Ep. 338: Aristotle on Potential vs. Actual and the Unmoved Mover (Part One)

0:00 Wes: Just want to let you know about our book coming out on April 25th, just in time for our 15th anniversary. It includes chapters for 18 of our episodes with such guests as Lucy Lawless and Michael Sandel, Peter Singer and Arthur Danto. The book also includes essays by me, Mark, and our editor. For more information, go to partiallyexaminelife.com book.

0:33 Mark: You're listening to Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our Questions for episode 338 are what's the relationship between the potential and the actual? And what is the ultimate source of all motion in the universe? This is our fourth and final discussion of Aristotle's metaphysics. If you're jumping in here, you may wish to listen first to episode 335, where our treatment of this book starts. Today we're discussing book nine, aka theta, and also book 12 or lambda. For more information, please see partialexaminelife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, causing motion in the manner of something loved in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:09 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, whose potency is according to a rational formula in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1:16 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey, being at work staying myself in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:20 Mark: All right, wrapping up the metaphysics. There's a lot of books that we skipped. I sort of skimmed over some of them, and I know we got this exact reading assignment from the St. John's College reading list. But starting at THETA, Chapter 6 was too confusing for me, so I just kind of at least skimmed all the previous parts of Theta, which were about potency.

1:39 Dylan: I thought the reading included one through three or something like that too, which

1:42 Mark: go through potency in any case. Yeah, 6 and 8 were focused on this notion of being at work. So actuality, which is mostly defined in contrast to potency. Book 12 is a separate thing, which. Which is the famous unmoved mover argument. This definitely does not seem like we're wrapping up. This is the thematic conclusion. Like, no, these are just sort of different issues. We could have stopped at any point. But these, you know, are interesting concepts to get at. I'm not sure how much of a meal I feel like I can make out of this. I like the term being at work.

I like the idea of something's thingness, its individuality, being fundamentally what it is doing, it's activity. It is a process philosophy. I didn't really expect that out of Aristotle. In contrast to Plato, where the ultimate things are the forms that are absolutely static. And we already talked about in our very first discussion of this book. How if something is absolutely static, how could it kick off the motion of the universe? How could we account for motion at all?

2:38 Dylan: Change, I mean, I think that's the beginning, right? I mean, you just called it not a meal. But I mean, potency, something having potential, and that's the source of change. And his rendition of what it means for something, the traditional was actualized, something being at work, staying itself. That's original Aristotle thought. Right. Maybe other people like Heraclitus are process philosophers too. But he's the guy thinking about this at that time. And I think everybody else is likely indebted to that. Even if they don't know it, they're indebted.

3:10 Wes: Sorry, to which?

3:11 Dylan: To Aristotle on the question of potency. The combination of potency and also the notion of what something is is a process of becoming, that is the activity of the thing.

3:26 Wes: I guess the question is, why do we need concepts like potency? This is one of the things that Aristotle got a bad rap for. Right. Is, you know, how do I explain why this medicine makes me sleepy? Well, it has a dormative effect. It has a power. It has a potency to cause this sort of thing. And so you just get these very generic explanations that don't look really like explanations, at least according to the way contemporary science would treat of these sort of things. And so then the question becomes, of what use is it even to talk about potency in contrast to actuality?

4:00 Dylan: I think you're right, but the moment you bring up contemporary science is the moment I think about the entire revolution of kinematics and mathematical physics in early modern science and the notion of energy and the notion of potential energy that that's stored up, that's available to a moving entity, and that that is the limit of its ability to move and the constraint of that energy, the total energy in the system is the combination of its energy and motion and its potential energy that's available to be turned into motion.

4:35 Wes: You took the words right out of my mouth. No, I mean, I totally. I do totally agree.

4:40 Dylan: Yeah. I haven't done the intellectual history on it at all, but it seems very doubtful that the notion of abstract, unconstrained notion of potency, where anything that happens is because of a power. You can certainly, like any idea, have a very undisciplined and unrefined thinking about it. And I don't think that you have that exactly in Aristotle, but the idea that if something is able to participate in a motion, it has to have the ability, the Potency to participate in that motion. And if something is going to be acted upon, it has to in some way be able to be receptive to being acted upon in that way. And there are trivial ways of that. And there are deeply non trivial ways of that.

5:22 Wes: Well, we would just talk about these things in more granular terms, right? In terms of very, very specific causal mechanisms. So for instance, maybe tensile strength or something like that would be relevant. Or certain material properties that might allow me to predict what's going to happen under what conditions to a material. But I was also thinking more generally about this word power, potency, which is dunamis in the ancient Greek, right. Which is where we get dynamic system, because in Locke it shows up as. Power shows up as something related to secondary qualities.

