3232

DOI 10.
1515/apeiron-2012-0030  apeiron 2014; 47(3): 356–389
Eli Diamond
Aristotle’s Appropriation of Plato’s Sun
Analogy in De Anima1
Abstract: Aristotle’s chapter on productive mind (De Anima III.5) and its com-
parison of this mind to light are best understood as a careful revision to Plato’s
Sun-Good analogy from Republic VI. Through a rigorous juxtaposed reading of
De Anima II.7 on vision and III.5 on thinking, one can see how Aristotle is al-
most wholeheartedly taking up Plato’s analogy between vision and thought.
When one accounts for all the detail of Aristotle’s explanation of light and vi-
sion in II.7 by seeing that chapter as anticipating III.5, an interpretation of pro-
ductive intellect emerges which reconciles the main opposing views on the
question that have long divided interpreters: whether the productive intellect
discussed in De Anima III.5 is human or divine.
Keywords: Plato, Republic, Aristotle, De Anima, Mind, Thinking, Agent Intel-

lect, Light, Sun, Vision, Soul, Separation, Analogy, God, Good

Eli Diamond: Dalhousie University – Classics, PO Box 15000 , Halifax, Nova Scotia B3H 4R2,
Canada; E-Mail: eli.diamond@dal.ca
In De Anima III.5, Aristotle’s compares the νοῦς which he qualifies as productive

(ποιητικός) to light. It has occasionally been noted by commentators, both ancient2

1 The interpretation of Aristotle’s view of mind in De Anima in this article is the one I offer in
my book Mortal Imitations of Divine Life: The Nature of the Soul in Aristotle’s De Anima (forth-
coming from Northwestern University Press).
2 See especially Themistius, On Aristotle’s ‘On the Soul’, 103, 20: “Yet the intellect that illumi-
nates primarily is one, while those that are illuminated and that illuminate are, like light, more
than one. For while the sun is one, you could speak of light as in some way divided into the
cases of vision. That is why Aristotle makes his comparison not with the sun but with light,
whereas Plato’s is with the sun, i.e. he makes it analogous to the Good” (Trans. Robert B.
Todd). Many scholars of Alexander of Aphrodisias think that at 88, 26–89,8 of his own De
Anima, Alexander makes an implicit reference to the sun analogy of Republic VI. For a sum-
mary of the literature on this question and persuasive reasons for rejecting that Alexander has
Republic in mind, see M. Bergeron and R. Dufour, Alexandre D’Aphrodise: De l’âme (Vrin,
2008), 348–9. Schroeder argues that Alexander has the analogy of the sun and good in mind in
the passage, and writes “[t]hat Aristotle at De Anima 430a14–17 may have had the same ana-
logy in mind is also possible,” citing a selection of modern interpreters of Aristotle who suggest
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Aristotle’s Appropriation of Plato’s Sun Analogy in De Anima  357
and modern3, that this must be an allusion to Plato’s Sun Analogy in Republic
VI. But surprisingly few explore the nature of this correspondence or its possible
philosophical consequences in any depth.4 Understanding Aristotle’s chapter
on productive mind as an appropriation and revision of the Platonic analogy
helps clear up ambiguities in Aristotle’s argument, as well as clarify the relation
between the master and the student’s thought more generally.
The greatest ambiguity of De Anima III.5 is whether its subject matter is hu-
man mind or divine mind. In the Republic’s analogy between seeing and think-
ing, there is of course no such ambiguity. The whole purpose of the analogy in
Republic is to understand the good. Socrates introduces the analogy between
the sun and the good as an alternative to answering the question “what is the
good” directly, since, unlike the other forms of the virtues as distinct determina-
tions of the good, it cannot be known directly.5 What is sought is the “form of

this. See F. M. Schroeder, “The Analogy of the Active Intellect to Light in the ‘De Anima’ of
Alexander of Aphrodisias”, Hermes 59 (1981), 215. See also F. M. Schroeder, “Light and Active
Intellect in Alexander and Plotinus”, Hermes 112 (1984), 239–248.
3 Victor Caston, “Aristotle’s Two Intellects: A Modest Proposal”, Phronesis, 44: 30 (1999), 223–
4; Michael Frede, “La théorie aristotélicienne de l’intellect agent”, in Cristina Viano (ed.), Corps
et âme: Sur le De anima d’Aristote, (Vrin: 1996), 386; R. D. Hicks, Aristotle De Anima (Cam-
bridge: 1907), 501; G. Rodier, Aristote, Traité de l’âme. Vol. 2. (Ernst Leroux: 1900), 460; Ronald
Polansky, Aristotle’s De anima (Cambridge: 2007), 463–4.
4 Of modern commentators, the exceptions are Rosamond Kent Sprague, “A Parallel with ‘De
Anima’ III.5”, Phronesis 17 (1972), 250–1, and L.A. Kosman, “What Does the Maker Mind
Make?”, in Martha Nussbaum and Amélie Rorty (eds.), Essays on Aristotle’s De Anima (Oxford:
1992), 342–358.
5 “But, you blessed men, let’s leave aside for the time being what the good itself is – for it
looks to me as though it’s out of the range of our present thrust to attain the opinion I now
hold about it” (Republic 506d8–e). Why can the good not be thought like the forms of the other
virtues? First of all, the good is beyond οὐσία or essence – while the other forms have determi-
nate natures, the good is not determinate in this way. It is a form that is not an essence. Sec-
ond, it is other than and greater than knowing. Taking these two facts together, we can see
why the good is not knowable like other forms. For all the forms of human knowledge, both
intellectual and sensible, there exists a basic division between knower and object known.
These various relations of knower and object are articulated most explicitly through the divided
line. But insofar as the good exists beyond knowing and beyond essence, its undivided unity
exists beyond the division that characterizes all the forms of cognition on the line. In this way,
existing as the final object of dialectical thought and the ultimate object of knowledge, it exists
at the summit of the line, beyond the line. The form of the good as the μέγιστον μάθημα (505a2;
cf. 517b) is the necessary term without which our knowledge of the other objects of thought is
inadequate (see 505d11–505a7): “I divine that no one will adequately know the just and fair
things themselves before this is known” (506a6–7). As existing beyond the division, the pro-
blem is that to know the good would require being the good. It is not that the Good is unknow-
able – after all, the sun is an object of sight (508b9–10), and the good is known (508e4). But

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358  Eli Diamond
the good”, not any of particular good thing, nor even other good universals or
forms, but the good that exists as separate and “itself by itself”, in one of Pla-
to’s common expressions. The analogy both gives an impression of what the
good is, and clarifies why it can’t be known as directly as the other forms. In
other words, Plato’s analogy is not first and foremost about epistemology – un-
derstanding how sensation and thinking work – but rather these epistemologi-
cal questions serve to answer a metaphysical, and one might say, theological6
question: what is the good, the first principle of all things?
I think Aristotle’s intention in III.5 becomes clearer once we read his claim
that this νοῦς is like light more rigorously than has been done, interpreting the
relevant passages in De Anima as a careful revision of Plato’s analogy between
the sun and the good. When Aristotle invokes this comparison, I take it that he
is in fact telling the reader: ‘I have discussed the role of light in vision in II.7: to
better understand my discussion of productive mind, please refer to the discus-
sion of light and vision in that chapter.’ As in Plato’s analogy, every single de-
tail of Aristotle’s analysis of vision is relevant to his analysis of thinking.7 Once
we read II.7 on vision and III.5 on productive intellect together,8 it becomes
clear that Aristotle is almost wholeheartedly taking up Plato’s analogy between
vision and thought. It is fruitful to compare the results of this more rigorous
juxtaposed reading of II.7 on vision and light and III.5 on productive mind with
Plato’s analogy of the sun, in order to see what are Aristotle’s revisions to the
Platonic epistemology and theology implicit in the sun/good analogy.
It is understandable that commentators have not pointed to the rigorous cor-
respondence I am arguing for in De Anima: when Plato draws his analogy be-
tween seeing and thinking, he does so in one unified discussion where the con-
nections are drawn explicitly for the reader. Aristotle is not nearly so explicit.

this undivided unity beyond essential determination and existing prior to the division of
knower and known cannot be known except as the cause of these effects.
6 Lloyd Gerson argues that it is anachronistic to look at the Platonic Good as divine. See
L. Gerson, “From Plato’s Good to Platonic God,” International Journal of the Platonic Tradition,
2 : 2 (2008) 93–112.
7 Obviously this is directly opposed to Ross’ view in W.D. Ross, Aristotle (London, 1949), 150:
“The analogy of light must not be pressed to closely.” (Cited in John M. Rist, “Notes on Aristo-
tle’s De Anima 3.5”, in John P. Anton and George L. Kustas (eds.), Essays in Ancient Greek
Philosophy (SUNY Press, 1971), 508.
8 F. M. Schroeder has done the same thing for Alexander’s De Anima, where he sets out to
explain Alexander’s reading of the light/mind analogy by examining “what Alexander has to
say, not about light as the term of an analogy, but about light itself.” See F. M. Schroeder, “The
Analogy of the Active Intellect to Light in the ‘De Anima’ of Alexander of Aphrodisias”, Hermes
59 (1981), 216.

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His treatment of vision in II.7 occurs a whole 10 chapters before his chapter on
active thinking. The connections I am going to be drawing are implicit, but hope-
fully still convincing. Most importantly, when one accounts for all the detail of
Aristotle’s explanation of light and vision in II.7 by seeing that chapter as antici-
pating III.5, an interpretation of productive intellect emerges which reconciles
the main opposing views on the question that has long divided interpreters:
whether the productive intellect discussed in De Anima III.5 is human or divine.9
Certain interpreters – Themistius in antiquity, more recently R. K. Sprague –
attentive to the connection between Plato’s Sun Analogy and the De Anima, see
the identification of mind with light rather than the sun in III.5 as an anti-Pla-
tonic denial that a divine cause of human thinking is required by the argument
of De Anima. Alexander, in contrast, makes light and its source interchangeable
in Aristotle’s account so as to argue that Aristotle, like Plato in his analogy, has
a divine cause and not the human mind in view in III.5. Several influential re-
cent interpreters (Michael Frede, Victor Caston, Myles Burnyeat) have tried to
recover the Alexandrian interpretation of De Anima III.5 by insisting on the nu-
merous compelling reasons for us to think that Aristotle’s famously obscure
chapter is about god, the divine nous.10 The strength of these readings is the
undeniable identity or at least proximity between the attributes associated with
the mind of III.5 and the attributes associated with the divine mind in Metaphy-
sics Lambda and elsewhere.11 But to make the point that III.5 is simply theologi-
cal without any reference to human psychology, Aristotle’s account of how hu-
man mind operates must be complete by the end of III.4. On this reading, the
human mind as essentially passive and receptive is wholly treated in III.4, and
can thus be contrasted with the non-passive, non-receptive activity of divine
mind of III.5.12 III.5 is then able to be read as moving on to the distinct question

9 The interpretation of productive intellect as pure awareness, consciousness, or attention
which I present is not particularly original. It has most recently been defended by Phil Corkum,
“Attention, Perception, and Thought in Aristotle,” Dialogue 49 (2010), 199–222. Corkum traces
the interpretation back to Kosman, whose views, he claims, “hasn’t received the attention it
deserves” (200).
10 For Burnyeat, III.5 “is first philosophy, theology, metaphysics. For it is wholly focused on
God, the Divine Intellect.” See Myles Burnyeat, Aristotle’s Divine Intellect (Marquette UP, 2008),
38. For Caston, Aristotle’s account of the psychological mechanisms of thought “is complete
without De Anima 3.5,” and “the second intellect does not belong to human psychology at all,
but rather theology.” See Caston (1999), 200 and 202.
11 Caston identifies eleven identical or nearly identical attributes between De Anima III.5 and
Metaphysics XII. See Caston (1999), 211–12.
12 Michael Frede, “La théorie aristotélicienne de l’intellect agent”, in Cristina Viano (ed.),
Corps et âme: Sur le De anima d’Aristote, (Vrin: 1996), 385: “L’intellect humain est par essence
une capacité qui peut être exercée ou non. De plus, c’est une capacité receptive ou passive.

