Ethics and the Dogma of Free Will

The last post treated Olivier Boulnois’s discussion of ethical deliberation and proairesis or “resolution” (which I formerly called “choice”) in Aristotle, which grounds Boulnois’s “genealogy of freedom”. Here are a few highlights of his discussion of how the very un-Aristotelian notion of free will emerged in the later tradition, along with parts of his conclusion.

Elsewhere I have used the common translation of Latin liberum arbitrium as “free will”, but more literally it is something like “free arbitration”, which is what a free will is characteristically supposed to do. In the context of this “archaeological” discussion where the terms appear side by side, the distinction matters.

Frequently, talk about will is fraught with ambiguity. Good will — and more generally, definite will as intent subject to interpretation — is a completely different thing from the indeterminate will conceived as a power of decision ex nihilo that is being criticized here, but the two are often mixed together.

“Voluntas did not always mean will, if we understand by that a directing principle of the powers of the soul, trigger of action and repose, and capable of contraries. The word is attested in classical Latin, in the sense of ‘favor’, ‘good disposition’ ” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 254, my translation throughout). “[The Greek boulesis], which Cicero translated as voluntas, designates a sage emotion, a rational desire, the superior form that desire takes when the [Stoic] sage is no longer subject to passions” (ibid).

In the Stoics, we can see the beginning of an evolution toward modern concepts of will. But the Stoic usage properly applies only to the ideal of the Stoic sage. It is not yet a faculty of the soul that all humans are supposed to have.

According to Boulnois, the next major step was taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, in late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. Standing near the beginning of the Greek Aristotelian commentary tradition, Alexander is the most historically influential of the Greek commentators. Relevant here are his arguments against Stoic determinism, in the non-commentary treatise On Fate.

“Is it necessary to define freedom as freedom of the will, or free arbitration? The problem of free arbitration, understood as a completely undetermined power to resolve [or choose], arises from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in a metaphysical rereading of Aristotle. In effect, Alexander is responding to a non-Aristotelian problematic, that of [Stoic] determinism. To do this, he establishes a connection between the concept of proairesis and the rejection of the cosmic determinism of the Stoics, thus giving birth to a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of decision, indeed to the concept of (undetermined) free choice. Where Aristotle affirms that we generically have the capacity to act or to not act, Alexander holds that we singularly, in each conjuncture, have the possibility to act or not, and to act otherwise. This is to say that proairesis becomes a faculty of choice independent of the state of the world — a free arbitration. And it is this concept, called ‘Aristotelian’ by Heidegger but in fact Alexandrian, that imposes itself, as well in [the early Augustine of the Treatise on Free Will] as in scholasticism, up to Descartes. It becomes necessary for this to consider not only action, but an interior power of choice. Free arbitration thus becomes free arbitration of the will” (p. 472, emphasis in original).

“In inventing a libertarian conception of action, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] founds an ethic centered on the capacity to choose for oneself a thing or its contrary, without depending on a preceding cause” (p. 248).

“The concept of free arbitration had already received its certificate of nobility from [the early Christian theologian] Origen…. But he implied no metaphysical thesis on determinism and indeterminism. It is Augustine who submits the concept of free arbitration to this problematic, and discovers the power of the will, in his Treatise on Free Will” (p. 253).

“But it is Augustine who made [voluntas] the founding concept of Western ethics, in joining it to that of free arbitration (liberum arbitrium). He made it the free arbitration of the will” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

“The Treatise on Free Will was at first conceived as a treatise on the good, in which Augustine demonstrated the divine goodness and the origin of evil, in opposition to the Manicheans. But to exonerate God, it was necessary to make the human will responsible for evil” (p. 256).

“The association of the will proper and free arbitration … suggests that the key of the fault [of original sin] resides in a power of choice belonging to the will. Evil does not come from nature, but from that will, in its exercise of choice…. Thus the first occurrence of [the phrase] free arbitration appeared at a crucial moment of reflection on the origin of evil” (p. 257, emphasis in original). “It is the human who is culpable, and God is innocent” (p. 259). “Willing is always in our power; in this consists our freedom” (p. 260).

“Augustine inherits the turn made by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Freedom of action has become a freedom of choice. And the power of choice is identified at once with the principle of assent to representations and the triggering principle of action: the will. Instead of a casuistry, instead of founding responsibility in the meeting of our beliefs and our desires, on the one hand, and on the circumstances of action, on the other, Augustine prefers to construct a unique and hidden inner principle, which is situated in an invisible part of the human (her soul); this principle is will, endowed with a free arbitration” (ibid).

Also influential in this context was the late 5th to early 6th century CE Roman Christian philosopher Boethius.

“In Aristotle, the problem of willing action and that of prescience of the future are totally disjoint. The first is treated in a reflection on ethical responsibility, the second in the framework of a logico-linguistic analysis of statements about the future” (p. 159). But “Boethius elaborates what will become the key argument: if the future is necessarily determined, free arbitration perishes, along with all moral responsibility” (ibid).

In the high middle ages, such arguments were developed to a fine pitch by the Latin scholastics. This turns out to be interrelated with the scholastic turn away from Aristotle’s own very innovative meta-ethical emphasis on the primacy of explanation by final causes, to a new privileging of a transformed notion of efficient cause that is closer to early modern mechanism than it is to Aristotle.

” ‘The final cause is not productive. That is why health is not productive, except metaphorically’ ” (p. 116). “At the end of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus understood this passage in an absolute manner. They deduced that the final cause produces nothing, that it is not really a cause” (p. 117). Henry of Ghent wrote, ‘The good that is known, insofar as it is represented in the intellect, moves the will only in a metaphorical way’ ” (quoted, p. 117, emphasis in original).

Though highly sophisticated and genuinely original, this scholastic devaluation of the final cause completely undoes what Aristotle himself highlights as his most important accomplishment in first philosophy (the detailed working out of a unique “final causes first” way of thinking and understanding, which orients itself through a hermeneutics of “that for the sake of which”). The scholastic reversal of Aristotle’s distinctive emphasis on final causes (in favor of putting a transformed notion of efficient causality first) puts a value-neutral notion of sheer power in top position in place of the good at the origin of things. Not only the first cause but also human agency are re-visioned in terms of this creative misreading of efficient causality as not just the means by which ends are achieved, but as a primordial value-neutral driving impulse, or (in the case of God) a value-neutral supreme power of creation from nothing. In philosophical anthropology, this is accompanied by a devaluation of Aristotelian teleological “intellect” in favor of the new voluntaristic notion of will, as the human analogue of creation from nothing.