Which is to say, if I'm seeing an object that looks red to me, where I have the qualia of red, and I don't want to say red is out there in the world, I have to talk about this in terms of what philosophers will come to call microstructure, but in terms of primary qualities of the object that for some reason have this power to produce the quality of red in me. And there's no way to say why it would produce this particular qualitative effect in the subject. Even though we can talk about frequency of light and light entering the eye and all that.

6:33 Dylan: You have to have a potency on the side of the sense receptor, right?

6:38 Mark: A potency on both sides. Right. The thing has the power to appear read to us. We have the power to be affected by this, to produce a sensation of red.

6:47 Wes: The power in the thing would become, in modern scientific terms, it would just become whatever we would talk about as the explanation at the level of microstructure in any way. An explanation in terms of physics would become a fleshing out of what it means for it to have that power. It doesn't explain everything to say that, well, a light of a certain frequency reflecting an object is going to give me red and another frequency, blue. But it does tell me something. And the other way to look at that is in terms of, you know, if we didn't like primary and secondary qualities, we would have to talk about things in terms of quote, unquote, ontological emergence, where red is, yes, it's out there, but it's an emergent property that sits on top of that underlying power, or dunamis.

Or to take another example, water, right. The macro properties of water sit on top of H2O. And that explanation we can explain to some extent, not all of it, but we can explain some of it in terms of the way molecules work at that level. So potency or power is at least a framework for those types of explanations. Even if Aristotle doesn't have the resources available to him to get into more

7:55 Dylan: detail, talking about the entity that's being observed, that's read as having the power to manifest redness to something that has the power to receive, the sensory power on the side of the receiver does seem to have a certain kind of feel more like a power or a potency than the other side, even though the balance is there in Aristotle having to have both. But the notion that, especially the way you were talking about it just now, Wes, of there being an emergent character of redness that is a result of the power of the entity doing the sensory reception of it, especially in this case of that entity being something that has something like reason.

Right. It does feel a little bit weirder when if you say that your radio has the potency to receive FM 106.9 and it's going to do that if the radio tower out there has the potency to send out radio frequency waves out into the world at 106.9 and those potencies on both sides really amount to. You built it right. It has the right kind of waveguide, has the right kind of electrical oscillator on it as the right kind of oscillator with the right frequency of detecting those waves in the waveguide of the antenna. That's like an electromechanical analogy to your radio is your eye and your radio station is sending out the waves.

It's just light being reflected off of a red surface. It's like a straight up exact analogy. But it's weird talking about as potency because you don't think of that radio as being active in that way. Whereas a living entity, there's something about it that feels more aligned with it.

9:48 Mark: Yeah.

9:48 Wes: Let's talk about the eye for a second, because that's his example. So what does it mean to say the eye has a potency or potential for seeing? It's about its structure. Right. And it's about what it is in a dormant state versus what it is in an active state. So the eye and the brain have to be doing something actively in order for us to be in an actual state of seeing. And probably in relation to some object, it gets a little complicated, but it's not always doing that. So what are you left with when someone is blindfolded or in some other state which we might legitimately call not seeing.

But they have this structure which when active would be seeing in a way. Potency becomes a way of describing. Well, it's about function as well. We'll find out. It's about the fact that eyes are for seeing that'll be important. But it's also about structure and the way it is that, you know, a certain arrangement of matter could actually do this extraordinary thing when it's activated.

10:51 Mark: So supposedly this is adding something. Dylan, I like your example with the many steps of what it takes to get a radio signal there. This is supposed to be, you know, why we did these two units together, the unmoved mover and the potency. Actuality is because it's about adding information to the chain of causation. That you could just see the chain of causation as just this is what happened. But that doesn't really let us understand like, well, why did each step happen? Was this step an expected step? Was this an aberrant step? I know that potency is very much derivative ontologically. Epistemologically it is inferior to, it is behind, it is beneath actuality.

11:32 Wes: Right.

11:32 Mark: We only actually know that an eye can be for seeing that an eye in a dormant state could see because actual seeing takes place.

11:41 Dylan: Same thing with an acorn and an oak tree. Right. You don't know that an acorn is a potential oak tree except in seeing that the acorn grows into an oak tree.

11:48 Mark: So many times I thought like, should my primary question should be what came first, the chicken or the egg? Because he talks about this, you know, epistemologically we would never know an egg was an egg.

11:59 Wes: It's the chicken, by the way, for Aristotle, it's just the chicken.

12:02 Mark: Well, he.

