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Aristotle on the Physiological Foundations of Moral Psychology

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Aristotle on the Physiological Foundations of Moral Psychology ABSTRACT Title of Document: ACTION, PERCEPTION, AND THE LIVING BODY: ARISTOTLE ON THE PHYSIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MORAL PSYCHOLOGY Michael Phillip Russo, Ph.D. 2009 Directed By: Rachel Singpurwalla, Department of Philosophy In this dissertation I show that Aristotle’s moral psychology is grounded in his natural philosophy of the living body. Moral psychology studies the ways in which agency and moral responsibility are rooted in the functional structure of the psyche. For Aristotle, the psyche – that is, the soul (psychê) – is unified with the living body, and its functional structure is integrated with the dispositional propensities of the body’s material constituents. On account of this, “the soul neither does anything nor has anything done to it without the body...” (DA I.1, 403a 5) Accordingly, Aristotle considers it an “absurdity” of the accounts of his predecessors that “they attach the soul to the body and set it into it, determining no further what the cause of this is or what the condition of the body is…” (DA I.3, 407b 14) However, most contemporary interpretations of Aristotle’s moral psychology suffer from essentially this same problem: they interpret Aristotle’s explanation of, say, voluntary action or lack of self-restraint (akrasia) in entirely psychological terms, and say nothing about the physiological processes that Aristotle takes to partially constitute, and to critically influence, these phenomena. Here I address this imbalance by exploring Aristotle’s view of the somatic dimension of moral psychology. More specifically, I examine Aristotle’s so-called “hylomorphism” – the view that a living thing’s body and soul are its material and its form (respectively) – and his account of the physiological functions underlying “incidental perception” (roughly, “seeing as” or perceiving particulars under a description), voluntary action, practical reasoning and its role in moving us to act, lack of self-restraint, and moral development. ACTION, PERCEPTION, AND THE LIVING BODY: ARISTOTLE ON THE PHYSIOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MORAL PSYCHOLOGY By Michael Phillip Russo Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2009 Advisory Committee: Rachel Singpurwalla, Chair Suheil Bushrui Samuel Kerstein Allen Stairs Lars Svenonius © Copyright by Michael Phillip Russo 2009 “[O]ne must ask what purpose and what obvious utility the Aristotelian philosophy has for us. We answer that it is to ascend to the common principle of all things and to be aware that this is the one goodness itself, incorporeal, indivisible, uncircumscribed, infinite and of infinite power.” Ammonius, Commentary on Aristotle’s Categories, 6, 9 ii Dedication For three true teachers – James Roddy, Daniel Kolak, and Suheil Bushrui And my “second selves” – Sarene Appelbaum, James Madaio, and Hope May iii Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere and unutterable gratitude for the heritage of wisdom that has been made available to us all by sages and scholars such as Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, Simplicius, Homer, Guatama Buddha, Shantideva, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Confucius, Al-Ghazali, William James, Theophan the Recluse, Kallistos Ware, Joseph Campbell, Jiddu Krishnamurti, G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspesnsky, Shunryu Suzuki, Alan Wallace, Robert Thurman, Elaine Pagels, Joe Sachs, as well as countless others who have labored, through whatever means, in the pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful. I thank the members of my dissertation committee for their efforts in working through this dissertation. I am particularly grateful to Lars Svenonius for standing by this project for many years. Additionally, I am thankful for many Aristotelian conversations with James Celarier and regret that he did not survive to see this dissertation’s completion. I also thank James Lesher for helpful comments on a few early drafts of some of what is presented here. I must also thank a number of friends and colleagues who have indirectly contributed in a variety of ways to the process of completing this dissertation: Jim Berry, Sihen Beshah, Bill Boos, Chris Cherniak, David DeGrazia and the philosophy department at GWU, Nancy Hall, Tanna Lewis, Mehrdad Massoudi, and Evan and Sheila Rotner. Last and far from least, I must very sincerely thank Rachel Singpurwalla, who made the completion and concrete realization of this dissertation possible, about which I will simply point to the words of Socrates in Plato’s Republic VI, 491D1-492A5. iv Table of Contents Dedication..................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................iv Table of Contents ............................................................................................................v List of Tables .................................................................................................................vi Introduction: The Practice of Ethical Philosophy........................................................1 0.1 Dissertation Overview ...........................................................................................1 0.2 The Practice of Ethical Philosophy ........................................................................7 Chapter 1: The Physics and Metaphysics of Living Things.......................................16 1.1 The Metaphysics of Psychosomatic Unity............................................................16 1.2 Strata of the Living Thing’s Composition ............................................................21 1.3 A Hierarchy of Powers: Propensities and Capacities ............................................34 1.4 Stratification of Actions and Experiences.............................................................43 Chapter 2: Appearance, Perception, and Voluntary Action......................................53 2.1 Animals, Automata, and Voluntary Action ..........................................................53 2.2 The Particular Circumstances of Voluntary Action ..............................................63 2.3 Appearance and Perception..................................................................................73 2.3.1 Incidental Perception and Perception Management........................................73 2.3.2 Dreams, Recollection, and Putting Together Perceptions...............................92 2.3.3 Phantasia and Incidental Perception ............................................................102 2.3.4 Memory, Association, and Incidental Perception.........................................109 2.3.5 Passions, Appearances, and Judgments .......................................................113 2.4 Conclusion.........................................................................................................117 Chapter 3: Practical Reasoning and the Physiological Causes of Akrasia ..............119 3.1 Introduction: Turning Reasons Into Causes........................................................119 3.2 Eudaimonia – The Overarching Aim and Its Realization....................................121 3.3 Practical Reasoning – Its Origin, Its Object, and Its Efficacy .............................133 3.4 The Practical Syllogism .....................................................................................145 3.5 Akrasia: Its Description and Explanation ...........................................................149 3.6 Aristotle’s Physiological Explanation of Akrasia ...............................................155 Epilogue: Moral Development as Psychosomatic Transformation .........................163 4.1 Introduction .......................................................................................................163 4.2 Moral Development, Biological Development, and Human Development..........166 4.3 The End of Moral Development.........................................................................172 Bibliography ...............................................................................................................176 I. ANCIENT GREEK SOURCES: EDITIONS AND TRANSLATIONS.................176 II. SECONDARY LITERATURE AND ADDITIONAL MATERIAL ....................179 v List of Tables Table 1: Strata of the Living Thing’s Composition (from the top down) .................. 22 Table 2: Dispositional Propensities and Functional Capacities................................. 35 Table 3: Stratification of Action(s) / Event(s) .......................................................... 44 Table 4: The Akratic’s Alternative Syllogisms ...................................................... 153 vi Abbreviations and Translations of Aristotle’s Works Cat. = Categories DA = De Anima (On the Soul) DC = De Caelo (On the Heavens) EE = Eudemian Ethics GA = On the Generation of Animals GC = On Generation and Corruption MA = On the Motion of Animals Metaph. = Metaphysics Meteor. = Meteorology NE = Nicomachean Ethics PA = On the Parts of Animals Pol. = Politics Post. An. = Posterior Analytics Additional works cited are referred to by their full titles (e.g., On Dreams). Except where otherwise noted, I follow the translations listed below. For works not included in this list, except where otherwise noted, translations are taken
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