by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)
Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), a generation younger than Plato (427-347 B.C.), studied under him in Athens and was his great philosophical rival. The shadow of Plato was surely a long one: Plato had revolutionized the understanding of reality (metaphysics) and of knowledge (epistemology) by introducing the idea of a kind of reality that is utterly independent of the physical world which we observe with our physical senses. This kind of reality Plato referred to as Being, to distinguish it from the physical world, which he referred to as becoming. Plato’s realm of Being consists of those things that are eternal and unchanging, such as mathematical truths, which are true everywhere, always the same for everyone (see the chapter, “How Do We Know that 2+3=5: Is There Such Thing as Eternal Truth?”). By contrast, everything in the physical world, clearly, is changing constantly, even if physical things sometimes appear to be stable and unchanging over time. Things can appear so simply because we are not perceptive enough to be able to observe the molecular alterations occurring constantly in any physical object; but if we wait around long enough, sooner or later we ourselves will obviously be able to see the changes that are at every instant taking place.
Prior to Plato and his mentor Socrates, philosophers had in large part limited their consideration of the world to what they could see, observing how the basic elements of the physical world—notably earth, air, fire and water―acted and interacted over time. This was what made Plato’s thought so revolutionary: Plato’s genius changed the entire subject of philosophy to one that considered not what we observe with our senses, but what we cannot observe with our senses—what we can think but not see. Moreover, where the earlier, “pre-Socratic” philosophers focused on seeking the causes for the constant changes they observed in the physical world, Plato focused on what never changes. The distinction between the changing and the unchanging is precisely the distinction between Plato’s opposed realms of becoming and Being.
Three Metaphysical Views: Idealism, Materialism and Dualism
Plato is often referred to as an “idealist” because he emphasized the reality of the ideal, non-physical, unchanging realm of Being, and asserted, further, that because all that is becoming is changing constantly even though we often do not see it change, therefore the realm of becoming is deceptive and illusory and not truly “real.” Thus we cannot know physical things. This is a highly reasonable point of view, since all physical things are in fact constantly becoming something else and never truly are simply what they are: thus, strictly speaking, it is altogether correct to say, as Plato does, that physical things, in a very real sense, are not—that they are not in Being. We should be aware that Plato’s strong emphasis on Being does not mean that he asserts that physical matter is not in fact material but spiritual, as does the “Immaterialist” philosophy of 18th Century English philosopher George Berkeley. Still, Plato’s philosophy at the least tends strongly toward Idealism.
The opposite of Idealism is “Materialism,” which asserts that the only kind of reality that exists is material reality. Such is the philosophy of 17th Century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. This is not the place to consider the views of Berkeley and Hobbes in more detail, though theirs are very interesting and well-reasoned points of view, to be sure, and are covered in later chapters. As we are concerned here with Aristotle, it is sufficient for present purposes simply to observe that, for all his disagreement with Plato, he is certainly not a materialist, because he did not fail to learn, from Plato, that “appearances can be deceiving” and that not all reality is observable by the senses, indeed the most important realities may well be the things that we think but cannot see.
We should mention here a metaphysical point of view that stands between Idealism and Materialism, and that is Dualism: this viewpoint asserts that the universe consists of dual realities, or two separate, distinct and independent kinds of substances, both physical and non-physical, as reflected in the distinction between becoming and Being, physical and “spiritual” (i.e. non-physical), the human body and the human mind. This is the point of view of the 17th Century Frenchman René Descartes, also the subject of a later chapter. The term “independent” is very significant: it indicates that neither substance depends on the other, that is, either substance could and would exist entirely in the absence of the other—ideas without physical objects, matter without ideas. And in principle it is surely reasonable to think of this kind of independence: wouldn’t the physical earth and planets, stars and galaxies continue in their motions without anyone around to think about them, and don’t two and three add up to five regardless of whether there are five of any physical thing to add?
Thus it surely seems that ideas and matter can be independent. As for Aristotle, however, he confronts and encounters the world as it is, we might say: as long as we are here to think about it, and as long as we have bodies, we will be dealing with a world in which, whether independent or not, ideas and bodies coexist. Moreover, it is fair to say that for Aristotle, ideas and bodies are not only coexistent, but are at least in some sense and to some degree interdependent.
