Nous

1. Nous

Nous (νοῦς), sometimes equated to intellect or intelligence, is a term from classical philosophy for the faculty of the human mind necessary for understanding what is true or real.

English words such as understanding are sometimes used, but 3 commonly used philosophical terms come directly from classical languages: νοῦς or νόος (from Ancient Greek), intellēctus and intellegentia (from Latin).

To describe the activity of this faculty, the word intellection is sometimes used in philosophical contexts, as well as the Greek words noēsis and noein (νόησις, νοεῖν).

This activity is understood in a similar way (at least in some contexts) to the modern concept of intuition.

In philosophy, common English translations include understanding and mind; or sometimes thought or reason (in the sense of that which reasons, not the activity of reasoning).

It is also often described as something equivalent to perception except that it works within the mind (the mind's eye).

It has been suggested that the basic meaning is something like awareness.

In colloquial British English, nous also denotes good sense, which is close to one everyday meaning it had in Ancient Greece.

In Aristotle's influential works, the term was carefully distinguished from sense perception, imagination, and reason, although these terms are closely inter-related.

The term was apparently already singled out by earlier philosophers such as Parmenides, whose works are largely lost.

In post-Aristotelian discussions, the exact boundaries between perception, understanding of perception, and reasoning have not always agreed with the definitions of Aristotle, even though his terminology remains influential.

In the Aristotelian scheme, nous is the basic understanding or awareness that allows human beings to think rationally.

For Aristotle, this was distinct from the processing of sensory perception, including the use of imagination and memory, which other animals can do.

This therefore connects discussion of nous to discussion of how the human mind sets definitions in a consistent and communicable way,

and whether people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same universal categories in the same logical ways.

Deriving from this it was also sometimes argued, especially in classical and medieval philosophy, that the individual nous must require help of a spiritual and divine type.

By this type of account, it came to be argued that the human understanding (nous) somehow stems from this cosmic nous, which is however not just a recipient of order, but a creator of it.

Such explanations were influential in the development of medieval accounts of God, the immortality of the soul, and even the motions of the stars,

in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, amongst both eclectic philosophers and authors representing all the major faiths of their times.

2. Pre-Socratic usage

In early Greek uses, Homer used nous to signify mental activities of both mortals and immortals, for example what they really have on their mind as opposed to what they say aloud.

It was one of several words related to thought, thinking, and perceiving with the mind.

In pre-Socratic philosophy, it became increasingly distinguished as a source of knowledge and reasoning opposed to mere sense perception or thinking influenced by the body such as emotion.

For example, Heraclitus complained that much learning does not teach nous.

Among some Greek authors, a faculty of intelligence known as a higher mind came to be considered as a property of the cosmos as a whole.

The work of Parmenides set the scene for Greek philosophy to come and the concept of nous was central to his radical proposals.

He claimed that reality as perceived by the senses alone is not a world of truth at all, because sense perception is so unreliable, and what is perceived is so uncertain and changeable.

Instead he argued for a dualism wherein nous and related words describe another form of perception which is not physical, but intellectual only, distinct from sense perception and the objects of sense perception.

Anaxagoras, born about 500 BC, is the first person who is definitely known to have explained the concept of nous (mind),

which arranged all other things in the cosmos in their proper order, started them in a rotating motion, and continuing to control them to some extent, having an especially strong connection with living things.

Amongst the pre-Socratic philosophers before Anaxagoras, other philosophers had proposed a similar ordering human-like principle causing life and the rotation of the heavens.

For example, Empedocles, like Hesiod much earlier, described cosmic order and living things as caused by a cosmic version of love, and Pythagoras and Heraclitus, attributed the cosmos with reason (logos).

According to Anaxagoras the cosmos is made of infinitely divisible matter, every bit of which can inherently become anything, except Mind (nous),

which is also matter, but which can only be found separated from this general mixture, or else mixed into living things, or in other words in the Greek terminology of the time, things with a soul (psychē).

Anaxagoras wrote:

Concerning cosmology, Anaxagoras, like some Greek philosophers already before him, believed the cosmos was revolving, and had formed into its visible order as a result of such revolving causing a separating and mixing of different types of chemical elements.

