In the beginning was the "nous"

Magritte: Le Blanc Seing

In the Spirit of "Nous"

The character of the Gods of the old days were based on the assumption that the natural world possessed intelligences. But it was only when pre-Socratics like Pherecydes abstracted these intelligences somewhat into powers or forces in the Heptamychos that other philosophers later came to see these powers as intelligible.

Pherecydes, said to be Pythagorus' tutor, wrote of a more abstract creative principle, Zas, rather than the human-like, Zeus. Zas existed in "time" (Chronos) on earth and Pherecydes was probably influenced not only by the Theogony of Hesiod and Homer's epic, but by Phoenician cosmology too.

Having assumed that, not only was nature possessed of intelligences, but that these intelligences themselves were potentially intelligible, Thales, Anaximander, Pythagorus and later Anaximenes were now in a position to try and understand the natural world: to become natural philosophers - physicists.

This is the importance of Pherecydes. He prepared the way for a leap of faith. That leap of faith was rationalism. The causes might be complex and the resultant natural world difficult to account for, but there were causes and effects and that people might understand.

The ability of people to understand was called nous by Homer and then it was refined by Anaxagoras. Aristotle said that passive nous was capable of apprehending intelligible forms Later on Plotonius developed the idea into that of an intelligible emanation from a single divine being - equivalent to the idea of Ein Soph in Kabalism.

Anaxagoras discusses "nous", in a rather messy way, feeling his way:

"All other things partake in a portion of everything, while Nous is infinite and self-ruled, and is mixed with nothing, but is alone itself by itself. For if it were not by itself, but were mixed with anything else, it would partake in all things if it were mixed with any; for in everything there is a portion of everything, as has been said by me in what goes before, and the things mixed with it would hinder it, so that it would have power over nothing in the same way that it has now being alone by itself. For it is the thinnest of all things and the purest, and it has all knowledge about everything and the greatest strength; and Nous has power over all things, both greater and smaller, that have life. And Nous had power over the whole revolution, so that it began to revolve in the beginning. And it began to revolve first from a small beginning; but the revolution now extends over a larger space, and will extend over a larger still. And all the things that are mingled together and separated off and distinguished are all known by Nous. And Nous set in order all things that were to be, and all things that were and are not now and that are, and this revolution in which now revolve the stars and the sun and the moon, and the air and the aether that are separated off. And this revolution caused the separating off, and the rare is separated off from the dense, the warm from the cold, the light from the dark, and the dry from the moist. And there are many portions in many things. But no thing is altogether separated off nor distinguished from anything else except Nous. And all Nous is alike, both the greater and the smaller; while nothing else is like anything else, but each single thing is and was most manifestly those things of which if has most in it."

Anaxagoras fragment R. P. 155 quoted in John Burnet's Early Greek Philosophy

Hold faith with the belief that the world and the cosmos is wholly intelligible, and you can take the first step using the invisible bridge of rational human thought to support you as you walk across the chasm of the unknown.

But let's go back to the initial idea, before Pherecydes partial abstraction, that nature, soaked in intelligibility, is not merely passively inanimate or animate, but that it is full of God-like intelligences, or the single unified intelligence of Plotonius.

The problem of language

Unfortunately, language and intelligence are bound together. This is unfortunate because with language as tool for reflection we are limited by the very structure of our tool. Linguists, and especially psycholinguists, have suggested that synesthesia and metaphor are at the root of human understanding.

This means that we think, to use an analogy, in a cellular fashion. When something has a recognisable pattern, then it comes within the cell walls of our consciousness. We can then attempt to deconstruct it and make sense of it and try to make sense of what remains to be understood.

We use our existing knowledge to absorb and understand what is just beyond the limits of what we know. We can use the metaphor of feeding or eating. But the metaphor of feeding or eating itself rests on very little; it is experientialist.

And so, as people like Lakoff have suggested, at root our rationality is based on experientialist metaphors.

In fact this metaphorical quality of language, the tool we use to think, is quite a handicap. In particular because, as surrealists like Magritte have pointed out, the representation of something is not the thing itself. Neither is the use to which we put something a useful defining characteristic.

If you use the canvas of the Mona Lisa to cover over a windy gap in a broken window that doesn't mean the Mona Lisa is a draught excluder.

Abstraction is, in a way, a sort of simplification, a reification. In this sense Pherecydes mild reifications and abstractions made the natural world more tractable. But in the process the natural world was simplified and its nature not fully understood.

