Tag: Actualization

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.

Potentiality and Actuality

Here I will treat what Aristotle says about potentiality and actuality in Metaphysics book Theta (IX). On this closer reading, I was initially disappointed that he did not say more about how potentiality and actuality provide the detailed basis for the “internal” teleology that is at the core of his thinking. But on further reflection, perhaps this is another case of what I have elsewhere appreciated as a kind of careful minimalism.

“[L]et us make distinctions also about potency [aka potentiality] and complete being-at-work [aka actuality], and first about potency in the sense in which it is meant most properly, although it is not the sense that is most useful for what we now want. For potency and being-at-work apply to more than just things spoken of in reference to motion. But when we have discussed them in this sense, we will make clear their other senses in the distinctions that concern being-at-work” (ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 167).

This most elementary sense of what I prefer to guardedly call potentiality was originally developed in the Physics, in connection with the theory of what he broadly calls “motion”. Here, he will ultimately extend it to cases that do not involve motion in this sense. I tend to think of the latter cases as primary.

“[A]s many [senses of potency] as point to the same form are all certain kinds of sources… of change in some other thing or in the same thing as other. For one kind is a power of being acted upon, which is a source in the acted-upon thing itself of passive change by the action of something else or of itself as other; another is an active condition of being unaffected for the worse…. And these potencies are in turn spoken of as only acting or being acted upon, or as acting and being acted upon” (pp. 167-168).

This is a thin, elementary definition, like that of substance in the Categories, with no mention of potentiality’s important role in Aristotle’s teleology. Until recently, working mostly from memory, I had not been thinking about what he calls “sources” (something strictly broader than “causes”) at all, or about this Physics sense of potentiality that is specifically a “source” of motion.

In the Physics, motion is in fact defined in terms of elementary versions of potentiality and actuality. Aristotle says “thus the fulfillment [actuality, being-at-work] of what is potentially, as such, is motion — e.g., the fulfillment of what is alterable, as alterable, is alteration; of what is increasable and its opposite, decreasable… increase and decrease; of what can come to be and pass away, coming to be and passing away; of what can be carried along, locomotion” (book III ch. 1, Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. 1, p. 343).

I rather like the Collected Works translators’ choice of “fulfillment” as an English alternative to “actuality” or “being-at-work”. Grounded more in what Aristotle says about energeia than in the etymology of the new Greek word he coined for it, it does nicely capture the teleological role of actuality. Translation is often not a simple affair.

The Physics definition of motion, though, is a tricky thought: the actuality of something that as such is a potentiality. This illustrates that there can be a kind of layering with respect to these terms.

“And it is clear that there is a sense in which the potency of acting and being acted upon is one (since something is potential both by means of its own potency to be acted upon and by something else’s potency to be acted upon by it), but there is a sense in which they are different” (p. 168).

The way in which these potentialities of acting and being acted upon are said to be “one” is structurally similar to what he says in On the Soul and Metaphysics book Lambda about thought and the thing thought being one. It seems like Aristotle might consider that to be one case of this.

“[A]ll the arts and productive kinds of knowledge are potencies” (ch. 2, p. 169).

This sort of case is very important to remember when considering the meanings of “potentiality” or “source of motion”. When he is speaking the most carefully, Aristotle says the art of building is the primary “source of motion” for the building of a house.

“And all potencies that include reason are capable of contrary effects, but with the irrational ones, one potency is for one effect, as something hot has a potency only for heating, while the medical art is capable of causing disease or health” (ibid).

He treats this thesis about rational potentialities producing “contrary” effects as important. The sense seems to be that because the actualization of rational potentialities involves practical judgment about what is appropriate in a given situation, the judgment can go wrong, leading to the production of the “opposite” of the intended effect. Heat and similar things can’t “go wrong” in this way,

“And it is clear that, with the potency of doing something well, the potency of merely doing or suffering it follows along, while the former does not always follow along with the latter, since the one doing something well necessarily also does it, but the one merely doing it does not necessarily also do it well” (ibid).

This is a nice incidental mention of the normative dimension involved in all practical doing, though the technical point is about what cases include what other cases.

“There are some people, such as the Megarians, who say that something is potential only when it is active, but when it is not active it is not potential…. The absurd consequences of this opinion are not difficult to see…. [T]hese assertions abolish both motion and becoming. For what is standing will always be standing and what is sitting always sitting, since it will not stand up if it is sitting” (ch. 3, p. 170).

The Megarian logicians claimed that potentiality has no reality of its own — that everything that is, is actual. This position results in paradoxes similar to those following from the claims of Parmenides about non-being and being.

“What is capable is that which would be in no way incapable if it so happened that the being-at-work of which it is said to have the potency were present” (p. 171).

This is another specification I had lost track of working mainly from memory. I’m not sure how it would apply to his example of arts and productive knowledge, which comes closest to the extensions of Aristotelian potentiality that I have suggested (to characterize recent notions of both the “space of reasons” and “structure” as belonging to potentiality).

“And the phrase being-at-work, which is designed to converge in meaning with being-at-work-staying-complete [entelechy], comes to apply to other things from belonging especially to motions” (ibid).

This seems to be an application of Aristotle’s frequent distinction between how things are “for us” and how they are “in themselves”. The appeal to motion as a basis for understanding being-at-work or actuality is an appeal to common experience. But further below, he will contrast motion with being-at-work in a fuller sense.

He goes on to make a number of logical distinctions.

“[I]t cannot be true to say that such-and-such is possible, but will not be the case” (ibid).

(When we say something will not be the case, we are also implicitly saying there is no possibility that it will be the case. Therefore, it cannot be possible, and the statement contradicts itself.)

Potentiality is a more specific notion than possibility, but it seems that whatever is potential must also be possible, and therefore the generalization about possibility applies to all cases of potentiality.

“For the false and the impossible are not the same thing; for that you are now standing is false, but not impossible” (ch. 4, p. 172).

Similarly, generalizations about impossibility also apply to the more specific notion of potentiality.

“[I]t is also clear that, if it is necessary for B to be the case when A is, it is also necessary for B to be capable of being the case when A is capable of being the case” (ibid).

If there is a relation of necessity between actual things, then logically there must be a corresponding relation of necessity between the corresponding potential things. Possibility and necessity are the two most basic modalities in modern modal logic.

