Reply to Bonnie on the Aristotelian Soul

Dear friend and frequent interlocutor, Bonnie, posted a long comment connected with this blog at the International Political Science Association Research Committee 12 Facebook page.  I am replying here. 

Others whose scholarship has focused on Aristotle propose that the Latin version of Aristotle differs from the Greek in ways that are significant for biology. For instance the concept of soul (psyche) about which Aristotle wrote in De Anima in Greek means breath (or life). The Latin Aquinas proposed that soul is autonomous and independent of the body. Thus a shift of that kind implies dualism in Aquinas translation of Aristotle that was not included in the Greek. Ken you know far more than me so correct any misunderstanding…

John Herman Randall, a great scholar of Aristotle who taught at Columbia where another friend of mine studied philosophy, taught that the Greek version of Aristotle is a kind of process philosophy. One small example of a translational conundrum is that the concept of soul (psyche) in Greek means breath (or life). The Latin Aquinas understood soul as autonomous and independent of the body. Thus, Aquinas’ translation of Aristotle leads to a dualism that, according to Randall, does not appear in the Greek Aristotle.

I cut and pasted out of order to focus on this central point.  I am marginally competent in classical Greek.  I have no Latin.  For a number of reasons however I do not think that the translation of Aristotle’s word for the soul‑ψυχή‑into the Latin anima was responsible for a more dualistic concept of soul. 

All words for soul are grounded in the distinction between the external, visible aspects of beings and the internal, invisible dimensions of those beings.  The soul explains two basic phenomena: why some things are alive rather than dead and how human beings and animals (and perhaps even trees or fresh springs) can have an internal consciousness and intention.  That these phenomena are real in the case of human beings we know firsthand.  That they are real in animals we know from analogy.  As for plants and sacred mountains, I remain agnostic. 

As soon as a culture becomes aware of this distinction between the visible and invisible aspects of the human being, it is almost inevitable that someone will imagine that they can exist apart from one another.  What, after all, is a corpse but a body from which the soul has departed?  If the soul departs, where does it go?  Perhaps it is as the Buddha suggested with his powerful question: where does the candle flame go when it is blown out?  The Greeks and the Romans certainly imagined that there were realms where souls exist without bodies.  I seem to recall Achilles complaining about the lodging in Hades.  Moreover, ghosts are ubiquitous in all cultures that are aware of the body/soul distinction. 

Philosophical accounts of dualism are another thing.  To my knowledge, the closest one comes to dualism in classical philosophy is Lucretius’ reading of Epicurus.  Lucretius is one of the rare examples of a genuine materialist.  All aspects of real beings are the consequence of their atomic components.  The soul, he supposed, was fine, invisible cloud of particles that escapes from the body at death like air from a balloon.  I suppose you will find more in the Neoplatonists; however, whatever they were, they weren’t Platonists. 

Aristotle’s account of ψυχή is not at all dualistic.  He says that the soul is the actuality of a body with potential for life.  To unpack this, ask yourself “what is a church?”  It’s not the bricks and boards, for these could have easily been assembled into a bank or a brothel.  It’s not the completed building, for a church has to have people and the building could be just as easily used by the bankers or the working girls.  The church is a group of human beings gathering together to do something, in this case, to worship.  Likewise, an Aristotelian animal is a specific kind of matter, organized in a certain way, and actually doing certain kinds of activity: breathing, metabolizing, sensing, etc. 

Aristotle’s soul is quite complex.  It encompasses three distinct explanatory causes: the species form (it’s a cat and not a catfish), efficient causation (the form is constantly pushing it to grow, feed, etc.), and final causation (the form directs the growth and activities of the organism towards certain ends).  It is very difficult to imagine how this kind of soul could exist apart from a material body.  To deploy a simpler analogy, a bowl has to have a convex shape; that means, however, that something must exist to be shaped into a bowl.  You can’t pour milk over cereal contained in an abstract geometrical form. 

I have read enough Aquinas to be astounded at the power of his thought.  I don’t know him nearly well enough to comment on his view of this matter.  I do know the New Testament and I read in the wee books at the end that Jesus was come in the flesh.  This was the result of a long struggle between the early church and the Gnostics.  The latter believed that all material was vulgar and bad; what was spiritual and good could exist only in the spirit.  So if Christ was the son of God, then he must have existed in spiritual form alone.  To this 1^st John 4:3 says:

καὶ πᾶν πνεῦμα ὃ μὴ ὁμολογεῖ τὸν Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα, ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ οὐκ ἔστιν καὶ τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ τοῦ ἀντιχρίστου, ὃ ἀκηκόατε ὅτι ἔρχεται, καὶ νῦν ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ ἐστὶν ἤδη

And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist, whereof ye have heard that it should come; and even now already is it in the world.

