De Anima (On the Soul)
52. 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
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[0:02] but this is more subtle thing there. But you know, if you don't love yourself because you know your parents didn't show love for you, you know, that you have a problem there in loving God.

[0:17] The Son, the Holy Spirit, Amen. God, our enlightenment, guardian angels strengthen the lights of our minds, order and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. Saint Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor, Pray for us. and help us to understand all that you've written. Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen. As I was mentioning to before you came in, some of you, couldn't have a short class today, okay?

[0:46] because I have to go see the grandchildren there, and I have to do some cooking, and guests are coming, and all kinds of things. So, but I didn't want to break our rhythm too much, so. So today we'll be looking at chapter nine here, which is the corresponds to the fourteenth Lectio in Thomas, and this chapter is really dialectical, raising certain problems. And then these will be resolved after chapter nine.

[1:19] Now he recalls something that was emphasized in the first book, in the dialectic of the first book, in the very first sentence. He says, "since however, the soul of animals Is defined according to two powers, by being able to discern, discriminate, which is the work both of thought and of sense,

[1:45] and moreover by moving according to locomotion. Now Aristotle and the other Greeks sometimes say that life in the plants is hidden. So when the Greeks before Aristotle investigated the soul, they investigated the soul where life was manifest, and that is in the animals. And they had not yet distinguished between sense and what reason too much, huh? And if I can use a little metaphor there from Shakespeare, he's always alluding to sleep, thou ape of death, huh?

[2:33] He was dead asleep, we say sometimes, right? But notice when you're asleep, you're not apparently sensing what's going on around you, and you're not moving from one place to another. All you have maybe is digestion and things of that sort, growth, huh? But when you're asleep,

[2:55] you resemble death, right? As if the plant life in you, digestion and growth, is hidden, right? That that's life, huh? And because you're not apparently sensing, and you're not moving from place to place, you don't seem to be what alive, huh? Like that dramatic scene in Henry the Fourth, there where the king is dying, right? And Prince Hal, his son, comes in and he thinks his father's died.

[3:25] Doesn't see any sign of life in him, and so he picks up the crown, which is now his, and he goes into the other room with the crown, and of course his father wakes up. Couldn't you wait until I had died? He said. It's a very interesting scene between the two of them, right? Okay. But that's just an example. All kinds of references in Shakespeare to how the sleeping man seems to be what dead, huh?

[3:50] Okay. Of course, Christians, you know, say that when you die, you fall asleep, right? But we use that partly to we have a hope of resurrection, right? Okay. So Aristotle's referring back to Book One, where when he talked about the investigation of the soul, the cause of life, first cause of life in living bodies, they investigated what was the cause of sensation, right? And before that, what was the cause of what motion from one place to another?

[4:25] Now Aristotle has just gotten through talking about the senses in Book Two and the beginning of Book Three, and then about the mind or the understanding or the reason in what we just finished last time, in chapters what four through eight, I guess, about. So now it remains to what talk about the cause of motion from one place to another, and so he raises that question here. However, one must inquire about the moving power, what it is of the soul, whether some one part of the soul, one particular ability of the soul, you might say, being separable either in magnitude, having its own place in the body, or at least being separable as to what it is, its account of its definition, or whether it's the

[5:26] entire soul itself, or some part, whether something proper beyond those usually named and those mentioned, or some one of these. As I mentioned already, the rest of this chapter now will be taken up with some dialectic, raising certain questions, and it's divided into two parts. And the first part is talking in general: how does one divide the powers of the soul? So he takes it up again, right, because it's relevant in some sense to what part or power of the soul is this ability to move from place to place.

[6:08] And then the second part of the dialectic is about, in particular, what is the power that moves us from one place to another. Okay.

[6:23] Now he's alluding to some divisions of the powers of the soul that were given by Plato, and which Aristotle himself sometimes touches upon in the Nicomachean Ethics. Okay. So he begins with this question: there is a difficulty right away: how one must name the parts of the soul and how many there are, for in some way they appear infinite. If you take everything that the living thing might do, there seems to be no end to the different things a living thing does, right?

[7:05] But then he talks about what some of these divisions proposed, especially in ethics, being not only what some who determine this say: the rational and the spirited and the desiring parts. That's the division that Plato uses in the Republic, and he divides the soul into three parts: one part being reason, the other part, which I'm not always sure how to translate, thumos,

[7:42] which in Greek can mean anger, right? anger right spiritedness, boldness, right? Sometimes they translate it as he does, spirited, huh? What the Latins call the irascible appetite, huh?

