Aristotle’s Unexplored Discovery: Being as Implication

Parmenides’ thoughts on the nature of Being painted the nature of reality as monistic and unchanging, derived from the axiom of “nothing can come from nothing.” Aristotle’s reply to Parmenides’ views on change allowed for breakthroughs in the history of human thought. Some of these have been explored thoroughly by scholars in the field. Others, such as his discovery of “Being as implication,” have only recently received somewhat proper attention. Let us explore these here.

Philosophers are not ahistorical entities. They are produced by history. Before they can even think about becoming a philosopher, each philosopher is flung into a world with its own historically distinctive problematics. As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard describes in his 1949 Le Rationalisme appliqué, these problematics consist of “not simply a set of questions; [but] rather the matrix or the angle from which it will become possible and even necessary to formulate a certain number of precise problems.”

Aristotle does not escape this universal condition. He is thrown into a world where the problem of being, expressed through a variety of sub-forms, such as the problems of change, the one and the many, and others, shapes the atmosphere of intellectual discourse.

The good philosopher is often the one who allows for significant breakthroughs in the problems they were born into. They’re the ones that develop, on the basis of what is already present, the new series of questions and concepts that will mold the problems of the following generation. I would like to explore how Aristotle does this with the question of change and how in doing so, he discovers—in a form that is yet to be properly enunciated explicitly—a new mode of conceptualizing being.

The Unspeakable and Unthinkable  

In his poem On Nature, written in dactylic hexameters, Parmenides will provide one of the most historically significant challenges to the reality of the ‘many’ and change. As is the case with all of the pre-Socratics, what we have available are, of course, mere fragments. “The one way,” Parmenides says in Fragment 5, “that It Is (esti) and cannot not-be, is the way of credibility based on truth. The other way, that It Is Not and that not-being must be, cannot be grasped by the mind; for you cannot know not-being and cannot express it.” He continues in Fragment 7:

“There remains, then, but one word by which to express the [true] road: Is. And on this road there are many signs that What Is has no beginning and never will be destroyed: it is whole, still, and without end. It neither was nor will be, it simply is — now, altogether, one, continuous. How could you go about investigating its birth? How and whence could it have grown? I shall not allow you to say or think of it as coming from not-being, for it is impossible to say or think that not-being is. Besides, what could have stirred up activity so that it should arise from not-being later rather than earlier?

Necessarily therefore, either it simply Is or it simply Is Not. Strong conviction will not let us think that anything springs from Being except itself. Justice does not loosen her fetters to let Being be born or destroyed, but holds them fast. Thus our decision must be made in these terms: Is or Is Not. Surely by now we agree that it is necessary to reject the unthinkable unsayable path as untrue and to affirm the alternative as the path of reality and truth (my emphasis).”

Accepting the notion of change and the multiplicity of being is characteristic, for Parmenides and the Eleatics, of the “way of opinion.” Nonbeing is unthinkable and unsayable; therefore, it is not. This is a simple yet powerful argument. How can nothing (or nonbeing), a concept so quotidianly present in our societies, be pregnant with such a contradiction? Or is the contradiction only apparent?

First, let us explore how we think of non-being and being.

Let us take being first, as nonbeing is understood only in reference to what it is not, i.e., being. The question of Being, from its initial formulation onwards, has always been rooted in our ability to think about that which is constant and present. When Thales says all is water, the question of being is implied in the following form: What is all that is? Or, in more concrete/specific terms, what is that which is constantly present in the plurality manifested in the world? Thales’ answer, water, holds that it is precisely this primal material substance that is constantly or consistently present in all things.

Being, as Heidegger notes in Being and Time, has been regularly understood in terms of presence, “Being as presence-at-hand” (Vorhandenheit).

The Positive in Non-Being

In understanding being-as-presence, nonbeing takes the form of absence, the negation of the presence of being. The question we must now ask is: is this non-being qua absence devoid of positive content, and hence, truly unthinkable and unsayable? Or is it the case, as we find in G. W. F. Hegel, that “the negative is just as much positive?”

