Rational and Natural Powers

“Theta 2 prolongs the analysis of dunamis in proposing another distinction, which no longer opposes active power to passive power, but power that is rational or accompanied by a logos, to irrational power. This analysis marks progress in comparison with Theta 1, in that it considers at the same time the relation of power to its effect. In so doing it gives a maximal extension to the notion, in manifesting that it applies as much to animate as to inanimate beings, and as much in the field of nature as in that of techne” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 121, my translation throughout).

“What distinguishes rational power is that it can be power for two contrary effects, ton enantion, where irrational power is only for one sole contrary: thus, the medical art can produce sickness or health, while fire can only heat. The logos in effect ‘shows at the same time a thing and its privation’…. Privation, which we have seen cannot in any case characterize a power, but rather characterizes its contrary, impotence, is given as the object of the logos that governs it. This object is nonetheless derived, or ‘in a certain way accidental’: it is in initially considering the positive contrary, or the form, then in negating it by reasoning that we see the negative contrary. The primacy of the positive contrary is thus maintained” (ibid).

The medical art and fire are very different kinds of things. They are both called “powers”, but the one is “rational” and the other natural or “irrational”. The medical art seems analogous to the art of housebuilding that serves as the canonical example of an Aristotelian principle of motion or “efficient cause”. Fire for Aristotle is one of four material elements defined by a division in terms of primitive qualities. In a recent post, we briefly saw how even the cyclical transformations of these qualitative elements can fit into an ultimately teleological schema, without any extravagant hypotheses.

We saw in the last post that Aubry’s strong emphasis on the distinctively Aristotelian dative form dynamei as characteristic of being in potentiality does not by any means rule out a recognition that Aristotle in fact devotes more space to the more common nominative form dynamis, which can after all be reasonably translated as “power”, which has wider non-Aristotelian usage, and which plays an important role in Plato.

Aristotle specifies the applicable meaning of logos in this context as the rational deliberation that governs prohairesis or choice, and thereby also governs the exercise of power or capability.

In the case of natural powers like that of fire to heat things, for Aristotle it is always a matter of power to do, cause, or undergo something definite. Then independently, as a matter of general logic (and of even more fundamental ethical seriousness about consistency of our assertions), we must affirm that a power we have stipulated to be for something definite is just that. If we accept that a particular “power” is for something definite, then we must also accept that is not a power for the opposite of that definite something, nor indeed for anything other than what it is for.

It is thoughtful deliberation that involves a consideration of pro and con, and determines a choice about the exercise of a power that in itself just is what it is. In the rational case too, the power at issue is still a power to do something definite, just like a natural power. But here the governing deliberation — in order to be a genuine deliberation at all — must be fundamentally open, and not predetermined in its outcome. This is how rational animals have freedom. We have flexibility and plasticity in the exercise of definite powers.

So we see that outside of first philosophy, Aristotle does use a more conventional notion of power. But Plato, Aristotle, and the classical Greeks generally regarded the idea of unlimited power — and indeed anything unlimited — with a kind of horror. (It seems to have been Philo of Alexandria who introduced the very un-Greek notion of infinite power.) Aristotle treats both rational and natural powers always as powers for something definite. It is reason, and more specifically deliberation about alternatives — not power in itself — that allows us freedom.

“This analysis allows two requirements that are apparently conflicting, but equally essential to Aristotelian thought about power, to be reconciled: affirming its positivity, all while introducing within it an indetermination” (p. 122, emphasis in original).

This is a really essential point about the nature of freedom. Besides developing the wholly new concept of being in potentiality, Aristotle distinguishes much more clearly than his predecessors between the more common notion of power and its exercise. Freedom belongs to the thoughtful exercise of definite powers and capabilities, not to any power in itself.

Next in this series: Critique of the Megarians

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

Potentiality for Interaction

“Before being elucidated in Metaphysics Theta as a sense of being, dunamis appears in the physical texts as the instrument of the thought of change and action. It is thus thought in the order of the correlation not of the in-potentiality to act, but of active power to passive power. The model is the mechanistic one of efficiency. This model is nonetheless subsumed under another, which for the correlation active dunamis / passive dunamis, substitutes that of dunamis to energeia, thus integrating the schema of efficiency under that of finality. The definition of movement and its characterization as the common act of the mover and the moved appears as an essential moment of this integration: it invites us to see in kinesis [motion] not only the result of the interplay between two powers, one active and the other passive, but the transition between two states of being. Interaction thus appears only as the means for actualization, the play of powers as the occasion of the realization of the in-potentiality” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 103, my translation throughout).

This all seems very sound. I would add only two more nuances. First, not only is so-called efficient causality or Aristotle’s notion of “sources of motion” subsumed by final causality, but it also subsumes mechanistic “action” under a broader notion of “means”, as in the example from the Physics in which the art of building is what is most properly said to be the source of the motion of building a house. Aubry herself also speaks of interaction as a “means for actualization”.

Second, she speaks here of interaction because Aristotle analyzes even the most unilateral, mechanistic physical “action” as a special kind of interaction between active and passive powers. Although Aristotle would also agree with Kant against Leibniz that there is real interaction between things, that is not at stake in the contrast here. For Aristotle, all action is really a kind of interaction in the special sense mentioned above, but I think what he means primarily to contrast with actualization is action as such, not interaction as such. I would thus suggest the friendly amendment “action appears only as the means for actualization”. On the other hand though, she is emphasizing the fact that all action for Aristotle is really interaction, which is also extremely important.

