Tag: Essence

The What-It-Is of Things

We’ve now reached the beginning of a much more sustained argument at the heart of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The sequence of books Zeta, Eta, and Theta (VII-IX in Sachs’ translation) has a much tighter cohesion than the Metaphysics as a whole. These are commonly referred to by scholars as the “central” books. Here I will cover book Zeta (VII).

We have also reached the transition from initial questions about being (einai) to the development of answers that will be expressed entirely in terms of ousia (substance, essence, thinghood, the what-it-is of things). Neither Aristotle’s questions nor his answers have to do with being in the sense of existence.

“[Being] signifies what something is and a this, but also of what sort or how much something is, or any of the other things attributed in that way. But… the way that is first among these is what something is, which indicates its thinghood” (book VII chapter 1, Sachs tr., p. 117).

“[S]omeone might be at an impasse whether each thing such as walking or healing or sitting is or is not a being, and similarly with anything else whatever of such a kind; for none of them is either of such a nature as to be by itself nor capable of being separated from an independent thing” (ibid).

I would call these “things”, but not “beings” or “independent things”.

Rather than attempting to speak about existence in general, he is concerned about the relative “independence” of particular things that are to be understood first in terms of what they are. This independence signifies both an internal cohesiveness associated with relative persistence in time, and a relative independence from us. Independent things are not just random phenomena, and they do not arbitrarily bend to our will. On the other hand, what they are can only be developed discursively, which implicitly involves us and our interpretation and judgment.

“[T]hinghood is primary in every sense, in articulation, in knowledge, and in time. For none of the other ways of attributing being is separate, but only this one; and in articulation this one is primary (for in the articulation of anything, that of its thinghood must be included); and we believe that we know each thing most of all when we know what it is…. And in fact, the thing that has been sought both anciently and now, and always, and is always a source of impasses, ‘what is being?’, is just this: what is thinghood?” (pp. 117-118).

Here he pretty much literally says that asking the famous “question of being” is asking the wrong question. From here on out, the inquiry will revolve around the status of definite “things” rather than of being in general — that is to say, it will focus on what things are, and on their “independence” as characterized above. We should still think of definite things in a higher-order way and not just one by one, but we will never leave definiteness behind.

Now the dialectical work begins in earnest. The first problem he addresses is that the preliminary separation of ousia from the more derivative senses of being was effected by treating the ousia as a kind of substrate in which all attributes inhere. This leads to the thought that it must after all be matter, but that cannot be right, because it is the form that allows something to be picked out as separate.

“But since at the start we distinguished in how many ways we define thinghood, and of these a certain one seemed to be what something keeps on being in order to be, one ought to examine that. And first let us say some things about it from the standpoint of logic, because what it is for each thing to be is what is said of it in its own right” (chapter 4, p. 120).

Again, it is vital to emphasize how questions of what things are are to be answered in terms of what is properly said about them. We will be concerned with proprieties of interpretation and judgment.

His concern with definiteness leads to a consideration of definition, and what it is to be a definable thing.

“Therefore there is a what-it-is-for-it-to-be of all those things of which the articulation is a definition. And it is not the case that there is a definition whenever a name means the same thing as a statement…, but only if the statement articulates some primary thing, and things of this kind are all those that are not articulated by attributing one thing to another” (p. 122).

Again, not being attributed to something else has to do with “independence”.

“This is clear: that a definition and a what-it-is-for-something-to-be belong primarily and simply to independent things. It is not that they do not belong to the other things in a way that resembles this, but only that they do not belong to them primarily…. And for this reason there will be a statement and a definition of a pale person, but in a different way than of pale, or of an independent thing” (p. 123).

“Therefore in one sense there will not be a definition of anything, nor a what-it-is-for-something-to-be present in anything, except of and in independent things, but in another sense there will be” (chapter 5, p. 124).

Independent things come first for Aristotle, but this emphasis is not exclusive. Derivative things — and corresponding things said in categories other than that of substance or thinghood — will also be taken into account.

“But one must investigate whether each thing is the same as, or different from, what it keeps on being in order to be” (chapter 6, p. 125).

“For there is knowledge of anything only when we recognize what it is for it to be…. Therefore the good and being-good must be one thing, and so too the beautiful and being-beautiful…. So by these arguments, each thing itself and what it is for it to be are one and the same, in a way that is not incidental, and this follows also because knowing each of them is just this: to know what it is for it to be…. In what way, then, what it is for something to be is the same as each thing, and in what way it is not, have been said” (pp. 126-127).

Once again, he directs our attention to definite form (or meaningful “content”, in the way many contemporary philosophers speak). Whether we call it form or content, the idea is to focus on meaning, and on wherever meaning is concentrated.

Next he begins to raise issues related to becoming.

“Of the things that come into being, some come about by nature, some by art, and some as a result of chance, but everything that comes into being becomes something, from something, and by the action of something… [J]ust as is always said, coming into being would be impossible if there were nothing present beforehand” (chapter 7, p. 128).

This is Aristotle’s more specific version of what Leibniz calls the principle of sufficient reason. Next he explains that becoming applies only to composite wholes that include both matter and form. In the way that Aristotle thinks about these matters, it is not correct to say that the form or what-it-is-to-be a thing comes into being.

“[J]ust as one does not make the underlying thing, the bronze, so too one does not make the sphere, except in the incidental sense that the bronze sphere is a sphere, and one makes that…. Therefore it is clear that the form, or whatever one ought to call the shapeliness that is worked into the perceptible thing, does not come into being, and that coming-into-being does not even pertain to it, or to what it is for something to be (for this is what comes to be in something else…)” (chapter 8, p. 131).

“So it is clear from what has been said that what is spoken of as form or thinghood does not come into being, but the composite whole that is named in consequence of this does come into being; and it is clear that there is material present in everything that comes into being, so that it is not only this but also that…. So it is rather the case that one makes or begets a certain kind of thing out of some this, and when it has been generated it is this-thing-of-this-kind” (p. 132).

Aristotle maintains a delicate balance in speaking about form. He strongly endorses the broad Platonic thesis of the importance of form, while refusing to take literally the more specific Platonic suggestions about the independence of form, which Plato’s other students elevated to a dogma.

“Therefore it is clear that the causal responsibility attributed to the forms, in the sense that some people are in the habit of speaking of the forms, as if they are certain things apart from the particulars, is of no use, at least in relation to coming-into-being and independent things” (ibid).

According to Aristotle, by virtue of their very “independence”, the kind of forms advocated by the Platonists would be cut off from the world, and could not possibly serve as causes of anything.

“[I]n a certain way everything comes into being from something that shares its name, just as the things do that are by nature (for instance a house comes from a house, insofar as it comes about by the action of an intelligence, since its form is the art by which it is built)” (chapter 9, p. 133).

In the natural case, living beings beget other similar living beings.

“And it is not only about thinghood that the argument shows that the form does not come into being, but in the same way, the argument concerns in common all the primary things, such as how much something is, and of what sort, and the other ways of attributing being” (p. 134).

In general, Aristotle wants to insist that none of the determinations according to the Categories, considered just in themselves, “comes into being”. It is always the composite things that have such determinations that come to have them.

“But what is to be understood from these considerations as peculiar to an independent thing is that a different independent thing that is fully at work, and that makes it, must be present beforehand” (ibid).

Next he asks whether the articulation of the parts must be present in the articulation of the whole.

The conclusion is that “[A]ll those things that are parts in the sense of material, and into which something divides up as into material, are derivative from the whole; but either all or some of those that are parts in the sense of belonging to the articulation and to the thinghood that is disclosed in the articulation, are more primary than it” (chapter 10, p. 137).

“And since the soul of an animal (for this is the thinghood of an ensouled thing) is its thinghood as disclosed in speech, and its form, and what it is for a certain sort of body to be (at any rate, each part of it, if it is defined well, will not be defined without its activity, which will not belong to it without perception), either all or some parts of the soul are more primary than the whole animal as a composite, and similarly with each particular kind, but the body and its parts are derivative from the thinghood in this sense, and it is not the thinghood but the composite whole that divides up into these as material” (ibid).

The soul of an animal is its form. This is a profound but difficult teaching. As for Plato, for Aristotle too forms as such are not supposed to be subject to becoming. This would seem to make them static. But at the very least, souls belong to hylomorphic composites that are subject to becoming. And it seems that souls themselves are involved in actions and passions (except from the standpoint of Plotinus, which is not Aristotle’s).

Something is clearly being said in more than one way here. The apparently static character of form will eventually be superseded or supplemented in the account of potentiality and actuality that is to come in book IX.

“But a human being or a horse in general, and the things that are in this way after the manner of particulars, but universally, are not thinghood but a certain kind of composite of such-and-such an articulation with such-and-such material, understood universally, while the particular, composed of ultimate material, is already Socrates, and similarly in other cases” (ibid).

Here he carefully distinguishes between an abstract universal of a kind of composite, and the what-it is of composites of that kind — e.g., between “a horse” and the what-it-is of a horse. Putting this together with what was said earlier, we can conclude that the what-it-is of a horse will be equivalent to “being a horse”, but distinct from “the horse itself” as an independent thing and a composite.

“But the parts of a thing’s articulation belong only to the form, and the articulation is of the universal; for being a circle and a circle, or being a soul and the soul, are the same thing. But of the composite already there is no definition” (ibid).

All composites are particulars, and for Aristotle no particular as such is definable.

“But the material is not known in its own right. And one sort of material is perceptible, the other intelligible, the perceptible, for example, bronze or wood, or any movable material, while the intelligible is that which is present in perceptible things, taken not as perceptible, as for example mathematical things are” (p. 138).

What is known in its own right seems to be only form, the what-it-is. The qualification “in its own right” is important. It leaves space open for other things to still be known in an indirect way.

“One might reasonably be confused about what sort of things are parts of the form, and what sort are parts not of that but of the all-inclusive composite. And yet so long as this is not clear, it is not possible to define any particular thing, since the definition is of the universal and the form; so if it is not clear what sort of parts are present in the manner of material and what sort not, neither will the articulation of the thing be evident…. For example, the form of a human being always appears in flesh and bones and parts of that sort: are they then also parts of the form and of its articulation? Or are they not, but just material…?” (chapter 11, pp. 138-139).

