Aristotle: Metaphysics

aristotle

When Aristotle articulated the central question of the group of
writings we know as his Metaphysics, he said it was a question that
would never cease to raise itself. He was right. He also regarded his
own contributions to the handling of that question as belonging to the
final phase of responding to it. I think he was right about that too.
The Metaphysics is one of the most helpful books there is for
contending with a question the asking of which is one of the things
that makes us human. In our time that question is for the most part
hidden behind a wall of sophistry, and the book that could lead us to
rediscover it is even more thoroughly hidden behind a maze of
misunderstandings.

Paul Shorey, a scholar whose not-too-bad translation of the Republic
is the Hamilton edition of the Collected Works of Plato, has called
the Metaphysics "a hopeless muddle" not to be made sense of by any
"ingenuity of conjecture." I think it is safe to say that more people
have learned important things from Aristotle than from Professor
Shorey, but what conclusion other than his can one come to about a
work that has two books numbered one, that descends from the sublime
description of the life of the divine intellect in its twelfth book to
end with two books full of endless quarreling over minor details of
the Platonic doctrine of forms, a doctrine Aristotle had already
decisively refuted in early parts of the book, those parts, that is,
in which he is not defending it? The book was certainly not written as
one whole; it was compiled, and once one has granted that, must not
one admit that it was compiled badly, crystallizing as it does an
incoherent ambivalence toward the teachings of Plato? After three
centuries in which no one has much interest in it at all, the
Metaphysics becomes interesting to nineteenth century scholars just as
a historical puzzle: how could such a mess have been put together?

I have learned the most from reading the Metaphysics on those
occasions when I have adopted the working hypothesis that it was
compiled by someone who understood Aristotle better than I or the
scholars do, and that that someone (why not call him Aristotle?)
thought that the parts made an intelligible whole, best understood
when read in that order. My main business here will be to give you
some sense of how the Metaphysics looks in its wholeness, but the
picture I will sketch depends on several hypotheses independent of the
main one. One cannot begin to read the Metaphysics without two pieces
of equipment: one is a set of decisions about how to translate
Aristotle's central words. No translator of Aristotle known to me is
of any help here; they will all befuddle you, more so in the
Metaphysics even than in Aristotle's other works. The other piece of
equipment, and equally indispensable I think, is some perspective on
the relation of the Metaphysics to the Platonic dialogues. In this
matter the scholars, even the best of them, have shown no imagination
at all. In the dialogues, in their view, Plato sets forth a "theory"
by putting it into the mouth of Socrates. There is some room for
interpretation, but on the whole we are all supposed to know that
theory. Aristotle must accept that theory or reject it. If he appears
to do both it is because passages written by some Platonist have been
inserted into his text, or because things he wrote when he was young
and a Platonist were lumped together with other things on similar
subjects which he wrote when he was older and his thoughts were
different and his own.

1. Aristotle and Plato

The Plato we are supposed to know from his dialogues is one who
posited that, for every name we give to bodies in the world there is a
bodiless being in another world, one while they are many, static while
they are changing, perfect while they are altogether distasteful. Not
surprisingly, those for whom this is Plato find his doctrine absurd,
and welcome an Aristotle whom they find saying that being in its
highest form is found in an individual man or horse, that mathematical
things are abstractions from sensible bodies, and that, if there is an
ideal man apart from men, in virtue of whom they are all called men,
then there must be yet a third kind of man, in virtue of whom the form
and the men can have the same name, and yet a fourth, and so on. You
can't stop adding new ideal men until you are willing to grant that it
was absurd to add the first one, or anything at all beyond just plain
men. This is hard-headed, tough-minded Aristotle, not to be
intimidated by fancy, mystical talk, living in the world we live in
and knowing it is the only world there is. This Aristotle,
unfortunately, is a fiction, a projection of our unphilosophic selves.
He lives only in a handful of sentences ripped out of their contexts.
The true Aristotle indeed takes at face value the world as we find it
and all our ordinary opinions about it–takes them, examines them, and
finds them wanting. It is the world as we find it which continually,
for Aristotle, shows that our ordinary, materialist prejudices are
mistaken, and the abandonment of those prejudices shows in turn that
the world as we found it was not a possible world, that the world as
we must reflect upon it is a much richer world, mysterious and
exciting.

Those of you for whom reading the Platonic dialogues was a battle you
won by losing, an eye-opening experience from which, if there is no
going forward, there is certainly no turning back, should get to know
this Aristotle. But you will find standing in your way all those
passages in which Aristotle seems to be discussing the dialogues and
does so in a shallow way. Each dialogue has a surface in which
Socrates speaks in riddles, articulates half-truths which invite
qualification and correction, argues from answers given by others as
though he shared their opinions, and pretends to be at a loss about
everything. Plato never straightens things out for his readers, any
more than Socrates does for his hearers. To do so would be to soothe
us, to lull us to sleep as soon as we've begun to be distressed by
what it feels like to be awake. Platonic writing, like Socratic talk,
is designed to awaken and guide philosophic thinking, by presenting,
defending, and criticizing plausible responses to important questions.
The Platonic-Socratic words have only done their work when we have
gone beyond them, but they remain in the dialogues as a collection of
just what they were intended to be — unsatisfactory assertions.
Hippocrates Apostle finds 81 places in the Metaphysics where Aristotle
disagrees with Plato. It is not surprising that Aristotle himself uses
Plato's name in almost none of those places. Aristotle is addressing
an audience of students who have read the dialogues and is continuing
the work of the dialogues. Many, perhaps most, of Aristotle's students
would, like scholars today, find theories and answers in Plato's
dialogues. Aristotle would not be earning his keep as a teacher of
philosophy if he did not force his students beyond that position.
Aristotle constantly refers to the dialogues because they are the best
and most comprehensive texts he and his students share. Aristotle
disagrees with Plato about some things, but less extensively and less
deeply than he disagrees with every other author that he names. The
Metaphysics inevitably looks like an attack on Plato just because
Plato's books are so much better than anything left by Thales,
Empedocles or anyone else.

