Aristotle on Metaphysics(2004) - Bibotu.com

220 THE SEARCH FOR PRIMARY BEINGSo this view, together with his conception of essence, is what leads him tothe view that primary being with regard to each thing is the essence of thatthing. If we ask, further, why he argues that something is a being at allprecisely in virtue of its being a determinate and well-defined thing, theanswer, apparently, is that he thinks that:If something is not a determinate and well-defined thing, or if itdoes not depend on something which is a determinate and welldefinedthing, then it is not a being, a thing that is, at all, but is asgood as nothing. Conversely, if something is a determinate and welldefinedthing, or if it depends on something which is a determinateand well-defined thing, then it is a thing that is, a being.So it is, apparently, along these lines that <strong>Aristotle</strong> arrives at the view thatprimary being with regard to each thing is the essence of that thing.<strong>Aristotle</strong> introduces the view that primary being with regard to eachthing is the essence of that thing at the very opening of book VII, when heimmediately states that a good candidate for primary being is, precisely,the essence (to ti estin, see especially 1028 a 13–15, discussed in §2 of thischapter). It is also worth noting that at the opening of VII. 6, when hebegins to develop his own positive account of primary being and to searchfor an answer to the question, ‘What is primary being?’, he simply states that:‘it is also true that the essence is said to be the primary being [ousia] ofeach thing’ (1031 a 18).However, if we look closer at the beginning of book VII, we canperhaps identify a particular argument that helps considerably to generatethe view that primary being with regard to each thing is the essence of thatthing. He began (in VII. 1, 1028 a 33–34) by characterizing a primary beingas a being that is separate (chōriston). Primary being is ‘separate’ being inthe sense that it is a being, something that is, simply in virtue of itself(kath’ hauto) and not in virtue of its relation to other things (pros ti). This,we saw, is part of the very notion, primary being (see §4 of this chapter).But this evidently implies that primary being with regard to each thing issomething that we grasp when we grasp the thing in its own right andwhen we set aside its relations to other things; i.e. when we grasp thething, as it were, in isolation —in this sense, when we grasp it ‘separately’(chōris). But what is it that we grasp when we grasp a thing in its ownright and when we set aside its relations to other things? Evidently, whatwe grasp in this way is, precisely, the essence of the thing. For the essenceof a thing is, exactly, what the thing is simply in virtue of itself (kath’hauto) and not in virtue of its relation to other things (pros ti). So it