The Imagination and Averroes’s Inconceivables

A fundamental principle of Aristotle’s philosophy, appropriated and originally developed by Averroes, is that intelligibles lie in matter in a condition of virtual existence.Footnote 1 This assumption presupposes a correspondence between reality (esse reale) and its apprehended forms (esse intentionale) which allows the intellect to abstract the intelligibles from the representations of the senses after they have been apprehended by the imagination. The activity of the intellect – i.e., the abstraction of intelligible reality from its condition of potential existence – is what Aristotle and his interpreters meant by thinking activity. In this context, intellects in their purest form are unremitting ‘actualisers’ of potential intelligibility. From sense perception – indeed from the discerning powers underlying the vital faculties of animate bodies – to the highest form of knowledge in which the intellect understands itself (noesis noeseos), each level of actuality corresponds to a level of apprehension within the incessant production of intelligible knowledge that pervades the universe. To put it succinctly, in Averroes’s cosmos animals imagine, individual human beings cogitate, humankind as a whole thinks and the heavenly intelligences intuit and understand themselves. These stages in the process of apprehension constitute real differences, and yet they postulate a continuity of intelligible activity that defines every single aspect of reality in the universe, on both a sublunary and supralunary level. In the continuum of rational life, the imagination mediates between the two extremes of matter and the intellect. In this, it represents a principle of universal fungibility, through which exchanges of knowledge constantly occur among the various parts of the universe.

In this chapter, I will argue that in Averroes’s philosophy the imagination fulfils specific noetic, cosmological and psychological functions: it bridges the gap between the human mind and the astral intelligences (noetics), it accounts for exchanges of energy and knowledge between supralunary and sublunary bodies (cosmology) and it is the channel through which the human mind communicates with the other faculties of the soul (psychology). Most of all, the imagination plays a characteristically delicate role in Averroes’s philosophy, in that it mediates between nature and culture: the imagination – in the form of dialectical, rhetorical, poetic, narrative and exegetic transactions – bridges the gap that separates the level of universal and necessary knowledge from that of sensible, individual and popular representations. This means that, in abstracting the intentiones of meaning from the matter of the universe, an apprehensive power manifests itself in a variety of forms throughout the ladders of the sublunary and supralunary worlds, from the most elementary faculties of vital discernment active in plants and bodily organs to the actualising power of the intellect operating in the celestial spheres. This phenomenon does not occur only in nature. The same holds true for human cultures, which can be seen as different arenas in which alternative forms of reasoning confront each other and constantly need to be reconciled by applying varying standards of proof depending on the circumstances.

Imaginatively bold, Averroes’s philosophy and Averroism have long taxed the philosophical imagination with a series of counterintuitive views originating from a peculiar way of understanding the relationship between knowledge, the intellect and reality. Jacopo Zabarella, professor of logic and natural philosophy at the University of Padua from 1564 to 1589 (the year of his death), was not the first and only philosopher to charge Averroes with a number of inconceivable views (inexcogitabilia) regarding the nature of thought.Footnote 2 The following are some of the inconceivables that were commonly associated with Averroes’s doctrine of the mind: If, in the great scheme of things, at the highest level of intellective knowledge, the understanding subject (intellectus), the understood things (intellecta) and the activity of understanding (intelligere) converge into one reality, why should the intellect need the object of knowledge to be synthesised by the imagination? (Which, by the way, is the fulcrum of Pietro Pomponazzi’s demonstration of the mortality of the soul: by requiring an object in the form of the imagination, human thinking necessarily depends on the body). Connected to this question is a series of related inexcogitabilia: What is the point of the external world? Why should the soul be united to the body? Is there any room for an individual self? And if the intellect transcends the cogitative functions of the individual self, what does distinguish the cognitive powers of human animals from other nonhuman animals? They all imagine and, perhaps, cogitate.

Imagination as Apprehensive Intentionality

The Renaissance can be described as the golden age of the imagination given the level of pervasiveness and sophistication that characterised the debate on the nature of images and the imagination at the time.Footnote 3 During this period, a question of philosophical exegesis that acted as a powerful catalyst for discussions about the nature of the imagination revolved around a well-known passage from Aristotle’s De anima (I, 1, 403a): ‘possibly thinking is an exception. But if this too is a kind of imagination, or at least is dependent upon the imagination, even this cannot exist apart from the body.’Footnote 4 This is the key locus where Aristotle is debating whether the human mind can or cannot think without relying on the representative material provided by the imagination. In his Long Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, Averroes had recalled the crux of the Aristotelian conundrum: ‘it is not so evident that understanding is different from imagination.’Footnote 5 Here Averroes concluded that, beyond the dilemmatic formulation of the question, Aristotle had in the end reaffirmed the ontological diversity of the two faculties.

Aristotle’s dilemma created a distinctive hermeneutical situation that led many Renaissance philosophers to exercise their exegetic skills, from Pomponazzi, who, as already noted, used the Aristotelian statement to reaffirm the profoundly material and bodily nature of human experience and culture, to Giordano Bruno, who stretched the interpretative boundaries to a limit, comparing the process of thinking to a constitutively visual and imaginative activity and the philosopher to a painter.Footnote 6 For others – in a hermeneutically more sober fashion – the Aristotelian locus meant that human beings were unable always to think in a demonstrative and systematic way, or to ‘see’ the truth in a direct way, and that as a result they had to resort to various forms of deliberative thinking in political and ethical contexts, and to interpret key religious statements in a figurative way. These kinds of undemonstrative and unintuitive thinking presupposed the existence of a number of alternative views on reality that needed to be negotiated before one could reach a consensus on the particular matter under discussion. No doubt, everyone seemed to agree that the imagination had a key role to play in this situation. Renaissance philosophers saw the imagination as a mediator between the body and the soul, the intellect and the senses, the appetites and the will, between the animal and natural functions of the body, motion and rest, past and future, between memories, dreams and prophecies, between nature and culture.

