The human psyche (temporalogically)

 300th post

Psyche according to Aristotle

What is the human psyche? The modern empirical science of psychology does not confront itself with this question, but contents itself with a quick definition such as consciousness or cognition and, more recently, with the dogma that these latter are somehow generated by material, neurological brain processes.

For deeper questioning of the human psyche, we have to return to Aristotle's De Anima (On the Soul), if only because his investigation laid the groundwork, i.e. the foundational concepts and way of thinking, that has governed Western (and today global) thinking on the psyche, even, unknowingly, on modern psychology.

After reviewing and criticizing the thinking of his predecessors in Book I, Aristotle starts anew to pursue the question, "what the psyche is" (τί ἐστιν ψυχὴ 412a3), a question that cannot be answered without understanding fundamental concepts from Aristotle's Metaphysics. Here I will have to assume a knowledge of these concepts. His investigation proceeds in a number of steps to find the psyche of "physical bodies" (σώματα...φυσικά 412a12f) that "have life" (ἔχει ζωήν 412a13), and is thus wider than the question concerning the specifically human psyche with which I am concerned here. Living bodies for Aristotle comprise plants, animals and humans as a special kind of animal.

The first answer deems the psyche "to be an essence as the 'look' of a physical body having the potential/ability to live" (οὐδίαν εἶναι ὡς εἶδος σώματος φυσικοῦ δυνάμει ζωήν ἔχοντος 412a20f), whereby this eidetic 'look' is the body's "having its end" (ἐντελέχεια 412a10) or "perfected presence" as living. (A non-living thing such as an axe, for example, has the eidetic look and perfected presence of something that is good for chopping.) This perfected presence of the psyche accounts for a living physical body's both "sleeping and waking" (ὔπνος καὶ ἐγρήγορσις 412a25). The "ability to live" is further specified as having organs (ὄργανα 412b1) which is exemplified by a plant (a living physical body) having roots in analogy to the stomach (412b4) that enables nutrition.

The general definition of the psyche is then given as the "essence/whatness of such a body" (τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι τῷ τοιῳδὶ σώματι 412b11) with organs, which amounts to "having the starting-point/principle of movement and stasis within itself" (ἔχοντος ἀρχὴν κινήσεως καὶ στάσεως ἐν ἑαθτῷ 412b17). Note that the psyche for Aristotle is an eidetic 'look' or 'idea' formulating the principle of self-movement of living bodies, and not a material cause (αἴτιος). The emphasis is on understanding what life is, rather than trying to causally explain it — especially not from material causes.

This concept of psyche applies to the living physical body as a whole and also to its parts. Aristotle provides the example of the eye as a bodily organ, whose essential whatness as organ of a living body is its "eyesight" (ὄψις 412b19), i.e. its ability to perceive visually. The eye is endowed with such psyche even when it is closed and cannot see, just as a living body is still alive even when asleep, i.e. 'dead to the world'. The organ of sight in this case is an organ of sense perception (αἴσθησις) that enables an openness to and receptiveness for everything presently visible in the world. Such sense perception is necessary for a living physical body in order for it to orient itself and move itself in its environs, and the bodily organ of the eye enables such self-movement characterizing for Aristotle what life itself is, and the role of the psyche as the essence or whatness that enables life, in this case, the sense perception necessary for life.

Temporalogical conception of the human psyche

What does this entail for the attempt to conceive specifically the human psyche starting from the elementary concept of three-dimensional time? The conception of life in this case is restricted to that of human life. The psyche is conceived first of all as belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time composed of its three characteristic dimensions of past, present and future familiar to us humans, but also mostly taken for granted and overlooked because, as such, these temporal dimensions are empty. We humans are instead focused on what comes from each these dimensions: from the past, from the present and from the future, and not on the empty, unmoving dimensions themselves that hide themselves in their inconspicuousness. 

What moves or stands still in coming from any of the three temporal dimensions is received by the human psyche which has this temporal receptiveness by virtue of belonging to the openness of three-dimensional time which thus provides the initial conception of the human psyche itself. Openness to the environs through sense perception is at the basis of the traditional conception of life in general*, and human life in particular, entails that this openness is restricted to what sense perception can perceive in the present. By contrast, a temporalogical account of the human psyche, and thus of human life itself, starts with its openness to all three temporal dimensions and what comes from each of these dimensions into the psyche's focus in order to be understood. This implies that the human psyche has a faculty of understanding that interprets what comes into focus in one way or another. It is thus hermeneutic through and through. This psychic faculty of interpretive understanding may be called the mind which is able to roam throughout three-dimensional time.

Hence e.g., to expect the visit of a friend from the temporal dimension of the future, is already to understand, to interpret the friend as a living human, which in turn implies already an implicit understanding both of what life is and of what, or who, a human essentially is, i.e. of a human's whatness or whoness. For Aristotle and Plato and the entire Western tradition, the human is a kind of animal, a legacy by which today's thinking remains bound, or rather, in which it remains incarcerated for the sake of preventing any deeper questioning and recasting. Even though the metaphysical, ontological interpretation of human being has receded into oblivion since the rise of empiricist positivism in the mid-19th century, and today's hegemonic understanding of the human as an evolutionarily evolved animal with an exceptionally large and complicated brain holds sway, there is still the need to pose the question of who the human is, thus revising this traditional understanding that has become thoughtless dogma. This requires 'doing a da capo' and starting again from an alternative beginning that may be called temporalogical, rather than ontological.

The phenomenon of human life itself, interpreted temporalogically, starts from the psyche's belonging to three-dimensional time. The self-movement of human life is then initially conceived, i.e. interpreted hermeneutically, as the ability of the psyche's understanding to roam, perhaps apparently haphazardly, throughout the openness of three-dimensional time by virtue of the psyche's power of imagination, focusing on this or that which comes to mind from any of the three temporal dimensions. This kind of self-movement of human life may be appropriately called the life of the mind. Mental movement thus gains precedence over physical movement upon which Western thinking remains fixated to the present day.

A friend's coming to visit is then tacitly 'always already' (a priori) interpreted eidetically** as a human endowed with a psychic openness to three-dimensional time and a mind able to roam freely through this temporal openness. This has consequences for how an encounter between friends is to be understood, namely, as an interplay between two humans, each of whom is endowed with an understanding mind endowed with free, temporally three-dimensional movement. To unfold further the phenomenon of interplay neglected by traditional thinking, however, cannot be undertaken in this brief post, whose aim has been to merely indicate how Aristotle's metaphysical-ontological conception of life can be recast temporalogically from an alternative starting-point. I have attempted this recasting, at least in outline, in On Human Temporality.

* Cf. "..the living being characterized first of all by sense perception", ...τὸ δὲ ζῷον διὰ τὴν αἴσθησιν πρώτος 413b3, the first sense treated being that of touch (ἁφή 413b5).

** εἶδος (_eidos_) reinterpreted temporalogically is the hermeneutic 'look' an essent offers of itself when presencing and absencing for the mind from three-dimensional time.

Further reading: Aristotle De Anima (On the Soul) esp. Book II Chap. i 412a1-413a10.

On Human Temporality: Recasting Whoness Da Capo De Gruyter, Berlin 2024.