Vertical Causation (I): Matter and Form

April 4, 2018 Greek Physics

Raphael De Paola
The subject of change and motion has always baffled the human mind, arousing many seemingly
unanswerable questions. Depending on the answers given, one may wind up faced with
insurmountable aporias. Aristotle was well aware of the dangers posed to Greek thinking before him
and strove to address them, appropriating the discoveries of his predecessors and integrating them
into a framework that to this day remains definitive, both in its general formulation and in its
immense plasticity to accommodate new discoveries, which include those of modern science.
Thales, Anaximenes, and Heraclitus each proposed that the world is composed, respectively, of
water, air, and fire; Empedocles then proposed the traditional “four elements” of water, air, fire, and
earth. Aristotle understood all of these as answering to the question, What are all things made out
of? Perplexed by the all-pervading experience of change and motion in the world, the Presocratic
philosophers sought an anchor — a unique, unitary principle that played the role of substratum to
all change. Their reasoning was that in every change there must be something that persists. In
agreement on this basic principle, Aristotle proposed that no change in an object can be so radical as
to eradicate everything that existed before the change and produce something entirely new. He
proposed that some unchanging principle must be maintained throughout any process of change —
something that does not change during the process-of-change itself — and concluded that it was this
radical principle that his predecessors, while unconsciously searching for, were unable to fully
glean. This principle was dubbed matter (Gk. hylê; Lat. materia: wood, timber): A principle out
of which something can be made — as in how “wood” stands to things like chairs, tables, and
shelves. Matter is a necessary principle for the reason that to deny its being at work is to assume
that each time an object undergoes a change of some kind, the original object disappears into
nothing whilst a new object springs up entirelyfrom nothing. Well-versed as he was in the
Parmenidean aporias regarding nothingness, Aristotle considered such an interplay between reality
and “pure nothing” to be absurd, and thus embraced the material principle as a necessary
explanatory “pole” of reality.
As a principle that bespeaks of the commonality of all beings, one of the marks of the notion
of matter is precisely this: that which remains during the process of change. But this material
principle cannot be the whole story. Having established that all reality is, in its material aspect, one
in the same, we must also account for the immense variety of the things we see in the world. Given
the principle of sameness on the level of matter, there must also be a complementary pole
comprising a principle of difference, a principle of heterogeneity as well as of homogeneity. Now
the principle of homogeneity is that which we call matter, which accounts for the fact that things
can transform one into another without completely disappearing in to, or emerging from, direct
nothingness; the mere fact of change itself is enough to convince us of this.
“As a principle that bespeaks of the commonality of all beings, one of the marks of the notion
of matter is precisely this: that which remains during the process of change.”
Whatever the ultimate constituent of reality is — call it, for the sake of argument, “water” — it
cannot be the case that it is the sole principle of reality. To say that “everything is made out
of water” is not the same as to say that “everything is only water.” At the very moment we say
“everything is only water” we imply that change does not exist at all, because water is already
“water,” and nothing can become what it already is. All philosophies that tend toward a
materialistic monism thus deny the intrinsically undeniable, namely, the existence of change. If, as
Democritus held, everything is “just atoms and the void,” then there can be no such events as, say, a
cow dying or an apple being digested; the description of such processes as these amounts to mere
“opinion” in such a philosophy.
In order to cope with the world as it shows itself to the unprejudiced mind — that is, in order to
seriously entertain the reality of change — Aristotle incorporated, as a second tenet of his
explanatory system, the principle of form. If matter is the principle present indifferently in all
things, form is what differentiates each thing from all other things: matter is the principle of
homogeneity, and form the principle of heterogeneity. Referring back to the hypothesis that all
matter is aqueous, we would say this red juicy thing here is water in the form “apple,” and that the
blue, noisy thing there is water in the form of “bird.” While the concept of matter answers the
question of what something is made of, the concept of form answers the question of what
something is, its essence. By definition, then, and in opposition to matter, form is an immaterial
principle. Aristotle proposed that every concrete being is a synolon composed of the co-principles
matter and form — more specifically, prime matter and substantial form.