Notes on Aristotle's De Anima (translated by Joe Sachs)
Materialism and revolutionary entelecheia
From the “Bamberg Apocalypse”
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“For example, imagine a body moving perpetually in a circular orbit...Every place it moves away from is just as much a place it is moving toward...An orbit has not been grasped as long as it seems to be many places; it is one place where the orbiting body always is. The motion of the orbiting is molded into a higher kind of stillness. That stillness is never visible to the eye, but it is the true and invisible look of the body's motion, a unity grasped through perception by means of thinking”
(p. 10, translator's introduction)
This (in particular the italicized portion) is a critical point. Intelligibility, in its purer immediacies, is all well and good, but it does seem that there are certain varieties of intelligibility that require thought as a preliminary. That should not be surprising. After all, there are many forms of intelligibility that require sensation as a preliminary—how could we perceive the intelligibility of religious art without sensation? Likewise for conceptual thought. Mathematical intelligibility, for instance, requires much specifically conceptual training as its preliminary, training in quantitative procedures, in mathematical thought. Have I not, in fact, already noted that Socrates, too, required a training in the “outer dialectic”, in eristics, as a preliminary to the initiation into the “inner dialectic”? An appreciation of intellect does not imply a diminishment in the value of rationality, but just the contrary. Indeed, it seems that a skilled deployment of rationality, of discursive Logos, provokes new and wondrous births in the symbolic Logos. Without the former, the latter would consist in little more than the most rudimentary myths and if you take sensation as a preliminary out of the equation, then not even this—though, indeed, how much discursive cunning is needed just to tell a story well! A myth which is not conveyed skillfully will have little impact. This line of reasoning seems to be a convenient point of access to the idea of the Promethean terraformation of the intelligible. That is just what happens through the cunning development of rationality, of the “theoretical” domain—new vistas of intelligibility are made accessible, or, rather, the very topography of immediacy is terraformed. Thought is both the offspring and the parent of intelligibility—the vanguard of intelligibility, and its impossible master, which is to say, both its ontological slave and its dialectical slave [1].
1: In this formulation, “vanguard” and “impossible master” correspond with rationality's “dialectical slavery”, and the dependency and ontological posteriority of rationality correspond with its “ontological slavery”.
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“Aristotle compares anything that is a genuine whole, and not a mere heap, to a syllable”
(p. 22, introduction)
This reasoning is a good entry point to the Buddhist debate over the “pudgala”. Note the expression “heap” (cf. skandha!). A syllable is an utterance with an intelligibility superior to its discursive components, or, at least, an intelligibility which is its own, which belongs to “its own person”—the sound “ba” is something other than “b” and “a”. Indeed, this priority is also historical. Written signs developed in order to accommodate an already existing speech, not the other way around (though, it is also worth noting that writing does not lose its efficacy apart from speech—a person born deaf can still communicate through writing, even apart from any association of sounds with letters). Likewise, we might propose that the disparate heap of faculties and existential conditions are, in some sense, merely an “accommodation” to a prior unity, a “dharma” that we call the “person” (pudgala). This “person” is not a “self” (or, perhaps more precisely, not a “self-subsisting self”—considerations of pratityasamutpada apply here as with other dharmas). Selfness is mere reflex, one condition or faculty among others which the person is subject to. The dependent co-emergence of all dharmas applies equally in this case of the particular dharma that we call the “person”. To understand the “person”, we must begin by not making about big deal about him. Therefore, the skandhas are both disparate and unified—disparate with reference to the purported “self” and unified with reference to the person.
The analogy of the syllable could also be useful as an instance of the relation between synthesis and analysis, an instance which conveniently dovetails with the discussion regarding written and oral communication in the Phaedrus.
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“The species is distinguished not by how it looks, but by how it lives”
(p. 26, translator's introduction)
Species is an intelligible reality, not merely a discursive classification. What is especially interesting here is the way this seems to connect with my previous observations (see the first note above) regarding “mentally constituted intelligibility”, intellection that takes thought as its preliminary. Though it may be a prematurely radical conclusion, one might even suppose that thought, in addition to intelligibility, is an always present constitutive factor in the world, that it is not somehow restricted to the mere “mental processes” of human beings (a rather Hegelian conclusion—minus the inclusion of intellect). Rather than attributing any kind of magical or fantastic character to this all-pervasive thought (e.g. as in “panpsychism”), we must begin here, as elsewhere, by “not making a big deal about it”. It is just manas. This is not something exclusively human, though it is in some way eminently characteristic of us (“man”, “manas”). We must not, in the first place, suppose “thought” to be what we initially think it to be. Let us, instead, question it, reduce it to a puzzling emptiness, and from there reconstitute it toward intelligibility.
