Pure Act

I just received the 2nd French edition of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s God Without Power: Dunamis and Energeia in Aristotle and Plotinus (2020), which is now also labeled Archaeology of Power volume 1, reflecting publication of her second volume, Genesis of the Sovereign God (French ed. 2018).

“But the notion of act (energeia or entelekheia) says something else that that of form does not: not only substance, but also the good. Of Aristotelian invention, contrary to that of form which belongs entirely to Platonism, it appears first in ethical contexts; and if its axiological significance is not explicitly formulated in [book Theta of the Metaphysics], but only suggested via the identification of energeia with telos [end] and with ergon [work], it is on the other hand clearly readable in book Lambda. Furthermore, the project formulated in book capital Alpha of a ‘wisdom’ (sophia) capable of determining the good and the end, like that, defined in [book Gamma], of a science of ‘being qua being’, are both accomplished in the knowledge of a single object: act.”

“For such a project, Aristotle claims originality. He underlines that he is the first to have posed the good as a principle, and to have dissociated principle and power. Reading the history of philosophy reversed in relation to the one familiar to us, he considers thus that position of the good as principle is not a Platonic gesture. But if the Platonists have failed to think the status of the good as principle, that is in part because they did not identify its proper mode of causality. The double Aristotelian decision thus bears a unique formula: the principle is act. For to designate it thus, is to say at once that it is an essentially good substance, and that it acts not as power, but as the end of that which is in potentiality.”

“It is however also, and in conformity always with the project of Metaphysics [capital Alpha], to leave a place for the diversity of goods and of ends. For, like being, the good is said in many ways. And if the Ethics identify the good according to substance with god and with intellect, this is not the essence of all that could be called ‘good’, any more than it is the act of the other substances. So here again, Aristotle succeeds where Plato had failed: he succeeds at the same time in thinking the good’s status as a principle and the causality of the good, as well as taking into account the plurality of goods (which also says: the good is neither a power nor an Idea). However, a relation of foundation holds between the essentially good substance and the goods of the diverse substances. And this relation doubles itself, for the substance that is the human, in a relation of resemblance and a relation of knowledge, if theoria [contemplation], in which ethics finds its energeia and its supreme end, at the same time is similar to the divine act, and can have the latter as its object” (introduction, pp. 15-16, my translation).

The mode of causality of the good as first principle is as the end or that-for-the-sake-of-which, as a kind of attractor for potentialities. I’ve presented most of these ideas before, but this provides a very nice overview. Aubry gives a bit more weight to book Gamma’s proposed knowledge of being as such than I do, but the content that she ultimately gives to it is very close to what I end up with in reading book Lambda as a teleological meta-ethics (she calls it “axiology” or theory of values, but the concept is similar). In upcoming posts, I’ll take a look at her detailed analysis of the text of the Metaphysics. (See also The Four Causes Revisited; On the Good as a Cause; Aubry on Aristotle; Properly Human, More Than Human?.)

Aristotle’s main historical influence began only centuries after his death. His manuscripts were claimed by a relative and left to deteriorate in an attic. They were only edited around the 1st century BCE. Even then, they attracted only limited interest. Stoicism had meanwhile become dominant in Greek philosophy. The great early commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias did not flourish until late 2nd/early 3rd century CE, and was influential mainly via Plotinus and the neoplatonic schools. It was only with the late Platonic school of Alexandria in Egypt under Ammonius (late 5th/early 6th century CE) that Aristotle’s works became central to the teaching curriculum, and then they were read with a heavy neoplatonic slant. (See Fortunes of Aristotle.)

Next in this series: Distinguishing Act and Form

Operativity?

Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty (2013) by Giorgio Agamben is the sixth book of a nine- or ten-volume series growing out of his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995). In the course of it, he propounds his own variant of Heidegger’s “history of (the forgetting of) Being”. Like Heidegger, he seems to partly blame Aristotle for later historical developments that he casts in a very negative light. He particularly claims that Aristotle’s distinction of potentiality and actuality and Aristotle’s thesis of the priority of actuality — both of which I find to be extremely valuable good things — are the ultimate root of various modern evils. I also could not endorse his negative remarks about Kant. But many of the details of his analysis are quite fascinating. This will be another longer post.

Agamben is an eminent Italian scholar whose major influences include Heidegger, Foucault, and Walter Benjamin. He has written in depth about the ethical consequences of the existence of concentration camps. He has analyzed the wider implications of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s grounding of claims for the absolute sovereignty of the modern state in a voluntaristic theology of omnipotence. (But lately, some people have thought he went off the deep end vociferously opposing Covid vaccination.)

He begins, “Only what is effective, and as such governable and efficacious, is real: this is the extent to which office, under the guise of the humble functionary or the glorious priest, has changed from top to bottom the rules of first philosophy as much as those of ethics” (preface). [For this I tried an online Kindle edition, which is not so good for citation. There is only one page number for each two pages of the printed book, and the preface has no page numbers.]

The rhetoric here is reminiscent of Foucault’s “archaeological” period, and indeed the fine grain of his analysis noticeably follows an “archaeological” method as well, bringing up many distinctions that are typically blurred together in more conventional historical writing that aims to produce a simple, unified narrative. I find it encouraging to see that others have picked up Foucault’s “archaeological” approach, while turning it toward the history of philosophy. Agamben here offers an archaeology of selected elements of Western (especially Catholic) religious practice that he thinks have philosophical and broader social importance.

Agamben summarizes Heidegger’s discussion of the way medieval Latin translations of various Aristotelian philosophical terms changed their meaning as focusing on how the meanings were changed to make them compatible with creationism. Aquinas’ sophisticated philosophical defense of creation from nothing seems to be a major implicit target of Heidegger’s critique, though he does not mention Aquinas by name. An important part of Heidegger’s critique has to do with the same medieval developments promoting the status of so-called efficient causality and changing its meaning that I have been pointing out (most recently, here).

A major thesis of Agamben’s book is that the “new” notion of efficient causality originated much earlier than Heidegger places it, among the early Christian church fathers and some Roman writers they read, like Quintillian (1st century CE) and Calcidius (4th century). (Of course, that it was a notion of “efficient causality” would not have been recognized by authors unfamiliar with Aristotle.)

Agamben argues that this was associated primarily with accounts of the efficacity of the mass rather than the doctrine of creation. He posits the officium (“office”) of the priest performing the sacraments as the original model for a new kind of efficient cause, and argues that it was applied originally in theological notions of “governance” and “economy”, even though it could also serve as a model for creation. He emphasizes that the officium of the priest completely separates the action of performing the mass from the subject who performs it, which is what allows the mass to be effective as the work of God even if the priest who performs it is sinful.

He is particularly examines Latin uses of the term effectus. He notes that Quintilian distinguishes between arts in actu or in agendo like dance, “which has its end in itself and does not leave behind any work once the act is ended” (p. 43), and arts in effectu like painting, “which reaches its end in a work” (ibid). An opus is the effectus of an operatio. This passage from Quintillian is cited by 4th century Church Father Ambrose.

Agamben writes, “in truth [Ambrose] is moving in an ontological dimension that has nothing to do with Aristotle. What is in question is not the mode of being and the permanence of a form and a substance (that is, of a being that, in Aristotelian terms ‘is what it was’) but a dislocation of being into the sphere of praxis, in which being is what it does, is its operativity itself…. The work, which was in Aristotle the paradigm of being, is here only the proof and the effect of a working…. The ontological status of the liturgical act, of the opus Dei, in which being and praxis, effectiveness and effect, operation and work, opus operatum and opus operans are inseparably intertwined, here has its obscure precursor…. What is decisive here is that it is a specifically artistic operation (theatrical or choral) that furnishes a new ontological-practical paradigm, that is to say, that what is in question is not an ethical paradigm, but a particular technical paradigm. While Aristotle in fact considered the work (ergon) as the telos of the artisan or artist’s poiesis, here, by means of the paradigm of performing arts like dance and theater, which are by definition without a work, the telos is no longer the work, but the artis effectio (execution of the art)” (p. 44).

Again, there is no indication that the authors in question were even aware of how Aristotle used the corresponding terms.

What someone (not me) might call the “dislocation of being into the sphere of praxis” is by my reckoning a major part of what Aristotle himself aimed to achieve in the texts that make up what is conventionally called the Metaphysics. (But praxis is not really one of my words in English; I don’t think of it as a dislocation; and I think this still puts too much emphasis on “being” at the expense of things that matter more to Aristotle.) On my view, Aristotle in the Metaphysics offers a deliberately deflationary account of being as such, while devoting his main attention to a kind of teleological meta-ethics that constitutes what could equally be called first philosophy or “wisdom” or a kind of philosophical “theology”.

The example from Quintillian also poses an interesting question as to what Aristotle would say about dance or theatrical performance. The Poetics is mainly concerned with written works such as the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, and only very secondarily with performance on stage. The writing of the works in question would be a standard case of poieisis (making or productive doing; root of English “poetry”). I’m inclined to think that the performative aspect of music, dance, or theater is better understood as a corner case of the mainly ethical non-productive simple doing that Aristotle calls praxis in Greek (root of English “practice”).

I don’t think it’s accurate to claim that this focus on performative doing in itself necessarily reflects or results in an essentially “technical” paradigm, even though artistic technique is involved in the examples. In calling it “technical”, Agamben implicitly invokes Heidegger’s fulminations against the modern technological world. I find it stilted to speak of doing performative art as an “operation”.

I think Aristotle wants us to see being largely in terms of doing. I don’t at all see a dichotomy of being versus doing in Aristotle, though maybe there is such a dichotomy between doing and “Aristotelian being according to Heidegger”. The ostensibly Aristotelian baseline to which Agamben compares later developments seems to be more assumed than argued for, and what he assumes is Heidegger’s concoction of being as presence.

“It is from this semantic constellation that an ontological paradigm is progressively elaborated among the Christian authors in which the decisive characteristics of being are no longer energeia and entelecheia but effectiveness and effect. It is from this perspective that one must consider the appearance in the Fathers, around the middle of the third century, of the terms efficacia and efficiencia, closely linked to effectus and used in a technical sense to translate (and betray) the Greek energeia” (ibid).

This tells us that the terms used in the eventual medieval translations of Aristotle to Latin already had well-established theological usages, which could not help but color the way that Aristotle was read in Latin. That is very important to know.

On the other hand, I’m already starting to think it is too broad a brush to associate any and all appeals to any kind of efficacy or effectiveness with the same criticisms that apply to more specific medieval and early modern uses of “efficient cause”.

Agamben points out that in explaining efficacia and efficiencia, Rufinus (340-410) gives the example of “the work of the blacksmith or of the one who effectu operis agit, renders his work effective (literally, ‘acts with the effectiveness of the work, with its operativity’). The thing and the work, considered inseparably in their effectiveness and in their function: this is the new ontological dimension that is substituted for the Aristotelian energeia. And it is interesting to note that before finding its canonical translation as potentia–actualitas, the couple dynamis-energeia had been rendered by the Latin Fathers as possibilitas–efficacia (effectus)” (p. 46).

By analogy with the housebuilding example from the Physics, Aristotle would say that properly speaking, the “source of motion” of the blacksmith’s work is the art of blacksmithing. Clearly Rufinus is speaking of something different.

It seems that Agamben implicitly wants to oppose any reliance on a concept of function. This is again an extremely sweeping condemnation, going far beyond specific notions of efficient cause.

He mentions that that “in Paul (and in his Latin translators) energeia indicates not a mode of being but the effectuation of a potency, the operation through which it receives reality and produces determinate effects” (p. 47).

This is also very important to know. Again, we have a pre-existing usage (this time in New Testament Greek) that would have encouraged distinctly non-Aristotelian interpretation of a key Aristotelian term among early Christian readers. The word energeia — which Aristotle had coined as a technical term for the most important modality of being (of which the first cause is the pure instance) — has entered into general circulation and lost its original precise meaning. It is used for a kind of happening in Paul.

“It is in Augustine (De gratia Christi et peccato originalis 1.4.5) that we find confirmed with perfect awareness the pertinence of effectus in ontology” (p. 46). Agamben concentrates on Augustine’s restatement of an argument by Pelagius that I won’t repeat. He concludes, “What is decisive is no longer the work as a stable dwelling in presence but operativity, understood as a threshold in which being and acting, potential and act, working and work, efficacy and effect, Wirkung and Wirklichkeit enter into a reciprocal tension and tend to become undecidable. This tension and this undecidability define the liturgical mystery that the Church recognizes as its most proper and highest task” (p. 47).

The stable dwelling in presence is Heidegger again. I think Aristotelian entelechy is a more nuanced concept, involving a kind of higher-order consistency in the pursuit within becoming of a goal that may itself be open-ended. Simple presence (even “presencing”) just is not an Aristotelian concept.

“The place where the ontology of effectiveness finds its complete expression is the theory of the sacrament as sign, elaborated by the scholastics from Berengar of Tours and Hugh of St. Victor up to Aquinas. According to this theory, what defines the sacraments is their being at once a sign and the cause of that of which they are a sign” (ibid).

“The decisive characteristic of the new effective ontology is operativity, to which the coinage of the adjective operatorius [by Ambrose] and, even earlier, the enormous diffusion of the term operatio (extremely rare in classical Latin…) both testify” (p. 48).

This linguistic point is again significant. I recall that variants of operatio play an important role in surviving manuscripts of the 13th century arts master Siger of Brabant, who not only was not a theologian, but was considered radically secular by some. This anecdotally supports the “enormous diffusion” of operatio.

