Resisting the Place of Belonging by Boscaljon Daniel;

Author:Boscaljon, Daniel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Conflicting Philosophical Anthropologies

Aristotle

Aristotle’s development of participation in complete friendship needs to be situated within its conceptual backdrop: his philosophical anthropology. The fundamental distinction here is between “body” and “soul,” or in broader terms between “matter” and “form.” We find neither of these empirically as such; rather, we always perceive particulars that are composites of both.12 As Aristotle suggests, we can distinguish these upon reflective analysis for the sake of understanding.13 With regard to the human self, the body is the concrete medium in which all acting, thinking, and feeling are actualized. Differing from modern Cartesian dualism, the body is not another part of the self distinct from the mind; it is the actuality of the thinking, acting, and feeling being that we are.14 If we are ever at home, it is always concretely embodied.

12 Aristotle, Metaphysics, III:4 and VII:4, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, trans. Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, 1983), pp. 1578–9 and 1625. 13 Aristotle, On the Soul, II:1, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, p. 657. 14 Ibid., p. 656. Aristotle delineates three discrete dimensions of “soul.”15 Before examining these dimensions, it should first be noted that by the term “soul,” we are speaking about the ways in which living things move. This can be brought out by rehabilitating our sense of “soul” in appealing to the Greek word for soul, anima. Our word “animal” is etymologically derived from this notion, but so too is our word “animation,” and even contemporary Anime. An inanimate object is something lacking in organic life and movement. So when we are looking at Aristotle’s distinctions, it is crucial to note that we are talking about discrete kinds of movements in speaking about the “soul.” Participation in friendship entails being caught up in a peculiar sort of movement, a movement whereby we achieve a deep yet uncanny sense of belonging and being home with others.

15 See Aristotle, Metaphysics, VII:9, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, p. 1635. See also Aristotle, On the Soul, II:3; and Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, p. 9. All organic life shares the movement denoted by the phrase “nutritive soul.”16 The kind of movement proper to nutrition is absorption, digestion, and growth. Animals possess increased capacities for movement; unlike plants, we are mobile. And Aristotle denotes this kind of movement proper to animals as “appetitive soul.”17 I take this to capture the increase of movement where animals have the capacity to be even more mobile than plants, a mobility that makes us more effective in gratifying our desires. Telescoping in on human beings in particular, the movement unique to us is denoted by the phrase “rational soul,” or what I prefer to translate as “discursive soul.”18 I deliberately translate “logos” as “discourse” in order to circumvent any modernist anachronism that reads Cartesianism back into the construal of reason for ancient Greeks. Reasoning, as discourse, is inherently public and social, concretely realized bodily, and so whatever privacy can be acquired, it is only to the degree that one reasons in constrained social

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