‘Obviously all this Agrees with my Will and my Intellect’: Schopenhauer on Active and Passive Nous in Aristotle's De Anima iii.5

Abstract

In one of the unpublished parts of his manuscript titled the Spicilegia, Arthur Schopenhauer presents an uncharacteristically sympathetic reading of an Aristotelian text. The text in question, De anima III. 5, happens to include the only occurrence of arguably the most controversial idea in Aristotle, namely the distinction between active and passive nous. Schopenhauer interprets these two notions as corresponding to his own notions of the ‘will’ and the ‘intellect’ or ‘subject of knowledge’, respectively. The result is a unique interpretation, according to which Aristotle's active nous is in fact non-intellectual: it is devoid of any interaction with intelligible objects, and hence lacks any intellectual activity. I show that this interpretation, though counterintuitive, is tenable, and that it may contribute to our understanding of Aristotle even if we do not adopt Schopenhauer's metaphysics.

Keywords:

• Schopenhauer
• Spicilegia
• Aristotle
• De anima III. 5
• nous poiētikos

Notes

1 I wish to thank Victor Caston, Stephen Menn, Brad Inwood, John Cooper, Michael Beaney, and my anonymous referees for their useful comments on previous versions of this essay. In addition, I am grateful to audiences at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/Excellenzcluster Topoi, Princeton University, the University of South Florida, Tel-Aviv University, and the 16th Annual Israeli Philosophical Association Conference (especially Jonathan Beere, Benjamin Morison, Hendrik Lorenz, Alexander Nehamas, Christian Wildberg and Desmond Hogan), and to G. S. Wundermann. Thanks are also due to Veronika Mraschall and Sabine Seifert for their transcriptions of the relevant parts of Schopenhauer's manuscripts, and to Mathias Jehn of the Schopenhauer Archive at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main, for enabling me to work with Schopenhauer's original handwritten notes on his personal copy of Aristotle's text.

²On p. 37 of his Pandectae, Schopenhauer goes as far as saying that ‘in der Metaphysik ist er [sc. Aristoteles] schlecht, ganz schlecht, ein flacher Wortmacher u. gegen frühere tiefer denkende Philosophen naseweis’. Transcription from the original manuscript by Sabine Seifert.

³Transcript by Veronika Marschall (with some editorial decisions of my own). Translation from German is my own. Marginal notes are given in chevrons. Underline emphases are taken from the original. Greek accents are not given in the original text, and are added in the translation by myself, following, whenever appropriate, the 1831 first volume of Bekker's edition used by Schopenhauer (Bekker page and line numbers are also supplied).

⁴ DA III. 5, 430a19–20.

⁵430a18. Schopenhauer explicitly alters Bekker's text, reading ἐνέργεια instead of ἐνεργείᾳ, both here and in his personal copy of Bekker's edition.

⁶430a23–4.

⁷Translations of quotations from the FR, WWR and PP are taken from Payne.

⁸In WWR II, XXI: 269–70, Schopenhauer calls Anaxagoras his ‘direct antipode’, giving similar reasons. As has been helpfully pointed out to me by Stephen Menn, he differs on this point, as on many others (cf. n. 11), from prominent members of his intellectual environment, most pertinently Hegel, who in the LHP speaks of Anaxagoras’ theory as the pinnacle of pre-Socratic thought, while maintaining that Empedocles ‘is not very interesting, and much cannot be made of his philosophy’ (I. E2-F; tans. Haldane).

⁹For instance, in his personal copy of Bekker, at DA III. 5, 430a20–21: ‘ἡ δὲ κατὰ δύναμιν χρόνῳ προτέρα ἐν τῷ ἑνί’, Schopenhauer adds the comment ‘scilicet ἀνθρώπῳ’. But see n. 25.

¹⁰My division is based loosely on Miller's distinction between ‘externalist’ positions (taking the active nous to be a transcendent intellect) and ‘internalist’ positions (taking it to be a part of the individual human soul) in ‘Separability of Mind’, 333, n. 47. For a survey of interpretations of the active nous in De anima III. 5 from antiquity to the nineteenth century, see Brentano, ‘Nous Poiētikos’.

¹¹Barnes, ‘Concept of Mind’, 113; Burnyeat, Divine Intellect, 38–42; Caston, ‘Two Intellects’, 212; and Frede, ‘La théorie d'intellect agent’. In Schopenhauer's day, Hegel expounds a somewhat similar interpretation (cf. LHP II. B.a.).

¹²Kahn in fact wavers between Alexander and Marinus/Averroes’ interpretations: ‘Role of Nous’, 412–4. Hamlyn seems to side with Marinus/Averroes, when he says that Aristotle's active nous ‘must be an intellect if it is to play the role required’ (Aristotle De Anima Books, 140), but, though it ‘may be divine’, ‘it is not itself God’ (ibid., 142).

¹³‘But [Aquinas] acknowledges that something is required on the side of the soul, namely, a cognitive capacity (in particular an agent intellect) that manipulates sensory data to produce intelligible universals’ (emphasis mine; MacDonald, ‘Theory of Knowledge’, 182). Cf. Kretzmann, ‘Infallibility’.