In the first place, thought, which is discursive, is primarily (indeed, seemingly exclusively) constructed out of symbols and metaphors. All etymologies seem to “reduce” themselves to this. So much for “words”. Individual sounds (syllables) have their own primordial qualities, in the second place. Syllables are only one kind of sound among many others—the rush of a stream, wind, thunder, the howling of wolves. Thought is made up of such things, but, as discursive speech, it is not reducible to “mere” sounds. Neither of these aspects of speech can really be separated from one another. Even discursive speech is, in some respects, mere babbling, noise making—we are all “barbarians” when we speak (“bar bar”). Hence the skepticism, directed by nearly all “mystics” (Socrates included), those strivers after intelligibility par excellence, toward speech. At some point, if we are to rest in our knowledge, wholly identified in it, we must cease babbling. However, when we cease babbling we also cease thinking. Thinking is founded on nonsense. Man thinks because he babbles knowingly. He understands his own nonsense, and so he distinguishes between that nonsense which is familiar to him and that which is foreign to him. The latter is barbaric. It is the noise of animals. The babbling of his own community is relatively comprehensible, but that depends on how exacting one's standards are—for the “mystic”, whose standards as pertains to intelligibility are intolerably ruthless, even the speech of one's own people is ultimately nonsensical, shadows dancing on the wall of a cave.
Humanity is the instance of “mentally constituted intelligibility” par excellence. Man is manas. How humanity lives is socially and historically, and in the context of rationally explicable (to one degree or another) institutions. With other species, time is, as it were, “incidental”. They are like the orbit in the first passage above (though perhaps not in the very long term, i.e. the “evolutionary” scale). The motion of humanity is not the motionless motion of an orbit, but a self-transgressing orbit, i.e. a spiral—that is, it is a spiral also in the short term, as compared with geologic timescales. Humanity, as the alchemists might put it, radicalize and accelerate nature's processes. The invocation of any “acceleration-ism” is basically redundant. Its redundancy is comparable to the redundancy of “artificial intelligence”, considered below.
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“Living things do not have purposes, they are purposes”
(p.28, translator's introduction)
This formulation is a much better support for the thesis of the Promethean transgression of teloi and, moreover, it connects it directly with the Promethean terraformation of the intelligible. To modify the intelligible ground of things and modify or transgress teloi amount to the same thing. Teloi are not discursive schemata that “describe” the way things function, they are the intelligibility of “things in action”. Intelligibility (as it pertains to temporality) precisely is teloic, an essence and a horizon that constrains the “movement” of life, that constitutes the way of being of things in advance.
Doing or acting is a basic form of knowing, and of being knowable. Theoretical and critical explicitness, in turn, allows us to empty our doing as much as it does our knowing (e.g. through questioning). For the communist, theory does not precede practice, but neither does practice precede theory (Mao unfortunately exaggerated the former polarity at the expense of the latter). Liberated activity needs theory as its preliminary, to give that activity the sharpness which cuts down to the very bones of intelligibility [1]. Only emptiness (of which rationality is a type) is that sharp. The rational line dividing this from that is razor-thin to the point of non-existence. If our theory must be practical, it equally holds that our practice must be theoretical. Moreover, we should also note the generically ambiguous character of the term “theory”, which has both an explicitly rational-conceptual sense and a contemplative-intellective sense. That distinction allows that there are, in fact, two ways of “cutting down to the bone of intelligibility”. The just mentioned rational and analytical sense, that which is more eminently critical and hence “cutting”, and the intellective sense which proceeds immediately to the essence of things, which possess that essence “in advance”. Heretofore, social revolution has primarily relied on the “critical criticism” of the former, but the latter is also at its disposal should revolution ever find itself prepared to take it up.
