Aristotle and the Animals: The Logos of Life Itself

Claudia Zatta, Aristotle and the Animals: The Logos of Life Itself (London: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2022). 9780367409494.

Reviewed by Charissa A. Jaeger-Sanders, The Graduate Theological Union, cjaeger-sanders@ses.gtu.edu.

In Aristotle and the Animals: The Logos of Life Itself, Claudia Zatta offers a masterful, nuanced, intense philological dive into the word choices that make up Aristotle’s philosophy of science and life, particularly his zoocentric understanding of animals and their connections to humans. Zatta endeavors to get back to Aristotle’s original views, which she argues are distinct from how he has been interpreted through the ages. For Aristotle, what sets humanity apart from their fellow animals is a matter of degree and analogy. Rather than focusing primarily on the differences between humans and animals, Zatta reveals how Aristotle is concerned with beings that possess sensation—something humans and animals share. Zatta asserts that Aristotle’s “goal is to understand all forms of life in terms of continuity and a ‘shared core,’ with sensation constituting the cement of animal life” (pp. 6–7). Aristotle uses his understanding and description of the multipartite soul to show how living things and living beings are on a spectrum that share, in part, some of the same aspects and building blocks of the composite soul that builds in complexity from non-sentient to sentient to humanity (p. 3). Untangling Aristotle from how he has been interpreted and used across the centuries, Zatta goes back to Aristotle’s writings, researching much of his corpus, to showcase how Aristotle is, in fact, more zoocentric than anthropocentric, valuing and interpreting animals on their own terms, and how Aristotle is a proponent of animal egalitarianism (pp. 3–4).

The introduction gives an overview of the book and situates Aristotle in his time, articulating how he aligns with Plato and the Presocratics and how he is in contradistinction to his fellow contemporary philosophers. Moreover, Zatta demonstrates Aristotle’s profound influence and lasting legacy on Western thought: his impact on Saint Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, and Stoicism, as well as originating the close systematic study of animals as creatures of nature.

Chapter 1 opens by illustrating how Aristotle was doing something novel in his purposefully detailed analysis of animals, especially terrestrial animals, and that he felt the need to justify this research (p. 11). During Aristotle’s time, the stars and planets were considered members of the animal kingdom, but these celestial beings were also understood as immortal and divine and, therefore, were privileged over the study of earth-bound animals (p.12). Aristotle intentionally worked to show how “mortal animals” were also worthy of contemplation (p. 12), stressing that because of both their physical proximity to us and their very nature, we have much to learn in what he understood as our “shared life” (p. 13). In this endeavor, Aristotle discovers a shared core across all life forms, especially sentient life, and devises a four-tiered framework for understanding the composite soul (p. 14).

In Aristotle’s schema, all living things have the “nutritive soul,” which enables essential functions, including nutrition, growth, and reproduction. In the sharing of this soul, plants, animals, and humans are all able to “be alive, to reproduce and nourish themselves, to grow and to decay” (p. 14). Yet, for Aristotle, plants are relegated to living things and not understood as living beings.  

According to Aristotle and in contradistinction from the Presocratics, the soul is not some homogenous entity, but rather, the soul is tiered and composite whereby each separate part works concurrently for particular purposes, including “growth, sensation, locomotion, and thought” (p. 16). Aristotle maintains that animals are ensouled and living beings (p. 20) and that all living beings share both the “nutritive soul” and the “sensitive soul.” Moreover, some also possess what he terms the “locomotive soul” (p. 20), which includes the ability to move. Finally, sensation implies intelligence and awareness, at least on some level appropriate to each living being. 

Chapter 1 also includes a discussion of Aristotle’s renowned four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final) and their specific relation to an organism’s lifespan from beginning to completion (p. 27). According to Aristotle, all life comes into being for a purpose, which is its telos. This telos is understood as logos (p. 28), which in the context of Aristotle’s discussion of animals points to the presence of orders and systemic relations to the shape (morphē) and form of various animals (p. 31). “The body’s complex action (polymerēs praxis) that is life itself,” which is its ultimate telos (p. 31). Zatta points out that here, the logos is similar to the notions of Aristotle’s predecessors, especially Anaxagoras’, that there is mind (nous) in nature (physis) (p. 34). Similarly, for Aristotle, the logos points to the teleological order (kosmos) and arrangement (taxis) in all organisms (p. 34).

