Soul And Soul Reflection Paper

One of the most profound scholars of all time, Plato, envisaged to have commenced his thoughts on Self from Socrates’ ideological doctrines on the concept of immortality. In the earlier writings of Socrates, Plato presents his well knitted conviction towards immortality of soul and gods with judicious words, judgmental and extremely thoughtful ideas. Aristotle’s concept of soul and self contradicts theory of Plato vindicating that soul does not have separate existence of its own. The essay is a theoretical understanding on what makes Aristotle’s theory of self as a manifestation of the soul and body as against Plato’s theory of the soul as a distinct identity which needs more consideration, food of thought and knowledge as contrast to body.

Our physical features and soul works together to form what we are as human being. We think and act as our mind and our heart orders us to do so, but with the mind and heart, we also hear our inner voice which dictates us what is right or wrong and what we should do and what we should not. Any action when performed is considered as our self, in other words, physical aspect of our body. Our activities like Growth, Self nourishment, Decay, Movement and Rest, Perception and Intellect (“Aristotle on the Soul” 2) are all the functions of our soul. It is our soul that helps us to think rationally and makes us realize our own self, our own real potentials and an absence of any one may renders us into beast. Self is a realization of ourselves in a certain particular way which helps to nourish our natural talents and makes us understand our vices and virtues. puts forward that our emotions like anger, pity, love, courage and hate involve our body which is central to our self but are controlled by our soul. If we want to do something, we think about it, this thinking is a dictate of our soul while action is predominantly physical act of our body. Aristotle posits his view on the basis of Hylomorphism emphasizing the concept of body and soul being an embodiment of matter-formism (“Hylomorphism and Functionalism” 63). In other words, he formulates the soul as a “form of the body” which in turn is considered as a matter of the soul as our body is formed of the matter (Granger 5). His theory is based on the scientific reasoning related with the formation of the different facets of human bodies, nutrition aspects of plant moments and reasoning power of human beings. Each aspect of all these living things is a mathematical formulation that constitutes its different parts and relationship to each other. Aristotle’s rational justification and the practical