Averroës
on Aristotle’s Criticism of his Predecessors:
An annotated translation of the long commentary on
Aristotle’s Metaphysics A
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At 987a2, toward the
end of Chapter 5 of Metaphysics A, Aristotle begins his summary of the
detailed statements of the doctrines of the pre-Platonic philosophers that he
has specified earlier (983b6-987a2), and Averroës picks up the treatment a
few lines later, where the philosopher says that both those who posited a
single material cause and those who posited more “put them in material form.”
To be sure, the Arabic translator misunderstands or ignores the citation of
people who spoke of more than one. However, the commentator’s
treatment of the material monists as such is worthy of discussion. At the end
of C1a he acknowledges Aristotle’s own principal criticism of them, expressed
here and elsewhere, that they noted only one type of cause, but the most interesting
point is his statement that true matter is “potential,” not some definite
entity like fire or air, thus implying that they were insufficiently abstract
in their treatment of matter. Aristotle himself generally views matter as a
“substrate” (hupokeimenon) in a perhaps
abstract sense.[1]
Yet
when speaking of the material “cause” (aition) he is content simply to
give examples, like bronze causing a statue (Metaph. D 2, 1013a24; Phys.
II 3, 194b23). He does imply that the monists did not have a very sophisticated
concept, in saying that they “(only) touched
on” (hēpsanto) the material cause (988a32),[2]
and that his pre-decessors who spoke of this or other causes and principles did
so “indis-tinct-ly” (amudrōs, 985a13, 988a23, 993a13).[3]
Still, while the specific idea that matter is “potential” is still
traditionally attributed to Aristotle himself, there have always been
dissenters among Aristotle scho-lars.[4]
The basic fact is that, while in a number of places in the Metaphysics
and the physical works he says that the matter substrate is the potential for
an object to be realized in a specific context, it is at best unclear
whether he ever means this of the matter substrate as such.[5]
We do find the idea that “matter is potential” in a metaphysical context with
Aristotle’s most faithful ancient commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias.[6]
Among the Arabs, the doctrine is cited by al-Fārābī,[7]
and is actually argued in detail by Avicenna (Ilāhīyāt 2.3.72-79).
Averroës himself subscribes to it in a number of places.[8]
In
any case, the commentator here articu-lates the specific idea that the monists
themselves in effect took a particular form of matter to be matter in the
abstract. Alexander (23.24-24.7) had perhaps anticipated him in commenting on
Aristotle’s first mention of the monists in the Metaphysics (A 3,
983b12), where the philosopher says that for them nothing ever arose or
perished, and the ancient commentator says that this is because they had made
matter actual rather than potential. Still, Averroës shows no
knowledge of Alexander’s commentary on the particular Book A.[9]
In any case, he gives a specific phrasing of the point that their philosophy
was naive. In this he perhaps anticipates the modern dissent from the
traditional view that the early Ionians were “the first philosophers.”[10]
Otherwise,
Averroës’s cryptic remark about earth being a principle if it accompanies
laws may refer to Aristotle’s citation of Hesiod at 989a10, upon which Averroës
comments at C14b
(cf. below, on 14b).
For
C1b, Aristotle has brought in the moving cause. Although the translation is not
really clear that those who added it were later in time (“then” in my
translation might only be the logical sense of fa), Averroës makes
the point explicit in his paraphrase. Although he seems to have no idea of specifically
who the earlier monists had been,[11]
he is aware that Aristotle means to include at least Empedocles and Anaxagoras
in the category of those who posited one or more moving causes (two and one,
respectively), since he will cite them shortly.
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#2 (to commentary on 987a9-13)
Aristotle
next gives a criticism of all the materialists. For C2a, neither the translator
nor Averroës is aware that some of these people only arose after the
Pythagorean order was initiated, as Aristotle has indicated earlier (at A 5,
985b23, before the part they treat). These in fact included
Empedocles and Anaxagoras.[12]
For
C2b there is a textual debate (still with us today) over whether Aristotle’s
precise criticism is that the materialists spoke about the causes “too
obscurely” or “too monistically” or “too weakly.” The latter seems specified by
our translator, as “insignificant” (yasīr) speech; and
Averroës in turn, at least here, specifies that as meaning omission of the
formal cause. This may be compared with Alexander (46.15-23) before him, who in
commenting on this passage says that most philosophers before the Pythagoreans
just cited the material cause, i.e., neglected the efficient cause, or with
Aquinas (43 6146) after him, who simply complains that the pre-Pythagorean
thinkers were vague on the type of cause.
With
respect to the six entities of Empedocles that Averroës notes here (the
four elements and the two agents of love and strife), and to his reference to
another work, Aristotle details these principles earlier in Book A (985a21-b3
[= 31A37 D-K], in the portion Averroës does not treat). However, that does
not mention bone or flesh, and it may be that the reference is to the lines
just before De gen. et corr. 334a26 (= 31A43 D-K), since they speak of
flesh and “marrow” coming from the elements, before asking how Empedocles would
explain the process.[13]
Still, Aristotle mentions Empedocles in several other places apart from
elsewhere in the Meta-physics, such as the Physics (see in
particular 252a7 = 31A38 D-K). As to the “principle” that Averroës here claims
is not any of the six of Empedocles, one supposes the formal cause is meant
even if he does not say so.
Aristotle’s
explicit identifications of the positions of Anaxagoras and Empedocles, cited
by Averroës in C2c, were made in the uncovered part of the work (at 984b18
and 985a5, respectively), so that the commentator is utilizing his general
knowledge here. However, he does not note that Aristotle also assigns a single
motive cause to Hermotimus of Clazomenae (984b20), and, perhaps more
importantly, two to Parmenides insofar as he spoke of what he called the “way
of seeming” as opposed to the way of reality (984b3).
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#3 (to commentary on 987a13-21)
In C3a Averroës reverts to a
common practice in his commentaries: beginning his commentary on a segment with
a paraphrase rather than an actual quotation. Here in particular he comments on
Aristotle’s beginning his summary of the Pythagorean doctrine.[14]
Averroës takes the similarity Aristotle states between them and the
materialists to have been merely that both groups spoke of two principles, as
does Alexander (47.2-3). But on the point that they were actually different,
Averroës simply paraphrases the point, while Alexander (48.9-10)
elaborates, to say in parallel with this comment and the next that the
Pythagoreans made number the substrate and hence the substance of all things,
whereas the physicists had made something like fire the substrate and
substance.
The
point that the Pythagoreans identified the limited with the one is not
immediately obvious from Aristotle’s text here, either in our edition or in the
Arabic translation.[15]
Yet Averroës draws that conclusion in C3b, perhaps again showing some
awareness of the content of the part of Book A ignored in his commentary proper
and in (what he gives us of) its Arabic translation. To be sure, already before
him Avicenna (Ilāhīyāt 3.6.8) was at least indirectly
aware of the Pythagorean table of opposites (986a22-26, containing the
correlation of one and limit among other things), and there is reason to
believe that all of the material earlier in A was actually known to the Arabs,
as was noted in the Introduction (see n. 9
there). But as to the Pythagorean doctrine actually referenced, Averroës
says on the one hand that they made the principles twofold as one/limited and
unlimited, but on the other as matter and form. I suppose he means that form
corresponds to one/limited and matter to unlimited. Yet from another point of
view this is a curious claim, since the Pythagoreans surely erased the
matter-form distinction by saying that “things are numbers.” Finally, “the
oldest physicists” were of course people who did not posit the motive cause in
addition to the material one, not those who recognized both as he says here,
and this again shows a certain haziness in his knowledge of the historical
development of these theories.
In
C3c Averroës accounts for what he sees as Aristotle’s major problem with
the Pythagoreans, that they effectively negated matter as having some causal
influence on matter; namely, the commentator speaks of their “failure” (taqṣīr, تقصير) to do so. He well be
more emphatic later (in C4e, C19a,
and C21d).
For
C3d the translator merges Aristotle’s thoughts contained in “the unlimited,
etc., are the essence, wherefore number is also the essence” into the simple
“the unlimited, etc., are substance (i.e., essence).” Averroës
nonetheless shows his knowledge that the Pythagoreans made number per se the
principle of things. He further concludes that “the principle of substance is
substance” for them, because one and unlimited underlie everything, i.e., are
“substance” (Greek ousia, Arabic ǧawhar, جوهر) and are themselves underlain by number, which is
itself a substance. One could imagine proceeding from there either to claim an
infinite regress or to say there must be different types of substance, but he
does not pursue the issue.
Aristotle
would of course agree with Averroës saying in C3e that the one and the
many are principles for the Pythagoreans. However, the translator has failed to
understand that what Aristotle says they began to define was not “these
considerations,” but more specifically the issue of what “what is” means. At
least in part because of this, Averroës fails to recognize either of two
possibilities modern commentators suggest for Aristotle’s intent in saying that
the Pythagoreans “began” to discuss such things: either (1) they “started” to
discuss essences but did not get far because, as the next segment tells us,
they went about it superficially; or (2) they “initiated” the philosophical
discussion of essences. The latter interpretation, which seems the most
natural,[16]
has led some modern commentators to see an implicit reference to the formal
cause.[17]
To be sure, Averroës has already noted (C2b;
cf. above on
C2b) that the materialists lacked that entity.
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#4 (to commentary on 987a21-28)
Aristotle
complains of the Pythagoreans’ superficiality in several places.[18]
Strictly speaking, that point as stated here is distinct from his next point
that they defined everything in a class by the first member to come along;[19]
still, Aristotle does not spell out the superficiality per se here, and perhaps
Averroës can be forgiven for merging the two points in C4a.[20]
His paraphrase, that they called the member of a class that they knew best the
worthiest of the class, is perhaps more stolid in manner than is warranted,
given a hint of exaggeration in Aristotle’s own statement for the sake of the
polemic.
For
C4b Aristotle gives the example of double and two, and Averroës
grasps the main point, that they are not the same thing, even if he does not
catch the translator’s error in claiming the former to be prior to the latter,
when Aristotle in effect had said the opposite in holding that double “belongs
first” to two. Thus in C4c that main point supplies an occasion to make a more
general point, that the identity of a mere property of different things does
not make them the same. By way of comparison, Alexander (48.17-21) is less
abstract in simply offering a different example, that “friendship” and
“equality” are not the same just because they are related.
For
C4d, Aristotle himself perhaps means by “one becoming many” that if a doubled
thing is considered the same as two things even though it is really one, then
one is two, and so on by extension. Differently, Averroës derives this
feature from the premise of number being something that is in itself prior to
existents.
In
C4e Averroës says that to say that one is many and that existents are
numbers are equally “absurd” (or “impossible,” “inconceivable,” etc.: muḥāl, محال). He is rather less restrained in speaking of the
Pythagoreans than is Aristotle himself, and so closes with an example meant to
shock, that if they were right then the opposites (which were of signal
importance to Presocratic thinking) would not be opposites.[21]
For
C4f Aristotle speaks of what can be learned “from the first (thinkers) and the
others,” but the translator misunderstands “the first (thinkers)” as if the
foregoing discussion were meant, and “the others” (tōn
allōn, presumably the later of the pre-Platonic thinkers) as “later
(discussion).”[22]
Averroës then compounds the error, interpreting “first” in neither
Aristotle’s actual meaning nor the translator’s, but as the subject (evidently
“substance” to him) being ontologically prior. Moreover, assisted by the
way he himself has section-ed the text, he converts Aristotle’s simple parting
remark, that more might be learned from study of such people, into a further
logical consequence of the doctrine of the Pythagoreans alone, that their
making number prior leads to everything being prior. His statement on that
consequence may be cogent in itself, but has nothing to do with what Aristotle
says here.
