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

Imagination

“Imagination” is said in at least three major ways. Aristotle minimalistically characterized phantasia as a production of images that both plays a role in our experience of sense perception and can operate independent of it, as in dreaming. Spinoza treated imagination as kind of a passive belief. For him, this was strongly associated with common illusions and wishful thinking – especially with regard to our status as agents — in ordinary life. The Romantics identified imagination with creativity.

Beatrice Longuenesse in her marvelous Kant and the Capacity to Judge has developed in detail Kant’s argument that the same basic “categories” used in reflective thought are already implicit in our pre-reflective apprehensions of things in what Kant called a synthesis of imagination. I think this means not that the Kantian categories have some pre-given or metaphysical status, but rather that for the kind of beings we are, even “pre-reflective” apprehensions have some dependency on previous reflective apprehensions. We are never either entirely active or entirely passive. (See also Passive Synthesis, Active Sense; Voluntary Action; Middle Part of the Soul.)

Richard Kearney in On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva nicely develops Ricoeur’s view that imagination is not so much a special way of seeing as “the capacity for letting new worlds shape our understanding of ourselves…. This power would not be conveyed by images, but by the emergent meanings in our language” (quoted in Kearney, p. 35). According to Kearney, Ricoeur associated imagination first and foremost with “semantic innovation”. What Aristotle in a different context called “searching for a middle term” is an aspect of this creativity with respect to meaning.

The Greek root for “poetry” (poiesis) fundamentally means making or doing in a much more general sense. The Romantics added a stress on innovation, which they saw as coming from the inner depths of the soul. Ricoeur’s treatment of imagination as fundamentally involving the emergence of new meaning nicely takes up the Romantic stress on imagination as innovation, without depending on the Romantics’ dubious metaphysical psychology of interiority. (See also Personhood; Reason, Nature.)