Nous, in his system, originally caused this revolving motion to start, but it does not necessarily continue to play a role once the mechanical motion has started.

His description was in other words (shockingly for the time) corporeal or mechanical, with the moon made of earth, the sun and stars made of red hot metal (beliefs Socrates was later accused of holding during his trial)

and nous itself being a physically fine type of matter which also gathered and concentrated with the development of the cosmos.

This nous (mind) is not incorporeal; it is the thinnest of all things.

The distinction between nous and other things nevertheless causes his scheme to sometimes be described as a peculiar kind of dualism.

Anaxagoras' concept of nous was distinct from later Platonic and Neo-Platonic cosmologies in many ways, which were also influenced by Eleatic, Pythagorean and other pre-Socratic ideas, as well as the Socratics themselves.

In some schools of Hindu philosophy, a higher mind came to be considered a property of the cosmos as a whole that exists within all matter (known as buddhi or mahat):

In Saṁkhyā, this faculty of intellect (buddhi) serves to differentiate matter (prakṛti) from pure consciousness (Puruṣa).

The lower aspect of mind that corresponds to the senses is referred to as manas.

Socratic philosophy

3. Xenophon

Xenophon, the less famous of the 2 students of Socrates whose written accounts of him have survived, recorded that he taught his students a kind of teleological justification of piety and respect for divine order in nature.

This has been described as an intelligent design argument for the existence of God, in which nature has its own nous.

For example, in his Memorabilia 1.4.8, he describes Socrates asking a friend sceptical of religion,

Later in the same discussion he compares the nous, which directs each person's body, to the good sense (phronēsis) of the God, which is in everything, arranging things to its pleasure (1.4.17).

Plato describes Socrates making the same argument in his Philebus 28d, using the same words nous and phronēsis.

4. Plato

Plato used the word nous in many ways that were not unusual in the daily Greek of the time, and often simply meant good sense or awareness.

On the other hand, in some of his Platonic dialogues it is described by key characters in a higher sense, which was apparently already common.

In his Philebus 28c he has Socrates say that:

- and later states that the ensuing discussion confirms the utterances of those who declared of old that mind (nous) always rules the universe.

In his Cratylus, Plato gives the etymology of Athena's name, the goddess of wisdom, from Atheonóa (Ἀθεονόα) meaning God's (theos) mind (nous).

In his Phaedo, Plato's teacher Socrates is made to say just before dying that his discovery of Anaxagoras' concept of a Cosmic Nous as the cause of the order of things, was an important turning point for him.

But he also expressed disagreement with Anaxagoras' understanding of the implications of his own doctrine, because of Anaxagoras' materialist understanding of causation.

Socrates said that Anaxagoras would give voice and air and hearing and countless other things of the sort as causes for our talking with each other, and should fail to mention the real causes, which are, that the Athenians decided that it was best to condemn me.

On the other hand, Socrates seems to suggest that he also failed to develop a fully satisfactory teleological and dualistic understanding of a mind of nature, whose aims represent the Good, which all parts of nature aim at.

Concerning the nous that is the source of understanding of individuals, Plato is widely understood to have used ideas from Parmenides in addition to Anaxagoras.

Like Parmenides, Plato argued that relying on sense perception can never lead to true knowledge, only opinion.

Instead, Plato's more philosophical characters argue that nous must somehow perceive Truth directly in the ways Gods and Daimons perceive.

What our mind sees directly in order to really understand things must not be the constantly changing material things, but unchanging entities that exist in a different way, the so-called forms or ideas.

However he knew that contemporary philosophers often argued (as in modern science) that nous and perception are just 2 aspects of one physical activity, and that perception is the source of knowledge and understanding (not the other way around).

Just exactly how Plato believed that the nous of people lets them come to understand things in any way that improves upon sense perception and the kind of thinking which animals have, is a subject of long running discussion and debate.

On the one hand, in the Republic Plato's Socrates, in the Analogy of the Sun and Allegory of the Cave describes people as being able to perceive more clearly because of something from outside themselves, something like when the Sun shines, helping eyesight.

The source of this illumination for the intellect is referred to as the Form of the Good.