Finally,
Averroës says that the point that “foregoing” can stand for something
other than “first in existence,” will be explained in later places. One of
these places, at least, is his comment on Aristotle saying that substance is
primary in all three of the rational, the known, and the temporal (Z 1,
1028a31-33), i.e., that the substance of a given entity is not just one of
these. To this the commentator appears to agree, interpreting it as “‘the
first’ is what is said to be prior in many ways, but in all things substance is
first in definition and in knowledge and in time” (Tafsīr 754.5-6,
from C4b to Z). He goes on to say on 1028.33-34 (where Aristotle says that of
all things that are predicated, only substance is separate), that “substance is
only prior in these three ways, since nothing of accidents is separate”
(754.9-10, from C4c to Z). Some commentators take Aristotle’s statement here to
refer to the priority of specifically time, but Averroës’s comment
indicates that he, at least, regards the temporal as no more nor less important
than the other two features of the priority of substance.[23]
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#5 (to commentary on 987a29-b2)
Aristotle next
indicates that Plato came after the physicists and the Pythagoreans. Of the
former, in C5a Averroës cites some of the thinkers specifically named in
the part of Book A he covers, plus Democritus, although none of them are
material monists such as those he had acknowledged at the outset (C1a).
(As to Democritus, Averroës has not previously cited him, but will refer
anonymously to the doctrine “bodies of indivisible parts,” i.e., atoms, and
will cite him by name in a number of places later in the Tafsīr,
notably in C19t, C21i, and C21l to Book à [409.4-9, 417.9-13, and 418.5-9,
respectively], where Aristotle [1009a23-b20] has tried to convict Empedocles
and Democritus as Protagorean relativists by saying they were seduced into
their respective doctrines by paying too much attention to the appearances of
sensory things. Averroës’s paraphrase of the argument if anything makes
them seem more so.) Averroës may believe here (as apparently Aristotle
himself does) that the monists had entirely been subsumed by Empedocles et
al. He also believes that the cited physicists had “partisans” (āl),
i.e., founded schools, I presume on the basis of Aristotle citing the
Pythagoreans as opposed to Pythagoras.
In C5b the
commentator again displays his general knowledge of Greek philosophy insofar as
it is not too ancient, but carries the omission of the monists just mentioned
to the point of outright incorrectness in saying that (the dualists or
pluralists) Anaxagoras et al. were “the first physicists” (aṭ-ṭabī‘iyūn [اطبيعيون] al-awwal). As to the
promise of later treatment, in commenting on Z 2, 1028b19-20, where Aristotle
says Plato distinguished the forms and mathematical objects as kinds of substance,
Averroës says (Tafsīr 764.16-19, within C5r to Z) that “some
(i.e., Plato and his followers) used to posit numbers and forms as of the same
nature, according to what will be related later, and they realized the
particular formal cause; they wanted to present the substances of particular
things by means of general forms, meaning that they made these the principles
of sensory substances”. (It is not clear where this promise of still later
treatment is fulfilled, although in commenting on Ë 9, 1075b27-28,
Averroës speaks of forms and numbers in the same breath, with Aristotle,
as being causes of nothing, in particular not of motion, Tafsīr
1731.4-10, within C57d to Ë; cf. Genequand 207-8, Martin 290). On the reference
to Euclid, see Plato, Tim. 55c-e. (E.g., earth is the cube, whereas the
universe as a whole is made a fifth component.) As to Averroës’s statement
on following the physicists for sensory matters, perhaps the reference is
Plato’s preface to this discussion of geometric correspondences, where (Tim.
48) the latter acknowledges that the four are called “principles” (archai)
and are presumed to be “elements of the universe” (stoicheia tou pantos),
but says that this is undeserved.
In C5c Averroës
is again hazy on chronology, at least in part because the translator is
(thinking that Heraclitean opinions came “after” the person Aristotle says
influenced Plato, and mistaking that person). Cratylus was a famous
Heraclitean, who was so extreme that according to Aristotle he once said that
“one cannot step into the same river even once” (Metaph. Ã 5,
1010a14-15). He may have actually been somewhat younger than (Socrates’s
contemporary) Democritus; still, the opinions he developed of course go back to
Heraclitus himself a century or so earlier. For all that, the commentator’s
summary of the doctrine, that everything changes so that there can be no
knowledge, is on target.
In C5d, although
Aristotle himself (and the translator) had meant by “these opinions” the
Heraclitean ones just mentioned, Averroës says by way of a summary
statement that Plato took up all the philosophical opinions cited thus far,
again implying as at C5b that he had some debt to the physicists.
In C5e Averroës
does not manage to supply the information missing in the Arabic text of
Aristotle, that Socrates introduced definition into ethics. If he had he might
not have introduced the strange notion that the reason for citing him was his
general fame, as opposed to his influence on Plato. To be sure, Aristotle and
Averroës alike ignore the point that the so-called Sophists discussed
these questions before Socrates, even if the latter was first to do so with
precision. (Averroës generally paraphrases Aristotle’s severe dismissal of
these figures with approval, e.g., when the latter claims that if you follow
the supposed doctrine of Protagoras that contrary things are both true, then if
someone thinks a human is not a ship, it is provable that that human is a ship
[Metaph. Ã 4, 1007b22-25; cf. Tafsīr 383.3-17, C15d-e to
Ã].) Finally, it is perhaps interesting that Averroës refers to the
philosophies before Socrates as “scientific” (‘ilmiyya) as if that were something counterposed to ethics.
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#6 (to commentary on 987b4-19)
Here and in the
following three segments (7-9) Aristotle summarizes Plato’s theory of forms,[24]
prior to actually criticizing it in Chapter 9 (while to be sure subtly hinting
at its problems already with the language he uses here). In C6a Averroës
seems to take the translator’s error of reading “the rest of things” for
Aristotle’s “(some) other things” as his point of departure for a general
discussion of genus and species. Still, his point is interesting. He
feels that whatever Plato got from Socrates (where Averroës seems ignorant
as just noted), he must have been struck by the similarity of the individuals
of what we conventionally call a genus or species, thinking that this feature
could not be accidental, and that Plato combined this with neo-Heraclitean
skepticism of sensory things to reach the conclusion that the latter can only
exist by “having in view” (tanẓuru ilā, تنظر
الى) the forms.
This speculation on why Plato thought the way he did is rather more
sophisticated than, say, Alexander’s (50.19-53.11) straightforward if lengthy
paraphrase of Aristotle’s text. To be sure, both show their knowledge of Plato,
up to the point of citing a favorite comparison of his: human and horse.[25] There
and in C6b, Averroës employs a craft analogy for the forms generating
individuals, as indeed will Aristotle himself shortly.
Modern commentators
differ on whether or not Aristotle speaks with justice in saying that Plato’s
“participation” (methexis) is merely comparable to the Pythagorean
“imitation” (mimēsis).[26]
But for C6c-d Averroës’s translator has somehow converted “(merely
changed) the name (to) ‘participation’” (tēn methexin tounoma) to
“(added) participation in the name” (ištirāku l-ism), and one
would think this does not allow the comparability of the doctrines Aristotle
intends. Still, in C6c the commentator nonetheless manages to reduce
Plato’s stature by saying it is all only a matter of names. In contrast,
Alexander (51.10-15) feels that Plato did not actually attribute essence to the
convention of things having the same name, Aristotle notwithstanding.
In
C6d Averroës essentially goes back to the Pythagoreans, to claim that they
did not need common names, again stressing that for them existents were
numbers.
In an aside, C6e, the
allusion Averroës thinks he sees to the beliefs of the ancients gives him
an excuse to relay an interpretation of one of Aristotle’s criticisms of
Parmenides, in effect that the latter failed to recognize that the term “one”
is used in several different senses.[27]
This criticism is stated in particular in the Physics, using the example
that there are many kinds of white things even if “white” has one meaning.[28]
Today we tend to
think that, in saying that Pythagoras and Plato alike did not investigate
participation or imitation sufficiently, what Aristotle means is that they
failed to describe the mechanism of the one or the other. So Alexander
(52.3-6) already interprets the clause.[29]
However, in C6f Averroës follows the translator’s misconstrual in saying
that Aristotle is speaking of the participation or imitation “among” species
(i.e., forms), not “of” them, and is thereby led to say that the problem was
lack of reflection on the general idea: if Plato had thought about it, he would
have seen in particular that there are forms of forms, and then there must be
forms of the forms of forms, and so on to infinity. This is a version of a
famous argument which has become entrenched in philosophical discourse as the
“third man” (although the Greek is actually “third human”), which Aristotle
himself will cite later (at Metaph. A 9, 990b17).[30]
For C6g, the
translator misconstrues the intermediacy of mathematics between sensory things
and forms or species as being between mathematics and (presumably sensory)
“things,” but Averroës is not fooled. Nor is he deterred by the
translator’s use of the third person plural, “they say,” yaqūlūna,
conveying the impression that both the Pythagoreans and Plato believe
mathematics is intermediate; he simply interprets the plural as meaning
hypothetical followers of Plato. His statement on the intermediacy of
mathematics (and his initial remark in C6h that the opposition was “unsound,” fāsid)
suggests that Plato’s opposition to Heracliteanism was a knee-jerk reaction
rather than the result of a thoughtful study, if tempered by a desire to
incorporate the Pythagorean insights into his more general schema. For his
part, Alexander (52.10-25) is more analytical in discussing how mathematical
entities differ from forms.[31]
For C6h the
translator gets what Aristotle says is motionless completely wrong, saying that
this is some part of sense impressions rather than mathematical entities.
Averroës takes the point as occasion to make a statement which is no
longer about mathematical entities, but about the general relation between
sensory things and forms.
For C6i the
translation has by now lost track of the fact that mathematics is the subject,[32]
and Averroës takes the resulting text in isolation. He states
that the point that a species is the same for all individuals partaking of it
is something that Plato as well as the Heracliteans would somehow oppose,
rather than Aristotle’s meaning that Plato means to contrast this idea with
that of a mathematical entity. His argument appears to be that a multitude is
defined by a number or by a form, but not both. Then his last sentence
straightforwardly opposes the Heraclitean view that it is a mere matter of
names.
For C6k, rather than
admit that Aristotle’s “since” (epei) indicates that the statement that
Plato saw forms as causes is the protasis to an upcoming clause within the
lacuna in his text, the translator renders it as a self-contained
sentence. Averroës then appears to assert that Aristotle means
that knowledge of given things rather than knowledge of their causes is the
result of Plato’s theory, I suppose meaning that he left out the material and
agent causes.
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#7 (to commentary on 987b21-25)
For C7a the
combination of the lacuna in the Arabic access to Aristotle and of
Averroës’s decision to make the division between texts #6 and #7 in the
particular place he puts it breaks up a natural paragraph in Aristotle’s
report. Averroës is thereby unable to comment here on the
central point; i.e., Aristotle claims that Plato says it is interaction between
great and small, on the one hand, and the one, on the other, that generates
both the forms and numbers -- a point which is not obvious.[33] Instead,
Averroës can only speak of what the translated text “probably means” (yaḥtamilu [يحتمل] an yurīda), presuming that it is
about the relation between individual and species. He then elaborates what many
would say is a straightforward and simple statement, that the species concept
arises from the unity of the individuals to which it applies (claiming in
particular that one must first find a unity in each individual, and only then
see what is common to these unities).
