Magnanimity and Its Opposite

When I hear “magnanimity” (literally “big-souledness”, in the ethical complimentary sense of “that’s big of you”), I think of its prominent place in Aristotle’s ethics, as the most comprehensive virtue of character. It is an expansive way of being, an uplifting and morally elevating attitude.

In the final few words of the introduction to A Spirit of Trust (2019), Brandom speaks of “a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all” (p. 32). Much later, his chapter on Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit concludes, “When recognition takes the form of recollection, it is magnanimous, edelmütig forgiveness. The result is the final form of Geist [Hegelian “spirit”, or ethical culture], in which normativity has the form of trust” (p. 582).

Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit are Hegel’s words in the Spirit chapter of the Phenomenology for what Brandom calls two contrasting metanormative attitudes. One possible translation of Edelmütigkeit is indeed “magnanimity”. An overly literal, etymological rendering of the two would be “noble courage” and “down-heaviness” (perhaps “putting down”, or “down-dragging”, or “dragging through the mud”). We could call them benevolent generosity and mean-spiritedness, or magnanimity and pettiness. The draft of A Spirit of Trust that Brandom first put on his web page around 2012 initially caught my interest largely based on this part of the book.

Hegel’s discussion revolves around the allegory of a valet or Kammerdiener (“room-servant”) to a great moral hero. In Hegel’s time, there was apparently a common saying, “No man is a hero to his valet”. The Kammerdiener‘s job is essentially to service someone’s petty personal needs. Even a great moral hero has petty personal foibles, which will be most visible to one whose job it is to service them.

Hegel portrays the Kammerdiener character as showing a mean-spirited disbelief in the genuineness of the hero’s virtue. In this it seems to me that Hegel anticipates Nietzsche’s later analysis of ressentiment. In Nietzschean terms, Edelmütigkeit and Niederträchtigkeit are respectively an affirmative stance and a stance of what he calls ressentiment (French for “resentment”). A person with ressentiment tries to feel good by taking a diminishing attitude toward others. Nietzsche famously criticizes common notions of morality as really more grounded in ressentiment than in any positive value or virtue. He particularly interprets religious and metaphysical otherworldliness as grounded in a generalized ressentiment toward life and the world. But in Hegelian terms, Nietzsche himself takes a one-sidedly negative view of religion and most philosophy.

Writing before Nietzsche, Hegel in the Phenomenology sharply criticizes the otherworldliness of what he calls the unhappy consciousness (or better, an unhappiness and bad faith at the root of otherworldliness), for which everything in the world is as nothing compared to the infinity of God. But he also sees one-sidedness and a kind of bad faith in the Enlightenment dismissal of religion as mere superstition and priestly manipulation.

In Kantian terms, the Kammerdiener reduces the hero’s ethical stance entirely to her personal petty inclinations that have nothing to do with the greater good. The hero of the allegory we can see as a Kantian moral hero who is posited to act entirely out of high moral principle. In this way she is not unlike the ideal sage in Stoicism, who similarly is said to leave the equivalent of Kantian inclination behind.

It is important to recognize that for the point Hegel aims to make here, it does not matter in the least whether or not we believe that as a matter of fact a perfect sage or moral hero exists. The question is rather whether we acknowledge that there are some genuinely ethical or genuinely magnanimous actions.

The Kammerdiener takes the attitude that there are no genuinely ethical actions, that all human actions are really grounded in some kind of self-interested motive or other. The most generous and other-oriented acts imaginable can unfortunately be diminished in this way.

Brandom stirs things up by associating the ethical naturalism discussed in analytic philosophy (a reduction of ethical stances and normative attitudes to psychology or biology or sociology or other non-normative empirical terms), with the Niederträchtigkeit embodied by the Kammerdiener in Hegel’s allegory.

“Because objective conceptual norms are (reciprocallly) sense-dependent on the normative statuses of subjects, the niederträchtig reductive naturalist is wrong to think that he can deny the intelligibility (his reason for denying the existence) of normative statuses and still be entitled to treat the objective world as a determinate object of potential knowledge. ‘No cognition without recognition’ is the slogan here. Because normative attitudes and normative statuses are both reciprocally sense-dependent and reciprocally reference-dependent, the attempt to entitle oneself to talk about determinately contentful normative attitudes while denying the intelligibility and (so) existence of normative statuses is bound to fail” (pp. 580-581).

Or “no objectivity without normativity”, one might say. Cognitive norms that ground knowledge are ultimately a kind of ethical norms.

“Understanding the stances and the choice between them as a matter of adopting a practical commitment, as producing the unity it discerns, hence ultimately as a recognitive matter of community- and self-constitution, corresponds to the response Hegel makes to Enlightenment’s misunderstanding of the nature of the community of trust, on Faith’s behalf…. Understanding the edelmütig attitude as a practical-recognitive commitment that has always already implicitly been undertaken as a pragmatic condition of semantically contentful cognition and agency of determinate subjective attitudes), then, corresponds to breaking through the confines of alienated modernity into the form of self-consciousness Hegel calls ‘Absolute Knowing’ ” (p. 581).

Kant asks about the conditions for the possibility of knowledge and thought. Hegel asks about the conditions of the possibility of meaningfulness and agency, and finds that they require a particular kind of ethical stance. His “absolute knowing” is an ethical stance grounded in reciprocity, not at all the arrogant claim of an epistemological super power.

“At the first stage, in which necessity is construed as objective necessity, the norms are found. For normative statuses (duty, propriety, what one is committed to do, what one is responsible for doing) reflect and are determined by objective (attitude- and practice-independent) norms. In the middle, modern stage, in which necessity is construed as subjective necessity, normativity and reason must be made by our attitudes and practices, rather than being found. At the projected postmodern stage, finding and making show up as two sides of one coin, two aspects of one process, whose two phases — experience and its recollection, lived forward and comprehended backward, the inhalation and exhalation that sustain the life of Spirit — are each both makings and findings. In the first phases of an episode of experience, error is found and a new phenomenon is made. In the recollective phase a rational selection and reconstruction of an expressively progressive trajectory of phenomena in experience is made, and an implicit noumenon is found. Explicitating senses are made, and the implicit referents they express are found. The unity, the identity of content, that consciousness and action involve must be made, and the complementary disparity is found. Absolute knowing is comprehending, in vernünftig [expansively rational] form, the way in which these aspects mutually presuppose, support, complement, and complete one another” (pp. 581-582).

This reciprocity of finding and making that conditions thought and knowledge has the same shape as the reciprocity in ethical mutual recognition, and is grounded in it. “Absolute” knowing in Hegel is the actually modest recognition of reciprocity in the constitution of things, of meaning, and of value.

Willingness, Deliberation, Choice

In Nicomachean Ethics book III, Aristotle with marvelous clarity, simplicity, and well-rounded good sense discusses what things we are and are not morally responsible for, without ever referring to or needing anything like the “free arbitration” (liberum arbitrium) that came to be widely assumed in the Latin tradition. I will continue to use Joe Sachs’s admirable translation.

“Now since virtue is concerned with feelings and actions, and praise and blame come about for willing actions, but for unwilling actions there is forgiveness and sometimes even pity, it is no doubt a necessary thing for those who inquire about virtue to distinguish what is a willing act and what is an unwilling act, and it is a useful thing for lawmakers as well, with a view to honors and punishments. Now it seems that unwilling acts are the ones that happen by force or through ignorance, a forced act being one of which the source is external, and an act is of this sort in which the person acting, or acted upon, contributes nothing, for instance if a wind carries one off somewhere, or people do who are in control. But with respect to those things that are done through fear of greater evils, or for the sake of something beautiful — for instance if a tyrant who was in control of one’s parents and children were to order one to do a shameful thing, and in the case of one’s doing it they would be saved but as a result of one’s not doing it they would be killed — there is some dispute whether they are willing or unwilling” (p. 36).

Aristotle’s positive regard for feeling and his early mention of it in this context are noteworthy, as is his explicit early mention of forgiveness. Equally important is the fact that from the very beginning, he focuses on the difficult cases in which we experience conflict or ambiguity between different values that we recognize. Characteristically, he does not aim to authoritatively lay down rules for every situation, but rather to encourage us to be thoughtful and understanding in our appraisals both of situations and of others’ responses to them.

“Something of this sort happens also in connection with things thrown overboard in a storm, for no one simply throws them away willingly, but all those who have any sense do so for their own safety and that of the rest of the people aboard. Such actions then are mixed, but they are more like willing acts, since at the time when they are done they are preferred, and the end for which an action takes place is in accordance with the occasion. So one has to say what is willing or unwilling at the time when someone does it; and one does things of this sort willingly, for the source of the moving of the parts that are instrumental in such actions is oneself, and anything of which the source is in oneself is also up to oneself either to do or not. So things of this sort are willing acts, though in an unqualified sense they would perhaps be unwilling acts, since no one would choose any such thing for itself” (pp. 36-37).

Even more than Plato, Aristotle addresses “mixed” cases and highlights their importance. Again characteristically, he qualifies what he says about the unqualified sense with a modest “perhaps”.

“Sometimes people are even praised for actions of this sort, when they endure something shameful or painful in return for things that are great and beautiful, and conversely they might be blamed, since enduring things that are exceedingly shameful for no beautiful object, or for one only moderately beautiful, belongs to a person of low moral stature. For some things, while no praise is forthcoming, there is forgiveness, when one does what one ought not to do on account of motives of this sort, when they strain human nature too far, and no one could endure them. Yet some things perhaps it is not possible to be forced to do, but one ought instead to die suffering the most terrible things, for the things that force the Alcmaeon of Euripides to kill his mother seem ridiculous. But it is difficult sometimes to distinguish what sort of thing should be chosen in return for what, and what should be endured for what, and still more difficult for those who have discerned it to abide by what they have chosen, since for the most part the things one anticipates are painful and the things they force one to do are shameful, which is why praise and blame come about according as people are or are not forced” (p. 37).

Again he mentions forgiveness. Again an otherwise more categorical-sounding statement is qualified by a “perhaps”. Again the focus is on difficult cases. A more general and abstract evaluation is called “difficult”. He notes that it is “still more difficult” to abide by what we have chosen.

Sachs’s glossary says for choice (proairesis): “Desire informed by deliberation, or thinking infused with desire, and hence an act of the whole human being, in which neither the rational nor the irrational part is superior. If desire predominates, one merely takes one thing in preference to others, as an animal or small child might, but deliberation allows one to take a course in the light of alternatives not immediately present and of long-term consequences not obvious at the moment…. [T]he only ‘rule’ that can make choice be right is the judgment of a person of good character, whose desires are neither excessive nor corrupted” (pp. 202-203).

This is very clearly not an arbitrary “choice”. It is the Latin tradition’s interpolation of a notion of arbitrary choice into the Aristotelian text that Boulnois rightly objects to.

Back to Aristotle, “So what sort of thing ought one to say is forced? In an unqualified sense, is it not what is done whenever the cause is in external things and the one acting contributes nothing? But with those things that are in themselves unwilling acts, but are chosen in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends, and their source is in the one acting, while they are unwilling acts in themselves, in the present circumstances and in return for these particular ends they are willing acts. But they are more like willing acts, since actions are in the particulars, and with respect to these they are willing acts. But it is not easy to give an account of what sort of things one ought to choose in return for what sort of ends, since there are many differences among the particular circumstances” (p. 37).

Up to now, Aristotle has focused on examples that are somewhat extreme. Here he returns to the broader scope of all action.

“Actions are in the particulars”, which is why, once again, “it is not easy to give an account” of the more general case. In general, we cannot adequately say what the sense of an action is — or indeed what action it is — until we take its context appropriately into account.

In the very same way, there is no way we can adequately say, for example, what Kant’s categorical imperative would have us do in an unspecified particular situation x, based on the categorical imperative alone. Applying it only begins to have meaning as the situation begins to be specified.

Boulnois would have us avoid translating proairesis as “choice”, on the ground of the very real concern that the Latin tradition strongly identifies talk about choice with so-called free arbitration. But in the Aristotelian text we see a repeating pattern already, in which Aristotle focuses on difficult situations that require us to make tradeoffs between values that we genuinely accept, and which seem to require us to be unfaithful to one of them. These could hardly be construed as arbitrary choices. It is the sense given to the words rather than the bare words themselves that matters most.

Though Boulnois’s preferred translation of proairesis as “resolution” definitely has points in its favor, as at least possibly capturing the sense of its dependence on deliberation (which “choice” tends to obscure rather than highlight), the case is less compelling here, where the syntax doesn’t line up and it would be necessary to speak instead of a resolution of the tradeoff. We could still say we “resolved upon” one of the alternatives, but that still doesn’t capture the specific sense of making a judgment based on a comparative evaluation of definite alternatives.

As long as we are speaking of a comparison of definite alternatives rather than a decision that is allegedly made ex nihilo, the comparison basically defines the context, and we are clearly speaking of a normative judgment rather than an arbitrary choice.

It is arbitrary choice that has no applicability to the discernment of what would be a right action. Normative judgment (or for that matter, any kind of comparison between definite things), insofar as it has validity, is precisely not arbitrary, but rather — to a degree we can also assess — “right” for the situation.

Aristotle continues, “But if someone claims that things that are pleasant or beautiful are sources of compulsion (for they exert force even while being external), everything would be forced according to that person, since everyone does everything for the sake of these ends. Also, those who act by force and are unwilling act with pain, while those who act on account of what is pleasant and beautiful do so with pleasure. And it is ridiculous to blame external things but not oneself, for being easily caught by such things, and to take credit oneself for beautiful deeds but blame the pleasant things for one’s shameful deeds. So it appears that what is forced is that of which the source is from outside, while the one who is forced contributes nothing” (pp. 37-38).

For now I will skip to the summary of the immediately following part, which concerns unwillingness that is due to ignorance.

“So since ignorance is possible about all these circumstances in which the action takes place, the person who was ignorant of them seems to have acted unwillingly, and especially in the case of the most controlling circumstances; and the most controlling ones seem to be the things in which the action consists and for the sake of which it was done. And if an action is to be called unwilling as a result of this sort of ignorance, it is also necessary that it be painful to the one who does it and held in regret” (p. 39).

Then he summarizes the whole discussion of willingness and unwillingness. We are responsible for our “willing” acts, and are not responsible for unwilling acts.

