Aristotle on Metaphysics(2004) - Bibotu.com

BEING QUA BEING AND PRIMARY BEING 99One point of clarification: why are distinguishing features(‘differentiae’, diaphorai) themselves beings, things that are? Because theyare what explain why things are distinguished in the ways in which theyare distinguished (e.g. why plants are distinguished into deciduous andevergreen). On <strong>Aristotle</strong>’s conception of explanation, it is the features of thethings themselves that explain why the things are as they are, and toexplain anything, a feature has itself to be real—to be a being, somethingthat is. Here we have of course to remember that, on <strong>Aristotle</strong>’s conceptionof science, when we ask why things are distinguished in the ways in whichthey are distinguished, we are assuming that there are distinctions in reality—natural kinds—and that there are explanations in reality that explainthese real distinctions. So we are not simply concerned with how wedistinguish things and how we explain the distinctions that we make; weare concerned with how the things themselves are distinguished and withfeatures of things that themselves explain why things are distinguished asthey are.So there appears to be a problem about whether it is possible to conceiveof being as whole, and so about the very possibility of metaphysics. For onthe one hand, we cannot conceive of being, as a whole and qua being, bydistinguishing it from something outside it; but, on the other hand,neither can we conceive of being, as a whole and qua being, bydistinguishing it from what is inside it, i.e. by conceiving of it as the sum ofeverything that there is and of all the kinds of beings that there are.It is for the sake of answering this problem, and so defending thepossibility of metaphysics (as metaphysics was characterized in IV. 1), that<strong>Aristotle</strong> introduces (in IV. 2) a general distinction between primary being(prōtē ousia, often simply ousia) and non-primary being. This is thedistinction between:(1) things that are beings in virtue of themselves and not in virtue of theirrelation to other things; and(2) things that are beings in virtue of their relation to, and so dependenton, the primary beings.But before we consider how <strong>Aristotle</strong> introduces the distinction betweenprimary and non-primary being, let us ask how in general this distinctionanswers the problem of how we can conceive of being, as a whole and quabeing. Suppose that we cannot conceive of being, as a whole and quabeing, either by distinguishing it from something outside it or bydistinguishing it from what is inside it. Perhaps we can still conceive ofbeing, as a whole and qua being, if we suppose that there is a distinction