Descartes popularized the idea that there is nothing puzzling or difficult to understand about motion. At one point, Descartes even dashed off a definition of motion as “the transference of something from the vicinity of one thing to another”. The definition is obviously circular, but that was probably the point. Descartes meant to say (and in fact does say) that no one needs to bother defining motion. Either you get it or you don’t, and either way there’s nothing to talk about. The point caught on, and philosophers have not seriously struggled with the idea of becoming or motion since.
The necessary consequence of this is that the distinction between act and potency is no longer seen as anything more than (at best) a sheer logical possibility, and more likely as irrelevant nonsense. Potency is only necessary if we seriously ask the question “what is the per seprinciple of becoming and motion?” and no one is goingto ask that question spontaneously or without being prompted to it, and if they are prompted to it, they have to do so in an environment that takes ideas like “searching for a principle” and “speaking per se and not per accidens or per aliud” seriously. Even after one comes to ask the question, and ask the question in the right way with the right principles, he still has to think about it for a very long time: but this requires some kind of trust or discipleship to a larger tradition, and a safe environment in which the idea is allowed to be nurturedapart from the all-too-easy refutations that, though wrong, could easily confuse or befuddle even those who have a pretty solid formation. These traditions and institutions have to a large extent disappeared. One can assume that there is a distinction between potency and act, but there’s no necessity forcing us to take it as real unless we take the long road of struggling with motion in a particular way, and we have no social, cultural, or institutional help to struggle with it in the proper way. In addition, we have many disincentives to take the problem of motion seriously (like the ridiculous or insufficiently subtle accounts of Aristotle’s physics, or the hubris that makes most people feel the reality of passive potency is sufficiently refuted by pointing out that the Medievals believed it).
When the reality of potency as a principle is lost, or is treated as a merely stipulated or hypothetical distinction in things, nothing much remains of scholastic thought. One cannot read a page to St. Thomas without hitting some distinction that rests upon the the distinction between potency and act (say what is material or formal, apt, subjective, a faculty and object, etc.) and when potency is lost, we loose predicated universality (aptitude to be in many) causes (which are a principles of becoming) any proofs for the divine existence (except more or less purely aesthetic/ rhetorical/ hypothetical design arguments) the ability to articulate existence (which is the form of form and the act of all acts) any ability to resolve questions about the unity and distinction of cells and the self, the brain and self consciousness as active (how are they one, yet many?) or or the unity and distinction of the sign and signified, or something used and the user (Wittgenstein only shifted the goalposts) or the relation between mind and sensation, or how knowledge can be objective when it is known by a subject, or how a person can still be called “rational” when they are sleeping, or in a coma, or unborn, or elderly, or how …
And there’s really no reason the list has to stop.
David said,
May 8, 2009 at 7:22 am
Wonderful post.
Would you see this as the ultimate reason why modern thought has failed to develop a moral reason worthy of the name? Because it has no place for becoming, and moral reason is either about becoming or it is about nothing at all?
peeping thomist said,
May 8, 2009 at 8:19 am
Amen. Er, let it NOT be so.
What can be understood of Act/Potency are answers to questions that we never ask. I really like that point. One doesn’t philosophize in a vacuum, and one needs a reason arising from a problem or tension (the negative side of wonder) in order to pursue the truth. We don’t jolly well just up and start wondering about things in a completely positive manner and end up at such fundamental places along with the rest of the wise.
And without concrete problems arising from the concrete world of nature itself, natural philosophy ceases to be and metaphysics becomes empty, scholarly gibberish that no self respecting, serious mind would be interested in for more than 10 uncomfortable seconds. I think its right to say that the cut off point for us today is right where one’s looking at the flesh, blood, fiber and stone of nature would normally take flight into the realm of natural philosophy proper. And your post hits the heart of that gap between the two.
Isn’t part of the problem for everyone here that in order to create that community of which you speak, the surrounding culture in which to pursue truth, we have to speak in abstractions to ourselves and work doubly hard to account for and substitute for that culture? If we don’t realize the incredible difficulty of that task, we are in real danger of deluding ourselves and getting things wrong.
Which is why I simply don’t see the point of dabbling in the modern academy, which has been rotten to the core in this country since grad schools started. New institutions.
