Saturday, April 5, 2014
Determining Being-at-Work
I'm am going to intentionally keep this question as open ended as possible. Modern philosophers often criticize Aristotle for anthropomorphizing or imposing teleological constraints on nature. Chapter 9 of the metaphysics focuses on Being-at-work and potencies. To what extent do you grant Aristotle that A) being-at-work and potentiality aren't just imposed on nature and B) we can discover a thing's being-at-work/potentiality.
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This is such a hard question! For this class, I try to grant both A and B. For life, I am not sure. A useful question would be the following: what would sufficient criterion be to prove/show that the being-at-work and potentiality we attribute to things are actually from the things themselves? Is there something that could provide sufficient evidence universally? Would it have to be a person by person basis?
ReplyDeleteI am disinclined to grant the latter because then it might lead us into the hazy land where "my truth is mine and your truth is yours." So I will search to see if I can find adequate proof.
Here's a thought: if we are all from nature,-- we being human beings, plants, animals, and the cosmos-- then it seems reasonable that natural things can recognize/identify other natural things, most probably through motion. For example, as a natural thing, I recognize that my couch is not natural. It has no motion of its own. The plant on my coffee table, however, grows towards the window and becomes bigger. It is natural and has motion. Perhaps our commonality of being natural is what allows us to discover a thing's being-at-work/potentiality?
-Mackenzie
I'll take the question up from the opposite side:
ReplyDeleteSo what is contentious about being-at-work and potency? Granting them is the same as granting 'nature.' That beings are something in particular (have a nature) and not by chance. Having a 'that-for-the-sake-of-which' is necessary to determine being-at-work and potency, since it gives us the measure of completion. If there is such a thing as a nature, we will know it through its being-at-work.
Really the only other options I see are 1) nature is unknowable 2) there is no nature only chance 3) there is no nature only will.
Even hardcore materialists will have to grant being at work and potency if matter (whatever they mean by that) has tendencies or characteristics. And if it doesn't, then what are they studying and how will they know it?
That final point interests me particularly because we have discussed it a few times in our Contemporary philosophy class. In "On Naming and Necessity," Kripke (to give a very crude summary) essentially says that we can call "water is H2O" an a posteriori ("coming after experience") truth. But that doesn't mean that water must always fill the water role--i.e. it does not need to fill our streams and be aqueous and so forth. But I think we all granted, at some point, that the point of science is that the physical makeup of water (H2O) dictates certain potentials for it, one of which is that it is aqueous at room temperature. If this is not an affirmation of being-at-work and potency, then I don't know what is!
ReplyDeleteI think the issue is when we say that we have found what a thing's purpose is, or that the thing-in-itself is this way. Granted, Aristotle didn't have this talk of "thing-in-itself," but it seems that this mistrust of our contact with the world is an incurable disease. Once we grant that we have access to the world as it is, it is pretty clear that hardcore materialists, physicists, and chemists are all granting being-at-work and potency. The question Matt is asking, I think, is whether or not we should call their discoveries "theories" or "truths." Should we tag a clause onto all of our discoveries that reads, "It seems to us now that..."