Philosophical Background to the Modern World - Timothy R. Quigley

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eplaced, etc. At each stage, regardless of the extent and number of changes made, we think ofthese as changes in the same chair even if it no longer looks like the chair we originallyacquired. A similar case can be made for our own identities, regardless of the changes that takeplace from infancy, to adulthood, and old age. No matter how much I change, it's always I whochange. How can that be?Plato's answer to this problem never satisfied Aristotle. Plato claimed that the things that are real,i.e. the Forms, are nonmaterial and, thus, are not subject to change. Rather they constitute aneternal foundation for the very possibility of existence of the things in nature that are subject tothe constant flux, i.e. the being and becoming of natural objects. Thus, it is only the imitations ofthose Forms – the material things of this world – that change. The Forms from which thesethings are derived are eternal and, hence, remain the same. And that which makes somethinggood (the highest value) is itself a nonmaterial Form. So you see that according to Plato changeis a kind of illusion – it's not real.Of course, this ingenious dualistic solution raised its own problems, some of which wereepistemological. For example, if there are two worlds, as Plato claimed – the world of Nature(appearance) and the world of Forms (reality) – and if the latter is totally nonmaterial andinvisible, two questions arise:1. How can we possibly know anything about it?2. If it is entirely non-material, how can it interact with the material world of nature?According to Aristotle, Plato had gone too far in his separation of form and matter. So Aristotleset out to correct Plato's excesses by showing that appearances are not deceiving, but that thethings that are real exist in matter and really do change. In the process he also managed to find aplace for values in the material, ever-changing world of nature.Form and MatterTo comprehend Aristotle's general philosophical scheme of things and to understand his place inthe intellectual world of seventeenth century European philosophy and science, we need to lookbriefly at his approach to nature and scientific explanation. Aristotle was, in many ways, apragmatic thinker concerned with the actual conditions of life and how they might be improved.His search for the good was a pursuit he shared with Plato, Socrates (469-399 BCE), and others.The difference is that Aristotle was to look for his solutions in the material world of nature andnot an ideal, abstract world of immaterial forms beyond it.For Aristotle, form is a characteristic element of the material world. He agreed with Plato thatwe must appeal to the notion of form to explain what we see, identify, and recognize around usand to account for our knowledge of these things. But the form that makes, for example, a treerecognizable as a tree and which allows us to know something about the nature of trees is not sofar removed as to be in some other world, as Plato claimed. Rather, the form is embodied in thisworld and is intimately connected to matter. These forms play an important role in ourexperience of the world, even though it must be admitted that they do have some paradoxicalfeatures.Page 2 of 12 | 17thCentBkrnd.doc

Forms are distinguishable in thought but not in fact. So, for example, we can distinguish onecolored or shaded square from another,but we never experience a square with no color or shade at all, nor do we perceive a color withno shape. What happens here, according to Aristotle's doctrine, is that we separate the form fromthe material thing in our minds through intellectual abstraction and analysis. But it doesn'tfollow that forms can exist apart from the material objects.So what is the proper way to think about the relation of form and matter? First of all, we mustobserve that the world is divided into beings and becomings. Everything in the material world ofnature is in the process of "becoming", i.e. everything is undergoing continual change in theprocess of birth, growth, decay, and death. This process of change can be analyzed in the mostgeneral Aristotelian terms as a movement from the "out-of-which" (that from which a thingmoves or emerges) to the "into-which" (that toward which the thing is moving, which it isbecoming).Now, to understand and to gain knowledge of a thing we must first be able to differentiate itfrom other things, in other words it must be articulated in our experience. 1 This articulationprovides the answer to the question which thing we're looking at or talking about. As we lookinto a room, we distinguish chairs, tables, walls, and human beings from one another in virtue ofthe fact that they are different particular things. But we move quickly in our experience beyondthe mere "whichness" of a thing to a recognition of the kind of thing it is, a process that relies ona definition of the form into which the particular thing (the matter) has developed. Thus, ourability to differentiate allows us to say which thing it is; the form tells us what the thing is.But in addition to the formal classification of the thing, the definition also specifies a function orpurpose, i.e. what the thing is capable of doing and what end it serves. This is whereexplanation comes into the picture. Explanation is an attempt to account for why the thing has acertain kind of form. So, for example, according to Aristotle the function of a chair is to allowone to sit, which explains why it has the form it does; the function of a shoe is to support andprotect the foot, which explains the general form of the shoe; etc. Thus, to answer the whyquestionone must have knowledge, and knowledge according to Aristotle is always of the formof a thing, not the matter. That's because the matter can vary, but the form must be roughly thesame from shoe to shoe, chair to chair, tree to tree, etc. And since knowledge is of things thatstay the same (which accounts for its permanence and reliability), and since it is the matter thatchanges, explanation and knowledge are relative to the form of things.Take, for example, a solid rectangular object. We might ask, "What is it?" The answer could be,"It's a brick." But how would we know this? What makes it a brick? Aristotle's answer is, "Its1 Notice that our discussion is becoming increasingly abstract as we look into the metaphysical and fundamental nature of reality.This is not uncommon in philosophical analysis. But it does take some getting used to. By all means don't hesitate to ask aquestion if you feel you're getting lost in the fog.Page 3 of 12 | 17thCentBkrnd.doc

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