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9 - Matter, Form, and the Corporeal World

from III - Natural Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2009

By
Sarah Pessin
Edited by
Steven Nadler  and
T. M. Rudavsky
Steven Nadler
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Madison
T. M. Rudavsky
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
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Summary

INTRODUCTION

Following variously on Pythagorean, Platonic, and Aristotelian traditions, together with biblical, rabbinic, and mystical insights, Jewish philosophies have envisioned matter and form as the necessary play of opposites, at once comprising the very fabric of reality, and signifying a deep cosmic struggle between corporeality and spirit. In Jewish as in Greek philosophical sources, matter marks a kind of not-yet-being moment in the metaphysical analysis of things, and in this sense, inspires three very different kinds of discourses.

In the first place, as mark of not-yet-being, matter emerges in various contexts in a decidedly negative light – as secondary and inferior to form (the mark of being), it is the mark of privation and failure and even the source of evil itself. We will address this kind of discourse with examples from Maimonides, Gersonides, and Philo.

In the second place, matter, as mark of not-yet-being, is addressed in a neutral light, without any negative (or positive) connotations, in various cosmogonic, metaphysical, and scientific contexts. Two good examples are discussions of creation on the one hand, and discussions of Aristotelian matter and prime matter, on the other. Seen by some Jewish theorists alternatively as the something first created by God or as the something (itself eternal and uncreated) out of which God creates all else, matter emerges in a neutral light when it signals the mysteries of [pre-]creation, standing as a cosmic building block in need of description.

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The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy
From Antiquity through the Seventeenth Century
 , pp. 267 - 301
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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