I.D. Greeks 00003

I have been reading a book by Richard Sorabji entitled ANIMAL MINDS AND HUMAN MORALS. Cornell, 1993. Sorabji is unquestionably an ‘authority’ on Aristotle and agrees with you in immense detail. Following the trail of his reasoning is fascinating. I have just started the book. But this is a book one must go through very carefully because I have found one must look up each reference in its full context and fully understand Aristotle’s terms. Sorabji does absolutely prove that Aristotle says that animals have no reason and do not at all think like homo sapiens sapiens. But, unfortunately, in looking up his references, I find much, much more than what he qualifies his initial statements:

The crisis came when Aristotle reverted to a position closer to Alcmaeon’s, denying animals reason (logos), reasoning (logismos), thought (dianoia, nous), intellect (nous) and belief (doxa). 30 He must then compensate them by giving them a rich enough perceptual content to deal with the world. (pg.12)

The formal denials of various intellectual capacities have already been noted. Animals lack reason (logos), 37 reasoning (logismos), 38 thought (dianoia), 39 intellect (nous), 40 and belief (doxa). 41 (pg. 14)

with—

. . . although Aristotle does admittedly hedge at this point on whether it is only mankind that thinks. 44 The distinction of human and animal capacities at the very opening of the METAPHYSICS leads up in 1.2 to a defense of philosophy as the activity that brings humans closest to God. Finally, the denial to animals of another rational activity, speech (logos) in Politics 1.2, is suppose to account for their inability to form a civic society. 45 (pg. 15)

Now, the way Sorabji expresses himself and the way he selects his references are very interesting. In one sense, that is, in reading all of Aristotle as one systematic unity consistent with itself in abstract logic, i.e., theoretically scientific, he is perfectly and precisely correct. But unfortunately there are a number of problems I was not aware of myself in his trying to stuff the step-daughter’s foot into Cinderella’s glass slipper .

If you remember, at the end of  “Empsuka” Part 3, I covered similar, but not the same, territory in Aristotle’s Politics to come to exactly the opposite conclusion to Sorabji.  I was trying to make a case for Heidegger’s presentation of the difference between animal mind and human mind in Book Theta of the METAPHYSICS as being as Sorabji himself says not of language per se but of just syntactical language --Sorabji:

It all sounded rather grand, when Aristotle said that we have reason and they [animals] don’t. But under pressure, the Stoics retreated to the position that at least they don’t have syntax. The moral conclusion was meant to be ‘They don’t have syntax, so we can eat them.’ My embarrassment increased when I noticed that the modern debate, among the followers of Chomsky and critics of the language abilities of chimpanzees, had reached exactly the same point. It has become crucial whether animals have syntax. (pg. 2)

And Heidegger’s deliberate use of equivocation and irony in THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS: World, Finitude Solitude to say we really don’t know what the hell we are talking about. I reproduce that portion of the letter here:

“All three parts are from: Heidegger, Martin, ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS Theta 1-3, trans. Brogan & Warnek, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 105-110.

This is an open ended text with open ended thinking, maybe something some of you are not use to. It is not saying a human is absolutely ‘this’ scientifically observed object or an animal is ‘that’ scientifically studied subject. It is explaining that  homo sapiens sapiens is fully an animal with one ability, conversance, logos, that other animals do not specifically have. But that some animals do have all the fundamental experiential basis which is the ground for human conversance, so that the dividing line between logon and alogon is extremely ambiguous. I think Heidegger makes it crystal clear that this is what Aristotle is saying, that the animal may not have the full ability of conversance, but that it does have all the preliminary abilities that make full conversance possible in human being which means it does seem to be logon, and not alogon, to a limited extent. That this is a possible trade-off of added ability in conversance for human being as opposed to being a deficiency compared to the wordlessly unbounded experience of the animal is made clear in an even more ambiguous text, THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. McNeil & Walker, Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 237-8 [German 346].

