The Concept Of Agent Intelligence In Aristotle: A Solution In Accordance With The Traditional Problem Of The One And The Many

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Content This dissertation has b een m icrofilm ed exactly as received 66— 10,558 WOODS, M artin T h o m a s, 1928— THE C O N C E PT O F A G E N T IN TE L L IG E N C E IN A R ISTO TLE: A SO LUTIO N IN ACCO RDANCE WITH TH E TR A D IT IO N A L PR O B L E M O F THE ONE A N D THE M ANY. U n iv e r s ity o f Southern C a lifo r n ia , P h .D ., 1966 P h ilo so p h y U niversity Microfilms, Inc., A nn Arbor, M ichigan ^ Copyright hy Martin Thomas Woods 1966 THE CONCEPT OF AGENT INTELLIGENCE IN ARISTOTLE A SOLUTION IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE TRADITIONAL PROBLEM OF THE ONE AND THE MANY by Martin Thomas Woods A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (Philosophy) June 19 6 6 UNIVERSITY OF SOU THERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES. CALIFO RNIA 9 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, written by MARTIN THOMAS WOODS under the direction of h.^?...Dissertation Com mittee, and approved by all its members, has been presented to and accepted by the Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of D O C T O R OF P H I L O S O P H Y Dean Date. DISSERTATION COMMITTEE Chairman TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM ....................... 1 II. ANALYSIS OF THE ARISTOTELIAN TEXTS........ 21 III. THE COMMENTATORS.............................. 58 IV. OTHER INTERPRETATIONS ....................... Ill V. A RESOLUTION OF THE OVER-ALL PROBLEM .... 132 VI. IMPLICATIONS OF THIS STUDY FOR FUTURE ARISTOTELIAN SCHOLARSHIP .................. 161 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................... 167 ii CHAPTER I THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM The timeliness of any genuinely philosophic question is usually justifiable in its essential timeliness. It was no less a contemporary figure than John Wisdom who but recently restated the Socratically adapted truism of Homer that the role of a philosopher was to reveal "not new things, but old things anew." With regard to the present question concerning the ontological status of so-called "agent intelligence," the feasibility of new research is not denied by many of those who have more recently studied this tantalizing question for a good part of their lives. Edmond Barbotin in his more recently published re-editing of 0. Hamelin's classic work La Theorie de L'Intellect d'apres Aristotle remarks in connection with two somewhat similar opinions on the nature of agent intelligence that "certainly one such agreement would not seem to eliminate 1 2 a complicated question which remains always open. . . . "^ A rather different reaction was expressed by W. K. C. Guthrie, who stated with some slight hint of exasperation, that "We shall never understand the full implications of Aristotle's thoughts about the nature of nous, for he seems to have been shy of the s u b j e c t . And yet, we have extant today in Aristotle's De Anima a complete treatise of which at least one full book is largely devoted to the question of knowledge and its relation to agent intelligence, not to mention numerous references to this doctrine in many of his other works. Within only the last two years P. Merlan in his scholarly work Monopsychism Mysticism Metaconsciousness performed a new exhumation of this question as a means of understanding Plotinus' doctrine of mystical intelligence. Did Aristotle by his theory of "productive intelligence," as Merlan calls it, mean that man could become omniscient by mystical assimilation? The answer is unimportant here at this time, but the cautiousness of Merlan's conclusion ^O. Hamelin, La Theorie de L'Intellect d 1apres Aristote et ses Commentateurs, Intro, by E. Barbotin (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin 6, Place la Sorbonne, 1953), p. xix. ^W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greek Philosophers (New York: Philosophical Library, 1950), p. 159. is illuminating: "it seems that at times at least Aristotle accepted the latter alternative. As a means of viewing this whole problem of Aristotelian "agent intelligence" in something of a new light it will be my main purpose in this dissertation to present it mainly within the more limited scope of inquiry proper to the question of unity and multiplicity, the age- old problem of the "one and the many," which, it must be admitted, is today open to attack even on its very right to exist as a valid philosophic question.^ This sceptical reprise does not, however, essentially affect questions disputed within the traditional range of disagreement proper to ancient and medieval thinkers. It is hoped, then, that through a reopening of this somewhat more traditional investigative approach, some definite conclusions can be reached about the ontological status of agent intelligence in the minds of Aristotle and his commentators. From the Hellenistic, Medieval Arabian, and Christian commentators JP. Merlan, Monopsychism Mysticism Metaconsciousness (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963), p. 25. . Clussell, after questioning the validity of monism-pluralism in logical relations, nevertheless readopts this basis for argument on "empirical grounds." Cf., his article on "Logical Atomism." A. J. Ayer, Logical Positivism (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1959), pp. 40-45. even to our own time the varied interpretations achieving candidacy are legion. To understand the problem in its principal context of post-Aristotelian scholarship, let us consider the schools of thought as they now exist histori cally. Perhaps no theory in the history of philosophic thought has been more completely obscured by the special interests and dogmatic preconceptions of its commentators. To use a well-known example, Aristotle's theory of agent intelligence was in the thirteenth century interpreted by St. Thomas Aquinas as upholding the immortality of the indi vidual soul while at the same time Siger of Brabant and his followers held that their interpretation of the same pas sages disproved this position. Much closer to Aristotle's time, the Hellenistic commentators, Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius show complete disagreement as to whether agent intelligence, as the cause of human knowledge, was identical with the Divine nature or with human nature. Closer to our own time, Barbotin maintained that it was "more in accord with the Stagirite's view" to characterize human intelligence as the subject's activity of creating its own intelligible object, while Hamelin took as Aristotle's own the opposite position, namely, that, as thinking, intelligence is ultimately reducible to the idea, or the intelligible object, in act.^ It is the investigator's misfortune that the question of "agent intelligence" becomes more complicated still by the fact that Aristotle himself never used a precisely translatable term when dis cussing it. In one place he specifically names it as 7^J //k»r»fc'7W(4/K t "the (mind) that makes all things," in direct contrast to "(the) mind that becomes all things." Thus, when given some thing in the soul that becomes man's ideas there must also be present in the soul that which makes ideas to be actually there, since in the senses the ideas are only potentially present.** In what exact sense Aristotle meant his opera tional definition to be taken we shall investigate later. But the point to be remembered is that Aristotle himself nowhere uses any of the varied terms now widely circulated as the semantic equivalents of his original notion. Thus, such names as agent intellect or agent intelligence (equivalent to 7F0iflT"tK&S, a term originated by ^Hamelin, op. cit., pp. 86-88. ^Aristotle, "De Anima," 430al5, The Works of Aristotle, translated by W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931). Hereafter references to this work will be cited as De An. 6 7 Alexander of Aphrodisias), efficient intellect, active intellect, and productive intellect or intelligence were all coined as special formulae to epitomize the many and « varied insights of the commentators and critics who in some cases reached honest conclusions about Aristotle's real meaning of the original term, and, in others, elaborated an hypothesis which happened to suit their own speculative point of view. For the present, I will be satisfied to use the more traditional term made popular by the medieval Latin commentators at the University of Paris who named this "active factor of intelligence" agent intelligence (intellectus agens). What, then, about the unity-plurality aspect of so-called "agent intelligence?" The various schools of thought on this problem can be reduced to five main inter pretations, with two major cases of overlapping which, in a sense, could form a sixth and seventh general interpreta tion. This problem of classification is somewhat simplified by the fact that both these overlapping interpretations involve the same two schools as a common ground for their ^R. D. Hicks, Aristotle; De Anima (London: Cambridge University Press, 1907), p. 498. thought. Within one of these schools there appears to be a major division between two basic views, each of which is shared by the other school to form two hybrid interpreta tions. The variety of points of view within each of the remaining schools seems non-essential, at least with regard to the unity-plurality aspects of the problem. Therefore, the five major interpretations in their order o treatment here will be the idealistic, metaphysical, psy chological, epiphenomenal and epistemological interpreta tions respectively, of which the metaphysical is divided into the metaphysically immanent and the metaphysically transcendent. Both of these sub-interpretations of the metaphysical combine with the idealistic to form the basis of the original Neoplatonic transcendent or mystical inter pretation, and the Trendelenburgian or immanent-mystical interpretation. The first main interpretation, the idealistic, develops the absolute primacy of the ideal object over its subject. Agent intelligence in its own nature is nothing other than the eternal subsistent actual intelligible comprising in its own unity the perfection of all ideas. Human thought is therefore reduced to a noetically plurali tic participation in the unity of objective thought. Thus thought reveals itself by degrees to properly disposed passive intellects which, when actualized, elevate human souls to a special noetic existence above the level of sense knowledge. This results in passive intellects being transformed into actual thought, which is the same thing as to partake of the essence of the actual intelligible itself. The original exponent of this view was Aristotle's own teacher Plato who postulated the Ideal Forms as being dependent on, but distinct from, the Form of the Good, thus resulting in a somewhat pluralized essence of all knowledge and knowability. However, the most notable thinker who actually commented on Aristotle's thought and derived an essentially idealistic interpretation from it was Al-Farabi (d. 950 A.D.) of Baghdad who held that "acquired intellect," consisting of the human intellect actualized by the theore tical intelligible in act, becomes noetically assimilated to agent intelligence as "a separate form of man."® This theory later led Gilson to remark that "acquired intellect" is a sort of needless reduplication of agent intelligence, ®M. Mahdi, Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), p. 127. the real actuality of the former being only the theoretic actual intelligible, or the form of agent intelligence itself.^ That Alfarabi was on firmer ground here we shall attempt to show later. But, in any case, human thought in this interpretation is, to the degree that it is actual, assimilated to the unity of an absolute idea. Thus, a thinking substance is or becomes essentially the object that it thinks, so that the ontological status of the thinker is to this extent reducible to the nature of an idea. Those who hold such a view read into Aristotle's own words, which characterize mind as the "form of forms,"10 the essentially Platonic notion of the Good: thus "being actually intelligible" can only mean "sharing the actual nature of the primary intelligible source." The second interpretation, called metaphysical, is divided into two distinct versions. The immanent meta physical notion of agent intelligence characterizes it as a faculty or power of the individual soul. This faculty is always active by nature, and when the materials of its ^E. Gilson, Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire du Moyen Age (Paris: J. Vrin, 1929-1930), p. 20. 10De An., 432alf. function are presented to it in the form of a sensibly apprehended nature, the soul's abstractive power of agent intelligence disengages this nature from its singularizing aspects, thereby enabling it to be understood by passive intellect in a universal sense. The point of primary interest here is that agent intelligence is interpreted to be a plurality of individualized metaphysical powers on the human level. The active factor of mind is neither itself an idea nor does it directly create its own noetic likeness in the passive intelligence. As an abstractive power of the soul it raises the potentially intelligible nature to the level of actual intelligibility, and, corresponding to this adventitious actuality of the intelligible object, there comes automatically into being the corresponding activity of potential intellect. Whatever the merits of this interpre tation propounded by St. Thomas Aquinas and his followers in the thirteenth century, it will be clear at least that the ontological status of agent intelligence is here that of an instrument of the soul and is therefore a pluralistic metaphysical power. The opposite metaphysical interpretation was ori ginally proposed by Alexander of Aphrodisias (198-211 A.D.), the most celebrated of Hellenistic commentators on 11 Aristotle. It takes a transcendent monistic view of agent intelligence as opposed to the theory of the "immanent pluralism" just discussed. Agent intelligence is here understood to be the unique and essentially creative "pri mary cause" by which material intelligence (the properly disposed potential intelligence) can enter upon its own proper activity of actually cognizing the intelligibles implicitly present in sense. In its own nature this "agent intelligence" is immaterial and perfectly intelligible in itself. It is changeless, external, unmixed with matter, and, above all, transcendent. To the extent that human intelligence disposes itself to the action of agent intelli gence, it is actively assimilated to "divine life." As a rather typical corrolary to this point of view, Alexander identifies agent intelligence with the "prime cause" >/ {-ttfArre k ollT t v v ), which is the term Aristotle used for God himself.H Under this interpretation, then, agent intelligence takes on the nature of a transcendent, effi cient cause, perhaps even that of God himself. Within it is ensconced the noetic exemplar which provides the grounds for the soul's "imitation" of the "divine life." The ^Hamelin, op. cit. , p. 35. relation here is one of noetic and metaphysical unity of the cause to noetic and metaphysical plurality of the effects, with the emphasis on the metaphysical aspect. It is to be noted, therefore, that the "noetic" aspect is some what deemphasized in this interpretation because the formal likeness of human intellects to the "divine" naturally fol lows upon the creative relationship of agent intelligence with respect to the ideas it makes. The "assimilation" of potential intellects by the follows »4 - upon its activity as '77”j ^ T V \/ AX / <C<*r j_n a productive sense.12 That is why Mure, who adopts this interpreta tion, renames agent intelligence "efficient intellect." Pointing out Aristotle's own analogy in this regard, those who adopt this view find that the creative role of the artist is primarily responsible for bringing the forms in the mind of the artist to exist in the materials of his art. Therefore, the primary role of "efficient" (or agent) intellect is causal in the efficient sense, and only secondarily teleological in the noetic sense. The forms or ideas that activate potential intellect to thought are caused in a manner similar to the effects brought about 12nerlan, op. cit., p. 39. 13 through physical agencies. The only difference is that the cause, agent intelligence, exists on a transcendent, though analogically similar, level. The efficient causality of Aristotle's physical world where forms in matter produce their own likeness in matter is now transferred to the noe tic world where the cause of non-material thought must itself be immaterial in order to produce its own likeness in potential intellects. This Aphrodisian view, now pro posed in a more contemporary context by G. R. G. Mure, will be discussed in a later chapter.13 We come now to the two derivative versions that combine aspects of both the idealistic and metaphysical interpretations. The first, or transcendent-mystical interpretation, is most evident in the original Neoplaton- ist synthesis achieved by Plotinus. His somewhat vicarious knowledge of Aristotle was taken mostly from the commen taries of Alexander of Aphrodisias. In this interpretation, being and mind are given separate status on the trans cendent level, with being holding metaphysical primacy over mind. Soul, with its potentially intelligent capacity, is brought under the influence of mind, which is equivalent in l-^Cf., Chapter V, p. 132ff. this context to a separate agent intelligence, in order that the soul itself may at length "return" to a mysterious metaphysical union with the being (called the One) that is in nature beyond mind itself. This hierarchical dualism of being over idea is somewhat oversimplified in the present description, but it is clear on this metaphysical principle how the state of "being the object" is seen to transcend the mediate and inferior state of "being subjectively aware of the object" and yet, on the other hand, it is also clear how both states are here recognized as being distinct, transcendent, and essentially self-subsistent in nature. For these reasons, agent intelligence in the present con text achieves simultaneously both an idealistic and a separate metaphysical status. This interpretation postu lates the assimilation to unity of a plurality of souls on both the ideal and metaphysical levels, but in a sequence of separate stages wherein the first state of "becoming" (in the sense of "assuming the character of") the "ideal subject" is the necessary means to the second, that of becoming the "ideal object" itself. The second combined interpretation is that of the immanent-mystical variety adopted by Trendelenburg and others. It maintains that Aristotle's "agent intelligence" 15 is really a human sharing of the "Divine Spirit," a "par ticipation" which is not to be confused with the nature of the "Divine Spirit" as such. Trendelenburg calls this a "participation" in "creative reason." The function of this creative reason is to activate passive reason to receive the intelligibles implicit in sense perception.-^ The metaphysically productive character of intelligence is here again evident, but the principle of productivity is in this case obviously immanent in human minds. Nevertheless, the noetic character of man's intelligence is placed on a transcendent ideal level because of its characterization as a Divine rather than as a human property. Possession of the active property of intelligence renders the individual a participant in the Divine nature, a point of view which though defensible in the light of some of Aristotle's statements appears to argue that the ontologi cal status of "agent intelligence" is that of a plurality of distinct "creative reasons" all of which possess a mysteri ous, mystical identity with the Divine nature simply on the grounds of their noetically causal character. This A. Trendelenburg, Aristotelis de Anima Libri Tres (Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1957), p. 405. 16 interpretation leads to some interesting but problematic antinomies. Sponsored by R. D. Hicks and others influenced by modern advances in the psychological sciences, the third or psychological interpretation in general construes "agent 4 intelligence" to be an ever-present sub-conscious residue of ideas and images actively capable of emerging into a state of actual consciousness in the form of individual human thought. Actual consciousness appears, passes away, and reappears relative to the activity of association and psychological structuring that takes place on the subconsci ous level. This is labeled somewhat enigmatically by Hicks a "dormant state." This sub-conscious activity, which is believed to be what Aristotle meant by "agent intelligence," is said by Hicks to be localized in potential intellect, Aristotle's place of forms.15 jn this connotation "agent intelligence" is recognized to be the actual content of thought underlying the individual's conscious state. This virtual capacity for consciousness, embracing in its nature the changing structural relationships of its ideas, does not question the plurality of individual minds, but it does l^Hicks, op. cit., p. lxviiif. 17 suggest the eternal presence of a certain psychological unity, a unity in the form of a continuing reservoir of dormant consciousness awaiting its chance to escape into the conscious thought of successive individuals. In this way an attempt is made to justify Aristotle's remarks about the eternity of thought. The next interpretation, that of the epiphenomenal, is well known to the adherents of critical realism. Mind, or "agent intelligence," in this context is neither reduci ble to its object nor simply creative of it. In some respects it resembles the previous psychological view, except that it emphasizes the "laws," "categories" or first premises of thought in general, instead of the psychologiz ing capacity of the individual. Mind, or agent intelli gence, as this interpretation has it, consists in a priori universal forms, categories, or generalized judgments which confer on individual experience that intelligibility which enables it to conform with the laws of generalized scienti fic knowledge. Agent intelligence becomes the ephiphenomen- al condition of mind which gives to objects of experience their mental character and enables us to make statements about them which have universal validity. Mind as existing prior to the experience of the individual is nothing more 18 than the generalized laws of thought which make the scienti fic understanding of objects of experience possible. "Mind" is not classed as a metaphysical entity. It is at most the "form" that our experience must take in order to be known. The plurality of intelligence in this sense would be found not only in the individuals who utilize it, but also in the enumeration of the irreducible categories and conditions of thought, e.g. space, time, and causality; the only possible unity of "mind" in this sense is discoverable in the normative identity of the transcendental, as opposed to the empirical, self. A fifth interpretation which we will here call the epistemological, resembles the psychological interpretation to the degree that it makes agent intelligence equivalent to the psychologizing capacity of the individual. It does so, however, not on the subliminally active level of sub conscious ideas but as the potential fulfillment of the conscious knowledge of the individual. In this view, agent intelligence means nothing more than the actualizable thought of the individual's potential intellect. A very recent proponent of this present view, Professor Anton, takes the position that the distinction between agent and potential intellects "must not be taken literally as a real 19 one. Its suggestiveness lies in the fact that it points to the two basic aspects of intelligence, as a power in operation and as a fulfilled actuality. When nous or intelligence is seen apart from transcendentalisms, it ceases being a mystery."16 This obviously episte mological view reflects an evolutionary naturalism of parallel psychological development, a naturalism which commentators have found to be quite characteristic of Aristotle's biological side; but whether this same principle is applicable to Aristotle's theory of univer sal intelligence remains to be seen later on when this view is examined in greater detail along with the others just discussed. We have, then, described in a general fashion five fundamental schools of thought with respect to the interpre tation of Aristotle's theory of active mind. In essence, each of the interpretations embraces one or more of the following five basic descriptions: agent intelligence defined as the transcendent idea or object of thought, as the transcendent (or immanent) thinking power which causes 16 j. p. Anton, Aristotle's Theory of Contrariety (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 167. 