From Process Studies, 14:4, Winter 1985, 224-236. “Insofar as
Whitehead interpreted Aristotle’s theory of Entity [ousia] as if
it were practically indistinguish-able from a Lockean or even a
Cartesian notion of substance, he was simply and radically mistaken. . .
. [T]he (perhaps) Lockean notion of an anonymous stuff enduring without
internal change beneath a transition of superficial qualities has
nothing to do with Aristotle’s concept of Entity. Whitehead’s withering
attack on the Lockean type of substance-philosophy proves nothing,
therefore, against the Aristotelian concept of Entity.”
Whitehead’s
Misconception of “Substance” in Aristotle
James W. Felt, S.J.
And indeed the question which was raised of old and is raised now and
always, and is always the subject of doubt, viz,
what being is, is just the question, what is substance?
Aristotle’s memorable sentence1 seems as true today as when
it was written. Far from settling among themselves on a metaphysical
description of the world of experience, philosophers do not even agree
on how Aristotle himself conceived “sub-stance.” At any rate it will be
argued here that Whitehead radically misunderstood Aristotle’s con-cept.
This misconception, which has ever since flourished unquestioned among
Whiteheadian philosophers, proved a powerful factor, I think, in
Whitehead’s ultimate adoption of an atomic or epochal theory of
becoming.
Whitehead’s interpretation of Aristotelian “substance” figures in a
classic exchange between Leonard J. Eslick and Charles Hartshorne in the
late Fifties. In his paper Eslick asserted:
I think it can be shown that Whitehead’s equation of Aristotelian
primary substance with Descartes’ definition rests upon a gross
misunderstanding. It is, furthermore, a travesty to depict Aristotle’s
substance as static and inert, hermetically sealed off from the causal
efficacy of other entities and devoid of any internal becoming. (SCCW
504)
Recognizing that Whitehead’s exegesis of Aristotle is not of primary
importance in evaluating Whitehead’s own metaphysics, Eslick did not
bother in that essay to show what he had said could be shown, and went
on to other issues. Hartshorne’s, however, took the time to respond
with some vigor that no such misinterpretation of Aristotle on
Whitehead’s part was evident.
Hartshorne’s instinct that this point is worth arguing was sound. I
suspect that Whitehead’s interpretation of “substance” in Aristotle had
a stronger influence on the formation of his own metaphysics than is
generally supposed. It was one of several factors which coalesced to
convince Whitehead that no metaphysics of essentially self-identical and
enduring fundamental entities is viable.2 It encouraged him
to develop a counter-theory of epochal, successive units of becoming.
This alternative, for better or for worse, draws a radically different
picture of the human person, for instance, than does that of Aristotle.
Man himself is at stake in what one takes the fundamental constituents
of being to be.
Whitehead evidently read Aristotle (or perhaps W. D. Ross’s book
about Aristotle) with the specter of modern materialistic
mechanism haunting his mind, and thought he recognized in Aristotle’s
“substance” its remote but unmistakable ancestor. And if, as seems
natural, Whitehead took Aristotle’s philosophy as paradigmatic of any
substance-type philosophy, his turn to another alternative is not
surprising.
Whitehead’s understanding (or, as I shall argue, misunderstanding) of
Aristotle’s concept of “sub-stance” has continued to flourish,
entrenched and unquestioned, among subsequent Whiteheadian philosophers.
It is taken for granted, so that the word “substance” is used as a term
of opprobrium. But whether this dogmatic antisubstance bias of modern
process philosophy is well-founded or, rather, stems largely from an
ill-examined myth, depends on the accuracy of Whitehead’s interpretation
of Aristotle’s concept of substance.
Here, then, is what I propose to do. I shall argue that Whitehead did
in fact badly misinterpret Aristotle’s concept of substance, as Eslick
claimed, and I shall suggest that, far from amounting to an
inconsequential error in historical exegesis, this misconception was a
strong influence in turning Whitehead’s metaphysics in the direction of
an epochal theory of becoming. I shall maintain that Aristotle’s theory
conceives substances as dynamic and interrelated, contrary to what
Whitehead supposed, but I shall not claim that, had Whitehead realized
this, he would have been satisfied with Aristotle’s conception. I shall
only ask that we accept Aristotle at his own word and not transform his
theory into a caricature he demonstrably never intended. I shall also
suggest that a recovery of the real Aristotelian view casts doubt on the
currently accepted repudiation of the very possibility of any sort of
substance metaphysics.
