lacey aristotleousiaform 1965

and Form in AristotleAuthor(s): A. R. LaceySource: Phronesis, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1965), pp. 54-69Published by: BRILLStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4181756 .Accessed: 21/04/2014 08:40

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oi,aEm and Form in Aristotle

A. R. LACEY

c" here is hardly a statement about form in the Metaphysics that is not (at least verbally) contradicted by some other statement." Anscombe and Geach's judgement (Three Philosophers, p. 75)

will no doubt find a heartfelt echo in al interpreters of Aristotle. Yet we must assume that Aristotle at least thought that he had some consistent philosophy, and that what look like flagrant contradictions to us did not appear so to him. The subject of Z is introduced by the closing words of E: oxenre6ov 8i ro5 ovro4 -roi3 r X'nocLx x ro, Gacpx&c f ov, though in Z itself the emphasis is rather on the 6v itself; the opening of H resembles the close of E, but with 'riv ouca&)v for To5 6v'oq, and without j 6v. It is an unfortunate fact of English that the termination '-ing' can be used as either participle or gerund, and so we do not know, when 6v is translated Being, whether the notion is meant or that which is. The use of the neuter adjective or participle for the notion allows a similar ambiguity concerning 6v itself. Aristotle's use of the term does not seem obvious. Sometimes 6v seems to be used un- ambiguously for the notion (e.g. 1029blO), but many such passages involve a word like e'yeo which suggests that the term, rather than the notion, or that which is, is intended, and elsewhere I think the predominant sense is 'that which is' (which was clearly the sense in Parmenides, though only sometimes in Plato). Also when he describes the field of metaphysics as being 6v h ov he is capable of varying this to 6v'm 6v 6vcx (1003 b 15).

But to say that 6v means 'that which is' is not of course to limit it to meaning 'that which exists'. It can also refer to that which is something, either in the sense of being a man or in the sense of being white etc. Aristotle makes it clear straight off that he is not primarily interested in the last of these senses, and in doing so he interprets the question -r s,o 6v; as equivalent to -r't oi'a'; (1028b4), which brings our title-piece onto the stage.

But this question could be interpreted in either of the two remaining ways. Is he asking What is it that exists? or What is it that a thing can be? Suppose that the world contains ten men and ten horses. Is the sort of answer that he is looking for "Well, there are ten men and

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ten horses, so that is twenty things in all" or "Well, a thing can be a man or it can be a horse, so that is two things in all"? The next sentence does not throw very much light on this, though it does confirm that o'valcx is not here being taken in the sense of the notion of being: ro&To y'p oL t gv etvo( ycxaLv, o't 8& nXe(w gv, xaxl o'L pv nene- pxasp.vx, oc 8i &Lsepa. This could refer to either the number of objects or the number of types of object. Just above, however, (1028a30) we have the rather tricky sentence: &aren X0 SpcUt@ OV xOl oU -L Ov &?XX' 8v aMrk,nM oqala &v st. This is not easy to translate. The obvious translation, "So that which primarily is, not being something but simply existing, would be substance", carries the absurd suggestion that oiUa(z is something which exists but has no predicates. One might feel tempted to take 6v in the sense of the notion and translate: "So that being in the primary sense, not being something but simply being, would be ouaL&", but this would fit badly with its context, where otuca has been apparently equated with T'O xoO' xoxa-sov (a27), and referred back to as such in the clause immediately preceding W'are (unless, as is just possible, TxV'-rv refers to xarqyop(oc). Aristotle has just been saying that so &yaO6v and lb x=0,uevov only exist by virtue of the existence of that to which they are applied, and in view of this contrast one might expect that it is -Z6 &yxO6v etc. which are somehow represented in our sentence by o'v Tt 6v, but it is hard to see just how. If ovaLt is to be taken here in the sense of a type of object presumably one must translate something like: "So that what a thing primarily is, not what it is in the sense of having some attribute but what it simply is, would be substance". There are at least some sentences that give some support to this. 1017a18 (under the heading 6v in A) says: oui-Tc 8i Xe&yv'OC xoct -06 i XUX6V SIVOCt, 6rt 4 ru0 xev, exeZvo go-Wv. "And similarly the not white is said to be because that to which it applies is." Cf. also 1028a18 in the present chapter. In other words there is a sense in which X is if something is X. This suggests that 7z tpC0tc5 6v can indeed be translated as 'what a thing primarily is' rather than 'that which primarily is'. But the proposed translation still seems to read rather a lot into ovu -t 6v, and the context speaks of o'UaL as the sroxeLevov, where this must surely be the object and not its type or form. Even if the form can in a sense be the iS7oze[[Levov (1029 a3), it is not likely to be so here, since one can say 'Man is rational' or 'Man is warlike' but hardly 'Man is sitting', and even 'Man sits' seems an unlikely example. What we want is a sense in which -6 xocx%Levov can be ri rather than

