Hylomorphism
1000wordphilosophy.comIf only hylo-morphism was so simple...I just spent a few months studying the concept, and let me tell you, Aristotle's form/matter distinction is so strange and complex and difficult to "boil down." Really, it takes a close, and very slow reading of the Physics (as well as other Aristotle texts), and a lot of reference to secondary sources, to get a handle on those difficulties. I'm not sure if this is an apt introduction, but I understand many people don't have the time to, as I said, read these texts carefully and closely, and they want an easy answer that conforms with the logic of the world they are already familiar with. But then you wouldn't be doing philosophy.
It's like Hegel said, when you want to study philosophy in earnest, you must "wear the vestments of the high priest," and never shy away from confusions or contradictions.
Two points.
First, I might recommend the Metaphysics before the Physics. Second, I think reading the original Aristotle as a novice and alone is perhaps not the best move. I think it is best to start with a commentary or something more pedagogically suitable. Contemporary expositors like Edward Feser or David Oderberg write lucidly and approachably on the subject (see “Scholastic Metaphysics” and “Real Essentialism”).
That never said, it takes time to understand this stuff, especially when all sorts of bad intellectual habits must be broken.
Asking from genuine curiosity: what sort of bad habits did you encounter when reading philosophy?
I can identify with this from analogy: I recently started learning a guitar solo that is probably a couple of steps above my current skill level, and it served to reveal some bad fingering habits I had that never became a problem until I started to push the limits of my playing ability.
I would recommend starting with Categories from Organon:
I have not read much Aristotle, but I can empathize.
He tried to get to the bottom of things and pursued various paths.
I think his mainstream metaphysics (Genus, Species, Difference, ...) is somewhat different from his Hylemorphism and was more successful.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/index.htm...
“mainstream metaphysics” what??
"Mainstream metaphysics" means categorialism. Everybody knows about genus/species hierarchy.
"What is the relationship between categorialism and hylemorphism, Aristotle’s other major ontological theory? Where does matter fit, if at all, in the categorial scheme?"
Hylemorphism is how Aristotle further subdivides the category of substance.
If it’s so messy and hard to understand, isn’t it maybe simply not Aristotle’s best work? Must we assume that everything he ever wrote was perfect?
I think there are 2 things at play here. 1. It's an old old idea, and the presentation was cogent in ancient times, but takes a lot of effort to get the meaning as expressed at the time. A poor example, because time goes the wrong way, but I'll still offer it, since I think it has some of the flavor of the problem. I theoretically could hand wrap wire memory to run python on a relay based computer, but I'm not going to. and, what would I lose in translation?
2. The form and matter split is probably the core, but I'd guess there are lots of subtleties and consequences of accepting or rejecting the various parts of the argument that the article sorta breezes through.
I don't know though. I'm not a historian or philosopher.
Who said it's perfect?
In short: the way people tried to promote their propensity to form concepts into fundamental structure of universe was messy.
TFA is about philosophy, but the computer science concept is also interesting - composition of recursive functions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hylomorphism_(computer_scien...
The article that explores these recursion schemes is: Functional Programming with Bananas, Lenses, Envelopes and Barbed Wire
https://maartenfokkinga.github.io/utwente/mmf91m.pdf
There is a review of this article, although it is quite readable in and of itself:
https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/blog/recursion-schemes/ind...
Thanks, this was my initial thought as well! Generally: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/recursion+scheme
(I'm actually kind of surprised ncatlab has this article!)
Hah. My first read was that this way of looking at the world sounds object-oriented (an instance of a class being state encapsulated with function). Just goes to show how quickly any philosophy can lead to a schism ;)
Yes: the class is the form; the data values are the matter. A superclass is a genus and a subclass is a species. I have long suspected that the creators of Simula had a grounding in Aristotelian metaphysics.
It is true that particular interpretations of Aristotle have led to the construction of our modern world, and that the text is constantly in tension with the material it is grounded in, and vica versa--like Heidegger's notion of World and Earth in "The Origin of the Work of Art" (a great introduction to Heidegger, if you're curious).
My intuition is that bits are pure matter. Data Values are bits with an interpretation, already more than pure matter.
Also: 21 Hylomorphisms and nexuses from Pearls of Functional Algorithm Design: https://dai.fmph.uniba.sk/courses/FPRO/bird_pearls.pdf
The issue I've always had with this kind of reductionist philosophy is that there is a very clear and obvious continuum between "table" and "not table". At no point can everyone clearly agree what is and isn't a table.
Sure, most people would agree that an assembled IKEA "LISABO" table is a table.
Okay.. what if one of the legs is removed and it is sideways? What if one leg is removed but it is propped up with a pile of boxes?
