Aristotle and Existentialism: Substance, Form, and Being

Aristotelian Metaphysics: Substance and Accidents

There are different kinds of objects that can be presented. The characteristics that can be attributed to a substance exist in an independent way and are called accidents. Aristotle called accidental categories those characteristics that can be attributed to a substance. They include quantity, quality, relation, place, time, possession, action, situation, and passion. Concrete disciplines are contained in one concrete category.

Matter and Form

A substance is a compound of matter and form. Matter is that which receives a form and is the principle of individuation. Form is the organization or disposition of matter; it is the essence of the object. Different individuals can share the same form, which determines that they belong to the same genus. Matter is always endowed with a form. It is indispensable for something to exist, but without form it lacks identity. Matter and form are inseparable and interdependent concepts.

Description and Study of Matter

Aristotle said that we know substances through their form. Aristotle manages to show that forms are found in the sensible world and demonstrates why science is possible: it must be a study of the universal, not of the particular.

Potency and Act

Potency is the set of all possibilities of realization that are found in beings. Act is the concrete realization toward which beings have arrived at a precise moment. Act is the actualization of some characteristic that a substance had in potency. Matter alone cannot explain change or movement. For Aristotle, all material things are composed of act and potency.

Change and Movement

Change or movement is the passage from potency to act. It has three types:

• With respect to place (locomotion)
• With respect to growth or decline (proper to plants)
• Alteration (change with respect to some quality)

When change occurs, three factors intervene: a subject that undergoes the change, the privation of a form that the substance has in potency, and the form, once actualized.

Contingent and Necessary Being

Essences are contingent; their existence is not necessary. Contingent beings refer to the existence of a necessary being (God).

Universals

Universals are the set of individuals, ideas, Platonic forms, genera, and Aristotelian species.

Moderate Realism

Universals are forms that exist independently of the mind. Ideas and genera are real. Moderate realism holds that universal concepts refer to the objective essence of things. Universals are forms, genera, and species. These forms are formed in the mind through a process of abstraction from concrete objects.

Exaggerated Realism

Ideas exist objectively, outside the mind, and are independent of concrete things.

Nominalism

Nominalism denies the existence of universals. It considers abstract terms to refer to concrete objects but not to any reality (William of Ockham).

Three Currents on Reality and Perception

• Critical realism: we grasp the representation of reality, not reality itself, but reality still exists.
• Subjective idealism: we only grasp perceptions; reality does not exist.
• Criticism: we grasp perceptions and part of reality, but in a more complex form.

Existentialism

Søren Kierkegaard. Common features:

• Revaluation of individual existence: priority is given to existence over essence; man has no essence, but exists.
• Priority of lived experience over reason: against rationalism, Kierkegaard exalts the subjective as a source of knowledge. Without an existential lived experience, there cannot be authentic philosophy.
• Opposition to scientism and Enlightenment optimism: he distrusted the progress of human beings and science, and distrusted scientific-technical reason.

Martin Heidegger

Heidegger's question concerns being; it refers to the question of human existence. Things exist, but not in a sense analogous to the existence of man. Existence is the mode of being of man. Characteristics: