The One Who Thinks in All of Us

Averroes and the scandal of a single mind for the whole human race

There is a question so old, so technically forbidding, and so quietly consequential that philosophy has never resolved it, only periodically walked away from it. The question is how knowledge is possible at all, not for you and not for me, but in a manner that guarantees that what I mean by “triangle” is identical to what you mean by it, that when a geometer in twelfth-century Córdoba completes a demonstration and a student encounters that same proof in thirteenth-century Paris, the two are thinking one thought rather than two private events that happen to wear the same words. The difficulty is not linguistic, since translation is a trivial labour by comparison. The difficulty is ontological. What structure must reality possess for thought to be genuinely shared rather than merely parallel, communicable rather than coincidentally similar from the outside?

Ibn Rushd, whom Latin Europe would call Averroes, gave an answer of such audacity that it scandalised Christian theology for three centuries, drew two episcopal condemnations at Paris, prompted Thomas Aquinas to compose an entire treatise of refutation, and was still being argued over in the lecture halls of Padua four hundred years after its author’s death. Reduced to its core, the answer was this: there exists a single intellect for the whole human species, and no individual possesses it. We do not own it. We connect to it. We are, in the precise technical sense Averroes intended, the sensory instruments of a mind that is not ours.

What these two intellects were, and how they stood to one another, Aristotle left sufficiently open to feed a millennium of commentary. The Neoplatonic tradition, and Plotinus in particular, whose work circulated widely in the Islamic world, had treated the higher intellect as a cosmic principle through which human beings gain access to knowledge. Within the Arabic peripatetic tradition, al-Farabi and Avicenna refined this into a precise cosmological doctrine: the agent intellect as the last and lowest of the celestial intelligences, a universal illuminator that abstracts intelligible forms from matter and deposits them in the soul. Crucially, in their account each human being still retained his own material intellect, his own individual capacity for thought, even if the activation came from above. Avempace, Ibn Bajja, the philosopher of Muslim Spain whose work directly shaped Averroes, pushed in directions that scholars still argue about, but the inherited consensus left the individual mind intact.

The metaphor Averroes himself reaches for is the one Aristotle had used for vision. The material intellect receives intelligible forms the way a transparent medium receives colours, as the condition of their appearance rather than their source. We, as individuals, are analogous to the particular illuminated surfaces. We furnish the occasion for specific thoughts to be actualised. The thinking, however, in its properly universal and necessary character, belongs to no one.

The objection is formidable, and Averroes had anticipated its shape. He does not deny that individuals entertain different thoughts, hold different beliefs, process different experiences. What he denies is that this individual variation can account for the universal and necessary character of genuine knowledge. The question is not whether you and I think different things, which is obvious, but whether what we each call the principle of non-contradiction, or the essence of a triangle, is truly the same object, or merely two private mental episodes described by a shared vocabulary. Averroes even gives the individual side of the process its own name. The activity in the brain he calls fikr, rendered into Latin as cogitatio, and it contains not universal knowledge but the active consideration of the particular things a given person has encountered. Individuality enters through the phantasms; universality requires something the phantasms cannot supply.

That something, on his analysis, is a genuinely universal substrate. If the possible intellect were individuated and multiplied across the species, nothing would guarantee that two instances of “understanding triangle” were instances of understanding the same thing rather than two numerically distinct events of private resemblance. The unity of the intellect, in this light, is not an extravagance but the precondition of communication, of teaching, of science as a collective enterprise. Without an intellective structure common to all, the master and his pupils share nothing properly intelligible, and instruction becomes the transfer of words emptied of any guarantee of common content.

Seven centuries later Kant would reformulate a recognisably continuous problem as the question of how synthetic a priori judgement is possible, and would answer it with the transcendental unity of apperception, the “I think” that must be able to accompany all my representations, a principle of universal cognitive structure that is the condition of experience rather than a deposit of it. The differences between the two projects are real and philosophically load-bearing, and the historical line between them runs not directly but through the critics of the Enlightenment, Herder and Tiedemann among them, who rediscovered Averroes and noticed the resemblance between his single material intellect and the modern conception of a universal, ahistorical reason. Yet the underlying difficulty is one and the same. What secures the identity of the categories through which different minds organise experience? What prevents knowledge from fragmenting into an aggregate of incommensurable private perspectives? Averroes located the guarantee in a separate substance. Kant relocated it inside the structure of subjectivity. The function it discharges is identical in both.

