Critique of the Megarians

Euclid of Megara (not to be confused with the geometer) was a student of Socrates who combined Socratic and Eleatic ideas. He reportedly claimed that virtue is knowledge of the Parmenidean One Being, which he also identified with the Good, God, reason, and mind. At a time when Megarians were banned from Athens for some reason, he is said to have entered the city disguised as a woman in order to listen to Socrates. He was present at Socrates’ death, and afterwards offered refuge to Plato and others in Megara. Socrates reputedly rebuked him for arguing more for the sake of winning than for the truth, but Euclid was said to have been very concerned with moral virtue. Plato credits him with having written down an actual conversation between Socrates and Theaetetus, which became the basis of Plato’s dialogue Theaetetus.

Euclid’s students were mainly interested in logic and argument. Some of them apparently founded a separate school, known as the Dialecticians, which developed a form of propositional logic. This latter group is considered to have been the major source for Stoic logic.

In chapter 3 of book Theta of the Metaphysics, Aristotle criticizes Megarian arguments that there is no distinction between power and act. Aubry quotes Aristotle’s restatement of the Megarian claim, “It is when a thing acts that it can act, but when it does not act, it cannot act” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 122, my translation throughout).

Independent of Aristotle’s development of a normative and teleological dimension of act that plausibly extends even to physical motion, he is also very concerned to carefully distinguish between power and its exercise. Thus he had to confront the Megarians, who argued that there is no such distinction.

Later writers of quite varying persuasions have wittingly or unwittingly developed variants of this Megarian position. Nietzsche, for instance, explicitly denied the reality of anything that is not actual. Any kind of argument for complete determinism has a similar effect, as does theological occasionalism, which subsumes all becoming under the model of creation.

“Against this thesis, it is necessary to affirm not only the distinction of act and power but, more precisely, that with a given act can coexist not only the power of which it is the effect, but the power for another, opposed, act” (ibid).

Aubry noted a bit earlier that the emphasis on contraries in the discussion of rational powers is rather accidental. The more general point — expressed at the level of potentiality rather than power — is that potentiality includes multiple alternate possibilities concretely grounded in the same state of actuality. The more specific notion of contrariety only comes into play because — due to the fact power is consistently understood by Aristotle as power to do or undergo something definite — related deliberation may be conceived as about exercising a power or not.

She quotes Aristotle, “It is possible for a thing to be capable of being and nonetheless not be, or capable of not being and nonetheless be” (ibid).

This, it seems to me, is an unavoidable presupposition of any coherent account of becoming. It is again also the foundation of Aristotle’s account of human freedom. This way of approaching freedom is greatly to be recommended, because it avoids both the dubious and dangerous concept of a separate faculty of will distinct from reason, and the worse concepts of arbitrary will, or will as “superior” to reason.

“The critique of the Megarians indeed carries a double, and paradoxical, positivity: it invites us to think at the same time becoming in relation with dunamis, and energeia in relation with being. In doing this, it indicates also the double stakes of the inquiry: to think becoming and being at the same time; to determine the mode of their articulation.”

The dynamis–energeia pair is what uniquely enables Aristotle to think of being and becoming in a non-opposed way, though this is far from exhausting its significance.

“The extension from the kinetic sense of energeia to the ontological sense is presented as a deepening: otherwise said, and in conformity to what Theta 1 noted already, it is the ontological sense that is primary. In effect, if we have a tendency to consider that energeia is manifested above all in movement, this is insofar as we take it as an index of being” (p. 123, emphasis in original).

“For not to be in act but to be capable of being so, is also a mode of being: that which in-potentiality names. Of certain things that are not, but are nonetheless capable of being, one says thus that they are dunamei” (pp. 123-124).

Here we have a good example of the explicitly dative grammatical form of dynamis (dynamei) that she finds to be associated with Aristotle’s distinctive notion of being in potentiality. These are things that have being potentially, or are potentially thus-and-such. Here the emphasis is all on “things” in a state of potentiality, or potential “states of affairs”. Potentiality (as distinct from actuality) is the modality in which these have being and are said. This is indeed clearly different from a power to do, cause, or undergo.

“That which is in-potentiality, nonetheless, is not, ‘because it is not an entelechy‘” (p. 124).

We do not say of that which is in-potentiality that it “is” simply, or in an unqualified sense.

At the link above, I suggested that entelechy is probably the most important guiding concept of the Metaphysics. I have also suggested that entelechy serves as a kind of explanation for how ousia or (substance or essence, or what Sachs calls “thinghood”) works. In turn, Aristotle uses ousia to help disambiguate and organize what is meant by the various ways in which we say something is something. In the quote above, he directly uses entelechy as the criterion for what we do and do not say “is”. It is vitally important that he appeals to this much more nuanced concept, instead of referring back to the blunt instrument of a common-sense notion of existence or reality. For Aristotle, being, existence, or reality is not an explainer; instead, it needs to be explained.

