Tag: Averroes

Desire, Image, Intellect

In the previous post, we saw an argument developed by Giorgio Agamben that for the great medieval Italian poets Dante and Cavalcanti, there is a very close connection between love, imagination, and intellect, and that in this they were inspired by the controversial views of the great commentator Averroes in his Long Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. Taking Agamben’s essay as a point of departure, Jean-Baptiste Brenet explores Averroes’ critique of his Andalusian predecessor Ibn Bajja on the relation between intellect and imagination.

Ibn Bajja is historically important for his very strong notion of the role of imagination in the constitution of a human being. He develops this as an elaboration of the Greek commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias’ view that the so-called material intellect is a “pure preparation”, and is purely immanent in a faculty of imagination that is ultimately grounded in the body. Alexander’s view partly anticipates modern empiricism. Averroes’ criticisms of Alexander and of Ibn Bajja partly anticipate some contemporary criticisms of empiricism.

Brenet begins by recalling Aristotle’s statement in book Lambda of the Metaphysics that the first cause “moves as the object of love” (quoted in Agamben and Brenet, Intellect d’amour, p. 35, my translation throughout). Following Alexander, Averroes repeats that “Every thing is related to the prime mover as the lover to the loved” (ibid, emphasis in original).

According to Brenet, Averroes holds that “[T]he human, in tending toward the prime mover, only achieves her desire in acquiring in a complete way her initially extrinsic intellect.”

“This idea here of mental acquisition is an Arabic concept, and not a Greek one” (ibid, emphasis added). It seems to have been Alfarabi who particularly developed the distinction between intellect “in habit [hexis]” and intellect fully “acquired”. In the tradition that Alfarabi founded, the “acquired” intellect is sometimes said to result from a human being’s “conjunction” with a transcendent “agent intellect”. Unlike Alexander, who identified the agent intellect (nous poietikos, literally “doing or making intellect”) with the intellect Aristotle associates with the first cause, Alfarabi and the subsequent Arabic tradition treated it as a distinct metaphysical entity subordinate to the first cause.

The sense of the distinction between “in habit” and “acquired” seems to oppose a common level of achievement and actualization to an extraordinary one, or perhaps an ordinary empirical psychology to a normative ideal.

Averroes in his early works generally follows Ibn Bajja on this issue, but later develops his own unique position.

“In [Averroes’] Compendium of the Metaphysics, he too recalls that that which moves the lover is nothing but the form (sura) of the beloved that we bear within ourselves. What form? Not the absolute intelligible that the lover’s intellect apprehends, but that singular one that her imagination summons: her phantasm” (p. 36).

Aristotle separately says that the first cause moves as the object of love, and speaks of the large role of imagination in what we might call the psychology of thought. Ibn Bajja and the early Averroes thoroughly merge these two considerations.

“When we say that the intellect moves itself toward the object of love, we should not see a metaphor that translates the tendency toward accomplishment. To describe the process of intellectual acquisition, Averroes poses that ‘we move ourselves toward the conjunction’ (dicimur moveri ad continuationem), and with him this recovers a veritable physics of thought…. or more precisely, cinematics…. Certainly, he says, we find a celebrated manner of apprehending movement, which consists in making it ‘a path toward perfection’, this path being distinct from perfection itself (via ad perfectionem quae est alia ab ipsa perfectionae). But there is another way, ‘more true’, according to which ‘movement […] does not differ from the perfection toward which it tends, except by the more and the less […]. Movement in effect is nothing other than the engenderment, part by part, of this perfection (generatio partis post aliam illius perfectionis)” (p. 37, emphasis and bracketed ellipses in original).

We have recently seen that Aristotle himself treats all motion as a kind of entelechy.

“Fascinating thesis, where movement is nothing but the thing itself in its partial realization” (ibid). He quotes Averroes, “To go toward heat is in a certain way heat itself” (ibid). He continues, “This is the model that applies to thought. To move oneself toward the conjunction is to go toward the complete intellect, that is to say to become it, part by part, being it more and more” (ibid).

As individuals we approach this completeness not by perfectly realizing some one particular thought, but primarily by simultaneously realizing many thoughts, from multiple perspectives. Spinoza seems to have been influenced by this, as well as by Averroes’ critique of the image.

Brenet also says that Averroes implicitly references Alexander’s remarks in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics (surviving Arabic fragments of this lost work having been recently translated to French) on the simultaneous continuity and discontinuity observable in the process of a body of water’s freezing. Averroes applies a similar combination of continuity and discontinuity to thought. Brenet suggests that Averroes compares arriving at determinate thought to a process of “freezing”, and suggests that Alexander’s model of simultaneous continuity and discontinuity holds good for the history of concepts and sciences as well.

“From Ibn Bajja, Averroes takes [the idea] that our concepts of things are composites. If they are, as universals, abstracted from matter, they conserve a form of materiality in that they only exist for us as applied to the images from which they are extracted. The concept is not simple, pure. It bears the mark of its concrete origin, and is first conceived only through this. That is to say, [the concept] only occurs in relation to the image which is its source, to the point of including this in its nature. That every thought is the thought of something signifies not that it aims at a noematic content, but that it is the thought of an image, of the intelligible of an image, and that necessarily the two, like all relational things, coexist while thought lasts. There is no concept but in presence of its image, with it, just as there is no son in act except by and from a father in act” (p. 38).

This is emphasizing the role of psychological immanence in thought, as distinct from thought’s objectivity, a transcendent object, pure structure, or an ideal concept in itself.

“In this composition, the required image plays the role of matter, not only as furniture, but in the sense that it is a point of support that must be integrated into the grasp of what is supported there. This is what the text repeats, that the concept is related to the imagined form, that it is attached to it, coupled. Copulatio in Latin translates Arabic irtibat, which designates a bond, like the rope that holds an animal. The universal only appears to humans in the copula to the image (from which proceed, moreover, language and speech). In its first aspect, thought thus presents two united sides, or better, occurs as their very ligature” (p. 39).

In more modern terms, even if thought primarily resides in inference rather than in some presented content, a psychologically immanent “content” corresponding to the image is nonetheless what gives it a point of application. Averroes emphasizes the role of immanent presentation in the form of images in the genesis of thought, while refusing to grant them normative status.

“That which is constitutive in the human, who is neither god nor angel, is a predisposition to think, and this, insofar as it is not mixed, necessarily has an anchorage. This pure mental aptitude is not floating, absolutely separated. It has its place, exists only as preparation of a subject, which, according to Ibn Bajja, can only be the image. By this, Averroes thinks Ibn Bajja means not only that imagination constitutes the substrate of which intellect as a power has need in order to exist, but that it is also, via the disposition of which it is the bearer, that in which thought in act is realized. The reading, which takes in a maximal sense the intermediary (mutawassit) status of the imagination, is dizzying. This would not only be the support of the faculty of thought, nor indeed, by the active images, the correlate of conception, but… the very space of intelligibilization, the place of the happening of the intelligible” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“Averroes, after having been seduced, contested this, bequeathing to scholasticism an exclusively negative portrait of his first master. The image in the intellect moves, it is not moved; it is subiectum movens, and not recipiens. What Ibn Bajja loses is the equivocity of the very notion of the power of thought. If we mean to designate the capacity for universalization, a universality latent but virtual, initially this works well for the image, which conceals an intelligible charge of multiple ‘states’ (ahwal) close to the universal immediately susceptible of becoming concept. But if we dream of the power to receive thought, which the tradition calls the ‘material’ intellect, this no longer works. Reading Ibn Bajja, writes the final Averroes, ‘it seems […] that he wanted to say that the material intellect is the imaginative faculty insofar as it is prepared for the entities that are in it conceived in act, and that there is no other faculty serving as subject for these intelligibles outside of this faculty’. But he was wrong. The image is only the landmark and the subject-mover, and not the subject-substrate (that which leads it to invest the body). Thought cannot realize itself in the place from which it is pulled, even though it depends on it, and if there must be an intermediary, a diaphaneity of the intelligible, and then a receptacle for what is extracted from the image, this can only be an intellect adjoining but substantially distinct (‘separated’), this ‘possible’ intellect about which Cavalcanti as a poet will repeat that in it ‘as in a subject’ (come in subiecto) the form ‘takes its place and its abode'” (p. 40, emphasis and ellipses in original).

