ARISTOTLE’S FIRST EXAMPLE OF AN EFFICIENT CAUSE: TRANSLATING PHYSICS 194B30

Abstract

Since the 1970s progressively more translators, in several European languages, have abandoned the traditional translation of ὁ βουλϵύσας at Physics 194b30 as ‘the adviser’ for a different one: ‘the deliberator’. The latter translation has never been defended, and is, as this article will argue, indefensible—the active of βουλϵύω is never used in classical prose in this sense. Furthermore, this translation obscures what may be a philosophically significant feature of the passage: the fact that all of the other examples of efficient causes Aristotle gives here, in what is his canonical account of the four causes, are cases where what causes something to move is distinct from the thing it causes to move (the father causes the child’s gestation, the builder causes the lumber’s turning into a house). An Aristotelian deliberator, on the other hand, while arguably an efficient cause, is the cause of their very own action. At least one ancient commentator, Simplicius, thought that Aristotle had good reasons to restrict his examples to causes distinct from what they set in motion. Both the traditional translation and the variant of it for which I shall argue, ‘the one who made the proposal’, fit this model.

In his canonical presentation of the theory of four causes, after describing material and formal causes, Aristotle describes the third τρόπος of cause (traditionally known as the ‘efficient cause’) as follows (Ph. 194b29–32): ¹

ἔτι ὅθϵν ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς μϵταβολῆς ἡ πρώτη ἢ τῆς ἠρϵμήσϵως, οἷον ὁ βουλϵύσας αἴτιος, καὶ ὁ πατὴρ τοῦ τέκνου, καὶ ὅλως τὸ ποιοῦν τοῦ ποιουμένου καὶ τὸ μϵταβάλλον τοῦ μϵταβαλλομένου.

In the original Oxford translation of the Physics in 1930, Hardie renders the passage as follows: ²

Again the primary source of the change or coming to rest; e.g. the man who gave advice is a cause, the father is cause of the child, and generally what makes of what is made and what causes change of what is changed.

In translating ὁ βουλϵύσας as ‘the man who gave advice’, Hardie agrees with Ross’s earlier translation of the passage in the original Oxford translation of the corresponding Metaphysics passage, ³ and both are following a venerable Latin tradition. Aquinas read consilians, ⁴ which is also to be found in both translations of the Physics produced by William of Moerbeke ⁵ (one of which Aquinas doubtless had in front of him). Subsequent Latin translations tend to use either this term or terms derived from consulo. ⁶ The Revised Oxford Translation of 1984, however, substitutes ‘the man who (has) deliberated’ in these two passages, and similar renderings have since turned up in other English translations, ⁷ as well as in translations into French, Italian and Portuguese. ⁸ None of those who adopt this translation explain their reasons for doing so, nor do I know of any other scholarly defence of it. This article argues that the translation is mistaken, and that while the traditional translation ‘adviser’ is closer to Aristotle’s meaning, it also does not quite succeed in capturing it. Rather, I shall argue that ‘the one who made the proposal’ comes closer to doing so.

What has presumably motivated the translation I am concerned to contest is the fact that Aristotle does, indeed, treat deliberation as a case of efficient causation. In Nicomachean Ethics 6.2 he states (1139a31–3, ROT):

The origin (ἀρχή) of action—its efficient, not its final cause (ὅθϵν ἡ κίνησις ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ οὗ ἕνϵκα)—is choice (προαίρϵσις), and that of choice is desire and reasoning with a view to an end (λόγος ὁ ἕνϵκά τινος). ⁹

Ethical choice—προαίρϵσις—is here explicitly said to be an efficient cause (literally, ‘whence the motion’). Now the reasoning an agent undertakes prior to, and which concludes in, an ethical choice is precisely deliberation: Aristotle’s terse definition of choice is ‘deliberative desire’ (ὄρϵξις βουλϵυτική, 1139a23). Since whenever choice is an efficient cause it is so because there is some agent making that choice, and an agent makes that choice after deliberating, the claim that a person who has deliberated is an efficient cause is a recognizably Aristotelian thought.

