It is a fairly straightforward piece of wisdom from modern science that objects are all ultimately made up of physical components. What is a molecule of H2O but two Hydrogen atoms and one Oxygen atom bonded in a certain way? Pry open my scull and you won't find any piece of mental ectoplasm or Cartesian Ghost floating amongst the material grey matter. Indeed, ultimately everything is exhaustively composed out of physical matter, and by that I mean bits of stuff that are susceptible to the laws of physics. So although there are, as Jaegwon Kim puts it, different ontological levels in the hierarchy of objects;
"Things of this world, and their properties, are pictured in a vertically organized hierarchical system, micro to macro from the elementary particles of microphysics to atoms and molecules, and their aggregates, and then upward to cells and organisms, and so on..." (1998: 79)
But ultimately, beneath it all;
"...entities belonging to a given level, except those at the very bottom, have an exhaustive decomposition, without remainder, into entities belonging to the lower levels." (15)
This is what Tim Crane calls 'the generality of physics' (2001: 44) and I happen to accept such a picture as a true characterisation of the world. But I am not a physicalist in any traditional sense of the term. That is, I don't believe that all there is to the world can be described in the language of physics. Actually my philosophical beliefs probably more closely resemble that of Thomas Aquinas than Kim. So how do I square this with the above picture?
My solution is to propose that although every object is ultimately composed of physical particles, each object's particles are composed in a certain way that makes it the unique object that it is. There is no property, part or power that the object has that does not exhaustively involve its physical components. But the key distinction to remember is that those particles are organised in such a way that each has a unique place or context in the object as a whole. So the physical components of an object are a necessary condition for its functions but not a sufficient condition. You need the physical parts but they are not enough on their own to get us the unique attributes of objects.
Philosophers of science Robert Bishop and Harald Atmanspacher spell out such a view in what they call Contextual Emergence;
"The description of properties at a particular level of description (including its laws) offers necessary but not sufficient conditions to derive the description of properties at a higher level. This version, which we propose calling contextual emergence, indicates that contingent contextual conditions are required in addition to the lower-level description for the rigorous derivation of higher-level properties." (2006)
To offer an analogy, a chair may be exhaustively composed of oak, there is no part of that chair that does not share the same density or colour as oak. You couldn't point to a part of the chair that does not share oak's colour or density, for example. But a chair and oak are not the same thing. There needs to be a design plan or blue print that is the abstract, formal component of the chair. This formal component consists in the entirety of the physical components organised in a certain way. There is no part of the chair that is not physical, yet the formal component is not itself physical, but abstract. The total weight and volume of the materials are no more assembled then when they were separate parts. Yet something ontologically distinct comes into the world when a chair is built. The best way to describe the form is to say that it is expressed, or manifested, through the physical components and their specific arrangement.
This is how I propose we think of the hylomorphic relationship in Aristotelianism/Thomism and its a novel way of analysing the form-matter relationship. The formal component is obviously the form, the matter is the physical components. Put another way, the form is the way the matter is arranged. To borrow an analogy from Aristotle, take the syllable 'cat'. The material parts are the letters 'c', 'a', and 't'. But 'atc' or 'atc' or 'tac' is not the same as 'cat'. Aristotle writes
"Since that which is compounded from something so as to be one and a whole – not in the way that a heap is, but as a syllable is – where a syllable is not its elements, since the syllable ‘ba’ is not the same as ‘b’ and ‘a’, nor is flesh the same as fire and earth (since when they are dispersed, the wholes – that is, the flesh and the syllable – no longer exist, whereas the elements – the fire and the earth – do exist). What a syllable is, then, is not only the elements, the vowel and the consonant, but also something else, and the flesh is not only fire and earth, or hot and cold, but also something else." ((Met. 1041b11–19)
The hylomorphic relation for any particular object may be written as a, b, c, .../R, where a, b, c, are the material components arranged (R) in a unique, sui generis fashion (/). The sui generis relation between the material components is the form but form is not contentless as some Aristotelian scholars like Frank Lewis have stressed. This is why I characterised the form as the blue print or design plan.
Part two will show how some of the insights from Kim and other physicalists like David Papineau are not that incompatible with hylomophism (at least my version of it) after all...
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