Active intellect
Encyclopedia
The active intellect is a concept in classical and medieval philosophy
. The term refers to the formal
(morphe) aspect of the intellect (nous
), in accordance with the theory of hylomorphism.
De Anima
, Book III. Following is the translation of one of those passages (De Anima, Bk. III, ch. 5, 430a10-25) by Joe Sachs, with some notes about the Greek. Sachs comments that "it is the source of a massive amount of commentary and of fierce disagreement":
The passage tries to explain "how the human intellect passes from its original state, in which it does not think, to a subsequent state, in which it does." He inferred that the energeia/dunamis distinction must also exist in the soul itself. Aristotle says that the passive intellect receives the intelligible form
s of things, but that the active intellect is required to make the potential knowledge into actual knowledge, in the same way that light makes potential colors into actual colors.
The passage is often read together with Metaphysics
, Book XII, ch.7-10, where Aristotle also discusses the human mind and distinguishes between the active and passive
intellects. In that passage Aristotle appears to equate the active intellect with the "unmoved mover
" and God
.
This has been referred to as "the most intensely studied sentences in the history of philosophy". As Davidson remarks:
and Themistius
, gave several different interpretations of the distinction between the active and passive intellects. Some of them regarded the active intellect as a power external to the human mind, Alexander going so far as to identify it with God.
Later, both these interpretations, neoplatonist ones, and perhaps others, influenced the developed of an important Arabic language philosophical literature, using the term 'aql
as the translation for nous. This literature was later translated into, and commented upon, in Latin and Hebrew.
Al-Farabi
and Avicenna
, and also the Jewish philosopher Maimonides
, agreed with the "external" interpretation of active intellect, and held that the active intellect was the lowest of the ten emanations descending through the celestial spheres
. Maimonides cited it in his definition of prophecy
where
) wrote about how one could conjoin oneself with the active intellect, thus attaining philosophical nirvana.
The reason of the Islamic and Jewish Aristotelians for positing a single external Agent Intellect is that all (rational) human beings are considered by Aristotelians to possess or have access to a fixed and stable set of concepts, a unified correct knowledge of the universe. The only way that all human minds could possess the same correct knowledge is if they all had access to some central knowledge store, as terminals might have access to a mainframe computer . This mainframe is the Agent Intellect, the "mind" of the universe, which makes all other cognition possible.
In medieval and Renaissance Europe some thinkers, such as Siger of Brabant
, adopted the interpretation of Averroes on every point, as did the later school of "Paduan Averroists". St. Thomas Aquinas
elaborated on Aristotle's distinction between the active intellect and passive intellect, arguing against Averroes that the active intellect is part of the individual human personality. A third school, of "Alexandrists", rejected the argument linking the active intellect to the immortality
of the soul, while hastening to add that they still believed in immortality as a matter of religious faith. (See Pietro Pomponazzi
; Cesare Cremonini
.)
The active intellect, in the sense described, is more properly called the Agent Intellect, as it is the force triggering intellection in the human mind and causing thoughts to pass from the potential to the actual. It must not be confused with the "intellect in act", which is the result of that triggering, and is more akin to the psychological term "active knowledge". Another term for the final result of intellection, that is to say a person's accumulated knowledge, is the "acquired intellect".
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
. The term refers to the formal
Substantial form
A theory of substantial forms asserts that forms organize matter and make it intelligible. Substantial forms are the source of properties, order, unity, identity, and information about objects....
(morphe) aspect of the intellect (nous
Nous
Nous , also called intellect or intelligence, is a philosophical term for the faculty of the human mind which is described in classical philosophy as necessary for understanding what is true or real, very close in meaning to intuition...
), in accordance with the theory of hylomorphism.
Aristotle
The active intellect was the subject of intense discussion in medieval philosophy. The idea is first encountered in Aristotle'sAristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
De Anima
On the Soul
On the Soul is a major treatise by Aristotle on the nature of living things. His discussion centres on the kinds of souls possessed by different kinds of living things, distinguished by their different operations...
, Book III. Following is the translation of one of those passages (De Anima, Bk. III, ch. 5, 430a10-25) by Joe Sachs, with some notes about the Greek. Sachs comments that "it is the source of a massive amount of commentary and of fierce disagreement":
...since in natureNature (philosophy)Nature is a concept with two major sets of inter-related meanings, referring on the one hand to the things which are natural, or subject to the normal working of "laws of nature", or on the other hand to the essential properties and causes of those things to be what they naturally are, or in other...
one thing is the material (hulēMatterMatter is a general term for the substance of which all physical objects consist. Typically, matter includes atoms and other particles which have mass. A common way of defining matter is as anything that has mass and occupies volume...
) for each kind genosGenosGenos was the ancient Greek term for kind; race; family; birth; origin which identified themselves as a unit, referred to by a single name...
