Medicine and philosophy - Classical Homeopathy Online

212 Aristotle and his schooland cognition – we are told that they suffer from certain disturbances intheir recollective capacities because of the presence of moisture around their‘perceptual parts’, 19 but we are not informed about the normal physiologicalconditions for a successful operation of the recollective faculty.One reason for this may be that Aristotle believed his audience to besufficiently aware of these physical or physiological processes, perhaps becausethey were part of a medico-physiological tradition which he took forgranted, 20 or he may not have quite made up his mind on them himself;in both cases, lack of clarity in the texts 21 prevents us from seeing how allthese brief references to physiological processes fit together and are to beaccommodated within the more ‘formal’ account of On the Soul, in whichthe emphasis is, as I said, on what ensouled beings have in common andin which deviations are rarely considered (although they are occasionallytaken into account in passing in that treatise as well, as in De an. 421 a 22ff.,to be discussed below).However, it would also seem that these discrepancies are, at least partly,the result of a fundamental tension in Aristotle’s application of the conceptof ‘nature’ , that is, what it means for the psychic functions tooperate ‘naturally’ . On the one hand, there is what we mightcall his ‘normative’ (or perhaps ‘idealistic’) view of what it naturally meansto be a living plant, animal or human being – an approach which dominatesin On the Soul and in the Ethics. On the other hand, there is also a more‘technical’ or perhaps ‘relativistic’ perspective, in which he is concernedwith the mechanics of psychic processes and with a natural explanationof the variations that manifest themselves in the actual performance ofpsychic functions among different living beings (e.g. degrees of accuracyin sense-perception, degrees of intelligence, degrees of moral excellence).Thus from the one perspective he might say that every human being isintelligent by definition, but from the other that not all human beings areequally intelligent, or from the one perspective that all animals have senseperceptionby definition, but from the other that not all animals possess allsenses. Whilst some of these variations exist between different species (e.g.some species of animals have only one sense, touch, whereas others havemore), others exist between individual members of one species or betweendifferent types within one species (thus Aristotle distinguishes, within thehuman species, types such as the melancholics, dwarfs, ‘ecstatic’ people,19 Mem. 453 a 19ff.20 This seems to be the case with his concept of the melancholics; see ch. 5 in this volume.21 On the general lack of clarity of physiological descriptions in the Parva naturalia see Lloyd (1978)229.