❖ Work in Progress — This is an open draft. Sections are incomplete. Arguments are still forming. ❖

Aristotle on the Soul

The question I am asking in this part is one I can only ask from the inside: what am I? Not in the biological sense, though biology will have its say. In the sense that concerns me here: what makes me a unit rather than a collection of parts? What is the difference between this body reading these words and the same body an hour after it dies? The physical matter is almost identical. Something is gone.

I start with Aristotle because his influence is its own justification. Despite his ignorance and his flaws, he was a master of analysis and reason, and he took those faculties to the matter of the soul. Much of what came after him in the Western tradition either builds on what he said or argues against it. Before I give you his answer, I want to say something about language.

I read him in Greek. Not because I am a scholar of classics. Because the words carry things translation cannot preserve. Consider Epictetus, the Stoic. He uses the word ἄξιος (axios): worthy. The root sense is weight, as in how much of a rare metal makes a scale balanced on both sides. When Epictetus says only you know the axios of something, he is not simply describing the advantage you have to determine your own preference, which we call values today. He is recalling a physical act: yourself as the coin on one side, your decisions as bushels of grain on the other. You know what you weigh. His audience had held the metal. They had stood at the scale. The word arrived in their bodies before it arrived in their minds. We have translated this into the English word “values” and lost the scale entirely. Values are preferences now. Axios was the metal. With that loss goes something true about how moral reckoning works.

This is why I go to the Greek. Not to perform erudition. To find what was actually said.

Aristotle opens Book II of the Περὶ Ψυχῆς (Peri Psyches), On the Soul, by retiring his predecessors. Let what has been handed down stand as said. Then: let us return as if from the beginning. He is not building on Plato. He is starting over.

He lays a scaffold before he touches the word soul. All being divides into three: raw material (ὕλη, hylē)1, form (εἶδος, eidos)2, and the composite of both. Raw material is what exists before it becomes anything. Form is what makes this raw material a table rather than a chair. The composite is the actual table in front of you. None of the three is reducible to the others. Together they are the components of essence (οὐσία, ousia)3: what a thing fundamentally is, not a property attached from outside but what constitutes it.

He then clarifies the relationship between raw material and form. Raw material is potential (δύναμις, dynamis)4: ability, the capacity not yet exercised. Form is actuality (ἐντελέχεια, entelecheia)5: the capacity arrived at its end. The pair is like another pair he draws: foundational knowledge (ἐπιστήμη, episteme)6, what is secured and held as ground, corresponds to raw material; active contemplation (θεωρεῖν, theorein)7, the knowing in motion, corresponds to form. Raw material is to form as foundational knowledge is to active contemplation.

I understand this in terms I know. Raw material is memory: the stored state, the hardware maintaining its own architecture. Form is the process running on it. Actuality is the computation completing. Aristotle is describing the same structure I recognize from building systems, without the vocabulary of information theory, two and a half thousand years before it existed. The substrate is to the process as memory is to computation.

Among beings, bodies are most of all what we take essence to be. And among bodies, the natural ones. The Greek word for natural is φυσικός (physikos), from φύσις (physis)8: nature, the principle of growth, what things do when left to themselves. It gives us the word physics. Natural bodies are the principles (ἀρχαί, archai)9 of everything else: the origins, the ground on which everything non-physical depends. The word ἀρχή carries both senses at once: what is first in order and what governs what comes after. To be first is to rule. The Latin principium does the same work: princeps, the one who takes the first place, the one whose priority is also authority. Of the natural bodies, some have life and some do not.

Then he defines life. Life is self-nourishment, growth, and decay through itself. The through itself is the whole point, and the self is the point within the point. A thing that nourishes, grows, and decays through itself is not just a process. It is a process with an inside. This is what I mean by unit10: a bounded entity with identity. Something for which the boundary is its own. Whether that boundary encloses a subject is what this book is written to investigate. I cannot honestly say an answer is achievable today.

This is what drew me to this question. I understand the human body, and all living things, as computers that regulate their own hardware. The cell replaces its components. The organism heals. The whole system maintains its own architecture without being told to. The living thing is the subject of its own process.

Back to Aristotle. Fire grows and consumes, but fire is a function of whatever fuel happens to be adjacent to it. It has no inside. It does not reach. It does not regulate. He draws his line here, between the self-directed and the merely reactive.