In C7b Averroës
says that the Platonists deny that there is a one “in any way other than
substance,” and allows that this is not quite Pythagoreanism, because for the
Platonists the numbers are the substantial one only insofar as they are “the
undivided part” (al-ǧuz’u -llaḏī lā
yataǧazzā,الجز
ُ الذى لا
يتجزى ),
presumably meaning not differentiated into specific numbers. Then he speaks of
the inability of the Pythagoreans and Plato alike to explain “contiguity” (muttaṣil, متصل), evidently meaning the contiguity
between their theoretical constructs and the observed world, or how “the one”
gives rise to many in practice. Indeed, their lack of attention to the
interface between theory and practice is a central point in Aristotle’s
criticism of their doctrines, as is seen later in Book A where he moves beyond
simply describing them[34]
(quite apart from explaining this and other points in the locations in the
physical works to which Averroës alludes, which are numerous).
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#8 (to commentary on 987b25-988a2)
Although Aristotle
intends this segment as part of his summary of Plato’s doctrine, the
translator’s construal mixes his (or rather, his followers’) opinions
anonymously with those of the Pythagoreans. Worse, although the natural
construal of 987b25-27 is that the Platonist makes the infinite two instead of
one, namely great and small, in the Arabic version this appears as some faction
somehow making two into one, separately from a possibly different faction
making the infinite the great and small. Thus in C8a Averroës is forced to
believe that there was a faction that embraced the absurdity that two is one,
although fortunately we will hear no more of it. For him the faction that did
not do so is presumably the Platonists.
In C8b, Aristotle’s
intended comparison of Plato with the Pythagoreans is made into a comparison of
people (presumably Platonists) who proposed three principles with anonymous
“ancients,” who supposedly counterposed the great and small to the substratum
as opposites. It is not clear who is meant by the latter, unless “great and
small” simply means the observable world, in which case the Ionian monists
would qualify. To be sure, the original three principles that the Pythagoreans
in particular merged into two were the limited, the one, and the unlimited,
respectively (see C3b).
In any case, the point that the people under discussion here (the Platonists)
did not make the one and unlimited a “substratum” (mawḍū‘ , مزضع = hupokeimenon)[35]
may be compared with Alexander’s (54.13-14), that Plato did not make numbers
“underlie” (hupoballōn) things.
For C8c Aristotle’s
Greek makes the relation between numbers and sense perceptions according to
Plato governed by the nuanced preposition para, whose sense ranges from
“apart from” to “along side of,”[36]
but the translator has quite gone beyond this ambiguity in rendering it as min,
to erroneously interpret Aristotle as saying Plato made numbers “of” (meaning
“from”)[37]
sensory things. Nonetheless, to some extent Averroës is able to salvage
the matter by construing “from” as “a component of” (ǧuz’an [جثءا] min), and interpreting that as a form.
He then notes that this is different from the Pythagoreans simply identifying
the two, and thus ends with a straightforward paraphrase after all.
In C8d, after noting
the familiar difference between the Platonists and the Pythagoreans before the
lemma, he divides the former into two factions, Platonists proper who advanced
the “mediate” doctrine and those who said numbers and forms were of the same
nature. Aristotle will indeed mention the latter (specifically Xenocrates),
aside from in Book M, in Book Z (1028b25-27), which Averroës will
paraphrase straightforwardly (Tafsīr 765.11-16, C5u to Z). But as to
Book M, if the construal “thirteenth” is correct at the end of C8d (for which
see n. 58 to
comments 1-8), it shows Averroës recognizing the existence of this
book. It indeed details the gradations of thought on the relations
of forms and numbers according to various parties,[38]
and an Arabic translation of it indeed existed according to the Fihrist
index. It seems likely to me that Avicenna was aware of it,[39]
and it is curious that Averroës did not include it in the Tafsīr.
For C8e, unlike for
C8c, the translator gets the sense of para reasonably well
(ġayr, “other than”), only to have
Averroës himself misread it as min, “from,” in the lemma. Thus he
consolidates the interpretation of Platonic doctrine begun in C8c as singling
out the “formal component” of things. Otherwise, he takes note of Aristotle’s
claim that Plato differed from Pythagoras by conducting actual in-vesti-gation
(albeit he shows no interest in the aside about the ancients’ lack of
dialectic). Here the translator’s construal of “reason” (logos) as
“definitions” (al-ḥudūd, الحدود), taken up by Averroës, may be compared
with Alexander (54.23-55.16) speaking of Plato employing “definition” (horisma)
as well as “division” (diaresis), to note the difference between species
and genus, on the one hand, and underlying principles and sensory things, on
the other, thereby arriving at the forms. Averroës, rather, speaks of the
need for what is not “outside the mind,” since what is defined in this external
realm is nonetheless “variable.” This finally leads him to attribute a belief
to Plato that if the forms did not have an abstract[40]
relation to matter they would be unlike number, whereas they must be like
number.
For C8f-g the
translator, assisted by reading the protasis of a sentence to be finished in
the next segment as rather part of this segment, construes Aristotle’s denial
that it is reasonable to generate numbers from the dyad as an affirmation that
they should instead be generated from matter. Averroës modifies this idea
by saying that it is the dyad that generates numbers, not numbers themselves,
which is material, as indeed Aristotle himself will say a bit later (988a11-14,
corresponding to C9f-g). Averroës’s defense of this proposition is to
answer an objection which it is not clear anyone would actually make: that such
generation could be accidental.
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#9 (to commentary on 988a4-16)
For C9a the
translator omits A.’s explanation of the male doing much, i.e., in relation to
the female, and skips to the statement that all this amounts to
exemplification. Lacking the knowledge that we are speaking specifically about
tables (within the lacuna), he also reduces the carrier of the form (meaning
the mind that conceives it, specifically the form of a table), to which Aristotle
assigns the doing of much, to the form (or “species”) itself.[41] As for the
commentary, Averroës notes the lacuna in the Greek text and
speculates on the missing content. He does get the essential point, that the
male makes many as does the form, only missing the contrast within the lacuna
of the (bringer of) the form doing much with a craftsman making only one
artifact at a time. Probably he understands the translator to mean by “those
people” the Platonists of all subgroups, although we cannot be certain.
For C9b, as Martini
points out, the translator’s “examples and similes” (amṯalatun
wa-tašbīhāt, امثلة
وتشبيهات) is a hendiadys for Aristotle’s “images” (mimēmata).[42] Here
Averroës implies that the process by which they (presumably meaning the various
types of Platonist) arrived at the concept of forms was induction from
examples.
For C9c-e, Aristotle
accuses Plato of using “only two causes,” i.e., that he neglected the efficient
cause,[43]
and it has been said that the criticism is unjust.[44]
For his part, Averroës at first asserts that the species concept operates
both as form and as “agent” (al-fā‘il), but then agrees that matter
and form were all that Plato used, and finally allows that “species” (naw‘,
the translator’s standard term for Aristotle’s “form,” eidos),[45]
in fact is “form” (sūra) itself. This seems rather muddled. Yet his
statement in C9d, that Plato held matter to be (merely) that whose quiddities
and definitions are forms, is interesting. This might be thought to
imply a contrast with Aristotle’s theory as interpreted by Averroës,
wherein matter is the (seemingly important) substrate or potentiality (see the
annotation on C1a
above).
For
C9f the translation misunderstands Plato’s view as Aristotle reports it, that
“the one is (the cause of the ‘what is’) of the forms,” as that, rather, the
forms simply “are one.” Then for the combination of C9f and C9g Aristotle
himself says that the identity of the matter substratum is the duality of great
and small, “according to what is said” about two things, the forms and the one
(kath’ hēs legetai), i.e.,
as an aspect of what Plato believed about these entities. The Arabic version,
rather, only applies that phrase to the second thing (for which see the next
paragraph). As to the first thing, the translator says that the
matter substrate or its environs is the entity “in which (species) are found” (allatī
fī-hā tūǧadu, توجد), i.e., perhaps, as what
one who examines Plato’s doctrine would “find.” In any event, Averroës
interprets this statement together with “the one is the forms” as what
Aristotle himself finds in it, that is, as a criticism of one aspect of it,
rather than the statement Aristotle actually intends, on what Plato would say
of it.
According
to modern interpreters as well as to Alexander (59.20-21), it is the previously mentioned matter substrate to which Aristotle
refers in saying (988a13) that “this” (hautē) is the duality of the
great and the small according to Plato. However, for C9g the Arabic version
loses this reference and instead focuses on the property of the duality, that
it is the great and small. Then it is interpreted by Averroës, as
referring not to matter but to species (i.e., forms) and to that which governs
them (the one or the form of forms), respectively. The commentator then
considers that Aristotle tacitly implies that this shows why Plato is wrong,
because in fact great and small are “other than the twofold,” meaning the
particular two-fold entity that would be relevant,[46]
I suppose matter and form.
For
C9h, after Aristotle has referred the “elements” (stoicheia) which are
the cause of positive and negative ethical qualities for Plato to the one and the
dyad, respectively (or so the sentence is generally construed), the translator
possibly refers them to the (presumably standard four) elements (al-usṭuqusāt, الاسطقسات), and speaks only of
positive qualities. Averroës somehow ignores the fact that the
translator’s term for elements is in the plural, not the dual, and gets “matter
and form” (al-māddatu wa-ṣ-ṣūra, والصر). Still, he understands
“good and praiseworthy” as actually standing for both them and their opposite,
thus restoring Aristotle’s original sense of both good and bad despite the
translation; however, as will become even clearer in his next comment, he
construes two principles as the source of them generally, not via Aristotle’s
own correspondence of one entity to good and another to bad. Indeed,
given the translator’s construal of the elements as plural rather than dual he
cannot make the one-to-one identification of two ethical qualities to two
entities respectively as Aristotle intends, and thus for C9i thinks of “the
remaining (things)” (al-bāqiyya), perhaps meaning the rest of the
universe. For whatever it is worth, in C9i Averroës interprets
this distorted text straightforwardly, albeit after again ignoring the
translator’s plural and this time forgetting the opposite of the good and praiseworthy.
For
C9k one can grant the possibility that the recension of the Greek text our
translator used omitted the specific mention of Empedocles and Anaxagoras
giving causes of good and evil, as it appears in our text of Aristotle (where
he means to refer to his discussion at A 3, 984b15-22 for Anaxagoras and at A
4, 985a4-10 for Empedocles, both in the portion not relayed by Averroës).
Also, “in the beginnings” (fī l-awā’il) is a natural construal
for the translator to make of Aristotle’s “some earlier philosophers” (tōn
proterōn tinas philosophōn). Nonetheless, Averroës himself
treats this beginning as ontological, not historical. As for the content he
derives, the implication of his rather pedestrian statement of the need for
consistency between appearances and principles is probably that matter and form
are the only principles consistent with the empirical universe. The fact that
Aristotle is simply describing the Platonic doctrine is again lost. In
contrast, Alexander (60.13-26) gives a simple paraphrase of what he says.
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#10 (to commentary on 988b17-19)
Here
the long lacuna between the last text and this one creates problems in
identifying just who Averroës believes are referenced, but at least he
speaks in C10a of “the number of genera” of causes identified by the earlier
thinkers, not just the number of causes, that Aristotle believes bear witness
for him. Thus after all he implies the presence of Aristotle’s “of what type,”
which was left out in the Arabic translation. To be sure, his paraphrase states
the absolute impossibility of a fifth cause, not just that the earlier
thinkers’ inability to find one suggests that there is none as Aristotle
seems to say. The paraphrase in C10b is straightforward.
