[I am working from the J.A. Smith translation. I wanted to jot these notes while they are fresh- if these were knowledge, they would not degenerate]
The first note is that Aristotle does not yet distinguish between the animal and human soul, to find the distinct object of study that is psychology. The true Aristotelian psychology may be that underlying the Ethics– to which we may soon turn in trying to understand section III. 5-8. The five senses- sight, hearing, taste and smell, and touch, have intellectual and psychic analogies, even to “feelings,” aesthetic senses like taste and smell- which are also ethical senses- and hearing, which is used to denote both the receiving of a teaching by authority and the following of any account. There may be yet a third sense, as in “let him who can hear, hear” which includes not only perceiving the sentences, but also understanding or perceiving the meaning, as in a parable. One wonders too if the perception of music is not something more than the perception of sound, including harmony, discords and implied ratios. But the fairest of the senses is sight, due to its analogy to intelligence, and its medium to light. These in addition to the senses shared by many animate creatures are more properly the topic of psychology. What does the perception of objects of the imagination entail? These are not only imagined, but communicated from one mind to another by the poets and the greatest teachers- such as Plato in the Allegory of the Cave- and in order to be communicated, it would seem, must be perceived. And the same is so of reasoning and any rational account communicated- it must be perceived, and this like hearing and seeing the same object at once, is by the mind.
But it does seem that what was the animal body has become in man the soul, or that our soul is the same as our life, that of the particular person. It includes of course much more than the conscious function, if it is to contain, in any sense, the knowledge to be recollected. But we would say that these senses too are really “somewhat closer to the body,” and distinguish just here between body and soul.
We know pants do not feel pain, because they cannot move, and that would seem to be the purpose of pain. But if the premise is not true, this is not knowledge. Pants still may perceive, as to lean toward the sunlight- somehow getting longer on the far side to lean over. An amazing inter-sylvian communication system has recently been uncovered, enabling plants to even share resources- which would require something functioning as does communication.
Just as plants do not violate the laws of physics, by functioning as wholes, countering entropy, and achieving continuity through seeds, so animals do not violate the known causes even of botany and chemistry and physics when these move themselves- though this character almost unique to animal life cannot be explained from the principles of what one must notice appear as levels in a hierarchy of cause and being.
All the senses began in touch. In taste and smell, touch becomes first refined to sense especially food and poison or bacteria, and then further refined to receive molecules of the very substance without touching it, through unseen particles in the air. Let Kant say we receive only numina! Then in hearing touch is refined through the ear drum to perceive sound through waves in the air, and sight to perceive by light. Still all these are refinements of touch. There is a kind of fish that is able to perceive by electrical fields as well, and animals and humans can sense charges of static electricity through hairs and even through the skin. Our perception of dry and wet when we touch the spoil of a potted houseplant, is especially noteworthy and astonishing. The bind too are able to almost see by hearing, and the deaf by hear by interpreting visible lip movements and hand signs.
If soul were the wholes of which the parts of animals are parts, it would be difficult to distinguish the organism or soul from the wholes of organs and systems, and even the organelles of one celled creatures- where many of these mysteries can be seen in their root. But the soul is the distinct from the wholes- though it is one kind of the whole of an organic unity.
The root of self motion appears in the amoeba and the slime mold. Its root is in the wholeness of the organism as a being distinct from the rest of the cosmos, in contraction and selective reaching. “Reach and pull!” As Strauss when reading Genesis says, these are beings that change their courses, as would be quite valuable to plant trying to move into the sunlight- though they cannot do it. Nor could the wheel grow, except as the invention of a creature that grows- apparently because it has two disconnected parts. There are some microscopic living parts that resemble electric motors.
With life, there enters purpose into our consideration of the kinds of things that are. These have been well discerned to be survival and reproduction, the daily work of preserving the body. Aristotle discerns 4 causes, separating the final causes referenced by Socrates in the Phaedo into formal and final, as materia cause set in time becomes efficient cause. So the structures or forms are explicable by nature in terms of functions- we have feet to walk, etc. From the wing, it can be discerned not only that there is air, but from the kind of wing, the very density of the air in different periods of our history. But Aristotle does seem wrong to think of particular beings such as planets as having purposes. Whether nature itself or the tree of life itself is directed to a purpose, or rather manifests a possibility that is always there in being, is also a good question. The cause of purpose in nature must be at least as wonderous, whether or not it can be said to be or have a purpose. We can see the intelligible ground of the visible things as in geometry, but that of life, self motion and reason does not so easily appear, and yet must be. But it is said that every 7-10 years, every molecule of our bodies is exchanged, so that not a scrap is the same, and similarly with genetics, it is the order or meaning that is passed along through generations, like a word that grows, bridging time.
mmcdonald77 