I can understand you because I have a theory of mind (TOM) about you. I make guesses as to what you know and what you want and what makes you tick and because I am like you I might get it right to some extent.

In a sense our ancestors had TOMs about the intelligences in nature. They saw the manifestation of intelligence; to a degree nature and its wheeling seasons flourishing and decay was intelligible and naturally they assumed that this implied that these complex and rhythmic manifestations of nature were the product of multiple intelligences.

And of course the world was full of animate beings and there was no reason for the human with a stick and a fire, a pot and a bone needle to conclude that s/he was separate and above nature or particularly privileged compared to other animals.

Naturally, a human seeing a gorilla or a bear would assume that we walked under the same forest and that, together with the bear and the gorilla, we were in a shared hyponymic relationship with them and not a superordinate one.

Of course the gnostics went back to the classics; but they made the assumption, not that nature was made up of rational intelligible processes, but that there were actual intelligences that operated through nature, and that these were intelligible.

In a way this was laziness. The were leaning on the symbolic and metaphorical nature of language. They were making universalist assumptions without seeing that the nature of the language of their thought did not allow this universalism.

What is a universal table? What is a universal mother? What is universal love?

These are merely constructs based on core of the human experience and yet understanding is not about going back to universals and monadism and the basic core of experience, but about going to the frontier of experience and coping with the ever increasing complexity and subtlety of it.

I think a good metaphor for human understanding comes from the director of a medical research institute in France who was a student of mine. He said.

"Look. It was our job to try and find a cure for aids and people have criticised us and they have said why haven't we found a cure for AIDs and my reply to them is this. Do you understand how incredibly complex it all really is?"

He proceeded to explain how a cell dealt with viruses and how the nucleus of a cell had a "memory" and how the body defended itself and I listened and I asked him to clarify what he said to me and finally I said:

"Well I seem to understand more or less what you are saying and if I understand more or less what you are saying then this natural phenomenon is intelligible and once you have understood it you can find a cure."

But he said:

"Look. The picture I have given you is incredibly simplified in fact there are hundreds of thousands of these different "viral keys" and we don't know how they operate and we don't know many things."

"And yet", I said, "once you have identified all of them, no matter how long it takes, and once you have worked out all the ramifications, then surely you will be in a position to find a workable solution."

He laughed: "It is easy to say, but not very easy to do. That's what people do not understand.

'This is the lecture I give my medical students at my university in Paris', he said. "But I always finish it in this way. I say:

"Everything I have told you up till now is only a metaphor.

"We don't really know exactly what happens. This is merely the way we explain this aspect of nature to ourselves. The words that I use and the descriptions I give you are useful and roughly correspond, but the description I have given you for what really happens when a virus attacks a cell and a cell has to defend itself, is incredibly simplified and it is a metaphor. It is not what actually happens.

"Remember that"'

To assume that we can understand nature is a great leap. The assumption causes us to progress, but some of the problems we face in understanding the complexity of nature seem unbelievably daunting.

And I am not sure how to disentangle intelligibility and intelligence. Science and gnosticism. Turing suggested a simple test. In fact it was based on intelligibility. The material, made intelligible and responsive to a human would then become an intelligence.

I am not sure if anyone is in a position to force a choice between scientific agnosticism and gnosticism. I think we are too glib about the distinction between intelligibility and intelligence.



* * *


Doing a search on "Intelligible power" produced:

Cartesian Meditations, Edmund Husserl

Could anything be more Intelligible than everyday Intelligibility: Reinterpreting Division I in Being and Time in terms of Division II, Hubert L Dreyfus

Early Greek Philosophy, John Burnet

Feminism, Foucault and Embodied Subjectivity, Margaret A Mclaran

Greek Philosophy III, The Hellenistic - Roman period (texts and commentary), E. J. Brill

The Intelligible Gods in the Platonic Theology of Proculus, Edward P. Butler

Lonergan on philosophic pluralism: the polymorphism of consciousness as the Key to philosophy, Gerard Walmsly

Metaphor Analogy and the Place of Places: where religion and philosophy meet, Carl G. Vaught

Plotonius on the Appearance of Time and the World of Sense: A Pantomime, Deepa Majumdar (?)

Plotonius, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The unity of Wittgenstein's Philosophy: unity, intelligibility and normativity, Jose Medina


Some of this stuff is seminal, some of it a little odd, some of unintelligible and much of it illuminating.