“For Henry and Scotus, our passage means that the intellect and its object do not move the will…. But this interpretation, which reduces finality to the conjunction of a representation and a subjective will, is a hazardous extrapolation: Aristotle speaks here only of the need to distinguish between a productive cause and a final cause (the aim pursued is not the efficient cause of movement). And all the rest of his thought implies a teleology, that is to say a motion by a final cause, even for the beings that have no representation” (ibid).

“The will ceases to be simply the excellence of good humans (as with the Stoics). It implies a mentalist theory and a causal theory of action. — 1) Mentalist: because all action is explained as the exterior deployment of a mental state…. –2 ) Causal: the will is the cause of action…. Action becomes the effect of the will” (pp. 260-261, emphasis in original).

“At first, the fundamental definition of freedom is strictly ethical. It consists in the absence of constraint and of ignorance, independent of any metaphysical position on determinism or causal indeterminacy” (p. 473). “For at the origin, in Aristotle, [desire and logos or discourse] are clearly distinct…. The aporia arises when in an articulation that is not ontologically clarified, we confuse desire and the logos in the concept of ‘will’ (since the Stoics and Augustine). Successfully to rethink this articulation is the challenge and the task of an ethics. This imposes on us the task of destroying this metaphysical confusion that obstructs the philosophy of action” (p. 475).

The reference to “destruction” might sound a bit shocking, but it refers back to Boulnois’s methodological preliminaries. There, he said

“In the element of thought, destruction and construction are one sole and same act…. My approach is a form of ‘discursive dissolution’: through dissolution, we approach the resolution of the problem.”

“To solve: resolve, destroy. Here it is not simply a matter of ‘deconstruction’…. Can we again philosophize after analytic philosophy? If the analytical method has a virtue, it is to conduct a rational reflection on problems, and to accept that they can have a solution” (p. 20, emphasis in original).

“It is undoubtedly impossible to give a complete analytic interpretation of the problem of freedom. It is likewise impossible to give a complete history of the diverse statements responding to the question. But paradoxically, what is impossible separately becomes possible conjointly.”

“I will reconstruct the principal sources of the doctrine of freedom, and of its intrinsic aporia. I attach myself particularly to the work of Aristotle….”

“When Aristotle affirms that an action ‘accomplished willingly engenders praise and blame, while an action accomplished unwillingly only engenders compassion (suggnome) and perhaps pity’; when Descartes declares that the freedom of indifference is ‘the positive faculty of determining oneself for one or the other of two contraries, that is to say to pursue or to flee, to affirm or to deny’; when Nietzsche demands, apropos of the eternal return: ‘do you will that again and innumerable times again?’, not only does it not concern the same thesis, but above all it does not concern the same question” (pp. 20-21, emphasis in original).

He devotes a whole subsection of the introduction to “the legitimacy of the middle age” as a field of scholarly endeavor.

“In studying the middle ages, we indeed study the hidden face of our history…. To choose the long path, which passes through the Middle Age, is to choose multiplicity and discontinuity” (p. 22).

“[T]here are not two eternal conceptions, one determinist, the other libertarian…. an alternative of which both terms were unknown to Aristotle, who envisaged neither free arbitration (but solely willingness) nor determinism (but only cause and responsibility)” (p. 23).

“This study supposes that we first research the origin and the structure of the question of free arbitration, then we examine the sense of action from Aristotle, as well as its obliteration under a theory of free arbitration” (ibid).

In the conclusion, he says

“The problem of free arbitration, or of the freedom of the will, is a metaphysical artifact for two reasons:”

“1. The will was introduced by the commentators on Aristotle through a complex series of translations and projections, such that rational desire (boulesis) became a will, which renders the primordial sense of action and of practical reason incomprehensible.”

“2. Freedom is not essentially a power of the soul, but a social and ethical aptitude.”

“To go further in the elucidation of the problem of freedom, it is necessary to destroy the concept of will, as the mental and causal principle of human actions. As Wittgenstein well saw, for this it is necessary to confront a radical analysis of action without reproducing this term (anachronistic in relation to Aristotle). For the idea of an interior principle, capable of contraries and cause of action, not only conceals an internal contradiction, but is a fiction that occults the different levels of action in which we are responsible.”

“We have given an account of the actions of which we are the authors. To be responsible for an action, it is necessary to be a cause. This signifies that the agent has the power to act, and for Aristotle, this is a bivalent power, to act or not to act in general. Aristotle never says that, in some precise conjuncture, given the beliefs and representations of the agent, she must have the power to do a thing and its contrary, and to not do what she does. For that is not the question: that is not what makes ethical responsibility; we are responsible for actions of which we are generically the origin; action depends on us, it is ours, when we are not constrained by an exterior force. That is also why we cannot excuse ourselves (exclude ourselves from the cause), by arguing that faulty action was necessarily brought about by our desires…. For our desires are part of us, and our action is not imputable to another…. To speak of a ‘weakness of the will’, is precisely to render the phenomenon incomprehensible” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original).

“It is only through confusion with the problematic of future contingents that the metaphysical question of the contingency of choice emerged…. For Aristotle never claimed that our capacity to act or to not act now depends uniquely on us” (p. 477, emphasis in original).

“Free arbitration becomes the condition of responsibility, which makes free arbitration a necessary but indemonstrable condition of ethics. — This argument has a double inconvenience: first of all, it requires the admission of an indemonstrable principle; then, in making free arbitration the condition of morality, it prevents us from seeing the converse, that ethical orientation is constitutive of its concept” (p. 478).

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power to determine oneself. Neither the term ‘will’ nor its functions exist at the origin, in Aristotle: we find neither a power that centralizes the other faculties of the soul, nor a principle of assent at the source of action….. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 479, emphasis in original).

“Freedom is not a postulate of practical reason; it is practical reason. And the human is not born free, but she may become so” (p. 481).

Gadamer on Socratic Questioning

“Socratic conversation [has] the single goal of achieving an authentic shared process of speech…. Part of the meaning of genuine substantive explication is that it can continually justify and clarify itself…. A sophistic logos fails to meet this requirement because one did not acquire it with a view to the facts of the matter but rather with a view to its effectiveness in impressing the people around one” (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (German ed. 1931), p. 56).

