Some Controversies about De Anima 3.7

Although 3.5 is the most cryptic chapter of De Anima, there are some controversies about 3.7 as well. I will sketch them briefly here. To this end I will use the paper by Klaus Corcilius ‘De Anima III 7: The Actuality Principle and the Triggering of Mental Episodes’ which – I hope – will enrich my current deliberations, especially when it comes to the issue of desire.

If we made immortality the ultimate criterion, then I would bet on the mystics (despite all my criticism towards them, see for instance: my discussion with Caston or Burnyeat). Aristotle did not believe in individual immortality (endorsed by the rationalists), but in the immortality of the species (in biological terms). This, together with the non-theist account of the Deity, makes the mystical interpretations more appropriate. The Christian ones, despite being prevailing in our Western culture, are sometimes an ‘abuse’ of Aristotle or – broadly speaking – the ancient worldview. And although the vision of having an individual immortal soul that unites with God after our bodily death and retains its personality is nice and comforting (to some extent, because in most cases the soul is powerless and can do nothing, only ‘sit and watch’), it is very far from Aristotle. Moreover, Thomism, for instance, has this advantage over almost every reading of the Stagirite: that it is very coherent and fixes all the ‘holes’ in Aristotle. This is, I believe, one of the main reasons (besides the religious motivation) why Franz Brentano endorsed it. He claimed coherence to be the most important feature of a good interpretation. He was very much against incorporating foreign views or leaving some questions unanswered (which is what many scholars are forced to do while working on ancient thinkers). But it is here where I believe he made a mistake. First of all, Thomism does incorporate heterogenic views into Aristotelianism, creationism being the most vivid example of not only foreign, but also contradictory views. Rationalism simply comes at a bigger price … Second of all, Brentano embarked on a breakneck project to introduce an agreement between Theophrastus and Eudemus. However, instead of frankly admitting that there are both rational and mystical elements in Aristotle, he tried to show that Eudemus meant something else and thus bring him nearer to Theophrastus (whom he obviously preferred), and on this basis, he built his Christian interpretation. And this is what led him astray.

For now (and apart from my personal preference), let us accept a peaceful coexistence of rational and mystical elements in Aristotle.

Rational vs. Mystical Readings of Aristotle’s Nous Poiêtikos. Introduction to the Subject and Overview of Central Positions

One of the authors who inspired me to start the journey in search of nous poiêtikos’s proper function, besides Aristotle and Franz Brentano (to whom I have devoted a decade of research and whose Aristotelianism has shaped my thinking profoundly, although I often disagree with him), is Victor Caston. Caston – in his brilliant and provocative paper ‘Aristotle’s Two Intellects. A Modest Proposal’ – claims that nous poiêtikos has no proper function and thus does nothing. He calls the attempts to find this function ‘a wild goose chase’. Well … he may be right. However, it is not easy to come to terms with this (dis)solution. It is both bold and disturbing. Although it is designed to bring peace, it does not put my worries to sleep. And it makes me want to dig deeper. Thus, I am embarking on this project full of hope and with a strong conviction that it is all about the journey and not (just) the destination. To avoid getting lost in Aristotle and Aristotelian interpretations, I have divided the readings of nous poiêtikos into mystical and rational ones. What inspired me here is Rolf George’s opinion, expressed in the introduction to his translation of Franz Brentano’s Habilitationsschrift: Die Psychologie des Aristoteles, insbesondere seine Lehre vom nous poietikos (1867). George claimed there that Brentano was against all the mystical elements and traces in the interpretation of Corpus Aristotelicum. Interestingly, Brentano does not explicitly declare war against mysticism and does not use this label in his Aristotelian writings (he does criticise mysticism as the phase of philosophy’s decay some time later, but it is a different mysticism though). George’s remark was pointed at Brentano’s lifelong discussion with Eduard Zeller (see, for instance, Aristoteles Lehre vom Ursprung des menschlichen Geistes). Interestingly, if one scrutinises all the philosophical theories denounced by Brentano in his Habilitationsschrift, one will clearly see that they have a lot in common. I borrow the name from George, and I call these views (and the contemporary, post-Brentanian ones that are somehow similar to them) ‘mystical’. Along these lines, I call the adherents of the opposite ones – ‘rationalists’.

Possible Readings of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Book X

Above, I presented two possible interpretations of the notorious active intellect whose proper function still remains uncertain. These were: (a) the mystical and (b) the rational one. According to (a) nous poiêtikos does not belong to a particular human being but is identical with Deity or a divine sphere. Moreover, humans are capable of a sort of mystical union with it and this is how they access and emulate the Deity. According to (b) nous poiêtikos belongs to us and through its activity we can learn about the Deity and strive after it. In both (a) and (b) there is a sort of an imperative to follow what is divine, in order to lead a good life. This is why I decided to examine which of these two viewpoints is more appropriate, by comparing the paths leading to such a life proposed by each of them. I decided to use the book X of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics as a criterion. This is where the philosopher’s theoretical life finds its most famous description. Let us then begin with presenting the most important fragments thereof.

