Metaphysics IX, Reading 1: Substance, the Categories, and the Senses of Ability (Active and Passive Potency)

Orientation #

He opens reading one of Book Nine, recalling Aristotle’s own recapitulation of Books Seven and Eight (substance) and saying “like I was saying last time” about the rise from a more particular to a wholly universal treatment of ability and act. The preceding class finished Book Eight, reading five, on what unites matter and form.

The class, in order #

1. Substance as the first being (“the first being to which all the other categories”) #

The point: Book Nine follows on the treatment of substance, which is first among the figures of predication. Quantity, quality, towards-what, where, when are all said according to the thought of substance — quantity is the measure or size of substance, quality its disposition; their definitions unfold that of substance.

• The ten highest genera are enumerated in only two places he knows: the Categories and Topics I — same ten, same order, except the first is called ousia (substance) in one and to ti esti, “what it is,” in the other. That shows how we arrive at the category substance.
• The figures of predication are distinguished by the ways something can be said of individual substances — of Socrates or Socrates’ dog: by what they are, by how big they are, by how they are (healthy or sick), where, when.
• Everyday recognition of the distinction: what is my pet — a dog or cat; how big is it — the tiny dog against the one that almost knocks you over.

2. Trinitarian aside: one thing or three? (“are the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit one thing or three things”) #

The point: knowing there are different kinds of thing dissolves an apparent contradiction.

• The persons are distinguished towards one another (relation); taken absolutely, you speak of the divine substance or nature.
• Because there is no difference between each Person and the divine nature, the three are one thing, namely God. Denying a real distinction among them is heresy — “real” from res, thing: three things.
• Reply to the sophist: Boethius — the only categories carried over to God are substance and relation. One thing absolutely, three things in respect of being towards each other. If “thing” had only one meaning, you would be in a contradiction.
• Greek of John 1: “the Word was pros ton theon” — pros ti is exactly Aristotle’s word for relation, Latin ad aliquid; our translations say “with.” He notes that neither in Thomas’s Commentary on John (quoting Augustine, Chrysostom) nor in Thomas himself does awareness of the Greek word appear; “I can’t be the first man to have noticed this.”
• Student: is Boethius starting dogmatically from belief in the Trinity? Answer: Augustine saw it first and most fully, Boethius follows Augustine, Thomas follows both. Augustine is the greatest mind among the Fathers though without much access to Aristotle. Aside: the Catechism now cites Augustine even more than Thomas; Augustine and Thomas stand to theology a little as Plato and Aristotle to philosophy.

3. The two main divisions of being, and the plan of Book Nine (“by ability and act, and by doing”) #

The point: besides the division by figures of predication, being is divided by ability and act — the subject of Book Nine.

• Wisdom treats being as being mainly as substance in Books Seven and Eight, and as ability and act in Book Nine.
• Aristotle begins with “the ability which is said most properly, although not the most useful towards what we want now”: readings 1–4 take act chiefly as motion, and ability in reference to motion or change. Shakespeare: “Things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stir.” So the act most known to us is the least actual act, motion itself.
• Readings 5–6 see act in a wholly universal way, and so disclose further senses of ability — ability and act are found even in immaterial things; in God, pure act only; in the angels or separated substances, some kind of ability and act.
• Ability and act stand to being something as matter and form to things that move, but matter and form are more particular; there are other kinds of act.
• A third part will treat the order of ability and act: in almost every way act is before ability — the beginning of realizing that the first of all things is pure act, that God is pure act.

4. Why the rise to universality is hard (“whatever is must be somewhere”) #

The point: our mind starts from a particular, material grasp of being and only with difficulty rises to a universal one — the same pattern as with the one (from the one that begins number to the one convertible with being).

• The early Greeks identified the causes of natural things with the causes of being; in Physics IV on place he reports their opinion that whatever is must be somewhere, and if not somewhere, does not exist — making being-in-place a property of being as being. The man in the street would agree.
• Thomas, following Avicenna, says being is the first thing our mind understands — but sometimes more explicitly says it is being considered in sensible things. Cajetan’s scholastic phrase: ens concretum quidditati sensibili [ed.: as he gives it, “ens concretum in quidditate sensibili”].
• “It’s hard for our mind to separate things that, in our experience, never separate.” Only if one has reason to think there are immaterial things can the mind separate being from being-in-place.
• Student: were the early Greeks speaking of place in a particular or general way — something moving across the table is in the room but not in a definite place? Answer: yes, you can see it is not a definite place, but that does not change their basic thinking; they think these things are in place in some way and cannot rise above it.

5. Translating dunamis: “ability” (“ability and to be able are said in many ways”) #

The point: dunamis (Latin potentia) is best rendered “ability,” not “power.”

