Over the past summer I have been making a new effort to understand and appreciate classical metaphysics. I just finished reading Aquinas on Being and Essence: a Translation and Interpretation by Joseph Bobick, and prior to that I read all the way through Aristotle's Physics. I learned things from each book, and cleared up a few difficulties, but I also sharpened some of the difficulties I have with the Aristotelian/Thomistic "perennial" philosophy.
From this reading of Aristotle I picked up the following:
1. Clarification: The meaning of the definition, "time is the number of motion," is that time is that aspect of motion in virtue of which it can be measured. In other words, for Aristotle time is the numerability of motion.
2. Difficulty: Why think that time is an aspect of motion, rather than motion being an aspect of time? Or to put it another way, does time presuppose motion, or does motion presuppose time? I find the latter position to be more intuitive, and I suspect many, if not most, people would agree. This would also seem to be the position of Dooyeweerd, for whom time is the "bottom layer" of created reality, underlying every kind of meaning. And Husserl as well, for whom internal time consciousness is the deepest structure of consciousness.
3. Clarification: Because Aristotle thinks of time as an aspect of motion, for him something that does not move is not in time. Thus it seems that for him, timelessness simply means immutability, and a thing can be said to be timeless even though it exists along with temporal things. So for example, his Unmoved Mover is a timeless being despite its being part of, or in immediate spatial contact with, the otherwise temporal universe. This, to me, sheds some light on Boethius's description of divine timelessness, according to which all moments of time are present to the timeless God. Althougth Boethius works with Augustine's idea of a timeless eternal present as contrasted with endless duration for his notion of eternity, perhaps he continues to think in Aristotelian terms about time itself. Contemporary philosophers have found it difficult to articulate how there might be a kind of simultaneity between all temporal events and a timeless eternal present, and perhaps this is because we do not share Aristotle's notion of time.
From the Bobick commentary I picked up the following:
1. Clarification: For Thomas, there are levels of actuality, and matter is to some extent a relative term. That is, a matter-form composite substance can be as matter to a further form. In the course I took on Aristotle's Metaphysics, I remember this being an issue that is unclear in Aristotle, with some philosophers interpreting him to ultimately imply that only living things are truly substances. But for Thomas, it is clear that matter never exists without some form, that at bottom the quantitative-spatial form of matter is the most basic substantial form, and greater actualities build on that.
2. Clarification: "Absolute" is a third kind of existence in addition to individual and universal. I had long thought that Thomas' doctrine was that God is a universal being, and that out intellectual grasp of essences is simply a grasp of universals. But Bobick says that "God is being" (as opposed to "God is a being") means that God is absolute being, and that we ordinarily consider essences as absolute (132). We consider things as universal only by means of our logical intentions.
3. Clarification: I now see that the claim that God is his existence does not contradict, but rather expresses the meaning of the claim that we cannot know his essence. To say that God's essence is his existence is not to explicate what that essence consists of, but rather it is to say that his essence is not distinguishable from his existence. It is something like Forest Gump's saying, "stupid is as stupid does." God is what he is. I better appreciate now why classical philosophers thought that this metaphysical conclusion expresses the meaning of YHWH, "I am that I am."
4. Difficulty: Bobick says that for Thomas (whether for Aristotle too I am not sure) quantified matter is three-dimensionally quantified. (This kind of matter is also designated matter and the principle of individuation.) Apparently, for Thomas, to be quantified is to be spatial, and to be spatial is to be quantified. I have great difficulty with this equation of quantification and spatiality.
To me it seems to be a conflation, for the meaning of quantity and the meaning of spatiality are readily distinguishable. Numbers are not as such spatial beings, and figures are not as such numbered--arithmetic does not require geometry, and geometry does not require arithmetic. I would say that any real thing with spatial properties must have quantitative properties, for real space does presuppose quantitative meaning, e.g. any line segment in the real world must have a determinate length. But the reverse is not the case. Numbers are not, and do not imply, spatial extensions.
For Thomas this notion seems to serve as a crucial, unargued assumption in the argument that the intelligences (angels) do not have matter. Bobick explains that since matter of itself is indivisible, if the intelligences had matter, then that matter would have to be quantified to be divisible (among different individuals), but since quantified matter is corporeal matter, then the intelligences would have to be corporeal, which everyone denies (140). For my part, I see no reason why the intelligences could not have a quantified, non-corporeal matter as part of their composition.
For me there is a further theological difficulty here as well. For Thomas, since angels are immaterial, they are also immutable, like God. But Scripture describes them engaging in all kinds of temporal activity. Indeed, I daresay there is not a hint in Scripture of this idea of immutable intelligences whose essences are their degrees of knowledge.
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