Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
as material cause, or as might be said today, genetics. From this
perspective, the activity of the soul is constrained by the capabilities of
the body and appears almost as an epiphenomenon.
Passivity and Activity
The constraints imposed by the material composition of the body are an
important part of our nature. We are not gods because we have a mate-
rial cause and tire in all our activities, even thinking.
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Pleasure and pain
also influence our activity, as Aristotle notes: “Our activities are sharp-
ened, prolonged and improved by their own pleasure,” and “when an
activity causes pain, this pain destroys it.”
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We are constrained by the
material circumstances of our lives: “Since man's nature is not self-
sufficient for the activity of contemplation, [the philosopher] must also
have bodily health and a supply of food and other requirements,” main-
tains Aristotle.
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These represent limitations on the soul that arise from
the materiality of the body. Aristotle is clear that happiness requires
favorable material circumstances for a happy life, among them good
birth, health, satisfactory children, personal beauty, wealth, friends,
political power, and a life long enough to have all of this.
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In particu-
lar, death limits the person, and as an example, presents Aristotle with
a conundrum as to whether a dead person may be considered happy and
what conditions might change that evaluation. These are limits present
in the person because of the material cause, and they present both obsta-
cles and opportunities for the actualization of the person—that is, the
activity that is the soul.
In addition to this passivity, the soul is also the activity of that body;
it is its completion and its presence. It is the
essence
manifested in the
thing; the doing of what the body both allows and is brought to. The
soul brings the body to completion and makes the whole more than the
sum of its parts. This completion is a discovery of the capabilities of
the body, wherein the body is taken its inertness and its structured mate-
riality (entelecheia, its actuality as a living substance) to its activity
(energeia). Because it is beyond the body, because the whole person is
more than the sum of its parts, the activity of the soul cannot be con-
clusively anticipated by the structure of its materiality. The limits of the
activity—birth, struggle, death—may be anticipated, but the activity
