Let’s take a
look, starting with the key passage:
The fatal flaw in hylomorphism is
that it leaves too little room for distinctions: being concrete, individual,
temporal (contingent), and material are all lumped together. That is, all and only material entitiesare particular, temporal concreta – everything else is an
abstract, eternal kind. Moreover, there
is only one possible relation between the two sides: inhesion (instantiation…).
And, finally, the modes of composition
areasymmetrical: you can go horizontally or up, but not
down. That is, you can take an arbitrary
bunch of materialindividuals and fuse them into a new
one; or, you can abstract away from – rise above – all their materialityto get a pure form... What
you can't do is go the other way, and make matter out of forms – once eternal,
always eternal. The result is a rigid
hierarchy, with all temporal individuals exactly on a par at the bottom. (p. 121)
The first
thing to say is that Haugeland appears to have Aristotle’s version of
hylomorphism in mind, rather than the emended versions developed by Aquinas and
other Scholastics. For those later
versions do indeed recognize further possibilities beyond those to which
Haugeland says hylomorphism is limited.
Consider the
account Aquinas gives of angelic intellects.
Each such intellect is a concrete particular, not an abstract kind. And since each has a nature, each can be
said to have a form. But an angel is not
a material substance, and thus its
form is not instantiated in matter.
Since an angel is immaterial, it is also not in time, though it is also
not strictly eternal. It has an
intermediate kind of existence which Scholastics called aeviternity. Moreover,
though there is a sense in which it exists in a necessary way, there is also a
sense in which it is contingent. It is
necessary in the sense that once it exists, it cannot be made to go out of
existence by anything in the created order, either in its own nature or in
other created things. But it is
contingent in the sense that, like anything else in creation, it could not
exist at all if it were not caused to exist by God, and it could be annihilated
if God ceased conserving it in being.
No doubt
Haugeland wouldn’t acknowledge the existence of angelic intellects. He might also object to the metaphysical
apparatus Aquinas deploys to make sense of immaterial substances, which
includes notions such as the real distinction between essence and
existence. But that is not to the point. What matters is that the key notions of
hylomorphism in fact can be and have been systematically elaborated upon and
supplemented in a way that allows it to accommodate more kinds of reality than
Haugeland thinks it can.
But why
would Haugeland suppose in the first place that there really are any entities that
hylomorphism cannot capture? The answer
is that he offers a couple of specific examples that he thinks don’t fit
comfortably into hylomorphism’s ontology.
He asks us, first, to consider a story
and its relationship to the particular material entities that convey it (such
as a collection of ink marks on the pages of a book). Deploying the
type-token distinction, Haugeland says that the story itself is a type and
the different sets of ink marks that convey it (in different copies of the same
book, say) are tokens of this type. He
claims that “in some sense, a
story-type is composed or ‘made up’ of its tokens: it has its being in and
through them – without them it wouldn’t exist at all” (p. 121).
But exactly
what, Haugeland asks, is the relationship between these tokens and the
type? Should we think of it as a
part-whole relationship? That can’t be
right, for that would make copies of
a story parts of it in just the way that chapters
in a story are parts of it, which they obviously are not. Moreover, if there were only one copy of a
story, the distinction between type and toke would collapse. Should we think instead, asks Haugeland, of a
story-type as a timeless kind? But a story is temporal and contingent,
coming into being at some point. And
timeless kinds are not like that.
Furthermore, any given particular story is not really itself a kind, but rather an instance of a kind – of the mystery story kind, or the romance kind,
or whatever.
It’s not
clear to me exactly how this is supposed to be a problem for hylomorphism. For one thing, Haugeland’s suggestion that “a
story-type is composed or ‘made up’ of its tokens” seems to me just wrong. The word-type “cat” is not somehow made up of
all its many tokens (all the particular individual instances of the word written
in pencil, ink, or chalk, the various verbal utterances of it, etc.) as is
evident from the fact that all of those could go out of existence, but the word“cat” would not thereby go out of
existence. Word-types are abstract
objects of a sort, and story-types seem to be too. But abstract objects are not “made up” of
anything.
