Christopher V. Mirus

In his contemplative works on nature, Aristotle twice appeals to the general principle that being is better than not being. Taking his cue from this claim, Christopher V. Mirus offers an extended, systematic account of how Aristotle understands being itself to be good. Mirus begins with the human, examining Aristotle's well-known claim that the end of a human life is the good of the human substance as such--which turns out to be the good of the human capacity for thought. Human thought, however, is not concerned with human affairs alone. It is also contemplative, and contemplation is oriented toward the beauty of its objects. In each of the three branches of contemplative thought--mathematics, natural science, and theology--the intelligibility of being renders it beautiful to thought. Both in nature and in human life, moreover, the being that is beautiful through its intelligibility serves also as an end of motion and of action; hence it counts not only as beautiful, but also as good. The persistent concern of thought with the beautiful reveals what is at stake for human beings in Aristotle's larger metaphysics of the good: in the connection between goodness and actuality that structures his natural science and metaphysics, in his explicit claim that being is better than not being, and in his concepts of order and determinacy, which help connect being with goodness. These in turn shed light on his concepts of the complete and the self-sufficient, on his teleological understanding of the four elements, and on the curious role of the honorable in his natural science and metaphysics.

What picture of reality emerges from the attempt to hold together the following three claims? (1) For temporal beings only the present, not the past or the future, exists. (2) For God, all times are present. (3) For temporal beings, what counts as present varies from individual to individual, as described in the theory of relativity. These claims jointly suggest that reality is always reality for—for God, or for this or that creature. This is neither relativism nor anti-metaphysical phenomenology; instead, it looks more like a modest but insistent development of the Thomistic doctrine of participation in being. Being is not a neutral and amorphous glop spread out before just any observer; rather, it belongs to and is measured by particular beings. Created being as a whole belongs to God (and, eventually, to the saints in God), whereas the share in being assigned to any creature is limited.

Working within the Aristotelian tradition, I argue that relation is not a category but a transcendental property of being. By this I mean that all substances are actualized, and hence defined, relationally: all actuality is interactuality. Interactuality is the locus for the relational categories of substance, action, being-affected, number, and most types of quality. The interactuality of corporeal beings is further conditioned by relations of setting; here we find the relational categories of place (where), quantity in the sense of size, quality in the sense of shape, and time (when). In offering a relational account of substance, I distinguish between external relata (physical environment, objects of sensation and knowledge as external) and internal relata (one’s body, objects of sensation and knowledge as internal. This distinction between external and internal relata is transcended in the case of the Trinity, insofar as the divine persons are both perfectly distinct and perfectly united.

Aristotle twice affirms that being is better than nonbeing. Throughout the corpus—in both practical and theoretical works—he explicates this claim in terms of three main concepts, each of which serves to link being with goodness. These include completeness and self-sufficiency, which are well-known from Aristotle’s ethics and politics. Even more fundamental, however, are the closely related concepts of order and determinacy, which the present essay explores. Beginning with the causal role of the good in Aristotle’s accounts of nature and human life, it proceeds to his identification of order as characterizing both the being and the goodness of natural things. After pausing to consider the relation between goodness and beauty, it then moves from order to determinacy as a general characteristic of being by examining his concepts of limit and the unlimited. It concludes by discussing determinacy and the good in Aristotle’s ethics and metaphysics.

IN GENERATION AND CORRUPTION 2.9, Aristotle sets out to give an account of “how many and what are the principles of all coming to be are like.” In doing so, he situates the cause “for the sake of which,” τὸ οὗ ἕρεκα, within a causal nexus familiar to readers of Physics 2. It is constituted by the end—that is, the form produced—by the matter in which it is produced, and by the agent that produces it. In Meteorology 4.12, moreover, he explains that form itself must be understood in terms of the species-typical activities that follow upon its presence and for the sake of which the composite substance exists. He thus recognizes two sorts of ends, form and activity, of which the latter seems to be ultimate. Although form is the immediate end of coming to be, a composite substance exists in the last analysis for the sake of its activity.

In this article I provide a philosophical exposition of Aristotle’s claim that natural beings—precisely as beings—are intrinsically good and beautiful. The discussionattends to both living and non-living beings, and also explores the relation between Aristotle’s account of natural beauty, his teleology, and his ethics. I conclude by exploring three objections to Aristotle’s view: that many existing things are clearly bad; that the concepts “good” and “bad” apply only in relation to living things, being relevant to these not as beings but as alive; and finally, that things cannot be called good or bad in themselves, but only good or bad “for” an appropriate sort of agent. The discussion of these objections gives particular attention to the legacy of Hume’s fact-value distinction.

This essay explores Aristotle’s description of virtue or excellence as a completion through a contextual reading of two texts: the entry on “the complete” in his philosophical lexicon and the brief discussion of excellence in Physics 7.3. In both Aristotle explores conceptual and ontological issues germane to a general concept of excellence; in both, the key premise is that excellence is best thought of as a completion. His development of this claim draws on two larger themes. In Metaphysics 5, the concept of excellence as a completion belongs to a broad conceptual realm—explored in chapters 16–17 and 25–27—in which intelligible realities are presented metaphorically in terms of shape and size. Within this realm, excellence grows toward a limit set by the powers that make a substance what it is. In the Physics, excellence belongs to a world structured by contraries and therefore also by coming to be and destruction. What it completes is a substance’s power to negotiate such a world while maintaining and developing its own identity. Having grown to full stature through its proper excellence, the substance can keep itself from being affected or altered in ways that would undermine its being; in so doing, it approximates the self-sufficient impassivity that Aristotle attributes to thought. The themes of alteration and identity are also pursued in On the Soul 2.5, which provides an important complement to Physics 7.3

THERE ARE ANY NUMBER OF REASONS for wanting to know what Aristotle means by “good”. For students of Aristotle, understanding his conception of goodness would provide an authentic Nicomachean metaethics, so to speak, a clearer view of his natural teleology, and a great deal of help in making sense of his cosmology and his metaphysics, especially the theological bits. For the less historically minded, the rebirth of virtue ethics makes the relation between nature and norm an important problem, with implications not only for ethics proper but also for social philosophy and the foundations of the social sciences. Epistemology and the philosophy of science finally have begun to take questions of value more seriously, and therefore they ought also to be interested in possible connections between knowledge of nature and the apprehension of value. Aristotle’s conception of goodness is relevant to all these questions.