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The Scholastic Background - form and matter

Summary

Part of the early Modern conception of the human being was that s/he had a body. This was thought of in a way that represented the rejection of Scholastic hylomorphism.

The scholastic conceptions of matter and form

It's really difficult to explain quickly the Scholastic framework of hylomorphism, because all the terms one might use are problematic. The quick thing to say is that it regarded a thing as matter under a form.

Here is a simplified version of the idea, which I offer to suggest the kind of idea - before giving a more accurate account:

Think of a worm in a jar. And then think of the worm as having been ground up into a paste. (Think of the worm dying first if you like, but note that this adds a simplification of its own.) In the grinding process, let us suppose, nothing has been added to the jar and nothing has been lost: the paste is the worm ground up, and only the worm ground up. What is the difference between the worm as it was and the paste? You might say: the worm is a portion of matter organised in a certain way. What you do when you grind it up is destroy the organisation. The matter, all the matter, is still there: but the way the matter is organised has been dramatically altered, or you might say, actually eliminated. To say that the 'matter' has a certain organisation is a little like saying it has a 'form' as the Scholastics understood this term. To say that the worm entire is 'matter organised in a certain way' is a little like saying the worm is 'matter with form' as the Scholastics understood these terms.

But not by any means exactly like! Their conception of matter was not ours, and their conception of 'form' carried much more content. And if we say they thought of a thing as 'matter with form' there is the question of the extension of 'thing' in their thought - of whether they included artifacts and natural objects and animals and people as all of them 'things' and thus subject to the 'matter plus form' analysis.

For an understanding of how the Moderns developed a different understanding of material things we need most of all a grasp of their new notion of matter.

Materia prima

What for the Scholastics was matter?

Aquinas (and Aristotle) had the notion of ‘prime matter’ (materia prima). It was a notion that helped articulate the fact that sometimes a thing of a particular sort could change into a thing of another sort - a jug of milk into a cheese, to borrow one of Kenny's examples. In such cases as these, the need was felt for some way of reflecting the fact that something in these cases appeared to remain the same throughout the change. There needed to be a concept for 'something' that could be one sort of thing, and then another - ie of 'something' that had one form at one time and another form at another time. Aquinas called "stuff-which-is-first one thing-and-then-another-without-being-anything-all-the-time by the name ‘prime matter’ (materia prima)” (Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, p.25.)

'Prime matter' always existed under some form or other, but it was thought of as capable of ceasing to embody one form and starting to embody another.

Things capable of change – ie almost everything you can think of – were therefore thought of by the Scholastics as composed of prime matter, but of prime matter organised by a form.

Did the Scholastics think of prime matter then as some kind of completely unstructured – ie formless - goo out of which everything (almost) was made? No. 'Prime matter' was something that could not exist prior to acquiring a form – could not exist independently of form. It existed only as ordered by some form or other.

Accordingly, it doesn’t make sense, unless you are very careful, to speak, as one is very tempted to do (I'm sure Kenny of all people does this on page 23 of the terrific book I've just referred to, Aquinas on Mind ("... a parcel of stuff changes from being one kind of thing to being another kind of thing..."), of an 'amount' of prime matter organised by a form. This way of talking almost irresistibly erects the suggestion that there could be a parcel of prime matter without a form, and that would be to misunderstand what Aquinas meant by ‘prime matter’. In fact, as Kenny explains, prime matter is best understood not as something capable of being parcelled up but as a ‘potentiality’:

“[W]hen air is turned to flame, this shows that the air has the potentiality of turning into flame. The matter which is common to air and flame is precisely capacity to turn into each other. But the potentiality of being flame is not what has the form of air: it is the air that has the form of air, and the air that has the potentiality too.” Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, p.27.

If this was the Scholastic notion of materia prima, what was the notion of form that went with it?

I have tried to convey the general direction of the idea - the suggestion that the form was the organisation of materia prima - that a thing was materia prima plus form.

How can we put this more precisely - and correct some of the false inferences such a crude oversimplification can lead to?

Materia prima is not stuff.

The first correction to the crude picture I have already entered: materia prima is not stuff or matter, and a thing for the Scholastics is not a 'lump of matter' organised by a form.

Form confers sort.

A second clarification is this. A thing's form is thought of as responsible for the thing's being a thing of a particular sort. A particular animal - eg my pet dog - was an animal in virtue of its possessing the animal form.

"..[t]he distinction of things comes from their proper forms," writes Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Question 47 Article 1, Pegis edition, p.260. "Matter is contracted by its form to a determinate species," ibid, p.216.

"...the species of each thing is derived from its form." p.295.

