Moral Entities and Voluntarism

This will continue the last post’s in-depth look at The Invention of Autonomy, J. B. Schneewind’s insightful history of moral philosophy in the 17th and 18th centuries. We come to the chapter on the “central synthesis” of the religious but relatively secularized Protestant natural law tradition, carried out by the Lutheran jurist Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694). Pufendorf develops a novel theory of what he calls “moral entities”. Schneewind notes that “Locke recommended Pufendorf’s work for the education of any gentleman’s son. It is, he said, ‘the best book of that kinde’ ” (p. 141).

While the non-naturalist and anti-realist theory of moral entities is only presented rather sketchily by Pufendorf and retains a voluntarist coloring, it is important as an alternative to the ethical naturalism of Hobbes and Locke (Locke’s endorsement of Pufendorf notwithstanding). Despite its clear voluntarist heritage and its emphasis on positive law, Pufendorf’s work also emphasizes government by consent, which — to a degree at least — explicitly undoes the unilateral conception of authority with which legal and political voluntarism, with its emphasis on the will of the sovereign, is commonly associated. (Incidentally, I just learned that Duns Scotus preceded Pufendorf in speaking explicitly of the consent of the governed, which further complicates the picture of Scotus. Locke will later become the most famous advocate of this notion of consent.)

Pufendorf introduces moral entities saying, “[C]hiefly for the direction of acts of the will, a specific kind of attribute has been given to things and their natural motions, from which there has arisen a certain propriety in the actions of man…. Now these attributes are called Moral Entities, because by them the morals and actions of men are judged and tempered” (On the Law of Nature, quoted in Schneewind, p. 120, ellipses in original).

Pondering this material has led to another conceptual refinement on my part, which again further complicates the discussion on voluntarism. Under this heading up to now I have been concerned mainly with worries over the “ideological” kind of voluntarism that plays an important role in sectarian disputes among Western Christians during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; whose origins a number of scholars trace back to the Condemnation of 1277; whose more remote origins I have noted in the creationism of Philo of Alexandria; and which is paralleled in the occasionalism of al-Ghazali.

There is also a “technical” use of voluntarist concepts, in which a voluntarist explanatory model is used in in a more neutral way in the formulation of new theories like Pufendorf’s account of law, or in the earlier Latin medieval formulation of the theory of signification. Encountering a second instance of this in Pufendorf has led me to think more explicitly about this “technical” voluntarism, which could perhaps also describe an aspect of Brandom’s earliest, pragmatist-flavored work on social practices involved in the constitution of meaning.

To express the status of moral entities as different from natural things, Pufendorf employs the term “imposition”, which was previously used in the theory of signification developed by Roger Bacon and others. The slightly odd connotations of this term “imposition” seem in both cases to be very non-accidental. Each of these two theories makes important technical use of what can be called a “voluntarist” model. The signifier is explicitly said to be arbitrary in relation to its signified. This technical use of arbitrariness is paralleled in Pufendorf’s theory of moral entities and positive law.

In contemporary terms, both of these could alternatively be explained as “anti-realist” theories that need not depend on voluntarist claims. A certain verbal allegiance to some strands of voluntarism for a while seems to have become de rigueur in Protestant countries, even though Luther and Calvin emphasized the late Augustine’s rather extreme anti-Pelagianism, which denies any role of human free will specifically in Christian salvation. The “technical” use of voluntarist language is at least as closely related to contemporary disputes about realism and anti-realism, as it is to disputes involving ideological voluntarism. It seems that in this more technical and less ideological use of voluntarist language, its voluntarist aspect may reflect an accident of historical origin that is not essential to its meaning.

These anti-realist uses of voluntarist language partially anticipate Kant’s talk of “taking” of things to be thus-and-such. One of the most common ways in which Kant is misunderstood is by the assimilation of Kantian “taking” to some kind of subjectivism or ideological voluntarism. Before I learned the error of my ways from Brandom, I used to do this myself.

In continuing to use the term voluntarism in spite of these and other complications, and continuing to hold that it is a Bad Thing, I am deliberately practicing a kind of studied vagueness, with the thought that it names a cluster of related concepts — some more closely related than others — each of which is individually a bad theory, whether it be Divine Command Theory, which one-sidedly insists on the absolute freedom of God; an insistence on the absolute sovereignty of the ruler; a claim that law is prior to ethics, and therefore requires no justification; the intemperate attribution of metaphysically absolute or inherently sovereign free will to humans, which not only exceeds what is really required for ethical practice, but tends to undermine conscience, deliberation, and critical thought; or a theory that culture is something that we one-sidedly “impose” on the world, which ignores the extent to which culture is something we are passively assimilated into.

