Aristotle’s ideas on the soul are more persuasive than those of other philosophers. He talks about the natural world and not the metaphysical world. He begins by introducing his understanding on the soul (psyche) and what it consists. He explains many aspects of the soul.
The advanced knowledge about the soul helps us to understand nature as well as truth. In a natural body, the soul is the first actuality. The second actuality is that the soul has potential of life within it. It enables the compound of the body substance work appropriately.
The sole purpose of any soul is for it to meet self – sufficiency. The soul does not include the inanimate things like a rock since it has no life. Colouring our knowledge on nature is that attributes in both material and immaterial things ability to strive for success. He believes in the hierarchy of souls.
Their organization is such that the top in the rank consists of all properties of the one at the bottom. He acknowledges that to meet any assured knowledge about the soul is difficult. Aristotle suggests that we perhaps should ask ourselves, ‘what is it?’ What it in a tree that contributes to it being a tree is an example of such questions. It is a subject of properties and forms.
He alleges that the soul cannot be separated from the body. The soul is essentially a type of body. This would imply that the body possesses another body in itself. There is no single action on the soul or by the soul that does not involve the body. This creates an impasse that leaves us wondering how this could be possible is our understanding that the soul is immaterial while the body is not. This kind of argument attracts many debates especially in the religious world.
Many religions believe that souls meet with the divine after the boy dies. Most Christians know the soul as an ontological reality distinct but connected with the body. Description of the soul’s characteristics is in religious, idealistic and moral terms. They point this unusual power to the human soul.
The Catholic Church for instance teaches that human souls are immortal. Once a person dies, his soul separates from the body and unites with the maker. The divinity passes judgement to either destiny it to heaven or hell. The two contrasting ideas cannot pass the test of acceptance or denial. I find both of them not only fascinating but also incredible. Aristotle believes, when an organism dies, the soul dies along with it. The two entities are homologous; none can exist without the other.
Indeed humans are the most intelligent organisms on earth. Though their senses might be inferior to those of animals, they have a high degree of discrimination. The sense of smell of objects in human beings is inferior to that of some animals such as the shark. Sharks differentiate between smell of objects. For instance, they can distinguish the smell of blood and water. There are three types of souls.
There are three types of souls; the sensitive soul possessed by animals, the nutritive soul by plants and the rational soul belonging to humans. The nutritive soul is able to recycle nutrients. The sensitive soul is proficient of both discriminating and movement. The rational soul’s ability to reason that is not in the other types of souls. It is able to perceive the objects in the environment and rationalise. Besides the common five senses animals share with animals, humans have a sixth sense.
This is the intellectual or the ability to reason. The purposive nature of being introspective is the distinguishing reason. After receiving impulses, they question the meaning and the action to follow. Sense gives us knowledge of what is pleasurable or painful that is dependent on what is good or bad leading to either pursuit or avoidance. Whatever the thinking soul interprets as pain, it avoids where it pursues what is pleasant.
Am wondering what could happen if my thoughts were to revolve around what I experience every day. Basically, I would never make any progress in terms of self growth and development. Art powers imagination. What art does is to expand on our imagination. The scene creates mental images that allow the audience to think. Aristotle distinguishes between mind and perception and imagination. He says that imagination is the coming up with mental images.
He distinguishes imagination from perception on the grounds of perception does not create images, imagination does. Lower animals such as ants are lacking in imagination. Perceptions are true but falsification of imaginations is possible.
Imagination stores, produces and recalls affecting cognition in humans and higher animals including thinking. Imagination comes as a result of sense perception. These perceptions as images stored and reproduced. The mind blends with the objects of thought in the following ways. For objects with no matter, thought is same to what thinks.
Aristotle continues and talks about the distinction between forms and matter. I find his ideas confusing. His ideas of form suggest that form is internal in an object and only the senses can perceive it. The matter he says is the make of an object. I wonder whether something could exist without form or matter.
Are the two elements inseparable? God has form but no matter. It is enthralling that something without matter can exist. According to Aristotle, essence of objects does not lie on either matter or form but purpose. A snub-nose to what is straight in the case of abstract objects. It implies continuum types of form and mater constituents are different.
The capacities of perceiving and knowing are akin to the potencies of knowing or perceiving. Objects that have potencies of being perceive up to certain degrees. Perceiving cannot take place beyond this point. The same applies to knowing. One cannot know more than what there to know about an object.
Unless one enters into the realm of imagination, nothing more is knowable. This means that the knower can only understand objects up to certain potencies. In both cases, the mind is comprehensible in the similar way as objects. Human beings can only see to certain wavelengths.
In my view, the soul is present in all living organisms. Looking at it from the sense that when we experience pain, we move from danger. When we experience pleasure, the object causing it attracts us. There is a certain unconscious internal mechanism that is at work. For me, this is the soul. The issue of whether the soul is separable from the body remains a mystery.