Aristotle: De Anima, On Souls and Soullessness
{Note: Aristotle’s ‘De Anima’ is a work that has, admittedly, got me tied up in knots, which I think will be evident in this post. I’m going to reread De Anima; but I figured I’d put this up so anyone who perhaps understands it better than I do can lend a hand. Consider this a Guide By the Perplexed!}
It’s strange: even though I’m not much of a believer, something still stops me from signing on for atheism. I think it’s that, at some point, it makes no sense for an atheist to believe in the soul. I can easily understand why atheists reject belief in gods. But it’s hard for me to conceive of myself as soulless and all living things as similarly de-souled. This in spite of the fact that I can’t in any way account for the soul! Where does it reside? What does it do? How do souls differ from one another? I can’t answer any of this, and yet I find the possibility of a life without a soul unfathomable.
I think this is why Aristotle’s “Of the Soul” is so perplexing- he’s defining something called the soul, but it’s so vague that it seems inconsequential. He might as well call it “life”. He’s describing, I think, what it is that makes us, and all living things, live. Some have said the treatise should be understood as “On the Life force”. It seems strange to call it a discussion of the soul.
Aristotle believes that the soul is almost entirely inseparable from the body- it is the essence of a body that gives its form. “The soul is the cause or source of the living body”. If matter is potentiality, then its form is actuality– its essential whatness: the soul. This is all very confusing, of course, but I like Aristotle’s example: If an eye were an animal, sight would be its soul, for sight is the essence of the eye. The body exists from potentiality, but the soul gives it its first actuality- it’s sort of the formula of its being. I think of this as wax being the potentiality that takes the form of a candle- the formula of its candleness is its soul. In other words, the soul is almost totally inseparable from the body.
The key here is almost- Aristotle comes close to saying the soul dies with the body, but doesn’t quite follow through. The powers of the soul are nearly all physical: nutritive, appetitive, sensory, locomotive and thinking. All living things have some of these powers- this makes them living- but not necessarily all of them. The plant, according to Aristotle only has the first, although we might now add sensory powers. Aristotle details these powers- interestingly, he includes reproduction with the nutritive power, seemingly because the organism feeds to live and lives in order to reproduce. It’s the natural goal to which all living things strive. He’s not the last thinker, of course, to consider a good meal a prelude to reproduction!
Much of book II deals with the senses and it’s interesting that Aristotle deals with the senses also as both potentiality and actuality: a sentient being either has the power to sense or manifests that activity. Much of this book will be familiar to us sentient beings; however, I would disagree with Aristotle’s claim that skin cannot be considered the organ of touch as well as his idea that touching the sensory organ to an object of perception makes it unperceivable- maybe we cannot see the colors of an object held against the eye, but I am not about to try this experiment with my eardrum!
The exception to the rule that soul is inseparable from body is Mind, which is discussed in Book III, chapters 4 and 5. Mind is “thinkable” because it is unmixed with anything, is simple and impassible. In its essential nature, it is activity. Thinking doesn’t begin- it is not at one time thinking and another not thinking. Without it, nothing thinks. It is, therefore, immortal and eternal. The closest I can come to understanding this concept of Mind is Kant’s Subject, which is prior to all thinking, but is itself unthinkable. We can’t see the eye directly, nor think the Mind. I also hear echoes of Socrates here, but would have to re-read Plato to understand where Aristotle differs. For me, the problem with all of this is not that one part of the soul is eternal, while the rest dies; it’s that Mind seemingly has to exist separate from the body, as something out there- the Ideal, or a sort of collective unconscious that precedes actual thought. So maybe it’s best just to say that the soul dies, but thought doesn’t. Small consolation, although I’m not sure that I’m understanding Aristotle correctly anyway!
The other problem with Aristotle’s soul is that it makes mine seem so inconsequential after all. If the powers that come to me by the soul are essentially the same as those of most animals and all human beings, what makes me different from other living things? I tend to think of the soul as what makes me Me, but here it’s both the essence of me and somehow fulfills the same functions in all living things. It’s just the basic formula of life. Why aren’t living things virtually identical? Or is this understanding basically right and our sense of having our own unique identity is overblown and mistaken?
This is the problem I have with reducing the soul to functions of the body, or a sort of confluence of chemical reactions- without a soul, it’s hard to understand how “I” am anything but the sum total of those chemical reactions- a series of firing synapses. Try though I might, I can’t quantify free will without a soul, and the further along we come in mapping out and explaining the neurochemical basis of our behaviors, memories, desires, and ideas, the more it seems that my sense of having a choosing self, and free will along with it, was a mistake after all. Maybe we’re all pieces of driftwood, floating down a river, and convinced that we’re swimming.
That’s because you aren’t. Why do you want to be? Because your brain is pre-wired to create the illusion of identity.
You are, for all practical purposes, unique. You are a unique collection of experiences, genetics, and random influences, encoded in the biological machine that we call the brain. And the machine includes mechanisms for making choices, based on the unique and varied state that is you.
But you want it to be more, because you’re wired that way: humans, and many of our ancestors, have brains in which there is a deep association between the individual’s decision-making capability and the way in which our fellow creatures interpret our agency. The best descriptions of these ideas is in the books of Dan Dennett, especially The Intentional Stance and Elbow Room: The Varieties of Free Will Worth Wanting. Social stability is enhanced if we feel that our choices are free, and that we are responsible for them, and evolution has selected these adaptations. We see the results in ourselves and other primates. Of course evolution does not plan – there is no design! – and so the possibility that we might come to understand the mechanism and question it was unprecedented.
