In the late 16^th and early 17^th
centuries, a number of ‘liberal Jesuit scholastics’ produced the last great
synthesis of Aristotelian psychology with Christian theology. In this
magnificently sympathetic reconstruction of their systems of the soul, Dennis
Des Chene rescues Toletus, Suarez, and the other ‘schoolmen’ from neglect which
resulted from scornful dismissals by Descartes and his fellows. Deliberating
bypassing the political and medical contexts of their work, and focusing almost
exclusively on Jesuit rather than other, ‘dissident’ Renaissance
Aristotelianisms, Des Chene focusses intensely on intellectual history, what he
calls at one point ‘the flurry of subtleties’ of these astonishing systematic
commentaries on Aristotle.

Folk everywhere, according to persuasive
cross-cultural studies, tend to use hierarchical biological classifications,
which are much closer to Aristotle’s hierarchical taxonomy of the parts of the psyche
than to modern systematics. It’s not surprising, then, that the
sophisticated philosophico-religious hybrid so deeply embedded in pre-modern
Western culture still has intuitive appeal: ‘by shedding heresies and resisting
the allure of pagan revivals’, Des Chene argues, the Church had ‘arrived at a
phenomenologically plausible and philosophically defensible position that
balanced the claims of soul and body’. In the weight of detail, it’s almost
possible to forget the tension between Aristotle’s naturalism and the
individual incorporeal soul required by Christian metaphysics and morality. Des
Chene does note, in a brief chapter on ‘propositions to be held by faith’, the
tendency of textbooks and commentaries to pump up the confident rhetoric as
they near ‘the loose bricks in the edifice’.

In his long first chapter, ‘Facts and Texts’, Des
Chene presents the data of the ‘science of the soul’ (scientia de anima). This
exposition is a brilliant success, immersing the reader in rich descriptions of
‘the powers and forms that populate the Aristotelian world’. We are to study
both what is in common to all living things, and the idiosyncrasies of
particular plants and animals. Framing the study of life neatly within a
coherent general natural philosophy, the Aristotelian draws on common
experience and tradition to delineate the nature of vital operations, from
vegetation through sensation, appetite, and local motion, to intellection.

Generation can be by putrefying matter acted on by
the sun (worms), by birth (horses and humans), or both (wasps and ants): Des
Chene works hard to help us ‘recover that sense of the ease with which
nonliving and living could exchange places’. The ceaseless interchange in
nutrition between body and world means that creatures are tightly coupled, by
way of the vegetative soul, with their environment. (It is odd that here and
elsewhere Des Chene says little about the practical and medical implications of
Aristotelian physiology, which often merged with other ancient medical
traditions to drive radically holistic therapeutic regimes). A concise account
of debates about sensation and memory in animals leads in to a powerful
comparison between perceptual illusions and monsters as abnormal data.

Anatomy and function are tightly linked in, for
example, Aristotelian views of hearing, voice, and speech. Des Chene is willing
to offer illuminating modern comparisons, drawing on 20^th-century
physiology in asking whether the sense of touch is a single sense or not, or
linking the Aristotelian variable ‘corpulence’ in describing sound and voice
with our notion of ‘fat’ analog sound. In their interest in the diversity of
forms, as on many other topics, the Aristotelians are favorably compared with
Descartes, to whom, Des Chene judges, ‘the variety of the living world matters
little’: ‘ever in a hurry’ to reduce and explain away organic powers, Descartes
would offer mechanical accounts or imitations of animals in order to eliminate
the category of the living. In a companion volume, Spirits and Clocks:
machine and organism in Descartes (Cornell University Press, 2001), Des
Chene expands on this interpretation and assessment of Cartesian physiology:
here he is concerned more to show us the richness and sophistication of what
was lost.

The later parts of the
book, which address internal disputes between Thomists and other Aristotelians
about the soul’s distinctness from its parts, how to count powers, and whether
souls are divisible, may be of less general interest. One intriguing
controversy concerned the boundaries of the body. Most authors agreed that milk
and seed, like hair and nails, are not themselves animated, but there was
considerable doubt about the blood.

I expected more detail here on Aristotelian
treatments of the psychophysiology of the internal senses (memory, imagination,
and the ‘common sense’), discussed in commentaries on Aristotle’s Parva
Naturalia: but Des Chene says nothing about sleep and dreams, or about the
brain and the nervous system. How did the late Aristotelians deal with
Aristotle’s own cardiocentrism, and how did they update his sketchy accounts of
the transmission of information to the heart in eddies of pneuma roiling
through the blood? Did they deal with psychological disorders in any depth? How
did they interpret the passages in which Aristotle seems to acknowledge severe
bodily constraints on the purity and stability of thought? Did they connect
their views on the metaphysics of mixtures with their accounts of the proper
blending (krasis) of bodily fluids?

One source of the
appeal of the Aristotelian soul is that it covers a continuum between reason
and life, such that students of the soul must attend to the concrete material
realizations of deliberative and rational operations. Des Chene acknowledges
that this tradition may appeal to ‘those philosophers now who find the project
of “embodying” the mind attractive’. Yet, as his sad conclusion acknowledges,
contemporary versions of embodied and ‘situated’ cognition, whether faithful to
Aristotle himself or not, seek to reunite ‘vitality and cognition’ at a price
‘that neither Descartes nor his Aristotelian predecessors would have been
willing to pay. The mind will live, but it will also die, with the body’.
Cognition and emotion are embedded in the mortal body and the changing world
even more thoroughly than the brave Jesuits could accept.

© 2002 John Sutton

John Sutton, Ph.D. teaches
philosophy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He is working on a
book about interdisciplinarity in the sciences of memory.

Categories: Philosophical