Discussing a passage from Marius Victorinus, the Latin translator of Plotinus, on the Trinity Agamben concludes that the author is saying “operativity itself is being and being is in itself operative” (p. 50).

“[T]he mystery [of the liturgy] is the effect; what is mysterious is effectiveness, insofar as in it being is resolved into praxis and praxis is substantiated into being” (p. 54). “The sacramental celebration only causes the divine economy to be commemorated and rendered each time newly effective” (ibid).

“To what extent this effective ontology, which has progressively taken the place of classical ontology, is the root of our conception of being — to what extent, that is to say, we do not have at our disposal any experience of being other than operativity — this is the hypothesis that all genealogical research on modernity will have to confront” (ibid).

Maybe. But as broadly as he has defined it, in spite of all my scruples about “efficient causality” and sympathy for his concerns about sovereignty, etc., I would most certainly by Agamben’s lights be a captive of operativity, too, just for taking seriously the interplay between being and doing.

This kind of massively global generalization (a “metaphysics of operativity” applicable to nearly everything) is a recipe for confusing apples with alligators, so to speak. Too many different things are all being thrown together, which seems ironic and very unfortunate after all the careful “archaeological” scholarship oriented toward making additional distinctions.

Just to be clear, Agamben is the one calling these theological views views an “ontology” or a “metaphysics”.

“In the paradigm of operativity, a process that was present from the very beginning of Western ontology, even if in a latent form, reaches its culmination: the tendency to resolve, or at least to indeterminate, being into acting. In this sense the potential-act distinction in Aristotle is certainly ontological (dynamis and energeia are ‘two ways in which being is said’): nevertheless, precisely because it introduces a division into being and afterwards affirms the primacy of energeia over dynamis, it implicitly contains an orientation of being toward operativity. This distinction constitutes the originary nucleus of the ontology of effectiveness, whose very terminology takes form, as we have seen, by means of a translation of the term energeia. Being is something that must be realized or brought-into-work: this is the decisive characteristic that Neoplatonism and Christian theology develop, starting from Aristotle, but in what is certainly a non-Aristotelian perspective” (p. 57).

Now he says the paradigm of operativity was “present from the beginning”, meaning in Aristotle. How could the potential-act distinction “introduce a division into being” for a thinker whose most indisputable and elementary view of being is that it is said in many ways? There is no hint that he recognizes either Aristotle’s explicit subordination of sources of motion to that-for-the-sake-of-which, or his far from immediately “operative” paradigm for so-called efficient causality in something like the art of building.

Where Agamben says “certainly ontological”, this seems to recall Heidegger’s idiosyncratic specification that ontology is supposed to be about Being and not about beings. Agamben equivocates on the word “being”, substituting an extravagant and unitary Heideggerian meaning for Aristotle’s deflationary and multiple one based on uses of the word “is” in speech. (I get the impression that Heidegger detests Aquinas, and thus find it ironic how much he in a way ended up imitating him, in raising Being to the lofty heights.)

“The place and the moment when classical ontology begins that transformation is the theory of the hypostases [the One, Intellect, and Soul] in Plotinus (which will exercise a decisive influence on Augustine’s trinitarian doctrine through Marius Victorinus)…. [O]ntology is conceived fundamentally as a realization and a hypostatic process of putting-to-work, in which the categories of classical ontology (being and praxis, potential and act) tend to be indeterminated and the concept of will, as we shall see, develops a central function” (ibid).

Now we are back to talking about a major transformation in the hands of Plotinus and the church fathers, rather than continuity from the beginning. This part seems relatively much more solid, though I have doubts whether there is such a thing as “classical ontology”. The Greek term for the persons of the Trinity was none other than that used by Plotinus for his three “hypostases”. Augustine regarded his reading of Plotinus as second only to his conversion to Christianity among the milestones of his life. Agamben correctly points out that there is a connection between the way Plotinus introduces something like a kind of dynamism into the eternal, on the one hand, and the subtle mutual relations of the persons of the Trinity in Augustine on the other.

He quotes from Heidegger’s 1941 course “Metaphysics as History of Being”, referring to the conceptual transformations that accompanied the latinization of Aristotle: “Now ergon becomes the opus of the operari, the factum of the facere, the actus of the agire. The ergon is no longer what is freed in the openness of presencing, but what is effected in working. The essence of the ‘work’ is no longer ‘workness’ in the sense of distinctive presencing in the open, but rather the ‘reality’ of a real thing which rules in working and is fitted into the procedure of working. Having progressed from the beginning essence of energeia, Being has become actualitas” (p. 58).

Here again we see Heidegger’s idiosyncratic claim about the centrality of “presencing”, but this is a distraction. His point about the connotations of the Latin terms, on the other hand, makes good sense. These terms do have a somewhat “operative” feel, and a kind of bite that does not seem to be there in the Greek.

“Putting the creationist paradigm at the center of his reconstruction of the history of being leads Heidegger to define the central trait of modern metaphysics as a working in the sense of a causing and producing…. And it is this conception of being as effectiveness that, according to Heidegger, renders possible the transformation of truth into certainty, in which the human being, whom faith in God renders certain of salvation, secures its unconditional dominion over the world by means of techniques” (p. 60).

Here he speaks of “causing” in the modern sense, rather than Aristotle’s very different one of various kinds of why. It is quite true though that Aristotle regards considerations of “production” or “making” as something secondary compared to what in modern terms might be called ethical doing. Ethical doing is “more beautiful” than useful making, even though we also need what is useful. For Aristotle, what is more beautiful is more appropriate to the divine.

“It is just as much and above all governance and oikonomia, which in the last analysis can even provisionally put causal production between parentheses in the name of a more refined and diffuse form of management of human beings and of things. And it is this peculiar practice whose characteristics we have sought to define through our analysis of liturgy” (ibid).

Here the mutual relations between persons in the Trinity meet late Foucault’s analysis of power as something that is distributed throughout a field, rather than concentrated in points of authority.

Aristotle had distinguished between doing (praxis) and making (poieisis). According to Agamben, the Roman scholar Varro (2nd-1st centuries BCE) added a third, “distinctively Roman” type of human action (p. 81). “Gerere, which originally meant ‘to carry’, means in political-juridical language ‘to govern, administer, carry out an office'” (ibid).

So now we also have a Roman political dimension of government interacting with these ecclesiastical concerns. Whereas Hegel in his analysis of Rome especially focuses on the negative aspects of the “only one is free” character of the Roman emperor’s personal absolute rule, Agamben dwells on the institution of a commandist bureaucracy.

“The nature of office and its gerere is strikingly illuminated if one puts it in relation to the sphere of command, that is, with the action proper to the imperator” (p. 83).

“Here one can see the proximity between the ontology of command and the ontology of office that we have sought to define…. The official — like the officiant — is what he has to do and has to do what he is: he is a being of command. The transformation of being into having-to-be, which defines the ethics as much as the ontology and politics of modernity, has its paradigm here” (p. 84).

Elsewhere in the text he dwells on Hannah Arendt’s protrayal of the Nazi bureaucrat Adolph Eichmann, who lived for his office in this sense, in a book subtitled The Banality of Evil. I detest nothing more than arbitrary power, or power exercised arbitrarily, so I thoroughly understand the desire to denounce an “ontology of command”, even if I do not really believe first philosophy calls for an “ontological” approach. But as we will see, this concept too turns out to be dangerously vague.

Agamben thinks there is something wrong with the Aristotelian notion of hexis (emotional constitution or “habit”), which serves as a kind of mediating bridge between potentiality and act in a human.

“Habit is… the mode in which a being (in specific, a human being) ‘has’ in potential a technique, a knowledge, or a faculty, ‘has’ a potential to know and to act. It is, that is to say, the point where being crosses into having. But it is precisely this that constitutes hexis as an aporetic concept…. The strategic meaning of the concept of habit is that, in it, potential and act are separated and nonetheless maintained in relation…. Having the hexis of a potential means being able not to exercise it” (p. 93). “As Aristotle never stops repeating against the Megarians, someone truly has a potential who can both put it and not put it into action” (p. 94).

Potentiality is not univocally determining. It always involves multiple alternatives. The absence of univocal determination does not in itself constitute an aporia. This is how Aristotle accounts for human freedom, without making extravagant assumptions about the power of a “will”.

Agamben’s use of “aporia” also seems excessively broad. He seems to mean anything that is not subject to a univocal interpretation, and he writes as though aporia is necessarily a bad thing. For Aristotle, that is not the case at all; aporias for Aristotle provide valuable insight.

Agamben doesn’t like the fact that Aristotelian virtue is measured against practice. Apparently this is too “operational”. But how else are we to make ethical judgments? Ethics is first and foremost about good doing.

He sees Aquinas as already anticipating a Kantian notion of duty. “In the concept of virtue whose sole object is a debitum, of a being that coincides totally with a having-to-be, virtue and officium coincide without remainder” (p. 101). I haven’t specifically studied Aquinas on this point, but for Aristotle there is simply no such thing as a virtue that corresponds only to an obligation. Virtue is always being good in some positive way.

He does cite the late scholastic Francisco Suárez as calling specifically religious duty an “infinite debt”, but I don’t see what this has to do with Aristotle or Kant. He doesn’t like the idea of an “infinite task” either, but doesn’t explain why.

“Here one clearly sees that the idea of a ‘duty-to-be’ is neither solely ethical nor solely ontological; rather, it aporetically binds being and praxis in the musical structure of a fugue” (p. 106).

(I would say rather that attempts to approach first philosophy as “ontology” reach a fundamental aporia. Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel already showed us a way out of this mess.)

“It is obvious that the paradigm of duty or office… finds its most extreme and aporetic formulation in Kantian ethics” (p. 110). “What in Kant reaches completion in the form of having-to-be is the ontology of operativity…. It is not possible, however, to understand the proper characteristics of the ontology of operativity if one does not understand that it is, from the very beginning and to the same extent, an ontology of command” (p. 117).

“From the very beginning” presumably means in Aristotle. But where on earth would anyone claim to find and “ontology of command” in Aristotle? Notions of command and obedience really have no place at all in Aristotelian ethics. Theological and political voluntarism imply what might reasonably be called an ontology of command. Neither Aristotle nor Kant have anything to do with this.

As with Aristotle, what is “aporetic” in Kantian ethics is actually a strength. Kant leaves an irreducible role for thoughtful judgment about how to best apply principles to particulars in each case. The “aporia” is that Kantian ethics doesn’t aim to give us ready-made answers on what we should positively do, and is not reducible to any schema of unconditional command and obedience.

“The imperative presupposes as its foundation and, at the same time, as its object not a being but a willing…. One understands, from this perspective, why juridical-religious formulas (of which the oath, the command, and the prayer are eminent examples) have a performative character: if the performative, by the simple fact of being uttered, actualizes its own meaning, this is because it does not refer to being but to having-to-be” (p. 118).

I generally share Agamben’s concerns about the imperative form in grammar, which tends to absolutize a “should” or leave it standing in the air, when in reality every “should” is just as strong as the balance of reasons favoring it, and no genuine “should” is a matter of arbitrary obedience. Kant’s categorical imperative, on the other hand, is of a form that cannot possibly be simply “obeyed”, because it is only a procedural guideline.

Agamben recalls Hannah Arendt’s meditations on the trial of the Nazi bureaucrat Eichmann, who claimed to have sincerely followed Kantian precepts of duty in carrying out his governmental responsibilities. But whatever duty to the state he may have believed he was following was obviously antithetical to the universalism of Kantian ethics, which puts respect for all human beings over all other considerations. But Agamben even represents respect as something bad.

“Kant represents the moment when the ontology of command and having-to-be reaches its most extreme elaboration” (p. 120). “Kant’s thought represents… the catastrophic reemergence of law and religion in the bosom of philosophy” (p. 121).

Agamben strenuously objects to Kant’s superficial but nonetheless very prominent emphasis on duty. Duty was a favorite theme of Frederick the Great, who ruled Prussia in Kant’s time, and Kant as a university professor was a civil servant. Kant’s talk about duty — which I also don’t particularly care for — was close to, if not in fact, a civil obligation of his position. But the real substance of Kantian ethics has to do with free rational search and testing for appropriate maxims to guide action in different kinds of situations. I prefer to express this in a more Aristotelian form of deliberation and practical judgment, but the import is the same.

He cites Pufendorf’s opinion that ethics should be expressed in terms of duties rather than virtues. But unlike Aristotle or Kant, Pufendorf really is a political voluntarist who does put the will of the sovereign ahead of everything else.

Kant abstracts duty to the point where it does not dictate specific actions, only a kind of procedural best practices for making judgments. This is far removed from what Brandom calls the authority-obedience model. Calling Kantian ethics an “ontology” of “command” as Agamben does seems utterly inappropriate. Kant is anything but a defender of arbitrary authority.

Next Agamben turns to the origins of the ontology of command.

“With a gesture in which one can make out the birth of the modern metaphysics of the will, Plotinus ultimately identifies will with being itself…. It is precisely this ‘voluntarization’ of Greek metaphysics that, by transforming from within both the image of the world of the Timaeus and the Aristotelian unmoved mover, will render possible the Christian creationist paradigm” (p. 126).

He is onto something real here. Although most of his treatises do not mention it, Plotinus in at least one of them speaks very explicitly of a will, which Plato and Aristotle do not. Agamben quotes from Plotinus’ treatise “Free Will and the Will of the One”: “all therefore was will and in the One there was nothing unwilled or prior to will: he was above all will” (p. 126). And again, “will [boulesis] and substance [ousia] must in itself coincide necessarily with being in itself” (ibid).

