Arabic philosophy

from external objects. Avicenna seems to hold that the compositive

imagination is always engaged in the random creation of new images,

even unconsciously and during sleep, when it produces dreams. Its

random activity can, however, be controlled and directed to specific

ends. When the ends are those of the sensitive or animal soul, the

director is the estimative faculty. But in humans the compositive

imagination can also be placed under rational control, and when

this happens, its proper designation is the “cogitative” faculty (almufakkira).

In Avicenna the cogitative faculty – that is, the entity

formed by the cooperation between the intellect and the imagination

– is responsible for a good deal of what we would ordinarily call

“thinking,” including the analysis and synthesis of propositions and

syllogistic reasoning.21

The most innovative element inAvicenna’s theory of the internal

senses, the positing of the estimative faculty, was also the most controversial

for later authors. Averroes eliminates this faculty entirely

in animals, arguing that it is superfluous, since sensation and imagination

are able in their own right to perceive their objects as pleasant

and painful.22 But Averroes does accept Avicenna’s claim that the

senses perceive “intentions” as distinct from mere sensible forms.

Averroes, however, believes that the perception of intentions is distinctive

of human sensation, and he assigns it to the cogitative

and memorative faculties. Thus Averroes reduces the total number

of internal senses to four: common sense, imagination, cogitation,

and memory, substituting cogitation for estimation in humans and

rejecting the distinction between compositive and retentive imagination.

Moreover, for Averroes intentions are no longer defined as any

non-sensible properties conveyed by the senses. Instead, an intention

is the property that allows us to grasp the individual as such, and its

function is thus limited to explaining incidental perception.

Avicenna and Averroes also offer different versions of the scale

of abstraction as it applies to the external and internal senses.

For Avicenna, there are two distinct grades of abstraction within

the internal senses, corresponding to the retentive imagination

(al-khaya¯ l) and estimation. Imagination is deemed more abstract

than sensation (including both the external senses and the common

sense), since the sense powers can only operate through contact with

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316 deborah l. black

objects that are actually present to them, whereas imagination is able

to imagine objects which are no longer physically present. Estimation

is the most abstract sense power, however, because its objects,

intentions, are in themselves non-sensible properties. Nonetheless

estimation remains at the level of sensible abstraction because its

objects are always particular and conveyed through sensible forms

and qualities. The sheep, for example, does not fear the universal

wolf, but always this particular wolf that it encounters.

Averroes makes extensive use of the claimthat sensation is a form

of abstraction in his account of the perceptual capacities of both

the external and the internal senses. He claims that sensible forms,

such as colors, exist in a nobler and more immaterial way in the

soul of the perceiver than they do in extramental objects. Averroes

often describes their abstract, perceptual mode of existence as a more

“spiritual” one (ru¯ h. a¯niyya), borrowing a term used extensively by

his Andalusian predecessor, Ibn B¯ajja. As a favorite illustration of

this point, Averroes notes that the senses are not subject to material

limitations such as the inability to be simultaneously affected by

contraries. While a physical body cannot be black and white in the

same respect at the same time, nor can a very large body be contained

within a small one, the eye can actually see black and white at the

same time, and despite its own small size it can be visually informed

by the entire hemisphere.23

Still, Averroes admits that sensible abstraction retains some tinge

of materiality, for it perceives particulars rather than universals, and

this requires some sort of relation to the matter that makes individual

intentions individual. This explains why the senses require

media, such as the air, to convey the forms of their objects to them.

The medium functions as a sort of connector which preserves a relation

between the percipient and its material object, even though the

act of sensation itself remains abstract. But since sensation itself is

spiritual, the mediummust also share some spiritual properties, such

as the ability to receive and convey contraries simultaneously. The

medium, then, must be quasi-spiritual and included on the hierarchy

of abstraction, albeit at a lower grade than the senses themselves.