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of the divine νοῦς which operates apart from any body and hence any of the
soul’s other powers treated by De Anima to this point.
Paying closer attention to the analogy between seeing and thinking, how-
ever, undermines this reading of III.4–5. Although Caston13 has claimed that the
difficulties in the interpretation of this chapter result from too much attention to
the analogy of light and mind and not enough attention to the logical structure
of the argument, this reading of the structure of Aristotle’s treatment of mind is
itself flawed and does not take into account the structure of the unfolding argu-
ment about mind or the all-important analogy between sensation and thinking
at its core. As Caston argues, it is true that, in isolation, the analogies are inde-
terminate. In order to understand Aristotle’s appropriation of Plato’s Sun Ana-
logy, I will look at III.5 within the structure of the larger treatment of sensation
and thinking, and interpret the light analogy in that context. I hope to show
that it is by being attentive to this analogy between vision and thinking, read as
an appropriation and revision of the Sun Analogy, that the structure of the De
Anima argument about mind is made most explicit. On the view I will be pre-
senting, De Anima III.5 begins as a treatment of human thinking, answering a
question left open at the end of the previous chapter about what explains the
difference between acquired knowledge and active contemplation of this knowl-
edge. But the answer to this question discovers an aspect of human mind so
unmixed with body, unaffected, active, and honourable that it gives us some
insight into what the nature of pure divine actuality must be like. III.5 begins as
human psychology but culminates in theology, articulating a view that does not
ultimately have very much to distinguish it from the Platonic analogy.
II. The Two Analogies: Establishing the

Connection Between Republic VI and De Anima
In order to see the undeniable parallel between Republic and De Anima, it is
worthwhile recalling the basic terms of the analogy between seeing and think-
ing for Plato and Aristotle.

Ainsi son acte, le penser, est une sorte de passion. L’intellect divin, de son côté, n’est pas par
essence une capacité que Dieu pourrait exercer ou non. C’est un acte. Et pour cette raison, la
pensée divine, ne peut pas être considérée comme une sorte de passion.”
13 Caston (1999), 199. Frede (1996, 381) locates the difficulty in the obscurity of Aristotle’s ac-
count of light: “La théorie d’Aristote concernant la lumière par rapport à la vision est assez
obscure. Pour cette raison, j’hésite à creuser les détails scientifiques de cette analogie.”

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Beginning with seeing as being more clear to us than thinking, Plato distin-
guishes two aspects to the perceiver, and two aspects to the object perceived.
On the side of the seer, there is the eye, and its power to perceive, i.e. vision.
On the side of the object seen, there is the object of sight, and the object’s capa-
city to be seen, i.e. its colour. In other words, for both perceiving organ and
perceptible object, there is 1) its existence, and 2) its power or capacity. Beyond
the perceptual and perceptible capacities is 3) their active unity in active seeing
and actively being seen. But Plato points out that these powers of the eye and
the colour remain merely unrealized potentialities, unless there is present a
third kind distinct from perceiver and perceived, another genus of object:
light.14 Light is a unifying cause, wholly distinct from and external to both per-
ceiver and perceived. It is the cause of seeing as the coalescence of a seeing eye
and a seen colour. As long as there is light, a healthy eye and a coloured object,
there is an act of seeing in which the division between coloured object and see-
ing eye is overcome. And light, not being self-caused, of course points to a pri-
mary cause: though not the only possible source of light,15 the sun is the cause
whose light makes sight see and objects be seen in the best way. The sun
through its light is the cause responsible for the transition from the organ’s abil-
ity to see to actual seeing, from the object’s ability to be seen (its colour) to
actually being seen.
This division of existence, power and activity is then transferred to thinking
in the intelligible realm. In the place of the eye there is mind, the eye of the
soul. In the place of the visible object or colours, there are the universal forms,
ideas or essences of things. Both the mind and the form are also characterized
by a power, the mind’s capacity for thinking, and the form’s truth, which consti-
tutes its power to be known corresponding to the visible object’s colour. The
cause of the transition to active knowing, uniting the capacities to know and be
known, is an intellectual light,16 caused by the idea of the good.

14 Incidentally, at Republic 507c6–d9 Plato points out that sight is absolutely unique among
the senses in this need for a third ingredient which causes the active union of perceiver and
perceived. This is one of Aristotle’s important revisions of Plato’s analogy. In his own analysis
of sensation, Aristotle attempts to show that the need of a third unifying term between the
organs’ capacity and the object’s capacity to be perceived is a universal feature of all sensation,
though he would agree with Plato that this is most clearly discerned in sight. But Aristotle
shows that this need for a medium is present even in touch, though very obscurely. This differ-
ence belongs to the Aristotelian view that what is there in the highest is also there in the lowest
and most immediate, if only very obscurely.
15 Republic 508a4–6.
16 It is remarkable, especially given how clearly and exactly the analogy works in all other
respects, how difficult it is to discern what in the intelligible realm corresponds to light. Ed-

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362  Eli Diamond
Turning to the De Anima, we see just how indebted Aristotle’s account of

perception is to Plato’s. Aristotle organizes his own treatment of perception ac-
cording to the three-level schema of potentiality and actuality: first potentiality;
second potentiality/first actuality; and second actuality.
For Aristotle, the bodily element of vision, the eye17 is first potentiality –
this is the underlying matter of vision. The first actuality is the capacity to see,
vision – this is the οὐσία of the eye.18 And the second actuality is ὅρασις (De
Anima 412b28), active seeing, that which vision is a capacity for. That the same
distinctions exist on the side of the object is clear from Aristotle’s treatment of
hearing in III.2 at 425a26–426a26.19 There is the distinction between the object
actively being seen20 (second actuality), the object’s illuminated colour or active
capacity to be seen (second potentiality/first actuality), and the object upon
which this colour exists (first potentiality). The distinction between first potenti-
ality and first actuality is not a distinction between events in a temporal succes-
sion,21 but rather the material and formal aspects of one being – so the eye is
the unity of the pupil and its essence, which is vision or the capacity to see,
and the object is the unity of its sensible form or colour with the object22 that

ward Houser [“Philosophical Development Through Metaphor: Light Among the Greeks”, Pro-
ceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 64 (1990), 82] even argues that the
intellectual medium analogous to light is omitted intentionally by Plato, since light is an effi-
cient cause, and efficient causality is banned from the higher realm. The difficulty is the follow-
ing. In one respect, Socrates says that what illuminates the mind and its objects is truth and
being (508d5). Since there are not two distinct lights, light would seem to be the unity of truth
and being, something like reason itself as the principle of the unity of thinking and object. He
further associates sight and light with knowledge and truth (508e6–509a2), suggesting an
equivalence between truth and light. But truth has an ambiguous place in the analogy. On the
one hand it seems, along with being (τὸ ὄν) to be the analogue of light. But it also seems to be
the analogue of colour, that which has the power of being seen, paired with ἐπιστήμη and
γνῶσις (508e6–509a2) as the objective side of the power of being known (508e1–3).
17 Or alternatively the pupil [κορήν]: see De Anima 431a17–18.
18 If the eye were a living being, Aristotle argues vision would be its soul. (De Anima 412b19)
19 The extension of the model of hearing to vision is justified by Aristotle’s comment that “the
same λόγος hold for the other senses and sense objects.” (De Anima 426a8–9)
20 There is no word for the object of vision which corresponds to the object of hearing’s
sounding (ψόφησις): “the actuality of vision is seeing, but the actuality of colour has no
name.” (De Anima 426a12–14)
21 Yet it seems as though the transition from first potentiality to first actuality could be separate
and successive events also. See Kosman (1992), 349: “If I am looking at a judge in the dark, turning
on the lights will make her seen and therefore visible; if I am in the next room, it will make her
visible because only my looking at her will be required for her to be seen.” (emphasis mine)
22 Kosman makes a crucial point here: the matter which underlies sensible form is not the
stuff out of which it is made, but the object itself that underlies the sensible feature being taken

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underlies it.23 As we have seen, all these moments of Aristotle’s account are pre-
sent in Plato’s articulation, and they seem to be simply a further conceptual
organization of Plato’s model.
Yet in treating the question of the activating cause of vision, Aristotle intro-
duces an ingredient absent from Plato’s schematization: the medium between
organ and object. Such a medium, which both separates the organ from its ob-
ject but then also connects them from a distance, is necessarily present for any
of the five senses to operate. For vision, this medium is something transparent,
through which coloured objects can appear to the eye. The transparent in activ-
ity is light, the transparent in potentiality is dark, and the difference between
them is explained through the presence in the transparent of an illuminating
source: fire, or one of the heavenly bodies. Through this focus on the role of the
transparent, Aristotle emphasizes how the object of sense and the sensing organ
are external to each other – the medium is that externality.
In Aristotle’s account of mind in De Anima III.4–5, these three stages of
potentiality and actuality can be identified with three distinct and separable
states of the mind. On the side of the knower, first potentiality is the unlearned
mind prior to the determination by intelligible form, first actuality/second po-
tentiality is the mind having acquired these forms through learning, and second
actuality is the active contemplation of these acquired forms. On the side of the
object, the images of the object retained from sensation, prior to the abstraction
of intelligible form from them, constitute the first potentiality;24 the essence or
intelligible form acquired through learning and having the capacity to be
thought constitutes the first actuality/second potentiality; the form when being
actively contemplated is the second actuality.
The near-identity of Plato and Aristotle’s two analogies is striking:25 in fact,
the distinction between existence, power and activity on the side of the object

in. He writes that “the door is the matter of the visible door in the same way the horse is the
matter of the white horse; it is the substratum of which the determining quality is predicated.”
See L. A. Kosman. 2000. Metaphysics Λ 9: Divine Thought”, in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Lambda,
Symposium Aristotelicum. ed. Michael Frede and David Charles (Oxford UP: 2000), 320.
23 Some complexity is introduced in the discussion once one introduces the active condition
of perception. In hearing for example, one might distinguish between a bell, which when
struck with a blow becomes a sounding bell, and then a sounding bell in the presence of a
healthy ear to hear it. In terms of vision, one could divide these stages into events if one con-
sider the eye in the dark, the eye in light, and then the eye in light in a room full of coloured,
visible objects.
24 Or perhaps the object itself which underlies the essence or form.
25 See Kosman (1992), 349: “In the first place, we may wish to simply note how like Aristotle’s
discussion it [i.e. Plato’s discussion of light and the visible in Republic VI] is: here (as in the

