object, as he does at the beginning of Book 2 of On Generation and Corruption, that ‘those thinkers are in error who postulate, beside the bodies [four elements, Bibikhin] we have mentioned, a single matter – and that a corporeal and separable matter’.6 Aristotle’s immediate objection is that this matter would duplicate the already known elements: it would either be light like air and fire, or heavy like earth, and so on. It might perhaps be even more basic than the elements, but certainly not of a different kind from them.
Why? Was Aristotle really incapable of imagining imperceptible matter? We are only too good at that, in the case of radiation, say. Ultraviolet and infrared rays are imperceptible. Quantum leaps are imperceptible. Why is it that for Aristotle a body, and any primary matter will be a body, ‘cannot possibly exist without a “perceptible contrariety”’? (329a). Because his perception was more refined. Radiation, owing to its effects on the body, would definitely be considered perceptible: the boundary of perception extended to include that. The same would be true of ultraviolet light: that ‘different’ light, or ‘different’, ‘higher’, ethereal fire was perceived, so to speak, as a change of mood before it was noticed that it caused a suntan. We are mistaken also in thinking that quantum mechanics as an intellectual (which is not the same as a mathematical) system was not elaborated by classical thinking in the topic of the automaton and spontaneity: there was an intellectual system of analogous complexity in the teaching about the soul.
When Aristotle talks of ‘perception by the senses’, he includes intuition and mood; at all events, he includes more than just direct impingement on the sensory organs. If the soul is in some way everything, then everything in a specific way will affect it. Today we have a foreboding that somewhere, in some dark, still place, someone – aliens, the government, the mafia, an international conspiracy – is up to something we cannot detect, do not know about, cannot perceive, cannot influence; or that in the bowels of substance, processes beyond our ken are brewing. Aristotle would have called that induced, superstitious. Everything affects me in one way or another; I react effectively to it in my own individual way, and can influence it just as long as I do not close my eyes or numb myself with noise.
Aristotle’s objection to Plato’s geometrical matter is precisely that such matter would be separate from what affects me personally, just as abstract values do not affect me. But we have already said that identity and unity affect all of me more than some random passing donkey. Again we are back with the problem of so-called substantial numbers. So that is the root of the difficulty! For Aristotle, numbers are apart, like geometric shapes. That is why, without explanation, he rails against Plato’s tetrahedrons again and again. It is impossible for abstract planes to be the wet-nurse (i.e. primary matter) (329a). Being is complete being, the being of things, which means that ‘things’ must be understood differently. And that is how Aristotle does understand them; they are not peeled away from eidos. And that is where we need to look for what we are surmising in Aristotle: ontological numbers, number as being? Almost certainly.
For the present, if Aristotle says something ‘exists’, he is automatically conferring fullness of being on it. He does not look for ‘existence’ among intellectual abstractions. ‘Our own doctrine is that although there is a matter of the perceptible bodies (a matter out of which the so-called “elements” come-to-be), it has no separate existence, but is always bound up with a contrariety’ (329a).
With great aplomb, taking a good swing, Aristotle approaches the topic of matter at the beginning of his Physics, and the examples he gives there for matter, or the substratum, the underlying hypokeimenon, speak volumes.7 The examples are of education and formation: first the becoming of a musical man from a not-musical man; and then the forming of an image, a statue from bronze. We can say, from being not-musical, the man becomes musical. Was being not-musical the substratum underlying the musical man? No, because the condition of being not-musical ceased to be, and the substratum is so called because it continues to lie beneath. On the other hand, we do not say from being a man he came to be musical. That would imply that we had in mind that a man is always unmusical. That is something we do not know. He may be as yet not-musical, but it is not necessarily the nature of man to be unmusical. Another example: we speak of ‘a statue coming to be out of bronze’. A form out of something formless? Here we need to differentiate. Just as it is not necessarily the case that before becoming musical a man was unmusical, so bronze before a sculptor gives it form is not necessarily formless. It is only carelessness that makes it seem so to us. Formlessness is no more the natural state of bronze than being a sculpture is, and in just the same way it is not necessarily formless. Formlessness is not the substratum of the statue: bronze is.
Note that a person is not entirely neutral, not wholly indifferent to becoming musical; it is not meaningless to say that people want to be, are attracted to being, musical. Matter is not chaos. It is not meaningless for a sculptor to say that the bronze wants to be a statue. Aristotle’s third example of a substratum clarifies this situation (190b). There is always something that underlies, from which that which comes to be proceeds: for instance, animals and plants from seed. In this third example, it is quite clear that the substratum has a reserve of movement in it. A person reaches out for the art of music the way a seed reaches out to develop into a living being. In order to understand how bronze reaches out to be a sculpture, we must remember that the Greeks were not at all interested in the microscopic world: for them the world they knew was their microscope and telescope. The bronze reaches out to the sculpture … we need now to return to this idea of Aristotle’s, to seek to penetrate it with the aid of the theories of modern physics about self-organization. We shall ask, however, as physicists cannot: what do we mean by ‘self-’?
I shall read out, to reprise and consolidate what has already been said, a long quotation from the Physics (190b), the point of which is that it introduces nothing new. ‘Thus, clearly, from what has been said, whatever comes to be is always complex. There is, on the one hand, (a) something which comes into existence, and again (b) something which becomes that – the latter (b) in two senses, either the subject or the opposite. By the “opposite” I mean the “unmusical”, by the “subject” “man”’ (190b, 10).8
To repeat: the ‘matter’ for becoming musical was, make no mistake, not the chaos of ‘unmusical’ but human; the chaos of unmusical is the contrary of musical and, paradoxically, it is lodged not in the person but in the musical: until the aim of becoming musical was formulated there was no unmusical; ‘the absence of shape or form or order are the “opposite”, and the bronze or stone or gold the subject”’ (190b, 15). We tend to think that the matter itself was chaos and that it is overcome by eidos. Not a bit of it. Before eidos, matter is not chaos. As soon as eidos comes on the scene, the absence of shape or form or order also appears.
Now, just as the seed wants to develop, does every substratum contain this movement within it? Exactly so, we read in the Physics, Book 1; and in Book 2 we find matter and movement placed side by side (200a, 31). Matter and its movements, the forest and its history. If the forest is like the seed, it, too, will have its history of development.
Notes
1 1. Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. ‘Christianity: Relics and Saints’ (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Christianity/Relics-and-saints). [Tr.]
2 2. See ‘Yggdrasil (Ygg’s Steed)’, in John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 319–22. [AM]
3 3. Ossip Zadkine (1890–1967) was a Russian-born avant-garde French sculptor and artist. [AM]
4 4. Pavel Florenskii, Filosofiia Kul’ta (Moscow: Mysl’, 2004). The ontology of the Cross is the central topic of this 1922 lecture course. [AM]
5 5. The Metaphysics of Aristotle, tr. John H. M’Mahon (London: George Bell, 1884). [Tr.]
6 6. Aristotle, On Coming-to-Be and Passing-Away, tr. Harold H. Joachim (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1922), book 2, part 1 (329a). [Tr.]
7 7.