Tag: Metaphysics

The What-It-Is of Things

We’ve now reached the beginning of a much more sustained argument at the heart of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The sequence of books Zeta, Eta, and Theta (VII-IX in Sachs’ translation) has a much tighter cohesion than the Metaphysics as a whole. These are commonly referred to by scholars as the “central” books. Here I will cover book Zeta (VII).

We have also reached the transition from initial questions about being (einai) to the development of answers that will be expressed entirely in terms of ousia (substance, essence, thinghood, the what-it-is of things). Neither Aristotle’s questions nor his answers have to do with being in the sense of existence.

“[Being] signifies what something is and a this, but also of what sort or how much something is, or any of the other things attributed in that way. But… the way that is first among these is what something is, which indicates its thinghood” (book VII chapter 1, Sachs tr., p. 117).

“[S]omeone might be at an impasse whether each thing such as walking or healing or sitting is or is not a being, and similarly with anything else whatever of such a kind; for none of them is either of such a nature as to be by itself nor capable of being separated from an independent thing” (ibid).

I would call these “things”, but not “beings” or “independent things”.

Rather than attempting to speak about existence in general, he is concerned about the relative “independence” of particular things that are to be understood first in terms of what they are. This independence signifies both an internal cohesiveness associated with relative persistence in time, and a relative independence from us. Independent things are not just random phenomena, and they do not arbitrarily bend to our will. On the other hand, what they are can only be developed discursively, which implicitly involves us and our interpretation and judgment.

“[T]hinghood is primary in every sense, in articulation, in knowledge, and in time. For none of the other ways of attributing being is separate, but only this one; and in articulation this one is primary (for in the articulation of anything, that of its thinghood must be included); and we believe that we know each thing most of all when we know what it is…. And in fact, the thing that has been sought both anciently and now, and always, and is always a source of impasses, ‘what is being?’, is just this: what is thinghood?” (pp. 117-118).

Here he pretty much literally says that asking the famous “question of being” is asking the wrong question. From here on out, the inquiry will revolve around the status of definite “things” rather than of being in general — that is to say, it will focus on what things are, and on their “independence” as characterized above. We should still think of definite things in a higher-order way and not just one by one, but we will never leave definiteness behind.

Now the dialectical work begins in earnest. The first problem he addresses is that the preliminary separation of ousia from the more derivative senses of being was effected by treating the ousia as a kind of substrate in which all attributes inhere. This leads to the thought that it must after all be matter, but that cannot be right, because it is the form that allows something to be picked out as separate.

“But since at the start we distinguished in how many ways we define thinghood, and of these a certain one seemed to be what something keeps on being in order to be, one ought to examine that. And first let us say some things about it from the standpoint of logic, because what it is for each thing to be is what is said of it in its own right” (chapter 4, p. 120).

Again, it is vital to emphasize how questions of what things are are to be answered in terms of what is properly said about them. We will be concerned with proprieties of interpretation and judgment.

His concern with definiteness leads to a consideration of definition, and what it is to be a definable thing.

“Therefore there is a what-it-is-for-it-to-be of all those things of which the articulation is a definition. And it is not the case that there is a definition whenever a name means the same thing as a statement…, but only if the statement articulates some primary thing, and things of this kind are all those that are not articulated by attributing one thing to another” (p. 122).

Again, not being attributed to something else has to do with “independence”.

“This is clear: that a definition and a what-it-is-for-something-to-be belong primarily and simply to independent things. It is not that they do not belong to the other things in a way that resembles this, but only that they do not belong to them primarily…. And for this reason there will be a statement and a definition of a pale person, but in a different way than of pale, or of an independent thing” (p. 123).

“Therefore in one sense there will not be a definition of anything, nor a what-it-is-for-something-to-be present in anything, except of and in independent things, but in another sense there will be” (chapter 5, p. 124).

Independent things come first for Aristotle, but this emphasis is not exclusive. Derivative things — and corresponding things said in categories other than that of substance or thinghood — will also be taken into account.

“But one must investigate whether each thing is the same as, or different from, what it keeps on being in order to be” (chapter 6, p. 125).

“For there is knowledge of anything only when we recognize what it is for it to be…. Therefore the good and being-good must be one thing, and so too the beautiful and being-beautiful…. So by these arguments, each thing itself and what it is for it to be are one and the same, in a way that is not incidental, and this follows also because knowing each of them is just this: to know what it is for it to be…. In what way, then, what it is for something to be is the same as each thing, and in what way it is not, have been said” (pp. 126-127).

Once again, he directs our attention to definite form (or meaningful “content”, in the way many contemporary philosophers speak). Whether we call it form or content, the idea is to focus on meaning, and on wherever meaning is concentrated.

Next he begins to raise issues related to becoming.

“Of the things that come into being, some come about by nature, some by art, and some as a result of chance, but everything that comes into being becomes something, from something, and by the action of something… [J]ust as is always said, coming into being would be impossible if there were nothing present beforehand” (chapter 7, p. 128).

This is Aristotle’s more specific version of what Leibniz calls the principle of sufficient reason. Next he explains that becoming applies only to composite wholes that include both matter and form. In the way that Aristotle thinks about these matters, it is not correct to say that the form or what-it-is-to-be a thing comes into being.

“[J]ust as one does not make the underlying thing, the bronze, so too one does not make the sphere, except in the incidental sense that the bronze sphere is a sphere, and one makes that…. Therefore it is clear that the form, or whatever one ought to call the shapeliness that is worked into the perceptible thing, does not come into being, and that coming-into-being does not even pertain to it, or to what it is for something to be (for this is what comes to be in something else…)” (chapter 8, p. 131).

“So it is clear from what has been said that what is spoken of as form or thinghood does not come into being, but the composite whole that is named in consequence of this does come into being; and it is clear that there is material present in everything that comes into being, so that it is not only this but also that…. So it is rather the case that one makes or begets a certain kind of thing out of some this, and when it has been generated it is this-thing-of-this-kind” (p. 132).

Aristotle maintains a delicate balance in speaking about form. He strongly endorses the broad Platonic thesis of the importance of form, while refusing to take literally the more specific Platonic suggestions about the independence of form, which Plato’s other students elevated to a dogma.

“Therefore it is clear that the causal responsibility attributed to the forms, in the sense that some people are in the habit of speaking of the forms, as if they are certain things apart from the particulars, is of no use, at least in relation to coming-into-being and independent things” (ibid).

According to Aristotle, by virtue of their very “independence”, the kind of forms advocated by the Platonists would be cut off from the world, and could not possibly serve as causes of anything.

“[I]n a certain way everything comes into being from something that shares its name, just as the things do that are by nature (for instance a house comes from a house, insofar as it comes about by the action of an intelligence, since its form is the art by which it is built)” (chapter 9, p. 133).

In the natural case, living beings beget other similar living beings.

“And it is not only about thinghood that the argument shows that the form does not come into being, but in the same way, the argument concerns in common all the primary things, such as how much something is, and of what sort, and the other ways of attributing being” (p. 134).

In general, Aristotle wants to insist that none of the determinations according to the Categories, considered just in themselves, “comes into being”. It is always the composite things that have such determinations that come to have them.

“But what is to be understood from these considerations as peculiar to an independent thing is that a different independent thing that is fully at work, and that makes it, must be present beforehand” (ibid).

Next he asks whether the articulation of the parts must be present in the articulation of the whole.

The conclusion is that “[A]ll those things that are parts in the sense of material, and into which something divides up as into material, are derivative from the whole; but either all or some of those that are parts in the sense of belonging to the articulation and to the thinghood that is disclosed in the articulation, are more primary than it” (chapter 10, p. 137).

“And since the soul of an animal (for this is the thinghood of an ensouled thing) is its thinghood as disclosed in speech, and its form, and what it is for a certain sort of body to be (at any rate, each part of it, if it is defined well, will not be defined without its activity, which will not belong to it without perception), either all or some parts of the soul are more primary than the whole animal as a composite, and similarly with each particular kind, but the body and its parts are derivative from the thinghood in this sense, and it is not the thinghood but the composite whole that divides up into these as material” (ibid).

The soul of an animal is its form. This is a profound but difficult teaching. As for Plato, for Aristotle too forms as such are not supposed to be subject to becoming. This would seem to make them static. But at the very least, souls belong to hylomorphic composites that are subject to becoming. And it seems that souls themselves are involved in actions and passions (except from the standpoint of Plotinus, which is not Aristotle’s).

Something is clearly being said in more than one way here. The apparently static character of form will eventually be superseded or supplemented in the account of potentiality and actuality that is to come in book IX.

“But a human being or a horse in general, and the things that are in this way after the manner of particulars, but universally, are not thinghood but a certain kind of composite of such-and-such an articulation with such-and-such material, understood universally, while the particular, composed of ultimate material, is already Socrates, and similarly in other cases” (ibid).

Here he carefully distinguishes between an abstract universal of a kind of composite, and the what-it is of composites of that kind — e.g., between “a horse” and the what-it-is of a horse. Putting this together with what was said earlier, we can conclude that the what-it-is of a horse will be equivalent to “being a horse”, but distinct from “the horse itself” as an independent thing and a composite.

“But the parts of a thing’s articulation belong only to the form, and the articulation is of the universal; for being a circle and a circle, or being a soul and the soul, are the same thing. But of the composite already there is no definition” (ibid).

All composites are particulars, and for Aristotle no particular as such is definable.

“But the material is not known in its own right. And one sort of material is perceptible, the other intelligible, the perceptible, for example, bronze or wood, or any movable material, while the intelligible is that which is present in perceptible things, taken not as perceptible, as for example mathematical things are” (p. 138).

What is known in its own right seems to be only form, the what-it-is. The qualification “in its own right” is important. It leaves space open for other things to still be known in an indirect way.

“One might reasonably be confused about what sort of things are parts of the form, and what sort are parts not of that but of the all-inclusive composite. And yet so long as this is not clear, it is not possible to define any particular thing, since the definition is of the universal and the form; so if it is not clear what sort of parts are present in the manner of material and what sort not, neither will the articulation of the thing be evident…. For example, the form of a human being always appears in flesh and bones and parts of that sort: are they then also parts of the form and of its articulation? Or are they not, but just material…?” (chapter 11, pp. 138-139).

He points out that it will not always be easy to distinguish what belongs to a form itself, and what belongs to a composite that has the form.

“[T]hat is why tracing everything back in this way, and taking away the material, is overly fastidious, for presumably some things are such-and-such in such-and-such, or such-and-such in such-and-such a condition…. For it is not a hand of any sort that is part of a human being, but one capable of accomplishing its work” (p. 140).

The example of the hand introduces a distinction by that-for-the-sake-of-which, that could be applied even if we said the form was the same. Here we have a first intimation that the what-it-is of something may after all not be adequately characterized by form alone.

“And it is clear too that the soul is the primary independent thing, while the body is material, and the human being or animal in general is what is made of both, understood universally; and if it is also true that the soul of Socrates is Socrates, then names such as Socrates or Corsicus have two meanings (for some people mean by them a soul, but others the composite), but if Socrates is simply this soul plus this body, then the particular is just like the universal” (ibid).

“What, then, the what-it-keeps-on-being-in-order-to-be-at-all of something is, have been stated in a general way that applies to everything…. For the thinghood of a composite is the form that is in it, and the whole that is made out of that and the material is called an independent thing” (p. 141).

