As Ivo says these discussions are in Suarez , undoubtedly. From my side I dare to suggest the following bibliography:

Klima, G. (1993). The Changing Role of" Entia Rationis" in Mediaeval Semantics and Ontology: A Comparative Study with a Reconstruction. Synthese, 25-58.

Roncaglia, G. (1995). Smiglecius on entia rationis. Vivarium, 33(1), 27-49.

Novotný, D. D. (2008). Forty-Two Years after Suárez. Mastri and Belluto’s Development of the «Classical» Theory of Entia Rationis. Quaestio, 8, 473-498.

Smith, B. (1990). Brentano and Marty: an inquiry into being and truth. In Mind, Meaning and Metaphysics (pp. 111-149). Springer, Dordrecht.

Gellera, G. (2020). Logic in seventeenth-century Scottish academic philosophy. Scottish Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, 111.

Jaume, A. L. (2020). Victor M. Salas-Robert L. Fastiggi (eds.), A Companion to Francisco Suárez,(Andrés L. Jaume). Acta Comeniana, 2015, vol. 29, p. 177-179.

Noonan, J. P. (2020). General metaphysics. Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Salatowsky, S. (2020). Unitarian materialism. Christoph Stegmann, Joseph Priestley, and their concepts of matter and soul. Intellectual History Review, 30(1), 7-29.

Thank you, Elías, for the extensive bibliography. Especially the Texts by Novotny are proving very helpful.

Thank you, Ivo, for the reference to Disputation 54. The references to Aristotle are very much to the point.

Aristote oppose l'être par accident à l'être par soi : "Métaphysique D, ch.7, l'être". Et au sein de l'être par soi, il distingue l'être selon les catégories, qui appartient au monde extérieur à l'intellect et l'être comme vrai, propre aux réalités intellectuelles comme les êtres de raison). Même doctrine en "Métaphysique E, ch.4", et partout où Aristote distingue l'être "dans la nature des choses" avec l'être "dans l'âme".

Cordialement

Dear Guy Delaporte. I’m glad you brought up Met. Δ, 7 and Met. Ε, 4, for that was where my question arose. I had seen that many scholastic commentators affirm that in E 4 Aristotle excludes entia rationis from the metaphysical discourse. You mention that in this chapter, he speaks about certain things being “in thought and not in things” (‘ἐν διανοίᾳ ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐν τοῖς πράγμασι’). He affirms this of two pairs of things: (a) composition and separation (συμπλοκή καὶ διαίρεσις), which are the affirmative and negative judgment, and (b) the false and the true (τὸ ψεῦδος καὶ τὸ ἀληθὲς) which here he considers exclusive properties of the affirmative and negative judgment. It can be argued (a) that the terms “affirmation” and “negation” are second intentions and that (b) truth and falsehood are relations, which then may be real relations or relations of reason (another interesting point of discussion). Second intentions and relations of reason are entia rationis. But this leaves untouched the two main entia rationis which are negations and privations. I am not sure Aristotle would be happy with them being called “entia rationis” as opposed to “entia realia”, for it seems to me that Aristotle considers privations such as blindness and ignorance as real, i.e., as something that is in the things and not only in thought. What privations lack seems to be not so much reality (independence of our judgment) but rather positive existence. That is why I wonder, if the scholastic division of “ens” into “…reale” and “…rationis” is really and truly secundum mentem Aristotelis. I would greatly appreciate any comments, opinions and considerations on this point.

Au chapitre 2 du livre Γ de la Métaphysique, Aristote énumère tout ce qui peut être dit “être” parce qu’il est en relation avec la substance qui est “être” par excellence : les affections et qualités des substances, les générations et corruptions des substances, etc. Et même, précise-t-il, ce qui est négation d’être, comme les privations et le non-être, qu’on peut qualifier d’être puisque il “EST” non-être.

La privation est un non-être dans un sujet apte à être tel mais qui ne l’est pas, et le non-être est néant. On ne peut dire qu’ils sont êtres “dans la nature des choses”, car ils ne sont êtres que pour un esprit qui peut les connaître. Ce sont des êtres de raison, c’est-à-dire des relations entre la raison et le monde extérieur (intentions premières), ou bien entre la raison et la raison (intentions secondes).

