Forms are possible events
Is there form of feces?
Section 20 (first updated 1.4.2021)
Is There a Form of Feces?
Forms as Possible Events
Forms are not merely abstract ideals; they are possible events. Every form, even the most seemingly base or undesirable, represents a potential configuration of reality. Hence, the provocative question: Is there a Form of feces?
In the common interpretation of monotheistic religions—especially Judaism and Islam—to conflate oneself with God is considered a grave sin. The distinction between Creator and creature is absolute. In Christianity, this separation is less rigidly maintained, because the divine is understood to be embodied in Christ, who represents the ideal of man. Christians often say, “What would Jesus do?”, implying that the standard of action is the ideal human, a reflection of the divine in man.
Yet even here, there remains a clear division between God and humanity. By contrast, in older religions such as Hinduism or Buddhism, any embodiment in nature is recognized as a form of the divine. When someone declares, “I am God,” within these traditions, they are often celebrated as enlightened, as having recognized their true nature.[^1] In monotheistic traditions, however, such a claim is condemned as blasphemy—for it collapses the infinite perfection of God into a finite human limitation.
Nonetheless, certain interpretations of Christianity (particularly in Christian mysticism) propose that Jesus did not claim divinity over others, but rather revealed the divine essence within each individual. In this view, God, the Holy Spirit, and the Son represent universal components within every person:
- God as the universal essence or totality of being,
- Spirit as the soul or mind, and
- Son as the material, bodily manifestation.
Thus, each human embodies a trinity of existence—universal, mental, and material.
Aristotle and the Missing Concept of Consciousness
Aristotle’s philosophy never fully developed the notion of consciousness as distinct from thought. He saw thought (νοῦς) as the active principle of the cosmos, but he did not yet conceive of it as self-conscious thought.[^2]
In Aristotle’s system, the heart is not essential in itself but functions as part of a whole organism; it depends upon other organs to continue.[^3] This reveals a key insight: growth is distinct from creation. The heart is created, but the man as a whole grows. Aristotle understood the organism as a unity of parts, but his metaphysics did not yet grasp the self-determining nature of thought as consciousness.
The limitation of Aristotle’s philosophy lies in its inability to explain how thought determines universal principles while still adapting to the flux of sensible objects. Aristotle correctly saw that the universal forms of Plato are active within natural processes, but he stopped short of explaining how thought itself modifies those processes by reflecting upon them.
The notion of consciousness—as the self-reflective awareness of thought—had not yet emerged in Greek philosophy. For the ancients, thought was a cosmic substance present in all things. Indeed, things exhibit rational structures that can be communicated through logic, but the idea of an individual consciousness capable of freely determining nature itself was still undeveloped.
It is with Hegel that this ancient notion of thought becomes fully transformed. Hegel characterizes consciousness as the spirit (Geist)—the living energy of thought that knows itself.[^4] In this sense, consciousness is the personality of thought, its inward reflection.
For the Greeks, thought was everywhere; for Hegel, everywhere is within thought. There is now a point within the universe that constitutes its own change: the alteration of consciousness itself. The change of consciousness constitutes the change of the object. This is the way in which consciousness conceives thought: by realizing that transformation in awareness transforms being itself.
Two Perspectives: Top–Down and Inside–Out
Consciousness can approach the object of knowledge from two complementary directions:
- From the top–down, as in abstract reasoning, where general concepts are applied to particular situations. For example, the concept of angle applies universally to all objects with corners.
- From the inside–out, as in perception, where the observer collects details of particular objects and abstracts their common features. From seeing many objects with corners, the mind abstracts the universal form of the angle.
In the second case, the act of identifying details already presupposes a kind of intention—a preexisting capacity to recognize what one finds. The object is the bare substratum that appears in a particular manner. Yet this state of being in a particular manner is itself universal to all things. Thus, universality and particularity meet within the act of consciousness, the very point where perception becomes conception.
Footnotes
[^1]: Alan Watts, The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (Pantheon, 1966), and The Way of Zen (Vintage, 1957). Watts explains how Eastern thought encourages the recognition of divine immanence, whereas Western theologies emphasize divine transcendence.
