Aristotle's De Anima (On The Soul)

We, but by the soul. — Plotinus

Aristotle has always been a bit of a blindspot for me. I read The Nicomachean Ethics many years ago, as well as the incredibly short On Poetics, but the rest of my Aristotle knowledge comes from references made by other philosophers. I'm not in the worst company with this admission, Louis Althusser, in his posthumously published autobiography, wrote "I knew the work of Descartes and Malebranche well, Spinoza a little, Aristotle not at all…"¹ There's only so much time one has to devote to philosophy, especially considering it is my hobby and not my profession, but one must engage every now and again, at minimum, with the ancient Greek masters.

My last foray into the mind of Aristotle came in the form of flipping through the first fifty or so pages of The Metaphysics and giving up due to sheer boredom². This time around I chose two rather short treatises by Plato's successor: The Categories and De Anima (On The Soul). The former given major flowers by Kant in using those selfsame categories as the baseline for the boundaries of rationality in the Critique of Pure Reason; the latter praised by Hegel as "the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic [the soul]."³ Heady praise from two of the most consequential philosophers of modernity!

The Categories is a rich text, but not a particularly exciting one. In the most basic sense of the work, Aristotle outlines what it means for something to be a thing or what thingness even is. He does this by enumerating the following ten different classifications:

The primary category being substance which is defined as "that which is neither said of a subject nor present in a subject,"⁴ such as an individual man or horse. Without "primary substances" "it would be impossible for any of the others [secondary substances] to exist."⁵ He continues, "every substance is thought to indicate a this"⁶—"for example, if that substance is a man, he cannot be more of a man or less of a man than another man."⁷ Similarly, he goes on to explain how things can be counted, how things can be compared, how things hold certain traits, how things interact with other things, how things are ordered both spatially and temporally, and how things may posess things.

What's fascinating about The Categories is not so much the ideas themselves, but the fact that when reading it one can see the germination of the next few thousand years of arguments over metaphysics. This is most illustrated by an incredible quotation in his discussion of simultaneity:

But it is thought that that not all correlatives exist simultaneously by their nature; for the knowable might be thought to exist before knowledge. Now in most cases things existed before we acquired the knowledge of them, for a few cases or in no cases at all one might observe the knowable and the corresponding knowledge coming into existance at the same time."⁸

Although these sorts of musing did not originate with Aristotle (Plato had these exact concerns about the origin of knowledge as far back as the Meno) they have a form which is curiously Kantian in their construction—and perhaps even somewhat Hegelian in the dialectical opposition between the knowable and the knowing object.

The real meat of this two course meal comes by way of De Anima which covers Aristotle's detailed investigations into "the soul". He claims, "the soul is, so to speak, the first principle of living things."⁹ Where substance was the primary stuff of the universe, soul is the primary stuff of living substance. If the soul is tied to living things we must then have a definition for what life is, luckily Aristotle deigns to provide us with one: "…life what we call self-nourishment, growth, and decay."¹⁰ That which grows and dies is that which is alive, and all that is alive has a soul—for Aristotle, this extends to plants as well as to animals.

Aristotle does not land on the soul being strictly material or immaterial. Instead, he defines the soul more as something that provides a necessary function:

"So just as pupil and sight are the eye, so in our case, soul and body are the animal. It is quite clear then that the soul is not separable from the body or that some parts of it are not…"¹¹

The soul is not an abstract category by means of which one places the intangible qualities of life, it is something innately bound up in life itself. Furthermore, "the soul discerns and has cognition of things that exist."¹² And through its powers of cognition it is "all the things that exist. For all the things that exist are objects either of perception or of thought…"¹³ (i.e., the things ruled by soul). The soul encapsulates all of existence because it functions as the living being's mediator. It is the "form of forms"¹⁴, the faculty which provides the contours of intelligible life.