Native Words vs. Imported Words, and Aristotle's Examples of Act (Metaphysics IX)

Orientation #

He begins by tying this to “what we were talking about the last day or so”: how to translate dunamis. He then turns to “the middle part” of Book Nine, the fifth and sixth readings, and says the sixth reading (when something is in ability to being in act) “we may not get to today.” The previous class treated Shakespeare’s definition of reason within the opening of Book Nine’s more universal treatment of act and potency; the next continues on act through proportional likeness.

The class, in order #

1. The native word and the imported word (“you have to establish your priorities”) #

Point: using the right word matters both for being understood and for thinking (“you don’t think without words”); as a rule, prefer the native English word over the imported Greek or Latin one, because it is more known and familiar.

• Example: Categories ch. 12, the four senses in which one thing is said to be prior. The Basic Works uses “prior and posterior”; the Brookhouse translation uses “before”. “Before” connects with forenoon, afternoon, foresight; “prior” connects with none of these.
• “Establish your priorities” would be clearer as “your befores” — and then one sees “before” has more than one meaning: sometimes what is before in the second sense must be done first; where there is no such order, one tries to do the better before the lesser.

2. Against the word “metaphysics” (“meta ta physica”) #

Point: the imported name conveys nothing to most people and names the work oddly.

• Meta ta physica in English means “the books after the books in natural philosophy”: it names the fourteen books from their place in the order of learning, which tells you nothing of what they are about unless you already know what natural philosophy is and what these books are.
• He prefers “the fourteen books of wisdom”: objection “I don’t know what wisdom is” — reply: the proemium of Book I tells you what wisdom aims at and what kind of knowledge it is, and that is where one has to begin.

3. First exception: when English has no native word (“reasoned out understanding”) #

Point: sometimes the imported word must be kept.

• Episteme → Latin scientia → “science”, which “has certain problems” from the meanings it has since acquired. “Knowledge” is closest but more general. He tries “reasoned out understanding / reasoned out knowledge”, but one cannot always use a whole phrase and falls back on “science”.
• “Syllogism”: he keeps the Greek; “reckoning” or “reasoning” is not a correct translation.

4. Second problem: the imported word in its later meaning (“a point is a principle of a line”) #

Point: since (De Koninck) “every respectable word in philosophy is a word equivocal by reason”, a Greek/Latin word often starts with a sensible meaning and is carried over several times; English borrows only the later meaning, so the mind starts “with the after rather than the before” — out of order.

• “Beginning”: the fifth book of Wisdom gives six meanings in order. English took Latin principium in a late sense: “the principles of geometry” (definitions, postulates, axioms of Euclid I) rather than “the beginnings”; a student asks “what do you mean by first principles?” He would extend “beginnings” here — “not stretching us too much.”
• Test: would you say “a point is a principle of a line”? No — “the beginning of a line”, which was the first meaning of Greek archē / Latin principium.
• Rule: better extend the English word (the mind stays in order, and the extension carries you further) than use the imported word with the earlier meanings lost. Custom’s tyranny is “some excuse” for the imported word; one should not willingly be a slave to it.

5. Dunamis: potency or ability; road or method; soul (“the piano is playable”) #

Point: applying the rule to the term of Book Nine.

• No Greek-derived option (dynamo, dynamite). Latin potentia → “potency”: useful for Thomists because it connects with Thomas’s text. But he prefers “ability”: native, and it yields the concrete “able” and passive compounds — burnable, breakable, freezable. “Potent” allows no such connections (“break a potent” makes no sense).
• Piano example (a student was playing before class): first meaning of ability is ability to act on or move another — the pianist’s. No one at first thinks the piano has ability; yet the keys give way, so the piano in tune is playable — something is able by some ability — and so the word is carried over even to the piano, “playable by this pianist.”
• “Road” rather than “method”: hodos, the road one walks or drives on, a series of locations one after another, carried over to the order in the mind; used by Plato, Heraclitus, Parmenides. Thomas: “virtue is the road to happiness”; he adds “vice is the road to misery” — concrete, it “sinks in” because it goes back to the sensible.
• Student: does “soul” have a problem, being restricted? Reply: we have no other word; its etymology is hard to find (Greek psuchē may refer to breath, but English “breath” was never extended). “Spirit” has a different meaning: we call the human soul spirit only in its higher powers; as act of the body it is soul.

6. The proemium and division of the fifth reading (“let us now determine about act”) #

Point: Aristotle’s little proemium ties what he has done to what he will do, ascending from the less universal to the more universal consideration.

