SUBSTANTIAL KNOWLEDGE ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS SUBSTANTIAL KNOWLEDGE ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS C.D.C. REEVE hackett publishing company, inc. indianapolis/cambridge Copyright © 2000 by Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. All rights reserved 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 For further information, please address: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. P.O. Box 44937 Indianapolis, IN 46244-0937 www.hackettpublishing.com Cover and interior design by Abigail Coyle Cover photograph: "The Inheritance of Form." Reproduced by permission of the artist. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Reeve, C.D.C., 1948– Substantial knowledge : Aristotle's metaphysics / C.D.C. Reeve. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. ISBN 0-87220-515-0 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 0-87220-514-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Aristotle—Contributions in metaphysics. 2. Metaphysics. 3. Aristotle— Contributions in philosophy of substance. 4. Substance (Philosophy) I. Title. B491.M4 R44 2000 100'.92—dc21 99-052539 ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-515-4 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-87220-514-7 (paper) eISBN: 978-1-60384-014-9 (ebook) For George and John not many behold God he is only for those of 100 percent pneuma —Zbigniew Herbert “Report from Paradise” TABLE of CONTENTS Introduction xiii Abbreviations of Aristotle’s Works xvii ONE PLATONISM 1 1.1 Separation 1 1.2 Platonic Forms 10 1.3 Problems with Platonic Forms 13 TWO SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE 18 2.1 Aristotelian Sciences 18 2.2 Dialectic and First Principles 21 2.3 Natural Sciences 27 2.4 Natural and Theoretical Sciences 35 2.5 Exact and Inexact Sciences 38 THREE ESSENCE 43 3.1 Natural Beings 43 3.2 How Natural Beings Come-to-Be 45 3.3 How Human Beings Come-to-Be 48 3.4 The Inheritance of Understanding 55 3.5 Artifactual Essences 60 3.6 Mathematical Essences 63 3.7 Penmattered Natural Essences and Inexact 66 Sciences 3.8 The Definition of an Essence 70 ix CONTENTS 3.9 The Parts of an Essence 80 3.10 The Formal Element of an Essence 83 3.11 Other Essences 88 FOUR BEING AS SUBSTANCE 89 4.1 Intrinsic Being 89 4.2 Coincidental Being 92 4.3 Categories of Intrinsic Being 94 4.4 Non-Substantial Intrinsic Beings 96 4.5 Substantial Intrinsic Beings 98 4.6 The Structure of Intrinsic Being 100 4.7 The Task of Categories 105 4.8 Primary Substancec 112 FIVE PERCEPTIBLE SUBSTANCE 115 5.1 Perceptible Substance and Change 115 5.2 Primary Substancem 123 5.3 Form 125 5.4 Suniversals 130 5.5 Winners and Losers 132 SIX SUBSTANCE AS FORM 134 6.1 Potentiality and Actuality 134 6.2 Activities and Their Ends 140 6.3 Activity as Primary Substancem? 147 SEVEN INTELLIGIBLE SUBSTANCE 149 7.1 Sight as a Model for Understanding 149 7.2 Passive Understanding 160 7.3 Productive Understanding 167 7.4 Self-Understanding 174 7.5 Human Beings as Their Self-Understandings 182 7.6 Self-Understanding as Primary Substancem? 188 x CONTENTS EIGHT DIVINE SUBSTANCE 190 8.1 God as Unmoved Mover 190 8.2 God and the Heavens 209 8.3 God’s Essence 219 8.4 God and “the Nature of the Whole” 230 8.5 God as Primary Substancem? 237 NINE THE SCIENCE OF BEING QUA BEING 240 9.1 Primary Science and Its Problems 240 9.2 Special and Universal Sciences 247 9.3 Theoretical Philosophies and First Principles 258 9.4 Primary Philosophy and Non-Contradiction 260 9.5 Non-Contradiction Demonstrated 271 9.6 Primary Philosophy as Primary Science? 273 9.7 Theology as Primary Science? 277 9.8 The Primacy Dilemma Solved 282 9.9 Post Dilemma Metaphysics 287 TEN ARISTOTELIANISM 291 10.1 The Primacy Dilemma Revisited 291 10.2 Aristotelianism or Platonism? 293 10.3 Aristotle Without God? 298 10.4 Aristotle’s Conception of Philosophy 300 References 303 Index Locorum 310 General Index 319 xi L INTRODUCTION Everything that is something—as Socrates is a man, pale a color, in the garden a location, ten pounds a quantity, or two o’clock a time—is a being. And what makes something a being, according to Aristotle, is its relationship to substance. Hence the account of substance is the center- piece of his metaphysics, and of his science of being qua being. But the account itself is notoriously difficult—so difficult, in fact, that it is com- monly viewed nowadays as an inconsistent amalgam of different accounts, developed at different times. In the supposedly early Categories, so the story goes, the canonical or primary substances are particular instances (Socrates) of universal species (the human species), which, with genera, are substances only in a second- ary sense. In the supposedly later Metaphysics, by contrast, secondary