Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

Aristotle on sleep and dreams 199For when the body is awake, the soul is its servant: it is divided among many partsof the body and is never on its own, but assigns a part of itself to each part of thebody: to hearing, sight, touch, walking, and to acts of the whole body; but themind is never on its own. However, when the body is at rest, the soul, being setin motion and awake, administers its own household and of itself performs all theacts of the body. For the body when asleep has no perception; but the soul, whichis awake, cognises all things: it sees what is visible, hears what is audible, walks,touches, feels pain, ponders, though being only in a small space. All functions ofthe body or of the soul are performed by the soul during sleep. Whoever, therefore,knows how to interpret these acts correctly, knows a great part of wisdom. (OnRegimen 4.86)He presents soul and body as two separate entities which co-operate in thewaking state but whose co-operation ends in sleep. 51 Aristotle, however,views the soul as the principle of organisation of all bodily functions, theformal apparatus which enables every organism to live and to realise itsvarious functions. It would be impossible for Aristotle to say – as the writerof On Regimen does – that in sleep the body is at rest but that the soulworks. Sleep is for Aristotle an affection of the complex of soul and bodydue to the heating and cooling of food and preventing the animal fromperceiving actual sense movements.It is obvious, therefore, that we cannot say that Aristotle is influenced hereby the medical writer’s views on dreams. It would be more appropriate tosay that the non-specialised student of nature gives a theoretical explanationor even a justification of the view held by the distinguished doctors; thisjustification is given entirely in Aristotle’s own terminology and based on hisown presuppositions (the two principles mentioned above). This procedureis completely in accordance with his general views on the relation betweennatural science and medicine discussed above.However, the incorporation of the medical view on the prognostic valueof dreams into his own theory of sleep and dreams does confront Aristotlewith a difficulty which he does not seem to address very successfully. For,as we have seen above, in On Dreams Aristotle says that dreams are basedon the remnants of small sensitive movements which we receive in thewaking state but do not notice at the time, because they are overruled bymore powerful movements which claim all our attention. Yet during sleep,when the input of stronger competing sensitive movements has stopped,the remnants of these small movements come to the surface and presentthemselves to us in the form of dreams. As I have already said, it is exactlythis mechanism to which Aristotle seems to refer in Div. somn. 463 a 7–11.51 On this conception see Cambiano (1980) 87–96.