The Activity of Being: An Essay on Aristotle's Ontology

295 Pages·2013·3.53 MB·English

by  Aryeh Kosman

The Activity of Being

The Activity
of Being
AN ESSAY ON
ARISTOTLE’S ONTOLOGY
Aryeh Kosman
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts • London, En gland
2013
Copyright © 2013 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-674-07286-2 (alk. paper)
Contents
Preface vii
1. Being and Substance 1
2. Motion and Activity 37
3. Activity and Substance 69
4. The Activity of Living Being 87
5. What Something Is 122
6. Something’s Being What It Is 151
7. The First Mover 183
8. Divine Being and Thought 211
9. The Activity of Being 238
Notes 255
Index 273

Preface
This book began a number of years ago when I set out to collect
some papers about Aristotle that I had written— papers that are
scattered in various journals and collections—a nd to read them with a
former student. In the course of the collection and subsequent reading,
I was struck by several ideas that informed these papers, ideas that I still
thought to be good ideas and of interest, but ideas that wanted develop-
ment, both in themselves and in relation to one another. The fi rst con-
cerned the role in Aristotle’s thinking of the notion of energeia (ejnevr-
geia). I had discussed this notion in par tic u lar in two much earlier
papers. In one, I had argued that a proper understanding of Aristotle’s
account of motion depended upon recognizing that motion is a species
of energeia, and in another, that this recognition would enable us to under-
stand the critical role of energeia in the argument of the Metaphysics.
But in these early papers I had not properly understood the nature of
energeia, nor, as a consequence, had I understood its role in Aristotle’s
argument. What I saw as an emblem of my misunderstanding, or perhaps
as constitutive of it, or perhaps as a cause of it, was the fact that I had, like
most people, almost always rendered energeia in Eng lish as actuality. I
was in good company in this choice of translation, but I had come to rec-
ognize it as a mistake. That recognition had not come all at once. In
vii
viii Preface
1984, I allowed in a footnote that “I’d like ‘activity’ to be heard through-
out my readings of ‘actuality.’ ”1 But in later papers I was more resolute. I
recognized that Aristotle’s ontology requires us to read energeia as a
mode of activity. The translation of energeia as actuality fostered the
repre sen ta tion of that concept in modal terms, terms that contrast the ac-
tual with the merely potential and lead us to think of realization as the
making actual of a possibility. That repre sen ta tion, I came to see, ob-
scures what is fundamental in Aristotle, and it must yield to one in which
the paradigmatic realization is the exercise of a capacity.
I initially set out in this work to consider the role that energeia must be
seen to play once that mistake has been corrected. My aim was to explore
Aristotle’s understanding of activity and to reveal the centrality of that
understanding to his developed ontology, where by activity I mean to
designate what is expressed in Aristotle’s Greek by the term energeia.
Along the way the work became, for better or worse, a more ambitious
and a more general interpretation of Aristotle’s ontology; and that is what
this essay is.
My practice of using, for the most part, activity to translate energeia
and ability or capacity to translate its correspondent term dunamis is not
unique, but it replaces the much more common practice of Eng lish
translation and scholarship to which I referred above and which I had
earlier followed, the practice that renders energeia as actuality and du-
namis as potentiality.
This customary practice, as I indicated, skews our understanding of
Aristotle. It leads to an emphasis on notions of change and otherness
rather than what are for Aristotle the conceptually and ontologically prior
notions of being and self- identity. By so doing—b y emphasizing becoming
rather than being, potentialities and their actualization rather than ca-
pacities and their exercise—i t has contributed to a subtle misreading of
Aristotle’s argument, most centrally in the Metaphysics but throughout
his writing in general.
The translations of energeia by activity and dunamis by ability or ca-
pacity are of course not perfect. No choice for rendering these terms in
En glish could hope to be completely satisfactory, for they have no exact
Eng lish counterpart. A widespread but not always happy strategy of
translators in dealing with the fact that there is rarely perfect semantic
Preface (cid:2) ix
congruity between terms of diff erent languages is the use of diff erent
words in diff erent contexts to render the complex semantic fi eld of a for-
eign term relative to En glish. Such a strategy purchases felicity in par tic-
ul ar contexts at the cost of obscuring a larger argument. Sometimes that
obscuring is limited to a specifi c text; translations of Plato’s Charmides,
for example, faced with the formidable task of representing swfrosuvnh
(sophrosyne) in Eng lish may use diff erent translations of the term through-
out the course of the dialogue, revealing perhaps more clearly the sense of
each passage but obscuring the larger progression of Plato’s argument.2
Sometimes the obscuring occurs on a much larger scale. The transla-
tion, for example, of Aristotle’s Greek ousia as substance contrasts with a
common (and rather happier) translation of that term in Plato’s dialogues
as being. Whate ver one may think of the superiority of one or the other
translation, even given diff erent contexts, the shift masks an important
continuity in thought from Plato to Aristotle. The Greekless reader has
little sense of the fact that Aristotle’s inquiry into substance is a sequel to
and continuation of aspects of Plato’s concern with being, and that the
question of the Metaphysics concerning the nature of substance is a cousin
to questions asked throughout the dialogues concerning the nature of
being.
Still, it is tempting to employ this strategy, and to render energeia
sometimes as activity and other times as actuality. It is also tempting to
fi nesse the issue of translation altogether by using Aristotle’s own term
energeia. But I intend to resist these temptations, and to avoid strategies
that might thus obscure the force of Aristotle’s argument for the English-
speaking reader. And since a central part of my argument will be that
activity is, all things considered, the best En glish translation of Aristot-
le’s term, it is the translation I will standardly use. I hope to make it
convincing.
The question of how best to translate energeia is, as should be obvi-
ous, an issue of philosophical interpretation and not merely, as it w ere, of
rhetorical felicity. The translation of philosophical terms so shapes our
reading and our thinking as a hermeneutical community as to inform
globally the interpretive and theoretical understanding of substantive
views. Consider a parallel case with another of Aristotle’s terms. For many
years, it was standard to translate episteme (ejpisthvmh) by knowledge,