[7:59] And then the sense appetite, which in Greek is called epithumia, Epithumia, and in Latin the concupiscible appetite. None of the Republic had ever had a chance to read that. He talks about these three parts of the soul, and he makes an analogy, huh? Between these three parts of the soul and three parts of the what city, huh?

[8:40] And he compares the reason to the part of the city, the rulers, you might say, those who direct everybody else in the city. And the irascible appetite, he compares to the soldiers, Because they need what boldness and confidence, huh? And then the common people down here to the concupiscible appetite, Okay?

[9:09] Common people as a way. And if you study the Republic as a whole, he's trying to show from the order of these parts and what it should be in the city, what should be the order of these parts, huh?

[9:27] I was rereading de Tocqueville's recollections of the French Revolution of 1848, huh? Very interesting work. man. it's like a novel almost. It's very exciting to read, but the common people are arming themselves in Paris and overthrowing the government, and there's chaos, right? And the soldiers are trying to stop the thing, and so on. So he had that same three parts there in in Paris at the time: the government and the soldiers and the rabble down here, right?

[10:02] That are rising up, blocking the streets and threatening the lives of people and so on, huh? So now, epithumia is the part that's concerned with sensible pleasures and pains, huh? And so in this part of the soul, they put the famous virtue of temperance, huh? Or moderation, huh?

[10:35] And in dumas they put the virtue of courage, and in reason the virtue of what foresight, huh? Or prudence, as they call it, this Latin word for foresight, huh? And then, Socrates is the place where where does justice belong?

[11:02] Because justice is actually found in the will, right? And the will is not the same thing as reason, but it follows upon what reason, huh? So he doesn't really have a place to put the will, and so he kind of has the will being the what order arrangement of all these together, right, underneath reason and so on. Well, this makes some sense as a what division of the powers of the soul that are involved in human action, huh?

[11:36] And with reason, you can bring in the will because the will follows upon reason, huh? And reason determines what's good or bad, huh? Okay, like in Shakespeare's words, there, and Hamlet says, "What he chose, what Horatio was his friend, right? Well, choice is an act of the will, but notice his words: 'Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, and could have been distinguished. '

[12:10] That's the act of reason, right, to distinguish, man. Her election, you know, is sealed before herself, right? Okay, so you could understand the will somewhat with reason, huh? Because the will follows upon reason, huh? But then, these are the two kinds of emotions that we have, huh? The concupiscible emotions, are the emotions that are concerned with what is pleasing or painful to the senses, and thumas is concerned with difficulties that arise in getting what is pleasant or avoiding what is painful, huh?

[12:53] So the other animals, now Aristotle says, they fight about food and sex. That's what they fight about, and they fight about these pleasant things, right? Okay, so someone else is competing for the food or for the partner there, then they what? Even though it's not pleasant, they will fight them, okay? Or if their life is threatened, they will what? Maybe run away if they are a small animal, huh?

[13:22] Okay. Aesop tells the story there: you know, little animal got away from the big animal, and they're laughing at the big animal, but he couldn't catch the little animal. And the big animal says, "Well, he says it's one thing to be running for your dinner, " he says, "and another to be running for your life. "

[13:41] Okay, so you could defend this division to some extent in reference to what human action, right? Okay. But is not adequate as a division of all the powers of the soul. As he's going to go on.

[14:07] Sometimes they make an even briefer division, and they'll speak of what the rational part of the soul, right, and then the irrational part of the soul, okay. Again, that makes some sense when you're in ethics, huh? And you're talking about reasonable action and so on, and so you want to divide the powers in terms of reason and what doesn't have reason but can listen to reason, right?

[14:34] But often resists reason, huh? Okay. And those are very relevant to our actions, huh? Because our reason and our will and our emotions seem to determine our actions, huh? And the way these Are related to each other, huh?

[14:56] So now in 362, there he begins to criticize that division, huh? For according to the differences to which they separate those parts, other parts appear having greater distance than these, about which something was now said in the previous parts of this book. The feeding part, right? The nutritive part. I like to translate it with the exact word there. The feeding part, right? Huh? Okay. Which is both in plants and in all animals, huh?

[15:29] Because the plants in some way take in something like food for themselves, right? Through the soil and so on, water. Okay. And then again, the sense powers we've been talking about, right? Okay. So that doesn't seem to come into these divisions, do they, huh? Okay.

[15:55] Moreover, the part we talked about after the senses, the imaginative part, right? Which in being or definition is different from all. If all, if one will put down separate parts of the soul, presents a great difficulty with which of these it is the same or different, and we saw some of those difficulties before.