1:At the same time, “materialist” theorizing presupposes, that some sort of practice already subsists, in the form, for instance, of “spontaneity” (e.g. as in unionizing, strikes, and other spontaneous forms of class struggle). It theorizes, especially, that practice which already is, not, however, in order to merely understand it, but in order to bring it to fruition—which qua human practice, also means to “accelerate” it, in the “alchemical” sense considered above, that is, that one guides this process, scientifically, not that one merely allow “capitalism (= mere nature) to accelerate itself”. As radical as capitalist transformation of the social space might appear, as compared with the stability of feudalism, its movement, hobbled by periodic crises, is still all-too-circular from the revolutionary standpoint of communism. (Communist) theory is the yeast which transforms the dough of (all-too-circular) spontaneity into the bread of revolution. Theory is the seed which falls on the good soil of a receptive situation, a spontaneous practice with revolutionary prospects. If the test of a good theorist is their ability to engage with or gauge the character of their present social and political environment then the test of a social and political situation's receptiveness and propitiousness lies in its readiness to absorb good theory. Many are the situations whose spontaneity will come to say “Lord, Lord, have we not unionized in your name, and held strikes, and rioted?”. To them the tribunal of history will say, “I never knew you. Depart from me, you who practiced theory-less”. Equally worthy of condemnation are pharisaical theorists, blind leading the blind, who, holding the keys to the gate of the revolutionary situation of their times, refuse entrance to anyone—“Enter not through this gate. That is not real communism. Totalitarianism! Counter-revolution! State-capitalism!”. Every blasphemy will be forgiven except that of the all-too Holy and Spiritual intelligentsia against the revolution.
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“[Intellect is] the source of unity at work in every genuine being within the cosmos...Thus every living thing is continuously a product of a divine intellect”
(p. 34, translator's introduction)
To understand the “divinity” of this “divine intellect” we must begin here, as elsewhere, by not making a big deal about it. It is just divinity. It helps, in that respect, as ironic as this may sound, to connect this “divinity” to its roots in divination; “ironic”, that is, because divination, too, seems to be something utterly fantastic, and hence a kind of “big deal”. A visit to a tarot card reader or an astrologer should quickly dispel impression. The silliness of the whole thing is abundantly manifest. Divination, too, then, must cease to be a big deal. Putting aside, for the moment, an extended examination of the divinatory hermeneutic, which I have already begun to undertake elsewhere, we can state from the outset that the divinity of intellect consists, primarily, not of its being some ghostly thing up in the sky, but simply in its performing the function of “divining” things, whatever that might mean. As this is a topic which I have already dealt with elsewhere, I see no need to repeat myself.
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“People put their effort into saying what sort of thing the soul is, while they determine nothing further about the body that receives it, just as though, in the manner of Pythagorean myths, any random soul were clothed in any random body”
(p. 64)
Soul and body seem to be mutually conditioned and “dependently co-emergent” notions (keeping in view, of course, the distinction between “soul” and “spirit”, i.e. psyche and nous). Every soul will have some sort of bodiness to it and, presumably, vice versa. Indeed, soul itself can be conceived as “subtle body” (and we might add, as an aside, that while the term “soul” is rather offensive to modern ears, no one would bat an eyelash at “psyche”, of which it is simply a translation). When Plato, in the Phaedrus, characterizes “soul” as that which “is what it is”, one has to wonder whether this should be understood in a “static” sense, a being-what-it-is eternally, or in an active sense, like the Aristotelian entelecheia, a continual “being at work staying itself” (Sachs' very apt phrase). That it is the latter is evident from the qualification given by Plato that this “soul” is continually in motion, and it is through this perpetual motion (which he calls “immortality”) that is”does not leave off being itself”. One would be very hard pressed to apply the former (“it is what it is eternally”) to psyche, except in some highly qualified sense (e.g. “eternally” understood as perpetuity). One might say, then, that soul is the temporal being-what-it-is of body, some body or another, whether subtle or gross [1], with soul being slanted toward the pole of “is” (in an active sense, of “being at work staying itself”) and body toward the pole of “what”. Intellect is a being-what-it-is without a differentiated “what” and “is”, thus characterized by a timeless “eternality”. In practice, the being-what-it-is of the body-soul relation is a “being-at-work-staying-itself”, as Sachs characterizes it. The soul-body relation is temporal, and to be what one is, temporally, is to perpetually become what one is—to continually work at being oneself. “Psyche” is an equivalent of “anima”, animation, animal life, life that continually moves and works at being itself. To the extent that we (conceptually) divide this moving life, apprehended initially in its intelligible immediacy, according to a certain polarity, we find set before us what we call “body” and “soul”. There is nothing “magical”, then, about “soul”. It is the product of a provisionally useful division of intelligible temporality.
