Reading 13: First Matter Known by Proportion, Ability, and the Soul as Substantial Form

Orientation #

He looks back to readings ten and eleven (butter hard/soft, cloth wet/dry) for the subject of accidental change, explains that he has attached the ninth and fifteenth readings after the thirteenth because Aristotle is so brief here on first matter (“we’ll see that when we come to them”), and says the soul will be studied “after you finish the eight books in Natural Hearing.” The previous class worked through reading 13 on matter, form and privation; the next continues into reading 9 on prime matter and Anaxagoras.

The class, in order #

1. The first underlying nature is knowable by proportion (“knowable by proportion”) #

Point: the paragraph of reading 13 that touches what all the Greeks before Aristotle could not see: the first matter, subject of substantial change, is known only by proportion.

• Readings 10 and 11 gave a subject of accidental change: butter underlying hard/soft, cloth underlying wet/dry. Aristotle now asks what underlies change of substance.
• Example: man and dog. When a man eats a dog (or a dog “gets the mitts”), the dog becomes a man, or the man a dog; something underlies that change.
• The proportion he states: first matter is to man and dog as clay is to sphere and cube.
• Aside: a country where dogs are eaten (Vietnam) trying to discourage the practice for visiting foreigners, “this we’re doing for hundreds of years.”

2. What a proportion is and is not (“four is to six as two is to three”) #

Point: to use the proportion you must see in what respect the first is to the second as the third is to the fourth, and not exaggerate the likeness.

• A student’s errors: (a) “5 is to 6 as 2 is to 3” because the distance is the same, but proportion is not sameness of difference, it is that 4 is the same part of 6 that 2 is of 3 (4 = two twos, 6 = three twos); (b) “2 is even and 3 odd, so 4 is even and 6 odd”: the proportion does not consist in that.
• Applied: clay is an actual substance, sphere and cube are accidents; first matter is not an actual substance, man and dog are two actual substances. To say first matter is an actual substance because clay is, or man and dog accidents because sphere and cube are, is “like thinking six is odd because three is odd.”
• What the likeness consists in: clay is able to be sphere and able to be cube, not both at once; while actually a sphere it remains able to be a cube, but in becoming a cube it ceases to be a sphere. Likewise first matter is able to be man, or dog, or another substance, not both at once; when it is one it remains an ability for the other, and in becoming the other it ceases to be the one. The first term is to the second as ability is to act; in every other way the terms differ (actual substance in ability to two accidents vs. substance-in-ability in reference to two actual substances).

3. Any ability is known only through its act (“do you see my ability to walk”) #

Point: Aristotle could be more explicit: first matter is knowable only by proportion because ability as such is not knowable by itself.

1. You never sense or imagine an ability, only its act: you see the ball player’s hitting, not his ability to hit; you hear my talking, not my ability to talk; for all you know I am paralysed until I get up and walk. (Student: “we know your ability by the test we give you”; his examples: “show me” you can play piano, speak French.)
2. So ability is known only through the act for which it is an ability, i.e., one thing through another, and this is reason’s work: Shakespeare’s definition of reason, looked at earlier in the year, as the ability for large discourse, looking before and after. Hence ability is known by reason, not by sense or imagination.
3. Abilities are distinguished and defined by their acts: seeing is not a form of hearing, so the abilities differ; reason itself knows what it is only through what it does.

• Boundary: something that is an ability need not be only an ability. Clay is an actual substance in its own right though able to be sphere or cube; man is definable apart from health and sickness though able to be either (not both at once). But first matter cannot be an actual accident (an accident cannot underlie substance) nor an actual substance; so by itself it is nothing actual, so not knowable by itself, so known only by the proportion.
• Why the early Greeks failed: first matter seemed to be nothing, so they made it an actual substance (water, air, Mother Earth); they could not see substantial change possible without getting something from nothing. Modern scientists too often think of first matter as an actual substance; but Heisenberg, going from quantum theory to elementary particles, found no form of matter permanent or eternal, so first matter must be formless, and says we know matter only through the forms of matter.

4. Why readings 9 and 15 are attached; Anaxagoras and false imagination (“every elementary particle is composed of all the rest”) #

Point: since the text here is so brief, reading 9 (Aristotle’s critique of Anaxagoras) and reading 15 are the way into first matter.

• Anaxagoras’s difficulty: he puts actually into matter everything matter is able to be, made infinitely small so it all fits; Aristotle shows many difficulties. The same way of speaking returns in the most advanced modern physics of matter: the “well-known formula” that every elementary particle is composed of all the rest (he may bring in Heisenberg’s book on the unified field theory).
• Weizsäcker (Heisenberg’s student): when we imagine something we make it actual in imagination; so trying to imagine first matter necessarily falsifies it, making actual what is there only in ability. This is what philosophy calls false imagination.

5. The same failure with other abilities: universal vs. class, Locke and Berkeley, the line (“all and none of these”) #

Point: men everywhere tend to make actual what is there only in ability; first matter, being pure ability, is only the hardest case.