[^2]: Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), II.1–3. Aristotle defines nous as the highest faculty but does not equate it with self-awareness in the modern sense.
[^3]: Aristotle, Parts of Animals, I.1–5. The heart’s function depends upon the entire living organism; it is teleologically related to the whole.
[^4]: G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), §§24–26. Hegel describes spirit as the movement of thought returning into itself—“substance that is also subject.”
Section 21: Things Are Angles
(Connecting with the First Dimension)
One might think that angles are parts of things, as if they were secondary features added to objects; yet it is more accurate to say that things themselves are angles. Mathematicians, in fact, often regard the world in precisely this way.
When we say that an angle is a common feature, we do not mean that it belongs to a thing as a mere attribute, like a horn on a rhinoceros. Rather, every scene is filled with angles—they constitute the layout of the visible world. As Plato teaches, individual objects participate in universal Forms; they are not self-contained, but share in the reality of an intelligible structure that precedes them.[^1] There is first a concept fundamentally present, and particular variations of it are traced over this conceptual plane, as if the Form provides the outline upon which all things are drawn.
Consider, for instance, a bundle of sticks. One might suppose that the angles appearing between the sticks arise accidentally, as random consequences of their overlapping arrangement. Yet these apparent accidents still express definite geometric relations. The specific intersections and triangular gaps between the sticks can be abstracted and maintained as independent geometric patterns. If you remove the pile of sticks altogether, the geometry remains—and the same pattern of angles can be found again in a different pile of objects, such as pins, needles, or straws. Geometry, therefore, is not dependent on the material form of the objects; rather, the objects depend on geometry for their very form.[^2]
The differences between individual members of a species give rise to immediate interactions. For example, the asymmetrical structure of one plant may obstruct another by virtue of being taller. Such interactions compel living beings to maintain their distinct organization as individual expressions of a common form.[^3]
When two branches intersect, the triangular opening between them is not a mere void but a Form—a shape that can be conceived independently and recognized in countless different objects. This triangle is a universal schema that both particularizes and unites all its instances.
The Reality of the Idea
Whenever we perceive an object, its idea is simultaneously received into the mind as an experience. Charles Sanders Peirce defines “idea” (closer to Plato’s usage) as “anything whose being consists in its mere capacity for getting fully represented, regardless of any person’s faculty or impotence to represent it.”[^4]
Every object in nature thus has an idea belonging to it. The idea of a table, for instance, includes its flat surface, supporting legs, and its function of elevating objects above the ground. Contained within this idea are more general geometrical structures—right angles, parallel planes, and triangular supports—that serve as the logical skeleton of its existence.
According to Peirce, the term “real” signifies “having properties, i.e., characters sufficient to identify their subject, and possessing these whether or not they are attributed to it by any person or group of persons.”[^5] In this sense, the real is not dependent on human attribution; it is the persistence of formal relations that maintain their intelligibility regardless of perception.
Thus, to say that things are angles is to affirm that reality is structured by intelligible relations—that the geometry of being precedes and sustains the materiality of things. Angles, in their most fundamental sense, are not features of objects, but the way objects are.
Footnotes
[^1]: Plato, Timaeus 28A–30C; Republic VI–VII. Plato posits that sensible things participate in immutable Forms that preexist them as intelligible structures.
[^2]: Euclid’s Elements, Book I, defines geometry as the science of relations independent of material instantiation. The modern philosophy of mathematics (e.g., Whitehead’s Process and Reality, 1929) extends this to claim that structure underlies substance.
[^3]: Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima), II.3, trans. J.A. Smith, where he explains that the organism maintains its unity through its internal form (entelechy), which differentiates and preserves it amidst change.
[^4]: Charles Sanders Peirce, Collected Papers, 1.422. Peirce’s “idea” echoes Plato’s eidos—the real as that which can be completely represented.
[^5]: Peirce, Collected Papers, 5.311. Peirce’s definition of the “real” anticipates a modern realist semiotics, where reality consists of relations and properties independent of subjective opinion.
