Tag: Pure Act

Eternal Motion

Chapter 6 of book Lambda of Aristotle’s Metaphysics takes chapter 5’s unification of eternal and corruptible sensible substance as a starting point, and now inquires into the relation between sensible, movable substance as a whole and unmoved substance. We’ve been following the detailed development of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s provocative non-traditional interpretation of the distinctive features of Aristotle’s account.

“The simple and necessary substance is not needed in order to give an account of the substances that, insofar as they are mixed from act and in-potentiality, can either be or not be, but in order to give an account of movement insofar as it cannot not be. The first question for Aristotle is not ‘why is there being?’ but ‘why is there movement?’, or, more precisely, ‘why is there always movement?'” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 178, emphasis added, my translation throughout).

“Whereas the theology of omnipotence is a response to the question of the emergence of being, the theology of pure act in effect is a response to the question of the eternity of movement. The god of Aristotle thus provides a reason for the most manifest, for the most evident. It is not the ground — or the bottomlessness — of the mystery of being, more mysterious than the being it serves to explain, but the reason of the most immediate, most apparent phenomenon. Movement, in effect, is the first given” (ibid).

“[A]mong the different species of movement, the priority comes back to local movement. The latter is indeed anterior to genesis: ‘It is impossible that generation should be first’. Generation is only first in the order of the individual, since the latter must exist in order to move. But in order for it to come into being, it is necessary for another being to have preexisted it which was in movement, and the same for this last. Thus it is not movement that comes to be, but coming to be that presupposes an antecedent movement and being” (pp. 178-179, emphasis in original).

She quotes from Generation and Corruption book II chapter 10, “For it is far more reasonable that what is should cause the coming-to-be of what is not, than that what is not should cause the being of what is. Now that which is being moved is, but that which is coming-to-be is not: hence motion is prior to coming-to-be” (Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. 1, p. 550, emphasis in original).

“There is no first instant of movement. Movement cannot not have always been” (Aubry, p. 179). She notes that the Metaphysics does not contain the demonstration of this. Aristotle’s actual demonstration of the eternity of movement occurs in book VIII of the Physics, and basically consists in adding an indefinite regress to arguments like those we have just seen.

“Lambda 6 in effect establishes that the principle of such a movement must be not power but act. We have already seen Aristotle’s insistence here on underlining, as in book capital Alpha, the originality of such a thought of the principle. The argument works in a regressive way, establishing successively that the principle of eternal movement cannot be conceived as a power (dunamis), not even as an active or acting power, but must be such that its very substance is act, he ousia energeia. Its stages, let us recall, are the following:”

“–to give an account of movement, it is not sufficient to assert a moving or efficient (kinetikon e poietikon) capacity, if it does not act (me energoun); for it is possible to have a power without acting (endekhetai gar to dunamin ekhon me energein)”

“–nonetheless, even supposing that the principle acts (ei energesei), we cannot give an account of eternal movement if its ousia is dunamis. In effect, if that which has a power has the possibility of not acting, that which is in-potentiality has the possibility of not being (endekhetai gar to dunamei on me einai)”

“–it follows therefore that there is a principle such that its ousia is act, he ousia energeia” (p. 180).

She notes the striking parallelism of Aristotle’s phrases, but also finds a progression between the two formulae, corresponding to a transition between the “kinetic” and “ontological” senses of dynamis that she has often remarked upon.

“As with that from power to in-potentiality, the transition is thus effectuated from action to act: the principle of eternal movement must be conceived not only as an always active and acting power, but as an act. The argument relies only on the ontological sense of [pure] energeia, understood as that mode of being which is subtracted from the possibility of non-being” (p. 181).

“Ultimately we find posed as the condition of eternal movement, a being of which the ousia is energeia. But to say this is also to say, as the two moments of the demonstration underline, that from this substance is excluded every form of power: as much active power as in-potentiality. Thus — and it is again necessary to underline the force, and the paradox, of such a thesis: the very condition of the efficacity of the principle resides in its absence of power. It is not because it is all-powerful or fully active, but indeed because it is fully act that it is maximally efficacious, since it is the principle of eternal movement” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“That the principle (or principles) of eternal movement are act is deduced again from two necessary properties: eternity and immateriality. We verify equally the claim of Lambda 5: act serves to name not only (as Theta 8 established) the mode of being of the necessary and the eternal, but also that of form or the immaterial” (p. 183).

She goes on to contrast this argument with the more limited concerns of Aristotle’s demonstration of the need for an unmoved mover in the Physics.

“Decisive for the demonstration of Lambda 6, the ontological sense is on the other hand absent from that of Physics VIII. The latter utilizes not the schema of finality and the correlation of in-potentiality and act, but that of efficiency and of the correlation of powers…. [T]he text of Physics VIII considers at length the Platonic hypothesis according to which the first principle can be a self-mover. It is concerned to demonstrate that even a self-mover must have a mover and a moved, and finally to establish that at the origin of change there must be an unmoved mover. But the relation of the unmoved mover to that which it moves is thought on the model of efficiency…. The hypothesis, foundational for Lambda 6, of an unactualized power, or a power that is able to not act, is not envisaged. The action of the mover on the moved is described [in Physics VIII] as that of a mechanical force, working by contact with the first moved thing” (ibid).

In Physics VIII, Aristotle even speaks of a temporally infinite power (dynamis apeiros) behind what is commonly translated as “eternal” movement. In Aubry’ s paraphrase, “But an infinite power cannot reside in a finite body, so the first mover must be thought as being indivisible, without parts, and without magnitude” (p. 184).

Physics VIII is after all concerned with the roots of ordinary physical motion, so it is reasonable that it focuses on the “kinetic” sense of dynamis. It does seem that Metaphysics Lambda refers to Physics VIII’s demonstration of the need for an unmoved mover, so it is reasonable to assume that Lambda represents a later development.

It should not be surprising that Lambda, from a different and later point of view, makes new arguments about the first cause that are not in Physics VIII, and corrects some statements of the latter on its nature. Aubry does not comment on this discrepancy, but is content to do her due diligence in pointing it out. We saw earlier, however, that in Physics III Aristotle does also subordinate the kinetic sense of dynamis to what she calls the ontological one of in-potentiality.

Next in this series: Ousia Energeia

Book Lambda: Introduction

“Book Lambda of the Metaphysics responds to the exigencies defined in book capital Alpha: to pose the good as a principle; and to determine its proper mode of causality as being that of a final cause, and not an efficient or formal cause. These two exigencies are resolved in a single proposition: the principle is act, and is without power. Act here receives its full signification: it is act and not form that is the mode of being of separate substance; but act also serves to name the good as a principle” (Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 153, my translation throughout).

We saw last time that pure act (energeia) for Aristotle — unlike any being in subcelestial nature — has the character of unmixed necessity. This is true because pure act is the only thing that fully is what it is. It is the admixture of power (dynamis) and in-potentiality (dynamei) in other things that is the source of their contingency, as not being pure act.

“If the concepts of dunamis and energeia simultaneously unify ousiology and integrate theology into it, they also bear all the singularity of the Aristotelian thought of being, and within it of the first being, insofar as the latter is conceived not as an excess of power, but as the reality of the good” (p. 154).

Ousiology would be an account of ousia, or what we call “substance” from the Latin. Again, the first cause is not first in the sense of time, but first in the sense that all other things depend on it. The whole point of calling it pure act is to separate it from the contingency of the dependent things that have power and potentiality.

The very idea of an “excess of power” is utterly alien to Aristotle. We saw before that he understands power as always being power for something definite. Only those things that also have a dependency on something outside of themselves have this kind of “power” at all, corresponding to an unrealized in-potentiality. This “power” and potentiality are the mark of their contingency, not of implacable might.

It is Plato and Plotinus who on the other hand associate superlative power with the Good or the One. But Aristotle criticizes Plato for failing to explain how the Good acts as a cause. Then Plotinus later attempts to answer Aristotle’s criticism by adapting and dwelling upon the novel theme of the excessive character of the One’s power that first emerges in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

“To read book Lambda in a unitary manner, and to find this unity in ontology, that is to say in the sense of being that dunamis and energeia express, is not at all to deny or to minimize its theological content. It is on the contrary to affirm the unity of metaphysics, against the onto-theological readings that scission it between a science of common being and a science of the first being. It is also to recognize a continuity among the different treatises that have come down to us under the name of the Metaphysics” (p. 156).

“The date of composition of book Lambda is debated by commentators. But it is necessary in any case to distinguish between the historical question of its editorial status and that of its conceptual relation to the other books of the Metaphysics, with regard to the problems to which responds to, displaces, or resolves, the analyses that it deepens” (ibid).

“The problems treated in the central books [Zeta–Eta–Theta], and most especially in book Theta, seem to us to be decisive. In Lambda, the elucidation of [1] the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia that orients Theta in its entirety; [2] the analogical relation between them in Theta 6; and [3] the anteriority of act over in-potentiality subsequently developed in Theta 8, furnish the conceptual basis as much for the analogical unification of the principles of substance, as for the principal position of ousia energeia” (ibid).

“Massively mobilized in Lambda 6 and 7, [the notions of dunamis and energeia] are absent from the introductory chapter that constitutes Lambda 1, as from the analyses of Lambda 3, and little present in Lambda 8 and 10. Nonetheless, the successive and modulated interventions of dunamis–energeia (or — and it is necessary for us to ask ourselves about this variation, of their dative form dunamei–energeia) over the course of Lambda serve each time to respond to the different questions raised in Lambda 1, which serve as the program for the book in its entirety: what is a principle (notably in its difference from an element, stoicheion, or a cause, aitia)? What are the principles common to sensible substances? What is the nature of separate substance (is it a form or not)? Finally, and these two questions are intrinsically linked, in what way is separate substance a cause, and are there principles common to all substances, sensible or separate?” (p. 157).

Here Aubry notes that while still maintaining his own preferred sense of “separate” ousia (separate as subsisting with relative independence with respect to other things) as distinct from that of Plato (separate as independent of matter subject to becoming), Aristotle nonetheless in this part of the text turns to ask questions about substance that is separate in both of these senses.

“Going forward, we will be able to extract a unitary principle for all substances, sensible or separate, that is not reducible to the unity of the material composite; and at the same time to maintain, under the auspices of this unity, a hierarchy that is not episodic or disjunctive” (p. 158).

What makes the hierarchy of substance not episodic or disjunctive in Aristotle is the explanation he provides for the mode of causality of the end and the good as that for the sake of which.

“Lambda 2 will thus substitute the notion of in-potentiality for that of matter, in order to extend it, beyond the corruptible sensible substances, to the eternal sensible substances. This positive result is followed in Lambda 3 by a negative, but decisive, result, since we will establish, against Plato, that form cannot be separate. In Lambda 4, it is this time against its reduction to an element [i.e., a constituent in the material sense] by those who wrote about nature, that the notion of principle will be redefined” (ibid).

For Aristotle, a principle of something is never reducible to a constituent part of it, and what any given thing “is” is always more than a mere sum of its parts.

“The veritable pivot of book Lambda, chapter 5 goes on to integrate these various results, negative as well as positive: the extension of dunamis to the eternal sensibles; the exclusion of form from consideration as the mode of the being of the separate; the distinction between principle and element; and going forward, [chapter 5] brings two fundamental responses to the questions posed in the introductory chapter: separate substance must be conceived as act and not as form; and dunamis and energeia are, by analogy, the principles common to all sensible substances” (ibid).

“On this basis, the central concern of chapters 6-10 will consist in determining and exploring the mode(s) of relation between separate substance and the other substances. Lambda 6 having demonstrated that separate substance as ousia energeia is the condition of the movement of the other substances, it remains to identify its mode of causality as being that of the end (Lambda 7) and of the good (Lambda 9), but also the way in which this causality operates in the case of the eternal sensibles (Lambda 8), and, finally, the whole universe (Lambda 10)” (ibid).

The whole universe coheres intelligibly, both insofar as it realizes the good, and insofar there are also explanations when things fall short or go wrong. The world we live in is not a mere whole made up of discrete parts, as the pre-Socratic writers on nature tended to assume. Neither is it the mere sequence of disconnected episodes that follows from the Platonic sole emphasis on what Aristotle calls formal causes.

Next in this series: Physics and Theology

Act as Separable

“At this point in Theta 8, we have completed, by the mediation of the terms telos [end] and ergon [completed work], the justification of the equivalence between the superior terms of the analogy, energeia [act], kinesis [motion], and ousia [“substance”], just as we have justified that between the inferior terms, dunamis [power] and hyle [matter]. But in so doing, we have also subsumed one analogical relation under the other, by showing in the correlation dunamis–kinesis a particular case of the correlation hyle–ousia: power serves as a means for matter to attain the form posed as end, and indeed as a means for the coming to be of substance as unity of matter and form, movement itself being able to serve, in the case of transitive activities, as end and as realization of essence. We have thus completed the transition from the kinetic sense to the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia, and at the same time established the priority of the ontological sense over the kinetic sense.”

“The end of Theta 8 nonetheless begins another process: this no longer aims at showing the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia, but at extending their field of application beyond the corruptible sensible substances” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 141, my translation throughout, Becker number citations to the Greek text omitted). 

Aristotle regards the stars as eternal (or more precisely, sempiternal) sensible beings, because on a human time scale their motions and other characteristics appear to be unchanging. From this perspective, he understands not only the first cause but all astronomical entities in terms of pure act (energeia), without any admixture of power (dynamis), or of being that is only in-potentiality (dynamei). But these are still sensible beings subject to motion, so they occupy an intermediate place between terrestrial things and the first cause.

This association with eternity and pure act goes along with his view that unlike terrestrial things, the stars move by necessity. Again, for Aristotle this just means always in the same way. Here he does speak of “what cannot not be”, but I think this is only a consequence of his definition of necessity. It is a reflection of the logical truth that if we say something always occurs in a certain way, then we are committed to saying it cannot not occur in that way, simply because “always” implies “never not” — and not anything stronger than that.

Aristotle’s argument, which ultimately aims to draw conclusions about the first cause from an analysis of things closer to us, is made somewhat easier by the existence of this intermediate case of eternal sensible substances in his conceptual schema. But it does not seem to me that any of his arguments about pure act really depends on this common-sense assumption that the stars are eternal.

Even if we have a different conception of astronomical entities, according to which they just exist on a much longer time scale than terrestrial things, the conceptual distinction of a separable pure act remains available to us. (Hegel, for example, develops a version of it that has no connection to astronomy, and instead appeals only to the lasting ethical and cultural achievements of rational beings.) (See also Grammatical Prejudice?.)

“Act can in effect only be attributed to the eternal sensible substances on the condition of being dissociated from dunamis, redefined as the power of contradiction (in the same way, it will only be able to be extended in book Lambda to the simple substance on the condition of the exclusion of movement). But insofar as Theta 6 introduced it as indissociable from its correlation with in-potentiality, it is the very understanding of the notion of act that seems to be called into question: how do we understand energeia without in-potentiality? What kind of act is it that is no longer the unity of matter and form in the end? Can we under these conditions maintain its identity to ousia?”

“These questions will only find a definitive response in book Lambda. Theta 8 is content to begin the process of the extension of energeia: the notion is in effect applied to the eternal sensible substances. For this application allows us to extract yet another sense, and a more fundamental one, of the anteriority of act according to ousia: if act is anterior to in-potentiality according to ousia, this is also because, contrary to in-potentiality, it characterizes such substances. For these are more so substances than the perishable sensible substances” (ibid).

In the analysis of things around us that are in becoming, we see the underlying modalities of in-potentiality and in-act functioning in an interdependent way. But if we look at in-potentiality and in-act just as modalities, only one depends on the other. That is just what the priority of act is intended to convey.

Aubry sees a new distinction introduced here for the first time. Aristotle first explicitly mentions that dynamis may have effects that are not only contrary but contradictory, and at the same time specifies in-potentiality is a mode of being that can be resolved to act in contradictory alternative ways. But it seems to me that this has been implicit from the moment that talk about potentiality for contraries was introduced. And in the bigger picture, Aristotle’s whole insistence on the priority of act over potentiality and the asymmetry in the relation between them seems to have been designed from the start to support considerations of the independence of act from potentiality.

There could be no potentiality without something being in act. But it is very clear that for Aristotle, the relation of potentiality to act is asymmetrical. By contrast, activity and passivity are completely symmetrical, so it is impossible to have the one without the other. But potentiality depends on act, whereas act seems to be the very thing that makes something an ousia malista, or what is most of all a substance. The criterion for this is precisely “separability” or independence relative to other things. Potentiality seems ubiquitous to us because it is a necessary component of all the terrestrial things we are accustomed to, not because act in principle has any dependency on it. Or such seems to be Aristotle’s argument.

Aubry already emphasized in her reading of book Zeta that for Aristotle, what distinguishes ousia malista is its separability, or ability to have being on its own. But Zeta’s discussion focuses on perishable sensible substances, and therefore on applying this kind of separability to concrete composites of form and the familiar kind of (non-celestial) matter. Here for the first time Aristotle explicitly addresses eternal sensible substances.

“The correlation of in-potentiality and act is here broken: act is no longer presented as the end and the principle of dunamis, but as excluding it. Energeia and dunamis name opposed modes of being, where one is proper to the necessary, as that which cannot not be, the other to the contingent, as that which can be or not be. Dissociated from dunamis, energeia remains on the other hand associated with kinesis [motion]: in effect, the eternal sensible substances are in movement. But movement in their case is not the transition from one state of being to another, or from in-potentiality to act: exclusive of in-potentiality, it is confounded with their very act — by which we indeed verify that for certain beings kinesis can serve as telos [end] and as manifestation of being. Finally, dissociated from in-potentiality, this movement remains no less associated with matter, or at least a certain kind of matter” (pp. 142-143).

“[E]ven though the correlation of in-potentiality to act has been broken among the eternal sensible substances, it operates again between these and the corruptible sensible substances” (pp. 143-144).

“[A]ct can be not only another name for the ousia composed of matter and form (or for matter as realized in a form, the form in a matter), but for ousia as such. Act thus comes to name a superior degree of being, which, insofar as it is exempt from in-potentiality, is characterized by necessity, understood as the impossibility of not being” (p. 144).

“In-potentiality, as being able to be or not be, names an inferior degree of being, which characterizes contingency, but remains no less correlated to act in a relation of dependency that also marks act’s anteriority according to ousia” (ibid).

Aristotle’s text does clearly suggest that astronomical entities are somehow superior to terrestrial things, and it relates this superiority to the notion that they are purely in-act. But a modern understanding of astronomical entities expressed in Aristotelian terms would be that contrary to what Aristotle thought, they are not in fact purely in-act.

There is, however, an alternate basis for vindicating the “superiority” of the celestial over the terrestrial. The cosmos is inconceivably more vast than the earth, and for modern science too causally subsumes and includes it, analogous to the way that Aristotle thought it did.

Since childhood I have felt a fascination for the vastness of space and time, that could include distant galaxies and dinosaurs. Completely unlike Pascal’s famous terror at being so small in this vastness, I experienced this with only the profound wonder that Aristotle identifies as the beginning of philosophy.

Even if we do not regard astronomical entities as eternal sensible substances, I think Aristotle for his part would have no trouble endorsing Kant’s expression of the two great wonders, “the starry heavens above and the moral law within”.

Next in this series: Book Theta: Summing Up

Reflection, Judgment, Process

Reflection is a key concept both for later Kant and for Hegel (see, e.g., Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity; More on Contemplation). We have seen that it led Kant to deepen the notion of judgment he had already used in the Critique of Pure Reason, giving more explicit attention to what I have called the process of interpretation, in contrast to the eventual conclusions that had been the exclusive preoccupation of early modern logic. He had already criticized the latter for confusing judgment with predication.

When judgment is identified with simple predication, the process of interpretation entirely disappears. Indeed, both early modern and contemporary formal logic are explicitly concerned with mechanical syntactic manipulation of uninterpreted terms.

Kant’s narrower point in the first Critique had been that only categorical judgments (those having the simple form A is B) can be analyzed as linguistic predications. Against the early modern tradition, Kant pointed out that neither hypothetical judgments (if A then B) nor disjunctive judgments (if A then not-B) can be understood in this way.

Whereas the early modern tradition strongly privileged categorical judgments, taking simple predications straightforwardly as simple assertions, Kant argues that hypothetical and disjunctive judgments have at least equal significance for thought, if not more. Hypothetical and disjunctive judgments are irreducibly inferential, as can be seen from the presence of “if” and “then” in their forms. What Kant suggests about this in the first Critique is that the inferential aspect of judgment is more fundamental than its assertive aspect. Brandom makes the further suggestion that the kinds of inferences Kant is primarily concerned with in this context are informal “material” inferences, which are grounded in the meanings of terms rather than in formal syntax.

With the enhanced concept of reflective judgment developed in the Critique of Judgment, Kant begins to take an even wider range of interpretive processes into account in his view of judgment overall. Reflective judgment is primarily focused on the process of interpretation, though it also reaches conclusions. This makes the contrast between Kantian judgment and judgment in early modern logic even more profound. Early modern logic codifies a “conclusory” notion of judgment grounded in simple assertion, and makes the formal manipulation of such assertions the paradigm for all reasoning. Kantian judgment on the other hand begins as primarily inferential, and comes to emphasize the wider, open-ended, reflective process of interpretation.

The “logic of being” that Hegel presents as a kind of necessary preliminary failure in his Logic is precisely the logic of simple assertion. From any arbitrary assertions, we can deductively generate more assertions that will be consistent with these, and we can classify other assertions according to whether they are consistent with the accepted ones or not. But Hegel is concerned with the possibility of genuine intelligibility and knowledge. Starting only from mere assertions, we can never reach these. The most we can achieve is some kind of relational discrimination between the implications of different assertions, whose meaning is merely assumed.

Kantian reflection is the main theme of Hegel’s “logic of essence”. Hegel’s conclusion is that the ultimate ground of essence is none other than pure reflection, which embodies a kind of reflective infinity of mutually referencing relations, that presupposes no fixed terms. Essence, as a kind of deeper truth of things than the shallow one of logical consistency alone, is not based on “fixed” concepts of the sort that are always assumed in formal logic. Rather, essence for Hegel is grounded in reflection all the way down, which we can pursue as deeply as we like. Socratic inquiry can be seen as a foreshadowing of this.

I see an important parallel to book Lambda of Aristotle’s Metaphysics here. There, the ground of the what-it-is of things is the pure contemplation of thought thinking itself. In other words, the ground of essence is pure reflection, just as Hegel says. The pure actuality or pure entelechy of Aristotle’s first cause is an actuality or entelechy of what Hegel calls pure reflection.

A major difference between Aristotle’s first cause and ourselves, as I read it, is that the purity of the first cause makes it only concerned with essence or deep truth, whereas we rational animals also live in a world of appearances, and therefore also have to deal with these. Because we live in a world of appearances, we humans have a need for judgment that Aristotle’s first cause does not share.

In the “logic of the concept” with which he concludes his Logic, Hegel gives a thoroughly Kantian treatment of judgment, effectively identifying all judgment with reflective judgment in Kant’s sense. If the logic of essence was concerned with the objective determination of essence from pure reflection, the “subjective” logic of the concept is concerned with applying reflection to particular appearances that we encounter in life. This is something we rational animals have to do that Aristotle’s first cause does not.

Pure reflection is a kind of ideal thing that is analytically separable from process, but the kind of reflection that we embodied beings engage in only occurs as part of a concrete process that involves particular appearances and development in time.

Not Power and Action

My copy of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s Genèse du dieu souverain arrived today, and I’ve started to look at the front matter. She begins by explaining why Aristotelian potentiality and actuality are not reducible to concepts of power and action. In the Metaphysics, the most sophisticated sense of being and substance is associated with the pair en dunamei and energeia. Whereas the grammatical nominative form dunamis could connote an active power, she says the dative form en dunamei was used by Aristotle precisely to distinguish from this. The other essential distinguishing feature of Aristotle’s approach was to make the en dunamei dependent on an energeia (act, actuality, or at-work-ness), a term of Aristotle’s own invention. In French, Aubry translates en dunamei for potentiality as en-puissance, as distinct from the puissance that means power.

“[Potentiality] names, for a given being, the principle of a movement oriented by the act that is also its end and its proper good” (p. 10, my translation throughout). Actuality and potentiality, she says, thus provide an alternative model to that of efficient causality based on the relation between an active and a passive power.

“In the same way that potentiality is not power (active or passive), act is not action. Act does not act [L’acte n’agit pas]. On the contrary, it names that for which we act or move: the telos or end, which is also the good” (ibid). Nor should the relation between potentiality and actuality be reduced to that between matter and form. She notes that Aristotle never referred to god as “pure form”.

She observes that book Lambda of the Metaphysics (1071a 4-5) singles out potentiality and actuality as applicable by analogy to all substances of all kinds. (Scholars debate whether “by analogy” adequately translates Aristotle’s pros hen or “toward one”, but that is a side issue.) “This assures at the same time the generality of the ontological discourse and the real primacy of the theological principle” (ibid). (I prefer to avoid the term “ontology”, but that is another side issue.)

“Determining [god] as pure act, [Aristotle’s view based on potentiality and actuality] poses [god] as at the same time identical with the good” (p. 11). She reads Aristotle’s statement of the project of the Metaphysics in book Alpha as “posing the good as a principle and identifying the causality proper to it” (p. 12). The Latin medieval tradition mostly followed Avicenna in treating the Metaphysics as what Duns Scotus called ontology, but the great commentator Averroes characterized the Metaphysics as a philosophical theology, and Aubry also calls it an axiology, or study of goodness and value.

Disambiguating “Power”

As Aristotle might remind us, “power” is said in many ways. Each of these is different.

There is the power that Plato suggests as a distinguishing mark of being in the Sophist. There is the greater power he attributes to the Good more ancient than being. There is Aristotelian potentiality, which I normally prefer to distinguish from “power” altogether, but is referred to by the same Greek word. There is the related notion of power as capacity, of the sort developed by Paul Ricoeur. There is efficient causality, itself said in many ways. There is physical force. There is legal or political authority. There are repressive apparatuses. There is the positive, distributed social power involved in the formation of selves, discussed by Michel Foucault. There is the artistic and inventive power with which Nietzsche was especially concerned. There are claims of supernatural power beyond possible human understanding.

I haven’t yet found where in her French text Gwenaëlle Aubry clarifies how her identification of Aristotle’s god with pure act — involving neither Aristotelian potentiality nor Platonic power — goes together with her identification of the efficacy of the pure act with a final causality realized through “potentiality as tendency toward the end”. I think this has to do with the pure act’s role as an end or attractor, so that the potentiality in question belongs to the things it attracts, rather than to Aristotle’s god. Aristotle’s god for Aubry is what might be called an “inspiring” or attracting cause rather than a ruler and a driving cause.

It seems to me that in order to even be intelligible, a power of any kind must be understood as having definite characteristics related to its efficacy. I therefore think “infinite power” is devoid of sense. Even the “omnipotent” God of Leibniz who selects the best of all possible worlds at the moment of creation only selects an inherent, coherently realizable possibility that is also in accordance with non-arbitrary criteria of goodness. He does not create arbitrarily.

Aubry on Aristotle

Gwenaëlle Aubry’s brilliant Dieu sans la puissance (2006) recovers a distinctly Aristotelian theology. Aristotelian potentiality is to be distinguished from Platonic power, even though Aristotle used the same Greek word (dunamis) for it. For Aristotle, god is moreover pure energeia or act (what I have translated as “at-workness”) with no admixture of potentiality.

Aubry says, “As such, [Aristotle’s god] is distinguished from the Platonic Idea of the Good, exceeding being in power, as much as from the Christian God in whom power and being merge to exceed the Good. Because he is act, the god of Aristotle is not the essential Good (the Idea of the Good), but the essentially good substance. And because he is without power, he does not act as an efficient cause. But he is not, however, powerless: his efficacy is non-efficient. If he acts, it is as end…. Aristotle thus thinks the causality proper to the good as being not power, but potentiality as tendency toward the end” (p. 201, my translation, emphasis added).

In a 2015 lecture “Genesis of the Violent God” at Cornell, anticipating her second volume Genèse du dieu souverain (2018), she develops in fine historical detail various theological positions on omnipotence that eclipsed Aristotle’s view, explicitly subordinating goodness to absolute power. She traces the way divine omnipotence has served as an explicit model for political doctrines of sovereignty, from the absolute monarchist Jean Bodin through Hobbes to the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Noting that various writers who have grappled with the moral significance of Auschwitz ended up suggesting a “weak” God, she instead urges us to take more seriously Aristotle’s view of a god of pure act.

This work is a development out of her 1998 doctoral thesis. She has worked extensively on Plotinus. She has co-edited volumes of essays on Aristotle’s ethics and on ancient concepts of self, as well as editing a volume on Proclus’ Elements of Theology. Aubry is actually better known as a novelist, and has won several literary awards.