Tag: Final Cause

Ethics and the Dogma of Free Will

The last post treated Olivier Boulnois’s discussion of ethical deliberation and proairesis or “resolution” (which I formerly called “choice”) in Aristotle, which grounds Boulnois’s “genealogy of freedom”. Here are a few highlights of his discussion of how the very un-Aristotelian notion of free will emerged in the later tradition, along with parts of his conclusion.

Elsewhere I have used the common translation of Latin liberum arbitrium as “free will”, but more literally it is something like “free arbitration”, which is what a free will is characteristically supposed to do. In the context of this “archaeological” discussion where the terms appear side by side, the distinction matters.

Frequently, talk about will is fraught with ambiguity. Good will — and more generally, definite will as intent subject to interpretation — is a completely different thing from the indeterminate will conceived as a power of decision ex nihilo that is being criticized here, but the two are often mixed together.

“Voluntas did not always mean will, if we understand by that a directing principle of the powers of the soul, trigger of action and repose, and capable of contraries. The word is attested in classical Latin, in the sense of ‘favor’, ‘good disposition’ ” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 254, my translation throughout). “[The Greek boulesis], which Cicero translated as voluntas, designates a sage emotion, a rational desire, the superior form that desire takes when the [Stoic] sage is no longer subject to passions” (ibid).

In the Stoics, we can see the beginning of an evolution toward modern concepts of will. But the Stoic usage properly applies only to the ideal of the Stoic sage. It is not yet a faculty of the soul that all humans are supposed to have.

According to Boulnois, the next major step was taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, in late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. Standing near the beginning of the Greek Aristotelian commentary tradition, Alexander is the most historically influential of the Greek commentators. Relevant here are his arguments against Stoic determinism, in the non-commentary treatise On Fate.

“Is it necessary to define freedom as freedom of the will, or free arbitration? The problem of free arbitration, understood as a completely undetermined power to resolve [or choose], arises from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in a metaphysical rereading of Aristotle. In effect, Alexander is responding to a non-Aristotelian problematic, that of [Stoic] determinism. To do this, he establishes a connection between the concept of proairesis and the rejection of the cosmic determinism of the Stoics, thus giving birth to a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of decision, indeed to the concept of (undetermined) free choice. Where Aristotle affirms that we generically have the capacity to act or to not act, Alexander holds that we singularly, in each conjuncture, have the possibility to act or not, and to act otherwise. This is to say that proairesis becomes a faculty of choice independent of the state of the world — a free arbitration. And it is this concept, called ‘Aristotelian’ by Heidegger but in fact Alexandrian, that imposes itself, as well in [the early Augustine of the Treatise on Free Will] as in scholasticism, up to Descartes. It becomes necessary for this to consider not only action, but an interior power of choice. Free arbitration thus becomes free arbitration of the will” (p. 472, emphasis in original).

“In inventing a libertarian conception of action, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] founds an ethic centered on the capacity to choose for oneself a thing or its contrary, without depending on a preceding cause” (p. 248).

“The concept of free arbitration had already received its certificate of nobility from [the early Christian theologian] Origen…. But he implied no metaphysical thesis on determinism and indeterminism. It is Augustine who submits the concept of free arbitration to this problematic, and discovers the power of the will, in his Treatise on Free Will” (p. 253).

“But it is Augustine who made [voluntas] the founding concept of Western ethics, in joining it to that of free arbitration (liberum arbitrium). He made it the free arbitration of the will” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

“The Treatise on Free Will was at first conceived as a treatise on the good, in which Augustine demonstrated the divine goodness and the origin of evil, in opposition to the Manicheans. But to exonerate God, it was necessary to make the human will responsible for evil” (p. 256).

“The association of the will proper and free arbitration … suggests that the key of the fault [of original sin] resides in a power of choice belonging to the will. Evil does not come from nature, but from that will, in its exercise of choice…. Thus the first occurrence of [the phrase] free arbitration appeared at a crucial moment of reflection on the origin of evil” (p. 257, emphasis in original). “It is the human who is culpable, and God is innocent” (p. 259). “Willing is always in our power; in this consists our freedom” (p. 260).

“Augustine inherits the turn made by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Freedom of action has become a freedom of choice. And the power of choice is identified at once with the principle of assent to representations and the triggering principle of action: the will. Instead of a casuistry, instead of founding responsibility in the meeting of our beliefs and our desires, on the one hand, and on the circumstances of action, on the other, Augustine prefers to construct a unique and hidden inner principle, which is situated in an invisible part of the human (her soul); this principle is will, endowed with a free arbitration” (ibid).

Also influential in this context was the late 5th to early 6th century CE Roman Christian philosopher Boethius.

“In Aristotle, the problem of willing action and that of prescience of the future are totally disjoint. The first is treated in a reflection on ethical responsibility, the second in the framework of a logico-linguistic analysis of statements about the future” (p. 159). But “Boethius elaborates what will become the key argument: if the future is necessarily determined, free arbitration perishes, along with all moral responsibility” (ibid).

In the high middle ages, such arguments were developed to a fine pitch by the Latin scholastics. This turns out to be interrelated with the scholastic turn away from Aristotle’s own very innovative meta-ethical emphasis on the primacy of explanation by final causes, to a new privileging of a transformed notion of efficient cause that is closer to early modern mechanism than it is to Aristotle.

” ‘The final cause is not productive. That is why health is not productive, except metaphorically’ ” (p. 116). “At the end of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus understood this passage in an absolute manner. They deduced that the final cause produces nothing, that it is not really a cause” (p. 117). Henry of Ghent wrote, ‘The good that is known, insofar as it is represented in the intellect, moves the will only in a metaphorical way’ ” (quoted, p. 117, emphasis in original).

Though highly sophisticated and genuinely original, this scholastic devaluation of the final cause completely undoes what Aristotle himself highlights as his most important accomplishment in first philosophy (the detailed working out of a unique “final causes first” way of thinking and understanding, which orients itself through a hermeneutics of “that for the sake of which”). The scholastic reversal of Aristotle’s distinctive emphasis on final causes (in favor of putting a transformed notion of efficient causality first) puts a value-neutral notion of sheer power in top position in place of the good at the origin of things. Not only the first cause but also human agency are re-visioned in terms of this creative misreading of efficient causality as not just the means by which ends are achieved, but as a primordial value-neutral driving impulse, or (in the case of God) a value-neutral supreme power of creation from nothing. In philosophical anthropology, this is accompanied by a devaluation of Aristotelian teleological “intellect” in favor of the new voluntaristic notion of will, as the human analogue of creation from nothing.

“For Henry and Scotus, our passage means that the intellect and its object do not move the will…. But this interpretation, which reduces finality to the conjunction of a representation and a subjective will, is a hazardous extrapolation: Aristotle speaks here only of the need to distinguish between a productive cause and a final cause (the aim pursued is not the efficient cause of movement). And all the rest of his thought implies a teleology, that is to say a motion by a final cause, even for the beings that have no representation” (ibid).

“The will ceases to be simply the excellence of good humans (as with the Stoics). It implies a mentalist theory and a causal theory of action. — 1) Mentalist: because all action is explained as the exterior deployment of a mental state…. –2 ) Causal: the will is the cause of action…. Action becomes the effect of the will” (pp. 260-261, emphasis in original).

“At first, the fundamental definition of freedom is strictly ethical. It consists in the absence of constraint and of ignorance, independent of any metaphysical position on determinism or causal indeterminacy” (p. 473). “For at the origin, in Aristotle, [desire and logos or discourse] are clearly distinct…. The aporia arises when in an articulation that is not ontologically clarified, we confuse desire and the logos in the concept of ‘will’ (since the Stoics and Augustine). Successfully to rethink this articulation is the challenge and the task of an ethics. This imposes on us the task of destroying this metaphysical confusion that obstructs the philosophy of action” (p. 475).

The reference to “destruction” might sound a bit shocking, but it refers back to Boulnois’s methodological preliminaries. There, he said

“In the element of thought, destruction and construction are one sole and same act…. My approach is a form of ‘discursive dissolution’: through dissolution, we approach the resolution of the problem.”

“To solve: resolve, destroy. Here it is not simply a matter of ‘deconstruction’…. Can we again philosophize after analytic philosophy? If the analytical method has a virtue, it is to conduct a rational reflection on problems, and to accept that they can have a solution” (p. 20, emphasis in original).

“It is undoubtedly impossible to give a complete analytic interpretation of the problem of freedom. It is likewise impossible to give a complete history of the diverse statements responding to the question. But paradoxically, what is impossible separately becomes possible conjointly.”

“I will reconstruct the principal sources of the doctrine of freedom, and of its intrinsic aporia. I attach myself particularly to the work of Aristotle….”

“When Aristotle affirms that an action ‘accomplished willingly engenders praise and blame, while an action accomplished unwillingly only engenders compassion (suggnome) and perhaps pity’; when Descartes declares that the freedom of indifference is ‘the positive faculty of determining oneself for one or the other of two contraries, that is to say to pursue or to flee, to affirm or to deny’; when Nietzsche demands, apropos of the eternal return: ‘do you will that again and innumerable times again?’, not only does it not concern the same thesis, but above all it does not concern the same question” (pp. 20-21, emphasis in original).

He devotes a whole subsection of the introduction to “the legitimacy of the middle age” as a field of scholarly endeavor.

