309 ARISTOTLE’S IDEA OF THE SELF The Journal of Value Inquiry 35: 309–324, 2001. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Aristotle’s Idea of the Self PETER SIMPSON Department of Philosophy, City University of New York, College of Staten Island, Staten Island, NY 10314, USA 1. Modern Selves The preoccupation with the self or with subjectivity would seem to be one of the distinctive features of modern philosophy, or philosophy in the tradition that goes back to Descartes. The turn to the self is very much present in Descartes, since the self or the ego is the very fons et origo of his philosophi- cal system. Everything else is ultimately to be traced back to the self and its immediate conscious states. The self is more or less identified with presence to self: the self is self-consciousness. Animals are thus not selves because not self-conscious. Indeed animals are not even alive, properly speaking. Con- trary to what Aristotle supposed, life comes not with self-movement, but with self-consciousness. 1 Accordingly there is a splitting off of self from body, at least at the level of the meanings of terms, since consciousness need not in- clude any reference to body. This remains true still of modern materialists in the philosophy of mind, for, while they are keen to reduce the being of con- sciousness to body, they are not as keen to reduce the meaning of conscious- ness to body, as in the case of functionalists. Self-motion, by contrast, does very much include reference to body, for self-movers are paradigmatically bodies. The separating of self and body, initiated if not fully intended by Descartes, brings with it a separating of the self from the public and observable and its retreat into the radically private. Just as the public world of bodies is cut off from the self behind the screen of the self’s ideas, so is the self cut off from the public world of bodies by its merely instrumental and non-constitutive relationship to bodily motion. Bodily motion can be the effect of the self, but it need not be. Bodily motion is fully intelligible in its own right as a mechani- cal process. It is only subjectively, or in our own self-consciousness, that we can speak of effects of self on bodily motion. There is nothing in the idea of the body’s motion as such that requires the presence of the choosing, active self. Descartes famously reduced animals to machines but exempted men from the same reduction because of the fact of speech. 2 Among publicly percepti-