Aristotle on Metaphysics(2004) - Bibotu.com

PHENOMENALISM AND RELATIVISM 187particular not in virtue of their relation to the things themselves (See 1011 b 1:‘But then this [i.e. things as they appear to us, to the extent that thesethings are determinate and PNC is true of them] will be [what is] true’.Note especially that he does not say ‘true for someone’, but simply ‘true’.)This challenge to the disputant of PNC-M begins to look like apromising defence of PNC-M, and a defence that is not dogmatic orquestion-begging. But it is at the same time a defence that is to a largeextent programmatic and anticipatory. For it will emerge later in theMetaphysics that precisely the appeal to determinacy is a candidate answerto the question, ‘What is primary being (prōtē ousia, often simply ousia)?’and ‘What is it for something to be a primary being?’ So ultimately theappeal to determinacy is a candidate answer to the question, ‘What isbeing?’ and ‘What is it for something, anything, to be?’ Thus <strong>Aristotle</strong> hasalready argued (in IV. 1–2, which we discussed in Chapter 4) that theanswer to the question ‘What is being?’ must, in general, take thefollowing form: for something, anything, to be a being, something that is,is for it to be either a primary being or a being that depends for its being abeing, something that is, on its relation to a primary being. But he willargue later (especially in book VII, the central book of the Metaphysics)that a candidate answer to the question ‘What is primary being?’ is,precisely, this: for something to be a primary being is for it to besomething determinate (i.e. something that is F, for some specific F) invirtue of itself and not in virtue of its relation to other things. Indeed, wewill see that this candidate answer to the question, ‘What is primarybeing?’, is precisely the answer that <strong>Aristotle</strong> will defend.So it emerges that, apparently, the disputants of PNC-M are in effectconceiving of the things as they appear to us, i.e. of appearances, as if theywere primary beings. For they think that the things as they appear to us aredeterminate in virtue of themselves and not in virtue of their relation toother things—and in particular not in virtue of their relation to what theythemselves, the disputants, conceive as the things themselves. But to besomething determinate in virtue of itself is, precisely, a good candidateanswer to the question: ‘What is it for something to be a primary being?’Clearly, this begins to look like a formidable challenge to the disputantsof PNC-M. For suppose, on the one hand, that the disputants simplyaccept that it is the appearances that are the primary beings. Then it willbe difficult for them at all to distinguish appearances from the thingsthemselves. We may recall that they want to distinguish appearances fromthe things themselves, since their whole point against PNC-M is that PNCmay be true only of appearances and not of the things themselves. For surely,if something is a primary being, then it, precisely, is one of the things