Hylomorphism

Hylomorphism refers to the fact that Aristotelian form and matter are found in a pair, are only analytically distinguishable, and have no separate existence. This is utterly different from a dualism such as the Augustinian one between a separately constituted soul and body, or the Cartesian one between mind and matter. Form and matter — an active way of being and its contingent situatedness — are so deeply interwoven that one cannot be empirically picked out from the other. I think something similar applies to substance and accident. At the end of the day, the distinction is only analytical. (See also Purpose, Contingency.)

Form

[This early skeletal note is preserved in its original form. For a somewhat more expansive treatment, see Form Revisited; Form as Value; Form, Substance; Form vs Action.]

The expressive metaconcept of form has multiple levels of meaning in Aristotle. A theme common to these various senses is that depending on the context, form is a way of being, or a way of being and doing.

A way of being and doing can be understood as constituted by a counterfactually robust effective orientation with respect to ends. The ends in question may belong either to whatever is considered as “having” the form, or to an intelligence that discerns the form, but in either case, the effective orientation that is form is attributed to the “thing” that “has” the form.

Thinking in terms of form is thinking in terms of a sort of primarily adverbial, richly modal, differential-consequential pragmatic determination rather than in terms of objects and extensional identity. That mouthful notwithstanding, it is often actually simpler than life in the kingdom of nouns.

The first sense is close to what Brandom would call a concept. (See also Conceptual, Representational.)

Then there is a hylomorphic biological one where psyche or “soul” is said to be the “form” or first actuality of the body, which seems to include its capacity for nutrition and self-movement and what we might call its elemental desire.

Things having to do with second nature or second actuality, such as character or intellect in a human, constitute a further level grounded in sociality and language.

Yet another is associated with the complete actualization of a thing, which includes not only actuality but its interweaving with material contingency and structured potentiality. It is at this level that we can speak of form as a counterfactually robust effective orientation in some delimited context, fusing potentiality and actuality together.

The complex functional role of form in Aristotle has a relatively close analogue in the role of mediation in Hegel. (See also

Substance; Mutation of Meaning; Concept, Form, Species; Aristotelian Dialectic; Structure, Potentiality; Meant Realities; Difference; More Difference, Less Conflict.)

Structure, Potentiality

I now want to say, structure — which statically captures a determinate field of potential inferences — is isomorphic to Aristotelian potentiality. These concepts are mutually illuminating.

This helps clarify how Aristotelian potentiality differs from the Platonic power referenced by the same Greek word, as well shedding light on the association I have made between potentiality and counterfactual inference.

From the other direction, the thing to notice is that for Aristotle, potentiality exists only in a pair with actuality or at-work-ness. Similarly, synchronic structure exists only in a pair with diachronic process. I always read the conspicuous lack of definition of the synchronic/diachronic interface as reflecting something like Aristotle’s principled use of underdetermination in order to focus on what is most essential and clearly justifiable.

A lot of people seem to have been very confused about this latter point during the drama over 1960s French structuralism. What passed for dialogue was often a complete disconnect. “Look at how much can be explained synchronically!” “Oh no, you’re abolishing history, free will, personality, and identity!” If the new viewpoint was forgivably one-sided in its enthusiasm, some of the reaction verged on hysteria. (See also The Dreaded Humanist Debate.)

Another source of confusion seems to be that many people apparently thought of structural causality in terms of a monolithic, complete determination. I think instead that structural causality comes in many separate blocks, in an overall context of less-than-complete determination. (See also Structural Causality, Choice; Values, Causality; The Importance of Potentiality.)

Actuality

Aristotelian energeia — traditionally translated as actuality — captures the status of being active or effectively operative in a process. I have somewhat awkwardly rendered it as “at-work-ness”. “Being-at-work” sounds like better English, but might wrongly be taken to refer to a kind of Being in the intransitive sense qualified by a predicate of at-work-ness. (I think Aristotle was in fact very little interested in Being in an intransitive sense. He devotes much more attention to several transitive senses.) There is no “being” at all in the Greek. Energeia is most literally “in-work-ness”, but I and others have preferred to substitute “at” for “in”, as better conveying the intended connotation in English.