1. Whitehead’s Conception of “Substance” in Aristotle
We begin with Whitehead rather than with Aristotle, for Whitehead’s
assessment of Aristotle flows out of Whitehead’s own philosophic
concerns. We also take special note of what Whitehead was concerned to
avoid. Bergson’s observation still holds:
Is it not obvious that the first step the philosopher takes, when his
thought is still faltering and there is nothing definite in his
doctrine, is to reject certain things definitively? Later he will be
able to make changes in what he affirms; he will vary only slightly what
he denies. (CM 110)
Appropriately, Eslick writes: “It is likely the polemic against
substance was originally motivated by Whitehead’s reaction against
mechanistic materialism, in which substances are inert, vacuous pieces
of matter or stuff” (SCCW 504).
Whitehead’s polemic against materialistic mechanism is too well known to
require much elaboration here. The “matter” of such a mechanism was, by
its nature, static, passive, and incapable of supporting internal
relationships to other bits of matter. This incapacity of relationship
had its counterpart, Whitehead thought, in Descartes’ definition of
substance, and that in turn was a direct consequence of Aristotle’s
notion. In a key passage Whitehead writes:
All modern philosophy hinges round the difficulty of describing the
world in terms of subject and predicate, substance and quality,
particular and universal. The result always does violence to that
immediate experience which we express in our actions, our hopes, our
sympathies, our purposes, and which we enjoy in spite of our lack of
phrases for its verbal analysis.
The true point of divergence is the false notion suggested by the
contrast between the natural meanings of the words “particular” and
“universal.” The particular is thus conceived as being just its
individual self with no necessary relevance to any other particular. It
answers to Descartes definition of substance: “And when we conceive of
substance, we merely conceive an existent thing which requires nothing
but itself in order to exist.” This definition is a true derivative
from Aristotle’s definition: A primary substance is “neither asserted of
a subject nor present in a subject. . . .”
The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle’s
dictum, “A substance is not present in a subject” . . . . The philosophy
of organism is mainly devoted to the task of making clear the notion of
“being present in another entity.” (PR 49f./78f.)
Whitehead’s assertion that Descartes’ definition of substance is a true
derivative from Aristotle’s was based, claimed Eslick, on a “gross
misunderstanding” of Aristotle. Hartshorne promptly countered this
claim by providing the following formal derivation of Descartes
definition from Aristotle’s:
Suppose, contrary to Descartes’ formula (inconsistently qualified with
respect to God), a substance S’ requires another substance S”,
in order to exist; then S’, just in being itself, is related to S”,
and since related-to-S” includes S”, S’ itself must
include S’. Otherwise, it must be possible for it to exist
without S”, external relations being those not necessary to a
thing. It follows that S” is predicable of S’ as a
necessary relatum for its intrinsic relation. (SCCW 514)
Thus, argues Hartshorne, denying Descartes’ definition of substance
logically entails denying Aristotle’s, so that affirming Aristotle’s
entails affirming Descartes’. Aristotelian substances, therefore, are
in principle mutually independent, hence intrinsically unrelated to one
another. It would follow that Descartes, in defining a substance as
needing nothing else in order to exist (Principles of Philosophy,
I, 51) only spelled out what was already implicit in Aristotle’s
definition. This apparent incapacity of Aristotelian substances to
enter into intrinsic relations with one another seems to have struck
Whitehead as distinctive of matter or stuff, hence to lend itself
readily to the viewpoint of materialistic mechanism.
