Matter vs. Lack of Form: Heisenberg, Plato's Confusion, and Augustine against the Manichaeans

Orientation #

He opens with “just a footnote about what we were talking about last time, Heisenberg,” and recalls that “I looked at the position of Anaxagoras on matter in detail” because it helps distinguish matter from form (prev. lectures). He says the matter/lack distinction “is very important for many other reasons too, as we’ll see,” without specifying next time. The previous session introduced reading 15 as Aristotle’s respectful critique of Plato’s conflation of matter with privation.

The class, in order #

1. Footnote on Heisenberg (“Every elementary particle consists of all other elementary particles”) #

The point: Heisenberg’s own words on the mutability of matter, and a caution about his comparison of energy with Aristotle’s matter.

• Reads Heisenberg: it is “scarcely possible” to define an elementary particle against a compound system; a pion can be considered a system of nucleon and antinucleon, the nucleon built from lambda hyperon and kappa meson, the photon from muon and antimuon; the “well-known paradoxical phrase” in quotes: every elementary particle consists of all other elementary particles. “Just like any scientist would be speaking.”
• Gifford lectures: 25 new elementary particles seem to lead away from the unity of matter, but particles are created from other particles or from kinetic energy and disintegrate again, so “the complete mutability of matter” — no form of matter is unchangeable; “the final proof for the unity of matter”: all made of the same substance, energy or universal matter, different forms in which matter can appear. Heisenberg compares Aristotle’s matter (mere potentia) to energy actualized by form when a particle is created.
• His caution: (1) as Heisenberg says in his lecture on the first philosophers, energy is like the fire of Heraclitus — both mover and matter, a double aspect; (2) it is the mathematical science of nature, and in mathematics there is no matter and therefore no motion, so one is “just shadowing these things.” “Be very careful about that comparison.”
• Heisenberg’s “language of reality” lecture: Weizsäcker’s tip of a new logic giving up the principle of contradiction, which Heisenberg does not go along with; but if “state” describes a potentiality rather than an actuality, “coexistent potentialities” is plausible, since one potentiality may overlap with others.

2. Three things in every becoming (“three things are found: matter, form”) #

The point: to understand change distinctly each of the three must be distinguished from the other two.

• Form vs lack of form: “altogether evident,” because the basis of distinction is opposition.
• Matter vs form (act vs ability): people confuse them; that is why he looked at Anaxagoras, who “falsely imagines” everything in the potentiality of matter to be actually in there. The “well-known formula” of Heisenberg shows it is natural for man to speak that way — what comes out of something must be actually in there — when often it is there only in potentiality.
• Matter vs lack of form: what the Platonists and others confuse; the topic of reading 15.

3. Text 15.3, first paragraph: the Platonists and Parmenides (“comes to be simply from what is not”) #

The point: the Platonists accept Parmenides’ either/or and choose the second horn.

• Parmenides: if what is comes to be, it must come from what is or from what is not. From what is: it would be before it came to be, “laughable.” From what is not: something out of nothing. So what is does not come to be.
• The Platonists (Plato “like Sherlock Holmes”: eliminate all possibilities but one and the one remaining, however strange, must be it) know things come to be, so it must come from what is not — “some truth to that”: a sphere comes to be from what is not a sphere.
• Aristotle: there is a distinction between that non-being and the matter which is able to become something.
• “One in number … only one in ability”: soft butter put in the refrigerator — the soft becomes hard, the butter becomes hard, not two things but one in number; yet the soft is not able to be hard, the butter is; so butter and soft are not one in ability.

4. Second paragraph: the two differences (“we say that matter and lack are other”) #

The point: Aristotle (“for we,” the editorial we) gives two ways matter and lack differ.

1. Lack is non-being “as such” / “to itself” (either phrase in English); matter is non-being only “by happening.” The lack of hardness as such is the non-being of hardness; butter is not as such the lack of hardness, though it can happen to lack it. Ignorance as such is the non-being of knowledge; the mind as such is not, though the mind very often happens not to know something before it learns. Glass: it can happen to be empty, but to be a glass and to be empty are not the same thing.
   • Student: so the matter has a non-being with regard to that hardness? Answer: yes, by happening; it does not belong to matter as matter — the student’s word “accidental” accepted.
2. Matter is “near” and in some way a substance — a substance in ability; lack is in no way a substance. The mind is near to knowing, knowing in ability; ignorance is in no way knowing (even knowing your ignorance is a knowing, not an ignorance).

