Tag: The Good

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).

Flasch on Eckhart

“What is essential is the ability of the soul to give itself a form, to shape itself. It does not stand there fixed, like a tree; it knowingly and willingly throws itself upon others, it becomes what it takes up” (Flasch, Meister Eckhart, pp. 35-36; see Eckhart as Philosopher: Background for introduction).

“The eye, opened and cast on the wood, is, within itself, over there with the wood” (p. 44).

With this example taken from visual perception, Eckhart illustrates the essence of the Aristotelian theories of perception and intellect that, according to Flasch, are at the core of Eckhart’s thought. At the heart of both perception and intellectual knowing, Aristotle posits a kind of fusion of what modern people call subject and object.

Also central to Eckhart’s thought is the neoplatonizing medieval notion of “intellectual soul”, which fuses together the separate Aristotelian notions of intellect and soul, emphasizing their status as an operational whole. For the many medieval writers who attribute such a strong unity to the operational whole of soul and intellect, all the unique attributes of Aristotelian intellect may then also be said of the human soul, though it is far from clear that Aristotle himself would agree with this.

Eckhart also upholds a unitary interpretation of the “substantial form” of hylomorphic unities, which aims to be a completely univocal kind of form. Elsewhere, Flasch notes that this late and specialized version of the more general (and not entirely univocal) notion of form in Aristotle is already present in Averroes’ Long Commentary on the Metaphysics. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas used it to argue against the sharp soul-body dualism defended by some medieval Augustinians. Substantial form poses a stronger unity in the forms of things than I want to claim for a reading of Aristotle, but that seems to be a relatively separate issue that does not greatly affect Eckhart’s argument here.

“[L]ike the seeing eye that casts a glance at the wood and becomes one with the wood, man, through active performance, through seeing and loving, becomes that which he sees and loves in the mind…. We retroactively separate eye and wood from the eye-wood unity. Is the wood-eye union the truer reality? Or is it merely an image, or simply a thought? Seeing things clearly in this regard, according to Eckhart, is the necessary precondition for understanding everything he says — not study of the Bible or dogmatic theology. First and foremost, we need to occupy ourselves with understanding this unity. It is our daily life. It is not a thing of nature, but rather the having of natural things” (p. 38).

We become that which we contemplate and love, that toward which we direct our attention. For Eckhart, the intellectual soul is not just a theoretical construct, but a part of everyday experience and of the basic ways of human being. Where the modern “subject” is usually considered to stand aloof from its objects, Aristotelian soul and intellect actively find or develop their content in and by means of what modern people would call their objects. Though we may marvel at it, this kind of fusion is not a mystical ecstasy, but part of the normal working of everyday life. It is not passivity, but a kind of fused activity. It seems to be this fusion at the heart of human experience that for Eckhart involves the divine giving birth to itself.

Eckhart uses philosophical senses of logos (word, speech, discourse, relation, ratio; what distinguishes the human from other animals) to explain its religious sense associated with Incarnation. We might say he uses logos as a name and descriptor for the intellectual soul’s fused active relationality.

“Why is ‘Word’ the keyword? It signifies relation. The Word unifies the speaker and the spoken content” (p. 36).

“‘Word’ in its essence refers to the intellect; the one who speaks and that which is spoken occur in the Word. The Word has a relational character; it unifies within itself those that are separate as natural things…. Eckhart conceives of man as Word, not primarily as a thing of nature” (p. 37).

It seems that for Eckhart, the Biblical Word and the Incarnation refer to the fused activity of the intellectual soul.

“[R]eason conceives of itself as an image identical to its exemplar, which is within it in eidetic fashion, that is, as actual intellectual being, uncreated and uncreatable” (p. 43).

As in Plotinus, for Eckhart the intellectual soul has a direct link with the divine, and may be said to contain metaphysical realities within itself.

“The unity of reflective self-consciousness and ethical orientation follows from this. The way reason — always in the qualified sense — is, it has nothing in common with anything else” (ibid).

“Eckhart does not say: ‘Until now, you have misunderstood Christianity.’ He says: ‘You have misunderstood yourselves, and as long as you persist in this error, you cannot provide Christianity with the intellectual and ethical form which is possible today, in 1300′” (p. 44).

Eckhart makes the astonishing claim that Aristotle, the Old Testament, and the New Testament all teach the same thing. According to Flasch, he even says that the Bible contains all natural philosophy. A first clue to what such sayings mean is that he says he will explain the Bible using nothing but the natural reasons of the philosophers. He will not appeal to revelation to justify what he says. This is not entirely atypical among medieval theologians. Flasch notes that even Anselm of Canterbury, a rather cautious thinker who precedes the main development of Latin scholastic philosophy, considered it a theological best practice to minimize the use of conversation-ending appeals to revelation.

“What previous readings of Eckhart often lack are linguistic discipline, semantic specification, and a philological basis: the way we have labeled and interpreted Eckhart and the categories into which we attempt to squeeze him even today were created at a time when his Latin works were still unknown. And yet they far outnumber his German works, and their tradition is more secure” (p. 46).

Flasch highlights Eckhart’s systematic use of the qualifier “insofar as”, an Aristotelian device that picks out and distinguishes one sense of something that may be considered in several ways. This he combines with a radical notion of what he calls primary determinations. These include the traditional four “transcendentals” Being, Oneness, Truth, and Goodness, as well as Idea, Wisdom, Love, and Justice. In a rather Platonic way, Eckhart will say things like “Insofar as we are just, Justice itself operates through us.”

“If something is, the primary determination is completely present within it. Then not only is the primary determination’s product or its similarity within us; the primary determination itself is present…. Everything that the primary determination itself effects, it effects not toward the outside, but rather into itself. Being has no outside. Again, those imaginative ideas taken from the working methods of craftsmen are problematic. The effecting of the primary determinations is not a producing…. Their effecting consists of making what has been established resemble them, of making what has been established into a being. Eckhart teaches elementary concepts of reciprocity…. Someone who has not learned from the prologues that the active pulls the passive toward itself, that is, that it makes it active, cannot interpret Eckhart’s birth cycle in the proper Eckhartian sense” (p. 80).

“Being, Oneness, and Goodness are active primary determinations, not abstractions. Thus, one has to say that this is God. As Aristotle saw the being of green in the being of the tree, so Eckhart sees the being of things in Being itself” (p. 82).