My first assumption, then, was that the Metaphysics is one book with
one complex argument, and my second is that, in cohering within
itself, the Metaphysics may cohere with the Platonic dialogues. I
assume that discussions in the dialogues may be taken as giving flesh
to Aristotle's formulations, while they in turn may be taken as giving
shape to those discussions. One need only try a very little of this to
find a great deal beginning to fall into place. For example, listen to
Aristotle in Book I, Chapter 9 of the Metaphysics: "the Forms …are not
the causes of motion or of any other change …And they do not in any
way help either towards the knowledge of the other things..or towards
their existence …Moreover, all other things do not come to be from the
Forms in any of the usual senses of 'from.' And to say that the Forms
are patterns and that the other things participate in them is to use
empty words and poetic metaphors." A devastating attack on Plato, is
it not? Or is it? Aristotle says that positing the Forms explains no
single thing that one wants to know. But doesn't Socrates say in the
Phaedo that to call beauty itself the cause of beauty in beautiful
things is a "safe but stupid answer"–that one must begin with it but
must also move beyond it? Again, everyone knows that the Platonic
Socrates claimed that the forms were separate from the things in the
sensible world, off by themselves, while Aristotle insisted that the
forms were in the things. Recall the Phaedo passage just referred to.
Does not Socrates say that the cause of heat in a hot thing is not
heat itself but fire? Where, then, is the form for Socrates? Aristotle
taught that the causes of characteristics of things were to be looked
for not in a separate world of forms but in the primary instances of
those characteristics right here in the world. This doctrine may seem
to be a rejection of Plato's chief postulate, but listen to Aristotle
himself explain it in Book II, Chapter 1 of the Metaphysics: "of
things to which the same predicate belongs, the one to which it
belongs in the highest degree is that in virtue of which it belongs
also to the others. For example, fire is the hottest of whatever is
truly called 'hot', for fire is cause of hotness in the others." Do
you hear an echo? Again, Aristotle teaches that form is to be
understood as always at work, never static as is the Platonic form, or
is it? Do not the Stranger and Theaetetus agree in the Sophist that it
would be "monstrous and absurd" to deny that life, motion, and soul
belong to the intelligible things? Do they not indeed define being as
a power to act or be affected? Does not Socrates in the Theaetetus
entertain the same definition when he construes the world as made up
of an infinity of powers to act and be affected? Plato's dialogues do
not set forth a theory of forms. They set forth a way to get started
with the work of philosophic inquiry, and Aristotle moves altogether
within that way. Much in his writings that is a closed book to those
who insist on seeing him as Plato's opponent opens up when one lets
the dialogues serve as the key.
2. Translating Aristotle

Then we shall not hesitate to take whatever light we can find in the
dialogues and shine it on Aristotle's text at least to see if anything
comes into the light. And this brings me to a third assumption: the
English word substance is of no help in understanding Aristotle's word
ousia. The central question of theMetaphysics is, What is ousia?
Aristotle claims that it is the same as the question, What is being?
and that it is in fact the question everyone who has ever done any
philosophy or physics has been asking. Since we do not share
Aristotle's language we cannot know what claim he is making until we
find a way to translate ousia. The translators give us the word
substance only because earlier translators and commentators did so,
while they in turn did so because still earlier translators into Latin
rendered it assubstantia. Early modern philosophy, in all the European
languages, is full of discussions of substance which stem from Latin
versions of Aristotle. Though oral traditions keep meanings alive this
written tradition has buried Aristotle's meaning irretrievably. We
must ignore it, and take our access to the meaning of ousia from
Plato's use of it, but before we do so a quick look at where the word
substance came from may help us bury it.

The earliest Latin translations of Aristotle tried a number of ways of
translating ousia, but by the fourth century AD, when St. Augustine
lived, only two remained in use: essentia was made as a formal
parallel to ousia, from the feminine singular participle of the verb
to be plus an abstract noun ending, so that the whole would be roughly
equivalent to an English translation being-ness; the second
translation,substantia, was an attempt to get closer to ousia by
interpreting Aristotle's use of it as something like "persisting
substratum". Augustine, who had no interest in interpreting Aristotle,
thought that, while everything in the world possesses substantia, a
persisting underlying identity, the fullness of being suggested by the
word essentia could belong to no created thing but only to their
creator. Aristotle, who is quite explicit on the point that creation
is impossible, believed no such thing, and Augustine didn't think he
did. But Augustine's own thinking offered a consistent way to
distinguish two Latin words whose use had become muddled. Boethius, in
his commentaries on Aristotle, followed Augustine's lead, and hence
always translated ousia as substantia, and his usage seems to have
settled the matter. And so a word designed by the anti-Aristotelian
Augustine to mean a low and empty sort of being turns up in our
translations of the word whose meaning Aristotle took to be the
highest and fullest sense of being. Descartes, in his Meditations,
uses the word substance only with his tongue in his cheek; Locke
explicitly analyzes it as an empty notion of an I-don't-know-what; and
soon after the word is laughed out of the vocabulary of serious
philosophic endeavor. It is no wonder that the Metaphysics ceased to
have any influence on living thinking: its heart had been cut out of
it by its friends.
3. The Meaning of Ousia (Being) in Plato

