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[ 84 ] the rise and fall of soul and self
principles. Those souls that have been tarnished by their association with the body
undergo eternal torment, vainly seeking to reunite with their bodies, which once were
potential instruments of their perfection.
In support of the idea that the soul in humans is immaterial, Avicenna argued that
when one refers to oneself as “I,” one cannot be referring to one’s body, for if a man
were to come into being fully mature and rational but floating suspended in space
and totally unaware of his physical attributes or circumstances, he would still be
certain of his own existence. This thought experiment, which anticipated
Descartes’s famous cogito
argument, was, from the thirteenth century onward,
frequently repeated by Latin writers.
Averroës not only understood Aristotle better than anyone up to his time but
took himself to be in almost complete agreement with him. He viewed his own
project as that of fostering a correct understanding of the master. In his view of
Aristotle, the human mind is composed of three intellects:
material ,
agent , and
spec-
ulative. Adopting from Alexander the term
material intellect
for the potential intel-
lect, Averroës viewed the material intellect as a passive power that
humans have to
form abstract concepts, with the help of the agent intellect, from the specific and
particularized information that originates in sense experience. The material intel-
lect initially is mere potential, containing nothing. All of the content it acquires
derives from two sources: the phantasms provided by sense experience and the
illumination provided by the agent intellect, which together give rise to abstract
ideas. The illumination that the agent intellect provides partially strips the
phan-
tasms of their particular material conditions. The fusion of these phantasms in the
activity of the agent intellect is the speculative intellect, which is where the prod-
ucts of this fusion—the combination of the phantasms provided by sense experi-
ence and the abstract ideas provided by the agent intellect—reside. These concepts
in the speculative intellect are, thus, partly material and partly formal.
Most importantly, in Averroës’ view there is only one material intellect and
only one agent intellect for the entire human race. There can be only one of each
since these intellects are immaterial and matter is the principle of individuation.
The material intellect and the agent intellect originate in the heavens and merely
participate in each human’s mind, without actually being any human’s personal
possession. However, since the speculative intellect is material, each human has
his or her own speculative intellect. Although the material intellect and the agent
intellect are immortal, neither of them is a vehicle for personal human immor-
tality since neither belongs to any human in particular. The speculative intellect
dies with the body and, so, is also not a vehicle for personal immortality. In sum,
individual humans have no soul of their own that could be a vehicle for personal
immortality. Thus, there is no personal survival of bodily death.
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