Aristotle's Theory of Actuality (S U N Y Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy)

221 Pages·1995·1.47 MB·English

by  Zev Bechler

Aristotle's Theory of Actuality SUNY Series in Ancient
title :
Greek Philosophy
author : Bechler, Z.
publisher: State University of New York Press
isbn10 | asin : 0791422399
print isbn13 : 9780791422397
ebook isbn13 : 9780585046068
language : English
subject Aristotle, Philosophy of nature.
publication date : 1995
lcc : B491.N3B43 1995eb
ddc : 113
subject : Aristotle, Philosophy of nature.
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Aristotle's Theory Of Actuality

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SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy
Anthony Preus, Editor

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Aristotle's Theory OF Actuality
Zev Bechler
State University of New York Press

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Published by
State University of New York Press, Albany
© 1995 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this
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of the publisher.
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Production by Diane Ganeles
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Composition by Kelby Bowers, Compublishing, Cincinnati, Ohio
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bechler, Z.
Aristotle's theory of actuality / Zev Bechler.
p. cm.(SUNY series in ancient Greek philosophy)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7914-2239-9 (alk. paper).ISBN 0-7914-2240-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Aristotle. 2. Philosophy of nature. I. Title. II. Series.
B491.N3B42 1995
185dc20 94-1045
CIP
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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To Niza Dolav
For her special friendship

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Contents
Acknowledgments xi
Introduction: The Idea of Anti-Informationism
1. Tradition: Forms into Forces 1
2. Nonseparability and its Consequences 2
3. A Note on the Translations 4
Chapter One: Aristotle's Explanation of Natural Motion
1.1. The natural motion puzzle and the two potentialities 5
1.1.1. Soul as first actuality 6
1.1.2. The definition of motion and the aspects of the potential 8
1.1.3. The two potentials 11
1.1.4. Genuine potentiality is one with actuality 12
1.1.5. Consistency-potentials are noneffectual and nonreal 18
1.1.6. A role for consistency-potentials: Dispute with the Megarians 21
1.1.7. Plato's Forms and the nature of consistency-potential 23
1.1.8. Aristotle's principle of the priority of the actual 25
1.2. The explanation of natural motion 28
1.2.1. Is everything moved by another in Aristotle's physics? 28
1.2.2. The official interpretation and the energizer theory 30
1.2.3. The natural motion of living creatures is uncaused motion 32
1.2.4. Is "nature" the mover in the natural motion of the elements? 34
1.2.5. How can potentiality be the mover in natural motion? 36
1.2.6. Practical syllogism and the necessity of action 39
1.2.7. Desire and motion 42

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Page viii
1.2.8. The mover in natural motion is a logical mover 44
1.3. Logical causality and teleology 47
1.3.1. Form and end are logical causes 47
1.3.2. Efficient causes and logical causality 50
1.3.3. Is causal necessity really different from teleological necessity? 52
1.3.4. Hypothetical and categorical necessities are the same 53
1.3.5. Means and ends are strictly convertible 55
1.3.6. Aristotle's teleology "strictly speaking" 56
Chapter Two: Logical Causality and Priority of the Actual: Consequences and
Illustrations
2.1. Coincidence, relationality and the ontology of potentiality 59
2.1.1. Coincidentality entails non-causality 59
2.1.2. Why is the coincidental necessarily causeless? 62
2.1.3. The nullity of the coincidental 63
2.1.4. Clustering, instantaneity and the relativity of the coincidental 65
2.1.5. The identity of the relative and the coincidental 68
2.1.6. Lack and the coincidental 69
2.1.7. The potentiality connection 73
2.2. The First Mover fiasco 76
2.2.1. The ontology of Met 12 76
2.2.2. Redundancy: "Why need we seek any further principles?" 77
2.2.3. Contradicting the priority of the actual 79
2.2.4. How is separate form possible? 81
2.3. Substance and causality 84
2.3.1. The unity of substance 84
2.3.2. The unity of causal action 89
2.3.3. The inconsistency of Aristotle's actualism 92
2.3.4. The notion of particular-form: A.C. Lloyd 95
2.4. Logical determinism 102
2.4.1. Plenitude and the necessity of eternal motion 102
2.4.2. The necessity of all states 104
2.4.3. Necessity into contingency 107
2.4.4. The future sea-battle: Physical indeterminism and logical 109
determinism

