Tag: Desire

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

Therapy of Desire

Is philosophy a kind of therapy? Martha Nussbaum’s excellent The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (1994) impressed me greatly when it first came out. Looking at it again 30 years later, this ethical “therapy” turns out to follow a different paradigm from the emphasis on mutuality in dialogue that I have been addressing from various angles recently. The discussion has many interesting twists and turns.

What is philosophy for, anyway?

Nussbaum says “The idea of a practical and compassionate philosophy — a philosophy that exists for the sake of human beings, in order to address their deepest needs, confront their most urgent perplexities, and bring them from misery to some greater measure of flourishing — this idea makes the study of Hellenistic ethics riveting for a philosopher who wonders what philosophy has to do with the world” (p. 3).

Her main point in this early work is to exhibit the sophistication of Epicurean, Stoic, and Skeptical understandings of emotion. She highlights their practical commitment and “combination of logic with compassion” (p. 9). An important part of her argument, though, is that these later figures further developed themes that Aristotle already raised. I’m currently expecting to cover her first three chapters, where Aristotle plays a larger role. This post focuses on the introduction and first chapter.

“In order to get a purchase on this complex issue, I shall begin this book with Aristotle. For Aristotle sketched an account of the emotions and desires that is very close to the more elaborate accounts we find in the Hellenistic philosophers. And yet he did not defend a norm of detachment from the mutable good things of this world. His best human life is a life rich in attachments to people and things outside the self — friendships, family loves, political ties, ties of certain sorts to possessions and property. Thus it is a life rich in possibilities for emotions such as love, grief, fear, and even anger; the study of these connections will shed light, by contrast, on the Hellenistic conceptions” (pp. 41-42).

Aristotle’s positive valuation of various forms of emotion stands in opposition to these later philosophers.

The Hellenistic period is usually said to extend from Alexander the Great up to Roman times. Increased long-distance trade brought many cultures into closer contact with one another. Religions became detached from local traditional communities, with many coexisting side by side. The new philosophies that emerged in these times were simpler than those of Plato and Aristotle and more dogmatically presented, but still quite sophisticated and interesting. It is largely through them that philosophy for a while gained an unprecedented place in mainstream culture. Meanwhile, Aristotle’s uncirculated manuscripts were left to decay in the attic of a relative who had greedily claimed them. The great rise in Aristotle’s influence began only later, after a third or so of his uncirculated works were recovered and edited. (See Fortunes of Aristotle.)

“The major Hellenistic schools are all highly critical of society as they find it; and all are concerned to bring the necessary conditions of the good human life to those whom society has caused to suffer. They are, moreover, far more inclusive and less elitist in their practice of philosophy than was Aristotle, far more concerned to show that their strategies can offer something to each and every human being, regardless of class or status or gender. On the other hand, the way they do this has little to do, on the whole, with political, institutional, or material change. Instead of arranging to bring the good things of this world to each and every human being, they focus on changes of belief and desire that make their pupil less dependent on the good things of this world. They do not so much show ways of removing injustice as teach the pupil to be indifferent to the injustice she suffers” (p. 10).

I hold that a consistent application of Socratic-Platonic-Aristotelian philosophical values rules out any kind of elitism, by grounding everyday values in mutuality and reason.

“Aristotelianism sets exacting worldly conditions for the good life, making virtuous activity dependent in many ways upon material and educational conditions that are beyond the individual’s control. But Aristotle then assigns to politics the task of bringing those conditions to people: the good political arrangement is the one ‘in accordance with which each and every one might do well and lead a flourishing life'” (ibid).

Several important points about Aristotle are expressed in condensed terms here. Virtuous activity depends in part on conditions the individual does not control. Good politics should benefit all, not only some. He favors engagement rather than withdrawal, and he favors refining our emotional sensitivities rather than casting them aside or suppressing them.

On the other hand, “Epicurus urged a complete withdrawal from the life of the city, Skeptics an uncritical obedience to forces of existing convention. Even among the Stoics, whose commitment to the intrinsic value of justice is plain, we hear less about how to alter the political fact of slavery than about how to be truly free within, even though one may be (politically) a slave; less about strategies for the removal of hunger and thirst than about the unimportance of these bodily goods in a wise life; less about how to modify existing class structures and the economic relations that (as Aristotle argued) explain them, than about the wise person’s indifference to such worldly distinctions. In all three schools, the truly good and virtuous person is held to be radically independent of material and economic factors: achieving one’s full humanity requires only inner change…. I shall conclude that this criticism has some merit” (p. 11).

But there is also substantial common ground.

“[B]oth Aristotle and the Hellenistic thinkers insist that human flourishing cannot be achieved unless desire and thought, as they are usually constructed within society, are considerably transformed. (Both hold, for example, that most people learn to value money and status far too highly, and that this corrupts both personal and social relations.)” (ibid).

Here we come to the center of her reading, which is that for the Hellenistic philosophers, philosophy is a kind of therapy of the soul. (I note in passing the unanimity with which the philosophers denounce the overvaluation of money and status.)

“Epicurus wrote, ‘Empty is that philosopher’s argument by which no human suffering is therapeutically treated. For just as there is no use in a medical art that does not cast out the sicknesses of bodies, so too there is no use in philosophy, unless it casts out the suffering of the soul.’ The ancient Skeptical teacher, too, portrays himself as a healer of the soul. Being a lover of humanity, the Skeptic wishes to heal by argument, insofar as possible, the arrogant empty beliefs and the rashness of dogmatic people” (p. 13).

“Or as Cicero, speaking on behalf of the Stoa, more succinctly puts it: ‘There is, I assure you, a medical art for the soul. It is philosophy, whose aid need not be sought, as in bodily diseases, from outside ourselves. We must endeavor with all our resources and all our strength to become capable of doctoring ourselves’. Philosophy heals human diseases, diseases produced by false beliefs” (p. 14).

“All three schools, in short, could accept the Epicurean definition of philosophy: ‘Philosophy is an activity that secures the flourishing [eudaimon] life by arguments and reasonings.’ And all can agree that a precise, logically rigorous argument that is not well suited to the needs of its hearers, an argument that is simply and entirely academic and unable to engage its audience in a practical way, is to that extent a defective philosophical argument” (p. 15).

She contrasts all this with Augustine, for whom “God has set up certain ethical standards; it is our job to do what God wants. But we may or may not be endowed with the capability of seeing, or wanting, what God wants. Truth and God’s grace are out there; but the ability to see ethical truth or to reach for grace is not something we can control. There is, therefore, no reliable method by which we can construct an ethical norm from the scrutiny of our deepest needs and responses and desires” (p. 18).

“For both Platonists and these Christians, digging more deeply into ourselves is not the right way to proceed in ethical inquiry” (p. 19).

Here we reach a matter of deep ambivalence, and correspondingly great interest. Nussbaum will argue that on this particular point, Aristotle is closer to the “therapeutic” attitude of the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics than to the heaven-centered, more objectivist views of ethics that she attributes to Plato and Augustine. I broadly agree.

