Physics and Theology

Returning to Gwenaëlle Aubry’s landmark new reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, last time I covered her preliminary roadmap of book Lambda, in which Aristotle discusses the first cause and its relation to the world. Here I will focus on her discussion of chapter 1.

As is common in Aristotelian treatises, Lambda begins with a survey of the opinions Aristotle deems most important and relevant in this area — namely the “physical” approach of the Ionian philosophers of nature, and the “logical” one he attributes to the Platonists. Aristotle will borrow from both, and criticize both.

At the same time, Chapter 1 outlines a program of investigation that will be pursued over the course of the book. This consists of four questions:

1) How are cause (aitia), principle (arkhe), and element (stoikheion) distinguished, and how are they related?

2) Are there principles common to both eternal (astronomical) and corruptible (earthly) sensible substances?

3) How are we to understand the meaning of unmoved substance?

4) Are there principles common to unmoved substance and to eternal and corruptible sensible substances?

The Ionians and the Platonists agree, each in their own way, that it is principally of “substance” (ousia) that we investigate the principles and causes, though they interpret substance differently. Aristotle retrospectively interprets both the Ionians and the Platonists as reaching toward his own notion of substance and its role — i.e., as dwelling on questions about what things are, and about why things are the way they are.

It is the “things” in life that are of primary interest, because to a greater or lesser degree they all have persistence, and therefore also have recurring relevance in their own right. Mere transient events only have relevance to meaning and deeper truth insofar as they may be claimed to show something about recurringly relevant things.

Aubry points out that in book Lambda, it will not be a question of demonstrating the primacy of substance and of independent things over those other “things” that are attributed to them. Something like book Gamma’s argument for the methodological priority of inquiry into relatively independent things seems to be presupposed. Nor does Lambda ask what substance is, as book Zeta does. The specifically Aristotelian sense of substance’s defining criterion of “separateness” — embodied in the relative independence of some but not all of what we call “things” in the broadest sense — which was a major result of Zeta, is recalled in the opening lines of the chapter here, and is thus integrated into Lambda’s inquiry from the beginning. But Zeta’s investigations are also deepened here by a new connection with book Epsilon’s emphasis on causes and principles, so that we now also ask, what are the causes and principles of substance? Moreover, questions raised but unanswered at the end of Zeta about unmoved substance will eventually be addressed here.

Aristotle contrasts the Ionian view of the world of becoming as a certain (material) whole with that of the Platonists, who treat it as a pure succession of phenomenal instantiations of immaterial Forms. The Ionians recognize as principles only the elements of bodies, thus putting all intelligibility on the side of matter. The Platonists recognize only immaterial Forms as principles, and hold becoming as such to fundamentally lack intelligibility.

“Going forward, the opposition between holists and episodics does not outline the alternative according to which the arguments of Lambda will be deployed, but rather, conversely, that which it will be necessary to overcome” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 161, my translation throughout).

In a second contrast between the Ionians and the Platonists, the Platonists associate substance exclusively with what is logically universal (katholou; literally “according to the whole”), but the Ionians associate it exclusively with concrete individual things (kath ekasta; literally “according to each”). Aristotle will bridge this gap too, by posing the first cause as not itself a logical universal, but rather as a unique thing, to which all other things universally have a broadly similar constitutive relation.

Finally, Aubry refers to the passage, “And the former kind belongs to the study of nature (since they include motion), but this kind belongs to a different study, if [ei] there is no source [principle] common to them” (Metaphysics, Sachs tr., p. 231). Scholars have debated the significance of Aristotle’s ei here.

“The translation [of the ei] adopted here [and independently by Sachs] results in a hypothetical meaning, ‘if’, but another reading gives it a causal meaning, ‘since’. Such a divergence is far from being minor. The traditional causal reading of the ei in effect founds a scissionist interpretation of metaphysics, which will be divided between the science of sensible substances, or physics, and ‘another science’, having for its object the unique substance that is separate [in the Platonic sense of separation from matter], which going forward will be identified with theology…. As well as a scissionist reading of metaphysics, these lines invite a hybrid reading of Lambda according to which it is necessary to distinguish between a treatise on sensible substances, and a treatise on substance that is separate [again in the Platonic sense]. Such an interpretation amounts to abandoning any project for a general ontology — eventually only leaving place for a unification from above, that is to say by theology, applied to [the emphasis on causes and principles from] book Epsilon chapter 1″ (Aubry, p. 163).

She cites a survey of this issue by David Lefebvre, but does not directly identify sources for the traditional interpretation. Since the dispute is about a detail of the Greek text though, I would presume that these are traditionally minded modern scholars, and not medieval writers.

“On the other hand, the hypothetical reading of ei leaves open the possibility that there exists a common principle [of sensible and Platonically “separate” substance], and, going forward, also a common science of all the substances, sensible and separate. Nonetheless, this hypothetical reading admits in its turn of two distinct interpretations: one could understand that the common science of all the substances is to be identified with physics; or again that it is the alternative ‘physics’/’different science’ that is itself conditioned by the [presumed] eventual absence of common principles, but that under the hypothesis that such principles exist, this partition can be superseded, to the profit of a unique science of substances — a unique science that can be reduced neither to physics nor to theology” (p. 163-164).

The key point that should be emphasized is that Lambda aims to sketch the basis of a unified account of all substance.

