Tag: Activity

Active Sense?

I previously noted a weakness in the otherwise exemplary use that Robert Pippin makes of Aristotle in his groundbreaking reading of Hegel. Pippin wants to emphasize the radical novelty of Kant’s claims about the active role of human intellect in the formation of what we take as reality. This drives him to make the seriously wrong claim that Aristotle views intellect as purely passive, or receptive of pre-given forms. This is a complicated subject, but I think the beginning of a reasonable interpretation is to recognize that our ability to think is neither purely passive (merely receiving the given), nor purely active in the sense of having no objective dependencies, or in the sense of arbitrary choice.

Aristotle suggests a kind of analogy between sense perception and intellect. His account of sense is oriented toward explaining the relative objectivity of ordinary sense perception. But context is all-important here. If Aristotle bends the stick rather far in the direction of realism, this needs to be understood as a counterbalancing response to Plato’s sometimes extreme distrust of the deliverances of sense.

Pattin says that for Aristotle, it is necessary to posit an agent intellect because sensible intelligibles do not exist in act outside the soul. Any existence of sensible intelligibles outside the soul is only potential.

There was a major debate among the Latin scholastics about the passivity or activity of sense. One view does argue that there is no such thing as an active component in human sense perception, that it is entirely passive. But the other view sharply objects to this. Pour l’histoire du sens agent by A. Pattin (1988) collects many of the Latin sources for this dispute. I am not so bold as to offer my own translations from the Latin, as I occasionally do with French. But I wanted to at least briefly skim the surface of this extensive debate on the existence of active sense.

Pattin notes that Albert the Great already catalogued many views concerning the causal role of the sensible object in relation to the human sensitive faculty. Some authors assigned the active role in visual perception to light. For others though, including Augustine, it is the activity of the soul, in reaction to the experience of the sensible object, that forms the cognitive content of sensation “from its own substance”. Pattin says that for Augustine, it is absolutely impossible for the spiritual soul to be passive in relation to sensible realities, because the inferior cannot in any way act on the superior. I would note that in this Augustine follows Plotinus.

Pattin says that Aquinas accepts a non-Augustinian view of sense perception as categorically passive. For him sensibles are found in act outside the soul. But he argues against giving much weight to the analogy between sensation and intellect, because he wants at the same time to defend the existence of an active intellect within the human soul. In itself, the issue of active sense is not very important for him.

This understanding of the significance of positions for and against the analogy between intellect and sense is very far from the way Pippin presents it. For both Aquinas and Pippin, the analogy is an argument from a claimed passivity of sense to the passivity of intellect. For Aquinas, the truth is that sensation is passive while thought is not. But for a number of important medieval and Renaissance thinkers, both our sense perception and our thought have an active component, and the analogy supports this.

There was a particularly influential debate on this subject between Bartholomew of Bruges (ca.1286-1356) and John of Jandun (ca. 1285-1328). Bartholomew is believed to have written three treatises against the notion of active sense, of which one survives. John on the other hand defends the analogy of sense and intellect, and uses it to argue from the existence of active intellect to the existence of active sense. An intermediate position is argued by John Buridan (ca. 1301-1360), who was also an important participant in the debates about nominalism and realism. John of Jandun’s position was defended by numerous Italian Aristotelians — including Taddeo de Parma, Mathieu de Gubio, Gaetan de Thienne, and Agostino Nifo, who like John of Jandun have been labeled as Latin “Averroists”. It was discussed by other very non-Thomistic Aristotelians like Pietro Pomponazzi and Jacobo Zabarella. The intermediate position of Buridan was meanwhile taken up by his students, like Nicolas Oresme and Marsilius of Inghen.

Averroes to Eckhart?

I’m looking at the French edition of 2005 lectures given at the Sorbonne by German philosopher Kurt Flasch, who is responsible for the modern editions of the Latin translations of Averroes, Avicenna, and Maimonides, as well as publication of the Latin works of Albert the Great’s students Dietrich of Freiberg, Ulrich of Strasbourg, and Berthold of Moosburg.

Flasch has contributed greatly to scholarship on Meister Eckhart, who also stands in the tradition of Albert the Great, and may have studied with him at Cologne. Eckhart has been known in modern times as a “mystic”, mainly on the basis of his popular German writings. But a consideration of his Latin works suggests that he was also and primarily a scholastic philosopher, close to Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg. Even when he comments on scripture, he explicitly does so per rationes naturales philosophorum, “in terms of natural philosophical reasons”. This post will mainly cover Flasch’s discussion of Averroes.

I think this all makes a fascinating counterpoint to Rorty and Brandom’s provocative but nearsighted Deweyan historical storytelling about the rational maturation of humanity, which tends to treat premodern philosophy as if it were monolithic and all the same, and as if only in modern times did any worthwhile philosophy emerge. My own view is that there have been at least three other “Enlightenments” that substantially recognized the autonomy of reason, before the modern Enlightenment — one initiated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; another with the rise of philosophy in the Islamic Golden Age; and another with the spread of Aristotelian learning to previously backward Europe. Just as with the modern Enlightenment, these developments were sharply contested, and very uneven in their results. The historical picture is far more complex and nuanced than any simple “Whiggish” linear progress.

Flasch first gives an account of Averroes. Later, he will discuss how Averroes’ work is used by Albert, Dietrich, and Eckhart. He calls heretical “Averroism” an invention of theologians and of the 19th-century scholar Ernest Renan. Averroes and those who are sometimes called Averroist simply thought of themselves as Aristotelians.

Flasch highlights four broad characteristics of the thought of Averroes — a strong insistence that accidents depend on substance; sharp distinction of a “metaphysical” or first-philosophical point of view from ordinary logical and physical points of view; an exclusion of efficient causality from metaphysics (in favor of an emphasis on substantial form); and a notion of natural intellectual beatitude. Most of Averroes’ Long Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics has still only been published in Latin, and Flasch mentions something new to me, that Averroes excludes not only efficient causality but also final causality from metaphysics, giving pride of place to substantial form instead. From Flasch’s account, it sounds like Averroes is the major proximate source for Latin scholastic notions of substantial form, which do not come from Aristotle.

“The way in which Averroes constructs the relation between the individual human and the intellect is not very different from the way in which Christian theologians envisage the action of divine grace in the human: having a certain degree of accomplishment of representation (indeed of imaginatio [imagination], the individual human is united with the intellect that illuminates the images of representation by making their universal character appear. The perfection of the human consists in her union, her copulatio, with the intellect that contains all the intelligibilia. This union is realized in each act of intelligence, since knowledge of the universal liberates the individual human from spatio-temporal determination. This universalization of mental contents can also be interpreted as a certain divinization, given that it makes the human participate in the supratemporality of the universal” (D’Averroés á Maître Eckhart: les sources arabes de la “mystique” allemande, p. 37, my translation throughout, emphasis in original).

“In a human life consecrated to intellectual work, the singular human becomes more and more close to the intellect. The active intellect, which produces all the intellectual contents, becomes in this case more and more our form, and no longer an efficient cause. This transformation is our highest perfection, in this life and possibly in a future life. It is in this conjunctio [conjunction] that our beatitude resides” (ibid).

“According to Averroes, intellect is not a superhuman being, a sort of angel in the beyond, but a virtus animae [virtue of the soul]” (p. 40).

“Aristotle… proceeds to introduce a series of extraterrestrial, quasi-divine predicates for intellect, even as he calls it a part or a power of the human soul. In fact, these are negative predicates: to be capable of knowing ‘all’ (omnia), all that one could see or imagine, it is necessary that intellect be none of that all, it must be amiges, that is to say unmixed with things…. Indeed it has no determinate essence, non est hoc aliquid [it is not a this-something], so that it is capable of becoming all things…. To describe the non-natural nature of intellect, Aristotle repeats the Platonic formula in saying: the intellective soul is the place of ideas (topos eidon)” (p. 41).

“Its activity is its substance, it is what it thinks…. This identity signifies not only that its activity and its object are identical, but that the action of intellect is its substantial nature” (p. 43).

“[K]nowledge is (also) receptive…. But as we have seen, intellect is immaterial and impassible. Intellect cannot be directly determined by a thing of the exterior world. If it has a phase of receptivity, it is necessary to understand this receptivity according to the measure of its intellectual nature; it is an active receiving of an intellect that accepts something from an intellect…. Before being realized, this function is nothing…. It cannot be actualized by any bodily thing…. Only intellect — as active intellect — can actualize it. This active principle is the other face or function of intellect, that is the intellect called agent that produces all the intelligible contents. Intellect as center of activity merits all the predicates Aristotle attributes to nous: it is the light that illustrates all, it is activity in its essence, identical with its content” (p. 44).

“[I]t has nothing in common with anything, it must be void of the physical character of its objects to be identical with them, in the same way that the eye must be without color to be capable of seeing all the colors. We find all these metaphors in the texts of Albert the Great, of Dietrich, and of Eckhart…. These phrases of Aristotle speak with such insistence of the proper character of intellect and of its substantial negativity that those who have not mastered Aristotelian terminology inevitably take them for ‘mystical'” (p. 45).

“These are the Aristotelico-Averroist formulas and the metaphors that we find again in Dietrich and Eckhart. All these expressions are formulas of the negative philosophy of mind [esprit]. This is the principal message of [Averroes’] commentary on the De Anima…. Categories derived from physical nature and usual conceptions no longer serve: to understand intellectual knowledge, the philosopher must make a radical change of perspective.”

