1.5 The Scholastic notions of form and essence

We can be quite precise of course about the notions that are basic to medieval thought as it went on in universities. The notion of form is especially worth studying because it is alien to us and because it played a central role in the scientific revolution which brought the medieval period and its conceptions to an end.

The form provides 'organisation'

The idea that is commandeered from Aristotle by Scholasticism is that an individual animal - e.g. an individual horse - is various bits and pieces (e.g. heart, skin, bone) organised in a certain way. The organisation is provided by the form. (See e.g. R.S. Woolhouse: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, London, 1993, Routledge.) ('Substance' has been used as a term of art for an individual thing organised by a form.)

The form gives a thing its identity as a thing of a particular sort

The form was what made this assemblage of matter a horse, and this is the first key thing about the form. It was what made an assemblage of matter a thing of a particular sort.

So far therefore we have the notion of a 'substance' as a set of bits and pieces organised by a form, a form which gave the substance its identity as a thing of a certain kind.

(Some individual things, according to the Scholastics anyway, do not have forms providing their organisation. A stone would be an example. Maybe one can sense intuitively the distinction they were anxious to acknowledge in this way - a stone, you may think (without being too clear about it!), has much less in the way of organisation than a living thing - its internal structure, you may agree, is much 'simpler'). Anyway, the scholastics thought of a stone as significantly different from a horse. The horse is bits and pieces subject to a form, a stone they called an 'aggregate' - a mere assemblage of smaller bits.

Scholastic thinking about forms comes out also in the fact that they regarded things made by human beings as 'aggregates' also.

Again, perhaps intuitively one can understand how it might be thought that human beings supply the organisation for artifacts, so that unlike animals which are not put together by human beings, they do not 'require' forms.

(I am speaking here of the Scholastic account. It was derived from Aristotle, but his presentation of his own view is confounded rather by his taking a house as his paradigm of a thing with a form. Other things that he says support the thesis that in spite of this unfortunate example he in fact believed that forms were exclusive to living things.)

The form grounds a thing's behaviour and properties

I have said that 'form' is like 'organisation'. But the sense of 'form' is decisively wider. It goes far beyond mere shape for example. In the words of the great Scholastic thinker St Thomas Aquinas:

Commentator Roger Woolhouse indicates the full breadth of the notion when he writes of the form of an oak tree, for example, as follows:

A thing with a form has the power to initiate change

If this is the Scholastic conception of form, it leads to a conception of a thing possessing a form as something which has within it a power to initiate change. Unlike the atom of the post Scholastic world, a thing with a form does not necessarily stay put unless and until acted upon by an external force: it can entirely unaided itself launch change.

Woolhouse again:

To explain the properties and behaviour of a thing with a form is to show how they flow from it

And if this is what a thing with a form is, explaining its properties and its behaviour is a matter of explaining how its properties and behaviour are expressions of its form:

The Role Of 'Form' in the Scholastic Account Of Understanding

An excellent site offering texts by Aristotle and many other writers from the ancient world (together with related material) is MIT's Internet Classics Archive. Following this link will open a new window. Close it to come back here.

If we now have an idea of what the Scholastic notion of a 'form', we can move on to explore one way in which this notion was central to their outlook on themselves and on the relationship to things around them.

They thought of human understanding, for example, as a matter of our intellects becoming informed by a 'form'. (Our modern word 'informed' harks back to this whole way of thinking.)

For Aquinas, the part of us that is responsible for understanding is the intellect.

The intellect first renders 'intelligible' the form of the thing being understood, and then grasps and retains that form.

That is the Scholastic way of thinking about understanding.

Because the form is what makes a thing the sort of thing that it is, it seems to follow that understanding something involves becoming that sort of thing! - since it is a matter of coming to share the form of the thing being understood.

This is obviously a very difficult implication to take in board, and scholars disagree about how it is to be undertood. 'Intelligible in actu est intellectus in actu' - these are the enigmatic words which express the Thomist thesis, translated by Kenny as 'thought in operation is identical with the object of thought'.

Maybe the thought that today makes most sense to us in coming to terms with this idea is the notion that as one contemplates God the more Godlike one becomes onself.

The Scholastics themselves saw the difficulty and solved it in typical fashion by saying that the way in which the form of a thing being understood informed the intellect was different from the way in which it informed the thing itself.

(I say this a typical Scholastic move because it sees the problem and solves it to its own satisfaction by an accommodation which sheds not the least bit of light.)

One thing we should resist in trying to get our minds round the Scholastic form and the role it plays in the Scholastic understanding of understanding. The thought is that understanding x involves coming to share its form. What we must not do I'm sure is think of coming to share a thing's form as like breaking off a piece of the thing and putting it in our pocket. The notion of 'sharing a thing's form' has probably a closer parallel today in understanding something we are reading.

The meaning of a piece of text is not a component of the text which we can somehow get our hands on. Its meaning is rather something we think of ourselves as 'internalising' or 'absorbing'. In some such way as this does the intellect, according to Aquinas, come to share in a thing's form.

The notion of a form played a similarly central role in the Scholastic understanding of the other actvities which we today subsume under 'thinking', for example, imagining, planning, medtating, dreaming and so on.

The form is there too at the heart of how they thought of perception. It emphasises the alien character of Scholastic thought though to realize that for them perception was a bodily function and not one that fell to the 'intellect'. In perception, the sense faculty, not the intellect, was thought of as 'abstracting' the form of the perceived thing from a 'phantasm' of a thing ('phantasm': "something like a mental image" Kenny, AM, p.37).

Here is Kenny explaining the significance of hylomorphism and its successor, which I suppose could be called representationalism:

"According to some philosophers, in sense experience we do not direcetly observe objects or properties in the external world; the immediate objects of our experience are sense-data, private objects of which we have infallible knowledge, and from which we make more or less dubious inferences to the real nature of external objects and properties.

In Aquinas' theory there are no intermediaries like sense-data which come between perceiver and perceived. In sensation the sense faculty does not come into contact with a likeness of the sense-object. Instead it becomes itself like the sense-object..." (Kenny, AM, p.35.)

So it is said that Modernity with its representational theory of the mind and of the relationship between our experience and the world (which now becomes the 'external' world) cuts us off from the world and locates us in a quasi-theatre in the head. There we look not at the things about us - trees, tables, other people - but at mental stand-ins for those things - ie representations.

Thomas Aquinas' great work Summa Theologica in a fine Internet presentation. Following this link will open a new window. Close it to come back here.

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