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

0:07 Mark: Hey. This is a Partially Examined Life Episode 338, our concluding part on Aristotle's metaphysics. I think we still had a little more to do on book nine, chapter eight before we move on to chapter 12. What else did you want to say, Wes? About. About the priority. The priority in time of the actual over the potential of being at work over potency.

0:28 Wes: I don't think we should spend a huge amount of time on priority in time because the main part of this is priority and substantiality. But this is our made a joke about the chicken and the egg problem and this is that problem. And he wants to say that, yes, you might say that seed is prior to the corn or the human being. And it's a potentiality in the sense that we all come from that, but also the seed comes from another human being. And he wants to say the fully formed thing is prior. So in that sense, actuality is prior to potency. And remember that for Aristotle, this whole sequence of seed to full organism to seed to full organism, that just goes on forever.

The universe is infinitely extended into the past. And if you really want an answer to the chicken and the egg paradox, the answer is the unmoved mover, which he mentions here. So you might think it's weird that he brings up the unmoved mover here, but in a way that is the only answer to the chicken the egg question.

1:29 Mark: Is there a particular quote that we can read that actually brings in the unmoved? Because it's not at all obvious why, again, repeating what I said in the first half, why a chain of efficient causes which, you know, have some material and formal stuff of course, built into them, of the form of chicken, causing indirectly the next chicken through the potent egg, why then it would be satisfactory to say, and that whole thing gets kicked off by something that does no kicking, because the chain itself has to go on forever.

2:00 Wes: Well, we can talk about that when we do book 12. And the other thing he wants to say here, he calls Meno's problem a sophistical quibble in my translation. But he acknowledges that, you know, there's something important to the idea of that which is coming to be, some part must have come to be. So there must be something preexistent, right, in the seed that explains what comes to be in a fully formed organism, form to organism, and vice versa. And the same thing with learning. We're familiar with things pre. Theoretically, at the level of macro level, phenomena or sensible things, right? The things which for Aristotle, are most knowable. And then we can build out a science that gets at the things that are actually farthest from us, right? So in contemporary science, we understand that very well.

2:45 Dylan: I mean, just related this paradox, we didn't have it exactly in our reading, but I had gone through, in chapter five, he talks about this concept of flute and makes the notion of the distinction between something innate and something in habit. And so there's the potentiality, the potency to learn to play the flute, and then there's the potency to play the flute. And you would have the potency to learn to play the flute innately. You would have to have some potential for learning to play it, but the potentiality to play it, that's formed by habit and by learning. And so your ability to play the flute in any particular way has to do with your having played the flute and cultivated the ability to play the flute.

3:28 Wes: So the fluting art must exist prior to your learning.

3:33 Dylan: I mean, to me, it's a much more satisfactory resolution than the myth of recollection regarding solving Meno's paradox, because it addresses the distinction between having the ability to learn to do something and then having the ability to do the thing. And in the myth of recollection, those two are conflated. In Socrates work with the slave boy is putting him into a point of recognition that he is confused now about the relationship between the diagonal of a square and the sides of a square. And that ends up being rendered as well, that learning is bringing out something that he already knew, which seems kind of weird, right.

But it is in line with the notion of the forms existing for all time. And there's this kind of unearthing of discovery that happens in Aristotle's case. It means that Meno has to be the kind of entity that's capable of learning such a thing. That's one condition. And the other is what happens in the activity with Socrates is that act of learning. So in being confused, he's sort of at the beginning of that recognition is a manifestation of the activity of his potency. It's like that's the presence of seeing for an eye is Meno's actual confusion about the relationship between the diagonal of a square and the sides of the square.

And that decision, to me is way more satisfactory here.

5:01 Mark: Yeah. Sachs says in a footnote, the primary kind of learning is like recollecting an emergent habit of concentrating on what is already going on in us. So it's just the Chomskyan thing that we said. It seems weird to think that we have actual knowledge, but we have abilities natively. And so, yeah, the ability to get the ball rolling is something that the slave boy has.

5:22 Wes: Yeah, right. We've done that with Descartes and Locke and all that. Right. So how much has to be innate? We need some innate cognitive stuff in order to get the ball rolling. But how robust do you want to say that is? Locke wants to make it as minimal as possible, and Kant probably is more. More robust. But yeah, I think Aristotle. Dylan, you're right. Brings out that distinction with these two different types of potentiality. All right. Priority and substantiality. This is a big long list of things in my notes.

