Aristotle’s Psychology: The Nature of the Soul, Sense Perception and Thought by Leonard Peikoff

but now I want to see how Aristotle uses the same basic concept form and matter actuality and potentiality in his discussion of psychology and here the question as you know is what is the nature of the soul remember - hey is the Greek for soul and therefore psychology is the theory of the soul now you remember Plato his view was that the soul is a substance an entity a self-contained entity which has temporarily exists in the body which is capable of independent existence in another world when you remember Plato believed in reincarnation the whole Pythagorean wheel of birth and that there was for Plato a conflict a basic metaphysical conflict between the soul and the body and more exactly between the highest part of the soul Plato called reason and the body and the bodily influenced elements of this soil and on that basis Plato drew his ethics of asceticism the body as a prison we should flee from sensory pleasures philosophy is the practice of dying etc now Aristotle consistent with his basic approach to philosophy wants to give a this worldly account of the nature of the soul a naturalistic not a supernatural istic account and he starts with the ordinary Greek meaning of the terms UK or soul soul for the ordinary Greek on the street meant the principle of life it was not restricted to the human beings or to conscious beings it was the element responsible for life whether possessed by a carrot a dog or a man and of course where applicable it was the element responsible for cognition a thing which is alive in Greek is a thing which has a soul and we still use that language today although if you don't know Latin you won't be familiar with it because you call a living thing an animate thing an animate is simply a English derivative of the Latin word anima which is Latin for soul the translation of the Greeks UK and therefore when you say something is inanimate you are literally saying it lacks a soul and that is the original greek usage so a soul for aristotle you could put it this way is that which makes a living thing living and we can for instance compare it therefore to madness madness is the essence of man that which makes a thing of man well similarly soul we might say is the living nasur ghen ism the essence of a living thing that which makes it a living thing well what makes a thing the kind of thing it is you know it's always its form and so if madness is the form of any particular man soul is the form of a living thing and the body conversely must be the matter of a living thing and therefore soul is to body as form is to matter now we can express the same point in the potentiality actuality terminology suppose we have a handful about 98 cents worth of chemical compounds this is in the days before inflation probably now those compounds might be worth five or six dollars and they are so chosen that together they have the potentiality for life not the actuality but the potential now let us organize put them together in various ways into a functioning living body now we have actualized their potentialities because of the new structure we have imposed we now have actually the set of vital capacities and functions that before we only had potencial in that says Aristotle is soul which he defines in essence as the actuality of a natural body having life potentially in it so a soul is to body as form is to matter as actuality is to potential at one point it gives the example it's like a mark stamped on wax the wax is the parallel the body and the stamp or structure imposed on it is the parallel to the soul the soul for Aristotle therefore is not a thing not an entity but simply an aspect of a living entity it is the name for those vital capacities which derive from organizing matter in a specific way well now the question is what is the form of a living body what does differentiate it from nonliving things and Aristotle's answer is a specific set of biological powers or capacities essentially the power of nutrition of growth of reproduction this is the bare mineral when entity has these powers it is alive and if form if soul then represents the form of a living thing its distinctive attributes then soul must be conceived not as a substance or a thing but rather as a set or collection of vital capacities because these are what differentiate a living thing and soul says Aristotle if the i ey e if the I were a complete organism its eyeness its actuality its soul would be its power of vision if an ax were an organism its Exynos its distinctively axe capacities its power of cutting would be its soul well the same thing is true with actual living things you cannot discover the soul by dissecting the thing and hoping you'll pull out a non-material ghost which belongs to another dimension it is the name for the characteristic modes and capacities of behavior that make a living thing a living that's what soul is for Aristotle now this doctrine has many major consequences to begin with Aristotle explicitly draws the conclusion there can be no soul without a body no form without matter no a power of cutting floating free without the material acts no vital capacities floating free without the entity which possesses those capacities therefore for Aristotle reincarnation the soul leaving the body and coming back to inhabit a new body is positively bizarre and he is nothing but scornful of that doctor for Aristotle for the same reason there is no such thing as personal immortality now why I put the word personal in you'll understand shortly further with this doctrine the metaphysical basis for any soul body clash has been removed soul and body are two aspects of one integrated entity as against Plato's view now I hasten to add there is some Platonism in Aristotle's ethics as we'll see but it is not nearly as intense as in Plato because the metaphysical and psychological foundation fourth has now gone there is no other world there was no metaphysical soil body opposition and no personal immortality now so far I've just given you the introduction to Aristotle's theory of the soul because he says there are various kinds of soul in other words various types of vital capacities which are to be discovered by observing the distinctive types of behavior