Life After Death_ A History of the Afterlife in Western Religion - Alan Segal [145]
To a certain extent Aristotle continued Plato’s dualism. In his De Anima, for example, Aristotle assents to a number of Plato’s notions. The body is to the mind as matter is to form. The soul is still the principle of life. It is, however, inseparable from the body as bodies are primary and their forms or ideas are secondary, to be perceived by us by our senses. The body provides a context for the intellect to develop. The mind has the potentiality of thought, and perception turns it to actuality. The nous, the intelligence, is therefore the process of turning the potentiality of the mind into actuality. Aristotle’s notion of potentiality and actuality is another innovation.
The object also has primary actuality in the world. This, for Aristotle, was the same as saying that the principle of the perceived thing comes to subsist in the person’s intellect because it existed elsewhere initially. The idea of the object is the same as the object as it resides in the mind; it is the same as the essence of the object, which only exists in the object itself. Since actuality is ranked higher than potentiality, actual knowledge must first subsist in an active intellect, which is a divine not a human quality.
As a result, Aristotle had a clearer idea of what individuality is but, by the same token, a healthier skepticism about what immortality could mean for any specific individual. We participate in divine processes when we think, so thinking demonstrates that there is intellect in the world. But that does not mean we are immortal. And thus, Aristotle’s philosophy is easier for demonstrating the existence of a God; but Plato is easier for demonstrating the immortality of the soul.
That virtually assures that later religious commentators would combine Aristotelian with Platonic thinking and come up with a system that was friendly to the notions of God and immortality. The meaning of “Active Intellect” puzzled Aristotelian commentators for a millennium. Aristotle did not offer a precise definition. Many commentators, such as Alexander of Aphrodisias (flor. ca. 220 CE), thought that the Active Intellect was God. If not God, it would have to be one of a series of God’s emanations. Other religious, medieval commentators—Al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and Maimonides—thought that the Active Intellect was the angelic intelligence that governed the sublunar sphere from the moon, and that, therefore, it was the Active Intellect which also conveyed prophecy (now an intellectual process) to the true prophets. But, for Aristotle, the Unmoved Mover was named god. The nous remained divine in a more extended sense.
For one thing, how the extramental Active Intellect could relate to the active aspect of thinking is not clear. Aristotle, for instance, seems to have thought that memory and loving and hating perish at death. Although a person’s acquired intellect survives death, memory does not (it inheres to the body), and therefore the soul retains nothing personal of its existence in matter. Immortality is a property of the Active Intellect, mind (nous) itself, which is a transcendant value. Perhaps then, Aristotle regarded the Active Intellect as a principle which is identical in all humanity, an Intelligence that enters into an individual and functions within him or her, and that survives the death of the individual. The individual soul does not survive in personal form.48
Nous had a kind of divinity for Aristotle and, perhaps, it is equivalent to the Unmoved Mover, as it is a perfect, active, actual intelligence, in contrast to our purely personal, receptive, imperfect one. While the soul and its intelligence are immortal and transcendent and while we can return to our divine source in the nous, personal immortality is even less possible in the Aristotelian system than in the Platonic one. It is probably this