The Gospel of Hellas - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

aristotle
Plato considered the body as the prison of the soul. For Aristotle the
body was the instrument and organ of the soul. Aristotle’s inestimable merit
was his discrimination between soul and spirit through which he developed
the understanding of the difference between man and animal. Animals are
“animated,” have a soul; only man has spirit. Within the spirit of man a spark
of the divine spirit or nous appears and it is that which makes man an entelechy,
through which he is different from the animals.
The human physical body as a mere mineral substance is sarx; this Greek
word (sarx) for body, means that which is contained in the sarcophagus, the
coffin (German, Sarg). The principle which makes the body alive and lets it
rise from the “sacophagus” is the threptikon, the vegetative or nutritive soul.
Furthermore, the living being has the soul of sensitiveness, aisthetikon; the soul
of desiring, orektikon; and the soul of moving and understanding, kinetikon.
Man alone among all living beings has reason, noesis; this appears in its highest
aspect as dianoetikon. The dianoetikon comes from the spiritual world, from
nous: “It alone is capable of existence in isolation from all other psychic powers
… When mind is set free from its present conditions, it appears as just what it
is and nothing more; this alone is immortal and eternal and without it nothing
thinks.”
Here Aristotle with his impulse of the will opened the door to a new
experience of the soul. His concept of the nous poietikos is actually the willing
within the thinking. It is the active thought in contrast to the nous pathetikos,
the passive thought. The ethics of Aristotle appears as the philosophy of the
will. It is a philosophy of freedom.
In his Nikomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that the virtues are the actions of
freedom; without freedom they do not exist at all. “It is not possible to be good
in the strict sense without practical wisdom, nor practically wise without moral
virtue.” Virtues were for Aristotle degrees of development towards freedom.
He enumerated the ethical virtues: temperance, courage, justice, friendship.
Then he arrived at the dianoetic virtues: art (techne), reason (phronesis) and
action according to conscience (synesis). He gives here the word for conscience
as a dianoetic virtue standing between phronesis (reason) and sophia (wisdom).
Sophia-wisdom is higher than everything else. It is the highest good and the