Averroes on Intellect: from Aristotelian Origins to Aquinas’s Critique

There have been philosophers who sought to preserve and ratify the dictates’ common sense, and there have been philosophers who were willing to overturn and correct those dictates. And then there was Averroes. His most notorious doctrine is not just counterintuitive. It commits him to something that seems self-evidently false, namely that there is only a single mind to which all human thought is related. As his most famous critic, Thomas Aquinas, pointed out, it seems simply obvious that we each have a mind of our own, and that we can each think as individuals. Averroes—to use the Latinized version of his name, Ibn Rushd—seemed to deny this in his Long Commentary on Aristotle’s On the Soul, triggering a protracted debate in Latin medieval and Renaissance philosophy.1 Why spill so much ink over such an implausible theory? Part of the reason was surely Averroes’s stature as the most authoritative commentator on Aristotle. When Aquinas devoted a treatise specifically to the issue, he met Averroes on his own ground by disputing the unity theory as an interpretation of On the Soul. His concern was not mainly to refute a false philosophical view, but to rescue Aristotle from being associated with that view.And there was another reason the topic attracted so much attention: Averroes’s arguments for the unity of intellect were surprisingly powerful. Just how powerful is shown in a superb new book by Stephen Ogden. Applying the sort of sympathetic approach and analytic acuity now standardly brought to the works of Aristotle himself, Ogden explains that Averroes had strong philosophical and exegetical reasons for endorsing the unity of the intellect. With regular reference to Aquinas as a foil, Ogden makes a convincing case that Averroes’s apparently unbelievable view in fact made a great deal of sense within an Aristotelian framework. Indeed, within that framework it often seems to be at an advantage against the apparently far more plausible view of Aquinas, for whom intellect is immaterial but individual: one mind per human, not one mind for the whole human race.Averroes’ position was, as he noted himself, unique within the complex history of interpretations of Aristotle’s On the Soul chapters 3.4–5, the chapters that deal most centrally with intellect. Ogden indeed says that the Averroist view “boasts novelty galore” (92). But it was actually not new to posit a single mind standing over all human individuals. The Aristotelian God was such a mind, as was the nous postulated by Plotinus. Closer to Averroes in time, culture, and intention was Avicenna (again, this name is a Latinization, in this case of Ibn Sīnā). He held that the so called “active intellect” (AI) described by Aristotle in the brief and inscrutable chapter 3.5 of On the Soul is a single transcendent principle that somehow allows individual humans to think. (Exactly how it does so is a matter of extensive dispute among Avicenna scholars.) By contrast, the potential or material intellect (MPI), which is responsible for receiving intelligibles, is for Avicenna unique to each human intellect.Averroes and Aquinas, as Ogden nicely observes, are in agreement that this mismatch between the AI and the MPI is unsustainable. Either both should be individual, or both should be one. Aquinas of course adopted the former view, Averroes the latter. Why? Before reading Ogden’s book, I thought that a chief reason for Averroes’s stance was that matter is the principle of individuation. For instance, two sunflowers share in the species of sunflower, but their forms are individuated by being received in two parcels of spatiotemporally distinct matter. But Aristotle argued explicitly that intellect is an immaterial power. So there is nothing that could distinguish many individual intellects. Ogden, though, makes a convincing case that this is not the argument underlying the Averroist theory (98–100). After all, the intellects associated with the celestial spheres are likewise immaterial, yet they manage to be distinct from one another. Possibly they differ in some way that would be impossible for individual human intellects, but that would need further argument. Thus, when Averroes argues that the MPI is a determinate, immaterial substance, this in itself leaves open whether there is one such intellect or many (105–8). Indeed, Avicenna used an argument much like Averroes’s to prove the immateriality of the MPI, while holding that each individual human has an MPI of their own.2So, while he allows that concerns about individuation may help to suggest a unity theory and would certainly pose problems for a view like Aquinas’s (see 220), Ogden thinks the Averroist theory is best proven in a different way. This is by means of what he calls the “Unity Argument,” which states that “the best way to explain how we can all think the same thing is that there is only one and the same thing that is thought—in one intellect” (109). As