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ABSTRACT
Highlighting the relations between De Anima II.5 and De Anima III.4, this paper argues that Aristotle held a surprisingly dynamic view of the intellect. According to this view, the intellect is in a constant development brought about by its own activity. This dynamic view distinguishes the intellect from both physical objects and from sense-perception. For Aristotle the intellect is a “nothing” that gradually becomes something by thinking. The paper traces the logic of this idea and its meaning. It defends the simple thesis that in the intellect alone first and second transitions are bound together: that every concrete thought is also a determination of the possibility of the intellect. This, I will suggest, was known to ancient commentators who distinguished between not two but three “intellects” in De Anima; not only the possible and actual intellects, but also the acquired intellect. It is the unique conceptual structure of the acquired intellect that this paper sketches.
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Notes
1 Malabou, What should we do with our Brain?, 4.
2 Many traditional commentaries on Aristotle’s psychology emphasize this analogy. Lowe, “Aristotle on Kinds of Thinking”, discusses some. See also Ross, Aristotle; Allan, the Philosophy of Aristotle; Hicks, Aristotle’s De Anima.
3 See Lowe, “Aristotle on Kinds of Thinking”; Polansky, “Analogy and Disanalogy”.
4 namely (a) that the intellect “thinks all things” and (hence, though the inference is contested) has no organ; (b) that the intellect grows stronger and not weaker when thinking a “powerful thought” – unlike sense, that grows weaker and can even be destroyed by too strong impressions; and (c) that the intellect can bring itself to action and does not necessitate external stimulation. These distinctions are made in III.4 and have been discussed in detail by commentators. See Lowe, “Aristotle on Kinds of Thinking”; Polansky, “Analogy and Disanalogy”; Sisko, “Separating the Intellect from the Body”; Politis, “Intellect as Pure Capacity”.
5 I have used Hamlyn’s translation throughout this paper. Here I have opted for Lawson Tancred’s.
6 Polanski suggests distinguishing between “the possible” and “the potential” in order to clarify the difference between the two levels of possibility: bricks are potentially a house, whereas clay only has the possibility to become a house. See Polansky, Aristotle’s De Anima, 439.
7 The distinction between knowledge and contemplation, exemplifying that between hexis and Energeia, is made already in II.1, 412a6.
8 This does not mean that second alterations involve no change at all. Aristotle further complicates this issue by introducing a distinction between two types of alteration (alloiosis) in 417b20. He distinguishes between “privative” alterations, meaning “a substitution of one quality for another contrary to it”, and “unordinary” alterations, meaning “a development of an existing quality”. There seems to be a general disagreement among scholars about how the two kinds of alteration relate to the two kinds of possibility: Burnyeat argues that first transitions carry a change in the sense of “a substitution of one quality for another contrary to it” (privative alterations) and that these alone should be considered alteration in the true sense of the term; Heinaman thinks the distinction between kinds of alteration and the distinction between kinds of transition are unrelated; with alteration, the distinction is between “positive alterations” that preserve the nature of possibility – unordinary alterations – and “negative alterations” which destroy it in whole or part – privative alteration; with transition it is between the transition from abstract possibility to “knowledge” (first transition), and the transition from “knowledge” to “contemplation”; And Bowin thinks first transitions should be equated with change in the sense of “a development of an existing quality”, unordinary alterations – the exact opposite of Burnyeat’s understanding. Be that as it may, it is clear that alteration in its truer sense – be it unordinary or privative – should be attributed to first transitions. See comment 7 above, and Heinaman, “Actuality, Potentiality”.
9 This, like many other issues mentioned in passing throughout the paper, is a controversial interpretive subject. Burnyeat, “De Anima II 5” suggests that this passage discusses the nature of thought: but what is described is a specific kind of thought, the thought of a wise man thinking wise thoughts: this is, I argue, a second transition. Sisko, “Material alteration” points to a similar example in Physics VII.3: it is there said that a builder who tiles the roof of a house cannot be said to alter the house (246al7-19); the differences between the examples are evident, however: in DA the subject of the example is the builder, whereas in the Physics the subject is the house. In the DA the builder does not change because he already has the ability to build; in the Physics, the house is not changed because the tiled roof is part of its nature.
10 See Burnyeat, “De Anima II 5”; Bowin, “Alteration in De Anima II 5”.
11 A translation suggested by Sachs in his translation of the Metaphysics IX.8.
12 The relation between the disposition and the possession in the notion of Hexis in the Metaphysics is complicated. In the context of the soul it is however helpful. The notion of hexis also has normative implications which I do not here discuss. See Rodrigo, “The Dynamics of Hexis”.