He points out that it will not always be easy to distinguish what belongs to a form itself, and what belongs to a composite that has the form.

“[T]hat is why tracing everything back in this way, and taking away the material, is overly fastidious, for presumably some things are such-and-such in such-and-such, or such-and-such in such-and-such a condition…. For it is not a hand of any sort that is part of a human being, but one capable of accomplishing its work” (p. 140).

The example of the hand introduces a distinction by that-for-the-sake-of-which, that could be applied even if we said the form was the same. Here we have a first intimation that the what-it-is of something may after all not be adequately characterized by form alone.

“And it is clear too that the soul is the primary independent thing, while the body is material, and the human being or animal in general is what is made of both, understood universally; and if it is also true that the soul of Socrates is Socrates, then names such as Socrates or Corsicus have two meanings (for some people mean by them a soul, but others the composite), but if Socrates is simply this soul plus this body, then the particular is just like the universal” (ibid).

“What, then, the what-it-keeps-on-being-in-order-to-be-at-all of something is, have been stated in a general way that applies to everything…. For the thinghood of a composite is the form that is in it, and the whole that is made out of that and the material is called an independent thing” (p. 141).

Here he dips back to a more categorical identification of the what-it-is with form.

Next he raises the question, what makes a definition one? This seems to be a digression or supplementary remark, though possibly it anticipates further criticism of Platonism that lies ahead.

The discussion of definition is narrowed to “definitions that result from divisions” (chapter 12, p. 143), in which kinds of things are defined by their distinctions from other kinds within some common scope. This is sometimes known as Platonic division, and it is illustrated in Plato’s Sophist.

Definition will be explained in terms of difference, but Aristotle’s notion that gets translated as “difference” has an important nuance we might not anticipate. In book V he says “All those things are called different that are other but the same in some respect” (p. 89). Naively, we might expect “different” to mean the same as “other”, but in the translation here Aristotle uses “other” for the unrestricted case that includes things with no relation at all to one another, and “different” only for things that are comparable in some way, and therefore must also have some underlying similarity. Thus he avoids what Hegel calls the “problem of indifference”.

“But surely it is necessary also to divide the difference into its differences; for instance, provided-with-feet is a difference belonging to animal, and next one must recognize the difference within animal-provided-with feet insofar as it is provided with feet, so that one ought not to say that of what is provided with feet, one sort is feathered and another featherless, if one is to state things properly (for one would do this rather out of ineptness), but instead that one sort is cloven-footed and the other uncloven, since these are differences that belong to a foot, cloven-footedness being a certain kind of footedness. And one wants to go on continually in this way until one gets to things that have no differences; and then there will be just as many kinds of foot as there are specific differences, and the kinds of animals-provided-with-feet will be equal in number to the differences. So if that is the way these things are, it is clear that the difference that brings the statement to completion will be the thinghood of the thing and its definition” (ibid).

“So if a difference comes into being out of a difference, the one that brings this to completion will be the form and the thinghood of the thing; but if a difference is brought in incidentally, such as if one were to divide what is provided with feet into one sort that is white and another sort that is black, there would be as many differences as cuts. Therefore it is clear that a definition is an articulation consisting of differences, and arising out of the last of these when it is right…. But there is no ordering in the thinghood of the thing; for how is one to think of one thing as following and another preceding?” (p. 144).

Here he omits the critique of the binary character of Platonic division that he makes in Parts of Animals book I. As he expounds here, in a hierarchical ordering of differences, it is the most specific difference at the bottom of such a hierarchy that picks out the what-it-is of a thing. But he also wants to say that the what-it-is itself is a simple unity without internal ordering. Next he moves to explicit criticism of some Platonic positions.

“[I]t seems to some people that the universal is responsible for a thing most of all, and that the universal is a governing source, and for that reason let us go over this. For it seems to be impossible for any of the things meant universally to be thinghood. For in the first place, the thinghood of each thing is what each is on its own, which does not belong to it by virtue of anything else, while the universal… is of such a nature as to belong to more than one thing” (chapter 13, p. 144).

“Again, thinghood is what is not attributed to any underlying thing, but the universal is always attributed to some underlying thing…. And what’s more, it is impossible and absurd that what is a this and an independent thing, if it is composed of anything, should have as a component… an of-such-a-sort…. So for those who pay attention, it is clear from these things that nothing that belongs to anything universally is thinghood, and that none of the things attributed as common properties signifies a this, but only an of-this-sort” (p. 145).

Platonic forms are generally considered to have universal import, although I think Plotinus argues that there are also forms of individuals.

“But there is an impasse. For if no independent thing can be made of universals, … and no independent thing admits of being composed of active independent things, every independent thing would not be composed of parts, so that there could not be an articulation in speech of any independent thing…. Therefore, there will be no definition of anything; or in a certain way there will be and in a certain way there will not. And what is said will be more clear from things said later” (p. 146).

More generally, independent things seem to be particulars, and Aristotle says that properly speaking, there are no definitions of particulars. That of course does not prevent dialectical inquiry and clarification about them.

“But it is also clear from these same things what follows for those who say that the forms are independent things and separate, and at the same time make the form be a compound of a general class and its specific differences…. [I]f it is impossible for things to be this way, it is clear that there are not forms of perceptible things in the way that some people say there are” (chapter 14, pp. 146-147).

Another paradox about Platonic forms — seemingly acknowledged by Plato himself in the first part of the Parmenides — is that they are supposed to have universal import, but themselves to be a kind of immaterial particulars.

“[T]here is destruction of all those things that are called independent things…, but of the articulation there is no destruction…. And this is why there is no definition of nor demonstration about particular perceptible independent things…. For this reason it is necessary, when one is making distinctions aiming at a definition of any of the particulars, not to be unaware that it is always subject to be annulled, since the thing cannot be defined” (chapter 15, pp. 147-148).

Independent things are destroyed, but their what-it-is is not. Here he mentions explicitly that particulars cannot be defined, though this does not stop us from inquiring and making judgments about them.

“But neither can any form be defined, since they say that the form is a particular and is separate; but it is necessary that an articulation be composed of words, and that the definer will not make up a word (since it will be unknown), but the words must be names given in common to everything, so that they must also belong to something else” (p. 148).

Strictly speaking, all definitions without exception implicitly depend on other definitions. If the words used in the definition of a thing did not themselves have definitions, we could not understand them. The larger our web of connected, consistent definitions, the greater the confidence we can have in it. I think another relevant point is that we don’t have knowledge of the correctness of any isolated definition, though we could have knowledge of the compatibilities and incompatibilities of one definition with others. Definitions in general are a matter of dialectic and judgment.

He mentions problems involved with the definition of unique things. The errors here are an instance of more general errors in specifying too much or too little for sound identification of unique instances of kinds.

“For people miss the mark not only by adding things of a sort such that, if they were taken away, the sun would still be the sun, such as ‘going around the earth’, or ‘hidden at night’ (for if it were to stand still or shine at night it would no longer be the sun, but it would be absurd if it were not, since ‘the sun’ signifies a certain independent thing), but also by including things that admit of applying to something else, such that, if another thing of that kind came into being, it would clearly be a sun; therefore the articulation is common, but the sun was understood to be among the particular things” (p. 149).

“And it is clear that most of what seem to be independent things are potencies, not only the parts of animals…, but also earth and fire and air, since none of them is one, but just like a heap, until some one thing is ripened or born out of them (chapter 16, p. 149, emphasis added).

The seeming is all-important here. He actually means to deny that these are independent things. Only when “some one thing is ripened or born” might there then be an independent thing.

“And since one is meant in just the same way as being, and the thinghood that belongs to what is one is also one, and those things of which the thinghood is one are one in number, it is clear that neither oneness nor being admits of being the thinghood of things…. [B]eing and oneness are thinghood more so than are sourcehood and elementality and causality, but it is not at all even these…; for thinghood belongs to nothing other than itself and that which has it, of which it is the thinghood” (p. 150).

Aristotle here clearly emphasizes a self-containedness of the what-it-is of a thing. This seems to be motivated by a concern correlative to that for independence in things. Leibniz would later take this to an extreme with his monadology. Hegel goes in the other direction, questioning the self-containedness of a what-it-is. I think Aristotle is implicitly maintaining a Kant-like duality between the self-containedness of an undefinable indemonstrable what-it-is in itself, and his view of the difference-based character of definitions and knowledge, which I think also ought to extend to what I have called relatively well-founded belief. We could perhaps then resolve the duality between self-containedness and knowledge, somewhat in the way that Hegel resolves the Kantian ones, while at the same time preserving an Aristotelian respect for the independence in things.

“And yet, even if we had not seen the stars, nevertheless I suppose there would have been everlasting independent things besides the ones we know, so that now too, even if we cannot say what they are, it is still presumably necessary that there be some. That, then, none of the things attributed universally is an independent thing, and that no independent thing is composed of independent things, is clear” (pp. 150-151).

Now he really sounds like Kant: “even if we cannot say what they are, it is still presumably necessary that there be some.”

“But what one ought to say thinghood is, and of what sort it is, let us speak again, as though making another start; for perhaps from these discussions there will also be clarity about that kind of thinghood that is separate from perceptible independent things. Now since thinghood is a certain kind of source and cause, one must go after it from that starting point. And the why of things is always sought after in this way: why one thing belongs to something else” (chapter 17, p. 151).

Now he explicitly suggests that there is something separate from perceptible independent things.

“Now why something is itself is not a quest after anything…. But one could search for the reason why a human being is a certain sort of animal…. For example, ‘why does it thunder?’ is, ‘why does noise come about in the clouds?’, for thus it is one thing’s belonging to another that is inquired after…. It is clear, then, that one is looking for what is responsible, which in some case, as presumably with a house or a bed, is that for the sake of which it is, but in some cases it is that which first set the thing in motion, since this too is responsible for it. But while the latter is looked for in cases of coming into being and destruction, the former applies even to the being of something” (pp. 151-152).

Identity by itself cannot be a reason for anything. Meanwhile, he mentions that that-for-the-sake-of-which also applies to things outside of becoming.

