 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Today's episode, Matter Over Mind. Ibn Gabirol. Philosophy's history is a winding lane upon which we find ourselves part way through Spain. We've looked at some Muslims, like Ibn Tufayl, with his desert-set autodidactical tale, to say nothing of Averroes' theory of mind, which thinks there's one thinking for all humankind. But, we certainly cannot leave Al-Andalus until we've considered ideas among Jews. So let's stay in Iberia, not in South Tyrol, with a philosopher-poet, Ibn Gabirol. I actually thought about writing this entire episode in rhyming verse, but decided that this would be lots of work for me and rather annoying for you. Still, in principle, setting philosophy into poetic form is a good idea, and one with a long pedigree. For precedent, we can look back to early Greek philosophers, like Parmenides, or more recently to Avicenna, who composed poems on logic and medicine. I love that idea. Imagine turning up to a class on introductory logic, or at medical school, and being assigned a poem as your textbook. The human has bones also found in the lemur, for instance the tibia, sacrum, and femur. One really can't overstate the cultural centrality of poetry in pre-modern societies. This too is something we've occasionally seen in our history of philosophy, most obviously with the importance of Homer and Hesiod among Greek philosophers, but also when we looked at music in the Islamic world and saw Al-Farabi associating music closely with poetry in order to defend its value. So, putting philosophy in poetic form was a way of bringing it to a wider audience. The ancient or medieval version of the podcast, if you will. Of course, poetry is also far easier to memorize than prose, and the sheer beauty and power of poetic verse can help to make philosophical ideas more compelling. In the case of Ibn Gabirol, the subject of today's episode, we have a figure who is valued first and foremost for his poetry, at least among later Jewish readers. This poetic masterpiece is also a philosophical work, the Kingly Crown, which deals with the transcendence of God and the celestial bodies that move at his command. Like other poems from his pen, the Kingly Crown was written in Hebrew, whereas his two surviving prose works of philosophy were composed in Arabic. Of these two, the more famous is entitled Fountain of Life. It is often referred to under its Latin name, Fons Vitae, because the original Arabic version is lost. Apart from the medieval Latin translation, we have only a summary composed later in Hebrew by the Jewish philosopher Ibn Falakhera. In addition, there is another work on ethics, entitled On the Improvement of Character, which does still survive in Arabic. It's a fascinating text, as I'll explain in a moment, but it was not as important for Ibn Gabirol's later reception as his poetry and The Fountain of Life. One might say that Ibn Gabirol lived on in the later imagination as two separate authors. For Jewish readers, he was above all the Hebrew poet who wrote The Kingly Crown. For readers in Latin Christendom, he was the author of The Fountain of Life. Only in the 19th century did European scholars realize that Ibn Gabirol the poet was the same man as the philosopher-readers of Latin called Avicebrol. His real name was, in Arabic, Abu Ayyub Sulayman ibn Yahya ibn Jabirul, or in Hebrew Shlomo ben Yahudah ibn Gabirol. Born in 1021 or 1022 in Malaga, he was educated in Saragossa and gained patronage from another poet, the court official Shmuel HaNagid. We don't know a great deal about his life, though we learn from his own poetry the memorable detail that he suffered from a misery-inducing skin disease. Even the date of his death is uncertain, though most sources seem to indicate that he died in the 1050s, which is good enough for me. So here, with Ibn Gabirol, we're returning to the story of Jewish philosophy in the first half of the 11th century. We were picking up pretty much where we left off, since our look at early Jewish thought in the Islamic world featured Isaac Israeli. Ibn Gabirol has more in common with him than with the other early Jewish philosopher we considered at length, Saadia Gaon. Like Isaac Israeli, Ibn Gabirol draws above all on the Neoplatonic tradition, as it was available in Arabic in texts like the so-called Theology of Aristotle. In Ibn Gabirol's case, there's another rather intriguing possible source, Empedocles. I don't know how much you remember about him, since we covered him way back in our look at the pre-Socratics, but hopefully you'll at least recall that he lived many centuries too early to be a Neoplatonist. In one of the stranger transformations of the Greek-Arabic philosophical transmission, far weirder than the confusion of Socrates with Diogenes the Cynic, for instance, though that's weird enough, Empedocles became the spokesman for a version of Neoplatonic metaphysics. In some Arabic texts, he is also presented as the very founder of Hellenic philosophy, teacher of Pythagoras and thus the source of all Greek wisdom. In the theory of this pseudo-Empedocles, God creates all things out of