Tag: Ergon

Reading Metaphysics Theta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Rational and Natural Powers

Dynamis Before Aristotle

Before proceeding to Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality and act in book Theta of the Metaphysics, Aubry surveys pre-Aristotelian usages of the Greek word dynamis (or dunamis, as Aubry romanizes it). This detour adds further fascinating nuances to her already very rich discussion. (She also surveys Aristotle’s uses of dynamis in other works besides the Metaphysics. I will treat that part in a separate post.)

The meaning of dynamis in Homer and Hesiod is contested. A 1919 study by Joseph Souilhé concluded that it meant physical force in Homer, and royal or divine power in Hesiod. But a 2018 study by David Lefebvre concentrates on the phrase kata dunamin [“in accordance with” dynamis], and concludes on the contrary that already in Homer and Hesiod this is an expression of the Greek “sense of measure” and “wisdom of limits”. Aubry says that according to Lefebvre, for Homer and Hesiod, “To act kata dunamin is to act within the limits of a nature” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 95, my translation throughout). Lefebvre sees in Plato a tension between a descriptive use of dynamis related to knowledge and definition, and a normative one related to what is proper to a given nature.

Turning to her own analysis of Plato, she says that in book V of the Republic, “dunameis are designated not as a sense of being, but as a genus of beings (genos ti ton onton); they are that by which ‘we can do what we can do, and in general every other thing can do precisely what it does’…. Dunamis is strongly associated with power and action. It does not help us say what a thing is, determining its distinctive properties, but rather what it can do, and what it does” (p. 96).

“This couple of power and action is associated neither with notions of latency and manifestation, nor with potentiality and effectivity” (p. 97). The thought here seems to be that Platonic power and action are more synchronic and in-the-moment than diachronic and involved with development.

On the other hand, already in Plato dynamis “is articulated to an ergon [work]” (p. 96). This is of the utmost importance. As we will see, for Plato ergon is not just any arbitrary product or outcome. It has an ethical significance.

“[Republic book I defines ergon] as either that which a thing is the only one capable of accomplishing, or that which it accomplishes better than all the others, and articulates it strongly with the notion of excellence, arete. As D. Lefebvre underlines, the articulation of dunamis to ergon, understood as a proper function allowing the deployment of an excellence, comes in play against the notion of indeterminate, non-normed power, the tyrannical or political ‘omnipotence’ to which the orators aspire, and of which, like book I of the Republic, the Gorgias presents a critique” (p. 96n).

Plato was extremely concerned to avoid the unprincipled political abuses of tyrants, and to combat the analogous unprincipled abuses of discourse by the Sophists. Neither the tyrant nor the Sophist nor the apologist for arbitrariness respects the good or the truth.

“In this articulation of the dunamis to the ergon, which nonetheless remains timid (the term ergon is not used, but only the [related] verb apergazetai), and is associated neither with a causal model nor with an ontology, one can already recognize a teleological and normative determination of power (here univocally characterized as active), in play against the idea of an undifferentiated and non-normed power” (pp. 96-97).

Plato thus partially anticipates Aristotle’s more developed teleological view.

In the Theaetetus, “Dunamis appears… as a power as much of possession as of usage, and not according to a progressive schema comparable to what Aristotle elaborates in De Anima [book] II [chapter] 5, where a native power (that for example which every human has to understand grammar) is transformed into a hexis [acquired disposition] by study, then can be exercised in an energeia, but according to a reversible and alternating schema” (p. 97).

Plato seems to emphasize a kind of symmetry in the relations between active and passive power, which makes them reversible. Aristotle subordinates this to the asymmetrical relation between act and potentiality, but it is important to recognize that he is not simply substituting an asymmetrical relation for a symmetrical one. Rather, he is fully accepting the symmetrical one, but then, so to speak, wrapping it in the asymmetrical one.

It is worth dwelling on the Platonic moment in its own right. There is already something quite profound in a truly symmetrical view of activity and passivity. Certainly there is also what might be called a vulgar view of activity and passivity that doesn’t recognize any symmetry between them at all. But that is not Plato’s view.

