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On the Soul
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Themes
Nature Has a Purpose
One of the fundamental ideas of Aristotle’s philosophy is that we can understand nature in terms of a series of causes. This in turn is grounded in the idea that nature is ordered teleologically, or ordered to a specific purpose or goal (from the Greek word telos, meaning end or purpose). Aristotle states that “nature does nothing in vain” as a way of explaining why various animals have the particular faculties and senses that they do (212). For example, one will not find an animal that has a mouth but no stomach (250). Thus, to explain a phenomenon in nature, one must find its goal, that “for the sake of which” it exists, which Aristotle terms the final cause of a thing.
This idea is one of Aristotle’s basic assumptions throughout On the Soul. For example, nature supplies animals with the senses they need most for their particular mode of life. Those that are stationary (i.e., plants) have just the nutritive soul, those that move have touch and/or perception, and so forth. Further, each sense organ is intended by nature for a specific function, and from this it follows that sense perception is “never or very seldom deceived” (Introduction, 79) in perceiving special sense objects. This again shows Aristotle’s confidence in the rational structure of nature. Finally, in Book 3, Aristotle expresses the purposiveness of nature in an additional statement: “For all things in nature either exist for a purpose or are accidents of the things that so exist” (218).
Nature Is Ordered in a Hierarchy
Aristotle sees nature and various things within nature as existing in a hierarchy, or graded system. For example, he sees all living things as possessing the type of soul that is most appropriate for them. The lower life forms, such as plants, have a soul that is limited in scope to nutrition—i.e., promoting growth and reproduction. Higher animals, such as horses or dogs, have in addition to this a perceptive or sensitive soul as well as locomotion, the ability to move from place to place. Finally, at the top of the hierarchy, man has all these types of soul as well as the rational soul, the intellect that allows him to think and reason, a power no other living things possess.
Another example of Aristotle’s hierarchical view of nature is the structure of the soul itself. It has in its outer rim the nutritive faculty, promoting the growth and decay of the organism. Then, as we move inward, we find the faculties of sense perception, imagination, and desire, and then finally that of intellect, which can reflect on all these things. In similar fashion, when it comes to the individual senses, various animals have various senses according to what is most appropriate or most necessary for them, such as touch or touch combined with sight and hearing.
Thus, for Aristotle, nature is not random but exists in a purposefully ordered system in which beings have various degrees of power and ability appropriate to them.
Body and Soul Are Inseparable
The idea that body and soul are united connects with two larger concepts in Aristotle’s philosophy: hylomorphism, or the relationship of form to matter, and the theory of actuality and potentiality. Aristotle says that soul is the form, the substance, and the actuality of the body. Aristotle compares the union of soul and body to that of wax and its imprint (157). He again compares the soul of a living thing to an axe: If an axe became separated from its handle, it would cease to be an axe. Similarly, Aristotle says that an eye that lost its sight would no longer be an eye, except in a manner of speaking—like an eye in a painting or on a statue.
Aristotle’s view of the soul-body union thus differs from that of his teacher Plato. Plato held that the body and the soul are essentially different and that the soul was a higher entity that “uses” or is “housed” within a body. For Plato, death is a great good because the soul is thereby freed from the body. Aristotle sees the soul and the body as essentially united and, indeed, unable to exist without each other:
the soul is neither without body nor a kind of body. For it is not a body, but it belongs to a body, and for this reason is present in a body, and in a body of the appropriate kind (161).
In this passage Aristotle also emphasizes that the soul is fitted to a body of the appropriate kind, as a human soul is fitted to a human body. Each soul is perfectly suited to the matter it actualizes.
Soul is thus the body’s “form”—its primary activity or reason for being, the “account” that explains why it exists. Just as we say that knowledge is the proper activity of the knowing faculty, and health of the nutritive faculty, soul is the activity of the entire body (161).
Yet while insisting that body and soul are inseparable, Aristotle hints in Book 3, Chapter 5, that one particular part of the soul, the active intellect, is an “eternal” principle representing pure, disembodied thought and thus might have a separate existence.
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