Simple Index of Course Webpages
11 September 2021 (c) Richard C. Taylor
Human Knowing in the Classical Rationalist Arabic Tradition
Lecture 1 of 2 for class on 16 September 2021
al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) and Ibn Rushd (Averroes)
Al-Farabi on intellect and abstraction
Two videos on (a) al-Farabi, and (b) al-Farabi on intellect, abstraction and substantial transformation:
Extracts from Letter on the Intellect, from Classical Islamic Philosophy, McGinnis & Reisman, tr. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007, pp. 68-78.
Pp.70-71:
10. Aristotle established four aspects to the term “intellect” that he uses in De anima: (i) the potential intellect, (ii) the actual intellect, (iii) the acquired intellect, and (iv) the Active Intellect.
11. The (i) potential intellect is a certain soul, or a part of a soul, or one of the faculties of the soul, or a certain thing whose being is prepared or disposed to extract the essential definitions and forms of all existing things from their matters and to make them all a form or forms for itself. Those forms extracted from matter do not become extracted from the matter in which they exist unless they have become forms for the potential intellect. Those forms that are extracted from their matters and become forms in this intellect are the intelligibles (this term is etymologically derived from the term for this intellect that extracts the forms of existing things, whereby they become forms for it).
12. The potential intellect is comparable to matter in which forms come to be. When you imagine a particular corporeal matter to be like a piece of wax on which an impression is stamped, and that impression and form that comes to be in its surface and depth, and that form so encompasses the entire matter that the matter as a whole comes to be like that form in its entirety by the form’s having spread through it, your imagination comes close to understanding what is meant when the forms of things come to be in that [intellect] that resembles a matter and a subject for that form but which differs from other corporeal matters in as much as corporeal matters receive forms only on their surfaces, not in their depths. Moreover, this intellect does not itself remain so distinct from the forms of the intelligibles that it and the forms stand removed in themselves from one another; rather, this intellect itself becomes those forms. It is as though you were to imagine the impression and mold through which a piece of wax takes on the form of a cube or sphere, and that form sinks into it, spreads throughout it, and entirely engulfs its length, breadth, and depth, then that piece of wax will have become that very form, with no distinction between what it is and what that form is. It is by way of this example that you should understand the coming to be of the forms of existing things in that thing that Aristotle in De anima calls the “potential intellect.”
13. As long as none of the forms of existing things is in it, it is potential intellect. Then, when the forms of existing things come to be in it as in the example we have provided, that thing itself becomes (ii) an actual intellect. This then is the meaning of”actual intellect.” When the intelligibles that it extracts from matters come to be in [the intellect], those intelligibles become actual intelligibles, having been potential intelligibles before they were extracted. Once extracted, they become actual intelligibles by virtue of becoming forms for that intellect, and it is precisely by those things that are [now] actual intelligibles that the intellect becomes an actual intellect. Their being actual intelligibles and its being an actual intellect is, then, one and the same thing. What we mean when we say that it “intellects” is nothing other than that the intelligibles become forms for it, in the sense that it itself becomes those forms. Thus, what is meant by the intellect’s actually intellecting, of being an actual intellect, and of being an actual intelligible, is one and the same thing and [is used] for one and the same account.
14. The intelligibles that are potentially intelligibles are those things that, before they become actual intelligibles, are forms in matters outside the soul. When they become actual intelligibles, their existence as actual intelligibles is not the same as their existence as forms in matters, and their existence in themselves [as forms in matters] is not the same as their existence as actual intelligibles. Their existence in themselves is a consequence of whatever else is connected to them, whether that is place, time, position, quantity, being qualified by corporeal qualities, acting, or being affected. When they become actual intelligibles, many of those other categories are removed from them, in which case their existence becomes another existence that is not the former existence. Moreover, what is meant by these categories, or much about them, in relation to [the actual intelligibles], comes to be understood in ways different from the former ways. For example, when you consider the meaning of place as understood in relation to [the actual intelligibles], you find either that none of the meanings of place apply to them at all, or you give the term “place” as understood by you in relation to them another meaning, one that is different from the former meaning.
p. 74:
18. The acquired intellect is like a subject for those [forms], whereas it is like the form for the actual intellect. The actual intellect is like a subject and matter for the acquired intellect, whereas it is like a form for that [potential intellect]. That [potential intellect] is like matter. At this level, forms begin to reduce to corporeal, material forms, and whatever they were before that gradually proceeds to break away from matter, each one in a different way and at a different level.
