16) Aristotle - On the Soul

can you pass this back let's back to Rachel Rachel you can be in charge of making sure folks in the back at a microphone hey how's it going a little more Aristotle again not easy stuff by a long shot but I don't know what did I find on this hole a little bit easier than physics and metaphysics yeah was it's getting it's gonna get even better in Nicomachean ethics Marikina ethics is gonna start to be oh yeah yeah I see I see where he's going hmm remind me real quick what did we what did we have to say when we were talking about Aristotle's physics and metaphysics remember there were three topics that we hit on last time we talked about nature or the nature of nature we talked about the relationship between matter and form when we talked about the four causes what's up with those three things somebody tell me about nature what's nature all about and I'll give you a hint it's if we're ever talking about air so I'm like what does the restaurant I'll have to say about blank you would you could do worse than to start out by saying well blank is said in many ways artifact yeah so so that's alright so that's our first distinction when we say like well what's what are we talking about when we talk about nature we're talking about a distinction perhaps one way of talking about nature's to talk about a distinction between natural objects and artifacts well objects what's the difference that's right all right so yeah so again in just in case this didn't get picked up by my microphone or the microphone on the tablet for natural objects source of motion and change the archaic innit on we'll be talking a little bit about that again today the source of change are the source of motion comes from within the living or the natural thing itself and for artefactual objects that comes from without does that make sense just kind of intuitively so like whatever it is that like make something move and we can think be thing about this you know kind of like project just ahead a couple of steps to the efficient cause or we could talk about some kind of more subtle ways of talking about what the principle of motion and change are like the formal cause or even the final cause all of this is within the thing the natural thing itself whereas for a computer what a computer is what it takes for a computer to be a computer and do computer ly stuff depends very heavily on something outside of the computer we can think about this in terms of its design we can think about this in terms of its use and function what computers are for what they're good for what makes a computer a computer relies almost necessarily in fact yes let's go ahead and say necessarily on some user computers are what our computers they're for something that we do with them same with clocks same with tables same with chairs what's the essence of a chair it's for being sat on right so yeah we can see how like it's archaic innit on even though chairs don't move all that much but like what it is that makes a chair into a chair comes from outside of the chair that's artefactual objects natural objects they seem to have their own archaic kind of time anything else about nature there was like at least one other sense of the nature of nature let's spread it around a little bit yeah that's right yeah nature has substance so this is like the essence of something I was kind of touching on it just a second ago here when I was like what is it that makes this chair its chair what is the chairs in nature if that makes any sense even though it's not a natural object right this is a second sense of nature where we're talking about its essence its substance its what it is to be the Greek word that Aristotle keeps throwing around here is Lucia we're gonna get a slightly third sense of nature today but we didn't cover that yet what about the next thing matter in form what's up with matter in form for Aristotle are you guys just shy yeah they depends like inextricably on each other like you can't have formless matter and you can't have matter less more or less form yeah so this idea of them being pure at least when it comes to Lucia right when it comes to substances when it comes to things existing things there is no formulas matter there is no matter without form this is interesting because like we're Aristotle's articulating a disagreement with a couple of folks that we've seen already Anaximander talked about the appear on formless matter air smells like nonsense separable thought perhaps but not with respect to being so this is this like form and matter are conceptually distinguishable they're separable according to the law gas but only according to speech and thought you'll never actually get them apart from one another so we end up with this high-low morphic unity for all things that are osya for all things with substance you're going to have matter and form together matter enjoined with form formed matter or in mattered form however you want to look at it right Plato said form says separable as pure and existing on their own and again Aristotle's like no no no makes no sense that makes no sense we're gonna see him kind of dependent on what our time looks like today we might see him start to backtrack a little bit on this this is some weird stuff that happens in book 3 chapter 5 of on the soul all right so that's matter in form not distinguishable according to being but perhaps distinguishable according to thought and furthermore when it comes to understanding the nature of things when it comes to understanding substance when it comes to understanding the essence or the what it is to be of anything Aristotle says this is the register of thought we're talking kind of in a strange way we're talking about thinking about things natures or things essences and so he kind of sort of tips the Hat just a little bit back to form he says the two are inseparable with respect to being even though they're conceptually distinguishable but when it comes to talking about trying to understand things when it comes to you know by nature all humans desire to know that desire to know kind of inclines us a little bit towards the form of things that we focus a little more unformed than we do on things matter or material all right so that's the hula morph a Hilah morphic unity what about the last thing what about the four causes to be hint there's four of them let's start with will four yeah material cause alright so that's the that's the matter right and specifically I don't know if I made this point I hope I did the material there's a subtle difference like when I talk about matter it's almost like it's too easy for me to talk about just prime matter right unformed matter just plain stuff but when I say material material is always matter for something right so I might say something like like lumber is a good at like we can talk about wood and like what you know like wood as like a kind of matter a kind of stuff but if we're talking about wood for something for any kind of tech Nate anta for any kind of artefactual object it's always woods almost the wrong word lumber that's that's the word I want right it's material for building something so that's the material cause what else we got efficient cause I heard formal we'll get to that in just second let's go with the fishing cause so what's the efficient cause yeah so we're talking about like building a table out of lumber lumber is the material the hammering of the nails right all of the motion all of the labor of the craftsperson to make the table this is the efficient cause annex agar is kind of got a little bit of this and a lot of