The Judgment of Animals in Classical Greece: Animal Sculpture and ...

The third occurrence of the term in Aristotle is in his treatise Memory and
Recollection, which considers these two functions products of the senses and places them
in the realm of the thinking faculty. Aristotle uses zw|~on to refer to an image held by
memory. He speaks of memory in clearly visual terms. According to him, memory is a
mental state sustained by a fa&ntasma, that is, an impression or image of a thing that has
been experienced through sense perception (ai1sqhsij) in the past, and is now stored onto
the soul (and the part of the body that contains it) in a certain capacity. 619 This capacity,
which is, in turn, affected by circumstances, such as the age of the percipient subject,
dictates the vigor with which the initial impression or image can be retrieved. Aristotle
perceives of this image as having a dual essence: it is a present affection, but, at the same
time, it resembles or stands for the absent thing that originally stimulated it; therefore, it
is an aid to memory. In order to elucidate this point, Aristotle draws an analogy from the
realm of the arts:
For example, the gegramme/non (picture drawn) on a tablet is both a zw|~o&n and
a[n] ei0kw&n, and one and the same thing in both of these, although what it is to be
these two things is not the same, and it is possible to behold it both as a zw|~on and
as a[n] ei0ko&na, so too one ought to conceive of the fa&ntasma that is in us as
being itself something in its own right, and as being of something else. Insofar,
then, as it is something in its own right, it is a (qew&rhma) or a fa&ntasma, but
insofar as it is of something else, it is a certain kind of ei0kw_n and reminder.
619 Important for understanding what Aristotle means by ai1sqhsij is his clarification (Mem. 450a) that “the
stimulus produced impresses a sort of likeness of the percept (ai0sqh&matoj), just as when men seal with
signet rings”; translation: W. S. Hett, ed., tr., Aristotle VIII. On the Soul. Parva Naturalia. On Breath
(Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1936; repr. 1995) 295. Additional evidence for how Aristotle understood
the term derives from his treatise On the Soul (II. 12.424a), where he explains (ai%sqhsiv) in the following
way: “we must understand as true generally of every sense that sense is that which is receptive of the form
of sensible objects without the matter, just as the wax receives the impression of the signet-ring without the
iron or the gold, and receives the impression of the gold or bronze, but not as gold or bronze”; translation:
Hett, Aristotle VIII 135. According to W. J. T., Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago,
1986) 14, n. 13, the idea of memory images as impressions in a wax tablet is also discussed by Plato in the
Theaetatus (without documentation). For a brief discussion of Aristotle’s theory of fanta&smata and its
influence upon philosophers like Hobbes, Hume and also modern psychology, see Mitchell, Iconology 10-
11 and 14-15, n. 13.
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