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human. Aristotle didn’t explicitly answer this question, perhaps because he
wasn’t interested in it or, perhaps, because he was uncertain how to answer it.
When, in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, Aristotle achieved among
Christian scholars an authoritative status almost equal to Divine Revelation, the
implications of his view of the psyche for personal survival of bodily death
became a contentious issue, with some thinkers even suggesting that his true
view must have been that no parts of the soul, not even nous, are separable from
the body.
As for the rest of Aristotle’s view of psyche, at the bottom of the scale of souls
is the nutritive or vegetative soul, which accounts for assimilation and reproduc-
tion. It is found only in plants. Next is the sensitive soul, which includes all of the
powers of the vegetative soul plus the additional powers of sensation, which
gives rise to imagination, memory, desire, and local motion. Aristotle thought
that of the senses, touch and taste are the most important, for just as nutrition is
necessary for the preservation of any sort of life, so touch and taste are necessary
for the preservation of animal life. Other senses, such as sight, while not strictly
necessary to the preservation of animal life, nevertheless contribute to its well-
being. The sensitive soul is found only in nonhuman animals. Finally, higher
than all of the other souls is the rational soul, which possesses all of the powers of
the lower souls but also possesses nous, which is reason or intellect. Nous
is
responsible for scientific thought, which has as its object truth for its own sake. It
is also responsible for deliberation, which has as its object truth for the sake of
some practical or prudential objective.
In Aristotle’s view, with the possible exception of nous, the psyche and all of
its parts come into being (potentially) at the same time as their associated body
and are inseparable from it. Hence, with the possible exception of nous,
the
psyche perishes when the body perishes. Throughout most of De anima, the
psyche is considered to be the form of the body, the two constituting a single liv-
ing substance. Aristotle defined psyche, or soul, as the first “perfection” of a nat-
ural organic body having the potentiality for life. This, his most general definition
of soul implies that the soul perishes at bodily death. This is how Alexander of
Aphrodisias, one of Aristotle’s most important early commentators, later under-
stood him. However, Aristotle muddied this picture.
In
De anima, Aristotle wrote that the intellect “seems to be a substance that
comes about in a thing and is not corrupted.” He added:
Therefore, it is necessary that in [the soul] there be an intellect capable of becoming all
things, and an intellect capable of making itself understand all things. And the intel-
lect which is capable of understanding all things is . . . separated, not mixed or passible