Skip to content
Wellsprings
metaphysics

Privation

στέρησις

A statue hides in unshaped bronze not as wood or stone, but as a specific absence—the not-yet of the form it is destined to receive.

When Aristotle asked how a thing can come to be from what it is not, he answered with privation: the lack of a form that a thing is naturally fitted to acquire. The unmusical man becomes musical, the cold thing becomes hot—change always moves from a determinate absence toward its corresponding form. Alongside form and matter, privation completes Aristotle's three principles of change, letting him explain becoming without conceding the old paradox that nothing comes from nothing.

Where this idea shows up

6 Greek sources·3 Jewish-canon citations

Where to read it