Dans son Traité de l’Interprétation, Aristote explique qu’une négation est toujours seconde par rapport à une affirmation affirmant ce qui est, car elle affirme ce qui n’est pas. C’est une affirmation de non-être absolu ou relatif. Cela, seule une raison peut le poser. La sensibilité animale connaît une sorte de jugement positif du bien et du mal, et derrière, de l’être réel de l’objet, mais est incapable de porter un jugement de non-être. Seul l’esprit le peut, ce qui prouve que la négation est un être de raison.

Cordialement

https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198749639.001.0001

These are nice efforts to find "entia rationis" in Aristotle, but they show that the distinction between entia realia and entia rationis is a scholastic and not aristotelian distinction.

On peut toujours le dire, cela ne coûte pas cher !

Dear Guy and Gaetano, thank you very much for your (quite contrasting) answers. I do agree that Scholastics are justified in calling negative objects “beings of reason”, though Aristotle never does this: (1) For they are – as Aristotle does say expressly in Met. Γ, 2 – beings (ὄντα), since we say that they are in some way (“non-being is non-being”, “blindness is the lack of sight” etc., (2) but they are, as Guy explains, only for reason, i.e. only for rational beings, since only rational beings can conceive and speak of them (saying: “they are such-and-such”).

What I do not agree with, and where I agree with Gaetano, is when they are being opposed to “real beings”. Aristotle does have the term “εἶναι ἐν τοῖς πράγμασι” (‘to be in the things’, ‘esse in rebus’) and correspondingly “οὐ εἶναι ἐν τοῖς πράγμασι”, (‘not to be in the things’, ‘non esse in rebus’) but as I said above, I don’t think that, for him, the latter would comfortably apply to privations and negations. He applies it to the acts of the intellect and their properties (Met. Ε 4), but privations and negations he rather places in the things. (“X is really blind”; “Y is really ignorant” etc.).

My textual reasons are the following: as Guy says, every negation, according to De Interpretatione, affirms some absolute or relative non-being. But according to Met. Θ, 10, the states of affairs expressed by any true judgment (be it synthetic-affirmative or diairetic-negative), are in the things (ἐπὶ τῶν πραγμάτων, 1051b2), and to contradict these true judgments means “to think the things differently than how they actually stand” (ibid. 4-5, I follow the German Bonitz-Seidl-translation). The true negation: “…is not able to see” and the true affirmation of the corresponding privation: “…is blind” are therefore, according to Aristotle, in the things, for they express adequately how things actually stand.

And I believe that, in the line of Met. Θ, 10, 1051b2-5, one must also understand Met. Ε, 4, 1027b21-23 (“for truth has the affirmation in the case of what is compounded and the negation in the case of what is divided, while falsity has the contradictory of this apportionment”, Ross-translation) and Kat. 5, 4b8-10 (“For it is because the state of affairs (πρᾶγμα) actually does or does not obtain (εἶναι) that the statement is said to be true or false”, Ackrill-translation, modified). My opinion is therefore that Aristotle considers real any negative state of affairs (or predicate), as long as it is true. Those negative objects, then, are certainly only captured by reason or by rational beings, but that does not mean, in my view, that Aristotle considers them unreal.

Chèr Guy, une réponse très spirituelle!

Ok Albert, but in the first lines of your last comment you indicate things that logos can tell with entia rationis, and I am publishing an essay where aristotelian logos and scholastic ratio are different activities: ratio does not contain intellectus and sensations, while logos does. Best Regards

Chers amis,

Au livre 1 de la Physique Chapitres 8 et 9, Aristote explique comment sujet et privation sont un en un sens, et deux en un autre ; un en sujet et double en notion. le sujet premier, la matière première, est non-être par accident et être (pure puissance) par soi, tandis que la privation est, au contraire, être par accident et non-être par soi. Ce qui est être "dans les choses" pour la privation, c'est son sujet, le sujet qui est privé, mais la privation, en tant que telle, est non-être absolu, c'est à dire non-être dans les choses. L'aveuglement comme tel ne se trouve pas dans les choses, ce qu'on trouve, c'est un sujet aveugle. Il en va à l'inverse de la couleur rouge, par exemple, que l'on trouve comme telle dans les choses là où l'on trouve un sujet rouge.