Contrary to Plato’s doubts about the possibility of understanding becoming, Aristotle is committed to eliciting its intelligibility. Rather than looking for generative powers behind things as Plato had obscurely suggested might be our best hope, part of Aristotle’s strategy is to draw our attention to what is immanently at work in a process as a kind of methodological starting point. The discernment of what it was to have been such and such a thing begins from the indistinct apprehension of something we merely take to have been effectively operative. (That something would be a mediated immediacy in Hegelian terms.) It is eventually constituted with greater precision and a degree of universality through inferential elaboration of the counterfactual potentiality of what we initially took to have been effectively operative, as well as through the implicit correction over time of errors that become apparent in the course of this elaboration.

Worlds away from the dry stereotype of “essentialism”, Aristotle is if anything more of a process thinker or pragmatist. He directs our attention to the concrete actualization of things, which “essentially” involves the interweaving of effectively operative actuality with both counterfactual potentiality and material contingency. Hegel makes large use of this Aristotelian concept. Brandom associates Hegelian actualization with expression and making explicit.

There is a very interesting distinction suggested by Aristotle and developed by later writers between a “first” and “second” actuality. Whereas the first actuality of an organic body is not too far from the later Stoic conatus as an internal source of primitive desiring activity, second actuality applies to things associated with evolved practice like habit, character, and intellect.

Aristotle also speaks about the “First” cause as pure at-work-ness, with no admixture of potentiality. I take this to mean that the “First” cause — just as the higher-order goal at which everything indirectly aims — is effectively operative in things, but unlike other effectively operative things, it has no counterfactual aspect (because it has no factual aspect, because it exactly is a pure aim rather than something having an aim). It functions as an ideal of normativity that we can retroactively see to have been at work, as a sort of virtual, uplifting attractor of purely natural desire, and also more speculatively as a posited virtual attractor for the directionality in material tendencies. (See also Aristotelian Actualization; Moved, Unmoved.)

Matter, Potentiality

I’ve suggested nonstandard readings of both Aristotelian matter and Aristotelian potentiality. While traditionally there is thought to be a loose analogy such that matter is to form as potentiality is to actuality, the two concepts as I am reading them are sharply distinct. Matter captures the accumulation of contingent fact. Potentiality captures counterfactually robust inference. Matter particularizes, while potentiality universalizes.

Potentiality seems to me to be a kind of form. This is a bit tricky, because an important classical sense of Aristotelian matter that I have not been emphasizing is associated with a disposition to respond in certain ways when acted upon. This, however, sounds like counterfactual potentiality to me.

Potentiality

Potentiality (dynamis) is yet another great Aristotelian expressive metaconcept. Plato had the intriguing idea of explaining things and states of affairs in terms of power (also dynamis), but left power as an unexplained explainer, and required it to be postulated as pre-existent. Aristotle thoroughly reconceptualized the term to eliminate these weaknesses. Every Aristotelian potentiality begins from actuality or at-work-ness.

Instead of referring to postulated powers behind things or abstract logical possibility, Aristotelian potentiality is a way of talking about the aspects of a conceptual content captured by what Brandom would call modally robust counterfactual inference. Such robustness of inference across counterfactual cases is implicitly central to the most elementary meaning of Aristotelian substance or “what it was to have been” a thing (ousia), as what grounds the weak unity that allows us to talk about the same “thing” persisting through time even though something about it changed.

The semantic importance of counterfactual inference in determining the sense of what things are is a thesis shared by Aristotle, Hegel, and Brandom. It is explicit in Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel, and implicit in Aristotle. We cannot even really form a view of any thing as a thing of a certain kind unless we at least implicitly consider its potentiality.

