Tag: Astronomical Entities

Eternal Sensibles

Metaphysics Lambda chapter 8 returns to a consideration of astronomical entities as eternal sensible substances. While this “appears to be an insertion of physics (or of astronomy) into the metaphysical discourse” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 194, my translation throughout), Aubry sees it as fulfilling part of the program laid out in Lambda 1 for a unified account of the principles of all substance.

“Thoroughly interrogating [the principle’s] relation to the other substances allows the efficacity of the act without power to be shown” (p. 195).

Modern people are not generally used to thinking of the causality of a substance in relation to another substance. We are taught to approach causality in terms of events leading to other events, or to states of affairs. Aristotle on the other hand is less concerned with explaining particular events or states of affairs than with the much more general and multifarious question of why things are the way they are. He argues that “substance” (ousia) and final causality play the pivotal role in any account of the way things are.

Aristotelian substance is far from being simply the “kingdom of nouns”. For Aristotle no more than for Kant is the what-it-is of things a simple primitive that is just given to us. The “identities” of things are consequences of an involved process, and not a starting point. A substance is explained by its characteristic act, which can be further explained as aiming at a kind of entelechy. These can only be discovered by indirect means, through thoughtful interpretation.

“First, it is a matter of establishing against the Platonists that the principle is a cause, that it has efficacy, and in particular is able to explain the movements of the different substances, of which the theory of Ideas had failed to give an account…. Secondly, it is a matter of identifying the causality proper to the Good, while showing that the Good acts, not insofar as it has a dunamis, as suggested by the formula of Republic book VI, but insofar as it is energeia…. Finally, and this time against the Platonic episodism, it is a matter of marking not only that the Good is efficacious insofar as it has no power, but also that the separate substance is not disjoint from the other substances, though it has a primacy over them: or better, separation if it is conceived as being that of act and no longer that of form, determines the ordering, the very taxis of the ensemble of mobile substances” (ibid).

I am fascinated by this suggestion that the separate first substance is “not disjoint from the other substances”, and that “separation” is also a connecting link. Aristotle wants to emphasize the extent to which the astronomical substances are connected to the first cause by the nature of their ordering. Lambda 10 will extend this to earthly substances.

(We have seen the enumerated criticisms of Platonism before. While agreeing that Aristotle’s formulations in these areas represent a major advance, I also continue to find great value in many of Plato’s other insights.)

“It falls to Lambda 8 to show, against the Platonists, that if we conceive the principles and the separate substances as acts and not as Forms, we can give a complete and precise account of movement: not only that of the sphere of the fixed stars, but also those of the other spheres and planets” (p. 196).

The connection between astronomy and first philosophy that Aristotle works so hard to establish strikes me as poetically beautiful, but I don’t know what to do with it philosophically, except in the very broad sense that astronomical phenomena do affect earthly things, and represent a more inclusive cosmic whole of which our earth is but a part. I am personally inclined to de-emphasize this aspect in favor of his other characterizations of the first cause as the good, and as thought thinking itself. But on the other hand, his idea that the first cause moves other things as a final cause but not as a direct agent seems extraordinarily well argued, and incredibly fruitful and auspicious.

“But now is posed the problem of the relation between the unmoved prime mover and the others. These are ordered according to a hierarchy (taxis) , which follows that of the celestial movements. It appears nonetheless that this hierarchy is also ontological: unlike the first among them, which Lambda 7 had ended by identifying with god, the other unmoved movers are neither characterized in Lambda 8 as pure energeia, nor as identical with the first intelligible and with the best. Of them, it is said that they are immutable and eternal, but also impassible, and that ‘they have on their own attained the supreme good’…. This is insofar as they are ends, telos. Thus, unlike the prime mover, the others are not ends insofar as they are already themselves the good, but insofar as they have attained the good” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“But since it is said of them that they have attained the good, we can suppose that they have been in movement, and indeed that they have been in-potentiality: if the prime mover is always already an act without power, we can suppose that they are powers fully actualized and stabilized in their end” (p. 197).

This is an ingenious solution, within the context of Aristotle’s desire to link astronomy to first philosophy.

Next in this series: The Ideal

Potentiality in the Stars

“Lambda 2 marks the irruption in Metaphysics Lambda of the notions of dunamis and energeia, at the same time as the passage from doxographic examination to the thetic moment” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 165, my translation throughout). Aristotle’s distinctive concepts of potentiality and act had been absent from chapter 1’s preliminary survey of the opinions of others, but as soon as he begins to elaborate his own proper theses, they reappear.

