Body and Soul in Ancient Philosophy

Aristotle on desire and action 293
[3] Aristotle did not require the presence of any concurrent physical
process because he understood the relevant matter as primitively endowed
with capacities for ungrounded psychological activity. 1
Both sets of interpreters, so understood, explicitly accept [1] (which is
equivalent to [1]* above) and tacitly assume [2]*, en route to their fundamentally
opposed conclusions. Aristotle, I shall argue, did not accept
either of their shared assumptions. Indeed, his position calls into question
the Cartesian map which most current philosophers and interpreters
use to locate themselves and others in this area. We have to recover
his very different standpoint before we can see that his apparently disappointing
account of how desire moves the body constitutes an intelligible
alternative to contemporary (20th/21st cent.) orthodoxies.
2. De anima I.1.1: Fear and anger: An overview
Anger and fear, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere, are treated by
Aristotle as inseparable in definition as well as in existence from states of
the body. More specifically: the type of desire for revenge which defines
anger cannot be defined without reference to certain physiological
processes (boiling of the blood). The latter play a role in determining
the type of desire which is present in anger. Desire of this type is an inextricably
and essentially psycho-physical process. It is a-boiling-of-theblood-type
of desire for revenge. 2
The type of desire for revenge which the angry experience resists
decomposition into distinct physical and psychological components.
As Aristotle comments: “We have said that the affections of the soul
are inseparable from the physical matter of living beings in the way in
which anger and fear are inseparable and not in the way in which
line and plane are.” (403b17 – 19) In this passage, he distinguishes
these cases in terms of distinct types of separability:
Anger and fear: they are existentially inseparable and inseparable in definition
from perceptual matter.
1 Dualists would present desire as the purely psychological efficient cause of the
material change involved in action. They would also see desire as the manifestation
of a capacity of a separate substance: the dualist’s soul.
2 For a fuller statement of this view, see Charles 2009.