Aristotelian Dunamis and Sexual Difference

Abstract

As is well known, according to the Aristotelian theory of sexual difference, the female is a sort of deformed or mutilated male. The word Aristotle uses for this deformation of the female is anaperia, the most common usage of which refers to male castration.1 In sexual reproduction, a female offspring is produced because of some fault in the proceedings, most commonly an inadequacy of heat in the reproductive process, and furthermore, in herself the female does not possess the capability to create a seed that would carry forth her form to subsequent generations. The female contributes matter to the offspring, not logos, movement, or form, and this is because she is, for Aristotle, characterized by "a certain inability" (adunamia).2 Everywhere, then, the female is identified with lack, incapacity, falling short, and failure, while the male contribution, the sperm, is by contrast described as possessing "great potency" (megalen echei dunamin).3 This essay attempts to think through the account ofdunamis given in Metaphysics Theta taking the question of sexual difference as a guide. In Theta, Aristotle carefully elaborates the definition of dunamis and in this way prepares the ground for the discussion of energeia, the Ideological culmination of Aristotelian metaphysics and cosmology. He first gives the primary definition of dunamis, a "principle (arche) of change in another or in the thing itself qua other," about which much may be said in its own right.4 Here, I will limit my investigation to two subsequent modes of dunamis discussed in Theta 1 and 2, namely adunamia, incapacity, and dunamis meta logou, potentiality according to logos or rational potentiality (given the range of meanings covered by Greek logos-word, account, formula, reason, narrative, discourse, calculation, etc.-I will leave it untranslated). While feminist philosophers have rightly focused on the connections between form and the masculine, and matter and the feminine in Aristotle's account of substance, Aristotle's formulation of being according to potentiality and actuality cannot be mapped so easily on to conceptions of gender. This issue has been largely ignored by feminist commentators, with the exception of Charlotte Witt, whose investigations lead her to conclude that Aristotle's hierarchy of gender is not fundamental to the constitution of his Metaphysics.5 By contrast, in what follows I will show that paying close attention to the tropes and figures of sexual difference offered by the text will disclose an agonic encounter between the dunamis meta logou, the rational logos of the scientist, and materiality as dunamis alogon, irrational dunamis, in which the most fundamental stakes are those of gender. This approach will also assist in identifying and teasing apart a knot comprised by the anxiety of masculine impotence and the threat of feminine weakness and lack inherent in the notion ofadunamia, as well as resolving some interpretive difficulties in Book Theta. At the close of Metaphysics Theta, Aristotle turns to the dunamis-energeia couplet in an attempt to provide a solution to the problem of the unity of substance. This, briefly stated, is the problem of how particular substance, a "this," tode ti, for example a bronze sphere, can be thought of as a unity. Up until this point, Aristotle has analyzed the "this" as a composite of matter and form, the bronze on the one hand, the sphere on the other. Neither in itself is sufficient as a candidate for substance, for neither fully accounts for the unified substance that one can hold in one's hand, that is, the "this," which is Aristotle's concern. However, if both matter and form are present in the "this," the hylomorph, what is it that subtends their apparent unity? He writes that "the proximate matter and the form are one and the same; the one exists potentially, the other as actuality (men dunamei, to de energeia). Therefore to ask the cause of the unity is like asking the cause of unity in general; for each individual thing is one, and the potential and the actual are in a sense one. …