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A Quick Bit Of Scholastic (Meta)physics
Metaphysics
Descartes was reacting to a framework for thinking about the mind and everything
else that ultimately comes from Aristotle.
A substance is a basic individual thing. An example would be Rover the dog. He is
not basic in the sense of being not made of anything smaller. He is composed of
identifiable parts, such as his legs and his internal organs, and they are composed
out of smaller things and smaller things, right down to the basic matter all things are
made out of. He is basic in the sense that he is the kind of thing we identify as the
primary bits of furniture of the world. If someone pointed at Rover and said, “what’s
that?” you would say, “a dog.” You would not say, “it is four legs, a torso, some hair,
some internal organs, a head and a tail.” In the same way, if someone pointed at
your place of residence and said, “what’s that?” you would say, “it is a house” and not
“it is a collection of bricks, pipes, bits of wood, furniture…” and so on.
A substance is a composite of matter and a (substantial) form. This view is called
hylomorphism (ὑλο-, hylo- = matter, μορφή, morphē = form.) Today, we think of
matter as being an actual substance in its own right. More specifically, we think of
matter as composed of atoms that are themselves composed of smaller parts that
have natures by themselves. So, there are electrons and protons and neutrons as
the basic building blocks of the universe.1 Aristotle did not think matter had nature by
itself.2 To put in Aristotle’s terms, matter is potentially something. In order for the
potential to realised – to get something actual – you need the substantial form. So,
Rover the dog is a piece of “informed matter”. Matter, therefore, cannot exist without
being informed. In the other direction, forms cannot exist without being realised by
matter. Matter and forms are made for one another.
A substance has properties or qualities. Rover’s property of being a dog is just his
substantial form. We might also call it his essential property. But Rover has many
accidental properties too.3 Rover is a large and black dog. Properties need a bearer,
something to be the properties of. You can’t simply have largeness or blackness. If
someone says, “that’s large” or “that’s black”, you can say, “what is large?” and “what
is black?” Substances are the things we pick out with nouns: dog, badger, bed, sock,
planet, etc. Note that in doing so, we pick out the substantial form or essential
property. Accidental properties are the sorts of things we pick out with adjectives
(more generally, predicates): black, large, happy, untidy, etc.
A substantial form makes the entity what it is. X cannot lose its substantial form F
without ceasing to exist. So, I cannot lose the form man. A substantial form is thus
essential; an accidental form is something I can gain and lose. For example, I can
change the colour of my hair, my job, my position from seating to standing, and so
on.
Forms are responsible for the substantial and accidental features of things. Plato’s
forms were transcendent entities that did not exist in the terrestrial realm but in their
own realm. They ‘participated’ in material entities, thus making them have the
features they have. This raised a big question: how did things not of this world exert
an influence on things in this world. What is this ‘participation’? Plato did not have a
good answer (and knew he didn’t4). Aristotle’s answer was to make the forms
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immanent. They are here, in our physical reality. Forms inhere in matter or inform
matter.
To analyse or explain something was to give the four causes. Do not think of cause
as meaning what it does in “cause and effect”. Aristotle’s word aition is really best
translated as explanation. But it is too late now. Okay. Let’s take a pencil as an
example:
Material cause of X:
Formal cause of X:
Efficient cause of X:
Final cause of X:
what X is made out of
the form of X
what made X exist
the telos of X: its purpose or
function.
→ wood & graphite
→ form of the pencil.
→ Percy the pencil-maker.
→ writing.
The Scholastic Picture: Metaphysics and Science.
The Scholastics took on the Aristotelian apparatus and developed it into a fiendishly
complex picture. Or, rather, many pictures – there are many different Aristotelianinspired ontologies to be found in the Middle Ages. For our purposes, we can just say
that they kept the overall picture. Things are made out of matter and form. We
explain things by reference to the four causes.
Descartes and his contemporaries reject substantial forms and what they call real
qualities. The short way of understanding this is to say that real qualities are just the
qualities of things: the accidental and substantial forms. The longer way of
understanding it is to say that some qualities are more real than others. Consider a
heavy wooden cube. The shape of the cube is a quality it has but the shape seems to
result from the way the material is arranged. It is not separable from the wood in any
real sense. The weight of the cube is something different. It does seem something
‘extra’ that is added to the cube. The cube by itself is just a piece of matter – that it
falls to earth when dropped cannot be explained by reference to the matter and
shape alone. Similarly, if a steel cube is hot, the heat seems something extra in the
cube. (Of course, now we know that weight and heat are not extra ingredients. The
weight is just a consequence of the matter being present in a gravitational field and
the heat is just the matter in motion.)
It was said that a real quality or real form is a feature of something that could exist
separately though only perhaps through the power of God. Now, this should seem
puzzling. How can weight exist apart from something having weight? To put the
problem another way: on the one hand, a real form is to some extent self-standing
and yet on the other, it is not a substance and so surely needs something to inhere
in. Contradiction? Descartes thought so, as did many people in the 17th century.
Descartes made a point of rejecting “real qualities and substantial forms”. He thought
they failed to explain anything. He was right.