Whitehead also saw ethical significance, says Hartshorne, in the
rejection of substance. For if each person is self-sufficient to
himself and intrinsically independent of all others, have we not a
prescription for selfishness and self-centeredness? As Hartshorne put
it:
All genuine interests and purposes transcend the mere self. Egoism
rests on a superstitious absolutizing of self-identity and consequent
absolutizing of nonidentity with other persons. . . . Whitehead once
humorously summed up the ethical objection to substance theories by
remarking, “I sometimes think that all modern immorality is produced by
Aristotle’s theory of substance.” (RFP 72)
In addition to this apparent intrinsic separateness of Aristotelian
substances, Whitehead was bothered by what he took to be their static
nature. He conceived Aristotle’s “substances” as stolidly,
changelessly, enduring through time (whatever that could mean!), while
yet acquiring or losing various accidental qualities. This is the
impression he got from Aristotle’s Categories—or perhaps,
instead, from W. D. Ross’s Aristotle.3 For
Aristotle says it is distinctive of a substance that it remains
numerically one and the same while nevertheless taking on varying, even
contrary qualities (Categories, Ch. 5).
This suggested to Whitehead a notion of “undifferentiated endurance”
(a favorite phrase) almost indistinguishable from that of passive
matter or “stuff.” The tenacity with which the latter concept held the
minds of philosophers for centuries was due, Whitehead thought, to (1)
the influence of Aristotelian subject-predicate logic, and (2) a
careless misconstrual of what is given in sense experience—an instance
of misplaced concreteness, as we see in the following passages:4
The baseless metaphysical doctrine of “undifferentiated endurance” is a
subordinate derivative from the misapprehension of the proper character
of the extensive scheme.
. . . In the perception of a contemporary stone, for example, . . . the
immediate percept assumes the character of the quiet undifferentiated
endurance of the material stone, perceived by means of its quality of
color. . . .
Thus in framing cosmological theory, the notion of continuous stuff with
permanent attributes enduring without differentiation, and retaining its
self-identity through any stretch of time however small or large, has
been fundamental. The stuff undergoes change in respect to accidental
qualities and relations; but it is numerically self-identical in its
character of one actual entity throughout its accidental adventures.
The admission of this fundamental metaphysical concept has wrecked the
various systems of pluralistic realism.
This metaphysical concept has formed the basis of scientific
materialism. . . .
As for Aristotle’s logic, its dominance over several centuries “imposed
on metaphysical thought the categories naturally derivative from its
phraseology” (PR 30/45). Its pattern of attributing varying
qualitative predicates to stable, self-contained subjects was mistakenly
taken for a metaphysical description of the structure of the real. “The
evil produced by the Aristotelian primary substance is exactly this
habit of metaphysical emphasis upon the “subject-predicate” form of
proposition” (ibid.).
Furthermore, the notion of the purely numerical identity of an
unchanging subject of change seems vague or even incoherent. How can
something endure changelessly, and in what would its
supposed self-identity consist? “Numerical identity,” writes
Hartshorne, has no strict meaning, once accidental qualities are
admitted such that they can alter, but the thing remain that very thing”
(SCCW 515).
In sum, Whitehead interprets Aristotle’s substances (1) as
self-contained, self-sufficient units of actuality, lacking the
possibility of internal relationships to one another, and (2) as
entities whose individual histories consist in acquiring or losing
various accidental characteristics, while they, the subjects of these
accidental changes, remain themselves unchanged. This interpretation
arises essentially from (1) Aristotle’s definition that a substance is
never “present in” another substance, and (2) Aristotle’s doctrine of
the relation of substance to accident: that it is characteristic of
substance that it itself remains numerically one and the same while
nevertheless taking on various accidental qualities.
2. Whitehead’s Conception a Misconception
Preliminary word-problem
Before taking a closer look at the evidence for Aristotle’s own
conception of “substance,” it is necessary to ask whether that is even
the most appropriate English word. Aristotle’s actual word is ousia
(accented on the second syllable), etymolo-gically a derivative of
the Greek word “to be” (einai). In a long and careful
analysis of what ousia would mean to the Greek ear, Joseph Owens
sets down the following characteristics of any near-equivalent in
English:
What is required is an English word which
a) implies no prejudices in favor of any post-Aristotelian theory of
Being,
b) is more abstractive in form than “Being,”
c) can denote the individual, both concrete and incomposite,
d) and express to English ears an immediate relation with Being. (DBAM
72)
Owens concludes that the English word “entity” comes closest to
satisfying these requirements, especially if written with an uppercase
“E” whenever it is being used to translate Aristotle’s term, ousia.