What does ousia mean? It is already a quirky, idiomatic word in
ordinary use when Plato gets hold of it. By a quirk of our own
language one may say indeed that it means substance, but only, I
repeat only, in the sense in which a rich man is called a man of
substance. You may safely allow your daughter to marry him because you
know where he will be and what he will be doing tomorrow and twenty
years from now.Ousia meant permanent property, real estate,
non-transferable goods: not the possessions we are always using up or
consuming but those that remain–land, houses, wealth of the kind one
never spends since it breeds new wealth with no expense of itself.
When Socrates asks Meno for the ousia of the bee he is not using a
technical philosophical term but a metaphor: what is the estate of a
bee that each one inherits simply by being born a bee? A man of
substance who has permanent wealth is who he is because of what he
owns. A bee is to his permanent and his variable characteristics as a
man is to his permanent and his spendable wealth. The metaphor takes a
second step when applied to virtue: the varying instances of virtue in
a man, a woman, a slave, and the rest must all have some unvarying
core which makes them virtues. There must be some single meaning to
which we always refer when we pronounce anything a virtue. This is the
step Socrates continually insists that Meno must take. But remember,
in the slave-boy scene, Socrates twice entices the slave-boy into
giving plausible incorrect answers about the side of the double
square. Is there an ousia of virtue? Socrates uses the word not as the
result of an induction or abstraction or definition, but by stretching
an already strained metaphor. People have disposable goods which come
and go and ousiatic goods which remain; bees have some characteristics
in which they differ, and others in which they share; the virtues
differ, but are they the same in anything but name? Even if they are,
must it be a definition that they share? Not all men have ousia.
Ordinarily only a few men do. The rest of us work for them, sell to
them, marry them, gather in the hills to destroy them, but do not have
what they have. Perhaps there are only a few virtues, or only one.

The word ousia, as Plato's Socrates handles it, seems to be a
double-edged weapon. It explicitly rejects Meno's way of saying what
virtue is, but implicitly suggests that the obvious alternative may
fail as well. If virtue is not simply a meaningless label used
ambiguously for many unconnected things, that does not mean that it
must unambiguously name the same content in each of the things it
names. Since ousia is our metaphor, let us ask what wealth means. If a
poor man has a hut and a cow and some stored-up food, are they his
wealth? He is certainly not wealthy. On the other hand, King Lear says
that "our basest beggars Are in poorest thing superfluous"; no human
life is cut so fine as to lack anything beyond what satisfies bare
need. The beggar, like the family on welfare, does not have the means
to satisfy need, but need not for that reason forego those possessions
which give life comfort or continuity. His wealth is derived from the
wealth of others. The small farmer may maintain something of the
independence a wealthy man enjoys, but one bad year could wipe him
out. He will either accumulate enough to become wealthy himself, or
his life will remain a small-scale analogy to that of the wealthy.
Wealth means, first of all, only that which a few people have and the
rest of us lack, but because it means that, it also, at the same time,
means secondarily something that all of us possess. There is an
ambiguity at work in the meaning of the word "wealth" which is not a
matter of a faulty vocabulary and not a matter of language at all: it
expresses the way things are. Wealth of various kinds exists by
derivation from and analogy to wealth in the emphatic sense. Indeed
Meno, who spontaneously defines virtue by listing virtues, is equally
strongly inclined to say that the power to rule over men and
possessions is the only virtue there is. He cannot resolve the logical
difficulties Socrates raises about his answers, but they are all
resolvable. Meno in fact believes that virtue is ousia in its simple
sense of big money, and that women, children, and slaves can only have
virtue derivatively and ambiguously. Socrates' question is one of
those infuriatingly ironic games he is always playing. The ousia of
virtue, according to Meno and Gorgias, is ousia.
4. Ousia in Aristotle

When the word ousia turns up in texts of Aristotle, it is this hidden
history of its use, and not its etymology, which is determining its
meaning. First of all, the word fills a gap in the language of being,
since Greek has no word for thing. The two closest equivalents are to
on and to chrema. To on simply means whatever is, and includes the
color blue, the length two feet, the action walking, and anything at
all that can be said to be. To chrema means a thing used, used up,
spent, or consumed; any kind of possession, namely, that is not ousia.
ousia holds together, remains, and makes its possessor emphatically
somebody. In the vocabulary of money, ousia is to to chremata as
whatever remains constant in a thing is to all theonta that come and
go. ousia also carries with it the sense of something that belongs
somehow to all but directly and fully only to a few. The word is
ready-made to be the theme of Aristotle's investigation of being,
because both the word and the investigation were designed by Plato.
For Aristotle, the inquiry into the nature of being begins with the
observation that being is meant in many ways. It is like Meno's
beginning, and it must be subjected to the same Socratic questioning.

