Act in Process

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

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

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

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

This case applies to biological reproduction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Act as Separable

Interim Recap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Act in Process

The Relativity of Dynamis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Interim Recap

Critique of the Megarians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Potentiality and Possibility

Reading Metaphysics Theta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Rational and Natural Powers

Potentiality for Interaction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Reading Metaphysics Theta

Ethical Roots of Aristotelian Dynamis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Potentiality for Interaction

Entelechy and Hylomorphism

The remainder of Aubry’s third chapter analyzes book Eta of the Metaphysics, following on her analysis of book Zeta.

In Zeta, matter had been dismissed as a candidate for ousia or “substance” taken simply. But Eta chapter 1 “allows matter to be characterized not simply as ousia, but as ousia in potentiality. And in its turn, it invites us to consider not simply ousia but ousia as act” (Dieu sans la puissance, 2nd ed., p. 89, my translation throughout).

“In the text that follows, the term energeia [act] is found systematically associated with that of eidos [form]” (ibid). “Energeia thus inherits, in Eta, all the characteristics of eidos brought to light in Zeta” (ibid).

“What Eta 3 shows, nonetheless, is that it is not always easy to distinguish the act from the composite: for example, does the term ‘house’ designate ‘a shelter made of bricks and stones in such and such a way’, or only a shelter? The term ‘animal’, a soul in a body or a soul? It appears that the distinction between material element and formal element has something artificial about it; form is not only that which makes the stones erected into walls, the wood made into a roof, into a house: it is the very organization of the stones into walls, of the wood into a roof (and in the same way, the soul is not superimposed on a body that would be already provided with organs, already able to grow, to be nourished, to move, etc.: it is that very organization and those very capacities. Thus, the composite substance is a unity, the unity of the material element and the formal element — and in such a way that it can be called an entelechy, and a certain nature” (ibid).

(I would say it is really the entelechy of a composite substance — its embodied, realized, and continuing purpose — that gives it unity, and makes it a substance in the Aristotelian sense at all. Any ousia involves stronger unity than a mere coexistence of elements. Entelechy is a higher-order persistence of purpose and its realization that explains the unity of a substance. The stronger degrees of unity that we see in living things and artifacts don’t just happen, and knowledge of them isn’t just somehow immediately given. Entelechy expresses the intelligible cause or reason for there being a unity strong enough to be called a substance. Perhaps we might even say that entelechy is a final cause in act. Every Aristotelian substance would in this way be an end unto itself. Kant explained respect for others in terms of regarding the other as an end in herself. Thus I think Kantian respect ought to apply to all Aristotelian substances.)

“To this, Eta 4 adds that just any thing cannot have just any matter” (p. 90). “It thus appears that, considered as potentiality, matter is an element of substance, and that if it is determined by form, it is a determiner also” (ibid).

So here we have a clear expression of reciprocal determination between form and matter. (Aristotle’s biological works contain many other examples of this.) She quotes from Eta 6 that “the most proximate matter of a thing and its form are one and the same thing” (p. 91). The mutual determination noted above is why that is true.

“Adopting the language of in potentiality and in act is indeed to think the unity of what the Platonic and abstract language of matter and form invites us to distinguish” (p. 91).

“Potentiality is the unity of the matter and the form seen from the side of the matter, act the unity of the matter and the form seen from the side of the form. Matter and form are nothing but abstract points of view adopted toward the concrete individual” (ibid, emphasis in original).

The superficial clarity of quasi-syntactic distinctions between matter and form is belied by the reality of mutual determination that underlies the Aristotelian thesis of hylomorphism.

“Eta does not just repeat the analysis of Zeta while modifying the terms: in substituting the etiological point of view for the logical one, … it offers a solution, which will again be completed in Theta, and will only acquire its full meaning in Lambda, to the problem of ousia” (ibid).

What she calls the etiological point of view consists in explanation in terms of Aristotelian causes or “reasons why” — especially final causes, or internal teleology — and may include an aspect of process. What she calls the logical point of view consists in what I called quasi-syntactic distinctions between matter and form, which are purely static.

“Ousia is neither the matter nor the form, it is the composite, but it is also the matter as potentiality for the form, the form as in-act in a matter — the two constituting the unity of an individual at the same time determinate and separable. Act responds in fact to all the criteria of ousia: insofar as it inherits the characteristics of form, it says determination and permanence; insofar as it names the form as linked to a matter, it says also the individual and the separate. Act indeed says ousia at the same time as substance and as essence…. Through the notion of act, the conflict with which Zeta ended, between the Platonic criterion and the Aristotelian criterion for ousia, between ousia prote and ousia malista, and also between the candidate of form and the candidate of the composite, is indeed found to be resolved” (pp. 91-92).