“I must not speak of Being or of ens in general in the same way that I can speak of this or that individual being…. In substance, they are in each other. This is what pious people mean when they say the world is created. This needs to be explained. Otherwise, the imagining thinking, that is, thinking that creates mental images, edges forward and makes us believe that the creation of the world consisted of God externalizing things from within himself” (pp. 82-83).

“In Eckhart’s time, the concept of pantheism… did not exist. Eckhart removed the issue… by differentiating… between primary determination and individual thing, but he made it clear that Being was not distinguished in the way that individual things were differentiated” (p. 83).

“This theology is short and clear. And it argues philosophically. It easily solves all or almost all questions that can be asked about God, and it does so in the light of natural reason…. There is nothing here of the abyss, nothing of the blinding darkness of Dionysius…. Moses says that God created the world in six days, but he said this for simple people; we know that Being is directly present in self-positing. People say that God created the world, but we know that Being continually posits itself anew in the present” (ibid).

“Placing his Biblical interpretation… before the doctrine of primary determinations — that means contradicting Eckhart” (p. 85).

“[T]ruth, Eckhart says, belongs to the intellect; it indicates relation or includes it within itself. Then follows a strange sentence […]: ‘A relation, however, has its entire being from the soul and as such is a real category, just as time, although it has all its being from the soul, is nonetheless a subspecies of quantity, that is, of a real category'” (p. 89).

“This sentence is strange for several reasons. It shifts from the statement ‘I am the Truth’ to a general theory of relations. Truth, Eckhart says, either is a relation or includes a relation, but a relation stems entirely from the soul and as such is an actual ‘predicament’. Every philosopher admitted that there existed relations purely of thought…. But no one who argued for real relations claimed that they were entirely derived from the soul” (ibid).

This is in Eckhart’s Parisian Questions. Here he rejects the argument of Aquinas that being comes before life and knowing, saying, “I, however, believe the exact opposite” (quoted, p. 91). Eckhart indeed explicitly puts knowing before being.

“[H]e reminds us in good Aristotelian fashion that mathematical objects cannot be considered according to intent or good, and that something that has being is identical [sic] to the good. Good and evil exist in the things themselves, but true and false only in the soul” (p. 91).

“Eckhart successfully describes the special status of the image. It still has, so to speak, a foot in the world of natural things; it consists of wood or stone or canvas; it has an efficient cause and often also an aim. But as an image, it does not have being; rather, it is the relation to the thing it represents…. Insofar as it is knowledge, it belongs to a different world. In questions such as this one, philosophical analysis has to be detached from the imagination” (p. 92).

“Properties are not beings; only their substance has being” (ibid).

“The intellect must not be a specific physical nature if it is to be able to comprehend all physical natures. The knower is the living negation of the known” (p. 93).

Eckhart makes the implicit “negativity” of Aristotelian intellect explicit, and applies it also to the soul.

“Our intellect is nothing, and our intellectual knowledge is not being…. This means that we are talking about the intellect as the actual having of universal objects, and about perception as the grasping of perceivable things. Not about the eye as a sensory organ, not about the equipment of the soul with the faculty of knowledge. Eckhart has transformed the question of an angel’s knowing and being into a general negative theory of sensory and intellectual recognition and claims. The intellect as such and also perception as such are neither here nor now, and insofar as they are neither, they are nothing, but insofar as they are natural faculties of the soul, they are something” (pp. 95-96).

“Here, in what appears to be an excessively dry critique of the Aristotelian ontology of the schools of the time, Eckhart lays the foundation of his thinking. He is looking for the special condition of the intellectual being, its nonmateriality, its energeia-like unity of knower and knowledge” (p. 99).

“Thus, intellectual knowledge is being God’s form or becoming God’s form, since God also is intellectual knowledge and is not being” (p. 100).

In different contexts, Eckhart says both that God is being and that God is not being.

“In summary, the first Parisian questions seem to be concerned with God and angels, but they are actually exercises in the search for intellectual being. They lead us to the edges of ontology, which cannot grasp image and knowledge. Its consequence is that we imagine God and the soul as thing-like. But that way is best forgotten” (p. 101).

“[W]isdom is infinite. Within it, everything always continues. Where it actually is, it is continually re-created. It is not born once and for all; its eternity is perpetual becoming” (p. 103).

Eckhart clarifies that creation is not meant as an occurrence in time.

“Eckhart, we must remember, permitted everyone so inclined to call God being. Now he proposes to say ‘Being’ (esse) and ‘Justice’ (iusticia) instead of ‘God'” (p. 104).

“God is Being. This tenet remains. But since Heidegger, the sentence has had a different ring to it from what Eckhart intended it to mean” (ibid).

“The human mind is the eagle that ascends to the origins of things” (ibid).

“What Eckhart calls Being is the productivity of the primordial mind, which produces images of ideas that the human intellect grasps as the immanent origin of the experiential things. Being is defined through the intellect, not through presence, not as a whole of facticity” (ibid).

“Being” taken in a positive sense especially means “intelligible being”.

“Primordial mind” is intellect outside of space and time. In this regard, Eckhart is closer to Augustine’s strong emphasis on eternity than to Hegel’s valorization of becoming.

“The philosopher, like the lover, does not look for the origin from which something developed, that is, its efficient cause, nor for what it is good for, that is, its purpose. Analyzing efficient and final causes is indispensable for investigation into natural things, but Eckhart is searching for the pure form as the true Being. He construes the divine life and the life of the deified man, the homo divinus, as a disclosure of form outside efficient and final causes…. [P]hilosophy was the eagle-like ascent to the realm of the grounds of being, the return to living substances that have their purposes within themselves, the elimination of thing-oriented ways of thinking, and the path to a proper life…. The proper human life is the aimless settling into the perpetually new Wisdom that is also Justice and Godhead” (p. 105).

Flasch points out numerous Platonic-sounding phrases in Eckhart, like the “pure form as the true being” above.

That efficient causality has no role in first philosophy is how I read Aristotle. But the neoplatonic commentator Ammonius (a student of Proclus, and teacher of Simplicius, Philoponus, and Damascius) argues that the first cause is also an efficient cause, and not only “that for the sake of which”, as Aristotle says. Most medieval writers (certainly Aquinas) follow Ammonius on this, and assume that the first cause is an efficient cause. Eckhart is an important exception.

