Separate Form?

“Lambda 3 goes on to show that form cannot be separate” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 168, my translation throughout).

I have always been rather baffled by interpretations of book Lambda that claimed to find evidence there that Aristotle finally revives the notion of separate form he so thoroughly refutes elsewhere.

“The first object of Lambda 3 is to examine the well-foundedness of the Platonic arguments in favor of the separation of form — or its pretension to the status of ousia [“substance”]. The permanence of form in generation can be invoked in support of such a thesis” (ibid).

“[F]orm, even if it well fits the Platonic criterion of ousia that is permanence, does not meet the specifically Aristotelian criteria. Here the appeal will be to that of tode ti, of being a ‘this'” (ibid).

“[T]he text opens with a new formula of change, which, contrary to the previous ones, takes into account its cause” (ibid).

As Sachs renders the full passage that she cites in part, “For with everything, something changes, by the action of something, and into something: that by the action of which it changes is the first thing that sets it in motion, that which changes is the material, and that into which it changes is the form. For it comes into being either by art or by nature, or else by fortune or chance. And next after this is the fact that each independent thing comes into being from something that has the same name (for this is true both of natural independent things and of the rest). Now art is a source that is something else, but nature is a source that is in the thing itself (since a human being begets a human being), while the rest of the causes are deprivations of these” (Metaphysics, p. 233).

Aubry notes that this language appears to be a bit of a regression, since matter has already been superseded by potentiality in Lambda chapter 2. But she explains that chapters 2 and 3 constitute a pair concerned respectively with matter and form, and chapter 2 did not yet address form.

She points out that Aristotle goes on to mention three kinds of substance, among which form is conspicuously not included. “What are enumerated are matter, which is only in appearance a tode ti; phusis [nature], which is at the same time a tode ti and a hexis [acquired disposition]; and finally, the composite, or individual realities, the kath ekasta like Socrates and Callias. Where we might expect the term form, we instead find that of phusis, which will be qualified again as hexis. For phusis is precisely a form realized in a matter, stabilized as hexis at the end of a process. Such an enumeration already signals that form as such cannot be counted as ousia, and cannot be separate, in the sense that it does not exist apart from the composite” (p. 169).

“In Zeta 8, it was already the intervention of the criterion of tode ti that allowed it to be established that form does not exist apart from (para) the composite, and thus to reject as superfluous the hypothesis of the Platonic Forms, since, at least in the case of natural beings, it is indeed an individual — and a concrete composite — that engenders another. But besides Zeta 8, it is necessary to refer equally to Eta 1…. Eta 1 makes intervene, in addition to the criterion of tode ti, the criterion of khoriston, which, as we have underlined, is equally present in Lambda 1. The examination established that matter is only a tode ti in-potentiality, dunamei; while form is only [a tode ti] insofar as it is to logo khoriston [separate according to the formula, or in speech]; and only the composite is khoriston haplos [separate simply]” (pp. 169-170).

“Like the criterion of khoriston and even dissociated from it, the criterion of individuality indeed leads to only counting the composite of matter and form as ousia” (p. 170).

“[I]n the case of art, there can be form without matter, but the form thus considered is nothing but tekhne [art] itself, that is to say in fact the form such as it is conceived and envisioned by the artisan. In the case of phusis, the principle of synonymy, the permanence of one same form transmitted from one individual to another, is sufficient to explain how we are led, as Plato did, to assert that there exist distinct forms of natural substances. But we can conclude from this neither that they are separate, nor that their character is that of tode ti and of ousia.”

“This would presuppose that the forms exist apart from and independent of composites, and in particular that they are capable of pre-existing as well as perhaps surviving them. But in truth, the existence of the formal cause is simultaneous with that of the composite. Certainly health is distinct from the healthy, and sphericity from the bronze sphere, but health and sphericity do not have full existence, that is to say do not exist as ousia except as instantiated in the cured patient, the completed sphere” (ibid).

“At the end of the whole formed by Lambda 2 and 3, we are indeed in possession of a positive result: matter, conceived kata dunamei, can be extended from the corruptible sensibles to the eternal sensibles; but also a negative result: form cannot be separate. Each of these results already contains elements of a response to the guiding questions posed in Lambda 1: whether or not it is possible to unify the principles of substance; and the nature of the separate. One term is still missing: that of energeia, in which will reside the definitive response to these two questions” (p. 171).

In discussing Lambda 2, she emphasized the substitution of potentiality for matter. Here in passing she suggests that alternatively, we could consider that matter has been redefined along with potentiality. But which alternative we endorse is really just a question of the optimal use of words. The old understanding of both matter and potentiality has been left behind.

Next in this series: Explanation by Constituents?