Ep. 337: Aristotle on Primary Being (Part Two)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life, episode 337, part 2. We've been discussing book Zeta or seven of Aristotle's metaphysics, and we are up to. To what Chapter four.

0:20 Wes: Yeah, we're just about to start chapter four here, which starts out with saying, hey, maybe substance is essence. Let's try that. That's one of the options he described in the previous chapter. It's going to be his favorite answer. It's going to be the one he starts with. So why does he want to say that? One of the possibilities is essence. We must investigate this. I'm reading at the Very beginning of the chapter. And first let us make some linguistic remarks about it. The essence of each thing is what it is said to be in virtue of itself. For being you is not being musical. Since you are not by your very nature musical, what then you are by your very nature is your essence. So why is that important, then?

1:00 Mark: I mean, we're just distinguishing incidental properties from essential properties. I think we've said in several places that this causes problems.

1:12 Dylan: Yeah. Being you is what you are in virtue of yourself. To me, that way of phrasing it is again getting towards the sort of tipping your hand. Right. That way of phrasing it is going to really push against the notion of who we are as a property of something. Our essence has to be our being. If you say that what your being is is what you are in virtue of yourself, it's going to really, really push against the possibility that your essence is anything different than your being.

1:43 Wes: He said in the beginning that he's going to start with these sensible organisms. And that's not exactly what seems to be happening here, although he is going to use Socrates a lot as an example. But I think the step here is to say if we are looking for things that count as beings, then they have to be what they are in virtue of themselves. They have to be these non accidental unities. I can't just say, hey, look at that heap over there. Let's treat that as a substance and say how it is that that's a substance. So we look at something that has some essential properties. Right. That's why he's using the word musical. We don't just say, hey, let's look at the random properties of this thing and see if that's what makes it substance. We need something that defines it, that delimits it as a determinant. Real unity can't just be any old properties that we focus on. I think that's the idea.

2:35 Mark: My essence is music.

2:37 Wes: Now, suppose musical were a natural kind and there are just these beings, you know, like rabbit. They're just these musical beings that were running around.

2:46 Dylan: That's a version of things like gods or spirits and stuff like that. The way we would talk about them. Right. Even if we in our narratives and stories end up anthropomorphizing them, what they would be would be cases of something

3:00 Wes: like musical beings couldn't share musical with any other creatures. That's one thing. Yeah.

3:06 Dylan: I'm not saying it's perfect, I'm just saying that's the kind of thing that we go to in our narratives.

3:10 Mark: Right, Right. When I wrapped up our first half by talking about how you are a causal agent, but the tide is not a causal agent. But you could personify and say, oh, that's Poseidon there bashing the boat.

3:24 Wes: So in particular, whatever we say it is, that makes it something in virtue of its own nature. It can't be a shared thing.

3:33 Dylan: And in this second or third paragraph here, he's talking about a thing that has a white surface. And he starts trying to talk about these properties and at the end he's talking about a pale person. And he says the pale person is of course pale, but what it is for it to be is not what it is for pale to be. And then he has this. Is being a sheet, any sort of what it is for something to be at all?

4:00 Wes: Is it sheet in your translation? Is cloak in my translation?

4:03 Mark: He's just coming up with a word that is naming a compound thing because you might think that every word must pick out a simple thing. And he actually uses the word later. Snub. Nose. Rather snub. But snub implies nose. So it is just like this made up word sheet, a compound that implies an element. It does not pick out a natural kind.

4:24 Wes: Right. He's trying to say, let's pretend that we have a natural kind here. It's the same sort of thought experiment as my. Let's imagine that there were musical creatures that. That's their essence. So cloak stands for pale man or white man in my translation. But he wants to get us away from the idea that the man is a natural kind and the white is the accidental properties. Just says, well, what? This is the natural kind and we'll call it cloak. Know why he chooses the word cloak? But we're just going to give it a name. Treat that as a natural kind and treat that as having an essence. And he's going to say that doesn't work. We can't just treat any old thing as having any old compound of entity and accidental property, as something that has its own essence.

5:09 Mark: And that is just because then a single thing. So Socrates as human and Socrates as sheet, as white person as. Or cloak. And Socrates the individual ends up being essentially Right. Many different things. These would all be equal to each other, which is absurd. That sheet would be equal to human would be equal to any other property you could name of him.

5:32 Wes: Right. That's one of the arguments. But I think the overall concept is that Socrates is already determined by human being before we add any properties. Right. Think of this as titrating. Okay, what do we need to get to the entity? You know, what properties do we need? At some point it becomes excess. So white doesn't actually help us to pick out the determinant entity. We already have the determinant entity with man. So what's white doing in there? It's not doing any work.

