Whether in everyday language or in philosophy and science, the concept of “matter” is so basic that people mention it frequently, yet rarely probe its precise referent.
Like time, space, and other concepts that have become habitual, people have not always agreed on the idea of “matter” throughout history.
Today, “matter” as a physics term is usually understood to mean: “anything that has mass and can be perceived and measured; all matter is made up of atoms, and atoms in turn are made up of elementary particles.”[①] In everyday language and philosophical discussion, “matter” is often opposed to “spirit” and “thought,” and is close to, or even used interchangeably with, concepts such as “substance” and “objective.” But sometimes we are discussing the properties of “matter” itself—for example, “matter has objective reality,” “matter is composed of atoms”[②], and so on; at other times, we take “matter” as a kind of “property” in order to talk about “other” things—for example, “the origin of the world is matter,” “matter is primary,” and so on. So what exactly is the “matter” we are talking about?
Taken literally, the English matter includes the senses of “thing,” “question,” and “content,” “essence,” while the Chinese word “物质” is precisely a combination of “thing,” “all things,” and “essence,” “substance.” In fact, “the essence of things” is exactly the original meaning of the word “matter.”
The word “matter” did not initially appear in opposition to “spirit”; the concepts first opposed to “matter” were actually “change,” “reality,” “form,” and so on.
Among the ancient Greek natural philosophers there was no concept corresponding to “matter”; what they talked about was simply “things” or “all things.” It was only modern thinkers who sometimes reformulated their question of “the origin of all things” as a question of “the primordial stuff of matter.” In fact, “matter” has already come to mean “the origin of all things.”
The things people see, hear, and touch are always varied and changeable; yet since we call them “change,” this means there must certainly be something unchanging within them. And this common element of all things is the “origin” of all things—that is also the basic meaning of what we now call “matter.” But the objectivity, reality, and so on of modern “matter” do not belong to the view of the ancient Greeks. Even if we say that “things” are, in intuition, sensible, knowable, real, and so forth, that does not mean that the “essence of things” must also necessarily possess these traits.
It was not until Aristotle that a term close to the modern concept of “matter” began to be used, but what he meant was actually stuff or material. He set “matter” against concepts such as form, efficient cause, and purpose, and often identified it with “potentiality”[③], regarding it as one of the causes of change in things. But Aristotle’s view of matter was utterly different from that of modern people. For Aristotle, matter is “insensible and unknowable,” because sensation perceives only the form combined in matter, while intellect knows only the form not combined in matter. And everything of which we can form a definite concept is form, and form is precisely not matter.[④]
In the Metaphysics, Aristotle says: “By matter I mean that which in itself is neither something nor of any quantity nor anything else by which being is determined.”[⑤] This stands in sharp contrast to the modern common understanding of “matter as a unity of mass”[⑥].
Here, the term “matter” seems almost a contradiction. When Aristotle analyzed the number of “first principles,” he argued: “(The first principles) cannot be infinite in number, for if they were infinite, being would be unknowable.”[⑦] — Aristotle refuted the claim that the first principles are infinite by saying that “being cannot be unknowable,” yet he never offered an argument for why being cannot be unknowable. It is clear that the “knowability” of being was one of Aristotle’s most fundamental convictions. Yet why, then, is “matter” unknowable?
In fact, Aristotle did not regard “matter” as the “substance” of all things—“this is impossible”[⑧], “because substance is primarily something that has independence and individuality. What is called substance is, rather than matter, the universal form and the combination of universal form and matter; and the combination of universal form and matter can be temporarily bracketed, for its nature is clearly posterior to form. Matter in this sense is also plainly ‘posterior.’”[⑨]
In other words, Aristotle’s “matter” is similar to the modern concept only in the sense of the “material” out of which all things are constituted; as for the substances of all things discussed in modern atomic theory, electron theory, and so on, in Aristotle’s view those descriptions of all sorts of structures and rhythmic motions “are all theories of form, and by no means theories of matter at all.”[⑩]
According to Aristotle’s distinction, “matter,” as the “material” that constitutes all things, is something insensible and devoid of determinations of quality and quantity; “form,” by contrast, is that which has quality and quantity and is perceptible. In modern times, these two concepts were again conflated. Matter, as the material constituting all things, also came to acquire determinations of quality and quantity—this began with the revival of atomism.
