CHAPTER 1
Not-Always-Thinking / Aristotle
No one who wasnât already convinced that asking what thinking means counted as thinking would ask such a question. At the same time, no one who didnât also intend from the outset to suspend or abandon this conviction would bother to ask. Either the most profound question in thought is also the silliest, or else something essential about the constitution of thinking is revealed here, or both. Am I thinking when I think about thinkingâs meaning, or do I put the act, receptivity, or spontaneityâhowever I may mean it or will mean itâinto suspension, in order to inquire into its sense? If I suspend the sense of it, can I trust the outcome? Wonât the thought of thinkingâs meaning for all intents and purposes be illegitimate, a result of faulty method, fickle? In short, the thought of thinkingâs meaning is a tangle that produces something more like not-thinking. If thinking seems to stumble when it makes its act into a question, its approach to distraction should be even more precipitous.
How many understandings of this activity or passivityâthinking, penser, noein, denkenâand its ambiguous seat or facultyâmens, mind, intellect, nous, Geist, esprit, and so forthâhave been posited, and how various the attempts to cut through the tangle! The stubborn âproblem of the moving principle of our thought,â so Franz Brentano summed it up in his brilliant 1867 study of Aristotleâs De anima. Brentano was struck by the large variety of responses to what he perceived as a single problem with a single solution. âHow different the paths that different minds have traveled!â in order to arrive at thought thinking thought (The Psychology of Aristotle 157). How different indeed, and how strongly Brentano wanted to send the paths back to their origin, to minimize the confusion and show their primordial convergence, which could be found, he contended, in Aristotleâs account of nous. Not returning to Aristotle had been the kernel of the problem. âHow many of those who indignantly shunned this thought were driven to the most extravagant assumptions by the difficulties of the problem. . . .â Aristotle too likes to list errant paths taken by his predecessors. Brentano and Aristotle agree on this methodological ideal: there is one original and unified description of thinking, representing the only solution to the problem of thought, and the different thoughts of different minds on the subject, when taken together, although they apparently point away from the origin, in pointing away simultaneously point back to the primordial path from which their minds strayed. They share the assumption that thinking is in essence whole, transparent, stable, essentially separate from the variety of ways in which one might try to gain access to it, a complex unity, to be sure, yet despite its complexity lacking nothing; thought is, in short, eminently thinkable. Diverging articulations of the meaning of thought prove the underlying unity. Brentano accepts the multiplicity; he has a plan for it: âis there not rather more unity where one begins with a multiplicity of assumptions, but where layer is securely placed upon layer, and the uniformity of style and coherence of all parts is skillfully preserved from top to bottom?â (159). The history of thought can be peeled away to reveal Aristotle, the skilled preserver who pioneered the layering of parts (in the soul) to engineer their coherence. After an afterlife of further layering, Brentano returns the parts to their proper strata.
Under the last layer, following this logic, lies the active intellect, the hen and haplos beneath the manageable complexity. No doubt it too is layered, encrusted with the false opinions of philologists and interpreters. The Aristotelian image of nous poiÄtikos is riddled with conceptual problems that Brentano sets out to simplify in a reading of De anima, perhaps better than Aristotle did or could possibly have done. Aristotle, after all, does not use the phrase âproductive thought,â nous poiÄtikos, which nonetheless came to represent his thought of thought for millennia, up to and including in Brentanoâs study.1
We will also start from a problem in Aristotleâs account of nous, although it doesnât seem to have become diverted or layered over with opinion, and so it may not be a problem in Brentanoâs sense. Like Brentano, we will return to a beginning in De anima, but instead of the lofty archÄ of a tradition that degenerates into extravagance after âthis thought,â Aristotleâs pure thought of actual thinking, ours will stop short at a trouble that might have prevented him from beginning. In the beginning there is the beginning of something that would arrest him, but it is not carried through. Aristotle addresses the arresting trouble in his treatise on the psuche, when he calls for an investigation into a peculiar disturbance in noÄsis. âOf not-always-thinking the cause must be investigatedâ (tou de mÄ aei noein to aition episkepteon) (De anima 430a5â6). An urgency sounds in this phrase, a fury to pinpoint a cause, and yet at the same time the strangeness and precariousness of the demand is also audible. With this sentence Aristotle enjoins us to find insight into the cause of an irregularity in the concept or experience of noÄsis. In the general order of the argument in this section of the text, the demand seems to come out of nowhere. Unlike other problÄmata or aporiai in the theory of nous, this one is not contextualized; it is not integrated into the network of psychic capacitiesâperception (aisthÄsis), comprehension (dianoia), imagination (phantasia), and intellection (noÄsis)ânor does it find a proper place in the ontological schemaâpotential/actual (dunamis/energeia)âthat operates here. A sign of the peculiar difficulty inherent in making this demand is its sudden appearance and its even more precipitous disappearance from the argument. Once the productive aspect of nous has been determined to be actual, one, apart, and unchanging, Aristotle forgets or ignores the demand just as abruptly as he announced it.