For a general orientation to the point of view Averroes is expressing here, Brenet turns to Hannah Arendt, summarizing part of the argument of her Life of the Spirit.

“To think, she explains, consists in a retreat, withdrawing oneself from place, not from where one is, from the quotidian space of worry and noise, but from all place, from all space, from spatiality itself. For thinking has for its object ‘essences’, and essences, as generalities, products of a de-sensorialization or of a stripping away of matter, offer themselves subtracted from spatial qualities: ‘In other words, the “essential” is what applies everywhere, and this “everywhere” which gives to thought its characteristic weight, is in terms of space a “nowhere”. The thinking me which moves itself among the universals, the invisible essences, is strictly speaking found nowhere: it is a non-citizen of any state, in the strongest sense of the term — that which explains perhaps the precocious development of a cosmopolitan mentality among the philosophers'” (pp. 40-41).

“Cosmopolitan” literally means “citizen of the cosmos”, indeed an appropriate epithet for a philosopher. Thought is nonspatial in the sense that it cannot be reduced to “seeing” an image, as something immediately there in a place. He notes that she particularly singles out Aristotle as having understood “that this status of being a non-citizen is the state of nature of thought” (p. 41).

To be a “citizen” of the cosmos , or of the universal community of rational animals, makes one to an extent a “non-citizen” of one’s particular community. It is also to be capable of detachment from the immediacy and naturality of imagination in experience.

Brenet quotes Albert the Great’s summary of the views of Ibn Bajja. “They say that there is no possible intellect in the human that is the subject of the intelligibles insofar as they are intelligible, because for them the form thought (forma speculationis) […] cannot have a subject in which it is found, given that it is universal, that is to say valid everywhere and for all time — but if it had a subject, it would be necessarily individuated, since every form is individuated and determined by its subject. From this they concluded that what we call possible or potential intellect is that which is potentially the thinking (speculativus) intellect, and that this is the image (phantasma) in the imagination (phantasia)” (ibid, ellipses in original).

“Without following Avempace [Ibn Bajja], many ‘Averroists’ contemporary to Dante and Cavalcanti also insisted on a form of implantation of thought by the image. This is the case with Antonio di Parma, medical doctor and philosopher, whom the two poets could have read or crossed paths with. The problem for him is not to conceive of the non-place of the universal, the atopia of the concept as such, that which is in evidence. Inversely, it concerns a being-there that makes of thought, in spite of the substantial separation of the intellect, something other than a cosmic phenomenon without relation to the incarnate personality of the thinker. The solution is in the image. Thought indeed is abstracted from the image, it is pulled from it, but this does not mean that it ‘leaves’ (leaving us at the same time), as if intellectual abstraction corresponded to a transit of the form, from the place that is the image (where it is intelligible potentially), to another place (the intellect, where it would be in act). For the universal form there is no other place, since by the way properly speaking it ‘does not go outside of us’ (non exit extra nos) when we abstract. And not only does the intellect ‘think nothing outside of us’ (non intelligit extra nos), even if it is separated, but since thought does not happen somewhere else than there where the image is transmuted, it is ‘in us’ (in nobis) that it happens, so to speak, in place. Thought does not migrate, it is not exported, and the atopism of its being promotes the immanence of its fabric. The image, homeland of thought” (pp. 41-42).

But if the image is the homeland of thought, for Averroes and his many Latin followers it is not thought’s destiny.

“These philosophers nonetheless did not make the image their last word. The individual thought that conjoins the universal to the phantasm from which it is extracted is only a form of thought in mid-course, characteristic of the apprenticeship by which physical knowledge proceeds from the punctual experience of things. A human of this sort accedes to the true, but always in mediate fashion, in a dependency on the body that keeps the ‘thing itself’ at a distance. ‘The one who attains the theoretic rank, writes Ibn Bajja, certainly regards the intelligible, but through an intermediary, like the sun appearing in water, where what we see in the water is the image and not [the sun] itself’. The intelligible linked to the image, as a consequence, is like the sun reflected in water, or in a mirror, that is to say also an image, that it is necessary to go beyond if we intend to approach reality as closely as possible.”

“To express this going beyond, Averroes uses a strong term: abolition” (pp. 42-43, emphasis in original).

Brenet quotes Averroes: “The form of the intellect in habitus is corrupted and destroyed, and nothing remains but the material intellect” (p. 43, emphasis in original).

“Finally, the image and that which it founds are reduced to nothing, leaving the power alone faced with the full act” (ibid).

This is indeed strong language, almost ascetic in character. But the emphasis is not on a rejection of worldly being, but on a detachment from overly specific representations as they spontaneously arise. The goal is not abstraction or suppression of passion, but true universality.

“The notion of Entbildung in the ‘mysticism’ of Meister Eckhart is not without support — under the veil of sermons — from the Averroist idea of the effacement or the annihilation of phantasms. Entbilden is to dis-imagine, and this de-figuration imposes itself on the soul, to render it available to the highest truth” (pp. 43-44).

Meister Eckhart has become famous in popular spirituality as a mystic, but he was also the third German master of theology from the University of Paris after Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg, and held important positions in the Dominican Order. Scholars increasingly emphasize the importance of his philosophical work. Brenet quotes from Meister Eckhart’s commentary on the gospel of John:

“This is why certain philosophers affirm that the agent intellect, which they call a separate substance, is united with us in the images (nobis uniri in phantasmatibus) thanks to its light that illuminates and penetrates our imaginative faculty by that illumination, and when this intellect is multiplied by multiple acts of intellection, it unites itself finally with us and becomes for us our form (tandem nobis unitur et fit forma) in such a way that we perform the works proper to that substance, which is to say that we intellectually know the separate beings, as these last know themselves. And according to these philosophers, this intellect is therefore in us an acquired intellect (iste est in nobis secundum ipsos intellectus adeptus)” (p. 44).

Someone might object that this passage only seems to refer to the Arabic tradition in a general way. References to Arabic philosophers are not exactly uncommon in scholastic theology. But I think Brenet’s implicit argument here is that the reference to the imaginative faculty in the passage suffices to establish that the philosophers mentioned are not just Arabic but specifically Andalusian in the tradition of Ibn Bajja, and this in turn allows us to safely infer that the reference is to Averroes, because it was overwhelmingly through translations of Averroes that the Latin-speaking world gained knowledge of the Andalusian tradition. In presence of such a reference, it seems unlikely that Eckhart’s explicit talk about “dis-imagination” is a mere coincidence.

“Why this abolition of the image?… Even if their competition was necessary and must expand, the images need to disappear because our current intellect, that of abstract thought, disengaged from the world, is never transmuted. There is no great work in the individual intelligence, no alchemy. The possible does not turn into the necessary, the transitory into the incorruptible, and the intellect in habitus must finally be corrupted in order to allow to subsist, under its collapse, only the in-itself universal and timeless power of thought that is the intellect called material” (p. 45).

