Metaphysics IX, Readings 1–3: Kinds of Ability, the Megarian Error, and Why Motion Seems Most Real

Orientation #

He is working through his own handout of Metaphysics Book Nine in numbered “readings”: today the third and fourth readings (handout pp. 3–4), after recalling the first and second. He says the class will see the priority of act “more clearly in the middle, in the third part,” and takes a break at the end. The neighbouring classes also treat Metaphysics IX on rational and non-rational powers.

The class, in order #

1. The five meanings of ability, reviewed (“in the first reading, we distinguished at least five meanings”) #

• (1) Active ability: the ability to act upon or move another — “a beginning or source of motion or change in another as other.” This is fundamental.
• (2) Its reverse: the ability to be moved or acted upon; defined by reference to (1).
• (3) The ability we mean by durable: the ability to resist being acted upon by what would corrupt you.
• (4) and (5): the ability to do something well, and to undergo well. Moist wood is burnable, but not burnable well.
• Boundary case he puts to himself: “Am I able to speak French?” In the first sense yes, in the second no — so a friend can ask when he will learn to speak it.
• Aristotle’s before-and-after at the end of the first reading: you can have the ability to do something without the ability to do it well, but not the ability to do it well without the ability to do it.

2. Natural vs. rational ability (“the natural ability is limited to one of two contraries”) #

• Natural ability is determined to one of two opposites; rational ability is open to both.
• Paper before the fire: the fire does not hesitate whether to heat or cool — it burns. Patient before the doctor: the medical art can heal or sicken (the Nazi doctors inoculating prisoners; abortion).
• Logic: he can make a good argument or a sophistical one — “Happiness is the end of life; the end of life is death; therefore happiness is death.”
• Shakespeare’s poetic art writes tragedy or comedy; Mozart writes a happy or a sad melody.

3. But a rational ability is founded in a nature (“something Aristotle doesn’t particularly point out”) #

• His own addition to the text: reason and will have a nature, and so are themselves determined to something and not open to all opposites. Reason naturally adheres to one half of some contradictions; the will by natural necessity wills happiness and not misery — it does not choose between them.
• This does not contradict Aristotle, provided the distinction is not taken as absolute (like sweet against bitter). It is rather like two against three: three is two plus one, so it contains what two has and something more; we distinguish by the addition.
• Parallel with his earlier point about a name said somewhat univocally of two things: the one with nothing noteworthy in addition keeps the common name, the other gets a new one. So man is distinguished against animal, but man is an animal — a living body with sensation — with the noteworthy addition of reason; the beasts keep the name “animal.” (Compare the analogy of natures to numbers from the eighth book.)
• The moderns misunderstand this: for Sartre the will is completely undetermined, completely free, even with respect to the end; for Mill reason is never naturally determined to anything. “This is a very serious mistake,” and it comes from misunderstanding the character of that distinction.

4. What today’s readings do (“he’s going to address himself to a couple of mistakes”) #

Third and fourth readings: ability and act in the same subject. He refutes two mistakes — the first thoroughly, since it needs it more; the second briefly. Along the way Aristotle touches on the fact that the first meaning of “act” is really motion, and that motion seems the most real thing — “that’s where the kids want to go, where the action is.”

5. The Megarians, and modern determinism (“a thing is able to act only when it is acting”) #

• The position (Megara, a city in Greece): he who is not building is not able to build; only the one building, while he builds.
• Thomas suggests, and he agrees, that the Megarians may be moved by something like modern determinism: everything necessary, no contingency.
• Why determinism arose first in the most mathematical, physical sciences: applying pure mathematics to the natural world carries over the necessity found in mathematics. In Euclid the interior angles of a triangle are necessarily equal to two right angles, one necessity after another. So if you think the natural world can be understood simply mathematically, you get complete determinism — Galileo, Copernicus, Newton; and biologists and psychologists took it as a mark of being scientific. Freud on dreams: even a dream is made completely determined. Aristotle argued against this in Book Six.
• His own illustration: he is sitting now; on this view it was not possible for him to be standing or lying down, because that would deny the necessity.