Aristotle’s Metaphysics
In the Stanza della Segnatura in the Vatican Palace in Rome is a famous fresco by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael entitled “The School of Athens” of 1510-1511. It depicts a scene in an open, pillared forum in Athens where various philosophers are gathered to study and converse, and in the center of the painting are the monumental figures of two bearded, white-haired old men in robes, striding toward the viewer, engaged in intent discussion. One of these men points his finger dramatically heavenward, while the other has his palm, opened earthward, out-stretched before him. It is of course Plato who points up, which represents his conviction that true reality consists of the eternal realm of Being and is not to be observed in this physical world; and it is Aristotle with his palm gesturing earthward, representing his dedication to the reality we all can see, to the world “as it is.” It is telling and proper that Aristotle is not pointing to the earth, for this might imply that his metaphysics—his view of reality—is materialist, the exact opposite of Plato’s, which it surely is not.
Indeed, Aristotle clearly understood and appreciated Plato’s invaluable and revolutionary contribution to the history of philosophy. It seems likely that many of the thinkers of Plato’s day were hard-pressed to grasp the profundity of his idea of Being, but Aristotle clearly understood Plato very well and surely gained immeasurably from Plato’s instruction. However, Aristotle could not be content merely to be Plato’s student and follower. In particular, he was intent to give due regard to the traditional subject matter of philosophical speculation as studied by the pre-Socratics. So Aristotle cannot agree to limit himself to the unchanging realm of Being; at the same time, he clearly appreciated its profound importance.
Thus we might interpret Aristotle’s gesture in Raphael’s painting to indicate that he wished to return Plato’s investigation of Being to ground-level, so to speak, without thereby asserting a materialist point of view; indeed, his viewpoint is clearly that certain universal concepts or ideas, of a non-material nature, are vital to the understanding of reality, yet these non-material universals are not independent of the physical world, but somehow exist within it. So it is fair to say that Aristotle, neither an idealist nor a materialist, is not really a dualist either, since Dualism does imply the separation and independence of physical and spiritual reality, while Aristotle seems more intent on emphasizing their mutual interdependence.
What Is?; Aristotle’s Account of Substance, the Foundation of his Metaphysics
The question “What is?” puts in the briefest of terms what the study of metaphysics is all about. It might be extended to “What is real?” or “What most truly is?” To these questions Aristotle would give “substance” as the answer. So we can say, for Aristotle, substance refers to what most truly is; the genuine reality of a thing is its substance; the real “being” of a thing is its substance.
We today typically use the word “substance” to refer to a thing’s physical presence or its significance or importance, calling a physical object “substantial” if it is large or heavy and a book “substantial,” for example, if it conveys big or important ideas. The bias toward the physical connotations of the word “substance” is fairly strong, and Aristotle reflects this himself when he considers whether “substance” might refer properly to the matter of a thing. For his part, though, while recognizing that the physical matter is an important aspect of a thing’s being (in stark contrast to Plasto), such that no physical thing would be the thing it is if it weren’t made of some matter, nonetheless Aristotle asserts that the “form,” “shape” or “design” of a thing has more to do with identifying its substance than its matter. He uses the term “form,” however, not, as Plato does, to denote a separate entity that exists independent of the physical world in the eternal, unchanging realm of Being; rather, “form,” as Aristotle uses the term, refers simply to the design or shape of a thing as it resides within the matter of the thing.
Thus if a wooden “desk” is a substance, clearly it would not exist as a desk—as the particular subject or entity that it is—if the wood were not there; however, if the wood were replaced by metal or glass or plastic or countless other materials, without changing the design or “form,” the “substance” of “desk” would still remain, though the particular “subject” desk that had been there before would be gone: the particular entity would be gone, while the universal idea or function of what the desk is would still be there. We would still have the same kind of thing, a thing on which we could place papers and books, so, “in substance,” so to speak, the desk, or a desk, would still be there. Thus the being of the desk would remain, even though the particular wooden entity, or “subject,” would be gone. It is thus that Aristotle sees “form,” as he uses the term, as having more to do with identifying the substance or true being of a thing than its matter.
Aristotle’s Four Causes
So the term “substance” refers to what a thing truly is or a thing’s actual being. The primary way that Aristotle uses to identify the being of a thing, and thus another way to understand the meaning of “substance,” is to consider what causes a thing to be the thing it is. Thus we might ask of a thing, “Why is this thing here?” or more precisely, perhaps, “Why is this thing the thing that it is, what causes it to be this thing and not some other thing?” To these “why” questions, the appropriate response typically begins with the word “because” to indicate that the question “why” is asking for the cause of a thing, for what caused the thing to be here or, more specifically, to be this thing.