• Dunamis survives in English only in “dynamo,” “dynamite.”
• The first sense of dunamis is active — the ability to act upon or move another — but the word is also moved over to the ability to undergo. The English “power” does not move to the passive sense (Latin distinguishes potentia activa / potentia passiva); “ability,” and still more clearly “able,” does. Hence “abilities of the soul” rather than “powers of the soul.”
• Parallel case: paschein / passio. “To suffer” captures the first meaning but in English is stuck on being acted upon harmfully (the Passion of our Lord), whereas the Greek and Latin move to receiving what is not painful, even what perfects. So he translates paschein by “to undergo” — though “he’s undergone a lot” still carries some of the bad.

6. Senses to be set aside as (nearly) equivocal (“let us leave aside whichever of these are called abilities equivocally”) #

The point: some uses of “ability/power” are purely or almost purely equivocal, connected only by metaphorical likeness.

• Geometry: three to the second power, three to the third power.
• Logic: “able” where the predicate is not incompatible with the subject — man is able to be white; man is not able to be a dog.
• All the senses treated here are equivocal by reason, not purely equivocal, and all refer back to the ability that is the beginning of some motion or operation.

7. The first two senses: active and passive ability (“the beginning of change in another as other”) #

The point: the primary sense is the ability to act upon or move another; the second, the ability to undergo, a beginning in the one being changed, when acted upon by another as other.

• Berquist in the ring with Cassius Clay: you would see ability only in Clay, none in Berquist — yet Berquist is beatable, breakable, bustable. The word “able” is being used, and that use answers to the passive ability, which refers back to Clay’s ability to beat him.
• The pianist and the piano: ability is attributed first to the pianist, not to the piano; yet the piano is playable — the keys don’t stick. Aside: Benedict XVI and his brother are pianists; a piano had to be brought to the North Italian chalet, which “was full of Mozart every evening” (Catholic World Report) — “I got Paul the Sixth there for Shakespeare, and I got Benedict the Sixteenth for Mozart.”
• The names are concrete: acting upon, undergoing — taken from the spatial image of being above.
  • His little nephew (left with him while his brother Richard and wife hunted an apartment): a tower taller than the boy drew admiration, one shorter than him he knocked over with contempt. What is taller might act upon him.
  • The man in the bar who rises off his stool to his full height; hammering nails into a ceiling tires the arm, but you do it better from above.
  • Antony on Caesar “the day he overcame the Nervii” — overcome, from being above; likewise “underdog.”
  • Since understanding is an undergoing, matter is imagined as underlying and form as above it — natural, because the form in the matter results from the agent acting upon the matter.
• It is the passive ability we deny of God; omnipotence is the active sense — though God’s ability is not merely to act upon something but to create, with nothing given to act upon.

8. The third sense, and doing well (“the firm disposition not to undergo change towards the worse”) #

The point: a third sense is negative — the firm disposition not to be corrupted or changed for the worse by another as other — and two further senses add “well.”

• The image again in “able”: something is durable, able to endure the weather without being corrupted. Less important than the first two, but like the second it refers back to the first.
• The thought of the first ability is in all these definitions: “beatable” means something can beat him; paper is “burnable” by fire, referring back to the fire’s ability.
• Abilities are said of acting upon or undergoing, or of doing so well — and the definition of playing the piano well includes the ability to play the piano.
  • Mrs. Berquist (his mother) asked on the phone if she was the Mrs. Berquist who sings: “Yes, I do sing — I don’t think you’d want me for your wedding.” His father-in-law [ed.: so the transcript; possibly “my father”]: “people who can’t sing usually don’t.” Asked by his friend Juan Maria whether he was able to speak French, the answer would be no, though he can say a few things.
  • Thomas’s example: wood is burnable, but wet wood is not burnable well.
  • His typing: self-taught — “you have a fool for a teacher if you teach yourself” — and the old typewriter key that struck faint, so you had to back up and hit it three or four times. The key did react, but not well: another sense.
• He counts five senses of ability: to act upon, to undergo, to resist being acted upon, to act upon well, to be acted upon well. The most important distinction remains active/passive.

9. Are the two abilities one? (“in some way… so connected that they seem to be one ability”) #

The point: active and passive ability are ordered one to the other and so seem one, but they are in different subjects and are never the same ability.