13 Sisko fruitfully reads DA II.5 with Categories 8 and 14. He suggest that true alteration is a change not of affections – pathos – but of settled, long-lasting and stable states – hexeis. He argues that hexeis are, for Aristotle, the true sense of “quality”, so that a “change in quality” – alteration, alloiosis – in its true sense would involve not a change in pathos but in hexis. Sisko’s discussion is significant for another reason: he argues that DA II.5 “seems to speak to an abstract distinction between settled states and affections” – thus suggesting that the debate over material alteration, initiated by Sorabji in the 1970s, should not be considered an exclusive perspective through which to read Aristotle’s theory of intellect; Sisko, “Material alteration”.
14 Aristotle, Aristotle’s De Anima, DA 417b16.
15 This is Hamlyn’s opinion: he argues that it makes little sense to speak of an acquisition of the capacity to perceive, and concludes that “there is something wrong with Aristotle’s attempt to apply the dunamis-hexis-energeia scheme to perception and to anything parallel with it” – Hamlyn, “Aristotle De Anima”, 102. I disagree, for (1) the transition from dunamis to hexis in sense-perception does not necessarily take place at the moment of birth – Aristotle’s explicitly states the contrary; and (2), perhaps more importantly, there can be no hexis without a previous dunamis to be determined.
16 See also NE II.1:
in all cases where something arises in us by nature, we first acquire the capacities and later exhibit the activities. This is clear in the case of the senses, since we did not acquire them by seeing often or hearing often; we had them before we used them, and did no acquire them by using them. (Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 102)
17 This calls into question Hamlyn’s understanding of Hexis; he argues that things which have a soul have “a potentiality for opposites, the disposition to one of which is eliminated and the other reinforced in the process of training” (Hamlyn, Aristotle De Anima, 101). Here however we see Aristotle talking about perception as an axis-hexis, and not a choice between opposites. Furthermore, as I will argue later, reason has not a potentiality for opposites but possibility pure and simple.
18 The possibility of a perception is said to be included in the sense-organ; but the sense in which it is included is a controversial issue, and is related to the well-known debate between “the literalist” and “the spiritualist” interpretation of Aristotle’s understanding of perception. See Burnyea, “Aristotelian Philosophy of Mind”; Sorabji, “Body and Soul”; and Woolf, “The Coloration of Aristotelian Eye-Jelly”.
19 Is it not the case, one might ask, that the musician has a better ear? Is it not true that the painter trained himself to see what he was previously unable to? It would seem, then, that sense-perception partakes in a kind of recursive development through actualization. Yet it is doubtful that the painter in the process of training is actually learning to see, if by seeing we refer to the organic function of the eye. Aristotle’s position would be that the eye has a predetermined capacity to detect light within a certain fixed range, and that this capacity cannot be altered through use. What can be altered is the capacity for distinction in sensory perception. Yet this capacity is not to be attributed to pure sense perception. The musician is not learning to hear, but is gradually altering is listening capabilities: and while hearing is a perceptual process, listening is an intellectual activity. In this sense, the musician’s training is an intellectual, and not merely perceptual, process. The very distinction between seeing and observing or between hearing and listening implies a more fundamental distinction between perceptual and intellectual processes. Where purely perceptual processes activate pre-determined capacities, intellectual processes develop their own possibilities.
20 The senses, however, can be destroyed by their use (which, as mentioned above, is one of the aspects explicitly distinguishing them from thought):
either excess, whether high or low pitch, destroys hearing; and in the same way in flavors excess destroys taste, and in colors the too bright or dark destroys sight, and so too in smell. (426a27)
21 Aristotle, Aristotle De Anima, DA 429a18.
22 See note 16 above. See also Politis, “Intellect as Pure Capacity”, arguing that the intellect is unlimited in scope because unlike perception it is not understood as a mean of a specific range of qualities.
23 Aristotle does not seem to deny this possibility – and a comment made in passing in 417b25-27 mentions “sciences dealing with objects of perception” which are “particular and external”, suggesting that there is a way to think about the concrete.
24 See Lowe, “Aristotle on Kinds of Thinking”; Polansky, “Analogy and Disanalogy”.
25 This “Nothing” has naturally perplexed readers for centuries. Shields offers an interesting reconstructions of the argument – though focused, as most recent commentaries are, on the question of the seperability of the intellect – in Shields, “Intentionality and Isomorphism”. Shields convincingly shows that both the claim that the intellect is nothing and the claim that it is separable are based on the logically previous claim that the intellect can think all things.
