Joseph Owens and Aristotle’s to ti en einai (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι‎)

Aristotle’s phrase to ti ên einai is generally understood as a formula for expressing the notion of “essence.” But the word “essence” glosses over the difficulty of adequately capturing and perhaps losing what was meant by the original, literal sense of the phrase. The literal translation of to ti ên einai comes out disjointedly in English as, “the what it was to be.” Joseph Owens has proposed a variant that reads “the what-IS-being” as an alternative. His translation requires some justification however: the words “IS” and “was” tend to lead the reader to different conclusions about the implications of a term that as usually glossed as referring to the essence of a thing. In what follows we will briefly explore his justification for his choice of translation and what he takes it to connote, including the broader significance it purports to have for Aristotle’s metaphysics.

1. Verbal Aspect
2. Textual Support
3. The to ti en einai of a Thing as its Formal Cause

One prominent suggestion for how to deal with the phrase comes from the Aristotelian scholar, Joseph Owens. Owens emphasized that the “was” in the phrase should be understood as invoking the sense of a timeless present. In Owens’ words,

“…the Greek cannot be taken here as denoting past time. It refers in this phrase to something still present, and applies equally well to the timeless separate Forms. It indicates ‘timeless Being,’ and so implies exemption from the contingency of matter and change, upon which time follows. The notion back of the imperfect should therefore be that of necessary Being, with the necessity implied rather than expressed.”¹

(The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, 183-184)

Thus, the translation Owens recommends emerges as “the what-IS-being”² where the ‘was’ becomes a timeless capitalized ‘Is’ that denotes the timelessness and necessary being of the Platonic forms.

Verbal Aspect

One way to understand the move Owens is making here is to bring in the grammatical notion of verbal “aspect.” Consider the word “was” in English and what it connotes. In the phrase, “I was at the cafe at 8:00pm,” the action of the verb could be taken to mean that at a certain point in time there was a certain someone who existed at a particular time and was at the cafe at a particular time. This way of taking the verbal tense carries with it the idea of a particular, designated time when the action occurred. In other terms, the “was” in this case is understood in terms of its perfective aspect, the word “perfective” connoting the idea of complete and determinate action.

By contrast, an “imperfective aspect” connotes, as the Latin root of the word “imperfect” suggests, the idea of an incomplete action, whose duration is incompatible. For example, consider the sentence “Pierre was a good waiter.” A way to understand the phrase imperfectively would be to emphasize the sense in which the sentence “Pierre was a good waiter” might betaken to denote an open-ended time within which the expression is true, in a sense, a timeless truth. This is where Owens’ sense of  ên (“was” above) enters in as denoting an action taking place, but without regard to a definite moment in time, indefinitely, in a sense, timelessly.

It may be noticed that the referents of these different aspectual senses of the expression are quite different. In the case where the imperfective aspect of the verb “was” is invoked, the referent is directly related to the historical occurrence of an event. But in the case of the example involving Pierre, the timeframe invoked indicates something ongoing, always true if true at all whenever it was true. If we had to consider whether Pierre was truly a good waiter, our way of reading the expression imperfectively would bring us to say that it must be true at any time when Pierre was a waiter if it is to be true at all.  Owens himself seems motivated toward expressing this precise sense where he retranslates the phrase from “was” to a capitalized “Is.”

This is, at any rate, Owens’ attempt to translate the sense of the expression in such a way as to bring out its imperfective aspect, without which, it could be said, its sense could be mistaken as denoting a perfective one. Thus, if someone takes the expression “The what it was to be” as indicating something existing in time they are getting the wrong idea. For Owens, “the what it was to be” understood as “the what-Is-Being” of a thing refers not to a thing, but to an idea, specifically its essence.

Textual Support

Having a look at the places where the phrase occurs will help elucidate what Aristotle takes the sense of the expression to be.

Consider first De Generatione 335b35, which reads

Δῆλον δὲ καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν τέχνῃ καὶ ἐπὶ τῶν φύσει γινομένων· οὐ γὰρ αὐτὸ ποιεῖ τὸ ὕδωρ ζῷον
ἐξ αὑτοῦ, οὐδὲ τὸ ξύλον κλίνην, ἀλλ’ ἡ τέχνη. Ὥστε καὶ οὗτοι διὰ τοῦτο λέγουσιν οὐκ ὀρθῶς, καὶ ὅτι παραλείπουσι τὴν κυριω-τέραν αἰτίαν· ἐξαιροῦσι γὰρ τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι καὶ τὴν μορφήν.    (35)(336a) Ἔτι δὲ καὶ τὰς δυνάμεις ἀποδιδόασι τοῖς σώμασι, δι’ ἃς γεννῶσι, λίαν ὀργανικῶς, ἀφαιροῦντες τὴν κατὰ τὸ εἶδος αἰτίαν.