12:02 Dylan: It's just a chicken.

12:03 Wes: He answers that question over and over.

12:05 Mark: It seems like, I think one of the sources for this whole line of thinking about potential is this thing that we saw in Plato's Phaedo, this common metaphysical conception that opposites always come from opposites. So he puts the potential actual thing in that way a number of times. And so the chicken comes from the egg, which comes from the chicken, which comes from the egg. Right. The thing that ends up being the unmoved mover is not a chicken. Right? It's not. It has to be something external to that whole particular chain because he does have this multi layered version of causality, which is one of the things I want to get into.

Right. You said the fact that the eye's for seeing ends up being an important explanatory thing. But that's very different than what we might have thought that the unmoved mover argument was about, which is a chain of efficient causation, physical causing of one thing to another.

12:57 Wes: But it's not right.

12:58 Mark: The cosmological argument of the existence of God is something kicked off the movement. But that wouldn't be an unmoved mover. That would be a kicker, the place kicker, the primary kicker. The notion of potency and actuality introduces some ambiguity. I'm not sure I'm entirely clear on how these different types of causation feed into each other, because I would have thought that, oh, these are just different kinds of explanation. You can give an explanation for what happened in terms of efficient causation. You can give it in terms of formal causation, material causation, final causation purposes.

But those are all sort of running in parallel. It seemed like he was saying in the first episode where we discussed this that you need all four of those to give a full account, to give a full understanding. But that doesn't mean that you could have. What's the cause of the egg is the chicken? Well, what caused the chicken is the previous chicken, and then the form of chickenhood, and then somehow ultimately going back to a final cause, the fact that all things are working toward the good. The fact that chickenhood is working towards his full actuality, you know, that all things are sort of rotating around the good in a very Platonic sounding way.

14:07 Wes: I will say, though, you know, he does explicitly reject the good because it's static. But I think you're right. The unmoved mover just turns out to be a dynamic version of the good.

14:17 Dylan: This is the point where to me, he gets to the unmoved mover in this kind of logical way that we'll talk about. Wes invoked the term, and I used it as well, of emergence. And this is where I don't think you in the end have Aristotle really having a strong notion of emergence. It still ends up being that the initial cause, the unmoved mover, is really the primary fundamental cause. And a strong notion of emergence would be that those entities actually come into being not as a result of some unmoved mover cause, but come into being out of the actions of. In the potentials and the playing out of the activities before. That's a strong notion of emergence, which I don't know that is there in Aristotle.

15:06 Wes: I mean, ultimately, you have to say

15:08 Dylan: human beings didn't exist even potentially a billion years Ago, human beings didn't exist even potentially then. It wasn't until the conditions existed, whatever it was 10 million years ago, 3 million years ago, that that potential started happening, existing.

15:23 Mark: I do like the question, right, in chapter seven of the first. So this is not technically one of the sections that we read, but between six and eight he asks, when is something the potential of something else? Is the Earth potentially a human being? Like that seems like a pretty wacky question. But okay, there's a chain of causation from the substance Earth, if you take this to be, or, you know, the elements to humanity. So it almost seems like, is there a purpose of this besides just kind of verbiage that I want to say? Yeah, of course the Earth plays into the causal network and the composition of the thing that eventually results as a human being.

But we would only want to use the potential for the bun in the oven that is ready to become the full edible bun, or the seed that is ready to become the tree, not something further back. I mean, he's just asking this question of like, where do we want to draw the line? Because this is about the. This ness of a thing, right, that its activity is essential. Part of what makes Aristotelian forms different than Platonic forms is that the form instantiated in the individual is at work. And so where does this come from? Well, it comes out of potency.

Forms can't come into being. Forms still are eternal, Right. Just like yellow itself is eternal. It doesn't mean that there's a Platonic form that's static off. But in terms of. Yeah, this is always difficult for me to explain that how, yeah, forms can come and go and they're individual, but yet it's more like turning off a light than sort of building something. Is that accurate that when a form clicks in, even though the form is a dynamic thing, you can't have half a form, Right? We already said forms are the fundamental unit. Either it's there or it's not there.

And so potency is supposed to add something to the story of how you could suddenly have a form where none was before is because you have the conditions, you have the potency, the form is ready to come in.

17:15 Wes: I think the way in which this is helpful is if we think of things in terms of modern biological explanations, we would say that DNA is a good example of a potency where one form of formality explains ultimately another form of formality. Right. So the structure of the DNA will ultimately explain the phenotype. In other words, there's a Blueprint there in the thing that is only potentially a human being, there's a blueprint there for human beings. So potentiality is a good way to describe the dormant structure which, when it becomes active and does a lot of other things, could manifest a form for which it really is just a code.