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2.5. The continuum 112
2.5.1. The instantaneity of actualization 112
2.5.2. The nature of the infinite 116
2.5.3. Potential infinity and Zeno's Achilles 120
2.5.4. Homogeneous analysis and the impossibility of continuous change 122
2.5.5. Continuous motion and abrupt change 126
Chapter Three: Necessity, Syllogism and Scientific Knowledge
3.1. Two kinds of necessity 129
3.2. Deductive necessity and group inclusion 130
3.3. Propositional necessary truth 132
3.4. Deductive necessity and the circularity of the syllogism 134
3.5. Accepting circularity 1: Syllogistic demonstration 135
3.6. Nominalism and Aristotle's essentialism: Seeing the universal 137
3.7. Aristotle's demon: Potentiality and the scientific syllogism 141
3.8. Accepting circularity 2: Knowing that and what and why 143
3.9. Convertibility and noninformativity 146
3.10. Necessity by construction 148
3.11. Objective identity and noninformativity 151
3.12. Aristotle on noninformative questions 153
3.13. Noninformativity and error 155
3.14. Summary 157
Chapter Four: Inconsistent Potentials: The Philosophy of Mathematics
4.1. Some conditions for a philosophy of mathematics 159
4.2. The potentiality of mathematical objects 160
4.3. The puzzle of the exactness of mathematics 162
4.4. Qua and the relativity of the essence-matter distinction 164
4.5. Construction and absolute potentiality 166
4.6. Objections to a constructionist interpretation: (1) Annas 170
4.7. Objections to a constructionist interpretation: (2) Lear 171
4.8. Objections to a constructionist interpretation: (3) Hussey 175
4.9. Intelligible matter: The triangle is neither a "this," nor a triangle, nor 177
triangular
4.10. The nondenotativity of mathematics according to Aristotle's philosophy: A 179
short review
4.11. The a priority of Aristotle's philosophy of essence and mathematics 181
4.12. The formality and emptiness of mathematics according to Aristotle's 183
philosophy
4.13. The a priority of qua and the nature of mixed science 184
4.14. Aristotle's concept of universal mathematics 186

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Page x
Notes 190
Bibliography 231
Index of Passages 259
General Index 267

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Page xi
Acknowledgments
During the ten years in which this work has been in the making, it was continuously rewritten, expanded, and
contracted. Its earliest version was read by my colleague and friend, Shabtai Unguru, and criticized in many heated
discussions. I thank him for his patience and insistence on proof for everything. Special thanks go to Antony Lloyd
who so freely and generously donated his time and deep scholarship to a complete stranger. His detailed criticism of
the first half of the book helped me steer clear of many errors, clarify many arguments, and drastically readjust the
book's perspective. Niza Dolav, my close friend and assistant during all these years, gathered (sometimes unearthed)
the literature I needed, typed the infinite number of my longhand drafts and the whole book several times as it
metamorphosed. She created the whole apparatus, gave the book its final look before going to the publisher, and
finally proofread both galleys and the page proofs. I wouldn't have completed the book but for her devotion and
determination. My wife Nira has been my daily love-support system and no words can express my gratitude to her.

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Introduction: The Idea Of Anti-Informationism
1. Tradition: Forms into Forces
Our traditional perception of Aristotle's philosophy of nature takes it as a kind of dynamics, a theory of forces that
cause the motions of the world. This tradition interprets his concept of ''nature" by taking what he calls "beginning" or
"principle" or "origin" (arche *) as some kind of a force, and the "internal origin of motion" (arche* kineseos* en
auto(i)*, which is Aristotle's formal definition of "nature") as "a power, resident in natural objects" (Ross, 1936: 25).
This initial step is next followed by linking the "internal power" with potentiality for motion, and potentiality
(dunamis) now becomes a power or force resident in natural objects, causing their natural motions.
From such humble beginnings, this traditional reading of Aristotle molds him into a sobered-up Plato, namely, a Plato
without a world of Ideas. Aristotle took these, so it is suggested, and transformed them into indwelling entities
residing within natural objects. These, in their new role, he renamed "forms," but apart from these two variations he
left them intact as he found them in Plato. In particular, Aristotle's forms remain causative as "powers, resident in
natural bodies" (Ross, ibid.) acting on these bodies from within as their immediate movers in their natural motions.
"Nature or essence" is the indwelling form that is "an internal power of originating movement" as Ross put it (ibid:
24), or as a recent scholar writes, it is the "developmental force which impels it [the body] toward the realization of its
form . . . a force for future growth and development. This force is form. The form in the young healthy organism is an
internal force propelling it toward the realization of its form" (Lear, 1988: 19).
Aristotle's theory of natural motions becomes, in this manner, a kind of Newtonian (or at least Galilean) Ur-Physik,
with Aristotle's nature or essence or form acting as the force of inertia (with the minor difference of causing acceler-

