Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 149 - Back to Basics - Averroes on Reason and Religion.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, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Back to Basics, a Varroes on Reason and Religion. In the unlikely event that you are invited to an audience before a king or queen, here are some guidelines to follow. Do not make casual jokes about regicide, or remark that the monarch's crown would go really well with what you yourself are wearing. Do avoid direct eye contact, and compare the monarch favourably to other outstanding royal figures. Alexander the Great is always a favourite. Do not snap your fingers and say, that reminds me I need to buy postage stamps. Do display your comprehensive knowledge of the works of Aristotle, and feel free to give favourable mention to this podcast, which sadly has yet to receive patronage from any of the crown heads of Europe. Actually, that bit of advice about Aristotle may or may not be applicable depending on the taste of the king or queen in question. But it was just the trick if you wanted to impress Abu Ya'aqoub Yusuf, who served as the Almohad ruler of Muslim Spain for about 20 years starting in 1163. Or so was the experience of a scholar who appeared before him, introduced to the emir by the subject of the last episode, Ibn Tufil. Ibn Tufil was the emir's doctor, and thus in a position to arrange an interview for his friend, a fellow philosopher, and, the subject of this episode, Abu Walid Imrosht. Imrosht, or Averroes, as he was known in Latin and is usually called in English, hailed from Cordoba and came from a family of legal scholars of the Maliki tradition, which as we saw was the dominant jurisprudential school in Andalusia. Averroes followed in their footsteps, eventually becoming the chief judge of Cordoba. So he was a well-connected individual. Still, meeting the Almohad ruler would have been a nervous occasion. After he was quizzed about his family background, Averroes became especially nervous when the emir asked him a question about the heavens. Are they, according to the philosophers, created, or are they eternal? You don't have to have read Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers to know that this is a rather provocative issue, and Averroes decided to play safe by playing dung. So the emir turned to Imtufel instead, engaging with him in a wide-ranging conversation that displayed the emir's considerable philosophical knowledge. Now reassured, Averroes joined the discussion and so impressed Abu Yaqub Yusuf that the emir bestowed upon him lavish rewards, including a fine steed. Now I hate to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I'm skeptical whether this nice story has any basis in truth. It's derived from a history of Andalusia written in the following century, and the author of this history presents the anecdote as having been told by Averroes himself to one of his students. Like a good Hadith scholar, we should be cautious about the reliability of this chain of transmission. Likewise for another story from the same source, which states that Imtufel prompted Averroes to write elucidations of Aristotle's works because the emir found them difficult to understand. It's certainly plausible that readers of Aristotle would feel the need for some help, but Averroes's project of explaining Aristotle went well beyond the likely needs of the emir. It culminated in five line-by-line commentaries on Aristotle's major works, covering the posterior analytics, on the soul, the physics, on the heavens, and the metaphysics. So detailed and sophisticated are these commentaries that you could be forgiven for wondering whether there was anyone in Averroes's immediate environment of any social rank who could make much use of them. For the less ambitious, or perhaps we should say obsessed, reader of Aristotle, Averroes prepared two other sorts of text. Firstly, brief summaries that explain the main points of Aristotle's works. Secondly, running paraphrases such as those written in antiquity by the rhetorician Themistius. It's common to call Averroes's three sorts of exegesis short, middle, and long commentaries, but apart from the fact that the line-by-line commentaries are most definitely long, this terminology is rather misleading. More helpful would be to talk of epitomes and paraphrases reserving the word commentaries for the five massive works of exegesis that represented the peak of Averroes's achievement. On the strength of these writings, Averroes was known in Latin Christendom simply as the commentator, much as Aristotle was spoken of simply as the philosopher. When figures like Albert the Great or Thomas Aquinas read Aristotle, they would often have done so literally with a Latin translation of Averroes open on their desk. In fact, some of Aristotle's works were first made available through versions of Averroes's commentaries, which of course included Latin translations of the passages Averroes was commenting on. Averroes was equally influential among Jewish authors. Not only was he translated into Hebrew as well as Latin, but there were super-commentaries devoted to him, in other words commentaries on Averroes's commentaries. And it's a good thing too. Throughout the Latin and Hebrew translations, much of Averroes's output would be lost. Of his line-by-line commentaries, we have only a tiny handful of Arabic manuscripts, and the treatments of physics and On the Soul are lost in Arabic but survive in Latin and Hebrew. This is eloquent proof of Averroes's failure to make an impact on his fellow Muslims. He was