But the really serious event still remains to be registered: that is when Aristotle, in the subtle depths of his very ontology, proceeds to manipulations placing the whole simplicity of his original anthropology in fearful jeopardy. Somehow he felt induced to add a certain ingredient to his basic system. I would say a foreign element, which is on the verge of causing a complete reversal of his theory of the human soul. Presumably the purpose was to give a better and more comprehensive explanation of the intimate relations between body and soul. And the characteristic thing is that he is here concerned about those relations, not so much from a biological point of view, but we might say from a "purely" psychological point of view. The all-inclusive science of Life turns into a subtle specialized science of the Soul. And here the term soul acquires, as it were, a new meaning. It is no longer the psyche of primitive, pre-platonic ages (the ages when views of naive totality were vigorous among men, the nephesh haia of the old Hebrews, penetrating the human being as a living unit, the anima of biological Aristotelianism as a principle of animation, pertaining indiscriminately to every single portion of the whole). Aristotle has found it necessary to supplement his synthetic method with an analytical one (De anima, 402 b, ff.). He decides to see how far the soul is bound to be divided up into parts.
To what extent was that decision dictated by those fixed ideas we have just described--about an endless superiority of contemplation, of a pure intellect, over certain "lower" faculties of the human being? Obviously, to the tradition-bound philosopher, the distance here seems too great, indeed, for any bridge to be built over the chasm, except that subtle one which he now undertakes to manufacture, in the following way.
From that soul which was described as the form of the living body Aristotle has deemed it indispensable to distinguish a "soul by itself". That is, the intelligence. So, in the last round, he, too, establishes a difference between "pure thought" on one hand, and an infinitely lower--physiological--soul, as it were, on the other.
This "lower" soul is still considered as a soul real enough and important enough, of course. For it is still nothing less than the principle of life. Of "animal" life that is! (The eager students of Aristotle during the Middle Ages, availing themselves of the important Latin versions of his works, no doubt had a natural feeling of the close connection between the adjective animalis and the noun anima. The soul is of course precisely what animates, gives life.)
So still there is, in Aristotle's mind, a perfect and most intimate union between the body and that "biological" soul which is the principle of life. And he cannot doubt that such mental phenomena as anger, fear, etc. directly affect the body. In fact, everybody can see that. For as soon as the soul experiences those emotions, or passions, the body undergoes corresponding changes. On the whole, such states of the mind are certainly not purely immaterial states, he concludes, for they are conditions realized in matter.
Aristotle, obviously enough, has serious hesitations in recognizing these "passions"--so clearly belonging to the body and the "physical" soul--as constituting part of the soul herself. We might as well write Soul with a capital S in this latter case. For what is meant by the philosopher is something on a very different plane: how do the "passions" mentioned compare to this? They are obviously just movements. But the Soul, in that higher sense, according to Aristotle's terminology, is not subject to any such thing as movement. For--naturally enough--movements take place in space, and of course space is something entirely foreign to the essence of the Soul.
In fact, the Soul herself is above suffering any passions. To say that the Soul is irritated, would be as bad as to say that she spins wool or builds houses. It is not the Soul by herself who spins or builds. It is man, i.e. the compound unit of body and soul. Similarly, it is not the Soul that is subject to anger. It is man--man in his concrete reality (De anima, 408 b, 10).
So Aristotle is leading us into "new realms of reality". We have passed the stage of that body-soul compound which we have in common with all living beings, for instance animals--and even plants. We have risen above the subject matter of physics and physiology. We are entering the sublime regions of psychology, regions peculiar to man only. Here, however, the "problem" presents itself. We still mean the problem of a union between body and soul. The painful search for a possible bridge across the abyss arises again with traditional force. The necessity of solving the unsolvable imposes itself once more upon the sagacity of a philosopher.
How can material things engender psychical reactions? And conversely, how can psychical conditions produce material phenomena? Aristotle has not made the bridge-building task too easy for himself.