Referring to mytho-poetic imagery in Plato’s Phaedrus, she says “We do not inquire into the human good by standing on the rim of heaven; and if we did, we would not find the right thing. Human ways of life, and the hopes, pleasures, and pains that are a part of these, cannot be left out of the inquiry without making it pointless and incoherent. We do not in fact look ‘out there’ for ethical truth; it is in and of our human lives. More than this, it is something to and for human lives” (pp. 20-21).

For Aristotle, the Good is always concrete and situationally attuned.

“The medical conception of ethical inquiry opposes itself, as well, to another conception of ethics that stands, so to speak, at the opposite end of the spectrum from Platonism. This is the idea that ethical inquiry and teaching are simply the recording of traditional social belief and have no legitimate goal beyond this” (p. 24).

As Nussbaum points out, none of the Greek philosophers defends this kind of traditionalist view of ethics. The Hellenistic philosophers in particular see much that is wrong with the social world.

“For according to the Hellenistic philosophers, society is not in order as it is; and, as the source of most of their pupils’ beliefs and even of their emotional repertory, it has infected them with its sicknesses. The upbringing of young people is held to be deformed in various ways by false views about what matters: by excessive emphasis, for example, on money, competition, and status” (p. 26).

This is quite a far cry from the divine right of kings, the invisble hand, and other providential underwriting of the status quo that was claimed in early modern times. The Hellenistic philosophers dwelt more extensively than their avid readers in the Enlightenment on what modern people might call alienation.

Nussbaum next turns to address the limits of the therapeutic paradigm.

“All this suggests that the medical kind of ethics may be inclined — like medicine itself, but even more so — to adopt an asymmetrical model of the relationship between teacher and pupil, doctor and patient” (p. 27).

As she points out, at the heart of the therapeutic paradigm is an asymmetrical social relation. This stands in implicit conflict with the ideal of mutual and reciprocal relations in Aristotle’s ethics.

“Hellenistic ethics combines immersion with critical distance in something like this way — insisting on the rigorous scrutiny of belief and desire, while insisting, too, that it is to real people and their beliefs and desires that ethics must ultimately be responsible” (p. 28).

“In the course of developing their medical norms of health, the Hellenistic philosophers appeal to ‘nature’ and the ‘natural’. These slippery notions had better be scrutinized, since misunderstanding them could cause serious misunderstanding of the entire medical approach” (p. 29).

“The ancient appeals to nature that we shall be considering do not … pretend to derive value-norms from a value-free account of the ‘scientific’ underpinnings of human life. Ancient accounts of ‘nature’, especially of ‘human nature’, are value-laden accounts…. Norms follow from an account of ‘nature’ because the account is frankly normative to begin with” (p. 30).

The therapeutic paradigm’s appeals to nature ought therefore to be sharply distinguished from what 20th century philosophers called ethical naturalism. Even the account of nature is frankly normative from the outset.

“A good introduction to the Hellenistic appeals to nature, which clearly reveals both the normative and the anti-conventional thrust of these appeals, is in the famous lines of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself concerning the animal kingdom” (p. 31).

“What the animals show Whitman is not a value-free realm of life; nor does he learn from them to glorify that which exists without effort or teaching. What he sees is that certain practices that (already) appear to him to impede human flourishing — practices connected with religious fear and guilt, with economic obsession and accumulation, with status and power — need not exist. Moreover, when they do not exist, certain deformations of life — sleepless fear, groveling subservience, anxiety, dissatisfaction — do not exist either. The ‘tokens of myself’ that the animals show Whitman are possibilities for self-respect, self-expression, and social equality that are frequently obscured by the realities of human social life. So too, I shall argue, in Hellenistic appeals to the nature of the child, the nature of the animal: the purpose is to construct a radical norm of true human flourishing. This norm is not value-free or ‘scientific’: it is justified by appeal to deep human desires and judgments, and it is value-laden; but it is highly critical of ordinary belief, and sees many of our ordinary beliefs as impediments to flourishing” (p. 32).

“The medical conception seeks to combine the critical power of Platonism with the worldly immersion of ordinary-belief philosophy. And it adds something further of its own: a commitment to action” (pp. 32-33).

“Philosophy understood along medical lines deals with both beliefs and emotions or passions. One reason why the tension described earlier seems to arise is that philosophy is asked not simply to deal with the patient’s invalid inferences and false premises, but to grapple, as well, with her irrational fears and anxieties, her excessive loves and crippling angers” (p. 37).

“Both Aristotle and the Hellenistic schools hold, furthermore, that many, if not all, of the passions rest upon beliefs that do not spring up naturally (if any beliefs do this), but are formed by society” (p. 38).

“All the schools dedicate themselves to the searching critique of prevailing cognitive authority, and to the amelioration of human life as a result” (p. 40).

But in contrast to Aristotle, “These philosophers do not simply analyze the emotions, they also urge, for the most part, their removal from human life” (p. 41). This idea of aiming to cast off all emotion I vehemently reject. Nussbaum too finds it troubling.

“Aristotle accepts and develops at length the idea that ethical philosophy should resemble medicine in its dedication to the practical goal of ameliorating human lives. And he develops, in some detail, aspects of the analogy between the philosopher’s and the doctor’s tasks. And yet Aristotle also criticizes the medical analogy at certain points, arguing that there are some very important ways in which ethical philosophy should not be like medicine” (p. 42).

She lists three points common to Aristotle and the Hellenistic philosophers.

“1. Arguments have a practical goal: they are directed at making the pupil better, and can be assessed for their contribution to this end. (This, as I said, does not entail that the value of argument must be merely instrumental.)
“2. They are what we might call value-relative: that is, at some level they respond to deep wishes or needs of the patient and, again, are to be assessed in accordance with their success in doing this.
“3. They are responsive to the particular case: just as a good doctor heals case by case, so good medical argument responds to the pupil’s concrete situation and needs” (p. 46).

Then she lists five more characteristics that apply to the Hellenistic philosophers but not to Aristotle.

“4. Medical arguments, like bodily medical treatments, are directed at the health of the individual as such, not at communities or at the individual as member of a community.
“5. In medical argument, the use of practical reason is instrumental. Just as the doctor’s technique is no intrinsic part of what the goal, health, is, so too the philosopher’s reasoning is no intrinsic part of what the good human life itself is.
“6. The standard virtues of argument — such as consistency, definitional clarity, avoidance of ambiguity — have, in medical argument, a purely instrumental value. As with the procedures of the medical art, they are no intrinsic part of the goal.
“7. In medical argument, as in medicine, there is a marked asymmetry of roles: doctor and patient, expert authority and obedient recipient of authority.
“8. In medical argument, the teacher discourages the sympathetic dialectical scrutiny of alternative views. Just as a doctor does not urge the patient to experiment with alternative medications, so the teacher does not encourage cognitive pluralism” (ibid).

Next in this series: Living Well and Equity

Brandom on Reason and Authority

Brandom respectfully takes issue with his teacher Richard Rorty’s claim that all talk about an ultimate objective reality — or objective truth — should be rejected as authoritarian. He uses Hegel to answer Rorty.

