The Soul as First Act of a Natural Body Made of Tools: Explaining the Definition by Comparisons (Axe and Eye)

Orientation #

He recalls “as I mentioned last time” the comparison between the soul and the arts with their tools (prev. lecture), and says Aristotle “is going to show later on in Book Three” that understanding and choosing are not acts of any part of the body. The previous class reached the definition of soul and the reading of organikon as “composed of tools”; the next opens chapter two and the demonstration of the definition.

The class, in order #

1. Review: the two sides of the definition (“three divisions on the side of the soul”) #

Point: the soul, like time, is defined as “something of another,” so the definition has three divisions on the soul’s side and three on the side of what it is the soul of.

• Soul’s side: (i) among the genera, substance; (ii) substance divided not into species but into matter, form, composite — “almost the division of the meaning of the word substance”; soul is form; (iii) since form is to matter as act to ability, act divided into first and second, “first” in the first sense of before, the order of time or generation (one acquires geometry before thinking as the geometer thinks). Second act is operation; first act is form; soul is first act.
• Body’s side: (i) substance, body; (ii) natural body, not artificial — here Aristotle “almost recalls the definition of nature”; (iii) natural body having life, which he later modified to a body “composed of tools,” better made explicit as “a tool body.” The higher the soul the greater the diversity of tools, because of the multiplicity of operations.
• Arts and tools (recalled from last time): the tailor’s needle, thread and scissors cannot do the carpenter’s work with hammer and saw, nor vice versa; so one soul adapted to this body’s tools cannot enter another body — that would be carpentry entering the tailor’s tools.
• The gathered definition: first act of a natural body composed of tools. Greek grammatical order (entelecheia prōtē, act then “first”) matches the logical order, though grammar and logic are different sciences; English must put the adjective first. One Greek word for “tooled”; English “organic” has lost its concreteness.
• Student: is “tooled” another way of saying living? — No, it specifies the body of which soul is the first act, not a species of living. Even plants have some diversity of tools; a stone, dirt or water is not “composed of tools” even if water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen.
• Aside: man’s soul can do so many things that not all his tools (knife, fork, ballpoint pen) can be part of his body or he would be weighed down — the carpenter’s tool belt, the soldier’s pack.

2. How to read a likeness of ratios (“four is to six as two is to three”) #

Point: the manifestation to come is a likeness of proportions in Euclid’s sense, so one must see exactly in what way the ratios are alike and not exaggerate the likeness.

• 4:6 :: 2:3, though 2 and 3 are even and odd and 4 and 6 are both even: the likeness is that (Euclid) four is the same parts of six that two is of three — six as three twos, four as two of them. Likewise 2:4 :: 3:6, each the half; but two is not three and four is not six.
• Fourth Lateran Council (the one just before Thomas was born; Thomas has a little work on its first two decrees; called to his attention by Paul VI): Joachim of Fiore exaggerated the likeness in “that they may be one as the Father and I are one”; no likeness between creature and God can be pointed out without noting a greater unlikeness — an infinite distance remains.
• Plato, Sophist: likeness is a slippery thing. Shelley on poetry: imagination delights in likenesses, reason seeks differences — “not the whole truth,” since reason also takes an interest in likeness; but “imagination” comes from “image,” likeness, so imagination without reason seeing differences is apt to deceive, as it did Job.
• Aristotle puts the dialectical tool of likeness after the tool of difference, perhaps because difference guards against being deceived by likeness; he calls it skepsis (whence “skeptic”): you must think about the likeness, especially “the crowning likeness,” the likeness of ratios.

3. Reading 119: the axe (“if some tool was a natural body”) #

Point: the definition, said universally of human, animal and plant soul (though the fullness is in the human), is now manifested by the axe.

• “Substance according to account”: Greek ousia kata ton logon, substance in the sense of form; Aristotle defines form as what completes the definition, “the what it was to be” of this sort of body.
• The proportion: if the axe were a natural body, its soul would not be chopping (its operation, second act) but what makes it actually able to chop — its “ability to chop,” its first act. Separated from that it is an axe only equivocally, as an axe unable to chop is like a dead body.
• Then the difference: soul is not the form of such a body as the axe, but of a natural body, one with an intrinsic principle of moving and resting — the definition of nature from Book II of Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• Ballpoint pen: if it were a natural body, its soul would not be writing (second act) but whatever makes it actually able to write; still, the soul is not the first act of a pen.
• Student: does “what it was to be” here mean second act? — No: what makes something intrinsically an axe is not chopping; chopping is what it can do because it is an axe. Student: then why “the soul is not the what it was to be”? — He was taking part of the sentence: not the form “of such a body” as the axe, “but of such a natural body.”