1: But, is not “subtle body” the equivalent of “soul”? Indeed, and in this way we see the sheer relativity of these designations. “Soul” is not a “thing” which just subsists as an “atom” of which the world is made up, alongside the “atom” of “body”. “Soul-body” is a conceptual-polar division of intelligible temporality, to the extent that we find it useful to divide intelligible temporality. One need not posit a division between “body” and “soul”, at all, let alone an irreducible one as in Cartesian thought. It is merely a way of attenuating the sheer and excessive intelligibility of immediacy, thus rendering it more pliable to scientific manipulation.
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“In any living thing, what is maintained and preserved is its kind, not only in the changes of its own body through time, but in offspring like itself, so that Aristotle views even the first potency of soul as primarily reproductive (gennētikē). And what is maintained and reproduced is not just a certain kind of body but a certain kind of life”
(p. 80, intro to Book II)
When the addition of thought, in its rational and critical expressions, is factored in to this process of re-producing intelligible form (being-at-work-staying-itself [1]), the whole process is revolutionized. Intelligible form is emptied by critical and rational thought, and is thereby able to repeat itself as that which it is not. This results in a revolutionary being-at-work-not-being-itself—but it is precisely the “itself” which does this “not-being-itself”. Thought stimulates the productive mimesis (as opposed to the merely analogical mimesis, typical of intelligibility as such) of intelligible form, allowing these forms to re-produce themselves in revolutionary newness. This re-producing, as pertains to human things, is especially relevant as the re-production of the social sphere, which is not a mere kind that re-produces kind, in perpetual sameness of form, but historically revolutionizes itself, that is, re-produces itself as something other than itself, re-news its own social form in new social forms, re-produces itself into new means of re-producing itself. Feudalism does not forever reproduce feudalism, but ruptures into capitalism through the abstract “nothing” which is capital and its accumulation. Capitalism does not forever re-engender its own kind, but ruptures into socialist revolution at the juncture of the “nothing” which is human creative power itself, now magnified at the social and industrial scale.
Thus, we distinguish two kinds of entelecheai here: the “classical” Aristotelian sense, which is the re-production of kind by kind, and the revolutionary sense (on a geological timescale, evolutionary), in which kind reproduces itself as something other than itself. Revolutionary entelecheia continually transgresses the limits of Aristotelian entelecheia.
1:“Being-at-work-staying-itself” refers to a kind of relative intelligibility, intelligibility as it pertains to temporal forms. Intelligibility, “in itself”, would be more appropriately characterized as a simple “being-itself”, no effortful work necessary by the instantaneity of intellect.
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“The soul could not be a body, since it is not the body that is in an underlying thing, but rather the body that has being as an underlying thing and material (for something else)”
(p. 81)
That is precisely why the soul can be a body, and, in fact, is a body. Soul is the body in which intelligible reality clothes itself in the context of the “mundus imaginalis” (in its more limited and “intermediate” sense). Soul is an underlying thing for intellect, a body. Naturally, it is not the only kind of body-ness in which intelligible reality clothes itself. Intellect walks about corporeally, as well. However, soul-ness is the necessary intermediary on the way to corporeality, provided we make any polar division between the intelligible and the non-intelligible, the corporeal and the non-corporeal, etc. The sophist (who is a kind of untethered psychicality) always lies waiting on the road to knowledge, and likewise as the spokesperson (though not its incarnation) on behalf of knowledge for the world.
