An "authentic existentialism," Maritain writes, "affirm[s] the primacy of existence, but as implying and preserving essences or natures, and as manifesting the supreme victory of the intellect and intelligibility" (ibid., p. 13).
Crescas's God is not first and foremost an intellect, and humanity's supreme goal is not to think but to love God with a love corresponding, as far as possible, to his infinite greatness and to rejoice in the observance of his commandments.
Al-Farabi describes the purpose of active intellect as "true and supreme happiness " (PR, N1 38), and further clarifies that the human being can have this happiness "only when the active intellect first gives the first intelligibles, which constitute the primary knowledge…" (PR, N1 35).
The three lights are the immediate source of "the three supreme sefirot of 'Pure Thought,'Knowledgege,' and 'Intellect,'" but whereas the sefirot "themselves are clearly created [or emanated?] … the triad of the lights illuminate one another, uncreated [and unemanated?], without beginning, in the hidden root".
For Themistius the active intellect is not God or the supreme principle upon which everything depends for its existence.
The object of the will, the supreme Good, is more eminent than the object of the intellect, which is the truth, i.e. the good, of a given thing and is thus a subordinate good.
Yet the supreme value that Arendt places on individual pride and aristocratic distance, on intellect and excellence, also sharply restricts the human understanding that must be the basis for any confrontation with political evil, especially the evil of the Holocaust.
We may posit this distinction as one where prose operates within the realm of the intellect, with its abstract concepts and categories and where poetry rules supreme in the land of the qalb (heart) and rūḥ (spirit); where a constant taqallub (fluctuation) and murāwaḥa (vascillation) is the definitive state of reality.