the a lot of the pluralist got at this and pedicle ease and NX agarose got at this with an idea of something's got to move the matter we have matter sure but something's got to move it whether forum pedicle ease it's love and strife for NX agus it's noose but it's kind of a it's kind of a dumb form of noose by dumb form of noose I don't mean the idea itself is down I mean like the noose doesn't seem to be thinking anything in particular it just kind of moves stuff all right so that's our efficient cause and I heard formal cause who said that formal cause so what's the formal cause all about clothes let's come back to the table the lumber is the material cause the labor of the craftsperson that's the efficient cause what's the formal cause like what yeah we can think of it and this is this is something that we're gonna get a real taste of like just how stretchy and slippery a term like form the term morph a for Aristotle is gonna be he's gonna play a little bit fast and loose with it when he talks about the soul but we can think of it as the shape of the table right the outward form we can also think of it as the essence although like we want to be careful with that because essence that what it is to be of something that's its substance that's who SIA and we know that we need both matter and form right we don't want to make an outright identity between form and essence but Aristotle is gonna kind of like think that way an awful lot he's gonna say this is the way of understanding the essence of something is to think about its form so I can think in terms of the tables outward shape and every swirl loosens this up a little bit more than that he'll use the term I dose when he wants to talk about the shape or the look of something morphe which is what he uses far more often when you see it translated as form is a kind of a slightly more abstract idea so we've got the outward shape of the people we might also have its function as well like what it does as a really big part of the form of a table and last but not least the final cause and Gretchen this is what you were saying what it's this kind of almost how would we say it what is the final cause the goal the tail Oz though what is it good for right this is a way of talking about cause that might be a little bit unfamiliar although we'll notice that like sometimes this is what somebody means when they ask a why question these are all that Aristotle's four causes are there four different ways of answering a why question four different ways of asking a why question as well focusing on different aspects of trying to understand why the world is the way that it is or some particular pocket of the world like the table is the way that it is and one of the ways of answering it is like why is the table the way it is because of what it's good for because of its gold this is a cause that's not temporarily behind the event kind of propelling it forward this is a cause that's in the future of the event that's kind of kind of dragging it along with it saying like come come to me I'm the target that you're aiming for plenty of examples for this right why did the student give the professor a bunch of money because they wanted to get a good grade right this is this would be a final cause it's a for the sake of which don't try to drive bribe here for professors okay today we're gonna be talking about the soul we're gonna be talking about the way that we see it in book 2 of Aristotle's de anima or on the soul if we have time we're going to talk a little bit about what's going on in book 3 this just kooky crazy stuff and then we'll get into the first book of Nicomachean ethics so we've got Aristotle on the sole remind me of what Plato had to say about the soul that it was one of the forms or it was an awful lot like the forms it's a mortal yeah it exists apart from the body right it's it's separable from the body when the body dies the soul lives on so we've got this idea of soul identified with form for Plato but form as something that's separable from matter in fact like not just with respect to thought but with respect to being as well and this is why we get the whole idea of an immortal soul right what about for Aristotle what's the soul what is maybe we can start with what isn't the soul yes Andrew it's not this yeah the form right but the way in this that we yeah we'll see that it gets blurry but yeah because it doesn't have the form of the living thing right it has the outward look of a horse you can make a statue of a horse it's got that the shape but it doesn't have the form of the horse in the sense of the form of a lived body right so this is we're gonna get a couple of these definitions here's a nice one to start with the soul is the form of the living body form here is morphing so not just the outward look not the idea of Plato it's not just an idea it's not a concept we'll see it's a far looser and kind of squishy or sort of concept and one of the reasons why this ends up being squishy and a little bit vague around the edges it's something that we saw at our last meeting which is that these four causes for Aristotle the material the efficient the formal and the final cause especially when we're talking about living things but we can do this for for our four artifacts as well they tend to kind of collapse into one another a little bit the easiest sorts of things to conceptually distinguish are between like material and formal aspects of some things being but when we're talking about like the efficient the formal and the final cause we see these things start to kind of get blurry and mush together and that's actually intentional that's not it's not a flaw of what Aristotle sorry at least he takes it to not be a flaw what he's trying to say is that these are different perspectives on the same thing to understand them altogether is actually to be progressing it's to be seeing things as they are these four causes are just modes of thought are modes of question asking and answering they're not descriptions of reality itself there are ways of separating things in thought not necessarily with respect to beam so the soul is the form of the living body and we'll get a really quick what it's not the soul is not an independent substance when we say it's not an independent substance we're saying it's not it's not an existing thing there are no there are no like it it's got a whole book about the soul that he opens up in book 2 talking about how like yeah the soul isn't really a thing we're an independently existing thing why not why would somebody write a whole book about the soul if they're gonna say like it's not actually an independently existing thing the soul is not an ousia why isn't the soul an independently existing thing we just said it's the form of the living body yes like my thumb is a part of my body that's true right yeah so it's especially since it's the form of the living body Andrew gave us an example of like something that's got the shape of a horse but it's not in sold it's not actually alive we could talk about a horse corpse as well in which case we'd say like no soul there do we have a horse body there kinda kinda we'll get into this just in just a second yeah Andrew that the soul is a part of the living organism just like a body part is the part of a loop the pineal gland yeah well the pineal gland isn't the soul it's where this for Descartes it's where the soul and the it's like the meeting place between the soul and the body right it might be yeah or at least because we know that if it's the form of the living body is well this thing about this its form