I have been studying Aristotle's Metaphysics and his definition of "coming to be" and "being" and with my limited knowledge I have tried to contrast his ideas to Plato's, so as to make sense of certain concepts. I do however have a hard time understanding the relationship between "form" and "being". There is specially one passage, namely Book VII Chapter 8, pg. 131 from Joe Sachs translation of Aristotle's Metaphysics that confuses me greatly:
“Now since what comes into being comes about by the action of something (and by this I mean that from which the source of its generation comes), and out of something (and let this be not the lack but the material, since we have already distinguished the way in which we mean this), and becomes something (and this is either a sphere or a circle or whatever it might be in other cases), just as one does not make the sphere, except in the incidental sense that the bronze sphere is a sphere, and one makes that.
For to make a this is to make a this out of the whole of what underlies it. (I mean that making the bronze round is not making the ‘round’ or the sphere but something different, such that this form is in something else; for if one made the form, one would make it out of some other thing, since that was assumed, in such a way as one makes a bronze sphere, in the sense that out of this, which is bronze, one makes this, which is a sphere.)
So if one were also to make the underlying thing itself, it is clear that one would make it in the same way, and the coming-into-being would march off to infinity.
Therefore it is clear that the form, or whatever one ought to call the shapeliness that is worked into the perceptible thing, does not come into being, and that coming-into-being does not even pertain to it, or to what it is for something to be (for this is what comes to be in something else, by art or by nature, or by some capacity).”
I do understand that anything that comes to be or what is "begotten", must necessarily have a source out of which it comes to be. What I try to grasp however, is the part where he says
For to make a this is to make a this out of the whole of what underlies it.
But we know that what underlies it, is the "being". So how can "being" be involved in making something? Isn't "being" always there in a timeless manner? And what is the relation of "form" to the "being" of something?
