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METAPHYSICS that being came from non-being Aristotle wants to cut between the two by saying that actual being comes from potential being This, of course, is not a magic formula that will dissolve all philosophical puzzlement: but it is an appropriate template in which to insert detailed analyses of diVerent types of possible change Aristotle did not call his own investigations ‘Metaphysics’; that name initially just meant ‘After Physics’ and was given it by his editors to mark the text’s place in the corpus He does, however, say that there is a discipline ‘which theorizes about Being qua being, and the things which belong to Being taken in itself’ (C 1003a21) This discipline is called ‘Wrst philosophy’, and it interests itself in Wrst principles and supreme causes Aristotle seems to give two conXicting accounts of its subject matter: one that, unlike the special sciences, it deals with Being as a whole; the other that it deals with a particular kind of being, namely divine, independent, and immutable substance (for this reason he sometimes calls it ‘theology’) Are we to say that these are two diVerent accounts of Being qua being? No: there is no such thing as Being qua being: there are only diVerent ways of studying Being You can study Being qua being, but that is not to study a mysterious object but rather to undertake a particular sort of study This study, like all Aristotelian sciences, is an inquiry into causes: and when we study Being qua being we are looking for the most universal and primary causes Contrast this with the other disciplines: when we study human physiology, we study humans qua animals, that is to say we study the structures and functions that humans have in common with animals But of course there is no such entity as a human qua animal To study something as a being is to study it in virtue of what it has in common with all other things (Precious little, you might think: and Aristotle himself says, as we have seen, that nothing can have being as its essence or nature.) But a study of the universe as being is to study it as a single overarching system embracing all the causes of things coming into being and remaining in existence At the supreme point of the hierarchy of Aristotelian causes—as we shall see more fully in Chapter 9—are the heavenly moved and unmoved movers that are the Wnal causes of all generation and corruption When Aristotle says that Wrst philosophy studies the whole of Being, he is assigning to it the Weld it is to explain; when he says that it is the science of the divine, he is 227
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