Gersonides offers a thoroughly Aristotelian conception of the human soul and of its capacity for immortality, but one that also stands in stark contrast to the views of other latter-day Aristotelians, such as Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroes. The topic of the immortality of the soul is of supreme importance for Gersonides, for upon it depends not just the metaphysical fate of the soul, but also human happiness and well-being - and not only in the afterlife, but in this life as well.
Gersonides begins his discussion by singling out that part of the soul that is the prime candidate for immortality. The soul is composed both of parts that use the body in their functioning (such as sensibility and imagination) and of pure intellect. That part of the soul that does depend on the body - and, in particular, the senses and the imaginative faculty - for its operations is called the material intellect. The material intellect is pure potentiality, the bare capacity for thought. Like all potentialities, it must reside in a subject; it cannot be a substance in its own right. Gersonides argues at length against the view that the subject of this disposition is a soul understood as an incorporeal substance distinct from the body. If such were the case, the disposition would belong to an actual intellect - a form - and would not have any potentialities. In fact, the material intellect is a disposition of the body (with ‘‘body’’ understood in Aristotelian terms as a substance composed of both matter and form). It is a capacity or potentiality that the animated human body has, because it is informed by the soul and its faculty of imagination, to contribute to the acquisition of knowledge through the mediation of sensation. It is basically the living human organism’s capacity to transform sensory input into knowledge. The material intellect is also, therefore, along with the body, corruptible and mortal - it comes to an end with a person’s physical death.
Left to its own devices, the material intellect will not generate knowledge. True knowledge is the intellectual grasp of abstract, universal truths - it is conceptual in nature, not sensory - and the unaided material intellect can receive only the images of particular things. The senses and the imagination give us only limited access to individual objects in the world around us. What supplements the material intellect and makes it possible for a knower to transcend this acquaintance with particulars and apprehend more general things - such as essences, mathematical truths, and natural laws - is what Gersonides calls the Agent Intellect. Understanding just how this higher intellect functions requires a brief excursion into the cosmos itself.
In the medieval Aristotelian cosmology that Gersonides inherits, the universe is a series of concentric material spheres. On most accounts, there is, first, an outermost sphere encompassing the universe as a whole; its turning initiates the motions of the inner spheres. Gersonides himself, however, rejects such a starless sphere undergoing diurnal motion. For him, the outermost sphere of the universe is the sphere holding the fixed stars. Within this sphere lie the other spheres that, in their perpetual circular motion, each carry around either one of the five known planets, the sun, or the moon. At the center of the universe, within the innermost sphere of the moon, stands the earth itself. The spheres are animate beings. Like all substances, they are constituted out of matter and form. They are also, therefore, intelligent, ensouled beings, and their motion is explained in part by their desire and volition.
Associated with each sphere, but distinct from it, is a separate intellect. This is the immaterial spirit or incorporeal intelligence that governs that sphere. It needs to be distinguished from the indwelling soul that animates each sphere. In fact, the separate intellect is that whose perfection each sphere’s indwelling soul desires to emulate. Each separate intellect explains (again, only in part) the motion of its corresponding sphere (as the desire to emulate a perfect being gives rise to circular - that is, perfect - motion) and the arrangement of its contents. All of the separate intellects flow from God, and serve as God’s intermediaries for the spheres they govern.
The separate intellect governing the sublunary realm - that is, the earth and the phenomena that lie between the earth and the moon - is called the Agent (or Active) Intellect. This eternal and incorporeal soul plays two roles in the world. First, it is causally responsible for all of the physical phenomena in nature: their natures, their arrangements and sequences, their interactions, and especially the laws that govern these. While God is the remote and ultimate cause of everything in the sublunar realm, the more proximate agent (and working on God’s behalf) is the Agent Intellect. It is the agent responsible for the existence of things in the sublunar world: primarily by being the generative source of all the forms constituting natural things, but also by being the cause of the order and hierarchy of things, as well as of the general course of nature. The Agent Intellect actively governs the dynamics of the natural world.
Because the Agent Intellect is an intelligent cause, it possesses full knowledge - the maker’s knowledge - of the order it imposes on things in the world. The Agent Intellect contains the concepts of all beings, organized comprehensively and systematically, such that the totality of what the Agent Intellect knows constitutes an exhaustive body of science. Its knowledge is a kind of complete and archetypal blueprint for the world it governs. Gersonides, in fact, calls it ‘‘the rational order of the terrestrial world,’’ although its science also includes knowledge of all celestial phenomena as well. It is an eternal and incorruptible order, in contrast to the changing, corruptible, and temporal ordering of things and events that instantiate and dynamically exemplifies it. This knowledge in the Agent Intellect exists in ‘‘a perfect and unified manner.’’
The second role played by the Agent Intellect is epistemological, related to human knowledge. It is a role made possible, in fact, by its first role as intelligent cause. The Agent Intellect is responsible for illuminating human minds and generating human cognition of the general concepts of things and of universal truths, that is, true science. Because of the intellectual union between the human intellect and this higher, separate intellect, the potential of the material intellect can be actualized and the human being can acquire a knowledge of things that goes beyond mere sensory acquaintance through particular images. The world, in effect, becomes intelligible to the human intellect via the Agent Intellect. If knowledge is the apprehension of the forms of things, the grasp of their essential and general features, then what the Agent Intellect does is, through its own knowledge of the forms, cause the human intellect’s understanding of them.