5:51 Mark: This was the point I was wondering about before, that the actualized has the form, the potential does not. So he sees the germinal fluid, basically an embryo, because he thought the germinal fluid was the complete genetic makeup of the baby. The sperm had the entire baby in it, and it just needed to get implanted to have an environment in which to grow and some substance to make the baby out of. So we just use embryo. But according to this, the actualized baby has the form, but that embryo does not have the form. Thus the mere potency is. Is a substantial.

6:24 Wes: He said, is more complete in form. In my translation, what does it say?

6:29 Mark: So page 178, 1050a in the middle. Surely it takes precedence in thinghood too. First, because things that are later in coming into being take precedence in form and in thinghood, as a man does over a boy or a human being does over germinal fluid, since the one already has the form and the other does not. So it's not completeness.

6:49 Wes: Right. But the one already has the completed form. He'll say later on. So he'll say further, matter exists in a potential state just because it may come to its form. And when it exists actually, then it is. Then it is in its form.

7:01 Mark: That seems needlessly confusing, but maybe it's getting at something subtle. That is in the literal translation.

7:07 Wes: For the action is the end and the actuality is the action. And so even the word actuality is derived from action. Right. And points to the complete reality. Why do I have the. I mean, obviously matter has to have form. He doesn't think. We're never just talking about prime matter here. Something just completely formless. And so the question is. Yeah, in what sense would he think that a seed. Potentiality is a very vague term which gets at the idea that seed has something which allows it to develop into the completed form. Is that something, a more primitive form, the code, the DNA, the structure? You know, it's unclear what Aristotle thinks about that, I think. And maybe when I put in the more completed form, maybe I'm just interpolating that to make sense of it, because I'm not finding it in the text.

7:50 Mark: Well, the second half of the sentence that I was reading. And also because everything that comes into being goes up to a source and an end goes up to. Since that for the sake of which something is. Is a source and coming into being is for the sake of the end, but the being at work is an end, it is for the enjoyment of this that the potency is taken on. For it is not in order that they may have the power of Sight that animals see, but they have sight in order to see. And similarly to people have the house building power in order that they build houses, the contemplative power in order they may contemplate, but they do not contemplate in order that they may have the contemplative power unless they are practicing and these people are not contemplating other than in a qualified sense, or else they would have no need to be practicing contemplating.

I almost used as my intro something referring to I'm practicing contemplation in Madison, Wisconsin, because I really like that little notion of contemplation is for its own sake. But we do a lot of what we do. Maybe you listen to podcasts because like I want. It's so educational. No, it should just be something in itself, not because it's polishing your mind so you can do better at your day job. I mean, is that what you mean by educational? Sharpening your mind, preparing you for the future you're practicing contemplating.

9:03 Wes: It's around here that he gets into this distinction we talked about before, where some forms of action have products as well. And so there's a kind of a dual actuality. In house building, for instance, the activity of building is the actuality, but so is the product, so is the house. And here he gives us the seeing agent again as the analogy to the house.

9:23 Mark: But again, I like the footnotes almost better. How does the nature display that a squirrel has reached the completion for the sake of which it exists in the spectacle of the squirrel at work being a squirrel. So this is the functions lust the teleology. The virtue of something it's being at work is its activity. It does not exist for the sake of anything else. It is just being itself, doing its thing. And that's the final cause of this whole process of the growth.

9:50 Wes: Then he'll say one actuality precedes another all the way back to the eternal prime mover. He gets into actuality in a quote unquote stricter sense. Eternal imperishable things are prior to perishable in that eternal things don't exist potentially, they exist necessarily.

10:09 Dylan: He's thinking about the stars here. The stars would be an example of something that he would point to as eternal.

10:15 Wes: Right? Those are the only sensible objects that are non perishable. So yeah, so to have a potency is to be capable of being in the other. Says opposite in mind, I think, but capable of being in the opposite state. And eternal things don't have that. So they exist necessarily, not contingently.

10:32 Mark: Yeah.

10:33 Wes: So the stars, the Heavens are not capable of not being. They are just eternal and necessarily so.

10:38 Mark: You know, if we're going to get theological soon, so we might as well start that. You think God has the potential to create whatever God wants to create, but that just can't be the way God work. God is eternal and actual. And so anything that God could create, God already has created something. Something along those lines. Right? God cannot have potential. Potential indicates a lack. I'm so disappointed in God. He's just not living up to his potential. 12. Yes, let's move on. The Cause of Being is the title that Sachs gives to the chapter. Lambda is the Greek letter.

