De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 4: Difficulties in Investigating the Soul's Nature

Transcript
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And A42, the moderns don't even know if they have a soul, right? Let alone what it might be, right? Okay. And then he starts there at line 20 there, the difficulties about what would be inside the definition of the soul, right? For the principles of others are other, as of number and of surfaces, right? Now, of course, the first thing in the definition, it seems, is to decide into which of the genre it falls, right? And what it is. So is the soul an individual substance, a this something, a substance, or is it a quality or a quantity or something of the others, right? Well, notice, if you go back to the famous dialogue of Plato there on the soul, the Phaedo, right? Socrates is thinking of the soul as being a, what, substance, right? And a substance distinct from the body, right? And a substance that's in the body, like a sailor in a boat or something, right? Okay. Some of the Greeks before Plato thought of the soul as being, what, breath, right, huh? You know? And when you exhale at the end of life, the soul leaves you, right, huh? But again, the soul would be a substance distinct from the body, right? Okay. And the one guy is dying in the battle, right? And the soul starts to leave his body, and a big wind comes up and forces his soul back into the body, right? Yeah. Then others speak, you know, like Simmius does in the dialogue, that he's heard that the soul is the harmony of the body, right, huh? And there you think of the soul more as, what, a substance, but a certain, what, quality of the, you know, kind of a harmonization or organization of these things, right? Okay. So what is the soul, right, huh? What is the genus of it, right? So where are you going to put the soul? Is it a substance or is it a, you know, is it a combination of substances? An order of substances, right? Then it would be something accidental, right? Good quality, huh? Is it something, is it an ability of the soul or is it an act, huh? That's a very fundamental division that Plato introduced, act and ability. For this makes no small difference, huh? And one must consider whether it is divisible into parts or is partless, right? Whether, what, the soul has parts or not, right? And whether every soul is of the same species or not. Now, so you'll find it strange that we talk about, what, the soul of a dog, right? In A. Fort Rory, the soul of a tree, huh? Or a plant, huh? I was saying to my wife there when they were looking for the plants there for the yard, you know. Each one has got its own individual soul here, right? Well, if I say that the plant has a soul, you know, people might be kind of amused, right? It's not, you know, that's a quaint notion. You know, do you really mean that? You know? For until now, those who speak and inquire about the soul seem to look into the soul of man alone. We have that same tendency today, don't you, right? So people are surprised that Aristotle talks about the soul of a dog and the soul of a tree, right? Or the purpose does, right? See? So is it just one kind of soul? Are there many kinds of soul, right? One must be careful, lest they escape one's notice, whether the account of it is one like that of animal or different for each, as horse, dog, man, God, right, huh? Is there a general definition of soul and then a definition of particular kinds of soul? Like there's, in geometry, there's a definition of quadrilateral and then there's a definition of, what, square, definition of rhombus, definition of oblongus, and so on, right? Aristotle's going to determine that there's a general definition of soul, but then there's a definition of the plant soul and a definition of the animal soul and a definition of the understanding soul, right? Moreover, if there be not many souls but parts, one must consider whether to seek first the whole soul or the parts. That's the question I was raising, right, with you earlier. But it's difficult to determine how these parts are by nature different from each other and whether one needs to inquire about the parts first or the works of these, their acts, and so on. If one should seek first the works or the acts, some will then be at a loss, and one must seek first the things corresponding to these, right? So he's talking about the objects there, right? So should we seek first to know what the soul is or what its abilities or powers are, right? Should we seek first to know its abilities or powers or to know what the acts of these abilities or powers are? Should we seek first to know the abilities, the acts of these powers or the objects of those acts, right? Should I talk first about eating or about food or about the ability to eat or about the soul or about we have the ability to eat and nourish ourselves, huh? Should I talk about the ability to reproduce first or should I talk about reproducing? Or should I talk first about the reproduced? So that's, again, a question, right? Now, six is the last paragraph dealing with the problems about what the soul is. And that's the one that I was raising here with these texts a little bit here. But not only does knowing that what it is seem to be useful for considering the causes of the accidents and substances, as in mathematics, right? Knowing what the straight is and the curved are or what the line is and so on. And the plane is useful for grasping well that the angles of a triangle are to so many right angles and so on. So you might say, yeah, understand what a triangle