Part II: Man the Maker, continued further

As we know, Aristotle set the change of coming to be (or passing away) apart from the more mundane change of place, alteration of quality, and increase or decrease of quantity. Simply put – pieces of wood becoming a chair is not the same thing as the green chair turning red. In order to better understand how that truth applies to natural generation, we start by investigating artificial products.

Adler is a big fan of “coming to terms” with your author if you want to really understand him, and five terms are crucial to this demonstration:

• Matter: the matter that comprised the pieces of wood now comprises the chair.
• Form: the carpenter can imbue these pieces of wood with the form of a chair.
• Privation (a lack of some virtue): these pieces of wood have a privation of chairness.
• Potentiality: these pieces of wood have the potentiality of being a chair.
• Actuality: these pieces of wood that HAD the potentiality of being a chair have now actually become a chair.

You’ll note that potentiality and actuality are mutually exclusive. The pieces of wood either CAN be a chair or they ARE a chair. To that end, privation is necessary for potentiality, but it is not sufficient by itself. After all, a crème brûlée also has a privation of chairness, but it also lacks the potentiality of becoming a chair.

Suppose, however, that there were totally formless matter – you might say that it would have limitless potentiality. Then again, you might say that it would have no potentiality whatsoever. Heck, you could even say that, by definition, that matter does not exist, and there is no point wasting our breath discussing imaginary nonsense. So long as we are talking about artificial production, you would be totally justified in that opinion; birth and death, however, are more tenacious mysteries.

Remember the tomato I had you eat in the last entry? Well what if you were a wolf, and the tomato a rabbit? When the wolf eats and digests the rabbit, does the rabbit matter become wolf matter? What about the fertilization of a rabbit egg by a rabbit sperm? What is the relationship of the egg matter and the sperm matter to the resulting baby rabbit? If you believe that anything persists in those changes, it is to that which Aristotle was referring when he spoke of formless matter.