So, yeah, we supposedly just read the beginning of this and then skipped to chapter six through 10 again. I felt like I just read the stuff in between because it seemed easier, you know, at least skimmed it, not letting myself get slowed down too much because it seemed a little easier. The thinghood of anything is primary, of what sort it is comes next, then how much it is. So we're doing a lot of reviewing in here, but trying to connect some of the things that he had said before or, you know, recast some of this, you know, about primary being in terms of.

We were all concerned in the primary being chapter of Changeable Things. Right. That this was the big advance over Plato is it's not just the forms, the eternal forms that have primary being. We're going to say that primary being, the ontologically paradigm, foremost precedent stuff is in plants and animals. And you might have thought that. Oh, really? Those are the things that have primary being and all the. Well, no, no, actually you can still have eternal things that are also just as primary. Right. Because they are actual. Right, they're always actual.

We were just saying. We just need to then now clarify how these plants and animals that we've been talking about fit into the larger cosmological structure.

12:23 Wes: Well, the one new thing here in chapter one is that the universe as a whole is a substance. So it stands on a. Now it's a particular, it's an individual. I mean, it'll turn out to be something like a living thing. I think he'll talk a lot about life with the unmoved mover. So I think we think of the universe as a whole as a something like a living organism or at the very least a substance. And the unmoved mover will be its principle. It turns out.

12:50 Mark: I want to say that this must mean that there is emergence because a particular a thing has to have no parts. Right? So that even though it seemed like, oh, you're. You're taking matter and you're adding some form to it and you create this new thing. Well, the new thing ends up being the fundamental thing. We only understand the matter and the formhood abstractly, the universal. In terms of the primary thing, the thing is primary epistemically, ontologically, it does not have parts. And so if you're going to say that the universe as a whole has primary being, then it's not as a whole. It is somehow.

13:26 Wes: I don't know what you mean. Why it doesn't have parts. Like animals have parts.

13:30 Mark: Animals have physical parts, but their essence does not have parts. What makes the animal the specific animal? It is its essential character.

13:37 Wes: So the essence. Right, but the definition has parts, and the definition is of the essence. So the account that you can give of the thing will have parts. But I get what you're saying. It's a real whole, but I think ultimately it's about structure and about relationships between parts, formal relationships. But I mean, I think, Mark, the thing you're pointing to is that we would have to understand if the particularity of the thing is in its having an essence, and if the essence, in a way, is prior, then there's a sense in which the unmoved mover is implicated in every explanation.

14:11 Dylan: Maybe.

14:11 Wes: Right. So we can't understand a hand except in relation to the whole animal, the whole human being. We can't understand anything in the universe except in relation to the whole, maybe, is the point. Yeah, yeah.

14:22 Dylan: In the case with the unmoved mover, right. That's the whole of the universe as an entity, yes, there are parts, but in terms of the activity of the universe, that's a whole. And, yeah, there's going to be some way in which the cause of being, that is, of the universe, is the cause of all being, both eternal and not.

14:44 Mark: You were talking before Wes about how form and matter are sort of relative by level. Right. That the wood is the matter of the wooden box, but the wood is itself a complex structure with regard to, you know, is a form with regard to whatever is the thing below that. So maybe when we say we can't understand the hand without reference to the organism, well, in some ways, as a biological blob, you can understand a hand because you can say these are the chemicals that are in it. You just don't understand functionally how it plays that role in the whole. So you don't have the full understanding of the hand.

15:19 Dylan: So.

15:19 Mark: But we've been saying throughout that individuals are primary Being, they should be separable. Metaphysically separable, epistemically separable. So you should be able to understand a plant or animal without reference to the whole of creation. In a sense, it's just that then when we're looking at things from the eternal point of view, then we can only understand the parts as they relate to whole. I mean, does that analogy work?

15:44 Wes: I don't know. Clearly we don't really need to think about the unmoved mover to understand rabbits,

15:50 Mark: to really understand the rabbit.

15:52 Wes: Even if the unmoved mover is implicated causally. Ultimately, and maybe at a philosophical level we do, maybe. But we can't say we fully understand something unless we have the full causal chain.

