⁂ Concepts · Being · No. 5
Substance

A tasting note: every property of the wine, and nothing that is the wine.

Substance

Whatever it is that has properties, as distinct from the properties it has.

Theme
Being and reality
Tradition
Greek
Term
οὐσία · ousia
Term fixed
c. 330 BC

In plain terms

Describe anything completely and you produce a list of properties: this colour, this weight, this shape, this age. Now ask what the list is a list of. Whatever answers that question is what philosophers call a substance.

The pull of the idea is that properties seem to need something to belong to. Redness does not wander about on its own; it is the redness of something. And that something appears to persist while its properties change - the same tree, greener in spring than in autumn.

The difficulty arrives immediately. Strip a thing of every property in order to look at the bearer underneath, and there is nothing left to look at. So either substance is something we can never encounter, or it is a shadow cast by the grammar of subject and predicate.

As a philosopher would put it

For Aristotle, primary substance is the individual - this man, this horse - and everything else is said of it or present in it. The later tradition turns this into the substratum: that which underlies and supports attributes, itself no attribute.

Descartes reduces the question to a count. A substance is what depends on nothing else for its existence, which strictly admits only God, and derivatively two created kinds distinguished by a single principal attribute each - thinking and extension. Spinoza takes the definition seriously and draws the conclusion Descartes avoided: if a substance depends on nothing, there can only be one, and thought and extension are its attributes rather than two substances. Leibniz goes the other way, to an infinity of simple substances, each a complete concept, none interacting.

The empiricist demolition is Locke's, half-unwilling: the idea of substance is a supposed but unknown support of qualities, a something-we-know-not-what. Hume takes the remaining step and finds no impression corresponding to it at all. Bundle theory is the alternative that survives: an object is not a bearer plus properties but a bundle of properties standing in the right relations, with nothing underneath.

Where you meet it

A wine tasting note is a public document with a fixed form. It records colour, clarity, intensity, the aromatic families, acidity, tannin, alcohol, body, length and finish. A trained taster's note on a given bottle will match another trained taster's closely, and the vocabulary exists precisely so that it can be checked.

Read one and notice what is not in it. Every line is a property. Nothing in the note is the wine. You could satisfy every clause with a laboratory mixture and still have made something else, and the taster would say so - but not by citing a further property, because there is no line on the form for it.

That is the whole problem in the space of a page. The bearer never appears on the list, and it is not obvious whether that is because the list is incomplete or because there was never a bearer to list.

What is actually disputed

Whether anything underlies the properties.

Substratum theorists hold that properties require a bearer, and that a bundle with nothing in it cannot explain why these properties are co-instantiated rather than merely similar. Bundle theorists reply that the bearer does no work - it is posited, never encountered, and stripped of all properties it is indistinguishable from any other, which makes it a difference that makes no difference.

The count is disputed independently of that. Spinoza's one substance, Descartes's two kinds and Leibniz's infinity are three answers to the same definition, which suggests the definition is doing less than it appears. And the Buddhist tradition denies the question outright: dependent origination is the claim that there are no independent bearers anywhere, only conditions, and that is a considered position rather than a failure to have the concept.

Commonly confused with

  • Matter c. 330 BC Matter is what a thing is made of. Substance is what has the properties, and on Aristotle's account a substance is form and matter together rather than the matter alone.
  • Essence c. 330 BC Essence is which properties make it the thing it is; substance is what has them at all.
  • substance in chemistry A chemical substance is a kind of stuff with a fixed composition. The philosophical term is about the relation between a thing and its properties, and the two meanings share nothing but a word.

Defined against

  • Relationality Whether things are bearers with relations, or relations all the way down, is the same dispute in two vocabularies
  • Śūnyatā The explicit denial that anything has independent existence of its own

Philosophers

  • Aristotle Primary substance is the individual, and the categories are said of it
  • René Descartes A substance depends on nothing else - and there turn out to be very few
  • Baruch Spinoza Takes the definition seriously and gets exactly one
  • Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Takes it the other way and gets infinitely many
  • David Hume Finds no impression of a bearer, and drops it

Works

Schools

Related concepts

Essence c. 330 BC · Universals c. 380 BC · Form c. 380 BC · Matter c. 330 BC · Identity 1714

Aristotle's ousia is the first of the categories and the one the others are said of; the Latin substantia, that which stands under, is a translation that supplied a picture the Greek did not have.