Here he dips back to a more categorical identification of the what-it-is with form.

Next he raises the question, what makes a definition one? This seems to be a digression or supplementary remark, though possibly it anticipates further criticism of Platonism that lies ahead.

The discussion of definition is narrowed to “definitions that result from divisions” (chapter 12, p. 143), in which kinds of things are defined by their distinctions from other kinds within some common scope. This is sometimes known as Platonic division, and it is illustrated in Plato’s Sophist.

Definition will be explained in terms of difference, but Aristotle’s notion that gets translated as “difference” has an important nuance we might not anticipate. In book V he says “All those things are called different that are other but the same in some respect” (p. 89). Naively, we might expect “different” to mean the same as “other”, but in the translation here Aristotle uses “other” for the unrestricted case that includes things with no relation at all to one another, and “different” only for things that are comparable in some way, and therefore must also have some underlying similarity. Thus he avoids what Hegel calls the “problem of indifference”.

“But surely it is necessary also to divide the difference into its differences; for instance, provided-with-feet is a difference belonging to animal, and next one must recognize the difference within animal-provided-with feet insofar as it is provided with feet, so that one ought not to say that of what is provided with feet, one sort is feathered and another featherless, if one is to state things properly (for one would do this rather out of ineptness), but instead that one sort is cloven-footed and the other uncloven, since these are differences that belong to a foot, cloven-footedness being a certain kind of footedness. And one wants to go on continually in this way until one gets to things that have no differences; and then there will be just as many kinds of foot as there are specific differences, and the kinds of animals-provided-with-feet will be equal in number to the differences. So if that is the way these things are, it is clear that the difference that brings the statement to completion will be the thinghood of the thing and its definition” (ibid).

“So if a difference comes into being out of a difference, the one that brings this to completion will be the form and the thinghood of the thing; but if a difference is brought in incidentally, such as if one were to divide what is provided with feet into one sort that is white and another sort that is black, there would be as many differences as cuts. Therefore it is clear that a definition is an articulation consisting of differences, and arising out of the last of these when it is right…. But there is no ordering in the thinghood of the thing; for how is one to think of one thing as following and another preceding?” (p. 144).

Here he omits the critique of the binary character of Platonic division that he makes in Parts of Animals book I. As he expounds here, in a hierarchical ordering of differences, it is the most specific difference at the bottom of such a hierarchy that picks out the what-it-is of a thing. But he also wants to say that the what-it-is itself is a simple unity without internal ordering. Next he moves to explicit criticism of some Platonic positions.

“[I]t seems to some people that the universal is responsible for a thing most of all, and that the universal is a governing source, and for that reason let us go over this. For it seems to be impossible for any of the things meant universally to be thinghood. For in the first place, the thinghood of each thing is what each is on its own, which does not belong to it by virtue of anything else, while the universal… is of such a nature as to belong to more than one thing” (chapter 13, p. 144).

“Again, thinghood is what is not attributed to any underlying thing, but the universal is always attributed to some underlying thing…. And what’s more, it is impossible and absurd that what is a this and an independent thing, if it is composed of anything, should have as a component… an of-such-a-sort…. So for those who pay attention, it is clear from these things that nothing that belongs to anything universally is thinghood, and that none of the things attributed as common properties signifies a this, but only an of-this-sort” (p. 145).

Platonic forms are generally considered to have universal import, although I think Plotinus argues that there are also forms of individuals.

“But there is an impasse. For if no independent thing can be made of universals, … and no independent thing admits of being composed of active independent things, every independent thing would not be composed of parts, so that there could not be an articulation in speech of any independent thing…. Therefore, there will be no definition of anything; or in a certain way there will be and in a certain way there will not. And what is said will be more clear from things said later” (p. 146).

More generally, independent things seem to be particulars, and Aristotle says that properly speaking, there are no definitions of particulars. That of course does not prevent dialectical inquiry and clarification about them.

“But it is also clear from these same things what follows for those who say that the forms are independent things and separate, and at the same time make the form be a compound of a general class and its specific differences…. [I]f it is impossible for things to be this way, it is clear that there are not forms of perceptible things in the way that some people say there are” (chapter 14, pp. 146-147).

Another paradox about Platonic forms — seemingly acknowledged by Plato himself in the first part of the Parmenides — is that they are supposed to have universal import, but themselves to be a kind of immaterial particulars.

“[T]here is destruction of all those things that are called independent things…, but of the articulation there is no destruction…. And this is why there is no definition of nor demonstration about particular perceptible independent things…. For this reason it is necessary, when one is making distinctions aiming at a definition of any of the particulars, not to be unaware that it is always subject to be annulled, since the thing cannot be defined” (chapter 15, pp. 147-148).

Independent things are destroyed, but their what-it-is is not. Here he mentions explicitly that particulars cannot be defined, though this does not stop us from inquiring and making judgments about them.

“But neither can any form be defined, since they say that the form is a particular and is separate; but it is necessary that an articulation be composed of words, and that the definer will not make up a word (since it will be unknown), but the words must be names given in common to everything, so that they must also belong to something else” (p. 148).

Strictly speaking, all definitions without exception implicitly depend on other definitions. If the words used in the definition of a thing did not themselves have definitions, we could not understand them. The larger our web of connected, consistent definitions, the greater the confidence we can have in it. I think another relevant point is that we don’t have knowledge of the correctness of any isolated definition, though we could have knowledge of the compatibilities and incompatibilities of one definition with others. Definitions in general are a matter of dialectic and judgment.

He mentions problems involved with the definition of unique things. The errors here are an instance of more general errors in specifying too much or too little for sound identification of unique instances of kinds.

“For people miss the mark not only by adding things of a sort such that, if they were taken away, the sun would still be the sun, such as ‘going around the earth’, or ‘hidden at night’ (for if it were to stand still or shine at night it would no longer be the sun, but it would be absurd if it were not, since ‘the sun’ signifies a certain independent thing), but also by including things that admit of applying to something else, such that, if another thing of that kind came into being, it would clearly be a sun; therefore the articulation is common, but the sun was understood to be among the particular things” (p. 149).

“And it is clear that most of what seem to be independent things are potencies, not only the parts of animals…, but also earth and fire and air, since none of them is one, but just like a heap, until some one thing is ripened or born out of them (chapter 16, p. 149, emphasis added).

The seeming is all-important here. He actually means to deny that these are independent things. Only when “some one thing is ripened or born” might there then be an independent thing.

“And since one is meant in just the same way as being, and the thinghood that belongs to what is one is also one, and those things of which the thinghood is one are one in number, it is clear that neither oneness nor being admits of being the thinghood of things…. [B]eing and oneness are thinghood more so than are sourcehood and elementality and causality, but it is not at all even these…; for thinghood belongs to nothing other than itself and that which has it, of which it is the thinghood” (p. 150).

Aristotle here clearly emphasizes a self-containedness of the what-it-is of a thing. This seems to be motivated by a concern correlative to that for independence in things. Leibniz would later take this to an extreme with his monadology. Hegel goes in the other direction, questioning the self-containedness of a what-it-is. I think Aristotle is implicitly maintaining a Kant-like duality between the self-containedness of an undefinable indemonstrable what-it-is in itself, and his view of the difference-based character of definitions and knowledge, which I think also ought to extend to what I have called relatively well-founded belief. We could perhaps then resolve the duality between self-containedness and knowledge, somewhat in the way that Hegel resolves the Kantian ones, while at the same time preserving an Aristotelian respect for the independence in things.

“And yet, even if we had not seen the stars, nevertheless I suppose there would have been everlasting independent things besides the ones we know, so that now too, even if we cannot say what they are, it is still presumably necessary that there be some. That, then, none of the things attributed universally is an independent thing, and that no independent thing is composed of independent things, is clear” (pp. 150-151).

Now he really sounds like Kant: “even if we cannot say what they are, it is still presumably necessary that there be some.”

“But what one ought to say thinghood is, and of what sort it is, let us speak again, as though making another start; for perhaps from these discussions there will also be clarity about that kind of thinghood that is separate from perceptible independent things. Now since thinghood is a certain kind of source and cause, one must go after it from that starting point. And the why of things is always sought after in this way: why one thing belongs to something else” (chapter 17, p. 151).

Now he explicitly suggests that there is something separate from perceptible independent things.

“Now why something is itself is not a quest after anything…. But one could search for the reason why a human being is a certain sort of animal…. For example, ‘why does it thunder?’ is, ‘why does noise come about in the clouds?’, for thus it is one thing’s belonging to another that is inquired after…. It is clear, then, that one is looking for what is responsible, which in some case, as presumably with a house or a bed, is that for the sake of which it is, but in some cases it is that which first set the thing in motion, since this too is responsible for it. But while the latter is looked for in cases of coming into being and destruction, the former applies even to the being of something” (pp. 151-152).

Identity by itself cannot be a reason for anything. Meanwhile, he mentions that that-for-the-sake-of-which also applies to things outside of becoming.

“But the thing in question escapes notice most of all in those cases in which one thing is not said to belong to another, as when the thing one is seeking is what a human being is, because one states it simply and does not distinguish that these things are this thing. But it is necessary to inquire by dividing things at the joints; and if one does not do this, it becomes a cross between inquiring after nothing and inquiring after something…. Accordingly, it is clear that in the case of simple things, there is no process of inquiry or teaching, but a different way of questing after such things” (p. 152).

Knowledge for Aristotle is concerned with things “belonging” to other things. It consists of things said of other things. Of particulars or singular things taken in isolation, may we have acquaintance or experience. We may have dialectical inquiry, and perhaps good judgment, but not knowledge.

Causes and Sources

Aristotle distinguishes arché (principle or source) from aitia (cause or reason why). He frequently uses the metonymic shorthand of saying “being” for the sources and causes of being that are the proper concern of first philosophy.

Both “source” and “cause” get chapters in Metaphysics book V’s compendium of things meant in many ways. Sources and causes are also discussed in the short book VI. I have not written about “sources” before. The main effect of book VI though, as we will see, is to significantly narrow the scope of first philosophy.

I very frequently point out issues related to things said in many ways, usually providing a link to my old short post Univocity. This is an extremely important topic. It goes beyond the use of language to the real diversity of the things spoken of. However, book V has 30 chapters, each devoted to a different specific term or terms, so I won’t try to summarize them all. I already covered the chapter on being and “is”. Here I’ll just cherry-pick basic information about sources and a remark on “that for the sake of which” from book V, then go on to a brief discussion of book VI.

All causes are sources (book V chapter 1, Sachs tr., p. 77), but not all sources are causes.

“And what is common to all sources is to be the first thing from which something is or comes to be or is known; of these, some are present within while others are outside. For this reason nature is a source, as are elements, thinking, choice, thinghood, and that for the sake of which; for the good and the beautiful are sources of both the knowledge and the motion of many things” (ibid).

Aristotle’s concept of nature applies especially to living organisms, whose “nature” is an internal source of motion.

Elements are primitive constituents of bodies.

Thinking and choice are additional sources available to rational animals.