Suppose that there is some one core of meaning to which we refer
whenever we say that something is. What is its content? Hegel says of
being as being:

"it is not to be felt, or perceived by sense, or pictured in
imagination… it is mere abstraction… the absolutely negative… just
Nothing."

And isn't he right, as Parmenides was before him? Leave aside all
those characteristics in which beings differ, and what is left behind?
To Aristotle, this means that being is not a universal or a genus. If
being is the comprehensive class to which everything belongs, how does
it come to have sub-classes? It would have to be divided with respect
to something outside itself. Beings would have to be distinguished by
possessing or failing to possess some characteristic, but that
characteristic would have to be either a class within being, already
separated off from the rest by reference to something prior, or a
non-being. Since both are impossible, being must come already divided:
the highest genera or ultimate classes of things must be irreducibly
many. This is Aristotle's doctrine of the categories, and according to
him being means at least eight different things.
5. The Doctrine of Categories

The categories have familiar names: quality, quantity, relation, time,
place, action, being-acted upon. The question Socrates asked about
things, What is it?, is too broad, since it can be answered truly with
respect to any of the categories that apply, and many times in some of
them. For example, I'll describe something to you: it is backstage
now; it is red; it is three feet high; it is lying down and breathing.
I could continue telling you what it is in this fashion for as long as
I pleased and you would not know what it is. It is an Irish setter.
What is different about that last answer? To be an Irish setter is not
to be a quality or quantity or time or action but to be a whole which
comprises many ways of being in those categories, and much change and
indeterminacy in them. The redness, three-foot-high-ness, respiration
and much else cohere in a thing which I have named in its thinghood by
calling it an Irish setter. Aristotle calls this way of being ousia.
Aristotle's logical works reflect upon the claims our speech makes
about the world. The principal result of Aristotle's inquiry into the
logical categories of being is, I think, the claim that the thinghood
of things in the world is never reducible in our speech to any
combination of qualities, quantities, relations, actions, and so on:
that ousia or thinghood must be a separate category. What happens when
I try to articulate the being of a thing such as an Irish setter? I
define it as a dog with certain properties. But what then is a dog? It
is an animal with certain properties, and an animal is an organism
with certain properties, and an organism is a thing with the property
life. At each level I meet, as dog, animal, organism, what Aristotle
calls secondary ousia or secondary thinghood.

I set out to give an account of what makes a certain collection of
properties cohere as a certain thing, and I keep separating off some
of them and telling you that the rest cohere as a whole. At my last
step, when I say that an organism is a living thing, the problem of
secondary thinghood is present in its nakedness. Our speech, no matter
how scientific, must always leave the question of the hanging-together
of things as things a question.
6. The Central Question of the Metaphysics

Thus the logical inquiries bequeath to the Metaphysics its central
question, which we are now in a position to translate. The question
that was asked of old and will always be asked by anyone who is alive
enough to wonder about anything is, What is being? What is a thing?
What is the thinghood of things? What makes our world a world of
things at all? We are here at the deepest postulate of Aristotelian
philosophizing: the integrity of the world as a world and of anything
in it which endures as itself for any time at all, is not
self-explanatory, is something to be wondered at, is caused.

We are taught that a moving thing, if nothing disturbs it, will
continue moving forever. Do you believe that? It is certainly true
that a heavy thing in motion is as hard to stop as it was to set in
motion, and that we cannot step out of moving automobiles without
continuing, for a while, to share their motions. But these are
evidences of persistence of motion, not at all the same thing as
inertia of motion. There is no evidence of the latter. In principle
there cannot be, because we cannot abolish all the world to observe an
undisturbed moving thing. There is a powerful and in its way,
beautiful, account of the world which assumes inertia, appealing to
those experiences which suggest that motion at an unchanging speed is
a state no different from that of rest. The hidden premise which leads
from that step to the notion of inertia is the assumption that rest is
an inert state. If it is not, the same evidence could lead to the
conclusion that an unchanging speed is a fragile and vulnerable thing,
as unlikely and as hard to come by as an unchanging anything. How can
a balloon remain unchanged? It does so only so long as the air inside
pushes out no harder and no less hard than the air outside pushes in.
Is the air inside the balloon at rest? Can it be at rest as long as it
is performing a task? Can the balloon be at rest if the air inside it
cannot be? It can certainly remain in a place, like other apparently
inert things, say a table. If you pulled the legs from under a table
the top would fall, and if you removed the top the legs would fall.
Leave them together and leave them alone and they do not move, but is
the table at rest? Surely no more so than a pair of arm wrestlers,
straining every muscle but unable to budge each other, can be said to
be resting. But can't we find an inert thing anywhere in the world?
How about a single lump of rock? But if I throw it in the air it will
return to find a resting place. It seems to rest only when something
blocks it, and if I let it rest on my hand or my head, something will
make me uncomfortable. Can the rock be doing nothing? And if we cannot
find inertia in a rock, where could it be? An animal is either full of
circulating and respirating or it is rotting, and the same seems true
of plants. But what in the world is not animal-like, plant-like,
rock-like, or table-like? The world contains living and non-living
natural beings, and it contains products of human making, and all of
them are busy. From Aristotle's wondering and wonderful perspective,
everything in the world is busy just continuing to be itself. This is
not a "theory" of Aristotle's; it is a way of bringing the world to
sight with the questioning intellect awake. Try that way of looking on
for size: the world has nothing to lose for ceasing to be taken for
granted. Consider an analogy. Ptolemy is content to say that Venus and
Mercury happen to have the same longitudinal period as the sun and
that Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn all happen to lag just as far behind
the sun in any time as they have moved in anomaly. Copernicus, in the
most passionate and convincing part of his argument, shows that these
facts can be explained. Lucretius (whom we may substitute for
Aristotle's favorite materialist, Empedocles) thought that cats and
dogs and giraffes just happened to come about by accumulation, like
the sands on the beach. Lucretius' failure to wonder at a giraffe, his
reduction of the living to the blind and dead, is, from Aristotle's
standpoint, a failure to recognize what is truly one, what is not just
a heap, what is genuinely a thing.

