Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 158 - Born Under a Bad Sign - Freedom and Astrology in Jewish Philosophy.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich and King's College London, online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Born Under a Bad Sign, Freedom and Astrology in Jewish Philosophy If Abraham ibn Ezra didn't have bad luck, he would have had no luck at all. He was born under a bad sign, as he reports in a poem he wrote about his unfortunate time of birth. Had he become a candle maker, the sun would never set again. If he were a dealer in shrouds, people would stop dying. And, when Ibn Ezra spoke of his bad birth sign, he wasn't kidding. He was a convinced astrologer, and indeed the author of numerous works on the subject of astrology, and he believed that all events here on earth, involving individuals both great and humble, and entire nations, are steered by the heavenly bodies. They say that there's nothing new under the sun, and Ibn Ezra's belief in astrology is a good example. Many moons ago, we saw that figures in antiquity, notably Ptolemy, contributed to both the science of astronomy and what most people would now consider to be the pseudoscience of astrology. Astrological teachings came into the Islamic world not only from Hellenic culture, but also from India, and the science assumed great cultural importance. Like the Roman emperors, Caliphs used astrology for imperial propaganda, and, like the philosophers of the Roman empire, thinkers of the Muslim world were known to combine astrology with the cosmological teachings of Aristotelianism and Platonism. Astrology was already a major interest of al-Kindi, and he helped to launch the career of one of the most important early astrologers, Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi. Abu Ma'shar, like al-Kindi, drew on philosophy to give a methodological and cosmological rationale for this science. This is not to say that all philosophers of the Muslim faith accepted the validity of astrology. It was criticized, and indeed mocked, by al-Farabi. Avicenna also wrote a refutation of the claims of astrologers. We find a similar situation among Jews, with both advocates and critics of this science of the stars. In the century before al-Kindi and Abu Ma'shar, there was already a major Jewish astrologer named Mash'allah. Like Abu Ma'shar, his works were translated into Latin and became influential in medieval Christendom. But it would be in Andalusia that astrology really came to the fore as a subject of debate between Jews. It was a debate of considerable philosophical interest, since astrology seemed to undermine human freedom, yet was also often considered to have a solid foundation in Aristotelian natural philosophy. In this episode, I'm going to look at three thinkers of 12th century Andalusia who contributed to this debate. First, the aforementioned Abraham ibn Ezra, who, as I've already said, was an astrological hardliner. Next will come Abraham ibn Dawud, a philosopher whose major work, the Exalted Faith, is an exploration of the question of human freedom. And, after these two Abrahams, it will make sense to turn to a Moses. In fact, to Moses Maimonides, the greatest of all medieval Jewish philosophers. He wrote a withering criticism of astrology and went so far as to blame astrological activities for the ancient misfortunes of the Jews. As I've already said, our first thinker, Abraham ibn Ezra, was no stranger to misfortune himself. Like many other Jews of Andalusia, including Maimonides, ibn Ezra was forced to flee his home when the political situation there became untenable thanks to the anti-Jewish policies of the Almohads. This personal misfortune for ibn Ezra became good fortune for the Jews of Christian Europe. Ibn Ezra was one of the earliest authors to expose Jews in France and Italy to the highly advanced culture of Arabic-speaking Andalusia. To do so, he needed to write in Hebrew. As ibn Ezra traveled far and wide to Rome, Lucca, Ruan, and even London, he encountered Jewish communities who were in need of guidance in both religion and science. But these co-religionists knew no Arabic, so he wrote for them in Hebrew. Most important for the history of Judaism were his commentaries on the Bible. He presented these as an improvement on all other available commentary. He judged the early medieval commentaries of the Gaonim, like Saadia Gaon, to be full of extraneous matter drawn from non-religious science. Meanwhile, the Christians' attempts to understand what was for them the Old Testament were marred by an excess of figurative and symbolic exegesis. Ibn Ezra, by contrast, claimed to strike the right balance between explaining the surface and underlying meanings of the text. He lamented the decline of expertise in the Hebrew language among his readers, and indeed all Jews since the nation had been exiled from the Promised Land so many centuries ago. To remedy this, he offered detailed analysis of difficult grammatical points and vocabulary in Scripture. And of course, as a product of the cutting-edge culture of Andalusia, he could weave scientific points into his commentaries when appropriate. This happened more frequently than you might expect. For Ibn Ezra, being