For this week, I wanted to share some free-flowing thoughts on various points of interest that have been on my mind lately.

Matthew Levering says that “Anselm raises the possibility that there might be more than one nature that is inferior to no other nature. This would entail that the supreme natures be equals. But, as Anselm says, being equals means possessing something that is the same.” ¹ But, then, what differentiates them must be other than what makes them supreme, which just is inferiority.

Now, you might expect me to go after the language of ‘entailment’ in sentence (2): it just isn’t true that a multiplicity of unsurpassable natures entails that they are equals. But, I think he is right: given that there is “more than one,” they are collated and coordinate.

The problem, then, is not with the validity of Anselm’s logic, or the truth of his premises, but the relevance of his point: why exactly are we talking about “the possibility that there might be more than one…”? Why not, instead, about the possibility of non-coordinate, uncollated ultimate individuals?

This is the same mistake Ed Feser makes in premise (15) of his 50-proposition Aristotelian Argument:

“15. In order for there to be more than one purely actual actualizer, there would have to be some differentiating feature that one such actualizer has that the others lack.” ²

In this case, however, the polytheist has an additional point to make: Feser might actually be right to ask how many purely actual actualizers there are, as even Aristotle speculated 50 some, because purely actual actualizers are not Gods in the strictest sense, and so are fairly susceptible to such quantitative inquiries.

Why on earth should we think that? Well, one reason you might not guess from Feser’s work, especially as it includes an entire section on the “Neo-Platonic Proof of God” without mentioning it, is that what makes something divine in the strictest sense is prior to all such things as Being, Act, and Intellect, etc. On such a view as this, the Unmoved Mover, First Mover, or Purely Actual Actualizer, even at its best, would be something like the highest creature (whose discovery would still be a feat for the philosophy of nature). This seems to be the strategy of the Platonists, who took themselves to see a sense of unity that preceded even the unum that is convertible with Being. Thus, Plotinus will critique Aristotle in his Enneads V, ³ and Proclus will argue variously, such as in the body of proposition 115 of The Elements of Theology, that Unity precedes Being. ⁴

It is also intriguing that Feser calls his first argument “Aristotelian,” as it not only goes far beyond anything Aristotle said, but draws consequences seemingly at variance with Aristotle’s thought.

Obviously, Aristotle’s argument from motion never extended to existence, especially as he thought many things existed necessarily. But, that might seem to be a softball as he will say in Metaphysics XII.8 1074a33 rather explicitly that there is a first unmoved mover which must be one in definition and number–lest there be many of a ‘kind’ which involves having matter and potency. So, all motion ultimately derives from a numerically singular purely actual actualizer, including what we might call existential motion, or the motion of one’s potency to exist.

But what on earth is a potency to exist? What would Aristotle have thought?

Aristotle says that “the being-at-work-staying-itself of whatever is potentially, just as such, is motion, (Physics Bk. III, Ch. 1, 201a10). ⁵ This definition, Sachs tells us, has been misunderstood by almost everyone who wrote on it in the last thousand years. Even bracketing translation issues (from Greek, to Latin, to English), Sachs says that what Aristotle had in mind is at the very edges of intelligibility.

“Motion” is not definable as actuality, as that is static, nor as actualization, as that is just another way of saying motion, or a subset thereof. ⁶ This is, of course, bad news for the Thomist definition of motion as the reduction of potency to act, insofar as it is meant to define what Aristotle had in mind. Though, insofar as it is not targeting the same thing, it has no place in an “Aristotelian” proof, either.

Rather, Aristotle places motion in the class of what he calls entelecheia. This is a word that Aristotle makes up by “combining enteles (complete, full-grown) with echein (= hexis, to be a certain way by the continuing effort of holding on in that condition), while at the same time punning on endelecheia (persistence) by inserting telos (completion).” ⁷ Entelecheia, or ‘being-at-work-staying-itself’, forms for Aristotle one of the ultimate classes of things: everything is at work staying itself. It takes work to continually persist as the thing that one is.

As Sachs will say, this class comes to form a genus that contains two species: first, the being-at-work-staying-itself of a potency qua material, which we know as ousia, and second, the being-at-work-staying-itself of a potency qua potency, which we know as motion. ⁸ So, then, we have a definition of motion in terms of its proximate genus and its specific difference.

It is remarkable to think of motion as belonging to the same genus as ousia, making it just as fundamental or primary. But this sheds light on why Aristotle defines motion so broadly: all things are, for Aristotle, at continuous work staying-themselves. This is to say that a thing’s form is not a stillness amidst all the comings and goings of its matter; a static permanence throughout the flux, but rather a force that is stable in its ceaseless or restless application.

What does all this have to do with Feser’s attempt to extend Aristotle’s logic to a potency to exist? Well, the problem is that nothing has a potency except what exists: potency is part of a hylemorphic work of substance. So, a substance does not have an unactualized potency to exist: it already exists! It might have a potency to exist at this future time t1, or that one t2. But not at this very moment. Otherwise, it is in potency and act with respect to the same thing, at the same time, which Aristotle says is impossible.

Nor does it do any good to invoke prime matter, the normal location for substantial potency, because it cannot be that there is prime matter when something exists. The potency to exist right now, which is pivotal to Feser’s argument, seems more complicated, then, than surface appearance.

The only way to salvage this is perhaps to say there is a potency to exist, but not a passive one: it is an active potency in a cause to create or sustain a substance right now. But, of course, if you already have that, you don’t need a 50-proposition argument for God, right?

I could go on, but this seems rambly enough.

I will be attending (not as a contributor) The Greatest Philosophy Conference of All Time at Purdue next week, so I will probably not have a post up in time before I leave. Though, you should know that the next one in the chute examines in relation to polytheism Aquinas’ idea that “[w]hen the existence of a cause is demonstrated from an effect, this effect takes the place of the definition of the cause in proof of the cause’s existence.” ⁹

1. Matthew Levering, Proofs of God: Classical Arguments from Tertullian to Barth, (Grand Rapids: Baker
   Academic, 2016), 51. ↩︎
2. Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017), 36. ↩︎
3. Gerson, Lloyd P., et al., eds. Plotinus: The Enneads. Translated by George Boys-Stones, John M. Dillon, Lloyd P. Gerson, R.A. King, Andrew Smith, and James Wilberding, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), §5.6, 599-604.  ↩︎
4. Proclus, The Elements of Theology: A Revised Text with Translation, Introduction, and Commentary, (New York: Oxford University Press UK, 2004), 101. ↩︎
5. Joe Sachs, trans. Aristotle’s Physics: A Guided Study, (Rutgers University Press, 1995), 74. ↩︎
6. Joe Sachs, Aristotle’s Physics, 78. ↩︎
7. Joe Sachs, Aristotle’s Physics, 245. ↩︎
8. Joe Sachs, Aristotle’s Physics, 79. ↩︎
9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, Q. 2, A. 2, Rep. Obj. 2. https://isidore.co/aquinas/english/summa/FP/FP002.html#FPQ2A3THEP1 ↩︎