• Universal vs. class: “man,” said of every individual (I am a man, you are a man), vs. “mankind” or “the human race,” a collection in which the individuals are actual. In the universal none of us is actual, only in ability. Logicians who make the universal a class are resolving to imagination, as in mathematics, instead of reasoning, as logic must.
• Locke, Essay, on the general idea of triangle: is it equilateral, isosceles or scalene? Any one fails the others, so it is “all and none of these.” Berkeley: that is absurd, so there is no general idea of triangle. Neither understands it, because any imagined triangle is one of the three, and because neither understands ability. Proper answer: triangle is a plane figure contained by three straight lines; the lines must be equal or unequal, but in the definition they are not actually either, they are able to be either. “All of these in ability, but not in act.” Anaxagoras does the same with matter: everything actual but so small that nothing is clear, so “everything and nothing.”
• Modern mathematicians: a straight line composed of an infinity of points, because wherever you cut you find a point and cannot get something from nothing; they make actual a point that is there only in ability.
• Metaphysics IX (the book on ability and act): the Megarians apparently denied ability altogether, since it cannot be sensed or imagined; Aristotle’s reply, they would be blind and have sight many times a day. His examples: closing my eyes I am blind; stopping playing, I have lost the ability to play the piano; stopping speaking, I no longer know English.

6. Reading the text and its summary; toward substantial form (“as bronze is towards statue”) #

Point: the text says the same thing (bronze to statue, wood to bed, matter to any formed thing, is as the subject to substance and “this something”), and the last paragraph at the top of page 4 sums up the whole.

• Summary as he reads it: first, only contraries are the beginnings (reading 10); later, that something underlying makes three (reading 11); from the present, the difference of the contraries, how the beginnings are to each other, and what the subject is. Whether form or subject is substance is not yet clear (“more in Wisdom”); but that the beginnings are three, how three, and their way, is clear.
• Back to the definition of nature: beginning and cause of motion and rest in that in which it is first, as such and not by happening; “first” takes you all the way back to substance.
• The step this text prepares: if a sphere is composed of clay and an acquired accidental form, then man and dog are composed of first matter and something proportional, not an accidental but a substantial form. This is the key to later understanding what the soul is.

7. The two opinions on the soul in the Phaedo, and the truth between them (“like a sailor in a boat”) #

Point: the Phaedo touches two probable opinions, each with part of the truth; substantial form gives the whole.

• A: Socrates/Plato, the soul is a substance complete in itself and distinct from the body. B: Simmias with the Pythagoreans, the soul is the harmony of the body; the modern position, which without the word “soul” explains living bodies by the order and organisation of matter, i.e., an accidental form.
• The dialogues are mainly dialectical: part of the truth, not necessarily the whole. Socrates’s argument against Simmias: the soul opposes the body (the man fasting, resisting anger, lust, hunger); a harmony of the body could not oppose the body, so the soul is something substantial. He develops arguments, perfected in Aristotle and Thomas, that the human soul is immortal, which it could not be as an accidental form.
• The rock A founders on: a substance in the body like a sailor in a boat or a man in his car cannot explain the unity of man; the body would not be part of man. Against our inward experience, the starting point of the study of soul: when your body is in pain, the one thinking how to relieve it is the one feeling it, with an urgency no sympathetic doctor has.
• B gives the unity but cannot explain immortality or the soul’s resisting and rising above the body. Truth: the soul is a form but not an accidental form; something substantial but not a complete substance. “The truth is between two extremes.”
• Theological parallel: on the Trinity, some deny three persons to keep one nature, others deny one nature to keep three persons; on the Incarnation, some say two natures therefore two persons, others one person therefore one nature (Monophysites). Neither extreme can explain why anyone held the other; the middle position (three persons one nature; one person two natures) explains both errors, since each has part of the truth. So here.
• Aside: the Church did not officially say Aristotle was right on this until after Thomas died, at the Council of Vienne [ed.: transcript “Yen”]. Aristotle’s review of predecessors in the first book on the soul has so many opinions one gets lost; the Phaedo shows the two main ones.

8. Ability and the spiral of history (“a spiral staircase”) #

Point: this is a very fundamental text for substantial change, and the history of the idea of ability moves in a spiral, not a circle.

• Empedocles, Anaxagoras and perhaps all the first philosophers admitted no change but change of place, because they could not understand ability. Aristotle understands ability and so inward and substantial change become possible. Early modern scientists again speak only of change of place. Twentieth-century quantum physics moves back toward ability, but at a more particular level of experience and experiment.
• Heisenberg, the greatest 20th-century physicist for emphasising ability or “potency, as he calls it.” De Broglie (father of wave mechanics): a 19th-century physicist would say the colours from a prism were all actually in the white light and merely separated; now we say they are in the white light only as in possibility.
• Biologists too are coming back to nature acting for an end, in a more detailed, particular way.

9. Student: does the Church have a position on prime matter? (“the two go together”) #

Point: not explicitly; the Church’s concern was the soul, but soul as substantial form implies prime matter.

