Disunity between Aristotle’s God’s Thinking and Human Thinking

This thesis argues for the disunity between Aristotle’s divine intellect and human intellect, including generic disunity and analogous disunity. Aristotle elaborates his accounts of divine thinking from Metaphysics Λ 7. He concludes it in Λ 9 with God’s definition of “it must be itself that thought thinks, and its thinking is a thinking on thinking.” While this definition is generally regarded as borrowed from Aristotle’s definition of human thinking, as mainly elaborated in De Anima IV, this thesis denies their generic unity. Aristotelian God’s definition starts with a series of principles that its role requires it to be the most supreme and perfect. By interpreting the argumentation from Λ 7 to Λ 9, we deduce that Aristotle’s God must be actual, must have himself as the object, and subsequently cannot be a capacity/thought or an activity/thinking. On the other hand, we observe that Aristotle’s human intellect has an agent-patient structure. The structure consists of a passive intellect, an active part, and an object of thought that the human intellect formally becomes in every understanding episode. Such structure implies several qualities of the human intellect, including potentiality, capacity, and intellectual process of formally becoming its object. Since these qualities of human intellect violate God’s requirements, the two kinds of intellect have causally distinct structures, resulting in generic disunity. In the rebuttal part, this thesis deals with a potential counterargument: Aristotle’s human thinking and animal thinking are proved to be qualitatively different, yet they are shown as analogous in many of Aristotle’s works, including Nicomachean Ethics and On the Movement of Animals. Aristotle defies animals to have many abilities, including rationality, thinking, and speech, but he entitles some sorts of practical wisdom to both humans and animals in an analogous way. If Aristotelian God and human thinking are only yet causally different, they can still be analogous to human thinking. In response, this essay argues that the analogy between human and animal intellect is particularly borne out by a shared functional structure, in which both kinds of intellects serve ad hoc roles to solve practical problems humans and animals encounter. In contrast, Aristotle’s divine thinking cannot have any of these features, as it does not have any function, any object other than itself, or any ad hoc role. Therefore, the analogy between human and animal thinking cannot be applied to divine and human thinking, and the attempt to establish such an analogous unity in this rebuttal is undermined