(this is what is in potencyPotencyPotency may refer to:* Potency , a measure of the activity of a drug in a biological system* Virility* Potency is a measure of the differentiation potential of stem cells...
all the particular things of that kind) but it is something else that is the causal and productive thing by which all of them are formed, as is the case with an art in relation to its material, it is necessary in the soul (psuchē) too that these distinct aspects be present;
the one sort is intellect (nousNousNous , also called intellect or intelligence, is a philosophical term for the faculty of the human mind which is described in classical philosophy as necessary for understanding what is true or real, very close in meaning to intuition...
) by becoming all things, the other sort by forming all things, in the way an active condition (hexisHexisHexis is a Greek word, important in the philosophy of Aristotle, and because of this it has become a traditional word of philosophy. It stems from a verb related to possession or "having", and Jacob Klein, for example, translates it as "possession". It is more typically translated in modern texts...
) like lightLightLight or visible light is electromagnetic radiation that is visible to the human eye, and is responsible for the sense of sight. Visible light has wavelength in a range from about 380 nanometres to about 740 nm, with a frequency range of about 405 THz to 790 THz...
too makes the colors that are in potency be at work as colors (to phōs poiei ta dunameiDunamisIn philosophy, Potentiality and Actuality are principles of a dichotomy which Aristotle used throughout his philosophical works to analyze motion, causality, ethics, and physiology in his Physics, Metaphysics, Ethics and De Anima .The concept of potentiality, in this context, generally refers to...
onta chrōmata energeiai chrōmata).
This sort of intellect [which is like light in the way it makes potential things work as what they are] is separate, as well as being without attributes and unmixed, since it is by its thinghood a being-at-work, for what acts is always distinguished in stature above what is acted upon, as a governing source is above the material it works on.
KnowledgeKnowledgeKnowledge is a familiarity with someone or something unknown, which can include information, facts, descriptions, or skills acquired through experience or education. It can refer to the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject...
(epistēmē), in its being-at-work, is the same as the thing it knows, and while knowledge in potency comes first in time in any one knower, in the whole of things it does not take precedence even in time.
This does not mean that at one time it thinks but at another time it does not think, but when separated it is just exactly what it is, and this alone is deathless and everlasting (though we have no memory, because this sort of intellect is not acted upon, while the sort that is acted upon is destructible), and without this nothing thinks.
The passage tries to explain "how the human intellect passes from its original state, in which it does not think, to a subsequent state, in which it does." He inferred that the energeia/dunamis distinction must also exist in the soul itself. Aristotle says that the passive intellect receives the intelligible form
Intelligible form
An intelligible form in philosophy refers to a form that can be apprehended by the intellect. According to Ancient and Medieval philosophers, the intelligible forms are the things by which we understand.-Aristotle:...
s of things, but that the active intellect is required to make the potential knowledge into actual knowledge, in the same way that light makes potential colors into actual colors.
The passage is often read together with Metaphysics
Metaphysics (Aristotle)
Metaphysics is one of the principal works of Aristotle and the first major work of the branch of philosophy with the same name. The principal subject is "being qua being", or being understood as being. It examines what can be asserted about anything that exists just because of its existence and...
, Book XII, ch.7-10, where Aristotle also discusses the human mind and distinguishes between the active and passive
Passive intellect
Passive intellect is a term used in philosophy to refer to the material aspect of the intellect , in accordance with the theory of hylomorphism.-Aristotle:In Aristotle's philosophy of mind, the passive intellect...
intellects. In that passage Aristotle appears to equate the active intellect with the "unmoved mover
Unmoved mover
The unmoved mover is a philosophical concept described by Aristotle as a primary cause or "mover" of all the motion in the universe. As is implicit in the name, the "unmoved mover" is not moved by any prior action...
" and God
God
God is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
.
This has been referred to as "the most intensely studied sentences in the history of philosophy". As Davidson remarks:
Just what Aristotle meant by potential intellect and active intellect - terms not even explicit in the De anima and at best implied - and just how he understood the interaction between them remains moot. Students of the history of philosophy continue to debate Aristotle's intent, particularly the question whether he considered the active intellect to be an aspect of the human soul or an entity existing independently of man.
Interpretations
The early Greek commentators on Aristotle, in particular Alexander of AphrodisiasAlexander of Aphrodisias
Alexander of Aphrodisias was a Peripatetic philosopher and the most celebrated of the Ancient Greek commentators on the writings of Aristotle. He was a native of Aphrodisias in Caria, and lived and taught in Athens at the beginning of the 3rd century, where he held a position as head of the...
and Themistius
Themistius
Themistius , named , was a statesman, rhetorician, and philosopher. He flourished in the reigns of Constantius II, Julian, Jovian, Valens, Gratian, and Theodosius I; and he enjoyed the favour of all those emperors, notwithstanding their many differences, and the fact that he himself was not a...