• Theology considers everything in reference to God, and the human soul is made in God’s image, so the soul matters more than matter. The Council of Vienne text (he will bring it) speaks of the soul.
• How immortality is eventually shown: prove the soul does something not in the body; then its being is not only in the body, or as Thomas puts it, not immersed in the body. Reason: as with Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am,” you must be before you can do; if the soul’s being were only in the body its doing would be only in and through the body. So its being is substantial, not accidental. But then one is tempted to make it a complete substance (sailor in boat) and lose the unity; seeing the truth in B (it is the form of the body, but substantial) gives the whole. Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, after defining the purpose of man: with the truth all things harmonize; neither extreme fits everything we know about man.

10. Four senses of “part”; soul and body as essential parts (“the parts of the word cat”) #

Point: soul and body are parts of us in a hidden sense of “part,” the one reading 13 leads up to.

• The parts of the word cat: C, A, T; take them away and nothing is left, so they seem the only parts (quantitative parts). But the word cat has the same letters as “act”: the order is also a part. Letters and order are essential parts, matter and form. Soul and body are parts of us not as C, A, T are parts of cat but as the letters and their order are, except that the form is substantial, not accidental. Rubber ball: the rubber and the shape.
• Msgr. Dion: someone stuck on the first meaning of a word cannot see the others. Thomas’s Latin: impositio nominis, placing a name on something (the label), then translatio, carrying it over to something else because of a similarity or connection.
• Four senses in Metaphysics V. His sophistic argument: the whole is more than the part; animal is only part of what man is (rational animal); yet animal includes dog, horse, elephant; so the part is more than the whole. It mixes two senses: animal as a composing part of the definition of man (composed whole) and man as a subject part of the universal whole animal. With quantitative parts and matter/form, four senses.
• The old argument against the soul: the anatomist who never found the soul among lungs, brain, liver, pancreas. Like opening “cat” and finding only C, A, T: the order does not show up among the quantitative parts, which are more known to us.
• Back to reading 1: knowing the confused before the distinct, Aristotle went from the sensible composed (quantitative) whole to the definition (another composed whole) to the universal whole, and left out this sense of part, which is less known to us.

His words #

• underlying nature / first matter; the subject of substantial change; nothing actual by itself, “substance in ability” [ed.: prime matter, potency]
• proportion; the first is to the second as the third to the fourth, in one respect only [ed.: analogy]
• ability / act; ability known only through the act for which it is an ability [ed.: potency / actuality]
• pure ability: ability without any act, considered by itself
• reason: Shakespeare’s “ability for large discourse,” discourse = knowing one thing through another
• false imagination: making actual in imagination what is only in ability (Weizsäcker)
• universal vs. class: “man” said of each vs. “mankind” a collection of actual individuals
• resolving to the imagination: proper to mathematics, not to logic
• ninth book of wisdom; fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX, V]
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• dialectical: having a part of the truth, not necessarily the whole
• substantial form vs. accidental form; the soul as substantial form of the body
• “not immersed in the body” (Thomas’s phrase for the soul’s existence)
• impositio nominis: the placing of a name, “the label”; translatio: carrying a name over
• quantitative parts; parts of the definition; subject parts of a universal whole; essential parts (matter and form)
• composed whole vs. universal whole
• spiral staircase: returning to the same point at a different level of experience

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics I, Reading 13 (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 13), from his handout p. 2 onward: the paragraph on the underlying nature knowable by proportion; “as bronze is towards statue, or wood towards bed”; the closing summary at the top of handout page 4.

Mentioned

• Physics I readings 1, 9, 10, 11, 15 (as he refers to them)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (“ninth book of wisdom,” ability and act; the Megarians) (inferred)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (“fifth book of wisdom,” four senses of part) and Metaphysics III (“dialectic of Book Three”) (inferred)
• Aristotle, On the Soul I (predecessors’ opinions) (inferred)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (“with the truth all things harmonize”)
• Plato, Phaedo (Socrates, Simmias, the harmony of the body)
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason, “large discourse, looking before and after” (Hamlet, inferred)
• Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding (general idea of triangle); Berkeley
• Heisenberg (elementary particles; book on unified field theory); Weizsäcker; Louis de Broglie
• Descartes, “I think, therefore I am”
• Council of Vienne (on the soul)
• Msgr. Dion’s saying on the first meaning of a word

His questions #

• What underlies the change between a man and a dog? The first matter, known only by proportion: as clay is to sphere and cube.
• Is five to six as two is to three? No; proportion is sameness of ratio, not of difference.
• Do you see my ability to walk, or just my walking? Just the walking; ability is known only through its act, by reason.
• Is first matter an actual substance? No, otherwise man and dog would be accidents; it is substance in ability, nothing actual by itself.
• In the definition of triangle, are the three straight lines equal or unequal? Neither actually; able to be either.
• If the sphere is clay plus an accidental form, what are man and dog composed of? First matter and a substantial form.
• Can the harmony of the body oppose the body? No; so the soul is something substantial (Socrates against Simmias).
• Does the Church have an official position on prime matter? Not explicitly; its definition concerns the soul as substantial form, which implies prime matter.
• What are the parts of the word cat? C, A, T; but also the letters and their order, another sense of part.