Since Habermas cites Gadamer as an influence, Gadamer’s work may well be the primary source for Habermas’ striking remark “Reaching understanding is the inherent telos of human speech”. In any case, it provides a good explication. I find this particularly valuable, because although Habermas and Brandom neglect Plato and Aristotle, Gadamer himself treats them as not merely of antiquarian interest, but as having central contemporary relevance. (In the introduction to his Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002), Brandom too cites Gadamer’s hermeneutics as representative of one of two major ways of reading philosophical texts, neither of which he intends to follow strictly.)

“Precisely because the sophist’s logos, with its agonistic goals, does not make explicit or stick to the sense in which it is intended in each case, it falls prey itself to these ambiguities when someone else uses them against it. Socrates, on the other hand, keeps his eye on the subject matter even in these circumstances” (p. 57, emphasis added).

Real dialogue is not a social negotiation between individuals confronting one another. It holds fast to the shareable subject matter under discussion. Not our “immediate” egos but the rich and variegated terrain of open-ended meaning that we jointly inhabit is at issue here. What matters is not the competitive question of who is right, but the open-ended, shared exploration of what follows from what.

(Brandom’s first major work is called Making It Explicit. Sophistical sleight of hand — be it in politics, religion, or everyday life — depends on an opposite strategy of keeping it obscure what really or properly follows from what, in order to keep things safe for arbitrary “truths” plucked out of thin air. Although Making It Explicit does not directly address the topic of sophistry, that book of linguistic philosophy is a very substantial and original development of something like the positive side of Gadamer’s argument here, which folds in additional perspectives not addressed by Gadamer. Brandom also points out that Habermas’ work articulating what constitutes an “ideal speech situation” provides a detailed and interesting explication of Hegel’s central ethical notion of mutual recognition.)

Gadamer goes on, “Socrates’ logical traps are not meant to be the manipulations of a virtuoso technician which are simply applied where they promise success; instead, they are living forms of a process of seeking shared understanding” (p. 58). “[R]efutation in the Socratic style is positive: not a process of reducing the other person to silence so as, tacitly, to make oneself out as the knower, in contrast to him, but a process of arriving at a shared inquiry” (p. 59).

“The good, then, is knowledge’s object; that is, it is the unitary focal point to which everything must be related and in relation to which human existence in particular understands itself in a unified way. The general character of the good is that it is that for the sake of which something is, and thus, in particular, that for the sake of which man himself is. It is in the light of it that human beings understand themselves in their action” (ibid).

Here Gadamer brings out into the clear the central role of what Aristotle calls that for the sake of which — the telos or “final cause” — which extends all the way from the understanding of living beings in nature to the highest first philosophy. To ask after that for the sake of which is precisely to step back from what is immediately present. This is the beginning of wisdom.

“Just that, then, which presents itself unambiguously as good, in its immediate presentness, should and must be ‘measured’, if it is supposed to be ‘the good’, in relation to something that is not contained in its immediate attractiveness itself. So it certainly cannot be the immediate attractiveness that constitutes the goodness” (p. 61).

“Thus it is no more the case that the immediate experience of well-being is an indubitable testimonial of its goodness than that any behavior that is regarded as virtuous is so automatically, without being justified by reference to the good itself. Thus the demand for an art of measuring pleasures — which alone could justify the claim of pleasure to be the good — succeeds, despite the impossibility of such an art, in making clear what the good is sought as. Dasein understands itself in relation to what it is ‘for the sake of’, not on the basis of how it feels at any present moment but on the basis of its highest and constant potential” (pp. 61-62).

Real understanding is precisely a movement beyond what is immediate. Gadamer is still partly under the spell of Heidegger, and refers to Heideggerian Dasein, but this plays no real role in the argument. I would refer more simply to “our” understanding of ourselves.

“The methodological point of the imagined art of measurement, then, is to show that an understanding of Dasein must understand present things in terms of non-present ones and can grant them goodness only in such a relation. Thus this Socratic course of argumentation allows us to see what the good must (in any case) be sought as: namely, the central thing on the basis of which human being understands itself. So the positive point of Socratic refutation consists not only in achieving a positive perplexity but also — by the same token — in explaining what knowledge really is and what alone should be recognized as knowledge. It is only in the concept of the good that all knowledge is grounded; and it is only on the basis of the concept of the good that knowledge can be justified” (p. 63).

Again, for Dasein I would just say “ourselves”.

Here he again brings out the central role of the good in the constitution of what we call knowledge and truth. He points out that in order to make distinctions at all, we must have some preliminary idea of the good, even if we cannot articulate it.

“Insofar as the search for grounding that gives an accounting is a shared search and has the character of a testing, it operates, fundamentally, not by one person’s making an assertion and awaiting confirmation or contradiction by the other person, but by both of them testing the logos to see whether it is refutable and by both of them agreeing in regard to its eventual refutation or confirmation. All testing sets up the proposition to be tested not as something for one person to defend, as belonging to him or her, and for the other person to attack, as belonging to the other, but as something ‘in the middle’. And the understanding that emerges is not primarily an understanding resulting from agreement with others but an understanding with oneself. Only people who have reached an understanding with themselves can be in agreement with others” (p. 64).

Gadamer on Plato and Aristotle

Some of Gadamer’s most interesting work is on Plato and Aristotle. More so than many modern commentators, he sees their work as closely connected. He is especially fond of Plato. In the introduction to Gadamer’s The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy, (German ed. 1978, English tr. 1986), translator P. Christopher Smith offers useful comments.

For Gadamer, “Plato and Aristotle both belong to the unified tradition of logos philosophy. In the Phaedo Plato’s Socrates turns away from naturalistic accounts of things to the logoi, our ways of speaking; similarly, Aristotle founds his investigations on ‘pos legetai’, how something is spoken of” (Smith, p. xiv).

At least in this work, the term “logos philosophy” is not explicitly defined. But in the passage above, it clearly indicates a linguistic character. It is nice to see a recognition that Plato’s — and even more so Aristotle’s — work has a substantial linguistic dimension.

Smith recalls that the Ionian pre-Socratics had “only two kinds of explanation at their disposal — from what, and by the agency of what — [and so they] could not properly grasp the cosmos, in which things occur for the sake of (heneka) what is good” (p. xv).

The moderns on the whole don’t really do much better than the pre-Socratics at recognizing what Aristotle calls “for the sake of” and the role it plays in the constitution of things. This involves not providential intervention, or even a reified indwelling ontological principle that could simply unfold. It is also not just a fact, but something that motivates without necessitating.