Eckhart’s negative conclusion about “final causes” applies to external ends of a utilitarian sort, but ignores Aristotle’s emphasis on entelechy, which involves precisely an end that is intrinsic to a being’s being what it is. I want to say that we are our ends, as confirmed by our actions. In Eckhart as in many medieval writers, the later construct of univocal “substantial form” takes over most of the large role that Aristotle assigns to entelechy. It is admittedly hard to see entelechy as completely independent of time, which I think is what leads Hegel to reverse the traditional order and make eternity dependent on becoming.

“Eckhart’s God sheds the regalia of otherworldly imperial honors and endorses man as his own kind” (ibid).

Eckhart develops a theology that clearly rules out what Brandom rightly decries as the “command-obedience model” of normativity. As in Plotinus, a human’s connection to the Good instead involves an intimate sharing, and even a kind of reciprocity.

“The active above attracts the initially passive below. The below becomes the eagle that flies up to the hidden grounds of the world. It is our reifying contemplation that does not recognize the coincidental dynamic in the process between the above and the below” (ibid).

The active above works as an attractor. This is important. Though Eckhart doesn’t seem to explicitly talk about the teleology that Kant called “internal” and that on my reading is the mode of operation of the first cause in Aristotle, he nonetheless seems to come to a similar conclusion. For both Eckhart and Aristotle, the “below” is attracted to the “above”. But Eckhart is closer to Plotinus and the monotheistic mainstream in his insistence that the First is a source as well as an end.

“Eckhart declares… that he intends to proceed as a philosopher, and he adheres to this stated method. He aims to answer all or almost all questions about God with philosophical arguments, and in clear and simple terms…. This aspiration appears so impracticable, so immoderate that some Eckhart scholars have felt the need to understate it in order to present Eckhart in a better light. But Eckhart asserted this claim sharply and clearly. We can choose to reject it, but we should refrain from reinterpreting and changing it” (p. 109).

“The intellect is supernature. Plato’s intellectual world will become Leibniz’s ‘realm of grace'” (p. 111).

“Every reader of Eckhart has to fight his own imagination, which presents justice to him like an additional property of a person that is dependent on the person” (ibid).

“Eckhart’s God is Being and Unity, Justice and Wisdom. He is the all-encompassing attraction or love…. God is the original formal act, the primus actus formalis…; he discloses the having of form.” (ibid).

Again we have attraction, rather than a making, a push, or a command.

“The primary determinations attract to themselves everything that follows” (p. 112).

And again we have attraction. By this description, Eckhart’s primary determinations are after all what Aristotle would call ends that are sought for themselves, and not for the sake of something else.

“What matters in the context of moral actions is the intention, not the external act…. This justice is before and outside external actions” (ibid).

Eckhart is not the only medieval philosopher to say something like this. Peter Abelard similarly emphasizes the importance of intentions in ethics.

“Justice, in Eckhart’s writings, becomes the life of the mind. Thus, the just man finds peace in works and does not expect rewards; his ethical actions have value in themselves” (p. 113).

One of the charges against Eckhart was that he denied the importance of external works and ritual observances. But the context was implicitly things done for the sake of something else. That, I presume, is what Eckhart meant. But ethical actions have value in themselves. They have their end in themselves. They are not done for the sake of something else. And, he says according to Flasch, the just man finds peace in works. Whatever may be said about his relation to orthodoxy, Eckhart is on firm Platonic and Aristotelian ground here.

“Eckhart does everything he can not to construe God’s relation to the world as having developed arbitrarily, although there are people who imagine that this is precisely what proves the freedom of a personal God” (p. 119).

Like Albert the Great as previously discussed by Flasch, Eckhart puts intellect decisively ahead of will in his theology. To my layman’s eye Aquinas seems to formally maintain the same, but to make more concessions to voluntarism.

“Only thinking overcomes the false imagination to which many people succumb: they imagine God and the world as separate and relate the two as efficient cause and effect” (p. 121).

So there is someone else besides Aristotle who agrees that the first cause is not an efficient cause.

“[I]n divinis, that is, in the nature of God, but also in the homo divinus, in grace and salvation, there is no place for the category of causality, only the category of the ideational ground of reason, of ratio, which shows itself as disclosure of form. Aquinas described grace in man as the presence of God as efficient cause…. Eckhart’s philosophical reform consisted also of silencing the voice of efficient causality. Only grounds of an ideational-formal kind are at once wholly immanent and wholly transcendent…. They make possible the qualified concept of the living that has its telos within itself, just as Aristotle conceptualized it in the twelfth book of his Metaphysics” (p. 122).

Aha, now we even get living with a telos within itself, and a reference to book Lambda. Previously we saw him exclude external “final causes”, while remaining silent about the “internal” kind that are of far greater interest. But here the internal kind seems to be affirmed.

Eckhart’s first commentary on Genesis “rests on the combination of the Neoplatonizing metaphysics of Being and Oneness with the doctrine of intellect as presented by Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and Averroes and as corresponding with Augustine’s theory of mens. Eckhart’s anthropology, like his philosophical theology, is also a theory of intellect. This becomes especially clear when Eckhart speaks of man as God’s image. The Platonizing metaphysics of Being joins the philosophy of intellect and produces an ethics. Eckhart’s ethics presents the concept of the homo divinus” (ibid; see also The Goal of Human Life; Properly Human, More Than Human?).

“Eckhart writes that the reader should take the Biblical narrative as parable. He is supposed to let go of the narrative as events and facts” (p. 125).

“If someone says that God commands, then his commanding is to be interpreted in the light of his intellectual nature: his is not an external commanding. He is not ordering about. His ordering consists in providing things with their form” (p. 127).

Those who have understanding do not need to be commanded to be good. Commands are for those who lack understanding.

“The intellect is the root of freedom…. The goal of acting freely is to become a deified man, homo divinus. Within the deified man, the just man and justice are one. For him, the Good itself is the goal and in itself is its own reward. He does not look for external reward. Punishments, too, are intrinsic to acting. The good life consists of a consequent inner orientation, of inner being, not of doing. Action implements the way to being and life. God does not order any external act” (pp. 128-129).