&70?64, and the best sense seems to be that -6 xxO4'iLvov is not itself the

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name of anything and does not provide any but an accidental reference to anything; when r' x0'te0vov is used at all it is a less adequate substitute for o xxoM[tvo &vOpmoq, and Socrates can properly be referred to as kxeZvoL4 6 vOpcto4, but only accidentally as Cxeivo T0 xc0O4tuvov. So we are driven back to something like our original translation, only in a rather different sense: "So that which primarily is, not (like T6 x=0mQtvov) being something else (Socrates or a man) but existing in its own right, would be substance."

So far the search for ou'a' has been exhibited as the search for what exists really or in its own right; men and horses perhaps do but attributes do not. But oJa'cx is clearly ambiguous, and this ambiguity may be present in ZI (1028a35) and is illustrated at the beginning of Z2: 8OX?L 8 T ovuLt U'7rpX?LV aVSPYTaXTa pLv OL awlcmawL 8L0 TX 'E 4&a... oaocaq EN=ocL qactev. On its first occurrence here ou'a' is evidently taken in a general sense, where a plural would be senseless, while the plural oi'aLoc refers to different substances. That animals rather than types of animal are meant is suggested by the inclusion in the list of 'r& t6pwa xvtxv and things like the sun and moon, though 'stuffs' such as (but not I think limited to) the four elements are included (such stuffs are referred to as -a' xoO' exa'toc at A 1069a29). Later in Z2 (1028b20) Forms and TX' iiaOfthJoLxa are called a8Co ouctaa, where ovLa. obviously means type of object.

The four senses of oUaLo that we have discussed so far may for convenience be numbered: o'uat I is the primary substance of the Categories. oUSaLa II is roughly the secondary substance of the Categories, but without necessarily including the genus. o'uat III is the substance o/ something, the sense which tempts one to translate o'Uacx as 'substantiality' or 'essence'. osta( IV is the notion of substantiality. III and IV cannot occur in the plural, and IV cannot (in English) take the article. I and II are the senses in which oi'aLtx is allied to ov. Our initial question, T[q N o'uat; is verbally a case of IV, though I have already mentioned the succeeding words as showing that Aristotle was really understanding it in the sense, What is it that exists? i.e. Should III be explained in terms of I or II or something else? Two points call for comment here. First, the singular 6v in t TC6 6 v; is presumably a generic singular such as also occurs in English, What is it that exists? without implying that there is some one thing. The singular oi)aLo can perhaps best be explained by exhibiting Aristotle's thought in both Greek and English: d( O' Ov; oicaLo. T'L n oUCLa; What is it that exists? Substance. What is substance? The last question, though natural enough, is

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difficult to interpret. I think in fact it is a quite general question framed in a non-committal way, but at this point I should mention E. Buchanan, who in his essay on Aristotle's Theory of Being (1962) has argued that the correct translation of oV5aLce is 'Being' or 'mode of existence' rather than 'substance', which is etymologically misleading and suggests a Lockian substrate which Aristotle rejected from the status of oCua'. He goes on to argue that the lvoct in TL iv elvoa is existential and that &v6pyeot means 'activity' rather than 'actuality' and that Aristotle's notion of oCatLc is dynamic rather than structural; the ousala of Socrates is his activity qua man. He also claims (pp. 61-2) that this gives a clearer criterion for distinguishing essence from properties and accidents. To some extent Buchanan is right. The form of man is certainly related to his activities rather than merely to his bodily structure (hence Aristotle's opposition to the Pythagorean &pXtovLo view (de An. 1.4)), but I find difficulty in following Buchanan's view (pp. 57ff.) that the force of calling the soul a first entelechy is that the soul is life 'regarded from an abstract point of view' as opposed to the 'multifarious activities or operations of the living being' which come and go while the soul is constantly present until death. The point is surely that we are always alive, and so able to act, but not always acting, since we are often asleep etc. No doubt Aristotle often refers to the soul as an ?Cpyeta in passages outside the de Anima when he is not concerned to make this distinction. Moreover though Aristotle is primarily concerned with ouiaotr. that exist cpuce, in the central chapter Z 17 he explicitly takes oLxtoc as his example. Furthermore I am not convinced that we need or should abandon the translation 'substance' for oa'tax. Etymologically oUaLx may be equivalent to 'being', and it is certainly wider than 'substance' and is indeed used for 'being' upon occasion, in Aristotle as well as in Plato (e.g. 263b8), and no doubt the senses shaded into each other for a Greek speaker. But in popular speech it had often the connotation we find in 'a man of substance' (see LSJ and also R. Hirzel in Philologus, 1913), and Aristotle found it sensible to ask whether it should be equated with Lockian substance, even though he ended by rejecting this. Also I feel more confident than Buchanan seems to (p. 3) that 'substance' does not necessarily carry a Lockian interpretation nowadays, especially when it takes the plural. Buchanan makes a strong case for translating 7t jv EIv &vOpC7rc as 'what it is for a man to be' rather than 'what it is to be a man', but I doubt whether the expression should be contrasted with the latter. As I have said, Buchanan is right in so far as the essence of