Averroes’s contribution to this debate was momentous. In his philosophy, the imagination played a crucial role both as a faculty of knowledge and a principle of life. First, the imagination provides the metaphysical conditions that allow the intellect to think what is different from itself. By definition, the primary object of a pure intellect is its own essence, because of the already mentioned coincidence between the understanding subject (intellectus), the intelligibles (intellecta) and the understanding activity (intelligere); images represent the principle of otherness – the body, the world, matter, the object qua object. Put otherwise, while the active intellect knows all the other things that are different from it by knowing itself, the human intellect knows itself by knowing all the things that are different from itself. To put it in an even more straightforward way: God qua the supreme intellect knows the reality of things, human beings know the images of things. Alessandro Achillini (1463–1512), professor of logic, natural philosophy and medicine at Bologna and Padua, aptly summed up the point in his Quolibeta de intelligentiis (first edition 1494, republished in 1506 and 1508): ‘no intellect, with the exception perhaps of the possible intellect, understands something outside itself.’Footnote 7 For Giulio Cesare Scaliger (1484–1558), the self-proclaimed champion of Aristotelian correctness, Averroes’s principal mistake was to assume that a separate intellect could understand through human phantasmata, when in fact this intellect acts in such a way that, ‘by intuiting itself, it sees everything.’Footnote 8

The second important role played by the imagination in Averroes’s system was to provide the psychological and physiological conditions that make each individual human being a vital self and an ensouled body capable of abstracting the esse intentionale from the esse reale. Averroes called this sophisticated form of apprehensive faculty, emerging from the potency of matter, cogitativa, the cogitative faculty, and he made it the distinguishing mark of human nature.Footnote 9 However, for an Aristotelian like Zabarella, the Averroists’ attempt to explain human thinking as the union of the intellect with the phantasmata in man’s cogitativa was a mere ‘subterfuge’. Such a union (the famed copulatio of the Averroists) could be interpreted as a momentary conjunction resulting from the activity of the imagination (per phantasmata) or as an original bond existing ‘by nature’ (per naturam). In criticising the view that such a union was made possible by man’s phantasmata, Zabarella referred to one of Aquinas’s arguments:

If someone, in Averroes’s defence, says that the intellect is joined to man through the representations of his imagination (phantasmata), and therefore it happens that man understands when the intellect understands, this, says Thomas, means nothing, for, when the intellect according to its nature is deemed to be separate from the human nature, its union with it through the representations of the imagination (phantasmata) contributes nothing to making man understand, because these representations are indeed human, but in relation to the intellect their only function is to be a motive object [i.e., they work as stimuli to the activity of thinking, not as their form] and a known thing (res cognita), not a knowing subject (cognoscens). Therefore, through his own representations, a man does not become a subject capable of understanding, in the same way as a wall does not become capable of seeing through the colour with which it stimulates the eye.Footnote 10

Possessing phantasmata does not make a human being think any more than possessing colours makes a thing a subject capable of seeing. Phantasmata are potential res intellectae, ‘understood things’, not intelligentes res, ‘understanding things’. The role of phantasmata is to stimulate the production of intelligible species in the intellect. The solution to this problem offered by some Averroists was to say that the intellect depends on man’s body in a ‘representational’ sense (objective), that is, insofar as it depends on human representations (phantasmata) understood as the object from which the intellect is ‘moved’ (which is very close to Pomponazzi’s solution). But again, as Aquinas had already demonstrated, this would simply mean that man is understood rather than being the understanding principle, i.e., an object of thought rather than a thinking subject.Footnote 11

A second way of characterising the union between the intellect and man’s imaginative and cogitative faculties was to postulate an original, natural union between them. Such copulatio through nature was supposed to be in place before the development of the cogitative faculty so that its partial abstractive powers occur already at an earlier stage, even before the soul begins to supply phantasmata with a sufficient degree of transparency to be used by the material intellect. In this case, too, Zabarella contested that a real union could take place in human beings because the ‘presence’ of the intellect was ‘already constituted through the cogitative faculty and completed in the human species, in the same way that a man in a ship that is not sailing is said to be present in the ship, but not united to it.’ For Zabarella, it did not make any sense to say that the intellect was united ‘by nature’, because the intellect does not inform, i.e., pervade the whole psycho-physical compound and does not constitute it as a human being. Rather, for the human mind the experience of knowing things would be the same as being possessed by a demon:

a demon that possesses a human being is not united to him, although it takes control of him (assistat) and it is even said to move his limbs. Therefore, as when a demon who possesses a human being understands, but the human being does not understand that he is carrying a demon, likewise, if the human mind lies in the human being in a way that it does not give man its being, when such a mind understands, man does not understand.Footnote 12

Here Zabarella is rehearsing a series of well-known polemical topoi that had long been used in addressing Averroes’s notion of the intellect. In the secondary literature on Averroes’s philosophy and its medieval and Renaissance interpretations, the notion of the intellect is usually presented as the necessary prerequisite for a correct understanding of the notion of the imagination. This interpretative angle is not without reason, for it cannot be denied that Averroes’s theory of the intellect lays the metaphysical coordinates of his philosophy. The role of the imagination, however, cannot be confined to the act of providing the intellect with images of sublunary reality.