4. Order of the two likenesses, and where the soul falls (“going from the tools that are more known”) #

Point: 119 uses an artificial tool, 120 a natural tool (the eye); the order runs from what is more known to us to what is closer to the soul.

• “Tool” (Greek organon, like the English) first brings to mind an artificial tool; a tool is what you use to do something — knife to cut, pen to write, axe to chop, and likewise eyes to see, ears to hear, front teeth to bite, back teeth to chew, heart to pump blood. The second tool is closer to the soul.
• Making an axe: wood and metal are an axe only “in ability”; once shaped and put together it actually is an axe and can chop the cherry tree in the backyard. What is analogous to soul is neither the raw materials nor the chopping but “something in between”: the act that lets you call this an axe. Student: does the definition include the matter, wood and metal? — Form completes the definition; and from the same wood and metal you can make other tools.
• Digression, the same double movement in the first reading of natural philosophy (we know the whole confusedly before distinctly): first a sensible whole (salad dressing, painting, symphony), most known to us; then a definition, less known — we name before we define, and the definition spells out what the name says confusedly; then back to the senses with the general sensible whole, closest to what he wants to show, that the general is known before the particular: “something on the hill” → something moving → a dog → a red dog → Rosie (the dog outside before class). So Aristotle moves at once from more known to less known and toward what he is approaching; here likewise from less like the soul to more like it.

5. Reading 120: the eye (“if the eye was an animal”) #

Point: if the eye were an animal its soul would be its sight — sight meaning the ability to see, the form of which the eye is the matter.

• Lacking the ability to see it is an eye only equivocally: the eye of a dead man, and more clearly the eye of a statue or painting, which has shape and colour but does not see, and so lacks what is proportional to the soul.
• The proportion: soul : natural body :: ability to see : eye; just as before, soul : natural body :: ability to chop : axe.
• The IQ-exam joke: if you check “soul is to natural body as seeing is to the eye,” or “as chopping is to the axe,” he marks it wrong — you have not seen the likeness. Seeing and chopping are second acts; the soul is the first act. (What stands to the body as seeing to the eye would be the operations of the living thing — tentatively, “maybe.”)

6. Proportion in discovery and theology (“the ability to see a proportion”) #

Point: seeing a proportion is extremely important for understanding and for discovery in philosophy, science and theology.

• Einstein on the fourth dimension: we are three-dimensional, so he compares us to a two-dimensional creature discovering it lives in a three-dimensional world.
• Pierre Duhem (great scientist and historian of science): discoveries are usually made by seeing a proportion. The inverse square law (1/x²: double the distance, one fourth the force; triple, one ninth) was already known for light spreading out, so Newton and his contemporaries reasonably guessed gravity, spreading evenly like light, diminishes the same way. A British scientist’s dimmed-room demonstration: a light source and a small square casting a shadow, double the distance and the square is a quarter the size. This goes back to Euclid Book VI: double the side and the square is four times as big.
• Waves: a marble dropped gently makes long waves, dropped from higher makes shorter; hence the guess that shorter wavelength means greater energy for sound and light. Proportions lead, “some stronger than others.”
• Christ’s parables are extended proportions: “The Lord is my shepherd” — God is to us as a shepherd to his flock, so we are sheep who need to be directed.

7. “For there is a proportion”: ratio, proportion, and the rest of 120 (“as the part is to the part”) #

Point: “proportion” has become equivocal; here it means likeness of ratios, and the whole passage is read on that footing.

• Ratio vs. proportion: 2:3, 4:6 are ratios (Greek logos, the order or relation of one thing to another; both “ratio” and logos can also mean reason, which knows ratios); “4:6 as 2:3” is a proportion, Greek analogia. Moderns and Thomas often use “proportion” for ratio — “unfortunate,” but one must be aware of it. The Greek here is ana logon: as the part is to the part, so is the whole sense to the whole body — as the ability to see is to the eye, so the soul is to the whole sensing body.
• Student: is “the eye” here the composite? — No: ho ophthalmos is the hylē, the matter, of sight — the subject in which sight is, not the composite.
• Continuing the text: “which leaving” it is an eye only equivocally, “a stone and the painted one”; it is not what has thrown off the soul that is potentially living but what has a soul; seed and fruit are such bodies potentially. Cutting and seeing are actualities, second acts; so is waking; soul is “as the sight.”
• “Sight” is equivocal in English: the act of seeing, or the power of seeing — a blind man “lacks sight” means the power; it is sight in that sense that is proportional to the soul. Body is what is in potency. Another figure: as the eye is the pupil and sight, the living thing is the soul and the body.
• Summary of the two comparisons: the axe’s power to chop and the eye’s power to see are more known to us than the soul, and the soul is proportionally like them (and like the pen’s power to write), never like the writing or the chopping.