What if it's intact as designed, but slightly scuffed? Deeply gouged? Horribly worn to the point of having holes through the top but still able to support plates and cutlery? What if all four legs are also broken, but it's still serviceable as a Japanese-style low table? What if atom-by-atom, we erode its form until nobody alive agrees that it is a table? What if someone then changes their mind?
This is the problem: all forms of matter, unless specified down to individual atoms, are just social conventions -- inconsistent ones at that!
A table is an artificial object. If I’m trying to build a table and a leg breaks, I will replace the broken leg. A natural object like the Old Man of the Mountain isn’t like that. When it broke, nature didn’t care and didn’t “fix” it. Biological organisms are weird because they are in between. Your heart pumps your blood, and if it’s not working, your body tries its best to fix it. It has a function like an artificial object, but it has no designer or mental intention behind it. Then what about the mind itself? The brain is an undesigned organ. How can it represent the world?
> A table is an artificial object.
Does it have to be? If a natural rock formation or horizontal tree root with a flat top is used as a table, then it is a table, is it not?
Tables are anything humans use for the purpose of a table.
Their manufacture or lack thereof is immaterial.
I agree discovery vs. manufacture isn't that big of distinction. If a rock table was almost fit for purpose, but not quite, you might do something to make it work, or if it's way too different to work as a table, you wouldn't consider it at all. In any event, human intention is taking raw material (trees, rocks that are almost table) and using it according to an intention, and the intention is what makes it a table.
If you discover a flat surface in the forest that happens to have some stuff on top, like pine-cones or whatever, you might think to yourself: "Hah! It's a table!", even if no human ever touched it or designed it to be a table.
Similarly, if we find aliens and see their tables, then we would also call them tables even though they were not human-designed.
If an AI builds and uses a table, then that is still a table, even if no organic (or even conscious!) being ever intended it to be a table.
Last but not least: tables don't even have to be made of matter! A table is a table, even if it's in a computer game or virtual reality.
These concepts are much more fuzzy around the edges than philosophers like to pretend they are.
There's some distinction in Aquinas that I don't remember the word for that would describe a "table" of pinecones as just being a table by analogy but not a real table. It has a form like a table, but if it just arose by accident, it lacks the substance of a table. I don't think aliens or videogames complicate the question that much, but I do think some flat surface in the forest is only like a table but not really a table until some conscious being comes along.
> It has a form like a table, but if it just arose by accident, it lacks the substance of a table.
Incidentally, only the life created by God Himself is actual life, but the life that evolved on its own is not actually life, it lacks the substance of true life. Has nobody tried this argument against Darwin's work before?
Yes, this is the mereological nihilism which the author mentions in the first paragraph.
Right, anything at a higher level than like vibrations in quantum fields is a mental construct and doesn't exist as such.
It's pretty similar to Chinese Neo-Confucian concepts of 理 (li) and 气 (qi). Qi being matter-energy. Li - being structure or form or pattern.
Although to be human in Chinese concepts, required more than just having the form of a human, and e.g. looking human, but also the ability to act like a human with concepts of e.g. 仁 (ren).
I love Xunzi’s definition of human and wish it were more widely discussed in the West:
水火有氣而無生，草木有生而無知，禽獸有知而無義，人有氣、有生、有知，亦且有義，故最為天下貴也。力不若牛，走不若馬，而牛馬為用，何也？曰：人能群，彼不能群也。人何以能群？曰：分。分何以能行？曰：義。故義以分則和，和則一，一則多力，多力則彊，彊則勝物；故宮室可得而居也
Water and fire have qi but lack life. Trees and shrubs have life but lack intelligence. Birds and beasts have intelligence but lack morality. Humans have qi, life, intelligence, and moreover morality, hence are most honored under heaven. Our strength is not like the ox, nor our speed that of the horse, yet we employ them. How is it so? I say, humans work together and they do not. How do we work together? Through social roles. Where do social roles come from? Morality. Thus morality creates social roles, and from social roles comes harmony, from harmony comes unity, from unity comes strength. Strength overcomes obstacles and conquers nature. Thus we have mansions and palaces to reside in.
It’s a very clear distillation of Chinese thought, but no one ever talks about it.