“Authoritarianism is an attitude toward the relation between normative statuses and critical practices of giving and asking for reasons. It consists in practically or theoretically taking it that there can be genuine authority without a corresponding critical responsibility to give reasons entitling one to that authority” (Robert Brandom, Pragmatism and Idealism: Rorty and Hegel on Reason and Representation, p. 63, emphasis in original).

“Rorty takes it that Kant was right to draw from his distillation of the insights of the Enlightenment the lesson that genuine norms essentially involve liability to rational criticism, to demands for reasons justifying and legitimating claims to authority…. Seeing norms as instituted (solely) by power relations… (‘might makes right’) is authoritarianism” (p. 64).

As I have pointed out, Plato and Leibniz anticipated Kant and Hegel in explicitly rejecting this kind of authoritarianism. Gwenaëlle Aubry has extensively documented the lengths to which Aristotle went to avoid grounding normativity in power.

Brandom notes that Rorty goes on to argue that “The idea that inanimate objects and objective states of affairs can exercise representational authority over the beliefs of those who can engage in critical rational challenges and defenses is a remnant of fetishistic authoritarianism” (p. 65).

Brandom rejects this last claim, as do I (see Things in Themselves; Essence and Explanation).

He says, “I argue for two claims. The first is that the considerations and commitments that shape the final, anti-authoritarian argument of Rorty’s… are among the central concerns Hegel addresses in his Phenomenology. The second is that Hegel there assembles and deploys conceptual resources that suffice to disarm Rorty’s anti-authoritarian arguments against the legitimacy and ultimate intelligibility of the concept of representation” (pp. 65-66).

“I think Rorty accepts the first point, and that is largely why he saw Hegel (at least, in a Deweyan, suitably naturalized form) as representing a way forward for philosophy…. But I do not think he was ever in a position to appreciate the second point (p. 66).

“Hegel takes over from Kant the insight that what distinguishes us sapient, discursive beings from the merely natural ones is the normative character of the space in which we live, and move, and have our being. Geist [spirit or ethical culture], Hegel’s focal concept — what the [Phenomenology] is a phenomenology of — is the whole comprising all of our implicitly norm-governed performances, practices, and institutions, the explicit theoretical expressions of them that constitute our normative self-consciousness, and everything that those normative practices and institutions make possible” (pp. 67-68). 

“We are what things can be something for, which is to say that we are conscious beings. Hegel understands the origins of this capacity to lie in our nature as organic, desiring beings…. For something is food for the hungry animal who eats it, but is actually food… only if it in fact satisfies hunger. Hegel takes this possibility of practically experiencing error… to be the organic origin of consciousness” (p. 68-69; see also For Itself).

“We are, further, essentially self-conscious beings. That is, what we are for ourselves is an essential component of what we are in ourselves” (p. 69; see also Consciousness and Identity).

The qualifier “essential component of” is extremely important. To simply equate what we are in ourselves with what we are for ourselves would be subjectivism.

“As I am characterizing Hegel’s thought, his idea is that social pragmatism about norms is the master idea of modernity, and the Enlightenment is the explicit theoretical consciousness of this change of practical attitude. Rorty, Dewey, and Hegel are at one on this point, different as their expressions of it might seem” (pp. 72-73).

Brandom connects Hegel’s ethical ideas about mutual recognition with John Dewey’s characteristic concern for democratic values, as discussed by Rorty. The mere phrase “social pragmatism” sounds a bit shallow, but at this point Brandom has already given his own capsule history of pragmatism and described Dewey’s social and political concerns, so he is using it as a sort of extreme shorthand.

“My overall contention here is that because Rorty’s grasp of the social and historical articulation of normativity that Hegel discovers remains at a highly abstract and programmatic level, he does not understand how the more detailed structure Hegel discerns provides the resources to respond to Rorty’s anti-authoritarian critique of the ultimate intelligibility of representational norms. The rational criticizability of normative statuses can be seen to be built into them when we appreciate the social and historical fine structure of the process by which they are instituted by normative attitudes” (p. 73, emphasis added).

Brandom in effect argues that mutual recognition in Hegel is not only ethical, but that it also conditions knowledge and first philosophy.

Wisdom and Judgment

For Aristotle, the ultimate aim of a talking animal as such is wisdom, which cannot be separated from ethical sensitivity and concern for others. This wisdom might be characterized as an excellence in reflective judgment or interpretation.

There has, however, come to be a traditional view of what is called judgment — especially common in early modern logic — that reduces it to the grammatical form of predication (“A is B”), and its truth to a matter of simple correspondence to fact, which is presumed to be independently knowable. Predication on this view aims to be a kind of authoritative saying of how things are, grounded in putatively immediate truth that is not supposed to depend on any kind of normative inquiry or process of interpretation in order to be known. Things just factually are certain ways, and judgments are conclusions produced immediately that are supposed to correspond to the facts. Judgments are either right, and thereby count as objective; or wrong, and to be dismissed as merely subjective. But in neither case do they involve any depth of engagement or extensive activity. They are “shallow”.

This dogmatic way of thinking, criticized by Kant and Hegel, is utterly alien to the kind of spirit of rational inquiry promoted by Plato and Aristotle, who thought that assertions should be grounded in reasons shareable and discussible with other humans, and not on vain claims of immediate insight. But both this reductive use of “judgment” for the mere immediate production of a representation, and the reduction of truth to a correspondence to presumed fact, have often been wrongly characterized as Aristotelian, when they are really of much later origin.

I would suggest that the very idea of better or worse judgment, or of judgment as something of which there could be an excellence, is incompatible with the shallow black-and-white view of judgment as simply right or wrong. Judgment as activity is anything but an immediate production. It is an extensive and intensive activity of interpretation and reflection.

The contemporary American philosopher Robert Brandom writes, “Here is perhaps Kant’s deepest and most original idea…. What distinguishes judging and intentional doing from the activities of non-sapient creatures is not that they involve some special sort of mental processes, but that they are things knowers and agents are in a distinctive way responsible for…. Judgments and actions make knowers and agents liable to characteristic kinds of normative assessment. Kant’s most basic idea is that minded creatures are to be distinguished from unminded ones not by a matter-of-fact ontological distinction (the presence of mind-stuff), but by a normative deontological one. This is his normative characterization of the mental” (Reason in Philosophy, pp. 32-33; see Kantian Intentionality).

Over the course of many posts, we have seen not only that what Aristotle calls nous and gets translated as “intellect” is an activity and not a stuff, but also that it is intrinsically concerned to seek the better in each instance. The highest good for Aristotle is not a pre-given content, but the result of a truly consistent aiming at the better in life, where what is better is intelligible, and once again not pre-given, but expressible in terms of reasons that any human can share in evaluating.

A important notion of responsibility is also implicit in Aristotle, as when he points out that the freedom of ethical beings is not an arbitrary license, but is commensurate with the taking of responsibility. For Aristotle, unfree beings have no responsibility insofar as they are unfree. It is free beings capable of real deliberation and choice that have responsibility.