“Of all potencies, since some are innate, such as the senses, while others come by habit, such as that of flute playing, and others by learning, such as the arts, some, those that are by habit and reasoning need to have previous activity, while others that are not of that kind, and apply to being acted upon, do not need it” (ch. 5, p. 172).

For Aristotle, a sense like vision is to be understood first of all as a potentiality for the complete act of actually seeing. All other details — of optics, of physiology, of the operations of imagination, of what modern people might call the consciousness of seeing — that are conditions of the complete act, are subordinate to the complete act itself as a realized end. This is a good example of how Aristotle uses teleology to organize and coordinate other sorts of explanation.

The distinction between by “habit” (hexis, or acquired disposition) and by learning does not seem to be strict. Further below, he mentions practicing in order to play the harp as a form of learning, rather than habit. I think he is speaking casually both times. One might even say that all habits are learned; at the very least, they are acquired. (This broader term related to “second nature” seems to have been particularly important for al-Farabi, who uses it in his classic neoplatonizing elaboration of the Aristotelian theory of intellect.)

“[With irrational potencies] it is necessary, whenever a thing that is active and a thing that is passive in the sense that they are potential come near each other, that the one act and the other be acted upon” (pp. 172-173).

This formulation is surprising. I don’t understand why the qualification he applies immediately below for the case of rational potentialities (“not in every situation but when things are in certain conditions”) would not also apply to irrational potentialities. The distinction between the “rational” and “irrational” cases is based on presence or absence of a dimension of desire or choice, which seems not to affect the relevance of situations and conditions.

“[B]ut with [rational potencies] this is not necessary…. It is necessary, therefore, that there be something else that is governing; by this I mean desire or choice. For whatever something chiefly desires is what it will do whenever what it is capable of is present and it approaches its passive object…. not in every situation but when things are in certain conditions” (p. 173).

“Since what concerns the kind of potency that corresponds to motion has been discussed, let us make distinctions about being-at-work, to mark out both what it is and what sort of thing it is. For that which is potential will also be clear at the same time to those who make distinctions, since we speak of the potential not only as that which is of such a nature as to move some other thing or be moved by something else, … but also in another way, and it is because we are inquiring after that other meaning that we went through this one” (ch. 6, p. 173).

He explicitly says he will not define actuality or being-at-work, but instead suggests that we infer a pattern from a series of examples. Actually, it turns out that the more abstract pattern he is thinking of includes two distinct variants.

“The other way these things are present is in activity. And what we mean to say is clear by looking directly at particular examples, nor is it necessary to look for a definition of everything, but one can see at a glance, by means of analogy, that which is as the one building is to the one who can build, and the awake to the asleep, and the one seeing to the one whose eyes are shut but who has sight, and what has been formed out of material to the material, and what is perfected to what is incomplete…. But not all things that are said to be in activity are alike, except by analogy…. For some of them are related in the manner of a motion to a potency, others in the manner of thinghood to a material” (pp. 173-174).

At the end, he is now saying that motion and substance-essence-thinghood are the two alternate kinds of actuality or being-at-work. Motion is the “imperfect” kind that is still in process of realization, and substance-essence-thinghood is the “perfect” or “complete” kind that is an entelechy.

“And since, of the actions that do have limits, none of them is itself an end, but it is among things that approach an end, (such as losing weight, for the thing that is losing weight, when it is doing so, is in motion that way, although that for the sake of which the motion takes place is not present), this is not an action, or at any rate not a complete one; but that in which the end is present is an action. For instance, one sees and is at the same time in a state of having seen, understands and is at the same time in a state of having understood, or thinks contemplatively and is at the same time in a state of having thought contemplatively, but one does not learn while one is at the same time in a state of having learned, or get well while in a state of having gotten well. One does live well at the same time one is in a state of having lived well, and one is happy at the same time one is in a state of having been happy” (p. 174).

“And it is appropriate to call the one sort of action motion, and the other being-at-work. For every motion is incomplete: losing weight, learning, walking, house-building…; but one has seen and is at the same time seeing the same thing, and is contemplating and has contemplated the same thing. And I call this sort of action a being-at-work, and that sort a motion. So that which is by way of being-at-work, both what it is and of what sort, let it be evident to us from these examples” (pp. 174-175).

Motion and being-at-work are both said to be forms of “action”. Anything broad enough to comprehend both of these will not fit common connotations of the English word “action”, so we need to recognize that it is being used in a special sense closer to “activity”, which seems better suited to something that includes both.

“Now when each thing is in potency and when not must be distinguished, since it is not the case at just any time whatever…. Then it would be just as not everything can be healed, by either medical skill or chance, but there is something that is potential, and this is what is healthy in potency” (ch. 7, p. 175).

The reference to time does not seem to be essential. What seems decisive for these distinctions are the possibly blocking circumstances or “conditions” mentioned earlier.

“And since the various ways in which something is said to take precedence have been distinguished, it is clear that being-at-work takes precedence over potency. And I mean that it takes precedence not only over potency as defined, … but over every source of motion or rest in general. For nature too is in the same general class as potency, since it is a source of motion, though not in something else but in a thing itself as itself” (ch. 8, p. 177).

This is the first of several iterations on the precedence of actuality or being-at-work over potentiality. The way that he respectively defines potentiality and nature as sources of motion, they are strict logical complements of one another, so he is implying that all sources of motion are either natures or potentialities.

“And this is why it seems to be impossible to be a house-builder if one has not built any houses, or a harpist if one has not played the harp at all; for the one learning to play the harp learns to play the harp by playing the harp, and similarly with others who learn things…. But since something of what comes into being has always already come into being, and in general something of what is in motion has always already been moved…, presumably the one who is learning must also already have something of knowledge” (p. 178).

Aristotle’s account of the precedence of actuality over potentiality might be the origin of the “always already” theme. This is also the root of many interesting things that Hegel says about Wirklichkeit (commonly translated as “actuality”, with Aristotle in mind).

“But surely [being-at-work] takes precedence in thinghood too, first because things that are later in coming into being take precedence in form and in thinghood (as a man does over a boy, or a human being over the germinal fluid, since the one already has the form, and the other does not), and also because everything that comes into being goes up to a source and an end (since that for the sake of which something is is a source, and coming to be is for the sake of an end), but the being-at-work is an end, and it is for the enjoyment of this that the potency is taken on. For it is not in order to have the power of sight that animals see, but they have sight in order to see, and similarly too, people have the house-building power in order that they may build houses, and the contemplative power in order that they may contemplate; but they do not contemplate in order that they may have the contemplative power, unless they are practicing, and these people are not contemplating other than in a qualified sense, or else they would have no need to be practicing contemplating” (ibid).