We have already considered two aspects of or candidates for what causes a thing to be the thing that it is, the matter and the form, or what Aristotle calls the material cause and the formal cause. And, at first blush, we might feel that we need no other causes than these: in the case of the desk, for example, what else is it but some matter with a certain form. But would the desk be there if that were all that caused it? Aristotle thinks not, since these two causes, standing alone, do not explain what caused the form to be imposed on the matter—in other words, who made it, what formed the desk out of the wooden material? Thus there must be a third cause, which Aristotle calls the efficient cause, which effects or brings about this specific desk by combining a design with an appropriate matter. Aristotle observes that the desk already existed potentially in the wood, or the tree, before the desk was made; but in order to effect the making of the desk so that it moves from being merely potential to being actual, the efficient cause is needed.
So, are we done—are there no other causes than the material, formal and efficient? In fact, according to Aristotle, we haven’t even named the most important cause of all, which he calls the final cause. Consider again the desk: why did the carpenter think to make a desk in the first place, what was the point, what was his purpose or goal, what end did he have in view when he came up with the form in his head, then acquired the wood as material and then made the desk actual by building it? Clearly what motivated and started the whole process was the carpenter’s reflection that he needed a surface on which to place his books and do his paperwork. Indeed, this was in a sense the first thing that came about and that caused the other three causes to come together. First the carpenter needed a work surface, and then he came up with a design, acquired the wood and built the desk: without all of these four causes—final, formal, material and efficient, respectively—there would be no actual desk. The Greek word for “end” or “purpose” is telos, so Aristotle’s emphasis on ends as being the most important aspect of what causes things to be is why Aristotle’s philosophy is often referred to as “teleological”―concerned with an account of “ends.”
So with the four causes, by going behind a thing, so to speak, to consider why it is what it is, Aristotle has discovered an important way we can answer the question of what a thing is: what a thing truly is must be a function of where it came from, of what caused it to be, which, for Aristotle, might have most to do with “where it is going,” so to speak, what its “end” is.
Five Ways of Being
There is another issue we must consider before returning explicitly to what the substance or true being of a thing is. That is the question of what we mean by “being.” Aristotle observes that there are different ways a thing can be said “to be,” different ways we use the word “is.” We can divide these into five distinct definitions of being.
First, we might say, for example, “There is a unicorn in the room.” What does that word “is” mean in this context? Clearly what is most evidently being conveyed by the statement is the simple existence of a unicorn. If someone were to make that statement, we might, with surprise and alarm, respond, "There is?” Thus, what we understand by the statement is most likely that a unicorn is, or exists, in the room. So existence is one thing we might express by the word “is.”
Second, if I point to my desk and say, “That object is my desk,” what do I mean to convey here by the word “is?” My point probably is to identify the object I’m sitting at as the particular object that is “my desk.” I’m not telling you that the thing exists, since we both see it and its existence is thus taken for granted. I am also not telling you that the kind of thing this is a desk, since presumably we both also already understand that. Finally, I am not saying something about the desk (which we’ll turn to next)—namely that it is mine: if I were, the clearer way to say that would be to say, “this thing is mine” or “this desk is mine.” The best interpretation of the word “is” here, I suggest, is effectively as an “=” sign: I’m saying, in other words, “This object I’m pointing to “equals” my desk, “that object” and “my desk” are identical, one and the same, just as “2+3” and “5” are different ways of expressing the same idea; thus we often use the verb to be in its plural form “are” to say, “two and three are five.” So identity is a second thing we might express by the word “is,” and to “identify” something is to say that it is the same thing as, or identical to, something else.
Third, I might say, “this desk is mine” or “my desk is wooden,” or “this object is brown.” Here the word “is” is being used not to express existence, which is not in question, nor is “is” being used here to express identity—that it is the same as something else, for clearly “the desk” and “wooden” are not the same thing. Rather, the word “is” here is being used to express something about the object, to identify a quality or attribute that the desk happens to have. But what kind of quality or attribute are we talking about here? The term Aristotle sometimes uses is “coincidental” attribute, but philosophers today more often use the term “accidental.” The woodenness of the desk is “coincidental” in the sense that it happens that this particular subject desk―this particular entity that has been brought about in accordance with what causes a desk to be a desk—is made of wood. As we have noted above, for a desk to be a desk it has to be made of some material (the material cause); however, the substance of this desk would still be present if this particular desk were refashioned out of any number of other materials. There would still be a desk if this same design or form were present in metal. This object would still be a desk if I sold it to someone else, or if it were painted another color. So here, the wooden material occurs (is “incident”) with (the prefix “co-”) the form or substance of desk to produce this particular subject desk, but it could also have “happened” or “occurred” that another material have replaced it or been present in its place. So the particular material (or color or owner) is merely a “coincident” or “accident” of the being or substance of the desk. Even more clearly coincidental is a case like “the person is walking,” where clearly the walking is coincidental with the person but not part of its being. In these cases the word “is” has been used here to connect to (or, to use the grammatical term, to predicate of) this desk or person to an accidental or coincidental quality or attribute that this desk or person happens at the moment, “coincidentally,” to possess.