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man consists not, or not only, in his bodily structure but in what he does, or can do. But in so far as 'what it is for a man to be' is sharply contrasted with 'what it is to be a man' the former suggests something that would distinguish men from, say, numbers but not men from horses (cf. Frege's 'three realms'), and this would hardly suit Aristotle's purpose.

Having introduced the question TLt n ouiaEx; we can notice that Aristotle has at least the following eight tasks which o'uaU is at one time or another needed to fulfil:

(i) It is needed in order to provide a subject for predicates. This is the sense of U7rno%e[evov in the phrase zcd' 67oXEL.LIVOU of Cate- gories 2, and when Ut7roxe4evov is introduced as a candidate for being oijaL in Z3 it is described as that xaQ' oi ra- %Wca Xe'yeTIt, exe tvo 8'e AcUT,O 0jXeTL XOCTr WOU9.

(ii) Another sense of U'oxec4Lzvov occurs in the phrase ev UsoxeyC.cVp of Categories 2, and in this sense oiuatc is needed as the substrate of attributes. It is in this sense that o:aLx is opposed to 7-nor0a0 (e.g. 1029 a 14).

(iii) Similar to but not quite identical with the above is the function of serving as a substrate for change (1042 a 32ff.) In the Categories the potentiality of spw'r- oi)axa for opposite qualifications is brought out for this reason.

(iv) Substance is what exists in its own right, ov ri 6v, XA' ov a7rMoq (1028a30). This might seem to be the same as (ii), and it appears to be what Aristotle had primarily in mind in the Categories, but there is a difference, because (ii) allows for ovuaLt being v'k, which in the present case it could not be. One would think that on many occasions it is this feature that is referred to by xcpLsaTv, in which case 'independent' would seem a better translation than 'separate' or 'separable'. Cf. M10, 1068b16-19.

(v) Substance is that which is most actual. 1 o:aLoC xcxal Tot6 8o eVepy?La 7Ca'nv... 7rp6'epOV T'n ovLa' L VOpC 8uv&eco (1050b2; cf.

de Int. 23a23: xoa -r& [v & veu Av&vcuec, evepyeoca ecLv, otov acL 7t-6WrML ouuaLcL).

(vi) If there is to be knowledge there must be something single and stable beyond particulars, for if there are only particulars there will be only perception (999a24ff.)

(vii) For similar reasons o6atcz is needed to make definition possible. Definition is o rou 'r iv ZvocL ?o6yo4, and the n' %v elvoci belongs

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primarily to ouatL (1031all; cf. 1031al, 1039a19: 'n Covov ouvtocL ?IVcL 6pov i [u soscx).

(viii) Finally there is Z 17 where oijaL is that which makes a thing what it is.

A house is made of bricks and mortar and (let us say) nothing else, but bricks and mortar do not necessarily make a house. The o'uaL of house must be present as well, though this is not of course another element.

