Tag: Knowledge

Pragmatism vs Foundationalism

In his recent Spinoza lectures, Brandom also summarizes the context of the 20th century Anglo-American analytic philosophy criticized by Rorty.

“In any case, the broadly Hegelian project Rorty was then recommending as an alternative to the degenerating Kantian research program he saw in analytic philosophy did not look to Europe for its inspiration, but to the substantially distinct tradition of classical American pragmatism.”

“Rorty’s remarkable diagnosis of the ills of analytic philosophy as resulting from an uncritical, so undigested, Kantianism is at least equally radical and surprising as the reimagined, redescribed, and revived pragmatism that he developed as a constructive therapeutic response to it. For Kant emphatically was not a hallowed hero of that tradition. Anglophone analytic philosophers thought that the ‘Kant [or] Hegel?’ question simply didn’t apply to them. After all, Russell had read Kant out of the analytic canon alongside Hegel — believing (I think, correctly as it has turned out) that one couldn’t open the door wide enough to let Kant into the canon without Hegel sliding in alongside him before that door could be slammed shut. Both figures were banished, paraded out of town under a banner of shame labeled ‘idealism,’ whose canonical horrible paradigm was the Bradleyan British Idealism of the Absolute” (Brandom, Pragmatism and Idealism, pp. 4-5). 

“The dominant self-conception (combatively made explicit by Carnap) was of analytic philosophy as an up-to-date form of empiricism, a specifically logical empiricism, whose improvement on traditional, pre-Kantian, Early Modern British empiricism consisted in the deployment of much more sophisticated logical tools it deployed to structure and bind together essentially the same atoms of preconceptual sensory experience to which the earlier empiricists had appealed” (p. 5, emphasis in original).

Brandom portrays logical empiricism as foundering on the skeptical “trilemma” (circular argument, infinite regress, or appeal to unjustified justifiers) formulated by the Greek Skeptic Agrippa. Foundationalism in the theory of knowledge typically arises from excessive worries about skepticism.

“Attempts to justify empirical knowledge must either move in a circle, embark on an infinite regress, or end by appeal to unjustified justifiers, which must accordingly supply the foundations on which all cognition rests…. The two sorts of regress-stoppers Rorty saw appealed to by epistemological foundationalists were immediate sensory experiences, as ultimate justifiers of premises, and immediate grasp of the meanings of our terms or the content of our concepts, as ultimate justifiers of inferences. In a telling phrase, he refers to these as two sorts of ‘epistemically privileged representations'” (pp. 5-6).

In order to avoid skepticism, foundationalism makes untenable claims about immediate (noninferential) knowledge, which depend on the assumption that certain representations are specially privileged, so as to be immune to questioning. I have always appreciated Brandom’s exceptional clarity on these issues, and it seems that in this he was preceded by Rorty.

“Rorty takes Kant at his word when Kant says that what he is doing is synthesizing rationalism and empiricism. But Rorty takes it that what logical empiricism made of Kant’s synthesis in the end takes over both sorts of privileged representations: the sensory given from the empiricists, and the rational (logical, inferential, semantic) given from the rationalists…. In this story, Carnap shows up as a neo-Kantian malgré lui [in spite of himself] — though that is not at all how he thought of or presented himself. It is, however, how Rorty’s hero Wilfrid Sellars regarded Carnap. (Perhaps the revenant neo-Kantian spirit of Heinrich Rickert, passed on through his student Bruno Bauch, Frege’s friend and colleague and Carnap’s Doktorvater [academic mentor, literally “doctor father”], was just too strong to be wholly exorcised by the empiricist rites and rituals practiced by the Vienna Circle.)” (pp. 6-7).

According to Brandom, Rorty criticizes mid-20th century logical empiricism in terms very similar to Brandom’s, except that Brandom is much less inclined to blame Kant.

“But the roots of those foundationalist commitments can be traced back even further, to Descartes. For he assimilated the images delivered by the senses and the thoughts arising in intellect together under the umbrella concept of pensées precisely in virtue of what he saw as their shared epistemic transparency and incorrigibility” (p. 7).

Descartes makes the extravagant assumption that not only that there is one unified subject of all thought, feeling, and sensation in a human, but that it has perfect transparency to itself, and therefore at a certain level cannot be mistaken about itself.

“In rejecting both sensory givenness and meaning- or concept-analytic inferential connections, Rorty relies on the arguments of two of Carnap’s most important and insightful admirers and critics: Sellars in ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ and Quine in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism, respectively. (These are in any case surely two of the most important philosophical essays of the 1950s.) Tellingly, and with characteristic insight, Rorty finds a common root in their apparently quite different critiques. Sellars and Quine, he sees, both offer ultimately pragmatist arguments, which find the theoretical postulation of such privileged representations to be unable to explain cardinal features of the practices of applying empirical concepts” (ibid, emphasis in original).

These same two essays are recurringly cited by Brandom. I did not know that Rorty preceded him in that.

When Brandom here mentions “meaning- or concept-analytic inferential connections”, he is referring back to what he earlier called “immediate grasp of the meanings of our terms or the content of our concepts”. (There is a very different sense in which material inference can be seen as simultaneously grounded in, and grounding, concrete meaning and the understanding of meaning, as opposed to formal operations. But in that case, the concrete meaning is something arrived at, not something given or immediately grasped. Meaning is always a question, as Socrates might remind us.)

“Rorty then widens the focus of his own critique by deepening the diagnosis that animates it. The original source of foundationalism in epistemology, he claims, is representationalism in semantics. Thinking of the mind in terms of representation was Descartes’s invention” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Representationalism — the explanation of meaning in terms of reference to (nonlinguistic) objects — still dominates mainstream discussions of semantics. It is associated with a view of truth as a correspondence of claims to a reality that is assumed to be independently accessible. But this is not the only way meaning and truth can be explained. I think that, first and foremost, meaning needs to be explained by relating it to other meaning. Variants of this include dictionaries, the coherence theory of truth, and Brandom’s inferentialism.

The Latin term repraesentatio in fact played a large role in scholastic discourse. The status of sensible and/or intelligible “species” or representations was hotly debated. Scholastic discourse also included quite vigorous and sophisticated debates about nuances of representational semantics, under the rubric of the theory of “supposition”. This refers not to speculation, but rather to something close to the modern notion of reference. Scholastic philosophers even tended to treat questions of knowledge and truth in terms of what we might call questions of referential semantics. 

Descartes did not invent thinking about the mind in terms of representation, though he certainly practiced it. Arguably, this goes back even past scholastic theories of species and supposition, to Stoic theories of phantasia. The Stoics also had a somewhat foundationalist outlook. They were the original dogmatic realists in Kant’s sense.  But Descartes drew especially vivid conclusions from his claim of the incorrigibility of appearances. 

Brandom wants to redeem a positive valuation of Kant from Rorty’s hostility, and he even suggests that Rorty is making a Kantian move without realizing it.

“It is perhaps ironic that in digging down beneath epistemological issues to unearth the semantic presuppositions that shape and enable them, Rorty is following Kant’s example. For Kant’s argument, culminating in the ‘Refutation of Idealism’, was that once we understand how to respond to the threat of semantic skepticism about the intelligibility of the relation between representings and what they represent, there would be no residual issue concerning epistemological skepticism about whether any such relations actually obtained: whether things were ever as we represent them to be” (p. 8, emphasis in original).

Kant was understood by scientifically oriented neo-Kantians as effectively putting epistemology, or the justification of knowledge, before all else. A refreshing aspect of Brandom’s reading of Kant is that he shifts the axis toward questions of meaning and value.

Brandom strongly supports Rorty’s critique of epistemological foundationalism, but thinks that Rorty throws out the baby with the bath water when he claims that all talk about representation is implicitly authoritarian. Momentarily playing devil’s advocate, he reconstructs Rorty’s “global anti-representationalist” argument as follows.

“The starting point is the Cartesian idea that if we are to understand ourselves as knowing the world by representing it (so that error is to be understood as misrepresentation), there must be some kind of thing that we can know nonrepresentationally — namely, our representings themselves. On pain of an infinite regress, knowledge of representeds mediated by representings of them must involve immediate (that is, nonrepresentational) knowledge of at least some representings. Our nonrepresentational relation to these representings will be epistemically privileged, in the sense of being immune to error. For error is construed exclusively as misrepresentation. (This is the representationalist semantic analogue of the justificatory epistemological regress on the side of premises.)”

“Next is the thought that when we ask about our knowledge of the relation between representings and representeds, another potential regress looms if we are obliged to think of this knowledge also in representational terms, that is, as mediated by representings of it. (This is the representationalist semantic analogue of the justificatory epistemological regress on the side of inferences.) On this dimension, too, appeal to nonrepresentational access to representational relations seems necessary…. Rorty saw that according to such a picture, the epistemological choice between foundationalism and skepticism is already built deeply into the structure of the semantic representational model” (p. 9).

Brandom recounts that in 1996 discussions with Rorty on the occasion of Rorty’s anti-authoritarianism lecture in Gerona, “We all agreed that if one found oneself obliged to choose between epistemological skepticism and epistemological foundationalism, then somewhere well upstream something had gone badly wrong conceptually” (p. 11).

I wholeheartedly concur with that conclusion. Skepticism (claiming that there is no knowledge) and foundationalism (claiming to systematically ground knowledge in certainty) are both equally implausible, extreme positions.

“For Rorty, a principal virtue of the sort of pragmatism he endorsed that it had no need and no use for the traditional concepts of experience and representation in talking about how vocabularies help us cope with the vicissitudes of life. Indeed, from a pragmatist point of view, the very distinction between epistemology and semantics becomes unnecessary — a lesson he took himself to have learned from ‘Two Dogmas’…. He sums up his anti-representationalist pragmatism in the pithy slogan: ‘language is for coping, not copying‘” (p. 12).

The kind of experience at issue here is not that which is acquired over a period of time, but the immediate experience that is supposed to be a privileged source of knowledge in empiricism. Brandom recalls John Dewey’s unsuccessful attempt to get the public to change the prevailing notion of “experience” as something immediate.

“Dewey worked tirelessly to give ‘experience’ the processual, interactive, broadly ecological sense of Hegelian ‘Erfahrung,’ rather than the atomic, episodic, self-intimating, epistemically transparent Cartesian sense of ‘Erlebnis’. (Dewey’s is the sense in which, as he says, it is perfectly in order for a job advertisement to specify ‘No experience necessary’. It is not intended to be read in the Cartesian sense, which would invite applications from zombies.) But Dewey signally failed to get the philosophical and generally educated public to shake off the Cartesian associations of the term” (ibid).

Brandom endorses Rorty’s sharp critique of experience talk.

“I was entirely of [Rorty’s] mind as far as the concept of experience is concerned. Outside of explicitly Hegelian contexts, where it figures in his conception of recollective rationality, it is not one of my words…. I agree that the associations and correlated inferential temptations entrained with the term ‘experience’ go too deep, easily to be jettisoned, or even for us to success in habituating ourselves completely to resist. The light of day neither drives out the shadows nor stays the night. We are on the whole better off training ourselves to do without this notion” (pp. 13-14).

But Brandom does not accept Rorty’s “global anti-representationalism”.

“But by contrast to the concept of experience, it seemed to me then, and seems to me still, that things are otherwise with the concept of representation. There are many things that one might mean by ‘anti-representationalism’. When I use the term ‘representationalism’, I mean a particular order of semantic explanation. It starts with a notion of representational content (reference, extension, or truth conditions) and understands proprieties of inference in terms of such already representationally contentful contents. Those contents must accordingly be assumed to be, or made to be, theoretically and explanatorily intelligible antecedently to and independently of the role of representations in inference. ’Representationalism’ in this sense contrasts with inferentialist orders of semantic explanation, which begin with a notion of content understood in terms of its role in reasoning, and proceed from there to explain the representational dimension of discursive content. I recommend and pursue inferentialist rather than representationalist semantic explanations,” (p. 14, emphasis in original).

“But not giving representation a fundamental explanatory role in semantics does not disqualify it from playing any role whatsoever…. [T]here is a big difference between rejecting global representationalism, in the sense of denying that the best semantics for all kinds of expressions assigns them a fundamentally representational role, and being a global anti-representationalist, by insisting that no expressions should be understood semantically to play representational roles” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Here Brandom makes a very Hegelian kind of point. All-or-nothing, black-and-white distinctions like the forced choice between skepticism and foundationalism can only be defended by a kind of sophistry.

“It seemed to me in Gerona, and still does today, that a suitable pragmatist explanatory strategy, beginning with social practices of using expressions to give and ask for reasons, could unobjectionably both underwrite theoretical attributions of representational content to some locutions and also underwrite the viability and utility of the common-sense distinction between what we are saying or thinking and what we are talking or thinking about” (p. 15, emphasis in original).

Brandom takes the reasonable position that we don’t have to ban all talk about representation in order not to be representationalist. What he wants to get away from is the notion of privileged representation that is supposed to be beyond question.

Philosophical Storytelling

Plato uses a variety of literary devices to convey philosophical meaning — notably the dialogue form itself, but also the Platonic myths, which resemble traditional myths in form, but are deliberately constructed to make a point. In a contemporary context, Robert Brandom practices a kind of historical storytelling about the development of concepts of normativity.

Brandom’s recently published Spinoza lectures help fill out the picture of his own work, by critically reflecting on his teacher Richard Rorty’s relation to the tradition of American pragmatism, as well as to Hegel. The title of the first lecture, “Pragmatism as Completing the Enlightenment: Reason Against Representation”, well indicates its scope. Brandom is at pains to portray Rorty, “the quintessential anti-essentialist”, as a serious defender of reason. 

We see here the apparent origin of Brandom’s preoccupation with the stories that we tell ourselves to anchor and orient our sense of meaning. He purposely gives pride of place to such informal orienting stories, over formal theories that are supposed to straightforwardly represent reality. This is part of his way of carrying forward Hegel’s sharp critique of the idea that concepts are fixed once and for all in representation. Hegel himself talks about the “life” and “liveliness” of things that qualify as genuine concepts in his sense.

(It is an interesting historical paradox that Aristotle — one of the figures with whom the Latin term “essence” is most strongly associated — broadly agrees with modern anti-essentialism. ”Essentialism” as understood in contemporary discourse is partly a later development, and partly a product of bad historiography.)

Brandom says that at the end of Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, “in a phrase he came not only to reject, but to regret, he prophesied the ‘death of philosophy'” (p. 2). By that Rorty mainly meant the enterprise of 20th century analytic philosophy, but also the Kantian preoccupation with epistemology and strict warrants for belief.

“[T]he new kind of pragmatism with which Rorty proposed to replace that sort of philosophy is evidently and avowedly Hegelian in spirit — albeit inspired by the naturalized (but still social and historical) form of Hegelianism he admired in Dewey and self-consciously emulated in his own work” (ibid).

Brandom continues, “Later, Rorty would applaud the broadly naturalistic, sociological, historicist impulse he saw Hegel as having bequeathed to the nascent nineteenth century, and speculate about how much further we might have gotten by now if at the end of that century Russell and Husserl had not, each in his own way, once again found something for philosophers to be apodeictic about, from their armchairs” (pp. 2-3).

“Apodeictic” was a favorite term of Husserl’s, referring to the certain knowledge he believed to be achievable by following his phenomenological method. Russell is considered by many to be the founder of analytic philosophy. A great champion of modern science and a pioneer of mathematical logic, he was hostile to what he called speculation in philosophy. Old mainstream analytic philosophy and Husserlian phenomenology both make foundationalist claims of certain knowledge, and they both owe something to Kant’s distinctive emphasis on the theory of knowledge as coming before a direct account of things. (Although I do not regard Kant as a foundationalist, some of his rhetoric could be read that way). According to Brandom, Rorty presents these 20th century ambitions as a retrograde development compared to Hegel. 

Hegel’s great lesson, on Rorty’s Deweyan view according to Brandom, lies in his storytelling. (I would note that Hegel himself also makes claims of strong knowledge, even though he is an anti-foundationalist.) This is fascinating to me, because I have come to know Brandom as emphasizing this kind of storytelling, and I wondered where it came from, because it seemed to only very partially fit Hegel. Where Hegel himself is concerned, I think storytelling is an interesting theme, but (I find myself spontaneously saying) making it the theme throws out way too much of what Hegel is doing. 

In the case of Brandom himself, I would not at all say that his main strength is his historical storytelling. It is other aspects of his work that make him a contemporary giant — the inferentialism, the mutual recognition ethics, the developed account of the “historical fine structure” of the genealogy of normativity, and so on. I think Brandom overemphasizes telling a particular story, and at the same time the particular stories he tells are a bit historically shallow. Paul Ricoeur has a much richer meta-level account of the distinctive aspects of narrative as compared to ordinary assertion, and puts less emphasis on particular stories. 

I think of the storytelling that Brandom invokes as one way of expressing results of interpretation. I prefer to focus on the process of interpretation, before everything is decided.

“Rorty’s idea of the form of a justification for a recommendation of a way forward always was a redescription of where we have gotten to, motivated by a Whiggish story about how we got there that clearly marks off both the perils already encountered and the progress already achieved along that path. This is the literary genre of which Rorty is an undisputed master” (p. 3, emphasis in original).

The Whigs were a liberal political party in Enlightenment Britain, famous for promoting belief in the linear forward march of historical progress. Brandom contrasts an optimistic “Whiggish” genealogy with what Paul Ricoeur calls the hermeneutics of suspicion, associated with Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud. Ricoeur, though, is far from simply condemning the “suspicious” point of view, and even says it is a necessary complement to the more affirmative approach he wants to emphasize.

Brandom quotes Rorty’s reminiscence of his undergraduate days, “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas, and Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being gave me a taste for ambitious, swooshy, Geistesgeschichte [cultural history, literally “history of spirit”] that I never lost” (ibid).

I am well familiar with the experience of reading Hegel at the “swooshy” level, and would certainly acknowledge that historical storytelling is a valuable literary device that I too often use to make a point. But H.S. Harris’ monumental Hegel’s Ladder reconstructs the fine grain of Hegel’s argument in the Phenomenology, paragraph by paragraph, with great success. And albeit at a much higher level, more recently Robert Pippin has even reconstructed what is at stake in the argument of Hegel’s Logic. 

Brandom himself impresses me for the exemplary thoroughness of his own detailed arguments, not the quality of his stories. But he clearly has a soft spot for Rortyan stories. Although I tell such stories myself as part of a necessary pedagogy, I’m very concerned on the other hand not to lose the fine grain of the twists and turns and transformations and reversals that make up history. I don’t give my own stories any higher status than Platonic “likely stories”.

Of the three works Rorty mentions in the quote, Hegel’s Phenomenology is among the most important books ever written. By contrast, Whitehead’s Adventures (1933) is a only a minor classic. Lovejoy’s Great Chain (1936) is a shallow popular work of the 20th century that oversimplifies and badly misrepresents the philosophical thought of the middle ages, about which scholarship has vastly improved since it was written. But mentioning the three together suggests that Rorty is taking a lowest common denominator approach, as if the main point of all three were the telling of simplified stories. Lamentably, Brandom too seems to use Lovejoy as his main source for generalizing about the history of philosophy before the time of the Enlightenment. 

Incidentally, Brandom’s view of the Enlightenment seems to be largely based on Jerome Scheewind’s The Invention of Autonomy, whereas mine is particularly influenced by Jonathan Israel’s trilogy Radical Enlightenment (2001), Enlightenment Contested (2006), and Democratic Enlightenment (2011).

Consciousness and Identity

Previously, I raised a doubt about Robert Pippin’s statement to the effect that “I know I am the one acting because I am the one acting”. For this line of argument, he cites Sebastian Rödl’s work. Pippin also says, drawing on Rödl, that “judgment is the consciousness of judging” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 105).

In the first case, my doubt had to do with what counts as knowledge. I tend to adhere to Plato’s sharp distinction between knowledge on the one hand, and belief or opinion on the other. In the second case, I draw a sharp line between Hegelian consciousness and self-consciousness, or between Kantian empirical and transcendental subjectivity (see numerous posts under Subjectivity). It is my contention that when they are being more careful, both Kant and Hegel too emphasize such a distinction. But they both also make more casual remarks that blur the distinction.

Judgment in the Kantian and Hegelian sense, I want to say, belongs to reflection and to what Hegel calls self-consciousness, which is not a kind of plain simple “consciousness” that just happens to take for its object a substantial “self”, but something else altogether. The plain simple consciousness that we share at least with all animals has an organic basis related to perception and emotion, but no one is born with self-consciousness. Self-consciousness belongs to what the scholastics used to call second nature. In modern terms, it is in part a cultural acquisition, and in part something that we give birth to ourselves, or, as Hegel might prefer to say, that is able to give birth to itself in us, once we have the necessary acculturation.

Ordinary consciousness includes what has traditionally been called inner sense. This involves immediately having images of one’s (empirical) self, or of aspects of it, analogous to the way that we experience external sensation. This is a kind of imagination, not a kind of reflexivity.

Thought and judgment on the other hand are inherently reflexive, and self-conscious in the sense of reflexivity, but — I want to say, and I think this is implicit in Aristotle and Hegel — the reflexivity of thought and judgment belongs directly to each specific thought and judgment itself, rather than to a separate substantial “self” that “has” them. In the main example that Pippin gives, the reflexivity of a judgment consists in all the reasons for it, which refer to it.

At one point in this discussion, Pippin says that “Finally, there is little doubt that Hegel realized that apperception was not a kind of consciousness” (p. 107). He quotes Hegel saying that the “original deed” corresponding to a Kantian unity of apperception is “liberated from the opposition of consciousness, is closer to what may be taken simply as thinking as such. But this deed should no longer be called consciousness; for consciousness holds within itself the opposition of the ‘I’ and its intended object which is not to be found in that original deed. The name ‘consciousness’ gives it more of a semblance of subjectivity than does the term ‘thought’, which here, however, is to be taken in the absolute sense of infinite thought, not encumbered by the finitude of consciousness” (pp. 107-108).

This is what I have been saying, and I do not see how it can be reconciled with the claim that judgment is identical to a consciousness of judgment, if judgment is inherently apperceptive. Apperception is something higher than mere consciousness. Apperception and judgment are inherently discursive; mere consciousness is not.

Which comes first, reasons we live by and things we care about, or a substantial self? I say it is what we live by and care about. Put another way, it is discursivity and not consciousness that involves reflexivity. (And even our basic sentience need not be attributed to a substantial self. See Droplets of Sentience?.)

What is true is that judgment does presuppose that misleadingly designated “self-consciousness” which is not a kind of consciousness and does not involve a substantial self. Consciousness of judgment would be judgment’s presentation in imagination. It may well be true that there is no judgment without its also being presented in imagination, but a reflexive, apperceptive, discursive judgment and its immediate presentation as an image in animal imagination are by no means the same thing.

Shine and Reflection

Hegel introduces reflection in by contrasting it with immediacy and simple being.

“The truth of being is essence.”

“Being is the immediate. Since the goal of knowledge is the truth, what being is in and for itself, knowledge does not stop at the immediate and its determinations, but penetrates beyond it on the presupposition that behind this being there still is something other than being itself, and that this background constitutes the truth of being. This cognition is a mediated knowledge, for it is not to be found with and in essence immediately, but starts off from an other, from being, and has a prior way to make, the way that leads over and beyond being or that rather penetrates into it. Only insofar as knowledge recollects itself into itself out of immediate being, does it find essence through this mediation” (Logic, di Giovanni trans., opening of book II, p. 337).

Knowledge “does not stop at the immediate”. The perspective of “Being” for Hegel is a mere starting point that turns out to be unsustainable on its own terms. Being by itself is not sufficient to make anything intelligible. Essence on the other hand begins to give us truth.

He goes on to say what essence is, in terms of reflection. This is initially introduced in rather classic Hegelese:

“For essence is an infinite self-contained movement which determines its immediacy as negativity and its negativity as immediacy, and is thus the shining of itself within itself. In this, in its self-movement, essence is reflection” (p. 345).

Each part of this actually makes sense, if you think in terms of reflection from the start and treat immediacy as derivative, which is just what Hegel ends up recommending here. Reflection is Hegel’s model for “good” infinity.

The metaphorical “shining” above is wordplay on Schein, Hegel’s term for a kind of appearance, which di Giovanni renders as “shine”. Kant had spoken of the Schein or illusion produced by pure reason outside the realm of experience. As an appearance-like thing, shine is contrasted with essence. For Hegel, essence is to be found nowhere else than within shine, but the articulation of essence involves a selectivity, distinction, and elaboration within shine that the logic of being (based as it is on a principle of indifference) is unable to support.

“Shine is the same as what reflection is; but it is reflection as immediate. For this shine which is internalized and therefore alienated from its immediacy, the German has a word from an alien language, ‘Reflexion’.”

“Essence is reflection, the movement of becoming and transition that remains within itself, wherein that which is distinguished is determined simply and solely as the negative itself” (ibid).

Hegel introduces talk about “the negative” as a reminder that higher thought requires moving beyond pre-given or “fixed” concepts. This “negative” has virtually nothing to do with classical negation in formal logic.

“In the becoming of being, it is being which lies at the foundation of determinateness, and determinateness is reference to an other” (ibid).

Being is supposed to be a stable foundation, but for Hegel any true stability of intelligibility cannot come from a foundation in mere fixity. At this level, any determinateness and any intelligibility really depend not on being as such, but on relation and relatedness that is external to the supposed foundation.

He continues, “Reflective movement is by contrast the other as negation in itself, a negation which has being only in self-referring” (ibid).

Here he explicitly connects negativity with reflection and self-reference, vocabulary I find far more illuminating.

Reflective judgment works in part by a sort of hall of mirrors effect, in which the back-and-forth of reflection effectively moots the question of which was the original of the images. All that remains is a new level of variegated and articulated whole. Hegel is saying something like essence is the equilibrium resulting from the back-and-forth of reflection. This is how intelligibility originates. Relations are prior to any notion of being that is not utterly indeterminate.

The following passage, read slowly and carefully, elaborates this identification of the Hegelian negative with self-reference and reflection. It portrays reflection as bootstrapping itself.

“The self-reference of the negative is therefore its turning back on itself; it is immediacy as the sublating of the negative, but immediacy simply and solely as this reference or as turning back from a one, and hence as self-sublating of immediacy. — This is positedness, immediacy purely as determinateness or self-reflecting. This immediacy, which is only as the turning back of the negative into itself, is the immediacy which constitutes the determinateness of shine, and from which the previous reflective movement seemed to begin. But, far from being able to begin with this immediacy, the latter first is rather as the turning back or as the reflection itself” (p. 347).

He says quite clearly that immediacy is only the semblance of a beginning.

“Immediacy comes on the scene simply and solely as a turning back and is that negative which is the semblance of a beginning, the beginning which the return negates” (ibid).

He explicitly recalls the Kantian background here.

“Reflection is usually taken in a subjective sense as the movement of judgment which transcends an immediately given representation and seeks more universal determinations for it or compares it with such determinations. Kant opposes reflective and determining judgment (Critique of Judgment, Introduction, pp. xxiiiff.). He defines judgment in general as the faculty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the judgment which subsumes the particular under it is determining. But if what is given is only a particular, for which it is up to the judgment to find the universal, then the judgment is reflecting. Here, too, reflection is therefore a matter of rising above the immediate to the universal. On the one hand, the immediate is determined as particular only by being thus referred to its universal; for itself, it is only a singular or an immediate existent. But, on the other hand, that to which it is referred, its universal, its rule, principle, law, is in general that which is reflected into itself, which refers itself to itself, is the essence or the essential.”

“But at issue here is neither the reflection of consciousness, nor the more specific reflection of the understanding that has the particular and the universal for its determinations, but reflection in general. It is clear that the reflection to which Kant assigns the search of the universal for a given particular is likewise only an external reflection which applies itself to the immediate as to something given. — But the concept of absolute reflection, too, is implicit in it. For the universal, the principle or the rule and law, to which reflection rises in its process of determination is taken to be the essence of the immediate from which the reflection began; the immediate, therefore, to be a nothingness which is posited in its true being only by the turning back of the reflection from it, by the determining of reflection. Therefore, that which reflection does to the immediate, and the determinations that derive from it, is not anything external to it but rather its true being” (p. 350).

Here we are far indeed from early modern representationalism and its “given” objects, traces of which Hegel still finds in Kant. Yet nothing could be more contrary to this point of view than subjective arbitrariness. The process of the back-and-forth of reflection generates shareable rational objectivity out of practical distinctions of value. And reflection does not live within the confines of one person’s head. Hegel emphasizes the continuity of the inner and the outer, and elsewhere explicitly proposes mutual recognition as the ground not only of ethics but also of knowledge.

Hegel on Hegel’s Logic

By his own account, Hegel makes a “completely fresh start” in what he calls logic (Science of Logic, di Giovanni trans., 1st preface, p. 9). Robert Pippin points out that insofar as it has precursors, the principal debts of Hegel’s effort are to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Judgment and to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, none of which are ordinarily viewed as works of “logic”. Translator George di Giovanni calls it a “discourse about discourse” (p. xxxv). Fundamentally, it is about meaning, and the conditions for anything to be intelligible.

“[A]n altogether new concept… is at work here…. [Philosophy] cannot borrow its method from a subordinate science, such as mathematics, any more than it can remain satisfied with categorical assurances of inner intuition, or can make use of argumentation based on external reflection. On the contrary, it can only be the nature of the content which is responsible for movement in scientific knowledge, for it is the content’s own reflection that first posits and generates what that content is” (pp. 9-10).

He emphasizes “the nature of the content” (which is to say meaning), and “content’s own reflection”. That reflection, moreover, “first posits and generates what that content is“. Meaning’s own reflection “posits and generates” what it means. We are not far from Aristotle’s thought thinking itself that is the cause of the what-it-is of things. Hegel shares with Kant and Aristotle a discursively reflective view of thought and meaning.

I still prefer to speak of “knowledge” rather than “science” in a philosophical context. But Hegel just means a disciplined form of knowledge. The German word for science (Wissenschaft) literally means something like the art of knowing (wissen). Our word “science” comes from Latin scientia (knowledge in a strong sense). According to di Giovanni, wissen for Hegel “signifies the product or the origin, rather than the process, of reason” (p. lxx). It is distinguished from Erkenntnis (confusingly also rendered by some translators as “knowledge”), which starts from a root meaning of acquaintance or recognition, and comes to refer to the process of reason.

“The forms of thought are first set out and stored in human language…. In everything that the human being has interiorized, in everything that in some way or another has become for him a representation, in whatever he has made his own, there has language penetrated, and everything that he transforms into language and expresses in it contains a category, whether concealed, mixed, or well defined. So much is logic natural to the human being, [it] is indeed his very nature. If we however contrast nature as such, as the realm of the physical, with the realm of the spiritual, then we must say that logic is the supernatural element that permeates all his natural behavior, his ways of sensing, intuiting, desiring, his needs and impulses; and it thereby makes them into something truly human, even though only formally human — makes them into representations and purposes” (2nd preface, p. 12).

Our involvement with linguistic meaning is “our very nature”, or is the “supernatural” element in our natural behavior that makes us truly human. As one reading of Aristotle puts it, what makes us human is that we are talking animals.

“But even when logical matters and their expressions are common coin in a culture, still, as I have said elsewhere, what is familiar is for that reason not known…. To indicate the general features of the course that cognition goes through as it leaves familiar acquaintance behind, the essential moments in the relationship of scientific thought to this natural thought, this is the purpose of the present preface” (p. 13).

“First of all, it must be regarded as an infinite step forward that the forms of thought have been freed from the material in which they are submerged in self-conscious intuition, in representation, as well as in our desires and volitions or, more accurately, in ideational desiring and willing (and there is no human desire or volition without ideation); a step forward that these universalities have been brought to light and made the subject of study on their own, as was done by Plato, and after him by Aristotle especially” (pp. 13-14).

He credits Plato and Aristotle with first clearly articulating notions of thought and meaning in a way that is independent of particular subjectivity. Next he cautions against the illusion of mastery.

“We do not indeed say of our feelings, impulses, interests, that they serve us; on the contrary, they count as independent forces and powers, so that to have this particular feeling, to desire and to will this particular thing, to make this our interest — just this, is what we are. And it is more likely that we become conscious of obeying our feelings, impulses, passions, interests, not to mention our habits, than of having them in our possession, still less, in view of our intimate union with them, of their being means at our disposal. Such determinations of mind and spirit, when contrasted with the universality which we are conscious of being and in which we have our freedom, quickly show themselves to be particulars, and we rather regard ourselves to be caught up in their particularities and to be dominated by them. It is all the less plausible, therefore, to believe that the thought determinations that pervade all our representations — whether these are purely theoretical or hold a material belonging to sensation, impulse, will — that such thought determinations are at our service; that it is we who have them in our possession and not they who have us in theirs” (p. 15).

We are masters neither of our feelings nor of our thought.

“[W]hen the content that motivates a subject to action is drawn out of its immediate unity with the subject and is made to stand before it as an object, then it is that the freedom of spirit begins” (p. 17).

True freedom of spirit is the very opposite of following one’s arbitrary will or impulse.

“The most important point for the nature of spirit is the relation, not only of what it implicitly is in itself to what it actually is, but of what it knows itself to be to what it actually is” (ibid).

Here he already raises the Aristotelian theme of the priority of actuality.

“As impulses the categories do their work only instinctively; they are brought to consciousness one by one and so are variable and mutually confusing, thus affording to spirit only fragmentary and uncertain actuality. To purify these categories and in them to elevate spirit to truth and freedom, this is therefore the loftier business of logic” (ibid).

Hegel’s logic thus serves a profound ethical purpose.

“It is soon evident that what in ordinary reflection is, as content, at first separated from the form cannot in fact be formless, … that it rather possesses form in it; indeed that it receives soul and substance from the form alone and that it is this form itself which is transformed into only the semblance of a content…. By thus introducing content into logical consideration, it is not the things, but rather the fact [Sache], the concept of the things, that becomes the subject matter” (pp. 18-19).

What the moderns call “content” is a special case of what Plato and Aristotle call form. Hegel calls it a “semblance” of content. But its role in his logic is pivotal. Logic is concerned not with things as such but with meanings, Aristotelian forms, the what-it-is of things. What the translator calls “fact” seems rather different from ordinary English usage.

Mathematical Things and Forms

We’ve reached the end of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, though there are in fact two more books, Mu (XIII) and Nu (XIV).

Aristotle’s main point of contention with his former colleagues of the Platonic Academy is whether or not mathematical objects and forms understood as universals are independent things in their own right. Both books Mu and Nu (XIV) are concerned with this, and have a somewhat polemical character. I think Aristotle’s own distinctive views on form are better expressed in what has been said already, so I will mostly focus on the other remarks he makes in book Mu, and will skip book Nu entirely.

Book Mu does not clearly refer to the preceding book Lambda (XII), but does refer to previous discussion of “the thinghood that has being as being-at-work” (Sachs tr., ch. 1, p. 253) as well as to discussion on aporias.

“Now it is necessary, if mathematical things are, that they be either in the perceptible things, as some people say, or separate from the perceptible things (and some people also speak of them that way); or if they are not present in either way, then they do not have being or they have it in some other manner. So for us the dispute will not be about whether they have being, but about the manner of their being” (pp. 253-254).

I take especial note of the last sentence above. This could also serve as a comment on what is at stake in the Metaphysics in general — questions not really about being as if it were one thing, but about what things are, and the ways they are.

He goes on to argue that mathematical things are neither “in” perceptible things, nor are they separate things in their own right. “In” for Aristotle suggests a material constituent.

“It has been said sufficiently, then, that mathematical things are not independent things more than bodies are, nor are they prior in being to perceptible things, but only in articulation, nor are they capable of being somewhere as separate; but since they are not capable of being in perceptible things either, it is clear that either they have no being at all, or that they have being in a certain manner and for this reason do not have being simply, for we speak of being in a number of ways” (ch. 2, p. 257).

For those who insist that the whole Metaphysics is a single linear development and not just generally coherent with itself, and also that being finally acquires an unequivocal sense, it seems inconvenient that now, after book Lambda, he continues to emphasize that being is said in many ways.

I think the Metaphysics is very much coherent with itself, but is not a single linear development pointing toward Being, and that he never wavers on the emphasis that being is said in many ways, although he does sometimes use the word equivocally himself. If the whole thing points toward something, that something is the good and the beautiful, and not Being.

He goes on to make some positive remarks about mathematics.

“Now just as the things that are universal within mathematics are not about things that are separate from magnitudes and numbers, but are about these, but not insofar as they are of such a sort as to have magnitude or to be discrete, it is clear that it is also possible for there to be both articulations and demonstrations about perceptible magnitudes, not insofar as they are perceptible but insofar as they are of certain sorts” (ch. 3, p. 257).

He is saying that insofar as there is mathematical knowledge, it is not about magnitude or number as such, but about more specific things such as right triangles or even numbers. Similarly, the meaning of articulations and demonstrations about perceptible magnitudes does not depend on their perceptibility as such.

“[S]ince it is true to say simply that there are not only separate things but also things that are not separate…, it is also true to say simply that there are mathematical things and that they are of such a sort as people say….If it is about things which incidentally are perceptible, but is not concerned with them insofar as they are perceptible, mathematical knowledge will not be about perceptible things; however, it will not be about other separate beings besides these either” (p. 258).

Mathematical things are bona fide things in the broad sense, but not all things are separate or independent. Some are attributed to others.

“[I]f someone examines anything concerning these attributes, insofar as they are such, positing them to be separate, he will not on this account cause anything to be false, any more than when one draws a line on the ground that is not a foot long, and says it is a foot long, for the false assumption is not in the proposition…. [F]or this reason the geometers speak rightly” (pp. 258-259).

Mistaken belief about the independence of mathematical things is incidental to the doing of mathematics. It is irrelevant to the results of constructions or calculations.

“And since the good and the beautiful are different (for the former is always involved in action but the beautiful is also present in motionless things), those who claim that the mathematical kinds of knowledge say nothing about what is beautiful and good are wrong…. The greatest forms of the beautiful are order and symmetry and determinateness, which the mathematical kinds of knowledge most of all display. And since these make their appearance as causes of many things…, it is clear that these kinds of knowledge would also speak about what has responsibility in the manner of the beautiful as a cause in some manner” (p. 259).

Here he not only recognizes mathematical beauty, but relates it to the beauty associated with that-for-the-sake-of-which as a cause.

“The opinion about the forms came to those who spoke about them as a result of being persuaded by the Heraclitean writings that it is true that all perceptible things are always in flux, so that, if knowledge and thought are to be about anything, there must be, besides the perceptible things, some other enduring natures, since there can be no knowledge of things in flux. And then Socrates made it his business to be concerned with the moral virtues, and on account of them first sought to define things in a universal way. For among those who studied nature, only to a small extent did Democritus attain to this… and before that the Pythagoreans did about some few things…. But it is reasonable that Socrates sought after what something is…. But Socrates did not make the universals or the definitions separate, while those who came next did, and called beings of this sort forms” (ch. 4, p. 260).

Aristotle rejects the Heraclitean doctrine of radical flux that influenced Plato. He says Plato was driven to assert separate forms because he wanted to assert that there is knowledge, in spite of his Heracliteanism about perceptible things. Aristotle says that driven by a concern for ethics, Socrates — and not any of those we know as the pre-Socratics — was the first to seriously inquire about what things are. Aristotle has been inquiring about the what-it-is of things and its causes and sources, and we have seen in abundance his concern for the good and the beautiful. Aristotle is claiming a Socratic heritage, and claiming to be truer to it than the Platonists: “Socrates did not make the universals or the definitions separate”.

There follows a long argument against Platonic views about the forms, at the end of which he observes:

“[K]nowledge, like knowing, has two senses, the one as in potency, the other as at-work. The potency, being, like material, universal and indeterminate, is of what is universal and indeterminate, but the being-at-work is determinate and of something determinate; being a this it is of a this, but incidentally sight sees a universal color because this color that it sees is a color, and this A that the grammarian contemplates is an A” (ch. 10, p. 279).

If I am reading this right, he is saying here that being as universal and indeterminate is to being-at-work as potentiality is to being-at-work. If that is so, then the priority of actuality over potentiality would also seem to be a priority of actuality over being. Once again, it just doesn’t seem that being is the principal term.

In any case, he returns to the ultimately ethical theme of the priority of actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment over potentiality, and of particular concrete things over universals in the ordinary logical sense. This still has to be carefully balanced with his other view that there is no knowledge of particulars; knowledge is of universals only.

Positive concern for the priority of actuality is in my opinion the primary thing that underlies his sharp critique of the Platonists. The second — evidenced in the part I skipped over — was the popularity within the Academy of a kind of Pythagorean mystique of numbers that also identified the forms with numbers, in sometimes baffling ways. Plato himself was apparently not immune to this.

Many think Aristotle claims to have knowledge of non-perceptible particular independent everlasting things. I think this interpretation relies on ambiguous use of Aristotle’s saying of “knowledge” in different ways in different contexts. Sometimes he means it very strictly, other times much more loosely. Some translations add confusion by using the same English “knowledge” for other Greek words like gnosis, which I think for Aristotle means personal acquaintance with things nearer to us, whereas episteme is supposed to be about things in their own right.

I do not think that Aristotle means to claim knowledge in the strong sense about ultimate things, but rather that his attitude was in a way closer to that of Kant, who held them to have the highest importance but not to be knowable in the strict sense. This means we do not have to equivocate about what knowledge is.

The wisdom that is called sophia in book capital Alpha initially seems to be concerned with universals in the ordinary sense, as true episteme or knowledge genuinely is. It turns out in book Lambda that sophia‘s primary concern is not with universals in the ordinary sense at all, but with analogous relations that a uniquely positioned particular or particulars has or have to all other things.

In any case, my own view is that the wisdom or sophia concerning these highest things ought to be understood as aligned not so much with knowledge or episteme, as with the ethical or “practical” wisdom (phronesis) that is explicitly said to be a wisdom about particulars. A wisdom about particulars is not prevented from making — and indeed presumably would make — use of knowledge of any universals that genuinely apply. Nonetheless it is the wisdom about particulars that judges which universals should apply in a particular case.

New State Not a Change?