Fourth, I could say, “This object is a surface for writing.” As in the previous case, I am saying something about this particular object; it may seem, in fact, that I am attributing a quality to this object, as above where I attributed the quality of woodenness to the desk. But that quality, as we observed, was an accidental quality: it just happened to be attributable to this particular desk, but if the desk had been made of a different material, or had been a different color, it would still have been a desk. But the “quality” I am attributing to the desk now is not an accidental quality; in fact, I am very close to saying specifically what this object most truly is. For if this object did not have this quality of being a surface for writing then it would not be a desk, it would not be what it is. So this quality is not accidental or coincidental to the being of the desk, but essential. The word “essence” is derived from the Latin word esse, which means “to be,” so a thing’s “essence” is the being of a thing, and a quality of a thing that is essential is a quality that makes the thing what it is, or a quality without which the thing would not be what it is. Again, if this object lacked the quality of being a writing surface, it would not be a desk, whereas if it lacked woodenness, and were made instead of metal, it would still be a desk. So by naming the essence of a thing, I am very close to naming that actual substance of the thing―to saying what the thing really is.
Our fifth “way of being” is explicitly to name the substance of the desk, which is simply to say, “This is a desk.” Since, as we noted above, the essence of a thing can in a sense be said to identify what a thing really is, what its being consists of, the terms “essence” and “substance” are very close; indeed, Aristotle himself says at one point that the essence of a thing is the substance without the matter, in other words, the form without the matter, or the idea of what the thing really means, its end or final cause. Clearly, however, the substance of this desk is not merely the universal idea of “desk,” independent of material existence; to the contrary, though the essence (or “nature”) or form comes very close to naming the real being of the desk, the desk is not fully in being except insofar as that form or essence is in some particular matter.
Why this Emphasis on Precise Use of Language Matters
So to review, the verb “to be” is used to express five distinct meanings, namely, existence, identity, accidental attribute, essential attribute or substance. Evidently, in learning to use language precisely and so express ourselves clearly, we must be conscious of these distinct meanings and be able to distinguish among them.
You might be thinking here that this is all very technical and picky, and you might find the writing of Aristotle to be labored and awkward, at best, and at least to a point I agree! So this is a good time to offer a little context about Aristotle’s texts. The main thing to know is that these texts were probably not recorded or written down by Aristotle himself; indeed, the published work of Aristotle—the writing he intended for other people to read—was probably in the form of dialogues, like those of Plato, and tragically all of those original Aristotle works have been lost. If what we have, and thus what we are reading, seems disorganized and convoluted that is largely because these texts are probably collections of lecture notes or the like written by various of his students and gathered together in later years—we just don’t know for sure (it’s been a long time). So we can assume that Aristotle himself was much more organized than his texts might make him look. Having said that, however, we must also note that his efforts to be fastidious or “picky” about defining terms is crucially important to assure clarity. The issues we are dealing with here are themselves “picky,” you might say; however, no one can reasonably deny that there is in fact a huge difference in the different ways that we use the term “is,” yet all of us use that term constantly in everyday speech. Ordinarily, in common conversation, we are not dealing with technical matters of the nature of reality or knowledge, as we are in philosophy, so the context makes it clear what we mean by a particular use of “is” and there is little chance for confusion; however, when we are dealing with philosophical subjects, strict precision in our use of language becomes critical. Thus, for example, there is obviously a huge difference between the “reality” of ideas and the “reality” of matter, and yet, when we use the term “reality” we might be very unclear on what we really mean and we might easily fall into confusion or miscommunication. And consider the term “truth” or “knowledge, which we discussed in the Introduction. Indeed, it should be clear, in the context of contemporary news and politics, that these terms are thrown around these days with very little clarity about what they really mean, and we all suffer from the confusion and conflict that result from that lack of clarity. The point is that it is easy to make statements that are ambiguous—statements that could reasonably be interpreted to mean different things—if we are not careful and precise in our use of language. Just because you know what you mean when you say something does not mean that your reader or listener will understand you correctly unless you are clear and precise enough in your use of language to avoid ambiguity!
