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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Critique of the Megarians