[16:16] Now in 364, he says, well, when you classify the powers of the soul as we did back in the beginning of the second book, after we defined the soul,

[16:31] that classification was based upon their objects, huh? And in a way, the will up here and these ones down here, they're all concerned with what? The good or the bad, right? They're all concerned with desire in some sense, huh? And you're kind of breaking up that natural division, right? The desiring powers, huh? The sense desiring powers and the rational desiring power, right? But you've said separate things that should be put together in the same what?

[17:07] Category or the same genus of powers, huh? So he says, besides these, there is the appetitive, the desiring power, to use the English word, or the desiring genus of powers, which both in account and in power would seem to be different from all. And indeed, it is strange to tear this apart, right?

[17:33] For will, and of course the Greek word there is what? Boulesis right? For boulesis or will comes to be in the rational part, and desire, sense desire, epithumia, and thumos. I don't like that translation, of spirit, but it's very common to translate that way. In the what? Irrational,

[17:55] okay. So you have these three kinds of appetite that should be put in the same genus of powers, huh? The desiring powers, huh? So these are some problems with the adequacy of these divisions that are common in what ethics, right? And if you ever studied Nicomachean Ethics,

[18:22] Aristotle says that a knowledge of the soul is to ethics as a knowledge of the body is to the medical art. So the man who's going to what acquire the medical art completely or fully has to know something about what the body is by nature,

[18:46] as he says in the biological works. The better medical doctors push their investigations back into a knowledge of what the body is by nature, right? And vice versa, those who study what the body is by nature, at the end, they start to give some medical advice on the basis of this, huh? So he says the same way in ethics, you need a certain knowledge of the soul, and of course in ethics you take up a lot of the different virtues and they're in different parts of the soul.

[19:20] So foresight is in reason and justice is in the will and courage is in the irrational appetite and temperance or moderation in the concupiscible appetite. So to know something about the parts of the soul is relevant to the what student of ethics, huh? But at the same time, Aristotle says he doesn't have to go into that full knowledge of the soul and its powers in ethics that you have in the study of the soul here, okay?

[19:53] So some divisions that are not as complete or exhaustive, huh? But have some relevance to what you're studying in ethics might be acceptable in ethics, right? But not for the student of the soul, right? Because he sees other powers that aren't really included in those divisions and powers that are further apart, right? And have greater differences than these powers that enumerated have, right? Plus there's another problem, you know, switching and putting the will with what

[20:28] with the reason or somewhere else, right? Rather than with the other desiring powers. Okay. Now that ends the first half of the dialectic, huh? And in a way, someone might say it's almost out of place here the dialectic of this first. Part because it's back in the beginning of the not the beginning but after the definition of the soul in the second book that he divided up the powers of the soul into five geni, if you recall, right okay and now he seems to be coming back to that right huh okay but it's kind of a recollection you know about the divisions of the powers and he's going to take up a entirely new kind of power here in a way so he recalls those

[21:23] things right but now the more particular dialectic begins here at 365 where he's going to say now what is it that is responsible for the movement of an animal from one place to another right so you and I are always moving from one place to another right what's the cause of that in us huh of course when people talk about life you know the first idea we have of life is what self motion huh

[21:59] so if I'm walking through the woods and I kick the stone and it rolls I don't say it's alive do I because it didn't move itself I kicked it right but if I step on something and I kick it and all of a sudden it shoots across the path it jumps it's surprised it's alive right you know there are these things that you don't think are alive sometimes all of a sudden they start moving

[22:22] maybe us me or others just surprised they're moving right but it's this idea of self motion huh and of course the first philosophers tried to explain the soul what would be the cause of the self motion huh and they had various strange positions huh okay like the Pythagoreans said it's a self moving number huh but what the Democriteans thought was these atoms that are always in motion huh and they're moving the body huh so what's the cause huh why do you move from one place to another right huh see and so he's going to relate it now to the more exhaustive what division of powers that we gave in the beginning or book two right after the definition of the soul right okay maybe that's

[23:13] why he has this general dialectic here about the powers too because he's trying to recall right the division of the different genera the five genera of powers because that's going to set the stage now where does the locomotive powers huh fit in right or how do they fit in and so he's got to have an adequate division of the powers of the soul and so he wants to recall that adequate division but do so in a way by criticizing the what inadequate divisions that some people what Would have in mind, huh?

[23:50] Okay. I mean, Aristotle spent what twenty years in the school of Plato. That's a long time to spend in school, right? Must have been a little bit of a slow student, right?

