Responding to a post by Matthew of Footnotes2Plato, Michael of Archive Fire nicely critiques the notion that we must presuppose formal causality as a distinct sort of causality. Defending forms, Matthew writes:
Forms can have no cause or effect independently of their realization in and through some actual occasion. But still, form cannot simply be reduced to its material instantiations, either. Forms, in Whitehead’s terms, are possibilities of definiteness. They determine (or allow occasions to determine) how an occasion will be characterized. If we dispense with forms as ontologically basic, we have not at all sided with concrete reality over abstraction. On the contrary, without the participation of eternal objects (Whitehead’s term for forms in his reformed Platonism), “matter” and “energy” can take on no definite quality. They remain vague abstractions lacking all particularity.
To this, Michael responds:
Here I think Matt is presupposing the function of the term in dispute (i.e.‘form’) prior to explaining why “matter” is incapable of expressing structure of itself.
Quite right. The central assumption of Matt’s critique of materialism– which is one I see quite often and not unique to him –is that matter is formless. The argument runs that because matter is formless (though this assumption is seldom stated outright), form must descend from elsewhere and be imposed on matter to give it structure. Continuing the argument, if this is the case, then it is because having already established that matter is formless (and this is never established in an argument by anyone) it is chaos, and because it is chaos, it could not give rise to form out of itself. Therefore form must come from elsewhere. And since we cannot imagine how form might descend on formless matter of its own accord, we are led to conclude that matter must take on form through the agency of a Demiurge or God that both contains the forms in its intellect and imposes them on matter giving it structure.
Such is the theory of hylomorphism that originated with Aristotle. It’s likely that Aristotle himself was not guilty of this crass form of hylomorphism where form and matter get reified and treated as distinct entities, yet this sort of hylomorphism is perhaps one of the most persistent tendencies of all speculative thought. We can readily see how people arrive at this idea and why they find it so persuasive. When looking at someone making clay bricks (or the equivalent) they note that the clay takes on a new shape as a result of the wooden form that the clay is pressed into. They thus reason
See! the clay was formless and now it has form. That form could have only come from the imposition of a form from without, and that imposition required the agent that both fashioned the form– in his intellect when he imagines and then in other matter when he makes the wooden form –that then imposes the form on the formless matter.
The problem is that clay is not formless. In fact, clay has quite an exquisite and determinate form at the molecular level. Indeed, it even has form at the molar level as a heap of clay. It’s just not the form that we would like it to have. What takes place between the wooden form and the clay is not an imposition of form on the formless, but an encounter between structured matters that generates a new structure as a result of the interplay of both of the matters interacting with one another. It is not an “active principle” (form) being imposed on a “passive principle” (matter) from without. Rather, both matters are structured, and both matters are simultaneously active and passive in relation to one another.
Invariably I find some variant of the hylomorphic assumption in every argument against materialism. It’s always the same old saw: matter is un-form-matted or unformatted and thereby in need of form. The problem is that those who advance this argument never give us any reason to suppose that there’s anything like unstructured or unformatted matter. Everywhere we look in the world we find matter that is exquisitely structured. We never find anything like a pure hyle. This is one of the central reasons that I find the process philosophy of Deleuze far more persuasive than that of Whitehead. Deleuze is able to do more with less. He doesn’t make recourse to ad hoc transcendent entities (forms, Demiurge, God) arrived at through analogical reason to rather inaccurate observations of how craftsmen craft– inaccurate because inevitably these models of craft presuppose the myth of the author where the author has everything planned out in his intellect in advance and simply fashions matter according to the model in his mind –but rather Deleuze sees structure as immanent in matter. Matter is pervaded by structure and singular potentialities. It’s never unformed, though it is always formable… In and through encounters between matters.