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364  Eli Diamond
and the perceiver in Plato’s analogy easily fits into the Aristotelian distinctions
of first potentiality, first actuality/second potentiality; second actuality. Both
analogies seek to answer the same question: what is there, beyond the knowing
mind and the object known, that explains the power of active thinking’s identity
with its object? Plato writes that “light makes (ποιεῖ) sight see in the best way
and the object of sight seen,”26 or, to put matters in a more Aristotelian lan-
guage, light makes these first actualities into second actualities. Thus for Plato
too, light is ποιητικός or productive.27
There are however, differences. Two particular differences are worth simply
noting at this point: 1) in III.5, in the comparison of mind to light, Aristotle, as
opposed to Plato, makes no reference to a source of this light;28 and 2) Aristotle
develops the idea of a medium in sensation, not present in Plato’s analogy,
which then seems to drop out in the analysis of thinking.
Perhaps the most striking difference between Plato’s and Aristotle’s account
is that where Plato sees an exact correspondence between the structure of see-
ing and thinking, Aristotle points out several ways in which the analogy is not

Theaetetus) one can see how deeply Aristotle’s theory of perception and cognition is grounded
in Platonic discussions. Note in particular the symmetrical model of perception which attri-
butes potentiality and actuality to both subject and object.”
26 508a5.
27 Kosman (1992, 349–352) has usefully shown how Plato’s treatment of vision and thinking
fits into Aristotle’s threefold schema of first potentiality, second potentiality/first actuality, and
second actuality. To support his view that νοῦς in De Anima is the cause of both the transition
through learning from first potentiality to first actuality, and then transition from knowing (first
actuality) to active thinking (second actuality), Kosman shows that for Plato, while sensible
and intelligible light effect both these transitions, the priority in the account is on light and
mind as effecting the second kind of actualization.
28 It is likely for this reason that Alexander, in his De Anima, makes no difference between
light and the source of light, both of which he characterizes as that which is eminently visible.
Since Aristotle identifies productive intellect with light and not the sun, and since Alexander
argues here and elsewhere that the productive intellect is God, and not an aspect of human
mind, the distinction between light and the source of light becomes superfluous: light is the
first principle, with nothing prior to it. See Schroeder, “Light and Active Intellect in Alexander
and Plotinus”: “It is significant that Alexander, in his analogy of the Active Intellect and light
(De Anima 88,26–89,6), despite his dependence upon the analogy of the sun in Plato’s Repub-
lic, omits mention of the sun and confines himself to light” (246). See also his comments in
“The Analogy of the Active Intellect to Light in the ‘De Anima’ of Alexander of Aphrodisias”:
“In the analogy of light Alexander speaks, not of the source of light, but of light as supremely
visible. He has already (88, 25) described the Active intellect as supremely intelligible. In the
account of light itself he speaks both of the source of light and of light as supremely visible”
(219).

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exact.29 When Plato translates his analysis of the eye’s vision of visible objects
to the mind’s thinking of the intelligible object, the truth of his conclusions
about what is involved in thinking is not established independently of the ana-
logy: rather there is the mere assertion30 that there is an exact correspondence
between the ingredients required for vision and for thinking. That there is a
demand for a third unifying term external to mind and its object, equivalent to
light and to the source of light, depends on the here ungrounded assumption
that this perfect match exists between the two spheres, but no independent ar-
guments are given for the need of mind and its object of a self-diffusing princi-
ple distinct from them both.31 Not that such arguments don’t exist for Plato –
but the analogy itself is what does all the argumentative work in establishing
the desired conclusion. We will see how Aristotle’s argument diverges in two
ways. First, the correspondence or analogy between seeing and thinking is not
established by the analogy; it is established through an independent argument
which is simply confirmed by the correspondence between them. Secondly, be-
cause the analysis of thinking is not dependent on the analogy with perception,
Aristotle is able to point out crucial differences between seeing and thinking,
avoiding certain distortions of how thinking works that follow from understand-
ing it too strictly through the model of perception.
In general Aristotle takes it to be the great virtue of Plato as opposed to his
predecessors to have clearly distinguished between sense perception and think-
ing, between sense objects and the objects of thought. Yet in his own presenta-
tion of the analogy between light and mind, further distinctions between how
perception and thinking work must be made to properly understand the relation
of thinking to the first principle. Even in the chapter prior to his invocation of
the analogy between productive mind and light in III.5, Aristotle in III.4 makes

29 On the disanalogy between perception and thinking in De Anima, see Michael V. Wedin,
“Tracking Aristotle’s Noûs,” in Aristotle’s De Anima in Focus, ed. Michael Durrant (London and
New York: Routledge, 1993), 128-161, esp. 130: “The analogy, often granted strict governance
over the Γ.4 account, is in fact crucially imperfect.”
30 The analogy between the good and the sun is not set up as a kind of poetic coincidence.
The maker of the senses (τῶν αἰσθήσεων δημιουργὸν [507c6–7]) – by the logic of the analogy,
the good itself - has given vision, alone of the senses, a need for a third uniting term between
vision and visible object which makes it perfectly parallel with thinking, the object thought,
and the good as the uniting term. The sun, although ungenerated, is caused by the Good as its
father and so the analogy is grounded in this family resemblance. The sun is the “offspring of
the good (ἔκγονος...τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ)”, and most like (ὁμοιότατος) it (506e3–4; cf. 508b12–c2). Each
is the king of its own ‘place’, the Good of the intelligible place and the sun of the visible place.
31 See Edward Houser (1990), 82: “Plato’s conclusions concerning the existence and ontologi-
cal priority of the good over the noetic realm, therefore, rest solely upon the sun as efficient
cause in the sensible realm.”

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366  Eli Diamond
clear that the analogy between perception and thinking is important to his own
analysis of mind: “If thinking is like perceiving, either it is a certain kind of
being affected (πάσχειν τι) by the object of thought, or some other such thing”
(III.4.429a13–15). But in that chapter he also points out that there are ways that
Plato’s tight correspondence distorts certain distinctive features of thought.
Aristotle notes the limits of sensitive receptivity, due to the facts that its recep-
tive indeterminacy has its own determinate form. This is exhibited through the
organ’s vulnerability to an extreme sense object (τοῦ σφόδρα αισθητοῦ). This
vulnerability of the sense organs was explained by Aristotle in II.12 by the fact
that the capacity was defined by a certain ratio (λόγος) of its extended bodily
constituents, which can be disturbed if too intensely opposed by the determina-
tions of the object of sense (II.12.424a29 ff.). The opposite occurs in thinking,
Aristotle remarks, as the thinking of intense objects of thought, meaning more
explanatory and universal principles, make one more able to think more parti-
cular objects, not less.32 So already in the preceding chapter the treatment of
productive intellect we have been alerted to the fact that Aristotle will be taking
up the analogy of seeing and thinking, but revising Plato’s model through
pointing out structural differences between seeing and thinking glossed over in
Plato’s treatment.
III. The Structure of Aristotle’s Analysis of

Sensation and Thinking
To understand how Aristotle takes up the analogy of seeing and thinking in
Plato’s Sun Analogy, we must review briefly the structure of Aristotle’s treat-
ment of mind in De Anima III.4–5 in the context of the parallels he draws be-
tween perception and thought. In his treatment of perception in De Anima, Aris-
totle proceeds first by giving an account of the passive, receptive aspect of
sensation. In chapters II.7–11, he examines how, for each of the senses, the bod-
ily organ is affected and determined by its object, receiving the sensible form of

32 This seems to be another possible implicit criticism of Plato’s sun and cave allegories,
where one returns to the cave blinded by the darkness after having adjusted to the light of
higher principles. Yet Aristotle himself adopts his own image to explain how what is clearest in
itself is initially too bright for the lower mode of knowing to which we grows accustomed: “For
as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are
by nature most evident of all” (Metaphysics II.1 993b9–11). According to Cicero, Aristotle had
his own version of the cave allegory. See De Natura Deorum 2.27.95.

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the object without its underlying matter, thus becoming identical with its object.
After going through his account of each of the five senses, he draws general
conclusions about the affection of the sense organs in the final chapter of Book
II. Yet he closes Book II with an aporia33 which is left unanswered at the end of
Book II. Are all bodies or only bodies with the capacity for perception affected
by or receptive of sensible forms? Aristotle uses the sense of smell and odours
to illustrate the problem, and concludes that not all bodies are affected by the
sensible form of odour, but only those that are sufficiently indeterminate and
do not simply remain what they are (‘ἀόριστα, καὶ οὐ μένει’ 424b16), such as
air. Air can actually become affected by odour, and must be affected by it in
order to transmit the odour from the object through the medium to the organ.
But then what is the difference between air being affected by odour and a nose
being affected by odour? Aristotle asks:
What is smelling beyond a certain kind of being affected? Or is smelling perceiving, but
air, being affected momentarily, merely becomes perceptible? (II.12.424b17–19)34
Both the medium and the organ are constituted out of some elemental body
which takes on the sensible form of the object, but we of course want to be able to
distinguish between the way a nose smells when it is affected and the way air
becomes smelly when it is affected. So the aporia asks: is there something beyond
this being affected by which a nose is aware of its being affected, some principle
of awareness that distinguishes noses from air?35 Is this principle of awareness
distinct from the receptive affection of the organ or simply identical to it?
To answer this question, Aristotle moves on in the first two chapters of
Book III to examine the common sense, which accounts for the apperceptive
element of sensation, the awareness one has of being affected. This is a compli-
cated argument, but the general conclusion is that a nose is different from air
because of the awareness that accompanies the affection, and that this active
principle of apperceptive awareness is not something above and beyond or dis-
tinct from the affection, except conceptually. One never, for example, has one’s
sense of smell affected by an odour, followed later by awareness once this ac-
tive principle is directed towards it.36 These moments are inseparable in percep-

33 The opening of the aporia is clearly indicated at 424b4 ff.: “ἀπορήσειε δ’ ἄν τις…”
34 On the Greek text and preferring “ἢ τὸ μὲν ὀσμᾶσθαι αἰσθάνεσθαι” over the emendation “ἢ
τὸ μὲν ὀσμᾶσθαι καὶ αἰσθάνεσθαι”, see Kosman, “Perceiving that we Perceive: On the Soul III,
2”, Philosophical Review 84, 499–514 (esp. 509–511 and 518–519). See also Corkum (2010, 204)
for a similar reading.
35 See also Physics VII.2 244b7 ff.
36 Corkum’s way of expressing this covers over the inseparability of sensitive awareness from
passive affection of the organ. He writes: “Perceiving that we see or hear is a turning of one’s

