Aristotle
De Anima,
Books I and II
Book I: Introduction to the subject
• Soul as a ‘lifeforce’ within all living things:
plants, animals, humans.
• Soul related to body, not independent. Recall
Aristotle’s four causes and his rejection of
both materialism and ‘formalism’. For A., soul
and body are connected. The body is the
material cause upon which the soul (as formal,
efficient, and final cause) acts.
Book II, ch 1
• Aristotle’s ‘dualism’: substance as a
combination of matter and form
• Hence, the soul cannot be ‘just’ a body. But
neither is just ‘mind’. “The soul, then, must be
substance as the form of a natural body that is
potentially alive. Now, the substance is
actuality; hence the soul will be the actuality
of this specific sort of body” (4121 20-21).
Bk II, ch. 1 (see Michael Taber
http://faculty.smcm.edu/mstaber/arisdean.htm)
• Two sense of “actuality”:
• Aristotle distinguishes between the first and the second
actuality of something. What he means is this. Let Alice be
ignorant of (but capable of learning about), say, the cause
of the winds. Let Betty know the cause of the winds but not
be thinking about it now (as she is asleep). And let Cathy
know the cause of the winds and be presently explaining
the matter to Daphne. Betty has actualized what Alice has
as mere potential, yet Cathy is actualizing something which
Betty both has actually (in that she actually possesses the
knowledge) and has potentially (in that she's not, in her
sleep, actualizing that knowledge). So Cathy has actualized
her knowledge in two senses, whereas Betty has only the
first actualization.
Bk II, ch 1
• Aristotle's claim here is that soul/psyche is the
first actualization. This is important, first,
because the implication of saying that psyche
is the first actualization is that the psyche
would be not some sort of activity, but the
capacity to engage in some sorts of activities;
more precisely, not the undeveloped capacity
(that would be Alice), but the actualized
potential to engage in some sort of activities.
II, 1
• Examples: an axe, an eye, and a living body
• Axe
– Second act (defining activity): to cut
– First act, which is the potency for the second act: the form or essence
of an axe
• The form which makes it possible for an axe to cut is the sharpness of its
blade.
• Sharpness, must be realized, instantiated in matter of a certain type, i.e. with a
certain hardness - e.g. steel.
• In order to be an axe, a thing has to have a hard, sharp blade, so that it
perform the defining activity of an axe. The form of axe (first act) cannot exist
unless it is in matter, and matter of a certain type (hard sharp steel). If
something merely looks like an axe (if it is made out of wax) but it does not
have a hard, sharp blade, it will be an axe in name only.
• The form of axe has an essential and necessary relationship to the matter in
which it is realized.
II, 1 (see Magee, http://www.aquinasonline.com/Magee/aristotle2.htm)
• Body and soul are one as the wax and its
impression are one.
• Soul, and parts of the soul, are actualities of the
body, and so cannot exist apart from the body,
unless there is an activity of soul which is not the
activity of an body, or any organ.
• However, if there is an activity of soul apart from
the body, that part (at least) may be separate.
(This is the theoretical basis for arguing that the
mind is separate because its activity is not (and
could not be) the activity of the body.)
Overview
(See http://www.socinian.org/aristotles_de_anima2.html)
• The living being differs from the nonliving, and life signifies the
following characteristics: intellect, sensation, movement or rest in
space.
• But the movement has a broader meaning -- it also means change,
growth and decay. The living organisms have faculty and principle.
Life belongs to the living by inheritance of this principle. But what
originally constitutes an animal is the ability of sensation, the touch,
growth and decay.
• The soul is the principle of various kinds of life that is defined by
various faculties: nutritive and reproductive, appetitive , desire,
courage, reasoned wish; sensitive, mobile, discursive thinking.
Plants have only the nutritive faculty; all animals have at least touch
for sensitivity; humans and all others who might resemble humans
have deliberative thinking faculty and intellect.
Aristotle’s scale of life
•
Faculties of living beings at various levels
• Plants and animals
Animals
• nutritive + reproductive Sensitive
touch + taste Rational
• + sight + hearing + smell
practical + theoretical reasoning
+calculus + intellectual intuition
nous
appetitive
– physical desire + courage
+ rational will
imaginative
sensitive
deliberative
Summary
• 1. The Aristotelian concept of the soul does not correspond
to any religious tradition.
• 2. Aristotle's concept of the soul fits into his larger onto
logical scheme of reality as composed of matter and form,
potentiality and actuality.
• 3. The soul is described as the actuality or form of a living
organism (living body) with all its faculties corresponding to
the characteristics of life. As there is a gradualness in the
degree of complexity of life, so there is a corresponding
gradualness in the complexity of the soul. Man is at the top
of the scale with the intellectual faculty of syllogism.
Summary
• 4. The soul, being a form of the living body, perishes with the
organism at death.
• 5. Still, in the Aristotelian ontology, the universe requires the
transcendental Primal Mover or the First Cause to keep the
universe in motion and to maintain it.
• 6. The human soul is superior to those of plants and animals in that,
besides all the other psychic faculties, it possesses the faculty
(potentiality) of thinking, the basis of which is the recognition and
manipulation of universals. As the senses are called into activity by
the external objects perceived, so similarly the nous of rational
living organisms, whose objects are within it, requires a
transcendental First Rational Cause, Cosmic Nous, to set in motion
the intellectual process.
Summary
• 7. The Aristotelian idea of the First Cause, with
all its consequences, is based on the
erroneous Law of Motion (corrected by
Galileo and Newton) and on the
anthropomorphic transposition of the
relationship between the cause and effect,
"matter" and form (idea), from the sphere of
human activity (crafts) to the Universe.