Aristotle's Philosophy: Power, Act, and Nature

Power

Power: The capacity to perform a transformation on an object or the potential to become something. It is divided into active and passive:

• Active Power: The ability, power, or authority to enact a transformation on something or to produce something. This understanding of power is present in everyday language, such as when we say a car is powerful or someone has a powerful imagination. Aristotle also uses this notion in psychology, for example, defining the powers and the active powers of the soul.
• Passive Power: The capacity or aptitude to become something else, a determination to acquire a form. Examples of this understanding are present in our language, as when we say that someone has a future as a footballer and is potentially a good player.

In this second sense, power is opposed to the act. Thus, Aristotle says, a seed is potentially a tree, and a child is potentially an adult.

Act

Act: The present reality of being. Aristotle offers two perspectives on time:

• Looking at the characteristics, properties, or determinations that a thing or object has in the present, we are looking at being in act, which is the most important way of being. Sometimes, he defines it as the reality of being.
• Conversely, if we look at the future, what is not yet but is suggested in a being by virtue of what it is, we are thinking of being in power.

Being in power is not pure nothingness; a merely imagined future is a way of being rooted in the subject. We can say something is in power precisely in terms of what is in act. A seed in act is potentially a tree; a child in act is potentially an adult. The seed is a tree and not a man because, in act, it is a seed and not a man.

Aristotle defends the primacy of the act with respect to power: Something is in power (e.g., a child being a man) because it is in act in relation to some set of properties (e.g., those that define him as a child). The output of power is about a future act.

Nature

Nature: This notion is important in all of Greek philosophy, but Aristotle studied it in more detail. His entire philosophy revolves around this concept, just as Plato's revolves around the theme of Ideas. There are two basic understandings of nature, but the second is much more important than the first:

1. Nature understood as all natural beings.
2. Nature as the very being of things.

Nature is identified with the being itself of things, with its essence, but with the capacity for things to change from themselves. Nature not only determines the possible types of movements of an object but also the type of rest that it seeks (e.g., a stone belongs on the floor and remains there by virtue of its nature).

Aristotle distinguishes three types of causes or principles in existence, movement, and possession of one or another trait, property, or characteristic of beings:

1. By chance: Something can exist and occur as a result of chance, such as deformed creatures called "monsters of nature," or a falling stone accidentally breaking a branch.
2. By art or technique: As with any of our machines and the things they do.
3. By nature: Like the four elements, plants, animals (including humans), and their parts.