In Plato, “To begin with there are the refutational, or elenchtic, dialogues, in which Socrates confronts the great sophists of his time — Protagoras, Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus — and displays the emptiness of their claims to be able to teach virtue. In truth theirs is a technical mentality, and what they teach is only a techne of succeeding. The conclusion to be drawn from these dialogues — at times explicit, but more often implied negatively or indirectly — is that knowledge in virtue is somehow different from knowledge in techne. This shows up above all in the fact that virtue cannot be taught. And there is a further truth that emerges here, again largely unsaid, that the traditional ideas of arete upon which the sophists rely and which might be learned by imitating a paragon have become groundless and susceptible of sophistic dissimulation. Therefore, to withstand seduction by self-interest and by otherwise insatiable desires for sensuous gratification and power, to which sophism panders, one must now be able to give justification for what is good, that is, justification for one’s choices of what is right as opposed to what is wrong. But nobody seems to know how to do that, least of all those sophists who claim that they do” (pp. xv-xvi).

This concern with justification is something Gadamer shares with Habermas and Brandom. But Gadamer traces it all the way back to Plato, whereas Habermas and Brandom are modernists. It seems to me that Plato and Aristotle’s outrage at the Sophists has to do with the Sophists’ subversion of justification.

“The primary concern in these elenchtic dialogues, then, is a practical one, and that makes the Phaedo and the Republic, in which concern seems to shift to epistemological and ontological matters, appear to mark a definite transition in Plato’s thought. For in these next works the ‘ideas’ are introduced, and in the Republic even the ‘idea of ideas’, the idea of the good which would seem to serve as a first principle of both true knowledge and true reality. In the twentieth-century traditions of Plato interpretation — particularly the neo-Kantian, which found support for its theory of science in this ‘stage’ of Plato — would have it that the question Plato is addressing here is a new, theoretical one no longer related to the Socratic question concerning arete. But Gadamer sees a serious oversight here. A careful reading, he argues, shows that Plato is still dealing with the same issue” (p. xvi).

“Gadamer maintains … that if one asks what question is actually being addressed in the allegory of the cave, one sees that the concern is not just, or even primarily, a theoretical, scientific one, but in fact an existential-practical question of holding steadfastly to the truth in the face of tests or refutations (elenchoi) much as a soldier holds his ground in battle or a wrestler stands firm against attempts to throw him — this is the language Plato uses here. And what are these tests of mettle? The guardians will find themselves in a conflict between honest execution of the duties of their office for the public weal and the ‘pursuit of power after power’, as we in the English-speaking world might put it, using the words of Thomas Hobbes. The guardians, in other words, will be tested by the flattery of both their own desires for gratification and sophistic sycophants, flattery that might seduce them into sacrificing their integrity” (p. xvii).

“In short, it turns out that the theory of dialectic in which they are to be trained is a way of distinguishing and, above all, of distinguishing practically between right and wrong, good and bad. To do that, the guardians must know the idea of the good, for that idea is exactly what those in the cave do not know. The cave-dwellers’ technai (arts) give them the knowledge ‘how to’ do something, knowledge of the means to an end, but not knowledge of the end itself, the hou heneka, the ‘what for’…. Thus, knowledge of the good turns out to be not just a theoretical insight, not just a matter of logos (reasoning). It is a principle on ergon (deed), and makes possible constancy in the choice of the life that one leads (Aristotle: prohairesis tou biou)” (p. xviii).

The sense in which he says the guardians “must know” the idea of the good seems to me to be of necessity quite different from the way in which we may be said, e.g., to know the Pythagorean Theorem. I would rather say something like, the guardians “must have wisdom” about the good.

“And now the real meaning of the hypothesis of the eidos in the Phaedo becomes evident. As opposed to what the neo-Kantian school might have seen in it, the hypothesis of the eidos is not at all the ‘scientific’ postulation of a universal idea that is to be verified by the facts. As in the Republic, the issue in the Phaedo is how to head off whatever might mislead us, how to head off sophistic talk…. Hypothesizing the eidos thus has nothing to do with empirical verification but, instead, with making precisely these eidetic distinctions…. The paradigm for steadfastness … remains Socrates, who was not to be dissuaded from what he saw to be right, no matter what arguments concerning his own ‘advantage’ might be advanced. His arete was such that he would not even accept the escape from death offered to him by his friends” (pp.xviii-xix).

At first I was confused by the reference to verification by facts. To speak of empirical verification of an eidos would be a category mistake. But I think “the hypothesis of the eidos” refers not to any particular eidos, but to the general “hypothesis” that there are eidei.

The important point here is the Socratic “steadfastness”, where steadfastness means not being lured and fooled by the verbal tricks of the clever sophists, who aim at success and at victory in argument, rather than at truth and shared understanding. It seems very relevant today.

“[The Philebus] too begins with an ethical issue — whether the good life is one of pleasure or of intellect or of some third thing — and it also involves its interlocutors in the task of giving justification for their contentions concerning the good life, justification that will make their arguments invulnerable to the sophistic arts of confusing and confounding people with sleights of hand that interchange the one and the many” (p. xix).

“Here the techniques of Husserl’s descriptive phenomenology can be put to good use, for the task is to display the phenomenon that Plato is getting at. In the Philebus Plato speaks of the good as the structure of a ‘mixture’ someone might brew, the ‘potion’ as it were, which is our human life. The various ‘ingredients’, the kinds of pleasure and intellect, are not to be mixed indiscriminately, but well…. A ‘good’ mixture is thus one that has limits to it, and the good itself is limitedness (measuredness, or metriotes) in the midst of constantly threatening indeterminacy and limitlessness…. As measuredness, the good in the Philebus, we now see, is precisely Aristotle’s mean between the extremes” (pp. xx-xxi).

Paul Ricoeur also points out the importance of a notion of mixture in Plato. This undoes many old stereotypes about Platonism.

I am rather unclear on what Husserlian phenomenology is supposed to specifically contribute to the history of philosophy here. I imagine Husserl might question this claim himself. He wanted phenomenology to be a precise “science”, grounded in the phenomenological and eidetic reductions. Here instead we have a thoughtful examination of Plato’s metaphorical language.

“In anticipating Aristotle’s criticisms, it should be noted that, as measuredness, the good in Plato must be distinguished, or ‘separated’ intellectually, from the mixture itself. But if one abstracts from this metaphor, one finds that, as measuredness, the good is what Hegel calls ein Moment, namely, an aspect of something which does not exist separately from it. In short, it is in the thing of which it is the structure. Thus, when we say that it is choriston (separate), we are not denying that it is in the thing. We are saying only that it must be distinguished from the thing in our thinking” (p. xxi).