I think the word code here is another way to think about it. But he will say, Mark in seven, he'll say, the seed is not yet potentially a man, for it must be deposited in something other than itself and undergo a change. He's thinking of human seed. But when through its own motive, principle has already got such and such attributes, in this state it is already potentially a man, while in the former state it needs another motive principle. Just as the Earth is not yet potentially a statue, and so on and so forth. There's some point where it's always useful to think about organisms because they're doing everything for themselves.

Once you get things going, there's all this activity which will lead, all things being equal inevitably, to the development of a human being out of a fertilized egg. It doesn't need any other external interference. Of course, you know, you need nutrients from the environment and all that stuff, but you don't need any. But the activity of the organism will do everything it needs to take this potential thing and make it an actual thing.

18:50 Mark: Right? His answer in chapter 7, when is the potential of something? When is something the potential of something else? If you take something, add a desire that it be actual, and nothing stands in the way, then it's actually actual. That's at least the note that I had. So he talks about this both in terms of things where the source of change is in something else. So in other words, when is this pile of wood a potential house? Or when is the bronze a potential statue? Versus when the source of change is in the thing itself. So the seed. So with a potential house, if nothing in this or in the material for becoming a house stands in the way, and there is nothing that needs to be, have been added or taken away or changed, this is potentially a house.

Is that helpful? It just sounds like, you know, you've got all the parts there, right? So all you need is somebody to come along with the form. And I listened to a video. I don't know if this was from some book that we didn't read, but. But that was strongly associating the potential with the material, with the matter, and the actual, with the form. That this is the way that this just smashes into our previous discussion last time about like, was this the material itself? Is that the ultimate thinghood? Well, no, no, no, that's just the potential.

You have to add the form, then you get the actual.

19:57 Wes: He will say actuality will turn out to be formula. Because the form is the what it makes thing that really is. Sorry, let me say that again. The form is what makes the thing the thing that it really is. Should we say, since we skipped over book six, should we just say briefly

20:10 Dylan: what the closest thing to that notion of activity, of the form being embodied in the activity of the thing? I want to say the thing rather than the material. Right. Because I think all of these pieces come together in calling an entity an entity. And whatever that thing is, it is the material and the activity that represents the form.

20:32 Wes: And I think, you know, if we talk of emergence, we're talking about sort of a drill down effect. When we're talking about seeds and complete organisms, we're talking about something that unfolds over time and the same thing with the final cause. These are temporal explanations or horizontal explanations. The reason why I've brought up emergence several times is because I think this, you know, this is usefully applied to what I would call drill down explanations in terms of getting from macro level form to micro level structure. And the same thing confronts us in any time we talk about substance, which is to say, and it kind of came up in Hegel as well, right.

The absolute is really ultimately about substance. And so what is the very first thing at bottom? Substance could be at the level of microstructure, could be the ultimate particle or field or whatever it is, the thing which no longer has any prior explanation. And that's substance in the drill down sense. And then going backwards to the big bang or whatever is behind it, that's the horizontal explanation, which gives us something like something corresponding to the unmoved mover. In either case we have to say where all this activity comes from in the first place.

Or in other words, maybe there is no explanation except to appeal to something like the unmoved mover. But at bottom, things are just doing what they do. They don't have an efficient cause behind them. That's what I'm trying to say.

21:59 Mark: Yeah, I don't think they could have an efficient cause. It's just that the efficient cause is the application of the water or the light or the material or whatever it is that like if you just consider the efficient cause, then it really would be emergent. That I could never have predicted these possibilities. But if you're talking about a formal Cause or the way that the form gets applied to the matter, then, yeah, it seems like no true emergence is possible because it's right there in the blueprint. And when the blueprint is applied to the thing, there still could be things that you couldn't necessarily have predicted epistemologically, epistemically, whatever, from looking at the blueprints. But that doesn't mean that they weren't somehow encoded in the blueprint.

22:35 Wes: I was just making a point about if you find the ultimate particle or whatever, that thing's properties can't be explained in terms of the properties of something else, some smaller thing or something before it. Whatever activity it has, whatever energy it has, it just has. Hasn't been given that by something else.

22:54 Mark: I mean, that sounds like Lucretius. I'm not sure I see a place for that. You're seeing a place for that in

22:58 Wes: Aristotle's thought, or you're just, well, in contemporary science. And what I was trying to connect the two forms of explanation, because what Aristotle is concerned about, he's been concerned about it in all our readings to some extent, is where does the motion come from? Where does the activity ultimately come from? He doesn't like Plato's forms because they're static and they can't introduce motion. He doesn't like reducing things to the material elements because he doesn't think you can get motion from those either. Although fire is our best candidate if we want to go that route.

