Victor Mansella Aristotles Physics Any complete philosophical system is still necessarily a provisional one in that each has

a use by date. But some are far from their expiration- Aristotles Physics, a first-of-its-kind sweeping analysis of the natural world that marks a turning point in the understanding of concepts like causality, potentiality and actuality (and how these and other important ideas form a coherent philosophy of nature) is one such example. Novel as the explanations in the Physics are, many other satisfying and respectable accounts of these ideas had been made before Aristotle and in the same spirit; Plato, for instance (of whom Aristotle was a student), along with his predecessors, had contributed the valuable insights (fragmentary as they sometimes were) that prepared the grounds for the new synthesis of ideas disclosed in the Physics and the Metaphysics. While addressing the same concerns as other great thinkers before him, Aristotle attacked them from a different angle; that is to say his methodological approach differed in an important way. In the Physics, the investigation concerns our knowledge of natural entities, which are considered by Aristotle to be all things hylomorphic (this term refers to a composite of matter and form). The matter and form of a thing respectively correspond to the material and formal causes of the thing (these are explained in more detail below). In a natural entity, which includes at least all of those that are available to our empirical sensibility, matter goeswith (is inseparable from) form. For Aristotles natural entities, form and matter are separable in account (i.e. in metaphysical speculation) but in actuality can only be properly described with reference to one another. Platos

transcendent forms, as unmanifested entities, are not hylomorphic, and so do not properly belong to Aristotles investigation of nature. A distinguishing feature of Aristotle as a natural philosopher is that he emphasizes the form as the more essential determining factor of a natural thing: Indeed, the form is the nature more than the matter is. (Phys. 193c 1) Aristotles teleological approach to explanation is the basis of this priority of form over matter, as exemplified in this passage from the Physics: What is it, then, that grows? Not what it is growing from, but what it is growing into. Therefore, the shape is the nature. (Phys. 193c 13-15) But this priority of form to matter does not in any way imply the separability of form and matter in the natural entity. Natural being depends both on what a thing grows from as well as what it grows into. So far we have grasped two essential causes of a natural thing: form and matter, or the material and formal causes. For Aristotle, we know a thing to the degree that we can account for its several cause(s): we think we do not have knowledge of a thing until we have grasped its why, that is to say, its cause (Phys. 194 b 1720). Aristotle was well read in similar investigations of causality found in the works of Plato and others; but for Aristotle, the explanations advanced by his predecessors were inadequate (or at least incomplete). Falcon explains: they [Aristotles predecessors] did not engage in their causal investigation with a firm grasp of these four causes. They lacked a complete understanding of the range of possible causes and their systematic interrelations. Put differently, and more boldly, their use of causality was not supported by an

adequate theory of causality. (Falcon, Andrea, "Aristotle on Causality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition). Aristotle insists on a fourfold formulation of causality to sufficiently account for the why of a thing: material, formal, efficient, and final. We find the material cause in the substance of the thing, which is itself formless and passive; the formal cause in the active template, or idea, that imposes its shape on that substance; the efficient cause in the specific agency that chooses or otherwise determines the various forms of substance; and the final cause in a things purpose, or that for the sake of which the entity exists. A useful illustration in understanding the four causes involves the building of a house. The bricks and wood out of which the house is built is the material cause; the builder of the house, in determining the form, is the efficient cause; the floor plan for the house is the formal cause, and its purpose as a place to live is the final cause. We can map the descriptive distinction of form and matter onto that of actuality and potentiality. Falcon remarks, As a rule there is a collaboration between these causes: matter provides the potentialities which are actualized by the form. (Falcon) The intuitive fact that what is actual is more determinant than what is possible once again emphasizes the hierarchical relationship between the two causes. The efficient and final causes of a thing might be understood as the limiting cases of potentiality for that thing; that is, they constrain the matters range of available possibilities in its process of becoming. Consider again the materials required for a house (wood, bricks, nails etc); these materials provide the potentiality of a completed house that could not be provided by materials like