26 See Norman, “Aristotle’s Philosopher-God”, 64. Politis, “Intellect as Pure Capacity”, 381 refutes this.
27 Cf. Cohoe who claims that “no physical structure could enable a bodily part or combination of bodily parts to act as an organ of understanding, producing or determining the full range of forms that the human intellect can understand” – Cohoe, “Why the Intellect can have no Bodily Organ”.
28 Or again in 429b29: “The intellect is in a way potentially the objects of thought, although it is actually nothing before it thinks”.
29 Is Aristotle really suggesting that perceptual isomorphism is true literally – that the eye actually becomes red when seeing a red colour – as Sorabji believes? See note 17 above. For a detailed assessment of this debate, see Caston, “The Spirit and the Letter”.
30 Cf. Burnyeat, Aristotle’s Divine Intellect, 21: “It is widely agreed in the scholarly literature that no underlying material processes or conditions are involved when the intellect becomes its object by taking on an intelligible form”.
31 See Hamlyn, “Introduction to De Anima”, 137.
32 See Burnyeat, Aristotle’s Divine Intellect.
33 Aristotle leaves open the possibility that every passing thought does contribute something to the formation of a hexis – but the precise mechanisms of habituation are left under-conceptualized in the De Anima and in Aristotle’s corpus as a whole. Brodie comments that “it is remarkable that Aristotle has almost nothing to say about the how or why by acting in a certain way we acquire the corresponding disposition” – Brodie, Ethics with Aristotle, 104.
34 Burnyeat, “De Anima II 5”, 58, where it is used in a different context and with a different meaning.
35 See on this Kosman, “What does the Maker Mind Make?”. Kosman’s central claim is precisely this: “the active intellect brings into being first-actuality mind and the first actuality thinkable (…) – but this happens by virtue of the active intellect being the source of those acts of thinking by which nous is brought to second actuality” (Kosman, “What does Maker Mind Make?”, 355).
36 This is in tune with the model of learning brought forth in NE II.1. It is said there that in sense perception (and all other things that “arise in us by nature”) “we first acquire the capacities and later exhibit the activities”. We cannot see before being-able to see. In the activities of the intellect, on the other hand, “we acquire by first exercising”: for instance, we do not learn philosophy by first acquiring philosophy and then using it – rather we become philosophers by first doing philosophy. This means that in matters of the intellect, activity generates and changes the capacity. A second transition from capacity to activity, brings about a first transition which determines the nature of the capacity. Energeia determines a hexis. While the concrete mechanisms at play in this transition from activity to disposition are under-conceptualized in Aristotle, the general trajectory is the backward movement from second to first transitions, as described above.
37 See note 20 above.
38 Burnyeat for instance argues that knowledge cannot be considered an alteration at all: “for knowledge the language of alteration is ruled out”; “perceiving is to be different (…) from the exercise of knowledge, which is not alteration at all”. See Burnyeat, “De Anima II 5”, 60–1.
39 There is a very long history of interpretation of the relationship between these two intellects and the nature of the elusive active intellect. Caston gives a list of commentaries in the second note of Caston, “Aristotle’s two Intellects”.
40 Alexander of Aphroditias, Themistius, Simplicius, Philophenus, Avicenna, Averroes and Aquinas are all of this opinion, though their understanding of the three intellects varies. See Buttaci, “Aristotle’s Intellects”.
41 Alexander of Aphrodisias, Supplement to On the Soul, 25.
42 Themistius and Alexander of Aphrodisias, Two Greek Aristotelian Commentaries on the Intellect, 78 [94.13].
43 Themistius and Alexander of Aphrodisias, Two Greek Aristotelian Commentaries on the Intellect, 47 [107.21].
44 The ancient opinion that the active intellect is identical with god, scorned by Brentano, has been resuscitated in recent years and can be found in Burnyeat, Aristotle’s Divine Intellect, and Caston, “Aristotle’s Two Intellects”.
45 Themistius etc. 1990 48 [107.25].
46 Alexander of Aphrodisias, Supplement to On the Soul, 25.
47 See Kosman, “What Does Maker Mind Make?”, 343; Kosman’s argument, foreshadowing my own, is that the maker mind makes precisely the possible mind.
48 Themistius and Alexander of Aphrodisias, Two Greek Aristotelian Commentaries on the Intellect, 90 [99.11].
49 See note 38 above. Burnyeat is basing his reading on some passages in Aristotle that will be seemingly difficult to settle with my reading. 417b8-9: “it is not good to call it alteration when a knower exercises their knowledge any more than when a builder builds”. Or, perhaps more powerfully, Physics VII 3, 247b9: “the states of the intellectual part of the soul are not alterations, nor is there any becoming of them”.