Nonetheless, Aubry points out that here, Aristotle does not explicitly invoke the normative aspect of entelechy. We are still primarily investigating the more common “kinetic” sense of dynamis and energeia that accounts for physical motion. The aspect of entelechy that is to the fore is therefore that of the continuing activity that constitutes a substance as something persisting, or a motion as ongoing.

Next in this series: Potentiality and Possibility

Rational and Natural Powers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Critique of the Megarians

Reading Metaphysics Theta

This will be the first of several posts on Gwenaëlle Aubry’s detailed analysis of book Theta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Here I will cover her introductory remarks.

In Aristotle’s text, “the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia, which the use of the dative expression to dunamei kai energeiai indicates, will not be explored at the outset. We depart from the kinetic sense of these notions, designated as corresponding to their current usage, but not from the project of the inquiry. And it is only later that we will see how dunamis and energeia exceed what is said solely in relation to movement” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, pp. 117-118, my translation throughout).

“This extension, nonetheless, is also a deepening: the ontological sense will be progressively extracted from the kinetic sense, and the sense ‘sought’ from the current sense, but as that which the latter presupposes. For the notions of entelekheia [entelechy] and of ergon [a work] which the beginning of Theta highlights play a fundamental role in the transition from the kinetic sense to the ontological sense of energeia: it is they that mediate between energeia as the name of movement and energeia as a sense of being. And again, they allow it to be understood that energeia says being: not only subsistence or presence, but the function in which is accomplished the form or essence (en-ergon), and in this also the end (en-telos). Energeia is thus found coordinated with dunamis not only as the effective to the possible, but as the end toward which it tends” (p. 118).

“[T]he transition from the kinetic sense to the ontological sense goes hand in hand with a transfer from the model of efficiency and of the correlation of powers to that of finality and the actualization. of the in-potential. This last model, as we have seen, is already at work in the physical and biological writings, but Theta gives it an ontological foundation” (ibid).

Where I see Aristotle’s teleological and normative explanation of being as an alternative to impoverished articulations of first philosophy as “ontology” (i.e., a pure concern with being as existence, subsistence, or presence), Aubry instead chooses to retain the term “ontology”, while transforming it into a teleological and normative account. What she calls the ontological sense of the terms is for me their teleological sense.

“We must begin by studying the kinetic sense (or the sense that is at the same time kurios, first from the point of view of current usage, and me khresimotatos, not the most useful, not the one we seek)” (ibid).

This kind of approach, which takes ordinary language and what is commonly accepted as starting point but eventually moves beyond them, is very typical of Aristotle.

“This usual sense of dunamis is that which book Delta [on things said in many ways] already explored, but nonetheless did not consider in its correlation with energeia. If Theta resumes the first definition and the different senses distinguished by Delta, it nonetheless orders them and operates a sorting among them: thus dunamis is initially designated as equivocal, but among its significations, certain are designated as purely homonymic…. By contrast, the other senses of dunamis can all be referred to a primary sense: that of a ‘principle of change in another thing or in itself as another’. This primary sense of dunamis is indeed an active sense. Nonetheless, the definition proposed in Theta does not manifest this as such, since it does not indicate whether the change in question is enacted or undergone” (pp. 118-119).

“Thus in Delta as in Theta, the distinction between active power and passive power is effaced before the univoval characterization of dunamis as arkhe, as principle of change: or better, the distinction of active and passive is offered as a trait of change more than of the power that presides over it” (p. 119).

Arkhe, which Aubry here renders by the French cognate of “principle”, is what Sachs in his translations calls “source”. Dynamis at the “kinetic” level is a source or principle of motion and change, which renders Aristotle’s phrase for what got Latinized as the efficient cause.

I’m beginning to appreciate that Aubry is far from claiming that dynamis never means power in Aristotle. When I recently began studying this work more closely, I was initially confused to see her frequent use of the French puissance, as opposed to her emphatically preferred en-puissance. (I think at least once in an earlier post I substituted English “potentiality” — which I’ve been using for en-puissance — for what should have been “power” (for puissance) in my translation. Regardless of the grammatical form in the the Greek, Sachs and other English translators choose one word — “potency” for Sachs, “potentiality” in older translations influenced by the Latin. This makes the distinction Aubry is focusing on invisible.)

As things are coming more sharply into focus with this closer reading of her work on Aristotle, I now think these uses of puissance are her reflection of the nominative form used by Aristotle himself in many passages. As she says, the nominative form could denote an active power, but the dative form rules that out. According to Aubry, what she calls the ontological as opposed to the kinetic sense — the distinctively Aristotelian being-in-potentiality, as contrasted with the more generally recognized power to move things — is mainly associated with the dative. But the nominative nonetheless plays quite a large role in Aristotle’s text. And it is quite appropriate for the kinetic sense of dynamis, the one associated with motion and largely anticipated by Plato. But she has first emphasized the symmetry and reversibility of active and passive dynamis, and now suggested that dynamis is in a way indifferent to the distinction of active and passive.

She quotes Aristotle, “It is indeed evident that in a sense the power of acting and the power of undergoing are one” (p. 120).

“Principle of movement, dunamis can also be resistance to a movement of deterioration or of destruction: it is as such a state of impassibility, a hexis apatheias…. It is necessary to note that on the other hand, the capacity of resistance to a movement toward the better is not qualified as dunamis…. One notes already the gradation between a neutral sense and a normative sense that the notion of energeia will engage” (ibid).

“Dunamis, whether it be active or passive, is always found associated with a positivity and a possession (hexis). It is its contrary, impotency (adunamia) and the impotent (adunaton) that one associates with privation, steresis” (ibid).

“[P]ower, whether active or passive, remains univocally characterized as a principle of movement, and as being of the order of possession and of positivity” (p. 121, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Rational and Natural Powers

Dynamis Before Aristotle

Before proceeding to Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality and act in book Theta of the Metaphysics, Aubry surveys pre-Aristotelian usages of the Greek word dynamis (or dunamis, as Aubry romanizes it). This detour adds further fascinating nuances to her already very rich discussion. (She also surveys Aristotle’s uses of dynamis in other works besides the Metaphysics. I will treat that part in a separate post.)

The meaning of dynamis in Homer and Hesiod is contested. A 1919 study by Joseph Souilhé concluded that it meant physical force in Homer, and royal or divine power in Hesiod. But a 2018 study by David Lefebvre concentrates on the phrase kata dunamin [“in accordance with” dynamis], and concludes on the contrary that already in Homer and Hesiod this is an expression of the Greek “sense of measure” and “wisdom of limits”. Aubry says that according to Lefebvre, for Homer and Hesiod, “To act kata dunamin is to act within the limits of a nature” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 95, my translation throughout). Lefebvre sees in Plato a tension between a descriptive use of dynamis related to knowledge and definition, and a normative one related to what is proper to a given nature.

Turning to her own analysis of Plato, she says that in book V of the Republic, “dunameis are designated not as a sense of being, but as a genus of beings (genos ti ton onton); they are that by which ‘we can do what we can do, and in general every other thing can do precisely what it does’…. Dunamis is strongly associated with power and action. It does not help us say what a thing is, determining its distinctive properties, but rather what it can do, and what it does” (p. 96).

“This couple of power and action is associated neither with notions of latency and manifestation, nor with potentiality and effectivity” (p. 97). The thought here seems to be that Platonic power and action are more synchronic and in-the-moment than diachronic and involved with development.

On the other hand, already in Plato dynamis “is articulated to an ergon [work]” (p. 96). This is of the utmost importance. As we will see, for Plato ergon is not just any arbitrary product or outcome. It has an ethical significance.

“[Republic book I defines ergon] as either that which a thing is the only one capable of accomplishing, or that which it accomplishes better than all the others, and articulates it strongly with the notion of excellence, arete. As D. Lefebvre underlines, the articulation of dunamis to ergon, understood as a proper function allowing the deployment of an excellence, comes in play against the notion of indeterminate, non-normed power, the tyrannical or political ‘omnipotence’ to which the orators aspire, and of which, like book I of the Republic, the Gorgias presents a critique” (p. 96n).

Plato was extremely concerned to avoid the unprincipled political abuses of tyrants, and to combat the analogous unprincipled abuses of discourse by the Sophists. Neither the tyrant nor the Sophist nor the apologist for arbitrariness respects the good or the truth.

“In this articulation of the dunamis to the ergon, which nonetheless remains timid (the term ergon is not used, but only the [related] verb apergazetai), and is associated neither with a causal model nor with an ontology, one can already recognize a teleological and normative determination of power (here univocally characterized as active), in play against the idea of an undifferentiated and non-normed power” (pp. 96-97).

Plato thus partially anticipates Aristotle’s more developed teleological view.

In the Theaetetus, “Dunamis appears… as a power as much of possession as of usage, and not according to a progressive schema comparable to what Aristotle elaborates in De Anima [book] II [chapter] 5, where a native power (that for example which every human has to understand grammar) is transformed into a hexis [acquired disposition] by study, then can be exercised in an energeia, but according to a reversible and alternating schema” (p. 97).

Plato seems to emphasize a kind of symmetry in the relations between active and passive power, which makes them reversible. Aristotle subordinates this to the asymmetrical relation between act and potentiality, but it is important to recognize that he is not simply substituting an asymmetrical relation for a symmetrical one. Rather, he is fully accepting the symmetrical one, but then, so to speak, wrapping it in the asymmetrical one.

It is worth dwelling on the Platonic moment in its own right. There is already something quite profound in a truly symmetrical view of activity and passivity. Certainly there is also what might be called a vulgar view of activity and passivity that doesn’t recognize any symmetry between them at all. But that is not Plato’s view.

For the subtle initiates in the metaphor of the Theaetetus (in contrast to those non-initiates who count as being only what they can hold in their hands), Aubry notes that Plato says “the whole is movement […]; there are two forms of movement, each of infinite extension, but the one having the power to act, and the other to undergo” (quoted, pp. 97-98, ellipses in original). “It is at the same time, thus, that vision and the white are born, and they are not white and vision until that encounter: for something is an agent only by encountering a patient, only patient by encountering an agent, and that which in this encounter is agent can in another become patient” (p. 98).

Plato explicitly points out that what is an agent in one encounter may be a patient in another. The example of vision and the white also highlights the interdependence of what the moderns call subject and object.

“Power to act and power to undergo are at the same time relative to one another and reversible…. Active or passive dunamis is nonetheless articulated, beyond the epistemological context of the discussion, to an ontology: a paradoxical ontology, since, presented as subtle in that it reconciles being with becoming, it results in the negation of being to the benefit of becoming” (ibid).

Plato is famous for emphasizing eternal forms, but dialogues like Theaetetus and The Sophist invalidate many clichés about his broader views. This has the effect of bringing Plato closer to Aristotle.

“It is nonetheless in the Sophist that the ontological dimension of Platonic dunamis is most readable” (ibid). There the character known as the Eleatic Stranger (who expresses views contrary to — and to me far more interesting than — those of the historic Eleatics like Parmenides and Zeno) says “That which possesses a power, whatever it be, whether to act on no matter what other natural thing, or to undergo — even in a minimal degree, by the action of the weakest agent, and even if this occurs only once — all this, I say, really exists. And as a consequence, I pose as the definition that defines beings that they are nothing else but power” (quoted, pp. 98-99).

And again, this does not mean arbitrary power. Plato is after all the one who first said that the Good is the highest principle of all, even though Aristotle criticizes him for failing to explain how this works.

Aubry recounts that in the allegory of The Sophist, the Friends of the Earth are generally materialist, but accept the reality of virtues and vices. They therefore accept the Stranger’s definition of being as power, and this leads them also to change their minds and accept that the soul is a being too, since it is that in which virtues and vices are present. The Friends of the Forms on the other hand continue to resist the conclusion that “in ousia itself, insofar as it is known, and not only in in genesis, movement and passion occur” (p. 99). Aubry goes on, “but the Stranger and Theaetetus in their turn refuse what follows from that refusal: that being ‘solemn and sacred, stands immobile'” (ibid).

The Eleatic Stranger here is explicitly rejecting the historic Eleatic view of being, and at the same time Plato is implicitly rejecting the semi-Eleatic view of the “Friends of the Forms”. Aristotle indeed attributes to Plato the mistaken view that the forms are independent things, but he also says that Plato was initially influenced by the Heracliteanism of Cratylus, who is known for saying that you can’t step in the same river once, because it is always changing. There is no evidence that Plato was ever a Parmenidean. (Aristotle’s sharpest anti-Platonic remarks seem to me to be directed at Platonists, and perhaps at Plato’s successor Speusippus in particular.)

“Dunamis appears here as an instrument directed at the same time against the ‘materialists’, an extension of the notion of ousia to the incorporeal insofar as it posesses the power to act and to undergo, and, against the ‘idealists’, an inclusion in ousia, insofar as it is the object of knowledge, of traits considered by them to be characteristic of genesis: passion and movement” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Plato clearly wants to reject both the materialism of the Ionian pre-Socratics and the static One Being of Parmenides.

“From this brief examination of the principal places where Platonic dunamis is elaborated, one can conclude that the Aristotelian concept is found there ‘in potentiality’, by way of the normative articulation of dunamis to ergon, the distinction between capacity and effectivity, the project of an ontology unifying being and becoming, but only under the form of fragmentary and broken anticipations, which it remained for Aristotle to articulate and to systematize” (p. 100).

Next in this series: Ethical Roots of Aristotelian Dynamis

Distinguishing Act and Form

“In fact, the notions of form (eidos) and of act (energeia or entelecheia) are not equivalent; and if the first belongs to a Platonic vocabulary, the second is an Aristotelian invention. It belongs, as such, to an anti-Platonic project: there is no sense, for Aristotle, in posing ‘pure’ or ‘separated’ forms, that is to say forms subsisting outside of and independent of the composites that they define. Form is not separable except ‘by logos‘, ‘according to the formula’, which signifies also that form is not fully ousia, fully substance” (Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu sans la puissance, 2nd ed., part 1, introduction, p. 23, my translation throughout).

For Aristotle, form is only separable from the embodied composite analytically, in speech or in thought. Though he was Plato’s star pupil for 20 years and continued to be influenced by Plato in other ways, his project is “anti-Platonic” in the sense that he specifically criticizes the notion of separate form, with which Plato is famously associated.

“It goes otherwise for act, which implies separation, understood as autonomous subsistence, and therefore has the value of another name for ousia. Act, nonetheless, is not only another name for substance. Identified with the end, it is also [identified] with the good. Being in act is not only to subsist, it is to subsist as adequate to its form and to a form that, posed as end, is also posed as good…. Act thus is not only another name for being, but also for the good: or more, insofar as it says the good as real, or as realized, [it] names the identity of being and the good” (p. 24).

Here it is important to recall once again that all the senses of “being” Aristotle discusses in the Metaphysics involve being as a transitive verb (i.e., being this or that), not being as a noun. Being in the sense of existence simply has no place in this account. The identity of the senses of being as a transitive verb with those of the good tells us that the saying of transitive being for Aristotle has a normative character. Talking about the being or essence of things is talking about value, and making value judgments.

“Certainly, [the idea of] the unmoved First Mover does not come in response to the question of the emergence of being, but to that of the eternity of movement — both the continuity of the movement of the stars, and the perpetuity of the cycle of generation and corruption. This is why [book] Lambda [chapter] 10 [of the Metaphysics] can also designate the good as the cause of taxis [order], associated both with the movement of the eternal sensibles and that of the corruptible sensibles. If it is not an efficient cause, the First Mover nonetheless has an efficacity, or an influence on the world, which follows from the very fact that it has no power. For the purely actual substance, indeed excluding power as much as movement, is required as the condition of movement (Lambda 6 and 7). Again, it is necessary to determine the way in which it is [required]; Lambda 7 invokes the notion of final cause, which it is nonetheless necessary to understand in a particular sense: not in a sense in which the unmoved substance is itself the act and the end of the other substances, but in the sense in which, aiming at their proper act, the latter aim at the same time at its characteristic necessity. To understand this, it is not necessary to have recourse to the notion of imitation: the relation of the pure act to the substances mixed of act and potentiality is determined by the different relations of the anteriority of act to potentiality distinguished in Theta 8.” (p. 25).

Aristotle is saying that the good in general or value in general is a condition for the possibility of all movement, both celestial and terrestrial. Every being is moved by some good or other. Aubry is here explaining the difference between Aristotle’s own view and the “ontotheology” that Heidegger and others have attributed to him.

“[The pure act’s] efficacy could be called non-efficient; its strength merges with the desire it arouses. Designating god as act, Aristotle identifies his mode of being; determining the mode of relation of act to potentiality, he identifies his mode of action….”

“But by this, Aristotle also identifies the mode of being and the mode of action proper to the good. It is perhaps thus that it is necessary to understand his insistence in affirming that he is, of all the philosophers, the first and the only to have posed the good as a principle….”

“The singularity of the Aristotelian theology as a theology of the good, and of the power proper to the good, can nonetheless not be known except on the condition of taking seriously the designation of the First Mover as pure act. This supposes in particular that the Aristotelian inventions that are act and potentiality are not reduced to form and power. The Aristotelian theology, that is to say the science of unmoving and separate substance, appears only in effect as one of the areas of application of an ontology or, at least, a general ousiology, which has for its foundation the notions of act and potentiality” (p. 26).

In contrast to the ways being is said in the senses of the Categories, which are “inadequate for speaking about the first unmoving being, [act and potentiality] allow both the difference and the relation of moved and unmoved substances to be thought. In a more general way, act and potentiality are at the foundation of an anti-Parmenidean ontology, …allowing being, movement, and their correlation equally well to be thought” (p. 27).

Aubry points out that the notions of act and potentiality first arise in the discussion of motion. But book Theta of the Metaphysics is dedicated to reshaping them in a way that applies to “being” as well as to motion. It is more particularly through act and potentiality that beings are constituted as the beings they are.

“Movement, in effect, should not be understood only in the order of interaction, but also in that of actualization. Or again: movement should not be understood only in the order of the correlation of an active dynamis and a passive dynamis, partitioning the field of efficiency into an agent and a patient, but in that of the correlation of dynamis and energeia” (ibid).

“But the dynamis found thus to be correlated to act, and which designates a state of being, is therefore irreducible to power: being in potentiality, coordinated with and determined by act, is neither passive nor efficient. Or again, potentiality is reducible neither to active power nor to passive power. The notion of potentiality serves to name the very possibility of the interaction of an agent and a patient in view of a change determined and finalized by act.”

“The correlation of potentiality to act nonetheless does not exclude that of passive power to active power: but it subsumes it, or subordinates it, insofar as it carries a greater intelligibility. It invites us to consider that which, in an impact, a meeting, or an interaction, is the occasion of an accomplishment. It is a point of view taken on that which, in movement, makes itself, that is to say not only makes itself but perfects itself…. Aristotle’s universe is not exempt from impacts and meeting: the substances that populate it are not Leibnizian monads…. The order of efficiency is a real order, but subordinate to that of finality” (pp. 28-29; see also The Four Causes Revisited).

“Potentiality is indeed for a being the real possibility, inscribed in the very qualities that give it its essence, of realizing that essence. Potentiality is the index and the principle of the becoming that leads a being to its accomplishment. It bears at the same time the distance between a being and what it has to be, and the possibility of crossing that distance. If act names the identity, real or realized, of being and the good, potentiality names this identity as to be realized. It inscribes into being at the same time as the concreteness of mediation, the possibility of perfection” (p. 29).

“The ontology of potentiality bears with it at the same time the thought of a possible perfection, realizable here and now, and that of failures, of accidents, of bad encounters, of unsuccessful mediations that could counter it” (ibid).

For Aristotle there is no “problem of evil”. Things are at one and the same time both imperfect and perfectible.

Again, I prefer to drop the term “ontology” altogether, because it is strongly associated with a (non-Aristotelian) approach to first philosophy that focuses on being as a noun, and in the sense of existence. Aubry retains the traditional term, but gives it a different meaning that is less prejudicial.

Far be it from me to claim to have the one true interpretation of these sharply contested points about Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but the key features of Aubry’s account seem to fit very well with my own examination of the text.

Aubry has emphasized the role of Plotinus in the historic re-interpretation of Aristotelian act and potentiality. I would note that the later neoplatonic school at Alexandria under Ammonius (5th/6th century CE) — especially Ammonius’ students Simplicius and John Philoponus — also produced extensive commentaries on Aristotle with a neoplatonic slant, which helped shape the way Aristotle was read in medieval times.

Ammonius argued that Aristotle’s first cause is after all also an efficient cause. Simplicius, who is also a major source for quotes from lost works in the history of Greek philosophy, added two more distinctly neoplatonic kinds of causes to Aristotle’s four. Philoponus was a Christian Aristotelian who defended creation from nothing, and was cited by Galileo as an inspiration for the impulse theory of motion. The impulse theory decouples physical motion from any teleology, paving the way for early modern mechanism.

Next in thus series: Aristotle on the Platonic Good

Free Will in Plotinus

“Can there be question as to whether the gods have voluntary action? Or are we to take it that while we may well inquire in the case of men with their combination of powerlessness and hesitating power, the gods must be declared omnipotent, not merely some things but all lying at their nod? Or is power entire, freedom of action in all things, to be reserved to one alone…?” (Plotinus, Enneads VI.8.1, MacKenna tr., p. 595).

Plotinus in his treatise “On Free Will and the Will of the One” makes arguments that are unprecedented in the previous history of Greek philosophy. The treatise seems to show some (perhaps indirect) influence from the voluntaristic theology of Philo of Alexandria, as well as from Stoic theories of assent and of the so-called hegemonikon, a sort of ruling master faculty in humans that begins to approximate modern notions of a strongly unitary “mind”. It is noteworthy that free will and omnipotence are mentioned together from the outset.

It is especially common for writings on this subject to go through many twists and turns, since there are obvious appearances pointing in conflicting directions. Plotinus ends up advocating a fairly extreme position on these matters, but he is a serious enough thinker to feel the need to deal with conflicting evidence.

“The very notion of power must be scrutinized lest in this ascription we be really setting up an antithesis of power (potency) and Act, and identifying power with Act not yet achieved” (ibid).

Here he is implicitly responding to Aristotle. Given that he in general both shifts the meaning of Aristotelian potentiality back in the direction of Platonic power and emphasizes the unlimited power of the One unconstrained by any actuality, it is interesting that he recognizes there is an issue with “identifying power with Act not yet achieved”.

“To begin with, what must be intended when we assert that something is in our power; what is the conception here?” (ibid).

Aristotle had implicitly introduced the consideration of what is “in our power” in discussing moral responsibility for “willing” and “unwillling” actions. This became the basis of a key distinction in Stoic ethics: Epictetus says that only what is in our power is good or evil.

Plotinus writes, “A cardinal question is where we are to place the freedom of action ascribed to us…. But if rage or desire implied freedom we must allow freedom to animals, infants, maniacs, the distraught, the victims of malpractice producing uncontrollable delusions. And if freedom turns on calculation with desire, does this include faulty calculation? Sound calculation, no doubt, and sound desire; but then comes the question whether the appetite stirs the calculation or the calculation stirs the appetite…. Further, every emotion is preceded by some meager reasoning; how then can a compelling imagination, an appetite drawing us where it will, be supposed to leave us masters in the ensuing act?” (VI.8.2, p. 596).

Here he clearly recognizes that meaningful freedom must be something more subtle than just arbitrarily doing what we want. No emotion is completely devoid of reason, but he recognizes that we are often driven mainly by imagination and appetite. This will not qualify as free.

“We may be reminded that the Living Form and the Soul know what they do. But if this knowledge is by perception it does not help us toward the freedom of the act; perception gives awareness, not mastery” (p. 597).

He uses the term “knowledge” loosely here, but recognizes that mere awareness is superficial.

“We have traced self-disposal to will, will to reasoning and, next step, to right reasoning; perhaps to right reasoning we must add knowledge, for however sound opinion and act may be, they do not yield true freedom when the adoption of the right course is the result of hazard or of some presentment from the fancy with no knowledge of the foundation of that rightness” (VI.8.3, p. 597).

Up to this point he has mentioned will, but not given an account of it. The account comes a bit later in the text. But it is clear that he sees will as intimately involved with reason and intellect, as well as being a free power to choose. There is implicit tension between these two aspects, which will affect many later thinkers as well.

“Self-disposal, to us, belongs to those who, through the activities of the Intellectual-Principle, live above the states of the body” (ibid).

Now we come to what seems to be the main point of his solution. Pure intellect and what he calls the separated soul are by definition exempt from the passions and imagination that sway us embodied humans this way and that. But he maintains that we have an intimate connection to the separated soul, and that through this connection, freedom can be ours as well.

“Effort is free once it is toward a fully recognized good; the involuntary is, precisely, motion away from a good and toward the enforced, towards something not recognized as a good” (VI.8.4, p. 598).

He remains close enough to Plato and Aristotle to want to also tie freedom to the good, which Plato says all beings desire.

“[B]ut an undivided Principle, a simplex Activity, where there can be no difference of potentiality and act, must be free; there can be no thought of ‘action according to nature’, in the sense of any distinction between the being and its efficiency, there where being and act are identical…. In a principle, act and essence must be free” (ibid).

Here he takes a more radical step, guided by abstract thinking about what “must” be true about Principles. This kind of approach is not completely absent in Plato and Aristotle, but plays a much more central role in Plotinus. He seems to be saying that when we orient ourselves by the separated soul, we are no longer governed by a nature at all.

“If freedom is to be allowed to the soul in its Act, it certainly cannot be allowed in regard to issue, for we are not master of events: if in regard to fine conduct and all inspired by the Intellectual-Principle, that may very well be freedom; but is the freedom ours?” (VI.8.5, p. 598).

If events do not turn out as we had wished, our effective action in the world will not count as having been “free”. He recognizes also that it does not follow automatically that because pure intellect is free, we are free.

“If thus virtue whose manifestation requires action becomes inevitably a collaborator under compulsion, how can it have untrammeled self-disposal? Should we, perhaps, distinguish between compulsion in the act and freedom in the preceding will and reasoning? But in setting freedom in these preceding functions, we imply that virtue has a freedom and self-disposal apart from all act; then we must state what is the reality of the self-disposal attributed to virtue as a state or disposition” (p. 599).

This is indeed the path that he will follow.

“Virtue does not follow upon occurrences as a saver of the imperilled; at its discretion it sacrifices a man; it may decree the jettison of life, means, children, country even; it looks to its own high aim and not to the self-regarding of anything lower. Thus our freedom of act, our self-disposal, must be referred not to the doing, not to the external thing but to the inner activity, to the Intellection, to virtue’s own vision” (VI.8.6, p. 599).

It sounds as though he thinks virtue inheres in the separated soul.

He seems to want to say that virtue is completely independent of any necessity — not only of external compulsion, but also of any constraint by universals. I think Kant sometimes goes too far with the analogy between a “should” and formal necessity; what Plotinus says here suggests he wants to go too far in the opposite direction, effectively denying any real substance to a “should”. Of course he would object to this latter conclusion, since he clearly wants to tie freedom to the good, but it seems to me that it follows anyway. His stance seems to imply that good is whatever a “good” will wills. This is opposite in spirit to Plato’s Euthyphro. Either it is circular, or it implies a kind of voluntarism.

“This makes it all the more evident that the unembodied is the free; to this our self-disposal is to be referred; herein lies our will which remains free and self-disposing in spite of any orders which it may necessarily utter to meet the external. All then that issues from will and is the effect of will is our free action, whether the will is directed outwards or remains unattached; all that will adopts and brings, unimpeded, into existence is in the highest degree at our free disposal.”

Now he has turned things around so that all willing is free. This depends on a new assumption that seems to locate the will in the separated soul, which does make sense if we accept what he has said. The claim seems to be that we can say that the will of the separated soul chooses which “orders” to give in unconditional freedom, in spite of the fact that the content of all particular orders is conditioned by external factors.

“The contemplating Intellect, the first or highest, has self-disposal to the point that its operation is utterly independent; it turns wholly upon itself; at rest in its good it is without need, complete, and may be said to live to its will; there the will is intellection: it is called will because it expresses the Intellectual-Principle in the willing phase and besides, what we know as will imitates this operation taking place within the Intellectual-Principle” (p. 600).

He goes on to argue at length that since pure intellect is free, the One must be so to an even higher degree. Many have seen a strong element of necessity in his view of the procession of everything else from the One. Plotinus seems elsewhere to say that if we look bottom-up, there appears to be necessity, but here he claims that from a top-down perspective, the One is absolutely free, and beings inherit a portion of that freedom through the operations of procession. By means of the separated soul, he claims that we participate in this.

Others might question whether we humans really have access to such a top-down perspective. Basically no one — even the later Greek neoplatonists — has fully embraced Plotinus’ notion of the separated soul. But many later monotheists found the sort of conclusions that he reached attractive nonetheless, and sought alternate grounds for embracing them. For example, although the scholastic “intellectual soul” is embodied rather than separated, like Plotinus’ separated soul it has many very “strong” attributes that do not come from Aristotle.

Foucault on Power

“Power’s condition of possibility… must not be sought in the primary existence of a central point, in a unique source of sovereignty from which secondary and descendent forms would emanate; it is the moving substrate of force relations which, by virtue of their inequality, constantly engender states of power, but the latter are always local and unstable. The omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another. Power is everywhere, not because it embraces everything; but because it comes from everywhere…. One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society” (Foucault, History of Sexuality vol. 1, p. 93).

“I’d like to mention only two ‘pathological forms’ — those two ‘diseases of power’ — fascism and Stalinism. One of the numerous reasons why they are, for us, so puzzling is that in spite of their historical uniqueness they are not quite original. They used and extended mechanisms already present in most other societies. More than that: in spite of their own internal madness, they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality” (Foucault, “The Subject and Power”).

