Substance and what it means to be › Form Explains a Whole

VII.17 offers a particularly useful way into the positive proposal. Aristotle treats substance as a principle and cause, and asks why certain materials are a house. The inquiry seeks what makes the matter a definite thing. Form answers that explanatory question. The answer is more informative than a repetition of the inventory of bricks and stones.

Return to the dismantled house. An account of the arrangement and organization of its materials helps explain what was lost when it was taken apart. However, a house is an artifact, and we should be cautious about transferring every feature of its explanation to a living organism. Aristotle's Physics II.1 distinguishes natural things, which have an internal source of change and rest, from artifacts considered as products of an art. The artisan analogy introduces a distinction; it does not erase the difference between growth and construction.

A related account appears in On the Soul II.1. There Aristotle describes the soul as the form or first actuality of a natural organized body capable of life. His analogy in II.1 distinguishes possessing knowledge from exercising it. First actuality here means possessing a living capacity, while its present exercise is a further actuality. Soul in this account means a principle of living activity, rather than simply the outline of a body. Plants count as living through nutrition and growth, so the discussion is broader than a theory of conscious thought alone. This related text helps explain why form should not automatically be translated in one's mind as visible shape.

There is also a challenge to the proposal. If form is introduced merely as the name for whatever makes the materials a whole, have we explained anything? An Aristotelian answer must supply a determinate account of the thing's organization and characteristic activities. Calling a difficult case a matter of form cannot by itself settle what its form is. The distinction earns its explanatory value only when an account shows why these materials belong together as this kind of thing.