The demand hangs suspended without a response, and in this suspension, and suspense, questions arise: why would a thinking whose time signature was not always, mÄ aei, present itself to Aristotle as requiring, let alone being susceptible to, causal investigation? Why would it seem necessaryâas the suffix â-teonâ impliesâfor an inquiry into the intellectual aspect of the psuchÄ, which was in turn necessary to the logos of anthrĹpos? Moreover, how could the emphatically necessary investigation then come to be abandoned by this most rigorous of philosophers?
Aristotleâs Insatiable Demand
An understanding of non-attentional distraction could have been articulated in Ancient Greece; conditions were ripe. A strong theory of intellectual activity had developed in which nous, with theoria as its main mode and genre, had taken a stand against poetry and history, as well as, in another vein, against less centralizing modes of community. As its meaning changed and became fixed in texts by thinkers from Heraclitus to Aristotle, nous came to replace other principles for organizing cultural goods, while at the same time excluding and substituting for disorder and the lack of principles.2 Needless to say, only in retrospect do pre-noetic modes appear as lacking principle and as negations of order. Not-thinking is an accusation made within the agora of thought. After the demise of Mycenaean palace culture, at roughly the same time as scattered rural communities on the Greek peninsula began collecting into poleis, nous began its rise to prominence. Nous and polis have been seen as historically parallel centralizing, stabilizing, and ordering processes. In their own ways responding and contributing to the turning point between the so-called eighth-century renaissance when the Homeric poems were most likely recorded and the âgolden ageâ when the dalliance called philosophy came into its own, the two concepts provided guidelines for a novel commonality and predictability in anthropic things.
Alternative structures had been articulated, among other places, in the Homeric poems, although the consolidation of political community around something like a soul had already begun there. The wild caprices of the Olympian gods in the Iliad, for instance, are ultimately quashed by âThe Will of Zeus,â which transcends all other negotiations.3 When, a few centuries after the Homeric poems became codified, Heraclitus wrote that the unified intellectual principle (hen to sophon mounon) was âboth willing and unwilling to be known by the name Zeus,â he was commenting on a process, well underway, by which transcendence was falling out of fashion and was gradually being replaced with an immanent force or will, though the necessity for a divine will would never wane (Kirk and Raven #228). An internal will can be found at work in almost every scene of the Iliad, a plan sprung from the fatherâs head that renders mortal challenges moot. Achillesâ resistanceâto Agamemnon, to war in general, to the gods, as well as to his own finitude and fateâis but a reaction to the Zeus principle, the psychic principle of principles. In the codified texts left from the Homeric tradition the heroâs resistance becomes the medium through which the godsâ will exerts itself, crushing other forms of order and pointing the way toward a collectivity based on a central intellect that keeps the destiny of the group firmly in mind, despite the vicissitudes of experience.
