Ibn Rushd (Averroes) · Philosophy
Averroes’s most notorious and daring doctrine: that the <em>material intellect</em> - the mind by which any of us thinks universal truths - is a single, separate, eternal substance shared by the whole human race. This lesson follows the argument that thrilled radical Europe, threatened personal immortality, and drew Thomas Aquinas into open war.
In his On the Soul, Aristotle had said tantalizing, cryptic things about the intellect. Unlike the senses, which use bodily organs, the mind that grasps universal concepts seems to have no organ; it must be ‘unmixed’ with the body to receive all forms, and one puzzling passage says that when separated it ‘alone is immortal and eternal.’ But immortal what - each person’s mind, or something shared? Aristotle never clearly said, and for fifteen centuries his commentators fought over it. Averroes, wrestling with the text across three separate commentaries, came at the end of his life to the boldest reading anyone had proposed: the intellect that receives universal truths - the material or possible intellect - is not a faculty housed in each individual person at all. It is a single, immaterial substance, numerically one, in which the entire human species shares. There are billions of us, but in the strictest sense there is only one thinker.
The engine of the whole doctrine is a single argument about what it takes to receive a universal. A universal - ‘triangle,’ ‘human,’ ‘justice’ - is by definition not tied to any particular time, place, or individual; it is one meaning that applies to indefinitely many cases. Now, Averroes reasons, whatever receives a form takes it on according to the receiver’s own nature. If the intellect that received universals were itself a particular thing - a faculty lodged in your individual, material body - then it would particularize whatever it received, turning the universal into just another private mental item, yours and no one else’s. But then it would no longer be a genuine universal, and there could be no common truth shared between teacher and student, no single geometry we all learn. To stay truly universal, Averroes concludes, the receiving intellect must itself be free of matter and individuation - and therefore one and the same for all who think.
Averroes’s full picture involves not one intellect but a small hierarchy, and untangling it clarifies what he did and did not mean. The agent intellect is the active power that illuminates mental images and abstracts universals from them - Averroes, like most Muslim Aristotelians, held this to be a single separate intelligence, cosmic rather than personal. The material (or possible) intellect is the receptive capacity that takes on those abstracted universals - and this is the one Averroes daringly declares also to be a single shared substance. What each of us contributes, from our own perishable side, is the stream of sense-images our bodies generate; thinking happens when the shared intellect works on my particular phantasms. The high point of human life, Averroes says, is ‘conjunction’ (ittisal): the moment the individual, through disciplined thought, links up with the separate intellect and, however briefly, shares in its deathless knowing. Human happiness is intellectual union with a mind larger than our own.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Averroes argued the material (receptive) intellect must be one for all humans - separate, immaterial, eternal - because a universal truth cannot be received by a particular, bodily organ without being particularized; and that this seemed to deny personal immortality, thrilling the Latin Averroists and…
Leads to Thomas Aquinas.
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