Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

Otherwise, the religious or philosophical understandings of soul seem to lead to confusion rather than enlightenment! That is, apart from one reference from Aristotle. ‘If the eye were a creature’, he said, ‘then seeing would be its soul’. So he was saying something along the lines of — it’s our activity in the world that makes the difference — delivers our essence, so to speak — and not some other-worldly add-on. If you know your Aristotle, then you’ll know that this is typical of him. No need for supernatural explanations, when Earthly explanations will suffice.

If we were to put Aristotle’s quote from above — 'if the eye were a creature, then seeing would be its soul’ — together with another of his famous quotes — ‘the soul is the form of the body’ — then we can get a bit more of a picture as to his meaning. Remember, from previous chapters, we had the plain meaning of form, as just three-dimensional shape, and also the mysterian meaning — that form is some kind of pattern that is derived from a transcendent world, such as with the Platonic perfect forms. Aristotle is using form in a third way, I suggest, in that the pattern of a thing is known through its immanence in real things. So the form of a soul is known through its visible instances of real people and how we behave in the world. As Wittgenstein said, ‘if you want to see the human soul, look at the body’.

I take from this — and maybe stretching Aristotle somewhat — that soul could be described as mind plus body plus action in the world. These three things can be considered separately, and indeed, they so often are

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