I would go somewhat beyond the scope of Aubry’s argument here, to also question the traditional talk about “sciences” in this context. Aristotle himself simply speaks of knowledge (which we could gloss, following the broader of his usages, as an interpretive account grounded in reasoned explanation). This presupposes rather less than either the ideal of foundational demonstrative science bequeathed to later traditions by Alfarabi, or the whole elaborated apparatus of empirical science, with which “science” is identified in most modern contexts.

I also question the identification of Aristotle’s more specific “ousiology” or account of substance with “ontology”, or the alleged science of being. Properly speaking, we owe the latter to successive post-Aristotelian elaborations, principally by Avicenna, Duns Scotus, and Christian Wolff — however often these elaborations get retrospectively read back into the Aristotelian text. Aristotle does indeed refer without prejudice to the question whether knowledge of being “full stop” is possible, but his eventual answer is the more limited one that a general reasoned account of ousia is possible. I think it shows the original naive question about being to have been badly posed. That way of posing it leads to other nonsensical, non-Aristotelian questions that imply category mistakes, like “why is there being?”

Finally, I give more weight to the fact that the term “metaphysics” is never used by Aristotle, and was only first applied to the collection of treatises we know by that name by an editor, long after Aristotle’s death. I prefer Aristotle’s own term “first philosophy”.

But I do very strongly agree with Aubry that book Lambda is intended to develop what could reasonably be called a general ousiology, embracing both sensible and Platonically “separate” substance; and moreover, that this ousiology has a fundamentally axiological or value-oriented character.

Next in this series: Potentiality in the Stars

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

Act as Separable

“At this point in Theta 8, we have completed, by the mediation of the terms telos [end] and ergon [completed work], the justification of the equivalence between the superior terms of the analogy, energeia [act], kinesis [motion], and ousia [“substance”], just as we have justified that between the inferior terms, dunamis [power] and hyle [matter]. But in so doing, we have also subsumed one analogical relation under the other, by showing in the correlation dunamis–kinesis a particular case of the correlation hyle–ousia: power serves as a means for matter to attain the form posed as end, and indeed as a means for the coming to be of substance as unity of matter and form, movement itself being able to serve, in the case of transitive activities, as end and as realization of essence. We have thus completed the transition from the kinetic sense to the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia, and at the same time established the priority of the ontological sense over the kinetic sense.”

“The end of Theta 8 nonetheless begins another process: this no longer aims at showing the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia, but at extending their field of application beyond the corruptible sensible substances” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 141, my translation throughout, Becker number citations to the Greek text omitted).

Aristotle regards the stars as eternal (or more precisely, sempiternal) sensible beings, because on a human time scale their motions and other characteristics appear to be unchanging. From this perspective, he understands not only the first cause but all astronomical entities in terms of pure act (energeia), without any admixture of power (dynamis), or of being that is only in-potentiality (dynamei). But these are still sensible beings subject to motion, so they occupy an intermediate place between terrestrial things and the first cause.

This association with eternity and pure act goes along with his view that unlike terrestrial things, the stars move by necessity. Again, for Aristotle this just means always in the same way. Here he does speak of “what cannot not be”, but I think this is only a consequence of his definition of necessity. It is a reflection of the logical truth that if we say something always occurs in a certain way, then we are committed to saying it cannot not occur in that way, simply because “always” implies “never not” — and not anything stronger than that.

Aristotle’s argument, which ultimately aims to draw conclusions about the first cause from an analysis of things closer to us, is made somewhat easier by the existence of this intermediate case of eternal sensible substances in his conceptual schema. But it does not seem to me that any of his arguments about pure act really depends on this common-sense assumption that the stars are eternal.

Even if we have a different conception of astronomical entities, according to which they just exist on a much longer time scale than terrestrial things, the conceptual distinction of a separable pure act remains available to us. (Hegel, for example, develops a version of it that has no connection to astronomy, and instead appeals only to the lasting ethical and cultural achievements of rational beings.) (See also Grammatical Prejudice?.)

“Act can in effect only be attributed to the eternal sensible substances on the condition of being dissociated from dunamis, redefined as the power of contradiction (in the same way, it will only be able to be extended in book Lambda to the simple substance on the condition of the exclusion of movement). But insofar as Theta 6 introduced it as indissociable from its correlation with in-potentiality, it is the very understanding of the notion of act that seems to be called into question: how do we understand energeia without in-potentiality? What kind of act is it that is no longer the unity of matter and form in the end? Can we under these conditions maintain its identity to ousia?”

“These questions will only find a definitive response in book Lambda. Theta 8 is content to begin the process of the extension of energeia: the notion is in effect applied to the eternal sensible substances. For this application allows us to extract yet another sense, and a more fundamental one, of the anteriority of act according to ousia: if act is anterior to in-potentiality according to ousia, this is also because, contrary to in-potentiality, it characterizes such substances. For these are more so substances than the perishable sensible substances” (ibid).

In the analysis of things around us that are in becoming, we see the underlying modalities of in-potentiality and in-act functioning in an interdependent way. But if we look at in-potentiality and in-act just as modalities, only one depends on the other. That is just what the priority of act is intended to convey.

Aubry sees a new distinction introduced here for the first time. Aristotle first explicitly mentions that dynamis may have effects that are not only contrary but contradictory, and at the same time specifies in-potentiality is a mode of being that can be resolved to act in contradictory alternative ways. But it seems to me that this has been implicit from the moment that talk about potentiality for contraries was introduced. And in the bigger picture, Aristotle’s whole insistence on the priority of act over potentiality and the asymmetry in the relation between them seems to have been designed from the start to support considerations of the independence of act from potentiality.