“Of all cases it would be most natural to suppose that there is alteration in figures and shapes, and in states and in the process of acquiring and losing these; but as a matter of fact in neither of these two cases is there alteration” (Aristotle, Physics book VII ch. 3, Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. 1, p. 412).

What the translator calls a matter of fact, I would call a matter of terminology. All specialties tend to develop their own terminology, and philosophers do likewise. Aristotle uses many Greek terms with meanings that were already specialized in his day. Modern disciplines and common speech have evolved their own choices using different criteria.

“[T]here is alteration only in things that are said to be affected in their own right by sensible things…. For when anything has been completely shaped or structured, we do not call it by the name of its material: e.g. we do not call the statue bronze or the candle wax or the bed wood, but we use a paronymous expression and call them brazen, waxen, and wooden respectively. But when a thing has been affected or altered in any way we still call it by the original name: thus we speak of the bronze or the wax being fluid or hard or hot…, giving the matter the same name as the affection” (ibid).

Aristotle makes his usual semantic distinction between the matter, the form, and the composite of both. He wants to specialize the term that is translated as “change” or “alteration” to apply only to the matter, and to use different locutions with regard to the form and the composite.

“Again, states, whether of the body or of the soul, are not alterations. For some are excellences and some are defects, and neither excellence nor defect is an alteration: excellence is a perfection (… since it is then really in its natural state: e.g. a circle is perfect when it becomes really a circle and when it is best), while defect is a perishing of or departure from this condition. So just as when speaking of a house we do not call its arrival at perfection an alteration…, the same holds good in the case of excellences and defects and of the things that possess or acquire them” (ibid).

As we might also anticipate, he strongly emphasizes a teleological and normative perspective on these matters.

“Further, we say that all excellences depend on particular relations. Thus bodily excellences such as health and fitness we regard as consisting in a blending of… elements in due proportion, in relation either to one another within the body or to the surrounding; and in like manner we regard beauty, strength, and all other excellences and defects. Each of them exists in virtue of a particular relation and puts that which possesses it in a good or bad condition with regard to its proper affections” (pp. 412-413).

Most fascinating of all is this emphasis on particular relations. Good and bad conditions are explained in terms of these.

“Since, then, relatives are neither themselves alterations nor the subjects of alterations or of becoming or in fact of any change whatever, it is evident that neither states nor the process of losing and acquiring states are alterations, though it may be true that their becoming or perishing, like that of form and shape, necessarily involves the alteration of certain other things…. For each defect or excellence involves a relation with those things from which the possessor is naturally subject to alteration: thus excellence disposes its possessor to be unaffected or to be affected thus and so, while defect disposes its possessor to be affected or unaffected in a contrary way” (p. 413).

Relations in themselves are static abstractions of conditions. But some of the things involved in these relations are subject to change or alteration. This is a sophisticated way of approaching the matter.

“And the case is similar in regard to the states of the soul, all of which too exist in virtue of particular relations…. Consequently these cannot be alterations either, nor can the process of losing and acquiring them be so, though their becoming is necessarily the result of an alteration of the sensitive part of the soul, and this is altered by sensible objects…. Consequently, although their becoming is accompanied by an alteration, they are not themselves alterations” (ibid).

States of the soul are to be viewed in this relational way. Their becoming is said to be accompanied by an alteration, not itself to be an alteration.

“And again, the states of the intellectual part of the soul are not alterations; nor is there any becoming of them. For the possession of knowledge most especially depends on a particular relation” (ibid).

Knowledge also “most especially” involves being in a particular relation. It is not just the possession of some content.

“It is evident, then, from the preceding argument that alteration and being altered occur in sensible things and in the sensitive part of the soul and, except accidentally, in nothing else” (p. 414).

Toward a First Cause

Book Kappa (XI) of Aristotle’s Metaphysics briefly reviews material from books Beta (III), Gamma (IV), and Epsilon (VI) about the aims of the ultimate inquiry into first things that is still to be pursued. It also incorporates a brief review of his discussions in Physics books II, III, and V about what motion and change are. Both parts of the presentation here add more explicit hints that we will be looking for something that is both separate and unmoved. These hints are the book’s main interest.

Perhaps surprisingly given its review of content from the Physics, Metaphysics Kappa makes no reference to the detailed argument in Physics book VIII that there is a first unmoved mover of all things, or to the related background about unmoved things in Physics book VII. The beginning of Physics book VIII refers back to “our course on physics”, which is ambiguous, but could imply that it was written later, and possibly after Metaphysics Kappa, which would explain why book VIII’s argument about the first mover is not mentioned here.

“But neither ought one to set down the kind of knowledge being sought as concerning the causes spoken of in the writings about nature, since it is not about that for the sake of which (for this sort of cause is the good, and this belongs among actions and things that are in motion, and it moves things first — for that is the sort of thing an end is — but a thing that first moves them is not present among immovable things). And in general, there is an impasse whether the knowledge now being sought is about perceptible independent things at all, or not, but about other things. For if it is about others, it would be about either the forms or the mathematical things, but it is apparent that there are no forms…. But neither is the knowledge being sought about mathematical things, nor is it a knowledge of perceptible independent things, since they are destructible” (ch. 1, Sachs tr., pp. 205-206).

This passage is interesting in a couple of ways. The knowledge being sought in the inquiry to be conducted is now more definitely said to be not about perceptible independent things, not about mathematical things, and not about Platonic forms.

He also points out that what he calls physics is concerned primarily with what he calls sources of motion and change. It does not address questions about the good or that-for-the-sake-of which, except in an incidental way. But in Parts of Animals book I, he clearly says that in the overall scheme of things, the good and that-for-the-sake-of-which are more primary than sources of motion. The implication here in Metaphysics Kappa is that the inquiry being prepared for will address them in their own right.

“Also, ought one to set down anything besides the particular thing or not, and is the knowledge being sought about particulars?” (ch. 2, p. 207).

For Aristotle, no universal is an independent thing. The knowledge being sought does seem to be about particulars.

“And there is besides an impasse, that all knowledge is of universals and of the suchness of things, but thinghood does not belong to universal” (p. 208).

Knowledge, however, is concerned with universals. This was the major impasse remaining at the end of book Zeta (VII).

“Now since the knowledge that belongs to the philosopher concerns being as being universally and not in relation to a part, … if it is meant in accordance with something common, it would be subject to one knowledge. It seems to be meant in the way that has been spoken of, in just the way that medical and healthy are meant” (ch. 3, p. 209).

He refers back to the discussion of how the saying of being in the other categories points back to the saying of substance-essence-thinghood.

“Since all being is meant in accordance with something that is one and common, even though it is meant in a number of ways, … such things are capable of being subject to one knowledge” (p. 211).

This enables us to say that there is after all one knowledge that can be said to be of being as such. It will address the proper saying of substance-essence-thinghood directly, and the proper saying of being in the other categories in a derivative way.

“And since the mathematician uses common notions in a particular way, it would also belong to the primary sort of philosophy to study the things that govern these” (ch. 4, p. 211).

He seems to assert in passing that first philosophy includes what we would call the foundations of mathematics. Elsewhere he mentions that the first principles of mathematics are similarly supposed to be applicable to all things. But mathematics does not address what things in general are in their own right.

“And it is the same way also with the knowledge about nature as with mathematics, for physics studies the attributes and sources of beings insofar as they are in motion and not insofar as they are, (but we have said that the primary sort of knowledge is about these things to the extent that the things underlying them are beings, but not insofar as they are anything else). For this reason one must set down both this sort of knowledge and the mathematical sort as parts of wisdom” (pp. 211-212).

Neither mathematics nor what Aristotle calls physics addresses substance-essence-thinghood, or what things are in their own right. It is left to first philosophy to do this, as well as to inquire into the ultimate principles that underlie mathematics and physics.

Just as in book Gamma (IV), Aristotle’s claim that there is after all a knowledge that applies to all being as such, and that the philosopher is the one who has it, is immediately followed by a somewhat lengthy expression of outrage against those who claim a right to contradict themselves, or deny that there is any such thing as contradiction. Just as in book Gamma, the concerns he expresses are about dialogue, the understanding of meaning, and the possibility of sound reasoning.

This makes perfect sense when we recall that Aristotle has consistently treated being in a transitive way, as always being this or being that; and as intimately involved with saying, especially the saying of what things properly are in their own right. He has at the same time treated saying as meaningful saying, intimately involved with reasoning. So we should not be surprised when it turns out that the knowledge that applies to all being as such has to do with fundamental principles and presuppositions of reasoning and the understanding of meaning.

“Now those who are going to participate in a discussion with each other must in some way understand what they say…. It is necessary then for each of the words to be intelligible and to mean something, and not many things but only one, but if it does mean more than one thing, it is necessary to make clear to which of these one is applying the word. So the one who says ‘this is and is not’ denies that which he says, and so he denies that the word means what it means, which is impossible” (ch. 5, p. 212).

Then he again expresses outrage at what he takes to be Protagoras’ claim that truth is entirely subjective. If this were the case, there would be no being as Aristotle understands it. Being “in its own right” is discursively communicable intelligibility.

“Something closely resembling these things being discussed is what was said by Protagoras, for he said that a human being is the measure of all things, meaning nothing else than that what seems so to each person is solidly so” (ch. 6, p. 213).

“And since it is necessary for each sort of knowledge to know in some way what something is, … one must not let it go unnoticed in what way the one who studies nature needs to define it and how he needs to get hold of the articulation of the thinghood of things” (ch. 7, p. 217).

The inquiry to be pursued here is implicitly presupposed by physical inquiries. To the extent that one of these two, taken in itself, governs the other, taken in itself, the inquiry to be pursued here is more primary than physics (or mathematics).

“Now the study of nature is about things having a source of motion within themselves, while mathematics is contemplative and concerns something that remains the same, but is not separate. Therefore, about the sort of being that is separate and motionless, there is another sort of knowledge that is different from both of these, if there is any such independent thing — I mean something separate and motionless — which is just what we shall try to show. And if there is any such nature among beings, that would be where the divine also is, and this would be the primary and most governing source of things. It is clear, then, that there are three classes of contemplative knowledge: physics, mathematics, and theology” (ibid).

What he calls nature is a source of motion within something “as itself” (all other sources of motion he calls potentialities).

Now he explicitly mentions that he intends to show that there is a kind of being that is both separate and motionless, as he understands these two terms. He says that if there is such a thing, it will be “where the divine is”, and it will be “the primary and most governing source of things”. First philosophy will therefore be alternately characterized as theology.

He returns to the impasse about knowledge in first philosophy. “One might be at an impasse whether the knowledge of being as being ought to be set down as universal or not” (p. 218). Knowledge is supposed to be concerned with universals, but we are seeking an independent thing, and no logical universal is an independent thing.