In On Generation and Corruption book I, Aristotle describes cyclical transformations of the four elements. Aubry notes that the elements are there said to have neither forms of their own nor any principle of autonomous movement. The reciprocal action of the elements is explained in terms of active and passive dunamis.

“[A]ction has for effect an assimilation of the patient to the agent; but always in the case of a material agent, it can entail a passion in return…. If dunamis determines the agent as well as the patient, it is indeed according to a reversible schema, and in a relation of co-implication” (p. 104).

“This first formula, which accounts for action by the correlation of an active dunamis and a passive dunamis, is nonetheless succeeded by another, which substitutes for the pair of powers that of in-potentiality and of act” (ibid).

“The agent is no longer solely determined as active, but as in act…. As for the patient, it is not only passive, but in-potentiality. If there can be action of the one on the other, it is because the effect is already present, dunamei [in potentiality], in the patient: fire, for example, can only heat that which is already hot-in-potentiality” (ibid).

She quotes from book II: “That which is hot in-act is cold in-potentiality, and that which is cold in-act is hot in-potentiality, so that, at least if they don’t equalize themselves, they transform themselves the one into the other” (p. 105).

She continues, summarizing “This cycle obeys the principle of the best, and has a finality of its own” (ibid).

“All the same, the elements are deprived as much of active power as of spontaneity. Their movement toward a place should not be understood on the model of action, or of the interaction of an active power and a passive power, but on that of actualization, and of the correlation of the in-potentiality and the in-act” (ibid).

“The case of elemental change indeed appears as an example of the substitution of the model of actualization for that of interaction, and of the model of finality for that of efficiency. Aristotle starts from the place where mechanistic explanation seems the most justified: the first elements, the original impulses of matter. But precisely, these are not, like the dunameis that fill the khora [receptacle] of [Plato’s] Timaeus, brute and disordered forces: they are passive powers, deprived of self-motion and of spontaneity, but which nonetheless are principles of movement, and have an orientation or a tendency. Between them and their act, the active power, efficiency, only intervenes as an exterior cause; it is nothing more than the occasion for their actualization” (p.106).

Far from serving as the primary model for causality in general, efficient causality in Aristotle only provides occasions for more essential causes or reasons why to operate. It is always only a means for something, a kind of circumstantial catalyst.

On the Soul book II distinguishes “two degrees of dunamis. The first, according to ‘the genus and the matter’ is a non-exercised native capacity — that in virtue of which every human is capable, simply insofar as she is human and possessed of reason, of understanding grammar; the second is a capacity already employed, exercised, the effectuation of which requires no supplementary apprenticeship, but simply the will and the absence of obstacles…; and finally entelechy, or the actual exercise of knowledge” (p. 107).

“The case of perception, like that of elemental change, must be conceived as a transition from second dunamis to entelechy. This kind of alteration (alliosis) neither affects nor destroys the nature of the subject, but on the contrary is ‘a progress toward itself and toward entelechy'” (pp. 107-108).

“Nonetheless, in the case of the apprenticeship of knowledge, the passage from first dunamis to second dunamis should also be conceived as alteration-amelioration…. More than on the distinction between two degrees of dunamis and between movement (kinesis) and change (metabole), it seems it is necessary to insist on that between two types of alteration, the one privative and the other positive. This distinction underlines once again that the intervention of the efficient cause and of the external agent can serve as the occasion of an immanent progress” (pp. 108-109).

“In the transition between the model of interaction and the model of actualization, the definition of motion as the common act of the mover and the moved also appears as an essential moment” (p. 109).

“In Physics III, movement is defined as the entelechy of that which is in-potentiality as such…. Movement, otherwise said, is the act of the dunamis of a being not as such, but as mobile: the process of fabricating a statue is not the act of the brass as brass, but of the brass insofar as it becomes a statue. Immediately proposed, this definition is designed as a sort of default; of movement, in effect, one can say neither that it is privation, nor power, nor act; it is necessary, ultimately, as difficult as this may seem, to define it as an incomplete act, energeia ateles, in opposition to a simple act, energeia haple” (ibid).

“Movement indeed manifests the power of a being whatever it is, that is, independent of what it is, [independent] as well as of that by which such a being can become other than it is…. Movement is indeed the the entelechy of a power as such, since being a power is being a principle of movement, but the power is always the power of a being that by that movement becomes what it is. As consequence, the distinction is not between two powers, but between becoming as the being of power, and the being in view of which there is becoming” (p. 110).

“If the analysis of movement makes appeal to the distinction between mover and movable, and indeed between agent and patient, this distinction nonetheless finds itself relativized: in fact… the mover moves in being itself moved — since there exists also, Aristotle points out, an unmoved mover. The agent indeed is at the same time patient, and the patient in its turn can become agent, so that everything is both agent and patient, poietikon kai pathetikon. But to this it must be added that act is the same in the agent and the patient” (ibid).

