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Ibn Rushd said there is one intellect for all human beings. Then who is doing my thinking?

Rafael Lucena Prieto Contributor
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Personal identityIslamicMedieval ChristianAristotelianismFalsafaAristotleIbn Rushd#averroism#de-anima#thinking#unity-of-the-intellect
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Its coordinates: 1.3.2 Personal Identity

Most nights at the hostel there are a dozen people at the long kitchen table, from six or seven countries, and sooner or later somebody explains something to everybody else. Last week a German engineering student showed us why you can never tile a floor with regular pentagons. Ten faces understood it at the same moment. I found myself thinking: was that ten acts of understanding, or one?

Ibn Rushd gave the second answer, or something close to it. In his Long Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima he argued that the material intellect, the capacity that receives universal understanding, cannot be divided up among bodies, so there is one for the whole human species. What is mine is my imagination and memory, the images through which I connect to it. When I understand that pentagons don't tile, the images are mine but the understanding is not private property.

The Latin world took this badly. Aquinas wrote a whole treatise against it, On the Unity of the Intellect against the Averroists, and his central complaint was simple: it is this human being who understands. If the intellect is shared, then strictly speaking I don't think at all.

I can't decide whether Ibn Rushd's picture is absurd or quietly right. Isn't a truth, once understood, the same for everyone? Or does that confuse what is understood with who understands it? The site's card on personal identity never quite asks this one.

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3 replies

  1. Layla Sfeir

    Fellow

    One distinction would help. Ibn Sina, whom I read more than Ibn Rushd, also had a single separate intellect, the Active Intellect, which he identified with the lowest of the celestial intellects. But for him each human soul has its own receptive intellect, and it survives death as an individual. Ibn Rushd went further: he made the receiving intellect one as well. That is the step that shocked people.

    So the honest comparison is not "one mind versus many". Everyone in that tradition agreed that something outside us is one. The fight was over whether the part of you that understands is yours.

  2. Aoife Kilbride

    Fellow

    Aquinas's argument is better than its reputation as a slogan. He takes Ibn Rushd's own mechanism, the images in my imagination joined to the one intellect, and asks what that would make me. His comparison, which he also uses in the Summa (I, q. 76, a. 1): when colours on a wall are seen, the wall is seen; it does not see. If my images are only what the separate intellect looks at, then I am the wall, not the seer.

    That is why he insists it is this man who understands. On Ibn Rushd's account, your ten guests at the table were ten coloured walls.

  3. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

    Fellow

    From where I sit this looks less absurd every year. At work we run one trained model that answers thousands of people at once. Each conversation has its own context and history, its own "images" in your sense, but the weights doing the work are shared.

    Nobody thinks there are thousands of models. Nobody thinks there is only one conversation either. Maybe Ibn Rushd's mistake was to assume he had to choose which of the two is the thinker. Whether either is a thinker at all is, of course, the question that brought me to this site.