COMMENTARY ON ARISTOTLE’S
DE ANIMA

NOTE TO III, �� 744-5 (Lectio ten)

A much-disputed passage. A safe rendering of the Greek is: �This alone is immortal and perpetual. We have however no memory of it because it is impassible, whereas the passive intellect (Or, the mind that can be affected) is perishable; and without it nothing thinks�—taking �it� to refer to the agent intellect. The Latin translation, however, followed by St. Thomas, takes this �it� to mean the �passive intellect� and inserts anima, �the soul�, as subject of �thinks�. Hence St. Thomas takes the whole section to refer to the state of the intellect after death: it �does not remember�, etc., once the passive intellect has perished; the latter is only �called� intellect and is really a pars animae corporalis.  See Introduction, as follows:

(6) Bk. III, lectio 10 (430a 20-25); �� 740-5. The text here has given rise, on various counts, to much perplexity. For reference in discussion it will be well to have before us the Greek text and Latin, version:

Τὸ δ᾽αὐτό ἐστιν ἡ κατ᾽ ἐνέργειαν ἐπιστἠμη τῷ πράγματι· ἡ δὲ κατὰ δύναμιν χρόνῳ προτέρα ἐν τῷ ἑνί, ὅλως δ᾽οὐ χρονῳ· ἀλλ᾽ οὐχ ὁτὲ μὲν νοεῖ, ὁτὲ δ᾽οὐ νοεῖ. Χωρισθεὶς δ᾽ ἐστὶ μόνον τοῦθ᾽ ὅπερ ἐστί, καὶ τοῦτο μόνον ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀΐδιον. Οὐ μνημονεύομεν δέ ὅτι τοῦτο μὲν ἀπαθές, ὁ δὲ παθητικὸς νοῦς φθαρτός, καὶ ἀνευ τοῦτου οὐδὲν νοεῖ.

Idem autem est secundum actum scientia rei; quae vero, secun�dum potentiam, tempore prior in uno est. Omnino autem neque tempore. Sed non aliquando quidem intelligit, aliquando autem non intelligit. Separatus autem est solum hoc, quod vere est. Et hoc solum immortale et perpetuum est. Non reminiscitur autem, quia hoc quidem impassibile est; passivus vero intellectus, est cor�ruptibilis, et sine hoc nihil intelligit anima.

The English translation given above follows the version more closely than the latter follows the Greek. The main prob�lems are (i) to find the antecedent of intelligit in the third sentence, (2) to find what separatus agrees with, and (3) to discover what Aristotle means by �the passive intellect�.

(i) This question was already familiar to St. Thomas. The alter�natives can be seen in Summa Theologiae, I, 79, 4, obj. 2 and ad 2. The objection runs: �The Philosopher (de Anima, III) says of the active (i.e. agent) intellect, that it does not sometimes understand and sometimes not understand. But out soul does not always understand: sometimes it understands, and sometimes it does not understand. Therefore the active (agent) intellect is not something in our soul.� To which St. Thomas replies: �The Philosopher says those words not of the active (agent) intellect, but of the intellect in act: of which he had already said: Knowledge in act is the same as the thing. Or, if we refer those words to the active (agent) intellect, then they are said because it is not owing to the active (agent) intellect that sometimes we do, and sometimes we do not understand, but to the intellect which is in potentiality.� The conclusion of the objection shows the importance of the question for the Averroist thesis of the separated intellect. St. Thomas clearly shows his pre�ference for taking intellect to refer right back to �knowledge in act�, though finding the Averroist conclusion not necessitated by the alternative of taking it to refer to the agent-intellect. Curiously, though the version does not give any help in deciding this point, the Greek seems fully to justify St. Thomas's preference. The ἀλλά is the strongest particle in its sentence and would seem absolutely to demand that its antecedent should be all of the sentence which precedes it. Commentators have not always seen this, but de Corte is surely right in making it one of his main arguments for taking the passage in the sense preferred by St. Thomas in the Summa and adopted by him in the Commentary.