As for the internal senses, Averroes assigns a distinct grade of

abstraction to each power, with cogitation and memory the most

spiritual senses because of their concern with the individual intention,

which Averroes likens to the “fruit” or “core” of the sensible,

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Psychology 317

in contrast to its external qualities or “rinds.” The limit of sensible

abstraction, then, is the ability to perceive and identify an individual

whole, such as an individual person like Zayd or Socrates, and the

perception of the individual as an individual is the sensible analogue

to the perception of the universal as universal.24

intellect

The framework for all Arabic theories of the intellect was provided by

Aristotle’s distinction in book III of the De Anima between the agent

and potential intellects. But the Arabic philosophers also identified

a number of additional stages of the intellect, a practice which they

inherited from the later Greek tradition. Both al-Kind¯ı and al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı

wrote brief treatises which are concerned with clarifying these various

senses of the term “intellect.”25 Later, Avicenna and Averroes

would incorporate their own versions of these discussions into their

psychological works.26 Although individual philosophers interpret

the scheme differently to fit their own theories of how knowledge is

acquired, generally the Arabic Aristotelians identify four meanings

of “intellect”:

(1) The agent intellect of De Anima, III.5. The Arabic philosophers

all followed the prevailing view of the Greek commentators

that the agent intellect, which Aristotle declares to be

immortal and eternal, is a separate, immaterial substance,

not a faculty in each individual soul. Its function is to act as

an efficient cause of human understanding, either by rendering

objects intelligible or by actualizing the potential intellect,

or some combination of the two.

(2) The potential intellect, which is often called the material

intellect, following the practice of the Greek commentator

Alexander of Aphrodisias. For most of the Arabic philosophers

this is an innate capacity within the human soul

for receiving intelligibles, as discussed by Aristotle in De

Anima, III.4. Averroes, however, comes to believe that this

intellect, like the agent intellect, must also be a separate

substance and one for all humans.

(3) The habitual or speculative intellect, sometimes called the

actual intellect by al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı. This is the status of the human

potential intellect once it has acquired some intelligibles and

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318 deborah l. black

developed a habit or disposition for thinking at will. Avicenna

subdivides it into two stages, using the label “habitual

intellect” to describe the acquisition of primary intelligibles,

such as the principle of non-contradiction, and the label

“actual intellect” for the acquisition of secondary intelligibles

deduced from them. To add to the terminological confusion,

al-Kind¯ı uses the label “acquired intellect” for this

stage of development.

(4) The acquired intellect (al-‘aql al-mustafa¯d, Latin intellectus

adeptus). For most Arabic philosophers this is the habitual

intellect when it has perfected itself by acquiring all possible

intelligibles. At this stage it becomes a completely

actual being akin to the separate intelligences, able to know

itself as well as the closest separate intelligence to us,

the agent intellect. In Avicenna, the acquired intellect is

simply the intellect when it is exercising knowledge that

it has previously learned, such as when the grammarian

parses a sentence. For Al-Kind¯ı, such an actual exercise

of stored knowledge is called the “appearing” or “second

intellect.”27

Averroes adds a fifth type of intellect to these four when he regularly

calls the imagination, or more precisely the cogitative faculty,

the “passive intellect,” the only term found in Aristotle’s own De

Anima.28 Modern readers take the passive intellect to be identical

to the potential intellect, but since Aristotle says that it is perishable,

Averroes follows an alternative interpretation among the Greek

commentators and reasons that it must be identified with a bodily

faculty.

The questions about the intellect that most concerned the Arabic

Aristotelians were the nature of the potential intellect and the explanation

of how intellectual cognition comes about. While there are

some minor discrepancies among al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı’s various writings on the

intellect, it is clear that for him the potential intellect is a faculty

of the individual human soul on which intelligibles are imprinted

through a process of abstraction. Since it is subject to generation

and corruption, the human potential intellect is not immortal in its

own right. Rather, its immortality depends on the degree to which

it actualizes itself by acquiring immaterial intelligibles, a process by

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Psychology 319

which it gradually becomes freed from matter. This, in effect, is what

al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı believes happens when a human being reaches the stage

of the acquired intellect. At this stage the individual human intellect

becomes entirely one with its immaterial intelligibles, thereby

attaining a status similar to that of the agent intellect itself. As a

result, the human acquired intellect is also able to have the agent

intellect as a further object of knowledge, to “conjoin” (ittis.a¯ l) with

it in a union of knower and known. Conjunction with the agent

intellect is identified by al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı as the supreme human end and a

necessary condition for achieving immortality. Souls which do not

reach the level of acquired intellect in this life thus cannot survive

the death of the body, since they remain material and perishable.

