Metaphysics IX, Readings 9–10: Act Is Better Than Ability, the Transcendentals, and the Ability for Contraries

Orientation #

He opens saying they are “coming to the end of the ninth reading,” where Aristotle showed more manifestly that act is more perfect than ability, and looks ahead to readings ten and eleven, where goodness and then the knowable and true come up. Verified sources: the class reads from his handout on Metaphysics Book Nine, pp. 11–12.

The class, in order #

1. Recap of reading eight: act and ability in one and the same thing (“what comes later in generation is more perfect”) #

Two arguments already given, both taking act and ability in the same thing:

1. What comes later in generation is more perfect; in a thing being developed, what comes later is the act, what comes before is the passive ability. Examples: lumber and bricks are a house only in ability, and forming and arranging them perfects the house; likewise making an apple pie.
2. Ability is for the sake of act (the ability to see is for the sake of seeing), and the end is always more perfect — this is the third meaning of perfect in Book Five, what has reached its end or purpose.

2. Reading nine: act and ability in different things (“that’s more manifest because you are losing different things”) #

Aristotle now compares necessary, eternal, incorruptible things with corruptible things: the corruptible are corruptible because they are able to be and not be, so the incorruptible stand to them as act to ability. It is more manifest this way, since two different things are compared.

Parallels for “blow it up so you can see it”:

• Goods of the soul vs. goods of the body (Socrates in the Apology): hard to see inside one man; easier when you compare man with beast, since the beast shares the goods of the body but not of the soul.
• Republic: that the just man’s soul is better off than the unjust man’s is hard to see, so Socrates compares parts of the soul with parts of the city — rulers to reason, soldiers to the irascible appetite (Greek thumos), common men to the concupiscible — where disorder is more clearly seen to be bad.
• Aristotle’s question whether reason should rule the emotions as a father rules a son or as a master rules a slave: master/slave and father/son are two different men, my reason and my emotions are not.

Aside: in the third paragraph of p. 11 he hints at the third argument for God’s existence in the Summa — from contingent to necessary things to what is necessary through itself.

3. Digression: the transcendentals as subject and properties of wisdom (“the six most universal thoughts, most universal words”) #

Point: to see where “good” and “true” fit in reading ten and eleven, one must see how the six most universal words stand to wisdom. From De veritate q.1 a.1, Thomas following Avicenna: being (first thing the mind understands), thing, one, adequate/“something” (he says the word “adequate” may not be the right translation), true, good.

• being vs. thing: being is taken from to be, existence — nothing can fall outside it, even a being of reason (“nothing is something to talk about”); thing is named more from what it is. Sign: we define definition as “speech making known what a thing is,” not what a being is.
• one and something add nothing real, but add in thought a negation: one adds undivided; something adds distinct from all others, and distinction means one is not the other.
• Being and unity are inseparable: the chair ceases to be if its parts are separated; destroy an army by destroying its order; separate soul from body and I am not. Hence Book Four shows wisdom is about being, then about one.
• Books six–ten track this: accidental being and being in the sense of the true (VI), substance — and one meaning of substance is what a thing is, bringing in “thing” (VII–VIII), act and ability (IX), the one (X).
• In many texts of Thomas and Albert “one” carries both notes: to be one man, my parts are undivided and I am distinct from all of you.
• true and good get their universality from De anima III, the soul is in some way all things: reason and will are in a way infinite, since about every being in or outside the mind there can be knowledge and truth, and being as such is desirable.
• Where do they belong? Logically they have the place of properties — unusual properties, not really differing in reality from their subject. As geometry shows the triangle as such has its interior angles equal to two right angles, so being as such is good and knowable/true. “Kind of a subtle thing to see that.”
• Support from Book Five’s division of the words into three groups, since every reasoned-out knowledge has a subject, its properties, and causes: (i) names of beginnings/causes — beginning, cause, element, nature, necessary (a complete cause has its effect follow necessarily); (ii) one and being and their parts — substance, quantity, quality; (iii) beginning with perfect. In class he normally takes one word from each: beginning, being, perfect.

4. Being as such is good; the bad is fundamentally non-being (“the bad is fundamentally a non-being”) #

Augustine saw this, but Aristotle long before; Augustine exaggerates: “sin is nothing, and the man who sins becomes nothing.” This harmonizes with the later doctrine that the first cause is “I am who am,” in whom there is nothing bad: things are like God and good insofar as they have being. But we do not reason from God here, because God is less known than act and ability.

The bad is not non-being period, but a lack: the non-being of something one is able to have and should have, when one should have it.

• The mug does not see, but that is not bad: by what it is the mug is not apt to have sight. If you or I, or the dog or cat, were blind, there would be a lack of what we are able and should have — bad, though not morally bad.
• Student: a bad human act is “non-rational.” He accepts: it lacks the measure or order of reason, an unmeasured or disordered act. His standing example: the house on fire — grab my books first and then the baby if time allows? A disordered act, disordered love, since the baby is better and should be saved first. Also eating or drinking too much.
• Three senses of bad, in order of priority: (1) the lack itself (blindness); (2) what has the lack (a blind man is bad because blindness is bad); (3) what causes it (my poking your eye is bad because it blinds you).

Ability is also good, since it is capable of act — but not as good as the act.

5. Reading ten read: one ability for contraries (“the ability for contraries then exists at the same time”) #

Text read: act is better and more honourable than the good ability, because whatever is said according to ability is capable of contraries — the same thing is able to be healthy and to be sick, at rest and in motion, to build and to knock down, to be built and to fall down. The ability for contraries exists at the same time; the contraries cannot. “Therefore, while the good must be one of them, the ability is both alike or neither. The act, therefore, is better.”