For the subtle initiates in the metaphor of the Theaetetus (in contrast to those non-initiates who count as being only what they can hold in their hands), Aubry notes that Plato says “the whole is movement […]; there are two forms of movement, each of infinite extension, but the one having the power to act, and the other to undergo” (quoted, pp. 97-98, ellipses in original). “It is at the same time, thus, that vision and the white are born, and they are not white and vision until that encounter: for something is an agent only by encountering a patient, only patient by encountering an agent, and that which in this encounter is agent can in another become patient” (p. 98).

Plato explicitly points out that what is an agent in one encounter may be a patient in another. The example of vision and the white also highlights the interdependence of what the moderns call subject and object.

“Power to act and power to undergo are at the same time relative to one another and reversible…. Active or passive dunamis is nonetheless articulated, beyond the epistemological context of the discussion, to an ontology: a paradoxical ontology, since, presented as subtle in that it reconciles being with becoming, it results in the negation of being to the benefit of becoming” (ibid).

Plato is famous for emphasizing eternal forms, but dialogues like Theaetetus and The Sophist invalidate many clichés about his broader views. This has the effect of bringing Plato closer to Aristotle.

“It is nonetheless in the Sophist that the ontological dimension of Platonic dunamis is most readable” (ibid). There the character known as the Eleatic Stranger (who expresses views contrary to — and to me far more interesting than — those of the historic Eleatics like Parmenides and Zeno) says “That which possesses a power, whatever it be, whether to act on no matter what other natural thing, or to undergo — even in a minimal degree, by the action of the weakest agent, and even if this occurs only once — all this, I say, really exists. And as a consequence, I pose as the definition that defines beings that they are nothing else but power” (quoted, pp. 98-99).

And again, this does not mean arbitrary power. Plato is after all the one who first said that the Good is the highest principle of all, even though Aristotle criticizes him for failing to explain how this works.

Aubry recounts that in the allegory of The Sophist, the Friends of the Earth are generally materialist, but accept the reality of virtues and vices. They therefore accept the Stranger’s definition of being as power, and this leads them also to change their minds and accept that the soul is a being too, since it is that in which virtues and vices are present. The Friends of the Forms on the other hand continue to resist the conclusion that “in ousia itself, insofar as it is known, and not only in in genesis, movement and passion occur” (p. 99). Aubry goes on, “but the Stranger and Theaetetus in their turn refuse what follows from that refusal: that being ‘solemn and sacred, stands immobile'” (ibid).

The Eleatic Stranger here is explicitly rejecting the historic Eleatic view of being, and at the same time Plato is implicitly rejecting the semi-Eleatic view of the “Friends of the Forms”. Aristotle indeed attributes to Plato the mistaken view that the forms are independent things, but he also says that Plato was initially influenced by the Heracliteanism of Cratylus, who is known for saying that you can’t step in the same river once, because it is always changing. There is no evidence that Plato was ever a Parmenidean. (Aristotle’s sharpest anti-Platonic remarks seem to me to be directed at Platonists, and perhaps at Plato’s successor Speusippus in particular.)

“Dunamis appears here as an instrument directed at the same time against the ‘materialists’, an extension of the notion of ousia to the incorporeal insofar as it posesses the power to act and to undergo, and, against the ‘idealists’, an inclusion in ousia, insofar as it is the object of knowledge, of traits considered by them to be characteristic of genesis: passion and movement” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Plato clearly wants to reject both the materialism of the Ionian pre-Socratics and the static One Being of Parmenides.

“From this brief examination of the principal places where Platonic dunamis is elaborated, one can conclude that the Aristotelian concept is found there ‘in potentiality’, by way of the normative articulation of dunamis to ergon, the distinction between capacity and effectivity, the project of an ontology unifying being and becoming, but only under the form of fragmentary and broken anticipations, which it remained for Aristotle to articulate and to systematize” (p. 100).

Next in this series: Ethical Roots of Aristotelian Dynamis