“But the destroyed images have been indispensable (as a path, otherwise desired, that it is a question of traveling, and not as an impurity that it would be preferable to immediately get rid of)…. The image allows the power of thought to accede, not first to the act but beneath that, to its own power; in actualizing it, it opens it up to its essential capacity” (p. 46, emphasis in original).

“If it has to build its power (for it does not at first have it, being at first only an aptitude), our intellect must also increase its scope, to the point of maximizing it, and it is by the image that it can do so. The image that the human desires, in which and by which she desires, is for the person the space of the appropriation of thought. It is like the mark made on the concept that not only individualizes it, but imputes it and attributes it” (ibid).

“In his Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, which the Latins could read, Averroes recalls the progress of the material intellect toward the acquired intellect, and of the first he writes: ‘if this intellect strips itself of all potentiality, when human perfection is realized, it is necessary that its act, which is not itself, annihilates itself (yubtilu; destruatur)’. Stripping, then ruin of the fruit of the stripping. Intellect must divest itself of its power in actualizing itself in the thoughts of the world, then obliterate this actualization solidary with the images of things…. It is on this intentional nihilism, of which the image is the paradoxical operator, that felicity depends” (pp. 46-47).

Nonetheless, “The theory of thought by ‘conjunction’ is founded on a doctrine of desire, which raises the subalternate question of moral action. There is never thought except by desire” (p. 47, emphasis added).

Brenet recalls that in book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle explains choice by orektikos nous (desiring intellect) “or” orexis dianoetike (reflective desire), “and such a principle is a human” (quoted, ibid). Averroes in turn speaks of cogitatio — the cogitative faculty of the soul, responsible for deliberation — sometimes in terms of discursive reasoning and sometimes in terms of imagination, but it should be understood as both simultaneously. “The principle of the human is only made effective in the crossing and the permanent division of these two dimensions” (p. 48).

The claim is that without ever becoming exempt from desire, “[T]he intellect of the human can have as object not only the abstract intelligible but the separate intelligible, universal in itself” (ibid, emphasis in original). “For Averroes, convinced of the necessity of this thought that is literally supernatural (though operated in the world here below, and by the force of reason alone), the question is not one of knowing whether our intellect accedes to the pure intelligible, but of establishing how it does so, how it can do so, what is the power that will make it capable of this” (ibid, emphasis in original).

This worldly and rational “supernatural” is a technical consequence of Aristotle’s narrow identification of the natural with terrestrial materiality. I prefer to use the term “natural” in a more expansive way, as including both astronomical entities and the whole scope of Aristotelian teleology.

“Why are all the individuals not already thought ‘in’ the thinking intellect, in the way that Augustine held that all humans have sinned in Adam? The solution again draws on the image” (p. 50).

“We have said that there are two dispositions to think in the human. The first is that which her images procure; … the second follows on this, and is its reward. This is the disposition toward the supreme thinkable, which occurs when the intellect has been taken to the limits of its capacity by the cumulative effect of all kinds of images” (p. 51).

“As for the philosopher, the beatific thinker, she is intellectually subtracted from time, and as Ibn Bajja says, that of her which is eternalized does not ‘redescend’.”

“In spite of all this, knowledge does not remain without a body. Each singular body that wears out and perishes in its images must be constantly relayed if the resulting universal is to be a constant event…. [T]he body in its phantasms is dead. Long live the immense Body” (p. 53).

“While Dante wrote his Monarchy to defend in the name of Averroes the existence of a ‘multitude’ allowing all its power to be activated, the theologian Thomas Wylton in Paris wrote an ‘Averroist’ text also maintaining that what the intellect completes is always in the first instance the species and not the individual: ‘the first perfectible of the material intellect is not Socrates or Plato, nor is it the universal abstracted by the intellect, but human nature itself, which in itself and in relation to quiddity is one in all its supports, even though it is numerically distinct in them. Insofar as it is one in this manner, it is the first perfectible of the material intellect, and as such it is — if we speak of a determinate singularity within a species — neither numbered nor singular: one may call it singular, but [only in the sense of] a vague singularity‘” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Brenet has written an entire book on Wylton.

“It appears, but as a vague individual, of which we perceive only that it is some animal, or some human, an aorist, the indeterminate individual of which what follows must show the figure or the face” (p. 54, emphasis in original).

“The phantasm is abolished, indetermination advances, the images return. Desire resumes” (ibid).

Love’s Intellect

The main theme here is an unexpectedly close relation between love and a broadly Aristotelian notion of intellect. We will also see another perspective on the crucial Aristotelian concepts of potentiality and act, and perhaps shed further light on Aristotle’s telegraphic remarks about how we have knowledge of “privations” or negations of things.

I’ll be devoting two posts to the small pamphlet Intellect d’Amour (2018), introduced by the great contemporary scholar of medieval philosophy Alain de Libera, in which leading specialist in Averroes and Latin Averroism Jean-Baptiste Brenet translates an Italian essay by Giorgio Agamben, and presents a related essay of his own. This post deals with Agamben’s part.

While I have little sympathy for Agamben’s quasi-Heideggerian reduction elsewhere of “Western metaphysics” as a whole to a fundamental error for which Aristotle is supposedly to blame, his essay here is focused and interesting. The medieval Italian poet and philosopher Guido Cavalcanti (1255?-1300) — a close associate of and influence on the great Dante Alighieri, author of The Divine Comedy — is now generally understood to have been inspired by Italian Averroist philosophy (see Italian Aristotelianism). The dominant interpretation of Cavalcanti, however, has been that of Bruno Nardi, who emphasizes a fundamental discontinuity between Cavalcanti’s exaltation of love in both its spiritual and its erotic dimensions, and his Averroist views on intellect. Agamben, Brenet, and de Libera all seem to agree in turning this interpretation on its head.

Dante and Cavalcanti are both commonly associated with the historically shadowy group of poets known as the fedeli d’amore (love’s faithful). The fedeli were apparently influenced by the poetry and music of the troubadours, who developed the Western medieval tradition of courtly love, and also used it as a spiritual metaphor, somewhat along the lines of Plato’s Symposium. Sources of the troubadour tradition are disputed by scholars and likely were multiple, but an Arabic or specifically Sufi element has been repeatedly suggested.

Agamben’s essay points out that a particularly mysterious phrase bianco in tale obiettò cade (something like “white falls into this objection”) in Cavalcanti’s poem Donna me prega appears to be intended to recall the Latin cecidit albedo in exemplari in Averroes’ Long Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul. In the poem, Cavalcanti has just said that love cannot be understood in terms of vision.

Agamben notes that in the passage where the corresponding phrase appears in Averroes, Averroes is more broadly addressing how we know the privations of positive terms. In the context of vision, Averroes poses “blackness” as a privation of “whiteness”, somewhat like modern science calls blackness an absence of color. Agamben quotes de Libera’s remark in his partial French translation of Averroes’ work that “Every privation is effectively known negatively, by preliminarily positing something and then negating it” (p. 13, my translation throughout).

The “white” in Cavalcanti’s poem recalls the white by which the black is known as a privation. Following the passage Cavalcanti refers to, the Latin translation of Averroes says “And it is necessary that this faculty of knowledge perceives the privation in perceiving itself as being in potentiality, when it is in potentiality, since it perceives the one and the other of itself, that is to say being in potentiality and being in act. And such is the case with the material intellect” (quoted, p. 19).

Here we have among other things a fascinating connection between self-apprehension and negation. I imagine Hegel nodding in approval here.

