Platonic Forms and Prime Matter in Loux's Aristotle

Michal Loux runs into some difficulties in his book Primary Ousia when he tries in his interpretation of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Zeta and Eta to combine a Platonistic theory about substantial form and a Thomistic account of prime matter. Unsurprisingly, this proves to be an unworkable combination, but why is this exactly?

Loux’s account of the forms is Platonistic in the sense that there is a merely accidental relation between the substantial form and the proximate matter it informs. This is important not so much because he denies the views inspired by Z.11 that would include some sort of matter in any account of a substantial form of a material composite. It is important rather because he opts for a deflationary understanding of the homonymy of material parts.

This is the doctrine that (e.g.) a human corpse is human in name only or that a severed hand is a hand in name only. Loux’s view is that the homonymy of material parts means that we can speak in two ways about any given matter either insofar as it is the matter for some form or insofar as it has its own characteristics and even simpler parts. So to make sense of the proximate matter of some composite substance, we should make no appeal to the substantial form that it is the matter for (at least not if we intend to understand the essence of this matter).

Rightly, Loux thinks that for Aristotle to make sense of existence, he brings in essence. So statements like ‘Aristotle is’ should be understood as abbreviations of the proper statement ‘Aristotle is a human being’. For anything to exist, it must exist as some kind of thing, and in order to be some kind of thing some form must be predicated of some matter.

The issue is that Loux wants to apply this analysis to matter as well. Thus for something’s proximate matter (my flesh and blood, say) to exist is for it to be some kind of thing essentially. This analysis will apply at each level of matter, but the problem is that Loux accepts the Thomistic view that there is a bottom level of matter (i.e. prime matter) that cannot be characterized formally. There is nothing that can be predicated of it essentially. Rather it is potentially either fire or water or earth or air (or if we take a broader view of what prime matter could be outside the context of Aristotle’s elemental chemistry, it is potentially quarks or leptons or…).

Applying this essentialist analysis to prime matter won’t work though because of its being what Thomas calls ‘pure potentiality’. It does not have any predicates essentially, and so we can only say what it is potentially. What this means, though, is that at bottom the essentialist framework fails for Loux.

Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770-1844), "Achilles Trails Hector's Body after his Chariot" 

Now I think his acceptance of essentialism and the existence of prime matter are both correct and both should be ascribed to Aristotle, but speaking about the predication of form of matter as merely accidental is a great mistake. This is why immediately after these two books, Aristotle goes into potentiality and actuality in Theta and defends the priority of actuality over potentiality in account. In order to understand any given potentiality, we have to understand what actuality it is potentially. This is not merely some convention. It’s not as if we can understand the proximate matter of a human being just as well by considering it apart from the human form. No, to fail to understand it as a potentiality for the human form is to misunderstand it. It cannot be understood on its own terms and in abstraction from its form. Once we see this, we see that the essentialist framework applies to potentialities in an attenuated way. We are not to understand such potentialities on their own but in respect to the actualities, which are themselves something essentially.