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#11 (to commentary on 988b20-29)
As
to C11a, the sentence in question, which outlines the individual criticisms to follow,
is the last of Chapter 7 according to our tradition; however, by his
paragraphing of the text Averroës interprets it as a preface to Chapter 8
(perhaps correctly). The ambiguity in construing Aristotle’s text as to whether
the problems to be covered refer both to the manner of the earlier thinkers’
speaking and to the content of their thoughts or just to the content (see n. 19
to comments 9-16) is interpreted by our translator as the
latter. Averroës perhaps means the manner as well as the
content in speaking of where “it is possible to be skeptical” (yumkinu an
yatašakkaka), and in any case interprets what is to be discussed
rather broadly: that skepticism plus the manner of each thinker’s statement and
its scope. (For his part, Alexander, 64.11-12, only repeats
Aristotle’s statement in the narrower construal almost verbatim, although
Aquinas, 52 6180, is explicit that both the manner and the content are to be questioned,
even after reading the narrower in Aristotle’s actual text.)
With
C11b we get to the first of the comments on Aristotle’s actual criticism of
earlier thinkers. Here the translator conflates the given thinkers’
positing “the all to be one” (hen to pan) and “some one material nature”
(mian tina phusin hōs hulēn), by which they make multiple
errors, to have them posit “some one nature for the all, it being material.”[47]
Thus in giving a simple paraphrase (only deviating from the text to specify the
three elements the earlier thinkers invoked), Averroës is not able to
comment on the idea of unifying the universe per se in non-materialist terms
(such as with the Eleatics) as well as in materialist ones (the Ionian
monists). Meanwhile, it is interesting that Avicenna offers a criticism not
included in Aristotle’s and Averroës’s list of the ways the earlier
thinkers erred (to follow), which is based precisely on the aspect of making
the principle one as such. Speaking of people who made the principle water or
air or whatever (Ilāhīyāt 8.4.6), he does not complain
that they make the principle a material entity as such, but rather says that
they make it “not the essence of one, but something that (happens to be) one,”[48]
that is, something “to which unity accidentally happens.”[49] In
the surrounding discussion (8.4.3-7) he argues that such unity cannot be
characteristic of the first principle, because (in his view) that can have no
quiddity other than its being itself. This is a rather lofty objection to the
material monists compared with what is offered by Aristotle himself or by
Alexander or Averroës, or even by the more theologically oriented Aquinas.
Averroës,
his comment appears to mean in C11c that if we posit fire or air or whatever as
the principle it must be composite in order to be visible, so that it in turn
has a principle, and so on to infinity. (This statement is consistent with the
point he made in C1a,
to the effect that the material monists did not understand matter itself.) At
first sight he does not thereby raise the obvious objection that the
non-bodily entities which Aristotle says the material monists overlook in fact
exist, and cannot be explained by a bodily entity. This point is
explicitly raised by Alexander (64.23-24) and by Aquinas (55 6181), and indeed,
Asclepius (57.8-9) gives examples. Namely, this commentator (who,
apart from insertions here and there from Alexander, relays the teaching of the
Neoplatonist Ammonius) says that the non-bodily matters are “such as souls,
angels, and all the mental powers” (hoion psuchōn, angelōn kai
pasōn tōn noerōn dunameōn).[50] Still, perhaps part of what
Averroës means is that the primary element after all must be non-bodily.
This
discussion may be compared with the summary of the earliest Preso-cratics
contained in the summary commentary on Aristotle’s work generally attributed to
Averroës, translated as Epitome of Metaphysics.[51]
There it is stated that “the most ancient of the physicists” held particular
issues of the senses to take priority over universal things, and simultaneously
that for any given genus there is one primary genus which is the reason it
exists (such as that heat is made to exist by fire).[52]
That is to say, what is stressed of the early Presocratics in this work is, not
than their monism per se, but the idea that they imposed form on matter in a
particular way.
For
C11d the translator converts Aristotle’s protasis clause, on the monists
speaking of becoming and decay and nature in general, of which the apodosis is
that all this denies motion, into a sentence in itself meant to imply content
apart from denying motion, i.e., the hardly necessary statement that they
wanted to explain becoming and decay and nature in general. This causes
Averroës to go off on a tangent which implies that they failed on becoming
and decay but succeeded on nature. In the first case he is not too clear,
saying that they failed to explain becoming and decay because true change only
occurs with bodies, even though bodies were what they assigned as the
principle. I suppose he means that the principle must not change, so that it
cannot be a body. In the second case, explanation of nature, or rather
recognition of what is not nature, he alludes to the criticism he noted earlier
(in C3c),
that it is improper to make mathematics the basis of physics, while suggesting
actual approval of the monists to the extent that they did not do so.
For
C11e the translator finally isolates the actual point of Aristotle’s sentence
just noted, that the monists abolished the agent
cause. Averroës’s objection is that matter cannot move by
itself, whereas Alexander’s (64.24-29) stress is, rather, that generation
itself is motion and so needs an agent cause.[53]
For
C11f, in one of the more egregious of his errors the translator has failed to
understand that Aristotle puts “substance” and “cause” in apposition (substance
as cause),[54]
and then assumes that we speak of “the cause of substance.” Still, when
Aristotle complains that the monists do not relate substance to “what
is/quiddity” (ti esti = Arabic māhiyya), Averroës is
able to give the natural interpretation that what is neglected is form (sūra). So
also Alexander (64.30-33) and, more emphatically, Asclepius (Ammonius)
(57.20-24). For his part, Aquinas (55 6183) distinguishes substance as “the
form of the part” and quiddity as “the form of the whole,” and says the monists
did not treat either as a cause.
In
passing, elsewhere Aristotle, followed by Averroës, speaks of matter
itself as “substance,” ousia, ǧawhar (جزهر). In Book Z Aristotle
allows that matter can be substance, because (1029a1-3) “substance seems to be
first of all the substrate, which in one way is said to be matter, and in
another shape (morphē).” To this Averroës comments (#7g to Z, Tafsīr
769.13-18) that “matter is a substance insofar as it is a substrate for the
form, while form is a substance insofar as it is a shaper of the substrate.”[55]
And it may be noted that the sometime Averroës-follower Siger of Brabant
makes what his editor sees as a comment on Aristotle here. Namely,
he says that as to whether “matter is substance,” the monists erred in making
the substance that is matter into actual substance, and thus accepted what is
not form as form.[56]
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#12 (to commentary on 988b29-34)
For
C12a Aristotle says that the monists speak of one element as being the basis
“simplistically” (rhaidiōs), and without “considering” (episkepsamenoi)
the process of how the others are made from it. I presume that these are two
distinct points: that on the one hand they speak without thinking the matter
through at all, and that on the other they do not think out one given process
in particular. In any case, the translator says that their problem is, rather,
that they only see that specific process, condensation/rarefaction, as
the mechanism. Aristotle himself might ultimately agree with that sentiment,
but in any case Averroës concludes that the problem with the process is
that it is sufficiently alike for each choice of principle element that it
makes the choice arbitrary, to be sure, after spelling out how it would take
place for each choice, fire, air, or water, but not earth,[57]
in exhaustive detail. Alexander (65.14-17) makes the same point in considerably
fewer words. (To be sure, he has also just paraphrased an argument
of Aristotle’s in De gen. et corr. that the elements cannot be generated
this way in the first place, 64.34-65.10.) As to the arbitrariness, it may be
noted that in the Upanishads, the quasi-materialist Uddālaka treats air as
more fundamental than the other elements, like Anaximenes in the West, while
the female sage Gārgī Vācaknavī says it is water, like Thales.[58]
Arbitrariness is perhaps what makes it so easy for the idealist
Yājñavalkya to throw over the entire business in the latter
location, saying that the true principle is the ātman (“self”)
entity.
As
to C12b, today we assume that when Aristotle says it matters whether something is
anterior versus posterior, he means that it matters which element in the
process of condensation/rarefaction is the origin and which is the result,
respectively. He will detail the differences in the sequel (which Averroës
treats as separate issues, in texts 13 and 14). But our translator construes
what is prior as the elements generated by the process of
rarefaction/condensation as a whole, and thinks that the difference is between
the possibilities for whatever is “after” that. Somewhere in between these two
construals, Averroës thinks of the difference between generated elements
or compounds and the original element that generates them, and says is too
great “in quiddity and definition” for the given mechanism to serve.
The
gist of the further comment on the same clause in C12c appears to be that each
champion of a given element would simply answer all objections by saying that
the derivative substance formed from it is in some way still that element.
Given Averroës’s lack of historical knowledge this is presumably a guess
on his part; however, it was probably the actual case for the only example
where we have appreciable fragments in the thinker’s own words. Heraclitus
thought that his “fire” was all-pervasive (see especially 22B30 D-K), although
many have questioned Aristotle’s lumping his oracular-sounding utterances with
what might have been more prosaic statements by the Milesian monists who
specified water or air as if he held the same type of doctrine.[59]
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#13 (to commentary on 988b34-989a5)
Averroës’s
paraphrase in the first part of C13a is based on a version of Aristotle which
(1) renders “(the body that is) most elementary” (stoicheiōdestaton),
i.e., most like an element in the sense of “basic,” as “(the opinion that is)
most fitting” (alzam); (2) renders the elements coming to be “at first
by combining” (sungkrisei prōtou), i.e, with “first” an adverb, as
“from the first mixing (or: mixture)” (‘an al-imtizāǧi awwal, عن
الامتزج
الاول), i.e., with “first” an adjective; (3) has removed
the conditional mood of the sentence; and (4) has not understood that it is
posited “on the one hand” (men), with the “on the other” (de)
clause to be given later (in fact in text #14; see n. 26
to comments 9-16). An aspect of the result that Averroës fortunately
does not follow is that it is uncomfortably close to speaking of the “primary
mixture” of Anaxagoras, who is yet to be discussed. Nonetheless, the
commentator has no choice but to assume that the cited statement as to what might
be elementary is the only possibility.
At
the end of C13a and in C13b Averroës supplies the notion that the initial
principle’s particles are fine as well as small, explicit in Aristotle’s text
but left out of the translation. But then in the process of arguing
that fire would be thought the principle by means of having indivisible parts,
he reduces their fineness to smallness anyway.
In
C13c Averroës thinks each monist holding that his choice for principle is
“ultimate in degree” means that in a chronological sense, not that the phrase
refers to the particles being smallest as Aristotle and the translator hold.
Averroës then reiterates the notion that the parts being “undivided” is
the criterion of what is fundamental. All this may be related to segmenting the
text so that the first part of #14 is considered separate, not something which
indicates why each of the advocates thought the particles of his particular
element were the finest, as Aristotle means in saying that they agreed with the
principle if not its application. This does not give Averroës much of a
chance to comment on why the monist who did not think the element was fire
nonetheless thought air or water was fundamental on the basis of the size of
its parts. To be sure, he will nonetheless do so in C14b.
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#14 (to commentary on 989a5-18)
For
C14a, perhaps because he has misunderstood the statement of which the segment
989a5-6 is a part as positive rather than adversative, the translator construes
earth having coarse particles as a positive reason for advocating it as
a principle, not, as Aristotle intends, as a reason for no one doing so.
Averroës then belabors the obvious, that anyone doing so was at odds with
fineness as a criterion, in the process continuing to hold that that criterion
is absolute.
