Q&A: Matter and Form
Matter and Form
Question
Can the Rabbi explain the definition of matter and form according to Maimonides’ view (which, to the best of my understanding, follows Aristotle), and are these definitions axioms, or are they a necessary conclusion from prior premises?
Answer
I’m not an expert in Aristotle or in Maimonides. As far as I understand, these are abstractions. You look at some object and see that it has a collection of characteristics. But you assume that there is something of which these are the characteristics—that it possesses them and is described by them. Then you define form as the collection of characteristics (or their essential part), and matter as that which possesses the characteristics.
Definitions are neither axioms nor derived from any premises. Axioms, or theorems that can be derived from them, are propositions, not definitions. Therefore, the definitions of matter and form are abstractions, as I explained, and are not derived from anything. The claim that such things exist is a claim about reality, and as such one can ask whether it is axiomatic or derived from something. But I think that for Aristotle (as opposed to Plato), form is not an independently existing entity, and therefore there is no claim about reality here but rather a definition. If he makes some claim about form or matter, that can be discussed.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t think so. Here he is describing man’s essential characteristics. There is no statement here that they have an existence of their own.
One could say that Maimonides believed in a “law of conservation of forms” (the opposite of the scientific conception of the law of conservation of matter).
Forms are preserved; matter decays.
Part III, 8: “All generated and corruptible bodies are subject to corruption only on account of their matter, and not otherwise. But with respect to form, and insofar as form’s essence is concerned, corruption does not affect them; rather, they endure.”
According to the Rabbi’s explanation, form is a collection of characteristics, whereas matter is the object that bears those characteristics.
In the Eight Chapters, at the end of chapter 1, Maimonides writes: “Know that this one soul, whose powers or parts we previously enumerated, is like matter, and the intellect is its form.”
But in the source from Foundations of the Torah that I quoted above, he writes that the human soul is the form of man.
It sounds from Maimonides’ words as though something can be defined both as matter and as form, and according to the Rabbi’s definition it is not clear how form, which is a collection of characteristics, can serve as the object that bears other characteristics.
On the contrary—according to my definition this is very clear. The relation between matter and form is relational. The soul is the form of the human being, and the intellect is the form of the soul. And this is further proof of what I wrote: that for Maimonides these are definitions and not propositions, meaning that he is Aristotelian and not Platonic (form does not exist as a thing, but is only a useful definition).
Maimonides writes in chapter 1 of the Guide for the Perplexed that the Holy One, blessed be He, created man in His image, and explains that the intention is man’s form, which is intellectual apprehension.
And in Foundations of the Torah, chapter 4, halakha 8, he writes: “The soul of every living creature is its form, which God gave it, and the additional knowledge found in the soul of man is the form of the complete human being in his understanding. About this form the Torah says, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness’—
meaning, that he should have a form that knows and apprehends ideas that have no body, so that he is comparable to them.”
Can one infer from Maimonides’ words that he understands form, like Plato, as something that truly exists?