Journal of the History of Philosophy

On the Relations of Soul to Body in Plato and Aristotle THOMAS M. OLSHEWSKY MY CONCERN IN THIS PAVER is to give an exposition of, apology for, and to draw implications from, the following contrastive statement: On Plato's understanding, the soul is in the body; but Aristotle's account implies that the body is in the soul. On first glance, the former clause seems commonplace and quite intelligible, while the latter seems to do violence both to history and to common sense. One can perhaps understand how a soul could be in a body, on analogy to a loaf of bread in a breadbox, or to a pilot in a ship--or even to a ghost in a machine; but a reversal of the relation of body and soul seems as ludicrous as a reversal of these analogue relations of containment and of agency. Yet, I hope to show that Plato's account is an unintelligible one, especially in the light of his own ontology; that while Aristotle never asserted the relationship that I claim for him, his account of body and soul clearly requires it; that Aristotle's account is both consistent with his own ontology and intelligible in its own right. I. The first clause of the aphorism is prima facie unproblematic, the characterization in the Phaedo of the body as the prison house of the soul being a commonplace. How we are to understand the soul/body distinction in Plato, together with this container model for their relationship, is not all that clear. Indeed, we find shifting concerns, if not shifting concepts, through the several dialogues. Crombie has astutely delineated three different contexts in which the soul/body distinction is of concern: (1) the religious context, in which the concern is with the soul surviving the body after death; (2) the psychological context in which a distinction is drawn between the psychological and the physiological, and their interaction considered; (3) the ethical context, in which concerns with spiritual needs and activities are distinguished from concerns with carnal needs and activities.2 That there are conceptual shifts from context to context can readily be argued; that one context will frequently be coalesced or confused with another seems patent; that all three contexts of concern with the relation of body to soul exist 1 An early version of this paper was presented under the title "Conceptions of Psyche in Plato and Aristotle" to the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 1972. My thanks for subsequent criticisms by David Hamlyn and Henry Schankula, making it impossible for this to be that version. I must also thank T. M. Robinson, Jesse deBoer, Hippo Apostle, and Alan Perreiah for their comments on a later version. I have cited quotations from Plato and Aristotle by the standard texts, using a variety of translations, some my own, and noting Greek terms where interpretation might be questionable. I. M. Crombie, An Examination of Plato's Doctrines (London, 1963),I, 293ff. [391] 392 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY in Plato's dialogues is evident. The first problem we face is to find some coherent concept or set of concepts of psych~ which will give adequate understanding for the relation of the soul to the body, while acknowledging the various concerns involved. The concerns that dominate in the Phaedo are the religious and the ethical ones. The conception of the soul is unitary in characterization and discrete from the conception of the body. By Book IV of the Republic we have a tripartite characterization of the soul with an accent on at least functional integration with the body. Here, psychological concerns dominate in an ostensively ethical context--an ethical context, however, in which a soul/body distinction is not accented, but where moral defects are rather accounted for in terms of disfunctional relationships within the soul. This requires Plato to fudge a bit in the latter part of the Republic, maintaining that only a portion of the soul survives the body.3 We can perhaps see in the mythical account of the Phaedrus an attempt to reconcile these several concerns, with the surprising result that divine souls as well as human ones have a tripartite composition of...