Averroes vs Ghazali

The Persian al-Ghazali (1055–1111 CE), known to the Latins as Algazel, is regarded as the greatest theologian of the Ash‘arite school of Sunni Islam. According to Wikipedia, the Ash‘arites are one of several schools that advocate the use of reason in expounding the Islamic revelation. In this sense they are definitely to be distinguished from the literalists. The Ash‘arites nonetheless defend a radical version of omnipotence.

Ghazali wrote a work that circulated in the Latin world, which summarized the views of the Islamic philosophers accurately enough that the Latins mistakenly regarded him as one of them. “Philosophy” in this context principally refers to the thought of al-Farabi and Ibn Sina (Avicenna). But Ghazali is best known to historians of philosophy for his sharp attack The Incoherence of the Philosophers, which treated Ibn Sina as representative. Ghazali was a very strong creationist who insisted that creation must be understood as having occurred in time. Like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham a bit later in the West, he defended a radically voluntarist theology.

In a short work called the Decisive Treatise that was never translated to Latin, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) argues as an Islamic jurist that the Koran commands those capable of doing so to study philosophy. Though his philosophy had very little influence in the Islamic world, he was the leading Maliki jurist in al-Andalus and the Maghreb in his day. He wrote the authoritative textbook of Maliki jurisprudence. I learned that Maliki law is still practiced in many Islamic countries.

Ibn Rushd wrote a refutation of Ghazali called The Incoherence of the Incoherence, which interspersedly contains the full text of Ghazali’s work. It circulated in Latin under the title Destructio Destructionum (destruction of the destruction). I’ve transcribed some small excerpts of this historically fascinating book.

The dispute is basically about Aristotle versus creationism. The particular focus of the first part I have excerpted addresses this from the angle of views about the relation between what is eternal and what is in time. The other part I’ve excerpted has to do with Aristotle versus theological voluntarism.

[Ghazali] “The philosophers say: It is impossible that the temporal should proceed from the absolutely Eternal…. When the world begins in time, a new determinant either does or does not arise…. If it does not, the world will stay in the same state of pure possibility as before; if a new determinant does arise… either we shall have an infinite regress or we shall arrive at a principle determining eternally” (Averroes’ Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence), tr. Van Den Bergh (1954), p. 1).

[Averroes] “This argument is in the highest degree dialectical and does not reach the pitch of demonstrative proof. For its premises are common notions, and common notions approach the equivocal, whereas demonstrative premises are concerned with things proper to the same genus” (ibid).

Averroes retains Farabi’s exaggerated emphasis on strict demonstration in the sense of the Prior Analytics in Aristotle. Reading Aristotle partly through a Farabian lens, Averroes does not recognize the large place and positive role that Aristotle implicitly gives to dialectic in the sense of the Topics throughout his works. Averroes sees “dialectic” as an intellectually loose approach that easily falls into sophistry.

[Averroes] “For the term ‘possible’ is used in an equivocal way of the possible that happens more often than not, of the possible that happens less often than not, and of the possible with equal chances of happening, and these three types of the possible do not seem to have the same need for a new determining principle” (ibid).

“All these are multifarious and difficult questions which need, each of them, a special examination, both in themselves and in regard to the opinions the ancients held about them. To treat what is in reality a plurality of questions as one problem is one of the well-known seven sophisms, and a mistake in one of these principles becomes a great error by the end of the examination of reality” (pp. 1-2).

[Ghazali] “[The world’s] existence was not willed before and therefore did not happen… at the exact moment it began it was willed by an eternal will and therefore began” (p. 3).

[Averroes] “The act of the agent necessarily implies a change and … each change has a principle which causes it…. [T]he Eternal cannot change in any way. But all this is difficult to prove” (ibid).

“[O]ur expressions ‘eternal will’ and ‘temporal will’ are equivocal, indeed contrary…. [W]hen one says: ‘There is a Willer who wills eternally one of two contraries in Himself’, the definition of the will is abandoned” (p. 4).

[Ghazali summarizing the philosophers] “The effect only takes place when a new event, i.e. entering the house or the arrival of tomorrow, has actually happened…. A delay in the object willed is imaginable only in decision, for decision is not sufficient for the existence of the act” (p. 5). “If, however, the eternal Will is analogous to our decision, it does not suffice to produce the thing decided upon, but the act of creation must be accompanied by a new act of volition, and this brings us again to the idea of a change” (ibid). “[W]ithout the realization of any new condition, this effect comes into existence and is produced. And this is absurd” (p. 6).

[Averroes] “[Ghazali’s] example of divorce based on convention seems to strengthen the argument of the philosophers, but in reality it weakens it. For it enables the Ash’arites to say: In the same way as the actual divorce is delayed after the formula of divorce till the moment when the condition of someone’s entering the house, or any other, is fulfilled, so the realization of the world can be delayed after God’s act of creation until the condition is fulfilled on which this realization depends, i.e. the moment when God willed it. But conventional things do not behave like rational” (ibid).

[Ghazali] “[T]he party which believes in the creation of the world in time through an eternal Will includes so many persons that no country can contain them and no number enumerate them, and they certainly do not contradict the logically minded out of obstinacy, while knowing better in their hearts” (p. 7).

[Averroes] “[T]his argument is mistaken, for it is not a condition of objective truth that it should be known to all” (ibid).

[Ghazali] “[T]o suppose the Creator of the world ignorant of His own work is necessarily absurd” (ibid).

[Averroes] “This assertion belongs to the class of assertions whose contrary is equally false. For there exists no proof which refutes anything that is evidently true, and universally acknowledged. Anything that can be refuted by a demonstrative proof is only supposed to be true, not really true…. Equally, if it is absolutely true that the effect of a cause cannot be delayed after the causation and the Ash’arites claim that they can advance a proof to deny it, then we can be absolutely sure that they cannot have such a proof. If there is a controversy about questions like this, the final criterion rests with the sound understanding which does not base itself on prejudice and passion, when it probes according to the signs and rules by which truth and mere opinion are logically distinguished” (p. 8).

[Ghazaili] “[E]ternity of the world is impossible, for it implies an infinite number and an infinity of unities for the spherical revolutions, although they can be divided by six, by four, and by two” (p. 9).

