ARISTOTLE ON ACTION
1. The Metaphysics of Actions
«An Action, Complete and Whole» - Agency and Potentiality – Actions and Actuality Practical Being – The Priority of Actions – Psychical Form, Somatic Matter - Action and Apophansis –
Orexis and the Unity of Actions - Location and Causation of Actions
The fragmentation and nearly disappearance of actions ensuing on Davidson’s ontology
stands in deep contrast with Aristotle’s views of their ontology, structure, and normativity. These
views are advanced in important texts like Metaphysics Θ, De Anima III, Nicomachean Ethics III
and V; also, somewhat surprisingly, Poetics, 6-7. Shifting to Aristotle is, in many ways a familiar
move in the philosophy of action – and one not free from risks.1 Still, as I hope to show, if one
aims to gain an understanding of conduct, actions, deeds, by recognizing their standing in reality,
their intrinsic normativity, and their reciprocal and internal connection with agency, one would
should have recourse to the deep and rich resources of Aristotle’s theory of action. My focus will
be, in this Section, on Aristotle’s metaphysics of actions and of the relations between actions and
agency. Some important features of Aristotle’s doctrine are not only at odds with contemporary
philosophical views but also somewhat neglected by the interpreters. In the next Section, I cover
the more familiar ground of Aristotle’s views of practical normativity and of its implications for
the nature of actions. The result of our discussion should be an overall conception of actions, of
their reality and normativity, which makes them suitable to count as an essential dimension of
the practical domain.
«An Action, Complete and Whole»
To address this complex subject matter, we can start from a point about Aristotle’s
‘phenomenology of practice’, from his view of how practice come immediately in sight, is
experienced and can be represented by an observer. This is one of the main lines of enquiry of
the theory of tragedy, and of poetry in general, put forward by Aristotle in his Poetics. As
everyone knows, poetry, dramatic and epic, and tragedy in particular, is according to Aristotle a
craft and an instance of productive knowledge. Dramatic and epic poetry, as a form of poiesis,
See, for a warning against the risks of interpreting Aristotle’s theory of action from the
perspective of contemporary (analytic) philosophy of action, C. Natali, L’Action Efficace,
Peeters, Louvain-Paris-Dudley 2004, pp. 3-7.
1
must be addressed, as productive crafts must be in general, in terms of the sort of knowledge
they embody and put to exercise and of the results they bring about. In the present case, and in
particular in the case of tragedy, both the exercise and the results have the character of
knowledge: respectively, the knowledge, or understanding, of actions; and their imitation, or
representation and expression, by actions performed on stage. The contents and principles of
dramatic and epic poetry and, in the case of tragedy also the imitation in which it issues, have
thoroughly practical subject matter and character.2 Of course, the work, the production proper of
tragedy (ê tês tragodias poiêsis),3 in particular, has further results. The imitation must issue in
pity and fear and must promote the purification of these passions in the spectator.4 Still, imitation
is the main goal of tragedy: whatever other results it can achieve, they are achieved by imitation.
Aristotle’s concept of mimesis is only deceivingly simple. To begin understanding it properly,
we must free ourselves of the model of one object, one thing, imitating another by resemblance.
Mimesis can consist in resemblance at least superficially, for instance when it is realized by
colors, figures, or voice. But imitation it can also be realized by a variety of means: rhythm,
words, harmony, employed separately or jointly, as in tragedy; and by a variety of modes: by a
simple narrative, by a story-teller, or by performance of actions, together making explicit a more
complex ways of relating to objects. Even if, as in tragedy, a natural resemblance is anyway
involved in the imitation – imitation being of actions by actions – the presentation of an object is
the most important thing.5 This latter – the relation of imitations to objects – matters most to
Aristotle and gets the most attention. Imitation is, in the first place, a cognitive operation: it is the
production of a representation or expression of an object; it is something that has an object and
brings to mind and teaches about that object. Imitation is intimately connected to knowledge, our
first acquisition of knowledge being by spontaneous, instinctive (sumphuton) imitation.6
Correspondingly, to grasp the nature (phusin) of tragedy,7 to give a definition of its essence
2
Poetics, III, 2. Aristotle observes that the name dramata, given to works that imitate by the
performance of actions, has its roots in the verb dran, to act (the Doric counterpart to the Attic
prattein), Poetics, III, 4, 7.
3
Poetics, I, 2.
4
Poetics, VI, 2.
5
Poetics, I, 3, 4, 12; III, 2.
6
Poetics, IV, 2.
7
Poetics, IV, 16.
(oron tês ousias),8 or to determine its end (telos), which is what is most important in it,9 we must
look in the first place at its distinctive kind of object and, thereby, at its distinctive kind of
content or of productive knowledge. It is in this connection, in connection with the objects that
constitute the essential content of the production of tragedy, that Aristotle’s theory of tragedy
manifests its importance for his conception of action.
The essence of tragedy lies primarily in its being the imitation of actions, in having
actions as its object. «Tragedy is the imitation of an action that is important and complete, with a
certain extension». The imitation must be in pleasant and articulated linguistic and musical form;
it must consist itself in the performance of actions; give raise to certain emotions.10 But what is
crucial is that actions are what comes to presentation and expression. «We have established that
tragedy is imitation of an action which is complete and whole, with some extension; because a
whole can have no magnitude».11 What we can immediately remark is that what Aristotle assigns
as object to tragedy is some concrete action (I borrow the term and the idea from Carl Ginet), a
physical action located and extended in place and time, with a structure schematically consisting
in a beginning, a middle, and an ending. The proportion between the extension, the complexity,
and the clarity of the action serves the end of beauty; but this stands in no contrast with its
contributing to the recognizability and significance of some going on as an action.12 The same
holds of the unity and completeness of the imitated action. The imitation must be one of one
objects; in the case of tragedy, the imitation of one and complete action, whose parts – the parts
of the doings which compose it – are so connected that if one is transposed or withdrawn, the
whole is modified or disrupted.13 This is required for artistry, the good working, of tragedy (or,
for that matter, of epics). But certainly it is a condition that concrete actions, the actions which
form the appropriate object of tragic imitation, can satisfy. Actions are a kind of entity that can
achieve completeness and unity and in this way stand for understanding and expression of the
sort pursued in tragedy; are the appropriate object for this sort of knowledge. The wholeness,
completeness, extension, variety, and structure of the actions that are the objects of tragic poiêsis
8
Poetics, VI, 1.
Poetics, VI, 13.
10
Poetics, VI, 2.
11
Poetics, VII, 2.
12
Poetics, VII, 3, 12.
13
Poetics, VIII, 4.
9
converge in the key notion of plot, muthos. The core of tragic imitation, of the content of
tragedy, is its plot, because it is right in and by the plot that the imitation of actions is done: «The
imitation of an action is the plot». The plot is the combination of actions (sunthesin tôn
pragmatôn) which constitute the overall object of a tragedy and it precisely because it imitates,
represents, by its plot that tragedy can achieve its distinctive kind of understanding and
expression. «The most important part [of the tragedy] is the combination of the actions, because
tragedy is the imitation not of persons but of actions, life, happiness and misery». «Therefore,
actions and the plot are the end of tragedy; and the end is what is most important».14
The essence of tragedy, in connection of its kind of object and imitation, that is, of its
content, what it is about, and of the expression it gives of it, is that its object is a concrete,
complex, inclusive, unitary and complete action and that it presents such action in and by its plot.
The properties looked for in the plot correspond to properties that actions can exhibit. I think that
this is already an important phenomenological point. Actions, as they can be observed and
understood in common life and as they could be meaningfully recounted in dramatic form, put on
stage, can manifest unity, internal articulation and order, completeness, such as mark them as in
some way real - something to be encountered in the world. The phenomenological point is
reinforced by what Aristotle says about how actions figure in the plot, or about the respect in
which they are imitated by tragedy. This came into view in the last texts quoted above: actions
should be imitated as such, in their nature and in their connexion, as they are connected in life;
not or not primarily as the manifestation of persons and their choices and characters. This is an
important point, which Aristotle makes very forcefully. It goes with the concept of action that
imitation of actions is also imitation of agents doing things, doing actions. «Since it is imitation
of an action, and acting involves agents, it is necessary that agents be such as their character and
thinking is; it is because of these that we say that their actions are such as they are».15 However,
even though characters, thinking, and ensuing choices are causes of actions, of their properties,
and of the success and failure of agents, it is not characters and thinking of agents the primary
and specific object of tragedy. Tragedy imitates, presents and describes, actions as they figure,
better, constitute, the lives and persons and their happiness and misery. If this is the content, the
14
15
Poetics, VI, 9, 12, 13.
Poetics, VI, 7.
kind of understanding and knowledge, which is deployed in tragedy, then it is actions, rather than
agents and their characters, which should be imitated. «Characters make persons how they are,
but they are happy or their opposite according to their actions». Since it is the life, the happiness
and misery of persons that matter for tragedy; and these are determined by their actions, consist
in the connection, in the combination of their doings and deeds and in how these affect their
fortune and misfortune, actions, and not characters, stand primarily for imitation by tragedy.
«Therefore it is not acting that imitates characters (oukoun opôs ta êthê mimêsôntai prattousin),
but characters are taken in consideration through the actions (alla ta êthê sumperilambanousi dia
tas praxeis). Without the action there would be no tragedy, but there would be one without the
characters».16
Aristotle is making a complex claim. On the one hand, his claim is about the very point
and aims of tragedy. Tragedy has no essential moral concerns, does not consist in moral
reflections, no matter how accurate and well presented. A tragedy could well do without that, if it
only had a well-contrived plot or combination of actions. The elements of the plot, what takes
place within and by the arrangement of actions – reversal of fortune, recognitions – have the
deepest influence on the emotions of the audience. The depiction of characters is an easier and
less important task than the construction of the plot.17 In consideration of this, it is neither
necessary nor appropriate to delve into the characters and the choice of agents, into their
principles and exercises of agency, further than what is required to identify and connect together
the actions of the plot. «The plot is the principle (arche) and almost the soul (psuche) of tragedy,
characters come second».18 This claim about what is important with respect to the object or
content of tragedy seems to imply a claim about the order of intelligibility between actions and
agency. It is true, obviously true, that character comes to expression in and qualifies choice
16
Poetics, VI, 14-15. For an interesting treatment of these matters, see E. Montefiore,
“Aristotle’s Concept of Praxis in the Poetics”, The Classical Journal, 79, 2 (1983-1984), pp.
110-124.
17
Poetics, VI, 16-18.
18
Poetics, VI, 19. Aristotle relatedly claims that the personae of the play matter mostly for what
they do and what happens to them because of their doings. The tragic poet needs to represent of
them only what secures a stronger emotional impact, for instance, that a man of middling moral
dispositions undergoes some great misfortune because not of a moral fault but of a mistake,
Poetics, XIII, 5-6.
(proairesin) and choice explains actions and makes them be what they are.19 But this is
consistent with thinking that the nature of actions and the ways they are connected the ones with
the others are manifest and intelligible starting from how they really figure – or how they could
figure – in life and generally in the world. Actions as de facto encountered in reality – or as
possibly encountered - are recognizable and intelligible per se, in their own terms, without the
need of mediation by some agential construal of them. In fact, any consideration about character
and choice might depend on this previous understanding of actions in their reality (or
possibility). This ordering of actions and agency is explicit in what Aristotle says about the
imitation of actions and of characters. For the work, for the purposes of tragedy, the imitation of
actions is prior to that of characters, that is, of principles of agency. At bottom, necessarily if not
sufficiently, the work of purpose of tragedy is one of understanding and expression. Imitation is
a form of cognition and a kind of representation. Something that can stand for imitation per se is
something that we can represent, directly, in its own nature, as it is in itself. Aristotle’s theory of
tragedy tells us that actions are susceptible of this sort of imitation and are entities, objects, of
this sort, with their own nature and their own standing in reality (or their own inherent
possibility). Actions are essentially related to agency but are recognizable and intelligible prior to
any robust, specific inference about their agential antecedents. 20 This is how they figure in life
and in our experience, as well as in their poetic expression. This phenomenological point of
course stands in need of philosophical articulation; and, as we will see, Aristotle provides what is
at least a right ontological framework – in terms both of actuality and potentiality and of form
and matter – for explaining the status of actions and the relations between agency and actions
depicted in Poetics. Still, the phenomenology of tragic actions provides an important starting
point.
Agency and Potentiality
The reality of actions and the relations between agency and actions, as we have seen in
the preceding Chapter, in our immediately preceding discussion of Davidson, and in our cursory
19
Poetics, VI, 7, 24.
The main ground Aristotle offers for poetry being superior to history qua more philosophical is
that history only tells about really happened actions, poetry tells about possible actions and about
their necessity, Poetics, IX, 1-4. Actions, imitated or represented per se, as in tragedy, thus bear
modal properties. This is further indication of their having their own identity and nature.
20
discussion of Aristotle’s conception of tragedy, are critical for any philosophical conception of
practice. Our view of practice and the prospects for understanding it in terms of distinctive kinds
of conceptual content and for ascribing to it objective normative principles depend in many ways
on whether it makes sense to say that agents relate to actions as real and normative entities,
enjoying a partial but relevant independent ontological standing. Aristotle addresses this issue in
terms of the conceptual framework of potentiality and actuality. This framework has a
compelling application to practice and Aristotle explicitly relies on it in his metaphysical account
of actions. I will start my discussion of Aristotle’s philosophy of action from this angle.
It is necessary to say, as briefly and simply as possible, something about the actualpotential conceptual scheme. Such scheme
(a) Has its primary application to the ontology of the different kinds of change, both as to
their elements and to the relations between such elements; by extension, to the constitution of
changeable and perishable substances;
(b) With regard to change, it has constitutive-explanatory import, because it allows
drawing a real distinction between possible and actual changes; by extension, it has such import
with regard to the question of the unity and change of individual substances;
(c) It essentially includes principles of appropriate correspondence or fittingness between
the potential and the actual; these principles impose a tight conceptual and normative
requirement, grounded on explanatory considerations, on their descriptions and relations.21
This characterization comes in view in the following texts. (a) Metaphysics, Θ, 1, 1046a9-19:
the central case of potentiality-actuality is the capacity of bringing about a change in something
else. (b) Metaphysics, Θ, 1, 1046a19-29: active capacities are clearly different in role from
passive ones; Θ, 3, 1047a17-24: there is a real distinction between what an agent is capable of
and what it is doing; and Θ, 5, 1047 b 35-1048 a 15: capacities have a necessary import on the
occurrence of actions, with or without choice. (c) Θ, 5, 1047 b 35-1048 a 15: a condition of
rightness of conditions and of relations between agents and patients is necessarily included in the
concept of a capacity for change; see also Θ, 7, 1049a5-18. See Aristotle, Metaphysics Book Θ,
translated with an Introduction and Commentary by S. Mankin, Oxford, Clarendon Press 2006,
“Introduction”, pp. xiii-xvi, xl-xlii. Point (b) underlies the explanatory distinction between
possible according to a dunamis and possible not according to a dunamis (Mankin,
“Introduction”, pp. xxv-xxvi); point (c) also underlies the distinction between the exercise of a
capacity and a change produced by it, as results of its exercising (see Mankin, “Introduction”, p.
xviii. (N.B. I will give my own translation of Aristotle’s texts, keeping well present Ross’s and
Mankin’s translations).
21
The potentiality-actuality scheme is the model and the grounding of a special possibility
of explanation: the constitutive explanation of changes (both the progressing and effected
changes); or of a kind of particulars essentially existing in time and with a temporal structure.
The model is the following: the same components, considered in different respects, figure both in
the explanantia and in the explananda. The entities, or the properties located in certain
individuals, which as potentialities explain a certain change, also figure in the processes and in
the states that are their actualizations. This condition underlies the possibility, the success, and
the constitutive import of such explanations. Of course, all this depends on the availability of
conceptually fine-grained, intensional ontological distinctions and constraints on descriptions.
The potentiality- actuality scheme should make available precisely the conceptual resources for
this explanation of change.
Against this admittedly minimal background, I suggest that, according both to the spirit
and to the letter of Aristotle’s ontology of action, the relations between agency and actions
relation could and should be an instance of the potentiality-actuality relation.22 To begin
articulating this suggestion we can start from the picture of agency and actions drawn in the
foregoing Chapter. Actions are manifestly, phenomenologically, for how they are present in our
immediate experience, changes in the state of the world, progressing and completed changes.
Actions as changes are real, are part of the furniture of the world, appear to form a distinctively
practical layer of reality. (The same layer which is addressed, in their own different fashions, by
psychology, economics, history, and, by Aristotle’s’ own lights, tragedy, comedy, and epics.)
Agency, equally manifestly, sums up to the properties, the commitments, the engagements of
subjects that are, in a distinctive way, causally responsible and explanatory of such changes. The
explanatory relation between agency and actions is a constitutive fact about them. It marks off
the kind and the nature of changes that are actions and of agency as principle of change. It is not
an empirical and contingent but an a priori and necessary matter that agency gives a uniquely
appropriate kind of explanation of actions and that actions are susceptible to this kind of
explanation.23 This reciprocal, internal relation constrains the right understanding of these
This is in keeping with the overall structure of Metaphysics Θ which, at least in the FredeMakin interpretation, consists of systematic extensions of the potential-actual schema. See
Makin’s comments on pp. 130-132 of his edition of Θ.
23
Notice that saying that it is constitutive for actions that they can (only) be adequately
explained agentially is very different from saying that agential explanation tells us all there is to
22
notions. Agency is not simply a psychological phenomenon; it is distinctively and irreducibly
practical. The conceptual capacities and contents constituting it come to appropriate expression
only in commitments and engagements, not in psychological happenings – in deliberating,
deciding, intending, eliciting and monitoring conduct. Correspondingly, actions are practical
occurrences or performances, with the right contents and conditions of existence. In this way,
agency and actions stand in conceptually and normatively determined correspondence as to their
contents and conditions of existence. On no other assumption actions can stand in the right
explanatory dependence on agential capacity and these latter can find achievement in them.
Notice how the language of potentiality and actuality here comes natural. In fact, because of
their basic ontology as changes and principles of change, of their internal explanatory
connections, and of their reciprocal normative and conceptual determination, the suggestion that
we view agency and actions as instances of potentiality and actuality is not only legitimate but
almost compelling. This means, in particular, that applying to agency and actions the apparatus
of potentiality and actuality should allow articulating them in philosophically important ways –
in regard, for instance, of their relations of sameness and difference in explanatory contexts; or
of their intrinsic normative nature. This is precisely a position Aristotle makes available by his
account of potentiality and actuality - of being potentially or actually something - in Metaphysics
Θ. In particular, it is not just that Aristotle’s discussion of actuality and potentiality is shot
through with practice-related concepts. Rather, and more importantly, agency and actions are per
se and explicitly one of the central concerns in this area of metaphysics: a metaphysical topic of
its own, one of the instances of the scheme of potentiality and actuality. This is one of the most
important aspects of Aristotle’s ontology of actions.
Within this framework, Aristotle understands agency as a potentiality for practical life: a
potentiality for changes, movements and activities with a distinctive practical nature. (I will
further explore what Aristotle means by this in what follows.) It is primarily – that is, in its
paradigmatic cases – an active and productive capacity: being an origin of change in another or
in oneself as other.24 It is important to grasp the completely general point that Aristotelian
be told about the constitution of actions.
24
Metaphysics, Θ, 1046 a 10-15: I produce a change in myself as other if the change is one that
someone else could produce in me (a medical doctor healing himself would be an example). This
is in contrast with active potentialities as natures: principles of changes of a sort that nothing else
could produce (the principle of growth of an animal, for instance) See Metaphysics, Θ, 1049 b 5-
potentialities are not simply possibilities or dispositions. A fortiori, agential potentialities –
which are located in the rational part of the soul – are not more or less neutrally described
psychological dispositions, in any sense that would have subjectivist or naturalistic implications.
The Aristotelian notion of potentiality has a richer content and a different modal behaviour from
generic possibilities and dispositions. It involves a dimension of capacity and a teleological
characterization, together with a fine-grained ontological characterization, related to change and
to becoming. Potentialities are non-standard modalities. In particular, something being in fact so
and so does entail its possibly being so and so, but does not entail its potentially being so and so.
The fact and the corresponding possibility could be merely accidental. There could be not set and
accountable capacity for being so and so that would underlie them. For example, if I hit a
difficult target at my first attempt, this is something I certainly had the possibility to do. But it
could be something I had not the (agential, in this case) potentiality to do. This would be if I
were not such as hitting that target reliably and with a view of hitting it. Aristotelian
potentialities are not implied by what is the case. (In this respect, Aristotelian potentialities are
like deontic modalities, not alethic ones: actuality does not entail either permissibility or
potentiality.) Therefore, they can be fully explanatory of what is the case, of what happens.