In his commentary on the Book of Wisdom, Eckhart “continues his battle against the advancement of reified ideas, as though Being were a retrospective abstraction of many things or as though it were added to things in the form of a property. It is a rejection not so much of the representation of things in the imagination as of their dominance within philosophical thought” (p. 132).

“Eckhart recommends substituting primary determinations’ names for one another as a method. We may as well say Being instead of ‘God’ or Oneness or Justice or Wisdom. This was not uncommon among philosophers; Plato said ‘the idea of the Good’ instead of ‘God’ when he was not referring to the gods of popular religion; Aristotle, ‘the prime unmoved mover’, Avicenna, ‘the necessary being’, Aquinas , ‘being that exists by itself'” (p. 135).

“As we have seen, other primary determinations, such as Oneness, Wisdom, and Justice, are supposedly uncreatable. If God is called the esse, it is also uncreatable. Different meanings of ‘esse’ are operating here. Readers of Eckhart have to learn how to handle the flexibility of the concept” (p. 136).

“‘Many,’ Eckhart says, imagine creation as an effecting, as it were, toward the outside” (p. 137).

“Eckhart also rejects the idea that man should act well in order to receive earthly and heavenly rewards. The ethical good is an intrinsic value, not a means to an end” (p. 192).

“The sermons criticize the theology of the time, not just the wrong kinds of living. They correct the dominance of the imagination of stable, ontologically autonomous things, which hinders man from understanding himself and God and from grasping that his ‘neighbor’ lives beyond the ocean, too” (p. 198).

“The humble man compels God so that God must give himself according to his nature, and indeed must give himself wholly, for he is indivisible. God must: that is the message. His grace is not a random selection of blessed individuals out of a mass of sinners. God must; this motif appears again and again, not in the sense of an external compulsion, but rather from his nature, which he follows freely. Thus, he gives me everything that he gave Jesus, without exception; he gives the soul the power to birth; and thus it births itself and all things” (p. 200).

Peter Abelard, who was interested in safeguarding divine goodness, had argued more generally that God can only do what he does. Albert the Great had argued for the possibility of purely natural beatitude.

“Someone who speaks of God but does not talk about his oneness with the ground of the soul is not speaking of the true God. The ground of the soul has nothing in common with anything; it is not like anything else and is thus like God” (p. 201).

Here again we have Eckhart’s version of the intellectual soul. The “ground of the soul” would presumably be intellect, since it is described in the same terms.

“The soul exists more in Justice than in the human body” (p. 210).

The human soul carries intellect and the One within it, Eckhart might affirm with Plotinus. Plotinus is the only other writer I can think of who has as exalted a view of the soul as Eckhart.

“One does not learn the correct understanding of the world from the Bible; one must have developed this understanding in order not to read the Bible mindlessly” (p. 212).

“‘Reason’ needs to be conceptualized differently than a ‘power’. It is by no means a sort of mental hand that grasps something and thereby comprehends it” (p. 213).

The Reason he wants to call upon is about the interpretation of form.

“The truly wise life consists not in contemplative joy, but rather in the directing of external action to the best thing that love demands (p. 222).

Here we see how he does make a place for external action.

“The just man exists in Justice. No vision or intuition tells us this is possible, but only the philosophical analysis of the concrete’s containedness within the universal (abstractum) — with a realism of universals taken for granted” (p. 229).

Realism about universals here seems to acquire both a distinctive ethical dimension, and something like a neoplatonic “procession” from the universals in the soul that I have not encountered before in discussions of realism and nominalism.

“In pre-nominalist fashion, Eckhart takes it for granted that Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness) is the common and real determinant shared by all just men and then proceeds by eliminating the idea of making regarding the activity of Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness)” (p. 227).

Eliminating the idea of making in thinking about the activity of justice makes sense as part of a program of de-emphasizing efficient causes and accidents in favor of substance and internal telos, such as it now seems Eckhart supported.

The Universe

“From the first lines of Lambda 10, the question of the good and of its relations with the universe is explicitly posed: should the good and the best (to agathon kai to ariston) be conceived as something separate (kekhorismenon), existing in itself and by itself, or as the very order (taxin) of the whole?” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 200, my translation throughout).

“We know from now on that there exists a separate substance, that it is act and not form, that it is identical to the good, and that it acts as an end: from this, it is already apparent that the universe can be neither totalized via its reduction to a unique material principle, as the [Ionian] holists maintain, nor conceived [in the manner of the Platonists] in an episodic manner as a disjunctive series…. The universe indeed constitutes a totality, but this is not exclusive of an order that admits of degrees…. It remains to know whether the good is to be identified with this taxis or is separate from it” (pp. 200-201).

“But these options are not exclusive: the good can be conceived at once (amphoteros) as the very order of the universe and as separate from it, in the way that the good of an army resides in its order as well as in its strategy. It is nonetheless necessary to recognize between these two modes of the existence of the good a relation of anteriority, such that the order depends on the strategy, and not the strategy on the order” (p. 201).

“The problem is thus posed to know in what such an order consists, which is at the same time determined by the principle and serves as its manifestation. Already applied in Lambda 8 to the hierarchy of the spheres and their movers, the term taxis is from now on applied not only to the eternal sensible substances, but also to the perishable sensible substances (animals, plants)” (ibid).

“This order receives a triple characterization: first, it operates in a horizontal way between the different substances…; all these are then ordered in relation to something unique…; but finally, they are not so related in the same way…. We have indeed a relation at the same time univocal and diversified…. It tends nonetheless toward one same end, and proceeds from one same principle” (ibid).

“But we discover now that it is just insofar as [the unmoved substance] is separated that it is the principle of the order and of the distinctive movements of sensible substances…. And we can think the principle or the Good at once as separate and as constituting a taxis, an ordered and related totality” (pp. 202-203).

The universe is held together by the good or the ideal — a principle separate in both the Aristotelian and the Platonic sense, but acting only as a final cause or object of desire — and by the desires and aims of all beings — which in themselves indirectly also aim at the ideal. But nothing “enforces” the good or the ideal at a cosmic level. As a consequence, no evil in the world is cause for doubting the reality of ultimate good.