Let us look at an example Jean-Paul Sartre provides in Being and Nothingness:

“I have an appointment with Pierre at four o’clock. I arrive at the café a quarter of an hour late. Pierre is always punctual. Will he have waited for me? I look at the room, the patrons, and I say, ‘He is not here.’ Is there an intuition of Pierre’s absence, or does negation indeed enter in only with judgment? At first sight it seems absurd to speak here of intuition since to be exact there could not be an intuition of nothing and since the absence of Pierre is this nothing. Popular consciousness, however, bears witness to this intuition. Do we not say, for example, ‘I suddenly saw that he was not there.’ Is this just a matter of misplacing the negation?”

It is clear here that Pierre’s absence, although a negation of presence, contains a positive content. It is a felt absence, just like the sudden absence of café denizens who were part of the resistance movement during the Nazi occupation of France is a felt absence.

As Sartre puts it, “the necessary condition for our saying not is that non-being be a perpetual presence in us and outside of us, that nothingness haunt being.”

The contradiction Parmenides finds in nonbeing is rooted in his abstract treatment of both being and nonbeing. This abstraction of pure being and nonbeing produces when carried to its logical conclusion, an understanding of the identity of being and nonbeing. Being qua one and indeterminate finds itself, in Parmenides’s hands, indistinguishable from nonbeing.

This is the basic conclusion we find in Hegel’s first movement in logic. It is what allows us to move forward into the category of becoming (the mode being is already understood through in Heraclitus), and with that, determinate being.

On the Impossibility of Change 

Parmenides’s treatment of nonbeing sets the ground up for his rejection of change. C. J. Wolfe has summarized this argument pithily:

Parmenides’ line of argument is as follows. Change is coming into being. If something comes into being, it comes into being from something that existed before. What was it before? There are only two possibilities which make up the Parmenides problem:

1. Either, Being comes from being.

2. Or, Being comes from nonbeing.

If Premise #1 is correct and being comes from being, in that case, the same thing exists before and after, and no change occurs. If #2 is correct and being comes from nonbeing, then nothing comes to be. Nothing comes from nothing, after all, so no change occurs. The conclusion is that there is no such thing as non-being and no such thing as change. The world is all one being, and there is no division into separate individual beings that interact and change.

For Parmenides, therefore, nothing comes from nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit). Perhaps this is true of the abstract and empty form through which he understands nonbeing. But when this nonbeing is tarried with, it shows the positive in the negative and the negative in the positive. It shows, in other words, the dialectic of being and non-being. The constant presence of being qua becoming. A presence is understood as a continuous process of coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.

However, what form or structure does this coming and ceasing take? Can a chicken egg cease-to-be and allow for the coming-to-be of a horse? Clearly not. So, how can we concretize, i.e., how can we understand the complexities of being qua becoming? This is where Aristotle breaks through the problems he was thrown into.

Aristotle’s reply to Parmenides, as it is found in his Physics, starts with extracting what rational kernel existed in Parmenides’s thesis. For Parmenides, as we have stated, change can only ever be an illusory fault in our understanding. Change implies a process in which the many, the plurality of the cosmos, unfolds itself into the world. Parmenides stands on the side of permanence. What is really real, what is true, is being—permanent and eternal.

Aristotle, in concretizing our understanding of being qua becoming, observes how every process of change necessarily sustains something from the previous state. Every process of change, of coming-to-be (gignesthai) and ceasing-to-be, retains something from that which has ceased-to-be. “In every case,” Aristotle notes, there is “something that underlies from which proceeds that which comes to be.” Whenever one thing turns into another, something always remains the same. Parmenides, according to Aristotle, “exaggerated the consequence of this.”

As he writes:

“The first of those who studied science were misled in their search for truth and the nature of things by their inexperience, which, as it were, thrust them into another path. So they say that none of the things either come to be or pass out of existence because what comes to be must do so either from what is or from what is not, both of which are impossible. For what is cannot come to be (because it is already), and from what is not, nothing could have come to be (because something must be present as a substratum). So, they exaggerated the consequence of this and went so far as to deny even the existence of a plurality of things, maintaining that only Being itself is. Such was their opinion, and such was the reason for its adoption.”

At the core of Parmenides’s failure, Aristotle holds, is the inability (as we mentioned above) to see how “a thing may ‘come to be from what is not’–that is, in a qualified sense… For a thing comes to be from the privation, which in its own nature is not-being, – this not surviving as a constituent of the result.”

“Being does not come to be,” Aristotle argues, “except in a qualified sense.”

