Eternal Motion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Ousia Energeia

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?

Being and Becoming

“Our hypothesis is the following: the division of being into [being] in potentiality and [being] in act has a greater extension than that according to the categories. If the latter only determine the mobile and composed substances, act is said also of the immobile, and its priority over potentiality allows the relation of the immobile substance to the mobile substances to be thought” (Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu sans la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 2, p. 51, my translation throughout).

“Dunamis [potentiality] and energeia [act] are the foundation of an anti-Parmenidean ontology, which articulates movement with being. They respond thus to the requirement defined in [book capital Alpha] for a science capable of giving account of both being and movement, both the one and the multiple. Since book Gamma, the notion of dunamis serves to resolve the dilemma of becoming: the posing of being in potentiality allows overcoming the impasse of emergence (that it is from non-being that being comes) as well as that of coexistence (that it is from contraries pre-existing in act that all being comes)” (pp. 51-52).

As Aristotle well recognizes, these impasses related to becoming imply that pre-Socratic notions of “being” were severely flawed.

“Invoked to think not only becoming, but the being of becoming, sensible and mobile substance, the notions of potentiality and act serve, over books Zeta and Eta, to replace those of matter and form. It is in book Theta, in backwards order, that the process finds its justification: the ontological pertinence of the two notions is there underlined, and their transfer from the field of movement to that of being, elucidated. At the end of book Theta, finally, are formulated the conditions for an extension of dunamis and energeia from the field of corruptible substances to that of eternal substances” (p. 52).

Again, for Aristotle, “eternal” means not radically outside of time as it does in Augustine, but simply persisting forever.

Aubry wants to recover a sense for Aristotelian being-as-such that is not the “absolutist” one of a first Being, argued for by excellent Thomist scholars like Joseph Owens. In passing, she cites Aristotle’s aversion to pursuing ultimate explanation in terms of “numbers, lines, or fire” (p. 53). As Aristotle says in book Gamma, “for us too it is the first causes of being as being that must be gotten hold of” (ch. 1, Sachs tr., coincidentally also p. 53). Aubry notes that this also takes us beyond any consideration of being as a genus or species.

But in spite of the fact that being is not a genus, the first causes for Aristotle are common to all beings. She refers to the “focal” meaning of being as ousia, while arguing that ontology is not reduced to the study of substance. She alludes to Aristotle’s inclusion of the knowledge of axioms and the principle of non-contradiction in the knowledge of being, while pointing out that the principle of non-contradiction is not a cause. She notes how Aristotle first mentions then dismisses incidental sayings of being, and the saying of being in the sense of true and false.

She discusses Pierre Aubenque’s argument that being in the senses of the Categories is more fundamental than potentiality and act, commenting that it encounters a difficulty in Aristotle’s explicit development of a sense for potentiality and act that goes beyond their use in the explanation of motion. She notes that Franz Brentano among others argues the opposite: potentiality and act are not reducible to the categories. She doesn’t think Aristotle addresses this question of priority explicitly; any answer will be based on analysis of what Aristotle does with the respective terms.

Both the categories and potentiality and act are at the basis of a non-Parmenidean ontology. The pair of potentiality and act in particular allows for the articulation of “a certain non-being” within being. Saying according to the categories, too, generates affirmations that from a Parmenidean point of view would be paradoxical. Every predication says that something “is” something other than just what it is.

“Potentiality is in effect the place where contraries can coexist” (p. 61). “It allows becoming to be thought without violating the founding principle of being and of discourse [non-contradiction]” (p. 62). “In opposition to the Eleatics, the distinction of potentiality and act plays the same role as that of substance and accident against the Sophists: it founds the possibility of predication. The accent is nonetheless inverse: if it serves, in Gamma 3, to reconnect the diversity of predicates to the unity and the identity of a subject, it serves here to relate one same subject to the possible plurality of predicates” (ibid).

“There is nonetheless one thing that dunamis and energeia say that the categories do not say: the becoming other of the same, the becoming multiple of the one” (ibid). Here she recalls Aristotle’s polemic against the Megarians in book Theta. The Megarian denial of the difference between act and potentiality makes becoming unintelligible, because it eliminates all continuity within change. This makes the explanation of change impossible.

“Dunamis thus appears as the very instrument of the thought of becoming” (p. 66). And “not only becoming, but being in becoming” (ibid).