Christian Aristotelianism and Creationism

The Middle Ages bring yet another change and it is mostly due to the Christian Aristotelianism represented by the person of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274). This is, of course, a bit of a simplification, because for instance the Franciscan school accepted other senses of agent intellect, and I will come back to that later on. Nevertheless, the position of Aquinas is still among the most popular interpretations of Aristotle’s psychology. He believed that nous poiêtikos was an immaterial faculty of man, together with passive mind, building up an intellectual soul and without a bodily organ. It was created and incarnated by God and is immortal. It is individual for every human being. I find it worthwhile that Aquinas is instead in agreement with Theophrastus, which may indicate that some of the ideas usually ascribed to medieval interpretations of Aristotle stem from the Stagirite’s immediate followers. But, there is a significant difference that must not be overlooked: Aquinas is a theist, this means that he believes that God is a person. And that would be unacceptable in antiquity. If an ancient god was a person, it would have been an Olympic god and when it comes to those, it must be stressed that Aristotle spoke of them in a metaphorical way, while commenting on our good or bad luck in life (eutychia), and they had little or nothing to do with the first principle of all things. Deity was not a person, as this would deprive it of perfection, to say the least. Coming back to Aquinas, he also claimed that God created us and equipped us with this divine intellect during our foetal development (perfecta dispositio corporis). This is a possible rendition of Aristotle’s concept of the divine seed (theion sperma) from De generatione animalium 2.3. Aquinas spitefully, but amusingly called Averroës ‘a despoiler of Peripatetic philosophy’ and the Renaissance Averroists criticised him in return.

The Thomistic paradigm was undoubtedly long-lasting, maintained also by the nineteenth-century philosophers who belonged to the so-called ‘Aristotelian revival’.

Are Brentano’s Habilitationsthesen Aristotelian and What Do They Say about Nous Poiêtikos?

This chapter is meant to be a commentary on Franz Brentano’s 25 Habilitationsthesen that – together with The Psychology of Aristotle – compose Brentano’s ‘habilitation project’. Liliana Albertazzi claims that Brentano obtained his habilitation on 15 July 1866, in Würzburg, after he defended the theses in question. 15 July was the day of his Probevortrag and a session of the university senate. An open defence of the theses in Latin took place on 14 July. Rolf George and Glen Koehn, in ‘Brentano’s Relation to Aristotle’, state that Brentano had submitted his Habilitationsschrift: Die Psychologie des Aristoteles, insbesondere seine Lehre vom nous poietikos (for some reason the English translation omits the second – and crucial – part of the title, which I – in turn – explore in the title of my book) as early as 1865. Wolfgang Huemer, on the other hand, dates this book to 1867 (and so does George in the foreword to the English translation of the work). This discrepancy may follow from the fact that George and Koehn give the date of submission and Huemer (and George) – of publication. Interestingly the book most probably was ready before the theses were defended and thus naming it their follow-up (which is very common) can be called into question. Brentano’s ‘Preface’ is dated 14 July 1866 – the exact day of his defence. So, it is reasonable to claim that he had worked on the theses and the book simultaneously. Both Albertazzi and George/Koehn stress that habilitation was a sine qua non condition of conducting classes at the university and I find this crucial, since teaching was Brentano’s great mission.

As to Brentano’s habilitation, Wilhelm Baumgartner says: ‘First, [Franz] Hoffmann, a scholar of Schelling’s and Baader’s philosophy, had supervised Brentano’s habilitation and had suggested that Brentano should deliver his habilitation lecture on Schelling’s philosophy. Brentano did so, but with a rather critical attitude towards Schelling’. Elsewhere Baumgartner says:

A Perfect Life Gone Wrong

On several ways of achieving the perfect life and immortality and … failing

A precondition of writing this appendix is the fact that it has already been proven that there exists a tight relationship between the activity of nous poiêtikos (whatever it is) and happiness. I will devote this part to activating, deactivating and malfunctioning of the active mind to see what can prevent the perfect life from happening. I will be borrowing some of the terminology from power ontologies, which I find very useful for this purpose.

My aim

Instead of an epilogue, I would like to throw a proverbial spanner in the works and dwell on a problematic issue that emerges while working on nous poiêtikos, namely: can we turn it off, can we prevent it from acting, can we destroy it, can we choose not to use it? Below, I would like to present some issues concerning the activity of nous poiêtikos that arose during my work on Brentotle (in my papers, books and talks). I wish to follow in Tuominen’s footsteps and propose an experiment per impossibile. Namely, what if we turned off something which is in its very essence activity?

On and off? The big question about the switch

These are the questions I find important to ask here: What – if anything – activates the active mind? And can anything deactivate it or cause its malfunctioning? If yes – is there anything that deactivates it / causes its imperfect action or is this a lack of proper activation?

I will concentrate mainly on the analysis of De Anima 3.4 and 3.5. But I will also refer to Aristotle’s Ethics (Nicomachean and Eudemian), Metaphysics and De generatione animalium.

