Chapter 3

"Matter"

I think the discussion I am about to engage in deserves a chapter to itself, even though I don't intend to use in my philosophical system the term that is its title (which is why it is in quotes). In past writings, I have defined the quantity of the unifying energy as "matter," and have been at pains to distinguish it from the material (the parts) that make up the body; but it only causes confusion and is not necessary; and so I finally decided that "matter," is a term that should be dropped from my philosophical vocabulary.

Let me give some of the history of the term, and show why it seems to "point to" the quantity of the unifying energy more than anything else.

Aristotle was the first to use it, meaning by it the "stuff" or "material" that bodies were "made of," which he called "potentially" the body in question. Thus, a wooden statue is (is active as) a statue and is "of" wood; so it is wood that is acting as Hermes, say. A human being is flesh and bones and so on active as human; and so on. So the wood is the "matter" of the statue and the flesh and bones the "matter" of the human. But of course wood "is" in some sense wood, and what it is made of is (according to Aristotle) some mixture of earth, air, fire, and water; and earth itself "is" something, and so it is made of--what? When you are back this far, the "matter" has no name or no form, and so the "ultimate matter" (which the Scholastics called "prime matter") is just "pure potency."

For Aristotle, the form limited the matter to being a "this," because it made it act as "this kind of body." Later Scholastics clarified things somewhat in distinguishing the "substantial form" from an "accidental form," so that the "statue" was not a kind of body, but only an (accidental) shape of wood; and the wood, in this case would be the "kind of body," meaning that the elements (earth, air, etc.) were the "proximate matter," and these were forms in some sense of "prime matter."

But with Plotinus, the form didn't limit the matter, the matter limited the form or Aspect; and so the "potency" meant what "received" the Form; but this still made it the form of the matter.

One of the things we must be aware of in all this is that the ancients thought of bodies as continuous, not as discrete parts separated in space and interacting at a distance from each other with internal fields. Wood, for instance, didn't have a lump of earth connected to two lumps of air and one of water; it was more like a mixture, as when you mix red paint and green paint and get brown paint all the way through. That is, earth and air and water, when they all act together ("as one") in a certain way, are wood, which is through and through wood, with earth, air, and water in every part of it.

In any case, after Plotinus, the matter was "potency" because it limited the form or Aspect, which in itself is unlimited. Aristotle had held that the matter "individualized" the body, because of course the lump of "stuff" that acted a certain way made the act this individual case of wood, or whatever. But the post-Plotinian Scholastic notion now meant that the individualization of the Form was due to the limitation by the matter.

You can see why the matter became a kind of "something which limited" instead of being just the limitation itself, because, even though in the last analysis it was just "stuffness" and had no form, still, "stuff" is "there," isn't it? And so, even though logically, "prime matter" doesn't exist and is just the ultimate limitation of some body, it was still thought of as what "received" the form, and the form was thought of as the form "of" the matter.

And matter as "stuff" was also obviously what had "extension" (equated with quantity) connected with it, because again "stuff" is what "spreads out."

So in Thomism, the "substantial form" limited the existence and the matter limited the substantial form, giving you the substance, whose first accident as a material substance was extension, and the other accidents "inhered" in the extended substance.

Of course, Descartes muddied the waters with his "clear and distinct ideas" and the notion that the only thing that a body had as a body was extension, so that matter and extension now meant the same thing.

But we need not go into this further, I think.

Now if the quantity of the unifying energy is the ultimate limitation on the act unifying the body, then it would seem obvious that a body is this individual body because it is a limited instance of the particular kind of body. In other words, what makes the body an individual of a certain kind of body is the particular degree of unification of the body.

But why not the parts? Because parts can come and go and the body is still this individual body. Presumably, you don't have most of the chemicals that actually made up your body a number of years ago, and yet your body is still one and the same individual, because it is (any old) parts united with this unifying energy. Hence, what makes your body distinctively this one is not the humanity of your unifying energy, but the "thisness" of the particular case of humanity it is--and that, of course, is its limitation in degree.

So if matter is (a) limitation of what makes the body the kind of body it is, and (b) what accounts for the individual instance of a given kind of body; then obviously what is being "pointed to" by the term is not the parts (the "material" of the body) but the quantity of the unifying energy.

Hence, what was actually referred to by the Scholastic notion of matter, once the atomic nature of bodies was known, was not the "stuff" at all, but how strongly the parts were held together.