Next in this series: Mixing Up Plato and Aristotle

More On the First Cause

Referring to Odysseus’ speech that inspires, unifies, and invigorates the Greeks in Homer’s Iliad, from which Aristotle quotes in the final sentence of book Lambda, translator Joe Sachs says in a footnote, “Similarly, the divine intellect described by Aristotle does not create things or the world, but confers upon them their worldhood and thinghood” (Metaphysics, p. 252n). It is that which the what-it-is of every other thing presupposes. For Aristotle, the thought thinking itself identified with the first cause is the condition of their intelligibility, and the condition of the possibility of there being any intelligibility at all. Otherwise, everything would be in “chaos and night”.

For Aristotle, there could be no such thing as a beginning of time, nor could there be anything “before” time, since before and after presuppose time. The first cause and the stars persist forever, but to my knowledge he never clearly refers to anything being strictly eternal or outside of time altogether, as is true of God for Augustine.

Platonic forms might be outside of time, but Aristotle does not recognize forms of the Platonic sort. However, he says that the hylomorphic kind of form he does recognize is not itself subject to becoming or change. What becomes or changes is the composite of form and matter.

The first cause is also said to be exempt from becoming and change. We have recently seen, though, that Aristotle has a very specific concept of becoming and change. Any kind of new state — whether of body, soul, intellect, or knowledge — does not count for it as a becoming or a change.

The intuition behind this seems to be that becoming and change apply to processes that are continuous, whereas a new state may be considered to be something discrete. With composite things, he says that a new state may also be accompanied by a change or becoming in something else that is related to it.

The first cause, though, would be unaffected by anything else, so this would probably prevent its having a new state. Also, as a pure entelechy, it should always be in a state of completion or fulfillment, which would probably also rule out its having any new state. So while not technically eternal in the Augustinian sense of outside of time altogether, according to Aristotle it persists forever inside of time, without becoming or change, and it seems not to have any new states either.

The “firstness” of the first cause, then, does not refer to any kind of firstness in time. It is first in the sense that everything else has a dependency on it, while it has no dependency on anything else.

A puzzle related to the first cause is that it seems it is supposed to be both a pure that-for-the-sake-of-which, and a non-perceptible independent particular thing that persists forever. In general, we would not expect any particular thing to be a pure that-for-the-sake-of-which. But perhaps the thought thinking itself that he says characterizes the first cause is in fact a bridging term that could meet the conditions for both.

Thought thinking itself seems as if it may be the same as pure contemplation (theoria). In the Nicomachean Ethics, he says that contemplation seems more divine than human, and seems to feel a need to justify his claim that it applies to humans at all, but he associates it with what he considers to be the highest possible human virtue. As the highest possible virtue, it would qualify as an unconditional that-for-the-sake-of-which. If it is not just the idea of thought thinking itself but an actual thought thinking itself, then it is also a particular thing.

He also identifies it with the good and the beautiful, but this does not mean the Platonic idea of the Good as a logical universal that is supposed to have a univocal meaning. What gives it universal import is not logical universality, but its unique concrete relation to all other things. The concrete particular thing that is pure thought thinking itself is superlatively good and beautiful, just because it is a pure entelechy. A pure entelechy for Aristotle is itself the highest conceivable perfection, and is thus easily equated with the good and the beautiful in an unqualified sense.

Last post in this series: Mathematical Things and Forms

New State Not a Change?

“Of all cases it would be most natural to suppose that there is alteration in figures and shapes, and in states and in the process of acquiring and losing these; but as a matter of fact in neither of these two cases is there alteration” (Aristotle, Physics book VII ch. 3, Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. 1, p. 412).

What the translator calls a matter of fact, I would call a matter of terminology. All specialties tend to develop their own terminology, and philosophers do likewise. Aristotle uses many Greek terms with meanings that were already specialized in his day. Modern disciplines and common speech have evolved their own choices using different criteria.

“[T]here is alteration only in things that are said to be affected in their own right by sensible things…. For when anything has been completely shaped or structured, we do not call it by the name of its material: e.g. we do not call the statue bronze or the candle wax or the bed wood, but we use a paronymous expression and call them brazen, waxen, and wooden respectively. But when a thing has been affected or altered in any way we still call it by the original name: thus we speak of the bronze or the wax being fluid or hard or hot…, giving the matter the same name as the affection” (ibid).

Aristotle makes his usual semantic distinction between the matter, the form, and the composite of both. He wants to specialize the term that is translated as “change” or “alteration” to apply only to the matter, and to use different locutions with regard to the form and the composite.

“Again, states, whether of the body or of the soul, are not alterations. For some are excellences and some are defects, and neither excellence nor defect is an alteration: excellence is a perfection (… since it is then really in its natural state: e.g. a circle is perfect when it becomes really a circle and when it is best), while defect is a perishing of or departure from this condition. So just as when speaking of a house we do not call its arrival at perfection an alteration…, the same holds good in the case of excellences and defects and of the things that possess or acquire them” (ibid).

