Christof Rapp

Interaction of Body and Soul: What the Hellenistic Philosophers Saw

and Aristotle A voided

Anti-dualistic philosophers of mind often refer to the problem of inter­action between body and soul. If we understand body and soul as two different substances and if, like Descartes for example, we combine these two substances with different or even incompatible characteristics, such as "being extended" and "having awareness", then, indeed, it seems dif­ficult to explain how one of t hese two substances can causalJy act upon the other. With some phenomena, however, it is hard to deny that some kind of interaction takes place; for example in sensual perception some information must be transmitted from the sense organs to the soul, and in intentional action the decision of the soul must somehow be communi­cated to the bodily limbs t hat have to carry out the intended action. Thus the obvious interaction between body and soul raises serious difficulties. In early modern philosophy, the most famous, though perhaps not the most attractive, responses to these difficulties are occasionalism, various kinds of parallelism, and monism of the Spinozist type.

lt is remarkable that also ancient philosophers often refer to pheno­mena that are, at least, "common to body and soul", though, of course, t heir context is quite different. Whereas the modern critics and successors of Descartes are primarily interested in t he possibility of causal inter­action, the ancient concept of being common to body and soul is much broader. In addition to causal affections, it comprises relations like mere cooperation, simultaneous affections of body and soul, mere co-variation, epiphenomenal reaction, etc. The examples of cooperation or interaction between body and soul are taken mainly from three domains : perception (in various senses), action, and emotion . In the long run, I think, it would be wor thwhile to collect and classify the various examples that have been given of the interaction of body and soul together with the various conclu-

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sions that the adherents of the various philosophical schools have drawn from these examples.

Of course, there is no chance to compress such a project into a few pages. So I have decided to treat only one of these three domains, the domain of emotions. I have picked emotions for several reasons. The most important is that the emotions are often used as the paradigmatic case of the interaction or cooperation between body and soul. In many passages discussing the question whether there are states or properties of the soul that affect the body too, philosophers refer to the example of emotions. Obviously, they want to remind their readers of the non-controversial experience that things like anger and fear - though they are undoubtedly affections of the soul - are combined with immediate reactions of the body. When we are angry, the blood surges through our veins, when we are frightened, we become pale and start shivering, etc. References to this kind of examples can be found in Aristotle, Epicurus, Lucretius, and some Stoic sources as weil. Comparing the different uses the various philosophers make of these examples I found that there is one point which is important or even crucial for the Hellenistic philosophers, but is completely absent from the relevant passages in Aristotle: While the former ones assume that the psychosomatic character of emotions requires causal interaction and that causal interaction cannot be explained within a non-monistic system, Aristotle's account of more or less the same examples completely abstains from the terminology of causal interaction. This seems tobe remarkable in itself; but if it were possible to extend the significance of this observation beyond the example of emotions it would even have a major impact on the interpretation of Aristotle's concept of the soul. The remainder of this paper is centered around this observation; for strategic reasons I start with the discussion of the Hellenistic philosophers to sketch the background of their causal account of interaction between body and soul; in the later parts of the paper I am going to introduce the Aristotelian approach and to draw some more general conclusions.

Epicurus and Lucretius

The Epicurean philosophy of rnind centers on the argumentative target that the soul is mortal. Since his opponents who advocate the immor­tality of the soul have made incorporeality the most important precondi­tion of the immortality of the soul, Epicurus has to argue that the soul is corporeal. According to his general atomistic physics, this corporeal-

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ity implies that the soul is a fine-grained body that is diffused through the whole aggregate that constitutes the living thing. Epicurus carefully avoids bringing body and soul into plain opposition; instead of speaking of body and soul, he prefers the formulation "the soul and the remaining part of the aggregate" .1 This, however, does not mean that he regards the concept of soul as redundant, nor that the function of the soul can be equated with the rest of the body. On the contrary, it is the soul that is responsible for some essential capacities, for example perceiving, thinking, feeling, mobility, and "those features whose loss would mean our death" 2 ,

i.e., the vital functions . When the soul has been separated from the rest of the aggregate, what remains cannot have one of these capacities. On the other hand, the soul must be contained by the rest of the aggregate in order to display these functions.

Epicurus' Letter to Herodotus , in which he outlines his essential as­sumptions about the soul, is not very explicit about the material con­stitution of the soul. He compares the relation of body and soul to the blending of wind and heat and adds that there must be something beside wind and heat that is even finer than they are; this additional finest ele­ment is mere co-affectability ( sumpatheia) with the rest of the aggregate, which again is especially useful in sense perception.3 What starts as a mere comparison in the Letter to Herodotus is taken up by the later testimonies and Epicureans in a literal way, identifying wind and heat as elements of the soul. According to Aetius, the Epicurean soul is a blend consisting of one fire-like, one air-like, one wind-like, and a fourth element, which is unnamed. This fourth element is responsible for sensation because of its unique fineness. 4 Therefore, the fourth element in the report of Aetius reminds us of the third element that Epicurus himself mentions in the Letter to Herodotus . Lucretius confirms the doctrine of the four elements of the soul,5 but is also eager to show that these four components are blended in a specific way such that no one element can be distinguished and no capacity can be separated;6 together they make up a homogeneous body with multiple capacities. It is by no means clear what this assertion amounts to; on the one hand, it seems as if the four elements of the soul are somehow melted together and blended to an entirely new stuff that is no longer governed by the principles of elementary change. On the other hand, in some contexts, Lucretius still makes use of the original powers of fire, air, and wind , for example when he says that the element of fire

2

3

4

5

6

Letter to Herodotus 64 ( = LS 14A 3) . As usual, 'LS' refers to: Long/Sedley (1987). Letter to Herodotus 63 (= LS 14A 2) . Letter to Herodotus 63 (= LS 14A 1). Aetius 4.3.11 (= LS 14C). Lucretius 3.231-245. Lucretius 3.262-273 (= LS 14D 1).

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prevails in the minds of irritable persons, while cold wind prevails in the minds of the cowards and the timorous people.