Therefore, while Aristotle is in agreement “in holding that nothing can be said without qualification to come from what is not,” in every instance in the real-world, things constantly come-to-be from what is not, or at least, what is not-yet. It is, as an existential copula, ought to be thought of here as presence. To say that a thing comes from what it is not in a qualified sense is akin to saying that a thing comes-to-be present from what is currently non-present.

However, Aristotle holds that there is another way of “solving this difficulty,” and it is done through the concepts of potentiality and actuality (and, we can add, substance and accident since they’re implied in an appropriate understanding of potency and act) developed in his Metaphysics. Here is where he truly tears through the problems of his day and concretizes our understanding of becoming and change (genesis).

Accidental Change 

Aristotle writes that “things are said to ‘be’ 1- in an accidental sense, 2- by their own nature.” To be in an accidental sense is not, as we understand the term today, to be in a mistaken sense. Aristotle is not referring to Bob Ross’s “happy accidents” here. Of course, there are points of connection between the way Aristotle employs the terms and the way we do them.

If I say, “Carlos is a philosopher,” philosopher is here an accidental property of “Carlos.” It is an attribute of Carlos; its current existence is dependent on being in such a state. “Carlos” could very well exist without the attribute of “philosopher” (although, knowing myself, this would be highly unlikely). Out of the things employed in the sentence, “Carlos is a philosopher,” Aristotle would hold that “one is an accident of another… because that to which the attribute belongs is.”

Accidental properties, in short, are those that can be transformed while leaving the substratum fundamentally the same as it was before. In his Categories, Aristotle lists nine of these: quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, or affection.

One can change each of these accidental properties of a thing and leave the thing qua the type of thing it is unchanged. In accidental change, therefore, the accidental properties of a thing are transformed, while the substance of that thing, i.e., that which makes it the type of thing it is, is sustained. William Norris Clarke puts it in the following concise manner: “a transition from one real mode of being to another remaining within the same identical being, i.e., its essential self-identity remaining intact.”

Accidental properties are those which are dependent on something else for their existence. What is this something else whose existence is presupposed in the investigation of accidental properties? Aristotle’s answer is substance.

“Substance, in the truest and primary and most definite sense of the word, is that which is neither predicable of a subject nor present in a subject; for instance, the individual man or horse…It is a distinctive mark of substance, that, while remaining numerically one and the same, it is capable of admitting contrary qualities, the modification taking place through a change in the substance itself.”

While in the Categories, Aristotle treats substance in two forms (primary substance as an individual, e.g., an individual man, and secondary substance as species and genus—each dependent on primary substances, e.g., human beings or animals), in his Metaphysics he does it in four:

“We call ‘substance’ (1) the simple bodies, i.e., earth and fire and water and everything of the sort, and in general bodies and the things composed of them, both animals and divine beings, and the parts of these. All these are called substance because they are not predicated of a subject but everything else is predicated of them.-(2) That which, being present in such things as are not predicated of a subject, is the cause of their being, as the soul is of the being of an animal.-(3) The parts which are present in such things, limiting them and marking them as individuals, and by whose destruction the whole is destroyed, as the body is by the destruction of the plane, as some say, and the plane by the destruction of the line; and in general number is thought by some to be of this nature; for if it is destroyed, they say, nothing exists, and it limits all things.-(4) The essence, the formula of which is a definition, is also called the substance of each thing.”

The Types of Substance

He divides these four into two senses of substance: “(A) ultimate substratum, which is no longer predicated of anything else, and (B) that which, being a ‘this,’ is also separable and of this nature is the shape or form of each thing.”

Here, Aristotle is combining the tradition of the early presocratics’s focus on answering the question of Being through appeals to some basic element (this is a position that reaches its culmination in Empedocles and the qualitative pluralists) and the Platonic tradition of answering the question of Being with forms. In his understanding of (A), he treats substances as material substratum. It is in his understanding of (B) that, when applied to the real things in the world, the ingenious notion of substantial form arises as that actualized unity of form (morphe) and matter (hyle).

What is Preserved in Change 

By introducing the categories of substance and accident, Aristotle allows us to see how, in every type of change, something is always preserved and something transformed. In substantial change, a thing as the type of thing it is is destroyed. It is a “transition from one real mode of being to another such that the being at the end of the change is no longer the same being but a different one, either a different individual of the same species or more usually a being of an essentially different kind.”