Reminds me of a qoute from Aristotle's Politics [0]:
διότι δὲ πολιτικὸν ὁ ἄνθρωπος ζῷον πάσης μελίττης καὶ παντὸς ἀγελαίου ζῴου μᾶλλον, δῆλον. οὐθὲν γάρ, ὡς φαμέν, μάτην ἡ φύσις ποιεῖ: λόγον δὲ μόνον ἄνθρωπος ἔχει τῶν ζῴων: ἡ μὲν οὖν φωνὴ τοῦ λυπηροῦ καὶ ἡδέος ἐστὶ σημεῖον, διὸ καὶ τοῖς ἄλλοις ὑπάρχει ζῴοις （μέχρι γὰρ τούτου ἡ φύσις αὐτῶν ἐλήλυθε, τοῦ ἔχειν αἴσθησιν λυπηροῦ καὶ ἡδέος καὶ ταῦτα σημαίνειν ἀλλήλοις）, ὁ δὲ λόγος ἐπὶ τῷ δηλοῦν ἐστι τὸ συμφέρον καὶ [15] τὸ βλαβερόν, ὥστε καὶ τὸ δίκαιον καὶ τὸ ἄδικον: τοῦτο γὰρ πρὸς τὰ ἄλλα ζῷα τοῖς ἀνθρώποις ἴδιον, τὸ μόνον ἀγαθοῦ καὶ κακοῦ καὶ δικαίου καὶ ἀδίκου καὶ τῶν ἄλλων αἴσθησιν ἔχειν: ἡ δὲ τούτων κοινωνία ποιεῖ οἰκίαν καὶ πόλιν.
And why man is a political animal in a greater measure than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we declare, does nothing without purpose; and man alone of the animals possesses speech. The mere voice, it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is possessed by the other animals as well （for their nature has been developed so far as to have sensations of what is painful and pleasant and to indicate those sensations to one another）, but speech is designed to indicate the advantageous and the harmful, and therefore also the right and the wrong; for it is the special property of man in distinction from the other animals that he alone has perception of good and bad and right and wrong and the other moral qualities, and it is partnership in these things that makes a household and a city-state.
[0]http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:abo:tlg...
Xunzi is underappreciated, even in China.
"4. Conclusion
If I do produce something new when I assemble the contents of the box, then the table is something more than just those contents. The table is not only its material parts, but also the formal organization of those parts.
And that is the fundamental claim of hylomorphism: that there is some kind of formal part, component, or aspect to any table, chair, rock, tree, rabbit, planet, or human being, something beyond its matter which accounts for its existence and nature."
Yes, and this is what Kant called 'the conditions of the possibility of knowledge', namely space and time in our reason. The form exists neither on the object nor in a Platonic heaven, but only in our minds because it is 'imposed' on the table by our reason and intellectual categories.
This is a useful connection, but I think “in our minds” is misleading. Like you say, the forms of particular things like tables are not the same forms that are the conditions of possibility of experience. The latter forms are more abstract and common to our experience of all things, like the forms of space and time and the structure of causality. That universality also shows why “in our minds” is misleading, because these forms are common to all minds and therefore cannot really be said to reside primarily in individual minds, even though they are of course employed somehow by individual minds in cognition.
> The form exists neither on the object nor in a Platonic heaven, but only in our minds because it is 'imposed' on the table by our reason and intellectual categories.
This. I was looking for this in the original article. Thanks for following up.
I really prefer learning these aspects of philosophy rather than more ethics oriented topics but it’s really such a rich subject.
I wonder what Aristotle would’ve thought of Zygohistomorphic prepromorphisms: https://wiki.haskell.org/Zygohistomorphic_prepromorphisms
He would have laughed about the joke.
It works well for computer science as well. Values have types (forms) and bytes (matter). One type can be instantiated in multiple ways, for example you can have multiple integers, like 1,2,3,4 or the bytes 01000001 can represent different information, like 65 or 'A'.
The interesting thing is null, because here the distinction sort of breaks down.
But that's not entirely true, because the mapping alone doesn't give you any ordering relation or comparison options. Translating the natural numbers into bytes doesn't tell you how they should be ordered. We determine the 'form' of the order with our minds.
Could the sort be another form? Taking the article’s example, I could sort a bunch of tables by height or weight or some other attribute. That sort order then takes on a form that was not there prior to the sort. To think of it another way, after the tables (or values in CS) are sorted, the sort has been “assembled”.
I don't think so. Height and weight are sorted/ordered numerical, and numerals are not properties of the table, nor of its weight or height. The form of the relation is abstract, it's actually between the values attached and not the objects, and therefore in our mind.
I wonder if this is the reason Hylo was given its name: https://www.hylo-lang.org/
> The interesting thing is null, because here the distinction sort of breaks down.
Kind of like zero, represents "nothing" but also "something", at the same time.
It fits with mathematics. You have structure (a la Bourbaki or CT) and stuff (well founded sets).
