Metaphysics IX: Refuting the Megarians on Ability and Act

Orientation #

He opens: “this morning we will look at the third reading from the ninth book of wisdom,” and states its division into two errors; the class covers only the first (the Megarians) and stops as he says “Now there’s a second part now where Aristotle is going to come back” (on what it is to be an ability and an act). Before the prayer a fragment of prior discussion survives: logos “could be translated as thought too, but we use the translation definition… the definition of what was to be.” The previous class closed the taxonomy of equivocals “in preparation for further readings on act and potency,” and the next takes up Aristotle’s definition of “possible” and the naming of act from motion. Note: the VERIFIED SOURCES entry suggested Metaphysics V-VI; the transcript itself says ninth book, third reading, and is followed here.

The class, in order #

1. Division of the third reading (“into two parts or into three parts”) #

The point: as Thomas explains, the reading divides in two, by two errors Aristotle reasons against.

• Error 1 (the more important): nothing is an ability until it is an act — “almost denying the distinction of ability and act.”
• Error 2 (lesser): everything is possible, though not everything will take place, “even the impossible.”
• Because error 1 amounts to rejecting the act/ability distinction, after refuting it and drawing the conclusion Aristotle adds a second part on what it is to be an ability and what it is to be an act — the part not reached today.

2. The Megarian position and its probable source (“such as the Megarians say”) #

The point: to state the error before attacking it.

• The position: something is an ability only when it acts / is in act; when it does not act it is not able — e.g. the one not building a house is not able to build a house; “likewise in other things.”
• Aristotle gives no reason for it; Thomas in the commentary supplies one: it probably comes from thinking all things happen necessarily, so nothing is possible except what actually happens — “what we call the principle of determinism.” So they are “really, in a sense, denying ability and having only act.”
• Comparison he draws: Thomas in Summa Contra Gentiles I ch. 16 (he thinks the third of six arguments) reasons from God being necessary through himself to God having no passive ability. That argument — from things that can be and not be, which of themselves have no more to be than not to be, therefore depend on something necessary; what is necessary can have a cause (as the conclusion of a demonstration is necessary yet has a cause); hence something necessary through itself, God — is the third of the five ways in the Summa Theologiae, and is not in SCG ch. 13 but in ch. 16. Difference: Thomas reasons from necessity to no passive ability in God; the Megarians reason from necessity to no ability in the universe. Same movement, “necessity seems to exclude that contingency, and therefore to exclude the ability” (his answer, later, to a student asking whether cause-and-necessity really force one to deny ability).
• Aside: the only Megarian he knows is Euclid of Megara (confused by people with Euclid of Alexandria); the anecdote — city sacked, citizens counting losses, Euclid: “I didn’t see anybody carrying off wisdom.”

3. The four arguments and their order (“the unsuitable, the unfitting”) #

The point: at line 32 Aristotle says the atopa that follow are “not hard to see”; Thomas counts four arguments: from the art of building, from the sensible, from the senses, and a fourth of a different kind.

• Order he notes: following the passage in Thomas after Avicenna (ability first said of powerful men and human things, then carried over to natural things), Aristotle begins with the human (the art), then the more natural (the sensible, the senses) — “a little confirmation” of that order.
• A second distinction, given later: the first two arguments are from an ability to act upon something (art on wood, sensible on senses); the third is from an ability to be acted upon, to undergo.

4. First argument: the art of house-building (“you don’t lose the art of house building in one day”) #

1. One does not get an art without learning it from someone or discovering it oneself, and both take time.
2. One does not lose an art except by forgetting, disease, time — not “like that.” Nor is it lost by the object being destroyed, because the raw material is always there (Thomas: true knowledge that you are sitting is destroyed when you stand; the art’s matter — wood, the piano — does not disappear; a student asked about this line at 1047a1 and he repeated Thomas’s explanation).
3. On the Megarian view, one has the art the instant he starts building and loses it the instant he stops; “how would he be taking it?”
4. But to be a house-builder is to be able to build; so before and after building one has the art and is able — “ability without act.”

• Examples: the student who cooked the bacon this morning did not acquire the art of cooking on turning down the stove nor lose it on serving; a concert pianist possesses the art before and after; Walter Gieseking after his twelfth encore — a student adds he would have had to lose and regain it twelve times; his brother Mark’s Greek teacher who had to relearn Greek each time he taught (the contrast case). “Aristotle is really using what’s most known to us.”
• Student objection: the Megarians might say there is no such thing as art, only the action. Reply: there is obviously a difference between the man who has the art and can play and the man who does not.
• Student suggestion that the ability is “really something actual” (nerves). His reply: no — they say he can play only when playing, otherwise there would be contingency and the world would not be completely necessary; “he could have played tonight, but he didn’t” is exactly the contingency they refuse.

5. Digression: determinism as the absolute principle of modern science (“you cannot doubt determinism”) #

The point: the Megarian root, determinism, is also the unshakable principle of 17th-19th-century science, not seriously challenged until quantum theory.

• Leucippus’s fragment: nothing happens by chance; there is a reason, and everything happens by necessity.
• Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (about 1860; three parts: method in general, method in biology, his own experiments): he sees that “doubt is intrinsic to the experimental method” — an hypothesis is never known for sure, can always be retested — yet says to doubt determinism would be to doubt science.
• Einstein: physicists took Newton’s successes as truth until relativity predicted the same things (and some more) from a different theory; then it was “crystal clear” one never knows. Elementary logic: confirming an hypothesis is not a syllogism — “if Burke dropped dead last night he will be absent today; he is absent; therefore…” — “wishful thinking, not logical thinking.”
• Freud, making psychology scientific, insists on determinism even for dreams: cousin Donald’s dream of the tiger who, cornering him, asks “How would you like to buy a raffle ticket?” — Freud would say “you had to dream that last night.”
• Source of the idea: Leucippus and Democritus influenced by the mathematical science of nature; Aristotle sometimes calls the causality in mathematics necessity; carry it over to nature and you deny ability — and acquire and lose the art of cooking several times a day.

6. Second argument: the sensible (“is the sugar sweet when no one is tasting”) #

The point: on the Megarian view nothing sensible — cold, hot, sweet — would be, when not being sensed.

• This is how Protagoras spoke, and like Berkeley’s esse est percipi: no distinction between the sensible in ability and the sensible in act. If your friend feels cold and you do not, it both is and is not cold.
• Aristotle already argued against this in the fourth book, defending the axiom of being and non-being against the sophists (arguments from motion and from Protagoras’s “whatever appears is so”); here he simply says the Megarian view falls back into that refuted difficulty. The sensible-in-ability / sensible-in-act distinction is also made in the De Anima, taken for granted here: sugar is able to be tasted when not tasted.

7. Third argument: the senses (“I’m blind many times a day”) #

The point: if I have the ability to see only when seeing, then with eyes closed I am blind, and I acquire sight on opening them.

• Ability to be acted upon (see §3). He notes Aristotle speaks here “a little bit like the Greeks,” as if sensing were an alteration; the middle part of the book will show sensing is not motion in the original sense, but that is not yet out.
• Examples: closing and opening the eyes as passing from blindness to sight — “what’s the big deal about Christ restoring the blind man?”; plugging the ears as becoming deaf and recovering hearing. Obviously false; so ability is “quite different from act.”

8. Fourth argument: standing and sitting (“you’ll always be sitting”) #

The point: a less concrete but “very convincing” argument.

1. If I am able to stand only when standing, then sitting I am not able to stand, so I will never stand; likewise standing I cannot sit.
2. Line 10: what is deprived of power, what is not, cannot come to be; one who speaks of it as being or coming to be lies, signifying something impossible.
3. So these positions take away motion and generation: the standing will always stand, the sitting always sit, “he will not be able to stand up or resurrect” (he remarks on the word being that of Christ’s resurrection).

• “If you gentlemen are sitting right now, you’ll always be sitting in case you follow the Megarian position.”

9. Conclusion: ability and act are other (“what does it mean to say that two things are distinct”) #

The point: line 18 — if one cannot say these absurd things, it is clear that dunamis and energeia are other; the Megarian speeches make them the same; “it is no little thing they seek to destroy.”