The reception of the doctrine in Latin Christendom was not merely hostile; it was structurally irreconcilable with the entire architecture of individual salvation. If the possible intellect is one and impersonal, there is no individual rational soul to survive the dissolution of the body. The phantasms through which each person connected to the universal intellect perish with the flesh that produced them. What remains is the intellect, which was never personal to begin with. The position therefore entails, as a strict consequence rather than an incidental implication, the denial of personal immortality, of individual divine judgement, and of the whole economy of merit and reward on which Christian anthropology rests.

What the doctrine threatens, beneath the question of the afterlife, is the standing of the individual subject as such. Taken seriously, Averroes does not abolish the person but demotes it, assigning it within the life of thought a position analogous to the one a single cell occupies within an organism. The cell experiences itself as a unit; the organism registers it as a function. Averroes simply moves the vantage point from the first to the second, and the self that had seemed the author of its own understanding turns out to be a perspectival appearance, real as a point of view but not as a substance that thinks. The theological terror follows directly from this displacement. Christian salvation requires an individual durable enough to be judged and redeemed, whereas Averroes requires only a species capacious enough to know, and these two requirements do not coincide. A religion organised around the destiny of persons could not absorb a philosophy organised around the cognition of the species.

The Latin Averroists themselves, Siger, Boethius of Dacia, and in the next generation Giovanni di Jandun, laboured to soften the conflict. Siger proposed that the single intellect is joined to the individual body only in an operational union; Jandun argued that it operates within the body by means of the phantasms. Some sheltered behind a doctrine of double truth, the notion that philosophy and theology occupy separate planes and may reach incompatible conclusions without either being false in its own order. Averroes himself, however, was no double-truth theorist, and this is among the most persistent misreadings of him. In his Decisive Treatise ( Fasl al-Maqal) he insists that truth is one and cannot contradict itself, and that philosophy and revelation are, in his memorable phrase, milk-sisters, nourished at the same breast. Apparent conflicts are only apparent, and their resolution falls to those competent to interpret the deeper sense of the sacred text. The unity of truth was not a difficulty for his system; it was its premise.

Latin Europe knew Averroes almost entirely as the author of the unicity thesis, the Commentator whose dangerous doctrine had to be neutralised before Aristotle could be safely admitted into Christian theology. What Latin Europe did not read, because it was not translated in time, was the body of work in which Averroes laid out his understanding of the relation between reason and revelation: the Decisive Treatise and the Incoherence of the Incoherence ( Tahafut al-Tahafut), his systematic dismantling of al-Ghazali’s assault on philosophy. Had these texts circulated, the European portrait of Averroes might have been less that of a damned heretic and more that of a thinker who defended, with arguments that were anything but trivial, the autonomy and authority of demonstrative science.

In the Decisive Treatise Averroes argues that philosophy is not merely tolerated by the religious law but commanded by it, since the Quranic injunction to reflect on creation is an injunction to reason demonstratively. He develops a theory of interpretation stratified by audience: the rhetorical register for the many, the dialectical for the theologians, the demonstrative for the philosophers. Where philosophy reaches a conclusion that appears to conflict with the surface of the text, the remedy is to reinterpret the text, never to surrender the demonstration, and that reinterpretation belongs by right to the philosophers alone. The theologians, the mutakallimun, who attempt allegory without the training that would legitimate it, are for Averroes the true authors of sectarian fragmentation, fanaticism, and superstition. The argument is at once epistemological, political, and pointedly anti-clerical, and it issues in a startling recommendation: that the ruler protect the philosophers and silence the half-competent interpreters whose allegories generate more confusion than light.