“We cannot explain escaping and pursuing simply by applying theoretical mathematics or mechanics, however complex. Here a quite primordial kind of movement reveals itself. The escaping worm does not merely appear within the context of a sequence of movements which began with the mole. Rather the worm is escaping from the later. This is not simply an event, but rather the escaping worm behaves as fleeing in a particular way with respect to the mole. And mole for its part behaves with respect to the worm by pursuing it. Thus we will describe seeing, hearing, and so forth, and also assimilation and reproduction, as a form of behavior, as a form of behavior, as a form of self-like behavior [Sichbenehmen]. A stone cannot behave in this way. Yet the human being can—he or she can behave well or behave badly. But our behavior—in this proper sense—can only be described in this way because it is a comportment, because the specific manner of being which belongs to man is quite different and involves not behavior but comporting oneself toward . . .  The specific manner in which the animal is we shall call behavior. They are fundamentally different from one another. In principle it is also possible to reverse this linguistic usage and refer to animal comportment. The reason why we prefer the first way of describing the matter will be revealed from the substantive interpretation itself. Being capable of . . . means being capable of behavior. Capability is instinctual, a driving forward and maintaining oneself in being driven toward that which the capacity is capable of, toward a possible form of behavior, a driveness toward a performance of a particular kind in each case. The behavior of the animal is not a doing and acting as in human comportment, but a driven performing [Treiben]. In saying this we mean to suggest that an instinctual driveness, as it were, characterizes all animal performance. ¶ Yet here again, from a purely linguistic point of view, we can see that the terminology is arbitrary if we recall that we also talk about ‘driving’ snow where there is no question of anything organic announcing its specific manner of being. This shows that language in all this is not subject to logic, and that a certain inconsequentiality belongs rather to the essence of language and its meanings. In other words, language is something that belongs to the essence of man in his finitude. To imagine a god expressing himself in speech is utterly meaningless.”

Heidegger deliberately puts in question his own language and definitions as he goes along until he comes to this ultimate point “that the terminology is arbitrary” that “shows that language in all this is not subject to logic and that a certain inconsequentiality belongs rather to the essence of language and its meanings. In other words, language is something that belongs to the essence of man in his finitude. To imagine a god expressing himself in speech is utterly meaningless.” Language is specifically stated as belonging “to the essence of man in his finitude” and we are brought immediately to the point of comparison I raised long ago to Aristotle’s POLITICS, that “he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity” (Bk I, 2, 1253a3-4), and “he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god” (1253a27-8), where this self-sufficiency is held by Aristotle in the NICOMACHIAN ETHICS, X, 7, is held to be a condition of “the highest excellence; and that this will be the best thing in us” (1177a11-1177b1), i.e., “to take thought of things noble and divine, whether it be itself divine or only the most divine element within us”—“this activity is contemplative” which is “most continuous” , where “philosophy is thought to offer pleasures marvelous for their purity and their enduringness,” where “the self-sufficiency that is spoken of must belong most to the contemplative activity. For while a wise man, as well as a just man and the rest, needs the necessities of life . . . but the wise man, even when by himself, can contemplate truth, and the better the wiser he is; he can perhaps do so better if he has fellow-workers, but still he is the most self-suficient”

RETURN TO PRESENT CASE:

Heidegger starts off saying exactly the same things Aristotle says at numerous points throughout his  complete works, but, again like Aristotle, he equivocates his position quite clearly, something I will also show that Aristotle does but without the deliberate irony. Rather Aristotle hesitates and even seems to change his mind in mid-stream because he is actually, and this is an important point, he is trying to get at the experiencial, not systematically scientific, truth. And he does so on a separate basis in each of his texts so that what is said in De Anima may directly contradict what is said in De Partibus Animalium or the Eudemian or Nicomachian Ethics. What Heidegger clearly does in two continuous paragraphs  in one text, Aristotle does throughout his works. This, of course, raises the question of when each work was written during his career of which I have not seen any satisfactory way of sorting the matter out.

Now, I shall prove my point on Sorabji’s quotations and the implicitly assumed systematic consistency among them. First of all, from the quote I made from page 2 of his book, it should be clear that he is attacking Aristotle’s position and desires a sufficiently sturdy straw man to stand up to him so he can knock him down. Sorabji’s orientation is not Peripatetic but Neoplatonic.  He is the chief editor of Ancient commentators on Aristotle of whom only two, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius, could be called “Peripatetic.” All the rest believed fervently in the primacy of Plato, to whom Aristotle was only a preliminary introduction. Sorabji’s primary text, he makes clear, in his attack on Aristotle is Porhyry’s On Abstinence from Animal Food which he says shows a continuous tradition from the Presocratics through Plato to the Neoplatonic commentators on Aristotle  on the similar, if not exact, equivalence of animal soul and mind with human soul and mind.