Here he implicitly mentions the teleological aspect, referring to ends and that-for-the-sake-of-which.

Sachs aptly comments, “How does nature display that a squirrel has reached the completion for the sake of which it exists? In the spectacle of the squirrel at work being a squirrel…. Aristotle is arguing that the very thinghood of a thing is not what may be hidden inside of it, but a definite way of being unceasingly at-work, that makes it a thing at all and the kind of thing it is” (p. 179n).

(I would say “is what it is” instead of “exists” in the part about the squirrel.) The other part, that thinghood is not hidden inside things, but rather manifest in their ways of being at work, makes me think of what Hegel says about essence.

“[T]he putting to use of some things is ultimate (as seeing is in the case of sight…), but from some things something comes into being….[O]f those things from which there is something else apart from the putting-to-use that comes into being, the being-at-work is in the thing that is made…; but of those things which have no other work besides their being-at-work, the being-at-work of them is present in themselves (as seeing is in the one seeing and contemplation in the one contemplating, and life is in the soul, and hence happiness too, since it is a certain sort of life). And so it is clear that thinghood and form are being-at-work” (p. 179).

The last sentence is a principal new conclusion of book Theta: substance-essence-thinghood and form are both said to be cases of actuality or being-at-work.

Since actuality or being-at-work has already been identified with entelechy, this means that both independent things and (some) forms are now also being said to be entelechies. In the case of independent things, this is not surprising, given everything that was said about them in book Zeta. In the case of forms, I suspect he means that those forms that are souls are entelechies.

“But being-at-work takes precedence in an even more governing way; for everlasting things take precedence in thinghood over destructible ones, and nothing that is in potency is everlasting…. Therefore nothing that is simply indestructible is simply in potency (though nothing prevents it from being potentially in some particular respect, such as of a certain sort or at a certain place), and so all of them are at work. And none of the things that are by necessity is in potency (and yet these are primary, since if they were not, nothing would be), nor is motion, if there is any everlasting one; … and this is why the sun and moon and the whole heaven are always at work” (p. 180).

Aristotle generously calls everything “everlasting” that is apparently so, and for which he has no evidence to the contrary.

“And things that undergo change, such as earth and fire, mimic the indestructible things, since they too are always at work, for they have motion in virtue of themselves and in themselves” (p. 181).

What Aristotle calls matter is not itself alive, but nonetheless he says it has intrinsic motion. Motion, as we saw above, is defined in implicitly teleological terms in the Physics, using both potentiality and actuality. This is how the behavior of inanimate matter for Aristotle ends up having teleological characteristics.

“And that being-at-work is a better and more honorable thing than a potency for something worth choosing, is clear from these considerations. For whatever is spoken of as being potential is itself capable of opposite effects…. And in the case of bad things, it is necessary that the completion and being-at-work be worse than the potency…. Therefore it is clear that there is nothing bad apart from particular things, since the bad is by nature secondary to potency. Therefore among things that are from the beginning and are everlasting, there is nothing bad, erring, or corruptible” (ch. 9, pp. 181-182).

Things that don’t measure up to what they are supposed to be are “bad” examples of the kind of things that they are. I am surprised that he speaks of any “completion and being-at-work” of bad things at all.

“And geometrical constructions are discovered by means of activity, since it is by dividing up the figures that people discover them…. And so it is clear that the things that are in the figures in potency are discovered by being drawn into activity, … and for this reason it is only those who make a construction who know it” (p. 182).

Aristotle seems to anticipate the attitude of mathematical constructivism.

“[B]ut the most governing sense [of being and not being] is the true or the false…. For it is necessary to examine in what way we mean this. For you are not pale because we think truly that you are pale, but rather it is because you are pale that we who say so speak the truth” (ch. 10, p. 183).

I was a bit surprised when he earlier ruled out further discussion of being in the sense of the true and false attributed to the “is” or “is not” used to form propositions. But here, he goes on to speak of a different notion of truth, which seems to be more like metaphorically “grasping” an essence.

“But now for things that are not compound, what is being or not being, and the true and the false? For the thing is not a compound, so that it would be when it is combined and not be if it is separated, like the white on a block of wood or the incommensurability of the diagonal; and the true and false will not still be present in a way similar to those things. Rather, just as the true is not the same thing for these things, so too being is not the same for them, but the true or false is this: touching and affirming something uncompounded is the true (for affirming is not the same thing as asserting a predication), while not touching is being ignorant (for it is not possible to be deceived about what it is, except incidentally). And it is similar with independent things that are not compound, since it is not possible to be deceived about them; and they are all at work, not in potency, for otherwise they would be coming into being and passing away, but the very thing that is does not come to be or pass away, since it would have to come from something. So it is not possible to be deceived about anything the very being of which is being-at-work, but one either grasps it or does not grasp it in contemplative thinking; about them, inquiring after what they are is asking whether they are of certain kinds or not” (p. 184).

What is meant to be included under “independent things that are not compound” and “anything the very being of which is being-at-work” — about both of which it is said to be impossible to be deceived — has yet to be specified.

The “grasping” and “touching” metaphors here need not be taken as literally implying a kind of immediate experiencing. The next book will be explore at length the ways in which things are one, and thus form wholes. I think the implicit emphasis here is on a grasping of things as integral wholes. When we think of an essence as an integral whole, either we get it or we don’t, just as he says here. How we are able to do this is another question, not addressed here, but I think that for rational animals, the immediacy of grasping an essence can only be what Hegel would call a “mediated” immediacy.

“The true is the contemplative knowing of these things, and there is no falsity, nor deception, only ignorance, and not the same sort of thing as blindness; for blindness would be as if someone were not to have the contemplative power at all” (ibid).

The True and the Good

For Plato and Aristotle, considerations of truth are not separable from questions of value. Hegel pushes this further, to the point where only as good can anything really be true. He effectively argues for the identity of the true and the good. Apparent surface truths that are ugly have to be rejected as not really true. This means not that we should try to pretend they are illusory or unimportant, but that we should do something about them. It is up to us to make the world more true and right. This is how we participate in the “world’s purpose”. (See also Emancipatory Logic?; The Logic’s Ending.)