The idea of free will and responsibility was a social adaptation for tribal creatures. In humans, it is fused with our dualist instinct to form what you call the soul. Dualism has a number of mutually-reinforcing sources: animism as way of explaining natural forces, an explanation for the subtle distinction between the living and dead, coping with death, understanding social hierarchies, and so forth. The relationship between body and soul or spirit was always rather loose, and not always one-to-one: consider the idea of demonic possession. (Schizophrenia is such a prosaic alternative….)
I prefer to think that we are swimming vigorously down the river, amazed by the water and the sky and our our abilities, and occasionally confused by people who dream that they are drifting…Report
@Geoff Arnold, That’s probably a better way to put it. I keep wondering how countries with high concentrations of Buddhists answer these questions. I understand that some Buddhists disagree, of course, but I understand him as saying that we have no Self to speak of. This certainly could be correct and does make it easier to let go of craving, but it’s still hard for me to know what exactly we’re doing when we arrest someone for a crime, if that makes sense.Report
I’ve often wondered whether De Anima was worth a read. I’m still unsure. At best it would be a good description of the experience of having a soul. At worst, it would be a bad description of same.
Very little in this area strikes me as interesting before the dawn of modern science, to be honest, and some of the claims you cite don’t inspire much confidence:
“His idea that touching the sensory organ to an object of perception makes it unperceivable.”
Does Aristotle taste food with his Mind? (More seriously, how does he hold up against Hume?)Report
@Jason Kuznicki, De Anima is essentially like course notes, so it’s a pretty easy read. I think you can really skip the whole book on perception, which tells you things like the eye is the organ of sight, and read the rest in an hour.
What he says about touching the object of perception directly is that, if you hold an object to your eye, you essentially can’t see it, since you can’t get a good image of it. I can accept that without wanting to try it. But he says it’s the same for hearing, which seems incorrect. As for touch, he thinks the organ of perception is deeper than the skin, so he probably means the same thing there- but the organ of perception is still skin, and not something buried under the skin.Report
Did Aristotle think that light bounced off objects and entered the eye, or did he think the eye projected a kind of action allowing is to see? In other words, how active an agent in sight was the eye for Aristotle? I don’t remember.
If the answer is that sight is projected from the eye, then the need for some kind of internal, animating energy or spirit–unseen by anyone yet having clear physical effect–to generate sight is inescapable.
I like Geoff Arnold’s description of what it’s like to know and appreciate that one does not have a soul. It’s similar to my own understanding of my mind.
I disagree with your statement that “thinking doesn’t begin.” Your words would seem to suggest an ether that populates our bodies with pure Thought, and that our souls are our shares of that Thought. So, when you die, does your soul return to the ether like rain in a pond, or does it now have its own integrity. What gave it integrity? A new energy or force that creates souls? No, I think an understanding of the soul as the engine of free will needs to accept, perhaps axiomatically, that the thinking inside a person starts at some point before which there was no thought and contemporaneously or prior to that, no soul.Report
@Boegiboe, I’m just saying that I think Aristotle is saying that “thinking doesn’t begin”; not that I believe it. When he says that it’s eternal and does not at one time exist and another time not exist, that’s all I can make of it- that he thinks it’s some sort of ether that populates our bodies and gives them Thought. And, I suppose, if you try to remember your first thought, or figure out why you can think things that aren’t there, it could seem that way, but, no, I don’t agree with him on that.
Again, though, it’s a really hard piece and I could be misreading Aristotle.Report
@Boegiboe, Without getting into the greek, Aristotle thought the eye was an active agent.
Someday, someone is going to re-read The Poetics with this in mind.Report
The other problem with Aristotle’s soul is that it makes mine seem so inconsequential after all. If the powers that come to me by the soul are essentially the same as those of most animals and all human beings, what makes me different from other living things? I tend to think of the soul as what makes me Me, but here it’s both the essence of me and somehow fulfills the same functions in all living things. It’s just the basic formula of life. Why aren’t living things virtually identical?
I think the answer to your question, hinted at in previous replies, is that all living things are virtually identical. Our cognition is contained so far down in the weeds, so to speak, that we see minor variations as larger than they actually are.Report
@Sam Hutcheson
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Larger than they actually are? How large is that? And from whose perspective?
We see those variations that are important to us. Even babies can do so within a few days of birth. Cui bono? To us, all elephants look pretty much the same, but it’s really important for elephants (or, more precisely, their genes) to be able to distinguish between good and bad elephant mates.Report
Do you guys have a list of “books I wish someone would write”? Top of my list is a book on the history of the notion of the soul. The sense I get is that Plato’s “soul” is substantially different from Aristotle’s and miles away from the Christian notion, Kant’s notion, etc. I think has left us very confused and conflicted in what we mean by this word that is very very important to us. In fact, in modern times, it seems like “soul” just means “that part of me I think is most important and don’t ask me to be more specific.”
Rufus, your thoughts here were still useful to this perplexed soul. I look forward to more.Report
There is a confusion on the basis what soul means here. We are holding that the soul talked about is that of self and personality. The original Greek term, that “soul” was used as a proxy for, was psyche. It meant a variety of things and could most essentially be treated as “the principle of life” or “the principle of animation.” It was a study in the third-person. You are attempting to use this evidence in the first-person.
All life has a soul by this definition of a soul, and one could say that any object also has a soul by loose interpretation. By using this term improperly, we have muddled the investigation.
Thought is eternal because thought has no beginning and no end. We are not talking about the noun of a single thought, but the general action of thought. If one thinks that nothing exists, then he still thinks. It is axiomatic that thought simply exists from the human perspective. That is the maxim of thought.Report
@Cameron Cornick, This is a very helpful explanation of the psyche! I suppose my difficulty comes from a desire to see a psyche as a soul- as an internal constituent of existential identity and directionality- when you’re exactly right that Aristotle doesn’t see it this way at all.Report