Ancient philosophy · short paper

On the Priority of Form over Matter in Aristotle

A note on De Anima II.1, with an aside on translation.

Demetra Papadopoulos

Department of Philosophy · University of Χ

Abstract

Aristotle's account of the soul as the "first actuality" of a living body — ἐντελέχεια ἡ πρώτη — is usually presented as an innovation against Platonic separability. I argue that it is better read as a clarification of a position already implicit in Heraclitus B49a, and that the Latin translation of εἶδος as forma obscures the continuity. The paper proceeds in three short sections.

The question, briefly

The question is ancient and has not aged well into clarity: in what sense does the soul stand to the body? The Platonic tradition will say the soul is a separable substance, imprisoned for a time in flesh, departing at death; Aristotle, replying, denies both the separability and the prison.1 The soul is not a part of the body, nor is it something housed in it. It is, Aristotle insists, "the first actuality of a natural body which has life potentially."

The soul is an actuality or formulable essence of something that possesses the potentiality of being besouled.

Aristotle · De Anima II.1 · 412b10

The question this paper pursues is what, exactly, Aristotle is answering when he makes this reply. The standard answer is Plato. I will suggest, shortly, that he is also — and perhaps primarily — answering a problem that Heraclitus posed five generations earlier.

The Heraclitean premise

Heraclitus's fragment B49a is usually read as a poetic observation about flux. It is something more than that. The claim that "into the same rivers we step and do not step; we are and are not" is a claim about what kind of thing a person is — an ongoing activity, not a settled stuff. It is the identity condition for a being-alive that Aristotle will later articulate as form acting on matter.2

If this reading is correct — and I grant it is philologically underdetermined — then the doctrine of the soul-as-form does not arrive in Aristotle as an innovation. It arrives as a technical formulation of a problem already in the tradition, one to which the Platonic answer (separable soul) looks, from this angle, like an overcorrection.

The trouble with forma

English "form" is, by now, so encrusted with metaphysical connotations that it does its reader a disservice. The Greek εἶδος means simply look or shape — the way a thing presents itself, the arrangement it has. When Aristotle says the soul is the εἶδος of a living body, he is not saying something forbidding; he is saying the soul is the look of being alive, the manner a body has of being a body that does the things bodies do.3

The Latin forma carries a more technical charge, and the English "form" inherits it: we hear in the word the mediaeval scholastic apparatus, the Aristotelian categories systematised. This is not Aristotle's fault. It is the fault of the centuries between him and us. Stripping the word back to look restores the claim to the tractable shape it originally had.

The modest conclusion of this short paper, then, is two-fold. First: the Aristotelian account of the soul is best read as a completion of Heraclitus rather than a departure from him. Second: the standard English translation of εἶδος is not innocent, and a reader of the De Anima should try it twice — once with "form," and once with "look."

Notes

  1. The standard citations for the Platonic view are, of course, Phaedo 80–82 and Phaedrus 245c–249d. Aristotle's reply runs across De Anima I.3–5 and II.1.
  2. I follow the Diels-Kranz numbering throughout; for an alternative reconstruction of B49a, see Kirk, Raven, and Schofield, The Presocratic Philosophers, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1983), §211–213.
  3. The linguistic point is not original. See Ackrill, Aristotle the Philosopher (Oxford, 1981), ch. 5, where the same suggestion is made in passing and then set aside.

Bibliography