This concludes my direct treatment of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s detailed analysis of Aristotle in her second edition. When I first encountered her work, I was delighted to see someone vigorously arguing that the first cause is indeed just a final cause, and putting major emphasis on potentiality and act. In the course of working through this, I have improved my own understanding of numerous details. Her book has another 100 pages on what happens to all these issues in Plotinus, which I will pass over for now.

Beginning of this series: Aubry on Aristotle

The Ideal

“The last two chapters of book Lambda adopt a new point of view toward the divine: the latter is no longer in the first instance considered as energeia [act], but as good” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 197, my translation throughout).

“The question of the good is nonetheless raised in an indirect way in Lambda 9, by means of an inquiry into nous, or intellect. Here again, the text inscribes itself in the continuity of Lambda 7, and in two ways: first, because the intelligible and the good are identified through the mediation of substance and energeia; then also because the god was described there not only as act, but as an activity of thinking, and as being at the same time the thought of the best, and this thought or contemplation was described as the best and most agreeable” (pp. 197-198).

“Lambda 9 precisely poses the question whether the value of thought comes from its object, or from its very exercise. The response to this question is conditioned by a double premise, which directly articulates the two determinations of ousia energeia [substance as act] and of ousia ariste [the best substance, or ideal substance]: noesis or intellection is the best ousia, he ariste ousia; and as such, it cannot be dunamis. It can have no other object than itself, which would determine its activity of thinking and thus be superior to it; and in the same way, if it were dunamis and not energeia, maintaining the continuity of the activity would be hard. Finally, if it thought of an object other than itself, then it could equally well think different objects, not only the good but ‘something taken randomly'” (p. 198).

“As result, the two initial hypotheses must be eliminated: the value of thought cannot be derived from its object (at least, if the latter is exterior to it, and if it depends on it to be in-act). But no more than this can it be derived only from its activity, taken independently of its object: for thought and the activity of thought also pertain to the one who thinks the worst. If the value of thought can be derived neither from an (exterior) object, nor only from thought’s activity, it is then necessary to say that thought has value not due to what it thinks, but because in itself it thinks. Thus the prime mover ‘thinks itself, if it is true that it is the most excellent, and its thinking is thinking of thinking'” (ibid, emphasis added).

Thinking of thinking, or contemplation, can also be characterized as reflection. I would suggest that what more specifically makes thought thinking itself the best substance is its character of pure reflection. I think that intelligence is fundamentally reflective — a matter not of unexplainable direct apprehension, but of the elaboration of mediation, or of repeated refoldings of a self-referential thread. To be reflective for a human is also among other things to be indefinitely inclusive of new perspectives, while aiming to combine them in a unity of apperception. In the case of the first cause, this unity would be under the modality of always-already.

“But this again leaves open two possibilities: once we have excluded that the value of thought comes only from its own activity, or from an exterior object, we can again ask whether it comes from an object that is immanent to it, or from the very immanence of this object; in other words, does thought think itself because it is the best, or is it the best because it thinks itself? This is the sense of the question posed: ‘And again, if thinking and being thought are two different things, in virtue of which of these two terms does the good (to eu) belong to thought?” (pp. 198-199).

“The response consists in showing that in certain cases, which do not only concern the divine intellect, there is an identity between knowledge and its object — thus we respond to the objection… according to which the knowledge of self is only a parergon, a supplement or an accidental effect, of the knowledge of the object. This identity applies in the case of the practical sciences when they treat of an essence considered as independent of matter, and for the theoretical sciences or intellection, [this identity of knowledge and the known] is itself their object. It remains to know whether this object is indivisible or composed. The response proceeds by way of a new comparison, this time between the human intellect and the divine intellect” (p. 199).

“The passage admits an ethical reading: it is a matter of saying that the human intellect, insofar as it is the thought of composed beings (of matter and form, or of in-potentiality and act), does not have an immediate access to the good, to eu, but only attains the best, to ariston, in time, and as a being different from itself, on allo ti” (ibid).

“In effect it inherits from a decisive premise, which is that nous [intellect] is ousia ariste, the best substance. This proposition is supported in Lambda 7 by the identification of the intelligible, the good, and substance…. This premise, like the resurgence of the notions of the good and the best in the last lines of chapter 9, goes in the direction of an objective, and indeed also ethical, or more so axiological, reading of the text. Certainly thought is of nothing but itself; but if it thinks itself, this is because it is identical with the good” (p. 200).

Next in this series: The Universe

Eternal Sensibles

Metaphysics Lambda chapter 8 returns to a consideration of astronomical entities as eternal sensible substances. While this “appears to be an insertion of physics (or of astronomy) into the metaphysical discourse” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 194, my translation throughout), Aubry sees it as fulfilling part of the program laid out in Lambda 1 for a unified account of the principles of all substance.

“Thoroughly interrogating [the principle’s] relation to the other substances allows the efficacity of the act without power to be shown” (p. 195).

Modern people are not generally used to thinking of the causality of a substance in relation to another substance. We are taught to approach causality in terms of events leading to other events, or to states of affairs. Aristotle on the other hand is less concerned with explaining particular events or states of affairs than with the much more general and multifarious question of why things are the way they are. He argues that “substance” (ousia) and final causality play the pivotal role in any account of the way things are.

Aristotelian substance is far from being simply the “kingdom of nouns”. For Aristotle no more than for Kant is the what-it-is of things a simple primitive that is just given to us. The “identities” of things are consequences of an involved process, and not a starting point. A substance is explained by its characteristic act, which can be further explained as aiming at a kind of entelechy. These can only be discovered by indirect means, through thoughtful interpretation.

“First, it is a matter of establishing against the Platonists that the principle is a cause, that it has efficacy, and in particular is able to explain the movements of the different substances, of which the theory of Ideas had failed to give an account…. Secondly, it is a matter of identifying the causality proper to the Good, while showing that the Good acts, not insofar as it has a dunamis, as suggested by the formula of Republic book VI, but insofar as it is energeia…. Finally, and this time against the Platonic episodism, it is a matter of marking not only that the Good is efficacious insofar as it has no power, but also that the separate substance is not disjoint from the other substances, though it has a primacy over them: or better, separation if it is conceived as being that of act and no longer that of form, determines the ordering, the very taxis of the ensemble of mobile substances” (ibid).