I translate,

This is, furthermore, clear in cases that involve development both by artifice and by nature. For water does not of itself produce an animal by itself and wood does not make a bed, but rather artifice does so. And so in these further cases they do not speak rightly and since they leave out the most important and determinative cause: they omit the τί ἦν εἶναι and its determining form (τὴν μορφήν). By the same token, since they leave out the [internal] potentialities relevant to bodies by which they develop, indeed organically, they fail to mention the ideal cause (τὸ εἶδος).

This text indicates the ideal quality in the phrase to ti en einai that Owens’ reading attempts to bring to the surface.

Here is another that serves to strengthen this impression:

καθόλου μὲν οὖν εἴρηται τί ἐστιν ἡ ψυχή· οὐσία γὰρ ἡ κατὰ    (10)
τὸν λόγον. τοῦτο δὲ τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι τῷ τοιῳδὶ σώματι, καθάπερ
εἴ τι τῶν ὀργάνων φυσικὸν ἦν σῶμα, οἷον πέλεκυς· ἦν μὲν γὰρ
ἂν τὸ πελέκει εἶναι ἡ οὐσία αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἡ ψυχὴ τοῦτο· χωρι-
σθείσης δὲ ταύτης οὐκ ἂν ἔτι πέλεκυς ἦν, ἀλλ’ ἢ ὁμ-
ωνύμως, νῦν δ’ ἔστι πέλεκυς. οὐ γὰρ τοιούτου σώματος τὸ τί    (15)
ἦν εἶναι καὶ ὁ λόγος ἡ ψυχή, ἀλλὰ φυσικοῦ τοιουδί, ἔχον-
τος ἀρχὴν κινήσεως καὶ στάσεως ἐν ἑαυτῷ.

I translate,

Therefore, it follows that the definition (τί ἐστιν) of soul applies to souls in general. For, the substantiality (οὐσία) of a thing is stated according to a logos, an account of what it is. That is, [it expresses] the τί ἦν εἶναι for a particular kind of body, just as, by analogy, would be the case if a tool of some kind were a physical body. Consider, for example, the case of an axe: the axe would be its substantiality, corresponding to the soul. Being dissociated from this, it would no longer be an axe, but only what can be said to apply to homonymously to the name “axe,” and where that applies, there is an axe. For the soul is not the τί ἦν εἶναι and logos of any body, but of a physical body having a principle of motion and rest within itself.

In each case, the phrase to ti en einai refers to a formula (logos) that expresses the actuality of a thing when it has achieved a state of development that corresponds to that formula. That actuality is the target of the question ti esti (“What is it?”) which implicitly inquires into a state of a thing whose actuality can be expressed in some kind of formulaic description. But even more particularly, it is meant to target the substantiality of a thing, its ousia, that can be said to make it what it is, so that the term “axe,” for example can be correctly applied to it. The ti en einai of a thing is then, in particular, a phrase that answers the ti esti question in terms of the substantiality of a thing. In terms of the developmental aspect of things, it could be said to pick out the realized actuality of a thing it always had the potential to be, such as when the materials of a axe are finally given the appropriate shape, so that the resulting artifact can be called an axe in the same sense that is applicable to axes in general.

The being of a thing that it particularly applies to is, then, an entelechtic state: one that has been achieved as part of its process of development, an actuality that has been achieved in the process of becoming that belongs to the being of things in the world. When a rational being has been created or an cube that has the appropriate form, it may be said to have acquired the “what it was to be” of a thing that corresponds to Owens’ “what-IS-Being” for that thing.

The ti en einai of a Thing as its Formal Cause

Owens emphasizes that the ti en einai of a thing corresponds to its formal cause as a way of picking out the ousia of a thing. A sample from Owens’ “The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics that shows this distinct emphasis that relates directly to the Platonic sense of form already discussed in the quotation from Owens above:

In this analysis, then, the phrase presents the notion of a cause opposed to the unintelligible matter (which is the principle of contingency and change), and so expresses the formal, intelligible perfection of a thing. It implies that the form is the fundamental Being of the thing, and that whatever else may be in the thing derives its Being from the form. The form is designated by the peculiarly Aristotelian expression as the element in the thing which is that thing’s necessary and unchangeable Being, in contrast in the physical order to the mater and the composite (both of which are changeable), and in the logical order to the generic characteristics (which are not necessarily restricted to the species in question). A thing is its generic nature, its matter, and the composite. They are what it is. But what it necessarily and unchangeably and definitely is is its form….The what-is may express the thing as matter, or as form, or as composite. Of these three the, the what-IS-Being of a thing can denote the form only.

(The doctrine of being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics 185-187)

If we consider the relationship between this sense of timeless Being and ousia in the quotation from the de Anima above, the ti en einai corresponds to a particular kind of logos, one that expresses what it is to be a living body or an axe, or makes clear that without which a thing cannot be said to be what it is. As the quotation makes clear, any such logos must have universal applicability inasmuch as it expresses the necessary conditions for something to be said to exist as that particular kind of thing. This kind of necessity seems to correspond best to the kind of necessity Owens invokes in the first quotation above.

References

1. Joseph Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics: A Study in the Greek Background of Medieval Thought (Toronto : Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 1978) 183-184.
2. Owens, The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, 184.