Desire, Image, Intellect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brenet has written an entire book on Wylton.

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

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

Love’s Intellect

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book Lambda: Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Physics and Theology

Book Theta: Summing Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She goes on to give some conclusions about causality.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Book Lambda: Introduction

Grammatical Prejudice?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Act as Separable

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Book Theta: Summing Up

Act in Process

At this point we are starting to sum up the results of Aristotle’s Metaphysics book Theta on potentiality and act. Aubry now makes a stronger statement that what it is in itself to be something in potentiality or in act can only be made clear by considering the relation between the two.

“In fact, and always in continuity with the analogy of Theta 6 [between various particular cases of something being in-potentiality and in-act], we begin by considering the relation of dunamis and energeia — that which, according to Theta 6, is the unique means of understanding these notions in themselves, but which also serves to justify the various equivalences posed by the analogy” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 135, my translation throughout, Becker number citations to the Greek text omitted).

“This relation is defined according to a triple anteriority: energeia is anterior to dunamis at once according to the formula, logoi; according to the substance, ousiai; and, but only from one point of view, according to time” (ibid).

“Of an individual in-act, one must say in effect that she is engendered from in-potentiality by another individual in act…. In-potentiality is no longer presented here as a principle of movement, but as a transitory state between two acts. And energeia in its turn is no longer identified with movement, but with the state of that which moves [something else], insofar as it is identical in form with the moved” (p. 136, emphasis in original).

This case applies to biological reproduction.

“Anteriority according to the formula is qualified as evident: it is in relation to act that one defines in-potentiality” (ibid).

“From [Becker index] 1050a4 on, we go on to explore the third relation of anteriority, that according to ousia [“substance”; what it was to have been a thing]. Here we are at the heart of Theta 8, and indeed of Theta in its entirety, since here the triple transition will be accomplished — from the kinetic sense to the ontological sense; from the model of the transitivity and the correlation of powers to the model of the dunamis–energeia correlation insofar as it applies to transitive change as well as to immanent change; and finally, from the model of efficiency to the teleological model.”

“The anteriority according to ousia is not initially given as an anteriority in the order of existence, but as an anteriority in that of form and of essence…. That which is anterior according to ousia is posterior according to generation: the adult is posterior to the infant…, even though in the latter is found the form that is not fully present. But this inversion from one order to the other is explained by the fact that the anteriority of act according to ousia is that of form as end: the act [the adult] is ‘that for the sake of which’ for generation.”

“Here we rejoin the analyses of books Zeta and Eta, where the substitution of the notion of act for that of form proceeds from the adoption of an etiological, and not only logical, point of view, by which the form is considered in its causal function, and envisaged as end” (ibid).

In a composite of form and matter, the form that is considered as end and not only “logically” will be in a sense identified with the composite as a whole, i.e., with the form as realized in matter.

“The anteriority of act according to ousia is that of the end, that is to say of the form as the term of a process that realized it in a matter — and indeed, in the composite that book Zeta qualifies as ousia malista [ousia most of all].”

“For it is this anteriority of act as end that provides the key to the necessary correlation of dunamis and energeia. One does not say only that energeia is to dunamis as that which builds is to the art of building, or as that which sees is to that which is given to view, but that it is for building that one understands architecture; for sight that one has sight; for contemplating that one has the power of contemplating. Act, from this point on, does not appear only as that in relation to which one defines power, but as that for which power is” (p. 137, emphasis in original).

She quotes Aristotle, “The act is the end, and it is in view of it that the power is acquired” (p. 137).

“We integrate here the results of Theta 7 for justifying the equivalence between matter and in-potentiality; for what justifies this equivalence is that the matter is teleologically determined by the form…. As at the end of book Eta, act serves here to name the unity realized from the matter and the form” (ibid).

Act serves “as another name for the ousia malista [ousia most of all] of book Zeta” (p. 138). And this is none other than the composite of form and matter.

“The ontological sense of energeia nonetheless is presented as being at the foundation of the kinetic sense; if movement can be called energeia, it is insofar as we take it as an index of being…. From now on, what justifies the equivalence between energeia and kinesis is that movement can also be telos. And if energeia and kinesis can be called entelekheia, it is not only in the sense where they name effective and complete being in opposition to the incomplete being that in-potentiality says, but because they name that being which, for in-potentiality, is its end” (ibid).

She quotes Aristotle, “For the ergon [completed work] is the end, and energeia is ergon. This is why the term energeia is derived from that of ergon, and tends toward entelekheia” (p. 139).

She continues, “Ergon thus intervenes as the mediation between energeia and telos, and indeed also between energeia and entelekheia. It was present, we saw, from the first lines of Theta 1, presented alongside dunamis and energeia as a sense of being. We find it also, in a sense at the same time normative and teleological, in the Protrepicus. The term serves here to allow the kinetic sense and the ontological sense of energeia to be unified, and at the same time to range the first under the second.”

“If it can play this role, it is thanks to the double sense that it carries: in fact, ergon signifies at the same time the proper function, understood as the act in which the essence is accomplished, and the oeuvre [completed work]. For the remainder of the text goes on precisely to distinguish between two kinds of act: one intransitive, in which nothing else is accomplished but itself, and the other transitive, which produces a being exterior to itself. To illustrate the first, one gives the example of vision, which is the ergon-function of sight, and serves in itself as a telos, an end; for the second, the example of the construction which, resulting in an ergon-work, the house, is only fully [an end] when taken together with the latter. From this we understand that movement can be called energeia: because it indeed has an ergon and a telos, which are not confused with it, but are its work, or that which it produces, and in which, thenceforward, we can say that it is.”

“In fact, ‘the action of building a house resides in the house that is built, and it comes to be and is at the same time as the house’. This affirmation can appear problematic at first glance: one tends spontaneously to distinguish the transitive activity from what it produces, and the being of the house from that of the movement of its construction, since the house only fully is when, precisely, the movement is no longer. We can nonetheless understand this in the light of the analysis of movement in Physics III, and of its characterization as the act common to the mover and the moved: Aristotle already affirmed that the ergon and the telos of the agent and the patient, or of the mover and the moved, reside in one sole and same energeia. In the same way, it seems that the phrase of Theta 8 has no sense unless by the house we understand not the completed house, but the house as object of the movement of construction. We thus understand that the act of construction comes to be at the same time as the house in the process of being constructed, since the two movements (construction/being constructed) are one. The work and the end of transitive activity do not reside in the achieved product, but in the production itself…. The distinction between immanent activity and transitive activity is no longer so great” (pp. 139-140, emphasis in original).

A being that is “in process” can also be an “achieved” being, in varying degrees insofar it also represents an incremental achievement.

“We have seen in effect that act was identical to form as the end and term of in-potentiality, indeed to the form as realized in a matter. If act is anterior to power from the point of view of ousia, this anteriority is not only the logical one of the form-essence and the ousia prote, but also that of substance and ousia malista” (pp. 140-141).

Here we see Aristotle’s strong vindication of immanence and concrete being. Ends — and indeed “perfection” according to a particular kind — are intended to be understood as realizable in form and matter. This is far indeed from the perspective that all finite things necessarily fall infinitely short of a perfection conceived as infinite. For Aristotle, the highest being will be characterized not as infinite, but as pure act and as the good.

Next in this series: Act as Separable

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