[Averroes] “This too is a sophistical argument. It amounts to saying: In the same way as you are unable to refute our demonstrative argument for the creation of the world in time, that if it were eternal, its revolutions would be neither even nor uneven, so we cannot refute your theory that the effect of an agent whose conditions to act are always fulfilled cannot be delayed. This argument aims only at creating and establishing a doubt, which is one of the sophist’s objectives…. But when the existence of an eternal prime mover had been proved, whose act cannot be posterior to his being, it followed that there could as little be a beginning for his act as for his being; otherwise his act would be possible, not necessary, and he would not be a first principle…. The agent who has no beginning either for his existence or for those acts of his which he performs without an instrument, has no first instrument either to perform those acts of his without beginning which by their nature need an instrument.”

“But since the theologians mistook the accidental for the essential, they denied this eternal agent” (pp. 10-11).

“It will be clear to you that neither the arguments of the theologians for the temporal creation of the world of which Ghazali speaks, nor the arguments of the philosophers which he includes and describes in his book, suffice to reach absolute evidence or afford stringent proof” (p. 12).

Like Aquinas, Averroes holds that arguments on neither side of the debate for and against creationism reach demonstrative certainty. Averroes defends a theory of eternal “creation” that is far removed from what creationists mean by creation. It has been argued that Albert the Great also had a notion of eternal creation.

[Averroes] “No motion possesses totality or forms an aggregate, i.e. is provided with a beginning or an end, except in so far as it is in the soul, as is the case with time. And it follows from the nature of circular movement that it is neither even nor uneven except as represented in the soul” (p. 13).

“[T]he impossibility of an actual infinite is an acknowledged axiom in philosophical theory, equally valid for material and immaterial things…. Perhaps Avicenna wanted only to satisfy the masses, telling them what they were accustomed to hear about the soul. But this theory is far from satisfactory” (p. 14).

[Ghazali] “We seek to show by all this that the philosophers cannot shake the conviction of their adversaries that the eternal Will is connected with temporal creation, except by claiming its absurdity by the necessity of thought, and that therefore they are in no way different from the theologians who make the same claim against the philosophical doctrines opposed to theirs. And out of this there is no issue” (p. 15).

“[W]e say that the soul of Zaid is either identical with the soul of Amr or different from it; but their identity would mean something absurd, for everyone is conscious of his own identity and knows that he is not another” (ibid).

[Averroes] ” ‘[D]ifferent’ is an equivocal term, and ‘identity’ too is predicated of a number of things which are also called ‘different’…. The souls of Zaid and Amr are one in one sense and many in another; we might say, one in relation to their form, many in relation to their substratum” (pp. 15-16).

“When someone denies a truth of which it is absolutely certain that it is such-and-such, there exists no argument by which we can come to an understanding with him; for every argument is based on known premises about which both adversaries agree. When each point advanced is denied by the adversary, discussion with him becomes impossible, but such people stand outside the pale of humanity and have to be educated” (p. 16, emphasis added).

In emphasizing argument from agreed-upon premises, Averroes treats something like Platonic dialogue as a norm.

[Ghazali] “God before the creation of the world was able to create it, say, one year or two years before He did, and there is no limit to His power; but He seemed to have patience and did not create. Then He created” (p. 17).

[Averroes] “[W]hat has no beginning does not finish or end.” (ibid).

[Ghazali for the philosophers] “[W]e philosophers know by the necessity of thought that one thing does not distinguish itself from a similar except by a differentiating principle…. [I]f you answer that the Will of God is the differentiating principle, then one has to inquire what differentiates the Will, i.e. the reason why it has been differentiated in such or such way (p. 18).”

[Ghazali] “[W]ill is a quality which has the faculty of differentiating one thing from another, and if it had not this faculty, power in itself would suffice…. And to ask why will differentiates one of two similars is like asking why knowledge must comprehend the knowable” (ibid).

[Averroes] “As the theologians were unable to give a satisfactory answer, they took refuge in the theory that the eternal Will is a quality the nature of which is to differentiate between two similar things, without there being for God a differentiating principle which inclines Him to one of two similar acts” (p. 20).

This is the originally Stoic idea of a “freedom of indifference”. The Ash‘arites defend both predestination and theological and anthropological voluntarism.

[Ghazali] “Everyone, therefore, who studies, in the human and the divine, the real working of the act of choice, must necessarily admit a quality the nature of which is to differentiate between two similar things…. Suppose two similar dates in front of a man who has a strong desire for them, but who is unable to take them both. Surely he will take one of them through a quality in him the nature of which is to differentiate between two similar things” (p. 21).

[Averroes] “[I]t is by no means a matter of distinguishing between two similar things when, in this condition, he takes one of the two dates. It is nothing but the admission of an equivalence of two similar things. His will attaches itself therefore merely to the distinction between the fact of taking one of them and the fact of leaving them altogether” (p. 23).

“A definite moment cannot be assigned for the creation of the world, for either time did not exist before it, or there was an infinite time” (p. 32).

“[T]he temporal proceeds from the First Eternal, not in so far as it is temporal but in so far as it is eternal, i.e. through being eternal generically, though temporal in its parts…. for its arising anew is not a new fact, but is an eternal act, i.e. an act without beginning or end. Therefore its agent must be an eternal agent, for an eternal act has an eternal agent, and a temporal act a temporal agent. Only through the eternal element in it can it be understood that movement has neither beginning nor end, and this is meant by its permanence, for movement itself is not permanent, but changing” (p. 36).

[Ghazali on the philosophers] “They assert that he who affirms that the world is posterior to God and God prior to the world cannot mean anything but that He is prior not temporally but essentially” (p. 37).

[Averroes] “[T]he posteriority of the world to the Creator, since He does not precede the world in time, can only be understood as the posteriority of effect to cause” (p. 39).

[Ghazali] “How will you refute the man who claims that creation and annihilation take place through the will of God: if God wills, He creates, and if He wills, He annihilates, and this is the meaning of His being absolutely powerful, and notwithstanding this He does not alter in Himself, but it is only His act that alters?” (p. 83). “[T]he agent must be willing, choosing, and knowing what he wills to be the agent of what he wills, but according to [the philosophers] God does not will, He has no attribute whatever, and what proceeds from Him proceeds by the compulsion of necessity” (p. 87).

[Averroes] “Ghazali’s words ‘The agent must be willing, choosing, and knowing what he wills to be the agent of what he wills’ are by no means self-evident and cannot be accepted as a definition of the maker of the world without a proof, unless one is justified in inferring from the empirical to the divine” (pp. 87-88).