“Averroes affirms that, in knowing obscurity, the material intellect knows itself insofar as it is in potentiality, and that, reciprocally, for the material intellect, to understand itself is equivalent to knowing obscurity and privation. One sole and same faculty — the material or possible intellect — knows obscurity and light (obscuritatem et lumen), power and act, form and its privation. As de Libera notes, this signifies that ‘privation is attached to the very essence of intellect’, and indeed also — the consequence is inevitable — that obscurity — non-thinking in act — is an integral part of intellect and is consubstantial with it ” (pp. 19-20).

Here I think also of Socrates’ comment that wisdom involves recognizing what we do not know. In a sense, this kind of recognition of privation is just as much a part of knowledge as any positive content.

“The idea that obscurity, which for him constitutes an essential part of the amorous experience, in no way implies an exclusion of knowledge, could not but fascinate Cavalcanti. On the contrary, since one sole and same faculty — the possible or material intellect, where love has its dwelling place — knows equally well the darkness and the light, equally well the form and its privation, having the amorous experience of obscurity thus also necessarily signifies having the experience of the pure power of intellect” (p. 20).

In passing, Agamben refers here to his major thesis in this essay, that the material intellect is where love has its abode for Cavalcanti. We also see an example of the Aristotelian thesis that rational knowledge of one of a pair of opposites necessarily entails knowledge of the other.

“In this perspective, it is possible to divide the philosophers into two great classes or families. According to the one group, what defines humans is the act of thinking, and the latter are indeed like the angels, always in the act of thinking; according to the others (the Averroist tradition in which Cavalcanti as well as Dante are inscribed by right), what defines humans is not the act, but the power of thinking (humans do not think continually, which is to say they think in an intermittent way — not sine interpolatione [without interpolation], as Dante says” (pp. 20-21).

In our thinking, we who are not pure act depend on this “power of thinking” that begins as something external to us.

Agamben recalls that Averroes calls the material intellect a fourth kind of being (neither form, nor matter, nor a composite). “It is this perception of its own obscurity by the material intellect, essentially divided in its being, which becomes for Cavalcanti the place of the experience of love” (p. 22). “If the attempt to think, apropos of the material intellect, the existence of a pure power as a fourth genus of being leads Averroism to an aporia from which it is not easy to escape, it nonetheless furnishes, and precisely through that, the elements of another conception of subject than that which has prevailed since Descartes…. Otherwise said, Averroism thinks the subject as the subject of a power, and not only of an act…. Averroes suggests that the material intellect should be considered more as a place… than as a matter” (p. 23).

Agamben’s language seems overly loose here, in that it blurs together act in an Aristotelian sense and agency in a modern sense, but he nonetheless makes an important point. The “Cartesian subject” is indeed commonly conceived more or less exclusively in terms of its agency in the modern sense. Both the mechanist and the voluntarist dimensions in Cartesian thought mitigate against taking the key Aristotelian concept of potentiality seriously (and conversely, taking potentiality seriously makes both mechanism and voluntarism untenable).

The modern notion of agency is distinguished by the fact that from the outset, it is conceived as not having any inherent relation to a contrasting term like potentiality, that would condition and limit it. By contrast, Aristotle only arrives at the thesis that there can be such a thing as pure act after a long dialectical development, starting from the cases where act is only analytically distinguishable from potentiality. The common modern approach short-circuits all of this. Aristotelian act and agency in the modern sense are thus two different things. But Agamben correctly points out that any finite “subject” that is the subject of a conditioning power (or capability, as Paul Ricoeur more felicitously puts it) will be fundamentally different from the modern stereotype of a one-sided subject-agent.

“The great invention of Cavalcanti, of Dante and the other poets of love, is to situate love in the possible intellect without reservation. As the song says, and for once clearly, the possibile intelletto is the subject — or the quasi-subject (come in subietto) — the loco [place] and the dimoranza [residence] (the mansio [house]) of the veduta forma [form seen] that produces love…. [L]ove (as the ‘form seen’, veduta forma, which gives birth to it) is in the possible intellect as in its proper place” (p. 24).

The thought here seems to be that the feeling of love follows from the apprehension of a form or image as having characteristics that make it in itself lovable. According to Agamben, for Cavalcanti and Dante, the possible aka potential aka material intellect is the “quasi-subject” of love. At the same time, the possible intellect is not so much a discrete entity as a “place” that is not really a discrete place either, but a kind of ubiquitous structural relation.

Agamben cites a line from Dante speaking of “women who have love’s intellect”. He comments, “[B]etween intellect and love the connection is essential” (ibid).

“The modern specialists, each convinced that they think with their own brain — when to all evidence they on the contrary think according to the common paradigms imposed by the doctrinal system in which they are inscribed — experience such distress before the Averroist theory of the unique intellect, that they do not understand what should nonetheless be evident, namely that the speculative node of the question, so to speak the experimentum crucis [cross test] of Averroism, does not consist in the division between individuals and intellect, but — once the division is affirmed — in their conjunction, which the Latin translators render by the technical terms copulatio and continuatio. In this conjunction between the unique material intellect and singular individuals, the essential mediating function is accomplished by the intentiones ymaginatae, that is to say the phantasms of the imagination” (p. 25).

“Nonetheless, not only does the imagination operate as an intermediary between individuals and the intellect, but it is also for Calvalcanti the object and at the same time the subject of amorous passion” (p. 26). “Cavalcanti and the poets of love take the coincidence between love and imagination so far that they personify the phantasms” (p. 27).

This is saying that imagination is both the object and the subject of love, as well as what individualizes intellect.

Agamben points out that Averroes strongly underlines Aristotle’s statement that only the combination of intellect and desire moves us. “It is this singular fusion between intellect, desire, and imagination that it is also necessary to understand in the ‘love’s intellect’ of Dante…. Love is not a substance, it is — as [Cavalcanti’s] song says in its overture — an ‘accident’ that indetermines the three substances intellect, imagination, and desire, and puts them fiercely in tension” (p. 29).

“[F]or intellection to be ‘acquired’ and become ‘proper’ to the individual, in effect it does not suffice that the forms be imagined, but it is necessary that they be desired and willed…. [T]he phantasm by desire makes the intelligible proper to the subject. Thought belongs to me because it has been imagined and desired” (p. 31).

“The great invention of Cavalcanti and the poets of love is to make love the place par excellence of the adeptio [acquisition] of thought by the individual” (p. 32).

Whom and what we love are of decisive importance to who we are, as well as to what we hold to be true.

Agamben notes that Dante also drew political consequences from his Averroist view of intellect. He quotes Dante’s treatise on monarchy: “Since the power of thought cannot be integrally and simultaneously actualized by a single human or by a single particular community […], it is necessary that there be in the human genus a multitude through which the whole power is in act” (p. 33, ellipses in original).

Dante’s universalist aspirations distinguish him from Cavalcanti, who was deeply involved in factional intrigue. For Dante, “‘our’… accompanies and precedes ‘me'” (p. 34).

Space of Reasons, Potential Intellect?

Having recently written a bit more about the “space of reasons”, it occurs to me that this makes a good model for the perplexing and commonly misunderstood notion of a “separate” potential intellect. I’ve suggested previously that the space of reasons belongs in the register of Aristotelian potentiality, and elsewhere argued that the controversial “separate” potential intellect was not supposed to be some cosmic mind pulling the strings of our minds, but rather more like a shared tool that we all use and help improve. This tentative identification brings things a bit more into focus.

Although scholastic discourse about separate intellect used metaphysical vocabulary, what was actually said by Averroes about separate potential intellect clearly places it inside of time, and in an intimate relation to all rational animals. It was said to function as a kind of thesaurus (literally, “treasury”) of universals abstracted from concrete forms in human imagination, but to be “nothing at all” apart from operations that result from human imagination. (See “This Human Understands”; “This Human”, Again; Averroes as Read by de Libera; Separate Substances?)