19. . . . [I]f one ascends by degrees from prime matter to the nature that is the corporeal forms in prime matter, then up to [the potential intellect] and above that to the acquired intellect, one will have reached something like the outermost boundary and limit to which the things related to prime matter and matter reach. When one ascends from [that], it is to the first level of immaterial beings, that of (iv) the Active Intellect.
20. What Aristotle calls the “Active Intellect” in Book III of De anima is a separate form that has never been and never will be in matter in any way. In its species it is an actual intellect very similar to the acquired intellect. It is what makes the potential intellect an actual intellect, and it is what makes the potential intelligibles actual intelligibles.
p. 76:
24. Next, [the Active Intellect] aims to bring [those forms in matter] closer and closer to the immaterial forms until the acquired intellect comes to be, at which point the substance of man, or man by virtue of what constitutes his substance, becomes the closest thing possible to the Active Intellect. This is the ultimate happiness and the afterlife, which is that the ultimate thing by which man becomes a substance comes about for him, and he attains his final perfection, which is that the final thing through which he becomes a substance performs the final action by virtue of which he becomes a substance. This is what is meant by the afterlife. When [the acquired intellect] does not act on some other thing outside of itself, where to act is to cause itself to exist, then it itself, its action, and the fact that it acts are one and the same thing. At that point, it has absolutely no need for the body to be a matter for it in order to subsist, and it has absolutely no need in any of its actions to seek the help of a faculty of a soul in a body, or to use any corporeal instrument whatsoever. The least perfect existence belonging to it is when it requires the body to be a matter for it in order to subsist as an existent, and when it is a form in a body or a corporeal matter as a whole. Above that, it does not require the body to be a matter for it in order to subsist, but in order to perform its actions, or many of them, it needs to use a corporeal faculty and to seek the aid of its action, for example, sensory perception and imagination. Its most perfect existence, though, is to reach the state we just mentioned.
Ibn Sina / Avicenna (d. 1037)
On intellect and abstraction:
Ibn Sina: Two videos on (a) Ibn Sīnā and (b) Ibn Sīnā on the rational soul and multiple kinds of abstractions
De Anima of the Shifa’:
Selections from Classical Arabic Philosophy, McGinnis & Reisman, tr. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005)
p. 177: “It is clear from this, then, that when we define the soul as a perfection, this most properly denotes its meaning and likewise includes all species of the soul in all respects, not excluding the soul that is separate from matter.”
P.178-9: The floating or flying man:
“7. … For the purposes of establishing the existence of the soul belonging to us, here we have to provide a pointer that serves [both] as alert and reminder by hitting the mark with anyone who is at all capable of catching sight of the truth on his own, and also does not require straightening out his way of thinking, or hitting him over the head with it, or steering him away from sophisms. So we say that it has to be imagined as though one of us were created whole in an instant but his sight is veiled from directly observing the things of the external world. He is created as though floating in air or in a void but without the air supporting him in such a way that he would have to feel it, and the limbs of his body are stretched out and away from one another, so they do not come into contact or touch. Then he considers whether he can assert the existence of his self. He has no doubts about asserting his self as something that exists without also [having to] assert the existence of any of his exterior or interior parts, his heart, his brain, or anything external. He will, in fact, be asserting the existence of his self without asserting that it has length, breadth, or depth, and, if it were even possible for him in such a state to imagine a hand or some other extremity, he would not imagine it as a part of his self or as a necessary condition of his self-and you know that what can be asserted as existing is not the same as what cannot be so asserted and that what is stipulated is not the same as what is not stipulated. Thus, the self whose existence he asserted is his unique characteristic, in the sense that it is he himself, not his body and its parts, which he did not so assert. Thus, what [the reader] has been alerted to is a way to be made alert to the existence of the soul as something that is not the body-nor in fact any body-to recognize it and be aware of it, if it is in fact the case that he has been disregarding it and needed to be hit over the head with it.”
The rational soul and abstraction:
P. 192:
“13. It is also correct for us to state that the posited intelligibles, each one of which the rational faculty can actually intellect, are potentially infinite. Moreover, it is correct for us to state that something that has a capability for a potential infinity of things cannot be a body nor a faculty in a body. We have demonstrated this in the preceding sections. Therefore, it is impossible for the thing itself that forms concepts of the intelligibles to subsist in a body in any way, or for its action to be generated out of a body or by means of a body. […]”
P. 195:
“1. The soul does not die with the death of the body; for anything that corrupts by virtue of something else’s corrupting has some type of connection with it. Either (1) it is connected with it as something posterior to it in existence, or (2) as something prior to it in existence (that is, it precedes it essentially, not temporally), or (3) as something coexistent with it.”
