Interpretations of the Relationship between Potency and Logos [Heidegger, Aquinas, Aristotle]
Aristotle begins The Metaphysics with the premise that all men desire to know. Natural sciences sought knowledge of beings revealed as natural objects, but said nothing of the ontological grounding of what can be known of being. Aristotle defines “first philosophy” as the study of the “first principles and causes” of being, and by book five posits that “first philosophy” is primarily concerned with substance – being spoken in the sense of the categories.
Aristotle reaches a second way of speaking being when he considers change. When things change, matter persists through the change of form. The change, including the original coming to presence of a thing, requires an efficient cause. This seems tricky, for it presupposes both a causal relationship between things, such as billiard balls, but it also takes a second meaning when mediated by the activities of a reason-imbued actor. Medicine can result in disease or health, so what brings about one result over another?
This is a good spot to begin discussing interpretations of Book Nine. While Lesson One introduces the reader to a new aspect of being “as potency and actuality and activity”, Lesson Two is primarily concerned with potency and its division between the rational and irrational.
Aristotle is first concerned with passive potency in the “strictest sense” of motion/force, but cautions that potency extends beyond the cases that involve reference to motion. The passive sense of potency as a “being acted upon..the principle of its being passively moved by another inasmuch as it is other” is easily understood by the scientific model - the world is made of matter in causal relation. In this sense all matter contains a passive potency, and conforms to causal relations. Beings without reason carry only an irrational potency which resolves to a single designation, since “natural things act by reason of the forms present in them, and contrary forms cannot exist in the same subject.”
But since potency is also found in beings with a rational soul, certain potencies will be rational while others are irrational. Active potency relates to rational potency – a potential for contrary outcomes. An individual who acts by science may be occupied with both contraries because “the conception of both contained in the soul is the same.” The doctor has an active potency, for he is able to direct medicine to the health of his patient, although the contrary of disease is also a possibility. Active potency sets a stage for an understanding of purposive activity; the activity that originates with appetite or choice. Active potency is an ontological potency, in that it is present in a being that has the capability to effect and persist through a change; it is the potency of becoming.
The relation between potency and Logos, in this interpretation, is as such: Aquinas interprets Logos as Reason; as the faculty for choice and designation of outcome. Reason is the product of a beings active potency. The “rational animal” makes decisions that bring about a single outcome of contrary possibilities. It is the activity of the human to see through the change/generation of matter to an actual form that corresponds with a Telos, the end cause of a thing. For example, medicine can lead to disease or health, so it is a rational potency. The physician seeks the Telos of health in his patient, and works to achieve that end. Reason mediates activity towards the Telos. Passive potency as motion is a necessary condition for an active potency of becoming, but the second sense cannot be reduced to the first, for they are oriented towards different realms.
Heidegger interprets the title of Lesson Two as “The Division of Potency with Regard to Movement for the Purpose of Elucidating Its Essence,” and elucidate is exactly what he does, writing close to forty pages of commentary for two page of Aristotle. His commentary differs from that of Aquinas in both language and orientation. He uses the Greek words for concepts he believes suffer semantic distortion in translation, and draws heavily from his own phenomenology of Dasein. Intertextual references, both to Aristotle and his own writing, make for a very difficult read.
To properly understand Heideggers interpretation of Logos and Potency and the relationship that obtains between, we first must be aware of some of the nuances of Heidegger’s thought.
Heidegger seems to set out with the following belief: when Aristotle put forth the notion that “being is said in many ways,” he put it forth not as a manifold system but in the sense of a task1. Heidegger, in response, takes up the task to investigate actuality and potentiality to uncover its realm and its relation to substance, the categories, and change. This is an inquiry into the open-ended ontological realm of potency, activity and possibility.
With respect to being, Heidegger is not content to settle with the imposition of descriptive divisions, which he states are unjustified and arbitrary2. In response to his concern, Heidegger provides an understanding of division not as dichotomy3, but as a manifold unfolding. My understanding is that this unfolding is important in two ways: first, all ‘divisions’ are actually ‘relations’, in which one informs the other. I take this to be similar to Aristotles notion of “privation.” Secondly, the experience of any ‘division’ is actually a privileging or “revealing” of one of many aspects of a manifold logos which responds to the manifold realms of Being.
With respect to force, Heidegger does not interpret it as either an active or passive. Even with regard to the causal potency of force/motion, he writes “We have cause and effect simultaneously – the cause-effect relationship and, in its light, ‘force’. Force is accordingly a derivative concept.4” Heidegger believes that Aristotle was aware of the unity of force, and its “decisive essential moment” (that which Aquinas interprets as “transference”). Heidegger calls this the “ambiguity of the Aristotelian formation of guiding meaning.” Ambiguous, but nonetheless, a guide - not a doctrine.