Lucia its form a substance all on its own give me him we just talked about it was one of the three things that we talked about our last meeting that I just recapped that you guys just recapped can I get an existing independently existing thing if all I've got is form nope what else do I need I need matter right I need some stuff and is the stuff independently existing as a thing no not really it needs form so let's come back just a second - a horse corpse is a horse corpse a horse body because it doesn't have the soul our horses living things is the horse body a living thing the corpse at least is that a living thing this is one yeah it's material for a horse right but if it's not gonna do hoarsely things aristotle will say like it's a body dead bodies are bodies in name only perhaps they're not really in if we're gonna kind of take this like through simha kiss and Socrates approached a dead body is not a body in the precise sense it's just in a matter of speaking would we say that a dead body is a body bodies are like parts of living organisms right so if something is dead yeah now it's it's a pile of flesh and bones perhaps maybe that's what it is it's just stuff and we're like stuff for what if it's a dead horse it's not stuff for getting up in like eating oats and jumping over fences or any like that it's just it's stuff now for mushrooms to eat maybe right yeah well if we are existing things if I man osya which I'm pretty sure I am I'm pretty sure I'm a thing I'm a little less sure but pretty sure that you're a thing to like a genuinely existing thing that means that I'm not just my soul my soul is like part of a unity that is like material and form right the material part is my body the formal part is my soul it's the form of the lived body such that it's living and we can talk about dead bodies or we can talk about like body parts - I can chop off a hand and be like is that a hand and then we'll say like it's a hand in name only I suppose but if it's not doing the things that a hand does it's maybe even got the shape and the outward look of a hand but if it's not engaged in the activity that hands are engaged in if it doesn't perhaps enjoy the relationship to the end of my arm that hands typically do then we'll say like yeah it's not a hand in the proper sense anymore it's really just flesh and bone now on the table if I could reattach it then maybe we'll say it's a potential hand which gets us into thoughts of actuality and potentiality because Aristotle quickly pivots from this talk of the soul as the form of the living body whereas the body is the material if an individual person is an ousia then the body is the who lay and the soul is the morphe right it's the high/low morphic unity that makes something a substance that makes something a new sia so the soul is the form the body is the material and a living organism is this union of body and soul you lose one of those things when all you've got left is the material and no more form of the living body the organism is gone right the individual thing is gone this is different than Socrates and Plato we're talking about Socrates and Plato are talking about the soul lives on after the body dies not so here when in living organism dies for Aristotle that's it no more thing which I guess it's a little bit there's a little bit of anxiety that comes along with that if you realize that you're going to die someday it's not just that like I'll move on to some unfamiliar place it's not just it's not even like this kind of whoo could be nice I'll free my soul from the prison of my body it's like no no no these two things are not separable according to being you will cease to exist when you die according to Aristotle know if that's better or worse certainly weirder because non-existence is a weird thing right yes brain is part of your body yeah yeah so there's the brain is the just kind of like my body is not I can do all kinds of bodily activities too right I can do a little dance and say like oh is that just my body and we're like it's my body it's my body informed in a certain way and performing certain activities what you know what made it move you say the same thing about my brain right my brain perceives it does all kinds of stuff but it doesn't just do it automatically something makes it move somehow right so well like Aristotle was not just like ignorant the fact that brains were things the Greeks bashed open enough head to know that like there were brains inside they hadn't really done any kind of vivisection and like experimented on people to find out what it is that the brains are actually doing but they knew that you needed them you know they knew that if they got damaged like that was the end of you like you couldn't you couldn't live anymore but still we have this question of like yeah but the brain acting the brain performing seems like it's at least conceptually a slightly different thing right so to just reduce it to the cool a of the brain it's still not gonna quite be enough it's only half the equation we need informed matter not just matter and maybe this is exactly what we mean when we say a brain I don't mean a thing in a jar on my desk okay that's not a brain it's a brain named only brains do brain we things they think they've got to be attached to it they're like the rest of the body they've got to be oxygenated by blood they've got to be thinking we'll get to this in the second about how weird we might try to consider about like well what about when the brain is not thinking like right now for many of you or when you're when you're asleep and not dreaming like oh so what's going on with the brain there where's its activity alright so we need to transition to this which means we need to do like one little slight pivot from matter and form to talking about this kind of parallel conversation that Aristotle really articulates very well in metaphysics books Zeta and ADA if you're looking for some extra Aristotle reading which I know many of you are are you if you're looking for some extra air style reading metaphysics book Zeta and ADA get into this sort of thing that he just kind of gestures towards but I think we're gonna be able to see where he's going from we have this idea of let's start with body body as potentiality and soul as actuality Greek words here gonna be Dunamis is potentiality and for actuality we actually get a couple of different words that kind of play around the idea of actuality but the one he's using here is an heir gaya you know a little bit of Greek well it's it's in the air gone it's the at work that's another way of thinking about the actuality it's the at work of something in the air gun Aragon is work so the body has potentiality the soul has actuality where we can think about this is the true of like we can think of matter and form this way to matter is always potentially something especially if you think about something like a pot something I'm gonna make out of clay or a hunk of brass that I'm gonna make into like a statue it's always potential we can think about these stories you know like Michelangelo sees the block of marble and he sees like the potential in it these are all the places where I could carve a way it's almost like the the potentiality of the block of marble is already speaking to the sculpture as soon as they see it they're like this is what I can do with this present certain possibilities there's the potentiality that body represents and then there's this actuality the at work and in Aristotle says this is this this is the soul this whole is the actuality of the living body so we get it's the