We have said that, for Epicurus, the soul is responsible for all ca­pacities involving any sort of consciousness, such as perceiving, thinking, feeling, but that, at the same time, the soul is responsible for all vital functions, thus qualifying itself as a principle of life. In Lucretius, these two aspects of the soul reappear in a technical distinction between animus or mens, on the one hand, and anima, on the other. Lucretius concen­trates the controlling faculties in the animus; the animus js like the head, he says, and it dominates the entire aggregate. But while the anima, or as he sometimes says, the rest of the anima {hereby using anima as the broader term, which includes the more specific term animus) is distributed throughout the body, Lucretius insists that the animus itself is firmly lo­cated in the central place of the ehest. 7 This information may strike us as odd, for one could wonder why the animus needs a well-defined place at all, and one could also wonder how Lucretius could find the location of the animus. The answer to the first question is that, according to Lucretius, it often happens that the body is sick while the mind is in a pleasant state or that - conversely - someone has a poor state of mind, but flourishes in his body. Lucretius' point is that if the animus were distributed through­out the body, it could not remain unaffected by what the body undergoes, hence it must have its own separate location. The answer to the second question is that we can feel where the animus is located, since the animus is the place where fear leaps up and where joys caress us. Because we can feel that these affections arise in our ehest, we know that this is the place of the animus.8

This is the background against which we must see the following ar­guments. Since the animus is spatially relatively separated, it is possible that the animus itself possesses its own understanding and its own joys , without any affection of the rest of the aggregate. And this in turn means that the rest of the anima and the body are not co-affected. But this is only one half of the story. Like other philosophers before him, Lucretius introduces the example of emotions to elucidate the connection between the soul and the body. Obviously the pure joy that can be entertained by the animus itself is not what we usually take to be a fully-fledged emotion. An ordinary strong emotion is expected to have an impact on the body, too. This is why Lucretius says that in the case of a powerful fear, for example, we see the whole anima throughout the limbs share its (the animus') sensation, with sweat and pallor arising over the whole body, the tongue crippled and the voice choked, the eyes darkened, the

7

8 Lucretius 3.140. Lucretius 3.14lff. (= LS l 4B 1).

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ears buzzing, the limbs buckling. Sometimes, he says, we even see men collapse from the rnind's (animus') terror.9

According to the simple atomistic theory of the soul, one could easily explain these phenomena by saying that the soul is distributed throughout the body and hence has no problem to co-affect the different parts of the soul. But since Lucretius insists that the animus must have a determinat e limited location within the body, one additional step in the argument is needed. The first thing we can conclude from the observation of these strong bodily reactions to an affection of the animus, is, according to Lucretius, that the animus is closely linked with the anima or the rest of the anima, which is spread all over the body. The anima is d irectly impelled by the animus' power and it hastens to forward this impulse to ~he surrounding parts of the body. Commenting on the processing of t he 1mpulse between animus and anima, Lucretius even says that together they constitute a single nature. This again could raise the question why some affections of the animus are forwarded to the anima and some are not. Anyway, he draws a second conclusion from the description of strong ernotions; he says:

This same reasoning proves the nature of the animus and the anima to be corporeal. For when it is seen to hurl the limbs forward, to snatch t he body out of sleep, to a lter the face, and to govern and steer the entire man - and we see that none of these is possible wit hout touch, nor touch without body - you must surely admit that the animus and the anima are constituted with a corporeal nature.10

lt is this kind of interaction between the anima and the body t hat deserves our attention. Epicurus himself formulated one of the premises of this argurnent. In his Letter to H erodotus , he writes that we cannot think of the incorporeal per se except as void. The void cannot be acted upon, but it is clear that the soul can be acted upon. Hence the soul must be corporeal, because otherwise it could not be acted upon and could not suffer anything at all. 11 For Epicurus, the corporeality of the soul is not only the condition for its interaction with the rest of the bodily aggregate, but is also the precondition for its affectability tout court . T his again presupposes that if there is an affection at all, it must be of t he kind that is typical of bodily affections. When he speaks of sumpatheia, co-affectability, his point, then, is not that the soul undergoes something caused by the body, but rather that body and soul are affected by the same thing at the same time in a similar way. In Lucretius, the anima t akes on the properties of the animus at once, since, strictly speaking, t hey share one and the same nature. The contact between anima and body is made possible by tauch. This again strongly suggests that, in

9 Lucretius 3.152-158 (= LS l4B 2) . 10 Lucretius 3.161-167 (= LS l 4B 3) . 11 Letter to Herodotus 67 (= LS 14A 7) .

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the case of strong emotions, the body is causally affected by the animus. Therefore, the term "sumpaschein" not only means that body and soul are affected by the same thing in a similar way, but also that one of them is affected by the other. This must be seen against the background that the quoted passage12 is immediately followed by a description of the inverse situation, namely that the body is hurt, for example by a spear, and the animus suffers together with the body.13 In this inverse case, Lucretius' description points in another direction: the injury does not proceed from apart of the body to the animus; rather he emphasizes that the animus is affected together with the body in a similar way. Now, even if we assume that in the case of strong emotions there is a causal interaction from the animus to the soul, we can add one important qualification: Since the animus and the bodily parts that are moved in the course of strong emotions share the same bodily nature and since the preservation of the original quality is guaranteed by the fact that parts of the body and the soul are in toueh, the body can be affected in the same way as the soul, and vice versa. This specific kind of interaetion is illustrated when Lucretius says that, in the state of fear, the animus is filled with cold wind, which stimulates the shuddering and shivering of the limbs. 14 Though, of course, it is not clear how to extend this mechanism beyond the three elements wind, air, and fire, it seems plausible, according to the Epieurean premises, that the sort of alteration that an emotion causes in the body must have the same quality as the alteration that took place in the soul.15

The Stoies

According to Stoic physics, all things that are something ( to ti) ean be divided into corporeal and non-corporeal beings. In the dass of non­corporeal beings, we can find the lekta, the void, place and time, while the soul is listed among the corporeal beings. The material of the soul is identified as breath (pneuma), which is composed of two elements, air and fire. All elements, i.e., water, earth, air, and fire, are subject to reciprocal change. The mutual transformation is performed either by condensation or expansion. Since the stuff of the soul is a blending of ordinary elements, at least some of the alterations that happen in the soul are governed by the principles of elementary change. Though there is a report by Galen say­ing that the Stoies distinguished three different kinds of breath, of which

12 Cf. footnote 10. l3 Lucretius 3.170-176. 14 Lucretius 3.290f. 15 For a full account of thc Epicurean concept of soul see: Annas {1991).