20 thought, as the continual psychological processes underly ing individual thought, as the transcendental conditions or laws which make experience knowable as thought, and as the achieved scientific correlative of whatever is thinkable. Based on Aristotle's statement that "actual knowledge is identical with its object,the combination of the first interpretation with either version of the second naturally entails the sixth and seventh interpretations. Thus, "agent intelligence" becomes either the ideal object or actual intelligible as mediated for souls by the transcend ent actuality of thought, (Neo-Platonism) or it becomes the immanent subjective participation in the activity of Divine thought, which Trendelenburg called Creative Reason. ^De An., 430a20. CHAPTER II ANALYSIS OF THE ARISTOTELIAN TEXTS Before such an obviously controversial historical question about the meaning of agent intelligence can be resolved one way or the other, a careful investigation of Aristotle's use of the term mind must be conducted. For this purpose I shall rely chiefly on the Greek versions of R. D. Hicks and Trendelenburg. The English translations cited will be from Ross's Oxford text, unless otherwise noted. Before reaching conclusions, however, either about mind in general or about the unity or multiplicity of agent intelligence in particular, we must consider the answers which Aristotle himself gave to four basic questions. What is the nature of agent intelligence in itself? What is its relationship to "passive intellect," to the soul, and to the actual thought of individuals? After answering these questions by citing Aristotle's own treatment of these matters and thus accounting for his various uses of the term "mind," we shall go on in the next chapter to a 21 22 discussion of the manner in which these same views were developed, and sometimes misconstrued, by his later commen tators and critics. With regard to the nature of "agent intelligence" in itself Aristotle is quite specific. He considers it to be the cause of passive intellect's natural contrary, which is actual knowledge. Describing agent intelligence as essentially productive of actual understanding in passive intellects, he states that "mind as we have des cribed it is what it is by virtue of becoming all things, while there is another which is what it is by virtue of making all things. . . . Mind in this [latter] sense of it is separable, impassible, unmixed since it is in its essential nature activity. Now these four special attributes of mind in the "active" sense are especially significant. They here imply, first, that agent intelligence is "separable" or capable of separate existence; second, that it is not sub ject to movement or change of any kind; third, that it has no material composition in its nature; and fourth, that actual knowing belongs to it fully by nature and not in 1De An., 430al4-19. 23 virtue of any potentiality (or concomitant attribute) which would presuppose its antecedent receptivity to knowledge. The first point of "separability" is clarified by Aristotle when he states that "when mind is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more; this alone is immortal and eternal (we do not, however, remember its former activity because, while mind in this sense is impassible, mind as passive is destructible), and without it nothing thinks."2 The "former activity" must refer either to all thought which exists as the conscious actuality of the individual mind or to the activity of agent intelligence itself.^ Which interpretation is cor rect makes little difference in the present connection because this "activity" could not be recalled anyway by the individual following the destruction of passive intellect, which Aristotle calls the "place of forms."^ Secondly, Aristotle would appear to call "mind in the active sense" "impassible" for a very special reason, to wit: "in the universe as a whole it [potential knowledge] is not 2Pe An., 430a22-25. ^Critics disagree on this point, but the separ ability of agent intelligence is not challenged by either interpretation. ^De An., 429a27; 430a7-9. 24 prior even in time. [Active] mind is not at one time know ing and at another not."^ Therefore, agent intelligence, or mind in the active sense, is not the same in nature as that actual knowledge that comes to exist in time. The flux of perception, forgetfulness and memory make "mind," in the sense of individual thought, to be at one time know ing and at another not. Thirdly, mind as "active" is "unmixed," a property which, however, it shares with passive intellect since the latter, as Aristotle points out, "can not reasonably be regarded as blended with the body: If so, it would acquire some quality, e.g. warmth or cold, or even have an organ like the sensitive faculty, as it is, it has none"6 It is this Anaxagoran property of passive mind's being organically "unmixed" as opposed to "separable" in the sense of "immortal" that later raised problems for the com mentators in understanding why Aristotle apparently contra- 7 diets himself by calling passive intellect "perishable." But to pass on, agent intellect as regards its fourth 5Pe An., 430a20-22. 6Pe An., 429a24-26. 7jtt ^s in this sense of "unmixed" not "separable" that the (separable) of 429b4 should be taken. There is question here of its activity as separable from a material organ, not of its corruptibility. o attribute is "in its essential nature activity." In this respect, the active factor of thought is superior to its correlative passive factor. For even though the passive factor becomes the activity of thought, it does not possess this nature in virtue of itself alone. Aristotle when speaking of the activity of imperfect thought states: "If it thinks, but this depends on something else, then (as that which in its substance is not the act of thinking, but a potency), it cannot be the best substance; for it is through (actual) thinking that its value belongs to it."^ It would appear that the second main question regarding the relationship of agent intelligence to passive intellect is partially answered already. First, agent intelligence and passive intellect are opposite in nature because, as con traries of the same order, they are essentially distinct. Secondly, agent intelligence is eternal and impassible with respect to its own knowing activity, with which it is self identical; but knowing activity for potential intellect is temporary and derivative and does not belong to its own 8Pe An. , 430al9 . ^Aristotle, "Metaphysics," 1074b33-5, The Works of Aristotle, translated by W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 193 1). Hereafter references to this work will be cited as Meta. 26 very nature except potentially. Thirdly, potential intel lect is essentially subordinated to the causal activity of agent intelligence without which potentially thinkable forms in perception cannot become the actually intelligible forms of thought in man.10 To clarify this third point, however, we must remember that agent intelligence is a necessary though not a sufficient condition of understand ing. These forms of thought when once received are now capable of being thought at willH by means of one's actual ized potential intelligence, provided, however, that there is present also the one other necessary condition which con- * 1 o sists of the presence of correlative sense images. * Let us now summarize our conclusions drawn from these two points, the nature of agent intelligence and its relationship to the potential intellect. First, agent intel ligence lacks all contrariety in its own nature, because its nature is essential activity to which it is in no wise potential. Its nature is therefore in direct irreducible contradiction to that of potential intelligence which, in its own nature, is likened by Aristotle to the unformed 10De An. , 430al4-17. 1;LDe_An. , 429b5-9. 12pe An., 432a2-8. 27 materials of artistic endeavor: "it is what it is by virtue 1 * 1 of becoming all things." Furthermore/ mind, as essen tially active, must by nature be knowing the objects of its thought, for, in this sense, "mind is not at one time knowing, and at another not."^^ And "actual knowledge is [actually] identical with its object."-^ Thus, the separ ately adventitious and dependent nature of actualized potential intelligence becomes clear when its nature is referred to in the context of Aristotle's metaphysical law which states that "all things that come into being arise from what actually is."^ What comes to be (actualized potential intelligence) is therefore not identical with what already is (agent intelligence). Agent intelligence, being by the necessity of its own nature what "actually is" in the order of thought, ought therefore to conform in con cept to the nature of Aristotle's "unmoved mover," at least in the noetically causal sense. For just as the existence of hands is presupposed by the existence of manufactured tools, so by this very analogy Aristotle calls "mind" in the active sense the "form of forms.” The analogy suggests ^ De An. , 430al0-ll, 14 . ^^De An. , 430a22. l^De An., 430a20. ^De An., 431a3. that the existence of mind as the actually intelligible universal form-in-itself is a presupposition of the further extension of universal knowledge which arises relative to the many particular sense forms apprehended by mankind. Thus, the nature of thought itself, if it is to be made actual within the limitations of potential intellects, must pre-exist in its independent ontological status as the eternally actual thought of agent intelligence. It is in this sense, therefore, that agent intelligence is the first cause 4Um0V) of all abstract universal knowledge that can reasonably come into existence and just as reasonably pass away. Furthermore, all such contingent universal knowledge is dependent for its incidental genera tion and corruption as actual thought on the coming-to-be and passing away of sense forms apprehended by individuals in time. This growth of abstract knowledge from particular perceptions is even termed by Aristotle the "restoration" of an "original form."^ We shall investigate later to what extent this noetic first cause was thought to be equivalent to God. We now face the problem of the reverse -^Aristotle, "Posterior Analytics," 100a9-13, The Works of Aristotle, translated by W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931). Hereafter references to this work will be cited as An. Post. 29 relationship of agent intelligence to its potential correla tive. We have already mentioned the role of agent intelli gence as the "maker of forms," but this is an insufficient account. Even though agent intelligence is clearly respon sible for "making" the forms in potential intellect, the question still remains open as to the sense in which Aristotle meant this "making." "Making" is always in some sense productive, simply because something "made" always results from the activity of the "maker," and some kind of material is always presup posed. In this case the potentially intelligible forms of sense knowledge are, according to Aristotle, "made" into the actually intelligible thought of the potential intel lect. But in order for us to understand this sense of "making," a further investigation is necessary because, for Aristotle, there is more than one sense in which something can be "made." Aside from being "created" or "made out of nothing," which Aristotle believed to be an impossible and self-contradictory notion,18 something can be "made" out of its preexisting potentiality in several ways: first, by nature when plants, animals, and man are produced by the 18Meta., 1032b30-32. progenitive capacities of individuals specifically similar in form. However, this category of biological reproduction does not, in the opinion of Aristotle, belong to the cate gory of things that are "made," except by analogy.-*-^ He states positively that in the proper sense, "all makings proceed either from art or from a power or from t h o u g h t . " 2 ® Now leaving out of consideration any "chance results," since we are attempting to establish how the essential object of intelligent activity is "made," we find that Aristotle further distinguishes between "making" in the strict sense of artistic production and the "thinking" which he believes to precede it. The latter type of "mak ing" terminates in the actual idea or pattern in the mind of the artist. It is this artistic conception as thought, in contrast to the actual" "making" of physical change, that is properly the guiding or teleological principle of artistic production. Of the productions or processes one part is called thinking and the other making— that which proceeds from the starting point and the form is thinking, and that which proceeds from the final step of the thinking is making.2^ l^Meta. , 1032a26. ^ Meta. f 1032a28. 21Meta., 1032bl5-16. 31 Therefore, the relation of "thinking" or "thought" to what is "made" by thought is one of teleological deter mination or determinately final cause; it is the "making" that "proceeds from the starting point and the form" that is responsible for the essential character or form that comes to exist in the final product. The other type of "making" refers only to the physical motions necessary to adapt matter to receive form. Aristotle here falls back on the analogy of the doctor who must first know the form of health before he can direct his skill to its production in the body of the patient. Aristotle admits, of course, that on this level of artistic production thinking is not sufficient to produce a healthy patient. The physician's power and skill must be brought to bear in effectively disposing the body for this "form" of health. Nevertheless, this latter "making" is essen tially distinguished from "thinking" and so also must the object of thought (or form) to be made actual in the mind of the thinker he distinguished from the "potential intelligible" which can be described as the proportionate paraphernalia or materials of sense imagery required for the universal form or actual intelligible's appearance in the passive intelligence of man. However, to "make" thought to 32 be present in the potential intellect prepared to receive it is an activity proper to thought alone; for that is more properly the cause of thought which is responsible for its form or actuality, rather than what is responsible for its potentiality. Now, since it is the senses and the sense object anyway that are responsible for supplying the poten tial intelligible on which mind acts— for "everything actually sensible is by nature potentially knowable"^--it is only the essential character of thought itself that is lacking. Therefore, agent intelligence causes as "giving form," not as "providing potentiality." But, again, to specify "form" is to act as a controlling final cause even in artistic production, while to dispose for the reception of forms by initiating change is to act as an efficient cause.23 Therefore, agent intelligence must be understood to cause actual thought by acting as an end or final cause, not as an efficient cause, especially since it is ultimately the action of the sense object, the imagination, or memory, 22Pe An., 430a6. ^Aristotle, "De Generatione et Corruptione," 335b30-336al3, The Works of Aristotle, translated by W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith (Oxford; The Clarendon Press, 1931) . Hereafter references to this work will be cited as De Gen. et Cor. 33 that is responsible for bringing about those alterations in sense which come to constitute the potential intelligible .24 The "making" of the intelligible is thus found in the pro perly disposed subject matter of the senses; the "thinking" is found in thought's actualization of itself in the subject matter. This newly actualized thought has the same nature as actual thought— not of itself, however, as was true in the case of agent intelligence, but. by virtue of its being a potentiality receiving the actual character of thought. Thus, "mind" as agent intelligence, since it is itself the actual object of thought, is the cause which makes all potentially thinkable objects of thought actually thinkable wherever there are minds capable of thinking such objects, which, of course, happen to be present here and now to the external and/or internal senses. Agent intelligence is itself beyond the pale of thinking potentially knowable objects since it is already self-identical with actual knowledge, and, therefore, immutable with respect to such objects. However, in virtue of what it already is, all other minds which are potential to thought are moved in its direction to be actual, and this is typically Aristotelian 24Pe An., 431al4-19. 34 causality in the teleological sense. The "making" of thought in the efficient sense is rather the presentation of the potential intelligible through sense activity.^ The actual notion of "becoming" is found neither in agent intelligence nor in the already actualized form of thought, but in the structured masses of perceived details which constitute the potential intelligible.^ Between the actual ity and non-actuality of a given form qua form there is no middle ground (save in "potentiality" which does not yet have the character of actuality in itself). Thus, the law of excluded middle applies here also. It is therefore necessary to characterize agent intelligence as that which is by nature capable of activating the potentially intelli gible form just as the sun is the factor responsible for bringing about the illumination of the moon which becomes in its own right a real derivative source of light. Like the sun, agent intelligence accomplishes this objective by being simply what it is, namely, the self-illumined ooject of its own thought and the source of illumination for all potential thought. For Aristotle, the perfect thought of a perfect substance is prior to the imperfect thought of 2^pe An. , 431a2. 2^An. Post., 100a9-13. 35 imperfect substances. Indeed, the following quotation will show to what extent and on what grounds Aristotle found the primary object of actual thought to be an actually existing perfect substance. And thought is moved by the object of thought, and one of the two Columns of opposites is in itself the object of thought, and in this, sub stance is first, and in substance, that which is simple and exists a c t u a l l y . 27 The two "columns of opposites" refer here to the opposition of actuality and potentiality in each of the categories. That which is by nature the actual object of thought must be first an actuality, not a potentiality, and secondly, it must be an actuality that is independent and underived, not a quality, relation, or other accident. The reason is that fully actual thought can have no potential ity, or even be the actuality of what is potential, as to be potential in any sense is to be the contrary of actuality itself. Therefore, the natural object of actual thought is a being per se, i.e., it is substance in its actual and simple sense. This would seem to confirm the view that agent intelligence could not possibly be a quality or dependent attribute of substance, but that it must rather 27Meta., 1072a30-32. 36 be a separate substance which enters into the nature of the soul as a cause of something in the soul, i.e., "from outside," as Aristotle suggests in the De Generatione Animalium.Though the activity of agent intelligence is present in the soul by its being the cause of the potential intelligible's actualization, the principle of such "essen tial activity" could hardly be an infra-substantial attri bute of the soul itself because perfect actual thought, as we have just seen, has for its object the actuality of sub stance, simple and underived. Indeed, if we push the argument a bit further, as Aristotle does in the Metaphysics, where he claims that the best activity must by nature, belong to God, then we find that, since the best activity according to Aristotle is that of reason and this same essential activity of reason belongs in its perfection to agent intelligence, it follows that God and agent intelli gence must be the same. Indeed, in Aristotle's opinion, judging by the citation that follows, nature, knowledge and the value of life itself must find their archetypal ground and finality in this one ultimate unmoved mover precisely ^^Aristotle, "De Generatione Animalium," 736b28, The Works of Aristotle, translated by W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931). Hereafter references to this work will be cited as De Gen. An. 37 because God is on the level of perfect thought. On such a principle then, depend the heavens and the world of nature. . . . And thinking in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thinking in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. . . and God is that actuality; and God's self-dependent actuality is life most good and eternal.^ Also favoring the view that God Himself is the one principal unmoved mover of the universe in the sense of his being the actual thought of agent intelligence, we have the following climactic passage from the De Mundo in which Aristotle compares divine movement to differing types of motion in the physical world and then defines it by what he believes to be the more precise and scientific notion of perfect movement. To sum up the matter, as in the steersman in the ship, the charioteer in the chariot, the leader in the chorus, law in the city, the general in the army, even so God in the universe; save that to them their rule is full of weariness, disturbance, and care, while to him it is without toil or labor and free from all bodily weakness. For, enthroned amid the immutable, he moves and revolves all things, where and how he will in different forms and natures; just as the law of a city, fixed and immutable in the minds of those who are under it, orders all the life of the state. 29Meta., 1072bl4, 17-28. •^Aristotle, "De Mundo," 400b6-14, The Works of Aristotle, translated by W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931). 38 This again confirms the view that the way in which actual thought moves makes it by nature an essentially Divine principle, and furthermore, that this same principle is the ultimate cause of all becoming at every level of the universe, while remaining itself essentially immutable, unlike moved movers or physical agents.31 A question arises at this point. Did Aristotle mean by "actual thought" a special unmoved mover essen tially distinct from the prime unmoved mover which is God? We note that in the Metaphysics where Aristotle unifies his theory of the prime unmoved mover with his astronomical hypothesis about the movement of the planets, he adopts the view that from forty-seven to fifty-five unmoved movers must be postulated to account for the simple spatial motions of the planets. The heart of the passage itself should be cited in order to clarify his distinction between the pri mary universal movement and the secondary singular movement. The first principle or primary being is not movable either in itself or accidentally, but pro duces the primary eternal and single movement. But since that which is moved must be moved by ■^Cf., De Gen. et Cor., 324b5-13. The following paragraph in which a distinction is made between the "active power" and the actualized state is concerned with physical change, and this only from the standpoint of physi cal activity, not from the standpoint of the function of thought. 39 something, and the first mover must be in itself unmovable and eternal movement must be produced by something eternal and a single movement by a single thing, and since we say that besides the simple spatial movement of the universe, which we say the first and immovable substance produces, there are other spatial movements— those of the planets which are eternal {for a body which moves in a circle is eternal and unresting; we have proved these points in the physical treatises) each of these movements also must be caused by a substance both unmovable in itself and eternal.32 Unlike the form of potential intelligence, which in its own nature is impassible and nonmaterial, the forms of the planets, as Aristotle conceived them, are embodied in matter of a special kind endowing them with ingenerabil- ity, incorruptibility, and the natural tendency to a per fect spatial motion, which, for Aristotle, meant to move eternally in a circle. Actual knowledge, even as gener ated, is, for Aristotle, not the property of a material body, except incidentally, inasmuch as the one who knows happens to possess a body; but actual spatial movement is^ the property of a body, even if this is the perfect motion of an eternal body possessing incorruptible matter. 32Meta., 1073a23-34. 33Aristotle, "De Caelo," 268b-270b incl., The Works of Aristotle, translated by W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931). 