Section 22: Forms and Matter — Real and Unreal
The Forms are considered as being “in” something else, which Plato calls nature (physis).[^1]
The notion of reflection in Plato’s theory of Forms is intriguing because physical objects, or what Plato calls sensible things, imitate the Forms. This imitation, however, seems to imply that material things are less real or even unreal. Yet this is an extreme interpretation. Although material objects are not as “real” as the Forms, they are still real in the sense of being reflections—derivative but not illusory. They are not originals, but they are not nothing.
The term “reflection” is often poorly defined as the “throwing back” of something—such as light—off a surface without absorption. This describes the action of reflection, but not reflection itself. The other, more philosophical sense of reflection—to think or ponder—means to bring something back into the mind, as memory recalls what was once present. Reflection, therefore, is not merely the copying of an image but a motion of return, a turning of the mind back toward its source. In this way, reflection is not static imitation but dynamic participation in what is reflected.
The weakness of Plato’s doctrine lies in his inability to explain how physical objects can be less real than Forms. Plato maintains that the Forms constitute reality, while the material world is only a shadow or imitation, because matter is always changing and decaying, whereas the Forms are unchanging and eternal.[^2] However, it is not immediately clear why permanence should determine greater reality. For it is conceivable that a substance could be permanently changing—and thus eternal in its very flux.
Plato’s reasoning is that a thing maintaining a single identity for eternity possesses more being than something whose identity constantly changes. The latter must pass through intermediary stages that are not identical with itself before returning to its former state. In contrast, what maintains its identity continuously is said to exist “longer” in the duration of its being, and therefore possesses greater reality.
Change and Permanence
Let us illustrate this distinction. Suppose we have a sequence of alternating colors: green and red.
If there is only one pair—green followed by red—it is impossible to infer empirically that this alternation will repeat. To know that “green comes after red” must then be presupposed as an abstract truth, not verified through experience. But once we have a series of alternating pairs—green, red, green, red, and so forth—the pattern confirms itself: each instance verifies the rule that “green follows red.” The truth is the same in both cases, but in the first it is abstract (inferred a priori), while in the second it is empirical (confirmed by repetition).
Change, therefore, can itself establish identity through repetition—by returning to itself through cycles of alternation.
If something is constantly changing back and forth between two states, it is “itself” only half the time; during the other half, it is “not itself.” Yet if something remains completely unchanged, it is “itself” all the time—but only by being opposed to change, which is also constant. Thus, permanence and change define each other: the changeless exists only in contrast to change, and the changing maintains itself through recurrent self-identity.
In this sense, the constantly changing may actually exhibit a deeper continuity, because its motion preserves identity through transformation. To be always in flux is not to be without self, but to be a self that endures through change—a unity of becoming.
Footnotes
[^1]: Plato, Timaeus 49A–50C; Phaedo 96A–100A. Plato distinguishes between to on (being) and to gignomenon (becoming), identifying the former with Forms and the latter with sensible nature (physis).
[^2]: Republic X, 596–602; Phaedrus 247E–249B. Plato argues that the realm of Forms is unchanging and truly real, while the sensible world “participates” in being through imitation.
[^3]: Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.6, 1071b–1072b. Aristotle critiques Plato for divorcing Forms from material things and proposes that form and matter coexist as hylomorphic composites—actual and potential aspects of one reality.
[^4]: Plotinus, Enneads V.1.6. Plotinus interprets the sensible world not as illusion but as the necessary “image” of the intelligible world, an emanation that remains dependent on its source.
[^5]: G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic (1812–16), “Doctrine of Being.” Hegel transforms the Platonic dualism by showing that permanence and change are dialectically united: being passes into becoming, and becoming into determinate being.
When You Change the Angle of Conception, You Change the World
The logic that divides things into categories of change and non-change, and further into what is real and unreal, creates the fundamental problem in the distinction between a true and a false reality. When Plato claims that the Forms are more “real” than sensible things, what he means is that they are more actual.[^1]
However, actuality differs from reality in a crucial way. Something that appears to us as not what it truly is can still be real in the sense that it exists — that is, as a phenomenon. But to be actual means to express what the thing ought to be, its inner determination or essence, which unfolds through time. Actuality, then, is the substance of time, because in what a thing ought to be there is already implied a duration, a process of realization.