Although my own readings here of Zeta and Eta did not catch the nuance of the prote/malista distinction that Aubry makes a good case for based on the Greek text, my general sense of the respective results of Zeta and Eta is quite similar to hers. The long development of Zeta ends — and Eta begins — with an unresolved tension between the requirements of knowledge, and what I would call an ultimately ethical focus on independent things as concrete wholes. Eta ends up much more optimistically suggesting that we can respect independent things and have knowledge.

Next in this series: Dynamis Before Aristotle

Substance, Essence, Form

Here I will partially translate and briefly comment on Gwenaëlle Aubry’s analysis of the argument of book Zeta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in chapter 3 of her Dieu sans la puissance. I think it is important to carefully capture a fair amount of the technical detail, especially because she is in part arguing against the most widely accepted traditional interpretation of a key point in the interpretation of Aristotle, which has to do with Aristotle’s ultimate attitude toward form.

(For the sake of the general reader, I have elided her precise citations, which use the standard Becker numbers for lines in the Greek text. English for much of book Zeta is reproduced in my own initial commentary on it. I have also omitted numerous accent marks that are sometimes used in romanization of Greek words.)

Aubry notes that whereas Aristotle uses the same word ousia for both primary and secondary substance in the senses of the Categories (a “this” and a universal, respectively), medieval Latin translations used substantia for primary substance and essentia for secondary substance. One important question raised in the discussion has to do with whether there are any cases where the “substance” and the “essence” of a thing are the same.

At the beginning of Zeta chapter 3, ousia is defined in terms very close to those of the Categories, as something that is not said of an underlying thing, but rather is the underlying thing of which other things are said.

“Matter being that which remains, it seems to be a substrate in the physical sense of the term…. But it also seems to satisfy the logical signification of the criterion of hypokeimenon [underlying thing]” (2nd ed., p. 77).

“But it is precisely the adequation of matter to the criterion of hypokeimenon, in its double acceptance logical and physical, that manifests the insufficiency of this criterion — and by that also the necessity of completing the analysis of the Categories” (ibid). She quotes Aristotle: “But this is impossible, for also to be separate and a this seem to belong to an independent thing most of all” (Sachs tr., p. 120). “No more than it suffices to respond to the question ‘what is ousia‘ that it is the substrate, does it suffice to respond… that ousia is matter” (Aubry, p. 77).

“This new criterion, that of khoriston kai tode ti [separate and a ‘this’], nonetheless conserves a trait of ousia as defined in the Categories: the capacity for independent existence. The initial analysis of Zeta thus has the effect at the same time of accentuating this trait, and of distinguishing the notion of a capacity for independent existence, or that of subsistence, from those of substrate and subject” (ibid).

“[T]here where one would expect to see the examination of form as a candidate developed, it is an analysis of to ti en einai [the what it was to have been] that is deployed, with respect to both the essence and the object of a definition (Zeta [chapters] 4-6). Of form, eidos, there is no question before Zeta 6″ (p. 78).

“This approach is qualified as logikos [logical]…. The logical approach to ousia will be governed by two questions: first, is there no essence but that of substance (Zeta 4-5)? Then, in what cases is essence identical to substance (Zeta 6)?” (ibid).

“One begins from the logical definition of essence as that which is said in accord with itself (kath auto). In the Posterior Analytics, the first sense of ‘in accord with itself’ names precisely what is mentioned in the definition of a given being and constitutes its ousia” (ibid).

“One goes on to conclude that there is an essence for everything for which one can give an account in a definition…. One does not affirm, nonetheless, that to ti en einai is the ousia, but only that it pertains to it first. According to the steps characteristic of Zeta, one goes on to establish not an exclusivity, but an order of priority: thus, essence belongs first and absolutely, protos kai haplos, to ousia. To the other categories, it belongs only secondarily…, in a certain way…, not absolutely” (pp. 78-79).

“Thus associating essence and definition, one remains in a Platonic logic…, even if Zeta 5 establishes that definition can give account not only of simple substances, but also of composite substances insofar as they are composite, on the condition that the composition is not accidental” (p. 79).