Averroes as Read by de Libera

Alain de Libera has played a major role in reviving interest in Averroes. In 1999 he published a French translation of the crucial book III of the famous (or infamous) Long Commentary on Aristotle on the Soul, which was the first rendering of this work into a modern language. He devotes an 80-page chapter of Archéologie du sujet volume 3 part 1 to reconstructing the more controversial parts of this long-misunderstood text. I’ve previously discussed the reading of Deborah Black in “This Human Understands”, and that of Stephen Ogden in “This Human”, Again.

The modern notion of a subject-agent, de Libera says, originated partly in opposition to Augustine and partly in opposition to Averroes. Though he was responsible for first introducing a notion of “subject” into Aristotelian discourse about the soul, Averroes did not introduce the “modern subject”. According to de Libera, the notion of the human as subject-agent of thought was developed first in opposition to Averroes, then in opposition to the Averroists, then by later Averroists responding to criticism.

“[F]or an Aristotelian as for a Plotinian, the intelligibles in act are not mental states, accidents or accidental forms of a mind posed as substrate and having before it things, themselves bearing qualities, but the intelligibles themselves as intellects in act” (p. 166; my translation throughout). I’ll try to shed some further light on this below.

De Libera cites Aristotle’s own statement that intellect and the intellected are one. He says Averroes’ Latin readers were misled by Michael Scot’s translation of intellectus (intellect as a faculty) for what should have been intellectum (the intelligible). The thesis of the unity of intellect commonly attributed to Averroes is really at its root a thesis of the unity of the intelligible, he says. Averroes primarily has in mind Plato’s problem of how teaching and learning — and shared apprehension and objectivity — are possible.

“The first concern of Averroes is to escape from Platonism” (p. 182). This means we still like forms, but we do not posit free-floating Forms. Aristotle’s alternative is a theory of “abstraction”. Intellect is said to “abstract” intelligibles as universals from the concrete particular contents of what is called imagination. De Libera says that Aristotle used both inductive and “geometric” notions of abstraction, but notes that the commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias particularly emphasized the “geometric” version, which is said to involve conceiving as separate from matter the forms that are nonetheless not separate from matter.

“The noetic problem inherited from Alexander by Averroes is above all that of the production of the intelligible in act: the intentio intellecta” (p. 184). “Intellect is not mind. Nor is it consciousness” (p. 185). The intentio intellecta is not the intentionality arising from the act of a transcendental Ego that Husserl spoke of.

“What is this problem? Not that which Thomas posed to the Averroists, and through them to Averroes: to account for the fact of experience that I think, but rather: to account for the fact that we think, or better, the fact that we think or are capable of thinking the same thing.”

“At issue here is neither the I, nor the human, nor the individual human, but indeed the I and the you” (p. 186). De Libera suggests the analogy of Fregean thought that “is independent of our activity of thought” (p. 187), and says that like Frege, Averroes “opposes thought, intellectio, to representation, cogitatio” (ibid).

The Greek commentator Themistius had suggested underwriting the unity of the intelligible by a unity of “intellect”.

“[T]he theory of the unity of the material intellect has the function of resolving, from a strict Aristotelian point of view, the Platonic question of the possibility of teaching and apprenticeship” (p. 189).

Averroes wants to say that the intelligible is both one and multiple. We can apprehend the very same thing, and yet do so separately. In the forms in our incarnate imaginations it is multiple, but in the immaterial “material intellect” it is one.

Averroes referred to both the imagined, represented, or “cogitated” forms in the soul and to the so-called material intellect with a word that was translated to Latin as subjectum or “subject”. His account of how the two “subjects” interact has become known in secondary literature as the “theory of the two subjects”. Though it was being applied to human imagination and thought, the notion of subject here was understood by his Latin readers as just the abstract one of something standing under something else.

De Libera says it is impossible to understand the theory of two subjects without paying attention to what Averroes says about two related movers. In a famous development in the Metaphysics, Aristotle himself progressively sublimated the “standing under” concept, ultimately replacing it with considerations of potentiality and actualization. De Libera says that in Averroes’ reflections on intellect, “subject” really means mover rather than substrate.

An Aristotelian mover is actually very different from the modern concept of an agent. De Libera quotes Aristotle to the effect that “movement, action, and passion reside in that which is moved” (p. 198).

Averroes, following Aristotle, develops an analogy between sense and intellect. De Libera analyzes Aristotle’s account of the case of sense in four points: 1) that which is potentially sensible exists independent of sense; 2) it only plays the role of mover in the sensitive faculty; 3) the sensible in act (or the sensed) and the sensing or the sense in act are numerically the same act, but differ in essence or quiddity; 4) the identity of the act of the sensible and the act of the sensing in the sensing serves as Aristotle’s explanation for how we sense that we are sensing, or how we have internal sense. In this “synergetic” account, sensation is not a pure passive reception, but rather at the same time is an actualization of a potentiality that we have, and indeed an actualization of us.

De Libera notes that the analogy Aristotle and Averroes both make between sense and intellect in this regard is already enough to invalidate all the readings of Averroes that make the human entirely passive in relation to thought. Intellect for Averroes is not a simple “Giver of Forms” like the transcendent intellect in Avicenna. According to de Libera, in sensation only the potentiality of the sensing functions as a subject of inherence or attribution. That which is potentially sensible does not sense. Similarly, in intellect the intentio intellecta has only one subject of inherence or attribution, which is the potentiality for intellection in the so-called material intellect. That which is potentially intelligible does not think. Nor are intelligibles “emanated” directly to the soul, any more than sensations are received in a purely passive way.

“The receiving intellect is not a sponge. It moves itself. Or better, it is moved. Its movement is a motion by final cause” (p. 212). The two movers in this case are the forms in imagination and the abstracting “active” intellect.

“The human is not the subject of thought, but nonetheless she thinks, and thinks at will. Such is the thesis of Averroes” (p. 215). We think when we want. For Averroes, the agent and receptor of the intelligible in act are both eternal, separate substances, but the activities of these separate substances nevertheless take place in us, and are attributed to us. This should correct the misleading impression that for Averroes what the moderns call “the subject” is divided into a part that is mental but not thinking, and a part that is thinking but not mental. It is even further removed from the argument of Aquinas that Averroes makes the human into something like a wall, and into something passively thought by something else rather than something thinking.

Thought in the human is a habitus, or Aristotelian hexis. This is a “second actuality” or “second perfection”, a product of processes of actualization. Averroes makes significant use of the notion of the “acquired intellect” that may come to be immanent in the human, which was explicitly elaborated by al-Farabi using Aristotelian notions of potentiality and actualization. In this context de Libera speaks of production and re-production, actualization and re-actualization. It is by virtue of having this “acquired intellect” that the human has the ability to think when she wants.

“The one who has thoughts thinks” (p. 219). “Active” and “material” intellects are two faculties or moments of one thing or process. We act by means of them, and according to de Libera this means that for Averroes, they constitute our form insofar as we are thinking. Averroes holds that Aristotle’s use of “soul” is equivocal with respect to whether or not it includes intellect; that only the animal and vegetable parts of the soul count as form and first perfection of the body; but that intellect nonetheless is our form when we are thinking.

The Act of Thought

Volume 3 part 1 of Alain de Libera’s Archéologie du sujet carries subtitles translating to The Act of Thought for volume 3 overall, and The Double Revolution for part 1. The cast of major characters will include Averroes, Aquinas, and the Scottish philosopher of common sense Thomas Reid (1710-1796). This tome is packed with extremely interesting material. It also appears to me to intersect with the important work of Gwenaëlle Aubry on the historical transformation of Aristotelian potentiality and actuality into a neoplatonic notion of power and a more modern notion of action. At the time part 1 was published (2014), part 2 was supposed to be a few months away, and de Libera announced titles for volumes 4 through 7. Instead, he has since published three volumes of related lectures at the College de France.