This character of body as “material for something else” suggests an inherently pragmatic slant to materialist conceptions (since “body” is one of the specifications of “material”, though not reductively or exclusively so). Privileging materiality is a technoscientific and pragmatic gesture, from the beginning. Materiality, from its conceptual inception in traditional forms of metaphysics, is always for something, a support, a base, a “sub-stance”, body (corporeality) being one specification of “material”. In this case that something seems to necessarily be “soul” taken in a broad sense. That is, “materiality”, as a conception, implies, together with it, a more or less elaborate psychical and discursive apparatus that makes something of it, determines it, “inhabits” it. The materia, in its metaphysical purity, is sheer potentiality, and for us almost nothing. Materiality wants to be conceived (pun intended). Materiality, then, implies the complementarity of a psychical apparatus, which, in turn, is always dependent on intellection. Which is to say, “materialism” is a package deal. If we want to be thorough materialists, we must accept “intellectual intuition”, implicitly or otherwise. A distinction is also necessary between materiality conceived in transcendental terms and that which is posited in the context of transcendent metaphysics, a distinction which only confirms the above since the transcendental conception of “materiality”, as a conception, is dependent on the transcendent account of “materiality”. Material-ism, thus, is a “technoscientific pragmatism” which, if it is to be a thoroughgoing materialism, allows itself to be intelligibly contextualized. If that “technoscientific pragmatism” is to be uncompromising in its expression it will have to be fully historical and social in its scope (this follows from the meaning of “technoscience”) and, moreover, revolutionary by virtue of giving this historical sweep a pragmatic directedness [1], and if that intelligibility is to be just as uncompromising it will have fully come to terms with traditional metaphysics, in both is theoretical (contemplative) and practical (“initiatic”, ascetical) dimensions, since it is here that intelligibility attains its maximum for human beings. The combination of these tendencies, “technoscientific pragmatism” and traditional metaphysics, as a unity which continually transgresses itself, is truly revolutionary, explosive.
1: This makes it into a partisan history, a history with a definite agenda, an agenda which, grounding itself in a prior historical intelligibility, reveals itself to be the agenda of a social class. It is social class which is historically (= temporality + humanity) intelligible, because, as already considered above, entelecheia is the principle of temporal intelligibility, generally, and social classes are the symbolic anchors of society's reproduction of itself—in the short term, society as a kind which reproduces its own kind (Aristotelian entelecheia) , and in the long term a kind which reproduces itself as something other than itself (revolutionary entelecheia).
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If soul is entelecheia and entelecheia is a being-at-work-staying-itself and being-at-work-staying-itself is the defining characteristic of life, then we have here, in this formulation, the quandary to be untangled in our search for the possibility of “artificial intelligence” (intelligence being an expression of certain forms of life). An “intelligent machine” must be so constituted that it continually works at remaining itself. That, however, is not the chief difficulty. In order to work at being itself, it must first be an “itself”, and that is precisely what seems to be lacking in the rational world of machinery. The intelligible “itself' of machinery must be uncovered, and from there, perhaps, we can think up some clever way of rendering it more than the mere potency of life, that is, raise it from the potency of being itself to the actuality of continually working at being itself.
Upon further reflection, the solution to the mystery posed above seems obvious—the intelligible “itself” of machinery is the human, the rational animal. There was, in fact, never a problem to begin with, except the false kind. The search for “artificial intelligence” is a search by man for himself, unknowingly. Man is, as I have considered elsewhere, always both an artificient and an artificial intelligence. The notion of an intelligent machine whose itself is in itself, is a nonsensical one. Machinery is, from its inception, an extension of man. To believe otherwise is mere superstition, to fetishize (in a strict anthropological sense) the machine. It is to say “this instance of human rationality is not human”. It is simply a contradiction in terms. The search for “artificial intelligence” as something radically new, heretofore unrealized, is redundant. The amplification of artificial intelligence as that which already subsists, namely, the human rational faculty in its artificial and artificient expressions, is the only meaningful relation that we can have to any notion of “artificial intelligence”. A genuine pursuit of artificial intelligence begins by ceasing to merely “pursue” that which we have already (trivially) attained just by virtue of being human.