The least thoughtful, least alert way of being in the world is to
regard everything which remains itself as doing so causelessly,
inertly. To seek a cause for the being-as-it-is of any thing is
already to be in the grip of the question Aristotle says must always
be asked. To seek the causes and sources of the being-as-it-is of
everything that is, is to join Aristotle in his Copernican revolution
which regards every manifestation of persistence, order, or recurrence
as a marvel, an achievement. That everything in the world disclosed to
our senses is in a ceaseless state of change, most of us would grant.
That the world nevertheless hangs together enough to be experienced at
all is a fact so large that we rarely take notice of it. But the two
together–change, and a context of persistence out of which change can
emerge–force one to acknowledge some non-human cause at work: for
whichever side of the world–change or rest, order or dissolution–is
simply its uncaused, inert way, the other side must be the result of
effort. Something must be at work in the world, hidden to us, visible
only in its effects, pervading all that is, and it must be either a
destroyer or a preserver.
7. The World as Cosmos

That much seems to me to be demonstrable, but the next step is a
difficult one to take because the world presents to us two faces: the
living and the non-living. The thinghood of living things consists in
organized unity, maintained through effort, at work in a variety of
activities characteristic of each species; but a rock or a flame or
some water or some dirt or some air is a thing in a much different
way, unified only by accidental boundaries, indifferent to being
divided or heaped together, at work only in some one local motion, up
or down. Which is the aberration, life or non-life? For Aristotle the
choice need not be made, since the distinction between the two forms
of being only results from a confusion. Flesh, blood, bone, and hair
would seem inorganic and inanimate if they were not organized into and
animated as, say a cat. But earth, air, fire, and water, all of it, is
always organized into and animate as the cosmos. The heavens enclose
an organized body which has a size, a shape, and a hierarchical
structure all of which it maintains by ceaseless, concerted activity.
You may think that in believing this, Aristotle betrays an innocence
which we cannot recover. But not only Aristotle and Ptolemy, but also
Copernicus and Kepler believed the visible heaven to be a cosmos, and
not only they, but also, amazingly, Newton himself. In our century,
Einstein calculated the volume of the universe, and cosmology has once
again become a respectable scientific pursuit. Moderns, for whom the
spherical motion of the heavens no longer indicates that the heavens
have boundaries, draw the same conclusion from the fact that there is
darkness. Anyone who would take the assertion that his outlook is
modern to include the denial that there is a cosmos would make a very
shallow claim, one having more to do with poetic fashion than with
reasoned conviction. The question of the cosmos has not been made
obsolete, and the very least we must admit is that the appearance of
an inorganic, inanimate nature is not conclusive and would result from
our human-sized perspective whether there is a cosmos or not.

If the world is a cosmos, then it is one more instance of the kind of
being that belongs to every animal and plant in it. And if that is so,
there is nothing left to display any other kind of being. Try it: take
inventory. What is there? The color red is, only if it is the color of
some thing. Color itself is, only if it is some one color, and the
color of a thing. The relation "taller than" is, only if it is of two
or more things. What has being but is not a thing must depend on some
thing for its being. But on the other hand a mere thing, mere matter
as we call it, using the word differently than Aristotle ever does, is
an impossibility too. Relatively inert, rock-like being is the being
of a part of what comes only in wholes–cosmos, plant, or animal. And
all man-made things must borrow their material from natural things and
their very holding-together from the natural tendencies of the parts
of the cosmos. To be is to be alive; all other being is borrowed
being. Any comprehensive account of things must come to terms with the
special being of animals and plants: for Lucretius, living things are
not marvels but a problem which he solves by dissolving them into the
vast sea of inert purposelessness. For Aristotle, as for Plato, wonder
is not a state to be dissolved but a beckoning to be followed, and for
Aristotle the wonderful animals and plants point the way to being
itself, to that being qua being which is the source of all being, for
we see it in the world in them and only in them.