A Logic of Being?

We’ve reached part 2 of Robert Pippin’s important Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Despite recently mentioned peripheral caveats, I’m enormously impressed with the way he makes sense of Hegel’s Science of Logic, possibly the most difficult philosophical work ever written.

He now begins a high-level survey of the three separate “logics” Hegel develops. It is essential to Hegel’s scheme that the first two will be regarded as failures in the explanation of what is involved in making things intelligible. For Hegel, failures of thought play an essential, irreducible role in the attainment of new insights. The perspectives achieved by thought are not “refuted” by other perspectives external to those achieved; instead, the achieved perspectives metaphorically “discover” their own inability to solve their own problems.

We’ve already seen the first move of the first of these failed accounts of what it is to be intelligible, the logic of being.

Hegel uses the further development of this account as a vehicle for discussing the Kantian categories of quantity and quality. If his first point was that being qua being is utterly sterile because intelligibility depends on the ability to make definite determinations, the elaboration begins to show the relational character of all determination, and at the same time the failure of any simple assertion of properties of things (“judgment”, in the severely truncated early modern form that reduces it to predication) to adequately make those things intelligible.

Pippin does not go into detail on Hegel’s lengthy discussion of quantity and quality, so for instance there is no more mention of the issue about good and bad infinity, though this is where Hegel treats it. Pippin reserves the most space for the final logic of the concept that is supposed to be successful, and gives the least to the logic of being, which according to Hegel is the least adequate.

In discussing the logic of being, Pippin is mainly concerned to extract takeaway points relevant to understanding the high-level “movement” of Hegel’s logic as a whole. I have been highlighting his suggestion that this notorious “logical motion” is teleological in a genuinely Aristotelian sense, rather than being either deductive, or somehow univocally driven forward by contradiction. It is all oriented toward the merely hypothetical necessity of what is required if we aim to reach a deeper truth. Pippin is at pains to point out that for Hegel as for Aristotle, every teleological actualization involves contingency.

“The idea is to begin with the thought of anything at all, in its immediate indeterminacy, simply being, Sein. But the thought of anything at all is not the thought of anything…. Nothing is excluded, so nothing is included…. It is a failed thought, not the thought of this failure or even just the enactment of the failure. This is the beginning of everything of significance in the Logic; it (the thought of Sein being nothing other than Nichts [nothing]) is the reflective relation to what is being thought that is inseparable from anything possibly being thought. It is thought’s apperceptive moment…. Just thereby, thinking is thinking its failure to be thinking, not thinking of a strange object, Nichts. It is only in this sense that the first moment has a second moment, a realization of what thinking must be to be thinking of anything” (p. 186).

“Such a reflective determination reveals both that such putative immediate indeterminacy must itself already be a determination, and that such a putative content, anything at all in its immediate indeterminacy, has not been transformed, has not ‘become’ Nichts, but that it always already was” (p. 187).

“Hegel here is doing something like making a case for, or at least in some way showing us, the apperceptively discursive nature of any possible discursive intelligibility. This also means that in judging anything, I am always also implicitly holding open the possibility of the self-correcting of judging…. Or, any judgment always implicitly applies, is implicitly applying, the concept of judgment to itself” (p. 189).

That apperceptive judgment always implicitly applies the concept of judgment to itself follows from its apperceptive, reflective nature. To be apperceptively reflective is to be self-referential, Pippin has been saying.

“As Kant insisted, in any such case I must be able to ‘stand above’ what I judged and what I now judge correctly and take the latter to be a correction of the former in order for it to be that, a correction. Otherwise, there is just a succession of episodes. This is why he could say that the understanding, the power of claiming, is the synthetic unity of apperception (in the same way, I am ultimately claiming in this book, Hegel is claiming that what he calls the concept is the synthetic unity of apperception)” (ibid).

“This also means, as we have been stressing, that given certain concepts of the power of knowing — say, a knowing that must be indeterminate and immediate, a ‘resolve’ to begin with such a notion — we already have thereby the concept of the object of such pure knowing, Being. If we are talking about a case of knowing, as we are, the two are, must be, inseparable…. There is no question, here or anywhere in the Logic, of the need to ‘move’ from the order of knowing to the order of being. If that were claimed to be necessary, how would we have begun with a case of knowing?” (pp. 189-190).

This intimate connection between the form of knowing and the object of knowing is Hegel’s alternative to the difficult “transcendental deduction” by which Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason aims to establish that the categories of thought really are relevant to experience. Pippin suggests that Hegel generally reinterprets Kantian dualities as cases of Aristotelian hylomorphism, and notes that even Kant occasionally makes remarks tending in this direction. In this particular case, reinterpreting the duality as a hylomorphism eliminates the “gap” between thought and being that in Kant creates the need for the transcendental deduction.

I confess, though, that it was not obvious to me that we had begun with a case of knowing. I have trouble identifying any kind of failed thought or thought that fails to have a content with knowing; I am not used to recognizing the possibility of an empty “knowing”.

But we are at least implicitly talking about an instance of thought here, even if it is a degenerate instance. Pippin is arguing that even that failed, empty thought must still be self-referential, just in being a case of thought in Hegel’s sense at all. By virtue of its form as thought or apperceptive judgment, it is already reflectively turned back on itself. I think Pippin is suggesting that that turning back on itself counts as a kind of knowing at the meta level, even though the thought failed at ground level.

“[T]here is no objection in Kant or among the relevant post-Kantians, in their denial that thinking is a kind of perceiving or primarily receptive, to the general form of such claims as ‘I know it because I saw it’, especially because that is the invitation to establishing that it can be seen by anyone…. But for thinking as such, there is nothing like: ‘I know that is the essence because I had an essence-intuition…'” (p. 190).

I am more reserved about claims like “I know it because I saw it”. Plato would not accept this as an instance of knowledge, and I am inclined to follow suit. I would say, “I believe it with confidence because I saw it”. But Pippin makes a good point here about the implicit invitation to treat this as the claim that it could be seen by anyone.

As I have noted before, what I prefer to call belief and others call a form of immediate, noninferential empirical “knowledge” are not just arbitrary assertions. Though we arrive at such beliefs “spontaneously” (in the ordinary sense, which is nearly the inverse of the Kantian sense), after the fact it is always possible to ask about the reasons for them.

