Aristotle's De Anima Proemium: Nature, Substance, and How to Define the Soul

Orientation #

He returns to the proemium of De Anima I after an opening reading from King Lear, and says the division of definitions “we talked about when we were in logic” and the definition of time and of nature “we met in the second book of Natural Hearing” (prev. courses, as he recalls them). He says of Book II: “which we’ll be looking at after the proemium.” The previous class worked through the same opening difficulties of De Anima I with Aquinas, Contra Gentiles and the De Trinitate commentary, and the next continues with an excursus on “error” as wandering before turning to the Sadducees on the resurrection.

The class, in order #

1. Gloucester at the cliff of Dover: “the clearest gods” (“think that the clearest gods”) #

Point: a Furness footnote on one adjective in King Lear shows Shakespeare using an English word in its Latin sense for the pure and luminous nature of God.

• Plot as he tells it: Gloucester, blinded and in despair, asks his disguised son Edgar to lead him to the cliff; Edgar only describes the cliff; Gloucester “jumps”, stumbles, and Edgar in a new voice says a fiend with “eyes like two full moons” and “a thousand noses” led him there. Then: “think that the clearest gods, who make them honors of men’s impossibilities, have preserved thee.”
• Furness quotes Luke (17 or 18, as he says) for “make them honors of men’s impossibilities”: things impossible with men are possible with God; when God does the impossible for man we honour him.
• The editors on “clearest”: Theobald “open and righteous”; Johnson “purest, most free from evil” (fits the sense of “holy” as purity); Capel “clear-sighted”; Schmidt “bright, pure, glorious”; Stewart “who perform miracles to make themselves clear to unbelievers”.
• The one he prefers, Reyher, Essai sur les idées de Shakespeare (French): the word “expresses the pure and luminous essence of the divinity” and “reflects the clear and profound nature of the man who utters it” (Shakespeare, not the actor). He reads “clearest” as pure (no mixture in God) and luminous, recalling Latin clarus / clarificatio, which “we saw in Saint John” for glory. Shakespeare often uses a Latin-derived English word in its Latin sense.

2. The proemium recalled: three parts, and three words for one thing (“the nature and substance of the soul”) #

Point: the proemium’s second part names its object by three words that Aristotle uses as synonyms for what a definition gives.

• Parts of the proemium: (1) excellence of this knowledge, in itself (the best thing in the natural world) and by certitude (we are certain within ourselves of having a soul), the two ways one knowing is better than another; also useful for all truth (he recalls the Proverbs verse a student checked: no good without knowledge of the soul); (2) the order: first the nature and substance of the soul, then its accidents, i.e. its abilities or powers; the rest of Book I reviews predecessors, Book II investigates what the soul is; (3) the difficulty.
• The three phrases: “nature and substance” (par. 3; Greek physin and ten ousian), “the substance and the what it is” (par. 4; to peri ten ousian kai to ti esti). All three ask for the same thing, the definition. Greek physis, ousia, or “what it is” are all used to describe a definition.

3. Excursion: Ammonius on definition, and the Categories (“logos tes ousias”) #

Point: Greek commentators define definition through “nature” and Aristotle names it through “substance”, confirming the equivalence.

• Ammonius Hermeias: Neoplatonist in Alexandria, roughly the 400s AD, “the son of Hermeias”, teacher of Boethius (a student asks whether he taught Plotinus: no, that was Ammonius Saccas). His commentary on the Peri Hermeneias is the one predecessor Thomas follows rather than rejects or modifies, even in examples; the Latin text has footnotes showing this. Thomas’s commentary breaks off (Cajetan completed it), or a Latin manuscript of Ammonius breaks off.
• In his commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, before defining philosophy Ammonius defines definition: a logos syntomos, a brief speech, showing the nature of a thing. Equivalent to “speech making known what a thing is”. Aside: reminds him of Shakespeare, “brevity is the soul of wit.”
• Categories, opening: things named in common may also share the logos tes ousias, the account of the substance.