Thus when Aristotle begins in Book 7 of the Metaphysics to ask what
makes a thing a thing, he narrows the question to apply only to living
things. All other being is, in one way or another, their effect. He is
asking for their cause. At that point, his inquiry into the causes and
sources of being itself, simply as being, merges with the inquiry in
Book 2 of his Physics, where the question is, What is nature? The
answer, as well, must be the same, and just as Aristotle concludes
that nature is form, he concludes that being is form. Does the
material of an animal make it what it is? Yes, but it cannot be the
entire or even principal cause. If there is anything that is not
simply the sum of its parts, it is an animal. It is continually making
itself, by snatching suitable material from its environment and
discarding unsuitable material. Add some sufficiently unsuitable
material, like arsenic, and the sum of parts remains, but the animal
ceases to be. The whole which is not accounted for by the enumeration
of its parts is the topic of the last section of theTheaetetus, where
Socrates offers several playful images of that kind of being: a wagon,
a melody, the number six, and the example discussed at most length,
which Aristotle borrows, the syllable.
8. Forms, Wholeness, and Thinghood

Aristotle insists that the syllable is never the sum of its letters.
Socrates, of course, argues both sides of the question, and Theaetetus
agrees both times. Let's try it ourselves. Take the word "put", p-u-t.
voice the letters separately, as well as you can, and say them in
succession, as rapidly as you can. I think you will find that, as long
as you attempt to add sound to sound, you will have a grunt surrounded
by two explosions of breath. When you voice the whole syllable as one
sound, the a is already present when you begin sounding the p, and the
t sound is already shaping the u. Try to pronounce the first two
letters and add the third as an afterthought, and you will get two
sounds. I have tried all this, and think it's true, but you must
decide for yourself. Aristotle says that the syllable is the letters,
plus something else besides; Socrates calls the something else a form,
an eidos, while Aristotle calls it the thinghood of the thing. When I
pronounce the syllable "put", I must have in mind the whole syllable
in its wholeness before I can voice any of its parts in such a way as
to make them come out parts of it. Now a syllable is about as
transitory a being as one could imagine: it is made of breath, and it
is gone as soon as it is uttered. But a craftsman works the same way
as a maker of syllables. If he simply begins nailing and gluing
together pieces of wood, metal, and leather, he is not likely to end
up with a wagon; to do so, he must have the whole shape and work of
the wagon in mind in each of his joinings and fittings. Even so, when
he is finished, what he has produced is only held together by nails
and glue. As soon as it is made, the wagon begins falling apart, and
it does so the more, the more it is used. All the more perplexing
then, is the animal or plant. It is perpetually being made and re-made
after the form of its species, yet there is no craftsman at work on
it. It is a composite of material and form, yet it is the material in
it that is constantly being used up and replaced, while the form
remains intact. The form is not in any artist's imagination, nor can
it be an accidental attribute of its material. In the Physics, nature
was traced back to form, and in the first half of the Metaphysics all
being is traced to the same source. But what is form? Where is it? Is
it a cause or is it caused? Most important of all, does it have being
alone, on its own, apart from bodies? Does it emerge from the world of
bodies, or is a body a thing impossible to be unless a form is somehow
already present for it to have? Or is there something specious about
the whole effort to make form either secondary to material or primary?
Are they perhaps equal and symmetrical aspects of being, inseparable,
unranked? Just as ultimate or first material, without any
characteristics supplied by form, cannot be, why should not a pure
form, not the form of anything, be regarded as its opposite pole and
as equally impossible? Or have we perhaps stumbled on a nest of
unanswerable questions? If form is the first principle of the science
of physics, might it not be a first principle simply, behind which one
cannot get, to which one may appeal for explanation but about which
one cannot inquire? Aristotle says that if there were not things apart
from bodies, physics would be first philosophy. But he calls physics
second philosophy, and half theMetaphysics lies on the other side of
the questions we have been posing. It consists in the uncovering of
beings not disclosed to our senses, beings outside of and causal with
respect to what we naively and inevitably take to be the whole world.

Aristotle marks the center and turning point of the Metaphysics with
these words: "One must inquire about (form), for this is the greatest
impasse. Now it is agreed that some of what is perceptible arethings,
and so one must search first among these. For it is preferable to
proceed toward what is better known. For learning occurs in all things
in this way: through what is by nature less known toward the things
more known. And just as in matters of action the task is to make the
things that are good completely be good for each person, from out of
the things that seem good to each, so also the task here is, from out
of the things more known to one, to make the things known by nature
known to him. Now what is known and primary to each of us is often
known slightly, and has little or nothing of being; nevertheless, from
the things poorly known but known to one, one must try to know the
things that are known completely." (1029a 33 – b 11) The forest is
dark, but one cannot get out of it without passing through it,
carefully, calmly, attentively. It will do no good to move in circles.
The passage just quoted connects with the powerful first sentence of
the Metaphysics: "All human beings are by nature stretched out toward
a state of knowing." Our natural condition is one of frustration, of
being unable to escape a task of which the goal is out of reach and
out of sight. Aristotle here likens our frustration as theoretical
beings to our condition as practical beings: unhappiness has causes–we
achieve it by seeking things–and if we can discover what we were
seeking we might be able to make what is good ours. Similarly, if we
cannot discern the goal of wisdom, we can at least begin examining the
things that stand in our way.
9. The Being of Sensible Things