• His translation: since one has spoken about the ability said according to motion, let us now determine about act (energeia) — what it is and how it is; the able (dunaton) will become clear at the same time, dividing: the able is said not only of what can move another or be moved by another, simply or in some way (well etc.), but otherwise, in ways found even in immaterial things; on account of which we have also gone through the ones already discussed.
• Thomas’s division: (I) rest of the fifth reading, what act is; (II) sixth reading, when something is in ability to being in act. Part I divides: (a) what act is, (b) the distinction of acts from one another. Part (a) divides: examples, induction and proportion; then the reason why he does not define act — surprising in “the great definer,” the follower of Socrates and Plato.

7. Act shown by three examples (“Hermes or Mercury is in the wood”) #

Point: energeia is for the thing to exist, “not thus as when we say it is in ability” — obviously not a definition; three examples, each pairing something in ability with something in act.

1. Hermes/Mercury in the wood before the sculptor shapes it (in ability) vs. shaped (in act, “then we can start to worship him”).
2. The half in the whole: a circle has a semicircle only in ability; find the centre (Euclid III, early theorem), draw the diameter, and the semicircle is actual. Likewise a parallelogram has two triangles in ability, actual when the diagonal is drawn.
3. The one possessing the habit of episteme (geometry) but not thinking of it, vs. actually considering the theorem. His TAC-graduate example: he springs a theorem on one who has forgotten the proof — sometimes the proof comes out, habitual ability passing to actual consideration.

• Method: induction, from many particulars to one general — here particulars that are ratios: wood : statue :: undivided circle : divided :: possessor of geometry : thinker.

8. Why these examples, in this order (“look to see a reason for the examples”) #

Point: imitating De Koninck (“when I read Aristotle or Thomas, I often look to see a reason for the examples”) and Thomas.

• Thomas’s model: Aristotle’s examples for the mover among the four causes — father (nature) and advisor (reason); restated as seed (nature), advisor and doctor (reason as foresight and art). Thomas sees and points out the significance.
• Student: the order is from more sensible to less — sensible qualities, then quantity only, then in the mind. He agrees, “some truth.”
• Omitted: the act most known to us, motion — as if he had said enough. Met instead: form, in the first example, to “jolt you from your limitation of thinking of act as motion.” Third example: closer to motion, an activity, yet not motion but what Thomas “for want of a word” calls operation — perfect activity against the imperfect act motion is shown to be in Book III (of Natural Hearing).
• Middle example: ability and act even in mathematics, where there is no matter in the ordinary sense — “imaginable” or “intelligible matter” — striking, and showing how universally ability and act are understood.
• Parallel: Categories ch. 12, second sense of “before” (in being) illustrated by “one before two”, not by bricks before a wall: a student says it is “more clearly the second and not the first”; with bricks one might see only before-in-time (though bricks are also before in being — a knocked-down wall’s bricks are sold). Here the purpose differs: to see the universality of ability and act.
• Third example, by De Anima III, is entirely immaterial — not sensing (in the previous reading, treated by early Greeks as alteration) but understanding, more clearly other than motion.

9. Why act is not defined: where the buck stops (“where does the buck stop”) #

Argument:

1. If everything had to be defined, defining anything would require defining an infinity of things first (square ← quadrilateral ← rectilineal plane figure ← plane figure ← figure); one could not even begin.
2. So definition must stop somewhere.
3. Aristotle says it stops at act, which therefore cannot be defined but is made known by induction from proportions.

• Text: it is clear “in the particulars” (epi tōn kath’ hekasta) by induction (epagōgē); one ought not to seek a definition (horon) of everything, but in some cases to see together (synoran: horan “see”, syn “together”) the proportion — the two ratios and their likeness.
• Distinction: “analogy” is sometimes used for a name equivocal by reason — but that names the more general by the more particular; analogia properly is proportion, Euclid’s likeness of ratios (“this is to that as that is to that”), and that is its sense here.

10. Descartes and Locke on motion (“we just wave them goodbye”) #

Point: the rationalist Descartes and the empiricist Locke both hold motion cannot be defined (Descartes quoting a garbled version of the definition, “who understands those words?”; Locke’s simple ideas), as if Aristotle thought he could define everything.

• Reply: Aristotle had already said not everything can be defined — analogously, some statements are known not by syllogism but through themselves. The dispute is where it stops: they say motion, he says act; and Natural Hearing III shows motion is definable by act and ability.
• Criticism of method: they neither recall Aristotle’s text nor refute his reasons. Santayana: “we no longer bother to refute our predecessors; we just wave them goodbye.” Aristotle, disagreeing with a predecessor, recalls what he said and why and then gives his reason. Same failure on the confused and the distinct. Student: the moderns seem never to have read Aristotle’s text, only received opinions. Thomas: read the greater minds carefully, frequently, with reverence.

11. How a simple thing can still be given something like a definition (“is it the falling that falls”) #

Point: even something simple admits a definition-like speech if there is a basis for the duplicity a definition needs, namely being something of another.