On the other hand, at a top level Aristotle prefers to stress the affirmative values of friendship, love, and reciprocity over the constraints of responsibility. For Aristotle, an ethically serious person guided by affirmative aims will turn out to be responsible in her actions. Kant was more distrustful of our affirmative aims, as possibly biased by our individual impulse, and therefore tended to emphasize duty and responsibility as more reliable motivators for ethical action. Aristotle has the more optimistic view that there can be such a thing as desire that is consistent with reason about what is better. (See also Intellectual Virtue, Love; The Goal of Human Life).

Ousia Energeia

Aristotle’s Metaphysics is arguably the single most important text in the history of philosophy, but even though on one level Aristotle’s writing is extremely clear and lucid, its deeper implications have been highly disputed. The great Iranian philosopher Avicenna is reported to have said that he read the Arabic translation of the Metaphysics 40 times without understanding it, and only began to understand after reading the commentary by Alfarabi. We are nearing the end of a long journey following what I think is a brilliantly innovative 21st century reading by Gwenaëlle Aubry. Here I’m covering the first half of her discussion of book Lambda chapter 7.

The title of this post is a phrase used by Aristotle to characterize the first cause. He distinguishes it as the ousia [“substance”] that, unlike other substances, simply “is” energeia [“act”]. The latter Greek term was coined by Aristotle, and the former was “substantially” redefined by him. I find it is best to put aside ordinary connotations of the English words for key philosophical terms like this (including “first cause”) — and to focus instead on the ways the philosopher himself uses them, along with what he says about them.

“Chapter 7 of book Lambda responds to the question, left in suspense, of the mode of relation of the first mover to the moved, and of the nature of its action. At the same time it exploits and deploys the ontological signification of energeia, designating in act the mode of being of the separate, and identifying it with the good and the end” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 184, emphasis added, my translation throughout).

“In so doing, it implies at the same time a distinction, absent from book Theta, between kinesis [motion] and energeia, the last being designated as the mode of being of the unmoved, even while maintaining a broad sense of energeia, understood not only as act and as a mode of being, but also as a certain activity (contemplation)” (ibid).

Aubry previously noted that Aristotle’s earliest use of energeia seems to have been in an ethical context. Here she points out that Aristotle is distinguishing between its better known physical sense (which already has a teleological element) and what she calls its ontological sense.

“The first lines of Lambda 7 mark a progress in relation to chapter 6, since they demonstrate not only the necessity of posing a principle that is act and not power in order to give an account of eternal motion, but also of that of thinking the first mover as unmoved” (ibid, emphasis added).

Within the context of Greek philosophy, the very idea of an unmoved mover is another extremely important Aristotelian invention. Plato speaks instead of a self-moving thing, thus postulating motion as an unexplained primitive attributed to something as a whole. He is not bothered by the unexplained primitive, because he sees becoming as fundamentally lacking intelligibility. For Aristotle on the other hand, motion ought to be explainable, and every explanation of motion also involves a passivity. To move in the colloquial English sense is always to be moved in Aristotle’s sense, by something, and we can give an account of this. It will turn out that the primary examples he gives of “movers” are the unmoved intelligible and desired things that serve to activate internal principles of motion in other things. But living beings such as animals also function as “moved movers”.

Aubry quotes Aristotle’s characterization of an unmoved mover as “being at the same time ousia and energeia” (p. 185). Aristotle makes a very compressed reference to his critique of Platonic “self-moving” in Physics book VIII. Anything we broadly call a “self” mover must be a moved mover, because it is implicitly moved by what it understands and desires. Any moved mover — and hence any self-mover — must be only an intermediary cause, and not an ultimate principle. Aristotle wants to very emphatically insist that the first cause is in the strict sense an unmoved mover, and not a self-mover in the broad sense that an animal is a self-mover. For him, any holistic “self-motion” necessarily involves the kind of mixture of activity and passivity that we attribute to an animal. Such a mixture is incompatible with the nature of the first cause.

“[I]t is because energeia is conceived here as ousia, and no longer as kinesis, that the first mover is unmoved” (ibid).

“This poses the question of how the unmoved can be the principle of movement. The demonstration this time proceeds in an indirect way: it consists in the premise according to which the desirable and the intelligible move [other things] without being moved, then in successive identifications, first of the real good with the desirable, then of simple and actual substance with the first intelligible, and finally of the first intelligible with the good. We then ought to conclude that the actual substance, itself already identified with the first mover, is identical with the intelligible and the good, and as such can move [other things] without being moved” (ibid).

She goes on to note that what allows these terms to be unified is really once again energeia, although at first it seems to be substance. This makes perfect sense, given the conclusions of book Eta.

“The unifying term of these identifications seems here to be that of substance. It is so nonetheless by the mediation of a double relation of anteriority: of substance itself, first of all, in the series of positive contraries; then, within substance, of substance that is simple and in act, haplo kai kat’energeian — or, more precisely, of substance that is simple insofar as it is said according to act. For it is this position of the preeminence of substance in the context of the series of intelligibles that justifies its identification not only with the good and the desirable, but with the better or that which is analogous to it. Thus it is once again the notion of energeia more than that of substance that appears as the conceptual mover of the demonstration, and as that from which the attributes of the principle can be deduced” (pp. 185-186, emphasis in original).

Just as Aristotle uses ousia or substance to explain our talk about being, he uses energeia or act to explain our talk about substance. And sometimes he even uses entelekheia or entelechy to explain our talk about act.

“Up to this point, Lambda 7 has established that the unmoved can be a mover, but not how it moves something else. Here again, the demonstration proceeds in an indirect way: it begins by establishing that there is also a final cause among unmoved things. In order to do this, we have to make precise what we mean by ‘final cause'” (p. 186).

“The text at this point poses a problem. Since antiquity, it has been reconstructed so as to coincide with parallel passages in Physics II and On the Soul II which, also relying on a pronominal distinction, distinguish between two senses of the final cause, that is to say to ou and to o, that which is envisaged and that for which something is — or, according to the traditional interpretation, the end of an action and its beneficiary. But neither of the senses thus distinguished can apply to the first mover: the latter cannot be conceived as the beneficiary of action, which would imply that it did not have its end in itself, and would thus be incompatible with its status as pure energeia. But it is equally difficult to conceive it as the end envisaged by action, since this would imply that the movement ends in it, or finds in it its term: the first mover would thus be the act and the end of eternal motion, and indeed of every moved being; thus conceived, the divine would be in sum the act of the world, or at least of the moved substances that make it up, whose separate existence would be explained only by the failure of their fusion with it” (pp. 186-187).