Ogden allows, it looks as if the arch-Aristotelian Averroes is here indulging a Platonist intuition (113). When you and I both understand the form of sunflower, we should both be grasping one and the same object of thought. But Averroes assumes that an intelligible object must always reside in a mind, not subsist independently like a Platonic form. It follows that the intelligibles are all received in a single mind. The only alternative would be to say that you are getting one idea of sunflower, while I am getting another. But then we would not in fact be thinking about the same thing or, as we might put it, “having the same thought.”This leaves Averroes with the problem of how to explain why it seems that we are thinking as individuals. Actually, that is not the only problem. Ogden makes another nice point here, namely that the difficulty is not only phenomenological, but also ontological (166). The individual human should be the agent of thinking, and the fact that we feel as though this is the case is simply evidence for that ontological claim. When Aquinas pressed this objection in his treatise against Averroes on the unity of the intellect, repeatedly challenging the Averroist to explain the fact that “this human thinks (hic homo intelligit)” (McInerny 1993), the objection functions at both levels. Modern-day interpreters have sought to answer on Averroes’s behalf. Typically, they want to show that each human is in some sense a subject of intellective thought for Averroes, for example, through some sort unification with the single intellect, or because our lower cognitive activity is supplying the necessary basis for that intellect. Thus when my remembered images of sunflowers are used by the single intellect to think about the intelligible form of sunflower, it will seem to me that I am the one engaging in intellection. Ogden allows that this might explain the phenomenological appearance that I am the one thinking. But when it comes to the ontological version of the objection, he thinks that Averroes would just bite the bullet. He would admit that strictly speaking, no human individual is the one understanding or thinking the universal intelligible object. Only the single intellect is doing that. The intellect lies outside individual human cognition, which is why it can only be called “soul” in an equivocal way (51–2, 184).Thus Ogden ascribes to Averroes an “error theory” (174), according to which we mistakenly take ourselves to be engaging in true intellection when in fact we are not. The most that embodied humans can do is operate with abstract or “vague” individual images that approximate universal intelligibility without quite achieving it (199). So it turns out that you and I really do have our own ideas of sunflower, gleaned from our different experiences of particular sunflowers. There is a single thought of sunflower only at the level of the single intellect. Ogden courteously but firmly critiques other scholars’ attempts to escape this conclusion, for instance by saying that there is some sort of formal unity between the intellect and the individual human (the single intellect would, as Richard C. Taylor 2013 has stressed, be “form for us”). Ogden argues that this is true in the sense that there is an operative unity between intellect and individual (205). But the fact that the intellect is using the memories and imagined images in my brain obviously does not mean that I am the intellect, any more than an online server would be identical with my laptop because it uses data uploaded from my laptop’s hard drive (my analogy, not Ogden’s, though he uses similar ones). The intellect would be identical with the human individual if it were that human’s substantial form (174), which is clearly not the case, given that it could not be both my substantial form and yours.While I’m guessing that some modern-day Averroes specialists may balk at this reading, Ogden is able to point to medieval and Renaissance thinkers who had the same no-holds-barred understanding of Averroes. He at the very least puts the onus on interpreters to explain how we humans are, in our multiplicity, somehow the same as one single intellect. Ogden’s reading has a consequence that Averroes seems to admit (see esp. 223), namely that humans have no prospect of an individual afterlife. The human species is everlasting and so is the intellect “fed” by our bodily cognitive processes, but you and I are going to stop existing when we die. More generally, Ogden’s version of Averroes accepts a philosophical anthropology according to which we are fully embodied beings, “like other animals” as Ogden says more than once, with substantial forms that require a material receiver to ensure continued persistence (217). In this respect, Ogden’s Averroes, despite the startling conclusions to which he was led in his protracted attempts to interpret Aristotle aright, had an understanding of the human being that is not so unfamiliar to the modern-day philosopher.