Life: Between Nature and Meaning

I have wanted to emphasize the goodness of life, in spite of the fact that many things are wrong in the world. But what is “life”? I don’t have a completely satisfying answer, but I do have a few thoughts.

Nature is said in many ways, of course, and these yield different perspectives on life from the side of nature. In an evolutionary context, I prefer to stress the marvelous diversification of organic forms over competition between individuals or species. Life, I think, is better understood in terms of purposes and what Aristotle calls “that for the sake of which”, than by attempting to reduce it to elements and efficient causes. All those purposes are intrinsic to the nature of the things that have them, and indeed they constitute that nature.

It does not make sense to inquire about “the” meaning of life. Rather, life is meaning, in superabundance and overflow. We should look at life not in terms of minimal biological prerequisites, but in terms of its highest development in each of the many kinds that flourish. That is the real significance of Aristotelian and Hegelian “actuality”.

Entelechy and Hylomorphism

The remainder of Aubry’s third chapter analyzes book Eta of the Metaphysics, following on her analysis of book Zeta.

In Zeta, matter had been dismissed as a candidate for ousia or “substance” taken simply. But Eta chapter 1 “allows matter to be characterized not simply as ousia, but as ousia in potentiality. And in its turn, it invites us to consider not simply ousia but ousia as act” (Dieu sans la puissance, 2nd ed., p. 89, my translation throughout).

“In the text that follows, the term energeia [act] is found systematically associated with that of eidos [form]” (ibid). “Energeia thus inherits, in Eta, all the characteristics of eidos brought to light in Zeta” (ibid).

“What Eta 3 shows, nonetheless, is that it is not always easy to distinguish the act from the composite: for example, does the term ‘house’ designate ‘a shelter made of bricks and stones in such and such a way’, or only a shelter? The term ‘animal’, a soul in a body or a soul? It appears that the distinction between material element and formal element has something artificial about it; form is not only that which makes the stones erected into walls, the wood made into a roof, into a house: it is the very organization of the stones into walls, of the wood into a roof (and in the same way, the soul is not superimposed on a body that would be already provided with organs, already able to grow, to be nourished, to move, etc.: it is that very organization and those very capacities. Thus, the composite substance is a unity, the unity of the material element and the formal element — and in such a way that it can be called an entelechy, and a certain nature” (ibid).

(I would say it is really the entelechy of a composite substance — its embodied, realized, and continuing purpose — that gives it unity, and makes it a substance in the Aristotelian sense at all. Any ousia involves stronger unity than a mere coexistence of elements. Entelechy is a higher-order persistence of purpose and its realization that explains the unity of a substance. The stronger degrees of unity that we see in living things and artifacts don’t just happen, and knowledge of them isn’t just somehow immediately given. Entelechy expresses the intelligible cause or reason for there being a unity strong enough to be called a substance. Perhaps we might even say that entelechy is a final cause in act. Every Aristotelian substance would in this way be an end unto itself. Kant explained respect for others in terms of regarding the other as an end in herself. Thus I think Kantian respect ought to apply to all Aristotelian substances.)

“To this, Eta 4 adds that just any thing cannot have just any matter” (p. 90). “It thus appears that, considered as potentiality, matter is an element of substance, and that if it is determined by form, it is a determiner also” (ibid).

So here we have a clear expression of reciprocal determination between form and matter. (Aristotle’s biological works contain many other examples of this.) She quotes from Eta 6 that “the most proximate matter of a thing and its form are one and the same thing” (p. 91). The mutual determination noted above is why that is true.

“Adopting the language of in potentiality and in act is indeed to think the unity of what the Platonic and abstract language of matter and form invites us to distinguish” (p. 91).

“Potentiality is the unity of the matter and the form seen from the side of the matter, act the unity of the matter and the form seen from the side of the form. Matter and form are nothing but abstract points of view adopted toward the concrete individual” (ibid, emphasis in original).

The superficial clarity of quasi-syntactic distinctions between matter and form is belied by the reality of mutual determination that underlies the Aristotelian thesis of hylomorphism.

“Eta does not just repeat the analysis of Zeta while modifying the terms: in substituting the etiological point of view for the logical one, … it offers a solution, which will again be completed in Theta, and will only acquire its full meaning in Lambda, to the problem of ousia” (ibid).

What she calls the etiological point of view consists in explanation in terms of Aristotelian causes or “reasons why” — especially final causes, or internal teleology — and may include an aspect of process. What she calls the logical point of view consists in what I called quasi-syntactic distinctions between matter and form, which are purely static.

“Ousia is neither the matter nor the form, it is the composite, but it is also the matter as potentiality for the form, the form as in-act in a matter — the two constituting the unity of an individual at the same time determinate and separable. Act responds in fact to all the criteria of ousia: insofar as it inherits the characteristics of form, it says determination and permanence; insofar as it names the form as linked to a matter, it says also the individual and the separate. Act indeed says ousia at the same time as substance and as essence…. Through the notion of act, the conflict with which Zeta ended, between the Platonic criterion and the Aristotelian criterion for ousia, between ousia prote and ousia malista, and also between the candidate of form and the candidate of the composite, is indeed found to be resolved” (pp. 91-92).

Although my own readings here of Zeta and Eta did not catch the nuance of the prote/malista distinction that Aubry makes a good case for based on the Greek text, my general sense of the respective results of Zeta and Eta is quite similar to hers. The long development of Zeta ends — and Eta begins — with an unresolved tension between the requirements of knowledge, and what I would call an ultimately ethical focus on independent things as concrete wholes. Eta ends up much more optimistically suggesting that we can respect independent things and have knowledge.

Next in this series: Dynamis Before Aristotle

Independent Things

Having just posted notes on Aristotle’s Metaphysics book Zeta (VII), I wanted to pause for some personal reflections. The hands-on engagement of putting together a textual commentary like that with extensive quotes always gives me a quality of insight into the material that I don’t get from just reading or re-reading a text.

One of the ways Aristotle stands out as a philosopher — to speak a bit figuratively — is his philosophically generous attitude toward not only living, “independent” beings, but ordinary “things” of all sorts. This carries over into his ethics.

Engagement in the world, approached the right way, need be no distraction from our essential concerns. Rather, for Aristotle it is a fulfillment of the “purpose” of the kind of beings that we are. He encourages us to cultivate a feeling of being fundamentally at home in life in the world, a feeling strong enough to remain ultimately unshaken by our emotional responses to events and circumstances. By contrast, Plotinus, for instance, though appreciative of beauty in all its forms, ultimately directs our attention both spiritually and philosophically away from the world and toward the One. Modern philosophers tend to view the world as inert matter for us to manipulate, not something with which we would feel kinship and a sense of belonging.

Hegel criticizes Kant for being “too tender” toward objects, but I feel that this and some other remarks are a bit lacking in interpretive charity, even though Hegel is deeply Kantian in many ways. In particular, I have a lot more sympathy for Kant’s notion of “things in themselves” than Hegel did.

Kantian things in themselves don’t exactly align with either Aristotle’s notion of independent things or with the what-it-is of those things, but they have relations to both, which may suggest an alternate way out of the Kantian “impasse” that troubles Hegel. What Hegel regards as an unresolved impasse in Kant in this area is the irreducible gap Kant sets up between knowledge and things in themselves. But Aristotle also says we do not have knowledge of independent things or their what-it-is.

We may have knowledge of their articulations, but articulations are only expressible in terms of universals (words with posited meanings that are applicable to multiple things), while independent things and their what-it-is are particulars. Therefore, for Aristotle too there will be a sort of Kantian gap between knowledge and independent things. I have praised this as a kind of “epistemic modesty”.

We have only experience and acquaintance with independent things, not knowledge. We may also dialectically inquire, interpret, and make judgments about them, thus reaching relatively well-founded belief, but we cannot know them, because they are particulars independent of us, while all knowledge (episteme) is discursive.

When it comes to the what-it-is of things as distinct from the independent things themselves, we have no experience or acquaintance either, but only the “long detour” of dialectic, interpretation, and judgment. This, it seems to me, is what Hegel’s logic of essence addresses. In the logic of essence, Hegel speaks to Aristotelian considerations, and I would now say more specifically that Hegel’s logic of essence explores more or less the same dialectical level as Metaphysics book Zeta.

Kant’s things in themselves seem utterly remote and mysterious to nearly everyone — I dare say much more so than the Aristotelian what-it-is. A historical reason for this is not far to seek. Kant’s intellectual formation was in the milieu of the Wolffian school, within which the small fraction of the works of Leibniz published in his lifetime played a leading role.

Leibniz developed the highly original notion of the “complete essence” of a thing, corresponding to the way God would know it — as including every true statement about a thing, including all the empirical facts applicable to its past, present, and future. Leibniz’ God is concerned with the totality of logical truth about a thing.

From the point of view of Aristotle or Hegel, this turn to the totality of logical and factual truth abolishes the distinction between essence and what is not essence. It thus effectively abolishes the more specific concept of essence and a “deeper truth”. An emphasis on complete essence also foregrounds something we could not possibly experience over the sensible independent things with articulable properties that we do experience.

For Leibniz, naturally enough, only God knows complete essences. Humans could not possibly know them. What I want to suggest here is that the reason the Kantian thing-in-itself is inherently unknowable by us is that it basically is a Leibnizian complete essence.

Because a complete essence is no longer a proper what-it-is that can potentially be distinguished from the many incidental facts about a thing, it is far less tractable to Aristotelian or Hegelian dialectic than a what-it-is that at least potentially can be so distinguished. A complete essence poses head-on what Hegel calls the “problem of indifference”, which plagued early modern philosophy. Among all the true statements about a thing, there is no clear way to pick out which would be more relevant to what Aristotle would call the articulation of what-it-is.

While Aristotelian independent things and their what-it-is are unknowable because they are particulars, they remain relatively tractable to dialectical inquiry, and are therefore not radically unknowable to humans in the way a complete essence or thing in itself would be. Certainly Aristotle seems to say more about them that is meaningful than Kant is able to say about things in themselves.

Hegel wants to abolish things “in themselves” — not at all because he wants to abolish Aristotelian independent things or their what-it-is, but because he objects both to the Hermetic isolation of complete essences from one another and to the problem of indifference that complete essences pose. He in effect goes back to Aristotle on this.

It is important to emphasize that the independence of an Aristotelian independent thing means it cannot be just an object of consciousness. It is supposed to be a reality in its own right. While this is not the only point of view we may adopt, the kind of deeper truth that Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel all seek is not to be found by fleeing the world and leaving such realities behind.

If we accept an Aristotelian revision of the Kantian gap between knowledge and what is, the gap no longer brings inquiry to a halt. Then the broadly Kantian view that there is a gap and the broadly Hegelian view that we can go a long way toward overcoming it can both be sustained. (See also Practical Wisdom.)

Next in this series: Toward Potentiality and Actuality

Questioning the Role of Action

Which comes first in the order of explanation: action, as immediate doing; or patterns of activity or practice, as extended, intricately developed over time, mediated, purposeful, and responsive to circumstance? I think it is more the latter.

What I aim to question here is not at all the reality of change or activity, but rather what might be called the “action model” — a way of explaining extended processes and changes and human reality in general in terms of punctual and immediate actions or events. The question is, do we focus on understanding larger processes and developments as the sum of discrete actions, or do we focus on understanding more or less immediate actions in terms of their place in larger processes and developments?

There is more than just a simple polarity here — meaning consists of both concrete detail and a larger context, and we need each of these to help elaborate the other. Nonetheless I want to suggest that it is better to explain things from the larger perspective of activities rather than the narrower one of actions.

Purpose, Contingency

In chapter 11 of Spirit of Trust, Brandom begins to talk about the interweaving of purpose and contingency. I may repeatedly revise a plan of action to realize the same intention. I may even redefine my intention along the way.

Only retrospectively, after this incorporation of contingency, can the intention be viewed as fully determinate. I look back and discover what I have turned out to have actually intended all along.

As Pippin and Pinkard have noted, this kind of Hegelian thought is also very Aristotelian. For Aristotle, it is only in this way — retrospectively — that we can make judgments about someone’s “happiness” or success in living a good life. Aristotle’s biological works are full of concrete examples of the worked out interweaving of purpose and contingency, but there are few other precedents for this kind of thinking.

Historically, thinking about purpose in the world was usually remapped to very un-Aristotelian notions of particular providence, and as a result considerations of contingency were suppressed. Explicit thinking about human purposes has usually occurred in unrealistically voluntaristic contexts, again resulting in the suppression of considerations of contingency. Early modern mechanism banished purpose to a supernatural realm, and attempted to reduce contingency away. Recovering this Aristotelian insight of the interweaving of contingency and purpose in a modern context was one of Hegel’s great achievements, and recovering that Hegelian insight is another great achievement.