Aristotle Lawson-Tancred Hugh - De anima. On the soul: translated, with an introduction and notes by Hugh Lawson-Tancred

DE ANIMA

ADVISORY EDITOR: BETTY RADICE

ARISTOTLE was born at Stageira, in the dominion of the kings of Macedonia, in 384 BC. For twenty years he studied at Athens in the Academy of Plato, on whose death in 347 he left, and, some time later, became tutor of the young Alexander the Great. When Alexander succeeded to the throne of Macedonia in 336, Aristotle returned to Athens and established his school and research institute, the Lyceum, to which his great erudition attracted a large number of scholars. After Alexanders death in 323, anti-Macedonian feeling drove Aristotle out of Athens, and he fled to Chalcis in Euboea, where he died in 322. His writings, which were of extraordinary range, profoundly affected the whole course of ancient and medieval philosophy, and they are still eagerly studied and debated by philosophers today. Very many of them have survived and among the most famous are the Ethics and the Politics, both of which are published in Penguin Classics, together with The Athenian Constitution, De Anima, The Art of Rhetoric, Poetics and the Metaphysics.

HUGH LAWSON-TANCRED was born in 1955 and educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. He is currently a Departmental Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Birkbeck College in the University of London. He has published extensively on Aristotle and Plato and is engaged in research in the philosophy of linguistics and cognitive science. His translations of Aristotles The Art of Rhetoric and The Metaphysics are also published in Penguin Classics. He is married with a daughter and a son and lives in north London and Somerset.

ARISTOTLE

(ON THE SOUL)

TRANSLATED,
WITH AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES,
BY HUGH LAWSON-TANCRED

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published 1986
19

Translation, Introduction and Notes copyright Hugh Lawson-Tancred, 1986
All rights reserved

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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IN PIAM MEMORIAM
W. G. WILLIAMSON

(And) of the soul the body form doth take;
For soul is form, and doth the body make

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

In this rendering of Aristotles De Anima, I have tried to produce a version at once accessible to the layman and tolerable to the initiate. However, even if I had discharged this task with unexampled felicity, readers unfamiliar with Aristotles thought would, if confronted with an unsupported text, have at times been left wondering what was going on. For these readers I have provided a fairly long Introduction, in which I have tried to offer a conspectus of recent discussion of the work. I hope its central themes will have been thrown into perspective, although it goes without saying that I offer the serious student no more than a starting-point to further inquiry.

My debt to many writers will be abundantly clear and I have mentioned in the Bibliography some of the works that I have found most useful. I must, however, single out Professor Hamlyns stimulating notes in the Clarendon edition for especial acknowledgement. I am no less indebted to Professor Hamlyns kindness in reading through my typescript and suggesting a large number of improvements at which I would scarcely have arrived without his assistance, but this expression of gratitude should not be taken as an attempt in any way to bring this still very imperfect work under the shadow of his authority. A debt of a different order I owe to Roger Scruton. He has encouraged me to what reflections I have reached in connection with the subject of this work and has saved both Translation and Introduction from some conspicuous blunders. I must, however, firmly exclude him from any responsibility for the many that remain. Two friends, Edward Jenkyns and Andrew Radice, also read the Translation in draft, and their comments on its readability were valuable and engagingly discreet. Finally, I would like to thank Miranda Dear for a contribution that has evolved from being of clerical to being of editorial scope.

Hugh Lawson-Tancred

Holland Park

London

INTRODUCTION

It was the opinion of Hegel, not a philosopher conspicuous for his sympathy of outlook with Aristotle, that the present work was the only text earlier than his own writings worth serious attention on the subject of the soul. This judgement, strikingly original in its day, would have been almost a commonplace in thirteenth-century Paris or ninth-century Baghdad. Today mental philosophy bears a very different cast from that which it bore for the Schoolmen, and Hegels verdict has a paradoxical air. The air of paradox will be increased, not diminished, for many readers by confrontation with the text. There will be some who will be at a loss to see the connection between the subject-matter of this treatise and its title. For the English word soul is, in the title of this translation, being made, in deference to convention, to stand proxy for the Greek term psyche. This word had a wide variety of meanings for various Ancient Greeks at various times, but most of them were remote from the usual associations in English of the word soul. This is certainly the case with Aristotles use of the term, and, inevitably, the difference in meaning between the English word soul and the Greek word psyche is responsible for the difference between the subject-matter of the present work and that which might be expected from a tract with the English title On the Soul; but it can plausibly be argued that it is in many ways a more worthy subject of philosophical reflection and that the value of Aristotles remarks during the course of the work for contemporary mental philosophy is not diminished by their being primarily intended as contributions to an account of an entity of which we have no habitual cognizance.

What, then, is the exact meaning for Aristotle of the Greek word psyche? What precisely is the subject of this work? The answer to this question is in fact simple. The psyche, for Aristotle, is that in virtue of which something is alive. The most accurate translation of the term into English would be principle of life or principle of animation. Stylistic reasons, however, clearly render this unacceptable in practice. Now, it should be clear after only brief reflection that psyche so defined is a much wider concept than the English terms soul, mind or consciousness denote. This being so, the study of psyche will correspondingly be wider than that of these concepts, and since it is they that form the principle subject-matter of modern philosophy of mind and psychology (along with such terms as self, personality and so on which are dependent on them), it is clear that Aristotle is addressing himself in this work to a broader topic than is usually discussed by modern philosophers. Since the time of Descartes, the central problem of human nature has seemed to be the subjectivity with which each individual is aware of the world. If, with Descartes, we take this subjective viewpoint as our starting-point, so that I, for instance, will be concerned to show how my view of the world is itself to be found a place within my general theory of the world, we soon arrive at the intractable difficulties of Dualism, at the need to coordinate the content of our consciousness with our objective conception of the world itself. Now, even if Descartes starting-point is not in fact a legitimate one, it at least seems reasonable and it requires a philosophical argument to show that it is not. In our century such arguments have been produced, and it would not be wrong to say that contemporary philosophy of mind centres on the question of whether or not they are successful. Thus our debate distracts us from the subject-matter of Aristotles inquiry. For we are interested in a problem which only fully arises in the case of human beings, Aristotle in a feature of all animate creatures. The Cartesian controversy is a controversy about that vague entity, the mind. It is an assumption of that controversy that the peculiar features of mental life are more philosophically important than the general features of all life. Aristotle, however, reverses this order of relative importance. He certainly considers those features of human life that might come under the Cartesian heading of Mental Properties, but he considers them strictly within the context of a general survey of all the features of any form of life, and it is clear that it is the general concept of life that he hopes to clarify by producing his account of psyche. Thus, one of the rewards this work offers its students is the illustration of what perhaps familiar terrain can look like from a quite new perspective.