“Since an unwilling act is one done by force or on account of ignorance, a willing act would seem to be one of which the source is in oneself, when one knows the particular circumstances in which the action takes place. For things done on account of spiritedness or desire are probably not rightly called unwilling acts. In the first place, none of the other animals would any longer do anything willingly, nor would children. And then, of the things that result from desire and spiritedness, do we do none of them willingly, or do we do the beautiful ones willingly and the shameful ones unwillingly? Or is this ridiculous when one thing is responsible for them? And perhaps it is absurd to call things toward which one ought to extend oneself unwilling, and one ought to get angry at some things and to desire some things, such as health and knowledge. And while unwilling acts seem to be painful, those that result from desire seem to be pleasant. Also, what difference does it make to whether things that are wrong are unwilling acts, that they result from reasoning or from spiritedness? Both kinds of error are to be avoided, and irrational feelings seem to be no less human than reasoning is, so that actions that come from spiritedness and desire belong to the human being too. So it is absurd to set those down as unwilling acts” (pp. 39-40, emphasis added).

Feeling and reason are equally human. Unlike the Stoics, Aristotle does not regard all feeling as an impediment, or as necessarily a source of unfreedom.

Next he turns to an explicit discussion of “choice”.

[Chapter 2.] “Now that willing and unwilling acts have been distinguished, it follows next to go through what concerns choice, for this seems to be what belongs most properly to virtue and to determine one’s character more than one’s actions do. A choice is obviously something willing, but they are not the same thing, as what is willing covers a wider range, since children and the other animals share in willing acts but not in choice, and we speak of things done on the spur of the moment as willing acts, but not as things done as a result of choice. Those who say that choice is desire, or spiritedness, or wishing, or some sort of opinion do not speak rightly. For choice is not shared by irrational beings, while desire and spiritedness are. And a person lacking self-control acts while desiring something but not choosing it, while a person with self-control conversely acts while choosing something but not desiring it. And while desire sets itself against choice, desire does not set itself against desire. And desire is for what is pleasant and painful, while choice is of something neither painful nor pleasant.”

“Still less is it spiritedness, for things done out of spiritedness seem to be the ones least in accord with choice. But surely it is not wishing either, even though that appears a close approximation to it, since there can be no choice of impossible things, and if anyone were to claim to choose something impossible, that person would seem to be foolish; but there is wishing even for impossible things, such as deathlessness. And there is also wishing for things that can in no way be done by oneself, such as for a certain actor to win an award, or for an athlete to win a contest, but no one chooses such things, but only those things one believes could come about by one’s own act. Also, wishing is rather for an end, while choice is of things that are related to the end; for example, we wish to be healthy, but we choose those things by means of which we will become healthy, and we wish to be happy and say so, while it would not fit the meaning to say we choose to be happy, since, universally, choice seems to be concerned with things that are up to us” (pp. 40-41).

Here he is saying not that choice is the efficient cause of action, as the Latin tradition would have it, but rather that it evaluates and compares possible efficient causes, with respect to how well they would serve as means to realize the ends we wish for.

“So it could not be opinion either, since there seems to be opinion about all things, and no less about things that are everlasting or things that are impossible than about things that are up to us; and opinion is divided into the false and the true, not into the bad and the good, while choice is divided into the latter two kinds. Now no doubt no one even claims that choice is the same as opinion as a whole, but it is not even the same as some particular opinion, for by choosing good or bad things we are certain kinds of people, but not by having opinions. And we choose to take or avoid something from among those alternatives, but we have an opinion about what it is or whom it benefits or in what way, while taking or avoiding is not at all what we have as an opinion. And choice is praised for being a choice of what it ought to be, more than for being rightly made, while opinion is praised for being as something truly is. And we choose what we most of all know to be good, but have opinions about things we do not know very well, and it seems not to be the same people who choose best who also have the best opinions, but rather some people seem to have better opinions but to choose what they ought not, on account of vice. And if an opinion comes before a choice or comes along with it, that makes no difference, for we are not considering this, but whether it is the same as any sort of opinion” (pp. 40-41).

Even though Aristotle does not follow Plato’s categorical devaluation of opinion, we can still hear echoes of Plato’s radical contrast between opinion and knowledge.

“What then is choice, or what sort of thing is it, since it is none of the things mentioned? It is obviously something willing, but not everything that is willing is something chosen. But might it just be the one that has been deliberated about first? For choice is involved with reason and thinking things through. And even its name [pro-airesis] seems to give a hint that it is something taken before [pro] other things”

In saying here that choice is involved with reason and thinking things through, and in suggesting that it “might just be” the outcome of deliberation, Aristotle anticipates what will be his eventual conclusion. Quite the opposite of being exercised in a vacuum, Aristotelian choice is the rational outcome of deliberation.

[Chapter 3.] “But do people deliberate about all things, and is everything a thing to be deliberated about, or about some things is deliberation not possible? Perhaps one ought to mean by a thing to be deliberated about, not what some fool or insane person might deliberate about, but those things that people with sense would deliberate about. Now no one deliberates about everlasting things, such as the cosmos, or about the diagonal and side of a square, that they are incommensurable; but neither does one deliberate about things that are in motion but always happen according to the same pattern, whether by necessity or else by nature or by means of some other cause, such as solstices and the risings of stars; nor about things that are sometimes one way and sometimes another such as drought and rain; nor about things that are by chance, such as finding a treasure; but not about all human things either, as no Spartan deliberates about how the Scythians should best be governed, for none of these things could happen through us. We deliberate about things that are up to us and are matters of action, and these are the ones that are left. For the causes responsible for things seem to be in nature, necessity, and chance, and also intelligence and everything that is due to a human being. And among human beings, each sort deliberates about the things to be done by its own acts.”

“And there is no deliberation about the precise and self-contained kinds of knowledge, such as about letters (for we are not in doubt about how something ought to be spelled), but as many things as come about by our act, but not always in the same way, about these we do deliberate, for example about the things done by medical skill or skill in business, and more so about piloting a ship than about gymnastic training, to the extent that the former is less precisely formulated, and similarly also about the rest of the skills but more about those that are arts than those that are kinds of knowledge, since we are more in doubt in connection with the former. Deliberating is present in things that happen in a certain way for the most part, but are unclear as to how they will turn out, and in which this is undetermined. And we take others as fellow deliberators for large issues, not trusting that we ourselves are adequate to decide them. We deliberate not about ends but about the things that are related to the ends, for a doctor does not deliberate about whether he will cure someone, nor a rhetorician about whether he will persuade, nor someone holding political office about whether he will produce good order, nor does anyone else deliberate about ends, but having set down the end, they consider in what way and by what means it would be the case.”

“When it appears that the end would come about by more than one means, people examine through which of them it will come about most easily and beautifully, but if the end will be accomplished by only one means, they examine how it will come to be through this means, and this in turn through some other, until they come to the first thing that will be responsible for the end, which is the last thing in the process of discovery” (pp. 40-42, emphasis added).

“What is deliberated about and what is chosen are the same thing, except that the thing chosen is already determined, since the thing chosen is what is decided out of the deliberation” (p. 43).

Aristotelian choice is the rational and feeling evaluative outcome of a well-rounded and multi-dimensional deliberation, not a power of arbitration or an arbitrary power that would allegedly be superior to reason and human feeling.

Ethics and the Dogma of Free Will

The last post treated Olivier Boulnois’s discussion of ethical deliberation and proairesis or “resolution” (which I formerly called “choice”) in Aristotle, which grounds Boulnois’s “genealogy of freedom”. Here are a few highlights of his discussion of how the very un-Aristotelian notion of free will emerged in the later tradition, along with parts of his conclusion.

Elsewhere I have used the common translation of Latin liberum arbitrium as “free will”, but more literally it is something like “free arbitration”, which is what a free will is characteristically supposed to do. In the context of this “archaeological” discussion where the terms appear side by side, the distinction matters.

Frequently, talk about will is fraught with ambiguity. Good will — and more generally, definite will as intent subject to interpretation — is a completely different thing from the indeterminate will conceived as a power of decision ex nihilo that is being criticized here, but the two are often mixed together.

“Voluntas did not always mean will, if we understand by that a directing principle of the powers of the soul, trigger of action and repose, and capable of contraries. The word is attested in classical Latin, in the sense of ‘favor’, ‘good disposition’ ” (Généalogie de la liberté, p. 254, my translation throughout). “[The Greek boulesis], which Cicero translated as voluntas, designates a sage emotion, a rational desire, the superior form that desire takes when the [Stoic] sage is no longer subject to passions” (ibid).

In the Stoics, we can see the beginning of an evolution toward modern concepts of will. But the Stoic usage properly applies only to the ideal of the Stoic sage. It is not yet a faculty of the soul that all humans are supposed to have.

According to Boulnois, the next major step was taken by Alexander of Aphrodisias, in late 2nd to early 3rd century CE. Standing near the beginning of the Greek Aristotelian commentary tradition, Alexander is the most historically influential of the Greek commentators. Relevant here are his arguments against Stoic determinism, in the non-commentary treatise On Fate.

“Is it necessary to define freedom as freedom of the will, or free arbitration? The problem of free arbitration, understood as a completely undetermined power to resolve [or choose], arises from Alexander of Aphrodisias, in a metaphysical rereading of Aristotle. In effect, Alexander is responding to a non-Aristotelian problematic, that of [Stoic] determinism. To do this, he establishes a connection between the concept of proairesis and the rejection of the cosmic determinism of the Stoics, thus giving birth to a ‘libertarian’ interpretation of decision, indeed to the concept of (undetermined) free choice. Where Aristotle affirms that we generically have the capacity to act or to not act, Alexander holds that we singularly, in each conjuncture, have the possibility to act or not, and to act otherwise. This is to say that proairesis becomes a faculty of choice independent of the state of the world — a free arbitration. And it is this concept, called ‘Aristotelian’ by Heidegger but in fact Alexandrian, that imposes itself, as well in [the early Augustine of the Treatise on Free Will] as in scholasticism, up to Descartes. It becomes necessary for this to consider not only action, but an interior power of choice. Free arbitration thus becomes free arbitration of the will” (p. 472, emphasis in original).

“In inventing a libertarian conception of action, Alexander [of Aphrodisias] founds an ethic centered on the capacity to choose for oneself a thing or its contrary, without depending on a preceding cause” (p. 248).

“The concept of free arbitration had already received its certificate of nobility from [the early Christian theologian] Origen…. But he implied no metaphysical thesis on determinism and indeterminism. It is Augustine who submits the concept of free arbitration to this problematic, and discovers the power of the will, in his Treatise on Free Will” (p. 253).

“But it is Augustine who made [voluntas] the founding concept of Western ethics, in joining it to that of free arbitration (liberum arbitrium). He made it the free arbitration of the will” (p. 255, emphasis in original).

“The Treatise on Free Will was at first conceived as a treatise on the good, in which Augustine demonstrated the divine goodness and the origin of evil, in opposition to the Manicheans. But to exonerate God, it was necessary to make the human will responsible for evil” (p. 256).

“The association of the will proper and free arbitration … suggests that the key of the fault [of original sin] resides in a power of choice belonging to the will. Evil does not come from nature, but from that will, in its exercise of choice…. Thus the first occurrence of [the phrase] free arbitration appeared at a crucial moment of reflection on the origin of evil” (p. 257, emphasis in original). “It is the human who is culpable, and God is innocent” (p. 259). “Willing is always in our power; in this consists our freedom” (p. 260).

“Augustine inherits the turn made by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Freedom of action has become a freedom of choice. And the power of choice is identified at once with the principle of assent to representations and the triggering principle of action: the will. Instead of a casuistry, instead of founding responsibility in the meeting of our beliefs and our desires, on the one hand, and on the circumstances of action, on the other, Augustine prefers to construct a unique and hidden inner principle, which is situated in an invisible part of the human (her soul); this principle is will, endowed with a free arbitration” (ibid).

Also influential in this context was the late 5th to early 6th century CE Roman Christian philosopher Boethius.

“In Aristotle, the problem of willing action and that of prescience of the future are totally disjoint. The first is treated in a reflection on ethical responsibility, the second in the framework of a logico-linguistic analysis of statements about the future” (p. 159). But “Boethius elaborates what will become the key argument: if the future is necessarily determined, free arbitration perishes, along with all moral responsibility” (ibid).

In the high middle ages, such arguments were developed to a fine pitch by the Latin scholastics. This turns out to be interrelated with the scholastic turn away from Aristotle’s own very innovative meta-ethical emphasis on the primacy of explanation by final causes, to a new privileging of a transformed notion of efficient cause that is closer to early modern mechanism than it is to Aristotle.

” ‘The final cause is not productive. That is why health is not productive, except metaphorically’ ” (p. 116). “At the end of the 13th century, Henry of Ghent and Duns Scotus understood this passage in an absolute manner. They deduced that the final cause produces nothing, that it is not really a cause” (p. 117). Henry of Ghent wrote, ‘The good that is known, insofar as it is represented in the intellect, moves the will only in a metaphorical way’ ” (quoted, p. 117, emphasis in original).

Though highly sophisticated and genuinely original, this scholastic devaluation of the final cause completely undoes what Aristotle himself highlights as his most important accomplishment in first philosophy (the detailed working out of a unique “final causes first” way of thinking and understanding, which orients itself through a hermeneutics of “that for the sake of which”). The scholastic reversal of Aristotle’s distinctive emphasis on final causes (in favor of putting a transformed notion of efficient causality first) puts a value-neutral notion of sheer power in top position in place of the good at the origin of things. Not only the first cause but also human agency are re-visioned in terms of this creative misreading of efficient causality as not just the means by which ends are achieved, but as a primordial value-neutral driving impulse, or (in the case of God) a value-neutral supreme power of creation from nothing. In philosophical anthropology, this is accompanied by a devaluation of Aristotelian teleological “intellect” in favor of the new voluntaristic notion of will, as the human analogue of creation from nothing.

“For Henry and Scotus, our passage means that the intellect and its object do not move the will…. But this interpretation, which reduces finality to the conjunction of a representation and a subjective will, is a hazardous extrapolation: Aristotle speaks here only of the need to distinguish between a productive cause and a final cause (the aim pursued is not the efficient cause of movement). And all the rest of his thought implies a teleology, that is to say a motion by a final cause, even for the beings that have no representation” (ibid).

“The will ceases to be simply the excellence of good humans (as with the Stoics). It implies a mentalist theory and a causal theory of action. — 1) Mentalist: because all action is explained as the exterior deployment of a mental state…. –2 ) Causal: the will is the cause of action…. Action becomes the effect of the will” (pp. 260-261, emphasis in original).

“At first, the fundamental definition of freedom is strictly ethical. It consists in the absence of constraint and of ignorance, independent of any metaphysical position on determinism or causal indeterminacy” (p. 473). “For at the origin, in Aristotle, [desire and logos or discourse] are clearly distinct…. The aporia arises when in an articulation that is not ontologically clarified, we confuse desire and the logos in the concept of ‘will’ (since the Stoics and Augustine). Successfully to rethink this articulation is the challenge and the task of an ethics. This imposes on us the task of destroying this metaphysical confusion that obstructs the philosophy of action” (p. 475).

The reference to “destruction” might sound a bit shocking, but it refers back to Boulnois’s methodological preliminaries. There, he said

“In the element of thought, destruction and construction are one sole and same act…. My approach is a form of ‘discursive dissolution’: through dissolution, we approach the resolution of the problem.”

“To solve: resolve, destroy. Here it is not simply a matter of ‘deconstruction’…. Can we again philosophize after analytic philosophy? If the analytical method has a virtue, it is to conduct a rational reflection on problems, and to accept that they can have a solution” (p. 20, emphasis in original).

“It is undoubtedly impossible to give a complete analytic interpretation of the problem of freedom. It is likewise impossible to give a complete history of the diverse statements responding to the question. But paradoxically, what is impossible separately becomes possible conjointly.”

“I will reconstruct the principal sources of the doctrine of freedom, and of its intrinsic aporia. I attach myself particularly to the work of Aristotle….”

“When Aristotle affirms that an action ‘accomplished willingly engenders praise and blame, while an action accomplished unwillingly only engenders compassion (suggnome) and perhaps pity’; when Descartes declares that the freedom of indifference is ‘the positive faculty of determining oneself for one or the other of two contraries, that is to say to pursue or to flee, to affirm or to deny’; when Nietzsche demands, apropos of the eternal return: ‘do you will that again and innumerable times again?’, not only does it not concern the same thesis, but above all it does not concern the same question” (pp. 20-21, emphasis in original).

He devotes a whole subsection of the introduction to “the legitimacy of the middle age” as a field of scholarly endeavor.

“In studying the middle ages, we indeed study the hidden face of our history…. To choose the long path, which passes through the Middle Age, is to choose multiplicity and discontinuity” (p. 22).

“[T]here are not two eternal conceptions, one determinist, the other libertarian…. an alternative of which both terms were unknown to Aristotle, who envisaged neither free arbitration (but solely willingness) nor determinism (but only cause and responsibility)” (p. 23).

“This study supposes that we first research the origin and the structure of the question of free arbitration, then we examine the sense of action from Aristotle, as well as its obliteration under a theory of free arbitration” (ibid).

In the conclusion, he says

“The problem of free arbitration, or of the freedom of the will, is a metaphysical artifact for two reasons:”

“1. The will was introduced by the commentators on Aristotle through a complex series of translations and projections, such that rational desire (boulesis) became a will, which renders the primordial sense of action and of practical reason incomprehensible.”

“2. Freedom is not essentially a power of the soul, but a social and ethical aptitude.”

“To go further in the elucidation of the problem of freedom, it is necessary to destroy the concept of will, as the mental and causal principle of human actions. As Wittgenstein well saw, for this it is necessary to confront a radical analysis of action without reproducing this term (anachronistic in relation to Aristotle). For the idea of an interior principle, capable of contraries and cause of action, not only conceals an internal contradiction, but is a fiction that occults the different levels of action in which we are responsible.”

“We have given an account of the actions of which we are the authors. To be responsible for an action, it is necessary to be a cause. This signifies that the agent has the power to act, and for Aristotle, this is a bivalent power, to act or not to act in general. Aristotle never says that, in some precise conjuncture, given the beliefs and representations of the agent, she must have the power to do a thing and its contrary, and to not do what she does. For that is not the question: that is not what makes ethical responsibility; we are responsible for actions of which we are generically the origin; action depends on us, it is ours, when we are not constrained by an exterior force. That is also why we cannot excuse ourselves (exclude ourselves from the cause), by arguing that faulty action was necessarily brought about by our desires…. For our desires are part of us, and our action is not imputable to another…. To speak of a ‘weakness of the will’, is precisely to render the phenomenon incomprehensible” (pp. 175-176, emphasis in original).

“It is only through confusion with the problematic of future contingents that the metaphysical question of the contingency of choice emerged…. For Aristotle never claimed that our capacity to act or to not act now depends uniquely on us” (p. 477, emphasis in original).

“Free arbitration becomes the condition of responsibility, which makes free arbitration a necessary but indemonstrable condition of ethics. — This argument has a double inconvenience: first of all, it requires the admission of an indemonstrable principle; then, in making free arbitration the condition of morality, it prevents us from seeing the converse, that ethical orientation is constitutive of its concept” (p. 478).

“Fundamentally, freedom does not reside in a subjective power to determine oneself. Neither the term ‘will’ nor its functions exist at the origin, in Aristotle: we find neither a power that centralizes the other faculties of the soul, nor a principle of assent at the source of action….. It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (p. 479, emphasis in original).

“Freedom is not a postulate of practical reason; it is practical reason. And the human is not born free, but she may become so” (p. 481).

Free Will in Aristotle?

A recent large book by Olivier Boulnois, Généalogie de la liberté [Genealogy of Freedom] (2021), provides great detail on the emergence of the notion of free will (liberum arbitrium in Latin). I have previously mentioned his Être et représentation (1999), which gives fascinating documentation of the role of Duns Scotus in the formation of modern notions of representation, and metaphysics as ontology. Boulnois has written extensively on medieval philosophy. Like Alain de Libera, he turns a broadly Foucaultian “archaeological” method in the direction of showing the large and largely unknown role of medieval philosophy in the development of common Western philosophical concepts. This post will focus on a part of his discussion of how Aristotle stands largely apart from later views.

Early on in the present work, Boulnois cites the first sentence of G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica:

“It appears to me that in Ethics, as in all other philosophical studies, the difficulties and disagreements, of which its history is full, are mainly due to a very simple cause: namely to the attempt to answer questions, without first discovering precisely what question it is which you desire to answer” (quoted in Boulnois, p. 34).

Boulnois notes how Latin translations extensively transformed the meanings of Aristotelian concepts.

“Is free will proper to the human? All of medieval and modern reflection on action rests on this thesis…. The concept of proairesis is analyzed for the first time in book III of the Nicomachean Ethics” (Boulnois, p. 133, my translation throughout). “To begin with, must we follow the [12th century Latin] translation of Burgundio? Does proairesis really mean free will?” (p. 134).

“With the translation of proairesis by ‘choice’, the key concept of Aristotelian ethics is integrated into the semantic field of will. The Burgundian point of intersection, which connects Aristotle and [the Church Fathers] Nemesius and Damascene in the same bundle of translations, constitutes a second origin of proairesis as free will in the 12th century” (p. 137). “Aristotle defines proairesis as a kind of desire joined with deliberation (with discourse)” (p. 139). “With Aristotle, we are indeed far from the medieval and modern interpretation, which speaks of choice (electio)” (p. 141).

Until now I have followed Joe Sachs’s translation in using “choice” myself. Sachs uses the English word with the same root as the French that Boulnois is questioning, but he explains it in terms of Aristotle’s definition just mentioned. But as we will see in an upcoming post, the Latin tradition gave it a voluntaristic coloring that is foreign to Aristotle.

“The most rigorous translation seems to be ‘resolution’…. Resolution introduces logos and time” (p. 140). “The object of our resolution is first of all the object of our desire, insofar as this results from a deliberation” (pp. 140-141). “Our moral character depends not on our theoretical attitude but on the ensemble of our resolutions, the repetition of which constitutes our disposition to act, indeed our aptitude for beautiful actions” (p. 142).

This ensemble of our resolutions sounds like the commitments of which Brandom and other contemporary writers speak.

“Since Cicero, the boulesis of the Stoics has been translated to Latin by voluntas [will]. But the Stoics affirm that such a mastery of impulse is found only in the sage…. It is only later, with Augustine, that this prerogative of the sage becomes a faculty accessible to all. Our concept of will, as capacity to consent or not to our representations, carries all this history. But in Aristotle, boulesis always designates the desire that pertains to that part of the soul that is capable of speech. It is a form of desire that is enunciable, intelligible…. Boulesis indeed is a wish: a wish does not require the existence of a will; like all desire, it is moved by its object” (p. 143).

“Among our desires, resolution results from a deliberation, which deploys itself in language…. The true principle of our resolution is of the order of language and of thought. Like all living beings, the human is necessarily moved by what appears to her as desirable; but in distinction from the other living beings, it is through speech that the desirable appears to her…. Resolution bears on action that can be accomplished by us…. There is only a place for deliberation when several lines of action are possible…. We deliberate on that which no one can do in our place” (p. 145, emphasis in original).

Here the resolution of deliberation is explicitly grounded in language and thought, and not in an anachronistic non-Aristotelian notion of a faculty of will.

“It is necessary to underline: Aristotle does not exactly say that the resolution depends on us. What depends on us is the action that is the object of that resolution…. Aristotle does propose a theory of decision, or of resolution, but not a theory of freedom of choice, or of free will” (pp. 145-146, emphasis in original).

Unlike Boulnois here, some 20th century writers have used “decision” in the sense that Boulnois gives to “choice”.

“Such actions are ontologically contingent: they could [also] not be. The metaphysical tradition deduced from this the existence of a power of choice, of a will or a free will” (pp. 146-147).

The important point here is that this “metaphysical tradition” does not include Aristotle.

“Nothing obliges us to understand contingency in an absolute manner, and as subject to our power. Aristotle refers to the ensemble of actions that depend on us (eph’ hemin) in general (in the sense of a collectivity: the humans, the agents, the citizens), but not to those that depend on me (here and now)…. But Aristotle never claims that an agent has, other things being equal, at a given instant, the capacity to do one thing or its contrary, to act and not to act. ‘What depends on us’ is a generic capacity, proper to humankind, and not to some particular individual, here and now. Reciprocally, in insisting on the idea that deliberation is the cause of our resolution, Aristotle holds that at the interior of this bivalence, we more often see what the logos presents as desirable” (p. 147, emphasis in original).

“In this context, what is the principle of action?” (p. 150). He quotes Aristotle, “and the principle of resolution is desire and reason…. What affirmation and negation are in thought, pursuit and flight are to desire…. For resolution to be good, it is necessary at the same time that the discourse be true and the desire just” (p. 150).

Boulnois summarizes, “Thus the properly human principle of action is resolution, that is to say the conjunction of desire and of logos in the pursuit of an end” (p. 151).

He turns to the background that Aristotle is responding to.

“The sophists affirm that every desire is good; Plato, that we can only truly will the true or absolute good” (ibid). “While the sophists identify freedom with the capacity to do what we want, and Plato with sole adherence to the Good, Aristotle proposes a third way: ethical freedom is the art of deciding well, of arriving at the resolution the circumstances require…. The resolution taken by the homme de bien [literally, “man of the good”] is indeed a point of coincidence between the apparent good (which all seek) and the true good (that she discerns). In leaving behind the confrontation between sophists and Platonists, Aristotle has recourse neither to a relativism of appearances nor to an objective norm; in the element of virtue (and of desire), he aims at a coincidence between the phenomenon of good and its truth” (p. 152).

This Aristotelian idea of a point of coincidence between appearance and truth was later taken up by Hegel.

“Is it necessary to say that resolution is free? Does it consist in a choice?… Aristotle never makes the concept of freedom intervene in relation to the question of choice, nor even that of willingness” (p. 153). “Nevertheless, Aristotle knows and uses a concept of freedom (eleutheria). But this pertains to politics and not to the theory of action” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“The Latin translation not withstanding, ‘hekousion’ (willing) does not mean ‘voluntary’ (voluntarium); it is rather the mode of our action, except in cases of constraint or ignorance. Proairesis does not mean ‘free will’ (liberum arbitrium), but decision, resolution… Freedom is the ethical horizon of our action, and not the metaphysical attribute of a will that Aristotle did not envisage” (p. 154).

“It is indeed possible to analyze human action without postulating in the agent a central instance of arbitration, and without inscribing her in a physical determinism…. Ethics is indeed thinkable without a theory of will” (p. 155).

As I have noted many times, Plato and Aristotle founded ethics without the later notion of a faculty of will.

“Ethical action does not necessarily require a freedom of choice. It depends on a resolution (proairesis), which mainly refers to a dimension of anticipation, and does not always imply a choice. Ethics is indeed thinkable without the doctrine of free will” (ibid).

Here again the emphasis is on something like commitment.

“Resolution presupposes a process of deliberation in the agent: she at least implicitly evaluates the reasons to do x rather than nothing; that which she does is not imposed on her from the outset. That is to say that for her, there are a multitude of options and reasons to act” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Deliberation is concerned with the goodness of reasons.

“A stranger to the metaphysical problem of free will, freedom is ethical in essence; it consists in the ability to act well; it is only acquired at the completion of an education in virtue” (ibid).

“All thought about action situates itself in the horizon of the good, and freedom is nothing other than liberation from the bad” (p. 156).

“It is ethics that founds freedom, and not freedom that founds ethics” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“On the plane of finite existence, no one knows if they have absolutely accomplished the best action. In the same way in their reflections on our moral lack of power, Aristotle and Ovid speak of that which is ‘better’ (comparative) and not of that which is ‘best’ (superlative)” (ibid).

“Intellect” as Culminative Intuition

Once or twice before, I’ve somewhere mentioned the issue of interpreting the remarks Aristotle makes about intellect (nous) in the Posterior Analytics. Some people read this text as attributing to intellect a kind of immediate grasp that they associate with intuition. I have even seen nous translated as intuition.

If intuition is supposed to be immediate in an unqualified way, I don’t think this interpretation can be reconciled with Aristotle’s view that although there is what he calls an inner sense, the soul does not have direct self-knowledge, but only self-knowledge of an indirect sort.

My late father was quite impressed by Kant and Hegel’s critique of the notion that intuition is a source of immediate knowledge, but he also used to distinguish “culminative intuition” from “originary intuition”. This seems very useful to me. Originary intuition is the immediate kind that some people claim to have, but is rejected by Kant and Hegel. Culminative intuition on the other hand arguably resembles what the Arabic philosophers called “acquired intellect”. That is, it is an end result of a long process (see also Long Detour?; First Principles Come Last; Adeptio). One of my very first posts here suggested that Aristotle and Plato would have been sympathetic to the inferentialist account of reason propounded by Robert Brandom. Brandom himself reads Kant and Hegel as inferentialists.

Google returns zero references to culminative intuition on the internet. Now at least there will be one. If a kind of intuition does have a kind of immediacy, I think it must be what Hegel called mediated immediacy, which is like knowing how to ride a bicycle. That is, it depends on a process of learning, but eventually acquires a kind of immediacy.

Adeptio

This will conclude my treatment of Jean-Baptiste Brenet’s account of the unexpected thought of the 14th-century “Averroist” John of Jandun, which confounds and unsettles quite a number of stereotypes. One of the surprises is that this seemingly obscure chapter in the history of medieval philosophy turns out to be a significant episode in the formation of what in recent times have been regarded as modern concerns pertaining to the so-called Subject.

(Let me just briefly suggest that to be humane — to seriously care about people — and to develop concrete accounts of human subjectivity need not be tied to the frequent modern assumption that whatever is ethically important about human beings must be expressed in terms an account of the human as Subject.)

Here it is a matter of what in the Aristotelian commentary tradition came to be called “acquired” intellect (adeptio for the Latins). The point is that what is called intellect in the Aristotelian sense is not reducible to something we are born with. What we have from nature and for the most part live by is a kind of imagination. Within John of Jandun’s elaborate account of the nature and progress of so-called acquired intellect, we encounter both a “metaphysical” or “cosmic” dimension and an elevated concern with the status of human individuals.

Brenet writes, “What the ‘state of acquisition’ signifies [for John] is only a momentary union, a transitory contact and not a stable terminal state. The human sleeps, drinks, and eats, and is not a philosopher when she does so” (Transferts du sujet, p. 379, my translation throughout).

“The image not being an obstacle, it is a matter of seeing what happens with adeptio” (p. 380). “It is important not to confound the order of being and the order of knowledge. The agent intellect is in effect an invariable forma informans [informing form] of the possible intellect. That is to say that in its substance, it is always united to it in the same manner. The only relation between the two that can be modified is that of knowledge: it falls to the possible intellect to know the agent intellect better and better. What is adeptio, as a result? Not only the formal conjunction of the agent intellect with the possible intellect, but the perfect knowledge of one by the other. The agent intellect is acquired when the intellect in potentiality comes to think substance: it knows it in what it is, and not only in the punctual acts that it causes. In short, adeptio is produced when the human intellect knows itself” (p. 381).

Brenet points out that John’s distinction between substance and knowledge in this context is not to be found in Averroes. It seems to me also that this identifies knowledge of substance with a very immodest claim of immediately reflexive human self-knowledge that has no place in Aristotle.

We note that at the end of the above he says “the human intellect”. Up to that point, we might have been reading an account of al-Farabi, who substantially elaborated the elaboration of Aristotle on this point by Alexander of Aphrodisias. The way John and other medieval writers speak about intellects can sound rather “metaphysical”. But after the initial controversies over the translations of Averroes, it became obligatory among the Latins to stress the human element.

John of Jandun in his day was famous and notorious for his defense of Averroes against theological objections. But Brenet documents how deeply John is affected by what might be called the theologically motivated “humanism” of the Latins, summarized in the slogan “this human thinks”. This does not eclipse the “metaphysical” dimension of the discourse about intellect, but rather is layered on top of it.

For John, “This knowledge of self on the part of the intellect, independent of phantasms, subtracted from all intermittences of cogitation, is always there, since always, in the same manner. It is radically different from that which can fall to this or that human, even if in a sense it serves as a model of cosmic success toward which tend those who work to actualize philosophy” (p. 383).

Brenet observes that “this idea is faulty from the start, since for the Cordovan [Averroes] there is no sense in conceiving a cosmic bond between the two [intellects] that operates without the intermediary of individuals and their images” (p. 385). Averroes stands out among the medievals for his rejection of neoplatonic emanationism. John back-pedals on this.

“Each time an abstraction is produced, as a consequence, the possible intellect thinks itself, and thinks the agent of that abstraction. It knows itself as that which informs the intellectual act, then it knows the operator of that act. It knows the subject of thought, it knows the (efficient) cause of it. As imperfect grasp of its substance, the intelligere seipsum [self-understanding] of the intellect accompanies the thought of the world; as achieved thought of itself, it conditions the contemplation of God. In sum, the knowledge of self intervenes at two points in the process that leads to happiness” (p. 391).

Here we have self-knowledge of intellect identified with an imperfect knowledge of substance that seems more achievable. But he speaks of an efficient cause of the intellectual act, which is again problematic.

“The insertion of the problem of knowledge of self into a theory of intellect was inevitable for John of Jandun. It suffices to cross the Nicomachean Ethics and the Metaphysics: from the first, he takes it that happiness resides in contemplation, that God is nothing but this contemplation, and that the human, to be happy, should strive to do like God, in contemplating the divine realities; from the second, he takes it that for God, contemplation comes down to thinking oneself. The First principle subsists as Thought that thinks itself, and the happy human comes to see with this self-knowledge” (p. 393).

Here we seem to be back on more or less Aristotelian ground again. At this point he is neither claiming super-powers for the human, nor reducing intellect to something explainable by efficient causes.

“[John] divides the knowledge of self in two: in imagining an eternal rapport of thought between the agent intellect and the possible intellect, outside of all relation with humans, he misunderstands the essence of intellectus, and loses what is really posed in the text of Averroes: the existence of the philosopher” (pp. 393-394).

“The acquired intellect [adeptio] is the intellect that thinks itself” (p. 394).

“John speaks for Averroes, but like Alfarabi…. In disputing on junction with the separate substances, John [recovers] the program of the Parisian scholastics of the 1240s, where it was a matter of completing Aristotle with the Book of Causes, Avicenna, and Alfarabi…. John holds that the acquisition of the agent intellect does not take place on the level of the intellection of the pure intelligible. For John that is only a stage that rehearses (and does not crown) an ascent to the supreme intelligible. As a consequence, what Averroes poses — i.e., that once joined to the agent intellect, which has become for us our form in act, we ‘effectuate by it the action that is proper to it’, John interprets according to a model that is not Averroes’ own, a cosmological and emanationist model of thought in which it is via the agent intelligence, the lowest of the separate Intelligences, that the human soul accedes to the superior forms and to God. Adeptio is the necessary condition of a re-ascent into being, which according to him is involved in the cosmic gradation of forms between the first Cause and the world of bodies. At the end of her first journey, that of theoretical apprenticeship that ends in the abstraction of the intelligible of the world, the human thinks the agent intellect, then the nearest immaterial substance of a superior degree, and so on. In this way, knowledges that mimic in their order the causal articulation of these substances that pilot the world are assembled in a chain. As a consequence, adeptio is not the last word of noetics. It inaugurates metaphysics, passing the preliminary that is abstractive knowledge. For John, the ‘acquired intellect’ represents a kind of extreme point of two worlds” (pp. 395-396, emphasis in original).

“Averroes nonetheless does not mean this. The formal junction with the agent intellect for him equates to an immediate and total access to the pure intelligible. Under these conditions, how are we to understand the fact that John insists on a progressive ascent, when the text he is reading seems to be satisfied with a direct union with the principle of thought. And what sense should we give to this difference?” (p. 396).

Here for once John’s view sounds more plausible than the one attributed to Averroes. Nothing in Aristotle is “immediate and total”. Plato too is more careful. Immediacy and totality are inventions of later monotheistic theology, belonging to the same order as miracles and omnipotence.

“The term ‘adeptio‘ (Arabic istifada…) is Farabian [from al-Farabi] in origin, and for the Second Master designates the state of ‘acquired’ intellect (‘adeptus‘ or ‘acquisitus‘ in other translations), that has arrived at the ultimate degree of its achievement, where the agent intellect becomes form for the intellect said to be in act, itself a form of the potential intellect. This ‘acquired’ intellect is at the same time identical to the agent intellect, and different from it in that it is the realization of it in the human. At the same time that it is the highest form of the human, it is also contiguous, in the emanationist hierarchy of beings, to the last in the order of separate forms, the agent intellect that is the tenth and last of the celestial Intelligences emanated from the One. This characteristic allowed thought that ascends to the intelligible not to have the stage of ‘acquisition’ as its ultimate term. Rather it was possible, using it as a springboard, to ascend beyond the most eminent of the forms related to matter, to ascend, stage by stage, the whole hierarchy of the separate Intelligences, even to the contemplation of the One, even if this idea is only suggested by Alfarabi, for reasons no doubt related to religious censure. On the other hand, for Averroes, who repudiated the emanationist system of the oriental philosophers, the notion of ‘acquired intellect’ could no longer have this significance. In fact the Cordovan sometimes uses the notion of adeptio for his own proper account, as a synonym pure and simple of the continuatio-copulatio [two key terms for the relation between intellect and the soul in the Latin translation of Averroes], and sometimes in a polemical context he refers to the Farabian sense of the term, in order to reject its pertinence and to deny that ‘acquisition’ is a stage of the actuality of intellect distinct from ‘junction with the agent intellect’, the ultimate end of human knowledge. But precisely, it seems that John of Jandun could not measure the consequences of Averroes’ break with the emanationist model of Farabian origin” (pp. 397-398).

”John’s misunderstanding is explained if we refer back to the idea of an intellect ‘coming from outside’ or ‘acquired from outside’, of which Aristotle speaks in [The Generation of Animals] II 3, as well as the Arabic tradition that was the outcome of the Greek reading posed by Alexander of Aphrodisias in his [On the Intellect]. For the latter, the extrinsic intellect is the agent intellect of Aristotle. Otherwise said, it is strictly the same intellect, but under another name. An error was introduced in the Arabic text of Alexander, which gives aql mustafad (literally ‘acquired intellect’) for nous o thurathen [intellect from outside]” (p. 398).

“Alfarabi gave this notion a sense that it did not have, that of the final perfection of the human, delivered by the agent intellect but distinct from it…. We progress from the acquired intellect to the agent intellect, from the agent intellect to the immediately superior celestial intelligence, etc., up to the First. But for Ibn Rushd [Averroes] it doesn’t go the same” (p. 399).

“For John of Jandun, the Rushdian theory of formal junction to the agent intellect is overcome by another doctrine, of Farabian inspiration, of the ascension of the ladder of the separate beings” (p. 400). “According to John of Jandun, Aristotle defines human happiness as an actus sapientiae, as the act of theoretical wisdom that consists in contemplating the divine realities, God and the separate beings” (p. 401).

“John deduces that Aristotle and Averroes do not strictly speak of the same thing, and proposes to articulate their two positions. He does this by distinguishing two modes of knowledge, two ways the human can have the knowledge of the supreme substance that is God. The first is an intuitive and simple knowledge of the divine quiddity. The second, more rich, more extended, is discursive…. Adeptio is an example of the first, and the actus sapientiae the second…. Relative to the other intuitive knowledges, it certainly constitutes the final degree, but it is only a preparatory stage for the ultimate knowledge that the metaphysician obtains when he demonstratively unfolds the folded ensemble of the essential characters of God” (p. 402).

It is noteworthy that John treats discursive knowledge as higher than intuitive knowledge. I hold this to be true for both Plato and Aristotle, as well as for Kant and Hegel.

“Each in their order, these two stages constitute maximal goods. But they remain ordered toward the accomplishment of a discursive knowledge of the divine essence, the only absolute felicity” (p. 404).

For John, “The achieved state is not the work of anyone in particular. The perfection of knowledge is not the lot benefiting an elite. It is not a privilege. It is not simply incarnated: the totality of philosophical knowledge only results from the integration of partial knowledges. One could thus compare knowledge to the silver in circulation on the earth: this silver is indeed a sum, a capital in which humanity partakes, but never the wealth of one alone. Indeed philosophy is not reserved for the fine flower of humanity, it is not this activity that divides the humans and separates their species in two (the brutes and the simple thinkers on one side, the philosophers on the other); on the contrary, it is the fruit that engenders the combination of their efforts” (p. 424, emphasis in original).

This anti-elitist conception is another aspect of John that I find admirable.

“Almost at the same time, this idea of a collective actualization of intellect is found in the Monarchia of Dante. The latter posed that there is an end common to every human society, the universal end of the human species to which God has destined it by nature. It is a matter of a ‘proper operation’, an operation, ‘which lends itself neither to the individual alone nor to the family alone, nor to the town, nor the city, nor the realm taken apart from others’. What is it? Constantly reducing to act all the power of the possible intellect. Knowledge by this intellect is in effect the specific activity of the human species: outside of the human there are only being, life, and sensation that serve minerals, plants, and animals just as well; and above them the intellectual nature of God and the separate substances has something particular so that it is never potential but always in act; there is only a self-knowledge that is never eclipsed. As a consequence, only the human is in potentiality to knowing; and only the ensemble of human beings accomplishes it” (p. 425).

“In reality two things are posed, and this is the central thesis of the Monarchia that profoundly distinguishes Dante from John of Jandun: the participation of all the humans is necessary to actualize the possible intellect’s power of thinking, and to allow humanity to attain its end; but this ‘multitude’ is only possible in ‘peace’. No peace, no universal human society; and only the ‘temporal monarchy’ is capable of eliminating wars. As R. Imbach notes, this means that the actualization of the possible intellect in Dante not only has a social dimension, it has a ‘political dimension’. It is by the just political organization of the world that the human comes to attain her proper end at every instant: the perfection of knowledge, because it is from the monarchy that humankind acquires the power to think in common” (pp. 425-426).

This political dimension was somewhat similarly developed by John’s friend Marsilius of Padua.