It is matter of less moment but worthy of remark, that St. Thomas shows his penetration in overcoming, correctly, a further obscurity which is absent from the Greek but introduced by the author of the version by his writing omnino for ὅλως. An early variant is ἅπλως which comes to the same thing. The contrast is between knowledge in potency considered in the individual and the same considered absolutely or universally, without qualifica�tion. Omnino does not give this sense unmistakably, but St. Thomas does so understand it in the Commentary.

(ii) Separatus is commonly taken as referring only to the agent intellect, the last aspect of the intellective soul to have been con�sidered. St. Thomas, with at least as much probability in his favour, argues for its reference to the intellective soul without qualifica�tion, on the ground that the �possible� as well as the �agent� intel�lect has been characterised as �separate� in the foregoing passage. De Corte insists that the same interpretation is imposed by the whole theory of the soul and its parts which Aristotle presents.

We may note that the version�s vere is one of its rare verbal addi�tions to the text, admirably, however, bringing out the emphasis of the Greek. Its presence renders less objectionable St. Thomas's transference of the adverb solum into an adjective; the transference is to be explained by his taking solum with separatus rather than with est hoc quod vere est. But the presence of vere does much to retain the emphasis on the clause in which it occurs. It would be possible, consonantly with St. Thomas's principles, to translate: �By itself, the intellect, when separated, is that which it truly is�, the general sense being, in any case, that, in the state of separation from the body, intellective soul is purely intellective, the organic powers being necessarily in abeyance.

(iii) The Version turns μνημονεύομεν by reminiscitur, but without serious consequences. With what previously mentioned period is the verb co-ordinated? It can only be with that indicated by Χωρισθεὶς. In a state of separation from the body, the intellective soul no longer remembers. Memory has already been mentioned in 408b 24-29 as perishing with the compositum of body and soul; St. Thomas refers to that passage in � 744, supra dixit in primo quod intelligere corrumpitur, quodam interius corrupto. We have already seen that the commentary on that passage (� 163 ss.) presents certain difficulties. This is the place to suggest that they may in part be caused by St. Thomas's awareness that Aristotle could not possibly be saying, in accordance with his own principles, that intelligere in the normal sense of that word is an act of the compositum as such and perishable with it. Yet the version gave him the state�ment, to which he here refers, Intelligere igitur et considerare mar�cescunt alio quodam interius corrupto. This genuine difficulty may have been the reason for the commentator's interpreting the pas�sage as an argumentum ad hominem. But now in Book III, at the end of lectio 10 (� 745) he has his finger on the solution:... destructo cor�pore non remanet in anima separata scientia rerum secundum eundem modum quo modo intelligit. Sed quomodo tunc intelligat, non est prae�sentis intentionis discutere. The word turned by intelligere is διάνοια and its association in these two passages with memory and other acts of the compositum suggests that this term could be applied to other than distinctively spiritual acts of the mind. Indeed its being coupled with θεωρεῖν in 408b 24 is sufficient warrant for finding such another use, since θεωρεῖν is often used by Aristotle both for an act of sense and an act of mind. De Corte suggests that the pre�position διά in composition with the verb may here, as in other cases, have the sense of �penetration�. The act signified would then be intermediate between sense perception and understanding proper: that collaboration of intellect and sense which is inescapably necessary to intellectual activity, so long as the soul is united to the body. The total aptitude for such collaboration is the �passive� in�tellect of which Aristotle here alone makes mention. It is certainly impossible to equate this with the �possible�, or knowing, intellect properly so called.

We may close our discussion of this difficult passage by expanding the translation in the sense which seems to be appropriate.

Knowledge in act is the same as the thing (actually known). But (knowledge) that is potential is, in the individual, prior in time. Absolutely, however, not even in time. Whereas (know�ledge in act) does not sometimes know and sometimes not know. When mind is separated (from the body) it is simply what it truly is. It does not (then) remember, because (mind) indeed is impassible; but the passive intellect is corruptible, and without it (in this life) the soul understands nothing.