From a reader:
Tell us more about your De Anima class. I’m serious. The Corner needs more Aristotle.
Well, okay — you asked for it.
If you happen to be a philosophile (redundant?) in Washington DC, you should contact me about attending next Wednesday’s class, downtown at 7 p.m.: De Anima II, taught by Dr. Fulvio Di Blasi. It is the last in the series, and would make a good sample if you’d like to sign up for the spring session.
The class itself is run by the Ralph McInerny Center for Thomistic Studies. (Full disclosure: I am, officially, the center’s executive assistant, as I help organize the classes. My father, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, is on its advisory board.)
The center, which is part of an international organization based in the U.S. and Italy, is named after my dear family friend, the famous (and still-living) Notre Dame philosopher and novelist who wrote the Father Dowling mystery series (no, it’s nothing like the television show). Last night’s class, as you might have guessed if you know some Latin, was on the Aristotelian concept of the soul.
Let me try, in my humble way, to explain – but bear in mind that I am not the philosopher in the family.
To understand Aristotle’s soul, you need to blank out of your mind the eternal, Christian idea of the soul for a moment — it is consistent with Aristotle, but it is also different. Aristotle wanted to talk about what makes living things live. That includes animals and even plants — yes, they have souls too.
Clearly, life is not a material thing. You cannot point to life, you can only see signs that some particular living thing is alive. This is true at any level of life that you study — cells, DNA, molecules, atoms, etc. They work a certain way in a living being. Outside of that context, they are very different. If you could know the exact makeup of an oak tree, and then somehow build next to it an identical structure, using exactly the same molecules and atoms in exactly the same placement, you would still not understand why one is alive and the other a non-living model of a tree.
When you study the soul, you are asking why these things act as they do in a living being.
A modern biologist might tell you, as Aristotle does, that life is an activity of a material thing. Yet even this does not explain everything, because activity has a cause. The soul (anima, psyche) is that cause — the organizing principle of a living thing. The soul is a real phenomenon whose manifestations we see every day, and by necessity it cannot be explained in terms of matter.
Think of a plant. Biology tells us that at the moment it dies, all of the same matter that was just a plant one moment ago is now merely a well-ordered set of cells (each of which will also die shortly, now that the plant is dead). The plant has stopped living because the organizing principle behind the activity of life — the soul — is no longer present, or has stopped causing the activity of life. The whole thing begins to decay in the soul’s absence.
With respect to the animal soul, it is capable of much more. Animals have senses and (depending on the animal) sense-memories. And so do human beings. This produces our capacity for imagination – and again, don’t think of the word in its common usage. When you “imagine,” you are somehow impressing on your mind the same feeling that you get when you see, hear, touch, taste or smell something. This produces our memories, and also our capacity to “imagine” things that have never happened. Naturally, your body is involved in this process — your nerves and your brain, at least. (Aristotle would have predicted that all of the senses register in one place, and our modern science has given us the answer.)
But what about the unique capacity of the human soul for non-imaginary thought? What do I mean? Well, we learn everything through the senses — the senses are required even to introduce us to abstract concepts. We learn by hearing or by seeing an analogy — for example a triangle drawn on a blackboard. But when we think about and manipulate abstract concepts (“triangle,” “commerce,” “the soul”), we are not depending in the same way on our senses any more, even though we may also imagine a triangle when we think of the concept of triangle — 180 degrees, three sides, etc.
So we are constantly engaging in “extra-sensory” thought. This ability distinguishes us from animals.
Does the human soul continue to exist after the body dies? Aristotle does not say. But if anything can survive without a body, it would include this capacity for higher thought, which does not depend on the bodily senses. It is eerie to consider what it would feel like to think without also imagining (answer: it would not “feel” at all), but there you have it. Centuries later, St. Thomas would jump in and describe how this fits with the Christian view of body and soul.
Anyway, I’m sure I’m getting a few things wrong, but there’s a little teaser for you. If you’re still reading this, then congratulations on your long attention span, and I hope I haven’t done Aristotle some grave injustice.
UPDATE:
From a reader:
I think you did a great job. We were introduced to Aristotle by studying De Anima as college sophomores in the seminary back in 1968, and it took me forever to get the hang of the whole idea of matter and form (the hylomorphic theory, as I recall). We were learning whole new meanings for terms we used everyday, and it was not easy. I was in way over my head, but some of it must have stuck. I wish I would have had your summary when I was studying for my philosophy exam back then! I can still remember Eddie Griffin asking Fr. Connelly at the end of the semester in a review class if he could just explain again that whole ‘matter and form thing’ (which he had just spent most of the semester doing)!
From my dad:
It could have been worse.
(Grin.)