“Dante takes from Aristotle’s Politics how to conceive this last point, but it is to the Long Commentary of Averroes on the treatise On the Soul that he makes reference, when he maintains that the (possible) intellect cannot remain in potentiality…. The philosophy of Averroes in effect marks a rupture with the fundamentally neoplatonic attitude that sustained the conception of intellectual perfection among his Arabo-Moslem predecessors. For Averroes, the existence of the community is a necessary condition for the existence and maintenance of philosophy” (p. 426).

It is this dimension of Averroes that inspires Marsilius and Dante.

“What Averroes confronted was an Islamo-Andalusian tradition of praise of philosophical ‘solitude’, illustrated in his time by Avempace [Ibn Bajjah] (d. 1139), then in an undoubtedly more radical way by Averroes’ elder the doctor Ibn Tufayl, in the novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan…. It is with this conception, and those who maintain it, that Averroes resolutely breaks….The community participates in the achievement of philosophy” (p. 427-428).

This too I find quite admirable. It is not individual genius but dialogue and discourse that grounds philosophy.

“On the question of thought, [in John] the doctrine of Averroes certainly meets its demise almost in its totality. John retains almost nothing: neither his conception of the accomplishment of intelligere, nor that of its attribution, nor that of its final perfection. But two new ideas, at least, proceeded from this decomposition. The first is the more powerful, without doubt, and it determined John’s philosophical production: it is that of the individual who experiences herself as the author of a thought produced in herself. But second is beautiful, asssuredly, and it concludes this part: if it is no longer a question of the subordination of society to a group of people in whom total knowledge is incarnated, it is that of an immanence to the human species of its proper destiny” (p. 432).

“According to [John], subiectum in the case of the image does not mean ‘support’ for Averroes but ‘object’; the image is the mover of the species and not vice versa. He judges incomplete the first opinion: that the human individual does not think only because her image is the cause of thought, or of the intelligible species; but he rejects the other absolutely: the image is not the place of thought, one of its two places, and it is not such a localization that gives reason, according to the Commentator, either for individuation or for the attribution of intelligere. This second critique revolves around a fundamental passage of the Long Commentary. We have read it closely to bring out three things. First, there are reasons that justify the Rushdian formula of the duo subiecta [two subjects] of thought. Here we can see the lexical trace of a youthful theory, since the Cordovan took from Avempace the idea that images are spiritual forms serving as a substrate for the intelligibles in each individual. But we must recognize above all that the idea of the ‘two subjects’ or, more precisely, the designation of the image as subiectum, was grounded in the very letter of the De Anima of Aristotle. Certainly Averroes elaborates in his manner the Aristotelian analogy between intellection and sensation, combining in a single paragraph elements that the De Anima treats separately, but it remains that it is in the Stagirite that we find the term hupokeimenon used for the sensed ‘object’, and that he indeed would agree that the subiectum of the Long Commentary should not be weighed down with a local determination it absolutely does not have. If Averroes maintains that conceiving by the intellect is accomplished by the intermediary of the ‘two subjects’, it is above all because, like Aristotle, he compares the intellective process to sensation, and because he reads in the De Anima that the sensible is subiectum. The latter designates the object of sensation; in the same way that the image is the mover of thought, and not its receptor. Besides, in the Long Commentary, the rupture with Avempace is explicit: the image is the subject-mover of the universal in act, and only the material intellect receives it. It is absolutely not a question of a bilocation of the intelligible. If we speak of a substrate, the intentio intellecta has but one, the (material) intellect; and the fact that the intelligible is in potentiality in the image in the Long Commentary has nothing to do with the determination of that image as subiectum. Also, Averroes never claimed that the intelligible species was in the image, its subject of inherence, and that the human by this comes to thinking in person. In making the image one of the subjects of thought, he did not designate a sub-jection of the intelligible in it, any more than he intended to conceive of a transitive subjection of that intelligible in the human as support of images. The model of the duo subiecta has no worth from the Rushdian point of view if we do not systematically assimilate subject and substrate. His ‘theory’ of the two subjects is not a topic. His idea of individual intellection is not governed, on the basis of a conception of the image-substrate, by a theory of the human as hupokeimenon of thought.”

“As a result, it appeared clearly how the Latin misinterpretation by other important authors such as Herve de Nedellec and Durand de Saint-Pourcain was situated…. And paradoxically, the solution they opposed to the doctrine of Averroes appears intimately related to the principle their erroneous critique had extracted from him, that is, the idea that the human only thinks by being in a certain manner the subject of thought. This is the second thing we have raised. Where Averroes problematizes the question of the noetic subject of thoughts (the ‘problem of Theophrastus’, which bears on the being of the material intellect, related elsewhere to that of the intellective process within which the image-subject is the mover of the concept, his Latin critics believed they read a theory of the bilocation of the intelligible that made the human who imagines a second ‘substrate’ of thought, having from this position the possibility of thinking in her own right. In fact this was inexact, and in any case the Latins contested that that would be possible in the system of the Commentator; but the problem of the human subject of thought had emerged” (pp. 440-441, emphasis in original).

“This suspended the question of the attribution of intellection in favor of the human as substrate of that act: this the Latins will hold onto, in order to maintain that the human only thinks if she herself is the subject of thought, or if some part of her can be (which from their point of view implied that intellect could not be separate and unique, as in the Rushdian system). Thus authors like Herve or Durand denied that the system of Averroes could satisfy the principle of [what Heidegger callled] subjectity, insofar as intellect was cut off from the humans and the image could not serve as the place of the universal, but they were re-launching for themselves the principle that their misinterpretation had quite simply invented” (p. 441, emphasis in original).

“[John’s] displacement appeared remarkable to us: while he with good reason notes a misinterpretation of the word ‘subject’, applied to the image, he seems nonetheless to subscribe to their principle, produced in this faulty reading, requiring of the human that she be the subject of thought in order to think in her own right. And this is the sense of his inclusion of intellect in the thinking human, of his partition of the human being that repatriated the receptor of thoughts for each, insofar as she thinks. This ‘recentering’ as well is only the first face of a new idea cut in reality from two sides. Averroes’ theory of continuatio is in effect reinscribed in another disposition; it is rethought as a theory of productio. Averroes writes that the human thinks in the measure that she joins herself to the intelligible in act by her images (which constitute potentially the formal part), but John translates that the human thinks insofar as she produces the act of thinking, and that intellect is thus aggregated to her; she produces it in herself: my thought is through and through made in me” (pp. 442-443).

As I have noted before, this kind of creative misinterpretation anticipates (what I would call the error of) Descartes with his cogito.

“Although he aims to save the Long Commentary from the Latin attacks that castigate the inability of the Cordovan to rationally ground the psychological fact, the Parisian master, inheritor of the quarrel between Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant, constituted a theory that finally differed in nearly all respects from that of Averroes, and which left behind the two ‘canonical’ models of ecstasy or of ‘prolongation’. It was a complex theory, as witnessed by his use of denomination (‘thinking’ denominates the individual at the same time as subject, by ‘her’ intellect, and as cause, by her image). It is also a theory that we willingly call Latin, where in the field of psychology there is imposed a certain articulation between ‘human’ and ‘subject’ that other thinkers (William of Auvergne, Peter Olivi) had already in their manner put in place. In defending the idea of the human aggregate, in integrating intellect into the human, in posing that the thinking human is active and that it is within herself that she produces her thought, John of Jandun, the prince of the Averroists, is effectively in solidarity with the sliding, on Latin ground, that transformed the question of the noetic subject of thought into that of its personal or human subject. How did ‘subject’ become so to speak the privilege, indeed exclusive, of the human? To this question that Heidegger posed, the study of the Averroist crisis from now on provides an entirely new response” (p. 443).

“Finally, after the study of the theory of intelligere and that of continuatio, we passed to the transfer affecting the theory of adeptio, the ultimate junction with the separate beings and with God. In John’s re-reading it is in the responses to a series of objections that the transformation it is subjected to becomes manifest. On four major points, the Rushdian doctrine of perfection is undone and re-done otherwise: the necessity of the image, once the stage of theoretical accomplishement has been attained; the rapport of the two intellects with one another, when one is acquired by the other; the after-junction, i.e. the passage of the intellect adeptus to the thought of the pure intelligibles; and finally, the harmony of the adeptio of Averroes with the actus sapientiae of Aristotle” (ibid).

“John is hesitant at first where it concerns knowing whether it is still necessary to imagine once we have come to think perfectly. He responds in the affirmative, no doubt because he does not conceive the ultimate junction as a stable state but as a transitory contact that it is necessary to regain each time. He makes a great effort to clearly conceptualize intellectual access to adeptio, and notably to reconcile the abstractive process expounded in the Long Commentary (which leads to perfect junction by abstraction from all the mundane intelligible) with that presented in the commentaries on the Physics, where we pass from caused movement to the moving intelligences, i.e. to the pure forms. On the question of the relation between the two intellects, agent and possible, he develops a theory of the self-knowledge of intellect: it is in the order of knowledge and not that of being that the information of one by the other progresses, such that there is ‘acquisition’ when the intellect knows itself perfectly” (p. 443-444).

“John is led in his exposition to alter the text of Averroes: on the one hand, and it is the effect of the disputes to which he was contemporary. He introduces distinctions that are not found there: the ontological and gnoseological relations between the two intellectus, the intellect taken insofar as it is separate and insofar as it is united to us, the different phases of auto-reflection (the reception of the species, then the consideration of the species, then that of its receptive power, then that of the substantial subject of that power, etc.); on the other hand there slips away from him in his interpretation of a capital text on the continuity of knowledge a fundament of the Rushdian noetics: the position of the existence of the philosopher. He thus develops a different theory of ‘acquisition’ from that of Averroes. Besides, the term adeptio was not completely suitable to the doctrine of the Commentator, and this lexical floating equates in reality to a sliding of the foundation. On the question of the after-junction, in fact John is more Farabian. He opts for an ascent of the ladder of separate beings, on the basis of the acquired intellect conceived as a springboard for ascending by stages up to God. Indeed he aggregates to the Rushdian model of theoretical accomplishment another model, in solidarity with an emanationist conception of the universe that relegates to second-class status the formal junction to the agent intellect, the latter perceived as nothing more than a means, a preparation for the enjoyment of a yet greater intellectual perfection. This evidently has effects on his conception of happiness: on its nature, its sharing, its possibility, as well as on the harmonization one could make of the Long Commentary of Averroes with the Nicomachean Ethics or the Metaphysics of Aristotle. John posits that adeptio is not the ultimate degree of beatitude, but solely that it conditions the discursive practice of metaphysics, which concerns the essential predicates of God. The completely happy human is the metaphysician of Aristotle, who must, in order to be such, have known the acquisition of which Averroes speaks. As a result, John develops a typology of happiness that distinguishres between the successes that the individual knows according to the stages of her ascent. In this process, the direct junction to the agent intellect and the fiducia philosphantium [philosophical faith] have only a relative value for the human” (p. 444).

“The end of the analysis again changes what is given. When John disputes on the sharing of ‘felicity’, he says it is difficult to earn, notably by reason of the moral exigence that places the intelligent life above the right life and its severe discipline; but it is nonetheless possible, and it is necessary to see what is proper to the philosopher, to whom falls the premier place among the humans of the city. Nonetheless, when John passes to the explication of a strong proposition of the Commentator, who maintains, he writes, that ‘philosophy is always perfect in the major part of its subject’, he concludes that the ‘subject’ of accomplished philosophy designates the humans, and that there is not — or so rarely that one returns like the mythical phoenix — an individually perfect philosopher. Only philosophy is complete at every moment, if we add together all the particular knowledges of individuals on the earth. Against the eventuality of personal successes, John indeed opts for the idea of an ahistorical totality, without progress, complete in permanence, which confers to science a conservative or patrimonial dimension: philosophy is actualized collectively, from all eternity, if we integrate the sum of partial knowledges. Whatever we may fear, the spirits never desert to the point that the number of brutes surpasses the number of thinkers. After having constructed a theory of individual intellection in solidarity with the Latin problematization of that intellect that makes the human the ‘subject’ of thought, and having at the same time completely decomposed the theory of the continuatio that Averroes develops, John makes humans the ‘subject’ of philosophy, and undermines one of the basic principles of [Averroes’] doctrine of the ultimate perfection: the necessary and permanent existence of the philosopher. Surrounded by professionals like himself, John of Jandun is probably beholden to the theoretical model of the universitas, and to the distinction dear to the artists [secular professors] of the end of the 13th century, between the unity of truth and the fragmentation of knowledges. No doubt he did not have the idea of a philosopher-king like Averroes with his imam-philosopher. If specialization is the grand word of the thought of the university (and there was no Almohad university), John finishes here with the thesis of the integration of partial knowledges, which acquires a striking anti-elitist bearing and excludes making the ‘artist’ the metonymy of the philosopher, on a ‘globalized’ vision of philosophical actualization, inspired not only by this or that scholastic debate but, more profoundly again, by the institutional framework that was his own” (pp. 444-445).

So he adds both an unfortunate conservative dimension and a laudable anti-elitism.

“In displacing the question of the noetic subject, to the point of losing it in that other problem of the intellect forma corporis [form of the body], in ruining, without having been able to demonstrate the intellectual illumination of the phantasm, that of his imaginary subject, and finally in articulating as he does ‘human’ and ‘subject’, sometimes for producing a theory of individual intellection that slides from the concept of junction to that of internal production, sometimes for saving the idea of a total accomplishment of knowledge that integrates the fragmentary participations of each, John of Jandun properly annihilated the Long Commentary of the Cordovan. The epigones, we know, are not always the most faithful to the masters they claim to serve. We have said also, from the beginning, that John is not Rushdian. But here the division is abyssal” (pp. 445-446).

“Contrary to what [the great 20th-century Thomist] Gilson could allow to be understood, the emancipation of philosophy in the 14th century is not entirely made in the form of a condemnation (or abandonment) of Aristotelianism. Gilson saw in the current incarnated by John of Jandun a frankly ‘conservative’ movement, or ‘an obstinate and limited Aristotelianism’. The description of the ‘transferences of the subject’ has seemed to show us the contrary” (p. 448).