a primordial matter and uses his own divine will as an intermediary in this creative act. Ibn Falakera, the 13th century philosopher who summarized Ibn Gabirol's Fountain of Life in Hebrew, already pointed out that this work has something in common with these supposed teachings of Empedocles. In light of this, a number of scholars have identified pseudo-Empedocles as the main source for Ibn Gabirol's philosophy. But he never mentions the name Empedocles, and it may be that he and the authors who put Neoplatonic words into the mouth of the pre-Socratic Empedocles were drawing independently on a broader tradition. By the way, I know you're wondering how to say Empedocles in Arabic. It's An-ba-du-cliz, which is not nearly as much fun to say as my favorite Arabic version of a Greek name. Wonderfully, Porphyry was known in Arabic as Furfuryus. At the beginning of The Fountain of Life, Ibn Gabirol asked the question that will, with luck, be answered by the rest of the work, for what purpose was humankind created? Well I say that Ibn Gabirol asked this question. Actually, The Fountain of Life is a dialogue between an unnamed teacher and an unnamed student. In the Latin translation, the two characters are just called Magista and Disquipulus, neither of which, since we're keeping score, is anywhere near as much fun to say as Furfuryus. So the student, or Disquipulus, asks why humankind has been created. The basic answer is given only a few pages later. It is so that we can achieve knowledge of all things as they are, and above all, knowledge of the first essence, which of course is God. This is the knowledge that is going to be conveyed by the teacher to the student in the rest of the dialogue with or without the help of An-pa-du-cliz, or for that matter, Furfuryus. I love saying that. Now here we immediately have a problem. This way of describing the purpose of mankind is awfully intellectualist. We were put here for the sake of nothing but knowledge. Yet Ibn Gabirol also wrote the ethical treatise I mentioned on the improvement of character. That much briefer work is far less intellectualist, at least at first glance. In fact, it looks a great deal like the writings about ethics we considered in an earlier episode by authors like Arazi, Abu Zayd al-Balhi, and Miskowy. You might remember that they presented ethics as a kind of medicine, and saw virtue or good character as closely parallel to bodily health. Ibn Gabirol structures his ethical writing around this parallel too, and in a highly systematic way. He treats 20 different character traits, some good and some bad, assigning four traits to each of the bodily senses. For example, the sense of hearing is associated with love, hate, mercy, and hardheartedness. This schematic design allows Ibn Gabirol to integrate Galenic ethics with the teachings of Scripture. Each character trait, along with its link to sensation, is illustrated by quoting the Bible. For instance, to prove that hearing is connected to hardheartedness, he cites Exodus 9.12, The Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he hearkened not. On the other hand, Ibn Gabirol is using the same originally Galenic idea that we found in other Arabic works on ethics. Our character depends on the temperament of the body and its humours. For instance, if yellow bile dominates, you are likely to be prideful and impudent, whereas black bile will make you anxious. He doesn't say which bodily humour causes misery-inducing skin disease, incidentally. All the character traits are correlated, not only with sensation, but with heat, cold, dryness and moisture, the qualities that describe the four bodily humours. Knowing this will help us to fine-tune our bodies and our character, and ultimately to possess the noble traits that please God. So which is it, then? Are we created for the sake of ethical perfection, as this treatise on the improvement of character seems to be saying? Or for the sake of knowledge, as stated in The Fountain of Life? Well, that may be something of a false contrast. Like Galen and the earlier Arabic ethicists, Ibn Gabirol is firmly committed to the idea that virtue means the domination of desire by reason. In fact, he cites Adam's sin in the Garden of Eden as a paradigmatic case of giving in to desire. So we can bring together Ibn Gabirol's remarks on the human good in his two prose philosophical works, by saying that in ethics, we should make sure that the rational soul is not undermined by lower desire. That clears the way for the attainment of knowledge, a presumably higher goal pursued in The Fountain of Life. While this whole scheme does draw on the ethical tradition initiated by Galen, Ibn Gabirol would see it within the wider context of his Neoplatonic metaphysical system. In agreement with Plotinus and other late ancient Neoplatonists, he thinks the soul is situated between the physical world of bodies and the spiritual world of the universal intellect. Also as in Plotinus, Ibn Gabirol thinks that God is a completely unified first principle that is beyond this intellectual realm. With Ibn Gabirol, we are returning to a purer version of Neoplatonism