A Brief Account of Form and Matter
Aristotle inherited the form-matter distinction from Plato, who supposed there are two worlds, the
world of being and the world of becoming. The world of being is the world of the Forms, the
changeless, immaterial archetypes; only from it can real knowledge derive. The world of becoming is
this material world, made up of jiggly, geometrical atoms, which are arranged according to the
Forms by the Demiourgos or “craftsman God” (at least, according to the Timaeus, that’s a muthos or
plausible story to capture something of the way things are) but resist being ordered so that the things
down here “participate” in the Forms, i.e. they imitate them imperfectly, in such a way that only
opinion and not certain knowledge can be derived from the things around us. The human soul belongs
in the world of the Forms, but is repeatedly put into a body and so forgets what it saw “up there”, until
reminded of the Forms by the things that imitate them. This account seems to me to be prompted by
the widespread Greek distrust of change.
For Aristotle, a changeless and immaterial Form cannot help us know a changeable and material
being. We actually come to know things by investigating them – as he did on his travels. We
“abstract” the forms, the knowable, i.e. the universalisable, aspects of things from the examples we
meet. We discern the patterns behind the chance variations. So, for Aristotle, the forms of the
material things around us are in the things not in a different world. Matter and form are the two
aspects of things – components, but not in the sense that casing and electronics are the components of
a computer. By form something is the kind of thing it is, by matter it is subject to material
conditions, it is part of this world of space and time, so that it is marked out from other examples of
the same kind of thing, it is individuated; it is liable to change.
This gives us the following sets of terms. The “physical” etymology of the terms should not mislead
you; form is more than something’s shape, and matter is not really the “stuff” of which it is made.
Admittedly a way into an understanding of form and matter is to take the example of a statue: the
shape or form it is given makes it a statue of Queen Victoria rather than King William IV, and the
matter is marble or bronze. But that is only a way in: prime matter is not a kind of stuff at all, but the
underlying “materiality” or “limitedness and locatedness” of things; and substantial form is not a
superficial shape, but the whole way of being by which alone it can be.
Form (morphe and eidos, “shape” and “idea”)
Puts something in a species
Provides its continuity from when it begins to when it
ceases to exist
Can be abstracted and universalised, hence knowable
The actuality of things – entelecheia or energeia
Matter (hule, originally “wood”!,
i.e. “stuff”)
Individuates something
Makes it liable to change into
something else
Resists universalisation and hence
scientific treatment
The principle of potentiality,
dunamis
In living things, the form is the soul, psuche
When one thing becomes something else, e.g. when the grape juice becomes wine or the cow a
corpse, the matter is the substrate of the change, and having been actualised under one form,
comes to be actualised under a different form.
Both form and matter contribute to the being of a thing: without form, it could not be at all, as it
has to be some kind of thing or other if it is to be. But even high forms of life, such as that of apes,
cannot exist immaterially, they have to be “received” by matter into a place and time, a limited
environment they can “cope with”. [Of course there are some yet higher forms of life, such as the
“gods” – we would say, the Angels – that can exist immaterially. The souls of the dead exist in this
way, according to Thomas Aquinas, for example, though Aristotle wasn’t all that clear on that issue.]
Aristotle rejected the idea of atoms because it would mean that a cabbage or a cat is not really a
single thing, an organism, but only a complex machine; it would not have an existence of its own. In
fact a cabbage or a cat has a single substantial form, it is a single existing being with a single life. That
is so even though Aristotle happily discusses the proportion of earth, air, fire and water in different
organs of the body; they don’t exist in their own form, as if the body were merely a complex mixture,
but only exist “virtually” – something of their “influence” remains in the organs of the living bodies
whose form has incorporated them. It seems to me that the subatomic particles recognised by modern
physics fit well into Aristotle’s scheme since the patterns they adopt depend on the whole they are in.
The above picture needs some refinements:
(1) Besides substantial forms, there are accidental forms, i.e. recurring patterns which contribute to
the precise way things are, without making them actually to be. For example, the shape given to
the bronze of a statue; the same bronze would exist even if the statue were recast into a different
shape, and the same shape could be given to some silver. Or the size of a cat that keeps overeating and getting fatter. Although it is possible to speak of the bronze or the cat as the “matter” it
is better to speak of them – especially the cat – as the subject. Felix does not be by being tabby or
on the mat, he merely be’s-tabby or be’s-on-the-mat. He is the subject of those “accidents”;
being-tabby or being-on-the-mat require a subject if they are to “exist”, yet they do exist, they are
real features of the world.