On the other hand, in the Meno for example, Plato's Socrates explains the theory of anamnesis whereby people are born with ideas already in their soul, which they somehow remember from previous lives.

Both theories were to become highly influential.

As in Xenophon, Plato's Socrates frequently describes the Soul in a political way, with ruling parts, and parts that are by nature meant to be ruled.

Nous is associated with the rational (logistikon) part of the individual human Soul, which by nature should rule.

In his Republic, in the so-called analogy of the divided line, it has a special function within this rational part.

Plato tended to treat nous as the only immortal part of the soul.

Concerning the cosmos, in the Timaeus, the title character also tells a likely story in which nous is responsible for the creative work of the demiurge or maker who brought rational order to our universe.

This craftsman imitated what he perceived in the world of eternal Forms.

In the Philebus Socrates argues that nous in individual humans must share in a Cosmic Nous, in the same way that human bodies are made up of small parts of the elements found in the rest of the universe.

And this nous must be in the genos of being a cause of all particular things as particular things.

5. Aristotle

Like Plato, Aristotle saw the nous or intellect of an individual as somehow similar to sense perception but also distinct.

Sense perception in action provides images to the nous, via the sensus communis and imagination, without which thought could not occur.

But other animals have sensus communis and imagination, whereas none of them have nous.

Aristotelians divide perception of forms into the animal-like one which perceives species sensibilis or sensible forms, and species intelligibilis that are perceived in a different way by the nous.

Like Plato, Aristotle linked nous to logos (reason) as uniquely human, but he also distinguished nous from logos, thereby distinguishing the faculty for setting definitions from the faculty that uses them to reason with.

In his Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI Aristotle divides the Soul (psychē) into 2 parts, one which has reason and one which does not,

but then divides the part which has Reason into the reasoning (logistikos) part itself which is lower, and the higher knowing (epistēmonikos) part which contemplates general principles (archai).

Nous, he states, is the source of the first principles or sources (archai) of definitions, and it develops naturally as people gain experience.

This he explains after first comparing the 4 other truth revealing capacities of soul:

All of these others apart from nous are types of reason (logos).

And intellect (nous) is directed at what is ultimate on both sides, since it is intellect and not reason (logos) that is directed at both the first terms (horoi) and the ultimate particulars,

on the one side at the changeless first terms in demonstrations, and on the other side, in thinking about action, at the other sort of premise, the variable particular;

for these particulars are the sources (archai) from which one discerns that for the sake of which an action is, since the universals are derived from the particulars.

Hence intellect is both a beginning and an end, since the demonstrations that are derived from these particulars are also about these. And of these one must have perception, and this perception is intellect.

Aristotle's philosophical works continue many of the same Socratic themes as his teacher Plato.

Amongst the new proposals he made was a way of explaining causality, and nous is an important part of his explanation.

As mentioned above, Plato criticized Anaxagoras' materialism, or understanding that the intellect of nature only set the cosmos in motion, but is no longer seen as the cause of physical events.

Aristotle explained that the changes of things can be described in terms of 4 causes at the same time:

2 of these 4 causes are similar to the materialist understanding:

Each thing has a material which causes it to be how it is, and some other thing which set in motion or initiated some process of change.

But at the same time according to Aristotle each thing is also caused by the natural forms they are tending to become, and the natural ends or aims, which somehow exist in nature as causes, even in cases where human plans and aims are not involved.

These latter 2 causes (the formal and final) encompass the continuous effect of the intelligent ordering principle of nature itself.

Aristotle's special description of causality is especially apparent in the natural development of living things:

It leads to a method whereby Aristotle analyses causation and motion in terms of the potentialities and actualities of all things,

whereby all matter possesses various possibilities or potentialities of form and end, and these possibilities become more fully real as their potential forms become actual or active reality (something they will do on their own, by nature, unless stopped because of other natural things happening).

For example, a stone has in its nature the potentiality of falling to the earth and it will do so, and actualize this natural tendency, if nothing is in the way.

Aristotle analysed thinking in the same way:

For him, the possibility of understanding rests on the relationship between intellect and sense perception.

Aristotle's remarks on the concept of what came to be called the active intellect and passive intellect (along with various other terms) are amongst the most intensely studied sentences in the history of philosophy.