“The duality of agent and patient, or of mover and moved, is reabsorbed thus, according to the point of view specified, into that of in-potentiality and in-act. In-potentiality, to dunamei, recovers active power and passive power equally well: it is a point of view taken on both powers insofar as they in principle belong to one and the same movement, or again, insofar as they are the subject of one and the same accomplishment” (p. 111).

Nothing in the real world is ever purely active or purely passive. It is hard to overstate the significance of this.

“In the same way that book III of the Physics subsumes the correlation of powers under movement as the act of the in-potential, book Theta of the Metaphysics places movement under energeia, understood this time not as ateles [incomplete], but as identical to the telos [end]” (ibid).

Next in this series: Reading Metaphysics Theta

Ethical Roots of Aristotelian Dynamis

“The notion of dunamis is present from the earliest writings of Aristotle, associated each time with an ethical context” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 100, my translation throughout). She cites studies of this issue by D. W. Graham and E. Berti.

The Protrepicus is an Aristotelian dialogue, famous in antiquity as an exhortation for people to learn philosophy, but surviving only in fragments quoted by other authors. According to Aubry, it discusses dynamis in terms still based on those of Plato’s Theaetetus — a kind of having, as distinct from use — but it already introduces Aristotle’s neologisms of energeia and entelecheia, or act and the closely related notion of entelechy. Significations according to act are already treated as focal, relative to significations according to dynamis.

“Finally, the distinction also shows a normative and teleological sense” (ibid).

“The notion of energeia is found associated not only with that of usage, but also with that of good usage and that of end, and by the latter ultimately with that of ergon [a completed work] — the text having ultimately for objective the determination of the ergon of the soul, not only its function but the act in which its end properly resides” (p. 101).

We saw recently that Plato already used ergon in a sense like this. Aristotelian energeia is the fulfilling activity from which the Platonic ergon emerges.

“It is with a normative and teleological sense that the notion of ergon intervenes again in fragment 6: the accomplishment of the ergon in effect is that in virtue of which a thing can be called good, agathos, that in which also resides its virtue, arete. For in the case of a composite being, this work cannot be immediately determined: constituted of different parts, such a being is also constituted of multiple acts and multiple powers. Its end resides in the accomplishment of its best work, its most proper dunamis, indeed that of that part of it in which its identity most resides. For the human, her end and her happiness reside in the accomplishment of the power of thinking, phronesis, which is at the same time her divine part and her most proper identity. The notion of dunamis is thus articulated to those of ergon and of energeia, which themselves are articulated to that of end, telos” (ibid).

Much of Aristotle’s most characteristic thought is expressed here. (On a side note, I am especially intrigued that phronesis or practical judgment is here explicitly assigned the same ultimate role that theoria or contemplation plays in the Nicomachean Ethics. I have long been skeptical of any sharp contrast between these two. See Aristotelian “Wisdom”.)

“The Protrepicus strongly associates notions that were present but disjoint in Plato: that of effective usage, of ergon and end, which are conjoined in Aristotle’s invented terms of energeia and entelecheia” (ibid).

She also points out a discussion of dynamis in book IV of the Topics, where it is opposed to choice based on deliberation. No one should be blamed for a dynamis. “One does not say of a human who is capable of acting badly that she is bad…. The bad is the one who is not only capable of evil, but chooses it…. Contrary to what Platonic aristocratism affirms, there are no naturally good or bad [rational beings]; in particular, it makes no sense to speak of someone as naturally virtuous: because virtue, the Nicomachean Ethics says, is not a dunamis, a native power, an innate quality, any more than vice is. It is a hexis, a disposition acquired… by means of repetition of one same act, and of which the actualization, in its turn, is suspended from prohairesis [choice grounded in deliberation]” (p. 102).

Next in this series: Potentiality for Interaction

Dynamis Before Aristotle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Ethical Roots of Aristotelian Dynamis

Entelechy and Hylomorphism

The remainder of Aubry’s third chapter analyzes book Eta of the Metaphysics, following on her analysis of book Zeta.

In Zeta, matter had been dismissed as a candidate for ousia or “substance” taken simply. But Eta chapter 1 “allows matter to be characterized not simply as ousia, but as ousia in potentiality. And in its turn, it invites us to consider not simply ousia but ousia as act” (Dieu sans la puissance, 2nd ed., p. 89, my translation throughout).

“In the text that follows, the term energeia [act] is found systematically associated with that of eidos [form]” (ibid). “Energeia thus inherits, in Eta, all the characteristics of eidos brought to light in Zeta” (ibid).

“What Eta 3 shows, nonetheless, is that it is not always easy to distinguish the act from the composite: for example, does the term ‘house’ designate ‘a shelter made of bricks and stones in such and such a way’, or only a shelter? The term ‘animal’, a soul in a body or a soul? It appears that the distinction between material element and formal element has something artificial about it; form is not only that which makes the stones erected into walls, the wood made into a roof, into a house: it is the very organization of the stones into walls, of the wood into a roof (and in the same way, the soul is not superimposed on a body that would be already provided with organs, already able to grow, to be nourished, to move, etc.: it is that very organization and those very capacities. Thus, the composite substance is a unity, the unity of the material element and the formal element — and in such a way that it can be called an entelechy, and a certain nature” (ibid).

