Aristotle Soul – Lecture 2
The Soul and its
Faculties:
Summary Lecure 1
Soul is form to body as
matter in living beings. Soul an essential form: What is it to be a living
being? To be ensouled. Living beings of the human kind are different from other
animals by having a rational soul. Most important function: Soul the
life-conferring element in the compound ‘living being.’ To the full living
being, body provides potentiality for life, soul actuality of life.
Status of soul and body in
living being: Soul actuality of body; body potentiality for actuality. Soul
does not exist without body. (414a16-27.)
A complex, unified, dynamic
forming element that not only confers life, but also determines the specific
form of life in its distinctive features. At the same time: something that is
fashioned by life, and changes over time.
Soul-Body Tensions
On
scrutiny the distinction between an active, forming function (form) and a
passive, formed function (matter) makes sense if we make an important
assumption: the body that potentiality that is enlivened by the nutritive and
self-maintaining soul of the plant is not just lying there, offering itself,
waiting to be ensouled, perhaps even longing for the breath of soul like Snow
White is for the kiss of her Prince. The body is also recalcitrant. It has its
own resistance to being kept alive. The form has to constantly overcome that
resistance in maintaining that body alive. (Another sense of ‘actuality’ here
cast in terms of a later model: the
machine needs to be turned in order to be turning; its inertia needs to be
overcome). Taken separately, the body is not just propensity to be ensouled,
made and kept alive. It is also an item in its own right, albeit not itself a
living item, but potentially the body of a living being – and that resistance
needs constantly to be overcome. We see it at work in illnesses, aging and
decay, formation into a developed being after conception and in the deviations
that can occur in generation.
Note
the difference between Aristotle’s health and Eryximachus’ (414a6-12).
The
idea of soul as enlivening form and body as formed life is therefore an idea
that combines the idea of fit – the propensity of each to unite with the other
to constitute a specific form of life and the idea that there is an
opposing tendency in life – something that opposes being in that form. Only
together do they account for life: Not ‘nature as clay animation,’ but: nature
as antagonism of forces. Nature is the world of change. Its living domain
changes as a consequence of internal antagonism. (Close to, but very different
from Eryximachus’ model: body-soul tension, codependence and fit.)
The Inner Made Manifest
[From:
Finding a
Soul in Bonsai. http://www.artofbonsai.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=961
Part
of the caption: “The Japanese have a word known as Kami. As far as I know I am
about the only person who has chosen to associate this word with Bonsai. Other
Bonsaists choose to use Wabi and Sabi when defining the
quasi-spiritual aspects of bonsai. Kami is for lack of a better definition
defined as spirit or soul, an almost personality that inhabits things of great
beauty, power, and artistry. It is a force that almost gives a thing a life of
its own that supersedes a tree or a pot or a sword, or a landscape.”
Soul cannot be without body
(exception perhaps intellect); body is not alive without soul (413a4). After
death of full being, what remains are: lifeless body, no soul. (Why is it
inadequate to say: the soul dies?)
Aristotle neither a dualist
concerning body and soul, nor a monist reducing one of the elements by saying
that are made up of only one thing, either all material stuff or all
spirit/mind. Hylomorphism is different from both dualism and reductive
monism. Most of the things that go on in a living being have corporeal and
psychic expression at the same time, in codependence on each other
(408a-408b18).
Specific Faculties of the Soul
When
something that has life lives, some of the following are present (413a24).
Growth
and decay,
Nutrition
Reproduction
Locomotion
Affections,
feelings, and desires
Perception
and Memory
Intellect
and practical reason
Soul
is differentiated into different sub-functions, and needs to perform its life-conferring
enabling function at different places in the differentiated organism.
Faculties: dispositions to perform specific tasks of functions. Need to be
developed; will be carried out in different ways by different beings.
Differently
distributed over and combined in different kinds of living beings, constituting
a hierarchy. Plants and the bottom, humans at the top. (414a29-414b5).
‘Vegetative
soul:’ Plants have only the faculties of growth, nutrition and
reproduction.
‘Animal
soul:’ Animals have the faculties for growth, nutrition and
reproduction, locomotion, affections, feelings, and
desires, perception. They lack
intellect and practical reason.
‘Human
soul: Humans possess the faculties that regulate growth, nutrition and
reproduction, locomotion, affections,
feelings, and desires, perception,
intellect, and practical reason.