16:03 Mark: I mean, isn't this the principle, right, the final cause. We think that the final cause of the rabbit form is to become a rabbit that's leaping around doing rabbity things. But what determines the directionality in that? Right. The fullness, the wholeness. I thought that was sort of the magnetic. Why I initially characterized this as the good. That all organisms are pushing toward the good abstractly, which is the unmoved mover. We don't want to call it the good, as he says, because that would be as opposed to the bad or something. We have to make it more generic than that somehow. But.

16:36 Dylan: But this way, I think you would call it the good is the way in which it's a fullness of activity. There's no lack involved. And so there's this completion, which I guess the word good is both satisfactory and unsatisfactory here. Because it's unsatisfactory. And then it's coming with a kind of ethical judgment about it in contrary to something else. As opposed to. Well, it's for the good of the thing in the sense of it's fulfilling its potential maximally. That seems more along the lines of what the good that's being manifest in the unmoved mover. Because the idea is that there's no lack there. Because there's nothing missing in its being at work of itself, that it's maximally being at work.

17:25 Wes: He's going to say it's good, and in a way it's goodness is in a way the way it works, right? So it's almost like things desire to become like the unmoved mover. In the end, he says something which sounds very much like. It's as if the world is identifying with the unmoved mover and trying to become like it. The way this worked in Plato was that ideas are normative so there's an eidos of rabbit. And the individual rabbits aren't always true to type. They may get injured or be mutants or whatever. So a form, in a way, is normative and it's good when the particular thing is actually as much its form as it can be.

We would think about this ordinarily, right, in terms of health and sickness. Health and sickness are normative terms, but we can think about them functionally in terms of the organism living up to its final cause. So I think, yes, the unmoved mover is Aristotle's version of the good. But he seems to like it better than Plato's version because it can kind of pull the world. It can put the world in motion in a way that Plato's good could not. Plato tells you that forms are normative ultimately, but it doesn't say why things are active in the way they are.

18:43 Mark: It's chapter seven where we get into this issue of a final cause can cause motion without being in motion. What is desired and what is thought. For instance, the beautiful. So in a footnote, Sachs says, well, it's not the good, just to make it clear. It's not an instrumental good, good for something, but it is for Aristotle. Beauty is the aim of all moral virtue. We might not have remembered that or. But it's not the aesthetic sense of beauty. It's the sense where everything is right. And so fullness, like you were saying, Dylan, that it's not a specifically moral thing. It's just trying to refer to the fullness of possibility, of activity. I shouldn't have said possibility there. Of actuality.

19:20 Wes: This kind of reads like a proof of the unmoved mover. His first premise is that there is this thing. There's the heavens, and they're in unceasing motions in a circle. They're always moved. So there must be something that moves it, and there must be something that moves it without itself being moved. Otherwise we would just need, you know, we'd go into an infinite regress where we'd need something to move that. So the thing which moves without being moved is eternal. It's substance, it's actuality. So then what is the mechanism? And that's where he gets into this whole. Okay, well, the object of desire and thought can move without being moved. So that's like a really cool analogy to try and explain this.

20:01 Dylan: That's the key, right? That's the whole idea of an unmoved mover. And it being inclination that something is going towards the notion that the good is that's what's desired and being drawn towards it. The way in which things desired or things that are thought cause motion without being motions themselves.

20:19 Wes: And he wants to make a distinction that there's the apparent good. And that's what we would say our appetite is directed for. But there's another sense of desire which he calls the rational wish. So the real good is the thing towards which our motivation is a rational wish. So we wouldn't necessarily understand that in terms of, okay, what's going to give me pleasure? So not everything in the world is explained in terms of pleasure seeking. Entities are moved towards the good in ways that do not simply involve desire. In our ordinary sense.

20:53 Dylan: What is desired and what is thought is to be in the same kinds of things. So in the primary instances of these are the same things. And what is yearned for is what seems beautiful. While what is wished for primarily is what is beautiful. But we desire something because of the way it seems rather than its seeming so because we desire it. For the act of thinking is the beginning. But the power of thinking is set in motion by the action of the thing thought. And what is thought in its own right belongs to an array of affirmative objects. Of which thinghood is primary. And of this, the primary kind is that which is simple and at work.

21:29 Mark: An array of affirmative objects. I'd like to display an array of affirmative objects in my space here. Do you know what it is in yours?

21:36 Dylan: Wes1072a2730 okay.