a good biblical commentator is like being a good Hollywood journalist. You need intimate knowledge of the stars. One example was the timing of Jewish holidays. Ibn Ezra used his astronomical knowledge to refute Karaite claims about the Jewish calendar. You'll remember that the Karaites were Jews who rejected the authority of late ancient rabbinical literature like the Talmud. Against them, Ibn Ezra was able to show that the resources of rational astrology are by themselves insufficient to settle all questions concerning the calendar, which means that we must depend on the authority of the rabbinic teachings recorded in the Talmud. Ibn Ezra also saw astrology as central for understanding the plight of the Jewish people. Their exile is due to the malign influence of Saturn. In this sense, all Jews are born under a bad sign to such an extent that an individual's specific horoscope can be trumped by the more general misfortune that has befallen the Jews as a whole. So Ibn Ezra says that a Jew whose time of birth indicates kingship will manage to reach a position within a royal court, but not actually sit on the throne himself. He also invoked astrology when explaining God's description of himself to Moses, the original Moses that is, as the liberator of the Jewish people. This may seem to be a case of God damning himself with faint praise, since he could have called himself, for instance, the creator of all things, not just liberator of the Jewish people. Read the end of the book of Job if you want to see God itemizing a more impressive resume. Ibn Ezra says, though, that the liberation of Jews was very impressive indeed, since it miraculously overturned malign astral influence. Interestingly, Ibn Ezra presented these ideas in a debate with his colleague and acquaintance Judah Halevi, who we looked at in the last episode. This was a remarkable relationship, given that Halevi and Ibn Ezra seemed to stand at opposite ends of the intellectual climate among Jews of the 12th century. In his Khuzari, Halevi emphasized the limits of reason, one factor which underlay his dismissal of astrology. This contrasts sharply with Ibn Ezra's attempt to explain God's relationship to the Jewish people in terms of astral influence. Of course, astrology had more quotidian uses too. In addition to casting birth horoscopes like Ibn Ezra's, which forecast that bad luck and trouble would be his only friends apart from Judah Halevi, one could also use astrology to make day-to-day decisions. Wondering whether to take a journey? Worried you might be getting ill? Hoping to find the location of some buried treasure? The stars will give you the answers to such questions, or at least a qualified astrologer will once he has consulted them. With this kind of help, we have a better chance of leading a healthy, successful life. For instance, you might use the stars to see that an illness is indicated for you, and just in time change your diet to ward it off. Ibn Ezra hastens to stress, though, that a righteous person will be even more securely guarded against suffering and distress, for the righteous are protected by divine providence, a more powerful ally than any skill in astrology. Here Ibn Ezra seems to be suggesting that it is, after all, possible for human beings to escape astral influence. The astrologer might come down sick as he has foreseen, but through his own efforts it may be milder because he's been watching what he eats and drinks. The righteous man seems to have transcended the sphere of physical influence entirely, using the beneficial influence that comes directly from God rather than suffering the malign influence of the stars. Evidently, when God wants to look after his favored servants, he can run rings around Saturn. This question of how much influence the stars do have on us, and whether we can elude that influence, usually arises only implicitly in Ibn Ezra. But it is front and center for our next 12th century Jewish author and the second Abraham of this episode. I'm sorry to say that Abraham Lincoln hasn't made the cut, though I did think about mentioning Abe Vigoda, who as the star of the old TV show Fish is presumably a Pisces. I now want to look at Abraham Ibn Dawud, who lived about a generation before Maimonides and paved the way for him by showing how Judaism and Aristotelianism could be brought into harmony with one another. He may also have paved the way for the further journey of Aristotelianism into Christianity. It seems likely, though not certain, that Ibn Dawud is the same man as the Jewish scholar who was known in Latin as Abun Dawuth. In the city of Toledo, this Abun Dawuth worked with the Christian translator Dominicus Gundesalinus to produce Latin versions of Arabic philosophical works. We know that Ibn Dawud did travel to Toledo from his home in southern Spain. This may have been another case of fleeing from the Almohads who invaded southern Spain from their base in North Africa in the middle of the 12th century. Assuming that Ibn Dawud and Abun Dawuth were the same man, he should on this basis alone be recognized as a significant contributor to the history of philosophy. As we'll be seeing in Duke the transmission of scientific and philosophical thought from Arabic into Latin had