Mon 15 Jan 2007
Substance
Posted by Thomas Larson under Philosophy Department Blog , Thomas Larson , Weekly Word[2] Comments
Substance
There is a kind of paradox attached to the Aristotelian notion of substance. For “substance” is distinguished from the so called “accidents,” and is said to be the true goal of our minds’ quest for knowing. As it is not one of the accidents, substance is not something sensible; no description can ever give you the substance of a thing. And yet, it’s only through the sensually observable (hence through the accidents) that the human mind can arrive at the substance of the thing. This process usually goes by the name “abstraction” – we abstract what is substantial from what is accidental in order to arrive at the essence of a thing. But accidents are essential to material substances. And some accidents are called essential properties, while the others are ‘merely accidental’. But how can we distinguish the essential properties from mere accidents without first knowing the substance? And how can we arrive at the substance of a thing without first being able to distinguish an essential property from a quality that is merely accidental?
What do we know when we know the substance of a thing? What makes us think substance can really be known at all? And if it can be known, what must the mind do to reach and articulate it with out obscuring it further?
This is the problem that led the thinkers of the scientific revolution to discard the idea of a substantial form or internal nature. If we have no access to the substance of a thing, then it is useless in the explanation of its actions and properties.
We try to use the substantial form of a thing to explain its actions. But we find that we can only describe the substantial form of a thing as a faculty, in terms of what it does. Thus our attempts at explanation will be empty or circular. Acid eats away metal because it has a corrosive nature. Glass breaks because it is brittle. (But corrosive just means “eats away things,” and brittle just means “breaks”.) So the explanation is empty: “Glass breaks because it breaks.”
The classic example of this is from Moliere’s The Imaginary Invalid, where Moliere makes fun of the medieval doctors examining a candidate who explains why opium puts you to sleep because of its dormative virtue. (The relevant passage is here.)
The moderns would be more likely to interpret what Aristotle called accidents, not as real properties of the object itself, but as potentialities of the things mechanical properties to affect things in different ways. (This, of course, is the distinction between primary and secondary properties, especially in Locke.)
Dave Banach writes: ‘We try to use the substantial form of a thing to explain its actions. But we find that we can only describe the substantial form of a thing as a faculty, in terms of what it does. Thus our attempts at explanation will be empty or circular. Acid eats away metal because it has a corrosive nature. Glass breaks because it is brittle. (But corrosive just means “eats away things,” and brittle just means “breaks”.) So the explanation is empty: “Glass breaks because it breaks.”’
For Thomists and Aristotelians, substantial form is taken as a cause that explains certain kinds of effects. It is not an efficient cause — so it’s not a mechanical force. One arrives at the notion of a substantial form by observing radically different kinds of behaviors in material bodies. Aristotle might say — consider the different behaviors of electrons and protons; both are bundles of material energy, but that energy manifests itself in radically different ways. How does one account for the radically different properties manifested in material bodies? Aristotle thought the best explanation was that the material (source of active and passive potencies) was ordered in fundamentally different ways — this order is itself the explanation; order = form.
But why not say its all a bundle of accidental forms. Why a single substantial form. I think the answer is that complex bodies manifest a regular coherence — a intelligible unity amidst the multiplicity. If this is so, there must be a cause of the complex coherence. A multiplicity of accidental forms does not explain fundamental, intelligible coherence. Substantial form — an ordering of the body’s many aspects towards integrity — does.