(I would say it is really the entelechy of a composite substance — its embodied, realized, and continuing purpose — that gives it unity, and makes it a substance in the Aristotelian sense at all. Any ousia involves stronger unity than a mere coexistence of elements. Entelechy is a higher-order persistence of purpose and its realization that explains the unity of a substance. The stronger degrees of unity that we see in living things and artifacts don’t just happen, and knowledge of them isn’t just somehow immediately given. Entelechy expresses the intelligible cause or reason for there being a unity strong enough to be called a substance. Perhaps we might even say that entelechy is a final cause in act. Every Aristotelian substance would in this way be an end unto itself. Kant explained respect for others in terms of regarding the other as an end in herself. Thus I think Kantian respect ought to apply to all Aristotelian substances.)

“To this, Eta 4 adds that just any thing cannot have just any matter” (p. 90). “It thus appears that, considered as potentiality, matter is an element of substance, and that if it is determined by form, it is a determiner also” (ibid).

So here we have a clear expression of reciprocal determination between form and matter. (Aristotle’s biological works contain many other examples of this.) She quotes from Eta 6 that “the most proximate matter of a thing and its form are one and the same thing” (p. 91). The mutual determination noted above is why that is true.

“Adopting the language of in potentiality and in act is indeed to think the unity of what the Platonic and abstract language of matter and form invites us to distinguish” (p. 91).

“Potentiality is the unity of the matter and the form seen from the side of the matter, act the unity of the matter and the form seen from the side of the form. Matter and form are nothing but abstract points of view adopted toward the concrete individual” (ibid, emphasis in original).

The superficial clarity of quasi-syntactic distinctions between matter and form is belied by the reality of mutual determination that underlies the Aristotelian thesis of hylomorphism.

“Eta does not just repeat the analysis of Zeta while modifying the terms: in substituting the etiological point of view for the logical one, … it offers a solution, which will again be completed in Theta, and will only acquire its full meaning in Lambda, to the problem of ousia” (ibid).

What she calls the etiological point of view consists in explanation in terms of Aristotelian causes or “reasons why” — especially final causes, or internal teleology — and may include an aspect of process. What she calls the logical point of view consists in what I called quasi-syntactic distinctions between matter and form, which are purely static.

“Ousia is neither the matter nor the form, it is the composite, but it is also the matter as potentiality for the form, the form as in-act in a matter — the two constituting the unity of an individual at the same time determinate and separable. Act responds in fact to all the criteria of ousia: insofar as it inherits the characteristics of form, it says determination and permanence; insofar as it names the form as linked to a matter, it says also the individual and the separate. Act indeed says ousia at the same time as substance and as essence…. Through the notion of act, the conflict with which Zeta ended, between the Platonic criterion and the Aristotelian criterion for ousia, between ousia prote and ousia malista, and also between the candidate of form and the candidate of the composite, is indeed found to be resolved” (pp. 91-92).

Although my own readings here of Zeta and Eta did not catch the nuance of the prote/malista distinction that Aubry makes a good case for based on the Greek text, my general sense of the respective results of Zeta and Eta is quite similar to hers. The long development of Zeta ends — and Eta begins — with an unresolved tension between the requirements of knowledge, and what I would call an ultimately ethical focus on independent things as concrete wholes. Eta ends up much more optimistically suggesting that we can respect independent things and have knowledge.

Next in this series: Dynamis Before Aristotle

Substance, Essence, Form

Here I will partially translate and briefly comment on Gwenaëlle Aubry’s analysis of the argument of book Zeta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in chapter 3 of her Dieu sans la puissance. I think it is important to carefully capture a fair amount of the technical detail, especially because she is in part arguing against the most widely accepted traditional interpretation of a key point in the interpretation of Aristotle, which has to do with Aristotle’s ultimate attitude toward form.

(For the sake of the general reader, I have elided her precise citations, which use the standard Becker numbers for lines in the Greek text. English for much of book Zeta is reproduced in my own initial commentary on it. I have also omitted numerous accent marks that are sometimes used in romanization of Greek words.)

Aubry notes that whereas Aristotle uses the same word ousia for both primary and secondary substance in the senses of the Categories (a “this” and a universal, respectively), medieval Latin translations used substantia for primary substance and essentia for secondary substance. One important question raised in the discussion has to do with whether there are any cases where the “substance” and the “essence” of a thing are the same.

At the beginning of Zeta chapter 3, ousia is defined in terms very close to those of the Categories, as something that is not said of an underlying thing, but rather is the underlying thing of which other things are said.

“Matter being that which remains, it seems to be a substrate in the physical sense of the term…. But it also seems to satisfy the logical signification of the criterion of hypokeimenon [underlying thing]” (2nd ed., p. 77).

“But it is precisely the adequation of matter to the criterion of hypokeimenon, in its double acceptance logical and physical, that manifests the insufficiency of this criterion — and by that also the necessity of completing the analysis of the Categories” (ibid). She quotes Aristotle: “But this is impossible, for also to be separate and a this seem to belong to an independent thing most of all” (Sachs tr., p. 120). “No more than it suffices to respond to the question ‘what is ousia‘ that it is the substrate, does it suffice to respond… that ousia is matter” (Aubry, p. 77).