If I had a list of top five philosophical errors to avoid in metaphysics, hylomorphism would be among them. Everywhere we encounter the hylomorphist temptation in philosophy, the humanities, and the sciences. We find it in the way that Kant talks about the relationship between concepts or the categories of the understanding and the sensibility. We see it in the way that Chomsky talks about deep grammar. We see it in the way that so many people talk about genetics as a blueprint of the organism and phenotype. We see it in the way that people talk about art and artists, implying that the meaning of the work is in the author and that he had an image in his mind that he merely “embodied” in the formless matter of paint. We see it in the way that many talk about society, suggesting that the social can only take on plan, structure, order, through the agency of a leader/king (the mirror of God on earth). We see it in the way that people often talk about society as a system of rules or laws, as if these rules and laws weren’t effects and formalizations of much fuzzier structures immanent to social relations. Examples could be multiplied endlessly. It’s extremely difficult to think in non-hylomorphic ways, but hylomorphism is certainly mistaken. And as the example of genetics, law, and the king indicate, it’s also dangerous. Matter is both structured and anarchic. Order does not descend from above, but is rather always a communistics or anarchistic result… Which is to say it is always the result of the collaborative interplay structured matters that are simultaneously passive and active. It’s hard to overcome our will to mastery (which is really, I think, what hylomorphism is libidinally about), but hylomorphism is metaphysically mistaken, epistemically mistaken, and politically and ethically dangerous. Bergson famously argued that there’s no such thing as disorder, but rather “disorder” is just the absence of order that we’d like to have for the sake of our own action or aims. Simondon and Deleuze make similar points, though in a far more refined way. These arguments continue to hold today, yet they still, I think, have not been heard. Ontology, politics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have still not become flat… Which is to say, anarchistic and communistic.
April 14, 2012 at 1:40 am
Interesting. I’m not sure why we should think matter can have its own form when every law or pattern we supposedly see in matter is in actuality a concept seen only in our minds. The patterns we see in nature are actually formed in our intelligence as conclusions about the unknown blitz of sense data we receive, which is why, in fact, they can change over time with different scientific paradigms, and even from individual to individual over time.
The real form-creation happens in the conscious mind. Matter is nothing but a word, an abstraction for certain aspects of conscious experience. And all conscious experience is the result of intelligence — an intelligence behind our minds.
April 14, 2012 at 2:14 am
Yes, yes! All those patterns are just us and our concepts. We can make concepts however we like! Try it with vaccinations and the space shuttle. We are like Atlas holding the world on our backs, except it’s not the world but our own alienated image we hold on our backs. You’re absolutely right!
April 14, 2012 at 2:19 am
Wait, you meant something more sophisticated than that? Well whatever did you mean? How can you account for vaccinations and the space shuttles based on concepts and intellect alone? I’ll be intrigued to hear your theory here. I’ll be even more intrigued to hear your theory about how hungry is merely a conceptual and intellectual problem. This will be very interesting.
April 14, 2012 at 2:26 am
Well I certainly love it when people agree with me so easily. It’s rather uncommon on the Internet. Nevertheless, for other readers who might not be so easily persuaded: the fact that technology (sometimes) works has no bearing on whether matter has intrinsic form. There are an infinite number of ways we might view the form of any particular set of matter.
Within this infinite set, there is a lesser infinity of ways that has some predictive value — more or less depending on the context, and depending on who’s measuring the value.
Newton’s physics worked partly as does Einstein’s. The sun can rotate around the earth in a somewhat complex astronomical system and still accurately predict some facets of the solar system.
Indeed, the human ability to both hone in on in multiple different, and differently useful, ways of seeing the world and to hone in, within this infinite set of possible ways of seeing the world, on just those possibilities that seem to be useful, just emphasizes the workings of conscious intelligence.
Matter is just a useful word. The only reality that exists is thought. There is of course what appears to be a common reality. It is not matter, it has no form. It is merely the product of a common intelligence that speaks to us all.
April 14, 2012 at 2:43 am
I see, so your argument is that partial understanding is no understanding and therefore it’s all conceptual. Again, you’re claiming it’s our own intellect and concept that kill us and that were we merely to change that we’d enjoy endless life?
April 14, 2012 at 2:44 am
And, of course, you’d advance this argument on the grounds that we only partially understand death so therefore it must be conceptual?
April 14, 2012 at 3:22 am
“Again, you’re claiming it’s our own intellect and concept that kill us and that were we merely to change that we’d enjoy endless life?”
Not at all. You seem to be equating the idea that a common reality with constraints on our life entails that matter have form.
That’s what I’m disputing. The constraints and the common reality both are not due to matter having form, but due to the fact that the sense data that we receive is not controlled by our individual minds. It’s controlled by a universal intelligence. And it’s not really matter.
That we can then put this data together in certain ways that we think are useful is a property of our psychology, not of the non-existent matter. The fact that there are constraints on our existence — although their exact nature is basically a matter of our interpretation — is not due to matter having form but rather to the fact that we don’t accept solipsism, that reality (which is the thought of an intelligence) can surprise us.
We talk as if the universe has laws, has form, is made of atoms, and so on, for pragmatic purposes and basically because we can’t help it, not because it actually possesses those features in any real way.