(On the other hand, Michael Frede has convincingly argued that the notion of a distinct faculty of will — or of the possibility of arbitrary choice, as distinct from choice based on goodness of reasons — is Stoic rather than neoplatonic in origin. Agamben’s focus on the Christian tradition also leads him to ignore Philo of Alexandria’s earlier development of a radically voluntarist theology of omnipotence, in explicit opposition to the whole previous tradition of Greek philosophy.)

He concludes, “The problem of the coming philosophy is that of thinking an ontology beyond operativity and command and an ethics and a politics entirely liberated from the concepts of duty and will” (p. 128).

Ethics and philosophy do still need to be freed from all-too-common dogmas regarding the very existence of arbitrary will not grounded in reasons; the priority of efficient causality over other kinds of explanation; and certain specific non-Aristotelian concepts of efficient causality that emphasize either immediate production or force. But only some concepts of duty are objectionable, and “operativity” is just way too broad a notion to be subject to a uniform evaluation or account. Global condemnation of operativity throws out the baby with the bath water.

The Four Causes Revisited

Previously I abbreviated my account of book capital Alpha of the Metaphysics, focusing mainly on Aristotle’s own remarks about the “knowledge being sought”. The other main content of this book is a discussion of what his predecessors had to say about this question. The bulk of it concerns the pre-Socratics, with mention of the poets who preceded them.

I tend to regard serious philosophy as starting with Plato. By comparison, even though they have interesting things to say, the pre-Socratics seem mostly to just make dogmatic pronouncements in a simplistic way. As Aristotle says, “[W]hile in a certain way all the causes have been spoken of before, in another way they have not been spoken of at all. For the earliest philosophy about everything is like someone who lisps [sic], since it is young and just starting out” (ch. 10, Sachs tr., p. 28).

But Aristotle’s remarks on his predecessors here — including a brief mention of Plato — also give insight into his perspective on what was most original in his own thought.

These remarks are superficially structured around Aristotle’s claim that no one before him made use of all four causes. But implicitly, this historical critique is preparing the way for a much more fundamental point about the overall leading role of that for the sake of which, which parallels his more developed argument about the nature of explanation in Parts of Animals. The treatment here could also be seen as an anticipation of related conclusions about the nature of the first cause, which will not be made explicit until book Lambda.

The very way in which he briefly introduces the four causes here at the beginning of the Metaphysics already has several important nuances:

“[One cause] is thinghood [ousia or “substance”], or what it is for something to be [what it is] (since the why leads back to the ultimate reasoned account, and the first why is a cause and source), another is the material or underlying thing, a third is that from which the source of motion is, and the fourth is the cause opposite to that one, that for the sake of which or the good (since it is the completion of every coming-into-being and motion” (ch. 3, p. 6).

“Causes” are reasons why. The what-it-is (ti esti) of things is their form, but notably he does not use the word “form” here. The word that Plato had used for form (eidos) had a more common usage for the “look” or visible form of a thing, which is nearly opposite to the sense of essence and deeper truth that Plato and Aristotle give to it.

(Hegel’s remarks on the intangibility of truth suggest a relation between this more ordinary usage of eidos and a weakness of the specifically Platonic notion of form, in which the open-ended nature of essence that Plato so well represents in his depictions of Socratic inquiry is compromised by Plato’s conflicting tendency to sometimes suggest that the form of a thing is something that could be simply known once and for all.)

The material or “underlying thing” answers to the superficial sense of “substance” (ousia) as a logical “sub-ject” of properties in the Categories. But Aristotle has already here associated ousia with the form rather than the material. This could be seen as anticipating the argument of book Zeta on the what-it-is of things, in which the “underlying thing” sense of ousia is eventually superseded by that of the what-it-is.

Pre-Socratic philosophy arose in the relatively cosmopolitan environment of the thriving trade centers of Ionia in Turkey. The Ionians formulated various theories positing a material first principle (water for Thales, air for Anaximenes, fire for Heraclitus, “the Unlimited” for Anaximander).

“Of those who first engaged in philosophy, most thought that the only sources of all things were of the species of material” (ibid). “[B]ut as people went forward in this way, their object of concern itself opened a road for them, and contributed to forcing them to inquire along it. For no matter how much every coming-into-being and destruction is out of some one or more kinds of material, why does this happen and what is its cause? … [But since sources of this kind] were not sufficient to generate the nature of things, again by the truth itself, as we say, people were forced to look for the next kind of source. For that some beings are in a beautiful or good condition, or come into being well or beautifully, it is perhaps not likely that fire or earth or any other such thing is responsible…. So when someone said an intellect was present, just as in animals, also in nature as the cause of the cosmos and of all order, he looked like a sober man next to people who had been speaking incoherently beforehand…. Those, then, who took things up in this way set down a source which is at the same time the cause of the beautiful among things and the sort of cause from which motion belongs to things” (pp. 7-9).

This may seem like a very “Hegelian” kind of argument: “their object of concern itself opened a road for them”. But in reality it is Hegel who is being Aristotelian.

“So these people, as we are saying, evidently got this far with two causes out of those we distinguished in the writings about nature, the material and that from which the motion is, but did so dimly and without clarity, rather in the way nonathletes do in fights; for while dancing around they often land good punches, but they do not do so out of knowledge, nor do these people seem to know what they are saying. For it is obvious that they use these causes scarcely ever, and only to a tiny extent. For Anaxagoras uses the intellect as a makeshift contrivance for cosmos production, and whenever he comes to an impasse about why something is necessarily a certain way, he drags it in, but in the other cases he assigns as the causes of what happens everything but the intellect” (ch. 4, p. 9).

He applauds Anaxagoras for bringing intellect into the discussion, but criticizes him for using it mainly as what Brandom would call an “unexplained explainer”. To the extent that Anaxagoras has an implicit theory of the way in which intellect affects other things, Aristotle regards him as treating it as a “source of motion”. But Aristotle notes that it is completely unclear in Anaxagoras how intellect is supposed to be a source of motion. The same goes for Empedocles’ principles of love and strife.

Aristotle will retain an important role for intellect (and love too) as well as the notion of sources of motion, but he decouples these, and develops a different account of each. In both the Physics and the Metaphysics, he ends up tracing sources of motion to potentiality. But meanwhile, the source of motion is also what the Latin scholastics and early moderns called the efficient cause.

It is again vitally important to recognize the order of explanation that Aristotle employs. He explains the operative aspects of “efficient causality” in terms of the more fundamental notion of developed potentiality. He does not explain “potentiality” in terms of efficient causality, and he most especially does not explain potentiality in terms of some passive role in what the scholastics and early moderns understood by efficient causality. Once again, when he is being careful, Aristotle makes it clear that the primary model for this kind of cause is something like the art of building as a developed potentiality, not something immediate like the hammer’s blow or the carpenter’s arm.

Chapter 5 is devoted to the Pythagorean school’s teaching that mathematical things are the sources of all things. This chapter also incorporates remarks on the Eleatic school’s teaching that the One or Being is the source of all things. He treats both of these as partial anticipations of Plato, grouping them together as “the Italians”, since both of these schools were centered in the Greek colonies in Italy.

“After these philosophic speculations that have been mentioned came the careful work of Plato, which in many ways followed the lead of these people, but also had separate features that went beyond the philosophy of the Italians. For having become acquainted from youth at first with Cratylus and the Heraclitean teachings that all sensible things are always in flux and that there is no knowledge of them, he also conceived these things that way later on. And since Socrates exerted himself about ethical matters and not at all about the whole of nature, but in the former sought the universal and was the first to be skilled at thinking about definitions, Plato, when he adopted this, took it up as applying to other things and not to sensible ones, because of this: it was impossible that there be any common definition of any of the perceptible things since they were always changing. So he called this other sort of beings forms, and said the perceptible things were apart from these and all spoken of derivatively from these” (ch. 6, pp. 14-15).

“In a curtailed way, then, and hitting the high spots, we have gotten hold of who happens to have spoken about origins and truth, and in what way” (ch. 7, p. 16). “But about what it is for something to be, and thinghood, no one has delivered up a clear account, but those who posit the forms speak of it most” (p. 17).

Aristotle thinks that Plato came closer to what is needed than any of his predecessors.

“That for the sake of which actions and changes and motions are, they speak of as a cause in a certain way, but they do not say it that way, nor speak of what is so by its very nature. For those who speak of intellect or friendship as good set these up as causes, but do not speak as though anything that is either has its being or comes into being for the sake of these, but as though motions arose from these” (ibid, emphasis added).

We saw that Aristotle understands Anaxagoras as claiming that intellect is a source of motion, in some direct but unexplained way. Aristotle maintains on the contrary that intellect is a cause in what he above called the “opposite” sense of that for the sake of which.

He continues, “And in the same way too, those who speak of the one or being as such a nature do say that it is the cause of thinghood [i.e., of things being what they are], but not that it either is or comes about for the sake of this; so it turns out that they both say and do not say that the good is a cause, since they say it is so not simply but incidentally” (ibid, emphasis added).

Parts of this remark apply to the Pythagoreans (the one) and the Eleatics (the one or being). All of it, including the part about the good, applies to the Platonists. For Aristotle, neither “the one” nor “being” is in its own right a true cause, because neither gives us a specific why for anything. Aristotle’s own notion of the first cause is to be identified neither with Thomistic Being nor with the neoplatonic One. On the other hand, the good is a true cause, because it does give us specific reasons why. These are expressible in terms of that-for-the-sake-of-which. But he also delicately implies that even Plato treats the Good more like a source of motions than a grounding for explanations in terms of that-for-the-sake-of-which. Elsewhere, he says that Plato treats the Good as a formal cause, rather than as that-for-the-sake-of-which. In any case, he clearly thinks that Plato treats the Good as affecting things in some other way than as that-for-the-sake-of-which. The neoplatonists explicitly represent the One or the Good as producing all things. But at this level, the specificity of reasons why things turn out some particular way is completely left behind.

Without a reason why things turn out as they do, for Aristotle there is no true cause. That-for-the-sake-of-which is more preeminently and properly a why than any of the other causes, and for Aristotle this makes it more preeminently and properly a cause than any of the other causes. That is why it seems reasonable to him that the first cause of all should be purely a cause in the sense of that for the sake of which.

The scholastics and the moderns tend to reduce all causes to the notion of efficient cause that they put in the place of Aristotle’s “source of motion”. But for Aristotle, a source of motion is principally a means to the realization of an end, to which it is subordinated. Aristotle ultimately subordinates all other causes to the operation of the good as that for the sake of which. The result is not a total determination or absolute necessity, but rather various hypothetical necessities that can each be realized in more than one way, and that therefore still allow room for genuine contributions to the outcome from secondary causes.

Aristotle’s association of that-for-the-sake-of-which with completion in the earlier quote recalls the way that he elsewhere associates it with actuality, which in the Barnes-edited Collected Works edition of the Physics is translated as “fulfillment”, and which Aristotle closely identifies with entelechy, which also implies completion. Thus, although I don’t recall him ever explicitly saying it, both potentiality and actuality are represented among the four causes, which we could now alternatively list as form, material, potentiality, and actuality. This particular conclusion is new to me, but based on the argument sketched here it seems pretty solid. This has a number of interesting consequences.

For example, with these identifications in hand, we can apply the priority of actuality over potentiality in Aristotle as an alternate reason why that-for-the-sake-of-which is prior to the source of motion.

We can also see another reason why although there is a kind of analogy between the actuality/potentiality and form/material relations, the distinction between actuality and potentiality cannot be reduced to that between form and material. Otherwise, there would be only two distinct kinds of causes, and not the four on which Aristotle insists. This distinction between the two distinctions fits perfectly with Aristotle’s other insistence that nonsensible as well as sensible things can have being in potentiality, whereas only sensible things are properly said to have material.

Next in this series: Infinity, Finitude, and the Good

Plotinus on Contemplation

“Supposing we played a little before entering upon our serious concern and maintained that all things are striving after Contemplation, looking to Vision as their one end — and this, not merely beings endowed with reason but even the unreasoning animals, the Principle that rules in growing things, and the Earth that produces these — and that all achieve their purpose in the measure possible to their kind, each attaining Vision and possessing itself of the End in its own way and degree, some things in entire reality, other in mimicry and image — we would scarcely find anyone to endure so strange a thesis. But in a discussion entirely among ourselves there is no risk in a light handling of our own ideas (Plotinus, Enneads III.8, ch. 1, MacKenna tr., p. 239).

Thus begins Plotinus’ great essay that we know by the title “Nature, Contemplation, and the One”. The remainder of the text suggests that he is in fact fairly serious in what he suggests, but this disclaimer shows that he recognizes its unusual character. He does at a later point say in effect, “and now for the serious part”. In the “playful” part, he is deliberately stretching the meaning of contemplation, challenging us to apply it in many more cases than we would expect. In the “serious” part, he narrows the meaning to cases that come close to instantiating the identity Aristotle speaks of between thought and what it thinks.

Scholars believe this essay was part of Plotinus’ single largest work, which his student and editor Porphyry divided into four separate pieces, including “On the Intellectual Beauty” and “Against the Gnostics”. I wanted to compare what he says about contemplation with what Aristotle says. I find that even when I don’t agree with Plotinus, his work often has a kind of poetic appeal.

Aristotle speaks of contemplation as the characteristic activity of the gods, and as the ultimate end of human life. Plotinus here suggests that all nature aims at contemplation. Aristotle never says that, but it is in a way implicit between the lines. If the first cause is characterized by pure contemplation, and is the ultimate end behind all particular ends for which things do what they do, then in that sense all things aim at contemplation.

