Actualizing potential

Aristotle argued that certain kinds of things have “a principle of motion and of stationariness,” an “innate impulse to change.”  Artificial things do not have such an impulse or principle, insofar as they are products of art, though “in so far as they happen to be composed of stone or of earth or of a mixture of the two, they do have such an impulse.”  Such things that have such a principle or impulse toward motion are things that “have a nature.”  A nature is an impulse to actualize what is potential in the thing.  One definition of nature is that it is “the immediate material substratum of things which have in themselves a principle of motion or change.”

Now this is an account of change, and thus seems to be an account of time.  But in fact Aristotle seems to be shielding nature from real time and history.   His model is botanical: Plants grow according to a “nature”; nature is the way plants would grow if not impeded by external influence.  That’s not even a very satisfying description of plant growth, and it certainly doesn’t describe how human beings are realized more fully as humans.  We don’t smoothly grow from seed, but become more fully human as we speak and are spoken to, as we gash our knees and blister our hands, as we are beaten by disappointments and grow big with success.

On this account of nature, we become what we are potentially.  Reality is more as Rosenstock-Huessy described it: We respond, though we shall be changed.