Anyway, where in matter would its structure be? As form is said of matter it cannot be matter. So what is it then? And whatever it is, it would have to admit of an infinity of possible views, all technically compatible with it, even if there were also so-called wrong views. This is truly stretching the word “form” beyond all possible recognition.
Is there really such a thing as a photon or an electron, or are those merely words that summarize data gathered from scientific instruments, provisionally and conveniently — data summarized in the minds of individual scientists?
“And, of course, you’d advance this argument on the grounds that we only partially understand death so therefore it must be conceptual?”
Well I think there’s no question at all that if there’s anything we don’t understand, it’s death. It’s not that death is (only) conceptual, as if concept is opposed to everything else. Everything is concept, only not everything is our controlled concept, and nothing at all is matter.
April 14, 2012 at 3:19 pm
According to hylomorphism, at least of thescholastic aristotelian tradition (thomism), the story is a bit different from what you’ve portrayed here. It’s not so simple as to say that there’s matter and then form that comes fom the outside. The question is: Which form? There are two radically (meaning: ontologically) different types of forms hylomorphism talks about: *substantial* forms and *accidental* forms. Now, if I’m not missing something obvious, when you’re criticising hylomorphism, you seem to talk about accidental forms (such as a particular shape) as if they’re being impressed on some sort of formless matter. But I think that’s not a very precise account of hylomorphism.
As far as I can remember, the minimal version of aristotelian scholastic hylomorphism goes something like this: the *prote hyle* (or *materia prima* in Latin) is pure potentiality without any form. It is like pure materiality that is neither wood nor glass nor anything definite yet. That doesn’t mean it’s just abstract, because it is really present in material substances, but it is nowhere found *as such*. For materia prima to become a substance of a certain type (to logically become a substance, so it’s not actual physical becoming) it must have a certain substantial form, such as “woodness” to become a piece of wood. Now, every such substance has a set of *actual* qualities or accidental forms (a certain shape, size, color, etc.), but also a whole array of *potential* forms, which it can actualize under certain circumstances. This set of forms is substance-specific and the substance has it in virtue of it’s substantial form (in this case: woodness). For instance, a rough piece of wood can become smooth under the hands of a carpenter, but it cannot become fluid, simply because the substantial form of woodnes does not have the accidental form of fluidity in it’s set of potential qualities.
Further, under certain conditions, a substance can change into another type of substance: a piece of wood can change into another type of substance, such as ash, under severe heat. In this case it is said, that the woodness cannot withstand a particular qualitiy (excessive heat), and sort of goes back into potentiality of prime matter, which is exactly the place where the new substantial form (“ashness”) is drawn from to actuality (it has always been there potentially).
The reason I am doing this metaphysical excercise here is that, as far as I know, no serious scholastic hylomorphist would say that a heap of clay is formless and it gains a form only when pressed into a brick. A heap of clay is a substance with well defined set of forms. What happens in the case of brick-making is only a change of an accidental form: the shape, which was there before – potentially. And that actually sounds much like your own account of Deleuze: you could say immanent instead of potential, I guess, although I’m no specialist of Deleuze, so I won’ try to develop that.
Let me say for the record that I’m no fan of hylomorphism myself, I’ve only tried to make sure that what’s being attacked here isn’t a straw man. Anyway, thanks for reading and sorry for my imperfect English. (BTW, language skill is also an accidental form of the soul, categorized as “active potency”, or sometimes a “habitus”, bu that’s another story.)
April 14, 2012 at 3:52 pm
Reblogged this on Sri Aurobindian Ontology.
April 14, 2012 at 4:36 pm
Grasshopper,
You need to read more carefully. I explicitly say Aristotle does’t advocate the sort of hylomotphism I discuss in the post. That aside, we can add all the bells and whistles you add here (scholastic obfuscation, I’d call it). That doesn’t change the fact that hylomorphism cognitively invites all the habits of thought I’ve outlined here. There’s a reason we see it associated with design arguments again and again.
April 14, 2012 at 11:47 pm
Levi,
“There’s a reason we see it associated with design arguments again and again”
Yes, and it seems that grasshopper grabbed the wrong end of the stick in thinking that you confuse accidental with essential form when it is precisely the point that the reason stems from an extrinsic source i.e. the straw man is not your outline but those who appropriate hylomorphism for arguments for intelligent design.
grasshopper,
You momentarily and unwittingly fall foul of this in your example of the carpenter i.e. “under the hands of the carpenter etc…” suggesting that the carpenter gives form of smoothness to the wood which raises question how the carpenter can ‘give’ something which it already has. I find Heidegger’s line of thought on this topic compelling i.e. as opposed to giving the carpenter reveals etc…
What I would interesting and where I would proberly depart from Levi would be on his views of final cause.
