Kenny Anthony. Ancient Philosophy: A New History of Western Philosophy Volume 1
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points substances? Are numbers substances? But he addresses right away,
though in a roundabout manner, the great Platonic question: Are there
separate substances of any kind, distinct from those we can perceive with
our senses? (F 3. 1028b8–32).
Essence and Quiddity
We saw that in the Parmenides Plato introduced a form of predication per se:
S is P per se if being P is part of what it is to be S. Aristotle is keenly
interested in this form of predication. In the Categories it is predication in
the category of (second) substance. In the Metaphysics it is predication
that answers the question what kind of thing something is (ti esti). Some-
times Aristotle speaks of the ‘what-is-it?’ of a thing; and in the context
of the present discussion he often uses an almost untranslatable expression,
to ti en einai, composed of the deWnite article, the question ‘what-is-it?’
and the inWnitive of the verb ‘to be’. This translates literally as ‘the what-
is-it to be’ of a thing, i.e. the type of being that answers the question ‘What
is it?’
Latin commentators on Aristotle sometimes used the word ‘quidditas’ to
correspond to this Greek expression; the Latin question ‘Quid est?’ corres-
ponds to the Greek question ‘Ti esti’. Many English scholars use ‘essence’as
a translation. That is quite possible; but I shall take my cue from the Latin
and use the word ‘quiddity’. ‘Essence’ is, of course, itself a Latinism,
deriving from the Latin verb for being, ‘esse’, just as the Greek ‘ousia’
derives from the Greek word for being. There is good reason, however, to
stick with the traditional translation ‘substance’ for ‘ousia’. We can then
use the word ‘essence’ to cope with another crabbed Aristotelian construc-
tion. We can speak, for example, of the essence of gold where Aristotle
would speak of ‘the for-gold being’, using the inWnitive after the Greek
dative case, meaning ‘what it is for gold to be gold’. This last construction,
again, is descended from Plato’s concern with questions about what is and
what is not part of what being gold involves. For most purposes, ‘quiddity’
and ‘essence’ can be treated as synonyms.
With these preliminaries, we can state the agenda that Aristotle sets for
himself at the beginning of the central section of Metaphysics F. ‘Substance’,
he says, has four principal meanings: the quiddity , the universal, the genus,
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and the subject. He treats of each of these four items in later chapters: the
subject in chapter 3, the quiddity in chapters 4 and 5, the genus not until
chapter 12, and Wnally the universal in chapter 14.
The subject (to hypokeimenon) turns out to be the same as the Wrst substance
of the Categories: it is that of which everything is predicated and which is
itself predicated of nothing. Such Wrst substances, we are told, are compos-
ites of matter and form; in the way that a statue is related to its bronze and
its shape (1029a3–5): so much is familiar to us from the Physics. But matter is
not substance (because pure matter cannot exist alone; 1029a27), and if we
are to discover whether form is substance, we have to investigate its
relation to quiddity.
In treating of quiddity Aristotle makes use of a distinction he drew in his
lexicon in Metaphysics D (1017a7) between being per se (kath’auto) and being per
accidens (kata sumbebekos). I have already used these expressions in giving an
account of the Parmenides, though Plato’s Greek expressions are not quite
the same. The Latin phrases are simply transverbalizations of Aristotle’s
Greek expressions. It is futile to seek to render them into English, since the
meaning of any English equivalents, as of the Latin and Greek phrases,
would have to be gleaned from the contexts in which they occur. The
phrases are used in various contexts, for instance in that of causation. A
builder is a per se cause of a house: he builds it qua builder. But if the builder
happens also to be blind, then the headline ‘Blind man builds house’ gives
not the per se but the per accidens cause of the house.
The distinction is applied to the case of being in the following way.
Entities in all ten of the categories, he tells us, are examples of per se beings:
a thing’s colour or shape is as much a per se being as the thing itself (D 7.
1017a22). Clearly, the distinction between per se and per accidens is not the
same as that between substance and accident. Accidents, confusingly, are
per se beings. It is a substance-qualiWed-by-an-acci dent that is a per accidens
being. So while the wisdom of Socrates is a per se being, wise Socrates is not;
he is a being per accidens.
Aristotle uses his deWnition in deW ning quiddity: a quiddity is what a
thing is said to be per se. You may be a scholar, but you are not a scholar
per se as you are a person per se (F 4. 1029b15). ‘The scholar Theo phrastus’
names a per accidens being. However, ‘the man Theophrastus’ names a per se
being, and ‘Theophrastus is a man’ is a per se predication. Being a man is
the quiddity or essence of Theophrastus.
