All the feels: Touch in Aristotle's De Anima
What does it mean to be an animal?
The Book:
De Anima
By Aristotle (Translated by C.D.C. Reeve)
Hackett
2017
The Talk:
Aristotle’s De Anima is translated On the Soul. It’s a short piece, only about 66 pages in this translation, with translator’s notes taking far more length than the text itself, which tells you a little bit about what you’re getting into.
(Shout out to philosopher and translator C.D.C. Reeve. I do not know Reeve, but I have now read his translation of Aristotle’s De Anima, Rhetoric, and Politics, as well as his translation of Plato’s Republic in recent years. I’ve enjoyed his introductions, notes, and the texts themselves, with plenty of underlines and marginal scrawls. My misunderstandings and misreadings are all my own, but he’s given me many hours of happiness with his work.)
Ostensibly, in De Anima, Aristotle wants to set out some first thoughts or starting places to begin thinking about what a soul is. And yet he seems to spend very little time discussing the soul—at least what we think of as the soul proper. And, furthermore, while he also argues that part of the soul is immortal, he seems—in this piece at least—not particularly interested immortality.
In fact, what Aristotle seems more interested in is defining what makes, say, a bug different from a rock. In other words, What is life? What makes some things have that inner motivator, that thing that makes them move from within themselves rather than simply knocking around the cosmos like billiard balls.
Surprisingly, thousands of years later, in our scientific age, people still debate what life actually is. There are general ideas, but no clear consensus. And this debate has particular relevance when thinking about the search for extraterrestrial life in the universe or creating synthetic life in a laboratory. Additionally, we might ask what it means if an AI or a robot is intelligent but not alive. Can something be conscious and not living at the same time? Or must consciousness be alive?
These modern questions aren’t too far from what Aristotle was investigating in De Anima, in my opinion. He begins by gathering together what notable people from the past have said about the soul, to kick off the conversation. He clusters these ideas around two concepts: internal motion and understanding. Some people say the soul is the thing that all living things have that makes them move. Others talk about the soul as the seat of understanding, the part of us that can reflect on our experience, a part that likely only humans have.
Rather than picking one or the other of these concepts, Aristotle attempts to give an account of how these different capacities of the soul link together, from the narrowest definition of life to the immortal human soul.
To touch is to want
Since all living things move but not all have understanding, and since all that have understanding must also move, Aristotle begins at the bottom, so to speak, investigating what all life has (growth, replication), and then what only some life has (various perceptions), ending with what only humans have (understanding).
Plants receive nourishment and grow, but they have no perceptions, posits Aristotle. Animals are different; they have perceptions. In II.2 he writes:
For even what does not move or change its place, but which does have perception, is said to be an animal and not just a living thing. Now the primary sort of perception that belongs to all animals is touch. And just as the nutritive can be separated from touch and every perceptual capacity, in the same way touch can be separated from the other perceptual capacities.
Here’s where the text really started to get interesting to me. Aristotle places the sense of touch as the basic, universal sense of all animals. And not only that, he says, but touch can be separated out from other perceptions, in the same way that the nutritional parts of an organism are separate from perceptions—which seems like he wants to say that touch is quite distinctive from the other senses.
Before he goes on to investigate the other senses, he unpacks what perception entails. (Keep in mind he’s talking about touch primarily.)
For where there is perception, there is also both pain and pleasure—and where of these, of necessity appetite too.
In the following section of Book II, II.3, he unpacks this even further.
If the perceptual [capacity of the soul] belongs, then so does the desiring one. For desire comprises appetite, spirit, and wish; all animals have at least one sort of perception, namely touch; but for what has perception there is also pleasure and pain and the pleasant as well as the painful; and where there are these, there is also appetite, since it is a desire for the pleasant.
…
For now, though let us state this much: those living things that have touch also have desire.
So for Aristotle, perceptions aren’t like motion detectors or fire alarms. They aren’t merely mechanical. They entail the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, primarily the pleasure of nourishment. (Aristotle talks later about the tongue as a perception organ of both taste and touch.) This seems a plausible connection to me, that the perceptions of animals, as we’ve known them to evolve, don’t exist disinterestedly. Perception is accompanied by appetite, long before reason and understanding arrive on the scene. Where there is touch, there is desire. And only touch is necessary. Indeed, touch is required for any other senses to exist.
Again, without touch none of the other sorts of perception is present, but touch is present without the others.
The flesh is the medium
In the rest of Book II Aristotle discusses the five senses (sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch). For each sense, he notes that there has to be a medium through which an object must be perceived. Visible objects can only be perceived through light. Sound must move through air or water. Smells must move through air (or water, Aristotle notes some animals can smell in water). Even taste requires water, moisture, in order to operate.