The characterization of contemplation as “Vision” is not one I would want to endorse in an Aristotelian context, at least without major qualification. The way Plotinus speaks of it, this Vision seems like a case of what Kant would call intellectual intuition — a kind of immediate grasping of some deep content.

I agree with Kant and Hegel that humans can “immediately” grasp deep content in holistic fashion only after and because we have previously done the work needed to understand it, which typically involves what Aristotle calls “thinking things through”, and what I have called interpretation and (after Paul Ricoeur) the long detour. I want to read Aristotle in a way that is compatible with this.

As it stands, Plotinus’ notion of Vision seems designed to exclude mediation, consonant with his emphasis on the simplicity of the One as the source of all things. For Plotinus, Vision is an immediate holistic “seeing” of deep truth.

I think Aristotelian contemplation is holistic too, but that any holistic Vision or immediate intuition achievable by humans and acceptable to Aristotle must have a cumulative, retrospective, reflective character that depends on previous insight and work, like apperception does in Kant and Hegel. I would suggest that Aristotelian contemplation could be elaborated as apperceptive entelechy.

“Well — in the play of this very moment am I engaged in the act of Contemplation? Yes; I and all that enter this play are in Contemplation: our play aims at Vision; and there is every reason to believe that child or man, in sport or earnest, is playing or working only towards Vision, that every act is an effort towards Vision; the compulsory act, which tends rather to bring the Vision down to outward things, and the act thought of as voluntary, less concerned with the outer, originate alike in the effort towards Vision” (ibid).

Here we begin to see in detail the vast extension of contemplation Plotinus is “playfully” suggesting. All things either are contemplation or aim at contemplation. In effect, he is treating Vision as a name for the Good at which all things aim.

“[L]et us speak, first, of the earth and of the trees and vegetation in general, asking ourselves what is the nature of the Contemplation in them, how we relate to any Contemplative activity the labor and productiveness of the earth, how Nature, held to be devoid of reason and even of conscious representation, can either harbour Contemplation or produce by means of the Contemplation which it does not possess” (ibid).

For Aristotle, the earth has a nature or internal source of motion, and plants as living things have an elementary kind of soul corresponding to their abilities for growth and nutrition. But even motion is a primitive kind of entelechy, of which contemplation is the highest form. Aristotle may not see contemplation everywhere, but he does see entelechy everywhere.

Incidentally, the English word “consciousness” was first coined by Locke’s friend, the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, to express ideas he found in Plotinus.

“To begin with, since in all [Nature’s] production it is stationary and intact, a Reason-Principle [logos] self-indwelling, it is in its own nature a Contemplative act. All doing must be guided by an Idea, and will therefore be distinct from that Idea: the Reason-Principle then, as accompanying and guiding the work, will be distinct from the work; not being action but Reason-Principle it is, necessarily, Contemplation” (ch. 3, p. 240).

Plotinus generally seems to use logos in a sense that is derived from Stoicism, rather than any Platonic or Aristotelian source. Logos is a — arguably the — fundamental explanatory principle in Stoicism. It has relations with Platonic and Aristotelian concepts, but is a distinct notion or family of notions in its own right. For the Stoics, everything has an indwelling logos or rational principle that internally governs it, and the logos has a divine origin.

“And does this Reason-Principle, Nature, spring from a contemplation? Wholly and solely” (ibid).

He doesn’t explain this, but instead proceeds to qualify it.

“The Contemplation springing from the reasoning faculty — that, I mean, of planning its own content — [Nature] does not possess” (p. 241).

Nature neither reasons explicitly, nor plans how to achieve its aims.

“Because to plan for a thing is to lack it: Nature does not lack; it creates because it possesses. Its creative act is simply its possession of its own characteristic Essence; now its Essence, since it is a Reason-Principle, is to be at once an act of contemplation and an object of contemplation” (ibid).

The idea of starting from fullness rather than lack is appealing. Aristotle’s way of doing this is to emphasize entelechies everywhere. Every entelechy is in a way complete in itself.

Aristotle complements this by saying that the living things that have natures are more immediately moved by desire. Plato, however, strongly identifies desire with a kind of lack. Plotinus therefore seems to want to downplay the role of desire, and identifies nature with the fullness of a creative act. If this is not the creativity of the translator, we have here a reference to creation, as distinct from making. Creation is also not part of Platonic or Aristotelian vocabulary.

Plotinus is said to have read works by Numenius, a Neo-Pythagorean who was impressed by the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. I don’t have my Loeb edition handy to check the Greek. (Incidentally, Armstrong’s complete translation of Plotinus in the Loeb edition is more accurate and less flowery than the more common MacKenna I am using here. Kevin Corrigan’s translation in his Reading Plotinus is also better, but I don’t have that handy either.)

The “act” part seems to be a reference to actuality or being-at-work. This is also an important concept for Plotinus, though in contrast to Aristotle he ultimately subordinates it to potentiality.

“Thus the act of production is seen to be in Nature an act of contemplation, for creation is the outcome of a contemplation which never becomes anything else, which never does anything else, but creates by simply being a contemplation” (ibid).

Aristotle makes the more specific claim that the what-it-is of things is the outcome of thought thinking itself that contemplates. He would not collapse this together as Plotinus does, into a claim that nature’s act of production is an act of contemplation.

“[W]hat we know as Nature is a Soul, offspring of a yet earlier Soul of more powerful life; that it possesses, therefore, in its repose, a vision within itself; that it has no tendency upward nor even downward but is at peace, steadfast, in its own Essence;” (ch. 4, p. 241).

Aristotle calls nature an internal source of motion, but not a soul (psyche). On the other hand, the things he regards as having a nature (plants and animals) he also regards as having a soul. But the notions of soul in Aristotle and Plotinus are also vastly different. While Aristotle is careful to stay close to what can be observed by anyone, Plotinus makes the soul a much grander thing with much stronger properties.

“Of course, while it may be convenient to speak of ‘understanding’ or ‘perception’ in the Nature-Principle, this is not in the full sense…; we are applying to sleep a word borrowed from the wake” (pp. 241-242).

Here he acknowledges he is stretching things.

“In the same way, human beings, when weak on the side of contemplation, find in action their trace of vision and of reason: their spiritual feebleness unfits them for contemplation; they are left with a void, because they cannot adequately seize the vision; yet they long for it; they are hurried into action as their way to the vision which they cannot attain by intellection. They act from the desire of seeing their action, and of making it visible and sensible to others when the result shall prove fairly well equal to the plan. Everywhere, doing and making will be found to be either an attenuation or a complement of vision” (p. 242).

Long ago, I was profoundly impressed by this argument that all action aims at contemplation, which he returns to further on. Looking at it now, it strikes me that this thesis may be implicitly counterposed to Aristotle’s idea of the priority of actuality, which, as we will see, Plotinus does not agree with. Aristotle also would never be so one-sidedly dismissive of doing and making, even though he agrees that contemplation is “even more” to be valued.

“The primal phase of the Soul — inhabitant of the Supreme… — remains unchangeably There; but in virtue of that first participation, … a secondary phase also participates in the Supreme, and this secondary goes forth ceaselessly as Life streaming from Life; for energy runs through the universe and there is no extremity at which it dwindles out” (ch. 5, p. 242).

“Energy” here is actuality or being-at-work, now explicitly associated with something secondary.

“All goes softly since nothing here demands the parade of thought or act upon external things: it is a Soul in vision and, by this vision, creating its own subsequent — this Principle (of Nature), itself also contemplative but in the feebler degree… a Vision creates the Vision ” (p. 243).

The implicit complaint against the “parade of thought” has to do with Plotinus’ strong bias for intuitive immediacy over what Aristotle would call “thinking things through”. I think Plotinus is perhaps the best proponent of this view that I disagree with — certainly better than the followers of Schelling and Jacobi who attacked Hegel.

“[T]his explains how the Soul’s creation is everywhere: where can this thing fail to be, which is one identical thing in every soul? Vision is not cabined within the bournes of magnitude.”

In Plotinus’ modified Platonic view, Soul is not just the form of a living body, but plays a huge role in the formation and governance of the world. There is a soul of the world or soul of the all; nature is a kind of soul; and there is a transcendent Soul that is Nature’s prior. Every individual soul has a direct connection to the transcendent Soul.

“This, of course, does not mean that the Soul is present at the same strength in each and every place and thing — any more than it is at the same strength in each of its phases.”

“The Charioteer (the Leading Principle of the Soul, in the Phaedrus myth) gives the two horses (its two dissonant faculties) what he has seen and they, taking that gift, showed that they were hungry for that vision; there was something lacking to them: if in their desire they acted, their action aimed at what they craved for — and that was vision, and an object of vision” (ibid).

Here he refers to imagery from Plato’s Phaedrus, while re-centering the myth around his own notion of Vision. He again dwells on the superiority of contemplation to action.

“Action, thus, is set towards contemplation and an object of contemplation, so that even those whose life is in doing have seeing as their object” (ch. 6, p. 243).

“[T]hey desired a certain thing to come about, not in order to be unaware of it but to know it, to see it present before the mind…. We act for the sake of some good; this means not for something to remain outside of ourselves, not in order that we may possess nothing but that we may hold the good of the action. And hold it, where? Where but in the mind?” (ibid).

“This vision achieved, the acting instinct pauses; the mind is satisfied and seeks nothing further” (p. 244).

Aristotle would agree that a maximally complete entelechy like contemplation is in a way better than any incomplete entelechy, such as would be associated with action. Even so, his emphasis on the priority of actuality leads to a much more positive valuation of acting, doing, and making. Also, for Aristotle contemplation is a being-at-work. And I at least also think of it as a particular kind of acting and doing, even though it is different from external acting and doing.

“[N]ow we come to the serious treatment of the subject — In proportion to the truth with which the knowing faculty knows, it comes to identification with the object of its knowledge” (ibid).

What he says here about knowledge resembles the Aristotelian identity of thought and the thing thought, broadened to include a kind of proportional applicability. On the other hand, Aristotle seems to view knowledge as a discrete relation, which if taken strictly would seem to rule out any kind of proportional applicability or approximation.

“Hence the Idea must not be left to lie outside but must be made one identical thing with the Soul of the novice so that he finds it really his own. The Soul, once domiciled within that Idea and brought to likeness to it, becomes productive, active; what it always held by its primary nature it now grasps with knowledge and applies in deed, so becoming, as it were, a new thing and, informed as it now is by the purely intellectual, it sees (in its outgoing act) as a stranger looking upon a strange world” (ibid).

Though the strong implications of Soul and the initiatory rhetoric are distinctive to Plotinus, what is really essential here is that “the Idea must not be left to lie outside”. Aristotle and Hegel would both wholeheartedly endorse this part.

“The Sage, then, has gone through a process of reasoning when he expounds his act to others; but in relation to himself he is Vision” (ibid).

Plotinus has a much more individualist point of view than Aristotle. For him we are ultimately each “alone with the Alone”. A direct personal relation to the One makes all human social relations seem insignificant by comparison. For Aristotle, participation in social relations is essential to being human, and this is a good thing, not just a distraction from personal spiritual development.

“All the forms of Authentic Existence spring from vision and are a vision. Everything that springs from these Authentic Existences in their vision is an object of vision — manifest to sensation or to true knowledge or to surface-awareness. All act aims at this knowing; all impulse is toward knowledge” (ch. 7, p. 245).

Now in the “serious” part, he repeats what was initially supposed to be the “playful” claim that all things either are contemplation or are oriented toward it.

“[T]he creating powers operate not for the sake of creation and action but in order to produce an object of vision. This same vision is the ultimate purpose of all the acts of the mind and, even further downward, of all sensation, since sensation also is an effort towards knowledge; lower still, Nature, producing similarly its subsequent principle, brings into being the vision and Idea that we know in it. It is certain, also, that as the Firsts exist in vision all other things must be straining towards the same condition; the starting point is, universally, the goal” (ibid).

Aristotle would never speak of “creating powers”. While he certainly recognizes distinctions between immediate, intermediate, and ultimate ends, he would also never deny that what a thing essentially does is its end.

“[T]he procreative act is the expression of a contemplation, a travail towards the creation of many forms, many objects of contemplation, so that the universe may be filled full of Reason-Principles and that contemplation may be, as nearly as possible, endless…. So Love, too, is vision with the pursuit of Ideal-Form” (ibid).

Again this has a kind of poetic charm, but taking it literally relies on a collapsing of distinctions.

“In the advancing stages of Contemplation rising from that in Nature, to that in the Soul and thence again to that in the Intellectual-Principle itself, the object contemplated becomes progressively a more and more intimate possession of the Contemplating Beings, more and more one with them” (ch. 8, p. 245).

Here he returns to what we know from Aristotle as the strict identity of pure thought and what it thinks. As before, he wants to first greatly generalize and then to relativize it.

“[I]n the Intellectual-Principle itself, there is complete identity of Knower and Known, and this not by way of domiciliation, as in the case of even the highest soul, but by Essence, by the fact that, there, no distinction exists between Being and Knowing” (ibid).

Aristotle would agree.

“The Supreme must be an entity in which the two are one; it will, therefore, be a Seeing that lives, not an object of vision like things existing in something other than themselves” (pp. 245-246).

The Supreme in Plotinus is a name for the One. Aristotle’s first cause is identified with thought thinking itself, more or less equivalent to the Intellectual-Principle here. Plotinus is clearly not satisfied with Aristotle’s first cause, and posits the One above it. Aristotle in the Metaphysics argues at length why we should not follow the Pythagoreans and Plato in regarding the One as a source or cause.

