form

form, the external shape, appearance, or configuration of an object, in contradistinction to the matter of which it is composed; in Aristotelian metaphysics, the active, determining principle of a thing as distinguished from matter, the potential principle.

Philosophical concepts

The word form has been used in a number of ways throughout the history of philosophy and aesthetics. It was early applied to Plato’s term eidos, by which he identified the permanent reality that makes a thing what it is, in contrast to the particulars that are finite and subject to change. The Platonic concept of form was itself derived from the Pythagorean theory that intelligible structures (which Pythagoras called numbers), and not material elements, gave objects their distinctive characters. Plato developed this theory into the concept of “eternal form,” by which he meant the immutable essence that can only be “participated in” by material, or sensible, things. Plato held that eternal forms, though they were not tangible, were of a higher reality than material objects.

For practical purposes, Aristotle was the first to distinguish between matter (hypokeimenon or hyle) and form (eidos or morphe). He rejected the abstract Platonic notion of form and argued that every sensible object consists of both matter and form, neither of which can exist without the other. For Aristotle, matter was the undifferentiated primal element; it is that from which things develop rather than a thing in itself. The development of particular things from this germinal matter consists in differentiation, the acquiring of the particular forms of which the knowable universe consists. Matter is the potential factor, form the actualizing factor. (Aristotle further posited the existence of a prime mover, or unmoved mover, i.e., pure form separate from matter, eternal and immutable.)

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Plato: The theory of forms

Thus according to Aristotle, the matter of a thing will consist of those elements of it which, when the thing has come into being, may be said to have become it; and the form is the arrangement or organization of those elements, as the result of which they have become the thing which they have. Thus, bricks and mortar are the matter that, given one form, become a house, or, given another, become a wall. As matter they are potentially anything that they can become; it is the form which determines what they actually become. Here “matter” is a relative term, for a brick on the pile, while potentially part of a house, is already actually a brick; i.e., it is itself a composite of form and matter, clay being matter to the brick as the brick is to the house or to the wall. Matter is that which is potentially a given object but which actually becomes that object only when it is given the right form.

Aristotle’s notion of form combines with his teleological viewpoint to give the conclusion that formal development has a direction and may have a goal and that some things are more informed than others. Bricks are more informed than clay, and a house more than bricks.

The Aristotelian concept of form was uniquely adapted to Christianity by Thomas Aquinas, whose works mark the high point of the medieval Scholastic tradition. Aquinas further delineated the concept of form to include “accidental form,” a quality of a thing that is not determined by its essence; “sensible form,” that element of form that can be distinguished from matter by sense-perception; and other such distinctions. Other Scholastic philosophers, including John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, worked with the Aristotelian concept of form, but none to as great an effect as Aquinas.

For the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant, form was a property of mind; he held that form is derived from experience, or, in other words, that it is imposed by the individual on the material object. In his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781, 1787; Critique of Pure Reason) Kant identified space and time as the two forms of sensibility, reasoning that, though humans do not experience space and time as such, they cannot experience anything except in space and time. Kant further delimited 12 basic categories that act as structural elements for human understanding.

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Literary and artistic concepts

The concept of form is also indispensable to the practice and criticism of several disciplines other than philosophy. In literature, for example, the term may refer to the schema, structure, or genre that a writer chooses for the presentation of his subject—e.g., novel, short story, maxim, haiku, sonnet, etc.; it may also refer to the internal structure of the work, and, to a great extent, a work’s critical success depends on the degree to which the artist is able to integrate the content and internal structure within the framework of its external form. In criticism of the graphic arts, the term form refers to the effect achieved by draftsmanship or mass as distinct from that achieved by such elements as colour or texture. In sculpture and other plastic arts, form (or shape) is both tangible and visible and thus is the chief element of organization.