In Z3 Aristotle lists four candidates for the status of o'uat, essence (TL iv elvL), universal, genus, and substrate. He then divides substrate into form, matter, and composite, and by so doing both replaces and extends (by the addition of composite) his original classification. The substrate thus in a way governs the entire discussion. The first three of the above tasks are those most associated with substrate, and also those which might incline one to take oijaEc' as matter. But Aristotle was never seriously tempted to do this. He realised for the most part that it is the object itself which is described by predicates, which has attributes, and which changes. One apparent exception to this, substantial change, is just that where properly speaking nothing changes at all but something disappears and something else comes to be in its place; prime matter may be looked upon as a logical device for describing the conservation not of matter but of informed matter. Put in these terms this might suggest a further sense of oi)aEo as informed matter or 'stuff', a sense where the plural would be out of place. But Aristotle does not in fact seem to have used oJa' in this sense, nor to have discussed the general question what is conserved. He need in fact only have said that any cpOop& must be balanced by the ysevaLc of some object or objects of the same volume, subject to certain rules of density, such as that a volume of water needs a larger volume of air to replace it (G.C. 321 a 10-22), and that water itself may exist in various states of density (Phys. 217a31ff.). Such rules may be said to presuppose a concept of mass, but I doubt if this concept ever be- came explicit in Aristotle. Another and perhaps more serious exception is the use of Utxy oi)aEa as the subject for essential predication (1049a36); but this is a question concerning Aristotle's theory of predication rather than his theory of substance, and the addition of "AaxLn shows that this is at best a secondary sense of oi)atoc. 1050b27 should perhaps either be taken as a secondary use, or the oiSao taken in a wide sense as 'involving'.

oiuaL then need not be matter as far as the first three tasks are

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concerned and could not possibly be matter as far as the last five are concerned. Matter in fact plays little further part in the subsequent discussion of the double question from which Z starts, What is it that really exists? and What is the ou'aL of things? The claims of the composite, after its introduction at 1029 a 3, appear implicitly rather than explicitly, and attention is concentrated on elaborating the conception of form or essence, leading up to the positive assertion that this is oi)atox in Z 17. A large section of this discussion is devoted to the claims of the universal, which are presumably to be taken as covering the claims of the genus, since this one of the original candidates is not given any separate discussion. But one of the surprising features of this discussion is that Aristotle never makes unequivocally clear just what is the difference between form and universal. Is the form universal or particular, one or many? Many writers, such as Owens (The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, ch. 11), Haring (Rev. of Met., 1956-7), have argued that the form is neither universal nor particular. Aristotle may have been searching for some such view, but in his statement of problems in B 1 (996a9) he ask whether the ipxoaL are xax6Xou or c, t& xc 0' rxcatac TCOv 7pOCypt&v, without mentioning any third possibility. Evidently therefore he started out from the position that they must be one or the other, and the discussion in the closing paragraph of B makes the same assumption. Owens (ch. 17 ? b) thinks that Aristotle may have deliberately based his &iropta on what he knew to be a false assumption; but if this were so one would surely expect that at some time or other he would have cleared the point up explicitly. When the problem is brought up in M 10 it is called a problem for both believers and non-believers in Platonic Forms, and the remarks about knowledge at the end of the chapter seem to distinguish actual and potential knowledge in terms of universal and particular and not to mention any tertium quid. Similarly the remark at 1087a7-10 is simply that if the Platonic view is not taken then a certain difficulty incident to that view does not arise, but we have just seen that Aristotle does not regard the problem as being one only for the Platonists (note also the ye at 1087alO). Cherniss (ACPA, pp. 338ff.) thinks that the 'essential form' is not universal in one sense but is in another. It is not universal in the sense that "what is known directly, the definite form A, is not as such universal but the knowledge of it is incidentally knowledge of the universality of that form as the form of all A's" (p. 347); on the other hand it is universal "not in the sense of mere extension but, like the object of first philosophy, as

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primary and prior to the extension which presupposes it and depends upon it" (p. 350). In M 10 Aristotle is thinking of the former sense, and hence the contradiction with his usual view that the object of knowledge must be universal. At the same time Cherniss thinks that the essential form is not particular; in M 10 Aristotle is talking not of oitalct but of the aroctZeo and &pac' thereof, and it is these that are symbolised by to'a To &Xpoc at 1087a21, but t68& t0 &X9cX refers not to a particular instance of the letter but, as at de An. 417a28-9, to "that intelligible object which, actualized in thought, is thereby distinguished from all other intelligibles at that moment existing only 'potentially' in the mind of the man who knows them" (p. 343). I find it difficult to grasp how the form can be 'not as such universal' but yet have universality as the form of all A's, and 1040a33-b2 suggests that the kind of universality inevitable for an object of definition (and therefore presumably for an object of knowledge) is generality rather than priority (cf. 1040a8ff.). Also though Aristotle does indeed use T6O'e CL of the form upon occasion, what one would expect Toas T' O"CpX to be distinguished from is surely not 'all other intelligibles' etc. but other &X?p's; otherwise one would need something like ro &Xpym r0'a tL 6V. Furthermore if we take the alphas and betas to represent the elements and principles of substances at 1087a7-10 as they did at 1086b22-4 then the point of a7-10 will presumably be that there are many essences, one for each object, just as each syllable BA has its own A. Whether or not Aristotle believed in such essences they still leave us with the problem what they have in common. I conclude then that M10 does not succeed in going beyond the distinction between universals and particulars and does not answer in any but a preliminary way the abropta from which it starts.