7. From “The Soul,” V.5
CONCERNING THE INTELLECT THAT ACTS UPON OUR SOULS AND THE INTELLECT IN OUR SOULS THAT IS AFFECTED
1. [234] We say that the human soul is at one time something intellecting potentially and thereafter becomes something actually intellecting. Now whatever is brought from potency to act does so only on account of a cause in act that brings it out. So there is a cause that brings our souls from potency to act with regard to the intelligibles. Since it is the cause with respect to providing the intelligible forms, it is precisely but an actual intellect in whom the principles of the intellectual forms are Separate (mujarrada) [from matter], and whose relation to our souls is the relation of the Sun to our vision. Just as the Sun is actually visible in itself and through its light it makes actually visible what is not actually visible, so likewise is the state of this intellect vis-a-vis our souls; for when the intellecting faculty reviews the particulars that are in the imagery [faculty] and the Active Intellect sheds light onto us upon them (which we discussed), the things abstracted from matter and its associations are altered and impressed upon the rational soul. [“Being altered” is] not in the sense that [the particulars] themselves are transferred from the imagery to our intellect, nor [is “being impressed”] in the sense that the connotational attribute (ma’nā) immersed in the [material] associations (which in itself and with regard to its very being is separate (mujarradd) [from matter)) makes something like itself. Quite the contrary, [the alteration and being impressed] is in the sense that reviewing [the things abstracted from matter and its associations] prepares the soul in order that the thing separate from matter [coming] from the Active Intellect [i.e., the intellectual forms] flows down upon them; for discursive thought and selective attention are certain motions that prepare the soul in a way to receive what flows down just as middle terms prepare [the soul] to receive the conclusion in the most convincing way, although the first is according to one way and the second according to another, as you will come to know.
2. So when a certain relation to this form happens to the rational soul by means of the light shed by the Active Intellect, then from [the relation to the form] there comes to be in [the soul] something that in one way is of its genus and in another way is not, just as when light falls on colored objects, in the seeing of them it produces an effect that is not in every way [reduced] to their sum. So the things in the imagery [faculty] which are potentially intelligible, become actually intelligible not themselves but what is acquired from them. In fact, just as the effect resulting from the sensible forms by means of the light is not itself those forms, but rather something related to them that is engendered by means of the light in the recipient facing [the light]’ so likewise when the rational soul reviews those forms in the imagery [faculty] and the light of the Active Intellect comes into a type of conjunction with them, then they are prepared so that from the light of the Active Intellect they come to be within [the rational soul] the abstract version of those forms [free] from [material] taints.
3. As soon as the essential aspects of [those forms] are distinguished from their accidental aspects on the part of the human intellect, and what makes them similar to the forms of the imagery is distinguished from what makes them different, the connotational attributes that show no difference from those become one in the intellect itself by comparison of similarity, but those connotational attributes that bear comparison to what is different become many connotational attributes and so the intellect has the ability both to consider one of the connotational attributes to be many and to consider the multiple connotational attributes to be one. There are two ways that the many can be considered one. The first is in that when the numerically many differing connotations related to the forms of the imagery do not differ in definition, they become a single connotational attribute. The second way is by combining the many different connotations of genera and differences into a connotational attribute that is singular in the definition. The way to make one connotational attribute many is the reverse of these two processes.
4. This is one of the properties of the human intellect. It does not belong to any of the other faculties; for they perceive the many as a many as it is and the one as one as it is, whereas they cannot perceive the simple one, but rather the one inasmuch as it is a whole combined of things and their accidents. Also they cannot separate out the accidental aspects and extract them from the essential aspects. So, when the senses present a given form to the imagery [faculty] and the imagery [faculty] presents it to the intellect, the intellect takes a single connotational attribute from it. Then if another form of the same species is presented to it-“another” only in number-the intellect by no means takes any form different from what was taken, unless it is due to the accident that is particular to this inasmuch as it is that accident such that it takes it one time as separate [of all accidents] and another time with that accident. This is why it is said [237] that Zayd and ‘Amr have one connotational attribute in terms of “humanness,” not on the basis of the fact that the humanness associated with the particular properties of ‘Amr is the very same humanness associated with the particular properties of Zayd, as though there were a single thing belonging to Zayd and ‘Ann, as is the case with friendship or property. Instead, “humanness” in terms of existence is many, and there is no existence belonging to some one common humanness in external reality unless it is that very humanness of Zayd and ‘Amr. We will endeavor to explain this in the discipline of philosophy [i.e., metaphysics]. What is intended [here] is that since the first of [the two forms, e.g., Zayd’s form of humanness] provided the soul with the form of “humanness,” the second [form, e.g., ‘Amr’s form of humanness] does not provide anything at all. Instead, the connotational attribute imprinted in the soul by both is a single one, that is, the one from the first presentation of the imagery, while the second presentation has no influence, for either one of them could have preceded and left this very same imprint in the soul, not like the two individuals of a man and a horse.