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“The sense and the thing perceived are meant in two ways, either as in potency or as at work”
(p. 129)
In other words, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to to hear it, it makes a sound “in potency”. Perceptibles exist as potencies (or, even more broadly, as possibilities) whether or not they are actually (in act) perceived. This is more than a clever of way of “resolving” the tree in a forest dilemma. The real import of this formulation lies in its relation to intelligibility. It is a way of saying that the intelligibility of “blackness”, or any other perceptible, is in no way impacted by whether or not it is perceived, whether it is in act or it is in potency. Intelligibility is intelligibility. Indeed, the maximum of intelligibility belongs to unmanifest possibility (see my notes on Chittck's Sufi Path of Knowledge). Blackness remains blackness whether in act or in potency—fundamentally, it is a possibility, and the possible encompasses both act and potency, both manifest and unmanifest. “Potency” is intelligibility in reserve, as background. When I see a tiger, its potential to leap at me is not yet actuated, but is nevertheless perceived as part of the intelligibility of the situation. It is visceral, tangible—one tastes it, that is, the potential for this tiger to leap is gnosensientially distinct. The Aristotelian formulation does not so much work at “preserving” the intelligibility of that which is in potency, as though some special effort were needed by “intellectuals” to preserve this. It attempts to account for the way that this “intelligibility-in-potency”, in fact, already presents itself to us. Potency is not only perfectly intelligible, but the image of intelligibility which we encounter in everyday situations is largely made up of so many potencies. Temporality cannot even be intelligible unless its potencies are taken as possessing an equal intelligibility together with its acts.
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“Intellect has no nature at all other than this, that it is a potency. Therefore the aspect of the soul that is called intellect is not actively any of the things that are until it thinks. This is why it is not reasonable that it be mixed with the body, … [for then] there would be an organ for it, as there is for the perceptive potency, though in fact there is none”
(p. 139)
Also consult previous note for reference. That intellect has no “organ” associated with it is far from some attempt at “spiritualizing” it, rendering it inaccessible to the merely earthly things to which our sense organs correspond. On the contrary, this concretizes intellect more thoroughly than any sense organ, putting it into immediate contact with the world, identifying as the immediacy of world. Intellect is that which is, that it is, as it is. Intellect, as potency, is the “background intelligibility” of a situation—and in act? In act, presumably, this intelligibility is brought into the “foreground”, or, better yet, “intellects” some portion or aspect of background into the foreground. Note that in the above passage it is not claimed that intellect “is not the things that are until it thinks them”, but that it is not these things actively until it “thinks” them. Naturally, this implies that it is those things prior to its “thinking” them, albeit somehow “inactively”. Intellect straddles act and potency because it simply is (possibility). Perception (especially taken in a subjective and empirical sense, the perception of a subject) is mediated by an organ. It is either active or inactive, but does not straddle both sides of this distinction simultaneously. A line of mediation cuts across things, dividing their potency for perception from their actual perception. Whereas, in intellect, a distinction between actively and passively intellected is, in a sense, an impossible one (which in no way prevents us from making it). Indeed, the subject-object relation is the condition of this impossibility, that which divides intelligibility into these active and passive portions. Intelligibility simply and immediately is intelligibility. That it can acquire a foreground and a background perspective implies the impossible intervention of a subject-object relation, the intrusion of the transcendental condition into the midst of primordial intellection, however occulted or inconspicuous that transcendental condition's presence.
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With intellect, we are always tempted to assign an ontological priority to either its background condition (Heidegger and, possibly, Buddhism, or certain streams of it) or to its foreground condition (Guenon, and traditional varieties of metaphysics generally). In reality, the a priority of both of these conditions is equally tenable and demonstrable (this is partially the significance of what I call “ontological inversion”). This should not be surprising since the distinction between them is merely an apparent one—apparent to whom? To the subject that always lies occulted (together with its object) in this distinction. This is why the relation between intellect and the intelligible always “seems” like a kind of subject-object relation. It is not such a relation, but it is this relation which lies behind the very possibility (or, rather impossibility) of the active-passive distinction within intelligible realities.
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“When the intellect has come to be each intelligible thing, as the knower is said to do when he is a knower in the active sense”
(p. 139)
The condition of active intellection or, in any case, the variety of metaphysics that prioritizes this pole of intelligibility, seems to necessitate the positing of a “knower” (e.g. “the knower of the field”), a knower that is somehow something other than a “subject”. That variant of metaphysical teaching which prioritizes passive intellection, on the other hand, can afford to do away with this “knower” (e.g. Buddhist metaphysics, or certain varieties of it). Therein, the condition of “knowing”, as a manner of being, is considered basic and primordial (“buddha” = awake, enlightened, knowledgeable) whereas the “knower” is incidental, apparent, or illusory with respect to this condition of knowing.
