Metaphysics Book 8, Reading 5: How Matter and Form Are One, and an Introduction to Book 9 on Act and Ability

Orientation #

He opens “We’ll go to reading five now,” continuing the reading of Book Eight of the Metaphysics (he calls it “wisdom”) from a handout; he refers back to a previous session’s treatment of Socrates’ first argument and of wine and vinegar (prev. lecture). He ends by announcing that next week they begin Book Nine, reading one. The neighbouring classes end Book VIII’s treatment of matter and open Book IX on potency.

The class, in order #

1. The puzzle restated: definitions and numbers (“what is the cause of their being one thing”) #

The point: what makes a many-parted whole one, when the whole is not a mere heap.

• Where the whole is something besides the parts, there is a cause of unity: in bodies, contact, or stickiness, “or some such other undergoing.”
• A definition is one speech not by being bound together like the Iliad but by being of one thing. So why is “two-footed animal” (his standing definition of man in the Metaphysics, alongside “rational animal”) one and not two?
• Platonic form of the difficulty: if there are separated universals, there is an animal-itself and a two-footed-itself, and man would partake of two universals — so man would not be one thing but many.

2. Aside on the Academy (“Let no one ignorant of geometry come in here”) #

Aristotle was in Plato’s school roughly from seventeen to thirty-seven, leaving only at Plato’s death — “must have been one hell of a good teacher.” The whole academic world takes its name from that school, so academics ought to know something about it. Over the entrance stood: let no one ignorant of geometry enter. At the University of Paris one had to be a master of at least the first book of Euclid to study theology.

3. The solution: one is ability, the other act (“one is merely the act of the other’s ability”) #

The point: the difficulty dissolves once matter and form are seen as ability and act, not as two things in act.

1. Those who define and speak in the accustomed way look for a third thing to unite matter and form, and can never untie the difficulty.
2. But this is matter and that is form, this ability and that act; one is merely the act of the other’s ability.
3. Therefore the union is immediate — “immediate” in the sense of having no middle.

• Example: clay in the shape of a sphere (Aristotle says bronze; “I always take spherical clay myself”). You do not glue, nail, screw, tape or rope the shape to the clay, because they are not two actual things needing a third. Contrast: the parts of a chair, which do need glue or screws.
• Application: those who look for a way to unite soul with body miss that the soul is the form of the body, so the union is immediate.
• The one cause that remains is extrinsic: the maker, the man who shapes the clay, “in those things of which there is coming to be” — he reduces ability to act, but “he’s not in there between the two of them holding them together.”

4. Understandable matter in mathematics (“of matter, some is understandable and some sensible”) #

The point: mathematicals too are form in matter, but of a different kind.

• Sometimes Aristotle says there is no matter at all in the definition of the geometrical sphere: a rubber sphere bounces off the wall, a glass one shatters, a metal one may go through or stick; a helium balloon goes up, a lead one down — but of the geometrical sphere you can say none of this. No reference to matter in the ordinary sense or to motion.
• But extension — length, width, depth — can be called understandable matter; “maybe better named imaginable matter.” Triangle, square, circle are like form in plane imaginable matter; sphere and cube in three-dimensional. He notes Aristotle chose “understandable” to mark it as quite different.
• Hence in the definition, one part is matter and one act: circle is a plane figure (plane as matter) given a shape.

5. Things with no matter are straightaway one (“right away each something one”) #

The point: whatever has no matter — sensible or understandable — is immediately a being in act and one, with no intrinsic cause of its unity.

• Boethius: Divina substantia forma est.
• Thomas’s comparison: as being is divided into the ten highest genera, so that being straightaway means substance or quantity or quality — not being determined by a difference, since being is not really a genus — so these separated substances are straightaway what they are.
• Contrast with us: our matter is only an ability, able to be many things; through the form it is actually a man or a dog, one this or one that. So its being in act and its unity are through the form.
• Student objection: in angels, whose being is caused, isn’t there composition of essence and existence, caused by God? His answer: yes, but that composition is not the same as form-and-matter; it is something different, and “Aristotle hasn’t pointed that out yet.” The angel’s substance is just form; our form is not the whole of us, but comes to our matter.

6. Failed solutions and the four senses of whole and part (“some speak of participation”) #

The point: those who miss the ability/act answer invent third things.

• Platonists speak of participation (and then must ask what the cause of participation is); Lycophron says knowledge is of knowing in the soul; others say living is a putting together or binding of soul to body — again a third thing.
• Four senses of whole and part (from Book Five of wisdom), two more in the mind, two in things:
  • in the mind: the definition (genus and differences); the universal whole — hence animal is in one sense part of man (part of his definition), and man in another sense a part of animal; “particular” comes from “part.”
  • in things: quantitative parts (head, arms, legs, organs) and the whole of matter and form (body and soul) — plainly different senses.
• Example: the word “cat” — C, A, T look like all the parts, but compared with “act” you see the parts are the letters and their order: a different sense of whole and part from the quantitative.
• Where Aristotle takes a thing apart to know it well (dialectic in the third book of wisdom) he gives three ways and leaves out matter and form; likewise in Physics I, where we know the whole confusedly before the parts, three of the four appear but not matter and form, which he brings out only later in Book One of the Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics] — “and that’s in a sense the most important for natural philosophy.” So it is somehow difficult for us.

