Long Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima

Quick Facts

• Title: Long Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima
• Author: Ibn Rushd, known in Latin as Averroes
• Main text discussed: Aristotle's De Anima, usually translated as On the Soul
• Date: late 12th century
• Genre: long commentary, meaning a detailed line-by-line explanation of Aristotle
• Main labels: Islamic Philosophy, Aristotelianism, Averroism
• Famous issue: whether all human beings share one intellect

The Problem

Aristotle says the soul is what makes a living body alive. That sounds simple until you get to thinking. Eating, growing, sensing, and moving can be explained through the body. But understanding universal truths is harder.

Take a triangle. You can draw one badly on paper, see another on a screen, and imagine another in your head. None of those individual triangles is the universal idea "triangle." Yet your mind can understand what a triangle is in general. Ibn Rushd wants to explain how a bodily person can understand something universal like that.

The Long Commentary asks a blunt question: what has to be true about the human soul and intellect for knowledge to be possible? Is intellect a private power inside each person's body? Is it separate from the body? Is it one shared intellectual power that different people connect to through their own sensory experience? This is the question that made the commentary famous and explosive.

In One Minute

The Long Commentary on Aristotle's De Anima is Ibn Rushd's most important work on soul, perception, imagination, and intellect. He is trying to explain Aristotle's difficult account of how living things work, especially how human thinking works.

The basic idea is this: the soul is not a ghost sitting inside the body. For Aristotle and Ibn Rushd, the soul is the form or actuality of a living body. It is what makes a body alive and able to do living things. Plants grow. Animals sense and move. Humans also understand universal meanings.

The controversial part is intellect. Ibn Rushd argues that the highest part of thinking cannot be a private bodily organ. The material intellect, which receives universal meanings, and the agent intellect, which makes them understandable, are separate from individual bodies. In his mature view, the material intellect is one for all human beings. Individual people still think through their own images, memories, and attention, but universal understanding depends on a shared intellectual power.

That made the work central to Latin Averroism. It also made it a target for Thomas Aquinas, who thought this view failed to protect individual human understanding and personal immortality.

The Main Argument

Ibn Rushd begins from Aristotle's basic picture of the soul. A soul is the first actuality of a living body. In plain English: it is the organized life of the body, not a separate object trapped inside it. A living body is not just matter arranged in a shape. It has powers. It can nourish itself, sense, desire, move, imagine, and in human beings, think.

He then separates different levels of soul. The nutritive soul covers growth and nourishment. The sensitive soul covers sensation, desire, and imagination. The rational soul covers intellect. This matters because Ibn Rushd does not explain all mental life in one sloppy way. Seeing a color, remembering an image, and understanding a universal idea are different activities.

Sensation starts with particular things. You see this color here, hear this sound now, or remember this shape from yesterday. Imagination keeps those sensory forms available after the object is gone. If you close your eyes and picture a drawn triangle, that picture is not yet universal knowledge. It is still your particular image.

The intellect is different because it can grasp universal meanings. "Triangle" is not this triangle or that triangle. "Justice" is not one court case. "Number" is not one written mark. Universal meanings are not physical images. Ibn Rushd thinks a purely bodily faculty cannot receive them as universal. A body is always this body, in this place, with these particular features. Universal thought needs a power that is not mixed with body in the same way.

This is where the material intellect comes in. The name is confusing. "Material" does not mean made of flesh or physical stuff. It means receptive, like matter is receptive to form. The material intellect is the capacity to receive intelligible forms, meaning forms as understood by thought. For Ibn Rushd in the Long Commentary, this material intellect is separate and shared. It is not a little private container inside each person's head.

The agent intellect is the active side of understanding. Aristotle compares it to light. Colors are visible, but they need light to be actually seen. In the same way, sensible images can become intelligible, but they need the agent intellect to make their universal meaning available to thought. If your imagination supplies many examples of triangular shapes, the agent intellect helps make "triangle as such" intelligible.

So how do individual people think if the intellect is shared? Ibn Rushd uses the lower human faculties to explain that. Each person has senses, memory, imagination, and a cogitative power. Cogitation means the brain-based power of sorting, attending to, and working with particular images. Your own experience supplies the material that thinking uses. The shared intellect makes universal understanding possible.

This gives him an answer to a real philosophical problem. If every person had a completely private intellect, then universal knowledge could start to look private too. My "triangle" and your "triangle" would be separate mental items, and it would be harder to explain why we are understanding the same universal truth. Ibn Rushd says there is one material intellect, so the universal content of thought is one, even though individual acts of thinking happen through different people's images and attention.