The problem Averroes had identified, however, did not recede, and a good deal of modern philosophy can be read as a sustained effort to dismiss the single intellect while retaining the work it had done. Kant interiorised it, transferring the guarantee of universality from a separate substance into the structure of the subject. Hegel historicised it, dispersing it into the movement of a spirit that comes to know itself across time. Durkheim socialised it into collective representations that precede and exceed any individual mind. Husserl rendered it as a transcendental intersubjectivity in which a shared world is constituted. Wittgenstein dissolved it into the public grammar of language games, where meaning is settled by use rather than by private possession. The sociology of knowledge lodged it in institutions, and contemporary cognitive science distributes it across informational networks and external memory. Each of these is, among other things, a way of explaining how something can be larger than the individual subject and at the same time constitute the content of his consciousness, which is the question Averroes had already posed. What they tend to explain well is coordination, the mechanisms by which minds come into alignment. What they explain less well is universality, what makes the alignment answer to anything more than itself, and on that point each new idiom inherits the difficulty rather than retiring it.

It would be a mistake, even so, to flatter the continuity and recruit Averroes as the first theorist of distributed cognition. His claim is not functional, not sociological, and not metaphorical. The intellect is numerically one, and the entire human species is, in the strict sense, a distributed apparatus of sense placed at the service of a single act of intellection. The modern variants relocate the function precisely in order to be spared the metaphysics, and in doing so they soften the argument until it no longer says what Averroes said. The interest of the contemporary moment is therefore not that a separate intellect has reappeared, since it has not, but that the picture against which his theory had to fight, the individual mind as a self-sufficient cognitive unit, grows less convincing with each passing year. The more we build internet archives, search systems, scientific networks that span the planet, and machines that store and recombine the accumulated record of human thought, the stranger it becomes to locate knowledge wholly inside any single head. The medieval metaphor does not become true. The modern alternative to it merely stops looking obvious.

Averroes lodged that structure in a separated metaphysical substance, an eternal intellect thinking the forms of things and rendering them available to human cognition through the mediation of the senses. We no longer command that vocabulary, and it is far from clear that we should wish to recover it. Yet the role the structure plays in his theory, as the guarantor of genuine universality, of the communicability of thought, of the possibility of knowledge that is shared rather than merely heaped together, remains indispensable. Every theory of cognition must discharge that function somehow. Most contemporary theories discharge it badly.

One further dimension of his thought deserves attention, because it joins his epistemology to a theory of social organisation that has not lost its edge. For Averroes the philosopher is not an individual of exceptional gifts but a functional category, the human being who has developed the capacity for demonstrative reasoning to its furthest extent. The presence of philosophers in a society is not a cultural ornament; within his framework it is something approaching a cosmic necessity, since the universal intellect requires that the full range of human inquiry be actualised, and the philosophers are those who actualise its highest reaches. Where they are absent in one part of the world, they must exist in another, for the species cannot afford their total absence.

This yields a theory of the intellectual division of labour that is less elitist than its surface suggests. Averroes does not diminish the many; he assigns them the indispensable empirical contribution, the sensory content without which the intellect would have nothing to think. The philosophers are not privy to a private truth withheld from others; they are the interpreters of what the entire species furnishes in common. The defect of the theologians, in his diagnosis, is not moral corruption but cognitive miscalibration, the attempt to operate at the demonstrative level without the formation it demands, producing readings that are neither literally faithful nor scientifically grounded.

The political conclusion, the protection of philosophers and the regulation of public theological speech, reads as naive or authoritarian from a liberal vantage. The underlying observation is not so easily dismissed. Societies that lack a stable institutional practice of demonstrative reasoning, and that permit rhetorically powerful but epistemically unreliable discourse to occupy the vacated ground, do tend toward precisely the fragmentation and intellectual pathology Averroes attributed to the theologians of his century. The form of the problem has changed beyond recognition. Its structure has not moved at all.

Ibn Rushd ended his life in disgrace. The Almohad caliph al-Mansur, son of the prince who had first commissioned the commentaries, banished him to Lucena, a small town south of Córdoba, before restoring him to favour shortly before his death in 1198. The works that might have redeemed his name in the Latin West stayed untranslated for centuries, and what reached Paris and Bologna was the Commentator alone, the man who had denied the individual soul. It was enough to make him dangerous. It was never quite enough to make him understood.

The single intellect he posited goes on thinking. Whether it is thinking us, or we are thinking it, is a question he left exactly where he found it.

Originally published at https://paolocalvi.substack.com.