is, understand what a right angle is, etc., right? Understand what parallel lines are. All that stuff is good to know, necessary to know, before you can know this property of the triangle. But also, on the contrary, the accidents lead in great part to seeing what it is. And this is especially in natural science. For when you can give an account of the accidents, either all or most of them in accordance with the appearances, then we will also be able to speak best about the substance. For the principle of all demonstration is to what it is. Once with regard to any definition according to which knowing the accidents, given the conjecturing about the measly, does not occur, it is clear that such a definition is said dialectically and in a holding empty way. I mean, the question there, like back in the, what, Euthyphro, right? Euthyphro says that piety is what the gods approve of, right? Exactly, he says, well, do the gods approve it because it is pious or is it pious because the gods approve of it? Is that the nature of the thing or is that like a property of it? The good is what all desire, right? Is it good because we desire it or do we desire it because it is good, huh? Well, outside of mathematics, we tend to know what? The effects, right? And the accidents more, right? So what is a dog, huh? Well, it's an animal. Well, so is a horse. Well, it's a four-footed animal. Well, so is a horse. Well, it's a four-footed animal that what? Barks. The cat is a four-footed animal that meows, right? Okay? That's why I kind of first distinguish them, don't I? But that's something kind of what? Secondary, right? But that's why I come to it, right? Okay? What's a comedy? Well, it's a play that makes you laugh, right? So laughter is really an effect of the comedy, right? But I tend to know the effect, right? Before I know what? What the substance of comedy is, right? What is the laughable? We don't have Aristotle's part in the poetics on comedy that's been lost, right? The second part of the thing. But he does say some things that the laughable is a form of the ugly, he says. But ugly does not produce pain, like the comic mask or something, right? And, you know, the red skeleton makes this funny face, right? It's ugly face, right? And it makes people laugh, right? So Aristotle's trying to get inward to what the laughable is, right? But we first know it from its effects, right? Aristotle's saying this works both ways, right? But especially in natural science, right? So, you can see in those paragraphs up to that point, some of the difficulties, starting with four, five, and six, right? The difficulties in knowing what the soul is, right? There's difficulties about what way you should investigate what the soul is, right? There are difficulties about even what genus you should place it in, right? In general, right? And there's difficulties about whether there's one definition of the soul, or more than one, right? You define soul in general, and then give particular definitions of particular kinds of soul. Or is there just one kind of soul, right? There's difficulties about, you know, does the definition of the soul manifest the properties of the soul, or is it vice versa? Of course, to some extent, you could say that the two might manifest each other, right? Just like in my example of the comedy there, right? If I know that an effect of comedy is that the audience laughs, right? Well, that's going to be useful to investigate what comedy is, right? Now, you see sometimes in the theater there, you see the two masks, you know, and you have the one, the person is kind of smiling, or they're weeping or something, you know. So, you know, the tragedy is a sad story, right, and so on, right? Well, that effect that it has upon our emotions is a starting point for us, right, to investigate what it is intrinsically, right? But vice versa, if I really come to understand what comedy is, or what tragedy is, then I'll see maybe the reason why, huh? The one makes us laugh, the other makes us cry, huh? You see? And if it doesn't in some way manifest why we laugh and why this makes us cry, then we don't really, what, haven't arrived at an understanding, really, of what tragedy is or what comedy is, huh? Okay? So, he's saying something like that about the soul, right? That's what Thomas says in his commentary about these three parts. We'll be looking at the rest of this third part here next time. But he says that, you know, what the author wants to do in the premium here is to make you, what, wish well, right? You know, by showing you the importance, the nobility of what is being studied here, right? He wants to make you, what, teachable, docile, he says, teachable, by showing you the order which you want to perceive, right? And he wants to make you, what, attentive by showing you the difficulty in what you're about to undertake, right? You know, beautiful explanation there, the three parts, huh? See that, huh? So you see something in the difficulty you're investigating what the soul is, huh? Okay, so I'll give you these two readings, if you want to look at them in Latin there, you know. The Phaedo has two most probable opinions about what the soul is. And like any probable, truly probable statement, it has some part of the truth. But neither one has the, what, the whole truth, right? Have you read the Phaedo or what? Yeah, yeah. I see. The one idea is the soul is a, what, a complete substance, a material substance, distinct from the body, right? And the other is that the soul is an accidental form, an accidental form of the body. The harmony of the