Furthermore, active potentialities for change, in particular, are impulses or inclinations to
determinate movements and changes; not the simple possibility of these.25 Potentialities, also and
relatedly, are not dispositions; at least, on an understanding of dispositions that individuates them
from the episodes that are their open manifestation. This view of the identity of dispositions
makes it difficult to distinguish a failure of a disposition to manifest itself in certain
circumstances in what would be its normal way, because of hindrance or prevention by some
external condition, from the manifestation of a different disposition, in the very same
circumstances, precisely on account of that external condition. According to Aristotle,
potentialities, differently from dispositions, or rather ‘mere dispositions’, are individuated by
their objects and conditions, and in case of rational potentialities, by contents, in advance of their
expression in particular episodes. «What is capable is capable of something and at some time and
in some way and with however many factors it is necessary to add to the specification». The
10.
25
Metaphysics, Θ, 1049a5. See, on this distinction, Makin, “Introduction”, pp. xxv-xxvii, xlixlii; “Commentary”, pp. 70-73, 117-118.
individuation of potentialities via its objects and conditions, normal or interfering, is primarily
teleological.26 In both respects, non-standard modal behaviour and independent individuation,
potentialities seem promising ontological tools for addressing agency.
Of course, the potentialities that can count as agency, in a sense corresponding to a
capacity for performing actions, for leading a practical life, are more tightly constrained than
this. Recognizing the distinctness and individuating the ontological properties of the
potentialities that mark off agents as origins of change is an important part of Aristotle’s program
in Θ – which therefore also includes the principles of a metaphysics of action. Aristotle
understands agency in terms of rational active and productive potentialities. The concept of a
rational potentiality is complex. It includes the location of such potentialities in the soul and in
the rational soul: «Since some origins like this are present in what is soul-less, while others are in
what has a soul, and are in the soul, and are in that part of the soul which is rational, it is clear
that of potentialities too some will be non-rational, while others will be rational». The model for
the location and the role of rational potentialities is offered by crafts and productive knowledge:
«That is why all crafts and all productive sciences are potentialities. For they are origins of
change in something else, or in the thing itself qua something else».27 The craft model for
rational potentialities provides an important specification of Aristotle’s view of their agential
character. Agential potentialities in general, like crafts, technai, and productive knowledge,
poietikai epistêmai, are content-individuated. That is, to individuate them one must not only refer
to their objects and other factors. One must specify how objects and other factors are present to
the soul – the content of the potentiality. Agential potentialities, like productive knowledge,
consist in grasping the relevant content or logos, one that concerns ways of explaining and
producing certain changes. Their exercise allows the agent to govern his conduct and to bring
about changes as dictated by that content. (Medicine and architecture are Aristotle’s favourite
examples in this area.) Rational potentialities, that is, constitute and regulate in general agency
just as crafts and productive knowledge constitute and regulate specific kinds of skill and
production.
This has important consequences for Aristotle’s account of agency as potentiality. One is
that rational potentialities, differently from non-rational ones, can be exercised on the same
26
27
Θ 1047 b 35-1048 a 2.See Makin, “Commentary”, pp. 103-107.
Metaphysics, Θ 1046 b 1-5.
things with opposite results, that is, by bringing about opposite changes. (Opposite results and
changes, not contradictory ones: a complete failure to actualize itself is intelligible also in the
case of non-rational properties.)28 «As regards those potentialities which are rational, the very
same potentiality is a potentiality for opposites, but as regards the non-rational potentialities a
single potentiality is for one thing: for example, heat only for heating, while the medical craft for
both disease and health».29 This is an enormously interesting claim – crucial to Aristotle’s
ontology of practice. Aristotle’s explicit ground for it is the view of rational potentialities as
content determined, on the model of productive knowledge. «The explanation of this is that
knowledge is account (logos) and the same account clarifies both the thing and the privation,
though not in the same way». Knowledge is a potentiality – the model for rational potentialities precisely because it consists in possession of the account (logon echein), that is, in the
understanding, grasp, of content susceptible to identify and regulate actions. The soul with this
has a principle of change; it follows, then, that it can produce opposite results. «For the account
is of both, though not similarly, and it is in the soul which has a principle of change; so it will
change both [opposites] from the same principle having connected both to the same».30 The
opposites have thus one principle, the logos, which also individuates the potentiality. The reason
why rational potentialities can be exercised in two ways or have, in normal conditions, opposite
results, therefore, is that the content that constitutively individuates them – and governs their
exercises – has the character and complexity of productive knowledge. This minimally entails
that the logos is conceptually articulated, predicative or apophantic in structure, and
teleologically organized. Precisely this character and complexity confer to agential potentialities
the susceptibility, the capacity, of being exercised in two ways. Just as the possession of the right
sort of content makes it possible to pronounce opposite judgments, affirmation and denial
Metaphysics, Θ 1050 b 5-15.
Metaphysics, Θ, 1046b 5-10.
30
Metaphysics, Θ, 1046b 15-20. Aristotle claims that the opposite results of rational potentialities
are not on the same plan and not neutrally linked to their individuation. Aristotle contends that
the logos concerns one opposite per se and the other incidentally, that is, as negation or primary
privation (Θ, 1046 b 20-25). This is certainly a point about individuation. As rational
potentiality, medical craft is primarily individuated by its resulting in health rather than in illness,
because this latter is itself individuated as the negation of the former, and not the other way
around.
30
Aristotle, Physics, […], 201a9-b31.
28
29
concerning the same matter. (I will come back to this conception of the contents of agency and
actions below, when commenting a text from De Anima.) But this susceptibility to being
exercised to opposite ends and results seems also a mark of human agency, of our practical life.
The extension of this logical feature from knowledge and judgment to active and productive
capacities is, therefore, a crucial step in Aristotle’s equation of agency with a specific kind of
potentiality.
The link between individuation by (conceptual, teleological) content and the two-ways
exercise of rational potentiality contributes to Aristotle’s metaphysical account of practice or to
his commitment to the agential nature of certain potentialities also in other, important respects.
One is that rational potentialities, on this account, both require and make room for the choice and
intentionality of agents in the exercise of them. With non-rational, one-way potentialities, it is
necessary, if agent and patient are in the right conditions and relation, that the one acts and the
other be affected. Not so with rational, two ways ones: «For all these latter are productive of one
thing, and those former are productive of opposites, so that they would produce opposites at the
same time; but this is impossible». Their structural difference as to individuation and mode of
actualization involves a difference in the conditions and in the explanation of their exercise.
«Then there must be something else which is decisive: I mean by this inclination (orexis) and
choice (proairesis). For whichever he is inclined to primarily (oregêtai kuriôs), this he does
(poiêsei) when has the possibility». There is necessity to the actions that are the exercise of
rational potentialities. But such as is grounded on possession of rational content by the agents
and on their inclination and decision.31 This is a further agential trait of this class of potentialities
and a further sense in which they are located in the soul – as requiring a principle or origin in the
soul besides content-possession, some sort of motivation and intention, to be put to exercise. The
dual actualization of rational potentialities also makes logical and ontological room for a
distinctive kind of failure or possibility of error, which is another important demand on any
viable conception of practice. Because of external conditions, non-rational potentialities can fail
to be exercised at all: they are susceptible to result in contradictories; or can be exercised
differently and have different, indeed opposite, results. Neither of these possibilities strictly
counts as error - even once it recognized that potentialities, including of course non-rational
potentialities, are not mere (episode-individuated) dispositions. Non-rational potentialities are
31
Metaphysics, Θ, 1048a10-11. See also 1049 a 5-15, and Makin, “Commentary”, pp. 160-163.
identified by their objects, times, ways, and other factors. Therefore, the cases in which they fail
to actualize according to these individuating factors can be in principle distinguished from those
in which a different potentiality comes to actuality. The distinction will be grounded precisely on
the previous identification of the potentialities. This distinction makes a difference – a difference
concerning the identity of potentialities.
However, we should not identify this issue with one of error or correctness. The point is
that failures of the potentiality to exercise itself according to its individuating factors depends on
the presence of interfering conditions, on external conditions not being normal. Things may go
differently from what implicitly indicated by the objects and other factors individuating a nonrational potentiality. This can be determined by considering what the potentiality is for. But what
we have is, simply, the very same potentiality, coming to actuality differently, because of a
difference in the external conditions. These latter, rather than any complexity in the individuating
factors, are responsible for the possibility that things happen otherwise. Of course, the
individuating factors of non-rational potentialities include what they are for, what goals their
exercise can further. With reference to this, one can think of failures in the actualization of a
certain potentiality. Still, it is the external conditions, rather than anything in the nature or
exercise itself of that potentiality, which are responsible for failure, which differ between
successful and unsuccessful cases. The logical situation, in the case of rational potentialities, is
very different. In this case, the opposite results – health and illness, construction and destruction
– would be both relevant to identifying one and the same potentiality. Such potentiality therefore
must be individuated at a more fundamental level and in more general terms. This Aristotle does
in terms of logos, of content, and of orexis and choice, on the model of productive knowledge
and technical activities. Once we identify a potentiality by such a structure of content, we can
explain its suitability to produce opposite results. But we can also explain, and before that
understand, how one such exercise can count as correct or incorrect, that is, how the fact that that
potentiality is exercised on certain objects, in certain ways, with certain results, can count as a
correct or incorrect actualization of it. This is because it is perfectly possible that that very
exercise of that very same potentiality should have been to the opposite result. For example, the
exercise of medical skill that results in healing should have resulted, in the light of the thoughts,
the aims, and the efforts of the agent, in illness. The fact that the potentiality issues in this result
rather than in its opposite tells nothing about its being one and the same in either case: thus, there
is no loss of the identity across these different, successful and unsuccessful cases. But what is
different in the different cases are not necessarily the external, normal or abnormal conditions.
There can be a difference, which is fully explanatory of the two cases and of their normative
difference, simply and directly in the exercise of the potentiality: in the thoughts of the agents, in
her deliberation and in the contents of her determinate choice, in the movements by which she
implements them. This sort of intrinsic practical error – of error in agency and in action – is
possible and intelligible, within the framework of potentiality and actuality, only if rational,
agential potentialities are two-ways and all active, productive two-ways potentialities are rational
and agential. This is a constitutive, normative feature of agency and actions, which the
Aristotelian doctrine of potentiality and actuality puts firmly in place. 32
Actions and Actuality
I thus suggest that, if cast, as in Metaphysics Θ, in the framework of potentiality and
actuality, the central features of the concept of agency are brought in special and full light.
Correspondingly, the concept of potentiality manifests its comprehensiveness, flexibility, and
importance right in its application to agency. Practice, as I have already suggested, is a
metaphysical topic of its own. Potentiality and actuality make room for and provide a ground for
the practical domain, both in respect of agency and of actions. In the latter regard, in regard of
the ontology of actions, the point and the significance of Aristotle’s apparatus should be
understood by keeping well present the relational character of the involved notions. Agency as a
potentiality is a potentiality for living a practical life, for performing actions. Therefore, we
should understand actions, in turn, primarily as that in which practice comes to have reality, the
changes we bring about as agents. Actions are the kind of beings that can be the actuality of
See Makin, “Commentary”, pp. 40-44, 103-107. The normative characterization of agential
potentialities, which goes with their two-ways character and individuation by content, has further
implications, discussed or pointed out in Θ. An important one is a distinction between the
potentiality for doing and that for doing well. In some cases, the capacity for doing cannot be
exercised without also exercising that for doing well. In other cases, one can be doing without
doing well (Metaphysics, Θ, 1046 b 25-30). This might be understood differently and might have
been meant by Aristotle differently. If part of what Aristotle means is that there are some
potentialities for which the issue of whether they are exercised well or are exercised at all does
not even arise, while it arises for others, the distinction would coincide with that between nonrational and rational potentialities. (This is however very tentative. See Makin, “Commentary”,
pp. 58-59).
32
potentialities of the agential sort – together with whatever passive and non-rationalities
potentialities are involved in their exercise. These conceptual, explanatory, and ontological
requirements on actions express the very notions of power and act and provide the necessary
complement to Aristotle’s metaphysics of agency. Aristotle’s agency, as we know, is a kind of
potentiality for change. Potentialities for change come to actuality as the corresponding
changings and as effected changes. Potentialities for change have both incomplete and complete
actualizations: movements or processes and changes in the state of the world.33 According to
Aristotle, this duality is characteristic also of the nature of actions, which in this general respect
can well qualify as the actualizations of agential potentialities. Actions entail changes and
therefore fall into the ontological scheme of change or movement: processes and end-states. 34
More in particular, actions take place both as doings and as deeds, these latter, in turn, internally
connected - at least in the central case of production, poiēsis - with objects, products.35 (I will
take up this point for discussion below.) This duality is an important respect in which the
ontology of actions corresponds to that of actualizations of potentialities for change, because
such actualizations necessarily take the form of movement (kinēsis) or work (ergon) or exertion
(chrēsis).36 What is done, on the understanding of it licenced by the potentiality-actuality
framework, is simply an instance, on essential structural grounds, of what in general has reality
or occurrence as a process or a change (and, in some regards, as perishable substance). There is
no other way for actions, doings, or deeds to be but as practical actualities, the actualizations of
agential potentialities for change. Conversely, there is no other way for agency to come to
actuality but in the performance and in the reality of actions. Agency is potentially actions;
actions are the actualization of agency. Seen in this light, actions do not only share the general
Aristotle, Physics, […], 201a9-b31.
Metaphysics, […], 996 a 25: all actions imply change.
35
See Charles, 30. Two aims drive Aristotle’s ontology of processes. (i) Explaining processes in
terms of constituents, properties, substances, times, and actualization or privation (which are not
a category), so that processes are not a fundamental ontological category, the world is made up
of substances and properties. (ii) Treating processes as seriously as material objects, in terms of
their essential and contingent properties (best theory of the nature of the relevant entities).
36
See for instance Metaphysics, Θ, 1, 1045b35; Θ, 8, 1050a20-25. The crucial circumstance that
this conceptual apparatus is primarily addressed to the metaphysical understanding not only of
natural events but also of practical engagements comes into view in the transparently practical
character of the last two notions. (Stephanus, Thesaurus Grecae Linguae, s.v., gives as first
meaning, respectively, “opus” and “usus”.)
33
34
metaphysical status of changeable beings, they can even count as a paradigm of reality of this
kind (as Heidegger famously pointed out). Of course, actions can only be by bringing to actuality
properties of practical rationality and correctness, expressive of logos or content and
appropriately connected to choice. Not any change or event is an action. Actions must share
practical nature with agential thoughts, commitments, and exertions, the origins that cause and
explain them. But the scheme of potentiality and actuality makes room for and supports precisely
such connections between agency and actions. In the Aristotelian framework, the internal,
content- grounded and normative relation between agency and actions is explained as the holding
or coming to be of the relation that links the specific, appropriate kinds of potentiality and
actuality. There is nothing one must add to Aristotelian changes, in order to obtain Aristotelian
actions. The nature and reality of actions is directly a specification, with the right features
individuating potentialities and actualities, of the general ontological scheme of change. Their
individuation, Dasein and Sosein, is in this sense intrinsic. This leaves no room for an extrinsic
identification of actions as proposed by Davidson. The relation between potentiality and actuality
is internal, not contingent. The practical nature of actions is that of the actualities of potentialities
with the features of agency; the practical nature of agency is that of a potentiality for which
actions are determined as its actuality. However, in this lies no danger of circularity, of the sort I
denounced in the preceding Chapter. Circularity would only arise if one attempted to construct or
project actions out of agency, as the mere expression of views, concerns, commitments, and
exertions of agents. There would be circularity, if, on the one hand, one wanted to reduce actions
to agency after this projective fashion, and, on the other, one recognized that actions have an
essential role in determining the contents and the very possibility of agency. (One who does not
recognize this, I would say, has no real grasp on the concept of agency.) But in the Aristotelian
framework, agency and actions are essentially included in the objective ontological structure of
actuality and potentiality. Whatever their roles and their reciprocal order of determination within
this structure, they leave no logical room for construction or projection, or for any controversial
claim of reduction, because they presuppose and manifest their relative sameness and ontological
independence as instances of potentiality and actuality, a fundamental mode in which things can
exist or be.
Practical Being
The real importance of Aristotle’s identification of agency and actions with instances of
the potential and the actual lies precisely in the robust ontological rendering it gives of the
structure of the practical domain. More in particular, the apparatus of potentiality and actuality,
whose application by Aristotle to the domain of practice I have just sketched, seems to provide
the right metaphysics for clarifying how agency and actions are related, both explanatorily and
constitutively, as to their contents, normative nature, and conditions of existence. It is the right
framework for clarifying the different ways in which practice can be real - especially as to the
structure of the kind of change, or movement, which human action is. Aristotle opens
Metaphysics Θ with the claim that being is said, with the utmost generality, on the one hand
according to the different categories, on the other, according to potentiality, and actuality or
work.37 Concepts of action or practice have their place among Aristotelian categories,
specifically, as the categories of acting and of being acted upon.38 But Aristotle’s metaphysics
manifests its importance for the conception of the practical domain primarily in connection with
the other general perspective on being, that of actuality and potentiality, and the general
metaphysical account it makes possible with regard of change and of the unity of substances. We
have already seen, in some detail, how potentiality and actuality allow addressing, in a finegrained way, the normative nature of agency and, respectively, actions. Now I want to see, from
a more general perspective, how the scheme of potentiality and actuality allows framing a
conception of practical being or reality as such and of its necessary forms.
The core of the conception of the practical domain that I have advanced is a complex of
relations that hold together agency and actions. (Putting reasons for acting into brackets.) I have
characterized such relations in terms of the contrast and combination of explanatory,
rationalizing, and constitutive considerations; of a priori and a posteriori claims; as well as of
empirical and transcendental priority. (This conflation of ontology and explanation differs in
obvious ways from Davidson’s views about description-relative explanation.) If these relations
must make minimally sense as the structure of the practical domain, that is, as the structure of the
reality and of the objective purport available in practical life, one must make some apparently
conflicting assumptions about the sameness and difference of agency and actions, in regard of
their respective conditions of identity, existence, and correctness. On the one hand, one must
37
38
Metaphysics, Θ, 1045 b 30-35.
See Natali, L’Action Efficace, […].
assume that agency and actions can exist with the same objects in the same circumstances,
thereby sharing the same conditions of success; and that this is something essential to their
individuation and satisfaction. This amounts to some sort of logical connection and is required to
make sense of the constitutive, a priori, transcendental continuity of agency and actions. Put very
simply, the constitutive, a priori, transcendental connection of agential episodes and of episodes
of action requires that they be, in some relevant respects, the same. The simplest model of
constitutivity is the part-whole relation: this is certainly a case a sameness in one respect. On the
other hand, agency and actions must be different as dimensions of practice and in regard of their
kinds of roles in the domain of practice. The sameness of conditions of individuation and
existence must be consistent with agency and actions consisting primarily in psychical and
respectively worldly states; with differences in which they contribute to our practical life.
Otherwise, there would be no interesting explanatory or rationalizing connection of agential
states with actions. More in general, even the minimal insight that it makes a real practical
difference whether things are done or not, would hang in the air. The difference in role is a
reflection of conceptual differences between agential commitments and actions. It is certainly not
a contingent or superficial matter that states which do involve happenings in the world –
happenings corresponding to their contents - are different from states that do not. This difference,
quite the contrary, seems to be essential, because it affects the nature (if not necessarily the
satisfaction) of their conditions of existence. Still, we must also be prepared to recognize that, in
the favourable cases, states differing in such conceptual or essential way cane be in reality one
and the same. Intentions or other strictly agential states cannot come to realization in the world
but in actions with the corresponding content. And without such realization of intentions, there
would nothing at all for actions to be. One should take seriously the notion of intention in action.
But one should also take seriously the difference between intentions and actions.
Therefore, the conception of agency and actions mandated by the attempt to frame
practice as a domain, as having conceptual constitution, intrinsic normativity, and objective
import, should combine sameness of objects and normative status and difference of character as
states; difference in concepts and sameness in reality.39 Such combination of sameness and
39
See, for a good treatment of this, Charles, 29, numerical identity, equivalence relation (close to
identity but without indiscernibility) = being one in some sense, unitariness (30) = consecutive
and distinctive parts constitute one numerically identical process, are the three distinctive
difference seems unpromising and to cast bad spell on our reading of agency and actions.