form of the living body and it's the actuality of an organism or the at work nests of an organism maybe another way we can think about this is as the activity and I had already kind of gestured towards this a little bit that like when we're talking about the form the soul as the form of the living body I don't just mean its shape I also mean perhaps its activity so we get another pair of concepts to think along with matter and form here and these are the concepts of potentiality potentiality potentiality and actuality or activity or being at work inside of Geo sacks there's a other translators who will translate these terms different ways Joe sacks manages every like technical term for Aristotle Joe sacks turns into like a big long hyphenated thing just so it sticks out like a sore thumb when you're reading you're like god that's a technical work so that enter gaya is the being at work of of the organism and this is the soul it's the activity of the living body is he contradicting himself are we just seeing like a different side of the same idea what's the difference between a living thing and a dead thing does the dead thing do anything yeah it rots but that's a very passive like rotting happens to it right living things do stuff they have activity that's the soul but we've got this problem that like things are not always active this chair for example what's the activity of the chair if it has a sort of like an activity that is its essence what's that yeah but it's not doing it right now is it like just not a chair it's only a chair when I'm actually sitting on it we could say the same thing about an organism what is it that a human does when you're asleep and you're not doing any of those things your soul just like blink out of existence this would be weird Locke actually talks about this he's like maybe yeah when you're asleep and not dreaming your soul is just there is no there is no soul which might sounds kind of weird but if you think about it from the your perspective as a subject that's exactly what happens the world just turns off when you're when you go to sleep and then when you wake up it's like what like right back where you started sometimes you don't even know like you wake up be like how much time was that nine hours no kidding alright remember that when you used to sleep for nine hours it was like back in the summer ironically that's the time you want to be out and about the most you end up sleeping the most body is potentiality SOLAS actuality but we've got this question of like yeah yeah yeah but souls aren't constantly active they're not always doing the things that they're doing so what's up with that and the way that Aristotle gets around this is he makes a distinction between what he calls first and second inner gaya or first and second actuality and we can think about it like this and in other places Aristotle does this in terms of like first and second potentiality so that it might be that first enter gaya is actually second dunamis or it might be that we have like four things this is like a great grad seminar type question for like us to wrestle about but we're not going to sweat it right now we're just worried about like this difference between first enter gaya and second enter gaya that has to do with this question of like yeah but the soul is not always constantly in action so what is it like only sometimes there and sometimes it like goes away what's going on when we can think about it like this can I well let's and you guys don't know about me let's make it about you Kylie can you play the violin cannot play the violin so you'd like are not a violin player even potentially Wow maybe potentially though right no not even potentially you've got fingers don't you you have all the requisite body parts I believe you probably unless you are like completely tone-deaf and like you're one of these people that like pitch and like organization of pitches into melody just makes no sense at all to you but I bet that you listen to music and you enjoy it you can play the violin but not right now right if we just handed her a violin she wouldn't be able to do it she has a certain kind of potentiality for playing the violin that hasn't been actualized yet this is probably true is there anybody here can play the violin one two all right everybody else is merely a potential violinist and even those of us who like don't have any hands we might say like this is a technological problem for us now we will find a way to get you to like be able to play the violin if you were brain-dead maybe then we would be like alright not even a potential violinist then you're not a violinist you're a violin playing machine you're part of a violin playing machine maybe we'll insist that a violinist has to be a person maybe not yeah now we're now we're just splitting hairs right okay so all of us have a certain potential to play the violin insofar as we could be trained once somebody is trained so let's let's talk about making Andrew over here to raise their hand and say like they can play the violin they're more of an actualized potentiality than we are right but they're not currently playing the violin are they so you're not actually a violinist the only actually violinist to somebody who's playing the violin right now who's engaged in the activity ah but see how we need to make this distinction between that which is kind of like just a really a raw potential that needs to be trained or or in a certain way in order to be accessed we have another one that's like ready to go as soon as it's time and we have this other second enter game which is at work right now we might even note that even to be like a good violinist you can't be in second enter gaya all the time and that's not just because you need to break for lunch it's because any violinists that it's constantly playing is a terrible violinist the songs got to end sometime and a violinist that doesn't know when to stop is like not an actually good musician and there are like places in a song where the violence needs to like hanging back not like constantly playing notes for the entire song maybe there are songs where the violinist plays the whole time flight of the bumblebee or something but any actuality involves a kind of like a popping back and forth any enter gaya it involves a kind of like a withholding and a kind of springing forth like a readiness to action and then an actual activity of action that's kind of like a popping back and forth between 1st and 2nd enter gaya yes silence between the notes right yeah yeah we saw the same sort of thing we're talking about the archway to the archway isn't just the matter it's the space inside the matter right we can talk about any kind of architecture it's not just the materials it's the space that the material frames as well we could say yeah exactly the same thing about music do we get what's going on here and like why this is a like a compelling sort of a shift in structure for thinking about this everything about body as matter or material it's the stuff that an organism is made out of and then there's the form which also includes the activity or the actuality of the organism it's you know like whatever is missing from the corpse that makes something an existing living organism or an existing thing and now we need to make this split between like recognizing that like well there's a sort of a active potential or a potential activity that will call first enter gaya and then there's actual activity an active activity that we'll call second enter gaya and the soul is both of these it certainly concerns both of these