“[H]e who chooses and wills lacks the things which he wills, and God cannot lack anything He wills. And he who chooses makes a choice for himself of the better of two things, but God is in no need of a better condition. Further, when the willer has reached his object, his will ceases and, generally speaking, will is a passive quality and a change, but God is exempt from passivity and change. God is still farther distant from natural action, for the act of the natural thing is a necessity in its substance, but is not a necessity in the substance of the willer and belongs to its entelechy. In addition, natural action does not proceed from knowledge: it has, however, been proved that God’s act does proceed from knowledge. The way in which God becomes an agent and a willer has not become clear in this place, since there is no counterpart to His will in the empirical world. How is it therefore possible to assert that an agent can only be understood as acting through deliberation and choice? For then this definition is indifferently applied to the empirical and the divine” (p. 88).

The argument that the One cannot lack anything is a good example of a neoplatonic argument that was widely adopted and applied to the monotheistic God in later theistic traditions. Although it is speculative in the pre-Hegelian sense, the logic seems unassailable.

Ghazali uses the Aristotelian term “deliberation”, but gives it a different sense. In Aristotle, deliberation determines choice, and there is no separate faculty of will. The idea of a faculty of will separate from reason is a later development that was designed to support the notion of a freedom of indifference. This has the disastrous effect of subordinating reason to arbitrariness.

Aristotle never says that the First cause deliberates, only that it contemplates. The idea of a freedom of indifference is Stoic and only emerged later. Aristotle would not have regarded his notion of deliberation as compatible with the alleged freedom of indifference, because deliberation is concerned with identification of differences or distinctions that have practical import.

[Ghazali] “We say: ‘Agent’ means someone from whom there proceeds an act with the will to act according to choice and with the knowledge of the object willed. But according to the philosophers the world stands in relation to God as the effect to the cause, in a necessary connexion which God cannot be imagined to sever, and which is like the connexion between the shadow and the man, light and the sun, but this is not an act at all” (p. 89).

[Averroes] “The agent is what causes some other thing to pass from potency to actuality and from nonexistence to existence; this actualization occurs sometimes from deliberation and choice, sometimes by nature, and the philosophers do not call a person who throws a shadow an agent, except metaphorically, because the shadow cannot be separated from the man” (ibid).

[Averroes] “His assertion that not every cause is called an agent is true, but his argument that the inanimate is not called an agent is false, for the denial that the inanimate exhibits acts excludes only the rational and voluntary act, not act absolutely, for we find that certain inanimate things have powers to actualize things like themselves; e.g. fire, which changes anything warm and dry into another fire like itself, through converting it from what it has in potency into actuality” (p. 92).

[Ghazali] “If the inanimate is called an agent, it is by metaphor, in the same way as it is spoken of metaphorically as tending and willing” (ibid).

[Averroes] “[W]hen by these expressions is meant that it actualizes another’s potency, it is really an agent in the full meaning of the word” (ibid).

[Ghazali] “This is wrong, because will necessarily implies knowledge, and likewise act necessarily implies will” (ibid).

[Averroes] “But in the definition of ‘act’ knowledge is not included, because actualization of another thing is possible without knowing it” (p. 93).

[Ghazali] “[T]here is as a matter of fact a contradiction when ‘natural act’ is taken in a real sense, only this contradiction is not at once evident to the understanding nor is the incompatibility of nature and act felt acutely, because this expression is employed metaphorically; for since nature is in a certain way a cause and the agent is also a cause, nature is called an agent metaphorically. The expression ‘voluntary act’ is as much redundant as the expression ‘he wills and knows what he wills’ ” (ibid).

[Averroes] “This statement is undoubtedly wrong, for what actualizes another thing, i.e. acts on it, is not called agent simply by a metaphor, but in reality, for the definition of ‘agent’ is appropriate to it. The division of ‘agent’ into ‘natural’ and ‘voluntary agent’ is not the division of an equivocal term, but the division of a genus” (ibid).

“But as a matter of fact the natural agent has an act much more stable than the voluntary agent, for the natural agent’s act is constant — which is not the case with the act of the voluntary agent” (p. 94).

[Ghazali] “[I]f a man were to throw another into a fire and kill him, it is the man who would be called his killer, not the fire…. This proves that the word ‘agent’ is used of one whose act proceeds from his will, and, behold, the philosophers do not regard God as endowed with will and choice” (p. 95).

[Averroes] “This is an answer of the wicked who heap fallacy on fallacy. Ghazali is above this, but perhaps the people of his time obliged him to write this book to safeguard himself against the suspicion of sharing the philosophers’ view. Certainly nobody attributes the act to its instrument, but only to its first mover. He who killed a man by fire is in the proper sense the agent and the fire is the instrument of the killing, but when a man is burned by a fire, without this fact’s depending on someone’s choice, nobody would say that the fire burned him metaphorically” (ibid).

[Ghazali] “Our aim is to show that such is not the meaning of ‘act’ and ‘work’. These words can mean only that which really proceeds from the will. But you reject the real meaning of ‘act’, although you use this word, which is honoured amongst Muslims. But one’s religion is not perfect when one uses words deprived of their sense” (p. 96).

[Averroes] “This would indeed be a correct conclusion against the philosophers, if they should really say what Ghazali makes them say…. He does not unmask their imposture by his words, but he himself deceives by ascribing to them theories which they do not hold” (ibid).

[Ghazali] ” ‘Act’ applies to temporal production, but for [the philosophers] the world is eternal and is not produced in time. The meaning of ‘act’ is ‘to convert from not-being into being by producing it’ and this cannot be imagined in the eternal, as what exists already cannot be brought into existence. Therefore ‘act’ implies a temporal product, but according to them the world is eternal; how then could it be God’s act?” (ibid).

[Averroes] “If the world were by itself eternal and existent (not in so far as it is moved, for each movement is composed of parts which are produced), then, indeed, the world would not have an agent at all. But if the meaning of ‘eternal’ is that it is in everlasting production and that this production has neither beginning nor end, certainly the term ‘production’ is more truly applied to him who brings about an everlasting production than to him who procures a limited production” (pp. 96-97).

“And therefore, just as the eternal existent is more truly existent than the temporal, similarly that which is eternally in becoming is more truly coming to be than that which comes to be only during a definite time” (p. 100).