Miss Haring (pp. 483-4) distinguishes three 'somewhat different ways' in which the form of a whole can be taken: We have the form by itself and the 'form-having-its-formal-effect-in-a-milieu', the 'essential determinacy' in this latter being either particular or typical. Later she makes considerable use of the distinction between the first and the last of these, between pure form and 'typical form-expanded', to explicate the distinction between form and universal, and holds that the form "is not the common nature instanced by individuals but the ground of the common nature" (p. 482). This distinction is not easy to grasp, but there are certainly passages where Aristotle opposes oiUa(z to the universal in some way, such as 1035b27-30: o a' &vOp&rno4 xocl o tmro; xar lt& ou'St& 'Td rm xmO' gxoccsoc, xao06Xou 8&, ouX .ECaLv 05aL6 aX a&

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auvo6v X1 ?x 'rouv' ro5 ),6you xod rja& T; d xaO6?ou. The point is perhaps brought out more clearly at 1037a5, where it is clearly not only the particular that is being opposed to the universal as oua: aiXov gE xclt 6TL 'I 46v yuX' ou:aC

' 7tpc'Tq, s6o aCiC {U7, o' & &vptooG7 n

'Z Ccdov so et 0,49poZv 4 x0o6Xou. Miss Haring talks of both these passages as treating the universal as a 'departicularised version of an individual' (p. 493; cf. p. 498). Here then we have the form of man,

iu I, contrasted with man as universal, and this seems to be in the general spirit of Z12, where Aristotle asks how we can establish the unity of the object of definition, when definition is in terms of genus and differentia. He answers that the definition is in terms of the differentia, and preferably of the last differentia alone, if, as should be the case, this is such as to involve all the higher differentiae as well as the genus. Man is the two-footed, because only a footed thing could be two-footed and only an animal could be footed (or to give a more realistic example from elsewhere, man is the rational). If 'the rational' (or rationality) is the form of man, and Smith is a rational animal, then the 'departicularised version' of Smith will presumably be 'rational animal' (or rational-animal-ness). (Miss Haring at p. 492 distinguishes 'circle' as typical form-expanded from circularity as pure form; at a purely verbal level one might suppose that 'circularity' sounds more like the universal.)'

The question that arises here is how much this distinction can achieve. In particular can it solve the one-many problem that confronts Plato and Aristotle when they come to treat of substance and universal? Aristotle is of course concerned to solve a one-many problem in Z 12, but this is the problem of a unity threatened by a plurality of elements in a definition, and Aristotle solves it by asserting that the genus is not a separately existing entity alongside the differentia, not even as something which has the differentia in the way that Socrates

1 A view somewhat similar to Miss Haring's, and, as it seems to me, bringing the issue into clearer focus, is expressed by Chung-Hwan Chen (Phron. Vol. IX, pp. 48ff.), who makes a clear distinction between form and 'universal concrete', based primarily on 1035b27-31. Dr Chen holds that this has catastrophic results for Aristotle's attempt to avoid Platonic 'duplication', and I am inclined to agree, though, as Dr Chen points out, the 'universal concrete' is not oijaLa. As will be seen, my general view is that Aristotle is basically on the side of the angels and has made a substantial advance on Plato's metaphysics, but that he fails to consolidate his advance consistently and his Platonism keeps showing through. If Dr Chen is right it shows through perhaps more glaringly than I had assumed.