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A quiddity, we are further told, is what is given by a deWnition. This is
puzzling, for surely not only per se beings have deWnitions. No doubt, for
Aristotle, a postman would be a per accidens being: but can we not deWne
‘postman’ as ‘man who brings the post’ (cf. 1029b27)? Aristotle responds
that we do not always have a deWnition of X when we have a series of word s
equivalent to ‘X’: otherwise the whole epic would be a de W nition of the
word ‘Iliad’ (F 4. 1030a9). A deWnition must be in terms of species and
genus, and only such a deWnition will generate a quiddity (F 4. 1030a12).
Accidents as well as substances can be deWned in this way: we can ask
what ‘triangular’ means as well as asking what a hors e is. To allow for this
Aristotle is willing to soften his original strict account of deWnition.
‘DeWnition’, he says, like ‘being’, ‘quiddity’, and ‘essence’, are all analogous
terms: all four of them belong primarily only to substances, just as ‘health’
is predicated primarily of patients and only secondarily of medicines and
instruments. Secondarily, they can be applied to accidents, and thirdly
even to per accidens beings (F 4. 1030b1; 5. 1031a9).
Aristotle next asks: what is the relation between a thing and its quiddity?
His answer is that they are identical: and this takes us by surprise, since a
thing is surely concrete and a quiddity is surely abstract. His initial
justiWcation of his surprising claim is that a thing is surely the same
substance as itself, and a thing’s quiddity is called its substance. The
Categories seems to oVer a fairly straightforward way of sorting out the
mystery here: Socrates, for example, is identical with a Wrst substance, and
his quiddity is his second substance. But here in Metaphysics F Aristotle is
looking for the answer to the question, what is really meant by ‘second
substance’? In ‘Socrates is human’ what does ‘human’ signify?
The Wrst answer Aristotle considers is that of Plato: it stands for a
Humanity that is something distinct from Socrates. Aristotle uses a variant
of the Third Man argument to show that this will not do. If a horse was
distinct from its quiddity, the horse’s quiddity would have its own distinct
quiddity, and so on for ever. The chapter ends with the remark, ‘It is clear
then that for things that are primary and spoken of per se the thing and its
essence are one and the same’ (F 6. 1032a8).
What this seems to mean is this. In a sentence such as ‘Socrates is wise’
the word ‘wise’ signiWes an accident, the wisdom of Socrates, which is
distinct from Socrates. But in ‘Socrates is human’ the word ‘human’ does
not signify anything distinct from Socrates himself. We need to distinguish
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between Socrates and his wisdom because they have two di Verent histories:
as Socrates gets older, Socrates’ wisdom may increase or perhaps evaporate.
But Socrates and his humanity do not have two diVerent histories: to be
Socrates is to be human, and if Socrates ceases to be a human being he
ceases to exist.
But is there not still the diVerence between concrete and abstract to be
taken account of ? Aristotle helps us with this in his discussion of coming-
into-being in chapters 7 and 8, where he makes the point that when a thing
comes into being, neither its form nor its quiddity begins to exist. Using his
long-overworked analogy, he says that if I manufacture a bronze sphere, I
do not thereby make either the bronze or the spherical shape. He goes on
to generalize:
What comes into existence must always be divisible, and there must be two
identiWable components, one matter and the other form. ...it is clear from
what has been said that the part which is called form or substance does not
come into existence; what comes into existence is the composite entity which
bears its name. ( F 8. 1033b16–19)
He goes on to draw an anti-Platonic conclusion: if everyday enmattered
forms do not come into existence at all, there is no need to invoke separate,
Ideal, Forms to explain how forms come into existence (F 8. 1033b26).
We do not even need to invoke Forms to explain how an individual
substance gets its form. Human beings derive their form not from an Ideal
Human, but from their parents (F 8. 1033 b 32). The father (plu s the mother,
though Aristotle was ignorant of this) is responsible for introducing form
into the appropriate matter. ‘The Wnal product, a form of such-and-such a
kind in this Xesh and these bones, is Callias or Socrates. What makes them
distinct is their matter, which is distinct; but they are the same in form (for
that is not subdivided)’ (F 8. 1034a8). In this passage Aristotle enunciates a
thesis that was to have a long history, namely the thesis that matter is the
principle of individuation. According to this thesis, however diVerent two
things may be from each other, it is not the diVerences between their
properties or characteristics that make them distinct from each other. For
it is possible for things to resemble each other totally without being
identical with each other. Two peas, for instance, however alike they are,
are two peas and not one pea because they are two diVerent parcels of
matter.