Perhaps
Haugeland merely means to suggest that the hylomorphist
must think of a story-type as made up of its tokens? The idea here, perhaps, is that since
hylomorphism takes things to be made up of form and matter, it must regard a
story-type as a kind of form and its tokens as a kind of matter. But in that case (Haugeland might then be
objecting) this proposal is open to the difficulties he identifies.
But if this
is what Haugeland means, the problem is that I don’t know of any hylomorphist
who would conceive of story-types in this fashion. Nor, as far as I know, would any hylomorphist
say that everything, without
qualification, is made up of form and matter.
The immediate application of the form-matter analysis is to physical substances, specifically. A stone, a tree, or a dog is composed of form
and matter – more precisely, of substantial form and prime matter – but there
are lots of other things that are not. I’ve
already given one example, namely angelic intellects, which are immaterial
substances. But there are lots of other
things that are not made up of form and matter.
For example, substances have attributes
and bear relations to one
another. And attributes and relations
are not made up of form and matter (even if the substances that bear the attributes and relations are
made up of form and matter).
And the
ontology of the typical Scholastic hylomorphist goes well beyond this. For example, there are what Scholastics call “beings
of reason” – things that exist as objects of thought. Now, this is how to understand abstract
objects. They are natures, properties,
patterns, and the like considered by the intellect in abstraction from the concrete circumstances in which they might be
instantiated. And this, I would say, is also
how what Haugeland calls “story-types” should be understood. They are “beings of reason,” not physical objects
or even immaterial substances. Hence it
is a mistake to try in the first place to give them a form-matter analysis, so
that the difficulties in doing so identified by Haugeland are moot. Once again, Haugeland sees a difficulty for
hylomorphism only because his conception of hylomorphist ontology is simplistic
and neglects what later Aristotelians added to the picture.
The same can
be said of Haugeland’s other example. He
asks us to consider a club devoted to some hobby, which has twelve
members. He says that “in some sense, a club is composed or ‘made
up’ of its members” (p. 122). But he
also takes it to be obvious that “a club is identical neither to the set of its
members nor to the fusion of their bodies.” (ibid.). And we can readily agree, given that, for
example, a club can persist despite a complete change in membership. But then (Haugeland seems to think) it’s not
clear what hylomorphism would say is the relationship between the club and its
members.
The problem
here is that, like many critics of hylomorphism, Haugeland neglects the
distinction between a substantial
form (which marks a true substance) and an accidental
form (which is what mere aggregates and artifacts have). The latter have looser identity conditions
than the former, identity conditions that can depend on human custom or
convention. One mistake critics of
hylomorphism make is to take an example of some aggregate or artifact, note that
there is a difficulty with giving its identity conditions (which is not
surprising given that these sorts of entities inherit all the messiness of
human purposes), and then fallaciously conclude that the hylomorphist account
of true substances is therefore
problematic. That seems to be what
Haugeland is doing here. A club is a
kind of artifact, and thus inherits all the messiness that artefactual kinds
tend to exhibit given the vagueness, contradictions, etc. of human purposes. But this tells us nothing about the
plausibility of the hylomorphist analysis of natural kinds (stone, water, lead, gold, trees, dogs, etc.).
In fairness
to Haugeland, it should be noted that his primary target in the article in
question is not hylomorphism itself, but a metaphysical position developed by
Geoffrey Hellman and Frank Thompson which Haugeland thinks is in certain ways
similar to hylomorphism. Hence he
criticizes hylomorphism as a way of indicating what he thinks is wrong with
their position. It may be that the
deficiencies in his objections reflect an inadvertent assimilation of the one
to the other – that what may (or may not) be good objections to the
Hellman/Thompson view are simply non-starters when applied to hylomorphism as
the Scholastic tradition developed it.
For a detailed exposition and defense of hylomorphism (or “hylemorphism,” a spelling which is less common but which I prefer), see my book Scholastic Metaphysics, especially chapter 3.