Starting with footnote # 30, De Anima 1.2, 404b4-6, I quote lines 1 through 6: “What Anaxagoras says is less clear; in many places he tells us that the cause of beauty and order is thought, elsewhere that it is soul; it is found, he says, in all animals, great and small, high and low, but thought (in the sense of intelligence) appears not to belong alike to all animals, and indeed not even to all human beings.” I will show, to a large extent, Aristotle makes exactly the same equivocations. 

In  “414b18-19 with 32-3 and 415a7-8,” Aristotle says (starting with line 414b15 and ending with line 415a14 which covers all of Sorabji’s references here), “The case of imagination is obscure; we must examine it later. Certain kinds of animals possess in addition the power of locomotion, and still others , i. e. man and possibly another order like man or superior to him, the power of thinking and thought. It is now evident that a single definition can be given of soul only in the same sense as one can be given for figure. For, as in that case there is no figure apart from triangle and those that follow in order, so here there is no soul apart from the forms of soul just enumerated. It is true that a common definition can be given for figure which will fit all figures without expressing the particular nature of any figure. So here in the case of soul and its specific forms. Hence it is absurd in this and similar cases to look for a common definition which will not express the peculiar nature of anything that is and will not apply to the appropriate indivisible species, while at the same time omitting to look for an account which will. The case of figure and soul are exactly parallel; for the particulars assumed under the common name in both cases—figures and living beings—constitute a series, each successive term of which potentially contains its predecessor , e.g. the square the triangle, the sensory power the self-nutritive. Hence we must ask in the case of each order of living things, What is its soul, i.e. What is the soul of plant, man, beast? Why the terms are related in this serial way must form the subject of examination. For the power of perception is never found apart from the power of self-nutrition, while—in plants—the latter is found isolated from the former. Again, no sense is found apart from touch, while touch is found by itself; many animals have neither sight, hearing, nor smell,. Again, among living things that possess sense some have the power of locomotion, some not. Lastly, certain living beings—a small minority—possess calculation and thought, for (among mortal beings) those which possess calculation have all the other powers above  mentioned, while the converse does not hold—indeed some live by imagination alone, while others have not even imagination. Reflective thought presents a different problem. It is evident that the way to give the most adequate definition of soul is to seek in the case of each of its forms for the most appropriate definition.”

One point I wish to bring out is the reference to “another order like man or superior to him” (414b19). The framework of the totally self-sufficient being , being “either a beast or a god” of the quote from Politics 1.1, 1253a29 at the end of “Empsuka, Part 3” is maintained intact here in the sense that man is a middle point in a series from unspeaking, totally self-sufficient plant to unspeaking, totally self-sufficient god. This is relevant to Sorabji’s argument with the first two chapters of  METAPHYSICS ALPHA (I). Another point is that  imagination is becoming very important here but seems to be a derogatory term, putting men (and gods) with calculative abilities on a higher plain above animals with just “imagination.” This hierarchy will be brought into question later by Aristotle himself.

In the reference 3.3, 428a19-24, Aristotle says (starting from line 428a19 going to line 428b22), “It remains therefore to see if it is opinion, for opinion may either be true or false. But opinion involves belief (for without belief in what we opine we cannot have an opinion), and in brutes though we often find imagination we never find belief. Further, every opinion is accompanied by belief, belief by conviction, and conviction by discourse of reason, while there are some of the brutes in which we find imagination, without discourse of reason. It is clear then that imagination cannot, again, be opinion plus sensation, or opinion mediated by sensation, or a blend of opinion and sensation; this is impossible both for these reasons and because the content of the supposed opinion cannot be different from that of the sensation (I mean that imagination must be the blending of the perception of white with the opinion that it is white: it could scarcely be a blend of the opinion that it is good with the perception that it is white): to imagine is therefore (on this view) identical with the thinking of exactly the same as what one perceives non-incidentally. But what we imagine is sometimes false though our contemporaneous judgment about it is true; e.g. we imagine the sun to be a foot in diameter though we are convinced that it is larger than the inhabited part of the earth . . .

Imagination is therefore neither any one of the states enumerated, nor compounded out of them. But since one thing has been set in motion another being may be moved by it, and imagination is held to be a movement and to be impossible without sensation, i.e. to occur in beings that are percipient and to have for its content what can be perceived, and since movement may be produced by actual sensation and that movement is necessarily similar in character to the sensation itself, this movement cannot exist apart from sensation or in creatures that do not perceive, and its possessor does and undergoes many things because of it, and it is true and false.