In recent years, a number of historians of philosophy working on Averroes’s thought have been drawing attention to the fact that a better understanding of how the higher cognitive functions of the soul operate can be reached if the faculty of sense perception rather than the intellect is taken as the starting point.Footnote 13 Michael Blaustein, for instance, has argued that apprehension, understood as a process of image formation, represents the key notion in Averroes’s theory of knowledge. For Averroes, any apprehended form is an ‘intention’ – ma‛nā, in Arabic, i.e., an image (usually the term is translated as ‘meaning’) – of the known object, and therefore it has a dual nature, i.e., it is both a thing in its own right and the thing it represents. (The scholastics expressed the same concept with the notions of ratio formalis and ratio obiectiva.) Intentions are representations, but they should be understood as vital apprehensions rather than passive and mechanical reflections of reality. Out of sensible and material experience, they produce representations of reality that are increasingly more abstract. This model of apprehensive intentionality is multi-layered. The external senses apprehend the ‘intentions’ of the sensible qualities, the common sense apprehends the ‘intentions’ of the senses, and so on until we arrive at the intellect, which apprehends the ‘intentions’ of the cogitative faculty. The main difference between cogitativa and intellectus is that the cogitative faculty apprehends individual forms, while the intellect apprehends universal intelligible forms. Human beings cogitate, do not think, and their acts of cogitation are imagined intentions that prelude to the forms of the material intellect.Footnote 14

That Averroes devised a comprehensive model of apprehensive intentionality is confirmed by the way in which Renaissance philosophers interpreted his theory of the imagination. In this case, it is evident that they addressed the question in a more comprehensive manner, taking into consideration not only the intellect as a cognitive power, but also the wider context of the internal senses, the system of the natural faculties of the body, the cosmological setting in its broader significance (including theories of physical change, reproduction and even angelology), not to mention the aesthetic, rhetorical and political implications underpinning the question of the relationship between the intellect and the imagination. The faculty of the imagination is involved in all these different contexts and its meaning cannot be narrowed down to the relationship that it entertains with the intellect. Indeed, it is through broadening the scope of the imagination in Averroes’s system that we can shed new light on his theory of the intellect.

Since Renaissance authors perceived the Averroist view of the imagination as particularly multifaceted, a proper investigation of this notion should address at least five levels of analysis: the ontological and noetic question (or: What is the point of such an elaborate dream of the intellect – i.e., providing the intellect with the imagination’s intentiones – if everything, in the final analysis, is eternal and intellectual?), the cosmological question (or: Do celestial intellects imagine? How does the flow of intelligible light coming from the celestial intelligences intersect with the material intellect?), the anthropological and psychological question (or: What is the nature of the bond that connects the mind with the body?), the medical question (or: Does the faculty of imagining things have as much power in altering the psycho-physiological state of human beings as the faculty of believing in them?) and, finally – to borrow (in this case, quite legitimately) the convenient label introduced by Spinoza – the theologico-political question (or: What is the role of the imagination in establishing systems of human beliefs?). As we will see in the course of this chapter, in all these cases the role of the imagination appears to be crucial.

The Cosmological Aspects of Averroes’s Imagination

Some Renaissances philosophers thought that the characteristically Averroist tension between the oneness (unitas) of the material intellect and the unified process of actualisation imparted to the sublunary world by its energy (informatio) could be solved by putting the discussion in a cosmological context. In the already mentioned Quolibeta de intelligentiis, Achillini explained how the material intellect, considered to be the lowest in the series of heavenly intelligences, could be united to man’s soul when this was conjoined to the active intellect (i.e., the highest intellect). In this scheme, the function of human imagination was not confined to making all phantasmata of natural things transparent, but also included the ability to receive, through the mediation of the material intellect, the knowledge coming from the rest of the planetary intelligences. Achillini thought that the celestial intelligences, on the one hand, and the sublunary world, on the other, met and reverberated in the imagination of human beings when they were in the process of cogitating.Footnote 15

Averroes’s material intellect could therefore be interpreted as both the lowest planetary intelligence and the one intellect covering the mental activity of the human species. As Zabarella summed up Averroes’s position,

[i]t was Averroes’s and also Themistius’s opinion, then followed by many later thinkers, that man’s rational soul, which Averroes called the possible intellect, is not multiplied according to the number of human beings, but is only one in number for the whole human species, and it is the lowest intelligence of all, to which the entire human species was assigned as its specific and adequate sphere. And this intellect, when a man dies, does not die, and maintains its numerical identity in the rest of human beings.Footnote 16

This cosmological point of view implies that the light of the intellect affects not only the knowledge of universals and concepts, but also the very roots of sensible knowledge. The intentiones ymaginabiles, Averroes had written in his Long Commentary on Aristotle’s De anima, are universals in potentiality. They are like seeds that need to be brought to their condition of full actualisation.Footnote 17 The cosmological significance of this process becomes even more apparent when we examine Averroes’s views concerning generation and reproduction. ‘The sun and the other stars are the principle of life and of everything that is alive in nature,’ he wrote in his Long Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysica.Footnote 18 Seeds are endowed with energy coming from the stars and even living beings that are produced through spontaneous generation result from the influence of celestial heat. Sol et homo generant hominem. Rationality, order and proportion, Averroes argued in the same commentary, are embedded in nature, and they derive from the astral intelligences. The active and shaping forces contained in seeds are analogous to the power emanating from the celestial intelligences, since they display a teleological behaviour (adducunt ad finem). They have the power to regulate the specific level of heat necessary for activating all vital functions. This mensura derives from ‘the divine intellectual art.’ It is by virtue of such art that ‘nature accomplishes things in a perfect and orderly manner as if, under the influence of loftier active powers, it were reminded of those that are called intelligences.’Footnote 19 A number of Renaissance philosophers, relying on passages like these, looked to Averroes’s material intellect as yet another incarnation of the anima mundi. As already noted, the lowest intellect in the series of celestial intelligences belongs to human beings only insofar as they are collectively taken to represent the species ‘human being’. Seen in this light, the material intellect represents the thought and the imagination of the sublunary world and as such it also contains its life. This explains why cosmological and pantheistic readings of Averroes’s theory of the intellect became popular during the Renaissance and were still referred to until late in the seventeenth century.Footnote 20

