The texture of being: essays in first philosophy

10. Immateriality Past and Present

Chapter 10 IMMATERIALITY PAST AND PRESENT The medieval conception of immateriality was prominent in discussions of God, man, and nature, of causality, activity, and order, of knowledge , freedom, and immortality. Yet this once noble conception seems absent from most present-day discussions of similar topics. Terms such as consciousness, subjectivity, Existenz and Dasein, temporality, historicity, and language have taken its place, and even current talk about spirituality does not seem quite the same. Has the conception remained unscathed, braving the gauntlet of misdirected blows? Has this grand weapon of the philosophical armory merely become blunt from too much wear? Has it been displaced instead by a paradigm shift in the manner of Kuhn’s scientific revolutions? Or, Dionysus-like, has it suffered the fate of dismemberment, passing over into a scattered existence among its very executioners? Has the ongoing search for the philosopher’s stone transmuted it, perhaps, in alchemical fashion, into better or baser metal? Or finally, has this once indispensable conception simply evaporated under the heat of critical inquiry and the pressure of new interests? In less metaphorical terms, has the conception of immateriality disappeared entirely from effective philosophical use? Has it lost its explanatory power, if it ever had any? And has the alleged reality to which it referred become so obscured as to render the use of the term obscurantist ? Worse still, has its referent been exposed as non-existent? Even a brief answer to these questions must begin by recalling the chief features of the classical conception of immateriality, especially as it was generally understood in the High Middle Ages within a received Aristotelianism that in its turn had been shaped at critical points by a received Platonism. 168 Reprinted from Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 52 (1978): 1–15. Copyright © 1978 by the ACPA. The Classical Conception of Immateriality Initially considered, immateriality is a negative term set over against materiality. The couplet, materiality-immateriality, provides a flexible correlation between the determinable and the determinative in any order of analysis or reality. Etymologically, immateriality carries the mind to the conception of matter itself. For our present purpose we can set aside the problem of the relation of the medieval conception of matter to various modern scientific conceptions.1 We can also set aside the medieval controversies over whether matter is an odd sort of primitive positive entity or an absolutely formless potential principle. It is enough for our purpose to recall the very general medieval meaning of matter. It refers to an underlying passive potentiality that, when coupled with form, is the root of features that attend any composite into whose constitution matter has entered. Insofar as anything manifests these features materiality is attributed to it. The “properties” of matter, according to medieval thought, are three. (1) The passive potentiality of material things renders them subject to, and subjects of, change. (2) They are subject to the transitive power of agents which transmute them, so that they are more or less radically altered by the new relationships into which they are brought by the transitive , transmutant power. They undergo rearrangement of their parts, qualitative changes of shape and disposition, as well as displacement by other adjoining things. (3) These processes take time, so that the whole movement together with its subject is indexible in reference to some determinate space and time. Indeed, a material thing insists upon its simple primary location at some definite place and time. Material things, then, are characterized by their (1) passivity, (2) transitivity, and (3) indexicity. Immateriality in medieval thought receives its first positive meaning as the formal principle in any composite into which materiality has entered. In medieval philosophies there are many modes, kinds, and degrees of immateriality, beginning with the simplest forms of primitive material composites and building in complexity, unity, and power towards the human intellectual form and beyond it. It is tempting to pass over the medieval conception of form, as though its meaning is obvious. Moreover, it is risky to say anything about it, lest we introduce modern constructivist tendencies into it. Nevertheless, when we reflect upon how formal principles function in medieval philosophies, it is correct to point to three features that are explicit characteristics of form, even if only indirectly. 1. See William Wallace, “Immateriality and Its Surrogates in Modern Science,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 52 (1978): 28–83. Immateriality Past and Present 169 (1) Contrary...