[ExI] Is anyone an expert on Aristotle and Life?

[Stefano Vaj]

On 30 December 2011 01:11, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:

> The basic problem is that the Greek word 'psyche' is commonly
> translated as 'soul' in English writings. :)
>

Interesting issue, that I have considered myself a number of time, because
I suspect that all such vocabulary has been dramatically polluted by the
psychological, semantical and philosophical consequences of some 1500 of
monotheistic cultural egemony,

Yes, it is true that the current translation of psyche is soul ("anima"
with some variants in Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, etc.).

OTOH, what does "psyche" literally means for a Greek? The Indo-european
root of the word is the same as that of "spirit" , and both
onomatopoeically refer to the puff, the breath emanating from a living body
(as in the English inspire, expire, siffle...), which is of course the most
obvious indication that the body is alive and functioning rather than dead
(as in "his spirit has left him"). Moreover, the (possibly distinctive)
"breath" of somebody indicated the current or recent presence of an
individual in given room (as in "his spirit was still permeating the
place").

The "land of the spirits" or "of the shadows" is therefore simply where our
memory hallucinates that the breaths or the shadows of bygone people who
have been important in one's life are still behind one's shoulder - a
common enough experience for many of us, with goes along with our
inclination of "speaking with the dead" by asking our memory to simulate
the comfort, the advice, the guidance, the emotional satisfaction we
derived by somebody's actual presence and interaction (interestingly, in
the Japanese tradition one can be haunted also by the spirit/ghost/phantom
of a living, but absent, individual). See the visits of Ulysses and Aeneas
to the "Ades" in Homer's and Virgil's poems.

But are we really on different ground with the Latin "anima" that has been
translated with "soul" (firstly attested in the Beowulf, if I am not
mistaken, and likely to mean itself originally "the thing binding things
together")?

An "anima" is again "what animates a body", that makes it move and directs
its behaviour as long as it does not become finally inanimated - a corpse
that the anima has deserted. This, in turn, has of course to do with the
body's "form" in an Aristotelian sense (its structure, pattern, model,
functional principle) and with its "psychological" states in the modern
sense.

Has all of it something to do with the dualistic, metaphysical view that
permeates the judaeo-christian tradition (world/God, body/soul,
life/afterlife, etc.)? Not much, but for the fact that the vocabulary and
the philosophical categories of ancient Europe came in handy for a
translating and formalising, in a drastically reinterpreted sense, the new
"anti-world" concepts.

Hope this is of help to Natasha.

-- 
Stefano Vaj
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