Aristotle on the matter of mind 215
the position of women, or on the natural disposition of the good citizen).
Moreover, he also seems to recognise that natural dispositions, though being
necessary conditions for the realisation of human moral and intellectual
capacities, are notsufficientto provide human beings with virtue and with
happiness, but need development, training, and education.^30 To be sure, he
recognises the existence of ‘natural virtues’K
" L,^31 but they are
in need of regulative principles (such as ‘prudence’, !#
Lin order to
develop in the right direction, and they are even potentially harmful without
these regulative principles, as his discussion of ‘shrewdness’K
!#L
shows.^32 Thus in the sphere of such distinctly human things as virtue, he
acknowledges that nature requires further elaboration and even correction
by ‘art’K#L. There is a tension here between a ‘biological’ and an
‘ethical’, perhaps ‘anthropocentric’ approach to human activity which has
been well expressed by Gigon in his discussion of Aristotle’s treatment of
the contribution of nature to human happiness in the first chapter of the
Eudemian Ethics: ‘In the background lurks the problem (which is nowhere
explicitly discussed in the Corpus Aristotelicum as we have it) why nature,
which arranges everything for the best, is not capable of securing happiness
for all people right from the start.’^33
To summarise this first section: a comprehensive study of Aristotle’s views
on the bodily structures and processes involved in the actualisation of the
various psychic functions of organisms (nutrition, growth and decay, lo-
comotion, sense-perception, desire, imagination, thinking) would be very
desirable.^34 Such a study would be even more interesting if it could demon-
strate to what extent these views are determined by a concern, on his part,
to provide a physical foundation for his normative views on hierarchy in
(^30) See the discussion inEth. Nic. 2. 1 , esp. 1103 a 24 : ‘Therefore virtues occur neither naturally nor
contrary to nature, rather they occur to us because we are naturally suited to receive them and to
bring them to perfection by habituation’ (&’' -
& 1 R
/ " 0
" 1 !
. 8 D
( 0
.
1 $ , and 10. 9 , esp. 1179 b
21 ff.; cf. alsoEth. Eud. 1. 1.
(^31) Eth. Nic. 1144 b 15 – 16 and b 35 ff.
(^32) Eth. Nic. 1144 a 24 ff., b 3 , 9.
(^33) Gigon ( 1971 ) 108 : ‘Im Hintergrund lauert das Problem (das in unserem corpus Aristotelicum nirgends
expressis verbis verhandelt wird), warum die -
, die doch alles1 3 <
einrichtet,
nicht in der Lage ist, alle Menschen von vorneherein mit der Eudaimonie auszustatten.’
(^34) This is not to deprecate the importance of, indeed my indebtedness to, existing scholarship on this
topic. Extremely useful (and deserving to be taken into account much more thoroughly by students
of Aristotle’s psychology) are the contributions by Tracy ( 1969 ); and by Solmsen ( 1950 ), esp. 464 ff.,
( 1955 ), ( 1957 ), ( 1961 a), and ( 1961 b). Nor are some German contributions from the nineteenth century
to be neglected, such as Baumker ( ̈ 1877 ); Neuh ̈auser ( 1878 a, b); Schmidt ( 1881 ); Kampe ( 1870 ); Schell
( 1873 ). Still useful are Beare ( 1906 ); R ̈usche ( 1930 ); and Peck ( 1953 ). See further Manuli and Vegetti
( 1977 ); Webb ( 1982 ); G. Freudenthal ( 1995 ) and Sisko ( 1996 ) 138 – 57.