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ated instead of uniform motions). It becomes Newtonian dynamics with a factual error but with no difference of
principle. Just as Newton did, Aristotle distinguished all motions into natural and forced and, like Newton, he viewed
all motions as caused by forces, internal for natural and external for enforced motions. All that was needed to arrive at
the Newtonian physics was to add that natural motions are uniform and enforced motions are accelerated. 1
One would expect that the notorious Aristotelian teleology might present some difficulty on the road to such
amalgamation, but this is not the case. For, to nicely round off the picture, the final cause is interpreted by this
tradition as just another force, acting from the "end" on the object, awakening a "desire" in it to unite with the end.
Since the ''end" is the eventual actuality of the form, it turns out that the end is the form and so, by a kind of magic,
the not yet actual-ized form becomes the indwelling form of the object and so the force that propels the object
towards its end. Natural motions of bodies are now "expressions of their strivings towards the fulfilment of [the
element's] proper form" (Sam-bursky, 1962: 63). Realizing that there is "an air of paradox" in holding both that
Aristotle "identifies an organism's nature with the end" and also that he identifies this nature with the indwelling form,
which is "an internal force propelling it toward the realization of the form," Lear attributes to Aristotle the answer
"that we should conceive the end as being the (fully actualized) form" (Lear, 1988: 19). How this duplication of the
paradox can also be its dissolution is a new paradox, never to be resolved.2
The picture that emerges is of Aristotle's theory as providing information about the content and inner components of
natural bodies. Each such body is composed of matter and form, and the form is a force acting on the matter, moving
it toward its end or purpose, with an intensity that is a measure of its desire for that purpose. The form, or nature, or
essence, is some definite component sitting inside the matter but distinct from it in a simple, physical sense, like the
balloon from the helium it contains.
2. Nonseparability and Its Consequences
The facts of the matter, in my view, could not be less compatible with this traditional reading. And the main relevant
fact, amicably accepted by all, is that Aristotle's forms are non-separable from the object or the matter either
physically or in thought (logically). But what is crucial here is not that the form is "in" the object (as against Plato's
external and separate Ideas, as the slogan goes), but rather that form is merely and strictly the object viewed in a
certain manner.

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Aristotle's forms are not parts or components within the object because, being aspects, they are not the kind of thing
that can compose their object. His attack on Plato's Ideas was not a campaign to transfer and install them intact, as
they are, within bodies, but rather to eliminate them altogether as self sufficient (i.e., separate) entities, and this
entailed eliminating them also as components that are in any sense separable. The situation is clearer in the symmetric
case of matter, for it is rather obvious that matter is not an entity dwelling "inside" or "within" any natural object, like
marbles in a matchbox. Rather, the matter of such an object is the whole of this object seen in a certain manner. But if
this is accepted, then the same must be true for the case of form, since it is the logically correlate concept, the whole
of the object seen in a complementary manner. In this sense it must be concluded that the object, its matter, and its
form are one and the same identical thing, "differently said." This is merely to spell out their nonseparability from
each other. 3
This step meant a wholesale rejection of the various schemes, which Plato explored, of informative explanation of the
phenomena (by means of, e.g., geometrical atoms, world-soul, Ideas, and more). But for forms and essences and
natures to go on explaining, as Aristotle's scheme demands, and yet be nothing but aspects, a wholly new concept of
explanation had to be presupposed in which explanation need not at all reveal new physical information about the
object. In contrast to the Galilean-Newtonian version of the Platonic conception, an explanation need not analyze the
object into-its separate components, discover how they act on each other, and then sum up the forces involved into a
resultant force that acts on the whole body and moves it on its way. The reason is twofold. First, in Aristotle's scheme
there are no such components, no such forces, no such action in natural motion. There is nothing inside the body that
desires some future purpose, nor does the future nonexistent end act on the body to pull it toward itself. Just as aspects
are not parts and components, so can they neither be forces nor desires nor deliberations. Since the only "parts" the
object contains are aspects, which are no parts at all, a natural object (e.g., a piece of the element earth, or water, or a
plant, or a living organism) is absolutely whole, absolutely a unity. Not even what we would normally call the parts of
such a natural substance (e.g., the legs of the cow) are actual parts. They are merely potential parts (i.e., the cow is not
composed of them), and the moment they become actual parts they stop being really the same things. A separate leg is
no leg at all, Aristotle would say.
Secondly, taking explaining and understanding to be mental processes, it is a fact of the natural world that they do not
need information about parts and components and forces in order to be "satisfactory" to us, i.e., to excite in us the
proper mental reaction. Thus, anti-informationism is both a doctrine about the furniture of the world (i.e., about "the
what-it-is-to-be" a natural substance) and

