Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Is Socrates a Substance or a Cross-Categorical Hybrid?

0. I wanted to explore supposita in their difference from primary substances, but John the Commenter sidetracked me into the aporetics of primary substance.  But it is a sidetrack worth exploring even if it doesn't loop back to the mainline.  For it provides me more grist for my aporetic mill.

1. Metaphysics is a quest for the ultimately real, the fundamentally real, the ontologically basic.  Aristotle, unlike his master Plato,  held that such things as this man and that horse are ontologically basic.  What is ontologically basic (o-basic) is  tode ti, hoc aliquid, this something, e.g., this concrete individual man, Socrates, and that concrete individual donkey.  Such individuals are being, ousia, in the primary sense.  And so Socrates and his donkey can be called primary beings, or primary substances. Asinity there may be, but it can't be ontologically basic. 

This is clearly the drift of Aristotle's thinking despite the numerous complications and embarrassments that arise when one enters into the details.

(If you think that there is 'substance' abuse in Aristotelian and scholastic precincts, I sympathize with you. You have to realize that 'substance' is used in different senses, and that these senses are technical and thus divergent from the  senses of 'substance' in ordinary language.)

2.  But of course every this something is a this-such: it has features, attributes, properties. This is a datum, not a theory.    Socrates is a man  and is excited by the turn the dialectic has taken, and this while  seated on his donkey.  Man is a substance-kind, while being excited and being seated are accidents.  (Let us not worry about relations, a particularly vexing topic when approached within an Aristotelian-scholastic purview.)  Setting aside also the difficult question of how a secondary substance such as the substance-kind man is related to Socrates, it is safe to say that for Aristotle such properties  as being excited and being seated are theoretically viewed as accidents.  So conceptualized, properties are not primary beings as they would be if they were conceptualized as mind-independent universals capable of existing unexemplified.  Accidents by definition  are not o-basic:  If A is an accident of S, then A exists only 'in' S and not in itself.  A depends on S for its existence, a mode of existence we can call inherence, while S does not depend for its existence on A. 

3. So much for background.  Now to the problem.  Which is ontologically basic: Socrates together with his accidents, or Socrates taken in abstraction from his accidents?

What I want to argue is that a dilemma arises if we assume, as John the Commenter does, that Socrates taken together with his accidents is an accidental unity or accidental compound.  A simple example of an accidental compound is seated-Socrates.  Now I won't go into the reasons for positing these objects; I will just go along with John in assuming that they are there to be referred to.

Seated-socrates is a hylomorphic compound having Socrates as its matter and being seated as its form.  But of course the matter of the accidental compound is itself a compound of prime matter and substantial form, while the form of the accidental compound is not a substantial form but a mere accident.  The accidental compound  is accidental because seated-Socrates does not exist at all the same times and all the same worlds as Socrates.  So we make a tripartite distinction: there is a compound of prime matter and substantial form; there is an accident; and there is the inhering of the accident in the substance, e.g., Socrates' being seated, or seated-Socrates.

As Frank A. Lewis points out, accidental compounds are "cross-categorical hybrids."  Thus seated-Socrates belongs neither to the category of substance nor to any non-substance category.  One of its constituents is a substance and the other is an accident, but it itself is neither, which is why it is a cross-categorical hybrid entity.

The Dilemma

The dilemma arises on the assumption  that Socrates together with his accidents is an accidental compound or accidental unity, and the dilemma dissolves if this assumption is false.

a. Either (i) Socrates together with his accidents is a primary substance or (ii) Socrates taken in abstraction from his accidents is a primary substance.

b. If (i), then Socrates is an accidental compound and thus a "cross-categorical hybrid" (F. A. Lewis) belonging neither to the category of substance nor to any non-substance category.  Therefore, if (i), then Socrates is not a primary substance.

c. If (ii), then Socrates is not a concretum, but an abstractum, i.e., a product of abstraction inasmuch as one considers him in abstraction from his accidents.  Therefore, if (ii), then Socrates is not a primary substance.  For a primary substance must be both concrete and completely determinate. (These, I take it. are equivalent properties.)  Primary substances enjoy full ontological status in Aristotle's metaphysics.  They alone count as ontologically basic.  They are his answer to the question, What is most fundamentally real?  Clearly, Socrates taken in abstraction from his accidents is incompletely determinate and thus not fully real.

