{63} (cont’d)

II. First philosophy as a science that is searched for

Based on these elements, we are going to take a fourth step and persist with the question, what is Aristotle searching for? He is searching for what is “that which is” (tí tò ón)! Certainly, but Aristotle himself places us in a difficult situation. He mentions that we have several ways of referring to being, that we use being in four senses, that the fourth way in turn is said in ten ways, which are the categories, and in turn substance is said three ways (matter, form and the composite). One may ask, where is reality? Aristotle never answers this; the idea of what he is searching for is completely diluted.

Nevertheless, Aristotle tells us, via the double way of logos and motion that he is searching for precisely something that until now has not been searched for.

Until now, certainly, Aristotle has the impression that Greek philosophers have been discovering different zones of reality. The zone of the material, the zone of the physical elements of reality, the entity of numbers and figures; Democritus discovered the atoms; Socrates discovered rhetoric, politics and virtue (areté). Aristotle thinks that all these things “are”, but none of them tell us “in what being consists”. All these regions of being delimit a section of reality and say about it “that it is”. But none take the term in its universality (kathólou), in its omneity¹ as applied to everything real, and bother to tell us {64} what is “that which is”, not insofar as just, virtuous, hot, cold, divisible or indivisible, but purely and simply insofar as “that which is”. And this science or knowledge of things that are, insofar as they simply are (epistéme toû óntos e ón), is what he calls proté philosophía² and we call metaphysics.

Stated that way, this is nothing but a formal definition. But Aristotle, as a typical Greek, is immersed in the horizon of motion and precisely understands this “which is” from the Greek point of view, from the horizon of motion.

Motion functions in the philosophy of Aristotle in two ways, as a content, a determination of some of the things that are, and also as the horizon from which being, the ón, is discovered. This happens not only in the philosophy of Aristotle, but in the rest of all the other philosophies. We shall see that this involvement can be problematic for philosophy. In medieval theology and philosophy, creation as total production of reality, and the intervention of God in each thing are always involved and it is not easy to delimit this double involvement.

Aristotle makes a special region out of motion, the one of beings in motion. A special region of being, of things that are born and die, of things which naturally are (phýsei ónta). But when Aristotle understands in what does being consist insofar as being, he sees it from the point of view of motion. He understands that being, in one form or another, consists in always being (aeí). What sometimes is and sometimes is not, cannot be called something that always is in the fullness of the term. Consequently, when Aristotle has to tell us his last word about this phýsis, of these motions that happen through time, he has no hesitation in making his own that notion of time as a cyclic time, as an eternal return, a notion probably {65} going back to the Orphic. In one of the pages that have impressed me most in the Metaphysics, Aristotle tells us, “A tradition has been handed down by the ancient thinkers from the most remote antiquity, and bequeathed to posterity in the form of a story, a myth, to the effect that first substances are gods, and that the divine pervades the whole of nature.”² After a few lines we read, “We believe, that every divine art and philosophy have probably been repeatedly developed to the utmost and have perished again... These opinions, however [that the gods are the ultimate separate substances], have floated as relics of the shipwreck of ancient wisdom up to our days.”

Aristotle has a cyclic idea of time and of the very form of wisdom. The idea that wisdom has been found multiple times and lost multiple times should have had a better and more profound treatment in the conceptivation of Aristotelian metaphysics.

Of course, all this motion is provoked by the theós, which is the only separated substance. And then Aristotle is going to say that this separated substance is exempt from any motion. To say it is the first unmovable mover (próton kinoûn akíneton), that moves without being moved, is to see God from the horizon of motion. Aristotle calls this theology (theología), something that has nothing to do with our theology, and metaphysics is also involved with it. These two definitions of metaphysics have promoted numerous discussions between philosophers and philologists. This is not important here for we shall see what happens to these two definitions at the hands of medieval philosophy.

{66} The only thing remaining now is for Aristotle to tell us how we attain the truth about that “which is”, considered as such.

Aristotle here gathers the inheritance of Parmenides. Intelligence and being are the same. What does Aristotle understand by that sameness? Is it the case that intelligence and being are formally identical? This never occurred to a Greek mind; for this idea we shall have to wait until Hegel. For a Greek it is not the case of a formal identity.