The matter that took form (substantial form) to be that type of thing, however, is preserved. It goes on to take a new form. As it is put in Jostein Gaarder’s hit philosophical novel, Sophie’s World, “A hydrogen atom in a cell at the end of my nose was once part of an elephant’s trunk. A carbon atom in my cardiac muscle was once in the tail of a dinosaur.”

On the contrary, in accidental change, the non-essential factors of a thing are transformed. The thing as the type of thing it is is preserved; the accidental properties are transformed. Gaarder’s elephant, for instance, would stay substantially the same even if, following a warm bath, the darker hue it took on thanks to its dirt-covered body is removed and its appearance is lightened.

With the understanding of substance and accident and the different forms of change produced when one or the other is transformed while leaving one or the other intact, Aristotle helps us concretize the understanding of change. The process of becoming, of an endless coming and ceasing to be, has been refined. It is not just a random, chaotic process.

The categories of substance and accident enhance our understanding of change-in-general by categorizing it into two types. However, this doesn’t yet fully answer the riddle as to how something can come from nothing in a qualified sense. To fully grasp this, we must move on to the categories of potency and act, “the structure underlying and helping to explain all change.”

For Aristotle, potency can have a “variety of meanings”:

“‘Potency’ means (1) a source of movement or change, which is in another thing than the thing moved or in the same thing qua other; e.g., the art of building is a potency which is not in the thing built, while the art of healing, which is a potency, may be in the man healed, but not in him qua healed. ‘Potency’ then means the source, in general, of change or movement in another thing or in the same thing qua other, and also (2) the source of a thing’s being moved by another thing or by itself qua other. For in virtue of that principle, in virtue of which a patient suffers anything, we call it ‘capable’ of suffering; and this we do sometimes if it suffers anything at all, sometimes not in respect of everything it suffers, but only if it suffers a change for the better–(3) The capacity of performing this well or according to intention; for sometimes we say of those who merely can walk or speak but not well or not as they intend, that they cannot speak or walk. So too (4) in the case of passivity–(5) The states in virtue of which things are absolutely impassive or unchangeable, or not easily changed for the worse, are called potencies; for things are broken and crushed and bent and in general destroyed not by having a potency but by not having one and by lacking something, and things are impassive with respect to such processes if they are scarcely and slightly affected by them, because of a ‘potency’ and because they ‘can’ do something and are in some positive state.”

Further Explanation on Potency

In essence, potency refers to the potential that something has as that type of thing. While it is true that matter is to potential as form is to actual, there is a sense in which substantial form sets the boundaries, the horizon, of potency since the secondary substance of a thing works as a limiting force, that which sets the parameters of the possible for the infinite potential of matter. It is by this interconnection of what is within and outside the reach of a thing qua the type of thing it is that potency is defined.

Take “Carlos,” a primary substance that has its secondary substance, “human being,” his potential will never go beyond that of his species (secondary substance). Carlos won’t be able to magically develop feathers and the needed qualities to fly. It is outside of his power; it is not a potential that can be realized. The potency of a thing delimits its possibilities for change. It determines what can and cannot become actual, i.e., obtain a form of being qua presence.

Employing the New Conceptual Tools

So, now the categories for answering the question we posed earlier are present. A chicken egg cannot crack open a horse because it is outside of the potential of a chicken (and a chicken egg as a chicken in an embryonic form) to give rise to a whole other species. A chicken egg can produce a wide range of different chickens (assuming one is unaware of the egg’s lineage), but it will never produce something that is not a chicken. It is outside of its spheres of possibility.

All change, therefore, is a process of actualizing something that was potentially. What is present does not come from what is absolutely absent but from what is potential. A chicken comes-to-be because that which has ceased-to-be, i.e., the chicken egg, had the potential to become a chicken. As Fran O’Rourke has noted, “the old must be,” always, “potential to the new.” Samual Taylor Coleridge expresses it most poetically in his Biographia Literaria,

“They and they only can acquire the philosophic imagination, the sacred power of self-intuition, who within themselves can interpret and understand the symbol, that the wings of the air-sylph are forming within the skin of the caterpillar; those only, who feel in their own spirits the same instinct, which impels the chrysalis of the horned fly to leave room in its involucrum for antennae yet to come. They know and feel that the potential works in them, even as the actual works on them!”