[Ghazali] “We do not say that the simultaneity of agent and act is impossible, granted that the act is temporal…. It is only an eternal act that we consider impossible, for to call an act that which does not come into being out of not-being is pure metaphor and does not conform to reality…. Our answer is that our aim in this question is to show that you philosophers use those venerable names without justification, and that God according to you is not a true agent, nor the world truly His act, and that you apply this word metaphorically — not in its real sense. This has now been shown” (p. 102).

In Aristotle there is a very important distinction between ordinary “action” as understood by everyone and his own completely original notion of “act”, which, as Gwenaëlle Aubry has very thoroughly documented, is most properly said of entelechy as a self-referential, purely internal determination, and is therefore not an “action” in the ordinary sense at all. In particular, Aristotelian act in its proper sense has nothing to do with efficient causality, especially as that latter notion was transformed by Latin writers such as Aquinas and Suárez. Efficient cause in Aristotle is the instrumental means by which some end is achieved. As such, it is the least primary of Aristotle’s four causes, not the most primary as it is for Aquinas and Suárez. This is a really big difference between them and Aristotle.

[Averroes] “In this argument he supposes that the philosophers concede to him that they only mean by God’s agency that He is the cause of the world, and nothing else, and that cause and effect are simultaneous. But this would mean that the philosophers had abandoned their original statement, for the effect follows only from its cause, in so far as it is a formal or final cause, but does not necessarily follow from its efficient cause, for the efficient cause frequently exists without the effect’s existing” (p. 103).

“[T]he term ‘eternal becoming’ is more appropriate to the world than the term ‘eternity’ ” (p. 104).

“When, however, after a close examination, it was discovered that all things tend to one end, and this end is the order which exists in the world, as it exists in an army through its leader, and as it exists in cities through their government, they came to the conclusion that the world must have one highest principle…. They believed therefore, because of the good which is present in everything, that evil occurs only in an accidental way…. [F]or the existence of much good with a little evil is preferable to the non-existence of much good because of a little evil” (p. 106). “Nowadays, however, … that out of the one all things proceed by one first emanation, is generally accepted, and with our contemporaries we need discuss only this latter statement” (p. 107).

The military metaphor does briefly appear in book Lambda of the Metaphysics. To me though, it has always seemed incongruous with Aristotle’s main idea of the First cause as a pure entelechy.

[Averroes] “But when the philosophers of our religion, like Farabi and Avicenna, had once conceded to their opponents that the agent in the divine world is like the agent in the empirical, and that from the one agent there can arise but one object (and according to all the First was an absolutely simple unity), it became difficult for them to explain how plurality could arise from it” (ibid).

This notion of the First as an absolutely simple One sounds to me more like Plotinus than Aristotle. “According to all” in this context would presumably be a reference to the neoplatonizing Farabian tradition. Of all medieval philosophers, Averroes is probably the closest to being a pure Aristotelian, but that is a relative distinction, not an absolute one. The only completely pure Aristotelian I know of is Aristotle himself. (Though I try to distinguish a genuinely historical Aristotle from the many Aristotles of the commentary tradition, I am certainly no pure Aristotelian either.)

[Averroes] “[T]hey declared that from the First, who is a simple existent, the mover of the highest sphere proceeds, and from this mover, since he is of a composite nature, as he is both conscious of himself and conscious of the First, a duality, the highest sphere, and the mover of the second sphere, the sphere under the highest can arise. This, however, is a mistake, according to philosophical teaching, for thinker and thought are one identical thing in human intellect and this is still more true in the case of the abstract intellects. This does not affect Aristotle’s theory, for the individual agent in the empirical world, from which there can only proceed one single act, can only in an equivocal way be compared to the first agent…. And thereby Aristotle proves that the agent of the human intelligibles is an intellect free from matter, since this agent thinks all things, and in the same way he proves that the passive [sic] intellect is ingenerable and incorruptible, because this intellect also thinks all things” (p. 108).

“They” in this case is clearly a reference to the Farabian tradition. The translator’s choice of “passive” intellect above for the potential intellect reflects the near total absence of specific scholarship on the texts of Averroes that still prevailed in the mid-20th century. In Averroes, the difference between the potential or “material” intellect on the one hand, and the passive “intellect” or the soul’s faculty of cogitation on the other, is huge. (See Cogitation, Intention; Imagination, Cogitation).

[Averroes] “Aristotle connects sensible existence with intelligible, saying that the world is one and proceeds from one, and that this Monad is partly the cause of unity, partly the cause of plurality. And since Aristotle was the first to find this solution, and because of its difficulty, many of the later philosophers did not understand it, as we have shown” (pp. 108-109). “But what we said of this connexion of every existent with the One is something different from what is meant by ‘agent’ and ‘object’, ‘maker’ and ‘product’ in this sublunary world” (p. 112).

Aristotelian Illocution

I’ve recently been writing about the use Habermas makes of Austin’s notion of illocution and illocutionary speech acts. Illocution refers to the various kinds of purely linguistic or “performative” doing — to acts or purposes that are accomplished entirely within the use of language.

Aristotle’s famous definition of what it is to be a human, which is traditionally rendered “rational animal”, is equally well translated as “talking animal”, or animal that uses language. He calls this distinctively human activity “saying”. Saying for Aristotle is never a mere event or occurrence. It always has what contemporary philosophers would call a normative sense. In fact, what mainly counts as a saying for Aristotle is precisely what Habermas would call an illocutionary act.

Although Wittgenstein famously claimed that “meaning is use”, pragmatics or inquiry specifically into language use generally received little attention in 20th-century philosophy of language, while it made great advances in the technical study of logical syntax and representational semantics. A pragmatist minority, however, urged an alternative “pragmatics first” or “use first” approach to language. This has been taken up most prominently in recent times by Habermas and Brandom.

The current topic takes me back to the original goals of this blog. The idea was to develop in an expanding spiral, starting from personal reflections and an extremely informal exploration of how Aristotle and Brandom could be inter-articulated. I wanted to show that this could be both interesting and serious, and that it was not the quixotic task it might sound like. Nowadays the scope is broader, and I more often start by commenting on some text or other, which helps provide focus. Anyway, with the current topic, it feels like I just completed another expanding lap. This time it is an unexpected strong connection between Aristotle and Habermas.