Therefore

d. On either horn, Socrates is not primary substance.   

What say you, John?

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Bill Vallicella

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8 responses to “Is Socrates a Substance or a Cross-Categorical Hybrid?”

  1. John Avatar
    John

    I see that I have been demoted from ‘John the Astute Commenter’ to ‘John the Commenter’. Perhaps, then, I should quit before I am dubbed ‘John the Obtuse Commenter’.
    What I have to say is that I should like more time to think over this challenge, as well as the metaphysics of accidental unities more generally. That said, it is not obvious to me that being ontologically basic means what you think it means for Aristotle. In Metaphysics Delta 11, he offers a variety of alternative formulations of what he calls “priority in being” or “priority in nature”, and only one of these has anything to do with being capable of existing independently of some other entity or entities. He identifies that notion of ontological basicness with Plato, and when he discusses priority in substance in Theta 8, it’s pretty clear that that’s not what Aristotle has in mind. So, I would take the second horn of this dilemma. I would say that Socrates is a primary substance, and is ontologically basic, even though he cannot exist without having some accidents or other.
    Now, this answer is a bit of a dodge, since it adverts to what Aristotle thinks instead of whether what Aristotle thinks is true. Perhaps Aristotle’s account of ontological basicness is wrong. But I have worries about the contemporary view that ontological basicness has something to do with a capacity for independent existence. The singleton {Socrates} is less ontologically basic than Socrates even though the one exists if and only if the other exists. I would say something similar in the case of Socrates and his accidents. On this view, Socrates cannot exist without having some accidents, and the accidents exist only if they inhere in Socrates, but nevertheless Socrates is more ontologically basic than his accidents. Indeed, he is ontologically basic, full stop.
    This is not fully worked out. This is something I am still thinking a lot about. As I said, I should like more time to think over this challenge before committing myself to any particular solution to it.

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  2. DavidM Avatar
    DavidM

    I tried commenting on this yesterday, but it appears my comments never got through. I’ll try again. First, I think that Socrates together with his accidents is a primary substance. But I think Lewis is wrong to say that seated-Socrates is not a substance but a cross-categorical hybrid. His claim seems to rest on the invalid inference: “if ‘X-ness’ (e.g., ‘seated-man-ness’) does not name a substantial form, then instantiations of X-ness are not substances.” How to justify that inference? Looks like a non sequitur to me. Aristotle discusses this in Met. VII using the example of ‘white man,’ which is arbitrarily assigned the name ‘cloak.’ A white man is surely a primary substance, even though the formula ‘white man’ does not express the essence of the thing (the tode ti), because it is not a species of a genus. But the essence of a substance like man does include being informed by accidental forms, such as whiteness. And the accidentally informed thing does not fail to be a substance, because when a substance is informed by accidental forms it appropriates these to itself, so that the whiteness is the whiteness OF the substance (the being of an accident is the being OF a being, i.e., OF a substance), not merely conjoined to, or together with, the substance.

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  3. BV Avatar
    BV

    John,
    Since you find accidental compounds/unities in A., how would you answer David above?

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  4. John Avatar
    John

    Briefly, I don’t understand why Lewis’s inference is supposed to be invalid. Aristotle repeatedly contrasts the unity we find in ‘white man’ with the sort of unity we find in a substance: the latter, but not the former, is a per se unity. So, when a substantial form is predicated of some matter, we get a per se unity and therefore a substance. By contrast, when an accident is predicated of a hylomorphic compound, we get an accidental unity, which is not a substance.
    David’s inference, rather than Lewis’s, seems invalid to me. From the fact that the essence of a substance like man includes being informed by accidental forms, it does not seem to me to follow that the result of being thus informed must therefore be a substance rather than a cross-categorical hybrid. Yes, the whiteness is the whiteness OF the substance; it inheres in the substance. But the unity involved here is not a per se unity, and Aristotle is very clear that he takes all substances to be per se unities. What we have, then, cannot be a substance, but some other kind of entity.