The reason is as follows. Perception of the special objects of sense is never in error nor admits the least possible amount of falsehood. Next comes perception that what is incidental to the objects of perception is incidental to them; in this case certainly we may be deceived; for while the perception that there is white before us cannot be false, the perception that what is white is this or that may be false.”

Though I maybe cutting this short, I may be loosing your attention. Several movements are being made here in one continuous context. Though the word judgment is not used (?), ‘judgment’ is one of the main subjects right from the beginning to the end as specifically distinguished from perception. Judgment can be true or false whereas perception is never in error: this is a fundamentally phenomenological statement! Now, I explicitly accept the word “experience” and the word “perception” as synonymous in that they both present to one always true knowledge. Theodore Kisiel presents an extention of this view to include things not normally categorized under either word but I think should be when regarded as just “experience” or “perception.” Kisiel also equates then with “intentionality” which sees white as white, without any necessity for naming it as such, as distinguished from an otherwise colored area/object which to some degree almost any animal must possess even if it is just a distinction between light and dark.

Intentionality itself already contains its own solution to the problem of expression. As we have already noted, in being already intentionally structured, immediate experience is itself not mute but “meaningful,” which now means it is already contextured like a “language.” In view of the articulation inherent in intentionality, the problem of “intuition and expression” may perhaps now be more cohesively formulated: How can appropriate expressions be “read off” directly from experience and developed in order to enable rather than to obscure intuitive access to it? . . . The objection is answered by distinguishing between formal theoretization (Vergegenständlichhung), which yields  the “anything in general” in one fell swoop directly from primal life, and the actual theoretization (Objektivierung) which occurs stepwise and typewise from the environmental experience . . . Its compass is far broader: sensory and nonsensory, real and possible objects, even nonbeing. Noteworthy is the fact that it is not tied to the theoretical comportment, to the scientific lifeworld, but is to be found also in atheoretical comportment, in the aesthetic, ethical, and religious lifeworlds. Even in religious experience, “something” is given. This suggests that the formal-objective something first has no connection with the theoretical process, that its motivation out of life is qualitatively and essentially different. (Theodore Kisiel, THE GENESIS OF BEING AND TIME, California, 1993, pp.49-50)

The course of KNS 1919 seeks to set phenomenological philosophy as a pre-theoretical primal science outside of any connections with the ultimate human questions, which would turn it into a worldview. To make this step in the present context, a kind of “religious reduction” is called for. For all that Eckhart, Schleiermacher, and Dilthy contributed to shaping the phenomenological topic for the young Heidegger, there is a qualification to such assertions as “The stream of conscious is already religious” which must be kept in mind. The “is” here is not a expression of identity between religion and life but of the identification of the motivating ground of religion. But the very same vital source is also the motivating ground of philosophy, art, morality, science, in short, of all human culture. The conditions that make the soul receptive to religion thus also make it receptive to philosophy . . . Nevertheless, it is not always clear that Heidegger at this time consistently carried out such a “religious reduction,” and so separated a research orientation from a personal life with an overriding religious motivation, or, in Husserl’s words, from a personal “religious orientation in which the theoretical-philosophical interest was predominant.” Not until 1922 does Heidegger’s personal pathos for his Christian facticity clearly yield to the “fundamental atheism of philosophy,” the skepsis of radical questioning which he will later characterize as the “piety of thinking.” (pg. 113)