For Aristotle, a thing that is called “separate” is simply a thing that is conceptually distinct, whereas for Plato, separateness involves independence from matter. This means a thing that Aristotle calls “separate” may nonetheless never exist apart from the whole to which it belongs. This has been discussed in detail by Gwenaëlle Aubry.

“These striking convergences of Plato’s thought with Aristotle’s leave us puzzled about Aristotle’s critique of Plato. Why would he criticize Plato if in fact he and Plato are saying the same thing? “(ibid).

We should be careful about saying things are “the same”. I have sympathy for Leibniz’s argument that no two things are the same. Then there is the question, at what level of blurriness can we no longer distinguish two things? But again the important point is rather the relative one that it is on the whole a lot less false to say Plato and Aristotle thought the same, than it is to present them as if they were opposites, as has also been done at times.

“At the core of the argument in all three [of Aristotle’s surviving ethical works] is the contention that Plato improperly fuses the ontological and the practical in his applications of the idea of the good” (p. xxii).

“Aristotle, of course, is a consummate phenomenologist who wishes above all to avoid running distinct things together. But is it just his ‘descriptive caution’ that leads him to try to keep ontological and practical theory separate? Gadamer suggests that there is something else fundamental in Aristotle’s way of inquiring that leads him to put things as he does, namely, his orientation toward life science. Mathematically oriented thinking such as Plato’s would indeed lead to inquiry about the idea of the good as an abstract structure of good things…. But that is not the orientation of Aristotle’s questioning, which gives primacy to the concrete living thing” (p. xxiv).

“The relationship of moral theory to practice is not at all the modern relation of theory to practice in which an objective, neutral theory can be applied generally to particular problems. In distinction to producing something (techne, poiesis), doing the right thing is not simply an application of general rules” (p. xxvi).

Even Kant has qualification and subtlety in his rule-orientedness.

“In the first place, as Aristotle recognizes, we need an ‘appropriate principle’ (oikeia arche) for moral reasoning, which is not to be confused with mathematical deductive reasoning. For in moral reasoning I always find myself in a particular situation, and the task is not to subsume this particular case under a universal rule which I could know apart from the situation I am in, but to define from within my situation what the general rule is of which this situation is an instance. The particular virtues and virtue in general, as finding the ‘mean between extremes’ are not universal principles that I apply to a situation, but universalizations of what I am doing when I do what is right. Hence it should be noted carefully that, although Aristotle does indeed speak of the ‘practical syllogism’, he in fact uses this syllogistic reasoning only to exemplify the technical choice of the right means to an end” (p. xxviii).

This is an interesting hybrid view on the universality issue. It is certainly true that Aristotle does not treat ethical conclusions as a matter of deduction (instead, they are matters of interpretation).

“[Cleverness] deals with means to an end, and for just that reason, he says, it is to be distinguished from [moral reasonableness]” (ibid).

“Moral reasonableness” is how Smith translates Aristotelian ethical phronesis. This is a kind of reason, which I have called ethical reason.

“As both the Philebus and Aristotle’s ethical treatises make clear, human beings are not gods, and thus the life that is best for them has to be a life that combines theoria and praxis…. The point that both wish to make — which is the fundamental point of agreement between them concerning the good — is that, in distinction to gods, human beings are always under way toward the divine, or, as Gadamer puts it, their best life is philosophia, not sophia, that is, striving for wisdom, not wisdom itself. Human beings are finite, not absolute — never absolved from the ‘remnant of earth’ (Goethe) in them that inevitably involves them in the task of living well here in the practical world” (pp. xxviii-xix).

Finitism and infinitism are both said in many ways. The very sharp distinction being made here between humans and gods seems rather one-sided in relation to Aristotle.

Gadamer is apparently a pretty strong finitist, and strongly opposed to the infinitism he sees in Hegel. What infinity means in the more “deflationary” views of Hegel I have sympathy for is quite different from this. Meanwhile Aristotle literally says that the world is finite, but allows for an expansive notion of human being.

“Thus, in both Plato and Aristotle, the good emerges as that toward which we are striving, that for the sake of which (hou heneka), that at which we aim (to telos). But not only we. The whole universe is to be understood as striving for perfection…. [T]he universe, and not only human experience, is to be thought of in relation to the good ” (p. xix).

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”.

Ousia Energeia

Aristotle’s Metaphysics is arguably the single most important text in the history of philosophy, but even though on one level Aristotle’s writing is extremely clear and lucid, its deeper implications have been highly disputed. The great Iranian philosopher Avicenna is reported to have said that he read the Arabic translation of the Metaphysics 40 times without understanding it, and only began to understand after reading the commentary by Alfarabi. We are nearing the end of a long journey following what I think is a brilliantly innovative 21st century reading by Gwenaëlle Aubry. Here I’m covering the first half of her discussion of book Lambda chapter 7.

The title of this post is a phrase used by Aristotle to characterize the first cause. He distinguishes it as the ousia [“substance”] that, unlike other substances, simply “is” energeia [“act”]. The latter Greek term was coined by Aristotle, and the former was “substantially” redefined by him. I find it is best to put aside ordinary connotations of the English words for key philosophical terms like this (including “first cause”) — and to focus instead on the ways the philosopher himself uses them, along with what he says about them.

“Chapter 7 of book Lambda responds to the question, left in suspense, of the mode of relation of the first mover to the moved, and of the nature of its action. At the same time it exploits and deploys the ontological signification of energeia, designating in act the mode of being of the separate, and identifying it with the good and the end” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 184, emphasis added, my translation throughout).

“In so doing, it implies at the same time a distinction, absent from book Theta, between kinesis [motion] and energeia, the last being designated as the mode of being of the unmoved, even while maintaining a broad sense of energeia, understood not only as act and as a mode of being, but also as a certain activity (contemplation)” (ibid).

Aubry previously noted that Aristotle’s earliest use of energeia seems to have been in an ethical context. Here she points out that Aristotle is distinguishing between its better known physical sense (which already has a teleological element) and what she calls its ontological sense.

“The first lines of Lambda 7 mark a progress in relation to chapter 6, since they demonstrate not only the necessity of posing a principle that is act and not power in order to give an account of eternal motion, but also of that of thinking the first mover as unmoved” (ibid, emphasis added).