• Why it matters: the distinction must be seen (parts one and two of Book IX, on ability and on act, and defended here inside the treatise) before the order of act and ability, the main thing of the third part. Nothing is before or after itself; as with the axiom about a beginning and that of which it is the beginning, there must be distinction before order.
• Distinction defined, from a student’s “drawn apart” corrected: “one is not the other” — something negative. The Megarians did not see that one is not the other.
• Wine and beer example: judges at a serious tasting must identify a wine blind or cannot judge that year; one who cannot tell Cabernet Sauvignon from Pinot Noir, or Budweiser from Miller (and ends up preferring whichever he is not drinking), cannot judge which is better. He stresses he is not saying the reverse: being able to distinguish does not make one able to judge better; but being able to judge better requires distinguishing. If five who can taste the distinction agree A is better, that counts; market share does not. (A student: “your middle way for in vino veritas?” — “a step in the right direction.”) Applicable to many judgments people call subjective.
• Lose the distinction and the order disappears, “and everything that the order… leads to,” including getting to God. “Something really necessary for a philosopher to see what’s important.” Student aside: MacArthur noticed quicker people often never see “what was riding on their position.”
• Final lines read: so it is possible for something to be that is not, and not to be that is; likewise in the other categories — to be walking when not walking, to not walk when able to walk.

His words #

• ability: his rendering throughout of dunamis [ed.: potency, power]; act for energeia.
• ninth book of wisdom: [ed.: Metaphysics IX (Theta)]; “fourth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IV].
• third reading: [ed.: lectio 3 of Thomas's commentary].
• atopa: “the unsuitable, the unfitting, the actually impossible things that follow.”
• determinism: his name for the Megarian premise that all things happen necessarily.
• passive ability: what Thomas denies of God in SCG I 16 — ability to be or not be.
• esse est percipi: Berkeley, “to be is to be perceived.”
• apsuchē: garbled Greek at the start of the second argument [ed.: reading uncertain; possibly a word of the text].
• distinct: “one is not the other.”
• ability to act upon vs. ability to be acted upon (to undergo): the split between arguments 1-2 and 3.
• resurrect: his note on Aristotle’s word for “stand up.”
• Bulgarians: slip for Megarians, said in passing.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (Theta), the Megarian passage: his line refs “thirty two,” “1047a1,” “line ten,” “line 17 or 18” (inferred: 1046b29-1047a20).
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Metaphysics IX, third reading — division, cause of the error, count of four arguments, the “sitting” gloss.

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles I ch. 16 (God has no passive ability; the argument from possibility and necessity), and ch. 13 (proofs of God’s existence).
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae, the third of the five ways (inferred: Ia q. 2 a. 3).
• Thomas following Avicenna on “ability” first said of powerful men (passage from “the other day”).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV, latter part, against Protagoras and the sophists.
• Aristotle, De Anima, sensible in ability and in act.
• Leucippus fragment on necessity; Democritus.
• Claude Bernard, Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine.
• Einstein on Newton and relativity; Freud on dreams; Berkeley; Euclid of Megara.

His questions #

• “Is it into two parts or into three parts?” Two, by the two errors Aristotle refutes (Thomas).
• “Do you see a certain order in the arguments of Aristotle?” From the human (art) to the natural (sensible, senses), as Thomas after Avicenna.
• “Did you suddenly acquire the art of cooking this morning when you turned down the stove?” No — arts are acquired and lost over time, so ability exists without act.
• “Do you really have to deny ability? … if you say there’s cause and necessity?” (student) Necessity excludes contingency, and so ability; the same move, differently, in SCG I 16.
• “Is the sugar sweet when no one is tasting its sweetness?” Yes: sensible in ability vs. in act (Metaphysics IV, De Anima).
• “What’s the big deal about Christ restoring the blind man to sight?” On the Megarian view I do it all day by opening my eyes — absurd.
• “What does it mean to say that two things are distinct?” One is not the other.
• “If you can’t distinguish a Budweiser and a Miller, are you able to say one is better?” No; though the reverse does not follow.