6:03 Seth: I closed part one with the notion of the articulation of a definition. But that's midway through chapter four. And then we started back up at the beginning of chapter four. So I'm just waiting till we got down there, which we kind of have.

6:16 Wes: I want to say one more thing about this, which is he starts out with this idea of identity statements because we're not just saying that the essence is predicated of some underlying thing. We want to say X is X, where X is is not predication, it's identity. But then it looks like, well, can I do that trick with any Is. Can I say this is the is of identity for cloak. You know, the whole point of this, and this is, I think why he's calling it a linguistic observation is that he's getting into this concept of identity. And it's not just something that we can use willy nilly.

We can't just choose Socrates, the white pale Socrates. Or I was using. And he uses the example of Socrates sitting, which I think is a better example where the cat, you know, I was using the cat on the mat. Like, do you want to say that there's one entity, cat mat there, that's the entity I'm picking out or that I have the option of doing that if I'm using a different conceptual scheme? No, I don't have that option. The actual individual unified entity there is Socrates.

7:18 Mark: But I think what Seth was just referring to in terms of have we not covered this already? I felt that in reading this, that this moves so incrementally, this text that I kept feeling like, wait, have we not just already said this? What is being new that's added here? And it's just so gradual and clearly by the time. Okay, now we're five chapters ahead. Like we have added something, we've added a number of arguments. But whether maybe it's just my patience

7:42 Seth: level, to me it picks up again like maybe in eight after four. So the chapter wise. But it is really important here to say or to point out if you cannot define it, it's not a thing. There's the concept of articulation and you know, is really the concept of predication. Thinghood is not a Naturally occurring. I don't even know what the right word is. I don't have the vocabulary for this phenomenon. I mean, yeah, phenomenon, maybe like that. Without language, we're not having this conversation. So what it is for it to be a thing from a linguistic perspective, which is to say from a human perspective.

So I think that points towards the elimination of certain kinds of candidates as well as a scientism or a scientific kind of approach to a worldview where you're talking about just the physical bodies doing X, Y and Z. And then later on in this book, when he starts talking about the process of becoming, you'll see then that there becomes this further refinement which explains why, you know, it seems like plants and animals can be things. But like a sheet of paper or a bed isn't going to be. Because there's at least in the Sachs translation, the thing itself, which is thinghood.

There's what it is for the thing to be. But they also uses the phrase what it is for it to keep on being. There's a kind of continuity and maintenance of a thing that only entities which become organically to some sense and have kind of an internally motivated, that can be self motivated or self generating, are good candidates for thinghood in the Aristotelian sense.

9:26 Mark: Just to start with the last point, you know, so like, could a triangle, the abstract triangle, be a thing? Well, it has something that causes it to continue to be in that it's an eternal thing. And he's going to admit God, it's just that he's not talking about that. Those here. So yes, four changeable, physical, sensible things is how he refers to them. Sensible things. Then there's going to be something that makes it continue to be what it is and continue to be at all. And that's going to be its essence. But I don't think that requires that it be a changeable thing, that it has that sort of inertia, because just a triangle doesn't have to worry about that kind of inertia. It just. It's already an eternal thing.

10:06 Wes: Well, he knows, he thinks there are unchanging, perceptible things like planets that have essences. So the other thing to get out of this chapter is that he's kind of saying what it is to give a real definition. He's saying this is not just a semantic exercise. I can't just take something and say, here's what I mean by cloak, and say that I am defining something in the sense of giving a real definition, in the sense of Giving an essence of something. He's going to conclude the only things that have essences are species.

10:35 Seth: Basically a real definition versus a description.

10:40 Wes: Yeah. So we need a natural kind. To say that we're not allowing any combination of thing and property to be substance is to say that we need a natural kind. Well, natural kind is not his phrase he's using. He'll say species of a genus.

10:56 Mark: Right. Seth raised an interesting point, though, about this relation in this chapter between the metaphysical and the logical. He said, seth, the only reason we're talking about this is because it's about epistemological categories. It's about how we understand things. We understand things in terms of their definitions, which are essences. And it's as if the understanding determines the metaphysical. I'm not sure if that's what you're implying. Definitely the Routledge keeps telling us over and over again that while there is a correspondence between how we understand things and how the world really is, the causality is the other way around. The metaphysical thing is primary, and the semantic, the way we understand things is made possible by the metaphysical consistency.