I am claiming that after the fact, it should always be possible to express something of why we believe what we do. “Because I saw it” is not a reason, but a reiteration that it appeared that way to me. Intrinsically, it has no more value than “because I said so”. The kind of reasons that can be provided in this case will be persuasive (or, in Aristotle’s usage, “probable”) to some degree or other, but also potentially refutable. Typically they will take the form of more detailed claims about what we saw.

“Fichte insists on the same point that is made in the first move in the Logic… by pointing out the difference logically between ‘A’ and ‘A = A’. For the latter, we need… an ‘I’ that is ‘= I’…. But this identification is something done, a Tat [deed], the equivalent here of ‘bringing contents to the unity of apperception’ in Kant’s account, an active unifying necessary for the I to be continuously that I in experience” (p. 191).

As Aristotle pointed out, merely saying something (“A”, “Being”, or whatever) is not yet saying something about something, which turns out to be the minimal condition for truth or falsity. This formulation points to some kind of self-relatedness in the attitude toward content that seems to be a minimal condition for any kind of assertion. This self-relatedness in the content of assertions seems to be related to the inherent self-referentiality of thought for which Pippin is arguing, as if the one were a sort of hylomorphic reflection of the other.

I used to misunderstand the above argument of Fichte as additionally requiring the existence of an “I” like a rabbit out of a hat, but again we are only dealing with hypothetical necessity here. If I want to be able to conclude “A = A”, then I need to be able to apply the same identification “A” twice within the context of one judgment. That the two identifications of “A” must be combined within the context of one judgment is the sole import of Fichte’s “I = I”. If there is any existence of an I involved here, it is by hypothesis.

Pippin stresses that although Hegel speaks of logical “movement” in temporal metaphors, each part of the “movement” has always already occurred. Once again, Hegel is not talking about what drives the course of events, but something like the conditions of possibility of the constitution of intelligibility and normativity.

He goes on to discuss more problems related to immediacy, and the transition to the logic of essence, each of which I’ll address separately.

Anything at All

I was surprised to see the way that Pippin talks about “the thought of anything at all”. For him “anything at all” is apparently the unique failed thought of the utterly indeterminate, taken as a single abstract pseudo-thing with no characteristics.

What I thought of first on seeing this phrase was rather the indefinitely vast multitude of different things of all sorts that could be thought of. “Anything at all” could be idea of the good, or Hegel’s left shoelace, or absolutely any other “thing” in the broadest possible sense, but in each case I would want to say that it is something. The one (pseudo) thing I think “anything at all” excludes is the symbolic term “nothing” and its analogues.

As Hegel points out, the thought of “the indeterminate immediate” is in reality the thought of nothing at all. I think he is right that without distinction there is no intelligibility, and that the abolition of all distinction in Parmenidean Being makes it inferentially and thus “logically” equivalent to Nothing. No consequences could follow from anything that has no characteristics.

The utterly indeterminate is already equivalent to Nothing, independent of the mention of immediacy. Things are equivalent or not based on the equivalence of their characteristics, so all nominal or pseudo “things” with no characteristics are equivalent to one another. Parmenidean Being falls to Hegel’s critique because Parmenides denies that it is determined in any way whatoever.

Although I agree with Hegel that the utterly indeterminate is nothing, I don’t at all want to identify the phrases “anything at all” and “nothing at all”, which is the direction in which Pippin’s usage of “anything at all” seems to me to tend. I take “nothing at all” to name the one case that “anything at all” (i.e., any thing at all, i.e., anything that can be distinguished) excludes.

What Pippin really meant was “the thought of ‘anything at all'”. Adding explicit scare quotes around “anything at all” makes it clear that it is intended as an “immediate” concept, rather than invitation to substitute what we please. The thought of “anything at all” is equivalent to the thought of nothing at all. This is a very specific point about terminological clarity that has little to do with the important and valuable main argument of Hegel’s Realm of Shadows.

I mention this only because I seriously misunderstood the first reference Pippin made to “the thought of anything at all”, before he explicitly connected it to Hegel’s thesis of the nullity of Parmenidean Being. He said something like, “For Hegel, logic begins with the thought of anything at all”, and I initially took that to refer to any of the vast multitude of possible thoughts. I mistook the message to be that what we begin with is of little import; what matters much more is the form of the course of development and actualization and making explicit. That is true also, but in the passage, it turns out that Pippin was referring forward to the material I covered in the last post.

Emancipatory Logic?

When it comes to Hegel’s “logic” the first question is, what does it really aim at? What is it even trying to do? Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows (2019) is the best attempt to answer this I have found so far.

“[Hegel] seems to promise something quite extraordinary and, no doubt to contemporary ears, something quite implausible, a treatment of ‘logic’ in some way in service of an emancipatory ideal — an emancipatory logic, of all things” (p. 24).

To briefly anticipate, it will be emancipatory in addressing the Aristotelian actualization of Kantian freedom.

“[T]he most important element in Hegel’s fulfilling such an ambition… is a ‘science of pure thinking’. What any thinking does is to render something intelligible, a task that, as we shall see, has many different dimensions and is inseparable from the giving of reasons. But, as we have also noted, to say what something is, or to explain why something happened, or to understand the point or purpose of anything, is not just to present a picture or grasp a content. It is to judge, something always open to challenge and interrogation” (p. 20).

What Hegel calls pure thinking is concerned with and exhibits the general shape of the space of reasons.

“Eventually… we would need a fully reflective account of the ‘ground of giving grounds’…. In the practical domain, in Kant and the post-Kantians, I am free when I am acting on reasons about what ought to be done. This is a form of self-consciousness that, according to Kant, is paradigmatically embodied when I act wholly on reasons, and not just prudently or instrumentally, as when I act for the sake of ends I have not rationally determined I ought to have” (p. 21).

Put another way, all our reasons ought to trace back to the highest good. When our reasons stop at some partial good, we are not yet free.

“[I]n just the same sense as Hegel will want to treat concept and intuition in experience as distinct but inseparable, he will want to say that so-called ‘material’ issues… are inseparable from forms of self-understanding, as inseparable as such forms are from their material embodiment” (p. 22).

Hegel’s strong emphasis on actuality and actualization leads him to see something like Aristotelian hylomorphism (inseparability of form and matter) in places where Kant tended to see dualities. For Hegel as for Aristotle, our true intent is expressed by what we actually did.

