Metaphysics V, Reading 17: The Senses of Being – Being by Happening, the Ten Categories, Being as True, and Act and Ability

Orientation #

He places the class in “the ninth reading,” the most central reading on the names of the subject of wisdom, whose main name is “being.” He says Aristotle will not spend much time on accidental being “as we’ll see in the sixth book,” and that act and ability will be studied in the ninth book. At the very end he announces the next word: “Let’s turn to the word perfect.”

The class, in order #

1. Accidental being finished: the Christian geometer (“being by happening”) #

• Opening line of the reading proposes the division: being kata symbebēkos vs. being kath’ hauto; the first big paragraph subdivides accidental being.
• Clearest case: two things happen to a third. He is a Christian and he is a geometer; each of these is being per se, but “a Christian geometer” is no such thing — his geometry is not painted white, nothing makes one a white geometer.
• Theological aside (Thomas): God is altogether simple yet universally perfect, so His substance is His knowledge, justice, love. Xenophanes anticipated this: “the whole of God sees, the whole of God hears.” Creatures are the reverse: take away my geometry, my justice, my being Christian and I am extremely imperfect. “This is the condition of the creature, that he has his perfection in actually many things.” Hence: “don’t have too much contempt for accidental being” — it is how a man gets whatever perfection he has. Catechism: to know Him and to love Him are two different things, and you should have both.
• Antonomasia digression: “Why do you call me good? One alone is good” — in Greek with the article, ho agathos, the Good One; likewise “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Aristotle calls Homer “the poet”; the Federalist Papers call Shakespeare “the poet.” Bible, Gospel, Christ are all said by antonomasia. Story: Alcibiades, wanting a Homer, knocked the schoolteacher to the ground when he had none.

2. First group: being by the figures of predication (“the ways of being said of are proportional to the ways of being”) #

• Logic leads us in: some things are said of me by reason of what I am (man, animal, substance); some by reason of something added — how much of me there is (five foot ten), how I am (healthy, white), towards another (grandfather, teacher), by something outside (clothed, in this room).
• The man in the street half sees this: “knee-high to a grasshopper” — you stayed a human being while your size changed.
• This is the division by the ten genera met in the Categories, and more than the other divisions it can be called the division of the kinds of things there are.

3. Second group: being as true, and beings of reason (“that isn’t so”) #

• Being here is what you say when a statement is true; non-being is false. “Purpose is standing now” — “that isn’t so”; “Purpose is sitting” — “it is so.”
• In one way more inclusive than the figures of predication: my humanity and geometry are real and can also be in my mind, but some things have being only in the mind — blindness, death, nothing. Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” treats death as not to be, yet we truly say “John Paul II is dead.”
• But if you want the being in things outside the mind, the figures of predication is what you are interested in.
• Plato’s Sophist problem (via the Greek idiom “to say what is not”; also in Antony and Cleopatra, where the steward will not say what is not about Cleopatra’s hidden jewels): how can you say or think what is not? Pre-Aristotelian Greeks all held you cannot get something from nothing — so they must mean something by nothing.
• His answer: nothing is something in the mind. “What is nothing? It’s nothing” — and that is true. Joke from his undergraduate teacher: “philosophy is the only subject where you get paid for talking about nothing.”
• Blindness looks more real because it has a subject (an animal that by nature should see), but it is still a not-having. Likewise ignorance is not knowledge but the non-being of knowledge — Socrates knew his own ignorance.

4. Third group: being by ability and by act (“this last division is the most universal”) #

• It cuts across the figures of predication: something able to be a man vs. actually a man; able to be a geometer vs. actually one; able to be five foot ten; able to be a grandfather; and likewise able to be in the mind vs. actually there.
• Extends even to God: when in Book Nine we find that act is simply speaking before ability, we are on the way to the first cause as pure act.
• Food: what I eat is not yet human flesh and blood; Aristotle in the book on the soul says food is at first unlike the fed and afterwards like it — an elementary truth in each saying.

5. Digression: the three orders of consideration (“the order of determination”) #

Two things can be said of each order.