“From this point of view, Averroes has established a concrete criterion for our evaluation of the philosophers of the 13th and 14th centuries: have they or have they not realized the radicality of this general conversion in the way of thinking? Have they understood, have they accepted this challenge? If I speak of a challenge, I am not thinking of the heresies of the unity of the possible intellect and the eternity of the world, but of the consequences of the negative philosophy of the intellect” (p. 48).

Here I think we also see the ultimate origin of Hegel’s specialized discourse about the negative. I don’t mean that Hegel read Averroes, but he reached a similar Aristotelian conclusion that goes beyond anything Aristotle explicitly said.

“Averroes insists in any case on the following fact: if intellect, as Aristotle suggests, is impassible, (apathes), if it is separable and simplex, then it is not permitted to speak of it in the terms that are characteristic of the world of generation and corruption. It becomes necessary to reform the theory of mind, in proceeding to its ‘de-physicalization’. Intellect is not hoc aliquid, it is not a ‘this something’. It is not an individual. By its intellectual movements, it separates itself from every kind of material individuality” (ibid).

“Averroes always speaks of the intellect that is found in us. He writes: intellectus existens in nobis habet duas actiones [“the intellect existing in us has two actions”]. He underlines that thinking or not depends on our decision. Averroes describes this active phase as a process of detachment, of undressing or denuding (denudare). When we think, our concrete experience consists very exactly in the combination of the actions of these two faculties: invenemus no agere per has duas virtutes intellectus. It is we who act, by the two intellectual virtues” (p. 49).

“In the Latin translation, Averroes designates the activity of the agent intellect as a creation. It is intellect that makes or produces the universal. If it is necessary to make it, it did not already exist before. The intellectual activity of denudare is a facere [a making or doing], it is a veritable creative act: Intellectus qui creat et generat intelligibilia [intellect that creates and generates intelligibles]. In showing in relief the creative character of intellect, Averroes goes further than Aristotle. The fact that one designated the activity of intellect in the Latin of the ‘Christian’ middle ages as a creare is quite remarkable…. Averroes explains the ‘creative’ force of our intellectual virtue thusly: in intellectual knowledge, we formulate judgments regarding innumerable particulars by means of a sole and unique common judgment; and in this way, by this knowledge of what is common, we can attain a certain form of infinity” (ibid).

Here I think of Kant’s insistence on the active role of the understanding, and of Husserl’s talk about putting existence in brackets. We see that Averroes insists on the generally active character of Aristotelian intellect, to the point where it becomes challenging to explain its receptive aspect. This is quite opposite to the unfortunate prejudice that Aristotelian intellect is passive in an unqualified way — simply receiving the given — expressed by Robert Pippin in his otherwise excellent work on Hegel. Flasch says Averroes concluded that neither Aristotle’s Categories nor concepts from the Physics are adequate to address the questions raised in the Metaphysics. This makes perfect sense, because much of the Metaphysics is devoted to developing new concepts. We saw this in detail with substance in relation to the Categories, and with potentiality and actuality in relation to the Physics.

I have been extremely curious what lies within the Latin text of Averroes’ Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, most of which has yet to be translated to any modern language. As I would have hoped, Flasch’s summary remarks suggest that Averroes sees efficient causality as basically irrelevant to first philosophy. But unexpectedly, he also says that Averroes rejects the metaphysical use — let alone centrality — of final causes. Where I would have expected or hoped for a development highlighting the unity of Aristole’s use of teleological explanation in both biology and first philosophy, Flasch reports that Averroes instead presents a notion of “substantial form” that is probably the source of that term’s leading role in Albert and Aquinas.

From Flasch’s remarks, it sounds like Averroes favored this option because he believed that first-philosophical reality must in general be purely and strictly eternal and necessary, even though he also says there is a special case in that the “material” intellect depends on humans living in time for its existence and its contents. A teleology-first point of view like Aubry sees in Aristotle is not compatible with this kind of pure and strict eternity. In reviving a form of Aristotelian teleology as a meta-interpretive framework in his Logic, Hegel finds it necessary to conclude that the eternity of first-philosophical reality is not pure and strict — that what we call eternity actually has a dependency on becoming, rather than being its immaculate origin. I am also reminded of Avicenna’s claim that the human soul has no pre-existence, and yet persists in eternity.

Albert the Great set the standard for Latin scholasticism, treating Averroes as generally the best commentator on Aristotle, but also eclectically making substantial use of Avicenna and Maimonides. I read elsewhere that up to the 16th century, Albert the Great’s commentaries on Aristotle were better regarded and more used in European universities than those of Aquinas. Albert has a very favorable view of Averroes overall. When he criticizes him, he does so in moderate and respectful terms. (Aquinas’ early remarks about Averroes are closer in tone to those of Albert. But in the 1260s and 1270s, there was a growing clamor among conservative Augustinians against Greek and Arabic philosophy in general. I think Aquinas, as a moderate and a diplomat within the Church, made a tactical or strategic decision to try to focus all that ire on Averroes and sacrifice him, so to speak, so that Aristotle could be made acceptable to the Church. And he was successful. As a result, Aristotle’s works were not all burned by the forces of darkness, or permanently banned from being taught, as they actually were during part of the 13th century.

Flasch insists on the radicality of Averroes’ claim that intellect is nothing before it thinks, that it is simply not a this-something like other things at all.

“But other problems remain. We say that universal forms exist in individual things potentially, in potentia. What does this mean? In reality what does the agent intellect do with the forms? Is it content to take off their clothes? Do these forms exist in reality if they are present potentially, in potentia? But in that case, intellect does not make or produce them, and even less could it create them. What exactly does ‘being in potentiality’ signify in the exact sense of Aristotelian ontology?” (p. 50).

“To be in potentiality is indeed to be real, but not actual. For, according to Aristotle as well as Averroes, actual being is the measure of being in potentiality. But from another perspective, Averroes requires the permanence of species, and indeed the eternity of the world, in order to guarantee the potential of our intellectual knowledge for objectivity. But why require the permanence of species, even in potentiality, if our intellect can create them? No one better recognized the difficulty of this problem than Averroes. He never ceases to groan and complain about the extreme difficulty of this inquiry. At stake in the analysis of intellectual knowledge is the encounter of the eternal and the corruptible, and indeed of the universal with the individual: how can a single action, directed by my will, result in these two components? Aristotle’s explanations on this point are insufficient, and the philosophical analysis is very difficult, valde difficilis et ambigua, Averroes confesses” (ibid).

“The more one reads the commentaries of Averroes, the more distant is the Arab thinker from a scholastic rigidity of Aristotelian orthodoxy. He continually evokes his doubts, and indicates problems in suspense. In a great number of doctrines, he goes well beyond Aristotle. He knows very well that intellectual activity is a personal action of a singular human. The knowledge of the universal is the highest achievement of the human, it is her perfection. One cannot displace or transfer the supreme perfection of the human outside of her, and as a consequence one cannot transfer her beatitude to another world. According to Averroes, it is necessary to think of the ultimate stage as a conjunctio or copulatio with a supra-temporal intelligence. Averroes shows himself very preoccupied with the subject of intellectual individuality, but he does not hesitate to formulate aporias…. Aristotle left a great number of questions without solutions, says Averroes, and this is ‘why I thought about writing about this subject what I think myself. If what seems right to me is not perfect, it can at least be the beginning of a perfecting. And in this case, I bid my brothers who read my work to write their objections. Perhaps in this way the truth can become manifest, if I have not found it'” (pp. 50-51).

“Averroes conceived intellectual knowledge as capable of augmentation and intensification. The human who thinks adapts herself little by little to the intellectual and universal world. She becomes what she knows…. Intellect must become my proper essential form…. [T]he human in a certain measure becomes all things in knowing them. All the things are nothing else than her knowledge…. Intellect is reality; it produces reality, not arbitrarily, not insofar as it is individual, but insofar as it receives the impression of the universal, the spirit of humanity” (p. 52).

“This divinized life is the beatitude of the human. According to Aristotle, the nous, the intellect, is in reality the human. Intellect is substantial activity and felicity. Eudaimonia [true happiness] cannot be added, it cannot be thrown over our shoulders like a cloak. The mind or spirit is beatitude by its proper activity…. It is not reserved for the life of the beyond; it begins with our terrestrial life, as our ascension and nobility…. [T]he intellectual life is the true nobility, it is the life of the noble human, as Meister Eckhart says” (p. 53).

This is also broadly similar to the ethical stance of Plotinus, who says that the goal of a human being is to live by her proper act of intellect, and in this way to become as like to the divine as is possible for a mortal.

Passivity Revisited

One point on which I sharply differ from Pippin is his claim that Aristotelian intellect is purely passive. I think I have sufficiently documented that this is not historically accurate. But the context of Pippin’s claim is Kant’s great elaboration of the active side of judging and thinking. And undoubtedly, Kant was arguing against a received view. So whose view was it?

I think the answer has to be Leibniz, his popularizer Christian Wolff, and the Wolffians like Mendelsohn and Baumgarten who dominated philosophy in German universities in Kant’s time. An examination of Kant’s work shows that most of the received views Kant argues against are Wolffian views.