“But the thing in question escapes notice most of all in those cases in which one thing is not said to belong to another, as when the thing one is seeking is what a human being is, because one states it simply and does not distinguish that these things are this thing. But it is necessary to inquire by dividing things at the joints; and if one does not do this, it becomes a cross between inquiring after nothing and inquiring after something…. Accordingly, it is clear that in the case of simple things, there is no process of inquiry or teaching, but a different way of questing after such things” (p. 152).

Knowledge for Aristotle is concerned with things “belonging” to other things. It is expressed by things said of other things. Of particulars or singular things taken in isolation, may we have acquaintance or experience. We may have dialectical inquiry, and perhaps good judgment, but not knowledge.

Essence and Concept

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflection and Dialectic

As with dialogue, reflection provides a kind of model for dialectic. Reflection can be understood as an either metaphorical or literal dialogue with ourselves. We “question ourselves”, which is to say we examine and potentially criticize or refine the basis of our own commitments. Further, actual dialogue is always implicitly dialogue among fellow rational beings, all of whom are engaged at least to some extent in their own reflective activity, just by virtue of being rational beings, so dialogue implicitly presupposes reflection.

Pippin quotes Hegel: “But at issue here is neither the reflection of consciousness, nor the more specific reflection of the understanding that has the particular and the universal for its determination, but reflection in general…. For the universal, the principle or the rule and law, to which reflection rises in its process of determination is taken to be the essence of the immediate from which the reflection began…. Therefore, what reflection does to the immediate, and the determinations that derive from it, is not anything external to it but is rather its true being” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, pp. 238-239).

And again: “In general, this means nothing but this: Anything which is, is to be considered to exist not as an immediate, but as a posited; there is no stopping at immediate determinate being [Dasein] but a return must rather be made from it back into its ground, and in this reflection it is a sublated being and is in and for itself. What is expressed by the principle of sufficient reason is, therefore, the essentiality of immanent reflection as against mere being” (p. 239).

In the first quote, Hegel is again emphasizing that what he means by reflection is not just looking in a figurative mirror, but rather something more like finding an orientation among (or building a synthesis of) the potentially infinite mutual reflections in a hall of mirrors. Reflection “in general” is a name Hegel gives to reflection with this kind of potentially infinite dimension. (That the infinity here should be called potential is my friendly Aristotelian interpolation.)

In the second quote, he is saying that this kind of reflection — lifted out from the distinction between reflective activity and what it reflects upon — is what he would call the “truth” of everything that appears to be immediately determinate.

The principle of sufficient reason as formulated by Leibniz effectively says that for everything that is in some definite way, there is a reason why it is that way. Hegel is saying more specifically that such “reasons why” emerge immanently from the reflective grounding of what he is in a nonstandard way calling essence. What Leibniz cannot show is how a particular essence or monadic point of view results in certain predicates and not others; despite great sophistication, he is still to some extent using essence and monads as unexplained explainers to avoid what Hegel calls the “problem of indifference”. Hegel on the other hand explicitly makes essence and explanation interdependent.

“[T]he ‘principles’ of identification and differentiation are deeply intertwined, not independent of each other” (p. 240).

“[A] thing’s determinate properties are not, cannot be, a mark of that thing’s unlikeness from other things, just by being those properties…. If one thing is red and another square, we do not thereby know one is unlike the other; they are just two different things. A locomotive has nothing to do with a melody; it is not unlike a melody. We are trying to account not for determinate otherness, as in the logic of being, but for how objects that share properties (are like) could be, even with an extraordinary degree of such likeness, still unlike” (p. 241).

“Some of this anticipates topics in the logic of the Concept. Two trees are alike in being trees but unlike in being two individual trees. The idea will be that just in their likeness, their way of being alike, that they are unlike (different trees), just in the way each distinctly instantiates ‘treeness’ that they are unlike. Such a different ‘way of being a tree’ is not another property but the way the tree-properties are ‘had’ by the individual” (p. 242).

“Hegel is thinking of the way in which the specifying work of ‘unlikeness’ cannot be a matter of individual properties, atomistically conceived, but unlikeness within likeness is best understood as some content, the unlikeness of which is strict, even within such likeness. Some charge can be both positive and negative; some number, 4, can be both +4 and -4; some quantity of money can be an asset and also a debt pending; some force can be attractive and repelling; some distance marched east is canceled by the same distance marched west, and all these are ‘opposed’ only within some common likeness” (ibid).

I find “either-or” language more appropriate to these cases than the “both-and” language above, but the intent is the same. The distinctions in each sub-case are concrete “opposites” applicable to some specific context, and each definable only in reference to the other. In each case, it is possible to abstract an indifferent thing being measured or assessed — “positive-or-negative-quantity” for the one, and “virtue-or-vice” for the other.

“The ‘world’s being contradictory’ means nothing more than that, as he says, virtue cannot be virtue just by being other than, different from, in comparison with, vice, but only by ‘the opposition and combat in it’ against vice” (p. 243, emphasis in original).

Pippin complicates the matter with this example, because “relative” seems to have a different significance in the context of virtue and vice than it does in, say, that of positive and negative numbers. But the intended point is a very abstract one about constitution of meanings that is common to both cases. Whatever the difference between the two “oppositions” (positive/negative, virtue/vice), in each case the two sub-terms are somehow measured or assessed “against” one another.

“Hegel is trying to specify how affirming contrary predicates (‘in opposition’) does not amount to a logical contradiction. That is the point of his discussion, to make this distinction, not to treat such oppositions as if they were logically contradictory and then to affirm them anyway. As [Michael] Wolff puts it, Hegel’s orientation… is not from sentence or predicate negation, but from developments in the understanding of negative numbers and from Kant’s defense of Newton on positive and negative magnitudes. In general, then, mathematical, not logical negation” (pp. 243-244).

This is extremely important. The status of negative numbers was still controversial in Hegel’s time. Kant and Hegel contributed to their acceptance. Hegel struggled to invent new language to distinguish ambiguous cases in his Logic and to say reasonable things about them, but readers (certainly including myself) have found his unique idioms very hard to follow. Most of the ink spilled over “contradiction” in Hegel has been based on fundamental misunderstandings. (See also Negation and Negativity.)

“To use an empirical example, if the question is something like ‘Why did the ball fall to the ground?’ we want to avoid two kinds of answers: ‘because whenever a heavy object is dropped from a height, it falls’; and ‘it is in the nature of heavy things to fall’. Doing so, avoiding these alternatives, will allow us to see that the relation between a ‘ground’ and ‘what it grounds’ must be understood as a dynamic relation, one whereby the determinacy of the ground and that of the grounded cannot be fixed in isolation from each other” (pp. 245-246).

He quotes Hegel: “But the being that appears and essential being stand referred to each other absolutely. Thus concrete existence is, third, essential relation; what appears shows the essential, and the essential is in the appearance. — Relation is the still incomplete union of reflection into otherness and reflection into itself; the complete interpenetrating of the two is actuality” (p. 246).

“The general point [Hegel] keeps making is: a strict separation of the two moments, and an insistence that the nature of an appeal to an essence, or to a causal law, or to someone’s reason for acting cannot be understood as punctuated moments on the billiard-ball model of causation, but involve a kind of unity, the development of a kind of unity, much closer (yet again) to Aristotle on energeia. This essential-being-as-activity, manifesting itself in its appearances, is what should count as ‘actuality’. This has the implication that many existing things have no actuality, are not really ‘anything’. A lump of dirt, a cough, a strand of wire” (ibid).

“The question for Hegel is the question of ‘actuality’, not ‘existence’, or the sensibly apprehensible, just as for Aristotle, the question is the ‘really real’, to ontos on.” (p. 247).

Pippin quotes from the Encyclopedia Logic, “The logical is to be sought in a system of thought-determinations in which the antithesis between subjective and objective (in its usual meaning) disappears. This meaning of thinking and of its determinations is more precisely expressed by the ancients when they say that nous [“intellect”, or thought in a non-psychological sense] governs the world” (p. 248).

Here “governs” is meant in a constitutive sense. The important point is that the “thought-determinations” here are indifferent to the ordinary distinction between a subjective “thinker” and an objective “thought content”.

In this context he speaks of “this dynamical relation, this Ur-relation of all relations” (ibid).

“I have tried to show in another book that the most important, most clarifying implications of this Ur-relation occur in Hegel’s practical philosophy, both in his account of human agency, and in the implications of that account for the practical theory of freedom in his Philosophy of Right and theory of objective spirit in general (ibid).

“[T]he full demonstration of the truth of this Ur-relation lies in what it actually illuminates, in the cogency and credibility of, for example, an account of agency based on it” (p. 249).

It was the outstanding (and very Aristotelian) account of Hegel’s view of agency in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy that first attracted me to Pippin’s work.

In his own idiom, Hegel says “thus the inner is immediately the outer, and it is this determinateness of externality for the reason that it is the inner; conversely, the outer is only an inner because it is only an outer” (quoted, ibid.)

Pippin comments, “He does not mean here anything as obvious as: when I do something, my ex ante intention is fulfilled and so becomes something outer, just as what was done, the bodily movement, counts as an action because it expressed this ex ante intention. The passage does not say that the inner becomes the outer, nor that the outer is the expression of the inner. It says: there is no ex ante intention except as outer. It is the outer. And there is no outer except as what must count as inner, nor that it expresses a separable inner. There is no such separation” (pp. 249-250; see also Hegel on Willing).

This concludes Pippin’s chapter on the logic of essence. Unsurprisingly, we have not uncovered any magic formula that would tell us which appearances manifest the essence in particular cases. Such a thing seems completely impossible to me; we should not expect to be able to find any general formula covering an unspecified collection of particulars. Any judgments involving particulars must in part at least come back to something like Aristotelian deliberation and practical judgment, which yield only particular results.

Nonetheless, in discussing the logic of essence we have ruled out some important classes of misunderstandings, and we have set the stage for the climax of Hegel’s Logic in the “logic of the concept”. The logic of the concept will take as a starting point the non-separation of “inner” and “outer” that has been shown in the logic of essence.