Pippin quotes the Phenomenology Preface’s statement that the task of modernity “consists in actualizing and spiritually animating the universal by means of the sublation of fixed and determinate thoughts” (p. 24).

“Hegel’s unease with [the dominance of fixed representations] is what begat those familiar later claims about the ‘ideological’ nature of bourgeois philosophy, the one-dimensionality of modern societies, the dominance of ‘identity thinking’, the crisis of the European sciences, the colonization of the life-world, and so forth. And while all such critiques can be traced back to Hegel, he does not make the case for such limitations by contrast with a positive or utopian theory, as is the case in many of these examples” (p. 25).

Hegel aims at a purely immanent development of self-critical understanding, in which forms of spirit all on their own eventually exhibit their own incompleteness and one-sidedness, rather than being claimed to fall short of some external ideal.

“Stated in the simplest possible terms, Hegel’s diagnosis of the fix we have gotten ourselves into consists in the claim that we have not properly understood how to understand ourselves and the social and natural world in which we dwell. This is not, though, because we have simply been regularly mistaken, the victim of false philosophies, wrong ideas. It is due to the inevitable partiality and one-sidedness of various ruling concepts (let us say, for shorthand, norms for explanation and justification, the normative structures of the ‘space of reasons’)” (p. 26).

The solution is not a matter of simply substituting more correct first-order beliefs. Of far greater import are our higher-order ways of thinking, judging, and assessing.

“Moreover, the problem is not the contents of our beliefs but the way we have come to collectively regulate what is believable…. Our norms for authoritative explanations and for how we justify ourselves to each other are imbricated in the everyday fabric of a form of life” (p. 28).

“Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Hegel’s basic claim… is that we have not properly understood the ‘grammar’ of spirit (the logic of self-relation, both individual and collective, that makes up spirit), and this is connected with our failure to understand the grammar of possible renderings-intelligible or account-givings in general…. And it would also not be an exaggeration to say that, for Hegel, once we do understand it, we (at least we philosophers) will be freed from the illusion that some particular form of account-giving (like modern Verstand [understanding based on simple fixed predications]) could be taken to be ‘absolute’; the proper relativization (historically and systematically) of different accounts of account-giving will have been made. Or, stated in its most surprising form: Hegelian philosophy has no distinct doctrine of its own; its content is the right understanding of past attempts at account-giving in their limitations and interconnection” (p. 30).

This notion of a “grammar” of spirit is quite fascinating. “Self-relation” is at the heart of Hegel’s often misunderstood talk about the “true infinite”. Hegel wants to say that the ordinary grammar of subject and predicate as fixed terms is not a very good form for expressing thought, because it lacks “life”. Pure thought for Hegel involves moving beyond all fixed terms. Self-relation involves no substantive “self”, only the purely relational character of an always re-emerging unity of apperception. Freedom for Hegel has a kind of grounding in the “true infinite”, but this has nothing to do with an infinite power. What makes self-relatedness “infinite” is its relations-first character, which does not depend on any pre-given fixing of ground-level terms. For Hegel, higher-order form is more primary than first-order form. First-order terms are degenerate cases, not foundational instances.

“Apperceptive spontaneity is not understood as a subjective mental activity, opposed to or addressed to or imposed on what there is…. If we understand this properly, we understand apperceptive spontaneity ‘in its actuality’, as having ‘given itself’ its own actuality, the actuality of the intelligibles, what there is” (p. 35).

What is free in us is not a separate faculty of decision-making, but the open-endedness of the basis of our understanding. For Hegel, there is no gap between understanding and action. What we really understood or didn’t understand is made publicly interpretable by our action. Meanwhile, what there is is inseparable from the intelligibility of that “what”.

Pippin notes that the original context for talk about “spontaneity” in Kant was the latter’s insistence against the tradition that thought is entirely active in character. Thought for Kant includes no moment of passive receptivity, and therefore generates and is responsible for all of its own content. Hegel adopts this perspective.

“Put in terms of the history of philosophy, what all of this will amount to is an attempt by Hegel at a highly unusual synthesis of the Kantian revolution in philosophy, especially the anti-empiricist, self-grounding character of reason (aka ‘the Concept’), and the most important Kantian innovation, the spontaneity of thinking, together with essential elements of Aristotle’s understanding of metaphysics, especially the Aristotelian notions of energeia, which Hegel translates as Wirklichkeit, actuality, the proper object of first philosophy, and, as we have seen, the core of the classical view that ‘nous’ [intellect] rules the world, all in contrast to the rationalist metaphysics of nonsensible objects accessible to pure reason alone. Hegel is no metaphysician in this rationalist sense, but he is most certainly a metaphysician in the Aristotelian sense. That is, at any rate, the thesis of the following book” (ibid).

It is refreshing to see metaphysics treated as something other than an ahistorical lump extending from Parmenides to the present. Later common usage has diverged so far from the meaning of Aristotelian first philosophy that I prefer not to call the latter “metaphysics” at all, but that term loses its objectionable connotations insofar as the reference is tied to something specifically Aristotelian.

I think recognizing that Hegel fundamentally aimed to combine Kantian and Aristotelian insights in a principled way is essential for grasping what he was really about. But to even have the perspective that such an aim makes sense requires work on the interpretation of both Aristotle and Kant; one would never come up with it based on textbook stereotypes.

More than any other commentator, Pippin has developed both the Kantian and the Aristotelian dimensions of Hegel. Later in the current book, he will have more to say specifically about Hegel’s post-Kantian recovery of Aristotelian teleology.

(He says in passing that the earliest precedents for Kant’s view that thought and reason are never purely passive are from the late 16th century. That is not quite right. Alain de Libera has documented that the foremost medieval commentator on Aristotle, Averroes, explicitly interpreted Aristotle as saying that the so-called potential intellect has an “activity” of its own and is not purely passive. In fact, even sense perception is not just passive in Aristotle. Aristotle’s remarks about the synthesizing role of the “common” sense and “inner” sense are unfortunately extremely sketchy, but it seems beyond doubt that they do have a synthesizing role.)

Zambrana on Actualization

Building on the interpretations of Pipppin and Brandom, Rocío Zambrana in Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility (2015) argues that Hegel’s logic is based around the same notion of actualization that orients his ethics, and that actualization is none other than Hegel’s reformulation of Kantian synthesis. This is a fascinating complement to my previous focus on the Aristotelian background of Hegelian actualization. She argues that the main significance of the theory of the “absolute” idea in the Science of Logic is to make intelligibility a function of normativity.