• Applied to first matter: as such it is not the non-being of form but being in ability; lack as such is non-being. Hence “you should not identify matter with lack of form” [ed.: transcript reads “should identify”; sense demands the negative].
• If the mind as such did not know, “as long as that one mind, I’ll never know.”
• Flag: this touches the distinction as such vs accidental, “the first fallacy Aristotle takes up outside of language,” which he says “deceives even the wise.” Confusing matter with lack is the fallacy of the accidental.

5. Student backtrack: why the Platonists take the second horn (“dull, barren, unfeeling ignorance”) #

The point: the Platonists judge the first horn more absurd and miss the middle between being and non-being.

• Student: doesn’t “they agree something comes to be simply from what is not” contradict Parmenides? Answer: Parmenides asserts both horns impossible; Plato takes the either/or and accepts the second because the first is worse — how can Duane Berquist come to be from Duane Berquist? He would be before he came to be. “Inasmuch as Parmenides spoke rightly” means in giving the alternative — while leaving out the third possibility, being in ability.
• Student: doesn’t the first horn violate the principle of contradiction while the second doesn’t? Answer: yes, something would be before it came to be; so it makes more sense that before something comes to be it isn’t. But the fact that it isn’t is not what enables it to come to be; what is able to be is made actual, non-being is not.
• Shakespeare’s “dull, barren, unfeeling ignorance”: barren, no ability to produce anything. Table: knowing length and width but not yet having multiplied, he is ignorant of the area yet able to know it; he comes to know it through his knowledge of length and width, not through his ignorance. If you cannot distinguish ability from act you end up confusing ability with non-being.
• Student rereads “one in number … one in ability” with the butter; confirmed.

6. Third paragraph: Plato’s triad (“the large and the small”) #

The point: Plato’s three (form, the large, the small) are not Aristotle’s three (form, matter, lack).

• Plato puts the large and the small on the side of matter — quantity on the side of matter “makes sense,” but strange, since large and small are really relations, and he makes relations the substance of something.
• Text: some make non-being the large and the small, together or apart; this triad is “wholly other.” They got as far as some nature underlying (matter vs form), but “he overlooks the other” — no distinction of matter from lack.
• The confusion “runs down” to the Platonists: Plotinus, centuries later, has the same confusion.

7. Fourth paragraph: the common understanding of form (“godlike, good, and desirable”) #

The point: following Heraclitus’ principle (those who speak with understanding must hold to what is common), Aristotle argues from a basis he shares with Plato: form is godlike, good and desirable.

• “Divine” here means godlike, not of the divine nature — hence his translation.
• Why godlike: form is act, and in theology one learns that God is pure act; matter, only able to be actual, does not at first sight seem like God. “A very profound thing.”
• Why good and desirable: act is the perfection or completion of a thing; an ability is not complete until actualized; the perfection of a thing is its good; the good is desirable.

8. The argument from desire (“desire its own corruption”) #

The point: compared with form, matter and lack of form differ as perfection differs from destruction.

1. Matter desires form, i.e., is ordered to form as its perfection, as ability is for the sake of act (the ability to see for seeing). Matter, capable of the good, is good in a secondary way.
2. Lack of form is bad, being opposed to form.
3. Reduction to absurd: if lack of form desired form it would desire not its good but its own elimination.
4. Form is the perfection of matter but the destruction of lack of form; the perfection of something is not its destruction; so matter and lack cannot be the same.

• Method: distinguish two things by comparing to a third — if one of you is taller than me and one shorter, you cannot be the same.
• “Desire” is concrete speech: no will, sense desire, or even plant desire (“it wants a lot of sunlight”); simply order to form as end. Screw that does not fit the hole: it “doesn’t want to go,” not made for that.
• Pun on “end”: form is the end of matter as purpose, the end of lack of form as elimination. Students confuse them — “happiness is the end of human life; the end of human life is death; therefore happiness is death”; a final-exam paper: if nature acted for an end, all things would come to an end, “gloomy.”

9. Reading the rest of the paragraph (“do the ugly want to be beautiful”) #

The point: the text confirms the argument with Plato’s own comparison and the examples.

