 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Down to Earth, Aristotle on Substance. A few years ago I had the chance to visit the Vatican Museum. Apparently being pope gives you good opportunities to collect art, because the Vatican houses a number of very impressive objects. The thing I most wanted to see was Raphael's painting The School of Athens, which depicts several of the philosophers we have looked at in this series of podcasts. In the centre, of course, are Plato and Aristotle. I've used that part of the painting on the podcast website for this episode, in fact. Anyway, I was very excited to see this work in person, so you can imagine how I felt when we came into the room to find it walled off from view, as it was undergoing restoration. I'm a trained philosopher, so my reason should be in charge of my soul, making me immune to such disappointments. But sadly, this would be one of the areas where my philosophical training has been inadequate, so I glared petulantly at the plywood blocking my view, until finally my companions dragged me off to see some chapel with a decorated ceiling, which I'm sorry to say did not feature either Plato or Aristotle. In the painting that I didn't get to see, Raphael depicts Plato pointing up towards the heavens, an apparent allusion to his theory of forms. Aristotle, meanwhile, is painted holding his hand flat to the ground. Usually this is seen as representing a traditional contrast drawn between Plato and Aristotle. Whereas Plato seems to encourage us to turn away from the world, towards an ideal realm, Aristotle is interested in the here and now. He's the sort of man who devotes many hours to biological pursuits, he delights in dissecting fish to see how their organs are arranged. His natural philosophy looks carefully at the mechanisms of moving bodies, developing theories that will remain dominant until Galileo. In his ethics, he praises a life of virtuous practical action, rather than seeing political engagement as something one would rather avoid, as Plato did in the Republic. Now, I know what you're thinking. Whenever Peter mentions one of these traditional contrasts, he always goes on to say that it's too simple, and that the standard view is a misconception. I have to plead guilty, at least in the present instance. We've already seen that Plato was very interested in the natural world too, as we can see especially from his dialogue The Timaeus. And, as we'll see later, Aristotle's ethics present a life of pure contemplation as superior even to the life of practical virtue. The relationship between Plato and Aristotle is rarely a simple one, a point I'll be exploring in these episodes on Aristotle and again when I reach late antiquity. Still, there is at least one topic where it seems that we can draw a fundamental contrast between Plato and Aristotle, the topic of substance. I didn't use the word substance in discussing Plato because it isn't a technical term he uses. In fact, Plato in general is much less fond of technical terminology than Aristotle, and frequently has his characters say that terminology is not important, so long as the philosophical ideas are clear. For Aristotle, though, substance is a technical term. The Greek word is ουσια, which is simply a form of the Greek verb to be. So, substance, in this context, means something rather straightforward, it is simply that which is. And, of course, this is a topic on which Plato does have plenty to say. You may remember that in both the Republic and the Timaeus, Plato describes forms as the objects of knowledge, and as things that truly are, whereas things that participate in forms are objects of opinion, they both are and are not. Aristotle thinks that Plato is deeply wrong about this. There are two mistakes being made, in fact. For one thing, Aristotle denies that there are forms. For another, he believes that concrete, sensible objects around us, things like me, a giraffe, or the Eiffel Tower, are good candidates for being the most real beings that there are. These points appear in a variety of Aristotelian works. It's in his Nicomachean Ethics that Aristotle makes the famous remark that truth is to be honoured above our friends, as a prelude to his strenuous rejection of Plato's idea that there is a form of the good. But the two texts that are most important for setting out Aristotle's views on substance are the categories, which we've already looked at a bit in the episode on his logic, and, unsurprisingly, the metaphysics. When we set out to piece together an account of substance on the basis of these two works, we quickly discovered that Aristotle's ideas on this score seem to have changed. The categories account of substance is much simpler than the one we find in the metaphysics, though they are not necessarily inconsistent. Let's begin, then, with the categories. The reason substance even arises here is that substance, ouzia, is the first of the ten categories. As you might remember, the categories seem to be the most general classes of predicate. In other words, if you list terms that can be ascribed to things, you discover that they fall into ten types, or, at least, that's what the categories ask us to believe. The reason that substance is the first category to be mentioned is that it is so basic. Here, we would be dealing with ascriptions like, Socrates is a man, or, Hiawatha is a giraffe. Predications of substance tell you what kind of being you are dealing with, so that these predications are more fundamental than the others. Before something can be white, or tall, or walking, or in a room, it must first be some kind of being, like a man, for instance. Here, we have already arrived at a difference between Aristotle and Plato. From Aristotle's point of view, things like individual men and giraffes are basic, because they are the subjects of predication. If I want to ascribe humanity, or whiteness, or tallness to something, then I need something to which I can ascribe it, and this will be a substance, like the individual man Socrates or the individual giraffe Hiawatha. Thus, individual items in the world around us are, as Aristotle puts it, primary beings, rather than derivative beings, as Plato suggests. Where Plato thinks of beautiful things as caused by beauty itself, Aristotle holds that without beautiful things, there is no such thing as beauty. Plato might fall back to his point about the compresence of opposites, insisting that individual substances can be both equal and unequal, or both