8. Corollary: the soul not separable, and how the soul is “in” the body (“in the way of the sailors or the ship”) #

Point: the soul, or some parts of it, is not separable from the body, since it is the act of its parts; but nothing prevents some parts being separated if they are not acts of the body.

• Book Three will show that the power to understand and the power to choose are not acts of any part of the body — but “you have to show that,” by investigating powers through their acts and acts through their objects.
• Thomas’s word: the soul’s existence is not “immersed” in the body — borrowed from a body wholly submerged in water versus one partly above. If every power of the soul operated through a bodily organ there would be no reason to think it exists except in the body; if it does something not in the body, its existence is not only in the body.
• “Unclear whether the soul is the act of the body in the way of the sailors or the ship”: added because later he will treat how the soul in some way moves the body, though he has already shown the soul is not in the body as a sailor in a boat.
• Which sense of “in”? Form in matter, the fifth sense — not water in a glass. Pagans and many writers speak of the soul imprisoned in the body, which would be in-a-place; most people who think of it at all think so, “he’s gone, she’s gone, the soul has left the body,” words taken from change of place. Does the soul leave as a sailor leaves his boat or a man his car? The skeptical doctor who has done many autopsies never found a soul among liver, lung and heart — but is the soul in the body as a part in a whole? It is more like the shape of the glass in the glass (though soul is not an accidental form), or the order of the letters in “cat,” which is not among the pieces when you cut up c, a, t. Soul is in the body as form in matter; “that’s why it has a unity that is so great.”

His words #

• something of another — the soul, like time, defined by reference to another
• ability — his rendering [ed.: potency]
• first act / second act — form / operation; “first” in the order of time or generation
• tool body, tooled body — organikon [ed.: usually “organic”]; a body composed of tools
• entelecheia prōtē — act, first; Greek word order following logical order
• likeness of ratios, likeness of proportions — the kind of likeness used to manifest the definition
• skepsis — Aristotle’s name for the dialectical tool of likeness: you must think about it
• substance according to account — ousia kata ton logon, substance in the sense of form
• what it was to be — form, what completes the definition
• equivocally — an axe that cannot chop, an eye that cannot see, said to be such only in another meaning
• Natural Hearing — [ed.: Physics]
• ratio — logos, order or relation of one thing to another; proportion — analogia, likeness of ratios; Thomas and moderns use “proportion” for ratio
• ana logon — the Greek of “for there is a proportion”
• ho ophthalmos … hylē — the eye is the matter of sight
• sight — equivocal in English: act of seeing or power of seeing; here the power
• immersed — Thomas’s word for the soul’s existence in the body
• in — the fifth sense, form in matter, vs. in a place

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima II, sections 119–120 of the class text (page six): “Universally, therefore, it has been said what the soul is” through the sailor-and-ship sentence (Aquinas’s commentary, lectio 2, per verified sources)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Physics (“Natural Hearing”) II, definition of nature as intrinsic principle of motion and rest
• Aristotle, Physics I, first reading: confused before distinct (salad dressing, definition, “something on the hill”)
• Aristotle, De Anima III, that understanding and choosing are not acts of the body
• Aristotle’s four tools of dialectic, likeness after difference (inferred: Topics I)
• Aristotle, definition of form among the four causes
• Euclid, Elements: definition of proportion; Book VI on squares and sides
• Plato, Sophist
• Fourth Lateran Council, first two decrees; Thomas’s little work on them; Paul VI; Joachim of Fiore; Gospel of John on unity
• Shelley on poetry (imagination vs. reason); Job
• Einstein, essay on the fourth dimension; Pierre Duhem; Newton and the inverse square law
• Psalm “The Lord is my shepherd”; Christ’s parables

His questions #

• Is the soul the composite, the matter, or the form? Form, in the genus of substance.
• First and second act — first in which sense of before? The first sense, the order of time or generation.
• In what way is four to six like two to three? Four is the same parts of six that two is of three; not that both ratios are even to odd.
• If the axe were a natural body, what would be its soul? Not chopping, which is second act, but what makes it actually able to chop.
• Is the water composed of tools? No, even if composed of hydrogen and oxygen; being tooled is characteristic of the living body.
• Which of the two tools, the axe or the eye, is closer to the soul? The second, the eye.
• Soul is to natural body as what is to the eye — seeing, or the ability to see? The ability to see; “seeing” gets marked wrong.
• Is “the eye” in “the eye is the matter of sight” the composite? No, the subject in which sight is.
• In what sense is the soul in the body? As form in matter, the fifth sense; not as in a place, not as a sailor in a ship, not as a part in a whole.
• Whether the soul is the act of the body as sailors of the ship? Left as “unclear” in the text; to be taken up when he treats how the soul moves the body.