Adeptio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Turn to a Subject

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brenet summarizes the view of Augustine:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Adeptio

Cogitation, Intention

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Turn to a Subject

Imagination, Cogitation

I’ve been rereading Jean-Baptiste Brenet’s Transferts du sujet, an exemplary case study of the now mostly forgotten 14th century philosopher John of Jandun. John’s use and misuse of Averroes and the surrounding anti-Averroist controversies both turn out to have major relevance for the history of Western concepts of “subject” and subjectivity. The discussions involve a fascinating mix of psychology, epistemology, and so-called metaphysics.

After examining the relation between Aristotelian “intellect” and the body, the second major topic Brenet addresses has to do with the cognitive role of Aristotelian phantasia or “imagination”. A while back, I excerpted and commented on an essay of Brenet’s on imagination in Averroes (see Desire, Image, Intellect). More generally, this is an area where the Arabic and Latin traditions greatly expanded upon Aristotle’s rather minimalist account of these matters. To begin with, they divide phantasia into three aspects, or interrelated but distinct “faculties”: imagination proper, memory, and what Averroes calls cogitation (and Avicenna calls estimation), which is broad enough to cover most everyday “thinking”.

Aristotelian imagination in the narrower sense is explained as involving sensible forms or images that we experience without external sensation. Memory involves sensible images that are similarly independent of external sensation. Like imagination and cogitation, memory deals primarily with particular sensible things. Aristotle explicitly says that memory requires a living body, whereas the “intellect” (nous) associated with knowledge of universals does not inherently have such a dependency. I would say that instead of depending on the body or individual consciousness, Aristotelian intellect and universals depend on language, discourse, and what contemporary writers call the “space of reasons”. Cogitation on the other hand, like memory, is generally treated as individual and bodily, and some writers treat intellect in the same way.

“Cogitation” is a kind of concrete everyday thinking by individuals that works with particulars and accidental properties rather than universals and essences. This includes pretty much everything we call “thinking” in ordinary life. (Its etymological connection to the Cartesian cogito is no accident. Cogito in Descartes is a first-person verb, though modern people treat it as a noun. It has the same broad scope as cogitation in Averroes.) Averroes criticizes Alfarabi and Avicenna for making Aristotelian intellect too transcendental. Late in life, he also comes to criticize Ibn Bajjah for going too far in the other, “Alexandrian” direction of effectively reducing human “intellect” to an “imagination” that is considered to be inseparable from a material body.

Brenet asks, “What does an image do? It is concerned with the production of the universal and the active role of the individual in that genesis. At stake is not only the empirical basis of thought, but the motive efficacity of the phantasms in the intellective process, and their dynamic function in uniting the body and intellect” (p. 133, my translation throughout).

“This is a subject that Averroes raises many times in his Long Commentary. The rational soul, he writes, has to consider the ‘intentions’ existing in the imaginative faculty, just as the senses have to inspect sensibles. If we left the image out of the production of the intelligible, it would be necessary to admit that thinking is a direct operation of the agent intellect on the material intellect. But that is inexact. The image is an indispensable subject of intellection and ‘one cannot say that the connection [rapport] of the agent intellect in the soul to the generated intellect is from every point of view like the connection of arts (artficium) to the artefact'” (pp. 133-134).

Intention is a concept from Arabic philosophy that was particularly developed by Avicenna. It acquired wide currency among the scholastics. This idea was rediscovered in the late 19th century by Brentano, and acquired wide currency in Husserlian phenomenology and analytic philosophy. Brandom credits Kant and Hegel with developing a non-psychological alternative account of intentionality.

“As intelligible species, ‘universals’ are concepts. What is proper to a species is in effect to ‘represent’. And if a sensible species represents a singular, an intelligible species represents an essence or quiddity (representitiua quidditatis). Concepts are produced. An intelligible species is not given from the outset or always already available. As ‘intention’, the universal is posterior to singulars. It does not exist outside of things” (p. 135).

A multitude of elaborate accounts and critiques of intelligible and sensible “species” were elaborated in the Latin tradition. Scholars have debated about the origins of the Latin term species (possibly Stoic?), but in any case, like the fine semantic distinctions of the theories of “supposition” and the far more heated but also highly sophisticated debates over various versions of nominalism and realism, this non-Aristotelian usage of the term “species” became a scholastic commonplace. It was not so much attributed to Aristotle as grafted into an already hybrid discourse. (Is there a discourse that is not hybrid?) More Aristotelian is the notion of “conceptualism”, a variant of which has been attributed to Peter Abelard.