Hierarchy and
Integration:
Faculties
in a hierarchy: the ‘lower’ faculties presupposed for the ‘higher’ ones. As
there are living beings that possess only some of them, the faculties organize
an order of realms of living beings:
Greater
complexity and richness of ‘higher’ beings is not just additive. Integration
into the unified soul is different at each level – plant, non-human animal,
human animal. The vegetative faculty functions differently in humans (hunger,
thirst) when compared to plants, but is still vegetative, because it fulfills
the same purpose. For each kind, the different faculties form an organized and
unified whole.
The
Nutritive and Reproductive Soul Functions
Aristotle
calls the nutritive and reproductive functions the “first and most commonly
possessed potentiality of the soul, in virtue of which they all live” (415a25).
The basic life-conferring and life-maintaining sub-function of the soul. The passage
makes clear that these belong to all living beings. Aristotle thinks that there
is something in the plant, a faculty, that is active, and makes it go after
nutrition and makes it produce whatever is the reproductive mode of the plant.
(Formative form.) We, of course, analyze the system of roots and of the
organization of the tree towards reproduction of another in such a way that we
find these functions in structure and chemistry and know about the inner
processes of transportation and transformation, also in the cell. For
Aristotle, they are or would be soul. In other words: those who study
life-functions of plants would do research (also) into the soul of plants.
Biologists are also plant psychologists in Aristotle’s eyes.
Affects
Focusing on us: together with
perception our animal part, both of course integrated into the human soul.
Affects and their correlate event, affections, are pathos, results of
receiving something and responding to it with a feeling. They are experiences
(a) related to the impact of some state of affairs or
occurrence – being insulted, meeting a person, being confronted with a
dangerous situation
(b) consist in a feeling response to the impact of
the state of affairs or event – anger about insult, love for that person, fear
in front of danger.
(c) a motivational force or power – wanting to take
revenge, desiring the beloved person, dealing with fear through flight,
confrontation or danger-removing response.
A triad of conditions: impact
from the outside of the soul, soul-response to impact, and action or behavior
that enacts or acts upon the affect. Main problem: How do we deal with the
‘emotional’ pressure of affects towards direct translation into behavior
(thought to be the animal response).
Perception
In perception we obtain
knowledge of things that affect our sensuous organs: touch, vision, the auditory, taste. To perceive is to be
aware of differences – between substances, between their qualitative
characters, between relation between them. For animals this occurs without the
help of concepts. Perceptions are our primary link with the world around us.
Being cognitive, they are not directly linked to responsive behavior. Responses
to perceptions will come about in the chain ‘perception-affect/desire-practical
reason-action.’
In passing two oddities of
Aristotle’s idea of perception. All perception relies on an organ of
perception, as to its specific matter. (412b19 for the eye). This makes our
whole body surface and much of our inside functioning as the organ for touch.
The organ is kept in function by specific formative elements. The eye
(physiological) is in seeing condition because a seeing faculty is active in
it. The other: perception can’t be wrong. (428a11). We do not normally conceive
of perception in that way. But Aristole has the idea that the form of the thing
affects us and communicates its form to our sense organ. And in this process,
nothing can go wrong. When we are in error, we merely misinterpret the form we
receive. Error is at the side of thinking, not at the side of perceiving.
Desire
Our selection deals mainly
with affects. But it mentions desires (414a32). For those who want to read
beyond the assigned texts: De Anima, Book III., chapters 9 & 10.
I desire that beautiful peach
I see at the Farmers Market. I want to have it, perhaps to eat it. But it’s out
there, still belonging to the vendor. Desire is normally understood as lack
(reminder: Socrates argument against Agathon: to desire beauty is not to have
it): we can only desire, what we do not have in the way that would satisfy our
desire. We feel this lack, and an urge to satisfy the desire. Satisfaction, we
think, fulfills that desire, the lack disappears, and with it that specific
desire.
Aristotle thinks about desire
with a twist: desire is what makes animals, us among them, go after things. Why
did I reach for that peach? Because I desired to eat it. (That’s an
explanation) But also: There is a peach in front of me. I desire that peach. So
I have a reason to reach for it. Animals pursue of objects of their
desire by changing place: hunting, collecting, planting and harvesting, etc.
Desire – a way of being affected, but already filtered by rational factors –
occurs only in forms that can move and that will move in the pursuits of
objects that their life-form is after. Desires set in motion goal-directed
behavior in living beings of the animal kind, human as well as non-human.
Desire shares with affects
like anger and fear an urge for action that pushes towards immediate
satisfaction, regardless of obstacles and reservations. But in humans it
participates in the general malleability of the vegetative and animal drives in
us.
