Methodological reorientation

We have noted (§4) that in the Categories, the substantial individuals are (as it was put) “methodologically opaque”, so prodigiously “atomic” as to display no internal structure. And we saw (also in §4) that the treatment of both the synchronic and the diachronic unity or “oneness” of substantial individuals is unusually terse and obscure: synchronically, the explanation of the “this”-hood of substance quickly gets into deep trouble (pp. 30–33). And diachronically, the requirement that a substantial individual have a permanent essential nature which it cannot “migrate” out of while remaining the same and numerically one, is at most insinuated there by some not very luminous outgivings about “definition”, rather than made unmistakably explicit (pp. 34–38). Subsequent to that, some few main features of substantial individuals according to the Metaphysics concept have been sketched out, in a rather schematic way; but we have not yet tried to see very deeply into their internal structure, to conceptualize with any vividness what “substantial being” comes to. To get further, we must try to do this.

However, the best way to do this is not, I believe, to try to wring an intuitive understanding directly out of Aristotle's own positive outgivings on the topic, particularly those coming down to us as the peri tēs ousias, “On Substance”, i.e., Metaphysics ZHΘI. That is an abstruse and imperspicuous work, as is well-known in itself and well-attested-to by the notably uneven successes of the interpretive tradition, and this tends to discourage such a frontal approach; but besides, for an intuitive understanding there is a better way in, one that can for now circumvent some of the perplexities of the metaphysical writings, and that may later enable us, as it were, to come up beneath them under our own power.