[24:05] The story is told of Plato coming in one day, and everybody there was Aristotle, and he says, "Well, he says he's a whole school of himself, right?" And the other anecdote is that he's supposed to have called Aristotle the mind of the school, which is a great compliment, right? To to pay a teacher, teacher to pay a student, just like Albert the Great there when he had Thomas in his class and realized that the student was superior to the teacher, he should be teaching and I should be be learning, right?

[24:39] So maybe it's kind of marvelous to see that in Plato if those anecdotes are true, right? And what we know from Albert's time that there's there's no envy of the younger man even when he excels you, right? And but notice Plato's school is so famous that the whole academic world gets its name from Plato's school. And every school called an academy gets its name from Plato's school. Plato sent up his what, his school in the grove dedicated to the hero Academus in Athens, and so from the place where he set up his school, it became known as the what, academy, right?

[25:28] So the fact that the whole academic world and every academic department and every academic professor and every academy is named from Plato's school is one reason why you should be acquainted with Plato. And in this very famous work, *Republic*, Plato has this division of the soul into those three parts, right? So someone might coming in to Aristotle's lectures on the soul have in mind that, right? And Aristotle says, well, that makes some sense as a division to be used in ethics, right?

[26:00] It's kind of ad hoc in a way, right? And imperfect as far as it's ad hoc to the ethical concern, right? But it's not really adequate to the what consideration of the soul as a whole and the five genera powers that are involved.

[26:22] So in 365 he begins, and indeed about that which the present argument concerns, what is the mover according to place, for Adam? Of course, he begins by going back to the first kind of power we talked about, the kind of powers that we share even with the plants in a way, right? The feeding and growing and reproductive powers, okay.

[26:51] For in regard to motion according to growth and diminution, like we find even in the plants, being in all, being in all living things, right? I mean, among all living bodies, that is to say, that which is in all would seem to move the generative and the nutritive. However, we must look into breathing in and out and sleep and waking later. Aristotle wrote somewhat individual works on breathing and on sleep and waking, huh?

[27:19] Because they have special problems, okay. But he's going to eliminate, of course, in 366 that these powers that we share with the plants are the source of motion from one place to another. That's kind of obvious, right? Because the plants don't move from one place to another, right? But one must inquire about motion according to place. What moves the animal in regard to progression, going from one place to another, going forward?

[27:51] It is clear then that this power is not the nutritive power, the feeding power, right? For this motion, huh, from one place to another, is always for the sake of something. And is with imagination or appetite, desire, some sort. For nothing, not having appetite or desire or avoidance, is moved except by violence.

[28:20] Of course, the animals. I mean, the plants don't have those things, right? Moreover, he says the plants would be what motive. They would move from one place to another if they had this what power, right? And they would also have some what organic part for this motion.

[28:45] Aristotle has a book in particular on the progression of animals, and another one on the motion of animals, huh? And the different ways that they move forward, right? You see these kind of worm-like things. You know, they hump up their back and then they spread it out and go. You know, it's like if you lay on the floor, then you hump up your back, you know, and then you move forward.

[29:08] All these different ways that they have moving themselves. But here he's not going to get into that great detail, right? Of the organic bodily parts, right? But if the plants had this power, they would have what the organs for moving from one place to another, like a wing or a leg or a fin or something of this sort, right? Okay.

[29:31] That's pretty obvious, is not the plant things. But now, is it the sensing powers? Huh? That makes maybe more sense, right? When I was a little boy, I used to have this cat, and the cat would be out in the kind of the shed that was attached to the garage there at night time. Would be the door open, so the cat could go inside there. But in the morning, you go to the back door and just turn the latch as silent as you could, and that cat would jump down.

[30:10] The thing you ran up the sidewalk, you know, and it's you know longer than this because a nice long sidewalk to the garage there, running up the step, you know, to get the food, huh? Okay. So you might think that it's that, right? You see the cat there, you know, you know hiding in the bushes or something, right? The neighbor had a kind of water place, so the birds came down, you know, to water, and the cat would like to get into the high plants around there, you know, and wait till the.

[30:44] So obviously, he's moving from one place to another. You see the way the cat when they're about to jump, you know, and they kind of wiggle back and forth, you know.

[30:54] So, you might think that what's the sense powers that move the animal, right? But he says, nevertheless, there are many animals which have sense, but are stable and unmoved till the end. Now, what is he thinking of? Are there animals that have sensation but don't move from one place to another? Barnacle. Yeah, some of these things that are attached to the floor of the ocean. And Aristotle was a marine biologist, among other things.