Un être qui est "être dans les choses", qu'il soit substance ou accident, est le composé d'un sujet (de la matière première pour la substance) et d'une forme (substantielle ou accidentelle). ce ne saurait être le cas du non-être comme tel ; quelle serait, en effet, sa forme ? C'est pourquoi, comme le Traité de l'Interprétation l'explique, le nom désigne la forme de la chose, telle que reçue dans l'intellect, tandis que le nom infini (non-A) n'est pas un vrai nom, car il ne désigne pas "quelque chose"; il ne signifie pas une forme mais un néant de forme.

Mais si le non-être, qu'il soit néant ou privation, n'a pas d'"être dans les choses", quel est son statut d'être ?

Cordialement

Dear Gaetano,

I will be interested in reading your essay. When Aristotle says, in Met. VII, 4, that non-being may be said to be, not that it is simply, but that it is non-being, he calls this kind of consideration “λογικός”. But interestingly – and I think correctly – the Aristoteles latinus does not translate this as “rationalis”, but as “logicus”. In Met. VI, 4, instead of “λόγος” he uses another noun: “διάνοια” which can also be translated to Latin as “ratio” (in the sense of discursive thought), but which here means not so much the faculty of reasoning, but the faculty of judgment. The Aristoteles latinus translates it as “mens”. The expression “ἐν διανοίᾳ” in Met. VI, 4 certainly is at the root of the scholastic “ens rationis”, about the expression “λογικῶς” in Met. VII, 4, I am not exactly sure.

Dear Guy,

Thank you for adding fuel to this discussion. Analysing first your argument from Physics I, 8, 9, it seems to be resting mainly on the affirmation: “la privation, en tant que telle, est non-être absolu, c'est à dire non-être dans les choses“. You are referring to 192a3-5:

“We say that privation is a non-being per se.” (‘Ἡμεῖς […] φαμεν […] οὐκ ὂν εἶναι […] τὴν […] στέρησιν καθ' αὑτήν’).

But your addition: “…c'est à dire non-être dans les choses“ (‘that is to say, non-being in things’) is not to be found in the text. And yet your whole argument seems to hinge on this addition.

To your argument from De Interpretatione: Aristotle does say that spoken sounds indirectly (via the affections of the soul) signify things (πράγματα).” (Ch. 1, 16a3-9). Then he goes on to say that “‘not-man’ is not a name” (Ch. 2, 16a29-30). It may appear at first sight that this is because it is not a symbol (σύμβολον) at all, in that it does not symbolize or signify a thing.

But this is not the case, because Aristotle immediately specifies: it is a name – though not a name in the full sense, but an indeterminate name; that is to say: it does signify something, in fact, it signifies many more things than the determinate name “man”; for “man” signifies only those beings that are human; “not-man” to the contrary signifies everything else, whatever it may be.

What this indeterminate name is lacking is not a real thing it refers to, but rather – as you rightly state – a mental likeness (ὁμοίωμα, similitudo), something seen by the intellect (εἶδος, forma, species), which mediates between the linguistic sign and the things it signifies. But thinking along this line, the not-man would seem to be almost the opposite of an ens rationis: it exists in the outside-world (as cats, dogs, bricks and snowflakes…), but there is no likeness of it in the mind. It seems to be only ens reale and not at all ens rationis.

But in fact, the De Interpretatione does not call the not-man a being at all (neither real nor of reason). It does not attempt to explain at all (as do Met. IV, 2 and VII, 4) why we may, in some way, call non-beings “beings”.

So I would argue that neither Physics I, 8-9 nor De Interpretatione 1-2 can help clarify whether or not the distinction between ens rationis and ens reale is (explicitly or implicitly) part of Aristotle’s thought.

Dear Albert, many congratulations for your knowledge of Aristotele's text and for the efforts to connect ens rationale to logoi, diànoia etc., but Aristotle's concept of logos and medioeval ratio are different activities, you can try to distinguish the faculty of judgement (diànoia) from the faculty of reasoning (diànoia, logìzethai, syllogìzethai), and of course from the faculty of intuition (nous), but the fact that the greek word logos is untraslatable remains, because logos has all the told faculties in itself, and it is more an activity (discourse) than a faculty (language)! Thank you for interest, I will write you when I will publish my essay here, best Regards

Dear Gaetano,

Is a 1:1 translation of the Greek “λόγος“ into Latin impossible? Totally agreed! Do the discrepancies between Greek and Latin words hamper the medieval understanding of Aristotle? Certainly! Still I find that the Latin literal translations of William of Moerbeke and the literal commentaries (particularly those of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus) deal very conscientiously with the Aristotelian text and can be very enlightening. In my opinion, a case by case study is the best thing.