However, these complex conditions of sameness and difference simply follow on framing the
domain of practice in terms of potentiality and actuality. The basic ontological of the potentiality
and actuality is that of distinguishing and at the same time internally connecting being potentially
something and being something, the same thing, actually. What is potentially this or that is not
different from what is actually this or that; but it is such only potentially, not actually. This
distinction marks a difference, an ontologically important one, because it underlies the
continuity, the identity of movement or change as well as the unity of changeable, perishable
substances.40 Potentialities for change and changings and changes are really different conditions:
Aristotle makes a strong point for this in Metaphysics, Θ, 4. But the reality and the identity of
change also depends on their sharing some deep, common feature. The scheme of potentiality
and actuality can take care of this. Active and passive potentialities are potentially the
corresponding changings and changes. Changings and changes are actually the corresponding
potentialities. (The correspondence is fixed by their contents or definitions.) This apparatus
allows individuating episodes of change or movement in terms of what underlies change, of the
one subject of change. It also allows distinguishing changings, across which potentialities are
being exercised and thus preserved, and changes, the end result, where potentialities can possibly
be replaced.41 But change is real, because being potentially a change is not the same with being
actually and something goes on, something changes, comes to be, moves. Much in the same way,
the unity of matter and form of changeable, perishable substances, is explained and grounded by
the difference and sameness of potential and actual being. Matter is potentially what substance,
identified by form is actually. Therefore, the form-and-matter structure poses no threats to the
unity of changeable substances. But at the same we can make sense of the susceptibility of such
substances to change, because potentially and actually being one and the same substance is not
one and the same thing; and different things are true of potential being, matter in this case, and of
actual being, the substance itself.42
elements of Aristotle’s account of processes. [NB, good for later, when discussing the
ontological type of actions.]
See Makin, “Introduction”, pp. xi-xiv; M.L. Gill, Aristotle on Substance, […].
See Makin, “Introduction”, p. xviii.
42
Metaphysics, Θ, 1048 a 30-35. See Makin, “Introduction”, pp. xxxvi-xxxix and
40
41
The same considerations seem to hold of practical being, of agency and actions as
instances of the potential and the actual. Agency, agential capacities are potentially actions;
actions are what agency, the corresponding principles of agency, is actually. (Of course, we must
distinguish the ongoing, progressive exercise of agential potentialities from their actualization in
a deed: this will be discussed below.) The same rational forms individuate practical potentialities
and actualities. A difference in this respect would amount either to a failure of choice or action or
to the taking place of different choices or actions. But potential being and actual being, a fortiori
potential and actual being of practical items and episodes, the being of agential episodes and of
actions, are different and have different properties and roles. Potentialities for actions are
conceptually different from actual actions: their explanatory roles and other relations (causal
weight, location) are different. This is a difference as to their form or nature: not as to the objects
they are about or to their existence, but as to the kinds of states they are. But in action, in
actuality, practical potentialities and actuality are one and the same. There can be no difference
between the exercise of a rational potentiality for change and the corresponding changing and
change, the corresponding doings and deeds. Even though per se they are different. Within this
framework, agency and actions, and their constitutive individuating conditions, stand in the
appropriate relations of difference and sameness in a certain respect. This is the ontological
scheme interconnecting them and the ontological structure of the practical domain. In these
terms, we can distinguish and connect the constitutive and explanatory relations between agency
and actions. Agency and actions are related not only as a principle of explanation or causation
with what it explains or causes, but in a reciprocally internal way, so that one is in some respect
necessary and constitutive with respect to the other. This is not just a conceptual matter, much
less a methodological point, but expresses a distinctive mode of their being, of what they are.
Agency and actions, in the light of their contents and of the circumstances, are the same across
the difference between being potentially and being actually. This seems a plausible way to
combine, in an objective, non-arbitrary fashion, the sameness of constitutive and constituted
condition with the differences that animate the dynamics of practice. Something analogous can
be said about the combination of a priori insights and a posteriori information deployed in our
“Commentary”, pp. 132-135; M.L. Gill, Aristotle on Substance, […]. It is important to remark,
following Frede and Makin, that origins of change and effected changes are already and per se
instances of potential and actual being.
understanding and knowledge in the practical domain. What we grasp or know a priori about
how agential episodes and doings and deeds is what expresses their sameness as potentialities
and, respectively, actualities. But given their different nature and in consideration of how
contextual, empirical factor figure in and shape the transition, the change, from potentiality to
actuality, it is only a posteriori that we can know whether and how exertions of agency as
successful in action. (The transcendental-empirical pattern is discussed below.) On either
account, the resources made available by the potentiality and actuality scheme make possible
devising an ontology of the practical domain, which puts in place the required features of realism
and objectivity.
The potential-actual ontology of agency and of actions is more fine-grained than anything
licensed by Davidson or by the Myth of the Giving. Practical subjectivity and objectivity, the
structure and the import of the practical domain, fall neatly under familiar and general
ontological categories. This also suggests an answer to a lingering question: what is the practical
character of the practical domain, what is for concepts, principles, thoughts, and actions to be
practical. A first, very abstract, two-pronged answer could be the following. The concepts and
principles essentially involved in practical thoughts, just as these latter as states of mind
(deliberations, decisions, intentions, tryings), essentially refer to conditions of realization; or
expect, demand, aim to, being realized rather than merely held in mind. This is an aspect, the
core, indeed, of their counting as potentialities. A certain kind of occurring episode (the
movement of a living body in the environment, the unclenching of a psychological disposition) is
necessarily also a practical achievement or failure, because is the actualization of contents and
principles that individuate corresponding rational potentialities. One cannot individuate such
episodes neutrally, but only as achievements of a practical sort. The two conditions are
interdependent. Together they establish that the practical domain should include in an essential
way rationally individuated chunks of the world. This expresses and gives some articulation to
the core practical idea of making something true, or be the case.
The Priority of Actions
The general aim of Metaphysics Θ – defining and explaining the unity and reality of
change and of perishable substances - is strictly connected with the further aim of establishing
the priority of the actual over the potential. Aristotle thinks that understanding the nature of a
class of objects requires addressing them in terms of a conception of what constitutes their
fulfilment or perfection, which can only be something actual. The principle is completely
general, encompassing the origins and end-states of changes as well as the matter and form of
substances. Applied to rational, practical potentiality and actuality, it redefines and supports the
idea to take actions first.
Aristotle advances the claim of the priority of actuality on potentiality (in Θ and in
correlated texts in Δ and Ζ) along three dimensions: priority in time; in definition or account; in
substance.43 The actual is prior in time on the potential if it is the same in form but not in
number: the potentialities that which precede what is now actual come to be from other
actualities (man from man and so on); some actualisation of a potentiality for doing something
must precede the potentiality itself: one becomes a builder by building. However, Aristotle’s
seem mostly to suggest that, in coming to be or in changes, something must already have come
to be or have changed. This point comes into sharper light, within the practical domain, in the
relations between agents, doings, and deeds rather than in the conception of agency per se; and it
is better to put it to a side for now. Priority in definition or account, logos, is the idea that the
actual - building or seeing - is involved in the account or definition of the potential - the capacity
to build or to see - in a way in which the latter is not involved in the account or definition of the
former. This holds (pace Makin, ad locum) with a special, intensional import: whether what
happens is an action depends on whether it is the performance of an agent; one of two physically
indistinguishable episodes might be an action and the other not. Also in this case we have the
relevant asymmetry: the intrinsic nature of the relationally individuated actualities - the
combination of the two features is perfectly possible, if essentiality entails intrinsicalness - has a
constitutive explanatory import for the corresponding capacities which is more fundamental than
any that such capacities can have. Therefore, in the practical case, actions are constitutively
explained as the results of the exercise of agential capacities. But only the previous
understanding of the What-is of actions gives a fundamental understanding or account of agential
capacities, including their explanatory import. Aristotle’s text also suggests a suitable extension:
priority in logos is not just priority in understanding or definition but also in knowledge.
Knowledge of actuality is prior to knowledge of potentialities.44
43
44
All the material in what follows is from Θ, 8, 1049 b 5-1050 b 5.
See for a related point C.D.C. Reeve, Practices of Reason. Aristototle’s Nicomachean Ethics,
Priority in substance is the most fundamental. It holds of what is «more real» (Ross) or
has «existential independence» (Makin): notions badly in need of clarification. Furthermore,
actuality-potentiality encompasses non-substantial items like changes or actions. Something
should be said about how this priority applies to them.45 These are huge interpretive and
philosophical questions; but here are some thoughts. Aristotle frames his discussion in terms of
the notions of form and of end, which both express actualities and have application across
change and substance. Things that are actual and posterior in coming to be are prior in substance,
because they already have the form, while the potentialities do not: think of adult and child, the
former already fully exemplifying the form of man, the latter not. This holds also of changes: the
progressing or the effected changes count as realizing or as already having the form, manhood,
say. Neither of these hold of the mere capacity for becoming a man. Correspondingly, actualities
are the ends of potentialities. They are that for the sake of which potentialities are acquired and
exercised. This also holds of matter, which is oriented or directed to the form or to the substance.
Thus Aristotle takes the claim of the priority in substance of the actual, based on the notions of
form and end, to apply across the distinction between changes and things. (This is important
because Aristotle’s ontology of actions has recourse both to actuality and potentiality and to form
and matter.) This also elucidates the sense in which priority in substance is a question of degree
of reality or independent existence. Form and end are concepts expressing objective, constitutive
normative conditions. They express the idea that how a certain thing or change should be in part
defines and constituters what is for it to exist as such and such. In the successful cases, it is an
essential aspect of the existing thing or change. 46 In this perspective, forms and ends realized
and achieved in actuality contribute to determine the corresponding potential being. But since
forms and ends, in this way, both constitute the actual being of a thing or a change and determine
its potential being, what it potentially is, it makes sense to say that they express a fuller sense of
its reality. Think of the following: Only forms and ends make possible distinguishing whether
things and changes exist or take place as they should. Being as they should - or not – is the mode
Clarendon Press, Oxford 1995, p. 59: the real experience of actions, the experience of the that
and how of their performance and taking place, as an irreducible epistemic role with regard of
practical wisdom.
45
Makin, “Commentary”, pp.192-195.
46
For a fine discussion of this idea, with reference to actions, see R. Stout, Things that Happen
Because they Should, […], 1996. I will come back to this important work below.
of being, belongs to the very nature, of such things or changes. There is no normatively neutral
description of them, both as they are potentially and as they are actually. But forms and ends are
complete and completely determined only in actuality. Therefore, as form or end, actuality is
prior to potentiality not only in a causal and explanatory sense but with respect to being - degree
of reality or existential independence.
These claims about the priority in substance of the actual – and the related one about the
normative dimension of reality - hold across nature and practice, natural productions and actions.
As Aristotle remarks in Physics, wherever there is telos, everything before is done for the sake of
it. How it is done, prattetai, is how it comes to pass naturally, pephuken; and how it comes to
pass naturally, so it is done, if there are no obstacles. But doing is for the sake of something; also
coming to pass naturally therefore is for the sake of something. A house coming to be by nature
would come to be just like it comes to be by art; the converse would hold also.47 There is an
internal teleological order and necessity common to action and to nature, which in this way
mirror each other. Such order can only be internal: in the case of nature, it could not be
otherwise, given the definition of nature. It is the same with the order of the doing (prattein or
poiein indifferently), of the actual performance of the action; not simply of the reasoning
concluding to the action. Actions have the telos as end, not as arche.48 In this way, also, errors
are possible in the things according to art and in the things according to nature, precisely because
of their aiming to achieve what they are for the sake of.49
The Aristotelian doctrine of the priority of the actual – in particular, the priority in logos
and in substance – therefore has a perfectly appropriate application, on completely general
grounds, to the domain of practice. The Aristotelian priorities seem to be in deep harmony with
47
See Physics, 199 a 8. Notice that the verb is prattein, but the example is one of poiesis. This is
an indication of a point I will take up for discussion below, that there is no deep ontological
difference between praxis and poiesis.
48
See Physics, 199 b 13: natural thing undergo continuous change, from an intrinsic source of
change and concluding to a particular end; this holds also of actions.
49
See Physics, 199 a 33. See also Metaphysics, 1033 b 5. Form and matter cannot be produced or
come to be. Production cannot proceed to infinity. Production consists in bringing the sphere into
this particular matter; both artifacts and natural things consist of form and matter. Thus natural
genesis and production by art have the same structure, only differing in the nature of their
principles or kind of form. Natural form, respectively; or reason, art, capacity. This, by the way,
supports the idea that poiēsis is not a kind of practical activity but rather a dimension of it, having
to do with the structure and content of performance.
the grounds I have given for taking actions first. In particular, the idea of priority in substance,
which mirrors the relations, the order of determination, between being potentially and being
actually something, seems to provide a ground for the distinction I have proposed between the
empirical priority of agency on actions and the transcendental priority of actions on agency. The
distinction, as one will recall, is between the constitutive role of agency with regard of actions, in
causal and explanatory terms: it is not accidental that actions are explainable and caused in a
unique way by agential principles; and that of actions have in regard of actions, because of
considerations of individuation and in terms of presupposition. The second sort of role is
presuppositional, because it does not consist in agency following, in any causal or explanatory
sense, from actions. Rather, it consists in the independent, irreducible ontological status of
actions being presupposed by any sound conception of agency. This has to do with the conditions
of individuation of agential contents and principles; as well as with the general normative nature
of agency itself. This sort of priority, of constitutive relation, bears some resemblance with
Aristotle’s priority in substance. It is neither temporal nor explanatory. It is not even a priority
regulating our conceptions of the practical domain, in any sense in which this would stand
opposed to ontological considerations. The transcendental priority of actions invests the very
possibility of agency having determinate contents and in particular normative conditions. This is
an issue concerning the possibility of agency itself, not just of a conception of it. One way of
understanding this, a perfectly legitimate one, is as a form of priority in substance. In general, the
ontological interpretation of how actions constitute practical objectivity and world-directedness
is the gain one can expect from the Aristotelian approach – one dispelling any lingering
antirealism or pragmatism. But the Aristotelian framework also suggests that the best approach
to the reality of actions and of practice in general is in terms of rational forms and normative
character. This is our next topic.50
My basic complaint with Charles’s in many respects excellent discussion of Aristotle’s
ontology of actions as changes is the excessive concentration on the identity and location of
actions, what is to be one action, to the expense of their formal, conceptual and normative nature,
having to do with what is to be an action, tout court (see 62). I disagree (for the same reasons)
with the concluding diagnosis of J. Akrill, “Aristotle on Action”, in A. O. Rorty, ed., Essays on
Aristotle’s Ethics, University of California Press, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London 1980 (93-101),
p. 100: «He [Aristotle] does not direct his gaze steadily upon the questions: “What is an action?”
and “What is an action?”»
50
Psychical Form, Somatic Matter
We have seen that in Metaphysics Θ Aristotle explicitly connects actuality and
potentiality with form and matter and with the problem of the unity and change of substances, in
this way defining something like an analogical field of concepts and problems.51 This suggests to
take a view of Aristotle’s metaphysics which is both wider and closer than what we have done up
to now. Wider, in the sense that we should progress from agency and actions as instances of
potential and actual to the form-and-matter ontological structure of agency and actions, as in part
we have already done. Closer, because in this way we can clarify both what is for actions to
actualize practical potentialities and what is their ontological status vis-à-vis with substantial
being. That is, we can give a – much-needed – specification of the contents of agential
potentialities and of their actualization in action, putting some substance in the outline of
Aristotelian practical nature so far provided.
The crucial text, in this connection, is De anima. Here Aristotle advances a view of action
as a natural feature of life and of the faculties of living beings, on a par with perception,
imagination, and cognition.52 Life is also and in an essential way practical life. (Not only an
active condition, but a distinctively practical one.) The general background for the form and
matter account of practice, of agency and actions, is thus a conception of life, soul, and body.
Aristotle’s views are well known but it is convenient to rehearse them briefly. Natural living
bodies are substances of a composite kind; the soul or mind (psyche) is substance qua form or
actuality of such a body, which has life potentially. Soul is actuality only as hexis, as the first
actuality of a natural body, which has life potentially. The soul is logos and essence of a body,
which has within itself the source of movement and rest.
53
The mind thus has the general
functions connected with life: growth, nutrition, local self-movement; and, in the case of humans
and of certain other animals, with cognition and motivation: thinking, understanding and
discriminating, sensing and perceiving, knowledge and belief, reasoning, appetite, decision,
action.54 These are forms that, in different and complementary way, constitute episodes and
states of living beings: forms in the soul, psychical forms. Rational psychical forms are only
Makin, “Commentary”, pp. 128-135.
See T. Irwin, “The Metaphysical and Psychological Basis of Aristotle’s Ethics”, in Essays on
Aristotle’s Ethics (35-53), pp. 41-43).
53
De Anima, 412 a 11, 412 a 22, 412 b 10.
54
De Anima, 413 a 20, 414 a 4.
51
52
human; and individuate the specific episodes and states of the life of human beings, primarily
cognition and action. No dualism is even conceivable within this framework. The soul does not
exist without a body, even though it is not itself a kind of body. But the kind of body must be
determinate. This is not a matter of chance but one according to logos: the actuality of each thing
comes in what is already potentially such thing and in its appropriate matter (tēi oikeia ule).55
Like potentiality and actuality, matter and form stand under tight and reciprocal normative
constraints: matter can only be the right or wrong one for taking the appropriate form in the in
the appropriate way. Psyche stands into an internally relation to a certain kind of body, soma:
body that has potentially life; that has organs, and the right kind of organization. Aristotle rejects
as absurd the position taken by his predecessors in the study of the soul, who have described the
characteristics of the soul and joined it to the body, without giving a thought to the
characteristics of the body which was to contain it.56 Mind and body are same in actuality, in the
living being; if they are of the appropriate kinds, they come to reality as life, knowledge, and
action. This strongly suggests that cognitive and practical episodes, as episodes of the life of a
natural being, somehow participate of its substantial character, are unitary and real as natural
substances can be. 57
The internal connection, causal and normative, between psyche and soma, is perfectly
consistent, according to Aristotle, with recognizing their differences. The soul is not itself a
body. At least some of the potentialities and of the parts of the soul are distinctively
psychological, even in our sense. And, in general they do not only have functions, but objects;
and one must understand and explain them starting from their objects. Aristotle remarks that the
forms or potentialities of the soul – the thinking power, or the perceptive, or the nutritive –
should be explained taking a step back, and enquiring the corresponding activities: thinking or
perceiving, which are prior in account. On this ground, we must take a further step and enquire
the objects (antikeimena) corresponding to these activities: nutrients, what is perceived, what is
55
De Anima, 414 a 19.
For a compelling statement of Aristotle’s view of the normative connection of body and soul,
see De Anima, 407 b 15-25.
57
This was a hot topic of discussion in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, in connection with functionalism,
see M. Burnyeat, “Is an Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind still Credible?” and M. C. NussbaumH. Putnam, “Changing Aristotle’s Mind”, in Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima, M. C. Nussbaum &
A.O. Rorty edd, Clarendon Press 1992.
56
thought.58 At least in the case of perception and thought, the antikeimena define the contents of
these activities and potentialities and thereby individuate them in intentional terms, as broadly
rational capacities. It is in this guise that they contribute to psyche as a form, marking its
difference from body. This holds generally of the capacities of the soul, sense perception
(aisthnesthai), inclination (orexis), desire (epithumia), local motion, understanding (phronein),
thinking (voein).59 Most, if not all, of these potentialities involve movement and are causes of
movement – simply because of their relation to bodily potentialities. This however does not
mean that the mind originates the movement of the body by moving in its turn, as if it were a sort
of refined quicksilver. The mind is form, not matter. It does not move intransitively, as the body
moves. It moves locally the body, but not by moving itself. «In general, it is not in this way that
the soul appears to move (kinein) the animal, but by choice (proairesis) and thought (noesis) ». 60
The moving which is proper to the soul is not movement or by movement but rational, strictly
psychical, determined by contents or logos. 61 The soul causes movement – and all the cognitive
and active capacities of the embodied soul involve movement – but what moves is not the soul
itself, but the «animal by the soul (ton anthropon tê psychê) ». The movement belongs to the soul
only in the sense that it is caused and directed, oriented by and in relation to it: «it is not that it
[the movement] is in the soul, but rather that it reaches to it (mekri ekeines) or comes out of it
(ap’ekeinê) ». Sense perception and reminiscence are the examples - we may safely add local
motion as an example of movement outwards.62 Therefore, whether or not Aristotle had a full
conception of intentionality, psychical activity consists in the mind moving the body in the
rational guise defined by its forms (and their objects) and by the exercise of form-determined
capacities – like wanting, thinking and choosing. This complex of relations – between soul and
body; between the soul and its parts or forms; between capacities, activities, and objects – are
58
De Anima, 415 a 15-20.