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  5. BV Avatar
    BV

    John,
    A plausible answer. But why posit accidental unities in the first place? Doesn’t the very fact that they are cross-categorical hybrids disqualify them from being entities? How can they be entities if they are not ‘booked’ under any category?
    You are certainly right that A. takes all substances to be per se unities. Conversely too? Can we advance to a definition:
    X is a primary substance =df X is a per se unity?

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  6. DavidM Avatar
    DavidM

    @John: “Briefly, I don’t understand why Lewis’s inference is supposed to be invalid. Aristotle repeatedly contrasts the unity we find in ‘white man’ with the sort of unity we find in a substance: the latter, but not the former, is a per se unity.” – Yes. – “So, when a substantial form is predicated of some matter, we get a per se unity and therefore a substance.” – Yes; but we also thereby get a bunch of accidental forms which are the necessary concomitants – existential sine-qua-non’s – of the substance. – “By contrast, when an accident is predicated of a hylomorphic compound, we get an accidental unity, which is not a substance.” – But where does Aristotle say that something which can be characterized as a *per accidens* unity (and not just as a *per se* unity) is not a substance? Doesn’t he just say that a formula which expresses both essential/substantial AND accidental elements does not constitute a proper definition?

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  7. DavidM Avatar
    DavidM

    Just to clarify my first comment:
    When I wrote:
    “the formula ‘white man’ does not express the essence of the thing (the tode ti), because it is not a species of a genus”
    I probably should have written:
    “the formula ‘white man’ does not express the essence of the thing (the essence of the tode ti), because it is not a species of a genus.”
    I didn’t mean to give the impression that *tode ti* was equivalent to ‘the essence of the thing.’

    Reply
  8. John Avatar
    John

    My apologies for taking so long to reply. I was out of town for a friend’s wedding.
    Bill, I have often wondered what the motivation is for positing accidental unities. It seems clear to me that Aristotle himself does in Z.1, but it is not clear to me whether he was right to do so. I suspect that positing them had something to do with trying to avoid the various problems that plagued Plato when trying to explicate the relationship between a property and its bearer. Thus, in Z.12 Aristotle says that “‘man’ and ‘pale’ form a unity when what underlies, namely the man, has pallor as an attribute…In the present case, however, the one does not participate in the other” (1037b14-18; Bostock’s translation).
    I do not know whether Aristotle would accept your definition of a primary substance. His discussion throughout Z examines a variety of proposals for what a primary substance is, and being a per se unity is not mentioned. Instead, being a per se unity seems to be a necessary condition on being a substance for Aristotle.
    David, I cannot find any place where Aristotle explicitly says an accidental unity cannot be a substance. But it seems clear that Aristotle rejects this possibility. In Z.12 he says that a substance is a unitary thing, and throughout Z he contrasts different kinds of unities. In Z.4, for example, Aristotle says that “there will be a formula and a definition even of a pale man, but not in the same way as there is of pallor or of a substance” (1030b12-13). Here it’s very clear from the context that the reason that the definition of a pale man is not like the definition of a substance is that the substance is a per se unity whereas a pale man is merely an accidental unity. The general tenor of book Z seems to support this reading.
    Again, I agree that when you have a substance you *also* have (as you put it) “a bunch of accidental forms which are the necessary concomitants – existential sine-qua-non’s – of the substance”. But the relationship between a substance and its accidental forms is accidental; they compose an accidental unity. And, again, I think Aristotle is clear that something is a substance only if it is a per se unity. So I think the substance is the hylomorphic compound of matter and form. That substance has to have some accidents, but the matter/form compound combined with those accidents is not itself a substance, but an accidental unity.

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