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In some places Aristotle identiWes form and quiddity (e.g. F 7. 1032a33)
and he goes on to say that in the case of humans and other animals,
the form and the quiddity are to be identiWed with the soul (F 10. 1035b14).
This presents a problem: if the soul is the quiddity, and the quiddity is
the same as what has the quiddity, does this mean that Socrates is
identical with Socrates’ soul? Aristotle seems brieXy ready to contemplate
this possibility (F 11. 1037a8), but that is not his considered opinion, and
he goes on to qualify his identiWcation of soul, form, and quiddity. ‘Man
and horse and whatever is predicated universally of individuals are not
substance. Substance is the composite of this deWnition and this matter
taken universally’ (F 10. 1035b27). That means that having Xesh and
blood is indeed part of being human; but having this particular Xesh
and blood is not part of being human. It is part, however, of being
Socrates.
We may wonder what is the relationship between the pair matter–form
and the pair body–soul. Aristotle at F 11. 1037a5 says that an animal is
composed of body and soul, and he clearly identiWes body with matter, but
at that point he says not that the soul is form, but that it is Wrst substance.
He goes on shortly afterwards to say that the primary substance is the form
inherent in the thing, and that substance (of another kind) is the compos -
ite of this and the matter (F 11. 1037a29). To make this cohere with his
earlier teaching, we have to assume that he is here calling ‘Wrst substance’
what in the Categories he called ‘second substance’!
We are left, however, with a serious problem. In studying an
earlier passage of the Metaphysics we had good reason to conclude that
Aristotle was teaching that in ‘Socrates is human’ the predicate ‘human’
signiWed nothing other than Socrates. Now it seems to be suggested that it
signiWes Socrat es’ form or soul: it is that which provides the deWnition of
Socrates, and it is here being distinguished from Socrates’ matter. Socrates’
body is clearly part of Socrates: but is it part of Socrates’ deWnition or
quiddity?
Some light is thrown on this by Aristotle’s treatment of deWnition.
DeWnitions have parts, and the substances they deWne also have parts:
Aristotle takes a chapter to explain that if A is a part of X this does not
always mean that the deWnition of A has to be part of the deWnition of X.
(You don’t have to mention an acute angle in deWning a right angle; just
the reverse, in fact; F 11. 1035b
6.) The deWnition has to mention parts of the
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form, but not parts of the matter. Parts of the form are to be identiW ed by
the method of deWnition by division, into genus and species, that we met in
Plato’s later dialogues.
We can now see why it is misguided to ask whether Socrates’ body is part
of his quiddity. Body and soul are parts of Socrates (parts of a rather special
kind, as will be explained in the next chapter). Being rational and being
animal are parts of the quiddity of Socrates, and being animal includes
having a body (an organic body of a particular kind). But having a body is not at
all the same as a body. To ask whether Socrates’ body is part of his quiddity is
to fall into the confusion of concrete and abstract of which we were earlier
tempted to accuse Aristotle himself. On the other hand, we must say
something similar about soul. The soul cannot simply be identiWed with
the quiddity, as Ari stotle sometimes incautiously suggests: to be human is to
have a soul of an appropriate kind incarnate in an organic body.
We have done our best to make sense of the doctrine of substance in the
Metaphysics. The topic was introduced by Aristotle as a method of answering
the fundamental question, What is being? It is now time to address that
question frontally.
Being and Existence
It is clear that Aristotle uses the expression to on in the same manner as
Parmenides: Being is whatever is anything whatever. Whenever Aristotle
explains its meaning he does so by explaining the sense of the Greek verb
‘to be’ (e.g. D 7. 1017a6 V.; F 2. 1028a19 V.).
Being contains whatever items can be the subjects of true sentences
containing the word ‘is’, whether or not the ‘is’ is followed by a predicate.
Both ‘Socrates is’ and ‘Socrates is wise’ tell us something about Being.
Predicates in all the categories, Aristotle tells us, signify being, because any
verb can be replaced by a predicate that will contain the copula ‘is’:
‘Socrates runs’, for instance, can be replaced by ‘Socrates is a runner’.
Every being in any category other than substance is a property or mod-
iWcation of substance. That is why the study of substance is the way to
understand the nature of Being.