“The context of the distinction in On the Soul is nonetheless very close to that of the distinction of Lambda 7, since the text opposes on the one hand living things (plants and animals) considered as substances subject to the cycle of generation and corruption, and on the other hand the eternal and the divine…. Nonetheless, it does not aim to distinguish between an unmoved end and an end presupposing movement, but rather between an immediate and immanent end and a mediate and transcendent end. The first is identified with the soul, designated as being at the same time cause of motion, essence, and final cause…. The second is identified not with the divine itself, but with participation and community (koinonia) with it, and a community envisaged as continuous. Thus is explained the process of generation, which compensates for that of corruption: not being able to [persist indefinitely] as individuals, living things [persist] not in their numerical unity, but in the unity of their species. The object of their desire is thus not to be god but to participate in the divine, or in the mode of being that characterizes continuity and eternity. Or again, it is not to assimilate themselves to the divine form or the divine act, but rather to perpetuate their own form and act, in the way that the divine continually maintains its own” (p. 187, emphasis in original).

“But if read this way, as a distinction not between the end of action and its beneficiary, but between two kinds of end, the distinction in On the Soul seems reconcilable with that of Lambda 7, and to apply to the first unmoved mover: the latter should be understood neither as the immediate end of action nor as the one who attains that end, but as that which the moved substances aim at through their own proper ends” (pp. 187-188, emphasis added).

“The latter aim at no other end than themselves, and attain this immanent end by means of the different movements to which they are submitted, but through this end they aim also at the eternity and the necessity characteristic of the unmoved substance. As result, we can say that they are also moved by the unmoved, and again by the desire for unmovedness. We see that this interpretation agrees with the end of Lambda 7, as well as with Lambda 10’s reflection on the final cause and the good” (p. 188, emphasis added).

“The remainder of [Lambda 7] goes on precisely to mark the relation between unmovedness and necessity, at the same time as that between motion (even local) and contingency. This last point is the same that Theta 8 already underlined, but the demonstration relies no longer on the notion of dunamis understood as the power of contradiction, and indeed as the power to be or not-be, but on the notion of energeia. Unmovedness is deduced from this, and necessity in its turn from unmovedness. Here indeed, and for the first time, the ontological sense of energeia… excludes kinesis” (ibid).

She notes that Aristotle uses the grammatically dative from of energeia in the text here, which she has argued he consistently uses to distinguish what she calls the ontological sense of dynamis and energeia from their physical sense that is involved in the ordinary explanation of motion.

(I would add that this philosophical primacy of the dative form over the nominative in Aristotle is closely related to a perspective that puts adverbial phrases and relations ahead of nouns and verbs in the order of explanation. In fact, every noun or verb taken by itself is just a simple linguistic token that still has to be given an interpretation. No mere linguistic token by itself explains anything at all. By contrast, it is the non-simple character of relations — the fact that they already intrinsically “say something” about something — that gives them their fundamental role in interpretation and explanation.)

“If it is thus established that the unmoved can be an end…, it remains to know how it is, or to identify its proper mode of action, which is presented as valid for all final causes that exclude motion. Two words suffice to name this mode of action: hos eromenon [as being loved]. The hos does not introduce a metaphor, … but must be understood in the sense of ‘insofar as’: the unmoved mover moves without being moved, but ‘insofar as it is loved’. In its turn, the theme of eros has been prepared by the earlier reflection on the identity of the intelligible and the desirable, where it was said already that they move [other things] without being moved” (ibid).

“For the technical register that distinguishes between different species of desire, rational and irrational, is here substituted a broader term, eromenon. This term also has Platonic resonances: it evokes the amorous ascension of the Symposium, and recalls the figure of Eros, the daimon child of Penia and Poros, in whom are conjoined lack and abundance, absence and presence. Evoking Eros, nonetheless, Plato in the Symposium speaks of dunamis. Here, inversely, the erotic ascension has for its principle energeia. We see again in this point the rupture underlined in book capital Alpha, as in Lambda 6: to conceive the causality proper to the good, it is necessary to think it as a final cause, acting not as power but as act, and as the end of in-potentiality” (p. 189).

Aubry has consistently maintained that acting in the sense of having an effect is not reducible to the “action” of a power. All ordinary “action” is in reality a mixed form — an interaction — that includes an element of passivity. Pure act on the other hand is supposed to have an effect and to move other things, but without itself being involved in passivity. There is still an element of passivity in this case, but it is entirely on the side of the other things that are moved by what they understand and desire. Pure act for Aristotle is situated beyond the correlation of activity and passivity. Only where in-potentiality is also involved is there the ordinary interaction of activity and passivity that we experience in earthly happenings.

Rather than aiming to think pure presence, in the context of a human being even Plato is far more interested in mixed forms, as Paul Ricoeur has pointed out. Aristotle here takes up the Platonic theme of eros, while recasting it as an ascent toward pure act. But pure act is precisely not ever purely present to us. In the next post, we’ll see how Aristotle contrasts human life with the ideal life he attributes to the first cause.

Next in this series: Ideal Life and Ours

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).

Distinguishing Act and Form

“In fact, the notions of form (eidos) and of act (energeia or entelecheia) are not equivalent; and if the first belongs to a Platonic vocabulary, the second is an Aristotelian invention. It belongs, as such, to an anti-Platonic project: there is no sense, for Aristotle, in posing ‘pure’ or ‘separated’ forms, that is to say forms subsisting outside of and independent of the composites that they define. Form is not separable except ‘by logos‘, ‘according to the formula’, which signifies also that form is not fully ousia, fully substance” (Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu sans la puissance, 2nd ed., part 1, introduction, p. 23, my translation throughout).

For Aristotle, form is only separable from the embodied composite analytically, in speech or in thought. Though he was Plato’s star pupil for 20 years and continued to be influenced by Plato in other ways, his project is “anti-Platonic” in the sense that he specifically criticizes the notion of separate form, with which Plato is famously associated.

“It goes otherwise for act, which implies separation, understood as autonomous subsistence, and therefore has the value of another name for ousia. Act, nonetheless, is not only another name for substance. Identified with the end, it is also [identified] with the good. Being in act is not only to subsist, it is to subsist as adequate to its form and to a form that, posed as end, is also posed as good…. Act thus is not only another name for being, but also for the good: or more, insofar as it says the good as real, or as realized, [it] names the identity of being and the good” (p. 24).

Here it is important to recall once again that all the senses of “being” Aristotle discusses in the Metaphysics involve being as a transitive verb (i.e., being this or that), not being as a noun. Being in the sense of existence simply has no place in this account. The identity of the senses of being as a transitive verb with those of the good tells us that the saying of transitive being for Aristotle has a normative character. Talking about the being or essence of things is talking about value, and making value judgments.

“Certainly, [the idea of] the unmoved First Mover does not come in response to the question of the emergence of being, but to that of the eternity of movement — both the continuity of the movement of the stars, and the perpetuity of the cycle of generation and corruption. This is why [book] Lambda [chapter] 10 [of the Metaphysics] can also designate the good as the cause of taxis [order], associated both with the movement of the eternal sensibles and that of the corruptible sensibles. If it is not an efficient cause, the First Mover nonetheless has an efficacity, or an influence on the world, which follows from the very fact that it has no power. For the purely actual substance, indeed excluding power as much as movement, is required as the condition of movement (Lambda 6 and 7). Again, it is necessary to determine the way in which it is [required]; Lambda 7 invokes the notion of final cause, which it is nonetheless necessary to understand in a particular sense: not in a sense in which the unmoved substance is itself the act and the end of the other substances, but in the sense in which, aiming at their proper act, the latter aim at the same time at its characteristic necessity. To understand this, it is not necessary to have recourse to the notion of imitation: the relation of the pure act to the substances mixed of act and potentiality is determined by the different relations of the anteriority of act to potentiality distinguished in Theta 8.” (p. 25).