The what-it-is of a thing is a source. With sincerest respect for the outstanding translator, I disagree with the choice of “thinghood” for the ousia that Aristotle identifies with the what-it-is of a thing. (But then, I still guardedly use the English terms substance, potentiality, and actuality that I learned originally, to all of which Sachs raises quite legitimate objections. In my opinion, for instance, any of the translations formally proposed for ousia (substance, essence, thinghood, etc.) needs to be used in a guarded way, so I have stuck with the one I learned. The only way I see to get around this is to instead rely on Aristotle’s identification of ousia with the what-it-is, which translates very straightforwardly, and I am now starting to do this some of the time.)

Interestingly, in the above enumeration of sources only one of the four causes is mentioned explicitly: that for the sake of which. Not only that, but in the text the good and the beautiful seems to refer back to what was just mentioned as that for the sake of which.

Mentioning that-for-the-sake-of-which again in the chapter on cause, he explicitly identifies the end with the good.

“But the semen and the doctor and the legislator, and generally the maker, are all causes as that from which the source of change or rest is, but other things as the end or the good of the remaining ones. For that-for-the-sake-of which means to be the best thing and the end of the other things, and let it make no difference to say the good itself or the apparent good” (book V chapter 2, p. 79).

The whole reason the end or that-for-the-sake-of-which predominates over all the other causes in Aristotle is its association with the good.

Moving on to book VI, “[E]very kind of knowledge that is discursive, or takes part in any way in thinking things through, is concerned with causes and sources, of either a precise or a simpler kind” (chapter 1, p. 109).

“[I]t is clear by… a review of examples that there is no demonstration of the thinghood or the what-it-is of things, but some other means of pointing to it” (ibid).

The what-it-is of things is an object of dialectical inquiry rather than demonstration.

“[T]he study of nature concerns things that are indeed separate, but are not motionless, while some mathematics concerns things that are indeed motionless, but presumably not separate, but in truth in material; but the first contemplative study concerns things that are both separate and motionless.”

What Aristotle calls “independent” things he also calls “separate”. This just means that they count as bona fide things having some reality of their own, and are not just any phenomena. First philosophy for Aristotle is concerned especially — though certainly not exclusively, if the text of the Metaphysics serves as a witness — with things that are both separate and unmoved.

“And while it is necessary that all causes be everlasting, these are so most of all, since they are responsible for what appears to us of the divine” (p. 110).

This is why the subject of the Metaphysics is sometimes seen as a kind of theology. Aristotle’s language here carefully delineates his concern in this regard as what appears to us of the divine. The theology here will be purely “natural”. It will not address or assume any specific tradition or revelation, but only what is openly accessible to the inquiry and experience of all rational animals.

It seems quite significant that he says “all causes” are everlasting. A billiard ball clunking into another billiard ball is just an event, not a cause at all for Aristotle. Circumstances affecting the outcomes of events will not be causes either. Form, matter, ends, and sources of motion themselves, he is saying, are not subject to coming-to-be and perishing as composite things are. But circumstances are subject to coming-to-be and perishing, which is why they don’t qualify as causes.

Modern science, on the other hand, depends on a notion of cause that has mostly to do with circumstances being the case or not. Neither notion of cause invalidates the other, but we have to be very careful to avoid confusion when we move back and forth from one to the other.

“Now if there were no other independent thing besides the composite natural ones, the study of nature would be the primary kind of knowledge; but if there is some motionless independent thing, the knowledge of this precedes it and is first philosophy, and it is universal in just that way, because it is first” (p. 111).

This is very important. Normally, universality is associated with classes and abstractions. Here he implies there is an alternate path to speaking about “all things”, by way of the dependency of all concrete things on causes, and thereby on the concrete first cause that he will argue for.

Next he recalls the incidental senses in which we say things about things.

“For some things are results of capacities to produce other things, while others result from no definite art or capacity; for of what is or happens incidentally, the cause too is incidental. Therefore, since not all things are or happen necessarily and always, but most things are and happen for the most part, it is necessary that there be incidental being…. [I]t is clear that there is no knowledge of what is incidental, since all knowledge is of what is so always or for the most part — for how else will anyone learn or teach? For it is necessary to make something definite by means of what it is always or for the most part” (p. 113).

In a somewhat Kant-like way, he is saying we have to recognize that there is incidental being, but we cannot have knowledge of it in the proper sense because incidental being is inherently particular. Following the shorthand established before, incidental “being” concerns things insofar as things are said of them incidentally. It refers specifically to the incidental way in which we say that the one “is” the other. Something just happens to be some way.

“That there are sources and causes which come and go without being in a process of coming-to-be or passing-away is evident. For if this were not so, all things would be by necessity, if there must be some nonincidental cause of what is coming into being or passing away. For will this particular thing be the case or not? It will be if this other thing happened, but if not, not….. Therefore it is clear that the result goes back as far as some starting point, but this no longer goes back to anything else. This, then, will be the origin of what happens in whichever way it chances to, and nothing else will be responsible for its happening. But to what sort of source and what sort of cause such tracing back has gone, whether to material or to that for the sake of which or to a mover, one needs to examine with the greatest care” (p. 114).

Since knowledge is being sought here, incidental causes will not be considered further. Nonetheless, he emphasizes that as causes in his sense, incidental causes too would be outside the sphere of becoming. This means that no event or circumstance is an incidental cause; rather, it may have an incidental cause. The incidental cause may be material or final or a mover, but not a form, because there is no form of what is incidental.

This eliminates one of the ways in which something is said of something — the incidental “is” that was laid out before — from the scope of the inquiry.

This is related to the point that keeps coming up in recent posts, that Aristotelian actuality is not what-is-the-case. The inquiry will end up being concerned precisely with this actuality that is not what-is-the-case. (Hegel in the logic of essence makes a similar move to put off to the side considerations of what is the case, but then at the very end of the logic of the concept, he brings back what is the case, as that within which we live and act. Addressing the gap between what is the case and the actual becomes our task.)

Then more briefly, Aristotle eliminates what was previously called being in the sense of true and false. It is unclear whether he sees any causes specific to this, analogous to those he explicitly mentions for the incidental case. In any case, the true and false — he says here as he also does in On Interpretation — have to do with what he calls combining and separating.

“[B]eing as the true and nonbeing as the false concern combining and separating” (p. 115).

Affirming something of something is “combining” the two somethings, and denying something of something is “separating” them. His choice of grammatical forms in naming these implies that he thinks of combining and separating as activities.

“[T]he false and the true are not in things, …but in thinking” (ibid).

Aristotle says that such combination and separation pertain only to thought, not to independent things. (Kant would say, combination and separation are judgments, not data that could be given to us. The later Kant would add that these judgments have a reflective dimension. Hegel would raise additional questions about the apparent sharpness of Aristotle’s distinction between thought and independent things, just as he does with similar distinctions in Kant. Similarly, he would question the sharpness of the distinction between sayings about things in their own right and incidental sayings.)

It is very common to hear a correspondence theory of truth attributed to Aristotle — i.e., a statement is true because it accurately characterizes the applicable state of affairs. That is just not what he says about truth and falsity, as we just saw. It is not a question of good representation of — or accurate pointing to — something external, but rather of good combining and separating within what is said.

There are many things we might wish Aristotle said more about, like the tantalizing suggestion here about combining and separating. But it is has been estimated that as much as two-thirds of his writings were never circulated in manuscript in the ancient world, and therefore have not come down to us (see Fortunes of Aristotle.)

Of the ways of saying “is” enumerated in book V, this leaves the saying of the what-it-is of things with its metonymic satellites in the other categories, and the saying in relation to potentiality and actuality still on the table.

Next he will take an in-depth look at the what-it-is of things and our saying of it.

(One of the things I admire most about Aristotle is his way of speaking simultaneously and even-handedly both about real things that have independence from us, and about the ways and the activity of our saying of and about them. I think this means he might have been receptive to Hegel’s refinements mentioned above, because Hegel recognizably aims to extend the same kind of Aristotelian evenhandedness to these cases as well. Aristotle could still say that these additional cases point to the focal case of the what-it-is of things, though I think the incidental and the true and false would be related to it as something like modal extensions, rather than metonymic substitutions like the other categories.)

Being as Such?

Aristotle begins book IV of the Metaphysics by saying that after all, “There is a kind of knowledge that contemplates what is insofar as it is, and what belongs to it in its own right” (p. 53).

To understand what this really means, we need to consider book IV as a whole, also taking into account in advance Aristotle’s disambiguation of “being” and “is” in book V. (There is another enumeration of the meanings of being in book VI, but it is does not really add anything to the one in book V.)

Here in book IV he adds the new element that “Being is meant in more than one way, but pointing toward one meaning and some one nature rather than ambiguously…. just as every healthful thing points toward health…. For some things are called beings because they are independent things, others because they are attributes of independent things, others because they are ways into thinghood, or destructions or deprivations or qualities of thinghood, or are productive or generative of independent things, or of things spoken of in relation to independent things, or negations of any of these or of thinghood, on account of which we say even nonbeing is nonbeing. So just as there is one kind of knowledge of healthful things, this is similarly the case with the other things as well” (pp. 53-54).

Classically, “said in many ways” means said homonymously, like “flies” in “Time flies like an arrow” and “Fruit flies like bananas”. The same sound and spelling are used for different meanings that have no discernible relation to one another.

The comparison to health gives a pretty clear indication of what he wants to say here. But the “one thing” that is pointed to in the same way that health is pointed to is not “being”, but rather the concept of what Sachs calls independent things (“substances”).

In the disambiguation in book V, Aristotle says “just as many things are said to be in their own right as are meant by the modes of predication”. This is an allusion to the various ways in which things are said, which are enumerated and discussed in an elementary way in the Categories. Ousia (“substance”, or what Sachs calls “independent thinghood”) has a somewhat privileged place in this enumeration — we might say, just because it is the one that the others “point” to. Ousia will later turn out to be the “what it is” or “what it was to have been” of a thing.

The uses of “is” that he mentions are exclusively the transitive ones. He does not even mention any case like “Socrates is, full stop”. There is absolutely no mention of an “is” of existence, as opposed to the “is” of saying something about something. Saying something about something is the only role of “is” here, and this is strongly borne out by the remainder of the text of book IV.

Saying the what-it-is of something of that thing is for Aristotle the central, focal way of saying something about something in general. The other ways of saying something about something form what linguists might call a family of metonymies clustered around the saying of what-it-is. Metonymy involves indirectly referring to a thing by referring to one of its attributes. By contrast, Aristotle takes the what-it-is to refer directly to the thing (which is probably why Sachs calls the what-it-is the “thinghood” of the thing).

All the ways of saying something about something have in common that they are ways of saying something about something. In Sachs’ language, they are “modes of predication”. But the saying of what-it-is serves as a kind of paradigm for the rest.

The main body of book IV is actually a long polemic against the Sophists and the friends of Cratylus. It is about the conditions of rational discourse.

A number of the Sophists outraged Aristotle by making flagrantly self-contradictory assertions, and claiming a right to do so. Very uncharacteristically, Aristotle seems to lose his cool over this. He goes on and on about it, beating the dead horse into the ground. He does so because for him this is a violation of fundamental ethics.

To deliberately assert something and its contrary, or to claim a right to do so, is not just to talk nonsense. Aristotle implies it is deeply immoral — the deepest possible violation of intellectual integrity and the integrity of thought. As he says, it is completely impossible to have dialogue with someone who insists on this, and dialogue is the foundation of reason. For Aristotle, such a person hardly even qualifies as human.

Kant and Hegel treat unity of apperception not as something that spontaneously happens, but as the fulfillment of an ethical norm. When we commit ourselves to something by asserting it, we are then also morally committed to the assertion of what follows from it, and even more so to the denial of what is contrary to it. Aristotle’s outrage shows how strongly he shares this point of view.

The friends of Cratylus were radical Heracliteans. Heraclitus famously said that all things flow, and you cannot step in the same river twice. Cratylus claimed it would be more correct to say you cannot step in the same river once. Effectively, this means there is no such thing as being the same at all, so “same” has no real meaning. But if there is no sameness, there can be no contradiction, because contradiction is saying contrary things about the same thing. So the friends of Cratylus too ended up justifying what we would regard as self-contradictory statements.

So when Aristotle is concerned to assert that there is after all a knowledge of being as such and that it is the business of the philosopher to have it, all the evidence in book IV leads to the conclusion that what he is really saying is that the philosopher doesn’t just believe but knows that contraries are not true of the same thing in the same respect at the same time. This is simultaneously a genuine knowledge and a condition of any possible dialogue, a moral imperative as Kant would say.

The only other thing besides the principle of non-contradiction that Aristotle mentions in book IV as applying to being as such is mathematical axioms, which are similarly supposed to be true of all things whatsoever (he does not enumerate them).

Famously, Aquinas read Aristotle’s notion of “pointing toward one meaning” as a kind of analogy. The notion of an analogy of being is better considered as original to Aquinas. Analogy is a symmetrical relationship. If A is analogous to B, we should be able to conclude that B is similarly analogous to A.

But Aristotle’s example of the relation of health to healthful things is not symmetrical; health has a kind of logical primacy over healthful things, and Aristotle very explicitly gives the saying of what-it-is a similar primacy over its metonymic relatives corresponding to the other categories. That is the very means by which he gets from the non-univocity of being to a single concept. That concept is ousia — i.e., “substance”, “essence”, what Sachs calls “thinghood”, or the what-it-is of a thing.

Some commentators have argued that the subject of the Metaphysics is “ousiology”. That seems more accurate than the conventional “ontology”. In any case, Aristotle’s focus is on the conditions of meaningful saying, and especially on saying of what-it-is — not at all on being in the sense of existence.

In the big picture, existence as such is just not an important philosophical concept for Aristotle. What something is and why it is that way are what he is concerned with.

There will be a further level beyond this, in which we will further distinguish the saying of what something is by looking at it in potential and in act, where these terms are understood in a way that is independent of motion, and instead is oriented toward that-for-the-sake-of-which and the good.

Entelechy

I think “entelechy” — or what Kant called internal teleology — is probably the most important guiding concept of Aristotle’s Metaphysics (rather than the “Being” championed by many). There is a great deal to unpack from this single word. Here is a start.

The primary examples of entelechy are living beings. Aristotle also suggests that pure thought (nous) is an entelechy. I think the same could be said of ethos, or ethical culture.

Sachs’ invaluable glossary explains the Greek entelecheia as “A fusion of the idea of completeness with that of continuity or persistence. Aristotle invents the word by combining enteles (complete, full-grown) with echein (= hexis, to be a certain way by the continuing effort of holding on in that condition), while at the same time punning on endelecheia (persistence) by inserting telos (completion [what I have been calling “end”]). This is a three-ring circus of a word, at the heart of everything in Aristotle’s thinking, including the definition of motion. Its power to carry meaning depends on the working together of all the things Aristotle has packed into it. Some commentators explain it as meaning being-at-an-end, which misses the point entirely” (p. li).

He points out the etymological connection of echein (literally, “to have”) with hexis, or “Any condition that a thing has by its own effort of holding on in a certain way. Examples are knowledge and all virtues or excellences, including those of the body such as health” (p. xlix).

I previously suggested a very literal rendering of entelechy as something like “in [it] end having”, with the implication that it more directly means being subject to internal teleology. As Sachs says, this is very different from just being at an end. The latter would imply a completely static condition not subject to further development.

Entelechy is Aristotle’s more sophisticated, “higher order” notion of an active preservation of stability within change, which in the argument of the Metaphysics accompanies the eventual replacement of the initial definition of ousia (“substance”, which Sachs renders as “thinghood”) from the Categories as a kind of substrate or logical “subject” in which properties inhere. What he replaced that notion of substrate with was a series of more refined notions of ousia as form, “what it was to have been” a thing, and what I am still calling potentiality and actuality.

Whether we speak of active preservation of stability within change or simply of persistence (implicitly in contrast with its absence), time is involved. Reference to change makes that indisputable. Persistence is a bit more of a gray area, since in popular terms lasting forever is associated with eternity, but strictly speaking, “eternal” means outside of time (which is why the scholastics invented the different word “sempiternal” for things said to persist forever in time).

Sachs’ translation for what I will continue to simply anglicize as “entelechy” is “being-at-work-staying-itself”. This is closely related to energeia (“actuality”), which Sachs renders as being-at-work. I think it is important that there is nothing literally corresponding to “being” in the Greek for either of these, and want to avoid importing connotations of Avicennist, Thomist, Scotist, or Heideggerian views of the special status of being into Aristotle.

I also think “staying itself” tends to suggest a purely static notion of the identity of a “self” that is foreign to Aristotle. Sachs might respond that “at-work-staying” negates the connotation that “itself” is static, but I don’t think this necessarily follows. It might take significant effort to remain exactly the same, but this is not what Aristotle is getting at. To be substantially the same is not to be exactly the same.

Entelechy is intimately connected with actuality (energeia) and potentiality (dynamis). As Sachs points out, “actuality” in common contemporary usage has connotations of being a simple matter of fact that are at odds with the teleological, value-oriented significance of energeia in Aristotle.

“The primary sense of the word [entelecheia] belongs to activities that are not motions; examples of these are seeing, knowing, and happiness, each understood as an ongoing state that is complete at every instant, but the human being that can experience them is similarly a being-at-work, constituted by metabolism. Since the end and completion of any genuine being is its being-at-work, the meaning of the word [energeia] converges [with that of entelecheia]” (p. li).

If we take “being” purely as a transitive verb (as it is indeed properly meant here), my objection above to connotations of its use as a noun could be overcome. But in English, “being” remains ambiguous, and it is not there in the Greek.

Further, though it has the good connotation of something being in process, “at work” also introduces all the ambiguities of agency and efficient causation, in which overly strong modern notions tend to get inappropriately substituted for Aristotle’s carefully refined “weak” concepts. Aristotle very deliberately develops weak concepts for these because — unlike most of the scholastics and the moderns — he thinks of all agency and causing of motion as subordinate to value-oriented entelechy and teleology.

Sachs’ glossary explains dynamis (“potentiality”, which he calls “potency”) as “The innate tendency of anything to be at work in ways characteristic of the kind of thing it is…. A potency in its proper sense will always emerge into activity, when the proper conditions are present and nothing prevents it” (p. lvii).

He notes that it has a secondary sense of mere logical possibility, but says Aristotle never uses it that way.

I fully agree that potentiality in Aristotle never means mere logical possibility. Kant’s notion of “real” as distinct from logical possibility comes closer, but it still lacks any teleological dimension. I think Paul Ricoeur’s “capability” comes closer than Sachs’ “potency”, because it it seems more suggestive of a relation to an end.

However, I am very sympathetic to Gwenaëlle Aubry’s argument that Aristotelian dynamis should not be understood in terms of any kind of Platonic or scholastic power. “Power” once again suggests all the ambiguities of efficient causality. I think such a reading is incompatible with the primacy of final causality over efficient causality in Aristotle. (Historically, of course, the divergence of scholastic “power” from Aristotelian dynamis was accompanied by assertions of a very non-Aristotelian primacy of efficient causality.) To my ear, “potency” has the same effect. (See also Potentiality and Ends.)

Sachs had said that entelechy is also at the heart of Aristotle’s definition of motion. (Motion with respect to place is only one kind of motion for Aristotle; he also speaks of changes with respect to substance, quality, and quantity as “motions”. He also says there are activities that are not motions.)

Properly speaking, motion (kinesis) for Aristotle is only “in” the thing that is moved. That is how it becomes reasonable to speak of unmoved movers. A moved mover is indeed moved, but not insofar as it is itself a mover, only in some other way. He says there is no “motion” in being-at-work or actuality as such, but there is activity.

In book III chapter 1 of the Physics, Aristotle says that “the fulfillment [energeia] of what is potentially, as such, is motion — e.g. the fulfillment of what is alterable, as alterable, is alteration; … of what can come to be and pass away, coming to be and passing away; of what can be carried along, locomotion” (Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. I, p. 343).

Sachs expresses this by saying that as long as “potency is at-work-staying-itself as a potency, there is motion” (p. lv). Otherwise said, motion is the entelechy and “actuality” of a potentiality as potentiality. As I’ve noted before, Aristotle doesn’t just divide things into actual and potential, as if they were mutually exclusive, but at times uses these notions in a layered way.

A mover (kinoun) is “Whatever causes motion in something else. The phrase ‘efficient cause’ is nowhere in Aristotle’s writings, and is highly misleading; it implies that the cause of every motion is a push or a pull…. That there should be incidental, intermediate links by which motions are passed along when things bump explains nothing. That motion should originate in something motionless is only puzzling if one assumes that what is motionless must be inert; the motionless sources of motion to which Aristotle refers are fully at-work, and in their activity there is no motion because their being-at-work is complete at every instant” (pp. lv-lvi).

It is worth noting that Aristotle has a relatively relaxed notion of completeness or perfection. We tend to define perfection in a kind of unconditional terms that are alien to him. For Aristotle in general, complete actualization or perfection is always “after a kind”, and it is supposed to be achievable. But also, it is only unmoved movers (and not organic beings) whose being-at-work is being said to be complete at every instant.

When he says “the phrase ‘efficient cause’ is nowhere in Aristotle’s writings”, he means that “efficient” is another Latin-derived term that diverges from the Greek. Aristotle in book II chapter 3 of the Physics speaks of “the primary source of the change or rest” (Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. I, p. 332), but again we have to be careful to avoid importing assumptions about what this means.

As I’ve pointed out several times before, the primary source of the change in building a house according to Aristotle is the art of building, not the carpenter or the hammer or the hammer’s blow, and everything in this whole series is a means to an end. The end of building a house, which guides the form of the whole series, is something like protection from the elements. Neither the end nor the source of motion is itself an entelechy. But the house-building example is a case of external teleology. Correspondingly, it requires an external source of motion.

Internal teleology and the entelechy that implements it are more subtle; entelechy is an in itself “unmoving” and “unchanging” activity. The things subject to motion and change in the proper sense are only indirectly moved by it (by means of some source of motion).

We might say that Kantian transcendental subjectivity and Hegelian spirit are also entelechies.

Recently I suggested that what makes Hegel’s “subjective logic” to be “subjective” is its focus on the activity of interpretation and judgment, which in fact always aims to be “objective” in the sense of reaching toward deeper truth, and has nothing at all to do with what we call “merely subjective”. This is a sense of “subjective” appropriate to what Kant calls transcendental as opposed to empirical subjectivity. This higher kind of subjectivity, characteristic of what Hegel calls “self-consciousness” and of the activity of Kantian reflective judgment, would be very well characterized as an entelechy.

I strongly suspect that what Hegel metaphorically calls “logical motion” would be expressed by Aristotle in terms of the end-governed “unmoving activity” of entelechy.