Saluti!

In this I agree with you, but William of Morboeke, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scoto are dwarfs on the shoulders of giants, and I don't find any place in Aristotle's text where is genuinely possible to see the distinction between ens reale and ens rationale, even if I really appreciated your erudite discussion! Best Regards

Chers amis

il faudra tout de même expliquer ce passage de la Métaphysique d'Aristote :

Metaphysics L E, ch. 4, 1027b17-1028a8:

Let us dismiss the accidental; for we have sufficiently determined its nature. But since that which is in the sense of being true, or is not in the sense of being false, depends on combination and separation, and truth and falsehood together are concerned with the apportionment of a contradiction (for truth has the affirmation in the case of what is compounded and the negation in the case of what is divided, while falsity has the contradictory of this apportionment—it is another question, how it happens that we think things together or apart; by ‘together’ and ‘apart’ I mean thinking them so that there is no succession in the thoughts but they become a unity—; for falsity and truth are not in things—it is not as if the good were true, and the bad were in itself false—but in thought; while with regard to simple things and essences falsity and truth do not exist even in thought):—we must consider later what has to be discussed with regard to that which is or is not in this sense; but since the combination and the separation are in thought and not in the things, and that which is in this sense is a different sort of being from the things that are in the full sense (for the thought attaches or removes either the ‘what’ or quality or quantity or one of the other categories), that which is accidentally and that which is in the sense of being true must be dismissed. For the cause of the former is indeterminate, and that of the latter is some affection of the thought, and both are related to the remaining genus of being, and do not indicate any separate class of being.

(Trans. W.D. Ross)

Il y est clairement fait une distinction entre l'être qui est dans les choses et l'être qui est dans la pensée. L'être dans la pensée est être "dans un sens différent de l'être au sens plein du terme", car son être est "une affection de la pensée". Cet être ne concerne pas directement la métaphysique, au contraire de l'être au sens plein.

Cordialement

Dear Gaetano,

un piacere!

Dear Guy,

Met. VI, 4 is an extremely difficult chapter and many passages are quite obscure and heavily debated. So to clarify what Aristotle means by “being in thought and not in the things” is not an easy task at all. It requires an overall exegesis of this chapter. I will make an initial attempt at this, though even that will be somewhat extensive.

The question we are dealing with seems to be the following: can Met. VI, 4 ground the distinction between ens rationis and ens reale as understood by Scholasticism? In other words: when Aristotle says that certain things “are in the judging mind (διάνοια) and not in things (πράγματα)“, is he intending to conceptualize what Scholastics call entia rationis?

This requires us to answer a prior question: what is Aristotle’s basic intention in this chapter? His intention is not, as has sometimes been presumed, to exclude all entia rationis from metaphysical consideration. The text says only that he intends to exclude being in the sense of ‘being-true’ (τὸ ὡς ἀληθὲς ὄν).

Now, this expression (“being in the sense of ‘being-true’”) can only be properly understood through Met. V, 7, 1017a31-35, where he explains it at some length:

ἔτι τὸ εἶναι σημαίνει καὶ τὸ ἔστιν ὅτι ἀληθές, τὸ δὲ μὴ εἶναι ὅτι οὐκ ἀληθὲς ἀλλὰ ψεῦδος, ὁμοίως ἐπὶ καταφάσεως καὶ ἀποφάσεως,

Further, “to be“ and „is“ signify that something is true, “not to be” that something is not true but false, in the same way when dealing with affirmation as when dealing with negation.

Now he explains this by means of some examples:

οἷον ὅτι ἔστι Σωκράτης μουσικός, ὅτι ἀληθὲς τοῦτο,

For example: that it is: “Socrates [is] cultured”, this means that this is true.

ἢ ὅτι ἔστι Σωκράτης οὐ λευκός, ὅτι ἀληθές:

Or that it is: “Socrates [is] not white”, this means that that is true.

τὸ δ᾽ οὐκ ἔστιν ἡ διάμετρος σύμμετρος, ὅτι ψεῦδος.