Typical modernist historiography fails to recognize things like the existence of an “emancipation of philosophy in the 14th century”. On this point, I have to sympathize with the Thomists. However, Brenet also points out a notably anti-Aristotelian element in 20th-century neo-Thomist historiography that is in accordance with both traditional theological and modernist anti-Aristotelian prejudice. In the modern period, there has often been a sort of unprincipled bloc of theologians and modernists, who in this regard are united only by their quite differently motivated hostilities to Aristotle. Brenet finishes by remarking that his investigations have also shown “how philosophy continued to advance within Aristotelianism, and not (or not only) against it” (p. 449, emphasis in original).

“The question of the subject does not exist, any more in the modern epoch than in this period of the Middle Age. We have been able to see, on the other hand, what problem of the subiectum applied to the human (what determination or assumption of the individual as subject) is posed in [John’s] rearticulation of the Rushdian noetic. A question of the human subject of thoughts arises, which requires that [what Heidegger called] subjectity place itself in the human (and for some, already, in ‘the’ me), if we want to accurately reflect intellectual personality” (p. 448, emphasis in original).

Turn to a Subject

This continues a reading of Jean-Baptiste Brenet’s Transferts du Sujet (2003). Up to now, broader themes related to the common modern assumption that there must be a univocal “Subject” behind all the varied appearances and experience of subjectivity have remained mostly in the background. Now they are beginning to move to center stage. How did we get to a point where it seems natural to attribute all our particular thoughts, feelings, and perceptions to a tight unity called “the Subject”?

Plato famously likens the soul’s unity to the rather loose one of a city. Meanwhile the Aristotelian word translated as “subject” (hupokeimenon) has no specifically psychological meaning. It is a much more general logical term that applies to anything that in a quasi-syntactic way “stands under” something else. Brenet uses the Heideggerian term “subjectity” to distinguish this older meaning.

Augustine insists on the active character of the soul, as an image of God and analogue of the Trinity. Contrary to Aristotle, he attributes an immediate reflexivity to the soul or mind. But he sharply rejects the idea that the soul or mind is a “subject” (subiectum). Augustine argues that this would make things like knowledge and love inhere in us as mere properties or predicates.

But in the 13th century, the Latin translation of Averroes’ Long Commentary on Aristotle on the soul raised the question what is the Aristotelian “subject” of thought? Augustine’s followers began to insist on exactly what Augustine rejected. This is the point at which the term “subject” acquired a psychological meaning. Brenet points out its adoption by the Augustinian William of Auvergne, whose work Brenet previously translated to French.

“[W]hen the reading of Averroes began, the notion of ‘subject’ was already on the scene. An exemplary witness is the work of William of Auvergne, bishop of Paris between 1228 and 1249. William asserts not only that the human soul is the ‘subject’ of thought, but that it knows itself reflexively as ‘subject’…. [I]t is the knowledge that it knows, and the knowledge that it knows as the subject of knowledge. This is not a deduction that from acts of knowledge oriented toward objects conjectures the existence of a power serving as their substrate, but indeed the knowledge of the self as that subject” (Brenet, Transferts du sujet, p. 333, emphasis added, my translation throughout).

According to Brenet, William takes up Avicenna’s metaphor of the flying man. “If since birth a man were suspended in the air, without use of any of the senses, he will nonetheless necessarily think, and think of himself as thinking, as a spiritual substance, as receptor and substrate of the intellectual forms. Besides the recurrence of the word subiectum, attributed to the soul in this spiritualist conception of the human, the great interest of William of Auvergne’s psychology lies in the combination he makes of this notion of ‘subject’ with the dynamic one of ‘agent principle’ (principium agens). The thinking soul in effect is not pure passivity…. It must be actrix and effectrix…. (this is why William, a firm adherent of the principle of the indivisibility of the soul, rejects the division within it of an agent intellect and a receiving intellect). The sensible is nothing but an occasion for an immanent act of intellection, which excites the soul to produce its own proper concepts from itself and within itself. William cites the joint authority of Augustine and Boethius here…. When it thinks itself, as a result the soul apprehends itself as the receptacle of a self-engendered knowledge; it is like the water of the sea or a river that welcomes the fish to which it gives birth” (p. 334).

“This is a captivating double aspect for us: first of all because, having been said of the human in a fundamental sense (the human is her soul, and it is first of all as subject….), the subiectum in William of Auvergne is intimately related to an idea that our modernity retains: an active power of foundation, a causal determination of acts…. Secondly, because William of Auvergne injects the concept of the subject into an Augustinian analysis of cognitive processes or of spiritual knowledge that a priori does not tolerate it. We know in effect that Augustine rejects the model of ‘subject’ as support of accidents, for thinking the relation that is maintained between the spirit and its faculties” (pp. 334-335).

Brenet summarizes the view of Augustine:

“The spirit knows that it understands and thinks, it knows itself entirely in its proper substance; and it is not as ‘subject’ that it is present to itself; it is that being of which the very essence is to know itself; it is not as attributes that its spiritual powers are manifested, since they each reveal to the spirit its own being or substance. Neither intelligence, nor memory, nor will, etc., is a quality in the spirit, inhering in it. The spirit is made in the image of God, who in the proper sense does not subsist (God is not susceptible to being the subject of accidents that affect their bearer). It is the model of the Trinity itself that allows the relation of the faculties and the spirit to be thought. That is to say, the circumincession of the Persons, or perichoresis (perichoresis being the mutual immanence of the Persons of the Trinity)” (pp. 335-336).

“It is thus necessary to think the relation of the powers to the spirit as like that which the divine Persons have to God. In the ‘perichoretic model’, to take up the expression of Alain de Libera, the spirit and its faculties, while being distinct from one another, are essentially one. The paradigm of inherence of qualities in the subject is indeed inoperative in this context, and its rejection leads to the expulsion of the Aristotelian notion of hupokeimenon [underlying thing] from the field of psychology” (p. 336).

“From this angle, William of Auvergne’s theory of the soul breaks the project that wants to be Augustinian at the heart. In elucidating the unity of the mens [Augustinian “mind”] with the subiectum, that is to say the infallible intuition that gives the soul knowledge of itself as ‘subject’, the Parisian bishop did much more than enrich a vocabulary. He crossed two models that the Middle Age up to that time had kept distinct: a theory of the me as clear presence to self, and a theory of the subiectum as being sub-jacent. He introduced subjectity in the soul, and conferred on the thinking human, active in this production, the new status of support of mental acts” (pp. 336-337).

“Having once raised the preceding considerations, we can better appreciate the anti-Averroist solutions of Durand de Saint-Pourcain and Herve Nedellec, who both affirm that the human thinks only as subject of the intellective act…. Before the problem posed to the Latins by the duo subiecta [two subjects] of Averroes, there was already question of the human-subject of thought” (p. 337).

“What effectively characterizes the anti-Averroist conception that John of Jandun confronted, and what is progressively put in place, is a new articulation of ‘human’ and ‘subject’…. It is not only a matter of saying, like William of Auvergne, that the soul is the subject of intellectual sciences, and that it thinks itself as such. It is not only a matter of posing, with Thomas Aquinas, that that by which the human thinks can only be her substantial form. It is necessary from now on to ensure, like Durand de Saint-Pourcain and Herve de Nedellec do, that the human can only be thought in her status as subject of the intellective act” (ibid).

“One says not only that the human thinks, and that she is the subject of her thought, but that she thinks insofar as she is the subject, on this condition alone. ‘Subject’ is not the term that one predicates of the thinking human (in supposing the necessity of a sub-jective power, assuring the possession of acts of knowledge), neither is it how she intuits herself, but rather it is the very thing on which the propriety of her acts in thought depends. Otherwise said, it is less the appearance of the subiectum in the field of psychology that we remark on here, than its place in the anti-Averroist project of the Latins. The notion of subject, applied to the human, becomes the centerpiece of the offensive. Where did this come from? What authority justifies that one has recourse to a ‘subject’ in the conceptual construction of these responses? None other than that, evidently paradoxical, of the Long Commentary itself. It is from the text of Averroes that the Latins take the idea that they oppose to him” (p. 338, emphasis in original; see “This Human Understands”; “This Human”, Again; Averroes as Read by de Libera).

“The faulty reading of the theory of ‘junction’ and of the duo subiecta brought about the appearance of two things: on the one hand the attribution to the human, by the inclination of her images, of the title of subiectum; on the other hand the idea that the individuality of thought depends on this status. This is to say, combining the two: that the human only comes to think under her subjective condition, insofar as she is subject, if not of thought, at least of the intelligible species that lead to it. It is this articulation that the Latins preserve, while denying that it can be realized in the system of Averroes. They denounce in him the impossibility of a thing whose importance was invented by their misunderstanding. It is in the work of the Cordovan, interpreted crookedly, that this adjunction was brought out that was supposed to rationally justify the multiplicity of acts of intellection, in spite of the unity of the intellect” (ibid).

“As a consequence, the pivotal role of this transposition of subjectity into the human is not attacked, any more than it is in Thomas Aquinas. When the Aquinate reproaches Averroes for making the human only a being that is thought, and not a thinking one, in truth he has no issue with it being said that the image is the ‘subject’ of the intelligibles, and indeed with the placement of the human so that she thinks as the subject of universal species: he does not contest the idea of the human-subject, but the fact that reason is given for a doctrine in which individual images, and ultimately the individual herself, are nothing but furniture for the act of intellect. Averroes claims that the thinking human is (also), by means of her images, subject of the intelligible, but this is theoretically impossible for him, since the image has to be abstracted and by it, in it, the human can receive nothing of the universal” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Brenet is not saying that images and the individual are mere furniture for Averroes, but recalling that according to Aquinas’ critique, they would be.

“In fact, Aquinas does not insist on the term subiectum — which after a few years became, notably among other Dominicans, a decisive philosophical element that was believed to take Averroes at the stronghold of his own logic, and show that it is incapable of satisfying its principal postulate: contrary to what [Averroes] says, the human is not the subject of the intellecta in actu, and the intellect in which the intelligibles are truly subjected has nothing to do with the human or the individual” (pp. 338-339).

“When we look at the 70 years that separate the entry of the Long Commentary into the Latin language from the intellectual activity of John of Jandun, we are as it were constrained to ask why the notion of ‘subject’ came to play a preponderant role in regulating the problem of the individuality of thought. Why is it all based on a certain arrangement of the triad human-subject-thought? How, in the paradoxical opposition to the noetics of Averroes, did the matter of intellectual individuation become in part constituted or effectuated in the University as the question of the subject? The idea of the human as subject of acts of thought was not the already available counter-argument, and the evolution of formulae from Thomas Aquinas to Durand de Saint-Pourcain or Herve Nedellec is revelatory of the intense elaboration that took place, up to the vindication of a human subjectity for thought” (p. 339).

“While Averroes posed the question of the noetic subject of thought, the Latins, based on his text, problematized that of its personal or human subject. This came down to transposing subjectity into the human, to placing into the terrain of subjectity, insofar as it is human, the problem of the humanity of thought, that of her individuation, that of thought’s appropriation by singular persons” (p. 340).

“This human who thinks, Socrates, is the body composed with intellect: an aggregate, a whole that unites the soul that cogitates and that which thinks. When thought is produced, intellect is not only a separate intelligence whose act passes on occasion by the intermediary of human images and is joined by humans who are humans without that; on the contrary, ‘it’ enters into the definition of each person. Even if in a non-substantial way, ‘it’ is constitutive of what individuals think. Otherwise said: in its separation, intellect is a part of the thinking human; and from this angle the humanity of the latter participates as ‘intrinsic operator’ that exists as her form” (p. 341).

“Thomas Aquinas says that a thing only acts by its form? John of Jandun too! Durand de Saint-Pourcin says that an individual can only think if the subject of thought is aliquid hominis [something human]? John of Jandun too! Certainly they don’t strictly understand the same thing: because this form and this subject are for John an ‘intrinsic operator’ without substantial support, because it raises an issue for personal immortality, etc.; no one denies the importance of these disagreements. Nonetheless, John shares this idea that it is necessary to include intellect in the human, and not only unite the latter to thought. We can see the effect of [Siger of Brabant’s] De anima intellectiva, but not only that; it is the effect of a previous Latin problematization that poses the subjection of the concept in the human as the condition of her proper thought. One could say also: which required that intellect in its entirety be an intellective soul. If we say that Averroes decentered the subject, John of Jandun recentered it: this thought is mine if that which it operates as thought is ‘of’ me” (ibid).

I have frequently commented on the non-Aristotelian character of the common scholastic term “intellective (or intellectual) soul”. Here we see its motivation.

“With Siger of Brabant, John constructs his response in two stages: he shows first that intellect-operans intrinsicum, along with the body, is a part of the thinking human; then, playing anew with the cosmologico-noetic analogy, that the act of a part can be referred back to its whole. On the basis of the human-aggregatum, the second function of the celestial comparison is in effect to indicate that the act of a part can be attributed to the composite — a way of maintaining with Aristotle that ‘it is the human, by her soul’ who thinks, and not only the soul” (p. 342).

“Vision is only in the eye, in the organ that receives the seen, and nonetheless we say that the human sees…. When the human thinks, the intellect is operans intrinsicum for her” (p. 344).

“In his questions on the Metaphysics, John defends the idea of an effective unity, a unity realized by the production of an effect” (p. 346).

“The exclusivity of human being follows from the affinity that the cogitative, the best of the sensory faculties, has with intellect” (p. 349). “The intellect does not abstract the brute image, the image of brutes, it requires a preliminary refinement…. The human intellective soul is the first of the separate forms, the most distant from the First, and the cogitative is the last and most spiritual of material forms” (p. 350).

“More exactly, without the existence of bodies the intellect cannot accomplish its end, which is the thought of the pure intelligibles, junction with the separate beings and with God” (p. 352). “Without the body, which conditions the engenderment of the intellect in habitu, the intellect, deprived of adeptio, cannot really be intellect…. Intellect depends on the human species, conceived as an uninterrupted succession of multiple supports of images, and not on this or that one in particular” (p. 353).

“The cogitative is a sensitive soul, the perishable form numbered with the humans, inherent to the body. It is its individual proper form, which also constitutes its specificity. Moreover, and without contradiction (on the contrary, because the order of the universe requires it), the human has a second substantial perfection, which is aggregated to her body in thought…. The human is not only a cogitating body, the bodily individual, but the whole formed by the operative unity of intellect with the body” (p. 357).