Sachs on Dialectic

My former St. John’s tutor Joe Sachs, from whom I especially learned to appreciate Aristotle’s biology, later produced a wonderful series of translations of Aristotle and Plato, on which I often rely. The first part of his introduction to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, entitled “Ways of Writing and Ways of Being”, emphasizes the Metaphysics’ dialectical character.

“Two mistakes give rise to the widespread opinion that Aristotle’s Metaphysics is not a whole. One of them is that written treatises must always be conceived deductively, even if they are presented with their highest assumptions given last. The other is the belief that, in the first place, all wholeness of thinking must be logical [i.e., deductive]” (p. xi).

Robert Pippin has argued that none of Hegel’s works is intended to implement a deductive order, and that even his Logic is fundamentally structured as a kind of narrative of a development. Previously, Paul Ricoeur developed an extensive account of the “logic” of such narrative structures. Both make very significant use of Aristotle.

Sachs notes that in Plato’s Meno, “dialectic is explained as the way of doing things that suits friendly conversation about serious questions. Unlike debate, where the aim is victory in verbal combat, dialectical speech cannot be content to say something true, but must get at the truth only by way of things the other person already understands and acknowledges” (p. xiii, emphasis added; see also Aristotelian Dialectic).

Plato is here anticipating both Aristotle’s more developed account of friendship and Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition. The ethical and more specifically “intellectual” aspects of such conversation with another person are deeply intertwined.

Sachs goes on to note that in the Topics (Aristotle’s treatise on dialectic), Aristotle explains how the same kinds of benefits can follow from a written account that does not take the literary form of a conversation, but proceeds by reasoning from “things that seem true to everyone, or to most people, or else to the wise, and of the latter either to all of them or most of them or to those who are best known and most respected” (ibid).

Sachs continues, “By writing in this way, or reading things written in this way, one will not only gain agility in thinking and become better at conversation, but one can also get at the heart of all knowledge, since dialectic ‘contains the road to the starting points of all pursuits’. Dialectical reasoning does not set down permanent beginnings such as, for example, David Hume’s declaration that all knowledge must derive from sense impressions. A dialectical inquiry might assume some opinion that equates knowledge with perception (which is just what happens in the first half of Plato’s Theaetetus), but it would do so in order to try it out and test it. This is the humble meaning of that passage in Plato’s Republic in which Socrates assigns dialectic to the fourth and highest part of his divided line, and to those knowable things ‘which speech itself gets hold of by means of its power of conversing, making its suppositions not ruling beginnings but in fact supports, like scaffoldings and springboards, in order to go up to what is beyond supposition at the beginning of everything’…. Aristotle praises Plato for inquiring whether the philosophic road is down from or up to first principles” (pp. xiii-xiv, citations omitted; see also The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle).

Aristotle also explicitly says near the beginning of the Topics that inquiries into first principles are best pursued in this dialectical way.

“It is already abundantly clear that the dialectical ascent of the Metaphysics is not simply a deduction in reverse. Various roads are traveled, that are partly parallel, partly divergent, but always finally convergent; the goal is not simply to get to an end but to get there well, to cast a variety of lights on the way that it is an end, to reinforce previous conclusions with related observations, and to reflect the true complexity of the topic, in which there is no reason to expect neatness. Such a journey involves repeatedly stopping, backing up, and partially retracing some ground that has already been covered in a different way” (p. xvi).

Sachs is not very sympathetic to Hegel, but I think particularly the interpretations of H.S. Harris and Robert Pippin serve to show that Hegel’s dialectic works in the very same way that Sachs attributes to Plato and Aristotle.

Like Owens and Reale, Sachs ultimately defends a more or less Thomistic claim that for Aristotle, being “in its own right” is identifiable with the first cause, understood as the supreme Being.

I prefer his more neoplatonic-sounding formulation that the good is beyond being, and being depends on it. As I see it, this makes considerations of normativity, ethics, and hermeneutics prior to any possible ontology or epistemology, and I think this is the path Aristotle took.

The “first philosophy” that is Aristotle’s own name for the subject of the Metaphysics is identified by Aristotle with what turns out to be a unique kind of theology. But I would argue that Aristotle’s unique theology is characterized by ultimate explanation in terms of the “upward” movement of what Kant called “internal” teleology, rather than by meditations on the “downward” movement of a creative Act, or on external teleology (see also Thoughts on Teleology; Aristotle on Explanation; Aubry on Aristotle; Not Power and Action; Life: A Necessary Concept?.)

At least in this very important regard and some others, I think Hegel as read by Harris and Pippin is relatively closer to the historic Aristotle than Aquinas is.

Parmenides

The late 6th or early 5th century BCE poet Parmenides of Elea was commonly regarded in the Greek tradition as a philosopher. Apparently his only work was a poem of 800 or so verses in epic hexameter form, of which about 160 are known from quotations in later authors, principally the commentary by the neoplatonist Simplicius on Aristotle’s Physics.

Parmenides may have been the first person to make strong claims purportedly grounded in nothing but pure reason. At the same time, he drew a sharp distinction between appearance and reality. He achieved notoriety among his fellow Greeks because his claims contradicted all experience. His disciple Zeno used Parmenidean principles to “prove” that arrows cannot fly, and that the speedy Achilles could never overtake a tortoise that had a head start.

According to Parmenides, we can “neither know, or attain to, or express, non-being”. He concluded from this that all distinction, becoming, and motion were mere appearances of “the way of error in which the ignorant and double-minded mortals wander. Perplexity of mind sways the erring sense. Those who believe Being and non-being to be the same, and then again not the same, are like deaf and blind men surprised, like hordes confusedly driven”.

“But the truth is only the ‘is’; this is neither begotten of anything else, nor transient, entire, alone in its class, unmoved and without end; it neither was, nor will be, but is at once the all. For what birth wouldst thou seek for it? How and whence should it be augmented? That it should be from that which is not, I shall allow thee neither to say nor to think, for neither can it be said or thought that the ‘is’ is not. What necessity had either later or earlier made it begin from the nothing? Thus must it throughout only be or not be; nor will any force of conviction ever make something else arise out of that which is not. Thus origination has disappeared, and decease is incredible. Being is not separable, for it is entirely like itself; it is nowhere more, else would it not hold together, nor is it less, for everything is full of Being. The all is one coherent whole, for Being flows into unison with Being: it is unchangeable and rests securely in itself; the force of necessity holds it within the bounds of limitation. It cannot hence be said that it is imperfect; for it is without defect, while non-existence is wanting in all” (quoted in Hegel, History of Philosophy vol. 1, Haldane trans., pp. 252-253).

Plato treats Parmenides with considerable respect, but fundamentally rejects his blunt teaching about being and non-being, replacing it with far subtler views, e.g., in The Sophist.

Aristotle says that Plato (and the atomist Democritus, whose writings are lost) were the first practitioners of extended philosophical argument, and I consider that the true beginning of philosophy; it seems to me Parmenides only made assertions and claimed they were grounded in pure reason. In his poem, the key claims are presented as revelations from a goddess. Much later, Kant would argue that nothing follows from pure reason alone.

According to Hegel’s History of Philosophy lectures, “This beginning is certainly still dim and indefinite, and we cannot say much of what it involves; but to take up this position certainly is to develop Philosophy proper, which has not hitherto existed”. Hegel says Spinoza tells us correctly that all determination is based on negation, but “Parmenides says, whatever form the negation may take, it does not exist at all” (p. 254). Spinoza scholars have criticized the claim about Spinoza, but in this context that is a side issue.

Hegel’s association of Parmenides with the beginning of philosophy needs to be understood in terms of his insistence on the inherent defectiveness of beginnings and the positive, provocative role of failures of thought. In differing degrees, Hegel also actually recognizes two other beginnings of philosophy as well — in the figurative thought of the world’s various religious traditions before Parmenides (who appears only halfway through volume 1 of Hegel’s History), and in the dialogues of Plato, with whom Hegel’s second volume begins. For Hegel, Parmenides’ bare thought of Being and denial of the basis of all determination represent an absolute failure of thought and an impossibility, but he nonetheless credits that failure and impossibility as having defined a problem that provoked all later development.

I consider it quite possible that Aristotle’s brief remarks about “being qua being” in two books of the Metaphysics were a kind of response to the Parmenidean problem. Traditionally, this has been claimed to be the subject matter of the Metaphysics, but both times Aristotle raises the problem explicitly, his discussion is limited to arguing for the moral necessity of the principle of noncontradiction, against the Sophists. In effect, he says that serious people must by definition take their commitments seriously, and therefore they do not contradict their own commitments.

Noncontradiction has a great importance for integrity in ethics, which was to be taken up anew by Kant and Hegel, with their emphasis on unity of apperception. But as Hegel points out explicitly in the Logic, pure being by itself is logically empty and sterile. In first philosophy, nothing follows from being qua being. (See also Hegel on Being.)

Hegel’s Union of Kant and Aristotle

Aristotle gets more pages in Hegel’s History of Philosophy than anyone else, and Kant gets the second most. This post will show that that is no accident.

Where I left off in Pippin’s account of Hegel’s Logic, he was still discussing the meaning of Hegel’s claim that now “logic” could take the place of metaphysics.

The idea of a “gap” between thinking and being, with the consequent need for an extensive inference to show that the rational categories of thought are after all applicable to being, had been a major theme of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Hegel ambitiously wants to eliminate that gap, while at the same time preserving and extending Kant’s critique of dogmatism. At first glance this might seem impossible, but as I see it, Hegel’s strategy consists of two moves.

First, Pippin has been arguing that a major theme of Hegel’s Logic is an alternative showing of the applicability of something analogous to the Kantian categories. Hegel’s alternative is inspired by Aristotle’s non-psychological view of the content of thought as shareable rational meaning. From this point of view, there is a no discernible difference (and therefore a strict and literal identity) between a thought and that of which it is the thought. Thought in Aristotle is unaffected by the modern distinction of subject and object in consciousness. This is intimately related to Aristotle’s ambivalence on whether or not thought belongs to a part of the soul.

“As with Aristotle, [the] link between the order of thinking (knowing, judging to be the case) and the order of being is not an inference, does not face a gap that must be closed by an inference. Properly understood, the relation is one of identity” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 60).

The other, complementary part of Hegel’s strategy uses his critique of representation to express the Kantian problem of dogmatism in a different way. For Kant, dogmatism consists in ignoring or leaping over the gap between thinking and being. For Hegel, there is no such gap. Dogmatism consists in adhering to fixed representations and disregarding the real fluidity and liveliness of both thought and being.

Alongside this strategy for dealing with Kantian issues, Hegel revives Aristotle’s ideal of normative, teleological explanation of overall processes of actualization, and of the subordination of explanation by the efficient causes that serve as particular means of actualization (see Aristotle on Explanation). For Hegel as for Aristotle, intelligibility and explanation first and foremost involve a rational “ought”, and other forms of explanation are subordinate to that.

Pippin quotes John McDowell’s contemporary distinction between explanation by rational “ought” and by empirical regularity. McDowell refers to “explanations in which things are made intelligible by being revealed to be, or to approximate to being, as they rationally ought to be. This is to be contrasted with a style of explanation in which one makes things intelligible by representing their coming into being as a particular instance of how things generally tend to happen” (p. 61).