beautiful and ugly, in relation to other things. So how can they be primary? Aristotle will say, actually that proves my point. Substances are indeed primary because they are the bearers of predication. And if you check my list of categories, you'll see that one type of predicate is relation. He also subverts Plato's idea that true beings are unchanging, by insisting that one reason individual substances are primary is precisely that they undergo change. When there is a change from short to tall, it is some individual substance that is first short and then tall, like our giraffe Hiawatha growing from childhood up to her full majestic adult height. The capacity for change goes hand in hand with being a subject of predication. So these particular beings that we can actually see around us are what Aristotle here in the categories calls primary substances. He also recognizes what he calls secondary substances. These are things like species and genera. A species is a basic class of entity like human or giraffe. A genus is a wider class which includes numerous species, like for instance animal, which embraces both human and giraffe. These things are secondary, says Aristotle, because they are predicated of individuals. The species human is predicated of particular humans. Again, the particulars are doing all the metaphysical work here. Just as it is beautiful things that guarantee and explain the presence of beauty in the world, so it is the fact that there are individual humans that ensures that there is a species of human. Thus the categories, at least at first glance, seems to present a metaphysical picture that is more or less faithful to our experience. Forget the radically revisionary ideas of Heraclitus with his unity of opposites, Parmenides with his one being, and Plato with his forms. Aristotle says that the basic bits of reality are particular things you can touch and interact with. But you can't really see them. But is this just a matter of taste, or does Aristotle have good arguments for why his metaphysical picture is the right one? We've just seen that Aristotle believes that being a subject of predication, and being capable of change, will make things good candidates for being genuine substances. But Plato isn't likely to accept these criteria, so what can Aristotle say that might convince Plato? Well, he says several things that look a little familiar from Plato's own self-criticism in the dialogue Parmenides. For instance, he complains that if forms are really separate from things, then they won't be able to causally influence them. This is reminiscent of the argument Plato calls the greatest difficulty in his Parmenides. Aristotle also takes advantage of some of his own technical distinctions to force unappealing choices on Plato. For instance, he's produced this contrast between particular things like Socrates, and universal things like human and the genus animal. And, as we saw a couple of episodes ago, he's managed to capture Plato's intuition that knowledge deals with general features of the world by agreeing that knowledge must be universal in scope. But since universals are dependent on particulars, it is still going to be things like Socrates that make our knowledge of humanity possible. Here it's worth repeating the point that, for Aristotle, there must always be individual men, so that there will be something for universal truths about men to be true about. Now Aristotle can ask Plato, are these forms of yours supposed to be universal or particular? They seem in fact to be an uneasy compromise between the two, for they are each supposed to be one substance like a particular, yet they are also supposed to explain general features of the world like goodness, beauty, equality, and so on. Aristotle also produces more specific criticisms. For instance, in his Ethics, he argues that Plato's doctrine of the form of the good is incoherent. There are just too many ways that things can be good, as Aristotle says, good is said in many ways. So there is no one notion or idea of good for the form to embody. Now, that locution, said in many ways, appears elsewhere too, and never more prominently than in The Metaphysics. The Metaphysics is perhaps Aristotle's most complex and difficult work, and I'm going to have to come back to it in later episodes, for instance when I talk about God. It encompasses a number of different topics and problems, and in fact it is far from clear whether it was intended as a single work, or was rather assembled after Aristotle's death as a collection of originally separate texts. But to the extent that The Metaphysics is a unity, it is because it envisions a single science devoted to nothing less than being. Aristotle never calls this science metaphysics, speaking instead of first philosophy. One fundamental thesis of this science of first philosophy is that being, like goodness, is said in many ways. We've already seen an example of this in the categories discussion of substance. Remember, the word substance is in Greek just a form of the verb to be. So, when Aristotle talks about primary and secondary substance, really what he is saying is that there are two kinds of beings, one of which is more fundamental than the other. Hiawatha is primary, and the species giraffe is secondary, because particulars are more fundamental than species. Similarly, Hiawatha is a more fundamental being than the accidental properties she has, like her skin color, height, or that twinkle she gets in her eye when she sees a good-looking male giraffe. Accidents are beings, and the substances in which they adhere are beings, but the latter beings are more primary. By the time we get to The Metaphysics, Aristotle has made a further distinction which complicates his understanding of substance. This is the distinction between matter and form. To understand this, we need to return to the question of change. I mentioned earlier that he sees individuals as primary because they can undergo change, as when Hiawatha gets taller. In such a case, a substance goes from having one predicate to having another predicate. But what about when a change is substantial rather than accidental? What do we say, that is, when the change in question is that a giraffe is born, or tragically, dies? Giving a complete answer to this question would mean wading into some rather deep waters, since it would involve dealing with Aristotle's theory of soul, and that's a podcast for another day. For now, though, we can say this. Aristotle is sympathetic to