than what we found in Muslim authors like Al-Farabi and Avicenna. God's transcendence above intellect, which I just mentioned, is a good example. Whereas Al-Farabi and Avicenna follow Aristotle in making God a supreme intellect, Ibn Gabirol places his God above all thought, and for that matter, pretty much everything else. In coming to know him, we are mostly doing something negative, denying that his essence is subject to inappropriate descriptions. Occasionally though, Ibn Gabirol will sound a more positive note. In The Fountain of Life, he does allow the possibility of special divine, or as the Latin translation says, theological, characteristics that belong to God. Usually though, Ibn Gabirol stresses that God is beyond what we can say or understand. He has a good reason for this, which is that a description always implies a relationship between two things, a subject and the descriptive property that belongs to that subject. For instance, if I say that the giraffe is tall, I am alluding to two items, the giraffe and its tallness. Since God is absolutely one, this sort of relationship is ruled out in his case. That sort of point is pretty familiar from earlier in the history of philosophy, whether among the original Neoplatonists or the Muslim theologians known as the Mu'atazilites. But Ibn Gabirol has a startling new way of seeing the issue. He thinks that whenever we have some feature describing a subject, we can speak of a relation between matter and form. Although no such relation exists in God, it will appear in all that he has created, including spiritual things, like soul and intellect. Thus we have Ibn Gabirol's most distinctive philosophical idea. Everything apart from God himself consists of a subject and its properties, which is to say, of matter and form. This idea is sometimes called universal hylomorphism, which may sound like a misery-inducing skin disease, but actually comes from the Greek words houle, or matter, and morphe, meaning form. In the Latin tradition, Ibn Gabirol was notorious for this claim. Christian philosophers like Aquinas mention him as a useful opponent to be refuted while proving such things as the immateriality of angels. We may be rather more sympathetic to Ibn Gabirol. After all, materialism is respectable these days in a way it just wasn't in 13th century Paris. But if Ibn Gabirol is a materialist, he's a materialist of a rather unfamiliar kind. For one thing, of course, he is excluding God from this universal analysis of things into matter and form. But even leaving God aside, this is a materialism which accepts the existence of incorporeal things, like soul and intellect. And how can something be made of matter if it is incorporeal? Well, even at the level of our physical world, Ibn Gabirol sees a clear difference between matter and body. Bodies inevitably have a variety of properties. For instance, they are extended in space. Or to say that in the Aristotelian language regularly used by Ibn Gabirol, they have accidents in the category of quantity. This just means that any body will have a certain length, breadth, and depth. These are forms, albeit forms of a basic kind, which must be presupposed if the body is to have other properties, like color or temperature. Matter, by contrast, is that which underlies all forms, even forms like these quantitative dimensions. It is what you are left with if you perform a thought experiment first suggested in Aristotle's metaphysics and repeated by Ibn Gabirol. Imagine stripping away all the properties and forms from something until nothing is left apart from the subject to which these forms belonged. That is matter. Obviously this sort of matter is rather abstract and difficult to conceive. You wouldn't be able to come upon a heap of matter lying in the middle of a room, for instance, since anything you could find in a room would have size, color, weight, and so on. This might make it a bit easier to believe that there will also be matter in spiritual or in corporeal things. But Ibn Gabirol doesn't just ask you to believe it, he argues for it at great length. In the third book of his Fountain of Life, he provides no fewer than 56 arguments to show that there must be some sort of intermediary between God and the physical world. This intermediary level will not have the complete unity and transcendence of God, but neither will it have spatial extension like bodies. Rather it will, as the Neoplatonists argued, consist of incorporeal substances that possess multiple forms. These will, of course, be the soul and intellect. In fact, Ibn Gabirol sees a hierarchy of four levels below God, which consist of different kinds of forms in combination with different grades of matter. Multiple forms in spiritual matter, souls, the heavenly bodies, and finally bodies down here on earth which are made of the four elements. As these levels proceed down from God, they are progressively less unified, like water streaming forth from a fountain and getting more and more muddy. Of course, someone might be willing to agree with Ibn Gabirol and earlier Neoplatonists that there are incorporeal things between God and the