Reflective Grounding

In Essence and Explanation, I introduced Hegel’s generalization from essence to “ground”, which is anything that explains something else and could be said to metaphorically “underlie” it.

Essence and ground in Hegel’s sense are not simply definable once and for all. Instead, he emphasizes dynamic relations of “grounding”, in accordance with his unusual notion of truth as a process. These dynamic relations correlate with movements of the reflective judgment that Kant discusses in the Critique of Judgment.

Kant distinguishes “determinative” judgment — corresponding to ordinary predicative assertions like “S is P“, and to the subsumption of individuals under universal concepts — from “reflective” judgment, which open-endedly looks for universals appropriate to the individual. Pippin suggests there is a kind of reciprocal dependency involved in the actual working of these two kinds of judgment.

It seems to me that reflective judgment has a great deal in common with the deliberation that lies behind Aristotelian practical judgment, even though Aristotle speaks of these as concluding in action rather than knowledge or opinion. Perhaps we might also say with Brandom that undertaking a commitment about how things are is a kind of action.

Hegel argues that even determinative judgments presuppose a reflective component, and speaks at length of “reflective determination”.

This use of “reflective” has nothing to do with the immediate inspection or direct consciousness of some content, or even with any single stage of reflection, or indeed any kind of move that could be completed all at once.

Paul Ricoeur’s works make a similar point, in tying the term “reflective” closely to his other notion of the “long detour” needed for philosophical understanding, which is itself very Hegelian in spirit. This is anything but a rabbit-out-of-hat “reflexivity at a glance”.

If there is a metaphor here, it is not gazing in a mirror to see something, but finding an orientation within the potentially infinite reflections of a hall of mirrors. Note also that we see the potentially infinite reflections in an “immediate” representation, even though each layer of reflection is an additional mediation when we interpret what we are seeing.

At the level of nature, similar potentially infinite reflection occurs in biological and ecological processes that achieve stability through feedback cycles.

Essence and Explanation

Hegel’s Logic comprises what Robert Pippin calls three separate “logics” — a logic of being, a logic of essence, and a logic of the concept. The first of these, the logic of being, was characterized by Pippin as an out-and-out failure that Hegel deliberately embarks on in order to make an indirect point. Broadly speaking, that failure consists in attempting to explain things or make them intelligible solely by means of simple assertions. The logic of being also shows the impossibility of grounding philosophical explanation in a simple immediacy of sense-certainty or intuition, or in any notion of pure Being or being qua being. It seems to me that what these results have in common is the impossibility of explaining any definiteness or determinacy in terms of what is indeterminate.

So far, there is no indication that the logic of essence will ever be regarded by Hegel or Pippin as a failure like the logic of being. It will be further enriched by the logic of the concept, and we have yet to see the detail of this. But now we have at least reached the beginning of a true beginning, after having completed extensive due diligence toward claims of an easier, more direct kind of beginning that did not pan out. At the same time, the subject matter has changed from mere isolated assertions to what Kant in the Critique of Judgment called reflective judgments.

I have characterized the indirect positive outcome of the logic of being in terms of the primacy of relation and relatedness over discrete “things”. Pippin says that the logic of being also showed the impossibility of a completely presuppositionless beginning. Hegel’s reworking of Kantian reflective judgment now takes the primacy of relatedness as a starting point.

The logic of essence will thus effectively take the constitutive priority of intelligible relations over their respective “things” as its starting point. Relations will constitute things, at least to a greater degree than vice versa. This is what the Preface to the Phenomenology calls the perspective of “otherness”, and what Hegel also, in a special polymorphic sense that has been very badly misunderstood, calls “negativity”.

Rather than futilely trying to explain something determinate from something completely indeterminate, we have now turned to examining the conditions of the constitution of any possible determinacy. Additional normative considerations will be made explicit in the logic of the concept.

Essence is a Latin term that is read backwards into Greek philosophy, due mainly to its use as a translation of Aristotle’s “what it was to be” a thing. As treated by mainstream scholasticism, however, it had a meaning closer to that of Platonic form (see Platonic Truth). Platonic form is eternal, whereas form for Aristotle and Hegel has an irreducible dependency on manifestation and development in time. But Plato in his dialogues treats “essence” or what a thing eternally is as a matter of dialectical discovery subject to a kind of perpetual renewal, whereas the scholastics generally (and Leibniz) held it to be already finally established by God in the act of creation.

I think of human character as a sort of privileged example of Aristotle’s “what it was to be” some particular one. Pippin has given this an excellent development (see Toward Essence; Hegel on Willing). What makes human character a “privileged” example for me is that it makes many nuances visible that are not so applicable to “what it was to be” that chair, for instance. The nuances of interest here concern relations between essence and appearance, which form the main subject matter of the logic of essence.

Here we also have an instance of the Aristotelian and Hegelian point that we gain the most insight from considering the richest examples of anything, rather than the simplest ones.

The moderns learned from Descartes to privilege simple cases, and to aim to systematically reduce complex cases to simple cases. That is an admirable procedure in mathematics, with many applications. But in life more generally, there is no good reason for assuming that richer cases can be explained with no more resources than it takes to explain simpler ones. In mathematics, if we have a proof that some specific class of rich cases can be reduced to some set of simple cases without remainder, then we can make that sort of “reductionist” claim for that particular class of cases. Outside of mathematics, it seems to me that reductionist claims usually turn out to be mere assertions.

What Hegel calls the “problem of indifference” — how are we to judge which particular appearances show aspects of the “essence” or deeper truth of people or things and which do not — is brought to the fore here.

“We can be said to know the ‘what it was to be’ of a thing, neither by direct intellectual intuition (its being-at-work is a process, a way of being, not graspable punctually as itself some object) nor by just observing, say, the life of a living thing or the uses of an artifact” (Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 227).

As Pippin puts it, “if essence is to explain anything, it must be the ground of what immediately ‘shines’ or appears. Those seemings must be its own, and they are made sense of by reference to their essence” (ibid).

“In some sense, and it is the task of the logic of essence to explain in what sense, the thing’s actuality is both not its mere seemings, and yet nothing other than those seemings, rightly understood” (p. 228).

This is another very Aristotelian point.

“Determinate specification of something essential in an appearance requires essential predication or specification of some sort — some predicates, not others. But we know which predicates are essential only by already knowing what essence is. This is a problem that assumes different forms but is basically the same, whether posed in the language of classical essentialism and manifestations, or selecting from a large set of ‘grounding’ causal factors the genuinely explanatory one or ones” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, pp. 226-227).

Hegel develops the terms “ground” and “grounding” for discussing the generalization from essence to any sort of explanation.

Pippin notes that “Plato, Kant, Locke, Spinoza, and others can all be cited in various ways as expressive of the reflective logic of the appearances of essence, the manifestation of something substantial that is nevertheless not manifest as it is in itself” (p. 231).

He quotes Hegel: “On the one hand, the ground is ground as the immediately reflected content determination of the determinate being [Dasein] which it grounds; on the other, it is that which is posited. It is that on the basis of which that determinate being [Dasein] is supposed to be understood; but, conversely, it is inferred from the latter and is understood from it. The main business of this reflection thus consists in gleaning the ground from a determinate being [Dasein], that is, in converting the immediate determinate being [Dasein] into the form of reflected being; consequently the ground, instead of being self-subsisting in and for itself, is rather that which is positive and derived” (pp. 227-228, Pippin’s emphasis).

Once again, I would note a convergence with Aristotle. Aristotle says that in order to possibly know how things are in and for themselves, we should and do start with how things are “for us”, not with how they supposedly are, full stop. Hegel will eventually amplify this into what he calls the “subjective” (though anything but merely subjective) logic of the concept.

Aristotle and Hegel both want to say that the basis of knowledge and explanation is a partial overlap between how things are initially for us and how they really are. This notion of a partial overlap between essence and appearance is a sort of Aristotelian mean that eliminates the roots of the twin evils of “all is illusion” skepticism, and of foundationalism, or the claim of a certain starting point for knowledge.

“[Hegel] is in effect saying that a putative logic of being is, has shown itself to be, mere seeming, Schein [literally, “shine”]. As [Michael] Theunissen points out, this means that Hegel is actually invoking the notion of Schein in three different senses. There is the unacknowledged Schein that a logic of being has turned out to be. There is the Schein of the mere appearance that the skeptic and idealists claim are all we are able to know. And there is the result of the analysis, that this purported limitation of knowledge to mere Schein is itself Schein, unable to account for itself; what seemed to be mere Schein turns out to be the Schein of essence or Erscheinung [Hegel’s technical term for appearance that is more than just mere appearance]” (p. 229, emphasis in original).

That all appearance is only mere appearance must be itself only a mere appearance, if there is to be any knowledge or meaningful explanation at all.

“In other words, the illusion of any possible absolute presuppositionlessness is what has been demonstrated by showing that Sein [being] must be understood as Wesen [essence], just in order to be understood as Sein. ([Hegel says] ‘Being is as such only the becoming of essence’…)…. Wesen will show itself (and itself as the truth of Sein) as always already conceptually mediated determinacy” (p. 230, emphasis in original).

The brute “things” of mere assertion depend on the richer, subtler “things” considered by reflective judgment for any truth they may have. This is an archetypal Hegelian move.

Pippin points out that the logic of essence gives a new sense to Hegel’s very nonstandard notion of negation. Whereas before, “negation” served to express the dependency of meaningful relational distinction on what else something rules out in order to express what it is, now “Essence’s seemings are its own…, even though no seeming or set of appearances express in their immediacy what that essence really is” (ibid).

He quotes Hegel, “In the becoming of being, it is being which lies at the foundation of determinateness, and determinateness is reference to an other. Reflective movement is by contrast the other as negation in itself, a negation which has being only as self-referring” (p. 231, Pippin’s emphasis).

Rather than addressing an external other, in reflective judgment Hegelian “negation” is now turned on itself — seeking further clarification first and foremost through questioning itself and its own formulations. (See also Hegel on Reflection.)