The second chapter delves more deeply into Aristotle’s understanding of the soul, including its divisions and the genuine challenges of partitioning the soul, which in theory could consist of infinite parts (apeiron), reflecting the unfathomable complexities of life that transcend easy explication (p. 54). Yet, for Aristotle, it is about explicitly dissecting “the soul’s relation to life” (p. 63). Consequently, Aristotle divides the soul into four “parts that are responsible for, and at the same time reflect, living beings’ activities, from nutrition, growth, and decay, to sensation, locomotion, and reason” (p. 63). He meticulously names the nutritive (threptikon), sensitive (aisthētikon), locomotive (kata topon) and the rational (noētikon) (p. 63) in his tetrapartite depiction of the soul. The first three aspects are Aristotle’s own inventions (p. 63). Moreover, “the parts of the soul are complementary to, and, importantly, build on one another” (p. 65). All living things have a nutritive soul. All living beings have both a nutritive and a sensitive soul, some of which also have a locomotive soul. In addition to these three components, humans also include a rational soul. Importantly, though, Zatta emphasizes that in Aristotle’s model, “life can be full and fulfilled without reason” (p. 66).

Chapter 3 celebrates Aristotle’s zoocentrism and his thoroughgoing study of animals.  It also discusses how Aristotle understood reproduction as an animal’s quest for immortality; a way to leave a legacy of themselves. Through reproduction, animals are able to fulfill their desire to live forever, to share in immortality and the divine, by passing on their form: “What persists is not the individual itself but something in its image, not identical as a unit, but identical in form” (p. 92). 

In the fourth chapter, Zatta gets to the heart of her claim of the logos of life itself by investigating more closely Aristotle’s discussion of the sentient animal, including how sensation is connected to knowledge. For Aristotle, animals build their knowledge through sensation (p. 114). Therefore, Zatta aruges Aristotle’s discussion that sensation itself is actually a means of knowledge—sensation is epistemological. For the Presocratics, plants were understood as sentient beings (p. 120), but not for Aristotle, who restricts sensation to living beings—animals. Significantly, Zatta notes that Aristotle connects awareness with self-awareness, explicitly articulating that when an animal senses something like color, sound, temperature, or taste, it actually knows that it is sensing (p. 125). In my view, as a theologian who works in dialogue with science, this understanding of awareness as self-awareness could have considerable and vital implications for future work.

In Chapter 5, Zatta moves to a thorough discussion of animal pleasure and pain as well as their capacity for imagination, anticipation, and memory, thus establishing for the reader the relationship of pleasure and pain to sensation and life. For Aristotle, all living beings experience pleasure in ways that are natural to them (p. 146). Moreover, pleasure can be anticipated (p. 152). Similarly, pain is inescapable for living beings (p. 140). Living beings also have the capacity for imagination (phantasia) (p. 151) and for memory, which “enables animals to be intelligent and learn” (p. 156). Aristotle uses the analogy of a wax impression to show how animals can remember in a way that is distinct from recollection (pp. 156–57). This distinction is important for Aristotle because he considers recollection to be “exclusive to human beings because it implies reasoning (logismos)” (p. 156).

The sixth chapter focuses on how Aristotle views animals, including understanding their “common nature.” He sees both their sameness and their differences from one another, which are understood on a spectrum and connecting to one another via analogy since many similar parts perform the same function: “Bone corresponds to fish spine, nail to hoof, hand to claw, feather to scale, and vice versa” (p. 178). 