The interplay of dreams and imagination in Averroes’s philosophy is closely related to the question of the cosmological aspects of the imagination. Reading his Epitome on Parva naturalia, one has the clear impression that sleeping and dreaming provided Averroes with a golden opportunity – an experimental opportunity, as it were – to explore the potentialities of perception, feeling and imagination. The advantages offered by states of sleeping and dreaming lay in the possibility of studying the process through which the copulatio – the union between the intellect and the imagination – occurs in concreto. The main question then becomes: What is the scope and what are the boundaries of the apprehensive power, especially in all those circumstances in which sensible objects appear not to be affecting the senses? Dream imagination (ymaginatio que fit in sompno), precisely because it has the unique characteristic of not being sensus in potentia, nor sensus in actu (for no sensible objects are involved), is as it were a sample of imagination in its plain, unadulterated form – pure fungibility in the exchange of cognitive goods from all regions of the universe.Footnote 21 Another important aspect is that in dreams (but it is fair to say that the same holds true for sensory hallucinations), the ordinary route of knowledge is reversed: rather than from the senses to the intellect, the direction is from the intellect down to the senses.

Amongst the authors who discussed Averroes’s theory of dreams during the Renaissance, we can mention Julius Caesar Scaliger and Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola (1469–1533), the former a staunch Aristotelian, the latter a harsh critic of the tradition of medieval Aristotelianism. Scaliger was well aware that the role of the imagination in divinatory dreams could have dramatic consequences for the Averroist theory of the intellect. He pointed out that a philosophical position which looks at the separate intellect as the certifier of divinatory dreams and, at the same time, describes divination in terms of knowledge that deals with individual corporeal substances (materialia and individua) was inevitably exposed to embarrassing difficulties. In his discussion of Averroes’s position, Scaliger went straight to the point and ruled out the possibility that the intellect could know through the representations conveyed by the imagination, the phantasmata. The intellect, he said, ‘does not receive knowledge when it knows, for in this case it would be an imperfect intellect.’ Rather, he went on to say, ‘the intellect is in itself its own knowledge and knowledge of itself (ipsemet, sua, suique cognitio est).’ Furthermore, in the typical spirit of Aristotelian immanentism, he reminded his readers that ‘universals are in matter,’ otherwise they would be the same as Plato’s intellectual figments (idearum figmenta non admittimus). In Scaliger’s opinion, by defending both the separate condition of the intellect and the possibility of divining particular events, Averroes was led to maintain the view that God did not create the world. Since God could not have intellection of particular things, Averroes had been forced to reject the thesis that He had created particular things. ‘This is what vexed that man,’ said Scaliger, ‘the fact that the understanding subject, the understood object and the act of understanding are one single thing in separate intellects. Therefore, if the separate intellect understands what is corruptible, the intellect itself will be corruptible.’Footnote 22

Scaliger’s critique of Averroes’s theory of prophetic dreams rested on two main assumptions. First, a true intellect, in an Aristotelian sense, is pure actuality, therefore cannot have a receptive nature and rely on the objects conveyed to it by human imaginations. Secondly, the real place where universals could be found is the material worlds of particulars. For Scaliger, the intellect represented a closed system of pure actuality constantly actualising itself; in a way, one might describe it as an uninterrupted cycle of self-referential understanding. As such, he regarded the view that the intellect communicates externally with the individual imaginations of human beings as deeply inconsistent. While Averroes had looked at prophetic dreams as interferences in an otherwise unremitting flow of intelligible knowledge, for Scaliger the very notion of interference represented a flagrant breach in the Aristotelian model of intelligible determinism.

Unlike Scaliger, Gianfrancesco Pico was quite a severe critic of Aristotelian philosophy and his attack on Averroes aimed at two central tenets in the Averroistic reading of Aristotle’s metaphysics, i.e., the very notion of nature, understood as a thoroughly deterministic system, and the idea that, through a methodical and severe exercise of speculative knowledge (so methodical an exercise to become an ingrained disposition), man could even attain the very knowledge of God. In De rerum praenotione (1506–1507), he argued that prophetic revelation could not derive from one’s personal application (studium) or from nature. He devoted a specific chapter to criticising the theories of Avicenna, Algazel (al-Ghazālī), Averroes, Moses Maimonides and Moses of Narbonne. Of the four, Pico portrayed Avicenna as the most radical in his views about the powers of the imagination. He interpreted Avicenna as holding the view that ‘the rational soul understands only when it is converted to the higher intelligence on which it depends.’ He added that, ‘as a result of the very purity of that soul, it could happen that the soul is joined by God to the intelligence itself, so that it would acquire the knowledge of sacred mysteries, predict future events, subdue and command matter through the influence of the imagination (appulsus imaginationis), to the point that even the elements could be affected by the imagination (ministerio imaginationis).’Footnote 23 For Pico, the assumption that there could be a natural flow of divine revelations from celestial intelligences contravened the very principles of Aristotelian science. Such intelligences would pour intelligible species directly into the mind of human beings without taking into account the senses and the phantasmata. For Pico, the problem with this view was not so much the attempt to roll the Trojan horse of Platonic innatism into the citadel of Aristotelian naturalism as it was the blatant lack of consistency in the explanatory framework that was supposed to be cogent and systematic: Why then should the soul of a human being be united to a body?Footnote 24 Like Scaliger, Pico conceded to both Avicenna and Algazel that ‘separate minds can see new species in the senses and the imaginations (phantasmata),’ but he denied that this kind of knowledge could be seen as either ordinary or natural.