“The philosophers pose all sorts of questions concerning thought. Who thinks? Am I the author of my thoughts? What is the place of thought? What is its theater or its scene? In what way are the thoughts that come from me or that I have mine? Am I the owner of my thought? In sum: is it necessary to say ‘I think’ with Descartes, or ‘it thinks’ with [Belgian new wave musician] Plastic Bertrand, [and philosophers like] Lichtenberg, Schelling, and Schlick? It seems natural to us to believe that the act of thinking takes place in us. ‘Takes place‘ says a lot. That which takes place is [emphasis added]. Being is having a place of being — in other words: it is having (a) reason for being. But what takes place also happens. What takes place in us happens in us, is produced, is effectuated, is accomplished in us. What takes places in us is in us, in whatever way that it has being. It certainly seems natural to believe that since the act of thinking takes place in us, it begins and is completed in us. In us, that is to say in our soul (if we are religious), in our spirit (if we know the French for Mind), or in some part of us (if we [participated in the May 1968 Paris uprising]).”

“There is nothing ‘natural’ in all this. All these beliefs are cultural, and historically constructed. They are assimilated philosophical theses, philosophemes neither proven as such nor a fortiori proven as historical constructs, philosophemes (learned theorems, technical injunctions, theoretical words of order) lived without justification as immediate givens of consciousness, as a flower of experience” (p. 13, my translation throughout).

De Libera refers to very strong assertions by Thomas Reid about the common-sense character of all this. Reid explicitly refers to the mind as a subject. It was philosophers, de Libera says, “who decided that this, or that which thinks, was the SUBJECT of an act, the act of thinking. It was philosophers who decided on this subjective basis that this ‘that’ or this ‘it’ could be known as the author or the actor. They did this partly against Aristotle, and partly in the name of Aristotle….”

“The philosophical construction accounts for a fact of experience: we sense ourselves as the principle, that is to say also as the beginning, the point of departure… of our actions, notably, and very particularly of our thought. But exactly in accounting for this fact, the philosopher encodes it, and never ceases throughout history to re-encode it, to complicate it, to invest in it and reinvest in it linguistically, conceptually, argumentatively.”

“‘Denomination’ is one of the keys of this code” (p. 15). “According to Reid, to say that an agent x acts on a thing y is to say that a power or force exercised by x produces or has a tendency to produce a change in y. What is particularly interesting for an archaeology of the subject-agent of thought is that this schema does not apply to perception” (p. 17).

According to Reid, when we perceive objects, the objects don’t act on the mind, and the mind doesn’t act on the objects. To be perceived is an external denomination. According to de Libera, in the language of the Latin scholastics, causal denomination finds its main application in the domain of action. An action denominates its agent causally, and not formally or extrinsically. On the other hand, extrinsic denomination applies perfectly to the ontological and noetic analysis of the object of thought.

For most of the scholastics, as for most modern people, the being-thought of a stone is real in the human, but is not real in the stone. But de Libera points out that the great Thomist Cajetan says about thought in the passive sense what Reid says about perception — both the stone and the thinker are only extrinsically denominated by the being-thought of the stone.

As de Libera points out, Averroes and his Latin followers have been understood as arguing that thinking is an extrinsic denomination of the human. “It requires a solid engagement with [Aristotle’s work on the soul] and its Greek, Arabic, Jewish, and Latin interpretive tradition to understand what this means” (p. 22).

Church councils in the 14th and 16th centuries upheld the opposing views of Aquinas as doctrinally correct. According to de Libera, this opened two paths, one leading to Descartes and the “Cartesian subject”, and the other leading to what he calls a Leibnizian notion of subject as the “thing underlying actions”. He says there is also a third path, leading from Averroes to Brentano, who reintroduced the scholastic notion of intentionality in the late 19th century. In this sense, he says the middle ages were more modern than we realize, and modernity is more medieval than we realize.

De Libera notes that Foucault ultimately derived his philosophical use of the word “archaeology” from Kant. Such archaeology is concerned with very Kantian “conditions of possibility”.

Taking the modern notion of “subject” at its point of emergence demands that we look back to the scholastic subjectum and “being in a subject” — not for the pleasure of returning to the middle ages, but in order to understand Descartes in context. It was not actually Descartes who was responsible for the transition from what Heidegger called “subjectity” (simply being a thing standing under something else) to the mental “subjectivity” of an ego.

Incidentally, de Libera points out one of the first uses of the word “subjective” in a modern sense in Martin Schoock, an early Dutch critic of Descartes who objected that Descartes reduced thought to something “subjective”. He quotes Schoock as saying “The reason Descartes brags about is not reason understood in a general sense, but in a subjective sense, that is to say the reason he can consider in himself” (p. 30).

Here I would note that in an interesting little meditation on Averroes called Je phantasme (“I imagine”), de Libera’s former student Jean-Baptiste Brenet points out that general Latin use of the verb cogitare referred primarily to operations of what in Aristotelian terms was called “inner sense”, as distinct from intelligere, which was the standard word for the “thinking” attributed to “intellect”.

(Inner sense is the closest Aristotelian analogue to what Locke more abstractly called “consciousness”. At least in the Arabic commentary tradition, it seems to involve several distinct faculties that all have what Aristotle and the scholastics following him called “imagination” as their common root. These are said to include what animals use in place of reason to make meaningful discriminations such as the nearness of danger, which is not actually given in external sense. Descartes’ own usage of cogito (first person singular of cogitare) basically covers all forms of awareness. It is a commonly repeated “Aristotelian” dictum that nothing comes to be in intellect without first coming to be in sense perception, but de Libera in an earlier volume pointed out that a more accurately Aristotelian version would be that nothing comes to be in intellect without some basis in imagination, and nothing comes to be in imagination without some basis in sense perception.)

Origins of a Subject-Agent

How did the modern equation of subjecthood and agency come to be? How did the notion of “I” or ego come to be substantialized? An extremely influential argument of Heidegger makes this an innovation of Descartes. Alain de Libera argues that this is too hasty, and that the groundwork for this identification was actually laid in the later middle ages. I’m continuing a high-level treatment of de Libera’s extremely important “archaeology of the subject“ (see also On a Philosophical Grammar).

Answering this question will involve an extended historical odyssey through complex interactions between Aristotelian and Augustinian views, and much more. De Libera sees Aquinas in his polemic against Averroes raising four interrelated questions of a more fundamental nature: Who thinks? What is the subject of thought? Who are we? What is man? The second of these seems to have been first asked by Averroes. The other three are largely attributable to Aquinas and his contemporaries, in their reactions to Averroes.

Several points of Aristotelian interpretation (What is substance? What is form? What is act? What is an efficient cause? What is the soul?) will be relevant to answering these, as will Augustine’s meditations on personhood and the nature of the Trinity. De Libera notes that John Locke — a major contributor to modern views on “the subject” — was deeply involved in debates on trinitarian theology. He also discusses Franz Brentano’s modern revival of the medieval notion of intentionality. The medieval version was closely bound up with a notion of “inexistence” or “existing in” of mental objects (forms separated from their matter) in the soul.

In the Categories, Aristotle gives substance the logical sense of something standing under something else. This influenced the Greek grammarians who formulated the notion of a grammatical subject. But in the Metaphysics, he treats this as only a starting point that is quickly superseded by an identification of substance with form or “what it was to have been” a thing, before moving into an account of substance as potentiality and actuality.