read for some generations in Arabic, but mostly by Jews. When they turned to using Hebrew as the favored language of philosophy, there just wasn't anyone left who wanted to read the Arabic originals. This is a significant fact about the Islamic philosophical tradition. Sometimes Averroes is given credit for rescuing philosophy from the assault launched on it by Al-Ghazali, but if Averroes was trying to rescue anything, it was a rather old-fashioned version of philosophy. He looked back to the project of Al-Farabi and other members of the Baghdad school, who had likewise dutifully written summaries, paraphrases, and commentaries on Aristotle in the antique fashion. His was a doubly outdated endeavor, an attempt to revive the Baghdad revival of late antique Alexandria. But we are now in the 12th century. Averroes died in 1198, by which time the eastern heartlands of Islam were deep into the process of grappling with Avicenna rather than Aristotle. Averroes talks about Avicenna too, but is much less favorable towards him than his Andalusian colleague Ibn Tufayl. He usually mentions him only in order to complain that Avicenna is departing from Aristotle, and hence from the truth. This is the constant refrain of his response to Al-Ghazali's incoherence of the philosophers, entitled Incoherence of the Incoherence. Even if Al-Ghazali succeeds in refuting Avicenna, it doesn't really matter, because the real philosophy is what we find in Aristotle. In his commentaries too, Averroes is dismissive of Avicenna's achievement. He rejects the famous Avicennan proof of God's existence out of hand. The proper way to establish God is through the science of physics, by proving that there is a first cause of motion, just as Aristotle had done. Avicenna's attempt to do so in metaphysics is obviously wrong-headed, because God is part of the subject matter of metaphysics, and there is a rule of Aristotelian methodology which states that no science can prove the existence of its own subject matter. What Averroes offered then was a throwback to a philosophical approach that was simply no longer relevant for mainstream intellectuals in places like Persia. His project of commentary was not too little, but it was definitely too late. It didn't help either that Averroes worked so far west. His failure to make an impact in the East could in part be thanks to the practical difficulties of copying such enormous texts and carrying them across such a large distance. In fact, it's generally true that under the sea and thinkers had little impact on the Eastern tradition unless they actually went East themselves, like the great mystical thinker Ibn Arabi. Still, I think the basic explanation for Averroes' failure to find an Arabic readership is an intellectual one, not a practical one. For Latin Christendom, Averroes was a source of tremendous excitement, offering the most subtle and expert account available for Aristotle, whose works were suddenly becoming available in the 12th and 13th centuries. For a post-Avicenna, post-Ghazali audience of Muslim thinkers, by contrast, Averroes' commentaries were the equivalent of silent films made after the invention of sound. Averroes' allegiance to the old-school approach of the Baghdad Aristotelians is clear not only from his commentaries, but also from his most popular and frequently read work. Its full title is Fazl al-maqal wa taqrir ma'baina ashariyya wal-haqma min al-ittisar, which is a bit of a mouthful, especially considering how short the work is. The title means something like distinction of discourse and a determination of the relationship between the religious law and philosophy. A bit of a mouthful even in English, so it's usually just called the decisive treatise. This version of the title is not much more accurate than calling his works on Aristotle short, middle, and long commentaries. While I'm at it, silent movies weren't silent either. They were shown along with live music. It's a hard world for us pedants. A good thing about the title, decisive treatise, though, is that this little text is indeed decisive. In fact, it is a legal decision or judgment so that we here see Ivaroese in his guise as jurist. As often with a general legal judgment or fatwa, the question to be answered here concerns a certain practice and what Islam teaches about this practice. Standardly, the jurist needs to determine whether the practice is obligatory, encouraged, allowed, discouraged, or forbidden. We had a taste of this classificatory system when we looked at Ibn Hazm, whose literalist approach led him to say that anything not explicitly decided by the sources of the law is by default allowed. The issue decided in the decisive treatise, then, is going to be the legal status of philosophy, according to Islam. Obviously, given what we've seen about Ivaroese thus far, we wouldn't expect him to say that philosophy is forbidden or discouraged. It's hard to believe that he would want to say that philosophy is obligatory, like prayer, or the charitable tax paid by Muslims, so presumably he'll want to say that it is encouraged or merely allowed. But hard to believe or not, it turns out that he does think philosophy is obligatory, at least for those who have the talent and opportunity to pursue it. He supports this, as a good Islamic jurist should, by quoting scripture. The Qur'an contains remarks such as, A literalist like Ibn Hazm would not need long to make up his mind that such verses fall short of an explicit command to study philosophy. But Ivaroese, like most jurists, has a more flexible approach, and sees in these lines a requirement to investigate all