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has whiteness, which would make the object of definition a complex, like white man. But this does not seem to touch the main objections to the universal as developed in Z13ff., such as that the universal is split up over the things partaking in it; both Socrates and Plato are rational just as they are both men. In fact if one takes these four chapters (Z 13-6) which are directed against the universal being substance one finds that an ouatoc cannot be predicated (1038b 15), nor be a gv xL -oXX&v (1040b29), nor be composed of ouaLt (1039a3) nor of non-o)atocx (1038b23), so that it must be &auvOv?o (1039al7) and so not an object of definition (ib.); also it must have a unity that stuffs, like fire or air, lack (1040b8); nor must it be the substance of two things at once (1038b29, which seems to mean that if the genus is substance, animal will be the substance of both man and Socrates). This last passage is strange, since one would think that if it is relevant to bring in Socrates in this context it is equally relevant to ask whether the form, if substance at all, is not equally the substance of Socrates and Plato; the only apparent ways out of this are either to say that the form is not the substance of Socrates or anyone else (but this would seem to destroy the whole point of the doctrine), or else to say that what is objectionable is that one ouatoa should be the oi'a't of different kinds of things (like man and Socrates). But this of course leaves open the question why the objectionableness should be limited to this. At the end of chapter 13 Aristotle himself realises that he has apparently committed himself to saying that definition is only or mainly of ouia' and yet that there can be no definition even of that, since it is &CarvOvtov. He promises enlightenment later, and Ross refers to Z 15 and H 6, adding that "Aristotle is not very successful in solving the problem" (note at 1039a22). In fact H6, where Aristotle returns to the question of the unity of the object of definition, solves the &7rtop(a by pointing out that though definition is by genus and differentia the genus only exists potentially, so that there are not really two things there (he had in fact hinted at this solution while stating the problem, by the use of (40q) ev'eXczLqc at 1039a4, 17). But this again is an answer only to the Z 12 problem.

An alternative to Miss Haring's view is that of Ross who divides form from universal as it were longitudinally rather than latitudinally, by making the lowest species the form and all the higher genera universals. This view is not quite so arbitrary on Aristotle's doctrine of natural kinds as it would be without it, since at least there is for him such a thing as a lowest species, and this is called ovsaE at Part. An. 1.4

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(644a23, 29). But taken just like this it makes his criticisms of Plato lose at least part of their force, by suggesting that if Plato had confined his Forms to lowest species he would have been all right. But Aristotle nowhere, I think, even hints at this, and certainly uses terms like vEOpwntos and 'vrtoq for universals which are not ovacz (1035b27),

while the arguments of Z 13 (which Ross at p. cviii of his commentary calls 'clearly dialectical') would need supplementing by its being pointed out that words like rxOaCoTv did not there refer to particulars, even in phrases like np&Tov ;tiv y&p ouaLo ixa'tou -T L4oq ex&a6tou, 7 ux cWapeL Xkc o (1038b9). Also of course, if combined with the doctrine that the substance of a thing must not be outside the thing, it leaves wide open the one-many problem of the Parmenides. It is true of course that there are considerable differences between the lowest species and higher genera, such as that it has no indeterminateness left, for when calling something an animal we have yet to specify whether it is a man or a horse etc., but when we have called something a man we do not, for the purposes of Aristotelian science, have to specify any further. This account, which is used by Moreau in his contribution to Autour d'Aristote to defend the claims of the lowest species, would be un- satisfactory as an account of scientific knowledge, because though the scientist may study man as such rather than Socrates, he can surely also study the vertebrate as such, though this would be a genus in Aristotle's scheme. Moreau argues that it does not matter to the lowest species that it is split up because the things over which it is split derive their existence from it rather than vice-versa. Now Aristotle certainly says that the composite of matter and form is posterior (1029 a 31, and a6, if one reads 'o5, adds that form is xZUov 6v). But the question arises just what part the particulars do play, and whether the form can exist independently of them. One is tempted to start from the clear statement in the Categories (2b5) that if primary substances did not exist nothing else would. This is slightly offset by the fact that in chapter 2 secondary substances are not 'in' a subject, where 'in' appears to be defined as meaning 'such as cannot exist apart', which suggests that secondary substances can exist apart; but perhaps this 'definition' is only meant to mark off, without fully explaining, one sense of being 'in' as opposed to another (being in as a part), the possibility being left open of secondary substances not being 'in' primary ones in either of these senses but bearing some different relation to them which still involves their not existing apart. But we cannot of course rely entirely on a presumably early work like the

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Categories, and the Metaphysics certainly speaks of the form as being in the particular (e.g. 1038b21). At 1043b18 Aristotle says that the OUGMLE of some perishable things cannot be Xwpt=c4&, namely things which cannot exist 7rapa& t& tnva, such as house or tool, and adds that there probably are no oCuatx in these cases, but only in the case of natural objects, since in perishables only the ypiJ:Xs can be oiva'Lo. In what sense can natural things have an oi)aLo existing apa' ra rtva' while artefacts cannot? We can hardly, without begging the question, simply appeal to the doctrine of natural kinds, but one obviously relevant feature of natural objects is that they are self -reproductive, so that the form is not confined to any instance it may be in but can be passed on to another (and in fact in a way this also applies in the case of house, only here the form is passed on not from one house to another but from the mind of the builder). But this, and especially the former case, which is the case of form more properly speaking, does not involve that the form can exist apart from all instances (the existence of a form in the builder's mind is certainly a complication, but the very fact that such cases are secondary cases of form shows, I think, that Aristotle is not concerned to build this part of his theory on this complication).