With Aristotle, as with Parmenides, it is a mistake to equate being with
existence. In the dictionary entry for ‘being’ in the philosophical lexicon
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Metaphysics D existence is not even mentioned as one of the senses of the
word. This is surprising, for from time to time in his logical works he seems
to have identiWed it as a special sense. Thus in Sophistical Refutations he makes
the point that ‘to be something is not the same as to be, period’, i.e. to be
and to be F are not the same (5. 167a 2). He uses this principle to dissolve
fallacious inferences such as ‘What is not is, because what is not is thought
of’ or ‘X is not, because X is not a man’. He makes a similar move in
connection with the being F of that which has ceased to be: e.g. from
‘Homer is a poet’ it does not follow that he is (Int. 11. 21a25).
In a famous passage of Posterior Analytics (11. 7. 92b14) Aristotle says ‘to be is
not part of the substance (ousia) of anything, because what is (to on) is not a
genus’. This can be taken as saying that existence is not part of the essence
of anything: i.e. that there is such a thing is not what anything is. If that is what
it means, then it deserves the compliment paid by Schopenhauer when he
said that with prophetic insight Aristotle forestalled the Ontological Argu-
ment.3 But it is not clear that this is the only sense that can be given to the
passage.
The premiss that to on is not a genus need not mean that there is no such
kind of thing as the things that there are, true though that may be. Aristotle
elsewhere argues that being is not a genus because a genus is diVerentiated
into species by diVerences that are distinct from it, whereas any diVerentia
is a being of some kind (Metaph. B 3. 998b21). The clearest case where ‘be’
must mean ‘exist’ is when it is attached to ‘entia per accidens’: when he says
‘wise Socrates is’ and distinguishes it from ‘Socrates is wise’ he can hardly
mean anything else than that wise Socrates exists, and is among the things
that there are. It is much more diYcult to decide, when Aristotle writes
simply ‘Socrates is’, whether this means that Socrates exists or that Socrates
is a subject of predication: we cannot pin him down to the distinction that
seems so clear to us between the copula ‘is’ and the ‘is’ of existence.
When ‘is’ does occur as a copula, joining subject and predicate, we may ask
what it signiWes. Two possible accounts are suggested by the Aristotelian
texts. One is that it has no signiWcation: it is a n incomplete symbol, not to be
construed by itself, but to be taken with the predicate-term that follows it, so
that ‘...is white’ is to be taken as standing for the accidental form being
3 See G. E. M. Anscombe, in Anscombe and P. T. Geach, Three Philosophers (Oxford: Blackwell,
1961), 20–1.
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‘white’. There will then be no general answer to the question what ‘is’
denotes, but there will in general be an answer to the question what ‘ . . . is P’
denotes, namely an entity in one of the ten categories.
The other, which is easier to Wt to the texts, is that it stands for being ,
where ‘being’ is to be taken as a verbal noun like ‘running’. If we say this, it
seems that we must add that there are various types of being: the being that
is denoted by ‘is’ in the substantial predicate ‘...is a horse’ is substantial
being, whereas the being that is denoted by ‘is’ in the accidental predicate
‘...iswhite’ is accidental being of a kind corresponding to the category of
quality. Further, more detailed, diVerence can be drawn between diVerent
kinds of being and therefore diVerent senses of ‘is’.
A passage that strongly supports this reading is the second chapter of
Metaph. H. Here Aristotle says that there are many ways in which things
diVer from each other. Sometimes it is because there are diVe rent ways in
which their components are combined: sometimes these are mingled, as in
a punch, sometimes they are tied together, as in a sheaf, sometimes they
are glued together, as in a book. Sometimes the diVerence is one of
position: a stone block may be a threshold or a lintel according as it is
above or below a door. Time makes the diVerence between breakfast and
supper, and direction makes the diVerence between one wind and another.
He goes on to say that ‘is’ is said in as many diVerent senses. A threshold is
because it is placed in such and such a position, and so its being is to be so
placed. For ice to be is for it to be solidiWed in such and such a way (G 3.
1043b15 V.).
While it is a mistake to look to Aristotle’s treatment of being for an
account of existence, it would be wrong to think that he is unaware of the
issues that have exercised philosophers in this area. When philosophers ask
themselves which things really exist and which do not, they may be
worrying about the contrast between the concrete and the abstract (e.g.
Socrates v. wis dom, Socrates v. humanity), or the contrast between the
Wctional and the factual (e.g. Pegasus v. Bucephalus), or the contrast
between the extant and the defunct (the Great Pyramid v. the Pharos of
Alexandria). In diVerent places Aristotle treats of all three problems.