Will.
April 15, 2012 at 5:55 am
[…] some of his reflections, relating the issue to the old debate between realists and nominalists. Levi Bryant/Larval Subjects also chimed in, arguing that my Whiteheadian articulation of formal causation is just hylomorphism […]
April 15, 2012 at 7:38 pm
Hi Levi, while I would argue with your use of Matt as a hylomorphism whipping boy, it’s clear from the comments that there are still many nominalists out there who believe that their ideas are formative of important matters!
Here’s an few example of such thinking from today’s Washington Post OUTLOOK section: Chris Mooney’s “Politics is all in Our Heads” makes much of how psychology shows that “liberals consistently score higher on a personality measure called ‘openness to experience’ … Conservatives, in contrast, tend to be less open … and more ‘conscientious'”. Perhaps, but these are learned attitudes & practices, not genetic traits. The more serious problems with Mooney’s analysis are the related claims that “Liberals & conservatives have access to the same information” and that “there is only one reality”. This is simply untrue! No one has access to ALL information, nor to ALL of reality. Everyones’ views are filtered – necessarily ignoring some sources of information in favor of others. Ann Romney and other rich, stay-at-home moms simply have little clue of the pressures faced by single moms who must work long hours and somehow also attempt to raise their kids. They do not face the same reality!
But, this certainly doesn’t mean that reality is *constructed* according to our concepts, only that reality is *filtered* according to our concepts, which is sometimes helpful when it comes to everyday affairs, but mostly unreliable when translated to the larger scale.
In case it’s not clear, I totally agree with this post’s critique of hylomorphism. Best, Mark
April 17, 2012 at 10:22 am
[…] Hylomorphism: The Myth of Formlessness (larvalsubjects.wordpress.com) 37.774929 -122.419415 Rate this: Share this:FacebookTwitterDiggEmailPrintLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. This entry was posted in Alfred North Whitehead, Brian Swimme, Cosmology, Graham Harman, Philosophy, Plato, quentin meillassoux, Schelling and tagged cosmology, materialism, Ontology, Process, Process philosophy, unity. Bookmark the permalink. […]
April 19, 2012 at 8:53 am
Mark,
Let me say this: I know that the point od Levi’s critique of hylomorphism is in the last paragraph of the post, so he just tried to briefly sketch out the doctrine in the first part. I just wanted to make a clarification to avoid the misconception that hylomorphism just says: “matter is formless, and then forms come from outside, period.” The fact is that the doctrine had been most fully developed in scholastic aristotelianism and that’s the only reason I gave an explanation from that point of view. The account Levi gave of hylomorphism in the first part of his post is really so simplified that I don’t believe anybody has actually ever advocated it this way. And yes, the example of the heap of clay clearly shows confusion of the substantial and accidental form. What is formless is not clay, but pure materiality, which is nowhere found as such, yet it is a real constituent of every material substance. So I don’t think that any serious type of hylomorphism has ever defended the claim that matter can be found formless anywhere. Even the accidental shape doesn’t shape the totally unshaped matter but gives a shape to previously shaped matter. That’s not a problem for hylomorphism, I think.
Ad carpenter: I’m not making any mistakes here as far as I know, because the point is exactly that the carpenter doesn’t literally ‘give’ a form to a piece of wood. From the point of the carpenter, he applies the form of smoothness in his mind to the wood, yes, but that’ just a regulative idea according to which he works. What happens on the actual metaphysics of substance in this case is that under the hands of the carpenter the form of smoothness is just brought from potentiality to actuality (and vice versa: the form of roughness goes from actuality back to potentiality). The point of this is that hylomorphism (as any other theory of material world) shoud be able to explain, why is it impossible to liquefy wood, for example. If I have an idea of liquid wood in my mind, how come I am not able to impress this form on wood? Well, exactly, the substantial form of wood doesn’t allow for the form of liquidity: it is not in the wood, not even potentially. Etc.
But again, I am no hylomorphist, I think the early moderns had made a very strong argument against it. The problem with this way of arguing (at least in the physical domain) is that for every new quality that we observe in a material object we have to postulate another separate form on the ontological level.