This chapter also discusses the characters and dispositions of various types of animals (see especially pp. 184–90). Then, it connects the traits animals share with human beings (see pp. 190-196). In contrast to how Aristotle has been interpreted across the pages, Zatta insightfully reveals that Aristotle sees a lot in common between humans and their fellow animals. He shows what is in common by degree and what is distinct by analogy, showcasing that even though nonhuman beings do not have the rational soul, they do have the analogous functions of the rational soul that are appropriate to their nature. He repeatedly affirms their sentience and their intelligence. This chapter uses several specific examples to demonstrate that animals are self-aware, including the emblematic example of the deer (pp. 194–95), who knows when it grows antlers and, therefore, is safe to come out from hiding. Aristotle also highlights how the Cretan wild goats would eat dittany when arrows struck them and that the dittany would force the arrows out (p. 195). Similarly, tortoises would eat oregano, an antidote to poison, after swallowing a viper (p. 195).  

The conclusion nicely rounds out the discussion of what has come before and points to the legacy that Aristotle’s ideas leave to those who come after him, including notably their influence on Plotinus, who built on and expanded Aristotle’s work to include plants, highlighting that “life in any of its forms (vegetal, animal, or human) implies a form of rationality” (p. 216). Moreover, Zatta interprets Aristotle to show how, in keeping with his contemporaries, “a body-rooted form of thought resides” (p. 218), which means that imagination is grounded in the body, moored in the particular. 

In her interpretation of Aristotle’s On the Soul, Zatta concludes by showing how Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 CE) introduces a radical separation between human beings and other animals that was not present in Aristotle’s original framework (p. 219). This pivotal yet erroneous move results in “[a]nthropocentrism [trampling] over the zoocentrism which was at the core of Aristotle’s study of living beings and life, obliterating his appreciation of sensation as the cement of all animals’ existence, and how it actually enables living beings to live through their ensouled bodies and ensuing knowledge, partaking of the eternity of this world” (p. 219). Zatta is working to counter the anthropocentricity that has developed in interpreting Aristotle, especially by prominent interpreters such as Aquinas and those who read Aristotle through the lens of Aquinas.

Zatta’s account is well-researched and even-handed, highlighting Aristotle’s strengths and showcasing areas where he might revise some of his ideas today in light of modern science. For example, Zatta highlights Aristotle’s view of plants as a growing edge for him, an area where he still had much to learn, and how his interpretation of plants radically and negatively impacted thought for centuries to come. She acknowledges that after Aristotle, plants would long be interpreted as “simple and senseless phyta,” (p. 4). Although beyond the extent of this review, recent botanical studies have, of course, shown how Aristotle’s position on plants is “utterly untenable” (p. 4) by affirming that plants are indeed sentient in the sense that plants exhibit behaviors and responses that indicate a level of sensitivity and awareness to their surroundings. Additionally, beyond the scope of Zatta’s current monograph, which focuses primarily on Aristotle’s understanding of animals, this reader would like to see how Aristotle and others of his time might have laid the groundwork for a richer understanding of plants and living things with sentience and awareness consonant with their nature.  That said, this book enables the reader to see that in light of scientific developments, Aristotle’s core methods have transferable concepts that are still quite relevant today.

Zatta shows that Aristotle was ahead of his time in many ways. What we see in Aristotle is a value and appreciation for closely investigating animals, which acts as a foundation for what scientists and naturalists would do after him, including what well-known English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882 CE) would do over two millennia later. Moreover, Aristotle recognized how interconnected all life is.

While Aristotle and the Animals is geared toward scholars, with some intentionality and deliberate focus, this monograph could be accessible to anyone interested in the topic. That does not mean that it is an easy read, but rather, it affirms that the author has worked diligently to define Aristotle’s terms and concepts clearly to help the reader stay connected as the robust discussion unfolds.

Although the author clearly defines Greek terms as they arise in the text, it would be helpful in future editions to include a glossary of all the Greek terms used in the work as a reference for the reader. This step would broaden the audience, allowing the reader to learn more deeply and to stay better connected with the unfolding discussion.