¹⁴ Aristotle De anima, 47. More recently, ‘internalist’ interpretations have been offered by Wedin, Sisko and Gerson. Gerson takes nous in DA III. 5 to be a unified concept: nous, qua active, ‘is always engaged in self-reflexive activity’, like the God of Aristotle's Metaphysics. When it is in the soul, nous operates in conjunction with phantasia, and ‘passive nous’ simply designates the locus of this cooperation (‘Unity of Intellect’, 365). Sisko holds, like Gerson and contra Wedin, that the active nous thinks eternally, though, in his view, it does not always think ‘in the standard way’ (‘Modern Mind’, 195). For more on these views, see n. 29.

¹⁵This reading (shared, for example, by Themistius) is facilitated by the absence of the parentheses around ‘οὐ μνημονεύομεν δέ, ὅτι τοῦτο μὲν ἀπαθές, ὁ δὲ παθητικὸς νοῦς ϕθαρτός’ in Bekker's edition, with which Schopenhauer works. The parentheses, the acceptance of which forces us to take τούτου in 430a25 as referring to the active nous, appear in Ross’ editions (both the 1956 OCT and the 1961 Editio Maior).

¹⁶Ross, in his apparatus (Editio Maior), supplies further support for the omission: Par. 2034, saec. xiii–xiv, Simplicii lemma, citatio et paraphrasis, Sophoniae praphrasis.

¹⁷In fact, even if we retain ‘οὐχ’ in 430a22, and take the subject of the sentence to be the active nous, it is still possible to read the sentence as suggesting that the active nous does not engage in intellectual activity. As has been helpfully suggested to me by Hendrik Lorenz, if it is not the case that the active nous sometimes thinks and sometimes does not, it does not follow that it always thinks, because it can equally be the case that it never does. Sisko also mentions, but does not endorse, this possibility (‘Modern Mind’, 194).

¹⁸From Ross’ apparatus (Editio Maior): Vat. 260, saec. xiv; Par. 2034, saec. xiii–xiv; Simplicii lemma, citatio et paraphrasis; Sophoniae paraphrasis; Simplicii citatio in Phys.; Simplicii citatio in De caelo; cf. Philoponi paraphrasis, p. 534.

¹⁹Cf. Il. viii. 143; xvi. 103; xx. 25; Od. xxii. 215.

²⁰Von Fritz, ‘Noos and Noein’, 81–2.

²¹Cf. 1072a25–6; 1072b27–8. Indeed, as has been helpfully pointed out to me by an anonymous reader, most interpreters nowadays read ἐνέργεια (instead of ἐνεργείᾳ) in DA III. 5, 430a18, just as Schopenhauer does (cf. e.g. Ross [both editions]; Hamlyn, Aristotle De Anima Books, 60; Caston, ‘Two Intellects’, 211; Barnes, ‘Concept of Mind’, 111). This does not prevent them, of course, from thinking that Aristotle's active nous essentially consists in intellectual activity, nor should it.

²²Davidson, On Intellect, 29; see also 24, 27, 49, 87, 158. Cf. Plotinus, Enneads 5.9.4; Themistius, Paraphrase of the De anima 98, 103–4; Rasā'il al-Kindī 356, cf. 155; Alfarabi, Al-Madīna al Fāḍila, 198–201; Avicenna, Shifā': De anima, 234, Najāt, 192–3. I am thankful to Stephen Menn for a helpful discussion of the issues dealt with in this paragraph.

²³This might explain why both Plotinus and Kindi, while having a transcendent cause of human thought in their systems, halt in their versions of the ‘standard argument’ at the conclusion that there must be an agent possessing actual thought which brings about the actuality of human thought, without explicitly drawing the further conclusion that this agent must consist in thought. See Davidson, On Intellect, 29.

²⁴Thomas Aquinas breaks with the tradition upholding the ‘standard argument’ as well, as a consequence of locating the active nous in the individual human soul. For an account of his view, and its problematic implication of being forced to deny complete actuality to the active nous, see White, ‘Aristotle's Nous’, 738–9. However, as we have seen, Aquinas does not deviate from the traditional assumption that the active nous and its operation must be intellectual, which Schopenhauer clearly rejects (cf. the second section).