11:37 Seth: I wasn't trying to make a call one way or the other about which way the causality went. The point is this, even though it's ironically called the metaphysics, is a work of epistemology. And he says that very clearly in book one, when we started off, that he's moving towards the whole reason to get to essences and definitions is so that you can get knowledge and understanding. And so my point was just there's been a lot of abstract conversation here about concepts and ideas and various sorts of theories that have been put forth. But this is the chapter where he actually reconnects it back to that epistemological thread in a really hard way with this notion of definition, because we are going to need that in order to be able to create any sort of knowledge or generate or find or discover or what have you.

12:24 Wes: The way this chapter ends is he conceives of someone who might come along and object and say, well, wait a minute, properties are real entities. Don't real entities have essences? Aren't you saying that properties don't have essences? Properties as in sometimes translated attributes. So he's going to have a response to that and say, yes, in a sense, they have an essence, right, Insofar as they are in and of themselves, real things. But that's not to say that when I attach a property to something, the thing's essence somehow becomes the property's essence. That's What? He's objecting.

12:56 Mark: Right.

12:56 Wes: Which.

12:56 Mark: Nobody ever said that.

12:57 Wes: So he'll say in a limited way, essence belongs to property properties.

13:01 Mark: I mean, it doesn't seem like anybody ever said that. If I want to say whiteness has an essence and that connects all the various white things, that's not to say that. Well, then if I say there's a white person, that somehow that person becomes the essence of whiteness. Nobody ever claimed that. Is this just a straw man? Why is he bothering to refute this?

13:21 Wes: I just think he wants to point out that when he says that essences belong primarily to substances, he is not denying that there's a sense in which accidental properties also have an essence.

13:32 Mark: Being of whiteness is related to the particular white thing. The being of this token, whiteness is only derived from the fact that there are objects that are white. But the essence of the whiteness is not derived from particular objects that are white. Is that right?

13:49 Wes: Right.

13:50 Dylan: But would he say that there's the essence of whiteness?

13:53 Wes: Well, this is what he's doing at the very end of four. He'll say yes and no. He'll say, in a sense, yes. This is very typical Aristotle. In a sense, yes, in a sense, no, not in the primary sense. Not in the sense in which it belongs to substances, but in the sense that properties are real things.

14:07 Dylan: A definition and what it is for something to be belong primarily and simply to independent things. It's not that they don't belong to other things in a way that resembles this, but only that they do not belong to them primarily.

14:20 Mark: Okay, so resembling, not derived from that was the difference for being. It was derived from. For having an essence has a quasi essence. White has a quasi essence. It has something to match up all the white things.

14:34 Wes: I think chapter five is something we should skip. He's asking whether matter form compounds are definable and have essences. So he's going to say basically only the substance has the essence. It's too in the weeds. It's difficult.

14:49 Mark: It is so in the weeds that I want to read one paragraph for it, just because I read it aloud in my home and laughter came out. And so this is the middle of 124 in the Sachs. If a snub nose and a squashed in nose are the same thing, then snub and squashed in will be the same thing. And if they are not, on account of the impossibility of saying snubness without the thing of which is an attributed to its own right. Since snubness is squashed in ness. In a nose it is either not possible to say snub nose or else the same thing will have been said twice. Squashed in nose. Nose. Since the nose that is snub would be a nose that is a squashed in nose. For which reason it is absurd that a what it is for it to be should belong to such things. And if it did it would be infinite. Since in a snub nose there will

15:32 Wes: always be another nose present concavity is in my translation, not squashed-in-ness concavity, which I think is better because it gets at the abstractness of this. Right. So we can say some properties seem to implicate the matter, like snub. But it's going to take too long.

15:45 Mark: Someone with a snub nose actually has an innie. A concave nose.

15:50 Dylan: That.

15:50 Mark: No, that is not.

15:52 Seth: They have two noses.

15:53 Mark: So you have a nose shaped hole in your head. That's disgusting. That's not Socrates. He's not that ugly.

16:00 Wes: Have you seen what he looks like?

16:01 Mark: He's a mutant from the Fallout series.

16:04 Wes: He's a skull famous statue of him and he's. Yeah, he's ugly all right.

16:08 Mark: Chapter six.

16:09 Wes: So here he's going to say individual things are identical to their substance and therefore their essence. So now we're getting into the particulars.

16:16 Mark: Yeah. So is Socrates the same as being Socrates? Because it sure seems like it shouldn't be. But it ends up that it is just because it's absurd. That he traces absurd conclusions. If you assume something else, there would be a Platonic way of doing it. How would Socrates interact with the being Socrates? If the being Socrates were an external thing. But he wants to say they are one and the same thing. Is there something more to that?

