Sahara’s Reviews > Fewer, Better Things: The Hidden Wisdom of Objects > Status Update

Even science, seemingly the most objective type of material intelligence, is often organized according to the telos of different substances—materials as they are put to some definite purpose. Researchers make a conventional distinction between “pure” and “applied” disciplines, +

To adapt a popular philosophical conundrum: If a tree falls in a forest, it only matters if someone knows about it, sees specific features in the wood that can be put to use, and decides to give it form. We might say this is the moment when materiality “happens.” It is not important just in and of itself, but because it acts as a matrix for relations between ourselves and the world, & amongst ourselves as people.

Aristotle had a useful way of thinking about this. He wrote that materials could be considered to have a telos, that is, a set of intrinsic features that could be used to achieve a particular end.

Kind of makes me think of how humans are created with specific attributes to achieve a particular end (Islamic perspective of purpose of creation is to worship Allah in all that we do on earth.)

“Matter” only becomes a specific “material” when someone sees its potential and puts it into action—thereby finding a way to put an intention into the world.

And if I am a spinner, the thread is what I am making, and the material is wool off a sheep’s back. And if I’m a shepherd—well, you get the point. It’s all relative.

Similarly, the distinction between a “material” and an object with a “form” seems to be quite subjective. If I am a furniture maker, the upholstery fabric I put on a chair is a material. But if I am a weaver, the fabric is what I am making; the material is the thread I put on the loom. +

In this sense, the very concept of materiality is inseparable from human agency. My brother uses the analogy of cooking in the kitchen. We make dinner from things we call ingredients. But when does something become an “ingredient”? Even regular table salt is highly processed stuff. It comes to us quite differently from how it exists in nature. +

Returning to the distinction between “matter” and “materials,” we can see that the latter term only really makes sense in a moment of change—when some physical stuff is being used to make something else. A tree in a forest is only a “material” when it has been cut down and brought to the carpenter’s yard, so that a table can be made from it. +

It’s like no matter how much science-y things we (I suppose non religious people) do the puzzle still remains: how do things be + exist? And without knowing how, can we truly understand matter itself?

As a believer, Muslim, we have the answer: Allah is the source of all things big and small, that is how things exist, by His will.

We can now delve down to subatomic level, and have made wondrous and counterintuitive discoveries about particles interacting with one another to form the properties of things. Yet no matter how far down we go, the foundational puzzles of ontology, the philosophy of being, remain. How should we understand matter itself?
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