7. Falling back on earlier meanings (“the shape has changed”) #

The point: we regularly slip back to an earlier, more-known sense of a word when reaching for a later one — a sign the earlier is more known to us.

• In Physics IV Thomas orders the eight senses of “in” and puts species-in-genus before form-in-matter, strange as that seems, because species and genus is like part and whole, and the senses just before are part and whole.
• Test: mould a clay sphere into a cube — what has changed, the clay or the shape? People invariably say the shape, falsely imagining the genus shape to change from one species to another. It is the clay that changes, accidentally.
• Same slip: young to old — is the man different or the age? Sick to healthy — “his condition has changed,” as if the genus condition changed species; but it is the man or the body that changed.
• Plato speaking as if place were the matter of things: one body and then another in the same place, as one shape and then another in the same clay — falling all the way back to the first sense of “in,” to be in a place.
• Spatial residue in our words: “composed” means come together, “put together” — as if you brought matter and form into the same place, like his glass and his briefcase. Diaphora / difference: pherō to carry, dia apart — as if the genus were a common place where the species are thrown together and the differences carry them apart.
• Aside: nowadays you buy a grill at one price assembled and another not; identify the parts, make sure they’re all there, screw this onto that. That is exactly what people try to do with matter and form.

8. Socrates’ first argument and the imagination of loss (“the soul leaving the body”) #

The point: the real weakness of the argument is a false imagination, not the wine/vinegar difficulty.

• Socrates imagines the soul leaving the body as a man leaves his house or a car and comes back in — a cap out of a bottle and back in.
• But for a non-human soul it may be more like clay shaped into a sphere, then a cube, then a sphere again: you do not take the shape out and set it aside to reinsert later. So what returns would be a similar form, not numerically, individually the same — and the soul would not be immortal.
• Same false picture in “you lost your health”: lost keys are somewhere (pray to St. Anthony), but lost health and lost youth have not gone anywhere.
• “Coming into” and “going out of” existence borrow from change of place, as if existence were a house. And Shakespeare: “All the world’s a stage” — people say their part is a sad part.

9. The closing text of Book Eight (“the last matter and the form are the same and one”) #

• They seek a reason making one, and a difference of ability and act. But the last (proximate) matter and the form are the same and one, one in ability, the other in act; so it is like seeking the cause of something one and of its being one. The only cause of their being one is what moves from ability to act. Whatever has no matter is simply something one. “So, enough for book eight of wisdom.”

10. Where Book Nine stands: the senses of being (“wisdom is about being as being”) #

The point: recalling how being was divided, to see what Book Nine adds.

• Book Four: being does not mean one thing, yet the meanings are connected — to substance. Some are beings as substances (existing by and in themselves), others as accidents of substance, others by the coming-to-be or passing-away of substance or accident, others by a lack — blindness is called a being by reference to accident, as the lack of the ability to see.
• Book Five, fuller: being by happening vs. being through itself; under the latter, being according to the figures of predication (substance, quantity, quality…), being as true, and being as ability and act — this last crisscrossing the ten genera, a different way of dividing.
• Being as true includes what is only in the mind: “nothing is nothing” is true, yet the mind takes nothing as if it were something; “this man is blind,” “this student is ignorant” — yet ignorance is the non-being of knowledge in a subject able to have it.
• Book Six: after stabilizing the subject of wisdom, he treats accidental being and being as true briefly and lays both aside. Accidental being hardly is: to be a geometer is something, to be a Christian is something, but Christian geometer — those are two forms, not matter and form.
• Books Seven and Eight treat substance, the chief of the figures of predication: Seven proceeding more from things in logic (not read by this class), Eight in terms of natural philosophy, matter and form. Book Nine takes being as act and ability.

11. The plan and importance of Book Nine (“act is before ability”) #

• Three parts, roughly: ability; act; the order (before and after) of act and ability. He calls this “a little bit of an oversimplification,” but useful.
• Part one treats ability in reference to motion — the act most known to us though least actual — without dwelling on motion as such, which belongs to natural philosophy. Part two sees act far more broadly: form as act, and operations like understanding, willing, even sensing, which are not motions in the strict sense; and since ability is known from act, new senses of ability follow. So the movement is from a less universal to a most universal consideration.
• This is characteristic of wisdom, and it is contrary to natural philosophy’s way: as the proemium to the eight books of the Natural Hearing shows, there we go from the more universal to the less and toward matter. Hence modern scientists, working in the later parts of natural philosophy, are materialists “by custom, if not by thought” — as the first Greek natural philosophers were.
• Part three shows act before ability in almost every way, and better than ability; whence the first cause is pure act and the best thing. It will also show why some take matter to be the first being: a mistake of the second kind, outside of words — Aristotle distinguishes six kinds of mistake from words and seven outside of words in the Sophistical Refutations.
• When he teaches the Metaphysics in one semester he cannot do Books Six through Ten; if he does only one, he always does Book Nine, because there one sees most clearly how the division of being into act and ability carries you all the way to the first cause.