The terms are derived from a single passage in Aristotle's De Anima, Book III.

Following is the translation of one of those passages with some key Greek words shown in brackets:

The passage tries to explain how the human intellect passes from its original state, in which it does not think, to a subsequent state, in which it does according to his distinction between potentiality and actuality.

Aristotle says that the passive intellect receives the intelligible forms of things,

but that the active intellect is required to make the potential knowledge into actual knowledge, in the same way that light makes potential colours into actual colours.

The passage is often read together with Metaphysics, Book XII, ch.7-10,

where Aristotle makes nous as an actuality a central subject within a discussion of the cause of being and the cosmos.

In that book, Aristotle equates active nous, when people think and their nous becomes what they think about, with the unmoved mover of the universe, and God:

Alexander of Aphrodisias, for example, equated this active intellect which is God with the one explained in De Anima, while Themistius thought they could not be simply equated.

Like Plato before him, Aristotle believes Anaxagoras' cosmic nous implies and requires the cosmos to have intentions or ends:

Anaxagoras makes the Good a principle as causing motion; for Mind (nous) moves things, but moves them for some end, and therefore there must be some other Good—unless it is as we say; for on our view the art of medicine is in a sense health.

In the philosophy of Aristotle the soul (psyche) of a body is what makes it alive, and is its actualized form; thus, every living thing, including plant life, has a soul.

The mind or intellect (nous) can be described variously as a power, faculty, part, or aspect of the human soul.

For Aristotle, soul and nous are not the same:

He did not rule out the possibility that nous might survive without the rest of the soul, as in Plato, but he specifically says that this immortal nous does not include any memories or anything else specific to an individual's life.

In his Generation of Animals Aristotle specifically says that while other parts of the soul come from the parents, physically,

the human nous, must come from outside, into the body, because it is divine or godly, and it has nothing in common with the energeia of the body.

This was yet another passage which Alexander of Aphrodisias would link to those mentioned above from De Anima and the Metaphysics in order to understand Aristotle's intentions.

6. Post Aristotelian

Until the early modern era, much of the discussion which has survived today concerning nous or intellect, in Europe, Africa and the Middle East, concerned how to correctly interpret Aristotle and Plato.

However, at least during the classical period, materialist philosophies, more similar to modern science, such as Epicureanism, were still relatively common also.

The Epicureans believed that the bodily senses themselves were not the cause of error, but the interpretations can be. The term prolepsis was used by Epicureans to describe the way the mind forms general concepts from sense perceptions.

To the Stoics, more like Heraclitus than Anaxagoras, order in the cosmos comes from an entity called logos, the Cosmic Reason.

But as in Anaxagoras this Cosmic Reason, like human reason but higher, is connected to the reason of individual humans.

The Stoics however, did not invoke incorporeal causation, but attempted to explain physics and human thinking in terms of matter and forces.

As in Aristotelianism, they explained the interpretation of sense data requiring the mind to be stamped or formed with ideas, and that people have shared conceptions that help them make sense of things (koine ennoia).

Nous for them is soul somehow disposed, the soul being somehow disposed pneuma, which is fire or air or a mixture.

As in Plato, they treated nous as the ruling part of the soul.

Plutarch criticized the Stoic idea of nous being corporeal, and agreed with Plato that the soul is more divine than the body while nous (mind) is more divine than the soul.

The mix of soul and body produces pleasure and pain; the conjunction of mind and soul produces reason which is the cause or the source of virtue and vice. (From: On the Face in the Moon)

Albinus was one of the earliest authors to equate Aristotle's nous as prime mover of the Universe, with Plato's Form of the Good.

7. Alexander of Aphrodisias

Alexander of Aphrodisias was a Peripatetic (Aristotelian) and his On the Soul (referred to as De anima in its traditional Latin title), explained that by his interpretation of Aristotle,

potential intellect in man, that which has no nature but receives one from the active intellect, is material, and also called the material intellect (nous hulikos) and it is inseparable from the body, being only a disposition of it.

He argued strongly against the doctrine of immortality.