• The piano’s ability is an ability to be played by the pianist; the two are united in order, but the one is in the pianist, the other in the piano.
• Harder case: one thing with parts, one part acting on another — but there is still a distinction of parts.
• Anaxagoras’s fragment: mind must be separated from things to order them; mixed up with them it could not rule.
  • The impartial judge — impartial literally means not a part of; a judge with a financial interest in one company should excuse himself. Likewise a priest made bishop cannot stay buddy-buddy with his former fellows, or his judgment is corrupted.
  • Objection: how then can Anaxagoras say mind is self-ruling, as logic shows it is? Solution, as before: a country’s self-rule means one part, the government, rules the others; a self-controlled man’s reason rules his emotions. Within reason, the distinction comes from Socrates — men mix up what they know with what they don’t; separate them, and what you know rules what you don’t. Knowing the length and width rules what you say about the area; reason is ruled in the conclusion by the premises, in the less known by the more known.
• So too self-motion: a living thing moves itself, but mover and moved are not without all distinction — there is always some distinction of parts.

10. Inability as lack, and the senses of “lack” (“inability and unable is a lack”) #

The point: every ability is opposed to an inability of the same and according to the same; inability is a lack contrary to such an ability — e.g. the male said to be impotent.

• Student: is lack in the strict sense a privation? Answer: privation is the Latin word for lack — something that should be there but isn’t. In a broad, loose sense a stone lacks life; but since a stone is not apt to have life, that is not lack in the strictest sense. The strictest sense is the non-being of something you are able to have and should have — the lack that is really something bad.
• Parallel from logic on strict and loose senses: Porphyry’s property — to only one species, to every member, always. Half of four is a property of two (only, every, always). “Less than ten” belongs to two always and to every two, but not only to two. “Logician” belongs only to man (no other animal is a logician, because of his reason), but not to every man and not always.
• Asides: George Bernard Shaw — the average man thinks two or three times a year. Oscar Wilde’s definition — “the irrational animal that gets angry when called upon to live in accordance with the dictates of reason.” Calling man the rational animal means he has reason, not that he uses it. Aristotle (he thinks in the Politics rather than the Ethics) criticises the early Greeks for explaining how animals and men know but not how they are deceived, which is more common. Reported of Augustine: the only part of logic worth teaching is the part on mistakes and errors — “I never found the text of Augustine, so I don’t know whether that’s a quote or not.”

He breaks here before the second meeting.

His words #

• “figures of predication” — the division of being by the ways something is said of individual substances [ed.: the categories].
• “what it is” / to ti esti — the Topics’ name for the first category, elsewhere ousia, substance.
• “towards another” / pros ti, ad aliquid — relation.
• “ability” [ed.: potency, dunamis, potentia] — preferred to “power,” because “ability/able” moves to the passive sense as “power” does not.
• “to undergo” [ed.: to be acted upon, paschein, passio] — preferred to “to suffer,” which is stuck on the harmful sense.
• “equivocal by reason” vs. “purely equivocal” — the senses treated here vs. geometrical “power” and logical “able.”
• “lack” [ed.: privation] — in the strictest sense, the non-being of what one is able to have and should have.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics].

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, reading 1, paragraphs 1–4 (handout pp. 1–2) — substance as first being; ability and act announced; the senses of ability; inability as lack.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Categories; Topics I — the two enumerations of the ten genera.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (substance in the definitions of the others); Metaphysics V (the senses of “ability”).
• Aristotle, Physics IV — the predecessors’ opinion on place.
• Aristotle, Politics (he is unsure, perhaps Ethics) — error more natural to man/animal than knowledge in the early Greeks’ accounts.
• Anaxagoras, fragment on mind separated.
• Boethius, on substance and relation as the only categories carried to God; Augustine; Thomas, Commentary on the Gospel of St. John; John 1:1.
• Porphyry, on property.
• Shakespeare (Antony on Caesar and the Nervii; “things in motion sooner catch the eye”); Oscar Wilde; George Bernard Shaw; Cajetan; Avicenna via Thomas.

His questions #

• Are the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit one thing or three things? One thing in the absolute sense (the divine nature), three things as really distinct towards one another.
• Why is “ability” a better translation of dunamis than “power”? Because “able/ability” is moved over to the passive sense and “power” is not.
• What sense of ability answers to saying “Berquist is beatable”? The ability to undergo — which refers back to Clay’s ability to act upon him.
• Would you attribute ability first to the pianist or to the piano? To the pianist; the piano is only playable by him, the second sense.
• How can mind be self-ruling if the ruler must be separated from the ruled? As a country’s self-rule is one part ruling others: within reason, what is known rules what is not, premises rule the conclusion.
• Are the ability to act upon and the ability to undergo one ability? Connected in order so as to seem one, but in different subjects, or at least in different parts — never the same ability.
• Is a stone lacking life? Only in a loose sense; strict lack is the absence of what one is apt to and should have.
• Is it a property of man to be a logician? Only man is, so it is connected with his nature, but not every man and not always — a looser sense of property.
• Is the saying about logic really from Augustine? Left open — “I never found the text.”