If my actuality is not what I am right now, but what I could be, then my potentiality is the actuality of reality. There is movement — a becoming — toward the realization of potential. Plato leaves unexplained how the Forms serve as the actuality of sensible, material things, and therefore seems to make one possess reality while the other remains an illusion of being.
Aristotle’s Revision: The Form in Matter
Aristotle makes a more scientific move. He accepts that we are indeed confronted with a reality that is not exactly what it appears to be, but rather that appearance contains what explains it — its form. Appearance (phenomenon) means what is given to consciousness through sense or thought. Aristotle observes that when the mind perceives one object after another, it discerns a continuum between them, even when they differ in appearance. This continuity points to the material substrate underlying all change — what he calls hyle.[^2]
This substrate is real, yet it is not actual on its own, for it lacks what makes things distinct. The wall, the desk, and the tree are all material, but their differences arise from their forms — the structures that define their function and essence. Unlike Plato, Aristotle does not place the realm of Forms in a separate, transcendent world. Instead, he locates form within matter itself. Form is the actuality of matter because it reveals the function, activity, and purpose of a thing — its entelechy, or “being-at-work.”[^3]
Matter alone captures the present moment, a single snapshot in the stream of time. What makes the “present” meaningful is the alignment between an abstract form and a concrete substrate. These are not two separate entities but two aspects of the same reality — one abstract, one concrete. When two forms come into contact, they create a contradiction, not in the sense of error, but as a complex unity, a synthesis of distinct structures forming a new one.
As moments pass, they move like a stream through matter, shaping and being shaped by it. The world, therefore, is not a static collection of substances but a field of interactions between forms — each influencing, sensing, and knowing the other.
Perception, Abstraction, and the Geometry of Reality
For example, consider the enzyme helicase, which “unwinds” the DNA double helix. When we illustrate helicase, we often represent it as having a triangular form — symbolizing sharpness or cutting. But helicase is no more triangular than it is curved or rugged when viewed at a molecular scale. Our abstraction of its structure derives from both sensation and geometry — the concept of sharpness being drawn from shapes like triangles or blades.
This demonstrates how the mind interprets physical processes through geometric and logical analogies. What is truly present at the molecular level is not a distinct, mechanical object acting upon another, but an abstract interaction within a continuous field of events. What we call the “helicase molecule” may simply be a cluster of events within the continuous field of the DNA chain itself.
The senses interpret geometry as feeling — sharpness as painful, roundness as soft. This is not arbitrary: geometric structures correlate with how forces act on the body. A sharp angle exerts more pressure on a smaller surface, causing pain. The organism maintains its form by responding to such sensations. Pain, in this sense, is the alertness of form defending its integrity.
Thus, perception translates the abstract relations of geometry into affective experience. Reality is therefore neither purely objective nor purely mental, but the coincidence of abstract relations and sensory feeling.
From Plato to Hegel: Reality as Relation
Hegel, much later, dissolves the strict Platonic division between appearance and true being. For him, the real and the unreal are not separate worlds but moments within one process — the unfolding of the universal through the particular.[^4] Reality is not divided between “what is” and “what is not,” but is the relation between universality (form) and particularity (matter).
When perception isolates a quality — say, the angle of a doorway — and recognizes the same quality across other objects (the edge of a table, the bend of an arm), the understanding has abstracted a universal form from particulars. It can either regress into opinion, by thinking that the angle is merely a subjective mental model, or advance into reason, by recognizing that the angle itself is real — a universal form expressed in each object.
This shift marks the transition from understanding to reason, from static observation to dialectical thought. Reality, therefore, changes when the angle of conception changes — because to perceive differently is to constitute a new world of relations.
Motion, then, is not merely the change of objects in space, but the change of conception in consciousness. Whether this change appears external (as the movement of bodies) or internal (as the transformation of perspective), it is one and the same phenomenon — the motion of form through consciousness.
Forms and Timelessness
According to Plato, Forms are timeless and unchanging — perfect models of all things and qualities.[^5] Yet Plato also admits, through Socrates, that it is impossible to know the realm of Forms directly. The Forms are not “in” space or time, but beyond them, existing “in themselves and with themselves” (Timaeus 52a). They have no extension, no orientation, no duration.
