Abstract
This chapter introduces a novel interpretation of Aristotle’s metaphysics of powers, drawing on various of his works, and putting it in dialogue with alternatives in contemporary metaphysics, thus assessing its relative strengths. The chapter argues that Aristotle held what is currently known as a “pure” power ontology, with no categorical properties at the fundamental level and no categorical base to the fundamental powers. In Aristotle’s system, there are no relations relating a power with its manifestation, or with its manifestation partners. Power for Aristotle are relatives, that is, monadic properties of a special kind, whose nature is discussed in the chapter. Their manifestation is governed by conditional necessity. Instances of physical powers are for Aristotle all there is at the foundations of reality.
The European Research Council and the British Academy have supported two different stages of the research leading to the preparation of this article.
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Notes
- 1.
This interpretation makes a radical departure from the traditional ways Aristotle has been understood. I articulate it and defend it more fully than the limits of the present paper allows in Chap. 1 of in my monograph Aristotle on Perceiving Objects (2014).
- 2.
- 3.
Aristotle understands perception too, which is a case of causation, as being the reception of form without matter by the sense organ. For a fuller discussion of the case of perception, see Marmodoro (2014).
- 4.
In contemporary physics, to explain how elementary particles act on one another virtual particles are posited, as force-carriers (in effect, force-instances). Thus, elementary particles exert forces on each other by exchanging such virtual particles—e.g. the gauge bosons. One might think that, by introducing virtual particles to carry forces from particle to particle, e.g. the electromagnetic force or the weak force, contemporary physics has solved the problem of causal efficacy by replacing causal efficacy with addition to, or subtraction from the constitution of the particles (e.g. more, or less, weak force) rather than with interaction between particles. But there are reasons to think that this is not the case. Virtual particles of different types interact with one another, too. For instance, in the Standard Model, vector bosons couple with fermions, and W bosons couple with a photon or a Z0 boson (Couchman 2000). Such couplings between virtual particles happen due to the effect of gauge bosons on gauge bosons of a different type. Such primitive effect between forces is what Aristotle, too, assumed in his theory of causation.
- 5.
I will use the terms ‘activation’ and ‘realisation’ of powers interchangeably in what follows, to describe a power’s reaching the end that defines its nature.
- 6.
In our common sense conception of change, both process and activity count as changes. What Aristotle wishes to capture by treating only process as change is that activity does not alter the constitutional make up of the active agent, but only puts the existing constitution to work.
- 7.
For instance, see Bird (2007: 7): ‘Potencies are characterized in terms of other properties (their stimulus and manifestation properties)’.
- 8.
All translations of Aristotle’s text are from Barnes (1995).
- 9.
Aristotle defines place as ‘the innermost motionless boundary of what contains’ (Physics 212a20–21).
- 10.
Aristotle’s account of relatives is different from Bennett’s (2011a) account of superinternal relations. For Bennet superinternal relations are such that the intrinsic nature of one relatum grounds the obtaining of the relation, as well as the existence and nature of the second relatum. For Aristotle it is the nature of both correlative monadic properties that grounds the nature of their interdependence.
- 11.
See also pages 17 and ff. below.
- 12.
They are separable at least in principle, since they are not found in pure form in nature, but mixed between them. See Generation and Corruption 330b21–23:
Fire and air, and each of the bodies we have mentioned, are not simple but combined.
- 13.
A qualification of this assertion is in place. Aristotle explains mixing by saying that when two items, e.g. wine and water, mix,
Then each of them changes out of its own nature towards the dominant one … Thus it is clear that only those agents are combinable which involve a contrariety (for these are such as to suffer action reciprocally). (Generation and Corruption 328a28–33)
But mixing requires that:
Each of them may still be potentially what it was before they were combined, and both of them may survive undestroyed. (Generation and Corruption 327b25–26)
In giving this account of mixing, Aristotle does not assume that the contrarieties themselves change, without being destroyed. It is the things mixed which change without being destroyed, and therefore their complex natures that somehow remain and yet are compromised—in a way that we might compare to the way the nature of a substance remains, increasingly compromised, while the substance is deteriorating towards the end of its life span. The identity criteria of complex natures need not be the same as those of simple properties.
- 14.
I will use the terms ‘fulfilment’, ‘activation’ and ‘realisation’ of a power interchangeably in what follows, to describe that the end that defines the nature of the power comes to be.
- 15.
I discuss further the ground level of powers in elemental transformations in my paper ‘Reciprocity without symmetry in causation’, Marmodoro 2017.
- 16.
It is Molnar (2003: 173) who called it the “Always packing, never travelling” argument.
- 17.
- 18.
Thus, reality is a structured network of powers; as opposed to an aggregate of powers with no internal connectivity.
- 19.
Even if the potentiality to be actualised is preserved when the power is actualised, as e.g. in the case of mathematical abilities, the claim here is that an actualised mathematical ability is powerful because problems are being solved, not because it can be put to further use to solve problems when another occasion arises.
- 20.
See for example Martin (2008: 51), discussed by Mumford in his contribution to the present volume ‘Mutual manifestation and Martin’s two Triangles’.
- 21.
See discussion of Generation and Corruption 330a24–29, p. 13 above.
- 22.
‘All the other things—the things, I mean, which are reciprocally transformed in virtue of their qualities and their powers, e.g. the simple bodies—imitate circular motion. For when Water is transformed into Air, Air into Fire, and the Fire back into Water, we say the coming-to-be has completed the circle, because it reverts again to the beginning’. Generation and Corruption, 337a2–6.
- 23.
Aristotle makes the same point verbatim in the Metaphysics:
Movement is thought to be an actuality, but incomplete; the reason is that the potential, whose actuality it is, is incomplete. (1066a22–23)
Cf. also Physics 257b9: ‘Motion is an incomplete fulfilment of the movable’.
- 24.
The matter, such as the marble for a statue or the pieces of wood for a house, are not the matter that remains when we abstract the form of a statue or a house, because lumps of marble and planks of wood do have forms of their own, even if they are thought of as privations (because non-substantial). The matter that remains is an abstract entity.
- 25.
There are secondary senses of lacking e.g. form, as in the case of an object whose form is a privation, e.g. a lump of bronze, but I will not expand the discussion in this area.
- 26.
Although there is nothing physical that is transmitted between the powers, the reception of the form of the active power by the passive power indicates the respective metaphysical incompleteness of the powers, which is exhibited as the efficacy of the active power on the passive power.
- 27.
E.g. that every coming to be is for the sake of an end (See Metaphysics 1050a7–9).
- 28.
Generally speaking, there may be many—even arbitrary—ways in which something incomplete can be completed. Aristotle’s teleology selects one of those ways as describing the type of incompleteness an entity or a process has on the basis of the systematically occurring capacities present in the entity or process to complete entities or processes of that type, if nothing prevents.
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Marmodoro, A. (2018). Potentiality in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In: Engelhard, K., Quante, M. (eds) Handbook of Potentiality. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1287-1_2
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