“Every life is some form of thought…. But while men may recognize grades in life they reject grades in thought; to them there are thoughts (full and perfect) and anything else is no thought” (p. 246).

This is an important point. The thoughts that we embodied beings have in ordinary life are far from “full and perfect”, but we tend to act as though they were full and perfect.

“The essential is to observe that, here again, all reasoning shows that whatever exists is a bye-work [sic] of visioning” (ibid).

Once again, for Plotinus the immediate whole of the One is the complete source of everything. By contrast, Aristotle complements his account of the dependency of all things on the first cause by insisting that everything also depends on particular causes.

“The Highest began as a unity but did not remain as it began; all unknown to itself, it became manifold; it grew, as it were, pregnant: desiring universal possession, it flung itself outward, though it were better had it never known the desire by which a Secondary came into being…. The Whence is better; the Whither is less good: the Whence is not the same as the Whence-followed-by-a-Whither; the Whence alone is greater than with the Whither added to it” (ibid).

Overall, Plotinus seems to be conflicted about the goodness of manifestation and actualization. There are many texts like “On the Intellectual Beauty” that seem to present these in a positive light, and he sharply criticizes the Gnostics for their negative views of life in the world. But here he repeats in three different wordings that the One shut up within itself is better than the One complemented by a world.

For Aristotle, manifestation and actualization as such are unequivocally good, even if some true facts are not good. For Aristotle — in diametrical contrast to Plotinus here — the highest good should be called not a Whence but a Whither, the ultimate end of all things, that-for-the-sake-of-which. The first cause is a pure end.

“If, then, neither the Intellectual-Principle nor the Intelligible Object can be the First Existent, what is? Our answer can only be: The source of both…. Yet: our knowledge of everything else comes by way of our intelligence; our power is that of knowing the intelligible by means of the intelligence: but this Entity transcends all of the intellectual nature; by what direct intuition, then, can it be brought within our grasp?” (ch. 9, p. 247).

Here and below, Plotinus seems to refer to the One as a Being. In other texts, he says that the One is beyond being, and associates being with intellect. Even here, he associates all knowledge with intellect (the One would be beyond knowledge).

“To this question the answer is that we can know it only in the degree of human faculty: we indicate it by virtue of what in ourselves is like it. For in us, also, there is something of that Being; nay, nothing, ripe for that participation, can be void of it. Wherever you be, you have only to range over against this omnipresent Being that in you which is capable of drawing from It, and you have your share in it” (pp. 247-248).

Now he uses “knowledge” in a much looser way than above. The idea that what is highest is not entirely inaccessible to us is appealing.

“The Intellectual-Principle in us must mount to its origins: essentially a thing facing two ways, it must deliver itself over to those powers within it which tend upward; if it seeks the vision of that Being, it must become something more than Intellect.”

Elsewhere, Plotinus seems to suggest that if each thing “turns upward” toward what is above it and away from what is below, that which is below it will spontaneously carry on in the best possible way — i.e., better than if we were more actively looking down into it and intervening in it. Very different presentation notwithstanding, this always reminded me of the Tao Te Ching‘s idea of getting things done in the best possible way by “non-action”.

“For the Intellectual-Principle is the earliest form of Life: it is the Activity presiding over the outflowing of the universal Order — the outflow, that is, of the first moment, not that of the continuous process” (p. 248).

He identifies neither intellect nor the the One with the whole of things.

“[I]t must of necessity derive from some other Being, from one that does not emanate but is the Principle of Emanation, of Life, of Intellect, and of the Universe…. [T]his can be no thing among things but must be prior to all things” (ibid).

The One is not a “thing” at all. For Aristotle, the first cause is a particular thing that is prior in nature to all other things. To be a being in the proper sense is to be a particular independent thing.

“And what will such a Principle essentially be? The potentiality of the Universe: the potentiality whose non-existence would mean the non-existence of all the Universe and even of the Intellectual-Principle which is the primal Life and all Life” (ch. 10, p. 248).

Here he makes the potentiality of the One prior to any actuality. Aristotle would strenuously object to this.

“Imagine a spring that has no source outside itself; it gives itself to all the rivers, yet is never exhausted by what they take, but remains always integrally what it was…. Or: think of the Life coursing throughout some mighty tree… it is the giver of the entire and manifold life of the tree, but remains unmoved in itself” (p. 249).

This image of something that constantly gives and never needs anything is powerful. Plotinus radicalizes and generalizes Aristotle’s notion of unmoved moving, making it a complete cause of things, which Aristotle never claimed it was.

“Thus we are always brought back to The One. Every particular thing has a One of its own to which it may be traced; the All has its One, its Prior but not yet the Absolute One; through this we reach that Absolute One, where all such references come to an end. Now when we reach a One — the stationary Principle — in the tree, in the animal, in Soul, in the All — we have in every case the most powerful, precious element: when we come to the One in Authentically Existent Beings — their Principle and source and potentiality — shall we lose confidence and suspect it of being — nothing?” (ibid).

I probably should go back to the Metaphysics, and pull out Aristotle’s discussions of oneness and the Pythagorean-Platonic claims that the One is something separate. I think he pretty conclusively shows that claims for a separate One are incoherent.

“Certainly, this Absolute is none of the things of which it is the source — its nature is that nothing can be affirmed of it — not existence, not essence, not life — since it is That which transcends all these. But possess yourself of it by the very elimination of Being and you hold a marvel. Thrusting forward to This, attaining, and resting in its content, seek to grasp it more and more — understanding it by that intuitive thrust alone, but knowing its greatness by the Beings that follow upon it and exist by its power” (ibid).

This seems like his more standard position that the One is not a Being. It also at least suggests the very useful approach of understanding a cause or a higher thing by examining what follows from it. But the extent to which Plotinus puts this into practice is limited.

“The Intellectual-Principle is a Seeing, and a Seeing which itself sees; therefore it is a potentiality which has become effective…. All actual seeing implies duality; before the seeing takes place there is the pure unity (of the power of seeing)” (ch. 11, p. 249).

The assertion that all seeing — and implicitly, all knowing — implies duality suggests a denial of Aristotle’s thesis that pure thought is simply identical with what it thinks. But again there is a mismatch that could also allow for doubt. Where Aristotle speaks of thinking, Plotinus speaks of seeing, and of knowing in some broad sense. For Aristotle, thinking and knowing are primarily discursive; for Plotinus, they are primarily intuitive.

“Now as our sight requires the world of sense for its satisfaction and realization, so the vision in the Intellectual-Principle demands, for its completion, The Good” (pp. 249-250).

Here he implicitly rejects Aristotle’s identification of thought thinking itself with the good. In modern terms, we are back to the model of the duality of consciousness of an object that is not Aristotle’s, and that Hegel strove mightily to overcome in favor of a more Aristotelian solution.

“It cannot be, itself, The Good, since then it would not need to see or to perform any other Act; for The Good is the center of all else, and it is by means of The Good that every thing has Act, while The Good is in need of nothing and therefore possesses nothing beyond itself” (p. 250).

For Plotinus, intellect sees and acts, while the One or The Good is above all that. For Aristotle, pure intellect is a pure entelechy that is also the the ultimate good for all things. Whether or not we say that it sees and acts depends on the meaning we attribute to seeing and acting.

“Once you have uttered ‘The Good’, add no further thought: by any addition, and in proportion to that addition, you introduce a deficiency. Do not even say that it has Intellection; you would be dividing it; it would become a duality, Intellect and The Good” (ibid).

“[W]e form a conception of its true character from its image playing upon the Intellectual-Principle (ibid).

“[A]ll the striving is on the side of the Intellect, which is the eternal striver and eternally the attainer (ibid).

For Aristotle, intellect is an entelechy, which I think would be exempt from “striving”. It is composite things that do the striving.

“The Source of all this cannot be an Intellect…. [T]here is That before them which neither needs nor possesses anything, since, needing or possessing anything else, it would not be what it is — The Good” (ibid).

Once again, Aristotle does not claim that his first cause is the “Source of all this”. Rather, it is the destination of all this.

Mathematical Things and Forms

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He goes on to make some positive remarks about mathematics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pure Entelechy

Book Lambda (XII) of the Metaphysics sketches Aristotle’s brilliant and beautiful solution to the problems that have been under investigation in this work. The text of book Lambda itself, however, seems more like a series of fragments than the kind of tight, continuous development that characterizes the so-called “central books” Zeta (VII), Eta (VIII), and Theta (IX), or the books of Aristotle’s Physics.

He now clearly affirms that there is a first cause of all things — not only of their being what they are, but also of their motion. As a result, book Lambda presents a mix of philosophical theology and Aristotelian physics.

Aristotle has a very distinctive notion of what the first cause is. I would call this pure entelechy. I’m not aware that he literally uses that phrase, but he definitely says that the first cause is pure energeia (actuality, being-at-work, or fulfillment), and he very strongly identifies energeia with entelecheia (a new Greek word coined by Aristotle, meaning literally “in [it] end having”, or “being-at-work-staying-itself” in Sachs’ translation), for which I am using the English “entelechy”.

Entelechy is the theme that unifies Aristotle’s account of motion with the inquiry about why things are what they are. Motion is a kind of incomplete entelechy. The first cause, both of motion and of things being what they are — which he identifies with the good, that-for-the-sake-of-which, thought thinking itself, and what I would call a kind of pure delight — is a complete and pure entelechy. The concept of entelechy thus binds Aristotle’s physics together with his theology.

Apart from considerations related to the first cause, Aristotle normally distinguishes that-for-the-sake-of-which from the potentiality that is an internal source of motion in things. But he also says that every motion is for the sake of that toward which the potentiality inclines. And the first cause of all motion affects things purely as that-for-the-sake-of-which.

The kind of motion that best exemplifies entelechy is circular motion. Circularity is also a kind of figurative image or metaphor for entelechy. Continuous motion in a circle is in a sense always complete in the sense of unchangingly accomplishing its goal, and yet it is always ongoing. But not even the first motion is itself unconditionally complete as an entelechy, since it is still moving. Only the first cause is that.

For Aristotle, there is one thing that is directly moved by the first cause, and that is the sphere of the fixed stars, which also demarcates the most comprehensive whole of things that occupy space. Other motions are indirect consequences of this, which follow only in a conditional way.

The first cause is not just pure entelechy in the generic sense of a logical universal. It is a particular independent thing that turns out to be the unique exemplar of its kind.

In virtue of its unique relation to all other things, it plays the role of what Hegel would later call a concrete universal. Further, the unique character of that relation of “firstness” makes it an unconditioned concrete universal. This is the kind of unconditioned thing that Kant says reason is always reaching for, but that cannot be strictly known. It is also the kind of unconditioned thing that Hegel treats as the ultimate ground of intelligibility and value.

He begins by recalling that the path of the inquiry has approached “all things” by focusing on those sources and causes that make concrete independent things be what they are. Independent things turn out to be those that have some entelechy of their own, which exhibits greater self-determination than the minimal kind that applies to all motions. These include plants, animals, and the stars.

“Our study concerns thinghood, for it is the sources and causes of independent things that are being sought” (ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 231).

“[E]verything changes from something that has being in potency to something that has being at-work” (ch. 2, p. 232).

All change for Aristotle is from something being potentially something to its being that same something in actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment. This is narrower than common English usage. In Physics book VII he says that “states, whether of the body or of the soul, are not alterations” (Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. 1, p. 412).

“Now if something has being in potency, still this is not a potency to be any random thing, but a different thing comes to be from a different potency” (ibid).

Although one thing may have many potentialities, each of which may or may not be realized, each of these is a specific potentiality to be actual or at-work or fulfilled in some definite way.

“The kinds of thinghood are three, since the material is a this by coming forth into appearance (for whatever has being by way of contact, and not by having grown together, is material and underlies something else), while the nature of a thing is a this and an active condition into which it comes; and then the third kind is the particular thing that consists of these, such as Socrates or Callias” (ch. 3, p. 233).

He reminds us that when we speak of particular things, to avoid confusion we need to attend to whether we mean their matter, their form, or the composite consisting of both.

“Now things that cause motion are causes as being previously present, but things that are causes in the sense of rational patterns are simultaneous with what they produce” (p. 234).

Causes that are not of motion as such, but rather simply of being in a certain way, like form and that-for-the-sake-of-which, are not like more direct causes of motion in their mode of operation with respect to time. Their operation as causes does not involve a distinct externality related to a before and after, but rather unfolds immanently in their effects.

“Now there is a sense in which the causes and sources of different things are different, but there is a sense in which, if one speaks universally by way of analogy, they are the same for all things…. [B]ut the elements are different in different things, and the first cause that sets them in motion is also different in different things…. [B]ut still, over and above these, is the cause which, as the first of all things, sets all things in motion” (ch. 4, p. 234-236).

For Aristotle, everything has both a particular cause or causes, and a dependency on the first cause of all. The first cause of all operates through particular causes. This is the first time he has unambiguously implied that there is a first cause of all things. (In the middle above, when he speaks of “the first cause that sets them in motion”, this is not the first cause of all, but the first more specific cause of the motion in question.)

“Now since some things are separate while others are not separate, the former are independent things. And it is on account of this that all things have the same causes, because without independent things, attributes and motions are not possible. So then these causes will be, presumably, soul and body, or intellect, desire, and body. And in yet another way the sources of things are the same by analogy, namely being-at-work and potency, though these are both different and present in different ways in different things” (ch. 5, p. 236).

Once again, he recalls both the strategy of deriving the saying of being in the other categories from the saying of what independent things are, and the analogy by which the meanings of actuality and potentiality were illustrated. Again he emphasizes actuality and potentiality as sources of all things.

In passing, he seems to suggest thinking about human being in more specific terms of intellect and desire, rather than an undifferentiated soul. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he specifies that choice is grounded in a fusion of intellect and desire.

“Further, it is necessary to see that some things are possible to state universally, but others not. Now the primary sources of all things are a this that is first at work and something else which is in potency. So these are not the universal causes, since the source of particular things is particular; for a human being is the source of a human being universally, but no one is this universal, but rather Peleus is the source of Achilles and your father of you, and this particular B is the source of this particular BA, but B in general is the source of BA simply. And then, if the causes and elements of independent things are the sources of all things (but different ones of different ones), then as was said, of things not in the same class (colors and sounds, or independent things and quantity) they are different except by analogy; of things that are in the same kind they are also different, but not in kind, but because they are different for particular things, your material and form and mover from mine, though they are the same in their universal statement” (p. 237).

Again he emphasizes that particulars have particular causes. The kind of universality and operation that will be attributed to the first cause of all will be of a sort that respects this. He also again emphasizes that the primary sources of all things are particular actualities and potentialities.

“So as for seeking out what are the sources or elements of independent things and of relations and the of-what-sorts of things, and whether they are the same or different, it is clear that, since they are meant in more than one way, they do belong to everything, but when they have been distinguished they are not the same but different, except in one sense. And the causes of all things are the same in this sense — by analogy — because they are material, form, deprivation, and a mover, and the causes of independent things are the causes of all things in this sense — because when they are taken away everything is taken away; and further, the primary thing that is completely at work is the cause of all things. But the causes are different in this sense — they are as many as the primary contraries, described neither generically nor ambiguously, and as there are kinds of material as well. So what the sources are of perceptible things, and how many there are, and in what way they are the same and in what way different, have been said” (pp. 237-238).

At long last, we come to the argument that there really is a first cause of all things. Again he emphasizes that everything also has particular sources and causes.

“Now since there are three kinds of thinghood, two of them natural and one motionless, about the latter one must explain that it is necessary for there to be some everlasting motionless independent thing” (ch. 6, p. 238).

“For independent things are primary among beings, and if they were all destructible, everything would be destructible; but it is impossible for motion either to come into being or to be destroyed (since it always is), and impossible too for time” (ibid).

For Aristotle there is no first motion, or first moment in time. Instead, there must be an everlasting cause of motion.

“For if there were no time, there could be no before and after; and motion is continuous in just the way that time is; since time is either the same as or some attribute of motion” (ibid).

He points out that to speak of anything “before” there was any time is incoherent, since before and after presuppose time.

“But there is no continuous motion other than in place, and among these, other than in a circle” (ibid).

Only motion in a circle could continue forever. Space is vast, but Aristotle does not believe in infinite distances, so for him there could not be motion continuing forever in a straight line.

He seems to imply that the most fundamental motion of all — that of the fixed stars — provides a uniform measure for time. In modern terms, this is the earth’s rotation on its axis, as observed from a point on the earth. In the absence of evidence refuting what we see to be the case, he assumes that the stars forever rotate around the earth, and that the apparent motion of what is apparently the outermost sphere of the fixed stars is therefore a primary motion that spatially surrounds all things. If we take earth as the point of reference for whatever relativistic motions we see in the sky, this fits all the observational facts.

“But surely if there is something capable of moving and producing things, but not at work in any way, there will not be motion; for what has a potency admits of not being at work” (ibid).

Here he returns to the Physics sense of potentiality and actuality, and to the priority of the actual. Every potentiality is a source of motion that requires something external that is already an actuality of the same sort, in order for the potentiality to be actualized. The child requires a parent, the artifact a Platonic model.

“Therefore, there is no benefit even if we adopt everlasting independent things, as do those who bring in the forms, unless there is in them some source capable of producing change; moreover, even this is not enough, not even if there is another independent thing besides the forms, since if it is not going to be at work, there will not be motion” (ibid).

A pure form or logical universal that is not “actual” cannot explain motion. Once again, motion as the actualization of a potential depends on a pre-existing actuality.

“What’s more, it is not enough even if it will be at work, if the thinghood of it is potency, for there would not be everlasting motion, since what has being in potency admits of not being” (ibid).

Further, any first cause of motion must be everlasting, continuous, and unchanging in its action. That is to say, it must itself be purely actual, with no admixture of potentiality. It would not be sufficient to explain everlasting, continuous motion if the first cause just happened to be actual for some period of time.

“Therefore it is necessary that there be a source of such a kind that the thinghood of it is being-at-work. On top of that, it is necessary that these independent things be without material, for they must be everlasting, if indeed anything else is everlasting. Therefore they are being-at-work” (ibid).

As he just suggested, any first cause of all must therefore be a pure actuality with no potentiality. What Aristotle calls matter is kind of potentiality, so the first cause must have no matter either.

“For how will things have been set in motion, if there were not some responsible thing at work? For material itself, at any rate, will not set itself in motion” (p. 239).

“And this is why some people, such as Leucippus and Plato, bring in an everlasting activity, for they say there is always motion. But why there is this motion, and what it is, they do not say, nor the cause of its being in a certain way or some other way. For nothing moves at random, but always something must be present to it, just as now something moves in a certain way by nature, but in some other way by force or by action of intelligence or something else” (ibid).

It is not enough to simply posit motion. This does not explain anything.

“And then, what sort of motion is primary? For this makes so much difference one can hardly conceive it. But surely it is not possible for Plato to say what he sometimes thinks the source of motion is, which sets itself in motion; for the soul is derivative, and on the same level as the heavens, as he says” (ibid).

The thought here seems to be that if there is a first cause of motion, there must be a primary sort of motion that it primarily causes. For Aristotle, this is the movement of the fixed stars.

“Anaxagoras testifies that being-at-work takes precedence (since intellect is a being-at-work), as does Empedocles with love and strife, and so do those who say there is always motion, such as Leucippus; therefore there was not chaos or night for an infinite time, but the same things have always been so, either in a cycle or in some other way, if being-at-work takes precedence over potency. So if the same thing is always so in a cycle, it is necessary for something to persist always at work in the same way” (pp. 239-240).

If all things did not come from something that is an actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment, then they could only come from what the poets called “chaos and night”. But if all things came from chaos and night, there would be no hope of understanding anything. Aristotle suggests that several of his predecessors ought to have recognized the priority of actuality, as an implicit presupposition of what they did say.

“But since it is possible for it to be this way, and if it is not this way things will come from night and from ‘all things together’ and from not-being, these questions could be resolved; and there is a certain ceaseless motion that is always moving, and it is in a circle (and this is evident not only to reason but in fact), so that the first heaven will be everlasting” (ch. 7, p. 240).

He does not claim to positively know that actuality is necessarily prior to potentiality. He claims that the account is plausible, and that any alternative must lead back to sheer chaos, which would make it impossible for anything to be truly intelligible at all.

“Accordingly, there is also something that moves it. And since what is in motion and causes motion is intermediate, there is also something that causes motion without being in motion, which is everlasting, an independent thing, and a being-at-work” (ibid).

Behind each independent celestial motion, there must be some actual everlasting independent thing. Behind these, there must be something that is completely unmoved, and that is a pure actuality or being-at-work or fulfillment.

“But what is desired and what is thought cause motion in that way: not being in motion, they cause motion” (ibid).

For Aristotle, desire and thought are unmoved movers.

“But the primary instances of these are the same things, for what is yearned for is what seems beautiful, while what is wished for primarily is what is beautiful; but we desire something because of the way it seems, rather than its seeming so because we desire it, for the act of thinking is the beginning” (pp. 240-241).

Desire and thought both aim at what is good or beautiful. The way things seem — and consequently, the act of thinking or judging — drives wishing and willing, not vice versa. Further below, he will again emphasize the active rather than merely receptive role of thought.

“But the power of thinking is set in motion by the action of the thing thought, and what is thought in its own right belongs to an array of affirmative objects of which thinghood is primary, and of this the primary kind is that which is simple and at work” (p. 241).

Thinking itself is driven by the actuality of what it thinks. This does not negate his emphasis on thinking as act.

“But what is one and what is simple are not the same, for oneness indicates a measure, but what is simple is itself a certain way” (ibid).

The simplicity he attributes to the first cause is a stronger criterion than being one.

“But surely the beautiful and what is chosen in virtue of itself are also in that same array, and what is primary is always best, or analogous to it” (ibid).

First things are good and beautiful, and the first thing of all can be identified with the good and the beautiful.

“And that-for-the-sake-of-which is possible among motionless things, as the [following] distinction makes evident; for that-for-the-sake-of-which is either for something or belonging to something, of which the former is and the latter is not present among motionless things” (ibid).

Here he explicitly says that that-for-the-sake-of-which has a broader scope than any source of motion. Alone among the four kinds of causes, it provides ultimate reasons why things are what they are. Form may be identified with what things are, but that-for-the-sake of which is the cause of form and the reason why it is what it is.

“And it causes motion in the manner of something loved, and by means of what is moved moves other things” (ibid).

The highest kind of cause, that-for-the-sake-of-which, involves no force or compulsion or unconditional necessity. Other things are moved because they love it or are attracted by it, but they could not be so moved if they did not have their own sources of motion. They are not moved by some active power emanating from the first cause.

“But since there is something that causes motion while being itself motionless, this does not admit of being otherwise than it is in any respect at all” (ibid).

“For among changes, the primary one is change of place, and of this the primary kind is a circle, but this is what this mover causes” (ibid).

“Therefore [the first cause] is something that has being necessarily…. On such a source, therefore, the cosmos and nature depend” (pp. 241-242).

“And the course of its life is of such a kind as the best we have for a short time. This is so because it is always the same way (which for us is impossible), and because its being-at-work is also pleasure (which is what makes being awake, perceiving, and thinking the most pleasant things, while hopes and memories are pleasant on account of these)” (p. 242).

If we speak in terms of pleasure here, it would be of the highest possible sort. I think “pure delight” captures the meaning more clearly.

“And the thinking that is just thinking by itself is a thinking of what is best just as itself, and especially so with what is so most of all” (ibid).”

“But by partaking in what it thinks, the intellect thinks itself, for it becomes what it thinks by touching and contemplating it, so that the intellect and what it thinks are the same thing” (ibid).

And this, I say, is pure delight.

“For what is receptive of the intelligible and of thinghood is the intellect, and it is at work when it has them; therefore it is the being-at-work rather than the receptivity the intellect has that seems godlike, and its contemplation is pleasantest and best” (ibid, emphasis added).

He is saying that it is by virtue of the more perfect entelechy of intellect, which goes beyond the limited entelechy associated with motion — rather than intellect’s incidental touching or contemplation of something else — that intellect seems godlike. Here again he emphasizes the primarily active rather than receptive character of thought.

“So if the divine being is in this good condition that we are sometimes in, that is to be wondered at; and if it is in it to a greater degree than we are, that is to be wondered at still more. And that is the way it is” (ibid).

For Aristotle, the divine is not incommensurable with the human. Albeit in a very partial manner, we also partake of it, and the more so the more that we are moved by our highest values.

“But life belongs to it too, for the being-at-work of intellect is life, and that being is being-at-work, and its being-at-work is in itself the best life and is everlasting. And we say it is a god who everlastingly lives the best life, so that life and continuous and everlasting duration belong to a god; for this being is god” (ibid).

“That, then, there is an independent thing that is everlasting, motionless, and separate from perceptible things, is clear from what has been said. And it has also been demonstrated that this independent thing can have no magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible (for it causes motion for an infinite time, while no finite thing has an infinite power, and since every magnitude must be either finite or infinite, it cannot have magnitude, either finite, for the reason given, or infinite, because there is no infinite magnitude at all). But surely it has also been demonstrated that it cannot be affected or altered” (p. 243).

Sachs says in a note that the reference to a demonstration that the first cause is not involved with magnitude effectively incorporates the entire argument of the Physics by reference. Book VIII of the Physics has a far more thorough argument that there must be a first unmoved mover corresponding to the primary observable motion of the circling of the fixed stars, but that account does not address the what-it-is of things.

“But since… we see in addition to the motion of the whole heaven, other everlasting motions which belong to the planets…, it is necessary that each of these motions also be caused by something that is itself motionless and an everlasting independent thing. For the nature of the stars is for each to be an everlasting independent thing, while the mover is everlasting and takes precedence over the thing moved, and what takes precedence over an independent thing must be an independent thing” (ch. 8, p. 244).

The terrestrial independent things are mainly plants and animals. These have the richest entelechies among terrestrial perceptible things.

Aristotle also acknowledges each star participating in the motion of the heaven as an entelechy of its own. At least in a way, it is superior to ours, in that to all appearances it lasts forever.

The stars he calls planets are those that stand out by having observable independent motions of their own, different from the primary motion that they share with all the stars that are called “fixed” by contrast.

“[B]ut the number of motions is already something one must examine from that kind of mathematical knowledge that is the nearest kin to philosophy, namely from astronomy. For this kind makes its study about perceptible, everlasting thinghood, while the others, such as those concerned with numbers and with geometry, are not about thinghood at all” (ibid).

“[A]s for how many [independent motions] there happen to be, we now state what some of the mathematicians say, for the sake of a conception of it, … and as for what remains, it is necessary to inquire into some things ourselves, while listening to what other inquirers say about others. If something should seem to those who busy themselves with these matters to be contrary to what has just now been said, it is necessary to welcome both accounts, but trust the more precise one” (pp. 244-245).

“[F]or let the number that is necessary be left for more relentless people to say” (p. 246).

Apparently he made an arithmetic error counting the motions (“either 55 or 47”, where the 47 should have been 48, according the details I have not reproduced), then made a joke of it. I don’t believe Aristotle is very attached to specific enumerations of any sort. It is the principles upon which distinctions are based that matter.

“There has been handed down from people of ancient and earliest times a heritage, in the form of myth, to those of later times, that these original beings are gods, and that the divine embraces the whole of nature. The rest of it was presently introduced in mythical guise for the persuasion of the masses and into laws for use and benefit” (p. 247).

The divine embraces the whole of nature. We still name the planets by the Roman names for the Greek gods that were associated with them in antiquity.

Next he seems to respond to, or perhaps anticipate, doubts about what he said earlier about intellect.

“Now concerning the intellect there are certain impasses, for it seems to be the most divine of things that are manifest to us, but the way it is if it is to be of that sort contains some things that are hard to digest. For if it thinks nothing, what would be solemn about that? Rather, it would be just like someone sleeping. But if it does think, but something else has power over it, then, since it is not thinking but potency that is the thinghood of it, it could not be the best independent thing, for it is on account of its act of thinking that its place of honor belongs to it. And still, whether the thinghood of it is a power of thinking or an activity of thinking, what does it think?” (ch. 9, p. 247).

“For [what intellect thinks] is either itself or something else, and if it is something else, either always the same one or different ones. And then does it make any difference, or none, whether its thinking is of what is beautiful or of some random thing? Isn’t it even absurd for its thinking to be about some things? Surely it is obvious that it thinks the most divine and honorable things, and does not change, since its change would be for the worse, and such a thing would already be a motion” (p. 248).

Intellect will prefer the beautiful and the good over any random thing. Physics book VII much better explains why certain things that we are used to calling “changes” are not considered changes in his way of speaking.

“First, then, if it is not an activity of thinking but a potency, … it is clear that something else would be more honorable than the intellect, namely what it thinks…. Therefore what it thinks is itself, if it is the most excellent thing, and its thinking is a thinking of thinking” (ibid).

For a third time, he insists that intellect is primarily active, rather than receptive. Its main concern seems to be with whatever is most good and beautiful and honorable. It is a thinking of thinking — true higher-order thinking, rather than a first-order “thinking” of something external.

“But [the human soul’s] knowledge and perception and opinion and step-by-step thinking seem always to be about something else, and about themselves only as something secondary” (ibid).

The above seems to be in implicit contrast with the active thinking about which he was speaking just before. In this way, intellect in its own right is unlike the human soul.

“What’s more, if the thinking and the being thought are different, then in virtue of which of them does what is good belong to it? For to be an act of thinking and to be something thought are not the same” (ibid).

They are the same and yet not the same. Of course, this is in different respects. This is the model for many similar formulations in Hegel.

“Or is it rather that in some cases the knowledge is the thing it is concerned with, so that in the case of the kinds of knowing that make something, the thinghood without material and what it is for something to be, or in the case of the contemplative kinds of knowing, the articulation, is both the thing the knowledge is concerned with and the activity of thinking it? So since what is thought and what is thinking are not different with as many things as have no material, they will be the same, and the act of thinking will be one with what is thought” (ibid).

Here he suggests that we may after all be able to see instances of this identity by reflecting on our experiences of productive and contemplative knowing. Insofar as we actually know anything, we partially escape the inherent limitations of the human soul.

“But there is still an impasse left as to whether what is thought is composite, for then thinking would be changing among the parts of the whole. Or is it the case that everything that has no material is indivisible?” (pp. 248-249).

Implicitly, he seems to favor the latter alternative. Then twice more he speaks of intellect’s predilection for what is good and best.

“So the condition the human intellect, or that of any composite being, is in at some period of time (for it does not have hold of what is good at this or that time, but in some whole stretch of time it has hold of what is best, since that is something other than itself), is the condition the thinking that thinks itself is in over the whole of time” (p. 249).

Again, for Aristotle we have a little bit of the divine within us insofar as we have intellect, so there is no radical incommensurability between the divine and the human.

“One must also consider in which of two ways the nature of the whole contains what is good and best, whether as something separate, itself by itself, or as the order of the whole of things. Or is it present in both ways…?” (ch.10, p. 249).

Book Lambda’s final chapter ends with a quote from a speech by Odysseus in Homer’s Iliad. The whole chapter is oriented toward this literary image. At this point in the Iliad, the Greeks had been in complete disarray, a confused mass, but Odysseus’ words restore their morale and disciplined unity. (Notably, Odysseus was not the high king or commander-in-chief, though he was a leader. It was what he said that mattered.) Aristotle wants us to see this as a metaphorical answer to the question just posed. What is good and best must indeed be present in both ways — both as from the first cause, and as distributed and embodied throughout the whole — but he wants to emphasize that the “for the sake of which” of the first cause plays a real leading role, even though it does not govern by force.

“But beings do not present the aspect of being badly governed” (pp. 251-252).

As we have seen, this does not mean that all the facts of the world are as they ought to be. It does mean that life and the world are essentially good.

Next in this series: Reflections on Book Lambda

Toward a First Cause

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Pure Entelechy

Potentiality and Actuality

Here I will treat what Aristotle says about potentiality and actuality in Metaphysics book Theta (IX). On this closer reading, I was initially disappointed that he did not say more about how potentiality and actuality provide the detailed basis for the “internal” teleology that is at the core of his thinking. But on further reflection, perhaps this is another case of what I have elsewhere appreciated as a kind of careful minimalism.

“[L]et us make distinctions also about potency [aka potentiality] and complete being-at-work [aka actuality], and first about potency in the sense in which it is meant most properly, although it is not the sense that is most useful for what we now want. For potency and being-at-work apply to more than just things spoken of in reference to motion. But when we have discussed them in this sense, we will make clear their other senses in the distinctions that concern being-at-work” (ch. 1, Sachs tr., p. 167).

This most elementary sense of what I prefer to guardedly call potentiality was originally developed in the Physics, in connection with the theory of what he broadly calls “motion”. Here, he will ultimately extend it to cases that do not involve motion in this sense. I tend to think of the latter cases as primary.

“[A]s many [senses of potency] as point to the same form are all certain kinds of sources… of change in some other thing or in the same thing as other. For one kind is a power of being acted upon, which is a source in the acted-upon thing itself of passive change by the action of something else or of itself as other; another is an active condition of being unaffected for the worse…. And these potencies are in turn spoken of as only acting or being acted upon, or as acting and being acted upon” (pp. 167-168).

This is a thin, elementary definition, like that of substance in the Categories, with no mention of potentiality’s important role in Aristotle’s teleology. Until recently, working mostly from memory, I had not been thinking about what he calls “sources” (something strictly broader than “causes”) at all, or about this Physics sense of potentiality that is specifically a “source” of motion.

In the Physics, motion is in fact defined in terms of elementary versions of potentiality and actuality. Aristotle says “thus the fulfillment [actuality, being-at-work] of what is potentially, as such, is motion — e.g., the fulfillment of what is alterable, as alterable, is alteration; of what is increasable and its opposite, decreasable… increase and decrease; of what can come to be and pass away, coming to be and passing away; of what can be carried along, locomotion” (book III ch. 1, Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. 1, p. 343).

I rather like the Collected Works translators’ choice of “fulfillment” as an English alternative to “actuality” or “being-at-work”. Grounded more in what Aristotle says about energeia than in the etymology of the new Greek word he coined for it, it does nicely capture the teleological role of actuality. Translation is often not a simple affair.

The Physics definition of motion, though, is a tricky thought: the actuality of something that as such is a potentiality. This illustrates that there can be a kind of layering with respect to these terms.

“And it is clear that there is a sense in which the potency of acting and being acted upon is one (since something is potential both by means of its own potency to be acted upon and by something else’s potency to be acted upon by it), but there is a sense in which they are different” (p. 168).

The way in which these potentialities of acting and being acted upon are said to be “one” is structurally similar to what he says in On the Soul and Metaphysics book Lambda about thought and the thing thought being one. It seems like Aristotle might consider that to be one case of this.

“[A]ll the arts and productive kinds of knowledge are potencies” (ch. 2, p. 169).

This sort of case is very important to remember when considering the meanings of “potentiality” or “source of motion”. When he is speaking the most carefully, Aristotle says the art of building is the primary “source of motion” for the building of a house.

“And all potencies that include reason are capable of contrary effects, but with the irrational ones, one potency is for one effect, as something hot has a potency only for heating, while the medical art is capable of causing disease or health” (ibid).

He treats this thesis about rational potentialities producing “contrary” effects as important. The sense seems to be that because the actualization of rational potentialities involves practical judgment about what is appropriate in a given situation, the judgment can go wrong, leading to the production of the “opposite” of the intended effect. Heat and similar things can’t “go wrong” in this way,

“And it is clear that, with the potency of doing something well, the potency of merely doing or suffering it follows along, while the former does not always follow along with the latter, since the one doing something well necessarily also does it, but the one merely doing it does not necessarily also do it well” (ibid).

This is a nice incidental mention of the normative dimension involved in all practical doing, though the technical point is about what cases include what other cases.

“There are some people, such as the Megarians, who say that something is potential only when it is active, but when it is not active it is not potential…. The absurd consequences of this opinion are not difficult to see…. [T]hese assertions abolish both motion and becoming. For what is standing will always be standing and what is sitting always sitting, since it will not stand up if it is sitting” (ch. 3, p. 170).

The Megarian logicians claimed that potentiality has no reality of its own — that everything that is, is actual. This position results in paradoxes similar to those following from the claims of Parmenides about non-being and being.

“What is capable is that which would be in no way incapable if it so happened that the being-at-work of which it is said to have the potency were present” (p. 171).

This is another specification I had lost track of working mainly from memory. I’m not sure how it would apply to his example of arts and productive knowledge, which comes closest to the extensions of Aristotelian potentiality that I have suggested (to characterize recent notions of both the “space of reasons” and “structure” as belonging to potentiality).

“And the phrase being-at-work, which is designed to converge in meaning with being-at-work-staying-complete [entelechy], comes to apply to other things from belonging especially to motions” (ibid).

This seems to be an application of Aristotle’s frequent distinction between how things are “for us” and how they are “in themselves”. The appeal to motion as a basis for understanding being-at-work or actuality is an appeal to common experience. But further below, he will contrast motion with being-at-work in a fuller sense.

He goes on to make a number of logical distinctions.

“[I]t cannot be true to say that such-and-such is possible, but will not be the case” (ibid).

(When we say something will not be the case, we are also implicitly saying there is no possibility that it will be the case. Therefore, it cannot be possible, and the statement contradicts itself.)

Potentiality is a more specific notion than possibility, but it seems that whatever is potential must also be possible, and therefore the generalization about possibility applies to all cases of potentiality.

“For the false and the impossible are not the same thing; for that you are now standing is false, but not impossible” (ch. 4, p. 172).

Similarly, generalizations about impossibility also apply to the more specific notion of potentiality.

“[I]t is also clear that, if it is necessary for B to be the case when A is, it is also necessary for B to be capable of being the case when A is capable of being the case” (ibid).

If there is a relation of necessity between actual things, then logically there must be a corresponding relation of necessity between the corresponding potential things. Possibility and necessity are the two most basic modalities in modern modal logic.

“Of all potencies, since some are innate, such as the senses, while others come by habit, such as that of flute playing, and others by learning, such as the arts, some, those that are by habit and reasoning need to have previous activity, while others that are not of that kind, and apply to being acted upon, do not need it” (ch. 5, p. 172).

For Aristotle, a sense like vision is to be understood first of all as a potentiality for the complete act of actually seeing. All other details — of optics, of physiology, of the operations of imagination, of what modern people might call the consciousness of seeing — that are conditions of the complete act, are subordinate to the complete act itself as a realized end. This is a good example of how Aristotle uses teleology to organize and coordinate other sorts of explanation.

The distinction between by “habit” (hexis, or acquired disposition) and by learning does not seem to be strict. Further below, he mentions practicing in order to play the harp as a form of learning, rather than habit. I think he is speaking casually both times. One might even say that all habits are learned; at the very least, they are acquired. (This broader term related to “second nature” seems to have been particularly important for al-Farabi, who uses it in his classic neoplatonizing elaboration of the Aristotelian theory of intellect.)

“[With irrational potencies] it is necessary, whenever a thing that is active and a thing that is passive in the sense that they are potential come near each other, that the one act and the other be acted upon” (pp. 172-173).

This formulation is surprising. I don’t understand why the qualification he applies immediately below for the case of rational potentialities (“not in every situation but when things are in certain conditions”) would not also apply to irrational potentialities. The distinction between the “rational” and “irrational” cases is based on presence or absence of a dimension of desire or choice, which seems not to affect the relevance of situations and conditions.

“[B]ut with [rational potencies] this is not necessary…. It is necessary, therefore, that there be something else that is governing; by this I mean desire or choice. For whatever something chiefly desires is what it will do whenever what it is capable of is present and it approaches its passive object…. not in every situation but when things are in certain conditions” (p. 173).

“Since what concerns the kind of potency that corresponds to motion has been discussed, let us make distinctions about being-at-work, to mark out both what it is and what sort of thing it is. For that which is potential will also be clear at the same time to those who make distinctions, since we speak of the potential not only as that which is of such a nature as to move some other thing or be moved by something else, … but also in another way, and it is because we are inquiring after that other meaning that we went through this one” (ch. 6, p. 173).

He explicitly says he will not define actuality or being-at-work, but instead suggests that we infer a pattern from a series of examples. Actually, it turns out that the more abstract pattern he is thinking of includes two distinct variants.

“The other way these things are present is in activity. And what we mean to say is clear by looking directly at particular examples, nor is it necessary to look for a definition of everything, but one can see at a glance, by means of analogy, that which is as the one building is to the one who can build, and the awake to the asleep, and the one seeing to the one whose eyes are shut but who has sight, and what has been formed out of material to the material, and what is perfected to what is incomplete…. But not all things that are said to be in activity are alike, except by analogy…. For some of them are related in the manner of a motion to a potency, others in the manner of thinghood to a material” (pp. 173-174).

At the end, he is now saying that motion and substance-essence-thinghood are the two alternate kinds of actuality or being-at-work. Motion is the “imperfect” kind that is still in process of realization, and substance-essence-thinghood is the “perfect” or “complete” kind that is an entelechy.

“And since, of the actions that do have limits, none of them is itself an end, but it is among things that approach an end, (such as losing weight, for the thing that is losing weight, when it is doing so, is in motion that way, although that for the sake of which the motion takes place is not present), this is not an action, or at any rate not a complete one; but that in which the end is present is an action. For instance, one sees and is at the same time in a state of having seen, understands and is at the same time in a state of having understood, or thinks contemplatively and is at the same time in a state of having thought contemplatively, but one does not learn while one is at the same time in a state of having learned, or get well while in a state of having gotten well. One does live well at the same time one is in a state of having lived well, and one is happy at the same time one is in a state of having been happy” (p. 174).

“And it is appropriate to call the one sort of action motion, and the other being-at-work. For every motion is incomplete: losing weight, learning, walking, house-building…; but one has seen and is at the same time seeing the same thing, and is contemplating and has contemplated the same thing. And I call this sort of action a being-at-work, and that sort a motion. So that which is by way of being-at-work, both what it is and of what sort, let it be evident to us from these examples” (pp. 174-175).

Motion and being-at-work are both said to be forms of “action”. Anything broad enough to comprehend both of these will not fit common connotations of the English word “action”, so we need to recognize that it is being used in a special sense closer to “activity”, which seems better suited to something that includes both.

“Now when each thing is in potency and when not must be distinguished, since it is not the case at just any time whatever…. Then it would be just as not everything can be healed, by either medical skill or chance, but there is something that is potential, and this is what is healthy in potency” (ch. 7, p. 175).

The reference to time does not seem to be essential. What seems decisive for these distinctions are the possibly blocking circumstances or “conditions” mentioned earlier.

“And since the various ways in which something is said to take precedence have been distinguished, it is clear that being-at-work takes precedence over potency. And I mean that it takes precedence not only over potency as defined, … but over every source of motion or rest in general. For nature too is in the same general class as potency, since it is a source of motion, though not in something else but in a thing itself as itself” (ch. 8, p. 177).

This is the first of several iterations on the precedence of actuality or being-at-work over potentiality. The way that he respectively defines potentiality and nature as sources of motion, they are strict logical complements of one another, so he is implying that all sources of motion are either natures or potentialities.

“And this is why it seems to be impossible to be a house-builder if one has not built any houses, or a harpist if one has not played the harp at all; for the one learning to play the harp learns to play the harp by playing the harp, and similarly with others who learn things…. But since something of what comes into being has always already come into being, and in general something of what is in motion has always already been moved…, presumably the one who is learning must also already have something of knowledge” (p. 178).

Aristotle’s account of the precedence of actuality over potentiality might be the origin of the “always already” theme. This is also the root of many interesting things that Hegel says about Wirklichkeit (commonly translated as “actuality”, with Aristotle in mind).

“But surely [being-at-work] takes precedence in thinghood too, first because things that are later in coming into being take precedence in form and in thinghood (as a man does over a boy, or a human being over the germinal fluid, since the one already has the form, and the other does not), and also because everything that comes into being goes up to a source and an end (since that for the sake of which something is is a source, and coming to be is for the sake of an end), but the being-at-work is an end, and it is for the enjoyment of this that the potency is taken on. For it is not in order to have the power of sight that animals see, but they have sight in order to see, and similarly too, people have the house-building power in order that they may build houses, and the contemplative power in order that they may contemplate; but they do not contemplate in order that they may have the contemplative power, unless they are practicing, and these people are not contemplating other than in a qualified sense, or else they would have no need to be practicing contemplating” (ibid).

Here he implicitly mentions the teleological aspect, referring to ends and that-for-the-sake-of-which.

Sachs aptly comments, “How does nature display that a squirrel has reached the completion for the sake of which it exists? In the spectacle of the squirrel at work being a squirrel…. Aristotle is arguing that the very thinghood of a thing is not what may be hidden inside of it, but a definite way of being unceasingly at-work, that makes it a thing at all and the kind of thing it is” (p. 179n).

(I would say “is what it is” instead of “exists” in the part about the squirrel.) The other part, that thinghood is not hidden inside things, but rather manifest in their ways of being at work, makes me think of what Hegel says about essence.

“[T]he putting to use of some things is ultimate (as seeing is in the case of sight…), but from some things something comes into being….[O]f those things from which there is something else apart from the putting-to-use that comes into being, the being-at-work is in the thing that is made…; but of those things which have no other work besides their being-at-work, the being-at-work of them is present in themselves (as seeing is in the one seeing and contemplation in the one contemplating, and life is in the soul, and hence happiness too, since it is a certain sort of life). And so it is clear that thinghood and form are being-at-work” (p. 179).

The last sentence is a principal new conclusion of book Theta: substance-essence-thinghood and form are both said to be cases of actuality or being-at-work.

Since actuality or being-at-work has already been identified with entelechy, this means that both independent things and (some) forms are now also being said to be entelechies. In the case of independent things, this is not surprising, given everything that was said about them in book Zeta. In the case of forms, I suspect he means that those forms that are souls are entelechies.

“But being-at-work takes precedence in an even more governing way; for everlasting things take precedence in thinghood over destructible ones, and nothing that is in potency is everlasting…. Therefore nothing that is simply indestructible is simply in potency (though nothing prevents it from being potentially in some particular respect, such as of a certain sort or at a certain place), and so all of them are at work. And none of the things that are by necessity is in potency (and yet these are primary, since if they were not, nothing would be), nor is motion, if there is any everlasting one; … and this is why the sun and moon and the whole heaven are always at work” (p. 180).

Aristotle generously calls everything “everlasting” that is apparently so, and for which he has no evidence to the contrary.

“And things that undergo change, such as earth and fire, mimic the indestructible things, since they too are always at work, for they have motion in virtue of themselves and in themselves” (p. 181).

What Aristotle calls matter is not itself alive, but nonetheless he says it has intrinsic motion. Motion, as we saw above, is defined in implicitly teleological terms in the Physics, using both potentiality and actuality. This is how the behavior of inanimate matter for Aristotle ends up having teleological characteristics.

“And that being-at-work is a better and more honorable thing than a potency for something worth choosing, is clear from these considerations. For whatever is spoken of as being potential is itself capable of opposite effects…. And in the case of bad things, it is necessary that the completion and being-at-work be worse than the potency…. Therefore it is clear that there is nothing bad apart from particular things, since the bad is by nature secondary to potency. Therefore among things that are from the beginning and are everlasting, there is nothing bad, erring, or corruptible” (ch. 9, pp. 181-182).

Things that don’t measure up to what they are supposed to be are “bad” examples of the kind of things that they are. I am surprised that he speaks of any “completion and being-at-work” of bad things at all.

“And geometrical constructions are discovered by means of activity, since it is by dividing up the figures that people discover them…. And so it is clear that the things that are in the figures in potency are discovered by being drawn into activity, … and for this reason it is only those who make a construction who know it” (p. 182).

Aristotle seems to anticipate the attitude of mathematical constructivism.

“[B]ut the most governing sense [of being and not being] is the true or the false…. For it is necessary to examine in what way we mean this. For you are not pale because we think truly that you are pale, but rather it is because you are pale that we who say so speak the truth” (ch. 10, p. 183).

I was a bit surprised when he earlier ruled out further discussion of being in the sense of the true and false attributed to the “is” or “is not” used to form propositions. But here, he goes on to speak of a different notion of truth, which seems to be more like metaphorically “grasping” an essence.

“But now for things that are not compound, what is being or not being, and the true and the false? For the thing is not a compound, so that it would be when it is combined and not be if it is separated, like the white on a block of wood or the incommensurability of the diagonal; and the true and false will not still be present in a way similar to those things. Rather, just as the true is not the same thing for these things, so too being is not the same for them, but the true or false is this: touching and affirming something uncompounded is the true (for affirming is not the same thing as asserting a predication), while not touching is being ignorant (for it is not possible to be deceived about what it is, except incidentally). And it is similar with independent things that are not compound, since it is not possible to be deceived about them; and they are all at work, not in potency, for otherwise they would be coming into being and passing away, but the very thing that is does not come to be or pass away, since it would have to come from something. So it is not possible to be deceived about anything the very being of which is being-at-work, but one either grasps it or does not grasp it in contemplative thinking; about them, inquiring after what they are is asking whether they are of certain kinds or not” (p. 184).

What is meant to be included under “independent things that are not compound” and “anything the very being of which is being-at-work” — about both of which it is said to be impossible to be deceived — has yet to be specified.

The “grasping” and “touching” metaphors here need not be taken as literally implying a kind of immediate experiencing. The next book will be explore at length the ways in which things are one, and thus form wholes. I think the implicit emphasis here is on a grasping of things as integral wholes. When we think of an essence as an integral whole, either we get it or we don’t, just as he says here. How we are able to do this is another question, not addressed here, but I think that for rational animals, the immediacy of grasping an essence can only be what Hegel would call a “mediated” immediacy.

“The true is the contemplative knowing of these things, and there is no falsity, nor deception, only ignorance, and not the same sort of thing as blindness; for blindness would be as if someone were not to have the contemplative power at all” (ibid).

Next in this series: One, Many, Same, Different

The Innovation of Potentiality-Actuality

The couple dynamis/energeia (for lack of better English terms, potentiality and actuality) has excited my imagination for nearly 50 years. There are at least three huge, unprecedented innovations in Aristotle’s concept, which I find still immensely and freshly relevant today.

From the pre-Socratics all the way to the present, the great majority of attempts at ultimate explanation have aimed at a monomorphic account of some sort or other — an account in a single shape, whether in the form of simple assertions about how things are, or of an elaborate system following a single order of development. Against this background, Aristotle’s thinking stands out as richly polymorphic and polyphonous. Things are analyzed as said in many ways; multiple kinds of causes are investigated for the same thing; necessity is hypothetical rather than categorical. The innovation of the potentiality/actuality pair gives a whole extra dimension to all of this. The concrete comes to be teeming with alternatives, but without falling into arbitrariness. Things aren’t just what they are, full stop, and they don’t just follow a single, predetermined trajectory, but at the same time there is supple coherence and meaning everywhere. Potentiality itself is polymorphic; we don’t have just one potential, but many. But it is also bound to concrete reality.

Second, Aristotle puts actuality before potentiality, reversing the logical order of precedence implicitly followed by nearly everyone else, before and since. This has all sorts of implications. It directs our attention toward the concrete. It gives positive ethical value to concrete manifestation and particular being. It supersedes the arbitrary or random aspect of mere logical possibility, while still leaving flexibility in things through the additional dimension of potentiality. Potentiality is not abstract possibility.

Third, actuality is not factuality. It is through-and-through a normative concept of the realization of an end that may or may not be achieved. Since potentiality is defined by its relations to actuality, it acquires a normative aspect as well. Each potentiality is a capability for realizing a definite end, not just a general ability to do things. Thinking in terms of actuality and potentiality puts what Aristotle calls that-for-the sake-of-which and the good first in the order of explanation.

Reaching this point in my own modest textual commentary on the Metaphysics thus has a bit of the feeling of glimpsing the promised land. With such extraordinarily high expectations, the beginning of a more disciplined confrontation of the text of book Theta (IX) has been sobering. There are gaps between what I imagine it ought to say and what it does say, and I find the remainder of the text of the Metaphysics to be quite uneven. This may in part have to do with ancient editing of the manuscripts, and the loss of many more Aristotelian writings (see The Unity of Aristotle’s Metaphysics; Fortunes of Aristotle). But from internal references in the text, some of the issues seem to belong to the original.

I have several frustrations with the text of book Theta. In spite of the importance for Aristotle of conceptually putting actuality before potentiality, the account of potentiality is placed first in the text. Then for some reason he makes the choice to focus almost entirely on potentiality’s relation to the causing of motion as discussed in the Physics, even while acknowledging that this is “not the sense that is most useful for what we now want” (Sachs tr., p. 167). What we now want, in my opinion, is an account relating the original and distinctive aspects of potentiality and actuality to Aristotle’s original and distinctive view of that-for-the-sake-of-which and its ultimate relation to the good as first in the order of explanation. This ought to be the crown jewels of the whole Metaphysics. But the way it is presented, it falls short of what I would hope for. Later books partly make up for what is missing here, but on many points we are left to read between the lines. This leaves Aristotle’s overall message less clear than we might wish. However, I am extremely impressed with what Gwenaëlle Aubry has managed to pull out from it.

Next in this series: Potentiality and Actuality

Toward Potentiality and Actuality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This again was a major conclusion of the previous book.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: The Innovation of Potentiality-Actuality