As we might also anticipate, he strongly emphasizes a teleological and normative perspective on these matters.

“Further, we say that all excellences depend on particular relations. Thus bodily excellences such as health and fitness we regard as consisting in a blending of… elements in due proportion, in relation either to one another within the body or to the surrounding; and in like manner we regard beauty, strength, and all other excellences and defects. Each of them exists in virtue of a particular relation and puts that which possesses it in a good or bad condition with regard to its proper affections” (pp. 412-413).

Most fascinating of all is this emphasis on particular relations. Good and bad conditions are explained in terms of these.

“Since, then, relatives are neither themselves alterations nor the subjects of alterations or of becoming or in fact of any change whatever, it is evident that neither states nor the process of losing and acquiring states are alterations, though it may be true that their becoming or perishing, like that of form and shape, necessarily involves the alteration of certain other things…. For each defect or excellence involves a relation with those things from which the possessor is naturally subject to alteration: thus excellence disposes its possessor to be unaffected or to be affected thus and so, while defect disposes its possessor to be affected or unaffected in a contrary way” (p. 413).

Relations in themselves are static abstractions of conditions. But some of the things involved in these relations are subject to change or alteration. This is a sophisticated way of approaching the matter.

“And the case is similar in regard to the states of the soul, all of which too exist in virtue of particular relations…. Consequently these cannot be alterations either, nor can the process of losing and acquiring them be so, though their becoming is necessarily the result of an alteration of the sensitive part of the soul, and this is altered by sensible objects…. Consequently, although their becoming is accompanied by an alteration, they are not themselves alterations” (ibid).

States of the soul are to be viewed in this relational way. Their becoming is said to be accompanied by an alteration, not itself to be an alteration.

“And again, the states of the intellectual part of the soul are not alterations; nor is there any becoming of them. For the possession of knowledge most especially depends on a particular relation” (ibid).

Knowledge also “most especially” involves being in a particular relation. It is not just the possession of some content.

“It is evident, then, from the preceding argument that alteration and being altered occur in sensible things and in the sensitive part of the soul and, except accidentally, in nothing else” (p. 414).

Entelechy

“Entelechy” — which I closely associate with what Kant called internal teleology — is probably the most important guiding concept of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (rather than the “Being” championed by many). There is a great deal to unpack from this single word. Here is a start.

The primary examples of entelechy are living beings. Aristotle also suggests that pure thought (nous) is an entelechy. I think the same could be said of ethos, or ethical culture.

Sachs’ invaluable glossary explains the Greek entelecheia as “A fusion of the idea of completeness with that of continuity or persistence. Aristotle invents the word by combining enteles (complete, full-grown) with echein (= hexis, to be a certain way by the continuing effort of holding on in that condition), while at the same time punning on endelecheia (persistence) by inserting telos (completion [what I have been calling “end”]). This is a three-ring circus of a word, at the heart of everything in Aristotle’s thinking, including the definition of motion. Its power to carry meaning depends on the working together of all the things Aristotle has packed into it. Some commentators explain it as meaning being-at-an-end, which misses the point entirely” (p. li).

He points out the etymological connection of echein (literally, “to have”) with hexis, or “Any condition that a thing has by its own effort of holding on in a certain way. Examples are knowledge and all virtues or excellences, including those of the body such as health” (p. xlix).

I previously suggested a very literal rendering of what Sachs calls the punned meaning of entelechy as something like “in [it] end having”, with the implication that it more directly means being subject to internal teleology with a certain stability, and I think something like this is the primary meaning. As Sachs says, this is very different from just being at an end. The latter would imply a completely static condition not subject to further development.

Entelechy is Aristotle’s more sophisticated, “higher order” notion of an active preservation of stability within change, which in the argument of the Metaphysics accompanies the eventual replacement of the initial definition of ousia (“substance”, which Sachs renders as “thinghood”) from the Categories as a kind of substrate or logical “subject” in which properties inhere. What he replaced that notion of substrate with was a series of more refined notions of ousia as form, “what it was to have been” a thing, and what I am still calling potentiality and actuality.

Whether we speak of active preservation of stability within change or simply of persistence (implicitly in contrast with its absence), time is involved. Reference to change makes that indisputable. Persistence is a bit more of a gray area, since in popular terms lasting forever is associated with eternity, but strictly speaking, “eternal” means outside of time (which is why the scholastics invented the different word “sempiternal” for things said to persist forever in time).