6. Four absurdities following on the Megarians (“it is not hard to see the absurd things that follow”) #

1. A man would acquire and lose an art many times a day. For to be a builder is to be able to build; but arts are acquired only by learning, and lost only by forgetfulness, by suffering some ill, or by time — not by the thing’s being destroyed, “for it always is.” So when the builder pauses he will not have the art; how will he get it back the instant he builds again? The pianist who pauses would lose and suddenly reacquire the ability to play. Absurd, since acquiring an art takes time and losing one takes sickness or time.
2. It asserts the position of Protagoras about soulless things: nothing will be cold or hot or sweet or sensible at all when no one is sensing. He likens it to Berkeley’s esse est percipi. The modern form: is there a sound in the forest if nobody hears it? To say no is to deny that there is an ability there — able to be heard though no one hears. So the sugar is not sweet when no one tastes it, and the birds are not singing if no one listens.
3. Stronger still: nothing will have sense unless it is sensing — so he is blind whenever he does not see; the same thing will be blind many times a day and deaf many times. “This will undo the miracles of our Lord, right? One miracle after another.”
4. It takes away motion and becoming. If what lacks ability is impossible, then what has not come to be will not be able to come to be; and one who says that what is impossible to come to be is or will be speaks falsely. So the standing will always stand and the sitting always sit: “if I am not able to stand up now, I will never succeed in standing up.”

• Conclusion of the text: if such things cannot be said, ability and act are other; these thinkers make them the same. “Hence it is no small thing they are seeking to take away.” So something is able to be when it is not, and able not to be when it is — he is actually sitting, yet able to be standing and able not to be sitting; likewise able to walk and not walk.

7. Two corollaries: the possible, and act named from motion (“act seems to be especially motion”) #

• That is possible in which, if the act it is said to have ability for existed, nothing impossible would follow. Nothing impossible about his standing now.
• “But the next paragraph is very important here”: the word “act,” later placed upon perfection and other things, comes most of all from motion, for act seems especially to be motion. Shakespeare: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.”

8. Compared with the division of being by the figures of predication (“is substance something sensible as such?”) #

• The other division of being follows the ways things are said of individual substances, and is helped by logic; it ends in substance as the fundamental meaning of being. But substance is not sensed as such — what you sense as such are qualities and quantities. Hence the moderns’ difficulty.
• Descartes identifies material substance with extension, i.e. substance with quantity — as the Pythagoreans and perhaps the Platonists tended to. His joke: Descartes never grew up, since growing up means that one and the same individual substance takes on different sizes — little Johnny or Mary has grown, the marks going up the wall, but Johnny is more fundamental than Johnny’s height.
• Under the division into ability and act, act is the fundamental meaning, ability being said by reference to act. And “being” is not said equally of act and ability as a genus is: animal is said equally of dog and cat, a dog no more an animal than a cat; but being is said of act before ability. Our speech shows it: you say flatly “I am sitting,” but of standing you must qualify — “I am able to be standing,” “I am standing in ability.”
• Among the meanings of act, motion is the most known, a common sensible (second book on the soul), very striking to the senses.
• Modern consequences of losing substance: Bertrand Russell — the accidents of Mr. Smith have no more need of a substance to exist in than the earth has need of an elephant to rest upon; what is left is a collection of accidents with no real unity. Einstein, used to hypotheses, treats substance as a hypothesis — hence his joke that Einstein’s wife is a hypothesis uniting a number of sounds and sensations. Berkeley denies material substance, keeping spiritual substance, and then the human soul goes too.

9. Why motion seems most real, and why it is least actual (“motion is the act which is most known to us, but least actual”) #

