The Lagoon Read online

  We were going for cuttlefish. In spring they migrate into the Aegean’s shallow bays to mate, spawn and die. In his Halieutica, which was written in a town just up the Turkish coast, Oppian says that’s when you can catch them in conical traps made of rush. The technique is still the same except that the traps are now made of plastic mesh. The first traps we brought up were empty, and for a while we suspected that someone else had lifted them (Kalloni’s fishermen, a fractious brotherhood, are not above stealing each other’s catch), but then a small octopus slithered bonelessly on to the deck. Oozing intellect, it headed straight for the scupper, but we caught it, stunned it and threw it into a bucket. An entangled mullet came up with its head chewed off – ‘See, soupia did that’ – and then a few kilos of cuttlefish, just enough to cover the fuel.

  ‘At the salt mines of Salzburg,’ wrote Stendhal, ‘they throw a leafless wintry bough into one of the abandoned workings. Two or three months later they haul it out covered with a shining deposit of crystals’ – thus the famous metaphor for the crystallization that happens if you leave a lover alone with his thoughts for twenty-four hours. Throw a branch into Kalloni during the spring and, within a day, it will be covered with berries resembling small, Greek grapes. They’re cuttlefish eggs. ‘The cuttlefish spawns close to land near seaweed or reeds or any debris such as brushwood, branches or stones; fishermen even put branches in position deliberately for them to lay on,’ says Aristotle, and in Kalloni fishermen still do that. But cuttlefish will lay on anything hard and our traps were covered with their eggs. There must be cephalopod orgies down there.

  A cuttlefish’s eggs are solitary, rubbery and, when first laid, stained by their mother’s ink an opaque violet-black. As they mature the egg case clears. I plucked one of these translucent berries from the net, held it up to the sun and saw within it a minute, twitching sketch of a cuttlefish, white with startlingly pink eyes, floating in its golden perivitteline fluid. Aristotle must have done the same:

  The development of the young cuttlefish: developing inside, from the moment the female spawns, is a sort of hailstone. It’s out of this that the young cuttlefish develops, attached by the head: birds have a similar fastening by the belly. As yet there is no visual evidence of the exact nature of this umbilical attachment: just that, as the young cuttlefish grows, the white bit gets smaller and eventually, as with the yolk in birds, disappears. Its eyes, like those of other animals, appear very big to start with. In the diagram A represents the egg, B and Γ the eyes, and Δ the young cuttlefish itself. Pregnancy occurs in spring; laying within fifteen days. When the eggs have been laid, another fifteen days later something like a bunch of grapes develops: when these burst, the young cuttlefish come out.

  As we drifted, a pair of copulating cuttlefish swim by. Aristotle: ‘Soft-bodies, such as the octopus, the cuttlefish and the squid, all copulate in the same way, that is to say, they unite at the mouth, by an interlacing of their tentacles.’ He fails to mention that both partners need not be alive. With necrophiliac ardour, the male was dragging about a very pale, and very dead, female. Females die once they’ve spawned and males grab anything with tentacles, twitching or not. As the cuttlefish came out of the traps they flushed dark-red with irritation, squirted jets of black ink and hissed like small, but very angry, kittens. We headed back, common terns transecting our wake.

  CUTTLEFISH EMBRYO AFTER HISTORIA ANIMALIUM, BOOK V

  LIII

  WHAT IS LIFE? It is Erwin Schrödinger’s question. His answer was that life is a system that feeds on negative entropy. Herbert Spencer defined life as ‘the definite combination of heterogeneous changes, both simultaneous and successive’. Jacques Loeb thought that living things were chemical machines ‘consisting essentially of colloidal material, which possess the peculiarities of automatically developing, preserving, and reproducing themselves’. Hermann Muller thought that any entity that had the properties of multiplication, variation and heredity was alive. For the authors of any biology textbook that you care to pick up it is a rather arbitrary list of properties: metabolism, nutrition, reproduction and so on; for most biologists it is a question best ignored.