I want to seriously suggest that Aristotelian “saying”, in what Aristotle would call its proper sense, refers to what Habermas would call an illocutionary act. Conversely, a Habermasian illocutionary act can be identified with the proper or strong sense of Aristotelian saying.

Aristotelian saying and Habermasian illocution both refer to expressions or articulations of meaning, rather than to events of producing sounds or characters.

Nothing is more fundamental than inquiry into meaning. At the same time, there is more to meaning than representational semantics. Sociality, insofar as it is achieved, is founded on shared understanding that depends on articulation in language. Aristotelian saying and Habermasian illocution name the intrinsic normative dimension of natural language use. Unlike artificial formal languages, the understanding of natural languages is inseparable from the taking of positions on questions of normative interpretation and judgment.

Life: Between Nature and Meaning

I have wanted to emphasize the goodness of life, in spite of the fact that many things are wrong in the world. But what is “life”? I don’t have a completely satisfying answer, but I do have a few thoughts.

Nature is said in many ways, of course, and these yield different perspectives on life from the side of nature. In an evolutionary context, I prefer to stress the marvelous diversification of organic forms over competition between individuals or species. Life, I think, is better understood in terms of purposes and what Aristotle calls “that for the sake of which”, than by attempting to reduce it to elements and efficient causes. All those purposes are intrinsic to the nature of the things that have them, and indeed they constitute that nature.

It does not make sense to inquire about “the” meaning of life. Rather, life is meaning, in superabundance and overflow. We should look at life not in terms of minimal biological prerequisites, but in terms of its highest development in each of the many kinds that flourish. That is the real significance of Aristotelian and Hegelian “actuality”.

Hegel’s Recovery of Aristotelian Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ousia Energeia

Aristotle’s Metaphysics is arguably the single most important text in the history of philosophy, but even though on one level Aristotle’s writing is extremely clear and lucid, its deeper implications have been highly disputed. The great Iranian philosopher Avicenna is reported to have said that he read the Arabic translation of the Metaphysics 40 times without understanding it, and only began to understand after reading the commentary by Alfarabi. We are nearing the end of a long journey following what I think is a brilliantly innovative 21st century reading by Gwenaëlle Aubry. Here I’m covering the first half of her discussion of book Lambda chapter 7.

The title of this post is a phrase used by Aristotle to characterize the first cause. He distinguishes it as the ousia [“substance”] that, unlike other substances, simply “is” energeia [“act”]. The latter Greek term was coined by Aristotle, and the former was “substantially” redefined by him. I find it is best to put aside ordinary connotations of the English words for key philosophical terms like this (including “first cause”) — and to focus instead on the ways the philosopher himself uses them, along with what he says about them.

“Chapter 7 of book Lambda responds to the question, left in suspense, of the mode of relation of the first mover to the moved, and of the nature of its action. At the same time it exploits and deploys the ontological signification of energeia, designating in act the mode of being of the separate, and identifying it with the good and the end” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 184, emphasis added, my translation throughout).

“In so doing, it implies at the same time a distinction, absent from book Theta, between kinesis [motion] and energeia, the last being designated as the mode of being of the unmoved, even while maintaining a broad sense of energeia, understood not only as act and as a mode of being, but also as a certain activity (contemplation)” (ibid).

Aubry previously noted that Aristotle’s earliest use of energeia seems to have been in an ethical context. Here she points out that Aristotle is distinguishing between its better known physical sense (which already has a teleological element) and what she calls its ontological sense.

“The first lines of Lambda 7 mark a progress in relation to chapter 6, since they demonstrate not only the necessity of posing a principle that is act and not power in order to give an account of eternal motion, but also of that of thinking the first mover as unmoved” (ibid, emphasis added).

Within the context of Greek philosophy, the very idea of an unmoved mover is another extremely important Aristotelian invention. Plato speaks instead of a self-moving thing, thus postulating motion as an unexplained primitive attributed to something as a whole. He is not bothered by the unexplained primitive, because he sees becoming as fundamentally lacking intelligibility. For Aristotle on the other hand, motion ought to be explainable, and every explanation of motion also involves a passivity. To move in the colloquial English sense is always to be moved in Aristotle’s sense, by something, and we can give an account of this. It will turn out that the primary examples he gives of “movers” are the unmoved intelligible and desired things that serve to activate internal principles of motion in other things. But living beings such as animals also function as “moved movers”.

Aubry quotes Aristotle’s characterization of an unmoved mover as “being at the same time ousia and energeia” (p. 185). Aristotle makes a very compressed reference to his critique of Platonic “self-moving” in Physics book VIII. Anything we broadly call a “self” mover must be a moved mover, because it is implicitly moved by what it understands and desires. Any moved mover — and hence any self-mover — must be only an intermediary cause, and not an ultimate principle. Aristotle wants to very emphatically insist that the first cause is in the strict sense an unmoved mover, and not a self-mover in the broad sense that an animal is a self-mover. For him, any holistic “self-motion” necessarily involves the kind of mixture of activity and passivity that we attribute to an animal. Such a mixture is incompatible with the nature of the first cause.

“[I]t is because energeia is conceived here as ousia, and no longer as kinesis, that the first mover is unmoved” (ibid).

“This poses the question of how the unmoved can be the principle of movement. The demonstration this time proceeds in an indirect way: it consists in the premise according to which the desirable and the intelligible move [other things] without being moved, then in successive identifications, first of the real good with the desirable, then of simple and actual substance with the first intelligible, and finally of the first intelligible with the good. We then ought to conclude that the actual substance, itself already identified with the first mover, is identical with the intelligible and the good, and as such can move [other things] without being moved” (ibid).

She goes on to note that what allows these terms to be unified is really once again energeia, although at first it seems to be substance. This makes perfect sense, given the conclusions of book Eta.

“The unifying term of these identifications seems here to be that of substance. It is so nonetheless by the mediation of a double relation of anteriority: of substance itself, first of all, in the series of positive contraries; then, within substance, of substance that is simple and in act, haplo kai kat’energeian — or, more precisely, of substance that is simple insofar as it is said according to act. For it is this position of the preeminence of substance in the context of the series of intelligibles that justifies its identification not only with the good and the desirable, but with the better or that which is analogous to it. Thus it is once again the notion of energeia more than that of substance that appears as the conceptual mover of the demonstration, and as that from which the attributes of the principle can be deduced” (pp. 185-186, emphasis in original).