Interesting point, David. If you don’t work to understand change/motion in terms of act/potency, you cannot possibly have a solid ground from which to understand the way in which nature acts for an end (never mind a full understanding of what “nature” means). This eviscerates any understanding of what “good” means in relation to nature (if nothing is by nature tending towards its nature, there is no proper end for anything in nature, unless it be whatever end the most powerful entities in nature designate for the weaker through some kind of force). At that point, the following words apply:
“…there are certain more universal implications of the doctrines found in this, the first part of natural philosophy. If there is in fact no end or purpose in nature, then one natural being in whom we have particular interest, man, must arbitrarily choose an end to work toward, and there will be no reason to claim this or that end is to be preferred. For either the good is what really perfects the being for which it is a good, so that what is good for a thing is a consequence of the very nature of a thing, not of what the thing desires in abstraction from a consideration of its already determined nature, and so the thing is ordered to that good by nature, or else the good is not really perfective and so, though one may desire a thing, it is no more good really than its opposite, if one should happen to prefer that. All moral judgments would be perfectly subjective; the most heinous barbarities would be on the same moral level as the work of Mother Teresa. The doctrine of Aristotle, that there are objective goods in nature determined by the sorts of things in nature, is finally the only possible basis for ethics. Much of the debate over the real foundations of ethics is perhaps the result of a too simplistic acceptance of modern physics, with its abstraction from (not necessarily denial of) goods in nature. Where could one find a basis for ethics in a mathematical universe, when mathematics abstracts from the notion of the good? To maintain a sane view of the world, we must note that mathematical physics does not deny the existence of goods in the world, it simply does not depend on their existence for its arguments. This is no more a denial of the good than the plumber’s lack of interest in carpentry is a proof that wood does not exist.”
—from page xix of R. Glen Coughlin’s introduction to his new translation of Aristotle’s Physics, or Natural Hearing
Peter said,
May 8, 2009 at 10:01 am
P-T,
There is also the similar point — is it made in that same book? — that the basis for logic also requires these distinctions. And what serious-minded thinker would/could throw that out?
James Chastek said,
May 8, 2009 at 10:17 am
Be back in a few hours.
peeping thomist said,
May 8, 2009 at 10:53 am
Peter,
Yah, if we want to go upstream…heh. Let’s. Don’t even get my ignorant self started re logic. For all the blahblahblahblah talk about all manner of serious matters, how many people take logic according to the tradition seriously enough to actually study it. This should be one of the single most embarrassing facts about the way we all pursue the life of the mind now, or are influenced to by our peers. How many people who pride themselves on making arguments, especially philosophic arguments, have ANY training in logic? This is to my mind one of the strongest reductio ad adsurdum arguments that smacks the way we do things now in the face.
A little far afield from the topic of the post, but it is astounding…it is utterly asinine…that so few study logic, whilst so many make arguments. For the entire human race, this is not surprising, but the way things are. But within civilization, when those who would seek to know don’t pay attention to the vehicle by which they can know…well…that’s just ig’nant.
If I stood before those who I think are wise throughout the ages, I would be ashamed of my ignorance of logic. Not that its all my fault, as the system doesn’t exactly promote such things.
Anyhow, the margaritas are talking now. I want to go back to the point, which is that the way things are at present, it makes it hard for us to escape the abstract games that haunt the pursuit of wisdom. Having the outside culture/traditions that guide us (what James is pointing to) saves one from those errors to some degree. We all now are outside the norm, and this means its way to easy to play abstract philosophist games and cut oneself off from what is. To truly see what it is is to realize the significance of the fundamental distinction that James mentions above and in so many other places. Eh. Need to get back to the mundane in order to have the chance to pursue wisdom at a later date.
Peter said,
May 8, 2009 at 5:43 pm
True.
There is a good parallel with other difficult arts. Consider a virtuoso musician. Usually they begin their studies at about 4 years old and sacrifice thousands of hours practicing over decades (when young at the command of their parents, usually with crying and sometimes violence) doing countless studies and technical exercises to even be worthy of consideration — maybe — later on. How many people dedicate that kind of time and energy to perfecting their art of logic??!! St. Thomas, perhaps. (And that is one of the reasons why he knows what he’s doing, and we bumble along.)
T. Chan said,
May 8, 2009 at 10:17 pm
#5 Re: the study of logic
Unfortunately this is true of many of the newer Catholic liberal arts schools — I don’t think enough time is spent on logic. Would any TAC alums like to comment about TAC in this regard?
James the Least said,
May 11, 2009 at 11:48 pm
All of Aristotle’s Organon is read and discussed from beginning to end at TAC except the Sophistical Refutations, or at least that’s the way it was when I was there in the ’80s.