In the earlier suggestion of a solution to this impasse, he re-interpreted the many ways in which being is said for the different categories, re-describing them as multiple derivative meanings pointing to one primary meaning. This seemed to eliminate the need to refer to a universal that abstracts over the ways being is said for the different categories.

Now he complements this by introducing a new way of speaking universally, which does not depend on abstraction. Instead, universality can be achieved by referring to a concrete thing or things that is or are concretely the cause or causes of all things, and that therefore is or are prior to all the rest.

“So if natural independent things are primary among beings, then also physics would be the primary sort of knowledge; but if there is another nature and independent thing that is separate and motionless, it is necessary that the knowledge of it be other than and prior to physics, and universal by being prior” (ibid).

Everything that Aristotle calls independent, he also calls separate. Also equivalent to these is calling something a this. As noted earlier, the challenge is to find something that is independent and separate and a this, but that is also unmoved in his sense. The impasse about universality will be conclusively resolved by finding something that is universal not in the sense of being abstract, but rather, as he says, universal in the sense of being “prior” to all other things, because it is a cause for all of them.

“And that, of what is so incidentally, there are not causes and sources of the same sort as there are of what is so in its own right, is clear, for then everything would be by necessity” (ch. 8, p. 219).

As he said in book Zeta (VII), the contingency of incidental being must have contingent, incidental causes. Now he relates this more specifically to a consideration of that-for-the-sake-of-which.

“That which is for the sake of something is present in things that happen by nature or as a result of thinking, but it is fortune when any of these happen incidentally, for just as being is in one way in its own right and in another way incidental, so also with cause. And fortune is an incidental cause in the things that are by choice, among those that happen for the sake of something, for which reason fortune and thinking concern the same things, since there is no choice apart from thinking…. And since nothing incidental takes precedence over things in their own right, neither then do incidental causes, so if fortune or chance is a cause of the heavens, intelligence and nature have a prior responsibility” (pp. 219-220).

There is such a thing as fortune or things happening by chance, but “intelligence and nature have a prior responsibility”, just as what things are in their own right takes precedence over things that are the case incidentally.

“Something is in one way only as at-work, in another way as in potency, and in another way both in potency and at-work, and again in one way as a being, in another as a so-much, in other ways in the rest of the categories; and there is no motion apart from things, since something changes always according to the categories of being, and there is nothing common to these which is not within a single category” (ch. 9, p. 220).

Every change is understood by Aristotle as a change with respect to one of the categories. What is common to these is not an abstraction, but the single concrete sense for one category (substance-essence-thinghood), from which the senses for the other categories are derived.

Here he mentions being in the sense of potentiality and actuality, before he mentions being in the senses of the categories. Next, he summarizes the Physics‘ account of motion. “Motion” is the (incomplete) actualization of a potentiality, where actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment would be its complete actualization.

“So the being-at-work-staying-itself [entelechy, identified by Aristotle with actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment] of what is in potency, whenever it is at-work as a being-at-work-staying-itself, not as itself but as movable, is motion” (p. 221).

“And the reason for motion’s seeming to be indefinite is that it is not possible to place it as a potency or as a being-at-work of beings, for neither is what is capable of being so-much necessarily in motion, nor what is actively so-much; and motion seems to be a certain sort of being-at-work, but incomplete, and the reason is that the potency of which it is the [complete] being-at-work is itself incomplete. And for this reason it is hard to grasp what it is, for it is necessary to place it either as a deprivation or as a potency or as an unqualified being-at-work, but none of these seems admissible; so what remains is what has been said, both that it is a being-at-work and that it is the sort of being-at-work that has been described, which is difficult to bring into focus but capable of being” (p. 222).

Motion is an incomplete actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment. This is a rather subtle thought, the grasping of which requires that we first understand that-for-the-sake-of-which, actuality, and potentiality. (Motion in the modern sense, on the other hand, has no teleological significance. It is entirely reducible to measurable quantities. It it not that one of these is “right” and the other “wrong” — they are two different concepts, grounded in different kinds of explanation.)

“And it is clear that motion is in the movable thing, for it is the being-at-work-staying-itself of this by the action of the thing capable of causing motion. And the being-at-work of the thing capable of causing motion is not different, since it is necessary that it be the being-at-work-staying-itself of both; for a thing is capable of causing motion by its potency and is in motion by being-at-work, but it is capable of being-at-work upon the thing moved, so that the being-at-work of both alike is one, just as the interval from one to two and from two to one is the same, and the uphill and downhill road, though the being of them is not one, and similarly also in the case of the thing causing motion and the thing moved” (ibid).

Motion for Aristotle is always said to be in the thing moved, not in the mover. The potentialities of mover and moved with respect to any motion are said to be one.

“Now it is not possible for the infinite to be something separate…. Also, how could the infinite admit of being something in its own right, if number and magnitude, of which the infinite is an attribute, do not?…. And it is clear that it is not possible for there to be an infinite actively…. [T]hat there is no infinite among perceptible things is clear…. [N]or could there be a number that is separate and infinite, since a number or that which has a number is countable…. In general it is impossible for there to be an infinite body and a place for bodies” (ch. 10, pp. 222-224).

As he argues in greater detail in the Physics, there is no “separate” or “actual” infinite.

“[T]here is something that is moved primarily on account of itself, and this is what is moved in its own right. And this is the same way also with the thing that causes motion, for it does so either incidentally, or on account of a part, or in its own right” (ch. 11, p. 225).

There is something that is a mover in its own right.

“But the forms and the attributes…, such as knowledge and heat, are motionless; it is not heat that is a motion but the process of heating. Change that is not incidental is not present in all things but in contraries and what is between the and in contradictories, and belief in this comes from considering examples” (ibid).

For Aristotle, it is only composite things (i.e., those he understands as formed from material) that are subject to motion and change. In his sense, for instance, a composite thing may undergo a process of becoming warmer, and that would be a kind of motion of the thing. But heat itself is not a composite thing. (That heat itself does not move would be true even under the modern interpretation of it as the amount of molecular motion within a material.)

“A thing that changes does so either from one underlying thing to another, or from what is not a subject to what is not another subject, or from what is not a subject to that subject (and by ‘subject’ I mean what is declared affirmatively), so that there must be three kinds of change, since that from what is not one subject to what is not another subject is not a change, for they are neither contraries nor is there a contradiction, because there is no opposition between them” (ibid).

“And since every motion is a change, and the kinds of change mentioned are three, but those that result from coming-into-being or destruction are not motions, and these are the changes between contradictories, it is necessary that change from one subject to another be the only sort of change that is motion” (p. 226).

A “subject” here is just some thing that underlies something else that has the character of an attribute. I would infer that the change from one subject to another that is spoken of here is a reference to the way that something that is potentially X becomes actually X by the action of something else that is already actually X, as the parent of a child and the Platonic “model” of an artifact were said to be.

“So if the ways of attributing being are divided into thinghood, quality, place, acting or being acted upon, relation, and quantity, there are necessarily three kinds of motion, with respect to the of-what-sort, the how-much, and the place. There is no motion with respect to thinghood, because nothing is contrary to an independent thing, nor of relation …, nor is there a motion of acting and being acted upon, nor of moving and being moved, because there is not a motion of a motion or a coming into being of coming into being, or generally a change of a change…. For every motion is a change from one thing to another, and this is also with coming into being and destruction, except that these are changes into one sort of opposites, while motion is a change into another sort” (ch. 12, pp. 226-227).

The modern concept of acceleration is not a “change of a change”, but a change in a rate of change. Surprisingly, he does not seem to mention change with respect to place, or locomotion, here.

“Also, it would go to infinity if there were to be a change of a change and a coming into being of coming into being…. And since of infinite things there is no first one, there would not be a first becoming, and therefore no next one either, and then nothing would either come into being or be moved or change” (pp. 227-228).

Here as elsewhere, Aristotle is anxious to avoid any form of infinite regress. Showing that there is a separate, unmoved, everlasting thing that moves others is what will enable him to do that. That will be the main task of book Lambda (XII).

Next in this series: Pure Entelechy

One, Many, Same, Different

Book Iota (X) of Aristotle’s Metaphysics extends the discussion in book Delta (V) of things said in many ways, going into detail on what makes things one, many, the same, or different. These are extremely important matters for any sound reasoning, though somewhat technical in nature. It also contains Aristotle’s sharp critique of the saying of Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things”.

“[T]here are four senses in which something is said to be one primarily and in its own right, rather than incidentally” (ch.1, p. 185).

As to the first, “oneness belongs to what is continuous, either simply or, especially, by nature, and not by contact or a binding cord (and of these that is more so one and is more primary of which the motion is more indivisible and simple)” (ibid).

Continuity in a material is the lowest degree of something being one in its own right. That which is materially united by contact or by any artificial means would not be one in its own right.

As to the second, “[oneness] belongs still more to what is whole and has some form and look, especially if something is of that sort by nature and not by force, as those things are that are so by means of glue or bolts or being tied with a cord, but rather has in itself that which is responsible for its being continuous. And something is of this sort if its motion is one and indivisible in place and time; and so it is clear that, if something that has a source of motion that moves it in the primary kind of the primary class of motions (by which I mean a circular type of change of place), this is one magnitude in the primary sense” (ibid).

Being a whole is a higher degree of unity than being materially continuous. The association of circular motion with a strong unity is relevant to the upcoming argument in book Lambda (XII) about the first cause.

“So some things are one in this way, insofar as they are continuous or whole, but others are one because the articulation of them is one, and of this sort are those things of which the thinking is one, and this in turn is of this sort if it is indivisible, and an act of thinking is indivisible if it is of something indivisible in form or in number” (ibid, emphasis added).

As to the third, “a particular thing is one by being indivisible in number” (ibid, emphasis added).

These would include all the independent and non-independent things that were extensively discussed in book Zeta (VII).

He continues, “but that which is one by means of intelligibility and knowledge is indivisible in form, so [fourth] what is responsible for the oneness of independent things would be one in the primary sense” (ibid, emphasis added).

I expect that this last kind will turn out to be the first cause.

“But it is necessary to notice that one must not take the sorts of things that are spoken of as one as being meant in the same way as what it is to be one, or what the articulation of it is” (p. 186).

This is analogous to the distinction between saying something about something in general, and saying what something is, also discussed in book Zeta. He illustrates this below, with the example of fire.

“The same thing would also be the case with ‘element’ and ’cause’, if one had to speak about them, distinguishing the things to which the words are applied, and giving a definition of the words. For there is a sense in which fire is an element… and a sense in which it is not; for being fire is not the same thing as being an element…. And it is that way also with ’cause’ and ‘one’ and all such things, and this is why being one is being indivisible, just exactly what it is to be a this, separate on its own in either place or form or thinking, or to be both whole and indivisible, but especially to be the primary measure of each class of things, and, in the most governing sense, of the class of things with quantity, for it has come from there to apply to other things” (ibid).

