Aparna Ravilochan (St. John's College)
Vegetal, Animal, and Menses in Aristotle's Generation of Animals
In Generation of Animals II.3, Aristotle offers the curious comparison that menstrual fluid, the material cause of an animal, is “no less alive than a plant is” (736a33–5). The assertion indicates that something about the potential for animal life might be illuminated by an analogy with plant life. But what, exactly, do we learn from the comparison?
Keeping in mind De Anima’s division of soul into the nutritive, perceptual, and rational “parts”, it would seem that an animal’s material substratum, taken alone, exhibits the nutritive activity characteristic of vegetal life. Some scholars have supposed this to imply that the nutritive existence of animal matter exhibits expressly plantlike qualities and lacks features of animality until the perceptual soul contributed by a male parent confers them. Sophia Connell (2016) claims: “The male ensures that ...an animal rather than a plant will come to be” (177, my emphasis); Devin Henry (2006) that the male conveys “the property that makes the creature an animal” (283). Other scholars (Peck 1942, Lange 1983, Tuana 1989) hypothesize that menstrual fluid’s “life” is not expressly vegetal but instead comprises only the “lower” life capacities for growth, metabolism, and reproduction that are observed among plants, while the “higher” animal capacities (sense, appetite, movement) are separately conferred by the perceptual soul. On this view, both sets of capacities are discrete, independent powers which aggregate into the capacities for a complete animal life.
In animal generation, then, does vegetality transform into animality, or does a natural thing with plant powers come to acquire animal powers? In this paper, I resist both these views. The plant analogy, I argue, allows us to understand how nutritive soul for animal is a precise potentiality for perceptual (animal) soul rather than an aleatory existence upon which order and determinacy are stamped. I will argue that vegetality and animality are not categorically different forms of life but are related to one another as potentiality to actuality: nutritive animal activities occur not separately from perceptual activities but instead as constitutive of the animal’s capacity for those perceptual activities. I draw support for this view from Rabinoff (2015), who observes that “among animals (for whom nutrition is a part of the soul and not the whole soul), we can observe how nutritive activities are ‘conditioned by perception’ (736)”. For example, hunger is an appetite that belongs to perceptual soul, but its satisfaction relies upon an activity of nutritive soul (i.e., nourishment). This conditioning of the lower soul by the higher, I contend, is thoroughgoing: every feature of an animal’s nutritive activity is aimed toward its perceptual function and animal character. This implies that a plant differs from an animal not because it has “vegetal” rather than “animal” life, but because its form of life is not the potentiality for any further form of life. Nutritive soul, therefore, should be understood as a power that for plants is an irreducible life activity and for animals a potentiality for further powers.