Pippin says that for both Kant and Hegel, logic “states the conditions of possible sense, the distinctions and relations without which sense would not be possible” (ibid). Here he is implicitly recalling Frege’s distinction between sense and reference, and making the point that Kant, Hegel, and Aristotle all see meaning mainly in terms of sense rather than reference. “The Logic is never said to seek a determination of what is ‘really’ real, and in a way like Kant, it also concerns the determination of the possibility, the real possibility, of anything being what it is. Hegel calls this Wirklichkeit, actuality, and distinguishes it often from questions about existence” (p. 62).

Possible sense construes real possibility in terms of explanation by a rational “ought”. Logical concepts for Hegel always embody a context-sensitive rational “ought”, rather than a direct simple determination of what exists. For example, “for Hegel to claim that ‘Life’ is a logical concept is to say not that there could not be a world that did not have living beings in it, but that if there is a world at all, the denial that there is any distinction between mechanically explicable and organically unified beings is self-contradictory” (ibid).

Such a contradiction is something we ought to avoid. The overcoming of contradictions in Hegel is a matter of teleological actualization that may or may not occur. Contrary to old stereotypes, no formal or causal determinism is involved. The overcoming of contradictions is in fact intimately connected with the motif of freedom. Kant and Fichte struggled to articulate a very strong notion of practical freedom that did not depend on a one-sided notion of free will. Hegel makes the explanation of freedom much easier by explicitly adopting the Aristotelian priority of explanation by ends and oughts. For him as for Aristotle, the realization of ends and oughts at the level of factual existence is contingent, and involves multiple possibilities. For him as for Aristotle, being has to do primarily with sense and intelligibility rather than brute factual existence.

“So what Hegel means by saying logic is metaphysics, or that being in and for itself is the concept, can be put this way. Once we understand the role of, say, essence and appearance as necessary for judging objectively, we have thereby made sense of essences and appearances, and therewith, the world in which they are indispensable…. In making sense of this way of sense-making, its presuppositions and implications, we are making sense of what there is, the only sense anything could make” (pp. 63-64).

“The actual Kantian statement of this identity is the highest principle of synthetic judgments, and it invokes the same thought: that the conditions for the possibility of experience are at the same time the conditions for the possibility of objects of experience” (p. 64).

Pippin quotes from Adrian Moore: “To make sense of things at the highest level of generality… is to make sense of things in terms of what it is to make sense of things” (p. 65).

He notes similarities and differences between his and Robert Brandom’s approach to Hegel.

On the one hand, Brandom agrees that the job of distinctively logical concepts is “not to make explicit how the world is (to subserve a function of consciousness) but rather to make explicit the process of making explicit how the world is (to enable and embody a kind of self-consciousness)” (quoted, p. 66).

On the other, Brandom sees the making explicit of the process of making explicit entirely in retrospective terms, whereas Pippin argues that Hegel in the Logic takes a more Kantian, prospective approach. Pippin calls Brandom’s retrospective approach “empirical” because it relies on retrospective insight into concrete occasions of making things explicit.

Elsewhere, Pippin had previously criticized Brandom’s emphasis on “semantic descent” in interpreting Hegel’s Phenomenology. Brandom himself introduces semantic descent in the following terms: “I believe the best way to understand what [Kant and Hegel] are saying about their preferred topic of concepts operating in a pure, still stratosphere above the busy jostling and haggling of street-level judging and doing is precisely to focus on what those metaconcepts let us say about what is going on below…. If the point of the higher-level concepts is to articulate the use and content of lower-level ones, then the cash value of an account of categorical metaconcepts is what it has to teach us about ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts” (A Spirit of Trust, pp. 5-6).

While I don’t care for the rhetoric of “cash value”, which to my ear sounds too reductive in the context of normative sense-making, the idea that meta-level considerations get their relevance from what they teach us about ordinary life seems fundamentally right to me, and of great importance. Moreover, this is clearly presented by Brandom as his interpretive strategy, which he points out is quite different from the way Kant and Hegel usually talk. Brandom’s reading of Hegel is also mainly focused on the Phenomenology; he doesn’t have much to say specifically about the Logic.

The idea of a retrospective reading of the Phenomenology is encouraged by Hegel himself, and there I think it is fair to say that Hegel’s own method is retrospective. On the other hand, I think the text of the Logic clearly supports Pippin’s claim that it takes a more prospective approach, closer to that of a Kantian a priori investigation. This still does not conflict with the suggestion that its ultimate value lies in what its high concepts have to teach us about living our own lives.

“[W]hatever the connections are in the [Science of Logic], they are clearly not truth-functional or deductive. As suggested, they have something to do with the demonstration of dependence relations necessary for conceptual determinacy” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 70).

For Hegel, “concepts can be determinately specified only by their role in judgments, the determinacy of which depends on their roles as premises and conclusions…. And he never tires of noting that the standard subject-predicate logical form is finally inadequate for the expression of ‘speculative truth’…. The basic possibility of sense depends on an act, an act of rendering intelligible or judging” (pp. 71-72).

“In the traditional reading of Kant, it would appear that Kant wants to introduce a step here, as if skeptical about why ‘our’ ways of sorting things should have anything to do with ‘sortal realism’ in the world…. In this picture, there must ‘first’ be sensible receptivity (according to ‘our’ distinct, nonconceptual pure forms of intuition), and ‘then’ there is conceptual articulation/synthesis, which is possible because of the imposition of categorical form” (pp. 73-74).

According to Pippin, Hegel denies this two-step picture, though he “fully realizes the extreme difficulties in stating properly the dual claims of distinguishability and inseparability” of concept and intuition” (p. 75).

“Hegel clearly wants a way of understanding the mutual dependence of each on the other that involves an ‘identity’ even ‘within difference’. In other words, he came to see that the concept-intuition relation was at its heart a logical or conceptual problem, what he would variously call the problem of (how there could be such a thing as) ‘mediated immediacy’, or the inescapably reciprocal and correlated functions of identifying and differentiating. For another, in any apperceptive determination of content, a relation to content has to be understood as a modality of a self-relation….This gets quite complicated because such an apperceptive awareness in the case of perceptual experience… must be distinguished from apperceptive judging…. Neither Kant nor Hegel believes that experience itself consists in judgments” (ibid).

What Pippin here calls apperceptive awareness in the case of perception as distinct from judgment belongs in the same general territory as the “passive synthesis” discussed by Husserl.

“Failing to observe the ‘norms of thinking’ is not… making an error in thinking; it is not thinking at all, not making any sense. The prospect of objects ‘outside’ something like the limits of the thinkable is a nonthought…. But just because it is unthinkable, the strict distinction between a prior, content-free general logic and an a priori transcendental logic, the forms of possible thoughts about objects, can hardly be as hard and fast as Kant wants to make it out to be. Or, put another way, it is an artificial distinction…. For one thing, … the distinction depends on a quite contestable strict separation between the spontaneity of thought (as providing formal unity) and the deliverances of sensibility in experience (as the sole ‘provider of content’). If that is not sustainable, and there is reason to think that even Kant did not hold it to be a matter of strict separability, then the distinction between the forms of thought and the forms of the thought of objects cannot also be a matter of strict separability” (p. 76).

“‘To be is to be intelligible: the founding principle of Greek metaphysics and of philosophy itself…. [T]he formula ‘to be is to be intelligible’ is not, as it might sound, some sort of manifesto, as if willfully ‘banning’ the unknowable from ‘the real’…. ‘What there is is what is knowable’ is an implication of what knowing — all and any knowing — is if it is to be knowing. It is not a first-order claim about all being, as if it could prompt the question: How do we know that all of being is knowable? That is not a coherent question. There may be things we will never know, but that is not to say they are in principle unknowable” (p. 77).

“So those ‘two aspect’ interpretations of Kant’s idealism and his doctrine of the unknowability of things in themselves, those claiming that knowing ‘for us’ is restricted to ‘our epistemic conditions’, leaving it open for us to speculate about what might be knowable but transcends our powers of knowing, cannot be right. The position is internally incoherent. There is no ‘our’ that can be put in front of ‘epistemic conditions’. They would not then be epistemic conditions; the account would not be philosophical but psychological” (ibid).

In place of the Kantian unknowability of things in themselves, Hegel puts the “liveliness” of real things that overflows any particular representation. For Hegel, dogmatism is a disregard for the overflowing character of real meaning and being.

“[I]f we… ask how we can know a priori about nature’s suitability for our cognitive ends…, we have again imported a kind of neo-Kantian version of Kant” (p. 78).

“Yet more care must be exercised here, lest readers get the wrong idea. To say that the forms of ‘thought’ are, must be, the form of objects of thought does not mean that any form of ‘mere thinking’ delineates some ontological realm — as if the forms of the thought of astrological influence are the forms of such influence in the world” (ibid).

“Thought” here clearly does not mean any arbitrary belief. It refers to possible knowledge. Hegel and Pippin are saying only that if and wherever true knowledge is indeed possible, corresponding knowledge of objects must be possible. “It would never occur to us, I assume, to entertain the thought that the form of some piece of empirical knowledge is not the form of the object of knowledge” (ibid).

Pippin points out “what amounts to a kind of operator in Hegel’s Logic on which all the crucial transitions depend, something like ‘would not be fully intelligible, would not be coherently thinkable without…’ What follows the ‘without’ is some more comprehensive concept, a different distinction, and so forth” (p. 79).

This means that Hegelian logic is not about the deduction of consequences from assumptions, but rather aims to be an assumption-free regressive movement from anything at all to a fuller view of the conditions for its intelligibility.

In the introduction to the Encyclopedia, Hegel “notes explicitly that what exists certainly exists contingently and ‘can just as well not be‘, and he refers us to the Logic for the right explication of what is ‘actual’ by contrast with what merely exists. He adds, ‘Who is not smart enough to be able to see around him quite a lot that is not, in fact, how it ought to be?’…. Yet despite Hegel’s waving this huge bright flag inscribed, ‘I believe in contingency!’ one still hears often (even from scholars of German philosophy) that his philosophy is an attempt to deduce the necessity of everything from the Prussian state to Herr Krug’s fountain pen” (p. 87).

Pippin thinks that actuality in Hegel is “congruent with what Kant meant by categoriality” (ibid). I don’t fully understand this particular claim about actuality, unless it is intended as a variant of the Philosophy of Right‘s famous formula about the actual and the rational, which itself makes good sense with a normative or teleological as opposed to factual notion of the actual. I would agree there seems to be a strong “Kantian categorical” component to Hegelian “logic” in general. Pippin agrees that actuality has a normative rather than factual character in both Aristotle and Hegel. However, the generally normative emphasis of Kant’s thought notwithstanding, at this point in my effort to understand Kant, his “deduction” of the categories seems to me to make the categories more like a kind of universal “facts”. I also think of the Aristotelian “ought” as primarily concrete, as when Aristotle says that practical judgment applies to particulars. Kantian normativity by contrast aims to be universal in an unqualified way, which is certainly closer to categoriality. So, there is a question whether Hegelian actuality inherits more from Aristotelian actuality or from Hegel’s incorporation of Kantian universalizing normativity.

If we were talking about Hegelian “concrete universals”, this might provide a basis for reconciling Aristotelian and Kantian perspectives on the “ought” involved in actuality. Do the Hegelian incarnations of Kantian categories in the Logic — called by Hegel a “realm of shadows” — qualify as concrete universals? At this point I am in doubt. I suspect Hegel might say that the concrete universal is reached only at the very end of his development. Maybe the ultimate bearer of categoriality and the place where it unites with actuality will be the “absolute” idea.