“Lambda 2 proceeds also to a substitution: that of the couple dunamei/energeia for the triplicity of matter and the contraries. It is necessary to note — and this is an essential point — that here in what is their first occurrence in Lambda, these notions intervene straightaway under their dative form, and as a division of being: ‘For, since being is double, everything changes from being in-potentiality to being in-act’…. the dative form marking the ontological sense more specifically” (ibid).

Aristotle is not abolishing matter in the modern sense. Replacing stuff with a modality like potentiality would seem rather odd, but that is not what is occurring here. Hylomorphism means that any kind of “stuff” must already be body — and thus for Aristotle must be a “composite” of form and matter. He never treats form and matter as discrete parts of a thing, and repeatedly insists that they can only be separated by abstraction. Aristotelian matter in itself has always struck me as principally specifying a kind of primordial adverbiality and relationality involved in any embodiment.

Here he is moving yet further away from the “grammatical prejudice” of an underlying thing in which properties inhere. The whole dialectical development of the concept of “substance” (ousia) in the Zeta-Eta-Theta sequence and book Lambda precisely involves moving beyond the notion of something “underlying” that we naturally begin with in thinking about how things persist through time. Here we see a related movement beyond the abstraction that Aristotle calls matter, which was the initial candidate for something underlying.

“Lambda 2 takes metabole [change] as its primary object. It proposes an analysis appropriate to all kinds of change, and in particular both substantial change and change of position…. More precisely, it is a matter of identifying the principles common to all sensible and movable substances, whether they are eternal [astronomical] or corruptible [earthly]. For it is the intervention of the notion of dunamei and its substitution for that of matter, that makes possible this unification of the principles of sensible substance” (ibid).

“The text finds a precise parallel in book I of the Physics, where the same three formulae succeed one another: the contraries and their subject; matter, form, and privation; and finally, the formula according to power and act, kata ten dunamin kai ten energeian. Nonetheless, in Physics I the last is mentioned as having been treated elsewhere with more precision. Still it reappears at the end of that book, in the context of a critique of the Platonic theory of matter: Plato erroneously identifies matter with non-being, with evil and privation…. That which desires the positive contrary must be matter, as distinct from one and the other contrary. Matter must therefore be distinguished from privation: the latter is in itself the principle of corruption. On the other hand, if we consider it according to power, kata ten dunamin, matter is unengendered and incorruptible” (pp. 165-166).

“The last lines of book I of the Physics considerably clarify chapter 2, but also 3, of Lambda, in that they designate two distinct modes of approach to the material and formal principles: the perishable forms are in effect called ‘physical’, and the study of the others is deferred to first philosophy. But this distinction applies also to matter: in fact, we distinguish equally between corruptible matter and incorruptible matter. For unengendered and incorruptible matter is identified with matter considered kata dunamin, or according to a point of view that, without having been explicitly named, has nonetheless been distinguished from the physical point of view” (p. 166).

Modern physics and chemistry speak of an ultimate conservation of matter.

“The fact is that over the course of Lambda 2, the couple of in-potentiality and act is substituted for the triad of matter and the contraries. Thus change is no longer presented as the transition of matter from one contrary to another, but as a passage ‘from being in-potentiality to being in-act’. For to treat it thus is to underline, as the end of Physics I already has against Plato, that even in the case of generation, metabole does not have for its principle absolute non-being, but being in-potentiality. And it is also to underline, this time against [the Ionian philosophers of nature], that in-potentiality in its turn is for a determinate being” (pp. 166-167).

“But beyond these polemical stakes, the substitution of the couple of in-potentiality and act for the triad of matter and the contraries makes possible a formula of change that is valid for all the movable substances, whether they are corruptible or incorruptible” (p. 167).

“Thus conceived, kata dunamin or again dunamei, matter appears no longer as a physical component but as a metaphysical principle, valid as much for the corruptible sensibles as for the eternal sensibles” (ibid).

A component suggests something mutually exclusive with other components, while a principle affects the whole of something. Potentiality is neither a component nor an underlying thing.

This “marks a progress from Theta 8: in fact, there energeia is found attributed to the eternal sensibles, but dissociated from dunamis, since the latter was understood as the power of contradiction, and treated as definitional of the corruptible sensibles. Now we discover that it is not only act, but also in-potentiality that… admits an extension from the corruptible sensibles to the eternal sensibles” (ibid).

The “power of contradiction” would be a power to be or not to be something. Unlike earthly things, Aristotle sees the stars as moving in an unchanging way, and as not changing in their being in doing so. Since they are involved in motion from place to place, I was previously surprised by Aristotle’s remark in Theta 8 that seemed to say that eternal sensibles have no potentiality. Now we see that after all they do have potentiality, in the way that he has redefined it here.

Next in this series: Separate Form?