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[i.e., perishable], and, in its substance, is action. . .
. And in its separated state, it is just
what it is, and this alone is always immortal. And there is no memory, because [this agent
intellect] is not passible, and the passible intellect is corruptible, and without it [i.e., the
agent intellect] nothing is understood.
14
In another work, in the context of discussing conception and fetal development,
Aristotle noted that the vegetative soul, having existed potentially in semen, comes
into being actually when it provides the vital heat to matter supplied by the mother.
15
He there wrote that the sensitive soul, having existed potentially in the vegetative
soul, comes into being actually in a similar way. He ended by noting that the
intellective or rational soul cannot have been generated internally. “It remains,” he
said, “that the intellect alone should come from without, and that it alone be
divine.” In the rational soul, he claimed, there is a power of acting and a power of
being acted upon, the former of which—the agent or active intellect—is
ungenerated and incorruptible.
Thus, in many interpretations of Aristotle, the agent-intellect, or nous, preex-
ists its associated body and is immortal.
16
Yet, even if nous is immortal, it is not a
good vehicle for personal immortality. This is because, in Aristotle’s view, matter
is what distinguishes one thing from another of the same kind. Thus, although
the rational part of every individual human soul may be immortal, individual
humans may not thereby themselves be immortal, and not just because their
bodies die but because there is only one nous, which all humans share. Hence, in
Aristotle’s view, it may be that only what we have in common, and not what
distinguishes us from one another, survives the grave. In his words, “All things
which are many in number have matter; for many individuals have one and the
same intelligible structure, for example, man, whereas Socrates is one.”
17
Once
the material human being is gone, along with his or her memories, only the form,
which is the same for all human beings, remains.
In a passage in On Generation and Corruption that would become especially
important in the thirteenth century when medieval philosophers were trying to
rework Christian theology through the lens of Aristotelian metaphysics, Aristotle
seems to deny the possibility of personal survival of bodily death. He began by
asking why “men and animals do not ‘return upon themselves’ so that the same
individual comes-to-be a second time?” He answered by distinguishing
between
those things whose substance is imperishable and those whose substance is per-
ishable. In the case of things whose substance is perishable, which he thought to
include humans and animals, although t he same kind of thing can recur, the very
same thing cannot recur. As we shall see, the failure of Saint Paul and the earliest