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368  Eli Diamond
tion as matter is from form.37 In other words, Book II treats the material aspect
of sensation, while Book III 1–2 points to the formal principle of sensation – the
principle of awareness that distinguishes the affection by and reception of sen-
sible form by a non-perceptive body from the affection involved in an instance
of active sensation.
This argument locating the principle of sensible awareness of the affections
of the organs within sensation as its intrinsic form is directed against the discus-
sion of the awareness of objects common to several senses at Plato’s Theaetetus
184b ff., where Socrates argues that what is common to sense objects is per-
ceived by the thinking soul through itself beyond the bodily organs. For the pre-
sent argument, what matters is that in the Theaetetus, the awareness of sensi-
bles beyond the sensible proper to each sense is not the activity of sensation,
but of the thinking soul beyond sensible awareness. The lower power requires
the higher power to connect and distinguish its content. This same awareness
of common sensibles Aristotle finds intrinsic to sensation itself as the immanent
form of the sensitive animal’s body and sense organs, without appeal to any
power beyond sensation. While the higher power requires all lower powers to
be present in order to function, the lower power does not require the higher to
be active. For Aristotle, sensation has a completeness in itself distinct from the
Platonic account. We will see this same difference is suggested in Aristotle’s
revision of the analogy between light and mind, where the activity which causes
the complete union of mind and its object is not a power beyond the mind but
itself an activity intrinsic to the mind as the formal principle of intellectual
awareness.
Once Aristotle turns to thinking, a similar structure emerges.38 III.4 begins
with an account of mind as receptive to determination by intelligible forms, and
describes the process by which this potential mind becomes determined by

attention to the affection of the sense organs. What I mean by attention here is a prosaic and
common phenomenon. We can, for example, attend to some item in our visual field while
ignoring other items; when we suddenly notice what was previously unnoticed, it often comes
as something of a surprise.” Corkum (2010), 204. This attributes a separability and autonomy
to perceptual awareness which runs against Corkum’s insight that perceptual awareness is a
necessary condition for but not a special case of perception.
37 De Anima II.5 417b15–17.
38 Corkum (2010, 209) captures this analogous structure well: “Aristotle’s discussion of the
intellect becoming all things concerns a passage from the first potentiality to the first actuality
of intellection; the discussion of the intellect making all things concerns the passage from the
second potentiality to the second actuality of intellection. This will suggest that the relation
holding between the active and the passive intellects is analogous to the relation holding be-
tween the perception that we perceive and the special senses.”

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these forms through learning. At this point the mind has become identical with
the objects of thinking that it knows.39 But at the end of III.4, an aporia emerges
which is, on close examination, practically identical to the aporia about sensa-
tion at the end of II.12 about whether there exists some principle of awareness
beyond the identity of affected organ and its object. Aristotle asks:
We must consider why mind does not always think? (III.4.430a6–7)
This is a problem precisely because the mind that knows is identical with its
objects: why is it not always thinking all the objects it knows? In other words, is
there some principle of thinking consciousness beyond our unthought learned
knowledge, the contribution of which explains the distinction between having
unexercised knowledge and actively thinking about what one knows? It is this
active principle of consciousness which Aristotle investigates in the infamous
subsequent chapter on productive mind. III.5 is a direct answer to a puzzle
about human thinking left unanswered in III.4.40
The analogy between sensation and thinking is not precise on this point.
The receptive and apperceptive moments of sensation are indistinguishable,41
since the organ never becomes identical with the sensible form of an object with-
out awareness of the assimilated form. The reception of form and the awareness
of the received form always occur together in sensation. This is why Aristotle
writes in II.5: “First, let us speak of being affected (πάσχειν) and being moved
(κινεῖσθαι) and being active (ἐνεργεῖν), as of the same being.”42 In thinking,
while presumably this active principle of rational awareness is involved in the
inductive learning process, there is also an exercise of this rational awareness
which is independent of the reception of form, which comes to light through the

39 Thus Burnyeat (2008, 23-24) is right to say that “the identity of intellect with its object holds
already as second potentiality = first actuality, before the knower switches to the second actu-
ality of exercising that intellectual power of their own accord.” Perhaps the only defect in Kos-
man’s (1992) account is his argument that “it is only in complete second actuality that subject
and object are identical,” which he argues for (Kosman [1992, 348]) based on a too-close ana-
logy between thinking and sensation, being perhaps mislead by the connection with the ana-
logy in Plato’s Republic.
40 See Kurt Pritzl, “The Cognition of Indivisibles and the Argument of De Anima 3.4–8”, Pro-
ceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association: Practical Reasoning 58 (1984), 149
fn. 12: “De Anima 3.4430a3–5 states that in the case of things without matter that which thinks
and that which is thought are the same. If mind and object can be so identified, why would
thinking ever start and end? Why is there transition in thought once such an identification is
achieved? Such issues are raised at 430a5–6. De An. 3.5 begins with a reference to phusis, the
realm of change, and applies the principle of matter to mind.”
41 This is one reason why the argument of III.1–2 is so difficult to follow.
42 πρῶτον μὲν οὖν ὡς τοῦ αὐτοῦ ὄντος τοῦ πάσχειν καὶ τοῦ κινεῖσθαι καὶ τοῦ ἐνεργεῖν λέγωμεν·

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370  Eli Diamond
analysis of the transition between unthought knowledge and active thinking of

what one knows. In order to understand this principle of awareness in isolation
from the mind’s other activities, Aristotle distinguishes his analysis of learning
or reception of form from his analysis of contemplating a form which has already
been received.43 What might be called ‘agent sensation’ as a parallel with the
‘agent intellect’ of III.5 is simply the formal side of the reception of sensible form
by the organ.44 Together these constitute an “enmattered λόγος”45, in which the
unity of form and matter cannot be doubted. What prevents this formal principle
of sensible awareness sense from being considered ποιητική is that it cannot of
itself produce the activity – in this sense it is the external objects, which remain
distinct from the perceiver, that are productive of the activity.46
As I said at the beginning, what is at stake in this argument is determining
whether productive mind is for Aristotle human or a divine intellect separate
from humans. The central question about mind to which Aristotle returns
throughout the treatise is whether or not it is separate or separable (χωριστός).
This I think depends largely on what Aristotle means by separability. I must
now make a brief digression so that we can get a sense of Aristotle’s overall
argumentative strategy concerning the separateness of νοῦς is in De Anima. I
will then try and confirm my view of this strategy through his revision of Plato’s
analogy of the Sun.
III. Mind’s Separability: Two Interpretations

Aristotle opens this treatment of thinking in De Anima III.4 by explaining the
principal questions which need to be addressed:

43 In this sense, while Corkum is right to speak of active intellect as the necessary condition
for all thought, his claim that it is not also a special case of intellection (Corkum 2010, 209)
must be qualified. Active intellect comes to light precisely through the special case of contem-
plating the truth you have already acquired through learning.
44 See Corkum (2010, 199): “the role of the active intellect in thought is analogous to the role
of perceiving that we see and hear in perception.”
45 403a25.
46 See De Anima II.5 417b19-28: “τὸ κατ’ ἐνέργειαν δὲ ὁμοίως λέγεται τῷ θεωρεῖν· ὅτι τοῦ μὲν
τὰ ποιητικὰ τῆς ἐνεργείας ἔξωθεν, τὸ ὁρατὸν καὶ τὸ ἀκουστόν, ὁμοίως δὲ καὶ τὰ λοιπὰ τῶν
αἰσθητῶν. αἴτιον δ’ ὅτι τῶν καθ’ ἕκαστον ἡ κατ’ ἐνέργειαν αἴσθησις, ἡ δ’ ἐπιστήμη τῶν
καθόλου· ταῦτα δ’ ἐν αὐτῇ πώς ἐστι τῇ ψυχῇ. διὸ νοῆσαι μὲν ἐπ’ αὐτῷ, ὁπόταν βούληται,
αἰσθάνεσθαι δ’ οὐκ ἐπ’ αὐτῷ· ἀναγκαῖον γὰρ ὑπάρχειν τὸ αἰσθητόν. ὁμοίως δὲ τοῦτο ἔχει κἀν
ταῖς ἐπιστήμαις ταῖς τῶν αἰσθητῶν, καὶ διὰ τὴν αὐτὴν αἰτίαν, ὅτι τὰ αἰσθητὰ τῶν καθ’ ἕκαστα
καὶ τῶν ἔξωθεν.”

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Concerning the part of the soul by which the soul knows (γινώσκει) and thinks (φρονεῖ)
– whether it is separable, or not separable in extension but only in reason – one must
examine what is its distinguishing characteristic (διαφοράν), and how thinking happens.
(III.4.429a10–13)
By the way Aristotle orders these three questions, it would seem that the second
and third question about νοῦς’ chief differentia and how thinking works serve
the ultimate purpose of answering the first question about whether and how
thinking is separable.
This question of the possible separability of some of soul’s activities from
the body resurfaces constantly from the beginning to the end of the work – all
along mind is considered the only plausible candidate for an activity of the soul
independent of body.47 But the question of whether mind is separable is consis-
tently postponed until later when mind is treated in itself – so we can expect
this guiding question finds its answer in III.4–5 on mind.
The question of what Aristotle means by mind being ‘separate’ is at the
heart of whether the mind under discussion in III.5 is human or divine. In these
earlier passages which raise the question of mind’s separability, there seem to
be at least two distinct senses of separation at play. A first sense of the separa-
tion of mind, pertaining to the thought of an individual human thinker, is think-
ing’s independence from the body and its processes. The following passage
from De Anima I.4 is an example of this sense of separation:
It seems that the mind is born in us as a certain substance, not to be destroyed. It would
be destroyed most of all by the feebleness of old age, but now perhaps it is just like
what happens to the sense organs. For if an old man were to get eyes of a certain kind,
he would see just like a young man. Thus old age is not due to an affection of the soul,
but to that in which the soul exists, as with drunkenness and disease. Thus thinking and
contemplating decays when some other thing within is destroyed, but it is itself impassi-
ble (ἀπαθές). Discursive thinking (διανοεῖσθαι), loving and hating are affections not of
that (i.e. mind), but rather of the one possessing mind, qua possessing it. Therefore
when this is destroyed, one neither remembers nor loves. For they were not a part of this
(i.e. mind), but of that which is common, which has departed (ἀπόλωλεν). But perhaps
νοῦς is something more divine and is unaffected (ἀπαθές). (408b18–29)
Here the question seems to concern whether there is some activity of the soul
which does not involve the body being affected. The mind whose imperishabil-
ity and separability is here being considered is the human mind, in particular,
what happens to the human mind as it declines in old age. Already suggested
in this passage is a certain answer to the puzzle about the relation of mind to
the rest of the human being: the mind itself is impassible and unaffected, but