“What we know is what we know in exercising reason, what we know in judging” (p. 90). In the Encyclopedia Logic, “Hegel remarks that Kant himself, in formulating reason’s critique of itself, treats forms of cognition as objects of cognition…. He calls this feat ‘dialectic’. Mathematical construction in mathematical proof makes essentially the same point…. And most suggestively for the entire enterprise of the Logic, practical reason can determine the form of a rational will that is also itself a substantive content. The self-legislation of the moral law is not volitional anarchy but practical reason’s knowledge of ‘what’ to legislate. It ‘legislates’ in being practical reasoning about what ought to be done. It legislates because in knowing what ought to be done it is not affected by some object, ‘what is to be done’, about which it judges. It determines, produces, what is to be done. Said more simply, when one makes a promise, one legislates into existence a promise. One is bound only by binding oneself…. Being bound is the concept of being bound, applied to oneself” (ibid).

Pippin is suggesting we look for ethical meaning in Hegel’s logic.

“Thought’s self-determination in the course of the book makes no reference to the Absolute’s self-consciousness in order to explain anything…. Any thinking of a content is inherently reflexive in a way that Hegel thinks will allow him to derive from the possible thought of anything at all notions like something and finitude, and ultimately essence, appearance, even the idea of the good…. Hegel thinks that thought is always already giving itself its own content: itself, where that means, roughly, determining that without which it could not be a thought of an object…. But all this can only count as previews of coming attractions” (pp. 91-92).

This is important. The thought that is self-legislating and one with its object, while it doesn’t include mere belief, is being said to include at least some thought that occurs in ordinary life. According to Pippin, thinking far enough through with any content at all has a self-legislating and category-generating character for Hegel.

“The suggestion is that Hegel thinks of anything’s principle of intelligibility, its conceptual form, as an actualization in the Aristotelian sense, the being-at-work or energeia of the thing’s distinct mode of being, not a separate immaterial metaphysical object. In understanding Hegel on this point, we should take fully on board the form-matter, actuality-potentiality language of Aristotle, and so the most interesting kind of hylomorphism, soul-body hylomorphism, as our way of understanding this nonseparateness claim.” (p. 92).

Here I can only applaud.

“To think that for creatures like us, we must distinguish the sensory manifold from the form that informs it is the great temptation to be avoided for Hegel. The power of the eye to see is not a power ‘added’ to a material eye…. The seeing power is the distinct being-at work of that body. The form-content model central to Hegel’s account of logical formality works the same way” (pp. 92-93).

That seeing is not somehow “added” to the eye is another Aristotelian point. The eye is what it is in virtue of what it is for the sake of. Incidentally, Joe Sachs’ translation of Aristotlian energeia as “being-at-work” appears to have a precedent in Hegel’s German.

Pippin’s identification of a being-at-work or actuality with a power here is novel. “Power” commonly appears in translations of (especially Latin scholastic) discourse about potentiality rather than actuality. Power seems to me to be some kind of capability for efficacious action, whereas potentiality and actuality both belong primarily in the register of ends and “for the sake of”. It does make sense that a capability could follow from an actualization or be attributed to it. Paul Ricoeur makes a nice ethical use of capability, but in general I worry that talk about power privileges efficacious action over the intelligible ought and the “for the sake of”.

Pippin returns again to the unity of thinking and being.

“So it is perfectly appropriate to say such things as that for Hegel reality ‘has a conceptual structure’, or ‘only concepts are truly real’, as long as we realize that we are not talking about entities, but about the ‘actualities’ of beings, their modes or ways of being what determinately and intelligibly they are. To say that ‘any object is the concept of itself’ is to say that what it is in being at work being what it is can be determined, has a logos…. We can say that reality comes to self-consciousness in us, or that the light that illuminates beings in their distinct being-at-work is the same light that illuminates their knowability in us, as long as we do not mean a light emanating from individual minds” (pp. 93-94).

“And here again, Hegel’s model of metaphysics… is Aristotelian. And Aristotle’s metaphysics is not modern dogmatic metaphysics, does not concern a ‘supersensible’ reality knowable only by pure reason. In many respects it is a metaphysics of the ordinary: standard sensible objects, especially organic beings and artifacts. This means that in many respects Kant’s critique of rationalist metaphysics in effect ‘misses’ it” (p. 94).

“By and large Hegel means to ‘denigrate’ the immediately given, how things seem to common sense…. This has nothing to do with doubting the external reality of tables and molecules…. The point of Hegel’s denying to finite, empirical reality the gold standard badge of true actuality is not to say that it ‘possesses’ a lesser degree of reality in the traditional sense (whatever that might mean). It is to say that finite objects viewed in their finitude, or considered as logical atoms, can never reveal the possibility of their own intelligibility” (pp. 96-97).

This provides a clue to the negative connotations of finitude in Hegel. It has far more positive connotations for me, but I consider the primary meaning of “finitude” to be a dependence on other things, which is as different as could be from logical atomicity. This is another different use of words, not a difference on what is or ought to be. If “finite” is taken to mean “to be treated as a logical atom” as Pippin suggests, the negative connotations are appropriate.

Emancipatory Logic?

When it comes to Hegel’s “logic” the first question is, what does it really aim at? What is it even trying to do? Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows (2019) is the best attempt to answer this I have found so far.

“[Hegel] seems to promise something quite extraordinary and, no doubt to contemporary ears, something quite implausible, a treatment of ‘logic’ in some way in service of an emancipatory ideal — an emancipatory logic, of all things” (p. 24).

To briefly anticipate, it will be emancipatory in addressing the Aristotelian actualization of Kantian freedom.

“[T]he most important element in Hegel’s fulfilling such an ambition… is a ‘science of pure thinking’. What any thinking does is to render something intelligible, a task that, as we shall see, has many different dimensions and is inseparable from the giving of reasons. But, as we have also noted, to say what something is, or to explain why something happened, or to understand the point or purpose of anything, is not just to present a picture or grasp a content. It is to judge, something always open to challenge and interrogation” (p. 20).

What Hegel calls pure thinking is concerned with and exhibits the general shape of the space of reasons.

“Eventually… we would need a fully reflective account of the ‘ground of giving grounds’…. In the practical domain, in Kant and the post-Kantians, I am free when I am acting on reasons about what ought to be done. This is a form of self-consciousness that, according to Kant, is paradigmatically embodied when I act wholly on reasons, and not just prudently or instrumentally, as when I act for the sake of ends I have not rationally determined I ought to have” (p. 21).

Put another way, all our reasons ought to trace back to the highest good. When our reasons stop at some partial good, we are not yet free.

“[I]n just the same sense as Hegel will want to treat concept and intuition in experience as distinct but inseparable, he will want to say that so-called ‘material’ issues… are inseparable from forms of self-understanding, as inseparable as such forms are from their material embodiment” (p. 22).

Hegel’s strong emphasis on actuality and actualization leads him to see something like Aristotelian hylomorphism (inseparability of form and matter) in places where Kant tended to see dualities. For Hegel as for Aristotle, our true intent is expressed by what we actually did.

Pippin quotes the Phenomenology Preface’s statement that the task of modernity “consists in actualizing and spiritually animating the universal by means of the sublation of fixed and determinate thoughts” (p. 24).

“Hegel’s unease with [the dominance of fixed representations] is what begat those familiar later claims about the ‘ideological’ nature of bourgeois philosophy, the one-dimensionality of modern societies, the dominance of ‘identity thinking’, the crisis of the European sciences, the colonization of the life-world, and so forth. And while all such critiques can be traced back to Hegel, he does not make the case for such limitations by contrast with a positive or utopian theory, as is the case in many of these examples” (p. 25).

Hegel aims at a purely immanent development of self-critical understanding, in which forms of spirit all on their own eventually exhibit their own incompleteness and one-sidedness, rather than being claimed to fall short of some external ideal.

“Stated in the simplest possible terms, Hegel’s diagnosis of the fix we have gotten ourselves into consists in the claim that we have not properly understood how to understand ourselves and the social and natural world in which we dwell. This is not, though, because we have simply been regularly mistaken, the victim of false philosophies, wrong ideas. It is due to the inevitable partiality and one-sidedness of various ruling concepts (let us say, for shorthand, norms for explanation and justification, the normative structures of the ‘space of reasons’)” (p. 26).

The solution is not a matter of simply substituting more correct first-order beliefs. Of far greater import are our higher-order ways of thinking, judging, and assessing.

“Moreover, the problem is not the contents of our beliefs but the way we have come to collectively regulate what is believable…. Our norms for authoritative explanations and for how we justify ourselves to each other are imbricated in the everyday fabric of a form of life” (p. 28).

“Thus, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Hegel’s basic claim… is that we have not properly understood the ‘grammar’ of spirit (the logic of self-relation, both individual and collective, that makes up spirit), and this is connected with our failure to understand the grammar of possible renderings-intelligible or account-givings in general…. And it would also not be an exaggeration to say that, for Hegel, once we do understand it, we (at least we philosophers) will be freed from the illusion that some particular form of account-giving (like modern Verstand [understanding based on simple fixed predications]) could be taken to be ‘absolute’; the proper relativization (historically and systematically) of different accounts of account-giving will have been made. Or, stated in its most surprising form: Hegelian philosophy has no distinct doctrine of its own; its content is the right understanding of past attempts at account-giving in their limitations and interconnection” (p. 30).

This notion of a “grammar” of spirit is quite fascinating. “Self-relation” is at the heart of Hegel’s often misunderstood talk about the “true infinite”. Hegel wants to say that the ordinary grammar of subject and predicate as fixed terms is not a very good form for expressing thought, because it lacks “life”. Pure thought for Hegel involves moving beyond all fixed terms. Self-relation involves no substantive “self”, only the purely relational character of an always re-emerging unity of apperception. Freedom for Hegel has a kind of grounding in the “true infinite”, but this has nothing to do with an infinite power. What makes self-relatedness “infinite” is its relations-first character, which does not depend on any pre-given fixing of ground-level terms. For Hegel, higher-order form is more primary than first-order form. First-order terms are degenerate cases, not foundational instances.

“Apperceptive spontaneity is not understood as a subjective mental activity, opposed to or addressed to or imposed on what there is…. If we understand this properly, we understand apperceptive spontaneity ‘in its actuality’, as having ‘given itself’ its own actuality, the actuality of the intelligibles, what there is” (p. 35).

What is free in us is not a separate faculty of decision-making, but the open-endedness of the basis of our understanding. For Hegel, there is no gap between understanding and action. What we really understood or didn’t understand is made publicly interpretable by our action. Meanwhile, what there is is inseparable from the intelligibility of that “what”.

Pippin notes that the original context for talk about “spontaneity” in Kant was the latter’s insistence against the tradition that thought is entirely active in character. Thought for Kant includes no moment of passive receptivity, and therefore generates and is responsible for all of its own content. Hegel adopts this perspective.