Just as Aristotle uses ousia or substance to explain our talk about being, he uses energeia or act to explain our talk about substance. And sometimes he even uses entelekheia or entelechy to explain our talk about act.

“Up to this point, Lambda 7 has established that the unmoved can be a mover, but not how it moves something else. Here again, the demonstration proceeds in an indirect way: it begins by establishing that there is also a final cause among unmoved things. In order to do this, we have to make precise what we mean by ‘final cause'” (p. 186).

“The text at this point poses a problem. Since antiquity, it has been reconstructed so as to coincide with parallel passages in Physics II and On the Soul II which, also relying on a pronominal distinction, distinguish between two senses of the final cause, that is to say to ou and to o, that which is envisaged and that for which something is — or, according to the traditional interpretation, the end of an action and its beneficiary. But neither of the senses thus distinguished can apply to the first mover: the latter cannot be conceived as the beneficiary of action, which would imply that it did not have its end in itself, and would thus be incompatible with its status as pure energeia. But it is equally difficult to conceive it as the end envisaged by action, since this would imply that the movement ends in it, or finds in it its term: the first mover would thus be the act and the end of eternal motion, and indeed of every moved being; thus conceived, the divine would be in sum the act of the world, or at least of the moved substances that make it up, whose separate existence would be explained only by the failure of their fusion with it” (pp. 186-187).

“The context of the distinction in On the Soul is nonetheless very close to that of the distinction of Lambda 7, since the text opposes on the one hand living things (plants and animals) considered as substances subject to the cycle of generation and corruption, and on the other hand the eternal and the divine…. Nonetheless, it does not aim to distinguish between an unmoved end and an end presupposing movement, but rather between an immediate and immanent end and a mediate and transcendent end. The first is identified with the soul, designated as being at the same time cause of motion, essence, and final cause…. The second is identified not with the divine itself, but with participation and community (koinonia) with it, and a community envisaged as continuous. Thus is explained the process of generation, which compensates for that of corruption: not being able to [persist indefinitely] as individuals, living things [persist] not in their numerical unity, but in the unity of their species. The object of their desire is thus not to be god but to participate in the divine, or in the mode of being that characterizes continuity and eternity. Or again, it is not to assimilate themselves to the divine form or the divine act, but rather to perpetuate their own form and act, in the way that the divine continually maintains its own” (p. 187, emphasis in original).

“But if read this way, as a distinction not between the end of action and its beneficiary, but between two kinds of end, the distinction in On the Soul seems reconcilable with that of Lambda 7, and to apply to the first unmoved mover: the latter should be understood neither as the immediate end of action nor as the one who attains that end, but as that which the moved substances aim at through their own proper ends” (pp. 187-188, emphasis added).

“The latter aim at no other end than themselves, and attain this immanent end by means of the different movements to which they are submitted, but through this end they aim also at the eternity and the necessity characteristic of the unmoved substance. As result, we can say that they are also moved by the unmoved, and again by the desire for unmovedness. We see that this interpretation agrees with the end of Lambda 7, as well as with Lambda 10’s reflection on the final cause and the good” (p. 188, emphasis added).

“The remainder of [Lambda 7] goes on precisely to mark the relation between unmovedness and necessity, at the same time as that between motion (even local) and contingency. This last point is the same that Theta 8 already underlined, but the demonstration relies no longer on the notion of dunamis understood as the power of contradiction, and indeed as the power to be or not-be, but on the notion of energeia. Unmovedness is deduced from this, and necessity in its turn from unmovedness. Here indeed, and for the first time, the ontological sense of energeia… excludes kinesis” (ibid).

She notes that Aristotle uses the grammatically dative from of energeia in the text here, which she has argued he consistently uses to distinguish what she calls the ontological sense of dynamis and energeia from their physical sense that is involved in the ordinary explanation of motion.

(I would add that this philosophical primacy of the dative form over the nominative in Aristotle is closely related to a perspective that puts adverbial phrases and relations ahead of nouns and verbs in the order of explanation. In fact, every noun or verb taken by itself is just a simple linguistic token that still has to be given an interpretation. No mere linguistic token by itself explains anything at all. By contrast, it is the non-simple character of relations — the fact that they already intrinsically “say something” about something — that gives them their fundamental role in interpretation and explanation.)

“If it is thus established that the unmoved can be an end…, it remains to know how it is, or to identify its proper mode of action, which is presented as valid for all final causes that exclude motion. Two words suffice to name this mode of action: hos eromenon [as being loved]. The hos does not introduce a metaphor, … but must be understood in the sense of ‘insofar as’: the unmoved mover moves without being moved, but ‘insofar as it is loved’. In its turn, the theme of eros has been prepared by the earlier reflection on the identity of the intelligible and the desirable, where it was said already that they move [other things] without being moved” (ibid).

“For the technical register that distinguishes between different species of desire, rational and irrational, is here substituted a broader term, eromenon. This term also has Platonic resonances: it evokes the amorous ascension of the Symposium, and recalls the figure of Eros, the daimon child of Penia and Poros, in whom are conjoined lack and abundance, absence and presence. Evoking Eros, nonetheless, Plato in the Symposium speaks of dunamis. Here, inversely, the erotic ascension has for its principle energeia. We see again in this point the rupture underlined in book capital Alpha, as in Lambda 6: to conceive the causality proper to the good, it is necessary to think it as a final cause, acting not as power but as act, and as the end of in-potentiality” (p. 189).

Aubry has consistently maintained that acting in the sense of having an effect is not reducible to the “action” of a power. All ordinary “action” is in reality a mixed form — an interaction — that includes an element of passivity. Pure act on the other hand is supposed to have an effect and to move other things, but without itself being involved in passivity. There is still an element of passivity in this case, but it is entirely on the side of the other things that are moved by what they understand and desire. Pure act for Aristotle is situated beyond the correlation of activity and passivity. Only where in-potentiality is also involved is there the ordinary interaction of activity and passivity that we experience in earthly happenings.

Rather than aiming to think pure presence, in the context of a human being even Plato is far more interested in mixed forms, as Paul Ricoeur has pointed out. Aristotle here takes up the Platonic theme of eros, while recasting it as an ascent toward pure act. But pure act is precisely not ever purely present to us. In the next post, we’ll see how Aristotle contrasts human life with the ideal life he attributes to the first cause.