Elucidating the essential nature of force, Heidegger states that the division of force can be accomplished by following the division of the realms of being. It is the approach that one takes to being that results in a particular discerning of force. Aristotle does not merely want to say that potency “at times has an ontic meaning, and at other times an ontological meaning5” but rather that it belongs to the essence of Force-being. Force-being is “the relation of the origin of the being-so-constituted and the origin of the producing-being.6 It is the implicating, reciprocal relation of being which is the essence of force, the origin for doing, and the insight into a possible site for a change.7
With respect to Logos, Heidegger rejects the Scholastic interpretation as “Reason,” with the claim that it is a simplifying and reductive. Instead, Heidegger finds many interpretations: at the origin of Logos, Heidegger discerns “relation’”, which describes the back and forth of the other categories to the primary category, as it occurs as in the “gathering” of Logos8. It is the gathering of the categories and causes which enables “discourse”, another function of Logos that seems similar to the Scholastic interpretation of “Reason”. In Chapter Two, Heidegger settles on “Conversance” to bring together the manifold meanings; a primary hub in the semantic net of Logos9. It is Heidegger’s nuanced interpretation of Logos as “Conversance” which informs his understanding of the structure of productive knowledge10 - that which enables activity and the potency to effect a change/produce.
It has been an ontological, rather than systemic, understanding for both Logos and the divisions of force that Heidegger has developed. Staying away from the imposition of external divisions, he divides potency into “what is without discourse and what is directed by discourse.” He does not find a correlation with the division of potency as ‘active/passive’. In general, “directed by discourse” corresponds to “beings with soul11,” although it does not follow that every besouled being is necessarily a being with conversance12.
Heidegger is now prepared to look into the phenomenon of change. Potency as Force-Being is the essential co-given in the basic phenomenon of change, “precisely in the reciprocal relation between potency as producing, and potency of being-so-constituted. Heidegger ecstatically calls it “The extraordinary relationship of force and conversance in capability.”13
Capability is the orientation from which can be directed a producing, or activity: that which takes work and transforms. The ‘gatheredness’ of producing springs forth out of the essence of Logos as “Gathering”, and it is from this perspective that the change is to be understood. From capability, producing is directed at the contraries, since the origin of capability contains the contraries, of which one is the Eidos – or, in its finished form, the Telos: the essence and boundary of the work to be done within producing14. As the contrary is co-given with the origin, it must be avoided in the striving. The care which belongs to production unites precisely both in itself: holding to the right path and avoiding going off track and awry.15 And how does this correspond to potency in the sense of movement? The movement of the soul consists in the striving, flight or pursuit. The force for producing towards an Eidos presupposes that in general a force for producing is there; Being-capable-at-all of goes along with being-capable-in-the-right-way.16
Heidegger and Aquinas do not differ drastically in their interpretations, but the nuances speak volumes. Aquinas seems to be doing more of a translation than interpretation. His commentary seems to trace Aristotles thought, rather than challenge it, or to seek ambiguity. If his prerogative was merely to explain and make assessible Aristotle to others, he met with incredible succeess; his work became a ground of scholarship that remains so today. But it is also notable that Heidegger challenges with questions that yield a much richer ontological ambiguity, nuance, and elaboration of Aristotles thought. Maintaining that the Scholastic interpretation of Logos as “reason,” “judgement” and “sense” does not capture the decisive meaning of Logos (as Conversance)17 Heidegger challenges the text with questions that yield a much richer ontological nuance and elaboration, shedding much light on the ontological aspects of Aristotles work as well as providing an insight into his own.
1 Heidegger 10
2 “A division may not be imposed externally onto what is to be divided” Heidegger 102
3 Heidegger 100
4 Heidegger 71
5 Heidegger 90
6 Heidegger 89
7 Heidegger 97
8 Heidegger 2
9 Logos is “the gathering, of those being related among themselves… discourse, the gathering laying open, unifyingmaking something known… discourse in the broad sense of the manifold making known and giving notice.” Heidegger 103
10 Gunter Zoller. “Aristotle’s Metaphysics, 1-3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force” Review of Metaphysics, The. March, 1997. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3545/is_n3_v50/ai_n28685867
11 Heidegger 104
12 Heidegger 105-106
13 Heidegger 111
14 Heidegger 118
15 Heidegger 130
16 Heidegger 133
17 Heidegger 104
