The Latin scholastics invented strongly univocal concepts of “substantial form” and “intellectual soul”, and read them back into Aristotle. The work of Jean-Baptiste Brenet shows how this is interwoven with the prehistory of the modern notion of a psychological subject as a knower and agent.

In the book that served as his doctoral thesis, Brenet develops a case study of the “prince of the Averroists” John of Jandun, who turns out to be closer to his Latin peers than to Ibn Rushd (Averroes) himself. Brenet has also published French translations of Aquinas’ questions on soul and body from Summa Theologica, as well as a work On the Intellectual Soul by the English Averroist theologian Thomas Wilton, whose theses we will see are disputed by John of Jandun.

Averroes had insisted that it is only equivocally that intellect is said to belong to the same soul that is said to be the form of the body. According to Brenet, John of Jandun wants to avoid two extremes. The first, which he associates with Alexander of Aphrodisias, in effect makes the human intellect entirely material, by insisting on the univocity of Aristotle’s definition of the soul. The second, represented by Themistius, treats intellect entirely as a transcendent principle, and absolutely denies that it is the form of the body. This latter view is often mistakenly attributed to Averroes. But in any case, John of Jandun reverses this emphasis, and pushes for a more “Alexandrian” solution. He searches the text of Averroes in order to highlight all the passages where Averroes says or suggests that intellect, in spite of its transcendent dimension, is nonetheless also in some meaningful way ours.

“Against the noetics of Averroes, to which he opposes in the first instance the experience of personal thought, Thomas Aquinas maintains in his De unitate intellectus that intellect is ‘a power of the soul that is the form of the body’. He even comes to write in this polemical context that ‘intellect is the form of the body’. It is this ‘information’ that, according to him, confers to each of us a principle for thinking that is our own” (Brenet, Transferts du Sujet, p. 35, my translation throughout).

Siger of Brabant had argued against Aquinas that the relation between intellect and the body is not one of substance, but rather is a kind of operational unity. Intellect is not the substantial form of the body, but is properly called a sort of “intrinsic mover or operator” within the soul. John of Jandun “is a child of this inaugural dispute. He inherits words and formulas from it, but not only that: he subscribes to the scholastic idea and its expression, that it is the form of the body that gives thought to the human” (ibid, emphasis in original).

“In fact Averroes, who paid extremely close attention to the exact problem of the being of intellect in potentiality, did not really seek to know in what sense intellect, without qualification, could be the form of the body. On the one hand, it is in effect the perfection of the human [i.e., the composite of soul and body] that interests him; on the other hand, he nearly always proposes a divided approach to the question” (p. 46).

“Not only must we not speak vaguely of the relation of intellect to human individuals, but things do not go the same way with each ‘intellect’. What is involved may be the thought of an infant, or that of a sleeping person” (p. 47). “The essential of [Averroes’] Long Commentary is developed in the third book, in the arborescence of modes of possible junction for the human, when Averroes details the diverse degrees of mediation that lead to the immediate information of the intellect, acquired at the end of the theoretical stage of thought: at this moment, the agent intellect has become directly our form” (ibid, emphasis in original).

(Here we have explicitly an immediacy that is not originary, but rather is a product of mediation. Hegel was not the first to raise such a possibility.)

John follows Siger of Brabant in modeling human intellect on the celestial intelligences that were believed to move the spheres by which the motions of the stars were explained. Like Siger, he uses Averroes’ commentary on Aristotle’s On the Heavens to derive conclusions about human intellect that conflict with what Averroes says in his more famous Long Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul.

“If intellect is the form of the body, it is so insofar as it is an ‘operator’. Every form is a giver either of being or of operation: the intellectual soul is precisely forma dans operationem” (p. 72).

Not without some irony, Brenet observes that “If we abstract away the corruptibility of the individual body, as well as its composition, if we neglect the fact that intellect has need of the image and needs it in its primary operation, we can justifiably say that it is a ‘form’ analogous to the celestial intelligence that is the mover of a sphere ” (p. 84).

“Between an immaterial form and a body that are ontologically separate, there can exist a relation in the order of act, a purely functional relation…. Even if it is separate from its Intelligence in its being, [the celestial sphere] is united to it in a certain way, i.e., to recall what John says himself, ‘at least as subject‘…. subjectum or ‘place’: the sphere-subject gives place to movement, the act of the Intelligence has a place in this sub-jection ” (p. 85, emphasis in original).

“Certainly, the Parisian master could say, the anti-Avicennan and anti-Platonic empirical orientation of the noetics of Averroes means that the implication of the body in the elaboration of thought must be strong, but intellect only has need of the human body for making thought, and not for being there” (p. 86).

“If the celestial sphere is indispensable as subject-receiver of the act caused by the Intelligence, insofar as it receives movement, how can it be compared to the human body, which does not receive thought from the intellect and is not, in this sense at least, the ‘subject’?” (p. 87).

Note well that intellect is not said to be “received” by the human here. In this Averroes differs from Alfarabi and Avicenna.

“We do indeed find a cosmologico-noetic analogy in Averroes, but Averroes does not reason in the same way. He does not found noetics on cosmology, he does the inverse, and goes from analyses of the human intellect to say something about the celestial Intelligences” (pp. 87-88). “John of Jandun seems to reverse this relation when he layers noetics over cosmology” (p. 88).