Ultimately, something's got to introduce energy into the universe. It's got to be. Introduce motion into the universe. And we could do that in two ways. We think again in terms of horizontal or vertical. But whichever way it is, we have to be able to say that the activity comes from somewhere. And the ingenious thing about his account is to have something that gives to the universe all the activity and energy it needs without actually doing that as an efficient cause, without actually just transferring the energy, because that just creates an infinite regress problem.

It creates other problems as well. It's a way to cut off those problems at the past.

24:05 Dylan: It's worth emphasizing what you. I guess you just recapitulated. Wes, is. Aristotle's big thing, is trying to account for change and persistence through change. So the challenge of the forms from Plato and the challenge of, like the one from Parmenides, the change in Heraclitus, that's constant flux, all of those things that he rejects earlier, he is simultaneously noting, look, stuff is changing, but things are also staying the same effectively. Or there are things that Stay the same through change. They change in position and location and composition.

And the quintessential example, over and over and over again, are living entities that they grow and age and change shape. But we still completely recognize and say that it's the same thing over time. And that ends up being true for other things. So he's trying to solve that problem. How do we maintain that it's the same entity while it's also changing?

25:13 Wes: And he'll use what for Plato is just a big contradiction in order to explain it, which is to say activity and becoming serve being. The thing works at being itself, right? So we have all this dynamic stuff going on at the micro. You know, again, I'm going to translate this into a contemporary explanation. All this dynamic atoms buzzing around molecules, this, that at one level that produce stability at another level, which gets us into. I think that might be a good segue into book six, because he wants to talk about some forms of movement in which the end is present. So there are some things which where it's not just there's a movement and then it's over. There's some things for which the ongoing being of the thing is a movement. And seeing is one example of that. Thinking is another example.

26:01 Mark: When you said book six, you mean

26:03 Wes: chapter six of book nine, chapter six of book Theta. Sorry.

26:06 Mark: What Dylan was saying was making me think of. It's book 12, chapter one, which is again about the contraries. When a perceptible thing changes, it must change into a contrary. But to quote there be something underlying the thing that changes into the contrary conditions, since the contraries themselves do not change. I just want to get a little clear because of all this form and matter stuff that we were talking about last time at which of those. Or is it a combination? Or is it, you know, a new version of form that creates the thing itself? When we say there is something that makes the passage from embryo to human or from acorn to oak tree a consistent thing, are we saying that it is the embodied form or are we saying that, oh no, the embodied form is only there when it is actualized, when it is at work, when it is the full tree or human.

And it is there only as a potency. We've been talking about, well, there's a different form, there's the DNA, the blueprint, that's one kind of form. And then the actuality is another kind of form that's very much not Aristotle's. It either has to be that the form is the thing that is consistent in the growth or there's something else that's consistent, yet the form comes into being. It is the contraries themselves do not change. So in other words, potential and actual are the contraries. Those do not actually change. So what is the thing that's consistent?

Is it the substantial form or not?

27:28 Wes: Aristotle knows there's something formal in the seed, right? He doesn't just think it's nothing. He knows there's something formal in the sea that explains what becomes formal in the fully developed organism. And the same thing goes for wood. You make a desk out of wood. Yes. Relative to the form of table, wood is matter. But relative to something else, wood is form. So there are always formal elements to matter. There's no matter which is just completely not formal. So when we do formal explanations of an entity, when we relate it to matter, we relate it to form at some other level just to respond to one party of what you're saying. So I didn't get the other part of what you're saying about what's remaining the same or.

28:09 Mark: Yeah, what was your take, Dylan, on there must be something that underlies the changes between contrary conditions. Right. Between potential and actual, between seed and acorn and oak tree. In Aristotelian language, what is the thing? It sounds like what Wes is saying is that if you think of form as just the shape of the mature thing or the activity of the mature thing, you're not getting how complicated a form is. For Aristotle, that the form is the whole process. So it's being at work is not only what it is doing. When it is a mature tree, it does the entire growth cycle, including its death. The whole thing is the form.

28:45 Dylan: That's exactly right. And I don't stumble on the contraries piece because I don't think of them as opposites. I think of them as just the embodiment of change is something going from one state to another state. And that's all I think he's saying. When he says you have to have contraries, he's not saying you have to have opposites, you just have to have have. In some ways, this state is not the same as the other state. He's just acknowledging that.