(2) The pair of terms potentiality and actuality can be used at several “levels”. The soul of a living
thing actualises matter into an organic body able to live. So soul is entelecheia and body is
dunamis. But because of being this or that kind of living thing, an organism has certain abilities,
faculties… So from the soul, the thing’s basic way of being, which is actuality, flow further
potentialities, dunameis. And these in turn get actualised in the various works, erga, that the
thing does (some of which are “pro-active” and some “responsive” to stimuli); so these are the
“second energeia.” In fact, between some powers or faculties, and some activities, there can be
dispositions or hexeis, such as virtues and vices that “channel” some power into working this
way or that way. So the soul is the first entelecheia of an organic body able to live:1 it makes
Felix, for example, to be a cat and hence to be, but his being a cat has to be “deployed”, via the
faculties, in catching and digesting mice...
(3) Dunamis goes into Latin as potentia, and energeia as actus. The Greek words seem to me to have
a more “dynamic” feel than the Latin. Entelecheia seems to be Aristotle’s own invention, it’s not
an everyday word adapted for philosophy, and has a more static feel (enteles echein would mean
“to have complete”). Although in the De Anima he uses entelecheia for the soul, and you’d expect
him to reserve entelecheia for the first actualisation, energeia for deployment of faculties in
action, he does not seem in general to make a rigid distinction between entelecheia and energeia.
How do sensation and knowledge work?
Material things have sensible qualities, features that can be grasped by the senses, and these can
reach out through the relevant medium to affect the sense-organs of animals. All animals have
touch, of which there is an organ inside the flesh (the flesh being the medium of touch), which is
receptive to hot and cold, hard and soft… (perhaps several senses are really involved here – and
modern science has in fact discovered different receptors for these pairs of qualities). Some animals
have other senses, such as taste (a form of touch localised in the tongue, with moisture as the
medium). Hearing picks up sudden movements of the air; sight picks up colours (and secondarily
things such as movement) through air or water when these are rendered transparent by light!
1
This does not mean that you can have an organic body able to live, without a soul, that starts living when the
soul “inhabits” it, the way you can have a car or plane able to run or fly as soon as the driver or pilot gets in.
The soul is the form, the whole living structure, so to speak, which makes matter into the organic body able to
live. The arrangement of elements (or, we’d say, electrons and protons) into just this kind of body (molecules,
cells, organs, animal – the structure at every level) is due to the soul, so that the growth of fingernails as well
as the most abstract thought flows from the soul. Except that the growth of fingernails, like most of what the
animal does, flows from the embodied soul by the activation of the relevant organs, whereas the most abstract
thought does not employ any organ at all.
A sense-organ is marked by a delicate balance so that it can be readily “swayed”. That is why touch is
receptive to hot and cold, but we don’t notice the lukewarm. It is also why a severe blow, a loud
noise, a bright light, damages the organ.
The basic way in which sense works is that the sense-organ receives the sensible form without
receiving the matter. The cow is not put into the eye, but its brown-ness is. Not in a crude way to
make the eye be brown, but in a more subtle way to make the eye see brown. Or rather, to make the
animal see brown. No room for scepticism. But sickness can happen, so that accidentally we might
think we see brown when we don’t; a cold confuses the sense of taste.
Besides the five exterior senses, we have interior senses. The common sense collates the data from
the individual senses so that for example when I lean on the table I can tell that the brown thing I see
is the hard thing I feel. The imagination retains the sense-impressions, and can “play” with them. In
us, it feeds the intellect.
The intellect receives forms (including substantial forms) abstracted from material conditions.
My concept of a cow applies to all cows, including distant ones and future ones. It is a universal.
Forms are not received in a crude way: the mind is able to become all things without ceasing to be a
human mind; still, the forms that make Felix and Garfield cats, and Daisy and Buttercup cows, are
present in my mind to make me know cows and cats.
The receptive intellect can become all things; there is an agent intellect (nous poietikos) which
“produces” the forms the receptive intellect has to receive, i.e. by abstraction from things via the
phantasms in the imagination. The agent intellect is “separate” – in the 13th Century it was debated
whether this meant it is an immortal “bit” of each of us, or there is a single Intellect (a kind of Angel
or race-soul) which produces concepts in the passive intellects of all the humans who currently exist,
but itself is “super-human”.
While Aristotle’s physics of sensation has been superseded, the idea of a real contact between the
living thing and what it senses may still be useful, and the idea that the human mind grasps the
“forms” of things is quite important.
Although it does not receive much treatment in the De Anima, an understanding of desire is
important. In the Ethics the desiring “part” of the soul, which shares in logos, is the seat of the moral
virtues. This seems to be the same “level” of soul where the senses are located, higher than the
vegetative part of the soul and lower than the rational/intellective. There is no discussion of a “rational
appetite” as St. Thomas would define the will. In the De Anima it is said that desire exists at all three
levels. At the vegetative level this presumably means a kind of energy for digestion and reproduction,
which in animals and human beings would sometimes be manifest at the level of sensation-emotion. It
is not clear whether at the intellective level it implies what we would call the will, or simply the
intellect’s drive to its own fulfilment, a “thirst” for knowledge.
In all but the lower animals there is also a capacity for locomotion.