Within the context of Greek philosophy, the very idea of an unmoved mover is another extremely important Aristotelian invention. Plato speaks instead of a self-moving thing, thus postulating motion as an unexplained primitive attributed to something as a whole. He is not bothered by the unexplained primitive, because he sees becoming as fundamentally lacking intelligibility. For Aristotle on the other hand, motion ought to be explainable, and every explanation of motion also involves a passivity. To move in the colloquial English sense is always to be moved in Aristotle’s sense, by something, and we can give an account of this. It will turn out that the primary examples he gives of “movers” are the unmoved intelligible and desired things that serve to activate internal principles of motion in other things. But living beings such as animals also function as “moved movers”.

Aubry quotes Aristotle’s characterization of an unmoved mover as “being at the same time ousia and energeia” (p. 185). Aristotle makes a very compressed reference to his critique of Platonic “self-moving” in Physics book VIII. Anything we broadly call a “self” mover must be a moved mover, because it is implicitly moved by what it understands and desires. Any moved mover — and hence any self-mover — must be only an intermediary cause, and not an ultimate principle. Aristotle wants to very emphatically insist that the first cause is in the strict sense an unmoved mover, and not a self-mover in the broad sense that an animal is a self-mover. For him, any holistic “self-motion” necessarily involves the kind of mixture of activity and passivity that we attribute to an animal. Such a mixture is incompatible with the nature of the first cause.

“[I]t is because energeia is conceived here as ousia, and no longer as kinesis, that the first mover is unmoved” (ibid).

“This poses the question of how the unmoved can be the principle of movement. The demonstration this time proceeds in an indirect way: it consists in the premise according to which the desirable and the intelligible move [other things] without being moved, then in successive identifications, first of the real good with the desirable, then of simple and actual substance with the first intelligible, and finally of the first intelligible with the good. We then ought to conclude that the actual substance, itself already identified with the first mover, is identical with the intelligible and the good, and as such can move [other things] without being moved” (ibid).

She goes on to note that what allows these terms to be unified is really once again energeia, although at first it seems to be substance. This makes perfect sense, given the conclusions of book Eta.

“The unifying term of these identifications seems here to be that of substance. It is so nonetheless by the mediation of a double relation of anteriority: of substance itself, first of all, in the series of positive contraries; then, within substance, of substance that is simple and in act, haplo kai kat’energeian — or, more precisely, of substance that is simple insofar as it is said according to act. For it is this position of the preeminence of substance in the context of the series of intelligibles that justifies its identification not only with the good and the desirable, but with the better or that which is analogous to it. Thus it is once again the notion of energeia more than that of substance that appears as the conceptual mover of the demonstration, and as that from which the attributes of the principle can be deduced” (pp. 185-186, emphasis in original).

Just as Aristotle uses ousia or substance to explain our talk about being, he uses energeia or act to explain our talk about substance. And sometimes he even uses entelekheia or entelechy to explain our talk about act.

“Up to this point, Lambda 7 has established that the unmoved can be a mover, but not how it moves something else. Here again, the demonstration proceeds in an indirect way: it begins by establishing that there is also a final cause among unmoved things. In order to do this, we have to make precise what we mean by ‘final cause'” (p. 186).

“The text at this point poses a problem. Since antiquity, it has been reconstructed so as to coincide with parallel passages in Physics II and On the Soul II which, also relying on a pronominal distinction, distinguish between two senses of the final cause, that is to say to ou and to o, that which is envisaged and that for which something is — or, according to the traditional interpretation, the end of an action and its beneficiary. But neither of the senses thus distinguished can apply to the first mover: the latter cannot be conceived as the beneficiary of action, which would imply that it did not have its end in itself, and would thus be incompatible with its status as pure energeia. But it is equally difficult to conceive it as the end envisaged by action, since this would imply that the movement ends in it, or finds in it its term: the first mover would thus be the act and the end of eternal motion, and indeed of every moved being; thus conceived, the divine would be in sum the act of the world, or at least of the moved substances that make it up, whose separate existence would be explained only by the failure of their fusion with it” (pp. 186-187).

“The context of the distinction in On the Soul is nonetheless very close to that of the distinction of Lambda 7, since the text opposes on the one hand living things (plants and animals) considered as substances subject to the cycle of generation and corruption, and on the other hand the eternal and the divine…. Nonetheless, it does not aim to distinguish between an unmoved end and an end presupposing movement, but rather between an immediate and immanent end and a mediate and transcendent end. The first is identified with the soul, designated as being at the same time cause of motion, essence, and final cause…. The second is identified not with the divine itself, but with participation and community (koinonia) with it, and a community envisaged as continuous. Thus is explained the process of generation, which compensates for that of corruption: not being able to [persist indefinitely] as individuals, living things [persist] not in their numerical unity, but in the unity of their species. The object of their desire is thus not to be god but to participate in the divine, or in the mode of being that characterizes continuity and eternity. Or again, it is not to assimilate themselves to the divine form or the divine act, but rather to perpetuate their own form and act, in the way that the divine continually maintains its own” (p. 187, emphasis in original).

“But if read this way, as a distinction not between the end of action and its beneficiary, but between two kinds of end, the distinction in On the Soul seems reconcilable with that of Lambda 7, and to apply to the first unmoved mover: the latter should be understood neither as the immediate end of action nor as the one who attains that end, but as that which the moved substances aim at through their own proper ends” (pp. 187-188, emphasis added).

“The latter aim at no other end than themselves, and attain this immanent end by means of the different movements to which they are submitted, but through this end they aim also at the eternity and the necessity characteristic of the unmoved substance. As result, we can say that they are also moved by the unmoved, and again by the desire for unmovedness. We see that this interpretation agrees with the end of Lambda 7, as well as with Lambda 10’s reflection on the final cause and the good” (p. 188, emphasis added).

“The remainder of [Lambda 7] goes on precisely to mark the relation between unmovedness and necessity, at the same time as that between motion (even local) and contingency. This last point is the same that Theta 8 already underlined, but the demonstration relies no longer on the notion of dunamis understood as the power of contradiction, and indeed as the power to be or not-be, but on the notion of energeia. Unmovedness is deduced from this, and necessity in its turn from unmovedness. Here indeed, and for the first time, the ontological sense of energeia… excludes kinesis” (ibid).

She notes that Aristotle uses the grammatically dative from of energeia in the text here, which she has argued he consistently uses to distinguish what she calls the ontological sense of dynamis and energeia from their physical sense that is involved in the ordinary explanation of motion.