The power of nous. Basic assumptions

First of all, let us assume (very much like Franz Brentano) that nous is a power, and more specifically a bundle of two powers: one of them is passive (nous pathêtikos), see De Anima 3.4, and the other one – active (nous poiêtikos), see De Anima 3.5. ‘And in fact mind as we have described it, is what it is by virtue of becoming all things, while there is another which is what it is by virtue of making all things: this is a sort of positive state like light; for in a sense light makes potential colours into actual colours’ (DA 3.5). By passive I mean able to receive (become all things thinkable in this case) and by active – able to act (and necessarily doing so).

Theophrastus and Eudemus – An Initial Discord

Let me begin with Theophrastus (371–287 B.C.) who was the successor to Aristotle in Peripatos and who believed that nous poiêtikos was immaterial, that it belonged to the nature of man, that is, to his intellectual soul. On the other hand, Eudemus (370–300 B.C.), who was Aristotle’s student and an editor of his writings, identified nous poiêtikos with Deity (Brentano complains that after reading the Eudemian Ethics one gets the impression that active intellect and Deity are the same …). So, we can see that there was no unanimity even between the immediate followers of Aristotle, which may seem rather puzzling as they were both very close to their master. Theophrastus can be called a rationalist, whereas Eudemus undoubtedly earned the name of a mystic. What could have caused this discrepancy? I will come back to that question later.

Theophrastus is known as one of the most faithful Aristotelian scholars. Giovanni Reale disagrees with this opinion and claims that this is rather an urban legend. Theophrastus’s knowledge is said to have been impressive and comparable to Aristotle’s, but it is the kind of knowledge which we now call ‘science’ (e.g., he invented botany). Whereas in metaphysics and ontology, Theophrastus arrived at different conclusions than the Stagirite and he is said not to have been a very sharp speculative thinker either. When it comes to human psychology, Theophrastus endorses the division into passive and active intellect and locates the latter inside the human soul (Reale calls this ‘accepting Aristotle’s doctrine’). There are, however, several problems. First of all, when he tries to explain why the mind does not think actively all the time, he puts the explanation down to ‘being mixed’. He calls the intellect a mixture of active and passive principle, what we learn from Themistius’s De Anima (108, 22), who – as Brentano puts it – saved these fragments of Theophrastus for us. The other puzzling thing is the issue of the active intellect possibly being innate. All this together seems to question the spirituality of intellect. According to Reale, this is another reason to believe that Theophrastus did not have a metaphysical talent.

Introduction: the asymmetry of time and the asymmetry in time

One of the most fundamental features of our world is that it is strongly temporally asymmetrical: as our experience shows, we have traces of the past in our memory and around us and no traces of the future; we can have an impact on future events with no possibility of having such an impact on the past; meanwhile, the future seems to be open, while the past is fixed and cannot be changed. The problem of the direction or the asymmetry of time itself consists in answering the question of whether the world is truly temporally asymmetrical and in finding an explanation of what is responsible for this asymmetry.

Two clarification are needed here: firstly, after Sklar (1974, 1993, 1995a, b, 2005), I distinguish between the asymmetry of time and asymmetry in time. That the causation is future directed and we find only traces of the past but can affect only the future, and that the past cannot be changed while the future can be, seem to be essential features of time itself, and not this or other particular process occurring in time.

This collection of my papers consists of mostly previously published articles which develop a scientific research program designed to defend a dynamic view of reality. Although such a view could seem to be obvious taking into account our everyday experience, we have so many conceptual difficulties with explaining the origin and mechanism of these dynamics and especially those stemming from physics that such a vindication is necessary.

At the outset, it would be useful to supply a reminder of why the flow of time is denied by the majority of both physicists and philosophers and why they stubbornly try to see reality as a four-dimensional static block universe. Well, these reasons are well-known:

• 1) There are conceptual problem with explaining what the flow of time consists in;

• 2) Physics, which is supposed to describe all fundamental phenomena in the world, does not provide us with a theory of the flow of time;

• 3) Even worse, if we assume that the flow of time consists in this that an infinity of global layers of Now come into existence successively, then it turns out that—according to the theory of relativity—there is no distinguished hypersurface of simultaneity and there are models of general theory of relativity (GTR) in which there are no such global hypersurfaces at all.

In this book, I briefly analyze different aspects of the problem of the flow of time and attempt to show—following Henri Bergson (although I should emphasize that I do not agree with the entirety of his view)—that the reasons for the difficulty with the acceptance of its reality may lie in inadequate metaphysics and a confidence in physics which goes too far. The papers are intended to answer such fundamental questions as: What is the origin of dynamics of the world?; What is the origin and nature of time?; Does the flow of time really exist and what it consists in?; Is physics consistent with existence of the flow of time?; Why don’t we have a physical theory of the flow of time?

There are two similar yet subtly different approaches to the problem of the dynamics of the world which are analyzed in this book: the first is based on the well-known notion of becoming, while the second is based on the notion of dynamic existence proposed by the author, a generalization of the notion of becoming.