Anima sensitiva

Let the scene be set in springtime on a hill in medieval Tuscany. A lamb enters and makes its tentative way to a clump of particularly succulent grass. It has scarcely begun to nibble the tips, however, when it is surprised by a young wolf and scampers away with its attacker in hot but in expert pursuit. The shepherd boy drops his piece of bread and cheese, springs to his feet shouting ‘Wolf, wolf’, and hurls a stone from his sling in the direction of the wolf, who abandons the chase and lopes away.

There are four ‘bodies’ in this Aristotelian pastoral – boy, wolf, lamb and grass – and all of them are ‘animate’. In their different ways, moreover, they are all actively engaged in taking or procuring the food that is necessary to preserve their ‘being’ and to enable them to ‘grow’ to maturity so that they may begin the task of ‘self-reproduction’ (food being ‘good’ as a ‘means’ to the ‘end’ of continued existence, which is assumed to be good both ‘in itself’, ‘for its own sake’, and also as a means to the end of the higher good of reproduction, which ensures the continued existence of the ‘species’).

The clump of grass, however, does not need to do anything further to ‘save its soul’ and ‘fulfil its potential’; and, since capacities are always determined by needs, it cannot perform any ‘task’ beyond these ‘operations of the vegetative soul’, nutrimentum, augmentum and generatio.