In a very broad sense, though, the notion of “moral entities” plays a positive role, insofar as it asserts the existence of a space for ethical practice and interpretation that is very different from the also valuable investigation and interpretation of facts and “natural” causes. Insofar as talk about imposition plays a more “technical” role, it is an optional vocabulary.

As Schneewind expounds, “Moral entities are better said to arise from ‘imposition’…. God imposes some moral entities on all human beings, and these may be called ‘natural’. The moral entities that we impose are not natural in that sense, but otherwise the two are of the same kind. Both serve to bring order into human life. The natural duties and rights which are central to morality and law obviously have this function. When we organize our affairs by giving individuals and groups socially defined roles such as husband, mayor, and town council, we are imposing moral entities on their physical being. The prices we set for things are moral entities. So also are the esteem we accord to people and all the culturally diverse distinctions constituting the offices, honors, and titles governing the right to esteem. As physical and biological beings we are independent of moral entities; but those entities constitute all the other aspects of the human world” (pp. 120-121, citations omitted here and throughout).

Pufendorf uses the anti-realist language of imposition to distinguish his view of the status of morality from that of Grotius. Grotius sees natural-law-based moral values as directly inhering in actions or things in a realist way, and Schneewind relates this back to the realist way in which natural law is developed by Aquinas. Pufendorf’s critique of Grotius seems to be the proximate historical instance for Brandom’s abstracted contrast between the derivation of normative attitudes from normative statuses, and the derivation of normative statuses from normative attitudes.

“The theory of moral entities is not worked out in any great detail in On the Law of Nature and is omitted entirely from On the Duty of Man and Citizen. But Pufendorf takes it to separate his position on the status of morality quite sharply from that of Grotius. Grotius thinks that there is a ‘quality of moral baseness or necessity’ intrinsic to certain acts, which guides God’s legislation. Pufendorf maintains strongly that it is a mistake to say ‘that some things are noble or base of themselves, without any imposition, and that these form the object of natural and perpetual law, while those, the good repute or baseness of which depends upon the will of the legislator, fall under the head of positive laws’ ” (p. 121).

The term positive law is normally applied to human law, viewed as creating rights and responsibilities. Rather than being grounded in moral valuations, rights and responsibilities on this view always already have a pre-constituted legal and binding character that is posited as prior to any moral valuation. From this point of view, law is prior to ethics and is presupposed by it. This fits hand-in-glove with the view that moral goodness is first and foremost a matter of obedience to law. The concept of law as instituted by God is also closely related to Islamic and Jewish theories that give a central place to a divine law.

In any case, it seems that for Pufendorf, natural law should be understood on the model of positive law. It is a kind of positive law that is founded by God, who is very unknowable to us. However, it is unclear how this is supposed to fit together with Pufendorf’s empiricist side, which will lead him to say that adequate knowledge of moral entities for humans can be derived from ordinary experience. The whole “modern” or “Protestant” stream of thought about natural law that makes up one facet of Scheewind’s book seems to agree that natural law is in one way or another adequately knowable from experience, and that this knowledge is not very difficult to attain.

One way that a command-and-obedience model has been claimed to be justified is by pointing out that a criterion of obedience can also be seen as leading to the idea that all humans are equally subject to the law. It can then be claimed that an interpretive paradigm of ethics, which holds that simple obedience is not an adequate ethical criterion, must be an elitist view because it sets the bar too high for ordinary people. I think this is disingenuous, because it is the obedience criterion that serves in a more direct way to ostensibly justify the view that some people just are superior, and therefore are to be obeyed.

Anyway, instead of grounding the content of law in valuations and reasons in the manner of Plato and Aristotle, Pufendorf seems to want reasons to be grounded in a primordial law. This seems to put all the determination inherent in creation under something that we are asked to think on the model of positive law.

The model of positive law seems to provide the technical basis for a radical foundationalism that has no precedent in Greek philosophy, and was only made possible by the later emergence of strong theism. This brings out an important logical tie between foundationalism and voluntarism that I had not considered before.

As I think about it now, this seems to bring out a constitutive relation between ideological voluntarism and the emergence of strongly foundationalist views, from which logical conclusions are supposed to follow in an absolute and unconditioned way. Such foundationalisms stand in sharp contrast with the classic, ultimately non-foundationalist view of Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian ethical reason, which makes the rightness of law depend on ethical interpretation and inquiry that is in principle open-ended.