In
C14b Averroës suggests that the monists consciously avoided (“fleeing
from,” hurūb min) positing earth, because they wanted to make the
principle in accordance with definition, which he continues to take as absolute
that it be the element with the smallest parts. Thus the commentator says the
best choice was fire, although some compromised with the definition to choose
air or water. (In the process he speaks after all to what Aristotle means by
his last sentence corresponding to #13, as noted above.) Then he comments on
the issue of the common people and Hesiod as the justification for earth being
the principle. As to the common people, the translator has wrongly
put them in Aristotle’s past, but Averroës ignores them
anyway. Especially, he observes that Hesiod was better known than
the material monists, which was certainly true relative to Anaximander and
Anaximenes,[60]
if not to Thales or Heraclitus. Aristotle’s reference itself clearly means the
statement of what were the original entities given at the outset of the
theogony proper in the poem Theogony.[61] It is tempting to believe that the
“rules” Averroës then cites correspond to the poem Works and Days,
and the “mysteries” to Theogony. In any case, given that “rules” here had
the original sense of “revelations,”[62]
it is possible that Averroës thought of Hesiod as a theologian, or indeed,
the prophet suggested elsewhere in the Theogony.[63]
To be sure, it must also be said that Aristotle cites the same Theogony
passage in the Physics, and that according to the Latin translation of
Averroës’s long commentary, the translator he uses attributes it to Homer
rather than Hesiod, with the commentator following suit.[64]
For
14c the translator fails to understand that the parenthetical comment which
began at 989a2, within text 13, has now closed, and that “this
argument/account” is that the finest of particles determines the principles,
not anything about the coarsest particles just cited. This may be the root of
his misunderstanding Aristotle’s “anything but fire” (ti plēn puros)
that the given monists assigned the principle “to fire alone” (bin-nāri
faqaṭ, النار
فقط). Averroës then merely paraphrases the argument thus
construed as still about earth as principle. In another error, the translation
has it that those who Aristotle says said that the principle is denser than air
but finer than water actually said that air is denser than fire but finer than
water, and somehow imputes the notion that this correct opinion is wrong to
Aristotle. To be sure, in saying that such people “make the small of the large”
and vice versa, Averroës evidently believes nonetheless that Aristotle
meant to say what he actually said, that they claimed fire is denser than air
and water finer than air. In any case, the thrust of the resulting comment is
merely that the people who said the principle was earth disagreed with those
who said it was one of the other three.
For
14d, at 989a15 Aristotle dispenses with the entire possibility of taking the
principle to be what is not yet assembled, begun at 988b34 at the beginning of
text 13, and says “on the other hand,” let’s consider the opposite possibility.
He himself favors this choice elsewhere, that what is later in time is primary
in essence (e.g., a man in relation to a boy).[65]
Averroës comments straightforwardly at the other location, saying that it
is a matter of the form being completed,[66]
but here again seem favors the first choice, that the simplest is primary. He
is able to do this by construing the making of earth primary being “according
to the converse” (‘alā l-‘aks), i.e., as an illegitimate
opposition, whereas Aristotle had actually meant by “would be the opposite” (tounantion
an eiē) a pure statement of fact, and by following the translator’s
misunderstandings just discussed. To be sure, he adds an argument, alleging
that the great dissolves into the small.
In
contrast to all this, Alexander suggests that Aristotle simply means that if
transformations take place by means of condensation-rarefaction, then one might
as well consider earth a possibility.[67]
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#15 (to commentary on 989a18-30)
Aristotle
next says that he is done with the material monists, and with C15a so is
Averroës since he adds nothing to his paraphrase. It might be thought that
his comments on Aristotle’s detailed critique of them here in Chapter 8, i.e.,
in C11b-C14d, are less pointed than what he says about them in commenting on
the mere statement of their views in Chapter 5, i.e., in C1a, where the thrust
is that they did not grasp the basic nature of matter. In part his negligence
in the present location is because, as is noted in the preceding annotations,
his translator has garbled the text, but it is also apparent elsewhere that he
is not much interested in discussing the material cause.[68]
It might be said that Avicenna goes into the monists somewhat more since, in
addition to his properly metaphysical criticism noted above (annotation
to C11b), in his work paralleling Aristotle’s De gen. et corr. he
makes the point that, on physical grounds, none of the posited primary elements
could function as desired. For example, he says, water cannot be the principal
element because “water is devoid of shape, and if a concentration is posited
for it to preserve (ability to make things with) shape, then what has been
posited is removal of the aspect that makes it elemental.”[69]
For
C15b Aristotle has said that the problem with the monists is the same as with those
for whom “four bodies are the material,” but the translator converts the
predicate of this clause to an adjective of its subject, thus “the material
bodies (al-aǧsāmu l-hayūlāniyya, الاجسام
الهيولانية) are four.” It thereby
appears that Aristotle is making a point of the fourfold character, so that
Averroës feels free to divide the text so as to give a separate comment
here, before the philosopher’s statement that in some ways Empedocles was like
the monists, in some ways not. Nonetheless he must search for why we are
“following the same road” with him as with them. Namely, he says, all give the
same mechanism of condensation-rarefaction, as opposed to (what we would say is
chemical) transformation. Then in C15c he paraphrases the statement of some things
being the same, others not, as the former set constituting the same problems as
the monists, while saying nothing of the latter. Differently, although in the
corresponding location Alexander (67.10-18) makes close to the same point as
Averroës about condensation-rarefaction, as well as to points the latter
will make in C15d-e and to the point that both groups neglected the substantial
formal cause,[70]
he will later say (67.18-68.3) that an objection peculiar to Empedocles is that
his love and strife principles do not purely condense and separate things,
respectively.
For
C15d, the translator has made the crude error of reading ὁ aὐtό?, i.e., with the
article, “the same,” as if without it, “itself,” so that “the same body does not
persist as fire or earth” becomes “fire and earth and body itself do not
persist.” Fortunately Averroës does not take the bait to allege what that
might mean, but concentrates on the transformations of the elements into one
another. The Aristotelian locations cited for their discussion are the twin
works De caelo (III 7) and De gen. et corr. (II 6),[71]
and in our location here Averroës gives a succinct summary of more or less
the objections Aristotle gives there. As to the addition of “those who say that
the elements are undivided bodies,” and who are subject to the same problems,
Averroës evidently means the atomist Democritus (whom Aristotle includes
along with Empedocles in the cited De caelo location), as opposed to the
element with the smallest parts having undivided parts, cited in C13b.
To be sure, nothing in all this is particularly metaphysical.
For
C15e, the translator supplies an extra “we have spoken (in the physical works)”
on lack of clarity in one vs. two moving causes. Aristotle has actually done so
in the present Book, explaining what he means,[72]
and will give some analysis in Book B (as will be noted shortly). Averroës
himself can only comment here on the reasons for the alleged discussion
of the question in the physical works, i.e., that this is appropriate when the
issue is other than the principles of substance. Then, in an aside to the
commentary proper, in C15f he summarizes the difference between physics and
metaphysics with examples that are general, as opposed to referring to specific
places in the Aristotelian corpus. Notably, he says that in metaphysics one assumes
the results shown in physics, not that metaphysics somehow supersedes physics.
That is a major difference between him and Avicenna.[73] But
as to the issue at hand one may compare with Asclepius (Ammonius), who
(60.15-27) says that, although Empedocles meant to assign to love “synthesizing
and form-creating and unifying,” and to strife “dissolution and
making-indefinite and distancing,” Aristotle says he is confused on whether
there are one or two moving causes because, as explained in the De gen. et
corr. location, he in fact used both principles for both synthesis and
dispersal.
Aristotle
next presents the issues of one versus two causes and of the abolition of
motion as distinct, saying that Empedocles in particular did not speak
correctly on the first, and that those like him are guilty of the second. But
for C15g the translator applies the correctness mostly to the second question
on abolition, or at least in a word order making it easy for Averroës to
decouple the question of correctness from the first issue of one vs. two moving
causes (see on C15e above). The translator, moreover, says that the people in
question had the wrong position on abolition, not that they did the abolishing
as Aristotle says, and finally treats the impossibility of cold coming from hot
and vice versa according to Aristotle as something according to them. Yet somehow
Averroës is able to cut through all this and give an explanation of what
Aristotle actually said. Especially, he says that a “solitary thing” cannot
undergo the transformation such as from cold to hot. It may be that his
reference implies what others have since spelled out more concretely, that all
this means there must be a substrate which takes on the character of one
opposite or the other as circumstances warrant.[74]
For
C15h, the translator thoroughly garbles the text, which is a simple consequence
of the preceding false proposition that Empedocles would agree is
counterfactual, and Averroës once again is forced to comment on something
Aristotle does not actually say. His conclusion is that what such people “do
not say” is that the elements as such are locked into their compounds, even
though that is contingent of their doctrine.
In
general, for Aristotle Empedocles was one of the more important of the
pre-Platonic thinkers,[75]
and mention may be made here in particular of the discussion in Book B of the Metaphysics.[76] There the focus is on agents, rather
than on materials as here; namely, nominally in the context of the need to
distinguish the causes of eternal vs. corruptible things, Aristotle complains
that Empedocles makes strife both responsible for corruption and, with love,
for the existence of things.[77]
On this Averroës comments in particular that in not detailing just when
love acts and when strife, Empedocles is no better than those who deny the
agent cause, and who say that “the nature of existents requires becoming and
decay by necessity.”[78]
Thus to the commentator, confusion on the employment of the two moving causes
has the same result as that of the monists who do not posit any as principles
in the first place.
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#16 (to commentary on 989a30-b6)
Excursus
on Anaxagoras and Averroës: Anaxagoras is known for having posited
significance for “mind” (nous), on the one hand, and an infinite number
of “(entities of) homogeneous parts” (homoi-omeroi), on the other.[79]
Our sources cite these two concepts in differing contexts, so that their precise
relation has long been subject to discussion.[80]
Aristotle’s principal discussions of them separately are not in Metaphysics.
Rather, for “mind” one looks primarily to De anima,[81]
on which Averroës’s long commentary only survives in Latin, although we have
his informative middle commentary in the original. These commentaries discuss
Aristotle’s own theory of mind and those of his successors Alexander and
Themistius at length, but for the most part do not go beyond paraphrase insofar
as Anaxagoras is concerned.[82]
The theory of the homoeomeroi is detailed in Physics, where early in the
tract Aristotle gives an extended critique of Anaxagoras’s ideas on these
entities and the relations of different sets of them; e.g., he argues that it
is contradictory to say both that water comes from flesh and that flesh comes
from water.[83]
He also attacks the idea that the homoeomeroi as elements can be infinite in
number in De caelo (302b10-303a3). As for Averroës, at least
according to their surviving Latin translations, it is true that his long
commentaries on these works primarily confine themselves to simply paraphrasing
Aristotle’s argument against Anaxagoras, identifying its logic, or clarifying
its details.[84]
However, they sometimes make substantive points. Thus in commenting on the
earlier Physics discussion, at one point (Lat. IV fol. 21K, on Phys.
187a23-25) Averroës attributes to Anaxagoras a view he may not have held
(because he may not have thought about the issue), i.e., that mind and the
original mixture had existed for an infinite time into the past before the
former caused the latter’s separation into our world. Also, in commenting on
Aristotle’s witness that any generated thing comes from a similar thing
according to Anaxagoras, Averroës (Lat. IV fol. 97L, on 203a28-29) imputes
a “cause” for this process existing within that similar thing, i.e., posits
something other than the mind principle. He may mean this in the sense of the
material cause that Aristotle says here in Metaph. it is possible to
attribute to the homoeomeroi.[85]
Then, in commenting on Aristotle noting that the example of Empedocles shows
that a finite number of principles can suffice, Averroës speculates that
Anaxagoras made the principles infinite because otherwise generation would
cease at some point, that is, because he thought generation must continue
indefinitely.[86]
To be sure, also Averroës comments on a number of Aristotle’s citations of
Anaxagoras later in the Metaphysics.[87]
As
for our commentary here, for C16a Aristotle has said that Anaxagoras’s doctrine
implies two elements even if he did not spell this out himself. As to the
elements themselves, Averroës appropriately attributes to Anaxagoras “mind
in the mode of agent” and “bodies of mutually-resembling parts.”[88]
In the present context of two “causes” one naively thinks of mind and the
homoeomeroi as principles, with the one as efficient cause and the other as
material cause.[89]
But as to Aristotle’s qualification, one usually interprets his statement as
saying that Anaxagoras did not himself present the matter thus but would have
agreed if others pointed out the inherent property of his statement (so already
Alexander 68.8-13, saying that Anaxagoras “dreams,” oneiropolei, of
matter). However, on the basis of his redoubtable translator’s construal of the
text, Averroës thinks rather in terms of something Anaxagoras himself
believed but did not explain well, and also that he was only led to it
erroneously.
