Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Let’s start with substance. What is a substance? Well, to modern thinking, it’s just what I’ve described above as a thing. But the ancients generally did not see it this way. The ancients took substance to mean ‘matter plus form’. There’s a great many ideas that spring from this simple statement.

First, we can note that the word ‘form’ might be used here with one of two different meanings. The more straight-forward meaning is to see form as we would use it in everyday speech today — that is, as a three-dimensional arrangement or shape. On this meaning, the formula — substance equals matter plus form — accords very well with our modern understanding of substances. We need, for instance, a particular arrangement of fundamental particles in order to get the atoms and molecules that make up the chemical elements and chemical compounds. Form, then, is critical in making things. And form, of course, is also a relationship.

But there is another understanding of the word form that gives us a very different perspective on things, as well as affording us a possible route into an understanding of essence and substrate. Form, in this second sense, means some kind of external pattern for the way things should be in the world. For Plato, ‘the forms’ are perfect — they are the ‘Realm of Being’, as opposed to our flawed world of imperfect substance — the ‘Realm of Becoming’ — the contingent world of everyday reality. More generally, this mysterian understanding of the word form has form residing in Heaven, or bestowed on us by God. Form then, in this

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