Next in this series: Ideal Life and Ours

Eternal Motion

Chapter 6 of book Lambda of Aristotle’s Metaphysics takes chapter 5’s unification of eternal and corruptible sensible substance as a starting point, and now inquires into the relation between sensible, movable substance as a whole and unmoved substance. We’ve been following the detailed development of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s provocative non-traditional interpretation of the distinctive features of Aristotle’s account.

“The simple and necessary substance is not needed in order to give an account of the substances that, insofar as they are mixed from act and in-potentiality, can either be or not be, but in order to give an account of movement insofar as it cannot not be. The first question for Aristotle is not ‘why is there being?’ but ‘why is there movement?’, or, more precisely, ‘why is there always movement?'” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 178, emphasis added, my translation throughout).

“Whereas the theology of omnipotence is a response to the question of the emergence of being, the theology of pure act in effect is a response to the question of the eternity of movement. The god of Aristotle thus provides a reason for the most manifest, for the most evident. It is not the ground — or the bottomlessness — of the mystery of being, more mysterious than the being it serves to explain, but the reason of the most immediate, most apparent phenomenon. Movement, in effect, is the first given” (ibid).

“[A]mong the different species of movement, the priority comes back to local movement. The latter is indeed anterior to genesis: ‘It is impossible that generation should be first’. Generation is only first in the order of the individual, since the latter must exist in order to move. But in order for it to come into being, it is necessary for another being to have preexisted it which was in movement, and the same for this last. Thus it is not movement that comes to be, but coming to be that presupposes an antecedent movement and being” (pp. 178-179, emphasis in original).

She quotes from Generation and Corruption book II chapter 10, “For it is far more reasonable that what is should cause the coming-to-be of what is not, than that what is not should cause the being of what is. Now that which is being moved is, but that which is coming-to-be is not: hence motion is prior to coming-to-be” (Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. 1, p. 550, emphasis in original).

“There is no first instant of movement. Movement cannot not have always been” (Aubry, p. 179). She notes that the Metaphysics does not contain the demonstration of this. Aristotle’s actual demonstration of the eternity of movement occurs in book VIII of the Physics, and basically consists in adding an indefinite regress to arguments like those we have just seen.

“Lambda 6 in effect establishes that the principle of such a movement must be not power but act. We have already seen Aristotle’s insistence here on underlining, as in book capital Alpha, the originality of such a thought of the principle. The argument works in a regressive way, establishing successively that the principle of eternal movement cannot be conceived as a power (dunamis), not even as an active or acting power, but must be such that its very substance is act, he ousia energeia. Its stages, let us recall, are the following:”

“–to give an account of movement, it is not sufficient to assert a moving or efficient (kinetikon e poietikon) capacity, if it does not act (me energoun); for it is possible to have a power without acting (endekhetai gar to dunamin ekhon me energein)”

“–nonetheless, even supposing that the principle acts (ei energesei), we cannot give an account of eternal movement if its ousia is dunamis. In effect, if that which has a power has the possibility of not acting, that which is in-potentiality has the possibility of not being (endekhetai gar to dunamei on me einai)”

“–it follows therefore that there is a principle such that its ousia is act, he ousia energeia” (p. 180).

She notes the striking parallelism of Aristotle’s phrases, but also finds a progression between the two formulae, corresponding to a transition between the “kinetic” and “ontological” senses of dynamis that she has often remarked upon.

“As with that from power to in-potentiality, the transition is thus effectuated from action to act: the principle of eternal movement must be conceived not only as an always active and acting power, but as an act. The argument relies only on the ontological sense of [pure] energeia, understood as that mode of being which is subtracted from the possibility of non-being” (p. 181).

“Ultimately we find posed as the condition of eternal movement, a being of which the ousia is energeia. But to say this is also to say, as the two moments of the demonstration underline, that from this substance is excluded every form of power: as much active power as in-potentiality. Thus — and it is again necessary to underline the force, and the paradox, of such a thesis: the very condition of the efficacity of the principle resides in its absence of power. It is not because it is all-powerful or fully active, but indeed because it is fully act that it is maximally efficacious, since it is the principle of eternal movement” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“That the principle (or principles) of eternal movement are act is deduced again from two necessary properties: eternity and immateriality. We verify equally the claim of Lambda 5: act serves to name not only (as Theta 8 established) the mode of being of the necessary and the eternal, but also that of form or the immaterial” (p. 183).

She goes on to contrast this argument with the more limited concerns of Aristotle’s demonstration of the need for an unmoved mover in the Physics.

“Decisive for the demonstration of Lambda 6, the ontological sense is on the other hand absent from that of Physics VIII. The latter utilizes not the schema of finality and the correlation of in-potentiality and act, but that of efficiency and of the correlation of powers…. [T]he text of Physics VIII considers at length the Platonic hypothesis according to which the first principle can be a self-mover. It is concerned to demonstrate that even a self-mover must have a mover and a moved, and finally to establish that at the origin of change there must be an unmoved mover. But the relation of the unmoved mover to that which it moves is thought on the model of efficiency…. The hypothesis, foundational for Lambda 6, of an unactualized power, or a power that is able to not act, is not envisaged. The action of the mover on the moved is described [in Physics VIII] as that of a mechanical force, working by contact with the first moved thing” (ibid).

In Physics VIII, Aristotle even speaks of a temporally infinite power (dynamis apeiros) behind what is commonly translated as “eternal” movement. In Aubry’ s paraphrase, “But an infinite power cannot reside in a finite body, so the first mover must be thought as being indivisible, without parts, and without magnitude” (p. 184).

Physics VIII is after all concerned with the roots of ordinary physical motion, so it is reasonable that it focuses on the “kinetic” sense of dynamis. It does seem that Metaphysics Lambda refers to Physics VIII’s demonstration of the need for an unmoved mover, so it is reasonable to assume that Lambda represents a later development.

It should not be surprising that Lambda, from a different and later point of view, makes new arguments about the first cause that are not in Physics VIII, and corrects some statements of the latter on its nature. Aubry does not comment on this discrepancy, but is content to do her due diligence in pointing it out. We saw earlier, however, that in Physics III Aristotle does also subordinate the kinetic sense of dynamis to what she calls the ontological one of in-potentiality.

Next in this series: Ousia Energeia

Principles of Substance

“Chapter 5 of book Lambda constitutes a veritable pivot, not in the sense that, as the traditional reading would have it, it would bring to a close a hypothetical first part, or a treatise on sensible substances, in order to introduce a second part, or a treatise on separate substance, but because on the contrary it enunciates the principle of their continuity” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 173, my translation throughout).

“It is indeed in Lambda 5 that it is necessary to seek the key to the unity of book Lambda, and thereby of metaphysics, understood, according to the minimal definition suggested by Lambda 1, as a science distinct from both physics and theology; but equally, and this time against the onto-theological understanding of it, as a science that is not scissionable between a science of common being and a science of the first being — or this time between ontology and theology” (pp. 173-174).

“Lambda 5 in effect contains responses to two of the fundamental questions of Lambda 1, that is to say that of the nature of what is separate, and that of the unity of the principles of sensible substance. These responses are made possible by the results, both positive and negative, of the inquiries conducted in Lambda 2 through 4: the extension of dunamis to the eternal sensibles (Lambda 2); the exclusion of separate Forms (Lambda 3); the distinction between principle and element (Lambda 4). And they have one same term in common: that of energeia. Lambda 5 states in effect at the same time that dunamis and energeia are the common principles of all substances by analogy, and that the separate must be conceived as energeia and not as form. Proceeding from this, it remains for the following chapters, Lambda 6 through 10, to elucidate the nature of separate substance understood as ousia energeia, insofar as it at the same time is principle and cause of the other substances, and has a or some principle(s) in common with them — an elucidation which ultimately amounts to a deepening of the notion of the analogy” (p. 174, emphasis in original).

“As was already the case in Lambda 1, separation is here invoked as a criterion of substantiality, or according to the signification established in books Zeta and Eta, which substitutes for the Platonic idea of existence apart from sensibles that of the capacity for independent existence. This criterion allows us to recall the primacy of substance over the other categories, equally posed in Lambda 1, and thereby to affirm that the causes of substance are their causes as well” (ibid).

“For the term cause (aitia), we will proceed to substitute that of principle (arkhe), in order to declare that ‘it is in another manner again that the principles are the same by analogy, that is to say act and in-potentiality'” (ibid).

Aristotle’s four causes — originally introduced in the Physics — are extremely famous. But the above already suggests that in first philosophy, his “two principles” of act and potentiality will ultimately supersede them. In a simple way, act is the end, and that-for-the-sake-of-which; potentiality is the principle of motion. Form and matter provide overlapping specifications from a more static point of view, for which act and potentiality will again tend to be substituted. Such an overlap among the causes should be no surprise, since they are intended as complementary explanations. We have already seen, for example, that Aristotle’s hylomorphism leads him to ultimately assert the identity of an embodied form with its proximate matter. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

She refers to a passage that “in associating the couple of in-potentiality and act with that of matter and form, enunciates not an equivalence, but the rules of a substitution” (p. 175). Aristotle says “In effect, in act are the form, if it is separate, as well as the composite and privation (for example, obscurity or sickness), while the matter is in-potentiality, since it is capable of becoming the two contraries” (ibid). “Act indeed serves here to express form insofar as it is capable by itself, and not only in its articulation to matter, of an independent existence. This is a great novelty in relation to Zeta and Eta, where act served to name the composite as ousia malista [ousia most of all], as alone capable of independent existence, unlike form and matter taken in themselves. Far from being a simple equivalent, act expresses form insofar as it subsists” (pp. 175-176).

This is a somewhat subtle point, but clear enough. Things that are truly equivalent are bidirectionally interchangeable, without qualification. Here she is saying act expresses form only with additional qualification, which does not license a bidirectional substitution. In effect, we have a one-directional arrow between the two terms, rather than a two-directional one.

“In these lines, the notion of act reveals the ontological sense already distinguished in Theta. On the other hand, it does not have the axiological sense with which Theta 8 charged it, in establishing its equivalence with the notions of telos [end] and of ergon [completed work]. As in Theta 9, it applies also to privation, or to the negative contrary by which matter, like form, can be said to be in-potentiality. Applied to privation, the notion of act expresses again, and paradoxically, the mode of being and this non-being. As for the notion of in-potentiality, it expresses the mode of being of matter insofar as it is precisely capable of a double becoming, — toward form, or toward privation” (p. 176).

“To the notions of matter and form, those of in-potentiality and act thus bring an ontological supplement. There is something distinctive in them, allowing them to express beings where the matter and the form are not the same. It is not only a matter of illustrating the notion of analogy, as we did earlier, in pointing out that the relation between distinct matters and forms can be the same, but more of pointing out that the notions of in-potentiality and act apply not only in the context of a single substance, but between distinct substances, and more particularly between substances where one is the cause and the other the effect (we will see later, but Theta 8 has already apprised us that they also indicate, from the one to the other, a specific relation of causality, that is to say final causality)” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The last lines of Lambda 5 contain a first response to the question of the unification of the principles of substance. Three kinds of unity are successively indicated, which nonetheless are conjoined:”

“–at the outset, a unity of a focal kind, which consists in the primacy of substance over the other categories, which has the effect that the causes of substance are aloso the causes of all otherr things;”

“–then a unity of an analogic kind, which constitutes the principal object of Lambda 4 and 5, and in virtue of which all beings, even if constituted from different elements, nevertheless have the same principles, that is to say matter, form, and the cause of motion;”

“–and finally, a direct or transitive causal unity, in virtue of which all things have for their cause ‘that which is first in entelechy'” (p. 177).

“This enumeration, we can see, mixes transitive principles and immanent principles. If it recalls the categories of matter and form, and not those of dunamis and energeia that the preceding developments have nonetheless substituted for them, it nonetheless makes the notion of entelekheia intervene, and applies it to the first cause. The latter is no longer mentioned only, as was the case at the end of Lambda 4, as ‘that which, as first of all, moves all things’, but as ‘that which is first in entelechy’. Act, designated this time by the term entelekheia and no longer that of energeia, taken indeed in its normative and axiological sense, which is no longer only ontological, appears from this point as the notion adequate to the designation of the first cause. We find thus suggested the possibility of its extension, which the remainder of Lambda accomplishes, from the corruptible and eternal movable substances to the unmoved substance — and, on this basis, of uncovering a principle common not only to the sensible substances as a whole, but to sensible substances and to the separate substance” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Eternal Motion

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 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?.)