…[I]t is obvious that actuality is prior in substance to
potentiality; and as we have said, one actuality always precedes
another in time right back to the actuality of the eternal
prime mover…Nothing, then, which is without qualification
imperishable is without qualification potential y…imperishable
things, then, exist actual y. Nor can anything which is of necessity be potential; yet these things are primary; for if it did not exist,
nothing would exist. Nor does eternal movement, if there be
such, exist potential y; and, if there is an eternal mover, it is not
potential y in motion…this will not be enough, if its substance
is potential y; for there will not be eternal movement; for that which is potential y may possibly not be. There must, then, be
such a principle, whose very substance is actuality.
If, as we have seen in our review of the definition of substance,
Matter as such is strictly speaking a mere potentiality for a given
form, and if God is ful y actualized potentiality, then, as Aristotle
wishes to maintain in Metaphysics 1071b21-22, one might assume that God has no ‘matter’. However, for Aristotle, we have seen
that any substance is defined as formed matter. The only logical
conclusion that can be drawn here is that God is not a substance on
the same level as other substances. This means that if He is to exist at 85
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al , within a world-view comprehensively defined by substances that
are each a particular this, then God must be a substance-defining principle. This would not mean that God is in all things, or that God occupies the same space as all things. Rather it would mean that God is all things even though they are manifold and diverse whereas he is one. This is analogous to the way that an “Organism” is not
something that pervades organs or exists inside organs. Rather, it is
the coherently functional whole of all of the individual organs taken
together in their relations to each other.
While there may be no explicit textual evidence for this ‘organic’
conception of God, it seems an appropriate analogy in light of the
central role of biology in Aristotle’s thinking. His father was the
doctor ( aescleipid) of the king of Macedon, and Aristotle himself was trained in his father’s profession. Aristotle spent eight years
of his life, between the end of his studies at Plato’s academy and
his tutorship of Alexander the Great, studying sea organisms. He
continued this in his own school, the Lyceum, including dissections
with a staff of assistants. He also consulted a wide range of people
for expert biological knowledge (fisherman, beekeepers, etc.).
History of Animals, Parts of Animals, and Generation of Animals are all major works of Aristotle concerned with biology. As such it is his foremost subject matter and his biological thinking extends into the
rest of his thinking. Most importantly, it is on the basis of having
primarily taken organisms as “substances” that Aristotle derives his
metaphysics of Being in general.
Bearing this in mind, we should now recall that Aristotle
defines God as no more than a thinking on thinking. We see this in Nicomachean Ethics 1177b1, where Aristotle states that divine thought “…alone would seem to be loved for its own sake; for
nothing arises from it apart from the contemplating…”, as well as
in Metaphysics 1074b15-34, where Aristotle writes: “The nature of divine thought…must be itself that thought thinks (since it is the
most excellent of things), and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.”
Taken together with the above, this would mean that the thinking
of God is one with the forms of the world (which I am viewing as
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analogous to the organs of a body). In a way analogous to the fact
that the matter of a body cannot be conceived but through the forms
of its organs (and limbs), God’s thinking may be a means by which
prime matter is rendered conceivable to Himself, through human
aisthesis and noesis. Such a notion is the only metaphysical y sound basis for drawing the conclusion, as Aristotle does, that man has an
essential nature separate from all that which he shares with other
life. This nature not only mirrors the essential nature of God, but
would have to be actualized through the essential nature of God.
Otherwise, Aristotle’s claim that Man and God share the same
would be metaphysical y incoherent.
In most respects, Aristotle shares with his fellow Greeks the
belief that life and soul are co-extensive, that anything ‘alive’ has a soul. Soul cannot be the body itself, which body is the potentiality
of its “first actuality”. This means that for Aristotle, in one sense, the soul is the hierarchic functionality of body, its capacity to engage
in nutritive, reproductive, perceptive and other activities. However,
Aristotle clearly states that a part of the soul is not a fact about the body but an “active intellect”, which is potential y separable from it and immortal. This is unique to human beings. We see him make
this claim at On the Soul 430a25: “When separated [the active intellect] is alone just what it is, and this alone is immortal and
eternal.” The souls of all other beings perish with their bodies, or
even before death if the body of an organism loses its capacities (for example, in a coma).