Yet Plato also says that “our world is modeled after the patterns of the Forms.”[^6] This seems contradictory — until we recognize that the Forms are not objects beside the world but the conditions of its possibility. They are not “elsewhere” but are the very logic of change itself.
The idea of a Form (e.g., Beauty, Love, Circle) is not one particular instance, but the infinite possibility of all its instances. To recognize one instance — a hug, a melody, a kind act — is to grasp the form of love as the unity of all such acts. Forms are thus hierarchies of possibility, each containing within it infinite variations.
The form of a hierarchy is itself physical, for it orders how possibilities manifest. Reality is therefore a living synthesis of form and matter, universal and particular, timeless and temporal — and when you change the angle of conception, you disclose a different configuration of that same eternal geometry.
Footnotes
[^1]: Plato, Republic 509D–511E; Phaedo 65D–66A. The Form is more “real” (ontōs on) because it is what a thing truly is in itself, not what it merely appears to be.
[^2]: Aristotle, Physics II.1–3; Metaphysics VII.3. Aristotle calls the underlying substance hyle, matter, which becomes actual through form (morphē).
[^3]: Aristotle, Metaphysics IX.8, 1049b–1050a. Actuality (energeia) is the realization of potential (dynamis) — the being-at-work of form in matter.
[^4]: Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Preface and Introduction; Science of Logic (1812–1816), “Doctrine of Essence.” Reality for Hegel is the process of becoming in which universality and particularity mediate each other.
[^5]: Plato, Symposium 211b; Phaedrus 247E–249B; Timaeus 52a.
[^6]: Plato, Timaeus 28A–30C. The world is “a moving image of eternity,” modeled after the perfect and immutable Forms.
The Materialist Account of Change as Opposed to the Doctrine of Forms
The materialist explains change as the transformation of an object’s physical state. For example, a banana is solid outside the stomach but becomes more liquid once digested, as its structure is broken down by heat and enzymes. A solid changes into a liquid, and a liquid into gas.
However, the result of such change is that the banana is no longer identifiable as a banana — it becomes protein. The materialist doctrine of change does not explain how the physical structure of an object is related to its identity. It simply notes two abstractions at different points in time, connected by a set of mediating conditions that produce one state from another. Under certain conditions, one object entirely loses its previous identity: apply heat to ice, and you get water.
But this empirical observation does not explain why water is the result of heat applied to ice. It merely describes that heat breaks down the molecular structure that sustains solidity, without showing why liquidity emerges as its specific consequence. Why does one state become another? The materialist description recognizes only that such transitions occur — not the principle of their relation.
Empirical Observation and Its Limits
If we take the empirical account literally, we cannot assume there to be liquidity implicit in solidity, because such an assumption refers to an ideal continuity from past to present — something not directly perceivable. Empiricism only admits what is observable at the present moment.
In one moment, the object is solid; in another, it is liquid. The connection between these moments — that liquidity was always potentially in the solid — cannot be empirically verified without presupposing an ideal continuity through time. Yet this very continuity belongs to what the materialist denies: the formal identity that underlies transformation.
If, however, we observe the process of melting — for instance, an ice cube gradually turning into water — we witness a duration in which the solid becomes liquid. This process reveals that change itself involves a transition between states, and that each state contains the potential of the other. When the process is complete, the new state (water) conceals its origin (ice), yet retains traces of its solidity — the way it maintains cohesion for a time, distinct from its surroundings.
Thus, in every change, what was actual becomes potential, and what was potential becomes actual. The banana becomes protein, but this transformation reveals that the protein structure was always implicitly contained within the banana — not as an observed part, but as a potential dimension of its being.
The Banana in the Protein, the Protein in the Banana
It is not immediately apparent how the microscopic proteins of a banana combine to form the visible, macroscopic banana we perceive. Nor is it obvious, from the perspective of molecular biology alone, how these microscopic structures relate to the unity of the whole fruit.
The relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic illustrates how potentiality and actuality interact to constitute reality. The macro and the micro form an infinitesimal continuum in nature, each relative to the observer’s standpoint.