I am fascinated by this suggestion that the separate first substance is “not disjoint from the other substances”, and that “separation” is also a connecting link. Aristotle wants to emphasize the extent to which the astronomical substances are connected to the first cause by the nature of their ordering. Lambda 10 will extend this to earthly substances.

(We have seen the enumerated criticisms of Platonism before. While agreeing that Aristotle’s formulations in these areas represent a major advance, I also continue to find great value in many of Plato’s other insights.)

“It falls to Lambda 8 to show, against the Platonists, that if we conceive the principles and the separate substances as acts and not as Forms, we can give a complete and precise account of movement: not only that of the sphere of the fixed stars, but also those of the other spheres and planets” (p. 196).

The connection between astronomy and first philosophy that Aristotle works so hard to establish strikes me as poetically beautiful, but I don’t know what to do with it philosophically, except in the very broad sense that astronomical phenomena do affect earthly things, and represent a more inclusive cosmic whole of which our earth is but a part. I am personally inclined to de-emphasize this aspect in favor of his other characterizations of the first cause as the good, and as thought thinking itself. But on the other hand, his idea that the first cause moves other things as a final cause but not as a direct agent seems extraordinarily well argued, and incredibly fruitful and auspicious.

“But now is posed the problem of the relation between the unmoved prime mover and the others. These are ordered according to a hierarchy (taxis) , which follows that of the celestial movements. It appears nonetheless that this hierarchy is also ontological: unlike the first among them, which Lambda 7 had ended by identifying with god, the other unmoved movers are neither characterized in Lambda 8 as pure energeia, nor as identical with the first intelligible and with the best. Of them, it is said that they are immutable and eternal, but also impassible, and that ‘they have on their own attained the supreme good’…. This is insofar as they are ends, telos. Thus, unlike the prime mover, the others are not ends insofar as they are already themselves the good, but insofar as they have attained the good” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“But since it is said of them that they have attained the good, we can suppose that they have been in movement, and indeed that they have been in-potentiality: if the prime mover is always already an act without power, we can suppose that they are powers fully actualized and stabilized in their end” (p. 197).

This is an ingenious solution, within the context of Aristotle’s desire to link astronomy to first philosophy.

Next in this series: The Ideal

Ideal Life and Ours

We are halfway through Aubry’s discussion of Metaphysics book Lambda, chapter 7. From this point, she says that the text becomes less of an argument, and more rhetorical and descriptive. Aristotle compares the “way of life” (diagoge) of the divine with “ours”. His discussion here largely follows the much more developed one in book X of the Nicomachean Ethics. Toward the end of Aubry’s section, she also critically scrutinizes the more particular basis of claims that the first cause of book Lambda is not only a final cause but also an efficient cause.

(Though it is much longer than this post, for greater insight and a fuller context on Aristotle’s view of this relation between the human and the divine, I would highly recommend reviewing Ethics book X in The Goal of Human Life.)

Now “it is no longer only a question of movable and perishable substances, but more concretely, and for the first time, of the human subject” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 189, my translation throughout).

“From the outset, the divine diagoge is characterized by comparison with the human condition, as being ‘like the best’ that is given to us, but also by opposition to it, since what is accessible to us ‘for a brief period of time’, mikron khronon, is for god continuously, aei [always]. The same opposition is found below, between the happy state god enjoys always, aei, but we enjoy only sometimes, pote” (ibid).

She quotes Aristotle, “The [divine] act is pleasure” (ibid). Plato in the Philebus suggests that the divine has a neutral state, but for Aristotle “god is the only living thing that at the same time has access to the most pure pleasure and always knows its enjoyment. If the human also has access to the pleasure of contemplation, she does not know it in a continuous enjoyment, for she is composed of two natures such that each for the other is against nature” (p. 190).

If I may be allowed a shallow comparison, this theme of divine pleasure makes me liken the condition of thought thinking itself to that of a blissful Buddha.

“In book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics, the continuity of divine pleasure is referred to the simplicity of the divine nature which, because nothing is mixed with it or hinders it, always exercises the same activity and finds in it a complete pleasure. The text of Lambda itself is content to associate pleasure and energeia. And where one might expect an exploration of the contrast between the transience of human pleasure and the perpetuity of divine pleasure, the next proposition proceeds on the contrary to underline their similarity. More precisely, the fact that the divine act is pleasure is given as the cause (dia touto [through this]) of the fact that for us every act is pleasure, whether it is a matter of walking, of sensation, or of thinking” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“We can see here a first illustration of the mode of action of the unmoved final cause as it has been determined above: we have immanent ends and aim at our own acts; it remains that through the latter, we also aim at the continuity and indeed the pleasure that attach par excellence to the divine act” (ibid).

“The following lines do no more than deploy the identity between act and pleasure, in formulating the conditions that make a certain act (thought or contemplation) pleasant. That the divine act indeed consists in thought is presupposed (or simply induced from the pleasant character of contemplation for us): above, the god has been assimilated to the intelligible, or to the noeton, but not to thought, noesis. For the act of thought to be pleasure, it is necessary that it be in-act, that is to say that intelligence is in effective possession of the intelligible” (pp. 190-191, emphasis in original).

“[T]hought in itself is thought of the best in itself, from which we deduce that the divine theoria [contemplation] is not only more agreeable, ediston, but also the best, ariston” (p. 191).

(Here again we are reminded how extremely different this is from modern notions of thought as “value free”, which seems to assume that all values are prejudices. We do not have to suppress questions of value in order to be fair and objective. Objectivity and fairness in the real world involve openness, but not a completely relativistic free-for-all. Fairness and objectivity are themselves values.)

“After the identity between act and pleasure, we pose that between act and life, zoe. This time, it is nonetheless clear that this identity only applies to one particular act: that of intelligence. It seems on the other hand that it applies to every act of intelligence, whether it be human or divine. Of the divine act, insofar as it is energeia kath autein [act directed toward itself], we say nonetheless that it is not simply life, but ‘the best life, and eternal'” (p. 191).

I was a little surprised that she says only the act of intelligence is to be identified with life. But she does not say that only the act of intelligence presupposes life, but rather that it is the only one to be strictly identified with it. Life for Aristotle is not reducible to some bare fact like a heartbeat; it involves purpose, and the best realization of purposes involves intelligence. That this applies to the human is no surprise. And if we accept that there is meaningful sense to thought eternally thinking itself, it is also no surprise that for Aristotle this would be the best life.

