Aristotle: Hylomorphism, Politics, Movement, and Actuality

Posted on Jan 14, 2025 in Philosophy and ethics

Aristotle’s Hylomorphism: Matter and Form

Hylomorphism is the Aristotelian theory that states everything is composed of matter and form:

  • Matter: The substratum of form.
    • First matter: The absolutely unknown substrate in the composition of all material things.
    • Second matter: The tangible reality. Example: wood.
  • Form: What determines the matter.
    • Substantial form: What makes a thing what it is. Example: table.
    • Accidental form: Accidents of second matter. Example: color of the table.

Aristotle also distinguishes between substance and accident:

  • Substance: That which has reality in itself and not in something else. It cannot disappear because it is the essence.
    • First substance: Concrete beings.
    • Second substance: Genera, species.
  • Accident: Exists in the substance. It can change without changing the substance.

Aristotle’s Political Philosophy

Ethics aims to achieve a good and happy life. However, welfare and happiness cannot be achieved by individuals alone but in a community. Aristotle states that man is a political animal, a social being born to live in a community.

  1. Man, and only man, has logos (word, reason).
  2. The isolated individual is not self-sufficient: only in the polis can the individual develop virtue.

We differentiate between three types of natural communities:

  • Family: Seeks the satisfaction of daily needs. It consists of the husband, wife, children, grandchildren, slaves, and even animals.
  • Village: Arises from the pooling of families to meet basic needs they cannot meet alone.
  • Polis: For Aristotle, it is the most perfect group because only the polis is self-sufficient. It is the end of every community, the place where human beings are fully realized as such, and where they can, therefore, achieve happiness. But not all human beings, only citizens.

Aristotle’s Rejection of Plato’s Theory of Ideas

Aristotle rejected the idea that ideas are separate things. Considering ideas as transcendent derives a number of problems:

  1. It does not succeed in explaining the relationship between ideas and sensible things and therefore fails to explain anything about the sensible world. Plato says that things participate in ideas, but for Aristotle, this is only a poetic license.
  2. If there are ideas of things, there must also be ideas of relations. Besides the idea of man, there must be ideas of father, son, etc. This is lost with the fundamental nature of ideas, their simplicity and uniqueness.
  3. It also follows that if there are ideas of positive things, there must be ideas of negative things, like beauty and ugliness.
  4. With the doctrine of ideas, all you get is to double the problems to solve.

Faced with the Platonic conception, Aristotle tells us that the being of things is not in their essence or in their ideas, but in this world, a physical, sensible world.

Act and Potency

Act: What it is.

Potency: What it can be.

Movement

Movement: The passage from being in potency to being in act.

Types of Movement

  • Substantial change: When the substance changes. It can be:
    • Generation: Birth of a substance.
    • Corruption: Death of a substance.
  • Accidental change: When the accident changes, even though the substance remains. It can be:
    • Qualitative: Loss of some quality.
    • Quantitative: Increase or decrease of the substance (e.g., the tree grows).
    • Local: Translation of the substance.

Causes of Movement

There are four types of causes:

  • Material: What something is made of.
  • Formal: The essence, what makes something what it is.
  • Efficient: The agent that produces the change.
  • Final: The purpose or goal of the change.