Form drives development.

And thirdly, where you had a thing that was capable of development, it was its form which drove such development: it was the form of the acorn which led to its maturing into an oak-tree. Once "a sensitive soul has been produced" in a newly born creature, says Aquinas, it "begins to work towards the perfection of its own body, by nourishment and growth." Summa Q118 Article 1, II IntraText Edition CT.

Form confers defining powers.

Next, it was the form of a thing which gave it its defining powers. Aquinas followed Aristotelian thought in thinking of human beings as distinct from other animals in virtue of their power of thought. This distinctive power he thought of as vested in the form.

Aquinas followed Aristotle in speaking in this connection of human beings having a 'rational (or 'intellectual') soul'.

In fact, he identified the 'soul' with the form.

Form is 'soul'

Aquinas held that the form of a human being was vested with the distinctively human power of thought. That is to say, he identified the human intellectual/rational soul with the individual human form.

"...the intellect which is the principle of intellectual operation is the form of the human body." Summa Theologica, Question 47 Article 1, Pegis edition, p.292

"...the intellectual principle is [the particular man's] form." Ibid. p.295.

"... the human soul is the highest and noblest of forms." Ibid. p.296.

"... the soul is essentially the form of the body." Ibid. p.297.

Aquinas recognised that the human being had the power to grow, and the power to initiate 'local movement', and these he was prepared to think of as vested in the vegetative and sensitive/animal souls respectively. But although he was happy to speak in this way, it was only on condition that we acknowledged that there was but one soul belonging to the human being, one soul which 'wrapped up' the three souls, nutritive, sensitive/animal and intellectual/rational.

"We must ...conclude that the sensitive soul, the intellectual soul and the nutritive soul are in man numerically one and the same soul" Summa Theologica, Question 47 Article 1, Pegis edition, p.305.

"... there is no other substantial form in man besides the intellectual soul; and that just as the soul contains virtually the sensitive and nutritive souls, so does it contain virtually all inferior forms, and does alone whatever forms do in other things. The same is to be said of the sensitive soul in brute animals, and of the nutritive soul in plants, and universally of all more perfect forms in relation to the imperfect." Ibid. p.309.

"...The soul is the primary principle of our nourishment, sensation, and local movement; and likewise of our understanding. Ibid. p.293

A man has an individual form

There is a very special clarification to enter in connection with the human being.

First, every individual human being was held by Aquinas to have a different form.

While, for example, every dog had the same substantial form, each human being was supposed to have a distinct form of their own.

This doctrine was crucial theologically.

In the case of an animal, conceiving of it as matter-with-form, would appear to involve thinking of its death as a case of that individual animal ceasing to exist. When the animal's body collapses and appears to fragment this has to be understood as the matter that had been the animal becoming one or more other things (eg a corpse, the worms eating on the corpse). The type of animal (usually) continues to be represented, in virtue of the form continuing to be present in the individuals of the same type that survive. But with the dissolution of this individual's body, this individual passes out of existence.

But an exception has to be constructed for the case of the human being, or the whole point of Christian theology, which is to secure for the individual escape from mortality (as Augustine says) is lost.

Aquinas' 'solution' is to assert that in the case of the human being the form is specific to that individual, and that it is such that it can go on existing after 'death'.

"...after the dissolution of the body, the intellectual soul [ie the form] retains its own being." Summa Theologica, Question 75 Article 1, Pegis edition, p.300.

"...[T]he souls of brutes are not self-subsistent, whereas the human soul is..." Summa Theologica, Question 75 Article 1, Pegis edition, p.288.

"We must conclude ... that the human soul, which is called the intellect or the mind, is something incorporeal and subsistent." Summa Theologica, Question 75 art 2 Pegis p.284.

(The exact meaning of 'subsists' for Aquinas is disputed, but Kenny is happy with the gloss 'having independent existence' - see Kenny, Aquinas on Mind, p. 131.)

I put 'solution' in quotation marks, because it involves twisting the concept of form, which is intelligible and lucid in its Aristotlian origins into a mystery-mongering incoherence.

For example, it leads to the idea that the individual human being whose body has fragmented can only enter into the life everlasting once it has been 'reunited' with 'its' matter. Hence the theological importance of the 'resurrection of the body', and the much-debated issue of the cannibal and the individuals who were once on the cannibal's menu. (See the wonderful paper by Strickland, 'Leibniz, the "flower of substance", and the resurrection of the same body', forthcoming in *)

The Role Of 'Form' in the Scholastic Account Of Understanding

Aquinas thought of human understanding as a matter of our human form becoming informed by the form of whatever it was we were understanding. (To put it plainly.)