29:08 Wes: Well, I think he's thinking. When he's thinking about opposites with change, he's thinking about property, accidental property change.

29:16 Dylan: Yeah, but opposites are different than contraries, right?

29:18 Wes: Well, you're going to have to explain that to me. I thought we were using them synonymously.

29:22 Dylan: I guess I was not thinking that they were the same thing.

29:25 Wes: You're right. Contraries in the sense of exclusive. Right.

29:28 Dylan: So, yeah, something could be not something else, but not the opposite.

29:31 Wes: Something goes from having one property, one color, to having another color. One property is exclusive to the other. So contraries in the sense of from red to blue. Blue is not red. So we don't need to call those opposites.

29:46 Mark: But I like that we're approaching this and trying to relate it to what we were talking about in the last discussions of like, what constitutes a thing, good of a thing. And so what persists through its change is exactly. Is the most important issue maybe, which

29:59 Wes: he's told us is the essence. The essence and the form are the things that persist through change. They are the underlying substratum, not the matter. So that's what we learned in our last discussion.

30:09 Mark: So I see my notes for book 12, chapter 2, that it's the material. Further, there's something that persists while the contrary state does not persist. Therefore, there's a third thing besides the contraries, the material. And then he talks about four different ways of changing, coming into being. Change of attribute, right? Change from green to red, how much or place. They're all into contrary states of particular kinds. So green and not green, whatever the other color is, are a contrary. They're just not opposites in all respect. Right. I don't know if he even uses the word opposite, but it would be sort of in complete respect. But, you know, that's never really what's going on day to night are both times what would the complete opposite of something. I don't. I don't even know what.

30:50 Wes: Well, I think Dylan was warning us, right, to not conflate contraries with opposites. So. And you're using this word opposite again, are you? Are you seeing opposites in there?

30:59 Mark: Right. No, that's what I was saying is I don't think he uses that and thinking about what that would mean. I mean, really, it's that negation is mostly what he's talking about here, that the movement from potential to actual involves contraries because either it could materialize as actual or it could fail to materialize as actual. And earlier in book nine, he says, when you introduce the will or reason into it, then, well, reason can decide to do the thing or not do the thing. So that a negation is the closest to an opposite as you would get. Right. Either it happens or it doesn't, or the statement is true or its negation is true. All right, we could go back to book nine, if you would.

31:39 Wes: So book nine, chapter six, we get this Idea that to talk about potentiality we have to think about it in relation to actuality. So we wouldn't ever talk about something as potentially seeing unless there was already a seeing. And I think, Mark, you already made this point. But in a way, I think the larger point is we wouldn't even think about the function of something unless we saw it actually doing what it's.

32:04 Dylan: Without seeing it functioning. Yeah, you wouldn't think about the function of something without seeing it functioning.

32:09 Mark: It's really interesting to me that he compares this is on 174. These things like potentially seeing to one who has his eyes shut. And the awake to the asleep is another one. And what has been formed out of material to the material, what is perfected to what is incomplete. Those seem to be quite different things that how this pile of wood and nails is a potential house versus you with your eyes closed being a potential seeing person. Like, it seems like a lot more work has to go in to the house.

32:40 Wes: He's going to get into that in chapter eight because there are some actualities where there's a quote unquote product. And to help us understand the analogy, he's going to say, well, just think of the seeing agent as a kind of product if you want to really complete the analogy. Because he wants to say that there's a potential house and then there's the building, that activity of building, which is itself an actuality of a sort. And then there's the product, the actual house, which is the full actuality. And he too is bothered by the disanalogy between the eye and then seeing, which is its full actuality. And then there's the lack of a product. So he says, if you want to think about a product, think of the seeing agent as the product. The human being, the subject who is in the state of seeing is like the house.

33:29 Dylan: That's the being at work stay in itself business. And the challenge with the house is the house doesn't build itself right as usual.

33:35 Mark: Sachs is. I'm not sure if he's right here, but because Aristotle says for some of them are related in the manner of a motion to a potency. Others in the manner of a thinghood to some material. And Sachs says this is the reason being at work is not definable. Potency is clearest to us at the capacity for motion or change. But motion itself is defined as a form of being at work staying complete. But being at work is usually reserved for the activities that are not motions. In Aristotle's discourse, energeia is an ultimate explanatory term, not itself explainable by anything simpler or clearer. But Aristotle has chosen the word to carry meaning on its own, and translating it as actuality kills it. So being at work is an energeia, right? That's what he's translating as being at work. Is that right?

34:17 Dylan: As a sui generis, a short version of not liking. Actuality is the way in which it's static. Actuality sounds static, whereas that's why I want to say being at work wants to maintain the notion of activity that's contained in it.