and we'll see that especially when we start to talk about virtue it's focused on first enter gaya questions so far stuff some squinty eyes and like motions like people were gonna raise hands yes yeah so yeah we could say that yeah so like a is a sleeping human an actual human yeah a sleeping human is an actual human as a matter of fact especially when we recognize that it is proper for all humans to sleep for at least part of the day any human that never slept is not human not alive anymore yeah or it won't be for long right if they can manage to stay quote-unquote alive then we'll say like this is a this is a different form of life than the human this thing that needs not sleep so yeah we could say that and if we're thinking about like yes but what are the activities that make humans human is sleep an activity you know I guess in a way of speaking is in activity an activity it's a with it's a withholding of activity right yeah so this yeah we can think about sleep as first enter gaya we might also think about if you really wanted to think about sleep as an activity which some of us you know sleep enthusiasts I think some of us do think about that like I've seen it before on questionnaires like what is your favorite thing to do people's good so far yes this one is being at rest yeah being at risk but ready to act for action yeah and this would be like being unstructured somehow or like disorganized perhaps that whatever we've got going on here body has potentiality it's more than just being at rest the same way that like when you see like a corpse you're like you're not thinking yourself like I it's sleeping maybe you are thinking that but like are we all aware that like that's a that's a figure of speech only that a dead body is not in fact sleeping it's not a body at rest it's not even really a body at all it's just a pile of stuff now yeah is it Sambi alive it's a zombie a living thing what where's it's archaic innit on is it within does it move itself what made the zombie move Undead yeah let's first preface by saying zombies are not real things so this is a strange conversation already but if they were what kind of zombies like Romero zombies I guess like movie zombies not not philosophical zombies but they're like different types of zombies and movies and media that's true Walking Dead zombies will that do so I just make distinctions between zombies doesn't even know the biggest zombie thing going on right now so what kind of zombies do you like what sorts of differences do you have in mind between different kinds of zombies well there there are multiple things that like are called or considered zombies such as in The Last of Us there there are people who have been taken over and essentially killed by a fungus that keeps their bodies moving yeah so in which case predatory appendages if that's true then the fungus is the organism right the fungus is the living thing and the corpse of the zombie the body of the zombie right is really just like what it's like a sock puppet for the fungi yeah in which case we would say like yeah maybe now not not really I guess then the zombie is not the and it depends on what you mean is this aam be the fungus the the hole the the the symbiosis is the is the zombie the unity of the fungus and the and the corpse is the zombie the corpse the fungus can that's right because if the fungus is just grown on a tree stump we don't say yeah that's a zombie we say it's the fungus that caused and SAAM BISM sure but when it matches yeah okay I would say yeah it's a living thing it's not human though right no does it does that fungus hijack the tree there are there are like there are fungi who do this with ants I I know they're like there's a fungus that attacks ants and it gets in their little ant brains and starts growing and it makes them do things that they wouldn't ordinarily do including like climb up to the highest point that they can find and then they die and then the fungus blooms and like spreads its spores as far as it can that's that's like one of the creepiest things I've ever heard it's like fungus that hijacks your but then there are other things like what's it called what's that thing that affects cats that pregnant women can't be around what's it called toxoplasmosis toxoplasmosis which affects which affects mice and rats and makes them extra-special bold and not afraid of cats anymore rats ordinarily wouldn't want to get near a cat mostly because the cat could kill it and frequently does but the toxoplasmosis gets into the cat's brain and secure our sorry gets into the mouse's brain or the rat's brain and says like nah go for it go for it and then the cat eats the rat and now the disease is spreading itself crazy diseases are weird like that they hijack bodies and get them to even does it to yourself and you're like I have this disease I have this infection in my body and Here I am just kind of like making all kinds of snot and sneezing it and coughing it all over the place that's what the disease wants you to do that's gonna spread it to new bodies yep or they can they just might get sick and it says it can affect the development of the fetus no they don't yeah they don't develop a sudden lack of fear of cats yeah yes please yeah let's get back to that the potential for all of the activities that an organism performs if the soul was there yeah and in fact what like the keeping in mind that like you need both like who Leigh Ann Murphy you need the hilum morphic unity in order for a thing to exist whenever we have a body in the proper sense we do have form body is always informed material and whenever we have the form of a living body it's always the form of a living body right it's always informed matter so the - in the proper sense are always going to be coming along with one another they're only distinguishable according to thought all right actuality first and second actuality we will get another way of thinking about this well think about this as soul as organizing principle for the body we've seen this phrase organizing principle before in a couple of places it's the arcade right and it's not just any old body it's the living body the organizing principle for the living body is the RK of this living body that's the soul it's what keeps the living body in the proper shape performing the right sorts of acts this is by the way when I say a living body and sometimes I'll use the word organism to talk about it the reason why we call it an organism is because it's an organizational structure of a relationship between body parts right all organisms have parts and they're organized in a certain way and that organizing principle that keeps them organized in the right way so that that body can be alive and an actual body not just a body in like a manner of speaking not just a corpse which is stuff for necro tropes to munch on it that's the soul that's an unsold body and the soul is what does all this organizing is the organizing principle of the living thing and when we talk about like what is it that a body needs to be organized for in order to live well it moves right it moves and it changes so we have the art it's the rk4 the living body it's an arcane qanitin' it's an organizing principle for movement and fame in a living thing yes as the harmony is to the heart this is this yeah yeah if you're recognizing this a little bit from fado and saying like this is like the harp harmony thing they're like totally it is totally like the harp harmony thing especially when we recognized that there was this ambiguity when we were talking about the harmony like well I know what