Basic to Leibniz’s and the Wolffians’ point of view is a very categorical preformationism. One of Leibniz’s best known theses asserts a pre-established harmony that not only aims to explain the relationship of mind and body, but encompasses all things whatsoever. According to Leibniz, God creates nothing less than an entire, coherent world, every detail of which is providentially anticipated in advance. Once there is a world, God never “intervenes” in it, because all the work of providence was done in creation. (Providence in the Greek (pronoia) is literally forethought.) God’s creative act consists in the selection of the best of all possible worlds. I personally regard the pre-established harmony as a kind of Platonic myth or “as if” — a speculative hypothesis that makes a kind of poetic sense, but is nonetheless very extravagant.

Consistent with his assertion of pre-established harmony, Leibniz denies that there is real causal interaction between things in the world. Instead, each being carries within it a microcosm of the whole, and is causally affected only by God.

One of Kant’s earliest publications was a defense of real causal interaction against Leibniz. Whether or not Kant thought about it at the time, he was effectively defending an Aristotelian view of the reality of secondary causes. Against this wider background, Kant’s later insistence on the active character of thought can be seen as taking the perspective that we too rank among the real secondary causes.

If the harmony of all things were pre-established, there would be no active work for intellect to do. It would just need to assimilate itself to the pre-established harmony. Intellect would thus be a passive recognition of pre-existing structures. Thus the Leibnizian-Wolffian world view intrinsically promotes the passivity of intellect that Kant opposes.

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

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

More on Contemplation

I’m still, as it were, contemplating Aristotelian contemplation or theoria (see also But What Is Contemplation?; Kantian “Contemplation”?).

The two main English meanings of theoria — “contemplation” and “theory” — have a rather different connotative feel. What is tricky is that by all accounts, contemplation is also an activity. But it is not grammatically obvious that the English “theory” is an activity. Indeed, a theory is commonly taken to be a kind of inert representation, and not an activity.

Nonetheless, it seems reasonable to say that “theory” by itself can also refer to a corresponding activity. Theory’s activity would be contemplative, and would not in itself aim at any external result. At least on a relative scale applicable to humans, it would be pure thinking. Meanwhile, contemplation for Aristotle is a kind of activity that does not in itself have an external result.

In the contemporary revival of American pragmatist philosophy, figures like Brandom and Pippin insist that thinking is a kind of doing. Rather than a distinction between theory and practice, this leads to a distinction between specifically “contemplative” or “theoretical” practice, and practice in general. Doing and practice in English can thus have the full generality that activity has in Aristotle. Not all doing is “external” doing; not all practice is “external” practice.

Human pure thinking may implicitly issue in a kind of result — a relatively coherent representation, or broadly speaking a “theory” of what it holds to be the case — but it may still be said that this implicit result is “internal”, until some additional external action gives the representation some kind of embodiment.

However, Hegel might remind us that the very distinction between “internal” and “external” is problematic. He argues that it is not really possible to draw an unambiguous line between them, and that internal and external are instead related by a kind of continuity.

(Hegel confusingly calls this a speculative “identity”, though he is very clear that a speculative identity is not a formal, exact identity. Having come to see the value in what Paul Ricoeur calls narrative identity — another “identity” that is not a formal, exact identity — I don’t object as strenuously to Hegel’s nonstandard uses of “identity” as I once did, though I still prefer to use some other word when what is meant is anything weaker than exact isomorphism or substitutional equivalence.)

The continuity of internal and external seems to me like a very Aristotelian point, albeit one that Aristotle does not himself make. But unlike Hegel, Aristotle has no need to respond to a sharp Cartesian or Lockean dualism between consciousness and its representations on the one hand, and everything else on the other.

I think most people would allow that contemplation may involve representations, but contemplation itself is neither an activity of representing, nor a simple consciousness of static representations.

The English connotations of contemplation and reflection are closely aligned. Connotations of words do not count as a philosophical argument for identifying terms that might be claimed to stand for different concepts, but such alignment is nonetheless helpful, because in doing philosophy we are also concerned with communicating clearly, and there are always issues with translated terms not meaning quite the same thing on the two sides of a translation.

Aristotle identifies contemplation with thought thinking itself. I am suggesting that thought thinking itself can be strongly identified with reflection in the sense discussed by Kant, Hegel, Ricoeur, and Pippin, which builds on the common one. That would mean that contemplation can be identified with reflection.

Though the precise meanings of reflection and apperception in Kant are debated by scholars, there seems to be broad agreement that Kant strongly connects pure reflection with pure or transcendental apperception, and a more empirical reflection with a more empirical apperception. (See also Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity).

These same concepts are fundamental to Hegel’s Logic. The three “logics” he develops there concern mere assertion; reflection or reflective constitution; and reflective or apperceptive judgment. Hegel innovatively explains the constitution of essence in terms of a pure reflective determination that presupposes no fixed terms, but builds determination from relations between terms. Then he explains judgment as normatively applying reflective determination to appearances.

I want to suggest that Hegelian reflective or apperceptive judgment should be considered as a more detailed elaboration of Aristotelian deliberation and practical judgment.

All of this leads to the conclusion that Aristotelian contemplation — at least the contemplation that he explicitly makes the goal of human life — can be explained as the exercise of reflective or apperceptive judgment. It is not clear to me that the contemplation attributed to the first cause also issues in judgment, but it certainly does seem to be a kind of pure reflection such as Hegel associates with the determination of essence, and this tracks with Aristotle’s claim that the what-it-is of things depends on the first cause.

Plotinus on Contemplation

“Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious concern and maintained that all things are striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end — and this, not merely beings endowed with reason but even the unreasoning animals, the Principle that rules in growing things, and the Earth that produces these — and that all achieve their purpose in the measure possible to their kind, each attaining Vision and possessing itself of the End in its own way and degree, some things in entire reality, other in mimicry and image — we would scarcely find anyone to endure so strange a thesis. But in a discussion entirely among ourselves there is no risk in a light handling of our own ideas (Plotinus, Enneads III.8, ch. 1, MacKenna tr., p. 239).

Thus begins Plotinus’ great essay that we know by the title “Nature, Contemplation, and the One”. The remainder of the text suggests that he is in fact fairly serious in what he suggests, but this disclaimer shows that he recognizes its unusual character. He does at a later point say in effect, “and now for the serious part”. In the “playful” part, he is deliberately stretching the meaning of contemplation, challenging us to apply it in many more cases than we would expect. In the “serious” part, he narrows the meaning to cases that come close to instantiating the identity Aristotle speaks of between thought and what it thinks.

Scholars believe this essay was part of Plotinus’ single largest work, which his student and editor Porphyry divided into four separate pieces, including “On the Intellectual Beauty” and “Against the Gnostics”. I wanted to compare what he says about contemplation with what Aristotle says. I find that even when I don’t agree with Plotinus, his work often has a kind of poetic appeal.

Aristotle speaks of contemplation as the characteristic activity of the gods, and as the ultimate end of human life. Plotinus here suggests that all nature aims at contemplation. Aristotle never says that, but it is in a way implicit between the lines. If the first cause is characterized by pure contemplation, and is the ultimate end behind all particular ends for which things do what they do, then in that sense all things aim at contemplation.

The characterization of contemplation as “Vision” is not one I would want to endorse in an Aristotelian context, at least without major qualification. The way Plotinus speaks of it, this Vision seems like a case of what Kant would call intellectual intuition — a kind of immediate grasping of some deep content.

I agree with Kant and Hegel that humans can “immediately” grasp deep content in holistic fashion only after and because we have previously done the work needed to understand it, which typically involves what Aristotle calls “thinking things through”, and what I have called interpretation and (after Paul Ricoeur) the long detour. I want to read Aristotle in a way that is compatible with this.

As it stands, Plotinus’ notion of Vision seems designed to exclude mediation, consonant with his emphasis on the simplicity of the One as the source of all things. For Plotinus, Vision is an immediate holistic “seeing” of deep truth.

I think Aristotelian contemplation is holistic too, but that any holistic Vision or immediate intuition achievable by humans and acceptable to Aristotle must have a cumulative, retrospective, reflective character that depends on previous insight and work, like apperception does in Kant and Hegel. I would suggest that Aristotelian contemplation could be elaborated as apperceptive entelechy.

“Well — in the play of this very moment am I engaged in the act of Contemplation? Yes; I and all that enter this play are in Contemplation: our play aims at Vision; and there is every reason to believe that child or man, in sport or earnest, is playing or working only towards Vision, that every act is an effort towards Vision; the compulsory act, which tends rather to bring the Vision down to outward things, and the act thought of as voluntary, less concerned with the outer, originate alike in the effort towards Vision” (ibid).

Here we begin to see in detail the vast extension of contemplation Plotinus is “playfully” suggesting. All things either are contemplation or aim at contemplation. In effect, he is treating Vision as a name for the Good at which all things aim.

“[L]et us speak, first, of the earth and of the trees and vegetation in general, asking ourselves what is the nature of the Contemplation in them, how we relate to any Contemplative activity the labor and productiveness of the earth, how Nature, held to be devoid of reason and even of conscious representation, can either harbour Contemplation or produce by means of the Contemplation which it does not possess” (ibid).

For Aristotle, the earth has a nature or internal source of motion, and plants as living things have an elementary kind of soul corresponding to their abilities for growth and nutrition. But even motion is a primitive kind of entelechy, of which contemplation is the highest form. Aristotle may not see contemplation everywhere, but he does see entelechy everywhere.