a huge impact on Christian medieval philosophy, just like the earlier introduction of Hellenic philosophy into Arabic, and for that matter, like Ibn Ezra's dissemination of Arabic philosophical literature among the Hebrew-reading Jews of Christian Europe. Aside from his possible role in the Arabic-Latin translations, Ibn Dawud's main achievement in philosophy is a book called The Exalted Faith. It was written in Arabic, but that version is lost, so it can be read today only in its Hebrew translation called Ha-Emunah-Ha-Rama. The goal of the work is not unlike that of Maimonides's most famous philosophical treatise, The Guide for the Perplexed. Like Maimonides, Ibn Dawud wants to resolve tensions that seem to arise between Aristotelianism and Scripture. Thus, he often emphasizes the agreement between philosophy and revelation, following Saadia's lead by mining Scripture for examples of the ten Aristotelian categories, and confidently identifying angels with the heavenly intellects of the Aristotelian system as it has come down to him. His method is usually to establish philosophical doctrines rationally and then quote Scripture in confirmation of those doctrines. Having said that, Ibn Dawud's Exalted Faith is not on a par with The Guide for the Perplexed. Of course, Ibn Dawud is a less powerful and original thinker than Maimonides—that's true of nearly all medieval thinkers—but I mean more that The Exalted Faith is directed at a narrower question. This is a guide for people perplexed specifically about free will. He explicitly states that puzzlement over this issue provides the occasion for the whole work, and he returns to solve it at the end, in a way that vindicates both human freedom and divine providence. In between, he runs through a wide range of topics, pausing occasionally to criticize his predecessors, especially Ibn Gabirol. He believes that we can only understand human freedom if we have first grasped the principles of Aristotelian cosmology, the nature of prophecy, the sense in which our language applies to God, and so on. His position on the free will issue emerges out of this systematic survey of philosophy as it has reached him in Andalusia. We find partial agreement between him and Ibn Ezra, insofar as Ibn Dawud, too, thinks that events in our earthly realm are caused by the heavenly motions. He speaks in rather astrological terms of the powers exercised by individual heavenly bodies. But he does not go into anything like the detail provided by Ibn Ezra, who was willing to explain exactly which stars have which effects, for instance by heating and cooling objects down here where we live. That fever you have, for instance, might have been caused by Mars, which stirs up hot yellow bile. It can't be a coincidence that you can also make yourself ill by eating too many Mars bars. Unlike Ibn Ezra, Ibn Dawud frequently invokes the agent intellect or giver of forms familiar from Muslim thinkers like Al-Farabi and Avicenna. It might look like Ibn Dawud has too many explanations on offer here. Is it the stars that cause things to happen through physical means, or rather the celestial intellect that does so by giving forms? But, as Ibn Dawud points out, two kinds of cause is exactly the right number. As every Aristotelian knows, substances are combinations of matter and form. The role of the agent intellect is to give form to suitably prepared matter. And it is physical processes, the ones ultimately caused by the stars, that prepare the matter. He compares this to the building of a ship, which requires not just physical labor but also the guiding principle of the idea of a ship in the shipbuilder's mind. Because the stars' motions play this crucial role in causing things to happen in our lower world, and because their motions are caused by God, Ibn Dawud sees the heavens as the instruments of divine providence. They are, he says, the servants of God's decree. Since late antiquity, we've seen many examples of this kind of theory, where heavenly bodies and sub-divine intellects play an intermediary role by passing on the causal influence and providential benevolence of God to the earthly realm. This sort of mediation has always been subject to criticism, not just because it abolishes any direct connection between God and most of his creatures, but also because it apparently leads to determinism. Everything will necessarily flow forth from God, his influence cascading relentlessly and inevitably down through intermediary principles like water rushing down the levels of a fountain. So, it's noteworthy that Ibn Dawud thinks the exact reverse. It is precisely the presence of intermediaries in his cosmic system that allows for free will and contingency in our lives. His rationale for this is that God, being simple, can give rise only to a simple effect. This is the principle of ex uno unum, or only one from one, that had been criticized in Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers. For Ibn Dawud, the principle means that God cannot give rise to opposed contraries. Being simple, he could not, for instance, create both black and white. This, presumably, is why God doesn't publish his own newspaper. More to the point, God cannot give rise to both good and evil, which is one