Moving on from Blake
in Nestor, Stephen thinks of a different model for
understanding history, with a different way of relating
intellectual possibilities to tyrannically stubborn facts.
Aristotle's Metaphysics describes coming-into-being
as passage from a state of potentiality (dynamis) to
a state of actuality (energeia). Stephen rather
loosely reads this argument as implying that, in any moment,
there are "infinite possibilities" that might become actual.
Only one possibility does become actual, so the others are
"ousted."
In the next two sentences, he skeptically questions his idea
of infinite possibilities: "But can those have been
possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only
possible which came to pass?" This line of thought seems
closer to what Aristotle says in the Metaphysics,
but it is even more discouraging than thinking of unpleasant
actualities "ousting" better ones. It would make history one
long deterministic process of unrolling a script that has
already been (all but) written.
After an unfortunate interruption caused by the need to speak
with his pupils (Stephen is not much of a teacher), he returns
to his silent Aristotelian interrogation of history: "It
must be a movement, then, an actuality of the possible as
possible." The allusion here, Thornton observes, is
to Aristotle's Physics 201a10: "The fulfillment
[completion or actuality, entelecheia, a
near-synonym of energeia] of what exists potentially
[dynamis], in so far as it exists potentially, is
motion [kinesis]." Similar statements, Thornton
notes, can be found at Physics 202a7 and 251a9, and
Metaphysics 1065b20 ff.
In Oxen of the Sun Stephen applies this
Aristotelian logic to the question of contraception, which the
Catholic church forbids: "what of those Godpossibled
souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin
against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life?"
