De Anima III.9 (Lectio 14): What Moves the Animal? Plato's Division of the Soul, and Why Neither Feeding, Sensing nor the Looking Mind Is the Cause

Orientation #

He says they have “just finished last time” the mind or understanding, chapters four through eight, and that the problems raised in chapter nine “will be resolved after chapter nine”. He announces a short class today (family and guests) but did not want to break the rhythm. The previous class treated imagination and thought in De Anima; the next takes up why reason alone does not produce action.

The class, in order #

1. Chapter nine as dialectic (“this chapter is really dialectical”) #

Chapter 9 corresponds to Thomas’s Lectio 14; it raises problems, resolved later. Its first sentence recalls Book One: the soul of animals is defined by two powers, discerning (the work of both thought and sense) and locomotion.

• The Greeks before Aristotle investigated the soul where life is manifest, in animals, and had not much distinguished sense and reason; life in plants they said is “hidden”.
• Shakespeare’s “sleep, thou ape of death”: the sleeper neither senses nor moves from place to place, only digests and grows, so he resembles the dead; the plant life in him is hidden. Henry IV: Prince Hal, seeing no sign of life, takes the crown from his sleeping father (“Couldn’t you wait until I had died?”). Christians say the dead “fall asleep”, partly from hope of resurrection.
• So after the senses (Book Two, start of Book Three) and the mind (chs. 4-8), it remains to treat the cause of motion from place to place.

2. The question put (“one must inquire about the moving power”) #

Aristotle asks what the moving power is: one part of the soul separable in magnitude (its own place in the body) or at least in account/definition; or the whole soul; or something beyond the powers usually named; or one of these. The dialectic has two parts: (i) in general, how to divide the powers of the soul; (ii) in particular, what power moves us from place to place.

3. Plato’s three-part division (“the rational and the spirited and the desiring”) #

Point: the divisions proposed “especially in ethics” (Plato in the Republic; Aristotle sometimes touches them in the Nicomachean Ethics) make sense for human action but are not divisions of all the powers.

• Difficulty first: the parts “in some way appear infinite” if you take everything a living thing does.
• Plato’s three parts: reason; thumos (anger, spiritedness, boldness; he is “not always sure how to translate” it, dislikes “spirit”; the Latins’ irascible appetite); epithumia (sense appetite, the concupiscible appetite).
• Republic analogy, parts of soul to parts of city: reason = rulers; irascible = soldiers (they need boldness and confidence); concupiscible = common people. The Republic as a whole argues from the right order of the city’s parts to the right order of the soul’s. De Tocqueville’s Recollections of 1848: government, soldiers, and the rabble arming itself in Paris, the same three parts.
• Virtues placed: temperance/moderation in epithumia; courage in thumos; foresight (prudence, the Latin word for foresight) in reason. Where does justice belong? It is in the will, which is not reason but follows upon reason; Plato has no place for the will, so makes it the order or arrangement of the parts under reason. One can understand the will “somewhat with reason” because will follows reason, which determines good or bad. Hamlet on Horatio: “since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, and could … distinguish” (choice the will’s act, distinguishing reason’s).
• The two kinds of emotion: concupiscible, about what is pleasing or painful to sense; thumos, about the difficulties in getting the pleasant or avoiding the painful. Aristotle: the other animals fight about food and sex; a small animal whose life is threatened runs. Aesop: “it’s one thing to be running for your dinner, and another to be running for your life.”
• Verdict: defensible with reference to human action, “not adequate as a division of all the powers of the soul.”

4. The rational/irrational division (“the rational part of the soul”) #

An even briefer division: rational vs. irrational (what lacks reason but can listen to it, and often resists it). Again sensible in ethics, since reason, will and emotions and their mutual relation determine our actions.

5. Aristotle’s criticism (nn. 362-364) (“it is strange to tear this apart”) #

1. Other parts have “greater distance” from each other than these do: the feeding part (he keeps the exact word “feeding” for nutritive), in plants and all animals, since plants take in something like food from soil and water; the sense powers; neither enters these divisions.
2. The imaginative part, different in being/definition from all, presents “a great difficulty” as to which part it is the same as or different from (difficulties seen before).
3. n. 364: the classification of powers in Book Two (after the definition of the soul) was by their objects. Will and the sense desires are all concerned with good and bad, all desiring; the ethical divisions break up this natural genus. “It is strange to tear this apart”: will (boulesis) is put in the rational part, epithumia and thumos in the irrational, though all three belong to the one genus of desiring powers.

6. Why the general dialectic is here (“the mind of the school”) #

• Aristotle: knowledge of the soul is to ethics as knowledge of the body is to medicine. The better doctors push back into what the body is by nature; students of nature end by giving medical advice. So the student of ethics needs some knowledge of the soul (foresight in reason, justice in will, courage in irrascible, temperance in concupiscible), but not the full knowledge of the study of the soul. Incomplete, ad hoc divisions may be acceptable in ethics, not for the student of the soul, who sees powers omitted, powers further apart, and the will misplaced.
• Someone might say this first half is “almost out of place,” since the five genera of powers were given in Book Two; but it is a recollection: a new kind of power is being introduced, and he needs the adequate division to see where the locomotive power fits, recalled by criticising inadequate ones a student might bring from Plato.
• Asides: Aristotle spent twenty years in Plato’s school (“a slow student”); Plato reportedly called him “the mind of the school” and, when only Aristotle was present, “a whole school of himself”; Albert the Great likewise recognised Thomas as superior, no envy of the younger man. Every “academy” is named from the grove of the hero Academus where Plato taught, one reason to be acquainted with Plato.