Unlike Aristotle’s view that “substance is primarily something that has independence and individuality,” the world-picture provided by atomism is homogeneous, uniform, and quantifiable. Schlick exclaimed: “From the epistemological point of view, this atomic theory (ancient atomism) has one advantage that can hardly be overestimated; it provides a world-image in which there are absolutely no qualitative differences. All qualitative differences in nature are replaced by differences of size, shape, and motion—in other words, by numerical, imaginable, quantitative determinations.”[11]
The union of “matter” and “form” underwent a very long historical development, beginning with the revival of Platonism (and at the same time Pythagoreanism) in the age of Copernicus[12]. This shift in worldview made it seem self-evident that “the fundamental structure of all things is mathematical, geometrical, and simple.” In the mature state of the natural sciences, people “restrict natural reality to a complex of quantities—quantities of time and quantities of space—nothing but quantity.”[13]
This mathematical world-picture was continually reinforced by the outstanding astronomical achievements of Copernicus, Galileo, and others; by Newton’s time, people had generally come to believe that “the essence of all things is mathematical.” And as Schlick put it, the epistemic pattern of atomism “is of course the basic condition for any mathematical construction of natural knowledge.”[14]
As the concept of “matter” and “form” were gradually blended together, “spirit” began to become the concept opposed to “matter.” Descartes’s mind-body dualism marks the rupture between these two concepts. The initiator of this rupture was likewise the mathematization of the world-picture. Put simply, the point is that things like spirit, mind, and consciousness are hard to mathematize! As “matter” and “spirit” were sharply separated, objectivity, reality, passivity, and so on gradually became the natural attributes of “matter.”
Along with the rise of atomism and mind-body dualism, “force” and “purpose”—the other two concepts opposed to matter—also became striking.
The world-picture of modern science is also called the “mechanical worldview,” and “the ontology of the ‘dynamic’ theory of moving material particles was the guiding principle of nineteenth-century physics.”[15] Yet what exactly is “force”[16]? By what means exactly do atoms interact with one another? For a long time this question had no satisfactory answer.
If one describes their interaction in terms of collisions between atoms, then one must “assume the existence of perfectly elastic bodies”[17], namely bodies that rebound at the very instant two atoms collide; but this would lead to infinite acceleration, and in any case it is hard to explain the nature of gravitation. At the same time, the action at a distance by which atoms act across the void is even harder to imagine (in modern science, to be imaginable means to be describable in mathematical terms).
The emergence and maturation of the concept of “field” resolved these perplexities to a certain extent. This concept was first proposed by Faraday—“Faraday cited two distinctive field representations, one being a field mediated by the continuous particles of the surrounding medium, and the other a field that asserts force lines to be primary.”[18] Faraday himself inclined toward the second approach; he advocated abandoning the concepts of atoms and void, “and instead imagining matter as composed of a space-filling ‘dynamic’ medium, that is, ‘matter is composed of force’”[19]. His successors—Thomson and Maxwell—then “attempted, starting from a mechanical theory of the ether, to develop a physical theory of force propagation.”[20]
Whether one says “matter is composed of force,” or explains force in terms of matter; whether one says “matter is some kind of field,” or says “field is also a kind of matter,” in short, the two concepts of “matter” and “force” eventually came together as one. In modern physics, “force” is even explained as the exchange of “bosons” between “fermions”; the difference between “matter” and “force” is merely the difference between a spin number that is half-integer and one that is integer, so to say that “force is also matter” is by no means excessive.
With the further development of science, concepts once opposed to “matter” such as energy, light, waves, void, and spirit were successively reclaimed into it, and everything can be understood in terms of “matter.” The “expansion” of “matter” has elevated its status to something “deified.” Similar to how people in the Middle Ages believed that “God is everywhere,” in modern times matter is everywhere! — “Matter is the sole origin of the world. There is nothing in the world apart from matter. The sole property of matter is objective reality, that is, existing independently of human consciousness and yet capable of being reflected by consciousness.”[21]
Since “there is nothing in the world apart from matter,” we need not be the least surprised that the last remaining concept—“purpose”—is ultimately swallowed up by “matter” as well. The universe itself seems meaningless, and what else can the “purpose” of life be apart from “matter”? Since there is nothing in the world except matter! Thus the “highest” ideal for human beings can only be “developing the productive forces”; while more people lose themselves in material desires and pleasures…
Is this really inevitable? It is worth reexamining the development of the “materialist view,” returning to the most original point for reflection—are each and every expansion of the concept of “matter” absolutely necessary? Is it necessarily reasonable to conflate “matter” with “form”? Is it necessarily correct to identify “matter” with objective reality[22]?