  Aristotle asked Schrödinger’s question, and answered it. At first he gives the conventional list of properties: ‘By life we mean the capacity for self-nourishment, growth and decay.’ But that doesn’t really capture the terms in which he analyses the problem. He’s after a much more abstract description of what it is that separates the living from the dead. His deeper answer is that living things, uniquely, have a soul.

  LIV

  THE TRADITIONAL GREEK conception of soul was Homer’s. Patroclus falls at Troy and his disembodied soul takes wing for the House of Hades. Perhaps this explains why the Greek name for a butterfly is the same as that for ‘soul’ – psychē – for, as the soul flees a corpse at death, so a butterfly clambers from its chrysalis.

  In The Phaedo Plato elaborates the traditional theory. The soul is no longer merely something lost when we die; it reasons and regulates the body’s desires while we are alive. Now it is Socrates who is dying. His soul, too, will leave the body in which it is trapped and travel to Hades, but, where Patroclus’ soul will live, at best, a kind of feeble afterlife, Socrates’ soul can look forward to the prospect of perpetual reincarnation – or so he optimistically argues. In The Republic the soul gains further complexities. It becomes the seat of moral virtue. Plato describes the human soul as being mutilated by evil rather as the sea monster Glaucus – evidently modelled on a species of spider crab – is weighed down by the shells and seaweeds that encrust it.

  Fragments of Aristotle’s youthful works tell of similar beliefs. A dear friend, Eudemus, had died on a Sicilian battlefield. In a monograph devoted to his memory, Aristotle has Eudemus’ soul returning to its home. Another early work, the Protrepticus, compares the relationship between body and soul to the unpleasant Etruscan habit of binding their captives face to face with a corpse – the soul being the living partner in this macabre pas de deux. Of this passage one scholar said, ‘Surely we are here in the presence of a sick, if strong and beautiful, mind.’

  Later in life, Aristotle wrote a whole book about the soul, de Anima, or The Soul. Devoid of Platonic moralizing, it is resolutely scientific in tone:

  Some types of knowledge may be especially fine and worthwhile for their precision or because their objects have greater value and elicit greater wonder. It is for both these reasons that we should treat the study of the soul as one of extreme importance. However its investigation seems to be of special importance for truth as a whole and the study of nature in particular. For souls are the principle of animal life.

  This, to us, is a very strange, even suspect, claim. ‘Soul’ is a word burdened with many meanings but none in modern science. Perhaps we would do better to abandon translation, but mere transliteration hardly helps matters at all. For us, ‘psyche’ refers to mental states – in particular, consciousness. To be sure, Aristotle does treat mental states in his book, but he treats them as physiology: the Cartesian problem of consciousness hardly arises. Indeed, The Soul is not a psychological treatise at all, but his most general statement about the systems of command and control that enable living things to do what they do.

  Aristotle asserts, with fairly little argument, two propositions: that all living things – plants, animals and humans – have souls; and that, when a living thing dies, its soul ceases to exist. These were probably commonplace among fourth-century Greek intellectuals. Plato clearly believes the first and has to argue against the second. But what, exactly, is the soul? Aristotle begins by surveying his predecessors’ views.

  Everyone, he says, agrees that souls are associated with movement: the ability of living things to breathe, grow, wriggle, swim, walk and fly. A good account of the soul should be able to explain how. He considers the popular idea that souls are made of some physical matter. The usual candidates for soul-stuff are the elements: air, water or fire – only earth seems to be missin
g as a candidate soul-stuff. He rejects them all. Quite reasonably, he cannot see how any element is capable of making an animal move. He considers Democritus’ argument that movement is due to the restless motion of the spherical atoms that comprise creature’s souls. That, says Aristotle, is about as sensible as Daedalus’ scheme for animating a wooden statue of Aphrodite by pouring molten silver into it. Elements are the stuff that souls operate on; they are the substrate of life – not life itself.