34:34 Wes: Section 6. He's going to tell us that there is a type of movement. I've said this before, but since we're covering this, there is a type of movement in which the end is present and that he is going to count as action. And not all movements are actions. So some movements, things that are mere movements, like walking or making thin, is what it is. One of his examples, movement occurs and then it's over and that's it. But in some movements, like thinking or seeing, the end is present. It's not that we just walk to a place and then we're done. But the destination is the activity, man. The destination is the movement.

35:19 Mark: The journey's the activity.

35:21 Wes: The journey. There you go. That's fine.

35:23 Dylan: The journey is the destination.

35:25 Wes: In chapter eight, he's going to get into all these senses in which actuality is prior to potency, to potentiality, and logos and substance in time in one sense, although not in another. So there's a long list of explanations of different forms of priority here. And this is also where he will get into that whole disanalogy between the house example and the seeing example that I talked about.

35:50 Dylan: So at the beginning of eight, he says, it is clear that being at work takes precedence over potency. Actuality takes precedence over potentiality. And I mean that it takes precedence not only over potency as defined, which means a source of change in another thing, or in the same thing as other, but over every source of motion or rest in general. For nature, too, is in the same general class as potency, since it is a source of motion, though not in something else, but in a thing itself as itself. Now, over everything of that kind, being at work takes precedence both in articulation and in thinghood. But in time, there is a sense in which it does and a sense

36:28 Mark: in which it does not takes precedence. Is such a weird translation there because, like, what do you mean it takes precedence? Okay, well, he's clarifying ontologically, chronologically, Epistemologically, like, which one do we know first? Clearly, as we were saying, we only know that there's a potential for seeing, because we know all about seeing. So epistemologically, that's really clear. Ontologically, I mean, this is the most important thing to him, although it's the most sort of abstract that we've been, throughout our discussions here, been saying that, well, primary being is the most being.

The whole point of the exercise is to characterize sort of what being is. And the way he does that. Since being can't be contrasted with something that's really not being, there was really no sense of nothingness. Nothingness is only sort of otherness than what we were expecting. So instead we talk about what has precedence, ontological precedence, what is the primary being? And within that, if we are saying that the embodied form is primary being and that persists from acorn through oak tree, from potential through actuality, then we have to say within that stretch, the actuality is the primary thing.

I'm still not sure, like, why do we have to make this point? Like, is this actually help understand anything? I'm not sure it does.

37:41 Wes: Yeah, I think saying the most being. I'm not sure he would say that. But it's what's ontologically prior and separable. So the particular rabbit, it has a kind of being that it's the white property of its coat, does not have. And white. Right. Only exists insofar as it belongs to something like a rabbit or to some other separable entity that exists in its own right. We can think about your question of whether that actually is helpful as we. As we move forward for now, priority in formula or logos or account. How is Sachs translating that? This is the first form of priority. My translation is formula, but I suspect Sachs is saying account, or maybe he's just leaving it as logos.

38:24 Dylan: I mean, he just uses word precedence. Right. It's clear that being at work takes

38:28 Mark: precedence over potency, where potency as defined,

38:32 Dylan: which means in articulation and thinghood.

38:35 Wes: Okay, as defined. So he's using the word definition, although I think Aristotle is using a more generic term. But definition is implied. Or maybe he said the word for definition would be horismos, and maybe that's what he's using there. I assumed he was saying logos, which is why my translation said formula, but it all comes to the same thing. Okay, so priority in definition, let's say. What is that?

38:56 Mark: I mean, the definition is supposed to establish the thingness of the thing, the specific thingness, and so when we're defi. I mean, this still sounds like it's bleeding into epistemology for me. Right. Because when I say how we explain it. But that's not what he means by definition. If the definition is supposed to metaphysically fix in a way that is not just making clear to hearers. So it's not an epistemic tool.

39:18 Wes: I mean, it's both. Because he does say knowledge of the latter must precede knowledge of the former.

39:22 Mark: Right, but that's a different.

39:24 Wes: So it is about priority and knowing.

39:26 Mark: Okay.

39:26 Wes: I mean, he says that in this.

39:27 Mark: Yeah, but I thought he was just distinguishing that from metaphysical priority. And that, as defined, was supposed to be on the metaphysical side. Maybe it's both, as you say, the

39:36 Wes: formula and the knowledge of the one must precede the knowledge of the other. That's the end of that paragraph. So I took that to be synonymous with what he meant. But I think, Mark, you're right. These are real definitions. So in a way, this is about conceptual priority. We can't know one thing without knowing the other. We can't know seeing as potency without knowing seeing the actual thing, seeing the activity. And yes, metaphysically, there'll be the same sort of priority. Which is an odd thing to say. Right. Because we think normally, we think of.