There could be no potentiality without something being in act. But it is very clear that for Aristotle, the relation of potentiality to act is asymmetrical. By contrast, activity and passivity are completely symmetrical, so it is impossible to have the one without the other. But potentiality depends on act, whereas act seems to be the very thing that makes something an ousia malista, or what is most of all a substance. The criterion for this is precisely “separability” or independence relative to other things. Potentiality seems ubiquitous to us because it is a necessary component of all the terrestrial things we are accustomed to, not because act in principle has any dependency on it. Or such seems to be Aristotle’s argument.

Aubry already emphasized in her reading of book Zeta that for Aristotle, what distinguishes ousia malista is its separability, or ability to have being on its own. But Zeta’s discussion focuses on perishable sensible substances, and therefore on applying this kind of separability to concrete composites of form and the familiar kind of (non-celestial) matter. Here for the first time Aristotle explicitly addresses eternal sensible substances.

“The correlation of in-potentiality and act is here broken: act is no longer presented as the end and the principle of dunamis, but as excluding it. Energeia and dunamis name opposed modes of being, where one is proper to the necessary, as that which cannot not be, the other to the contingent, as that which can be or not be. Dissociated from dunamis, energeia remains on the other hand associated with kinesis [motion]: in effect, the eternal sensible substances are in movement. But movement in their case is not the transition from one state of being to another, or from in-potentiality to act: exclusive of in-potentiality, it is confounded with their very act — by which we indeed verify that for certain beings kinesis can serve as telos [end] and as manifestation of being. Finally, dissociated from in-potentiality, this movement remains no less associated with matter, or at least a certain kind of matter” (pp. 142-143).

“[E]ven though the correlation of in-potentiality to act has been broken among the eternal sensible substances, it operates again between these and the corruptible sensible substances” (pp. 143-144).

“[A]ct can be not only another name for the ousia composed of matter and form (or for matter as realized in a form, the form in a matter), but for ousia as such. Act thus comes to name a superior degree of being, which, insofar as it is exempt from in-potentiality, is characterized by necessity, understood as the impossibility of not being” (p. 144).

“In-potentiality, as being able to be or not be, names an inferior degree of being, which characterizes contingency, but remains no less correlated to act in a relation of dependency that also marks act’s anteriority according to ousia” (ibid).

Aristotle’s text does clearly suggest that astronomical entities are somehow superior to terrestrial things, and it relates this superiority to the notion that they are purely in-act. But a modern understanding of astronomical entities expressed in Aristotelian terms would be that contrary to what Aristotle thought, they are not in fact purely in-act.

There is, however, an alternate basis for vindicating the “superiority” of the celestial over the terrestrial. The cosmos is inconceivably more vast than the earth, and for modern science too causally subsumes and includes it, analogous to the way that Aristotle thought it did.

Since childhood I have felt a fascination for the vastness of space and time, that could include distant galaxies and dinosaurs. Completely unlike Pascal’s famous terror at being so small in this vastness, I experienced this with only the profound wonder that Aristotle identifies as the beginning of philosophy.

Even if we do not regard astronomical entities as eternal sensible substances, I think Aristotle for his part would have no trouble endorsing Kant’s expression of the two great wonders, “the starry heavens above and the moral law within”.

Next in this series: Book Theta: Summing Up

Act in Process

At this point we are starting to sum up the results of Aristotle’s Metaphysics book Theta on potentiality and act. Aubry now makes a stronger statement that what it is in itself to be something in potentiality or in act can only be made clear by considering the relation between the two.

“In fact, and always in continuity with the analogy of Theta 6 [between various particular cases of something being in-potentiality and in-act], we begin by considering the relation of dunamis and energeia — that which, according to Theta 6, is the unique means of understanding these notions in themselves, but which also serves to justify the various equivalences posed by the analogy” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 135, my translation throughout, Becker number citations to the Greek text omitted).

“This relation is defined according to a triple anteriority: energeia is anterior to dunamis at once according to the formula, logoi; according to the substance, ousiai; and, but only from one point of view, according to time” (ibid).

“Of an individual in-act, one must say in effect that she is engendered from in-potentiality by another individual in act…. In-potentiality is no longer presented here as a principle of movement, but as a transitory state between two acts. And energeia in its turn is no longer identified with movement, but with the state of that which moves [something else], insofar as it is identical in form with the moved” (p. 136, emphasis in original).

This case applies to biological reproduction.

“Anteriority according to the formula is qualified as evident: it is in relation to act that one defines in-potentiality” (ibid).

“From [Becker index] 1050a4 on, we go on to explore the third relation of anteriority, that according to ousia [“substance”; what it was to have been a thing]. Here we are at the heart of Theta 8, and indeed of Theta in its entirety, since here the triple transition will be accomplished — from the kinetic sense to the ontological sense; from the model of the transitivity and the correlation of powers to the model of the dunamis–energeia correlation insofar as it applies to transitive change as well as to immanent change; and finally, from the model of efficiency to the teleological model.”

“The anteriority according to ousia is not initially given as an anteriority in the order of existence, but as an anteriority in that of form and of essence…. That which is anterior according to ousia is posterior according to generation: the adult is posterior to the infant…, even though in the latter is found the form that is not fully present. But this inversion from one order to the other is explained by the fact that the anteriority of act according to ousia is that of form as end: the act [the adult] is ‘that for the sake of which’ for generation.”