living things engaging there are three basic types of soul according to Aristotle the most primitive level are the entities which simply nourish themselves grow reproduce all living entities have this type of sorting but one type has only this and that is vegetables or plants as we would call them today I mean consequently this set of powers nutrition growth reproduction is called the vegetative soul or sometimes the nutritive soul next we observe living things which have all the vegetative powers plus the Faculty of sense perception in other words a primitive form of consciousness and as a result these entities are capable of experiencing pleasure and pain when the appropriate stimuli reached their consciousness and as a result they're capable of experiencing desire or a version and in some cases capable of locomotion of moving toward or from the object in question these we call animals and they have what is translated unfortunately as the quote sensitive soul that does not mean an aesthete it means a living entity with the power of sense perception now note that this saw presupposes the previous one the nutritive or vegetative salt is pre the precondition of keeping any entity alive it makes possible the higher type of soul which will be biologically self-sustaining and have the capacity of sense perception now notice I said it makes possible the higher type consequently we can say that the animal soul is the actualization of potentialities established by the vegetative soul so in that sense the animal soul is on a higher level it represents a higher degree of actualization than plants and finally we reach man who has the proceeding capacities plus noose the mind the capacity to think to grasp universals or abstract forms to reason he has the rational soul and again this requires the previous one if we didn't have sense experience we couldn't abstract we couldn't reach reason and therefore again the sensitive soul makes possible the rational soul and the rational salt when it emerges is the actuality or actualization of those potentialities and therefore it's on a higher level than the animal now Aristotle investigated each of these souls each of these sets of vital capacities in detail in his work the de anima the Latin translation for the peri be okay on the soul you see any many other works he's studied it yeah but the essential one is the de anima and here I want to say just a few words on two subjects Aristotle's views on senses and on reason as a supplement to last week's lecture I had to leave it out last week because you didn't yet have enough of Aristotle's key concepts to understand his view now first on the census Aristotle did many notable things he was the first one to define the five senses to specify their organs and functions as I mentioned last week he was the one who suggested that error is due not to the senses but to misinterpretation by the mind I have simply no time to survey his accomplishments in this connection I do want to mention briefly one element his account of the sentence however namely how did Aristotle answer the Sophists now you remember protagonist is argument which I stressed weeks ago that the qualities that things appear to have color sound taste warmth etc they do only because of the sense organs of the perceiver that these qualities are not really in the things themselves and that therefore we never come in contact with reality as it really is now what's Aristotle's answer well the first thing to say is that judging by his surviving works Aristotle is inconsistent on this subject sometimes he seems to agree with the Sophists that if human senses contribute to the kind of perception we have that would invalidate the perception and so a part of the time he asserts that the qualities we experience like colors smells odors etc exist in things themselves entirely independently of human perception this view is frequently called naive a realism realism because of its stress on our perception of reality as it is naive because the people who christened this you think that it is a naive viewpoint now too naive realism thus defined the Sophists seem to have an obvious answer Protagoras could say what do you mean those qualities are out there independent of us they so blatantly depend upon sense organs and they vary with variations in the sense organs how can you say that they are independent therefore part of the time Aristotle seemed to grant that in some way those qualities were a function of human perception and then he didn't seem to be able to make clear how they never the yes were to be regarded as valid now his best attempt on this question is as follows it's ingenious and see if you can follow it for about three minutes it uses a gain potentiality an actual the process of sensation Aristotle says that certain points is a process in other words a type of change and such it must be a passage from potentiality too actually it is in fact it goes on a dual actualization a double passage from potentiality to actual one which occurs in the sense organ the eye the ear whichever one in the object being sensed let's take them one at a time and first the change in the sense organ Aristotle observed or at least thought he did that when you perceive the appropriate sense organ comes to possess itself the particular quality being sensed so if you look out to see a red object and somebody looks at the eye of the seer you can see in the appropriate light a little red image on the eyeball it appears that the eye itself is temporarily red or if you put your hand into hot water to sense its temperature and then touch the hand itself it seems to have acquired the quality that it's same thing to have become warm itself you can yourself project the experience of tasting someone's tongue having eaten cherry pie that's section but it also presumably acquires the same quality as that taste it's experience so on the side of the perceiver sensation for Aristotle is a process in which the quality being perceived is actually represented the perception has the capacity the potentiality to be characterized by quality X and sensing is the process in which that quality becomes actualized in the order now Aristotle goes on there is an equivalent process taking place in the object in the thing in reality that which