40 Therefore, in this latter case there is not only movement in the singular, which, incidentally, by reason of a change in the senses, is also true in the case of actual knowledge, but there is here motion that is essentially of_ a singular and this requires ultimately, as Aristotle says, a single rather than a universal unmoved mover. Contrary to this is the case where the prime unmoved mover moves the whole uni verse with its first spatial movement, for this is a move ment not attributable in its reception to any single body, except incidentally, but to the universe as a whole. This latter movement is primary and universal in nature as opposed to the one aforementioned which was secondary and particular; yet both are perfect, each in its own order, notwithstanding the fact that the singular unmoved mover is incidentally dependent on the primary movement of the universal unmoved mover. Knowledge, however, when it comes to be in act is not the actuality of a material singular, except incidentally, and, therefore, its formally universal actuality is attributable only to the prime universal unmoved mover who is actual thought by nature. Therefore, in the light of Aristotle's distinction between a universal and a singular mover, agent intelligence would indeed still appear to be God rather than any other unmoved mover. It 41 does seem probable, however, that the ancients' exaggerated theological reverence for the heavenly bodies had much to do with Aristotle's postulation of additional unmoved movers to explain the assumed supra-cosmological natures of the individual planets. However, since intelligence, according to Aristotle, is essentially universal in nature, there was no need in this case to postulate additional unmoved intel ligence to explain knowledge in the individual. The question now arises as to what is the relation ship of agent intelligence to the actual thought of individ uals and what is the corresponding relationship of the latter to potential intellect. It seems that the "actual / thought of individuals" is something of a mean between the contraries of agent intelligence and potential intellect. The ontological status of such a mean must be made clear if one is to elaborate a coherent unity- multiplicity hypothesis about the relationship of agent intelligence to human thought. Is agent intelligence to be construed as identical in form and essence with the "Divine element" of human thought? Such an identity would result in human minds' being "assimilated" and rendered one and eternal in their formal actuality (as in Alfarabi's version). Or is all human thought essentially distinct in nature from the unity and eternality of God, and consequently destruc tible in keeping with its generation in time? The difficul ty of striking a consistent mean between the eternity of agent intelligence and the perishability of potential intellect has caused religiously oriented philosophers, particularly the medieval Arabians, to elaborate whole hierarchies of mediating levels of intelligence in order to prove the immortality of man in some sense. Now it would appear that from Aristotle's point of view such hypotheses are needless. Even though he was admittedly concerned with questions of man's survival after death, inasmuch as these questions were already discussed by previous thinkers,^ Aristotle himself never did attempt a reasoned clarification of the senses in which man could even be said to survive death. Much less did he try to establish ironclad conclusions on the matter. Indeed, for him the sole known activity which could by nature survive in separation from matter was contemplation, but Aristotle specifically states that with respect to human beings "our nature is not self-sufficient for the purpose of ^4Cf., Aristotle, "Nichomachean Ethics," I, 10-11 The Works of Aristotle, translated by W. D. Ross and J. A. Smith (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1931). Hereafter references to this work will be cited as Eth. Nich. contemplation, but our body must also be healthy, and must have food and other attentionContemplation, then, as a human activity, is dependent on a concomitant attribute for its existence. This is brought out by implicit refer ence in the Metaphysics when Aristotle compares the life of thought and contemplation enjoyed by the unmoved mover to that enjoyed by the individual thinker: "and it is a life such as the best that we enjoy, and enjoy for but a short time (for it is ever in this state, which we cannot be) since its actuality is also pleasure."36 Thus, contempla tion, or the activity of speculative knowing, is not believed by Aristotle to be naturally perfect or eternal except insofar as it is the activity of thought itself. The "Divine element" of thought in man is never said by Aristotle to be identical with the soul or the intellect or any other part of the human nature of the individual who thinks; this is at best merely a temporary participation in what may be the form but not the substance of the Divine and eternal. Indeed, Aristotle, as we saw before, made it quite clear that it was "the possession rather than the receptivity [that] is the divine element that thought seems 35Ibid., 1178b34f. 36Meta., 1072bl4f. 3 7 to contain." That human contemplation is only at best a similitude of the divine he confirms by continuing: "If, then, God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if in a better this compels 3 8 it yet more. And God is in a better state." Therefore, the "actual thought of the individual," although it is an actuality, is nonetheless, unlike agent intelligence, a dependent actuality relying for its subsis tence on the contingent and variable character of potential intelligibles actualized in the potential intellect. We then arrive at the problem of clarifying the nature of the potential intellect in relation to the semi divine actuality of contemplative knowledge. Why does Aristotle characterize potential intellect in one place as "destructible," and in another as "unmixed" and "impassi ble"?^ In the latter case, as Aristotle points out in the passages noted, the passive intellect is in its own nature, and even prior to the reception of its forms, completely "unmixed" with matter and is therefore not the actuality of 37Meta., 1072b23. 38Meta., 1072b24f. 39De An., 430a24f; 429b30f. a physical nature, nor does it depend on a physical organ for the range or measure of its activity;4® nevertheless, potential intellect is not a substance but an accidental attribute of a hylomorphic soul-body nature which is essen tially composite and perishable. Potential intellect, therefore, possesses the existence of its unmixed and impassible aspects not simply in virtue of its own essence or nature, but in virtue of the existence of the subject in which it is. Its own reality, and a fortiori its knowledge, will cease at death since its existence is incidentally, but no less really dependent on the subsistence of a corrupt ible entity. This is why "we do not remember its (agent intelligence's or passive intellect's) former activity, because . . . mind as passive is destructible."4^ Unlike God, who is his own actuality, and therefore cannot be cor rupted in virtue of any essential or incidental composition in his nature, passive intellect, while devoid of essential composition in its own nature, nevertheless, by being the attribute of a substance, fails to transcend the necessity of its own destruction when the human subject in which it 4Qpe An., 429al8-429b4. 41De An., 430a22-25. 46 inheres is destroyed. The actuality of potential intellect ceases to exist whenever that of which it is the actuality ceases to exist. Indeed, any other explanation would be forced to interpret the ontological status of passive intellect to be not a "part of the soul" itself but a separate substance. But in the latter case, the activity of potential intellect could no longer be that of the thinking individual, "the part of the soul with which the soul knows and thinks."42 The activity of passive intel lect would instead become the activity of a substance dis tinct from the individual, and Aristotle's theory is quite opposed to this view. The thinking part of the soul must therefore be, while impassible, capable of receiving the form of an object; that is, it must be potentially identi cal in character with its object without being the object. Mind must be related to what is thinkable, as sense is to what is sensible.43 Potential intellect, like sense, is thus a capacity or quality of the soul. This is not surprising, since otherwise the "thought of the individual" would not be accounted for. Finally, then, what is the relationship of agent intelligence itself to the soul? In view of the foregoing. 42Pe An., 429al0. 43Pe An., 429al2-18. in what sense can agent intelligence be said to exist "in the soul" at all except insofar as the actual thought of potential intellect results from its activity? That Aristotle believed agent intelligence to be "in the soul" in some sense cannot be doubted.44 However, he writes in the same place of its relationship to the potential intel lect as being that of an art (not an artist) to its material. This analogy refers to form as already actual "in the mind of the artist." The form itself, since it is 4 5 . already perfect, is not "made" into anything. But it is precisely this same form in accordance with which the potentiality for form is actualized. Form in its actual sense is "the essence of each thing and its primary sub stance."4® Aristotle goes on to state "I call the essence substance without matter This makes form to be an actual substance without matter. This form cannot be "made" for it is the product neither of nature nor of art. Now, obviously the form of agent intelligence which is unmixed, eternal, and "in its essential nature activity" cannot here be form 44Pe An. , 430al0-14. 4^pe Gen. et Cor. , 328al8-23. 46Meta., 10 32bl. 47Meta., 1032bl5. in the sense of its being actualized in potential intellect since potentiality belongs to the nature of the latter A Q while it is utterly excluded from the former. But form as actually intelligible is actual thought, and if this existed already in the soul as part of the nature of soul itself, the soul would be actually thinking the forms before it came to think them in the potential intellect, and there would be no need for the latter. Neither could it be reasonably held (at least on Aristotle's theory) that the already "actual forms of thought" in the soul may not yet be actually thought by it, but are in a "dormant" or "seminal" condition. To refute this with regard to the Platonic ideas, Aristotle states that absolute essences, or "those things which do not depend on something else but are self-subsistent and primary"— such as "the essence of reality, the good, and the beautiful"— are not real, good, or beautiful if they lack the actual property of being 49 real, good, or beautiful. The same can be said for the essence, or non-material substance, of thought. If it lacks the actual property of being "thought," it lacks that 48Cf., Hicks, Aristotle; De Anima, p. 502. 49Meta., 1031b8-21. 49 "divine element" of thought which consists, as we saw before, in the actual possession and enjoyment of the object of thought, and therefore it would not be actual thought. Just as the "source of good" must be a real good, so the "source of thought" must be a real thought. Further more, under the theory of "dormancy" agent intelligence would be subject to the ambiguous conditions of "individ ual knowing and not knowing" whenever it became or ceased to be the actuality of an individual thought. This contra dicts Aristotle's statement that "mind in this sense is not at one time knowing and at another not."^ However, a dis tinction must again be made here between thought actual by nature and thought actual in virtue of a concomitant attribute. It is true as Aristotle makes clear in the De Anima, that it is possible for mind— in this case, passive intellect— to become the object of its thought with out actually thinking it.^^ Its state is then one of active potentiality to exercise knowledge. However, the objects of thought are not deprived of their actuality of being known by reason of themselves, or their nature as objects of thought but by reason of the thinker's condition, or the 50Pe An., 430a22. 51Pe An., 429b5-9. 50 nature of the composite subject who must necessarily think the forms in the proper images if he is to think them at all, because all thought in human souls is limited to what can be derived from the given contents of sense percep tion. 52 xt is not in this way, however, that thought is actual by nature, for in the sense of agent intelligence thought is not dependent for its activity or any other fac tor simply because it is by nature its own activity, nor is its own activity conditioned by the necessity of taking place in some thing other than itself; this is not the case with potential intellect, "the faculty of thinking" which "thinks the forms in the images,"^ and must therefore depend on the latter, both for the inception and the con tinuance of its activity. It would appear, then, that definite conclusions have been reached on the questions discussed in the present chapter. Agent intelligence is postulated by Aristotle as the primary cause of knowledge. It is active by its very nature, not active in virtue of some accompanying potential ity. Its nature is, therefore, free of both material and ^DeAn., 431al4-16. 5^Pe An. , 431b2. 51 immaterial potentiality, and remains then, "just what it is," eternally immutable when the passive intelligence of men perishes. Furthermore, unlike potential intellects, it is fully actual with respect to the object of its knowl edge and is therefore identical with it and not dependent on anything else for the enjoyment of its knowledge. Pithily summarizing his view of such a nature, Aristotle states, "But if there is anything that has no contrary, then it knows itself and is actually and possesses independent existence"^ Now this is what it is to be an unmoved mover in the order of intelligence, but could there possibly be many of these? It seems not, because the actuality that such a mover causes is not the form of a singular material being, except inci dentally, but rather the form of a universal intelligible whole, and for such a mover the more universal must already be explicitly present in the less universal, as "animal" would be explicitly recognized by a perfect intellect in "man" (otherwise this "unmoved" mover could be moved to new knowledge or else it would not be fully identical with its own object of thought because man is^ an animal by nature). It therefore follows that the primary cause of thought must 54Pe An., 430b24f. 52 be the fully universal unmoved mover with respect to all thought, and this in Aristotle's view would by definition have to be God himself. Such a mover does not pass from what is implicitly knowable to what is explicitly known but is instead already identical in nature with whatever is actually knowable in itself, and this category does not include material nature as such which in its own right is potentially knowable only. Mediating between the fully actual perfection of agent intelligence and the essential imperfection of poten tial intellect, we find the ambiguously perfect and imper fect reality of the soul's actual knowledge. To the degree that actual knowledge is the activity of a perishable pas sive intellect and requires the good estate and proper performance of the bodily functions for its continuance, it is itself time-bound and perishable. However, as the actuality of an "unmixed" faculty actualized knowledge does partake of the immaterial, eternal, and unchanging forms of knowledge and therefore it partakes of the divine nature "for a time." But even when actualized thought is present, it is metaphysically at least, never the actuality or activity of anything other than that of a potential intel lect which is dependent for its existence on a soul which, to preserve its actual thought, must, in turn, also exer cise sensation and other human activities dependent on bodily organs in a nature that is not destined to live forever. Actualized knowledge is therefore "immortal and eternal" not in itself, but only because it partakes in a temporally generable and corruptible version of that kind of activity which, when it is identical with a perfect sub stance, is ingenerable, incorruptible, and eternal by nature. "Actualized intellect" develops from "unmixed" potential intellect; but, potential intellect is in its turn perishable by being the attribute of a corruptible nature. Thus, Aristotle stresses the point that there is no such thing as an attribute that is "incidentally perish able" or "incidentally imperishable."55 Furthermore, the activity of actualized thought is dependent on sense images because we find that the individual soul can think the universal object it has become only when it relates its thought to a sense image. An elucidation of the unity-plurality relationships implicit in my interpretation of Aristotle's doctrine of 55Meta. , 1000b24; cf. , also 1058b36. 54 agent intelligence is now made possible. The focus of this relationship is discovered in the unalloyed perfection of unity belonging by nature to the Divine Mover of intelli gence itself. For Aristotle, it is this essential actual ity of being which makes all becoming possible, and since knowledge itself is a kind of actuality, it is the perfect formal actuality of all knowledge as actually knowable in itself that makes all other actuable knowledge possible. Therefore, knowledge in itself as primordial actuality is both a metaphysical and a noetic unity; but the activity of actual knowledge in time arises relative to the concomitant attributes of potential intellects which in themselves are not actual thought at all. Consequently, there comes into existence in an eternal cycle a generable and corruptible metaphysical plurality of actualized potential intellects, the forms or primary substances of which can be thought of abstractly as a generalized noetic unity of actualized thought, and here it is possible to clear up the confusion about the abstract unity as opposed to the metaphysical plurality of human thought. Thought by its very nature exists primarily as an actually subsistent substance, a Parmenidean type of unity, and, secondarily, as a real plurality of actualized capacities carrying on their 55 activities whenever and wherever the necessary conditions are present. This plurality, though real, is incidental in character because plurality does not belong to the formal essence of any thought. Thought is universal and, further more, it belongs to the human soul in virtue of a capacity that in itself transcends the individuating properties of matter. Yet, as experience shows, thought depends on the organs of an individual for its subsistence and activity. Each soul must, then, be independently potential to thought in a fashion that is contingent on those changing phenomena of sensation to which it is accessible. There is, there fore, in Aristotle's system both a real unity and a real plurality to intelligence but this latter plurality-aspect of intelligence exists not because of the essential nature of subsistent intelligence itself, but only because of the essentially material and multiple character of those sub jects whose souls happen to possess the non-material attribute necessary to share in intelligent activity. Poten tial intellect, too, is a real plurality, not by reason of itself any more than "white" can be said to be many by nature, but just as "white" is found to be an attribute of many subjects that can be white, and its existence in one individual is not found to be contingent on the continued 56 existence of its essential character in a second individual, it therefore has the ontological status of being actually "many" in an incidental sense, i.e., not in itself, but by reason of those things in which it is. In this way poten tial intellect will be many by reason of the plurality of subjects in which it exists; thus each thinker in the pro per circumstances can think, forget, and remember his own thoughts either at will or by chance and these thoughts too can, by the same reasoning, follow as a consecutive series in their own intra-personal order of actualized thought. However, in human minds, the actual possession of the uni versal is distinct from its actual exercise. That is why the universal once learned is again "recognized" upon the appearance of subsequent particulars of the same class. Universals then also have a real incidental plurality status in those individuals who possess them without thinking them, somewhat as a biologist possesses his own scientific knowl edge of his subject matter even when thinking of something else. Therefore, thought, inasmuch as it is actual by nature, is agent intelligence itself and possesses perfect metaphysical and noetic unity; insofar as thought is a derived actuality it possesses a twofold nature: a metaphysi cal plurality of actualized potential intellects (actualized 57 non-material potencies) and an abstract noetic unity in terms of the general character of thought itself as well as the likeness included in it of certain common universal contents. CHAPTER III THE COMMENTATORS The purpose of the present chapter is both exigeti- cal and critical. It is exigetical because the principal varying interpretations historically applied to Aristotle's concept of agent intelligence must be explained in the precise terms of their authors. It is critical because the resultant hypotheses must be evaluated in the light of Aristotle's own statements about the nature of agent intel ligence and its relations. The first of the competing interpretations was, as we have seen, the idealistic theory of intelligence. Thought is conceived as being essentially nothing else than the formal content of the idea that is actually thought. In true "knowing" as distinguished from "sense awareness" the subject of thought is reducible to the idea conscious of itself, and since "agent intelligence" is identical with its object, and the object is what consti tutes the essential activity of thought itself, "potential 58 59 intellects" are "subjects of thought" to the extent that they lose their own distinct identity when they are assimilated to the actual thought of agent intelligence. It is for this reason, according to the idealistic theory, that Aristotle made it clear that potential intellect is "not any real thing before it thinks." Therefore, when we talk about "thought" or "intelligence" at all, we are already concerned with ideas that possess the ontological status of "actual thought." There is little point in talk ing about the "actual subject of thought" because the thinker is only said to be "mind" to the degree that he is identical with the actual object of thought, "for mind is thinkable in exactly the same way that its objects are." If one is to follow this viewpoint to its logical conclusions, discussion about potential objects and poten tial thinkers is futile because these are but capacities to become the actual object of thought and can in themselves be real and knowable in the order of intelligence only to the extent that they become the reality of thought and knowledge itself. This viewpoint does generally concede, however, that two levels of actual thought exist: the first is eternal and unchanging by nature, the equivalent of agent intelligence or mind (vous) and is generally identified 60 with God; the other enters into human souls "from the out side" or else "gathers" the soul to itself also "from the outside" but thought is itself never generated or corrupted. It is simply thought as already actual, "emanating" or "coming-to-be present" in beings which are potential to participation in a superior grade of actuality; or else the opposite is the case; these beings, souls, or intellects come to be the unchanging actuality of thought. Thought, then, in its strictly formal sense, is a participation in a "divine" or "supra-human" activity. It is thus that the human soul comes to be present to an activity that can hardly be called its own, since the origin, actuality, and essential nature of this activity are, strictly speaking, alien to the soul's own nature. The plurality aspect of thought is then reducible to nothing more than the poten tiality of thought in a multitude of souls. Who, then, are the adherents of this basic inter pretation of Aristotle's viewpoint? I shall limit myself here to three of the better known interpreters, one ancient, one medieval, and one modern, who do reach essential agree ment on the idealistic point of view, and shall then explore their theories in the light of Aristotle's system. As the ancient representative of this view, I will 61 consider Plotinus {205-270 A.D.) whose interpretation admittedly extends beyond the purely idealistic because it endows the One ^with a transcendent "supra-ideal" existence in addition to Mind's ontological status as the actuality of thought itself. Yet this "drawbridge to a world beyond thought" does not affect the essentially Platonic and idealistic viewpoint of Plotinus about the essential nature of thought itself. We, therefore, find his statements on the nature of intelligence entirely typical of the idealis tic interpretation of Aristotelian intelligence. Let us begin by showing that Plotinus' view of human thought is essentially "assimilative," that is, repre sents a quasi-assimilation of the soul to the nature of a previously existing noetic actuality; this interpretation does not propose any distinct actualization of real knowl edge arising from the potentiality of the pre-existing materials of sense perception. Knowledge in the reasoning soul is on the one side concerned with objects of sense, though indeed this can hardly be called knowledge and is better indicated as opinion or surface-knowing; it is of later origin than the objects since it is a reflec tion from them: but on the other hand there is the knowledge handling the intellectual objects and this is the authentic knowledge; it enters the reasoning soul from the Intellectual Principle and has no deal ing with anything in sense. Being true knowledge it actually is everything of which it takes cognizance; 62 it carries as its own content the intellectual act and the intellectual object since it carries the Intellectual Principle which actually is the primals and is always self-present and is in its nature an Act, never by any want forced to seek, never acquir ing or traversing the remote— for all such experience belongs to soul— but always self-gathered, the very being of the collective total, not an external creating things by the act of knowing them.l It is to be noted here that human knowledge is not a state whereby the transcendent Intelligible Principle violates the restraints of its self-sufficient immanence in order to reach the soul, it is rather a state wherein the soul itself is mystically united to transcendent thought or the agent intelligence. Souls are "assimilated" to Mind as a necessary stage of their journey to their further union beyond knowledge with the One. Mind does not act transient ly, but is "self-gathered."2 I make no attempt here to disparage this doctrine or its own premises, but since Plotinus ascribes this theory to Aristotle and purports to make actual thought on all levels identical with the "substance of thought" or the ^S. MacKenna, Plotinus: The Enneads (New York: Pantheon Books, Inc., 1957), p. 438f (v. 9.7.). 2Ibid., p. 438 (v. 9.6.). 63 Intelligible-Principle, let us see what difficulties this raises in the light of Aristotle's own statements on the matter. For Aristotle the Metaphysical status of every thing is either that of a substance or the attribute of a substance. It was for this reason that he denied in the Metaphysics any special state of existence for pure ideas. The reason was that since ideas are by nature universals predicable of many subjects they would have to exist as universal and individual substances simultaneously or else as the universal attributes of singular subjects, both of which alternatives are impossible.4 To Aristotle a sub stance and idea were metaphysically equivalent only in the "Unmoved Mover" which as the perfect substance could not exist otherwise than without potentiality, that is, as absolutely identical with itself; being itself the perfect object of its own knowledge this object would already include all that is best and fully actual in life and thought. Beyond the realm of perfect actuality, however, 3ibid., p. 437 (v. 9.5.). "In the immaterial the knowledge of the thing is the thing." This was Plotinus' paraphrase of Aristotle's De Anima, 430a3-5. 4Meta., 1038bl-10 39b20. 64 idea and substance are not equivalent. "In the individual, potential knowledge is in time prior to actual knowledge."® Furthermore, substance, in the primary sense for Aristotle was what neither exists in a subject nor is predicable of a subject. The universal idea (also called the formula of the essence or the definition) is defined quite differently as what does not exist in a subject but is^ predicable of a subject.