Incidentally, the English word “consciousness” was first coined by Locke’s friend, the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, to express ideas he found in Plotinus.

“To begin with, since in all [Nature’s] production it is stationary and intact, a Reason-Principle [logos] self-indwelling, it is in its own nature a Contemplative act. All doing must be guided by an Idea, and will therefore be distinct from that Idea: the Reason-Principle then, as accompanying and guiding the work, will be distinct from the work; not being action but Reason-Principle it is, necessarily, Contemplation” (ch. 3, p. 240).

Plotinus generally seems to use logos in a sense that is derived from Stoicism, rather than any Platonic or Aristotelian source. Logos is a — arguably the — fundamental explanatory principle in Stoicism. It has relations with Platonic and Aristotelian concepts, but is a distinct notion or family of notions in its own right. For the Stoics, everything has an indwelling logos or rational principle that internally governs it, and the logos has a divine origin.

“And does this Reason-Principle, Nature, spring from a contemplation? Wholly and solely” (ibid).

He doesn’t explain this, but instead proceeds to qualify it.

“The Contemplation springing from the reasoning faculty — that, I mean, of planning its own content — [Nature] does not possess” (p. 241).

Nature neither reasons explicitly, nor plans how to achieve its aims.

“Because to plan for a thing is to lack it: Nature does not lack; it creates because it possesses. Its creative act is simply its possession of its own characteristic Essence; now its Essence, since it is a Reason-Principle, is to be at once an act of contemplation and an object of contemplation” (ibid).

The idea of starting from fullness rather than lack is appealing. Aristotle’s way of doing this is to emphasize entelechies everywhere. Every entelechy is in a way complete in itself.

Aristotle complements this by saying that the living things that have natures are more immediately moved by desire. Plato, however, strongly identifies desire with a kind of lack. Plotinus therefore seems to want to downplay the role of desire, and identifies nature with the fullness of a creative act. If this is not the creativity of the translator, we have here a reference to creation, as distinct from making. Creation is also not part of Platonic or Aristotelian vocabulary.

Plotinus is said to have read works by Numenius, a Neo-Pythagorean who was impressed by the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. I don’t have my Loeb edition handy to check the Greek. (Incidentally, Armstrong’s complete translation of Plotinus in the Loeb edition is more accurate and less flowery than the more common MacKenna I am using here. Kevin Corrigan’s translation in his Reading Plotinus is also better, but I don’t have that handy either.)

The “act” part seems to be a reference to actuality or being-at-work. This is also an important concept for Plotinus, though in contrast to Aristotle he ultimately subordinates it to potentiality.

“Thus the act of production is seen to be in Nature an act of contemplation, for creation is the outcome of a contemplation which never becomes anything else, which never does anything else, but creates by simply being a contemplation” (ibid).

Aristotle makes the more specific claim that the what-it-is of things is the outcome of thought thinking itself that contemplates. He would not collapse this together as Plotinus does, into a claim that nature’s act of production is an act of contemplation.

“[W]hat we know as Nature is a Soul, offspring of a yet earlier Soul of more powerful life; that it possesses, therefore, in its repose, a vision within itself; that it has no tendency upward nor even downward but is at peace, steadfast, in its own Essence;” (ch. 4, p. 241).

Aristotle calls nature an internal source of motion, but not a soul (psyche). On the other hand, the things he regards as having a nature (plants and animals) he also regards as having a soul. But the notions of soul in Aristotle and Plotinus are also vastly different. While Aristotle is careful to stay close to what can be observed by anyone, Plotinus makes the soul a much grander thing with much stronger properties.

“Of course, while it may be convenient to speak of ‘understanding’ or ‘perception’ in the Nature-Principle, this is not in the full sense…; we are applying to sleep a word borrowed from the wake” (pp. 241-242).

Here he acknowledges he is stretching things.

“In the same way, human beings, when weak on the side of contemplation, find in action their trace of vision and of reason: their spiritual feebleness unfits them for contemplation; they are left with a void, because they cannot adequately seize the vision; yet they long for it; they are hurried into action as their way to the vision which they cannot attain by intellection. They act from the desire of seeing their action, and of making it visible and sensible to others when the result shall prove fairly well equal to the plan. Everywhere, doing and making will be found to be either an attenuation or a complement of vision” (p. 242).

Long ago, I was profoundly impressed by this argument that all action aims at contemplation, which he returns to further on. Looking at it now, it strikes me that this thesis may be implicitly counterposed to Aristotle’s idea of the priority of actuality, which, as we will see, Plotinus does not agree with. Aristotle also would never be so one-sidedly dismissive of doing and making, even though he agrees that contemplation is “even more” to be valued.

“The primal phase of the Soul — inhabitant of the Supreme… — remains unchangeably There; but in virtue of that first participation, … a secondary phase also participates in the Supreme, and this secondary goes forth ceaselessly as Life streaming from Life; for energy runs through the universe and there is no extremity at which it dwindles out” (ch. 5, p. 242).

“Energy” here is actuality or being-at-work, now explicitly associated with something secondary.

“All goes softly since nothing here demands the parade of thought or act upon external things: it is a Soul in vision and, by this vision, creating its own subsequent — this Principle (of Nature), itself also contemplative but in the feebler degree… a Vision creates the Vision ” (p. 243).

The implicit complaint against the “parade of thought” has to do with Plotinus’ strong bias for intuitive immediacy over what Aristotle would call “thinking things through”. I think Plotinus is perhaps the best proponent of this view that I disagree with — certainly better than the followers of Schelling and Jacobi who attacked Hegel.

“[T]his explains how the Soul’s creation is everywhere: where can this thing fail to be, which is one identical thing in every soul? Vision is not cabined within the bournes of magnitude.”

In Plotinus’ modified Platonic view, Soul is not just the form of a living body, but plays a huge role in the formation and governance of the world. There is a soul of the world or soul of the all; nature is a kind of soul; and there is a transcendent Soul that is Nature’s prior. Every individual soul has a direct connection to the transcendent Soul.

“This, of course, does not mean that the Soul is present at the same strength in each and every place and thing — any more than it is at the same strength in each of its phases.”

“The Charioteer (the Leading Principle of the Soul, in the Phaedrus myth) gives the two horses (its two dissonant faculties) what he has seen and they, taking that gift, showed that they were hungry for that vision; there was something lacking to them: if in their desire they acted, their action aimed at what they craved for — and that was vision, and an object of vision” (ibid).

Here he refers to imagery from Plato’s Phaedrus, while re-centering the myth around his own notion of Vision. He again dwells on the superiority of contemplation to action.

“Action, thus, is set towards contemplation and an object of contemplation, so that even those whose life is in doing have seeing as their object” (ch. 6, p. 243).

“[T]hey desired a certain thing to come about, not in order to be unaware of it but to know it, to see it present before the mind…. We act for the sake of some good; this means not for something to remain outside of ourselves, not in order that we may possess nothing but that we may hold the good of the action. And hold it, where? Where but in the mind?” (ibid).

“This vision achieved, the acting instinct pauses; the mind is satisfied and seeks nothing further” (p. 244).

Aristotle would agree that a maximally complete entelechy like contemplation is in a way better than any incomplete entelechy, such as would be associated with action. Even so, his emphasis on the priority of actuality leads to a much more positive valuation of acting, doing, and making. Also, for Aristotle contemplation is a being-at-work. And I at least also think of it as a particular kind of acting and doing, even though it is different from external acting and doing.

“[N]ow we come to the serious treatment of the subject — In proportion to the truth with which the knowing faculty knows, it comes to identification with the object of its knowledge” (ibid).

What he says here about knowledge resembles the Aristotelian identity of thought and the thing thought, broadened to include a kind of proportional applicability. On the other hand, Aristotle seems to view knowledge as a discrete relation, which if taken strictly would seem to rule out any kind of proportional applicability or approximation.

“Hence the Idea must not be left to lie outside but must be made one identical thing with the Soul of the novice so that he finds it really his own. The Soul, once domiciled within that Idea and brought to likeness to it, becomes productive, active; what it always held by its primary nature it now grasps with knowledge and applies in deed, so becoming, as it were, a new thing and, informed as it now is by the purely intellectual, it sees (in its outgoing act) as a stranger looking upon a strange world” (ibid).

Though the strong implications of Soul and the initiatory rhetoric are distinctive to Plotinus, what is really essential here is that “the Idea must not be left to lie outside”. Aristotle and Hegel would both wholeheartedly endorse this part.

“The Sage, then, has gone through a process of reasoning when he expounds his act to others; but in relation to himself he is Vision” (ibid).

Plotinus has a much more individualist point of view than Aristotle. For him we are ultimately each “alone with the Alone”. A direct personal relation to the One makes all human social relations seem insignificant by comparison. For Aristotle, participation in social relations is essential to being human, and this is a good thing, not just a distraction from personal spiritual development.

“All the forms of Authentic Existence spring from vision and are a vision. Everything that springs from these Authentic Existences in their vision is an object of vision — manifest to sensation or to true knowledge or to surface-awareness. All act aims at this knowing; all impulse is toward knowledge” (ch. 7, p. 245).

Now in the “serious” part, he repeats what was initially supposed to be the “playful” claim that all things either are contemplation or are oriented toward it.