Foucault in his earlier “archaeological” stage made an enormous impression on me in my youth. He began by questioning the tendency to assimilate similar or similarly named concepts from different times and places in history, as if the “same” concepts were always continuously at work. The metaphor of “archaeology” emphasizes a patient analysis of concrete raw materials of historical evidence as a kind of artifacts, with an emphasis on highlighting their diversity, over traditional history writing’s rush to construct simple, continuous, and uniform historical narratives. Larger historical unities — either the alleged uniformity of culture and attitudes at a given time and place, or alleged continuities of identical concepts persisting across time and space — should be established by evidence, and not simply assumed based on conventional wisdom or uses of the same words.

Later he turned to a series of works more concerned with power and the constitution of human subjectivity. First he emphasized that power is not a matter of formal or institutional authority. Power for Foucault is not something that could be a possession; it exists only in its exercise. Next he criticized the reduction of power to its overtly repressive aspects, recommending instead a “microphysics” that focuses on what in popular discourse is sometimes called “power to” as opposed to “power over” — a positive rather than a negative notion of power. Finally he began to say that there is really no such thing as power, and what matters is the way subjects are constituted through “technologies of the self”. The primary way that social control is effected, particularly in modern Western societies, has less to do with symbolic spectacles of extreme violence than with the very formation of our personal identities. (See also Ethos, Hexis.)

One way these developments might be summarized is to say that power for Foucault is something emergent and not something originary: “power”, whatever it is, is a result, and not a cause. Power is not a magical power emanating from a source that somehow directly affects things, but a way of describing aspects of concrete relational situations.

Aristotle too tells us that power is not a cause in a primary or ultimate sense. It may provide a relative “reason why” in particular cases, but ultimately it is something to be explained, rather than being an ultimate explainer.

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.

Is and Ought in Actuality

Aristotle regards the priority of actuality over potentiality to be one of his most important innovations. He regards it as a necessary condition for anything being intelligible. Along with the primacy of the good and that-for-the-sake-of-which in explanation, it is also central to his way of arguing for a first cause.

The Western tradition generally did not follow Aristotle on these points. Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin monotheisms have most often treated God as an absolute power, seeking to put unlimited omnipotence first in the order of explanation, before goodness. Christians were happy to criticize occasionalism in Islam, but theologians like Duns Scotus and William of Ockham defended an extreme sort of theological voluntarism, which was taken up again by Descartes. In the 19th century, Kierkegaard valorized Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son as unconditional obedience to God, claiming that faith should take precedence over ethics generally. In the 20th century, Sartre defended unconditional free will for humans, while asserting a militant atheism and the absurdity of existence. His currently influential follower Alain Badiou goes even further. He bluntly says that concern for ethics is a waste of time, and that dialogue and democracy are a scam — not just in particular cases, but in general.

Mainstream views of religion have always insisted that the absolute power is also absolutely good, but have been unable to show why or how this is the case. This has opened the door to simplistic but unanswerable arguments that the facts of the world cannot be reconciled with claims that it is governed by a good absolute power.

Instead of sacrificing ethics and the good on either religious or secular grounds, we should put them first. Leibniz argues that an emphasis on the absolute power or arbitrary will of God is bad theology, and effectively makes God into the kind of tyrant that Plato denounced (see also Euthyphro; Arbitrariness, Inflation).

Aristotle’s first cause doesn’t govern the facts of the world. It is the world’s normative compass. It is the pure good and pure fulfillment that all things seek, according to their natures and insofar as they are capable. Or as Hegel might say, it is pure Idea.

The priority of actuality is a priority of the good and of normativity. For Aristotle, we shouldn’t call something “actual” just because it exists or is the case. Rather, something is actual when it is the case that it is fulfilling its potential, as it “ought” to do.

It is not a matter of pure moralism either though. Actuality does involve an element of being the case; it is just not reducible to that. What is true also matters quite a lot in the determination of what is right, even though it is not all that matters. Every particular good is interdependent with particular truth. That is why Aristotle seems to make the understanding of causes into one of the most important elements of virtue, while at the same time cautioning us that ethics is not a matter of exact knowledge.

We are looking for a kind of mean here. What is true matters for what is right, but what is right also matters for what is true. Truth is not reducible to a matter of neutral fact. There can be no truth without intelligibility, and there can be no intelligibility without taking normative considerations into account in interpretation.

Entelechy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internal teleology and the entelechy that implements it are more subtle; entelechy is an in itself “unmoving” and “unchanging” activity (which may nonetheless have new relational states, due to the narrow way in which Aristotle defines “change”). The things subject to motion and change in the proper sense are only indirectly moved by the activity-as-end of entelechy (by means of some source of motion).

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

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

I strongly suspect that what Hegel metaphorically calls “logical motion” would be expressed by Aristotle in terms of the end-governed “unmoving activity” of entelechy. (See also Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity.)

Next in this series: Aristotle on Being