PHIL 336 PART 3

8/29/22, 12:00 PM Aristotle’s Account of the Mind Hylomorphism - PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228)

https://learn.umgc.edu/d2l/le/content/717197/viewContent/26960003/View 1/3

Aristotle’s Account of the Mind and Body: Hylomorphism

What you will learn in this reading:

What Aristotle meant by the word ‘psyche’ (Latin: Anima) How Aristotle explained the relationship between the soul and the body with hylomorphism What Aristotle’s teleological view of reality was What are some objections to Aristotle’s view of the mind/body problem

A useful starting-point for this discussion would be to reflect on the ways in which we normally talk about our minds, before we begin to do philosophy (or psychology, or neuroscience). Some things in our experience lead us to think of the mental and the physical as totally separate from each other. This way of thinking is reflected in common attitudes and ways of talking. For instance, we talk of a 'triumph of mind over matter', when by a great effort we succeed in overcoming the limitations imposed by our physical nature or by our biologically rooted inclinations. Similarly, we increasingly think it wrong to reduce human beings to their physical characteristics, whether it be the colour of their skin, or their stature, or their gender, their age or whatever. The real person, it seems, is not confined by any such physical limitations, but is expressed in their thoughts, their feelings, their ideals and so on. Sometimes, we even feel detached from our own bodies. Some of these ways of thinking are fairly modern, especially the resistance to stereotyping people in terms of their bodily characteristics, but in other ways this sense of a mind-body distinction has always been present in Western culture, and indeed in many other cultures too.

In the past, though not so much in recent times, this sense of distinction was often expressed in terms of the difference between the 'soul', rather than the 'mind', and the body. In Ancient Greek, the word usually translated into English as 'soul' was psyche, from which we derive words like 'psychology' and 'psychiatry'; in Latin, it was anima, the source of our words 'animism', 'animated' and the like. We are most familiar with talk about 'souls' in religious contexts, as in the doctrine of the immortality of the soul: the word had that sense in Ancient Greek thought, too, but it also had wider connotations which were not particularly religious.

Psyche or 'soul' for the Greeks meant something that included 'mind', but extended beyond that. Aristotle wrote a treatise On the Soul (usually known by its Latin title De Anima), in which he equates having a soul simply with being alive, so that even plants and non-human animals have souls. He defines the soul, in this wider sense, by 'the nutritive, perceptive and intellective faculties and movement' (Aristotle 1986: 413b). Of these three kinds of faculties, it is the last, the 'intellective', that we should most naturally identify with 'mind', since it is the capacity to think and reason, to reflect and engage in abstract contemplation, to control one's passions by rational principles, and so on. For Aristotle, only human beings had souls which involved these rational capacities, though their souls shared with those of plants and animals the capacity for self-nutrition, and with animals the capacity for movement and perception. Thus, Aristotle equated 'mind' with a part of the human soul, the most important part, since it was what defined our humanity, but nevertheless not entirely separated from our capacities for biological life and movement.

So what was the 'soul' for Aristotle, and how did it relate to the body? To explain that, we need to say a little about Aristotle's general view of reality. According to him, any individual thing which exists, (a 'substance', in his terminology) requires a 'form' and a 'matter' to make it what it is. That is, it has to be made out of something, its 'matter', and this matter has to be organized in a particular way appropriate to its being the relevant kind of thing, which he called its 'form'. To take one of Aristotle's own examples, an axe is a substance, whose matter is the wood and metal out of which it is made, and whose form is the way in which those materials are combined and shaped to make it capable of fulfilling the function of being an axe. Without both form and matter, it would not exist as an axe. A piece of wood and a piece of metal do not constitute an axe until they are combined in the appropriate

8/29/22, 12:00 PM Aristotle’s Account of the Mind Hylomorphism - PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228)

https://learn.umgc.edu/d2l/le/content/717197/viewContent/26960003/View 2/3

form; but obviously without material to actualize it, that form would not in itself constitute an axe (at most, it would be the idea of an axe). This theory of substance, form and matter is referred to as hylomorphism.

In these terms, we can say that a soul, in the broad sense, is the form of a living body. As Aristotle puts it, 'soul is substance as the form of a natural body, which potentially has life' (Aristotle 1986: 412a). In particular, what makes each of us a human being is that we have a soul involving not only nutritive and perceptive powers, but also intellectual or rational faculties: that is, we are living creatures of a certain kind, capable of nourishing ourselves, of moving under our own steam, of responding to the world around us, and above all of thinking and reasoning about our experience. The human soul, on this view, is distinct from the body, in the way that an impression on wax is distinct from the wax (cf. Aristotle 1986: 412b). But it is not a distinct thing or substance from the body: rather, the substance is the human being whose 'matter' is the body and whose 'form' is the soul. In that sense, as Aristotle says, the soul is inseparable from the body: "soul and body are the animal' (Aristotle 1986: 413a).