“This new criterion, that of khoriston kai tode ti [separate and a ‘this’], nonetheless conserves a trait of ousia as defined in the Categories: the capacity for independent existence. The initial analysis of Zeta thus has the effect at the same time of accentuating this trait, and of distinguishing the notion of a capacity for independent existence, or that of subsistence, from those of substrate and subject” (ibid).

“[T]here where one would expect to see the examination of form as a candidate developed, it is an analysis of to ti en einai [the what it was to have been] that is deployed, with respect to both the essence and the object of a definition (Zeta [chapters] 4-6). Of form, eidos, there is no question before Zeta 6″ (p. 78).

“This approach is qualified as logikos [logical]…. The logical approach to ousia will be governed by two questions: first, is there no essence but that of substance (Zeta 4-5)? Then, in what cases is essence identical to substance (Zeta 6)?” (ibid).

“One begins from the logical definition of essence as that which is said in accord with itself (kath auto). In the Posterior Analytics, the first sense of ‘in accord with itself’ names precisely what is mentioned in the definition of a given being and constitutes its ousia” (ibid).

“One goes on to conclude that there is an essence for everything for which one can give an account in a definition…. One does not affirm, nonetheless, that to ti en einai is the ousia, but only that it pertains to it first. According to the steps characteristic of Zeta, one goes on to establish not an exclusivity, but an order of priority: thus, essence belongs first and absolutely, protos kai haplos, to ousia. To the other categories, it belongs only secondarily…, in a certain way…, not absolutely” (pp. 78-79).

“Thus associating essence and definition, one remains in a Platonic logic…, even if Zeta 5 establishes that definition can give account not only of simple substances, but also of composite substances insofar as they are composite, on the condition that the composition is not accidental” (p. 79).

“The question thus arises to know whether there exist substances identical to their essence: for these are the sort of beings that the Platonists call ‘Ideas’…. Formulating this point, Aristotle clearly designates to ti en einai [what it was to have been], or the essence, as principle of intelligibility, and ousia as principle of being: if they were separated the one from the other, he writes, there would be no knowledge of the one, and the other would not exist” (ibid).

If being and intelligibility were not inseparable, there would be no knowledge of the one, and the other would not exist. But they don’t exactly coincide, either. Something similar could be said about being and value.

“Otherwise said, the guiding question is to know in what measure substance is identical to its essence, or to measure the division between a being and its principle of intelligibility: it is not again to know whether the essence can itself be considered a substance, that is to say capable of a separate existence” (ibid, emphasis in original).

(This relation of substance to essence bears some structural resemblance to the relation between existence and essence discussed by Aquinas. The criteria currently under discussion for ousia or “substance” (“separateness”, and being a “this”) indeed seem to have something to do with common notions of existence. But the ousia or substance is said to be the independent thing, whereas existence is commonly treated as an abstract property that can be said of things. And for Aquinas, God gives existence to an essence. But Aristotle starts by recognizing independent things that implicitly already exist.)

“But it is necessary, before arriving there, to establish the equivalence between essence and form, or between to ti en einai and the eidos. This is what the following chapters (Zeta 7-12), where the term eidos reappears, are concerned with” (p. 80).

The earlier “logical” approach is succeeded by a more physical approach in Zeta 7-9. “Form is the physical equivalent of essence…. Form is the essence that is found really instantiated in particular indviduals” (ibid).

“One indeed finds in form two traits characteristic of ousia, and more precisely of ousia as Plato had defined it” (ibid).

“Form can indeed pretend to the title of primary ousia. But (and this is essential), the text of Zeta itself distinguishes between ousia prote [primary substance] and ousia malista [what is substance most of all]. In the Categories, on the other hand, these terms are associated…. But while the denomination ousia prote is applied in Zeta to the form, that of ousia malista is applied to the composite, sunolon: that which is ousia malista is a human, a plant — not the ungenerated principle of generation that is form, but the concrete thing that is generated, mixed of form and matter” (p. 81).

“Ousia prote must be distinguished as much from ousia malista as from ousia said simply, or haplos, which is not the form [as such] but the immanent [instantiation of] form, associated with the matter together with which it constitutes the composite. This distinction is explicitly formulated in the preceding lines, in relation to the problem of definition: the definition does not include the matter” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Form and ousia prote are nothing else than essence [to ti en einai, what it was to have been a thing]” (p. 82).

“If ousia prote is not the same in Zeta and in the Categories, it is because prote [primary] does not have the same sense in the two texts” (ibid). She has already noted that Zeta 1 explicitly recalls that “primary” or “first” is said in more than one way.

On the other hand, “The ousia malista of Zeta does correspond to the ousia prote of the Categories: it designates the individual.”

“From this, the form is clearly distinguished: the form signifies toionde, ‘of what species’; it is not a tode kai horismenon, an individual being subject to definition, but it produces and generates a being of that species in the individual…. No more than the matter does it correspond to the criterion of tode ti [being a ‘this’]” (ibid).

“The eidos is not fully ousia; it is only primary ousia, its anteriority being at once epistemological, as the logical analysis showed, and chronological, as the physical analysis showed. The form is only ousia in a Platonic sense, as the object of a definition, principle of intelligibility and of permanence, in short insofar as it is nothing other than essence comprising identity at the level of a species, and transmitted, by art or by generation, from one individual to another” (pp. 82-83).