Again, that it is not: „The diagonal is commensurate [to the sides]”, this means that this is false.

This sense of “is” was not used in Latin, nor is it used in contemporary Indo-European languages. It needs some explaining (see authors such as C. Kahn, Pritzl, De Rijk):

(a) “Is”, taken as copula, posits a state of affairs, i.e.: out of two separate elements (“Margaret” – “clever”) it makes a sentence (“Margaret is clever”) (the example is taken from Kahn). It is a “sentence-maker”.

(b) Now, if one stresses the same “…is…”, one can use it as a „sentence-confirmer” (“Margaret is clever, I tell you”).

(c) In ancient Greek, the confirmative function of the copula may finally yield a separate, “veridical” sense: The copula is, as it were, moved from the center of the sentence and put, as a self-sufficient “sentence-confirmer” at its beginning: “It is: Margaret [is] clever”, meaning: “It is true that Margaret is clever”.

Aristotle uses “to be” in this sense when he says things like: “εἰ τοῦτ᾽ ἔστιν“ (Met. IV, 5, 1009a12), which literally means: “if this is”, but which must be translated as “if this assertion is true” or, as does Ross: “if this is so”; or: “δῆλον ὅτι οὐκ ἂν εἴη…” (Met. IV, 6, 1011b7), literally: “it is obvious that it is not that…” which must be translated: “it is obvious that it is not true that…”.

Philosophers before Aristotle (such as Melissus, Parmenides, Protagoras, Plato) have used the verb “to be” in this sense. Already in Herodotus and Thucydides we find expressions such as “„λέγειν τὸ ἐόν“ / „λέγειν τὰ ὄντα“ (literally: ‘to say what is’, meaning: ‘to tell the truth’), and Kahn explains that it is “a pre-historic us of *es- in Indo-European.”

It is this sense of “being-as-‘being true’” that Aristotle intends to exclude from the metaphysical consideration. What is his justification for this exclusion? Is it because truth is an ens rationis? No, it is because the veridical “is” refers to something which is in the judging mind (διάνοια) and not outside of it. More concretely: the “is” in the sense of “is true” refers to the judgment itself (“Socrates is cultured”), and this judgment is an act of the mind and therefore obviously in the mind and not in things.

Now back to the initial question: when Aristotle says that affirmations and negations are “in the judging intellect”, is he understanding them the way Scholastics define entia rationis? Not exactly, and that for two reasons: (a) because in itself the term “being in the intellect” differs from the scholastic “esse rationis” and (b) because its opposite (“being in things”) differs from the scholastic “esse reale”.

(a) Aristotle’s “being in the intellect” in itself differs from the scholastic “esse rationis”.

It is an essential feature of the ens rationis as such that it “exists objectively in the mind”. That is to say: we call something a being of reason inasmuch as it is an object of our intellect (and only that). (For example: a centaur exists only as an object of our intellect, and therefore it is a being of reason). But when Aristotle says that affirmation and negation are in the judging mind and not in things, he is not considering them to be objects of the intellect, but acts of the intellect, for it is the act of judgment that is either-true-or-false. (Of course, one may consider affirmation and negation as objects of the intellect, and then this consideration would be what Scholastics call a second intention, which in turn refers to one of the types of entia rationis. But in this passage, Aristotle does not consider them this way.) So the expression “…are in the judging mind and not in things”, as used by Aristotle here, does not define ens rationis in the Scholastic sense.

That becomes clearer if we compare the acts of affirmation and negation with concrete cases of the scholastic ens rationis: A centaur is an object of the intellect and can never be an act of the intellect; also blindness is obviously no act of the intellect. Even the second intentions always mentioned by Scholastics (genus, species, difference) are objects of the intellect and not acts. And relations of reason such as being-known-by-something or being-measured-by-something cannot be acts of the intellect either but only its objects. Thus, affirmation and negation – considered as acts and not as objects – do not comfortably fit into the Scholastic scheme of beings of reason.

(b) The opposite of Aristotle’s “being in the intellect” – “being in things” – differs from the scholastic “esse reale”.