De Libera notes a historic division among readers of Aristotle’s treatise On the Soul between those who interpret the soul as an attribute of the body, and those who treat it as a substance in its own right. The latter position has different meanings, depending on whether substance is taken in the “standing under” sense or in the sense of form. De Libera will be particularly interested in the consequences of a further family of positions that make the non-obvious equation of human actions and passions with attributes of the soul.

He notes that “category” in Greek originally meant accusation, and relates this to Locke’s characterization of personhood as a “forensic” notion. We have here to do with subtle relations between attribution, inherence, and imputation with respect to actions and passions in relation to the soul. But what is an action? Must we explain an act in terms of a substantial subject’s power of efficient causation in a late scholastic sense that is far from Aristotle’s? (See also Expansive Agency; Brandomian Forgiveness.)

“This Human”, Again

Stephen Ogden’s Averroes on Intellect (2022) is the first book-length treatment of this fascinating subject of medieval controversy that is centrally focused on an independent philosophical evaluation of the arguments of Averroes himself. Ogden develops a reading of Averroes in close relation both to the Aristotelian text and to the contrasting positions of Avicenna and Aquinas. Averroes, he says, deserves to be taken seriously both as a reader of Aristotle and as a philosopher in his own right. Averroes challenges us to question our assumptions as to what “intellect” might be.

Ultimately, Ogden suggests a sort of compromise between Averroes and Aquinas. This makes an interesting counterpoint to the interpretation of Deborah Black.

Like Black, Ogden highlights the common ground between Averroes and Aquinas. He develops the fact that unlike most earlier commentators on Aristotle, Averroes and Aquinas both explained actual and potential “intellect” in symmetrical ways that made them the same broad kind of being. They also both distinguished a third, “passive” intellect — said to be a kind of disposition of the human imagination — that others have often identified with the potential intellect.

Prior to Averroes, the most common type of reading made actual intellect a singular or universal cosmic or metaphysical principle, while treating potential intellect as something mortal and divided among many individuals. (While fascinating, this is to my mind anomalous with respect to the way Aristotle himself develops the relations between potentiality and actuality. I tend to think of these as only analytically distinguishable aspects, phases, or modes of the same real things.)

Averroes and Aquinas agree that both actual and potential “intellect” are immaterial things that are not dependent on the body. They both defend variants of what is termed “moderate realism” with respect to universals. In this kind of view, universals have reality independent of particulars, but they do not subsist in themselves as Plato thought. They are “abstracted” from human imagination by something called “intellect”.

On the other hand, Aquinas and Averroes approach the interpretation of “intellect” with very different concerns in mind. Ogden agrees with Deborah Black’s point that the role of intellect for Averroes lies in the constitution of intelligible objects. Further, for Averroes the universal singularity of “intellect” carries the whole burden of underwriting a non-Platonic reality of universals as universals.

For Aquinas on the other hand, I would say the primary role of intellect is to underwrite a metaphysically strong notion of personal identity. Aquinas uses a complex original theory of intelligible “species” to do most of the work of underwriting the reality of universals. This leaves him free to repurpose “intellect” as a basis of a philosophical argument for personal immortality that has no parallel in Averroes or Aristotle. Aquinas develops a nuanced account of how the soul exists in genuine union with the body, but each individual soul contains within it intellect that is separable from body. For Aquinas, the presence of intellect within the soul guarantees the immortality of the soul. Ogden mentions in passing Aquinas’ acceptance of Aristotle’s view that memory, however, is inseparable from the body.

Ogden agrees with Black that Averroes successfully explains the experience of human self-awareness in terms of imagination, without needing to appeal to intellect. But Ogden says that for Averroes, in a stricter sense it is indeed only the intellect as our perfective form that “understands”, so perhaps we should say that thought happens within us, rather than that we think.

He mentions that Bertrand Russell said that Descartes should have said “there is thought”, rather than “I think”. I would add that “I” am not a “thinking thing”, but an ethical being constituted by my commitments and practices of commitment.

Averroes

The Andalusian Arab Ibn Rushd (1126-1198 CE), known to the Latins as Averroes, was the most highly regarded commentator on Aristotle in the medieval and Renaissance Latin- and Hebrew-speaking worlds. Many of Aristotle’s central works first became available in Latin due to the translation of commentaries by Averroes that included Aristotle’s full text. In the early 14th century, the pope directed that European universities should teach Aristotle from the commentaries of Averroes, except where the opinions of “the Commentator” contradicted Christian faith. The first printed editions of Aristotle in the Renaissance were actually editions of Averroes with the works of Aristotle embedded in them.

Averroes was an Islamic judge in the Maliki tradition, and also an important medical authority. He maintained that philosophy and Islam taught the same truth in different ways. In addition to commentaries on Aristotle and works on law and medicine, he wrote several works on religion, and a short commentary on Plato’s Republic. The voluntaristic Sunni theologian al-Ghazali had written an influential denunciation of philosophy, which Averroes famously refuted in his Incoherence of the Incoherence. For most of his life he enjoyed the patronage of the Almohad caliphate, which controlled southern Spain and northwest Africa, but the situation was tenuous. Further East, the the Islamic Golden Age’s marvelous flowering of all sorts of learning and popular interest in “ancient wisdom” had already passed, as religious conservatives acquired greater influence.

As a reader of Aristotle, Averroes contributed greatly to distinguishing Aristotle’s own thought from that of the neoplatonically influenced commentary tradition. Though he only had access to Arabic translations of Syriac translations of the Greek, he did an amazing job of close textual analysis, comparing different translations of the same work to get better insight. He still inherited al-Farabi’s over-emphasis on demonstrative “science”, underestimation of the place of dialectic in Aristotle’s thought, and privileging of theory over practical ethical judgment, but on countless other points promoted textually sound and interesting readings of Aristotle’s works.

I feel a little guilty for perpetuating the Western obsession with a very narrow if important strand of his thought, concerned with his unique views on the nature of “intellect”, but I don’t read Arabic and my Latin is very poor, so my acquaintance is mainly based on sources in modern European languages. I also find the whole debate about intellect fascinating in its own right. (See also “This Human Understands”; “This Human”, Again; Averroes as Read by de Libera; Fortunes of Aristotle; Errors of the Philosophers; 1277.)

“This Human Understands”

Imagination rather than intellect is actually the main locus of human consciousness for both Thomas Aquinas and the great Aristotelian commentator Averroes whom Aquinas famously criticized, according to medieval scholar Deborah Black.

“[W]ithin the Aristotelian framework which Aquinas and Averroes share, the psychological explanation and interpretation of intellectual consciousness is not itself a given, even if the experience of consciousness is. Consciousness of thinking may play a central role in Cartesian philosophy, and in the system of Averroes’s and Aquinas’s predecessor, Avicenna. But it has no such privileged status in the philosophies of Aristotle, Averroes, or Aquinas, in which the possible intellect ‘is actually nothing before it thinks,’ and is only able to think itself after it has been actualized by some other object”, she wrote in her 1993 essay “Consciousness and Self-Knowledge in Aquinas’s Critique of Averroes’s Psychology”.

The relation of so-called “intellect” (nous) to the human “soul” (psyche) in Aristotle has historically been a major point of contention. These words are used in subtly or extremely different ways by many authors. I strongly recommend holding off on any easy identification of either of them with what modern people think of as subjective mind or consciousness.

Aristotle seems to apply a variant of his fruitful pairing of potentiality and actuality in his rather minimalist account of intellect. These notions were developed in greater detail in the commentary tradition. To hazard an oversimplification, intellect in actuality was considered to be something immaterial that makes things intelligible, whereas intellect in potentiality was considered to be something with no form of its own that takes on intelligible forms.

