Retrieving Aristotle in an Age of Crisis by Roochnik David

Author:Roochnik, David. [Roochnik]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438445205
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2012-11-04T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

Truth Is Easy.

“Truth is like the proverbial door that no one can miss”

—Metaphysics 993b5

“Human beings hit upon the truth more often than not”

—Rhetoric 1355a7–10

IV.1: If the Eye Were an Animal, Vision Would Be Its Soul.

“Soul” is a word that embarrasses scientists and most contemporary philosophers. Perhaps it conjures up an image from Dante's Inferno, where disembodied beings with fully intact characters and the capacity to feel pain remain for eternity to receive the endless punishments they deserve. Or it may suggest a mysterious notion of a nonmaterial substance that somehow acts within or upon the body. In the hands of a lazy thinker, “soul” can function as a deus ex machina in order to explain human consciousness or personal identity and so hard-nosed thinkers have long sought to replace it with a proper understanding of the brain.

This is a catastrophe. Soul is real. But it is not what Dante thought it was. It is what Aristotle calls (in Greek) psuchê, the origin of our words “psyche” and “psychology.”

Psuchê is derived from psuchein, “to breathe.” In its earliest appearance in Greek literature it means “life-breath” or “animating force” and it is often prominent in descriptions of someone's death. When Homer depicts Pandaros being killed by Diomedes, for example, he says “his life (psuchê) and strength were scattered” (Iliad, V.296). At the end of his life a man breathes his last. The difference between a corpse, which is a quickly decomposing heap of organic elements, and a living man who remains intact is the presence of psuchê. Aristotle's “psychology,” his logos of the psyche (the term used in this book), remains faithful to this primordial sense of the word, which itself is faithful to the phenomenon of, the witnessing of, someone's dying.

Consider On the Psyche II.1, in which Aristotle gradually works his way toward a definition of the psyche. He begins by arguing that it must be a “substance” (ousia: 412a19). This, however, is not sufficiently specific because there are three subdivisions of substance: “matter, or that which in itself is not a ‘this something’; shape or form, according to which something is said to be a ‘this something’; and third, that which comes from both of these” (412a7–10).

Bodies seem most of all to be substances, and especially natural ones, for these are the origins of other bodies. And of natural bodies, some have life while others do not. And we say that life is self-nourishment, growth and decay. Consequently every natural body having life is a substance and substance understood as a compound. Since it is this sort of body, which has life, the body is not the psyche. For the body is not something that belongs to an underlying subject; rather it functions as an underlying subject and as matter. Therefore, the psyche must be a substance in the sense of the form of a natural body potentially having life. And the substance is actuality (entelecheia). (412a11–22)

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