body, right? But some of that saying in 2nd opinion would be the idea that the difference is, what, an order, right? Okay? Now, some days I give people a little difference like this, I'll say. What's the difference between a living body and a non-living body? Is it like the difference between the word cat and the word dog? What's the difference between a living body and a non-living body? And the Greeks called, what, the elements and the letters the same word, right? And as Demarcus says, you can make tragedy and comedy out of the same letters. And so like this, you can make, you know, everything in the world out of the same things, right? But here you're saying you're made out of something different. Is that the way the living and the non-living bodies differ? You're made out of different letters? Different things? Or, or is the difference like a cat and, you see that the living body has something, right? The non-living body doesn't have. A soul, which you could, what, wanted to separate from the rest, right? And that's the way Theda is kind of thinking, or Socrates is in the Theda, right? The soul is something that becomes the body and leaves the body, right? In fact, there's a car with a man in it, a car with a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, In some ways, you'll find something that says, well, a living body's got podoplasm or something, right, you know, you have a living body, you know, but when they think twice, they say, well, podoplasm will be broken down into things that you do find in the, what, non-living world, right, okay, so that's probably the most powerful thing, isn't it, you know, in some people you don't think, well, you've got podoplasm, you've got DNA or something, you know, but they say to be broken down into things you find in the non-living world, right, okay, So in that case, you might see the difference as simply being, what, the order or arrangement of the matter, right, but here you see it is not just the arrangement or the matter, but it's, what, something added and that comes and goes, right, and see it comes to at, if you've got a living body, and see what leads at, and you see. You see, kind of a common notion that you have of death there, even in the Phaedo, is that death is a separation of the soul from the body, right? So the cat becomes act and separates the sea from it, right? Well, here's the cat that becomes act and we rearrange it, right? So which is the soul? Is it a substance distinct from the body, right? It's sometimes in the body and sometimes not in the body, somehow or other, right? Or is the soul not really something distinct? A distinct substance in the body, but simply the way the body is arranged, right? It's a little bit like tune-up, right? When that piano gets tuned up, you don't bring in something and add it to the piano, right? But you're kind of shorting or typing the strings, I guess, right? They're already there, right? You get them into tune, right? Now it gets out of tune, something has an electric cannon gone somewhere else, right? Now it's become about a harmony, the strings, right? It's become a disorder, right? I always take an example of a class where you've got these rows of chairs, right? And the students, you know, sit down, the chairs get out of order, right? And maybe the janitor, somebody comes in and, you know, he ranges these nice street lines, right? Is that the way the soul is, right? Because the straightness doesn't go out in the hall when the students come in, but, you know, the students go home and the straightness comes back in there. You know, you just take the same chairs and you arrange them a little differently, right? You see? So my, you know, bodily parts of them have been a little bit disorganized and others sync with each other, right? And I die. And I get disorganized, right? So death is the disintegration, disorganization of my body, right? You see, Socrates argues against this opinion, right? With a number of arguments, right? Saying that sometimes the soul opposes that body, right? Like when a man is fasting or opposing the passion of the body, right? But would the order of the body or the harm of the body oppose the body, he says? Or he argues, you know, that there's a harmony of the soul itself, you know, which is virtue and so on. But is there a harmony of harmony? Is there an order of order? It doesn't seem so, you see? And then he argues from recollection, you know, that the soul existed before the body, which is already the harmony of the not. But sometimes we'll argue later on from the soul having an operation that's not in the body, right? Like understanding, if you can show that, well then the soul can't simply be the order of the body, because then it would have no activity if it was not bodily. You see? But then, you know, in the care position there's difficulties too. If the soul is in the body like a sailor in the boat, right? Well then, really, there's no connection between the soul and the body. And then, you know, we fit together, right? And then the body's really not part of you, really. The one whose body's in pain and the one who's thinking about how to relieve that pain is not the same one. Just contrary to our inward experience of life, right? When I'm feeling pain in my body and I'm thinking about how to relieve that pain, that the one who's suffering is the one who's thinking about how to relieve that suffering, right? Not just being kind to my body, right? I can be kind to you if I see you in pain and I can help you out of your pain, right? You know? It's a little different from my experience