ABSTRACT
The Aristotelian understanding of death is a piece of outdated scientific ontology, a function of the Aristotelian theory of generation, growth, nourishment and change in general. Aristotle held that a natural stuff (the specific form of which is always itself reducible to a certain combination of the fundamental 'opposites', hot and cold, wet and dry) can have the active capacity to convert other matter into its own kind, as if a small amount of water added to a large amount of wine really became wine. Alchemists later accepted that metals grow in this way in the earth and in the fire. Fire itself was taken to be a natural substance with an active capacity to transform the inflammable. A fire fed with logs grows. The flesh or tissue of the various parts of the body was supposed to grow in the same way, transforming the matter of food so that new particles of tissue come into existence. At the same time other particles of tissue cease to be. Aristotle himself used the somewhat Heraclitean metaphor for growth and nourishment of 'flowing water that is measured by one and the same measure', 'some flowing out and some flowing in'. The vessel or 'measure' represents the active form of living flesh, or, indeed, the form of the animal. The water in the vessel represents the 'matter' of the tissue, previously the matter of the food. This matter, considered as surviving the change of substantial form or nature, must be regarded as indeterminate even in quantity: i.e. as 'materia prima'. The form of this or that sort of tissue is subordinate to, perhaps an aspect of, the form of the living individual. Death is the going out of existence of the form of the animal, hence of the animal itself. The active forms of flesh, bone and so forth go out of existence ipso facto: dead 'flesh' is inactive as such, and therefore not flesh, however much it may look like it. It is as if the vessel had suddenly been annihilated, while the matter, which was a moment before contained in it, temporarily and imperfectly kept its shape. Thus Aristotle accepted the Heraclitean flux of 'matter', but death, and substantial change generally, involves an absolute 'ceasing to be' of the substance.3