The forms of things are just their general natures. The general nature of horse is in every horse. Through repeated sensory perception, through the reception of particular images in the imaginative faculty of the material intellect, the intellect (moved by the Agent Intellect) can abstract from the particularities that distinguish one specific sensible encounter with an object of a certain kind from another of the same kind and reach an understanding of that common nature. After seeing a number ofhorses, one comes to understand what a horse is essentially. The Agent Intellect makes this process possible by illuminating the human intellect with that eternal order it contains; it informs the human intellect with the general knowledge required for it to make intelligible sense of sensible particulars.
What we are ultimately after is, in fact, not just the essence of this or that particular kind of being. Part of what is contained in a nature is a set of functions that will allow one to see a thing in all of its intrinsic and relational characters. What we truly seek is a complete and unified system of such truths. The real object of knowledge for a human being is the intelligible order of things as contained within the Agent Intellect. Because this order is eternal, universal, and immutable, it exclusively possesses the characteristic features of true knowledge. This, then, is how the human mind - initially limited by its union with a material body - moves past sensible cognition via images to the apprehension of the intelligibles, of the forms of things without their matter. Through this process, aided by the intelligent cause of the world’s order, the human mind comes to an understanding of the true order of the world. Its knowledge grows, in fact, to mirror (as much as possible for human beings) the knowledge that is in the Agent Intellect itself.
The result of all of this in the knower - the cognition of the very order inherent in the Agent Intellect - is what Gersonides calls the acquired intellect. Gersonides notes,
Of the material intellect brought about by the Agent
Intellect (Wars of the Lord [Wars], Book I.11, Gersonides
1984:212-213).
The acquired intellect is a body of conceptual knowledge. It is an intellectual attainment on the part of the knower; it just is that person’s knowledge of eternal truths. Because it is only a partial grasp of a larger whole, and a not entirely systematic one at that, the acquired intellect is not identical with the knowledge in the Agent Intellect itself. But the content of the acquired intellect reflects to some degree the knowledge in that higher spirit. What is immortal in a human being, for Gersonides, is nothing beyond the acquired intellect. Despite the fact that the acquired intellect is generated in us, it does not follow that it is corruptible; Gersonides rejects Aristotle’s claim that everything generated is corruptible. Because the rational order of the world in the Agent Intellect is eternal and incorruptible, our knowledge of that order (once it is acquired) must likewise be eternal and incorruptible, since knowledge takes its character from the object known. Moreover, he argues, the acquired intellect (unlike the material intellect) is both immaterial and separable from the body, and thus not subject to the forces that destroy the body. Hence, he concludes, the acquired intellect is immortal. When a person dies, the soul understood as the material intellect ceases along with the body. As a result, all further acquisition of knowledge necessarily comes to an end as well. But the acquired intellect remains. The immortality available to any human being consists only in this persistence, after the death of the body, of the knowledge that he or she has acquired in this lifetime.
To his contemporaries, Gersonides must have seemed to be treading perilously close to - if not right into to the eye of - the Averroist storm. Among the Arabic
Aristotelian’s greatest sins, at least in the eyes of his Christian critics, was the denial of an individual, personal immortality. Averroes had argued that the material intellect in a human being is not a particular product of the union of a body (matter) and an individual soul (form), but rather simply the manifestation in that person of the single, all-embracing Agent Intellect. Thus, a person’s soul - the form animating his body - is nothing but the Agent Intellect itself; and his cognitive powers and achievements are simply the direct activity in him of that higher intellect, which actualizes certain potentialities in his body. All human beings, that is, literally share the same form - the Agent Intellect is common to them all. And a person thinks only because of his union or conjunction with the Agent Intellect and the intelligibles it contains. Although in itself general, the Agent Intellect undergoes a temporary process of individuation when it is attached to and embodied in an individual human being in a lifetime. But since the Agent Intellect is, in truth, one, and thus the same in and for all individuals, when a person dies all such individuation acquired through the body disappears and his soul reverts back to its transcendent, separate, impersonal existence as the pure Agent Intellect. There is no personal immortality for Averroes.
Gersonides is aware of the philosophical problems here. For example, if all human beings literally share the same intellect, he argues, then how can we account for the different intellectual attainments of different people? But of even greater importance, it seems, are the religious and theological objections he has in mind. As Gersonides goes to great lengths to distinguish his own view of the soul from that of Averroes, he concentrates especially on the issue of personal immortality. If the human intellect is really nothing but the Agent Intellect, then immortality is of no practical value or moral consequence. For, he suggests, it would follow that all human beings, whatever their character or virtue - ‘‘be he fool or sage,’’ good or evil - will, because they literally share the same eternal soul, obtain this alleged immortality. Moreover, if immortality is indeed a totally impersonal affair, as Averroes claims, then it can have no relevance for our very particular lives. Gersonides believes that his doctrine of personal immortality avoids these problems. Each person’s acquired intellect is, he argues, a unity, numerically one, and thus can be distinguished - without any reference to the body at all - from other acquired intellects, even if those intellects have some knowledge in common.
Simon yet differ in them insofar as the kind of unity differs
In them; so that, for example, the unity in the acquired
Intellect of Reuben differs from the unity in the acquired
Intellect of Simon (Wars I.13, Gersonides 1984:224).
What gives each acquired intellect its unity and identity is both the amount of knowledge it involves and the content or character of that knowledge - not just its items, but also the way they are connected or synthesized. Different people acquire different, and different amounts of, intellectual knowledge. This will presumably allow one disembodied acquired intellect to be distinguished from another. And Gersonides seems to think that a sense of selfhood will accompany this unity. He speaks of the happiness and pleasure that the immortal soul will feel when, having been released from the body, it will contemplate the knowledge it acquired during its temporal, embodied existence.
World History