Well, the structure of the eye is what enables seeing, and therefore it is actually prior to seeing. But for Aristotle, you have to reverse that because there is no such thing as the structure to the eye. What makes it more than a random heap? There is no such thing as a structure to the eye, except unless we understand it in terms of the function that it can perform. If we couldn't understand in that way, we wouldn't call it a structure in the first place. How do we even know something is structured except with reference to the end? With reference to the.

That for sake of which.

40:42 Dylan: Well, it's getting awful close in this way of talking about it to existence is use. It's not exactly the same, but it's getting awful close to it. Right. What it is is what it does.

40:52 Wes: Yeah. So you're drawing this parallel to Wittgensteinian meaning.

40:55 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, I'm making a little bit of a jump here. Right. Because Wittgensteinian meaning is use is a little bit more of a language thing and not quite the same thing as the other way I clarified of saying something is what it does. Something is what it does is closer to what Aristotle's saying. But I do think this way of talking about it, the eye Having the ability to see is not prior to eyes actually seeing, which is what you were saying.

41:22 Mark: It almost should be logically prior, not even metaphysically prior. Logic is sort of more, more fundamental than metaphysics. It's a way of cutting across the epistemic metaphysical distinction by just saying, oh yeah, it's logically prior.

41:35 Wes: Have you learned nothing from Hegel, Mark? Logic is metaphysics. They're the same thing.

41:42 Mark: It seems like we should pause in this comment about nature. For nature too is the same general class as potency, since it is a source of motion, though not in something else, but in a thing itself as itself. I mean, is that telos? It's like I expected teleology to be all over here, but I don't know, unless telos is being translated some way that I cannot detect. But this looks like in something else, but in a thing itself as itself. That is the potency of the acorn as the thing that it is as itself.

42:10 Wes: Well, he's saying the principle of movement, right? The acorn will just grow into the tree of its own accord. It's not like something from the outside comes along and pushes it. So it has this principle of movement in itself. And the movement is towards what it is, you know, in full actuality. The movement is what brings it from the state of potency to the state of actuality. And this, whenever you see the word nature in Aristotle or in an ancient Greek text, think in terms of growth. That's what they're thinking about. Things which become and become by virtue of some internal activity. That's the mysterious thing about biology, right? Which is that you have all this form producing activity that comes from within.

42:51 Dylan: And also, to go back to your invocation of H2O as water, you'd have the same kind of discussion about. Well, that water can become ice is part of its being at work. The environmental conditions around it change such that the temperature is low. And that kind of environmental change isn't any different than the conditions that surround an acorn growing into a oak tree are required so that the intrinsic motion, the being at work of the acorn can do its thing. And those aren't exclusive of each other. You don't have to wrap in the dirt and the water and the sun and the right temperature to say that the acorn has its own being at work in that environment. The same thing is going to be. To me, it seems to be true in the case of water. Water becomes ice under certain conditions because of the way water is. Water becomes steam under certain conditions because

43:52 Mark: of the way water is a thing itself as itself. I was thinking Sachs had made another book nine, chapter one, distinguishing a thing itself as itself from a thing itself as another. So footnote three on that on page 167, Sachs talks about this whole thing serves to distinguish potencies from a thing's nature. A doctor doctors himself as another as a patient who happens to be himself. But a cut on his finger heals itself in its own right. Medical skill is a potency, while the self maintenance of being as a whole is a nature. So there's two ways that a doctor can heal thyself. The finger can just heal because that's what fingers do as itself in itself. Or he can be like, I'm treating myself as my patient. I'm externalizing something and applying the medical arts to fix the thing.

44:43 Dylan: And following the water example I gave is, I think strictly speaking you'd say that the medical arts create the conditions of environment such that the body can do the healing of itself.

44:57 Wes: Yeah, Aristotle makes a lot of this right in our prior readings when he's thinking, thinking about chains of causality. He's very curious about that one because it implicates these two different causal chains. One, the natural one, the artistic.

45:12 Mark: Hey, let's wrap up part one. Please come back for part two, the Unmoved Mover. We will finally be done with this book. You can get that right away if you're a partially examined life citizen. If you're not a partially examined life citizen either through our site or through Patreon, go to partially examined life.com support. If you do support us through Apple, you still have to wait till next week. Just plain Apple for that. It's fine. We thank you for your support regardless, even if you don't want to give us any of your money. We really appreciate you listening. Thanks. Bye bye.