208 Aristotle and his school
and to take into account the overarching framework of ‘principal activities
and affections’K D
#Lof living beings for the sake of which,
according to Aristotle, these parts and processes exist or occur.^8
The result might well be a morecompletepicture of Aristotle’s views
on what it means to be a living being, that is to say, on how the various
constituents that make up a living entity are interrelated. For, as Aristotle
himself indicates, a purely formal description of psychic powers and pro-
cesses is insufficient for at least two reasons. First, as he repeatedly stresses
(apparently in polemics against the Pythagoreans), the connection of a cer-
tain psychic function with a certain bodily structure (an organ such as the
eye, a process such as heating) is by no means coincidental; on the contrary,
the bodily basis should have a certain nature or be in a certain condition in
order to enable the exercise of a certain psychic power (e.g. perception).^9
Secondly, the material, bodily embedding of psychic functions accounts
for the occurrence ofvariationsK
Lboth in the distribution of
these functions over various kinds of animals and in their exercise. These
variations may exist, or occur, among different species, but also among in-
dividual members of one species, or amongtypesof individuals within one
species, or even within one individual organism at different moments or
states (e.g. sleep versus waking, drunkenness versus sobriety). As this chap-
ter will try to show, variations inintellectualcapacities and performances
among different kinds of animals, among different members of one kind or
even within one individual on different occasions are explained by Aristotle
with a reference tobodilyfactors.^10 This raises the interesting question of
the causal relationship between these intellectual performances and the
bodily conditions corresponding to them, both in abnormal cases and in
normal ones, and how the form–matter distinction is to be applied in these
various circumstances: does form fail to ‘master’ matter in these cases, and
if so, why? Should we speak ofoneform (e.g. rationality) being present in
different pieces of matter, or should we say that there are different levels
on which the form–matter distinction can be made (as in typological vari-
ations)? Are the variations to be explained mechanically or teleologically,
and are defects compensated for by other skills?
In spite of this pronouncedly biological context, however, thereareindi-
cations that the study of the soul has, for Aristotle, a special status and is
(^8) SeePart. an. 645 b 15 – 28. This approach is illustrated by Lloyd ( 1992 ).
(^9) SeeDe an. 412 a 15 , 21 ; 412 b 5 , 12 ; 414 a 22 , 26.
(^10) This is not to say that other factors, such as habit and education (
!0
) play no role
here; on the extent to which, according to Aristotle, cultural factors (education, local customs) may
account for variations in the degree of perfection of these capacities, see below.