16:42 Dylan: Isn't this one of the things that a piece of pulling you away from participation in form.

16:48 Wes: Yeah. Suppose a particular thing is not identical with its essence. If it's not identical with its essence, where is its essence? Is it a property attached to it? Is it a Platonic form? And then how do we explain that relation? He gets back into the third man. Regress. So unless we make that assumption that a particular individual is identical with its essence, which after all is the thing. Right. It's just the what it is to be that thing. Then we create all these metaphysical problems.

17:18 Mark: I'm just not sure why I can't say that Socrates is coextensive with being Socrates. Because only Socrates has this property, being Socrates. So they refer to one and the same thing, but they're still different concepts. It seems just obvious that this individual Socrates and the concept being Socrates, which by necessity only applies to this individual, but still conceptually those are separate things, so they have the same referent and different senses.

17:43 Seth: I'm not sure that he's not in agreement with you, Mark, because the term he uses, X and being X are one. I don't know if that means for him that they're the same thing or that they are a unity in the sense of versus being a plurality. I don't know if it means they collapse into each other or not. When he uses the term one, I

18:07 Dylan: took of them as that they are the same thing and that just because you can speak of them in different ways doesn't mean that they're different things.

18:15 Mark: But the ambiguity is same thing could mean they're just pointing to the same thing. Or that they are different concepts. You say different ways of speaking, but different ways of speaking could still mean the same thing. If they're not just co extensive, but they are literally the same. Is that what he's saying? That Socrates and being Socrates are the same concept?

18:35 Dylan: No, they're the same thing.

18:36 Wes: Socrates and being a man. So being that particular individual Socrates, he's identical to his essence, which is being a man. So it's not personal identity Socrates that's at issue here. It's his species. And the species is what makes him the determinant unity that he is. Aristotle, in places he seems to me to be thinking about the possibility. Why don't we just take each thing as the conglomeration? Like if I could list every single property of Socrates, including maybe his. You know, this is what Leibniz, I think kind of does. But including his spatial location through his entire temporal existence, isn't that really the identity of the thing?

And isn't it sui generis? Isn't that just like a thumbprint? And we all have different what it is to be's based on that. He doesn't want to go that route and I can't remember what his argument against that is. As if you could get kind of derive in essence from a maximal conglomeration of accidental properties. But in this case, what makes Socrates the particular determinant individual that he is, is the same thing that the same in a way and not in a way. It's not a universal right because it's his being human. Right, Right. Token humanness, but it's not token Socrates

19:50 Dylan: ness isn't one of the reasons why he would reject Leibniz's unity of all the accidental properties, including the path in space and time, is that it's leaving out the fact that that person is an active entity on their own, which Leibniz will reject. The kinds of beings exist that Aristotle insists exist, ones that have a activity of their own that are in virtue of themselves. Leibniz rejects things having existence in virtue of themselves.

20:22 Wes: I mean, it depends on how you interpret monads. And that would take us down a

20:26 Mark: whole path whether individual human souls are monads.

20:29 Wes: But there are lots of other things that are not human souls that are monads too. So sorry for mentioning Leibniz. Sorry for doing that and getting us to go down.

20:36 Mark: The identity of indiscernibles thing, though, is very relevant here. That, you know, that does come out, Leibniz, that it's not just defining by type the way that we're doing it here by saying it's his humanity. I mean, that's almost just like saying, well, it's that monad, you know, because for Leibniz, you can't describe something just by a definite description, I think, no matter how precise. Because if two things have all the same properties, maybe I'm getting this backwards. They are literally one thing, right? That's the whole point. If you had two identical things to who's Leibniz arguing against.

21:08 Wes: That's. That's not talking about Leibniz.

21:10 Mark: Okay, sorry.

21:12 Seth: I was trying to think of a punny way to talk about this being both the name drop and tangent. There's got to be a great Leibnizian pun on tangent.

21:20 Wes: But I could have explained that without mentioning Leibniz, because I do think Aristotle does entertain that idea and rejects it.

21:27 Mark: You don't want to go down the Leibniz hole.

21:29 Seth: What was the Aristotelian point that we're trying to drive at right now?