Beyond argument, however, “substance” is exactly the wrong term
to use, and that for several reasons:
(1) Etymologically it does all the wrong things. For it has nothing to
do with the verb “to be,” and derives rather from the Latin, “substantia,”
denoting something “standing under” another, although, as we shall
see, this is in a crucial sense not what Aristotle meant by
ousia! “Substantia,” as the Latin rendition of the Greek
term, was chiefly popularized by Boethius in his Latin translation of
the logical works of Aristotle, in which the primary meaning of
the term is the subject of predication. In his theological works,
on the other hand, Boethius was careful to use “essential” to
translate the same term. It was, however, by his logical works that
Aristotle first became widely known to the Western world, so that the
Boethian logical term, “substantia,” stuck (DBAM 68).
(2) Historically it conjures up exactly the wrong ideas—or at the very
least loads the dice against an impartial examination of Aristotle’s
real meaning. It is especially misleading to anyone acquainted with the
history of Western philosophy, as Owens points out: “Because of Locke’s
influence, substance in English philosophical usage strongly suggests
what its etymology designates. It conjures up the notion of something
‘standing under’ something else. The background is the view of
accidents ridiculed by Malebranche. Such a perspective inevitably
falsifies the Aristotelian ousia, and ends up by reifying the
accidents as in Locke” (DBAM 69).
I shall, therefore, hereafter adopt Owens’ recommendation and usually
write “Entity” (with an upper-case “E”) to denote Aristotle’s term
ousia, rather than continue to use the unfortunate term “substance.”
Let us then examine Aristotle’s own explanations of what he means by
“Entity.”
Not “present in a subject.”
Here is what Aristotle actually said:
Entity, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word,
is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a
subject; for instance, the individual man or horse. But in a secondary
sense those things are called Entities within which, as species, the
primary Entities are included; also those which, as genera, include the
species. For instance, the individual man is included in the species
“man,” and the genus to which the species belongs is animal; these,
therefore—that is to say, the species man and the genus “animal”—are
termed secondary entities . . . .
Everything except primary Entities is either predicable of a primary
Entity or present in a primary Entity, . . . and if these last did not
exist, it would be impossible for anything else to exist. . . . (Categories,
Ch. 5, 2a11-2b6, with substitution, here and henceforth, of “Entity”
or “entity” for “substance.”)
This is the first of the key Aristotelian definitions which bothered
Whitehead, and which he and Hartshorne think leads straight to
Descartes’ definition of substance as “needing nothing else in order to
exist.” It seemed to Whitehead to insulate Aristotelian Entities from
one another, so as to prevent any kind of inherence of one in another.
Aristotle goes on to add: “It is a common characteristic of all Entity
that it is never present in a subject” (3a6f). Do not such statements
vindicate Whitehead’s conception of the apartheid of individual
Entities in Aristotle?
No, they don’t. To see this, one must first examine what sort of work
the Categories is, and what Aristotle’s intention was in writing
it.
The Categories is the first of Aristotle’s ordered set of
treatises on the foundations of logic. In this first book he inquires
into the significance of the terms (or, as Ross suggests,
“linguistic facts”
[AR 26],
in which propositions are couched. In the subse-quent book, On
Interpretation, he inquires into the relationship between multiple
terms in the form of propositions. Aristotle is in effect asking, in
the Categories, what different sorts of entities are named
by the different terms in propositions. He refers back to this initial
treatise when, in Book Delta (V) of the Metaphysics, he writes:
“The kinds of essential being are precisely those that are indicated by
the figures of predication [i.e., the categories]; for the senses of
‘being’ are just as many as these figures” (1017a23-25).