But there are decisive reasons to hold that Aristotle is not offering a deliberator as an example of an efficient cause in our passage. While Aristotle uses the middle voice of βουλϵύω for agential deliberation, he never uses the active voice in this sense; and our term is the active aorist participle. Aristotle’s usage accords with LSJ s.v., who list the first meaning of βουλϵύω as ‘take counsel’, ‘deliberate’, and comment: ‘in Prose, chiefly Med. in this sense’. ¹⁰ Now while Aristotle never uses active forms of βουλϵύω to refer to an agent’s deliberation, he does use active forms of the verb seven times in the corpus (aside from the occurrences of ὁ βουλϵύσας under consideration here). These occurrences are all found in the Athenaiôn Politeia and the Politics, and in six of the seven the word occurs in the constitutional sense of holding office as a member of the council (βουλή) of a polis. ¹¹ The seventh, more relevant occurrence refers not so much to holding the office of councillor as to a certain activity that a member of the council may perform in that capacity. In Pol. 5.9 Aristotle reports that in some oligarchies officials take an oath—presumably upon entering office—of the following form: ‘I shall both be malevolently-disposed (κακόνους) to the demos and shall propose (βουλϵύσω) anything harmful to them that I can’ (1310a9–10). The ROT renders βουλϵύσω here as ‘devise’, which somewhat blurs its sense. In this part of the oath the speaker is not promising to be always hatching schemes to harm the demos—something like that is covered by the first part of the oath, to be κακόνους—but rather that he will propose measures to this effect in his capacity as member of the council. We know that an analogous oath was sworn by Athenians when becoming members of the Athenian βουλή. In Lys. 31.1–2 the speaker says: ‘I entered into the Council chamber upon taking an oath to propose what is best for the city’ (ὀμόσας … τὰ βέλτιστα βουλϵύσϵιν τῇ πόλϵι), and [Dem.] 59.4.9 decries a proposal that someone had made ‘after having sworn to propose what is best for the Athenian demos’ (ὀμωμοκὼς δὲ τὰ βέλτιστα βουλϵύσϵιν τῷ δήμῳ τῷ Ἀθηναίων). ¹²

The suggestion that the active βουλϵύσϵιν in these passages has the specific meaning of making a proposal is supported by two recent studies, one of ancient rhetoric, the other specifically of Thucydides. In a study of ancient rhetorical genres, Pepe writes:

The verb used for deliberation is βουλϵύω, in both the active and middle voices. βουλϵύϵιν in the active expresses the idea of proposing a project, emphasizing the power of decision making, while βουλϵύϵσθαι highlights the confronting and reconciliation of opinions, i.e. the communal aspect of deliberation. ¹³

The middle expresses a deliberative body’s activity when it is engaged in what we might call deliberation proper, that is, the weighing of various alternatives. The active, by contrast, is used for the actions that take place at the beginning and end of deliberation proper: an individual’s proposal of a course of action for consideration, and the deliberative body’s endorsing such a proposal. ¹⁴ Aristotle’s use of the middle βουλϵύϵσθαι for individual moral deliberation conforms to this usage. For an Aristotelian deliberator does, indeed, consider various ways of achieving their end without as yet definitively adopting one or the other. But here there is no room for the use of the active to refer to some analogue, in the individual case, of someone’s submitting a proposal to a deliberative body. Nor, more importantly, is there any room for using the active forms of the verb in the individual case to refer to some analogue of the collective’s adopting a proposal. In the latter case, there is typically some delay between a body’s resolving upon a course of action and that resolution’s being carried out—between, for example, a declaration of war and firing the first shot. In Aristotelian action theory, however, successful deliberation standardly issues in a προαίρϵσις to act immediately. ¹⁵ If Aristotle had such an agent in mind as his example of an efficient cause in our passage, the most appropriate term for him to use would have been ὁ προαιρούμϵνος. It is worth reiterating: Aristotle never uses the active of βουλϵύω to describe an agent’s making up their mind to act.