On the other hand, he identified the active intellect (nous poietikos),

through whose agency the potential intellect in man becomes actual, not with anything from within people, but with the Divine Creator itself.

In the early Renaissance his doctrine of the soul's mortality was adopted by Pietro Pomponazzi against the Thomists and the Averroists:

For him, the only possible human immortality is an immortality of a detached human thought, more specifically when the nous has as the object of its thought the active intellect itself, or another incorporeal intelligible form.

Alexander was also responsible for influencing the development of several more technical terms concerning the intellect, which became very influential amongst the great Islamic philosophers, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes.

The intellect in habitu is a stage in which the human intellect has taken possession of a repertoire of thoughts, and so is potentially able to think those thoughts, but is not yet thinking these thoughts.

The intellect from outside, which became the acquired intellect in Islamic philosophy, describes the incorporeal active intellect which comes from outside man, and becomes an object of thought, making the material intellect actual and active.

This term may have come from a particularly expressive translation of Alexander into Arabic. Plotinus also used such a term.

In any case, in Al-Farabi and Avicenna, the term took on a new meaning, distinguishing it from the active intellect in any simple sense - an ultimate stage of the human intellect where a kind of close relationship (a conjunction) is made between a person's active intellect and the transcendental nous itself.

8. Themistius

Themistius, another influential commentator on this matter, understood Aristotle differently, stating that the passive or material intellect does not employ a bodily organ for its activity, is wholly unmixed with the body, impassive, and separate (from matter).

This means the human potential intellect, and not only the active intellect, is an incorporeal substance, or a disposition of incorporeal substance.

For Themistius, the human soul becomes immortal as soon as the active intellect intertwines with it at the outset of human thought.

This understanding of the intellect was also very influential for Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, and virtually all Islamic and Jewish philosophers.

On the other hand, concerning the active intellect, like Alexander and Plotinus, he saw this as a transcendent being existing above and outside man.

Differently from Alexander, he did not equate this being with the first cause of the Universe itself, but something lower. However he equated it with Plato's Idea of the Good.

9. Plotinus & Neo-Platonism

Of the later Greek and Roman writers Plotinus, the initiator of Neo-Platonism, is particularly significant.

Like Alexander of Aphrodisias and Themistius, he saw himself as a commentator explaining the doctrines of Plato and Aristotle.

But in his Enneads he went further than those authors, often working from passages which had been presented more tentatively, possibly inspired partly by earlier authors such as the Neo-Pythagorean Numenius of Apamea.

Neo-Platonism provided a major inspiration to discussion concerning the intellect in late classical and medieval philosophy, theology and cosmology.

In Neo-Platonism there exists several levels or hypostases of being, including the natural and visible world as a lower part.

1) The Monad or the One sometimes also described as the Good, based on the concept as it is found in Plato. This is the Potentiality of existence. It causes the other levels by emanation.

2) The Nous (usually translated as Intellect or Intelligence in this context, or sometimes mind or reason) is described as God, or more precisely an image of God, often referred to as the Demiurge.

It thinks its own contents, which are thoughts, equated to the Platonic ideas or forms (eide). The thinking of this Intellect is the highest activity of life. The actualization (energeia) of this thinking is the being of the forms.

This Intellect is the first principle or foundation of existence.

The One is prior to it, but not in the sense that a normal cause is prior to an effect, but instead Intellect is called an emanation of the One. The One is the possibility of this foundation of existence.

3) Soul (psychē). The soul is also an energeia: it acts upon or actualizes its own thoughts and creates a separate, material cosmos that is the living image of the spiritual or noetic Cosmos contained as a unified thought within the Intelligence.

So it is the soul which perceives things in nature physically, which it understands to be reality.

Soul in Plotinus plays a role similar to the potential intellect in Aristotelian terminology.

4) Lowest is matter.

This was based largely upon Plotinus' reading of Plato, but also incorporated many Aristotelian concepts, including the unmoved mover as energeia.

They also incorporated a theory of anamnesis, or knowledge coming from the past lives of our immortal souls, like that found in some of Plato's dialogues.

Later Platonists distinguished a hierarchy of 3 separate manifestations of nous, like Numenius of Apamea had.

Notable later Neo-Platonists include Porphyry and Proclus.