Aristotle on Metaphysics(2004) - Bibotu.com

BEING QUA BEING AND PRIMARY BEING 101plant, and this belongs equally to roses and other plants. Second, there issomething that distinguishes roses from other plants, such that thisdistinguishing feature, precisely, distinguishes different things in so far asthey are all plants. However, if we distinguish beings into primary beingsand non-primary beings, we are supposing that there is something thatconstitutes what it is to be a being, but that this, precisely, does not belongequally to primary beings and non-primary beings. On the contrary, it isthe primary beings themselves that constitute what it is to be a being; andthe non-primary beings have a share in what it is to be a being onlybecause they depend, for their being beings, on the primary beings. So,although of course there is something that distinguishes primary beingsfrom non-primary beings, this distinguishing feature does not at all serveto distinguish different things in so far as they are all beings—and this iswhy the incoherence does not re-emerge.Hopefully, this notion of primary being will become more clear andbetter understood as we go along. But in order initially to understand thisnotion, it is important to emphasize the following points. First, the notionof primary being is introduced (in IV. 2) precisely in order to explain howwe can even conceive of being, as a whole and qua being, and how we caneven ask the question, ‘What is being qua being?’, i.e. ‘What is it forsomething, anything, to be?’—the question distinctive to metaphysics ascharacterized in IV. 1. Second, the notion of primary being is introducedprecisely as the notion: that which ultimately explains what it is forsomething, anything, to be. At the end of book VII, the central book of theMetaphysics, <strong>Aristotle</strong> says that primary being is, precisely, the ultimateexplanation of the being of each thing, i.e. that which ultimately explainswhat it is for each thing to be (see VII. 17, 1041 b 27–28: ousia is the‘ultimate explanation of the being of each thing’, prōton aition tou einai[hekastou]). But by considering why he introduces the notion of primarybeing in IV. 2, we have seen that this is also what he means by primarybeing as soon as he introduces this notion: primary being is that whichultimately explains what it is for something, anything, to be. Third, when heintroduces this notion here, <strong>Aristotle</strong> is not yet raising the question, ‘Whatis primary being?’, i.e. ‘What is it that ultimately explains what it is forsomething, anything, to be?’ All that he has done is argue that thisexplanation, whatever it turns out to be, will have the following form:there is something, primary being, which explains directly what it is for ititself to be and indirectly explains what it is for anything else to be.