“There is indeed a tension between ousia prote and ousia malista…. If the analysis of Zeta 7 manifests this, it indicates also, and already, the means to resolve it, in introducing, in the context of the study of generation, the notions of dunamis [potentiality] and entelecheia [entelechy]. Their substitution, in Eta, for those of matter and form, authorizes the reconciliation of the candidates, the criteria, and does so for both series of ousia, prote and malista: and it is at the end of Theta that the initial reflection of Zeta on this anteriority finds its culmination, since act is there said to be anterior both to to logo and te ousia, both from the point of view of the formula and from that of substance…. It will thus be possible to think the ousiai proterai not, in the manner of Plato, as forms-essences abusively separated from the matter they determine and the individual they define, but as acts having both an autonomous subsistence and a full intelligibility” (p. 83).

“Nonetheless, if we have on the one hand confirmed the identity between form, essence, and the object of definition and, on the other hand, qualified that between these three terms and ousia, we have up to now left aside another term fundamental to the Platonic equation: the universal” (p. 84).

“The universal meets neither the criterion of [full] determination, since it is common to many things, nor the criterion of being a substrate, since it is always affirmed of a subject…. Thus the universal cannot be called ousia in the qualified and reduced sense that essence is” (ibid).

“Once the pretention of the universal to the title of ousia has been eliminated, it remains to examine the question of its equivalence to form and essence. This is more complex, since form and essence are indeed a certain type of universal, a determinate one. But the fundamental point does not lie in this: the break with Platonism does not come, as maintained by the traditional reading, by way of the distinction between universal and form, and the affirmation that only the form would be ousia; it lies above all in the affirmation according to which form or essence itself is not fully ousia, the idea indeed according to which it does not suffice to be ousia kata ton logon [ousia according to what is said] to be ousia malista [ousia most of all]” (pp. 84-85, emphasis in original).

Aristotle in general does greatly emphasize the importance of what is said. Plato goes further, in making definition the very criterion of ousia. But for Aristotle, concrete things are not reducible to their definitions alone, and it is the concrete things that come first.

“The Platonic solution having been eliminated, we are brought back to the problem from which it was born (and which Beta calls the most difficult of all: how to think the relation between the individual and its principle of intelligibility” (p. 85).

“This problem is related to another…, how to think eternal and intelligible substances” (p. 86).

“Zeta 17 introduces a new point of departure… the point of view of principles and causes…. [I]n investigating the cause, it is first of all to ti en einai [what it was to have been a thing] that is researched” (ibid).

“But what is found there brought to light is not the nature of separate substance, as we might have hoped, but on the contrary the correlation of form and matter in the context of the composite substance” (ibid).

“These lines are generally read as the conclusion of Zeta, and as an ultimate affirmation of the identity between form and ousia. But it seems that they mark much more the insufficiency of this result” (ibid).

“Considered in its etiological, and not only logical, function, and taken as end, the form, in effect, is act. For the notion of act, insofar as it is substituted for that of form, but by way of completion, permits the reconciliation of the different criteria of ousia, as well as resolving the tension between ousia prote and ousia malista” (p. 87, emphasis in original).

“Act is ousia, absolutely, and in the full sense, from the logical and epistemological points of view as well as the ontological and etiological. If act allows ousia to be thought according to the double criterion of separation and intelligibility, it also allows the intelligible and separate substances to be thought, as Lambda will show. As for the notion of dunamis, its correlate, it serves to allow the reintegration of the candidate that Zeta has discarded: matter.”

“The notions of dunamis and energeia have something remarkable about them that allows a maximal extension of the notion of ousia to be given, without falling into equivocation, but on the contrary resolving the conflict between substance and essence, as well as that between simple and composite substances” (ibid).

Next in this series: Entelechy and Hylomorphism

Mixing Up Plato and Aristotle

Chapter 3 of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s Dieu sans la puissance analyzes Aristotle’s discussion of ousia (“substance”) in book Zeta of the Metaphysics, and the transition toward potentiality and act in book Eta. The discussion is very dense, and will merit at least one further post. The whole chapter elaborates her argument for an important distinction between form and act. Here I will focus on her introductory remarks.

The key Aristotelian term ousia already had established usages in Plato, some of which conflict with the meanings Aristotle gave to it. According to Aubry, the traditional interpretations that attribute to Aristotle a notion of separate form independent of the composite depend on reading distinctly Platonic (and non-Aristotelian) meanings of ousia into Aristotle’s text. I won’t get to the full justification of this here, but it is coming. The term “separate” is also used differently by Plato and Aristotle. In Plato, it means apart from sensible things, but in Aristotle it means able to subsist independently.

“Contrary to that of potentiality and act, the couple of matter and form is never counted by Aristotle among the senses of being. It nonetheless became one of the fundamental motifs of scholastic Aristotelianism, to the point where the notions of dunamis and energeia are happily identified the one with matter, the other with form. This had the effect, in particular, that one could affirm generally that the unmoved First Mover is a ‘pure form’, even though Aristotle only designated it as act, and never used terms for which the translation could be ‘pure form’. This indistinction of act and form is also at the origin of the affirmation, also very widespread, according to which Aristotle would accept the existence of ‘separate forms'” (2nd ed., p. 67, my translation throughout).