21:33 Wes: Each particular is identical with its essence. And the argument he makes here, and this is sort of towards the end of the chapter, is that if the particular thing is not identical with its essence, then we have another entity, the essence. And if we have another entity, then that thing has to have an essence and so on. We don't want to multiply entities like that and get into all the typical metaphysical problems. At some point we just have to bite the bullet and say there's some identity relation there that makes a thing a thing. Otherwise we get into the domain of the Platonic form. This is why he doesn't like them. We do not want separate entities that are the substance of things. We want things to be their own substance.

22:12 Seth: So given the example he's working with here of Socrates and Mark, you were talking about the this ness. Socrates is the this, but Socrates essence is human being. Is that correct?

22:27 Mark: Is his human being.

22:28 Seth: Okay, let's call it his human being. But it's not any attribute about Socrates in particular that picks him out from other. So in other words, we have. Let's just use two as an example. But this could proliferate on. So there's Wes and Socrates. Wes is this, Socrates is this. But they're both human beings. That's their this ness. That's the what it is for Wes and Socrates to be.

22:57 Mark: Yep.

22:58 Wes: Two numerically distinct forms, it turns out, not one Platonic form of humanness. And then we have to say how Socrates and I, who share this Platonic form of humanness are different. But the difference comes out in the possibility that we could numerically distinct token form tokens and give one to me and one to Socrates. And it's still the thing that makes us real entities, real unities that we can cut out from the background noise of the universe.

23:27 Seth: We could more generically say your differentiation can be done with attributes. But I think it's interesting. So it becomes more difficult to figure out how to distinguish the two of you without reference to attributes. Whereas if you were talking about the rabbit, you know, we could say we don't need attributes to distinguish Wes from a rabbit. We could distinguish by virtue of essence, by virtue of thingness. But if you're two tokens of the same type of thing, you can't distinguish via the essence. Correct.

24:02 Mark: This is what makes it really unsatisfying to me, because you can distinguish via the essence in that my human essence is numerically different than your human essence. But we can't express that. We want to be able to put that in the definition or some other. This is why I was trying to connect to Leibniz's identity of indiscernibles. Because it's only having different properties, even if those are locational properties that make something different from something else. And if you say, as Aristotle, the way that we understand something, not just its metaphysical difference, is by reference to the essence, which is a definition. Well, because that is a universal, then we have not actually it's metaphysically distinct. My way of my continuing to be is because I have this particular essence. But we can't actually say without just pointing or something. Right.

24:48 Wes: We can give accidental properties. Right. So Seth and me and Socrates, we're all distinct by virtue of various accidental properties, even including living in Greece at a certain Time or. But also snub nose. Ness. Right. I'm slightly snub nosed. Socrates is very snub nosed. We can't think of every single accidental property that belongs to an entity and say, okay, this is why they're numerically distinct and this is why there are two token forms.

25:15 Mark: I will not believe your nose is an innie no matter how many times you insist. What are you getting frustrated about, Dylan, that we haven't gotten to yet, that you are excited to get to?

25:24 Dylan: I'm not super frustrated. To me, the big bow around it is back to this notion. He doesn't use the word, but this notion of emergence. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's the thing that makes this all happen to me.

25:40 Wes: I'd say if we want to try to power through this, you know, the important parts today, 7, 8 and 9 on production and then jump to 16. The rest is all that definition stuff, which is a nightmare.

25:52 Mark: Sounds good. So, yeah, seven about production. Well, why do we care about this? Because to me, when I got to this, I slacked. You guys, like, wait, we've gone off the rails here. We're now talking about just a different topic of how things come into being. And you know, a house comes into being because you have the form of the house in your mind. So it's like houses are producing future houses because I have the form of the house from other houses. It just seemed like this is a different topic. Why is this the same topic? How does this fit into the chapter, is what I'm saying, and not a heap. Wes, you seem to have strong opinions that this was. This chapter is not merely a heap. The book is not merely a heap.

26:30 Dylan: It is, isn't it come from the very first sentence of the things that come into being. Some come about by nature, some by art, some by the result of chance. But everything that comes into being becomes something from something and by the action, something. So the reason this is interesting is we're talking about being and what beings are. And core to that is how beings come to be. And if you don't investigate that, then you're not investigating being.

26:56 Wes: We have a very difficult problem in front of us, or Aristotle does, because he's chosen to go down a road that Plato was terrified to go down, saying, these changeable things, these perceptible material entities that change are substances. And then the question is how? How can we have substance itself does not change. The form doesn't change. Ultimately, the whole point of talking about essence is to talk about something unchanging. How are we going to talk about this unchanging thing if it's actually in the changing things? That's what we want to try to figure out.

