Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 138 - The Self-Made Man - Avicenna's Life and Works.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of Kingham's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Self-Made Man, Avicenna's Life and Works. My father was a man of balch. That's the first sentence of Avicenna's autobiography. As opening lines go, it isn't exactly a classic, no, call me Ishmael, or I sing of arms and a man, but it's a significant line nonetheless. It places us directly into the context in which Avicenna lived his life, which was not the Baghdad of Al-Kindi and Al-Farabi, but the eastern reaches of the Islamic empire. He was born in a small town near the city of Bukhara, in what is now Uzbekistan. In Avicenna's day, it belonged to the vast area known as Khorasan. This eastern realm had once been a power base for the revolution that saw the Abbasids overthrow the Umayyads to become the second caliphate of Islamic history. But by Avicenna's day, the Abbasids no longer exercised any authority over the east, or for that matter over any part of the Islamic empire. The power of the caliphs was nominal, with real political authority being held by two Persian groups, the Buyids in Iraq and Iran, and the Samanids here in the east. This has direct relevance for Avicenna's life story, because his father worked for the Samanids as the governor of a village near Bukhara. The eastern setting is important for understanding Avicenna's further career. For one thing, it means that he had a Persian cultural background. Though he almost always wrote in Arabic, which had already been established as the dominant language of literature in the Islamic empire, he spoke Persian natively and did use it to write philosophy. Speaking of language, this might be a good opportunity for me to say something about Avicenna's name. His full name was Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina. In English, he is typically called Abicenna, which is the medieval Latin version of the name Ibn Sina. In these podcasts, for the most part I'm going with Arabic names, or English versions of those names, rather than using Latinizations. For instance, when we get to the Andalusian Jewish thinker whose real name was Ibn Jabirul, I'm going to call him Ibn Gabirol, rather than Avicebron, as he was known in medieval Latin. I am, however, making an exception for Avicenna and Iverroes, because they are so well known under these names. So much for his name, now back to his historical setting. As we saw a few episodes back, the eastern lands of the Muslim empire had seen an influx of Hellenic philosophy and science in the 9th and 10th centuries. For instance, we spoke of two associates of Al-Kindi from Balkh, the hometown of Avicenna's father. Because of this, and because of the wealth of the local Samanid rulers, the eastern Islamic lands were fertile ground for a budding genius like Avicenna. He mentions in his autobiography that in his capacity as a physician, he was invited to attend the Samanid ruler Nuh-i-Mansur when he was ill. This gave him the opportunity to visit the ruler's library in Bukhara, where Avicenna could see books he had never come across before, and would never find again. That the young Avicenna was indeed a budding genius is a point made crystal clear in his autobiography. His readers would not necessarily have expected modesty from him. To our ears, though, the autobiography rings so strongly of self-aggrandizement and arrogance that it becomes almost comic. Avicenna first tells us how he was recognized as a prodigy early on, having learned the Qur'an by heart by the age of 10. He learned arithmetic from a local grocer, and also studied jurisprudence. His father then had him tutored by a philosopher by the name of Ah-Nah-Tah-Lih, but he quickly outstripped his teacher, proving himself superior in logic and in astronomy. Avicenna furthermore claims to have taught himself to be a doctor. This took hardly any time at all, since, as he says, medicine is not one of the difficult sciences. Of course he also moved on to study the higher philosophical disciplines of physics and metaphysics, not just reading books, but also engaging in what he calls verification of their contents. And all of this by the time Avicenna was 16 years old, an age at which most of us are busy verifying our friends' claims that that cute kid in chemistry class totally has a crush on us. High school romance? Definitely one of the difficult sciences. So what does Avicenna mean when he says he was verifying what he found in the philosophy books? Some flavor of it is given by the next thing he says in the autobiography. He would stay up late into the night making files like note cards of arguments in syllogistic form. This was an ambitious experiment in applied logic. As we know, Aristotle's theory of scientific knowledge had depicted perfect understanding as consisting of chains of syllogisms, tracing back to indubitable first principles. The links in these chains are called middle terms. For instance, if you want to explain why all giraffes have four chambers in their stomachs, you need to see that they are ruminants. That will allow you to build an Aristotelian demonstration, which will be the following syllogism. All giraffes are ruminants. All