Zatta skillfully lays the groundwork for further engagement with Aristotle and offers a foundation for building on Aristotle’s egalitarian philosophy of science in light of modern science learnings. This is a must-read for those wanting to better comprehend Aristotle and his zoocentric understanding of animals and of the logos that permeates life itself.

Table of Contents

Introduction (1–10)
1. Aristotle, Animal Boundaries, and the Logos of Nature (11–50)
2. From Reason to Life: Aristotle on Soul Division (51–77)
3. Animals and Nature: At the Core of Aristotle’s Zoocentrism (78–108)
4. The Sentient Animal (109–36)
5. Animal Pleasure: From Sensation to Imagination and Beyond (137–74)
6. The Lives of Animals (175–214)
7. Conclusion (215–20)
Bibliography (221–32)
Index (233–37)

Discussion

1. Aristotle has often been interpreted/misinterpreted as anthropocentric throughout history. It was refreshing to see him illuminated in this intentionally zoocentric way. What motivated you to research, seek, and defend Aristotle’s zoocentrism specifically? How do you hope your book impacts or perhaps even changes readers’ understanding of Aristotle in contradistinction from other interpretations?

My motivation stemmed from an in-depth reading of Aristotle’s work on living beings, particularly the first book of On the Parts of Animals. In this book, Aristotle acknowledges embarking on an unprecedented project and feels compelled to establish a series of methodological principles to guide his study of living beings and life. One of these principles involves considering the soul as the principle of life but explicitly excludes the rational soul, which only humans possess, as irrelevant to understanding animals’ life. Aristotle’s aim is to understand “the animal as such,” which forms the foundation of his zoocentrism.

2. You seemed discontent with Aristotle’s stance on plants.  For example, in the introduction you write that “after [Aristotle], plants will be long considered simple and senseless phyta, a position which, only recently, new botanical studies have proven utterly untenable” (p. 4). Yet, you acknowledge that “for the Presocratics, we may recall, plants were indeed sentient beings” (p. 120). Moreover, in the conclusion, you reference Plotinus, who transcended Aristotle’s position and “redeemed plants from utter alterity and further unfolded the idea that life in any of its forms (vegetal, animal, or human) implies a form of rationality” (p. 216). Do you see yourself writing a sequel that looks at Aristotle’s contemporaries/followers and their expansion of his ideas and includes a sentient understanding of plants? Why or why not?

I would not say “discontent,” but I wanted to reassess Aristotle’s position in the development of the ancient Greeks’ scientific study of nature, particularly regarding the conception of plants. Reflecting on Aristotle’s project in light of my work on the Presocratics, I realized that he was responsible for the long-lasting, systematic division between animals and plants based on the possession or lack of sentience—a concept still evident in Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae (1735). Aristotle’s division was preceded by Diogenes of Apollonia, who also denied plants any form of awareness. In the future, I might explore the conception of plants in subsequent philosophers. Currently, I’m working on another book-length manuscript that stems from the reflections on the soul in chapters 2 and 3 of Aristotle and the Animals and addresses the conception of the soul in Plato’s Republic, examining both its embodied and disembodied existence.

3. Based on your own research and in light of modern science, if Aristotle was alive today, do you think Aristotle would change his stance on plants and see them along the spectrum of sentient living beings and perhaps more in keeping with the Presocratics, who affirmed sentience in plants? Why or why not? Also, what questions would you ask him and why?

I’m not too keen on “if-type” reconstructions. To Aristotle’s analytical mind, animals were more perfect creatures than plants, possessing more definite and complex bodies. Their study constituted a huge task, leading to several treatises that make up one-third of Aristotle’s extant work. The task of systematically studying plants was taken up by Theophrastus, who perpetuated Aristotle’s division but also explored aspects of vegetal life which fascinated Aristotle, such as reproduction and longevity. In a marginal statement in Physics 2.1, Aristotle claims that “man is begotten by man and the sun as well,” and I would ask if he had any specific thoughts on the effects of the sun on plant growth.