In the Categories, then, Aristotle is not yet concerned to work
out a metaphysics; he simply wants, as a necessary preliminary
clarification, to distinguish among the many different senses in which
something can be said to “be.” He notices that at least the
following sorts of entities or kinds of being can be distinguished:
Entity, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state,
action, and affection (Ch. 4). And among these diverse kinds of being
Aristotle notices a fundamental distinction logically dividing them into
two distinct classes. One class has only a single member: Entity. It
alone, of all the kinds of being, enjoys a sort of logical autonomy,
whereby it can be said to “be” in its own right, whereas all the other
kinds of being have an intrinsic dependence on Entity for their own
being. “White” or “tall” do not exist in their own right (except as pure
abstractions, and even then, as abstractions in someone’s mind): they
have to belong to Entities, such as a man or a tree, for instance, if
they are to be at all. But “man” and “tree,” as kinds of being, are not
thought of as needing to inhere in some other kind of entity.
Aristotle works out in precise, technical terms the relationships I have
just roughly sketched, and does it in terms of two careful definitions
which he has already provided in Chapter 2. These exact definitions are
essential for understanding what Aristotle later says about Entity. (He
is, after all, writing a careful, technical essay.) He says:
Forms of speech are either simple or composite. Examples of the latter
are such expressions as “the man runs,” “the man wins”; of the former
“man,” “ox,” “runs,” “wins.”
Of things themselves some are predicable of a subject, and are never
present in a subject. Thus “man” is predicable of the individual man,
and is never present in a subject.
By being “present in a subject” I do not mean present as parts are
present in a whole, but being incapable of existence apart from the said
subject.5
These statements define what Aristotle had in mind when he later
asserted that “entity, in the truest and primary and most definite sense
of the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor
present in a subject” (Ch. 5). When, therefore, we predicate “man” of
Socrates, man is entity not in the primary but only in the secondary
sense; it is a universal, a class. It denotes the essential nature
common to Socrates and all other men. Only entity in this secondary
sense is predicated, and then only of “Entity” in the primary
sense (never vice-versa). Roughly: classes are predicated, people
aren’t.
On the accidental level, however, to say that Socrates is shrewd or
homely, is not to attribute to him extrinsic qualities which cling to
him in about the same way as his cloak. It is to say something about
Socrates himself. In saying, therefore, that “Entity” is never
present in another as a in a subject, Aristotle is not at all concerned
to deny that (or even to ask whether) actual primary Entities relate
efficaciously to one another. In the Categories he is simply not
concerned to do that kind of metaphysics. He is asking, rather, how the
terms of proposition denote different kinds of being, and he points out
that, alone among other kinds of entities, primary Entity is
conceivable, and can be discussed, without its having to be thought of
as essentially inhering in some other kind or category of entity.
Colors and shapes and relations, on the other hand, are kinds of being
which of their very nature must be thought of an inhering in primary
Entities, if they are to be thought of as being at all. True, primary
Entities do require the other kinds of entities—a man, for instance,
must have some shape, yet not with that same relation of inherence.
Shape is clearly in the man in a way in which it would be absurd to say
that the man is in his shape.
One must conclude, therefore, that Aristotle’s stipulation that one
Entity is never “in another” provides no warrant for the supposition of
radical, mutual exclusiveness which Whitehead read into it. And indeed
there is plenty of evidence to show that Aristotle himself never
supposed that primary Entities could not be related to one another. For
instance, in Physics, Bk. III, Ch. 2, he says:
The solution of the difficulty that is raised about the motion—whether
it is in the movable—is plain. It is the fulfill-ment of
this potentiality, and by the action of that which has the power of
causing motion; and the actuality of that which has the power of causing
motion is not other than the actuality of the movable, for it must be
the fulfillment of both. A thing is capable of causing motion
because it can do this, it is a mover because it actually does
it. But it is on the movable that it is capable of acting. Hence
there is a single actuality of both alike, just as one to two and two to
one are the same interval, and the steep ascent and the steep descent
are one—for these are one and the same, although they can be described
in different ways. So it is with the mover and the moved. (202a12-22)
And a few lines farther down, in reply to an objection he has posed to
himself, Aristotle responds: “It is not absurd that the
actualization of one thing should be in another. Teaching is the
activity of a person who can teach, yet the operation is performed [on]
some patient—it is not cut adrift from a subject, but is of A on
B” (202b6-8).