Intellect
Theoretical, contemplative
The intellect is “the part of
the soul by which it knows and understands” (De Anima iii 4, 429a9-10;
cf. iii 3, 428a5; iii 9, 432b26; iii 12, 434b3). Having the intellectual
faculty or faculties is essential to being a human. The human rational
faculties do not just understand things; they are also active in planning and
deliberating, i.e. in the course of action. Aristotle thus distinguishes in the
rational the "practical mind" (or "practical intellect" or
"practical reason") from "theoretical mind" (or
"theoretical intellect" or "theoretical reason").
What is intellectual
activity? We think in terms of concepts, and we put together concepts when we
make judgments in which we assert something as being so, or conclude that
something is to be done. When we do this, we use forms. The intellect is also
the power to grasp forms. Life, animal, plant, pathos and logos, matter and
form, soul and body – each of them a form we use in intellectual activity.
Now in using these forms when
thinking is being performed, these forms must be available to us, or come to be
available to us.
Where are the tools and media
of the intellect when they are not processed in thinking? Do they com from
somewhere – ‘out of . . .’ – when they come up in thinking? The most proximate
idea would be that the intellect has the forms of thinking in form for a
potential for thinking, something that gets actualized in thinking activity.
The parallel with the relation of body and soul would suggest this idea. But
Aristotle says: The intellect is nothing before it is thinking. Saying this he
seems to be denying a differentiated intellect under conditions of a silence in
thinking. The intellect would then be a pure blank faculty, a slate, in which
the thinking occurs as writing occurs on a blank slate.
We do not just manipulate
forms when we think and contemplate. We claim knowledge, validity of our
arguments, and correctness of our practical reflections. Most of these things
do not just go on as independent performances of the intellect, but must be
thought to be true or correct. For Aristotle that means that the forms through
which we think are also the forms which inform the reality of the things that
are the objects of our thought. The forms of our thinking and the forms of
reality coincide. And it is when the forms through which we think correspond to
the forms of things that are, and then, and only then do we have truth and
correctness.
How does that correspondence
happen? It happens through the fact that the thought peach we subject to a
formal analysis asking: what is it to be a peach (we are not looking at it; the
operation is an operation of the intellect) represents the form of the peach,
and not just of this specific peach, but of all possible peaches ‘out there.’
Representation of forms through forms, and structural similarity, also called
isomorphism, are the characteristics of thinking.
This would also hold of the
contemplative forms ‘form,’ ‘matter’ and others. When we use these in thinking
they turn out to be the forms of our thinking and, simultaneously,
comprehensive features of the world.
Dynamic relations between faculties:
I have said that the
different faculties integrated with each other. Also pointed to the fact that
they are both capable of cooperation and of antagonism. Cooperation occurs, for
example, when perception presents to us an object of desire or a form that is
to be contemplated. Antagonism occurs when we desire something very strongly,
but reason tells us that we ought not to go after it. Now we tend to think of
that struggle as a conflict between two sides, where either the one or the
other wins: we are too weak to control our desire and suffer the consequences;
we are strong enough to control, and prevent the desire from guiding us towards
the final activity of trying to satisfy the desire. Christian doctrine with its
dualism of body and soul, and its ‘either-or’ of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is a major
factor for that belief.
In Anticipation of Ethics
Practical Reason
The intellect also has a part
in making us move to do something (432a30-433a8). Desire is the starting point,
and we desire what we consider under the aspect that it is good for us. But
desire and want on the one hand, and what reason recommends to us on the other
hand, may be opposed (433b5). What happens when the two parts of the soul meet?
Instrumental reason;
practical reason (ethics); soul-maintaining reason.
I am turning to Sappho to
show you a different and more subtle way of dealing with the antagonism in
soul-maintaining way. Care for soul; care by soul. Here are four of her poems,
in all likelihood fragments of longer poems. But, I think, each of them also
expresses thought, and the poems themselves are also a form of acting. This
thinking is a specific type of activity.. I would like to call it ‘poetic
action,’ even though it is not confined to poetry.
I
Love shook my heart
like the wind on the mountain
rushing over the oak trees.
II
The moon has set,
and the Pleiades as well;
in the deep middle of the
night
the time is passing,
and I lie alone.
III
Desire shakes me once again:
here is that melting of my
limbs.
It is a creeping thing, and
bittersweet.
I can do nothing to resist.
IV
Sappho, when some fool
Explodes in rage
in your breast
hold back that
yupping tongue!