Cicero, Tusculan Disputations 1.10

M. But what I have said as to the heart, the blood, the brain, air, or fire being the soul, are common opinions: the others are only entertained by individuals; and, indeed, there were many among the ancients who held singular opinions on this subject, of whom the latest was Aristoxenus, a man who was both a musician and a philosopher. He maintained a certain straining of the body, like what is called harmony in music, to be the soul, and believed that, from the figure and nature of the whole body, various motions are excited, as sounds are from an instrument. He adhered steadily to his system, and yet he said something, the nature of which, whatever it was, had been detailed and explained a great while before by Plato. 

 

Xenocrates denied that the soul had any figure, or anything like a body; but said it was a number, the power of which, as Pythagoras had fancied, some ages before, was the greatest in nature: his master, Plato, imagined a threefold soul, a dominant portion of which—that is to say, reason—he had lodged in the head, as in a tower; and the other two parts—namely, anger and desire—he made subservient to this one, and allotted them distinct abodes, placing anger in the breast, and desire under the praecordia. 

 

But Dicaearchus, in that discourse of some learned disputants, held at Corinth, which he details to us in three books—in the first book introduces many speakers; and in the other two he introduces a certain Pherecrates, an old man of Phthia, who, as he said, was descended from Deucalion; asserting, that there is in fact no such thing at all as a soul, but that it is a name without a meaning; and that it is idle to use the expression “animals,” or “animated beings;” that neither men nor beasts have minds or souls, but that all that power by which we act or perceive is equally infused into every living creature, and is inseparable from the body, for if it were not, it would be nothing; nor is there anything whatever really existing except body, which is a single and simple thing, so fashioned as to live and have its sensations in consequence of the regulations of nature. 

 

Aristotle, a man superior to all others, both in genius and industry (I always except Plato), after having embraced these four known sorts of principles, from which all things deduce their origin, imagines that there is a certain fifth nature, from whence comes the soul; for to think, to foresee, to learn, to teach, to invent anything, and many other attributes of the same kind, such as to remember, to love, to hate, to desire, to fear, to be pleased or displeased—these, and others like them, exist, he thinks, in none of those first four kinds: on such account he adds a fifth kind, which has no name, and so by a new name he calls the soul ἐνδελέχεια, as if it were a certain continued and perpetual motion.

 

Yet analogies, however helpful or profound, are always incomplete, and placing the principle of life in only one function of the body seems to focus on the part at the expense of the whole. 

 

Instead of saying that the soul is akin to one or another element, or to be found in this or that location, should I not be asking about what makes it distinct in and of itself, and how it is somehow distributed within all aspects of a living creature?

 

Aristoxenus offered another perspective, suggesting that the soul is not some static substance, but rather flows as a harmony from the active relationship of all the parts of the body. Just as the cooperation of many performers in an orchestra creates a complete work of music, so the balanced combination of the body’s operations produces the soul. 

 

When Plato considered a similar argument in the Phaedo, however, he noted a difficulty. If the soul is something that proceeds from the body, as a whole that is determined by the parts, then it would follow that the soul is ruled by the body. This, however, does not appear to be the case, since the soul, as a binding and guiding principle, is that which gives order and direction to its members. 

 

Let us not confuse causes and consequences. This harmony seems to require some unifying agency behind it, an identity that provides a pattern to all the pieces. To push the earlier analogy, the orchestra will sound like a cacophony without a conductor, or a composer. 

 

Might the soul, as Xenocrates proposed, be a sort of number? This need not be cryptic, for thinkers from many traditions have understood how mathematics can express the structure of reality. But can we, like the Platonists, speak of universals as existing independently, or only in particular things? How does an abstract concept give life to a body? 

 

Plato himself argued that the human soul acts on three related levels, the rational, the spirited, and the appetitive, and that the proper hierarchy among them, from the higher to the lower, is a key to living well. Indeed, when the mind harnesses our aggressiveness to rule the passions, we find ourselves at peace, while when the passions inflame our aggressiveness to stifle the mind, we meet only discord. 

 

What has always struck me as so insightful about Plato’s account is the way it describes the soul not only by its distinct powers, but also by how they are made to work together within the whole person. It goes beyond affirming that I am alive, to explaining how I am alive; the nature behind the actions become clearer. 

 

In sharp contrast, the theory discussed by Dicaearchus should sound fairly familiar to a modern reader, since it has much in common with the pure materialism that is popular in so much contemporary science. I regularly hear that the idea of a “soul” is nonsensical, an imaginary concept quite unnecessary to define a living being. What we call life, they say, is just the result of certain combinations of matter, and so can be reduced to the properties of matter alone. The patterns may be complex, the story has it, but reality is reducible to a bundle of particles. 

 

The same problem that befell Aristoxenus also rears its head here, in that the very presence of any pattern, or structure, or identity is something imprinted onto the matter, not proceeding from it. Here Aristotle comes to the rescue, arguing that a substance is not made of matter alone, but matter joined to a principle of form, the “whatness” that imparts its distinct nature. 

 

When it comes to a living thing, Aristotle called this identifying form a soul, and when it comes to a human being, he called this identifying form a rational soul. As giving life, the soul is what actualizes the potentiality in the body, the entelechy that Cicero mentions, in that what is animate adds something to what is inanimate, and what has awareness adds something to what lacks awareness. 

 

In examining how the human soul operates, Aristotle further observed how it has powers that cannot be contained within the organs of the body, or accounted for by the properties of matter. Particularly, mind rises above a physical nature, for it apprehends things in a in a universal and abstract way. 

 

So where, according to Aristotle, is this soul? It isn’t in the heart, or the blood, or the brain, or the breath, but resides beneath them all, and works through them all. It makes me a who instead of a what, the mode that specifies my existence. I can’t put it in a box, even as it very concretely allows me to be myself. 

 

This is a very brief and inadequate account, but it can perhaps give some sense of the many questions that will arise if we wonder about the soul, and it can point the way toward some possible answers. 

Written in 2/1996