In 1027b31, Aristotle speaks of another sense of “being” which he calls “κυρίως”, i.e. “principal”, “primary”, “main”, “full” or “proper”. Scholastics have generally believed that this other meaning is “existence outside of the mind”, which makes something be an ens reale, but this is not exactly the case. Aristotle is not speaking about “existence”, but about “being” as universal, determinable predicate: “To be” can mean “to be a man” (the ‘what it is to be’), “to be healthy” (‘how something is’), “to be 6ft tall” (‘how much or how great something is’) etc. He is talking about copulative being as it is determined by categorial determinations. And he states that this expression: “to be such-and-such” does not refer to an act of the intellect, but that it “explains (reveals, clarifies, δηλο[ί]) a nature of being which is outside”, meaning “…outside the judging intellect”. In other words: it expresses how the real things really are.

I argue that this idea of “how the real things really are” does not coincide with what scholastics call esse reale. For example: when I say “Homer is (or was) blind”, in Aristotle’s mind (and I believe in our minds too) I would be expressing how the real Homer really is (or was). And yet, being blind or blindness is one of the classical scholastic examples for ens rationis.

Another inconvenience about the scholastic view, (in that it applies the notion of ens reale to the categorial objects of substance, quality, quantity, relation…), is that it implies a questionable form of realism about the accidental categories, which we should be wary to attribute to Aristotle himself: accidents are here considered individuals which really exist in other individuals (i.e.: in substances). This becomes increasingly problematic as we move on down the line of accidents: How is “6ft tall” an individual existing in another individual? How is “twice as tall as little John” an individual existing in another individual? How is “in the marketplace” an individual existing in another individual? How is “at 10 o’clock” an individual existing in another individual? How is “sitting” an individual existing in another individual? How is “wearing a cloak” an individual existing in another individual? How is “walking” an individual existing in another individual? This is not a viable way of conceiving of the categories. (Though certain expressions in the early treatise on the Categories may favor the hypothesis that Aristotle might himself have held this kind of realism about accidental categories at that time of his life, there is nothing in the Metaphysics that would definitely indicate that, in writing this later work, he [still?] defended that view).

To conclude, looking at it from another angle: though there is an undeniable affinity between Aristotle’s “being in the judging intellect ↔ being in the things” and the scholastic “esse rationis ↔ esse reale”, there is one fundamental difference which precludes them from coinciding:

For scholastics, the “esse” is always understood as “existence”: Either objective existence in the intellect (esse rationis) or existence in things (esse reale). For Aristotle, “εἶναι, ἔστιν, ὄν“ (‚to be, is, being‘) means (a) primarily the copulative being (‘being’ as universal, determinable predicate), which expresses how the real things really are, and (b) (not-primarily, but it is explicitly mentioned) the veridical being (the ‘is’ in the sense of ‘is true’), which expresses a quality of our judgments (“This judgment is [= is true]”). (c) The esse simpliciter - i.e. being without a categorial determination, as when we simply say: “Socrates is” - which is usually translated as “Socrates exists” is conspicuously absent from both Met. V, 7 and Met. VI, 4.

Consequently, the reason why Aristotle calls true judgments beings (ὄντα, entia) is not that they exist as objects of the intellect, but that they are true. The reason why he calls the categorial determinations beings is not that they exist in the things but that they are co-signified by the copulative “…is…”, which expresses how the real things really are.

So I argue that the general scholastic idea, according to which in Met. VI, 4 Aristotle distinguishes between ens reale and ens rationis, excluding the latter from the metaphysical consideration, is not wholly adequate.

Many greetings, Albert

Cher Albert,

Le moment est peut-être venu de prendre un peu de recul.

Pour ma part, je suis disciple de saint Thomas d’Aquin de la racine des cheveux jusqu'au bout des ongles. Mais je ne résous pas à suivre l’évolution moderne du thomisme. Il se passe en effet un phénomène très intéressant depuis la renaissance du thomisme avec Léon XIII d’un côté, et la renaissance d’Aristote en grande partie grâce à Heidegger et, paradoxalement, parfois contre lui.

Du côté thomiste, tout est fait, encore aujourd’hui, pour minimiser voire même nier l’influence aristotélicienne chez Thomas, au profit d’une soi-disant pensée néo-platonicienne dominante, sous les auspices vénéneux de Gilson. Tandis que du côté des aristotéliciens, on s’efforce de traquer partout l’interprétation scolastique pour en inventer autant d’autres que possible pourvu qu’elles contredisent la première ; il n’y a qu’à lire l’introduction de Bernard Sichère à sa traduction française de la Métaphysique, il est ridicule d’idéologie heideggérienne. C’est rejeter une scolastique de valeur pour sombrer dans une autre ô combien verbeuse.

