Daniel D Mackey (University of Pennsylvania)
In this paper, taken from part of my dissertation on Aristotle’s psychology and natural teleology, I argue that Aristotle’s notion of the nutritive soul is far more Platonic than is generally recognized. I argue that previous scholarship on Aristotle’s De Anima tended to treat his hylomorphic conception of the soul-body relation in relative isolation from his other works, which is a mistake. Additionally, much of the discussion surrounding the question of the immortality of the soul in Aristotelian psychology has focused primarily on his discussion of the intellect in the 3rd book of the De Anima. The current topic, however, has been addressed recently by authors including Eli Diamond’s Mortal Imitations of Divine Life (2015), Mariska Leunissen’s Explanation and Teleology in Aristotle's Science of Nature (2010), and previously by such works as David Balme’s “The Place of Biology in Aristotle's Philosophy" (1987) and J.G. Lennox’s “Are Aristotleian Forms Eternal?” (1985). I substantiate my argument by examining certain key statements that Aristotle makes in the De Anima, focusing primarily on DA II.4. For example, in his discussion of the nutritive soul, Aristotle says at 415a26-415b7 that:
"The most natural act [among living things] is the production of another like itself, an animal producing an animal, a plant a plant, in order that, as far as its nature allows, it may partake in the eternal and the divine. That is the goal towards which all things strive, that for the sake of which they do whatsoever their nature renders possible…Since then no living thing is able to partake in what is eternal and divine by uninterrupted continuance (for nothing perishable can forever remain one and the same), it tries to achieve that end in the only way possible to it, and success is possible in varying degrees; so it remains not indeed as the self-same individual but continues its existence in something like itself, not numerically one but specifically one."
(Transl. Barnes, emphasis my own.)
The significance of this paragraph for our own understanding of Aristotle’s notion of the nutritive soul largely depends upon how we unpack this final sentence within the context of Aristotle’s biological theory; Barnes here translates the word for "form,” eidei, as “specifically,” thus emphasizing the diachronic continuity of the categorical kind or class. Instead, I argue that Aristotle here affirms a much more Platonic conception of the nutritive soul (to threptikon) as a psychic capacity (dunamis) that “participates” (koinōnein, metechein) in “the eternal and the divine” (tou aei kai tou theiou), not by remaining “one in number, but [by remaining] one in form” (arithmōi men ouk hen, eidei d’ hen). I conclude that Aristotle’s language here reveals a highly Platonic influence on his own thinking about the relationship between bodily growth, natural cycles, and what he enigmatically calls “the eternal and the divine.” Aristotle clearly recognizes in his natural psychology a Platonically informed notion of “participation in form” as a process which he thinks constitutes an “eternal” and “divine” cycle of recurrent morphogenesis in nature.