Again, in everyday banter with your friends, or when dealing with the routine and fairly trivial matters of everyday life, the context of our communications usually prevents serious ambiguity and miscommunication; however, when dealing with serious matters of social life and politics, as well as in philosophy, the precise use of language and clarity of expression are critical. Even in so trivial if ubiquitous a form of communication as text messages we should all be aware of how easy it is to be misunderstood! In short, Aristotle deserves credit for alerting us to the dangers of ambiguity and miscommunication and reminding us of how easy it can be to speak without really knowing what we are saying.
A Metaphysics of Motion
When we consider Plato’s realm of Being, which for him is the realm of true reality, we observe that this realm is one of eternal, unchanging things and thus one in which, effectively, nothing moves. 2+3=5 never changes; it is true at all times and outside of time, in all spaces and outside of all space: things in time move and change over time, but not this; things in space move and change place, but not this. In Being, there is no motion. According to Aristotle, however, motion is a critical component of all beings, of all that is, of all of reality; indeed, a simple way to differentiate the metaphysics of Aristotle from that of Plato is that Aristotle’s is a metaphysics of motion whereas Plato’s metaphysics is motionless.
Aristotle asserts that motion has always existed, since had it ever not existed there would have been nothing to get it started and thus there could be no motion now, which, evidently, there is. According to Aristotle, even the state of rest, which is the semantic “opposite” of motion, is itself a kind of motion and dependent on motion, since rest is really only the privation of motion: even matter at rest is already potentially in motion. Having said that, however, it is also the case that there must be some cause of motion, since bodies do not move of themselves: as the 17th Century physicist Isaac Newton observed, “a body at rest tends to remain at rest” until some force acts upon the body to make it or cause it to move.
Aristotle distinguishes different kinds of things that have correspondingly different kinds of motion. First, there are natural things and artificial things. Among natural things some are living and others not. According to Aristotle, all living things are alive by virtue of their possession of a “soul.” It is vital to note that Aristotle’s use of the term “soul” is very different from Plato’s. For Plato, only human beings have souls: Plato’s “soul” is the eternal, unchanging faculty or power of human beings that allows us to be in touch with eternal, unchanging truths; thus for Plato, without a soul we would have no way of knowing that 2+3=5 since it takes an eternal faculty to be in touch with an eternal reality, whereas our ever-changing bodies and physical senses can only perceive the ever-changing objects of the material world.
For Aristotle, however, all living things have souls, even plants, although as we move from the consideration of plants to animals to humans we encounter souls of increasing capacity; thus plants have only “vegetative” souls since they move only to interact with nature in the interests of their nutrition; animals have this vegetative capacity, too, but in addition they have an “appetitive” part of their souls, a capacity of desire according to which they automatically move themselves, by what we now know as instinct, toward what they need to survive; and finally humans have the same vegetative faculties as plants, and the same instinctual desire as animals, but, in addition, in our souls is the power of reason and choice such that what we desire instinctually may differ from what we know rationally to be best, and the development of a mature human character consists in harmonizing our reason and desire so that, ideally, we learn to desire what is right and best (this is the subject matter not of metaphysics but of ethics).
In general, “soul” for Aristotle essentially means “life force.” Specifically, the soul is the source of motion in a living thing, which is why living things carry their own principle and power of motion within themselves; thus even an acorn, which seems to be at rest, carries within itself the potential to become—“move toward being”—an oak tree. Whereas a stone does not move unless an external force is applied to it, an acorn, when touched by water, will send out a sprout and ultimately become actually what it already is potentially, since the design of the oak tree is “hard-wired,” so to speak, into the acorn; and note that it is not the water that causes the sprouting since water does not cause the stone to sprout—rather the cause of sprouting resides naturally within the very being (the “soul”) of the acorn itself. Modern biology has recently identified what Aristotle refers to as “soul” with the genetic code, or DNA, which is the set of instructions that all living things have within them that move them continually toward becoming what they are. In Aristotle’s terms, in the genes is recorded the “final” or “formal cause” of a living thing, like a blueprint directing what it will become and how to achieve it, and as long as it lives that thing is in motion toward realizing its full actuality as the thing its DNA directs it to be. So the acorn is essentially a potential oak tree, and its whole existence is essentially a movement from the potentiality of the acorn to the actuality of the oak tree.
As for natural but non-living things, they too, presumably, have some principle of motion that guides them, but that guidance is not internal but external. With the benefit of modern science we have theorized through observation that certain natural forces such as gravitation, heat and electromagnetism, for example, move the stars and the planets, the winds and the waters, the lightning and the thunder, the mountains and the valleys. Aristotle posited analogous kinds of natural forces corresponding to the natural elements depending on their relative densities, from the densest, earth, to water, air and fire; thus earthen matter moves earthward while fire naturally moves skyward, or sunward, with water and air moving somewhere in between, and all things are somehow combinations of these basic elements and their movements. However we conceive of the forces at work, all of non-living nature moves in constant cycles of coming-to-be and passing-away, the actuality of one thing merging into the potentiality of its successor—a star fulfills its complete actuality in reaching its final destiny in an explosion that creates the dust cloud that constitutes the potentiality of new planets or comets or asteroids; and so on.