“It appears nonetheless that in the passage, [energeia] no longer designates a way of being but a way of acting: we no longer say that god is in act, but that god has an act. If this distinction between act and activity is at work, the text nonetheless invites us to surpass it: the activity of god in effect comes down to its character of being in-act. Thus, if god’s activity is thought, and self-thinking, this is, as Lambda 9 will make precise, because god is the good; and if the act is continuous, this is because as act without power, god is without movement or change. The notion of life, zoe, intervenes precisely at the junction of the ontological sense and the practical sense of energeia, serving thus to name the activity of that which is act by itself” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“More decisive seems to be the reiterated distinction between the continuous activity of being in-act, and the discontinuous activity of beings mixed from act and in-potentiality. The latter (or, at least, ‘we’) have access to an activity of the same nature as that of the divine: thought, pleasure, and life. What makes the difference between the theos and ‘us’, is indeed not the nature of the activity, but its duration (continuous/discontinuous) and its value (the activity of god is the best, and indeed also the most pleasant” (ibid).

“This characterization initiates the transition from the ontological approach to the prime mover, governed by the notion of energeia, to [Aristotle’s] axiological approach, governed by the notion of the good, which energeia in its most determinate sense nonetheless also includes. Against the Pythagoreans and [Plato’s successor] Speusippus, we thus repeat that the best and the most beautiful are arkhe [principles or sources]” (p. 192).

“From here the question is posed whether dunamis, more than a mode of being, designates here a mode of action: indeed whether the final cause must also be conceived as an efficient cause. The fact is that we have seen that the schema of efficiency, such as it is expounded notably in On Generation and Corruption, presupposes that the agent is in-act. Further, this schema is extended so as to be applicable to impassible and incorruptible realities: in their case, there can be action without reciprocal contact (they touch without being touched, move [other things] without being moved); and insofar as they are without matter, they are not affected by the action they exercise (the medical art heals without being healed)” (p. 193).

“According to this enlarged model, efficiency — and indeed also the dunamis poietike [power to do or make] seems to be compatible with actuality, but also with immobility, immateriality, and impassibility. The question nonetheless remains whether it is also compatible with the final cause” (ibid).

Previously, she pointed out that book VIII of the Physics does once apply the phrase dynamis apeiron [unlimited power] to the prime mover. This is indeed the passage appealed to by those who want to make the prime mover an efficient cause. The basis for this appeal is that Lambda 7 does briefly recall the argument of Physics VIII that the prime mover is without magnitude or parts.

But she has explained that in Physics VIII, what she calls the ontological sense of dynamis is completely missing, and the context is a long polemic against the Platonic notion of self-motion. Along with the fact that any reference to unlimited power is completely absent from the Metaphysics, and that the “unlimited” power of the prime mover in Physics VIII is not said to be unlimited in all respects but only in relation to time, she argues that this in no way intended to undo Aristotle’s many consistent affirmations that the first cause is pure act without power. This seems entirely reasonable to me.

“That the prime mover is a final cause, [the first half of] Lambda 7 has clearly established. To this must be added that the ontological sense of dunamis and energeia mobilized by the argument of Lambda 6 implies not only… that energeia is anterior to dunamis, but that it is anterior as end” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Otherwise said… the final character of the causality of the prime mover is already posed, even in ontology, via the exploration carried out in Theta 8 of the asymmetrical relation between energeia and dunamis. As a result, the problem is not whether the prime mover is an efficient cause more than a final cause, but whether it can even be an efficient cause at the same time as it is a final cause. For on this point On Generation and Corruption is explicit: ‘to d’ou heneka ou poietikon‘, ‘the final cause is not efficient’. Thus ‘health is not efficient, except in a metaphorical sense’, that is to say in the sense in which, insofar as it is an end, it sets off an action that aims at it, but in which it is not itself the agent (it is not health that cures, but the medicine or the remedy). In the same way, we can say of the end that it moves [other things]; but we must not confuse that which moves [other things], kinoun, with that which does, poiein, or with the efficient cause as principle of movement, arkhe kineseos: if it is true that the efficient is also a mover, it is not true that every mover is efficient” (pp. 193-194, emphasis in original).

For this last, she cites On Generation and Corruption again.

“In the same way that the ontological sense of dunamis is incompatible with the characterization of the prime mover as pure energeia, its kinetic sense is incompatible with its characterization as a final cause” (p. 194).

Next in this series: Eternal Sensibles

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

Book Theta: Summing Up

We’ve reached the end of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s chapter on book Theta of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. At this point, with the textual analysis complete, she pauses to reflect on what this all means. I for one have been extremely impressed with the quality of her argument, upon this rather close examination in which we have been embarked. Here her conclusions seem to follow with ease. I’ll keep my comments to a minimum here, and mostly let her speak for herself.

“The movement of book Theta, such as we have attempted to trace, appears to us… as having for its object to subtract dunamis from the logic of force” (Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 4, pp. 145-146, my translation throughout).

“Theta 8 also justifies the etymology of the very terms, of Aristotelian invention, energeia and entelekheia, in posing the identity between act, ergon (function or work), and end…. Act says something more than ousia: not only subsistence, but being-in-the-end…. Thenceforth, dunamis and energeia are not only opposed as that which can be to that which is fully, or as the potential to the actual. They are articulated as oriented movement — tendency — toward its end” (p. 146).

“Act, for this reason, no longer appears only as another name for the composed ousia, but for ousia as such, and power, univocally characterized as the power of contraries, is designated as the principle of a fundamental contingency” (ibid).

“The notion of act is charged with an axiological significance [one having to do with value], the same that it already had in the Protrepicus where it made its appearance. If the identity of act and good is not explicitly posed in Theta (as it will be on the other hand in book Lambda), it is nonetheless presupposed by the identification between act, end, and ergon” (ibid).

“If the birthplace of the notion of energeia is ethics, and if this notion thereafter passes to ontology, it is indeed for founding an axiological ontology which in its content pronounces the identity of being, the end, and in the same way the good” (ibid).

“Going forward, what is proper to the ontology of dunamis and energeia seems to us to reside in that it allows being to be thought otherwise than as power and otherwise than as presence. Being, in the way that dunamis and energeia express it, is not only that which is there, not only that which acts [agit]” (p. 147).