“The question thus arises to know whether there exist substances identical to their essence: for these are the sort of beings that the Platonists call ‘Ideas’…. Formulating this point, Aristotle clearly designates to ti en einai [what it was to have been], or the essence, as principle of intelligibility, and ousia as principle of being: if they were separated the one from the other, he writes, there would be no knowledge of the one, and the other would not exist” (ibid).

If being and intelligibility were not inseparable, there would be no knowledge of the one, and the other would not exist. But they don’t exactly coincide, either. Something similar could be said about being and value.

“Otherwise said, the guiding question is to know in what measure substance is identical to its essence, or to measure the division between a being and its principle of intelligibility: it is not again to know whether the essence can itself be considered a substance, that is to say capable of a separate existence” (ibid, emphasis in original).

(This relation of substance to essence bears some structural resemblance to the relation between existence and essence discussed by Aquinas. The criteria currently under discussion for ousia or “substance” (“separateness”, and being a “this”) indeed seem to have something to do with common notions of existence. But the ousia or substance is said to be the independent thing, whereas existence is commonly treated as an abstract property that can be said of things. And for Aquinas, God gives existence to an essence. But Aristotle starts by recognizing independent things that implicitly already exist.)

“But it is necessary, before arriving there, to establish the equivalence between essence and form, or between to ti en einai and the eidos. This is what the following chapters (Zeta 7-12), where the term eidos reappears, are concerned with” (p. 80).

The earlier “logical” approach is succeeded by a more physical approach in Zeta 7-9. “Form is the physical equivalent of essence…. Form is the essence that is found really instantiated in particular indviduals” (ibid).

“One indeed finds in form two traits characteristic of ousia, and more precisely of ousia as Plato had defined it” (ibid).

“Form can indeed pretend to the title of primary ousia. But (and this is essential), the text of Zeta itself distinguishes between ousia prote [primary substance] and ousia malista [what is substance most of all]. In the Categories, on the other hand, these terms are associated…. But while the denomination ousia prote is applied in Zeta to the form, that of ousia malista is applied to the composite, sunolon: that which is ousia malista is a human, a plant — not the ungenerated principle of generation that is form, but the concrete thing that is generated, mixed of form and matter” (p. 81).

“Ousia prote must be distinguished as much from ousia malista as from ousia said simply, or haplos, which is not the form [as such] but the immanent [instantiation of] form, associated with the matter together with which it constitutes the composite. This distinction is explicitly formulated in the preceding lines, in relation to the problem of definition: the definition does not include the matter” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Form and ousia prote are nothing else than essence [to ti en einai, what it was to have been a thing]” (p. 82).

“If ousia prote is not the same in Zeta and in the Categories, it is because prote [primary] does not have the same sense in the two texts” (ibid). She has already noted that Zeta 1 explicitly recalls that “primary” or “first” is said in more than one way.

On the other hand, “The ousia malista of Zeta does correspond to the ousia prote of the Categories: it designates the individual.”

“From this, the form is clearly distinguished: the form signifies toionde, ‘of what species’; it is not a tode kai horismenon, an individual being subject to definition, but it produces and generates a being of that species in the individual…. No more than the matter does it correspond to the criterion of tode ti [being a ‘this’]” (ibid).

“The eidos is not fully ousia; it is only primary ousia, its anteriority being at once epistemological, as the logical analysis showed, and chronological, as the physical analysis showed. The form is only ousia in a Platonic sense, as the object of a definition, principle of intelligibility and of permanence, in short insofar as it is nothing other than essence comprising identity at the level of a species, and transmitted, by art or by generation, from one individual to another” (pp. 82-83).

“There is indeed a tension between ousia prote and ousia malista…. If the analysis of Zeta 7 manifests this, it indicates also, and already, the means to resolve it, in introducing, in the context of the study of generation, the notions of dunamis [potentiality] and entelecheia [entelechy]. Their substitution, in Eta, for those of matter and form, authorizes the reconciliation of the candidates, the criteria, and does so for both series of ousia, prote and malista: and it is at the end of Theta that the initial reflection of Zeta on this anteriority finds its culmination, since act is there said to be anterior both to to logo and te ousia, both from the point of view of the formula and from that of substance…. It will thus be possible to think the ousiai proterai not, in the manner of Plato, as forms-essences abusively separated from the matter they determine and the individual they define, but as acts having both an autonomous subsistence and a full intelligibility” (p. 83).

“Nonetheless, if we have on the one hand confirmed the identity between form, essence, and the object of definition and, on the other hand, qualified that between these three terms and ousia, we have up to now left aside another term fundamental to the Platonic equation: the universal” (p. 84).