April 20, 2012 at 4:49 pm
Levi, you write: “Invariably I find some variant of the hylomorphic assumption in every argument against materialism. It’s always the same old saw: matter is un-form-matted or unformatted and thereby in need of form.” I am not even sure I share the terms of this discussion, so it’s hard to think that I will fall into this invariance even though I do not share all your convictions about ontics. “Form” is used here as if it had clarity and certainly the philosophical tradition seems largely in this mode where the arguments become — as here — about its existence or not or the relations between supposed “things” and forms. Since this site valorizes science, it might be worth mentioned that there are — depending on whom you ask — 3, 4, or 5 states of matter (solid, liquid, gas, plasma, helium 2/Einstein/Bose condensate) and only one — a very unlikely one — corresponds to what individuals usually refer to under form. Indeed, some physicist comedians see the solid as just slow liquid. I am NOT contending — before I get help — that form is unavailable in the non-solid BUT that its attributes are more complex, dynamic, and open than most of the models that haunt philosophy. Further, I have followed to some degree your versions of more flexible form notions though they seem to share an intrinsic commitment to abiding integrity/coherence I see as imposed. If — as I believe — form “in nature” is transitional and interactive, permeable and unstable, and these are its usual characteristics, then the emphasis on a choice between form and formlessness is unhelpful.
April 22, 2012 at 1:15 am
[…] response to a discussion unfolding in an earlier post, the always thoughtful Dan remarks: Levi, you write: “Invariably I find some variant of the […]
May 23, 2012 at 6:15 pm
[…] since starting graduate school. HERE is an early example, and HERE is a more recent response to Levi Bryant/Larval Subjects on the same […]
May 25, 2012 at 1:47 pm
[…] Matthew is correct in pointing out that I don’t believe in formal causality. This is because I don’t believe that there’s such a thing as unformed matter. The concept of formal causality only makes sense and is required if one advocates the view that there’s unformed passive matter awaiting form to give it structure. However, in my view, all matter has form or is structured. While matter is formable as a result of encounters with other entities, it is never without structure. For this reason I don’t need a concept of formal causation distinct from matter. A pile of clay is not a formless stuff awaiting structure. It has all sorts of structure (its molecular structure, the contours of the pile, etc). It just doesn’t have the form that the craftsman wants (that of a brick or a vase). Wherever one speaks of matter as formless and awaiting form you can be sure that there’s anthropocentrism lurking in the background. I’ve written about this issue in an earlier post on hylomorphism. […]
November 17, 2012 at 10:08 pm
[…] seems to crop up as a sort of leitmotif throughout the history of philosophy. In an interesting post Levi R. Bryant, on just this topic (Hylomorphism: The Myth of Formlessness), describes his own […]
August 15, 2013 at 10:54 pm
“Bergson famously argued that there’s no such thing as disorder, but rather “disorder” is just the absence of order that we’d like to have for the sake of our own action or aims.”
I’m late and well out of my league here, but still can’t help asking: can’t we distinguish between disordered states and ordered states by way of entropy? that is, the lump of clay would be entering a lower entropy–more ordered–state upon becoming a brick, since statistically there are many more ways to be a lump than a brick. thus things we distinguish as forms would be not entirely arbitrary.
August 2, 2014 at 4:41 am
I think you made a valuable contribution to hylomorphism is saying, and “since we cannot imagine how form might descend on formless matter of its own accord, we are led to conclude that matter must take on form through the agency of a Demiurge or God that both contains the forms in its intellect and imposes them on matter giving it structure.” However, you seem grievous towards hylomorphism and I am not sure why.
Don’t forget prime matter. For example, it may be helpful to revisit how elements are formed. New elements are born from something. What is born, has been en-formed. Even these words as symbolic expressions of meaning are formed from matter. For example, I think someone once said the entire internet was about the size of a strawberry as of about 2013. So…the data, however, minute is en-formed matter.
Anyways, back to what you said in the first place, how does pure potential (prime matter) become en-formed? God. There must be a fragment of God resident in our minds that is the power which actualizes pure potential. God must be unknowable or else we couldn’t know anything at all. It’s kinda like the infinity or eternity fallacy. We must always lack at least one degree of freedom or we would be without any freedom whatsoever. Although chief among all theories is God. However, with this said, does hylomorphic theory not seem second only to God? There is first comes god, then comes matter, then comes form in a baby’s carriage. Now if that isn’t cute, I’m not sure what is. So there you have it, matter is separate from God. God empowers our minds with the ability of abstraction of which if we were without, we would never be able to form a theory in the first place.
Do you think maybe you didn’t give hylomorphism a fair shake?