If we're really going to go down this radical route of saying the world of flux, right, Heraclitus, all that stuff has essences in it and not out there in math or the forms or whatever, then we gotta solve a very difficult problem. It's probably not solvable, but Aristotle tries. So you have to talk about generation and decay and all that. We're talking about rabbits, right? We're talking about humans. We're talking about all these things that are born and die. And that's our paradigmatic case. And so how do we have unchanging forms and things that come to be?

28:10 Dylan: Because you want to say that from when Socrates is born and while he's sitting and while he's running and while he's marching, while he's drinking, and when he gets older and when he dies, that's all Socrates.

28:22 Wes: Yeah.

28:23 Seth: I was also under the impression that part of this was. See, this is where I got confused who I mentioned earlier about asking if the universal was the form. The idea that what he introduces here is you can't have thinghood or essence without both material and form. So I think what he's saying is, oh, some people think this essence, this thing that we were talking about is the form, and some think it's the material. It's kind of revisiting almost like this chapter could have come after whatever it was, three or two, where he introduces the notion, but he says it's actually the combination of the two.

28:59 Wes: I hate to disagree with you. Okay, let's explicitly rejects the idea that the essence is the compound, so the essence just is the form, substance, essence and form to go together. And he's going to explicitly argue that it's not the compound, which is. It is confusing. Right, because he does want to say the particular individual things are individual substances. Here he's going to argue that essence is, strictly speaking, form, not matter.

29:27 Mark: But if what you mean by a compound is just the substantial form, the form as instantiated, it's not the form

29:33 Seth: as universal, it's the form as instantiated, which requires material. The essence is not the compound, but it's the instantiated.

29:40 Wes: Yeah, the essence is the form is the instantiated form, but the matter and the parts of the thing are not.

29:46 Mark: Because that matter could be complex, which is.

29:49 Wes: Yeah, it's confusing.

29:50 Dylan: Importantly, this goes back to our AI discussion. The matter isn't required of the essence. It's not required in the definition.

29:57 Mark: It has to have some matter or other.

29:59 Wes: Yes. What he's going to say here. So the whole point of this chapter is to say, yes, the things are changing and that's because they have matter. But the form itself is not generated or destroyed. Those two things are just brought together, whether it's nature or art. You have two pre existing things, Right. It's conservation of mass and energy. They're not generated or destroyed, they're just pre existing. And then you bring them together.

30:23 Mark: It is weird to think of the instantiated form is something that doesn't change.

30:27 Seth: Right.

30:27 Mark: It's the universal form that doesn't change, the Platonic form that doesn't change. To insist that the form, for Aristotle is both a token that is part of the thing and in fact defines the thing, and yet in any sense it comes together with the matter that it is pre existent doesn't make any sense. Yeah.

30:45 Wes: Like if I produce a bronze sphere, it seems like the shape of the sphere is generated. This is very paradoxical what Aristotle is saying.

30:53 Seth: Yes. So this is a little before. It's like 1033 B. Therefore it is clear that the form, or whatever one ought to call the shapeliness that is worked into the perceptible thing does not come into being. And that coming into being does not even pertain to it or to what it is for something to be. For this is what comes to be in something else by art or by nature, by some capacity. But one makes the bronze to be a sphere, for one makes it out of bronze and out of the sphere, since one brings the form into the material, and it is this that is a bronze sphere. But of being a sphere, if there were to be a coming to being of it at all, it would be something made out of something. So the form gives shape, or the abstract form gives instantiated form to an object out of something. But that is not instantiating the form, it's instantiating the this which carries the form. Is that fair?

31:48 Wes: Yeah. What I'm generating is the compound. I'm not generating the form itself when I generate the compound. So if I generate the brazen sphere, the bronze sphere, I'm generating that compound thing and putting the form into it, but I'm not thereby generating the form. And he does say things like the form pre exists. Right. It's already in my mind. I'm not sure that's good enough. It does sound very much like we would want to say, well, there must be Some abstract Platonic form out there, then if it doesn't change and if it just gets stamped onto things.

What are you talking about, Aristotle? It is quite confusing and we should say that this whole idea of token form and all that, that's one interpretation. There's a whole camp of philosophers who want to interpret Aristotle as saying the essence is universal, even though he says over and over and over and over again that it's not. They have some very clever ways of saving him, because they don't. They just don't like this account.

32:44 Seth: I'm just confused if what we just said was correct. I just don't understand how the form could be the essence then unless it's to say, look, I mean, think about the account this way. Material without form might as well just be completely indeterminate because form would include shape, extension, number, and material would just be like a mass of atoms really. It's not even at the level of earth, brick, metal. And so while form itself is not instantiated in the world, the being of the form is not brought into being without form. It would just be undifferentiated material.