Aristotle also explains how we share the aisthetic powers of perception proper, imagination, and movement together with
animals. We see this in the following passages of On the Soul: 425b11 and 429b9; 428b10 and 429a1; 433a22. The case is somewhat
more complex with the power of desire. For Aristotle, Desire has
two types, “appetite” and “wish”. Aristotle says that the former is possessed by both humans and animals, while the latter is possessed
only by rational beings (i.e. humans). The former is irrational and
seeks immediate pleasure, while the latter is rational and directed
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at a long-term good. In On the Soul 433b5 we see that wish is only possible for beings with a sense of time and thought that can resist
the attraction of some present pleasure. Desire essential y takes the
content of Imagination and wants or wil s it. To do so requires a
noetic soul whose essence is “thinking”, just as the essence of God is thinking. At least for man, the aisthetic soul depends on the noetic soul, the latter is more essential. All beings with threptic and aisthetic souls are substances defined by the four causes. However, the same
cannot be said of human beings, an aspect of whose noesis is pure actuality without a specific ‘form’. For this aspect of man to interact in a non-contradictory and holistic manner with the threptic and aisthetic natures that he shares with other living beings, Aristotle must assume that this more fundamental and form-less noesis is not itself subject to the four causes but grounds them.
Likewise, a more coherent version of Aristotle’s God would not
be merely the final cause of the world (as is commonly assumed),
rather, it would exist as al four causes of the world by always already establishing the four causes as such. Aristotle does give us some,
albeit scant, textual resources for developing this actively creative
conception of God. In On the Heavens 271a33, Aristotle writes: “…
God and na
ture create nothing that is pointless.” This blatantly states that God creates the world and also implies God’s identity with
Nature, which in this context is not likely to be referring to living
beings alone, but to physis natural y generating all beings through the four causes. In 336b25 of Generation and Corruption, Aristotle writes:
Coming-to-be and passing-away wil , as we have said, always
be continuous, and will never fail owing to the cause we stated.
And this continuity has a sufficient reason. For in all things, as
we affirm, nature always strikes after the better. Now being…
is better than not-being; but not all things can possess being,
since they are too far removed from the principle. God therefore
adopted the remaining alternative, and fulfilled the perfection
of the universe by making coming-to-be uninterrupted; for the
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greatest possible coherence would thus be secured to existence,
because that coming-to-be should itself come-to-be perpetual y
is the closest approximation to eternal being.
This passage seems to establish God as both transcending and
accommodating a necessitating reason, beyond which there is
no more fundamental reason, of the becoming of all beings as
determined by the four causes of substance. Thus, in reference to the
passage from Nicomachean Ethics quoted at the outset of this paper,
“the things out of which the cosmos is composed” may be “more
divine in their nature than a human being”, but they are not more divine or fundamental in nature than that immortal essence of Man
which sustains them. Such ontology could explain in what sense the
active intellect of the human soul “makes” the object of thought that
the passive intellect becomes. In On the Soul 430a10-25, Aristotle writes:
…[T]hought, as we have described it, is what it is by virtue of
becoming all things, while there is another [aspect of noesis]
which is what it is by virtue of making all things: this is a sort
of positive state like light; for in a sense light makes potential
colors into actual colors. Thought in this sense of it is separable,
impassable, unmixed, since it is in its essential nature activity …
It does not sometimes think and sometimes not think. When
separated it is alone just what it is, and this alone is immortal
and eternal…
In this passage, as elsewhere, we have seen that the essence of Man is perpetual contemplation, like God “it does not sometimes think and
sometimes not think.” In this context, it does not seem unreasonable
to interpret the analogy of the active intellect “making all things”
the way that “light makes potential colors into actual colors” as
indicating the essence or ‘inner light’ of Man as that which renders
an otherwise unthinkable prime matter conceivable, through the de-
limitation of substantial forms of living and non-living beings. On
this reading, Aristotle’s words “when separated”, in the last line of
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this passage, would be taken to mean ‘when considered in-itself’ –
or in its persistence through all that is perishable – the soul of Man actualizes pure potentialities in Nature.
2. The Polis as the Theater of Being
What complicates this view is that Aristotle clearly did not view
human ‘individuals’ as self-standing beings. In Book 1, Chapter 2 of
the Politics, Aristotle claims that the polis is not only (temporal y) the crowning achievement and fulfillment of man’s natural potential, but
that (ontological y) “the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual”.3 “Man is by nature a political animal”,4 and
individuals (and their families) are like limbs that would be unable
to carry out their proper function, or fulfill their purpose, without
being members of the polis–body and the Justice which organical y regulates it.5 Aristotle takes the laws of a political community to aim at the happiness of its citizens [1], and he believes that this eudaimonia can only be achieved through the virtuous life [2]. From these two
premises it follows that it is the task of the laws to enjoin citizens to behave according to the virtues of character. Aristotle lays this out at 1129b20-26 in Book V, Chapter 1 of the Nicomachean Ethics.
