Written 5-1-2021
I finished On the Soul (De Anima) about a week ago now and I think it’s maybe my favorite of Aristotle’s works. It might just be because it's a little more digestible than Metaphysics and Physics while still tackling the heady concepts at the core of his mysticism, but I think that there’s also a sense in which this book fully embodies Aristotle’s wandering sense of knowledge. The title, On the Soul, would imply a fairly limited scope, or at the very least one where the topics all relate directly to the soul, but for Aristotle the soul is by definition a thing tied to both matter and form, almost inseparably. The discussion quickly becomes a mystical journey of the links between biology, phenomenology, cosmology, theology, and ethics.
This work feels like it ties the topics found in Physics, Metaphysics, and Ethics into one crazy package. Like all his other works, Aristotle tends to repeat himself and the prose is difficult, but these can be chalked up to thousands of years of translations. And like other of his works, the descriptions themselves become their own sublime poetry; descriptions which don’t exactly flow off the tongue but grope at the articulation of ideas which blow my mind. His attempts at light theory here also create a wonderful map and hint at what now we take as common knowledge. But not all his ideas are off the mark. His mind thinking of itself is stunning and so colossal an idea that it still feels beyond what any discipline can even begin to articulate. It’s an idea that seems forever stuck in the corner of esoteric theology or philosophy, but one that exists as the groundwork for generations of thinkers and the general public alike, setting the stage for a worldview that exists perhaps beneath or within the imaginations in all corners of the world.
The ideas here seem to exist in somewhat of a nascent stage, with little explanation behind some of the declarations and primitive views in regard to physics and biology, but even when Aristotle is at his most ridiculous you can see where he’s coming from. He simultaneously presents archaic opinions on biology and physics alongside a cogent theory of god. Aristotle is a philosopher over a biologist or physicist as his views here all extend down from the top level of immediate experience and scientific reason down to the fundamental questions of the bare building blocks of existence.
Aristotle doesn’t seem to have the universal depth of Plato, or Plato’s literary bend, but I can’t help but feel like reading him is more often and more immediately breathtaking. Each page is packed with more philosophical information at a higher rate than most every book I’ve read and On the Soul is no different. The connections made here are the invaluable Aristotealian bridges between his other work and him and much of medieval philosophy. Even the flaws in the book are suggestive. It seems he’s always willing to admit when he doesn’t think he knows what a thing is, and every idea is inspected from two or more perspectives, somehow making his work both a survey and rigid system of philosophy. And, as a last note, his credence to the history of philosophy makes him feel contemporary. And perhaps that’s this work's greatest flaw, as a work of ancient philosophy it still has enough to say that we’re just as eager to attack these ideas as we are to praise Aristotle's philosophical groundwork.