Finally, there are artificial things, the artifacts of human creation, or artifice, things humans make, which, unlike natural things, get their motion from outside themselves; with artificial things, as we have seen, it is the human maker (efficient cause) that provides that motion from potentiality to actuality with the guidance of purpose (final cause) and design (formal cause) using the vehicle of matter (material cause).
The Origins of Motion
Having considered the central place of motion in Aristotle’s metaphysics, the question remains, “Why is there motion, how did it begin, what is its origin?”
As noted above, Aristotle argues that motion must always have been, and with it, time, since, according to Aristotle, it is nonsensical to consider that there could have been a time when there was no time. Indeed, time and motion are inextricably linked and interdependent: without time there could be no motion, and without motion no time. Plato before him, and Augustine after him, disagree: they assert that time was created. For Augustine, time was created, along with all the rest of creation, by God, from nothing, which indeed is presumably all there could have “been” in the total absence of time and space. In any event, Aristotle insists that everything that is moved is moved by something, whether internal or external, as noted above. For each movement we observe in nature, we can trace it back to some other prior movement that has caused it. So one billiard ball hits another, transferring its motion, and one living organism begets another, transferring its life force, etc. But where in the past does it stop—that is, as we go back in time, when or where do we find what is responsible for it all, where it all began? Can we trace back such chains of movement indefinitely?
Aristotle argues that there must be a first mover in every chain of movements, thus the movement of the billiard balls is traced to the cue stick, which ultimately is traced to the pool player, who is the first and originary agent of the entire chain of movements and without whom there would never have been the pool shot in the first place. This is the key point: Aristotle asserts that there must be an agent to initiate the motion. The series cannot go back infinitely into the past (an “infinite regress”) because if it did there would be no first mover, no agent, no agency and thus no motion. In other words, if we were to admit that the chain of movements receded infinitely into the past, then, to the question, “When and where would we arrive at the actual beginning of the chain,” the answer could only be, “never and nowhere.” If this were so, it would be impossible to reach the actual beginning, to reach, that is, the actual agent of the motion, and if this is impossible then it cannot actually be: not only would it be practically impossible in the sense that it would take a long time, but it would even be impossible in principle, since never can only mean never: “never” is “never ever.” “There is no first term in an infinite series,” says Aristotle, and without an originating agent there is no cause and without a cause there can be no effect; therefore, without a first mover there can be no motion. Again, if we must conclude that we can literally never arrive at the cause of the motion we observe today, then we are effectively saying that motion cannot be; but there clearly is motion so there must therefore be a first mover, and if it exists then that first mover must be “reachable,” at least in principle. We might add another argument in support of the necessity of a first, or prime, mover. An infinite regress means that time stretches back infinitely into the past, but if this were the case then an infinite time must already have passed, yet an infinite time by definition can never “pass,” for otherwise it would not be infinite and just as we could never arrive at the cause of motion we also could never have arrived at the present now.
What is the nature of this first or prime mover? Aristotle argues that this first mover cannot itself be moved, that is, there cannot be something else that has moved it. This seems clear, for if something else had moved it, then it would not be the first mover and we’d have to ask what caused the thing that moved it to move… etc.: we’d be back to an infinite regress. Since this first mover must therefore be itself unmoved, Aristotle refers to it as “the unmoved mover.” In addition to being the first cause of motion, the unmoved mover must also be everlasting in order to assure the continuance and continuity of motion, so the unmoved mover can not be simply the cause of the first movement, but must also supply the principle of continuity that makes all motions, in some sense, one continuous motion: I suggest we think of it as a chain, which requires not only a first link that begins the chain and forms each individual link (or movement), but also an agent that connects the links together into a continuous chain (for if it isn’t continuous it isn’t a chain). The unmoved mover is the ultimate cause of each individual movement (or link) and so “apart from each,” as Aristotle puts it, and must also connect them together and so “embrace them all.”