But the immortality envisioned by al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı does not seem to be a

personal one, and toward the end of his life al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı came to doubt

the viability of even this limited formof immortality. In his now-lost

commentary on Aristotle’sNicomachean Ethics, known through the

reports of Ibn B¯ajja, Ibn T.

ufayl, and Averroes, al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı is reported

to have abandoned belief in the possibility of conjunction with the

agent intellect, on the grounds that it would require the impossible

transformation of a material and contingent being into an immaterial

and eternal one.29

In contrast to al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı, individual immortality is not a problem

for Avicenna since he holds that the soul is subsistent in

itself. Avicenna’s dualism also sets him apart from the other Arabic

philosophers in his account of the roles played by the potential and

agent intellects in the acquisition of knowledge. Just as the body

is only a preparatory cause that initially occasions the creation of

the individual, so too the sense powers play only a preparatory function

in the production of intelligibles. Indeed, the function of the

agent intellect in the production of human knowledge exactly parallels

its function in the creation of human souls: the consideration

of the corresponding sense images disposes the soul to receive one

universal rather than another, for example, “human being” rather

than “horse,” in exactly the same way that the species of the parents

disposes the matter of their offspring to receive one formrather than

another (that is, humans beget humans and horses beget horses).

The function of the agent intellect in this process is therefore not

to illumine the sense images so that universals can be abstracted

from them. The ultimate cause of the production of new intelligible

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320 deborah l. black

concepts in individual minds is not an act of abstraction at all, but

rather, a direct emanation from the agent intellect:

For when the intellectual power sees the particular things which are in the

imagination, and when the light of the agent intellect in us . . . shines upon

them, they become abstracted from matter and its attachments, and are

imprinted on the rational soul, not in the sense that they themselves pass

from the imagination to our intellect, . . . but rather, in the sense that their

consideration prepares the soul so that what is abstract emanates upon it

from the agent intellect.30

Avicenna’s claim that knowledge is ultimately an emanation has

a number of important epistemological consequences, one of which

is his denial of intellectual memory. On the emanational account

of knowledge, intellectual understanding is nothing but the actual

existence of the object known in the knower. To think of some concept,

c, is simply for the form or quiddity of c to exist in one’s intellect.

Since the intellect is not a body which has spatial extension,

there is no “place” within the intellect in which an intelligible can

be actually stored while it is not consciously being thought. The

storehouse for intelligibles, then, is not in the soul, but rather, it is

the agent intellect itself, which is always engaged in the contemplation

of its own contents. Moreover, “conjunction” with the agent

intellect for Avicenna is not a special state through which the intellect

becomes immortal, but rather it is the foundation for all learning,

which is nothing but “the search for the perfect disposition for

conjunction.”31

Avicenna’s account of the agent intellect’s role in human understanding

also allows him to posit a form of prophecy that is properly

intellectual. Avicenna’s prophet is blessed with a strong capacity for

intuition (h.

ads), possessing what Avicenna calls a “holy intellect.”

Avicenna recognizes lesser forms of intuitive ability in which other

human beings share, by which they are occasionally able to receive

the agent intellect’s emanation without the prior aid of the sense

faculties or the help of a human teacher. But the prophet’s intuition

is unique. For him intuition does not come in episodic flashes;

rather, he receives all intelligibles from the agent intellect in a single

instant. Nor is the prophet lacking in comprehension of the intelligible

truths that he receives in this way, since they are already

rationally ordered and logically arranged insofar as they include the

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Psychology 321

middle terms of the syllogisms that demonstrate their truth. For

Avicenna, then, the prophet is special not merely in virtue of the

bodily faculty of imagination, as was the case for al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı, but in

virtue of the special qualities of his immaterial intellect as well.32

Of all the Arabic philosophers, it is Averroes for whom the ontological

status of the material or potential intellect and its relation

to the individual causes the most vexation. In his three commentaries

on the De Anima and in related minor works, written at various

times over the course of his life, Averroes struggled to make

sense of Aristotle’s account of the potential intellect in De Anima,

III.4, changing his interpretation of the text many times.33 Averroes’

task was complicated by the competing theories of his predecessors,

the Greek commentators Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius,

who represented polar opposites on the question of the intellect’s

ontological status. At issue for Averroes was the basic question of

how to interpret Aristotle’s claim that the potential intellect must

be unmixed with matter in order to acquire knowledge of intelligible

universals. What exactly does it mean for the intellect to be

“unmixed,” and how does this affect the intellect’s relation to a

human being, whose individuality is a function of matter?