47 De Anima 403a10–12, 413a7–8, 413b25–28.

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372  Eli Diamond
because the activity of mind in us always occurs in conjunction with some bod-
ily process, it is not able to be exercised when this bodily side deteriorates,
though this does not compromise the separate mind’s impassibility.
The second sense of mind’s separation is what Victor Caston has called ‘tax-
onomical separability’: “a certain type of capacity ‘can be separated’ from an-
other just in case we can find an instance of one that is not an instance of the
other.”48 To ask whether mind is separable in this sense if to ask whether there
exists a being or a class of being who thinks without any of the other lower
activities of soul, namely, nutrition and perception. In this sense of separation,
nutritive soul is taxonomically separable from all other activities of soul, insofar
as there exist beings (plants) who nourish themselves apart from any other liv-
ing activities, while perception is not separable in this sense from nutrition –
though it is separable in this sense from thinking. Whether mind is taxonomi-
cally separable depends on whether there is a kind or class of being that thinks
without any other kind of power. The following comment in II.2 suggests that
Aristotle’s interest is this sense of separation:
About the intellect and the contemplative power nothing is yet clear, but it seems as if it
were a different kind of soul and that this alone can be separated, just as the eternal
from the perishable. (413b24–27)
As Caston notes, this comment occurs in a discussion of “the distribution of

powers across different types of living thing.”49 With the human being, we
clearly have an instance of a thinking being which necessarily eats and per-
ceives. But is there a being or a class of beings that thinks without nutrition or
perception in the same way that plants are nutritive without perception and
thinking? If so, this being would be distinguished from all mortal living beings –
plants, animals, humans – by the eternal nature of its life, and would constitute
a “different kind of soul.” Throughout De Anima Aristotle has used the criterion
of whether there is a species that exists with one power but not the other, in
order to determine whether the two powers are in fact distinct from each other.
For those who want to argue that the intellect discussed in III.5 is God, it is
the second sense of taxonomical separability which is central for Aristotle. Cas-
ton argues that this is the only sense of the separability of the soul’s powers
that interests Aristotle in De Anima: “Aristotle is thus concerned in De anima
with the way types overlap and diverge in their extension, and not what occurs
within a given token.”50 But Aristotle is also clearly concerned with the question

48 Caston (1999), 209.
49 Caston (1999), 210.
50 Caston (1999), 209.

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of whether there is an activity of soul in the human being which operates inde-
pendently of body. In fact, besides the passage from I. 4 already cited, this is
mentioned in the opening lines of De Anima as one of the most important goals
of the treatise, to determine whether any of the soul’s πάθη are not common to
the soul-body compound, but proper to the soul itself apart from the body.51 In
contrast, for those who want to argue the intellect investigated in III.5 is hu-
man, it is the psychological sense of separation that concerns Aristotle – he is
investigating whether there is a power of the human soul which functions inde-
pendently of the body. So which of these two senses of separability does Aristo-
tle have in mind in the opening lines of his treatment of thinking in III.4–5?
Perhaps one does not have to decide between them. It does seem that in
order for thinking to be taxonomically separable, it must be an activity which
functions in some sense independently of body. An unembodied separate thin-
ker is inconceivable if the very essence of thinking is to be a certain kind of
actualization of a body, as with perception. Following the treatment of percep-
tion, it would be absurd to ask whether there is a being which perceives but is
not self-nourishing, given that perceiving cannot be understood apart from the
affections of the living body which constitute it, and the living body is only
maintained through its nutritive activities. In the opening chapter of De Anima
Aristotle seems to point towards the interrelation of these two senses of separ-
ability in a crucial passage addressing whether any of the πάθη of soul are prop-
er to it apart from the body:
There is a puzzle also concerning the πάθη of the soul, whether they are all shared also
with that which has a soul [i.e. the body] or whether there is something among them
peculiar to soul. It is necessary for this to be grasped, but it is not easy. It appears with
most of them nothing is affected or acts without body, such as being angry, courageous,
desiring and generally perceiving. This would seem most of all proper to thinking (i.e.
being an affection proper to soul apart from body). But if this is a certain φαντασία or
does not exist without φαντασία, it would not be possible for even this to be without
body. If there is a certain one among the functions and affections of the soul which is
proper to it, then this would be able to be separated. If there is nothing proper to the
soul, then it would not be separate (χωριστή), but just as to the straight, qua straight,
many things belong, such as touching a bronze sphere at a point, it would not however
touch the sphere if separated. It is inseparable, if indeed it exists always with some
body. (403a3–16)
What is here important to note is that the question of whether our thinking
functions independently of body is here explicitly connected with the taxonomi-

51 “ὧν τὰ μὲν ἴδια πάθη τῆς ψυχῆς εἶναι δοκεῖ, τὰ δὲ δι’ ἐκείνην καὶ τοῖς ζῴοις ὑπάρχειν.” (De
Anima I.1. 402a9-10)

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374  Eli Diamond
cal question of whether thinking is able to exist separately from the bodily ac-
tivities in a being, or whether thinking is simply distinguishable conceptually
but not ontologically, like mathematical objects. And the question of whether
νοῦς is taxonomically separate is viewed here as established only if one can
show, in an investigation of embodied human thinking, that thinking in some
way happens independently of body. If there is no thinking activity separate
from body, then thinking would be analogous to the case of the line, which,
when its essence is separated from the material instantiation of the line, does
not even have the powers belonging to it by this essence or definition, such as
touching a sphere at a point on its circumference. If this holds for the activity of
thinking, then no thinking could even occur if the mind were separated from
the body, the source of the images thought requires. Thus in this passage the
two senses of separability are intimately related in the following way: if the for-
mer is untrue, that is, if thinking is in principle wedded to the body as its actua-
lization and not separate from body, then the theoretical possibility of a νοῦς
without the other activities of the body will be eliminated.52 Showing the possi-
bility of the first sense of separability is a pre-requisite for establishing the sec-
ond sense.
A passage from Metaphysics Lambda where Aristotle discusses the relation
of God or the good to the world offers yet another sense of being separate rele-
vant to the question of mind’s separability in De Anima:
One must examine how the nature of the universe possesses the good and the best,
whether it is something separate and itself by itself, or whether it is the order (of the
universe). Or in both ways, just like an army? For the good is in the order and it is the
general, and it is more this man (the general). For this man (is good) not because of the
order, but the order is (good) because of him.53

52 See Stephen Menn, “Aristotle and Plato and God as Nous and as the Good”, Review of Meta-
physics 45:3 (1992), 567: “If X depends on the conditions of matter (especially of generable and
corruptible matter), the X should not be predicated of a divine being, and X should not be said
to exist separately.”
53 “ἐπισκεπτέον δὲ καὶ ποτέρως ἔχει ἡ τοῦ ὅλου φύσις τὸ ἀγαθὸν καὶ τὸ ἄριστον, πότερον
κεχωρισμένον τι καὶ αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτό, ἢ τὴν τάξιν. ἢ ἀμφοτέρως ὥσπερ στράτευμα; καὶ γὰρ ἐν τῇ
τάξει τὸ εὖ καὶ ὁ στρατηγός, καὶ μᾶλλον οὗτος: οὐ γὰρ οὗτος διὰ τὴν τάξιν ἀλλ᾽ ἐκείνη διὰ
τοῦτόν ἐστιν.” Something like the relation of the general to the army expressed here might be
what Aristotle had in mind in his famously difficult question about whether the relation of soul
to body is like the relation of sailor to ship (II.1). After arguing that some part of the soul might
be separated if it is not the actuality of a body, he leaves the following question open: ‘further
it is unclear whether the soul is the actualization of the body just like the sailor of the ship (ἔτι
δὲ ἄδηλον εἰ οὕτως ἐντελέχεια τοῦ σώματος ἡ ψυχὴ ὥσπερ πλωτὴρ πλοίου – 413a8–10).’ Like
the general and the army, the sailor is the ordering principle commanding the ship, but also

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Here the question is whether the good exists only inside the cosmic order as the
goodness of beings, or whether it exists as separate from this order, beyond the
world and in no way dependent on it. As Stephen Menn notes,54 the language
of κεχωρισμένον and αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτό is clearly evoking the Platonic language
used to express the separateness and independence of the forms and the form
of the Good. This sense of separation refers to self-sufficiency, self-completeness
and independence – something is separate and existing itself by itself of it
needs nothing outside of itself to exist. This Platonic language of αὐτὸ καθ᾽ αὑτό
is also used suggestively by Aristotle in the De Anima itself, in his introductory
remarks about perception. In addressing the aporia as to why there are no
senses of the senses apart from their affection by external objects, Aristotle an-
swers that the senses are merely potencies relative to their objects, and they can
only actively exercise their function in and through their being affected by
something other than themselves. Aristotle then compares this feature of the
perceptual mode of our awareness to fuel:
Therefore it is just like fuel does not burn itself by itself (αὐτὸ καθ’ αὑτὸ) without that
which is able to ignite it. For otherwise it would burn itself, and would not need fire
existing in actuality. (De Anima II.5 417a7–9)
In this way something is separate in the sense of existing αὐτὸ καθ’ αὑτὸ if it
does not require anything besides itself to exist and exercise its function. We
can already see how, in this sense, even human mind exists itself by itself to a
far greater degree than perceptual awareness, since in contemplating what it
has learned it is contemplating itself without any reference to objects outside
itself – for this reason the mind that has learned can think when it wants, with-
out requiring an object outside itself to ‘ignite’ it – it can think itself, like a
hypothetical fuel that could burn itself without the igniting activity of fire in
actuality. This disanalogy between perception and thinking is essential to un-
derstanding how mind is separate in a sense that perception is not. One might
even ask whether the choice of example of actual fire igniting an activity is in-
tentionally used by Aristotle to evoke fire and the other heavenly bodies which
as the source of light are analogous to the activating νοῦς of De Anima III.5.
So in addition to the sense of separation of the mind from the body
(whether the mind can operate independently of body), there is the sense of
separation of the mind from what is external to it, from an object distinct from
itself (whether the mind operates self-sufficiently, containing everything it re-

exists independently of this relation, itself by itself, not in its function as sailor, but as an
independent substance prior to this relation.
54 Menn (1992), 547.

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376  Eli Diamond
quires for its operation within itself). If mind is shown to be separate in both
these senses, then there can be a pure thinking that exists in independence
from the activities of soul which depend on the body and on external objects.
I want to suggest this is precisely how Aristotle proceeds in III.4-5. As we
know from other Aristotelian texts, Aristotle argues that there is in fact an in-
stance of thinking activity apart from the lower activities of the soul, namely in
the thinking activity of God, while in humans thinking occurs alongside the
perceptive and nutritive powers. But the chapters on thinking in De Anima do
not assume this conclusion, but rather set out to discover it. On this interpreta-
tion, the moment Aristotle discovers productive mind as the most honourable
power in human soul – an immaterial, wholly actual activity - we get our clear-
est insight into the nature of the divine activity. Though the question of produc-
tive mind in III.5 has to do with human psychology, once the nature of the
activity of human mind is explained, the argument makes the transition from
psychology to theology. If this is indeed also how Aristotle proceeds in III.5,
what support might be afforded through Aristotle’s appropriation of Plato’s sun
analogy?
IV. Aristotle’s Revision of Plato’s Sun Analogy –

Reading De Anima II.7 and III.5 together
Aristotle writes in the crucial passage in III.5 which concerns us:
And there is, on the one hand, a mind [i.e. as was already described in III.4] in virtue of
becoming all things, and mind in virtue of making all things, just like a certain ἕξις55
such as light. For in a certain way light makes colours in potentiality into colours in
actuality. (III.5.430a14–17)
So having already discussed the actualization of the receptive side of mind as

ἐπιστήμη in III.4, Aristotle now turns to mind in the sense of that which makes
these objects of knowledge actually thought. This distinction is an instance of
that difference that exists ‘in all nature’, between matter, which is everything of

55 At Republic 509a5, Plato refers to the ἕξις of the good (τὴν τοῦ ἀγαθοῦ ἕξιν). That Aristotle
identifies light as a ἕξις is the best evidence for Polansky’s (2007, 458–472) unorthodox view
that the agent intellect of III.5 is nothing other than the knowledge it has acquired through
learning. A ἕξις for Aristotle usually refers to an acquired disposition or first actuality, the ac-
tual possession of a capacity without being exercised. But the fact the this ἕξις is compared to
light shows this is not the sense in which Aristotle is using the term – light is not a latent
disposition but the completely actual activity of the transparent.

