Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Volume 56 by Victor Caston;

Author:Victor Caston; [Caston, Victor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192591647
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2019-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

5.3. ‘Being-an-end’ as primary sense of energeia

Motion is energeia only in so far as it is on the way toward an end, but as only on the way, as incomplete in remaining merely capable, it is not energeia in the strict and unqualified sense. Substantial form is energeia in being an end, though it is an end relative to matter. An activity like seeing or thinking is energeia in the sense of possessing and indeed being its own end. If energeia is entelecheia,78 if having its end in itself and being ‘complete’ (teleion) is what is most essential to it, then the activities described in the Passage, to the extent that they are neither on the way toward the end like motion nor are ends for something else (like substantial form) but are their own ends, are energeia in the strictest, most unqualified sense and therefore help us understand the other analogous senses. The Passage is thus what transitions us from energeia in the sense of change to energeia in the sense of substantial form, as Frede thought, but not in the way in which he thought: not through some general schema of ‘actuality’, but through the notion of being-an-end, and not by introducing yet another kind of energeia to be grouped with the others as all ‘actual’ or ‘real’, but by introducing what is energeia in the strictest sense because it is an end in itself and for itself.79 This connection between energeia and being-an-end is then assumed throughout the rest of Book Θ, as is especially clear not only in the argument for the priority of energeia over dunamis in chapter 8, to be discussed below, but also in the assumption of chapter 9 that to speak of a bad energeia is to speak of a bad end: ‘It is necessary in the case of bad things for the end and the energeia to be worse than the capacity’ (ἀνάγκη δὲ καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν κακῶν τὸ τέλος καὶ τὴν ἐνέργειαν εἶναι χεῖρον τῆς δυνάμεως, 1051a15–16).

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