“[T]he creating powers operate not for the sake of creation and action but in order to produce an object of vision. This same vision is the ultimate purpose of all the acts of the mind and, even further downward, of all sensation, since sensation also is an effort towards knowledge; lower still, Nature, producing similarly its subsequent principle, brings into being the vision and Idea that we know in it. It is certain, also, that as the Firsts exist in vision all other things must be straining towards the same condition; the starting point is, universally, the goal” (ibid).

Aristotle would never speak of “creating powers”. While he certainly recognizes distinctions between immediate, intermediate, and ultimate ends, he would also never deny that what a thing essentially does is its end.

“[T]he procreative act is the expression of a contemplation, a travail towards the creation of many forms, many objects of contemplation, so that the universe may be filled full of Reason-Principles and that contemplation may be, as nearly as possible, endless…. So Love, too, is vision with the pursuit of Ideal-Form” (ibid).

Again this has a kind of poetic charm, but taking it literally relies on a collapsing of distinctions.

“In the advancing stages of Contemplation rising from that in Nature, to that in the Soul and thence again to that in the Intellectual-Principle itself, the object contemplated becomes progressively a more and more intimate possession of the Contemplating Beings, more and more one with them” (ch. 8, p. 245).

Here he returns to what we know from Aristotle as the strict identity of pure thought and what it thinks. As before, he wants to first greatly generalize and then to relativize it.

“[I]n the Intellectual-Principle itself, there is complete identity of Knower and Known, and this not by way of domiciliation, as in the case of even the highest soul, but by Essence, by the fact that, there, no distinction exists between Being and Knowing” (ibid).

Aristotle would agree.

“The Supreme must be an entity in which the two are one; it will, therefore, be a Seeing that lives, not an object of vision like things existing in something other than themselves” (pp. 245-246).

The Supreme in Plotinus is a name for the One. Aristotle’s first cause is identified with thought thinking itself, more or less equivalent to the Intellectual-Principle here. Plotinus is clearly not satisfied with Aristotle’s first cause, and posits the One above it. Aristotle in the Metaphysics argues at length why we should not follow the Pythagoreans and Plato in regarding the One as a source or cause.

“Every life is some form of thought…. But while men may recognize grades in life they reject grades in thought; to them there are thoughts (full and perfect) and anything else is no thought” (p. 246).

This is an important point. The thoughts that we embodied beings have in ordinary life are far from “full and perfect”, but we tend to act as though they were full and perfect.

“The essential is to observe that, here again, all reasoning shows that whatever exists is a bye-work [sic] of visioning” (ibid).

Once again, for Plotinus the immediate whole of the One is the complete source of everything. By contrast, Aristotle complements his account of the dependency of all things on the first cause by insisting that everything also depends on particular causes.

“The Highest began as a unity but did not remain as it began; all unknown to itself, it became manifold; it grew, as it were, pregnant: desiring universal possession, it flung itself outward, though it were better had it never known the desire by which a Secondary came into being…. The Whence is better; the Whither is less good: the Whence is not the same as the Whence-followed-by-a-Whither; the Whence alone is greater than with the Whither added to it” (ibid).

Overall, Plotinus seems to be conflicted about the goodness of manifestation and actualization. There are many texts like “On the Intellectual Beauty” that seem to present these in a positive light, and he sharply criticizes the Gnostics for their negative views of life in the world. But here he repeats in three different wordings that the One shut up within itself is better than the One complemented by a world.

For Aristotle, manifestation and actualization as such are unequivocally good, even if some true facts are not good. For Aristotle — in diametrical contrast to Plotinus here — the highest good should be called not a Whence but a Whither, the ultimate end of all things, that-for-the-sake-of-which. The first cause is a pure end.

“If, then, neither the Intellectual-Principle nor the Intelligible Object can be the First Existent, what is? Our answer can only be: The source of both…. Yet: our knowledge of everything else comes by way of our intelligence; our power is that of knowing the intelligible by means of the intelligence: but this Entity transcends all of the intellectual nature; by what direct intuition, then, can it be brought within our grasp?” (ch. 9, p. 247).

Here and below, Plotinus seems to refer to the One as a Being. In other texts, he says that the One is beyond being, and associates being with intellect. Even here, he associates all knowledge with intellect (the One would be beyond knowledge).

“To this question the answer is that we can know it only in the degree of human faculty: we indicate it by virtue of what in ourselves is like it. For in us, also, there is something of that Being; nay, nothing, ripe for that participation, can be void of it. Wherever you be, you have only to range over against this omnipresent Being that in you which is capable of drawing from It, and you have your share in it” (pp. 247-248).

Now he uses “knowledge” in a much looser way than above. The idea that what is highest is not entirely inaccessible to us is appealing.

“The Intellectual-Principle in us must mount to its origins: essentially a thing facing two ways, it must deliver itself over to those powers within it which tend upward; if it seeks the vision of that Being, it must become something more than Intellect.”

Elsewhere, Plotinus seems to suggest that if each thing “turns upward” toward what is above it and away from what is below, that which is below it will spontaneously carry on in the best possible way — i.e., better than if we were more actively looking down into it and intervening in it. Very different presentation notwithstanding, this always reminded me of the Tao Te Ching‘s idea of getting things done in the best possible way by “non-action”.

“For the Intellectual-Principle is the earliest form of Life: it is the Activity presiding over the outflowing of the universal Order — the outflow, that is, of the first moment, not that of the continuous process” (p. 248).

He identifies neither intellect nor the the One with the whole of things.

“[I]t must of necessity derive from some other Being, from one that does not emanate but is the Principle of Emanation, of Life, of Intellect, and of the Universe…. [T]his can be no thing among things but must be prior to all things” (ibid).

The One is not a “thing” at all. For Aristotle, the first cause is a particular thing that is prior in nature to all other things. To be a being in the proper sense is to be a particular independent thing.

“And what will such a Principle essentially be? The potentiality of the Universe: the potentiality whose non-existence would mean the non-existence of all the Universe and even of the Intellectual-Principle which is the primal Life and all Life” (ch. 10, p. 248).

Here he makes the potentiality of the One prior to any actuality. Aristotle would strenuously object to this.

“Imagine a spring that has no source outside itself; it gives itself to all the rivers, yet is never exhausted by what they take, but remains always integrally what it was…. Or: think of the Life coursing throughout some mighty tree… it is the giver of the entire and manifold life of the tree, but remains unmoved in itself” (p. 249).

This image of something that constantly gives and never needs anything is powerful. Plotinus radicalizes and generalizes Aristotle’s notion of unmoved moving, making it a complete cause of things, which Aristotle never claimed it was.

“Thus we are always brought back to The One. Every particular thing has a One of its own to which it may be traced; the All has its One, its Prior but not yet the Absolute One; through this we reach that Absolute One, where all such references come to an end. Now when we reach a One — the stationary Principle — in the tree, in the animal, in Soul, in the All — we have in every case the most powerful, precious element: when we come to the One in Authentically Existent Beings — their Principle and source and potentiality — shall we lose confidence and suspect it of being — nothing?” (ibid).

I probably should go back to the Metaphysics, and pull out Aristotle’s discussions of oneness and the Pythagorean-Platonic claims that the One is something separate. I think he pretty conclusively shows that claims for a separate One are incoherent.

“Certainly, this Absolute is none of the things of which it is the source — its nature is that nothing can be affirmed of it — not existence, not essence, not life — since it is That which transcends all these. But possess yourself of it by the very elimination of Being and you hold a marvel. Thrusting forward to This, attaining, and resting in its content, seek to grasp it more and more — understanding it by that intuitive thrust alone, but knowing its greatness by the Beings that follow upon it and exist by its power” (ibid).

This seems like his more standard position that the One is not a Being. It also at least suggests the very useful approach of understanding a cause or a higher thing by examining what follows from it. But the extent to which Plotinus puts this into practice is limited.

“The Intellectual-Principle is a Seeing, and a Seeing which itself sees; therefore it is a potentiality which has become effective…. All actual seeing implies duality; before the seeing takes place there is the pure unity (of the power of seeing)” (ch. 11, p. 249).

The assertion that all seeing — and implicitly, all knowing — implies duality suggests a denial of Aristotle’s thesis that pure thought is simply identical with what it thinks. But again there is a mismatch that could also allow for doubt. Where Aristotle speaks of thinking, Plotinus speaks of seeing, and of knowing in some broad sense. For Aristotle, thinking and knowing are primarily discursive; for Plotinus, they are primarily intuitive.

“Now as our sight requires the world of sense for its satisfaction and realization, so the vision in the Intellectual-Principle demands, for its completion, The Good” (pp. 249-250).

Here he implicitly rejects Aristotle’s identification of thought thinking itself with the good. In modern terms, we are back to the model of the duality of consciousness of an object that is not Aristotle’s, and that Hegel strove mightily to overcome in favor of a more Aristotelian solution.

“It cannot be, itself, The Good, since then it would not need to see or to perform any other Act; for The Good is the center of all else, and it is by means of The Good that every thing has Act, while The Good is in need of nothing and therefore possesses nothing beyond itself” (p. 250).

For Plotinus, intellect sees and acts, while the One or The Good is above all that. For Aristotle, pure intellect is a pure entelechy that is also the the ultimate good for all things. Whether or not we say that it sees and acts depends on the meaning we attribute to seeing and acting.

“Once you have uttered ‘The Good’, add no further thought: by any addition, and in proportion to that addition, you introduce a deficiency. Do not even say that it has Intellection; you would be dividing it; it would become a duality, Intellect and The Good” (ibid).