I formally object to his terminology of “lifeword” and “religious” in this context, but 1) that is largely my doing where 2) my intent is to use such words as distinguishing concepts of conceptual contexts that are only after “experience/perception” identified as such, and even then such identifications, though not logically ‘wrong’ as identifying areas of experience are actually arbitrary in their identification as such as a matter of easy and convenient communication which, as “easy and convenient communication” bring in totally unwarranted connotations that in “everyday ‘They’ self” fashion are then taken as justified as a matter of fact. For instance, a ‘religious experience’ is primarily and solely just an experience and only as pure experience can it never be in error. It is when it is identified as “religious,” which can be just a delineation of a certain kind of experience under a logically pronounced name, that judgments of truth versus falsity are sneaked in through connotation and common parlance when one in fact should be just delineating a finite, mortal area of purely animal experience. Belief in “another order like man or superior to him” (414b19) should remain phenomenologically just as indefinite and equivocal as Aristotle himself left it here if even mentioned which is strictly not necessary in that specific context. However, as I have said, such “religious” pointers, stripped of common parlance connotations, may be properly used to delineate an area of experience which as a “special object of sense is never in error or admits the least possible amount of falsehood” (428b17). But in such a situation one can be a complete atheist, or agnostic like William James or Deist like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine, that completely divorces avocation of belief in the actual existence of a deity that actually has any relation to or meaning for human life from the THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE. The point of bringing this in is to emphatically outline what Sorabji says when he states that “[Aristotle] must then compensate [animals] by giving them a rich enough perceptual content to deal with the world,” (pg. 12), when is exactly what Heidegger says Aristotle does do in ARISTOTLE’S METAPHYSICS Theta 1-3 and, on his own cognizance, in THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF METAPHYSICS: World, Finitude, Solitude. In other words, there is really nothing ‘meaningfully’ religious about “religious experience” although it can be an experience of some kind of grandeur. But if an animal can experience this also—theoretically—and an animal ‘cannot’ have “ belief” or “discourse of reason” . . .

Another point that this passage is making more and more problematical in Aristotle is the meaning of what he calls “imagination” which animals can have. Aristotle says clearly within the same context of this passage that the animal cannot have “belief” (428a21—H. J. Blumenthal translates Aristotle’s pistis as “conviction”) where “opinion involves belief” (428a20) nor “discourse of reason” (428a24) whereas “in the brutes though we often find imagination.” But the following comment in parenthesis “I mean that imagination must be the blending of the perception of white with the opinion that it is white” (428a27-9) throws everything into confusion by necessarily (“must be the blending,” 428a28) connecting the concepts of “imagination and “opinion” when “opinion involves belief” and yet “in the brutes (H. J. Blumentahal translates toon de therioon outheni huparxei pistis “and no wild animals have conviction”) . . . we never find belief,” (428a21). Pseudo-Simplicius says on 428a18:

The difference between imagination and opinion which is stated now seems to be the same as the one mentioned before. (‘Simplicius’ On Aristotle’s “On the Soul 3.1-5”, trans. Blumenthal, Cornell, 2000, pg. 69)

H. J. Blumenthal says this reference is to Pseudo-Simplicius’ comment on 427b20, “But having an opinion is not within our control, for it is necessary that it be either false or true”:

Belief is a wider term than opinion, but opinion is taken to stand for any kind of belief. Being true or false is common to every kind, since every kind of belief consists in assent. Assent consists not only in apprehension of what comes along, but in discrimination between what is true and false. Truth and falsity consist in agreement or disagreement with things, and things are not in our control. (pg. 64)

This actually, to me anyway, adds to the confusion. How can “belief” be “a wider term than opinion” if “opinion is taken to stand for any kind of belief”? Like Aristotle, Pseudo-Simplicius seems to be making a distinction that is not a distinction. “Assent” as “every kind of belief consists in assent” is used here exactly as Aristotle’s “imagination must be the blending of the perception of white with the opinion that it is white” which is what is causing my confusion in the first place. “Imagination” would supposedly then just be “apprehension of what comes along,” but it is exactly this “apprehension” that presents “things” that “are not in our control” and therefore implicitly, as Kisiel said in the first quote above about Heidegger (“, in being already intentionally structured, immediate experience is itself not mute but ‘meaningful,’”), is a judgment of truth in accord with Aristotle’s “Perception of the special objects of sense is never in error or admits the least possible amount of falsehood” (428b18-9). The point of this, I hope, is that the ‘confusion’ is not a product of my imagination but is actually present.

Pseudo-Simplicius goes on about 428a18:

Conviction is assent to what has been cognized, as being true: therefore it is not present in irrational creatures. For judgment of a thing as being true follows the apprehension of it and is rational. Intellect too knows that it is true, but in an undivided and unitary way. (pg. 69)

Much may depend on what “follows” means here exactly, but if it is used in syllogistic fashion, then Pseudo-Simplicius is stating a logically necessary conclusion and therefore attaches “judgment of a thing being true” by definition to animal “apprehension.” I do not see, especially considering the whole context of both Aristotle and Pseudo-Simplicius, how this conclusion can be evaded in any way.