Collingwood optimistically said: “At least the following seems clear: since modern science has accepted the view that the physical universe is certainly finite in space and perhaps finite in time, the activity identified by modern science with matter cannot be an activity of self-creation or fundamentally self-independence. From such a point of view, nature or the physical world as a whole must, for its existence, fundamentally depend on something outside itself. Here modern science agrees with Plato and Aristotle, agrees with Galileo and Newton, agrees with Kant and Hegel: in a word, after a materialist experiment, modern science has returned to the mainstream tradition of European thought, namely, always assigning nature an essentially derivative or dependent role within the overall pattern of things.”[23]
Although reality is far less smooth than Collingwood’s ideal, the new conception of time and space in modern science, as well as the impact of quantum mechanics on the concept of reality, have indeed provided some opportunity for us to rethink our idea of “matter”; at the same time, a historical reexamination of the concept of matter is even more important.
References:
[英]柯林武德：《自然的观念》，吴国盛译。北京大学出版社2006年
[英]彼得•迈克尔•哈曼：《19世纪物理学概念的发展》，龚少明译，复旦大学出版社2000年
[德]莫里茨•石里克：《自然哲学》，陈维杭译，商务印书馆1984年
[美]爱德文•阿瑟•伯特：《近代物理科学的形而上学基础》，徐向东译，北京大学出版社2003年
[古希腊]亚里士多德：《形而上学》，吴寿彭译，商务印书馆1983年
At the dawn of April 27, 2006
At the Plato Cafe
[①] Anna-Louise Norton, Hutchinson Dictionary of Thought, trans. Fu Zhiqiang, Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 2006, p. 305
[②] Obviously, descriptions such as “objective reality” cannot be used as a definition of “matter”; otherwise, saying “matter is objective reality” would be merely a tautology.
[③] See [英]柯林武德：《自然的观念》，吴国盛译。北京大学出版社2006年，第110页（边码P92）
[④] [英]柯林武德：《自然的观念》，吴国盛译。北京大学出版社2006年，第109页（边码P91）
[⑤] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1029a20: here I have consulted the translation in The Idea of Nature.
[⑥] For example, Xiao Kuntao, Natural Philosophy, Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 2004, pp. 86ff.
[⑦] Aristotle, Physics, 189a14
[⑧] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1029a27
[⑨] Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1029a29 ff.
[⑩] [英]柯林武德：《自然的观念》，吴国盛译。北京大学出版社2006年，第109页（边码P91）
[11] [德]莫里茨·石里克：《自然哲学》，陈维杭译，商务印书馆1984年，第73页
[12] See [美]爱德文·阿瑟·伯特：《近代物理科学的形而上学基础》，徐向东译，北京大学出版社2003年
[13] [英]柯林武德：《自然的观念》，吴国盛译。北京大学出版社2006年，第125页（边码P103）
[14] [Ger.] Moritz Schlick: *Philosophy of Nature*, trans. Chen Weihang, The Commercial Press, 1984, p. 75
[15] [Eng.] Peter Michael Harmon: *The Development of the Concepts of Physics in the 19th Century*, trans. Gong Shaoming, Fudan University Press, 2000, p. 9
[16] The “dynamics” in “dynamics” is obviously different from the “motion” in Aristotle’s so-called “efficient cause,” though there is still something in common between them; there is no need to get hung up here on the literal meaning.
[17] [Ger.] Moritz Schlick: *Philosophy of Nature*, trans. Chen Weihang, The Commercial Press, 1984, p. 76
[18] [Eng.] Peter Michael Harmon: *The Development of the Concepts of Physics in the 19th Century*, trans. Gong Shaoming, Fudan University Press, 2000, p. 77
[19] [Eng.] Peter Michael Harmon: *The Development of the Concepts of Physics in the 19th Century*, trans. Gong Shaoming, Fudan University Press, 2000, p. 75
[20] [Eng.] Peter Michael Harmon: *The Development of the Concepts of Physics in the 19th Century*, trans. Gong Shaoming, Fudan University Press, 2000, p. 75
[21] Li Da, ed.: *Outline of Materialist Dialectics*, People’s Publishing House, 1978, p. 164
[22] Then, since it is said that “being reflected by consciousness” is a property of matter, why can one speak of matter’s reflection apart from human consciousness?
[23] [Eng.] R. G. Collingwood: *The Idea of Nature*, trans. Wu Guosheng. Peking University Press, 2006, p. 188 (marginal page P155)
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
Leave a Reply