His chart: to be healthy / able to be healthy — able to be sick / to be sick. In the good, act is better than ability; in the bad, the act would be worse than the ability. But since it is one and the same ability for both, the ability has an affinity to the bad, and so cannot be as good as act.

6. The trap: “isn’t to be sick equally as much an act as to be healthy?” (“this is where you got to be careful”) #

“Aristotle’s way of showing this you got to be careful of, because if you misunderstand it, you won’t see later on what the bad really is.” Strictly, the bad is a negation (the class supplies the word), hence not an act at all.

Metaphorical uses of completeness and of ability:

• Book Five’s chapter on perfect gives a metaphorical sense: “my house has been completely burned,” “I’m completely ruined” — complete said of what is most incomplete. Likewise a car is “totaled” (from whole, and whole and perfect mean almost the same): as the complete has all its parts, the ruined has none.
• Is being able to be mistaken an ability God lacks? Strictly the ability to be mistaken is a lack of ability. So too people think man freer than God because man can sin.
• Signs that ability-to-be-healthy and ability-to-be-sick are not two abilities: I can walk and talk, walk and see, see and hear at the same time, because those are distinct abilities; I cannot be healthy and sick at once. He states the puzzle honestly: since abilities are known from acts, and to be sick and to be healthy look like different acts, one expects two abilities — and then rethinks: this is a strange ability, an ability for opposites.
• Student’s suggestion: is this because being sick and healthy are undergoings rather than doings? He grants it, but says the decisive point is that they are opposed, as walking and talking are not.
• Matter confirms it (from natural philosophy): clay molded sphere, then cube, then pyramid. If these were really separate abilities, why can it not be all three at once? One ability for all, and taking on one means ceasing to be the other.
• Mind, since understanding too is an undergoing: the slave boy of the Meno thinks doubling the side doubles the square (2×2 is four; 4×4 is sixteen, not double four) — it sounds reasonable; he is able to be mistaken and is actually mistaken, then led by questions to see the diagonal gives the double square. Not two powers but one, his reason, able to be mistaken and to know truth. His own classroom experience: students, taught the meanings of before, later say breathing is better than philosophizing because without breathing you do nothing else — that is before in the second sense (can be without the other, not vice versa), not the fourth; like saying Chaucer is better than Shakespeare for being earlier. He knows they will make it; and a sophistical argument makes students deny what they know.
• Conclusion: to know is good, to be mistaken bad; act of knowing is better than the ability, and the sign is that the ability to know is also the ability to be mistaken, hence closer to the bad.
• King Lear: the Duke [ed.: Gloucester] blinded. Going from able-to-be-blind to actually blind is not strictly an actualization — I am losing something. Likewise we say someone “has” blindness or ignorance, but strictly ignorance is not having something one is able and perhaps should have.

7. Aside twice made: Adam as forma futuri (“Adam is the forma futuri, the form of the future”) #

Reading Thomas on Romans (he thinks ch. 5) this morning, he was struck by St Paul’s forma futuri: a likeness of Adam to Christ — as through one man sin and death entered the world, through one man redemption, resurrection, life; Adam the source of all our troubles, Christ the beginning of our redemption. A likeness in opposites, “almost like saying you and I are alike because you emptied the mug and I filled it.” He notes he must still check the Greek.

His words #

• “ability” — passive potency, what act is contrasted with [ed.: potency]
• “the ninth/tenth reading” — the divisions of the handout text he is working through
• “wisdom” / “the Fifth, Ninth Book of Wisdom” — [ed.: Aristotle’s Metaphysics]
• “Natural Hearing” — [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics]; Book One fills in what Aristotle leaves implicit about lack
• “thing” — being named from what it is, as against being named from to be
• “adequate” / “something” — the transcendental adding distinction from all others; he doubts his own translation
• “reasoned out knowledge” — has a subject, its properties, and their causes [ed.: science]
• “lack” — non-being of what one is able to have and should have, when one should have it [ed.: privation]
• “undergoings” — student’s word, accepted [ed.: passions]
• “forma futuri” — St Paul’s “form of the future,” said of Adam

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, reading ten (handout pp. 11–12): act better and more honourable than the good ability; ability for contraries.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, readings eight–nine, summarized rather than read.

Mentioned

• Thomas, De veritate q.1 a.1 (with Avicenna); Thomas, Summa theologiae, third argument for God’s existence (inferred I q.2 a.3); Thomas on Romans 5.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV, V (words, esp. perfect), VI–VIII, X; De anima III; Physics I.
• Plato, Apology, Republic, Meno; Shakespeare, King Lear; Augustine (“sin is nothing”); Chaucer and Shakespeare as an example of before.

His questions #

• Could there be something that doesn’t come under being? No — it would be a contradiction, since being is taken from to be.
• What’s the difference between being and thing? Being is named from existence, thing from what it is.
• How should one regard true and good in wisdom, if being and one are its subject? As properties of being — unusual properties, not really differing in reality from their subject.
• What is a bad human act? An act lacking the measure or order of reason: an unmeasured or disordered act.
• Can ability be as good as act? No, because in a way it is the same ability for the bad, and so has affinity with the bad.
• Isn’t to be sick equally as much an act as to be healthy? No: the bad is strictly a negation or lack, therefore not an act at all.
• Is the ability to be mistaken an ability God lacks — is man freer than God because he can sin? No: strictly the ability to be mistaken is a lack of ability.
• Are the ability to be healthy and the ability to be sick two abilities? One and the same, since I cannot be healthy and sick at once, unlike walking and talking.
• Which is better, to know or the ability to know? To know; the sign is that the ability to know is also the ability to be mistaken.
• If I go from able to be blind to actually blind, is that really an actualization? No, strictly speaking; I am losing something, and it is called act only metaphorically.