Reading: A Reading from a philosophy textbook

The following is from Philosophy: The Power of Ideas, Moore & Bruder, 2011,

The Nature of Being

When a philosopher asks, What is the nature of being? He or she may have in mind any number of things, including one or more of the following:

           • Is being a property of things, or is it some kind of thing itself? Or is there some third alternative?

           • Is being basically one, or are there many beings?

           • Is being fixed and changeless, or is it constantly changing? What is the relationship between being and becoming?

              • Does everything have the same kind of being?

              • What are the fundamental categories into which all existing things may be divided?

            • What are the fundamental features of reality?

              • Is there a fundamental substance out of which all else is composed? If so, does it have any properties? Must it have properties?

              • What is the world like in itself, independent of our perception of it?

           • What manner of existence do particular things have, as distinct from properties, relations, and classes? What manner of existence do events have? What manner do numbers,minds,matter, space, and time have? What manner do facts have?

           • That a particular thing has a certain characteristic—is that a fact about the thing? Or is it a fact about the characteristic?

Several narrower questions may also properly be regarded as questions of metaphysics, such as:

            Does God exist?

            Is what happens determined?

             Is there life after death?

            Must events occur in space and time?

Some of these questions are none too clear, but they provide signposts for the directions a person might take in coming to answer the question, What is the nature of being? or in studying metaphysics. Because the possibilities are so numerous, we will have to make some choices about what topics to cover in The Nature of Being.

Moore and Bruder, p 21.

In Aristotle’s opinion, to be is to be a particular thing. And each thing, Aristotle maintained, is a combination of matter and form. A statue, for example, is a chunk of marble with a certain form. It is the same with other things too. There is some stuff out of which each thing is made, and there is the particular form this bit of stuff takes. Without the stuff, the thing would not exist, because you cannot have a thing made out of nothing. Likewise, without form, the thing would not exist. Without form, the stuff would not be some particular kind of thing; it would just be stuff. The form determines what the thing is; it is the essential nature of the thing.

For example, the marble of the statue is the same marble as it was when it was cut into a block at the quarry. But now it has a new form, and that form is what distinguishes the marble now from the marble in the block in the quarry. Yes, the marble has always had some form or other, but its transformation to this particular form is what makes it a statue. Thus, the form is what determines what a thing is, and for this reason Aristotle equated a thing’s form with its essence.

According to Aristotle, you need both form and matter to have a thing, and, with the exception of god (discussed later), neither form nor matter is ever found in isolation from the other. Things do change, of course: they become something new. Thus, another basic question is, What produces a change? In Aristotle’s opinion each change must be directed toward some end, so just four basic questions can be asked of anything:

             1. What is the thing? In other words, what is its form? Aristotle called this the formal cause of the thing. We do not use the word cause that way, but Aristotle did, and we just have to accept that.

             2. What is it made of? Aristotle called this the material cause.

            3. What made it? This Aristotle called the efficient cause, and this is what today we often mean by “cause.”

            4. What purpose does it serve? That is, for what end was it made? This Aristotle called the final cause.

Consider again a statue, Michelangelo’s David, for example. What it is, (1), is a statue. What it is made of, (2), is marble. What made it, (3), is Michelangelo (or Michelangelo’s chisel on the marble). And (4), it was made for the purpose of creating a beautiful object. Of course, natural objects were not made by humans for their purposes, but they still do have “ends.” The end of an acorn, for instance, is to be a tree.

But consider the acorn example more closely. The acorn is not actually a tree, only potentially so, correct? Change can therefore be viewed, according to Aristotle, as movement from potentiality to actuality. Because actuality is the source of change, pure actuality is the ultimate source of change. Pure actuality is the unchanged changer or unmoved mover or, in short, god. It should be noted that the pure actuality that Aristotle equated with god is not God, the personal deity of the Jewish or Christian religions.

It sometimes is difficult to perceive the ancient Greek metaphysicians as all being concerned with the same thing. But Aristotle explained that his predecessors were all concerned with causation. Thales, for example, was concerned with the stuff from which all is made: the material cause of things. Empedocles and Anaxagoras were concerned with why there is change, with efficient causation. In his Theory of Forms, Plato considered formal causation. It remained for Aristotle himself, Aristotle thought, to present an adequate explanation of final causation. So Aristotle gave us a handy way of integrating (and remembering) ancient Greek metaphysics.

Aristotle delineated the different kinds of imperfect, changing beings in terms of possibility and actuality. At one extreme is matter, which consists only of possibility. Matter, as we saw, is that which must be moved because it cannot move or form itself.

At the other extreme is god as pure actuality, which can only move things without god being moved or changed in any way. God is the unmoved mover. Any movement on god’s part would imply imperfection and is therefore impossible.

Nature (physis) and all the things of the universe exist between these two poles. Things move and are moved as a process of actualizing some of their potentialities.

There is a penchant in each being to take on ever-higher forms of being in an effort to approach the unmoving perfection of god. It is things’ love of and longing for perfection or god that moves the universe. God remains the unmoved mover.

Aristotle maintained that the stars, having the most perfect of all shapes, were beings with superhuman intelligence. Being much closer to god in the hierarchy of beings, they are incarnated gods unto themselves. Because their actions are much more rational and purposeful than those of the lower order beings on the earth, stars exercise a benevolent influence on earthly matters. Today many people read their astrology charts in the newspaper every day, and some political leaders even organize their programs around them. In this regard, Aristotle has not been the only one seeing stars.

To Aristotle, the earth is a mortal sphere. Things on it come to be and then cease to be. Earthly things are in a constant, unsettled state of becoming. As a consequence, earthly things and earthly matters long for the fixity and quietude that perfection allows. And although they strive mightily to become as perfect and godlike as possible, they never exhaust their own potentiality. Since god alone is pure act and perfect actualization, changes in the natural world go on without ceasing.

Moore and Bruder, p 64-66.