Aristotle was clear that potentiality is an irreducible ingredient in things, and potentiality clearly captures counterfactuals. Brandom has made the role of counterfactuals in the development of universality more explicit. Facts alone give us at best a very brittle structure of assertions with no real conceptual articulation or interpretation, so perspectives that try to ground things on facts alone are doomed to ultimate failure. (In this light, Nietzsche‘s elimination of potentiality also turns out to have been a very serious error.) Overly strong, question-begging notions of the Identity of things have helped obscure the vital role of counterfactual inference in stabilizing our experience of the world. (See also Modality and Variation.)

Tentatively mapping this to Brandom’s Fregean terminology, I think Aristotle would intend the relation of potentiality to actuality to be one of reciprocal sense dependence paired with asymmetrical reference dependence. That is to say, at a level of determination of meaning, potentiality and actuality are interdependent and equally important, but in the order of logical truth about representations, actuality or the concrete is the starting point in terms of which potentiality is evaluated. Potentialities are potentialities of some actuality. (See also The Importance of Potentiality; Potentiality, Actuality; Structure, Potentiality; Matter, Potentiality.)

Alienation, Second Nature

In chapter 14 of Spirit of Trust, Brandom points out a distinction developed by Hegel in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology between “actual” and “pure” consciousness. These turn out to correspond closely to practical and theoretical culture, respectively. Here it is important to note that “consciousness” is therefore a very different thing from the “consciousness” of the Consciousness chapter, where we began with a putatively immediate awareness and discovered that even then, every apparent immediacy eventually revealed itself as mediated.

Acculturation, and therefore the “consciousness” of the later chapter basically is a form of mediation. We are no longer making any pretense of beginning with the putatively immediate. Culture is very thick, and a long journey. More superficially, it includes all our attitudes.

In chapter 13, Brandom had quoted Hegel saying it is through culture that the individual acquires actuality. The “individual” here is not the atomistic psychological individual beloved of the Enlightenment, externally confronting objects and others, but a participant in Geist with some much more interesting topology. True individuality for Hegel is not given but emergent. Its borders are much wider, and not topologically closed. Atomic psychological individuals are a hallucination of the modern illness Hegel called Mastery. (Hegel explicitly says the pure “I”, by contrast — conceived after Kant as having no content of its own, but as a mere index of the unity of a transcendental unity of apperception — depends on language for its existence. Brandom reminds us that language is the medium of recognition, the sea in which normative fish swim; and that things said, in being public, acquire a significance that runs beyond what the speaker intended. The purely linguistic “I” becomes the focus of commitment and responsibility, which depend on linguistic articulation.)

In the same passage Hegel also speaks of Spirit as alienation from our natural being. Reading those words I sort of cringe, but in fact Hegel is not talking about anything like Gnostic or Plotinian alienation. The word has that heritage, but Hegel uses it in the same breath with actualization. This alienation is supposed to be a good thing. It is de-immediatization, which is just the other side of the coin of mediation. Hegel is here using an originally negatively connotated Gnostic and Plotinian word for what is for him a positively connotated Aristotelian concept of actualization, which Brandom associates with expression and making explicit. Mediation is in this passage allegorized by Hegel as, in effect, becoming strange (alien) to our putative atomistic psychological selves.

Spirit as alienation should not be read as any repudiation of nature. As Terry Pinkard points out in Hegel’s Naturalism, Hegel is in fact a naturalist, but of the expansive, Aristotelian sort, explicitly antireductionist. The difference with 2oth century naturalisms is that it allows for the emergence of increasingly higher forms of Geist and Hegelian “freedom” over a natural basis. In Aristotelian terms, 20th century naturalism only addresses “first” nature, the more primitive one. Aristotelian and Hegelian naturalism also recognize second nature that includes culture. Even though in other contexts there will still be talk of overcoming alienation, at least one meaning of “alienation” is just the move to second nature.

Renaissance

Renaissance Aristotelianism has finally at least become a subject of specialized scholarship. Decades ago, John Herman Randall Jr. put forth the thesis that modern science actually originated from Italian Renaissance secular Aristotelianism, especially in the University of Padua. Consensus seems to be that Randall overstated his case, but he put it in very strong terms. A weaker version of that seems a lot more plausible to me than what are still more common attempts to associate modern science with Renaissance Platonism. Renaissance Platonism was interesting, but not remotely scientific or mathematical. People like Ficino and Pico and Bruno were actually more interested in magic.