But this answer creates a massive problem. If the highest intellect is shared, then what belongs to the individual person? Do I personally understand, or does a shared intellect understand through me? What survives death: my individual soul, my images, my acquired knowledge, or only the eternal intellect? Ibn Rushd's answer was meant to defend Aristotle, but later readers saw it as dangerous because it seemed to weaken personal immortality and individual responsibility.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Soul: the form or actuality of a living body. This does not mean a spooky object floating inside the body. It means the body's living organization. A working eye can see because it has the power of sight; a dead eye has the same matter but not the living power.

• De Anima: Aristotle's work On the Soul. It studies living powers such as nutrition, sensation, imagination, and thought. Ibn Rushd's commentary is not a casual summary; it is a detailed attempt to explain what Aristotle must mean.

• Form: what makes a thing the kind of thing it is. A pile of wood and a finished desk may use similar material, but the desk has an organization and function the pile does not. For living bodies, soul is the form that makes the body alive.

• Intelligible form: a form as understood by the mind. A drawn triangle has a size, color, and imperfect lines. The intelligible form "triangle" is the universal structure: a three-sided figure. The intellect grasps that universal structure.

• Material intellect: the receptive power for universal meanings. "Material" here means able to receive forms, not made out of physical matter. Ibn Rushd's mature claim is that this intellect is separate and one for all humans.

• Agent intellect: the active intellect that makes universal meanings actually understandable. The simple example is light. A room may contain visible objects, but without light you do not see them. Sensory images may contain patterns, but without the agent intellect they do not become clear universal concepts.

• Imagination: the power that keeps sensory images available. If you picture a diagram after looking away, that image belongs to imagination. Ibn Rushd needs imagination because human thought starts from particular images, even when it rises to universal ideas.

• Cogitative power: the individual, body-based power that sorts and works with images. It helps explain why different people think at different times, with different memories and examples, even if the universal intellect is shared.

• Unity of intellect: the claim that the highest receptive intellect is one for all human beings. This does not mean every person has the same memories or opinions. It means universal understanding depends on one shared intellectual capacity rather than many separate private intellects.

• Conjunction: the mind's connection with the separate intellect. In plain terms, it is the point where a human thinker moves from images and examples to actual understanding.

Why It Matters

This work matters because it became one of the main medieval battlegrounds over mind and soul. It does not just ask, "Do humans have souls?" It asks what kind of power thinking is, whether thought is bodily or separate, and whether personal immortality can fit with Aristotle's philosophy.

It also matters because it shows Ibn Rushd doing what made him famous: reading Aristotle with extreme seriousness. He is not trying to make Aristotle cute or easy. He is trying to make the argument work. When Aristotle's text is unclear, Ibn Rushd reconstructs the machinery that would make the view coherent.

In Latin Europe, the commentary helped create the debate called Latin Averroism. University thinkers used Averroes to push a strong Aristotelian account of intellect. Other thinkers, especially Aquinas, used Averroes as the opponent they had to answer. That is why this commentary sits at the center of later scholastic arguments about reason, soul, immortality, and the limits of philosophy.

The page is also important for understanding Ibn Rushd himself. His defense of philosophy is not only about religion and law. It is also about how thinking works. If knowledge is possible, there must be a structure that connects sense experience, imagination, and universal truth. The Long Commentary is his most famous attempt to explain that structure.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Later Latin Averroists treated this commentary as a major guide to Aristotle. Thinkers such as Siger of Brabant and John of Jandun used Averroes's account of the intellect to argue that philosophical psychology could not simply be folded into standard Christian teaching. Some readers also connected the shared intellect to broader claims about humanity's common intellectual life.

Thomas Aquinas is the key critic for this wiki. He thought Averroes got Aristotle wrong. For Aquinas, each human being has their own intellectual soul. If there were only one shared intellect, then it would be hard to say that this particular person understands, chooses, learns, sins, or survives death. Aquinas also thought the view threatened Christian teaching about personal immortality.

Church authorities also pushed back against Averroist theses in the university world, especially in the condemnations associated with Paris in 1270 and 1277. The problem was not only one technical theory of mind. The larger fear was that philosophers were treating Aristotle, through Averroes, as a higher court than theology.

The opposition should not be oversimplified. Aquinas and other scholastics learned a lot from Ibn Rushd and took his Aristotle scholarship seriously. The fight was intense because the work was strong, not because everyone dismissed it.

Related Pages

• Ibn Rushd
• Aristotle
• Thomas Aquinas
• Latin Averroism
• Aristotelianism
• Islamic Falsafa