Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Aristotle on sleep and dreams 173about ‘ecstatic’, clairvoyant experiences such as told about Hermotimus ofClazomenae and other ‘shamans’. 11 It seems to have appealed also to Platoand even, if the indirect tradition can be trusted, to Aristotle in his earlyyears. 12 Yet both thinkers seem to have emancipated themselves from thisposition. For, at other places in his work, Plato seems to allow that oursleeping lives somehow reflect our mental state in the waking life. Thus ina well-known passage in the Republic, he suggests that dreams reflect anindividual’s spiritual state in that they show whether the soul is calm andorderly, guided by reason, or subjected to emotions and desires:(I mean) those desires that are awakened in sleep, when the rest of the soul – therational, gentle, and ruling part – slumbers. Then the beastly and savage part, fullof food and drink, casts off sleep and seeks to find a way to gratify itself. You knowthat there is nothing it won’t dare to do at such a time, free of all control by shameor reason. It doesn’t shrink from trying to have sex with a mother, as it supposes,or with anyone else at all, whether man, god, or beast. It will commit any foulmurder, and there is no food it refuses to eat. In a word, it omits no act of follyor shamelessness . . . On the other hand, I suppose that someone who is healthyand moderate with himself goes to sleep only after having done the following:First, he rouses his rational part and feasts it on fine arguments and speculations;second, he neither starves nor feasts his appetites, so that they will slumber andnot disturb his best part with either their pleasure or their pain, but they’ll leaveit alone, pure and by itself, to get on with its investigations, to yearn after andperceive something . . . whether it is past, present or future; third, he soothes hisspirited part in the same way, for example, by not falling asleep with his spirit stillaroused after an outburst of anger. And when he has quieted these two parts andaroused the third, in which reason resides, and so takes rest, you know that it isthen that he best grasps the truth and that the visions that appear in his dreamsare least lawless. 13As for Aristotle, the view that in sleep our souls regain their ‘proper nature’seems, at best, to have been a Platonic relic appealing to him in his earlyyears, soon to be abandoned in favour of his characteristic ‘hylomorphic’theory of the soul as the formal aspect of the natural soul–body compositethat makes up a living being. 14 In this view, soul and body are jointlyaffected by experiences (pathē ) such as sleep; but how this works out withregard to whether our sleeping lives somehow reflect our waking lives, isnot immediately obvious. Thus a passage in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethicspresents a certain ambivalence:11 Apollonius, Mirabilia 3; see the discussion by Bremmer (1983) 24–53.12 For a discussion of the fragments from his lost works On Philosophy and Eudemus see van der Eijk(1994) 89–93.13 Plato, Republic 571 c ff., tr. Grube and Reeve (1997) 1180.14 See the discussion in van der Eijk (2000b).