created beings using the most powerful instrument God has given us, namely the intellect. And what is philosophy, if not the intellectual investigation of beings? But wait, there's more. The Revelation must want us to arrive at the best possible understanding that can result from such an investigation, so the first thing we need to do is determine what the best possible understanding might be. Luckily, we already know the answer from reading, or at least listening to podcasts about, Aristotle. The best understanding of anything is demonstrative knowledge, as described in the Posterior Analytics, not coincidentally one of the five texts to which Ivaroese devoted a full commentary. Indirectly, then, the Qur'an is instructing us to study logic in order to learn what standards need to be met by such demonstrative knowledge. But Ivaroese still isn't done. Since the study of all these things is obviously going to be quite a challenge, we can only undertake to fulfill the divine command in question by calling on the help of our predecessors. It doesn't matter whether these predecessors are Muslims or not, just so long as they can assist us in climbing to the epistemological peak of demonstrative knowledge. Thus, the Qur'an turns out to be commanding all Muslims to read Aristotle, if they are in a position to do so. When Ibn Hazm helped disseminate the Baghdad school's enthusiasm for Aristotle into Andalusia a few generations earlier, I tend to doubt that this is what he had in mind. Ivaroese doesn't have to address himself to such an obdurate opponent, but still, this is a legal treatise. His intended audience is not philosophers who need encouragement, or even the general reader, the man or woman on the Qorduban street. It is rather Ivaroese's fellow legal scholars. This explains much of what happens here in the decisive treatise. For one thing, you may have noticed that he has not provided a philosophical defense of philosophy. Rather, he's justifying philosophy by appeal to the Qur'an, as his fellow jurists would expect. Likewise, when Ivaroese considers objections against the practice of philosophy, he answers them not with philosophical proofs, but with dialectical arguments. These are arguments aimed squarely at legal scholars. If the critic of philosophy says that the companions of Muhammad did not engage in philosophy, which casts doubt on its necessity, then Ivaroese will retort that the companions did not engage in legal theory either. And if the critic complains that the pursuit of philosophy has led some people to unbelief, as Alhazali claimed happened to Avicenna, then Ivaroese will respond that the single-minded study of law has also led some jurists astray. So far then, we've learned that God wants us to do philosophy. Were he alive today, would Ivaroese therefore think that God wants you to listen to this podcast? Probably only the episodes on Aristotle. Of course, Ivaroese realizes that this is not a command that everyone can carry out. It's an interesting question whether we would nowadays want to say that everyone, or just about everyone, can do philosophy, but in Ivaroese's social context, it was obvious that a vanishingly small proportion of Muslims could have any hope of doing philosophy, never mind studying logic with the help of books by Aristotle translated into Arabic. Fortunately, God has mercifully provided for all the non-philosophers. It was for their sake that he did not send revelation in the form of demonstrative syllogisms, but in the form of powerful symbols and language that everyone can appreciate. Ivaroese thus sees the Qur'an as a fundamentally rhetorical text. It is persuasive, whereas philosophical discourse is demonstrative. Thus the Qur'an induces conviction and belief, not certain knowledge. This is no insult to the Qur'an, at least not as Ivaroese sees it. Rather, the perfection of the book lies precisely in its overwhelming persuasiveness. This is why I say that the decisive treatise shows Ivaroese carrying forward the agenda of the Baghdad school, and specifically of Al-Farabi. You'll remember that for Al-Farabi, the ideal ruler is both prophet and philosopher, able to grasp truth with certainty thanks to his powerful intellect, and able to represent truth symbolically thanks to his powerful imagination. Ivaroese is thinking along the same lines, except that his focus is less on the person of the prophet, and more on the nature of the words revealed to the prophet. Again, this may be due to the legal context. Having shown that philosophy is made obligatory in Islam, Ivaroese wants to push his argument forward into the characteristically legal realm of textual interpretation. If the Qur'an really has a rhetorical or symbolic nature, as he has claimed, then who is in the best position to determine the true meaning of its symbols and rhetoric? The traditional answer was of course the religious scholar. Who can draw on expertise in the Arabic language, the supplementary information provided by prophetic hadith, and the previous tradition of Qur'anic commentary? Ivaroese has a different answer, the philosopher. This is because the philosopher, or at least the successful philosopher, has access to something the scholar lacks, namely certain knowledge achieved through demonstration. After all, one thing we know for sure about the Qur'an is that it's true. And as Ivaroese says, quoting Aristotle without mentioning his source, truth does not contradict truth. This means that we can use demonstration as a check on possible interpretations of the revealed texts. Some interpretations can be ruled out, since they would have the Qur'an