Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
By defining the soul as the first
entelechia
of a body with organs,
Aristotle supposes the soul to be the natural completion of the body.
As he makes clear in both
de Anima
and the
Nicomachean Ethics
, the
entelecheia of the body is a life of a variety of capabilities, desires,
emotions, and reasoning.
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The natural completion of the body is a
process of physical and psychological growth driven by the inherent
structure of the human being,
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and for the purpose of accomplishing
the activities for which the body is suited. The human being is complete
as a human being, each and every instant of its existence; but this com-
pleteness is nevertheless a process by which the structure of the being is
expressed, and that expression is (in the development of a happy life) made
more transparent over time. This can be illustrated by looking at the
differences between Thomas Hobbes and Aristotle on the subject of
happiness. Hobbes rejects the reality of any entelecheia understood as
making possible an energeia; so that for Hobbes life is endless motion, the
pursuit of the satisfaction of desire after desire, with no particular accom-
plishment attributable to the satisfaction of any particular desire. For
Hobbes, happiness is always temporary, satisfaction quickly overcome by
new desires.
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For Aristotle, the performance of certain capabilities is the
completion of the life of the body, what the body exists to be. Happiness
is the energeia of virtue, a stable, active state of completion, satisfying,
pleasurable, and (for humans, to a limited extent) self-sustaining. For
Hobbes, the body is always an instrument, for Aristotle, fundamentally it
is not. For Aristotle, it is the presence, the actuality, of the end. In short,
the concept of the entelecheia of the soul as making possible an energeia
is central to the notion of a hylomorphic psychology.
But what is entelecheia when put in these terms, especially when it is
applied to its obvious focus and source: human beings? One important,
and counterintuitive, observation is that it is passive, or perhaps better,
it is limited; it suffers the limitations of materiality. Aristotle described
the soul as the completion of a body with organs. The soul, as an ent-
elecheia, a completion, not a completer, not a doer, but an expression of
the capabilities of the body itself. The passivity is an expression of what
was already there, contained potentially in the body and released by the
soul to be the activity, the energeia, of what was already there. The body
is not the result and simple consequent of the activity of the soul; again,
the soul is not a maker of the body. In a sense, the body is already there,