Toward Essence

What does it mean to really explain something, as opposed to just making claims about it? According to Robert Pippin, this question underlies what he calls the key transition of Hegel’s Logic, between the “logic of being” addressed in several recent posts and what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

The logic of essence will itself eventually be superseded by the logic of the concept. With very broad brush, it seems to me one might expect that the logic of essence will be a representation of important insights Hegel attributes to Aristotle, whereas the logic of the concept is supposed to be a representation of what he claims as his own (and Kant’s).

“[Hegel’s] general approach [is] to begin with the least ‘mediated’, least theoretically committed determination and argue for the further determinations, further theoretical commitments, without which even these relatively simpler determinations would not be possible” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 211).

Hegel assimilates all simple predications or assertions to the logic of being, the inadequacy of which we have seen in some detail. Every word, phrase, or assertion taken in strict isolation reduces to meaningless noise, just like the attempt to “say” indeterminate Being. Only taken together and in some sort of context do words and assertions begin to mean something.

According to Pippin, “a mere list of contingent properties and quantitative measures cannot count as having determined any subject of those determinations as such” (ibid). Hegel “summarizes this problem by calling it the problem of indifference” (ibid). We still lack any even quasi-stable things to talk about.

An explanation is more than just a generalization. Explanation requires distinguishing the essential from the nonessential.

Hegel thinks that even something as sophisticated as the use of Newton’s inverse square law to account for the elliptical shape of planetary orbits is still only a compact way of making a complex assertion about relational properties, and does not give us a reason. This corresponds to the level of the “force and understanding” chapter of the Phenomenology, which reaches a purely relational point of view on mathematical physics, but still lacks the features Hegel associates with self-consciousness.

“[A] distinction between what is truly real or essential and what appears, or that way of thinking, is now on the Logic‘s agenda…. A practice exists, and we want to know not merely what happens or whether it exists but whether the practice is actually a religious practice. Or a computer wins at chess, but is it actually thinking? Something is displayed in a gallery, but is it actually art?” (p. 218).

“These questions are just examples. The Logic is not concerned with them, and, we should say, is concerned with actuality as such, the possible actuality of anything intelligible” (ibid). “These example questions… depend on ‘the logic of actuality’ as such, which simply means: how we think about what anything ‘really is’. As we have seen, the determinations of such conceptuality cannot be empirical; they must be understood, according to Hegel, as ‘products’ of thought’s self-determination of itself, a process that continually realizes thought’s apperceptive nature. Or: the concept gives itself its own actuality. Hegelian conceptuality has this subjective dimension (‘thought’s autonomy‘), even while also being the articulation of the conceptual structure of reality. This has nothing to do with spinning every actual, contingent species-form out of thought’s self-examination. The topic… is logical or categorical formality as such, not ‘what are the existing species-forms?’ ” pp. 218-219).

“The very title of a ‘logic of essence’ suggests (yet again) immediately the philosopher whom Hegel seems most to admire, Aristotle” (p. 219). “We found in the logic of being that, according to Hegel, it was not possible to specify a thing’s ‘actual’ being by qualitative and quantitative markers…. Since Hegel accepts the Aristotelian premise that actually to be is to be a this-such, where that means it is identifiable by being an instance of a kind, this means we have failed with respect to the question of actuality. We are thereby compelled, in the prosecution of the original task, to consider that, ‘actually’, a thing is not how it simply appears, looks, sensibly manifests itself, however regular or predictable. We have to say that in some way, what a thing actually is lies hidden, must be uncovered, posited, a product of thought, not a simple empirical apprehension as such” (p. 220).

The “original task” is the determination of meaning, which didn’t get very far in the logic of being, even though in the parts Pippin has skipped over, Hegel did develop resources for making broad classes of simple assertions or claims about appearance.

“What we will need is a comprehension of the difference… between the ‘essential’ and the ‘unessential’, and the basis for this differentiation” (p. 221). “[W]hatever seemings are, (in not ‘actually’ being), they exist and are determinate, a determinacy inexplicable, Hegel claims, by the ‘skeptics and idealists’ who claim that the distinction cannot be made, and therefore say, ‘everything is illusory'” (ibid).

Whoever claims that “everything is only mere appearance” turns out to have no basis for making any distinctions within the so-called appearance.

“Someone who had understood everything said onstage, the plot of Shakespeare’s King Lear, and the basic motivations of the characters, as those characters and others voice them, and had understood only that, would not, we feel entitled to say, have understood ‘the play’. Put in the simplest possible way, to understand the play, one has to do more than listen to it; one must think about it, or we can say, using the word most important for Hegel, ‘reflect’ on it, understand what lies ‘beneath’… these facts about plots and characters…. There is no such thing as a hidden meaning in King Lear; there are just the words spoken or found on the page. How we get from this clumsy metaphor to the ‘concept’ of King Lear in itself is the underlying story of the logic of essence” (pp. 223-224).

All meaning that is worth talking about has this same kind of non-thing-like character. It is constituted from relations of connection and disconnection.

“It would be a mistake to sum a person up, attempt to ‘understand’ her in the distinct way persons should be understood, simply by adding up or listing everything she did, from what she had for breakfast to volunteering for a dangerous mission. A person would not be properly understood by attention to such ‘immediacy’ alone (or her qualitative/quantitative/measured appearances, as in the logic of being). We need to understand her deeds as ‘mediated’ by what Hegel calls her ‘inwardness’…, something (and now in the most important difference with the logic of being) that we cannot see, that does not simply present itself” (p. 224).

The relations that constitute meaning do not themselves directly appear. This applies as much to things in general as to human character.

It is certainly ubiquitous that people and things also respond differentially to direct appearances, without anything deeper than a qualitative or quantitative appearance being involved. Mid-20th century behaviorism claimed that was all there is, that the meaning at issue here was a mere figment or conceit.

Pippin continues his previous example, “For example, we can’t really understand what she did except by some attention to her own formulation of the act description and to her avowed motive (her ‘intention’). Sometimes what happens should not count as a deed because there is not the proper connection of inner and outer. An accident happens. Something prevents her from realizing her intention; that is, something happens to her. She does not do something. What happens is not an expression of her character. On the other hand, as Hegel states the central claim of the entire logic of essence in a phrase, we must concede that any such inner self-construal can ‘prove itself’… only in what manifests that outwardly, in the deeds. (It is immediately important that this ‘test’ can fail.) Too radical a separation and we have someone trying to disown what she in fact did, to fabricate excuses. (‘Mistakes were made’; ‘It was never my intention to deceive/hurt/offend anyone’, etc.) We need this distinction, but we can’t establish which deeds are true manifestations of essence and which are merely aberrations by any statistical analysis of frequency, any simple inspection of what happens. We need to understand how ‘what shows’, ‘what manifests itself’ (Schein), can be said to reflect these deeds’ essence when it does (if it does, then as Erscheinung, appearance), even if, as appearance, no one deed is ever a manifestation or simple representation of essence as such ” (pp. 224-225).

It was this sort of point about the ethical meaning and use of actuality in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy that initially greatly impressed me in Pippin’s work (see especially Hegel on Willing). According to Pippin, this kind of question about the relation of actuality to appearances is just what Hegel’s “logic of essence” is all about.

Unexpectedly for me at least, this now provides the occasion for Pippin to tell us more specifically what he thinks “mediated immediacy” means in Hegel. As I mentioned before, I have always thought first of things like the experience of riding a bicycle or recognizing an object, which properly speaking are examples of “immediatized mediation”, bridging the gap between the intrinsic emptiness of immediacy in itself and our undoubtedly non-empty “immediate” uptake of things in ordinary experience. In other words, my attention was drawn to the way in which complex results of some previous synthesis can be pre-consciously associated to what we experience “immediately” in a new synthesis of imagination.

Hitherto, in thinking about the term “mediated immediacy”, I have focused on ordinary appearances of meaning, in contexts that according to Hegel are not adequate to “immediately” support the constitution of that apparent meaning. This is admittedly to disregard the surface grammar of the phrase.

Pippin here starts to give “mediated immediacy” a sense that is aligned with the surface grammar, and is also closely aligned with what he has just said the logic of essence is all about.

He continues, “Understanding this relation properly is what Hegel thinks allows him to speak of a mediated immediacy. The appearances are not denied as unreal. They ‘shine’ in their immediacy. But they can be understood in their determinate immediacy only as the manifestation of the thing that they are appearances of, and so are always mediated…. We can’t derive the appearances from a mediated (‘posited’, ‘reflected’, ‘thought-over’) essence. That would be a denial of their immediacy. But we don’t apprehend such appearances on their own, in pure immediacy, and then infer what appears. What appears is appearing in what manifests itself…. What a person does is tied to that person’s character, whatever it is. And understanding that character is nothing other than rightly understanding what that person has done. With respect to all the reflected dualisms introduced in the logic of essence, this thought in various forms remains the kernel of that logic throughout” (p. 225).

This is Hegel’s recovery of something like Aristotle’s qualified common-sense realism about experience. We say that we experience not just phenomena but also things, even if we are wrong about them sometimes. At the simplest level, though not itself thing-like, essence is what enables the distinction of things from arbitrary collections of appearances.

“This is also why essence is a retrospective reflection of what has been made manifest, why it is rooted in gewesen, the past participle of sein [to be] or ‘what has been’, a feature somewhat counterintuitive in an account of action. It is also why Hegel is happy to accept the Wesen/gewesen suggestion of temporality. It links his account with one he admired, Aristotle’s, whose term for what has often been translated as essence is to ti en einai, something like ‘the what it was to be’ of a thing” (p. 226).

Essence, I would suggest, subsists independent of time once constituted, but the constitution of essence for both Aristotle and Hegel has a dependency on appearances in time. It therefore could not be pre-given. We have to actively discover or construct it, often taking into account long sequences of appearances in time. These may wander in various directions or sharply reverse our previous expectation. Parts of them we will judge to be irrelevant. This is only the beginning of the story of essence, not the end.

“Ultimately on Hegel’s account, if we want to know whether this lie reveals a person to be a ‘liar’, what we need is not to have deeper insight into some thinglike essence, but to observe what else the person does over time and to understand the relation among these deeds, to interpret them or ‘think them over’ in their relation to each other. This will be a crucial point throughout the logic of essence, and it obviously raises the question of how to make, what guides us in making, this relational connection.”