® Now the primary substance neither exists in a subject nor is predicable of a subject simply for this reason: it is itself by nature a subject; the universal or the acquired idea qua idea on the other hand cannot possibly be the actuality of an individual subject, since it is by nature common to many in the sense of predication, yet it does incidentally belong to the subject that thinks it, as for example, when an individual thinks about fish-in- general without becoming a fish either singly or universally. The point here is that in Aristotle's view an idea is in no wise to be called a substance simply on the grounds of its being in some sense separable from matter. It is here, however, that Plotinus apparently runs into the difficulty ®De An., 431a2. 6Meta., 1038bl5. 65 mentioned above, for he credits Aristotle with equating the immaterial substance of the One Intelligizing Principle with the actualized thought of many individual souls. He feels that Aristotle could conceive of making thought both a sin gle independent substance and at the same time make it to be really predicable of other substances simultaneously. He appears to believe that on Aristotle's own principles the Intelligizing cause can be its own substance and yet be at the same time the substance or attribute of other substances. It is to be admitted, of course, that Plotinus' essential justification for his own point of view about the simultaneous identity and non-identity of ideas with their source is rooted in his conviction that a multiplicity of ideas can be simultaneously identical with and yet dis tinct from a unity which they constitute, just as species possess their own integrity while being identical with their genus.^ As Gilson puts it, "The true position of Plotinus is . . . that intelligible relations are the very stuff that beings are made of."® It was for this reason ^MacKenna, op. cit., p. 438 (v. 9.6.). ®E. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1959), p. 26. 66 that Plotinus found Aristotle's "category of substance" impossible to define because he could not discover "the grounds for regarding substance as one single genus" since such a genus would be predicable of intellectual and sensi ble substances alike and at the same time possesses a prior existence combining both.^ He therefore posited Mind, or his Intellectual-Principle as distinct from substance and yet inclusive of the reality of all pure immaterial ideas relative to substances. The intrinsically contradictory nature of the "material" had to be left out. Aristotle was not quite so essentialistic in his approach because for him first of all, beings were intelligible because they were substances, not the reverse, and secondly, a certain kind of substance was actually intelligible, and therefore an actual object of its own thought, precisely because as an unmoved mover it had to be a substance devoid of matter or any other potentiality, and not by the reverse order of reasoning. Thus while for Aristotle the order of inference went from substance to thought as a kind of activity belong ing to substance, the reasoning of Plotinus moves on the contrary from the level of the unity of perfect thought ^MacKenna, loc. cit. 67 (the genus, Mind, including all species) to that of thought's multiple aspect (the distinct species or ideas) in souls. This latter approach of Plotinus also runs essentially contrary to Aristotle's own view that "nothing can be the idea of one thing and the substance of another."-^ In Aristotle's view, the idea of Mind (vous) could never become the substance of the soul, nor could the substance of the soul preserve its identity if it were assimilated to the nature of an idea. Thus, in Aristotle, the essential forms or relations of things are not in all cases sufficient to account for the realities they represent. He blames this very inconsistency on Plato, who, he claims, attempted to explain the substance of individuals solely by recourse to absolute universal forms. "Each, then, of the ideas present in the species of animals will be the Ideal animal."^ Either they are "all one" or the "one" is "simply many." Thus, the one generic "Ideal animal" cannot be a substance in the Aristotelian sense of it. It may be objected, how ever, that in the case of the "Ideal animal" for Plotinus, the idea and its object will not be the same because the latter is a material substance, and, both Aristotle and 10Meta., 1039bl2. 11Ibid., 1039bl3. 68 Plotinus agree that only immaterial substances and their ideas are identical. But, although it is true that both Aristotle and Plotinus subscribe to this same statement, they do it in quite different ways. Aristotle states that since actualized knowledge in potentially knowable sense forms must come ultimately from what is already perfectly actual, it then follows that there must be a substantial and self-identical knowing activity which is free of matter and all other potentiality. Plotinus, however, does not follow the same path from actualized thought back to an actual knowing substance. Instead he begins with the specific intelligible notions we know and their actual inclusion in more generic notions, all of which implies their actual and perfect existence in that fully articulated noetic unity which transcends all material multiplicity. This is his meaning of Mind, which is the source of all intelligibility in being, although it is short of the perfection of the one, or being itself. As Gilson put it most graphically: The true position of Plotinus is . . . that intelligible relations are the very stuff that beings are made of. This may seem surprising to us, because the only intelligible relations we know are the loose and multiple ones which cease lessly succeed each other in our own minds. In us, intelligibility is fragmentary as well as dis connected, and its parts hold together only more 69 or less through the never-ending patchwork of human dialectic. Yet, from time to time, even we may hap pen to grasp a multiplicity of relations within the unity of a single intellectual intuition. In such cases, the more intelligibility grows into a unity, the more it begins truly to be. And why should we not conceive all intelligible relations, blended together as it were in the unity of some supreme Intelligence, in which they would all be present at the same time or rather out of time, since all its distinct consequences are simultaneously given in the unity of their common principle? Such pre cisely, is the V O V i (nous) of Plotinus. Therefore, while both Aristotle and Plotinus seem to agree that immaterial substance is identical with the idea of it, they mean quite different things. Aristotle means that perfect substances do not become objects of thought but being perfectly intelligible are already their own objects of thought, and Plotinus means, on the contrary, that the intelligibility of knowable relations in their dis tinct forms is grounded in the prior and actually subsistent unity of these relations. The principle on which Plotinus reaches his conclusion is, therefore, quite different from that of Aristotle, who did not limit his perspective to the actuality of thought relations alone, but rather credited the metaphysical character of thought in a thinker pri marily to the nature of the object about which he thought. 12 Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers, p. 26. 70 Thus "since mind is itself thinkable in the same way that its objects are,"^ if the object of thought is a perfect substance like the unmoved mover and mind is not a poten tiality of this thought, but is the actual object itself, mind will think itself as the actuality of a perfect sub stance . The second proponent of this idealistic interpreta tion Alfarabi of the Medieval school in Baghdad (c.950) takes a view midway between that of Plotinus and Aristotle. In his work entitled The Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle he is quite careful to avoid reducing the substance of the soul's "acquired intellect" (the intellect of man actualized by the intelligible in act) to the substance of agent intelligence or "active intellect" as he calls it. Comment ing on what he believes to be Aristotle's own theory on the matter, he states that "when the human intellect achieves its ultimate perfection, its substance comes close to being the substance of this intellect. He [Aristotle] called this intellect the active intellect."14 now it is quite 13pe An., 430al. Mahdi, Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle (Glencoe, 111.: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962), p. 124 (128, 7-8). "Active intellect" is still another term used to signify Aristotle's "agent intelligence." 71 clear in this and other similar statements Alfarabi made something of an effort to distinguish the noetically unitive character of thought from the metaphysically pluralistic status of human intellects. However, he does introduce his own brand of confusion when he defines the relation of "active intellect" to "acquired intellect" in the following statement: and it became evident that the thing (active intellect) whose very substance and nature are nothing but mind can be intellected and can exist outside the intellect— there is no difference between these two modes of its existence. Hence it became clear that it is intellected by man only when he is not separated from it by an intermediary.*' In this way the soul of man itself becomes this Intellect. Since the human soul is for the sake of this Intellect, the nature by which man acquires what is natural to him is for the sake of the soul only and the soul is for the sake of the theoretical intellect in its highest perfection it follows that these things belong to man so that he may attain this rank of b e i n g . 15 Following Aristotle, Alfarabi had sufficient enough grounds to identify the actual intelligible qua object of active intellect with the substance of "active Intellect," but then he goes on in this passage to identify active Intellect qua actual intelligible with the soul itself, which is said to become the formal actuality of the active 15Ibid., p. 127 f. (128,9 to 129,5). intellect by thinking it as its object. Here again we dis cover the apparent failure to distinguish between that kind of substance which is identical with the activity of thought and that which is by nature only potential to such activity. The main difficulty arises from Alfarabi's own statement above that "there is no difference between these two modes of its existence." In this regard Alfarabi is apparently swayed by the noetically identical character of the actual content of thought, a dramatically strong feature of neo- Platonic transcendentalism with which Alfarabi was undeni ably quite familiar; he failed to discern Aristotle's subtle but patently real distinction between thought as the essen tial activity of a perfect substance and thought as an acquired activity contingently attributable to an imperfect substance. It is here inferred that because the formal noetic actuality of both the "active intellect" and the acquired knowledge of the human (actual) intellect are alike they are then reduced by Aristotle to the one mode of exis tence enjoyed by the substantial activity of the active intellect both as a separate substance and as implanted "from without" ( and therefore "acquired" in a certain sense by the soul of man. It was for this reason that Gilson referred to the "acquired intellect" of 73 Alfarabi as a needless reduplication of the active intel lect. If this were true, it would then appear that the real multiple status of actual thought is here called into question. But this is not a problem for Alfarabi himself even in spite of the fact that Aristotle never identified his agent intelligence with actualized thought in this fashion. In Alfarabi's view to be the very same in essence as something else is to be as close as possible to being that other thing; the sole element differentiating the two would be the individual existence of the first as distin guished from that of the second, but this "existence" Alfarabi construed as being completely distinct from and adventitious to the nature of an essence;^ in other words, existence was an incidental attribute with the result that two things could be essentially the same in substance in virtue of what they are, but incidentally different by the fact of their separate existence.-*-® This essentialistic l^Gilson, Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire du Moyen Age, pp. 120, 15. Cf., F. Rahman, Avicenna's Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 90-93, for a further discussion of Gilson's view. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 19 55), p. 186. l®Mahdi, op. cit., p. 95f. (88, 6— 89, 10). 74 notion of substance is undoubtedly what Alfarabi had in mind in the following statement: When he (Aristotle) had found this (the acquisi tion of the purely theoretical intelligibles) to be the case and that the intellect could not enjoy another existence more perfect than this one that renders it entirely substantial, he realized that this is the final thing that renders man substantial, and that when the substance of man is realized in that final perfection beyond which it is impossible that there be further perfection, the substance of this part comes close to being identical with its act.19 In other words, for Alfarabi, as for all Neo- Platonists, the kind of "existence" that really matters is a sharing in a more perfect essence, namely, the actuality of perfect thought. This state is what renders man truly substantial; this alone transcends his concrete particular ity in matter, which is nothing else than an accidentally limited existential status almost completely replaced by this higher liberating order of essentially noetic substan tiality. By "acquiring" the higher noetic reality of thought, the intellect of man achieves the essential unity of a single substance with active intellect simply because the human intellect has acquired "a new 'whatness' (that is a shape or form corresponding to its definition) in virtue of which its essence differentiates it from every other 19Ibid., p. 124f. (125, 14-18) s p e c i e s . "20 The "whatness" of thought, then, brings the "acquired intellect" to possess the very nature of active intellect itself. The existence of the individual human intellect as a potency for thought becomes then completely irrelevant because this intellect is not an essential attribute of thought itself but an incidental attribute completely distinct from thought's essential substance. The substance of thought is therefore an essential unity and, the existent plurality of thinkers is but incidental in Alfarabi's account of actualized thought. The opposite view was true in Aristotle's case where, with regard to acquired thought, he found that the plurality of thinkers shared in the nature of thought "for a time only" and no longer "remembered" when the potential intellect by which they came to share thought finally perished. In the mind of Aristotle, the substance of man qua thinker was by no means the "essential activity" of thought itself" (some thing the human intellect would have to have been if Aristotle really thought "acquired intellect" was the substance of active intellect itself, as Alfarabi seemed to believe he did). Hather, the "substance" of the intellect or 20 Ibid., p. 96 (89, 13-15). 76 soul of man was nothing more than the potentiality of thought, not its possession, and therefore man's form or soul remains in its own nature not the actuality of thought, but only a potentiality of it, and as such it cannot be the substance of "active intellect," the agent intelligence of Alfarabi. We come now to the third of the idealistic theories which were to be discussed here. In his work entitled Le SySteme d 1 Aristotle, 0. Hamelin, in maintaining his thesis that Aristotle's theory is ultimately reducible to Plato's theory of forms with all its attendant contradic tions, asks this question: If we once grant that agent intelligence is a pure separated form that is immanently identical with its own thought, how is it possible for the activity of human thought is dependent on sense images?2^ The activity of agent intelligence would have to cause the intelligible forms to exist in a material relationship for which separate forms have no connaturality. Hamelin con cludes that Aristotle's interpretation was shy on this 210. Hamelin, Le Systeme d'Aristote (Paris: 1920), p. 386f. 77 point since Mind in the active sense is completely unmixed > / ( f l j pMiyhf) with matter and yet at the same time it is the cause of forms being present in the images of sense percep tion. To Hamelin, Aristotle's dilemma resembles Descarte's unbridgeable chasm between a thinking substance and its activity in a body. Since "1'intellect tout en acte est la forme m e m e , " 2 2 how, then, can Aristotle require this intelligible form to fulfill two contrary roles simultane ously, that of being the independent and unmixed activity of thought and that of being the activity of human thought in the images? The answer to what is really Hamelin's own dilemma easily suggests itself. The human knowledge of the Forms, the activity of thought which is the actuality of potential intellect is not to be confused with the essen tial activity of agent intelligence itself. This latter activity never "comes to be" at all, but is essentially actual and incapable of generation. Altogether distinct from the self-identical activity just mentioned is the adventitious activity of potential intellect which depends for its act not on any transient activity attributable to 9 2 O. Hamelin, La Theorie de L1Intellect d'apres Aristote et ses Commentateurs (Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin 6, Place la Sorbonne, 1953), p. 22. 78 the agent intelligence but rather on the actual intelligible of agent intelligence towards which it tends by thought. In other words, passive intellects according to the poten tiality of their intelligibles respond to and share the actuality of thought which remains just what it is already. In Aristotle's view "Form” never "becomes," only the potentiality of it does through a pre-existent form acting as a final cause. Only that which "has form" and is poten tial and non-identical with the form it has can come to act as an efficient cause to evoke "becoming," since the caused reality of becoming is an imperfect one; form as actual and self-identical is rather a cause of "being" in that which has the completed potentiality for it, and in this respect there is movement neither in the cause, since it is perfect, nor in the effect, for motion and becoming are completed and cease when the subject is fully potential to the actual term or form. Aristotle made this principle clear in his psychology where even on the level of sense wherein the object causes form to exist without alteration in either the object or the sense. In the case of sense clearly the sensitive faculty already was potentially what the object makes it to be actually; the faculty is not affected or altered. This must therefore be a different kind from movement; for movement is as we saw, an activity 79 of what is imperfect, activity in the unqualified sense, i.e. of that of what has been perfected, is different from m o v e m e n t . 23 As a second point, let us recall Aristotle's impor tant dictum which states that the "acting and being acted upon are in the passive, not the active factor."24 Cer tainly, then, the action of understanding whi^h.Aristotle claims to take place in the material images will hardly compromise the nature of agent intelligence in itself which, as Hamelin rightly assumes always retains the unmixed nature which it alone possesses. Even the "unmoved mover" is in fact a "mover." Therefore, this theory of unmixed intelligence does not interfere with the causal link between agent intelligence and the Forms known in images. By retaining its own identity of actual thought in this manner, agent intelligence plays the role of the "unmoved mover," the term and final cause of all thought. Now this latter type of thought comes to be as the actual thought of a potential thinker, and the genesis of such thought ori ginates in man's potential intellect through experience, that is, by depending for its origin on the material condi tions of specific imagery in the external and/or internal 23Pe An., p. 431a4-8. 24Ibid., 426a9f. 80 senses. "Actualized thought" belongs in its own nature to the "unmixed" passive intellect, but this activity neverthe less arises from and persists in the potential intelligible which, in turn, consists in the individual's concrete sense perceptions or memories. Thus, the whole man, body and soul, is involved interdependently in the thinking process, a cor relative to their necessary interdependence in being. On the human level the intelligible form plus the image consti tutes thought. To express this idea more in Aristotle's own fashion, we could say that, "as in being and nature, so with respect to action": "as the pupil plus the power of sight constitutes the eye, so the soul plus the body constitutes the animal."2^ Reapplying this principle, then, to action rather than to being and nature, Aristotle's later statement on the matter comes as no surprise: Hence, no one can learn anything in the absence of sense, and when the mind is actively aware of any thing it is necessarily aware of it along with an image.2® 25ibid., 413al3. 2^Ibid., 432a5-8. Thus, the forms of thought are necessarily relative to the forms of sense. The somewhat different reason, however, which Aristotle actually adduces here for his conclusion is fundamentally psychological rather than metaphysical, as might at first appear. "Since accord ing to common agreement there is nothing outside and separ ate in existence from sensible spatial magnitudes. ..." (432a2f) As R. D. Hicks points out (op. cit., p. 545) this 81 As in the other idealist interpretations of Aris totle's "Mind," Hamelin attempts to reduce the theory to an essentially Platonistic one. The thought of individuals is essentially a participation in the "actual intelligible" or form in the mind of a transcendent intelligence. This is because, as we have seen before, the actual subjects of intelligence qua thinkers are logically reducible to the objects of thought which give their thinking its essential character. As Hamelin puts it, Le noema (objet de 1'intellect)^ n 1 a pas d'aptre sujet que la noesis (actualite de la pense) et la noesis pas^d'autre objet que le noema; il n'y a que les idees on plutot il n'y a qu'une idee. L'intellect en puissance n'est pas autre chose que le receptacle des formes, on mieux, pas autre chose que les formes en puissance: 1'intellect tout en acte est la forme meme. Voila, semble-t-il^ la signification de la formule: & VSHnS V O nCTL 6 .27 This reduction of the subject of thought to the form that it thinks presents a difficulty whether one considers the thinking activity of the transcendent agent intelligence which Aristotle admits is identical with itself as its own intelligible object, or whether one "common agreement" (4SS ) is hardly Aristotle's own view of what exists in itself, even though it must be known by us always relative to sense imagery. 2^Hamelin, La Theorie de L'Intellect d'apres Aristote et ses Commentateurs, p. 22. 82 considers instead the status of actualized thought which, considered qua thought in a generically formal sense, is in no respects different from the form of the actual intelligible which is in turn identical with the nature of agent intelligence. The answer to the latter question has already been clarified by showing that in Aristotle's view the ontological status of thought as the actuality of a potency is imperfect even though its activity may "for a time only" correspond to the divine activity that is the "essential actuality" of thought.^8 The prior difficulty, however— namely, that the identity between agent intelligence qua subject and its form qua object is directly inferred by Aristotle from the very concept of agent intelligence itself— is a question which ought to be discussed further. If, in fact, we again accept the principle that the subject of thought qua think ing is essentially identical with whatever is the essential object of thought, it takes but a short jump in logic to say that wherever there are thinkers, there exists the substance of the object of thought. Now while Aristotle did say that "thought is knowable in exactly the same way 28cf., Meta., 1072bl4-30 as discussed supra. 83 that its objects are," he did not claim to identify the substance of the object of thought with the subject's own thought about that object except in the case of agent intelligence which is an activity of thought which has no object distinct from its own substance. Now since the proper object of the thought of agent intelligence is already present to itself as actually intelligible (and the primordial presence of the "actual intelligible" is^ a neces sary feature of Aristotle's eternal universe because the thought we experience as "coming-to-be" must like any other kind of being come into existence from what already is), agent intelligence (equivalent to God) is also by nature already an actual subject of thought in no need of actuali zation. Thus, the metaphysical identity of those two fac tors on the level of a perfect activity which on the level of potentiality are essential opposites does not constitute the logical annihilation of either factor from the result ant synthesis. That such a view portended no problem for Aristotle is quite clear from his analogous explanation of the actual unity of sense activity constituted by the actualized sense object and sense faculty. Since the actualities of the sensible object and of the sensitive faculty are one actuality in spite of the difference between their modes of 84 being, actual hearing and actual sounding appear and disappear from existence at one and the same moment, and so actual savor and actual tasting, etc., while as potentialities one of them may exist without the other.29 If the actuality of two opposites could exist in the unity of a single activity on the level of sense, it hardly seems problematical that the perfect actuality of thought should be identifiable as both the subject and object of -its own thought. Since, however, thought in this sense of it is by nature fully actual ex hypothesi, it follows that its reality is not, as in the case of sense, the activity of a form made possible by the compresence of two distinct opposites: such as the potentially determin ing object and the potentially active faculty. The subject and object of thought were in this former instance never potential to thought; the non-diversity of subject and object is what characterizes perfect thought; on the other hand, in the unifiable opposition of potential factors there is constituted the very imperfection of both animal sensation and human intelligence. Interaction is required in order to reach a unity of cognitive activity the continu ance of which is essentially dependent on the continuing 29Pe An., 426al5-19. 