In each of these cases, Aristotle points out that there has to be some kind of distance between the perceiver and the perceived in order for the perception to work. If you put something directly onto your eye, you can’t see it. The tongue is a bridge case, but generally these four senses are all connected to anticipation, seeking out things that are far away from the body. What’s on the horizon? What’s coming near or going away? What’s in the area? What good or bad thing is coming up next?
This sets up a puzzle, which is probably why Aristotle ends Book II on touch, even though he places touch as the most prior or primitive of the animal senses. The puzzle is that there is no apparent medium for touch. Rather than requiring distance, it requires no distance. Aristotle attempts to resolve this by suggesting that flesh is the medium and that the precepting organ is deeper in the body, near the heart.
Touch and being
In the third and final book, Aristotle goes on to describe imagination as a kind of intermediary state between perception and understanding. You can have perception without imagination, he argues, but you can’t have imagination without perception. And you can have imagination without understanding (he suggests bees are like this), but you can’t have understanding without imagination.
It creates a nice staircase. Nutritive/generative life → Perceptions → Imagination → Understanding. The lower levels don’t require the upper levels, but the upper levels require the lower ones, like a pyramid. Even the highest levels of contemplation require general animal perception.
And this is why without perceiving, no one could learn or comprehend anything, and when one contemplates, one must at the same time contemplate an appearance. For appearances are like perceptions, except that they are without matter.
Now, Aristotle believes that it is better to live one’s life as far as possible from the body, so to speak, in the higher parts of the soul—reason, abstraction, understanding. The self-controlled person is moved to action by the desire of the understanding. (Here the movement-soul and the understanding-soul come together!)
But that is what makes it even more remarkable, in my opinion, that after reaching the highest part of the soul, Aristotle double backs and spends the final two sections of his treatise discussing the perception of touch once again!
It is evident, accordingly, that [touch] is the only perceptual capacity with the loss of which an animal must die. For it is not possible for anything to have this if it is not an animal, nor is there any besides it that something must have to be an animal.
Aristotle goes on to say that a very bright object could blind you, a very loud sound could make you go deaf, but a very hot or cold or hard object will kill you.
For it has been shown that without touch it is impossible for an animal to exist. … The other perceptual capacities, as was said, the animal has not for the sake of being but for the sake of wellbeing.
That’s basically the last point that Aristotle makes in De Anima: Touch for animals is existential.
The sensitive soul
From start to finish, Aristotle is clear that what makes humans unique and special is our understanding, that higher self-reflective part, and his framework implies that humans are the only souls with immortality. That seems like a big deal.
And yet in Book II, in the section on odor of all places, Aristotle starts talking again about touch, in this case, human touch. He says that, among animals, humans do not have the best vision, nor the best hearing, nor the best smell.
For in others he is inferior to many animals, but in touch he is much more exceedingly exact than the rest. That is also why he is the wisest of the animals.
The context here (and Reeve’s notes are helpful) is that humans have very soft and tender skin compared to many other animals. We have less “hard earth” in our flesh, and thus our flesh is more heavenly, more ethereal. Softer (more sensitive) skin is a sign of a better thinker, a wiser animal, in Aristotle’s estimation.
I see the world feelingly
I do not know why Aristotle is so focused on touch, but it’s interesting. Vision (and to a lesser degree hearing) is our archetypical sense, tied to our conceptions of knowledge, language, reason, and the mind. Seeing is believing.
Aristotle starts from the bottom: To live is to be a body. To be an animal body is to move. To move requires touch. To touch is to discern, to want, to hunger, to feel pleasure, to feel pain. Other senses have value, but touch is animal being, animal life. All this before the conscious, rational self comes into play. There are “higher” parts of human life, but nothing is more core to living as an animal than the sense of touch.
In the opening of De Anima, Aristotle places emotions with the body:
So too the affections of the soul—spiritedness, mild-manneredness, fear, pity, confidence, and, further, joy, loving, and hating—would all seem to involve the body, since at the same time as these the body is affected in a certain way. … If this is so, however, it is clear that affections of the soul are enmattered accounts.
Given this, it may make sense why Aristotle spends little time thinking about the immaterial, immortal soul. It is unclear, under his account, how a dead soul could imagine or perceive anything without the body, nor feel emotion nor desire (except for a rather ethereal “wishing”). Somehow this is the ideal state in Aristotle’s program, and yet it doesn’t seem like much of anything at all—without touch.
Related:
Emotions are information: Audre Lorde vs Jonathan Haidt
Does he think the understanding can exist on its own, disembodied?