We have seen at length how Aristotle deals with abstractions by intro-
ducing the categories. Accidents are modiWcations of substance, so that
statements about abstractions, such as colours, actions, and changes, are
analysable into ones about Wrst substances. Predicates in the category of
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substance, on the other hand, do not involve the existence of any entity—
such as a Form of Humanity—distinct from the individual substance of the
appropriate kind.
Aristotle provides himself with the means to deal with the
problems about Wctions by introducing a sense of ‘is’ in which it
means ‘is true’ (D 7. 1017a31). A Wction is a genuine thought, but it is not,
i.e. is not true. With regard to the extant and the defunct, Aristotle
solves problems about things that come into existence and go out of
existence by means of the doctrine of matter and form. To exist is to be
matter under a certain form, to be a thing of a certain kind. Socrates ceases
to exist if he ceases to possess his form, that is, if he ceases to be a human
being.
We have still not explicitly considered the most important of Aristotle’s
contributions to metaphysics, namely the doctrine of actuality and poten-
tiality. If we consider any item, from a pint of milk to a policeman, we shall
Wnd a number of things true of that item and a number of other things
which, though not at that time true of it, can become true of it at some
other time. Thus, the pint of liquid is milk, but it can be turned into butter;
the policeman is fat, prone, and speaks only English, but if he wants to he
can become slim, start mowing the lawn, and learn French. The things that
something currently is, or is doing, are called by Aristotle its actualities
(energeiai); the things that it can be, or can do, are its potentialities (dynameis).
Thus the liquid is actually milk but potentially butter; the policeman is
actually fat but potentially slim; and so on. Potentiality, in contrast to
actuality, is the ability to undergo a change of some kind, whether through
one’s own action or through the action of other agents upon oneself.
A change from fat to slim is an accidental change: in such a case a substance
has the potentiality to be now F and now not F. A change, however, from
milk to butter would be, for Aristotle, a substantial change. It is not the
substance, but the matter, that has the potentiality to take on diVerent
substantial forms.
Of course in studying the pairs matter–form and substance–accident, we
have in fact become acquainted with particular types of potentiality and
actuality. The importance of the analysis in the history of metaphysics is
that Aristotle saw it as a way of disarming the challenges of Parmenides,
Heraclitus, and Plato. The early metaphysician s had spelt out the paradoxes
that could be generated either by saying that being came from being, or
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that being came from non-being. Aristotle wants to cut between the two by
saying that actual being comes from potential being. This, of course, is not
a magic formula that will dissolve all philosophical puzzlement: but it is an
appropriate template in which to insert detailed analyses of diVerent types
of possible change.
Aristotle did not call his own investigations ‘Metaphysics’; that name
initially just meant ‘After Physics’ and was given it by his editors to mark
the text’s place in the corpus. He does, however, say that there is a
discipline ‘which theorizes about Being qua being, and the things which
belong to Being taken in itself’ (C 1. 1003a21). This discipline is called ‘Wrst
philosophy’, and it interests itself in Wrst principles and supreme causes.
Aristotle seems to give two conXicting accounts of its subject matter: one
that, unlike the special sciences, it deals with Being as a whole; the other
that it deals with a particular kind of being, namely divine, independent,
and immutable substance (for this reason he sometimes calls it ‘theology’).
Are we to say that these are two diVerent accounts of Being qua being?
No: there is no such thing as Being qua being: there are only diVerent
ways of studying Being. You can study Being qua being, but that is not
to study a mysterious object but rather to undertake a particular sort
of study. This study, like all Aristotelian sciences, is an inquiry into
causes: and when we study Being qua being we are looking for the most
universal and primary causes. Contrast this with the other disciplines:
when we study human physiology, we study humans qua animals, that
is to say we study the structures and functions that humans have in
common with animals. But of course there is no such entity as a human
qua animal.
To study something as a being is to study it in virtue of what it has
in common with all other things. (Precious little, you might think: and
Aristotle himself says, as we have seen, that nothing can have being as
its essence or nature.) But a study of the universe as being is to study it
as a single overarching system embracing all the causes of things
coming into being and remaining in existence. At the supreme point
of the hierarchy of Aristotelian causes—as we shall see more fully in
Chapter 9—are the heavenly moved and unmoved movers that are the
Wnal causes of all generation and corruption. When Aristotle says that
Wrst philosophy studies the whole of Being, he is assigning to it the Weld
it is to explain; when he says that it is the science of the divine, he is
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