The great Greek commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias identified the potential or “material” intellect with a part of the soul, which he considered to be inseparable from the body, and therefore mortal. The actual or “agent” intellect he identified with a divine principle that he also gave a cosmological role.

The brilliant Arabic commentator Averroes (Ibn Rushd) argued that both aspects of intellect were symmetrically unique immaterial principles, outside the soul but connected with it. He became convinced that all humans must share a common “material” (potential) intellect, which grounds the real existence of logical universals and intelligible forms, but gets its contents from human imagination, and would not exist if there were no rational animals.

Aquinas located both intellects within the human soul, while giving the latter the elevated, more neoplatonic metaphysical status of an “intellectual soul”, and strongly associating its intellectual character with personal immortality. Especially in later works, Aquinas polemicized sharply against Averroes, claiming that Averroes could not even consistently say that “this human understands”, because for Averroes in his Long Commentary on the De Anima, there is only one material intellect shared by all humans.

Deborah Black argues that the two phases of intellect in Aristotle work together to constitute objects and intelligible forms. This need not imply an experience of immediate self-awareness. For Aristotle, Averroes, and Aquinas, intellectual self-awareness emerges only indirectly.

Black points out that Aquinas typically uses words like “perceives” or “experiences” in talking about self-awareness, and seems to deliberately avoid words implying intellectual comprehension. She sees this as reflecting Aristotelian scruples, and notes the studied vagueness of Aquinas’ endorsement of Augustinian immediate self-awareness. In his refutation of Averroes, Aquinas does appeal to the experience of consciousness, but she notes that he does so initially to argue against Plato’s identification of human being solely with intellect, pointing out that the same person perceives herself both to understand and to sense. “This human understands” does not actually emphasize any deep reflexivity, only individuality.

Aquinas approves of the fact that for Averroes, intellect is in some way united with the body, but argues that because for Averroes that union occurs only through a working of intellect on the contents of imagination, the human individual for Averroes does not herself think. On the other hand, Black argues that Aquinas does not take into account the fact that although what Aquinas himself calls imagination is an entirely passive reception of images, the contents of imagination for Averroes have a much more active character. For Averroes, according to Black, it is the active character of the contents of imagination that manifests human self-awareness. Because Aquinas views imagination as entirely passive, he refuses to acknowledge any credibility to this at all, claiming that the contents of imagination Averroes appeals to are really nothing more than the equivalent of inert colors on an inert wall, and that this makes the human equivalent to a wall.

Averroes compares active intellect to light, and so-called “material” intellect to a transparent medium such as air. Aquinas makes it sound as though the material intellect for Averroes would be analogous to the eye, which would make the material intellect a sort of mind behind our minds. However, Black says Averroes always compared it to a transparent medium, not to the eye. She argues that neither of Averroes’ intellects is a mind or a knower or subject in the modern sense. In her 2004 essay “Models of the Mind: Metaphysical Presuppositions of the Averroist and Thomistic Accounts of Intellection”, she contends that for Averroes, far from being the mind behind our minds that would make us into mere puppets, the material intellect serves as a shared instrument for human agents who individually constitute themselves in imagination.

Averroes’ notion of intellect, Black suggests, is mainly concerned with the constitution of intelligible objects as universals from imaginative content. It does not act as a subject in the modern sense. She cites a number of passages from Aquinas indicating that he, too, often treated intellect as an instrument, rather than as our very essence. (See also Parts of the Soul; Aristotelian Subjectivity Revisited.)

1277

I’m still slowly working my way through Gwenaëlle Aubry’s Genèse du dieu souverain. She notes that Peter Abelard’s student Peter Lombard (1096-1160) — whose Sentences became the standard textbook of Christian theology throughout the later European middle ages — rejected the novel teachings of Abelard, and defended basically Augustinian views on omnipotence. A more radical notion of omnipotence was advanced by Hugh of Saint-Cher (c. 1200-1263), who first introduced the distinction between God’s potentia absoluta or “absolute” power, and what he called potentia conditionata or “conditioned” power, which later authors referred to as potentia ordinata. Although Bonaventure, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas among others rejected Hugh’s distinction, it would later be adopted by Duns Scotus and many others.

Aubry argues that Bishop of Paris Etienne Tempier’s condemnation of 219 propositions in 1277 actually reflected a less extreme, more traditionally Augustinian, stance on omnipotence than the “absolute power” of Hugh of Saint-Cher. I’ve briefly commented on the 1277 condemnation before.

The accepted mid-20th century view was that the condemnation was prompted by the emergence of a trend of “Latin Averroism”, of which Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia were supposed to have been the leading representatives. The translations of Averroes’ commentaries on Aristotle from the Arabic were largely responsible for the rise of Latin Aristotelianisms, but closer scholarship has shown that even the most “Averroist” Latin thinkers considered themselves simply as Aristotelian, and diverged from the more particular views of Averroes on important details. A revised view of the condemnation was that it simply addressed “radical Aristotelianism” — a wholehearted embrace of Aristotle and various Arabic philosophers that was deemed to be in conflict with Christianity.

Alain de Libera has emphasized, however, that what the condemnation addressed was not merely doctrinal or academic matters, but the first social emergence of “intellectuals” in Europe, along with the idea of an ethical Aristotelianism as a way of life. While some authors have seen this as an essentially secular development and as a direct challenge to Christianity, de Libera, Kurt Flasch, and Burkhard Mojsisch have made the picture much more complicated by documenting on the one hand how this development was continued by the German students of Albert the Great, and on the other that the trend of Rhenish mysticism that included the great Meister Eckhart developed out of German Albertism.

The condemned propositions themselves are quite diverse — from praise of philosophy, reason, and this-worldly ethics to general questioning of authority; to assertion of various limits on God’s power; to Aristotelian emphasis on the importance of “secondary” causes; to theses on the characteristics of neoplatonic separate intellects; to expressions of astrological determinism; to rejection of specific points of accepted Christian doctrine. It is unlikely that any single person adhered to them all; certainly the German Albertist Dominicans whom de Libera, Flasch, and Mojsisch have associated with the broader trend addressed by the condemnation would have not have endorsed the rejection of points of common doctrine.

Those who have seen a theological-political confrontation between Augustinianism and Aristotelianism in the condemnation are not wrong, but it is more complicated than that. The Albertists did not see themselves as opposed to Augustine.

Scholars have debated whether any of the condemned propositions were intended to target Thomas Aquinas. Shortly after the condemnation, Bishop Tempier in fact attempted a move against the teaching of the not-yet-canonized Aquinas, which was thwarted in part by the efforts of Albert the Great, who traveled back to Paris to defend the reputation of his recently deceased student. In between, Tempier succeeded in getting the theologian Giles of Rome reprimanded, although Giles was allowed to resume teaching shortly thereafter and did not much change his arguments. Giles was himself the author of a treatise on the “errors of the philosophers”, but this did not prevent him from making use of philosophical arguments in his theology. Theology during this time generally became far more involved with philosophical questions than it had been.

Albert the Great, who along with Roger Bacon was the first European to lecture on the main body of Aristotle’s works after they were translated from the Arabic, developed a style in which he would alternately say “now I speak as a philosopher” and then “now I speak as a theologian”. This was in contrast to Aquinas, who preferred to emphasize the unity of truth. Around the time of Tempier’s condemnation, unnamed “Averroists” were accused of holding that Christianity and “philosophy” contradicted one another but were somehow both true. Scholars have generally concluded that no one literally held such a view, but it strikes me that it might have originated as a hostile caricature of Albert.