Singularly Aristotle
- Singularly Aristotle1
What does it mean for philosophy to become post-metaphysical? In contemporary post-Nietzschean thought, the injunction takes the form of the location of ‘groundless difference’—that is to say, a difference irreducible to a prior unity from which it springs. If metaphysical philosophies are primarily concerned with identity, unity and presence, then this difference confounds the metaphysical project itself. But while the articulation of this difference, this multiple (non)-being or (?)-being or différance, is tied to the failure to secure a ground underlying all difference, the post-metaphysical must not be seen as a simple move ‘beyond’ metaphysics. The groundless difference at issue is rather to be found in the very metaphysical philosophies that sought to ignore or evade it. In this sense, Aristotle is exemplary. For Aristotle’s rigorous thinking everywhere encounters the very anarchistic differences which decompose his every attempt to secure the metaphysical categories of essence, definition, cause, form, universal and particular. In this way, the logic of Aristotle’s metaphysics already indicates the direction which post-metaphysical thought might take.
In Book I, chapter iii of the Physics, Aristotle brilliantly deconstructs the Parmenidean conception of Being. At issue in this first book is the question of how change is possible, and Aristotle seeks to ground change in the irreducible plurality of Being. In response to Parmenides’s claim that ‘Only the One Being is,’ Aristotle introduces the statement, ‘X is white,’ asking which is the one that is, X or whiteness. If the answer is the predicate, not the subject, than the result is a non-being:
for an attribute is ascribed to some subject (other than itself); consequently the subject to which ‘being’ (supposing it to be an attribute) is ascribed will have no being at all; for it will be other than ‘being’ (the attribute ascribed to it) and so will be something which (simply) is not.2
Conversely, if the subject is the one that is (which is taken to mean ‘is identical-with-Being,’ since only what identical with the One Being could be at all), the result is also a non-being, for a subject lacking attributes would have no being itself.
For suppose a thing which is identical-with-Being also has the attribute ‘white,’ and that ‘being white’ is not identical-with-Being—(the only sense in which it can ‘be’ at all), for it cannot even have ‘being’ as an attribute, because (ex hypothesi) nothing except what is identical-with-Being has any being at all—then it follows that white is not, and that not merely in the sense that it is not this or that, but in the sense of an absolute nonentity. Accordingly, that which is identical-with-Being (our subject) will be a nonentity; for (we assumed that) it is true to say of it that it is white, and this means it is a nonentity.3
Aristotle’s point is that Being must be plural if anything is to be at all: a subject can only be through a performance that occurs beyond it, that performance being predication; while a predicate only has being insofar as there exists a subject other than it to which it can adhere.
But Aristotle’s attack on Parmenides turns against him when the issue of essence arises. For Aristotle understands essence as form — that is, formula—meaning the set of essential (as opposed to accidental) predicates adhering to a subject. Essence is defined by predication. The problem is that essence is not what a subject has, but what it is; but if subject and predicate are distinct, then a gap opens between a subject and its essence. If a subject’s essence is no longer ‘internal’ but instead is invested in an ‘outside,’ then the distinction between internal essence and external accident collapses, together with the differences between determinate and indeterminate, knowable form and unknowable matter, upon which Aristotelian metaphysics depends.4
So how does Aristotle resolve this predicament? Basically, he promises the possibility of combining subject and essence at the point where subject and predicate are reversible—that is, when one can say ‘X is (this...