Quel ressort psychanalytique collectif alimente ce processus de divorce, je l’ignore. C’est exactement dans l’attitude à contre-courant que se trouve, à mon sens, la vérité : Thomas d’Aquin est disciple d’Aristote de A à Ω et Aristote est “aquinable per se”. Quant aux néo-platoniciens, Thomas récupère chez eux ce qu’ils avaient emprunté à Aristote et rejette ou redresse ce qui reste platonicien.

Je ne suis pas, et ne veux pas être un historien de la philosophie ni un philologue soumis à la dictature du texte. Quand j’entends parler de la notion “scolastique” d’ens reale et d’ens ratione, j’avoue ne pas comprendre de quoi il s’agit. La scolastique s’étend sur presque 1000 ans, de Boèce à Suarez. Cette période compte sans doute plus d’une centaine de penseurs plus grands et plus puissants que jamais, par la suite, nous n’en connaîtrons en philosophie. Tous ou presque ont parlé d’ens reale et d’ens ratione chacun à leur façon parfois incompatibles, et la plupart en rattachant ces notions à Aristote. Il doit bien y avoir une raison.

Pour en revenir à la Métaphysique, suivons quelques étapes. Son sujet est “l’être en tant qu’être”. Autrement dit, elle étudie tout ce qui mérite le nom d’être (y compris, par conséquent, la privation et le non-être absolu) sous la raison où cela “est”. Puis Aristote distingue un mode d’être par soi et un mode d’être par accident. Considérant que de ce dernier, il ne peut y avoir de science, il le délaisse et se concentre sur l’être par soi. Celui-ci est de deux ordres : l’être dans les choses, qui se distribue dans les 10 catégories, et l’être vrai, qui est dans la pensée. Rien que cette simple distinction devrait suggérer qu’il y a un lien avec celle entre ens reale et ens ratione, même si le recoupement n’est pas terme à terme, il est tout de même d’un ordre d’idées comparable.

Mais allons plus loin. Lorsqu’Aristote distingue l’être dans les choses en 10 catégories, il éloigne de la Métaphysique l’étude des 9 catégories d’accidents pour se concentrer sur la substance, par “principe d’économie” dirons-nous. Est-ce à dire que l’étude des accidents ne relève pas de la Métaphysique ? Non, bien sûr, mais elle n’est pas utile dans un premier temps pour la science qu’Aristote recherche, à savoir celle des principes et causes de l’être. Cela veut dire sans doute que l’étude de l’être de chaque accident pourra faire partie par la suite d’une étude métaphysique et que de la même façon, dans un troisième temps, l’étude de l’être comme vrai, relève aussi à part entière de la Métaphysique sous le rapport où il est, même s’il peut être étudié sous un autre rapport par la philosophie de l’esprit ou la logique. Ceci pour la distinction d’ens reale et d’ens ratione.

Quant à la privation, voici encore ce qu’écrit Aristote dans ses Catégories : « Privation and possession are spoken of in connexion with the same thing, for example sight and blindness in connexion with the eye. To generalize, each of them is spoken of in connexion with whatever the possession naturally occurs in. We say that anything capable of receiving a possession is deprived of it when it is entirely absent from that which naturally has it, at the time when it is natural for it to have it. »

Ce que je vous disais dans mon précédent message : la vue est un être dans les choses (occurs in) et l’aveuglement est un non-être dans les chose (entirely absent). La privation est ce qui est entièrement absent là où la possession devrait être. Elle est un non-être dans les choses où elle devrait être à titre de possession. La vue est être dans les choses, tandis que l’aveuglement qui est une non-vue est un non être dans les choses où elle devrait être, une absence totale, dit Aristote. La leçon des Catégories rejoint exactement celle de la Physique.

Nous nous trouvons donc devant ce paradoxe que la privation est à la fois un non-être au sens absolu (Physique, Catégories) et un être par soi (Métaphysique). Comment résoudre ce paradoxe autrement qu’en constatant que la privation est un non-être dans les choses et un être dans la pensée ?

Cordialement