The Activity of Being
Aryeh Kosman
Harvard, 2013

"Aristotle's ontology requires us to read energeia as a mode of *activity*.... the paradigmatic realization is the *exercise of a capacity*.... [T]he practice that renders energeia as *actuality* and dunamis as *potentiality* ... skews our understanding of Aristotle. It leads to an emphasis on notions of *change* and *otherness* rather than what are for Aristotle the conceptually and ontologically prior notions of *being* and *self-identity*." (KOSMAN-2013, p. viii)

"[S]oul - psuche - just means the principle by virtue of which living things (things that are besouled - empsucha) are alive: the form of animals.... [S]ubstance - ousia - is to being rather as soul - psyche - is to being alive." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 12) [PSA: psyche is the form, the thinghood, the way of being, the aliveness of a living organism.]

"Substance is, as Aristotle puts the point time and again in his discussion, both a *this* and a *what* [PSA: an entity and its thinghood]: and here the important point is that its *being a this* is what enables it to serve as subject, and its *being a what* is a condition of the possibility of *being a this*." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 21)

Commenting on EN X.4 1174a14-b6 about hedone, Kosman writes: "It is because an activity does not need to away [CHECKTHIS] any further development to perfect or complete its being that it is complete and perfect at each and every present moment of its duration.... When I am seeing, there is no further activity that is required before I can say that I have seen: 'at the same time, one has seen and sees' (Metaphysics 9.6 1048b23)." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 42) [PSA: the same is true of living well: nothing is lacking to make it complete.]

Kosman defines energeia ("activity proper") as "a process or action whose end (and thus perfection) is nothing other than itself, a process that constitutes and contains its own end and completion, and is thus perfect - enteles - that is, complete in itself, and complete in itself because completed in itself.... An activity is such a fully realized being, for it has no end other than itself and is therefore fulfilled and completed in its very activity." (KOSMAN-2013, pp. 44-45)

"[T]he realization that occurs when what has been inactive becomes active is simply the exercise of the capacity in question. This is what takes place when ... a wise person exercises his wisdom, or in general, when a disposition to act - a skill or dispositional capacity - is brought into operation and is realized in its exercise, that is, in appropriate action. We can call this transition activation." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 63) [PSA: because this activation is volitional, it's misleading to use the passive voice ("is brought into and is realized".]

"[I]n all cases of activity proper, realization is constitutive, never privative. In cases of motion, however, the ultimate realization is privative, but there is an intermediate constitutive realization. This is essentially how Aristotle characterizes the two modes of transition when he says that 'the one, a change of qualities, is with respect to privation, the other is with respect to dispositional qualities (hexeis) and nature' (DA II.5 417b14-16). The sense in which motion is incomplete, then, is the sense in which it is ateles - incomplete - in the literal sense, that is, the sense that it does not contain its own telos - its own end - but is directed toward an end outside itself." (KOSMAN-2013, pp. 66-67)

"[W]hile motion is aimed at a realization that lies outside itself and that brings about its destruction, the exercise of a dispositional skill preserves and often indeed enriches it." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 67)

"[I]n the case of an activity ... the realization, far from replacing and using up the ability for it, is ... the full exercise of that ability. Indeed, in many cases in which Aristotle is interested (such as the development of a virtue or the acquisition of a skill), a realization strengthens and develops its ability (EN II.1 1103a34-b5).... [I]n the realization of what we have called a dispositional capacity - what Aristotle calls a first level of realization - a capacity has not been replaced by its correspondent realization, for the realization is the capacity in operation; it is the capacity being exercised. No change has taken place, and as a consequence no ability has been destroyed. The ability has in fact been brought into full being." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 72)

"Since an ability and its exercise are the same being, its exercise indeed constituting an ability's manifest presence and preservation, the relationship between dunamis and energeia thus understood is maintained even in the fullest moment of realization.... At the moment of exercise, abilities of this sort are indeed most fully realized, called forth into the fullest and most active form of their being. Here realization does not replace ability. It manifests ability and expresses it, and it is, in contrast to the unstable and other-directed expression of ability that defines motion, the occasion for the fullest and most active self-expression of the ability that it is." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 75)

"[T]he ability and its exercise are one thing: a capacity in operation. So it is with substance. Matter and form are not linked together by possibilities of becoming. They are present together in the being that is nothing other than the active essence - that is, the essential activity - of the one being that both are.... [M]atter and form are one and the same thing. They are one as body and soul are one: now understood as a locus of ability, now as the principle of that ability's active exercise." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 81)

