My Thoughts on Aristotle’s On the Soul

• Title: On the Soul (De Anima)
• Author: Aristotle translated by J. A. Smith
• Published:.

Preamble

It was the summer of 1983 that I walked over to the Ohio State Fair from the trailer park where I lived.  The newest edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica had just released, and they had a booth.  With my love of books, living on my own, and just a few days into the ripe wise age of twenty, I was easily convinced to take a loan and purchase a library.  This collection consisted of a thirty-volume encyclopedia, a fifty-four-volume set of Great Books of the Western World, a three-volume Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary, and a twenty-one-volume collection of the Annals of America.  Since then, I have lugged these 108 books from one end of the country to the other.  I have never regretted this purchase.

This collection was my Wikipedia.  It gave me incite into the world around me.  The Great Books, encyclopedia, and the dictionary I have used consistently over the years.  The Annals, for some reason, have been referenced or read very rarely, some volumes not at all.  But, to get back to my topic, Aristotle.  Two books, in this collection, are dedicated to his works.  I have read him several times over the years.  Do I understand him?  No, but with each reading I understand more of the world around me and of myself.

About the Author

Aristotle of Stagira (384-322 B.C.) was a Greek philosopher.  His father, Nicomachus, was a court physician to Amyntas II, father of Philip of Macedon.  Aristotle became a student of Plato’s Academy in Athens when he was seventeen and Plato was sixty-one.  When Plato died twenty years later, Aristotle, along with Xenocrates, left Athens and set up a school in Assos under the ruler Hermias.  Three years later, after marrying the adopted daughter of the ruler Hermias, Aristotle settled on the island of Lesbos.  For two years he studied natural history, especially, marine biology.  After this, he went to Macedonia to tutor Alexander, who was then only thirteen.  The next seven years were devoted to teaching the man who would be known as Alexander the Great.  In 336 BC Aristotle returned to Athens and established his own school called the Lyceum, which is also known as the Peripatetic School because of the path in the garden where he walked and talked with his students.  When Alexander died in 323 BC, he fell out of favor and was charged with impiety.  Remembering the fate of Socrates, he fled to his mother’s property in Chalcis declaring, “I will not let the Athenians offend twice against philosophy.”  He died just a few months after arriving.

My Perspective

On the Soul.  The very title conjures up a myriad of questions and Aristotle has plenty of them.  As far as studying the soul, Aristotle proclaims, “The knowledge of the soul admittedly contributes greatly to the advance of truth in general, and, above all, to our understanding of Nature, for the soul is in some sense the principle of animal life.” [1]  The more we know about the soul, the more we will know about Truth and Nature.  I have always been interested in learning and talking about the soul.  As I go through life my ideas of the soul change and develop as my personal experiences change my perspective of the world around me.  It can be likened to peeling away layers of an onion to get to the core.

What I like best about Aristotle is his ability to break things down.  His ability to analyze and present an argument.  “Our aim is to grasp and understand, first its essential nature, and secondly its properties; of these some are taught to be affections proper to the soul itself, while others are considered to attach to the animal owing to the presence within it of soul.” [2]

What frustrates me about Aristotle, or any of the ancient writers, is not them per se, but us.  Our language.  They were very particular about explaining what the words they used mean.  One could almost say that a large part of Plato’s works is explaining that the Athenians don’t really understand the words they are using.  How much more do we have this problem today.  We interchange words, adopt words to other meanings, and deliberately highjack words for propaganda.  Over the course of years, it feels as if our language is regressing rather than progressing.  Language is the tool used to express ideas.  And if our words are ambiguous, so also will be the transference of ideas.  So, as I read this work, or others, I wonder about the translation, or what Aristotle meant and what the translator thinks he meant.  Even if I knew Attic Greek and had the original copy, I would be thinking in terms and ideas of today and of my personal experiences, not the frame of mind and references that Aristotle was thinking.  This makes it challenging.

“We must consider also whether soul is divisible or without parts, and whether it is everywhere homogenous or not; and if not homogenous, whether its various forms are different specifically or generically: up to the present time those who have discussed and investigated soul seem to have confined themselves to the human soul.” [3]  Aristotle is making a departure from his peers.  Others have confined themselves to the human soul, but he will be looking at the soul in relation to all living things.  I think of all the flora and fauna specimens that Alexander the Great sent to him for study, his time spent on the island of Lesbos studying marine biology, and I wonder how much this influenced him, gave him a perspective that allowed him a broad view of life, and what it means to be alive.

“For our study of soul it is necessary, while formulating the problems of which in our further advance we are to find the solutions, to call into council the views of those of our predecessors who have declared any opinion on this subject, in order that we may profit by whatever is sound in their suggestions and avoid their errors.” [4] Always a good starting point.  Check out what all the great thinkers have said on the subject at hand so that you may learn what is good and avoid errors they might have made.  Aristotle then goes on to reference many people: Democritus, Leucippus, Pythagoreans, Anaxagoras, Homer, Empedocles, Plato, Thales, Diogenes, Heraclitus, Alcmaeon, Hippo, Critias, Philippus, Daedalus.  It is important to note that the only reason we know of some ancient writers is when other writers quote something they said.  Their original works are no longer extant.

Aristotle is going after the soul as that thing which makes us alive.  What is it that distinguishes something from an animate to an inanimate body?  All things that are alive must have a soul, because his definition it is that which makes us alive.  What if, what animates, is a set of instructions, like programable code.  In that code is the potential for possible manifestations of appearances and characteristics.  This would then discount evolution.  That instead, the code is programmed to take in to consideration outcomes and adapt to them; all within its original potentiality.  It never becomes more nor less in potential than its original design allowed.  It is only looking at snapshots in time that it appears as if it evolves.

“Since then the complex here is the living thing, the body cannot be the actuality of the soul; it is the soul which is the actuality of a certain kind of body.  Hence the rightness of the view that the soul cannot be without a body, while it cannot be a body; it is not a body but something relative to a body.  That is why it is in a body, and a body of a definite kind.  It was a mistake, therefore, to do as former thinkers did, merely to fit it into a body without adding a definite specification of the kind or character of that body.  Reflection confirms the observed fact; the actuality of any given thing can only be realized in what is already potentially that thing, i.e. in a matter of its own appropriate to it.  From all this it follows that soul is an actuality or formulable essence of something that possesses a potentiality of being besouled.” [5]

Reproduction and nutrition, the basics of life.  “The acts in which it manifests itself are reproduction and the use of food – reproduction, I say, because for any living thing that has reached its normal development and which is unmutilated, and whose mode of generation is not spontaneous, the most natural act is the production of another like itself, an animal producing an animal, a plant a plant, in order that, as far as its nature allows, it may partake in the eternal and the divine.”[6]

In order to participate “in the eternal and the divine” a creature of normal development, which is not mutilated, should seek to reproduce.  This makes me think of the Genesis where “God blessed them and God said to them: Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.” Gn 1:28[7]  We must seriously consider any choices that we make that concerns reproduction as this is a principle of the soul.

“The soul is the cause or source of the living body.  The terms cause and source have many senses.  But the soul is the cause of its body alike in all three senses which we explicitly recognize.  It is a source or origin of movement, it is the end, it is the essence of the whole living body.”[8]  This sentence is difficult to explain, but I felt it was important in summing up what Aristotle is talking about.  The source of movement is that which impels the body to locomotion so that will seek nourishment and fulfill its reason for being.  The “end” is like when we say ends and means.  The soul is not the means to an end, but is an end in itself.  The soul is also the actual essence of the whole living body, it encapsulates it, it is like that which makes a state a state instead of just a group of people.  Like I said, difficult to explain.

“Empedocles (and with him all others who used the same forms of expression) was wrong in speaking of light as ‘travelling’ or being at a given moment between the earth and its envelope. Its movement being unobservable by us; that view is contrary both to the clear evidence of argument and to the observed facts; if the distance traversed were short, the movement might have been unobservable, but where the distance is from extreme East to extreme West, the draught upon our powers of belief is too great.”[9]  Oops, Aristotle was wrong on this one!  But, can we really blame him?

Aristotle discusses the senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

“It might be asked why we have more senses than one.  Is it to prevent a failure to apprehend the common sensibles, e.g. movement, magnitude, and number, which go along with the special sensibles?  Had we no sense but sight, and that sense no object but white, they would have tended to escape our notice and everything would have merged for us into an indistinguishable identity because of the concomitance of color and magnitude.  As it is, the fact that the common sensibles are given in the objects of more than one sense reveals their distinction from each and all of the special sensibles.”[10]

I have always been the believer that we notice things only by contrasted them with something else, whether this be something we sense, or an abstract thought.  It is impossible for us to know something or sense something unless we can differentiate it from something else.  So that it is this and therefore not that.

“There are two distinctive peculiarities by reference to which we characterize the soul – local movement and thinking, discriminating, and perceiving.  Thinking both speculative and practical is regarded as akin to a form of perceiving; for in the one as well as the other the soul discriminates and is cognizant of something which is.”[11]

“Actual knowledge is identical with its object: potential knowledge in the individual is in time prior to actual knowledge but in the universe it has no priority even in time; for all things that come into being arise from what actually is.”[12]  This is a good explanation or rather a description of Objective Truth versus Subjective Truth (Opinion).  The actual knowledge is objective, hardcore, it is.  “For we know partially and we prophesy partially, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away.” 1 Cor 13: 9-10.  I look at the soul as that which connects us to the eternal.  We are beings of a temporal nature, but the soul connects us from a sequentially progressing collective of matter to that which is outside of time, or rather is all of time at once.

“Let us now summarize our results about soul, and repeat that the soul is in a way all existing things; for existing things are either sensible or thinkable, and knowledge is in a way what is knowable, and sensation is in a way what is sensible: in what way we must inquire.

Knowledge and sensation are divided to correspond with the realities, potential knowledge and sensation answering to potentialities, actual knowledge and sensation to actualities.  Within the soul the faculties of knowledge and sensation are potentially these objects, the one what is knowable, the other what is sensible.  The must be either the things themselves or their forms.  The former alternative is of course impossible: it is not the stone which is present in the soul but its form.”[13]

This final part makes we want to go back and read Plato again.  It is almost like I am on the cusp of understanding something monumental… and then it just slips out of my grasp.  Perhaps others feel this way.  It is not an easy read, but it is rewarding and perhaps frustrating.  But it has the possibility of enlightening me on a noble quest.  So, like Socrates, it appears that I still do not know exactly what the soul is, but I may just have gained something closer to that elusive, objective Truth that I seek.

Aristotle.  “On the Soul.” Translated by J. A. Smith.  In Great Books of the Western World, Vol. 8 Aristotle Vol. I, editor in chief Robert Maynard Hutchins, 627-668.  Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1982.

[1] 402a

[2] 402a

[3] 402b

[4] 403b

[5] 414a

[6] 415a

[7] The New American Bible, Revised Edition (NABRE)

[8] 415b

[9] 418b

[10] 425b

[11] 427a

[12] 431a

[13] 431b