“[W]e form a conception of its true character from its image playing upon the Intellectual-Principle (ibid).

“[A]ll the striving is on the side of the Intellect, which is the eternal striver and eternally the attainer (ibid).

For Aristotle, intellect is an entelechy, which I think would be exempt from “striving”. It is composite things that do the striving.

“The Source of all this cannot be an Intellect…. [T]here is That before them which neither needs nor possesses anything, since, needing or possessing anything else, it would not be what it is — The Good” (ibid).

Once again, Aristotle does not claim that his first cause is the “Source of all this”. Rather, it is the destination of all this.

Pure Entelechy

Book Lambda (XII) of the Metaphysics sketches Aristotle’s brilliant and beautiful solution to the problems that have been under investigation in this work. The text of book Lambda itself, however, seems more like a series of fragments than the kind of tight, continuous development that characterizes the so-called “central books” Zeta (VII), Eta (VIII), and Theta (IX), or the books of Aristotle’s Physics.

He now clearly affirms that there is a first cause of all things — not only of their being what they are, but also of their motion. As a result, book Lambda presents a mix of philosophical theology and Aristotelian physics.

Aristotle has a very distinctive notion of what the first cause is. I would call this pure entelechy. I’m not aware that he literally uses that phrase, but he definitely says that the first cause is pure energeia (actuality, being-at-work, or fulfillment), and he very strongly identifies energeia with entelecheia (a new Greek word coined by Aristotle, meaning literally “in [it] end having”, or “being-at-work-staying-itself” in Sachs’ translation), for which I am using the English “entelechy”.

Entelechy is the theme that unifies Aristotle’s account of motion with the inquiry about why things are what they are. Motion is a kind of incomplete entelechy. The first cause, both of motion and of things being what they are — which he identifies with the good, that-for-the-sake-of-which, thought thinking itself, and what I would call a kind of pure delight — is a complete and pure entelechy. The concept of entelechy thus binds Aristotle’s physics together with his theology.

Apart from considerations related to the first cause, Aristotle normally distinguishes that-for-the-sake-of-which from the potentiality that is an internal source of motion in things. But he also says that every motion is for the sake of that toward which the potentiality inclines. And the first cause of all motion affects things purely as that-for-the-sake-of-which.

The kind of motion that best exemplifies entelechy is circular motion. Circularity is also a kind of figurative image or metaphor for entelechy. Continuous motion in a circle is in a sense always complete in the sense of unchangingly accomplishing its goal, and yet it is always ongoing. But not even the first motion is itself unconditionally complete as an entelechy, since it is still moving. Only the first cause is that.

For Aristotle, there is one thing that is directly moved by the first cause, and that is the sphere of the fixed stars, which also demarcates the most comprehensive whole of things that occupy space. Other motions are indirect consequences of this, which follow only in a conditional way.

The first cause is not just pure entelechy in the generic sense of a logical universal. It is a particular independent thing that turns out to be the unique exemplar of its kind.

In virtue of its unique relation to all other things, it plays the role of what Hegel would later call a concrete universal. Further, the unique character of that relation of “firstness” makes it an unconditioned concrete universal. This is the kind of unconditioned thing that Kant says reason is always reaching for, but that cannot be strictly known. It is also the kind of unconditioned thing that Hegel treats as the ultimate ground of intelligibility and value.

He begins by recalling that the path of the inquiry has approached “all things” by focusing on those sources and causes that make concrete independent things be what they are. Independent things turn out to be those that have some entelechy of their own, which exhibits greater self-determination than the minimal kind that applies to all motions. These include plants, animals, and the stars.

“Our study concerns thinghood, for it is the sources and causes of independent things that are being sought” (ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 231).

“[E]verything changes from something that has being in potency to something that has being at-work” (ch. 2, p. 232).

All change for Aristotle is from something being potentially something to its being that same something in actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment. This is narrower than common English usage. In Physics book VII he says that “states, whether of the body or of the soul, are not alterations” (Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. 1, p. 412).

“Now if something has being in potency, still this is not a potency to be any random thing, but a different thing comes to be from a different potency” (ibid).

Although one thing may have many potentialities, each of which may or may not be realized, each of these is a specific potentiality to be actual or at-work or fulfilled in some definite way.

“The kinds of thinghood are three, since the material is a this by coming forth into appearance (for whatever has being by way of contact, and not by having grown together, is material and underlies something else), while the nature of a thing is a this and an active condition into which it comes; and then the third kind is the particular thing that consists of these, such as Socrates or Callias” (ch. 3, p. 233).

He reminds us that when we speak of particular things, to avoid confusion we need to attend to whether we mean their matter, their form, or the composite consisting of both.

“Now things that cause motion are causes as being previously present, but things that are causes in the sense of rational patterns are simultaneous with what they produce” (p. 234).

Causes that are not of motion as such, but rather simply of being in a certain way, like form and that-for-the-sake-of-which, are not like more direct causes of motion in their mode of operation with respect to time. Their operation as causes does not involve a distinct externality related to a before and after, but rather unfolds immanently in their effects.

“Now there is a sense in which the causes and sources of different things are different, but there is a sense in which, if one speaks universally by way of analogy, they are the same for all things…. [B]ut the elements are different in different things, and the first cause that sets them in motion is also different in different things…. [B]ut still, over and above these, is the cause which, as the first of all things, sets all things in motion” (ch. 4, p. 234-236).

For Aristotle, everything has both a particular cause or causes, and a dependency on the first cause of all. The first cause of all operates through particular causes. This is the first time he has unambiguously implied that there is a first cause of all things. (In the middle above, when he speaks of “the first cause that sets them in motion”, this is not the first cause of all, but the first more specific cause of the motion in question.)

“Now since some things are separate while others are not separate, the former are independent things. And it is on account of this that all things have the same causes, because without independent things, attributes and motions are not possible. So then these causes will be, presumably, soul and body, or intellect, desire, and body. And in yet another way the sources of things are the same by analogy, namely being-at-work and potency, though these are both different and present in different ways in different things” (ch. 5, p. 236).

Once again, he recalls both the strategy of deriving the saying of being in the other categories from the saying of what independent things are, and the analogy by which the meanings of actuality and potentiality were illustrated. Again he emphasizes actuality and potentiality as sources of all things.

In passing, he seems to suggest thinking about human being in more specific terms of intellect and desire, rather than an undifferentiated soul. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he specifies that choice is grounded in a fusion of intellect and desire.

“Further, it is necessary to see that some things are possible to state universally, but others not. Now the primary sources of all things are a this that is first at work and something else which is in potency. So these are not the universal causes, since the source of particular things is particular; for a human being is the source of a human being universally, but no one is this universal, but rather Peleus is the source of Achilles and your father of you, and this particular B is the source of this particular BA, but B in general is the source of BA simply. And then, if the causes and elements of independent things are the sources of all things (but different ones of different ones), then as was said, of things not in the same class (colors and sounds, or independent things and quantity) they are different except by analogy; of things that are in the same kind they are also different, but not in kind, but because they are different for particular things, your material and form and mover from mine, though they are the same in their universal statement” (p. 237).

Again he emphasizes that particulars have particular causes. The kind of universality and operation that will be attributed to the first cause of all will be of a sort that respects this. He also again emphasizes that the primary sources of all things are particular actualities and potentialities.

“So as for seeking out what are the sources or elements of independent things and of relations and the of-what-sorts of things, and whether they are the same or different, it is clear that, since they are meant in more than one way, they do belong to everything, but when they have been distinguished they are not the same but different, except in one sense. And the causes of all things are the same in this sense — by analogy — because they are material, form, deprivation, and a mover, and the causes of independent things are the causes of all things in this sense — because when they are taken away everything is taken away; and further, the primary thing that is completely at work is the cause of all things. But the causes are different in this sense — they are as many as the primary contraries, described neither generically nor ambiguously, and as there are kinds of material as well. So what the sources are of perceptible things, and how many there are, and in what way they are the same and in what way different, have been said” (pp. 237-238).

At long last, we come to the argument that there really is a first cause of all things. Again he emphasizes that everything also has particular sources and causes.

“Now since there are three kinds of thinghood, two of them natural and one motionless, about the latter one must explain that it is necessary for there to be some everlasting motionless independent thing” (ch. 6, p. 238).

“For independent things are primary among beings, and if they were all destructible, everything would be destructible; but it is impossible for motion either to come into being or to be destroyed (since it always is), and impossible too for time” (ibid).

For Aristotle there is no first motion, or first moment in time. Instead, there must be an everlasting cause of motion.

“For if there were no time, there could be no before and after; and motion is continuous in just the way that time is; since time is either the same as or some attribute of motion” (ibid).

He points out that to speak of anything “before” there was any time is incoherent, since before and after presuppose time.

“But there is no continuous motion other than in place, and among these, other than in a circle” (ibid).

Only motion in a circle could continue forever. Space is vast, but Aristotle does not believe in infinite distances, so for him there could not be motion continuing forever in a straight line.

He seems to imply that the most fundamental motion of all — that of the fixed stars — provides a uniform measure for time. In modern terms, this is the earth’s rotation on its axis, as observed from a point on the earth. In the absence of evidence refuting what we see to be the case, he assumes that the stars forever rotate around the earth, and that the apparent motion of what is apparently the outermost sphere of the fixed stars is therefore a primary motion that spatially surrounds all things. If we take earth as the point of reference for whatever relativistic motions we see in the sky, this fits all the observational facts.

