Human Dignity and Bioethics

70 | Robert P. Kraynak
motion, sense perception, and thinking. Aristotle, of course, spends
a lot of time trying to explain how the human soul thinks or uses the
intellect. And he comes up with his puzzling lines that in sense perception
“the soul receives the form [of the object] without the matter,”
like an imprint in wax; but in thinking, “the intellect becomes each
thing”—that is, the mind somehow fuses with the object of knowledge.
Hence, “the soul in a way is all existing things.”
We do not have to clarify the meaning of these difficult lines
in order to understand what Aristotle is saying about man and his
dignity in the natural universe. It is a sophisticated version of common
sense: the natural universe is divided into species or kinds that
display an ordered hierarchy of being—with non-living beings at the
bottom, followed in ascending order by living beings with souls, such
as plants (beings with self-motion), animals (beings with self-motion
and sense perception), and humans (beings with self-motion, sense
perception, and abstract thinking). Man is therefore a rational animal
at the top of a hierarchy of living beings, who possesses a lofty
dignity but not the infinite worth of an absolutely unique being. As a
living being, man shares characteristics with other animals while also
being essentially different; he is neither a beast nor a god but an “embodied
rational soul.” Accordingly, Aristotle says in the Nicomachean
Ethics, “Man is not the best thing in the universe,” because the heavenly
bodies are more perfect; they move in eternal circular motion
which man can contemplate and admire but cannot emulate. In this
reckoning, human dignity is comparative rather than absolute—man
is a living reflection of the divine intelligence that orders the cosmos,
but man is not the highest substance in the universe.
Overall, I would argue that Aristotle’s view of man as an embodied
rational soul makes more sense than either materialism or
dualism. It puts man back together, so to speak, into a unified whole
of body and soul, and it recognizes man’s proper place in the natural
hierarchy as a rational animal above the beasts but below the “gods”
(understood loosely as the heavenly bodies and the eternal laws of
the rational universe). The problem with classical philosophy is that,
even though it is supported by common sense, it rests on theoretical
premises that are highly speculative. To really establish it, two points
must be demonstrated: (1) that the mind is more than the brain yet is
somehow still in the brain, like a rational soul in a body; and (2) that