“In studying the middle ages, we indeed study the hidden face of our history…. To choose the long path, which passes through the Middle Age, is to choose multiplicity and discontinuity” (p. 22).

“[T]here are not two eternal conceptions, one determinist, the other libertarian…. an alternative of which both terms were unknown to Aristotle, who envisaged neither free arbitration (but solely willingness) nor determinism (but only cause and responsibility)” (p. 23).

“This study supposes that we first research the origin and the structure of the question of free arbitration, then we examine the sense of action from Aristotle, as well as its obliteration under a theory of free arbitration” (ibid).

In the conclusion, he says

“The problem of free arbitration, or of the freedom of the will, is a metaphysical artifact for two reasons:”

“1. The will was introduced by the commentators on Aristotle through a complex series of translations and projections, such that rational desire (boulesis) became a will, which renders the primordial sense of action and of practical reason incomprehensible.”

“2. Freedom is not essentially a power of the soul, but a social and ethical aptitude.”

“To go further in the elucidation of the problem of freedom, it is necessary to destroy the concept of will, as the mental and causal principle of human actions. As Wittgenstein well saw, for this it is necessary to confront a radical analysis of action without reproducing this term (anachronistic in relation to Aristotle). For the idea of an interior principle, capable of contraries and cause of action, not only conceals an internal contradiction, but is a fiction that occults the different levels of action in which we are responsible.”

“We have given an account of the actions of which we are the authors. To be responsible for an action, it is necessary to be a cause. This signifies that the agent has the power to act, and for Aristotle, this is a bivalent power, to act or not to act in general. Aristotle never says that, in some precise conjuncture, given the beliefs and representations of the agent, she must have the power to do a thing and its contrary, and to not do what she does. For that is not the question: that is not what makes ethical responsibility; we are responsible for actions of which we are generically the origin; action depends on us, it is ours, when we are not constrained by an exterior force. That is also why we cannot excuse ourselves (exclude ourselves from the cause), by arguing that faulty action was necessarily brought about by our desires…. For our desires are part of us, and our action is not imputable to another…. To speak of a ‘weakness of the will’, is precisely to render the phenomenon incomprehensible” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original).

“It is only through confusion with the problematic of future contingents that the metaphysical question of the contingency of choice emerged…. For Aristotle never claimed that our capacity to act or to not act now depends uniquely on us” (p. 477, emphasis in original).

“Free arbitration becomes the condition of responsibility, which makes free arbitration a necessary but indemonstrable condition of ethics. — This argument has a double inconvenience: first of all, it requires the admission of an indemonstrable principle; then, in making free arbitration the condition of morality, it prevents us from seeing the converse, that ethical orientation is constitutive of its concept” (p. 478).

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power to determine oneself. Neither the term ‘will’ nor its functions exist at the origin, in Aristotle: we find neither a power that centralizes the other faculties of the soul, nor a principle of assent at the source of action….. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 479, emphasis in original).

“Freedom is not a postulate of practical reason; it is practical reason. And the human is not born free, but she may become so” (p. 481).

Flasch on Eckhart

“What is essential is the ability of the soul to give itself a form, to shape itself. It does not stand there fixed, like a tree; it knowingly and willingly throws itself upon others, it becomes what it takes up” (Flasch, Meister Eckhart, pp. 35-36; see Eckhart as Philosopher: Background for introduction).

“The eye, opened and cast on the wood, is, within itself, over there with the wood” (p. 44).

With this example taken from visual perception, Eckhart illustrates the essence of the Aristotelian theories of perception and intellect that, according to Flasch, are at the core of Eckhart’s thought. At the heart of both perception and intellectual knowing, Aristotle posits a kind of fusion of what modern people call subject and object.

Also central to Eckhart’s thought is the neoplatonizing medieval notion of “intellectual soul”, which fuses together the separate Aristotelian notions of intellect and soul, emphasizing their status as an operational whole. For the many medieval writers who attribute such a strong unity to the operational whole of soul and intellect, all the unique attributes of Aristotelian intellect may then also be said of the human soul, though it is far from clear that Aristotle himself would agree with this.

Eckhart also upholds a unitary interpretation of the “substantial form” of hylomorphic unities, which aims to be a completely univocal kind of form. Elsewhere, Flasch notes that this late and specialized version of the more general (and not entirely univocal) notion of form in Aristotle is already present in Averroes’ Long Commentary on the Metaphysics. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas used it to argue against the sharp soul-body dualism defended by some medieval Augustinians. Substantial form poses a stronger unity in the forms of things than I want to claim for a reading of Aristotle, but that seems to be a relatively separate issue that does not greatly affect Eckhart’s argument here.

“[L]ike the seeing eye that casts a glance at the wood and becomes one with the wood, man, through active performance, through seeing and loving, becomes that which he sees and loves in the mind…. We retroactively separate eye and wood from the eye-wood unity. Is the wood-eye union the truer reality? Or is it merely an image, or simply a thought? Seeing things clearly in this regard, according to Eckhart, is the necessary precondition for understanding everything he says — not study of the Bible or dogmatic theology. First and foremost, we need to occupy ourselves with understanding this unity. It is our daily life. It is not a thing of nature, but rather the having of natural things” (p. 38).

We become that which we contemplate and love, that toward which we direct our attention. For Eckhart, the intellectual soul is not just a theoretical construct, but a part of everyday experience and of the basic ways of human being. Where the modern “subject” is usually considered to stand aloof from its objects, Aristotelian soul and intellect actively find or develop their content in and by means of what modern people would call their objects. Though we may marvel at it, this kind of fusion is not a mystical ecstasy, but part of the normal working of everyday life. It is not passivity, but a kind of fused activity. It seems to be this fusion at the heart of human experience that for Eckhart involves the divine giving birth to itself.

Eckhart uses philosophical senses of logos (word, speech, discourse, relation, ratio; what distinguishes the human from other animals) to explain its religious sense associated with Incarnation. We might say he uses logos as a name and descriptor for the intellectual soul’s fused active relationality.

“Why is ‘Word’ the keyword? It signifies relation. The Word unifies the speaker and the spoken content” (p. 36).

“‘Word’ in its essence refers to the intellect; the one who speaks and that which is spoken occur in the Word. The Word has a relational character; it unifies within itself those that are separate as natural things…. Eckhart conceives of man as Word, not primarily as a thing of nature” (p. 37).

It seems that for Eckhart, the Biblical Word and the Incarnation refer to the fused activity of the intellectual soul.

“[R]eason conceives of itself as an image identical to its exemplar, which is within it in eidetic fashion, that is, as actual intellectual being, uncreated and uncreatable” (p. 43).

As in Plotinus, for Eckhart the intellectual soul has a direct link with the divine, and may be said to contain metaphysical realities within itself.

“The unity of reflective self-consciousness and ethical orientation follows from this. The way reason — always in the qualified sense — is, it has nothing in common with anything else” (ibid).

“Eckhart does not say: ‘Until now, you have misunderstood Christianity.’ He says: ‘You have misunderstood yourselves, and as long as you persist in this error, you cannot provide Christianity with the intellectual and ethical form which is possible today, in 1300′” (p. 44).

Eckhart makes the astonishing claim that Aristotle, the Old Testament, and the New Testament all teach the same thing. According to Flasch, he even says that the Bible contains all natural philosophy. A first clue to what such sayings mean is that he says he will explain the Bible using nothing but the natural reasons of the philosophers. He will not appeal to revelation to justify what he says. This is not entirely atypical among medieval theologians. Flasch notes that even Anselm of Canterbury, a rather cautious thinker who precedes the main development of Latin scholastic philosophy, considered it a theological best practice to minimize the use of conversation-ending appeals to revelation.

“What previous readings of Eckhart often lack are linguistic discipline, semantic specification, and a philological basis: the way we have labeled and interpreted Eckhart and the categories into which we attempt to squeeze him even today were created at a time when his Latin works were still unknown. And yet they far outnumber his German works, and their tradition is more secure” (p. 46).

Flasch highlights Eckhart’s systematic use of the qualifier “insofar as”, an Aristotelian device that picks out and distinguishes one sense of something that may be considered in several ways. This he combines with a radical notion of what he calls primary determinations. These include the traditional four “transcendentals” Being, Oneness, Truth, and Goodness, as well as Idea, Wisdom, Love, and Justice. In a rather Platonic way, Eckhart will say things like “Insofar as we are just, Justice itself operates through us.”

“If something is, the primary determination is completely present within it. Then not only is the primary determination’s product or its similarity within us; the primary determination itself is present…. Everything that the primary determination itself effects, it effects not toward the outside, but rather into itself. Being has no outside. Again, those imaginative ideas taken from the working methods of craftsmen are problematic. The effecting of the primary determinations is not a producing…. Their effecting consists of making what has been established resemble them, of making what has been established into a being. Eckhart teaches elementary concepts of reciprocity…. Someone who has not learned from the prologues that the active pulls the passive toward itself, that is, that it makes it active, cannot interpret Eckhart’s birth cycle in the proper Eckhartian sense” (p. 80).

“Being, Oneness, and Goodness are active primary determinations, not abstractions. Thus, one has to say that this is God. As Aristotle saw the being of green in the being of the tree, so Eckhart sees the being of things in Being itself” (p. 82).

