The Unity of the Intellect II

Let us continue the thoughts we expounded yesterday. For the "Latin" thinkers most inspired by Averroes had another trick up their sleeves, by way of remaining orthodox Roman Catholics while expounding on the unity of the intellect. They didn't have to go with doubling truth. They could also double up what is meant by "intellect."

For it isn't the intellect that needs to be saved in order not to be damned, according to that orthodoxy. It is the soul. And the intellectuals intent upon introducing Averroes' ideas north of the Mediterranean distinguished between the active or agent intellect on the one hand and the individual or passive intellect to be another. Aristotle speaks tersely of a passive intellect that "is what it is by becoming all things." He appears to mean that one aspect of the intellect becomes a balloon when it looks upon a balloon, becomes the 'popping' sound when it hears that. etc.

In my life, I have "become" different things than you have in yours, due to the different histories of our bodies. So, you and I have different passive intellects in this sense, and accordingly different souls. But conceptual thought swoops in upon us from some sort of above> And it is always the SAME above, the single active mind. So, at any rate, the argument ran.

This is where we get back to the book I discussed in yesterday's post. Ogden makes the case that the active/passive distinction was foreign to what Averroes meant. Ogden says that the Andalusian theorist took an "all-or-nothing" approach. Either our whole intellect is one, or each individual intellect is one ots own. There is no splitting the difference here.

In the review, Fisher says that Ogden makes some good points in defending the all-or-nothing view. This is something Averroes and Aquinas shared. Each thought the unitary intellect was all-or-nothing. To Averroes it was all, to the Parisian it was nothing. But this is not just a difference, it is a commonality, given the ease with which thinkers to this 21st century day still tend to adopt a split-level view of the soul/intellect that they both oppose.

Ogden thinks they were right. The active/passive or perceptual/conceptual distinction is hard to render airtight. So: when seeking to answer the question "is there one human intellect or are there many" one should work from the all-or-nothing premise.

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