Form

FORM. - In its ordinary meaning it is the outward disposition of the parts of a body (μορφή), a quality of sensible substances, especially living ones, according to which they are called well-formed or deformed (Aristotle, Cat., 8, 10a-12). In philosophical reflection, "form" denotes the principle that determines the essence and structure of being as such: it is then called the cause of things and "species" (εἶδος) par excellence (Phys., III, 3, 194 b 26; Met., V, 2, 1013 b 23).

Form is the radical principle of the positivity of being, insofar as it is form that determines the content of the essence; it is the act and the "first perfection" of whatever exists either as a simple substance (that is, pure form) or as a composite substance (a synolon of matter and form). To form, an ontological act, there corresponds in the logical order the "difference": form determines and actualizes matter in reality, the specific difference determines and actualizes in the synthesis of the definition the still vague content of the "genus" (Met. VII, 4, 1030 e 11 ff.). On the one hand, therefore, form, as the distinctive and dividing principle of genera, runs from top to bottom through the classifications of beings, isolating them in the irrefutable originality of the lowest species; on the other, as the first constitutive principle of beings themselves and the reason (λόγος) proper to their structure, form at one and the same time maintains and ensures the unity of being within individual substances and the unity of nature in the multiplicity of individuals scattered through time and space (Top., II, 2, 109 b 14).

In an intellectualist vision of the world, to which both Plato and Aristotle remain faithful, form is therefore the first principle of being, of becoming and of knowing. The contrast between the two philosophers concerns the mode of the "presence" of forms in matter: whether it comes about by way of "participation," so that the "true" form is only one (transcendent and immaterial) as Platonism would have it; and whether one must affirm the "subsistence" of forms in sensible matter and the primacy of the singular sensible substance over genera and species, as Aristotelianism holds (Met., XIII, 3, 1070 a 18; XIV, 4, 1078 a 31). Without entering into the controversy over the proximate origin of the concept of form, one must hold that it expresses Aristotle's most characteristic contribution to Western culture (W. Jaeger). And it truly expresses the central nucleus of his thought, however it may be applied to the analyses of nature, of aesthetic, ethical, social and political activities, and of philosophical reflection itself. By virtue of form, Aristotelian becoming is not Heraclitean becoming but the "passage" from the capacity to have a form to the act of having it: a passage brought about by an "agent" that has such a form first as its own act and then as the "end" of its acting. For this reason form is the first and final perfection of being (ἐντελέχεια: De Anima, II, 1, 412 a 10; Met., V, 4, 1015 a 10).

In this way the new concept of form at once tempered the excesses of Platonism and checked the physical mechanism of Democritus and Empedocles by affirming the predominance, in physics and biology no less than in the development of the life of the spirit, of morphological and qualitative criteria over matter and purely quantitative relations. Form is therefore act, substance and being "more than matter" (Met., VII, 3, 1020 a 29): a principle that medieval Aristotelianism expressed with the formula "forma dat esse," which, however, was understood differently by the different schools. The followers of Avicebron (v.) extended the doctrine of universal matter and form and of the multiplicity of cosmic matters and forms to a "plurality of forms" in the same individual (the early Franciscan school) or at least, for man, to the composition of a "form of corporeity" and of the spiritual soul (Scotus). It is within this school that the opinion took hold that matter too had a certain imperfect "act" and was not pure potency: an attitude which, supported by the authority of Suárez, was not without influence on the dynamism of Leibniz. For St. Thomas, who remains on the rigorously metaphysical plane of Aristotle, form and matter stand in the metaphysical tension of contradiction: the unity of real being depends on the unity of the substantial form and is repugnant even to the divine power to attribute to matter any act whatsoever (Quodlib., III, q. I, s. 1).

The Aristotelian point of view, which seemed submerged by Galilean physics, has been restored to honor in various sectors of contemporary culture. In the ontogenesis of living beings, the processes of organization obey a law that is interior to them or that has the meaning and efficacy of a form or entelechy (H. Driesch). In the development and articulation of the cognitive functions, the content of objects is not given by the sum of simple elementary contents (associationism), but presents itself immediately as an organized "whole" that has the character of form (Gestaltpsychologie). And there are visual, acoustic, tactile forms..., static forms and forms of movement: for all of them the general law holds that the form is something other than, or rather, something more than the sum of the parts (Ehrenfels). Only that, in contrast to the apriorist position that attributes forms (Gestalten) to intellectual "production" (the school of Meinong), and to the hypothesis of "isomorphism" according to which perceptual forms would be the univocal effect of psycho-physical processes taking place in the cortical zone (the school of Wertheimer), the neo-Aristotelians distinguish, in agreement with experience itself, between form and meaning. Form can be an immediate sensory content (Aristotle's "common sensibles"), but the meaning, which is far more important than the form, belongs to the higher functions of the intelligence.

Within the sphere of philosophy, Kant's "pure a priori forms" (Denkformen) mark the deviation from the primitive Aristotelian concept that has proved most pregnant with consequences, to the point of abolishing with actualist Hegelianism the very concept of form in favor of an "act" that makes itself and knows no law outside itself. In modern historiography, form has the meaning of the "type" of a culture or civilization (Dilthey's Grundformen, Spranger's Lebensformen, etc.).

Cornelio Fabro