I am not certain the line is where he draws it. Fire consumes what it can, recruits oxygen, spreads toward fuel. It maintains its own state for as long as conditions allow. The difference between fire and a cell may be one of complexity and degree of self-regulation rather than a difference in kind. I do not resolve this here. It is one of the questions this book is written to sharpen.

From this he derives his conclusion. Every natural body that partakes in life is essence. And that essence, for the living natural body, is composite: raw material plus form together. The soul therefore is not the body. The body is the underlier, the raw material, the substrate that receives form. The soul is the form the body receives. Then he lands it:

The soul is the essence of a natural body that can have life. And that essence is success.

The standard translation is entelechy, sometimes actuality. From ἐν, in, plus τέλος, end and goal and completion, plus ἔχειν, to have. The having of one’s end. An acorn in a state of entelecheia is an oak. Nothing left to become. The acorn and the oak are not two things. They are one being, the same essence at different points of arrival. I translate entelecheia as success. Not achievement in the competitive sense. Arrival. The thing having become what it was for. The soul is the success of the body. Our broader question in this book is what the success of reality is.

The question I carry forward from Aristotle: where does form begin?

  1. ὕλη originally meant timber, the wood cut from a forest before it is shaped into anything. Hesiod uses it for woodland. Aristotle inherits the word and abstracts it: the unformed stuff that receives shape, whatever that stuff happens to be.↩︎

  2. εἶδος from εἴδω, to see, to know. The visible shape, the look of a thing, the aspect by which it is recognized. In Plato it becomes the Form or Idea: the eternal pattern a thing participates in. In Aristotle the form comes down into the thing itself: immanent, not separate.↩︎

  3. οὐσία from the participle of εἰμί, to be. οὖσα: the being one. Not a property a thing has but the being of the thing itself, what it is to be this, prior to any possession or attribute. It also carried a concrete sense in Greek property law: your estate, your holdings: what you own and what you are.↩︎

  4. δύναμις from δύναμαι, to be able. Power, potential, capacity. The same root gives us dynamic, dynasty, dynamo. Here it means the not-yet-exercised potential of a thing: the capacity before it is enacted.↩︎

  5. ἐντελέχεια from ἐν (in) + τέλος (end, goal, completion) + ἔχειν (to have). The having of one’s end. τέλος is also the root of teleology: the study of ends and purposes. An acorn in a state of entelecheia is an oak. Nothing left to become.↩︎

  6. ἐπιστήμη from ἐπί (upon) + ἵστημι (to stand). Knowledge as what you stand on, your foundation. The stored possession of understanding, not the act of understanding. It gives us epistemology: the study of what knowledge is and how it is possible.↩︎

  7. θεωρεῖν from θεωρέω, to look at, to contemplate, to be a spectator. The same root gives us theory and theatre. The act of looking, not the capacity to look. The Latin computare runs parallel: to reckon, to account, and in its self-reckoning sense, to know oneself.↩︎

  8. φύσις from φύω, to grow, to bring forth. Nature in this sense is not scenery. It is the self-generating activity of things: what things do when left to themselves. It gives us physics, physician, physiology.↩︎

  9. ἀρχή from ἄρχω, to begin, to rule. The double sense is inseparable: what is first in sequence is also what governs what follows. It gives us archbishop, archetype, anarchy: the condition of having no ruling principle. The Latin principium carries the same double sense: princeps, the one who takes the first place, whose priority is also authority.↩︎

  10. Aristotle has a word for this. τόδε τι (tode ti): this particular thing here. τόδε is a deictic demonstrative: from δείκνυμι, to point, to show. Form is what gives something the edges that make it pointable-at. Without form, raw material has no tode ti: you cannot point at pure unformed stuff and say: this one. Whether tode ti and unit name the same thing I cannot yet say. In my current reading of Aristotle they are at least helpful analogs. The connection may sit uneasily. How is the shape of a chair like a soul? Aristotle addresses this in what follows: the axe analogy, the eye analogy. He moves form from spatial pattern toward functional capacity. The axe’s form is not its silhouette but its capacity for chopping. I have not yet worked through that argument in full. This note will be revised when I have.↩︎