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the psyehical breath is only one kind, 16 it seems that at least Chrysippus said that we live and breathe with one and the same natural breath.17

According to general physical laws, the elements of t he soul - fire and air - are the two sustaining elements, while everything eise, especially water and earth, must be sustained by something else. This, in turn, leads to the opposition of the breath-substance t hat has the power to sustain and the material substanee that must be sustained by the breath-subst ance. Ensouled things have the principle of their motion in themselves and are moved by themselves. Just as the Epicureans distinguished between the animus or mind, which is firmly loeated in the breast, and the anima, which is distributed throughout the entire body, there is a certain am­biguity in the Stoic concept of the soul, as weil. Sextus Empiricus even says that for the Stoies the word "soul" has two meanings: on t he one hand, that which sustains the entire eompound; on the other hand, the eommanding faculty, which in the case of human beings is the deliberative part of the soul. If we say that man is a compound of body and soul or that death is the separation of body and soul, we particularly refer to the commanding faculty and not to the broader sense of "soul" . 18

The commanding faculty is loeated in the heart, where an immediate contact between the soul and the blood system of the body is guaranteed. Though Stoies and Epicureans differ slightly on the exact place of the cen­tral part of the soul, the Stoies' reasons for assuming that the soul must be in the heart are quite similar to what the Epicureans said. Aceording to Chrysippus, we came to think that the soul is in the heart through our awareness "of the emotions t hat affect the mind happening to t hem in the ehest and especially in the region where the heart is placed. This is so particularly in the case of distress, fear, anger, and, above all, ex­citement." 19 Besides the commanding faculty, there are several parts of the soul that "flow from their seat in the heart, as if from the source of a spring, and spread through the whole body. They continually fill all the limbs with vital breath and rule and control them with countless different powers - nutrition, growth, locomotion, sensation, impulse to actions." 20

One source mentions seven such parts of the soul: "From the commanding faculty, there are seven parts of the soul that grow out and stretch out into the body like tentacles of an octopus." 21 Five of these parts are the

16 Galen, Introductio seu medicus XIV.726.7-11 (= LS 47N). 17 Calcidius 220 (= LS 53G 1-2). 18 Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 7.234 (= LS 53F). 19 Galen, On Hippocrates ' and Plato 's Doctrines III.1.25 (= LS 65H). For Galen 's

report of Chrysippus' theory of emotion see the admirable stud y by Teun Tieleman (2003) .

2° Calcidius 220 (= LS 53G6). 21 Aetius 4.21.1-4 (= LS 53H 2).

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senses sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. Sight can be described as breath that extends from the commanding faculty to the eyes, hearing as breath that extends from the commanding faculty to the ears, etc. The number of seven parts can be reached only by counting seed and the use of language as parts of the soul, too; in these cases the breath also ex­tends to the genitals and the tongue. But obviously, even Chrysippus and Cleanthes disagree whether these faculties must be regarded as parts of the soul.22 lt also seems to be controversial whether there are different kinds of breath leading from the central seat of the soul to the different senses.

The assumption that there are no incorporeal beings beside the lekta and the void is deeply rooted in Stoic physics. Nevertheless, there are some explicit attempts to argue for the corporeality of the soul. And these arguments are remarkably similar to what we already know from

the Epicureans. The premise is again that it is impossible that something incorporeal

should be the agent of anything, and that only a body is capable of acting or of being acted upon. 23 This premise is taken for granted in the following report that Nemesius gives about Cleanthes:

He (Cleanthes) also says: no incorporeal interacts with a body, and no body with an incorporeal, but one body interacts with another body. Now the soul interacts (sumpaschei) with the body when it is sick and being cut, and the body with the soul, thus when the soul feels shame and fear, the body turns red and pale respectively. Therefore the soul is a body.24

In this argument, "sumpaschei" obviously does not mean that a and b are simultaneously affected by the same thing. Rather, there is in both cases one thing that is primarily affected and another thing whose being affected follows the first primary affection. When someone is being cut , then it is the body that is primarily affected, while the affection of the soul occurs as a secondary affection. In the case of emotions, it is the soul that is primarily affected, while the affection of the body is dependent on the soul being affected. The visible bodily symptoms of an emotion like shame or fear are used to demonstrate that the soul can act directly upon the body, and this, in turn, implies that the soul must be corporeal, since otherwise it could not act upon something else.

Now, on the one hand, the psychosomatic character of emotions is being used to argue for the corporeality of the soul; but if we have come to assume that the soul is a body, then, on the other hand, it seems somehow odd to say that in the case of emotions the body is co-affected

22 Seneca, Letters 113.23 (= LS 53L). 23 Cicero, Academia 1.39 (= LS 45A), Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 8.263

(= LS 45B). 24 Nemesius, 78.7-79.2 (= LS 45C).