, gave several different interpretations of the distinction between the active and passive intellects. Some of them regarded the active intellect as a power external to the human mind, Alexander going so far as to identify it with God.
Later, both these interpretations, neoplatonist ones, and perhaps others, influenced the developed of an important Arabic language philosophical literature, using the term 'aql
'Aql
‘Aql , is an Arabic language term used in Islamic theology or philosophy to the intellect the rational faculty of the soul or mind. It is the normal translation of the Greek term nous...
as the translation for nous. This literature was later translated into, and commented upon, in Latin and Hebrew.
Al-Farabi
Al-Farabi
' known in the West as Alpharabius , was a scientist and philosopher of the Islamic world...
and Avicenna
Avicenna
Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā , commonly known as Ibn Sīnā or by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persian polymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived...
, and also the Jewish philosopher Maimonides
Maimonides
Moses ben-Maimon, called Maimonides and also known as Mūsā ibn Maymūn in Arabic, or Rambam , was a preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the greatest Torah scholars and physicians of the Middle Ages...
, agreed with the "external" interpretation of active intellect, and held that the active intellect was the lowest of the ten emanations descending through the celestial spheres
Celestial spheres
The celestial spheres, or celestial orbs, were the fundamental entities of the cosmological models developed by Plato, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Ptolemy, Copernicus and others...
. Maimonides cited it in his definition of prophecy
Prophecy
Prophecy is a process in which one or more messages that have been communicated to a prophet are then communicated to others. Such messages typically involve divine inspiration, interpretation, or revelation of conditioned events to come as well as testimonies or repeated revelations that the...
where
The more strictly Aristotelian Muslims (in particular Avempace and Averroes
Prophecy is, in truth and reality, an emanation sent forth by the Divine BeingGodGod is the English name given to a singular being in theistic and deistic religions who is either the sole deity in monotheism, or a single deity in polytheism....
through the medium of the Active Intellect, in the first instance to man's rational facultyReasonReason is a term that refers to the capacity human beings have to make sense of things, to establish and verify facts, and to change or justify practices, institutions, and beliefs. It is closely associated with such characteristically human activities as philosophy, science, language, ...
, and then to his imaginative facultyImaginationImagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses...
.
Averroes
' , better known just as Ibn Rushd , and in European literature as Averroes , was a Muslim polymath; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy,...
) wrote about how one could conjoin oneself with the active intellect, thus attaining philosophical nirvana.
The reason of the Islamic and Jewish Aristotelians for positing a single external Agent Intellect is that all (rational) human beings are considered by Aristotelians to possess or have access to a fixed and stable set of concepts, a unified correct knowledge of the universe. The only way that all human minds could possess the same correct knowledge is if they all had access to some central knowledge store, as terminals might have access to a mainframe computer . This mainframe is the Agent Intellect, the "mind" of the universe, which makes all other cognition possible.
In medieval and Renaissance Europe some thinkers, such as Siger of Brabant
Siger of Brabant
Siger of Brabant was a 13th century philosopher from the southern Low Countries who was an important proponent of Averroism...
, adopted the interpretation of Averroes on every point, as did the later school of "Paduan Averroists". St. Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. , also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus, Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis...
elaborated on Aristotle's distinction between the active intellect and passive intellect, arguing against Averroes that the active intellect is part of the individual human personality. A third school, of "Alexandrists", rejected the argument linking the active intellect to the immortality
Immortality
Immortality is the ability to live forever. It is unknown whether human physical immortality is an achievable condition. Biological forms have inherent limitations which may or may not be able to be overcome through medical interventions or engineering...
of the soul, while hastening to add that they still believed in immortality as a matter of religious faith. (See Pietro Pomponazzi
Pietro Pomponazzi
Pietro Pomponazzi was an Italian philosopher. He is sometimes known by his Latin name, Petrus Pomponatius.-Biography:...
; Cesare Cremonini
Cesare Cremonini (philosopher)
Cesare Cremonini, sometimes Cesare Cremonino , was an Italian professor of natural philosophy, working rationalism and Aristotelian materialism inside scholasticism...
.)
The active intellect, in the sense described, is more properly called the Agent Intellect, as it is the force triggering intellection in the human mind and causing thoughts to pass from the potential to the actual. It must not be confused with the "intellect in act", which is the result of that triggering, and is more akin to the psychological term "active knowledge". Another term for the final result of intellection, that is to say a person's accumulated knowledge, is the "acquired intellect".
Sources
- Commentarium magnum in Aristotelis De anima libros, ed. Crawford, Cambridge (Mass.) 1953: Latin translation of Averroes' long commentary on the De Anima
- Averroes (tr. Alain de Libera), L'intelligence et la pensée, Paris 1998: French translation of Averroes' long commentary on book 3 of the De Anima
- Essays on Aristotle's De Anima, ed. NussbaumMartha NussbaumMartha Nussbaum , is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics....
and Rorty: Oxford 1992