So to that extent, if you want to ask what it means for something to have an essence, it's like, well, for anything to be at all in any determinate form, in any determinate being requires formal essence of that sort. So that's the work that it does. That's really what the work that the essence does. And then whether those things are universals that get instantiated individuals or whether it's some other mechanism, I don't know. But at least I think I understand now what essences are supposed to be doing for Aristotle, which is a much more physicalistic kind of like account than what you get out of Plato, which makes sense.

34:01 Wes: Well, he argues directly against Plato at the end of chapter eight, right, because he's going to anticipate our worry about this. He's going to say Platonic forms are not necessary to this account. All we need is a begetter. All we need is some thing prior that has the form in it and that can be in the real world. All we need is a producer, a begetter who has the form already and who can transfer that to new matter. And in fact that's something that Platonic forms can't do. They can't really explain production. So his account in a way is superior. All we need is pre existent matter, pre existent form, and then a producer who pushes them together. The form substance is not produced. The concrete thing which takes its name from the form is produced in everything that is generated, matter is present and one part of the thing is matter and the other is form.

34:52 Seth: The measure is definition. So if you're wondering about, well, what are the essences, what are the things in the world, you just go through the process of starting to do your definitions and you catalog and then from that you can create a basis for a system of knowledge.

35:08 Wes: I think it's helpful to think about this in terms of biological reproduction, because we can think about this in terms of the DNA preexistent form. And when we think about that, it's interesting because we have it on two levels, right? There's the abstract code of the organism which is getting transferred, but then there's this physical stuff, DNA, and then there's the phenotype that it produces. So there is pre existent form.

35:29 Mark: He has to bring in the term potency that in chapter nine, a seed produces like works of art are produced. In either case, the source contains the form in potency seed. That's interesting. The seed, it seems, has. I'm not sure how Aristotle thinks about it exactly, but we can think of it has sort of DNA in it, and so it has the blueprint in it. Does the artist necessarily have a blueprint before creating anything? Like definitely, an artisan has the model for a table before, but an artist, it seems like that might be a more organic thing, but maybe that is closer that he's not thinking of a seed having the full blueprint of the plant in it because he doesn't have the concept like DNA. It has a potency that is directed. And likewise, an artist is going to bloom this artwork, but doesn't mean that the plan was there.

36:21 Wes: I think he's thinking of the two analogously. Right? We, the artist has the form in mind and the seed in a way is on analogy to that. Obviously the seed is not thinking about the thing it's going to become, but we can think of it in terms of it being encoded. The phenotype of the organism is in some sense encoded in the seed or in the DNA. And I think there's something of that in what he's saying. And potency, because he can only speak about it vaguely. Potency is the word he has to use. But potency in a way is an encoding. When we think about something that we're going to do or make, there's an encoding there as well, before action occurs.

36:56 Mark: My notes for chapter nine were two paragraphs and that was it. And my 10 is not. Oh no, my 10 is quite a bit longer than that. Yeah. Do we want to finish up with saying a little about 10 or.

37:08 Wes: I think we should just skip to 16. But all those chapters on definition are really, really complicated.

37:13 Mark: Okay, yeah, that's where that starts. 10 is where definition and 16.

37:16 Wes: He really does kind of wrap up the whole thing. He gives his conclusion.

37:20 Mark: What seem to be independent things are potencies, parts of animals. And when they are separated, even then they all have being only as materials, but also earth and fire and air. These are just like a heap until some one thing is ripened or born out of them. That was a paraphrase in my notes.

37:36 Wes: The point of this chapter, ultimately, even though he's called form and matter, the parts of things, now, he's going to reject that in the strict sense. When we have a individual substance, like a human being, the whole, in a way is greater than the parts. And when we say what makes the whole greater than the parts, we're talking about the form or the essence. And that former essence isn't just another part, because if it were, we would have to talk about another form that says how it's connected to its other parts. So form, you think about it in terms of structure.

Whatever form is doing in a thing, it's integrated structurally, and it's not just another part of the thing, or it couldn't do what it's supposed to do on this account. And then again, he talks about universals as well. And he says if you treat universals as substances, you're basically just reifying what we know is substance, which is the particular. And we don't want to do that with the formal in general. So we don't want to say the form of a thing is just another particular in the particular. We don't want to do any reifying with this.