But common usage of "matter" makes us think of the "stuff" things are "made of" (which would "point to" the parts more than anything else), or to the body as such (as in "What is the behavior of an electrical field in matter?").

So to keep the term "matter" and refer by it to the quantity of the internal field (the amount of the unifying energy) means having to stress that it is not to be thought of as "stuff" or "material" at all; and for those who are not familiar with the tradition, why take a term and give it a meaning so very different from what everyone else means by it?

And it seems to me that this objection is quite reasonable--the more reasonable because of my experience in having really bright students struggle with the term. And since it is just as easy to talk about the quantity of the unifying energy, then I will simply not use "matter" any more.

However, before dropping the subject, it can now be seen why I defined "the spiritual" as "what is not limited quantitatively." If "materiality" comes from the fact that the body is unified by an act which has a quantity, then obviously what is not quantified would be what is not material--which is what everyone understands "spiritual" to deal with.

It can also be seen now why I called a body a "body" and not a "thing." If the parts are going to interact with fields, then, as we saw, they will interact to some degree, which means that the whole will be "material," or a body.

But then doesn't that mean that there are no spiritual analogates to bodies? No spiritual multiple units? Right. Every "part," as I have said, of what is spiritual permeates every other part, and there is no distinction in reality between the part and the whole, because what is spiritual, if it is multiple at all, "reduplicates itself" without being actually more than one act.

To make a transition, then, to our investigation, we can draw the following conclusion:

Conclusion 7: The quantity of the unifying energy is related to the total quantity of all the energies that make up the body.

This could give rise to the "conservation of matter." Matter, of course, is not here "stuff" but whatever it is that accounts for or is "behind" the total quantity of all the energies of the body. Hence, when two bodies interact and trade energy off, there is a total amount of energy in both of them, governed by (or connected to) the quantity of unifying energy of each. If one gains energy, then this means also that its unification is also more energetic; but by the same token, it implies (since it has to get this extra total energy from somewhere) that the other body has to lose at least that much energy; and so that body's unifying energy will be that much weaker.

So the "conservation of matter" as a law of physics just means that if you add up the total quantity of energy before the exchange and the total quantity after the exchange (making the proper conversion factors so that the actual numbers are equivalent), then they will be the same.

So there is no difference between "conservation of matter" and "conservation of energy" on this showing. If "conservation of matter" means "conservation of mass," then we know from relativity theory that mass is not conserved. Mass is just a form of energy (gravitational energy or resistance to force), and is not "stuff"; so there is nothing surprising in having it converted into other forms of energy or in having it suddenly come into existence from massless things like light (in "pair production")⁽¹⁾.

There is also something else we can say based on our discussion above about "matter" as being what individuates within a "species," putting this together with the fact that "matter" in that sense "points to" the quantity of the unifying energy:

Conclusion 8: The quantity of the unifying energy accounts for there being many different bodies of the same kind.

Since the type of body is explained by the form of its unifying energy, and since, as we saw, its "thisness" is not accounted for by the parts that are unified (because they can come and go and the body remains the individual body), then obviously what makes a given body this one and no other is the degree this type of unifying energy has--just as what makes one case of heat different from another is not where it is (which is intrinsically irrelevant), but the fact that this one is one temperature and the other is a different temperature.

That seems obvious enough, until you think of its implications: it means that, for instance, two different human beings are different precisely because they differ in the degree of their humanity. In other words, the proposition "All men are created equal" is exactly the opposite of what is the case. No human being is the equal of any other one; each of us lives at a different level of humanity from anyone else.

People tend to resist this, because they think "to be less human" means "not to be as good as the next person," and therefore implies some kind of lack in dignity or rights or in respect due to oneself in relation to someone else. But of course, it doesn't imply this at all unless one attaches "dignity" or "rights" to the degree of internal energy the body has, allowing the body to perform more acts or perform them more intensely--which is all this "level of humanity" means.

It is perfectly obvious that some people are more talented than others; and it is also, when you think about it, obvious that this means that they have more internal energy than others, and bodies that are so constructed that acts that are difficult for most people are easy for them. But the unifying energy is precisely what sets the limits to the total energy of the body, and what (in humans, certainly, and in living bodies generally) constructs the parts which then give greater or lesser facility to the acts implied in the parts. The unifying energy, for instance, constructs an eyeball that is either the perfect shape for seeing accurately, or is more or less an oval, in which case the person is myopic or has astigmatism or some other visual impairment.

