes it to the impossible, adunaton, defined as ‘that of which the contrary is necessarily true’ (for example, the commensurability of the diagonal of a square with its sides), and distinguishes the possible and the impossible thus defined, from power (dunamis) and the lack of power (adunamia)” (ibid).

“Nevertheless, the definitions of Delta again carry an equivocity: in its second sense (that which is true), the possible includes the necessary, or what cannot not be: according to the first and third definition, on the other hand, it is identified with the contingent (to endekhomenon). It is this last sense that is mentioned in Prior Analytics book I: ‘that which is not necessary, and of which one can think that it exists without that leading to any impossibility'” (pp. 124-125).

“The possible is indeed defined sometimes as including, sometimes as excluding the necessary. In its first sense, it can be identified with logical possibility: that is called possible which is not contradictory; the necessary — that which cannot not be the case — can thus be called possible, in the sense that it is true (noncontradictory) to say that it is the case. But the possible can also be identified with the contingent: it thus no longer [indifferently] designates that which cannot not be, or again that which can be this or that. In this second sense, the possible is opposed no longer to the contradictory, but seems to be identifiable with power, understood as the power of contraries (being A or not-A), and of contradictories (being or not being” (p. 125).

We saw previously that both of two contradictories cannot be in act or be the case at the same time, but contradictories can both potentially be in act or be the case.

“The remainder of Theta 4, up to the beginning of Theta 5, nonetheless has the object of opposing determinism. This begins from the distinction between the impossible and the false. A strong determinist position in effect comes back to saying that nothing is possible that is not and will not be true. This position assumes a triple reduction, not only of the possible to the potential and of the potential to the actual, but also of the actual to the true” (p. 126).

This leads back to the position of the Megarians. But Aristotle clearly affirms that the non-actual is not impossible. She quotes, “It is false that you are standing right now, but it is not impossible” (ibid).

Aristotelian potentiality encompasses alternate possibilities.

Next in this series: An Aside on Necessity

Critique of the Megarians

Euclid of Megara (not to be confused with the geometer) was a student of Socrates who combined Socratic and Eleatic ideas. He reportedly claimed that virtue is knowledge of the Parmenidean One Being, which he also identified with the Good, God, reason, and mind. At a time when Megarians were banned from Athens for some reason, he is said to have entered the city disguised as a woman in order to listen to Socrates. He was present at Socrates’ death, and afterwards offered refuge to Plato and others in Megara. Socrates reputedly rebuked him for arguing more for the sake of winning than for the truth, but Euclid was said to have been very concerned with moral virtue. Plato credits him with having written down an actual conversation between Socrates and Theaetetus, which became the basis of Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus.

Euclid’s students were mainly interested in logic and argument. Some of them apparently founded a separate school, known as the Dialecticians, which developed a form of propositional logic. This latter group is considered to have been the major source for Stoic logic.

In chapter 3 of book Theta of the Metaphysics, Aristotle criticizes Megarian arguments that there is no distinction between power and act. Aubry quotes Aristotle’s restatement of the Megarian claim, “It is when a thing acts that it can act, but when it does not act, it cannot act” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 122, my translation throughout).

Independent of Aristotle’s development of a normative and teleological dimension of act that plausibly extends even to physical motion, he is also very concerned to carefully distinguish between power and its exercise. Thus he had to confront the Megarians, who argued that there is no such distinction.

Later writers of quite varying persuasions have wittingly or unwittingly developed variants of this Megarian position. Nietzsche, for instance, explicitly denied the reality of anything that is not actual. Any kind of argument for complete determinism has a similar effect, as does theological occasionalism, which subsumes all becoming under the model of creation.

“Against this thesis, it is necessary to affirm not only the distinction of act and power but, more precisely, that with a given act can coexist not only the power of which it is the effect, but the power for another, opposed, act” (ibid).

Aubry noted a bit earlier that the emphasis on contraries in the discussion of rational powers is rather accidental. The more general point — expressed at the level of potentiality rather than power — is that potentiality includes multiple alternate possibilities concretely grounded in the same state of actuality. The more specific notion of contrariety only comes into play because — due to the fact power is consistently understood by Aristotle as power to do or undergo something definite — related deliberation may be conceived as about exercising a power or not.

She quotes Aristotle, “It is possible for a thing to be capable of being and nonetheless not be, or capable of not being and nonetheless be” (ibid).

This, it seems to me, is an unavoidable presupposition of any coherent account of becoming. It is again also the foundation of Aristotle’s account of human freedom. This way of approaching freedom is greatly to be recommended, because it avoids both the dubious and dangerous concept of a separate faculty of will distinct from reason, and the worse concepts of arbitrary will, or will as “superior” to reason.

“The critique of the Megarians indeed carries a double, and paradoxical, positivity: it invites us to think at the same time becoming in relation with dunamis, and energeia in relation with being. In doing this, it indicates also the double stakes of the inquiry: to think becoming and being at the same time; to determine the mode of their articulation.”

The dynamis–energeia pair is what uniquely enables Aristotle to think of being and becoming in a non-opposed way, though this is far from exhausting its significance.

“The extension from the kinetic sense of energeia to the ontological sense is presented as a deepening: otherwise said, and in conformity to what Theta 1 noted already, it is the ontological sense that is primary. In effect, if we have a tendency to consider that energeia is manifested above all in movement, this is insofar as we take it as an index of being” (p. 123, emphasis in original).

“For not to be in act but to be capable of being so, is also a mode of being: that which in-potentiality names. Of certain things that are not, but are nonetheless capable of being, one says thus that they are dunamei” (pp. 123-124).

Here we have a good example of the explicitly dative grammatical form of dynamis (dynamei) that she finds to be associated with Aristotle’s distinctive notion of being in potentiality. These are things that have being potentially, or are potentially thus-and-such. Here the emphasis is all on “things” in a state of potentiality, or potential “states of affairs”. Potentiality (as distinct from actuality) is the modality in which these have being and are said. This is indeed clearly different from a power to do, cause, or undergo.

“That which is in-potentiality, nonetheless, is not, ‘because it is not an entelechy‘” (p. 124).

We do not say of that which is in-potentiality that it “is” simply, or in an unqualified sense.

At the link above, I suggested that entelechy is probably the most important guiding concept of the Metaphysics. I have also suggested that entelechy serves as a kind of explanation for how ousia or (substance or essence, or what Sachs calls “thinghood”) works. In turn, Aristotle uses ousia to help disambiguate and organize what is meant by the various ways in which we say something is something. In the quote above, he directly uses entelechy as the criterion for what we do and do not say “is”. It is vitally important that he appeals to this much more nuanced concept, instead of referring back to the blunt instrument of a common-sense notion of existence or reality. For Aristotle, being, existence, or reality is not an explainer; instead, it needs to be explained.

Nonetheless, Aubry points out that here, Aristotle does not explicitly invoke the normative aspect of entelechy. We are still primarily investigating the more common “kinetic” sense of dynamis and energeia that accounts for physical motion. The aspect of entelechy that is to the fore is therefore that of the continuing activity that constitutes a substance as something persisting, or a motion as ongoing.

Next in this series: Potentiality and Possibility

Rational and Natural Powers

“Theta 2 prolongs the analysis of dunamis in proposing another distinction, which no longer opposes active power to passive power, but power that is rational or accompanied by a logos, to irrational power. This analysis marks progress in comparison with Theta 1, in that it considers at the same time the relation of power to its effect. In so doing it gives a maximal extension to the notion, in manifesting that it applies as much to animate as to inanimate beings, and as much in the field of nature as in that of techne” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 121, my translation throughout). 

“What distinguishes rational power is that it can be power for two contrary effects, ton enantion, where irrational power is only for one sole contrary: thus, the medical art can produce sickness or health, while fire can only heat. The logos in effect ‘shows at the same time a thing and its privation’…. Privation, which we have seen cannot in any case characterize a power, but rather characterizes its contrary, impotence, is given as the object of the logos that governs it. This object is nonetheless derived, or ‘in a certain way accidental’: it is in initially considering the positive contrary, or the form, then in negating it by reasoning that we see the negative contrary. The primacy of the positive contrary is thus maintained” (ibid).

The medical art and fire are very different kinds of things. They are both called “powers”, but the one is “rational” and the other natural or “irrational”. The medical art seems analogous to the art of housebuilding that serves as the canonical example of an Aristotelian principle of motion or “efficient cause”. Fire for Aristotle is one of four material elements defined by a division in terms of primitive qualities. In a recent post, we briefly saw how even the cyclical transformations of these qualitative elements can fit into an ultimately teleological schema, without any extravagant hypotheses.

We saw in the last post that Aubry’s strong emphasis on the distinctively Aristotelian dative form dynamei as characteristic of being in potentiality does not by any means rule out a recognition that Aristotle in fact devotes more space to the more common nominative form dynamis, which can after all be reasonably translated as “power”, which has wider non-Aristotelian usage, and which plays an important role in Plato.