The next section of the Metaphysics, from Book 7, Chapter 4 through
Book 9, is the beginning of an intense forward motion. These books are
a painstaking clarification of the being of the things disclosed to
our senses. It is here that Aristotle most heavily uses the vocabulary
that is most his own, and everything he accomplishes in these books
depends on the self-evidence of the meanings of these expressions. It
is these books especially which Latinizing translators turn into
gibberish. Words like essence, individual, and actuality must either
be vague or be given arbitrary definitions. The words Aristotle uses
are neither vague nor are they conceptual constructions; they call
forth immediate, direct experiences which one must have at hand to see
what Aristotle is talking about. They are not the kinds of words that
books can explain; they are words of the kind that people must share
before there can be books. That is why understanding a sentence of
Aristotle is so often something that comes suddenly, in an insight
that seems discontinuous from the puzzlement that preceded it. It is
simply a matter of directing one's gaze. We must try to make sense of
Books 7-9 because they are crucial to the intention of the
Metaphysics. Aristotle has an argument independent of those books,
which he makes in Book 8 of the Physics and uses again in Book 12 of
the Metaphysics that there must be an immortal, unchanging being,
ultimately responsible for all wholeness and orderliness in the
sensible world. And he is able to go on in Book 12 to discover a good
deal about that being. One could, then, skip from the third chapter of
Book 7 to Book 12, and, having traced being to form, trace form back
to its source. Aristotle would have done that if his whole intention
had been to establish that the sensible world has a divine source, but
had he done so he would have left no foundation for reversing the
dialectical motion of his argument to understand the things in the
world on the basis of their sources. Books 7-9 provide that
foundation.

The constituents of the world we encounter with our senses are not
sensations. The sensible world is not a mosaic of sensible qualities
continuous with or adjacent to one another, but meets our gaze
organized into things which stand apart, detached from their
surroundings. I can indicate one of them to you by the mere act of
pointing, because it has its own boundaries and holds them through
time. I need not trace out the limits of the region of the visual
field to which I refer your attention, because the thing thrusts
itself out from, holds itself aloof from what is visible around it,
making that visible residue mere background. My pointing therefore has
an object, and it is an object because it keeps being itself, does not
change randomly or promiscuously like Proteus, but holds together
sufficiently to remain the very thing at which I pointed. This way of
being, Aristotle calls being a "this". If I want to point out to you
just this red of just this region of this shirt, I will have to do a
good deal more than just point. .A "this" as Aristotle speaks of it is
what comes forth to meet the act of pointing, is that for which à need
not point and say "not that or that or that but just this," but need
do nothing but point, since it effects its own separation from what it
is not.

A table, a chair, a rock, a painting–each is a this, but a living
thing is a this in a special way. It is the author of its own
this-ness. It appropriates from its surroundings, by eating and
drinking and breathing, what it organizes into and holds together as
itself. This work of self-separation from its environment is never
finished but must go on without break if the living thing is to be at
all. Let us consider as an example of a living this, some one human
being. Today his skin is redder than usual, because he has been in the
sun; there is a cut healing on his hand because he chopped onions two
days ago; he is well educated, because, five years ago, his parents
had the money and taste to send him to Harvard. All these details, and
innumerably many more, belong to this human being. But in Aristotle's
way of speaking, the details I have named are incidental to him: he is
not sunburned, wounded on the hand, or Harvard-educated because he is
a human being. He is each of those things because his nature bumped
into that of something else and left him with some mark, more or less
intended, more or less temporary, but in any case aside from what he
is on his own, self-sufficiently. What he is on his own, as a result
of the activity that makes him be at all, is: two-legged, sentient,
breathing, and all the other things he is simply as a human being.
There is a difference between all the things he happens to be and the
things he necessarily is on account of what he is. Aristotle
formulates the latter, the kind of being that belongs to a thing not
by happenstance but inevitably, as the "what it kept on being in the
course of being at all" for a human being, or a duck, or a rosebush.
The phrase to en einai is Aristotle's answer to the Socratic question,
ti esti? What is a giraffe? Find some way of articulating all the
things that every giraffe always is, and you will have defined the
giraffe. What each of them is throughout its life, is the product at
any instant for any one of them, of the activity that is causing it to
be. That means that the answer to the question "What is a giraffe?",
and the answer to the question "What is this giraffe?" are the same.
Stated generally, Aristotle's claim is that a this, which is in the
world on its own, self-sufficiently, has a what-it-always-was-to-be,
and is just its what-it-always-was-to-be. This is not a commonplace
thought, but it is a comprehensible one; compare it with the
translators' version, "a per-se individual is identical with its
essence."
10. Matter and Form in Aristotle

The living thing as it is present to my looking seems to be richer,
fuller, more interesting than it can possibly be when it is reduced to
a definition in speech, but this is a confusion. All that belongs to
the living thing that is not implied by the definition of its species
belongs to it externally, as a result of its accidental interactions
with the other things in its environment. The definition attempts to
penetrate to what it is in itself, by its own activity of making
itself be whole and persist. There is nothing fuller than the whole,
nothing richer than the life which is the winning and expressing of
that wholeness, nothing more interesting than the struggle it is
always waging unnoticed, a whole world of priority deeper and more
serious than the personal history it must drag along with the
species-drama it is constantly enacting. The reduction of the living
thing to what defines it is like the reduction of a rectangular block
of marble to the form of Hermes: less is more. Strip away the
accretion of mere facts, and what is left is that without which even
those facts could not have gained admittance into the world: the
forever vulnerable foundation of all that is in the world, the
shaping, ruling form, the incessant maintenance of which is the only
meaning of the phrase self-preservation. Indeed even the bodily
material of the living thing is present in the world only as active,
only as forming itself into none of the other things it might have
been but just this one thoroughly defined animal or plant. And this,
finally, is Aristotle's answer to the question, What is form? Form is
material at work according to a persisting definiteness of kind.
Aristotle's definition of the soul in De Anima, soul is the
being-at-work-staying-the-same of an organized body, becomes the
definition of form in Book 8 of the Metaphysics, and is, at that stage
of the inquiry, his definition of being.