I find it fascinating that the early church was fighting explicitly against the dualism of the Gnostics.  Furthermore, to my knowledge, all major Christian churches confess the resurrection of the body.  Our souls don’t float off to heaven.  When we gain resurrection, we get our bodies back.  I am hoping for two things.  One is that the standard of admission, when it comes to opinions about these things, is lax.  The other is that I will be a bit taller and that I can sing. 

I don’t know what the nature of life after death might be but I agree with Aristotle’s model of the soul and I think that it is incoherent to imagine a human being without a human body.  The notion that the soul is a vaporous self that can float away from the body after death (or maybe from time to time during life) is probably what most contemporary Christians believe; however, that owes more to Descartes and his dualism than to the history of the Church or its doctrines.  The soul as milky, transparent self is what I like to think of as the Gospel according to Walt Disney.  It is easy to imagine a dog soul with tiny wings and a halo just as it is easy to imagine a centaur.  Both are logically incoherent. 

Nor am I convinced that all dogs go to heaven.  My mother-in-law had a dog that came straight from Hell and, gracefully, went back.  I am pretty sure that most dogs go to heaven.  

Living Organisms, Autonomy, & Lineages

Miranda: you are better than any student I have ever known at seeing what the next question is.  That is the single most important element in philosophy. 

Aristotle considered metabolism (the ability of a living organism to nourish itself and consequently produce waste) as a sufficient condition for life.  He referred to this as "nutritive soul."  Plants have this alone, whereas animals have additional layers (mobility, perception at a distance) and human beings have still others.  These are the elements that define various levels of autonomy.  I don't think that this makes autonomy just another word for life.  The word life points to what we are trying to understand whereas the word autonomy helps us to understand what life is. 

However, I smuggled in an element that does not seem to belong to autonomy so much: the production of babies.  Some philosophers of biology argue that, in addition to autonomy, living organisms have to be part of a lineage.  Every living organism is the offspring of a line of successful replicators. 

I am not certain, but I think that the addition of the lineage as an essential element of life is an attempt to head off the kind of objection that Scott James raises against me.  A political community, for example, seems to display autonomy or something very close to it.  It seems to struggle to maintain itself and it has to feed and produce waste.  Aristotle himself argued that the political community is precisely that human association that works enough dynamic cycles that it is "self-sufficient".  Well, if political communities are self-sufficient are they not autonomous?  And if they are autonomous, are they not alive? 

I think that the self-sufficient human community is a much stronger challenge to my view of autonomy than are refrigerators or thermostats.  It is tempting to talk about the evolution of political institutions and to see, for example, the United States as, perhaps, an example of political speciation.  The American regime broke off from the British regime in much the same way as homosapiens broke off from the common ancestor with pan troglodyte. 

This is misleading.  Political communities do not form lineages.  The Second Continental Congress formed spontaneously, as relations between the continent and the mother country worsened; it had no mommy or daddy.  Regimes form spontaneously all the time.  By contrast, living organisms do not form spontaneously.  They always have at least one biological parent. 

It is a very interesting question (and one that did not occur to me until your latest comment) whether the biological lineage is an element of life distinct from autonomy or whether it is another element of autonomy.  The cells and organs of my body (with the exception of my reproductive organs) have sacrificed any opportunity to reproduce.  Like sterile castes among the ants, they can have offspring only through the reproductive activity of something else (my gonads in the one case, the queen in the other).  Does this compromise their autonomy?  Every cell in my body is robustly alive as is the sister forager feeding on my picnic lunch.  I will have to ponder this one. 

Neuroscience & the Soul

The nature of the human soul and that of the souls of other organisms has been studied extensively since Socrates, Plato, and then Aristotle went to work on the questions.  The brain, by contrast, has been accessible only very recently.  I expect that neuroscience is poised to tell us a lot about both the brain and the soul. 

One thing that neuroscience has determined, in my view, is that Cartesian dualism (or substance dualism) is untenable.  This is important because dualism remains the de facto view in the popular imagination.  Human beings (and maybe dogs, if indeed they all go to Heaven) have two complete bodies: a material one and an immaterial one.  At death and sometimes a bit earlier the latter cuts its ties with the former and drifts free.  The immaterial self is the genuine self; the material body is a mere vehicle.  The immaterial soul is the home of our thoughts, passions, and essential self. 