• “The staying under nature” (underlying matter) is a cause with the form of what comes to be, “as the mother” — Plato’s comparison in the Timaeus. The other part of the contrariety (lack) is harmful and not-being at all; form is not such as to desire itself, being not needy, nor does the contrary, since contraries preclude each other; “this is the matter.”
• Ugly and beautiful: students say the ugly want to be beautiful; but ugliness and the body are not the same — the body as such wants beauty (its perfection); ugliness as such cannot. Beauty good, ugliness bad, the body capable of beauty good but less than being beautiful.
• Sick and healthy: health perfects the body, not sickness, which is eliminated.
• Thinking matter apart from form, one “almost naturally” thinks matter as formless; but to be matter and to be formless are not the same, even though matter may lack that form.

10. Augustine, the Manichaeans, Thomas (“De Natura Boni contra Manichaeos”) #

The point: the same argument arrived at independently against the same error.

• Confuse matter with lack and matter looks bad: a little in Plato, explicit in Plotinus, a pillar of Manichaeism; Augustine, a Manichean, worked out through his mother’s prayers and the “Ciceronian words of Ambrose,” wrote De Natura Boni contra Manichaeos: matter, being capable of form, is something good — essentially Aristotle’s argument against Plato. Augustine had the Categories, not (as far as known) the Physics, so he reached it independently: “perhaps the greatest of the philosophers” and “perhaps the greatest of the Church Fathers.”
• Thomas had both Aristotle and Augustine and wrote the definitive Quaestiones Disputatae de Malo; the Manichean thinking reflected also in the Summa Contra Gentiles.
• Asides: Thomas at Louis IX’s table slamming it — “this is the Manichaeans”; the king had it written down. Dominic staying up all night at the inn to convince the Albigensian innkeeper; the Dominicans founded to fight the Albigensian revival by dispute.

His words #

• lack of form — his rendering throughout [ed.: privation]
• ability / act — for potency and actuality [ed.: potency, act]
• “one in number … only one in ability” — butter and soft: one thing, two abilities
• as such / to itself / through itself — vs “by happening” [ed.: per se vs per accidens]
• fallacy of the accidental — first fallacy outside of language; confusing matter with lack
• “near” a substance — matter is substance in ability; lack in no way
• godlike — his translation of “divine” in the fourth paragraph
• “desire” (of matter) — concrete speech for being ordered to form as end
• end — two senses: purpose (form for matter) and elimination (form for lack)
• reduction to absurd — the form of the desire argument
• “staying under nature” — his rendering of the underlying nature, i.e., matter [ed.: substrate]

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Physics I, reading 15, section 3, paragraphs 1–4 (from his handout; Aquinas lectio 15)
• Heisenberg, passages on elementary particles, the Gifford lectures, and the lecture “the language of reality” (inferred: Physics and Philosophy)

Mentioned

• Heisenberg’s lecture on the first philosophers (Heraclitus’ fire)
• Plato, Timaeus (mother comparison)
• Aristotle on the fallacy of the accidental (inferred: Sophistical Refutations)
• Shakespeare, “dull, barren, unfeeling ignorance”
• Plotinus (matter confused with lack, matter bad)
• Augustine, De Natura Boni contra Manichaeos; Aristotle’s Categories as known to Augustine
• Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones Disputatae de Malo; Summa Contra Gentiles

His questions #

• Is the soft really able to be hard? No — the butter is; one in number, not one in ability.
• Is the mind as such the non-being of knowledge? No; not knowing happens to the mind; ignorance as such is the non-being of knowledge.
• Is my glass as such empty? No, it happens to be empty; to be a glass and to be empty are not the same.
• Is ignorance able to know? Does my mind come to know through its ignorance? No — barren; it comes to know through its ability and prior knowledge (length and width).
• Why would Plato and Aristotle think form is something godlike? Form is act, and God is pure act.
• If lack of form were to desire form, would it desire its own good? No, its own elimination — so matter and lack cannot be the same.
• Do the ugly want to be beautiful? Do the sick want to be healthy? The body as such wants beauty and health; ugliness and sickness are eliminated by them.
• Are Plato’s three (form, large, small) the same as Aristotle’s three? No; one is not matter and the other not lack of form.