21:40 Wes: And the object of desire and the object of thought move in this way. They move without being moved. The primary objects of desire and of thought are the same. For the apparent good is the object of appetite. And the real good is the primary object of rational wish. So this is the part I was summarizing. The desire is consequent on opinion rather than opinion on desire. For the thinking is the starting point. And thought is moved by the object of thought. And one of the two columns of opposites. This is the array, I think, in Sachs. And one of the two columns of opposites is in itself the object of thought.

This has come up before. And I forget what he's talking about here. And in this substance is first. And in substance that which is simple and exists actually. The one and the simple are not the same. For one means a measure. But simple means that the thing itself has a certain nature. But the beautiful also. And that which is in itself desirable are in the same column. And the first in any class is. Is always best or analogous to the best.

22:39 Mark: Yeah, ours is. What is primary is always best. Yeah.

22:42 Wes: So the argument in my footnote, the positive side of the list of contraries is the object of thought. And the first term on this side, which must be the prim object of thought, is actual, simple, the simple, actual substance. But the object of desire, which we have seen to be the beautiful, the Kalon, is on the same side of the list and therefore the first member of that list, the primary object of thought must be the primary object of desire.

23:08 Mark: I don't know what, where, where he's getting lists from. I mean, I see.

23:11 Wes: Afraid to say I can't explain.

23:13 Dylan: I can't explain it.

23:15 Wes: Array instead of column of opposites. So that argument was too into the weed in the weeds for me to try and figure out what he's talking about. And I didn't, I didn't figure out what he was saying. But I think the idea is that he wants to say that the primary object of desire is actually the object of thought, not the object of appetite. There's priority to the rational wish for the real good as opposed to the appetitive desire for the apparent good.

23:43 Dylan: This is all before we get to the intellect thinking itself. Thinking, thinking itself.

23:48 Mark: Let's get to it.

23:49 Wes: So, yeah, okay, so there's a section on final cause. The final cause can exist among unchangeable entities. That is in for the heavens, the stars, the planets.

24:00 Mark: They circle around for the sake of the good, even though they're also doing it. Just that, you know, they're being at work is their movement. That there's nothing contradictory about that, that they could be doing it for themselves and for the sake of the good. Or, you know, whatever we're saying the unmove mover is if we're not calling it the good, the beautiful.

24:17 Wes: And yeah, he'll say the final cause produces motion as being loved. Okay, so we get the movement of the heavens as if their movement is caused by their love. It's just an analogy, but as if they're in love with the unmoved mover and that's what causes them to move. It doesn't need to push them. It doesn't need to be an efficient cause. And then we're going to get into an argument of why the unmoved mover must exist.

24:41 Mark: But since there is something that causes motion while being itself motionless, this does not admit of being otherwise, and it is in any respect at all. Okay, well, this is just to say, right? You can't. You. There's no. It's pure actuality this unmoved mover.

24:55 Wes: I don't fully understand this, but he seems to say that since the circular motion of the heavens is unceasing, in a way, we. Right. So we can't just. When we're talking about the circle of motion of the heavens, we can't just appeal to something that's within nature to explain it. We can't say, oh, this was set in motion by the Big Bang, or something like that. It just is always the way it's been. So we need something that in a way, stands outside of nature. There must be something that exists to explain that, to give the motion to

25:27 Mark: the heavens, for instance, right, to the heavens themselves. Because they move their actuality, they're being at work. But they admit of being otherwise than they are because they change place, even if they are completely stable. Otherwise, the fact that they are moving means that they have that cycle of potentiality, actuality, potentiality actually. I mean, is that inherent in all movement?

25:49 Wes: Right?

25:49 Mark: This is potentially. Planet Venus is potentially over there in that sense. It's not. Not that could potentially wink out of being or. Or go come into being, but just the fact that movement. And so there has to be something, because movement is eternal. There has to be something that motivates that, that is not subject to this lack of being in whatever sense, right?

26:11 Wes: Not subject to potentiality in the same way. So has. Is purely necessary. So it's almost like there's this weird paradox, right? There's potentiality in the movement of the heavens, and yet there's also eternality. So how do you explain the eternal in light of the potential? Because if it's potential, it might not be the case. And. Yeah, so because that fact means that we must move outside of the circular motion of the heavens to talk about something which is purely necessary and doesn't partake of the potential, this circular motion.

