Having Claimed That There Is Matter Only for Things That Are Generated and Change Into One Another Aristotle Raises Two Puzzles
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Aristotle on the matter of corpses in Metaphysics H5 Alan Code (I) An Alleged Difficulty for Aristotle’s Conception of Matter Aristotle’s Metaphysics employs a conception of matter for generated items according to which the matter of an X is something that exists before the X, and is that from which the X comes-to-be.1 Furthermore, for Aristotle there are both actual beings and potential beings, and the matter for an X is a potential X. The matter for a horse, for instance, is a potential horse. The potential horse might never become an actual horse, but if and when it does, it does so because the matter (i.e., the potential horse) possesses the form of a horse. When the form is present to the matter, this potential horse constitutes an actual horse. In De Anima, II.1, his hylomorphic analysis of sublunary living substances treats the matter, or what is potentially living a horse’s life, as ‘organic body’,2 and the form that makes the matter an actual horse is described as the first actuality of such a body.3 The body is what is potentially alive. However, John Ackrill and others4 have argued that according to this conception of the body of a living thing, the body is not alive merely contingently. This would seem to contradict the thesis from the Metaphysics that the matter for a living substance is a potential F that exists before that substance does. Ackrill argues that the body that is potentially 1 See, for instance, Metaphysics Z7, 1032b30-1033a1, with a5-8. 2 412a27-b1. 3 412a27-28. 4 See Ackrill 1972 and Frey 2007. 1 alive is not able to exist after the death of the plant or animal of which it is the body. One of the texts adduced in support of this view is: “We must not understand by that which is potentially capable of living what has lost the soul it had, but only what still retains it; but seeds and fruits are bodies which are potentially of that sort.”5 The corpse of a horse that has died has no capacity to be brought back to life. Neither it, nor the parts of which it is composed, are potentially living an equine life. This is thought to support the views that whatever it is that remains after the horse has died is not an ‘organic body’ that served as its matter, and that the matter for a horse cannot exist after the death of the horse. What is this ‘organic body’? Commentators often have often understood it to be a “body having organs.” Ackrill, for instance, writes as follows: “Aristotle characterises the animal’s body as potentially alive and as ‘having organs’ – such organs, clearly, as eyes, hands, heart, etc.” 6 If an organic body is a body having non-uniform organs such as these, then since these kinds of organs cannot exist without soul,7 it would follow that 5 De Anima II.1, 412b25-27, from The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. 6 p.126 7 See Metaphysics Z11, 1036b30-32. Something is not a hand (except homonymously) without soul, since without soul it would not be able to perform the function of a hand. His view is not simply that a hand is not a part of a man if it is not ensouled, and hence unable to perform the function of a hand. This would incorrectly leave open the possibility that some hand that is now a part of a human could at a later time exist without soul, though in that case it would no longer be a part of man. However, the hand that is currently a part of some human cannot exist when the man dies, or when it is severed 2 the organic body itself cannot exist without soul. This would effectively block the possibility that an organic body of the relevant sort could be potentially alive only contingently. Since the animal itself has organs such as eyes and the like, on such a view it is hard to see how Aristotle could distinguish the animal from its body. If the organic body cannot exist without its non-uniform parts, and these cannot exist without soul, then it cannot exist after the death of the horse. Equally, it would not exist prior to the animal either, and so it is able to exist at all and only those times at which the composite substance exists. Since an animal’s organic body is its matter, this requires that the matter exists only when the composite itself exists. Additionally, as the body that potentially has life, the matter of an animal exists only when that potentially is realized. (II) Two Aristotelian Puzzles about Matter Having claimed that there is matter only for things that are generated and that change into one another, Aristotle raises two puzzles about the matter for such changes. The first is a puzzle about the manner in which that matter is related to contraries. Suppose that sickness and health are contraries and that the body is the matter that is potentially healthy. Is the body also potentially sick? Likewise, if water is the matter for wine and is potentially wine, is it also potentially vinegar? from the body. A dead hand, or severed hand, is not the same entity as the living hand. It is a hand in name only. We can see the same view in Meteorology IV.12: 329b31- 330a2. 3 Aristotle does not develop the puzzle before answering it, but let us pause to consider why it might seem problematic to treat the body as potentially sick or the water as potentially vinegar. Suppose that makes something potentially F in the first place is the possession of a dunamis or capacity. Just as an eye potentially sees because it possesses sight, the capacity to see, a body is potentially healthy because it possesses a certain capacity -- a capacity to be healthy. This is a capacity to receive a certain form. Furthermore, if the matter that is potentially healthy also is potentially sick, and being potentially F always requires an appropriate dunamis by reference to which something is potentially F, then if it is potentially sick it must also have some dunamis or capacity to be sick. But is this the right way to look at the situation? The human body has an ability to be in a healthy condition, and being healthy is the exercise of that ability. However, there is not some other ability that it also has, the exercise of which constitutes its being sick. However, lacking such an ability, how is it that it can be potentially sick? His answer involves distinguishing a form and a corresponding privative condition, or sterêsis. Health is a form and also what he calls a ‘hexis’, a state or condition that the body is in when we call it ‘healthy’. A body is spoken of as potentially healthy because of its relation to this state. It has the ability to be in that state. However, illness is not some other form or hexis that a body might be in, but rather is the privation of that condition in the kind of body that is of such a nature to be receptive of health. This privation is not merely the absence of health in the 4 body, but is the destruction (or, I would suggest, rather the result of the destruction) of health in a body.8 Additionally, he describes the destruction as ‘against the nature’. There are two ways one might take this, according to whether the nature in question is the nature of the body or the nature of health, but arguably they come to the same thing. Health is the good condition of the body, and as such this is a natural condition of the body. The privation of health is contrary to this good condition, and so is ‘against’ both the nature of the body and the nature of health. Despite the fact that wine and vinegar are not opposites in the way that health and sickness are, he cites this as another instance of the puzzle as to how matter is related to opposites, and the same kind of solution is supposed to apply here as well. Hence water is wine by virtue of the possession of a form and a positive state or condition that water is able to possess. In accordance with his solution to the puzzle, water is vinegar not by possessing the form of vinegar, for there is no such form. It is rather that water is vinegar due to the destruction of the form of wine. As a result of this destruction the water is characterized by privation or lack of a form. Additionally, this destruction is against the nature--either the nature of the form or the nature of water. If this is parallel to the other case, then the form of wine would be a good condition for which water is naturally suited, and as such a natural condition of water. The privation is not simply the absence 8 This would seem to rule out the possibility that something could be chronically ill from birth. A diseased state requires some kind of falling away from a good condition, even if that good condition is merely some part of health, as opposed to its entirety. 5 of this good condition, but is the condition that water is in as a result of that form having been destroyed in that water.