Aristotle’s De Anima
Aristotle’s groundbreaking and influential work on the soul in De Anima (mainly focused on in Book II) fundamentally changed the face of philosophy. However, Aristotle’s views on the soul are, at the very least, controversial. Modern scholars and philosophers cannot even seem to agree on a common understanding of his theories, which have been so widely interpreted that Aristotle has been made to fit into almost every school of thought in the philosophy of mind. Differentiating the true Aristotle from the interpretations is, therefore, extremely difficult, if not impossible.
His thought was nothing if not original, and his systematic approach has left a profound body of work still being interpreted to this day. His work on the soul however, seems to leave a number of unanswered questions and has been subject to harsh criticism.
To explain very briefly, Aristotle seeks to discover the nature of the soul through a teleological analysis, trying to discover the purpose of it, the role it serves. For Aristotle this alone distinguishes an object, with the example he gives (De Anima, Book II, Chapter 1, 412b 10.) being an axe; “Suppose, for example, that an instrument, say an axe, were a natural body, its axiety (i.e. what it would be for it to be an axe) would be its substance, would in fact be its soul.”
This thought was motivated in Aristotle by a division which runs through the core of Aristotle’s work. Aristotle differentiates between potentiality (matter) and actuality (form). Think of a sculpture, the potentiality is the stone which when formed/sculpted becomes a statue and is actualised or realises its actuality. For something to exist therefore it requires both potentiality/matter and actuality/form. Human beings are no different, the body is the matter to which the soul animates and forms what it is to be a living human.
Finally, (for the purposes of this entry) the big question, what is the purpose of the soul? What makes a soul a soul if you will? Living and perceiving, the latter can be done by all living beings by the base sense (sense-organ), touch. What is it to be distinctly human? To engage in thought and communication- which Aristotle believed to be innately and exclusively human.
In this brief summary, there are two questionable areas which I wish to challenge- (i) the basis of his teleological understanding, (ii) his reliance on perception.
Aristotle’s entire investigation relies upon teleology. Can we really understand human nature simply by the functions and capacities of the soul which is inseparable from the body? If an axe cannot cut, is it still an axe? Does the same apply for humans, if a human cannot think or communicate is he not a human? This appears a very narrow scope of human activity, being human involves a lot more than simply thinking, or maybe a lot less.
My major concern is can we really understand human nature or even the “thing-in-itself” solely by the external activities of the thing? Once an axe goes unused, it slips back into potentiality- it has the potential to cut, until it is used this potential is not realised. But Descartes took the opposite approach, for Descartes (something never considered by Aristotle) we can only discover human nature and the soul by ignoring the potentially deceptive sense perceptions of the external world, and (to quote Confucius) “turn(ing) your gaze within.” Which approach is more meritorious?
This overreliance on a vulgar conception of perception has led to G.R.T Ross condemning Aristotle as promoting “what looks like the crudest materialism.” Ultimately, without perception a thing cannot be alive. However, in an issue increasingly prevalent in modern philosophy of mind, how do we know other human beings think or perceive as we do (or as I exclusively do)? How do we know that an animal’s sense of touch (the base perception) is the same as our own?
Has Aristotle pandered to ‘common-sense’, making assumptions which leave noticeable gaps? Fundamentally for Aristotle, the soul is nothing more than a categorising terminology, without the body or individual it does not exist. Do we, therefore, lose all sense of what we mean when we say ‘I’? Can ‘I’ exist separate from the bodily form, free from purpose? For Aristotle, clearly not.
Thanks for that post; it certainly runs alongside my own philosophical interests and does highlight to fundamentally different ways of thinking about human nature.
ReplyDeleteI'm wondering whether Aristotle could be motivated to consider the Cartesian viewpoint. For Aristotle, a thing is knowable only insofar as it is in act, but for him, the intellect is not in act unless it is engaged with the external world. It is only when it engages with the world that the intellect can catch itself in such engagement and begin reflectively to consider its own operations.
Perhaps Aristotle might say to Descartes that he has turned things upside down, and assumed that the intellect can be in act prior to any actual engagement with the world, that is to say, that the intellect is an actual entity in itself and can be known in itself. The latter Aristotle would find difficult to accept given his ontology. For Aristotle, what we are are animals with an ability to reason, and to focus on our animality at the expense of our reason or on our reason at the expense of our animality would be to paint a distorted picture of ourselves in the world.
So the 'I' then for Aristotle is the set of intellectual operations the rational animal engages in which, reflectively, can be disassociated from the world within which the rational animal engages. Thus, the 'I' emerges in disassociation from the other things in the world that are not-I; consciousness of a self is only consciousness of a self in distinction from what is other than the self. Whilst self-consciousness then is impossible for Aristotle without our bodily engagement in the world, it does have its own phenomenology insofar as at a reflective level we can consider the intellectual operations that we as rational animals engage in when engaging with the world (De Anima Bk III draws out some fo these). And so there is the possibility of some conversation between Aristotle and Descartes, but this has to be taken in light of the fundamental differences in their approaches that your post serves to highlight.
Best
Gav