26:41 Mark: Somewhere in here it was saying like, well, things that move on Earth, I guess because the Earth is flat, it would eventually have to turn back. So you couldn't have just an eternal motion of any sort on Earth itself. I'm not sure why you couldn't have a circular motion of, you know, somebody running around the Earth that's not up in the sky, that could be down here. But for whatever reason, you can only in the heavens get eternal motion without some sort of reversal.

27:05 Wes: The universe, for Aristotle, is finite. It's temporally infinite, but it's spatially finite. And that means. And any sort of linear spatial causality would have to come to an end. And therefore Couldn't be eternal. Some sort of motion is eternal. It has to be circular. Since the unmoved mover is a necessary, purely necessary being, it must be good. So why. He gives us several senses of the necessary. One is what's contrary to natural impulses, like. So what we have to do or ought to do. One obviously, is that which cannot be otherwise. I think he's trying to derive goodness out of this idea that the necessary is something like an ought, that without which the good is impossible.

27:48 Dylan: Again, we're getting to a kind of fullness.

27:50 Wes: Yeah. Do we understand why the necessary must be good?

27:53 Dylan: I was understanding the necessary is associated with the good, again in this notion that of fullness. So if it's necessary, it's certainly a component of fullness. So if everything is maximally necessary, then it's not very satisfactory.

28:08 Wes: Yeah. So what if it had any potentiality? I think at some point he says if there's any potentiality, it can always change for the worse. So we definitely don't want that it can partake of evil and change for the worst. But I'm not sure that I fully understand this part, this step.

28:23 Mark: I mean, that we got another footnote from Sachs. Beauty is the stable simplicity that makes order possible. So if you say something is maximally, if it is maximally full, that it is maximally ordered, that chaos is sort of a potential that could become order. And he does relate this to. It's not just sort of this abstract fullness, but pleasurable is always at work and is always pleasurable. We love being alive, we love being awake. We're thinking, perceiving all these motivations that we have as individuals are rational motivations. Right. They're not our base desires.

So we recognize this is why we can call it beauty, even though it's supposed to be not aesthetic beauty, not some. That it is not purely abstract. It does actually relate to. What we don't understand is the normative. When we think about it in that Aristotelian, slash, Platonic way of everybody pursues what they perceive to be the best insofar as they're aware of it.

29:16 Wes: So what we experience psychologically as desire is already out there in a more abstract sense in the universe. It kind of reminds me of Schopenhauer and will as a metaphysical principle. It's like force, Right?

29:29 Mark: Yeah. That Schopenhauer just took out the Platonic

29:32 Wes: Will is the thing in itself, the

29:33 Mark: notion of complete order and fullness, and kept the rest.

29:37 Wes: Yeah. Will is the thing in itself. And we understand it we actually have perfect access to it because we are willing creatures.

29:45 Mark: So you might have thought that, you know, this unmoved mover should have the potential within it for everything it created everything. But that's not at all. Because it has to be completely simple. It can't have potential at all. It just has to be this pole around which all the other stuff revolves, you know, towards which it is always seeking. And it ends up that it's contemplation.

30:09 Wes: Yeah, it sounds like it can't even have spatial extension, right? Thought, thinking itself. It can't think about something else, Right. Because then it would depend on that other thing that it thinks. So okay, so how do we get to the fact that it's thinking? First, before we say that it must have itself as the object of thought, we have to say why it's thinking so. And thinking in itself deals with that which is best in itself and that which is thinking in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And thought thinks on itself because it shares the nature of the object of thought.

This is a difficult passage for becomes an object of thought in coming into contact with and thinking its objects. So that thought and object of thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, that is the essence, is thought, but it is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the possession rather than the receptivity is the divine element which thought seems to contain. And the act of contemplation is what is most pleasant and best. If then God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are. This compels our wonder.

So it sounds like if he must always be in a good state, it must always be this contemplative state. If in a better this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state. And life also belongs to God. For the actuality of thought is life. And God is that actuality. And God's self dependent actuality is life most good and eternal. Amen. We say therefore that God is a living being, eternal, most good. So that life and duration, continuous and eternal, belong to God. For this is God that is like the most sermon sounding thing in all of Aristotle.

And it is kind of inspiring.