She notes that many esteemed modern commentators, including Werner Jaeger and W. D. Ross, have followed this scholastic interpolation. For the absence in Aristotle of any terms translatable as “pure form”, she cites a 1973 article by E. E. Ryan, “Pure Form in Aristotle”.

“[I]t is hard to see what would lead Aristotle to forge two neologisms [energeia and entelecheia, or act and entelechy] to designate what a concept in the repertoire [eidos, or form] already sufficed to name. But what is more surprising is that in identifying act and form, and attributing to Aristotle the assertion of separate forms, one thereby attributes to him a doctrine he had himself combated in Plato, only in the end to reproach him for finally remaining a Platonist” (p. 68).

Modern criticisms of Aristotle have often targeted his alleged reliance on a notion of pure or separate form.

“The indistinction of form and act appears to us in effect to be at the source of numerous criticisms addressed to the Aristotelian metaphysics: thus one demands to know how it can at the same time admit the existence of separate forms, and affirm that the form is never given without the matter; one asks oneself about the coherence of an ontology having for its object both substances composed of matter and form and pure forms; one deplores the abstract character, the intellectualism, of a theology of pure form. But nevertheless, the reduction of act to form is also the basis of the traditional (‘onto-theological’) reading of the Metaphysics” (ibid).

According to Aubry, there are two principal differences between act and form.

First, “Only act implies subsistence; or again, only act is fully ousia — that which says also ‘separate entelechy’…. Form, on the contrary, is not [simple substance], because it does not exist in a separated state. If it is separable, it is only in a very limited sense, [according to the logos], writes Aristotle, or ‘according to the formula’; in the sense, certainly, where it can be thought and defined without the matter, but not in the sense where it could subsist by itself, independent of any material instantiation” (pp. 68-69).

Again, Aristotelian separateness is not Platonic separation from sensible being, but rather the capacity of a thing to subsist on its own.

Second, “Act nonetheless does not say being solely as separate, capable of subsisting by itself, but also as identical to the end and the good. This axiological significance only appears, before being confirmed in Lambda, in book Theta, at the end of the course by which the notion of act is substituted for that of form” (p. 69).

What she here calls the axiological significance of act — its essential involvement with valuations and ends — stands in contrast to its traditional “onto-theological” interpretation. Also, there now seems to be a question whether some of my own expansive remarks about form should perhaps be applied to act alone.

“[The substitution of act for form] explains the possible confusion between the two notions, but at the same time it indicates the procedure and the conditions which mark well that they are not simple synonyms. The principal operator for these appears to us to be the central notion of books Zeta and Eta and, to a lesser degree, of book Theta: the notion of ousia, as well as that of separation, which is strongly correlated with it. One of the great difficulties of book Zeta comes in effect from a partial conservation of the Platonic sense of the notions of ousia and of separation, which leads to a conservation of the primacy of form. Aristotle nonetheless also elaborates his own concept of ousia, which he associates with separation not in the sense of existence outside of sensibles, but as a capacity for independent existence. Thus redefined, ousia excludes form” (ibid).

That is to say, what Aristotle calls ousia malista [what is substance above all] excludes form. As we will see, she says that ousia in a broader sense subsumes form in the way that energeia and entelecheia subsume form, but this relation is not convertible — ousia, energeia, and entelecheia for Aristotle all cover more cases than eidos [form] does.

“This tension between two senses of ousia is reflected by the distinction, in Zeta, between ousia malista [what is substance above all] and ousia prote [primary substance], and by the correlative promotion of two candidates to the status of ousia: the composite of matter and form, and form. It is the intervention, in book Eta, of the notion of act that allows this tension to be resolved: act in effect satisfies at the same time both the Platonic criteria and the Aristotelian criteria for ousia, making it possible as a result to think both intelligibility and permanence, both essence and substance” (ibid).

“In Plato, the term ousia indifferently designates the reality, the existence, or the essence, the ‘what-it-is’ (the ti esti); it applies equally well to being in opposition to becoming, as to the totality of the real, or inversely to its terms in composition” (p. 70).

“Plato nonetheless also calls intelligible being, the Ideas and the Forms, ousia. Its distinctive characteristics are thus, along with intelligibility, permanence, immutability, eternity. On the other hand, Plato never makes separation, understood in its Aristotelian sense as capacity for independent existence, a distinctive criterion of ousia” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Whether Plato really must be read as asserting that the Forms are separate in an Aristotelian sense is a separate question, but there is no doubt that Aristotle and most others have attributed such a view to him.

For Aristotle, “Platonism consists in distinguishing from the sensible its principle of intelligibility (the universal and the definition), and giving to the latter an autonomous existence” (ibid). But for Aristotle, “That which is, is not walking, or good health, or a seated position, but the thing that walks, has good health, and is seated” (p. 71).

“Nonetheless, like being, primacy is said in many ways” (ibid).

“Among the traits characteristic of ousia, Aristotle preserves, alongside the criterion of separation, those which, in Plato, justify the primacy of form, such as permanence or intelligibility. These allow it to be well said that form is ousia, but in a qualified sense. Book Zeta is thus presented as a combinatory hierarchy of criteria that in turn serves to determine a hierarchization of different beings pretending to the title of ousia, but also a distinction of different degrees of ousia” (p. 72).