De Anima, 412 a 17, 413 b 16, 414 a 29-32.
60
De Anima, 406 b 20-25.
61
Notice that, as Charles has remarked, 71, Hornsby’s distinction of transitive and intransitive
movement has little or no role (even place) Aristotle’s form and matter ontology of actions. In
the context of action, it is only the rationally formed matter of the moving body that exists and is
relevant; this is by construction transitive motion, since there is necessarily a subject of it, the
mind.
62
De Anima, 408 b 15-20. See the texts of Burnyeat and Nussbaum-Putnam, referred to above;
and V. Caston, “Aristotle and the Problem of Intentionality”, Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 1998.
59
governed by patterns of sameness in actuality and difference in essence, which in turn exemplify
potentiality and actuality and form and matter.63 The same fundamental explanation in terms of
form and matter, psychical form and somatic matter, holds of practical life: inclination,
deliberation, and purposive local movements or actions. Its psychical and somatic constitution is
also and indissolubly its conceptual and normative determination and the ground of its unity and
reality. In the case of action, a feature that makes a body appropriate for taking the forms of
psyche is the capacity for local self-movement - having in itself the principle of motion and rest
(arche kineseos). Correspondingly, in acting, the soul relates to bodily movements in the
distinctive way of a rational form. We must now see what the characteristics of practical forms
are.
Action and Apophansis
What is a rational form? Rational forms are constitutively individuated by conceptual
contents and realized in activities of human beings. Any eidos can be described conceptually
(unformed matter cannot); but only rational forms are instances of conceptual content.
Correspondingly, any form normatively individuates its realization in a certain matter; but only
rational forms normatively govern their realization in episodes of human life. More deeply,
rational forms of this sort individuate in their turn contentful states indissolubly of mind and
body. This is the fundamental nature of agential episodes and actions. I will address these forms
and the constitution of action, firstly, in terms of their kind of content and then, in the next
Section, in terms of the kind of governance they have on human active life.
In a very terse text of De Anima, which is convenient to quote completely, numbering the
salient steps, Aristotle characterizes the rational form of actions. The text starts with a parallel
between action and assertion and then proceeds, by applications of the pattern of sameness in a
respect, to an account of how such form is constituted and how it defines the nature of actions:
(1) Perceiving then is like simple saying or thinking; but when it is pleasant or painful, it
is like affirmation or negation and pursues or avoids. (2) To feel pleasure or pain is like being in
act with the sensible mean in relation to good or bad as such. (3) Avoidance and desire are the
same in act; the faculty of desire and that of avoidance are not different, one from the other or
from the faculty of perception; but their being is different. (4) To the thinking soul images are
like perceptions. (5) When it affirms or denies good or bad, pursues or avoids. Hence the soul
63
De Anima, 424 a 17, 425 b 26. See D. Hamlyn, “Commentary”, pp. 113-114.
never thinks without images […] (6) The faculty of thought then thinks forms in the images; and
how in these what pursue and to avoid is defined for it, without perception, thus it is moved,
when it addresses the images. (7) In the same way as, perceiving the beacon on fire, one
recognizes, seeing it moved, that it is of the enemy; sometimes one calculates with images and
thoughts in the soul, as if seeing, and deliberates about future things from present ones. (8) And
when one pronounces, as there, the pleasant and the painful, in these he pursues and avoids; and
thus generally in action. (9) And that which is without action, the true and the false, is in the
same genus as the good and the bad, but they differ in the one being absolute and the other for
someone 64
The subject of this text is the soul or the man, the living being whose psychic capacities
and states instantiate practical rational forms. The basic architecture of the text is to address such
forms, firstly, from the perspective of sense perception - (1)-(3) – and, secondly, from the
perspective of thought – (4)-(8). There are detectable parallelisms. (1) and (2) correspond to (5)
and (8); (2) corresponds to (6). The same fundamental form-and-matter constitution of action is
recognizable across different sorts of psychical capacities. Aristotle seems to exploit our
immediate understanding of what is to act at a simpler, more ‘animal’ level, to clarify action at a
more explicitly rational one. But what matters, and what supports this strategy, is the unity and
order manifested by out cognitive and active life. (8) generalizes the argument to action as such.
(9) draws a general conclusion about the form of actions and truth aptness, which connects with
the discussion of practical normativity and practical truth. The main line of thinking is that the
form of action belongs to the genus as those of perceiving and of thinking. It is necessarily
directed to objects; it involves an apprehension and a response to them. Still, its specific
difference consists in distinctive and important characteristics, which is also the task of this text
to indicate and explain out.65 Both from the perspective of sense perception and from that of
64
De Anima, 431 a 8-17, 431 b 1-12. The two texts should be read in immediate sequence. The
in between material (at the place marked by square brackets) is a likely interpolation (see
Hamlyn, “Commentary” ad locum). In Nicomachean Ethics VI, 2 there is a partially parallel
passage. Also in De Motu Animalium, 6, the connection between thought and imagination,
pleasure and pain, and pursuit and avoidance as their practical realization is prominent. [?]
Admittedly, no mention of apophantic structure is to be found in De Motu Animalium; still, the
structure of action is analyzed in syllogistic terms. [?]
65
In what comes before this text, Aristotle makes a general point about knowledge and the object
of knowledge, or sensation, perception. These are the same in actuality (what is known and its
being known) but not in potentiality or in form (being respectively a fact, pragma, and a
cognitive capacity), De Anima, 431 a 1-5. This provides a general ground for the relations of
sameness in a respect that organize the following discussion.
thinking, we can begin to address this complex text in terms of three, strictly interrelated,
contrasts, which articulate and encompass (1), (5), and (8).
Firstly: At (1) Aristotle introduces an important distinction or contrast between simple
and complex mental states. The contrast is in the first place drawn in relation to sense perception
(aisthanestai) and is then implicitly extended to thinking at (4) and (5). Already at its first
appearance, anyway, simple sense perception is likened with simple saying and thinking,
«phanai monon kai noein». Aristotle’s point, therefore, is specifically one of logical or mental
simplicity or complexity. Perceiving but can be – but must not be - like the «thought of the
undivided, tōn adiaretōn noēsis» which Aristotle had introduced shortly before.66 This seems to
mean, firstly, that the content of such sense perception content is in some sense primitive. There
is an obvious contrast between conceptual and non-conceptual content in the immediate
neighbourhood, but we should handle this with some care. There is a sense in which sense
perception and thinking differ along the conceptual and non-conceptual dimension. This is
obvious (Aristotle, for instance, ascribe the first to all animals, the second only to man). But
sense perception can itself be conceptually determined. It can achieve recognition of objects
(EN, VI). It can unify sensations of different modalities (D.A.). It can be predicatively
articulated, as we are about to see. Correspondingly, thinking may be of the undivided, of a
simple object, without any articulation. Therefore, there is no all-out contrast, in this respect,
between sense perception and thinking (including imagination). The real point of the contrast is
that an episode of simple perceiving, like the thought of the undivided, is not predicative or
propositional and therefore not susceptible to truth and falsity. More generally, it is not
susceptible of any assessment and, before that, of any normative property, which would depend
both on its structure and on the satisfaction of external conditions. (It is essentially in this respect
that one can think in terms of conceptual and non-conceptual). Relatedly, simple perceiving and
simple thinking are not inherently susceptible to any commitment of their subject – like in just
saying “tree” we are not thereby engaging in any recognizable speech-act. It is possible,
somehow, to take a stance about what we simply perceive, think, or say. However, such a stance
would not stand in any internal connection with the content it addresses. The three points are
linked in obvious ways: non-propositional content excludes truth-aptness and any accountable
commitment.
66
De Anima, 430a26.
Aristotle determines the form of action contrastively, along these three dimensions. There
are different ways in which we can go beyond simple sense perception. One, clearly, is when we
form a belief or judge about some object we have experienced, perhaps by abstracting a feature
of it, predicating it of that feature, and endorsing the ensuing content. (How much this is a break
from simple perceiving depends on how one interprets Aristotle’s theory of perception – a vexed
question.) Another way of going beyond simple perceiving directly leads to action. This is
introduced in the second half of (1). An episode of sense perception that is pleasant or painful,
precisely because of this feature of it, has a more complex character than simple perceiving (or
saying or thinking). This depends both on the quality of the experience and of the import of
pleasure and pain for its content. As we will see below, discussing (2), pleasure and pain are
actualizations of the perceiving soul in relation to the good and the bad. I will take up this for
discussion immediately below. But it is clear that pleasure and pain do not figure in Aristotle’s
account simply as concomitant feelings. They rather make possible a more complex, implicitly
comparative, content of sense perception; a way of recognizing and characterizing its objects.
One perceives or experiences the object as pleasant – recognizing it as pleasant. This further
connotation goes beyond simply being acquainted with it and has in important and distinctive
role in mental and active life. But it is primarily on the form of the relevant contents that
Aristotle draws attention. The contents that are apprehended by pleasant or painful sense
perception and the act of apprehension itself are – Aristotle says - like like affirming or denying.
The soul or the man by the soul, the subject of such episode, is in a state like affirmation and
denial (oion katafasa ē apofasa). Most importantly, being in such a state, the soul or the man
pursues of avoids (diokei ē pheugei) – pursuit or avoidance being the primary purposive selfmovements or actions.67 This structure: object of sense perception and experience or recognition
of it as pleasant or painful is implicitly predicative. It defines the content, logos, of a mental
state, which is at the same time an action, an episode of purposive self-movement. This content
individuates both the mental state and the action. Therefore, it has the role of form with regard of
the somatic matter consisting in a capacity for self-movement. The form individuating and
constituting actions, at this very elementary, almost animal level, is thus of a psychic character
67
A closely related point in Nicomachean Ethics, II, 3 1104b15: every action and every passion
is accompanied by pleasure and pain; pursuing or avoiding pleasures and pains habituates
(therefore, pursuit and avoidance are actions, which only can habituate, see 1106b20)
(individuated by its content) and is not dissimilar from the form that individuates cognitive acts
of affirmation and denial, at least in so far as these keep close to perceptual experience. The form
of actions, therefore, is apophantic: it is predicative and has the form of affirmation and denial.68
The necessarily apophantic character of its form marks a difference between action and
cognition: cognition can also be simple, of an undivided object. Action is necessarily articulated
in its principles of individuation: the purposiveness of the self-movements that are actions
postulates a corresponding complexity in their forms. The apophantic structure implies, in its
turn, a complex condition of satisfaction or correctness for the corresponding episodes. This will
be the subject of the next Section. But we can anticipate that the structure and normativity of
actions and that of judgment and assertion are deeply similar. Aristotle at least suggest a
condition of practical truth, which is analogous, if somewhat different and more complex, to
theoretical truth. In the present text, at (8), Aristotle says something that goes in this direction:
the good and the bad, which, as we will see, are the predicative contents corresponding to
pleasant and painful experience, belong to the same genus as the true and false. We take this as
meaning that such predicates support a discrimination and an assessment of actions parallel to
that of judgments as true or false; or as meaning that the two assessments are parallel the one to
the other. Either way, it presupposes and manifests, in explicitly normative terms, the apophantic
character of the form of action. Actions are apophantically informed self-movements; their form
belongs to the genus of apophantic content.
Of course, this connection in form of assertion or judgment and action also holds from
the perspective of thinking; that is, if we explicitly formulate the form of action in rational terms.
This is the point of (4) and (5). The thinking faculty (noêtikon) thinks forms in images: this is the
psychologically real form of thinking, when practical life is in question. Pursuit and avoidance
are the same in actuality with the explicit affirmation or denial (phêsê ê apophêsê) of good and
bad, as presented in thought or images, that is, as conceptualized. This is a relevant and
important conceptualizing step. Actions are detached from occurring perceptions. They can
address any kind of objects, including future ones, as Aristotle remarks in (7). Even more
importantly, the contents deployed in the affirmation and denial or good and bad and therefore in
68
This condition is quite strong and is not generally satisfied by mental capacities. So, De
Anima, 432a3, imagination is said to be different from affirmation and denial, in that it does not
admit combination of thoughts. The role of pleasure and pain in introducing the apophantic
structure of action is all but trivial.
actions, as their form, make also possible to calculate and deliberate (logizetai kai bouleuetai)
about what to do. And these are the distinctive exercises of rational agency. Therefore, the
conceptualization of the form of actions not only extends our practical outreach but also deepens
the sense in which we can engage in practical life. This is summarized, neatly and forcefully, in
(8). Pleasure and pain are still in the picture. But the soul or the agent now judges (ôristai, at 6)
or asserts (eipê) them; the same things he pursues or avoids; and this holds of action in general
(olôs en praxei). This forms the background of the discussion of practical normativity in the
Nicomachean Ethics: «What affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit and avoidance are
in desire».69 Therefore, the form of action in general consist in an apophantic content including
the conceptual predicates of good and bad – better, these predicates, in a certain role determining
the objects they take and how they related to other psychic faculties, primarily orexis. I discuss
this immediately below. However, we should not lose sight of the essential unity of the form of
action across sense perception and thinking by images. The form of action is apophantic at all
levels at which it is worthwhile to talk of action. It is a psychic and potentially fully rational and
conceptual form. It is the same with the content of the corresponding deliberations and other
agential attitudes. Together with the appropriate somatic matter, it individuates actions as
structured, contentful, real episodes of purposive self-movement. In this perspective, differences
along the conceptual-non-conceptual dimensions lose much of their importance.
Orexis and the Unity of Actions
In the text we are discussing, Aristotle also makes certain - claims, somewhat elusive but
philosophically important - about the determinate contents of the form of actions, in particular
about the role of pleasure and pain, and about how their different aspects, both formal and
material, are unified. To begin addressing these claims, consider that a difference between action
and knowledge is that the former necessarily includes a specific feature of experience, pleasure
or pain. Precisely this feature is connected with and explains the committed character of the
grasp of practical forms. In general, the relation between form and matter, just like that between
actuality and potentiality, is in general between terms made, so to say, the one for the other. It
gives expression not to mere dispositional properties but to some mutual, teleological ordering of
them. In the case of practice, the grasp of the form of an action, when full and appropriate, is also
69
Nicomachean Ethics, 1139 a 20-25.
its endorsement, the commitment to act on that form, to realize it in one’s own self-movement.
This committed character of action is something which should be explained – alongside its
structured content and its susceptibility to something like truth – by the apophantic character of
its form (as opposed to its presenting the undivided). Aristotle accounts how form explains the
committed character of action or practice in terms of how pleasure and pain figure in that form.
This account is prominent in the first half of the text we are discussing, in (2) and (3); but
pleasure and pain contribute generally to the form of actions (8). The first thing to point out is
that pleasure and pain do not figure in the account only as feelings - although they certainly are
felt, are present as feelings. Their connection with objects of sense perception is not accidental, is
not an expression of some contingency of our constitution. Rather, they are the sensible,
discriminative apprehension of good and bad as and in objects. Aristotle gives this
characterization in (2): «To feel pleasure or pain is like being in act with the sensible mean in
relation to good or bad as such». The account is restricted to the medium or faculty of sensation
(tê aisthêtikê mesotêti). But within the bounds of sensibility, the conditions of cognition of
objects are completely satisfied. The cognitive capacity is fully exercised or realized. It is
cognition in act, addressed to (pros) a distinctive kind of objects, which are recognized or
apprehended as such (ê toiauta). The experience of pleasure and pain, therefore, has objective
import; in fact, it is an instance of knowledge with regard to the good and bad. 70 Under this
guise, it is part of the apophantic form of action in general. Being a case of object-directed,
recognitional apprehension, pleasure and pain can determine a class of concepts, good and bad,
which are suitable to figure as predicates in apophantic composition and to give shape to mental
content, to logos. The soul, already in the basic mode of sensibility, can possess forms with the
right complexity and contents for realization in bodily self-movement and thereby in actions. In
the mode of thinking, the soul thinks forms in images and therefore affirms or denies good or bad
as concepts. Good and bad here are manifestly predicates, whose application and endorsement,
on a certain occasion, is acting, pursuing or avoiding. Put most simply and abstractly, the content
or form of an action would be something like: Here and now, changing this in this way is doable
and is good in this respect. (To spell out more fully such content one would have to formulate the
This is the basic conception of pleasure laid out in Nicomachean Ethics, VII, … (……) and
perhaps also X, … (….). See J.C.B. Gosling and C.C.W. Taylor, The Greeks on Pleasure,
Clarendon Press, Oxford 1982, pp. 192-224.
70
corresponding practical syllogism.) The assumption is that this logos is present in the mind with
the force of an experience of pleasure and pain. This is part of what explains its role as form of
self-movement, our commitment to act on it. Something essential would be missed if one forgot
that such content is a form, must be taken within the context of form and matter. Its ontological
work is prior to any other specification.
We can say something more, following Aristotle’s steps, about such commitment and, in
general, about what is for forms of this sort or for the nature of actions to be practical. Part of the
answer, of course, is that such forms has necessarily apprehensions or concepts of the good and
of the bad as its constituents. But this is only part of the answer, since, very simply, the content
determined in such a way could well be contemplated and judged, rather than acted on. Even the
fact that we have some sort of experience of goodness and badness (as suggested above) would
not sufficiently discriminate between the endorsement or force of assertion and that of action.