31:48 Mark: I mean, Sachs makes it sound a little less glorious. His ending is. And we say that it is a God who everlastingly lives the best life. So that life and continuous and everlasting duration belong to a God. For this being is God. There's a little less prayer built into that phraseology, but it's the he lives the best life. So Aristotle ends up in his Ethics saying that the contemplative life is the best life. And oh, what a coincidence, the philosopher thinks that. But no, there's a metaphysical pretension or grounding, if we want to be nice about it, to this, that because God is essentially thinking thought that thinks itself, then we are participating in God insofar as we are engaging in this ability.

I think I ran across this verse in Spinoza like that we have immortality insofar as we are participating in reason, whereas reason is this super physical, the place in which all our individual differences melt away. Because when I think of two plus two equals four, and you think two plus two equals four, we're thinking literally the same thought. We all participate in divinity by contemplating.

32:53 Dylan: Yeah, you definitely have that part here. Right. That the source of the unmoved mover is. The way in which the unmoved mover moves things is through desire and contemplation. And we participate in that and in so far are godlike, divine. In our participation in reason and intellect.

33:11 Wes: It evokes our contemplation, but it is also in self contemplation. Is it self contemplation what evokes our contemplation? This begins to sound like Hegelian, Right? Self consciousness. This really gets.

33:24 Dylan: Hegen itself does sound like that, right?

33:26 Mark: Yes. So the important thing for Hegel was that you gain complexity by the reflection of thought upon itself. So that God is sort of self identical at the beginning, before any knowledge or consciousness exists. But that's a very abstract self identity. And it's only through humanity understanding itself that then God becomes three dimensional. And here it's intentionally. No, thought thinking itself is not a matter of thought turning back on itself and somehow creating a second entity or a third entity by externalizing itself. No, it's. It's the simple self identity of thought with its object. The abstract kind of thing that Hegel thinks is so barren. That's what Aristotle is going for. That's what he thinks God is and always has been. There's no historical process involved.

34:12 Wes: Right. It's not a historical God as spirit and God as culture. And yet we would say there's a final cause for the rabbit. There's a telos and. Right. It grows towards that form and then it works to maintain that form. But ultimately that is derivative of working to be like God. Did I imagine that? He says things are trying to be like God.

34:35 Mark: I think you're right.

34:36 Wes: Did I dream that?

34:37 Mark: Or is it in There they're all organized toward God. Yeah, I'm not sure if actually being like God. Well, certainly in the sense of contemplative.

34:46 Dylan: Well, he does say things godlike. He says they are being godlike, but that's not quite the same thing as being drawn to being godlike. I took it that in contemplation we are being godlike in those actions, but that's different than being drawn to being godlike. But even the notion of most fully being at work is also another manifestation of being like an unmoved mover.

35:11 Mark: So the final chapters ask questions like, well, okay, we've established that an unmoved mover is necessary. Could there be more than one unmoved mover? No, he says, and I don't know that it's that interesting. It seems sort of obvious as I was reading it. And then he brings up again the stuff about the Pythagoreans and people that thought number was ultimately. And he has the same reasons for dismissing it as he did before, but he's just, you know, applying it to this new, new context. A little more about all things coming from contraries. I feel like there's not anything fundamentally new. It's just a matter of sort of connecting a few dots that I don't care that much about.

35:51 Wes: Well, in 10, he does. One thing he says at the beginning is there's two ways. The nature of the universe contains the highest good. So one way is like having a leader for an army. That's a good thing. That's sort of the principle which determines the way the army coordinates to be a unified thing. And then there's just the structure of the army. There's its order, the order itself. I think his conclusion is that the unmoved mover plays both roles, such that all things are ordered to one end. I wish I could figure out where I got an identification. But anyway. But whatever the case, somehow something like the contemplation of the unmoved mover is supposed to explain all the activity in the world. Right. Has he solved the problem that he set out to solve? Plato's forms couldn't do it. But this explanation does. I mean, it's creative, it's elegant, but it's very analogical, Metaphorical.

36:45 Mark: Right. And does Plato do any worse? There's some footnote here that says that Plato refers somewhere to the fact that the forms, his forms have to be at work, basically, that they have to be creative, that they have to be processes. But he never develops this, says Sachs. So Aristotle is taking up the mantle and actually trying to work this out. But yeah, I find this whole thing deeply unsatisfying.

37:07 Dylan: What do you find unsatisfying?

