Act and Ability: Being versus Becoming and Aristotle's Definition of Motion

Orientation #

He refers back to “the first books of Natural Hearing” (form and lack, contraries, the tenth reading) and to the twelfth and thirteenth readings where “becoming” replaced “change”; the four kinds of causes were treated “earlier”. At the end: “we’ll finish up the second reading at least of motion, and then we’re going to look at time,” which matters for theology because of eternity. The verified handout page is DHB Vol III, The School of Aristotle, p. 185. The neighbouring classes treat Physics III on motion and the passage to place in Book IV.

The class, in order #

1. Where act and ability are first known (“there is something in act and something in ability”) #

The point: we first distinguish ability from act through motion and doing.

• Student: when we see someone do something, we know it was able to. He adds: or when we see something change.
• Him in the parking lot vs. now in the room: out there he was not in the room but was able to be.
• Clay moulded from sphere to cube and other shapes: we see the clay is able to take on many shapes; the distinction between ability and act is made “through motion”.

2. Subdividing what is in act by the categories (“this something, another so much, another such”) #

The point: “this something” (hoc aliquid), “so much”, “such” are the categories met in the Categories, and different questions correspond to them.

• A man, a cat, a tree in the room: “What is this?” — a man, a cat, a tree, a stone. “This something” = an individual substance you can point out; man the best example.
• “How big / how tall / how many men in the room?” — quantity.
• “How are you today?” (sick, healthy, sad, angry; “are the men of this country all villains?”) — quality; he cites Aristotle: “such as a man is, so does the end appear to him”.
• “Where are you?” — where. Ten in all; he will not “rehash the categories”.
• Aside: “how much” asks quantity, “how” alone asks quality; we usually hear “how are you” as health “because we’re such materialists”.

3. Towards another, and why it is singled out (“how am I towards you”) #

The point: Aristotle singles out “towards something” (pros ti, ad aliquid; abstractly “relation”) because of its special connection with motion.

• “How am I towards you?” a teacher, a friend; towards my wife, a husband; towards my children, a father.
• Some relations rest on quantity (four is double of two, half of eight); others are tied up with acting upon and undergoing (father because he generated, son because generated).
• The glass: it is able to undergo motion, he is able to act upon it; “the mover is mover of the movable, and the movable is movable by the mover”.
• Motion will be defined by ability and act, but the kinds of motion are tied to categories: change of place (where), growth (quantity), becoming hot (quality).

4. Four kinds of thing, but also four meanings of “thing” (“motion is not beside things”) #

The point: to read “motion is not beside things” one must see that substance, quantity, quality, relation are not only four kinds of being but four meanings of “being”, as with the four causes — “a very subtle thing to see”. Distinction: many kinds that are also many meanings vs. many kinds that are not many meanings.

• Parallelogram divided into square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid: four kinds, one meaning — said univocally, “with exactly the same meaning in mind”. Odd and even number: both “a multitude composed of units”, for the same reason. Dog and cat as animal, as quadruped: the same meaning, “one is not more a four-footed animal than the other” (students “get kind of mixed up” here).
• Against this: square and square number (4, 9, not 6, which is oblong; Euclid calls factors “sides”); square as a city square, quadrangle on campus; seeing of the eye, picturing, understanding — “three kinds of seeing” but also three meanings of “to see”, with connections between them.
• Applied to the four categories: “I am a man, I am five foot ten, I am healthy, I am a father, I’m shorter than Jordan” — different kinds of being, but also different meanings.
• Argument that they are not two things in the same sense:
  1. A man and a dog, you and an apple, are two things (first sense).
  2. You and your health: not the same thing — the student sick with flu last week was here but his health was not; yet not two things as you and an apple are.
  3. The shape of the nose: one hesitates to call it “a thing”, but it is “something of a thing”, and “something means something”, so a thing in some way. (Nose and ear can exist apart; nose and its shape cannot.)
• Sign for “being”: entering the room he did not come to be; leaving, he will not cease to be — but he came to be in the room, “I have to add that”. The joke: threatening a student “if you leave this room you will cease to be”, then telling the judge he meant “in the room” — no judge would let him go; nobody understands the words that way.
• Hamlet’s “to be or not to be”: unqualified, it means life and death, being of a substance, not marriage or Denmark. So “being” is not said equally; substance is primary, quantity and quality fuller than towards-another.
• Relation the weakest: taller than his son becomes shorter without any real change in him (immigrant sons towering over fathers); the change is “towards him”.
• Conclusion: “being” and “thing” are equivocal, but “by reason”, not by chance, since the meanings are connected (a substance has size, colours are on the surface, taller/shorter rests on quantity, teacher/student on qualities).
• Student asks him to repeat the two: sometimes distinguishing many kinds of something distinguishes many meanings (name said equivocally, by reason or by chance); other times only many kinds (name said univocally).
• Back to causes: the student who calls the carpenter, not the wood, the cause of the chair hesitates because he has one meaning of “cause” in mind — wood is not a cause in the way the carpenter is.