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its kind in potentiality, and form, which is the cause and the maker of those
things for which the matter is a potentiality.56 In this sense, the analysis of the
form of mind in distinction from its receptive matter corresponds to the analysis
in sensation of the awareness common to all five senses in distinction from the
receptivity of the sense organs. But rather than making this connection of active
mind to the formal principle of sensation, in order to clarify this formal side of
νοῦς he points to his comments about light in II.7. Rigourously analyzing the
details of his account of light will help bring out more clearly Aristotle’s concep-
tion of productive mind, and also make more sense of why Aristotle included
the details he did in his examination of the role of light in seeing.57
Light is the ἐνέγρεια of a characteristic of certain substances, which Aristo-
tle calls the transparent (διαφανῆ), meaning that through which something can
appear. The transparent is the external medium of vision in between the object
and the organ, through which the coloured object appears to the eye. One of
the difficulties in understanding the analogy between mind and light comes out
of an important difference between them. Light is the activity of the external
transparent medium of seeing distinct from both the eye and the coloured ob-
ject, while mind is an intrinsic aspect of the living being – objects may appear
through the mind, but it is also the mind that does the thinking. Thus there is
no real medium in thinking, as there is for all five senses, even touch.58 There is
a good reason for this. Thinking is not a relation to an object outside of itself: it
is a self-relation. When mind thinks its objects, it is thinking itself. There is
nothing through which the objects must appear to the mind, besides the mind.
In other words, one can either say there is no medium in thinking, or that the
mind is itself the medium of thinking. Mind is, in a sense, an intelligible trans-
parency in which objects of thought appear to thinking, much like the transpar-
ent in water, air, many solid objects, and the eternal body above through which

56 See 430a10–14. That we are speaking about the distinction between acquired actual knowl-
edge not being actively contemplated and its active contemplation is conveyed by the perfect
participle πέπονθεν, which indicates that the matter has already been informed. This is the
mind that is already identical with its objects through having learned. The perceptual analogue
is the organ that has been affected by the object and identified with it. See II. 5 417a20–21:
“πάσχει μὲν γὰρ τὸ ἀνόμοιον, πεπονθὸς δ’ ὅμοιόν ἐστιν.”
57 See Wedin (1993, 139 ff.): “The force of the analogy is easily missed, if we neglect certain
features of Aristotle’s views on light.”
58 Thinking here is comparable to vision, but elsewhere, Aristotle use the sense of touch to
describe thinking. Aristotle speaks of mind as touching its object (cf. Metaph. IX.10.1051b17 ff.;
XII. 7 1072b), probably to convey how in thinking there is no separate medium through which
the object appears. But strictly speaking, there is a medium in touch (flesh), though this med-
ium is simply attached to and continuous with the inner organ of touch, that is, the heart.

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378  Eli Diamond
sun, moon, stars and planets appear to us.59 Thus for Aristotle, the mind prior
to this distinction between potentiality and activity, is analogous to the δια-
φανῆ. Already here we see a crucial departure from the analogy between think-
ing and seeing on Plato’s account. Just because light is external to object and
perceiver in seeing, since all perception is a relation to an external object, we
should not assume that the analogue of light in thinking, as the mediating and
unifying term between mind and object, is equally distinct and external to
mind, as this ignores the mind’s self-relatedness. In other words, we cannot in-
fer (as Plato does about light and the Good in his analogy) that the νοῦς of III.5
is separate from human mind simply because light is distinct from the eye in
perception.
Aristotle’s association of mind with the transparent is wonderfully apt. The
objects of vision, colours, are defined as what overlies that which is in itself visi-
ble,60 and being in itself visible is glossed as having in itself the cause of its
visibility.61 This is to distinguish colour from the transparent, which is visible,
not in itself or absolutely, but only on account of another colour appearing
through it. Nothing is seen in the transparent unless it is conveying the colour of
some object,62 whereas the object has its colour (if only potentially) in itself, in-
dependently of any of the other conditions required for this colour to be seen.
For this reason, the transparent is both without any colour of its own (ἄχρουν),63
while somewhat figuratively its transparency is its colour.64 As Alexander makes
clear, light is not in itself visible without a coloured object, any more than a
coloured object is visible without light. It is only in the conjunction of light and
a visible object that anything can actually be seen.65
Now consider mind: it too is not itself any particular intelligible form or
determinate essence prior to thinking.66 The object of thought has in itself the
cause of its being thinkable, while the mind is thinkable in virtue of this object
existing within it, in the sense of first actuality of mind which is identical with
the objects it understands. This is a fundamental fact about human thinking
which is one of Aristotle’s chief points in the treatment of mind in De Anima:

59 418b6–9.
60 418a29–30.
61 418a30–31.
62 418b4–6.
63 418b26–28.
64 418b11.
65 See Schroeder (1981), 219: “Illumination is not simply the effect of the source of light. It is a
joint effect which arises from the juxtaposition of the source of light and the illumined object.”
Colour plays an integral role in making light visible.
66 429a18–24.

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human mind is necessarily object-directed. Both the object of thought and

mind’s consciousness are mutually necessary for any thinking to happen. While
it is true that all thinking is in a sense thought thinking itself – one never thinks
an external object until it has been interiorized as an image and then assimi-
lated by the mind as an intelligible form – it is only by the intervention of an
assimilated object that the human mind can think itself.67 Whether this is true
for all thinking we will explore in a moment.
Aristotle explains how the transparent is not always actively able to fulfill
the role of medium in sensation. The transparent is sometimes only potentially
transparent, that is, the intervening medium is sometimes dark. It is only when
the transparent is actively transparent, that is, when it is light, that colour as
the object of vision can be seen. Aristotle writes:
Light is the activity of the transparent qua transparent. Potentially, that in which there is
this [i.e. light], there is darkness. (II.7.418b9–11)
It seems that light is the contrary of darkness, but darkness is the privation (στέρησις) of
such a ἕξις from the transparent, with the result that it is clear that light is the presence
of this (ἕξις). (II.7.418b18–20)
There is thus one underlying being, the transparent, which when in a potential,
privative state, is darkness through which no vision can take place, even if the
objects are present in this potentially transparent air or water. In contrast, when
actively being that through which objects of vision can appear, it is light, the
cause of their being actively seen. But importantly, this light does not itself con-
tain any objects of knowledge – its’ colour is transparency, which is a kind of
absence of colour. In other words, this activity is essentially objectless.68
It is this activity of the underlying transparent to which the aspect of mind
treated in III.5 is compared. Where light makes the objects of vision, potential
colours, actually colours (which I take to mean ‘actually seen’), active mind
makes the potentially thought objects of the understanding, actually thought.
Or, more precisely, νοῦς ποιητικός is the very activity of thinking which makes
the objects of ἐπιστήμη actively contemplated.69 It is the active consciousness
or rational awareness of that which is implicitly understood in ἐπιστήμη, when

67 This is the force of the aporiai in the last section of III.4 (429b22 ff.) First, how can the mind
think objects if it shares nothing in common with them, and second, is the mind itself think-
able? The receptive mind is in itself potentially identical with all its objects, and once it be-
comes actually identical with them, it is then actually thinkable (430a2–5). The mind thinks
itself as determined by its objects, just as the eye can see the transparent as determined by the
colour of the objects which appears through it.
68 See Rist (1971), 510–11.
69 See Rist (1971), 509: “Active intellect transfers the νοῦς παθητικός into a νοῦς νοῶν.”

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380  Eli Diamond
the mind’s attention is directed towards the content of what it understands.

Whereas light is the activity of a third thing – the transparent - between object
and perceiver, an external element which causes their active identification,
thinking has no external medium, and there is no division between active mind,
passive mind and the objects of mind. It is the mind itself which is the transpar-
ency through which objects actively appear to it. So just as transparency is
equivalent to the mind itself, light as the activity of the transparent corresponds
in the analogy to the activity of the mind itself, that is, active θεωρεῖν.
I am arguing that, in contrast with Plato’s Sun analogy, it is wrong to un-
derstand Aristotle’s analogy of light as pointing towards the existence of some-
thing beyond thinker and object thought which is the cause of them both, since
this division is already contained within the human individual. This reiterates
the difference we saw between Plato and Aristotle on sensation: where Plato
sees the thinking soul as connecting and dividing the content perceived by each
of the five bodily senses in sensation, Aristotle locates this awareness within
sensation apart from thought as the formal principle of all sensation, thus giv-
ing sensation a completeness beyond the Platonic view. In Aristotle’s treatment
of mind, the formal principle of intellectual awareness is similarly located with-
in the human mind as the form of its receptive ‘matter’, in contrast to locating
the principle of intellectual illumination beyond the mind in the Republic ana-
logy. One way of characterizing Aristotle’s revision of Plato’s view is as a re-
centering of epistemology on the human being and a moving away from the
theology and metaphysics required in the Platonic account of thinking. After
schematizing and comparing the various ingredients in the analogies between
seeing and thinking in both Plato and Aristotle, R. K. Sprague notes that the
only difference between Plato and Aristotle’s analogy between perceiving and
thinking is that Aristotle makes no reference in III.5 to a source of illumination
or intellection as the necessary precondition of any seeing and thinking:
Since Aristotle has no use for the Form of the Good, neither it, nor its counterpart, the
Sun, have any explicit place in the scheme. And yet we find in III, 5, that the Active
Intellect has, as far as possible, taken over the functions of the Sun and of the Good. It
is poiētikos, as, at Republic 509b, the sun ‘not only gives to visible things their power to
see, but also gives generation and growth and nourishment, though being itself some-
thing other than generation.’ Or, to put it another way, the absence of the Sun explains
the presence, in the Aristotelian soul, of an efficient cause. There is no efficient cause
outside the soul, therefore there must be one inside. We might say too, that since the eye
cannot, for Aristotle, see the sun as well as the Sun’s light, it looks at light only. In
epistemological terms this means that the soul is basically self-regarding – and this,
again, is exactly what we should expect.70

70 Sprague (1972), 250–251.

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For Sprague, human mind has taken upon itself the role played by Plato’s Good,
and is for Aristotle the efficient cause of all thinking, thus making any divine
cause of human thinking superfluous. Here the student’s revision of his mas-
ter’s analogy reveals a turn away from theology and metaphysics, and a huma-
nization of what is responsible for thinking.
But if we consider Aristotle’s treatment of vision more carefully, even if it is
true that the analogue of light is a power of human mind, this does not exclude
the presence of a cause beyond human mind, since light in the visible is not
self-caused. Interpreters who argue that a transcendent cause of human think-
ing is the object of III.5 can find support by pointing to what is implicit in Aris-
totle’s analogy, if one only presses the correspondence between his analysis of
thinking and his explanation of the role of light in vision. Recall that light, on
this Aristotle’s analysis in II.7, is not self-caused:
Light is in a sense the colour of the transparent, whenever it is in actuality transparent,

by the agency of fire or some other such body above.71 (II.7.418b11–13)
[Light]…is the presence of fire or some other such thing in the transparent. (II.7.418b16–17)
Beyond the activity of the transparent there is the source of illumination, either
fire or one of the bright heavenly bodies. The question then is whether our text
in III.5, after exploring the role this principle of active consciousness plays in
human thought, then further identifies some element in thinking analogous to
the source of light in the transparent.72
On this reading of agent or productive intellect, the subject of III.5 is that
which brings first actuality mind to full second actuality. That which makes this
transition from knower to thinker is simply conscious awareness, the intellec-
tual light by which what we know and understand appears to us. By this aware-
ness the darkness of uncontemplated knowledge is illuminated and everything
potential is made actual. All that is left for the mind that has the acquired dis-

71 Cf. De Motu IV, 699b2.
72 One remarkable difference here between Plato and Aristotle’s treatment of the source of
light is how Aristotle mentions all the heavenly bodies without privileging any one of them. In
contrast, Socrates asks Glaucon “which of the gods in heaven can you point to as the lord
responsible for this, whose light makes our sight in the finest way and the seen things see?”,
and out of this multiplicity of light sources, Glaucon has no doubt that the sun is what fits this
description. Aristotle not only keeps open all the heavenly bodies as possible causes of light
sources, but also includes the highest of the four sub-lunar elements. It seems plausible that
this multiplicity of sources is intentional – there is not only the intellect of god (the analogue
of the sun), but also the other divine intellects which move the heavenly spheres, and finally a
sub-lunar instantiation of this source, referring to the human intellect as the analogue of fire in
the visible.