Now, we can understand how something can come from nothing in a qualified sense. Something comes not from an absolute nothing but from determinate nothing. It is nothing that is conditioned by the potential of the thing it operates in. A nothing that is nothing not because it is fully absent but because it is not present. A nothing that is in the form of potential. The chicken, indubitably, is not present, i.e., has no being qua presence, when it is in the egg. But neither is it absent. It is, instead, implied.

Aristotle writes in his Metaphysics that “there are many senses in which a thing may be said to be.” He tells us that there are “various senses of being.”

Being is, as we noted earlier, the foundational question of philosophy. In the problem Aristotle was thrown into, Being was primarily thought of as presence. With Heraclitus, this being qua presence obtains refinement through a general understanding of the universal presence of the negative and of negation in the present. Being here comes to be understood as becoming, as a presence enmeshed in a constant process of coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be. This is where Aristotle picks things up and develops from. The categories of substance and accident help us understand different forms of change. The categories of potency and act show these different forms of change are possible. However, implicit in all this is a fundamental development in the mode through which Being can be thought.

It is true, as O’Rourke notes, that some of Aristotle’s “richest insights,” such as the “potency of being,” are lost. They are lost, not because they cannot be found, but because the investigation has largely remained at the surface—at the level of the explicit. We have taken Aristotle’s developments as he’s enunciated them. But in doing so, we have ignored what developments objectively occur but are not made explicit, what developments remain in-themselves and not for-us. There is one of these unexplored implicit developments found in Aristotle’s answer to the Parmenidean dilemma we have been exploring.

As we saw above, Aristotle’s reply to Parmenides is that things can come to be from that which is not in a qualified sense. We come to understand that what this means is the following: things come to be out of states of being (out of states of actuality or presence), which has the potential of giving way to what has come to be. This potentiality, while not present, is not fully absent. It is implied. Aristotle, while not making it explicit, has developed a new mode of thinking of being qua implication. As Andrew Haas notes, Aristotle allows us “to think of being—not as presence or absence, neither as ground nor abyss, neither as an event nor even a non-event—but as implying.”

Being is that which is implied in all things, both at an abstract metaphysical level and at the immediate level of investigating the potential that actualized itself in a process of change. Once that potential becomes actualized, it is no longer implicit. It is now explicitly present. It is a presence with a renewed assortment of implications. Once I actualize my potential to write, it is no longer implied but explicit, realized. The activity done before writing (say reading) has gone from being actual (explicit, present) to being potential once again. Every process of making explicit something implicit, which is to say, every process of actualizing a certain potential, is simultaneously a reassortment of implications.

Andrew Haas’s Shortcoming

However, while Haas is correct in finding being qua implication as a monumental development made by Aristotle in the history of thinking about being (a development up to now unexplored), he is wrong to absolutize it to the exclusion of other forms of being and ways of reflecting upon them. Being as implication can only “be” qua implication because there is a mode of being qua presence (or presence as a form of becoming). It is through actuality that the reservoir of potentiality can be qua implication. Potency cannot be divorced from act; both categories exist in interdependency.

Therefore, you can’t have being qua implication without being qua presence, and, as we showed above, neither can you have being qua presence without being qua implication. Presence presupposes the potential to be present, and the potential to be present (i.e., implication) presupposes a presence that can simultaneously lose and retain itself in becoming something new, something which was previously implied.

Countless studies have been done on Aristotle’s treatment of being. Up until the work of Andrew Haas, most studies have looked like Joan Kung’s “Aristotle on ‘Being is Said in Many Ways,’” where the focus is on what is explicitly enunciated and not what is implicitly discovered. Kung, like most other scholars, ignores one of the fundamental forms through which Aristotle treats being and advances the discipline’s problem—as implication.

Andrew Haas, however, while rescuing this treatment of being qua implication from its centuries-old neglect, takes his re-discovery to an extreme and labels being qua implication the mode of Aristotle’s thinking of being, and not just one (an important and groundbreaking one to be sure) of the various modes of he conceived of it.

I have here shown how Aristotle replies and breaks through the problem he is thrown into, how this takes the form of various explicit categorial developments (substance, accident, act, potency), and how implicit in some of these is a new mode of thinking about being – one which Andrew Haas rediscovers but wrongfully absolutizes. Instead, we should see Aristotle’s breakthrough not as rejecting the previous forms of understanding being, but enhancing them through the understanding of being qua implication, and the dialectical interaction implicit in the relation of being qua implication and the previous forms of treating being.