[31:33] huh? I think he went to Troy after the death of Plato, right? He went to live with a friend there, and that's what he did. I think a lot of his marine biology marine biology. So there are things that sense. If you poke these things, they what react like in pain, and when something edible comes in what contact, they will grab it up. You see, but they don't move from one place to another, and they don't have to because the water brings everything to them.

[32:08] Talk about being lazy, right? Okay. So he's saying, well, these are animals then, because an animal is defined by sense, right? And they have senses, but they don't move from one place to another. So how can sense be the cause of motion from one place to another?

[32:29] Okay. Now, someone says, well, they they have sensation, but they don't have the organs to move from one place to another. Aristotle says, well, nature does nothing in vain, right? And it does not lack anything what necessary, right? Except in what mutilated and incomplete things. It's like a man might lose his legs or something like that, right? Okay, be paralyzed, right? Injured and so on. While these sorts of animals are complete and are not what mutilated, huh?

[33:07] Now, the sign that they are complete animals is that they what generate their own kind, okay? And they have full growth and diminution. Whence, if they had the what, whatever is the cause of motion, if that was sense, for example, they would also have by nature the what organ, organic parts, necessary for this what motion from one place to another. Okay.

[33:44] In other words, if the sense power was the cause of motion from one place to another, nature would not have given them that power without giving them the organ whereby they can move from one place to another. Okay.

[34:05] But indeed, neither is the rational power, meaning reason itself, or what is called the mind. Now let's look at the Greek there again. I bet it's what dianoia and nous. Oh, now here he uses the term to logistikon Okay, before I used the word dianoia, but here he uses so at the very beginning of this reading, and he said,

[34:54] "Since however the soul of animals is defined according to two powers, by being able to discern, which is the work of thought and the sense." There he had used the word dianoia. Okay, which we've talked about before, I think. Okay. And I say nous Okay, but here he uses the word logistikon and in nous Okay. Remember seeing logistikon before? Yeah, I think so. But to logistikon kai ho kaloumenos, what is called the nous Okay.

[35:48] Nous is usually translated in Latin by what? intellectus, huh? And in English by understanding. Yeah. But logistikon, as you did, the word logos, would be translated by what? Is reason, right? Huh? Okay. Logistikon

[36:11] is more the the reasoning part, right? You might say. Yeah. I think I mentioned how they have two arts in in Greek, which they called logike and logistike Oh, oh, is logistike like calculating? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. And logike was the art of defining and reasoning. Okay. But we might call logic, right? And then logistike was the art of counting and calculating. Okay. That's where we get the word logistic, but that doesn't have exactly that sense in English, right?

[36:50] Right. Has some relation to it, though. Logistics, you know. Yeah. Getting all the, you know, if we're going to invade Iraq now, there's, you know, logistical problem getting all the things, you know, there at the right time and enough at the right time and so on. Okay.

[37:09] So interesting that Aristotle has a number of words, huh? Okay. Now sometimes we divide the reason into looking reason and what practical reason. And so he descends now to both of these. Huh? They differ in their end or purpose. Huh? Because the end of looking reason is to know the truth. Period. The end of practical reason is to make or do something, right? Now it's more obvious that the looking reason, which they translate here by speculative, the Latin word for looking, be theoretical in Greek.

[37:59] Huh? Um. Incidentally, the word for God in Greek is what? Theos. Yeah, yeah. Thomas takes that as sign of what God sees, huh? He understands everything. He's named from seeing, huh? That's the way Thomas understands the word, huh? So it's interesting, huh? That the theoretical mind, its end is what to know Theos, huh? Theos itself understands everything.

[38:39] Interesting, huh? For the looking reason, in Greek they'd say the theoretical, in Latin the speculative. I don't like those words in English because speculative has taken on what other meanings in English today, right? So when you play the stock market, that's speculation, right? What is it? Nothing like that, huh? A lot of times you see the phrase speculative thinking, right? And by that they mean what? Guessing, guessing, yeah, yeah.

[39:13] See. But as you know, what in geometry we call theorem, right? Means something to look at, right? Okay, but it's not guessing. You might guess at first, but when you get the demonstration in geometry, you you know that this is so, right? So I don't like to translate speculative, but I like to shock you by translating it looking. The looking mind, right? The looking reason, looking understanding.

[39:44] Well, that considers no thing to be done, right? Okay. Nor does it speak about what is to be fled and what is to be pursued, right? While motion is always something of what is fleeing or what pursuing, right, huh? Okay.

[40:07] Okay. So in speaking of a motion, there from one place to another, right? Is the word Greek kinesis huh? Okay. So that's not the concern of looking mind, right? Yeah. It's very immobile.