“Here we rejoin the analyses of books Zeta and Eta, where the substitution of the notion of act for that of form proceeds from the adoption of an etiological, and not only logical, point of view, by which the form is considered in its causal function, and envisaged as end” (ibid).

In a composite of form and matter, the form that is considered as end and not only “logically” will be in a sense identified with the composite as a whole, i.e., with the form as realized in matter.

“The anteriority of act according to ousia is that of the end, that is to say of the form as the term of a process that realized it in a matter — and indeed, in the composite that book Zeta qualifies as ousia malista [ousia most of all].”

“For it is this anteriority of act as end that provides the key to the necessary correlation of dunamis and energeia. One does not say only that energeia is to dunamis as that which builds is to the art of building, or as that which sees is to that which is given to view, but that it is for building that one understands architecture; for sight that one has sight; for contemplating that one has the power of contemplating. Act, from this point on, does not appear only as that in relation to which one defines power, but as that for which power is” (p. 137, emphasis in original).

She quotes Aristotle, “The act is the end, and it is in view of it that the power is acquired” (p. 137).

“We integrate here the results of Theta 7 for justifying the equivalence between matter and in-potentiality; for what justifies this equivalence is that the matter is teleologically determined by the form…. As at the end of book Eta, act serves here to name the unity realized from the matter and the form” (ibid).

Act serves “as another name for the ousia malista [ousia most of all] of book Zeta” (p. 138). And this is none other than the composite of form and matter.

“The ontological sense of energeia nonetheless is presented as being at the foundation of the kinetic sense; if movement can be called energeia, it is insofar as we take it as an index of being…. From now on, what justifies the equivalence between energeia and kinesis is that movement can also be telos. And if energeia and kinesis can be called entelekheia, it is not only in the sense where they name effective and complete being in opposition to the incomplete being that in-potentiality says, but because they name that being which, for in-potentiality, is its end” (ibid).

She quotes Aristotle, “For the ergon [completed work] is the end, and energeia is ergon. This is why the term energeia is derived from that of ergon, and tends toward entelekheia” (p. 139).

She continues, “Ergon thus intervenes as the mediation between energeia and telos, and indeed also between energeia and entelekheia. It was present, we saw, from the first lines of Theta 1, presented alongside dunamis and energeia as a sense of being. We find it also, in a sense at the same time normative and teleological, in the Protrepicus. The term serves here to allow the kinetic sense and the ontological sense of energeia to be unified, and at the same time to range the first under the second.”

“If it can play this role, it is thanks to the double sense that it carries: in fact, ergon signifies at the same time the proper function, understood as the act in which the essence is accomplished, and the oeuvre [completed work]. For the remainder of the text goes on precisely to distinguish between two kinds of act: one intransitive, in which nothing else is accomplished but itself, and the other transitive, which produces a being exterior to itself. To illustrate the first, one gives the example of vision, which is the ergon-function of sight, and serves in itself as a telos, an end; for the second, the example of the construction which, resulting in an ergon-work, the house, is only fully [an end] when taken together with the latter. From this we understand that movement can be called energeia: because it indeed has an ergon and a telos, which are not confused with it, but are its work, or that which it produces, and in which, thenceforward, we can say that it is.”

“In fact, ‘the action of building a house resides in the house that is built, and it comes to be and is at the same time as the house’. This affirmation can appear problematic at first glance: one tends spontaneously to distinguish the transitive activity from what it produces, and the being of the house from that of the movement of its construction, since the house only fully is when, precisely, the movement is no longer. We can nonetheless understand this in the light of the analysis of movement in Physics III, and of its characterization as the act common to the mover and the moved: Aristotle already affirmed that the ergon and the telos of the agent and the patient, or of the mover and the moved, reside in one sole and same energeia. In the same way, it seems that the phrase of Theta 8 has no sense unless by the house we understand not the completed house, but the house as object of the movement of construction. We thus understand that the act of construction comes to be at the same time as the house in the process of being constructed, since the two movements (construction/being constructed) are one. The work and the end of transitive activity do not reside in the achieved product, but in the production itself…. The distinction between immanent activity and transitive activity is no longer so great” (pp. 139-140, emphasis in original).

A being that is “in process” can also be an “achieved” being, in varying degrees insofar it also represents an incremental achievement.

“We have seen in effect that act was identical to form as the end and term of in-potentiality, indeed to the form as realized in a matter. If act is anterior to power from the point of view of ousia, this anteriority is not only the logical one of the form-essence and the ousia prote, but also that of substance and ousia malista” (pp. 140-141).

Here we see Aristotle’s strong vindication of immanence and concrete being. Ends — and indeed “perfection” according to a particular kind — are intended to be understood as realizable in form and matter. This is far indeed from the perspective that all finite things necessarily fall infinitely short of a perfection conceived as infinite. For Aristotle, the highest being will be characterized not as infinite, but as pure act and as the good.

Next in this series: Act as Separable

The Relativity of Dynamis

“Up to the end of Theta 5, even though the end of Theta 3 had initiated the ontological inquiry, it is principally the kinetic dunamis [potentiality] that we have explored. The first lines of Theta 6 close this first moment: now that we have treated dunamis in relation to movement, it is necessary, writes Aristotle, to take an interest in energeia [act]. We note anew the dyssymmetry already raised: it is the study of energeia, not of dunamis, that presides over the extension of energeia as of dunamis from the kinetic sense to the ontological sense.”