Averroes’ first position on the material intellect is represented in

the original version of his Epitome of the “De Anima,” a work that

Averroes reworked at least twice to bring it in line with his changing

views. This position, which is closest to that of Alexander, may

loosely be termed “materialist.” On this view, the material intellect

is a special disposition for receiving intelligibles unique to the

human imagination, or more precisely, “the disposition which is

in the imaginative forms for receiving the intelligibles.” Since the

imagination is a faculty of the soul, and its contents have spiritual

or intentional rather than physical being, Averroes believes at this

stage in his thinking that such a position meets Aristotle’s fundamental

criterion that the intellect is neither a body “nor material in

the way that corporeal forms are material.”34

This solution did not satisfy Averroes for long. In his later writings,

in particular his Long Commentary on the “De Anima” (which

survives only in its medieval Latin version), Averroes moves closer

to the position of Themistius, now arguing that the material intellect

can be “neither a body nor a power in a body.” But Averroes adds

a further qualification to his account that sets it radically apart from

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322 deborah l. black

the views of all his predecessors. For he reasons that if the material

intellect is entirely separate from matter and incorporeal, then

it cannot be individuated by the body as Avicenna held, or as Averroes

puts it, “numbered according to the numeration of individual

humans.” The result, then, isAverroes’ much maligned position that

has come to be known as the “unicity of the intellect” or, less felicitously,

“monopsychism,” according to which the material intellect,

as well as the agent intellect, is a separate substance and one for all

human knowers.35

While this position is a sharp departure from Averroes’ earlier

view on the metaphysical status of the material intellect, it is noteworthy

that it shares with that view the recognition that human

thought is individuated by the images that accompany universal

thoughts, according to Aristotle’s dictum in the De Anima that the

soul never thinks without an image. Moreover, neither Averroes’

original materialism, nor the unicity of the intellect, allow for individual

immortality. Thus while Averroes allows for the possibility

of conjunction with the agent intellect, like al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı before him it

remains an intellectual ideal that has little bearing upon the traditional

belief in personal survival after death.36

the soul as a principle of motion: appetite

and practical intellect

The Arabic philosophers did not entirely neglect Aristotle’s observation

that the soul is a principle of motion as well as cognition, but

they focused most of their attention on the cognitive faculties of the

soul. The Arabic Aristotelians treat appetite as a byproduct of cognition

that arises when an object is perceived by either sense or intellect

as worthy of pursuit or avoidance. The principle that appetite follows

upon perception was applied with equal rigor in the intellectual as

well as the sensible realm. Perhaps the most important consequence

of this is that Arabic philosophers lack a strong conception of the

will, understood as an autonomous rational faculty able to resist the

dictates of the intellect. Rather, in the Arabic tradition “will” (ira¯da)

is a generic termfor all appetites, having roughly the same extension

as Aristotle’s conception of the voluntary, which applies to animals

and children as well as to adult humans. The peculiar appetitive

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Psychology 323

faculty associated with the intellect in Arabic philosophy is not will

but “choice” (ikhtiya¯ r, equivalent to the Greek prohaireˆsis), that is,

the ability to decide between alternative courses of action and to

base one’s choices on a process of rational deliberation.37

The Arabic philosophers do not worry whether this view compromises

human freedom or moral responsibility. Morality for them

is primarily a matter of the interaction between the practical intellect

and the lower sense appetites. For Avicenna the practical intellect

cooperates with the estimative and cogitative faculties on the

one hand, and the theoretical intellect on the other, to engage in

moral deliberation and practical reasoning, and to produce generalized

ethical principles and rules of conduct. Virtue and vice are