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382  Eli Diamond
positional understanding of ἐπιστήμη is to turn on the light to illuminate the

dark room of its uncontemplated content, its objects with which it has become
identified through learning, and as containing everything within itself required
for contemplation, the mind does this by itself whenever it wishes.73 This light
is the conscious attention of our mind. The essence of this added element is
ἐνέργεια, for activity is all that needs to be added to the understanding mind to
make it thinking in the fullest sense and to make its objects thought in the full-
est sense.74 The essence of this νοῦς ποιητικός is simply actuality or activity.
This is not God, but there is an obvious connection between the divine principle
studied in Metaphysics XII as that being “whose very substance is actuality.”75
I am here suggesting that what begins as a question of human psychology,
the analysis of that part of human thinking which explains the difference be-
tween uncontemplated and contemplated knowledge, at this point makes the
transition to contemplating its divine source and thus to theology, precisely be-
cause we have discovered in the analysis of human mind something which al-
lows us to glimpse what this divine nature must be like: a principle of aware-
ness whose very nature is nothing except actuality, and which is separable not
only from body, but also from mind as receptive and from the need for an object
other than itself. Aristotle writes:
And this νοῦς is separate, unaffected and unmixed, its essence being ἐνέργεια. For the
agent is always more honourable than the patient, and the principle than the matter.
(καὶ οὗτος ὁ νοῦς χωριστὸς καὶ ἀπαθὴς καὶ ἀμιγής, τῇ οὐσίᾳ ὢν ἐνέργεια· ἀεὶ γὰρ τιμιώ-
τερον τὸ ποιοῦν τοῦ πάσχοντος καὶ ἡ ἀρχὴ τῆς ὕλης.)76
In III.4, Aristotle has already shown how the receptive aspect of mind (identi-
fied in III.5 as the matter of mind) must also be ἀμιγής, ἀπαθὴς, and separate
from body, so that it can assimilate all intelligible objects as they are without
the interference of its own determinate nature. But the force of the above lines
is that it is this aspect of mind, its active consciousness, which most unequivo-
cally has the character of Anaxagoras’ cosmic mind, the first principle of all
things. The καὶ οὗτος ὁ νοῦς should thus be read as emphatic, as Frede has
suggested77: this mind – as opposed to receptive mind, is really separate, un-

73 See fn. 62 above.
74 At 417b6-7, Aristotle writes that this transition either is not alteration, or it is alteration of a
different kind.
75 Meta XII. 6 1071b20.
76 De Anima III.5 430a17–19.
77 Frede (1996), 386: “Mais je crois qu’Aristote veut dire que c’est seulement cet intellect, c’est-
à-dire l’intellect divin qui satisfait la description sans précisions d’Anaxagore et qu’Anaxagore
avait raison en parlant de l’intellect divin.”

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mixed and unaffected. Aristotle has, though an analysis of the human mind,
discovered an activity that is separate in all the senses we have discussed: it is
separate from body, separate from a particular object or essence. As a result, it
can exist separate from soul’s other powers as a taxonomically separate mind.
Aristotle then writes of this highest activity: “But it does not sometimes
think and sometimes not think (ἀλλ’ οὐχ ὁτὲ μὲν νοεῖ ὁτὲ δ’ οὐ νοεῖ)”
(III.5.430a22). Compare this with what he says of the transparent in II.7: “For
the same nature is sometimes dark and sometimes light (ἡ γὰρ αὐτὴ φύσις ὁτὲ
μὲν σκότος ὁτὲ δὲ φῶς ἐστιν)” (II.7.418b31–419a1). Not thinking is darkness,
thinking is light. If the parallel between the transparent and the human mind
holds, it seems that Aristotle is here contrasting human intellect with divine in-
tellect. Human intellect sometimes exercises its knowledge by actively thinking
it, and sometimes does not actively exercise this knowledge, leaving it in po-
tency, or darkness. In contrast, the divine intellect, which is separate from any
other activity and which has no potentiality, is always thinking.
Aristotle closes his analysis of the role of light in vision in II.7, however, by
noting that the source of light or the activity of the transparent is always active,
whether or not the transparent is light or dark, actively transparent or merely
potentially so:
And fire is seen in both, that is in the dark and in the light, and this from necessity. For
the transparent becomes transparent by virtue of this (πῦρ δὲ ἐν ἀμφοῖν ὁρᾶται, καὶ ἐν
σκότει καὶ ἐν φωτί, καὶ τοῦτο ἐξ ἀνάγκης· τὸ γὰρ διαφανὲς ὑπὸ τούτου γίνεται δια-
φανές.) (II.7.419a23–25)
The cause of light or the activity of the transparent, that is, fire or one of the
upper bodies, is lit independently of whether transparency is actively transpar-
ent. It is the cause of its own light, and therefore is lit and visible even when
the transparent is inactive and dark. So where light is not in itself visible with-
out the conjunction of an object which it illuminates, the source of light is be-
yond the division of light and its object. Correspondingly, while the human
mind is necessarily object-directed, and both rational consciousness and an ob-
ject are required for the act of thinking to occur, divine thinking is beyond this
division of consciousness and object. It is an independently existent pure prin-
ciple of self-consciousness.78

78 A fine statement of this same view can be found in Roopen Majithia, “The Relation of Di-
vine Thinking to Human Thought in Aristotle,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly,
Vol. LXXIII, no. 3 (1999), especially 394: “So what then is God’s activity? Let me suggest that
his so-called thinking, and therefore his being, is simply the activity of pure, unconditioned
consciousness.”

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384  Eli Diamond
Thus both the active transparent and the cause of light in the transparent
(the source of light) are light. The further difference between them is that the
former is an intermittently active state of an underlying object which is also
intermittently inactive and is caused by the presence of something other than
itself, whereas the latter is eternally active with no potentiality and is wholly
the cause of its own activity.
The same relation holds between human νοῦς and divine νοῦς. Human νοῦς
is not necessarily active, since one’s knowledge need not always be actively
contemplated. But the full active awareness of our thinking apart from the re-
ceptive aspect of human νοῦς is identical to the divine thinking activity, with
the difference that active human thinking is the activity of some independently
underlying potential for that activity, while divine thinking is pure activity com-
pletely devoid of any potentiality and without anything underlying it. It is
clearly this kind of intellect to which Aristotle refers in the concluding section
of the chapter: “χωρισθεὶς δ’ ἐστὶ μόνον τοῦθ’ ὅπερ ἐστί, καὶ τοῦτο μόνον
ἀθάνατον καὶ ἀΐδιον (When it is separated, it alone is that which it is, and this
alone is immortal and eternal)” (III.5.430a22–23). Caston points to De Anima I.1
403a14–15 for an earlier occurrence of this sense of mind’s separability, a pas-
sage I have cited above but which is directly relevant to this question about
νοῦς. Aristotle there outlines the puzzle over whether all τὰ πάθη of the soul are
all common to soul and body, or whether there are any of these πάθη that are
proper to the soul apart from the body, and while it seems that almost all the
πάθη are necessarily embodied, thinking seems to be most of all activities prop-
er to soul apart from body (μάλιστα δ’ ἔοικεν ἰδίῳ τὸ νοεῖν). Recall that Aristo-
tle’s point was that, if thinking is shown to operate without body, then there is
a possibility of there being a thinking being which exists independently of all
embodied activities. This is exactly what has been established by the argu-
ment – an activity has been discovered which is wholly unmixed, unaffected by
and separate from the body. This can exist as separate. So the χωρισθεὶς has the
force of saying ‘once we consider this principle of pure awareness not as an
aspect of a human thinking mind, but in itself as a separated pure thinking.’
This interpretation follows Caston’s translation of χωρισθεὶς as ‘When it occurs
separately’.79 Because our analysis of human thinking has found an activity
which is wholly separable, we have discovered at least the possibility that a
divine thinking independently of body and its nutritive, perceptive, a dianoetic
powers exists. Because of the psychological point, a taxonomical conclusion
has been drawn. Only this being will exist beyond the distinction between mat-

79 Caston (1999), 211.

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ter and form, potentiality and actuality – it is only that which it is – its exis-
tence is identical with its essence, to employ a later formulation, and it is im-
mortal and eternal. It does not have nous, it is nous.80
So because this formal case of thinking is independent of body or any bod-
ily process, it can exist in separation from its passive, ‘material’ side. While sen-
sible awareness is inseparably connected with the passive reception of the
organ, this moment of active thinking consciousness is a separate, distinguish-
able moment of the mind’s activity. And when we consider νοῦς ποιητικός not
as that part of us which illuminates our potentially contemplating mind and its
potentially contemplated objects, but in itself and separate from everything
else, we have arrived at a glimpse of the nature of the divine activity. νοῦς ποιη-
τικός, when it occurs separately as the divine nous, is a fully active, actual
being, with no underlying potentiality to be otherwise. This taxonomically sepa-
rate νοῦς is clearly God and only God, since in humans νοῦς ποιητικός does not
occur independently of mind’s receptive side. The adverb μόνον makes clear
that we are speaking only of God, νοῦς ποιητικός as a separate principle of pure
transparent consciousness. This eternity and immortality could not be predi-
cated of human νοῦς – even its most honourable part.
This pure activity of νοῦς is more honourable than its potentiality, since
“the agent and the formal principle is always more honourable than the patient
and the matter.”81 The active and formal aspect of mind is more honourable
than the passive, ‘material’ side, so it is only this that is identified with the
divine activity. A similar argument is found in Metaphysics Lambda, in a con-
sideration of the ἀρχή upon which the heavens and the world depends. There
Aristotle distinguishes between the two aspects of mind under discussion in
III.4-5 of the De Anima – mind’s passive and active aspects:
And thinking in itself deals with that which is best in itself, and that which is thinking
in the fullest sense with that which is best in the fullest sense. And thought thinks itself
because it shares the nature of the object of thought; for it becomes an object of thought
in coming into contact with and thinking its objects, so that thought and object of
thought are the same. For that which is capable of receiving the object of thought, i.e.
the essence, is nous. But it is active when it possesses this object. Therefore the posses-
sion rather than the receptivity seems to be the divine element, and the active contem-
plation is most pleasant and best.82
Thus the active possession of the object rather than potential receptivity is di-
vine, since only then is thinking of itself, is thinking united with itself – not in