“Energeia and dunamis will be initially characterized as two distinct sides of one thing of huparkhein, of existing. They are thus designated as two distinct modes of being, where the difference, nonetheless, can be known only through their opposition. This opposition constructs in-potentiality as relative to energeia [act as “in-a-work-ness”, or something realized in a work] — thereby rejoining the definition of dunaton in Theta 3 as that of which the act can exist (huparkhe he energeia). Thus, the in-potentiality is to be understood as that of [the statue of] Hermes in the wood, or that of the half-line in the whole line, because the one and the other can be separated…, or again as the way in which someone knows something without contemplating it, if it can be contemplated. If in-potentiality thus finds itself characterized only relatively to energeia, the latter in its turn is not explicitly defined, but implicitly identified with what is separated in the first example (the Hermes and the half-line), and with the exercise in the second (contemplation)” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 130, my translation throughout).

“Theta 8 will show, in conformity with what Theta 3 already affirmed, that it is the ontological sense [of dynamis and energeia] that is primary: it thus appears that movement can be called energeia insofar as it is taken as the manifestation of being, or again of the work, or again of the end. It is indeed the kinetic sense that will appear as an extension of the ontological sense, and of a more determinate sense by virtue of which act is not only another name for being, but for being in the end” (p. 132).

Aubry points out that the last lines of Theta 6, which somewhat confusingly emphasize a distinction between whether an end is immanent or not, have been regarded by leading scholars (including Werner Jaeger and Miles Burnyeat) as an addition to the text.

She notes that in Theta 8, “we will read that movement can be considered as a form of energeia insofar as, in certain cases, it can serve as an end…. Far from being opposed to energeia as that which does not have its end in itself to that in which the end is immanent, kinesis will be presented as a form of energeia insofar as it can serve as an end, which leads us to suspect the last lines of Theta 6″ (p. 133).

“As was already the case in Theta 5, we are here formulating restrictive conditions, which rule out saying that any matter whatsoever is in-potentiality for any form whatsoever. In-potentiality is only said of a determinate matter in relation to a determinate form. More precisely, in-potentiality indicates the very possibility of the relation of such a matter to such a form. Even in formulating the conditions of the equivalence dunamis–hyle posed by the analogy, Theta 7 thus justifies the formula of Eta according to which ‘the proximate matter and the form are one and the same thing, the one in-potentiality and the other in act’.”

“If in-potentiality names the capacity of matter to acquire a determinate form, the division of dunamis from hyle is no less maintained, at the same time as it is given measure. In effect, for the products of tekhne [art] as well as for the phuseis [natures], we can establish a common criterion: the uniqueness of change. Potential is thus distinguished from the indeterminate possibility in virtue of which any matter whatsoever could [supposedly] acquire any form whatsoever. But it is also distinguished from the actual….”

“If Theta 7 prolongs the analyses of Theta 5, a change of perspective is also evident: in effect, the question posed is no longer to know only of what a thing is capable, dunaton, but for what it is in-potentiality, dunamei…. A double displacement is marked here: first, the distinction between active power and passive power, with which we began, is effaced before the notion of in-potentiality…. [And second,] the notion of in-potentiality thus serves to name, beyond the distinction between active power and passive power, the very possibility of the interaction of an agent and a patient with a view to a determinate change.”

“In what follows, we will ask not only when a thing is in-potentiality for another, but when a thing is in-potentiality in another: in so doing, we ask not only about in-potentiality as a principle of change, but about in-potentiality as a mode of being” (p. 134, emphasis in original).

“This transition will be completed in chapter 8….”

“The text [of chapter 8] opens with a redefinition of dunamis…: this new definition, which is more expansive, is in effect formulated in such a way as to include natural beings…. In the same way, natural beings are defined in Physics II as ‘having in themselves a principle of motion and rest’. Nature can thus be said to belong to the same genus as dunamis, since it is an immanent principle of movement. Thus redefined, dunamis will be envisaged in the order of immanence more than in that of transitivity: we thus integrate the results of the previous chapter, which defined in-potentiality at the conjunction of the active and the passive, and beyond this distinction. The extensive definition of dunamis thus marks the definitive adoption of a new point of view, in virtue of which potentiality [puissance] will no longer be considered in the order of the correlation of agent and patient, but in its relation to act. Dunamis will thus appear as the principle of a movement that can take place within something, which is essentially teleological [finalisé] (even if it can have no other end than itself), and which is a transition from a certain non-being to full reality” (p. 135, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Interim Recap

Potentiality and Contingency

“[T]he rational powers are powers for two contrary effects: but two contraries cannot be actualized at the same moment by the same power. What is thus necessary (ananke) — but this time by a logical necessity, dictated by the principle of non-contradiction — is that there intervenes, in addition to dunamis, another principle: desire or deliberated choice, orexis or prohairesis, which chooses between the two contraries.”

“We can thus reformulate the definition so that it serves for the dunaton kata logon: it is necessary (ananke) when that which is capable according to reason [what was called a rational power] desires something for which it has the power, that it does that thing. The necessary sequence begins this time from the power insofar as it is modified by desire and/or by choice — and thus by liberty. It remains that, here again, the attribution of such a power implies the taking into account of the circumstances of its effectuation. According to this new determination, that is possible which is decided or desired by the agent, and which the circumstances allow (which its deliberation must take into account)” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, pp. 127-128, my translation throughout).