"Matter is related to form as the eye is to (the power of) sight; but both of these relationships may be understood in terms of the relation between that power and its active exercise in seeing. And just as eye, sight, and seeing are bound together in the complex unity of the healthy organ of sight in operation, so are matter, form, and being bound together in the complex unity of an actual substance: a particular human, for instance, informed body and soul, being human." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 82)

"[T]he divine being of Metaphysics 12 is ... 'a principle whose substance is activity' (1071b20). Whose ousia is nothing but energeia: the divine has activity as its essential nature, and therefore what it is - its essential being - is the very principle of being itself." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 85)

"What it is for an animal to be a horse is to be acting as horses characteristically act. This means to be performing the typical activities that make up a horse's proper ergon, the work ... in which it engages in leading its hippic life. So we can say: it is being at work (energos) as a horse, or being actively (energeia) a horse. (KOSMAN-2013, p. 101)

"On Aristotle's view, the body of a horse is the instrument by virtue of which a horse is able to do what it does in the acting out of its function. It is, in other words, the organ for the active living of an equine life. An animal body, according to this view, is a being whose formal account necessarily involves reference to some object for which it is the instrument, as a musical instrument is for making music. This object is what Aristotle terms a final cause - a hou heneka - the end that the instrument is for the sake of. A body, therefore, is essentially for the sake of something else, as its very being is to be an organon - an instrument for accomplishing the activity of an animal's life.... 'The body is an instrument (organon); for just as each of its parts is for the sake of something, so with the body as a whole' (PA I.1 642a11).... 'all natural bodies are instruments (organa) of soul' (DA II.4 415b18) [See also EE VII.9 1241b22]" (KOSMAN-2013, p. 103) [PSA: this "formal account" of the body is part of the overall account of how one lives, in the sense of action with an account explicated in BURNYEAT-1981.]

"The body of a living being considered as such is, as it were, the organ of its life. It is an instrument whose nature is to be for the sake of the activity that is the animal's life.... So to be a horse's body is to be able to do what is involved in being a horse. It is to be an organ that enables the activity of being a horse, an instrument for the complex activity specified in the formal account of being a horse." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 103)

"What is there about Aristotle's understanding of the ontology of animals that leads to these results? It is basically that living beings, as paradigm substances, exhibit most manifestly the fact that form and matter in substance are linked to the concepts of activity and the structures of ability that empower such activity. For the being of an animal or plant consists in its life functions, in the characteristic modes of activity that define its life. The specific form of its being is therefore, as we might say, its bioactivity: the configuration of these activities and of the capacities for them. Such a configuration involves the specifics of what an animal eats, how it gets its food, where it lives, the manner of its reproduction, sensation, and movement, and so on - the entire complex of capacities and activities, in order words, that constitute the manner of its life and that Aristotle thinks it is the task of the biologist to describe, understand, and explain." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 106)

"It follows from its necessarily instrumental nature that body bears a relationship to soul figured by that of ability to activity. Because the matter of an animal is a structure of instrumental ability directed toward the animal's active life as its realization, the unity of an animal is the unity of a capacity and its active exercise." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 108) [PSA: interestingly, human unity at the psychological and ethical level is not a given but is a specific achievement.]

"[I]t is Aristotle's view ... that it is only the determinate being of substance that is able to afford the luxury of openness to further determination and is thus able to fulfill its characteristic role as subject. It is precisely because determinateness is a condition of further determinability that substances [PSA: entities], as paradigmatic subjects, must have essences [PSA: identities]. There is therefore no being that is not determinate being." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 170) [PSA: note that determinateness is one of the factors in to kalon.]

"What is stressed in the early chapters of De Anima is that entelecheia as a type of realization may signify two quite different levels. Indeed the definition of soul as realization is developed directly in the context of a distinction between these levels. This distinction, at work everywhere in Aristotle's thinking but particularly critical to the analysis of soul and the structures of animal life in general, is the distinction we have already looked at in some detail: the distinction between first- and second-level realization, between an achieved dispositional ability for activity and the exercise of that ability in the form of activity. The question then is this: if substance is identified with activity, and activity is understood as a kind of realization, is substance to be thought of as first- or second-level realization? Is it to be thought of, in other words, on the model of ability or on the model of the exercise of ability? On the model of a mere capacity, or of a capacity in operation? .... The right answer is *neither*; and that is true not because there is a better answer, but because the question I have posed is fundamentally misconceived. It is wrong to ask whether the activity of something being what it is is first- or second-level realization, because with respect to that activity there is no such distinction. The activity of being human, for example, is fully realized by any individual human at all, simply by virtue of his existence. And in general, the defining activity of any substance, as the substance's being what it is, is fully realized in that being and is so in the way that thinking, for example, is realized not simply in the ability to think, but in the active exercise of thinking, the activity that Aristotle calls theoria. In this respect, to be sure, substance may be said to be more like second-level realization than like first, more, in other words, like the activity of seeing than like being able to see. But this way of speaking will be misleading in suggesting that substantial activity is to be understood *only* as second-level realization. In the activity of seeing, however, the ability to see is still present, as the ability to think is present in the activity of thinking; indeed those abilities are in their exercise most fully present. Activities such as seeing and thinking, activities to which Aristotle applies the term energeia in its strictest sense, are as activities the most complete expressions of their abilities. Seeing, after all, just *is* being able to see in operation and therefore most fully active. It will therefore be misleading to characterize substance as a mode of second-level realization if if by that characterization we are led to suppose that it is not at the same time a first-level realization." (KOSMAN-2013, pp. 176-177) [PSA: cf Beere's phrasing of being-in-capacity and being-in-energeia.]

