Aristotle begins his “Interpretations” classifying spoken and written “affections” of the soul. The former, spoken affections, are verbal language while the later, written affections, are written language. These two languages are said to be distinctly human for two reasons. Aristotle first explains, that he concedes that all languages do differ from one race of people to another, but in conceding this he is thereby universalizing languages’ claims by subsuming all people differing in race, all under “races”. Having shown what he means by human races, Aristotle then returns to what he means by “affections” of the soul, and its relation to human races, to demonstrate the second reason languages are distinctly human. To understand what affections of the soul means, it may help by going through Aristotle argument backwards starting with what he thinks an external object is and does in relation to the internal soul of a person, which if the argument works shows how the soul is affected by an object. Beginning with an external object, Aristotle notes that objects differentiate according to “likeness”, “images”, “copies”, and “representations”. Each of these resemblances of an object deserve there own respective inquiry, but for the time being let us focus on the last: “representations”. Representations is already an abstraction, or interpolation, from what an object itself is. This is an abstraction because Aristotle equates these representations to mental affections. Representations and mental affections are equated because both are similary dependent upon an object to give affection, although Aristotle does not delineate how this is possible here, it can be understood that the representations and mental affections, themselves, are affections, but need an object for them to be brought into active affection. These passive affections, understood as representations and mental affections, themselves, are given expression through either spoken or written symbols. What might detur one from equating mental affections and representations, could be the possible mistaking of spoken and written symbols, and how variegated they are, so that it would seem impossible to equate something so abstract, such as representations or mental affections, to language because they seem so divergent. But that is not an objection, nor is it Aristotles position, since we have already conceded to the ways language differs to “races”, while simultaneously upheld the distinctly human affectiveness of language. This affectiveness of language can also be the lead in, to the equating of representations and mental affections, which will help us understand how we get from the external object into the internal soul. For language is primarily a sign of affections, and as Aristotle says, “mental affections themselves, . . . are the same for the whole of mankind, as are also the objects of which those affections are representations or likenesses, images, copies”. The way we move from external to internal affection seems to be because “we” are affected by some representation or mental state, which are both the same for all of mankind, not because there is a difference in our mental or representational affections, but simply because they are the same for all of mankind. The posited external object appears to be conceded only to enter the logic which Aristotle has formulated for a rare sort of subjectivism. This subjectivism can be understood as the equation of representations and mental affections, making any sort of affection a derivative of human mediation, where an object is said to be stated, though is never affected nor affecting people. If anything it would seem that language does most of the affecting, if any.