Aristotle doesn’t literally offer a new definition of possibility at this point, but the effect is similar. In Sachs’ translation, he says that one having a rational power too “has the potency in the sense that it is a potency for acting, and this is not in every situation but when things are in certain conditions…. [E]ven if one wishes and desires… to do contrary things, one will not do them, for… there is no potency for doing them at the same time, since a thing will do the things it is capable of in the way that it is capable of them” (Metaphysics, book Theta ch. 5, p. 173).

All power or potency for Aristotle is the power to do something definite, and every power to do something definite is capable of doing it only under certain conditions. Consequently, there could be no such thing as an indefinite or unlimited power.

The emphasis on contraries in the case of rational powers is a little confusing, but it seems to be a further consequence of the notion that all power is definite. He seems to consider deliberation about the use of definite powers as revolving around the question whether to use them or not, which does thus acquire a kind of binary flavor. But it seems to me that a being having multiple powers might also deliberate about which of several to apply in a given situation.

What is really essential here is that rational power belongs to beings that deliberate. This is what makes it “rational”. And Aristotle sees a kind of “rational” (rather than physical) necessity that a being that desires or chooses something and has the power for it, will do it. But because it incorporates deliberation and choice among its conditions, this kind of necessity is not that of determinism. It is a hypothetical necessity that is compatible with contingency.

Returning to Aubry’s argument, “Proairesis [choice based on deliberation] thus intervenes as a principle of contingency, capable of inaugurating a necessary causal sequence. If the circumstantial definition of the possible leaves no place for logical possibility but tends to identify possible and potential, on the other hand the distinction between potential and actual is maintained.”

“But to this it is necessary to add — and this is what Theta 8 will do — that power considered in itself, and not in relation to its effect, is a principle of contingency. Every power, taken not as principle of action but in opposition to act, considered thus in its ontological determination and not only a kinetic one, is the place of an essential indetermination” (p. 129).

So by a sort of dialectical twist, Aubry momentarily attributes a kind of determinism to Aristotle, and then refutes it two pages later. On pedagogical grounds, I don’t favor the deliberate construction of unnecessary dialectical surprises, just as I don’t stylistically favor the kind of construction that first seemingly makes an unqualified statement, then adds qualifications later on. If a statement will later be qualified, it is good to give some indication of that up front. But in context this a minor point, and partly a personal preference of mine that Aristotle doesn’t follow either. The thing to emphasize here is that Aristotle simultaneously argues for an essential contingency in all power that is incompatible with determinism, and at the same time for the role of a hypothetical, delimited necessity that is compatible with contingency.

“It is on this essential contingency of power that the antideterminist argument of On Interpretation rests. Aristotle there distinguishes not only, like in Theta 4, the impossible from the false, but the possible from the true: of certain possible propositions, one cannot say in advance whether they will be true or false…. The possible is thus distinguished at once from the actual, the necessary, and the true” (ibid).

She summarizes Aristotle’s famous discussion in On Interpretation of the sea battle that may or may not happen tomorrow. At the most obvious level, this has to do with human deliberation and choice.

“But again Aristotle gives this another extension: if the future depends on decision and on human action, it is also true, and this time in a general (holos) manner, that ‘in all that which does not act always, there is a possibility of being and of not being. This indetermination in virtue of which the future must be called contingent, and the propositions concerning it neither true nor false, also affects events involving irrational powers” (p. 130).

Here we come full circle, to Aristotle’s rejection of strict determinism in the action of natural powers as well rational ones.

Next in this series: The Relativity of Dynamis

An Aside on Necessity

“The question remains to know whether a thing can be called possible, or again in-potentiality, when it will never be the case. In other words, can the possible designate the unreal, that is to say that which, while not being contradictory, is not and will never be the case? It is to this question that Theta 5 responds: the text opens with a new division of dunamis, according to which it is innate (for example, sensation) or acquired (by practice, like the art of playing the flute, or by study. It also recalls the distinction between rational and irrational powers” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 126, my translation).

Aubry notes that Aristotle introduces a new definition of the possible (dynaton). “The possible is in effect relative to actual circumstances: that which is possible is so kai pote kai pos, at a given moment and in a certain way…. Aristotle has a tendency to think the possible not as that which can be conceived, and is non-contradictory, but as that which can be: in other words, he does not distinguish neatly between logical possibility and real possibility, and in effect resists calling possible that which, while being capable of being in the sense that it is non-contradictory, will never be. In virtue of this new definition, one indeed calls possible that which, if all the conditions are present, must be actualized, and indeed must necessarily be actualized. The formula is one of determinism” (p. 127).

She immediately goes on to explain how Aristotle limits this determinism to irrational or natural powers, as opposed to rational ones. I would supplement this with another distinction.

In the bigger picture, even in the natural realm I think that for Aristotle, there is no strict predetermination of the overall unfolding of events. An animal gets its food in one way and not another on a given day, but this is in part due to “accident” in the ways that things come together.

The case Aubry is speaking about here is a hypothetical consideration of what would be really possible, at a given moment, and given a complete definition of the applicable circumstances. In this case, which by hypothesis is fully specified, Aristotle wants to say there should be a determinate answer, which should be subject to hypothetical necessity.