Aristotle specifies the applicable meaning of logos in this context as the rational deliberation that governs prohairesis or choice, and thereby also governs the exercise of power or capability.

In the case of natural powers like that of fire to heat things, for Aristotle it is always a matter of power to do, cause, or undergo something definite. Then independently, as a matter of general logic (and of even more fundamental ethical seriousness about consistency of our assertions), we must affirm that a power we have stipulated to be for something definite is just that. If we accept that a particular “power” is for something definite, then we must also accept that is not a power for the opposite of that definite something, nor indeed for anything other than what it is for.

It is thoughtful deliberation that involves a consideration of pro and con, and determines a choice about the exercise of a power that in itself just is what it is. In the rational case too, the power at issue is still a power to do something definite, just like a natural power. But here the governing deliberation — in order to be a genuine deliberation at all — must be fundamentally open, and not predetermined in its outcome. This is how rational animals have freedom. We have flexibility and plasticity in the exercise of definite powers.

So we see that outside of first philosophy, Aristotle does use a more conventional notion of power. But Plato, Aristotle, and the classical Greeks generally regarded the idea of unlimited power — and indeed anything unlimited — with a kind of horror. (It seems to have been Philo of Alexandria who introduced the very un-Greek notion of infinite power.) Aristotle treats both rational and natural powers always as powers for something definite. It is reason, and more specifically deliberation about alternatives — not power in itself — that allows us freedom.

“This analysis allows two requirements that are apparently conflicting, but equally essential to Aristotelian thought about power, to be reconciled: affirming its positivity, all while introducing within it an indetermination” (p. 122, emphasis in original).

This is a really essential point about the nature of freedom. Besides developing the wholly new concept of being in potentiality, Aristotle distinguishes much more clearly than his predecessors between the more common notion of power and its exercise. Freedom belongs to the thoughtful exercise of definite powers and capabilities, not to any power in itself.

Next in this series: Critique of the Megarians

Reading Metaphysics Theta

This will be the first of several posts on Gwenaëlle Aubry’s detailed analysis of book Theta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Here I will cover her introductory remarks.

In Aristotle’s text, “the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia, which the use of the dative expression to dunamei kai energeiai indicates, will not be explored at the outset. We depart from the kinetic sense of these notions, designated as corresponding to their current usage, but not from the project of the inquiry. And it is only later that we will see how dunamis and energeia exceed what is said solely in relation to movement” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, pp. 117-118, my translation throughout). 

“This extension, nonetheless, is also a deepening: the ontological sense will be progressively extracted from the kinetic sense, and the sense ‘sought’ from the current sense, but as that which the latter presupposes. For the notions of entelekheia [entelechy] and of ergon [a work] which the beginning of Theta highlights play a fundamental role in the transition from the kinetic sense to the ontological sense of energeia: it is they that mediate between energeia as the name of movement and energeia as a sense of being. And again, they allow it to be understood that energeia says being: not only subsistence or presence, but the function in which is accomplished the form or essence (en-ergon), and in this also the end (en-telos). Energeia is thus found coordinated with dunamis not only as the effective to the possible, but as the end toward which it tends” (p. 118).

“[T]he transition from the kinetic sense to the ontological sense goes hand in hand with a transfer from the model of efficiency and of the correlation of powers to that of finality and the actualization. of the in-potential. This last model, as we have seen, is already at work in the physical and biological writings, but Theta gives it an ontological foundation” (ibid).

Where I see Aristotle’s teleological and normative explanation of being as an alternative to impoverished articulations of first philosophy as “ontology” (i.e., a pure concern with being as existence, subsistence, or presence), Aubry instead chooses to retain the term “ontology”, while transforming it into a teleological and normative account. What she calls the ontological sense of the terms is for me their teleological sense.

“We must begin by studying the kinetic sense (or the sense that is at the same time kurios, first from the point of view of current usage, and me khresimotatos, not the most useful, not the one we seek)” (ibid).

This kind of approach, which takes ordinary language and what is commonly accepted as starting point but eventually moves beyond them, is very typical of Aristotle.