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with the soul, if the soul is a body, too. Is it still practicable to distinguish between the bodily and psychological aspects of an emotion? In what sense is becoming red or pale more peculiar to the body than the belief that something frightening is ab out to happen? And if we came to the conclusion that the emotion is no more t hen one bodily act, then we no longer need a causal impact of the soul on t he body. But originally it was exactly this kind of impact for whose sake the emotions were introduced. Do t he Stoies just keep the conventional vocabulary when they say that some aspects of the emotions belong to the soul and some to the body? Or is the difference just a matter of different degrees of complexity?25 To shed some light on those questions, we have to say a little bit about the Stoic theory of emotions:

There are several Stoic definitions of the emotions; we start with the most famous one:

A passion is an impulse that is excessive and disobedient to the dictat es of the reason , or a movement of soul that is irrational and contrary to nature. 26

An excessive impulse is generated if we evaluate something as good or bad when it is actually adiaphoron. Since the wise or sage would never approve of an adiaphoron, he cannot have emotions. Since an opinion or belief is the result of the approval ( sunkatathesis) we give to an impres­sion, and since the excessive impulse is generated by an active consent to an adiaphoron, emotions are also said to be beliefs. Strictly speaking, they are called "weak" or "fresh beliefs". 27 The term "weak" indicates that the approval given to an impression is contrary to the approval a wise man would give. The judgments of a wise man are always firm , in­variable and about kataleptic phantasiai, so the approval of the unwise person is always infirm, variable, and sometimes of non-kataleptic phan­tasiai. But what is much more relevant in our context is the concept of a "fresh belief" (prosphaton).28 That the belief a Stoic emotion consists in is fresh means that "it is the stimulus of an irrational contraction or swelling". 29 To understand this definition of "fresh", we have to keep in mind that there are four generic emotions: appetite and fear, pleasure and distress.30 Appetite is directed toward what appears good in the future, fear to what appears bad in the future, pleasure arises when we obtain the objects of appetite and avoid the objects of fear, and distress arises

25 As C hristopher Gill has suggested , cf. his cont ribution to this volume; see a lso his The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought, Oxford, forthcom ing.

26 Stobaeus, 2.88,8-90,6 (= LS 65A 1). 27 Stobaeus, 2.88,22-89,3 (= LS 65C). 28 I am indebted to Katja Maria Vogt fo r referring me to this context; a full and

thorough account of t hose issues can b e found in her (2004, pp. 69-93). 29 LS 65C; cf. Galen, On Hippocrates' and Plato's Doctrines IV.2.1 (= LS 65C). 3° Cf. Stobaeus 2.90,19-91,9 (= LS 65E).

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in the opposite case. Now, swelling or expansion and contraction or con­densation are just these two types of process that happen between the elements of the soul, so that swelling and contraction are the physiologi­cal description of two of the generic emotions. I postpone for the moment the question whether there also is an appropriate physiological description of the remaining two generic emotions in order to outline two situations in which the physiological aspect of an ernotion becomes relevant. The first situation is this: If I feel grief about the death of a friend, I have the fresh opinion that the death of my friend is something bad. As long as this is a fresh opinion there is a corresponding contraction. When after months the feeling of distress or grief becomes weaker and finally disappears, it is not because I altered my opinion on the point that the death of my friend is something bad, but because the contraction has disappeared. 31

The inverse constellation is the case of inertia, which Stoic philosophers also mention: people remain in states of emotion, even if they realize or are taught to realize that one should not feel distress or fear, for example, because they are "controlled by the tyranny of the emotions" . 32 If we want to explain this sort of tyranny, it is tempting to assume that the inertia of the bodily contraction or swelling keeps us in the state of emotion - even if we have already altered our opinion.

In these two situations, the bodily dimension of emotions clearly pro­vides an explanatory advantage. However, the problem arises that, in the first case, we hold opinions that, after the contraction has disappeared, no longer have a corresponding bodily state. A similar problem occurs with respect to the remaining generic emotions, appetite and fear. The very sec­tion that told us that pleasure and distress are swelling and contraction merely describes appetite and fear as stretching ( orexis) and shrinking ( ekklisis). These two terms have no place in Stoic physics. Nevertheless, it would be strange to assume that there is no bodily alteration that cor­responds to appetite and fear. The problem, I think, is that, beyond the level of swelling and contraction, Stoic physics does not provide an appro­priate description that could cover the physiological aspect of these two emotions.

What do we learn from all this about the distinction between bodily and psychological aspects of an emotion? We haven't reached a clear an­swer yet. But it seems to me that the bodily react ions of becoming red or pale are regarded as belonging to the body because they are just secondary affections of the respective emotions. If the processes of contraction and swelling are attributed to the soul, it is partly because these are states with direct intentional objects, narnely what is apparently good and what

31 Cf. Galen, On Hippocrates ' a.nd Pla.to's Doctrines IV.7.12-17 (= LS 650). 32 Stobaeus, 2.88,8-90,6 (= LS 65A 8).

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is apparently bad. Another reason why those processes are attributed to the soul became obvious in the discussion about the location of the soul: they belong to the soul partly because we can feel them and because it is not one of the sense organs where we feel them.

Interim conclusion: What the Hellenistic philosophers saw

There are, of course, many important differences between the Epicurean and the Stoic philosophy of mind. Above all, the Epicurean account of emotions is far from the elaborated theory of the various Stoic philoso­phers. But regardless of these differences the Stoic and the Epicurean ac­counts of emotions converge on one important point: They acknowledge that emotions are common to body and soul and they assume that this relation must be understood as causal interaction between both. Further, they take for granted that causal interaction always takes place between bodies so that the soul rnust be corporeal too. And this, again, is taken as a proof in favor of anti-dualism. l t is obvious, then, that the Hellenistic anti-dualists envisage their opponents as assuming that body and soul are related to each other as two separate entities, of which one is corporeal and one is not, but even the non-corporeal one is separate in a similar way as the corporeal is. But once we think of body and soul as two separately existing entities it is challenging to assume, as the Hellenistic philosophers actually did, that whatever is comrnon to body and soul must be mutu­ally exchanged or communicated by causal interaction. The only problem for the dualists, then, is that one of the two involved agents is incorpo­real, and, no matter what the precise meaning of that is, it is clear t hat what is incorporeal cannot be causally acted upon and cannot causally act upon something eise. - This seems to be coherent as it stands, the only problem is that the alternative between an Epicurean or Stoic material­ism on the side and a nai:ve dualism (as the dualism that the Hellenistic schools ascribe to their opponents) on the other side does not exhaust the theoretical options for describing to relation between body and soul.