38:44 Mark: Well, I'm a little disappointed that I thought potency was going to end up being a technical term. But if a potency is both in a seed and in an artist's heads, and the parts of animals and earth and fire and air, which clearly those are not analogous to the seed and the artist's mind, because earth and fire and air, the whole point of his account is that they don't have the blueprint. But, you know, they're still potentially something that's going to be part of an organism eventually, but they don't have the telos built into them. They're inert, a random heap.

39:18 Wes: They're a potentiality in the sense that what he says is when they're separated, they exist Only as matter, right? So if you cut a hand off, it's no longer a hand except in name. It can't do the work that it's supposed to do. Right. A hand is really a functional unit for Aristotle. It's a thing that can grasp and do other things. And if it can't do that, then it's no longer a hand. So it'll say, and here's a direct quote, you know, a hand when it's separated is not a unity anymore. It's really just a heap. He'll say, to be a unity, something needs to be worked up. Which is an interesting way to put it. There's gotta be some active principle. And I think we'll get into this in the next recording that can make it unified. And when that active principle goes away, it just becomes a heap again.

40:05 Mark: You've gotten me Googling what happened to Dr. Who's severed hand in the David Tennant Years. Because I thought maybe it grew into a new doctor, but no, it was, but it stayed alive.

40:15 Wes: He does mention that. He does mention that some animals, the parts can grow back to. Do you ever see that Michael Caine movie? I think it's called the Hand?

40:22 Mark: No.

40:22 Wes: If you want to see a great severed hand movie, watch that. Because it. He gets his hand cut off, but then the hand is chasing him for the whole movie. His hand is trying to kill him. Unless I dreamt that. I mean, I think that's a real movie.

40:35 Mark: The thing is, the dirty things you made me do so many times, Michael, I'm gonna get you for that.

40:42 Dylan: I just like the phrase, if you want to see a great severed hand movie, read just the questions that abound about all the shitty severed hand movies out there. And the Severed hand movie anthology.

40:58 Wes: It's a genre of movie. It's a species genre.

41:00 Dylan: It's a natural genre of severed hand movies.

41:04 Mark: I'm looking for the web article five Severed hand movies that are awesome and five that suck.

41:10 Wes: Listen, Severed hand movies, when they are cut off from the corpus of movies as a whole, are no longer severed hand movies, except in name.

41:20 Mark: What if we lived in a world where every movie was a severed hand movie? Then they would all just be movies. They would just call them movies.

41:28 Dylan: I think that's a fine place to stop.

41:31 Mark: Thanks, everybody. Next time we're going to be finishing this up with parts of two more books. So it is parts of nine, which is theta, and 12, which is upside down. Triangle, Lambda lambda.

41:49 Wes: Thank you.

41:50 Mark: It was news to me that Zeta was 7, Zeta was F. You Just

41:56 Dylan: have to know the Greek Alphabet in order. Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, eta.

42:01 Mark: I knew it wasn't last, but I didn't think zeta was so early.

42:04 Dylan: Alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, theta, lambda, mu, xi.

42:08 Wes: omicron, pi, rho, sigma, tau, you guys, that's ancient for you.

42:13 Seth: Theta and lambda. So that's 9 and 12.

42:18 Mark: That is correct. Some parts of those. On our St. John's sheet, it only says sections chapter 6 and 8 from theta, and then 1 and 6 through 10 from lambda. But let's see what we have the appetite for.

42:30 Dylan: They're two different topics. Which is going to be interesting for us to do on one recording, because it's going to be in some ways the culmination of what we've been talking about so far is this notion of you get the being at work staying itself of something. But then 12 is God, right?

42:47 Seth: All right.

42:47 Mark: Well, hopefully we won't have two more episodes, but no guarantees.

42:52 Wes: Well, how long is the reading? It's short, right?

42:55 Dylan: Hopefully.

42:57 Mark: What I just said, I think is probably short. But if we do all of theta and all of. If we feel the need.

43:03 Wes: No, we're not doing that.

43:04 Mark: Okay.

43:05 Dylan: Yeah.

43:05 Wes: So 20 pages would be the absolute maximum. I think we should do this. 40 pages was brutal.

43:12 Mark: Yeah, sounds good. Thanks, everybody. Let us know we have some things on the docket for after this tunnel opens up into the wider world, but we'd love to hear your suggestions. We had a couple this. This week, somebody saying you need to do X, you need to start a series on Zizek. That's the expectation that we have now, is that we're going to start a series on everything. All right, let's be done here. See, everybody? Good night.

43:37 Seth: Good night.

43:38 Wes: Good night.