ruminants have four chamber stomachs. Therefore, all giraffes have four chamber stomachs. Ruminant is what fills the gap between giraffe and four compartment stomach, hence it is called the middle term. So, pursuing his own philosophy without any gaps, Avicenna tried to verify the traditional Hellenic sciences from the ground up, beginning from first principles and building syllogistic inferences by finding middle terms. Genius that he was, he was intimately familiar with the dawning of sudden insights where such a middle term would simply come to him as if unbidden. It was obvious to him that not everyone was as blessed as he in this respect, so he coined a term for the special faculty by which gifted people like him are suddenly able to find the missing syllogistic link, Hadz, or intuition. When intuition did not come, he would often go to the mosque and pray to God for inspiration. And when he grew tired with his nighttime study, he would drink wine to restore his strength. The autobiography's mention of wine drinking scandalized many later Muslim readers who leapt on the passage to accuse Avicenna of lax morality. The immediately preceding reference to prayer at the mosque didn't impress them nearly as much. But the wine drinking should be understood within the context of the ancient Galenic medical theory Avicenna had mastered so easily. For him, drinking wine was not a means to get drunk, it was more like drinking coffee for us to stay awake studying for an exam. Having said that, I reserve the right to make jokes about his wine drinking, I don't think he'd mind. Or maybe he would actually, because he was rather thin-skinned. There was for instance the time Avicenna was insulted at court by a scholar of Arabic. Avicenna went off and laboriously compiled a text made up of ridiculously obscure information about Arabic linguistics and returned to court. He claimed he had come across the book by chance, and then publicly asked the scholar to explain it to him. All of this was just in order to embarrass his rival. The material in the compilation was far too obscure for the linguist to recognize. In short, you wouldn't like Avicenna when he's angry. This story comes not from the autobiography itself, which naturally enough stops part way through his life. Even he wasn't enough of a genius to write his own life story posthumously. Instead, the anecdote appears in the completion of Avicenna's life story contributed by his student Al-Jusjani. This last part also contains rather sensational information about Avicenna's death. Al-Jusjani relates a rumor that Avicenna was poisoned by servants who were afraid they would be caught stealing from him. Then, he explains that Avicenna, having engaged in some self-diagnosis, realized that he needed to abstain from sexual activity for his own health. But he found himself unable to do this, and duly passed away, dying in 1037 in the city of Hamadan in modern-day Iran. This is gossipy stuff, which yet again scandalized later Muslim readers, and which I really shouldn't even be discussing in a very serious podcast like this. By the way, did I mention he also used to drink loads of wine? To be fair, Al-Jusjani does preserve a good deal of useful information too, about Avicenna's movements and the circumstances under which he wrote his philosophy. The general picture is that of a man who moved from one patronage context to another, often because he was forced to. I've already mentioned his connection to the Samanid ruler Nuh ibn Mansur. Avicenna says tersely that he was forced to leave and move from one city to another, finally winding up in Jurjan in northern Iran, not far from the city of Ra'i and from modern-day Tehran, on the southern coast of the Caspian Sea. It was here that he met his student and future biographer, Al-Jusjani. While in Jurjan, Avicenna engaged in one of his many, frequently bitter, disputes with an intellectual rival, the polymath Al-Biruni, who is remembered today not so much for his dispute with Avicenna as for his work on mathematics and his pathbreaking writing about the culture of India. Avicenna was always up for a good dispute, also clashing with a representative of the Baghdad school of Aristotelian philosophers we covered some episodes back. This man, Abu Qasim al-Kirmani, was not one of the leading Baghdad peripatetics, but Avicenna saw him as symptomatic of the weak standards of the school as a whole. The only member of the school whose work he valued, or admitted to valuing, was Al-Farabi, whom he took seriously when it came to logic. As we saw when we looked at Al-Farabi, Avicenna was also greatly helped by his little essay on the purposes of Aristotle's metaphysics. On the other hand, one should never take Avicenna at his word when it comes to his influences. His admission in the autobiography that he could not understand the metaphysics without Al-Farabi's help is unusual. More typically, he is keen to conceal his dependence on other thinkers, and to explain how his native intelligence and hard work allowed him to reach an almost unprecedented level of insight all on his own. We should approach these claims skeptically. It may for instance be that he got quite a bit out of the work of another leading member of the Baghdad school, Yahya ibn Adi. He also tells us in the autobiography that in his youth he was exposed to the philosophical ideas of the Ismailis, because his father developed an allegiance to their cause. Avicenna insists that he immediately rejected these teachings in his youth, and there's no reason to doubt this. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that it could have been a route by which Neoplatonic ideas could have come to Avicenna's attention. Still, the greatest influence on Avicenna was undoubtedly, and unsurprisingly, Aristotle. Avicenna's most widely read work, titled Al-Shifa, which means The Healing, was an enormous reworking and rethinking of Aristotelian science, with separate volumes on every topic Aristotle had covered, and mathematics thrown in for good measure. It was explicitly intended as a so-called peripatetic work, that is, one that broadly follows an Aristotelian method and agenda of topics. Some recent work on The Healing has shown, for instance, how Avicenna wrote the masterpiece that is the section on metaphysics. This section deals with pretty much every topic taken up in Aristotle's metaphysics, but in a completely different order, giving arguments and conclusions original with Avicenna. Very unusually, in medieval philosophy Avicenna was a thinker who went out of his way to be original, deliberately overthrowing centuries of philosophical tradition to forge a new, distinctively Avicennan philosophy. At one point in his career, he even gave this innovative reworking of Aristotelianism a brand name. It was the Eastern, or Oriental philosophy, so called to distinguish it from the more traditional and less impressive kind of philosophy practiced in the West, that is, by the Aristotelians of Baghdad. He even wrote a summation of his philosophical doctrines called the Easterners, which is partially lost. Another characteristic work also preserved only in part was the Fair Judgment, which explained what Avicenna did and did not find acceptable in the previous philosophical tradition. The circumstances in which Avicenna wrote his magisterial Healing are characteristic of another aspect of his career, the constant upheaval he faced. He spent most of his life traveling from place to place in search of physical and financial security, so that he could concentrate on his modest project of shattering the entire philosophical tradition and building something new out of the shards. He found himself in the city of Hamadan, where he had been employed by the Buyid warlord Shams Adawla. When Shams Adawla died, his son wanted to retain Avicenna's services, but Avicenna rejected the offer. He quickly found out that you also wouldn't like Buyid rulers when they are angry, and had to go into hiding with another, less powerful patron. Astoundingly, it was under these difficult circumstances that he wrote the Healing, often relying on nothing but his memory to give him access to the texts he was so creatively rethinking. Finally though, he managed to find a more stable situation with a rival of the Buyids, another warlord named Allah Adawla. Avicenna died in the year 1037, still in Hamadan and still in the service of Allah Adawla. For him, Avicenna wrote a kind of summary of the contents of the Healing in the Persian language. A second abbreviated version in Arabic was called the Salvation. These texts are a good way to get into Avicenna's system, because they are relatively brief and clear. Of course brevity and clarity don't necessarily go hand in hand. The proof is another work of Avicenna's called الإشرات وطن بحات, or Pointers and Reminders. As the title suggests, this is a deliberately elusive and difficult work, which just supplies the reader with hints and prods to reconstruct arguments that Avicenna may have given in a fuller version elsewhere, either in discussion or in his longer treatises. If you don't mind my recording a personal impression, I would say it's the most difficult work of philosophy I've ever read, or tried to read, in Arabic. Rather unexpectedly though, the compressed and deliberately obscure style of the Pointers meant that it would wind up being perhaps his most popular treatise. It called out for later authors to explain it, provoking a long tradition of commentary. This is just one example of a more general phenomenon. As we've been seeing, the Arabic philosophical tradition drew inspiration from a range of sources, from Neoplatonic works, to the medicine of Galen and mathematics of Euclid and Ptolemy, to the theological systems put forth in Islamic kalam. Among these sources, Aristotle loomed largest. He had formed the basis of the late ancient philosophical curriculum, so it was only natural that in Syriac and then in Arabic, the study of philosophy and the study of Aristotle would remain nearly synonymous. Even highly original thinkers like Al-Farabi were content to devote a good deal of their activity to the interpretation of Aristotle. But, once Avicenna came along, things changed. The tradition of writing commentaries on Aristotle largely ground to a halt, with a couple of minor exceptions in the Eastern Empire and the very major exception of Averroes, far to the west in Islamic Spain. Centuries in the future, there would be a revival of interest in Hellenic sources in Safavid Persia, but for the time being it was a