Not surprisingly, of the four authors examined, Pico reserved the most severe treatment to Averroes. Averroes, he wrote, ‘dreamt (maybe he was drunk) that our cogitative power could join the intelligence that is the closest to us, which he called the active intellect, and that from that conjunction perfect bliss would ensue.’ He believed that, once human beings had acquired all the theoretical and practical habits, the intellect would naturally extend (continuaretur) to the cogitative faculty and that the ability to foresee future events would inevitably accompany the newly-reached state of absolute happiness, for – and this for Pico was the main rationale behind Averroes’s view – who could be happy to all effects without perceiving his or her future?Footnote 25 As in Scaliger’s case, the principal objection Pico addressed to Averroes’s interpretation of prophetic visions was that the character of ‘multifarious variety’ could never be reconciled with the allegedly direct intervention of ‘one intelligence’. Pico dismissed Averroes’s attempt to make sense of anomalous cases of imaginative receptivity towards intelligible universals as unjustifiable given the nature of Aristotelian determinism, both logical and ontological.

Pico was aware that in the Epitome on Parva naturalia Averroes himself had struggled with this delicate problem. This was all the more reason for him to question this very point: ‘How could you, Averroes, obtain prophetic knowledge from this conjunction of yours, when in your commentary on sleep you argued that one cannot have theoretical science from revelation, for, if this happened to someone, he could be said to be a human being only in an equivocal sense? Indeed, you positively declared that such a person would be an angel rather than a human being.’Footnote 26 In his criticisms, Pico mentioned the role of natura and studium. By natura he meant the cognitive abilities that are specific to the human species; by studium the very possibility of progressing towards fulfilling one’s intellectual potentialities through exercise, habits and concentration. But nature and individual effort were precisely the features that Pico wanted to remove from the definition of prophetic knowledge. What is more, Pico was not sure which power had been privileged by Averroes in his explanation of prophetic dreams, whether the intellect or the imagination, the intellect being the source of veridical visions, but the imagination being the material requisite that allowed intelligible truths to become particular and therefore visible.

From a more empirical point of view, Pico contested the view that prophetic dreams and imaginations could result from the exercise of intellectual knowledge. It was a matter of conventional wisdom among both physicians and natural philosophers to assume that in the act of dreaming the copulatio of the intellect with the bodily faculties was so close that it was not always easy to assess the extent to which the production of images depended on the digestion of food or on the actual vision of divine truths. Pico argued that, precisely because of the many material and cultural conditionings, the example of the prophets from both the Old and the New Testament did not support Averroes’s account of the active intellect and the notion of copulatio that he had introduced to strengthen his case. ‘It is apparent,’ he wrote, ‘that there were once very famous prophets who never gained all the speculative and practical habits,’ such as David, Amos and Jeremiah. In Pico’s view, Averroes ignored the fact that these prophets were mostly shepherds, soldiers, illiterate people and adolescents. And yet, to Pico’s surprise, Averroes’s explanation had been appropriated by such distinguished authors as Moses Maimonides and Moses of Narbonne, who, Pico continued, ‘remembered Averroes so well that they forgot the tradition of Jewish studies, for they say that old men do not prophesy because of the weakness of their imaginative power.’ For Pico, their position reflected an embarrassing combination of medical incompetence with a smattering of scriptural exegesis. Leaving aside the authority of the biblical text, Pico explained that, even from a strictly medical point of view, the imagination of old people was in fact more reliable because the excesses of humoral moisture ‘could be reduced to a right and suitable balance.’ Pico found Averroes’s inaccuracies in medical matters even more embarrassing, for Averroes prided himself on being a physician. Trying to rescue Averroes’s theory of prophecy by using Averroistic arguments and to support the thesis that prophets like Moses did in fact prophesy when they were old, Moses of Narbonne came up with the following hypothesis ad hoc: ‘Moses was excellent in using the cogitativa, which was something peculiar to him, but not the imaginativa, the use of which was common to other people.’ Pico did not hesitate to dismiss this distinction as irrelevant, although the nature of the difference between cogitativa and imaginativa was one of the most delicate and controversial points in the whole tradition of exegesis of Averroes.Footnote 27

Medical inaccuracies aside, Pico was mostly concerned with the possibility that Averroes’s notion of prophetic dream paved the way for forms of secularisation and naturalisation of prophetic knowledge. For Pico, prophecy should not be mistaken for a kind of natural precognition. Prophetic enlightenment was given directly by God to men as a gift and as a proof of His favour. Last but not least – especially given the fact that the Averroists claimed to be true Aristotelians – the idea of prophetic imagination was contrary to the very spirit of the Aristotelian theory of knowledge, according to which ‘the soul is united to the body as a thoroughly blank tablet, where nothing is painted or represented, and everything can be known by the soul through the ordinary power of nature only with the mediation of the senses and the imagination (phantasia).’Footnote 28