silk or chewed-up plant leaves. Additional constraints are specified by the efficient and final causes- both the construction worker and the reason for which the house is being built ensure that the transformation of these materials will result in a house and not in a spider web or a bees nest. Aristotle calls upon these four separate causes to account for the why of artifacts or manufactured things, but the specification changes for self-created or natural things, which are animals and their parts, plants, and the simple bodies, such as earth, fire, air and water (Phys. 192 c 1112). For such organic things, all the above causes collapse into the formal and final. Consider yourself as an illustration; as a human being you are a natural, self-creating thing, and your purpose or reason to exist is to express humanness. Your formal cause is the form of humanness that is actively ingressing into the substance of what you are, and your efficient cause is the human form expressing itself in substance. This broadening of the notion of causality, often narrowly recognized only in terms of material and efficient causes, cozily accommodates Aristotles teleological understanding of nature. The crucial point is that for Aristotle, the essential feature of any explanation makes reference to the end or purpose (telos) of the thing explained. In the spirit of the Physics itself, the discussion so far has been concerned with the being of natural entities. The Physics only, and only due to its teleological flavor, makes an indirect reference to being qua being (being as far as being is concerned). Though this ultimate sense of being is dealt with exhaustively in the Metaphysics, it is also anticipated in the conclusion of the

Physics, where Aristotle addresses the principle of motion or change. This principle partially defines nature in virtue of its being common to everything and universal (Phys. 200b 12), and without an understanding of how it is essentially involved we cannot proceed to an understanding of special topics. Aristotles abovementioned mapping of actuality and potentially to form and matter is inconveniently not the same as his use of these terms in explaining motion and change. The distinction in the new context is not one of being but pertains instead to moving and being moved (Aristotle says of this that there are as many kinds of motion and change as there are of being (Phys. 201a 14-15)). In this context, Aristotle defines motion roughly as the actuality of a potentiality as such. Potentiality is part of a thing as either its form (quantity, quality, or place) or the privation of form. Motion is the actuality of a thing as movable, or in other words its potentiality as a thing moved. It is a continuous process; a thing is said to be in motion while its potentiality is being actualized. Because of this, an account of motion is necessarily difficult and awkward, as when Aristotle described it as the actuality of what is potentially F, whenever, being in actuality, it is active- not insofar as it is itself, but insofar as it is movable (Phys. 201a 2831). Any change is a result of motion in this way. To illustrate this point, a barrel of grape juice has the potentiality to be a barrel of wine. The actualization of its potentiality to be a barrel of wine is generally identified as motion and is particularly identified as the change that is undergone in the process of fermentation. The motion is properly captured in the transition to the new actuality rather than in the fact of its potential to become the new actuality.

For Aristotle change is motion, and motion (as the potentiality of a thing to be moved) may either be in accordance with the nature of the thing or in discordance with its nature. In the case of the former the change is of a natural kind, and in the latter of a forced kind. In either case a mover is necessarily involved, whether straightforwardly accounted for from the outside or as a hidden inner principle of motion or rest. This is because of Aristotles conception of matter as an abstract array of potentiality that does not provide its own motion. The following spatial metaphor should be treated poetically: motion is sourced outside of natural entities. But what is it that causes this mover to move natural entities? This special mover surely could not be subject to the same abovenamed fourfold model of causation Aristotle and his readers are at this point drawn to a curious conclusion: there must exist a mover that is itself unmoved. This is the unmoved mover. It contains within itself the source of motion- not of moving something or of causing motion, but of suffering it (Phys. 255b 29-31). It must not itself be affected by change, lest we would expect an infinite regress. It is itself eternal, as would be necessary in order to be immune to change. It engages in the highest kind of reality, the activity of thought and only the thought of itself, for that is the only activity by which it can move while remaining unmoved by all things external to it. It is the grand teleological concept that is the culmination of both the Physics and the Metaphysics, and for nearly 2,500 following years it has been variously refined, distorted, and aggressively translated to accommodate mankinds slow drift toward civilization.