“I must not speak of Being or of ens in general in the same way that I can speak of this or that individual being…. In substance, they are in each other. This is what pious people mean when they say the world is created. This needs to be explained. Otherwise, the imagining thinking, that is, thinking that creates mental images, edges forward and makes us believe that the creation of the world consisted of God externalizing things from within himself” (pp. 82-83).

“In Eckhart’s time, the concept of pantheism… did not exist. Eckhart removed the issue… by differentiating… between primary determination and individual thing, but he made it clear that Being was not distinguished in the way that individual things were differentiated” (p. 83).

“This theology is short and clear. And it argues philosophically. It easily solves all or almost all questions that can be asked about God, and it does so in the light of natural reason…. There is nothing here of the abyss, nothing of the blinding darkness of Dionysius…. Moses says that God created the world in six days, but he said this for simple people; we know that Being is directly present in self-positing. People say that God created the world, but we know that Being continually posits itself anew in the present” (ibid).

“Placing his Biblical interpretation… before the doctrine of primary determinations — that means contradicting Eckhart” (p. 85).

“[T]ruth, Eckhart says, belongs to the intellect; it indicates relation or includes it within itself. Then follows a strange sentence […]: ‘A relation, however, has its entire being from the soul and as such is a real category, just as time, although it has all its being from the soul, is nonetheless a subspecies of quantity, that is, of a real category'” (p. 89).

“This sentence is strange for several reasons. It shifts from the statement ‘I am the Truth’ to a general theory of relations. Truth, Eckhart says, either is a relation or includes a relation, but a relation stems entirely from the soul and as such is an actual ‘predicament’. Every philosopher admitted that there existed relations purely of thought…. But no one who argued for real relations claimed that they were entirely derived from the soul” (ibid).

This is in Eckhart’s Parisian Questions. Here he rejects the argument of Aquinas that being comes before life and knowing, saying, “I, however, believe the exact opposite” (quoted, p. 91). Eckhart indeed explicitly puts knowing before being.

“[H]e reminds us in good Aristotelian fashion that mathematical objects cannot be considered according to intent or good, and that something that has being is identical [sic] to the good. Good and evil exist in the things themselves, but true and false only in the soul” (p. 91).

“Eckhart successfully describes the special status of the image. It still has, so to speak, a foot in the world of natural things; it consists of wood or stone or canvas; it has an efficient cause and often also an aim. But as an image, it does not have being; rather, it is the relation to the thing it represents…. Insofar as it is knowledge, it belongs to a different world. In questions such as this one, philosophical analysis has to be detached from the imagination” (p. 92).

“Properties are not beings; only their substance has being” (ibid).

“The intellect must not be a specific physical nature if it is to be able to comprehend all physical natures. The knower is the living negation of the known” (p. 93).

Eckhart makes the implicit “negativity” of Aristotelian intellect explicit, and applies it also to the soul.

“Our intellect is nothing, and our intellectual knowledge is not being…. This means that we are talking about the intellect as the actual having of universal objects, and about perception as the grasping of perceivable things. Not about the eye as a sensory organ, not about the equipment of the soul with the faculty of knowledge. Eckhart has transformed the question of an angel’s knowing and being into a general negative theory of sensory and intellectual recognition and claims. The intellect as such and also perception as such are neither here nor now, and insofar as they are neither, they are nothing, but insofar as they are natural faculties of the soul, they are something” (pp. 95-96).

“Here, in what appears to be an excessively dry critique of the Aristotelian ontology of the schools of the time, Eckhart lays the foundation of his thinking. He is looking for the special condition of the intellectual being, its nonmateriality, its energeia-like unity of knower and knowledge” (p. 99).

“Thus, intellectual knowledge is being God’s form or becoming God’s form, since God also is intellectual knowledge and is not being” (p. 100).

In different contexts, Eckhart says both that God is being and that God is not being.

“In summary, the first Parisian questions seem to be concerned with God and angels, but they are actually exercises in the search for intellectual being. They lead us to the edges of ontology, which cannot grasp image and knowledge. Its consequence is that we imagine God and the soul as thing-like. But that way is best forgotten” (p. 101).

“[W]isdom is infinite. Within it, everything always continues. Where it actually is, it is continually re-created. It is not born once and for all; its eternity is perpetual becoming” (p. 103).

Eckhart clarifies that creation is not meant as an occurrence in time.

“Eckhart, we must remember, permitted everyone so inclined to call God being. Now he proposes to say ‘Being’ (esse) and ‘Justice’ (iusticia) instead of ‘God'” (p. 104).

“God is Being. This tenet remains. But since Heidegger, the sentence has had a different ring to it from what Eckhart intended it to mean” (ibid).

“The human mind is the eagle that ascends to the origins of things” (ibid).

“What Eckhart calls Being is the productivity of the primordial mind, which produces images of ideas that the human intellect grasps as the immanent origin of the experiential things. Being is defined through the intellect, not through presence, not as a whole of facticity” (ibid).

“Being” taken in a positive sense especially means “intelligible being”.

“Primordial mind” is intellect outside of space and time. In this regard, Eckhart is closer to Augustine’s strong emphasis on eternity than to Hegel’s valorization of becoming.

“The philosopher, like the lover, does not look for the origin from which something developed, that is, its efficient cause, nor for what it is good for, that is, its purpose. Analyzing efficient and final causes is indispensable for investigation into natural things, but Eckhart is searching for the pure form as the true Being. He construes the divine life and the life of the deified man, the homo divinus, as a disclosure of form outside efficient and final causes…. [P]hilosophy was the eagle-like ascent to the realm of the grounds of being, the return to living substances that have their purposes within themselves, the elimination of thing-oriented ways of thinking, and the path to a proper life…. The proper human life is the aimless settling into the perpetually new Wisdom that is also Justice and Godhead” (p. 105).

Flasch points out numerous Platonic-sounding phrases in Eckhart, like the “pure form as the true being” above.

That efficient causality has no role in first philosophy is how I read Aristotle. But the neoplatonic commentator Ammonius (a student of Proclus, and teacher of Simplicius, Philoponus, and Damascius) argues that the first cause is also an efficient cause, and not only “that for the sake of which”, as Aristotle says. Most medieval writers (certainly Aquinas) follow Ammonius on this, and assume that the first cause is an efficient cause. Eckhart is an important exception.

Eckhart’s negative conclusion about “final causes” applies to external ends of a utilitarian sort, but ignores Aristotle’s emphasis on entelechy, which involves precisely an end that is intrinsic to a being’s being what it is. I want to say that we are our ends, as confirmed by our actions. In Eckhart as in many medieval writers, the later construct of univocal “substantial form” takes over most of the large role that Aristotle assigns to entelechy. It is admittedly hard to see entelechy as completely independent of time, which I think is what leads Hegel to reverse the traditional order and make eternity dependent on becoming.

“Eckhart’s God sheds the regalia of otherworldly imperial honors and endorses man as his own kind” (ibid).

Eckhart develops a theology that clearly rules out what Brandom rightly decries as the “command-obedience model” of normativity. As in Plotinus, a human’s connection to the Good instead involves an intimate sharing, and even a kind of reciprocity.

“The active above attracts the initially passive below. The below becomes the eagle that flies up to the hidden grounds of the world. It is our reifying contemplation that does not recognize the coincidental dynamic in the process between the above and the below” (ibid).

The active above works as an attractor. This is important. Though Eckhart doesn’t seem to explicitly talk about the teleology that Kant called “internal” and that on my reading is the mode of operation of the first cause in Aristotle, he nonetheless seems to come to a similar conclusion. For both Eckhart and Aristotle, the “below” is attracted to the “above”. But Eckhart is closer to Plotinus and the monotheistic mainstream in his insistence that the First is a source as well as an end.

“Eckhart declares… that he intends to proceed as a philosopher, and he adheres to this stated method. He aims to answer all or almost all questions about God with philosophical arguments, and in clear and simple terms…. This aspiration appears so impracticable, so immoderate that some Eckhart scholars have felt the need to understate it in order to present Eckhart in a better light. But Eckhart asserted this claim sharply and clearly. We can choose to reject it, but we should refrain from reinterpreting and changing it” (p. 109).

“The intellect is supernature. Plato’s intellectual world will become Leibniz’s ‘realm of grace'” (p. 111).

“Every reader of Eckhart has to fight his own imagination, which presents justice to him like an additional property of a person that is dependent on the person” (ibid).

“Eckhart’s God is Being and Unity, Justice and Wisdom. He is the all-encompassing attraction or love…. God is the original formal act, the primus actus formalis…; he discloses the having of form.” (ibid).

Again we have attraction, rather than a making, a push, or a command.

“The primary determinations attract to themselves everything that follows” (p. 112).

And again we have attraction. By this description, Eckhart’s primary determinations are after all what Aristotle would call ends that are sought for themselves, and not for the sake of something else.

“What matters in the context of moral actions is the intention, not the external act…. This justice is before and outside external actions” (ibid).

Eckhart is not the only medieval philosopher to say something like this. Peter Abelard similarly emphasizes the importance of intentions in ethics.

“Justice, in Eckhart’s writings, becomes the life of the mind. Thus, the just man finds peace in works and does not expect rewards; his ethical actions have value in themselves” (p. 113).

One of the charges against Eckhart was that he denied the importance of external works and ritual observances. But the context was implicitly things done for the sake of something else. That, I presume, is what Eckhart meant. But ethical actions have value in themselves. They have their end in themselves. They are not done for the sake of something else. And, he says according to Flasch, the just man finds peace in works. Whatever may be said about his relation to orthodoxy, Eckhart is on firm Platonic and Aristotelian ground here.

