Active Intelligence

The Seba library treats Active Intelligence in 9 passages, across 2 authors (including Corbin, Henry, Bosnak, Robert).

In the library 9 passages

the problem of the Intellects and of their relation to the active Intelligence conceals a crucial existential decision… it announces either that each human being is oriented toward a quest for his personal invisible guide, or that he entrusts himself to the collective, magisterial authority

Corbin argues that the doctrine of the Active Intelligence is not merely technical noetics but a foundational existential choice between personal angelic guidance and collective ecclesiastical authority.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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the problem of the Intellects and of their relation to the active Intelligence conceals a crucial existential decision. The solution — the decision, rather — prefigures and conditions a whole chain of spiritual development with far-reaching consequences.

Corbin frames the Active Intelligence as the hinge of an existential and spiritual-historical decision whose consequences ramify through Islamic mysticism and beyond.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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When the Active Intelligence of the Avicennans is taken to be the same as the Holy Spirit… it raises again, on the contrary, the whole problem of noetics in terms of angelology. Thereupon a further question arises: why should there be only one Active Intelligence?

Corbin demonstrates that identifying the Active Intelligence with the Holy Spirit and the Angel Gabriel transforms Avicennan noetics into a problem of angelology and individual spiritual identity.

Corbin, Henry, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971thesis

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what among the Greek Peripatetics was simply a theory of knowledge (with an Active Intelligence not yet separate, not yet an ‘Angel’), becomes, in the Avicennan disciples of Suhrawardī in Iran, a dialogue of spiritual initiation between the illuminating Active Intelligence (of the Angel) and the human intellect

Corbin traces the transformation of the Aristotelian Active Intelligence from an impersonal epistemological principle into a personalised angelic interlocutor in Iranian Ishrāqī mysticism.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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what among the Greek Peripatetics was simply a theory of knowledge (with an Active Intelligence not yet separate, not yet an ‘Angel’), becomes, in the Avicennan disciples of Suhrawardi in Iran, a dialogue of spiritual initiation between the illuminating Active Intelligence (of the Angel) and the human intellect

This passage restates Corbin’s core argument that the Islamicate transformation of the Greek noetics elevated the Active Intelligence into an angelic dialogic partner of the mystic.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969thesis

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what can become eternal in the individual pertains exclusively to the separate and unique active Intelligence… this doctrine is far removed from the sense of imperishable individuality which the Avicennan philosopher or Spiritual derives from the mere fact of his conjunction with the active Intelligence

Corbin contrasts the Averroist position — in which only the singular Active Intelligence is immortal — with the Avicennan doctrine in which individual immortality is secured through personal conjunction with the Active Intelligence.

Corbin, Henry, Alone with the Alone: Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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All knowledge and all reminiscence are a light projected by the Intelligence upon the soul. Through the Intelligence the human individual is attached directly to the celestial pleroma without the mediation of any magistery or ecclesiastical reality.

Corbin presents the Active Intelligence as the means of direct noetic illumination that bypasses ecclesiastical mediation, grounding the spiritual autonomy of the Avicennan mystic.

Corbin, Henry, Creative Imagination in the Sufism of Ibn Arabi, 1969supporting

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following Corbin’s tradition of substantive images with their own intelligence… what I had understood to be my intelligence now appears as a polyphonic presence of self and aliens. The notion of such a mutual intelligence gives me inklings of an Aboriginal landscape suffused with dreaming.

Bosnak applies Corbin’s concept of autonomous image-intelligence to describe a pluralised, distributed form of active knowing that resonates with the Active Intelligence doctrine.

Bosnak, Robert, Embodiment: Creative Imagination in Medicine, Art and Travel, 2007aside

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