saying something false. To take a standard example, we could reject out of hand any interpretation which involves God having a body, since philosophy can demonstrate that he is incorporeal. Other interpretations, which would have the message of scripture agreeing with the philosopher's conclusions would be ratified, albeit not necessarily confirmed as correct. After all, there might be multiple interpretations of a single text, which interpret it as teaching different truths. But so long as the various interpretive meanings are all really true, there isn't much harm in that. Besides Ivaroese says, the interpreter gains some merit by establishing any possible interpretation, even if it is not the right one. Here, he echoes a well-known hadith stating that a judge who tries sincerely to rule correctly is rewarded once. If he succeeds, he is rewarded twice. Unfortunately, others have treated their philosophically-minded co-religionists rather, more harshly, Step-Forward Al-Ghazali. He has mentioned and chastised numerous times in the decisive treatise, although Ivaroese admits that he presumably had good intentions. But it's intentions like these that famously pave the road to hell, and Al-Ghazali's damnation of the philosophers has been hugely counterproductive in Ivaroese's eyes. Al-Ghazali's error was to write dialectical works like the Incoherence, and in such works to address questions that can only be tackled adequately through demonstration. These would include the eternity of the world, the nature of divine causation, and the manner in which God knows about his creation. Never do Al-Ghazali's discussions rise to the level of demonstrative proof, which is typical of a theologian like him. For Ivaroese, as for Al-Farabi, the practitioners of kalam only manage to do dialectic. This is the unfortunate middle ground between the exalted heights of demonstrative philosophy and the modest level of those who are content to accept rhetorical symbols. Worst of all, untutored readers, who should just accept rhetorical teachings, may come across the writings of men like Al-Ghazali. This is liable to mislead them into outright false belief if they are made to doubt the symbols they previously accepted at face value. Ivaroese compares Al-Ghazali and other theologians to someone who makes patients question the advice given them by their doctor, by raising doubts that could only be adequately answered by someone with an expert understanding of medicine. Ivaroese's critique of Al-Ghazali involves an irony, in that Al-Ghazali's critique of Avicenna had been very similar, that Avicenna failed to measure up to the demonstrative standards required by philosophy. Not for the first time, we see intellectuals accusing each other of failing to offer demonstrative proofs. This relates to the equally common accusation of taqlid, since depending uncritically on authority is a sure way to fall short of demonstration. But the modern reader of the decisive treatise is more likely to aim a rather different accusation at Ivaroese. Isn't this all horribly elitist? Particularly objectionable is his idea that the vast majority of believers should content themselves with symbolic versions of the truth without even being exposed to the dangers of more advanced philosophical discussion. This might put us in mind of Plato's Republic, in which the population is kept in line by being taught a so-called noble lie, a myth which persuades them to maintain social order. Here it's worth noting that Ivaroese wrote a paraphrase of Plato's Republic since he couldn't get his hands on Aristotle's politics. This paraphrase is, again tellingly, lost in Arabic but preserved in Hebrew. It's not easy to defend Ivaroese from the charge of elitism. One response might be to point again to the different social circumstances of his day when even basic literacy was uncommon, and also to bear in mind how high his expectations were when it came to philosophy. When he talks in the decisive treatise about the philosopher, he means not just someone who is striving after wisdom, but someone who has already got it. This is a person who has achieved systematic, demonstrative insight. By this standard, Avicenna wouldn't make the grade according to Ivaroese, and in fact it isn't clear who might apart from Aristotle himself. Fortunately, Ivaroese didn't believe that it was crucial for everyone to achieve philosophical insight. This is because of another theory he developed in the context of commenting on Aristotle's On the Soul. This theory is anything other than elitist, though it has the disadvantage of being frankly unbelievable. After a long and careful reflection, Ivaroese came to the view that all of humankind shares one single intellect. Why would he say such a thing, and what could he possibly have meant by it? If Ivaroese is right, then you already know what I think are the answers to these questions. But if he isn't, you'll have to wait two weeks to find out. Before we tackle Ivaroese's theory of the mind, it's time for us to celebrate reaching another milestone. One hundred and fifty episodes. We're in the midst of discussing Ivaroese, who, along with Avicenna, is the figure from the Islamic world who exerted the greatest influence on Latin Christendom. So I thought this would be a good time to explore the process by which Arabic philosophical works were translated into Latin. Decide to treat yourself to an interview with not one, but two of the world's leading experts on that subject, Doug Nicholas Hasse and Charles Burnett. Next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Alhamdulillahi wa barakatuhu.