physical world, yet still question his idea that those things possess matter. Again, though, he has several arguments to offer. One depends on that old Platonist favorite, the idea that the corporeal world is an image or copy of the spiritual world. Given that things in our lower world are fundamentally matter-possessing form, presumably the same will go for the paradigms of which these things are copies. For a Platonically minded reader, though, this very line of argument might give rise to a creeping suspicion. Is Ibn Gabirol simply and simple-mindedly applying to spiritual things concepts that are only appropriate to bodies? He seems to have given in to a rampant Aristotelianism, according to which even spiritual substances are understood along the lines proposed by Aristotle for physical things. Ibn Gabirol does say a number of things that could encourage this suspicion. In particular, he remarks that matter has the features Aristotle associated with substance. It exists by virtue of itself, it has an essence, and it underlies various sorts of form. But on closer inspection, Ibn Gabirol turns out to be following a line of thought already explored by Plotinus. You might remember that Plotinus envisioned the intellect coming forth from his first principle, the One, in a two-stage process. First, the One produces an effect that is completely simple. Only when this effect turns back towards the One, in an unsuccessful attempt to return to its source, does it become intellect properly speaking, by grasping the multiplicity of Platonic forms instead of the One. Plotinus himself sometimes seems to think of the simple principle that becomes intellect as if it were a kind of matter. After all, like matter, it has a potential or power for realizing forms, in this case by thinking about them. All of this can be found as tentative suggestions in Plotinus, but now it becomes the explicit teaching of Ibn Gabirol. He even suggests that matter has a kind of precedence or priority relative to form. Until matter is on the scene, having been emanated by God, there is no subject that can come to possess a form, and there can be no form without a subject. This is true at each level of Ibn Gabirol's cosmos. Conceptually speaking, at least, matter comes first, and then it receives form. Of course, as Ibn Gabirol would hasten to add himself, this doesn't mean that matter ever actually exists without form. Rather, if you have one, you have the other, since matter cannot exist without actually being something and that means having a form. The two must always be created together. This mention of creation leads us to a final issue, which may have been bothering you for some time already. All this doesn't sound very, well, Jewish. The transcendent emanating God of the Fountain of Life would seem to have little to do with the God of the Hebrew Bible. In fact, later Jewish readers of the Fountain of Life sometimes complained that it proceeds without any biblical quotations or even allusions. One would be hard-pressed even to tell upon reading it what religion the author espoused. But Ibn Gabirol did see his philosophy as compatible with Judaism, as we can tell from his poem The Kingly Crown. Although it doesn't, say, set out 56 arguments in favor of a spiritual world in the form of Hebrew verse, it does resonate strongly with the teaching of the Fountain of Life. Especially striking is the praise of God's oneness and transcendence, and the hierarchical structure of the poem, which ascends through the heavenly spheres and a realm of intellect before ending with God. It also uses standard Neoplatonic imagery, saying for example that God creates like sending forth a ray of light. Thus, Ibn Gabirol introduces into Judaism the Neoplatonic idea of divine emanation, the way Al-Farabi and Avicenna brought it into Islam. And that could lead to more misgivings. Is his God really a creator? Or rather an automatic cause, like a source of light, or indeed a fountain of life? Certainly, Ibn Gabirol does use the language of emanation to describe the relation between God and his creation, yet he also gives a central role to divine will, which is said to be a sort of intermediary between God and the intellectual realm, much as intellect is an intermediary between God and the physical world. Here Ibn Gabirol is exploring a problem already familiar from antique Neoplatonism. On the one hand, the Platonists wanted to say that the universe inevitably comes forth from the first principle because of its superabundance. On the other hand, they wanted to ensure that the principle is free and not under any constraint in creating the universe. This is only one of several tensions that emerge with particular urgency in the Jewish Neoplatonism of figures like Isaac Israeli and Ibn Gabirol. Given the philosophical as well as historical interest of Jewish Neoplatonism, I thought it would be worth devoting another episode to the whole phenomenon. Now this is a topic I don't mind confessing, where I could use some help from my friend Sarah Pessin. So join me next time for no tricks and no traps, just a history of philosophy without any gaps.