“But surely if there is something capable of moving and producing things, but not at work in any way, there will not be motion; for what has a potency admits of not being at work” (ibid).

Here he returns to the Physics sense of potentiality and actuality, and to the priority of the actual. Every potentiality is a source of motion that requires something external that is already an actuality of the same sort, in order for the potentiality to be actualized. The child requires a parent, the artifact a Platonic model.

“Therefore, there is no benefit even if we adopt everlasting independent things, as do those who bring in the forms, unless there is in them some source capable of producing change; moreover, even this is not enough, not even if there is another independent thing besides the forms, since if it is not going to be at work, there will not be motion” (ibid).

A pure form or logical universal that is not “actual” cannot explain motion. Once again, motion as the actualization of a potential depends on a pre-existing actuality.

“What’s more, it is not enough even if it will be at work, if the thinghood of it is potency, for there would not be everlasting motion, since what has being in potency admits of not being” (ibid).

Further, any first cause of motion must be everlasting, continuous, and unchanging in its action. That is to say, it must itself be purely actual, with no admixture of potentiality. It would not be sufficient to explain everlasting, continuous motion if the first cause just happened to be actual for some period of time.

“Therefore it is necessary that there be a source of such a kind that the thinghood of it is being-at-work. On top of that, it is necessary that these independent things be without material, for they must be everlasting, if indeed anything else is everlasting. Therefore they are being-at-work” (ibid).

As he just suggested, any first cause of all must therefore be a pure actuality with no potentiality. What Aristotle calls matter is kind of potentiality, so the first cause must have no matter either.

“For how will things have been set in motion, if there were not some responsible thing at work? For material itself, at any rate, will not set itself in motion” (p. 239).

“And this is why some people, such as Leucippus and Plato, bring in an everlasting activity, for they say there is always motion. But why there is this motion, and what it is, they do not say, nor the cause of its being in a certain way or some other way. For nothing moves at random, but always something must be present to it, just as now something moves in a certain way by nature, but in some other way by force or by action of intelligence or something else” (ibid).

It is not enough to simply posit motion. This does not explain anything.

“And then, what sort of motion is primary? For this makes so much difference one can hardly conceive it. But surely it is not possible for Plato to say what he sometimes thinks the source of motion is, which sets itself in motion; for the soul is derivative, and on the same level as the heavens, as he says” (ibid).

The thought here seems to be that if there is a first cause of motion, there must be a primary sort of motion that it primarily causes. For Aristotle, this is the movement of the fixed stars.

“Anaxagoras testifies that being-at-work takes precedence (since intellect is a being-at-work), as does Empedocles with love and strife, and so do those who say there is always motion, such as Leucippus; therefore there was not chaos or night for an infinite time, but the same things have always been so, either in a cycle or in some other way, if being-at-work takes precedence over potency. So if the same thing is always so in a cycle, it is necessary for something to persist always at work in the same way” (pp. 239-240).

If all things did not come from something that is an actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment, then they could only come from what the poets called “chaos and night”. But if all things came from chaos and night, there would be no hope of understanding anything. Aristotle suggests that several of his predecessors ought to have recognized the priority of actuality, as an implicit presupposition of what they did say.

“But since it is possible for it to be this way, and if it is not this way things will come from night and from ‘all things together’ and from not-being, these questions could be resolved; and there is a certain ceaseless motion that is always moving, and it is in a circle (and this is evident not only to reason but in fact), so that the first heaven will be everlasting” (ch. 7, p. 240).

He does not claim to positively know that actuality is necessarily prior to potentiality. He claims that the account is plausible, and that any alternative must lead back to sheer chaos, which would make it impossible for anything to be truly intelligible at all.

“Accordingly, there is also something that moves it. And since what is in motion and causes motion is intermediate, there is also something that causes motion without being in motion, which is everlasting, an independent thing, and a being-at-work” (ibid).

Behind each independent celestial motion, there must be some actual everlasting independent thing. Behind these, there must be something that is completely unmoved, and that is a pure actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment.

“But what is desired and what is thought cause motion in that way: not being in motion, they cause motion” (ibid).

For Aristotle, desire and thought are unmoved movers.

“But the primary instances of these are the same things, for what is yearned for is what seems beautiful, while what is wished for primarily is what is beautiful; but we desire something because of the way it seems, rather than its seeming so because we desire it, for the act of thinking is the beginning” (pp. 240-241).

Desire and thought both aim at what is good or beautiful. The way things seem — and consequently, the act of thinking or judging — drives wishing and willing, not vice versa. Further below, he will again emphasize the active rather than merely receptive role of thought.

“But the power of thinking is set in motion by the action of the thing thought, and what is thought in its own right belongs to an array of affirmative objects of which thinghood is primary, and of this the primary kind is that which is simple and at work” (p. 241).

Thinking itself is driven by the actuality of what it thinks. This does not negate his emphasis on thinking as act.

“But what is one and what is simple are not the same, for oneness indicates a measure, but what is simple is itself a certain way” (ibid).

The simplicity he attributes to the first cause is a stronger criterion than being one.

“But surely the beautiful and what is chosen in virtue of itself are also in that same array, and what is primary is always best, or analogous to it” (ibid).

First things are good and beautiful, and the first thing of all can be identified with the good and the beautiful.

“And that-for-the-sake-of-which is possible among motionless things, as the [following] distinction makes evident; for that-for-the-sake-of-which is either for something or belonging to something, of which the former is and the latter is not present among motionless things” (ibid).

Here he explicitly says that that-for-the-sake-of-which has a broader scope than any source of motion. Alone among the four kinds of causes, it provides ultimate reasons why things are what they are. Form may be identified with what things are, but that-for-the-sake of which is the cause of form and the reason why it is what it is.

“And it causes motion in the manner of something loved, and by means of what is moved moves other things” (ibid).

The highest kind of cause, that-for-the-sake-of-which, involves no force or compulsion or unconditional necessity. Other things are moved because they love it or are attracted by it, but they could not be so moved if they did not have their own sources of motion. They are not moved by some active power emanating from the first cause.

“But since there is something that causes motion while being itself motionless, this does not admit of being otherwise than it is in any respect at all” (ibid).

“For among changes, the primary one is change of place, and of this the primary kind is a circle, but this is what this mover causes” (ibid).

“Therefore [the first cause] is something that has being necessarily…. On such a source, therefore, the cosmos and nature depend” (pp. 241-242).

“And the course of its life is of such a kind as the best we have for a short time. This is so because it is always the same way (which for us is impossible), and because its being-at-work is also pleasure (which is what makes being awake, perceiving, and thinking the most pleasant things, while hopes and memories are pleasant on account of these)” (p. 242).

If we speak in terms of pleasure here, it would be of the highest possible sort. I think “pure delight” captures the meaning more clearly.

“And the thinking that is just thinking by itself is a thinking of what is best just as itself, and especially so with what is so most of all” (ibid).”

“But by partaking in what it thinks, the intellect thinks itself, for it becomes what it thinks by touching and contemplating it, so that the intellect and what it thinks are the same thing” (ibid).

And this, I say, is pure delight.

“For what is receptive of the intelligible and of thinghood is the intellect, and it is at work when it has them; therefore it is the being-at-work rather than the receptivity the intellect has that seems godlike, and its contemplation is pleasantest and best” (ibid, emphasis added).

He is saying that it is by virtue of the more perfect entelechy of intellect, which goes beyond the limited entelechy associated with motion — rather than intellect’s incidental touching or contemplation of something else — that intellect seems godlike. Here again he emphasizes the primarily active rather than receptive character of thought.

“So if the divine being is in this good condition that we are sometimes in, that is to be wondered at; and if it is in it to a greater degree than we are, that is to be wondered at still more. And that is the way it is” (ibid).

For Aristotle, the divine is not incommensurable with the human. Albeit in a very partial manner, we also partake of it, and the more so the more that we are moved by our highest values.

“But life belongs to it too, for the being-at-work of intellect is life, and that being is being-at-work, and its being-at-work is in itself the best life and is everlasting. And we say it is a god who everlastingly lives the best life, so that life and continuous and everlasting duration belong to a god; for this being is god” (ibid).

“That, then, there is an independent thing that is everlasting, motionless, and separate from perceptible things, is clear from what has been said. And it has also been demonstrated that this independent thing can have no magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible (for it causes motion for an infinite time, while no finite thing has an infinite power, and since every magnitude must be either finite or infinite, it cannot have magnitude, either finite, for the reason given, or infinite, because there is no infinite magnitude at all). But surely it has also been demonstrated that it cannot be affected or altered” (p. 243).

Sachs says in a note that the reference to a demonstration that the first cause is not involved with magnitude effectively incorporates the entire argument of the Physics by reference. Book VIII of the Physics has a far more thorough argument that there must be a first unmoved mover corresponding to the primary observable motion of the circling of the fixed stars, but that account does not address the what-it-is of things.

“But since… we see in addition to the motion of the whole heaven, other everlasting motions which belong to the planets…, it is necessary that each of these motions also be caused by something that is itself motionless and an everlasting independent thing. For the nature of the stars is for each to be an everlasting independent thing, while the mover is everlasting and takes precedence over the thing moved, and what takes precedence over an independent thing must be an independent thing” (ch. 8, p. 244).