80 Menn (1992), 561.
81 De Anima III.5 430a18–19.
82 Metaphysics XII.7 1072b18–24.

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386  Eli Diamond
the sense that it has no object, but this object is wholly contained within itself.
The divine element of human thinking is the self-directed character of its think-
ing.83 But even better than possession is the activity of contemplation. It is thus
this illuminating activity of νοῦς that should be associated with the activity of
god, the act of contemplation which actualizes the possession of knowledge.84
Aristotle in the De Anima has already raised the possibility of the existence of a
being or class of beings either like the human through thinking or even more
honourable than the human (τιμιώτερον).85 The identity of this being and the
reason it is more honourable has emerged – its very essence is the most honour-
able aspect of human life in isolation from its less honourable aspects.
The chapter closes with a reflection on memory which resolves a possible
objection opened up by the argument of that chapter, but which is not inte-
grally related to the chapter if III.5 does not have anything to do we human
psychology: οὐ μνημονεύομεν δέ, ὅτι τοῦτο μὲν ἀπαθές, ὁ δὲ παθητικὸς νοῦς
φθαρτός (but we do not remember, because this (active mind) is unaffected, but
the affected mind is perishable)” (430a23–25). The objection being raised here
could be formulated in the following way: ‘how could you claim that some as-
pect of human mind is ἀπαθές, given that our minds do seem to be affected and
forget?’ If this active thinking consciousness has the independence of body at-
tributed to it by the earlier argument, what can explain forgetting what one
knows? The mind which was at its height of scientific understanding and able
to contemplate the knowledge it had acquired at will can suddenly become un-
able to do so, returning, in effect, to the ignorance which existed prior to learn-
ing. As most commentators recognize, this puzzling phenomenon, which might
serve as a compelling counter-example to the impassivity of thinking, has al-
ready been evoked as a problem in book I. Aristotle here answers the earlier
question by arguing that it is not the unaffected active consciousness in human
thinking which explains the forgetfulness, but that towards which this con-
sciousness is directed – the storing of what the mind has learned. Since human
contemplation only operates through directing its active consciousness towards

83 Kosman (2000), 321
84 In fact, Aristotle suggests that this active thinking, the best activity in living beings, is only
the closest approximation of what this pure activity beyond all potentiality must be like, while
the principle is likely different from and better than the activity we use to understand it. See
Meta XII.7 1072b23, where God is identified with the activity or actuality of thinking: “If, then,
God is always in that good state in which we sometimes are, this compels our wonder; and if
in a better state, this compels it yet more. And God is in a better state”. See also NE X. 8,
1178b24, where the theoretical life of the human is most identical with but most akin (suggenes-
tate) to divine theoria.
85 414b18–19.

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the objects it has acquired through learning, the corruption of the body compro-
mises the content which this active awareness illuminates. But this importantly
does not in the least affect the separateness of the rational awareness itself. If it
did, then the conclusion about the existence of a purely actual separate intellect
would be undermined, and only embodied intellects nested within the context
of nutrition and perception would be possible.86 Given the proximity between
the divine activity of thinking and the active, formal aspect of our own thinking,
Aristotle closes with this remark to emphasize the difference between divine
and human mind.
According to Aristotle’s argument, the mind unifies three aspects which re-
main separate and distinct in sensation, all of which could be qualified as ποιη-
τικός, as activating causes in sensation: the external sense object along with
the external medium which it affects, light, and the active formal principle of
awareness common to the five senses.87 In thinking, the mind which contem-
plates is its objects and the transparent medium through which these objects
appear; it is the light which illuminates the content of its otherwise unthought
knowledge; and it is the active, formal principle of mind.
It should be noted that on the reading I have presented, Aristotle has shown
that it is possible that there could be a thinking being which exists separately
from body, from all other activities, from potentiality, and from the necessity of
a relation to any external object. There is no explicit argument in III.5 explain-
ing either why this pure, separately existent activity must exist, nor is it ex-
plained what the nature of the causality that this principle exerts on human
thinking might look like. Of course, any being whose very οὐσία is ἐνέργεια
cannot fail to be active, and so if human mind is characterized by its intermit-
tent character, yet at the same time only fully actualizes itself through a think-
ing whose nature is nothing else but ἐνέργεια, we can see why Aristotle would

86 Caston (1999, 214) needs to explain, if the chapter is indeed exclusively about divine think-
ing from beginning to end without any reference to human thinking, why the chapter closes
with this reference to our (i.e. human) memory. His solution is both ingenious and grammati-
cally plausible. Reading ὅτι as ‘that’ rather than ‘because’, he is able to construe the sentence
as ‘we do not remember that while this cannot be affected, the intellect that can be affected is
perishable’. The point here would be to re-emphasize the difference between human mind
which is corruptible, and divine mind which is unaffected and hence imperishable.
87 Corkum (2010, 215–16) brings out the problem here wonderfully: “given the opportunity to
draw an analogy with the active intellect, Aristotle does not mention perceiving that we see
and hear. On the contrary, the analogy drawn in De An. 3.5 (430a10–17) is between the activity
of intellect and light.” As Corkum argues, while the activity of intellect is a sufficient condition
for intellection of forms, perceiving that we see and hear is a necessary but insufficient cause:
the external object and light are also required.

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388  Eli Diamond
write in the Ethics that “it is not insofar as he is man that he will live so, but
insofar as something divine is present in him.”88 In a way it is not the existence
of this eternal divine thinking which needs to be explained in III.5, insofar as its
essence is to be active. But how are we to understand the intermittence of a hu-
man thinking which also seems to exhibit a thinking activity whose essence is
nothing but ἐνέργεια? How can these two sides be combined? The only way to
combine thought which returns to latency with a thinking whose essence is to
be actual is, I think, in participatory terms: it is the presence of the divine in us,
it is a life which we can at best approximate, and we participate in this life
inasmuch as we are able. Now on the one hand, the human mind, possessing
its content within itself, can think whenever it wants – presumably this self-ac-
tualizing is the result then of its own desire. But on the other hand, insofar as
something potential can only be brought to actuality through the agency of
something already actually exhibiting that property, the human mind is intrinsi-
cally dependent upon the unchanging activity of this eternally active thinker. In
De Anima nothing more is explained about the relation between divine and hu-
man thinking. Besides being a living being which all living beings desire to
emulate, acting in this way as a final cause of all living being including human
being, nothing is said about the character of the causality it exerts upon human
mind.89
This analysis of Aristotle’s analogy between mind and light shows that de-
spite the corrections to Plato’s analogy in the Republic, the substance of the
teacher’s Sun analogy is almost wholeheartedly taken on by his student. As dis-
tinct from Plato, Aristotle’s analysis of animal sensation and human thinking
strives to show how each of these powers has an intrinsic completeness inde-
pendent of its higher powers. But this completeness is not a denial of the exis-
tence of a divine cause, an eternal and unchanging activity existing apart from
mortal thinking. Above the human mind lies a purified activity beyond the divi-
sion of thinker and object which characterizes human thinking. How this is so
is clarified for both Plato and Aristotle through a comparison with the more
easily understood role of light in seeing, itself the product of an illuminating
source. Aristotle’s revision of the analogy should not be read as an anthropo-
centric negation of Plato’s form of the Good. If there is a revision of the divine
principle, it is simply that the highest cause is not to be understood as a univer-

88 NE X.7 1177b26–28.
89 Many difficulties are left unaddressed: if human thinking is somehow caused by a divine
thinking, and that divine thinking is unceasingly active, how is human thinking as its effect
not also unceasing? How can the mind that knows have its active contemplation caused by an
eternally active divine thinking, yet at the same only think whenever it wants to think?

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sal beyond particular goods, but rather as a thinking beyond the distinction of
thinking and object and independent of the potentiality and relationality which
defines the human mind.90 Like the Platonic Good, this wholly self-related
thinking activity exists ‘itself by itself’, separate from both the body and any-
thing external to it. Ultimately, despite his qualifications, Aristotle appropriates
Plato’s analogy in Republic VI between vision and thinking and between light
and divinity for one simple reason: because he thinks it is true.91

90 This interpretation is similar to the following passage on the One from Plotinus’ treatise VI.
9 on “The Good and the One”, which I take to be an implicit commentary on De Anima III.5:
“Excluded from it are both thinking of itself and thinking of others. It is not like that which
thinks, but, rather, like the activity of thinking. The activity of thinking does not itself think; it
is the cause that has some other being think and cause cannot be identical to effect…”. See
Plotinus VI.9.7.51–55. Translation by Elmer O’Brien in The Essential Plotinus (Indianapolis:
Hackett, 1964) 82.
91 Just as Plato’s analogy between the sun and the good is offered as an indirect approach to
the good because direct access is too difficult (at least at that stage of the argument), there is a
way that Aristotle also uses his analysis of thinking as a way of indirectly accessing the being
of the principle that exists itself by itself and separate, and would prove for this reason other-
wise inaccessible. This approach to the divine through thinking about what is best in us would
provide a possible solution to the problem he raises at the end of De Anima III.7 (431b18–19):
how would it be possible for a mind that does not exist separately from the body, which comes
to learn through induction from sensation, to think something which is separate from body,
immaterial, and so imperceptible? Here through the study of living beings we discover an activ-
ity that belongs to the human but which gives some insight into what kind of living activity
and being would characterize a perfectly actual and immaterial being. This is a different read-
ing of the final lines III.7 than I have given in Mortal Imitations of Divine Life, but this interpre-
tation of the force of the question which concludes III.7 is also completely plausible.

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DOI 10.

1515/apeiron-2012-0030  apeiron 2014; 47(3): 356–389

Keywords: Plato, Republic, Aristotle, De Anima, Mind, Thinking, Agent Intel-

In De Anima III.5, Aristotle’s compares the νοῦς which he qualifies as productive

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II. The Two Analogies: Establishing the

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Turning to the De Anima, we see just how indebted Aristotle’s account of

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III. The Structure of Aristotle’s Analysis of

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We must consider why mind does not always think? (III.4.430a6–7)

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analysis of the transition between unthought knowledge and active thinking of

III. Mind’s Separability: Two Interpretations

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As Caston notes, this comment occurs in a discussion of “the distribution of

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IV. Aristotle’s Revision of Plato’s Sun Analogy –

So having already discussed the actualization of the receptive side of mind as

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human mind is necessarily object-directed. Both the object of thought and

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the mind’s attention is directed towards the content of what it understands.

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Light is in a sense the colour of the transparent, whenever it is in actuality transparent,

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positional understanding of ἐπιστήμη is to turn on the light to illuminate the

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