Making Something of Nothing: Privation, Possibility, and Potentiality in Avicenna and Aquinas

551 The Thomist 76 (2012): 551-75 MAKING SOMETHING OF NOTHING: PRIVATION, POSSIBILITY, AND POTENTIALITY IN AVICENNA AND AQUINAS JON MCGINNIS University of Missouri, St. Louis St. Louis, Missouri I N BOOK I OF THE PHYSICS, Aristotle famously analyzes the principles of coming to be into an underlying thing, a form that comes to be, and the initial privation of that form. While the history of commentaries on Aristotle is replete with varying and even opposing interpretations of what Aristotle intends by “the underlying thing” and what the nature of form might be, privation seems straightforward enough. If at sometime I, for example, come to be tanned, then before that time, I was not-tan, where being not-tan is the privation in question. In general, privation is just not being something. Understanding privation then seems to be as easy as understanding not. On some reflection, however, one might begin to feel that perhaps a bit more should be said about this “not,” particularly inasmuch as privation is a principle of coming to be, which ostensibly is supposed to be of some concern to natural philosophers . Not every instance of some matter’s not being something corresponds with what can come to be in that matter. I am not a pine tree; I am not 100 meters tall; and I am certainly not a Latin lover. Moreover, there are no natural conditions under which I could come to be any of these. Consequently, these, and countless other ways that I am not—mere logical privations, so to speak—are of little or no interest to the natural philosopher. Instead, the natural philosopher is concerned with those privations of a given form that correspond with a genuine possibility or JON MCGINNIS 552 1 Aristotle, Metaphysics 5.22.1022b22-1023a7 (ed. W. D. Ross [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924]). 2 For one study of Aristotle’s account of change and the principles of nature required for change see David Bostock, “Aristotle on the Principles of Change in Physics I,” in Language and Logos: Studies in Ancient Greek Philosophy Presented to G. E. L. Owen, ed. Malcolm Schofield and Martha Nussbaum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 179-96. potentiality in the matter for that form. These privations may be called “natural privations.” Among the many relevant philosophical questions, then, are two of particular interest: first, how are natural privations related to possibilities or potentialities? and, second, how are possibilities or potentialities related to matter? In this study, I will consider these two questions and show how privation plays a positive and even substantive role in the modal theories of two of the Middle Age’s outstanding philosophers, Avicenna and Aquinas, particularly with respect to their analyses of possibility and potentiality. I. ARISTOTLE Before turning to Avicenna and Aquinas on privation, it is helpful to return briefly to Aristotle. Aristotle offers four accounts of privation (ster‘sis) in Metaphysics )—his so-called philosophical lexicon—all of which in some way refer to an absence or loss of some attribute that might occur naturally or by nature.1 His richest discussion of privation, however, occurs at Physics 1.7 and 1.9. In Physics 1.7, Aristotle provides his own analysis of coming to be (genesis) during which he enumerates his three famous principles of nature or natural things required for any coming to be: an underlying thing or subject (hupokeimenon)—which traditionally has been associated with matter—a form that will come to be, and the initial contrary of that form in the subject, which Aristotle identifies with the privation.2 Thus, in one respect, privation is related to form in that it is the contrary or opposite of some form that will come to be. In another respect, the privation is also related to matter, or, more exactly, to the underlying thing, PRIVATION, POSSIBILITY, AND POTENTIAL 553 3 Aristotle, Physics 1.7.190b24-26 (ed. W. D. Ross [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936]). Unless otherwise stated, all translations are my own. 4 Ibid., 1.9.192a3-6. 5 See Ahmad Hasnawi, “La Physique du Šif~,: aperçus sur sa structure et son contenu,” in Avicenna and His Heritage: Acts of the International Colloquium, Leuven...