Ancient Philosophy
Substance and accidents cohere. Accidents are properties of individual things that are substances. We discussed these in a static perspective as a snapshot of the situation as you find it when you look at one specific thing, substance + accidence. You describe then how it is a combination of form and matter.
Onto that there is the dynamic perspective. What makes a thing grow into its essence?
Take for example the seed of a tree: it doesn’t look like a tree at all yet it contains all the genetic information to become the tree it becomes. How is it possible that things develop and grow in that perspective? Into what they ought to be. This also applies to other things, like rocks even, which also have the capacity in themselves to become otherwise.
To describe this we have a few bipolar terms opposite to that of form and matter. Act over potency. Energeia over dyanamis. In Aristotle, Energeia refers to the snapshot we have been taking before. If we look at the left-hand side of the screen, we stop the movement in a static object in terms of form and matter, an actual situation – act. The thing in its present shape and form. Act is nothing else than a rendering explicit of what was there when we discussed form and matter. If we look at things in a dynamic perspective there will be a sequence of dynamic perspectives that are instantiated in the growth of things, either by makers or else. This is applied by the term potency, energeia. It is not an active power, but rather passive potentiality, the openness of going through change without doing anything by itself.
So there is an active status, the actual fact, versus the potential that is in that status now present, which already refers to what can be developed next. The seed is a tree in potency. The potency is not something of the future, but in the present, but bears in itself already the next actual state that is going to develop out of the current actual state.
The potentiality will develop into something different. The question here is: what will happen next? Not anything can happen. There is a predisposed possibility of next stage/s. If you have a block of clay, the block of clay is never going to speak or articulate words, so there is no potentiality for whatever. It being a block of clay already determines the kind of potentiality, the openness, it has towards development. The more you give something form… the less it is open to other forms (seems like an unclear corollary honestly).
If you have a seed of a birch tree, nothing else will grow out except of a birch tree.
Information: in-forma – the form in itself. Something has the information of what will develop next. Growth is always aim-directed, there is a universal teleology present in this kind of theory. And what is this aim?
For Aristotle, the aim of things are always perfection. If you happen to be a cow, you want to be a perfect cow. If you are a human, your inherent goal is to be a perfect human, whatever that actually means. This is a typical Greek way of thinking, nothing is strived for unless it is a conceived good. In nature nothing is mistaken, so any strive must be for a real development to perfection. One example Aristotle gives is playing the flute: you would never start to learn to play the flute unless you want to play it perfectly. Does it mean you are perfect immediately? Of course not, but it is the goal of practice. Anything you would venture to do is a venture to a perfect performance.
Again, this is taken up in a more secularised version in the notion of genetic information. Whatever is happening is already predisposed and has already been contained in the seed or in the embryo of what is from the start. Present day biology would be pessimistic about this: as also failure is already calculated into that starting information. The proneness to falling sick or to grow crooked is also predisposed in the beginning. Aristotle would deny this: for him the only thing that is predisposed is perfection. He knows of course that there is failure in nature, not everything develops perfectly. But he has another answer to the possibility of failure: accidents. Accidents, traits and so on, can actually go wrong. They are related to the subject and its environment, but it is not substantive of a seed to not grow into a tree, rather that is accidentally part of the environment in which it is in. The essence of a seed is not to fail. Failure is never part of the ontological structure of the whole, but are rather accidental to it. Failure may be part of two different substances interacting with one another, which is an accidental property, and not related to the substance of the thing. Failure is not programmed into the situation in the beginning.
Difference between aristotle and darwin: in each human there is only a new individual, whilst all these individuals have the same form, whilst in Darwin each human is a new development of the form itself.
Form is actually more important than matter, act is more important than potency, in more or less a symmetrical manner. Act actually makes a thing into a specific actualised form. There is a direct correlation between form and an act. The more form you give to a thing, the more it is actualised. The perfect aim of a birch seed is to become a perfect birch tree. The more it gets the form of a birch tree, the more that aim is actualised. In the same way, more manner means more potency. Openness to becoming something different is greater, more extended if you have less form and more matter. The cell can become anything, because in a sense it is basically a kind of matter. A block of clay has more unpurposed matter, and once you start giving it more form, you diminish its potency to become something different.
Pure matter, given this limit notion, is actually total potentiality.
