Chapter 1 - One: The Whole Twist

Summary

Simply I am I. And you are you. It is vast, and will endure. What I’m writing to you is a ‘this.’ It won't stop: it goes on [continua] […] What I’m writing to you goes on and I am bewitched.

—Clarice Lispector, Água Viva

Best Tragedy

In the beginning of Book 12 of Metaphysics, Aristotle affirms substance (ousia) to be the primary category of reality as follows: “The subject of our inquiry is substance; for the principles and the causes we are seeking are those of substances. For if the universe [to pan] is of the nature of a whole [holon], substance is its first part; and if it coheres merely by virtue of serial succession [ephexes], on this view also substance is first, and is succeeded by quality, and then by quantity.” In other words, substance is so fundamental, so unquestionably the ground of things, that it still remains or holds true even if everything lacks integrity, if reality holds together only serially, “like a bad tragedy.” Later in the text, countering the Platonic exaltation of number, Aristotle explicitly rejects the view which “make[s] the substance of the universe a mere series of episodes” as a spurious form of rule, invoking a line from Homer: “they [Seusippus et al.] give us many governing principles; but the world refuses to be governed badly. ‘The rule of many is not good; one ruler let there be.’ “ It makes sense, then, that the philosopher, despite the issue of the serial ordering of the categories themselves, is in no way entertaining the second alternative, but only referring to it “as representative of a certain sort of position” in order to leave zero room to doubt the priority of substance, as the “structure of his argument makes it clear that these two views are meant to be exhaustive alternatives.” Even a fundamentally incoherent world would cohere by way of being the incoherence of something. Like the parchment of the pages which the poet-pilgrim sees in Dante's Paradiso “bound with love in one volume” (33.86), substance is simply too substantial not to survive reality's universal scattering into discrete and unconnected episodes of itself.