“Eckhart does everything he can not to construe God’s relation to the world as having developed arbitrarily, although there are people who imagine that this is precisely what proves the freedom of a personal God” (p. 119).

Like Albert the Great as previously discussed by Flasch, Eckhart puts intellect decisively ahead of will in his theology. To my layman’s eye Aquinas seems to formally maintain the same, but to make more concessions to voluntarism.

“Only thinking overcomes the false imagination to which many people succumb: they imagine God and the world as separate and relate the two as efficient cause and effect” (p. 121).

So there is someone else besides Aristotle who agrees that the first cause is not an efficient cause.

“[I]n divinis, that is, in the nature of God, but also in the homo divinus, in grace and salvation, there is no place for the category of causality, only the category of the ideational ground of reason, of ratio, which shows itself as disclosure of form. Aquinas described grace in man as the presence of God as efficient cause…. Eckhart’s philosophical reform consisted also of silencing the voice of efficient causality. Only grounds of an ideational-formal kind are at once wholly immanent and wholly transcendent…. They make possible the qualified concept of the living that has its telos within itself, just as Aristotle conceptualized it in the twelfth book of his Metaphysics” (p. 122).

Aha, now we even get living with a telos within itself, and a reference to book Lambda. Previously we saw him exclude external “final causes”, while remaining silent about the “internal” kind that are of far greater interest. But here the internal kind seems to be affirmed.

Eckhart’s first commentary on Genesis “rests on the combination of the Neoplatonizing metaphysics of Being and Oneness with the doctrine of intellect as presented by Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and Averroes and as corresponding with Augustine’s theory of mens. Eckhart’s anthropology, like his philosophical theology, is also a theory of intellect. This becomes especially clear when Eckhart speaks of man as God’s image. The Platonizing metaphysics of Being joins the philosophy of intellect and produces an ethics. Eckhart’s ethics presents the concept of the homo divinus” (ibid; see also The Goal of Human Life; Properly Human, More Than Human?).

“Eckhart writes that the reader should take the Biblical narrative as parable. He is supposed to let go of the narrative as events and facts” (p. 125).

“If someone says that God commands, then his commanding is to be interpreted in the light of his intellectual nature: his is not an external commanding. He is not ordering about. His ordering consists in providing things with their form” (p. 127).

Those who have understanding do not need to be commanded to be good. Commands are for those who lack understanding.

“The intellect is the root of freedom…. The goal of acting freely is to become a deified man, homo divinus. Within the deified man, the just man and justice are one. For him, the Good itself is the goal and in itself is its own reward. He does not look for external reward. Punishments, too, are intrinsic to acting. The good life consists of a consequent inner orientation, of inner being, not of doing. Action implements the way to being and life. God does not order any external act” (pp. 128-129).

In his commentary on the Book of Wisdom, Eckhart “continues his battle against the advancement of reified ideas, as though Being were a retrospective abstraction of many things or as though it were added to things in the form of a property. It is a rejection not so much of the representation of things in the imagination as of their dominance within philosophical thought” (p. 132).

“Eckhart recommends substituting primary determinations’ names for one another as a method. We may as well say Being instead of ‘God’ or Oneness or Justice or Wisdom. This was not uncommon among philosophers; Plato said ‘the idea of the Good’ instead of ‘God’ when he was not referring to the gods of popular religion; Aristotle, ‘the prime unmoved mover’, Avicenna, ‘the necessary being’, Aquinas , ‘being that exists by itself'” (p. 135).

“As we have seen, other primary determinations, such as Oneness, Wisdom, and Justice, are supposedly uncreatable. If God is called the esse, it is also uncreatable. Different meanings of ‘esse’ are operating here. Readers of Eckhart have to learn how to handle the flexibility of the concept” (p. 136).

“‘Many,’ Eckhart says, imagine creation as an effecting, as it were, toward the outside” (p. 137).

“Eckhart also rejects the idea that man should act well in order to receive earthly and heavenly rewards. The ethical good is an intrinsic value, not a means to an end” (p. 192).

“The sermons criticize the theology of the time, not just the wrong kinds of living. They correct the dominance of the imagination of stable, ontologically autonomous things, which hinders man from understanding himself and God and from grasping that his ‘neighbor’ lives beyond the ocean, too” (p. 198).

“The humble man compels God so that God must give himself according to his nature, and indeed must give himself wholly, for he is indivisible. God must: that is the message. His grace is not a random selection of blessed individuals out of a mass of sinners. God must; this motif appears again and again, not in the sense of an external compulsion, but rather from his nature, which he follows freely. Thus, he gives me everything that he gave Jesus, without exception; he gives the soul the power to birth; and thus it births itself and all things” (p. 200).

Peter Abelard, who was interested in safeguarding divine goodness, had argued more generally that God can only do what he does. Albert the Great had argued for the possibility of purely natural beatitude.

“Someone who speaks of God but does not talk about his oneness with the ground of the soul is not speaking of the true God. The ground of the soul has nothing in common with anything; it is not like anything else and is thus like God” (p. 201).

Here again we have Eckhart’s version of the intellectual soul. The “ground of the soul” would presumably be intellect, since it is described in the same terms.

“The soul exists more in Justice than in the human body” (p. 210).

The human soul carries intellect and the One within it, Eckhart might affirm with Plotinus. Plotinus is the only other writer I can think of who has as exalted a view of the soul as Eckhart.

“One does not learn the correct understanding of the world from the Bible; one must have developed this understanding in order not to read the Bible mindlessly” (p. 212).

“‘Reason’ needs to be conceptualized differently than a ‘power’. It is by no means a sort of mental hand that grasps something and thereby comprehends it” (p. 213).

The Reason he wants to call upon is about the interpretation of form.

“The truly wise life consists not in contemplative joy, but rather in the directing of external action to the best thing that love demands (p. 222).

Here we see how he does make a place for external action.

“The just man exists in Justice. No vision or intuition tells us this is possible, but only the philosophical analysis of the concrete’s containedness within the universal (abstractum) — with a realism of universals taken for granted” (p. 229).

Realism about universals here seems to acquire both a distinctive ethical dimension, and something like a neoplatonic “procession” from the universals in the soul that I have not encountered before in discussions of realism and nominalism.

“In pre-nominalist fashion, Eckhart takes it for granted that Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness) is the common and real determinant shared by all just men and then proceeds by eliminating the idea of making regarding the activity of Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness)” (p. 227).

Eliminating the idea of making in thinking about the activity of justice makes sense as part of a program of de-emphasizing efficient causes and accidents in favor of substance and internal telos, such as it now seems Eckhart supported.

Eternal Sensibles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: The Ideal

Ideal Life and Ours

We are halfway through Aubry’s discussion of Metaphysics book Lambda, chapter 7. From this point, she says that the text becomes less of an argument, and more rhetorical and descriptive. Aristotle compares the “way of life” (diagoge) of the divine with “ours”. His discussion here largely follows the much more developed one in book X of the Nicomachean Ethics. Toward the end of Aubry’s section, she also critically scrutinizes the more particular basis of claims that the first cause of book Lambda is not only a final cause but also an efficient cause.

(Though it is much longer than this post, for greater insight and a fuller context on Aristotle’s view of this relation between the human and the divine, I would highly recommend reviewing Ethics book X in The Goal of Human Life.)

Now “it is no longer only a question of movable and perishable substances, but more concretely, and for the first time, of the human subject” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 189, my translation throughout).

“From the outset, the divine diagoge is characterized by comparison with the human condition, as being ‘like the best’ that is given to us, but also by opposition to it, since what is accessible to us ‘for a brief period of time’, mikron khronon, is for god continuously, aei [always]. The same opposition is found below, between the happy state god enjoys always, aei, but we enjoy only sometimes, pote” (ibid).

She quotes Aristotle, “The [divine] act is pleasure” (ibid). Plato in the Philebus suggests that the divine has a neutral state, but for Aristotle “god is the only living thing that at the same time has access to the most pure pleasure and always knows its enjoyment. If the human also has access to the pleasure of contemplation, she does not know it in a continuous enjoyment, for she is composed of two natures such that each for the other is against nature” (p. 190).

If I may be allowed a shallow comparison, this theme of divine pleasure makes me liken the condition of thought thinking itself to that of a blissful Buddha.

“In book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, the continuity of divine pleasure is referred to the simplicity of the divine nature which, because nothing is mixed with it or hinders it, always exercises the same activity and finds in it a complete pleasure. The text of Lambda itself is content to associate pleasure and energeia. And where one might expect an exploration of the contrast between the transience of human pleasure and the perpetuity of divine pleasure, the next proposition proceeds on the contrary to underline their similarity. More precisely, the fact that the divine act is pleasure is given as the cause (dia touto [through this]) of the fact that for us every act is pleasure, whether it is a matter of walking, of sensation, or of thinking” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“We can see here a first illustration of the mode of action of the unmoved final cause as it has been determined above: we have immanent ends and aim at our own acts; it remains that through the latter, we also aim at the continuity and indeed the pleasure that attach par excellence to the divine act” (ibid).