(I would add that this philosophical primacy of the dative form over the nominative in Aristotle is closely related to a perspective that puts adverbial phrases and relations ahead of nouns and verbs in the order of explanation. In fact, every noun or verb taken by itself is just a simple linguistic token that still has to be given an interpretation. No mere linguistic token by itself explains anything at all. By contrast, it is the non-simple character of relations — the fact that they already intrinsically “say something” about something — that gives them their fundamental role in interpretation and explanation.)

“If it is thus established that the unmoved can be an end…, it remains to know how it is, or to identify its proper mode of action, which is presented as valid for all final causes that exclude motion. Two words suffice to name this mode of action: hos eromenon [as being loved]. The hos does not introduce a metaphor, … but must be understood in the sense of ‘insofar as’: the unmoved mover moves without being moved, but ‘insofar as it is loved’. In its turn, the theme of eros has been prepared by the earlier reflection on the identity of the intelligible and the desirable, where it was said already that they move [other things] without being moved” (ibid).

“For the technical register that distinguishes between different species of desire, rational and irrational, is here substituted a broader term, eromenon. This term also has Platonic resonances: it evokes the amorous ascension of the Symposium, and recalls the figure of Eros, the daimon child of Penia and Poros, in whom are conjoined lack and abundance, absence and presence. Evoking Eros, nonetheless, Plato in the Symposium speaks of dunamis. Here, inversely, the erotic ascension has for its principle energeia. We see again in this point the rupture underlined in book capital Alpha, as in Lambda 6: to conceive the causality proper to the good, it is necessary to think it as a final cause, acting not as power but as act, and as the end of in-potentiality” (p. 189).

Aubry has consistently maintained that acting in the sense of having an effect is not reducible to the “action” of a power. All ordinary “action” is in reality a mixed form — an interaction — that includes an element of passivity. Pure act on the other hand is supposed to have an effect and to move other things, but without itself being involved in passivity. There is still an element of passivity in this case, but it is entirely on the side of the other things that are moved by what they understand and desire. Pure act for Aristotle is situated beyond the correlation of activity and passivity. Only where in-potentiality is also involved is there the ordinary interaction of activity and passivity that we experience in earthly happenings.

Rather than aiming to think pure presence, in the context of a human being even Plato is far more interested in mixed forms, as Paul Ricoeur has pointed out. Aristotle here takes up the Platonic theme of eros, while recasting it as an ascent toward pure act. But pure act is precisely not ever purely present to us. In the next post, we’ll see how Aristotle contrasts human life with the ideal life he attributes to the first cause.

Next in this series: Ideal Life and Ours

Principles of Substance

“Chapter 5 of book Lambda constitutes a veritable pivot, not in the sense that, as the traditional reading would have it, it would bring to a close a hypothetical first part, or a treatise on sensible substances, in order to introduce a second part, or a treatise on separate substance, but because on the contrary it enunciates the principle of their continuity” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 173, my translation throughout).

“It is indeed in Lambda 5 that it is necessary to seek the key to the unity of book Lambda, and thereby of metaphysics, understood, according to the minimal definition suggested by Lambda 1, as a science distinct from both physics and theology; but equally, and this time against the onto-theological understanding of it, as a science that is not scissionable between a science of common being and a science of the first being — or this time between ontology and theology” (pp. 173-174).

“Lambda 5 in effect contains responses to two of the fundamental questions of Lambda 1, that is to say that of the nature of what is separate, and that of the unity of the principles of sensible substance. These responses are made possible by the results, both positive and negative, of the inquiries conducted in Lambda 2 through 4: the extension of dunamis to the eternal sensibles (Lambda 2); the exclusion of separate Forms (Lambda 3); the distinction between principle and element (Lambda 4). And they have one same term in common: that of energeia. Lambda 5 states in effect at the same time that dunamis and energeia are the common principles of all substances by analogy, and that the separate must be conceived as energeia and not as form. Proceeding from this, it remains for the following chapters, Lambda 6 through 10, to elucidate the nature of separate substance understood as ousia energeia, insofar as it at the same time is principle and cause of the other substances, and has a or some principle(s) in common with them — an elucidation which ultimately amounts to a deepening of the notion of the analogy” (p. 174, emphasis in original).

“As was already the case in Lambda 1, separation is here invoked as a criterion of substantiality, or according to the signification established in books Zeta and Eta, which substitutes for the Platonic idea of existence apart from sensibles that of the capacity for independent existence. This criterion allows us to recall the primacy of substance over the other categories, equally posed in Lambda 1, and thereby to affirm that the causes of substance are their causes as well” (ibid).

“For the term cause (aitia), we will proceed to substitute that of principle (arkhe), in order to declare that ‘it is in another manner again that the principles are the same by analogy, that is to say act and in-potentiality'” (ibid).

Aristotle’s four causes — originally introduced in the Physics — are extremely famous. But the above already suggests that in first philosophy, his “two principles” of act and potentiality will ultimately supersede them. In a simple way, act is the end, and that-for-the-sake-of-which; potentiality is the principle of motion. Form and matter provide overlapping specifications from a more static point of view, for which act and potentiality will again tend to be substituted. Such an overlap among the causes should be no surprise, since they are intended as complementary explanations. We have already seen, for example, that Aristotle’s hylomorphism leads him to ultimately assert the identity of an embodied form with its proximate matter. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

She refers to a passage that “in associating the couple of in-potentiality and act with that of matter and form, enunciates not an equivalence, but the rules of a substitution” (p. 175). Aristotle says “In effect, in act are the form, if it is separate, as well as the composite and privation (for example, obscurity or sickness), while the matter is in-potentiality, since it is capable of becoming the two contraries” (ibid). “Act indeed serves here to express form insofar as it is capable by itself, and not only in its articulation to matter, of an independent existence. This is a great novelty in relation to Zeta and Eta, where act served to name the composite as ousia malista [ousia most of all], as alone capable of independent existence, unlike form and matter taken in themselves. Far from being a simple equivalent, act expresses form insofar as it subsists” (pp. 175-176).

This is a somewhat subtle point, but clear enough. Things that are truly equivalent are bidirectionally interchangeable, without qualification. Here she is saying act expresses form only with additional qualification, which does not license a bidirectional substitution. In effect, we have a one-directional arrow between the two terms, rather than a two-directional one.