"[D]ivine substance is introduced ... not as an explanation of the existence of the world, but as an explanation of its being ... as a model of substance and therefore transitively as the principle of being in general.... This is what I mean by Book 12's offering the argument of the central books *in a different register*; it is the register of theology. But I want to urge here a different understanding of the theological force of these later discussions. Instead of imagining ourselves discovering what is divine and then coming to see it as the principle of being - of ousia - think instead of coming to see that which is the principle of being as, just because it is the principle of being, divine.... Rather than attributing the role of the first mover to divinity, think instead of conferring divine status on that which is revealed to be the world's motive principle; instead of imagining a cardinal feature of god as awareness, think instead of coming to see the principle of the awareness that we have of the world - of the consciousness that we know as nous - as for that very reason divine." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 186) [PSA: this is a much more naturalistic explanation of Aristotelian theology]

"[W]e risk being led to think that when Aristotle describes the first mover as unmoved, he means to suggest that it is inert and inactive. The danger is analogous to the more general danger that we will be led to think of an Aristotelian substance as an inert thing rather than as a determinate center of active being." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 207)

"God is spoken of with reference to nous - to thought or consciousness. This means, I will suggest, that our capacity to think of being is, like being itself, a godly thing. Aristotle ... see the awareness of the world, which permeates all life and is most explicit and sublime in human thinking, as one with being in its divinity. Thought, therefore, is both recognized as divine and used by Aristotle to represent the activity of the divine." (KOSMAN-2013, pp. 213-214)

"Aristotle then invokes the pleasure of perfected activity to explain the pleasure we take in cognitive awareness." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 214)

"[T]the assumption that the activity of divine being is thinking must result in part from the view that thinking is a paradigm instance of activity.... 'That which is capable of receiving what is thought of, that is, substance, is [the faculty of] thought. It {the faculty} is active when it grasps it {the entity/thinghood}, so that it is the latter {the faculty} rather than the former {the entity/thinghood} that is the divine which thought seems to involve, and active thinking (theoria) is most pleasant and best' (Metaphysics 12.7 1072b19-23). He then proceeds to tell us that 'if God always enjoys this well-being which we sometimes do, this is wonderful, and if {he enjoys} more than this, more wonderful yet' (Metaphysics 12.7 1072b24-25). Note the double transcendence that Aristotle attributes to divine activity.... [T]he remark underscores my earlier suggestion that we interpret Aristotle's attribution of thinking to the divine in light of what is in fact a reverse attribution: the attribution of divinity to thinking. Thought, as Aristotle puts it at the beginning of chapter 9, 'seems to be the most divine of phenomena' (Metaphysics 12.9 1074b16). So the claim that God thinks turns out to mean something like this: thinking is divine, and because thinking is divine it may be the clearest icon we have of divine being, of the principle whose essential nature is activity and on which depend heaven and earth. So we say that God thinks because (1) we understand consciousness to be divine, and because (2) we want to understand the self-directed activity that is divine, and thinking most revealingly represents this activity. Aristotle employs a similar strategy in the Nicomachean Ethics when arguing that the critical element in a happy life is active thought - theoria." (KOSMAN-2013, pp. 215-216) [PSA: to put it another way, the critical element in human fulfillment is awareness; compare this to the argument in Plato's Philebus.]