The terrestrial independent things are mainly plants and animals. These have the richest entelechies among terrestrial perceptible things.

Aristotle also acknowledges each star participating in the motion of the heaven as an entelechy of its own. At least in a way, it is superior to ours, in that to all appearances it lasts forever.

The stars he calls planets are those that stand out by having observable independent motions of their own, different from the primary motion that they share with all the stars that are called “fixed” by contrast.

“[B]ut the number of motions is already something one must examine from that kind of mathematical knowledge that is the nearest kin to philosophy, namely from astronomy. For this kind makes its study about perceptible, everlasting thinghood, while the others, such as those concerned with numbers and with geometry, are not about thinghood at all” (ibid).

“[A]s for how many [independent motions] there happen to be, we now state what some of the mathematicians say, for the sake of a conception of it, … and as for what remains, it is necessary to inquire into some things ourselves, while listening to what other inquirers say about others. If something should seem to those who busy themselves with these matters to be contrary to what has just now been said, it is necessary to welcome both accounts, but trust the more precise one” (pp. 244-245).

“[F]or let the number that is necessary be left for more relentless people to say” (p. 246).

Apparently he made an arithmetic error counting the motions (“either 55 or 47”, where the 47 should have been 48, according the details I have not reproduced), then made a joke of it. I don’t believe Aristotle is very attached to specific enumerations of any sort. It is the principles upon which distinctions are based that matter.

“There has been handed down from people of ancient and earliest times a heritage, in the form of myth, to those of later times, that these original beings are gods, and that the divine embraces the whole of nature. The rest of it was presently introduced in mythical guise for the persuasion of the masses and into laws for use and benefit” (p. 247).

The divine embraces the whole of nature. We still name the planets by the Roman names for the Greek gods that were associated with them in antiquity.

Next he seems to respond to, or perhaps anticipate, doubts about what he said earlier about intellect.

“Now concerning the intellect there are certain impasses, for it seems to be the most divine of things that are manifest to us, but the way it is if it is to be of that sort contains some things that are hard to digest. For if it thinks nothing, what would be solemn about that? Rather, it would be just like someone sleeping. But if it does think, but something else has power over it, then, since it is not thinking but potency that is the thinghood of it, it could not be the best independent thing, for it is on account of its act of thinking that its place of honor belongs to it. And still, whether the thinghood of it is a power of thinking or an activity of thinking, what does it think?” (ch. 9, p. 247).

“For [what intellect thinks] is either itself or something else, and if it is something else, either always the same one or different ones. And then does it make any difference, or none, whether its thinking is of what is beautiful or of some random thing? Isn’t it even absurd for its thinking to be about some things? Surely it is obvious that it thinks the most divine and honorable things, and does not change, since its change would be for the worse, and such a thing would already be a motion” (p. 248).

Intellect will prefer the beautiful and the good over any random thing. Physics book VII much better explains why certain things that we are used to calling “changes” are not considered changes in his way of speaking.

“First, then, if it is not an activity of thinking but a potency, … it is clear that something else would be more honorable than the intellect, namely what it thinks…. Therefore what it thinks is itself, if it is the most excellent thing, and its thinking is a thinking of thinking” (ibid).

For a third time, he insists that intellect is primarily active, rather than receptive. Its main concern seems to be with whatever is most good and beautiful and honorable. It is a thinking of thinking — true higher-order thinking, rather than a first-order “thinking” of something external.

“But [the human soul’s] knowledge and perception and opinion and step-by-step thinking seem always to be about something else, and about themselves only as something secondary” (ibid).

The above seems to be in implicit contrast with the active thinking about which he was speaking just before. In this way, intellect in its own right is unlike the human soul.

“What’s more, if the thinking and the being thought are different, then in virtue of which of them does what is good belong to it? For to be an act of thinking and to be something thought are not the same” (ibid).

They are the same and yet not the same. Of course, this is in different respects. This is the model for many similar formulations in Hegel.

“Or is it rather that in some cases the knowledge is the thing it is concerned with, so that in the case of the kinds of knowing that make something, the thinghood without material and what it is for something to be, or in the case of the contemplative kinds of knowing, the articulation, is both the thing the knowledge is concerned with and the activity of thinking it? So since what is thought and what is thinking are not different with as many things as have no material, they will be the same, and the act of thinking will be one with what is thought” (ibid).

Here he suggests that we may after all be able to see instances of this identity by reflecting on our experiences of productive and contemplative knowing. Insofar as we actually know anything, we partially escape the inherent limitations of the human soul.

“But there is still an impasse left as to whether what is thought is composite, for then thinking would be changing among the parts of the whole. Or is it the case that everything that has no material is indivisible?” (pp. 248-249).

Implicitly, he seems to favor the latter alternative. Then twice more he speaks of intellect’s predilection for what is good and best.

“So the condition the human intellect, or that of any composite being, is in at some period of time (for it does not have hold of what is good at this or that time, but in some whole stretch of time it has hold of what is best, since that is something other than itself), is the condition the thinking that thinks itself is in over the whole of time” (p. 249).

Again, for Aristotle we have a little bit of the divine within us insofar as we have intellect, so there is no radical incommensurability between the divine and the human.

“One must also consider in which of two ways the nature of the whole contains what is good and best, whether as something separate, itself by itself, or as the order of the whole of things. Or is it present in both ways…?” (ch.10, p. 249).

Book Lambda’s final chapter ends with a quote from a speech by Odysseus in Homer’s Iliad. The whole chapter is oriented toward this literary image. At this point in the Iliad, the Greeks had been in complete disarray, a confused mass, but Odysseus’ words restore their morale and disciplined unity. (Notably, Odysseus was not the high king or commander-in-chief, though he was a leader. It was what he said that mattered.) Aristotle wants us to see this as a metaphorical answer to the question just posed. What is good and best must indeed be present in both ways — both as from the first cause, and as distributed and embodied throughout the whole — but he wants to emphasize that the “for the sake of which” of the first cause plays a real leading role, even though it does not govern by force.

“But beings do not present the aspect of being badly governed” (pp. 251-252).

As we have seen, this does not mean that all the facts of the world are as they ought to be. It does mean that life and the world are essentially good.

Next in this series: Reflections on Book Lambda

Essence and Concept

Partway through my reading of Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, I suggested that maybe Hegel intended his “logic of essence” as an account of what he takes from Aristotle’s view of the conditions of intelligibility, and his “logic of the concept” or “subjective logic” as a statement of his own and Kant’s contributions in this same area. This is too simple.

To hazard another extremely broad-brush summary, the big message of the logic of essence is that deeper truth is not immediate; it does not just lie on the surface of appearances, ready for us to pluck as a ripe fruit and consume. Nor is it a kind of “secret knowledge” that could be straightforwardly communicated by one who knew, if she chose to do so. We need a long detour in order to better get at things. We should not be simply beholden to appearances, but neither should we neglect them. Rather, we need to interpretively work through them.

Essence was never supposed to be a matter of dogmatic affirmation. The very idea that there is a deeper truth implicitly calls on us to interpret it.

Hegel’s “logic of the concept” focuses on the activity of interpretation and judgment. This is what makes it “subjective”. But this notion of “subjective” has nothing to do with what we think of as merely subjective. It is not about accidents having to do with us, but about the process of getting to deeper truth, which underlies Platonic and Aristotelian “dialectic” (see also Aristotelian and Hegelian Dialectic; Reflection and Dialectic; Reflection and Higher-Order Things; Dialogue).

While Kant and Hegel dwell more explicitly and at greater length on aspects of this process, I don’t see how it is possible to begin to properly understand Aristotle without taking his concern for the process of interpretation and judgment into account. Wisdom — the ultimate object of philosophy — is not knowledge; it is not reducible to a kind of static content.

Hegel wants to say that the logic of essence implicitly presupposes the logic of the concept — that essence presupposes the need for interpretation. I think Aristotle would strongly agree.

Meaningful “Seeing”

We ordinarily “see” things with the appearance of immediate meaning — for instance, not just patches of color but recognizable objects and individuals. We experience these as having properties that we expect to hold under various conditions that do not apply at present. We also seem to immediately apprehend subtler aspects of situations that presuppose what Kant and Hegel called “reflection” to discern and express at all. This goes far beyond any simple passive registering of sense data.

The Stoics tried to bridge the gap between a theorized passivity of perceiving and knowing and the already meaningful character of experience in a naturalistic way, by positing some kind of material transmission of “phantasms” from objects to the perceiver.

Variants of this were adopted by many Latin scholastics under the name of “sensible species”. By analogy, Aquinas and others argued for the real existence of “intelligible species” that could be passively received by the intellect.

However, medieval nominalists already anticipated modern empiricism in rejecting both sensible and intelligible species, and medieval Augustinians argued for a much larger role of active powers of the soul in the apprehension of meaning.

Kant and Hegel broadly agree with the nominalist and empiricist critique of the theory of passive transmission of species, and with an abstracted version of the Augustinian thesis of the role of active capabilities in perception and knowledge.

How this all relates to Aristotle involves many subtleties, some of which are mentioned in Aristotle on Perception.

(See also Berkeley on Perception; Kantian Synthesis; Imagination: Aristotle, Kant; Taking “Things” as True; Husserl on Perception; Primacy of Perception?; The Non-Primacy of Perception; What We Saw.)