The notion ‘form’ accompanies the occidental educational thinking in the sense that ‘form’ is the product of a forming act. This means change in order to realize a determination. ‘Form’ is straightly linked with the notion ‘matter’, which in the Aristotelian tradition opens up the question of the cause in educational processes. In the paper presentation I will link the matter to the body, which is both corporeal and metaphorical respectively culturally constructed. With the following I will give a brief overview of the topics. The philosophical framework shows, that in Physics, Aristotle defines the form as the forming principle of the matter. In difference to Plato’s notion of ‘form’ – Plato describes form as the metaphysical idea of which the matter is the image or ‘copy’ – Aristotle links form and matter as requiring each another. The matter is the cause of what becomes actuality (‘energeia’) – this is the act of bringing to reality the potentiality, which is a principle in the sense of a matter’s inherent end (‘dynamis’). This Aristotelian conceptualization of matter and form continues to be influential in the Middle Ages (e.g. in St. Thomas Aquinas), when God is seen as the world’s inherent end. The dictum of ‘imitatio Christi’ is in this context relevant, and educationally effective. The in Christ incarnated transcendental God is the form-giving matter via medieval iconolatry and mysticism: subject to this ‘educational’ process is not at least the individual’s corporeality, for the body and more precisely the overcoming of the body is interpreted as a way of showing piety, for example in the Gnostic thinking, in Augustines’ objection of the body or in several streams of mysticism. Additionally in this context it is significant, as Ernst Kantorowicz showed, that the Christian community is represented via corporeal attributes and functions as a symbol of the collective (one example is the notion ‘corpus mysticum’, which originally denominates the Host, but slightly begins to be the image of the Christian community). The argument is, that the imaginary dynamic of collective images work as an educational matrix of the cultural appropriation of the body.

Methodologically I propose a discourse analytical approach by which I expect to contribute to an understanding of the history of the body as a category of knowledge. This approach should help to better understand the role of the body including the cultural genesis of its ‘form’ for the philosophical foundation of educational processes, their underlying ‘matrices’ and epistemology. Describing the Aristotelian tradition in medieval Christian philosophy should therefore provide a fragment for a history of human body.

In the paper presentation I want to develop the hypothesis that the occidental tradition of the notion ‘form’, as briefly described, has significant parallels with the educational dynamic of ‘civilizing’ corporeality. The therefore necessary discursive reference system I want to demonstrate by focusing on the Aristotelian-Christian tradition of the Middle Ages, which by connecting ‘form’ with ‘matter’ brings to relief a discourse of interdependency between individual and collective images of the body. The educational aspect – ‘education’ is used here in a broad understanding, because the intent is heuristic – would be the dynamic of the imaginary through which the individual gets ‘formed’: Christian principles such as strict regulation of sexuality, the genesis of the symbolic order of sexes or the esteem for ascesis transform the individual’s experience of his body via imagination. The individual’s body becomes dominated by the image of the normative.