(In the front matter to her second volume, Aubry says clearly, “Act is not action. Act does not act [L’acte n’agit pas].”)

“Dunamis, we have said, is reducible neither to active power nor to passive power, but must be thought as the possibility of a movement toward act. As for act, it expresses not only presence, but being-in-the end and the good as realized or (when it excludes in-potentiality) as real: substance having realized its essence as good, or essentially good substance. Act thus appears as the ontological name of the good. It expresses the unity of being and value, the conjunction of the ideal and the real. Every act is a perfection, however ephemeral it may be — a place of absoluteness, an inalienable achievement. That is in act which, however weak it may be, was successful — that in which an Idea is here and now, even for a brief instant, incarnated. The Aristotelian good, we recall, is not an abstract universal, a Form without substantiality, or an empty ideal: it is, for each being, a possibility that is proper to it, and that can be effectuated. An axiological ontology, the ontology of act appears also as an ontology of non-scission” (ibid).

She notes that Pierre Aubenque, with whom she studied, wrote about both scission (a cut) and mediation in Aristotle in this context, but tended to emphasize the scission. She also sees both as important, but prefers to emphasize the mediation.

“In a sense, our reading only modifies this accentuation. But at the same time, far from seeing in the thought of Aristotle a metaphysics of inachievement and a wisdom of limits, we see an ontology of perfection, which also carries with it an ethics of surpassing: what is important is not that being is not immediately perfect, the human not necessarily divine, but that by way of the notion of in-potentiality, they are posed as capable of being so, by way of the notion of act as having being, even fugitively” (p. 147n).

“Aristotle nonetheless thinks the difference of being and the good at the same time as their identity. It is in-potentiality that serves to name this difference, this division. If it does not have being absolutely, neither is being in-potentiality an absolute non-being. It is at the same time in the mode of not yet and of always already: being in-potentiality is to be awaiting what we will be. But it is also, since in-potentiality is for a determinate act and becoming, to carry its becoming and its end in itself: being in-potentiality is being able to become what one is. If in-potentiality expresses the division between a being and what it has to be (its act, indeed, in which reside also its end and its good), it also expresses the possibility of annulling that division. In-potentiality at the same time poses distance and its crossing: if it expresses difference, it is as a provisionally differentiated identity. Indeed no more than the good is an empty ideal (or a Form-Idea) is in-potentiality an indefinite desire doomed to unfulfillment” (p. 147).

“In this way, Aristotle avoids the misfortune of scission. But he nonetheless does not fall into the naivete of immediacy. With dunamis is introduced the mediation of time, of movement, and even, with dunamis meta logou in the human, of liberty” (p. 148).

Here she gives the Greek for what is traditionally translated as rational power. More literally, this is “power after logos“, which more clearly captures the dependency of such power on the logos associated with deliberation.

“This division introduces the possibility of encounter, of error, of accident. An ontology of non-scission, the ontology of in-potentiality and in-act also leaves a place for the thought of failure or messing things up. If act poses the good and the end as real, and in-potentiality as to be realized, the passage from in-potentiality to act is never assured. The potential cannot be called a future actual, and the actualization of in-potentiality is never necessary, since it can be suspended by deliberated choice, or interrupted by accident” (ibid).

“Finally, the distance between act and in-potentiality leaves a place not only for difference, but for alterity [otherness]” (ibid).

She goes on to give some conclusions about causality.

“[E]fficiency is not suppressed…, but subsumed under finality: alterity is required as a moment of this progress toward self” (ibid).

“Efficiency nonetheless is only a means for finality, and transitive causality is only a means for immanent development. For the articulation of dunamis and energeia has something else remarkable in that it allows the efficacy of the end and the good to be thought. We have seen that in-potentiality is not thought in the order of force. It is nonetheless the source of a movement, or of a change, which has for principle the form as end, or act. For the end does not act, at least in the sense that it is not an efficient cause…; if it is, it is only metaphorically, kata metaphoran. The end indeed is efficacious without being efficient. If it acts, or has an effect, it is not as an efficient cause, in implementing an active power, it is a cause as act and end of in-potentiality. We could say, going forward, that if act names the mode of being of the good and the end, in-potentiality names its mode of action” (pp. 148-149, emphasis in original).

“The correlation of in-potentiality and act also allows the specificity of final causality as causality that is effective but not efficient to be thought” (p. 149).

This, she recalls, was one of the projects laid out in book Alpha, where Aristotle insisted on his originality with respect to the causes.

“For to identify this causality implies precisely to think the good neither as power and efficient cause, in the manner of Love or Intellect [as Empedocles and Anaxagoras respectively held], nor as in-potentiality, in the manner of the separate Forms. Plato in the Republic attributed dunamis to the Good: but if we want to think the power of the good, it is necessary to think it not as dunamis, but as energeia, and as the end of in-potentiality” (ibid).

“It is indeed in the articulation of dunamis to energeia that the secret of the power of the Good resides, that ‘daimonic force that makes it so that things are disposed in view of the better and the more perfect’, and to which Socrates in the Phaido relates his quest” (ibid).

“Going forward we understand that book Alpha of the Metaphysics, which we can read in part as an echo of this text from the Phaido, encompasses Socrates and Anaxagoras in the same critique: to succeed where they both failed, it is necessary to understand that the power of the good is daimonic or divine precisely in that it is not a power” (ibid).

Here of course she uses “power” in two different senses.

Then, as I have also emphasized, hypothetical necessity is central to Aristotle’s notion of explanation. Here we have Aristotle’s answer to questions about freedom and determinism.

“Hypothetical necessity governs both the facts of nature and those of choice. It is indeed as compatible with contingency as it is with the frequency or modality of natural phenomena such that their regularity can be interrupted by accident” (p. 150). She cites book II of the Physics.

“[Hypothetical necessity] nonetheless does not hold good as a simple heuristic concept, or a simple ‘as if’, but indeed as a constitutive principle, since in-potentiality inscribes in the very heart of beings, natural as well as artificial, the efficacity of the end and the reality of act” (p. 151).

Next I’ll take a look at her chapter on book Lambda.

Next in this series: Book Lambda: Introduction

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