Aristotle

In a well-known section at the beginning of De Anima that raises the question whether all so-called affect ions of the soul are common to body and soul or whether there are some affections that belong exclusively to

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the soul, Aristotle places great emphasis on the role of emotions. 33 The example of emotions helps him formulate some general points about how to define psychological states within the frame of hylomorphism. The cel­ebrated outcome of this section is that the student of nature and the dialectician define different aspects of the same thing, since the former describes a bodily state, for example the boiling of the blood around the heart in the case of anger, while the latter adds the reasons why people get angry as weil as the target the angry person aims at. 34 This is an im­portant point for hylomorphism, and it is striking that of all the affections of the soul, he picks out emotions, especially since the emotions - unlike nutrition, sense perception, or phantasia - will not play a major role in the remaining parts of the book. The reason he chooses the emotions must be that he thinks the emotions provide the most telling and most persuasive example of the fact that some of the affections that are attributed to the soul are combined with bodily movements.

Let us take a closer look at this very interesting passage. In 403a3, Aristotle says that there is a difficulty concerning the pathe of the soul, whether they are common to that which have it or whether some of them are peculiar to the soul. This is an aporia , he says, that is not easy to overcome. He continues that seemingly (phainetai) most of them are not undergone without the body, and he adds as examples: being angry, being confident, desiring, and perceiving generally.35 In this sentence, Aristotle mentions emotions among those cases in which there is no doubt that the body must be somehow involved; but they are not the only examples, since he also mentions perceptions, which can be subsumed under ta pathe tes psuches, but not under emotions. If there is something at all that is peculiar to the soul, he continues, thinking would be the best candidate, but even thinking, which is possibly peculiar to the soul, cannot be without body, if it does not occur without phantasia. Next he teils us that the soul cannot be separable if there is nothing that is peculiar to it36 - leaving open, in my view, the possibility that thinking is separable, though under normal circumstances it is somehow dependent on the contribution of phantasia, which in turn implies a bodily alteration.

A few lines later, in 403a16, he gets back to what he said before his digression on thinking, now claiming that seemingly ( eoike) all affections of the soul ( ta tes psuches pathe panta) are together with the body ( einai meta somatos), and his examples are now: anger, gentleness, fear, pity, confidence, joy, and loving and hating. In all these cases, he says, the body undergoes something simultaneously with them ( hama toutois paschei ti

33 De An. l.l 403a3-5. 34 De An. I.l 403a27-403b2. 35 De An. I.1 403a5-7. 36 De An. I.1 403a8-12.

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to soma).37 Before we proceed to his evidence in Support of his assertion, I would like to highlight some minor observations. First, how can he say that "seemingly" or "obviously" all pathe of the soul are together with the body? Just a few lines ago he was at least sympathetic to the view that thinking could be an exception, and he also told us that this question leads to a serious aporia. The obvious solution is that now the formula "pathe tes psuches" is more restricted and only refers to emotions, as the given examples clearly indicate. This terminological confusion mirrors the fact that Aristotle has no single ward to select t his subset of "pathe tes psuches" that we call 'emotion'. Therefore, every time he wants to introduce the emotions he has to specify what he means by "pathe" with a !ist of typical emotions. So I am inclined to think that for Aristotle "pathe tes psuches" is not a technical term. He uses this formula to talk about phenomena that are usually ascribed to the soul. Hence the issue at stake is not whether phenomena that primarily belang to the soul are accompanied by bodily movements; rather, the point is that phenomena that are usually called "affections of the soul" belang to the body, too. My second minor observation is this: The wording "the body suffers something simultaneously with them (hama toutois paschei ti to soma)" sounds a bit strange, if we take it literally: then it seems to indicate that there are some definite and identifiable entities, called "the pathe of the soul", that are immediately followed by distinct and also identifiable processes or occurrences, called "what the body undergoes". However, we should keep in mind that the passage is taken from a preliminary discussion in the very first chapter of the book. This could explain why Aristotle chooses such a rough and ready way of speaking.

In what follows, Aristotle gives us three pieces of evidence for his assertion that the pathe of the soul are combined with an affection of the body. The common background of these pieces of evidence is the observation that emotions are typically accompanied by bodily changes: people become pale when they are in fear and they have foam at t he mouth when they are angry. But Aristotle's examples are more specific: "This is shown by the fact ," he says, "that sometimes when severe and manifest pathemata occur we do not get angry and do not feel fear, while at other times we are moved by small and feeble pathemata, when the body is already in a state of tension and behaves as it does in anger.»38 These are two different cases, though they must be read together. In the fust case we have clear and strong pathemata, but no corresponding emotions. Though Aristotle sometimes uses the ward "pathema" almost synonymously with "pathos" to refer to emotions, here it is clearly distinct from pathos in the sense of emotion, since it is the very point of the first example that there can be manifest pathemata without pathe. So I take 37 De An. l.1 403al6-19. 38 De An. 1.1 403a19-22.

200 Christof Rapp

pathemata here to mean something like "appearance" or "impression of the soul" in a non-technical sense - as it is used, for example, in the first paragraph of De Interpretatione. According to this reading, Aristotle wants to say that in the first case there is a clear impression either of something that is frjghtening or of something that is apt to evoke anger, for example an injustice or an insult done to me and my family or a humiliating treatment by someone who is not entitled to inflict it. Now, the text does not tel1 us explicitly why the pathe fear and anger do not occur in the first case; but, since the second case obviously is meant to describe the inverse situation and since in this second case the body is already in the state of fear or anger, we can infer that there are no pathe in the first case, because the body is not in a state of fear or anger. Aristotle does not explain how something like this can happen, but we can easily adopt some elucidating examples from his Rhetoric. In the second book of the Rhetoric, for example, he says:

People become calm whenever they have spent their anger on someone eise, which happened in the case of Ergophilus; for though the Athenians were more angry at him than at Callisthenes, they let him go because they had condemned Callisthenes to death on the previous day. 39