“[Pufendorf] offers several reasons for his position. One rests on the claim that the nobility or baseness of action arises from the conformity of action to law, and since ‘law is the bidding of a superior’ there cannot be nobility or baseness antecedent to law. Another is that man’s reason alone cannot account for the difference between bodily motions that are sinful and those that are not. Reason alone might enable us to do more cleverly or efficiently what animals do, and so to make a distinction between what is expeditiously done and what is not. But without a law it would never enable us ‘to discover any morality in the actions of a man’.”

This implies a calculative view of reason rather than an ethical one.

“These rather specious arguments do not reveal Pufendorf’s central concern. It is the voluntarist concern. To set up ‘an eternal rule for the morality of actions beyond the imposition of God’ is to admit some external principle coeternal with God, ‘which He Himself had to follow in the assignment of forms of things’. Pufendorf finds this quite unacceptable. Any such principle would limit God’s freedom of action in creating man. But everyone, he thinks, admits that God created man and all his attributes freely. So God must have been able to give man any nature he wished. Hence there cannot be any eternal and independent moral properties in things. Morality first enters the universe from acts of God’s will, not from anything else” (pp. 121-122).

As Schneewind makes clear, from a mostly secular point of view Pufendorf explicitly defends a number of the classic claims of theological voluntarism. Nonetheless Pufendorf’s God acts not by just any arbitrary will that could be chaotic or random, but by foundational law-giving, which also implies coherence and self-consistency. God’s will on this view can be understood on the model of a legislator who aims to be consistent.

“God does not contradict his own will. He did not have to create man, or to give him his actual nature. But once he had decided to make man a rational and social animal, then ‘it was impossible for the natural law not to agree with his constitution, and that not by an absolute, but by a hypothetical necessity’ ” (p. 122).

Natural law would then be something like a consequence of the creation of elaborated forms. The point about hypothetical necessity is also interesting. Commands are usually compared to an unconditional or absolute necessity that cannot be rationally justified, because commands are not supposed to be questioned. Hypothetical necessity is emphasized both by Aristotle and by the founder of American pragmatism, Charles Pierce.

” ‘Now good is considered in an absolute way by some philosophers, so that every entity, actually existing, may be considered good; but we pay no attention to such a meaning’. With this apparently casual remark Pufendorf breaks with a long-standing tradition in which goodness and being are equated. Grotius would have been at least sympathetic to the tradition, and Cumberland takes it as obvious that ‘Good is as extensive as Being’. Hobbes’s definition of good in terms of desire indicates that he rejects the equation, but he does not think the metaphysical point worthy of note. Pufendorf elaborates on it in ways that separate him from Hobbes as well as from Cumberland” (p. 123).

It is not quite accurate to speak of an “equation” between good and being. The neoplatonic sources of the views Schneewind is referring to do not simply equate the two, but rather assert a kind of inherent syntactic relation between them. The Good is supposed to be the ultimate cause or reason in the constitution of all things, and therefore, it is argued, all things must be good in some way or another.

“[Pufendorf] concentrates on what is good or bad in relation to persons. So understood, he says, ‘the nature of good seems to consist in an aptitude whereby one thing is fitted to help, preserve, or complete another’. Such aptitudes are part of the nature of things and do not depend on what people want or what they think about them. With Cumberland and against Hobbes, Pufendorf takes the relations which make one thing good for another as purely objective. He goes out of his way to indicate that although the good arouses desire whenever perceived, it may be misperceived or overlooked, and in that case desire would mistakenly urge us to pursue an ‘imaginary’ good” (pp. 123-124).

Schneewind is saying that for Pufendorf, the relations that make one thing good for another are part of the nature of things, and therefore fall under natural rather than moral goodness. So it makes sense that he would call them purely objective. Since he is calling them objective and generally claiming they are to easy to know, it also makes sense that he would point out the possible exception that a perceived good may be imaginary. Some reference to the nature of things seems to be inevitable in a natural law perspective, and any such reference is in some sense a counter-weight to voluntarist ways of thinking.

“Moral goodness is quite different from natural. Moral goodness belongs to actions insofar as they agree with law. For complete moral goodness, an act must accord materially with the law or moral rule, and must be done because it does so accord” (p. 124).

This sounds like fidelity in obedience, and obedience for its own sake. There is a kind of formal analogy between this and Aristotle’s notion of ends that are sought for their own sake, but I don’t think Aristotle would agree that obedience is that kind of end.

“In his definition of law Pufendorf breaks as radically with tradition as he does in abandoning the equation of goodness and being — and he does so just as casually. ‘Law’ is defined simply as ‘a decree by which a superior obligates a subject to adapt his actions to the former’s command’. Suarez and Cumberland, following Thomas, held that law is necessarily ordered to the common good, and even Hobbes defined law in terms of what on his view is the supreme good, life” (ibid).

