Intellect: What is it? Why was it so important to Ficino – and to us?
Written by Dr Valery Rees
Questions relating to intellect are raised in several of the letters of Marsilio Ficino, and they are raised in different ways. I present here material drawn from Books I and II of the Letters, where we encounter Ficino’s views expressed in relatively simple terms, intended for clear communication to a wide audience.
1. What do we understand by intellect?
Some people are suspicious of an intellectual approach to things, feeling it may be sterile, or fearing they may not understand, may be out of their depth, or may lack the intellectual tools needed to take part in discussion. But intellect isn’t like that. We all have it, even if we don’t always use it.
Again, difficulty may arise if we try to put another name to it. For example, is it what is called the buddhi in in the tradition of Advaita Vedanta? I am going to resist the temptation of explaining one tradition with the terms that belong to another, and will focus strictly on what Ficino says about it. But be in no doubt, what he says has relevance and meaning for us too, 550 years after he was saying it.
The human mind
The general setting for his views in these letters is an examination of the human mind and its potential. He asks, for example, does our mind have a goal, and if so, can it ever reach it? He observes the different roles played by different powers or parts of the mind, such as sensory perception and the power of reason, but he gives special attention to the contemplative capacity of intellect. Ficino is greatly interested in the transformative power of knowledge – in particular of the kind of knowledge that is the province of the intellect - and he also wants to know how that relates to the transformative power of love. His interest in transformation has a strongly practical aspect, and what we find on the subject of intellect in his letters is very much from this perspective, rather than the more detailed and theoretical perspectives presented in some of his commentaries.
The part called Intellect
Intellect is a part of the mind: he calls it the higher part of mind. It is in us, as individual human beings, and there is also a Divine Intellect, through which creation takes place, and a whole realm where intellect operates that is called the ‘intelligible world’, to distinguish it from the ‘sensible world’ ‒ that is, the world that is accessible to and appraised by sense-perception. All this, of course, is found in Plato, in particular in the sixth book of the Republic. Plato uses a Greek term, nous, but we won’t be guilty of explaining one tradition in terms of another as Greek, Latin and our own culture can all be regarded as part of a single tradition. So, nous translates straightforwardly into Latin as intellectus, and into English as intellect.
The proposition that Intellect might be the very first foundational principle of the whole creation was put forward even before Plato: some pre-Socratic philosophers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras, allot a very high status to nous and the operation of reason, and it can be traced back even to Hermotimus of Clazomenae in the 7th or 8thC BCE.
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