Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

208 Aristotle and his schooland to take into account the overarching framework of ‘principal activitiesand affections’ of living beings for the sake of which,according to Aristotle, these parts and processes exist or occur. 8The result might well be a more complete picture of Aristotle’s viewson what it means to be a living being, that is to say, on how the variousconstituents that make up a living entity are interrelated. For, as Aristotlehimself indicates, a purely formal description of psychic powers and processesis insufficient for at least two reasons. First, as he repeatedly stresses(apparently in polemics against the Pythagoreans), the connection of a certainpsychic function with a certain bodily structure (an organ such as theeye, a process such as heating) is by no means coincidental; on the contrary,the bodily basis should have a certain nature or be in a certain condition inorder to enable the exercise of a certain psychic power (e.g. perception). 9Secondly, the material, bodily embedding of psychic functions accountsfor the occurrence of variations both in the distribution ofthese functions over various kinds of animals and in their exercise. Thesevariations may exist, or occur, among different species, but also among individualmembers of one species, or among types of individuals within onespecies, or even within one individual organism at different moments orstates (e.g. sleep versus waking, drunkenness versus sobriety). As this chapterwill try to show, variations in intellectual capacities and performancesamong different kinds of animals, among different members of one kind oreven within one individual on different occasions are explained by Aristotlewith a reference to bodily factors. 10 This raises the interesting question ofthe causal relationship between these intellectual performances and thebodily conditions corresponding to them, both in abnormal cases and innormal ones, and how the form–matter distinction is to be applied in thesevarious circumstances: does form fail to ‘master’ matter in these cases, andif so, why? Should we speak of one form (e.g. rationality) being present indifferent pieces of matter, or should we say that there are different levelson which the form–matter distinction can be made (as in typological variations)?Are the variations to be explained mechanically or teleologically,and are defects compensated for by other skills?In spite of this pronouncedly biological context, however, there are indicationsthat the study of the soul has, for Aristotle, a special status and is8 See Part. an. 645 b 15–28. This approach is illustrated by Lloyd (1992).9 See De an. 412 a 15, 21; 412 b 5, 12; 414 a 22, 26.10 This is not to say that other factors, such as habit and education ( ) play no rolehere; on the extent to which, according to Aristotle, cultural factors (education, local customs) mayaccount for variations in the degree of perfection of these capacities, see below.