“Put in terms of the history of philosophy, what all of this will amount to is an attempt by Hegel at a highly unusual synthesis of the Kantian revolution in philosophy, especially the anti-empiricist, self-grounding character of reason (aka ‘the Concept’), and the most important Kantian innovation, the spontaneity of thinking, together with essential elements of Aristotle’s understanding of metaphysics, especially the Aristotelian notions of energeia, which Hegel translates as Wirklichkeit, actuality, the proper object of first philosophy, and, as we have seen, the core of the classical view that ‘nous’ [intellect] rules the world, all in contrast to the rationalist metaphysics of nonsensible objects accessible to pure reason alone. Hegel is no metaphysician in this rationalist sense, but he is most certainly a metaphysician in the Aristotelian sense. That is, at any rate, the thesis of the following book” (ibid).

It is refreshing to see metaphysics treated as something other than an ahistorical lump extending from Parmenides to the present. Later common usage has diverged so far from the meaning of Aristotelian first philosophy that I prefer not to call the latter “metaphysics” at all, but that term loses its objectionable connotations insofar as the reference is tied to something specifically Aristotelian.

I think recognizing that Hegel fundamentally aimed to combine Kantian and Aristotelian insights in a principled way is essential for grasping what he was really about. But to even have the perspective that such an aim makes sense requires work on the interpretation of both Aristotle and Kant; one would never come up with it based on textbook stereotypes.

More than any other commentator, Pippin has developed both the Kantian and the Aristotelian dimensions of Hegel. Later in the current book, he will have more to say specifically about Hegel’s post-Kantian recovery of Aristotelian teleology.

(He says in passing that the earliest precedents for Kant’s view that thought and reason are never purely passive are from the late 16th century. That is not quite right. Alain de Libera has documented that the foremost medieval commentator on Aristotle, Averroes, explicitly interpreted Aristotle as saying that the so-called potential intellect has an “activity” of its own and is not purely passive. In fact, even sense perception is not just passive in Aristotle. Aristotle’s remarks about the synthesizing role of the “common” sense and “inner” sense are unfortunately extremely sketchy, but it seems beyond doubt that they do have a synthesizing role.)

A Thomistic Grammar of Action

David Burrell’s Aquinas: God and Action (1st ed. 1979; 3rd ed. 2016) is a very interesting unorthodox sympathetic treatment that provides much food for thought. Burrell’s reading of Aquinas’ notion of action is quite different than what I expected to find — more Aristotelian and less proto-modern. How to relate this to the less favorable picture of Aquinas that emerges from Gwenaëlle Aubry’s account — which heavily emphasizes how Aristotelian concern with ends and the good is displaced by the notion of the priority of divine omnipotence, which is not discussed by Burrell — is an open question.

“This is philosophy as therapy, not as theory” (p. 17). “[P]roofs play an ancillary role at best in the theological task [Aquinas] sets himself: to elucidate the parameters of responsible discourse about God” (p. 9). “It seems that he regarded philosophy’s role in these matters less after the model of a scientific demonstration than as a manuductio: literally, a taking-by-the-hand-and-leading-along…. This somewhat novel contention is designed deliberately to help us rediscover philosophy in its proper medieval dress” (pp. 15-16).

“He is not proposing a synthesis of religious experience. He does not write to edify, nor does he appeal to religious life or practice as offering relevant evidence for his assertions” (p. 18).

Noting the intensive preoccupation of 13th century writers with logic and language, Burrell characterizes Aquinas’ work as principally a sort of philosophical grammar designed mainly to show what cannot be properly said of God. He suggests that we take Aquinas’ expressions of negative theology with utmost seriousness. Aquinas’ positive theology should be taken not as a doctrine of God (which would undermine the seriousness of his negative theology), but rather as an exploration of the limits of language.

God for Aquinas is ipsum esse, “to-be itself”. “Odd as it may seem, however, this assertion does not succeed in telling us whether God exists. For its form is not that of an existential assertion, but of a definition giving the nature of the thing in question” (p. 8).

For Aquinas according to Burrell, “to-be itself” cannot be properly described. What appear to be descriptions of God in Aquinas’ works need to be interpreted in some other way. Aquinas uses language indirectly to show what it cannot say, “to increase our awareness of what we are doing in speaking as we do” (p. 7). “Where less patient thinkers would invoke paradox, Aquinas is committed to using every resource available to state clearly what can be stated….We cannot pretend to offer a description of a transcendent object without betraying its transcendence. But reflecting on the rules of discourse brings to light certain contours of discourse itself. And those very outlines can function in lieu of empirical knowledge to give us a way of characterizing what we could not otherwise describe” (ibid).

Metaphysics involves no arcane method or privileged noetic access, only “an adept use of skills commonly possessed” (ibid).

“What people have failed to do is to take seriously Aquinas’ disclaimer about our being able to know what God is…. By attending closely to what Aquinas does, we can see that he is scrupulously faithful to that original limitation. What God is like is treated in the most indirect way possible” (p. 15). When we say that we clearly know a proposition about God to be true, we are in fact speaking only “of God in so far as he is the proper cause of certain effects” (p. 9). “If whatever we can say about something reflects the formal feature of compositeness, anything lacking it will lie quite beyond the range of our linguistic tools” (p. 17).

“[O]ne could easily mistake the logical treatment for a more substantive doctrine…. [Aquinas] even encourages the confusion by using object-language constructions to do metalinguistic jobs. Yet he had clearly warned us that he was not undertaking to treat of God’s nature” (p. 19).

Aquinas is commonly understood to have taught that although “being” has no one univocal meaning, there is an “analogy of being” that makes its meaning uniform by analogy. I have been at some pains to point out that scholarship does not support attributing this view to Aristotle, as is also commonly done. Burrell says it is a serious mistake to attribute it to Aquinas — the analogy of being was actually pieced together by Cajetan, and depends on views significantly different from those of Aquinas.

“Actus stands out as the master metaphor guiding Aquinas’ grammatical treatment of divinity” (p. 130). “It is the distinctively human activities of knowing and loving which offer Aquinas a paradigm for understanding action more generally” (p. 131). Here we are very far indeed from Gwenaëlle Aubry’s emphasis on the relation of action in Aquinas to a very non-Aristotelian notion of power. This certainly complicates the picture.

Burrell thinks Aquinas would agree that “exists” is not a predicate. He also thinks that “existentialist” readings of Aquinas miss the mark, and are distinguished by an inattention to language.

“Aquinas’ account neatly avoids what most of us today are persuaded lies at the heart of human action: decision” (p. 140). “[F]or Aquinas willing remains an activity of reason, broadly speaking. So it is proper that the pattern of receptivity be preserved in the consent which lies at the heart of more manifest voluntary actions like choosing. Furthermore, properly speaking, it seems that ends or goals are rarely chosen or even decided upon. Rather they grow on us. Or is it that we grow into them?” (ibid).

“It is at this point that one appreciates how a philosophical analysis works, especially in dissolving pseudo-problems. I have remarked how Aquinas’ analysis of action appears truncated. For it seems that the development of habitus [Latin for Aristotle’s hexis] as a proximate principle of activity demands one more step: to articulate what it is who acts. Such a step would carry us to the ‘transcendental ego’. But Aquinas neatly avoids that problem by recognizing there is no step at all. The one who acts, as Aquinas views the matter, is articulated in the remote and proximate principles of action. Nothing more need be said because nothing more can be said: the self we know is known by those characteristics that mark it” (p. 144).

“Aquinas manages to clear away certain endemic yet misleading ways of conceiving causal process by refusing to accept ’cause’ as the primary meaning of actus” (p. 146).

“Let me first put it paradoxically: the act of making something happen (causation) is not itself an action. As Aquinas analyzes it, causing an effect is properly a relation. The fact that A causes something to happen in B requires acts, of course, but it itself is not an action distinct from these” (p. 147). “In short, what happens is what we see happening to B (or in B). We say that A is causing this to happen, not because we ascertain that something is going on between them…, but simply because we understand that B depends on A to this extent…. Thus, causing does not have to be explained as a further act by the agent. It is, in fact, more accurately structured as a relation of dependence” (p. 148).

“The merit of Aquinas’ analysis is to exorcise the demand that a specific action be identified as ‘the causal process’. He succeeds, moreover, in locating ‘the causal nexus’ squarely in the category of relation. Causality can thus be explained as an ordering relation, given the capacities to act and to be acted upon in the factors so related…. [But] considerable intellectual therapy is always required to render plausible a formal or relational account of causality” (p. 158).

“A causal model misleads us, moreover, when we inquire into the source of action. That road leads one to adopt the language of will. We have already noted how elusive a notion will is…. Actions, however, require justifications rather than explanations — precisely in the measure that they are actions and not movements. Whoever understands actions to be the sort of thing for which the agent takes responsibility appreciates the import of this distinction. Hence Aquinas insisted that the will is an intellectual appetite, thus consciously adopting an intentional rather than a causal model in accounting for action” (p. 190).

All this is much closer to my reading of Aristotle than I expected. There is apparently also a much bigger distance between efficient causes in Aquinas and in Suárez than I thought. Suárez reportedly had just the notion of “influence” between cause and effect that Burrell finds to be absent in Aquinas.

Being and Creation

Gaven Kerr in Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Creation (2019) argues that Aquinas’ original notion of esse (being or existence, as distinct from essence or the “what it is” of a thing) is the common root of both his account of creation and his distinctive metaphysics (see Being and Essence). “In focusing on esse Thomas is the first to take note of the centrality of the actual existence of things as a metaphysically significant feature of them, rather than simply a general fact about them” (p. 50).

“All other metaphysical components such as matter and form are subject to esse, so that without esse there would be no actuality. Esse then is the act of all acts, and in being so it is the perfection of all perfections” (pp. 50-51). Pure esse is a name for God. Other beings receive the esse without which they would not exist from God’s act of creation.

Kerr cites arguments that neither Plato nor Aristotle had a concept of being as sheer existence. Only Avicenna seems to have preceded Aquinas in this regard. Aquinas considers the emphasis on being as existence to be more universal, and therefore an advance.

It seems to me that Aquinas’ esse as sheer existence is a new super-concept that will implicitly redefine the meaning of existing Aristotelian concepts, for which the old names will still be used. The novelty of esse will be largely hidden due to a combination of ordinary practices of translation; its apparent common-sense character; and the use of familiar Aristotelian terms with transformed meanings.

Aquinas developed a correlative notion of ens commune or “common being” as the subject matter of a reformulated metaphysics, based on his famous interpolation of a uniformly analogous sense of being in Aristotle.

Creation as the immediate bringing of things into being from nothing becomes the new model for efficient causation (quite unlike Aristotle’s art of building). Efficient causes meanwhile become the most important kind of cause.

According to Kerr, the act of creation should not be conceived as the first event in a series. It is characterized more abstractly in terms of what Kerr calls the absolute dependency of beings on Being. It is not a kind of change. Whole causal series are created instantaneously. What is created is the total substance.

Aquinas steered a middle course between Bonaventure, who claimed to prove that creation implied a beginning in time, and Siger of Brabant, who held that natural reason implied the eternity of the world. Aquinas argued that both are possible according to natural reason.

Kerr argues that Aquinas’ notion of creation is agnostic to questions of natural science, and fully compatible with, e.g., Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection. “When it comes to metaphysics, Thomas is committed to thinking through the issues involved therein on the basis of natural reason” (p. 4).

Kerr makes the interesting argument that mathematics and natural science are limited because they consider only the essence of things, and not their existence. He says Aquinas would have us focus on what it means for things to be rather than not to be.