Psychic Faculties

Although willing to provide a common account of the soul in these general terms, Aristotle devotes most of his energy in De Anima to detailed investigations of the soul’s individual capacities or faculties, which he first lists as nutrition, perception, and mind, with perception receiving the lion’s share of attention. He later also introduces desire, evidently as a discrete faculty on par with those initially introduced. The broadest is nutrition, which is shared by all natural living organisms; animals have perception in addition; and among natural organisms humans alone have mind. Aristotle maintains that various kinds of souls, nutritive, perceptual, and intellectual, form a kind of hierarchy. Any creature with reason will also have perception; any creature with perception will also have the ability to take on nutrition and to reproduce; but the converse does not hold. Thus, plants show up with only the nutritive soul, animals have both perceptual and nutritive faculties, and humans have all three. The reasons why this should be so are broadly teleological. In brief, every living creature as such grows, reaches maturity, and declines. Without a nutritive capacity, these activities would be impossible (De Anima iii 12, 434a22–434b18; cf. De Partibus Animalium iv 10, 687a24–690a10; Metaphysics xii 10, 1075a16–25). So, Aristotle concludes, psychology must investigate not only perceiving and thinking, but also nutrition.
There is some dispute about which of the psychic abilities mentioned by Aristotle in De Animaqualify as full-fledged or autonomous faculties. He evidently accepts the three already mentioned as centrally important. Indeed, he is willing to demarcate a hierarchy of life in terms of them. Even so, he also discusses two other capacities, imagination (De Anima iii 3) and desire (De Anima iii 9 and 10), and appeals to them in both his account of thinking and his philosophy of action. He does little, however, to characterize either in any intrinsic way. He evidently regards imagination as a sort of subordinate faculty, integrated in various ways with the faculties of nutrition, perception, and thought. Desire is still more complex. Despite its not occurring without the sensory faculty (De Anima iii 7 412a12–14), desire seems in the end elevated to a full capacity, primarily because of its role in the explanation of purposive behavior. His discussions of imagination and desire raise interesting questions about how Aristotle views the various capacities of soul as integrating into unified forms. They also raise questions along with his discussions of the other faculties as to how Aristotle conceives the unity of the whole soul. Some scholars seem content to characterize an Aristotelian soul as a set or sum of capacities, whereas Aristotle himself evidently demands a non-aggregative form of unity (De Anima ii 3 414b28–32, cf. iii 9 432a–b6).

5. Nutrition

When turning to these individual faculties of the soul, Aristotle considers nutrition first, for two related reasons. The first is straightforward: psychology considers all animate entities, and the nutritive soul belongs to all naturally living things, since it is “the first and most common capacity of soul, in virtue of which life belongs to all living things” (De Anima ii 4, 415a24–25). The second is slightly more complex, being at root teleological. Given that the higher forms of soul presuppose nutrition, its explication is prior to them in the order of Aristotle’s exposition.
Aristotle approaches his account of the nutritive soul by relying on a methodological precept which informs much of his psychological theorizing, namely that a capacity is individuated by its objects, so that, e.g., perception is distinguished from mind by being arrayed toward sensible qualities rather than intelligible forms (De Anima ii 4, 415a20–21). This induces him to offer what may sound initially like a pedestrian observation, that in nutrition there are three components, “that which is nourished, that by which it is nourished, and what nourishes (i.e. that which engages in nutrition).” This, however, Aristotle unpacks by maintaining that “what nourishes is the primary soul; what is nourished is the body which has this soul; and that by which it is nourished is nourishment (i.e. food)” (De Anima ii 4, 416b20–23). The interest of this suggestion lies in the implication that all and only living systems can be nourished, a consequence Aristotle makes more explicit by claiming that “nothing is nourished which does not have a share in life” (De Anima ii 4. 415b27–28) and that “since nothing is nourished which does not partake of life, what is nourished will be the ensouled body insofar as it is ensouled, with the result that nourishment (i.e. food) is related to the ensouled, and not coincidentally” (De Anima ii 4, 416b9–11). Here Aristotle means that food, as food, is definitionally related to life. Whatever is food is already such as to be necessarily related to living beings.
The significance of this observation resides in the thought that any adequate account of nutrition will make ineliminable reference to life as such. This in turn entails that it will not be possible todefine life as the capacity for taking on nutrition. For then we would have a vicious circularity: a living system is the sort of thing which can take on nutrition, while nutrition is whatever stuff is such as to sustain a living system. So, if living systems cannot be reductively defined in some other way, it will follow that no reductive account of life will be forthcoming. Consequently, Aristotle’s discussion of nutrition provides some reason for thinking that he will resist any attempt to define life in terms which do not themselves implicitly appeal to life itself. That is, he will resist any reductive account of life.
This also seems to be the purport of Aristotle’s rejection of the simple mechanistic accounts of growth which he considers when discussing the nutritive soul (De Anima ii 4, 415b27–416a20; cf. De Generatione et Corruptione i 5). Aristotle objects to those who want to account for growth merely in terms of the natural tendencies of material elements. For growth is aconstrained pattern of development, the source of which Aristotle ascribes to the soul. He takes it as evident that growth in organisms proceeds along structured paths, in end-directed ways. These structures in turn manifest capacities whose explication cannot be given in crude materialistic terms; for materialistic terms, as Aristotle understands them, fail to account for the fact that mature members of species cease growing, having realized the structures characteristic of their kind. Fire, for example, by contrast “grows” haphazardly, without directionality, flowing towards the combustible without end, until hindered by external impediments or lack of fuel.
Now, the forms of materialist explanations Aristotle considers are primitive. One critical question about his treatment of these explanations concerns whether he is right to suggest that facts about constrained patterns of development are incompatible with more explanatorily advanced forms of materialism, and, if so, whether those forms of materialism will be reductive in the sense that they will avoid all implicit or explicit reference to life. So far, there is little reason to think that Aristotle has been proven wrong; that is, there is at present no reductive account of life which enjoys universal or even broad support.
In any case, Aristotle’s discussion of nutrition is characteristic of his general approach to the soul’s faculties. His discussions often proceed on two levels. On the one hand, he simply seeks to provide an account of the relevant phenomena. At the same time, his interests in definition are conditioned by a host of broader methodological and metaphysical concerns. Consequently, he attempts to capture the nature of the individual faculties while at the same time investigating whether reductive accounts of them are plausible. In this way, at least, Aristotle’s investigations reflect sensitivity to an array of interlocking questions in definitional methodology, including most notably questions about the plausibility of reductive approaches to life’s most characteristic features. These same interests are apparent in his discussions of perception and mind.

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Psychic Faculties

5. Nutrition

Psychic Faculties :: تعاليق

Psychic Faculties

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