• The moderns do not deny motion; they are back in Heraclitus — all things flow, nothing abides. This is dialectics in Hegel and Marx: reality is fluid, nothing permanent; the existentialists say man has no nature, only a history; process philosophy.
• Jokes showing how people actually think that motion is doing something:
• Grant applications: travelling from library to conference gets funded; staying in your room to think looks like doing nothing.
• The philosopher’s wife knows not to disturb him while his eyes move over the lines, but comes in with small talk when he looks up — though that is probably the most important moment, when what was read is sinking in.
• The danger of the computer: jumping from thing to thing rather than looking again and again at one paragraph. He recalls keeping one sentence from Monsignor Dionne’s class in his head for a day.
• Students think they have done something if they turn many pages; spending an hour on one sentence — his “Royal Fragment” of Heraclitus — looks like going nowhere.
• But motion is the least actual of acts: walking to the wall, part of the motion is always over and part always to come; none of it is ever fully actual — otherwise he would be in two places at once.
• Aristotle’s confirmation: we do not attribute motion to what does not exist, though we say other things of non-beings — they are understood and desired. What is not cannot move or do anything.
• Children want to be moving all the time; Aristotle praises the invention of the rattle, which keeps them occupied; the mobile over the crib.
• The reversal: in the first argument for the existence of God you reason from motion, the act most known to us and least actual, to the unmoved mover, pure act, most actual and least known to us — the supreme example of Aristotle’s remark that what is more known to us is less knowable in itself, and what is least known to us most knowable.
• Hegel: “the history of philosophy is philosophy” — the historical process is the reality. Student: Did Karl Rahner get into that in theology? He: Could be, I think so — that you must understand the whole history of theology to be a theologian, so that the rest of us are dilettantes, and nobody can do it. Likewise American universities outside symbolic or mathematical logic teach the history of philosophy — “succeeding and succeeding, but never succeeding.”

10. The opposite mistake: that everything is possible (“the false and the impossible are not the same thing”) #

• Some say everything is possible even though some things will never be — a square able to be a circle, but never so. They do not understand ability: if something is possible, nothing impossible follows from positing it; what involves contradiction is therefore not possible.
• The Greek geometers’ example: one who does not admit the impossible says the diagonal is able to be measured — though the diagonal of the square is shown to be incommensurable with the side — but will never be measured.
• Distinction: the false and the impossible are not the same. “It is false that you stand now, but not impossible.”
• The last paragraph of p. 4: if “if A is so, then B is so” is true, and A is possible, then B is possible — but “possible” here is used in the broad sense, as Thomas explains.
• Narrow sense: the possible opposed to the necessary is what is able to be and not be; the necessary is not able not to be.
• Broad sense: the necessary must be said to be able to be, since otherwise it would be impossible to be — a contradiction, that what is necessary to be is impossible to be. So there is an equivocation on “impossible.”
• He notes that this error is not so important to refute as the first. Break.

His words #

• ability [ed.: potency, dynamis] — in five senses; chiefly a source of motion or change in another as other.
• act — opposed to ability; a word placed later upon perfection, taken most of all from motion.
• durable — his name for the third sense of ability: ability to resist being acted upon by what would corrupt.
• reading — his numbered division of the handout text of Book Nine.
• Megarians — those of Megara who say a thing is able only when acting.
• esse est percipi — Berkeley’s formula, cited as like Protagoras.
• figures of predication — the other division of being, ending in substance.
• common sensible — what motion is, from the second book on the soul.
• the Royal Fragment — his own nickname for a famous fragment of Heraclitus.
• possible in the broad sense — including the necessary, as opposed to the impossible.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, third and fourth readings (his handout, pp. 3–4): the Megarians; the four absurdities; act named from motion; the diagonal; false vs. impossible; if A then B.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI — argument against complete necessity.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII — natures of things are like numbers.
• Aristotle, On the Soul II — motion as a common sensible (inferred locus).
• Thomas’s commentary — on the Megarians’ determinism; on “possible” in the broad sense.
• Shakespeare, “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs.”
• Protagoras; Berkeley; Descartes; Russell; Einstein; Heraclitus; Hegel; Marx; Sartre; Mill; Freud; Galileo, Copernicus, Newton; Karl Rahner.

His questions #

• Am I able to speak French? — In the first sense yes, in the second no.
• Is there a sound in the forest if nobody is there to hear it? — To say no is to deny a real ability to be heard; the Megarian must say no.
• Am I able to stand up now or not? — Yes; else I would never succeed in standing up, and motion and becoming would be taken away.
• Is substance something sensible as such? — No; what is sensed as such are qualities and quantities.
• How much of my motion, walking to the wall, is ever actual? — None; part is always past and part to come.
• Does what is not move or do anything? — Impossible; though non-beings can be understood and desired.
• Is the diagonal able to be measured? — No; it is incommensurable with the side, and what involves contradiction is not possible.
• Did Karl Rahner get into that in theology? (student) — Could be, I think so: one would have to know the whole history of theology to be a theologian, which nobody can do.