Conatus: REVISED EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

different from how the word is understood today — and especially relevant for the way the argument of this book is developed. Aristotle’s view can best be appreciated through this quote from him: 'If the eye were an animal, sight would be its soul’. Sight is therefore the defining essence of an eye. And it seems that for Aristotle there is no need for anything beyond this — perhaps this is simply saying our soul is our mind, our body and our manner of being in the world. Of particular note here is that there is no situation in which we are just mind and body — there is always a context. It’s also worth noting that this concept of ‘soul’ — what I will henceforth term as the ‘Aristotelian soul’ — results in all manner of creatures being ‘ensouled’. In fact, anything that has a measure of sentience and interacts with its environment has a ‘soul’, by this definition.

Such a view of soul — the Aristotelian soul — suggests that soul is more fundamental than anything. Perhaps it should not be said that our body contains our soul, rather that our soul contains our body.

Psuchê was the word used by Aristotle himself for what I am putting forward here, but I don’t claim that what he meant by the term is exactly as I’m describing it. I hope though that it is in the spirit of Aristotle, if not to the letter! We can also note Heidegger’s term — dasein — as mentioned in Chapter 7. He regarded affective relations with people and objects (we might say, with our environment) as our way of being in the world.

From the splits and dualisms that were

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