(urth) Severian I, Severian II, Severian III, Severian Ad Nauseum
Lane Haygood
lhaygood at gmail.com
Wed Dec 3 20:37:18 PST 2008
OK, so matter, form and anima.
Plato and many of the early philosophers wrestled with this idea of
universality. For instance, if we go and look at a red thing (an
apple), we know it's red. We see the color. But what about
"redness?" What is the "thing-status" (being, reality) of redness?
Plato answers that for every general category there is a perfect,
unchanging, eternal Idea (eidolon) that is that category. So, in the
Platonic Heaven of the Forms, there is the perfect Form of Red, and
all particular red things "participate in" the form of red. That is,
red things are imperfect instantiations of redness.
But we never have direct contact with this world, Plato says, so we
must know about it in another way. Hence, he theorizes that our souls
know it, but forget it as we are born into the mortal world. When we
see particular instantiations, it allows us to grasp the pure concept
through a process called anamnesis, the remembrance of the Forms in
our souls.
Aristotle found this to be problematic, and so argued instead that
universality was a feature of things themselves. The general idea of
redness, he argues, inheres the being of red things. That is, there
is no "redness" apart from red things. The same "ground for being" is
in all particular predicates. When I say of an apple, "is red," I am
really making the claim that the apple itself is a ground, a
substance, for predication of a property, redness, but that said
property has no independent ground for being apart from that substance.
Matter is the stuff that persists through physical changes, or what we
commonly think of as physical stuff. It's like dirt, or wind, or
water. But it can be given form, and certain things arise only in
concert between matter and form. A house, for instance, isn't the
bricks and the framework and the plumbing, etc. It is the thing that
is made up by their precise configuration. To put it more poetically,
a cup isn't the clay shell, but the empty space inside of it that is
useful. That's what gives a thing its telos, its purpose.
So what is a substance, as opposed to just matter? A substance is
something non-separable from the object. I can separate the color red
from the apple. It is possible to think of a non-red apple. But I
can't think of an apple that is non-spatial. Extension, mass, etc.
are all properties of an apple that are substantial rather than
predicable. In other words, substantial features cannot have separate
existence. A substance must also be differentiable from other things.
Individuality is a rough way of understanding it, but that implies too
much uniqueness. We must be able to say that "this, and not that" is
a thing. Matter is therefore not a substance, because matter cannot
fulfill both these conditions at once.
So the primary substance for Aristotle is <i>form</i> or essence
(ousia) -- that special unique thing about a given individual that
helps us to differentiate it, without which it would not be a thing at
all. But nothing exists in this sort of "raw" state. Everything is
matter + form, or essences and predicates, or grounds and properties.
Apples have "applehood," but they also have mass, extension, a color,
a taste, a smell, etc.
Anima refers to the soul (Aristotle's "De Anima" is translated as "on
the soul."). It literally means breath, but refers instead to the life-
force or essential energy that animates (hey, hey, clue) the body.
Living things are matter + form + anima. We might say that anima was
a primitive attempt at understanding consciousness, though that'd be
specious, because we're no closer to understanding what consciousness
is 2,000 years later, and probably won't have any greater clue 2,000
years from today what it is.
This has been your nightly PHIL 101 lesson.
Lane
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