The more matter, the less act, ie. the less is it actualised into something that looks like an individualised thing.
If we start talking about this as soul and body, we change the range of potentiality that is there.
Soul is actualised form. In the case of human beings, form is the same as soul. And he defines it in text 2.56: the soul must be substance as the form of a natural body that is potentially alive. Now substance is actuality, hence the soul is the actuality of this specific sort of body. Hence the soul is the first actuality of a natural body that is potentially alive. So the soul is seen as a substance. He is applying the word ousia in the substantial meaning. Can the soul exist seperately from the body?
It is the first actuality of a body that potentially has live. A living being is then the actualisation of a living body with the potentiality to live. It is a bit circular. But in Aristotle’s ontology certain bodies have the potential to live and some don’t. When they have that potentiality, they show by that very fact that they have a soul, the principle of self motion – that is life. So the actualisation, or the entelechy, of the potentiality of being alive. Once it is there it is always perfect. But as you live, you live in a perfect sense, there is no gradation. There is no half-life (maybe they’ll make a third one eventually). Basically a binary logic.
The soul itself can perform different functions. There are three levels to the soul. This will be the leading criterion to distinguish types of living beings for a long time.
The first soul is the vegetative soul. The power of looking after the body and maintaining it. The power of pure survival, both of the individual and of the species. The vegetative soul plays an important role in any living being. If you lack the vegetative soul you cannot live. Of course there are those that only have this kind of soul, but anything that has more capacities also have this more basic soul. As such, the vegetative soul is just that part of being alive that is more basic.
Then there is second type of soul, a soul that accumulates further capacities that eg. animals have. This is the sensitive soul. Animals don’t find their food in the place where they live, they have to move in order to find the food that they want. So they need things like sense perception in order to see and hear the things that may satisfy the needs of their species, and the individuals. This comes together with locomotion.
There are of course some animals that are gradations, but this is the ontological distinction.
The third one is another addition. That is, the rational soul. The rational soul requires the below souls to actually develop. Our soul is distinctly human, and owes its distinction by being rational; that is thinking and acting rationally.
If you could call this a form that is now added to different kinds of living beings, then with the form comes a specific type of perfection. To be a perfect plant, rabbit, or human, there are gradations. A perfect plant is a plant that is capable of achieving all the aims nature has set for it by vegetation. A perfect animal is an animal that achieves its aim by nature through sense-perception. For a rational being, each lower parts needs to be transformed by the rational aspect of the soul. Even if you choose not to transform them, you will be susceptible to punishment, judgement etc. because you do not do what rational beings should be doing, as according to a given rational society.
What is the predetermined aim of human nature?
The answer is rather complex.
He is explaining two sides of a dilemma at the same time. He distinguishes between praxis and poiesis. Practical wisdom versus theoretical knowledge. So ethics will be about activities that you actualise. One thing you do as a human is the creation of external things, making. And another is doing things for its own purpose. You can say for instance that you want to construct a house in order to have shelter. By making a house you are actually enacting something that is important for the sake of its own, namely happiness or the comfort you have from having it – a better quality of life. This is something you act, and do. Or walking for the sake of walking. Not walking to get somewhere else, but walking to be happy etc. So poiesis is instrumental to reach a kind of praxis. You have to make things, like cooking, in order to enjoy that making. The quality of life however is in the order of praxis. And there is a distinct hierarchy between things that are acted out, and the final thing you want to reach is happiness. This means that everyone, whatever you do, playing the guitar, making a house etc. is always subordinate to the final aim of your human life, happiness – eudaimonia. This system then is called eduaimonism. Happiness in our language always supposes a kind of emotional state, but this is not what the Greeks want. They rather want an accomplished life. To actualise the best potentiality that was present in your life.