37:09 Mark: The thing that I keep repeating about efficient cause. Efficient cause, efficient cause, final cause is supposed to somehow explain. No, I think it's an irreducible antinomy that either the efficient causes go on forever, which is absurd, or that there is some sort of stopping point which itself would have to be an efficient cause, which is a self contradictory position. I don't like either of them and I just don't feel like this image, I see how it brings together things that were in Plato, but makes it a little more dynamic. And I find this whole idea of the unmoved world as thought thinking itself as really a cool image. But it does not make me feel better about any of the deep metaphysical questions he's asking.

37:49 Wes: But it gets an important problem which is this need for a cause which stands out side of the causal order because the universe is the causal order, all of nature is the causal order. And we need some non natural form of causation that can explain it all. Otherwise we're just locked into that infinite regress problem. So he's taking on analogy from nature, on analogy from the functionality of organisms. He's finding a way to explain that otherwise unsolvable metaphysical problem. We see the same thing epistemologically too, right? So with Kant, causality only exists inside the phenomena, inside the realm of appearance, and yet things in themselves are supposed to have some relation to those phenomena.

So how do we say what the relation between things in themselves and phenomena are? If we can't appeal to causality, which is just a category of the understanding, we have to say there is something like causality prime or some version of causality, right? There certainly has to be tight structural correlation of some kind between the phenomena and the things and themselves. And whatever causality we experience within the realm of phenomena, the type of causality Hume really didn't like has to correspond to some sort of thing in itself causality out there, which explains it.

So yes, it's very, very speculative, but I don't think it's crazy to try and think about that stuff.

39:17 Dylan: Yeah, and that's the part that I find much more compelling about both the way in which we experience the world in terms of entities and what it would mean to call an entity. So that portion of, of the metaphysics where he's articulating what makes a thing with respect to our experience and what kind of integrity does that have and what implications does that have for being outside of us and for being having its own independent activity that's not merely a collection of phenomena that we happen to interact with, but a collection of phenomena that we do interact with.

All that part is, I think, incredibly satisfying and on point, actually, in terms of understanding essences as being things in action in a unity that is independent on their own terms. And I think he's very good about the ways in which they are, the step at the end about trying to then go into what is the universe itself. And I actually find it fundamentally unnecessary because. And this is what I'm referring to when I get to thinking about strong emergence versus weak emergence. In the end, he wants to go all the way back to a beginning that doesn't admit of there being change in the entities.

Like in a strong emergence. Right. There would be no eternal things.

40:37 Wes: Well, I think another way of thinking about this is that we need some way to say that there are mind independent entities, real unities that are not the product simply of our conceptual schemes and scraping things together within experience according to the categories of the understanding and all that stuff. So how do we do that? And it may be the case that we can only do that by appealing to something outside the realm of phenomena, which is, for him, outside of the realm of nature. We need a concept of causality that is transcendent in some way in order to talk about mind independence, in order to talk about radical, real independent beings. I get that it's unsatisfying, but it's onto something that I think is a deep and a real problem.

41:25 Mark: Well, as my closing, I would love to have the opportunity to think a little more about how all these pieces fit together. And what do I actually want out of a metaphysics? And is this providing it? Is it just pure bunk, pure speculation that's unwarranted? I mean, I like speculation. That's partially why, even if it is not grounded to somebody's satisfaction.

41:47 Wes: How many years have we been doing this podcast?

41:50 Mark: Yes, clearly if I didn't have a lot large tolerance for speculation and things, I would not be very into this. But I don't want to do this global thinking now. As far as the experience, I feel so much for you, Dylan, how you were like with our first Kierkegaard episode. I don't really like Kierkegaard. Oh, let's do it for many more. Let's go for a couple more months. And I had that experience right from the beginning of this, and I've enjoyed each part of it less and less such that it was just like pulling teeth to get through this last portion of this last night even though it was a much less demanding reading that we had this time than last time. And you can always get into it when you get into it. But gosh, I sure will be happy to talk about other things.

42:32 Dylan: Sounds good.

42:34 Wes: Well, speaking of speculation, we have been going around in the circle for 15 years says something.

42:41 Mark: Next time we're going to read a modern descendant of Aristotelianism, The Philosophy of Nature: A Guide to the New Essentialism by Brian Ellis, a book from 2002. Thanks for listening. Thanks for getting through this marathon with us. We want to hear what you want us to talk about next. Email us pel@partiallyexaminedlife.com or use the contact form on our website or contact us through Patreon, through Twitter, through Facebook, Instagram, any number of ways. We'd love to hear from you. Good night everybody.

43:12 Dylan: Good night.

43:12 Wes: Good night.