5. This [is one point]. Next, it is characteristic of the intellect that, when it perceives things that have an earlier and later association with it, it intellects the time with them necessarily-but that is not over a period of time but in an instant, where the intellect intellects the time in an instant. Its construction of the syllogism and the definition is unquestionably in a period of time; however, its conception of the conclusion and the thing defined is instantaneous.
6. The inability of the intellect to conceptualize things that are at the upper limit of being intelligible and abstracted from matter is not on account of something in those things themselves, nor on account of something innate to the intellect, but rather on account of the fact that the soul is distracted while in the body by the body. It needs the body for many things, but the body keeps it at a remove from the most noble of its perfections. The eye cannot bear to gaze at the Sun, certainly not on account of something in the Sun nor that it is not clearly visible, but rather on account of something about the natural makeup of the body [of the eye]. When this state of being immersed and impeded are removed from the soul we have, it will intellect these [extreme intelligibles] in the noblest, clearest, and most pleasurable ways. Our discussion here, however, concerns the soul only inasmuch as it is a soul, and that only inasmuch as it is associated with this matter. So we should not discuss the return of the soul when we are discussing nature, until we move on to the discipline of philosophy [i.e., metaphysics] and there investigate the things that are separate [from matter]. The investigation in the natural philosophy, however, is restricted to what is appropriate to natural things, and they are the things that bear relation to matter and motion.
7. So we say instead that the intellect conceptualizes differently depending upon the existence of things. So with very strong things, the intellect may not be able to perceive them because they overwhelm it, and with very weakly existing things, like motion, time, and matter, the soul may find it difficult to conceptualize them because of their weak existence. As for privations, the intellect does not conceptualize them when it is actual in an absolute sense, because privation is perceived insofar as possession is not perceived, so whatever is perceived of privation as a privation and evil as an evil is something potential and an absence of a perfection. Any intellect that perceives it does so only because it bears some relation to it potentially. So the intellects in which nothing potential is mixed do not intellect nor conceptualize privation and evil as a privation and an evil, given there is nothing in existence that is an absolute evil.
Ibn Rushd / Averroes (d.1198)
Introduction to Averroes: video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo5ZlDnzgXs&feature=youtu.be
Averroes on Human Intellectual Understanding: video at https://streaming.mu.edu/Watch/Lg49Aqd8.
Since the only Latin writings on the De Anima of Aristotle by Averroes was the Long Commentary on the De Anima I will limit my account to that work.
Averroes’s Long Commentary on the De Anima
In his major work on human knowledge, more familiar because of the wide dispersion of its Latin translation in medieval Europe, Averroes again confronted the issue of the nature of intelligibles in act and the character of a subject suitable for them for the sake of human intellectual understanding in his last major work on the intellect. Critically reflecting on the teachings of Themistius in the latter’s Paraphrase of the De Anima, Averroes brought his mind to bear on notion he had not dealt with at length in either of the two earlier commentaries, namely, a unity of knowledge that makes shared science and intersubjective intellectual discourse possible. In both of those works Averroes held that each human being possesses his or her own personal material. In the Long Commentary, however, he adopts a view that he had explicitly rejected in the Middle Commentary and that he had raised as worthy of further consideration in a short work called Epistle 1 on Conjunction: the material intellect as a single separate entity shared by all human beings. In forming this new understanding, Averroes found the Paraphrase of the De Anima by Themistius a powerful stimulant.
In the Arabic text of Themistius Averroes read,
There need be no wonder that we all are as a group composites of what is in potency and of what is in act. All of us whose existence is by virtue of this one are referred back to a one which is the agent intellect. For if not this, then whence is it that we possess known sciences in a shared way? And whence is it that the understanding of the primary definitions and primary propositions is alike [for us all] without learning? For it is right that, if we do not have one intellect in which we all share, then we also do not have understanding of one another.
