De anima

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De anima in the Latin translation of Wilhelm von Moerbeke . Manuscript Rome, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vaticanus Palatinus lat. 1033, fol. 113r (early 14th century)

De anima (Latin; ancient Greek Περὶ ψυχῆς Perí psychḗs , German "About the soul") is a script by Aristotle . It treats the soul as the entity that causes a natural body to be given the predicate "living". The script consists of three books. It is the first known treatise from antiquity that specifically deals with the soul. Among other things, questions of epistemology , the philosophy of mind , philosophical psychology and the theory of action are addressed.

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As an introduction, Aristotle emphasizes in the first book that it is "one of the most difficult" to acquire reliable knowledge about the soul, but this is a worthwhile goal, both because of the great importance of this topic and because of the accuracy of the knowledge that can be achieved. Then he formulates questions that he wants to clarify: whether the soul is to be regarded as an individual thing (as a “certain something”), as quality or quantity; whether it is divisible or indivisible; whether it is simple (homogeneous) or compound; whether the souls of different types of living beings need different definitions; whether the soul has its own processes that are not part of the entire being and can therefore exist independently.

Then Aristotle turns to the earlier philosophers, the pre-Socratics and Plato . In doing so, he establishes that the “soul” has so far been understood as the cause of being alive, for the perception and self-movement of living beings . He describes the views of his predecessors and examines them for their validity, whereby he comes to negative results: the soul can neither be defined as that which moves itself, nor does it move in a circle, nor is it a harmony, a number or a spatial one extensive object composed of the elements.

Definition of soul

In the second and third books, Aristotle explains his own theory about the soul. He defines the soul as the entelechy ( act , reality, perfection) of a natural, "organic" body that has the potential to live. The term “organic” (from órganon , “tool”) is mostly translated as “equipped with organs”; the meaning is more likely to be “serving as an instrument”. By saying that the body potentially has life, it is meant that it is suitable for being alive; hence the soul can actually realize its animation. The soul is not an independent being that exists independently of the body, but its form. Therefore it cannot be separated from the body. It is to him as the sight is to the eye. With this Aristotle contradicts Plato's view that the soul has an independent existence. In terms of his teleological approach, he understands the soul as the ultimate cause of the body.

Soul power

Aristotle differentiates between various soul faculties , including nutrition, locomotion, perception and reason ( nous ). The soul is the life principle of all living beings - plants, animals, people. Different souls have different soul faculties; then he classifies living beings. Plants have the vegetative soul which is responsible for reproduction , growth and metabolism . In addition, all animals have the sensitive ability, the ability to sense perception, even if some only have the sense of touch, the only sense that every animal has. The distinction between the pleasant and the unpleasant and thus the desire, i.e. a life of feeling, emerges from the sense of touch. Most animals can move around on their own. Man alone has the intellectual faculty of reason, which can only be realized in the last of three phases of spiritual development: the actually human. Aristotle calls the first the vegetative (growing) and the second the animal (assertive) phase. To further clarify the connections, he examines the organs and functions of the individual senses in detail.

Epistemology

A necessary condition for the reason that produces knowledge is the faculty of imagination ( phantasía ), the activity of which is defined as a movement that is produced by the performance of a sensory perception. In addition, there is the "ability to strive" ( orexis ). In order for reason to be real and not only possible in humans, i.e. to appear concretely and to bring about knowledge, an active and a passive principle are required. Passive (“suffering”) or possible (potential) reason ( nous pathētikós , Latin intellectus possibilis ) denotes the faculty of imagination with regard to its ability to present sensory impressions to the mind for intellectual illumination. The active (or active, acting) reason ( nous poiētikós , Latin intellectus agens ) is then able to abstract, draw conclusions and form opinions. Passive reason is inherited biologically, while active reason comes into people “from outside”. The soul and with it passive reason is transitory, it dies with the body. Aristotle considers active reason imperishable; But by this he means - in contrast to the Christian doctrine of the soul - no immortality of the individual persons or individuals.

The forms that the intellect assumes, including the abstract mathematical, exist for Aristotle only in the objects perceived by the senses. Accordingly, they are not in the independent world of ideas that Plato assumed, directly accessible to the soul. Therefore, thinking takes place only through ideas that are derived from sensory perception. Without sensory perception there would be no experience and nothing could be understood. This basic statement later became famous in the Latin formulation Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius in sensu ("Nothing is in the mind that was not previously in the senses"). Another famous claim of Aristotle is that the human mind has no innate knowledge, but at the beginning of life is like a blank slate (Latin tabula rasa ) that can be written on with anything. In this sense it can be said that the intellect can "become anything". He can only know himself indirectly, namely as a side effect of an act of cognition directed at an external object.

reception

The Peripatetic Alexander of Aphrodisias took up the Aristotelian theory of the soul around 200 AD and took the view that the soul is mortal, which later earned him opposition from Christian authors. In the 6th century, the Neoplatonist Simplikios wrote a commentary on De anima , which was still much noticed in the early modern period , in which he endeavored to bring Aristotle's teaching into harmony with Neoplatonism.