• Natural philosophy: general before particular (Physics I, reading 1 — natural things in general, change in general, then place, quality, growth); and towards matter (eight books of Natural Hearing → the Universe → Generation and Corruption; and in living things from the soul towards the body, as Thomas explains in the order of the books at the start of Sense and Sensible). Most of all it is characterized by proceeding towards matter.
• Geometry: simple to composed (point, line, angle, figure; plane before solid; circle to sphere, square to cube — and a cube is not a kind of square, so this is not general-to-particular); and the equal before the unequal (Euclid’s axioms of equality before “the whole is more than the part”; equilateral, then isosceles, then scalene; square first, trapezium last; Book I ends with the Pythagorean theorem, and Book II 12–13 prove the obtuse and acute cases — unequal — from it). Modern mathematics rests on the equation, a name for equality.
• Wisdom: not simple-to-composed but the reverse — water is better known to us than hydrogen, hydrogen than the proton, though the proton is simpler; wisdom moves from composed creatures towards God, the simplest. (St. Teresa of Avila: the closer you get to God the simpler you get.) Its most basic characteristic: going towards the immaterial — Book Three’s dialectic takes matter for granted and asks whether there is a cause besides matter and whether it is only in matter. And it goes from less universal to more universal: Book Nine treats act and ability first in reference to motion, then universally; substance is studied first in material substance, then so as to apply to immaterial things. The two go together — the more universal a thing, the more it can be said of immaterial as well as material things (e.g. “God is one,” very universal, though equivocal by reason).

6. Applying that order to the three groups (“ascending from the less universal to the more universal”) #

• Figures of predication → being as true (which includes all of them, since I can think substance, quantity, quality, relation, and also nothing, blindness, ignorance) → act and ability (which covers real being as well).

7. Back to Book Four: the four senses of being (“Thomas, having pity upon us”) #

• In Book Four Aristotle showed wisdom is about being as being, then asked whether being means more than one thing. Contrast: “bat” (baseball bat, flying mouse) — no science of bat as bat, since one does not help you understand the other. But political philosophy is one knowledge of everything called political, because the government rules the city; and revolution, a change of government, belongs there too.
• Being is equivocal by reason, its fundamental meaning substance. Aristotle’s plethora of meanings Thomas reduces to four: (1) substance; (2) accidents — quantity the measure of substance, quality its disposition, relation how it is towards another; (3) the coming to be or ceasing to be of one of these; (4) non-being such as blindness, even nothing.
• Objection considered: is becoming being at all? Plato divides being, becoming, non-being (science, dialectic, sophistry). Coming to know is not knowing — “if it were, the student would be done before the course is over.” Reply: in coming to know you already have the knowing in an imperfect way, and coming to be really goes on — digestion, learning. (Student aside: “they learn how to be ignorant” — “yes, but in a lesser sense.”) And becoming is always the becoming of a substance or an accident.
• On the fourth sense: “how could you move the word further than that?” — being is now said of non-being; blindness is understood only in reference back to sight, an accident.
• Hence the order in the present reading fits: being of reason not found in things is Book Four’s last sense, so it is appropriately put after the figures of predication. Becoming is not mentioned here, but would fall in between.

8. The being of motion, and the paradox of becoming (“very subtle, right?”) #

• Hegel makes becoming a union of being and non-being; Heraclitus said day and night are the same. Most objections against the axiom that something cannot both be and not be come from motion — so you need natural philosophy to answer them.
• De Koninck, Le paradoxe du devenir par contradiction: is the last instant in which a thing is not a sphere the same as the first instant in which it is? If the same, contradiction; if not, the interval between must be either sphere or not sphere. Thomas’s solution (Physics VI): there is no last instant in which it is not a sphere; when the time of becoming is complete it has become one. “Very subtle.”
• De Koninck shows the same puzzle troubled medieval Eucharistic theology: making the last instant of bread and wine the same as the first instant of the body and blood would be a heresy. When the priest completes the words of consecration it has become the body and blood; there is a first instant of that, but no last instant of bread and wine.
• Motion has a diminished being: part has gone by, part is to come, and no part of it is ever all at once — if it were, I would be in two places at once. Fully actual motion is indivisible, i.e. no motion at all. Same with time: past and future do not exist, and the now has no length. Descartes could not understand motion and gave up defining it; Locke did the same for other reasons — and so cut off the knowledge of God, since the definition of motion is the main starting point for knowing the unmoved mover.