This unity of intellect for the sake of “understanding of one another” Averroes applied to his conception of human intellectual knowledge to form his novel understanding of the unity of the material. It is a view inspired by his third reading of Themistius’s Paraphrase, though not held by Themistius himself. For Averroes this understanding of the material intellect satisfied the need for the unity of understanding on the part of distinct human individuals since this entity is the repository of abstracted intelligibles in act to which all particular acts of understanding and scientific discourse refer. This is possible only insofar as the nature of the material intellect is such that it is a unique reality constituting a distinct immaterial species so that intelligibles received are not particularized as they would be were it to be truly material or one among many individuals of a species. Averroes was well aware of the difficulty of asserting that something without matter and itself actual as immaterial could be receptive, a notion he labeled as “the problem of Theophrastus.” Nevertheless, to solve the complex array of issues involved in accounting for the phenomenon of intellectual understanding on the part of transitory human beings, Averroes crafted this new account explicitly conscious of the metaphysical commitments entailed, something evident in his description of the Material as “a fourth kind of being” in addition to matter, form and matter-form composites.
With this new teaching Averroes brought the familiar notion that individual human beings employ the external senses and the common sense to produce intentions in the imagination. These are then refined and stripped of the extraneous by the cogitative power yielding denuded intentions placed in memory ready for transference from the mode of being of particulars to the mode of being of intelligibles in act. This takes place thanks to the presence of the separate agent intellect “in the soul” as “form for us” effecting the abstractive transference. It is also thanks to the presence of the material “in the soul” as well as its being the immaterial subject receptive of the intelligible made in act by the agent intellect, no longer an intelligible in potency as it was in the external and internal powers of the individual soul. For the individual human knower this brings about the theoretical intellect as a positive disposition of knowing (al-ʿaql bi-l-malakah, intellectus in habitu) in the soul which accounts for the human experience of knowing the intelligibles in act which Averroes had reasoned could only exist in the material, the shared immaterial subject of intelligibles. In this teaching the presence of the two separate intellects “in the soul” provides the connection with the individual knower’s cogitative power responsible for human acts of will in making pre-noetic preparations for abstraction. This is the gathering of images intelligible in potency through the external and internal senses. The realization of knowledge in that individual is coordinated with abstracted intellectual content in the material to yield the theoretical intellect of individual human knowing. On this account, the theoretical intelligibles exist in act in the separate material since they require an immaterial substrate but they also exist in the individual human knower through a connection with the separate material apparently forged in the process of abstraction. In this way the individual human knower can be called the subject of truth insofar as the individual provides from sense perception the content intelligible in potency. This comes to exist as intelligible in act in the material — the subject of the existence of the intelligible in act — by way of the abstractive and elevating power of the agent intellect. In his Commentary on the Republic he explains that the end of humans as natural beings is the attainment of ultimate perfection and happiness through the intelligibles of the theoretical sciences.
The most challenging section of the Long Commentary is in Book 3, Comment 36, where Averroes critically reviews the responses of Alexander, Themistius, al-Farabi and Ibn Bajja to Aristotle’s famous remark at the end of De Anima 3.7, 431b17-19: “Whether it is possible for [the human mind] while not existing separate from spatial conditions to think anything that is separate, or not, we must consider later.”It was commonly known that there was no extant text in which Aristotle returned to explicate his meaning. These two Greek philosophers took the text to refer not to mathematics and mathematical abstraction but to the issue of whether real intellectual knowledge of eternal and unchanging essences can only come through a connection to higher intellectual substances, and in this these two predecessors in the Arabic tradition followed their lead. Averroes found that those who held for the material to be a body or a power in a body could find no way to provide a satisfactory account of human intellectual understanding of immaterial intelligibles. Alexander had been right to hold that the activity of the separate agent intellect as “form for us” is required for the abstraction of intelligibles from human experience of the world and that that intellect must somehow be “in the soul.” But he was wrong to think that the material could be epiphenomenal on a mixture of bodily parts and elements. (Yet, as explained earlier, this not far from Averroes’s own position in the Short Commentary.) Such a thing could never be the receptive subject of eternal intelligibles in act. Themistius was wrong to think in a Platonic fashion that the intelligibles preexist in the Agent intellect and that each human individual has his or her own intellect to be actualized as immaterial in an abstractive process of its own under the guidance of the separate Agent intellect. Al-Farabi, Averroes reports, apparently questioned his own view and raised the question of whether there really could be a connection between transcendent intellect and human experiences of the