Locating, restoring and recompiling my digital records and documents, following crashes of two of my external hard disks, I have come across many documents that I hadn’t viewed in a long time. Among them are the papers I wrote for different classes as an undergraduate student at Grinnell College in the United States of America between 1990 and 1994. I have decided to reproduce some of them here in my personal blog.
This is one of the papers I wrote for my Introduction to Philosophy class.
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On The Existence of Soul
Does a thing such as a soul exist? It suffices for our purposes to define soul as the non-physical part of a being. A being in turn would be defined as one that is characterized by movement, growth and life.
In seeking the knowledge of the soul–or of anything for that matter–questions, in conjunction to the one above, such as the following are always asked: What is it? Or what is its nature? How do we comprehend it ( if it can be comprehended )? Where is it to be found? Or who has it? How long does it last? As with any inquiry of a philosophical nature a varied number of questions are posed and their answers sought. Plato and Aristotle must have asked the same type of questions when they embarked on the task of finding knowledge of all there is to know. First the common grounds from under which they operated.
Plato and Aristotle in their quest for knowledge and truth left no stone upturned. After inquiring and searching extensively, they established their philosophy, a theory of knowledge, on the basis of which each profess to explain all there is know. They each developed their theory based on a set of paradigm that they proclaimed to hold true everywhere, at all times, in all cases. From these set of paradigm each set up a theory distinct from the other. It is not at all surprising that their theory of knowledge differ. After all it’s just one man’s interpretation against another.
Life and the universe with its manifestations were the topic of concern to both. Because of that very fact, there are some common grounds from which they derive their principles. Both seem to accept the dichotomy to the things that exist: the visible and the invisible. ( P 483) ( A 250) The visible is always changing. The knowledge of the changing world is universal and is ever increasing with time. Newer knowledge can be obtained by newer methods.
One of the things that is invisible is the soul. The subject matter is just one but due to the different theory of knowledge propounded, their views are bound to be different as well. So, answers to those questions raised above will be sought in their philosophies. Then an attempt will be made at finding the roots of their views in their theory of knowledge.
Plato appears to have taken the word “soul” and just attributed various characteristics to it without so much accounting for them. The soul is thus likened to an omnipresence in all beings that live and breath. Existing all by itself, independent of the body, it is an entity by and in itself. Its knowledge is true knowledge; it is wisdom and knowledge of the realities that exist and never change. (P 121) The matters that are external to the soul and removed from it, change and perish but the soul keeps on living. Those bodies that the soul is said to inhabit perish when death comes. The soul lives on and is born again as it has always done. It is just one.
Aristotle on the other hand considers soul to be the “first principle in animals and in plants.” (A 235) As all things that exist are substances, a soul too is a substance. Substance is defined as the compound whole comprised of the matter, the form and the product of the two. As with every substance that is a particular thing, the soul too is a particular thing and that is it is the “realization of the body….[It] is the primary realization of a natural body that possesses life.” ( A 246-7) The whole of an animal thus constitutes both of the body and the soul. One is not distinct from the other. As with sight and eye it is with the soul and the body. The soul has three things in it: emotions, capacities, and dispositions. Of these three disposition is virtue. (A 307-80) Moral virtue on the other hand is the art of doing what is best. What is best is happiness which in turn is the activity of the soul.
Plato’s tone is very instructive and didactic. He deals more with the abstract whereas Aristotle engaged himself with the practical and human side of the inquiry. Aristotle took the views of his contemporaries and analyzed them and came up with what he deduced to be knowledge. For him the senses are infallible. Plato on the other hand saw the senses as fallible and proclaimed the turning of ones soul towards itself to be the only true knowledge.
How does the two account for their views? To answer that question let us consider the theory of knowledge of each of the two philosophers. Plato’s basic question was what is there out in the world and how can I know it? He then propounded his theory of forms and its corollary the theory of recollection.
According to his theory of forms, the world of senses is seen and the world of thought is unseen. There are two parts to the seen: images and objects. These as mentioned earlier characterize the changing world, the imperfect one. There are two parts to the unseen as well: thought-images and ideas or ideals. ( P 309) As far as Plato is concerned, the world of ideas and ideals are the things that really exist. The external world of objects are just imitations of the ideas and ideals. The objects just merely participate in what already exists, the ideas and the ideals, which in turn reside in the soul. The fact that the soul always exists and that the body die off makes it possible for it to carry the knowledge within it to its later life. That is, after the soul sheds off its former body it takes up a new body and lives again. When it does that, because it has lived before, it brings to the new life all that it had learned in its previous lives. Then in the life it leads subsequently, the latent ideas in the soul and the interaction of the senses produce the desired comprehension–termed recollection–of the world around. (P 42 ) Thus, all learning is mere recollection of what is already deeply embedded in the soul. If the soul were not immortal and imperishable as he claims it to be the theory would fall apart of course.
On the other hand, Aristotle’s guiding question was what is the cause? Man by nature, he wrote, desires to know and to know is to know the causes. This is his theory of causality. According to it, there are four causes: first, the matter; second, the form; third, the mover; and fourth, the purpose. (A 223) The matter and the form constitute the potentiality and the actuality of the substance. What brings about the actuality in substance from its state of potentiality is the mover or the efficient cause. It is due to the efficient cause that a substance becomes a composite substance. The final cause or the purpose is the end towards which all the efficient cause work. Soul as mentioned earlier is a substance and its purpose is to attain happiness. (A 297) Thus as has been shown, the soul for Aristotle is quite different from Plato’s soul.
The soul does seem to exist for both Plato and Aristotle though. The difference is in the nature of the soul. The nature of Plato’s soul is abstract whereas, Aristotle’s soul substantial.
