Mind

Aristotle describes mind (nous, often also rendered as “intellect” or “reason”) as “the part of the soul by which it knows and understands” (De Anima iii 4, 429a9–10; cf. iii 3, 428a5; iii 9, 432b26; iii 12, 434b3), thus characterizing it in broadly functional terms. It is plain that humans can know and understand things; indeed, Aristotle supposes that it is our very nature to desire knowledge and understanding (Metaphysics i 1, 980a21; De Anima ii 3, 414b18; iii 3, 429a6–8). In this way, just as the having of sensory faculties is essential to being an animal, so the having of a mind is essential to being a human. Human minds do more than understand, however. It is equally essential to the human being to plan and deliberate, to ponder alternatives and strategize, and generally to chart courses of action. Aristotle ascribes these activities no less than understanding and contemplation to mind and consequently distinguishes the “practical mind” (or “practical intellect” or “practical reason”) from “theoretical mind” (or “theoretical intellect” or “theoretical reason”) ( Nicomachean Ethics vi 8 1143a35-b5; see Aristotle: ethics). In all these ways, investigating this capacity of soul thus has a special significance for Aristotle: in investigating mind, he is investigating what makes humans human.
His primary investigation of mind occurs in two chapters of De Anima, both of which are richly suggestive, but neither of which admits of easy or uncontroversial exposition. In De Anima iii 4 and 5, Aristotle approaches the nature of thinking by once again deploying a hylomorphic analysis, given in terms of form reception. Just as perception involves the reception of a sensible form by a suitably qualified sensory faculty, so thinking involves the reception of an intelligible form by a suitably qualified intellectual faculty (De Anima iii 4, 429a13–18). According to this model, thinking consists in a mind’s becoming enformed by some object of thought, so that actual thinking occurs whenever some suitably prepared mind is “made like” its object by being affected by it.
This hylomorphic analysis of thinking is evidently a simple extension of the general model of hylomorphic change exploited by Aristotle in a host of similar contexts. Accordingly, Aristotle’s initial account of thinking will directly parallel his analysis of perception (De Anima iii 4, 429a13–18). That is, at least in schematic outline, Aristotle will offer the following approach. For any given thinker S and an arbitrary object of thought O:

S thinks O if and only if: (i) S has the capacity requisite for receiving O’s intelligible form; (ii) O acts upon that capacity by enforming it; and, as a result, (iii) S’s relevant capacity becomes isomorphic with that form.