An anecdote highlights the importance for Aristotle of nousâs independence from all that might change. His student Clearchus reports that Aristotle attended a public experiment in which nous was shown to be separable not only from the body but also from the rest of the psuchÄ. In the anecdote, someone strikes a reclining boy with a rod made for attracting souls (psuchoulkos rabdos). Upon being hit, the boyâs soul slips out of his body and comes to hover in a corner of the observation room. To the amazement of the onlookers who have gathered to witness the event, including Aristotle, when the soul is slipped back into him, the boy can report all that happened as though he had experienced it without interruption (Clearchus 11).4
Although the story is apocryphal and surely originates in a confusion about Aristotleâs desires in his study of the psuchÄ and its separable aspect, productive nous, on the part of a well-meaning but too empirically minded student, or perhaps on the part of Proclus, who records Clearchusâs anecdote, it is nevertheless striking. Through the veil of distortion produced by a student on one hand and a scholar on the other, the story lets a secret be communicated: the philosopherâs desire for direct experience of the highest aspect of thought. Throughout his natural-scientific investigations and even in his metaphysics, a direct view of the separability of nous eluded Aristotle. Unlike later generations of psychologists, the scientist did not think to experiment on himself; the subject here is a prostrate boy.5 In contrast to later schools of thoughtâCartesianism or phenomenology, sayâGreek âphilosophy of mindâ is acted out within a resolutely social milieu. Here, in contrast to Platoâs communal philosophizing, which proceeds by dialogue, the experimenter philosophizes with an instrument, the soul-attracting rod, which attracts psuchai not through erĹs, as the figure of the prostrate boy might otherwise suggest, but by a blow (plÄxas, âhaving struck himâ) (Clearchus 11). The philosophical quality of the soul-attracting rod seems to be the brusqueness with which it jars loose what only appears to be integrated into soul and body. The experimenterâs skill at moving psuchai around is also to be noted. It is Aristotleâs teaching, after all, that the intellectual part of the psuchÄ is actualized by the highest being, a god (Metaphysics 1072b19â30). He doesnât say in the Metaphysics, however, that violence is needed. In this anecdote, Clearchus confuses the empirical with the intelligible, confounding the inductive method of second philosophy with the deductive method of first philosophy. Or perhaps he is poking fun at the frustrated desire at the center of his teacherâs teaching: to be able to demonstrate with the certainty of the senses that nous is separable and immortal. The joke is on the student then, since it is not in the realm of phenomena that the difference of nous can be demonstrated. As soon as it became a phenomenon it would no longer be separable. Passed on in the anecdote, then, is the problem in Aristotleâs animating wish: he desires mastery over the special motion of nous, but he cannot demonstrate to himself that he has gained it.
Clearchusâs anecdote also reveals a peculiar quality, necessary in order for nous to be separable from the senses, from the other higher parts of the soul (such as imagination and the locomotive principle), and from phusis in general. If the psuchÄ is not mixed with physical life in any way it must have an unnatural motility of its own, different in kind from the locomotion it produces in bodies. Given Aristotleâs rejection of a âself-moving mover,â this motion would seem difficult to imagine. But the anecdote gives a clue. The peculiar movement of the psuchÄ is a movement without place, if place is thought of as physical location. In effect nous would have to be placeless, where being placeless meant nous could at any time slip away from these psychic locales, the senses, the imagination, the body, the world. To become master over this exceptional noetic motion is what it means, according to the anecdote, to be a philosopher. And indeed, the stunned boy recalls the process by which one comes to philosophy in the Aristotelian muthos. According to Metaphysics Î, a philosopher is the one susceptible to a blow of wonderâthaumazein (982b12â13), but also the one who can make use of this stunning blow to produce motion. Philosophizing moves the philosopher from potential to actual philosophizing, from trivial aporias to momentous ones (982b11â983a11). This anecdote, in contrast, goes further: the psuchÄ is struck out of place and is made to reveal its special movement.6 In this studentâs misreading or joke, a philosopherâs psuchÄ-moving rod, in one and the same blow, stuns a student, proves the separability, unity, and power of nous, and inadvertently gestures toward its innate slipperiness.
And yet the boyâs psuchÄ continues to process perceptions while he is out of his senses. Slipping away, in this tale, does not alter the ability of nous to function as the productive principle of thought. This is the exoteric teaching that survives in the anecdote. In his epilogue, Proclus remarks that the experiment convinced onlookers about the psuchÄâs independence from the body (Clearchus 11).7 And so, the philosopher has succeeded in demonstrating that, even when separated from the organs of experience, nous never stops noetizing. It operates continually, unchangingly, and forever, independent of circumstances.8 Whatever ephemeral forces appear to affect it belong to the body or the lower parts of the soul, and they only appear to affect it. Thus, on the surface, to be a philosopher means to demonstrate the total and continual disaffection of nous. No merely empirical violence can compel nous ...