For
C16b, Aristotle has referred to the attested doctrine of Anaxagoras that the
starting point of cosmogony was a mixture of all things, infinite both in
number and in fineness (59B1 D-K, from Simplicius Phys. 155.23),
beginning his criticism by saying that the doctrine is absurd (atopos)
“otherwise” (allōs). This refers to reasons which are unstated but
perhaps simply reduce to the later philosopher’s sense that the idea is absurd
on its face. Differently, Alexander (68.15-23) interprets “otherwise” as simply
referring to the stated reasons that follow,[90]
and similarly Asclepius (Ammonius) (61.25-34). Our translator keeps the
objections separate, but somehow construes “otherwise” to be the absurdity of
saying that existence or the existent “is induced into some state” (yuṣayyaru bi-ḥālin, يصير
بحال), and for the second objection construes “necessity”
(dein) as “statement” (al-qawl), not saying to whom it is
attributed. After this Averroës can only give a generality, not to say
platitude, to the effect that one should not say something inconsistent with
the basis of whatever the subject is. Then in C16c he gives a straightforward
paraphrase of what the necessity/statement is contrary to.
C16d
corresponds to the first of Aristotle’s actually stated reasons for the
absurdity, that all things must originally have been unmixed. According to Averroës
this is because the very idea of “mixed” means there must have been something
to mix. So also, in essence, Alexander (68.16-18) and Asclepius (Ammonius)
(61.27-28). Of course, Anaxagoras would answer that this is a sophistry: he
means “mixed” in reference to separate existences later. To be sure, Aquinas
(57 6195) points out that Aristotle’s opposition is conditioned by his view
that the world is eternal, and that therefore the distinctions between its
parts are eternal.
For
C16e Aristotle says that chance things are not mixed with chance things, and
Alexander (68.19-20) illustrates by saying that you do not mix something like
“white” and “musical.” However, our translator reduces Aristotle’s “chance” (to
tuchon) to one aspect of that concept, namely that what occurs by chance
partakes of “insignificance” (aṣ-ṣiġar, الصغر). In his turn,
Averroës presumes that what is insignificant is not the circumstances of
the mixture, the combining of things which may have no relation to one another,
but its parts, presumably meaning that their size is infinitesimally small. He
then says that this is not true mixing, because that entails a loss of the
identity of the components (thus elaborating what he had said in C15b).
To be sure, here he agrees with Ross’s comment on the segment: for Aristotle
mixture is chemical; for Anaxagoras, mechanical.
For
C16f Aristotle himself appears to mean that the logical conclusion of
Anaxagoras’s doctrine is that the properties and accidents of a thing would be
separate from its substance, in spite of the latter’s assertion that everything
(i.e., including properties and accidents) was originally mixed, because the
possibility of mixture implies that of separation. (So the segment is
interpreted by Alexander 68.20-23.) Anaxagoras might reply that this is a
sophistry merging two senses of “separation.” (The logical possibility of
separation need not imply an actual separation in a given situation.) As to
Averroës, his translator has removed the conditional sense of the clause,
thus making it unclear whether the separation in question is in the world or
(implicitly) in the doctrine of Anaxagoras. However, Averroës is able to
understand that a property of the doctrine in question is meant, and interprets
it straightforwardly.
For
C16g Aristotle speaks as if Anaxagoras’s doctrine when phrased differently
might appear modern. Alexander (69.1-3) speculates that this has to do with the
statement back at 984a11 that Anaxagoras was older than Empedocles but later in
his philosophizing. Asclepius (Ammonius) (61.34-62.20) is able to find a
connection to Plato. Aquinas (57-58 6s 196-97) thinks that it means the
philosophy of Anaxagoras was more sophisticated than that of his predecessors.
However, on the basis of a loose paraphrase by his translator, Averroës
somehow construes Aristotle’s comment negatively, as if he thought of
Anaxagoras as grandstanding, and without fear of punishment since there was no
law for it. This is ironic since, Averroës notwithstanding, Anaxagoras was
in fact banished, ostensibly for the impiety of his teaching although probably
really for his political activities.
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#17 (to commentary on 989b6-13)
Whatever
might be up-to-date in Anaxagoras’s teaching, Aristotle next resumes his attack
on the earlier thinker’s idea of a primal mixture, actually arguing in this
segment and the first part of the next (#18a-b) for the statement in the last,
that the idea is absurd when one considers the role of “properties and
contingencies.” Namely, the doctrine is inconsistent on whether qualities like
color are included in the primal mixture. Alexander (69.3-12) gives a
straightforward paraphrase of the overall argument. For his part, in C17a
Averroës (working this time from a moderately faithful translation) also
begins with a paraphrase, but then adds a further explanation, specifically
invoking the metaphysical position that whatever comes to be must have come
from what did not exist.
The
first part of C17b is a straightforward paraphrase of an individual point of
the argument, that qualities such as colors could not have been present
originally, but then Averroës works from the mistranslation of “similar
qualities” as the homoeomeroi themselves, to imply a bald refutation of the
Anaxagorean doctrine itself regarding substances, as opposed to Aristotle’s
narrow point about qualities. The misunderstanding continues in C17c, for which
the translator has also fallen back on his previous translation “forms” as
“species,”[91]
even though Aristotle is not speaking of them in anything like Plato’s sense
here, but simply as types of predication of a thing, in saying that something
of them would have belonged to the original entity if it were white or
whatever. In addition the translator has removed the reason why Aristotle says
this is impossibility Aristotle cites, putting it into the next segment as an
absolute assertion. Averroës is forced by all this to interpret any
“parts” hypothetically separated from those which they resemble in the primal
mixture as falling into a distinguished genus.
Then
in an aside, C17d, Averroës explains why that would be a problem, namely
that it would create equality between the concepts of genus and of matter, and
goes into their actual similarities and differences. The text of Alexander he
mentions is Quaestio 2.28 (Sharples 36-38, with references to the Arabic
version at 125 n. 168). It is not clear what Averroës means in saying that
the issue will be revisited later in the Tafsīr. (Aristotle does
discuss why some people say that genera are “elements,” at Metaph. Ä
1014b9-15, however without particularly criticizing them for this, upon which
Averroës comments straightforwardly in C4q-t to Book Ä, Tafsīr
503.18-505.11.) In any case, his discussion here has little if anything to do
with Aristotle’s criticism of the doctrine of a primal mixture.
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#18 (to commentary on 989b13-29)
Aristotle
next gives the reason why it is impossible for forms of colors, etc. to have
been present in the primal mixture, namely that they would have separated out
(i.e., otherwise they would not constitute color, etc.), a point which the
translator garbles, but which is left unmentioned by Averroës. So is
Aristotle’s next statement, that Anaxagoras said mind is unmixed and pure. But
then, as to what he actually treats in C18a, we can envisage Averroës
scratching his head over how the same principle can be all of one, simple, and
unmixed, on the one hand, and indeterminate before being defined (a point from
his translator’s text that is clearly the focus of his comment even though he does
not reproduce it in the lemma), on the other. Of course he does not know that
the translator has misunderstood a statement that they are different things by
means of consturing “other” as “at some point” (see n. 10
to comments 17-24). Thus he is unable to say anything about the “one,
simple, and unmixed” aspect in giving his statement of what it means for
something to be determined. That statement itself (apparently that in one way
the principles can be undetermined, but that they must be determined to some
extent, essentially by definition of “determine”) does little to clarify
metaphysics, as perhaps opposed to logic, and his point may be stated more
clearly by Alexander (69.19-22), that indefinite means not actual, although
while having the potential to become anything.
Aristotle
himself (989b19-21) next summarizes the treatment he has given of Anaxagoras
over the course of what Averroës breaks into texts 16, 17, and the first
part of 18, that on the one hand the doctrine is neither correct nor clear,
while on the other it has a modern tinge to it. The translator mixes the terms
of these distinct points, interpreting Aristotle’s “akin to” (his own
“something close to it”) to apply to Anaxagoras’s doctrine rather than to “what
was said later.” This gives Averroës, who is still thinking that the issue
is whether or not something is “determined,” license to go off on a tangent.
Namely, he says in C18b that the lack of correctness applies to anyone who
identifies the material principle with any concrete entity of which it is the
principle, which is to say, all of the early materialists as we know them,
including the monists and Empedocles as well as the subject here, Anaxagoras.
To be sure, Aristotle would agree even if that is not what he says in this
particular location. Then in 18c, after the translator has mistaken Aristotle’s
“what appears now (of doctrines similar to that of Anaxagoras)” for “what we
have now said (of past doctrines),” Averroës detects a link with
Empedocles in particular as the example par excellence of someone who violated
the dictum that the material principle cannot be a determined form of matter.
For his part, correctly understanding “what appears” to refer to actual
doctrines “now,” Alexander (70.6-7) refers, rather, to Platonists making the
two principles the one and an indefinite dyad.
Aristotle
next moves to a summary statement about all the materialists, that they can
only deal with motion and transformation of material bodies. But for 18d the
translator has somehow construed Aristotle’s schedon, that the
materialists were “close to” neglecting non-material issues, as “suffices” (kāfa),
i.e., that such neglect is acceptable if the discussion is limited to becoming
and decay and motion. Thus at least at first sight Averroës then
interprets the segment as being sufficient for physics as opposed to
metaphysics. However, that would certainly be inconsistent of him, since
neither Aristotle nor he think that neglecting non-material causes suffices in
physics any more than in metaphysics. Thus in Physics II 7 Aristotle is
clear that, “since there are four causes, the physicist is to know all of them”
(epei d’ hai aitiai tettares, peri pasōn tou phuskou eidenai,
198a22), while at least according to his Latin translator Averroës says
that Aristotle says this “because matter appears in natural science and all
causes are in matter” (quoniam in scientia naturali apparet materia, &
in quo est materia, sunt omnes causae, Lat. IV fol. 73L). On the other
hand, perhaps in our location Averroës means by what is “taken from
natural affairs” (al-ma’ḫūḏu min umūrin ṭabī‘iyya, المأخوذ
من
امورطبيعية) simply something restricted
to what does not require the formal and final causes, not all of what
could be taken from natural affairs. In any case, in the first part of C18e he
then attacks any equation of natural science and “divine science”
(metaphysics). One might think that this is a polemic against theologians
proper, but is in accord with Averroës’s general supposition that physics
and metaphysics are distinct subjects, as opposed to what he saw as the opinion
of Avicenna (who certainly construed metaphysics as “divine science”), that the
second is subordinate to the first.[92]
But for his part, Alexander (70.12-71.2) is clear that Aristotle’s actual point
here is to criticize the materialists, and to dismiss them from relevance.
Asclepius/Ammonius (63.17-19) adds the more specific point that, although
Anaxagoras would admit that “mind” was non-material, he ignored “soul and other
such things.”