85 influence of a multiplicity of factors. Act does not replace potency, it perfects it, and the newly realized actuality remains dependent on the continuance of both the active and the passive factors that originally made it possible. Thus, a new idea in the mind of an individual depends both on the cause that is fully actual, agent intelligence, and the potential intelligible constituted by some perceptual sense material. If either ceases to be present, actual thinking passes away from the potential intellect which has exercised it. Thus, the distinction between agent intelligence and actualized thought is not only not inconsistent with the Aristotelian theory of form and actuality but is rather an exemplification of both the perfect and the imperfect modes of their reality. While it is true that from the idealistic point of view form as act and form as the act of a potency can be thought of as the same thing, nevertheless, as Aristotle would say, "their being is not the same." If, in fact, Aristotle was in any sense idealistic, it would be in the dialectically Hegelian sense of a synthesis of conflicting opposites, not in a logical cancellation of potency by act. Turning now to the metaphysical interpretation, we find that this falls into two distinct points of view: The 86 approach which favors the immanence of agent intelligence as a natural power of the individual soul is well repre sented in St. Thomas Aquinas' Commentary on the De Anima while the transcendent approach to a metaphysical interpre tation of agent intelligence finds its classic proponent in Alexander of Aphrodisias, and one of its most cogent defenders during Modern times in G. R. G. Mure whose view we shall investigate later. For the present, we will dis cuss here two compromise solutions which attempt to straddle the transcendence-immanence problem, that of Theophrastus, Aristotle's successor as headmaster of the Lyceum, and that of Averroes whose devotion to the original Aristotelian texts acquired for him the sobriquet of "The Commentator." In his Commentary on the De Anima St. Thomas Aquinas has articulated a position on the meaning of "agent intelligence" which has dominated the neo-Thomist meta physical interpretation of the knowing process up to the present day. Three of the elements which St. Thomas finds to be essential in accounting for the reality of human thought are those already discussed in the previous chap ter; namely, the subsistent activity of thought (which is God) the passive intellect in man, and the actual thought 87 of individuals. But while these three elements may be necessary conditions for the explanation of thought, they are not, in his view, quite sufficient for us to under stand thought as we experience it. Since St. Thomas is convinced that in order to explain man's responsibility for his actions he must also necessarily be the natural cause and principle of his own thought, St. Thomas inter prets into Aristotle's somewhat obscure and scattered remarks on nous a fourth additional principle, a faculty or power belonging to the individual soul whereby the individual can raise actually concrete but potentially knowable cognitive materials to the universalized and abstract level of actual thought. Thus not only thinking, but the activity of abstraction which is presupposed to thought becomes a function of the individual thinker's activity rather than a quasi-intervention by a Divine Prin ciple . . . . quidam posuerunt intellectum agentem substantiam separatam, et quod differt secundum substantiam ab intellectu possibili. Illud autem non videtur esse verum. Non enim homo esset a natura sufficienter institutus, si non haberet in seipso principia, quibus posset operationem complere, quae est intelligere: quae quidem compleri non potest, nisi per intellectum possibilem, et per intellectum agentem. Unde perfectio humanae naturae requirit, quod 88 utrumque eorum sit aliquid in homine.^O He then goes on to say that just as the activity of understanding is attributed to the human individual so also is the abstractive activity of making the objects of knowl edge actually understandable likewise attributed to the individual. Such attribution would be impossible unless the agent intelligence belonged to man's nature. Man would cease to be the cause of his own activity. Perhaps, indeed, St. Thomas' allegation is sound that Aristotle ought to have posited an additional level of "active mind" that would belong as a distinct faculty to each human individual, thus permitting the thinking person to be at least on hiw own level of being the autonomous and sufficient principle of his own thinking activity. "Mind as making the forms," as it is labeled, in the De Anima would then possess a distinct psychological significance. Mind as active would cease to hold the ambivalent status of immanence-transcendence which it normally appears to possess in the De Anima. The nature of the "Unmoved Mover" of the Metaphysics in the character of the "essential 3®St. Thomas Aquinas, "Aristotelis Stagiritae De Anima," Opera Omnia, Vol. XX (New York: Misurgia, 1949), p. 123, c.1. 89 activity of thought" would appear to be dragged in liter ally as a deus ex machina in order to save the structure of Aristotle's metaphysical assumptions which underpin his theory of human psychology. Nevertheless, the question here is not one of criticism, but of attribution. Does St. Thomas in fact base his postulation of this special fourth element of an immanent active faculty distinct from Divine causality on what Aristotle actually said about the nature of agent intelligence? Only to this extent: Est etiam praedicta positio contra Aristotelis intentionem: qui expresse dixit, has differentias duas, scilicet intellectum agentem et intellectum possibilem, esse in anima: ex quo expresse dat intelligere, quod sint partes animae, vel potentiae, et non aliquae substantiae separatae.^l St. Thomas, then, claims that simply because Aristotle points out that the "active factor" of mind is found in the soul, it therefore follows that active mind (or agent intelligence) belongs to the soul by nature and cannot be a separate substance. However, it can be pointed out that St. Thomas himself in the First Book of the Sentences was himself aware of a quite different possibil ity, namely, that an angel, which was St. Thomas' own Revelational variety of "separate substance," may exert 31ibid., p. 123, c.1-2. 90 activity in a material location. Its essence is not by this fact "located" or made subject to material conditions as this would compromise the angelic nature which is that of an immaterial substance; furthermore, and this is the main point, the activity that an angel qua immaterial sub stance happens to exert is properly the perfection of the nature which is subject to this activity.It could therefore hardly be said that St. Thomas could object in principle to the statement that the activity of agent intel ligence, although it is by nature a separate substance, might nevertheless belong to the soul, per accidens, which is exactly what St. Thomas claims to be the case with regard to angels. This would certainly be more in accord with Aristotle's own stated view in the De Generatione Animalium: "It remains then for the reason alone so to enter [as a separate substance] and alone to be divine, for no bodily activity has any connection with the activity of reason."^ Thus, reason as "essential activity" is not the actuality of a material body and yet, without any change in its own nature it comes to belong as a perfective principle 32Ibid., Vol. VI, "In Quattuor Libros Sententiarum," I, 37, 3, 1, ad 2-3, p. 303. 33pe Gen. An., 736b28f. 91 to that which has a body. Although thus far we have only proved that Aristotle could have held the transcendent interpretation of agent intelligence without contradicting himself by assigning it as an activity to the soul, yet in the light of what has already been said about the nature of thought as belonging necessarily to that which is the essential activity of thought,^ we find that the "imman ence" interpretation runs into an insuperable difficulty. Given the truth of such an interpretation of agent intelli gence as immanent, it would be impossible to explain how the soul could "come to know" when it already possesses as part of its own nature the essential activity of Mind which is "not at one time knowing and at another not."35 The human mind would be simultaneously potential and actual in the same respect. All this, of course, does not answer St. Thomas' most fundamental objection that man, if deprived of an immanent intellectual power of abstraction, would lack the essential integrity of his nature. This point of view, however, does not seem to create any difficulties within 34cf., Ch. II, p. 51 and n. 54 of the present work. ^De An., 430a22. 92 the framework of Aristotle's own metaphysical psychology. Since the individual man is by nature only a potential ity of thought which is capable of being actualized as Aristotle appears to have indicated quite clearly in the De A n i m a , 36 an(j this actualization comes about through the already actual knowledge which belongs to the "universe as a whole,"37 it does not appear that Aristotle looked down the individual as the active originative source of his own knowledge. It is, however, true that the individual is through sense memory perfectly capable of indirectly reacti vating the forms of knowledge he has already received.38 Thus, the "possession and exercise" of knowledge, or the reception and thinking "at will" of those forms which are received in the passive intellect, is a sufficient ground for calling the individual a "source of intellectual activ ity." Upon the clarification by the universal agent intelligence of any potentially knowable essence confront ing the individual through sense knowledge, a man becomes aware once more of those forms he has come to know because he again associates them with the same or similar images. 36Ibid., 430a20. 37Ibid., 430a21; 431a2-3. 38Ibid., 412a22-6; 429a5-9. 93 This is what it means to be the active source of one's own knowledge of the forms without being the eternally actual source of their presence. Man as an individual is there fore the source of his own knowing activity with respect to the forms although he is not the creator of the forms them selves. And this is indeed a quite necessary corollary of Aristotle's system, since for him thought as fully actual is always present to its source, an essentially transcend ent agent intelligence, which in Aristotle's view never thinks intermittently, because it is not by nature a potentiality to thought, but rather the essential activity of thought itself. Furthermore, in the light of Aristotle's respect for the implications of the metaphysical problem of the "one and the many" the metaphysical interpretation under the immanence theory fails to explain how agent intelligence could conceivably exist as an intrinsic part of an individ ual nature arising in time. Agent intelligence would then, of its very nature, be a faculty or power of many individ uals existing in time. Given the demise of these individuals agent intelligence would likewise perish with them unless one of these two possibilities eventuated. Agent intelligence in addition to being by nature immanent, would also be simultaneously of a transcendent character, 94 that is, either one eternal subsistent nature or a single specific nature which survived in a perpetually changing set of individuals. This, of course, would be to admit the transcendent and super-individual nature of agent intelli gence and St. Thomas, in order to save personal immortality, does not adopt such a course. Instead, a second line of thought is adopted. The entire plurality of agent intelli gence is found by him to be immortal in virtue of the souls to which they belong, but this would only return us to the endless Avidennist-Thomist controversy concerning how it is possible for "many" spiritual souls to be individuated in their separated state relative to the "many" bodies which no longer exist, but which were originally responsible for making individuation possible.^9 We now arrive at the more subtle metaphysical inter pretations of Theophrastus and Averroes. Theophrastus was a contemporary of his master Aristotle and must have had considerable opportunity to instruct himself on the various aspects of the latter's doctrine. In Themistius' 39cf., h . Corbin's Avicenna and the Visionary Recital on this interesting question (New York: Pantheon 1960), p. 44f. Also, St. Thomas, "Summa Theologica," Opera Omnia (New York: Misguria, 1949), la, Iae, q.76, a. 2. 95 commentary on the De Anima he is credited with a two-fold interpretation of the activity of mind which characterizes it to be in one sense immanent and perishable and in another transcendent and imperishable.40 Theophrastus maintained that the combined activating and actively recipient factor of nous was really distinct as a kind of "combined intel lect" from the passively potential factor considered by itself. "Combined intellect" was immortal and immaterial because its actuality was immaterial and therefore separ able from the body. But the passively potential intellect was by nature "mixed in" the matter of the individual and would therefore perish along with it. However, Theophrastus also held that the mind even in its combined sense belonged to the actual unity of the individual because it originated there and was not a superadditive. He also construes mind in both its activating and actively recipient factors "as coming from the outside . . . to exist in the whole at the latter's generation. "41 The main problem about the Theophrastean 40Theophrastus, Theophrasti Eresii Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia Graeca recensuit, Latine Interpretatus Est, Vol. I, translated by F. Wimmer (Paris: Firmin Didot Bros., 1866), p. 427. ^Ibid. 96 interpretation is this: Potential intellect, which in itself is essentially perishable, would at the same time be essentially imperishable to the extent that it consti tutes part of the "combined intellect" which Theophrastus finds to be immortal. However, it could be pointed out that while Aristotle did allow for the fact that contrary attributes could co-exist in the same thing through not with respect to the same parts (A Zebra could be a case in point insofar as "dark" and "light" do co-exist in the same subject), Aristotle specifically denies the applica tion of this principle of "accidentally opposed contraries" to the case of the specific attributes of "perishable" and "imperishable." In Aristotle's view, those things which are "perishable" and "imperishable" are essentially opposite in nature. They must exist as two specifically different kinds of things which have no common identity. In the Metaphysics, he explains this point of view with reference to the attempt by Plato to establish a relation of inci dental identity between pure Ideal Forms and the forms of individual sensible objects, between for example, the Ideal Man and the forms of particular men. Because of its singular importance in pointing up the over-subtlety of the Theophrastean interpretation in the light of Aristotle's 97 own convictions about the nature of immortality, I here quote the hard kernel of this discussion in the Metaphysics: But while some contraries belong to certain things by accident (e.g. those now mentioned and many others), others cannot, and among these are ’perishable' and 'imperishable.' For nothing is by accident perishable. For what is accidental is cap able of not being present, but perishableness is one of the attributes that belongs of necessity to the things to which they belong, or else one and the same thing may be perishable and imperishable if perishableness is capable of not belonging to it. Perishableness must either be the essence or be present in the essence of each perishable thing. The same account holds good for imperishableness also; for both are attributes which are present of necessity. The characteristics then in respect of which and in direct consequence of which one thing is perishable and another imperishable are opposite so that the things must be different in k i n d . 42 Aristotle then goes on immediately to demolish Plato's "Myth of the Ideal Forms" by availing himself of this p r i n c i p l e . 43 But in any case, the application of this principle to the pseudo-problem of Theophrastus is now obvious enough. Theophrastus clearly maintains that pas sive intellect is "perishable" incidentally through its relationship to the body, but it is at the same time "imperishable" in virtue of its relationship to the active factor of mind which is not subject either to generation 42Meta., 1058b36-1059a9. 43ibid., 1059a9-14. or corruption. This is the same thing as saying that pas sive intellect is "accidentally" perishable in one respect and "accidentally" imperishable in another. But Aristotle makes it quite clear that in his opinion there are no such "accidental" attributes to begin with. Passive intellect, like any other reality, is either essentially imperishable or essentially perishable. There can be no middle ground because there can be no incidental relationship to either opposite. We must therefore conclude that when Aristotle calls passive intellect "perishable" he means by this "essentially perishable." There is no evidence that Aristotle changed his doctrine on this important point. It would then also follow that the thinking activity which comes to belong to the passive intellect is likewise perishable since the subject-object relationship which sustains thinking activity in the soul is perishable with respect to both its terms: the images as potential intelligibles and the potential intellect in which thought becomes actual. Because of the potentiality of both the passive intellect and its object, actual thought in the individual begins, ceases, and is renewed from time to time, as Aristotle points out. It would therefore follow that human thought is at least incidentally perishable, because there is a real dissociation of the elements con stituting this actuality, and this is brought about by the temporal separation of the form in the mind from the image in which it becomes actually understood. But since what ever is found to be incidentally perishable is by defini tion also perishable by necessity, the actual thought of individuals can have no claim to immortality whatsoever. It seems hardly remarkable, then, that Aristotle in the De Anima pointed out that although the "essential activity of thought" is immortal and eternal, the individual at death is reduced to cognitive oblivion about his past thinking activity, even though he was privileged to share in the possession of the "divine element" of thought "for a time only." In any case, as we have seen, the option of personal survival would hardly make good sense to Aristotle when even passive intellect, the most spiritual part of man's nature as such, is essentially perishable. To say that passive intellect could become immortal by combining with the "active factor" of thought is to say that some thing could retain the identity of its nature by becoming an essentially different kind of thing. It would be interesting to speculate on why Theophrastus was apparently not aware of the fact that Aristotle had specifically ruled 100 out this kind of interpretation on principle. Passing now to the Middle Ages, we find that Averroes (Ibn Ruchd), an Arabian scholar of the Emirate of Cordova (1126-1198) known in the middle Ages as The Commen tator and chief authority on Aristotle, adopted a bifur cated immanence-transcendence interpretation of human thought somewhat similar in principle to that of Theophrastus. First of all, for Averroes, the intellect is, in essence, the power which gives to forms that uni versality which they do not happen to possess in the many individuals of which they are predicated. In his De Anima, Averroes interprets Aristotle to the effect that thought descends from God through the cosmological hierarchy of unmoved movers in their role as separate intermediary intelligences until the process eventually reaches the moon's celestial sphere where "agent intellect" the final link in the chain, acts as the immediate cause of all intelligence in human kind. Sensitive to this activity of agent intellect is the material intellect which is simply that power residing in the human species as a whole, and which is actuated or "energized" so as to be capable of receiving forms. However, since this material intellect is one for all men, its actuation does not take place for the 101 individual only. Rather, the residues of sensation (formae imaginativae) in each individual mind are activated or "illuminated" by active intellect so that the individual can share in the unique material intellect. This action beings into existence what Averroes calls "speculative intellect," which is a mode of knowing proper to the actual knowledge abstracted from the individual's sense forms. Thus he concludes that human thought is in one sense immortal and in another sense perishable. While material intellect is immortal because it is not the actuality of sense forms, speculative intellect, insofar as it is dependent on these sense forms, perishes with them. Although the thinking individual passes away, that aspect of speculative intellect which is the direct effect of agent intellect's activity, is conserved in material intellect and exists eternally in combination with it.4^ In this way, Averroes assures immortality to the human species, while denying it to the individual, a position partially suggested to him without doubt by Aristotle's statement in his own De Anima to the effect that: "When mind is set free from its present conditions it appears as 44Merlan, op. cit., p. 85f. 102 just what it is and nothing more; this alone is immortal and eternal (we do not, however, remember its former activ ity because while mind in this sense is impassible, mind as passive is destructivle) and without it nothing thinks."4^ It would appear that here entities have been multi plied without any real necessity. The cosmological hier archy whose purpose was to serve the celestial spheres has been psychologized. In the lunar intelligence, the source of human thought becomes an agency distinct but subordinated to God, the Unmoved Mover, and a long chain of mediating intelligences. On the other hand, the essential activity of human thought which results becomes an entity separable on its side from the human individuals who think. Averroes1 basic problem appears to be that he felt compelled to assign a psychological function to the hier archy of unmoved movers of the heavenly bodies. He seems to forget the strictly cosmological character of the forty- seven or fifty-five perfect circular motions that result. Indeed, compared to the universal unmoved mover which imparts motion to the universe only "as a whole," the nature of each of the other unmoved movers is such that it only 45Pe An., 430a22-25. imparts a single spatial motion to a single thing. These movers are perfect and eternal in their own order of imparting a perfect single motion to each eternally stable material entity. In this role the celestial unmoved movers do not in Aristotle's view compromise the essence and proper activity of the unmoved mover which moves all things by its own primary and universal motion. The same will not be the case, however, if a psychological function is also shared by these movers, as Averroes suggests Aristotle to have meant. Since the lunar intelligence, as Averroes under stands it, is a per se mover of thought it is either an essential actuality or potentiality of thought. Therefore, only two alternatives are possible: each member of the descending hierarchy of unmoved movers including agent intelligence, would itself have to be the essential activ ity of thought in which case there would be a plurality of noetic first principles without any metaphysical basis for their essential non-identity or their hierarchical subordi nation to a meaningless "first" unmoved mover; or, as a second possibility, the entire hierarchy would be composed of moved movers. In the order of thought this second alternative would save the unique character of the first unmoved mover, but would call into question the nature of 104 the originally stipulated unmoved movers of the cosmologi cal hierarchy which, in order to be perfect and eternal substances without composition as Aristotle says they are, must be essentially unmoved and immovable.48 Averroes further complicates the problem by the addition of "material intellect" which receives from agent intelligence in a super-individual fashion, the forms in which individual thought (called speculative intellect by Averroes) comes to participate. This surging up of the "energized" material intellect to meet agent intelligence in an eternal activity of contemplating the forms may appear at first sight to meet Aristotle's standards for the eternal and immortal state of human thought "set free from its present conditions" of individualized thinking.47 it would also seem to accord better with Aristotle's descrip tion of passive intellect as separable in the sense of "not blended with the b o d y . " 4 8 From these two assumptions the way would seem open for Averroes to declare material intellect a separate substance immortal and eternal in its own right. But this will not do because the material 46Meta., 1088bl4-28. 