4. Metaphysics V: where “nature” and “substance” fall, and where they meet (“the fifth book of wisdom”) #

Point: nature is a cause-word and substance a subject-word, yet both have “what it is” among their meanings.

• Book V distinguishes and orders the meanings of the words of wisdom, which are also the words of the axioms and so used to some extent everywhere, because the subject of wisdom (being as being, one, many) and the axioms are common.
• Thomas’s division of Book V into three groups, with his reason: every science (episteme) has a subject, properties, and the causes why the properties belong; so (a) names of causes: beginning, cause, element, nature, necessary (the effect follows necessarily from the cause); (b) names of the subject: one, being, substance (the chief subject), then parts of one and being (quantity, quality, same, other); (c) names of properties: perfect and imperfect, whole, the perfection or defect of being.
• Meanings of nature: first birth (nativity, prenatal); then the source of the baby within the mother, “within/from within” kept in every meaning; then the definition met in Physics II, beginning and cause of motion and rest in that in which it is first as such and not by accident, which defines natural philosophy; then matter and form in the genus of substance (Aristotle shows both are nature after the definition); last, what it is.
• Meanings of substance: chiefly the individual (you, me, “the cat that comes in here sometimes”) and what it is.
• “Kind of interesting”: a word from the first group and one from the second intersect in one meaning. Words of different groups overlap: end vs beginning (the beginning of the table and “the ends of the table”; a line’s beginning and end vs its “two end points”). The six meanings of beginning: the beginning of the table; where you begin to leave it; the foundation of a house; the mover; where you begin to know; and every cause, even the end, which is first in intention though last achieved.
• Etymologies: substance from “standing under” (more fundamental than accidents); nature from birth; different roots arriving at the same meaning, what it is.
• Summa Theologiae I: q. 2 the existence of God; qq. 3-11 the substance of God, i.e. what he is (though we know more what he is not).
• Aside: English keeps “nature” hazily for the natural world, and “the nature of government, of God”; that meaning is found in every science and is not the one defining natural philosophy.

5. Paragraph 4: a most difficult task, and pistis (“in every way a most difficult task”) #

Point: even belief about what the soul is, short of certitude, is most difficult.

• Quantitative sign of difficulty: pars. 1-2 are the first part, 3 the second, 4 onward to page four the third.
• Pistis: belief; it is hard to get complete certitude, and even this imperfect state is most difficult. Student: is pistis the same as opinion? Not necessarily: belief is more founded than opinion but weaker than knowledge; philosophical modesty, not a denial that one can be sure.
• Following Thomas: pars. 4-6 difficulties about what the soul is; from par. 7 difficulties about its passions, accidents, properties (“using those words loosely”).

6. Is there one method of defining? (“some one method about everything”) #

Point: Aristotle’s first difficulty is whether there is a road (methodos) to the what-it-is as demonstration is to properties.

• Methodos: “not only over a road but something about a road”, close to English “method”.
• Posterior Analytics II, two roads: (1) many examples of the same thing, separating what they have in common; hard for the soul, which is hidden and cannot be “set up” in three instances; (2) find the genus, divide by differences, add the difference; if the speech is convertible you may have a definition, if not, divide again.
• If there is no common method, one must find the mode in each case, which seems a vast task.
• One known difference: natural philosophy and mathematics define differently (mathematics without sensible matter or motion; natural things cannot be defined without matter or motion); Metaphysics VI gives three ways of defining. Logic does not treat this, since it belongs to the particular differences of the sciences.

7. The three logical distinctions of definitions (“three distinctions of definitions in logic”) #

Point: recalled because the third is what matters for defining the soul.