(Our modern word 'informed' harks back to this whole way of thinking.)

If the human being is prima materia under a form, it is the form and not the matter that is responsible for 'understanding'. Aquinas thinks understanding is the work of a special 'part' or 'aspect' of the human form, namely what he confusingly calls the intellectual form. (Confusing because putting it like that suggests the intellectual form is one alongside other forms. But, no, Aquinas gives reasons for thinking that there can only be one form to a human being, and is thinking of the intellectual form as a cross between the form that wraps up the others and a department of the single form carrying a special function.

The special function anyway is that of 'understanding'.

This is not quite understaning as we think of it it today. Today, we think of a dog understanding that it is about to go out, but in connectuion with the intellectual form Aquinas was thinking of the sort of understanding that involves language. Language he thought of as special to human beings, so he is thinking of 'understanding' as special to them to.

Understanding in this sense is a matter of 'grasping' a form. Understanding a horse, for Aquinas, seems to amount to grasping the form horse.

We remember that as far as horses are concerned (they are brutes, not human beings), the form which a particular horse has involves nothing that is pecualira to that particular horse. It involves just those things which are definitionally true of horses as such. Understanding is being seen then as coming to grasp what it is that makes a horse a horse - coming to grasp what is true of the horse (and doesn't extend to what might happen to be true of any particular horse).

Aquinas thinks of the intellectual form of the human being, as the person gets involved in understanding a horse, as bringing about two distinct things: first, it has to do something Aquinas describes as 'rendering the form of the horse intelligible'; and second, it has to grasp and retain what has been rendered intelligible, the horse-form. In some sense then the human being who understands what a horse is 'shares' the form of the horse.

Because the form is what makes a thing the sort of thing that it is, it seems to follow that understanding something involves becoming that sort of thing!

This is obviously a very difficult implication to take on board, and scholars disagree about how it is to be understood. 'Intelligible in actu est intellectus in actu' - these are the enigmatic words which express the Thomist thesis, translated by Kenny as 'thought in operation is identical with the object of thought'.

Aquinas himself saw the difficulty here and solved it in typical fashion by saying that the way in which the form of a thing being understood informed the intellect was different from the way in which it informed the thing itself.

(I say this a typical Scholastic move because it sees the problem and solves it to its own satisfaction by an accommodation which sheds not the least bit of light.)

One thing we should resist in trying to get our minds round the Scholastic form and the role it plays in the Thomist understanding of understanding is this. Aquinas' postion seems to be that in some way understanding a horse is a matter of coming to 'share' its form. What we must not do I'm sure is think of coming to share a thing's form as like breaking off a piece of the thing and putting it in our pocket. The notion of 'sharing a thing's form' has probably a closer parallel today in understanding something we are reading.

The meaning of a piece of text is not a component of the text which we can somehow get our hands on. Its meaning is rather something we think of ourselves as 'internalising' or 'absorbing'. In some such way as this, presumably, does the intellect, according to Aquinas, come to share in a thing's form.

The notion of a form played a similarly central role in the Scholastic understanding of the other activities which we today subsume under 'thinking', for example, imagining, planning, meditating, dreaming and so on.

The form is there too at the heart of how Aquinas thought of perception, though perception was not a function of the intellectual form. In perception, the sense faculty, not the intellect, was thought of as 'abstracting' the form of the perceived thing from a 'phantasm' of a thing.

Here is Kenny explaining the significance of hylomorphism and its successor, which I suppose could be called representationalism:

"According to some philosophers, in sense experience we do not directly observe objects or properties in the external world; the immediate objects of our experience are sense-data, private objects of which we have infallible knowledge, and from which we make more or less dubious inferences to the real nature of external objects and properties.

In Aquinas' theory there are no intermediaries like sense-data which come between perceiver and perceived. In sensation the sense faculty does not come into contact with a likeness of the sense-object. Instead it becomes itself like the sense-object..." (Kenny, AM, p.35.)

So it is said that Modernity with its representational theory of the mind and of the relationship between our experience and the world (which now becomes the 'external' world) cuts us off from the world and locates us in a quasi-theatre in the head. There we look not at the things about us - trees, tables, other people - but at mental stand-ins for those things - ie representations.

So much for trying to present in outline the framework of conceptions developed out of Aristotle and Christian theology with which Aquinas, and broadly speaking Scholasticism in general insisted we should think about ourselves, about animals and plants and things that were neither animals nor plants nor human beings. The key idea was that we should think about these things through the conceptions of materia prima and form.

What replaced these notions?

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