Certainly Aquinas but also Suarez, Cumberland, and even Hobbes do not have a purely voluntaristic conception of law. Pufendorf’s definition by contrast is purely voluntarist, which is in accordance with his conception of law as purely “positive”. This may be the main reason why it eventually fell out of favor. Later on, Schneewind will document the rise of explicit anti-voluntarism.

Schneewind goes on to document a number of ways in which Pufendorf himself already rejects the idea of a purely voluntaristic conception of authority, even though he defends a purely voluntaristic conception of law.

Pufendorf also develops a doctrine of entitlement that acts as a counter-weight to voluntaristic authority. This is likely a source for Brandom’s important idea in our own time that authority and entitlement should balance one another.

“Neither strength nor beauty nor wit necessarily entitles one to anything. Neither do facts about one’s biological parentage. The logic of moral entities entails that nature cannot morally require us to accept hereditary rulers; and power alone entitles no one — not even God — to authority” (ibid).

Pufendorf’s explicit rejection of the Hobbesian idea that the sheer possession of power confers entitlement to use it in any way one sees fit might be his most important contribution. Within the broader proto-deontological paradigm that seems to have first arisen within a voluntaristic context, and while defending a purely voluntaristic conception of law, he effectively rejects the voluntaristic conception of authority. For Pufendorf, empiricism functions as a safeguard against voluntarist excesses.

“Pufendorf is firm in rejecting several views about the attainment of moral knowledge. He denies, for instance, that moral rules are so clearly imprinted in the mind at birth that we have but to look within ourselves to know them. He finds this objectionable first on epistemological grounds. Pufendorf is an empiricist and thinks we must be able to learn the laws of nature from evidence available in experience…. [W]hat he calls the axioms or basic principles of natural law are to be gathered from experience. On these matters Pufendorf is at one with Grotius, Hobbes, and Cumberland ” (p. 127).

“For him conscience is simply the ability of men to judge actions in terms of laws…. Grotius, Hobbes, and Cumberland would have been sympathetic to this way of defining conscience. All of them hoped, with Pufendorf, that insisting on observable evidence to support moral claims would offer a way to damp down some of the fiercest outbursts of human unsociability” (ibid).

We could certainly use some damping down of those fierce outbursts in the world today.

Reasoning ought to seek evidence, rather than claim self-evidence.

The term “experience” hides a deep ambiguity between the substantive practical wisdom of “experience” that can be acquired only over time, and subjective or empiricist “experience”, understood in terms of a simplistic model of immediate sensation or immediate consciousness. (The very notion of appealing to immediacy in questions of knowledge is a late development. It is at best problematic, and at worst a cover for ideological misdeeds.)

Empiricism is another term that is fraught with ambiguity: do we mean a view that focuses on subjective experience? An experimental method? A kind of faithfulness to evidence? A focus on concrete “real world” cases? And again, “consciousness” is profoundly ambiguous. Even sensation is itself ambiguous. Are we assuming that it is somehow inherently and entirely passive? Or not?

“The question of the justification of God’s authority is more difficult for Pufendorf than it is for Cumberland. Neither thinks that the content of God’s command is what obligates; the formality of his commanding is for both what obligates” (p. 135).

The recognition that authority needs to be justified — that authority is a matter of being justified and not one of having power, or of accidents of social position — is however extremely important. I imagine that this is why Brandom sees Pufendorf in such a strongly positive light. But the claim that the content of a command is irrelevant to its justification is again a voluntarist claim.

Seeing all humans as equally subject to obedience to one law and one set of criteria certainly does have a morally good aspect, compared to explicit insistence on alleged foundational inequality. (All moral characters are not equal — we distinguish some as good and some as bad, and much else — but this has nothing to do with alleged foundational or inherent differences between “kinds” of people, or their formal social roles. Rather our goodness or badness has to do with the particulars of our becoming, with patterns of what we do and how we act, and that not just in the present moment but over the whole of a life.) Pufendorf’s emphasis on the formality of command, on the other hand, follows a voluntarist paradigm that undercuts his good emphasis on justification.

Schneewind turns to some of the problems with Pufendorf’s approach.

“Although he rejects any naturalistic reduction of moral to natural concepts, the doctrine seems to entail a kind of reductionism that threatens his desire to hold that God has authority and not only power. Authority can belong only to one who is willing to use power within just limits. But if just limits arise ultimately from God’s will, it is hard to see how God could be held to have authority in addition to strength. It is indeed doubtful that Pufendorf can allow that we can even mean anything nontautologous by saying that God rules justly. His voluntarism seems to force him into pure Hobbesianism” (ibid).

To speak of “authority and not only power” already means that authority is not to be defined in terms of power.

Human authority must be legitimated, but Pufendorf’s limited appeal to divine authority remains unilateral.

“The appeal to sanctions is problematic for Pufendorf as well. He holds a strong doctrine of free will. In this he is again opposing Hobbes. For Hobbes, … will is only an endeavor occurring in a certain position in an alternation of endeavors, wholly determined by the state of the universe preceding it. Pufendorf treats will as a power separate from desires. Its chief quality is that it is not confined intrinsically to a definite mode of action. Given all the things requisite to action, the will is able to ‘choose one, or some, and to reject the rest’, or to do nothing…. Although the will has a general propensity toward good, it can remain indifferent in the presence of any instance of it” (p. 137).

This is a restatement of the common theological claim that the human has liberum arbitrium, or a power of arbitrary choice. It is the distinguishing mark of what I call anthropological or psychological voluntarism, as distinct from the theological voluntarism that is a claim about God.

From a point of view simultaneously secular and religious, Hobbes and Pufendorf share a theological voluntarism, which they both use in a somewhat instrumental way, although Hobbes’s sincerity in reference to God has been questioned in a way that that of Pufendorf has not. They both speak in terms of a voluntarist model of law and obedience.

Hobbes favors enlightened absolute monarchy that is supposed to be reasonable, but is not supposed to be questioned. Pufendorf develops the important notion of the consent of the governed, which the political voluntarist Hobbes ignores.

Pufendorf, however, as we saw, also defends unconditional free will in humans — a stronger concept than the Aristotelian choice that is really needed for ethics — while also claiming that the stronger concept is needed for ethics. In a somewhat truncated form, he carries forward the position of the scholastic mainstream in so doing.

“Freedom of this kind is crucial. Without it, Pufendorf holds, ‘the morality of human actions is at once destroyed’. Only because we possess it are our spontaneous and voluntary actions fully imputable to us. And Pufendorf insists that we are free to accept or reject obligations as well as natural goods. When an obligation is admitted, the will is thereby inclined to do the obligatory act, but it does not lose its ‘intrinsic liberty’. Thus without the capacity freely to obey or disobey, there can be no obligation” (p. 138).

This shows the way in which theological and anthropological voluntarism are analogous. The divine will and the human will are each respectively supposed have a completely unconditional power of choice, even though such a power is not empirically knowable in the way that for Pufendorf all particular values are supposed to be.

More usefully, independent of this, obligation is only relevant when it is possible to do otherwise. He also makes the important point that obligation presupposes some form of consent to or acceptance of what one is thereby obligated to.

“Obligation is a moral entity. As such it has no causal power of its own. Desires, as part of our physical nature, can cause us to act in space and time; but recognition of obligation gives us a consideration or reason for action that does not operate in the field of force in which desires operate. Desires and obligations are thus incommensurable kinds of considerations for and against action. Hobbes could explain action as the outcome of commensurable desires pulling us this way and that. Pufendorf cannot. He therefore needs a separate faculty of free will to explain how moral entities can be effective in human life even though they possess no causal strength. But he offers no account of how recognition of a moral entity can have effects in the physical world. If he was the first modern to find this problem squarely at the center of his metaphysics of ethics, he was not the last” (ibid).

This partially anticipates the views of Kant, albeit somewhat crudely. Pufendorf treats causality in the modern way as a monomorphic field of force, but then insists on unconditional free will. I think both poles of this opposition are ill-conceived, but will forego further comment on that here. This is also not the place for a lengthy digression on the strengths and weaknesses of empiricism. But as an empiricist, Puffendorf might not be very concerned with this conceptual issue.

“The success of Pufendorf’s exposition of natural law did much to make a concern with voluntarism inescapable in European moral philosophy. It affects both our understanding of the ontological position of morality in the universe, and our understanding of our moral relation to God.”

Pufendorf’s aims were mainly practical. His main concern was law, not philosophy.

“The ontological significance of the doctrine of moral entities is fairly definite. It is a major effort to think through a new understanding of the relation of values and obligations to the physical world. It presents a new response to the developing scientific view of the world as neutral with respect to value. Accepting the concept of a purely natural good dependent on the physical relations of things to humans, Pufendorf refuses to see it as the sole kind of value, and insists that moral norms are conceptually independent of it. He denies the old equation of goodness with existence, and the Grotian assertion of special moral qualities built into the nature of things. He equally repudiates the reductionism of Hobbes and Cumberland, the definition of all evaluative terms by means of terms descriptive of the physical world. Moral entities involve ideas and beliefs that do not in any way represent the way things are in the world. Their whole point is to guide action. Moral entities are inventions, some of them divine, most of them human” (pp. 138-139).

The view attributed to Grotius that he denies is not exactly an “equation” of goodness with existence, but more the assertion of an intrinsic relation.

“Pufendorf’s main reason for taking this line is that it alone allows us to have a proper understanding of God. Only voluntarism leaves God untrammeled. Religious voluntarists before Pufendorf might have accepted much of this. What they could not have accepted, and what makes Pufendorf’s voluntarist account of the construction of morality so striking, is that humans are accorded the ability to construct functioning moral entities in just the way that God does, and just as efficaciously. It takes God to get the process started; but God has made us so that constructive willing is part of our normal rational activity” (p. 139).

Pufendorf defends what I and some others call anthropological voluntarism, as well as theological voluntarism. Hobbes by contrast is widely recognized as an anthropological anti-voluntarist, because he not only does not treat free will as central in the human, but denies it altogether.

In all contexts like this, though, it is also important to ascertain what each author means by free will in the human. Some people speak as though any denial of strict determinism should count as an affirmation of free will. Others speak as though free will in the human is something radical and altogether exempt from natural determination. That is what I mean by anthropological voluntarism.

It is important to me to affirm that there is a spectrum of possible positions here. Strict determinism and voluntarism are two extremes. All the views that are called “compatibilist” would fall in between. I hold that Aristotelian choice also falls in between, though I would not call it “compatibilist”, because neither of the extremes had even been explicitly formulated yet in Aristotle’s time. I think the talk about compatibilism is somewhat misguided, because it seems to be understood as the claim that the two extreme views are compatible. I agree with Kant that they are not.

Schneewind’s implication that religious voluntarists as a whole could not accept anthropological voluntarism might be true within the early Protestant traditions, which I have not studied. It is certainly possible to have theological voluntarism without anthropological voluntarism. But while I am from being an expert on the Franciscan tradition, my recent investigations have strongly strongly suggested that a combination of theological with anthropological voluntarism (which would be something like the view that free will is prior or more fundamental in the human than intellect) is in fact the norm in that tradition. The early Augustine of the famous treatise on free will also seems clearly to embrace anthropological as well as theological voluntarism.

“[Pufendorf’s] view of religious language is Hobbesian, but with him there is no question, as there is with Hobbes, about whether his voluntarism is a cover for atheism. Pufendorf was a sincere Lutheran. God, for him, is beyond our comprehension. He is our creator and ruler, whom we are to honor and obey. But he and we are not in any sense members of a single community, as Cumberland thought that we are” (ibid).

“Pufendorf takes it that [God’s] message to us is that in this life we are to rely on one another. Any advantages we have now come to us from ‘men’s mutual assistance’. Reason shows us God’s most general instructions. The rest is up to us” (p. 140).

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

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

A Logic of Being?

We’ve reached part 2 of Robert Pippin’s important Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Despite recently mentioned peripheral caveats, I’m enormously impressed with the way he makes sense of Hegel’s Science of Logic, possibly the most difficult philosophical work ever written.

He now begins a high-level survey of the three separate “logics” Hegel develops. It is essential to Hegel’s scheme that the first two will be regarded as failures in the explanation of what is involved in making things intelligible. For Hegel, failures of thought play an essential, irreducible role in the attainment of new insights. The perspectives achieved by thought are not “refuted” by other perspectives external to those achieved; instead, the achieved perspectives metaphorically “discover” their own inability to solve their own problems.

We’ve already seen the first move of the first of these failed accounts of what it is to be intelligible, the logic of being.

Hegel uses the further development of this account as a vehicle for discussing the Kantian categories of quantity and quality. If his first point was that being qua being is utterly sterile because intelligibility depends on the ability to make definite determinations, the elaboration begins to show the relational character of all determination, and at the same time the failure of any simple assertion of properties of things (“judgment”, in the severely truncated early modern form that reduces it to predication) to adequately make those things intelligible.

Pippin does not go into detail on Hegel’s lengthy discussion of quantity and quality, so for instance there is no more mention of the issue about good and bad infinity, though this is where Hegel treats it. Pippin reserves the most space for the final logic of the concept that is supposed to be successful, and gives the least to the logic of being, which according to Hegel is the least adequate.

In discussing the logic of being, Pippin is mainly concerned to extract takeaway points relevant to understanding the high-level “movement” of Hegel’s logic as a whole. I have been highlighting his suggestion that this notorious “logical motion” is teleological in a genuinely Aristotelian sense, rather than being either deductive, or somehow univocally driven forward by contradiction. It is all oriented toward the merely hypothetical necessity of what is required if we aim to reach a deeper truth. Pippin is at pains to point out that for Hegel as for Aristotle, every teleological actualization involves contingency.