In this sense, scale determines how potentiality becomes actuality: a state that is microscopic in one frame of reference becomes macroscopic in another. For example, when saliva is spat onto a concrete wall, it is first liquid, but within minutes, it dries and crystallizes. The transition from liquid to solid is usually attributed to evaporation, yet this explanation merely restates the observation — it does not explain how the same liquid becomes solid.
From one perspective, we say that liquid molecules disperse into gas. But what happens to the liquid state itself? We cannot simply claim that it “disappears.” Rather, liquidity remains present, but at a more microscopic scale. When a liquid dries, its wetness recedes into the microscopic realm, while the solidity of the residue becomes the macroscopic expression.
In other words, the wet is implicit in the dry, just as the solid is implicit in the liquid. Each contains the other as its potential state. One form enters into the background when the other becomes manifest — a dynamic reciprocity between actuality and potentiality.
The Geometric Structure of Change
This reciprocal relation can be represented geometrically as a tesseract, a cube within a cube — where each dimension of reality is contained within another. When one dimension is manifest, the other is implicit within it. Each object becomes the dimension for the other: when one emerges outward, the other recedes inward.
From our perceptual position, the proteins are inside the banana, and the banana is outside the proteins. But if we shift our perspective to the microscopic scale, the relation reverses: the banana becomes outside the proteins, as their context and whole.
The materialist doctrine recognizes only the external succession of states — the banana, then the protein — and not the inner logic connecting them. It explains transformation as a sequence of quantitative changes within the substrate of matter, but fails to explain how qualitative identity — what something is — persists and transforms through those quantitative variations.
The Limits of Materialism and the Role of Form
The materialist says only that there was once a banana, and later there is protein. But the relation between the qualities of banana and protein remains unaccounted for. The doctrine reduces both to different configurations of the same matter, ignoring how each quality relates to the other in a shared continuum of identity.
Plato already recognized this problem: how can a world of changing things be intelligible without presupposing unchanging Forms? Yet Plato’s own doctrine faced a difficulty — how to explain the relation between the eternal Forms and the changing objects that imitate them.[^1]
Aristotle, while critical of Plato, in fact elaborates upon the same issue. He argues that the Forms cannot exist as independent entities apart from objects, but must be intrinsic to them — not as attributes or accidents, but as their immanent structures of being.[^2] The Form does not exist in space or time, but it is precisely the principle that explains space and time. The eternal does not negate change but grounds it: it is the ideal continuity through which change is possible.
When Aristotle says that the form is the actuality of matter, he means that the form determines how matter becomes what it is — its potential for being realized.[^3] The object, in turn, limits the infinite potential of form into a particular moment of appearance.
Plato describes the object as a limitation of the Forms but does not clarify how. Aristotle provides the missing link: the form of an object is its limitation — that which makes it distinct, identifiable, and actual. The Forms, though not in time, explain time by being every possible moment of it. The object, as it were, captures a single snapshot of the infinite continuity of the Forms, which themselves remain unaffected and eternal.
Conclusion
Thus, while the materialist explains change as a succession of mechanical transformations, the formal realist (Plato, Aristotle, and later Hegel) explains change as the reciprocal movement between potentiality and actuality, micro and macro, implicit and explicit.
Matter provides the substrate of change, but form provides the principle by which one state becomes another. Without this formal relation, change would be nothing more than the disappearance of one thing and the emergence of another — a world of disconnected events, without identity or continuity.
Footnotes
[^1]: Plato, Timaeus 27D–30C; Republic 509D–511E; Parmenides 130E–134E. Plato acknowledges the difficulty of relating immutable Forms to mutable objects.
[^2]: Aristotle, Metaphysics VII.8 (1033b–1034a); De Anima II.1 (412a–b). Aristotle holds that form is not a separate substance but the actuality within matter that gives it determinate being.
[^3]: Aristotle, Metaphysics IX.8 (1049b–1050a): “Actuality is prior to potentiality in definition and in substance.”
[^4]: For early materialist accounts of change, see Democritus (fragment DK 68A125) and Epicurus, Letter to Herodotus §41–42; for the modern mechanistic account, see Descartes, Principles of Philosophy II.