you are perceiving before you perceive a red object take that as an example before you do in itself he says is not actually read to this extent the Sophists are correct actual redness is somehow a function of our human form of perception and wouldn't exist if there were no human perceivers and the same for taste sounds etc but and here is his big disagreement with the Sophists the object in reality has in fact a certain potentiality it has the potentiality of being perceived in a certain way by a human perceiver and that is a real fact about the object it is the kind of object which can given a certain perceiver be perceived as red or hot or whatever as against the kind of object which in fact cannot which can only be perceived as for instance yellow or coal or whatever now in the process of sensation says Aristotle this potentiality of the object is actualized the object which can be seen for instance as red comes to be actually seen as red the object which has the potentiality to be perceived as cold becomes an object which is actually perceived as cold so a sense perception involves a dual actualization of the potentialities of the sense organ and of the object perception therefore is in contact with reality because in perception the object itself passes from potentiality to actuality and at the end you see it as it actually is so that redness for instance doesn't actually exist on this doctor except when we perceive but when we perceive it does actually exist because our perception actualizes the potentiality of the object to be seen as red you got that now those of you who are familiar with the Objectivist theory of sense perception will be able to see that Aristotle's heart here is certainly in the right place and that if you suitably developed his position his theory on this issue would be the same as the Objectivist position however I must say that as Aristotle himself formulated this answer I've given you the gist of it it is not fully satisfactory it wouldn't and didn't stop this office you need to say more than this because their immediate comeback with oh well that's all very fine we agree with you that in perception an object would has the potentiality to be seen as red actually is seen as real in that sense this office says okay there is a passage from potentiality to actuality what they say the big question is when we see the object as red does that mean that in itself it actually is red apart from us of course the skeptic says we perceive things as we perceive them but what we want to know is are things in themselves actually the way we perceive them or as all we can say is this is the way we see objects but who knows what they really are in themselves apart from us now to this objection Aristotle offers no explicit defensible answer at least in his surviving works and in this sense is views on the senses though certainly a huge step in the right direction are deficient as for the Objectivist answer on this issue you know I promised you that for lecture 12 now I want to turn briefly to a few words on Aristotle's conception of the process by which noose or reason operates in other words the process distinctive to man of abstract rational conceptual thoughts now Aristotle thought of the process of thought on the model of the process of sensation just as in sensation your organ actually acquires itself the quality being sensed you actually suck in so to speak the sensory quality being perceived so on the level of abstract thought in thoughts as Aristotle you in effect suck into your mind you imbibe or receive the forms of things the abstract essences or universals into your mind and become part of it just as in sense experience the sensory qualities into your organ and become part of it and indeed sometimes in terms of his own scheme aristotle contrasts of all things thinking with eating see eating being one of the central functions of the vegetative soul and he does it very sweetly as follows in eating in nutrition you take in the matter of things but you incorporate that into your body but the form is irrelevant so you in effect metaphorically spit out or discard the form but in thinking you do the reverse you take in the forms of things the abstractions incorporate them into your mind but the matter is irrelevant that your discard or ignore so in a very literal sense for Aristotle but a very literal sense thinking is a process of becoming in formed together the abstract form actually comes into your mind yeah that's where we get the term in formation you know now says Aristotle to go on to another point here the mind must be capable of receiving all forms nothing in the universe is closed to it everything is knowable by human concepts what then must be the nature of the mind in itself if it is to be able to receive without any distortion the forms of everything all kinds of forms throughout the whole universe well in a word Aristotle seems to answer the mind can have no structure or nature of its own because he seems to argue if the mind did have a specific nature or structure of its own if it had any identity prior to the act of thinking how could we ever know by the use of human reason things as they really are in themselves if the human mind had a distinctive nature of it's own wouldn't we always be open to the objection well we are then just grasping the world as we as human beings have to grasp and given our particular kind of thinking mechanism so our knowledge would just be subject to only for human beings in other words the view that Kant made his official philosophy thousands of years later now apparently to escape this conclusion Aristotle seems to have drawn the conclusion that the human mind the abstract conceptual faculty in itself has no nature or identity at all he says that in itself it is nothing at all actually before it starts to think and therefore there's nothing about it to distort or alter the data of reality in itself he says the mind is simply potentiality the capacity for receiving the forms but nothing actually it is he says the place of forms now he seems also to have been influenced by Plato on this question if you recall Plato wanted a place a medium in which his supernatural forms could be reflected and he argued that it must be empty space nothing non being partly Plato argued