Art Home | ARTH Courses | ARTH 213 Assignments

Form and Matter

David Summers ("Form and Gender," New Literary History, 1993, 24: 243-271) presents the following useful summary of Aristotle's conception of the relationship of form to matter: p. 254: ...Aristotle (and legions after him) believed that things are unions of matter and form. In the case of animals, the four elements in combination (matter) are shaped by form, which governs both the purposeful configuration of things and their growth, and is related to soul, which in its turn is related to pneuma or "breath," a principle of life and movement. This fifth higher element, this quintessence, is related to the heavenly bodies, to their light, and to their perfect movement. This pneumatic spark of life, Aristotle believed, is carried and transmitted by semen. Men thus represent the immediate contact of heaven and earth. Women are at one remove from that contact. Men are associated with the two higher elements -air, which is closer to the heavens, and fire, which tries to reach the heavens. Women, by contrast, are associated wit the lower elements of water and earth. It is for this reason that women are by nature colders than men, says Aristotle, and because of this coldness women are unable to convert blood into semen. This is Aristotle's explanation of menstruation. The monthly failure to convert blood into semen is, according to Aristotle, systematically related to other relative imperfections in female nature --passivity chief among them-- and it was possible for Aristotle to formulate the idea, which has had a long historical life of its own, that the female is an incomplete or mutilated male....

[the female does not contribute semen to generation, but does contribute something, and that this is the matter of the catamenia, or that which is analogous to it in bloodless animals, is clear from what has been said, and also from a general and abstract survey of the question. For there must needs be that which generates and that from which it generates; even if these be one, still they must be distinct in form and their essence must be different; and in those animals that have these powers separate in two sexes the body and nature of the active and the passive sex must also differ. If, then, the male stands for the effective and active, and the female, considered as female, for the passive, it follows that what the female would contribute to the semen of the male would not be semen but material for the semen to work upon. This is just what we find to be the case, for the catamenia have in their nature an affinity to the primitive matter [Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 729 a, as translated by Arthur Platt in The Basic Works of Aristotle, Richard McKeon ed.]]

 

/p. 255: In general, Aristotle believed that all things come into existence through the agency of nature, art, or chance. Natural generations contain their own forms. The apple seed contains in some way the apple tree. Things made by art differ from natural things in that they have their formal origin outside themselves. The form of the cup is in the mind of its maker before it is in matter --that is to say, before it is in the cup itself. In both cases matter is given form, though of the two art is clearly the deeper idea --that is, nature is explained in terms of art and not the other way around. In any case, here is Aristotle's explanation of human conception, which will be recognized as a longer version of the one encountered earlier when Aristotle explained why night or chaos could not be the origin of all things. In the first place, Aristotle is constrained by the terms of his argument to separate form from matter altogether and does this by asserting that semen is not material. "Nothing passes from the carpenter into the pieces of the timber, which are his material, and there is no part of the art of carpentry present in the object which is being fashioned; it is the shape and the form which pass from the carpenter, and they come into being by means of the movement of the material. It is his soul, wherein is the "form," and his knowledge, which causes his hands (or some other part of his body) to move in a particular way (different ways for different products, and always the same way for any one product); his hands move the tools and his tools move the material. In a similar way to this, Nature acting the male of semen-emitting animals, uses semen as a tool, as something that has movement in actuality; just as when objects are being produced by any art the tools are in movement, because the movement which belongs to art is, in a way, situated in them...."

/p. 257: This definition of matter and its relation to form, according to which matter is a feminine principle of perfect potentiality and form is a masculine principle of perfect activity, has had a truly millennial career in Western philosophy. Nor has the idea been just philosophical, first because the philosophical definitions passed into currency in all kinds of literature at the same time that they lent external authority to opinions stated in this literature. And it may be supposed that the philosophical ideas arose from attitudes, beliefs and practices with deeper, less articulated histories. When Cicero translated hyle into Latin, he used the word materia, which, like hyle, means "building material," and in doing so he associated matter for the tradition that followed with mater (mother). The Aristotelians, he wrote, divided nature into two principles, active and passive, always united in real things. The active principle he called vis (or "force," related to vir [man]) and the passive he associated with materia.

The ten Pythagorean contraries, again discussed by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, are older than either Plato or Aristotle, and also give some notion of how ideas may be linked simply by virtue of the scheme of contrariety to which all belong. The pairs of contraries are: limited and unlimited, odd and even, one and plurality, right and left, male and female, resting and moving, straight and curved, light and dark, good and bad, square and oblong. These categories are pairs, but they are hierarchical rather than symmetrical, the first being superior, just as form and matter are both necessary principles but form is higher. "Male" belongs to the category which contains "limited" (or definite), "oddness" (of numbers), "unity," "right," "rest," "straight," "light," "good," and "square"; "female" is "plurality," "left," "movement," "the curved," dark," "bad," and "oblong." /p. 258: Any one of these might trigger the idea of the others. We have already seen Aristotle pair matter with the female, the potential and passive, with ugliness and darkness (night), and in a long tradition matter was associated with the indefinite, the divisible and multiple (hence, the temporal), and with evil; clusters of oppositions might thus recur in many forms, any one of which was implicitly or explicitly gendered. Plotinus, standing at the head of the long and vastly influential neo-Platonic systematization of the ideas we have considered so far, conceived of matter as the literal end of emanation from light, good, beauty, and truth, the very end of the great chain of being, dark and formless, the principle of evil and mortality, never truly united to life and form....

/p. 261: God, in whom true forms reside, the true forms of which the real forms of nature are more or less adequate images, is "The Father." When the great analogy of the artist to God began to be made in the Renaissance and the artist began to be called a "creator," the artist was also one who imposed form upon matter, brought order out of chaos, made something out of nothing. Whatever materials the artist uses on such a view are absolutely subject to imagination --putty in his hands, so to speak. In short, the materials used become matter. It might be pointed out that making something out of nothing, the Judaeo-Christian view of creation, is in fact little different from the classical idea of the imposition of form upon matter....

Rona Goffen, Titian's Women: [Goffen notes the connection in Renaissance art theory of the distinction between disegno and colore (or design and color) with the dichotomy of form and matter] p. 10:The confrontation of disegno (design or draftsmanship) and colore , or, as the Venetians insisted, colorito (to distinguish the expressive use of color over mere pigment), was not a simple question of stylistic preference but was understood in relation to the ancient, gendered discourse regarding the structure of the universe. Aristotle had explained that everything in the world consists of form and matter --including human beings. Matter is female and physical (material) and is inferior to masculine form, which is related in turn to soul. Matter is shapeless until shaped by form.

Titian and Michelangelo came to embody the confrontation of colore or colorito and disegno for their contemporaries and apparently for themselve. While Michelangelo made his name with images of heroic men, Titian made a specialty of female subjects --and "female" style. Michelangelo disparaged the Venetians for an inability to draw, equating Venetian stylistic and technical "shortcomings" with femininity....