“The following lines do no more than deploy the identity between act and pleasure, in formulating the conditions that make a certain act (thought or contemplation) pleasant. That the divine act indeed consists in thought is presupposed (or simply induced from the pleasant character of contemplation for us): above, the god has been assimilated to the intelligible, or to the noeton, but not to thought, noesis. For the act of thought to be pleasure, it is necessary that it be in-act, that is to say that intelligence is in effective possession of the intelligible” (pp. 190-191, emphasis in original).

“[T]hought in itself is thought of the best in itself, from which we deduce that the divine theoria [contemplation] is not only more agreeable, ediston, but also the best, ariston” (p. 191).

(Here again we are reminded how extremely different this is from modern notions of thought as “value free”, which seems to assume that all values are prejudices. We do not have to suppress questions of value in order to be fair and objective. Objectivity and fairness in the real world involve openness, but not a completely relativistic free-for-all. Fairness and objectivity are themselves values.)

“After the identity between act and pleasure, we pose that between act and life, zoe. This time, it is nonetheless clear that this identity only applies to one particular act: that of intelligence. It seems on the other hand that it applies to every act of intelligence, whether it be human or divine. Of the divine act, insofar as it is energeia kath autein [act directed toward itself], we say nonetheless that it is not simply life, but ‘the best life, and eternal'” (p. 191).

I was a little surprised that she says only the act of intelligence is to be identified with life. But she does not say that only the act of intelligence presupposes life, but rather that it is the only one to be strictly identified with it. Life for Aristotle is not reducible to some bare fact like a heartbeat; it involves purpose, and the best realization of purposes involves intelligence. That this applies to the human is no surprise. And if we accept that there is meaningful sense to thought eternally thinking itself, it is also no surprise that for Aristotle this would be the best life.

“It appears nonetheless that in the passage, [energeia] no longer designates a way of being but a way of acting: we no longer say that god is in act, but that god has an act. If this distinction between act and activity is at work, the text nonetheless invites us to surpass it: the activity of god in effect comes down to its character of being in-act. Thus, if god’s activity is thought, and self-thinking, this is, as Lambda 9 will make precise, because god is the good; and if the act is continuous, this is because as act without power, god is without movement or change. The notion of life, zoe, intervenes precisely at the junction of the ontological sense and the practical sense of energeia, serving thus to name the activity of that which is act by itself” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“More decisive seems to be the reiterated distinction between the continuous activity of being in-act, and the discontinuous activity of beings mixed from act and in-potentiality. The latter (or, at least, ‘we’) have access to an activity of the same nature as that of the divine: thought, pleasure, and life. What makes the difference between the theos and ‘us’, is indeed not the nature of the activity, but its duration (continuous/discontinuous) and its value (the activity of god is the best, and indeed also the most pleasant” (ibid).

“This characterization initiates the transition from the ontological approach to the prime mover, governed by the notion of energeia, to [Aristotle’s] axiological approach, governed by the notion of the good, which energeia in its most determinate sense nonetheless also includes. Against the Pythagoreans and [Plato’s successor] Speusippus, we thus repeat that the best and the most beautiful are arkhe [principles or sources]” (p. 192).

“From here the question is posed whether dunamis, more than a mode of being, designates here a mode of action: indeed whether the final cause must also be conceived as an efficient cause. The fact is that we have seen that the schema of efficiency, such as it is expounded notably in On Generation and Corruption, presupposes that the agent is in-act. Further, this schema is extended so as to be applicable to impassible and incorruptible realities: in their case, there can be action without reciprocal contact (they touch without being touched, move [other things] without being moved); and insofar as they are without matter, they are not affected by the action they exercise (the medical art heals without being healed)” (p. 193).

“According to this enlarged model, efficiency — and indeed also the dunamis poietike [power to do or make] seems to be compatible with actuality, but also with immobility, immateriality, and impassibility. The question nonetheless remains whether it is also compatible with the final cause” (ibid).

Previously, she pointed out that book VIII of the Physics does once apply the phrase dynamis apeiron [unlimited power] to the prime mover. This is indeed the passage appealed to by those who want to make the prime mover an efficient cause. The basis for this appeal is that Lambda 7 does briefly recall the argument of Physics VIII that the prime mover is without magnitude or parts.

But she has explained that in Physics VIII, what she calls the ontological sense of dynamis is completely missing, and the context is a long polemic against the Platonic notion of self-motion. Along with the fact that any reference to unlimited power is completely absent from the Metaphysics, and that the “unlimited” power of the prime mover in Physics VIII is not said to be unlimited in all respects but only in relation to time, she argues that this in no way intended to undo Aristotle’s many consistent affirmations that the first cause is pure act without power. This seems entirely reasonable to me.

“That the prime mover is a final cause, [the first half of] Lambda 7 has clearly established. To this must be added that the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia mobilized by the argument of Lambda 6 implies not only… that energeia is anterior to dunamis, but that it is anterior as end” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Otherwise said… the final character of the causality of the prime mover is already posed, even in ontology, via the exploration carried out in Theta 8 of the asymmetrical relation between energeia and dunamis. As a result, the problem is not whether the prime mover is an efficient cause more than a final cause, but whether it can even be an efficient cause at the same time as it is a final cause. For on this point On Generation and Corruption is explicit: ‘to d’ou heneka ou poietikon‘, ‘the final cause is not efficient’. Thus ‘health is not efficient, except in a metaphorical sense’, that is to say in the sense in which, insofar as it is an end, it sets off an action that aims at it, but in which it is not itself the agent (it is not health that cures, but the medicine or the remedy). In the same way, we can say of the end that it moves [other things]; but we must not confuse that which moves [other things], kinoun, with that which does, poiein, or with the efficient cause as principle of movement, arkhe kineseos: if it is true that the efficient is also a mover, it is not true that every mover is efficient” (pp. 193-194, emphasis in original).

For this last, she cites On Generation and Corruption again.

“In the same way that the ontological sense of dunamis is incompatible with the characterization of the prime mover as pure energeia, its kinetic sense is incompatible with its characterization as a final cause” (p. 194).

Next in this series: Eternal Sensibles

Ousia Energeia

Aristotle’s Metaphysics is arguably the single most important text in the history of philosophy, but even though on one level Aristotle’s writing is extremely clear and lucid, its deeper implications have been highly disputed. The great Iranian philosopher Avicenna is reported to have said that he read the Arabic translation of the Metaphysics 40 times without understanding it, and only began to understand after reading the commentary by Alfarabi. We are nearing the end of a long journey following what I think is a brilliantly innovative 21st century reading by Gwenaëlle Aubry. Here I’m covering the first half of her discussion of book Lambda chapter 7.

The title of this post is a phrase used by Aristotle to characterize the first cause. He distinguishes it as the ousia [“substance”] that, unlike other substances, simply “is” energeia [“act”]. The latter Greek term was coined by Aristotle, and the former was “substantially” redefined by him. I find it is best to put aside ordinary connotations of the English words for key philosophical terms like this (including “first cause”) — and to focus instead on the ways the philosopher himself uses them, along with what he says about them.

“Chapter 7 of book Lambda responds to the question, left in suspense, of the mode of relation of the first mover to the moved, and of the nature of its action. At the same time it exploits and deploys the ontological signification of energeia, designating in act the mode of being of the separate, and identifying it with the good and the end” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 184, emphasis added, my translation throughout).

“In so doing, it implies at the same time a distinction, absent from book Theta, between kinesis [motion] and energeia, the last being designated as the mode of being of the unmoved, even while maintaining a broad sense of energeia, understood not only as act and as a mode of being, but also as a certain activity (contemplation)” (ibid).

Aubry previously noted that Aristotle’s earliest use of energeia seems to have been in an ethical context. Here she points out that Aristotle is distinguishing between its better known physical sense (which already has a teleological element) and what she calls its ontological sense.

“The first lines of Lambda 7 mark a progress in relation to chapter 6, since they demonstrate not only the necessity of posing a principle that is act and not power in order to give an account of eternal motion, but also of that of thinking the first mover as unmoved” (ibid, emphasis added).

Within the context of Greek philosophy, the very idea of an unmoved mover is another extremely important Aristotelian invention. Plato speaks instead of a self-moving thing, thus postulating motion as an unexplained primitive attributed to something as a whole. He is not bothered by the unexplained primitive, because he sees becoming as fundamentally lacking intelligibility. For Aristotle on the other hand, motion ought to be explainable, and every explanation of motion also involves a passivity. To move in the colloquial English sense is always to be moved in Aristotle’s sense, by something, and we can give an account of this. It will turn out that the primary examples he gives of “movers” are the unmoved intelligible and desired things that serve to activate internal principles of motion in other things. But living beings such as animals also function as “moved movers”.

Aubry quotes Aristotle’s characterization of an unmoved mover as “being at the same time ousia and energeia” (p. 185). Aristotle makes a very compressed reference to his critique of Platonic “self-moving” in Physics book VIII. Anything we broadly call a “self” mover must be a moved mover, because it is implicitly moved by what it understands and desires. Any moved mover — and hence any self-mover — must be only an intermediary cause, and not an ultimate principle. Aristotle wants to very emphatically insist that the first cause is in the strict sense an unmoved mover, and not a self-mover in the broad sense that an animal is a self-mover. For him, any holistic “self-motion” necessarily involves the kind of mixture of activity and passivity that we attribute to an animal. Such a mixture is incompatible with the nature of the first cause.