  He also considers some less mundane ideas. One, proposed by a renegade Pythagorean, is that the soul is a harmony. Aristotle interprets this to mean that it is a particular ratio of elements. This idea also strikes him as simplistic. Yet he sees some merit in it. It has something in common with his own theory insofar as it depends not on the properties of matter per se, but rather on the way in which matter is arranged. For Aristotle, when he comes to give his own theory, argues that the soul of a living thing is its form – its eidos – in its body.

  I have argued that, when Aristotle speaks of the ‘form’ or ‘formal nature’ of a creature, he often means the information required to order matter into a creature of a given kind. This interpretation is based not only on the various analogies he gives (imprints in wax; letters and syllables), but also on the fact that forms are present even when they are invisible. They are somehow present in an animal’s seed and are responsible for the development of the embryo and the appearance and functions of the adult. So an animal’s soul is its form, albeit under particular circumstances:

  If we must say something general about all types of soul, it would be the first actuality of a natural body with organs.

  The key word here is ‘actuality’ – entelekheia. It is this word, a bit of Aristotelian jargon, that is most distinctive about his theory of the soul. He often uses it in opposition to ‘potentiality’ – dynamis. The opposition runs deep into his physical theory. Any change, in Aristotle’s view, is the actualization of a potential. Thus when he says that the soul is an actuality, he’s stressing the fact that it’s something that previously existed only potentially; that it’s something that comes into being from something else. When combined with the claim that the soul of a living thing is ‘its form in its body’, it becomes clear that he means that the forms of unfertilized seed are mere potentials; and that those forms when realized in growing embryos and functioning adults are souls.

  This is still irritatingly abstract. But Aristotle tells us much about the properties of souls and they, in turn, tell us what he’s getting at. Some properties are quite general and apply to all that souls do in all creatures; others are more specific and apply just to humans. Four of them are particularly revealing.

  First, an Aristotelian soul is not made of matter. That’s clear from his objection to Democritus’ crude materialism, but it also follows from his definition of the soul as the ‘form in a body’. Second, the soul is associated with the presence of organs, which means that it is a functional property of living things. Third, the soul is responsible for change in living things. By this he means that it regulates the body’s processes: growth, maintenance, ageing, locomotion, sensation, emotion and thought itself. Finally, the soul is responsible for a creature’s goals, ultimately its survival and reproduction.

  Aristotle’s use of entelekheia to describe the soul tells us how important he thought this was, for the word is partly derived from telos, an end or goal. This conception, too, runs deep – into his metaphysics. The soul, he says, is ‘an entity [ousia] in the sense of a definition [logos]’. By this he means that a living thing’s soul is the sum of its functional features. If an eye were a living creature, he says, then its soul would be vision. He is so committed to the idea that functional features define a creature (or an organ), rather than the stuff it’s made of, that he even says that if an eye can’t see (because it’s damaged) then it really isn’t an eye at all. It’s an eye ‘in name only’, like the ‘eyes’ that Greek sailors paint on the prows of their ships.* He insists that a corpse isn’t a man at all since it does not have a soul. From this point of view, a male cuttlefish who copulates with a dead female is not only wasting his time but making a serious philosophical mistake.

  LV

  SOULS, THEN, BEAR a heavy burden. They embrace no fewer than three of Aristotle’s four explanatory causes – the formal, moving and final – leaving only the material cause for the stuff of which it is made. But for all their evident importance souls remain mysterious. What, after all, can move the stuff of which living things are made, contain its goals, yet be immaterial itself?

  Confronted with these demanding criteria, scholars have sometimes concluded that, when Aristotle speaks of the soul, he is invoking some sort of spiritual force. This ‘spiritual soul’ interpretation comes in different flavours that draw on two disparate intellectual traditions, biology and the philosophy of mind, though the end result is much the same – an unnecessary mystification of what Aristotle means.