1. Genus and species-making difference vs genus and property. Virtue as “praiseworthy quality” (end of Ethics I) defines by a property, since praise is outside the virtue, more in the praiser; “habit with choice, existing in the middle towards us as determined by right reason” (Ethics II) gets into what makes it virtue. Cat as “four-footed animal that meows”, dog “that barks”: is it a cat because it meows, or does it meow because it is a cat? Meowing is a property, an effect; we define by property when the essential difference is unknown and the property stands out to the senses (“I’m too stupid to see the real intrinsic difference”).
2. Definition by cause vs by effect. Euthyphro: the pious as what the gods approve; is it pious because approved, or approved because pious? The good as “what all desire”: desired because good. Augustine, De Vera Religione: the beautiful is what pleases when seen, and “I have no doubt it pleases our eyes because it is beautiful”; so the definition by effect has not fully brought out what the good and beautiful are.
   • These two are similar (property is like an effect; the species-making difference, so called in the Topics, is like the cause), equivalent but differently stated, like Heisenberg’s and Schrödinger’s mechanics, one more convenient than the other in a given case.
3. Not by that by which one defines, but by what is defined: substance vs accident.

8. Substance and accident: why an accident is defined with its subject (“definition has to fit just this one thing”) #

Point: the etymology of definition seems to forbid bringing in another thing, yet an accident cannot be defined without its subject.

• Metaphysics VII: either substance alone is defined and accidents not, or if accidents are defined it is another meaning of “definition”.
• Definition from finis, limit: nothing of me is outside the limits of my body, no chair is within the limits of the table, no part of another city within the limits of Worcester; “the shoe fits”, a tight fit. So no other thing should be inside a definition.
• But an accident exists only in another, so its definition must bring in the subject: health as the good disposition of the body; moral virtue as the good disposition of the soul. Two kinds of thing, so maybe two kinds of definition.
• Substance: if we knew its nature (though “nature loves to hide”, Heraclitus) nothing else would enter its definition; an accident, even when its nature is known, is “something of another”.
• Time, recalled: time is not perceived without motion, so it is either motion or something of motion; Aristotle argued it is not motion, so it is something of motion, the number of the before and after in motion (three days, three hours are numbers).
• Asides: Plato in the Sophist compares moral virtue to the health of the body and knowledge to its beauty; hence the film A Beautiful Mind (Russell Crowe, up for a second Oscar) and calling the perverse “sick”, though any virtue of the soul could be called its health.

9. Into which genus does the soul fall? (“a this something and a substance”) #

Point: Aristotle’s next difficulty, read ahead at about line 20, subdivides the question of definition.

• Principles of different things differ: number begins with the one, the continuous with the point, and these are not the same.
• “What it is” also enters the definition of genus: a name said with one meaning of many things other in kind, signifying what it is. “This something”, tode ti / hoc aliquid, is an individual substance.
• Predecessors by category: substance — Plato, an immaterial substance imprisoned in the body, perhaps as punishment; material substances: water, air (the dying warrior whose soul a wind pushed back), fire (grows and is active), Democritus’s atoms pushing the body. Quality — the harmony of the body (Simmias, which he places in “the Symposium” [ed.: he had earlier assigned this to the Phaedo]); Empedocles’s ratios of the same elements in flesh, blood, bone. Quantity, least probable — the Pythagorean self-moving number. He notes quality precedes quantity as the more probable opinion.

10. Potency or act, and the soul as form defined “of another” (“the truth is somewhere in between”) #

Point: the second question, whether the soul is a being in potency or an actuality, brings the definition question to its answer.