The traditional translation of ὁ βουλϵύσας here as ‘the adviser’, while certainly preferable to ‘the deliberator’, has some drawbacks: (1) the English word, unlike the Greek, does not have a distinctively political use in the sense of formally moving a proposal; (2) perhaps relatedly, it may seem somewhat strained to consider someone who merely advises a course of action to be responsible for it. It makes more sense, however, to blame someone who initiates a course of action by officially proposing it to an official body, or by urging it on a private individual. And several Greek authors, both philosophical and non-philosophical, remark on the natural tendency to assign blame in this way. In De falsa legatione Demosthenes tells the Athenians that on an earlier occasion Aeschines had told them that he (Aeschines) had ‘personally explained to Philip that those who proposed an action (οἱ βϵβουλϵυκότϵς) are no less guilty of impiety than those who carried it out (οἱ ταῖς χϵρσὶν πράξαντϵς)’ (19.21). ¹⁶ So, too, Plato’s Athenian Visitor, when legislating about murder in the Laws, considers the following scenario: ‘And if a person, while he does not [kill] with his own hands, yet proposes the death to someone else (ἐὰν δὲ αὐτόχϵιρ μὲν μή, βουλϵύσῃ δὲ θάνατόν τις ἄλλος ἑτέρῳ) and is responsible in virtue of having killed by intention and plotting (καὶ τῇ βουλήσϵι τϵ καὶ ἐπιβουλϵύσϵι ἀποκτϵίνας αἴτιος ὤν), then …’ (871e8–872a2). ¹⁷ Here the Athenian Stranger emphasizes that the person who initiated a murder by urging another to do the killing is just as guilty of murder as one who straightforwardly commits the deed with their own hands. A few lines later, when considering the case of a slave murdering a free person, he treats the two cases, once again, as on a par: ἐὰν δὲ δοῦλος ἐλϵύθϵρον ἑκών, ϵἴτϵ αὐτόχϵιρ ϵἴτϵ βουλϵύσας, ἀποκτϵίνῃ … (872b4–5).

Now that the proposer of an action is responsible for it is just the point Aristotle makes—or rather relies on as intuitively obvious—when he introduces the efficient cause in the passage with which we are concerned: ‘and [a] further [kind of cause], that from which the first origin of the change or rest [proceeds]; for example, the proposer is responsible (οἷον ὁ βουλϵύσας αἴτιος) …’ (Ph. 194b29–30). Aristotle could have in mind here the kind of non-political cases Plato discusses in the Laws passage just discussed: the person who puts the idea of committing an action into someone else’s head is responsible for the resulting action. ¹⁸ I suspect, though, that he has political cases particularly in mind. The Athenian demos was notorious for its propensity to blame political decisions gone bad on the speaker who had proposed them. ¹⁹ And Aristotle does sometimes illustrate the efficient cause by taking an example from the political realm: in particular, the efficient cause of a city’s being at war. When Aristotle returns to a consideration of the four causes and their interrelations in Physics 2.7, he introduces the efficient cause as follows: ‘… what first sets something in motion (τὸ κινῆσαν πρῶτον), for example: why did they go to war? Because they had conducted a raid’ (198a19–20; cf. also An. post. 94a36–b8). Now it is true that here Aristotle gives not a proposal, but an action—the Athenians’ raiding Sardis—as the efficient cause of the Persian War. This is particularly appropriate when explaining why a city finds itself in a war it did not intend to start. But in a ‘war of choice’—for example, the Athenians’ Sicilian expedition—it would be natural to place the blame on the person who proposed the war in the Assembly. (‘How did we get into this mess with Syracuse in the first place?’ ‘It was Alcibiades’ idea.’) And indeed, Philoponus understood Aristotle’s reference to ὁ βουλϵύσας in our passage in just this way. He comments: ‘The productive cause. For when we ask, who is responsible for the war? (τίς τοῦ πολέμου αἴτιος;) we shall say that it is the person who proposed it (ὁ βουλϵύσας).’ ²⁰

One final point on the significance of rectifying the translation of this passage. The larger context in which it figures is Aristotle’s canonical treatment of the four causes; it occurs not only in the Physics but also in the philosophical lexicon of Metaphysics Book 5. As previously noted, the expression Aristotle here uses for the efficient cause is ὅθϵν ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς μϵταβολῆς ἡ πρώτη ἢ τῆς ἠρϵμήσϵως—‘that from which the first origin of the change or rest [proceeds]’. The most perspicuous way of illustrating such a notion is with examples in which the source of motion is distinct from the thing that it causes to move; and the examples Aristotle uses all fit this model. The father is distinct from the child whose development he initiates, the doctor from the patient she heals, and in general the producer from the thing produced. ²¹ The same holds of someone proposing a course of action that someone else—individual or city—then carries out.

The choice of these examples suggests that an efficient cause distinct from the thing moved has some kind of priority in Aristotle’s understanding of the efficient cause, if only a pedagogical one. Simplicius, for one, thinks that the priority is more significant than that. He maintains that Aristotle employs the fuller expression in referring to the efficient cause at Ph. 194b30 to indicate that ‘that which is properly (κυρίως) the productive cause is separated and removed (κϵχωρισμένον … καὶ ἐξῃρημένον) from what comes to be’ (315.9–11). The proposed translation of ὁ βουλϵύσας leaves Simplicius’ suggestion an interpretative possibility.