“[I]f form cannot be called ousia absolutely, it nonetheless retains a primacy from the point of view of the formula and of knowledge” (p. 73).

“It is precisely this conflict that is resolved in Eta by substitution of the notion of act for that of form…. [Act] thus names the unity of the subsistent or separate individual, … as well as its principle of permanence and intelligibility. Thus only the notion of act satisfies all the criteria of ousia, in that it permits the reconciliation of the Aristotelian requirement of autonomous subsistence and individuality with the Platonic one of permanence and intelligibility” (ibid).

“For the combinatory hierarchy of Zeta is thus substituted an integrative synthesis [in book Eta]” (ibid).

“Considering form as act is in effect considering that in it which acts as an end, that is to say the principle of a becoming at the end of which matter is fully determined by form, and the form realized in a matter” (pp. 73-74).

“[I]f there can be no form without matter, there can on the other hand be an act without potentiality” (p. 74, emphasis added).

In an upcoming post(s), I’ll treat Aubry’s substantiating analysis of books Zeta and Eta.

Next in this series: Form and Entelechy

Being and Becoming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Mixing Up Plato and Aristotle

Aristotle on the Platonic Good

“Philosophy begins with wonder not that there are things rather than not, but that they are as they are” (Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu sans la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 1, p. 33, my translation throughout).

Here Aubry refers to Aristotle’s famous statement in book capital Alpha of the Metaphysics that philosophy begins in wonder. In the 20th century, Heidegger emphasized the question why there is something rather than nothing. Aubry is pointing out that that is not Aristotle’s question at all. As detailed in many posts here, it is the more particular what-it-is of things that Aristotle is mainly concerned to explain.

“Two texts, in Lambda and Nu, echo the critique of capital Alpha, and each time the insistence of Aristotle is the same, in underlining that he is, of all the philosophers, the first and the only to have posed the good as a principle” (ibid).

Of Aristotle’s four causes, the material cause and the source of motion were generally recognized by the pre-Socratics. The Pythagoreans and Platonists added something approximating to Aristotle’s formal cause. But Aristotle insists that even the Platonists made no real use of a concept of that-for-the-sake-of-which, and confusingly treated the good as a formal cause or as a source of motion instead.

In book Nu of the Metaphysics, according to Aubry he says that Plato’s successor Speusippus and the Pythagoreans “agree with the mythologists in seeing the good not as a principle but as an effect of order…. Beyond Speusippus, the allusion is to Plato…; the error of Plato is not in having posed the good as a principle in making it an attribute of the One, but in having made the One itself the principle” (p. 39).

The relevant passage in book Nu says, “Things that come down to us from those who wrote about the gods seem to agree with some people of the present time who say that the good and the beautiful are not sources but make their appearance within the nature of things when it has advanced. (They do this out of caution about a true difficulty which follows for those who say, as some do, that the one is a source. The difficulty is not on account of reckoning what is good to the source as something present in it, but on account of making the one a source — and a source in the sense of an element — and making number out of the one)” (Metaphysics, Sachs tr., pp. 291-292).

Aubry’s point rings true. Elsewhere Aristotle goes on at length about Speusippus’ and the Pythagoreans’ insistence on the central role of number, which gestures in the direction of a formal cause but is actually treated by them more like a kind of material cause. And when Speusippus and the Pythagoreans talk about the One, they seem to literally mean the number one. As Aristotle points out repeatedly, it is nonsense to make the number one the source of all things, and this also doesn’t explain anything.

I myself for many years simply accepted at face value an identity of the Platonic Good with the One as the source of all things, while downplaying the One’s connection with the mere number one, and emphasizing a sort of negative theology in the style of Plotinus, which eliminates all positive attributes of the One. This really just comes down to saying there is a source of all things, while leaving unclear the way in which it is a source. It also assumes the Platonic thesis — rejected by Aristotle — that there is a single form of the Good.

For Aristotle, the good is said in as many ways as being is. What is essential is not this good or that good, but the relevance of value and valuation to all judgment whatsoever and all doing whatsoever. That relevance appears concretely as that-for-the-sake-of-which, or “final” causality. This was Aristotle’s huge innovation.

Aubry reviews Aristotle’s critique of the Platonic Good in both the Nicomachean and the Eudemian Ethics, which focuses on its status as a universal or an Idea.

“Aristotle underlines that there is not a unique science of the Good, but multiple sciences having for their object different goods” (p. 44).

“To the Good as a genus — undiscoverable — and as Idea — useless and void — Aristotle opposes a good that is prakton [practical, in the ethical sense], a good realizable by the human, determined as the first term of a hierarchy of goods and ends, … which the Nicomachean Ethics calls ‘politics’…. If the critique of the Platonic Good leaves open this path, which the Ethics explore, it does not close off that which consists in posing a Good as principle, the relation of which to particular goods remains to be determined, and of the sort that it is neither that of a genus nor of a species, nor that of an Idea to its participants” (p. 45).

Once again, it will be only the causality of that-for-the-sake-of-which and the related details of act and potentiality that truly explain this relation.

Next in this series: Being and Becoming