47Pe An., 430al2. 48Ibid., 429a24. 105 intellect is essentially receptive of actual thought, and therefore it is a potentiality of thought by nature. It must therefore enter into composition with the forms it receives from agent intelligence and these forms will con stitute its essential adventitious actuality since, for Aristotle, mind as potential to thought "can have no nature of its own, other than that of having a certain capa city."4^ But a nature lacking its own essential actuality cannot exist as a substance unless it exists as an essential composite, and yet if it exists as an essential composite it is not an eternal substance because it fails to be by nature actual. It is by nature capable of not being the Forms which it has; but a substance whose nature is purely potential in terms of what it is essentially cannot exist in this state. Therefore, material intellect, if construed to be a substance, is perishable.50 it hardly seems reason able, then, for Averroes, or any other thinker, for that matter, to interpose a hierarchy of active and passive intellects between the activity of God who is essential thought, and the individual passive intellect which is a 49Ibid., 429a21. 50Meta., 1050b6-19; 1088bl4-28. 106 property of soul. By multiplying beings without solid textual foundation we only seem to succeed in multiplying conclusions which Aristotle would have readily seem were inconsistent with his own clearly established principles. The problem of interpreting the sense in which the activity of thought becomes "separated ) from its present conditions" seems to be well handled by Hicks who defends the view that the participle in this context may well mean nothing more than a condition a parte subjecti, namely, that if we consider agent intelligence in itself apart from the causal relation it had to the individual passive intellect, it remains just what it is (and always was), that is, immortal and eternal. No physical separa tion whatsoever need be implied by this phrase.^ On the other hand, the character of passive intel lect to which Averroes wished to give independent status as a super-individual "material intellect" because it was "unblended" with the body does not in itself create a difficulty. Although the soul does not have matter in its own nature, it does belong to the human individual who has 51Cf., Hicks, op. cit., p. 505f. From a metaphysi cal standpoint, however, I do think that Hicks finds this interpretation helpful for the wrong reason. For him, agent intelligence retains its essential quiddity unchanged within the soul. 107 matter. Likewise potential intellect which does not have matter in itself can nevertheless belong as a part of the soul to the composite which does. There is, then, no ques tion about how potential intellect could be perishable since it is essentially an attribute of the human individ ual, a substance which thinks its forms in time and space and is by nature destructible. That which is an attribute of a substance can hardly survive the substance to which it belonged since it does not exist in virtue of what it is but rather in virtue of the composite to which it belongs. Furthermore, if potential intellect were by nature a separ ate substance, its thinking would be attributable to itself only and not to the individual. Nor should the immaterial ity of potential intellect prevent its remaining quite dis tinct or "unmixed" with the sense forms (formae imaginativae), even granted that it remains necessarily related to them as the potentialities and necessary conditions of its own act of knowledge. This is hardly remarkable, since soul, too, remains essentially distinct from the body that it animates even in spite of the fact that they constitute one entity. Aristotle makes this principle abundantly clear in the following passage from the De Anima: 108 Since then the complex here is the living thing, the body cannot be the actuality of the soul; it is the soul which is the actuality of a certain kind of body. Hence the rightness of the view that the soul cannot be without a body, while it cannot be^ a body; it is not a body but something relative to a b o d y . 52 As on the level of nature, so also on the level of activity the same will be true of that kind of thought which takes place in human individuals; its activity is necessar ily relative to the sense forms (formae imaginativae) of perception, memory, and imagination. Every intelligible actualized in the individual will require as its material principle of origination and subsistence the presence of a correlative potential intelligible which Aristotle explicit ly states is always prior in time to the actual thought of individuals.53 This terminates my discussion of the idealistic and metaphysical interpretations. In a later chapter dealing with my over-all appraisal of this problem, sufficient evi dence will be presented to show that the more idealistic interpreters of Aristotle have assumed that the object of thought is in the case of human knowledge essentially prior to and different in nature from the subjects that come to 52De An., 414al6-21. 53Ibid., 430a21. 109 think it, with the result that thinking subjects qua actual thought are assimilated to the immortality and eternity of perfect thought. In this former interpretation the subject of thought takes on the essential character of the object that it thinks because the being of the thinker as such is reduced to the essential properties of the universal object of thought. In this approach, potentiality is not simply fulfilled; it is replaced. On the other hand, the opposite metaphysical inter pretation, the immanence theory, finds that knowledge on the human level is raised to objective actuality by the activity of the subject's own power of abstraction. Here, it is the subject itself that makes possible the appearance of an actual object of thought. Again potentiality is not simply fulfilled; the soul which becomes a potential subject and object of thought is on its own level the sufficient cause of the actual forms of thought. Thus, what comes to be, does not come to be from what already is, or else the forms of knowledge are innate to the soul. Both interpre tations are inconsistent with Aristotle's principles because the interpretations of the first class seem to say that the form of thought does not enter into a real com position with that which is potential to it, while the 110 interpretation of the second class appear to claim that the soul, which is essentially a potentiality of thought, can nevertheless produce a form of which it is not the actual ity, the only other possible alternative being that all states of knowledge are innate. The third general point of view, that of metaphysi cal transcendence, comes closer to Aristotle's view as we shall see. But in the light of Aristotle's principles, all versions of this interpretation which have been discussed so far seem to possess intrinsic inconsistencies. For example, the view of Aphrodesias assigns a "productive" function to the divine intelligence, thus making it a source of imperfect motion contrary to the Aristotelian view that the Unmoved Mover is capable of producing only a perfect motion. The other two solutions offered by Theophrastus and Averroes fail from the opposite point of view. Instead of attributing an imperfect function to a perfect nature, they assign instead a perfect state to an imperfect nature. Thus, Theophrastus, on the one hand, makes the "combined intellect" an immortal composite while Averroes, on the other, makes the lunar intelligence an "unmoved" mover the activity of which is dependent on other movers of the same essential character. CHAPTER IV OTHER INTERPRETATIONS The remaining general interpretations of Aristotle's doctrine of agent intelligence are of a definitely more modern and contemporary character, and for this reason it can be shown that they are far less related to the original context of Aristotle's thought. These interpretations may be grouped into three general divisions: the epiphenomenal, the psychological, and the transphenomenal. While any one of these points of view deserves special treatment on its own merits, I shall in the course of this discussion attempt to make clear that, whatever their own intrinsic merits, none of these is an accurate account of Aristotle's own concept of agent intelligence. Through the first of these interpretations, the modern epistemological problem is introduced into the psychology of agent intelligence. Perhaps Edwin Wallace best exemplifies this tendency by his characterization of agent intelligence as a "creative reason" or faculty which 111 112 contains "those general forms or categories by which a world of sense becomes a world for intellect1 The pre existence of the forms in the minds of men suggests Kant's clear distinction between the pure forms of thought and the contents of sensation of which the formal categories are organizing principles themselves "devoid of content until experience provide them with it."2 Now the general assump tion underlying this position is one which Aristotle does not appear to have adopted. It may even be seriously ques tioned whether such a view ever came to his notice even as a purely speculative hypothesis. The epiphenomenal view assumes that mind alone confers the universal and neces sary aspects of knowledge on our experience. The result is that any discussion about a potentially intelligible object of thought becomes meaningless in this context. When Wallace states that "such categories are, to start with, only implicit in our experience" he goes on immedi ately to make his meaning unexpectedly explicit by saying, "they are mere potential forms which can be applied to -*-E. Wallace, Aristotle's Psychology (London: Cambridge University Press, 1882), p. cxvi. 2Ibid. 113 e x p e r i e n c e ^ Thus is exposed a highly questionable theory about what Aristotle meant by "potential intelligibles." According to Wallace, Aristotle is referring to the forms which are already present in the active faculty of the individual but are not yet active due to the absence of sense content which experience alone can furnish. We may grant that the conception of experience as "contents of perception" was indeed not foreign to Aristotle's own theory.^ But it must be pointed out that Aristotle goes much further in his conception of the nature of a sense object. The sense object is construed not as an occasion for the appearance of that universal and necessary intelli gibility which belongs to the forms alone. For Aristotle, whatever is in the material world is by its very nature a potential object for thought; nor are there any subjective conditions like space-time forms or categories which confer upon the world of objects its experienceable and knowable character.^ For Wallace the act of understanding our experience involves an imposition of the forms on the •^Ibid. ^De An. , 431al4-16. 5 "The earlier students of nature were mistaken in their view that without sight there was no white or black, without taste no savor." Cf., De An., 425bl5-26. 114 contents of perception; for Aristotle the act of under standing experience, involves a disengagement of the essen tial and universal form from the perception of a clearly perceived particular. It is for this reason that the object of thought is recognized to possess a separate existence in itself as a potentiality of thought: "In the case of those (objects) which contain matter each of the objects of thought is only potentially present. It follows that while they will not have mind in them (for mind is a potentiality of them only insofar as they are capable of being disengaged from matter) mind may yet be thinkable."® Therefore the nature of the objects of thought is in a sense prior to our thought about them. "Potential knowledge 7 in the individual is in time prior to actual knowledge." But this could conceivably be interpreted by an epiphenome- nalist to mean that the forms exist in the mind prior to our understanding of them in experience. ". . . it is in applying themselves to and being embodied in our sensuous experience that the ideas of reason gain their true import."® 6Ibid., 430a6-9. 7Ibid., 431al. ^Wallace, op. cit., p. cxiv. 115 That is, knowledge in its pure form exists in the individ ual prior to its application to sense contents. But for Aristotle it is the other way around. On the material level, the knowable material object of thought exists prior to the universal form which comes to exist in the soul through the abstractive power of agent intelligence. The particular is thus recognized to be a contributing cause of human knowledge instead of a mere occasion of its presence, and this causal object of experience (the poten tial intelligible) contributes a definite specific or generic character of its own (albeit a delimiting one) to the actual object of thought which results. . . . these states of knowledge (art and science) are neither innate in a determinate form, nor devel oped from other higher states of knowledge, but from sense perception . . . when one of a number of logically indiscriminable particulars has made a stand, the earliest universal is present in the soul; for though the act of sense perception is of the particular, its content is universal— is man, for example, not the man Callias. . . . Thus it is clear that we must get to know the primary premises by induction; for the method by which even sense-per- ception implants the universal is inductiveT^ Thus, the epiphenomenal view of mind would be an unacceptable interpretation of Aristotle's theory, not because it attributes the major role in the knowing process 9An. Post., 100a9-10, 15-18; 100b3-4. to mind as the active source of the universal— for on this point Aristotle agrees— but because it disallows the real contribution made by the potentiality of sense perception. For Wallace, sense objects are a negation of universality; for Aristotle they are, with reference to universality, a privation or a potentiality of a definite kind, and this means that they possess in themselves some positive nature of their own which is essentially potential to being understood. For Aristotle, potentialities all have a positive and definite essential character except for pri mary matter and potential intellect; these latter are pure potential subjects of their essential forms. But the latter, potential intellect, does not become simply the actuality of conscious knowledge in itself, for then it would be identical with its object and think itself only, but rather it becomes the actuality of conscious thought relative and dependent on an image or symbol through which is communicated the nature of objects which are in this mode of expression potentially knowable to it, even though they may in their own nature be non-material, and therefore quite knowable in themselves. Thus, is preserved the rela tionship of mind to the actual world of objects it can know through experience even though they may not all be 117 experienceable in themselves, as in the case of mathemati cal and metaphysical entities like numbers and the sub stance of the Unmoved Mover. Nevertheless, the necessity and nature of all things is known through the nature of things that we do in fact experience. It is not quite the case, then, as Wallace contends, that "Aristotle says, not that things make thought, but that thought makes things." Nor would Aristotle agree to downgrade the real causal contribution which in his judgment sense perception must necessarily pass on to human knowledge. He would deny Wallace's contention that "though the forms of reason are thus contained within the vehicle of sense, it is still reason which is the cause and origin of them in things. While for Wallace the forms of reason are the a priori guidelines for the knowable character of experienceable nature, and must consequently pre-exist in the agent intel ligence; for Aristotle, experienceable nature essentially limits the character of the forms that can come to be known by human reason, and this is because Aristotle finds that the forms do in a sense pre-exist within nature herself antecedent to human thought. If Wallace had been right 10Wallace, op. cit., p. cxiii. ^Ibid. , p. cxiv. 118 about Aristotle, the "Copernican Revolution" in epistemology would have occurred twenty-two centuries before Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The fourth interpretation not infrequently attribu ted to Aristotle's theory of agent intelligence is of a still more contemporary character. Stemming from new and rather widely published research into the slumbering unconscious antecedents of our conscious behavior, it came into vogue at the turn of the century as a new insight dis coverable everywhere, perhaps even in the thought of Aristotle. Most notable in this respect is the work of R. D. Hicks, who is accepted by no less an authority than P. Merlan as a principal interpreter of Aristotle's thought about Mind. However, the theory that Aristotle's doctrine of nous is the brainchild of his own psychological self- study is most succintly stated in E. E. Spicer's work on Aristotle's Conception of Soul. When he (Aristotle) came to consider intellect, data were much more difficult to find. Ultimately, in giving an account of the function of mind, there is the individual introspection. I would therefore suggest that it is possible that Aristotle's account of nous is not primarily a metaphysical speculation, nor an epistemological explanation, but a psychological 119 analysis.12 Because in Spicer's view self-knowledge is the prime datum that gives us the right to talk about mind in the first place, the cognitive process is easily resolvable by means of introspection into its two main elements: (1) the concept being thought, and (2) the self which makes the con cept arise. The concept being thought belongs on the one hand to passive intellect— and this first category would include the inert objective concept of the self; but the self as the "lived element" in consciousness is intuitively apprehended in the same act of consciousness. This second apprehension is patent introspective evidence for Aristotle's assertion of active reason.^ After referring to the experiments by Aveling and Bartlett on "will processes," Spicer goes on to identify active reason with the actually experienced volitional power of that self which makes the concepts arise in consciousness. This simple explanation enclosed within the limits of a creative psychological process which finds its source in the active self which creates the forms does not need to depend on any wider e . Spicer, Aristotle's Conception of the Soul (London: University of London Press, 1934), p. 112. l^Ibid. , p. 113ff. 120 metaphysical frame of reference. The same general type of explanation in reverse order is used by R. D. Hicks in his De Anima.^ He points out that since Aristotle speaks of the "perceptual activity" of mind, it would be reasonable to suppose that passive mind is always thinking, although the individual may not be conscious of its thought. The possibility of this is clear from Aristotle's description of the sense memory which stores its images in a dormant state. It is likewise suggested by Aristotle's distinction between the possession of knowledge and its exercise. Hicks, therefore, concludes, like Spicer, that active and passive mind are but two different aspects of the same pro cess. To limit "active reason" to the role of illuminating images which it does itself fail to know is unnecessary; so also is it unnecessary to limit "passive reason" to the function of receiving thought whenever it thinks. But then Hicks goes on to conclude that the individual human psychol ogy/ as i-n Spicer's explanation, is a self-sufficient agency for creating and recalling its own thought, if the necessary sense phenomena are present. Active intellect is the state l^Hicks, op. cit., p. lxviii f. 121 in which potential intellect is "roused to activity in consciousness" while the other state, "the intellect which does not consciously think is similarly described as poten tial intellect, and . . . all the time its thoughts are there, though its incessant activity is s u b c o n s c i o u s . " ^ Hicks, then, differs from Spicer on the question of whether it is necessary to make any provision for the presence of the forms antecedent to the mind's thinking about them. Hicks finds them to be already present in this passive "aspect" of intelligence while Spicer makes no such provi sion. Hicks finds it sufficient to point out first, that the activity of the self does bring our concepts into existence and, second, that all concepts, even that of the self, are somehow "built up" out of our past experience. It is easy to see that Spicer's view is the more self- contained psychological explanation. Hicks is still faced with the highly metaphysical problem of how the forms came to exist in the potential aspect of intellect in the first place. He does not appear to clarify this question and therefore his position may be essentially reducible to that of the epiphenomenal interpretation in which the forms of l^Ibid. 122 knowledge are said to emerge a priori to reveal themselves in our conscious experience. Therefore, whatever has been stated regarding the previous interpretation would apply to the position of Hicks as well. But this psychological interpretation does in fact give birth to its own special type of problem. It is quite clear, in the case of intellect's relationship to universal form, that "pure potentiality" and "incessant activity" could not "refer to the same thing under two different aspects."!^ To say that the same intellect is by nature non-actual and by necessity always actual might have some meaning for Hicks, but not for Aristotle: "while mind in this (active) sense is impassi ble, mind as passive is destructible." In the previous chapter, we have already seen that essentially opposed attributes cannot in Aristotle's estimation, belong to the same subject, even incidentally. Coming now to Spicer's conception of the "conscious self" as equivalent to agent intelligence we would be hard put to discover anything in Aristotle that even closely approximates this notion. It is true that Aristotle stipu lates mind to be capable of thinking itself, when it "has ISlbid., p. lxviii. l^DeAn., 430a24. 123 become each set of its possible objects," but this is not what Spicer means by a "conscious self." It is not suffi cient that mind be thinkable "in exactly the same way as its objects are,"^-® "The object of self," claims Spicer "is always inert, the subject self is never inert. . . . This (concept) self is like any other immaterial object, and the intellect is said to become this object in the same way as it becomes any other o b j e c t . "19 Then borrowing a snippet from the psychologist Ach, he continues by describ ing what he means by the contrary subject self: "— an 'actual' or lived element is discriminated in consciousness. This experience is equivalent to the expression 'I truly will.' This 'I' is not a concept of the self. It is some thing lived; and it is this factor which conditions the future a c t i v i t y . "2® Now the closest that Aristotle comes to Spicer's theory of a "conscious self" is not in his doc trine of nous, but rather in his description of proairesis as the "deliberate desire of something within our power."21 Yet, in Aristotle's view, the scope of proairesis is the 18Ibid., 430al. l^Spicer, op. cit., p. 114f. 20ibid. 2lEth. Nich., 113allf. 124 practical realm of ends and means. It is exclusively con cerned with action. In fact, the only sense in which Aristotle refers to a "conscious self" at all in relation to the proairesis is in the sense of its being a condition for the achievement of its purpose, which is choice. "We all stop asking how we are going to act when we have traced the origin of our action back to ourselves, for that it is which makes deliberate choice."22 But this "consciousness of voluntary capacity" is not relevant to Aristotle's theory of speculative knowledge. A conclusion implicit in the premises is known, not chosen. The same would be true of any actual knowledge implicit in the nature of a potential intelligible, and any proairesis or deliberate choice which made possible the acquisition of such knowledge is inciden tal to the knowledge that results and does not directly cause or constitute it. Here lies the root of Aristotle's distinction of speculative and practical intelligence. The agent intelligence in its purely speculative character is the cause per se of the actuality of thought and contempla tion, while the prudential judgments, "right desires," and external actions ultimately attributable to proairesis can 22Ibid., 1113a5f. 125 only make these states of knowledge possible; likewise, the action-oriented functions of proairesis, such as practical 1 ~ deliberation, may also follow from the practical implications incidentally discovered in speculative thought. This kind of thinking, Aristotle believes, is quite unlike speculative thought. It is essentially imperfect because it deliberates "about the future and what is capable of being otherwise."23 For this reason, Aristotle finds himself in agreement with Agathon that "this (practical intellect) alone is lacking even to God" who would be identical with that perfect state of speculative knowledge which knows that which is true of 24 necessity and cannot be otherwise; but, unlike God, "such an origin of action (as desiderative reason or ratiocinative desire) is man" who shares in both practical and speculative intelligence, which nevertheless differ in principle although the subject matter of each is truth under a different aspect.2^ Now this kind of intellect and truth is practi cal; of the intellect which is contemplative, not practical nor productive, the good and the bad state 23Ibid., 1139b7. 25Ibid., 1139b4. 24Ibid., 1139bll. 126 are truth and falsity respectively {for this is the work of everything intellectual); while of the part which is practical and intellectual, the good state is truth in agreement with right d e s i r e . 26 Therefore, to identify the speculative function of agent intelligence with the practical one of proairesis, as Spicer attempts to do, is to hazard an interpretation quite at variance with Aristotle's own thinking on this matter. Consequently, there is no further need to add anything further on the question of whether Spicer's own theory on the immanent multiplicity of the "volitive self" is equiva lent to Aristotle's "agent intelligence." The fifth and final interpretation, which I have termed the epistemological, attempts to emphasize the realist view of a correspondence between the potential object of thought, that is, the natural character of the intelligible universe as a whole, and the actual object of thought in its perfection, namely, "the intelligibility of the universe stated in the medium of human logos."2^ An unqualified advocate of this view is Professor Anton, who looks upon Aristotle's "active nous" as the ideal fulfill ment of the potentially intelligent capacity of each 26Ibid., 1139a26-30. 2^Anton, op. cit., p. 167. 127 individual who thinks. Passive nous is the psychological faculty of cognition and understanding, which like all other powers of the soul must undergo developments in order to reach its completion. Active nous is the achieved coordination of all reliable knowledge which gives a systematic set of principles as the distilled order of logic and a highly inclusive set of statements true of all subject matters and all types of inquiry. Both are called pervasive traits of being. Intelligence as the final co-ordination of all reliable knowledge is an ideal open to all human beings and at the same time not subject to caprice or wishful thinking. The natural processes do not alter their intelligible features to suit the whims of men; they remain what they are and are disclosed to those who unhesitatingly proceed to think and inquire into the nature of t h i n g s . 2 8 Anton, then, would in essence contend that Aristotle is by his doctrine of agent intelligence proposing an ideal epistemology; or, more concretely, that he is stressing the real possibility for minds to develop in the direction of a "perfect adaptation of thought to reality"— to borrow the scholastic phrase used in some much older texts on epis temology . This final reflection of the universe in the fully clarified structure of the interrelated sciences would appear to interpret agent intelligence as being for 28ibid. 128 Aristotle something less than "essential activity" or the active factor which "makes all things." In fact, it would seem to stand for little more than a purely ideal possibil ity. Even if we were to concede that by "essential activ ity" was meant the term toward which scientific knowledge is continuously advancing, this would still suggest that agent intelligence is essentially a potentiality or possibility of forms not yet fully realized. The conclusion to be reached would be that agent intelligence is the ideal possibility of essential activity. How then could agent intelligence, if it is merely a potentiality or possibility for forms to be made, be said to make them? If then, Aristotle's agent intelligence is by implication defined as both the possibility of making the forms and the possibility of mind's "essential activity," what then would be the pur pose of "passive intellect" which is defined as that which "becomes all things" with respect to the objects of thought? The only answer that suggests itself is that potential intellect represents the possibility of thinking activity on the individual level alone, while agent intelligence represents the final possibility of finished thought in the universe as a whole. But if potential intellect is * characterized by Aristotle as being "before it thinks, not 129 any real thing,"29 much less could agent intelligence be defined as a real cause of thought in accord with the func tion Aristotle gives it of making the forms, while its actuality is defined by Professor Anton as being the "achieved coordination of all reliable knowledge." This is the same as saying that what is by nature a potentiality of agent intelligence is itself the cause or ground of those forms which enable it to exist in act. Such an hypothesis denies the metaphysical principle by which Aristotle clearly distinguishes the active and passive fac tors which operate even "in nature as a whole." This prin ciple he immediately applies, as indicated below to the problem of mind. Since in every class of things, as in nature as a whole, we find two factors involved, (1) a matter which is potentially all the particulars included in the class, (2) a cause which is productive in the sense that it makes them all (the latter standing to the former, as e.g. an art to its material) these distinct elements (emphasis mine) must likewise be found within the soul. And in fact mind as we have described it is what it is by virtue of becoming all things, while there is another which is what it is by virtue of making all things.30 29Pe An., 429a23. 3QIbid., 430all-15. 130 Now it may be argued that the potential correlative of the ideal fulfillment of all finalized knowledge is not itself, but rather the implicit knowability of the whole universe. But this would be to shift ground. The prin ciple underlying Professor Anton's argument is that the same thing, if he accepts Aristotle's words on this matter, can be both the cause of actual knowledge in the individual and also, according to his own interpretation, be the end result which arises as a consequence of the knowing-process of individuals. Actualized matter and its cause become identical elements with respect to the nature of knowledge as a whole, and this for Aristotle is not sound metaphysics. Professor Anton's position might have been more soundly based if he had allowed God as Aristotle's "pure nous1 1 to enter into the chain of his reasoning, but he appears to have been satisfied to say of it, in essence, that "it can be imaginatively envisaged as wisdom perfected” in a sense which would exclude it from affecting the basic account of human understanding which he proposed.31 "When nous or intelligence is seen apart from transcendentalisms and 31-Anton, op. cit. , p. 167. 131 super-naturalisms it ceases being a mystery."^2 jn this case it would seem that by neglecting a highly plausible and equally available deux ex machina, Professor Anton only compounds and deepens a mystery that was already mysterious enough. The three interpretations just discussed labor under a common misunderstanding, namely, that Aristotle would attempt to answer what for him were problems about the ideal formal character of thought and the metaphysical status of a thinking subject by subsuming premises that came to be the starting points for systems of thought which occurred much later in the history of ideas. That Aristotle would uncritically accept the doctrine of the synthetic a priori or the theory of introspective self- analysis or even the scholastic epistemology as a basis for his metaphysical conclusions is sheer nonsense. Only a correct understanding of what Aristotle meant by sub stance and form, actuality and potentiality, essential and accidental attributes can lead us to a true understand ing of his thought. ^Ibid., p. 166. CHAPTER V A RESOLUTION OF THE OVER-ALL PROBLEM Thus far, an attempt has been made in the two previ ous chapters to show that certain typical interpretations of Aristotle's theory of agent intelligence are at least par tially at variance with the Philosopher's own assumptions about the nature of thought, its objects, and the substances which think them. The problem will now be to explain how each of the various interpretations happens to develop and refine one or more of Aristotle's own more significant insights on this question to the eventual detriment of at least one necessary qualification which Aristotle himself introduces into the overall context of his complete theory. The resulting distortion of Aristotle's original concept will be seen to arise from a certain kind of misunderstand ing on the part of the commentators and critics about Aristitle's view of the "problem of the one and the many" in its application to thought and substance. A few remarks from the works of contemporary authorities, notably 132 133 W. D. Ross and G. R. G. Mure, whose works now present the popular image of Aristotle, will also be introduced to the end that their own expositions of Aristotle's theory of agent intelligence may be further clarified and refined as a result of this study. To begin with, it has become evident that the devotees of the idealistic interpretation, including its transcendental hybrid version, are quite clear on one important principle of Aristotle's theory, namely, that: Mind is itself thinkable in exactly the same way as its objects are. For in the case of objects which involve no matter, what thinks and what is thought are identical; for speculative knowledge and its object are identical.! From this principle, which only concerns that kind of speculative thinking, which is either a pure "thinking on thought," or that kind of thinking whose objects are totally abstracted from matter, that is, a thinking of meta physical and mathematical objects, an inference is drawn from the identity of mind with the cognized form of the object that it thinks, to the quasi-identity of mind with the very substance of these objects. This immediately precipitates a rash of speculation about the properties of immortality ^De An., 430al-4. 134 and eternity which are then attributed automatically to the minds and souls which come to think, and by thinking come to "share" the nature of such non-material objects. In order to make it clear that no directly mystical significance need be attached to the text of Aristotle just cited, let us review those passages of the De Anima in close proximity to the present one— passages which treat of the relationship of mind to the type of objects which are actually or potentially thinkable. First, mind is identical with any object of thought which is actually thought apart from matter: "What thinks and what is thought are identical." However, previous to any object's abstractive disengagement from matter, mind is only potentially identical with such an object: "Mind is a potentiality of them only insofar as they are capable of being disengaged from matter." Aristotle does not here state in so many words that the identity of mind with its cognized objects does, in this context, exclude the prior ity of time which material objects potential to thought are found to have over the dematerialized forms of actual thought known by individual thinkers. Nor does it neces sarily follow in the same context, as the idealists seem to believe, that minds become a mere ontological extension of 135 those objects "which involve no matter," objects which may then be said to be substantially interchangeable in fact with the minds with which they are said to be identical in the order of thought. Such an inference, if it were true, would indeed give birth to tne corollary that minds are mystically assimilated to the substance of their non material objects. Knowledge and sensation are divided to corres pond with the realities, potential knowledge and sensation answering to potentialities, actual knowl edge and sensation to actualities. Within the soul the faculties of knowledge and sensation are poten tially these objects, the one what is knowable, the other what is sensible. They must be either the things themselves or their forms. The former alterna tive is of course impossible: it is not the stone that is present in the soul but its form.2 That anything which is potential to thought should become the actual object that it thinks, in the sense of becoming its material substance, is, of course, impossible in Aristotle's view. But how can we reconcile the non identity of an object of thought with a thinker whose ideal object of thought is a pure form without any admixture of matter? On this level there are but two possibilities. The first is that of the so-called "abstract objects" of thought which are realized in the mathematical sciences. 2Ibid., 431b24. 136 The second would include those forms which are actual objects of thought by their very nature, a "thinking on thought" itself. The first class, the "abstract objects," however, are not actual objects of thought by their very nature. The units and pairs, lines and figures of mathe matical knowledge must first be disengaged from their spatial conditions in matter before they can be said to be identical with thought. Although they are thought separ ately from matter, they do not in Aristotle's view have any separate existence. Thus the mind thinking such objects shares in the form but not the existence of mathematical objects.^ Mind is the objects which it thinks, but only in the sense of becoming their forms, not their substance which exists separately. However, the objects which are actual objects of thought both in form and in existence are quite a different matter. Since these exist as actual objects of thought in themselves, they are self-identical forms, since for these to exist is the same as to be actually thinkable. But, since to suppose the object of thought to be an actually thinkable object with respect to its own substance without its being the activity of thought 3Ibid., 431bl5. 137 itself would be to have mind exist in it only potentially, such an object must therefore actively think itself as the object which it actually is already. Identity with the object of thought in this sense is equivalent to the "essen tial activity" of the agent intelligence to which no poten tial object or potential subject of thought can be pre supposed. In this one sense only is the idealist interpre tation justified in identifying mind with the substance of its object, whether this substance be thought of subjective ly as "a subsistent mind" or objectively as a "separate form" identical with the "active mind." In the other two senses of physical and mathematical forms, however, the problem of the one and many was clearly over-simplified by these commentators who either failed to notice or chose to ignore Aristotle's subtle distinction between the form and the substance belonging to objects of human thought, between the forms of thought and those things of which they are the forms. This failure to distinguish between the potential object of thought, or substance, and the actual object of thought, or the form in the mind by which the object is known, I would call in brief "the fallacy of object reduc tion" in which the total meaning of "thought" for Aristotle is erroneously found to be essentially reducible to the essence of the "object of thought." However, the idealis tic interpretation is not limited to this fallacy alone. In the hybrid version of the immanent mystical interpreta tion upheld by Trendelenburg, the soul's creative intelli gence qua agent of thought is found to be essentially reducible in its formal character to a "spark" of the Divine intelligence. Thus, every property predicable of the Divine intelligence is found to be predicable also of the active or "creative" human intellects even though the latter are said to be distinct from the Divine mind itself. While avoiding the Scylla of "object reduction," such a theory falls into the Charybdis of "subject reduction." Although eternity and immortality are predicated prima facie of human "creative intellects" with an apparent plausibility, the assumption on which this predication is made fails utterly to make the grade. Whatever properties are predicated by Aristotle of agent intelligence are not eo ipso predicated of actual human minds as well. The essential activity of thought is specifically excluded from the nature of individual human minds. "Mind in this sense of it is not at one time thinking and at another not." It remains, on the contrary, "just what it is" by surviving 139 the individual. Mind, in the human sense, is obviously "not always thinking" and is therefore dependent for its activity on something other than itself. Neither can the human mind boast of the remaining properties of eternity and immortality which Aristotle found to be naturally con sequent upon the nature of "essential activity," except perhaps, incidentally, that is, by reason of something other than itself; but we have already seen that Aristotle flatly denies that things can be either perishable or imperishable incidentally.4 It therefore follows that Aristotle would predicate "eternal" and "immortal" only of the essentially active and unchangeable first principle of thought which could not but be of this nature. "If there be anything that has no contrary, it knows itself C and possesses separate existence." The fallacy of the idealistic interpretation, then, lies in its attempt to extend Aristotle's absolute identity of thought and sub stance in the unmoved mover to thought and the substance of thought's object in moved movers. More precisely, they failed to follow Aristotle's distinctions between the various objects of thought and the various ways in which 4Meta., 1058b36f. 5De An., 430b24. 140 they can be known. Mind is indeed always "identical with its object," but in quite different senses. In its variety of approaches the metaphysical interpretation is perhaps the most well sown seed bed for speculation on Aristotle's theory of agent intelligence. And this may well be the case for the simple reason that hits are usually more frequent as one nears the center of the target. Yet there are misconceptions in abundance here also. Both the immanent and the transcendental metaphysical interpretations we have seen assume that certain basic questions Aristotle asks have been adequately answered in the light of their own various theories. Let us briefly review these questions and their alleged answers beginning first with the immanent theory of agent intelligence which we have already seen to be the less likely solution of the two to be discussed. The imposition of a "faculty-psychology" interpre tation on Aristotle's concept of agent intelligence is a natural consequence of one of Aristotle's own clear and unqualified statements, namely, that "the two (agent and passive intellect) being related as art to its material, of necessity these differences must be found also in the 141 soul."*’ If we assume that agent intellect is nothing more than a "power" as St. Thomas claims, and that this "power" moves mind as potential to its own proper activity when the potential intelligibles compounded of sense impressions are presented for abstractive clarification, the conclusiveness of this interpretation seems well assured; and so it always has seemed the proper explanation to the more "common sense" type of interpreter. Still, the prima facie acceptance of this view neglects to consider the very principle of which the statement itself is a conclusion. "As in the whole of nature," agent intelligence is related to potential intel lect— and Aristotle's words are quite explicit here— "as art to its material."7 Now certainly the passive intel lect is not by nature related to its proper form of actual thought, in the sense of being "already made" or "formed to thought." In its own right it is a tabula rasa on which nothing has yet been written, otherwise potential knowledge in the individual would not be "prior in time" to actual knowledge.® This form must then be actual even prior to the soul's actually coming to know it, in much the same 6Ibid., 4 30all-14. ®Ibid., 430a20. ^Ibid. 142 fashion as the design is actual in the mind of the Aristotelian craftsman previous to his shaping the materi als of his art to imitate it. In what sense then could such a principle be found within the soul merely capable of knowledge? If it is not present as the soul's formal knowing activity, then it is present only as the cause of that knowledge. In itself, it is, as Aristotle himself specifically states in the same paragraph of the De Anima, "separable, impassible, unmixed, being in its own nature essential a c t i v i t y . Since agent and potential intellect come into relationship with each other only through the causal activity of the former which is manifested by the possession of forms in the latter, it is not untrue to say that these two intellects can be discriminated in the soul itself, "since the acting and being acted upon are in the subject acted upon and not in the agent."-*-® One other statement in the De Anima does at first inspection appear to strengthen the position of the immanent metaphysical interpretation. In the same paragraph just discussed in which Aristotle presents his most complete ^Ibid., 430al6. 10Ibid., 426a9f. 143 description of agent intelligence, he speaks of mind's "survival" after the death of the individual. "When mind is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: this alone is immortal and eternal. If mind is "set free," ) would not "mind" in the active sense have to be a part of the individual himself? In order to understand in what sense Aristotle meant mind could be "set free," one would have to consider the various senses in which Aristotle might conceivably have meant this expression. To be "set free" would entail some change either in the nature of agent intelligence itself, or in its relationship to its own thought or the thought of the individual. Now, for mind to be "set free" does not, in Aristotle's view, entail any change in the nature of agent intelligence itself since he states in the very same sentence that "it appears as just what it is and nothing more." There remains then only its relationship to its own thought and to the thought of the individuals. But the former alternative is irrelevant to the immanent metaphysical interpretation since agent intel ligence does not possess its own thought, but is only the Hlbid. , 430a23. 144 cause of thought in the individual. This leaves the last alternative, and one can readily see that it obviously does not favor the immanent interpretation because mind is then understood to be "set free" from its relationship to the thought of the individual, a change which comes about not by any mutation in the nature of agent intelligence, but by virtue of the demise of individuals in which a temporary share of thinking activity came to exist in time. Yet if one were to assume with the immanent viewpoint that agent intelligence is really individual in nature, an assumption not at all apparent in Aristotle's own treatment (he even speaks of mind in this sense belonging to the "universe as a whole")^-2 then to "set free" the mind will mean first, to set it free, not from individuality, but from both "materi al conditions" and its relationship to passive intellect which Aristotle says is "destructible"; but then agent intellect, if it be "essential activity" as Aristotle claims, will then be thinking its own thought where before it was only an abstractive power making possible the thought of the individual. This would mean a change in its essen tial nature from "not thinking its own thought" to "actually 12Ibid., 430a21. thinking it" following its disengagement from both "material conditions" and its co-faculty of potential intellect. This would contradict Aristotle's statement that mind in the active sense when set free "appears as just what it is and nothing more." The second alternative would be that agent intellect, following "its disengagement," would possess actual knowledge, not in virtue of any change in its own nature, but through the possession of the actual thought of the individual acquired in the potential intellect through its earthly life. But then the activity of agent intellect would not be "essential" or co-natural with it as Aristotle plainly implies; it would be "acquired" and "appropriated" in some way by agent intelligence which would then exercise an activity that it did not previously possess. Further more, this activity was formerly attributed to passive intellect, and passive intellect is the agent intellect's essential contrary to which this kind of acquired "acting and being-acted upon" naturally belongs, a function he explicitly denies to the active factor as such.- * - 3 it therefore seems clear that consistent interpretation of this passage becomes possible only if agent intelligence is 13lbid., 426a9f. 146 understood to retain its own nature and essential thinking activity following the demise of individuals who come to share its thought "for a time only." In the individual "potential knowledge is prior to actual knowledge" and if this is not the case with agent intelligence, since its thinking is by nature not intermittent, then it follows that agent intelligence is not a power belonging to the nature of an individual but a separate substance on which individuals depend for the forms and principles of their intellectual activity. By the very fact that the theory of immanence fails to present a plurality of "active intellects" as a consistent doctrine, the transcendent metaphysical interpre tation appears to achieve victory almost by default. Regarding the transcendent metaphysical view whose main advocates have already been discussed, the theories of some Hellenistic and Arabian commentators such as those of Theophrastus and Averroes were subjected to some criticism by showing how the interpolation of one or more separate noetic substances between the prime mover of thought and individual thinkers was wholly unnecessary and even incon sistent with the primary assumptions of Aristotle's theory of mind. It is now necessary, however, to explore some of the much more current points of view which happen to adopt 147 the same kind of transcendent viewpoint with certain varia tions. This discussion will make it clear how the different interpretations within the same school of thought may differ quite significantly. Again, light will be shed on the fact that these "near misses" occurred through the failure to make a subtle distinction for which Aristotle had provided sufficient grounds in his own writings. G. R. G. Mure in his theory of "efficient reason" closely parallels Alexander of Aphrodisias who looked upon agent intelligence as the proton aition which produced the forms in the intellect prepared to receive them. Though not willing to identify agent intelligence with God, as Alexander did. Mure quite literally adopts the Aphrodisian view that the active factor of intelligence causes the forms as an efficient cause. "Passive reason implies an active reason, above and beyond its own actualized self, as effi cient cause of its a c t u a l i z a t i o n . " ^ I have already dis cussed the question of whether Aristotle believed agent intelligence to be an efficient cause. Our conclusion was that since "making" in the sense of "thinking" could not l^G. R. G. Mure, Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford Univer sity Press, 1964), p. 169. 