the harp is it's the matter what is the harmony and at one point we were playing around with the idea that it's the music that gets played by the harp it's the activity of the harp when you strum it it makes music and Aristotle is kind of saying like yeah kind of like that but also we played with this idea that maybe it's the attunement of the heart it's harp it's the way that you kind of get the harp into shape so that when you strum it it makes music and ever say it's Aristotle is saying like yeah that too because notice this like this is what a living thing does that a lot of its activity is keeping itself in the right shape keeping itself organized when the soul stops doing that organizational work what happens to the body it decomposes it comes apart tell me about since we're talking about the organizing principle of a living body let's start with like a couple of couple of examples that we can maybe start to get some idea like what this is all about let's start with a knife I know a knife is not alive but let's pretend like a knife was alive and like it had a soul what would what's the activity if the knife was alive and it had some certain activity that was like proper - like the sorts of things that knives do what is what is it's cutting right this is what knives do they cut things and if the knife had a soul it would be able to like maintain itself it would organize itself into like all of these things for cutting knives don't really quite have that this is why we say knives don't have souls Aristotle talks about the eye as an example though is that when you were going to bring up a knife does need to be sharpened yeah and it gets sharpened from without right where does the organizing principle for a knife come from comes from the knife master right it comes from the person who makes the knife not from the knife itself this is why a knife is not alive and it doesn't maintain itself a craftsperson or a cook sharpens the knife if the knife did sharpen itself and there are some self sharpening knives out there they're better candidates for being alive I suppose but still no not really what about it oh yes Gretchen but they still do like move and do stuff by themselves right they have a certain amount of autonomy if you were so handicap that you couldn't do anything for yourself including like move your blood around your body then we might say yeah you're not alive anymore you're like a an assemblage of machines although this starts to get into some like murky territory as well right yeah that's a that's a tough call and it also gets into like you've raised an interesting question that's gonna fall just slightly outside of this course but you're right Aristotle seems and like a lot of people after him like well through the Enlightenment we're gonna get this idea of like a person is independent a person kind of does things for themselves and this question about like for example what about handicapped people what about small children who don't really take care of themselves completely right other people feed them and clothe them and help take care of them we might recognize that there are some exceptional cases that for a long time philosophers were like yeah we'll have to figure out a way to get them in and more recently I'd say since the 1970s particularly some feminist philosophers have been saying like you guys have it all wrong nobody's completely independent everybody needs a little bit of help we're all interdependent on one another okay so let's the organizing for all right the eye an eye is not exactly a living thing but it's close what is the if the I had a soul what would the soul of an eye be it would be seeing yeah this is a this is a great little metaphor that Aristotle brings out for us if this the I had a soul it would be site which now raises this question of like yeah maybe an I doesn't have a soul and whatever the organizing principle of an AI is is like whatever keeps it capable of seeing things so like for example like wiping away grip from the outside right the ability to kind of like blink and clean itself the ability to kind of like maintain some cellular integrity to repair damage when the damage happens these are all the things that the eye does all of the activities of the eye that are all pointed towards one thing which is like this is the essential activity of the eye it's the essence this is yet another way of thinking about the soul soul as the essence of the organism and again we want to be careful here because like we're we don't want to say that it's an independently existing thing we've almost come full circle between this and this where we might recognize that like those two are not actually going to get along with one another so we have to be careful when we say that the soul is the essence of the living thing it's not any kind of substance exactly but it's maybe the way that we understand the substance of a living thing it's the kind of what it is to be of something we have to keep in mind that it's always acting on matter there's got to be some material there kind of triangulating the idea of a soul here or if you could think by some sort of analogy here the I had a soul the I soul would be site humans have souls our humans and all that Aristotle means here is that like you're alive right anything that's alive has a soul that's all that soul is it's the form of the living body do humans have living bodies then we've got souls what sort of activity are we talking about if we're thinking about form is just shape I've got some idea of what the rough shape of the average human looks like but form is more than that it's also the actuality the at work the activity of the human body that's also with the Sola so what's the activity of humans then what's the essential activity what's the organizing principle that makes a human a human for an eye at sight for a knife it's cutting things for human it's put that one on the shelf for just a little while and we'll get back to that question but it's a it's a tough one as a matter of fact you start to go into any kind of like fully blown organism let's start with a plant for example example because plants are alive plants have living bodies do they have souls yeah they have living bodies they have souls and they have a particular kind of soul this gets into I think we're see yeah we're still in book two of on the soul Aristotle starts doing a little taxonomy he starts like mapping out types of souls for us and he looks through plants animals and humans you guys remember this from the reading tell me about the plant soul what does the plant soul do what's the activity of a plant its nutritive right this is this is what plants can do plant souls are nutritive which is to say they take in nutrition they kind of passively take in nutrition and they grow and they kind of like maintain their bodies through some sort of kind of like cellular metabolism we might even say that they behave in certain ways have we been here before the roots grow down the stem grows up towards the Sun of sunflower or like lots of plants will turn their leaves towards a light source so the they kind of sort of behave but it's all geared towards just this through nutrition when we think about the ways in which like a plant will kind of move itself for example to get a little more sunlight this is always predicated on growth and this is question of like which way is it going to grow which way is it going to build its body it's got an organizing principle in it that builds its own body and maintains its own body such that it's able to perform the sorts of activities