It is relatively easy to express the openness of Aristotelian practical judgment. But we still have to do the work of judgment in each case, and due to the openness we will have committed to with Aristotle, there could not be a precise roadmap telling us how to do the work. But Kant already argued that at least at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, universals can meaningfully guide practical judgment, so perhaps something more could be achieved. Any such progress on how to judge what is essential would be priceless indeed.

“Finally, it is important to stress that this topic is being introduced very broadly. No particular theory of ‘essentialism’ is being entertained, and as already noted, making the general distinction just discussed could be achieved even by an account of the difference between transcendental and empirical subjectivity, or between categories and empirical concepts” (ibid).

Essence as such need not be taken as a specific “ontological commitment”. It means what is reasonably, reflectively judged to be important. That is part of the hermeneutics of things and of life, which we encounter as soon as we begin asking if someone or something is really or actually something-or-other. (See also Essence and Explanation; Hegel on Reflection.)

Logic and Metaphysics

In Emancipatory Logic? I began a walk-through of Robert Pippin’s important Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. This post borrows its title from his second chapter, though it only addresses the first part of it.

According to Pippin, Hegel’s Science of Logic is intended to exhibit the “spontaneous” or “self-generating” actualization of intelligibility. This takes places through the higher-order universals that Kant following Aristotle called “categories”.

Hegel’s “logic” provides his alternative to Kant’s notoriously long and difficult argument for the possibility of a priori knowledge that is not merely analytic, and to Kant’s derivation of the categories. As an exercise in what Aristotle called first philosophy, it is not supposed to depend on anything else.

By his own lights Hegel is extremely concerned with concreteness. He is therefore very conscious that his “logic as first philosophy” only addresses possible actualizations of intelligibility, and doesn’t derive anything real. We might think that the actualization of intelligibility would be a realm of light, but here the concern is with the emergence of light, hence his curious metaphor that “logic” is a realm of shadows.

“Hegel follows Kant’s innovation in his response to the empiricist challenge…. The basic question is, How could there possibly be objectively valid concepts, true of all objects, but not derived from experience? Where could they come from? In Hegel’s terms, this amounts to the question, How do concepts that are the products of thought alone ‘give themselves’ content, where by content we mean something extraconceptual?” (pp. 39-40).

Pippin says that Hegel will want “to determine objects in their thinkability, where that means their suitability not for a finite, subjective power, but for thought as such, that is, objects in their intelligibility, in their being at all intelligibly what they are. Their being what they are is their concept, or their ‘being their concept’, for Hegel. The concepts did not come from anywhere, any more than the thinking power comes from anywhere” (p. 40). Hegel aims for a “logic of the knowable as such” (p. 41).

“[Kant’s] critique concerns the modern tradition stemming from Descartes, embodied in Arnauld’s and Nicole’s Port Royal Logic in 1662, as well as the Leibnizian/Wolffian metaphysical tradition. The former held that clarity about the relations between ideas could lead the mind closer to the bearers of philosophical truth, clear and distinct ideas, known passively by the ‘light of reason’. For the latter, the laws of thought simply are the ‘laws of truth’ (to use Frege’s phrase), or a general logic is just thereby a logic of objects, because all philosophical truth is what Kant would call ‘analytic’, arrived at by logical analysis alone” (pp. 41-42).

Pippin emphasizes that Kant and Hegel both reject the early modern (originally Thomistic) idea of passive illumination by a “natural light” of reason. In the original Thomistic context, the idea of a natural light of reason played what I think was a very positive role as a counter-weight to sectarian tendencies in religion, but in the early modern context it led to a new kind of dogmatism.

“With general logic as it was understood in the Port Royal and the Wolffian traditions, [Hegel] agrees that logical reasoning, understood in that way, does not provide knowledge of objects. He especially agrees with Kant that reason and understanding are activities, not passively ‘illuminated’. As ‘that great foe of immediacy’, in Sellars’ phrase, he does not mention or rely on such receptive or noetic intuition. As such a great foe, Hegel is opposed to any notion of self-standing, atomic conceptual content. As he wants so famously to show in a dialectical logic, determinateness is a function of determination, always an identification ‘through an other’, his formulation for discursivity” (p. 42).

For Hegel, there is no determinateness without a prior activity of determination. That activity is a discursive articulation of otherness in its concreteness by means of language.

Hegel’s Science of Logic is divided into what he calls an “objective” logic, consisting in a “logic of being” and a “logic of essence”, and a “subjective” logic, consisting entirely in a “logic of the concept”.

“The logic of being seems clearly to correspond to the Kantian categories of quality and quantity, what Kant called the mathematical and constitutive categories, and the logic of essence certainly seems to correspond to the categories of relation and modality, or the dynamic and regulative categories. The logic of the Concept makes use of the same syllogistic central to Kant’s conception of the role of such an inferential structure in the activity of reason” (p. 43).

Incidentally, I find it intriguing and highly plausible that Hegelian essence would express relation and modality. As much of an improvement as this is over the early modern notion of essence as a putatively self-contained content, it still does not yet address the fluidity of what would have been essence in development over time.

Pippin notes that in an 1812 letter, Hegel also said the objective logic roughly corresponds to the “ontology” he saw articulated in Aristotle’s logical works. I would add that Hegel’s “logic of the concept” moves beyond the “objective” logic in somewhat the same way that the discussion of “substance” in Aristotle’s Metaphysics moves beyond that in the Categories.

Pippin says “there is no question that Hegel both wholeheartedly agreed with Kant’s critique of substantive metaphysics, and realized that that critique applied only to modern metaphysics and left several possibilities open” (p. 44). He quotes Hegel saying “What Kant generally has in mind here is the state of metaphysics of his time…; he neither paid attention to, nor examined, the genuinely speculative ideas of older philosophers on the concept of spirit” (ibid).

He begins to clarify what Hegel more specifically means by logic.

“[F]or both Kant and Hegel, the unit of significance for any logic is not the proposition or any static formal structure but acts of reasoning and assertion” (ibid).

“Hegel’s logic does not primarily concern relations among, operations upon, propositions, and is instead oriented from a logic of terms. So we don’t see a syntax specified by axioms, a proof theory, and a semantics” (ibid).

In mainstream 20th century logic, the older term logic was regarded as a mere historical relic. But since the late 20th century, type theory has provided a formulation of term logic in higher-order mathematics that subsumes not only first-order but also higher-order predicate logic, so even in strictly mathematical terms, term logic is once again highly relevant.

“But as becomes clearer in the logic of the Concept, conceptual content is not provided by analysis of atomistically conceived concepts. Concepts are understood, as they were in Kant, as ‘predicates of possible judgments’, and the roles they play in possible judgments in various contexts, involving other concepts, and the roles they can and cannot play in such judgments (including the inferential relations among the judgments) are necessary to specify such concepts. This is why Hegel metaphorically speaks of concepts as alive, in movement, and why the logic’s ‘motion’ is the key to the specification of any concept…. Concepts are rules for judgmental unification, and judgmental unifications are always apperceptive” (p. 45).

“So the structure of concepts in use is the structure of the apperceptive ‘I’ (ibid; see also Ideas Are Not Inert).

“The concept of the Concept, the apperceptive understanding of the implications of this apperceptive structure, is what Hegel calls ‘the Absolute'” (ibid).

He compares Hegel’s view of concepts to that of the contemporary philosopher John McDowell in Mind and World.

“[I]n McDowell’s view we can certainly distinguish thinking from what is thought (the world is not a thought-thing; thinking is a discursive activity; the world is not a discursive activity) and still insist that the world ‘is made up of the sort of things one can think. (That discursive activity is, in its unity, the unity of anything that can be known would be expressed on the ‘object side’ by claiming that a determinate object is articulable as a single unity.) Or, for example, the profound-sounding (even Heideggerian) claim that there is no ontological gap between thought and world just comes down to the fact that ‘one can think, for instance, that spring has begun, and that very same thing, that spring has begun, can be the case’. What I think when I know (think truly) that something is the case is simply what is the case. It is thus a truism of sorts that, with the issue posed in a Kantian way, ‘the forms of thought are the forms of things…. The distinction between ‘conditions on the possibility of knowledge of things’ and ‘conditions on the possibility of things themselves’, which some use to characterize Kantian idealism, should be rejected ‘on the ground that the relevant conditions are inseparably both conditions on the thought and conditions on objects, not primarily either the one or the other'” (p. 47).

Frege said a fact is a true thought. The early Wittgenstein identified the world with what is the case. Aristotle said there is no difference between thought in the strong sense (nous or “intellect”) and that of which it thinks. Pippin quotes Hegel’s implicit invocation of Aristotle on this point:

“The older metaphysics had in this respect a higher concept of thinking than now passes for accepted opinion. For it presupposed as its principle that only what is known of things and in things by thought is really true [wahrhaft Wahre] in them, that is, what is known in them not in their immediacy but as first elevated to the form of thinking, as things of thought. This metaphysics held that thinking and the determination of thinking are not something alien to the subject matters, but rather are their essence, or that the things and the thinking of them agree in and for themselves (also our language expresses a kinship between them); that thinking in its immanent determinations, and the true nature of things, are one and the same content” (p. 48; see also Form and Things).

Pippin points out that Hegel does not simply identify facts with propositions. Rather, in the spirit of Kant’s unities of apperception, he is concerned with “thought’s agreeing with itself” (p. 51). “The force of a judgment is judgment’s own force; it is not a natural force or the result of the accumulation of empirical data” (p. 52). In a footnote Pippin adds that “‘I did it because I thought I ought to’ could be appealed to to make the same point” (ibid).

“A wolf is not simply, in itself, what it is to be a wolf but to some degree or other a better or worse exemplification of such a concept ‘for itself’. The object is not just ‘as it is’; it is ‘for’ (here, in the sense of ‘for the sake of’) its concept and hereby itself…. This is all in keeping with Hegel’s general tendency to gloss his use of for-itself with Aristotle’s notion of an actualized potential” (pp. 54-55).