“For one who asserts that the possible intellect is unique, it remains to find solely in the particular organic faculties of humans the reason justifying the diversity of their thoughts” (pp. 358-359).

“A human thinks if she produces the act of thinking…. [T]he vocabulary of junction is succeeded by that of production, and the idea of a continuatio with the intelligible in act is succeeded by that of a production of the intellective act itself” (p. 361). “It is in the individual herself that thought is produced, and it is the internal dimension of its engenderment that makes a thought her own…. In estimating that junction with the intelligible in act is equivalent to production of the act of thought, that this production is the act of the human and that it occurs within her, John distances himself [from Averroes]” (p. 363). “John’s position coincides on an essential point with the anti-Averroist theses of certain great doctors of the School…. In spite of all their oppositions, John supposes no different thing: the human produces thought, and it occurs in her” (p. 364). “More generally, the act of intellect is attributed ‘denominatively’ to the human, in the measure that the last is in some way the cause” (p. 366).

“What governs the question of individual thought is not a doctrine of continuatio like that of Averroes: it is the idea of an intellectual production founded on a theory of the ‘subject’: a theory of the human as subject of the actus intelligendi, such as is elaborated at nearly the same time, in thinkers like Durand de Saint-Pourcin or Herve Nedellec” (p. 368).

Next in this series: Adeptio

Cogitation, Intention

“Besides access to the five senses and the common sense, the cogitative faculty in effect has a power proper to it, to know ‘non-sensible intentions‘. John of Jandun adopts a formula of Avicenna, which he read in Albert [the Great]. These non-sensible intentions are non-sensible properties of the things we sense. These are ‘properties’ of individuals, precisely those of things, and not general notions…. All that particularizes a thing and places me in a situation before it is not limited to what the external senses passively apprehend…. That which is sensed does not exhaust the properties [of the thing], and it is the charge of a faculty like the cogitative to know what the senses do not know” (Brenet, Transferts du sujet, p. 245, my translation throughout).

“Common” sense in Aristotle has to do with coordination of the five particular external senses, and especially with identification of objects and properties that affect more than one sense. His brief mention of internal “sense” was elaborated in the Arabic and Latin traditions to include imagination, memory, and cogitation or estimation. Brenet finds major differences between the accounts of Averroes and the 14th century philosopher John of Jandun, who was supposed by 19th and 20th century scholars to be an uninteresting, uncreative dogmatist who only repeated Averroes.

“Where nonsensible and non-sensed intentions are concerned, memory preserves the reflexive perceptions of the acts of sensation. In effect, I see and I know that I see, I touch and I know that I touch, etc.; that which I touch, I sense; that which I see, I sense; but that I see or that I touch, is not sensible…. A particular sense does not know its own operation, it makes no return upon itself” (p. 270).

This is a somewhat delicate point. It seems that in the course of its work of combining percepts from different particular senses, the common sense can be said to have perception of perceptions, i.e., a kind of second-order perception, that accounts for the reflexive element in experience.

Claims about reflexivity in experience are often overstated, in part because they are expressed as top-down generalities, and because they are used as what Brandom would call an “unexplained explainer”. I prefer Kant and Hegel’s more bottom-up ways of speaking about “reflection”.

Aristotle says in particular that we do not have direct perception of self. Self can only be a “mediate” concept, approached indirectly through the perception of accidents.

“It is the cogitative that ‘tells’ us that Socrates is a father, or a caring father…. The Parisian master holds that the cogitative is the principal of the powers of internal sense, insofar as it knows the non-sensible forms…. Memory retains the intentions known by the cogitative, and for that reason it is called the ‘treasury of intentions'” (p. 246).

On this account, the imagination-based “cogitative faculty” is thus responsible for all of what is commonly called our empirical “knowledge”. The role of “intellect” is only to extract universals from the intermediate abstractions of individuals that cogitation produces.

As background, Brenet develops at length the views of Albert the Great and Averroes on the so-called common and internal senses. On this subject, he says that Albert owes more to Avicenna than to Averroes, and John of Jandun owes more to Albert than to Averroes.

“[John] is close to Albert: the senses do not passively receive the non-sensible intentions” (p. 249).

What are here called nonsensible intentions only exist as constructions or inferences resulting from a kind of activity of the perceiver and knower that is concerned with individuals. In an Aristotelian context, knowledge of individuals is a matter of practical judgment, which is also the kind of judgment used in ethical deliberation. In effect all empirical knowledge is of this kind. Furthermore, our apprehensions of essence are reflectively derived in this same way — ultimately inferred from a consideration of accidents — rather than being simply receptive of “what is”.

“Intentions are accidental percepts. In a first sense, a sensible is called ‘by accident’ if it is not known by a particular sense…. A common sensible, for example size, is not directly suffered by a sense (sight), but it is necessary that we sense it in sensation proper: thus there is no color without a colored surface…. Things go otherwise with intention. On the one hand, the substantial individual Socrates does not as such affect a particular sense, since the only things effectively sensed are the sensible accidents; on the other hand, his relation to what we sense of him is totally contingent…. Here is a first reason for the characterization of the intention … as sensed by accident: it is not suffered, but added fortuitously to what we sense — we judge fortuitously, on the basis of that which we sense. But there is a second: we say of a sensible that it is ‘by accident’, not because it is not known by the senses, if the senses are incapable of knowing it, but if it absolutely speaking escapes from sense as sense” (pp. 249-250).

I would not say that this kind of intention is “totally contingent”, which would imply that it has no objective basis whatsoever. Even “fortuitous” sounds a little strong to me. But the main point here is that these “intentions” are neither axiomatic nor somehow simply given to us.

“The question of the object of the cogitative is decisive for the noetic reading of John of Jandun. It is this faculty that spiritually dominates all the individual powers of the human, and founds her intellectuality. The proper object of this virtue is the intention, which John thinks on the model of the ‘non-sensible properties’ ” (p. 250).

“Otherwise said, I know by my cogitative what it is that makes a human what she is” (p. 252). “The ‘substantial difference’ of the individual or her ‘individual intention’, [John] writes, does not in fact designate her substantial form, but a non-sensed property that follows from her individual substance” (p. 253, emphasis added).

“This all leads John of Jandun to assert that the phantasia of Aristotle — the ymaginatio of Averroes — is made explicit [s’explicite] in the cogitative. And if we want to translate the full sense of the major proposition of the Philosopher, … ‘The intellect does not think without the phantasm of the cogitative‘: the actus phantasiandi in reality is the actualis cogitatio, we do not think without ‘cogitating’ ‘” (p. 254, emphasis in original).

In this way of speaking, imagination in the narrower sense gives us the apparent wholes of experience. Cogitation works upon the details of an imagined whole, allowing us to more clearly re-identify and re-cognize the whole by bringing its characteristic accidents into focus.

“This is again to say that the intelligible species, which proceeds from my phantasms, has nothing eternal about it, is not perpetually subjected in the intellect…. In itself, once again, the intelligible species does not exist. It only persists when the phantasms that cause it persist” (p. 255).

John of Jandun is among those medieval authors who contest the idea that intelligible species come to us directly in any simple way. They are not pre-formed. For him they are our constructs.

“He insists that the intention, which causes the universal, is imagined…. The phantasm, in general again, directly engenders the universal, without the mediation of the agent intellect” (p. 257).

It seems that John wants the eliciting of intentions to be entirely immanent to imagination in the broader sense. Here we are not far from the self-contained cogito of Descartes. “The” cogito is a reification of the immanent activity of the cogitative.

“What is the act of the cogitative? We must not reduce it to the distinction of non-sensed intentions. The cogitative knows all the individual material forms…. The cogitative integrally knows the singular, and each of its phantasms comes back to one of the determinations of the ‘thing’.” (p. 258-259).

In other words, the cogitative subsumes all empirical “knowledge”.

“The imagination receives a sensible form from the common sense; the cogitative knows that same form, but in another mode, for sure always individual, but less sensible: subtilized” (p. 260, emphasis in original).

“Each thought depends systematically on two phantasms: the imaginative and the memorative” (p. 262).

Without imagination, we would have no sense of anything being “present” to us. Without memory, nothing would have coherent connection. These are neither guaranteed to be true nor merely subjective. Here we are in a space in between what is merely subjective, and what is supposed to be objective and unconditionally true.

“What is the ‘passive’ or passible intellect? The Long Commentary [of Averroes] says it is ‘the imaginative faculty'” (p. 265).

In Averroes, the passive or passible “intellect” is a third thing, distinct from both the “agent” and the “material” intellect, and human thought involves all three. According to Brenet, John of Jandun wants to explain human intellect entirely in terms of the immanent imaginative faculty. John rather forcibly reads this view into Averroes, who would have rejected it as one-sided.

“Ymaginatio in Averroes has a specific sense and a generic sense. The first properly concerns the faculty that receives sensible forms from the senses, one of the faculties of internal sense. The second on the other hand has a much larger extension, and stands for the ensemble of these faculties, as well as their combination” (ibid).

“It is not upon the image in a strict sense — that is to say, upon the block of percepts that the imagination holds in reserve — that the agent intellect operates to extract the intelligible, but upon the product of a first denuding, upon that which the cogitative extracts from the image…. Thought does not just obtain a partial supplement of information, or an ultimate incitation; it requires as its condition that [the cogitative] refine the otherwise uninterpretable data of sensation or of the imaginative” (p. 266).

There is no such thing as “raw sense data”. Modern discussions of Aristotelian abstraction have often presupposed an unproblematic binary distinction between what is abstracted and what is not, just as discussions of Kant have often made too much of a dualism between understanding and intuition. This is a delicate point, because we equally want to avoid obliterating the distinction, and to avoid reifying the distinction into a dualism. It is an instance of the old Platonic problem of the One and the Many, where (I would maintain) all the interest is in the in-between parts.

“The cogitative com-poses the intention of the imagined form with its individual…. Remembering consists in bringing back (to present consciousness) an intention of the past…. But again the representation of an intention is not a memory…. [I]t is necessary to search… to recompose the imagined form with its individual…. The ‘object’ of reminiscence is not stored as such, either in memory or in imagination” (p. 267).

This need to search and re-compose again expresses the active aspect of all interpretation.

“The cogitative re-composes what has been decomposed. It restores an integrity. It is the idol of the sensed thing that it tries to retrieve, and this idol does not in any way exist intact. The ‘object’ of reminiscence is not stored as such, either in memory or in imagination. It is not the memory of an image that we seek, not the memory of an intention, but indeed the memory of a thing, by the reconstitution of the best experience of it, the richest and most faithful to the singularities of sensation” (pp. 267-268).

Next in this series: Turn to a Subject

Transferences of the Subject

Here we have an important chapter in the emergence of the modern notion of “the Subject” as a mental entity.

The doctoral dissertation of Jean-Baptiste Brenet — supervised by Alain de Libera, and published as Transferts du sujet: La noetique d’Averroes selon Jean de Jandun (2003), is on John of Jandun’s reading of the noetics of Averroes.

John of Jandun was declared a heretic and excommunicated, but this was due to his support for his friend Marsilius of Padua’s work Defensor Pacis. That work uses a combination of theological and Aristotelian arguments to contest the pope’s and the Church’s authority over civil government. Marsilius reportedly also made the radical early claim that democracy is the best form of government. Like John, he is typically labeled as an “Averroist”.

Nineteenth-century scholar Ernest Renan wrote that “Few authors have been more cited and afterward more forgotten than John of Jandun” (quoted on back cover of Brenet’s book, my translation). Brenet, however, finds Renan and the great 20th-century Thomist Etienne Gilson to be extremely prejudiced in their accounts of so-called Latin Averroism.

The mid-20th century Thomist scholar F. Van Steenberghen wrote that John of Jandun was the first true Latin Averroist. Thirteenth-century figures like Siger of Brabant only defended a few key theses of Averroes. Brenet agrees that there was no real Latin Averroism in the 13th century, but he sharply challenges Renan’s and Gilson’s characterization of the “Averroism” that did emerge in the 14th century. They declared it completely lacking in philosophical substance, and claimed it was held together only by sheer dogmatism. Brenet’s book provides abundant evidence to refute this.

By Brenet’s account, John of Jandun sees himself first and foremost as a serious commentator on Aristotle. His works are full of references to Averroes, but his actual positions on issues by no means simply follow Averroes. Like many of the scholastics, he writes as a thoughtful philosopher examining questions that others have discussed. His original arguments about active sense are but one example. Conversely Averroes, known to the Latins as “the” Commentator, substantially influenced many writers whom no one would call “Averroist”. At one point during the nominalist controversy of the 14th century, it is reported that the pope explicitly directed European universities to continue teaching Aristotle using the commentaries of Averroes.

John of Jandun endorses the originally anti-Averroist slogan “this human thinks”. He accepts a variant of the scholastic “intellectual soul”. On a key question like the so-called material intellect’s relation to the human, he follows Siger of Brabant’s original theory that intellect is an “intrinsic motor”, a concept that has no precedent in Averroes.

I plan to devote a few posts to some of the details in Brenet’s book. For more context, see Aristotelian Subjectivity Revisited; “This Human Understands”; “This Human”, Again; Averroes as Read by de Libera; Averroes to Eckhart?; Desire, Image, Intellect.

Next in this series: “Intellect” and the Body

Emotion and Belief

“The Hellenistic thinkers see the goal of philosophy as a transformation of the inner world of belief and desire through the use of rational argument. And within the inner world they focus above all on the emotions — on anger, fear, grief, love, pity, gratitude, and their many relatives and subspecies. In Aristotle’s ethical thought we see, on the one hand, a view about the nature of the emotions that adumbrates many ingredients of the more fully developed Hellenistic views. Emotions are not blind animal forces, but intelligent and discriminating parts of the personality, closely related to beliefs of a certain sort, and therefore responsive to cognitive modification. On the other hand, we find a normative view about the role of the emotions inside the good human life that is sharply opposed to all the Hellenistic views, since it calls for cultivation of many emotions as valuable and necessary parts of virtuous agency” (Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire, p. 78).

“Why, then, does Aristotle adopt an analysis of emotion that resembles that of the Hellenistic thinkers, while at the same time advancing a very different normative view of their role?” (p. 79).

That is, Aristotle gives emotions a positive role in virtue, but his Hellenistic critics advocated both the possibility and the rightness of separating oneself from all emotion, root and branch.

“According to some influential modern views that have left a deep mark on popular stereotypes, emotions like grief, anger, and fear come from an animal irrational side of the personality that is to be sharply distinguished from its capacity for reasoning and for forming beliefs. Emotions are simply bodily reactions, whereas reasoning involves complex intentionality — directedness toward an object, a discriminating view of the object. Emotions are unlearned or innate, whereas beliefs are learned in society. Emotions are impervious to teaching and argument, beliefs can be modified by teaching” (ibid).

“This, however, was not the view of the emotions held by any major ancient Greek thinker. If we schematically lay out the common ground of their agreement, we will be in a better position to appreciate Aristotle’s specific analyses :

“1. Emotions are forms of intentional awareness: that is (since no ancient term corresponds precisely to these terms), they are forms of awareness directed at or about an object, in which the object figures as it is seen from the creature’s point of view. Anger, for example, is not, or not simply, a bodily reaction (such as a boiling of the blood). To give an adequate account of it, one must mention the object to which it is directed, what it is about and for. And when we do this, we characterize the object as it is seen by the person experiencing the emotion, whether that view is correct or not: my anger depends upon the way I view you and what you have done, not on the way you really are or what you really have done.
“2. Emotions have a very intimate relationship to beliefs, and can be modified by a modification of belief. My anger, for example, requires a belief that I have been deliberately wronged by someone in a more than trivial way. Should I decide that this belief was false (that the alleged wrong did not in fact take place, or was not in fact a wrong, or was not done by the person in question, or was not done deliberately) my anger will be removed, or shift its target….
“3. All this being so, emotions may appropriately be assessed as rational or irrational, and also (independently) as true or false, depending on the character of the beliefs that are their basis or ground. Thus, rather than having a simple dichotomy between the emotional and the (normatively) rational, we have a situation in which all emotions are to some degree ‘rational’ in a descriptive sense — all are to some degree cognitive and based upon belief — and they may then be assessed, as beliefs are assessed, for their normative status” (p. 80).

“Even the bodily appetites — hunger, thirst, sexual desire — are seen by Aristotle as forms of intentional awareness, containing a view of their object. For he consistently describes appetite as for, directed at, ‘the apparent good’. Appetite is one form of orexis, a ‘reaching out for’ an object; and all the forms of orexis see their object in a certain way, supplying the active animal with a ‘premise of the good’. In other words, when a dog goes across the room to get some meat, its behavior is explained not by some hydraulic mechanism of desire driving it from behind, but as a response to the way it sees the object. Aristotle also holds that appetite — unlike, for example, the animal’s digestive system — is responsive to reasoning and instruction. He is talking about human appetite here, but he recognizes much continuity between humans and other animals, with respect to the capacity for acting from a (modifiable) view of the good” (p. 81).

“Where specifically human appetite is concerned, the case for intentionality and cognitive responsiveness is clearer still. Aristotle’s account of the virtue of moderation, which is concerned with the proper management of the bodily appetites (the appetites, he frequently says, that humans share with other animals), shows that he believes suppression is not the only way to make appetite behave well. Indeed, suppression could produce at best self-control, and not virtue. The virtue requires psychological balance (sumphonein), so that the person does not characteristically long for the wrong food and drink, at the wrong time, in the wrong amount. But this is achieved by an intelligent process of moral education, which teaches the child to make appropriate distinctions, to take appropriate objects. The object of well-educated appetite, he holds, is the ‘fine’ [or beautiful, or morally noble] (kalon)” (ibid).

“[A] loud noise, or the appearance of enemy troops, may produce a startling effect, even on a brave person. The person’s heart may leap from fright or startling, without its being the case that the person is really afraid…. If the person is only startled and not afraid, it is clear that he will not run away: as the De Motu argues, only a part of the body will be moved, and not the entire body. The De Motu analysis suggests that we see in such cases the effect of phantasia, or ‘appearing’, without any concomitant orexis, reaching out, or desire. (Emotion is a subclass of orexis.) The question must now be, What would have to be added to this being startled, in order to turn it into real fear?

(Nussbaum’s translation and commentary Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium inspired my early brief note The Animal’s Leg Joint. That book of hers also contains a very down-to-earth elaboration of Aristotle’s notion of unmoved moving, using biological rather than astronomical examples.)

“The example resembles another one used by Aristotle in the sphere of perception, where he distinguishes simple phantasia, appearing, from belief or judgment. The sun, he says, appears a foot wide: it has that look. But at the same time, we believe that it is larger than the inhabited world” (p. 83).

Here she translates phantasia as appearance. Often it is rendered as “imagination”. When I write about imagination in Aristotle, it is phantasia. This is an important term for Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics as well, for whom it stands in between sensation and thought. For the Stoics, phantasia is a fundamental mode of presentation or representation in the soul that is also the object of a physical and physiological theory of image transmission that supports a kind of epistemological realism.

“Here it is clear that the something that needs to be added, in order to turn the mere appearing into the usual sort of basis for human action, would be an element of conviction or acceptance. It is in this that mere phantasia differs from belief. Although the contrast between phantasia and belief in Aristotle is sometimes depicted as one between non-propositional and propositional cognitive attitudes, it is clear that this cannot be quite the right story for our case. For the phantasia of the sun as a foot wide involves, at the very least, combination or predication. It is a little hard to see where to draw the line between this and the ‘propositional.’ The real difference between phantasia and belief here seems to be just the difference that the Stoics will bring forward as the difference between phantasia and belief: in the former case, the sun strikes me as being a foot wide, but I don’t commit myself to that, I don’t accept or assent to it. In the latter case, I have a conviction, a view as to how things really are” (p. 84).

“Further pursuit of the question shows clearly, however, that no technical distinction between phantasia and believing is at issue in any of these analyses of emotion: phantasia is used, in the rare cases where it is used, simply as the verbal noun of phainesthai, ‘appear’. The passage contains no suggestion that phantasia is being distinguished from doxa, belief. And indeed Aristotle feels free to use belief-words such as dokein and oiesthai in connection with his analyses of emotions” (p. 85).

She turns to a discussion of particular emotions.

“In short: fear, as described in this chapter, is a peculiarly human experience with a rich intentional awareness of its object, resting on beliefs and judgments of many sorts, both general and concrete” (p. 86).

“[T]he distress and pain are not independent of the judgment, but result from it. Thus if the judgment changed, we could expect the feeling itself to change — as Aristotle himself insists, when he speaks of the conditions under which fear will be removed” (ibid).

“In short, these emotions have a rich cognitive structure. It is clear that they are not mindless surges of affect, but discerning ways of viewing objects; and beliefs of various types are their necessary conditions. But we can now say more. For we can see by looking at Aristotle’s accounts that the beliefs must be regarded as constituent parts of what the emotion is. Fear and pity are both painful emotions. Nowhere in his analyses does Aristotle even attempt to individuate emotions by describing different varieties of painful or (as the case may be) pleasant feeling. Emotions, instead, are individuated by reference to their characteristic beliefs. We cannot describe the pain that is peculiar to fear, or say how fear differs from grief or pity, without saying that it is pain at the thought of a certain sort of future event that is believed to be impending. But if the beliefs are an essential part of the definition of the emotion, then we have to say that their role is not merely that of external necessary condition. They must be seen as constituent parts of the emotion itself” (p. 88).

“And we can go further. It is not as if the emotion has (in each case) two separate constituents, each necessary for the full emotion, but each available independently of the other. For Aristotle makes it clear that the feeling of pain or pleasure itself depends on the belief-component, and will be removed by its removal. He uses two Greek prepositions, ek and epi, to describe the intimate relationship between belief and feeling: there is both a causal relationship (fear is pain and disturbance ‘out of’ — ek — the thought of impending evils), and also a relationship of intentionality or aboutness: pity is defined as ‘painful feeling directed at [epi] the appearance that someone is suffering . . .’ ). In fact, both relationships are present in both cases” (ibid).

“Anger is especially complex: for it has both a pleasant and a painful feeling component, these being associated with different, though closely related, sets of beliefs. It requires, on the one hand, the belief that one (or someone dear to one) has been slighted or wronged or insulted in some serious way, through someone else’s voluntary action; this, Aristotle insists, is a painful experience. (Once again, the pain is not a separate item directly caused by the world itself; it is caused by the belief that one has been slighted. If the belief is false, one will still feel that pain; and if one has been slighted without knowing it, one will not have it.) Once again, these beliefs are necessary constituents in the emotion. Aristotle makes it clear that if the angry person should discover that the alleged slight did not take place at all, or that it was not deliberately performed, or that it was not performed by the person one thought, anger can be expected to go away. So too, if one judges that the item damaged by another is trivial rather than serious (peri mikron). But Aristotle holds that anger requires, as well, a wish for retaliation, the thought that it would be good for some punishment to come to the person who did the wrong — and the thought of this righting of the balance is pleasant” (pp. 89-90, Becker-number citations omitted).

“The subject of love is a highly complex one in Aristotle’s thought…. The general rubric under which Aristotle analyzes love is that of philia, which, strictly speaking, is not an emotion at all, but a relationship with emotional components…. The relation itself requires mutual affection, mutual well-wishing, mutual benefiting for the other’s own sake, and mutual awareness of all this…. Both in the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics, the cognitive content of philia‘s emotions is made overwhelmingly clear” (p. 90).

“On further inspection, the beliefs involved in the central cases of emotion have one general feature in common, as Socrates and Plato already observed. All, that is, involve the ascription of significant worth to items in the world outside of the agent, items that he or she does not fully control. Love, most obviously, is a profound attachment to another separate life, which must remain as a separate center of movement and choice, not being engulfed or fused, in order for the relationship of love to be possible at all. And in the loves Aristotle values most highly, the participants view one another as good characters, therefore as fully independent choosers of the good; if one controlled the other, even to the extent that a parent does a child, the love would apparently be less good as love” (p. 91).

“Loves of a more than casual sort require a belief in one’s own lack of self-sufficiency with respect to some of the most important things in life” (ibid).

“In pity and fear, we acknowledge our vulnerability before the circumstances of life; we have those emotions, he makes plain, only if we really do think that life can do something to us, and that this something matters. Anger is closely related: for in anger we acknowledge our vulnerability before the actions of other people. Again, if we judge that the slight is trivial, we do not become angry” (ibid).

“Unlike the Socrates of the Republic, Aristotle does not believe that the good person, the person of practical wisdom, is ‘sufficient unto himself’ for eudaimonia, and therefore impervious to grief and fear. According to him, it is right to grieve at the death of a friend, since that is an acknowledgment of the importance of the tie and the person” (p. 93).

“A courageous person will indeed feel fear and pain at the prospect of death, on account of the value that he rightly attaches to his own life” (ibid). “A person who is completely without fear does not strike Aristotle as virtuous (which would imply the possession of practical reason) but, rather, as unbalanced” (p. 94).

“In short, there are things in the world that it is right to care about: friends, family, one’s own life and health, the worldly conditions of virtuous action. These can sometimes be damaged by events not under one’s own control. For these reasons it is right to have some fear. The good person, rather than being a fearless person, is one who will have appropriate rather than inappropriate fears — and not be deterred by them from doing what is required and noble” (ibid).

“Anger is treated in a similar fashion. On the one hand, Aristotle clearly believes that many people get angry too much and for insufficient reasons. His choice of the name ‘mildness’ (praotes) for the appropriate virtuous disposition in this area reflects his conscious decision to pitch things rather toward the unangry than toward the angry end of the spectrum…. If anything, he errs in the direction of the deficiency ‘for the mild person is not given to revenge, but is inclined to be forgiving [sungnomonikos]’…. Reason, however, does tell this person that there are some very good reasons for getting angry, in connection with damages to things that it is really worth caring about…. [A]ssuming one has made deep commitments to people and things that can be damaged by another, not to defend those commitments is to lose one’s own integrity. Anger is said to be a necessary motivation for defending things that are beloved…. It is this conceptual connection between anger and the acknowledgment of importance that explains why Aristotle holds it to be necessary for defensive action — not because it plays some mindless hydraulic role…. The mild person is not especially given to revenge, as Aristotle has said. But in the case of the deepest commitments, not to take some action seems to show a lack of ‘perception’ ; and if one has those practical perceptions, then one seems bound to be angry. Anger, in these cases, is a recognition of the truth” (pp. 94-95).

“Emotions, in Aristotle’s view, are not always correct, any more than beliefs or actions are always correct. They need to be educated, and brought into harmony with a correct view of the good human life. But, so educated, they are not just essential as forces motivating to virtuous action, they are also, as I have suggested, recognitions of truth and value. And as such they are not just instruments of virtue, they are constituent parts of virtuous agency” (p. 96).

“All of this is a part of the equipment of the person of practical wisdom, part of what practical rationality is. Rationality recognizes truth; the recognition of some ethical truths is impossible without emotion; indeed, certain emotions centrally involve such recognitions” (ibid).

“This ethical theory is critical of much that Aristotle’s society teaches. People often value too many of these external things, or value them too highly, or not enough. Thus they have too much emotion in connection with money, possessions, and reputation, some times not enough in connection with the things that are truly worthwhile” (ibid).

“While depending on belief and judgment, the emotions may depend upon a type of belief and judgment that is less accessible to dialectical scrutiny than are most of the person’s other beliefs” (p. 99).

“Aristotle’s students pursue not just their own eudaimonia but that of others: for they think about the design of political institutions, starting from the idea that the best political arrangement is the one ‘in accordance with which anyone whatsoever might do best and live a flourishing life'” (p. 100).

“In short: the apparent conservatism of Aristotle’s dialectical education of Nikidion [Nussbaum’s imaginary character] is only apparent. Radical change is excluded from the part of his educational scheme that deals with her as an individual. But that is not all that philosophy does. The individuals who do come to share in it partake in a task that is both radical and far-reaching: the design of a society in which money will not be valued as an end, in which honor will not be valued as an end, in which war and empire will not be valued as ends — a society in which the functioning of human individuals in accordance with their own choice and practical reason will be the ultimate end of institutions and choices” (ibid).

We still have along way to go toward that noble goal.

Conclusion of this series: A Few Conclusions on Emotion