Biomedical Engineering Reference
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itself remains beyond any rational interpretation arising solely from the
material structure itself. Rooted in a structured passivity, the activity of
the soul appears as a surprise, a serendipitous discovery of the person.
This interpretation is at odds with strong criticism that Aristotle's
faculty psychology, and as a result his ethics, is reflective of the
Athenian social structure and hence unwittingly a social construction
disguised as essentialist metaphysics. The argument of this chapter is
that Aristotle's distinction between entelecheia and energeia in his con-
ception of the soul is metaphysically deeper than is suggested by a faculty
psychology, and is not wedded to the identity of virtues based on the
structure of the human being as described in the
Nicomachean Ethics
.
But it is not clear that the depiction of the social virtues as historical
and perhaps ideological renders the metaphysical concept of the soul as
the entelecheia of the body inappropriate and ethically useless; instead,
this conception of the soul is useful in its establishing teleological limits
rather than teleological necessities. Thus, a hylomorphic psychology
need not be dismissed as merely the reification of accepted social cate-
gories and modes of interpretation. Time and again, we see the develop-
ment of the life of the human body occur in ways mysterious and
unexpected. It is ourselves as active beings (as energeia) we do not
understand, and this is the point where genetic enhancement appears as
a metaphysical issue, not simply as an ethical problem.
Human Nature: Freedom or Serendipity?
Fundamental to human life and development is an openness and respon-
siveness to the unexpected and serendipitous—that is, the soul as the
activity of the body. This is a characteristic we find in evolutionary theory
as well: random mutations are tested and selected by the challenges of
the environment, and the successful mutation is the one that reproduces
itself with the greatest fecundity. But what is unexpected and serendipi-
tous occurs against a background of the expected and the routine. The
difference, of course, is the claim that it is the soul that is the source and
evaluator of human serendipity, while it is the environment that is such
for evolution.
The point of revisiting Aristotle's hylomorphic psychology is thus
not an effort to return to a discussion of the virtues as the basis for
