Potential Intellect?

I like to imagine Aristotelian and Kantian judgment flowing together. Moreover, I like to think that for both of them, thought is first and foremost an open-ended, discursive process of interpretation, and ultimately value judgment.

Applying Spinoza’s notion of conatus to Kant, Longuenesse well captures the idea that the Kantian unity of apperception as an achieved state is only a constantly renewed aim. The difference between what she calls the “mere capacity to judge” in Kant and what Aristotle means by thought that “is not actively any of the things that are until it thinks” basically comes down to the difference between a Kantian capacity and an Aristotelian being-in-potentiality. These notions are clearly related both conceptually and historically, but I have recently dwelt quite a bit on various historical transformations of what I take to be the Aristotelian notion of potentiality.

The latter would consist in something like multiform, branching spaces of alternate conditionals, with gradients of difference and consequence, affecting the actualization of ends and constituting a metaphorical topography of relative densities of possibility in our actual world. A Kantian capacity — even one that defines us — is still in some sense a capability we discretely “have”, whereas an Aristotelian potentiality pertains to our being, but also at the same time to that of the world we inhabit.

Aristotelian “thought” — commonly translated “intellect” — has been quite variously interpreted, and often fused with notions of neoplatonic or Augustinian provenance. Aristotle’s own texts dealing with it are quite minimalist. The relatively most extensive one is in On the Soul. I would complement it with what he says about practical judgment and ethos in the Ethics, and about the pursuit of wisdom in book Alpha of the Metaphysics. I take it to refer not to a mind-entity, or an intuitive knowledge, or an engine of predetermined reasoning, but rather to a discursive potentiality, an engagement in thought and valuation and earnest search, and the ethical “spirit” that is the undying essence of a human being.

Disambiguating “Power”

As Aristotle might remind us, “power” is said in many ways. Each of these is different.

There is the power that Plato suggests as a distinguishing mark of being in the Sophist. There is the greater power he attributes to the Good more ancient than being. There is Aristotelian potentiality, which I normally prefer to distinguish from “power” altogether, but is referred to by the same Greek word. There is the related notion of power as capacity, of the sort developed by Paul Ricoeur. There is efficient causality, itself said in many ways. There is physical force. There is legal or political authority. There are repressive apparatuses. There is the positive, distributed social power involved in the formation of selves, discussed by Michel Foucault. There is the artistic and inventive power with which Nietzsche was especially concerned. There are claims of supernatural power beyond possible human understanding.

I haven’t yet found where in her French text Gwenaëlle Aubry clarifies how her identification of Aristotle’s god with pure act — involving neither Aristotelian potentiality nor Platonic power — goes together with her identification of the efficacy of the pure act with a final causality realized through “potentiality as tendency toward the end”. I think this has to do with the pure act’s role as an end or attractor, so that the potentiality in question belongs to the things it attracts, rather than to Aristotle’s god. Aristotle’s god for Aubry is what might be called an “inspiring” or attracting cause rather than a ruler and a driving cause.

It seems to me that in order to even be intelligible, a power of any kind must be understood as having definite characteristics related to its efficacy. I therefore think “infinite power” is devoid of sense. Even the “omnipotent” God of Leibniz who selects the best of all possible worlds at the moment of creation only selects an inherent, coherently realizable possibility that is also in accordance with non-arbitrary criteria of goodness. He does not create arbitrarily.

Ricoeur on Memory: Orientation

The first part of Memory, History, Forgetting is devoted to the phenomenology of memory. Husserl’s notion of intentionality – summarized by the dictum that all consciousness is consciousness of something, which Ricoeur here calls “object oriented” and interprets as putting the what before the who – is suggested as a starting point. “If one wishes to avoid being stymied by a fruitless aporia, then one must hold in abeyance the question of attributing to someone… the act of remembering and begin with the question ‘What?’” (p. 3).

He notes that Plato bequeathed to posterity an approach to memory (and also imagination) centered on talking about a kind of presence of an absent thing. Aristotle is credited with clarifying the distinction between this kind of memory and the kind of doing involved in the effort to remember something. “Memories, by turns found and sought, are… situated at the crossroads of pragmatics and semantics” (p. 4). It is the pragmatics of recollection that will eventually provide an appropriate transition to the who of memory, but there will also be a difficulty with an inherent potential for a kind of abuse of active recollection, foreshadowed by Plato’s worries about the manipulative discourse of the Sophist.

It will be important to distinguish memory from imagination as having different kinds of objects, and especially to avoid a too-easy assimilation of memories to images (which he elsewhere applies to imagination as well). Memory is supposed to be concerned with a real past, and although images do seem to play a role in our experience of memory, Ricoeur suggests it will be a secondary one.

He urges that we consider memory first from the point of view of capacities and their “happy” realization, before questions of pathology and error. “To put it bluntly, we have nothing better than memory to signify that something has taken place” (p. 21). He also thinks it is possible to at least “sketch a splintered, but not radically dispersed, phenomenology in which the relation to time remains the ultimate and sole guideline” (p. 22).

There is a problem of the interconnection between preverbal experience and “the work of language that ineluctably places phenomenology on the path of interpretation, hence of hermeneutics” (p. 24). There is also an extensive problem of the relation between action and representation.

Memories are essentially plural, and come in varying degrees of distinctness. We remember diverse kinds of things in diverse ways — singular events, states of affairs, abstract generalities, and facts. We have practical know-how that closely resembles an acquired habit, and other memory that apparently has no relation to habit. There is a contrast between memory as evocation and memory as search. He recalls Bergson’s notion of a dynamic scheme as a kind of direction of effort for the reconstruction of something. From Husserl, there is a distinction between retention and reproduction. There is another polarity between reflexivity and worldliness. From Bergson, there is another distinction between “pure memory” and a secondary “memory-image”.

Ultimately, memory involves a search for truth, an aim of faithfulness. It will have to be shown how this is related to its practical dimension, concerned with memory’s uses and abuses.

What Ricoeur terms the abuses of memory include the Renaissance “art of memory” celebrated by Frances Yates, which connected artificial techniques of memorization with magic and Hermetic secrets. We will “retreat from the magic of memory in the direction of a pedagogy of memory” (p. 67). Natural memory, too, as Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx pointed out, can be blocked, manipulated, or abusively controlled. The phenomena associated with ideology are a part of this. Communities attempt to obligate us to remember things in certain ways, and to forget certain things.

Ricoeur would like to avoid both the radical subjectivism of “methodological individualism” and an immediate sociological holism of a Durkheimian sort. In this context, he again pleads for a deferral of the question of the “actual subject of the operations of memory” (p. 93).

Next in this series: Ricoeur on Augustine on Memory