Parmenides' rule that there can be no generation from nothing, and no destruction into nothing. On the other hand, he thinks it is obvious that Parmenides' ultimate conclusions are wrong. Things clearly do change, whether accidentally or in respect of their substance. We can explain this if we assume that every change involves two components. On the one hand, there is something that changes, and this will always be some nature or property. This Aristotle calls form. On the other hand, there is something that undergoes the change and takes on the new property. This Aristotle calls matter. The clearest illustrations are man-made artifacts. A table, for instance, is made by taking some pre-existing matter, for instance wood, and imposing the form of a table upon it. The wood persists through the change, but acquires a new shape. The centrality of this sort of example is suggested by the fact that Aristotle's word for matter is simply the Greek word for wood, namely houle. But the same analysis goes for other kinds of change, whether or not they involve wood, and whether they are substantial or accidental changes. When Hiawatha was born, form was imposed on some pre-existing matter, namely blood or whatever stuff was in the mother's womb that took on the new form of giraffe. Then when Hiawatha grows, she takes on the new form of being tall, and she is like matter for this new form of tallness. We'll have a chance to look at these ideas again next time. For now, I just want to consider a problem they pose for Aristotle's theory of substance. In the categories, things looked relatively simple. The most fundamental sort of being was a particular substance, like Socrates or Hiawatha. These substances have and various features, which are the predicates that fall under the ten categories. But now, with our new distinction between matter and form, we can analyze the situation further. There is still the substance with its features, for instance Socrates, who is a man, and who is in the marketplace badgering hapless Athenians, but the substance itself is further divided into matter and form. Socrates is, as Aristotle will now say, a composite of matter and form, just as a table is a composite of wood and the shape of a table. Hence the problem. In light of this further analysis, should we still say that Socrates, the composite individual, is a being of the most fundamental kind, a primary substance? Or should we instead say that his matter is the primary substance, or perhaps that form is primary substance? This is one of the questions considered by Aristotle in the difficult middle section of his metaphysics. He is still convinced that primary substance will be something of this world. He is no closer to accepting Plato's theory of separate forms. But he now needs to nuance and reconsider the category's theory of substance in light of his matter-form distinction. He could stick to his guns and insist that it is the whole particular that is primary substance. This answer has much to recommend it. A particular man or giraffe can exist independently of other things, for instance, and it's still going to be the case that universal generalities about men are made true by individual men. For instance, it is because each particular man is necessarily an animal that we can universally affirm that man is a species falling under the genus Animal. Also, the particular is still a subject of predication. Socrates has a snub nose, Hiawatha is tall. But hang on, Aristotle now thinks. Maybe snub-nosedness is predicated of Socrates and tallness of Hiawatha. But within Socrates and Hiawatha, don't we have predication of another kind? In each case, a form, whether human or giraffe, is predicated of matter. And this seems to be more basic than accidental features that can be lost, for instance if Socrates goes to a plastic surgeon and has his nose de-snubbed. By contrast, the only way to remove the human form from Socrates's matter is to do what the Athenians in fact did do, kill him. Thus, if we're looking for a fundamental subject of predication, it looks as though we should say matter is primary substance. On the other hand, form has its own claims to be the most fundamental kind of being. Aristotle shares with Plato the intuition that being should be intelligible, and it is through having determination of a certain kind, that is, form, that things are intelligible. This puts Aristotle in a bind, which he attempts to resolve in a formidably complicated discussion in the metaphysics. This discussion is indeed difficult, and I'm starting to run short on time, so if you at least see the problem Aristotle is facing, I'd be quite happy with that. But I'll close by gesturing towards his answer. Aristotle declares that if we are looking for the being of something, what we are after might be called its essence. It is this that we are grasping when we grasp what a thing is. This will certainly not be its matter. There's a lot more to being human than having flesh and bones. Rather, the essence of Socrates will be in a sense the same as Socrates, because each thing must be the same as its own being. Yet Aristotle also finds it plausible and in the end more compelling to associate essence with form. The essence of Socrates is simply what it is to be human, and this will be very close or identical to the form of human. To really understand what Aristotle means here we would of course need to read the metaphysics carefully, and that's something I'd obviously encourage you to do. Indeed, in general I hope these podcasts will encourage you not just to listen to me, but to go and read Plato, Aristotle, and all the other philosophers I discuss, since I'm only scratching the surface. But before profiting from the metaphysics, you'll need to add a few more weapons to your arsenal of Aristotelian philosophical concepts. Most obviously you will need to know more about change, matter, and form. You also need to think about form as it appears in Aristotle's favorite kind of substances, namely living things, whether plants, animals, or humans. These will furnish us with topics for several more episodes. We'll start next week with form and matter, which turn out to be only two of four types of cause recognized by Aristotle. With that under our belts, we'll be substantially better off in trying to understand the rest of Aristotle's philosophy. So there are plenty of reasons for you to join me next time for Aristotle's four causes, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.