148 have the "becoming" of anything as its end in an unquali fied sense because this is to make an imperfect motion the objective of a perfect mover, "making" in the perfect or "final" sense is prior to "making" in the efficient sense. Agent intelligence or God would then be the cause of the actuality of form in any perfected potentiality for form. The efficient activity of disposing what is potential to form would be an activity belonging to imperfect causes whose object is some change. Furthermore, what is already fully potential to form requires no mover except that of the final cause, since the potential intellect is itself the fully adequate efficient cause of its own new knowing activity when the forms are actually "illumined" in what is thinkable. Because no specific efficient causality in the production of the forms of knowledge is definitively ascribed by Aristotle to God as the Unmoved Mover, Mure decides at the end of his discussion, to move in the direc tion of the Averroistic interpretation where "efficient reason is a pure substance, identical in all men, and itself intermediate in the developing series between man and the astral intelligence."-^ He does not, however, abandon the l^Ibid.r p. 175. Alexandrian interpretation completely, but states that "it is perhaps more likely that Aristotle conceives a less direct relation between man and God. "-*-6 As has already been seen in the case of Averroes, this kind of intermediate position upsets the possibility of distinguishing between a moved and unmoved mover with respect to the same essential form of thought and further violates the old Ockhamite rule, highly applicable here, "that beings should not be multi plied without necessity." It therefore seems that Mure, in addition to his misnaming of agent intelligence as efficient reason, is not quite clear as to the precise sense in which Aristotle found the active cause of thought to be separate from individuals. And this brings us to the position of Sir David Ross who attempts to resolve this particular problem. W. D. Ross, whose work on Aristotle's systems is perhaps the most standard work in English on this subject, at least from a philosophical point of view, also adopts along with Mure a rather intermediate position on the ques tion of agent intelligence's absolute transcendence over l^Ibid. 150 the soul. The distinction between the active and passive reason falls within the soul. This is fatal to any interpretation which identifies the active reason falling entirely outside the individual human being. It is not fatal to the view that the active reason is a divine reason immanent in human souls.^ The immanence-transcendence problem which Ross envisioned here need never have existed if Aristotle's statements on the causal relationship, had been regarded more seriously. The activity of a transcendent cause may be quite immanent to the soul just as the action of "art" is found by analogy to be immanent and yet distinct from the material which it informs. Aristotle never intended to identify "reason" with that in virtue of which the soul is said to "have reason." "Reason" is essential activity and as a "positive state" is separate and therefore remains always "just what it is." Considered in itself separately, "Reason" is a substance distinct from the soul and passive intellect. This is why its status remains undisturbed when the "affections of loving, hating, and thinking" pass away. Considered in relationship to the soul, however, active reason is the eternal source of all forms which the passive 1 7 W. D. Ross, Aristotle (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964), p. 149. reason becomes consciously aware of in time relative to the images of perception. In this relational sense, that which already thinks the forms actually, and that which can think them, and that in which they can be thought must be present in the soul together if the soul is to have the wherewithal to do its own thinking. There is no contradiction between the transcendence or separateness of agent intelligence qua substance over the soul and the immanence of the same intelligence qua final cause within the soul. Even the sense object as a substance is separate from the sense that sees it and yet it is immanent to the sense as the final cause or form which directs the activity of the sense to its proper object. "Separated" from the sense's activity of sensation, the sense object too would remain just what it is. The sense object's vicarious identity with the eye that sees it would disappear without compromising the integrity of that which is by nature an object for sense. However, the question does arise as to why human knowledge is limited to that variety of forms that can only be known by passive intellect relative to accompanying images. This means that agent intelligence (or God) is never a proper object of human thought in the sense that a proper sensible like a red color would be a proper object of sensation. 152 Agent intelligence, and any other simple form, although actually intelligible in itself, would be only incidentally intelligible to souls as a cause known in relation to the actual understanding of some other object which is poten tially knowable in the sense. Forms separate from matter would necessarily be known subsequent to and by reason of forms known in matter. The knowledge of metaphysical and mathematical objects would depend ultimately on the isola tion of certain characteristics of physical objects such as number, shape, and essential movability which are by reason of sense less knowable to us, but in themselves more knowable to the mind. It is in this way that even the proper sensibles of color and tactile pressure naturally convey the common or secondary sensibles of figure, size, weight,and local motion which are sensed through properties other than themselves. However, in the case of mind's recognition of the cause by reason of recognizing the effect, this secondary recognition of the cause is mediated by a ratiocinative process in which the one first premiss indicates the primary truth about the cause of acquired knowledge, namely, that "all things that come into being 18Pe An., 425al4ff. 153 arise from what actually is";^ and a second first premiss, is the starting point for arriving at the nature of that which is the primary actuality of knowledge, namely, that . . if there is anything that has no contrary, then it knows itself and is actually and possesses independent existence."20 It is strange that Ross cannot seem to descry the distinction between that which thinks as being Reason itself and that which thinks as "having reason" or possess ing the forms of knowledge as the enabling affections which make thinking activity possible "for a time." Commenting on Aristotle's discussion in the De Anima beginning with, "Actual knowledge is identical with its object," et cetera, Ross seems at first to realize the implications of the reasoning involved. He points out that "The other phrases used in this sentence, of active reason emphasize the facts that it is entirely independent of the body and that it con tains no unrealized potentialities but knows always what it ever knows."21 But Ross is at the same time determined to hold the hypothesis that Aristotle nevertheless meant 19Ibid., 431a4. 20Ibid., 430b24f. 21ross, Aristotle, p. 151. 154 agent intelligence to exist as essentially immanent to the soul of the thinking individual because of the distinction Aristotle says exists there between the active and passive factors. This awkward antinomy leaves Ross no alternative but to walk an Averroistic pathway between what he believes are the two mutually exclusive viewpoints of immanence and transcendence. "It is clearly implied," he states, "that active reason though it is in the soul, goes beyond the individual (emphasis mine); we may fairly suppose Aristotle to mean that it is identical in all individuals."22 Aristotle himself would appear to have answered this prob lem satisfactorily immediately after he completed his rational proof that the divine thought, unlike human thought, thinks only on itself.23 First, he asks in which of two senses "the good and the highest good" can belong to the universe: as transcendent ("something separate and by itself") or as immanent ("as the order of the parts"). His answer is unequivocally in favor of both modes of inclusion in the total universe. 22Ibid. 23Meta., 1074b35-1075all. 155 Probably, in both ways, as an army does; for its good is found both in its order and in its leader and more in the latter; for he does not depend on the order but it depends on him.2 4 Why, then, cannot thought in the sense of the highest thought be "separate and by itself" as well as being the ordering principle of those individuals who are "formed" to thought? After all, thought ia the highest good in man; but thought itself, as essential activity, does not depend on the individual man's relationship to thought, but the individual man's actual relation to thought depends on the prior actuality of thought itself which is eternal. Thought, then, is present in the soul as the "art" or formative principle of thinkers who are in necessary universal dependence on it for their actual thought. Without the universal unmoved mover of thought, the thought of individuals would be essentially incapable of existing. The two general categories of interpretations just concluded, the idealistic and metaphysical, seem to run the entire gamut of ontological insights into the nature of form and substance. Such considerations did indeed continually occupy Aristotle's mind whenever he discussed 24Ibid., 107 5al3. mind, soul, knowledge, or God. When did he ever refer to any of these four topics without being concerned with potentiality of some form, the possession of that form, the activity consequent upon form, or an unacquired activ ity, the object of which is its own substance? For this reason, the epiphenomenal, psychological, and epistemologi- cal interpretations seem all but irrelevant in spite of the fact that they may well have their own intrinsic merits if considered separately from the Aristotelian tradition. Witness the attempt of the epiphenomenal interpretation to read the thought of Kant into the stagirite's own theory by implying that the agent intelligence creates its own ideas after the image of a priori premises or mental cate gories instead of making whatever is implicitly knowable in the external world to be actually understood. Witness also the attempt of the psychologistic view to reduce agent intelligence to a subliminally dormant level of activity in direct contradiction to Aristotle's statements that the agent intelligence is "essential activity" and that it is not at one time thinking and at another not." This kind of thought proposed by these comparatively modern psychological interpreters, would be found by Aristotle to be an essential contradiction. While he did admit the 157 distinction between the possession of a form without its correlative image and its consequent exercise whenever this image was present to consciousness, he never did, and probably never would, suggest that the essential activity of thought was a general potentiality of conscious awareness in individuals instead of the actual universal cause of the forms of thought. Agent intelligence is that which makes thought, not that which is made into it. While on the one hand the epiphenomenal view exaggerates Aristotle's stress on the formal aspect of acquired intellectual activity, the psychological approach on the other hand overstresses Aristotle's emphasis on the material preconditions neces sary for conscious intellectual activity. According to this opinion, the presence of a potential intellect and potentially knowable objects is not enough; the ideas as seeds of thought must seethe and boil in the mind, awaiting full expression in our conscious awareness. Aristotle steers a middle course here and finds the combined final, efficient, formal, and material elements of knowledge to be both necessary and sufficient to constitute any given acti vity of human thought. For man, the matter and form of thought must also be in act whenever agent intellect as final cause and potential intellect as efficient cause are themselves both in act, that is, the activity of thought must always take place in the images which constitute the intelligible perceptual activity of individuals. While knowledge even in this sense is by nature universal and transcends the particular instance, as, for example, the definition of "triangle" transcends 1 1 this triangle," never theless it is dependent on the potential intelligibility of an object or symbol which determines the activity of sense. For the epiphenomenalists the form of knowledge is what determines its character and for the psychologists it is the dormant "stuff" which rises to a higher level of dynamic ideality while retaining the formally ideal nature it already possessed. Aristotle denies neither position, but rather combines the two. The universal form of knowl edge is distinct in character and nature from the perceptual particularity of its image. But they can never be separable or unrelated to each other in human knowing. We recognize "what man is" only in relation to some natural image or conventional symbol. Aristotle's predilection for multiple causality outranges both these interpretations. Human knowledge is caused both by mind and the perceived object. The final interpretation, which I have called the epistemological and which Professor Anton has developed at 159 length, appears to hold that the "essential activity of thought" is at the same time the ideal possibility of the same. That such a goal-oriented concept as the "achieved coordination of all reliable knowledge," suggested in this connection by Professor Anton, could most appropriately fit into Aristotle's system is beyond doubt; but I fail to see where he has used any such term. Besides, even had this been the case, Aristotle's agent intelligence will hardly accommodate itself to these specifications. "Active mind" is in no sense potential or a "possibility"; neither is it "achieved" for it would then be an imperfect mover in the order of thought. Apart from the problem of reaching contradictory conclusions about active mind, it does not appear that this interpretation any more than the last two is couched in the style of language which Aristotle himself uses when reasoning about the nature of thought and think ing. Terms such as "categories . . . devoid of content" or "dormant activity" or "achieved coordination" would, I think, represent concepts sufficiently complex to lead Aristotle to exemplify and define them quite painstakingly before putting them to use. For this reason, it would be futile to sew new patches on old theories, particularly when they patently clash with the ancient pattern. To endow Aristotle's "active mind" with properties which implicitly contradict its given nature is unwise if his statements do not uphold this interpretation, and to leave out of con sideration the properties which Aristotle claims it to have militates against good scholarship. It has therefore been one of the main purposes of this dissertation to clarify the many significant insights of the Stagirite that converge on this unique problem and to show what his intent was and why. It remains now only to point out in the final chapter certain vistas that this study may well open out for future scholarship. CHAPTER VI IMPLICATIONS OF THIS STUDY FOR FUTURE ARISTOTELIAN SCHOLARSHIP There are two significant and highly general points of view for which Aristotle does not seem to have received due credit from his commentators and from contemporary scholarship. I shall show that both of these systematic viewpoints are brought out in bold relief by the problem of agent intelligence just resolved. In addition, I shall point out that Aristotle's influence on the history of philosophical psychology has been determined for more by what he has been stated to have said than by what he actually did say. This will lead to the conclusion that our understanding of the real nature of "Aristotelianism" in the history of philosophy needs to be reevaluated. The first apparent "blind spot" in points of view held about Aristotle's theory of mind goes deep into his theory of categories and has to do with the special status of thought in his system. By reason of its own nature, 161 162 thought is for Aristotle neither a substance nor an acci dent. However, relative to a substance which acquires the forms of thought, the activity of thought is an accident incidental to the nature of the thinking substance. But there is a substance which is in no wise a potentiality of thought, but is rather the first cause of the contingent actuality of all other thought (and in Aristotle's view such a cause must always exist, otherwise there would be a time when thought would never be since its primary and necessary actuality would be lacking), thought as activity and as object is self-identical; and is therefore an inde pendent substance. To put it in Aristotle's more concrete examples, "Red" and "hot" are always "accidents" in the categorial sense because they are never completely separ able from, nor completely identical with, the material objects that are said to be red and to be hot. But thought is not of this nature. Thought, as acquired, is in one sense identical with its object, e.g. the "hot" or the "red" in terms of their definition, and in another sense it is separate from it in fact. "It is not the stone which is in the soul, but the form of the stone.But actual thought, 1De An., 431b29. 163 as prior to thought that is acquired, is both its own object and its own activity, otherwise "thought is [again] moved by the object of thought,"2 and we would not yet have arrived at what is prior to acquired thought. In other words, thought in the perfect sense of it is an activity knowing itself as its own object, "a thinking on thinking," which Aristotle identifies as God. This basic assumption of Aristotle which is clearly reflected in his theory of psychology makes necessary a drastic reappraisal of his entire doctrine of the categories, since thought by reason of its own nature is reducible neither to the cate gory of substance nor to the generic predicamental notion of accident. Even the category of relation such as, large- small or like and unlike refers either to distinct sub stances or really distinct aspects of the same substance. Nevertheless it is true that speculative thought is classi fiable incidentally according to the categories. This depends on whether it is named as \f0VS which is the self identical activity of thought, and therefore a substance, j / or as acquired scientific knowledge which the soul is capable of exercising as the attribute of 2Meta., 1072a30. 164 thought. Therefore, to assume that Aristotle divides all being right down the center with substances on one side and accidents on the other may well be an assumption to be reevaluated by every tradition which has passed a value judgment on Aristotle's alleged viewpoint on this question. A second problem which this study would appear to present in a very different light from that of established tradition is the question of immanence-transcendence. We have observed Ross' difficulty in reconciling the alleged separability of agent intelligence from the individual with the immanent presence of the same intelligence to the soul during the life-span of the individual. For Ross, as for Averroes, the only solution seemed to be the postulation of an intermediate intellect-substance immanent to all individ uals as the cause of their thought, a substance later to be "released" when the individual's passive intellect is dis carded with the body. I have tried to show that Aristotle had no problem reconciling the antinomy of immanence and transcendence. What is present as a cause need not be present as a substance, just as the general's own substance or disciplinary art need not be present in the army except as its orderly operation, an activity which is nevertheless essentially dependent on its primary mover. Just as the substance of the sense object remains what it is even while causing the activity of sensation in the sense, so also can the substance of thought itself remain what it is in its own nature even while causing or being the active factor of thought's activity in the soul of a thinker. Passive intellect is only potentially an efficient cause and its object qua actual object of thought is only poten tially present when it is perceived. Agent intelligence must therefore "enter from outside" as Aristotle himself suggests and make what is potentially intelligible actually understood. To be transcendent qua substance and immanent qua cause was never a problem for Aristotle. The "acting" or "making of the forms" takes place in the passive.factor, and it is on these grounds that a distinction exists between the two categories of action and passion in the soul. The most revolutionary conclusion that could be drawn from the establishment of this principle would be the unification of Aristotle's psychological theory with his theology, a closer association of his theory of mind with the Augustinian-Avicennist tradition of illumination during the Middle -Ages, and finally the severance of Aristotle's doctrine from its traditional dependence on the Thomistic "faculty psychology" which originated in the 166 thirteenth century and has prevailed widely in neo scholasticism up to the present day. This brings us to the final point of this disser tation, which is merely this. As Kurt von Fritz points out with regard to Aristotle's contribution to the science of historical understanding, Aristotle himself so exceeded the wisdom of his commentators that they failed to report accurately what he actually meant to say. "This shows . . . the limitation of the capacity of ordinary men to learn from a man of genius."-* The failure to remember any one of the Philosopher's "true and primary first principles" which he finds to be necessarily true of the nature of his sub ject matter, will in some sense render the logic of his theorizing vague and ambivalent. Perhaps there is no better evidence to show for the Philosopher's critically comprehensive grasp of the implications of all his ingenious first assumptions and no more persuasive motive to treat his conclusions, however strange they may at first appear, with the profoundest scientific reverence. -*Kurt von Fritz, Aristotle's Contribution to the Practice and Theory of Historiography, University of California Publication on Philosophy, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958), p. 137. B I B L I O G R A P H Y BIBLIOGRAPHY Anton, John Peter. Aristotle's Theory of Contrariety. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 19 57. Aquinas, St. Thomas. "Aristotelis Stagiritae De Anima," Opera Omnia. Vol. XX. New York: Misguria, 1949. _________. "Summa Theologica," Opera Omnia. New York: Misguria, 1949. Ayer, A. J. Logical Positivism. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press, 1959. Brehier, Emile. The Hellenic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Corbin, H. Avicenna and the Visionary Recital. Translated by D. K. Trask. New York: Pantheon, 1960. Gilson, Etienne. Archives d'Histoire Doctrinale et Litteraire du Moyen Age. Paris: J. Vrin, 1929- 1930. _________. Being and Some Philosophers. Toronto: Pontifi cal Institute of Medieval Studies, 1949. _________. History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages. New York: Random House, 1955. Guthrie, W. K. C. The Greek Philosophers. New York: Philosophical Library, 1950. _________. A History of Greek Philosophy. Vol. I. New York: Cambridge University Press, 19 62. Hamelin, O. La Systeme d'Aristote. Paris: 1920. 168 169 Hamelin, O. La Theorie de l1Intellect d'apres Aristote et ses Commentateurs. Paris: Librarie Philosophique J. Vrin 6, Place la Sorbonne, 19 53. (Ed. by Edmond Barbotin). Hicks, R. D. Aristotle: De Anima. London: Cambridge University Press, 1907. Jaegher, Werner. Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962. MacKenna, Stephen. Plotinus: The Enneads. Second edi tion. New York: Pantheon Books, Inc., 1957. Mahdi, Muhsin. Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Glencoe, 111.: Free Press of Glencoe, 1962. Merlan, Philip. Monopsychism Mysticism Metaconsciousness. Problems of the Soul in the Neoaristotelian and Neoplatonic Tradition. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1963. Mure, G. R. G. Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Rahman, F. Avicenna's Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952. Ross, W. D. Aristotle. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1964 . _________. The Works of Aristotle. Vols. I-XII. Trans lated by J. A. Smith and W. D. Ross. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 19 31. Solmsen, Fredrich. Aristotle's System of the Physical World. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1960. Spicer, Eulalia E. Aristotle's Conception of the Soul. London: University of London Press, 1934. 170 Theophrastus. Theophrasti Eresii Opera Quae Supersunt Omnia Graeca recensuit, Latine Interpretatus Est. Translated by F. Wimmer. Paris: Firmin Didot Bros., 1866. Trendelenburg, F. A. Aristotelis de Anima Libri Tres. Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1957. Ueberweg, F. History of Philosophy. Vol. I. Trans lated by G. S. Morris. Fourth edition; New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co., 1872. von Fritz, Kurt. Aristotle's Contribution to the Prac tice and Theory of Historiography. University of California Publication on Philosophy, Vol. 28, No. 3. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958. Wallace, Edwin. Aristotle's Psychology. London: Cambridge University Press, 1882.

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Core Title The Concept Of Agent Intelligence In Aristotle: A Solution In Accordance With The Traditional Problem Of The One And The Many

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