For Averroes, this raises the “problem of Theophrastus [Aristotle’s collaborator and immediate successor]”: How can we say that the material intellect has no form of its own, and yet that it is a being?

“Nothing can be in act that we call a ‘this’, which is to say a body or a faculty existing in a body, like the sensory faculty. The absolute denuding of its being is the condition of its receptivity to universals; in order for it to potentially be the intelligible, there can be nothing of its own in its being-in-potentiality” (pp. 89-90).

Here he is effectively saying that no concrete particular can be “in act” in the Aristotelian sense. Being a particular involves accident, and accident is incompatible with pure act.

“If the material intellect is by definition ‘that which is in potentiality all the ‘intentions’ of universal material forms, and is not any being in act before having conceived it, it is excluded that its nature could be that of (prime) matter, that of the separate forms, or that of a hylomorphic composite” (p.91).

(I am inclined to think that the notion of prime matter (i.e., matter abstracted from the form with which it is ordinarily said to be inseparable, and supposedly having no properties of its own) is an interpolation due to Alexander of Aphrodisias.)

“As a consequence, the subject of the intelligibles… constitutes a being sui generis…. The interpretation that Averroes gives in the Long Commentary rests on a double rejection of the readings of Alexander of Aphrodisias and of Themistius” (p. 92).

Brenet quotes Averroes, “Alexander explains the demonstration of Aristotle concluding that the material intellect is not passive, that it is not something of which one says ‘this’, (aliquid hoc), that is to say a body or a faculty [existing] in the body, as intending the preparation itself [for the reception of intelligibles] and not the subject of the preparation. That is why he writes in his book On the Soul that the material intellect more resembles the preparation that is in the tablet that has not been written upon, than the prepared tablet itself” (pp. 92-93, brackets in original). Averroes continues, “But it is impossible to show the nature of the preparation proper to the intellect without having recourse to the nature of the subject, since the preparation proper to each subject is parallel to (currit cursu) the perfection and the form of the subject” (p. 93).

Brenet continues, “Otherwise said, Aristotle could not speak of the receptive power of the material intellect without considering the very essence of that intellect…. Averroes in effect rejects the idea that a form adjoining a corporeal substrate can be other than inhering in and mixed with it: an intellect-disposition of the body can only be a corporeal form whose implication in matter renders impossible any apprehension of the universal” (ibid).

Logical and epistemic access to universals is for Averroes neither natural nor supernatural. I like to call it “ethical”.

“As a consequence, contrary to what Alexander of Aphrodisias maintains, the material intellect is really or substantially the subject of the intelligible; it is not the accident of a support; it cannot be reduced to a pure disposition attached to the material composite” (p. 94). “Themistius errs too, because he makes the material intellect a substance in which is found the disposition to receive the intelligibles” (ibid).

“Averroes bases his conceptual elaboration upon the being of the material intellect, and it is this that governs his cosmologico-noetic analogy, i.e., a reflection on the subjectity of the subject of universals. His question is not: Is the receptive intellect a subject or not? but rather, What subject or what being must it be?” (pp. 95-96).

“Averroes and John of Jandun do not defend the same thesis. John holds that the intellectual soul is to the body of the human as the mover-intelligence is to the heaven it moves, whereas Averroes maintains that the ‘celestial body’, i.e., its ‘soul’, is to its intelligence and to the separate forms of the universe, that which the material intellect is to the agent intellect and to the intelligibles it receives. This does not mean that John’s idea, which remained very current throughout the Middle Age, is absurd, impossible, or absolutely contrary to what Averroes wanted to say” (p. 104).

“In not working on the problem of the ‘fourth kind of being’, John truncates cosmology and unbalances its relation to noetics…. The master of arts develops his reading of Aristotle and Averroes from the angle of a question that the Cordovan does not pose: what is it that unites intellect to the human body? Like Siger when he was cornered by Aquinas, he is already dominated by the will to find the kind of union that will allow us to say that hic homo intelligit [“this human understands”], or that homo formaliter intelligit [the human formally understands]” (p. 109).

“[Averroes] does not ask himself about the act that unites intellect and the human, but first of all about the very possibility of any intellectual act, about its material possibility. Under what conditions is the intelligible received? Where can it be received? These are his questions. He wants to determine what is the subject of thought, independent of seeking to know who thinks, which far surpasses the question of human consciousness and that of individual intellection” (ibid).

In a footnote, Brenet quotes Jean Jolivet: “The contingency of individual knowledge, the empiricity of its constitution, are overlooked by a globalizing conception of being, of thought, and of their adequation. Transposing the matter into modern terms (with the required precautions), one could say that Ibn Rushd elaborated a philosophy not of consciousness but of the concept, that puts itself on the same side as Aristotle, properly understood, but also that of Spinoza, Hegel, Marx” (p. 109n).

The “Averroist” theologian Thomas Wilton “judges that the agent intellect is neither a forma inhaerens nor a forma informans, but that it intervenes solely as forma assistens” (p. 116).

But “For the Parisian master, … our intellect is constituted by the possible intellect and by the agent intellect, and the latter is united secundum esse [in being] to the first. Clearly opposed to Thomas Wilton, the master of arts goes so far as to say [the agent intellect] is our form informans” (p. 117). “This comes back to his conception of the intellectus possibilis and of the intellectual soul: John in effect rejects the idea that the possible intellect should be in act, … just as he denies the fact that the agent intellect is not part of the human soul” (p. 118).

Next in this series: Imagination, Cogitation