4.5 Form and Matter
One of the oldest and most fruitful insights of philosophy is the distinction between form and matter. Aristotle formulated it almost two and a half thousand years ago1, and it has lost none of its power to this day.
4.5.1 Why Matter Alone Is Not Enough
Imagine a block of marble. A sculptor can chisel a statue from it, hew out a fountain, or fashion a gravestone. The matter is the same — marble. But what comes of it depends on the form the sculptor gives the matter.
Or think of the human body. Over the years, the atoms it consists of are almost completely replaced. The matter changes. But the person remains the same. What makes him the same person? Not the matter — that, after all, changes. Rather, something that orders the matter, holds it together, makes it into a living whole.
We call this ordering principle the shape or, in the language of philosophy, the form. The form is what makes a thing what it is. It is the determining principle. Matter, by contrast, is the determinable principle — that which is determined by the form.
4.5.2 Form and Matter in Living Beings
In lifeless things, the unity of form and matter is fairly external. A table is wood in the form of a table. If the table breaks, the wood remains. The form comes from outside — from the carpenter — and can be lost again.
With living beings it is fundamentally different. The form of a living being permeates its matter from within. The soul — as philosophy calls the life-form of a living being — is not one part alongside other parts. It is what makes the body alive, what makes it into a unified, self-organizing whole.
In the human being something more is added — something that fundamentally surpasses everything animal: reason, freedom, the capacity for self-knowledge and for love. The human form-soul is not simply a “souped-up” animal soul. It is a spiritual principle of life that informs and animates the whole body.
4.5.3 What Matter of Itself Cannot Accomplish
There is a widespread error: the idea that everything can be explained from matter alone. But that is a fallacy. For matter as such has no direction, no goal, no order. Order always comes from an ordering principle — which is to say, from the form.
This holds in a special way for the human being. The human body consists of the same chemical elements as every other body. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen — none of this is exclusively human. But it is not a mere lump of matter. It is an ensouled body, informed by a spiritual principle of life. And this spiritual principle of life cannot be derived from matter.
For our question about personhood this distinction has an immediate consequence: the being of the human being differs essentially from every apersonal being in that it possesses a spiritual principle of life, that is, a spiritual essential form.
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Fußnoten
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Aristotle, Metaphysics (2009), Book VII (Z); Aristotle, Physics (1987), Book II, chs. 1—3. ↩