Aristotle is saying that the good in general or value in general is a condition for the possibility of all movement, both celestial and terrestrial. Every being is moved by some good or other. Aubry is here explaining the difference between Aristotle’s own view and the “ontotheology” that Heidegger and others have attributed to him.

“[The pure act’s] efficacy could be called non-efficient; its strength merges with the desire it arouses. Designating god as act, Aristotle identifies his mode of being; determining the mode of relation of act to potentiality, he identifies his mode of action….”

“But by this, Aristotle also identifies the mode of being and the mode of action proper to the good. It is perhaps thus that it is necessary to understand his insistence in affirming that he is, of all the philosophers, the first and the only to have posed the good as a principle….”

“The singularity of the Aristotelian theology as a theology of the good, and of the power proper to the good, can nonetheless not be known except on the condition of taking seriously the designation of the First Mover as pure act. This supposes in particular that the Aristotelian inventions that are act and potentiality are not reduced to form and power. The Aristotelian theology, that is to say the science of unmoving and separate substance, appears only in effect as one of the areas of application of an ontology or, at least, a general ousiology, which has for its foundation the notions of act and potentiality” (p. 26).

In contrast to the ways being is said in the senses of the Categories, which are “inadequate for speaking about the first unmoving being, [act and potentiality] allow both the difference and the relation of moved and unmoved substances to be thought. In a more general way, act and potentiality are at the foundation of an anti-Parmenidean ontology, …allowing being, movement, and their correlation equally well to be thought” (p. 27).

Aubry points out that the notions of act and potentiality first arise in the discussion of motion. But book Theta of the Metaphysics is dedicated to reshaping them in a way that applies to “being” as well as to motion. It is more particularly through act and potentiality that beings are constituted as the beings they are.

“Movement, in effect, should not be understood only in the order of interaction, but also in that of actualization. Or again: movement should not be understood only in the order of the correlation of an active dynamis and a passive dynamis, partitioning the field of efficiency into an agent and a patient, but in that of the correlation of dynamis and energeia” (ibid).

“But the dynamis found thus to be correlated to act, and which designates a state of being, is therefore irreducible to power: being in potentiality, coordinated with and determined by act, is neither passive nor efficient. Or again, potentiality is reducible neither to active power nor to passive power. The notion of potentiality serves to name the very possibility of the interaction of an agent and a patient in view of a change determined and finalized by act.”

“The correlation of potentiality to act nonetheless does not exclude that of passive power to active power: but it subsumes it, or subordinates it, insofar as it carries a greater intelligibility. It invites us to consider that which, in an impact, a meeting, or an interaction, is the occasion of an accomplishment. It is a point of view taken on that which, in movement, makes itself, that is to say not only makes itself but perfects itself…. Aristotle’s universe is not exempt from impacts and meeting: the substances that populate it are not Leibnizian monads…. The order of efficiency is a real order, but subordinate to that of finality” (pp. 28-29; see also The Four Causes Revisited).

“Potentiality is indeed for a being the real possibility, inscribed in the very qualities that give it its essence, of realizing that essence. Potentiality is the index and the principle of the becoming that leads a being to its accomplishment. It bears at the same time the distance between a being and what it has to be, and the possibility of crossing that distance. If act names the identity, real or realized, of being and the good, potentiality names this identity as to be realized. It inscribes into being at the same time as the concreteness of mediation, the possibility of perfection” (p. 29).

“The ontology of potentiality bears with it at the same time the thought of a possible perfection, realizable here and now, and that of failures, of accidents, of bad encounters, of unsuccessful mediations that could counter it” (ibid).

For Aristotle there is no “problem of evil”. Things are at one and the same time both imperfect and perfectible.

Again, I prefer to drop the term “ontology” altogether, because it is strongly associated with a (non-Aristotelian) approach to first philosophy that focuses on being as a noun, and in the sense of existence. Aubry retains the traditional term, but gives it a different meaning that is less prejudicial.

Far be it from me to claim to have the one true interpretation of these sharply contested points about Aristotle’s Metaphysics, but the key features of Aubry’s account seem to fit very well with my own examination of the text.

Aubry has emphasized the role of Plotinus in the historic re-interpretation of Aristotelian act and potentiality. I would note that the later neoplatonic school at Alexandria under Ammonius (5th/6th century CE) — especially Ammonius’ students Simplicius and John Philoponus — also produced extensive commentaries on Aristotle with a neoplatonic slant, which helped shape the way Aristotle was read in medieval times.

Ammonius argued that Aristotle’s first cause is after all also an efficient cause. Simplicius, who is also a major source for quotes from lost works in the history of Greek philosophy, added two more distinctly neoplatonic kinds of causes to Aristotle’s four. Philoponus was a Christian Aristotelian who defended creation from nothing, and was cited by Galileo as an inspiration for the impulse theory of motion. The impulse theory decouples physical motion from any teleology, paving the way for early modern mechanism.

Next in thus series: Aristotle on the Platonic Good

Aristotle on Perception

Real and meaningful analytic distinctions in experience such as activity and passivity need not be grounded in ontological dualities.

It is common to hear Aristotle summarized as asserting a monolithic passivity in processes of perception. This is a considerable simplification. What is true is that in the absence of something perceptible that does not depend on us for its being, Aristotle would say we have a case not of perception but of something else. This does not mean there are not many active dimensions to typical sense perception as well.

One of Aristotle’s deepest principles involves a recognition of profoundly mixed conditions as being more typical of real life than monolithic or homogeneous ones. Plato treats “mixture” as a first-class topic at the heart of what Aristotle would call first philosophy, and not as a mere derivative from “pure” concepts.

Later authors have often tended to downplay Plato and Aristotle’s emphasis on mixed cases in experience as normal, and instead to privilege pure “black and white” distinctions. I think we should if anything privilege the mixed cases, and demand evidence when confronted with claims that any real-world cases involve “pure” black-and-white distinctions.

Aristotle’s account of perception in book 2 of On the Soul relies mainly on descriptions expressed in terms of actuality, potentiality, and actualization. While it is true that actuality has a character that is mostly active and potentiality has a character that is mostly not active, it is once again an oversimplification to simply equate actuality with activity and potentiality with passivity.

Aristotle’s description of perception is deliberately abstract, which reduces the need to speculatively fill in missing details. Perhaps the most salient overall aspect of this account is that it involves a multi-leveled layering of actuality and potentiality and of active and passive aspects that may be only analytically distinct. He focuses very generally on the various requirements of the kinds of form involved, and works hard to avoid causal explanations not clearly grounded in evidence.