At this point, one might wonder who in this debate was the true advocate for the power of the imagination, whether Julius Caesar Scaliger (who confined the power of the imagination, as a distinctively animal faculty, to the domain of nature, depriving its operations of any access to the intelligible realm of the intellect), or Gianfrancesco Pico (who fully acknowledged the material conditionings of the imagination and argued that natural knowledge could only be a form of knowledge mediated by the imagination and the senses, while prophecy was a direct illumination from God’s intellect), or, finally, Averroes and his medieval and Renaissance followers (who regarded the imagination as a power that, material as it may be, was nonetheless capable of imbibing the light of the intellect). By allowing exchanges of intelligible currents to occur between the intellect and the imagination in both directions, Averroes and the Averroists were in possession of a more flexible tool to interpret the complex reality of dreams and divinatory knowledge. They could therefore argue that, on the one hand, the imagination was able to visualise the universals of the intellect (a function whose scope and limits become apparent every time prophets receive truthful dreams and visions) and, on the other hand, the material intellect extracted the reasons of the material world (intentiones) conveyed by the phantasmata. Accordingly, the intellect represented a reality of a higher order, indeed immaterial, but the aspects of matter and corporeity maintained an irreplaceable function in the sublunary world. What is more, within such a view of the cosmos, the imagination remained – paradoxically – the only link, tenuous though it may be, with reality (the lessened ‘reality’ of the senses, below, and the heightened ‘reality’ of the intellect, above).

The Medical Aspects of Averroes’s Notion of Imagination

In Averroes’s philosophy, the human soul is the place in the universe where the supralunary and sublunary worlds meet. The part of the soul where this connection occurs is the cogitative power, the highest form of sense perception and the culmination of the animal faculties of the soul. By contrast, many Renaissance philosophers considered the special faculty of cogitation a pointless addition to an already crowded set of internal senses. Zabarella thought that the imagination (phantasia) could account for the complex operations of the internal senses by itself, without assuming further subdivisions. Most of all, there was no need to introduce a special apprehensive power, whether estimative or cogitative, to explain feelings of agreeableness (iucunditas) and dislike (molestia) perceived by human beings and some non-human animals.Footnote 29 The same view was later echoed by the Coimbra commentators, who held that common sense and the imagination (phantasia) could account for all the animal operations of the soul: ‘all the functions of the cogitative faculty can be referred to the imagination.’Footnote 30

In fact, behind Averroes’s decision to extend the powers of the imagination there was no intention to multiply the internal senses, but to reaffirm the view that intentions and apprehensions constituted potential patterns of intelligibility to be unfolded and actualised through the use of increasingly more abstract forms of imaging activity. The intentions, lying dormant in matter as it were in a state of virtual existence (intentiones ymaginabiles), covered the whole spectrum of sublunary life, from the unintentional but purposeful movements of nature (natura) to the conscious perceptions of the animal beings (sensus). On this particularly delicate point, Averroes’s medical work can shed some light. In the Colliget and Collectanea, he advanced the radical view – which is neither Aristotelian, nor Galenic – that natural faculties were by themselves vital and capable of discriminating among various objects. In doing so, they were endowed with a cognitive power, and therefore there was no need to assume the existence of special natural instincts in animals. Unlike Aristotle, Averroes described the vegetative faculties of the soul as capable of performing simple but fundamental cognitive tasks (by discriminating between what is conducive to life and what is not). Unlike Galen, he described the vital functions of the body as regulated by the common sense and its allied functions located in the heart.Footnote 31

In his important study on the Venetian editions of Aristotle and Averroes, Charles Schmitt argued that Averroes’s writings ‘added a medical component’ to the understanding of the Aristotelian philosophy.Footnote 32 Averroes’s medical synthesis had broadened the conceptual and terminological scope of medical theory in such subjects as the composition of medicines, the role of unnatural heat (calor putredinalis) in causing fever, the anatomical seat of the soul, the status of the vital faculties and the theory of reproduction.Footnote 33 A possible way of defining Averroes’s attitude in his medical work might be to say that, in a number of anatomical questions, he tried to show how Aristotle could be used as a more reliable authority than Galen.Footnote 34

Of course, since the intellect for Averroes is incorporeal and separate, one would look in vain for an anatomical account of the mind and its faculties in his medical works. What one finds, though, is a precise anatomy of the imagination and the cogitative power.Footnote 35 Averroes located the functions of the imagination and cogitation in the head, in a series of intercommunicating concavities (cellulae cerebri), two in the frontal part of the brain, one in the middle and one in the back, anatomically configured in such a way that, by opening and closing their respective entrances, the soul could be able to imagine, remember and formulate inferences.Footnote 36 Averroes also hinted at a ‘ruling power’ (virtus regitiva), a general faculty which ‘communicates with the body as a whole’ and which is served by four or five sub-faculties, i.e., the attractive, retentive, digestive, excretive and discerning (discretiva) powers.Footnote 37 Undoubtedly, one of the most intriguing aspects in Averroes’s physiology is to be found in the way it redefines the network of natural, vital and animal faculties in the body. As already said, Averroes expunged the notion of vital faculty as understood by Galen, but, unlike Aristotle, he assigned a certain level of discerning power even to the vegetative functions of the body. As a result, Averroes’s system of bodily functions looks more coherent and cohesive than the Aristotelian and Galenic ones: from the concocting faculties of the similar parts to the cogitative faculty located in the ventricles of the head, one continuous rational force permeates the whole organism. There is no leap from the vegetative to the sensitive soul as in Aristotle’s physiology, no gap between nature, life and knowledge as in Galen’s physiology. Unlike Galen, Averroes did not see the point of introducing extra vital virtues: ‘there are no more operations apart from these two, that is, the nutritive (nutribilis) and the sensitive (sensitiva) faculties.’Footnote 38 In Averroes’s anatomy, the natural and nutritive faculty – the basis for all other faculties – is located in the heart, and from there the nutrimentum cordiale – i.e., the vital heat – is distributed to the various parts of the body.Footnote 39 The heart, in turn, controls the brain. In keeping with the principles of Aristotle’s cardiocentric physiology, Averroes provided a series of empirical proofs and rational arguments to demonstrate that the brain depends on the heart even for its sensori-motor operations. One of these proofs is based on a syllogism that is particularly revealing to understand Averroes’s position on the anatomy of perception and life:

the animal is provided with nourishment and the nutritive power only through the sensitive power of the senses. But the organ whereby the brain is helped by the heart through the heat which it transmits to the brain is the five senses; therefore the sensitive power is first and foremost located in the heart; and this power is the common sense.Footnote 40