So the unmoved mover must be everlasting not only as the agent necessary to the beginning of motion, but also as the agent that assures the continuity of motion: this means that it must not only not ever have come to be, but also it must not ever be able to pass away. If the unmoved mover were even potentially capable of not being then it would by definition not be necessary and thus there would be no necessary agent of motion or of its continuity, that is, an agent assuring that things continue. In short, the unmoved mover cannot not be, since if ever it were not motion could not continue nor could it ever have been, since both the coming-to-be of motion and its passing-away into the further continuity of motion require an agent that has itself no coming-to-be nor passing-away, in short, a mover that is itself unmoved and everlasting.
Motion and Time
Since we have already observed that time and motion are inextricable—that we cannot have one without the other—this means that time too, along with motion, must be everlasting. In some sense, this is what time is—the very essence of time, we might say, taken as a conceptual whole, is “everlastingness.” Everything passes, all is coming-to-be and passing-away, which implies that it comes from and passes in time, from the past through the present into the future. Aristotle offers insight into the everlastingness of time by considering the “now.” Clearly the “now” is, since it is in the now, and only in the now, that human beings exist (though if there is a God, then presumably all “nows” would exist simultaneously in or for God). For us, at least, the past is not (any more) and the future is not (yet). But we can confirm that now is (though, to be sure, no sooner is it than it is not!), since if there were no now then we ourselves would not be. But what is the “now?” Aristotle notes that the now can only exist as a separation or gap (it has been described as a “gateway”) between the past and the future: in short, the very existence of the “now” entails—makes necessary—the existence of the past that precedes it and the future that follows, for, again, the now exists as nothing other than the “gap between past and future” (Hannah Arendt) and since the now evidently is, so must past and future, and time itself, be. In other words, the very existence of “now” entails the continuity of time itself—a time, to repeat, that from the human perspective at the same time is not except for the now itself, and even the now for us at least in a sense is not (or almost not) since at the very moment we say “now” it already is not! Indeed, we can never grasp or hold the now: at the very instant that the now now is, it is no more; if we ask how long the now lasts, it is clear by definition that it cannot last at all—it is nothing but a passing from past to future and the measure or rhythm of motion. It is this nothingness of the now that entails the everlasting continuity of the passing of time, since the now, lacking any being in itself, is nothing other than the passing of the past into the future, as each new now leaves behind a continually augmented past and rushes forth into the continually oncoming future… and so on everlastingly.
We started by observing that an infinite regress is impossible, which is why Aristotle asserts the necessity of an unmoved mover—a paradoxical being that is motion that is not itself moved. Motion has always been, yet it cannot extend back into the infinite past, and this is precisely what the paradoxical nature of the first, unmoved mover seeks to explain. This paradox is in part resolved by the fact that rest is itself a kind of motion, which exists as the privation of and potentiality for motion; still, we cannot be entirely satisfied with this, particularly when consider that time is everlasting and yet, like motion, cannot have extended infinitely into the past.
These difficulties, however, are no greater than, and are probably in fact essentially identical to, those posed by the contemporary scientific theory of the Big Bang, according to which the origin of our universe is traced back to a sudden, spontaneous expansion from an infinitesimal point of “nothingness.” According to modern physicists, “before” the Big Bang there was no space and no time, in fact, since space, time and motion are, for contemporary physics as for Aristotle, inextricable. Evidently, this scientific assertion leaves us with precisely the conundrum that Aristotle’s unmoved mover seeks to solve: how could there have been a “time before” the Big Bang if there was no time, and what motivated the universe to leap from a state of rest to a sudden state of massive, expansionary motion? As we have seen, Aristotle’s unmoved mover answers both these questions: there was always time, and there has also always been motion, whether potential or actual, latent within the being of the unmoved mover; and the cause of the actuality of motion is the unmoved mover itself, both “in the beginning” and everlastingly.
Further Consideration of Substance
We left our consideration of substance, above, with the observation that the form is more important than the matter. As we have noted, “form,” as Aristotle uses the term, is not, as for Plato, an eternal entity separate and independent from individual substances. Though Aristotle’s use of terms is shifting and at times even conflicting, especially perhaps in the case of the term “substance” itself, we can generally conclude, for practical purposes, that the terms “form,” “nature” and “essence” are more or less synonymous. The form is what invests a thing’s matter with the design of what it is, what brings the potentiality within the tree into the actuality of the desk. This is also what we mean when we speak of “the nature” of a thing, which indicates what the thing actually is, and so too the “essence,” which Aristotle at one point defines as a substance without its matter; and this brings us again around to the term “form,” which, when combined with matter, becomes “substance.”