This is Aristotle’s way of saying that the “agent” is in the
“patient”; that the Entity effecting change in another is, precisely in
that respect, in the other. The resulting activity in the
affected Entity is the actualization of both Entities together.
In Metaphysics, Book Lambda (XII), he writes:
All things are ordered together some-how, but not all alike—both fishes
and fowls and plants; and the world is not such that one thing has
nothing to do with another, but they are connected. For all are ordered
together to one end, but it is as in a house, where the freemen are
least at liberty to act at random, but all things or most things are
already ordained for them, while the slaves and the animals do little
for the common good, and for the most part live at random. . . .
(1075a16-23)
In the face of such passages one can suppose either that Aristotle was
inconsistent in wedding his notion of primary Entity with other aspects
of his system, or that interpreting Aristotle’s concept of Entity in a
Lockean manner is, as Eslick suggested, a “gross misunderstanding.” All
the evidence points toward the latter view.
Or does it? What about Hartshorne’s precise logical derivation, quoted
above, of how Descartes concept of “substance” is entailed by
Aristotle’s definition of Entity as “never in another”? The derivation,
in fact, fails! Instead of attending to Aristotle’s own careful
preliminary definition of what he means by “(present)
in another,” Hartshorne allowed this notion of “presence in” to
float ambiguously, unexamined, until it became implicitly transformed
into a notion of sheer logical inclusion. But that is
demonstrably not what Aristotle had in mind when he used the phrase.
There is a special irony in Hartshorne’s providing this derivation. For
not only was Aristotle highly sensitive to the perils of determining the
real by means of the logical—this was, after all, his chief criticism of
Plato’s theory of the Forms6—but Whitehead himself tirelessly
attacked the tendency to mistake logical relationships for the structure
of the real, an ultimate case of what he called “the fallacy of
misplaced concreteness.” Yet in proposing this derivation Hartshorne
succumbs exactly to this fallacy, since he thereby deals with the
metaphysical relationship between actual Entities as if it were simply
that of logical inclusion.
Entity and qualities:
“undifferentiated endurance.”
The other key aspect of Aristotle’s definition of “Entity” which
bothered Whitehead is the relation Aristotle proposes between Entity and
qualities, between “substance” and accidents. Aristotle says:
The most distinctive mark of Entity appears to be that, while remaining
numerically one and the same, it is capable of admitting contrary
qualities. From among things other than Entity, we should find ourselves
unable to bring forward any which possessed this mark. Thus, one and the
same color cannot be white and black. Nor can the same one action be
good and bad: this law holds good with everything that is not Entity.
But one and the self-same Entity, while retaining its identity, is yet
capable of admitting contrary qualities. The same individual person is
at one time white, at another black, at one time warm, at another cold,
at one time good, at another bad. (Categories, Ch. 5, 4a10-21)
We saw in Section 1 that, given the background of later Western
philosophic thought, this definition provoked Whitehead to attribute the
notion of “undifferentiated endurance” to Entity itself, conceived as a
substrate of diverse accidental qualities which come and go. It is, he
writes, “the notion of continuous stuff with permanent attributes,
enduring without differentiation, and retaining its self-identity
through any stretch of time. . . . The stuff undergoes change in respect
to accidental qualities and relations; but it is numerically
self-identical in its character of one actual entity throughout its
accidental adventures” (PR 78/120). This notion, Whitehead thought, has
wrecked the various systems of pluralistic realism and also formed the
basis of scientific materialism.
Whitehead’s clearly Lockean concept of “substance” in Aristotle, besides
supposing the mutual isolation of Entities one from another, seems to
include at least the following characteristics:
(1) Substance is conceived as intrin-sically unchanged, or unchanging,
even amid its acquiring or losing accidental qualities.
(2) Substance is therefore rightly thought of as both static and
passive, hence as lending itself immediately to the notion of an inert
stuff or matter.
(3) Similarly, substance enjoys a kind of independence of existence from
its accidental qualities; it becomes a kind of “thing” even apart from
those quali-ties. And in a somewhat different way, qualities must enjoy
a kind of ontological autonomy of their own.