[^5]: On Marx’s critique of materialism and his reworking of Aristotelian form within dialectical materialism, see Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and Capital I, ch. 7.
Layers, Form, and the Nature of Being
1. Layers of the Object
When we say that an object is layered upon its form, this does not mean that the form is merely the outline of the object, as in a geometrical figure, and that matter is the content filling that outline. Both the outline and the content belong equally to the object.
In geometry, an object is simultaneously its figure and its content. If we think of form as a kind of object, then the outline is one object, and the matter that fills it is another. In this way, every object is made up of other objects — though this is not apparent to immediate perception, since everything seems self-contained and independent.
Form is not a static conception that merely maintains the same identity of an object as it changes. Rather, form is the active process of change itself, the dynamic continuity through which the object preserves its identity while undergoing transformation.
The object is the indivisible relation between its outline and its content. The form, by contrast, is the infinite reiteration of possible actions the object may take — the total scope of its potential motion through time. Form includes every possible moment of the object.
2. Identity and Motion
When we observe an object falling through the sky, its shape and position change continuously as it moves through space. Yet we still maintain that it is the same object. In truth, the object does not remain the same in any physical sense — its measurements differ from one instant to another — but its identity remains constant.
This identity is a reference point by which we connect the different states of the object. The persistence of identity is not in the object’s physical continuity, but in the form that unifies its varying states into one intelligible being.
3. The Forms as Determinate Possibilities
There are infinitely many things that can be conceived, and all of these exist eternally. In this sense, Plato’s idea of the Forms expresses the totality of possible being.[^1] However, Plato associates the Forms not merely with everything that exists, but with the Good, which gives quality and value to all things. The Forms are therefore not an undifferentiated infinity, but an ordered system in which each Form is good in its own kind.
Plato writes that “our world is the offspring of the Good” (Republic 508b). The Forms are described as perfect — which raises the question: if the Forms are perfect, can there be Forms of trivial or even bad things? Can there be a Form of feces or decay?
For Plato, the answer seems ambiguous. He treats material things as deficiencies of the Forms, morally and ontologically inferior to their perfect originals.[^2] Corruptible, decaying objects belong to the world of becoming, not the world of being. Yet these imperfect things still exist — and if the Forms are truly infinite, they must include even the opposites of the good.
Here, Aristotle offers a resolution.
4. Aristotle’s Solution: Form and Matter as Limits
Aristotle argues that the Forms are not separate from the physical world but are immanent within it. Matter is the limitation of Form to a specific duration of time, while the Form itself is the limit of that limitation — the unlimited ideal.[^3]
In other words, matter is the means by which we experience the Forms. Matter is changeable and corruptible, yet it continually gives rise to pure experiences of form. The apparent heaviness, color, and motion of matter are imperfect elements that, together, create the perfect experience of a unified whole — just as hydrogen and oxygen, imperfect on their own, combine to produce the pure substance of water.
When we ask, “Is there a Form of feces?”, the answer is yes — because even waste represents the necessary expression of energy’s exhaustion. The negative value we assign to it arises only from our subjective position within a system of life. Feces is bad for humans but good for bacteria; what is inferior for one organism is nourishment for another.
Good and bad are therefore not relative in essence, but correlative in experience. The experience of good presupposes that of bad. Their relation is pure and perfect, but our lived experience of them is limited by the uncertainty of the world.
5. Potentiality and Actuality
The Forms represent the infinite possibilities of a thing — its ideal actions. The physical thing is merely one actualization among these possibilities. The thing, therefore, is the limit of its potential forms.
While probability in modern science treats the possible as unreal until actualized, potentiality in Aristotle’s sense means that all possible forms of a thing truly exist, even if only one is presently actual.[^4] The present is just one point in a real, extended continuum of possibilities.
When an object moves, it is actualizing its forms — traversing its possible moments in time. If we regard motion as an object occupying different points in space over time, then each point is a distinct actualization of its form. Without the variation of form, these points would be indistinguishable — a uniform void awaiting action.
6. Form as Rational Activity
A drummer, for instance, beats the drum according to patterns. Each possible strike, rhythm, and interval is one of the forms of the drum — its ideal activity. But not every possible combination produces music. Form requires rational order — intention and aim — otherwise it dissolves into noise and impossibility. Form, therefore, is not mere possibility but determinate possibility: the possible structured by reason.