“This usual sense of dunamis is that which book Delta [on things said in many ways] already explored, but nonetheless did not consider in its correlation with energeia. If Theta resumes the first definition and the different senses distinguished by Delta, it nonetheless orders them and operates a sorting among them: thus dunamis is initially designated as equivocal, but among its significations, certain are designated as purely homonymic…. By contrast, the other senses of dunamis can all be referred to a primary sense: that of a ‘principle of change in another thing or in itself as another’. This primary sense of dunamis is indeed an active sense. Nonetheless, the definition proposed in Theta does not manifest this as such, since it does not indicate whether the change in question is enacted or undergone” (pp. 118-119).

“Thus in Delta as in Theta, the distinction between active power and passive power is effaced before the univoval characterization of dunamis as arkhe, as principle of change: or better, the distinction of active and passive is offered as a trait of change more than of the power that presides over it” (p. 119).

Arkhe, which Aubry here renders by the French cognate of “principle”, is what Sachs in his translations calls “source”. Dynamis at the “kinetic” level is a source or principle of motion and change, which renders Aristotle’s phrase for what got Latinized as the efficient cause.

I’m beginning to appreciate that Aubry is far from claiming that dynamis never means power in Aristotle. When I recently began studying this work more closely, I was initially confused to see her frequent use of the French puissance, as opposed to her emphatically preferred en-puissance. (I think at least once in an earlier post I substituted English “potentiality” — which I’ve been using for en-puissance — for what should have been “power” (for puissance) in my translation. Regardless of the grammatical form in the the Greek, Sachs and other English translators choose one word — “potency” for Sachs, “potentiality” in older translations influenced by the Latin. This makes the distinction Aubry is focusing on invisible.)

As things are coming more sharply into focus with this closer reading of her work on Aristotle, I now think these uses of puissance are her reflection of the nominative form used by Aristotle himself in many passages. As she says, the nominative form could denote an active power, but the dative form rules that out. According to Aubry, what she calls the ontological as opposed to the kinetic sense — the distinctively Aristotelian being-in-potentiality, as contrasted with the more generally recognized power to move things — is mainly associated with the dative. But the nominative nonetheless plays quite a large role in Aristotle’s text. And it is quite appropriate for the kinetic sense of dynamis, the one associated with motion and largely anticipated by Plato. But she has first emphasized the symmetry and reversibility of active and passive dynamis, and now suggested that dynamis is in a way indifferent to the distinction of active and passive.

She quotes Aristotle, “It is indeed evident that in a sense the power of acting and the power of undergoing are one” (p. 120).

“Principle of movement, dunamis can also be resistance to a movement of deterioration or of destruction: it is as such a state of impassibility, a hexis apatheias…. It is necessary to note that on the other hand, the capacity of resistance to a movement toward the better is not qualified as dunamis…. One notes already the gradation between a neutral sense and a normative sense that the notion of energeia will engage” (ibid).

“Dunamis, whether it be active or passive, is always found associated with a positivity and a possession (hexis). It is its contrary, impotency (adunamia) and the impotent (adunaton) that one associates with privation, steresis” (ibid).

“[P]ower, whether active or passive, remains univocally characterized as a principle of movement, and as being of the order of possession and of positivity” (p. 121, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Rational and Natural Powers

Potentiality for Interaction

“Before being elucidated in Metaphysics Theta as a sense of being, dunamis appears in the physical texts as the instrument of the thought of change and action. It is thus thought in the order of the correlation not of the in-potentiality to act, but of active power to passive power. The model is the mechanistic one of efficiency. This model is nonetheless subsumed under another, which for the correlation active dunamis / passive dunamis, substitutes that of dunamis to energeia, thus integrating the schema of efficiency under that of finality. The definition of movement and its characterization as the common act of the mover and the moved appears as an essential moment of this integration: it invites us to see in kinesis [motion] not only the result of the interplay between two powers, one active and the other passive, but the transition between two states of being. Interaction thus appears only as the means for actualization, the play of powers as the occasion of the realization of the in-potentiality” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 103, my translation throughout). 

This all seems very sound. I would add only two more nuances. First, not only is so-called efficient causality or Aristotle’s notion of “sources of motion” subsumed by final causality, but it also subsumes mechanistic “action” under a broader notion of “means”, as in the example from the Physics in which the art of building is what is most properly said to be the source of the motion of building a house. Aubry herself also speaks of interaction as a “means for actualization”.

Second, she speaks here of interaction because Aristotle analyzes even the most unilateral, mechanistic physical “action” as a special kind of interaction between active and passive powers. Although Aristotle would also agree with Kant against Leibniz that there is real interaction between things, that is not at stake in the contrast here. For Aristotle, all action is really a kind of interaction in the special sense mentioned above, but I think what he means primarily to contrast with actualization is action as such, not interaction as such. I would thus suggest the friendly amendment “action appears only as the means for actualization”. On the other hand though, she is emphasizing the fact that all action for Aristotle is really interaction, which is also extremely important.