She begins, “To be is to be intelligible, according to Hegel” (p. 3). Plato and Aristotle would concur.

Zambrana agrees with Pippin that Hegel defends the complete autonomy of reason, thus radicalizing Kant’s critical project. “For Kant, the sensible given and the postulates of practical reason (freedom, God, the immortality of the soul) are touchstones of knowledge, morality, faith. For Hegel, the only legitimate touchstone of a thoroughgoing critical philosophy is reason itself” (p. 4).

She suggests that intelligibility and normativity for Hegel are a matter of binding between ideality and reality that is always subject to renegotiation.

“In the Logic, Hegel pursues an immanent critique of classical ontology, philosophies of reflection, and transcendental idealism that allows him to elaborate his distinctive view of determinacy as a matter of the dialectical relation between ideality and reality” (p. 6).

“In what is perhaps the most puzzling passage of the Logic, Hegel describes the absolute idea as personality (Persönlichkeit). While puzzling, this passage is not mystifying. It is in fact key. It helps us specify the status of the absolute idea as the concept that elaborates the view that intelligibility is a matter of normative authority. It indicates that binding is the structure of intelligibility” (pp. 5-6; see also Substance and Subject).

“Hegel argues that form is nothing but negation” (ibid).

That form is negation for Hegel seems clear. But I constantly struggle to clarify the real meaning of negation in Hegel. For sure, it is not classical negation. But what exactly is it? To me, many of Hegel’s usages of negation and related terms seem metaphorical. Ordinarily, people use concrete metaphors to circuitously express more abstract things, but Hegel often uses the extreme abstraction of negation or negativity as a metaphor for various more concrete things or conditions. Negativity in Hegel therefore doesn’t seem to me to have a single fixed meaning. This ought not to be surprising, given Hegel’s strong opposition to single fixed meanings in general.

I sometimes think Hegel goes too far in this direction. Good definitions retain value for clarity of thought, even if they are always provisional and context-bounded. Hegel himself seems to recognize something like this when he emphasizes that understanding, despite its limitations, plays an essential role. I prefer Aristotle’s style of approaching things as “said in many ways” — where each of the ways is potentially definable, but there may be real question which is applicable in any given case — over unspecified generalized fluidity.

“Negation is necessarily a negation of something — whether a logical category, a philosophical position, a historically specific identity or institution. Form thus requires content in order to be negation. The central claim of Hegel’s theory of determinacy, then, concerns the negativity of form and the necessity of content” (ibid).

I am also very sympathetic to the importance of content, but a bit in doubt about the argument that negation in and of itself straightforwardly requires content to which it is applied. That would be true for negation in a formal sense that is not Hegel’s, but Hegel does not put much stock in fixed definitions, and he often speaks of a pure negativity that doesn’t seem to depend on anything else or refer to anything external to it. This I take to be part of what he calls the “inverted” perspective of otherness.

“Negativity is the inner determination of the way in which intelligibility is articulated within practices and institutions” (p. 7).

“Inner determination” here would be the purely “logical” aspect, as distinct from the social and historical.

“[N]egativity calls into question the assumption that the content of any normative commitment retains authority or stability within a historically specific form of life…. [Concrete forms of intelligibility] are subject not only to reversals of meanings and effects but also to coextensive positive and negative meanings and effects. For these reasons, no determination can be understood as final or fully stable” (ibid).

She seems to think this latter point is implicit but insufficiently emphasized in the readings of Pippin and Brandom. I think they already make it explicit. How much relative emphasis to give to determination versus fluidity is a delicate matter subject to considerations of context.

“[T]he key to Hegel’s idealism and its emphasis on negativity is his treatment of the Kantian problem of synthesis” (p. 12).

“Hegel follows Fichte’s reading of Kantian autonomy [as positing], yet he stresses that positing is a matter of actualization, which he understands in terms of normative authority. The activity of reason is a matter of distinction-making” (p. 37).

Provocatively, she suggests that Hegel makes a three-way identification of reason, imagination, and synthesis.

“Recall that Hegel suggests [in his early work Faith and Knowledge] that the transcendental unity of apperception and the figurative synthesis are one and the same synthetic unity. Hegel calls this one and the same synthetic unity ‘reason’. In fact, he argues that ‘the imagination is nothing but reason itself’…. Reason for Hegel, I want to suggest, is neither an epistemic faculty nor an ontological principle. It is the work of synthesis” (p. 40).

My instinct is still to distinguish reason from imagination, thinking of reasoning as mainly conscious and deliberate and imagination as mainly pre-conscious. Similarly, I am doubtful about early Hegel’s identification of Kantian unity of apperception and figurative synthesis. Both are forms of synthesis, but following Brandom I take the unity of apperception to be a kind of moral imperative, whereas I take the figurative synthesis of imagination to be something that happens pre-consciously. This seems like an important difference.

That the activity of reason in general is one of synthesis, however, is an excellent point.

“A totality of relations of negation is gathered together by inferential patterns that thereby institute a concrete determination of reason. Reason can thus be thought of as concrete forms, figures, or shapes of rationality articulated by a process of actualization” (ibid).

“A logic of actualization indicates that intelligibility is not only historically specific but also precarious and ambivalent” (p. 41).

She points out that for Kant, an individual concept is not itself a product of synthesis, whereas for Hegel it is.

“That a thing, event, idea is always already outside of itself… is not to the detriment of the thing. Rather, it is the thing’s way of becoming what it is” (p. 42).

She recognizes that Hegel’s teleology is Aristotelian rather than “classical” in form, and that teleology for both Aristotle and Hegel is inherently subject to contingency in its actualization. In neither Aristotle nor Hegel is the working out of teleology underwritten by an omnipotent power.

“Hegel does not articulate reason’s purposiveness in terms of a goal that is unambiguously realized, thereby affirming a classical teleology of reason. Hegel argues that reason is purposive ‘in the sense in which Aristotle also determines nature as purposive activity'” (ibid).

She recognizes that the import of Hegel’s famous “substance is also subject” is not an assertion of some cosmic mind, but rather is intended at a much more elemental level.

“The ‘tremendous power of the negative’ is accordingly the capacity of things to unfold in and through conditions that exceed them…. The actualization of reason is the subjectivity of things themselves” (p. 43).