7. The particular dialectic: self-motion and the nutritive power (nn. 365-366) (“this motion … is always for the sake of something”) #

Point: the first idea of life is self-motion, and the first candidate, the powers shared with plants, is eliminated.

• A stone I kick and it rolls: not alive; something I step on that shoots across the path: alive. The first philosophers explained soul as cause of self-motion: Pythagoreans, a self-moving number; Democriteans, atoms always in motion moving the body.
• n. 365: what is in all living bodies would seem to move growth and diminution: the generative and nutritive. Breathing in and out, sleep and waking are reserved for later (Aristotle wrote individual works on them; special problems).
• n. 366, the mover in progression is not the feeding power, because:
  1. This motion is always for the sake of something and with imagination or appetite; nothing lacking appetite or avoidance is moved except by violence; plants lack these.
  2. If plants had the power they would be motive and would have an organic part for it (wing, leg, fin); they have none.
• Aside: Aristotle’s books on the progression and on the motion of animals (worm-like things humping the back to move); not the detail here.

8. Not the sense powers (“nature does nothing in vain”) #

• The cat of his boyhood, hearing the latch and running up the sidewalk for food, or lurking in the plants by the neighbour’s bird-water, wiggling before the jump: one might think sense moves the animal.
• But “many animals have sense but are stable and unmoved till the end”: barnacle-like things fixed to the ocean floor (Aristotle a marine biologist; he went, “I think,” to Troy [as heard] after Plato’s death). Poked, they react as in pain; they grab what edible touches them; the water brings everything, so they need not move (“talk about being lazy”). They are animals (animal is defined by sense) yet do not move, so sense cannot be the cause.
• Objection: they have sensation but lack the organs. Reply: nature does nothing in vain and lacks nothing necessary except in mutilated and incomplete things (a man who loses his legs, paralysed); these animals are complete, the sign being that they generate their own kind and have full growth and diminution. So if sense were the cause of motion, nature would have given them the organ.

9. Not reason: the words, and looking reason (“looking reason”) #

• Greek check: at the start he had dianoia (thought) with sense; here to logistikon kai ho kaloumenos nous. Nous: Latin intellectus, English understanding. Logistikon, from logos: reason, “the reasoning part.” Two Greek arts: logike (defining and reasoning, our logic) and logistike (counting and calculating; student: “like calculating?” yes; our “logistics”, cf. the logistical problem of invading Iraq, only loosely related).
• Reason divided into looking reason and practical reason, differing in end: looking reason’s end is to know the truth, practical reason’s to make or do something.
• “Looking” = Greek theoretical, Latin speculative. He dislikes “speculative” in English (stock-market speculation; “speculative thinking” = guessing); a theorem in geometry is something to look at, and is known by demonstration, not guessed. He translates “looking” “to shock you.”
• Aside: Theos, Greek for God; Thomas takes the name as from seeing, God understands everything; so the theoretical mind’s end is to know Theos.
• Looking reason considers nothing to be done and says nothing about what is to be fled or pursued, while motion (kinesis) is always of fleeing or pursuing; so it is not the mover: “very immobile.” The class ends here, before practical reason.

His words #

• discern / discriminate; the work of both thought and sense (opening sentence of ch. 9)
• thumos; anger, spiritedness, boldness; irascible appetite (he dislikes “spirit”/“spirited”)
• epithumia; sense desire, concupiscible appetite
• foresight; his rendering of prudence
• the feeding part; the nutritive power, “the exact word”
• boulesis; will, a rational appetite
• the desiring genus of powers [ed.: the appetitive]
• dianoia; thought
• to logistikon; the reasoning part, reason
• nous; intellectus, understanding
• logike / logistike; art of defining and reasoning / art of counting and calculating
• looking reason [ed.: speculative/theoretical reason]; practical reason
• theorem; something to look at
• Theos; God, understood by Thomas as named from seeing
• kinesis; motion, here from place to place

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III.9 (opening through the elimination of looking reason), with Thomas, Lectio 14, nn. 362, 364, 365, 366 (numbers he states)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima Book One (dialectic on soul as cause of sensation and motion); Book Two (definition of soul, division into five genera of powers); Book Three chs. 4-8
• Plato, Republic (three parts of the soul, city analogy)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (knowledge of soul to ethics as body to medicine)
• Aristotle’s works on breathing, on sleep and waking, on the progression of animals, on the motion of animals
• Shakespeare, Henry IV (the crown scene); Hamlet (on Horatio)
• De Tocqueville, Recollections (1848)
• Aesop (running for dinner vs. for life)
• Pythagoreans, Democritus (soul as self-moving number; atoms)

His questions #

• Where does justice belong in Plato’s three parts? In the will, which follows reason; Plato has no place for it and makes it the order of the parts.
• What is the cause of our moving from one place to another? Left open; nutritive, sense and looking reason eliminated so far.
• Are there animals that have sensation but don’t move from place to place? Yes: the barnacle and things attached to the ocean floor.
• If they have sense but lack organs, why not say sense is still the mover? Nature does nothing in vain; complete animals (they generate their kind) would have the organ.
• Nous is translated in Latin by what, in English by what? intellectus; understanding.
• Is logistike like calculating? Yes, counting and calculating, as against logike, defining and reasoning.
• What does “speculative thinking” mean in English today? Guessing, which is why he translates “looking.”
• What is the word for God in Greek? Theos, which Thomas takes as a sign that God sees.