9. Student exchange: is motion (and time) a being of reason? (“has a little bit of that mixed in with it”) #

• Student: is this emotional/motional being just the way we consider it? Aristotle says time would not fully be without the numbering soul.
• He: it has a little of that mixed in, but not simply. Three hours are not together the way three men at the table are, so the mind must take past and future into account — yet there is a foundation in reality for those three hours. It is not simply non-being like blindness or a void; zero is not simply nothing.
• Student: and motion likewise? — Yes, a little like that; it does not have full existence.
• Student: but my existence at a given point is objectively true. — That is being in the sense of substance, and so too my being a geometer, a father, five foot ten; but my walking to the wall, when is that here?
• Student: doesn’t walking involve an observer? — Ulysses to Achilles: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.” Motion grabs the senses, yet it hardly is.

10. The scale of being, restated (“substance is being in a fuller sense than accident”) #

Substance most fully (I came to be when conceived; if I forget geometry I have not ceased to be, but if I die I have); accident less (my being a geometer is all here now); motion still less (my walking is never all here); death, blindness, ignorance not at all in things, but said to be in the sense of true. So Aristotle’s placing being-as-true right after the figures of predication fits Thomas’s order in Book Four, and is also an ascent to the more universal. “It’s amazing this guy can do this. The more you read him, the more you realize how orderly he is.”

His words #

• “Being by happening” — accidental being; kata symbebēkos [ed.: per accidens].
• “Being by itself / through itself / as such” — kath’ hauto, per se.
• “Figures of predication” — the ten genera of the Categories.
• “Ability” and “act” [ed.: potency and act].
• “Being of reason” — what has being only in the mind: nothing, blindness, ignorance, death.
• “Antonomasia” — the figure of speech naming by the eminent instance: ho agathos, “the poet,” Bible, Christ.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: the Physics]; “the four books of the Universe” [ed.: De Caelo].
• “Wisdom” / “Natural Wisdom of Wisdom” — the Metaphysics.
• “Order of determination” (Latin) / “order of consideration.”
• “Equivocal by reason” — many meanings ordered to one, as with “political” and “being.”
• “Diminished sense of being” — of motion and time.

Texts #

Read in class / commented: Aristotle, Metaphysics V, ninth reading on “being” (opening line and last three paragraphs); Thomas’s commentary on it; Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (four senses of being; defence of the axiom, the unread portion).

Mentioned: Aristotle, Metaphysics III (dialectic), VI, IX; Physics I reading 1 and VI; De Caelo, Generation and Corruption, De Anima, Thomas’s prologue to Sense and Sensible; Euclid, Elements I–II; Plato, Sophist; Xenophanes; Charles De Koninck, “Le paradoxe du devenir par contradiction”; Shakespeare, Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, Troilus and Cressida; the Federalist Papers; Matthew 19 (inferred), John “I am the way, the truth and the life”; St. Teresa of Avila; Hegel, Heraclitus, Descartes, Locke.

His questions #

• Is a Christian geometer really anything? — No: to be Christian and to be a geometer are each something, but nothing makes one a Christian geometer; they merely happen to the same subject.
• Can you think about nothing — and if so, is nothing something? — Nothing is something in the mind only; “nothing is nothing” is true, so it has being of reason.
• Which of the three groups of senses is most universal? — Act and ability, since it divides both real being and being in the mind, and extends even to God as pure act.
• Does being mean one thing, so that there can be one science of it? — It is equivocal by reason, like “political”: substance is the first sense and the rest are named by connection with it.
• Is coming to be a kind of being? — Yes, in an imperfect way: the learner already has the knowing imperfectly, and becoming is always of a substance or accident.
• Is the last instant in which a thing is not a sphere the same as the first instant in which it is? — There is no last instant of not-being-a-sphere; only a first instant of being one (Thomas, Physics VI).
• When does my walking from here to the wall exist? — Never all at once; motion has a diminished being, as does time.
• Is motion, like time, simply a being of reason? — No: it has some of that mixed in, since the mind must take past and future into account, but it has a foundation in reality and is not mere non-being.