So what is the aim that makes you happy? You have to render concrete what this happiness constitutes for you. So it becomes a kind of interpretation per individual what happiness is. But insofar as we are human kind, the aim is always human happiness. Some will become doctors, and doctors involves a lot of poiesis – but everything you do is not for the sake of being a doctor, but rather for the sake of being happy. And the same goes for all other kind of poiesis. So there is no way to strictly define what you need to do – everyone has to find it out as a human being. And Aristotle is very adamant that in the discussion of ethics, which is not a discussion of a theory of how action should look like, but what you need to do, an advice on how to life your life, you cannot require the same amount of universality that you can ask of the exact sciences or the natural sciences. Between science as a rigorous activity, which is about universal and essential knowledge, and the way of discussing ethics, which is about particular actions – something that for Kant is always conditional, since he thinks Aristotle should make a categorical ethics – and which can only be solved by having a kind of know-how per situation. There is no universal knowledge in this case. Theoretical wisdom and practical wisdom are completely different here. Plato never distinguishes these two, and he argues that Plato always confuses them. Because for Plato doing the right thing is also knowing the right thing. Aristotle fiercely rejects this as at the level of praxis this is not true – you do not always do the good because you know the good. There may be conditional elements that prevent you from doing the good. And practical knoweldge is based on experience and memory, a kind implicit knowledge or cognitive attitude that tells you what will and won’t work. You always need to decide what needs to be done, and you may have experience of what is a good solution, but otherwise how can you know? There is no general route scheme of doing. You can maybe skip a few steps by following examples, but you have to do it yourself at that point when you make the decision, so you have to rather be prepared. What you have to do is prepare so that your character can make you decide naturally in the correct decision when the problem arises. You as a human have to learn this kind of practical knowledge. A correspondence between practical and theoretical knowledge in terms of syllogistic reasoning exists, but it functions differently given that one condition is always individual. The second is a general principle, and the third one is a conclusion/action. The aim of a practical syllogism is to find a universal term that applies in the situation and to instantiate it.
What you find in Aristotle is an ethics different from that of Kant, in that Kant only studies the formal requirements of our deeds, whereas Aristotle talks about the content of the behaviour – what should we actually do. Kant refuses it because it is conditional. A kantian thing to say is that all should have human rights, but what is a human right? A virtue ethicist would not agree. There are things that belong to the contents of your actions that determine the happy state or not.
As always, the final aim of our deeds is given by the soul that we have. In non-living things, the aim is given with the form, and the form is always aiming at perfection. The same is true in living things with the soul. But humans cannot essentialise be happy with just being content in the first two levels of soul – they need to also be doing rational things. First of all the aim is rationality, but as we now saw, there are two types: practical over theoretical. In the Nichomachean Ethics (the only work he published) Aristotle establishes very clearly byt the tenth book that what we say about virtue and practical wisdom is subordinate to theoretical wisdom. The actual thing we need to actualise to becoming happy is theoretical activity – being scientists. He argues for about 9.5 books against this point, and then returns to it, arguing this is in fact what needs to be done.
Ethics, morality in action, is not a distinction from the metaphysical scheme. Again what Aristotle applies in his ethics is a concrete version of the ontological principles he has priorly been establishing. The form, the aim, and all such terms remain in place. So ethics is applied metaphysics. What is it that is going to provide our happiness?
In ethics and morality you need friends, pride, pleasure etc. And pleasure is the natural sign that occurs when or if a capacity is brought to perfection. If you enjoy something it means you are doing the thing well. Animals enjoy sex, and they do well what they are supposed to do when they have sex. We humans can have pleasure in different things depending on how we render what we wish to do well. This goes together with other external things. Friendship, freedom (slaves cannot be happy), or health.
Aretè, earlier used by sophists who applied it to everything. Anything is virtuous when it does what it needs to do. So it is not an exclusively moral term. Plato moralises the term, and uses it exclusively when it is about the good of moral action. Aristotle finds inspiration in the older tradition that uses the word in many conditions.The word virtue we would use it in a moral sense, but words like virtuoso just means someone who is good at what they do. This helps Aristotle to knot together this explanation of virtue with ontology. It refers to the aim-directedness that determine all things. You can talk about the virute of the sensitive soul or the vegetative soul for example. In terms of what virtue is for humans, Aristotle has a short definition, 2.60: Virtue is a settled disposition that is able to choose, finding the middle that is adjusted to us, and determined by reason, meaning, determined in the way that prudent man would determine it.
Settled disposition, hexis or habitus. A reaction by doing things. By combining your inner capabilities with external influences. It is something like what Aquinas calls second nature, something you acquire by adding something to your first nature as it lacks something.
By learning how to play the guitar, you gain freedom. You add a capacity to your life which gives you the choice to play or not play the guitar. Someone who does not know this, doesn’t have this choice. Once you get a second capacity, you get another freedom of action, you are actually detaching from the animal nature that lacks a choice.