“The universal meets neither the criterion of [full] determination, since it is common to many things, nor the criterion of being a substrate, since it is always affirmed of a subject…. Thus the universal cannot be called ousia in the qualified and reduced sense that essence is” (ibid).

“Once the pretention of the universal to the title of ousia has been eliminated, it remains to examine the question of its equivalence to form and essence. This is more complex, since form and essence are indeed a certain type of universal, a determinate one. But the fundamental point does not lie in this: the break with Platonism does not come, as maintained by the traditional reading, by way of the distinction between universal and form, and the affirmation that only the form would be ousia; it lies above all in the affirmation according to which form or essence itself is not fully ousia, the idea indeed according to which it does not suffice to be ousia kata ton logon [ousia according to what is said] to be ousia malista [ousia most of all]” (pp. 84-85, emphasis in original).

Aristotle in general does greatly emphasize the importance of what is said. Plato goes further, in making definition the very criterion of ousia. But for Aristotle, concrete things are not reducible to their definitions alone, and it is the concrete things that come first.

“The Platonic solution having been eliminated, we are brought back to the problem from which it was born (and which Beta calls the most difficult of all: how to think the relation between the individual and its principle of intelligibility” (p. 85).

“This problem is related to another…, how to think eternal and intelligible substances” (p. 86).

“Zeta 17 introduces a new point of departure… the point of view of principles and causes…. [I]n investigating the cause, it is first of all to ti en einai [what it was to have been a thing] that is researched” (ibid).

“But what is found there brought to light is not the nature of separate substance, as we might have hoped, but on the contrary the correlation of form and matter in the context of the composite substance” (ibid).

“These lines are generally read as the conclusion of Zeta, and as an ultimate affirmation of the identity between form and ousia. But it seems that they mark much more the insufficiency of this result” (ibid).

“Considered in its etiological, and not only logical, function, and taken as end, the form, in effect, is act. For the notion of act, insofar as it is substituted for that of form, but by way of completion, permits the reconciliation of the different criteria of ousia, as well as resolving the tension between ousia prote and ousia malista” (p. 87, emphasis in original).

“Act is ousia, absolutely, and in the full sense, from the logical and epistemological points of view as well as the ontological and etiological. If act allows ousia to be thought according to the double criterion of separation and intelligibility, it also allows the intelligible and separate substances to be thought, as Lambda will show. As for the notion of dunamis, its correlate, it serves to allow the reintegration of the candidate that Zeta has discarded: matter.”

“The notions of dunamis and energeia have something remarkable about them that allows a maximal extension of the notion of ousia to be given, without falling into equivocation, but on the contrary resolving the conflict between substance and essence, as well as that between simple and composite substances” (ibid).

Next in this series: Entelechy and Hylomorphism

Form and Entelechy

In pondering the implications of Aubry’s narrower construal of form in Aristotle, an important case to consider is the classic definition of soul. The standard scholastic “soul is the form of the body” does in fact ultimately refer to Aristotle’s more precise statement in On the Soul book 2 chapter 1 that “soul is an entelechy of the first kind of a natural body having life as a potentiality” (Sachs tr., p. 82, modified). Entelechy is a strictly more powerful concept than form.

Plato calls the soul a form, but I always found it difficult to reconcile the soul’s apparent diverse activity in life with what Plato says about the eternal and apparently static nature of form.

On the other hand, Aristotle begins the chapter mentioned above by distinguishing form, matter, and the composite. And he says, “Therefore it is necessary that the soul has its thinghood [ousia] as the form of a natural body having life as a potency. But this sort of thinghood is a being-at-work-staying-itself [entelechy]; therefore the soul is the being-at-work-staying-itself of such a body” (p. 81, emphasis added).

Clearly, the quote I opened with is a more precise version of this, following Aristotle’s frequent pattern of first mentioning something in more colloquial terms, before offering a more definitive formulation of it.

The opening distinction of form, matter, and composite is even presented as a division of ousia. But Aristotle’s authoritative and in-depth discussion of ousia in book Zeta of the Metaphysics begins by distinguishing at least four senses of ousia, only one of which is an “underlying thing” (primary substance in the sense of the Categories). Then only “in a certain way” (ch. 3, Sachs tr., p. 119) are matter and form said to be of that sort. And the “underlying thing” sense is the one that is most left behind in Aristotle’s long development of what ousia really is.

Next in this series: Substance, Essence, Form