I submit that attributing the above characteristics to Aristotle’s
notion of Entity is a mistake on every count! For Aristotle says that
it is a distinctive mark of Entity that, while remaining numerically one
and the same, it is nevertheless capable of admitting contrary
qualities. If we read on in that same Chapter (5) of the Categories,
we find him indicating the manner in which this comes about, thereby
clarifying his whole concept of “alteration” (“accidental” change, in
which an Entity remains itself while undergoing change of qualities).
This clarification arises in the context of an objection which
Aristotle poses to himself. Propositions—which are not Entities in the
primary sense—appear also to satisfy the characteristic, supposedly
peculiar to Entities, of admitting contrary qualities, since the
proposition that someone is sitting passes from true to false when the
person stands up. But there is a key difference, says Aristotle,
between the proposed counter-example and what he has said of Entities.
The difference is that the proposition changes its truth-value because
of a change in something else, something other than
itself—namely, the person who stood up. But it is different with
Entities:
It is by themselves changing that Entities admit contrary
qualities. It is thus that that which was hot becomes cold, for it
has entered into a different state. Similarly that which was
white becomes black, and that which was bad good, by a process of
change; and in the same way in all other cases it is by changing
that Entities are capable of admitting contrary qualities. . . . It
is the peculiar mark of Entity that it should be capable of admitting
contrary qualities; for it is by itself changing . . . that it
does so. (4a30-4b3.0; emphasis added)
There is, therefore, no “undifferentiated endurance”
for the Aristotelian Entity! There is, on the contrary,
intrinsic development, change, becom-ing. It is the Entity
(the man or woman, for instance) which does the changing in
passing from thin to fat or pale to tan. The reason, says Aristotle,
why it is legitimate to predicate contrary predicates of the same Entity
at different times is precisely because the Entity itself has
changed: George himself, or Martha herself, has become tan, so
that as a result “tan” is truly predicated when it would have been false
before.
To identify Aristotelian Entity, then, with “undifferentiated endurance”
(characteristic (1) above), is, contrary to the received Whiteheadian
tradition, simply anti-Aristotelian. It deserves the “pincushion”
comparison used by Eslick (SCCW 506). For on that view Entity never
intrinsically becomes in any way; it only extrinsically acquires
or loses qualities, as one might acquire or lose books. But in that
case it is clear that characteristics (2) and (3) would also follow.
For by (1), Entity has no alternative to being static and passive (2)
and there must therefore be a kind of independence of existence of
Entity on the one hand, and of accidental qualities on the other. For
if contrary qualities do not affect Entity, and if they can
successively be “admitted” by Entity, it seems clear that Entity and
qualities all get along quite well by themselves (3).
It would be possible to construct a litany of other Aristotelian texts
which indicate that for Aristotle, Entity is dynamic and changing,
rather than passive and static. Recall only that natural things,
especially animals, are examples par excellence of Aristotelian
Entities. Yet they not only change, they even move themselves to their
own activities. In Aristotle’s view, the self-same squirrel, by its
feeding activities, moves itself to its own growth while nevertheless
remaining a single, enduring Entity. Leclerc writes:
The Aristotelian doctrine is that the physical existent, by virtue of
its inherent activity, is necessarily involved in internal change, while
. . . the denial of internal change in matter is the one feature of the
modern conception of matter which has persisted until this century. (NPE
257f.)
Whitehead might also have found a clue to this in Ross’s Aristotle,
with which we are certain that he was acquainted. In his chapter on
Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Ross explains:
Aristotle does not offer in the Metaphysics any treatment of the
categories as a whole. The categories other than substance [Entity]
are, as it were, mere “offshoots and concomit-ants of being.” Substance
is prior to them in three ways—(1) “because it can exist apart while
they cannot.” This does not mean that it can exist without them while
they cannot exist without it. A qualityless substance is as impossible
as a quality which does not presuppose a substance. The substance is
the whole thing, including the qualities, relations, etc., which form
its essence, and this can exist apart. It implies qualities but
these are not something outside it which it needs in addition to itself.
A quality on the other hand is an abstraction which can exist only in a
substance. Obviously, if this is his meaning, Aristotle is thinking of
substance as the individual thing. (AR 162f.)