of being pain myself, right? It's an urgency there trying to relieve my pain, right? You know? Or if I lose an arm or a leg or something like that, you feel like I've lost part of myself. Even getting tooth pulled is bad enough. You know? From the finger or something. But the truth, the whole truth is not that the soul is a substance that's stained from the body, a complete substance in itself, or the soul is a kind of, what, a central form of the body. But there's a part of the truth in both of those positions. And Aristotle will succeed in the second book, you know, to bring together two parts of truth and see the whole truth for the first time. The church there was, you know, the church finally, I think, was the Council of Vienna. The church, you know, officially adopted Aristotle's teaching there, you know? It's really the only position that fits. It harmonizes, right? The position of the soul to harmony the body doesn't harmonize with all the facts. As even Socrates sees there in the Phaedo, right? But again, the position of the soul as an immaterial substance, right? Complete in itself, distinct from the body, doesn't harmonize with our experience of our own inward unity, right? But the answer to Aristotle is, it's the whole truth, we'll see. It's not true because the church adopted it, the church adopted it, because it was true. Nowadays, we don't talk about the soul anymore. But it is kind of a difficulty, you know, that it seems to have the word soul and just have the general meaning anymore. Like you're saying, that's why people say, you know, a dog doesn't have a soul because it's not immortal. I see, it's like the problem, you know, in an easier matter than that, you know, the one about virtue, right? Aristotle says that wealth is the virtue of money. Or we could say sharpness is the virtue of a knife, right? And of course, you know, we probably use the word virtue if we use it on daily life. We're something that only man can have, right? Only some men, some women, have virtue, right? So we're jumping to the particular right away, right? And it gives us a lot of problems, huh? As I explained to the students, they say, you know, if you want a knife, you want it to cut well, don't you? If you want the knife to cut well, you want it to be sharp. Maybe you want to know how to make a knife sharp, right? The same with a human being, right? If you're a human being, you want to function well as a human being, right? Then you want to have the virtue of a human being. Then you want to know how to acquire the virtue of a human being. Same thing, right? It just says you have to know what the knife's own act is to figure out that sharpness is his virtue, right? So you have to know what man's own act is before you can see what his virtue is. You have to know what his virtue is before you can see how it's acquired in. So you want the virtue of your eye? They talk now about, you know, ladies and so on, you know, I might be afraid of it myself, but, you know, the art, you know, we start people as, you know, so they can see without glasses, right? You know, we see well without glasses, you see. But anyway, you want the virtue of your eyes, don't you, right? The virtue of your ears, right? You want that quality of your eyes that enables them to see well, right? In your ears, right? Do you want the virtue of yourself as a man, as a human being? You know? You want your knife to cut well. But you don't want to do your own act well, right? I mean, you can raise, you know, the question, not that it's easy to answer what the virtue of man is as what the virtue of the knife is, but you can see the point, right? The portion of their necessity of investigating it, right? How stupid it is not to be interested in the question of what virtue is, right? In fact, you know, if you're interested in the virtue of your knife or the virtue of your ballpoint pen, the virtue of your car, then you get your own virtue, huh? The virtue of your children or whatever it is that you're responsible for. They can't even see the importance of these things, you know, if they don't understand these things, understand them generally, you know? You know, I don't know how clear it is in Plato, but when Thomas talks about the immortality of the soul, you know, he talks about the Plato-ness as thinking, you know, that all souls are mortal, or at least all the animus souls are mortal, right? And kind of interesting, right? Because that's one extreme, which is a mistake, right? And the other, of course, is there's no souls that are mortal, right? And the truth, again, is in the middle between these two, huh? And it's hard to sort of balance until you see the two, you know. If no souls are mortal, why should anybody think that all the animal souls are mortal, you know? Some of the time it's in the earlier thinkers, too, because they said, well, what is to itself, right, is before and the cause of what is to another, right? As Aristotle says in the 8th book of the physics, right, of the natural hearing, and I was noticing Thomas here, he's talking there about the vision, and he says, well, it depends upon God, right? And, of course, he quotes that. The through itself, right, is before and the cause of what is to another, right? Well, God sees himself, right, through himself, right? And God, what is understood and that which understands and his understanding are all one and the same, right? So, and then he quotes the kathoto, right, through itself, is before and the cause is to another. So all the rest of us depend upon God for seeing God, huh? But that's the