5. Being and becoming (“difficult to become good”) #

The point: becoming is a still more diminished sense of being than the accidents are, and even non-being is “said to be” — but only in the mind.

• The man in the street would hesitate to call growing, walking, falling “a thing”.
• Readings: in the tenth and eleventh “change” was the word up front; in the twelfth and thirteenth “becoming”. Plato’s dialogues stress being vs. becoming (and non-being).
• Protagoras (who boasts he never fought “with the weapons of my opponent”) tries to catch Socrates contradicting himself: it is difficult to become good, not difficult to be good. No contradiction: hard to get to the top of the mountain, not hard to stand there; hard to come to be in heaven, delightful to be there.
• “Do you depend on your parents for being?” No — his parents are dead and he is not. The table does not depend on the carpenter for being (joke: the poor carpenter who must hold his chairs together). Strictly, we depend on parents and carpenter for becoming; on God for being, as theology shows — a dependence “hidden to us” (St Francis sees it). Hence the definition of cause: responsible “for the being or becoming of another”.
• The puzzle: becoming is not being; but whatever can be said to be is a being; so if becoming is said to be, it is a being — “then there can’t be any becoming in the world, can there?” Reply: becoming is being only in a sense much diminished even beyond quantity, quality, relation; “you’re really stretching the meaning”.
• Worse: is being blind, being ignorant, to be? The hole in the donut “is there”. “Nothing is nothing” is true, “so it is something, namely nothing”. This is the last sentence’s point: non-being is said to be, but only in our mind, which speaks of a non-being as if it were something. “Being” and “thing/something” are equally universal; the problem is easier to see with being and becoming.

6. Becoming is the coming-to-be of one of these (“nothing common to these can be taken”) #

The point: motion is not “another thing” beside the categories; it is the coming to be of a substance, quantity, quality or place.

• Generation is the coming to be of a substance, growing of a quantity, becoming hot of a quality; in relation “you don’t really change” — the change is in the son’s quantity.
• Text: the changing changes according to substance, quantity, quality or place — alteration, growth, locomotion (sometimes “motion” is kept for change of place), generation and its opposite corruption; explicitly in Book Five.
• “Nothing common to these can be taken”: nothing univocal, since “being” is common only equivocally; so there is no motion or change beside the aforesaid.
• Which categories really have change is left to Book Five; he names the four he will show there.
• Growing is not distinct from quantity as quality is from quantity; coming to be somewhere is not another kind of thing as being somewhere differs from being five foot ten. So “becoming” is the helpful word.
• How becoming is a sense of being: as logic is called philosophy because it is the tool for acquiring philosophy, becoming is related to being because it is the coming to be of a being.
• Aside on the Categories: ten predicaments (mainly the first four), antepredicaments, postpredicaments; motion and its four kinds among the postpredicaments.
• Student: what about doing and undergoing? “A special problem that Thomas takes up in the commentary”; left for later, “very difficult”.

7. Form and lack in each category (“each belongs in two ways to all”) #

The point: in each category (or each pair of contraries) there is something more perfect and something imperfect, background for motion as an imperfect act.

• Text: form and lack; white and black; perfect and imperfect; likewise in place. From the first books: even among contraries one is lacking — black almost the absence of colour.
• From the tenth reading: full and empty; dense and rare (a glass of yellow beer vs. a glass of foam at the same price — the rare has less matter in the same volume, dense is to rare as form to lack); mixed and segregated (mixing yields something new not in the segregated).
• Genera divided by contraries with one lacking: motion will not be lack but will involve an imperfect act — coming into the room, he is imperfectly in it.

8. The definition and the three reasons for “as such” (“the act of the able to be as such”) #

The point: act and ability crisscross the categories (able to be five foot ten / actually so; able to be a man, healthy), which lets Aristotle state something common to all motions: “the act of the able to be as such” (alteration the act of the alterable, growing of the growable, decreasing of the decreasable). Three parts: act; of what is able to be; as such (insofar as it is able to be). Aristotle “not always as explicit as he could be”; Thomas in various places brings out three things in the third part.