The truth behind "all men are created equal" is not that everyone exists to the same degree of humanity, but that rights and respect have nothing to do with the level or degree of humanity we in fact exist at. Not to get into a long discussion here, since it belongs with the implications of making free choices, what is behind this is that because, as free, we decide for ourselves (to some extent) what our individual expression of humanity is to be (our "life style," which amounts to what level of humanity we are to exist at), then the fact that we can do this is what demands respect and gives us rights, not the level we happen to exist at.

That is, since the quantity of my unifying energy is (within limits) not predetermined for me genetically,, but is determined by my choice (which ultimately is the form of my unifying energy, only in its spiritual "dimension"), then obviously I should be allowed to do this for myself, and must not be treated as if my energy-level allowed me to be used or despised by other people.

So it's not the fact that we exist at different energy levels that gives us rights and demands that we be respected by others; it is the fact that we control our level of existence that does so. Hence, the respect for anyone is to be "equal," whether the person's genetic limits give him a great deal of control over himself or only a small amount; he still has control over himself.

In the human being, then, what is predetermined is not a quantity for the unifying energy, but a range of quantities, among which one can choose the quantity he wishes to be "his," and how he is to express himself humanly. Thus, a person who is very talented naturally in mathematics might be interested in basketball and neglect his mathematical talent and develop his (perhaps mediocre) natural abilities in basketball to their fullest extent. The fact that he should not be prevented from doing this is what we mean by "his right" to do it. And this is connected with the fact that for a human being, the final state (the goal) is not "built in," but depends on what the person chooses as what is his "good"--which, as we saw, is subjective.

So "all men are created equal" really means "no one should impose his idea of what is 'good for a person' on anyone else." This does not mean, I hasten to add, that you can't prevent a person from doing wrong, if it involves doing harm to someone else (basically, violating someone else's rights); what it means it that you are not to presume to say to any human being, "You're wasting your life; I know what the real you is, and you're not living up to your potential." Every human has the right not to have to live up to his potential; but he should be given the opportunity to live up to it if he chooses.

This is a difficult saying; and I should comment here that it doesn't apply to children. Children must be forced to do things that they don't want to do as they are growing, precisely so that when their bodies are basically mature and their experience is sufficient to realize what the concrete implications of their choice of a lifestyle is, they will be able then to live up to the choice they make for themselves, and won't have opportunities (in practice) cut off because their physical or mental growth has been stunted. This is the tragedy of the poor schools we find in ghettos, or of "permissive" education in general. Teachers who don't challenge students and make them sweat (including those teachers who "want them to feel good about themselves") produce high-school graduates who can't even read--and how can they become doctors or engineers if they then see that this is what they would want to be? By pretending that they have the rights of adults, adults are violating the children's future rights.

Let me make one remark about the unifying energy and the parts before going on to the body and its properties. Newton looked on the solar system as a number of bodies connected by gravitational forces; but this didn't describe the behavior of the system with perfect accuracy (though the discrepancy between the way it is and the way Newton's description says it should be is so small as not to have been observed until the twentieth century).

Einstein's General Theory of Relativity describes the solar system better, in terms of a "warping of space-time" into a non-Euclidean geometry in the presence of massive objects. What this looks very much like is as if you were to say, "Let's not consider the sun and the planets as a system of interconnected bodies; let's look on it instead as a kind of body, with an internal field and parts at various energy levels within it, each (to a not very significant extent) giving up something of itself to behave as a part of the body."

It might be that if this point of view were taken, then something like Einstein's description would emerge, without the really self-contradictory idea in his theory that space (nothingness) is actually shaped in some way "between" objects, and there is no force connecting them. The field is not nothing; but it doesn't follow that it is a force that has the Newtonian configuration. This would also free us from Einstein's epistemological confusion that acceleration is the same as force, where he is confusing being-affected with causality--which are the same relation, but looked at from different points of view. What he is saying is very much like saying that if the distance between New York and Los Angeles is the same, then you're traveling to Los Angeles from New York no matter which way you're going.

I personally believe that if Einstein and others had stuck to physics rather than venturing into epistemology (with "principles" like the "identity of indiscernibles") there would now be a lot less confusion in the upper reaches of the science.

1. This hints at another common notion of "matter": what is "heavy" or "bulky." But we now know that weight is actually the interaction of the form of energy called "mass" with the gravitational field (one of the properties of mass) of another body.