²⁵This is probably why Schopenhauer asks, in a marginal note, whether active and passive nous might correspond to the (Kantian) a priori forms of pure sensibility (space/time) and empirical sensibility; for these forms, too, are preconditions for that sensibility. This suggestion is interesting as far as it goes. For Schopenhauer, the ‘union of space and time’, ‘matter’, is causality, whence he infers that ‘its being is its acting’ (WWR I, §4: 8), which again resembles Aristotle's description of active nous (cf. WWR II, IV: 45: ‘ἐνέργεια’). Further, ‘matter’ shares with the will (and active nous) the property of indestructibility (WWR II, XLI: 471–2). But the suggestion ultimately fails. First, on Schopenhauer's reading of DA III. 5, there is no knowledge without the passive nous. He therefore cannot take this nous to correspond to ‘empirical sensibility’, since knowledge outside the scope of the latter certainly is possible, for him (consider the a priori knowledge of space and time [WWR I, §3: 7]). Second, for Schopenhauer, the conjunction of empirical sensibility and the a priori forms of pure sensibility, resulting in ‘intuitive knowledge’, is due to the faculty of ‘understanding’ (Verstand) (FR V, §34). Since ‘all animals, even down to the very lowest, must have understanding’ (FR IV, §34), however, a new faculty (reason, Vernunft) is introduced to account for ‘abstract knowledge’ and the cognitive operations unique to humans, such as reflection, abstract thought, the use of language and future-planning (WWR I, §8: 36 ff). Now, though Schopenhauer generally identifies νοῦς with the ‘understanding’ and ‘reason’ with ‘τὸ λογικόν’ or ‘ἡ ϕρόνησις’ (WWR I, App: 521–2), Aristotle does introduce νοῦς in DA III. 4 as that by which the soul ϕρονεῖ (429a10–11), and his general conception of noetic activity, whose origination he sets out to explain in that chapter (429a13) and which is mentioned throughout DA III. 5 (430a22, 25), corresponds to the types of cognitive task that Schopenhauer associates with reason. But the faculty of reason is left out of the current suggestion, unlike the original one in which it was subsumed under the ‘intellect’ or ‘subject of knowledge’.

²⁶Unless we take Aristotle's statement in DA III. 4 430a3–4, i.e. that ‘in the case of things having no matter, that which thinks (τὸ νοοῦν) and that which is thought (τὸ νοούμενον) are the same’, to mean that the intellect and its objects are strictly speaking identical. This reading seems to imply that ‘νοῦς belongs to every νοητόν’ (Menn, ‘DA III. 4 to III. 5’, 12), which would in turn imply that the active nous, which is immaterial, would (or could) share in intellectual activity, if it is indeed also intelligible. If this is correct, then we would have to accept that the active nous, like Schopenhauer's ‘will’, is unintelligible, in order for Schopenhauer's interpretation of DA III. 5 to work. However, see Lewis for a persuasive rejection of the interpretation of 430a3–4 as establishing a strict identity relation between the intellect and its objects (in the human case) (‘Self-knowledge’, 40–5).

²⁷White, ‘Aristotle's Nous’, 739. Cf. Davidson, On Intellect, 13.

²⁸Cf. the second section; Ross, Aristotle, 153 and 160 n. 85. For recent defences of the original Alexanderean reading of 430a13, see Caston, ‘Two Intellects’, 206 and Menn, ‘From De anima III. 4 to III. 5’, 16.

²⁹Wedin would modify item (2) in a different way. He argues that the active nous in DA III. 5 is in fact neither eternal nor continuous (Mind and Imagination, 190–2). But his reading of 430a22–3 is forced. See also Sisko's criticism, ‘Modern Mind’, 196–7. Sisko's solution is that the active nous thinks continuously, but not always ‘standardly’ (ibid., 194–5). Non-standardly, the active nous thinks analogously to sightseeing darkness (which is invisible) (ibid; cf. DA II. 10, 422a20–5). But, (a) Aristotle never says that ‘we see the invisible’ (e.g. darkness), but rather only that sight is ‘in a way (πως)’ also ‘of the invisible’ and ‘discerns (κρίνει)’ it (cf. II. 9, 421b3–8; 11, 424a10–15; III. 2, 425b20–22; and Polansky, Aristotle's De anima, 317). By the same token, it is doubtful that the ‘non-standard’ activity of the active nous, if there be any such thing, would count as thinking at all. If not, Sisko would have to agree with Wedin that the active nous, qua intellect, is ‘a “gappy” thing’ (Sisko, ‘Modern Mind’, 196). Also, (b) it is not clear what the equivalent of darkness would be in the case of immaterial intelligible objects, which are eternal and thus always available. Sisko seems to think of this equivalent as the absence of phantasmata, but these are not themselves such objects (though they are necessary for all human thought), which renders the analogy with vision futile: discerning the absence of phantasmata should belong to phantasia, not nous. Gerson, for his part, claims that nous, qua active, always thinks, but that its thinking ‘is different from soul's thinking’ (‘Unity of Intellect’, 366). This ‘dualism of intellect and soul’ (ibid.) implies that nous is in the soul only in so far as it is accessible by the soul, whenever the soul thinks (ibid., 370). But this is hardly distinguishable from the view of active nous as an external intellect (rejecting item (1)). Themistius’ view is open to a similar objection (see Todd, Two Greek Aristotelian Commentators, 37–9; White, ‘Aristotle's Nous’, 735).

³⁰See the second section.

³¹

The tasks which commentators have invented for the Agent Intellect to fill – such as abstraction, selective attention, or free choice – are factitious. They are not problems Aristotle even acknowledges; a fortiori, they cannot be the reasons he appeals to for the existence of a second intellect. (Caston, ‘Two Intellects’, 200)

³²Menn, ‘From De anima III. 4 to III. 5’, 3.