Recovering the Body: A Philosophical Story

2. Body and Nature: Aristotle and the Stoics

chapter ii Body and nature: aristotle and the Stoics naturalizing the Forms: aristotle aristotle (who lived from 384 to 322 bce) is one of the giants of the history of philosophy. at the same time, he is a philosophical figure who does not fit readily into my narrative of the body. Unlike plato, he does not fit the dualist stream, since he does not accept that the mind and body are separate entities, and he is indifferent to the question of the immortality of the soul, something that was of primordial interest to plato. on the other hand, he does not fit neatly into the monist stream, as do the Stoics, whom we will meet next, as he does not admit, and is in fact scornful of, the possibility of a material soul. in the end, he is less interested in questions relating to mind and body than in questions relating to living vs. non-living things. the human body as such, along with what we would now call human consciousness, were not among his philosophical concerns. Further, as much as plato focused on that which is unchanging as the important work of the philosopher (confining the ever-changing to the world of appearances), aristotle focused precisely on explaining change, something he believed to be the hallmark of all living things, as well as the proper object of a science of nature. Several factors render the task of writing succinctly about aristotle very challenging. First, he wrote on a wide variety of topics (logic, ethics, metaphysics, rhetoric, politics and physics, as well as biology, botany, zoology, astronomy and more). as Jonathan Barnes tells us, “Choose a field of research, and aristotle laboured in it; pick an area of human endeavour, and aristotle 46 the road to MeChaniSM discoursed upon it. his range is astonishing.”1 yet less than a quarter of his writings have survived, and, of those that have, it cannot be said that they are systematic. in fact, it is generally agreed that the treatises we do have were lecture notes rather than polished texts written for wide circulation.2 as a result, there are widely diverging interpretations among specialists about aristotle’s position on matters that are of considerable philosophical importance to a discussion of the body (for example, regarding whether his theory of perception is materialist or dualist, or whether or not the soul is immortal). in sum, it is not easy to find a complete and coherent account of the human body in aristotle’s sizeable volume of work. on the other hand, a philosophical history of the body minus aristotle would be incomplete. So much of what came after him was a reaction to, or a modification of, his notions of the soul, which played a role in successive notions about the body—in Christianity, the renaissance and descartes, in particular—that not to bring him into my narrative would be a serious omission. in what follows, i will be concentrating on those aspects of aristotle’s work that relate most clearly to my themes about the body, in particular those that diverge from or contradict the teachings of plato, and those that later philosophers felt obliged to reject in their quest for a new philosophical and scientific paradigm.3 one of the most relevant facts of aristotle’s life, from the point of view of this narrative, is that he was a student of plato. he went to study at the academy in athens at the age of eighteen, and remained there for close to twenty years, until the death of his master. he returned to athens a dozen years later (after having, among other things, served as a tutor to alexander the great when the latter was a young teenager) and set up his own school, the lyceum, where he conducted empirical research and taught both his own selected students and members of the general public.4 Most of his works were written during this period in athens. When alexander died, aristotle left athens, fearing that the athenians might commit a second crime against philosophy (an allusion to the their condemnation of Socrates in 399).5 he died of natural causes in 322. aristotle and plato richard tarnas puts the relationship between the philosophies of these two ancient masters succinctly: “With aristotle, plato was, as it were, brought down Body and natUre 47 to earth.”6 We have seen that...