CSAMP Proseminar: Vanessa de Harven (UMass Amherst)

Substantial Confusion: Why Stoic ousia is Not Matter

Abstract. There is an underlying debate in the literature over how to understand and translate the term ousia for the Stoics. So far, this debate has taken place primarily in the margins and footnotes of debates about other matters. And yet the interpretive stakes are quite high — it makes no small difference to our reconstruction of Stoic metaphysics whether ousia is understood as matter along hylomorphic lines; or as the subject in which properties inhere; or, as I will argue, as corporeal substance along innovative corporealist lines. The aim of this paper, then, is to bring the topic of Stoic ousia out of the footnotes and into a body of its own. Given their affinity with the earth-born giants of Plato’s Sophist, it is fitting that the Stoics reserve the honorific ousia for body. But what are the implications of such a commitment? First, as body, ousia is solid three-dimensional extension, and as such it is a finite, undifferentiated, continuous mass or bulk. Thus, ousia is appropriately used both as a mass term and a count noun, just as the word “substance” is — there’s a sticky substance over there, some molasses, a blob of stuff … the substance of the cosmos is undifferentiated mass and a finite individual. This is the first reason to understand ousia as corporeal substance: because ousia is defined as body, and the term “substance” behaves in ways suitable to capture the mass and count aspects of the Greek verbal noun. Next, body for the Stoics is the stuff that takes shape, not matter (hulē); or, at any rate, not matter alone to the exclusion of logos or pneuma (which are also bodies). This point is obscured by the fact that for those reporting the Stoic position, the role of stuff-that-takes-shape is played by matter, and matter alone is what gives something its bulk. However, for the Stoics, this is not so: hulē in Stoic hands is only one kind of body, the thick and passive kind, but all of body is solid and malleable (pathetē). Therefore, textual evidence that for the Stoics ousia is unqualified matter, should not be understood as evidence that the Stoics equate ousia with hulē to the exclusion of logos or pneuma, but, rather, as evidence that ousia, the totality of body, is what takes shape — a role that others reserve for matter. In Stoic thought, the role of matter goes to ousia, i.e. corporeal substance, while the term hulē, is reserved for one kind of body, namely passive body. Thus, ousia refers to body as such, the stuff or bulk that takes shape, and by that token too it is best understood as corporeal substance. Finally, this understanding of ousia also makes sense of vexed testimony in the context of the Stoic categories, where the term “hupokeimenon” is glossed as ousia. Here, again, it makes no small difference to reconstructing Stoic theory whether we understand the hupokeimenon as matter strictly speaking, i.e. as hulē to the exclusion of pneuma along hylomorphic lines; or as an Aristotelian subject of predication, e.g. Socrates as the bearer of virtue; or, again, as I argue, as the substrate: the total corporeal substance that constitutes a qualified individual, just as clay constitutes a statue, and molecules a tree. Only on this last approach do the Stoic Categories find their rightful place in Stoic corporealism. With the hupokeimenon understood as the total corporeal substance that constitutes an individual, we can see that the Stoic Categories are not rehashing matter and form, or subject and predicate, but forging their own path out of the never-ending battle between materialism and idealism.