Active Intellect - Interpretations

Interpretations

The early Greek commentators on Aristotle, in particular Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius, gave several different interpretations of the distinction between the active and passive intellects. Some of them regarded the active intellect as a power external to the human mind, Alexander going so far as to identify it with God.

Later, both these interpretations, Neoplatonist ones, and perhaps others, influenced the development of an important Arabic language philosophical literature, using the term 'aql as the translation for nous. This literature was later translated into, and commented upon, in Latin and Hebrew.

Al-Farabi and Avicenna, and also the Jewish philosopher Maimonides, agreed with the "external" interpretation of active intellect, and held that the active intellect was the lowest of the ten emanations descending through the celestial spheres. Maimonides cited it in his definition of prophecy where

Prophecy is, in truth and reality, an emanation sent forth by the Divine Being through the medium of the Active Intellect, in the first instance to man's rational faculty, and then to his imaginative faculty.

The more strictly Aristotelian Muslims (in particular Avempace and Averroes) wrote about how one could conjoin oneself with the active intellect, thus attaining philosophical nirvana.

The reason of the Islamic and Jewish Aristotelians for positing a single external Agent Intellect is that all (rational) human beings are considered by Aristotelians to possess or have access to a fixed and stable set of concepts, a unified correct knowledge of the universe. The only way that all human minds could possess the same correct knowledge is if they all had access to some central knowledge store, as terminals might have access to a mainframe computer (Kraemer 2003). This mainframe is the Agent Intellect, the "mind" of the universe, which makes all other cognition possible.

In medieval and Renaissance Europe some thinkers, such as Siger of Brabant, adopted the interpretation of Averroes on every point, as did the later school of "Paduan Averroists". St. Thomas Aquinas elaborated on Aristotle's distinction between the active intellect and passive intellect, arguing against Averroes that the active intellect is part of the individual human personality. A third school, of "Alexandrists", rejected the argument linking the active intellect to the immortality of the soul, while hastening to add that they still believed in immortality as a matter of religious faith. (See Pietro Pomponazzi; Cesare Cremonini.)

The active intellect, in the sense described, is more properly called the Agent Intellect, as it is the force triggering intellection in the human mind and causing thoughts to pass from the potential to the actual. It must not be confused with the "intellect in act", which is the result of that triggering, and is more akin to the psychological term "active knowledge". Another term for the final result of intellection, that is to say a person's accumulated knowledge, is the "acquired intellect".