Experts on Aristotle or good knowledge of interpertation answer this question please?

Question

Aristotle once said: I see the universe as a scale lying between two extremes: form without matter on one end and matter without form on the other end.


can someone explain what he means by this?

Answer 1

On one extreme lies form without matter: The Platonic concept of the "eideai" the ideal form, out of which all the sensible objects and entities are but copies, an extreme idealism that gave actual intrinsic and formal existence to perfect ideas without the need of matter.
On the other side of the spectrum were the cinics, the stoics and the epicureans, who followed Democritus in assessing that all that there was, was matter and that there was no supreme essence in the world, but matter and atoms, and that we should be either indiferent to the mond: the cinics, adapted to the world and live with it the best we could: the stoics, and use it for pleasure: the epicureans.

Now Aristotle brings forth the concept of essence, that the particular things are more real than the universals and that of course matter and form can't exist separately but are necesary for anything to exist: One can't say that something is square or round or hard or soft without actual matter conforming, from whre derive its accidents (or sensible charachteristics). he organized all essences in genus and diferentia, and affirmed that the lower we go the more real it is, without deniying the reality of universals.

Answer 2

Matter is what an object is made of. Form is sort of a blueprint for matter. When form and matter come together, they make an object. So our world as we know it comes about because matter + form = objects. Since we experience reality primarily through the 5 senses, if there were no objects to touch, feel, etc., we'd have no knowledge of reality.

Matter can be arranged and re-arranged, and in that way makes change possible. Form is unchanging and eternal, and makes stability and permanence possible.

Plato believed that Form or Idea existed in some other spiritual realm (Plato claimed that he visited it in between lives), whereas Aristotle believed that both form and matter exist together in this world, not in some spiritual plane. That may be why Aristotle specified *the* universe (in ancient times, "world" and "universe" meant pretty much the same thing) with matter on one end and form on the other; what we experience as reality is in between.

Answer 3

Answers 1 and 2 are correct as far as I know. But to make it simpler, Plato placed the "essences" in heaven and said what we see are mirrior images of the essences, which were the gods. It is why the Greeks had so many gods. Each was the essence of something found on earth.
Aristotle placed the essences "in the things themselves," not in heaven.
Ayn Rand places the essences as concepts of consciousness.
So Aristotle saw the forms--the essences--as being with out matter except when they took empirical form. Then he saw matter on the other hand that had no essence in the form of those gods.

Answer 4

I think he was replying to Plato's idea of 'forms'. Plato's Forms were idealized objective truths that existed apart from reality. Reality always has flaws so nothing can be perfect.

Aristotle was famous for supporting the idea of a 'golden mean'. Instead of reaching for extremes, he thought that 'truth' lied in the middle somewhere between the idealized extremes.

I could explain further but it would take a long tedious rambling explanation that I'm not in the mood for.