Let’s take an example. One explains why things fall to earth by saying (a) they ‘want’
to and (b) they have a feature that makes them fall. One might as well explain how
bread nourishes by saying (a) it has the telos of providing nourishment and (b) the
quality of nourishment that makes it happen. We are no wiser as to what nourishment
really is. Molière famously satirised this style of explanation with his talk of the
“dormative virtue” in his play, The Hypochondriac.5
A stone falls to Earth because of its weight. This motion is a natural motion: it “wants”
to be at rest as it contains a lot of the earth-element whose natural resting place is
below that of water, air and fire. The motion of the stone is vertical. Aristotle taught
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that the natural type of motion for things in the terrestrial sphere was rectilinear – in a
straight line. The speed at which something fell was proportional to its weight.
Heavier things fall faster. In the celestial sphere, the natural motion of things is
circular. The planets and Sun move around the Earth in circles.
Not all motion is natural. Animals and plants are capable of moving themselves.
Although this is “natural” in an obvious sense, it is not “natural” in the Aristotelian
sense. Considered as just physical things, our natural movement is downwards in
just the same way as a stone’s motion is. (Throw a person and a stone out of the
window to prove this.) Our motion results from our will and so to does that of the
beasts. It is called violent motion. In general, violent motions result from acts of will of
living things. This means that when I throw a stone, its motion is initially violent as it
moves with greater horizontal than vertical velocity and only later natural when the
violent motion wears off and it plummets to the ground.
Aristotle taught that objects in motion need a constant force. So, the thrown rock
keeps moving because the air in front of it rushes behind it to push it forward. It
wasn’t until Galileo that we had the concept of inertia - something Descartes was
also grappling with – which enables us to think of things continuing to move all by
themselves. Of more immediate importance to us is the thought that sustained
motion requires contact, or, more generally, that there can be no action at a
distance. Descartes’ correspondent Elisabeth was to raise concerns about how the
immaterial mind can move the material body since it cannot exert a force on it,
lacking any extension, hence surfaces, that could come into contact with it.
Furthermore, said Descartes, to think of the real quality of gravity as having the aim
of moving things to earth makes it sound like a little mind, as surely only a mind can
want to do something. This is a general criticism of the teleological aspect of
explanation. Descartes’ understanding of the physical world is mechanical not
teleological.
1
The three-particle model of matter is, strictly speaking, the dominant model in the 1910s and
1920s. Since the 1930s, we know that reality is much more complex. Protons and neutrons
aren’t basic but composed of yet more basic things called quarks. Physicists today talk of a
greater variety of particles. The “standard model” keeps the electron as a kind of particle
called a lepton. There are six leptons in all. There are then six quarks and these are the
ingredients of protons and neutrons. (A proton is two up quarks plus a down quark; a neutron
is two down quarks plus an up quark). Then there are other particles that are the entities
responsible for carrying forces, such as gluons. (From glue. Really.) If you’re interested, try
http://www.particleadventure.org/
Didn’t Aristotle think that there were four earthly elements, earth, air, fire and water, and a
fifth element out of which the heavens were made, quintessence? Yes. But this doesn’t mean
that he thought of matter as having a nature after all. The full story would be that matter is
formless until informed by the forms of earth, air, fire and water. Thereafter, you have actual
stuff out of which more complex things such as Rover can be built. Aristotle thought that
matter was infinitely divisible and so he would have rejected the idea that eventually you
would get down to actual ‘fire-atoms’, ‘earth-atoms’, etc.
Atomism was very much in the air, however, when Aristotle was alive. Atomism begins with
the philosopher Leucippus and is associated in particular with his student, Democritus (born
about 460 B.C.) Democritus argued that the world was just a lot of atoms in motion and the
colours, tastes and sensory features of the world were not really features of the world but
features of our minds. They are secondary qualities, as we would say today. In this respect,
Democritus shared the view of Empiricists and Rationalists some two thousand years later in
the 17th century.
2
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Depending on how we understand “essential”, an essential property may be different from
the substantial form (or the property that is the substantial form, if you prefer). If by
“essential”, we mean necessary, then the two do not coincide. For example, any dog is
necessarily material and extended but these are not distinctive defining properties. It is only if
essential means “makes it the kind that it is” that we have coincidence of meaning.
4 See the discussion Socrates and Parmenides have about participation in Plato’s
Parmenides
(130a-134e).
For
a
(very
detailed)
discussion,
see
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-parmenides/
5 From Le Malade Imaginare (1673), Third Interlude.
3
PRIMUS DOCTOR
Si mihi licenciam dat Dominus Præses,
Et tanti docti Doctores,
Et assistantes illustres,
Très sçavanti Bacheliero
Quem estimo et honoro,
Domandabo causam et rationem, quare
Opium facit dormire?
BACHELIERUS
Mihi a docto Doctore
Domandatur causam et rationem, quare
Opium facit dormire?
À quoi respondeo,
Quia est in eo
Virtus dormitiva.
Cujus est natura
Sensus assoupire.
Doctor #1: If licence is given to me and doctors of such great learned things and famous
assistants, very knowledgeable, whom I esteem and honour, I will demand the reason and
rationale wherefore opium makes one sleep
Bachelierus: A learned doctor asks me the reason and the rationale why opium makes one
sleep. To which I respond that in it is a dormative virtue whose nature it is to dull the senses.
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