1. Not any act of what is able. In the hall (in the snow) he is actually a man, a philosopher, a father, and able to be in the room; coming in is his act not insofar as he is a man but insofar as he is able to be in the room. Water on the stove for tea: becoming hot is its act insofar as it is able to be hot, not insofar as it is actually water. Necessary because what is able “can have many acts” accidental to the motion. Thomas sometimes gives this alone.
2. The ability is not fully actualised by the motion: partly in the room, his ability is somewhat actualised; once fully in he can walk around but cannot come in — “the only way I can come in the room now is to go out”. So an imperfect, incomplete act.
3. Ordered to a further act. Is coming into the room the same as standing in the doorway? Both partly in the room, but standing is not motion. “As such” is opposed to “by happening”: standing in the doorway checking IDs, it is accidental whether he comes in further; warm milk for the baby need not become hotter. But so long as he is coming through the doorway it is not accidental that he comes in more — take away the order to a further act and he stops; water becoming hot will be hotter.

• Student: is that expressed by “insofar as it is able to be, insofar as it’s still going to be”? Yes, not the full act it already has. Student: so the last part is “kind of equivocal”? Yes, “in a way covering all three”; otherwise it would not separate motion from everything else.

9. Learning, imperfect knowing, knowing fully (“if you’re not going forward”) #

The point: an easier comparison for the third reason.

• Knowing fully, knowing imperfectly, learning: the two latter both fall short of full knowing, but the ill-disposed student who took the course only for graduation has no intention of knowing more — accidental to imperfect knowing; so long as one is learning, one will know more. Learning is an act of the ability to know “on the way to knowing more”.
• Monsignor Dionne, coming down from Quebec to St Paul, found his old teacher Kasurik wiser each visit while the others were “just where he left them”: Kasurik was still learning — stopping him at the lockers to tell what he had just seen. Others “level off” after formal training.
• Aside: spiritual writers say if you’re not going forward you’re going backwards; Boulet: all this goes away if you don’t keep thinking about it.
• Stop “about five”; next time finish the second reading, then time.

His words #

• ability — his word for potency [ed.: potency].
• this something — hoc aliquid; an individual substance one can point out.
• so much — quantity; such — quality.
• towards something / towards another — pros ti, ad aliquid; “sometimes we use the abstract word relation”.
• univocally — said with exactly the same meaning in mind (logician’s term).
• equivocal by reason vs. by chance — many connected meanings vs. unconnected.
• Natural Hearing — [ed.: Physics].
• readings — [ed.: lectiones] of the commentary (tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, first, second).
• alteration, locomotion, generation, corruption — change of quality, of place, of substance and its opposite.
• form and lack — [ed.: form and privation].
• predicaments, antipredicaments, postpredicaments — the divisions of the Categories.
• the act of the able to be as such — his rendering of the definition; “as such” = “insofar as it is able to be”, opposed to “by happening” [ed.: per accidens].

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics III, first reading: “something in act and something in ability”; “this something, another so much, another such”; “motion is not beside things”; “nothing common to these can be taken”; “each belongs in two ways to all”; and the opening of the second reading, “the act of the able to be as such” (DHB Vol III, The School of Aristotle, p. 185, verified).
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the same (his reasons for the third part of the definition; doing and undergoing deferred). Mentioned
• Aristotle, Categories (the ten; ante- and postpredicaments).
• Aristotle, Physics I, tenth reading (contraries: full/empty, dense/rare, mixed/segregated); twelfth and thirteenth readings (becoming).
• Aristotle, Physics V (which categories have change).
• Plato, Protagoras (difficult to become good / to be good).
• Euclid (“sides” of a number) (inferred locus not given).
• Hamlet, “to be or not to be”.

His questions #

• Where do act and ability first become known to us? Through motion and doing: seeing something do something or change (clay, the parking lot).
• Is the meaning of parallelogram the same when said of square, oblong, rhombus, rhomboid? Yes, said univocally; four kinds, not four meanings.
• Are dog and cat different meanings of animal? No, two kinds of animal with the same meaning.
• Is a man and his health two things? Not the same thing, but not two things in the sense a man and an apple are.
• Are these four kinds of being also four meanings of being? Yes; equivocal by reason, substance the primary sense.
• What does “motion is not beside things” mean? Becoming is not another kind of thing but the coming to be of something in one of the categories.
• Do you depend on your parents for being? No, for becoming; on God for being.
• If becoming is not being, can there be any becoming? Only if being is stretched to a very diminished sense.
• What is the difference between coming into the room and standing in the doorway? Coming in is as such ordered to a further act; standing is not.
• What about doing and undergoing? Left open — Thomas’s special problem, for later.