It is very characteristic that Aristotle treats perception and whatever is perceptible in a single context. For instance, his discussion of light occurs here. He has no theory of the transmission of light, which was only experimentally demonstrated in early modern times. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, he sees light as instantaneously diffused through a medium, and reasons that the medium must therefore play a necessary role in perception. For him, light is “the being-at-work of the transparent as transparent” (On the Soul book 2 ch. 7, Sachs trans., p. 101). “By transparent I mean what is visible but not visible in its own right, to put it simply, but on account of the color of something else…. Light is a sort of color of the transparent, whenever it is at-work-staying-transparent by the action of fire or something of that kind…. What, then, the transparent is, has been said, and what light is, that it is not fire or any body at all, nor anything that flows out of any body…, but the co-presence of fire or any such thing in the transparent” (ibid). “Rather, the color sets a transparent thing, such as air, in motion, and by this, if it is continuous, the sense organ is moved” (p. 103).

It is important to recognize that this is a thoughtful interpretation of ordinary experience, with minimal assumptions. We would say, e.g., that light is transmitted at the speed of light rather than instantaneously diffused, but this can only be justified by complex empirical evidence. We associate colors with particular wavelengths of light, and we think of light as consisting of material waves (or alternatively, particles of a particular kind) that cannot be directly observed, but all this depends on complex evidence and test equipment. By contrast, Aristotle aims mainly to do justice to our ordinary experience of seeing things — a dog, a rose, a landscape, and so on. He seems to think of the air in the presence of light as metaphorically “charged” with sensible forms, such that there is a continuous translation of visible configurations of color through the air along each perspectival line of sight.

He somewhat paradoxically speaks of a “transmission” of “forms without the matter” in perception, and of the soul-as-active-form-of-the-body “receiving” them. The soul, as an entelecheia (in Sachs’ translation “being-at-work-staying-itself”, or more literally “in [itself] end having”) of an organic body, is active at root. Perception is then at top level supposed to be the being-at-work of a receptivity of the primarily active soul. Since the “transmission” of color through the air is said to be without matter, it must be more like a translation of color between the medium and the eye.

Some contemporary writers have claimed that Aristotle’s account of perception is of historic interest only, sheerly on the ground that it focuses on potentiality and actuality rather than physical causes. But as usual, Aristotle is far more interested in interpreting experience in meaningful ways, with as few assumptions as possible.

I think it is better to have a very abstract description that remains descriptive of experience, rather than imaginatively positing physical or physiological explanations. That is to say, it is better to be only abstractly descriptive but faithful to ordinary experience like Aristotle, than it is to have a more physically grounded explanation like the Stoics, at the cost of depending on additional assumptions of fact that turned out to be wrong in light of more detailed empirical investigations.

The Stoic theory — following the general Stoic precept that everything that has being must be some kind of body — seems to involve a kind of subtly material forms of objects invisibly but literally flying through the air as distinct wholes, ancestral to the medieval “sensible species”. This is a logically consistent physical and physiological account, which however makes numerous speculative leaps of the sort Aristotle aimed to minimize.

The mathematicians Euclid and Ptolemy geometrically analysed properties of light rays, but believed light rays were actively emitted by the eye, rather than received by it.

The “father of modern optics” and early contributor to scientific method, Iraqi polymath Ibn al-Haytham (ca. 965-1040 CE), known to Latin readers as Alhazen, was the first to explain that vision occurs when light reflected from objects passes to the eye, and to assert that the brain plays a major (active) role in the process of identifying objects. His work was taken up by Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Huygens, Descartes, and Kepler, among others.

The reception of light in and of itself is passive, but ordinary seeing has a large cognitive and interpretive dimension, whether considered at the level of events in the brain or at the level of an interpretation of meaningful content. Reception of light rays is passive, but even the most minimal identification of objects cannot be entirely passive.

The visible forms of patches of color that are diffused through the transparent medium in Aristotle — just like the reflected light in the modern account — are indeed passively received, but that no more makes the entire process of vision necessarily passive in Aristotle than it does in the modern account.

“But about all sense perception in general, it is necessary to grasp that the sense is receptive of the forms of perceptible things without the material, as wax is receptive of the design of a ring without the iron or gold…; and similarly the sense of each thing is acted upon by the thing that has color or flavor or sound, but not in virtue of that by which each of those things is the kind of thing it is, but in virtue of that by which it has a certain attribute, and according to a ratio” (book 2 ch. 12, p. 118).

Joe Sachs comments in a note that “Some of the difficulty can be avoided if one keeps in mind that, by form, Aristotle does not mean shape or appearance. In the Platonic dialogues, it is always emphasized that the eidos is not the mere look of a thing…. That to which one must look, according to Aristotle, is the being-at-work of the thing. It is, then, no part of the analogy Aristotle intends with the wax impression, that the eyeball, say, becomes shaped and colored like an olive when it looks at one. What it takes on must be some sort of active condition” (p. 118n, emphasis added).

This last point about the active condition, I think, is the import of Aristotle’s phrase in the above quote, “not in virtue of that by which each of those things is the kind of thing it is, but in virtue of that by which it has a certain attribute, and according to a ratio”. We do not directly perceive the kinds of things we perceive, but rather “that by which [things have] a certain attribute, and according to a ratio”. I take this to be a suggestion of what should or should not count as a “perception”.

There is a puzzle here about how “that by which” a thing has an attribute would count as perceptible. I would argue that if this kind of abstraction does count as perceptible in some way, that would be another indication that perception is not entirely passive. Aristotelian “perception” would then be quite rich, including many things I have been calling products of the Kantian synthesis of imagination. But it would still stop short of, say, directly apprehending a complex gestalt or whole “image” as an immediately intelligible unit.

Worries about “passivity”, it seems to me, ought to be directed mainly at the kind of claims of direct apprehension of complex images as meaningful wholes that Aristotle explicitly rules out in this passage.

“But ‘being acted upon’ is not unambiguous either…. For the one who has knowledge comes to be contemplating, and this is either not a process of being altered (since it is a passing over into being oneself, namely into being-at-work-staying-oneself), or is a different class of alteration” (p. 98).

“Being-at-work perceiving is described in the same way as contemplating, but differs in that the things that produce the being-at-work of perceiving are external, the visible and audible things, and similarly with the rest of the senses. The reason is that active perception is of particulars, while knowledge is of universals, which are in some way in the soul itself. Hence thinking is up to oneself, whenever one wishes, but perceiving is not up to oneself, since it is necessary that the thing perceived be present. And similarly too, even the kinds of knowing that deal with perceptible things are not up to oneself, and for the same reason, that the perceptible things are among particular, external things” (book 2 ch. 5, pp. 98-99, emphasis added).

I note first of all the explicit reference to “active perception”. Second, it makes perfect sense that “the kinds of knowing that deal with perceptible things are not up to oneself” — that in some way sensible things are what they are, independent of us, in a way that abstractions and universals are not. Aristotle even seems to think there is an at least abstractly identifiable level at which the particular senses cannot be deceived.