I like to note in passing that substance dualism may be what most Christians believe today but it is not the teaching of any major church.  The teaching of the churches is that of the resurrection of the body, suggesting that a human being without a human body is not really thinkable. 

Michael Gazzaniga’s famous split brain experiments pose a powerful challenge to substance dualism.  Gazzaniga examined patients who had had the corpus callosum cut as a therapy for extreme seizures.  This is the thick cable of nerves that connects the two hemispheres of the brain. 

Gazzaniga devised an experiment that had such a patient look at a dot on a screen.  Then a word was projected on the screen to the right of the dot.  This meant that only the right eye could see the word.  When he asked the patient to identify the word, the patient had no problem.  He would say “cat”.  That is because the right eye is wired to the left hemisphere of the brain and the latter is where the language centers are located. 

Now what happened when a word was projected to the left side of the dot?  The patient could not say what the word was.  See above.  However, and this is the fascinating part, the patient could draw a picture of the named object with his left hand.  That is apparently because the more artistic, image processing modules of the brain are located in the right hemisphere.  Whereas the left hemisphere could respond with language, the right hemisphere could respond only with a picture. 

If substance dualism were correct, and the seat of consciousness is an immaterial soul that is somehow connected to the physical body and brain, then this experiment shouldn’t have worked that way.  Information gathered by one half of the severed brain should have been uploaded to the uncut, immaterial soul.  It should then have been available to the other hemisphere, since the soul both receives information from the physical senses and commands the physical body.  That is precisely what did not happen. 

Instead, cutting the corpus callosum effectively cut one human being into two.  As long as the patient is looking at the world with both eyes, the two halves of the brain are working in tandem.  The two half-brains in one skull are not aware that anything has changed.  They can navigate the world well enough that no one else knows the difference, unless he is a neuroscientists conducting a clever experiment. 

Aristotle proposed (de Anima) that the soul was the actuality of life in a body with the potential for life.  Just as heat is the actual temperature of a physical medium that can be more or less hot, so the soul is the actual state of a living body that can be alive.  Aristotle was right.  Descartes wrong and so is Walt Disney.  Neuroscience can now tell us a lot about the soul because it is exploring the brain. 

Science Daily describes a study that linked a willingness to punish violations of moral rules with specific regions in the brain. 

The results of the study show that people only punish norm violations at their own expense if the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex – an important area for control located at the front of the brain – is activated. This control entity must also interact with another frontal region, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, for punishment to occur.

The communication between these two frontal regions of the brain is also interesting in light of earlier fMRI studies, which showed that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex encodes the subjective value of consumer goods and normative behavior. As neuroscientist Thomas Baumgartner explains, it seems plausible that this brain region might also encode the subjective value of a sanction. This value increases through the communication with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. «Using brain stimulation, we were able to demonstrate that the communication between the two brain regions becomes more difficult if the activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is reduced. This in turn makes punishing norm violations at your own expense significantly more difficult.»

This study illuminates the neurological substratum of one of the key moral emotions, which in turn underlies moral behavior.  We are looking here at the activity of parts of the human soul. 

This is not, as one might worry, a reductionist account.  The activity of the various regions of the brain can only be understood in light of the moral activity that defines human action.  As a door knob depends on the existence of a doors, so the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex can be what it is only because it is part of a larger whole.  The parts are subordinate to the whole.  The material is what it is shaped into.  The soul is the actuality of the body. 

Evolution of Virtue 3

 Here is the third section of my paper on the evolution of virtue.  

Aristotle’s account of virtue is rooted in his understanding of biology.  He advanced a model of the human soul that was tripartite and hierarchical.  According to this model, human beings share with all organisms a basic level of soul that he called vegetative.  This level of soul includes such basic powers as feeding, growing, and producing waste.  It opens up an existential dimension of value that extends from flourishing to decay and death. 

While all animals share in the organic powers that make up vegetative soul, animals have powers that plants do not have: motility and perception at a distance.  These powers open up a second existential dimension: pain and pleasure.  Unlike plants, animals can have good and bad moments and good and bad days. 

