Are Potency and Actuality Compatible in Aristotle?
Mark Sentesy2018, Epoche
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Abstract
The belief that Aristotle opposes potency (dunamis) to actuality (energeia or entelecheia) has gone mostly untested. This essay defines and distinguishes forms of the Opposition Hypothesis—the Actualization, Privation, and Modal—examining the texts and arguments adduced to support them. Using Aristotle's own account of opposition, the texts appear instead to show that potency and actuality are compatible, while arguments for their opposition produce intractable problems. Notably, Aristotle's refutation of the Megarian Identity Hypothesis applies with equal or greater force to the Opposition Hypothesis. For Aristotle, then, potency and actuality are compatible.
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Of Aristotle's core terms, potency (dunamis) and actuality (energeia) are among the most important. But when we attempt to understand what they mean, we face the following problem: their primary meaning is movement, as a source (dunamis) or as movement itself (energeia). We therefore have to understand movement in order to understand them. But the structure of movement is itself articulated using these terms: it is the activity of a potential being, as potent. This paper examines this hermeneutic circle, and works out a strategy for reading Aristotle based on his conception of our epistemological predicament. This hermeneutic approach helps us gain access to the phenomena of movement and its sources (potency, and energeia). The paper closes with a review of the conceptual resources we deploy to think about movement: homogeneity, space and time, impulse, relativity, the blend of sameness and difference, and being and non-being. Showing that Aristotle uses none of these clears the landscape for a fresh inquiry into his account of movement. To get underway in the study of dunamis and energeia it is necessary to examine movement. Aristotle devotes book IX of the Metaphysics specifically to dunamis and energeia, yet it is not possible to start the study there, for the argument of that book begins with the sense of dunamis proper to movement, its primary sense, and with the sense of energeia that is movement, and from there works out how they from there extend to other things. Thus, to understand dunamis and energeia it is necessary to understand movement, and their function in movement. When we turn to Aristotle's account of movement, however, we do not find an explanation of these words through an appeal to movement. Instead, we find a proof of the existence of movement through an appeal to them. After all, Aristotle defines movement as the being-at-work (energeia) of a potent thing (tou dunamei ontos), as such. Thus, he expresses the structure of movement using the very terms we hoped movement would clarify; instead of making the meaning of any of these, more obvious, Aristotle brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by PhilPapers seems to make it less accessible by referring them to one another, making of them a kind of circle. We cannot undertake the understanding of dunamis and energeia without movement, but movement is not grasped through concepts that are readily available to us: it can only be grasped through understanding dunamis and energeia. The turn to movement, therefore, is not merely preliminary to the study of dunamis and energeia: to study one is to study the other. This circle, however, is not a closed circle. Three things hold it open: the words dunamis and energeia themselves, the experience of movement, and the differences and relationships between the words, as expressed in the structure of movement. After some general remarks on why this hermeneutic circle is not closed, we shall work out more precisely both this difficulty and how to get out of it. §1: Why This Hermeneutic Circle is Open The first reason, then, that movement (kinēsis) does not form a closed circle with dunamis and energeia is that dunamis, energeia, and entelekheia have meanings that we can partly recognize. One cannot suppose that the meanings of these words are those of ordinary Greek: consider Aristotle's complex relationship with inherited opinions (endoxa), and consider also that he created the words energeia and entelekheia from ordinary Greek words. Nevertheless, though we have reasons to say that the common meanings of each of these words are of limited usefulness, they nevertheless would have made some sense on their own. Thankfully, Aristotle goes out of his way to say something about their meaning, though not much, as we shall see. So while it will not be possible to grasp their meanings solely on philological grounds, it will be possible to gain some insight this way. The complex relationship between Aristotle's terms and ordinary Greek has a loose resemblance to the relationship between these terms and our English translations: what he tries to communicate is and can be expressed in ordinary Greek or in ordinary English, but only roughly. 1 For us this means that in many cases key terms should remain untranslated, except where elucidation would be very helpful; such elucidation, while it can be accurate, is usually provisional and will not survive being generalized or removed from its context. The distinctions Aristotle makes between them, and the relationships between them, however, are more likely to apply elsewhere, though here too one must be cautious. The second reason that it could actually be helpful to put kinēsis, on the one hand, and dunamis and energeia on the other, into a circle of inquiry, is that we have ample experience of movement. This experience is continuous, unrelenting; it is unclear at first whether there is anything to be distinguished from it, because it seems as though the whole of the cosmos moves. Even what appears to have ceased moving and be resting is in its most basic character something that moves. To be motionless, therefore, has two relevant meanings: to be at rest, and to be beyond movement and rest altogether. For rest has its meaning only as a moment of a moving thing, as "a deprivation in what admits of motion," (Physics V.2 226b10-18). But it is not at all obvious whether or not there is anything that transcends movement and rest altogether. The matter is complicated by our own natural constitution: we are living things, and for us to live is (also) to move: if nothing appears to be moving, nevertheless our hearts beat, our blood circulates continuously. If we grasp eternal ideas, such as Gödel's incompleteness theorems, we do so as moving things, whose minds will soon turn to something else. If movement seems to be indeterminate or difficult to grasp, it is in part because it is difficult to distinguish from anything in our experience. 1 Take, for example, the ongoing disagreement over how to translate entelekheia, e.g. as complete reality, full actuality, being-atwork-staying-itself, being-in-its-end, and being-at-its-end. 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