But in the case in which we consider what is really possible, this is not hypothetical, because we are not working from a hypothesis at all. Neither is there any “if”, nor are we “given” anything specific. We do not have a complete specification of the applicable circumstances. So here the conditions for hypothetical necessity do not apply. If we cannot even say what the hypothesis is, we cannot claim to draw a necessary conclusion. Accordingly, what is really possible cannot be answered in terms of hypothetical necessity.

Hypothetical necessity is a viable kind of claim because it is specific and delimited in its scope of applicability. It is also all that is needed to explain the successes of science and engineering. Given certain definite things, we can say with confidence that something definite will happen. We can iteratively improve our hypotheses and level of confidence as we go.

What is necessary for Aristotle is just what always follows. The applicability of “always” in a generalization about the natural world (as distinct from, say, mathematics or formal logic) is a question of fact. No implacable force stands behind it. And what always follows is implicitly bounded by our knowledge. “Always” simply means we have never encountered an exception. If we did, we would need to look for additional conditions to explain the new case. Necessity belongs in the register of a certain kind of intelligibility of what happens, not in the raw occurrence of events.

What I mean to have been explaining here is that if Aristotle appears to endorse a limited “determinism” with regard to natural powers, the terms in which this is expressed further limit it to a notion grounded in hypothetical necessity. The reason this is so important is that hypothetical necessity is fully compatible with the absence of predetermination, whereas determinism is commonly associated with predetermination. I would prefer to simply say that natural powers can be analyzed in terms of hypothetical necessity. And it turns out that Aubry refutes this appearance two pages later.

Next in this series: Potentiality and Contingency

Potentiality and Possibility

“At the conclusion of Theta 3, we had recognized in dunamis at the same time the condition of becoming and a mode of being, and in energeia the mode of being that is opposed to it and which characterizes, beyond movement, all that which is effective. In defining what is in-potentiality as that which is not in-act, we have also distinguished it from non-being, in characterizing it as that which can be in act. Now we need to pursue the examination of what is in play in this division, or the modality of the relation of the in-potentiality to act” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 124, my translation throughout, with Becker number citations to Aristotle’s Greek text elided).

“The discussion of Theta 4 concerns neither dunamis nor what is dunamei, but rather the dunaton. This term nonetheless can designate both the possible and that which has power, or the capable, just as much as adunaton can designate the impossible as well as that which lacks power. In Theta 3, the dunaton had been defined in terms of dunamis as ‘that for which nothing makes it impossible for the act (energeia) to exist, when it is said to have power (dynamis)'” (ibid).

Clearly, dynamis, dynamei, and dynaton all have related etymologies. My Greek isn’t strong enough to just casually read Aristotle’s original the way I can mostly read Aubry’s French without a dictionary, so this is a bit of an eye-opener. This is why Aristotle’s discussions of what we render by English words that have different etymologies are so closely related.

Because the English words do not have this visible relation to one another, it is easy to be confused by the ways in which Aristotle relates the corresponding Greek terms. For years, I have been puzzled by English translators’ seemingly random alternations between respective uses of power, potentiality, and possibility for what was supposed to be the “same” concept in Aristotle. Aubry’s highlighting of the Greek words tells me I should have long ago studied this more carefully with the side-by-side Greek and English texts in the Loeb edition. The translators’ alternations are probably not random at all, just not commented upon. We are not dealing here with things confusingly said of one same concept, but rather with things more clearly said about each of several related concepts. This is just the kind of disambiguation that Aristotle himself pioneered.

“Book Delta defines [the possible] differently, as that of which the contrary is not necessarily false; that which is true; that which can be true. Thus characterized without relation to dunamis, dunaton no longer means having power, but possible. Delta opposes it to the impossible, adunaton, defined as ‘that of which the contrary is necessarily true’ (for example, the commensurability of the diagonal of a square with its sides), and distinguishes the possible and the impossible thus defined, from power (dunamis) and the lack of power (adunamia)” (ibid).

“Nevertheless, the definitions of Delta again carry an equivocity: in its second sense (that which is true), the possible includes the necessary, or what cannot not be: according to the first and third definition, on the other hand, it is identified with the contingent (to endekhomenon). It is this last sense that is mentioned in Prior Analytics book I: ‘that which is not necessary, and of which one can think that it exists without that leading to any impossibility'” (pp. 124-125).

“The possible is indeed defined sometimes as including, sometimes as excluding the necessary. In its first sense, it can be identified with logical possibility: that is called possible which is not contradictory; the necessary — that which cannot not be the case — can thus be called possible, in the sense that it is true (noncontradictory) to say that it is the case. But the possible can also be identified with the contingent: it thus no longer [indifferently] designates that which cannot not be, or again that which can be this or that. In this second sense, the possible is opposed no longer to the contradictory, but seems to be identifiable with power, understood as the power of contraries (being A or not-A), and of contradictories (being or not being” (p. 125).

We saw previously that both of two contradictories cannot be in act or be the case at the same time, but contradictories can both potentially be in act or be the case.

“The remainder of Theta 4, up to the beginning of Theta 5, nonetheless has the object of opposing determinism. This begins from the distinction between the impossible and the false. A strong determinist position in effect comes back to saying that nothing is possible that is not and will not be true. This position assumes a triple reduction, not only of the possible to the potential and of the potential to the actual, but also of the actual to the true” (p. 126).

This leads back to the position of the Megarians. But Aristotle clearly affirms that the non-actual is not impossible. She quotes, “It is false that you are standing right now, but it is not impossible” (ibid).

