Aristotle on the Immortality of the Soul
Author：Paschal Fu-Ning Ting
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Aristotle’s De anima is the first book which deals with all sorts of organism: the living facts of all the plants, animals and human beings, and their proper activities or functions respectively. Soul is defined as the vital principle which enables the natural body from having life in potency to be a living body in act.
The problem regarding the immortality of the soul is altogether unclear in Aristotle’s writings. However, what is definite is that the concept of immortality of the soul is one of the central ideas in his early lost writings. At his early age, Aristotle was influenced by Plato and accepted the idea of the immortality of the soul. In his mature writings, Aristotle develops his own philosophy. When he speaks about psychology, he speaks in terms of the hylomorphism in the Physics. According to which, all the material substances are composed of form and matter, so is a man composed of soul and body. For Aristotle, as a man is a whole man, the soul cannot subsist separately in itself. In such a case, the possibility of the survival of the soul, after the death of body, becomes the repeated question on which philosophers have been trying to investigate.
Aristotle never makes any demonstration of the immortality of the soul, as Plato does before him. Nevertheless, he affirms that the intellect is the very soul of human beings, being metaphysically simple and immaterial, and its activity is immaterial in nature. Intellect is not the form of body; it is a separable substance in its own right. In fact, hylomorphism cannot be referred to the relationship between intellect and body. Intellect is different from the vegetative and animal souls which are bound to be united with bodily organs, whereas intellect can be a separable substance in its own right. It is a different genos of soul. Since intellect is immaterial, its activities are independent from body. It is therefore eternal and immortal. The Aristotelian idea of the intellect is platonic in essence. Aristotle has never given up his early idea of the immortality of the soul throughout his whole life.