The most important thing animals need for their self-preservation is nourishment. In their search for food, they are greatly helped by the senses, which, although they are managed by the brain through the nervous system, are nevertheless maintained by the natural heat produced and administered by the heart. During the Renaissance, a number of physicians and natural philosophers interpreted Averroes’s attempt to conflate Aristotelian with Galenic motifs as an original and bold rearrangement of disciplinary boundaries. Some of them considered the reorganisation too bold. Jean Fernel (1497–1558), the author of a wide-ranging reorganisation of medical learning, thought, for instance, that Averroes’s view ran the risk of oversimplifying the anatomical picture by transforming the vital and natural faculties into manifestations of one discerning power emanating from the heart and distributed throughout the body by means of the natural heat. In his Physiologia (published in various reedited versions in 1542, 1554 and 1567), he explained that ‘all those who were led by Averroes to swear allegiance’ to the Aristotelian view that there is no specifically vital power intermediate between the natural and the animal (cognitive) faculties were nevertheless forced to admit the existence of such a vital power after a more careful study of the operations of the body.Footnote 41 This is another case in which the characteristically Averroean tension between the intelligible light of the intellect and the intentional forms embedded in matter comes to the fore. And in this case, too, light and shadows meet halfway in Averroes’s sublunary world. Within the lesser world of the human body this means that all vital processes follow specific patterns of intentionality and cogitation. If we go back to the statement with which I opened this chapter – animals imagine, individual human beings cogitate, humankind thinks and the heavenly intellects intuit and understand themselves – I am now in the position to add the phrase that plants and all unsentient living beings have the ability to discern and discriminate, for discerning is the primary function in the intentional pattern that seems to characterise Averroes’s view of nature. He explained this crucial point in the course of a dense discussion in the second book of the Colliget. It is also the crucial moment when the soul makes its appearance in his medical encyclopaedia.

We will briefly say that there are further faculties (virtutes) besides the forms of the temperaments (complexionales formae) and they are called ‘souls’ … And therefore we say that physicians, when they investigate the operations, they say that the faculties that can be found in the human being are three, and they are natural, vital or animal. In their opinion, the natural operations are the ones through which nutrition, growth and reproduction occur. The vital powers are the pulsific powers (virtutes pulsatiles), which reside in the heart and perform the function of dilating and contracting through breathing in and out, and the motive power (virtus motiva), which is located in the heart and is called ‘elective’ (electiva), through which the animal is moved to desire an object or to flee from it. Also, the physicians believe that there are five animal faculties, the faculties of the senses, i.e., touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight. In addition, there are the faculty of locomotion (virtus motiva in loco), the faculty of the imagination (virtus imaginativa), the estimative, cogitative, retentive and recollecting faculties (aestimativa, cogitativa, conservativa, reminiscibilis). This is the division that is used by the physicians when they divide the faculties of the soul, and although such division is not appropriate, it will not do any harm to you in the exercise of the medical art. By contrast, the division that bears on the natural motions is entirely appropriate for it is apparent that these operations cannot be based only on the four qualities, but also on faculties added to them, which are called ‘souls’.Footnote 42

Here Averroes is referring to the division of the faculties – natural, vital and ­animal – which was current amongst physicians. This division is not ‘appropriate’, but it can be used on a pragmatic and operational basis. The medical division of the faculties of the soul that is ‘fully appropriate’ is the one concerning the natural operations of the soul because – more correctly than in Aristotle’s theory of life – Galen’s view on the natural faculties demonstrates that, even at the level of digestion, growth and reproduction, the operations of the body postulate the presence of elementary functions of the soul, such as the ability to distinguish and identify nutritive from harmful substances. Therefore these functions cannot be reduced to the material qualities of the four elements. Averroes’s eclectic approach in medicine is rich in theoretical implications. On the one hand, his decision to bring Galen’s vital faculties back to the Aristotelian notion of the vegetative soul implied the naturalisation, so to speak, of the internal senses, which accordingly became more closely connected to the operations of the natural faculties (the primordial tendencies behind appetites and involuntary movements do not need a special faculty, i.e., Galen’s ‘vital’ faculty). On the other hand, he entrusted the most elementary functions of life with animal prerogatives and with the ability to make decisions (the ‘elective’ power), for, in Averroes’s opinion, there was ample and compelling evidence for assuming that the natural functions of the body show a glimpse of animal life (in contrast with the strict Aristotelian division into the vegetative and sensitive ‘parts’ of the soul).

All vital functions are therefore distinguished by Averroes not according to the traditional ontological divisions between the domains of nature, life and soul, but by assuming various degrees of abstraction within one apprehensive power (esse intentionale). In this sense, the rational faculty is more spiritual than the faculty of the imagination (virtus rationalis est magis spiritualis quam imaginativa) because it is capable of apprehending the universals (perfectio virtutis rationalis est apprehensio rerum universalium), but it cannot operate its abstracting function without the preliminary operations of the faculty of the imagination.Footnote 43

Conclusion: The Imagination as a Surrogate for Thinking

We can summarise the various aspects of Averroes’s multifaceted position discussed above by saying that in his view of the cosmos the imagination acts as a surrogate for reality (i.e., the intellect). This key role can be examined on various levels. The imagination is a surrogate for thinking, for life, for beliefs and for demonstrative rigour in contexts of hermeneutic understanding (law and religion). Since Averroes maintains that the intellect is not simply real knowledge, but reality qua reality, and that, however, human beings can experience reality only through the imagination, it is not difficult to understand why, in investigating the nature and the extent of that particular reality (esse) that constitute the esse intentionale – i.e., reality qua represented – , the onus probandi falls on the imagination.