reason he must be absolved of responsibility for evils in our world. Another reason is that evils are, for Ibn Dawud, associated with privations. Following a tradition that goes back to Plotinus, he sees evil as the lack of goodness, especially in the human intellect. And again, privation is not the sort of thing that could be caused by God. Ibn Dawud illustrates this with a memorable example, God does not need to create the absence of an elephant in Spain. So, for Ibn Dawud, the problem of evil is the elephant that is not in the room. It is simply impossible for God to give rise to evils, so we must explain evil with reference to other causes. These will be the intermediary, heavenly causes that affect our world more directly. The movements of the heavens and the emanation of forms from the active intellect bring about natural and chance events. Human actions are not steered by these natural causes, though. Rather, we act voluntarily. Like all good managers, the God of Ibn Dawud's philosophy is willing to delegate. He oversees a providential order by appointing the heavens as his deputies and then gives humans the capacity to act of their own accord. Ibn Dawud walks a careful line with respect to astrology. His system shows that the stars do cause some events, so that there could be a basis for this controversial science, but it also ensures that we humans are not the mere playthings of the stars. A far more hostile line was taken by Maimonides. We'll be turning to him properly in a couple of episodes, but in this and the next episode I will already be giving you a glimpse of his wide-ranging and influential writings. Most important for our subject in this episode is a letter he wrote to some Jews in Provence who had solicited his opinion on the subject of astrology. Maimonides' response is unequivocal. Not only are the claims of astrologers entirely baseless and false, but astrology played a decisive role in the tragedy of the Jewish people. He blames the destruction of the Temple on the idolatrous practices of astrologers among early Jews. They placed their trust in the stars when they should have been arming themselves against their enemies. Maimonides also sees a close link between astrology and idolatry, a somewhat unfair accusation given that, as we've seen, in his day astrological beliefs had been carefully woven into the fabric of Judaism by authors like Ibn Ezra. But Maimonides' diatribe is not solely religious. He explains to the rabbis in Provence exactly why astrologers cannot predict the future as they claim. Like Ibn Dawud and other Aristotelians of the Islamic world, Maimonides accepts that the stars do have an influence on our world. For him too, the heavens are the servants and instruments of divine providence. But when it comes to their actual effects, he follows the late ancient commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias in thinking that the stars only bring about the general regularities of nature. In Aristotelian jargon, the celestial world perpetuates species but does not bring about events at the level of individuals. In the jargon of this podcast, this means that the stars ensure that there are giraffes without ensuring that Hiawatha has blue eyes. Individual events, according to what Maimonides states as the common consent of the philosophers, are simply down to chance. So they cannot be predicted by astrologers. Maimonides himself prefers a different view, albeit one with the same consequences for astrology. Individual events are brought about by divine providence, but not through the influence of celestial motion. Using an example from Talmudic literature, Maimonides says that it is not the stars that determine that Reuben is a poor tanner whose children have died and Simon a rich perfumer with a healthy family. Rather, this is a matter of chance if the philosophers are to be believed, or alternatively the will of God, which is the teaching of faith. Once the claims of astrology are falsified, we can rest assured that there is room for free human action. The heavens bring about only the continuation of natural species and the operation of chance, or divine providence, would not impede on our capacity for choice. Not that this settles all the issues we might be worrying about. In particular, if divine providence does oversee the lives of individuals, as Maimonides suggests, Reuben, the childless tanner, will want to know why his lot in life is so much worse than that of Simon the perfumer and family man. In this letter on astrology, Maimonides only briefly alludes to his preferred answer, suffering is sent as a punishment or to allow for a later compensating reward. But, we'll have a chance to examine Maimonides' views on suffering and greater death later on in an episode on what Jewish philosophers made of the book of Job. In the more immediate future, I want to look at a rather different question. Let's assume that Ibn Dawud and Maimonides are right, and that we do have free will. In that case, what should we do with it? You can find out by making the right choice and joining me next time when I'll be looking at ethics in Maimonides and the lesser known, but rather wonderful, Ibn Pakuda, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps.