Tag: Real Possibility

Interim Recap

We are still slowly walking through Gwenaëlle Aubry’s groundbreaking fresh reading of Aristotle’s Metaphysics in the second edition of her Dieu sans la puissance (2020). She highlights neglected aspects of the rich meaning of Aristotle’s key terms dynamis and energeia, which I learned in the Latin-based English of potentiality and actuality.

On the one hand, these are central to Aristotle’s account of motion. Aristotle identifies dynamis as the immanent source or principle of motion in natural things. He calls motion itself an incomplete energeia, and the entelechy of a dynamis. But in so doing, he also gives these terms a modal sense that he indicates is more primary than the sense having to do with motion.

That is to say, the Physics already effectively identifies in-act and in-potentiality as modalities of saying something “is” something. To be something in-act is to fully — immanently and concretely, as expressed in actions and interactive behavior — be that thing.

The Physics and other works on nature also already subordinate motion and sources of motion to causality by ends. Aristotle’s general approach to explanation leaves room for mechanical explanation (relativized to the level of hypothetical necessity), but avoids determinism, by subordinating mechanical explanation to explanation in terms of the realization of ends, which may occur in more than one way. For example, an animal is generally determined by a need for food, but the specific ways it will seek or find it on a given day are largely governed by “accidental” conjunctions of circumstances. Hypothetical necessity allows for a kind of play or maneuvering room in the working out of results.

Most recently, we saw that dynamis for Aristotle is always relative to something. Being something in potentiality derives its meaning from what it is to be that something in act. This reflects the priority of actuality that Aristotle always insists upon. If in the register of doing we call dynamis a power, this must be understood in a narrow sense as the power to do something definite. In the case of a “rational” power (one associated with a being capable of deliberation), it is understood as the ability to optionally do or not do some definite thing. More fundamentally, every particular potentiality is a potentiality to be some definite thing, or to exercise some definite way of being.

Since the same being may have many such powers or capabilities, potentiality as a modality is effectively multiple. We never have just one potentiality, but rather a field of potentiality consisting of multiple alternative real possibilities and capabilities.

The relativity of dynamis says that there is never a blank slate, or a completely undetermined situation. Things are not rigidly predetermined, but nothing ever just happens in a completely arbitrary way either. Looking backward, there is always an immanent explanation and a reason why things turned out the way they did.

Next in this series: Act in Process

An Aside on Necessity

“The question remains to know whether a thing can be called possible, or again in-potentiality, when it will never be the case. In other words, can the possible designate the unreal, that is to say that which, while not being contradictory, is not and will never be the case? It is to this question that Theta 5 responds: the text opens with a new division of dunamis, according to which it is innate (for example, sensation) or acquired (by practice, like the art of playing the flute, or by study. It also recalls the distinction between rational and irrational powers” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, p. 126, my translation).

Aubry notes that Aristotle introduces a new definition of the possible (dynaton). “The possible is in effect relative to actual circumstances: that which is possible is so kai pote kai pos, at a given moment and in a certain way…. Aristotle has a tendency to think the possible not as that which can be conceived, and is non-contradictory, but as that which can be: in other words, he does not distinguish neatly between logical possibility and real possibility, and in effect resists calling possible that which, while being capable of being in the sense that it is non-contradictory, will never be. In virtue of this new definition, one indeed calls possible that which, if all the conditions are present, must be actualized, and indeed must necessarily be actualized. The formula is one of determinism” (p. 127).

She immediately goes on to explain how Aristotle limits this determinism to irrational or natural powers, as opposed to rational ones. I would supplement this with another distinction.

In the bigger picture, even in the natural realm I think that for Aristotle, there is no strict predetermination of the overall unfolding of events. An animal gets its food in one way and not another on a given day, but this is in part due to “accident” in the ways that things come together.

The case Aubry is speaking about here is a hypothetical consideration of what would be really possible, at a given moment, and given a complete definition of the applicable circumstances. In this case, which by hypothesis is fully specified, Aristotle wants to say there should be a determinate answer, which should be subject to hypothetical necessity.

But in the case in which we consider what is really possible, this is not hypothetical, because we are not working from a hypothesis at all. Neither is there any “if”, nor are we “given” anything specific. We do not have a complete specification of the applicable circumstances. So here the conditions for hypothetical necessity do not apply. If we cannot even say what the hypothesis is, we cannot claim to draw a necessary conclusion. Accordingly, what is really possible cannot be answered in terms of hypothetical necessity.

Hypothetical necessity is a viable kind of claim because it is specific and delimited in its scope of applicability. It is also all that is needed to explain the successes of science and engineering. Given certain definite things, we can say with confidence that something definite will happen. We can iteratively improve our hypotheses and level of confidence as we go.

What is necessary for Aristotle is just what always follows. The applicability of “always” in a generalization about the natural world (as distinct from, say, mathematics or formal logic) is a question of fact. No implacable force stands behind it. And what always follows is implicitly bounded by our knowledge. “Always” simply means we have never encountered an exception. If we did, we would need to look for additional conditions to explain the new case. Necessity belongs in the register of a certain kind of intelligibility of what happens, not in the raw occurrence of events.

What I mean to have been explaining here is that if Aristotle appears to endorse a limited “determinism” with regard to natural powers, the terms in which this is expressed further limit it to a notion grounded in hypothetical necessity. The reason this is so important is that hypothetical necessity is fully compatible with the absence of predetermination, whereas determinism is commonly associated with predetermination. I would prefer to simply say that natural powers can be analyzed in terms of hypothetical necessity. And it turns out that Aubry refutes this appearance two pages later.

Next in this series: Potentiality and Contingency