“To say that an object is ‘for its form’ is just to say that there is an intelligible dynamic in its development. (As in Aristotle, the particular kind of unity by which any thing or process or activity is what it distinctively is is the unity by virtue of which it is intelligible.)…. This intelligible dynamic is its concept and is not something that exists separate from or supervening on some physical attributes and efficient causation. It just is the intelligible way a development develops; there is nothing ‘over and above’ the development” (p. 55).

Pippin quotes Hegel’s Encyclopedia logic where Hegel specifically recalls Aristotle’s criticism of Plato for neglecting the actuality of forms.

“Self” and “other” are inseparably related in the Logic, as they are in the discussion of self-consciousness in the Phenomenology. In the Logic, “‘for itself’ and ‘for an other’ will be reciprocally dependent notions” (p. 56).

For Hegel, a being “is what it is and not anything else (it is ‘in itself’), but only by virtue of the properties that can intelligibly distinguish it from its contraries (can determine what it is ‘for itself’)…. Accordingly, everything… turns on the sweeping claim that ‘truth [the truth of being, the determination of what things truly are] is self-consciousness [the forms of self-conscious judgment]…. This does not claim it exists only as conceived, or that the conceiving on which its determinacy depends should be understood as subjective mental episodes” (pp. 56-57).

“Thought can determine its objects, but not by appeal to the light of reason, not ‘immediately’…. Much more will have to be said about this, but it will be very important to Hegel that to consider things in their intelligibility is also and at the same time to consider them in terms of the only beings for whom beings can be intelligible, rational beings” (p. 57).

Pippin says that Hegel rejects Kant’s “distinction between things considered in their possible intelligibility and things considered simply as they are in themselves” (p. 58). He again notes that Hegel is neither simply identifying things with thoughts nor identifying thought’s self-determination with anything like the Absolute’s knowledge of itself.

“[T]he initial, simple point at issue now is that anything’s being at all would be mere indeterminate and indistinguishable being were it not conceptually determinate, articulable — in the simplest sense, an instance of a concept” (p. 59).

“And this raises Hegel’s main question in the Logic: how to account for conceptual content…. The answer to that question will depend on two very difficult elements in Hegel’s project: … that the form of the concept is the form of the self, and that, accordingly, truth is self-consciousness; and the claim that the way to understand this content is to understand these concepts as ‘self-negating’, but in a way that promises a positive result” (ibid).

Aristotle on Explanation

Book 1 chapter 1 of Parts of Animals provides an overview of Aristotle’s perspective on explanation in general. It is a nice synthetic text that brings together many of Aristotle’s core concerns, and shows his vision of how natural science ought to fit in with broader philosophy.

He begins by distinguishing between mere acquaintance with an area of study and being educated in it. “For an educated [person] should be able to form a fair judgment as to the goodness or badness of an exposition” (Complete Works, Barnes ed., vol. 1, p. 994). This seems to apply to any subject whatsoever.

Next he raises the more specific question of method. “It is plain then that, in the science which inquires into nature, there must be certain canons, by reference to which a hearer shall be able to criticize the method of a professed exposition, quite independently of the question whether the statements made be true or false” (ibid).

Continuing to emphasize the critical thinking that is the mark of an educated person, he makes it explicit that some of the most important questions about a subject are what I would call second-order questions, having to do with how we ought to approach the matter at hand. The educated person will give due emphasis to these, rather than naively rushing to deliver judgments on questions of fact.

“Ought we, for example (to give an illustration of what I mean) to begin by discussing each separate substance — man, lion, ox, and the like — taking each kind in hand independently of the rest, or ought we rather to lay down the attributes which they have in common in virtue of some common element of their nature? For genera that are quite distinct present many identical phenomena, sleep, for instance, respiration, growth, decay, death, and other similar affections and conditions…. Now it is plain that if we deal with each species independently of the rest, we shall frequently be obliged to repeat ourselves over and over again; for horse and dog and man present every one of the phenomena just enumerated” (ibid).

The educated person looks for explanations, not just facts or correspondences. The specific “dogginess” of a dog, for example, does not explain its sleeping, breathing, and so on. Instead these activities, which it shares with many other animals, are explained by natures common to all of them.

Further, the kind of method Aristotle commends to us is not a matter of following recipes by rote. Instead, it is a thinking approach that involves persistently following the thread of explanations wherever it leads.

“So also there is a like uncertainty as to another point now to be mentioned. Ought the student of nature follow the plan adopted by the mathematicians in their astronomical demonstrations, and after considering the phenomena presented by animals, and their several parts, proceed subsequently to treat of the causes and the reason why; or ought he to follow some other method? Furthermore, the causes concerned in natural generation are, as we see, more than one. There is the cause for the sake of which, and the cause whence the beginning of motion comes. Now we must decide which of these two causes comes first, which second. Plainly, however, that cause is the first which we call that for the sake of which. For this is the account of the thing, and the account forms the starting-point, alike in the works of art and in works of nature. For the doctor and the builder define health or house, either by the intellect or by perception, and then proceed to give the accounts and the causes of each of the things they do and of why they should do it thus” (p. 995).

He raises the question of which kind of cause comes first, because he wants to suggest a different answer from that of the pre-Socratic “physicists” who attempted to explain everything by properties of different kinds of matter. Elsewhere he says that Plato and the atomist Democritus (whose writings are lost) did better than others at following the thread of explanation, but he considers the elaborated account of ends or “that for the sake of which” to be one of his own most important contributions.

Notably he only mentions two kinds of cause here, rather than the classic four. Similarly, there are passages in other texts where he lists a different number of categories than the canonical ten from the Categories. Later authors often viewed things like causes and categories in a reified, univocal way, as susceptible to exact enumeration. But for Aristotle, these are abstractions from a concrete reality that comes first, to be wielded in a context-sensitive way, so the canonical enumerations are not absolute.

Aristotle’s understanding of the “beginning of motion” is different from that promoted by early modern physics. Conventionally in the reading of Aristotle, the “beginning of motion” is associated with the efficient cause, and these two terms are understood in a somewhat circular way, which is really informed by some broadly intuitive sense of what a “beginning” of motion is. Early modern writers assumed that this “beginning” must be some kind of immediate impulse or force. Aquinas associated it with God’s act of creation and with the free acts of created beings. For Aristotle himself it is neither of these.

My best reading of efficient cause is that it is the means by which an end is realized. In many cases the end is realized not by just one means but by a hierarchy of means (e.g., art of building, carpenter, carpenter’s hammer, hammer’s blow). Aristotle and the scholastics emphasized the top of such hierarchies (e.g., the art of building for Aristotle; God or some metaphysical principle for the scholastics), whereas the early moderns emphasized the bottom (e.g., the hammer’s blow), akin to the proximate cause of concern to liability lawyers. For Aristotle, the art of building and not the hammer’s blow is the true “beginning” of the motion of house construction, because it provides the guiding thread of explanation for the whole process of building the house. But even the art of building is still just a means that gets its meaning from the reasons why we would want to build a house in the first place.

He continues, “Now in the works of nature the good and that for the sake of which is still more dominant than in works of art, nor is necessity a factor with the same significance in them all; though almost all writers try to refer their accounts to this, failing to distinguish the several ways in which necessity is spoken of. For there is absolute necessity, manifested in eternal phenomena; and there is hypothetical necessity, manifested in everything that is generated as in everything that is produced by art, be it a house or what it may. For if a house or other such final object is to be realized, it is necessary that first this and then that shall be produced and set in motion, and so on in continuous succession, until the end is reached, for the sake of which each prior thing is produced and exists. So also is it with the productions of nature. The mode of necessity, however, and the mode of demonstration are different in natural science from what they are in the theoretical sciences [e.g., mathematics]…. For in the latter the starting-point is that which is; in the former that which is to be. For since health, or a man, is of such and such a character, it is necessary for this or that to exist or be produced; it is not the case that, since this or that exists or has been produced, that of necessity exists or will exist. Nor is it possible to trace back the necessity of demonstrations of this sort to a starting-point, of which you can say that, since this exists, that exists [as one might do in mathematics]” (ibid).

In Aristotle’s usage, “nature” applies to terrestrial things that are observably subject to generation and corruption. He earlier referred to astronomical phenomena like the apparent motions of the stars and planets as “eternal” because on a human scale of time, these are not observably subject to generation and corruption. For Aristotle, absolute necessity could only apply to things that are absolutely unchanging. We may have a different perspective on astronomy, but that does not affect the logical distinction Aristotle is making. His key point here is that things subject to generation are not subject to absolute necessity. Leibniz took this a step further and argued that hypothetical necessity is the only kind there is. Kant, in arguing that hypothetical and disjunctive judgment (“if A then B” and “not both A and B“) are more fundamental than categorical judgment (“A is B“), made a related move.

Hypothetical necessity has a particular form that is worth noting. As Aristotle points out in the quote above, under hypothetical necessity “it is not the case that, since this or that exists or has been produced, that of necessity exists or will exist”. To give a positive example, hypothetical necessity says that to continue living, we must eat. But it does not in any way dictate a particular series of motions that is the only way this can be accomplished, let alone the whole series of eating-related actions throughout one’s life. Neither does it dictate that we will eat in any particular instance.

How we meet a particular need is up to us. The reality of this flexibility built into nature is all we need to explain freedom of action. Humans can also affirmatively embrace commitments and act on them; that too is up to us. Freedom is not an arbitrary or supernatural power; it simply consists in the fact that nature is flexible, and many things are up to us.

Aristotle contrasts the way a thing is naturally generated with the way it is. “The best course appears to be that we follow the method already mentioned — begin with the phenomena presented by each group of animals, and, when this is done, proceed afterwards to state the causes of those phenomena — in the case of generation too. For in house building too, these things come about because the form of the house is such and such, rather than its being the case that the house is such and such because it comes about thus…. Art indeed consists in the account of the product without its matter. So too with chance products; for they are produced in the same way as products of art” (pp. 995-996).

“The fittest mode, then, of treatment is to say, a man has such and such parts, because the essence of man is such and such, and because they are necessarily conditions of his existence, or, if we cannot quite say this then the next thing to it, namely, that it is either quite impossible for a man to exist without them, or, at any rate, that it is good that they should be there. And this follows: because man is such and such the process of his development is necessarily such as it is; and therefore this part is formed first, that next; and after a like fashion should we explain the generation of all other works of nature” (p. 996).