application of that principle, right? I was looking at the text, Thomas says, when he quotes it in the Summa Concentilius, he quotes it, it's before, prior, and in Principium, right? There's usually the word Principium there in the sense of cause, huh? But I went back and looked at the Greek text there, and it says proteron, and it says ition, you know, one of the varying regions, of course, it says chi, ition, right? And cause, right, which makes more sense, huh? But it seems to me that through itself is before, that through another, as a cause is before and effect, maybe also in the sense of being, too, right? It can be without the other, not vice versa, right? God can see himself without us. But we can't see him, except through him, right? It's kind of funny, because you've got to think about that principle that you're talking about in regard to the arguments for motion, right? Well, I see, apparently, the way some players arrive at this is they say, well, the soul moves the body, right? Therefore, the soul has to be, what, in motion itself, right? Because they think nothing moves another unless it's moved itself, right? So, therefore, if the soul moves itself, and that's how it can move the body, then it has an operation by itself, and therefore it exists by itself, right? Not the way the soul moves the body, by moving itself. But some of the other guys before that, you know, the, you know, what is it, those who attribute, you know, to the soul, that the soul is fire, or the soul is atoms, you know? And they think these, these things are moving themselves, right? And therefore they move the body, they're moving themselves, right? If you have these random atoms bouncing around, moving you, you have no regularity to your emotion at all, right? No, you go, you know, with a cat, go towards the victim, rather than some other pair. All kinds of difficulties in these positions, huh? But it's nice, nice to see, when Thomas quotes it, you know, you have a before with, before and principium, you know, together, right? You know, they're so closely connected, huh? You see in the metaphysics, you know, in Aristotle in the metaphysics, when he distinguishes the, the senses of before there, he does so, not by itself, like he did in the categories, but he does so in comparison to the common notion of beginning, okay? So, he uses beginning there to distinguish the senses of before. But when he defines beginning, you know, he gives a common notion of beginning, he defines it by first, which is defined by before. So I maintain the before, you need before. Before, first, or beginning in definition, right? Because it's appropriate for the wise man, right, to do everything in terms of the beginning, right? First philosophy. But he's already just, he begins with the word beginning, and then they don't want to come with the word before, so then he calls the common notion of beginning, and then he uses that to distinguish the senses of before. The first three senses of before, maybe. I have to begin with the text and the categories, because that's somewhere independent, you know. But in his statement of the principle there, the way Thomas quotes it, he says, the through itself is before and the beginning, the through another, right? You have before and beginning, both, kind of a double, double axiom there, right? Axiom of before and axiom of beginning. The Greek actually uses the word itean, the same thing, in a way. The actual text says, protoron and protoron itean, before cause. But one of the varied readings, you know, is kai, which I think makes more sense. So it's before and the cause. Kapapa's inward experience is distinct from outward experience. Yeah. Can you say more exactly what that distinction is? It's not a distinction between sensing and... No, no, I'd say when I see, hear, smell, taste, or touch, I'm... Well, actually, with touch, I have some inward experience. It was a touch, right? I can feel stomach rumbling or something, you know, or pain inside or something like that, right? Sense of touch is sort of the sense of the interior, right? Okay. I mean, we have interior senses whereby we know sensing itself, right? So I sense in a way that I see, right? I'm aware of the difference between sensing and hearing, which are in me, right? I mean, seeing and hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching, you know? I mean, for it's already into the higher things, like imagining, right? And thinking, right? You don't see them in the world around you, right? But I imagine within me, right? Something. And sensing is really, you know, what's... You know, more so than moving around, is very much a sign of the living thing, you know? I think I mentioned that before, didn't I? I mean, how, in a way, sensing is a kind of activity that remains in the one's sensing. I mean, how, in a way, sensing is a kind of activity that remains in the world around you, right? I mean, how, in a way, sensing is a kind of activity that remains in the world around you, right? I mean, how, in a way, sensing is a kind of activity that remains in the world around you, right? I mean, how, in a way, sensing is a kind of activity that remains in the world around you, right? I mean, how, in a way, sensing is a kind of activity that remains in the world around you, right? I mean, how, in a way, sensing is a kind of activity that remains in the world around you, right? I mean, how, in a way, sensing is a kind of activity that remains in the world around you, right? I mean, how, in a way, sensing is a kind of activity that remains in the world around you, right?