In On Generation and Corruption book I, Aristotle describes cyclical transformations of the four elements. Aubry notes that the elements are there said to have neither forms of their own nor any principle of autonomous movement. The reciprocal action of the elements is explained in terms of active and passive dunamis.

“[A]ction has for effect an assimilation of the patient to the agent; but always in the case of a material agent, it can entail a passion in return…. If dunamis determines the agent as well as the patient, it is indeed according to a reversible schema, and in a relation of co-implication” (p. 104).

“This first formula, which accounts for action by the correlation of an active dunamis and a passive dunamis, is nonetheless succeeded by another, which substitutes for the pair of powers that of in-potentiality and of act” (ibid).

“The agent is no longer solely determined as active, but as in act…. As for the patient, it is not only passive, but in-potentiality. If there can be action of the one on the other, it is because the effect is already present, dunamei [in potentiality], in the patient: fire, for example, can only heat that which is already hot-in-potentiality” (ibid).

She quotes from book II: “That which is hot in-act is cold in-potentiality, and that which is cold in-act is hot in-potentiality, so that, at least if they don’t equalize themselves, they transform themselves the one into the other” (p. 105).

She continues, summarizing “This cycle obeys the principle of the best, and has a finality of its own” (ibid).

“All the same, the elements are deprived as much of active power as of spontaneity. Their movement toward a place should not be understood on the model of action, or of the interaction of an active power and a passive power, but on that of actualization, and of the correlation of the in-potentiality and the in-act” (ibid).

“The case of elemental change indeed appears as an example of the substitution of the model of actualization for that of interaction, and of the model of finality for that of efficiency. Aristotle starts from the place where mechanistic explanation seems the most justified: the first elements, the original impulses of matter. But precisely, these are not, like the dunameis that fill the khora [receptacle] of [Plato’s] Timaeus, brute and disordered forces: they are passive powers, deprived of self-motion and of spontaneity, but which nonetheless are principles of movement, and have an orientation or a tendency. Between them and their act, the active power, efficiency, only intervenes as an exterior cause; it is nothing more than the occasion for their actualization” (p.106).

Far from serving as the primary model for causality in general, efficient causality in Aristotle only provides occasions for more essential causes or reasons why to operate. It is always only a means for something, a kind of circumstantial catalyst.

On the Soul book II distinguishes “two degrees of dunamis. The first, according to ‘the genus and the matter’ is a non-exercised native capacity — that in virtue of which every human is capable, simply insofar as she is human and possessed of reason, of understanding grammar; the second is a capacity already employed, exercised, the effectuation of which requires no supplementary apprenticeship, but simply the will and the absence of obstacles…; and finally entelechy, or the actual exercise of knowledge” (p. 107).

“The case of perception, like that of elemental change, must be conceived as a transition from second dunamis to entelechy. This kind of alteration (alliosis) neither affects nor destroys the nature of the subject, but on the contrary is ‘a progress toward itself and toward entelechy'” (pp. 107-108).

“Nonetheless, in the case of the apprenticeship of knowledge, the passage from first dunamis to second dunamis should also be conceived as alteration-amelioration…. More than on the distinction between two degrees of dunamis and between movement (kinesis) and change (metabole), it seems it is necessary to insist on that between two types of alteration, the one privative and the other positive. This distinction underlines once again that the intervention of the efficient cause and of the external agent can serve as the occasion of an immanent progress” (pp. 108-109).

“In the transition between the model of interaction and the model of actualization, the definition of motion as the common act of the mover and the moved also appears as an essential moment” (p. 109).

“In Physics III, movement is defined as the entelechy of that which is in-potentiality as such…. Movement, otherwise said, is the act of the dunamis of a being not as such, but as mobile: the process of fabricating a statue is not the act of the brass as brass, but of the brass insofar as it becomes a statue. Immediately proposed, this definition is designed as a sort of default; of movement, in effect, one can say neither that it is privation, nor power, nor act; it is necessary, ultimately, as difficult as this may seem, to define it as an incomplete act, energeia ateles, in opposition to a simple act, energeia haple” (ibid).