“It is indeed in the intellective soul that the stone exists, or the human, and not in nature. The universal is something intellected, which can neither be really separated from the beings with which it is concerned nor really confounded with them. It is this conceptualist thesis, directed against Plato, which serves as the theoretical sub-basement for John of Jandun’s questions on noetics, that is to say the idea, derived from the Aristotelian distinction of the two intellects, of a production of intelligible thought as abstraction. But what is the detail of this operation?” (p. 136, emphasis in original).

The idea here is that universals are something rarefied and actively constituted, rather than something commonplace that is somehow given to us. All sensible things are regarded as particular. Ordinary life arguably deals only with particulars, like the peasant with her cows at the beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Aristotelian ethics meanwhile emphasize goodness of fit to the particulars in any situation.

This is complicated by the simultaneous non-Aristotelian discourse about species, which on some accounts precisely are supposed to be ubiquitous and given. Medieval species are paradoxical because they are alternately treated as universals and as objects. But either way, they are often supposed to be natural and/or God-given.

On the more active side, there are developments out of the Aristotelian notion of “abstraction”, which is supposed to be a process by which universals are derived from particulars. Some accounts make it sound like this just happens. There is a common interpretation that identifies abstraction with a simple logical induction of generalities from particulars. All dogs have four legs, and so on. But both “Alexandrian” and “Averroist” readings of Aristotle treat abstraction as a process of progressive removal of accidental properties, or progressive distinction of the essential from the accidental. This is sometimes called “geometrical” abstraction, due to the way geometry uses figures to represent universals. Aristotle’s minimalism on this key question led to many creative elaborations by later writers, from Alexander of Aphrodisias (late 2nd/early 3rd century CE) to Zabarella (late 16th century).

Brenet notes that many of the more detailed later accounts of Aristotelian abstraction are expressed in terms of expanded accounts of imagination, memory, and “cogitation”.

John of Jandun “asks if intellect is a virtus passiua [passive virtue]. We know his answer: there is in the human intellective soul a passive ‘power’, the possible intellect, which permits it to receive the intelligible species and thought. It is passive because it is moved by something ‘extrinsic’ to it, the human phantasm, without which intellection cannot occur…. It is absolutely necessary that the images ‘move’ the intellect for it to pass to the act of thinking…. This means that intellection comes down to passivity, to the intelligible mediante phantasmate [mediating phantasm]…. It is clear, as a consequence, that the image intervenes as motor in the intellective process, by making an intelligible species arise in the possible intellect” (pp. 136-137).

The “human phantasm” is basically coextensive with experience. Meanwhile, intellection is construed narrowly as concerned with universals. So when Brenet says that intellect for John is a passive virtue, this does not mean there is no activity in broader human thinking. The whole discourse about “production” of intelligibles makes the classic Aristotelian point that forms are not just “given” to us.

“For what is it that can produce the species that the intellect finally has need of to exercise itself? It is not the species present in the sensitive faculty of the individual, it is not the possible intellect, it is not solely the agent intellect, it can be nothing else than the phantasm. The sensible species is incapable of that, because it is not ‘spiritual’ enough, i.e., not close enough to the nature of the immaterial intellect. The possible intellect, which is a pure power of reception, cannot do so either. As for the agent intellect, it cannot be since it is the universal cause of all the species” (p. 137).

“If a phantasm is found in the imagination of an individual human, an intelligible species is received in the intellect; if the phantasm disappears, the intelligible species disappears with it…. And we can deduce that the image is to the intelligible species as the light of a luminous body … is to the illumination of the transparent medium: … an active cause (causa activa)” (p. 139).

“Universals are colligata [bound up with] imagined intentions. Is this to say that they are vaguely related, without being able to make precise the nature of the relation? John’s whole demonstration aims to show on the contrary that the image and the species in the intellect maintain a relation of principle and product…. This conditioning is a relation of causal genesis in which the image is given a motive efficacy” (p. 140).