Sachs’ translation for what I will continue to simply anglicize as “entelechy” is “being-at-work-staying-itself”. This is closely related to energeia (“actuality”), which Sachs renders as being-at-work. I think it is important that there is nothing literally corresponding to “being” in the Greek for either of these, and want to avoid importing connotations of Avicennist, Thomist, Scotist, or Heideggerian views of the special status of being into Aristotle.

I also think “staying itself” tends to suggest a purely static notion of the identity of a “self” that is foreign to Aristotle. Sachs might respond that “at-work-staying” negates the connotation that “itself” is static, but I don’t think this necessarily follows. It might take significant effort to remain exactly the same, but this is not what Aristotle is getting at. To be substantially the same is not to be exactly the same.

Entelechy is intimately connected with actuality (energeia) and potentiality (dynamis). As Sachs points out, “actuality” in common contemporary usage has connotations of being a simple matter of fact that are at odds with the teleological, value-oriented significance of energeia in Aristotle.

“The primary sense of the word [entelecheia] belongs to activities that are not motions; examples of these are seeing, knowing, and happiness, each understood as an ongoing state that is complete at every instant, but the human being that can experience them is similarly a being-at-work, constituted by metabolism. Since the end and completion of any genuine being is its being-at-work, the meaning of the word [energeia] converges [with that of entelecheia]” (p. li).

If we take “being” purely as a transitive verb (as it is indeed properly meant here), my objection above to connotations of its use as a noun could be overcome. But in English, “being” remains ambiguous, and it is not there in the Greek.

Further, though it has the good connotation of something being in process, “at work” also introduces all the ambiguities of agency and efficient causation, in which overly strong modern notions tend to get inappropriately substituted for Aristotle’s carefully refined “weak” concepts. Aristotle very deliberately develops weak concepts for these because — unlike most of the scholastics and the moderns — he thinks of all agency and causing of motion as subordinate to value-oriented entelechy and teleology.

Sachs’ glossary explains dynamis (“potentiality”, which he calls “potency”) as “The innate tendency of anything to be at work in ways characteristic of the kind of thing it is…. A potency in its proper sense will always emerge into activity, when the proper conditions are present and nothing prevents it” (p. lvii).

He notes that it has a secondary sense of mere logical possibility, but says Aristotle never uses it that way.

I fully agree that potentiality in Aristotle never means mere logical possibility. Kant’s notion of “real” as distinct from logical possibility comes closer, but it still lacks any teleological dimension. I think Paul Ricoeur’s “capability” comes closer than Sachs’ “potency”, because it it seems more suggestive of a relation to an end.

However, I am very sympathetic to Gwenaëlle Aubry’s argument that Aristotelian dynamis should not be understood in terms of any kind of Platonic or scholastic power. “Power” once again suggests all the ambiguities of efficient causality. I think such a reading is incompatible with the primacy of final causality over efficient causality in Aristotle. (Historically, of course, the divergence of scholastic “power” from Aristotelian dynamis was accompanied by assertions of a very non-Aristotelian primacy of efficient causality.) To my ear, “potency” has the same effect. (See also Potentiality and Ends.)

Sachs had said that entelechy is also at the heart of Aristotle’s definition of motion. (Motion with respect to place is only one kind of motion for Aristotle; he also speaks of changes with respect to substance, quality, and quantity as “motions”. He also says there are activities that are not motions.)

Properly speaking, motion (kinesis) for Aristotle is only “in” the thing that is moved. That is how it becomes reasonable to speak of unmoved movers. A moved mover is indeed moved, but not insofar as it is itself a mover, only in some other way. He says there is no “motion” in being-at-work or actuality as such, but there is activity.

In book III chapter 1 of the Physics, Aristotle says that “the fulfillment [energeia] of what is potentially, as such, is motion — e.g. the fulfillment of what is alterable, as alterable, is alteration; … of what can come to be and pass away, coming to be and passing away; of what can be carried along, locomotion” (Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. I, p. 343).

Sachs expresses this by saying that as long as “potency is at-work-staying-itself as a potency, there is motion” (p. lv). Otherwise said, motion is the entelechy and “actuality” of a potentiality as potentiality. As I’ve noted before, Aristotle doesn’t just divide things into actual and potential, as if they were mutually exclusive, but at times uses these notions in a layered way.

A mover (kinoun) is “Whatever causes motion in something else. The phrase ‘efficient cause’ is nowhere in Aristotle’s writings, and is highly misleading; it implies that the cause of every motion is a push or a pull…. That there should be incidental, intermediate links by which motions are passed along when things bump explains nothing. That motion should originate in something motionless is only puzzling if one assumes that what is motionless must be inert; the motionless sources of motion to which Aristotle refers are fully at-work, and in their activity there is no motion because their being-at-work is complete at every instant” (pp. lv-lvi).