“[I]t is because energeia is conceived here as ousia, and no longer as kinesis, that the first mover is unmoved” (ibid).

“This poses the question of how the unmoved can be the principle of movement. The demonstration this time proceeds in an indirect way: it consists in the premise according to which the desirable and the intelligible move [other things] without being moved, then in successive identifications, first of the real good with the desirable, then of simple and actual substance with the first intelligible, and finally of the first intelligible with the good. We then ought to conclude that the actual substance, itself already identified with the first mover, is identical with the intelligible and the good, and as such can move [other things] without being moved” (ibid).

She goes on to note that what allows these terms to be unified is really once again energeia, although at first it seems to be substance. This makes perfect sense, given the conclusions of book Eta.

“The unifying term of these identifications seems here to be that of substance. It is so nonetheless by the mediation of a double relation of anteriority: of substance itself, first of all, in the series of positive contraries; then, within substance, of substance that is simple and in act, haplo kai kat’energeian — or, more precisely, of substance that is simple insofar as it is said according to act. For it is this position of the preeminence of substance in the context of the series of intelligibles that justifies its identification not only with the good and the desirable, but with the better or that which is analogous to it. Thus it is once again the notion of energeia more than that of substance that appears as the conceptual mover of the demonstration, and as that from which the attributes of the principle can be deduced” (pp. 185-186, emphasis in original).

Just as Aristotle uses ousia or substance to explain our talk about being, he uses energeia or act to explain our talk about substance. And sometimes he even uses entelekheia or entelechy to explain our talk about act.

“Up to this point, Lambda 7 has established that the unmoved can be a mover, but not how it moves something else. Here again, the demonstration proceeds in an indirect way: it begins by establishing that there is also a final cause among unmoved things. In order to do this, we have to make precise what we mean by ‘final cause'” (p. 186).

“The text at this point poses a problem. Since antiquity, it has been reconstructed so as to coincide with parallel passages in Physics II and On the Soul II which, also relying on a pronominal distinction, distinguish between two senses of the final cause, that is to say to ou and to o, that which is envisaged and that for which something is — or, according to the traditional interpretation, the end of an action and its beneficiary. But neither of the senses thus distinguished can apply to the first mover: the latter cannot be conceived as the beneficiary of action, which would imply that it did not have its end in itself, and would thus be incompatible with its status as pure energeia. But it is equally difficult to conceive it as the end envisaged by action, since this would imply that the movement ends in it, or finds in it its term: the first mover would thus be the act and the end of eternal motion, and indeed of every moved being; thus conceived, the divine would be in sum the act of the world, or at least of the moved substances that make it up, whose separate existence would be explained only by the failure of their fusion with it” (pp. 186-187).

“The context of the distinction in On the Soul is nonetheless very close to that of the distinction of Lambda 7, since the text opposes on the one hand living things (plants and animals) considered as substances subject to the cycle of generation and corruption, and on the other hand the eternal and the divine…. Nonetheless, it does not aim to distinguish between an unmoved end and an end presupposing movement, but rather between an immediate and immanent end and a mediate and transcendent end. The first is identified with the soul, designated as being at the same time cause of motion, essence, and final cause…. The second is identified not with the divine itself, but with participation and community (koinonia) with it, and a community envisaged as continuous. Thus is explained the process of generation, which compensates for that of corruption: not being able to [persist indefinitely] as individuals, living things [persist] not in their numerical unity, but in the unity of their species. The object of their desire is thus not to be god but to participate in the divine, or in the mode of being that characterizes continuity and eternity. Or again, it is not to assimilate themselves to the divine form or the divine act, but rather to perpetuate their own form and act, in the way that the divine continually maintains its own” (p. 187, emphasis in original).

“But if read this way, as a distinction not between the end of action and its beneficiary, but between two kinds of end, the distinction in On the Soul seems reconcilable with that of Lambda 7, and to apply to the first unmoved mover: the latter should be understood neither as the immediate end of action nor as the one who attains that end, but as that which the moved substances aim at through their own proper ends” (pp. 187-188, emphasis added).

“The latter aim at no other end than themselves, and attain this immanent end by means of the different movements to which they are submitted, but through this end they aim also at the eternity and the necessity characteristic of the unmoved substance. As result, we can say that they are also moved by the unmoved, and again by the desire for unmovedness. We see that this interpretation agrees with the end of Lambda 7, as well as with Lambda 10’s reflection on the final cause and the good” (p. 188, emphasis added).

“The remainder of [Lambda 7] goes on precisely to mark the relation between unmovedness and necessity, at the same time as that between motion (even local) and contingency. This last point is the same that Theta 8 already underlined, but the demonstration relies no longer on the notion of dunamis understood as the power of contradiction, and indeed as the power to be or not-be, but on the notion of energeia. Unmovedness is deduced from this, and necessity in its turn from unmovedness. Here indeed, and for the first time, the ontological sense of energeia… excludes kinesis” (ibid).

She notes that Aristotle uses the grammatically dative from of energeia in the text here, which she has argued he consistently uses to distinguish what she calls the ontological sense of dynamis and energeia from their physical sense that is involved in the ordinary explanation of motion.

(I would add that this philosophical primacy of the dative form over the nominative in Aristotle is closely related to a perspective that puts adverbial phrases and relations ahead of nouns and verbs in the order of explanation. In fact, every noun or verb taken by itself is just a simple linguistic token that still has to be given an interpretation. No mere linguistic token by itself explains anything at all. By contrast, it is the non-simple character of relations — the fact that they already intrinsically “say something” about something — that gives them their fundamental role in interpretation and explanation.)

“If it is thus established that the unmoved can be an end…, it remains to know how it is, or to identify its proper mode of action, which is presented as valid for all final causes that exclude motion. Two words suffice to name this mode of action: hos eromenon [as being loved]. The hos does not introduce a metaphor, … but must be understood in the sense of ‘insofar as’: the unmoved mover moves without being moved, but ‘insofar as it is loved’. In its turn, the theme of eros has been prepared by the earlier reflection on the identity of the intelligible and the desirable, where it was said already that they move [other things] without being moved” (ibid).

“For the technical register that distinguishes between different species of desire, rational and irrational, is here substituted a broader term, eromenon. This term also has Platonic resonances: it evokes the amorous ascension of the Symposium, and recalls the figure of Eros, the daimon child of Penia and Poros, in whom are conjoined lack and abundance, absence and presence. Evoking Eros, nonetheless, Plato in the Symposium speaks of dunamis. Here, inversely, the erotic ascension has for its principle energeia. We see again in this point the rupture underlined in book capital Alpha, as in Lambda 6: to conceive the causality proper to the good, it is necessary to think it as a final cause, acting not as power but as act, and as the end of in-potentiality” (p. 189).

Aubry has consistently maintained that acting in the sense of having an effect is not reducible to the “action” of a power. All ordinary “action” is in reality a mixed form — an interaction — that includes an element of passivity. Pure act on the other hand is supposed to have an effect and to move other things, but without itself being involved in passivity. There is still an element of passivity in this case, but it is entirely on the side of the other things that are moved by what they understand and desire. Pure act for Aristotle is situated beyond the correlation of activity and passivity. Only where in-potentiality is also involved is there the ordinary interaction of activity and passivity that we experience in earthly happenings.

Rather than aiming to think pure presence, in the context of a human being even Plato is far more interested in mixed forms, as Paul Ricoeur has pointed out. Aristotle here takes up the Platonic theme of eros, while recasting it as an ascent toward pure act. But pure act is precisely not ever purely present to us. In the next post, we’ll see how Aristotle contrasts human life with the ideal life he attributes to the first cause.

Next in this series: Ideal Life and Ours

Eternal Motion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Ousia Energeia

Principles of Substance

“Chapter 5 of book Lambda constitutes a veritable pivot, not in the sense that, as the traditional reading would have it, it would bring to a close a hypothetical first part, or a treatise on sensible substances, in order to introduce a second part, or a treatise on separate substance, but because on the contrary it enunciates the principle of their continuity” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 173, my translation throughout).

“It is indeed in Lambda 5 that it is necessary to seek the key to the unity of book Lambda, and thereby of metaphysics, understood, according to the minimal definition suggested by Lambda 1, as a science distinct from both physics and theology; but equally, and this time against the onto-theological understanding of it, as a science that is not scissionable between a science of common being and a science of the first being — or this time between ontology and theology” (pp. 173-174).

“Lambda 5 in effect contains responses to two of the fundamental questions of Lambda 1, that is to say that of the nature of what is separate, and that of the unity of the principles of sensible substance. These responses are made possible by the results, both positive and negative, of the inquiries conducted in Lambda 2 through 4: the extension of dunamis to the eternal sensibles (Lambda 2); the exclusion of separate Forms (Lambda 3); the distinction between principle and element (Lambda 4). And they have one same term in common: that of energeia. Lambda 5 states in effect at the same time that dunamis and energeia are the common principles of all substances by analogy, and that the separate must be conceived as energeia and not as form. Proceeding from this, it remains for the following chapters, Lambda 6 through 10, to elucidate the nature of separate substance understood as ousia energeia, insofar as it at the same time is principle and cause of the other substances, and has a or some principle(s) in common with them — an elucidation which ultimately amounts to a deepening of the notion of the analogy” (p. 174, emphasis in original).