Even theological Aristotelianisms always preserved a fair amount of naturalistic content. Unlike most medieval and Renaissance universities, the Italian ones were dominated by the faculties of medicine and law rather than the faculty of theology. Italian scholasticism therefore developed in a more secular context. Secular masters of arts played an important role across Europe, and theologians too addressed many philosophical concerns in a sophisticated way, so the distinction is relative. But especially strong currents of largely naturalistic scholasticism developed in Italy.

It is also a little known fact that more commentaries on Aristotle were produced in the 16th century than in all previous history. There is a good high-level overview in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (See also Languages, Books, Curricula.)

Mean

An Aristotelian mean is not the subject of a fixed formula that could just be “applied” to yield a result, like an arithmetical mean. An Aristotelian mean also has nothing to do with mere compromise. It is a kind of structural rather than quantitative criterion. A mean is not necessarily between one-sided options, but may instead be outside the space determined by their confrontation. It is a product of practical judgment or phronesis. It takes interpretive work to arrive at one. The mean just represents an ideal of avoiding one-sidedness. When Hegel complains about something being one-sided, he is saying the mean has been missed.

Difference

Difference is not a univocal concept. X and Y may be orthogonally different like “day” and “raining”, or they may be relationally different like “black” and “white”. Things of whatever sort that are relationally different from each other are materially incompatible; things that are orthogonally different from each other are not materially incompatible.

Aristotle and Hegel both emphasize the importance of what I just called relational difference as the principal source of meaning and intelligibilty. Information theory, arithmetical subtraction, and the Euclidean logos or ratio between two magnitudes are all purely concerned with relational as opposed to orthogonal difference.

I’d like to point out that Saussurean phonological difference — say, the distinction between a “b” sound and a “p” sound — is also a relational difference, not an orthogonal one. Interpreting the sound as “b” is materially incompatible with interpreting the sound as “p”. (Brandom’s reference to Saussure as pre-Kantian and pre-Fregean on the ground that the latter worked with subsentential units of analysis in what was actually phonology is an unfortunate mistake.)

The famous 20th century “structuralism”, for which Saussurean difference was widely considered to have been a launching point, did not seem to be explicitly much concerned with inference, but it was very much concerned with the relational kind of difference, and in this way should be considered a potential ally of inferentialism rather than an opponent. Popular accounts do not much mention the role of 20th century French epistemological rationalism in the structuralist ferment, but I think it was significant, and that this could support additional connections to the inferentialist project. Synchronic structure is an expressive metaconcept, in no way inherently conflicting with a simultaneous recognition of the importance of diachronic process.

Writers like Deleuze and Badiou, on the other hand, and perhaps even someone like Rorty, while making valid points against our culture’s obsession with identity, have unfortunately chosen to valorize nonexclusive difference. This is not the answer. Ironically, an exclusive focus on nonexclusive, orthogonal difference leads back to undifferentiated sameness, via incommensurability. Deleuze and Badiou actually celebrate this, with slogans like “pluralism = monism” or “generic multiplicities”. This is precisely the night in which all cows are black. Even Kant’s point about the infinity of each person tends in this direction.

As Hegel saw clearly and pointed out in the Encyclopedia Logic, the polemic of Reason against Understanding should not lead us to try to throw out determinateness. Understanding wants to lock everything down under Identity, which is ultimately disastrous. The indiscriminate valorization of orthogonal Difference, on the other hand, ultimately destroys meaning and intelligibility. We should be looking for an Aristotelian mean (outside of, rather than between) these one-sided, shallow, and unattractive extremes.

I want to say that difference, when unbounded, ceases to be what I wanted to mean by difference. A thoughtful dwelling on relational difference, with due attention to real-world contingency and ambiguity, would be my candidate for the mean. (See also Determinate Negation; Conceptual, Representational.)