Is it simply, as Parmenides said, that intelligence is made for being? This is true, of course, and we shall see it immediately, but for Aristotle it was not sufficient. The Aristotelian affirmation of the moment of identity (tautón) as true is not limited to intelligence, but is also applied to the senses. If we hear a certain sound, we say that the act of our perception is auditive since it has a certain sound as an object. But for Aristotle this is not enough and will tell us that precisely my act, the one intrinsically determined as such an act, is an act of a sonorous or sound making type. Precisely then is when the sameness appears, between the sound that is heard by audition and the auditive quality of the act. There is among them a formal identity, this is precisely the same entelécheia, carefully understanding that the reality of the sound is not the reality of intelligence because there are many sounds we do not hear and one can be sensing many things that have nothing to do with hearing. Nevertheless, this happens with all the senses.

Indeed, the same thing in a greater degree occurs with intelligence. Intelligence, when it understands being intellectually as such, things insofar as they are, precisely has the structure of entity as such, of the entity that always is. That is the reason why for Aristotle, intelligence, at least considered in {67} general, is immortal and is anchored on the always. This has nothing to do with the idea of eternal life.

Aristotle will tell us next that founded on this sameness, which is the first radical truth, the logos that enunciates what things are (lógos apophantikós), refers to complex things, those that can be unfolded as subjects and attributes; the truth of that logos will consist in the fact that things we say are united are indeed united, and that things we say are separate are indeed separate. The famous “adequation” between thought and reality never appears in Aristotle.

This means that intelligence (noûs) in a certain way is made to be capable of being all (pánta pôs èstin), precisely all “that is”.


* * *


At the hands of Aristotle, this is the great gigantomachy Plato had mentioned (gigantomachía perì tês ousías). It is not strange that Plato himself, who had not reached the level of Aristotle, at one point said, “I felt overwhelmed scrutinizing reality.”³

We, the barbarians, have received Greek philosophy for an adventure completely different and alien to it, to make a Theology with it in the Middle Ages. As if philosophy were not, in and by itself, a grand problem that must be continued as such a problem and apply to it what St. Augustine said, “Let us search like those who have not yet found search, and let us find {68} like those who still have to search find, because it is written: the man that has reached his terminus has done nothing but begin.”⁴

Briefly viewed this is the general picture of Greek metaphysics, which culminates in Aristotle. We have referred to it, not in order to say things that are not known, but to keep in mind notions and ideas that will turn out to be quite important in the next chapters. We finish by saying, that if we squeeze a little the very idea of the object of metaphysics in Aristotle, we shall find the following.

In the first place, this idea springs precisely out of a very concrete horizon, the horizon of the motion of the real.

In the second place, fundamental reality, the ousía, is always viewed from this perspective of motion, as something delimited and separate from the rest of things.

In the third place, in that idea of reality as an ousía, separate and determined, Aristotle searches for what “to be” (tí estín) is, something that in one way or another may respond to the idea of the always (aeí).

In the fourth place, this idea of entity is taken by Aristotle along the line of the logos, a term I left without translation precisely because there is no need to distinguish between concept and judgment, a distinction Aristotle never made nor any other Greek, at least up to his own time. Aristotle takes ousía from the point of view of the logos; he views the problem of the ón from the logos.

In the fifth place, from that point of view truth appears as a precisely intellective possession of what is always said through the logos and viewed by the noûs.

These five points do not represent a simple summary of what the object of metaphysics is for Aristotle. What they {69} constitute is the inseparable internal core of the idea that Aristotle has of the ón. It is not the case of something extrinsic, as if the ón were something that is just there and about which Aristotle tries to investigate what it is, viewing it from the perspective of motion, saying it through the logos, etc. This belongs internally to the very structure of the ón, and precisely because of that, these five points respond to what is enunciated by the title of this present course, which I tried to explain in the Introduction, “The fundamental problems of western metaphysics”. In this case it is not the western, but the Greek metaphysics; however, these five points constitute the very core, five times problematic, of what for Aristotle the idea of being (ón) is, of reality.

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¹ This term was written by Zubiri with a question mark.
² Met L 1074 b 1 ff.
³ Here Zubiri freely quotes a passage of the Phaedo (99 d). It is a passage that Zubiri quotes several times along his works. Cf., for example, Nature, History, God, p. 21.
⁴ St. Augustine, De Trinitate IX, c. 1.