The underlying idea seems to be the following: lt is possible to vent one's anger on somebody, but then it takes time to recover the energy that is needed for a new eruption of anger. Now imagine that what we just called energy is something that affects the state of the body as well; then it can happen that we have a clear impression of something that should , und er normal circumstances, cause our anger, but that we are nevertheless not able to feel anger - either no anger at all or not enough anger -because our body has already spent its aggressive energy on something or someone eise. Another, less intricate, example can be derived from the statement that older people are cowardly and fearful, because they are chilled or cooled. Here "being chilled" or "cooled" must not be taken metaphorically; in addition to other factors, old people do not tend to courageous and aggressive emotions because their bodies are cooled down and for the most part do not produce the heat that is needed for such emotions. Therefore it can happen that an old person is faced with a situation that would have evoked her anger some years before, but now no anger occurs because the body is not in the appropriate state, i.e., does not provide enough of the specific heat.40

These remarks conclude my comrnents on the first case: if the absence of certain bodily conditions can prevent someone from being angry or feeling fear, even though the reasons for those emotions are given, then, indeed, we have a proof of the assertion that the pathe of t he soul affect 39 Rh. rI.3 1380bl0-13. 40 Rh. 11.13 1389b31-33.

lnteraction of Body and Soul 201

the body, too. The second case, as I have already mentioned, describes the inverse constellation: The pathemata are small and feeble, but they are enough to arouse an emotion, because the body already behaves in the way that is typical for the respective emotion. So if, for example, a previous event has already made someone's blood surge through her veins, an insignificant insult or the vague and obscure suspicion that such an insult could have taken place can suffice for a new episode of anger. In De Jnsomniis, Aristotle even says that the more someone is under the influence of an emotion, the less similarity with the proper object of this kind of emotion is required to give rise to such emotions.41 If this is an apposite reading, then this description is even closer to our everyday experiences than the first case. That we usually regard emotional behaviour as irrational is mostly due to the observation that emotional reactions tend to be neither consistent nor appropriate, and this again especially applies to situations in which persons overreact. But Aristotle's example works only if he can expect that his readers are familiar with the thought that these phenomena of emotional overreaction often occur as a result of a bodily disposition.

Aristotle adds a third case that is said to be even more convincing:

Even when nothing happens t hat is frightening, people find themselves in the pathe of someone who actually feels fear ( en tois pathesi ginontai tois tou phoboumenou).42

lt is clear that in this case no external cause or object of the respective emotion is given. Everything eise in this description is open to various interpretations. That there is no external object or cause does not, strictly speaking, exclude the possibility that there is an internal object of the fear; for example, Aristotle teils us in De Motu Animalium, that we often start to shudder and are frightened when we merely think of something.43 Or does Aristotle's wording "nothing frightening" also rule out a frightening thought or phantasma of something that is absent? The next difficult point is that Aristotle does not explicitly say that people actually suffer the emotion of fear despite t he absence of a proper object; he only says that they are affected like someone who actually feels fear. This indirect description avoids ascribing a fully-fledged emotion to the person; rather, the state in question is merely compared with the condition of someone who actually has the emotion. The reason for ilistinguishing the present situation from the fully-fledged emotion could be that, for Aristotle, a fully-fledged emotion requires the appropriate or allegedly appropriate cause or object of this type of emotion, so that where no cause or object

4 l Insomn. 2 460bl-15. 42 De An. l.1 403a22-24. 43 MA 7 70lb21-22.

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is given at all, we cannot speak of an emotion in the strictest sense. I am inclined to think that this would be a plausible point, since we are used to thinking and talking about most of our emotions as being directed towards a certain object or cause; this is why we hesitate to speak of a regular emotion if we cannot identify a possible cause. In Thomas Mann's Magie Mountain, there is a passage where the protagonist Hans Castorp complains about t he exaggerated activity of his heart until he discovers that if he relates the beating of his heart to his thinking of Madame Chauchat, the activity of his body receives a target and hence becomes a Gemuetsbewegung or affection of the soul.

Anyway, the third case makes us think of a person whose body displays all the symptoms of fear (she pales, goes weak in the knees, her teeth chatter) without any visible cause or without any cause at all. So the point of this third case seems to be that sometimes the body itself brings about either an emotion or at least the state that is equivalent to a fully­fledged emotion, and this in turn would support Aristotle's point t hat the pathe of the soul are affections of the body, too.

The celebrated conclusion he draws from these three cases is:

From all this it is obvious t hat the affections of the soul are enmattered logoi. 44

Consequently their definitions are, for example, as follows:

Being angry is a particular movement of such and such a body or part or faculty (of t he body), as result of this or that cause and for the sake of this or that end.45

The two aspects of this definition correspond with the division of labour between the student of nature and the dialectician - the former empha­sizing the material aspect, t he latter the form or logos. Therefore the dialectician would define anger, for example, as the desire for retaliation or something like that, but the student of nature would include into his definition that anger is also the boiling of t he blood and hot stuff sur­rounding the heart.

This conclusion, again, is subject to widely differing interpretations. Before outlining my own preferences, some comments on t he definition of emotions might be in order. Ample evidence of Aristotelian definitions of emotions can be found in the second book of the Rhetoric. There, in the Rhetoric, Aristotle does not attempt to describe the bodily changes that occur during the episode of an emotion. T hat is one of the reasons why some authors have feit encouraged to think that in the Rhetoric an emotion is nothing but a j udgment. But after all, the absence of bodily processes in the Rhetoric is by no means surprising. First, the Rhetoric 44 De An. 1.1 403a25. 4

5 De An. 1.1 403a26-27.

lnteraction of Body and Soul 203

stresses several times its affinity to dialectic, so that it also uses the defini­tions of the dialectician, and not of the student of nature (not to mention the point that a complete !ist of the bodily changes that constitute t he several emotions is one of the ultimate aims of psychology and cannot be given off-hand) . And second, it would be of no use for the orator to know the bodily changes that are involved in each type of emotion; for him it is important to know the causes and objects of the different emotions, because he can make the audience think that the cause of a certain pathos is given, but, of course, he has no means to modify the bodily conditions of his audience directly.