Aristotelian potentiality encompasses alternate possibilities.

Next in this series: An Aside on Necessity

Critique of the Megarians

Euclid of Megara (not to be confused with the geometer) was a student of Socrates who combined Socratic and Eleatic ideas. He reportedly claimed that virtue is knowledge of the Parmenidean One Being, which he also identified with the Good, God, reason, and mind. At a time when Megarians were banned from Athens for some reason, he is said to have entered the city disguised as a woman in order to listen to Socrates. He was present at Socrates’ death, and afterwards offered refuge to Plato and others in Megara. Socrates reputedly rebuked him for arguing more for the sake of winning than for the truth, but Euclid was said to have been very concerned with moral virtue. Plato credits him with having written down an actual conversation between Socrates and Theaetetus, which became the basis of Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus.

Euclid’s students were mainly interested in logic and argument. Some of them apparently founded a separate school, known as the Dialecticians, which developed a form of propositional logic. This latter group is considered to have been the major source for Stoic logic.

In chapter 3 of book Theta of the Metaphysics, Aristotle criticizes Megarian arguments that there is no distinction between power and act. Aubry quotes Aristotle’s restatement of the Megarian claim, “It is when a thing acts that it can act, but when it does not act, it cannot act” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 122, my translation throughout).

Independent of Aristotle’s development of a normative and teleological dimension of act that plausibly extends even to physical motion, he is also very concerned to carefully distinguish between power and its exercise. Thus he had to confront the Megarians, who argued that there is no such distinction.

Later writers of quite varying persuasions have wittingly or unwittingly developed variants of this Megarian position. Nietzsche, for instance, explicitly denied the reality of anything that is not actual. Any kind of argument for complete determinism has a similar effect, as does theological occasionalism, which subsumes all becoming under the model of creation.

“Against this thesis, it is necessary to affirm not only the distinction of act and power but, more precisely, that with a given act can coexist not only the power of which it is the effect, but the power for another, opposed, act” (ibid).

Aubry noted a bit earlier that the emphasis on contraries in the discussion of rational powers is rather accidental. The more general point — expressed at the level of potentiality rather than power — is that potentiality includes multiple alternate possibilities concretely grounded in the same state of actuality. The more specific notion of contrariety only comes into play because — due to the fact power is consistently understood by Aristotle as power to do or undergo something definite — related deliberation may be conceived as about exercising a power or not.

She quotes Aristotle, “It is possible for a thing to be capable of being and nonetheless not be, or capable of not being and nonetheless be” (ibid).

This, it seems to me, is an unavoidable presupposition of any coherent account of becoming. It is again also the foundation of Aristotle’s account of human freedom. This way of approaching freedom is greatly to be recommended, because it avoids both the dubious and dangerous concept of a separate faculty of will distinct from reason, and the worse concepts of arbitrary will, or will as “superior” to reason.

“The critique of the Megarians indeed carries a double, and paradoxical, positivity: it invites us to think at the same time becoming in relation with dunamis, and energeia in relation with being. In doing this, it indicates also the double stakes of the inquiry: to think becoming and being at the same time; to determine the mode of their articulation.”

The dynamis–energeia pair is what uniquely enables Aristotle to think of being and becoming in a non-opposed way, though this is far from exhausting its significance.

“The extension from the kinetic sense of energeia to the ontological sense is presented as a deepening: otherwise said, and in conformity to what Theta 1 noted already, it is the ontological sense that is primary. In effect, if we have a tendency to consider that energeia is manifested above all in movement, this is insofar as we take it as an index of being” (p. 123, emphasis in original).

“For not to be in act but to be capable of being so, is also a mode of being: that which in-potentiality names. Of certain things that are not, but are nonetheless capable of being, one says thus that they are dunamei” (pp. 123-124).

Here we have a good example of the explicitly dative grammatical form of dynamis (dynamei) that she finds to be associated with Aristotle’s distinctive notion of being in potentiality. These are things that have being potentially, or are potentially thus-and-such. Here the emphasis is all on “things” in a state of potentiality, or potential “states of affairs”. Potentiality (as distinct from actuality) is the modality in which these have being and are said. This is indeed clearly different from a power to do, cause, or undergo.

“That which is in-potentiality, nonetheless, is not, ‘because it is not an entelechy‘” (p. 124).

We do not say of that which is in-potentiality that it “is” simply, or in an unqualified sense.

At the link above, I suggested that entelechy is probably the most important guiding concept of the Metaphysics. I have also suggested that entelechy serves as a kind of explanation for how ousia or (substance or essence, or what Sachs calls “thinghood”) works. In turn, Aristotle uses ousia to help disambiguate and organize what is meant by the various ways in which we say something is something. In the quote above, he directly uses entelechy as the criterion for what we do and do not say “is”. It is vitally important that he appeals to this much more nuanced concept, instead of referring back to the blunt instrument of a common-sense notion of existence or reality. For Aristotle, being, existence, or reality is not an explainer; instead, it needs to be explained.

Nonetheless, Aubry points out that here, Aristotle does not explicitly invoke the normative aspect of entelechy. We are still primarily investigating the more common “kinetic” sense of dynamis and energeia that accounts for physical motion. The aspect of entelechy that is to the fore is therefore that of the continuing activity that constitutes a substance as something persisting, or a motion as ongoing.

Next in this series: Potentiality and Possibility