Unsurprisingly, the same questions which arose in the case of perception also arise here. Most immediately, to understand Aristotle’s approach to thinking, it is necessary to determine what it means to say that a thinker’s mind and its object become isomorphic.
Here, at least, Aristotle points out what is obvious, that when a thinker’s soul is made like its cognitive object, it does not become one with some hylomorphic compound, but with its form: “for it is not the stone which is in the soul, but its form” (De Anima iii 8, 431b29–432a1; cf. iii 4, 429a27). The suggestion is, then, that when S comes to think of a stone, as opposed to merely perceiving some particular stone, S has a faculty which is such that it can become one in form with that stone. Aristotle sometimes infers from this sort of consideration that thought is of universals, whereas perception is of particulars (De Anima ii 5, 417b23, Posterior Analytics i 31, 87b37–88a7), though he elsewhere will allow that we also have knowledge of individuals (De Anima ii 5, 417a29; Metaphysics xiii 10, 1087a20). These passages are not contradictory, since Aristotle may simply be emphasizing that thought tends to proceed at a higher level of generality than perception, because of its trading in comparatively abstract structural features of its objects. A person can think of what it is to be a stone, but cannot, in any direct and literal sense of the term, perceive this.
However that may be, Aristotle’s conception of thinking implicates him in supposing that thought involves grasping the structural features of the objects of thought. To take an initially favorable case, when thinking that tree frogs are oviparous, S will be in a psychic state whose internal structural states are, among other things, one in form with tree frogs. Since S’s soul does not become a tree frog when thinking of tree frogs (De Anima iii 8, 431b24–30), this form of isomorphism cannot be mere instantiation of the form being a tree frog. Rather, S’s mind will evidently be one in form with the tree frog, to revert to our earlier analogy, in something like the way a blueprint and the house of which it is the blueprint are one in form. There must be a determinate and expressible structural isomorphism, even though one could not say that the blueprint realizes the form of the house. Houses are, after all, necessarily three-dimensional.
For Aristotle, it is not a contingent state of affairs that S’s mind does not realize the form being a tree frog in the way that tree frogs themselves do. On the contrary, the mind cannot realize a broad range of forms: the mind is, according to Aristotle, not “mixed with the body”, insofar as it, unlike the perceptual faculty, lacks a bodily organ (De Anima iii 4, 429a24–7). As such, it would not be possible for the mind to realize the form of a house in the way bricks and mortar instantiate such a form: houses provide shelter, something a mind, so understood, cannot do. Consequently, when claiming that minds become isomorphic with their objects, Aristotle must understand the way in which minds become enformed as somehow attenuated or non-literal. Perhaps, though, this should be plain enough. If a mind thinks something by being made like it, then the way it is likened to what it thinks must be somehow representational. Consequently, Aristotle is reasonably understood as holding that S thinks some object of thought O wheneverS’s mind is made like that object by representing salient structural features of O by being directly isomorphic with them, without, that is, by simply realizing the form of O in the way O does.
This approach to the nature of thinking has some promising features. Both in its own terms and in virtue of its fitting into a broader pattern of explanation, Aristotle’s hylomorphic analysis merits serious consideration. At the same time, one of its virtues may appear also as a vice. We noted in discussing Aristotle’s hylomorphic analysis of change generally that his account requires the existence of suitably disposed subjects of change. Only surfaces can be affected so as to be changed in color. An action, such as Socrates’ becoming unnerved by a glance of Alcibiades, cannot be made white; it is simply not the appropriate sort of subject. So, hylomorphic change requires at least the following two components: (i) something pre-existing to be the patient of the change, and (ii) that thing’s being categorially suited to be changed in the way specified.
Already at the first stage, however, Aristotle’s application of this hylomorphic analysis of change to thinking may seem an over-extension. For he maintains directly that mind is “none of the things existing in actuality before thinking” (De Anima iii 4, 429a24). His reasons for maintaining this thesis are complex, but derive ultimately from the forms of plasticity Aristotle believes the mind must manifest if it is to be capable of thinking all things (De Anima iii 4, 429a18). Now, if the mind is indeed nothing in actuality before thinking, it is hard to understand how the hylomorphic analysis of change and affection could be brought to bear in this arena. If some dough is made cookie-shaped, it is actually dough before being so enformed; even the sense organs, when made like their objects, are actually existing organs before being affected by the objects of perception. So, given a conception of mind as not existing in actuality before thinking, it is hard to appreciate how thinking lends itself to an analysis in terms of any recognizable hylomorphic approach to change.
How great a problem this will be depends in part upon how entrenched Aristotle’s commitment to the mind’s being nothing in actuality before thinking turns out to be. It equally turns on how adaptable Aristotle’s hylomorphic account of change proves to be. On this latter point, Aristotle notes that according to his account, there are various different types of change and alteration, illustrated by the difference between a brown fence’s being painted white and a builder’s taking up his tools and beginning to build. In the first case, there is a destruction and a loss, of the fence’s original color; in the second case, nothing is destroyed, but rather that which is already dispositionally F becomes occurently F by engaging in some F-ish activity. A builder is as such already able to build. When he begins building he becomes fully and actually a builder for the duration of his working. In this way, he loses nothing, but instead realizes an already established potential.
This second type of change, which Aristotle maintains is the appropriate model for many psychic activities, is either “not an instance of alteration … or is a different kind of alteration,” where one “should not speak of being affected, unless there are two kinds of alteration” (De Anima ii 5, 417b6–16). Perhaps Aristotle’s position will then be that the mind, at least insofar as its cognitive capacities for thought are concerned, is simply such as to be enformed by any of an infinite range of objects of thought. This would involve its being nothing determinate in itself; and far from being anomalous for Aristotle, the mind would be in the cognitive realm precisely what the most basic stuff, if there is a most basic stuff, would be in the material realm. Both would manifest unconstrained plasticity; and so each would be characterized essentially in terms of their range of potentialities.

That said, it should be noticed that when it is detached from the idiosyncratic thesis that the mind is nothing in actuality before thinking, Aristotle’s hylomorphic analysis of thought retains whatever plausibility it may have independently. For the suggestion that thinking is to be understood at least partially in terms of isomorphisms between our representational capacities and the objects of our cognition has had, for good reason, a durable appeal. To the degree that hylomorphism is generally defensible, then, its application in this domain provides a theoretically rich framework for investigating the nature of thought.

اقتباس :: Supplement: The Active Mind of De Anima iii 5

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