The key to an adequate answer to this question lies in the relations between pleasure, the
recognitional experience of good, or the acceptance of a predication of goodness in favour of
some object, and a state of inclination, orexis, in regard of the same object. To understand this
we must begin by keeping well distinct considerations of efficient causation from considerations
of form-and-matter constitution. Aristotle has a firm grip on the efficient causation of actions by
choice and (more generally) by agents (this is discussed below). But the relation between the
different aspects of the apophantic form and the somatic movement, which is presented in (3), is
not one of efficient causation. It rather an instance of sameness in some respect. There are three
terms to the relation. One, introduced as last, is sensibility, the faculty of sense experience (tou
aisthêtikou). In the present context, sensibility includes the experience of pleasure, which
apprehends goodness as such. Pleasure, as sensible recognition of goodness, is the same in
actuality with inclination, orexis, toward the good object. Orexis, in turn, is same in actuality
with avoidance, phugê, the self-movement of the body is oriented by the object of sense
experience and of inclination. (I discuss the reading of this part of the text below.) These states
are the same in actuality, kat’energeian. They achieve completion or reality only jointly: to
experience really something as good or bad is also to be inclined with regard it and also to orient
oneself in movement on the same object. There is no real distinction, no distinction in reality,
concerning what is for these conditions to obtain or be the case. This also holds of the
corresponding faculties, which can be actualized or exercised only jointly. But sameness in
actuality is consistent with difference in essence, to eivai. Experience of pleasure, inclination,
and purposive self-movement are different states or conditions – they are conceptually different,
have different roles, within a common context of mutual explanatory and functional relations. 71
Precisely this pattern makes full sense and gives full expression to the matter and form
constitution of practice. (I have already made this point about the application of potentiality and
actuality to practice.) The sameness of the experience of an object as good or bad – of a
contingent object as a doable good or avoidable bad – and of the inclination or orexis in relation
to the same object is the ground for the unity of the apophantic form of actions. No matter how
different in their concepts, sense experience, pleasure or pain, and inclination can converge on
one and the same object and form one and the same content and psychical state. The same is true
if we substitute the thinking in images of objects as good or bad for sense experience (5). But
this complex condition, the necessary inclusion of these contents in the form of actions and the
necessarily joint occurrence of these states in the psyche of the agent, is in its turn same in
actuality with the purposive self-movement of the agent’s limbs, with his local motion. The
experience of goodness or badness, or the thought of them, and the corresponding inclination, are
same in actuality with the exercise of bodily capacities for self-movement and thereby, are
jointly instantiated with them as or in actions, avoidance or pursuit. Sameness in actuality and
difference in being provide a frame for the form and matter constitution of actions, just as it did
for the potentiality and actuality relations of agency and actions. A token of apophantic, good
and bad involving content, it cannot be instantiated in sensibility or thought and in orexis without
being instantiated also in self-movement, in pursuit and avoidance, in action. The sameness in
actuality of such a form and of self-movement, in a unified, intelligible action (primitively, the
71
See Charles, 85, desire as cause of basic actions, A. compares it with assertion and links it with
action; composite account. Analogy with assertion, DA and EN; desire is a mode of accepting a
proposition or a conclusion or is analogous to a mode of accepting (86) – but there is also
aversion and pursuit. DES (φ’ing is good) like AS (x is an apple). [this seems wrong, desire is
responding to φ’ing as good with inclination and in action; it is not what puts goodness, the
predicate, in place (that is pleasure); just as judgments and assertion respond to F(a) as a fact
with commitment and inference; desire has the preceding form only if it is the acceptance of the
conclusion of a practical syllogism.] And desire is an activity towards objects conceived as good
and bad and the mode of acceptance which produces the relevant action. This is different from
assertion. To desire is to be active toward the good; acceptance of φ’ing as good; we desire
because it seems good to us.
pursuit or avoidance of a present good or bad) constitutes the practical character of that form and
of the episode itself, of the action. The minimal but fundamental mark of practice – of practical
content, of practical nature, or practical reality – is the coming to be of a change identified,
caused, and directed or governed by its content or representation –brought about, done by and
according to logos. Form and matter make possible to identify and pro tanto to explain the
episode itself, the change. But if the contents and the relation itself of form and matter are as I
have described them, following Aristotle’s steps – if the form unifies cognition and inclination
referred to one object and its realization is the same with actual movement oriented to that
object, we have to look no further to individuate and understand practical import. What is
practical about or in the conceptual, apophantic logos is that it is such that cannot be realized in
any psychical state without with this being realized in an action, a purposive self-movement and
change in the environment. A practical form is one with that unifies a content of that sort and
whose realization conform to those conditions of sameness. The same holds of the practical
nature of an episode. And a practical psychical state is one which such content and whose actual
role in the life of a person is to shape his movements and activities in terms of its content. This
means that, on the grounds offered by Aristotle, practical import is not an extra character added
to some other structure of a content, or way of identifying an episode, or characterization of a
mental state. It is essential to such structure, identification, or characterization. The same account
can and must be given of the unity and reality of actions or agential episodes and of their
practical nature. Practical character is inherent to the nature of content or logos and to its actual
working as the form of suitable mental and bodily episodes: it consists in the way its constituent
concepts or predicates present events and things and constitute and govern suitable mental and
bodily capacities.72
72
A problem with my reading of (3) is that, putting sensibility into brackets, Aristotle talks of the
sameness in actuality and difference in being of orexis and phugê, or of the orektikon and the
pheuktikon. This raises a question as to how to understand orexis in this context: is it an
inclination (or desire), as one should expect, or a synonym for pursuing, diôkein, a movement
(see (1))? I opt for the first reading, even though it raises the question why it is connected
contrasted with avoidance only, not with pursuit and avoidance. My reasons for this are, firstly,
that this is how orexis figures in the context of De Anima: as a psychic sort of movement, which
causes and is actualized in local movement but is not local movement itself (see 432 b 5, 432 b
15, 433 a 5, 433 a 9-b 31). But pursuit and avoidance are local movements. Second, it would
seem gratuitous to apply the pattern of sameness in actuality and difference in being to faculties
of pursuit and avoidance. There is quite obviously but one such faculty, one in being, which is
Aristotle’s metaphysics of actions is in many respects at odds with modern and
contemporary views. This comes out very clearly in how it obliterates certain familiar dualisms.
One is between cognition and action. In the text just commented Aristotle draws two contrasts
about contents and acts of thought: simple and complex and theoretical and practical - this latter
at (9). Aristotle seems to suggest that knowledge (as expressed by judgment) and actions, while
different in the second regard, are similar in the first one. This is important and right: actions,
just as judgments, are conceptually articulated and essentially susceptible to normative
qualification; both are apophantic episodes. The forms of actions constitute and individuate
changes, consisting of self-movements, things, and their properties. Actions are of their nature
local self-movements instantiating rational forms, which are apophantic and practical:
predicatively structured with goodness essentially figuring in the contents of predicates.
Another very familiar dualism is between inner and outer, the inward- and an outwardlooking conception of practice (Stout). This I have discussed extensively with reference to
agency and actions; in modernity it had pride of place in a mind-and-body guise. On Aristotle’s
conception the mode of being of actions is (in actuality) indissolubly mental and physical; their
mental and the bodily and environmental aspects are only jointly actualised. This thought
underlies the concept of psuche and the form-matter schema of action. Actions are directly,
immediately located in the world, in the living body and in its surroundings, not in mental
antecedent states. Still, qua such worldly episodes, nonetheless counts as mental episodes (being
directed to objects and normatively related to them). They are actual, bodily-psychical episodes
and belong to the same formal genus of judgments, taking place directly in the world (which is in
a very general sense their matter) with (practical) mental, intellectual, normative being.
Much the same holds of agency and actions. Actions have the non-restrictive priority on
agential potentialities which generally befits actuality. A parallel thesis holds in terms of form
and matter. Agential potentialities are defined by rational and normatively governing forms:
thought, orexis, capacities for self-movement. These forms mark the second actuality of practical
life: being in a position to perform certain actions. But the same forms are in actions, which just
exercised differently in different circumstances. Finally, if orexis were an act or instance of
pursuit, it would be simply false that it is the same with an act or instance of avoidance.
Therefore, I think that in (3) Aristotle has in mind, or at least has predominantly in mind, orexis
as psychic inclination and not as bodily movement.
are the occurring episodes jointly realizing them. In this perspective, actions are the first
actuality of practical life. But sameness in actuality (all the more, in first actuality) of thought,
orexis and self-movement is the basic constitutive fact of practice. Since this fact simply is the
(successful) occurrence of an action, actions have priority on agency also in the form and matter
account of practice. But still, agency and actions are distinguishable and irreducible
conceptually. On grounds of form and matter, thus, a non-restrictive idea of the priority of
actions on agency is available.73
Finally, the Aristotelian metaphysics of actions can firmly locate the conceptual and
normative domain of practice within a completely general and principled ontology. We can think
consistently, thoroughly and non-reductively of practical being. Again, this primarily means that
actions are particulars, processes and changes taking place in time and that they are intrinsically
conceptually determined and normatively discriminable and that this is constitutive of practice.
(Notice in passing that having structure does not make actions reducible or even analysable into
simpler and independent elements. They are structurally individuated but as particulars; they are
no more reducible or analysable into independent elements than individual substances.) More
generally, practical nature is to be understood a necessary condition on actuality: the sameness in
actuality, in occurring episodes, of certain sorts of forms. Thus, the metaphysics of practice
delivers a fundamental insight about ontology: there is no universal and necessary divide
between events and significance, between coming to be and being right or wrong, between
matters of fact and meaning. The things we do are things that happen and have practical
essences; there can be no metaphysical contrast between the reality of practice and that of nature.
This is an attractive position about the practical domain, which is out of many contemporary
views of actions.
Location and Causation of Actions
The Aristotelian metaphysics of actions opens a highly distinctive and satisfactory
perspective on the much discussed topic of the location and the causation of actions. Actions
have been located internally to the mind of agents, typically as volitions (Pritchard); or internally
73
Charles ?105, S is a constituent of the action, the subject of change; the agent does not stand in
an external relation to a distinct intransitive event; but is a constituent of the action itself. [Ok –
which thus cannot be just a projection of agency.] (106) No need of an external objective
estensional relation between the agent and an intransitive event; like in D.
to his body, within the skin, as preparations to act or muscle contractions (Davidson, Hornsby);
or right in the world, as movements of limbs and changes in the environment (Stout). Barring the
first position (any restrictively agential conception like volitionism is hopeless), the last position
has better chances to be right. The argument for this is quite simply that, even at the level of socalled basic actions (actions not performed by doing something else), there is no general ground
for excluding action-description which essentially involve things in the environment. Clinching a
fist seems to be a basic action; but giving a kick and taking a step seem to be basic as well. It is
perhaps possible to describe the first in purely bodily terms; but this may not be so with the
second, and certainly it is not with the third (Stout). But if basic actions can in general be located
jointly in the body and in the environment (and typically have to be so located; body-restricted
basic actions can be left alone: how much time do we spend in finger-wriggling?), this seems to
hold a fortiori for non-basic, instrumental actions. This is the position I have implicitly adopted
in my presentation of Aristotle’s vies.
The Aristotelian ontology of actions provides an appropriate grounding for this insight.74
The basic thought is that movement is the actuality of what can be moved; it is located in what is
moved - moved by what has the capacity for moving it. But such actuality is not different from
that of what has the active capacity for moving. Therefore, the exercise and fulfilment of active
potentialities is itself located in what is moved. This apparatus is explicitly applied to practical
capacities and episodes. The actuality of agents and that of patients, of agency and of patiency
(Ross’s rendition of poiēsis and pathēsis) are the same, that is, the action (poiēma) and the
passion (pathos). It is located in what is acted upon, just as teaching and learning are both in the
learner, where we also find the actuality of the agent, the teacher. Actions, therefore, are where
changes or movements (which have a practical form) take place; here also the agent (in whose
soul such form is located) has actuality.
An underlying principle, here, is that the actualization of one thing can well be in another;
in effect, the activity of the agent cannot be kept isolated, apotetmēnē, but must be activity of
someone in something. Furthermore, on the principle of sameness in a respect, there is no danger
of losing the distinctness of agency. Agency and patiency are the same only in actuality, in
movement; but they are different in definition, in the way in which the road from Thebes to
See Physics, III,3, 202a13-b22; and Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action, pp. 12-15, 62,
70.
74
Athens and the road from Athens to Thebes differ, even if the distance is necessarily the same.
On this basis, actions can be said to be in the agent (as psychical exertions and movements of
limbs) only in a sense in which they must also be said to be in the world. There is no movement,
a fortiori no action, above its circumstances of occurrence: para ta pragmata, above the things,
quantities, qualities, places, which undergo change and are what the action is about; and this is
without loss of practical nature.75 The location of actions, thus, turns out to be intensional, finegrained, just as the individuation of the end-point of a road.76 This is perfectly in keeping with
the ontology of actual-potential and form-matter.
The doctrine of the location of actions can be further sharpened. Aristotle says that
actions are en tois kat’ekasta, in the particulars; that is, actions are in and about particulars, en
ois kai peri a praxis.77 This is a complex ontological characterization. Certainly, actions are in
the class of particulars (Ross) - with properties like voluntariness, existing in time, standing in
causal relations with agents and other particulars. Here however the idea is that actions (as
particulars) are necessarily located in particulars. Actions are nothing further than the particulars
in which their actuality consists: who is acting, what is done, what is acted upon, what is the
action for, the ways is it performed. But this is a sort of highly qualified supervenience thesis: the
main qualification being that the particulars in which an action consists are also what it is about peri. Actions are not just structured particulars, only to be individuated and known from their
constituents and structure (say, like a bundle is). Such constituents are normatively related to the
actions - as what the actions are about they realize their forms and determine their correctness.
Correspondingly, on the ontological grounds already familiar, these particulars cannot be
determined without reference to the form and to the actuality of the doing and of the deed.
Involuntariness of actions is owing to factual ignorance of some of these particulars; but such
conditions of involuntariness are also conditions of error in action, amartēthenta.78 Actions are
essentially connected with particulars not only in their existence but also in their identity and
normativity. It is important that the two considerations cannot be kept distinct in reality.
75
Physics, III,1, 200b32.
Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action, p. 12.
77
Nicomachean Ethics, III, 1-2, 1110b5-30.
78
Notice that the particulars in which the action consists are practically described and mutually
ordered: the agent, the internal object of praxis, the thing on which praxis is exerted, where it
takes place, what it is for the sake for, and its ways and means.
76
A final remark on the causation of actions: Aristotle is not only hospitable but deeply
committed to the efficient causation of actions as crucial to the understanding of them.79
Aristotle presents this doctrine in his account of the voluntary.80 The causal principle is within
the man. In fact, it is the man, who knows the particulars in which the action consists, and desires
to act accordingly. Apprehension (perception, imagination, thought) of and inclination to a
doable good, deliberation, wish, choice, shaped by the overall character of the agent, are the
efficient cause of action, rather than its goal. Efficient causation is causation of and by
movement; causal factors of actions operate by physical means, pulling and pushing the animal.
Thus, voluntary action is bodily movement with knowledge of particulars, which is caused
efficiently by inclination and connected psychic antecedents, culminating in choice, proairesis.
Action-explanation involves causation and knowledge and teleology.81 An aspect of this doctrine
deserves utmost attention. Davidson, with a majority of contemporary philosophers, understands
efficient causation by thought and desire or by «man» as the ontological core of actions. For
Aristotle, by contrast, the ontology of actions must be in place before any talk of efficient
causation. Actions are actualizations of a certain kind of form, episodes of movement same in
actuality with certain mental episodes. What can be efficiently caused by «man» are only actions
with this ontology; therefore, actions cannot be the kind of changes they are because they are
caused by agential psychical states. The ontology of actions is not causal but one of actualitypotentiality and form-matter. This follows from a completely general doctrine of Aristotle’s:
once form and matter are determined, given that the essence of the one is potentially to be the
other, there is no further problem of constitution (unity of definition) about any entity; only
efficient causes are still required. Proximate matter and form are one and the same, the one
potentially, the other actually; in this perspective, each thing is a unity; the only cause that can be
here still a play is the one which causes the movement.82 These considerations can be extended
to actions: there is room and need for efficient causation of actions only once the ontology of
actions (form/matter, actuality/potentiality) has been fixed. Then, but only then, the causation of
actions by agents (the «man») becomes intelligible and can be a focus of our theoretical efforts.
Davidson 2000; Mele, 1993, “Introduction”.
Nicomachean Ethics, III,…; but see VI, 2, 1139a 30; De Anima 433a.
81
This follows the authoritative reconstruction found in Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of
Action, 57-59:
82
Metaphysics, Η, 1045a25; 1045 b 25.
79
80
On this view, the efficient causation of actions has the necessary practical significance; it does
not conflict with the non-negotiable assumption that agents and actions as such must be the
causal relata.83
83
See Charles, 106: No need of an external objective extensional relation between the agent and
an intransitive event; like in D. [this is good] There are tight limits to the sense in which
causation figures in the account of action, neither agent-causation nor antecedent mental states.
107: Agent is a special sort of subject, not of cause. No need of a separate category of irreducible
events. This is a metaphysical version of the explanatorily or contextually constrained notion of
causation which we have briefly met in Chapter 1 and which are all ways to satisfy is a
requirement (necessary but not sufficient) for conferring practical significance to a view off the
causation of actions
2. The Structure and Normativity of Actions
Thought, Inclination, Actions - Practical Truth, Phronēsis, Action - Practical Syllogism and
Rational Order - By-Form, A-D Structure, and the Ontology of Actions - Kinēseis and Energeiai - Praxis
and Poiēsis - Doings, Deeds, Products - Ontological Unity, Normativity, and Mental Nature
Three conclusions from the sketch of Aristotle’s metaphysics of actions. First, one should
understand practical being and practical nature in terms of a distinctive sort of potentiality and
actuality and of form and matter. What makes, of certain episodes, actions is their kind of
apophantic form, which they realize or actualize in bodily movements and changes in the world.
Second, actions are same in actuality with agential thoughts and inclinations. This account for
the very essence of practice, the bringing about by agents of worldly changes individuated and
determined by rational contents. This also forges the internal connection of agency and actions,
across potential and actual being (agential principles are potentially the actions they explain).
Third, practical nature should be manifest in the very reality of actions. The metaphysical
grounding of actions should be indissolubly tied to their constitutive individuation and to their
possible good order. The basic ontology of actions must find a reflection in their structure and
normativity. Form-individuated actions exist as the finely individuated, structured unity of finely
individuated, intelligible constituents; and as the actuality corresponding to content-determined
active potentialities. Rational forms and potentialities also define distinctive, highly specific
possibilities of correctness and error: rational active potentialities can only have good or bad
actualizations; apophantic forms determine conditions of truth or falsehood - theoretical or
practical. This basic normativity is a necessary property of the existence of actions and of the
exercise of agency. It is not only an essential feature they share but also an expression of the
Aristotelian ontology of practice we have discussed. This is our next topic.
Thought, Inclination, Agency (philosophical psychology of action; agency; also De
Anima III on orexis here)
The apophantic form of actions finds expression, in the first place, in a conceptual and
ontological structure connecting thought, orexis, and self-movement. This structure manifests
itself in agency as well as in actions, doings and deeds. The relation between cognition and
inclination is articulated in Aristotle's (admittedly tormented) discussion of thought, orexis, and
action at the end of Book III of De Anima, along lines very different from those familiar to
modern and contemporary philosophy: that is, as a pattern of mental life mirroring the form-andmatter constitution of actions. 84
The background for this discussion of the philosophical psychology of agency is given in
the Nicomachean Ethics, especially in the first five chapters of Book III. There Aristotle sets up a
broad picture of human agency, as it is deployed in and of interest for ethics, the study of
character and virtue. The main topics of this picture of agency are voluntariness (ekousion),
choice (proairesis), and deliberation (bouleusis). The leading aim of the discussion is to account
and to give criteria for virtue, which has essentially to do with passions and actions; more
precisely, to explain and direct reactive attitudes like praise and blame, which animate ethical
discourse. This aim explains the essentially phenomenological character of Aristotle’s
discussion, which essentially deals with how voluntariness is assessed in common discourse and
how deliberation and choice are conducted and made in ordinary practical contexts. (Notice how
this concentration on the moral worth of character, ethe, and on the principles of agency stand in
neat contrast and complementarity with the approach to tragedy in the Poetics.) Still, Aristotle’s
illustration of agential principles at the opening of Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics provides
the right context and guidelines for the deeper philosophical treatments of the psychology of
agency in De Anima and of practical normativity in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Reactive attitudes of praise and blame being directed to voluntary passions and actions, the first
property of agential states and engagements that comes in discussion is voluntariness. Aristotle’s
discussion of voluntariness is thoroughly ‘pragmatic’, that is, internal to the concerns of ethical
discourse and of the study of character. «To distinguish the voluntary and the involuntary is
presumably necessary for those who are studying the nature of virtue, and useful also for
legislators with a view to the assigning both honours and of punishment».85 From this viewpoint,
Aristotle addresses voluntariness, as the basic condition of agency and primarily in negative
terms - in terms of what we deem would make actions or passions not susceptible of praise and
blame. The two considerations Aristotle advances in this respect have to do with compulsion
(bia) and ignorance (agnoia). Things are involuntary (akousia), which one does without
knowledge of what one is doing or because of a principle external to the agent (archê exôthen).
84
See S. Broadie, "Philosophical Introduction", in Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, S. Broadie &
C.Rowe edd., Oxford 2002, pp. 51-2.
85 Nicomachean Ethics, 1109 b 30-35.
In either regard, Aristotle follows the thread of our considered judgments and reactive attitudes –
what we are prepared to praise and blame and on what grounds. (Think of the discussion of
mixed actions or of the distinction between ignorance to blame and ignorance to pity.) Certainly,
especially in connection with the idea of an internal principle of movement, Aristotle leaves
important conceptual and metaphysical points unsettled, explicitly on the ground that one should
not look for more philosophical exactness and depth than what the nature of enquiry requires.
However, even within these limits, Aristotle’s characterization of the voluntary makes an
important contribution to a conception of agency – and more indirectly of actions – in regard
both of its character as a moving principle and of its cognitive contents. To take this second point
first. Voluntariness, and therefore agency at its basic level, involves conditions of knowledge:
«Everything that is done by reason of ignorance is not voluntary». 86 Aristotle is careful to
distinguish between different conditions on the knowledge of agents, with different imports for
their assessment and the assessment of actions.
Different conditions of knowledge, not all involving voluntary and involuntary.
Particular content, indexical content and indexical knowledge. Character and content of
agential thinking. Context and actions filling the gaps. The internal unity of actions and agency,
the transcendental priority of actions of agency.
The internal principle of movement. A causal and a normative condition. This is
developed though proairesis and bouleusis.
Proairesis – choice or deliberative inclination toward things in our power – as the
immediate mental antecedent of actions. This is a notoriously complex concept, which, in
contrast with generic wish, boulēsis, has the closeness to action of intentions but also involves a
comparative dimension and a qualification of rationality that are typical of decisions.87
Proairesis is the conclusion of deliberation: one ceases to enquire how he is to act, pōs praxei,
by settling on doing a certain action. But proairesis it is also an explicitly agential concept. To
conclude a deliberation is to bring back to oneself and to one’s ruling, thinking part the principle
of movement. Proairesis is thus the principle, archē of action as to movement - and it is the
agent, the rational animal, who moves. Aristotle equates this with man being such a principle,
86
87
Nicomachean Ethics, 1110 b 15.