In and by themselves, the representations of the imagination (phantasmata) cannot elicit acts of understanding (intellectiones) from the very ‘matter’ of knowledge. While it is true that the intellect cannot think without the objects provided by the imagination, it is also true that the faculty of the imagination cannot operate without the light of the intellect. In Averroes’s view of reality and knowledge, the representations of the imagination provide a reservoir of intelligible species in a latent state, ready to be actualised by the material intellect. By encompassing all the forms of material reality in a condition of potential existence, the material intellect acts as the intelligible counterpart of prime matter. Within the sublunary world, the highest level of apprehensive activity that is compatible with the material limitations of the imagination is the cogitative operations performed by human beings.

As seen in the course of this chapter, the imagination – and dream imagination in particular – plays an important role in unravelling some of the most notorious puzzles of Averroes’s philosophy. As suggested at the beginning, this role needs to be explored in all its various dimensions (metaphysical, epistemological, cosmological, medical and theologico-political). The most intricate of the Averroistic puzzles is, no doubt, the way in which the intellect is tied to the world of representations (copulatio) and the explanation of how the intelligibles in potentiality, contained in a virtual state in material reality, become intelligibles in actuality in the intellect (i.e., the original correspondence between the esse intentionale, esse intelligibile/intellectum and esse reale). Here it is worth reminding ourselves that Averroes’s intellect is, first and foremost, a cosmological, collective and impersonal entity. It is separate, and humankind participates in its intelligible light through the representative faculty that the Latin translators of Averroes called the cogitativa. The act of understanding occurs in the soul of human beings through episodic contacts between human imaginations (phantasmata) and the virtual reservoir of intelligible forms in the material intellect, contacts that are put into effect by the active intellect. Above all, in tackling the problem of the dual existence of the intelligible natures – in the material intellect and in the cogitative soul of human beings – , one should never lose sight of the cosmological dimension that characterises the Averroistic notion of the intellect. In releasing the light of reason from the representative matter of the individual imaginations (the phantasmata), the power of the intellect brings to actualisation a tendency to apprehend that runs throughout the universe, from the most elementary living beings to the heavenly intelligences. In this sense, reason can be said to be already in matter and, in the specific case of human beings, reason takes on the form of an embodied cogitative faculty, corporeal and yet fully representational.

In his De intellectu (1503), Agostino Nifo gave a very pointed definition of Averroes’s material intellect as ‘the matter of all separate intellects,’ for this intellect works like a switchboard that connects streams of knowledge from above and from below.Footnote 44 While it is a repository of intelligible knowledge, it also acts as a provider of information coming from the sublunary world. In a way, the world as a whole may be seen as the object par excellence for the material intellect, and the material intellect as the representation, the phantasma par excellence for the active intellect. I have summed up the complex layering of the Averroistic cosmos by saying that, within the Averroistic ladder of being, living beings discern, animals imagine, individual human beings cogitate, humankind as a whole thinks and intellects intuit and understand themselves; that is to say, natural operations in living organisms are capable of discriminating between the useful and the harmful, animal nature processes images (intentions is Averroes’s term) from matter, individual men cogitate those images and the human intellect thinks insofar as it is considered a species, i.e., the human species. In this sense, the intellect of the human species thinks the sublunary world seen as one collective representation of the universe to be further abstracted and processed by higher levels of intellectual activity. During the Renaissance, depending on how one interpreted the special relationship that connects intellects, the material intellect and bodily imaginations, the door could be left open even for possible pantheistic views of nature.

No doubt, Averroes’s universe was in the end an Aristotelian universe. One might safely say that it is one of the most radical attempts to apply Aristotelian principles to the understanding of reality. In this Aristotelian universe, every aspect of reality, with the exception of the unmovable mover, is in the process of being actualised. In the ascending ladder of being each form serves as matter for the next form of a higher ontological level: the material intellect is matter for the active intellect, the cogitative faculty is matter for the material intellect, prime matter, finally – this recalcitrant, refractory, never completely actualised source of potentiality – is matter for the imagination. In this sense, the world of human imaginations – in itself a synthesis of the representations of the natural processes occurring in both the sublunary world and in those microcosms of life that are the human bodies – is the basis for the intellectual world of humankind.

Very aptly, Bruno Nardi described phantasmata in an Averroistic sense as ‘an epitome of the whole world of sensible experience,’ where it is important to stress the point that sensible experience is not confined to human experience.Footnote 45 Single individuals imagine (including some non-human animals), but only those individuals in nature that possess the cogitative faculty (i.e., human animals) can process images out of matter which can be mediated with beliefs and are sufficiently abstract to be actualised by the intellect. In all cases, their imaginations accrue from material processes and cosmological events. As such, they reflect the life of the whole universe. Precarious as it may be, the intellect’s link with both nature and humanity is thus saved. Perhaps, in this subtle and delicate interplay of nature, history and humanity lies the most lasting legacy of Averroes’s theory of the imagination. However, the cosmological understanding of the imagination was progressively abandoned by the end of the sixteenth century. During the Renaissance, Averroes’s bewildering views on knowledge and nature – Zabarella’s inexcogitabilia – cried out for philosophical comment. Then the speculative furore seemed to subside. His multifaceted theory of the imagination fell gradually into oblivion and only the political and religious implications were absorbed into the theological-political controversies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.