“The image can indeed intervene as a motor in the production of the intelligible species. But it does not act alone” (p.142). “The image by itself is powerless to exceed its singularity, to transmute itself, to yield the intelligible species” (p. 144). “The agent intellect is necessary for the image to be related as cause to a product, the intelligible, whose nature surpasses its own” (p. 145).

“The universal form is taken from the image by the intellect, issue of their synergy: without the phantasm, intellect turns emptily, and without the intellect, the phantasm is unable to limit itself” (pp. 145-146).

That sounds like a famous quote from Kant about the interdependence of what he calls understanding and intuition.

“But what does the agent intellect ‘do’ when it intervenes on the image?” (p. 146). “We know the point of departure (the image) and the point of arrival (the intelligible species), and the necessity of the passage from the one to the other under the action of the intellect. But the modality of the transfer stumbles. The intelligible species is not already in the image, like an accident of imagination that the intellect has the function of de-subjectifying and de-localizing in depositing in the intellectual receptor. It is indeed not the intelligible species that is displaced by the agent from one order to another” (p. 148).

“The agent intellect and the image are both necessary for thought…. It is on the singularity of an image that the power of the agent intellect must be exercised if we want to think something. Images alone do not suffice for thought, which would come back to something confounding the individual and the universal” (p. 157). But according to Brenet, John rejects the view that “As a consequence, without contact, without influx, the presence of the agent intellect allows an object to appear, and an object of thought” (p.158).

“The mere presence of the agent intellect cannot make one intention rather than another modify the material intellect. For abstraction is impossible unless it is preceded by a separation of objects. Because it is always singular, the very act of thinking presupposes this exclusivity and this determinate modification: all thought is the thought of an image, or of a quiddity of images. It is not sufficient to put the agent intellect in the presence of a mass of phantasms for a thought to take place. For a thought to take place, it is necessary to explain why it is on this image that it is exercised” (p. 161).

John argues against Thomas Wilton that “It is intellect that gives objects to the will, and not the inverse” (ibid). “When [Averroes] affirms that we abstract and think when we will it, in reality, explains John, it is necessary to understand: when we cogitate, i.e. when we make use of the cogitative faculty that is proper to us. It is the cogitative that separates the imagined intentions” (ibid). “The truth, for John of Jandun … is that the cogitative ‘cogitates’ the individuality of a quiddity to the exclusion of another and that, in doing so, it disposes the possible intellect to think that quiddity” (p.162). John complains that Wilton “ignores the determining role of the virtus cogitatiua in the separation of individual intentions” (ibid).

“John of Jandun’s ‘solution’ is in effect the following. The phantasm acts in the possible intellect in producing the intelligible species and does so alone, without competition. It is the immediate cause and the unique active principle of that species” (p. 165, emphasis in original). “The individual imaginative faculty is the sole cause of an intellectual product…. From the process of production of the intelligible, in any case, the agent intellect is absolutely excluded” (p. 166). “The phantasm causes the intelligible species, and that is all. It is a motor, it moves the intellect in making the species. Nothing is said of the mode of its intelligibilization, of its genesis…. The production of the intelligible form is nonintellectual…. If abstraction is equated with producing the universal species, then the agent intellect does not abstract the intelligible” (p. 167, emphasis in original).

“The Parisian master indeed seems to reject the idea that the intellect has a connection with the image: it is certainly the abstracter, it is in this very capacity that it is united from the outset to the thinking individual; but not every abstraction is a universalization of forms and, in a certain sense, when the agent intellect ‘abstracts’, it acts on a form that is already universal. It is thus without direct connection to the phantasm — it does not act on it, or on the possible intellect, but on the product deposited in that intellect from the activity proper to the phantasm” (pp. 167-168).

“The phantasm alone is the principle of the intelligible that precedes thought” (p. 174). “The singularity of [John’s] reading lies in the fact that intellectual abstraction designates not the intelligibilization of the phantasm, but the intellection of what is intelligized…. This abstraction is not the act that assures the production of the intelligible, but that which operates the effectuation of its representative function” (p.175).

“What is left of the Long Commentary on the De Anima and of Averroes? Hardly more than words. For John, the image is endowed with an autonomous and self-sufficient motricity; the intelligible, although produced, precedes any intellectual intervention; and the intellect is no longer an abstracter save in name only, deprived of any connection to intelligibilization” (p. 176).

