On the Intellect

Overview

A very short epistle, perhaps five pages depending on the edition, written by Abu Yusuf Yaqub ibn Ishaq al-Kindi, who worked in Baghdad in the ninth century and is generally credited as the first philosopher of the Islamic world in the strict sense, meaning the first to systematically take up the recently translated Greek philosophical texts and build original argument on top of them rather than simply commenting on or transmitting religious and grammatical learning.

Al-Kindi worked at the moment when the great translation movement, centered on Baghdad’s House of Wisdom and sponsored by the Abbasid caliphs, was making Aristotle, and various Neoplatonic texts sometimes mistakenly attributed to Aristotle, available in Arabic for the first time. He did not himself translate texts from Greek, not having full command of the language, but he supervised, edited and built philosophical projects on translations others produced, and he wrote extensively to explain and defend this newly available material to an Arabic-reading audience that had no prior vocabulary for most of it.

This treatise on the intellect is a small piece of that larger project, aimed specifically at the notoriously difficult account of nous, intellect or mind, that Aristotle gives in Book III of On the Soul, a passage so compressed and ambiguous in the Greek that it had already generated centuries of disagreement among Aristotle’s Greek commentators before it ever reached Arabic readers at all.

The argument

A problem with no existing vocabulary. Before al-Kindi, Arabic simply had no established technical terminology for the kind of analysis Aristotle’s psychology required. Al-Kindi’s task here is partly definitional in the most basic sense: fixing, for the first time in the language, what words like aql, intellect, would mean when used in this specifically philosophical, Aristotelian sense, as distinct from their looser uses in ordinary speech or in theological contexts.

Four intellects. The treatise’s entire content is a fourfold division, attributed to Aristotle though considerably more schematic than anything explicitly stated in Aristotle’s own text, which al-Kindi presents as clarifying rather than adding to what Aristotle meant.

The first intellect is the intellect always in actuality, a cause external to any individual human soul, responsible for making the soul’s own merely potential intellect become actual. Al-Kindi does not develop this figure at length here the way al-Farabi would later develop the Active Intellect, but the basic structural role, an external, ever-active cause of human thinking, is already present in outline.

The second intellect is the intellect in potency, the bare, undeveloped capacity for thought that every human soul possesses simply by virtue of being a human soul, prior to and independent of any actual instance of thinking having yet occurred.

The third intellect is the intellect that has passed from potentiality into actuality within a particular soul, meaning the soul has now actually grasped some intelligible form or forms and so is now, in this respect, actually thinking rather than merely capable of thinking.

The fourth intellect is the intellect the soul can display or bring forth from within itself at will, once acquired, a category distinguishing intellect that is simply possessed, perhaps recalled only passively or occasionally, from intellect that is available for active, deliberate, repeatable use whenever the soul chooses to exercise it.

What the scheme does and does not explain. Compared to what al-Farabi would do with the same basic material a century later in his own treatise On the Intellect, al-Kindi’s four-part division is notably less developed. He does not work out in any detail the relationship between the first, externally active intellect and the process by which it actualizes the second, merely potential intellect within an individual soul, the way al-Farabi’s light analogy would later do. He does not address at any length the implications of his scheme for personal immortality, a question that became central to later debate. The treatise reads, and was almost certainly intended, as a preliminary clarification of terms rather than a complete theory, useful for readers approaching Aristotle’s original text for the first time and needing a map of its basic categories before attempting the terrain itself.

How to read it

Read it in one sitting; there is barely enough text here to divide into sections, and its value lies in what it represents historically as much as in its philosophical content taken alone.

Read al-Farabi’s own treatise On the Intellect immediately afterward, ideally the same day, so the contrast is fresh. Al-Farabi takes the same basic four-stage structure, adds the light analogy, develops the account of the Active Intellect’s specific cosmological role, and reaches conclusions about conjunction between the human and the divine that al-Kindi’s shorter, earlier treatment does not attempt. Seeing exactly what al-Farabi added lets you watch the tradition mature across a single generation and a half.

Notice that al-Kindi is working without a settled vocabulary, essentially inventing Arabic philosophical terminology as he goes. Where his account feels thin or underexplained, that thinness is itself evidence of how early this moment was in the tradition’s development, not necessarily a failure of insight on al-Kindi’s part.

Keep al-Kindi’s larger historical role in view as you read. He was as much an organizer and translator-adjacent figure, overseeing and shaping the transmission of Greek philosophy into Arabic, as he was an original systematic thinker in his own right, and this treatise is best read as a working document from that transmission project rather than as a finished philosophical system meant to stand on its own indefinitely.

Questions it raises

• Does al-Kindi’s four-part scheme actually explain how thought becomes actual, or does it only name the stages without accounting for the transition between them?
• What is gained, philosophically, by having a fixed, shared vocabulary for discussing the intellect, and what did earlier or looser ways of discussing thought lose by comparison?
• Al-Kindi leaves the relationship between the first, always-active intellect and the individual human soul largely unexplained. Is this an omission, or appropriately cautious given how little the text commits to?
• How much of what looks like philosophical progress from al-Kindi to al-Farabi to Avicenna is genuine conceptual advance, and how much is simply a a longer time to work out the implications of the same starting scheme?
• Is a short, clarifying treatise like this one philosophy in its own right, or is it better understood as a teaching tool built on someone else’s philosophy?
• What does the difficulty later thinkers had with Aristotle’s original text suggest about how well even Aristotle himself understood the phenomenon he was describing?