“The idea is to begin with the thought of anything at all, in its immediate indeterminacy, simply being, Sein. But the thought of anything at all is not the thought of anything…. Nothing is excluded, so nothing is included…. It is a failed thought, not the thought of this failure or even just the enactment of the failure. This is the beginning of everything of significance in the Logic; it (the thought of Sein being nothing other than Nichts [nothing]) is the reflective relation to what is being thought that is inseparable from anything possibly being thought. It is thought’s apperceptive moment…. Just thereby, thinking is thinking its failure to be thinking, not thinking of a strange object, Nichts. It is only in this sense that the first moment has a second moment, a realization of what thinking must be to be thinking of anything” (p. 186).

“Such a reflective determination reveals both that such putative immediate indeterminacy must itself already be a determination, and that such a putative content, anything at all in its immediate indeterminacy, has not been transformed, has not ‘become’ Nichts, but that it always already was” (p. 187).

“Hegel here is doing something like making a case for, or at least in some way showing us, the apperceptively discursive nature of any possible discursive intelligibility. This also means that in judging anything, I am always also implicitly holding open the possibility of the self-correcting of judging…. Or, any judgment always implicitly applies, is implicitly applying, the concept of judgment to itself” (p. 189).

That apperceptive judgment always implicitly applies the concept of judgment to itself follows from its apperceptive, reflective nature. To be apperceptively reflective is to be self-referential, Pippin has been saying.

“As Kant insisted, in any such case I must be able to ‘stand above’ what I judged and what I now judge correctly and take the latter to be a correction of the former in order for it to be that, a correction. Otherwise, there is just a succession of episodes. This is why he could say that the understanding, the power of claiming, is the synthetic unity of apperception (in the same way, I am ultimately claiming in this book, Hegel is claiming that what he calls the concept is the synthetic unity of apperception)” (ibid).

“This also means, as we have been stressing, that given certain concepts of the power of knowing — say, a knowing that must be indeterminate and immediate, a ‘resolve’ to begin with such a notion — we already have thereby the concept of the object of such pure knowing, Being. If we are talking about a case of knowing, as we are, the two are, must be, inseparable…. There is no question, here or anywhere in the Logic, of the need to ‘move’ from the order of knowing to the order of being. If that were claimed to be necessary, how would we have begun with a case of knowing?” (pp. 189-190).

This intimate connection between the form of knowing and the object of knowing is Hegel’s alternative to the difficult “transcendental deduction” by which Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason aims to establish that the categories of thought really are relevant to experience. Pippin suggests that Hegel generally reinterprets Kantian dualities as cases of Aristotelian hylomorphism, and notes that even Kant occasionally makes remarks tending in this direction. In this particular case, reinterpreting the duality as a hylomorphism eliminates the “gap” between thought and being that in Kant creates the need for the transcendental deduction.

I confess, though, that it was not obvious to me that we had begun with a case of knowing. I have trouble identifying any kind of failed thought or thought that fails to have a content with knowing; I am not used to recognizing the possibility of an empty “knowing”.

But we are at least implicitly talking about an instance of thought here, even if it is a degenerate instance. Pippin is arguing that even that failed, empty thought must still be self-referential, just in being a case of thought in Hegel’s sense at all. By virtue of its form as thought or apperceptive judgment, it is already reflectively turned back on itself. I think Pippin is suggesting that that turning back on itself counts as a kind of knowing at the meta level, even though the thought failed at ground level.

“[T]here is no objection in Kant or among the relevant post-Kantians, in their denial that thinking is a kind of perceiving or primarily receptive, to the general form of such claims as ‘I know it because I saw it’, especially because that is the invitation to establishing that it can be seen by anyone…. But for thinking as such, there is nothing like: ‘I know that is the essence because I had an essence-intuition…'” (p. 190).

I am more reserved about claims like “I know it because I saw it”. Plato would not accept this as an instance of knowledge, and I am inclined to follow suit. I would say, “I believe it with confidence because I saw it”. But Pippin makes a good point here about the implicit invitation to treat this as the claim that it could be seen by anyone.

As I have noted before, what I prefer to call belief and others call a form of immediate, noninferential empirical “knowledge” are not just arbitrary assertions. Though we arrive at such beliefs “spontaneously” (in the ordinary sense, which is nearly the inverse of the Kantian sense), after the fact it is always possible to ask about the reasons for them.

I am claiming that after the fact, it should always be possible to express something of why we believe what we do. “Because I saw it” is not a reason, but a reiteration that it appeared that way to me. Intrinsically, it has no more value than “because I said so”. The kind of reasons that can be provided in this case will be persuasive (or, in Aristotle’s usage, “probable”) to some degree or other, but also potentially refutable. Typically they will take the form of more detailed claims about what we saw.