His verdict is also quite merciless. One part of man has to be decomposed and disappear forever. And that part is frightfully comprehensive. It includes not only his passions and sensations, but even his memory and all discursive thought. And what, then, is saved over to the other side of the bottomless pit? What belongs to the blessed sphere of the truly eternal? Only one thing: pure reason. When the human being has been destroyed, his memories and his moods, his fondnesses and his friendships, have also been destroyed with him. Nothing but pure intellect, impersonal contemplation, goes on existing, imperishable and divine. (De an., 408 b, 25; Met., 1070a, 25)
As far as we can see, there must be one main reason why even so realistic a thinker as Aristotle has left called upon to abandon his first principle of monistic simplicity, elaborating a curious distinction between "two widely different souls": he is, after all, a most genuine philosopher, an incurable schizothyme. We mean a man who has fallen hopelessly in love with "wisdom" in the Greek and pagan sense of the term. Somewhere in his luggage he carries along with him, as his philosophical heritage, all that boundless admiration for the purely intellectual which was in his great teacher's heart. This means--if not all, at least an inevitable amount of--the traditional depreciation of anything that is not pure intellectuality, of emotions and bodily properties of any kind.
True totality, the perfect ability to embrace with equal admiration both sides of the human reality, is a sign of harmony which we shall describe as more particularly religious than philosophical. In this sense, religion has exactly the same distance from philosophy as spirituality has from spiritualism.
In other words: even in Aristotle's intellectualism there is something of the hardness, coldness, and one-sidedness which inevitably characterize the spiritualistic tendency, as contradistinguished from what we here consider typical of true spirituality, warmth, well-balanced humanity.
Of course it is touching enough to see with what naiveté and docility even a most intellectualistic Greek philosopher will quote the statements of the poets, at the same time the "theologians" of the times. But the mythology they refer to has a very peculiar God. There is the idea of a Supreme Being. And that Supreme Being is a Creator. But he is not commonly conceived as the one who has created bodies. So, if the philosophers have reverence for the representatives of religion in their environment, how could they at the same time have any real reverence for bodies, we mean a religious reverence, as manifested in Judaism, and later in Christianity?
It would be more than bold to say, "Aristotle has no longing for survival." At least, he does make a sincere inquiry into the theoretical possibilities of survival.
"We must examine whether any form also survives," he says earnestly. He even arrives at the conclusion, "In some cases there is nothing to prevent this; e.g., the soul may be of this sort--not all souled, but the reason, for presumably it is impossible that all soul should survive." (Metaphysica, 1070a, 25)
In other words, what "part" of the soul cannot be assumed to be able to survive? Of course the one which must be suspected of having too close an alliance with the body. This "inferior" soul, with its personally coloured memories, its highly human emotions, and its touching details of everyday experience--briefly, anything that marks a human being as an individual person--this is not capable of surviving. Or let us try and grasp the very spirit of philosophical spiritualism and what we will call the "worship of the species" from Plato to Schopenhauer: the individual simply is not worthy of survival!
Aristotle has not managed to disengage himself from the Platonic spiritualism. He constantly isolates a certain phantom of "pure thinking" as something quite exceptional in the soul, a sanctuary apart from all its other misery.
Here Aristotle's problem arises: What are the "affections" of the soul?
Are they all affections of the complex of body and soul, or is there any one among them peculiar to the soul by itself? To determine this is indispensable but difficult. If we consider the majority of them, there seems to be no case in which the soul can act or be acted upon without involving the body, e.g. anger, courage, appetite, and sensation generally. Thinking seems to be the most probable exception. But if this, too, proves to be a form of imagination, or to be impossible without imagination, it, too, requires a body as a condition of its existence.
In other words, even thinking must be very "pure", indeed. if it is to have a chance of freeing itself from a general dependence on the body, and thus really survive. Otherwise it seems that all the affections of soul involve a body--passion, gentleness, fear, pity, courage, joy, loving and hating; in all these there is concurrent affection of the body. (De an., 403a, 15)
Notice particularly--against a background of what we call the truly religious in human life:
Memory and love cease; they are activities not of mind, but of the composite which has perished. (De an., 408b, 25)
The case of "pure mind" is entirely different:
It seems to be an independent substance implanted within the soul and to be incapable of being destroyed. (Ibid., 15)
There is no possible doubt: Aristotle has arrived at a point where he coincides fairly well with Plato. In Book II, Chapter 2, of De anima he says:
We have no evidence as yet about mind or the power to think; it seems to be a widely different kind of soul, differing as what is eternal from what is perishable; it alone is capable of existence in isolation from all other psychic power. (413b, 25)
Infallibly corroborating passages are found in Book III, Ch. 4:
While the faculty of sensation is dependent upon the body, mind is separable from it. (429b, 4) When mind is set free from its present conditions, it appears as just what it is and nothing more: this alone is immortal and eternal (we do not, however, remember its former activity, because, while mind in this sense is impassible, mind as passive is destructible), and without it nothing thinks. (430a. Parentheses Aristotle's.)