Freshman philosophy begins with the fragments of the Pre-Socratics, then moves on to many of the books of Plato (some of the larger of Plato’s works–e.g. The Republic, The Laws–are covered in weekly seminars instead, and a couple are held until Junior and Senior Year). Finally, maybe 2/3 of the way through freshman year, you move on to Aristotle, reading through the Organon in, as I recall, the established order you find it in in most editions. This flows over into Sophomore Philosophy at some point, but I don’t remember exactly where the cutoff point is–maybe between the Prior and Posterior Analytics.
James Chastek said,
May 9, 2009 at 4:48 am
David,
Ever since Ockham, our ideas of freedom have made ethics impossible. On the rudest level, ethics invoves freely choosing to be perfect, but we see “freedom” as perfect from the beginning, as though freedom did not need to be developed like, say, an ability to play quarterback or write an essay. There is truth in this idea we have, and through it the modern person is more disposed to see the dignity of a person as absolute, but in order to bridge the gap between the dignity of persons or the rights of man and a real ethics, you have to be able to distinguish, on the one hand, the inherent dignity of a person (Both the ancients and we moderns would call this dignity “the dignity even a slave could have”, but the ancients would have said that phrase with contempt.) and on the other hand, we need to see that there is something to the notion of getting beyond a freedom that even a slave could have. The margin of the difference is ethics.
T,
Logic is one of the hardest arts/sciences to learn. What logic has been reduced to (formalism and validity, and intellectualism- remember that St. Thomas includes dialectics, rhetoric, and poetry in the modes of argument) is relatively easy to learn, but it is of dubious value and, as far as I can tell, is a tool of thought that excludes the possibilty of metaphysics from the beginning. Trying to make any statement about being or existence is either silly or impossible in all the formal systems I look at. The difference between the per se and the per accidens- which was the dividing line between philosophy and sophistry- is impossible to make or to take seriously where the fundamental unit of logic is the proposition, or where “classes” are seen as terms, or where the copula “is” is taken as having a single meaning.
A real logic course, studying all modes of argument and inference and the basis for them, etc. would probably take eight years. A basic program would probably take two years, and be followed by real life argumentative drills, like the medieval disputation (St. Thomas’s format of writing was developed by a real life public argument his “disputed questions” are developments of “transcipts” of public disputations) Given the rate of maturity of modern people, the needs we require our university system to meet, and the carpetbombing destruction that we commit upon our cognitive powers which makes contemplation very difficult (advertisements, pop music, movies, etc.) I’m not sure that the old modes of knowing logic could come back. The Medievals could never have had our medical or technological skill, and we can’t have their skill at metaphysics, logic, or disputation.
PT,
I daydream about what it would take to start a nation. Absent that, we could really use a more robust idea of “diversity” that could allow smaller states and counties to develop more independence. Our present trend in education seems more bent towards tyranny and homogenization: an odd sort of tyranny where everyone is demanded to have no center.
James the Least said,
May 12, 2009 at 12:06 am
peeping thomist wrote: “Interesting point, David. If you don’t work to understand change/motion in terms of act/potency, you cannot possibly have a solid ground from which to understand the way in which nature acts for an end (never mind a full understanding of what “nature” means).”
While this is quite true, I get the impression you’re putting the cart before the horse in terms of modern thought. The modern is not incapable of understanding that nature acts for an end because he fails to take the potency/act distinction into account. Rather, he’s incapable of considering the potency/act distinction because he rejects a priori the reality of teleology. It’s a matter of will, in other words, not of reason per se.
peeping thomist said,
May 12, 2009 at 2:31 am
That’s true to some extent JtL. I am just speaking of the order by which one would come to know that nature acts for an end and its consequences for ethics.
True that if you reject the reality of teleology, you won’t look to potency and act. Yet most people still think God exists, or at least a good number of people, and I would venture to guess that those who think so without much religious or philosophic training (most of em), if presses would probably would give some sort of argument relating to order in nature/teleology that they observe. And they would not know what potency and act means.
James the Least said,
May 12, 2009 at 5:19 am
Ok. I took you to be talking about the philosophical Modernist, not just people in general. The modern academy, as you called it, has a particular point of view, and that view is invariably grounded in rank materialism and the explicit rejection of teleology.
peeping thomist said,
May 12, 2009 at 5:57 am
My point is just that if you want ethics, work for act/potency and the definition of motion. Because they are related. But you are right, the rejection of teleology is often simply an act o the will rendering all the lead up to that conclusion null and void without a look.