12. The schizophrenia of the modern mind, and why think about God (“all things harmonize”) #

• Argument A: we know effects, naturally seek their cause and the cause of the cause; so the end of thinking is knowledge of the first cause.
• Argument B: from the proemium to the study of the soul, and more precisely at the beginning of the Parts of Animals — knowledge of a better thing is better knowledge; the end is better than what is for its sake; so the end of all our knowledge is knowledge of the best thing.
• If the first cause is the best thing, then as Aristotle says at the beginning of the Metaphysics, in truth all things harmonize. If not, there are two ends that do not come together — “now you got schizophrenia.” Moderns hold matter to be the first cause, and matter is ability, for the sake of act; so they are trapped.
• “Why should you think about God?” — “I can’t think of anything better to think about.” Whatever ratio you propose for how much better, he is much better than that; so the question becomes why think about anything else. Albert the Great (in a passage prefixed by his old teacher Kasurik, who translated Thomas’s commentary on the first two books of the Physics): to think about anything besides God except in order to think about God is a perverse attitude toward knowing — unless forced by necessity, as a doctor is.
• So we must think about the human soul, our understanding and will, and about act and ability, before thinking about angels and God.
• His standing line to natural philosophy students: if you don’t understand change you can’t understand changing things; if not those, not unchanging things, which we know by negating changing things; and then you know nothing — “may be a bit of exaggeration, but it sounds pretty good.”
• Why this matters for theology: God knows composed things simply; we know simple things composedly. As you go body → surface → line → point, each is simpler by adding negations (length, width, depth; then no depth; then no width; then none). So though “simple” is not grammatically negative, when Thomas shows God is altogether simple he negates each kind of composition found in creatures and finally composition altogether.

His words #

• “wisdom” — his regular name for the Metaphysics.
• “ability” and “act” [ed.: potency and act].
• “immediate” union — having no middle; no third thing between matter and form.
• “understandable matter” — Aristotle’s term for mathematical extension; “maybe better named imaginable matter.”
• “figures of predication” — the ten genera as a division of being through itself.
• “being by happening” — accidental being.
• “being as true” — being that may exist only in the mind (nothing, blindness, ignorance).
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics], “the so-called Physics.”
• “reasoned-out knowledge” [ed.: science].
• “schizophrenia in the life of the mind” — two ends of knowing that do not coincide.
• “the last matter” — proximate matter.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII, reading five (handout “Book Eight, Reading One,” pp. 8–9): the unity of definition and number; the Platonic difficulty; matter/form as ability/act; understandable and sensible matter; things without matter; participation and Lycophron; the closing paragraph on the last matter and the mover.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IV (being said in many ways, connected to substance); V (senses of being; four senses of whole and part); VI (accidental being and being as true laid aside); VII (substance from logic); IX (plan of the three parts); III (dialectic, taking a thing apart); opening of the Metaphysics (“all things harmonize”).
• Aristotle, Physics I, ch. 1 and proemium to the eight books; Physics IV, eight senses of “in,” with Thomas’s ordering.
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (six mistakes from words, seven outside words); proemium to On the Soul; opening of Parts of Animals.
• Plato, Phaedo — Socrates’ first argument (inferred as the locus; he says only “Socrates’ first argument”).
• Boethius, Divina substantia forma est.
• Albert the Great, via Kasurik’s translation of Thomas on Physics I–II.
• Thomas Aquinas, on the simplicity of God.
• Euclid, Book I.

His questions #

• Why is “two-footed animal” one thing and not two? Because one is matter and the other form — the form is merely the act of the matter’s ability, so the union is immediate.
• If you mould a clay sphere into a cube, what unites the shape and the clay? Nothing intrinsic; only the maker, who reduces ability to act, is a cause, and he stands between nothing.
• Do you glue, nail or screw the shape to the clay? No — they are not two actual things, unlike the parts of a chair.
• What has changed, the clay or its shape? The clay, accidentally; people say “the shape,” falsely imagining the genus to change into a species.
• When you lose your health or your youth, is it somewhere? No — unlike lost keys; the spatial picture misleads, and it is what wrecks Socrates’ first argument.
• Is a Christian geometer really something, as matter and form make something? No — both are forms; accidental being hardly is, so it is not the wise man’s concern.
• Why should you think about God? Because nothing is better to think about; and since he is better than any ratio you name, the real question is why think about anything else — only as a means to thinking about him.
• Is the end of all our knowledge the first cause or the best thing? Both, and they harmonize only if the first cause is pure act; whoever makes matter first is left with two ends and no harmony.