The definitions given in the Rhetoric better fit what Aristotle has called the formal aspect of such a definition. So the general scheme, ac­cording to which an emotion occurs "as the affection of this or that cause and for the sake of this or that end", can more or less be exemplified by the definitions of the Rhetoric. Anger is the emotion that fits very well in this scheme, since it is defined as desire ( orexis), accompanied by pain, for conspicuous retaliation because of a conspicuous insult that was di­rected, without justification, against oneself or those near to one.46 In this definition we have a cause, the unjustified insult, and an end or purpose, which is the revenge that the angry one desires to take on the person who is responsible for the undeserved insult . The purpose of anger can easily be identified, because anger is defined as desire with a certain direction. But anger is the only emotion that is defined as desire, other emotions are defined as pain or agitation or wanting. Hence they do not have any built­in impulse for a certain course of action, and therefore it is more diflicult to say for the sake of what end they exist. Nevertheless, I am inclined to think that the definitions given in the Rhetoric teil us the form or the Logos of the various emotions as required in De Anima, insofar as all def­initions include the specific cause or object of a certain kind of emotion; for example the object of fear is a future destructive or painful evil, the object of pity is an undeserved misfortune, the object of shame is the evil that seems to bring a person into disrepute, the object of gratitude is a favor that releases us from or prevents a painful situation, etc. I am even inclined to think that, on closer examination, those emotions that are not defined by a certain impulse have a teleological dimension, too: Probably there are purposes that are not explicit in the definition of an emotion and of which the respective person is not aware. Most of them are directed either toward the preservation of one's existence or are associated with the task of maintaining one's self-esteem in a social context.

Finally a word on pleasure and pain. Most of the emotions the Rhetoric deals with are defined as pain. But, unlike Plato's Philebus, Aristotle does

46 Rh. 11.2 1378a30-32.

204 Christof Rapp

not try to use pleasure and pain as the genus of all emotions. This becomes clear, for example, from the definition of anger, which is not said tobe a kind of pain, but only tobe connected with pain. The definitions of some emotions do not even mention "pain"; these are the definitions of loving (philein), hating, and gratitude ( charin echein). Aristotle explicitly says that hate is without pain.47 Nevertheless, all of them are somehow - in a vague sense - related to pleasure and pain: For example, if we have the emotion of philia, then we feel pleasure and pain together with our friend when something good or bad happens to him. Gratitude is also connected with pleasure and pain, since the favor we are grateful for liberates us from a painful situation, etc.

Pleasure and pain are interesting for our purpose, because they imply an immediate bodily change, as Aristotle tells us, for example, in De Motu Animalium:

the painful and the pleasant are nearly always accompanied by chilling and heating. This is clear from the passions. For feelings of confidence, fears, sexual excitement, and other bodily affections, painful and pleasant, are accompanied by heating and chilling. 48

However, it is important to note that these bodily affections are not identi­cal with the alterations mentioned in the material definition of an emotion, because the painful and the pleasant have uniform bodily reactions, while different emotions are thought to be the activity of different parts of the body.

What Aristotle avoided

What can we infer from these examples and how do they illuminate the expression "common to body and soul"? The initial question for the dis­cussion of the pathe of the soul in De Anima I.1 was whether some of those affections belong exclusively to soul. Perhaps we are inclined to think so because we are used to call them "affections of the soul", but the dis­cussion of the emotions clearly shows that this initial question must be answered in the negative: they are not peculiar to the soul, but common to body and soul. This result would still allow us to think of emotions as combinations of two separately existing components, one psychic or mental and one material. Fora post-Cartesian philosopher, it is tempting to think of Aristotelian emotions as consisting of two such components, but this is not exactly what we find in the text of De Anima 1.1:

47 Rh. 11.4 1382all-13. 48 MA 7 70lb37-702a4.

Interaction of Body and Soul 205

First of all, Aristotle refers to certain impressions or perceptions we have, but he nowhere says that these impressions are the mental or psychic component of the emotion and he nowhere contrasts them with a merely physiological component. He does not attempt to describe in a termino­logical vocabulary how these impressions are presented to us: whether we have perceptions or phantasmata of, say, frightening things or whether we judge that something frightening is about to happen. But if he were interested in sketching a two-component-model it would have been cru­cial for him to show that it is the representation of frightening objects which play the role of t he merely psychic component in his story (this, again, would have been astonishing since it is clear that within Aristotle's theory of the soul perceptions and phantasmata involve bodily changes so that they cannot be taken as the paradigm for purely mental states). This is also important for the claim that the full definition of an emotion includes a formal and a material part, e.g., that anger is t he boiling of blood around the heart as the result of an insult for the sake of revenge: If, as we said, the impression that some insult has happened is not meant as representing the psychic component of an emotion which causes an ad­equate reaction of the body, then it is not likely that the formal part of that definition "as the result of an insult for the sake of revenge" is meant to represent the respective impression, opinion, or judgment in the sense of a purely psychic or mental process which acts upon a certain part of the body.

Furth er, Aristotle does not say that the movement of the blood is affected by something that belongs to t he soul. He clearly maintains that the emotion is a certain movement of the blood. And what makes this movement a full-fledged emotion is the fact that it is a movement with certain causes and purposes. True, it must be some kind of representation of the insult that is likely to evoke the anger. But the passage's point is not that a sort of opinion or judgment representing the presence of an unjustified insult acts upon a purely material system, the body. This can be seen from the fact that the emotion is not the movement of some blood, but the movement of a certain portion of blood located in a certain place of an ensouled body. Hence, what happens in the ensouled body when the blood starts to boil is not due to the laws of elementary change, but rather something that only happens in a specific body formed by a speci-fic sort of soul. 49 For that simple reason it would be inappropriate to say that in the definition of anger as "boiling of blood around the heart as the result of an insult for the sake of revenge", the first part describes a purely physical and second part a purely psychic or mental component of the full-fledged

49 This point has a lso been stressed by Alan Code; cf. Code/ Moravcsik (1992, pp. 129-146).

206 Christof Rapp

emotion, since the boiling of the blood is a change that can only happen in an ensouled body; consequently, it would be odd to understand the remaining part of the definition as a description of what kind of mental process the soul undergoes while the blood in the bodily parts of the same person is boiling. The formal part of such definitions specifies the causes under which this particular emotion occurs; it does not determine the psychic capacity by which we understand or imagine that the relevant kind of insult has happened and, hence, it does not pick out a psychic component of the emotion as opposed to a physical or physiological one.