This way of reasoning backwards from an essence to its prerequisites is complemented by the fact that for Aristotle (and Plato) essences themselves are a prime subject of investigation, and not something assumed. “Begin with the phenomena”, he says.

Many 20th century philosophers have objected to presumptuous talk about the “essence of man”, and to any explanation in terms of essence. But these objections presuppose that the essence is something assumed, rather than being an object of investigation as it clearly was for Plato and Aristotle. Here also it is needful to distinguish between what we might call the distinguishing essence of humanity used to pick out humans — e.g., “rational/talking animal” — and what Leibniz later called the complete essence of each individual. Clearly also, the parts of the human body do not follow directly from “rational/talking animal”, but from many other attributes “presented in the phenomena”. It turns out that humans share these attributes with other animals, and they can therefore be conceptualized as attributes of common genera to which we and those other animals belong.

Because essences themselves are a prime subject of investigation and are ultimately inferred from phenomena, the kind of teleological reasoning Aristotle recommends always has a contingent character, which is how it naturally accounts for what the moderns call freedom. This contingency is built into in the “hypothetical” character of hypothetical necessity.

“Does, then, configuration and color constitute the essence of the various animals and their several parts? For if so, what Democritus says will be correct…. And yet a dead body has exactly the same configuration as a living one; but for all that it is not a man. So also no hand of bronze or wood or constituted in any but the appropriate way can possibly be a hand in more than name. For like a physician in a painting, or like a flute in a sculpture, it will be unable to perform its function” (p. 997).

Aristotle was the historic pioneer of “functional” explanation. Here he insists that the essences of living beings and their parts must be understood in terms of their characteristic activities. This development for the sake of biology parallels the deeper development of the meaning of “substance” in the Metaphysics as “what it was to be” a thing, and as actuality and potentiality.

“If now the form of the living being is the soul, or part of the soul, or something that without the soul cannot exist; as would seem to be the case, seeing at any rate that when the soul departs, what is left is no longer an animal, and that none of the parts remain what they were before, excepting in mere configuration, like the animals that in the fable are turned into stone; if, I say, this is so, then it will come within the province of the natural scientist to inform himself concerning the soul, and to treat of it, either in its entirety, or, at any rate, of that part of it which constitutes the essential character of an animal; and it will be his duty to say what a soul or this part of a soul is” (ibid).

Here it is important that we consider soul in the “phenomena first” way that Aristotle develops it.

“What has been said suggests the question, whether it is the whole soul or only some part of it, the consideration of which comes within the province of natural science. Now if it be of the whole soul that this should treat, then there is no place for any philosophy beside it…. But perhaps it is not the whole soul, nor all of its parts collectively, that constitutes the source of motion; but there may be one part, identical with that in plants, which is the source of growth, another, namely the sensory part, which is the source of change of quality, while still another, and this is not the intellectual part, is the source of locomotion. For other animals than man have the power of locomotion, but in none but him is there intellect. Thus it is plain that it is not of the whole soul that we have to treat. For it is not the whole soul that constitutes the animal nature, but only some part or parts of it” (p. 998).

Aristotle’s opposition to treating the soul as a single lump reflects his overall functional, activity-oriented, and phenomena-first approach.

“Again, whenever there is plainly some final end, to which a motion tends should nothing stand in its way, we always say that the one is for the sake of the other; and from this it is evident that there must be something of the kind, corresponding to what we call nature” (ibid).

Overall teleology always has to do with tendencies, not absolute determinations. He begins to wrap up this introduction by giving another example of the hypothetical necessity whose concept he pioneered.

“For if a piece of wood is to be split with an axe, the axe must of necessity be hard; and, if hard, must of necessity be made of bronze or iron. Now in exactly the same way the body, since it is an instrument — for both the body as a whole and its several parts individually are for the sake of something — if it is to do its work, must of necessity be of such and such a character, and made of such and such materials.”

“It is plain then that there are two modes of causation, and that both of these must, so far as possible, be taken into account, or at any rate an attempt must be made to include them both; and that those who fail in this tell us in reality nothing about nature” (p. 999).

Again, the two modes here are “that for the sake of which” and the phenomena associated with generation. Considering either of these in isolation yields an incomplete understanding, as we see respectively in bad scholasticism and bad empiricism.

“The reason why our predecessors failed to hit on this method of treatment was, that they were not in possession of the notion of essence, nor of any definition of substance. The first who came near it was Democritus, and he was far from adopting it as a necessary method in natural science, but was merely brought to it by constraint of facts. In the time of Socrates a nearer approach was made to the method. But at this period men gave up inquiring into nature, and philosophers diverted their attention to political science and to the virtues that benefit mankind” (ibid).

Socrates and Plato initially pioneered the notion of “that for the sake of which”, but in turning away from the phenomena of generation and becoming, they gave it a somewhat one-sided character.

The subtle way in which Aristotle wields the concept of essence avoids treating it as an absolute, or as something strictly univocal. In any given context, there is a clear relative distinction between essence and accident, but the distinction is not the same across all contexts. Hypothetical necessity provides the mechanism by which what is “accident” at one level of analysis can be incorporated into “essence” at another level. (See also Hermeneutic Biology?; Aristotelian Causes; Secondary Causes; Aristotle’s Critique of Dichotomy; Classification.)

Actuality, Existence

I have been using the English “actuality”, following old standard translations of Aristotle. As with any Aristotelian technical term, in interpreting its meaning I try to rely on what the Aristotelian texts say about it, and to avoid importing connotations associated with other uses of the English word used to translate it. Aristotle’s Greek term is energeia, a word he apparently invented himself from existing Greek roots. Joe Sachs translates it as “being at work”, which I think is good provided “being” is taken in the ordinary sense that we transitively say something “is” at work, rather than taking “being” as a noun. The word is formed from the noun ergon, which in its root sense means “work”; the prefix en, which corresponds to the preposition “in”; and the suffix eia, which makes the whole thing into a noun, like English “-ness” or “-ity”. So, in the most literal sense, energeia means something like “in-work-ness”.

Even the literal sense is a bit misleading, because Aristotle is very clear that the primary reference of energeia is not to a present state or a factual state of affairs, but to a primitive or ultimate end, understood as a kind of fullness or achievable perfection after its kind.

We are not used to thinking seriously about achievable perfection, but Aristotle’s fundamental intention regarding “perfection” is that it not be out of reach of finite beings. The “perfection” Aristotle has in mind is not a godlike attribute of unqualified or infinite perfection, but rather something like what modern ecology calls a “climax state” of an ecosystem (like the exceedingly rich environment of a rain forest).

Ecological succession involves a series of states that lead to other states, whereas a climax state leads back to itself, as in Aristotle’s other related coined word entelechy, which Sachs renders “being at work staying itself”, and is literally something like “in-end-having”. An ecosystem in a climax state is maximally resilient to perturbation; it is more able to recover its health when something throws it out of balance.

When Aristotle speaks of “substances” persisting through change, it is not a simple persistence of given properties that he has in mind, but rather something more like a stable (i.e., highly resilient, not unchanging) ecosystem. Stability in ecosystems and populations comes from biodiversity, which is a modern scientific analogue of Aristotelian “perfection”. Diversity provides a richer set of capabilities. With respect to human individuals, the analogue would be something like a “well-rounded” character. In ethics, we could speak of a well-rounded pursuit of ends, in contrast with a narrow or selfish one.

Thus the concept of “actuality” in Aristotle has to do with a kind of immanent teleology or interpretation of things based on ends and values, which for Aristotle takes the place of what later writers called “ontology”, as a supposed fundamental account of what exists.

Some contemporary analytic philosophers have spoken of “actualism” as an alternative to the possible worlds interpretation of modal logic. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in this context “actuality” is simply equated with factual existence. Instead of making confusing claims about the reality of non-actual possible worlds, this approach locates alternate possibilities within the actual world instead of somehow alongside it. As far as it goes, I have some sympathy for this. But I want to resist some of the conclusions with which it is commonly associated, which follow from the very non-Aristotelian identification of actuality with mere factuality. (See also Redding on Morals and Modality.)

I said above that actuality in Aristotle’s sense refers to processes and states of actualization relative to ends and values, not just to present existence or the current factual state of affairs. Readers of Aristotle as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Gwenaëlle Aubry are united in stressing the primacy of “in-act-ness” over mere factuality in the interpretation of “actuality”. Robert Pippin’s account of actuality in Hegel (see also here) in an ethical context spells out the consequences of this very nicely. I think Aristotle would endorse the views Pippin attributes to Hegel in this context.

Essentialism?

Is it reasonable to call a philosopher who makes significant use of “essence” or similar terms an essentialist? I would say no. If you look at the Wikipedia article on essentialism for example, it appears to be a term of superficial classification that is used in a hostile or pejorative way. The definition given there is certainly nothing I would identify with.

I find essence to be a very useful concept. This Latin-derived term doesn’t exactly capture any single word used by Plato or Aristotle. Essence is what I call a way of being rather than a thing or property. It corresponds to the more abstract meanings of “form” and “substance”, and to what Aristotle called the “what it is” and “what it was to have been” of a thing. For both Plato and Aristotle it is an object of inquiry rather than something taken for granted. Aristotle’s notions of potentiality and actualization apply to it concepts of alternatives, development, and unanticipated change.

Aquinas’ introduction of a separate explicit concept of existence is a good example of how meanings change with context. For Aquinas, God in the act of creation gives being to possible essences. This implies that the essences are completely preformed, as Leibniz argued explicitly. Leibniz’s pre-established harmony has been viewed as deterministic, though Leibniz argued that it was not. In any case, Aquinas and Leibniz treat essences as discrete possibilities, whereas I read Aristotle as focusing on what is actualized or subject to a process of actualization. Essence as a discrete possibility is still arguably more sophisticated than what gets called “essentialism”, but it is much closer. (See also Platonic Truth; Form Revisited; Form as Value; Form, Substance.)