"[W]hat is divine about thought is its universal power, the fact that thought, by virtue of its ability to think of anything at all, is capable of assuming the being {of?} all things.... [T]he soul 'is in a sense all being' (DA III.8 431b21).... And it is most powerful because it is most versatile, most capable of assuming the being of its objects whatever they might be." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 218)

"[A]ctive thinking {awareness}, Aristotle insists, must belong to thought by virtue of itself and not by virtue of anything external to it. For if, although actively thinking of something, it is only determined in this activity by that thing it is thinking of, then that thing, so to speak, turns its thinking on, so that its *nature* will still not be activity.... 'If it thinks, but something else determines it [to think], then since that which constitutes its substance would be not thinking but being able to, it would not be the best substance. For it is because of thinking that worthiness {to timion} belongs to it' (Metaphysics 12.9 1074b18-21). To explain the divinity of thought, then, we must understand it as something that in its very nature is a faculty in operation, something that is active." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 219)

"[D]ivine thinking is, in some sense, a form of self-thinking.... [O]ur grasp of that sense ... is ill-served by construing *thought thinking itself* as thought thinking of itself, for divine thought is not its own object. Understanding this fact will enable us to see why Aristotle's assertation about thought that 'it thinks [of] itself ... and is a thinking thinking [of] thinking' (Metaphysics 12.9 1074b33-34) is not meant to signify a mode of reflective self-awareness." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 225)

"[A]ll cognition involves awareness of an object; but the aspect of it that is divine, the awareness, is independent of any particular object.... The thinking that is divine is both centered within itself and outward directed, and this means that the centeredness must be at once determinate and diaphanous. We have already learned this from the fact that first substance is pictured both as activity and as prime mover. Thus as energeia it is perfectly self-actualized and self-fulfilled activity whose only nature is activity, a principle upon which depend the being and the motion of the world. As mind it is transparent and self-present awareness, a principle upon which depend the cognitive power and activity of all that is alive. It is thus the principle of life, governing both of those features said at the beginning of the De Anima ... to characterize that which is alive: self-motion and perception, that is, awareness (DA I.2 403b26-27)." (KOSMAN-2013, pp. 228-229)

"[T]he assertion that thought thinks itself ... and the ensuing description of the activity of thought as a thinking that is the thinking of thinking ... does not refer to an act of reflective self-awareness. It signifies simply the internal self-presence that must characterize any act of cognition (whatever its object) insofar as it is an act of awareness.... [T]hought thinking itself signifies merely the activity of thinking, independent of the nature of its object and solely in terms of one central feature: the self-presence of the subject that is a condition of its consciousness." (KOSMAN-2013, pp. 229-230)

"Aristotle offers a description of thought as a cognitive reaching out that grasps the world in active awareness.... Consciousness reaches out toward a world other than itself which it posits as an object. But at the same time it involves a mode of self-awareness that is nonobjective, an awareness of the self in which the self as aware is not present to itself in the same mode as the posited object of consciousness." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 230) [PSA: note the connection to orexis as another form of reaching out, dependent on the primary reaching of awareness.]

"Thought as determinate receptivity, self-present and intentional, informs all of Aristotle's understanding of human awareness from perception to action to cognition.... [H]e recalls perhaps the art with which Plato, in the Charmides, reads that elusive virtue of sophrosune as the understanding of understanding - episteme epistemes." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 231) [PSA: this in turn is a form of gnothi sauton.]

"The discussion in Metaphysics 12 reveals to us that the principle of awareness, the formal and general power that characterizes animate being, is consciousness, the concomitant self-awareness and self-presence most abundantly expressed as divine thinking." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 232)

"Mind represents living substance's capacity to be determined by the object of consciousness while remaining itself, for the faculty of thought is the psychic power so to be determined without relinquishing determinate identity. This is what Aristotle means when he describes mind as impassive - apathes; it is incapable of being shaken in its identity (DA III.4 429a1-16; 430a18). It is this remarkable power of mind - the power to become all things and yet to remain steadfastly what it is - that makes it, I have argued, emblematic of the characteristic nature of substance." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 233)

Citing GA II.1 731b24-732a1 and DA 415a30-b1, Kosman comments: "The emulation of divinity thus takes place in Aristotle's view not only in the activity of thinking, but in the activity of reproduction as well, in the complex biological, social, and in our case, political and cultural acts by which substances pass on to their progeny the bounded activity of their mortal lives." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 234)

"Aristotle's concern with substance is a concern not with a kind of thing, but with a mode of being.... [W]e are to understand his attention to divine substance similarly not as an attention to some particular thing in or out of the world, but as an attention to being as divine, and in particular, to a mode of being that is divine." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 235)

"Our story might be as simple as this: knowing that substance is the paradigmatic form of being, and understanding now that substance is *the activity of those things that are able to be fully what they are, being what they are*, we understand being. Being is the activity of things' being what they are. Understanding the connection between substance and *activity*, given the paradigmatic status of substance, helps us to see Aristotle's ontology an an ontology that portrays *being as activity*. In thus identifying substance as the activity of a subject's being what it is, this story reveals with clarity the ontological centrality of activity." (KOSMAN-2013, p. 239)

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