“Fichte insists on the same point that is made in the first move in the Logic… by pointing out the difference logically between ‘A’ and ‘A = A’. For the latter, we need… an ‘I’ that is ‘= I’…. But this identification is something done, a Tat [deed], the equivalent here of ‘bringing contents to the unity of apperception’ in Kant’s account, an active unifying necessary for the I to be continuously that I in experience” (p. 191).

As Aristotle pointed out, merely saying something (“A”, “Being”, or whatever) is not yet saying something about something, which turns out to be the minimal condition for truth or falsity. This formulation points to some kind of self-relatedness in the attitude toward content that seems to be a minimal condition for any kind of assertion. This self-relatedness in the content of assertions seems to be related to the inherent self-referentiality of thought for which Pippin is arguing, as if the one were a sort of hylomorphic reflection of the other.

I used to misunderstand the above argument of Fichte as additionally requiring the existence of an “I” like a rabbit out of a hat, but again we are only dealing with hypothetical necessity here. If I want to be able to conclude “A = A”, then I need to be able to apply the same identification “A” twice within the context of one judgment. That the two identifications of “A” must be combined within the context of one judgment is the sole import of Fichte’s “I = I”. If there is any existence of an I involved here, it is by hypothesis.

Pippin stresses that although Hegel speaks of logical “movement” in temporal metaphors, each part of the “movement” has always already occurred. Once again, Hegel is not talking about what drives the course of events, but something like the conditions of possibility of the constitution of intelligibility and normativity.

He goes on to discuss more problems related to immediacy, and the transition to the logic of essence, each of which I’ll address separately.

Next in this series: Problems of Immediacy

Thoughts on Teleology

Teleology is another subject on which my perspective has changed drastically over the years.

After a youthful fascination with Plotinus, my main interest turned toward the diverse group of writers loosely associated with French “structuralism”, several of whom were very interested in Spinoza. For some years, Spinoza became the great philosopher I identified with most. I had not explicitly thought much about teleology before, but Spinoza’s very sharp critique in the appendix to book 1 of the Ethics impressed me greatly. At the time, I did not trouble myself over whether it was fair to the historic Aristotle. I defended without reservation the strong determinism of Spinoza and the Stoics, emphasizing an understanding of the causes of things as the main path to enlightenment. At this time also, some contemporary writers on mathematical “chaos theory” were proposing what they called a superdeterminism, which would allow for deterministic explanation of all sorts of nonlinear phenomena, by an innovative separation of the notion of determinism from its traditional connotations of predictability. I had not yet begun to question what I have been referring to here as the “modern notion” of causality. My great preoccupation was with defending the possibility of ethics within a deterministic context.

My deeper engagement with Aristotle began initially with problems of things “said in many ways”. In my professional work as a data modeler, I was very concerned with the ambiguities of common-sense apprehensions of things, which I wanted to overcome in Platonic fashion. The univocity that Aristotle treats in a balanced way I initially saw more one-sidedly as an ideal to aim for in the quest for knowledge, though without underestimating the difficulty of attempting to treat everything in a univocal manner, or as comprehended by a single grand, consistent theory. Meanwhile, my personal interests were focused on questions of the interpretation of the history of human cultural development.

Gradually, I became more and more impressed with the importance of what I came to call “objective ambiguity” in history — the idea that this was not just a defect of our understanding or interpretation, but that the most objective reality of the concrete world may often reflect mixed or “in between” states of things. Eventually, I came to recognize that Aristotle, perhaps more than any other of the great philosophers, deeply thought about this and took it into account. I became aware of the arguments of Leibniz that all necessity is hypothetical, then realized Aristotle had already said that all necessity in generated things is hypothetical.

As Spinoza said, strict causal necessity rules out the “play” in things that leaves room for teleological explanation. But I have become convinced that that “play” in things is not something to be explained away as a mere appearance. Hypothetical necessity respects both the element of (conditional) necessity in things and this inherent “play”. It now appears to me as a priceless Aristotelian mean, and a kind of Hegelian synthesis of determination and play or flexibility.

The way Aristotle applies hypothetical necessity to determination by ends removes the mystery from final causes. Aristotle emphasizes the alternative that Spinoza ignored — that teleology need not be the product of conscious aims of a supernatural being or beings “intervening” in the natural order. In Aristotle’s non-reductionist view of the intelligibility of nature, natural things are shaped by inherent “tendencies” to seek certain states that are nonetheless not strictly determining. (See also Aristotle on Explanation; Ends; Equivocal Determination; Free Will and Determinism.)

Aristotle on Explanation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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