world of particular beings to allow for a real science of intelligibles in act to be generated in some way in human beings. And Ibn Bajjah had set out to explain the connection to transcendent intellect by a proposing a rising tree of abstractive processes that would lead human beings finally to a single intellect, the Agent intellect containing all the intelligibles in act. This Averroes rejected since abstraction alone by itself cannot attain to anything beyond initial experience with which the abstraction began. Abstraction of sensibles cannot lead by its continued use to something so generically different as a purely immaterial intellect. For Averroes none of these methods lead to a post mortem for human beings consisting in conjoining with separate intellect for highest human fulfillment and ultimate happiness. Rather, for Averroes the highest fulfillment available to human beings is perfection in the theoretical intelligibles, that is, in scientific knowledge. The existence of human knowledge of eternal intelligibles of science gives witness that human beings are naturally constituted to attain knowledge. What is required for this is that it be the natural condition of human beings that they use their external and internal senses to apprehend the world and its forms and essences which are intelligible in potency. To make the transference from the mode of being of a particular to the mode of being as an intelligible in act (which makes the predication of universals possible) Aristotle’s assertion of the Agent intellect is also required. And to make available the needed subject for intelligibles in act there must be asserted a separate Material which (unlike the views of Averroes in the two earlier commentaries) is not a determinate particular but a unique entity shared by all human beings for the unity of science and of intersubjective discourse. Hence, to return to the issue of Aristotle’s text at De Anima 3.7, there is a kind of uniting with separate substances that must take place for the sake of human knowledge, namely the uniting with the separate agent intellect and the separate Material. In this way the end of human beings is to be found in knowledge and not uniting with a separate entity; rather, uniting for the short period of a transitory human lifetime is a means to the fulfillment and happiness gained in the attainment of knowledge.
The foregoing reflects the issue of the ontology of the soul since the philosophical reasoning must be focused on the natures of the intelligibles in act and natures of the subjects into which they are received. For Averroes human intellectual understanding comes about when the two separate substances, the agent intellect and the material, are intrinsically present in the human soul by a form of sharing or participation. But the human soul is the first actuality of a natural body having organs, while those intellects are separate from body. In light of this, Averroes determines that the term soul is equivocal and that intellect is not properly part of the essence of the human soul. With this Averroes provided his own response to the issue raised by Aristotle in De Anima 2.2 as to whether intellect is another kind of soul distinct from the soul that is the form of the physical body. Explaining his understanding of Aristotle, Averroes writes,
[I]t is better to say, and seems more to be true after investigation, that this is another kind of soul and, if it is called a soul, it will be so equivocally. If the disposition of intellect is such as this, then it must be possible for that alone of all the powers of soul to be separated from the body and not to be corrupted by [the body’s] corruption, just as the eternal is separated. This will be the case since sometimes [the intellect] is not united with [the body] and sometimes it is united with it.
That is, the human being’s soul is the actuality of body responsible for the formation of the hylomorphic composite. The rational part of soul or intellect is not properly soul as form of the body; it can be called soul but only in a wholly equivocal sense. Intellect, then, does not belong properly and per se to this hylomorphic composite in virtue of itself but rather is only shared through the presence of the Agent intellect and the Material Intellect during the earthly life of the human individual. Hence, no argument for personal immortality can be based on the per se presence of an intellectual — and thereby immaterial — power of the soul fully intrinsic to each individual human. The consequence is that, while the agent intellect, the material, and also the human species can be reasoned to be eternally in existence, there is no basis in argument for a continued existence of the individual human soul after the death of the body. For Averroes in the Long Commentary, then, the ontology of the human soul does not entail any post mortem existence for individual human beings. Nor does it entail a rising of the human soul or intellect to some sort of extra natural contemplation of separate substances in which they are united in ultimate happiness. This, however, was not what the Latin tradition found in reading Averroes. Thomas Aquinas thought that Averroes held that through a connection with the Agent intellect humans could rise by natural powers to see and know other higher separate substances, something he fully rejected in his own teaching. Siger of Brabant reasoned that for Averroes the Material is the most receptive of all entities. Consequently, since human beings unite with the Material, through that uniting they could come to knowledge of all other separate intellects. The language for both views is present in Comment 36 and elsewhere in the Long Commentary but as parts of the analysis and refutation of the views of others. (See Taylor, “Abstraction and Intellection in Averroes and the Arabic Tradition: Remarks on Averroes, Long Commentary on the De Anima Book 3, Comment 36,” J.-B. Brenet-L. Cesalli (éd.), Sujet libre. Pour Alain de Libera, Paris, Vrin, (2018), pp. 321-325, via this Link.)