Public Lecture: Jonathan Buttaci (Catholic University of America) 'Aristotle on the Priority of Energeia to Dynamis: Discovery and Spontaneous Generation as Problem Cases'

Abstract:

In Metaphysics Θ.8 Aristotle gives a series of arguments defending the priority of actuality or activity (energeia) to potentiality (dynamis). One of the chief arguments that energeia is prior both in being and in time is, as Aristotle often says, “man begets man.” Although dynamis temporally precedes energeia for an individual, nevertheless every human comes to be from an already existing human.1 Aristotle also discusses learning: although dynamis is first for the student, nevertheless the teacher already possesses the knowledge in energeia. Hence, too, an educated person comes to be from an educated person.2

In the next chapter, Θ.9, Aristotle raises two problem cases for the priority of energeia established in Θ.8. In this paper, I focus on the second problem case: learning by discovery.3 If the teacher’s prior knowledge explains the priority of energeia in learning, how can Aristotle accommodate or explain discovery in the absence of a teacher? Discovery seems to present a case where there is only prior dynamis, plausibly offering a counterexample to the immediately preceding arguments regarding the priority of energeia. I first show how Θ.9 must be read as raising and resolving this objection.

Secondly, to understand his solution I turn to Aristotle’s biological account of spontaneous generation. Just as with the absence of a teacher in discovery, in spontaneous generation there is also no agent already possessing the relevant form in act, i.e. no parent. In both cases something is raised from dynamis to energeia without any agent already bearing the relevant form in energeia: there is neither any prior actual knowledge nor any prior individual of a given kind. In both cases, however, Aristotle insists that there is some prior energeia. While this goes some way to resolving the problem, these prior energeiai nevertheless cannot be of the same form (homoeides) as what they produce.4 I examine this divergence from the more standard account described in Θ.8 and elsewhere in the Metaphysics.

Finally, in order to appreciate Aristotle’s solution for discovery in Θ.9, I consider places where this analogy with spontaneous generation breaks down. For example, sometimes the relevant prior energeia is already somehow present, latent in an already divided diagram much like how the agent of generation already exists in the residue from which certain things come to be spontaneously.5 But in Θ.9 Aristotle also considers when an inquirer makes a discovery precisely by acting on and manipulating some geometrical diagram. This latter case, I argue, is importantly different from spontaneous generation because this energeia is neither latent nor spontaneous but deliberate and methodical, therefore inviting another account: the intellectual agency of the inquirer is of a very special sort.