• Argument: (1) what changes is composed of matter and form, ability and act (from the study of change); (2) men and cats are substances that come to be and pass away; so (3) substance itself is composed of something as matter and something as form. Hence, if the soul is in substance, is it there like man or dog, or like the matter or form of a substance, i.e. not a complete substance? Book II will subdivide substance accordingly, form meaning substantial form.
• If the soul is a form, form and matter are relative, so one cannot know what the soul is without knowing it is the form of this kind of body: in the genus of substance, not an accident, yet defined as something of another like an accident.
• Parallel: a point is not a line, but exists only as the end of a limited line; a surface has length and width without depth, cannot be cut off from the table, yet the body ends; if all that exists is bodies and what is in bodies, the surface is the limit of a body and must be defined so, not as a disposition but as a limit. So maybe the soul must be defined in a different way again.
• Against the soul as harmony: Socrates’s argument, why would the soul resist the body’s urges (to eat, drink, sleep while driving)? A fortiori if the soul has an activity not in the body.
• Against the soul as a complete substance differing from the body as man from dog: the unity of inner experience; the one thinking how to relieve hunger or pain is the one suffering it, with an urgency unlike caring for a cat or a mother for her child.
• Conclusion as he leaves it: predecessors defined the soul either as an accident or as a substance distinct from the body; the truth is between, something in substance but defined like an accident, as part of the complete substance, with a connection between this form and this matter, “not just any form and any matter.”

His words #

• “make them honors of men’s impossibilities”: God doing the impossible for man is what makes men honour him
• “clearest”: pure (unmixed) and luminous, in the Latin sense of clarus
• proemium; “premium” in the ASR
• nature, substance, what it is: three names for what a definition gives; Greek physis, ousia, to ti esti
• logos syntomos: Ammonius’s “brief speech” showing the nature of a thing
• logos tes ousias: the account of the substance (Categories)
• “wisdom”: his name for the Metaphysics; “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics]
• “ability” [ed.: potency]; “act”
• pistis: belief, more founded than opinion, weaker than knowledge
• methodos: something about a road; method
• species-making difference: the full title of the “specific difference” (Topics)
• definition, from finis, limit: a tight fit
• “something of another”: his formula for an accident and, here, for the soul as form
• “this something”: tode ti, hoc aliquid, an individual substance

Texts #

Read in class

• Shakespeare, King Lear, Gloucester at the cliff (Furness edition with footnotes; Reyher, Essai sur les idées de Shakespeare, p. 500)
• Aristotle, De Anima I, proemium, his paragraphs 3-4 and the passage at about line 20 (into which genus, potency or act)

Mentioned

• Luke 17 or 18 (as he says): impossible with men, possible with God
• St John, clarificatio as glory (no verse given)
• Proverbs, “no good without knowledge of the soul” (no verse given)
• Ammonius Hermeias, commentaries on the Peri Hermeneias and on Porphyry’s Isagoge; Aquinas on the Peri Hermeneias, completed by Cajetan
• Aristotle, Categories, opening; Metaphysics V (Aquinas’s division), VI (three ways of defining), VII (substance and definition); Physics II (definition of nature; matter and form as nature); Posterior Analytics II; Topics; Nicomachean Ethics I end and II
• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 2 and 3-11
• Plato, Euthyphro, Meno, Sophist, Phaedo / “Symposium” (Simmias on harmony)
• Augustine, De Vera Religione (the beautiful as what pleases when seen)
• Heraclitus, “nature loves to hide”
• Empedocles, Democritus, the Pythagoreans, on the soul

His questions #

• What does “clearest” mean of the gods in King Lear? Pure and luminous, Latin clarus; Reyher’s gloss is the best.
• Are “nature”, “substance” and “what it is” different things here? No; used as synonyms for what a definition gives, each having “what it is” among its meanings.
• Is pistis the same as opinion? No; more founded than opinion, weaker than knowledge.
• Is there one road to what a thing is? Left open by Aristotle; Posterior Analytics II gives two roads, and sciences define differently.
• Is it a cat because it meows, or does it meow because it is a cat? It meows because it is a cat; meowing is a property, so that definition is by property.
• Is it beautiful because it pleases, or does it please because it is beautiful? Augustine: it pleases because it is beautiful; the definition is by effect.
• Why can an accident not be defined without its subject? Because it is the kind of thing that exists only in another.
• Is the soul to be defined by itself or as something of another? As something of another, though in substance, since it is a form, not a complete substance.
• Why does the soul resist the body if it is only its harmony? Socrates’s argument that it is not the harmony; left as an argument, not a proof.