Nicomachean Ethics, III, 2, 1111b5-1112a15.
archē tōn praxeōn, thus emphasizing the agential dimension of proairesis - proairesis is thus
ultimate both in the explanation of actions and in the account of agency. 88 Furthermore, in Book
VI, Aristotle combines his account of the principle of practical normativity (orthos logos) with a
more straightly mental and agential account of proairesis. This notion, characterized in Book III
as deliberative inclination, comes now in sight as the unification of thought and orexis, as
inclining intellect or ratiocinative inclination; and this unification of mental Aristotle again
identifies with man, anthropos.89 This unification is a common feature across the account of
agential states and of the structure of actions; as well as across the enquiry into the normativity
and into the mental constitution of practice. It is thus important to see in detail how this
unification works. 90
Choice is contrasted – as a form of voluntary activity – with immediate drive by pleasure
and pain; it is determined in its contents or objects; essentially characterized by good and bad;
essentially finalized to purposive movement. Some choices are deliberative. Involvement of
rationality, for the sake of ad preference. Deliberation and choice as causes of actions, bringing
inside the principle of movement, man as agent, agency. Choice is therefore deliberate
inclination. This gives a precious hint about the mental structure of agency: deliberation and
inclination, cognition and motivation, strictly, essentially intertwined. This prepares the further
discussion in De Anima and in Nicomachean Ethics VI.
In De Anima, III, 9-10, Aristotle addresses these issues by asking «what is it in the soul
that originates movement» (432a20), that is, purposive movements or actions. Aristotle asks two
central questions corresponding to two different issues about agency and the unity of actions.
The first one is which of intellect, nous, or inclination, orexis, originates actions. Aristotle’s is far
from crystalline. He denies that intellect and appetite are separately sufficient for purposive
movement (akratic and enkratic behaviour are his argument for this, 432b25-433a10). Having
88
Nicomachean Ethics, III, 3, 1112b30; VI, 2, 1139a25.
Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 2, 1139b5.
90
All the texts discussed here come from De Anima, III, 9-10, where some of the deeper views
of Aristotle on the nature of practical thought are to be found. For a good discussion, see H. S.
Richardson, “Desire and the Good in De Anima”, in Nussbaum-Rorty edd., Essays on Aristotle’s
De Anima, pp. 381-400.
89
distinguished between theoretical and practical intellect, he proceeds to outline two apparently
inconsistent possibilities:
Both of these then are capable of originating local movement, intellect and inclination:
intellect, that is, which calculates, practical intellect (it differs from speculative intellect in the
character of its end); while inclination is in every form of it relative to an end: for that which is
the object of desire is the stimulant of practical intellect; and that which is last in the process of
thinking is the beginning of the action. Thus there is a justification for regarding these two as the
sources of movement, i.e. inclination and practical thought […] That which moves therefore is a
single faculty and the faculty of inclination; for if there had been two sources of movement intellect and appetite - they would have produced movement in virtue of some common form
(433a12-25)
(Why I translate orexis as inclination and not as desire.) What Aristotle is saying here is
in fact perfectly consistent, if we pay attention to the distinction between difference in form and
sameness in actuality. Both practical intellect and inclination originate purposive movement. The
object of orexis is the principle of practical vous and the conclusion of practical intellect is the
principle of action. Practical nous and orexis are different because they have no common form,
that is, they are different as mental capacities. But in actuality, for how they figure in actual
actions, they one and the same. In this sense, there is only one mover, since practical intellect
cannot be present in action without inclination and inclination cannot be present in action
without (at least) imagination. In other words, the potentialities for orexis and practical intellect
come to actuality only as constituents of choices and actions; episodes of orexis and of practical
thinking are the same with each other and with choices or deeds (given that they are about the
same objects). Practical thought and inclination, by contrast, cannot really be independently
determinable elements factors of actions (and actions are not derivative and factorizable
episodes). Thought and inclination are certainly different as potentialities or in form. But when
they so differ, there are no actions: only more primitive conditions of them are present. If actions
are there, thought and inclination (and movement) are internally connected in such a way as not
to count as independent elements. They share a highly specific rational form; but the same is also
the form of actions. This is the principle connecting, unifying, agency and the structure of
actions.
Aristotle singles out orexis and not practical nous, as the one mover of actions in
consideration of its (specific, distinctive) form as a capacity, orektikon. I think that this is
because the form of orexis and not of nous is that of a capacity for being locally moved; thus it is
more immediately explanatory of action, which is typically local movement. Aristotle in this
connection raises a second issue: Whether it is the faculty or the object of orexis, the orektikon or
the orekton, that is such one mover. It is better to quote his terse text:
While what moves must be one in the form, viz. the faculty of orexis as such (but first of
all the object of that faculty; for this moves itself remaining unmoved, by thought or
imagination), the things that move are numerically many. All movement involves three factors,
that which moves, that by means of which it moves, and that which is moved. What moves is
twofold, something which itself is unmoved or that which at once moves and is moved. Here that
which moves without itself being moved is the good that can be done, that which at once moves
and is moved is the faculty of orexis (for what desires is moved in that it desires, and desires in
act is a kind of movement), while that which is in motion is the animal (433b10-20)91
The underlying thought is the dual individuation of the mover: the capacity of inclination
(which is same in actuality with practical thought) and the object of inclination (the good
recognized and accepted). If we keep firmly in sight that the background of Aristotle’s
discussion is what the actuality of actions is rather than simply their genesis, this dualism is not
problematic. Quite the opposite, it marks an important feature of agency and of the structure of
actions. In the context of actual actions, orexis is itself actual, as the purposive movement of the
animal; as, say, the movement of an arm and of certain objects, which count as the (rational)
animal pouring water into a glass. In actuality, the psychical, thought-informed orektikon is the
one mover. But the good, correct actualization of the orektikon would fall short of being the
same with purposive movement or action if it were not the same with the actualization of the
doable good, the orekton: one’s pouring water in the glass. Only a state that is the realization of
the object of orexis can be the correct realization of the capacity of orexis and can count as
successful action and as the action it is. In this sense, the one, not necessarily psychical mover is
the orekton. What we should rather say, however, is that the orektikon, which as mover already
unifies practical thought and orexis, is same in actuality with the orekton and with the action that
would bring it about. The orekton is a practicable, doable good (prakton agathon). For such a
good to be actualize simply is to be done and done correctly: being brought about as an action.
Also in this respect Aristotle’s account of agency and of the structure of actions hinges around an
This text should be read keeping well in mind the qualification suggested in D.J. Furley, “SelfMovers”, in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (55-67), p. 63-4.
91
important pattern of unification of capacities and objects of thought and inclination, as well as of
psychical capacities and of bodily movements.
This is Aristotle’s metaphysical, hard-core, theory of agency, his philosophical
psychology of agency. It is prepared by the distinction in choice of an intellectual and a
motivational dimension. It is governed and unified by relations of sameness in a respect. This
involves relations between faculties and between faculties and objects. This gives an account of
the causes of movement; explains how the principle of movement can be causally and
normatively and intentionally inside. Both practical intellect and orexis are for the sake of and
both have objective import. But orexis, the object and the faculty, make the causal difference and
the difference as to content in regard of purposive movement. No common form but joint
instantiation. The conception of orexis identifies in a respect a mental faculty of motivation (not
locally moving itself) with local movement and with an object given to our apprehension; and all
this is ascribed to and constitutive the zoon, the agent. Notice that self-movement is also and
indissolubly action. The subject of orexis is the sould – it is a capacity in the soul. The subject of
purposive movement or action is the living being, by his soul and thus by his orexis. There is no
factorizing agency and actions below the level of the living, active being and his capacities. This
is perfectly consistent with the framework of form and matter and potentiality and actuality and
in fact an application of it. This is very much like in Physics; but orexis is connected to
movement in a very complex way, primarily in an intentional sense, movement out of the soul.
Practical Truth and Phronēsis
This is connected with the phenomenological, descriptive account of agency as
deliberation and choice, deliberation and inclination, now explicitly intellectualized – practical
intellect. This nexus now is considered in the perspective of practical normativity, the
normativity of agency and actions, rather than philosophical psychology. But we have the same
basic pattern everywhere: unity of agency and unity of actions, their reality, and the normative
import and status, essential, intrinsic, go hand to hand. Notice also that here the punch line is that
orthos logos is practical truth (conditions) and that phonesis is having reliably practical truth
(value).
The above is a version of the idea that practical mental capacities and episodes essentially
have contents. One cannot individuate and understand them independently of objects - their
orekton and the other particulars they are about. Together with the form-and-matter ontology,
this idea unveils and grounds the normative nature of practice. Appropriate relations to the
appropriate objects define criteria of correctness and error for the actualization that practical
thought and orexis achieve in action. The ontology of form and matter and actuality-potentiality
is inherently normative, since it is constrained in terms of appropriateness. This holds a fortiori
in the case of rational form and potentiality, whose logoi make normative constraints explicit and
come to reality only in correct or incorrect ways. Aristotle’s actions only exist with intrinsic
normative qualification: they have normative properties that only depend on their constitution.
Since I think that actions, alongside reasons, are practical normative entities, this view of
Aristotle’s is only welcome.
I will address the issue of the structure and condition of practical normativity, of the
normative features of agency and actions, from the perspective of Aristotle’s (admittedly
complicated) doctrine of practical truth. My discussion aims to show how the normativity of
Aristotle’s actions springs out of their structure and ontological constitution and how is mirrored
in the good order of the capacities of agents. The doctrine of practical truth comes to the fore in
Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, in the context of the discussion of the normative principle
of practice: the right rule, orthos logos, and its standard, oros, which should guide choice; and of
the best state of practical intellect.92 Aristotle’s discussion is conducted from a broadly agential
terms. It opens with the distinction of three kuria in the soul which govern action and truth:
sensation-perception, intellect, inclination. It focuses on how intellect and inclination can be
kurion or archē of actions and constitute the practical orthos logos. It closes by identifying the
best state of the relevant (calculative, deliberative) part of intellect with phronēsis, practical
wisdom. But the immediate background of the doctrine of practical truth is the ontology of the
apophantic form of actions. The analogy with affirmation and denial, as patterns of predication
and acts of endorsement, which we have already discussed, inevitably raises the question
whether there is anything like truth in the domain of practice. John Searle’s memorable answer to
92
Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 1, 1138b20.
the related question of what in action corresponds to truth in cognition is: Nothing.93 This is the
paradigmatic contemporary position; it is an aspect of a widespread rejection of the intrinsic
normativity of actions. Aristotle’s contrasting position comes out in the following text:
What affirmation and negation are in thought (en dianoia), pursuit and avoidance are in inclination (en
orexei); so that since moral virtue is a state of character concerned with choice, and choice is deliberative
inclination, therefore both the reasoning must be true and the inclination right, if the choice is to be good, and the
latter must pursue just what the former asserts. Now this kind of thought and of truth is practical (e dianoia kai e
aletheia praktike); of the thought which is contemplative, not practical nor productive, the good and the bad state are
truth and falsity respectively (for this is the work of all thought); while those of what is practical and is thought,
truth in agreement with right inclination (aletheia omologos echousa te orexei te orthe) 94
What Aristotle is here undoubtedly saying is that there is practical truth; that it is a
property or state of practical intellect; that it is essentially connected with the apophantic
structure of choice and action (pursuit and avoidance). He also says that practical truth consists
in the agreement between the good work of practical thought and the correctness of orexis. The
basis of this agreement is sameness of content: the conception of doable goodness apply to the
same objects as the apophantic structure of orexis. (All this is perfectly in line with De Anima
and with the relevant relations of sameness in actuality.)
(i) Practical Truth and Orthos Logos The first thing to remark about the concept of
practical truth is that, just as it is with contemplative truth and cognition, it is put forth by
Aristotle as the crucial normative principle of practice. It is implicitly advanced, again in parallel
with theoretical truth, as a prescription Addressed to agents and for practice: one should pursue
truth of practical reasoning in accordance with correctness of inclination. One should make what
is practically true to be the case; one should be, so to say, a maker of practical truth. More
deeply, practical truth seems to give an interpretation and the substance of orthos logos, which is
itself introduced as what tells us how to make good choices and to act correctly. The good work
of practical intellect is having and delivering true logos about practical goods. The orthotes of
inclination, itself the expression of a well-ordered character, secures that choice and actions can
be shaped by true practical reasoning. Practical truth, therefore, the inherent agreement of true
93
J. Searle, Rationality in Action, MIT Press, 2001, p. 137: «Truth is a reason for anybody to
believe […] In theoretical reason, the right reasons get you to a belief that is true. In practical
reason the right reasons get you to an intention that is…what? […] There is no x such that
intention is to x as truth is to belief».
94
Nicomachean Ethics, VI, 2, 1139a20-30.
practical reasoning and correct orexis, expresses the content and the possibility of orthos logos –
the criterion of practical normativity.
(ii) Phronēsis A second consideration is that the general normative structure of practical
truth has its agential reflection in the notion of phronēsis, the virtue of practical intellect; the best
state of the deliberative part of the soul. This is important, because a crucial aspect of our interest
in Aristotle’s philosophy of action is rightly that it achieves a unification of issues and
perspectives, like those of agency and actions, or of normativity and constitution, that threaten to
fall apart. Phronēsis is the stable capacity for being in the practical truth, for thinking truly and
being inclined correctly about the things to do. This is the agential form of the principle of
practical normativity, as it comes to expression in orthos logos or, equivalently, practical truth,
aletheia e praktike. It is an agential form, obviously, because it is a disposition of mind and
character of agents involved in deliberation and choice. The agential character of phronēsis is
explicit in its counting as a virtue, as an excellence of the agent, as well as in its involving the
other virtues of character. A state that implies the presence of orthos logos, rather than simply
the conformity to it, is a virtue. It is not possible to be good without phronēsis and phronimoi
without moral virtue, since correctness of inclination, a condition of practical truth and thereby
of phronēsis, depends on virtuous character.95 Furthermore, phronēsis is directly prescriptive on
agents, has authority on their practical commitments and engagements. It gives orders; it is
epitatktike with regard of what one ought to do.96
In all these respects, phronēsis is an agential notion. It expresses a possible and
significant configuration that human capacity for action can take, especially but not exclusively
in the intellectual respect. Importantly, Aristotle adds that the orthos logos of practice manifests
itself in the judgments and attitudes of those who have phronēsis. Therefore, the notion of
phronēsis has a crucial epistemological role in the account of practical normativity. The
judgments and attitudes of the practically wise provide the safest guide to practical truth or
orthos logos. We should be wary of thinking that this leads to any restrictive conception of
practical normativity or, for that matter, of agency. The concept of phronēsis internally links
Nicomachean Ethics, VI, […], 1143a10, 1144b25.
Nicomachean Ethics, VI, […], 1141a25: phronēsis is concerned with the ultimate particular
fact, since such is the thing to do. (1143a10) Phronēsis gives orders, its end is what ought to be
done or not to be done. (1143a25) Judgment, understanding, phronēsis, nous, all deal with
ultimates, with particulars; and all things one does are particular.
95
96
agential states with external conditions, practical goods and actions. It is crucial that all instances
of phronēsis as intellectual virtue are factive judgments and choices. That is, they imply that they
are about or of what is practically true. Phronēsis is defined as a true practical state. By being in
this state, we are in the true, aletheúomen. Practical thought can be of the true or of the false; but
its good work, phronēsis, is always true, in the guise of knowledge, intellect, episteme, nous.97
Therefore, phronēsis constitutes a factive, world-involving layer of agential thinking, it is an
intellectual capacity one can possess and exercise only in relation to practical truths; to what
makes deliberative thoughts and inclinations, respectively true and right.98
The factivity of phronēsis is a complex condition – and not only because it involves both
cognitive and motivational conditions. Being not only capable to act but actually acting are
constitutive aspects of being phronimos.99 The man of phronēsis is one who will act when the
occasion arises, because he is informed concerning the practically relevant individual facts, has
deliberated and chosen, and has the other virtues required for engaging in action. One has
phronēsis not by knowing only but by being able to act and acting competently, without
mistakes. Error in action and akratic failure to act are inconsistent with having and exercising
practical wisdom, with being in practical truth.100 This condition, which we might call of
practical efficacy, integrates the cognitive and motivational factivity of phronēsis. It has deep
roots in Aristotle’s conception of intellectual virtue. Phronēsis, in general and in any instance of
97
EN, VI, 5, 1140b20; EN, VI, 6, 1141b1-5; De Anima, 427a17-b13.
To avoid confusions, it is important to keep distinct the contributions to practical normativity
of the moral quality of actions, itself expressive of the character of agents, on the one side, and
of the apparatus of practical truth, on the other. The two considerations converge in the concept
of phronēsis and in a way entail each other. No moral virtue without phronēsis and therefore,
because of factivity, practical truth. No practical truth and therefore no phronēsis without moral
virtue: there would be no stable correctness of orexis. However, the two contributions contribute
to the conception of practical normativity in different ways. Given that an episode has the
appropriate form to count as an action - and this includes whether it can stand for practical truth
or falsehood - its moral quality, the correctness of orexis, makes it determinately practically true
or false. However, the moral consideration by itself does not put in place all the conceptual
resources for constituting agency and actions in normative terms; in particular, in terms of what
is to have practical truth-conditions and truth-values.
99
Reeve, Practices of Reason, p. 69: «the phronimos is trying to solve a problem. He is
searching for a way to act well […] When he hits on a type of action that is within his power to
do in the situation, he has partly solved his problem […] but to solve it completely, he must
actually do an action of that type».
100
Nicomachean Ethics, VI, […], 1146a5; 1152a10.
98
it, has the structure of a practical syllogism: it consists of a universal opinion of goodness (which
is contributed both by intellect and orexis); of an opinion about particular facts (which is
contributed by perception - by perceptual recognition of particulars as such and such; and which
gives direction to orexis). When, from these opinions, a single opinion results (the conclusion),
then the soul must immediately act. The man who can and is not prevented to act must actually
act accordingly.101
It is therefore of the very nature of phronēsis that it result in actions
involving (not just happening to conform to) the orthos logos, or practical truth, by being the
conclusion of a correct practical syllogism. Then, such actions are not just consequences, effects,
but internal constituents or dimensions of phronēsis, no less than true thoughts and right
inclinations.
(iii) Actions This last line of thought can be pressed further. Practical truth consists in the
agreement between the truth, the true logos of practical thought and the correctness, the orthē
configuration of inclination. This is however not simply a matter of internal agreement or
coherence. Truth of deliberative thought and correctness of inclination (as we know) are a matter
of thought and inclination grasping and responding to real facts and real goodness. Practical
truth thus involves in a complex, practical way, features and aspect of the world: the individual
facts which actions are about; the goodness of doable objects. Precisely because of this, it can
express the orthos logos of practice; it can be a synthesis of practical normativity. 102 This can
suggest that actions – when performed on the ground of true reasoning and correct inclination –
do not only contribute to the good state of the practical intellect, to intellectual virtue or
phronēsis. They essentially participate to practical truth; they are among what can have or can be
the practical truth. Aristotle does not explicitly advance this position; but I think it fits nicely
with his form-and-matter metaphysics of actions and with the sameness in actuality of thought,
Nicomachean Ethics, VI, […], 1147a25. The ‘mechanical’ aspect of the Aristotelian practical
syllogism, much decried by Anscombe, gives expression precisely to this involvement of actions
in phronēsis.
102
This somehow escapes also careful and sensitive interpretations of Aristotle’s doctrine:
«What, then, is the genus of which theoretic truth is one species and practical another? [...] One
who has an adequate syllogism at his command is said to be able to ‘demonstrate’ the fact to be
explained, and this demonstrative grasp (episteme) is grasp of truth. Having the truth about a fact
is having the explanation; it is not having grounds or evidence that the fact obtains. [It is] to
understand or explain», S. Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle, p. 223. There is a distinct worldresponsive dimension of the contents common to thought and orexis which constitute choice and
stand for practical truth.