Persian from Khurasan who would have commentaries lavished upon him. Avicenna would be known by the honorific of leading master, in Arabic, a shaykh ar-ayis, fitting given that he certainly did shake up the history of philosophy in the Islamic world. We are accustomed to the idea of unforeseen consequences in history and history of philosophy. The revolution in the name of freedom, whose leaders lapse into totalitarianism after their victory. The adoption of pagan ideas to expound the theory of the Trinity. These are the narratives we revel in, thinking that history, like life, is what happens when people are busy making other plans. But in Avicenna's case, things unfolded pretty much as he intended. It's clear that he harbored ambitions of founding a new tradition in philosophy, and not just from his adoption of the phrase Eastern philosophy. He claims in his autobiography that his philosophy did not change in its fundamentals since the time he was 18 years old. But the style in which he presented that philosophy certainly did. In some texts, like The Healing and Fair Judgment, he engaged more or less explicitly with the peripatetic tradition. In The Pointers, he wrote elliptically as a challenge to train his students and readers. In still other works, he set his philosophy in the form of symbolic fables, one of which bears the enigmatic title Hayy ibn Yaqdan, or Living Son of Awake. We'll be hearing that title again. So Avicenna worked hard to earn the legacy that would be his. I suspect that if you informed him that people would soon think of him, instead of Aristotle, as synonymous with philosophy itself, he would simply have nodded with the satisfaction of a man whose carefully laid plans have come to fruition. But there was a price to pay too. Critics of philosophy now had a new target to aim at. When the next great thinker of the Islamic East, al-Ghazali, wrote a critical text entitled The Incoherence of the Philosophers, it was Avicenna he had in his sights. Attempting to retrench to the Aristotelian Old School of the Baghdad Peripatetics, Averroes responded that al-Ghazali's arguments were beside the point. Philosophy means Aristotle, insisted Averroes, and in his thought you will find no incoherence. But he was fighting a losing claim. Respect for Aristotle would never die completely, and there was certainly an awareness that Avicenna himself was in some sense an Aristotelian. Avicennism was even referred to as a peripatetic school of thought. Still, especially in the East, Avicenna, and not Aristotle, was the indispensable philosopher. Avicenna attracted not only criticism from theologians like al-Ghazali and reactionary Aristotelians like Averroes, but a degree of admiration from certain unexpected quarters. Much as had happened to Aristotle in antiquity, his ideas were absorbed into a variety of intellectual traditions. In the Eastern Islamic world, one particularly dominant example would be illuminationism, which critically reworked Avicenna's theories in something like the way he had reworked Aristotelianism. The theological tradition of kalam would also become suffused with Avicenna's ideas and language. Finally, the mystical Sufis would make use of Avicenna and even claim him as one of their own. There are passages of Avicenna which allude to the terminology of what was, in his day, already a burgeoning Sufi tradition. And to this day, there are interpreters who think that, under the hard-nosed rationalism of Avicenna's philosophy, you can discover the beating heart of a mystic. In my view this interpretation is deeply misguided, but there is no denying that Avicenna's philosophy would become a major point of reference for Sufi thinkers, including al-Ghazali in fact, but also the great mystic thinker Ibn al-Arabi. To say that Avicenna was no Sufi is not to say that there is no such thing as philosophical Sufism, and we'll be turning to it in due course. First, though, we should turn our attention to the ideas that made such an impact on the later tradition. Some of these were almost universally adopted, while others scandalized readers just as surely as the references to wine and sex in Avicenna's life story. For instance, Avicenna will demonstrate God's existence with a widely admired proof. The implications of that proof, though, will dismay Jewish and Christian readers as well as Muslims. In Avicenna we will find stunningly original thought experiments and fundamental distinctions that will provide the basis for the metaphysical theories of thinkers ranging from Maimonides to Aquinas to the Safavid thinker Mullah Sadr. Indeed, for all the criticism he provoked, it is hard to deny that he is the single most influential medieval philosopher. He was the only medieval thinker to exert significant influence in all three Abrahamic traditions – Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. In his autobiography, Avicenna tells us that his student and amanuensis al-Jusjani applied the following lines of poetry to Avicenna's disruptive life, pulled as he was from one patron to another. He became great indeed, to the point that there is no greater philosopher in the Islamic world. So you can't afford to miss next week's episode as I look at Avicenna's metaphysics here on The History of Philosophy without any gaps.