In the Latin-speaking world of scholars of the Middle Ages, De anima first became known through the Latin translation that Jacob of Venice made around the middle of the 12th century at the latest. The detailed commentary with the integrated text of De anima in Arabic, which Averroes had written in the 12th century, had been available to scholars in a Latin translation by Michael Scotus since the 1230s . In the now onset of higher scholasticism , De anima was an authoritative textbook at universities. One of the numerous comments on this was written by Albertus Magnus in 1254/1257 , one of the most influential in 1267/1268 by Thomas Aquinas on the basis of a translation completed by Wilhelm von Moerbeke in 1266/67 . Aquinas emphasizes that the intellectus agens is not a separate substance, but a faculty of the human soul which forms one and the same substance with the intellectus possibilis . The Thomistic version of the Aristotelian doctrine of the soul established itself permanently in the Catholic Church.

In Renaissance Aristotelianism, the discussion about the understanding of De anima continued. It was also conducted among Protestant theologians. Martin Luther turned against the scholastic endeavors to show that philosophical and theological doctrines were in agreement, and emphasized that in Aristotelian doctrine the soul is mortal.

Editions and translations

Greek original

  • Klaus Corcilius (translator): Aristoteles: About the soul / De anima. Meiner, Hamburg 2017, ISBN 978-3-7873-2789-8 (Greek text based on the edition by Aurelius Förster with a list of the deviations from the edition by WD Ross )
  • Olof Gigon (translator): Aristotle: From heaven, From the soul, From poetry . Artemis, Zurich 1950 (only translation)
  • Gernot Krapinger (Ed.): Aristoteles: De Anima. About the soul. Reclam, Stuttgart 2011, ISBN 978-3-15-018602-2 (Greek text with translation)
  • William David Ross : Aristotelis De Anima . Oxford University Press, Oxford 1956 (critical edition)
  • Horst Seidl (ed.): Aristoteles: About the soul . Meiner, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-7873-1381-8 (Greek text based on the critical edition by Wilhelm Biehl and Otto Apelt with translation and commentary)
  • Thomas Buchheim (ed.): Aristoteles: De anima - About the soul. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 2016, ISBN 978-3-534-26817-7 (Greek text of the critical edition by Ross with translation, introduction and commentary)

Late antique paraphrase in Arabic and Persian tradition

  • Rüdiger Arnzen : Aristotle 'De Anima. A lost late antique paraphrase in Arabic & Persian tradition. Arabic text with commentary, historical source studies & glossaries. Brill, Leiden 1998 ( Aristoteles Semitico-Latinus , 9), online . (Publication of the dissertation Bochum 1994).

See also

literature

Comments and research on the work
  • Hubertus Busche : The soul as a system. Aristotle's Science of the Psyche . Meiner, Hamburg 2001, ISBN 3-7873-1591-8
  • Michael Durrant (Ed.): Aristotle's De Anima in focus . Routledge, London 1993, ISBN 0-415-05340-4
  • Andree Hahmann: Aristotle's "On the Soul": A Systematic Commentary. Reclams Universal Library, Stuttgart 2016, (introductory comment)
  • Hans-Jürgen Horn : Studies on the third book of the Aristotelian script De anima . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1994, [ Hypomnemata 104] ISBN 3-525-25204-8
  • Christian Jung : The double nature of the human intellect in Aristotle. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8260-4407-6
  • Martha C. Nussbaum / Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (eds.): Essays on Aristotle's De Anima . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1992, ISBN 0-19-824461-4
  • Georg Picht : Aristotle's De anima . Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1992, ISBN 3-608-91415-3
  • Ronald Polansky: Aristotle's De Anima . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007, ISBN 978-0-521-86274-5 (detailed commentary)
  • Michael Wittmann : Vox atque sonus: Studies on the reception of the Aristotelian script "De anima" and its meaning for music theory . Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus-Verlagsgesellschaft 1987.
reception
  • Henry J. Blumenthal : Aristotle and Neoplatonism in Late Antiquity. Interpretations of the De Anima . Duckworth, London 1996, ISBN 0-7156-2719-8
  • Matthias Perkams: Self- Confidence in Late Antiquity. The Neoplatonic Commentaries on Aristotle's De Anima . De Gruyter, Berlin 2008 [Sources and studies on philosophy, 85] ISBN 978-3-11-020492-6
  • Sascha Salatowsky: De Anima. The reception of Aristotelian psychology in the 16th and 17th centuries . Grüner, Amsterdam 2006 [Bochum studies on philosophy, 43] ISBN 90-6032-374-2

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ De anima II 1, 412a19-412b6. See Abraham P. Bos: The Aristotelian doctrine of the soul: contradiction against the modern development hypothesis , in: The concept of the soul in the history of philosophy , ed. Hans-Dieter Klein, Würzburg 2005, p. 92f.
  2. ↑ De anima II 1, 413a4.
  3. ↑ De anima II 3, 414a29-b6.
  4. ↑ De anima III 3, 428b30-429a2.
  5. ↑ De anima III 8, 432a3-10.
  6. ↑ De anima III 4, 429b29-430a2.
  7. ↑ De anima III 4, 429b5-9.
  8. ↑ Albert the Great: De anima , ed. Clemens Stroick, Münster 1968 (Editio Coloniensis Vol. 7/1)
  9. ↑ Thomas Aquinas: Sentencia libri de anima , ed. René Antoine Gauthier , Rome and Paris 1984 (Editio Leonina vol. 44/1)