Human beings obviously share in all of this.  Just as obviously, we alone possess a third basic power: logos.  Human beings are capable of speech and reason.  Logos makes it possible for us to distinguish between what something looks like and how it really is.  Most significant for moral thought, this means we can distinguish between what looks good and bad and what is really good and bad for us. 

Aristotle’s biology is unfortunately famous mostly for his howlers.  He believed in spontaneous generation, for example.  Yet he got most of it astonishingly right, according to modern evolutionary biology.  His tripartite soul maps very well onto evolutionary history.  Evolution does not work by adding new organisms to old ones built according to new blueprints.  Instead, it preserves what works while piling new systems on top of the older ones.  Some genes are unique to humans.  Others, like the famous tool box genes, are shared by all animals.  One the three basic systems that comprise the human brain is old enough to be called reptilian.  The neo-cortex, on the other hand, seems primary only in the primates. 

Aristotle models the human soul in much the same way as his teacher Plato (or Plato’s Socrates) did: by means of a political metaphor.  One part of the human soul is distinctly non-rational in so far as it does not respond to persuasion.  This includes all the organic activities that are rooted in the body and that are shared with other organisms.  It includes the sensations, among which are the pains and pleasures.  Logos, by contrast is uniquely human and its power is that of conscious thinking.  In between is what we might call the middle part of the soul.  This part of the soul includes the various passions.  Each passion includes an element of judgment: if I am angry, I am angry at someone about something.  Unlike the sensations (let alone the unconscious organic processes) the passions are rational in so far as they are susceptible to persuasion.  In the well-ordered human soul, reason rules the passions politically; i.e. reason both commands and persuades them.  Reason and passion together rule the sensations royally or even despotically, by command alone. 

From the viewpoint of evolutionary theory, the political metaphor is no mere convenience.  The passions develop their rational dimension precisely because they develop in the course of our evolution as political animals.  To the degree that human beings are capable of self-government, individually and collectively, it is because the psychological capacities underlying self-government were selected for.  The selection pressures that shaped these capacities were created by the advantages that highly cooperative human associations enjoyed.  Creatures capable of a sense of “we-ness” as Michael Tomasello has put it, who have a sense of moral obligation that they cannot easily escape, have largely inherited the earth.  Precisely because human souls were not fashioned anew but rather were built up out of preexisting psychological powers, it is both possible and necessary for the more rational elements to govern the less rational ones.  The moral dimension is one of the trajectories of our evolutionary history. 

When Aristotle looks for the nature of the virtues, he notes that there are three things in this human soul.  He is focusing here on consciousness or mind as modern philosophy calls it.  The three things are “feelings”, powers, and dispositions.  Under the first category, he explicitly lists a number of passions, including desire, anger, fear, and courage.  The powers indicate the capacity of the soul to generate the various feelings.  We can certainly suppose that there are creatures incapable of any of the feelings or only some and we can imagine that we might have existed with a different emotional palette.  By dispositions (or habits), he indicates that fact that each person may be disposed to experience each of the passions in an appropriate or inappropriate way.  Someone may be unable to feel sufficient anger when he has been genuinely offended or feel more anger than is reasonable in any situation. 

All three of these categories fit well within the context of an evolutionary analysis.  The emotions that we feel depend on an innate capacity to generate precisely this set of passionate motives.  Each emotive power exists in us because it was selected for.  In some set of circumstances that reoccurred frequently over time the power to produce an emotion contributed to the reproductive success of our ancestors.  To take a single example, a capacity for righteous indignation promoted cooperation by encouraging members of human communities to punish or ostracize those who violate fundamental social obligations.  When we see such violations, they look disgusting.  There is good evidence that the part of the brain that registers emotional disgust is the same part of the brain that registers physical disgust, as for example what we experience when we small rotting meat.  That is a good example of how evolution retools an existing emotive power for a fundamentally new function. 

To some degree, our emotional dispositions are innate.  Some persons are innately more prone to anger or compassion that others and men are in general more prone to violent aggression than are women.  On the other hand, in all or almost all human beings, the dispositions are flexible and subject to learning or conditioning.  Such flexibility makes every kind of sense in an evolutionary context.  It allows human communities to adapt to a wide range of environmental niches without having to suffer the losses that direct selection entails.  Whereas a species of bacteria might respond to a change in circumstances only after a catastrophic loss of numbers, a human society might respond simply by changing the characteristic behavior of its members.  It also allows the community to cultivate certain passions in certain ways, thus producing what we would call moral culture.  Finally, it allows an individual to cultivate himself.