The “subjectivity of things themselves” testifies that we have here moved beyond the opposition of subject and object that Hegel attributes to ordinary consciousness.

“Establishing the objectivity of subjectivity requires action (Handeln)…. Hegel’s appeal to action introduces the thought that Kant’s signature problem of objectivity is in effect a problem of normative authority” (p. 118; see also Hegel on Willing).

I would prefer to say activity rather than action, but in this context that is a nuance.

Constitution of Shared Meaning

The 20th century phenomenological tradition stemming from the work of Edmund Husserl emphasized that all meanings are constituted. With a very broad brush, one might say that Husserl redeveloped many Kant-like insights on a different basis, and with far greater detail in some areas. But like Kant, Husserl focused mainly on how each individual develops understanding for herself. Phenomenologists certainly discussed what they called “intersubjectivity”, but it always seemed to me like an afterthought. Husserl’s own development was quite complex, but it seems to me that the further he went in his later investigations of the constitution of meaning, the more he moved away from his early concern to emphasize that meaning is not something subjective.

It is the original “phenomenology” — that of Hegel — that seems to me to do a much better job of explaining simultaneously how meanings are constituted by us and yet how they are not subjective. Hegel does this by starting from the point of view of the development of shared meaning, and ultimately conceiving the constitution of meaning as a part of a great process extended across time and space. The process is grounded in concrete mutual recognition that nonetheless potentially extends to all rational beings. Individuals play an essential role in this as the anchoring points for its actualization, but do so as participants in free and open dialogue with others, rather than as the “owners” of meanings considered as private. Hegel used the Christian notion of the Holy Spirit manifesting between the members of a community as a philosophical metaphor for this.

Saying as Ethical Doing

Saying is a distinctive kind of doing. This goes way beyond the physical uttering of words, and beyond the immediate social aspects of speech acts. It involves the much broader process of the ongoing constitution of shared meaning in which we talking animals participate.

Before we are empirical beings, we are ethical beings. Meaning is deeply, essentially involved with valuations. The constitution of values is also an ongoing, shared process that in principle involves all rational beings past, present, and future. Our sayings — both extraordinary and everyday — contribute to the ongoing constitution of the space of reasons of which all rational beings are co-stewards. We are constantly implicitly adjudicating what is a good reason for what.

If immediate speech acts have ethical significance, this is all the more true of our implicit contributions to these ongoing, interrelated processes of constitution of meanings, valuations, and reasons. Everything we say becomes a good or bad precedent for the future.

Aristotle consistently treated “said of” relations in a normative rather than a merely empirical, factual, representational or referential way. Brandom has developed a “normative pragmatics” to systematically address related concerns. Numerous analytic philosophers have recognized the key point that to say anything at all is implicitly to commit oneself to it. As Brandom has emphasized, this typically entails other commitments as well. I would add that every commitment has meaning not only in terms of the pragmatic “force” of what is said, but also as a commitment in the ethical sense.

It is through our practices of commitment and follow-through that our ethical character is also constituted. As Robert Pippin has pointed out that Hegel emphasized in a very Aristotelian way, what we really wanted is best understood starting from what we actually did. In contrasting all this with the much narrower concept of speech acts, I want to return to an emphasis on what is said, but at the same time to take the “said” in as expansive a sense as possible. This is deeply interwoven with all our practical doings, and to be considered from the point of view of its actualization into a kind of objectivity as shared meaning that is no longer just “my” intention.

Ethics and Effectiveness

I’m sampling a French anthology edited by Gilbert Romeyer Dherbey and Gwenaëlle Aubry, Excellence in Life: On the Nicomachean Ethics and the Eudemian Ethics of Aristotle (2002; my translation throughout). Dherbey’s essay “Ethics and Effectivity in Aristotle” aims to show that Aristotle anticipates Hegel in successfully overcoming the apparent opposition between pure principles and the real world. This makes a nice complement to Robert Pippin’s discernment of strongly Aristotelian notions of actuality and actualization in Hegel’s ethics.

Dherbey begins by noting that some people situate pure ethics outside of all real-world effectiveness, while viewing real-world effectiveness as inevitably involving moral compromise, shortfall, deviation, and corruption. He associates this with “romanticism, from Schiller to Sartre” (p. 1). I think of the “beautiful soul” criticized by Hegel. Aristotle avoids this unfortunate result by emphasizing what Dherbey calls the “weight” of ethics, or “the inscription of the moral act in an exteriority that prolongs it” (ibid). Brandom makes the related point that we do not own or control the full scope of our deeds.

“The one who does nothing cannot act well”, Dherbey quotes from Aristotle’s Politics. Moral excellence is not constituted by intentions alone. Dherbey says that for Aristotle, “the validity of the intention is judged by the act that realizes it, or doesn’t realize it” (p.4, emphasis in original). Pippin develops a similar point in more detail in his remarks on actuality in Hegel.

For Aristotle it is not enough just to have the good will that Peter Abelard took to be the basis of virtue. According to Dherbey, Kant’s affirmation that nothing can be called good, if not a good will, makes intention the very source of the goodness of a good act. I am impressed by Nancy Sherman’s argument that Kant came closer to Aristotle than is commonly thought. But in any case, while Aristotle is far from disregarding the importance of what we might call the agent’s subjectivity, for him the goodness of an act depends on more than this.

Dherbey notes a major cleavage between Aristotle and the Stoics on another related point. For Aristotle, “not acting ‘lightly’ signifies that ‘intentional’ action, in order to be virtuous, must take support from a stable foundation, from a support that is none other than ethos or character…. It is indeed character, more than punctual intention in the modern sense of the term, that governs ethical choice” (p. 5; see also What We Really Want). It was the Stoics who bequeathed to later writers a strong notion of punctual decisions. I find the narrowing of ethics to a focus on punctual acts of decision to have consequences that are quite pernicious.

In closing, Dherbey quotes Hegel’s remark in his History of Philosophy lectures that for Aristotle, “The good in general is not defined as an abstract idea, but in such a way that the moment of realization finds itself essentially in it” (p. 12).

I would add that this is deeply related to Aristotle’s argument against Plato that potentiality at least in part depends on actuality, rather than being a power that simply produces the actual (or being a template that fully anticipates the actual, as Leibniz seems to have held).

Good will does not vindicate an action, but it does provide an additional reason to be forgiving in our evaluation of actions that turn out badly.