Metaphysics

Overview

The Metaphysics is not a book. It is fourteen treatises of different dates, assembled by editors and given a title that means only “the ones after the Physics”, which is where they sat on the shelf. Aristotle calls the subject first philosophy or sometimes theology, never metaphysics.

It is the hardest text on this shelf, and it is uneven: Book II is a fragment, Book V is a dictionary, Books XIII and XIV rehearse an attack on Platonic numbers that few readers need. Nobody reads it cover to cover on a first encounter and you should not try.

What holds it together is one question asked in several ways. Everything that exists, exists in some particular manner, and the special sciences each take a slice: the physicist studies things that move, the mathematician things as quantities. Is there a discipline that studies things simply as beings? Aristotle says yes, and that it turns out to be the study of substance, and that the study of substance ends at something eternal.

The argument

Book I surveys the predecessors, Thales to Plato, and reads them all as groping toward his own four causes. It is the first history of philosophy ever written and it is not a neutral one.

Book IV establishes the subject. There is a science of being as being. Being is said in many ways, but not equivocally: healthy can describe a complexion, a diet or a climate, all related to one thing, health. So with being, and the one thing is substance. This book also contains the defence of the principle of non-contradiction. It cannot be demonstrated, because demonstration presupposes it. What Aristotle offers instead is elenctic: let the denier say one determinate thing, and in saying it he will rely on the principle he denies.

Books VII to IX are the centre, and the hardest. Book VII asks what substance is and tests four candidates: the substrate, the essence, the universal, the genus. The substrate looks promising until you strip away every property and are left with bare matter, which is nothing in particular. Universals cannot be substances, since substance is what is not said of something else. Aristotle settles on essence, the what-it-was-to-be of a thing, and identifies it with form. A bronze sphere is not the bronze and not the shape; it is the shape in the bronze, and the form is what makes it the thing it is.

Book IX introduces the distinction that does most of the work in later philosophy: potentiality and actuality. An acorn is potentially an oak. Seeing is the actuality of sight. Actuality is prior to potentiality in account, in time and in substance, because what is potential only becomes actual through something already actual.

Book XII takes this to the end. Motion is eternal, so there must be an eternal cause of motion. A cause that is itself moved needs a prior cause, so the first must be unmoved, and unmoved means having no potentiality at all, pure actuality. How does something unmoved cause motion? As an object of desire does: it moves without being moved. And what does it do? Being pure actuality, it must be thinking, and it cannot think anything less than itself, so it is thought thinking itself. Aristotle’s God is not aware of the world and did not make it.

How to read it

Do not start at Book I. Read Book IV chapters 1 and 2, then Book VII, then Book IX, then Book XII. That is the argument. If you are reading for a course, that is almost certainly the assignment.

Read the Physics first if you can, or at least learn the four causes: material, formal, efficient, final. The Metaphysics assumes them everywhere and explains them nowhere.

Accept Book VII as difficult rather than as badly written. It is a search that changes its mind in public, testing candidates and discarding them, and it does not announce which answer it has settled on. Tracking the question rather than hunting for a thesis is the only way through.

On translations: Sachs renders Aristotle’s coinages into plain English, so ousia becomes thinghood rather than substance and energeia becomes being-at-work. This is startling if you know the standard vocabulary and enormously clarifying if you do not, because the Latinate terms have accumulated meanings Aristotle never had. Ross, in the Barnes edition, is the standard and the one every citation assumes. Read Sachs to understand and keep Ross to hand for reference.

Watch for a live difficulty rather than a settled doctrine. Aristotle has argued that substance is form, and that individuals are what most deserve the name substance. But form is common to all members of a species, and what is common looks like a universal, which he has just ruled out. Whether he solves this is one of the oldest disputes in the field.

Questions it raises

• If the principle of non-contradiction cannot be proved, is Aristotle’s defence of it an argument or a demonstration that argument requires it?
• Is the essence of a thing discovered or decided? What makes one way of carving up the world the right one?
• Form individuates a thing and is shared by its species. Can both be true?
• The unmoved mover thinks only itself and does not know the world. What is left of it once Aquinas makes it providential?
• Potentiality and actuality explain change without Parmenides’ paradox. Do they explain it, or name it?
• Aristotle reads every predecessor as an imperfect version of himself. What does that tell you about the history in Book I?