Autor: Thomas Aquinas

Buch: Summa Theologiae: Man 1a. 75-83

Titel: Summa Theologiae: Man 1a. 75-83

Stichwort: Materie, Form, Individuation; Thomas vs. Bonaventure, Scotus; Individuation durch materia, Philosophie d. Quantität vs. haecceitas, forma corporeitatis; Thomas vs. Augustiniander; menschl. Seele individuiert durch d. durch sie einformierten Körper

Kurzinhalt: St Thomas's criticism is inseparably connected with his argument (condemned by Kilwardby in 1277 and by Peckam in 1284) that the human soul is individuated by the body it informs. Instead of an imaginary forma corporeitatis, he sought to define a ...

Textausschnitt: MATTER, FORM AND INDIVIDUALITY
(1a. 75,5 & 76,1)

255a Matter-form analysis of the sense-world about us always had the strict Aristotelean school in its favour. In addition there was support in Scripture that God created the world out of formless matter.1 St Augustine2 had also devoted a memorable meditation to this theme. The tradition which crystallized in the Franciscan school of Paris interpreted him to mean that there is some sort of 'spiritual matter', while yet denying that matter is pure potentiality, intelligible only in terms of form. The question of spiritual matter was first raised as a major issue by Ibn Gebirol (1021-70), known to the medievals as Avicebron: he 'extended hylomorphism to spirit also, in the sense that "matter" was the potentiality, "form" the actuality of spirit.'3 Despite the criticisms of Maimonides (1135-1204), Alexander of Hales (1180-1245) put this doctrine into currency in the Franciscan school in Paris after 1231, and St Bonaventure (1221-74) finally established it. It came to be described as an Augustinian doctrine, but, as St Thomas argues in la 75,5, it has small claim to the name. The forma corporeitatis became the signature of the school outlook, together with the notion that angels and men were much the same sort of thing. Scotus (1266-1304) maintained that matter, like form, exists and is intelligible on its own. Matter-form, in St Bonaventure's thinking, occupied the place of essence-existence in St Thomas's, and this compelled him to conceive of matter as incomplete actuality. In maintaining this he appealed to the undeniably Augustinian theory of seminal reasons. (Fs) (notabene)

255b St Thomas's criticism is inseparably connected with his argument (condemned by Kilwardby in 1277 and by Peckam in 1284) that the human soul is individuated by the body it informs. Instead of an imaginary forma corporeitatis, he sought to define a profound philosophy of quantity or dimension as the condition under which material objects exist. As a given ultimate of thought, that is, as a mode of being, quantity is extremely hard to think about. As a mode of experience (shape, size, continuity and discontinuity) it is extremely easy to think about; it is the field for mathematics. He tried to get us to think of it in the first way. Perhaps the best we can do is ask ourselves, why is one soul's knowledge of itself knowledge of itself alone, and not of any other individual soul with the same nature? The answer is that each exists only as the form of its body, and the ensouled body can be identified only as a material unit. The senses are man's only access to such knowledge. (Fs) (notabene)

256a In opposition to this reading, Scotism set up the notion of haecceitas, which identified 'individuality' with 'singularity' and maintained that human understanding attains the individual directly, not just by reflexion from sense experience. Haecceitas is the form in the individual thing which is susceptible of intellectual intuition and is the substrate of all human knowledge. To non-scholastics it was rather a joke example of the power of abstract words to stop thought, but G. M. Hopkins found a place for it in aesthetics, where it perhaps really belongs. In due course it was buried by William of Ockham (1290-1350). Suarez (1548-1617) adopted a series of compromise positions which gave Scotist conceptions a somewhat artificial second life in the textbooks of post-Tridentine scholastic centres. Many thinkers were disposed to accept him as giving an authentic account of Thomist thought as part of the scholastic complex, with the result that the epithet became a sort of dismissal-phrase for all form-matter analysis of change, and for the notion of substance. (Fs)