For
the second part of C18e Aristotle says it is time to deal with those who do
consider non-sensory things, and Averroës interprets this decision to
refer only to people who thought of mathematics as the latter aspect, i.e.,
only the Pythagoreans. To be sure, most would say that Aristotle introduces the
entire subject of treating non-material issues here, including in particular Plato
as well as the Pythagoreans (so Alexander 71.2-9). Still, it is noteworthy that
Averroës say of the thinkers he means that they are especially the concern
of metaphysics since they merge two basic principles. C18f is then a
straightforward paraphrase.
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#19 (to commentary on 989b29-990a6)
Aristotle
begins his critique of the Pythagoreans by observing that, although they employ
principles at variance with those of the physicists, they nonetheless purport
to explain the same things. His tone in this segment is somewhat wry (the
Pythagoreans “busy themselves” with nature and “lavish” causes on the heavens, pragmateuontai
and katanaliskousin, respectively, albeit the translator is perhaps more
prosaic, “speak [about],” and “are awed [by],” yatakallamūna and yurā’ūna,
respectively). Averroës himself begins C19a in a quasi-ironic vein (“the
human [being],” al-insān, after all, is a creature that can detect
error), but ends rather more pointedly when, recalling what he had said in C3c,
he says they posited “unsuitable and improper” (ġayrun munāsabatin wa-lā ḏātiyya,ضاتية
)
principles for nature per se. For his part, Alexander at first (71.13) simply
paraphrases A.’s statement that the Pythagorean principles were “more remote” (ektopōterōs)
than those of the physicists as “stranger and disconnected” (xenikōtera
kai apērtēmenas),[93]
but then (72.7) goes a bit further on mathematics being unsuitable for
sublunary physics, stating that the Pythagoreans introduced mathematics to the
subject in the context of “having been raised” (entraphentes) on
mathematics. We can also consider the paraphrase of al-Baġdādī
(see preface/introduction,
n. 9). His fragmentary commentary does have a thought on C19a and the first
part of C19b, specifically on 989b29-32, namely, “but the situation of these
(people) is more (or most?) ruinous and further(-est?)[94]
from the truth, inasmuch as they make principles of affairs from which it is
impossible for natural sensory bodies to arise, although sometimes mathematical
bodies are imagined from them” (al-Baġdādī 100; Martini 2002,
96). He goes on to explain the last qualification in terms of their thinking of
geometrical relations, i.e., that moving a point of a body generates a line,
etc., thus showing how the Pythagorean idea might arise.
Then,
apart from making the idea of unsuitability that Aristotle himself does not
spell out explicitly, in C19b Averroës gives a straightforward paraphrase
of Aristotle saying that the Pythagoreans did not proceed from nature and that
only astronomical mathematics involves motion, and then underlines the
paraphrase with the abstract adage that you need different principles for
moving affairs than for non-moving ones. Alexander (72.8-9) also paraphrases,
but without that abstraction.
In
C19c Averroës digresses to discuss the content of study of the heavenly
bodies, specifying that it is not a matter of what makes up the moving planets
and stars, nor of the permissibility of any “kind of motions” (naw’un min
al-ḥarakāt, الحركات), but of such things as
“the manners of motions” (kayfiyyātu l-ḥarakāt), whatever that distinction might mean. Aristotle of course views these
bodies as inhabiting an arena where different laws apply than in the sublunary
realm, namely that they are not subject to generation and destruction (as
worked out in De caelo). The commentator here allows the physicist as
well as the metaphysician to study them, presumably insofar as he proves that
only circular motion is allowed for them, as Aristotle argues in De caelo
I 2. Differently, Asclepius (Ammonius) (66.9-15) is concerned with the
difference between the physicist and the astronomer, saying that the former
studies the matter of the heavens as a substrate, but the latter only the
motions of the heavenly bodies, referring to Physics I 2. Alexander
(72.9-12) confines himself to saying that the astronomer after all studies
natural bodies in motion, without making any explicit comparison with the
physicist.
As
to C19d, Aristotle himself says that the Pythagoreans speak about nature “as
if” (hōs) they agreed with the physicists on what constitutes
being, and so Alexander (72.17) simply says that they were “in agreement” (homologountes)
with the early physicists to the extent of effectively only considering sensory
things to exist.[95]
But the translator has introduced the idea that they were like that “so that” (kay-mā)
we will consider them natural scientists, and then Averroës accuses them
of (presumably consciously) “wanting to imitate” (yarūmūna an
yatašabbahū) the physicists. He implies that this procedure is a
false one by underlining once again that they “employ a principle not of nature
for natural affairs”̣ (ista‘malū fī l-umūri ṭ-ṭabī‘iyyati [الطبيعية] mabda’a ġayri ṭabī‘ī [طبيعى]), essentially smuggling
in mathematics as this principle.
For
C19e Aristotle has specified the mode in which the Pythagoreans resemble the
physicists, namely taking the sensory to be real. So also Alexander (72.16-18).
To this Averroës comments that positing something non-sensory to
nonetheless underlie the sensory was common among the ancients. The stress
might be thought curious, since for the most part this attribution applies only
to the Pythagoreans and Platonists before Aristotle, certainly not to the
Ionian monists, although Empedocles will later (in Chapter 10) be characterized
as admitting a rational principle, and Anaxagoras posited mind as well as the
homogeneous particles.
For
C19f the translator has isolated the clause citing the sky from Aristotle’s
immediate context, where he had meant it, rather, as an enclosure for the
sensory things to be studied, and has interpreted the next sentence’s protasis
clause as a complete sentence. For his part Averroës treats the resulting
two clauses together, claiming that it means that the “causes and principles”
of the second clause apply to the sky of the first, and that this means
equating the physics of the heavens with that of the sublunary world, of course
a false position in Aristotelian philosophy. In particular, he says, the
Pythagoreans applied the idea of numbers as cause to both realms (as indeed
they did at least according to Aristotle, who most famously accuses them of
inventing the “counter-earth” so that the celestial bodies would be ten in
number).[96]
Then Averroës takes the translator’s addition that there were “many
statements” on the causes and principles to refer to the several applications
corresponding to each number as exemplum (such as the one for the number two
cited earlier, in C4b).
C19g requires no elaboration.
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#20 (to commentary on 990a6-10)
Next,
the translator’s loss of the actual subject of Aristotle’s sentence here, that
it is the Pythagoreans’ view of the causes and principles that ascends to the
sky (putting a version of all this into the previous segment as just noted),
causes him not to recognize that Aristotle actually compares (discourse
on) “the higher of existents” with discourse on nature.[97]
Aristotle then wonders how there can be motion with only the limited and
unlimited principles, but the translator (presumably mistaking interrogative tínos
as indefinite tinós) reads this as a statement that there is some
of both bounded and unbounded motion. From all this Averroës in 20a draws
the incorrect conclusion that Aristotle assigns discussion of motion to the
Pythagoreans, to say that like everything else it must be numbers for them. But
he does have an interesting comment on what Aristotle actually says, namely, to
correlate limit vs. unlimited with the contraries the earliest Presocratics
posited (e.g., hot and cold separating in the cosmogony of Anaximander, 12A10 D-K).
This seems to go beyond his noting in C3a-b
that the Pythagorean principles were two-fold. It may indicate his awareness of
their grouping everything into opposites, as in the table Aristotle gives which
was known at least to Avicenna (see above on C3b).
In the meantime, however, Averroës leaves unremarked (because unseen by
him) the statement that the Pythagoreans’ principles suit “higher beings” more
than discussion of nature, which Alexander (72.19-20) interprets to mean that
they suit both non-corporeal entities and things “above” (huper)
ordinary physical objects, presumably heavenly bodies, better. Asclepius
(Ammonius) (66.34-67.1) actually interprets the comparison: it is a matter of
numbers better suiting the non-corporeal than the corporeal.
For
20b-c, Aristotle has complained that for the Pythagoreans only odd and even
(and limited and unlimited, already garbled by the translator as noted above)
are “supposed,” but as pointed out in the text note (#15),
the translator has mistaken this predicate as another subject, “substrate,” to
go with odd and even. This gives Averroës a chance to underline in 20b the
metaphysical position he has indicated previously (in C8b),
that the contrary entities the ancients were wont to posit must be underlain by
a substratum. Then in C20c he is unable to transcend the translator’s error,
wherein the Pythagoreans supposedly said nothing at all on “the paired and the
single.” (Perhaps then he is after all unaware of their just cited table of
opposites, since “odd and even,” at least, are its very next entry after “limit
and unlimited.”) In any case he fails to notice a contradiction with his just
having noted (in C19f) that they said a good deal on the single, the paired,
the triple, etc., namely that a prototype member of each category is the cause
of all its other members. Meanwhile, since Alexander correctly understands what
Aristotle said, that the Pythagoreans do not explain motion, he is able to
identify (72.25-26) the problem as being that numbers per se do not carry
motion as a property.
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#21 (to commentary on 990a10-18)
Next
Aristotle adds to what the Pythagoreans do not explain, first, how there can be
common phenomena of change without positing (a theory of) motion. For C21a the translator
errs by making heavenly actions part of the cause that is missing for the
Pythagoreans rather than the effect, and Averroës can only follow
(forgetting that he has just implied, in C20a, that there is indeed motion for
the Pythagoreans, albeit it must be numbers). His comment that there is neither
genesis nor decay when things are specifically numbers is cogent in itself, but
Alexander, not being subject to the given misunderstanding, is able to comment
on the failure to explain the motions, indicating (72.31-32) that it is
particularly damning since the motions of the heavenly bodies are precisely
what is important about them.
In
C21b, where Aristotle has wondered how diversity in magnitude can arise once we
assume it exists, the essential issue is joined, even though we have another
case of the translator and therefore Averroës cutting off a clause and
putting part of it in the next, and indeed joined in a distilled way. In saying
that it is impossible for a continuous magnitude (a body) to be assembled from
things not in contact (numbers), the commentator invokes the age-old difficulty
of making something continuous out of discrete entities. (From a slightly
different angle, Alexander 72.32-34 says the problem is making something with
magnitude out of something “without extension,” adiastatos, i.e.,
numbers.) Then Averroës implies that the issue is something like lightness
and heaviness after all, in saying that even if the impossibility is overlooked
the Pythagoreans do not explain how “diverse” bodies arise.
For
C21c, whether Aristotle really means that the Pythagoreans “speak no more on
the mathematical than on the sensory” has been questioned over the years,[98]
but in any case the translator misunderstands the sentence and simply allows
them to say something on both kinds. This failure precludes Averroës
giving an account of how they would need a discussion of something like
Euclid’s regular solids before they could explain why different mathematical
bodies produce different degrees of lightness/heaviness. Nonetheless he is able
to suggest that they cannot explain what is desired, the cause of the diversity
heaviness vs. lightness, without making basic the typological distinction
between mathematical and sensory things that they refuse to make (a point whose
full force will be felt in the next comment). Aristotle criticizes the
Pythagoreans in a similar vein at De caelo 300a14-19, saying that their
attempt to relate the heavens and the rest of nature to numbers fails because
one cannot obtain heaviness or lightness from a collection of units. To this
Averroës comments first on generating the world from numbers, simply
saying that it is impossible (Lat. V fol. 183E-F), and then speaks at some
length on the impossibility of getting magnitude from units (183G-184M). In
both cases, however, he takes the target to be Plato rather than the
Pythagoreans.