7. The Microcosm and the Macrocosm
Our abstractions often reduce nature to lifeless building blocks, forgetting that each unit participates in the experience of the whole. When we examine cells in the skin, each cell appears static and passive, yet each participates in the living process of being skin — sensing, regenerating, shedding, and growing. Each cell is part of a collective organismal experience, a species of activity within the continuum of life.
Thus, even a single cell can be regarded as an organism of experience, partaking in the broader unity of feeling and change.
8. Completeness and the Totality of Actions
If all actions existed simultaneously, every space would already be filled with activity. Change would no longer occur through time, for all potentialities would already be actual. This is the state of perfection: every form has its own complete embodiment, and every action is eternally realized.
This does not imply redundancy, since no two actions are exactly identical — each incorporates the trace of the previous. The universe, then, is already complete before any individual event occurs. Time and change are the unfolding of that already-complete totality.
9. The Whole and the Part
“The whole is prior to the part.”[^5] This Aristotelian principle defines how relation precedes its components. The form of a rock is a diamond; the form of feces is food. Each object has another as its ideal. This establishes a scientific metaphysics of the Forms: that every finite object possesses an ideal inversion of itself in nature.
From this we can also derive a natural ethics: every object bears a quality that defines its goodness relative to its form. What is good for bacteria (feces) is inferior for humans, yet both are linked by the same continuum of development. In the absolute sense, higher quality corresponds to the greater degree of formal organization and self-determination — not merely human bias, but a hierarchy of actuality within nature itself.[^6]
10. Being and Pre-Socratic Foundations
The pre-Socratics sought to define Being as the principle underlying all things. They recognized that everything is both separate and connected — distinct in identity yet continuous in relation.
Heraclitus first proposed that Being and Nothing are interchangeable, forming the unity of change.[^7] Parmenides denied this, holding Being and Nothing as fixed opposites, thereby making motion impossible. Yet empirical reality reveals that light and darkness, Being and Nothing, are interdependent.
This dialectic of Being and Nothing was inherited and refined by Plato and later Aristotle, who replaced “Being” with Substance (ousia) — the aspect of a thing that makes it what it is. Substance, for Aristotle, unites the universal and the particular: it is both the same in all things and distinct in each.[^8]
11. From Logos to Nous
Heraclitus’ logos — the rational order of the world — marks the beginning of metaphysics as abstract naturalism. Anaxagoras’ nous (mind) then introduced an ordering intelligence into this logos. The cosmos was no longer mere material mixture, but a rationally structured unity moved by Mind.[^9]
This lineage culminates in Plato’s Forms — where Being is Reason itself, the power to project universal structure into particular existence. Aristotle then redefines this projection as substance — the unity of matter and form, potentiality and actuality, universality and individuality.
12. Conclusion
To say that an object is “layered” upon its form is to say that the visible world is a cross-section of an infinite field of potential being. Every object, every event, and every act is one of the infinite ways Being realizes itself.
The world of matter is therefore not the negation of form, but its mode of expression. Change is the form of eternity appearing in time. Form is not a static blueprint of being, but the living movement of identity through change — the way Being continually becomes itself.
Footnotes
[^1]: Plato, Republic 507b–509b; Timaeus 29e–30b.
[^2]: Plato, Phaedo 65a–67b; Symposium 210e–212a.
[^3]: Aristotle, Metaphysics VIII.1–6 (1042a–1045b).
[^4]: Aristotle, De Anima II.1 (412a–b); Metaphysics IX.8 (1049b–1050a).
[^5]: Aristotle, Parts of Animals I.1 (640a–b): “The whole is prior to the part.”
[^6]: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I.7 (1098a–b); see also Hegel, Science of Logic (Book I: Being).
[^7]: Heraclitus, Fragment DK 22B50: “We step and do not step into the same rivers; we are and we are not.”
[^8]: Aristotle, Metaphysics VII.1 (1028b–1029a).
[^9]: Anaxagoras, Fragment DK 59B12; Plato, Philebus 28c–30c.