What Does the Maker Mind Make?
L.A. Kosman
In Nussbaum and Rorty, eds., Essays on Aristotle's De Anima. Clarendon, 1992.

Kosman translates DA 430a2ff as follows: "'Mind is itself thought exactly as what is thought is. For in the case of things which are without matter, the thinker and the thought are the same; for actual understanding (episteme theoretike) and the object of that understanding are the same. The reason why [mind] does not always think needs to be considered.'" (KOSMAN-1992, pp. 353-354) [PSA: We might render episteme theoretike as "fully aware understanding"...]

He then asks: "Once we have acquired the hexis of nous ... how is it ... that sometimes we are actualizing that hexis in theoria and sometimes not?" (KOSMAN-1992, p. 354)

"[W]hat in general distinguishes perception from the mere fact of being so affected as to become perceptible, is that the latter is, but the former is not, a mode of *consciousness*." (KOSMAN-1992, p. 355) [PSA: i.e., awareness]

"Aristole's move at the beginning of ch. 5 is then to offer an indication of the distinction between the merely intelligible, and nous, which we now understand to be at once intelligible and, more significantly, capable of *actual thinking*, that is, capable of theoria, the fully realized second actuality of nous. [fn40: I have used the term theoria here in the marked sense it often has for Aristotle as second-actuality energeia in contrast to first-actuality structures of cognitive capacity. Three central examples of this usage are in DA 412a10ff, 417a28ff and Metaphysics 1048a33ff.]" (KOSMAN-1992, p. 355)

"Theoria indeed is not located in a separate faculty, any more than perceptual consciousness, as DA 3.2 argues, is located in a separate faculty. Nous poetikos, therefore, does not, strictly speaking, make consciousness, by action for example on a pathetic mind incapable of thinking by itself. It is simply nous understood in its role of self-actualization in theoria; in this sense, it is correct, despite my earlier remarks, to call nous poetikos active mind." (KOSMAN-1992, pp. 355-356)

"[N]ous is not simply a principle of intelligibility, but a principle of active consciousness. This active consciousness is an (admittedly intermittent) capacity of human psuche. The paradigm of this *activity* of mind is that divine mind whose substance is energeia, and specifically the energeia of theoria - noesis noeseos noesis as it is called in the Metaphysics: thinking thinking thinking." (KOSMAN-1992, p. 356)

"[T]heoria is not theory; it is simply the principle of *awareness*... the (divine) full self-manifesting and self-capturing activity of *consciousness*." (KOSMAN-1992, p. 356)

"[N]ous is the capacity to think.... the arche, in other words, of episteme.... the arche of consciousness in general; thus Aristotle's hint at the end of the Posterior Analytics that animals have a rudimentary form of nous in the general capacity of discrimination which is aisthesis [APo 100a34ff]. I think this must mean that nous is only the purest form of that general power of cognitive awareness and discrimination that is increasingly revealed in the scala naturae." (KOSMAN-1992, pp. 356-357)

"Behind this general power of psuche to grasp, as it were, the qua of being, to separate, distinguish, and discriminate, is the power of nous, the capacity to separate out being and, as it were, to dematerialize it; so it is that he nou energeia zoe - life is the activity of mind. [Metaphysics 1072b27]" (KOSMAN-1992, p. 358)

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