that are required for it to be alive and not just to be alive in any old way to be alive in the particular way that a plant is a particular way that the particular species of plant is alive one thing that plants can't do this is actually not entirely true there's at least one kind of tree in the world that can do it and if Aristotle would have found it he would have himself but plants never really kind of like look around and say like the soil here is no good and there's like not enough water but like over there the soil is awesome and there totally is water so while I'm in it I'm just gonna kind of like pick up my stuff and like move from one place to another there is one kind of tree that can do this which is freaky in which case that tree is not a plant anymore that tree is and that's an animal if it can get up and move around that's an animal now here's the thing about animal souls they do all the stuff that plant Souls do animal souls are nutritive as well they animals eat they engage in basic cellular processes they grow they maintain their own tissues when there's damage the same way that a plant does animal souls have a nutritive component of their soul but in addition to that they have this part of the soul that allows them to move around now this is the sort of activity that an animal can engage in that a plant can't and yes in a sense the soul is this activity but it's also the organizing principle that allows for that activity what is the organizing principle that allows something to move around because we've got to recognize that when animals get up and move around from place to place on the surface of the earth they're not just like spazzing out like doing it all willy-nilly just like there's an order to it right there is a seeming purposiveness so we need some kind of organizing principle that makes animals move in certain ways move in certain ways that are going to be conducive to like an organizing principle that keeps them alive and keeps them active in all the ways that are proper to a living body in their particular form of living body that particular form of life what is it that makes animals move around on the surface of the earth desire yeah it's not and it's not like a mysterious mode of force its internal right the internal thing that makes animals move around that plants apparently don't have because if they did have it they would move is desire there's another side to desire there's also fear desire is this kind of it's this state of an animal soul that gets it to move towards something fear is the state of the animal soul that gets it to like move away from something right so between these two things it's kind of impetu clean right a love and strife sort of thing there's desire and then there's fear and we also have to recognize these things so there's actually in fact there's perception sensory perception and along with that sensory perception and evaluation of whether something is desirable or fearful and between these things we have perception with the evaluation of desire and fear and we have the nutritive soul now we've got animals and this explains why it is that animal souls are able to do the sorts of things that animals do then you've got the human soul do human souls have a nutritive component they do you can eat digest and do all the sorts of stuff with food and metabolize food and you can build your own body and like maintain the tissues nutritive soul is totally at work in the human body what about perception and desiring and fearing humans got it anything else or are we mere animals is there anything that makes the human soul different than the animal soul reason yeah not just the desire for reason the Faculty of the reason yeah yeah we'll get to that in a second when we get into Nick ethics yeah the the now the soul is gonna have parts in fact we already get some sense here that the soul kind of has parts right there's a nutritive part a nutritive part and a perceiving an evaluating part that a now a rational part of the soul as well and basically what's going on here is that we'll recognize that like animals can see something in desire it say a dog sees a squirrel and it's like I desire that squirrel and it will go after that squirrel a human can see a squirrel and desire it the human can see a human can see a pizza and desire it and say to itself yes but I also desire bodily health and the pizza is not conducive to that so I'm going to not give in to that desire I'm gonna make a rational decision where I say like I desire this and I decided this and now I'm thinking through this process of like how am I going to get to the things that I really desire and like I start engaging in reason I'm not just a slave to desire and fear the way an animal is the way the mere animal is I also have reason scoped retching first the whole thing what kind of dog lab golden oh wow yeah she had desire yeah some animals actually have like a shutoff switch where they're just kind of like I'm full like no longer desire food some animals including some dogs labs and Golden's are really really bad about it that like if you leave food out for them they will eat themselves into like a food coma for sure yeah and very very unhealthily I you know some humans myself included like there's some times where I'm just kind of like I'm full but it's delicious so what am I gonna do stop perhaps if my reason we're engaged a little a little more actively in the sense of second entered and not just first in our data yeah yeah but yeah so here's the question do we think that animals are actually engaging in reason when they do this the sort of classical conditioning that's used or they had kind of behaviorist tactics that are used are we just are we kind of we're building this sort of behavior through fear and desire and there's never any reason itself if there was reason we wouldn't we might imagine that like you could just talk to your dog and explain like you shouldn't cross this line because then you might die and maybe maybe there's just a language barrier there maybe it's just the dog doesn't understand what dying is which doesn't necessarily mean that you don't have a reason because that's actually a really difficult concept but yeah I think most expectations are that like na training a dog is like it's still playing on fear and desire we haven't really quite gotten to reason just yet and it's also not entirely clear that humans are we sit around and talk about how we're capable of reason in fact the thing the fact that we're sitting around talking about reason seems to be a pretty good indication that we've got it but I don't know how often we use it most of the day I think I might just be kind of bumbling around on fear and desire occasionally somebody stops me and says like what are you gonna do what's the right thing to do here and I have to stop and be like okay and even sometimes then I'm just like I have the thing I feel like doing that's the right thing but to actually stop and say like no no no let's think about this that's that extra step that humans seem to be capable of yes so here's the thing about ants or bees - which are seem to be like incredibly organized and Aristotle himself in a couple of places will even say like bees are like almost conscious it almost seems like bees have language they do like little dances to communicate to one another and they seem to have like an organizational structure for the colony one way of looking at this and I'm not actually sure like where air smell comes down that he says like bees are like humans in some interesting respects but they don't they're not actually for really real like that and his reasoning is a little wishy-washy but one way that we might say this is that maybe it's the colony maybe it's the ant colony or the bee colony that is like maybe that's the osya the like the real thing and it does the colony think I don't think that the individual bees or ants are thinking they might just have like very specific instincts the same way that I don't think that the mitochondria in my cells or the Golgi apparatus is thinking it just does what it does and I think that that might be how ants work but you bring up an interesting point that I'm sure it's like on a lot of people's minds which is like but wait a minute maybe humans aren't the only ones that engage in reason in which case Aristotle would say like I'm pretty sure humans are the only ones but I think that if Aristotle was alive today and saw some of the data that was coming out on things like dolphins and some other cetaceans and like some of the great apes koko the gorilla maybe even you know African Gray parrots or something like that what was that Harambee yeah rest in peace then Aristotle might be inclined to say like ah yeah brain like open like let's make the club bigger why not sure if you're in possession of reason here this third class of organism that's above animal maybe we want to limit it just to humans and an Aristotle thought it was limited to humans in fact up until very very recently everybody is limited this to just humans but more recently we've kind of been like yeah maybe maybe the club gets a little bit bigger maybe some other critters sneak in in which case we might even say something like yeah but they don't do it as well and we and then we might respond like not all humans do it all that well either variation in like the second enter gaya on this yes like again yeah yeah so one of the things that might be at work here is like there are all kinds of problems including that like who knows what the heck's going on in a gorilla mind for that matter who's knows what's going on in like your mind besides you right so like these are kind of difficult sorts of things to try to parse but we might also recognize that how is it that you said it that gorilla doesn't know it's a gorilla I think Coco knows that she's a gorilla right yeah now here's one thing that we might note that like that gorilla might not have done it in the wild it's only because we taught it but then again a human wouldn't do it in the wild either if you left a human infant with gorillas I bet they wouldn't learn language and they might not ever realize that like I'm a I'm a human they might not even realize like I'm a gorilla they just go out and like eat bananas whatever it is that gorillas do so yeah like it has to be taught but that only tells us that it's a potentiality that needs to be educated and developed right and that's true of humans as well so there there might be untapped rational soul in a lot of other animals that like it just it requires education yes there was a two word got around yeah now it might have been that they said like that's the scary guy and all the other Ravens were like oh like that it might have also been that like the Ravens that had been exposed to the masks when ah and then all the other ones were like what are we doing that oh and they just started doing it even though they didn't know why similar sorts of experiments on I think it's chimpanzees or like it's um some sort of some sort of a poor monkey there are some simians where like you can pass cultural knowledge down like this I think the experiment is you put a bunch of bananas on top of a ladder in a room and you let the monkeys in and if they go after the bananas you like turn the sprinklers on and everybody gets rained on and the monkeys very quickly learned like don't go for the bananas and then you start like putting new monkeys into this community and those monkeys will like go after the bananas before they can even get up and the other monkeys kick the out of them no and if you kind of like slowly cycle the monkeys out you can get a community of monkeys that like knows not to touch the bananas but nobody has any idea why except that it's just not done is that reason I don't know I don't know just yet and this is actually in part because we're almost out of time and also because we have like a natural sort of transition here we should talk about not just the human soul and what it is we should talk about the difference between a soul that's doing well and a soul that's doing poorly which gets us into this transition into the Nicomachean ethics the Nicomachean ethics is all about not just what a soul is but it's all about how to make a soul into a good soul one of the causes that and all that stuff that I just erased if you look back in your notes you can kind of ferret out all of the causes like all four of the causes but there's one that's only been kind of weakly represented and that's the final cause what is the final cause for a human what's the purpose of a human that's a really tough question but one way of getting at it as Aristotle points out for us is you look at any human activity and just ask like why why did that person do it why are you packing your stuff up because you need to go to another class why do you want to go to the other class so you can get a seat you don't want to sell the floor why don't you want to sit on the floor why would you prefer to sit in the seat because it would make yeah it's always happy that's the end of this wide fame Aristotle says every time you do it it always comes back to because humans want to be happy the word is not happy because that's English and Aristotle didn't speak English the word is eudaimonia you dominate and literally good-good spiritedness and eudaimonia one of the reasons it's sometimes translated as happiness but honestly I think this is a terrible terrible translation because we tend to think of happiness as a feeling I feel happy right I feel hungry if I feel hungry could I be wrong about whether or not I'm actually hungry or if I feel hungry than I am hungry I could be wrong that's interesting if I feel cold am I actually cold like feeling cold is all there is to being cold like my skin temperature might but that's like a difference between like whether or not my body is cold and whether or not like yeah what about happiness if I'm like I feel like I'm happy could it be possible that I'm not actually happy yeah if I say I feel happy yeah it's almost like well maybe I'm not actually happy especially if we think of happiness as maybe the better word here is flourishing because Aristotle is quite clear that you time Ania is an activity not a feeling it's the activity it's the goal it's the activity of the human soul when it's like just getting everything right the ideal form the goal that tell us the good of any kind of human soul is eudaimonia it's this activity of flourishing in whatever respect is proper to a human which we'll know over here just from looking at this and at least needs to be compatible with reason five more minutes five more minutes that totally what I had this so we'll open back up with the end of book 1 of Nick ethics and probably actually most of book 1 of Nick ethics at our next meeting you'll also have new reading it's going to be book 2 of Nick ethics we'll start getting into talking about moral virtue

Channel: Adam Rosenfeld

Views: 9,891

Rating: 4.8911567 out of 5

Keywords: Ancient Philosophy, Aristotle, Soul

Id: fl1RB86OWHc

Length: 74min 6sec (4446 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 01 2016