sub- stance is abandoned, Socrates is treated as a compound of matter and form, and form alone is identified as primary substance. Even within the Meta- physics itself, moreover, distinct strata are discernible, with the celebrated middle books (VII–IX)—die Substanzb¨ucher as a recent anthology re- vealingly calls them—containing Aristotle’s fully mature views. Since divine substance (God) is not discussed in these books, it is not a crucial part of those views, and so may be safely ignored or downplayed. In those same middle books, however, Aristotle claims that primary substances must be both ontologically primary (the fundamental beings) and epistemologically primary (the primary objects of scientific knowl- edge). At the same time, he is explicit that universals (specifically, definable universal essences) alone enjoy epistemological primacy, since they are the first principles of the sciences. It seems to follow that primary substances must be universals. But this conclusion he just as firmly rejects. The result is a dilemma of sorts, which I call the Primacy Dilemma. In my view, Aristotle’s attempt to solve it is the central project of his entire epistemol- ogy and metaphysics—one that leads him to abandon Platonism and be- come an Aristotelian. xiii INTRODUCTION If I am right, the Primacy Dilemma has a key role to play in one of the most portentous episodes in the history of philosophy. That alone would be enough to ensure its importance. But its implications for the interpreta- tion of Aristotle are equally significant. For it is the problem to which the Categories and Metaphysics (as well as many others of Aristotle’s works) constitute what will emerge as a coherent unified response. The Dilemma is as much a challenge to contemporary Aristotle scholarship, therefore, as it was a challenge to Aristotle himself—especially so, indeed, because his response to it so crucially involves his theology. Needless to say, anyone who proposes so significant a departure from more-or-less received wisdom is guaranteed to have bitten off more than he can thoroughly chew, and certainly more than he can hope to demonstrate—especially to those already heavily invested in such wisdom. My much more modest goal, therefore, is to lay out my own views in as vivid and straightforward a way as possible, in the hope that a clear target will attract equally clear criticism. Here, I want to say, is an account of Aristotle’s metaphysics that represents it as well worth any philosopher’s while. If it deserves to be added to the repertoire of such accounts, I will be well satisfied. If it is a contender, so to speak, it is all that I could reasonably hope it to be. I would be guilty of false modesty, however, if I did not also say this. Many of the individual texts I discuss—especially when taken in isolation—certainly admit of interpretations other than the ones I defend, and many of those I cite pretty much as proof texts have this status only when taken together with other texts similarly treated. Such holism must surely be any reader’s default position. Hence, though each individual interpretation I propose may be controversial when taken by itself, it is immensely strengthened by the fact that it fits into a unified reading of a large number of texts, drawn from a wide variety of Aristotle’s works, which can be seen as addressing a single problem in a philosophically perspicuous way. Piecemeal criticism, as a consequence, is unlikely to do much to threaten my views. Indeed, piecemeal interpretation, often taking the form of a near obsessive focus on a few texts, is precisely what I want to challenge. To see Aristotle right, we need—daunting as the prospect may be—to see him whole. Holism needn’t be incompatible, of course, with the view that an au- thor’s thought develops over time and so may contain fundamental changes in doctrine, and real or apparent inconsistencies. But holism is to some degree in tension with such developmentalism—especially when, as in the xiv INTRODUCTION case of Aristotle, independent dating of texts is difficult or impossible, so that developmentalist hypotheses largely piggyback on interpretative ones. If one can uncover doctrinal unity in such an oeuvre, therefore, develop- mentalism’s role is diminished. No doubt some of Aristotle’s writings do represent earlier stages of his thought than others, but on the central metaphysical and epistemological questions with which I am concerned, I see little evidence of any fundamental changes of mind. For me, then, issues of chronology are of relatively little significance, and I have usually said nothing about them. Rather, I have written as if Aristotle’s meta- physics were a single, atemporal entity contained in the totality of the texts that make up the Corpus Aristotelicum.