Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

The priority of soul in Aristotle’s De anima: Mistaking categories? 271
keeping with the milder translation, that the question of soul-body relation
is not so much pre-empted as simply answered. We may call these
families of interpretations, which are, it must be conceded, not always
crisply or consistently delineated, the pre-emptory and responsive understandings
of Aristotle’s attitude towards the question of soul-body unity.
Put in these terms, I contend that the reasoning of the passage supports
the responsive interpretation: Aristotle supposes, rightly or wrongly,
that the technical apparatus invoked – the apparatus of homonymy
and entelecheia – provides a perfectly defensible answer to a perfectly appropriate
question, namely the question of what makes the soul and
body one. If the responsive interpretation is comparatively deflationary,
it is also consequential in another way. If this approach is broadly correct,
it will turn out that Aristotle’s answer, when rightly understood,
puts pressure on the otherwise attractive assimilation of hylomorphism
to a sort of tertium quid navigating between the mirroring excesses of reductive
materialism and Platonic dualism, an assimilation which has won
Aristotle plaudits amongst some of his modern-day interpreters. For his
answer requires a firm commitment to the ontological priority of soul,
one which is not only likely to arouse modern-day misgivings about the
priority of something which appears predicated of that to which it is
held to be prior, but which already places almost intolerable internal
burdens on the hylomorphic framework within which Aristotle develops
his account of soul-body relations.
Once this form of priority is understood, it becomes salutary to revisit,
and reinterpret, a passage of De anima I which has captured the
imaginations of many of Aristotle’s modern-day readers. 11 This is the
so-called ‘celebrated Rylean passage’, where Aristotle has seemed in a
striking way to prefigure a colourful suggestion of Gilbert Ryle to the
effect that those embarking on inquiry into the unity of soul and
body are already implicated in an especially unfortunate sort of mistake,
a category mistake. 12 Upon its reconsideration, I contend, this passage
proves both more alien and more interesting than has too often been
supposed.
11 I have discussed this passage from different angles in 2007, 1 – 23 and 1988,
140 – 149.
12 Ryle, 1949.