Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

288
Christopher Shields
To be clear, what is at stake in the question of the force of this dative
is the broader question of whether the celebrated Rylean passage is
in fact in the slightest Rylean. The passage is not, I contend, because
categorial questions are not in view in De anima I 3 at all. Rather, Aristotle
is here concerned with questions pertaining to the appropriateness
of regarding the soul, a form which is evidently not a magnitude, 33 as
something capable of moving in its own right ( jah’ art|). His concerns
prove technical, involving features of his theory of motion, 34 but do not
engage the question of whether the soul is the proper subject or substrate
of the attitudes and actions he here discusses. This is perhaps
also why, later in De anima, he finds no difficulty in opening his discussion
of reason by introducing it as “the part of the soul by which it, viz.
the soul, thinks and understands” (Peq· d³ toO loq_ou toO t/r xuw/r è
cim~sjei te B xuwµ ja· vqome?; de An. 429a10 – 11). He is again not contradicting
himself, or speaking otherwise loosely, 35 but rather saying
what we might expect him to say, namely a human being is able to
think and understand in virtue of his soul, or simply, because of his soul.
This he might well say not despite his commitment to the priority of
the soul but precisely because of it. By contrast, it is hard to understand
how he might speak this way if he thought it foolish, and a category
mistake, to speak of the soul as a substance, on the grounds that it is
not a substance but a capacity or set of capacities belonging to the body.
Taking all that together, if there are category mistakes associated
with this passage, they reside not with Aristotle, but rather with those
interpreters who look to find in him a precursor thesis to Ryle’s socalled
category mistake. If that is right, then the error of these interpreters
is instructive because it is precisely the converse of the (alleged) error
Ryle fought to foist on Descartes. As Ryle would have it, Descartes
went wrong, along with those among his critics who thoroughly rejected
his commitment to immaterial souls but persisted in thinking the
mind or soul as an entity in its own right, by mistaking a collection
of capacities for a substance. Those who would have Aristotle emerge
as Ryle before his time have instead themselves mistaken a substance
for a collection of capacities. On Aristotle’s theory, the soul is not a
33 De An. 407b2: “in the first instance, it is not right to say that the soul is a magnitude”
(pq_tom l³m owmoqjak_r t¹k]ceim tµm xuwµm l]cehor eWmai).
34 I have characterized these technical features in Shields 2007.
35 As, for instance Hicks maintains. See Hicks 1907, 275.