for this on the grounds that only a thing without any form of its own would be suitable for receiving all forms well Aristotle seems to have taken over this doctrine and translated it from cosmology to psychology and argued that the mind in effect is like Plato's empty space ain't nothing which can receive all forms now this I interject and I think you can see very easily is a very dubious doctrine on Aristotle's part if the mind is nothing in itself how could it think how can it do anything what about the law of identity which decrees that everything including the mind has an identity that it's something that it has a specific nature but of course as soon as you say that the skeptics rush you didn't say AHA if the mind has a specific nature you can never know things as they are only things as they are thought by the human in other words they draw the kanji in conclusion you see there is a tricky question here and you can understand I think Aristotle's problem it's a brief addendum to our discussion of the census it does not raise any new issues and once you understand the correct view on the census the issue of the mind on this point falls into place without difficulty now again I want to say that Aristotle's views on the question of the minds nature are obscure from the remaining words other interpretations are possible I gave you in effect the standard interpretation which to me seems reasonable as an interpretation of Aristotle but I wouldn't deny that you could find other elements in Aristotle which definitely ascribe a specific nature to the mind on the basis of the existing manuscripts Aristotle is inconsistent on this issue and one last word on Aristotle's theory of the mind now this point is only of historical interest but I mentioned it for accuracy the mind according to the account so far is sheer potentiality simply the capacity to acquire or take in the abstract forms of things but potentiality as we know cannot actualize itself remember the four causes the clay the potentiality of the statute cannot mold itself it requires an efficient cause to act upon it actually to transform to realize its potential well says Aristotle the same is true with mind so if mind as we have discussed it so far is the sheer potentiality of acquiring the forms there must be another aspect of mind an aspect which operates on the potentiality bringing it to actuality mind in its potential sense Aristotle calls the passive reason mind in its capacity as actualize err he calls the active reason AC tive the active reason now about the active reason there is only a few broken sentences in the surviving works of Aristotle and it is impossible therefore to have any coherent theory of what he meant by all he really tells us if you can even trust the translation because the one of the key sentences can be read in at least four different ways grammatically he tells us that the active reason is an impersonal read reasoning agency a kind of spark which operates to actualize our potential to know and bring it to fulfillment there is he says nothing personal about this active reason it's an impersonal reasoning agency and he seems to suggest that it's independent of the body that it existed before the body and will survive the death of the body in other words it's immortal now this little fragment of Aristotle is an obvious carryover of Platonism as far as we can judge it's a non-material element of the soul which antecedence exceeds the body and is therefore in direct conflict with Aristotle's distinctive theory of the soul but this view is there and you should at least know about it because the later Christians made a great deal of this active reason you see they said even Aristotle the great lover of this earth believed in immortality and the point of course is that even granted this doctrine Aristotle didn't believe in any personal immortality there was no you that survived only this abstract sparkplug which has therefore got no psychological and certainly no religious significance but in any event that's not how most of the many evils interpreted and you see between the prime mover and the active reason they could really go to town to show that Aristotle is really compatible with Catholicism after all now philosophically that is ridiculous but you can see that the residual Platonism in aristotle made the medieval task of absorbing aristotle into catholicism at least seem possible to undertake well so much for Aristotle's psychology when in thinking the mind takes in the form of the object wouldn't that leave the object unformed just matter no no Iowa that's just metaphorically you don't literally suck in the form this you suck in an equivalent of the form you have the same form in kind in your mind but not the literal same numerical form that actual form remains out there does Aristotle consider the position of self-awareness essential to or a defining characteristic of consciousness no not that I am aware of and of course it is not a defining characteristic of consciousness because there are creatures on the perceptual level who are conscious but do not display any self-awareness self-awareness is a distinctive feature of conceptual consciousness which is capable of turning in and distinguishing itself from other things and forming the idea itself as against other things and therefore it is an attribute of the conceptual level now Aristotle certainly believed that human beings have this Faculty he ascribed it to what he called the common sense which was the general power of awareness which could turn in on itself he himself so far as I know ascribed it incorrectly to the perceptual level of consciousness but I don't know that he anywhere says that's an essential element of consciousness

Channel: Ayn Rand Institute

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Keywords: history of philosophy, history, philosophy, history of western philosophy, western philosophy, leonard peikoff, ayn rand, ayn rand institute, objectivism, objectivist, political theory, modern philosophy, ancient philosophy, school of life, crash course, lecture, educational video, secular humanism, aristotle, psychology, the soul, nature of the soul, sense perception, what is the soul

Id: LB45wJuNuSk

Length: 29min 54sec (1794 seconds)

Published: Fri May 01 2020