Aristotle's view of the human soul cannot be fully understood unless we see it as part of what is known as a teleological, or purposive, account of reality as a whole. According to this account, briefly, reality is made up of a number of distinct species, or kinds, of things, each with its own place in the scheme of things, its own purpose for existing expressed in the form which defines it as the species it is. The good for each species is to live in accordance with this purpose (so, for example, a good lion is one which best embodies the form of lionhood). The scheme of things is hierarchical, with the human species at the top of the pile. Humanity is defined, as we have seen, by rationality: so the good for humanity is to live a life guided by reason. In this way, Aristotle's account of the human soul was part of a theory of human ethics.

The Aristotelian view was taken up by many medieval thinkers, notably St Thomas Aquinas, and expounded with a number of specifically Christian overtones. But it was generally rejected at the beginnings of modern philosophy in the seventeenth century, by such thinkers as Descartes, Locke, Leibniz and Spinoza, essentially because the teleological background just described did not seem to them to fit with the needs of the modern physical science whose foundations they were trying to elaborate.

Nevertheless, there are some things in common between Aristotle's account of the soul and the thinking of some much more recent philosophers about the mind-body problem which we shall be considering later.

We can consider in more detail some of the virtues and vices of this approach in the later module, but we need to say something briefly about them here if we are to think critically about Aristotelianism. One of the virtues of the Aristotelian view and its later successors is that it preserves the unity of the human person. Although we do, as was said earlier, have experiences which suggest that we can separate ourselves (our minds) from our bodies - for example, we may be so lost in thought that we do not hear the doorbell ringing nevertheless, we do not, in non-pathological cases, feel our own bodies to be alien entities, only loosely attached to ourselves, but, as the words themselves imply, our own bodies. The fingers with which I am typing these words are my fingers, I am the one who feels the pressure of the keys on them as I hit each letter. Aristotle's view seems to fit in with this sense of ownership of our own bodies very neatly. My activity of writing this paragraph is an activity neither of my 'mind', nor my 'body', on its own: I could not write it unless I both had thoughts to communicate and some physical way to express those thoughts, in this case, fingers capable of operating a word- processor.

Aristotle's account coheres with this basic intuition of the unity of the person, and that is a very great virtue in it. But it still leaves unanswered a number of important questions about mind-body relations. First, it is all very well to say that a rational soul is the 'form' of a living human body, but that does not in itself tell us what exactly a soul is. Literally, 'form' means 'shape', but that is clearly not what

8/29/22, 12:00 PM Aristotle’s Account of the Mind Hylomorphism - PHIL 336 6380 Ideas Shaping the 21st Century (2228)

https://learn.umgc.edu/d2l/le/content/717197/viewContent/26960003/View 3/3

Aristotle means by the word in this technical sense. A rational soul is what defines us as human, in combination with a body of a certain kind (a humanoid kind): thus it is not the same as the characteristically human bodily appearance of members of our species. He seems to think of it rather in terms of certain characteristically human activities - those same 'mental' activities of thinking, planning, controlling, etc., which were listed at the beginning of the chapter. But, if so, that raises, at least to a modern mind, a further question: are those mental activities to be identified with the operations of certain specific bodily mechanisms (such as brain-processes), or could they be, at least in principle, detached from any such material basis? If the former, then the soul could still be called the 'form' of the human being, and the body the 'matter', but the view would be indistinguishable, apart from its background in Aristotle's teleological view of reality, from any more straightforwardly 'materialist' account, according to which thoughts, etc., are to be identified simply with brain- processes. On the other hand, if the mental activities are not to be identified with specific bodily mechanisms, then the very basis of Aristotle's account seems to be undermined: he says, after all, that the soul and body cannot exist separately, any more than any other 'form' and 'matter' which together constitute an individual thing as what it is.

Aristotle himself seems more than a little uncertain about this point. After saying that the soul is inseparable from the body, he goes on,

"Not that there are not some parts [of the soul] that nothing prevents from being separable, through their not being the actualities of any body. But it remains unclear whether the soul is the actuality of a body in this way or rather is as the sailor of a boat." (Aristotle De Anima 1986: 413a)

The parts of the soul he seems to have in mind are the rational parts, and the uncertainty he seems to be expressing is whether these parts might be separable because they do not depend on (are not actualized in) any particular part of the body - something which he says is still unclear to him. If the rational soul were separable in this way, the unity of soul and body to constitute a person would be destroyed: as he says, the soul would be in the body 'as the sailor of a boat' (this is an image which is very similar to one used by Descartes to convey much the same idea, and we shall come back to it later in the module).

------------------------------------------

SOURCE: Matthews, Eric, “Mind and Soul.” Mind: Key Concepts in Philosophy. Continuum (2005), Chapter 1, pp. 3-7. (CC BY NC)