Book 9 spells out the consequences of this clarification of form. Form
cannot be derivative from or equivalent with material, because
material on its own must be mere possibility. It cannot enter the
world until it has achieved definiteness by getting to work in some
way, and it cannot even be thought except as the possibility of some
form. Books 7-9 demonstrate that materiality is a subordinate way of
being. The living body does not bring form into the world, it must
receive form to come into the world. Form is primary and casual, and
the original source of all being in the sensible world must be traced
beyond the sensible world, to that which confers unity on forms
themselves. If forms had no integrity of their own, the world and
things could not hang together and nothing would be. At the end of
Book 9, the question of being has become the question of formal unity,
the question, What makes each form one? In the woven texture of the
organization of the Metaphysics, what comes next, at the beginning of
Book 10, is a laying out of all the ways things may be one. Glue,
nails, and rope are of no use for the problem at hand, nor, any
longer, are natural shapes and motions, which have been shown to have
a derivative sort of unity. All that is left in Aristotle's array of
possibilities is the unity of that of which the thinking or the
knowing is one.

This thread of the investigation, which we may call for convenience
the biological one, converges in Book 12 with a cosmological one. The
animal and plant species take care of their own perpetuation by way of
generation, but what the parents pass on to the offspring is an
identity which must hold together thanks to a timeless activity of
thinking. The cosmos holds together in a different way: it seems to be
literally and directly eternal by way of a ceaseless repetition of
patterns of locomotion. An eternal motion cannot result from some
other motion, but must have an eternal, unchanging cause. Again,
Aristotle lays out all the possibilities. What can cause a motion
without undergoing a motion? A thing desired can, and so can a thing
thought. Can you think of a third? Aristotle says that there are only
these two, and that, moreover, the first reduces to the second. When I
desire an apple it is the fleshy apple and not the thought of it
toward which I move, but it is the thought or imagining of the fleshy
apple that moves me toward the apple. The desired object causes motion
only as an object of thought. Just as the only candidate left to be
the source of unity of form among the animals and plants was the
activity of thinking, so again the only possible unmoved source for
the endless circlings of the stars is an eternal activity of thinking.
Because it is deathless and because the heavens and nature and all
that is depend upon it, Aristotle calls this activity God. Because it
is always altogether at work, nothing that is thought by it is ever
outside or apart from it: it is of thinking, simply. Again, because it
is always altogether at work, nothing of it is ever left over outside
of or apart from its work of thinking: it is thinking, simply. It is
the pure holding-together of the pure holdable-together, activity
active, causality caused. The world is, in all its being most deeply,
and in its deepest being wholly, intelligible. So far is Aristotle
from simply assuming the intelligibility of things, that he requires
twelve books of argument to account for it. All being is dependent on
the being of things; among things, the artificial are derived from the
natural; because there is a cosmos, all natural things have being as
living things; because all living things depend on either a
species-identity or an eternal locomotion, there must be a
self-subsisting activity of thinking.

The fact that there are a Book 13 and a Book 14 to the Metaphysics
indicates that, in Aristotle's view, the question of being has not yet
undergone its last transformation. With the completion of Book 12, the
question of being becomes: What is the definition of the world? What
is the primary intelligible structure that implies all that is
permanent in the world? Books 13 and 14 of the Metaphysics examine the
only two answers that anyone has ever proposed to that question
outside of myths. They are: that the divine thinking is a direct
thinking of all the animal and plant species, and that it is a
thinking of the mathematical sources of things. The conclusions of
these two books are entirely negative. The inquiry into being itself
cannot come to rest by transferring to the divine source the
species-identities which constitute the world, nor can they be derived
from their mathematical aspects. Aristotle's final transformation of
the question of being is into a question. Books 13 and 14 are for the
sake of rescuing the question as one which does not and cannot yield
to a solution but insists on being faced and thought directly.
Repeatedly, through theMetaphysics, Aristotle says that the deepest
things must be simple. One cannot speak the truth about them, nor even
ask, a question about them, because they have no parts. They have no
articulation in speech, but only contact with that which thinks. The
ultimate question of the Metaphysics, which is at once What is all
being at its roots? and What is the life of God?, and toward which the
wholeMetaphysics has been designed to clear the way, takes one beyond
the limits of speech itself. The argument of the Metaphysics begins
from our direct encounter with the sensible world, absorbs that world
completely into speech, and carries its speech to the threshold of
that on which world and speech depend. The shape of the book is a
zig-zag, repeatedly encountering the inexpressible simple things and
veering away. By climbing to that life which is the being-at-work of
thinking, and then ending with a demonstration of what that life is
not, Aristotle leaves us to disclose that life to ourselves in the
only way possible, in the privacy of lived thinking. The Metaphysics
is not an incomplete work: it is the utmost gift that a master of
words can give.
11. References and Further Reading

* Aristotle, Metaphysics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Green Lion Press, 1999.
* Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Focus
Philosophical Library, Pullins Press, 2002.
* Aristotle, On the Soul, Joe Sachs (trans.), Green Lion Press, 2001.
* Aristotle, Poetics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Focus Philosophical
Library, Pullins Press, 2006.
* Aristotle, Physics, Joe Sachs (trans.), Rutgers U. P., 1995.