Being one in the third sense above (being a particular thing) is now said to be “just exactly what it is to be a this“. This foreshadows an extensive one-to-one mapping he will develop below, between all the ways of the saying of being he elaborates in book Delta (V), and the ways of the saying of oneness.

He goes on to speak at some length about measures, which we would call units of measurement.

The most important point is that “a measure is always the same kind of thing as what it measures, for the measure of magnitudes is a magnitude, and in particular, that of length is a length, of breadth a breadth, of spoken sounds a spoken sound, of weight a weight, and of numerical units a numerical unit” (p. 188, emphasis added).

The distinction he makes here tracks perfectly with the way that different types, dimensions, and variables are handled separately in the operations defined by modern mathematics.

“And we speak of knowledge or sense perception as a measure of things for the same reason, because we recognize something by means of them, although they are measured more than they measure” (ibid).

The simultaneously humorous and serious caveat that “they are measured more than they measure” means that knowledge and perception are constrained by reality. More precisely, they are involved in mutual dependencies with the realities of things that they at once measure and are measured by.

“And Protagoras says a human being is the measure of all things, as if he were saying that a knower or perceiver were the measure, and these because the one has knowledge and the other perception, which we say are the measures of their objects. So while saying nothing, these people appear to be saying something extraordinary” (ibid).

Aristotle, at the end of his discussion of measure (longer and more detailed than included here), refers to Protagoras’ famous saying, commonly quoted as “Man is the measure of all things”. With uncharacteristic sharpness, he calls this “saying nothing”. Why? This seems worthy of a short digression.

Protagoras was a prominent Sophist, who appears in Plato’s dialogue of the same name. He wrote a controversial treatise entitled Truth, which began with the sentence, “Of all things the measure is man: of those that are, that they are; and of those that are not, that they are not”. Plato and Aristotle both took Protagoras to be asserting a kind of individualist relativism. Reportedly, the skeptic Sextus Empiricus also read him this way. Plato took him to deny any objective reality. Aristotle in book Gamma (IV) shows rare outrage at his other reported claim that “it is not possible to contradict”. I didn’t mention him by name in my account, but Aristotle names him there as well.

Aristotle implies it is a bit more plausible to much more specifically say that knowledge and perception are measures of things, but even that only with the caveat that really “they are measured more than they measure”.

But why go on to add with such sharpness that Protagoras is “saying nothing”? I suspect the answer may lie with the other part of Aristotle’s interpretation: “as if he were saying that a knower or perceiver were the measure, and these because the one has knowledge and the other perception”.

I’m inclined to think Aristotle would regard it as outrageous to transfer what may (ambiguously) be said of specific knowledge and perception, to an unqualified saying about one who is said to possess knowledge and perception in general.

Aristotle has just given an account of what a measure is, that it must be of the same kind as the things that it measures. How could one thing (“man”) possibly be the measure of countless things that have no common measure? That does sound like nonsense. Any measure has to be of one kind or another. Modern mathematics agrees that kinds, dimensions, variables can only be collapsed together if very specific criteria are met.

What Aristotle emphasizes here about knowledge and perception — that they have a remarkable involvement with things that also measure them — seems very consistent with his general views. But the way Protagoras implicitly presents “man” as their possessor makes the possessor stand apart from the mutual involvement with things that Aristotle emphasizes, in which knowledge and perception and things measure one another. In splendid isolation from all constraints of real measure, the possessor seems to have arbitrary freedom to claim whatever she wishes.

I intuitively associate Protagoras with the attitude that what’s true for you is true for you, but what’s true for me is true for me, so don’t tell me I’m wrong, and I won’t tell you you’re wrong! Then and now, such sentiments had and have a superficial appeal, because they seem to express a live-and-let-live attitude, which seems to be a good thing. But the way it is expressed, in fact it completely undermines any possibility of meaningful dialogue, which undermines reason itself, which undermines the very thing that makes us human.

Back to the text, Aristotle turns to illustrating the one-to-one mapping I mentioned between sayings about being and sayings about oneness.

“[S]ince not even being itself is an independent thing as though it were some one thing capable of having being apart from the many beings (since it is common to them), other than solely as a thing attributed to them, it is clear that oneness is not a universal either” (ch. 2, p. 189).

For Aristotle, neither Being nor the One is an independent thing in its own right. He will nonetheless argue in book Lambda (XII) that there is a first cause for all things.

“What’s more, what is true about oneness must hold true in a similar way for all things; and being and oneness are meant in equally many ways” (ibid).

“And the same account applies also to the other classes of things, … and [if] in all instances it is the case both that the number is a number of something and that oneness is some particular one thing, and oneness itself is not the thinghood of it, then it must also be the same way with independent things” (p. 190).

“[S]o too in thinghood, one independent thing is oneness itself; and that oneness in a certain way means the same thing as being, is clear from the fact that it follows along equally through the ways being is attributed, and is not any one of them (for instance, it is not what anything is, nor of-what-sort anything is, but stands similarly toward them just as being does), and from the fact that no other thing is predicated in ‘one human being’ over and above what is predicated in ‘human being’ (just as being is not something over and above what and of-what-sort and how-much a thing is), or in ‘being one’ over and above being any particular thing” (ibid).

Saying something is one human being is the same as saying it is a human being. In book Zeta, he analogously said that “good” and “being good” are the same.

Things are often one in one respect, but many in another. The one and the many are “contraries, and not opposed as contradictories or as what are called relative terms” (ch. 3, p. 190). Next he turns to the meanings of same, other, and different.

“Since the same is meant in more than one way, in one way we sometimes speak of what is the same in number, but we say it in another sense if things are one in meaning as well as in number, as you are one with yourself in both form and material, and in another again if the articulation of the primary thinghood of things is one, for instance in the way equal straight lines are the same, … but in these equality is oneness” (p. 191).

In Fregean terms, things are what Aristotle calls one in number when they have the same reference. They are what Aristotle calls one in meaning when they have the same sense. Frege illustrates how they differ by saying that the morning star and the evening star have the same reference, but different sense.

“Things are alike if, not being simply the same, nor without difference in their composite thinghood, they are the same in form, just as a larger square is like a smaller one…. Other things are alike if they have the same form, and have it in them to be more and less, but are neither more nor less than one another. Other things, if they are the same attribute, and one in form, say white, more and less intensely, people say are alike because their form is one. Other things are alike if they have more things the same than different, either simply or superficially, as tin is like silver insofar as it is white, and gold is like fire insofar as it is yellow and fiery-red” (ibid).

“So it is clear also that other and unlike are meant in more than one way” (ibid).

“[B]ut difference is something other than otherness…. [W]hat is different from something is different in some particular respect, so it must necessarily be the same in some respect as that with which it differs” (p. 192).

For Aristotle, calling two things different presupposes that they can be meaningfully compared in the first place. This is not the case for things that are just “other” than one another. Black is different from white; they are both colors. But an apostrophe is just other than an aardvark.

This is followed by a ten-page discussion of technical details of contrariety, which I will mostly skip. Contrariety supports a definitive ruling out of some things based on other things. This has great importance for reasoning.

Incidentally, Aristotle explains why there is no essential difference between human beings with different colorings.

“And since one sort of thing is articulation while another is material, those contrarieties that are in the articulation make a difference in species, but those that are in what is conceived together with the material do not make such a difference. This is the reason that whiteness of a human being, and blackness, do not make such a difference…. For there is a difference between a white human being and a black horse, but that is not insofar as the one is white and the other is black” (ch. 9, pp. 201-202).

Finally, he argues that destructibility and indestructibility inhere in things by necessity. Whether a thing is destructible or not depends strictly on what genus of things its species belongs to.

“[A] destructible thing and an indestructible thing must be different in genus…. Therefore it is necessary that destructibility either be the thinghood or be present in the thinghood of each destructible thing; and the same argument also concerns the indestructible, since both are among things present by necessity” (ch. 10, p. 202).

Next in this series: Toward a First Cause

Toward Potentiality and Actuality

With the discussion of independent things, the saying of what they are, and the provision for deriving sayings in the other categories from this, we have taken simple saying in the various senses of Aristotle’s Categories about as far as it can go. Although higher dialectical aspects will emerge in what is yet to come, I think the main results of Metaphysics book Zeta (VII) are qualified well enough to be counted by Aristotle as a permanent acquisition that will still be enhanced, but never rolled back.

Aristotelian saying is far from exhausted by saying in the syntactic senses of the Categories, however. We have yet to touch upon its all-important normative aspect, and the corresponding saying of things with an additional modal dimension of potentiality or actuality. This will be intimately involved with that-for-the-sake-of-which (see also Aristotle on Explanation). Book Eta (VIII), treated here, serves as a transition to the main discussion of potentiality and actuality that lies ahead in book Theta (IX).

For Aristotle (and Hegel as well), to say that something is actually X is to judge that it has achieved and is stably continuing to achieve a full expression of what it is to be X, which means it is actively fulfilling that for the sake of which X’s do what they characteristically do (see also Entelechy). In thinking about this, it is important not to set the bar too high — Aristotle thinks it is true of many things.

Then for something to be potentially X, at least within itself it has to be fully “ready” to undergo whatever is required by the process of becoming an actual X, though its becoming an actual X in fact will usually depend on conditions external to it, and in particular on the activity of some other actual X — parents in the case of offspring, and something like a Platonic “model” of the thing in the case of artificial things.

Book Eta begins with a summary of book Zeta, so here it is evident from the text itself that the two are intended to develop one continuous argument. Then book Theta will begin with a very short summary of both Zeta and Eta.

“Now one ought to reckon up the results of what has been said, and, putting them all together, to set out the final point to which they come. And it has been said that the causes, sources, and elements of independent things are being looked for” (ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 155).

Here again we have a more refined statement of the goal of the inquiry. He then cheerfully points out what is in fact the big new impasse reached in the previous book, concerning the impossibility of defining independent things:

“But in one way it follows from the discussions that what it is for something to be, and what underlies something, are kinds of thinghood, and in another way that thinghood is the general class, more than the specific one, and the universal more than the particulars; and the forms are also connected with the universal and the general class (since it is by the same argument that they seem to be independent things). And since what it is for something to be is thinghood, and the articulation of that is a definition, for that reason distinctions were made about definition and about what something is in virtue of itself; and since a definition is a statement, and a statement has parts, it was also necessary to know about the parts — which sort are parts of an independent thing and which not, and if these are the same ones that are parts of the definition. And further, in the course of this, it turned out that neither the universal nor the general class is thinghood” (ibid).

He highlights the discussion of definition, saving till the end the major issue that the independent thing itself is a particular that cannot be the direct subject of a definition. The subtle cue that there will be something problematic in what is said is his “in one way it follows”.

