Aristotle on Metaphysics(2004) - Bibotu.com

THE SEARCH FOR PRIMARY BEING 217demand a. different answer. This is a problem because <strong>Aristotle</strong> supposesthat each thing has just one essence, not many, let alone indefinitely many.But he is right to suppose this. For if a thing has as many essences as it hasproperties, then we can forget about the concept of essence altogether, andwe need only retain the general concept of a property, i.e. of what is trueof a thing. After all, the essence of a thing is the identity of that thing, notits indefinitely multiple identities. It is what precisely (hoper) the thing is,not just anything that it is. It is what the thing is simply in virtue of beingthe very thing it is (kath’ hauto), not in virtue of being any of theindefinitely many things that it is.By making (in IV. 4–5) a move that may by now strike us as familiarand unsurprising, <strong>Aristotle</strong> wants to answer this problem and to arguethat, in spite of the indefinitely many properties of each changing, materialthing, its essence is only one. The move that he makes is to argue that theindefinitely many things that a changing, material thing, such as Socrates,is (e.g. a human being, a snub-nosed being, a pale being, etc.) can bedistinguished into just two things: a single primary being (e.g. a particularhuman being), on the one hand, and an indefinite number of non-primarybeings (e.g. a particular snub-nosed being, a particular pale being, etc), onthe other hand. The primary being is the ultimate subject of predication,and the indefinitely many non-primary beings are things that are differentfrom and true of this subject. He argues that this will ensure that eachthing has only one essence, if we suppose that it is only or primarily theprimary being, which is one rather than many, that has an essence. So heconcludes that we really must make this supposition, i.e. the suppositionthat it is only or primarily the primary being and the ultimate subject ofpredication that has an essence, if we want to ensure that each thing has onlyone essence. Non-primary beings, he argues, either do not have an essenceat all, or they have an essence only in a derived way. That is to say, nonprimarybeings have an essence only because primary beings have anessence and because non-primary beings depend for their being beings,things that are, on their relation to the primary beings.So <strong>Aristotle</strong> answers the problem of whether each changing, materialthing (e.g. Socrates) has only one essence or it has indefinitely manyessences in the following distinctive way. He argues that in general eachthing has only one essence. He does so by, first, distinguishing betweenprimary being and non-primary being with regard to each thing. Second,he argues that primary being with regard to each thing is the ultimatesubject of predication with regard to that thing. Third, he argues that it isonly or primarily the primary beings that have an essence.