John Deely insists that Aristotle’s framework is not dualistic but trialistic. Against the widespread simplification that reduces his philosophy to a doctrine of matter and form—hylomorphism—Deely reminds us that Aristotle posits threeinseparable principles: “matter (hyle), form (morphe), and privation (steresis).”
As Deely writes, “privation gets more or less swept aside in the history of philosophy, and the term hylomorphism has come to suggest a matter–form dualism rather than the true matter–form–privation trialism.” This neglect, he suggests, is not merely terminological: it obscures a fundamental aspect of how beings change and persist.
In Deely’s reading, the principle of privation reveals the dynamic aspect of existence. Matter and form describe what a thing is, but privation records what it has been and what it no longer is. In a world “evolutionary as we now know it to be,” privation “names precisely that accumulation in the material substance of the environmental influences which trace its passage through time as eventually resulting in its final corruption.”
Every substance, he observes, “bears in its body and in its form the traces of everywhere it has been, everything it has done, and everything that has been done to it.” These traces are not external accidents but the very history inscribed within matter — “and it is from those traces that relations provenate.”
Deely therefore links Aristotle’s trialism directly to the logic of semiosis. Privation, far from being a negative or merely destructive principle, marks the temporal and relational dimension of being — the capacity of every entity to interact, to change, and to leave signs of that change. It is what allows “the passage of being in time” to become readable through semiosis.
By restoring privation to its rightful place, Deely gives to Aristotle’s ontology a semiotic depth: matter and form constitute the substrate of being, but privation testifies to its history — the silent narrative that semiosis deciphers.
Bibliographic reference: John Deely, Semiosis and Human Understanding, in Semiotics and Its Masters, Vol. 1, De Gruyter Mouton.