For Aristotle, virtuous conduct is self-reinforcing habit. In order
to become a virtuous person one must act as if one is a virtuous person, until this manner of acting becomes ‘second nature’, so
that it feels ‘wrong’ or out of place not to act virtuously.6 Those who have not been “beautiful y brought up by means of habits” will
have little if any capacity to improve themselves ethical y.7 In this
sense, virtue is an “active condition” that has no meaning abstracted
3 Ibid., 1253a19-20.
4 Ibid., 1253a3.
5 Ibid., 1253a21-22.
6 Ibid., 1103a35–1103b24.
7 Ibid., 1095b1-10.
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from the practical judgment exercised in concrete situations.8
“Active conditions” involve a feedback loop, wherein “on account of
themselves they make one apt to do those things by which they come
about”9 and “it is from one’s being at work involved in each way of
acting that one’s active conditions come about”.10 Acting according
to vice is also self-reinforcing. Aristotle believes that after initial y making a few decisions to do things which one knows are wrong,
one may ‘get in a rut’, so to speak, of performing vicious actions
from which it is eventual y as impossible to extricate oneself as it is for a sick man to simply wish himself wel .11
Whether or not one is virtuous is not a matter of natural
predisposition for Aristotle,12 but the socio-economic conditions of
one’s birth and early upbringing can drastical y restrict or expand
the scope of one’s potential to become a virtuous person. Aristotle
goes so far as to say that being habituated from childhood makes “all
the difference” in whether or not one is virtuous.13 Note the following key passage(s):
we learn by doing... we become just by doing things that are
just... lawmakers make the citizens good by habituating them,
and since this is the intention of every lawmaker, those that do
not do it well are failures, and one regime differs from another
in this respect as a good one from a worthless one... in the case
of the virtues... by acting... and getting habituated... active states come into being from being at work... Hence it is necessary to
make our ways of being at work be of certain sorts... It makes
no small difference, then to be habituated in this way straight
from childhood, but an enormous difference, or rather all the
difference.14
8 Ibid., 1107a.
9 Ibid., 1114b25-30.
10 Ibid., 1114a10.
11 Ibid., 1114a10-25.
12 Ibid., 1106a5-15.
13 Ibid., 1103b20-25.
14 Ibid., 1103a29–1103b26.
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Indeed, Aristotle claims that “it is necessary to be brought up in
some way straight from childhood” to feel pleasure and pain at the
right things, at the right time, and in the right measure.15 The text is rife with
the formulation “what one ought... as one ought, when one
ought” (one instance of which is at 1115b18-19). Those who have not
been “beautiful y brought up by means of habits” will have little if
any capacity to improve themselves ethical y.16 Moreover, Aristotle
recognizes that a certain degree of material prosperity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the exercise of arête.17
Of course, this material prosperity cannot be achieved without
distributive justice at work in the polis, and particular justice (both distributive and corrective), is subsumed by Universal Justice. In a
passage at 1134a24-30, Aristotle describes Universal Justice both as
lawfulness and as the whole of virtue. The passage begins with “what
we are seeking is also unqualifiedly just action and political y just
action.” In this statement, “unqualifiedly just action” and “political y just action” should be interpreted as two names for the same thing,
rather than as two separate items named in succession. We can take
as evidence for this the fact that nowhere does Aristotle explicitly
define “unqualifiedly just action”. The implication being that the
definition of political y just action as that which concerns “people
who share in a life aimed at self-sufficiency” (through trade of
diverse goods by people of different crafts) and “who are free and
either proportionately or arithmetical y equal” is also meant to
be the definition of unqualifiedly just action. So, for example, the
relations between master and slave, father and child, or husband
and wife only involve something “similar” to justice.18 Support for
this interpretation can also be drawn from 1134a24, where Aristotle
defines non-political y just action as “something just in virtue of
a similarity”, i.e. qualifiedly just action. This directly implies that political y just action is one and the same as unqualifiedly just action.
15 Ibid., 1104b10-15, 1105a1-15.
16 Ibid., 1095b1-10.
17 Ibid., 1099b1-10.
18 Ibid., 1134b8-18.
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Final y, there is a passage near the end of Politics III.6 that explicitly refers to political justice, which manifests solely in cities with good rulers, as the only unconditional justice: “It is clear that those