“As was already the case in Lambda 1, separation is here invoked as a criterion of substantiality, or according to the signification established in books Zeta and Eta, which substitutes for the Platonic idea of existence apart from sensibles that of the capacity for independent existence. This criterion allows us to recall the primacy of substance over the other categories, equally posed in Lambda 1, and thereby to affirm that the causes of substance are their causes as well” (ibid).

“For the term cause (aitia), we will proceed to substitute that of principle (arkhe), in order to declare that ‘it is in another manner again that the principles are the same by analogy, that is to say act and in-potentiality'” (ibid).

Aristotle’s four causes — originally introduced in the Physics — are extremely famous. But the above already suggests that in first philosophy, his “two principles” of act and potentiality will ultimately supersede them. In a simple way, act is the end, and that-for-the-sake-of-which; potentiality is the principle of motion. Form and matter provide overlapping specifications from a more static point of view, for which act and potentiality will again tend to be substituted. Such an overlap among the causes should be no surprise, since they are intended as complementary explanations. We have already seen, for example, that Aristotle’s hylomorphism leads him to ultimately assert the identity of an embodied form with its proximate matter. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

She refers to a passage that “in associating the couple of in-potentiality and act with that of matter and form, enunciates not an equivalence, but the rules of a substitution” (p. 175). Aristotle says “In effect, in act are the form, if it is separate, as well as the composite and privation (for example, obscurity or sickness), while the matter is in-potentiality, since it is capable of becoming the two contraries” (ibid). “Act indeed serves here to express form insofar as it is capable by itself, and not only in its articulation to matter, of an independent existence. This is a great novelty in relation to Zeta and Eta, where act served to name the composite as ousia malista [ousia most of all], as alone capable of independent existence, unlike form and matter taken in themselves. Far from being a simple equivalent, act expresses form insofar as it subsists” (pp. 175-176).

This is a somewhat subtle point, but clear enough. Things that are truly equivalent are bidirectionally interchangeable, without qualification. Here she is saying act expresses form only with additional qualification, which does not license a bidirectional substitution. In effect, we have a one-directional arrow between the two terms, rather than a two-directional one.

“In these lines, the notion of act reveals the ontological sense already distinguished in Theta. On the other hand, it does not have the axiological sense with which Theta 8 charged it, in establishing its equivalence with the notions of telos [end] and of ergon [completed work]. As in Theta 9, it applies also to privation, or to the negative contrary by which matter, like form, can be said to be in-potentiality. Applied to privation, the notion of act expresses again, and paradoxically, the mode of being and this non-being. As for the notion of in-potentiality, it expresses the mode of being of matter insofar as it is precisely capable of a double becoming, — toward form, or toward privation” (p. 176).

“To the notions of matter and form, those of in-potentiality and act thus bring an ontological supplement. There is something distinctive in them, allowing them to express beings where the matter and the form are not the same. It is not only a matter of illustrating the notion of analogy, as we did earlier, in pointing out that the relation between distinct matters and forms can be the same, but more of pointing out that the notions of in-potentiality and act apply not only in the context of a single substance, but between distinct substances, and more particularly between substances where one is the cause and the other the effect (we will see later, but Theta 8 has already apprised us that they also indicate, from the one to the other, a specific relation of causality, that is to say final causality)” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The last lines of Lambda 5 contain a first response to the question of the unification of the principles of substance. Three kinds of unity are successively indicated, which nonetheless are conjoined:”

“–at the outset, a unity of a focal kind, which consists in the primacy of substance over the other categories, which has the effect that the causes of substance are aloso the causes of all otherr things;”

“–then a unity of an analogic kind, which constitutes the principal object of Lambda 4 and 5, and in virtue of which all beings, even if constituted from different elements, nevertheless have the same principles, that is to say matter, form, and the cause of motion;”

“–and finally, a direct or transitive causal unity, in virtue of which all things have for their cause ‘that which is first in entelechy'” (p. 177).

“This enumeration, we can see, mixes transitive principles and immanent principles. If it recalls the categories of matter and form, and not those of dunamis and energeia that the preceding developments have nonetheless substituted for them, it nonetheless makes the notion of entelekheia intervene, and applies it to the first cause. The latter is no longer mentioned only, as was the case at the end of Lambda 4, as ‘that which, as first of all, moves all things’, but as ‘that which is first in entelechy’. Act, designated this time by the term entelekheia and no longer that of energeia, taken indeed in its normative and axiological sense, which is no longer only ontological, appears from this point as the notion adequate to the designation of the first cause. We find thus suggested the possibility of its extension, which the remainder of Lambda accomplishes, from the corruptible and eternal movable substances to the unmoved substance — and, on this basis, of uncovering a principle common not only to the sensible substances as a whole, but to sensible substances and to the separate substance” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Eternal Motion

Book Lambda: Introduction

“Book Lambda of the Metaphysics responds to the exigencies defined in book capital Alpha: to pose the good as a principle; and to determine its proper mode of causality as being that of a final cause, and not an efficient or formal cause. These two exigencies are resolved in a single proposition: the principle is act, and is without power. Act here receives its full signification: it is act and not form that is the mode of being of separate substance; but act also serves to name the good as a principle” (Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 153, my translation throughout).

We saw last time that pure act (energeia) for Aristotle — unlike any being in subcelestial nature — has the character of unmixed necessity. This is true because pure act is the only thing that fully is what it is. It is the admixture of power (dynamis) and in-potentiality (dynamei) in other things that is the source of their contingency, as not being pure act.

“If the concepts of dunamis and energeia simultaneously unify ousiology and integrate theology into it, they also bear all the singularity of the Aristotelian thought of being, and within it of the first being, insofar as the latter is conceived not as an excess of power, but as the reality of the good” (p. 154).

Ousiology would be an account of ousia, or what we call “substance” from the Latin. Again, the first cause is not first in the sense of time, but first in the sense that all other things depend on it. The whole point of calling it pure act is to separate it from the contingency of the dependent things that have power and potentiality.

The very idea of an “excess of power” is utterly alien to Aristotle. We saw before that he understands power as always being power for something definite. Only those things that also have a dependency on something outside of themselves have this kind of “power” at all, corresponding to an unrealized in-potentiality. This “power” and potentiality are the mark of their contingency, not of implacable might.

It is Plato and Plotinus who on the other hand associate superlative power with the Good or the One. But Aristotle criticizes Plato for failing to explain how the Good acts as a cause. Then Plotinus later attempts to answer Aristotle’s criticism by adapting and dwelling upon the novel theme of the excessive character of the One’s power that first emerges in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

“To read book Lambda in a unitary manner, and to find this unity in ontology, that is to say in the sense of being that dunamis and energeia express, is not at all to deny or to minimize its theological content. It is on the contrary to affirm the unity of metaphysics, against the onto-theological readings that scission it between a science of common being and a science of the first being. It is also to recognize a continuity among the different treatises that have come down to us under the name of the Metaphysics” (p. 156).

“The date of composition of book Lambda is debated by commentators. But it is necessary in any case to distinguish between the historical question of its editorial status and that of its conceptual relation to the other books of the Metaphysics, with regard to the problems to which responds to, displaces, or resolves, the analyses that it deepens” (ibid).

“The problems treated in the central books [Zeta–Eta–Theta], and most especially in book Theta, seem to us to be decisive. In Lambda, the elucidation of [1] the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia that orients Theta in its entirety; [2] the analogical relation between them in Theta 6; and [3] the anteriority of act over in-potentiality subsequently developed in Theta 8, furnish the conceptual basis as much for the analogical unification of the principles of substance, as for the principal position of ousia energeia” (ibid).

“Massively mobilized in Lambda 6 and 7, [the notions of dunamis and energeia] are absent from the introductory chapter that constitutes Lambda 1, as from the analyses of Lambda 3, and little present in Lambda 8 and 10. Nonetheless, the successive and modulated interventions of dunamis–energeia (or — and it is necessary for us to ask ourselves about this variation, of their dative form dunamei–energeia) over the course of Lambda serve each time to respond to the different questions raised in Lambda 1, which serve as the program for the book in its entirety: what is a principle (notably in its difference from an element, stoicheion, or a cause, aitia)? What are the principles common to sensible substances? What is the nature of separate substance (is it a form or not)? Finally, and these two questions are intrinsically linked, in what way is separate substance a cause, and are there principles common to all substances, sensible or separate?” (p. 157).

Here Aubry notes that while still maintaining his own preferred sense of “separate” ousia (separate as subsisting with relative independence with respect to other things) as distinct from that of Plato (separate as independent of matter subject to becoming), Aristotle nonetheless in this part of the text turns to ask questions about substance that is separate in both of these senses.

“Going forward, we will be able to extract a unitary principle for all substances, sensible or separate, that is not reducible to the unity of the material composite; and at the same time to maintain, under the auspices of this unity, a hierarchy that is not episodic or disjunctive” (p. 158).

What makes the hierarchy of substance not episodic or disjunctive in Aristotle is the explanation he provides for the mode of causality of the end and the good as that for the sake of which.

“Lambda 2 will thus substitute the notion of in-potentiality for that of matter, in order to extend it, beyond the corruptible sensible substances, to the eternal sensible substances. This positive result is followed in Lambda 3 by a negative, but decisive, result, since we will establish, against Plato, that form cannot be separate. In Lambda 4, it is this time against its reduction to an element [i.e., a constituent in the material sense] by those who wrote about nature, that the notion of principle will be redefined” (ibid).