There does not seem to be any reason then to think that for Aristotle a form like man could exist independently of all particulars, and though Socrates may be called posterior in that he only exists as Socrates because he is what he is, namely a man, still it is essential to the form of man that it should be divided over particulars (or at least divisible; there might have been just one man), and in this case we have again the problem how the form can retain its unity if it must appear as a whole in many instances (we can discount the view that each particular has a part of it). (It might incidentally be thought odd that an immaterial thing like a form should be dependent for its existence on the contingency of continued instantiation; but that the sensible world is what it is, at least in outline, is less contingent for Aristotle than for us. Ideally I think he thought that the basic outline of the world could be demonstrated a priori, and this is part of the significance of the doctrine of natural kinds.)

What then are we to say of the unity of the form? Should we follow Albritton (Jnl of Philos., Oct. 24, 1957, ? III) and say that the form is one et8L but not 4pLO[? This I think is on the right lines (in fact at de An. 415b7 Aristotle actually says that what 8atayV?L is one etcr but not 4pLO[LE), but one cannot strictly refer in the singular to what one

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is only willing to call one in form. It can only be the particulars that are one in form, because though many in number they have the same form. Should one then refuse to say of the form either that it is one in number or that it is one in form? The form must of course in one sense be one in number, namely as being one form rather than a lot of forms; but it is one form or essence, and the question is, what is involved in being one form? At Categories 3bl0ff., one of the passages used by Albritton, Aristotle says that all o'uat seems to signify -o6 nL, but that in the case of secondary substances this is not really true but it signifies 7oto6v nr, for the 67roxet[Lvov is not one as a primary substance is. The important term here is 0G[LoLVeLV, which I have translated neutrally as 'signify'. If ,ua&rvcv meant to name Aristotle would be saying that a secondary substance, or the corresponding word, doesn't name a single thing, a r68, but a 7otLov. But this is impossible, not only because the nOL6v would still be one 7toLov, but because of the following phrase, 7roLaV ya'cpLVa o0atv oa-%LocLcL. o-YLotELVeLV must be wider, and what Aristotle means is that while a phrase like 'this horse' signifies (refers to) a single object, 'horse' doesn't refer to anything, but signifies what sort of an object we have in front of us. Why Aristotle feels inclined to say 7r&aa o)a'La (including secondary substance) 8oxi 'r68e TL aYXLOLVCLV is perhaps because we use a noun in saying this is a horse, as opposed to this is white. What Aristotle ought to be saying in the Metaphysics is that terms like 'man' are not the name of an ou'sat in the sense in which one can talk of an oiuta. as an object, but are used to say what the ouacx of an object is. But it seems to me that Aristotle never makes this completely clear (though he often approaches doing so and I think this is the view he is really aiming for), and that his failure to do so is not without important effects. The failure is illustrated by passages such as 1049a34, where, in saying that accidents are predicated of the substance itself but that essence is predicated of the matter, he makes this second point by saying: 6aa. ai o&n c OV4 a' e1664 TL XCL 'o'e TrL TO xOvnrJyopoUevov... But surely what Aristotle means is not that what is being predicated is a 'this' but that the effect of predicating it is to show that the matter is constituted into a 'this', e.g. this horse.

Aristotle, then, was unable to avoid speaking of the form as a kind of entity, even though this was the very fault he found in Plato, and this affected his search for the supersensible in a radical way. We have already seen that it was one of the roles of oijaEc to be that which is most actual, and since Aristotle equates potentiality with matter o)aLta in this role becomes pure form. Pure form is not only free from potential-

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ity, but also from the plurality which leads to the distressing one-many question, and perhaps Aristotle was led both by the 'actualness' of form to suppose that the supreme thing would be a pure form, and by the supposed reality of such a pure form to suppose that even immattered forms must still somehow be talked about as though they were not real objects, so that the form and the composite enter the lists as com- petitors for the status of being real. The fallacy in this development is of course that the notion of form only makes sense in conjunction with that of matter. One can distinguish what it is that makes the bricks and mortar a house from the bricks and mortar, but there is nothing corresponding to be said about, say, a disembodied spirit; we can talk about its form only if we provide some sort of matter, perhaps a genus, to go with it. There is a perfectly good form of unicorn and it is a further question whether there are any unicorns. But what would this further question come to in the case of God? If God is his own form we are caught in the toils of the ontological argument. It might be said that something like a symphony would be a pure form. But a symphony is not anything actual until it is embodied in sound or performed, even if only in the 'inner ear'. Of course all the performances are performances of one symphony, but so for that matter are all humans embodiments of one shape, and the symphony is in no better case than the shape for being an actual object. Otherwise what would a per- formance of the symphony be?