“In these lines, the notion of act reveals the ontological sense already distinguished in Theta. On the other hand, it does not have the axiological sense with which Theta 8 charged it, in establishing its equivalence with the notions of telos [end] and of ergon [completed work]. As in Theta 9, it applies also to privation, or to the negative contrary by which matter, like form, can be said to be in-potentiality. Applied to privation, the notion of act expresses again, and paradoxically, the mode of being and this non-being. As for the notion of in-potentiality, it expresses the mode of being of matter insofar as it is precisely capable of a double becoming, — toward form, or toward privation” (p. 176).

“To the notions of matter and form, those of in-potentiality and act thus bring an ontological supplement. There is something distinctive in them, allowing them to express beings where the matter and the form are not the same. It is not only a matter of illustrating the notion of analogy, as we did earlier, in pointing out that the relation between distinct matters and forms can be the same, but more of pointing out that the notions of in-potentiality and act apply not only in the context of a single substance, but between distinct substances, and more particularly between substances where one is the cause and the other the effect (we will see later, but Theta 8 has already apprised us that they also indicate, from the one to the other, a specific relation of causality, that is to say final causality)” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The last lines of Lambda 5 contain a first response to the question of the unification of the principles of substance. Three kinds of unity are successively indicated, which nonetheless are conjoined:”

“–at the outset, a unity of a focal kind, which consists in the primacy of substance over the other categories, which has the effect that the causes of substance are aloso the causes of all otherr things;”

“–then a unity of an analogic kind, which constitutes the principal object of Lambda 4 and 5, and in virtue of which all beings, even if constituted from different elements, nevertheless have the same principles, that is to say matter, form, and the cause of motion;”

“–and finally, a direct or transitive causal unity, in virtue of which all things have for their cause ‘that which is first in entelechy'” (p. 177).

“This enumeration, we can see, mixes transitive principles and immanent principles. If it recalls the categories of matter and form, and not those of dunamis and energeia that the preceding developments have nonetheless substituted for them, it nonetheless makes the notion of entelekheia intervene, and applies it to the first cause. The latter is no longer mentioned only, as was the case at the end of Lambda 4, as ‘that which, as first of all, moves all things’, but as ‘that which is first in entelechy’. Act, designated this time by the term entelekheia and no longer that of energeia, taken indeed in its normative and axiological sense, which is no longer only ontological, appears from this point as the notion adequate to the designation of the first cause. We find thus suggested the possibility of its extension, which the remainder of Lambda accomplishes, from the corruptible and eternal movable substances to the unmoved substance — and, on this basis, of uncovering a principle common not only to the sensible substances as a whole, but to sensible substances and to the separate substance” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Next in this series: Eternal Motion

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

Aristotle on the Platonic Good

“Philosophy begins with wonder not that there are things rather than not, but that they are as they are” (Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu sans la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 1, p. 33, my translation throughout).

Here Aubry refers to Aristotle’s famous statement in book capital Alpha of the Metaphysics that philosophy begins in wonder. In the 20th century, Heidegger emphasized the question why there is something rather than nothing. Aubry is pointing out that that is not Aristotle’s question at all. As detailed in many posts here, it is the more particular what-it-is of things that Aristotle is mainly concerned to explain.

“Two texts, in Lambda and Nu, echo the critique of capital Alpha, and each time the insistence of Aristotle is the same, in underlining that he is, of all the philosophers, the first and the only to have posed the good as a principle” (ibid).

Of Aristotle’s four causes, the material cause and the source of motion were generally recognized by the pre-Socratics. The Pythagoreans and Platonists added something approximating to Aristotle’s formal cause. But Aristotle insists that even the Platonists made no real use of a concept of that-for-the-sake-of-which, and confusingly treated the good as a formal cause or as a source of motion instead.

In book Nu of the Metaphysics, according to Aubry he says that Plato’s successor Speusippus and the Pythagoreans “agree with the mythologists in seeing the good not as a principle but as an effect of order…. Beyond Speusippus, the allusion is to Plato…; the error of Plato is not in having posed the good as a principle in making it an attribute of the One, but in having made the One itself the principle” (p. 39).

The relevant passage in book Nu says, “Things that come down to us from those who wrote about the gods seem to agree with some people of the present time who say that the good and the beautiful are not sources but make their appearance within the nature of things when it has advanced. (They do this out of caution about a true difficulty which follows for those who say, as some do, that the one is a source. The difficulty is not on account of reckoning what is good to the source as something present in it, but on account of making the one a source — and a source in the sense of an element — and making number out of the one)” (Metaphysics, Sachs tr., pp. 291-292).

Aubry’s point rings true. Elsewhere Aristotle goes on at length about Speusippus’ and the Pythagoreans’ insistence on the central role of number, which gestures in the direction of a formal cause but is actually treated by them more like a kind of material cause. And when Speusippus and the Pythagoreans talk about the One, they seem to literally mean the number one. As Aristotle points out repeatedly, it is nonsense to make the number one the source of all things, and this also doesn’t explain anything.

I myself for many years simply accepted at face value an identity of the Platonic Good with the One as the source of all things, while downplaying the One’s connection with the mere number one, and emphasizing a sort of negative theology in the style of Plotinus, which eliminates all positive attributes of the One. This really just comes down to saying there is a source of all things, while leaving unclear the way in which it is a source. It also assumes the Platonic thesis — rejected by Aristotle — that there is a single form of the Good.

For Aristotle, the good is said in as many ways as being is. What is essential is not this good or that good, but the relevance of value and valuation to all judgment whatsoever and all doing whatsoever. That relevance appears concretely as that-for-the-sake-of-which, or “final” causality. This was Aristotle’s huge innovation.

Aubry reviews Aristotle’s critique of the Platonic Good in both the Nicomachean and the Eudemian Ethics, which focuses on its status as a universal or an Idea.

“Aristotle underlines that there is not a unique science of the Good, but multiple sciences having for their object different goods” (p. 44).

“To the Good as a genus — undiscoverable — and as Idea — useless and void — Aristotle opposes a good that is prakton [practical, in the ethical sense], a good realizable by the human, determined as the first term of a hierarchy of goods and ends, … which the Nicomachean Ethics calls ‘politics’…. If the critique of the Platonic Good leaves open this path, which the Ethics explore, it does not close off that which consists in posing a Good as principle, the relation of which to particular goods remains to be determined, and of the sort that it is neither that of a genus nor of a species, nor that of an Idea to its participants” (p. 45).

Once again, it will be only the causality of that-for-the-sake-of-which and the related details of act and potentiality that truly explain this relation.

Next in this series: Being and Becoming

Pure Act

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Distinguishing Act and Form

The Four Causes Revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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