lt could be objected that the boiling of blood is something that is separately identifiable and hence counts as a separate occurrence or entity with or without the specific causes and purposes of anger. I think that the wording of the third case provides a clear counterexample. If Aristotle says that one is "in the state of someone" who actually feels anger or fear, this seems to be a clear indicator that it is not possible to refer to this specific bodily state without mentioning anger or the form and purpose that define anger or fear. Hence, in this context, the emotions are described as a specific bodily activity, informed by certain causes and purposes, and not as a complex phenomenon which consists of two separate components. This is confirmed by Aristotle's discussion of the third case, that even when nothing happens that is frightening, people find themselves in the pathe of someone who actua lly feels fear: If his intention had been to argue that each emotion is composed of a bodily and a psychic component he should have stressed that in the present case the specific mental or psychic contribution is missing. But he makes no further comment on whether something is missing in this case; he rather confines himself to the point that even without visible causes t he relevant changes in the body can come about so that emotions cannot exclusively belong to the soul.

Finally, the outcome of the comparison between the two types of def­inition, the dialectical and the material one, is not that both types of definitions are complete in relation to different purposes: With respect to the dialectical definition, or logos, Aristotle says that it must be necessar­ily in a cer tain kind of hule50 so that the definition remains incomplete if we do not add in which kind of hule it is. And with respect to the student of nature (phusikos) Aristotle does not want say that he could be content with the material definition a lone. On the contrary, at the end of the chapter51 it seems that, properly understood, the student of nature is concerned with the composite, matter and form, and not with mere physiological descriptions.

50 De An. 1.1 403b2-3. 51 De An. 1.1 403b7-16.

Interaction of Body and Soul 207

If this analysis is correct so far we have identified a remarkable differ­ence to the discussion of the same phenomena in the Hellenistic schools: Aristotle fully acknowledges, as t hey did, the psychosomatic character of emotions, but the question of how a psychic part could act upon a merely bodily part - i.e., the question of causal interaction - does not even arise in the context of Aristotle's discussion. And the presumable reason why this question does not arise is that he does not even attempt to distinguish two relatively separate components. But as long as we do not have sep­arate components or agents there is no need to relate these components via causal interaction. The idea of such an interaction between body and soul does not occur until we think of the soul as a more or less separate entity which is like a second body - with the only difference that it is incorporeal. Certainly, this is how the Hellenistic philosophers have en­visaged their predecessors; but in the light of what we have said about Aristotle and his discussion of emotions in De Anima I.l, it seems that at least Aristotle would not even have accepted the setting in which the problem of causal interaction arises and the arguments of the Hellenistic philosophers against the immaterial soul become applicable.

A question to end with could be the following: Did Aristotle deliber­ately avoid the distinction between two more or less separate components of the emotion or did he j ust fail to see the problems of psychosomatic compounds which the Hellenistic philosophers clearly saw? A full and reliable answer to this question would certainly require a detailed inter­pretation of De Anima II and III. But a first hint can also be found in our chapter De Anima l.1: The discussion of emotions and the different types of definitions is finally concluded by the following remark:

We have said that the pathe of the soul are inseparable from the physical hule of living beings in the way in which anger and fear are inseparable and not in the way in which line and plane are. 52

This conclusion is remarkable for several reasons: First, it becomes clear that the emotions just served as a paradigm and that the results that we derived from this discussion can be extended beyond the special case of emotions. Second, it is important that Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of inseparability:53 Lines and planes are inseparable in existence, since they could not exist beside or over and above the enmattered exemplifications. But they are still separable in thought, because they do not require a specific type of matter and because their essence can be defined without reference to such a specific type of mat ter. Now, the point of Aristotle's conclusion is that anger and fear are inseparable in a different way, i.e. they turned out to be even inseparable in thought. Applying the example

52 De An. I.l 403bl 7-19. 53 I owe this point to David Charles. He elaborates on this d istinction in his unpub­

lished paper "Aristotle's Psychological Theory".

208 Christof Rapp

of lines and planes we must conclude that anger and fear can never be ab­stracted from a specific type of matter or specific type of material process. This confirms our dismissal of a two-component-reading: That emotions are inseparable in thought implies, at least, that they are not composed of two separately identifiable components but are psycho-physical units. If this is the major outcome of Aristotle's discussion of emotions in De Anima I.l he marks his own account off from two theoretical alternatives: firstly, from the assertion that some states of the soul can exist without the body and, secondly, from the assumption that the states of the soul are inseparable from the body for their existence, but that they can be separated in thought, i.e. that they are separable for their essence or iden­tity. If someone accepts one of these two accounts he is bound to think that, in principle, the two components involved could interact as other separately existing substances would do. Since Aristotle carefully argues against these theoretical alternatives and pleads, instead, for the model of emotions as psycho-physical units it seems safe to conclude that he deliberately avoids a setting which allows of causal interaction between body and soul.

References

Annas, Julia, 1991, "Epicurus' philosophy of mind", in: S. Everson (ed.), Companions to Ancient Thought 2: Psychology, Cambridge: Cam­bridge University Press, pp. 84-101.

Charles, David, unpublished, "'Aristotle's Psychological Theory'". Code, Alan / Moravcsik, Julius, 1992, "Explaining Various Forms of Liv­

ing", in: M.C. Nussbaum / A.O. Rorty (eds), Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.129-146.

Gill, Christopher, forthcoming, The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Ro­man Thought, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vogt, Katja Maria, 2004, "Die Stoische Theorie der Emotionen", in: Bar­bara Guckes (ed.), Zur Ethik der älteren Stoa, Göttingen: Vanden­hoeck & Ruprecht , pp. 69-93.

Lang, Anthony / Sedley, David (eds) , 1887, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2. vols., Cambridge: Cambridge Universtiy Press.

Tieleman, Teun, 2003, Chrysippus' On Affections: Reconstruction and In­terpretation, Leiden: Brill.