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a doctrine about explanation and understanding (i.e., about knowledge). Moreover, both are tightly linked, for since a
natural substance is an absolute unity, its explanation and understanding can only be knowledge of its aspects.
Matter and form in the case of natural change are, it thus turns out, aspects of the object as something else. If the cow
is the form of the calf, then the form of the calf is the calf aspected as a cow, just as the matter of the cow is the cow
aspected as the calf. And if the calf's matter is bones and flesh, then the matter is the calf viewed as bones and flesh.
But neither the cow nor the bones and flesh are parts or components of the calf. How, then, explain the fact that the
calf grew to become a cow? Or that it was butchered to become legs and ribs? Aristotle used the machinery of
actuality and potentiality in order to say that what becomes actual is what was potential, and, more importantly, that it
became actual because it was potential before. This scheme is the paradigmatic form of non-in-formative explanation.
Its aim, I'll argue, is strict logical necessity and maximal rationality, and it achieves these aims by rejecting the notion
of informative explanation, which it sees as nonlogical and nonrational.
3. A Note on the Translations
Wherever possible I tried to use only extant, widely accepted translations, but I used them to bring out as clearly as
possible the points I wish to make. This led me sometimes to even use different translations of consecutive passages
when they don't conflict or lead to some inconsistency. Consequently, I always mention the translator's name in the
reference, and only where no name is mentioned is the translation my own. The references also list the modifications I
made in the translation (following the sign "mod:"). Much as I wished, I could not employ some of the best modern
translations since the kind of awkward English they use (Eek, as Furth named it), though making them a precise
rendition of the Greek, also makes them at times useless for purpose of illustrating an idea. The bibliography lists all
the material I made use of in an earlier and much lengthier version of this work.

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Chapter One
Aristotle's Explanation Of Natural Motion
1.1. The Natural Motion Puzzle and the Two Potentialities
My main aim in this chapter is to impress upon you the presence of two kinds of potentiality in Aristotle's mature
philosophy, and then to lead toward the conclusion of the nonreality of all potentiality, a conclusion that is expressed
in Aristotle's principle of the priority of the actual. I begin with a light and breezy sketch of his definition of soul and
of a puzzle about the mover in natural motion, and let the analysis of this puzzle get thick only at a later stage, when
the consequences about potentiality are brought back to work on Aristotle's explanation of motion.
The puzzle is that in the whole of Aristotle's mature works there is no systematically clear answer to the question:
What moves things in their natural motion? He devotes to this question, for the case of living things, the last five
chapters of De Anima (= DA), but nothing definite comes out of it. And he makes a concerted effort to solve it for the
case of inanimate things in the seventh and eighth books of Physics (= Phys), with similar results. It is clear, however,
that he looks for an answer in terms of his concept of potentiality. For soul, which must be the mover of living
creatures, he regards as the first actuality of what is potentially alive, and in the case of inanimate bodies he concludes
that the mover is its potentiality to move as it actually moves.
I shall begin, just to get things rolling, with a brief and very superficial report of Aristotle's solution in the case of
animal motion in DA, and then use this for developing an interpretation of his theory of potentiality. Equipped with
this I shall then, in the second part of this chapter, explain his theory of natural motion. Throughout this presentation I
shall bring into relief the elements of his basic conception of nature and of explanation as two noninformative systems.
The meaning of noninformativity will emerge as we go.