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A certain radical conclusion suggests itself from out of the foregoing reflections. While it is possible to derive the procedure of automorphosis from “atman”, as its transcedental imitation, the opposite derivation also necessarily suggests itself. After all, “atman” is a “datum” of the metaphysics of the knower (i.e. active intellection), and active intellection is a product of the rupture of primordial intellection by the “transcendental nothing”. Therefore, in a sense, it is “atman” which derives itself from out of automorphosis, rather than the reverse. Primordial intellect “knows” no distinction between knower and known, and therefore need not posit any “atman”. “Atman” is only posited because automorphosis has intervened and impossibly conditioned the form of our intellection. “Atman”, as something we posit theoretically (in both senses of that term, theory and theoria) is an upaya (or “tactillection”, in my terminology).
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“...when the intellect thinks something exceedingly intelligible it is not less able to think the lesser things but even more able”
(p. 139)
That is to say, the actively intellected foreground does not exclude the passively intellected background. That which is brought to the fore is not brought there in the manner of a part selected out of a whole. It is the whole that is brought forward (cf. Isha Upanishad, “take whole from whole, whole remains”), even if it is brought forward through an “exemplary” part. The foreground of active intellection is the background of passive intellection—the distinction between them is,after all, merely apparent. To classify something as “merely apparent” is generally grounds for dismissing it as basically insignificant. In the context of this inquiry, however, to say “apparent” is to signify the impossible intervention of the subject (it is for this subject that appearances appear, just as, analogously, intellect is the context in which knowledge is known).
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In the previously quoted passage there is a significant ambiguity to the use of the expression “lesser things”. It can indicate various background intelligibles that are seemingly left by the wayside when active intellection steps forward. It can also refer to various subsidiary aspects of some actively intellected thing, that we extract from it by implication. These are, in reality, the same. Active intellection, as already stated, does not exclude passive intellect. Even when it appears to leave it behind, it always brings it along. When active intellect “zeroes in” on the intelligibility of some part, it brings its whole background with it. This background can also be “extracted” from out of the part, as just so many implications contained in its intelligibility.
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“Material”
(p. 142-3)
The introduction of materiality (presumably “hyle”), here, is an occasion that must be handled delicately. There could be a temptation here to make a “big deal” out of things, to consider the separation of thing from its “material” as somehow fantastical, an essentially magical or religious claim. Moreover, the basic metaphysical association of “materia” with the non-intelligible and passive pole of manifestation (the “prakriti” of samkhya), should not be lost sight of. A question—does the non-intelligibility of “materia” mark it out as a type of nothing, hence associating it somehow with the transcendental condition? This could be the basis for a rather unique “spin” on philosophical materialism.
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Materiality is that metaphysically posited nothing (that is, a type of nothing especially peculiar to metaphysical doctrines) which somehow acts as the precondition of the individuality and multiplicity of things. Intelligibility is seamless unity and instantaneous immediacy. Some underlying nothing must be posited in order to explain differentiation and multiplicity. Intelligible unity somehow “interacts” with this nothing (cf. the influence purusha exercises over prakriti) and produces multiplicity; and multiplicity is, essentially, the repetition of the unit. Materiality is the impossible (pre) condition for the repetition of unity as many units (which first demands the “transcendental reduction” of metaphysical unity to mathematical unit).
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“In denying that white is white one puts together not-white with white...What makes each thing to be one is intellect”
(p. 144)
Aristotle's account of intellect is one that excludes any defiance of the principle of non-contradiction. Intellect (for Aristotle) makes each thing to be just what it is and nothing else. Yet, the principle of dependent co-emergence (pratityasamutpada) does not exclude intellect and intelligibility. The world elaborated by Buddhism, the world of the mandala, is certainly an intelligible one. A different sort of account of intellection must be presupposed in a dependently co-emergent conception of the world—intellect in a world empty of essence (or “self-nature”), or, better yet, a world in which all essences are empty. How intellect “works” in such a theoretical context has to be worked out. Probably only a phenomenological exposition could do it justice. Which is to say, the dividing line between the the self-nature of a thing and its collapse into every other thing, into emptiness, is the distinction of “taste” (gnosense).