“Movement indeed manifests the power of a being whatever it is, that is, independent of what it is, [independent] as well as of that by which such a being can become other than it is…. Movement is indeed the the entelechy of a power as such, since being a power is being a principle of movement, but the power is always the power of a being that by that movement becomes what it is. As consequence, the distinction is not between two powers, but between becoming as the being of power, and the being in view of which there is becoming” (p. 110).

“If the analysis of movement makes appeal to the distinction between mover and movable, and indeed between agent and patient, this distinction nonetheless finds itself relativized: in fact… the mover moves in being itself moved — since there exists also, Aristotle points out, an unmoved mover. The agent indeed is at the same time patient, and the patient in its turn can become agent, so that everything is both agent and patient, poietikon kai pathetikon. But to this it must be added that act is the same in the agent and the patient” (ibid).

“The duality of agent and patient, or of mover and moved, is reabsorbed thus, according to the point of view specified, into that of in-potentiality and in-act. In-potentiality, to dunamei, recovers active power and passive power equally well: it is a point of view taken on both powers insofar as they in principle belong to one and the same movement, or again, insofar as they are the subject of one and the same accomplishment” (p. 111).

Nothing in the real world is ever purely active or purely passive. It is hard to overstate the significance of this.

“In the same way that book III of the Physics subsumes the correlation of powers under movement as the act of the in-potential, book Theta of the Metaphysics places movement under energeia, understood this time not as ateles [incomplete], but as identical to the telos [end]” (ibid).

Next in this series: Reading Metaphysics Theta

Ethical Roots of Aristotelian Dynamis

“The notion of dunamis is present from the earliest writings of Aristotle, associated each time with an ethical context” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 100, my translation throughout). She cites studies of this issue by D. W. Graham and E. Berti.

The Protrepicus is an Aristotelian dialogue, famous in antiquity as an exhortation for people to learn philosophy, but surviving only in fragments quoted by other authors. According to Aubry, it discusses dynamis in terms still based on those of Plato’s Theaetetus — a kind of having, as distinct from use — but it already introduces Aristotle’s neologisms of energeia and entelecheia, or act and the closely related notion of entelechy. Significations according to act are already treated as focal, relative to significations according to dynamis.

“Finally, the distinction also shows a normative and teleological sense” (ibid).

“The notion of energeia is found associated not only with that of usage, but also with that of good usage and that of end, and by the latter ultimately with that of ergon [a completed work] — the text having ultimately for objective the determination of the ergon of the soul, not only its function but the act in which its end properly resides” (p. 101).

We saw recently that Plato already used ergon in a sense like this. Aristotelian energeia is the fulfilling activity from which the Platonic ergon emerges.

“It is with a normative and teleological sense that the notion of ergon intervenes again in fragment 6: the accomplishment of the ergon in effect is that in virtue of which a thing can be called good, agathos, that in which also resides its virtue, arete. For in the case of a composite being, this work cannot be immediately determined: constituted of different parts, such a being is also constituted of multiple acts and multiple powers. Its end resides in the accomplishment of its best work, its most proper dunamis, indeed that of that part of it in which its identity most resides. For the human, her end and her happiness reside in the accomplishment of the power of thinking, phronesis, which is at the same time her divine part and her most proper identity. The notion of dunamis is thus articulated to those of ergon and of energeia, which themselves are articulated to that of end, telos” (ibid).

Much of Aristotle’s most characteristic thought is expressed here. (On a side note, I am especially intrigued that phronesis or practical judgment is here explicitly assigned the same ultimate role that theoria or contemplation plays in the Nicomachean Ethics. I have long been skeptical of any sharp contrast between these two. See Aristotelian “Wisdom”.)

“The Protrepicus strongly associates notions that were present but disjoint in Plato: that of effective usage, of ergon and end, which are conjoined in Aristotle’s invented terms of energeia and entelecheia” (ibid).

She also points out a discussion of dynamis in book IV of the Topics, where it is opposed to choice based on deliberation. No one should be blamed for a dynamis. “One does not say of a human who is capable of acting badly that she is bad…. The bad is the one who is not only capable of evil, but chooses it…. Contrary to what Platonic aristocratism affirms, there are no naturally good or bad [rational beings]; in particular, it makes no sense to speak of someone as naturally virtuous: because virtue, the Nicomachean Ethics says, is not a dunamis, a native power, an innate quality, any more than vice is. It is a hexis, a disposition acquired… by means of repetition of one same act, and of which the actualization, in its turn, is suspended from prohairesis [choice grounded in deliberation]” (p. 102).

Next in this series: Potentiality for Interaction