• Wisdom VII: a definition is never one name but a combination; Thomas: a synonym may help — philosophy is sapientia — but is not a definition. (His own intro: philosopher = lover of wisdom; philosophy names the knowledge he loves.)
• Point: has no parts, but as the limit or end of a line one says what it is of — more distinct than the name. Negative definition left aside.
• Motion: not like a man or dog existing by itself but like health, of the body. The bowling does not go bowling; the falling does not fall; the rolling does not roll — motion is of another, so it can be defined. Likewise “wisdom is the highest perfection of reason”: not a definition, but speech more distinct than the name.

12. Why act itself cannot be defined (“you can’t define a thing by itself”) #

Student: Aristotle gives no reason why act in particular is where it stops. He agrees Aristotle does not manifest it here; offers reasons:

• A student: if you follow the induction till you see it, you need nothing else to understand it; with motion you would remain uncomfortable.
• His reason: wisdom ascends from less to more universal; Book Nine’s act/ability is more universal even than the figures of predication (Book V speaks of causes in ability and in act). Ability can be made known by act, since ability is for the sake of act (third part, to come), but act cannot be made known by ability, and there is nothing more universal to define it by.
• Parallel: something vs. nothing can be distinguished (the Greeks: nothing comes from nothing), but “something” cannot be defined — one would have to use something to define it.
• Highest genera: strict definition is by genus and difference, so only a species as such is defined; Euclid defines quadrilateral as a species of rectilineal figure. The ten highest genera of the Categories are not strictly definable, though some speech may be said of them.
• Transcendentals: one may be before another in knowledge (one = undivided being), but act and ability pertain to being, the first transcendental. So defining act would require something actual — defining it by itself. “May I rest my case now, Father?”
• Aside, closing: a student asks whether “something” imports the concrete/individuated; he answers that even nothing is something in some way — something in reason.

His words #

• native word vs imported word; English against Greek/Latin borrowings.
• before / after; his rendering of prior/posterior.
• the fourteen books of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics].
• reasoned out understanding / reasoned out knowledge; his rendering of episteme [ed.: science].
• equivocal by reason (De Koninck); every respectable philosophical word.
• beginning; his rendering of archē / principium [ed.: principle].
• ability / able; his rendering of dunamis [ed.: potency]; passive compounds burnable, playable.
• road; his rendering of hodos [ed.: method].
• act; energeia; the able, dunaton.
• operation (Thomas, “for want of a word”): perfect activity as against motion, the imperfect act.
• imaginable matter / intelligible matter: the matter of geometry.
• induction, epagōgē: from many particulars to one general.
• see together, synoran: seeing two ratios and their likeness.
• proportion, analogia: likeness of ratios, Euclid’s sense.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• where the buck stops: the end of the chain of definitions.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, fifth reading (Thomas’s division): the proemium (“since one has spoken about the ability said according to motion…”), the three examples, and “it is clear in the particulars by induction… not seek a definition of everything but see together the proportion” (chapter 6, inferred).
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Metaphysics IX, lect. 5: the divisions of the reading.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Categories ch. 12 (four senses of before; one before two).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics I proemium (what wisdom aims at); V (six meanings of beginning; cause in ability and act); VII (definition is a combination of names; Thomas on synonym, philosophy = sapientia).
• Aristotle, Physics III (definition of motion by act and ability).
• Aristotle, De Anima III (understanding not in a body).
• Euclid, Elements I (definitions, postulates, axioms; square, quadrilateral); III (finding the centre of a circle).
• Descartes and Locke on the indefinability of motion (no locus given).
• Santayana, “we just wave them goodbye” (no locus given).
• Thomas: “virtue is the road to happiness” (no locus given).

His questions #

• Which word is more familiar to us, prior or before? Before — it fits with forenoon, afternoon, foresight.
• Would you say in English that a point is a principle of a line? No — the beginning of a line, the first meaning of archē.
• Do you see any significance in the three examples, and in their order? From the sensible (form in wood) to the mathematical (quantity) to the mind (understanding).
• Which act, most known to us, does he not give as an example here? Motion — he wants act seen more universally, first as form.
• What is a semicircle before the diameter is drawn? There in ability only; actual once the diameter is drawn.
• If everything had to be defined, could you ever define anything? No — you would have to define an infinity of things first.
• Where does the buck stop? Aristotle: at act, known without definition by induction from proportions; Descartes and Locke wrongly say at motion.
• When the stone falls, is it the falling that falls? No — motion is always of another, so there is a basis for defining it.
• Why can’t act itself be defined (student’s question)? Aristotle does not manifest it here; his reason: act is most universal, so any definition would use something actual — defining it by itself.
• Can you define something? No — you would have to use something to define it.