More Aristotle

During the peripatetic phase of office hours, one of you (I think it was Kiyomi) was asking about how the soul/anima/psyche (English/Latin/Greek) was passed from an organism to its reproductive offspring. Aristotle thinks that a "seed," broadly conceived, contains the entire telos of an organism. An apple is potentially an entire apple tree, a sperm is potentially an entire human being, etc. This is consistent with the idea of soul/anima/psyche being a motivating purpose. The only difficulty comes when Aristotle speaks of the psyche being indivisible; how could it divide some small part of itself to actualize the seed and still itself be a whole? And how could the small part that provides the actuality of the seed then itself become a whole? Aristotle, being a good scientist, acknowledges that it does, and that reproduction is part of what psyches do. (You can see the seed of this idea, actually, in the Symposium... compare the bottom paragraph of pg. 171 of our Aristotle book.) A very simple version of the "reproduction" problem occurs with something like a cactus shoot, which is actually a part of an ensouled thing (a plant) that you cut off from the whole, but the whole goes on functioning and the part then becomes a whole (a plant). Again, this requires some elaboration on Aristotle's part. Read this passage from Parva Naturalia (Minor Essays on Nature) and see if you think he's being too tricky. I think what we should keep in mind is that the psyche isn't like a little speck that's somewhere inside an organism. It is the form and telos, the animating principle of all of its material. Using our biology, we might say that it's in every cell. So it makes sense that it would be somehow transferable if we can get around this part/whole problem. Indeed in De Anima II.5 (pg. 174) Aristotle even concludes that the ability to reproduce is what makes something psychic in the first place... if an apple tree's purpose is to be an apple tree, its purpose is to continue being an apple tree, and reproduction through seeds is part of its telos.