Nous - Introduction: nous in Philosophy

Introduction: nous in Philosophy

The basic meaning of "nous" or "intellect" is "understanding", but several sources or types of "understandings" are often distinguished from each other:

• Sense perception is a source of feelings, impressions, or raw data about things, but it needs to be interpreted in order to be converted into real understanding.
• Reason is a source of new understandings but it is built by putting together and distinguishing other things already understood.

Philosophical discussion of nous has therefore centred around the origin of the most basic understandings which allow people to make sense of what they see, hear, taste or feel, and which also allow them to start reasoning. These basic understandings are often felt to at least include such things as understandings of geometrical and logical basics, and also an ability to generalize properly into correct categories or universals, setting definitions. This mental step between perception and reasoning has sometimes been discussed as an aspect of perception or an aspect of reasoning, as will be seen below.

The question then also arose of whether there can really be any source of such basic understanding other than the accumulation of perceptions. Somehow the human mind sets definitions in a consistent way, because people perceive the same things and can discuss them. So the argument goes, as will be shown below, that people must be born with some innate potential to understand the same things the same ways. And in addition to this it has also been argued that this possibility must require help of a spiritual and divine type. The question of where understanding comes from, is therefore related to the question of what knowledge is, and how things can and should be defined or classified.

Another important philosophical discussion concerning nous stemming from these, involves not only human thinking, but the nature of the cosmos itself. As mentioned above, some philosophers proposed that the human mind must have an ability to understand which is divine, and independent of normal sense experience and physics. This ordering of the individual human mind, it is then argued, must be somehow derived from a cosmic mind which orders nature just like the human mind orders its understanding of nature. This was claimed from an early time, by Greek philosophers such as Anaxagoras. By this type of account, it came to be argued that the human understanding (nous) somehow stems from this cosmic nous, which is however not just a recipient of order, but a creator of it. Such explanations were influential in the development of medieval accounts of God, the immortality of the soul, and even the motions of the stars, in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, amongst both eclectic philosophers and authors representing all the major faiths of their times.