Brief Guide to Ideas

Chapter 4The Nature of the SoulAristotle and IdentityWho are you exactly? That might seem a strange question, but have you ever suddenly caught sight of yourself in a mirror and wondered for a second who it is you are looking at? You can see a familiar face but just for a second you wonder who or what it is that makes you yourself apart from your body.Once we start thinking about ourselves in this way all sorts of questions arise:* Who am I exactly?* How do I know who I am?* How can I know I''m the same person today as I was yesterday?* What is it in me that causes me to be alive?* Do I have a soul which survives my body after death?Plato and the personIn Platonic thought a person is part of the physical world in that he or she has a body through which sense-impressions can be received. But at the same time he or she has an immaterial mind which is capable of knowing eternal truths beyond the world. There is also a directing force, the soul, which Plato pictures as a chariot rider, which is guiding and being guided by two horses, mind and body.The mind wants to travel into the heavenly realm of the ideas and to understand them; the body wants to be involved in worldly matters to do with the senses.The human soul is caught between these two opposing forces. The soul is trying to steer but is trapped in the prison of the body. Therefore, according to Plato, people have no real freedom if their lives are concentrated on physical requirements. However, your soul can free itself from this bondage and direct your life, both your physical circumstances and your intellectual pursuits. But it is only after bodily existence that the soul rises upward to the eternal world of Ideas.For Plato soul and body are two different things. The soul is immortal; it inhabits the body temporarily.Aristotle and the soulAristotle''s idea of the soul is very different from Plato''s. In his account On the Soul, Aristotle gives a general account of what he believes a soul is. He follows the belief common to the Greeks that the soul is the principle of life: inquiry into the soul is enquiry into the different forms of life.The basic form of life is found in plants, which feed themselves, grow, decay and reproduce. So the basic form of soul consists in the ability to do these things; all forms of life manifest this. The word ''soul'' then, simply describes how something is alive in the world. A ''soul'' is not necessarily separate from the body or eternal. On the contrary, a ''soul'' is what gives a body life.With animals there is the additional capacity for sense-perception, and in most of them the capacity for movement. For Aristotle oak trees and ostriches had psyche (or ''soul'') as much as monkeys or men. The word ''soul'' did not mean the same as ''mind''. Rather everything that lives has psyche, but human beings are at the top of creation. It is this hierarchical arrangement which makes it difficult to say that Aristotle had one single definition of the soul.A soul is what makes a body work. These souls are not bits of special spiritual stuff which have been placed inside the living body. They are sets of powers, capabilities and faculties. For Aristotle, to have a soul is like having a skill; it is not a part of you which functions independently from any other part. He wrote: ''One should not ask if the soul and the body are one, any more than one should ask it of the wax and the shape, or in general of the matter of anything and that of which it is the matter.''In Aristotle''s thinking there is no problem about how soul and body can co-exist and work together. This idea of the soul makes any thought of personal survival after death impossible.Plato had said that souls pre-existed birth and continued after the death of those bodies which they inhabited. Aristotle disagreed with this. Just as skills cannot exist apart from skilled people, so a soul is not the kind of thing that can survive the person. How could my skills, my character or my temper survive me?A popularRaeper, William is the author of 'Brief Guide to Ideas', published 2000 under ISBN 9780310227748 and ISBN 0310227747.