“The substance is the whole thing,” and its qualities are
not something outside it but rather a part of itself—that is exactly the
point which Whitehead missed.
3. Conclusion
Insofar as Whitehead interpreted Aristotle’s theory of Entity as if it
were practically indistin-guishable from a Lockean or even a Cartesian
notion of substance, he was simply and radically mistaken. Descartes’
definition of eremitical substances is not a “true derivative” of
Aristotle’s statement that an Entity is never “present in another.” And
the (per-haps) Lockean notion of an anonymous stuff enduring without
internal change beneath a transition of superficial qualities has
nothing to do with Aristotle’s concept of Entity.
Whitehead’s withering attack on the Lockean type of substance-philosophy
proves nothing, therefore, against the Aristotelian concept of Entity.
Furthermore, of itself it furnishes no antecedent evidence whatever
against the viability of at least some form of metaphysical
system which would postulate a world of interrelated, dynamic Entities
which endure in time as essentially self-identical individuals, which
move themselves to their own activities, and which, precisely by
themselves changing, change their accidental qualities over time.
References
AR—W. D. Ross, Aristotle (New York: 1960).
BWA—Richard McKeon (ed.), The Basic Works of Aristotle, trans. W.
D. Ross (New York: 1941).
CAT—J. L. Ackrill (trans.), Aristotle’s Categories and De
Interpretatione (Oxford: 1963).
CM—Henri Bergson, The Creative Mind, trans. Mabelle L. Andison
(Totowa, New Jersey: 1965).
DBAM—Joseph Owens, C.Ss.R., The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian
Metaphysics (Toronto: 1951).
MET—Richard Hope (trans.), Aristotle: Metaphysics (Ann Arbor:
1952).
NPE—Ivor Leclerc, The Nature of Physical Existence (London & New
York: 1972).
RFP—Charles Hartshorne, “Recollections of Famous Philosophers—and Other
Important Persons,” Southern Journal of Philosophy, 8 (Spring,
1970), 67-82.
SCCW—Leonard J. Eslick, “Substance, Change, and Causality in Whitehead,”
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 18 (June, 1958),
503-13; and Charles Hartshorne, “Whitehead on Process: A Reply to
Professor Eslick,” ibid., 514-20.
WTCS—Ivor Leclerc, “Whitehead’s Transformation of the Notion of
Substance,” Philosophical Quarterly, 3 (July, 1953), 225-43.
Notes
1
Metaphysics,
Zeta, Ch. 1, 1028b2-4.
2
The other principal factors, as far
as I can judge, are Zeno’s arguments (PR 68-70/106-08), and the
tendency in modern science to view nature in terms of quanta (SMW, Ch.
8). If, as I think can he argued, neither of these considerations is a
cogent argument against the possibility of any sort of metaphysics of
Entity, then the question of the validity of Whitehead’s rejection of
Aristotle’s notion of substance takes on special importance. It may be
the last substantial foundation, so to speak, of the modern
anti-substance bias.
3
Eslick points out
that at the crucial passage in Process and Reality in which
Whitehead says Descartes’ concept of substance is a true derivative from
Aristotle’s, Whitehead refers the reader not to Aristotle’s
Categories but to W. D. Ross’s book about Aristotle (SCCW
504). Partly for that reason I have in this essay used Ross’s own
translations of Aristotle (in BWA).
4 PR 77f./119f. Leclerc points out (WTCS
225) that the notion of substance which Whitehead was most concerned to
attack was that of Locke. It is also clear that Whitehead saw in
Aristotle’s notion the clear forerunner of that of Locke, as well as
that of Descartes. Leclerc in effect grants as much in his subsequent
explanation (WTCS 225f. and n. 6).
5Categories,
Ch. 2 (1a17-23). Confusion readily
arises from this passage inasmuch as Aristotle here intermixes a
linguistic relation (‘predicable of” a subject) with an ontological
relation (“present in” a subject).
6
This relation to
Plato was called to my attention by Professor Richard J. Blackwell of
Saint Louis University, to whom I am also indebted for other suggestions
concerning an earlier version of this essay.
Posted March 7, 2009
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