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Active and Passive Intellect: Without fuss or fuzz

 


Last week I quoted Plotinus about how the soul may use the body as an instrument without thereby sharing the experiences of the body. 

In the comments beneath that post, one will see Henry's observation that, if "soul" here means "mind," the observation is unremarkable. If soul means something else, it is nonsensical. 

Allow me to expand. Plotinus is using "soul" here to mean "active intellect," and he is expounding on a distinction between the active and the passive intellect. 

Centuries before him, Aristotle had written in De Anima, that "knowledge in activity is identical with the subject; but knowledge in potentiality pre-exists in the individual...."  That is one of the more mysterious of his observations! And no, more context would not resolve the mystery but would deepen it. 

Here is the context if you want it. https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Vital_Principle/Book_3/Chapter_5

The "knowledge in potentiality" corresponds with what Aristotle's commentators were soon calling the passive intellect, which one might call unself-conscious consciousness.

The body has experiences. But they don't stick, they don't become part of the soul, unless they are part of active knowledge by being acted upon, molded.   Plotinus was accepting that bit of Aristotelean wisdom into his systematized [neo]platonism.  

This active/passive distinction within the intellect was to have enormous consequences in western intellectual history. It sounds like it may be a distinction between a single human soul we all share (or even an earth-soul) on the one hand and individual subordinate souls on the other.  Yet when Aristotle was accepted by much of the Christian west as the "master of those who know," as The Philosopher with capitalization, this notion had to be rejected. 

The process of re-interpreting passages such as the one above so that both the passive and the active parts of the distinction about the intellect/mind are within the domain of the single human soul, the soul as the self that is in due course to be saved or damned for eternity -- THAT process catalyzed Thomism. 

So we end up with a split within the ghost within the machine.  Part of the ghost is kind of machine-like, the other part is more purely ghost-like.

I find it remarkable that Plotinus' observation about the soul as carpenter seems so unremarkable.  He addresses the matter without fuss or fuzz. 

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