The Lagoon: How Aristotle Invented Science

by Armand Marie Leroi

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.