So we see that Aristotle, too, in the last round, arrives at a sort of Platonic conception regarding the immortality of the human soul, but only in his own peculiar way. His idea of a survival, however, is certainly not less cold or less inhuman than that of Plato.
For the purpose of bridging the vast, icy gulf which he has here opened in man, he endeavours to establish some intermediaries between the material and the immaterial. Thus he distinguishes between a passive intelligence liable to perish with the body, and--on the other hand--an active intelligence superbly independent of the body. Nevertheless, the psycho-physical relations, in a man so deeply disrupted, remain a constant mystery and a terrible dilemma to metaphysical logic. Some of his disciples found the theoretical difficulties here so discouraging that they finished by seeing only two alternatives open to them: either that of an open Platonic dualism or that of downright materialism.
What remains in front of us, after this, seems to be an Aristotle who, himself, is split into two incompatible parts. One is the monistic psycho-physiologist, keeping soberly to the simple data of nature and seeking no artifice whatsoever in order to solve a "problem" of a union between body and soul. The other is the dualistic metaphysician who forges the doctrine of an intelligent, insubstantial, and divine Soul, joining the human soul (or animal soul). But just how it manages to join it, without being fused into it in any way, cannot possibly be grasped by any sharp and sober intellectual logic. It must be relegated to the realms of mythological fancy. And its origin is also, historically, to be sought just in mythology, and in certain forms of pagan survival mysticism.
By that we do not mean to say that it is necessarily a confused urge of self-preservation, which, through the undergrowth of religious dogma, has driven Aristotle, like so many other men in ages of ignorance and despair, towards philosophical conclusions permitting a certain degree of survival after all. In fact, it may just as well be the impersonal delight some frigidly intellectual minds seem to find in the solitary superiority of pure intellect and purposeless contemplation. In the latter case the element of self-centered introversion need not be less prevailing than in the former.
However, the main motive may also be that of a genuinely human mind, restlessly seeking truth, the truth that liberates and has meaning.
If one can look away from the vain superstructures which some kind of irrepressible reminiscences from contemporary spiritualism have added to Aristotle's original philosophical creation, there seems to be every reason to think that the ancient world would have presented a sufficient foundation here upon which posterity's elite of soberminded thinkers might have built a solid edifice constituting a redoubtable match for the mighty and splendid-looking tower of dualism which was destined to eclipse all other philosophical constructions during coming ages.
Even as it is now, "the system of Aristotle marks the apogee of Greek philosophy," says Charles Werner.[1] Only at the beginning of modern times did he begin to be severely fought. And still his philosophy is seen to form an integral part of the systems of such great thinkers as Hegel and Leibniz.
In spite of all that Aristotle has in common with Plato, he was the man who, to an admirable extent, made the Idea descend from its high heavens of the absolute down upon the firm ground of concrete realities. The Form of Aristotle is still the Idea of Plato, one may perhaps say. But it is now an Idea immanent in things. Dualism and idealistic spiritualism had received their first serious blow.
And nevertheless, the dualist conception of man may be said to have reigned with almost sovereign power in our world during the more than two millennia which have passed since the days of the highlight of Greek philosophy.
This is a trend which was never confronted by any entirely worthy match in reality. Professor Werner may very well say about the system of Aristotle something which seems to place Plato in the shade:
It joins in a vast synthesis all the currents of thought that had been produced before him, and it gives forever the model of true philosophical research.(40)
But whether that statement about the vast synthesis is a real eulogy, that may be a great question. For there are things which should never be synthesized. There are things which never can be synthesized.
What we must face unflinchingly is the situation, barely and squarely, such as it was in general likely to present itself to the vision of serious anthropologists, after the two giants of Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle, had thrown their weights into the balance of the history of ideas in our Western culture.
Verily, verily, the image of man which they have handed down to posterity is rather that of a hybrid creature, composed of a body too low to be worthy of true esteem and true salvation, and on the other hand a soul too high to be actually human.
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