Aristotle on divine movement and human nature 247
form of ‘divine concern’ (
), but the theory of others that a
god ‘sends’ (
) dreams to people does suppose divination in sleep to
be such, for ‘sending’ presupposes an active and purposive divine choice,
whereas such a choice is for Aristotle, as we have seen, incompatible with
the fact that prophetic dreams are found among simple people and not
among the best and wisest. For this reason he uses three times the same
distribution argument as that inEth. Eud. 1247 a 28 – 9.
The second part of the solution is in that the movement of God is, in
principle, not limited to the class of the ‘irrational’ ('
) people, but
extends to the ‘wise and intelligent’ ( !
) as well. What
Aristotle has in mind here is a general and universal divine causality. To
demonstrate this I shall first summarise my interpretation of the passage
1248 a 15 ff.; then I shall give a detailed account of this interpretation and
of my treatment of the various textual problems.
Having established thateutuchiaproceeds from natural desire (
and
), Aristotle asks in turn for the starting-point of this desire,
probably because it is not yet clear why this natural desire should be aimed
in the right direction. He considers that this starting-point will also be the
origin of rational activity ($and<-
), and having disposed of
‘chance’ (-#) as an evidently unsatisfactory candidate for this function
he argues that the starting-point wanted is in fact the starting-point of
movement in the soul; then it is clear that this starting-point is God. Thus
God is the starting-point of all psychic activity, both of reasoning (
)
and of the irrational impulses ( ) on whicheutuchiais based. God is
even more powerful than the divine principle in man, the intellect ($),
and it is for this reason that people who are devoid of rational activity, too,
can make the right choice: they succeed without reasoning because they still
have God, although the wise people also have God and use his movement
in their calculation of the future, either by experience or by habit: thus there
is a more rational form of divination as well. Both irrational and rational
divination, then, ‘use’ God (who sees the future as well as the present),
but God moves more strongly in those people whose reasoning faculty is
disengaged. Thus God’s movement is present both in the irrational people
daimoniabecause it is beyond human control, as is indicated by the use of the word
!
in
Somn. vig. 453 b 23 , where3
!
is presented as the opposite of what is done by human agency
and is subdivided into things that happen ‘naturally’ ( -
) and things that happen ‘spontaneously’
("3 ( ). The individual human nature is further calleddaimoniabecause it works more
strongly when reason is inactive, and because it plays the part of intermediary between God and
man, which Greek tradition assigned to demons. For this interpretation see van der Eijk ( 1994 )
292 – 6 , and ch. 6 above.