It is worth noting that Aristotle has a relatively relaxed notion of completeness or perfection. We tend to define perfection in a kind of unconditional terms that are alien to him. For Aristotle in general, complete actualization or perfection is always “after a kind”, and it is supposed to be achievable. But also, it is only unmoved movers (and not organic beings) whose being-at-work is being said to be complete at every instant.

When he says “the phrase ‘efficient cause’ is nowhere in Aristotle’s writings”, he means that “efficient” is another Latin-derived term that diverges from the Greek. Aristotle in book II chapter 3 of the Physics speaks of “the primary source of the change or rest” (Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. I, p. 332), but again we have to be careful to avoid importing assumptions about what this means.

As I’ve pointed out several times before, the primary source of the change in building a house according to Aristotle is the art of building, not the carpenter or the hammer or the hammer’s blow, and everything in this whole series is a means to an end. The end of building a house, which guides the form of the whole series, is something like protection from the elements. Neither the end nor the source of motion is itself an entelechy. But the house-building example is a case of external teleology. Correspondingly, it requires an external source of motion.

Internal teleology and the entelechy that implements it are more subtle; entelechy is an in itself “unmoving” and “unchanging” activity (which may nonetheless have new relational states, due to the narrow way in which Aristotle defines “change”). The things subject to motion and change in the proper sense are only indirectly moved by the activity-as-end of entelechy (by means of some source of motion).

We might say that Kantian transcendental subjectivity and Hegelian spirit are also entelechies.

Recently I suggested that what makes Hegel’s “subjective logic” to be “subjective” is its focus on the activity of interpretation and judgment, which in fact always aims to be “objective” in the sense of reaching toward deeper truth, and has nothing at all to do with what we call “merely subjective”. This is a sense of “subjective” appropriate to what Kant calls transcendental as opposed to empirical subjectivity. This higher kind of subjectivity, characteristic of what Hegel calls “self-consciousness” and of the activity of Kantian reflective judgment, would be very well characterized as an entelechy.

I strongly suspect that what Hegel metaphorically calls “logical motion” would be expressed by Aristotle in terms of the end-governed “unmoving activity” of entelechy. (See also Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity.)

Next in this series: Aristotle on Being

Very Different Kinds of “Will”

Two radically different things are both called “will”. One is a definite orientation and effort toward this end rather than that, analogous to a kind of desire. The other is supposed to be a power of decision independent of deliberation.

I don’t believe that there is or could be such a thing as decision with absolutely no deliberation. What we have is an ability to deliberate, and to choose between alternatives based on that deliberation (see also What We Really Want). Neither deliberation nor decision could apply to an eternal being, because these necessarily involve time and change.

Questioning the Role of Action

Which comes first in the order of explanation: action, as immediate doing; or patterns of activity or practice, as extended, intricately developed over time, mediated, purposeful, and responsive to circumstance? I think it is more the latter.

What I aim to question here is not at all the reality of change or activity, but rather what might be called the “action model” — a way of explaining extended processes and changes and human reality in general in terms of punctual and immediate actions or events. The question is, do we focus on understanding larger processes and developments as the sum of discrete actions, or do we focus on understanding more or less immediate actions in terms of their place in larger processes and developments?

There is more than just a simple polarity here — meaning consists of both concrete detail and a larger context, and we need each of these to help elaborate the other. Nonetheless I want to suggest that it is better to explain things from the larger perspective of activities rather than the narrower one of actions.

Values, Causality

I’ve said that normativity consists of derived ends in a space of multiple potentialities. Meanwhile, on the side of actuality, when we interact with the order of efficient causes, we become subject to the constraints of structural causality. In between come our finite choices. (See also Potentiality, Actuality; Fragility of the Good.)

Taking responsibility is a profound act that can have a kind of indirect efficacy of its own. Independent of the direct operation of our actual power and the order of efficient causes, taking responsibility can partially rewrite what would have been, at the broader level of meaning. Since we are so much creatures of meaning, this more circuitous route through the much larger space of potentiality can end up affecting an otherwise stubborn actuality, by changing the order of potentialities experienced by others, and thus affecting their choices.

One person alone may have no impact on the actuality, but for many together influencing one another’s choices, the story may turn out quite differently. At times, in this way even one person can end up initiating a much larger process far beyond that person’s individual power, and the total effect of many can be more than additive. In this way, what seems completely impossible can become possible, and the face of reality can be changed.