The following brief discussion concerns L. H. G. Greenwood’s presentation of the concept of component means (what are now referred to as constitutive means) in the introduction to his translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book Six (1909, Cambridge University Press). The passages in question occur on pages 46 and 47.
Upon introducing the distinction between component and external means, Greenwood immediately provides two examples. Here we will consider the first of these examples:
“A thing may be a means to an end in either of two senses, as component part of it, or as wholly external to it. To take a trivial example, fire and basin and cloth are means to a pudding in the latter sense, suet [fat] and flour and currants in the former.”
What Greenwood writes above is essentially the following, which we will refer to as #1:
With respect to a pudding, fire and basin and cloth are external means, while suet and flour and currants are component means.
By referring to the fire, basin, and cloth as external means on the one hand, and the suet, flour, and currants as component means on the other hand, what Greenwood seems to suggest is that in some sense, the suet, flour, and currants just are, or themselves constitute the pudding, while the fire, basin, and cloth are, to use a popular expression “instruments” of making the pudding.
The problem with this conception can be seen if we simply re-write Greenwood’s example as #2:
With respect to a pudding, suet and flour and currants are external means, while fire and basin and cloth are component means.
Here, we conceive or imagine that a person goes out looking for suet, flour, and currants “in order to” make a pudding, but the pudding just is, or only is, or is constituted, when the suet, flour, and currants—gathered previously and externally—are combined with the fire, basin, and cloth.
When we look at things this way, the suet, flour, and currants become, or seem to become, the external means, while the fire, basin, and cloth become, or seem to become, the component means.
But in Greenwood’s example it is implied that the kind of means a thing is, is a quality of the thing itself, and not a function of how the thing is considered by a subject.
He doesn’t write or conceive: suet, flour, and currants may be considered as either an external or a component means. Rather he writes and conceives: suet, flour, and currants are component means.
His intended meaning seems to be that the kind of means things are is a quality of the things themselves. But as our example illustrates, suet, flour, and currants can be considered external means to a pudding, or so it appears. If we grant the validity of the concept of component means, it seems it would be more accurate to say that suet, flour, and currants may be considered as either external means or as component means to a pudding.