It is typical of both Aristotle and Hegel to appear to endorse an argument for a while, only to eventually overturn it. This can be seen as preliminarily giving each current argument the benefit of the doubt, rather than attempting to anticipate its future refutation. Both Aristotle and Hegel consider it essential for learning to go through the process of an argument’s dialectical development, and not just anticipate ultimate conclusions, as if out of nowhere.

The last statement — that universals do not directly characterize substance-essence-thinghood, which is always particular — is one of the most important conclusions of the Metaphysics. It means that for Aristotle, knowledge (episteme) also will not apply to independent things, since independent things are particulars. This implies that for independent things, we have to rely on something like the practical judgment cultivated for ethical practice, which is directed at particulars.

Those who have wanted to treat “metaphysics” as a “science of being” are going in the opposite of Aristotle’s direction. First he characterizes “being” as having to do with what things are and what can properly be said about them. Then he says the inquiry is really about the causes of independent things. Then he eventually concludes that knowledge does not apply to independent things, because they are particulars. What he is after here is a kind of practical wisdom, not scholastic “science”.

“But now let us go over what concerns the acknowledged independent things. And these are the perceptible ones. And all perceptible independent things have material. And what underlies something is its thinghood, and in one sense this is the material (and by material I mean that which, while not being actively a this, is a this potentially), but in another sense what underlies something is its articulation and form, which, being a this, is separate in articulation; and a third sort of underlying thing is what is composed of these, of which alone there is coming into being and destruction, and which is separate simply. For of the independent things in the sense that corresponds to the articulation, some are separate simply, while others are not” (pp. 155-156).

Here he explicitly generalizes the notion of an “underlying thing”. In the previous book, he started with the accepted view that this must be some kind of material. Then he adopted a Platonic lesson that the form or articulation of things better characterizes what they are. Then he diverged from the Platonists and concluded that independent things are even more important than form.

He certainly discussed all three cases, but my reading of the previous book was that only the composite of both form and matter ended up fully and properly qualifying as an independent thing. In part, he is being extra generous here to his former colleagues in the Platonic Academy, as well as to common-sense views of material. But he is also setting the stage for a new conclusion we will see shortly.

At this point, I am a little mystified by the implication that both all composites and some forms (presumably, some forms of non-perceptible things, which have been mentioned in passing but not discussed yet) will turn out to be in the same way “separate simply”. His only developed argument about the applicability of “separateness” to forms so far has been against the separateness of the Platonic forms, at least in any context involving perceptible things.

However, it is also true that the previous book does in passing seem to defer discussion of the possibility that there are non-perceptible independent things. To anticipate, it does seem true that any first cause of all, analogous to the first cause of motion he argues for in the Physics, must also be independent, for by definition, “first” means having no dependencies.

“[I]t remains to say what the thinghood of perceptible things is in the sense of being-at-work. And Democritus seems to think there are three ways things differ (for he thinks that the underlying body, the material, is one and the same, while what differ are design, which is shape, twist, which is position, and grouping, which is order). But it is obvious that there are many differences; for instance, some things are spoken of by reference to the composition of their material, as are all those made by mixing, such as milk blended with honey; others by way of a binding-cord, such as a bundle, others by means of glue, such as a book, others by means of bolts, such as a box, others by more than one of these, others by position, such as a threshold and a capstone (since these differ by being placed in a certain way), others by time, such as dinner and breakfast, others by place, such as the winds, and others by the attributes of perceptible things such as hardness and softness, density and rarity, or dryness and fluidity, some things differing by some of these, some by all of them” (ch. 2, pp. 156-157).

As this passage makes clear for non-independent perceptible things, in no case does what he calls the “being-at-work” or “actuality” of things involve what we ordinarily think of as work (which is why I still guardedly use “actuality”). In the case of non-independent perceptible things, the “being-at-work” has to do with whatever makes a unified thing out of material components.

“So one must grasp the kinds of differences (since these will be the source of being)…. So it is clear from these considerations that if thinghood is the cause of each thing’s being, it is among these differences that one must look for what is responsible for the being of each of these things. None of these examples is an independent thing, but still there is an analogous structure in each of them” (p. 157).

As we saw in the previous book, Aristotle sees definitions not in the modern formalist sense of characterizations we simply posit in isolation, but as built up from an ordered series of essential differences that progressively distinguish something from other things. To define something for Aristotle is to clarify its relation to classifying distinctions from other things.

“Now it is clear from these examples that the being-at-work and the articulation are different for different materials” (p. 158).

Kinds of materials are a sort of universals, so we do expect their distinctions to be fully articulable. From his examples above, what is responsible for the unity of material things that are not independent living things is itself something material. What kind of thing this source of material unity will be varies according to the case.

“One must not ignore the fact that it sometimes escapes notice whether a name indicates a composite independent thing or its being-at-work and form” (ch.3, p. 158).

“[W]hat it is for something to be belongs to the form and the being-at-work” (p. 159).

Form establishes a what, though it is a universal what and not a particular what. So far we have only seen examples of the somewhat non-intuitive being-at-work of material, non-independent things, which I just called the “source” in Aristotle’s sense for their material unity.

“Now it is obvious to those who inquire about it that a syllable is not made of its letters plus combination, nor a house out of bricks plus combination…. Nor indeed is humanness animalness plus two-footedness, but there has to be something which is apart from these, since these are its material, and that something is neither an element nor derived from an element, but since people leave this out, they describe its material” (ibid).

Here he continues his dispute with Plato’s other students. Combination is not a material ingredient of anything, even in the sense of purely logical or “intelligible” material.

“But whether those things that are the thinghood of destructible things have being separately is not at all clear yet, except that it is clear for certain things at least that this is not possible, as many as are not capable of being apart from the particulars, such as a house or a piece of furniture. So presumably these things themselves are not independent things, nor is any of the other things that are not composed by nature, for one may posit that nature alone is the thinghood in destructible things” (ibid).

I find the above a bit perplexing. The previous book clearly seemed to assume that there are perceptible independent things, and that at least all earthly perceptible things are destructible, though he seems to assume the stars and planets are indestructible, since he sees no evidence to the contrary. But it seemed that animals and plants were implied to be independent things, and to have their own distinctive substance-essence-thinghood. He definitely said that “the soul of an animal… is its thinghood disclosed in speech”. Isn’t an animal a destructible thing?

“[I]t does not belong to an independent thing to be capable of a definition” (p. 160).

This again was a major conclusion of the previous book.

“[E]ach independent thing is a complete being-at-work-staying-itself [entelechy], and a particular nature” (pp. 160-161).

Here he explicitly associates the independence of independent things with the teleological notion of entelechy.

“[W]henever one is inquiring after what is responsible for something, one must state all the causes the thing admits of” (ch. 4, p. 162).

I silently passed over his discussion of his predecessors in book I, but his main argument there was that none of them took all the causes into account. In particular, even Plato resorted to treating the Good as a formal or efficient cause. Aristotle regards interpretation by that-for-the-sake-of-which as his own major innovation.

“And what is the cause in the sense of form? What it keeps on being in order to be. And what is the cause for the sake of which it is? Its end, though presumably both of the last two causes are the same. And one must state the nearest causes: What is the material? Not fire or earth but the material peculiar to the thing” (ibid).

I just pointed out that Aristotle regards the distinction of that-for-the-sake-of-which from a formal cause as of major importance. His identification of the two here therefore must be intended as less than fully general. Form has senses that do not primarily emphasize any normative component, such as the form of triangularity. But as we have seen, Aristotle also speaks of the souls of animals as forms.

One might say that the soul is the entelechy (literally, “in [it] end having”) of a living body. Entelechies may come in layers. More precisely, the soul would be a name for the “first entelechy” of the body, or its achieved and continuing organic functioning. For Aristotle, this is intrinsically a normative concept. To speak of the entelechy of a body implies that it is not only functioning, but functioning well in relation to its intrinsic ends. Higher ongoing functions — just insofar as they are well realized — involve higher entelechies.

He makes an important point about material. What is usually most relevant is “not fire or earth but the material peculiar to the thing“, such as an organic body or a particular mineral. The more specific a material is, the more form-like it is. We will see shortly that Aristotle takes this to the point of identity between the most specific material and the form of a material thing.

“[T]here will not be material in those things that are or are not without changing” (ch. 5, p. 163).

In the Physics, the material cause was originally developed as part of the explanation of change.

“[A]ll things that have more than one part, and of which the sum is not like a heap, but a whole that is something over and above the parts, have something responsible for them…. But a definition is one statement not by being bundled together like the Iliad, but by being of one thing” (ch. 6, pp. 163-164).

A form is normally treated as an integral whole. A definition implicitly refers to an integral whole.

“Now it is clear that, for those who approach defining and explaining in this way that they are accustomed to [crudely adding specifications together, as in “animal plus two-footed”], it is not possible to give an account of it and resolve the impasse. But if, as we say, there is one thing that is material and one that is form, and the former has being as potency and the latter as being-at-work, the thing sought after would no longer seem to be an impasse” (p. 164).

I think what he is saying here is that the definition applies to the form only, not to the composite. That is probably why he earlier mentioned the ambiguity between a name’s referring to the form, and its referring to the composite. This does resolve some of the earlier puzzles about the applicability of definitions (a definition applies to a form). It is important to recall, though, that he just said again that there is still no direct applicability of definitions — which are expressed in universal terms — to independent things, which are particulars.

“But as many things as do not have either intelligible or perceptible material, are each of them some very thing that is one, just as also some very thing that is, a this, an of-this-sort, a so-much (and this is why neither being nor one is included in definitions), and what it is for something to be is immediately a particular one and a particular being. Hence there is no other thing responsible for the being-one of any of these, nor of the being-a-being of each, since each is immediately a certain being and a certain one, not in the sense of being in a class of beings or ones, nor of being among things that have being apart from particulars” (pp. 164-165).

Now he begins to speak in general about things that have no material. What this will apply to is as yet unspecified.

“But as was said, the highest level of material and the form are one and the same thing; the former potentially, the latter actively, so that looking for what is responsible for their being one is like looking for a cause of one thing; for each of them is a certain one, and what is in potency and what is in activity are in a certain way one thing. Therefore there is nothing else responsible, unless in the case of something that moves it from potency to being-at-work, but everything that does not have material is simply something that is itself one” (p. 165).

Back again to things that do have material, here he makes a point I alluded to earlier. One aspect of Aristotle’s hylomorphism is this identity of the most specific material with the form (for things that have material). Each independent thing has its own entelechy that is the primary cause of its being what it is.

Finally, he reiterates that things without material do not require anything external to give them unity.

Next in this series: The Innovation of Potentiality-Actuality