Perishable and unperishable lives: Aristotle’s analogy between the seed and the element of stars in GA II 3 (736b29-737a5)

Aristotle’s concept of “living thing” has a very broad extension, as it includes not only the so-called “sublunary organisms” but also the celestial bodies. Now, whether Aristotle’s theory of sublunary and heavenly living things is a unified one depends on whether there are scientific analogies between them, since analogy is the sole tool of explanatory unification of things belonging to different kinds. But what analogies can there be between entities that are so different from each other? This paper tackles the GA II 3 analogy between the (hot) pneuma of sublunary living things and the element of heavenly ones. Broadly, it is suggested that the analogy is meant to stress that sublunary life is similar to the heavenly one since – despite its being temporally limited and realized in a materially complex way – it involves an element-like stuff (i.e., the hot pneuma) that is both the primary instrument and substrate of the soul and the tool whereby the eternal generation and the formal eternity of sublunary living things are accomplished. Further, it is suggested that these roles of the hot pneuma are grounded – on the material level – by its being a body that, unlike the sublunary elements (which are contraries and endowed with contraries), and similarly to the heavenly element (which has no contrary and is not endowed with contraries), is a “meson” between contraries. Since contraries, by their nature, destroy each other, the fact that the hot pneuma is a “meson” between contraries makes possible for it to be preserved throughout the life of each organism and from generation to generation, and hence to be similar (in this respect) to the heavenly element. The analogy therefore concerns the eternal activity and the material means to achieve it. But why should this be relevant for scientific purposes, i.e., for the explanatory unification of the science of life? In the penultimate section of the paper, the author explores this issue, showing that Aristotle (at least in some texts) conceives the different kinds of lives (i.e., of plants, animals, human beings, heavenly bodies, and the divine νοῦς) as different ways of accomplishing, to various degrees, eternal being, and suggesting that this conception of his could be a key to understanding if and how his science of life is unified.