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Mariah Blevans
Fledgling
13 Posts |
 Posted - Dec 09 2010 : 6:18:35 PM
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Okay, so -- last minute help for my essay because after reading the topic about Nietzsche and the Soul that is posted on this board, I suddenly am thrown back into quite a bit of confusion on this whole topic.
The idea that man has no nature seems to be one that Ortega and Nietzsche have in common -- my essay has to do with this having also a lot to do with Nietzsche's talk about the death of God and how if God were thought of as having given us a nature, His death would leave man without a nature -- giving us, as Ortega argues, a history instead. (Of course my account of all this in my paper is a bit more detailed than this.)
However, Aristotle does not believe that there is a god of any type who bestows man's nature on him and thinks that in fact man's nature really has nothing to do with any god at all. I'm confused (I don't know very much about Aristotle). What occupies the place of the modern idea of our having a nature in Aristotle's mind -- could it have something to do with the soul? What, in Aristotle's mind, drives man to do the things he does if it is not his nature, and what bestows this purpose upon him?
Can anyone help me out or at least guide me towards some texts that might help answer these questions for me? |
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Tom Trelogan
Forum Admin
1368 Posts |
Posted - Dec 11 2010 : 10:11:51 AM
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Mariah, I fear that so far as you paper is concerned, I'm doomed to being a day late and a dollar short, but what Aristotle has to say about man's soul and man's nature is most relevant to your concerns. Aristotle makes no bones about it at all: the soul just is our nature, and in general, it's soul that's the nature of any living thing, whether it be a human being, one of the "lower" animals, or even a plant. The relevant text is the treatise On the Soul (or On Soul as I'd prefer to translate it: the De Anima), and here it is. You shouldn't feel too bad about my not having gotten back to you with this last night before you finished up your paper. There's no chance you would have had the time to digest it and build anything very substantial about it into your paper in the short time you had left. But you should definitely take a look at when you can find the time to do so. It's fascinating stuff, and it demonstrates as clearly as anything could that the view according to which, as Nietzsche has Zarathustra put it, "the soul is something about the body" is one that has had a very long history indeed. For Aristotle, all bodies, living and non-living, have natures, and "soul" is just the name for the nature of a living thing.
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Nietzsche, Aristotle, and the Nature of Man