When Aristotle at last comes to his list of supersensible objects or pure forms it consists entirely of such spirits. He tries to define the soul as the form of the (potentially living) body, but such a definition is useless for disembodied spirits, as he in effect recognises when he says that a part of the soul may be separable if it is not the form of any body (de An. 413a6). There seem therefore to be two contradictory or at least divergent strands in Aristotle's thought here. On the one hand he realises that a spirit such as the Unmoved Mover cannot be the form of a body, which raises the question what it is the form of, and on the other he wants his Unmoved Mover to be supremely actual, and so free from matter, and so pure form. But he should surely admit that if he gets rid of matter the notion of form, in the sense in which it was correlated with that of matter, becomes inapplicable. Any piece of stuff must have a certain shape. If we abolish the stuff we can still go on talking about the shape, but the shape will not now 'exist', i.e. be an object. The stuff may also be so organised as to have functions, such as seeing or thinking, and it seems more plausible to say that we could

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abolish the stuff (destroy the body) and still have something that saw or thought; but this is so only in so far as the seeing or thinking is just not the form of the stuff.

What Aristotle really wants of course is something unchanging, and since he analyses change in terms of matter and form he looks for something without matter. Now if change is analysable into matter and form then anything without matter can be guaranteed not to change, and certainly no-one would suppose that the form of man might change into something else. But we are left with the two questions, whether there is anything free from matter, and whether freedom from matter is a necessary as well as sufficient condition of freedom from change. With regard to the first question Aristotle himself allows matter to range more widely than mere 'stuff'. The genus is matter for the species (1045a35), and the continuous is suggested as matter for the straight (de An. 429b18), and it is the categories that are given as examples of things free from both per- ceptible and intelligible matter (1045 a36-b 2), though these are hardly 'things' despite his calling them 67tp ev rt and orep 6v r. Even God, one may suppose, is a spirit, however different from other spirits. With regard to the second question the position is not clear. Aristotle seems to hold that any potentiality will be actualised if given time (de C. 281 b 18-25), but yet also that an efficient cause is necessary. But there could be an object consisting of a form imposed on matter but yet lacking any efficient cause that could replace this form by another. Such an object despite its possession of matter would perhaps not have the potentiality of change, and so we should have a changeless object which included matter. In any case if there is any object which is simple in the sense of not being a composite of form and matter it will not, if it is an object, be a form.

The search for the supersensible may have been motivated by the need to find a final or efficient cause for change in general (see the end of Mlle Mansion's contribution to Autour d'Aristote). I am not concerned with the arguments on this score, but a further motive was evidently the desire to find something free from potentiality and so 'really real', reality coinciding with actuality in the sense of freedom from potentiality. Here Aristotle was still evidently under the influence of the Parmenidean tenet that whatever really exists must exist and be itself at all times. He seems to have felt that if something had the potentiality of being something else then it was not, in full actuality, even itself. It had to be secure both against sometime failing to be what

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it is now and against now failing to be what it could be sometime, and even the 'eternal sensibles' of A had the potentiality of change of place. But whatever answer there may to these demands it does not lie in the direction of pure form.

Bed/ord College, London

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Article Contentsp. 54p. 55p. 56p. 57p. 58p. 59p. 60p. 61p. 62p. 63p. 64p. 65p. 66p. 67p. 68p. 69

Issue Table of ContentsPhronesis, Vol. 10, No. 1 (1965), pp. 1-106Volume InformationFront MatterEditores Lectoribus [p. 1]The Date of Plato's "Symposium" [pp. 2-20]The Theory of Ideas in the "Cratylus" [pp. 21-36]Anaximander's "Apeiron" [pp. 37-53] and Form in Aristotle [pp. 54-69]Rest and Motion in the "Sophist" [pp. 70-77]Neopythagoreanism and 'Plato's' Second Letter [pp. 78-81]The Interpretation of 'No One Does Wrong Willingly' in Plato's Dialogues [pp. 82-96]Inherence [pp. 97-105]Back Matter [pp. 106-106]

lacey aristotleousiaform 1965

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