“[T]he means by which we live and perceive is meant two ways, as is the means by which we know (by which is meant in one sense knowledge but in another the soul, since by means of each of these we say we know something)” (book 2 ch. 2, p. 87).

“And neither is thinking the same as perceiving, for in thinking there is what is right and what is not right, … for sense perception when directed at its proper objects is always truthful, and is present in all animals, but it is possible to think things through falsely, and this is present in no animal in which there is not also speech” (book 3 ch. 3, pp. 133-134).

Here he explicitly bounds the analogy between perception and thought. We have already seen that perception for Aristotle is not entirely passive, so thinking, as something that is more up to us, must be less passive than that.

“And it is certainly not the reasoning part, or intellect in the way that word is used, that causes motion, for the contemplative intellect does not contemplate anything that has to do with action…. And even when the intellect enjoins and the reasoning part declares that something is to be fled or pursued one does not necessarily move, but acts instead in accordance with desire, as does one without self-restraint…. But neither is it desire that governs this sort of motion, since self-restrained people, even when they desire and yearn for something, do not necessarily do those things for which they have the desire, but follow the intellect” (book 3 ch. 9, pp. 152-153).

Later he specifies that the motion mentioned here is motion with respect to place, i.e., bodily movement, not anything directly associated with perception or thought. Comparatively speaking, the earlier “motion” of air in the presence of light was said in a different, more figurative way. We should not assume that the way activity and passivity apply in the one context is the same as in the other.

He continues, “But it is obvious that these two things [together do] cause motion, desire and/or intellect, since many people follow their imaginings contrary to what they know, and in other animals there is no intellectual or reasoning activity, except imagination. Therefore both of these are such as to cause motion with respect to place, intellect and desire, but this is intellect that reasons for the sake of something and is concerned with action, which differs from the contemplative intellect by its end…. So it is reasonable that there seem to be two things causing the motion, desire and practical thinking, since the thing desired causes motion, and on account of this, thinking causes motion, because it is the desired thing that starts it. So it is one thing that causes motion, the potency of desire” (book 3 ch. 10, pp. 153-154, emphasis added).

What Aristotle initially mentions as “obvious” is refined and corrected later in the chapter. This sort of thing is very common in Aristotle. In book 2 chapter 2, he says that “what is clear and more knowable by reason arises out of what is unclear but more obvious” (p. 84).

“[B]ut the potency of desire is not present without imagination, while all imagination is either rational or sensory” (p. 156).

The imagination is identified in Aristotle’s On Memory and Recollection as the root of all perception. Here he suggests that it also depends on the particular senses. Both could easily be true if the sense in which imagination is the “root” of perception is teleological, rather than causal in the modern sense.

“For imagination is different both from perceiving [by the particular senses] and from thinking things through, and does not come about without perception, and without it there is no conceiving that something is the case” (book 3 ch. 3, p. 134).

Aristotle is saying that while conceiving that something is the case depends on imagination and imagination ultimately depends on the particular senses, we never directly perceive that something is the case. That something is the case is a practical judgment about particulars, rather than a perception. “Thinking things through” (dianoia) is discussed separately from pure thought or intellect (nous), and is a rational activity of the soul grounded mainly in imagination. To really “occur” in a human, pure thought depends on the activity of thinking things through as its vehicle.

“[F]alsehood is always in an act of putting things together…. What makes each thing be one is intellect” (book 3 ch. 6, p. 144). “[B]ut thinking what something is, in the sense of what it keeps on being in order to be at all, is true, and is not one thing attached to another” (p. 145).

Here he seems to be emphasizing that the idea of what something truly is, in the sense of being-at-work-staying-itself, is not adequately expressible in terms of a simple combination of pre-existing parts or independently defined features. Also, no expression of a “what” by itself forms an assertion that could then be either true or false. A “what” by itself has more of the character of a definition that could be either accepted by hypothesis or considered hypothetically.

If the thought of a being-at-work-staying-itself is simply “true”, it seems to me it must be true in some sense other than correspondence — perhaps a being-true-to-itself through coherence. This use of “true” is also different from the way it is defined in On Interpretation, where truth and falsity are said to apply if and only if we say something about something, which means a “what” taken in isolation would be neither true nor false. Only what is said about the what could be true in that sense, but then it could also be false, depending on what is said. So “true” is being said in a different, special way here.

“Knowledge, in its being-at-work, is the same as the thing it knows, and while knowledge in potency comes first in time in any one knower, in the whole of things it does not take precedence even in time, for all things that come into being have their being from something that is at-work-staying-itself. And… the perceiving thing is not [merely] acted upon nor is it altered. Hence this is a different kind of event from a motion” (book 3 ch. 7, pp. 145-146, brackets in original, emphasis added).

Here he emphasizes a distinction between motion in the primary sense of ordinary bodily motion on the one hand, and the actualization of a potential on the other, identifying perception with the latter.

History of Ethics: Plato

Traditional communities, even the most “primitive” known to modern anthropology, have well-defined, generally accepted ways of distinguishing good and bad actions. Hegel called this “ethical substance”.

What I call “ethics” involves a second level, in which the criteria for good and bad are subject to discussion. Here we are not simply laying down the law, but inquiring into the principles that ought to govern distinctions between good and bad. The oldest documented example of this kind of inquiry in our planetary family of cultures is the writings of Plato. How much of the literary character of Socrates in Plato is attributable to the historic Socrates is debated by scholars, but need not concern us here. It is in Plato that we find an actual record of Socratic inquiry. Other so-called “minor Socratic” schools also claimed to be inspired by Socrates, but left no record of critical give and take comparable to what we find in the dialogues of Plato.

Plato clearly recognized the weakness of argument from authority, and put the reasoned examination of principles before the mere fact of anyone’s say-so. He further pointed out that assertions about God’s will and its applicability to real-world cases need to be evaluated as human assertions, on the same footing as others. In discussions about truth, there are no specially privileged assertions or asserters. He set a strong ideal of sincerely seeking knowledge rather than assuming we have it, and by example promoted the modest attitude that humans should avoid making strong claims that human knowledge cannot validate. Many of his most important ideas are only presented as what I call “suggestions”.

Provocatively, Plato suggested that all beings desire the good, and that the Good is the most ultimate formative principle of all things. This reduces evil to ignorance of the true Good. The tendentious claim here is that evil is a kind of lack or defect, and that no one who aims at what is really evil properly understands what they are doing. This gives fundamental ethical significance to knowledge and the quest for better understanding. Treating evil as due to some lack of understanding also suggests a way of forgiving the evil-doer.

For Plato, wisdom and goodness are correlative. Wisdom especially includes the recognition of what we do not know. It is superior to any law. The most wise are the best qualified to govern, but do not want the job and must be coaxed into doing it.

Plato was unconcerned with questions like who decides who is wise, preferring to focus instead on how such judgments should be made. For the latter, he suggested the same kind of free and open dialogue and examination of reasons as for any other questions about truth.