For Aristotle, a principle of something is never reducible to a constituent part of it, and what any given thing “is” is always more than a mere sum of its parts.

“The veritable pivot of book Lambda, chapter 5 goes on to integrate these various results, negative as well as positive: the extension of dunamis to the eternal sensibles; the exclusion of form from consideration as the mode of the being of the separate; the distinction between principle and element; and going forward, [chapter 5] brings two fundamental responses to the questions posed in the introductory chapter: separate substance must be conceived as act and not as form; and dunamis and energeia are, by analogy, the principles common to all sensible substances” (ibid).

“On this basis, the central concern of chapters 6-10 will consist in determining and exploring the mode(s) of relation between separate substance and the other substances. Lambda 6 having demonstrated that separate substance as ousia energeia is the condition of the movement of the other substances, it remains to identify its mode of causality as being that of the end (Lambda 7) and of the good (Lambda 9), but also the way in which this causality operates in the case of the eternal sensibles (Lambda 8), and, finally, the whole universe (Lambda 10)” (ibid).

The whole universe coheres intelligibly, both insofar as it realizes the good, and insofar there are also explanations when things fall short or go wrong. The world we live in is not a mere whole made up of discrete parts, as the pre-Socratic writers on nature tended to assume. Neither is it the mere sequence of disconnected episodes that follows from the Platonic sole emphasis on what Aristotle calls formal causes.

Next in this series: Physics and Theology

Book Theta: Summing Up

We’ve reached the end of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s chapter on book Theta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. At this point, with the textual analysis complete, she pauses to reflect on what this all means. I for one have been extremely impressed with the quality of her argument, upon this rather close examination in which we have been embarked. Here her conclusions seem to follow with ease. I’ll keep my comments to a minimum here, and mostly let her speak for herself.

“The movement of book Theta, such as we have attempted to trace, appears to us… as having for its object to subtract dunamis from the logic of force” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, pp. 145-146, my translation throughout).

“Theta 8 also justifies the etymology of the very terms, of Aristotelian invention, energeia and entelekheia, in posing the identity between act, ergon (function or work), and end…. Act says something more than ousia: not only subsistence, but being-in-the-end…. Thenceforth, dunamis and energeia are not only opposed as that which can be to that which is fully, or as the potential to the actual. They are articulated as oriented movement — tendency — toward its end” (p. 146).

“Act, for this reason, no longer appears only as another name for the composed ousia, but for ousia as such, and power, univocally characterized as the power of contraries, is designated as the principle of a fundamental contingency” (ibid).

“The notion of act is charged with an axiological significance [one having to do with value], the same that it already had in the Protrepicus where it made its appearance. If the identity of act and good is not explicitly posed in Theta (as it will be on the other hand in book Lambda), it is nonetheless presupposed by the identification between act, end, and ergon” (ibid).

“If the birthplace of the notion of energeia is ethics, and if this notion thereafter passes to ontology, it is indeed for founding an axiological ontology which in its content pronounces the identity of being, the end, and in the same way the good” (ibid).

“Going forward, what is proper to the ontology of dunamis and energeia seems to us to reside in that it allows being to be thought otherwise than as power and otherwise than as presence. Being, in the way that dunamis and energeia express it, is not only that which is there, not only that which acts [agit]” (p. 147).

(In the front matter to her second volume, Aubry says clearly, “Act is not action. Act does not act [L’acte n’agit pas].”)

“Dunamis, we have said, is reducible neither to active power nor to passive power, but must be thought as the possibility of a movement toward act. As for act, it expresses not only presence, but being-in-the end and the good as realized or (when it excludes in-potentiality) as real: substance having realized its essence as good, or essentially good substance. Act thus appears as the ontological name of the good. It expresses the unity of being and value, the conjunction of the ideal and the real. Every act is a perfection, however ephemeral it may be — a place of absoluteness, an inalienable achievement. That is in act which, however weak it may be, was successful — that in which an Idea is here and now, even for a brief instant, incarnated. The Aristotelian good, we recall, is not an abstract universal, a Form without substantiality, or an empty ideal: it is, for each being, a possibility that is proper to it, and that can be effectuated. An axiological ontology, the ontology of act appears also as an ontology of non-scission” (ibid).

She notes that Pierre Aubenque, with whom she studied, wrote about both scission (a cut) and mediation in Aristotle in this context, but tended to emphasize the scission. She also sees both as important, but prefers to emphasize the mediation.

“In a sense, our reading only modifies this accentuation. But at the same time, far from seeing in the thought of Aristotle a metaphysics of inachievement and a wisdom of limits, we see an ontology of perfection, which also carries with it an ethics of surpassing: what is important is not that being is not immediately perfect, the human not necessarily divine, but that by way of the notion of in-potentiality, they are posed as capable of being so, by way of the notion of act as having being, even fugitively” (p. 147n).

“Aristotle nonetheless thinks the difference of being and the good at the same time as their identity. It is in-potentiality that serves to name this difference, this division. If it does not have being absolutely, neither is being in-potentiality an absolute non-being. It is at the same time in the mode of not yet and of always already: being in-potentiality is to be awaiting what we will be. But it is also, since in-potentiality is for a determinate act and becoming, to carry its becoming and its end in itself: being in-potentiality is being able to become what one is. If in-potentiality expresses the division between a being and what it has to be (its act, indeed, in which reside also its end and its good), it also expresses the possibility of annulling that division. In-potentiality at the same time poses distance and its crossing: if it expresses difference, it is as a provisionally differentiated identity. Indeed no more than the good is an empty ideal (or a Form-Idea) is in-potentiality an indefinite desire doomed to unfulfillment” (p. 147).

“In this way, Aristotle avoids the misfortune of scission. But he nonetheless does not fall into the naivete of immediacy. With dunamis is introduced the mediation of time, of movement, and even, with dunamis meta logou in the human, of liberty” (p. 148).

Here she gives the Greek for what is traditionally translated as rational power. More literally, this is “power after logos“, which more clearly captures the dependency of such power on the logos associated with deliberation.

“This division introduces the possibility of encounter, of error, of accident. An ontology of non-scission, the ontology of in-potentiality and in-act also leaves a place for the thought of failure or messing things up. If act poses the good and the end as real, and in-potentiality as to be realized, the passage from in-potentiality to act is never assured. The potential cannot be called a future actual, and the actualization of in-potentiality is never necessary, since it can be suspended by deliberated choice, or interrupted by accident” (ibid).

“Finally, the distance between act and in-potentiality leaves a place not only for difference, but for alterity [otherness]” (ibid).

She goes on to give some conclusions about causality.

“[E]fficiency is not suppressed…, but subsumed under finality: alterity is required as a moment of this progress toward self” (ibid).

“Efficiency nonetheless is only a means for finality, and transitive causality is only a means for immanent development. For the articulation of dunamis and energeia has something else remarkable in that it allows the efficacy of the end and the good to be thought. We have seen that in-potentiality is not thought in the order of force. It is nonetheless the source of a movement, or of a change, which has for principle the form as end, or act. For the end does not act, at least in the sense that it is not an efficient cause…; if it is, it is only metaphorically, kata metaphoran. The end indeed is efficacious without being efficient. If it acts, or has an effect, it is not as an efficient cause, in implementing an active power, it is a cause as act and end of in-potentiality. We could say, going forward, that if act names the mode of being of the good and the end, in-potentiality names its mode of action” (pp. 148-149, emphasis in original).

“The correlation of in-potentiality and act also allows the specificity of final causality as causality that is effective but not efficient to be thought” (p. 149).

This, she recalls, was one of the projects laid out in book Alpha, where Aristotle insisted on his originality with respect to the causes.

“For to identify this causality implies precisely to think the good neither as power and efficient cause, in the manner of Love or Intellect [as Empedocles and Anaxagoras respectively held], nor as in-potentiality, in the manner of the separate Forms. Plato in the Republic attributed dunamis to the Good: but if we want to think the power of the good, it is necessary to think it not as dunamis, but as energeia, and as the end of in-potentiality” (ibid).

“It is indeed in the articulation of dunamis to energeia that the secret of the power of the Good resides, that ‘daimonic force that makes it so that things are disposed in view of the better and the more perfect’, and to which Socrates in the Phaido relates his quest” (ibid).

“Going forward we understand that book Alpha of the Metaphysics, which we can read in part as an echo of this text from the Phaido, encompasses Socrates and Anaxagoras in the same critique: to succeed where they both failed, it is necessary to understand that the power of the good is daimonic or divine precisely in that it is not a power” (ibid).

Here of course she uses “power” in two different senses.

Then, as I have also emphasized, hypothetical necessity is central to Aristotle’s notion of explanation. Here we have Aristotle’s answer to questions about freedom and determinism.

“Hypothetical necessity governs both the facts of nature and those of choice. It is indeed as compatible with contingency as it is with the frequency or modality of natural phenomena such that their regularity can be interrupted by accident” (p. 150). She cites book II of the Physics.

“[Hypothetical necessity] nonetheless does not hold good as a simple heuristic concept, or a simple ‘as if’, but indeed as a constitutive principle, since in-potentiality inscribes in the very heart of beings, natural as well as artificial, the efficacity of the end and the reality of act” (p. 151).

Next I’ll take a look at her chapter on book Lambda.

Next in this series: Book Lambda: Introduction

Reading Metaphysics Theta

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Rational and Natural Powers