101
inclination, and self-movement. When carefully thought trough, I would say, the concept of
practical truth is the agreement not only between the best work of deliberative thought and of
inclination but also between their common contents and how thought and inclination
are
actualized in choice or action. The conception of practical truth is world involving along
different dimensions. One such dimension is that it is instantiated in correctly performed actions,
as opposed to incorrect or failed doings. The practical truth of our exercises of phronēsis entails
and is entailed by the practical truth of our actions. Failure of phronēsis is equivalent to practical
falsehood of actions, be this error in action (if contents are false and inclinations incorrect) or or
to act at all. It is germane to Aristotle’s position that practical normativity, orthos logos, should
be realized not only in the minds of agents, as phronēsis, but also in the world, in by their actions
or the things we do. This is much of the point of addressing this area in terms of practical truth.
We thus seem to have available an Aristotelian positive answer to Searle’s question.
There is something in action, which corresponds to truth in cognition. It is a three-place relation
between the objects and circumstances of action (including doable goods); the actual actions,
form-and-matter individuated changes brought about by agents; and rational and bodily agential
potentialities for thinking, being inclined, and moving. The underlying principle of the relation
between these terms are sameness in content (between thought and inclination and between these
and actions) and sameness in actuality (between thought, inclination, and actions; and between
these and doable goods). We can further articulate this point by distinguishing conditions and
values of practical truth. Truth of practical reasoning together with correctness of inclination
define the conditions of practical truth – which of course factual conditions and properties of
goodness. Mental states and actions can satisfy or fail to satisfy such conditions and thereby have
practical truth-values. Since rational forms or potentialities can be realized and actualized in
opposite ways, the relation is susceptible to error. Practical falsehood is a possibility. However, if
things go well, the relation between objects (goods), mental states, and actions determines
practical truth. There can be practical truth in the mind, as phronēsis and, by our actions, in the
world. The practical truth of agential states and that of actions are different in form but
inextricably joined in actuality. Aristotle’s practical truth is different from theoretical truth,
simply because it entails our own making true its conditions, by reasoning, self-cultivation, and
action. Correspondingly, practical error or falsehood is different from theoretical error. Agency
and actions can go awry in different ways than cognition and judgment. They can fail to be
exercised or to take place. They can be incorrectly exercised and take place; and this both in
regard of their internal order and of the nature of their objects. They can manifest moral flaws.
103
Still, it recognizably belongs to the kind of truth: it aligns facts and contents of mental states; it
ascribes to such alignment an irreducible normative role. On the conception of practical truth,
practical normativity cannot fall short of coming to reality in actions; at the same time, actions
are intrinsically normative, can only exist with a modality of practical correctness contributing to
individuate them. This means that practical truth is fully intelligible only as realized in action.
The elements which figure in the conceptions of practical truth and phronēsis: apophansis,
goodness, and movement; thought and inclination; truth and correctness; practical reasoning and
moral character, can only be completely unified and realized in their actualization in actions.
This clearly abolishes any gap between agency and actions, without sacrificing the position of
realism about actions that I am pressing on the reader as indispensable. 104
Practical Syllogism and the Order of Actions
103
I will discuss these issues below, in their own terms. I however want to say that, in the
Aristotelian framework, there is no sharp divide between the moral wrongness and the practical
incorrectness of choice and actions. Doability, well-doneness, moral goodness share in many
ways a common structure, in regard both of form and of agential dispositions. Therefore, there is
not much of a problem about the relations between rightness and efficacy, differently form how
it is with many modern moral theories.
104
Anscombe has an important discussion (I am much indebted to) of «the great question: what
does Aristotle mean by ‘practical truth’?» (Truth and Action in Aristotle, p. 76). Her main gloss
on the doctrine is as follows: «That [truth in agreement with right desire] is brought about - i.e.
made true - by action (since the description of what he [the agent] does is made true by his doing
it), provided that a man forms and executes a good 'choice'. The man who forms and executes an
evil 'choice' will also make true some descriptions of what he does. He will secure, say, if he is
competent, that such and such a man has his eyes put out or his hands cut off, that being his
judgment of what is just to do. But his description "justice performed" of what he has done will
be a lie. He, then, will have produced practical falsehood» (Truth and Action, p. 77) What this
gloss adds to the Aristotelian position is a (badly needed) articulation of the inner structure of
practical truth/action. The work of practical intellect is said to be (i) practical truth; (ii) the
agreement of truth of judgment and right desire; (iii) something “brought about” in action, which
makes true its own (action-) description, its form. Practical truth and correct action, in a truly
Aristotelian vein, are one and the same; they are unified by the idea of actions making true their
descriptions. Practical truth is not (like theoretical truth) truth of judgments, but a way actions
can be in actuality; it is truth primarily as the property of certain facts, of the facts that constitute
the taking place of action in the correct way. The same is with practical error: Theophrastus
dictum (as quoted in Intention) that practical error is not primarily in and of the judgements but
in the facts, in the things we do, is in force.
The ontology of actions is that of the actualization of a distinctive sort of apophantic form
or logos, by way of the exercise of the active rational potentialities (which are individuated by
the same sort of form), in the appropriate physical, somatic matter. Apophantic character
warrants talking of practice in terms of truth and falsehood, in a robust, world-involving sense:
this applies, in the first place, to the notion and to the exercises of phronēsis, the stable and
general capacity for being in the truth concerning practical subjects; and ultimately and more
deeply of actions, whose normativity, fundamental correctness and incorrectness, is of the
character of practical truth and falsehood. Here we have a first, fundamental connection, of the
ontology and structure of Aristotelian actions with normativity.
This introduces a further Aristotelian thought. The notions of practical apophantic form
and truth suggest, along obvious conceptual implications, that individuation and understanding
of actions and phronēsis are delivered by rational, inferential relations holding together practical
apophanseis and truths and others of the same and of theoretical, descriptive kind. Apophansis
and truth are clarified and established, in a justificatory fashion, by the support they receive from
inclusion in such a pattern, primarily of a syllogistic character. The same hold of practical forms
and truth. The practical syllogism thus provides the most complete and adequate individuation
and understanding of actions and exercises of phronēsis, in connection with their forms and with
their practical truth; it is a further respect in which actions and practical episodes internally
connected with them are normative (have essential properties of correctness).
Phronēsis is explicitly presented by Aristotle as having the structure of the practical
syllogism. As the «eye of the soul», phronēsis, together with virtue, must apprehend under a
general description the starting point of acting, the good to be pursued : «since the end, i.e. what
is best, is of such and such a nature» (EN, VI, 12, 1144a30-35: this is what primarily what
differentiates it from cleverness). This is the first premise of the syllogism. But phronēsis is also
and indissolubly the apprehension of particulars. It is concerned with the ultimate particular fact,
since the thing to be done is of this nature: it is a particular and it consists of or is about
particulars. Therefore phronēsis must consist of knowledge of particular facts (the
circumstances) and also of knowledge of what one is to do, the immediate recognition of this as
to be done (EN, VI, 8, 1142a20-25; 11, 1143a30-35). These are respectively the second premise
and the conclusion of the practical syllogism. But the knowledge of what to do which is
delivered by phronēsis (together with virtue and with correct deliberation: but the three are the
same in actuality) is a sort of knowledge in intention, it is immediately realized in action (if
nothing is of obstacle): «the man of practical wisdom is one who will act» as an aspect of his
being «concerned with individual facts» (EN, VII, 2, 1146a5-10). But, again, it is precisely the
distinctive feature of the practical syllogism that its conclusion consists in an action rather than
in the affirmation (EN, VII, 3, 1147a25).
Of course I am not engaging in any exegesis of Aristotle’s doctrine and not even in an
independent discussion of the practical syllogism.105 What only concerns me here is that, if there
is anything like a structure to phronēsis, which is the rational, psychic capacity best realizing
(instantiating and determining) the normativity of practice, then such structure has the form, the
order displayed by the practical syllogism – which is the basic pattern of intelligibility and
justification in the practical domain. This reinforces the Aristotelian position about the
normativity of practice formulated in terms of practical truth (normativity is essential to the
practical domain and has a basic import of realism). Now: the practical syllogism is not put
forward by Aristotle and is not best understood (in general) as a mental process or even as a
method for drawing conclusion about what to do. It is or it can be this, of course; but this is not
primary or indispensable. What the practical syllogism is for, as we have just seen, is to give an
account, an elucidation, of the good state of the practical intellect, of the stable and general
capacity for being in the practical truth; in this way, of practical normativity. Processes and
methods follow suit. But the same account holds of actions, which, when performed correctly,
realize in actuality, as mental and physical changes, the forms and truths of phronēsis; they are
practical truths and same in actuality with exercises of phronēsis, (This sameness, of course,
holds only if actions are performed correctly; what is important is that the conceptual apparatus
of practical truth determines what is for actions, or for exercises in practical apprehension and
deliberation, to be correct or incorrect – practically false.)
The extension of the practical-syllogistic structure to actions is in Aristotle only implicit.
Basically, it is grounded on the essential connection between phronēsis and acting which we
have already discussed: phronēsis can only be realized in the correct taking place of actions;
actions can only exist by expressing (or failing to express) elements and patterns of phronēsis.
105
On this, like on many other topics concerning action and practical reason, my ideas, like those
of many others, have been thoroughly shaped by Anscombe’s developing views (especially in
Intention, pp. 57-81; “Thought and Action in Aristotle”; “On Practical Inference”). Regrettably
I cannot take up this for discussion.
The occurrence of actions can be seen as the detachable conclusions of a practical syllogism: this
is how they figure in the perspective of the phronimos. But their complete individuation and
understanding, the complete specification of their forms and of correct or incorrect occurrence,
involves the same elements which constitute the practical syllogism: the apophantic form of
actions is fully articulated and fully understandable only in the guise of a practical syllogism.
This latter, thus, is not only the path leading agents to actions and explaining and justifying them;
it is, first and foremost, their adequate, formal (in the Aristotelian sense) constitutive ground.
Self-movement is action if and only if it instantiates the form of a practical syllogism; this is the
right format for the constitution and the normativity of actions. The idea is that what comes to
actuality when phronēsis is exercised or an action is correctly performed is a state of affairs with
the same structure as an instance of practical syllogism, with premises of the appropriate form
and contents. (This integrates the apophantic analysis with an explicit deliberative structure.)
The constitutive rather than regulative role of the practical syllogism with regard to the
structure and normativity of actions is prominent in Anscombe. Anscombe observes that the true
spirit of the Aristotelian account of the practical syllogism is that of describing (rather than some
actual mental process) «an order which is there whenever actions are done with intentions»; and
that in this respect, the Aristotelian account (quite unexpectedly) covers much of the same
ground as her (equally artificial) apparatus of Why?-Questions (and related notions), which
brings to light the «same order». More particularly, the potential for an enormous variety and
complexity of descriptions of actions (and our widespread, eerie competence at fixing on the
right ones) raise the crucial issue that has been addressed by Aristotle and Anscombe:
«Aristotle’s ‘practical reasoning’ or my order of questions ‘Why?’ can be looked at as a device
which reveals the order that there is in this Chaos».
106
This is very close to the Aristotelian
position I am outlining. The order which is revealed in the forms of the practical syllogism is
present, as a constitutive form, in the action itself, in what happens - if it is something which is
done (correctly and, otherwise, incorrectly). Order is an inherently normative notion, of course;
the demarcation of order and chaos is one of correct or incorrect instantiation or it is owing to
our imperfect grasp of conceptual forms. Therefore the constitution of action is normative itself.
This is an important, recognizably Aristotelian insight of practical realism, which I have been at
pains to disentangle from pragmatism.
106
Anscombe, Intention, p. 80.
This insight is present (if, to a large extent, unrecognized; or at least without due notice of
its possible implications) in contemporary philosophy of action in the guise of the By-Form, of
the A-D structure, or of the Generation Three, or some variants of them. The demand underlying
these theoretical forms is, in one way or another, one for representing the essential complexity of
agential commitments and of their achievement in actions and for individuating and assessing
their degree of unity and rationality. It is a demand for mastering both ontological issues and for
individuating normative standpoints and criteria. These matters will be critically discussed in the
next Section. Right now I only want to point out that the same demand underlies also the
Aristotelian view of the practical syllogism as defining the formal structure and the conditions of
unity and realization of actions and practical wisdom. Of course, in contemporary action theory,
these demands are unaccompanied by any systematic commitment to or even concern for issues
of realism and for fundamental, constitutive normativity. (Anscombe and to some extent
Thompson are solitary exceptions.) Still, the aspects of what is of practical significance in a
situation, their relations in an intention or a plan, and their order and unity in an action, are both
elements at play in the By-Form and its close in kin and the constituents of the apophantic and
syllogistic form of actions and of practical wisdom. This is strong evidence of the
compellingness of the Aristotelian approach to practical unity and normativity.
Anscombe is also in this regard the key figure, since her insights about the individuating
order of actions are explicitly framed in terms of the By-Form or A-D structure (the order of
Why?-Questions). And the importance or even indispensability of the By-Form for actionindividuation are generally recognized. The By-Form takes center stage in authors like Goldman,
Hornsby (“It is the word ‘by’ that is the cardinal thing”),107 Ginet (“The preposition by is
marvelously handy for our purposes”),108 Bennett (“The ‘by’-locution is a powerful, flexible,
tremendously useful conceptual device that we have for stitching together things we say about
how people behave”).109 Much the same could be said about strictly related locutions like
“thereby” and relations (like level-generation); or what Anscombe calls the A-D structure. All
the positions framed in these terms have more or less implicit commitments to a normative
understanding of action-descriptions and thus of actions and intentions themselves. This is not
107
Hornsby, Actions, p. 6.
Ginet, On Action, p. 16.
109
J. Bennett, The Act Itself, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1995, p. 27.
108
different from the Aristotelian view that the practical syllogism is the structure of actions.110
However, this widely shared and extremely fruitful, even mandatory, theoretical pattern goes
together with widely different interpretations of the By-Form - the most important issue concerns
the ontological types of the values for the variables and of the expressed relation itself. I will
discuss these matters in the next Section.
Form, A-D Structure, and the Ontology of Actions
On the Aristotelian ontology, if an action takes place a well determined normative
condition obtains which essentially involves mind and world; the structure of the actions which
realize such condition consists of an order of partial action-descriptions, as unified in the
practical syllogism; and of their conditions of satisfaction in the circumstances. The By-Form
and the A-D structure, which are prominent in contemporary action-theory, seem to draw their
compellingness as models for the structure of actions precisely from ontological grounds of this
sort.
Addressing actions in terms of these notions is ascribing to them a certain kind of
complexity: a thing is done by doing a differently described and rationally related thing; the
satisfaction of the D action-description orderly depends on that of the A, B, C (different) ones.
(One must be careful not to collapse complexity in composite character.) But: (a) Why should
such complexity be normal for actions and a condition for their intelligibility? (b) Could not
actions only consist in the elementary and direct doing of a thing, a basic action? (c) How (on
pain of regress) could actions fail to be such basic actions? I will sketch answers to these
questions, broadly drawing on agential potentialities and on the form-matter nature of actions as
well as on some contemporary view.
First: It is of the nature of actions to be the actualizations of active rational potentialities,
present in the psuche of agents and individuated by their defining logos. This thesis is very close
to the idea that it is constitutive of actions that they can stand for explanation and justification in
terms of reasons for acting. A reason for acting can be understood as such logos, determining the
objects and the ground of action;111 its explanatory and justificatory role is mirrored in the
110
Quotation from Davidson, 1963.
The elements of the logos which defines the rational potentialities of agents are essentially the
same with those which define the elements of their practical knowledge and of voluntariness:
111
explanatory and normative constraints on potentiality and actuality. Now, giving a (prima facie
or all considered) reason for action ψ or specifying what rational potentiality it is the
actualization of is best done in the form “φ by ψ”: by connecting in terms of the By-Form the
action-description ψ with a description φ of the same action (neither need to be complete) which
presents something that can be said in favor of an action that satisfies it (“Keeping one’s promise
by paying a visit”). The action-descriptions by which reasons or agential potentiality-determining
logoi are expressed stand to those under which actions are given in the converse of the By-Form;
the normative constraints on actualization correspond to the demand that action-explanation by
reasons be of the right form.112
Expressing this constitutive relation to reasons and (ontologically) to active potentialities
is at least part of the importance of the By-Form (and of the closely linked A-D structure). This
answers our first question. Now, by construction, basic actions do not require this form or
structure; they are not done by doing something else. To regiment basic actions to the By-Form,
we would have to say something like: φ by φ; which is not incorrect (since the By-Form is
reflexive) but hardy informative. Correspondingly, in doing some reasons-statement about them,
we would have to say something like: For no reason; and nothing in terms of rationality would
be gained from tracing such actions to agential potentialities. This does not mean that basic
actions are impossible or a degenerate case of acting. But they cannot give the central sense in
which actions are reasons-based and actualize agential potentialities. They are not even
independently intelligible. In the paradigmatic case, on constitutive and ontological grounds,
actions must have a structure reflecting the By-Form or the A-D structure. Non-structured
actions can figure only against this background, as limiting cases or (typically) as aspects of a
more complex rational whole; as such, they have no logical or ontological independence. This
answers our second question.
Second: Paradigmatic actions are physical, involving the body. For any such action there
is a true description specifying a transitive bodily movement. This does not entail that such
description must be accessible to the agent: it is only important that it does not reduce to a
mechanism whose operation is an enabling condition for action (rather than constitutive of it).
who he is, what he is doing, what or whom he is acting on, what is he doing it with, to what end,
and how he is doing it (Nicomachean Ethics, III, 1, 111a5-1). These aspects of doable goodness,
prakton agathon, are also the elements which should figure in reasons for acting.
112
See Ginet, On Action, pp. ***; Bennett, Act Itself, pp. ***.
Therefore, physical actions range from (say) waving one’s hand to focusing one’s sight. (Mental
actions, like recalling someone’s name, must be treated in partially different ways, selfmovement not being part of them; but still they involve a given psychological background, with
a circumstances- or matter-specifying role similar to that of physical environment.)
Understanding the involvement of the body in actions is, of course, one of the main gains
to be expected from the Aristotelian apparatus of psychical forms and somatic (generally
physical) matter. The forms are apophantic (or, rather, syllogistic) patterns of practical thought,
the matter is the animal, self-moving body. This constitution seems to underlie and find
expression in the By-Form or in the A-D structure. Specifying what is done by doing something
else or how a complex deed is structured in terms of different doings also gives a way of saying
how the doing of an action was realized in a bodily movement and how the rational form which
individuates such action was realized in the suitable bodily matter. Self-movement and
apophantic practical form stand, as matter and form generally, in the relation of sameness in
actuality: the doing of the former is the doing, the bringing about, of the latter, a doing of and of
φ by the doing of ψ. Actions supervene of bodily and mental complexes connected in the A-D
structure. Also in this respect, on these ontological grounds, such forms seem to be inescapable
for representing actions.
This tells us something more about basic actions. The By-Form might be accepted as
important for the understanding of actions without recognizing that it expresses something
essential to them. This would license a conception of basic actions, for instance, if the
complexity the By-Form expresses only consisted in the combination of a simple action-core
with descriptions of external conditions and consequences. The simple action-core could be a
mental action (trying, volition, being in a distinctive phenomenal state) or a physical one (muscle
contraction, nerve-activation); anyway, all is essential to action (to the complex going-on) would
be included in it. This would be so, if the By-Form did not unveil any deep fact about action. But
if the By-Form is mandated by the form and matter constitution of action, then recourse to basic
action cannot be mandatory. It is trivially true that since actions take place in time, they have
beginning in time, when something is done which was not being done before; a fortiori, which is
not done by doing something else. But this trivial point must not conceal that also this first stage,
if it is an instance of acting and if acting is understood in form and matter terms, necessarily
involves the complexity of doing something by doing something else. It is not a basic action in
any philosophically interesting sense.113
Quasi-Substantial Actions
Back (for a moment) to metaphysics! Actions are structured particulars, of the kind of
changes or processes, individuated and constituted by practical apophantic and rationally ordered
forms in the soul of the agents; they come to be realizations of such forms or actualizations of
agential potentialities in the suitable matter: the living self-moving body, the things in the
environment. (This conception is buttressed by conditions of sameness in actuality.) Such form
and matter constitution, together with their unification of thought and desire, their susceptibility
to practical truth and internal rational order, their essential connection with phronēsis, single out
actions as essentially normative episodes. They can only occur in correct or incorrect ways; there
is no normatively neutral description of their coming to be and being. Items whose nature and
being, Sosein and Dasein, are constitutively individuated in this way cannot be appropriately
substituted with any differently individuated other, no matter what (differently described)
conditions of identity we establish. Sameness in actuality, sameness in this respect, is perfectly
consistent with difference in form or being; only identity in actuality and in form licenses
unrestricted substitution, at a descriptive and existential level. Since no item can be the same
with an action without sharing its form and its matter, actions are not-substitutable.114
This is an important point, which will be further discussed. But it clearly presupposes that
actions are items with some sort of independent existence. But this is precisely what is true of
113
That is, one should not say that performing a basic (non-By-formed) action is all there is to
acting and one should not even say that a basic action-descriptions (non-By-formed) define a
class of individual, complete actions. This would be interesting – but it seems false. A.C. Danto,
“Basic Actions” (1965), in A.R. White, ed., The Philosophy of Action, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1968, (43-58), pp. 44-45, introduces basic actions by way of a distinction
between kinds of actions and exclusively in causal terms. On either account, his account does not
seem on the right track. See (by contrast) Hornsby, Actions, pp. 68-69.
