How to understand Prime matter?

Question

In the Aristotle-Aquinas tradition prime matter is the thing that underlies all other things in the world. It is described as completely indeterminate-pure potentiality, it was not created and cannot be destroyed. We cannot perceive it directly, as we perceive only the compounds of matter and form, the physical objects. All of these descriptions are negative, what prime matter is not.

Prime matter seems to be a substance without any properties, even Aquinas held that prime matter is unintelligible, it cannot be understood even by God.

How then should I understand or visualize prime matter? Or was Aquinas right and it is impossible to comprehend, but then why believe in it at all?

Answer 1

Energy

This so-called Prime matter lines up with the abstract physical concept of energy. You cannot see 5 joules on its own. But you can see 5 joules of kinetic energy when an apple falls. Or the apple can have 5 joules of potential energy if you raise it above your head. Or you can have 5 joules worth of electrons if you convert the energy into mass.

• completely indeterminate-pure potentiality. ✅

• Cannot be created and cannot be destroyed. ✅

• We cannot perceive it directly, as we perceive only the compounds. ✅

Answer 2

As mentioned in some of the comments, the medieval catholic interpretation of Aristotle in terms of "prime matter" has weak textual support in Aristotle himself.  Be that as it may, the simplest way of understanding the dichotomy prime matter versus form (hyle-morphism) is in terms of an analogy with a clay pot: the clay is analogous to the formless, property-less "prime matter" whereas the shape of the pot itself is the "form". 

The dichotomy became a theological issue ever since the 4th Lateran Council in 1215, which declared as canonical the transubstantiation interpretation of the eucharist in terms of hylemorphism, where the "morphism" part (including shape, taste, and smell) remains, whereas the "hyle" undergoes a miraculous substitution.  This interpretation was reinforced at the Council of Trent in the 16th century.  In the 17th century, this led to a traumatic clash with the emerging modern atomist science.

Answer 3

That bit about Aquinas denying the intelligibility of prime matter even in the light of God, is quite interesting. I'll use it as an indirect point of departure for my response.

The three "models" of creation that I'm familiar with are (A) creation "from nothing," (B) creation by emanation, and (C) creation by "organizing" pre-existent substance (which substance is not itself emanated). There's an LDS author, Brandon Sanderson, who penned a character in one of his novels as entertaining the thought that (A) and (C) can be had to coincide, but generally those two options are held to be quite distinct.

At its most extreme, exnihilation is the (internally contingent) creation even of "pure possibilities." Let us imagine a grid of variables, at the center of which is a single ultimate constant, 𝕲 (for God). Style creation as generically assigning a value to a variable (c.f. Quine's "to be is to be the value of a bound variable"). There is no other grid that we are working with in the background; this is the grid of all other grids. There is no source for assignments to the variables, besides what is available to God at the heart of this grid.

Per (B), then, we can also imagine 𝕲 itself as coding over a subgrid of Its own, let's say {X, Y, Z}. A popular pre/non-Trinitarian attempt to exalt Jesus (and the Holy Spirit, but less often...) is to hold that He was emanated from the Father, hence created modulo (B), but that 𝕲's creation of other things was either exnihilation (or maybe (C)) or "incomplete" in a way that the emanation of the Son was not. At any rate, let us hold Y = 𝕲, and say that God can quasi-create Itself, by emanation, in the sense of assigning values to X and Z from 𝕲. And then too, or instead, 𝕲 can create things through/in the rest of the universal grid, in some like way.

Alternatively, if the grid is pre-existent matter "surrounding" God (we're close to the relevance to defining "prime matter"), then maybe God can determine some variables according to other ones + 𝕲's own essence and character. By contrast, (A) requires that God decide even what the possible values of all the variables are. How could that be?

Worse, some extremists about divine sovereignty will go on to imply that not only are all the items imaged in the grid created from nothing, but that God created the grid itself from no grid at all, and decided that it would be a fact that things exist in terms of this grid. But leave those impious fanatics aside for a moment. If at least the grid in a way exists generally, no matter how 𝕲 has decided to determine the Xs, Ys, and Zs thereof, then this grid is functionally equivalent to the concept of prime matter: per the Aquinas bit, beyond 𝕲's understanding not by being a truth beyond 𝕲 so much as not sustaining (without contradiction) the predicate of intrinsic intelligibility at all. 𝕲 does not "understand" prime matter because there is nothing to understand: to know something, and to appreciate the ramifications/significance of this knowledge, there must be something to be known, but prime matter is as much as an array of question-functions so vaporous that God Itself does not need to care what the answers to said functions are, for there are no answers as such (the closest thing being, "Does X, or Y, or Z, exist?" which then for God is decided by the power of creation).

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Addendum: a set-theoretic look at the matter

Suppose that "is closed under the predicate 'is open under all other predicates'" is meaningful. For sets, this would mean a couniversal set, I suppose. Now, I often wondered how prime matter could never be defined by a specific property (I think this was something like Locke's contention, or even Aquinas', among others), but is that to which properties variously "attach," since "is that to which properties attach" seems propertyish (at least). But so take the following list:

• Is closed under the predicate "is closed under all other predicates"
• Is closed under the predicate "is open under all other predicates"
• Is open under the predicate "is closed under all other predicates"
• Is open under the predicate "is open under all other predicates"

The first and fourth options defeat the point of the "all other" moment of quantification, I would think. However, if there is a set that is open on all terms aside from its own general status, and this is not pointless, could there not be elements that reciprocate this relation, and these would be prime matter? For they would not have any defining property other than having no other defining properties; they might be predicated of sets in a neo-Humean way, maybe (I tend to interpret Humean bundles as sets of tropes, but maybe that's just me!), or then properties would calcify, in sets, over these generic elements, perhaps. In other words, these elements would have only the fairly insubstantial property of being themselves as such, but when they were included in sets with more vivid tropes, they'd "glue" an object's qualities together, forming the object.

Answer 4

I would look to the idea of a state of low entropy, for a comparison. A black hole has been shown to have the absolute maximum disorder per unit space inside the event horizon. So, a White Hole as the inverse, would seem to be a modern understanding of Prime Matter.

Answer 5

from the OP's link, page 636

whenever there is a form there must also be some matter that serves as its subject. On this conception, there will often be hierarchies of matter, with the most basic stuff ,prime matter, at the bottom, and various form-matter composites at higher levels, which may themselves be conceived as the matter for some further form. Wood, for example, is a form-matter composite that can itself serve as the matter of a bed (see Aristotle, Phys. II.1)

Switching to Kant, actual existence is a synthesis of form, matter and cognition. Now in Heidegger, World and Earth are metaphors respectively for things e.g. sculpture present in the intelligible world, excavated from earth, which withholds its secrets. Earth appears in world as the surface of the unknown, so when we look at atomic structure we are just taking a good look at the surface of the unknown. The atoms exist because we apply the concept or form to a material instance. Deeper than the atom (or strings, whatever) is unknown, undefined, indeterminate.

For Aquinas concept or quiddity is separate from existence. The undefined concept is concept without predicates: nothing, pure potentiality. A bare concept can have predicates added to turn it into anything, any form. Then if you find one, like a Higgs Boson, hey presto! it exists.

The kicker is that we know it existed before we found it, but really, before it was found it was a theory of the unknown. We always have the unknown, so I guess Aristotle's prime matter is Heidegger's earth.

Answer 6

The philosophic concept of "prime matter" does not exist in the field of physics. This means that it does not exist in the real world out there. This means that the concept of prime matter is not even irrelevant.

Note that arguing about the properties of something that does not exist is a waste of time. Have a sip of whiskey instead.