As for the term substance itself, it has, as Aristotle sometimes says, more to do with the form, essence or nature―and thus the cause or actuality―of a thing than with the particular matter, which is associated with a substance primarily as potentiality rather than actuality, or with the coming-to-be and passing-away of a thing rather than with the being of a thing. And it is the being of a thing that substance is primarily about, for as Aristotle says, “the question ‘What is being?’ is just the question ‘What is substance,’” implying that being and substance are identical, that “being equals substance.” In other words, a substance is something that exists “without qualification,” it is “a being in its own right,” that is, not dependent on any other being, rather all other beings are dependent on it.
So, on this account, “substance” is the universal principle residing within the particular subject or thing that allows for that thing to be the thing it is rather than some other thing. The substance makes the particular thing what it is, so the substance is predicated of a thing, as when we say, “this thing is a desk”; but it is not the case that the particular thing is predicated of a substance, since we can easily understand the meaning of the substance “desk” without talking about any particular desk. Thus “substance is primary in every way,” as Aristotle says, “in nature, in account and in knowledge.” It is primary “in nature” because no other aspect of a thing is “separable” from a thing except substance, which is present in all other like substances; by contrast, the woodenness of the desk or its color do not exist “in their own right,” that is, the existence of these accidental qualities of the desk only exist in this particular subject desk, whereas the substance of desk remains, in other desks, for example, when the wood and color of this desk are gone. Substance is primary “in account” since we cannot even talk of any particular desk without acknowledging that it is a desk, for it would not otherwise be what it is, whereas we would be giving an adequate account of it as a desk even if we omitted to mention its woodenness. And it is primary “in knowledge” since to know what this desk really is is precisely to know its substance, since that would be true of it even if it were not, for example, wooden.
Conclusion: What is "Substance"?
So have we determined what a substance really is, which is the same as to ask, have we determined what it is to be? It is reasonable to conclude, I suggest, that we have raised as many questions as we have answered. Aristotle (along with Plato) is famous for observing, “Philosophy begins with wonder;” that is, we begin to know, and to think, and to fulfill our capacity as human beings when we notice that the world is a wonderful and mysterious place, a place that exists for us as a continual series of questions. The only “final answer” for a human being is when questioning ceases, which only decisively occurs at death.
So we must at the outset acknowledge that Aristotle never settles the question of substance, though he can hardly be blamed for failing to pin down the very nature of being itself. Though Aristotle seems frequently to speak of “substance” as pertaining to particular things, he also seems to think of it, in a radically more abstract sense, as meaning “ultimate reality,” as that which underlies or makes possible everything that is—being itself. Still—recalling Raphael’s depiction of Aristotle with his palm gesturing vigorously toward the ground—it would seem that “substance” can not be altogether abstracted and separate from the world; so must each particular “subject” such as this person, this tree etc. be a separate substance? In short, there are basically two ways Aristotle thinks of substance. On one hand, the most basic reality of any thing is its substance; thus, unlike the eternal Forms of Plato, which are the foundation of his metaphysics, Aristotle’s substance is “concrete” in the sense that it does not exist independent of the world of becoming—substance exists within the everlasting and continuous movement from potentiality to actuality, from coming-to-be to passing-away, as the substance “desk” is “universally” present to all desks in the sense that it is what gives the being of desk to any and all particular desks and exists in all the particular objects of which it is the substance. On the other hand, as a sort of “ultimate reality” or equivalent not to any particular being or beings but rather to being itself, “substance” is not limited by any particular material object nor even any particular kind of or “form” of object; in other words, substance in this sense must at least be thought of as a sort of universal, underlying “substratum” of all that is aned the basis of the very being of all that is. In this sense we might think of it as analogous to the prime mover: just as “the mover” is the cause of the movement of all that moves while being independent of motion itself, so “substance” must be the cause of all the being of all that is without itself being a being: just as the prime mover is motion without moving, so substance is without being.
We might also define Aristotle’s “substance” with the paradoxical term “concrete universal,” paradoxical because this seems to make substance both particular and “in being” and universal “all-being” at the same time: it would be concrete because it is here in the world, yet universal because it is common to all being while not bound by any one being. If there is a resolution of this paradoxical definition of substance we might say that substance is universal in the sense that we can think of it, conceptually, as a kind of being that is separable in thought from individual things and thus not limited to them, while at the same time existing only in being or beings as a whole and this not separable in reality; in other words, substance would be separate from particular subjects in thought but not in being. So understood, we can think substance without “substances,” but substance cannot exist without being in them.
For our purposes, it has to be sufficient, at present, simply to acknowledge that for Aristotle, as for Plato, it is meaningful to ask the question of being—to wonder what it is that makes beings be; for none of us can deny that being most certainly is, nor is it reasonable to assert that there is not something that makes it so.
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