  In the ‘philosophy of mind’ version Aristotle is a Cartesian mind–body dualist who believes that mental states are independent of the body; when he speaks of soul he is, in Gilbert Ryle’s phrase, invoking a ‘ghost in the machine’. Now, when Aristotle discusses the ‘active’ intellect, there are some passages that do, indeed, lend themselves to this interpretation, but they are the despair of scholars for they are so very inconsistent with everything else that he writes about the relationship of souls to mental states.

  For one thing, Aristotle denies that souls are agents. He’s particularly clear about this when talking about emotions. He points out that any emotion that we might attribute to our souls (joy, despair) is evident in our bodies as a physiological response (laughter, tears). But then he goes further and argues that our tendency to see these responses as a consequence of the soul’s condition is wrong; rather, they are the soul:

  To say that the soul is angry is as though one were to say that the soul weaves or builds. For it is, perhaps, better to say not that the soul pities, learns or thinks, but that humans do these things.

  And:

  Thinking, loving or hating affect not the mind but what has the mind, to the extent it has it. Actually, it is when this decays that memory and love stop existing since they belonged not to the mind but to that composite thing which has perished.

  Aristotle is trying to root out the ‘homunculus’. He is attacking the notion that there is within us all a small, disembodied person – an I – who is thinking our thoughts, hating our hates, loving our loves and controlling, in some mysterious fashion, our bodily machines. He does not have Descartes’ problem of explaining how an immaterial soul moves the body.

  In the biological version of the ‘spiritual soul’, Aristotle is a vitalist. To be a vitalist is to suppose that living things have some property that cannot be found in, or derived from, inanimate matter; to deny that living things are really just very complicated machines; to believe in the autonomy of life. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a battle raged – particularly in Germany – between biologists and philosophers who thought that living things are just machines and those who did not. The latter were invariably impressed by the very thing that so impressed Aristotle: the goal-directness of living things. Teleology was an invitation to fill the explanatory vacuum with resounding, if empty, phrases: nisus formatus, Bildungsreib, Lebenskraft, vis vitalis, vis essentialis and the like. The last scientist of any repute to wear the vitalist badge proudly was Hans Driesch (1867–1941). A brilliant experimentalist in his youth, one of the founders of Entwicklungsmechanik – experimental embryology – in middle age he abandoned mechanistic theory and became a committed vitalist, arguing that no machine could even in principle construct a living thing. ‘But this may mean no more than that the living machine is more complex than any that Driesch has in mind,’ was Edward Conklin’s sardonic quip in 1914, and now Driesch is known, if at all, only as an object lesson on the perils of abandoning the lab bench for the airy realms of philosophy. In an un
fortunate homage to Aristotle, Driesch called his vital force entelechy.

  Mind–body dualists may still lurk in the darker recesses of philosophy departments, but in biology vitalists are extinct. The goal-directness of living things has been explained by natural selection, which tells us why living things have goals and what those goals are, by physiology and biochemistry which tells us how they achieve those goals and by genetics which tells us where those goals are stored and how they are transmitted from parent to child. Aristotle’s final, moving and formal causes – all the work that he attributed to the soul – have been absorbed by, and divided among, the branches of biology. The question, then, is this: did Aristotle, ignorant of this seamless hierarchy of explanation, succumb to Kantian despair and press a traditional word, ‘soul’, into service as a placeholder for the gap between inanimate material and all the things that living things do? If so, then he is a vitalist. Or did he use ‘soul’ as a term to embrace the processes by which living things develop and function; processes that he thought – rightly or wrongly – were perfectly explicable in terms of the physical science of his day? If so, then he is a materialist – albeit of a very sophisticated kind.

  It is sometimes said that all modern biologists are ‘materialists’ insofar as all our explanations take account of the brute properties of matter – chemistry and physics. But no biologist is a naive, Democritean, materialist, for all agree that the distinctive properties of living things depend on the arrangement of matter. The elements, though necessary, are not sufficient for life. An ordering principle – information – is needed as well. We are, to coin a term, ‘informed materialists’.