RENE THOM: THE HYLEMORPHIC SCHEMA IN MATHEMATICS
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-94-011-5690-5_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics,_Form_and_Function
For reasons that I have difficulty articulating this seems relevant to some intuition I've had in the last several years about matter maintaining "information memory" across time in a way that energy doesn't seem to? I'm not a physicist so I might be totally wrong about that but form to me seems to imply some information that is constant across time?
From what I’ve understood of Buddhist philosophy, it rejects this view that some pile of wood can turn into a table. Of course a table exists... but there is nothing special about “forms”. Everything is dependent origination (everything is caused by something else). We conventionally and intuitively split things into sort of the process of making a cake and then say that the cake is something kind of absolute and rigid. But it’s all just process; one thing causes another thing which then causes another thing.
Psychologically speaking it is not helpful to think of forms as anything but convenient signs. Yeah they exist for practical purposes, but they actually don’t. Psychologically speaking (again) we need to get away from thinking that there is ever a split between “things” and “process”. Ultimately it’s all relativistic. The one Absolute Truth is that everything is relativistic... of course most people (philosophers?) reject that as a trivial contradiction, but Mahayana does some tricks (apparently—who am I, Wittgenstein?) which makes this seeming contradiction just work.
At the end of the day our natural intuitions are wrong. They were more towards Aristotle’s view. So we have to actively do things like analyze or meditate in order to see reality for what it truly is. In order to rid ourselves of clinging.
There is an alternative view that exists in BFO/OBI for example where you have a 'planned process' which contain a set of processes to execute a 'plan specification' to act on 'material entities' (your parts and the table) and the parthood relations.
This is a start, but I think it doesn’t do hylomorphism justice. Many of us (as I was, before I overcame the inculcated bias) suffer from a kind of unsophisticated atomism. This is what happens in the vacuum of intellectual discipline and formation characteristic of our education systems. It is important to distinguish between physical models and metaphysical theory. Now, metaphysics doesn’t ignore physical models, but it does view physical models through the lens of physical methodology so that they are interpreted in a sound and responsible way. A naive reading of physical theory can easily lead to a mechanistic metaphysics, because while the physical sciences are not inherently mechanistic, the tradition does insinuate mechanism. In a mechanistic metaphysics, the artifact becomes the paradigmatic object, and pretty soon, reality becomes nothing but a shifting aggregate of atoms. Gone is the world of human beings, trees, cats, and dogs. Gone is the very intelligibility of the world and the very powers of reason that sought to grasp it. To say that mechanism, and especially materialism, doesn’t even get off the ground is beating a dead horse at this point (the obstinate still hanging on have doubled down to the point of embracing the patent absurdity of eliminativism, for example).
The renewed interest in hylomorphism (or hylomorphic dualism) is it seems related to the perhaps relatively modest, but certainly discernible resurgence of interest in Aristotlean metaphysics in the last decade or two. Speaking from experience, it is not easy to break mechanistic habits of mind, but it is possible. One way out, I find, is to begin with the realization that even if we accept a naive atomism, the atom itself is a thing, and to be a thing is to be an instantiated form. For if you truly have many atoms, as an atomist believes, then you have a plurality of things that are of like kind (the “matter” in hylomorphism is, first and foremost, prime matter, not something determinate as a kind of stuff, which itself requires form to be a kind of stuff; form is what causes a thing to be what it is). And if you happen to fall into the reductive mechanistic trap, you should recall that the further you go down that road, the more you undermine the very capacity of reason to know reality, the less you can explain the very possibility of reason, and the less your position holds weight as a result. We do not begin with atoms, but the world we experience everyday, and it is within that world that we perform scientific investigations and reason philosophically. Get something wrong, draw the wrong conclusion, and you can face a retorsion argument, a paradox of the sort skepticism generally faces (“there is no truth!” type of stuff).
I recommend some of Edward Feser’s books on the subject. “The Last Superstition” is a light read in that respect, but “Scholastic Metaphysics” is more of a proper manual.
One commonly encounters a conflation of the philosophical idea of atoms, time, matter, motion, etc., with the (modern) scientific concepts. That atoms are composed of quarks of course has no bearing on the original (and persistently recurring) idea that there has to be a fundamental element, some irreducible "thing", whether that's framed in terms of energy quanta, information bits, integers, sets, or what have you. Similarly, Einstein's relativity of time and the curvature of space, this idea of space-time, does not invalidate the fundamental notion of something following another and of the instantaneous arrangement, notions that are orthogonal to the concept of entanglement in a Riemann manifold.
Before this I only knew hylomorphism as an abstract algorithm (that can, among others, implement the factorial function). I had no idea it has such an esoteric side.
great vsauce video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXW-QjBsruE
it's called emergence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence
Hooray for mereological nihilism, which seems to me to the obvious, easy, thing to conclude.