114
Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action, pp. 33-34, remarks that for Aristotle (in contrast
with Davidson) processes have essential properties (subject of change, capacity actualized, time)
and thus have identities which support counterfactuals; and the connection between causation
and event identity is looser than for Davidson. Aristotle is more intensionalist. Davidson regards
events as an irreducible category of objects, with no absolute description; for Aristotle processes
are realizations; not a separate, irreducible and unexplained ontological category alongside
substances. [also Charles on identity]
Aristotelian actions. Actions are not substances: they are changes or states of substances. But
they have a sort of quasi-substantial standing in reality. Firstly, they have the same metaphysical
constitution, form and matter and actuality and potentiality; secondly, they are internally
connected (at least in certain important cases) with substantial things, products; thirdly,
substances themselves, in particular living substances, are constitutively subject to change, just
because of their consisting of formed matter or actualized potentialities. There is a fundamental
analogy change-particulars and thing-particulars (pragmata). There is no ontological hiatus
between actions and whatever has full title to substantiality. If substance, ousia, is taken as a
mode of being rather than as a sort of entity, this is all the more clear.
One must keep well distinct the idea that changes (actions) have substances and their
properties, capacities, as their constituents from the idea that they can be reduced to or factorized
into such constituents. Structured being is not derivative being (the being of perishable
substances would be derivative too.) There is a deep unity and internal necessity of actions which
is an aspect of their quasi-substantiality; and quasi-substantial actions form the core of the
Aristotelian view that practice has reality; that the natural and the practical world form a unity.115
Kinēseis and Energeiai
Another Aristotelian distinction which it is worthwhile to discuss is between actions
which have limits and result in products distinct from themselves and actions which have no set
limit and no distinct product. Following Θ, 1048b20, we can call the first kinēseis (movements,
changes, processes) and the second energeiai (activities, actualities): following Makin, I simply
transliterate the Greek to keep this specialized use of such notions well distinct from their
general ontological application (according to which changes are actualities). Energeia and
kinesis raise difficult questions.116 Ross and Makin downplay their ontological weight, either
because (Ross) they are two ways of conceiving of action so that it is anyway we are dealing
with actions or (Makin) because the complete/incomplete distinction seems to do no work in the
115
In Physics, II, 8, Aristotle identifies in the teleological structure of actions the analogical
model for the intelligibility of natural processes, thus assigning to action an explanatory priority
on life and nature: see H. Granger, “Aristotle on the Analogy between Action and Nature”, in
The Classical Quarterly, 43, 1, 1993 (168-176), p. 174. Since living beings are Aristotle’s
paradigm of compound substances, this is an indication of the (quasi-)substantial status of
actions.
116
References to Physics.
context of Θ.117 I agree that this is a not completely fundamental matter; still something must be
said about it. If it is true, as some interpreters say, that there is not just a difference but an
ontological incompatibility between energeiai and kinēseis, the viability of Aristotle’s theory for
a unitary and realistic metaphysics of actions can be called in question.118
In Aristotle’s text at Θ 1048 b 20 we read: actions which have a limit are not ends but are
about the end (they are movements which are not already what they aim to). They are not actions
or not complete actions, because they are not ends; while the movement in which the end is
present is an action. In this case at the same time we are seeing and have seen, are understanding
and have understood; but not at the same time we are learning and have learnt, we are walking
and have walked, we are building and have built. In this case, like in living well, the process does
not have to cease, like that of making thin.
Quite clearly, there are two differences here, which we can both loosely label as
complete/incomplete. One is between actions which have or have not a natural limit or
conclusion, be it or not a distinct product (think of learning as opposed to building). The other is
between doings which at any stage of their coming to be are or are not the corresponding deed –
between perdurant and endurant actions. An action is complete (incomplete) in the first sense if
we can (cannot) set a limit to it. In the second sense, if it can (cannot) be said that at any stage of
the doing, the deed is present. Now, if the first were the only sense of complete/incomplete here
at work, there would not be much to comment. It may be in some sense right that there is no limit
to seeing or understanding in the same way as there is to thinning or building: at the same time,
however, the two sorts of engagements seem to be structurally the same (we are anyway dealing
with actions, as Ross observes). The clearest distinction in this neighborhood is between
resulting in states or resulting in distinct products; but this distinction cuts across the limit/no
limit one, since complete actions and some incomplete ones (e.g., learning) result in states.
The real ontological difference lies in the second sense of completeness-incompleteness;
only on this ground energeiai and kinēseis can be said to be mutually inconsistent. Such a
difference would invest the very temporal being of actions; therefore, it would seem sufficient
Ross, “Commentary”, II, p. 253; Makin, “Commentary”, p. 134.
Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action, p. 36: Processes and activities are mutually
exclusive classes of entity, on the basis of a simple linguistic test; activities and processes have
different goals; no process can be the same with an activity; they are are distinct also if they cooccur.
117
118
for the conclusion that actions have ultimately a dual nature and a dual mode of being.119 I want
to say that, while this is a deep ontological difference, it is not one that can be plausibly drawn
among sorts of actions; it seems to be rather a distinction between (Aristotelian) actions and
some other sort of actuality. There are thus good grounds for Ross’ and Makin’s reservation
about this matter (even thought these may not be their grounds); some revision of Aristotle’s
position in this area seems necessary.
The basic problem with identifying a class of actions with energeiai is that these, by
Aristotle’s own lights, do not have the right structure to count at all as actions. That is, the
problem is not that it is not easy to give examples of energeiai as actions (are seeing or
understanding, thus described, actions?); it is not even so much that naturally understood actions
seem to be more endurants than perdurants: this distinction has been criticized on general
grounds. The problem is that, if an action were such that the deed, the accomplished action, were
included or present in any moment or stage of the doing of it, there would be no appropriate,
rational and practical structure connecting the doing and the deed, the progress in time and the
accomplishment of the action. That is, if doings and deeds were so related that at any stage of the
doing the deed, the action, would be done, there would be no clear rational structure that the
doing and the deed have in common and display. The two would be, quite simply, identical;
since the latter would always be wherever and whenever the former takes place; but identity here
is out of place.120
Aristotelian actions essentially have rational structure, expressing their forms. In the
simplest case, bare pursuit or avoidance, such rational structure is apophantic; but we have seen
that there is a normal, canonic expansion of such form into a practical-syllogistic pattern. This is
of course not an accident: the apophantic form is inherently of a sort which can figure in more
complex rational structures, on the model of the practical syllogism. The more complex formal
Stout [?].See also Makin, “Commentary”, pp. 142-149: the circumstance that energeiai take
place in time so that they can be stopped but not finished seems to sit uneasily with the rational
nature of actions.
120
This is a reversal of the position put forward by Thompson, Life and Action, pp. ….: and
discussed in Chapter 1, § …. Rather than being kept metaphysically and logically apart the ones
from the others, doings and deeds are collapsed the ones into the others; on the first view,
nothing is real before the deed; on the second, nothing is real apart from the doing. On neither
view the rational and practical nature of the relation between doings and deeds is preserved; on
either view, the structural complexity of actions is lost of sight.
119
structure certainly holds in the case of deliberate conduct, which (being paradigmatic of human
action) must be accommodated in general theoretical terms. Such structure consists in the
intelligible distinction, connection, and order holding between the whole and the different
aspects of the form of an action; and between the whole and the different stages of the doing of
it. As we know, this distinction and ordering come to expression in the scheme of a practical
syllogism or in a complex description governed by the By-Form and its close in kin. This order is
expressed in terms of the For-the-sake relation (or of the By-relation of contemporary action
theory). Now, if energeiai were to count as actions, they should instantiate the identity of the
deed with any stage at which the doing can be individuated. But then they could not have the
kind of rational structure which connects stages and aspects of doings among themselves and
with deeds on the pattern of a practical syllogism. And (as we will see) they could not even be
regulated by the By-Form, which does not express identity. But then energeiai could not even
have the apophantic form of actions; because to have such form would entail the possibility of
having the more complex structure; and this we have just seen is impossible. Then, there is
nothing like the practical form of energeiai; they are not actions at all: ateles action (in this sense
of incompleteness) lacks the form of actions.
To put it telegraphically: If both energeiai and kinēseis were to be actions, the practical
sort of rational structure should hold across their differences. But the differentia of energeiai is
the identity with the deed of the stages at which the doing can be individuated; and this is
inconsistent with such a structure. What if we addressed these issues in terms of the
(Aristotelian) concept of sameness in some respect? Well, there are obvious senses in which
doings and deeds are same in some respect. For instance, Aristotelian actions are intrinsically
normative changes, changes which only happen as they should or as they should not. The
normative criterion here relevant includes a representation of the deed, which must be involved
in the individuation and assessment of the doing at each of its stages (say, in the way of
functional-teleological systems or of intentions in actions).121 This induces an internal relation
between whole deeds and partial doings (one by no means unknown to Aristotle) which we can
mistake for identification. (Also from the agential viewpoint, doings and deeds are not only
internally connected; they are performed at once, the deed by the doing.) Fair enough: but these
121
I am here drawing on and adapting work by R. Stout, Things that Happen because they
Should, which finely develops this line of thought.
principles are way too weak to lend any support to the distinction of energeiai and kineseis:
firstly, they hold indiscriminately of all conceivable actions; secondly, they do not ground the
doings/deeds relation which the former require. Thus, ultimately, there is no danger of a split
Aristotelian ontology of actions, because (on the controversial construal) energeiai are not
actions at all.122
Doings, Deeds, Products
Of their nature, actions entail changes and fall into the ontological schemes of change:
processes and end-states; doings and deeds - these latter in turn typically internally connected
with thing-particulars, products.123 The structure of Aristotelian actions therefore must consist in
a specification of the ontology of change. There are very good examples of this (apart from
Aristotle): I have in mind Vendler’s highly detailed and non reductive taxonomy of activities; or
Thompson’s analysis of practical perfectives and imperfectives. It is interesting that we have met
the neat alternative between regarding doings and deeds (the process and the end-state
dimensions of the changes which are actions) as identical (in the alleged case of energeiaiactions) or as deeply metaphysically dissimilar (to the point of not sharing the property of
factivity). I have remarked that on either view, the ontological grounds of the rational structure
The distinction between energeiai and kinēseis should also be kept well distinct from that
between praxis and poiēsis. This latter in my view has ontological import; it is rather a
substantive normative distinction among actions; a distinction in point of authoritative principles
and of intrinsic worth. Evidence for this is that instances of praxis and poiēsis (no matter how
different in their contents and in their ethical importance, share the same rational structure and
internal order (in contrast, say, with the pure activity of reason) (EN, X, 7, 1177b15-20).For a
careful and well balanced account of the praxis and poiēsis distinction, see Reeve, Practices of
Reason, pp. 104-6 (see also p. 123): the two kinds of practical actualization share teleological
structure and are susceptible to the distinction between acts and results. This means that they are
constituted and can be individuated along essentially similar lines. But the end results of poiēsis
are also things (or possibly events) contingently connected with acts, activations, something over
and above them. This is a difference, indeed: between allo and para ends. But it is one which
does not prevent us from recognizing a genus of Aristotelian actions which is common to both.
For a contrasting account, see Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action, pp. 65-66.
123
Metaphysics, …., 996 a 25: all actions imply change.
Charles, 30: 2 aims of Aristotle’s ontology of processes: (i) explaining processes in terms of
constituents, properties, substances, times, and actualization or privation (which are not a
category), so that processes are not a fundamental ontological category, the world is made up of
substances and properties; (ii) treating processes as seriously as material objects, in terms of their
essential and contingent properties (best theory of the nature of the relevant entities).
122
of actions seem to crumble; but I still have to sketch how doings and deeds could be represented
in such structure. Here are some broadly Aristotelian ideas.
First, we have the idea of focal meaning, the systematic organization of a heterogeneous
conceptual area around a principle of significance. Practice is said in many ways. There is not
only the duality of agency and actions; actions, worldly practical actualities, can be specified
according to different ontological aspects. These, I suggest, are focused or unified (but not
reduced or eliminated) around the central one of the deeds. There is an irreducible plurality even
in the restricted metaphysical area of actions as changes: but this is consistent with there being
also an understandable principle of intelligibility, end-states or deeds. To understand actions
starting from the focus provided by deeds (the things we do, res, pragmata) we must connect
them with doings (the coming to be of deeds, the progressive actualization of agency) and with
products or artefacts (an important concern of Aristotle’s which we have already briefly met.)
A second idea might be that of understanding the relation between doings and deeds,
imperfective and perfective action-descriptions, by analogy with the Aristotelian distinction of
first and second actuality.124 The original distinction is between dispositional and episodic; but it
seems to be grounded on the more general one between incomplete and complete actualizations
or exercises of potentialities; and this is very close to that between change-processes and changestates actualizing conceptually (only conceptually) distinct potentialities for change.125 In this
vein, deeds are second actualities of agential potentialities, doings are first actualities. This is a
framework which allows distinguishing and connecting, on a principled and general ontological
basis, two dimensions of the coming to be and being of actions: the process-oriented dimension
displayed in progressing changes, doings, and the state-oriented one displayed in effected
changes, deeds. Correspondingly, changes are linked to two dimensions of potentialities for
change, which, respectively, cease (in realization) and do not cease (progressing) to be with their
actualization.126 This last consideration also explains how the doings and deeds structure of
actions is realized in time. The Aristotelian doctrine is that what is coming to be and is changing,
must come to be and change from something which already is; this seems to apply both to the
efficient causal principle (the origin of the movement) and to the process itself of becoming,
124
[References; discussion.]
[References to Physics; discussion.]
126
[References and discussion.]
125
which must involve something actual, something which is real and present (and which is a first
actuality or a self-preserving potentiality).127 In regard of the very understanding of becoming,
thus, there can be neither contrast nor conflation of the aspects of is which fall, respectively,
under the headings of processes and states; and this could be extended to action, as a coherent,
non-fragmented dynamic structure encompassing doings and deeds. (It is another important
Aristotelian doctrine that practical changes and natural changes have the same fundamental
ontology; this applies also to their coming to be in time.) 128
This interconnection of progressing and accomplished changes, doings and deeds,
suggest that rational structure and the normative nature of actions lend themselves to be
understood in terms of the first-second actuality framework in a way in which they do not lend
itself to be understood in terms of kinesis and energeia. The merit of the present ontological
framework (if its extension from dispositionality to incompleteness is legitimate) is that it makes
possible to have doings and deeds (together with all the connected notions and actiondescriptions) to fit into a homogeneous metaphysical frame. There is no metaphysical
dissimilarity between them (specifically, there is no necessity and no ontological room for their
being dissimilar in point of factivity, of their ‘foothold’ in ‘absolute’ reality). But also there is no
dissimilarity too in intensional, conceptual character). But metaphysical similarity is obviously
not identity. So there is nothing in the apparatus of first and second actuality and of the
dimensions of change and of potentialities of change (preserved or lost in their actualizations)
which is of hindrance to locating in their very nature the practical form or structure expressed in
the By-Form or in practical syllogism.129
127
[References and discussion.]
Metaphysics, […], 1034 a 10, proposes a unified view of spontaneous generation and art;
matter and form govern the coming to be in the production, and the bringing about of some
artifact; in this there is a part of the thing done, pragmatos; such matter can move itself or not,
and also the cause of the direct production in virtue of itself is a part of the product. The doing, is
not ontologically different from the deed and the product - a part of which is already present, in
form or as matter. Natural coming to be is like production; the seed produces like what works by
art; it has the form potentially; the seed comes from what has the same name or form with the
produced.
129
Metaphysics, […], 1034 a 10, assimilates natural and practical (technical) production to a
syllogism whose starting point is the substance, ti esti: something real which regulates the whole
process.
128
With this I have only broached a sketch of the doings-deeds interrelation. Still, I want to
add a further Aristotelian consideration. At least in the (important) case of kinēsis and poiēsis,
the actuality of agential potentialities can be seen as a substantial product (substantial in the
guise artefacts, as opposed to natural beings, are): something which issues from and is distinct
from their exercise. This is a possibility which Aristotle himself famously discusses at Θ, 8,
1050a20-35. The active, rational capacities which make of someone an agent, a builder, might be
actualized in the product of their exercise (a house) rather than in the process or end-state of such
exercise (I am building; I have built). Capacities for building, on the suggested view, are
potentially a house. Not all cases are like this, because potentialities may be exercised without
issuing in a distinct product but only in something which affects the agents (e.g. seeing); still,
one might observe that the state of the agent rather than any doing and deed is their actualisation.
I am not going now to discuss in general the ontology of artefacts and of their relation to
actions.130 Keeping to our present concerns, Aristotle recognizes that artefacts have a perfectly
good title to count as actualities of agential capacities: they are the end of such capacities and
that in order to which such capacities exist. But this is no ground for denying that actions, doings
and deeds, are not themselves such actuality: the reason is that actions (in their progression and
completion) are not really different from the product. In the successful case, the product (the
house) comes to be and is, actualizing the building capacities; but this is not different from the
progress and the accomplishment of the action of building which occurs in what is being built
and endures with product, the house (like generally the change is in the changed). The action is
same in this respect with the thing done; either can be regarded as practical actuality, because
they are but different aspects of it. Of course, action and product are conceptually or formally
different; but they are the same in actuality; and this is what is here in question.131 Of course,
130
Such a discussion could start from a critical confrontation with some of the ideas put forward
in A.C. Danto, The Transfiguration of a Commonplace […], especially in connection with the
criteria of individuation of works of art in contrast with indiscernible common objects.
131
In my reading of this passage a follow Ross’s interpretation and commentary (= II, pp. 263-4)
rather than Makin’s (“Commentary”, pp. 200-203). Makin contends that the action (or exercise)
as actuality is only in the materials from which the house is built and not in the house itself; and
that actions or exercises do not come to be. But the use of passive form seems to indicate the
thing which is being made rather than those the thing is made from (the example of kinēsis and
kinoumenon points in this direction: the thing which is changed; not what the thing is changed
from). Furthermore, Aristotle is perfectly master of the distinction between progressive and
perfective aspects of actions (as Makin himself points out, “Commentary”, pp. 148-149). See
again, this seems to imply that doings, deeds, and products belong to the same basic ontological
types. But such implication, for the reasons just given, is only welcome.
Unity and Normativity: A First Conclusion
The ontology of actions is special and irreducibly practical. Once the general
metaphysical parameters are fixed (what I do in terms of form and matter and potentiality and
actuality: others in terms of descriptions, or events, or causation, or modes of temporality), one
must account (in terms of those very parameters) for the sui generis and irreducible features of
the being of actions. One of the biggest flaws in the study of actions has been to take as
fundamental ontological determinations (of a substantive, rather than categorial or transcategorial, sort) common to actions and other entities; while one should rather start from (the
formal character of) what makes actions special. (This is how I read Anscombe’s strictures on
Davidson’s actions as events.) There is no substantive ontology (events, causation) common to
actions and to entities which are not actions - with the differentia of a further independently
possible element. The unity and constitution of actions, their fundamental position in the domain
of practice, their essential normative constitution, are falsified by such a fragmented ontology.
(As we will also see, there are serious doubts about the possibility of a conceptual analysis of
actions, on the model of the often proposed analyses of knowledge in terms of truth, justification,
and belief; just as there are such doubts in the case of knowledge itself.) This is not to say, of
course, that ontologically or conceptually actions are bare or blank entities. To be unitary,
irreducible, and sui generis is perfectly consistent with having complexity, structure, and order.
To attempt giving a special ontology of actions is not to fathom in the ineffable; it is simply to
recognize as metaphysically fundamental their special nature. This is as remote as possible from
any contextual or pragmatic account of action. I want to say that this, the principal lesson
concerning action that we should draw from Aristotle is how to see actions as having unitary,
normative, irreducible nature.
also D. Charles, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Action, Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1984, pp. 7879.