Bharatwaj Iyer examines substance with the help of Hume & Vedantic philosophy

Bharatwaj Iyer examines substance with the help of Hume & Vedantic philosophy.

Bharatwaj Iyer examines substance with the help of Hume & Vedantic philosophy.

In his 1738 classic A Treatise of Human Nature, the Scottish philosopher David Hume criticised a conception of substance held by many philosophers throughout the long history of Western thought. He rhetorically asks these philosophers how they know of the existence and nature of substances. Hume considers two possible answers: sense perception or sheer thought. If our senses are the source of our knowledge of substances, then substance would need to be observable through taste, smell, touch, and so on. No one, of course, considered substance to be a smell or a taste or a touch, nor even the combination of all these. Rather, the combination of all our sensations of an object, argues Hume, is imagined to belong to an unknown entity that acts as the locus of their manifestation; and that is precisely what the ‘substance’ is thought to be. Our conception of substance is a function, then, of our minds, not of our senses. The intellect conjures up the idea of ‘substance’ and then a relation is imagined between an unknowable something, the substance, and its knowable, sensible attributes or qualities.

This substance-attribute relation was instrumental in the conception of thing-hood and identity in Western thought. For instance in Plato’s dialogue Meno, when Meno asks what a solid is, Socrates answers that a solid (or we could substitute ‘thing’) is something that has contours (or edges) in which certain sensible qualities inhere. And to Aristotle, form confers thing-hood on a lump of matter by separating that form-impressed matter from the rest of the world in a specific way. Imagine Mount Rushmore were the matter. The monument would have thing-hood conferred upon it by the sculptor carving out the faces of the Presidents. The sculptor separates the monument from the remaining matter of the mountain. To call the unformed lump something in addition to what is defined by the faces of the Presidents would be to miss the whole point. In Aristotle’s view matter must combine with form to become a substance. In our example, the monument of sculpted faces is the substance formed by the rocks given shape by the sculptor. In Aristotle’s terminology, unformed matter is mere potentiality, and form is that which makes it actual. This actuated potentiality is what he calls substance. A mass of pure potentiality, a sea of undifferentiated matter, cannot be a thing or substance: a potentiality, by definition, is not (yet) a thing.

Hume thought that Aristotle’s argument did not hold water. Nevertheless, it’s a good starting point to critically consider some core aspects of Hume’s metaphysics.

Perhaps I'm being overly generous, but it strikes me that Aristotle's statement that unformed matter is mere potentialities.
Could be taken as an insight into modern physics.