“Two things, at least, can be deduced from the preceding analyses. First, there is no unified Averroist doctrine of abstraction…. Second, the hypothesis of the ‘Averroist’ John of Jandun on abstraction is not at all Rushdean” (ibid).

Brenet says that in fact John’s formulations on abstraction have an unrecognized strong connection to the thought of Duns Scotus, who also holds that the universal in act precedes the act of intellection.

Next in this series: Cogitation, Intention

“Intellect” and the Body

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

Transferences of the Subject

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: “Intellect” and the Body

Active Sense?

I previously noted a weakness in the otherwise exemplary use that Robert Pippin makes of Aristotle in his groundbreaking reading of Hegel. Pippin wants to emphasize the radical novelty of Kant’s claims about the active role of human intellect in the formation of what we take as reality. This drives him to make the seriously wrong claim that Aristotle views intellect as purely passive, or receptive of pre-given forms. This is a complicated subject, but I think the beginning of a reasonable interpretation is to recognize that our ability to think is neither purely passive (merely receiving the given), nor purely active in the sense of having no objective dependencies, or in the sense of arbitrary choice.

Aristotle suggests a kind of analogy between sense perception and intellect. His account of sense is oriented toward explaining the relative objectivity of ordinary sense perception. But context is all-important here. If Aristotle bends the stick rather far in the direction of realism, this needs to be understood as a counterbalancing response to Plato’s sometimes extreme distrust of the deliverances of sense.

Pattin says that for Aristotle, it is necessary to posit an agent intellect because sensible intelligibles do not exist in act outside the soul. Any existence of sensible intelligibles outside the soul is only potential.

There was a major debate among the Latin scholastics about the passivity or activity of sense. One view does argue that there is no such thing as an active component in human sense perception, that it is entirely passive. But the other view sharply objects to this. Pour l’histoire du sens agent by A. Pattin (1988) collects many of the Latin sources for this dispute. I am not so bold as to offer my own translations from the Latin, as I occasionally do with French. But I wanted to at least briefly skim the surface of this extensive debate on the existence of active sense.

Pattin notes that Albert the Great already catalogued many views concerning the causal role of the sensible object in relation to the human sensitive faculty. Some authors assigned the active role in visual perception to light. For others though, including Augustine, it is the activity of the soul, in reaction to the experience of the sensible object, that forms the cognitive content of sensation “from its own substance”. Pattin says that for Augustine, it is absolutely impossible for the spiritual soul to be passive in relation to sensible realities, because the inferior cannot in any way act on the superior. I would note that in this Augustine follows Plotinus.

Pattin says that Aquinas accepts a non-Augustinian view of sense perception as categorically passive. For him sensibles are found in act outside the soul. But he argues against giving much weight to the analogy between sensation and intellect, because he wants at the same time to defend the existence of an active intellect within the human soul. In itself, the issue of active sense is not very important for him.

This understanding of the significance of positions for and against the analogy between intellect and sense is very far from the way Pippin presents it. For both Aquinas and Pippin, the analogy is an argument from a claimed passivity of sense to the passivity of intellect. For Aquinas, the truth is that sensation is passive while thought is not. But for a number of important medieval and Renaissance thinkers, both our sense perception and our thought have an active component, and the analogy supports this.

There was a particularly influential debate on this subject between Bartholomew of Bruges (ca.1286-1356) and John of Jandun (ca. 1285-1328). Bartholomew is believed to have written three treatises against the notion of active sense, of which one survives. John on the other hand defends the analogy of sense and intellect, and uses it to argue from the existence of active intellect to the existence of active sense. An intermediate position is argued by John Buridan (ca. 1301-1360), who was also an important participant in the debates about nominalism and realism. John of Jandun’s position was defended by numerous Italian Aristotelians — including Taddeo de Parma, Mathieu de Gubio, Gaetan de Thienne, and Agostino Nifo, who like John of Jandun have been labeled as Latin “Averroists”. It was discussed by other very non-Thomistic Aristotelians like Pietro Pomponazzi and Jacobo Zabarella. The intermediate position of Buridan was meanwhile taken up by his students, like Nicolas Oresme and Marsilius of Inghen.