In
an aside, C21d, Averroës gives an answer to the question of how they can
explain heaviness and lightness, saying sharply that they cannot, or rather that
they can only do so by claiming that those physical properties accrue to
mathematical entities. For his part Alexander (on what corresponds to C21c-e)
denies that heaviness/lightness can be a matter of some natural (i.e.,
gravitational) inclination accruing to numbers of no extension (72.34-73.2),
and then remarks wryly that the Pythagoreans propose to treat natural bodies,
but not the qualities that make them natural bodies (73.4-8). But
Averroës, going somewhat beyond his simple crediting them with equating
numbers with things in C8c-e,
here denies that the Pythagoreans even engage in the simple process of
delineating the terms for explanans and explandum, numbers and sensory
things, as do some (meaning Plato) who make mathematics more fundamental than
sensation; rather, the Pythagoreans flout the idea that there must be an actual
relation between the two, and this is repugnant as the commentator says. To be
sure, he may be led to this attack in part by the translator’s misconstrual
noted above of “mathematical no more than sensory” as both “mathematical and
sensory.” Yet it is certainly as trenchant a criticism as one can make if we
assume that the Pythagoreans said “things are numbers” in so bald a way (and if
they thought the relation between things and numbers was something other than
one of equality, I know no evidence of them articulating it).[99]
For
C21e the translator has again distorted the details (see n. 19
to comments 17-24). Still, in following the version that the Pythagoreans
did not give a “proper” account rather than Aristotle’s meaning that they said
nothing on “particulars,” Averroës’s conclusion, that their problem was
not explaining how things can move starting from rest, says nothing that
Aristotle would dispute.
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#22 (to commentary on 990a18-22)
The
usual interpretation of Aristotle’s sentence here is the rhetorical question
that, given the Pythagorean equation of things and numbers, how is it possible
both that some type of number causes the cosmos, and that there is no other
type of number involved? I.e., one would expect the number which is the cause
to be different from the number which is the effect, as Alexander (73.15-16) in
particular says. He goes on to point out (73.16-20) that Plato in contrast
thought in terms of an ideal number and a distinct number for sensory things
(as Aristotle himself will say shortly), and (73.20-21) that in not doing so
the Pythagoreans make number its own cause. But possibly because of the
translator’s construal of the syntax (not making the men de, “on the one hand, on the other” construction clear),[100]
Averroës divides the sentence differently and assumes that each of the two
resulting statements is to be criticized on its own, that number causes the
cosmos, and that the number in question is the only one involved. Thus in C22a
he gives another variation on the theme that numbers and sensory things are
inherently different, saying that there is no “relationship” (nisba)
between them, and that if there were it would be observed. Then in C22b, after
Aristotle and the translator alike have put “heaven” (ho ouranos) as
“the sky” (as-samā’) in one clause, and “the world” (ho kosmos) or “the universe” (al-‘ālam) in the other, Averroës
supposes that the contradiction Aristotle highlights is that between what is
predicated of these two entities. Since part of the universe is the sublunary
world and the physics of that is different from the physics of the heavens in
Aristotelian thought, he thinks that the type of number responsible for the sky
must be different from that on earth, even though the Pythagoreans think of
them as the same.
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#23 (to commentary on 990a22-29)
In
this segment (which can be viewed as a continuation of the previous segment although
both Alexander and Averroës treat them separately), Aristotle speaks of
the Pythagoreans assigning “opinion, etc. to a region (or part) ” (tōi
merei doxa ), meaning that, e.g., “opinion” corresponds to a given part of
the world, and says that they also give it a number. Indeed, Alexander
(75.15-17) tells us that in the (now lost) treatise On the Pythagoreans
Aristotle specified where in the heavens they assigned different numbers,[101]
and also (38.8-39.17) which entity corresponds to which number: one for
substance, two for opinion, etc.[102]
But none of this reaches Averroës because, among the translator’s other
errors, for C23a he has misread the quoted phrase as saying that the
Pythagoreans had “an opinion on part(icular)s” (min al-ǧuz’iyyāti ẓannā, من الجزئيات
ظنا). Nonetheless, Averroës takes the occasion to make a good
point about the Pythagoreans’ opinion of particulars, i.e., that the eternity
of numbers implies the eternity of the sensory things they equate with numbers,
it being understood tacitly that that refutes their view since sensory things
are not eternal.
For
C23b the translator has interpreted “above and below” as indicating other
correspondences with numbers, rather than places where the correspondences
occur as Aristotle has it, and makes “demonstration” a predicate to replace
Aristotle’s ancillary phrase “in their demonstration.” Working from all this,
Averroës can only focus on the fact that the cited items fall into opposed
pairs, and claims that their ubiquity itself implies that they all correspond
to number. It is not obvious what5 he means, but it could be thinking that one
of the ways the Pythagoreans may have derived their schema, namely, that the
number two is important because of all the opposed pairs in the world. Indeed,
they were wont to say such things as that justice corresponds to the number
four because both are “square” (Alexander 38.10-12).
For
C23c Aristotle’s actual concern appears to be with a possible mismatch between
the number that corresponds to an object according to the Pythagoreans, on the
one hand, and what might naturally accrue to the object, on the other;[103]
but the translator mistakes the statement of magnitudes occurring naturally as
something actually contingent of their doctrine. Averroës is thereby led to
a claim that they do not recognize any substantial difference between
different regions. In an aside or gloss to the text, C23d, he spells out that
point further, saying that in their doctrine there is especially no difference
between the sky and the sublunary realm, an extreme deviation from Aristotelian
physics and thus for him escalating the sheer ugliness of the Pythagorean
doctrine.
For
C23e the translator has misunderstood the “or is it another number besides
this” clause at the end of the segment, meant to supply a completely different
alternative to the assignment of the “natural” number to the Pythagorean
choice, as merely indicating a slight difference, “something close to this.”[104]
This sends Averroës off on a tangent, claiming (unhelpfully and improvably)
that they only said something “close” to the offending doctrine precisely
because it was offensive, and that the impossibility accrues to any body (or
any place where it is located) to which one attempts to apply the doctrine.
In
contrast to all this, Avicenna (Ilāhīyāt 7.2) has a
generally more abstract criticism of the Pythagorean reduction to number
(albeit much of it is combined with criticism of the Platonic reduction to
forms).[105]
Namely, some Platonists (who can be identified in particular with Speussipus)
dropped Plato’s view that mathematical entities were intermediate between
sensory things and forms (see above, on C6g), in
favor of equating mathematics and forms, while nonetheless distinguishing them
from sensory things (7.2.5, 7.2.7), while (as we have seen) the Pythagoreans
equated the two sets, meaning those Pythagoreans who made the world from unity
and duality (7.2.8), and others who made it from excess, deficiency and
equality (7.2.9), apart from other ways of making divisions between them
(7.2.10-14). Avicenna states five formally distinct objections of an esoteric
nature to the views of this collection of the Pythagoreans and the particular
Platonists in question (7.2.16-21), such as (7.2.16-17) that they assume that
if one thing can be distinguished in thought from another then they must be
separate in actual existence, whereas this is not so.[106]
He then (7.2.3) gives an extended argument on these points.
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#24 (to commentary on 990a29-34)
Aristotle
continues the same train of thought, saying on the issue of whether the
Pythagorean number for a given entity is to be the same as, or different from,
the number it acquires naturally, that Plato in particular held it to be
different. Averroës’s division of the text, however, is such as to
understand the segment, rather, as the beginning of the discussion of Plato (to
follow in comments 25-49). Thus in his preliminary comment and in C24a,
Averroës isolates Aristotle’s statement of the difference between Plato
and the Pythagoreans, and gives a straightforward paraphrase. It is to be noted
that both had stressed their similarities earlier (in 987b4-19 and C6,
respectively). For his part, Alexander (74.14-15) sums up the entire objection
to the Pythagorean doctrine cited by Aristotle in the past several sentences
(corresponding to Averroës’s comments 22-24) by saying that Plato’s view
of a different number is more reasonable.
In
C24b (of which the transmitted Latin version omits the entire portion after the
lemma) Averroës first states why Aristotle feels that he has said enough
on the Pythagoreans (that one need do no more than what is convincing), and
then takes the occasion to offer a general statement about why one includes
something in a discussion. Thus, he says, Aristotle opens the Prior
Analytics with a statement of what the subject is and what it belongs to,
claiming that this subject is “investigation” (al-faḥṣ, الفحص), for which the Greek
would be episkepsis, theōrēma, or similar term. But
Aristotle in fact says at the outset there (24a11) that the subject is apodeixis,
“demonstration” (for which the Arabic term is usually burhān or barhana),
and then proceeds to discuss the famous “syllogism.” Averroës’s
identification of the subject here is curious, particularly since his Middle
Commentary on the Prior Analytics accurately identifies the subject as
“demonstration.”[107]
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#50 (to commentary on 993a11-17)
Aristotle
finally says that he has reached his goal indicated in Chapter 3 of showing
that no one prior to him has spoken of a cause other than the “causes stated in
natural works.” For 50a the translator’s mistaking that phrase as “stated on
natural causes” make Averroës to miss the point that Aristotle is
reminding us of his speaking of these causes in other works.[108]
Still, his paraphrase does get the gist of the point that these are all the
causes. Then he notices that the pre-Aristotelian thinkers actually failed to
cite the final cause as such, although they backed into it in a way, by virtue
of a certain reciprocity it has with the moving cause. (To be sure, Aristotle
himself says this in Metaphysics A 7, 988b6-16, that some people speak
of this cause vaguely in discussing issues like friendship or the good,
although this falls within the long lacuna in Averroës’s text.) Finally,
Averroës makes the point (omitted in the Latin translation) that people
who think that there is only chance in the world cannot recognize any purpose.
For his part, Alexander has already (59.28-60.2, on 988a11-14) wondered
somewhat why Aristotle does not assign the final cause to Plato, because the
latter speaks in places of phenomena occurring for the sake of something, and
here (135.4-6) says Plato “might be found” (euretheiē
an) to have considered all four causes, if unclearly.
In
C50b, an aside to C50a, Averroës recalls Plato as the most obvious
candidate for someone who implied the existence of the final cause if not
calling it that. The commentator evidently thinks of the action in the Republic
with Socrates as interlocutor as taking place “in the time (waqat) of
Socrates,” that the concept dikē, “justice” (the stated occasion of
the work) is a principle “about the purpose of humanity” (fī ġāyatin al-insān), and that the
ideal city the work devises is a matter of “the management of cities” (tadbīru
l-mudun).[109]
For
C50c the translator has mistaken Aristotle’s criticism that earlier
philosophies were childlike as a statement of the scope of “first philosophy,”
in addition to repeating the error of reading the latter notion instead of
“earliest philosophy,” to yield the near-truism that first philosophy
investigates everything. Averroës takes the opportunity to tout ontology
and epistemology in particular. The first of these is certainly within the
purview of the Metaphysics (in particular in Books Z and ?), although
the second is more the province of De anima.
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#51 (to commentary on 993a17-27)
Here
the statement of Empedocles on bone being a “ratio” (logos) that
Aristotle seems to invoke is preserved by Simplicius (Physics 300.21-24
= 31B96 D-K), and says that bone came together by means of Harmonia (clearly a
principle of order)[110]
combining eight parts from Nestis (who seems to have been a water goddess)[111]
and four from Hephaestus (the fire god). One imagines that Averroës would
have been shocked to see this actual statement, as figurative as it is (one
wonders if he even knew that Parmenides and Empedocles composed their work in
dactylic hexameter). In any case, in C51a he first gives a relatively
straightforward paraphrase of Aristotle’s claim that Empedocles indicated that
something other than the four material elements and the two moving causes was
involved, but did not do so clearly. Then Averroës says that this factor,
“definition,” was “the substance and form” of bone or similar entity, and “a
meaning added to” matter, thus implying the usual doctrine of matter as
substrate and the form being what gives essence to a given thing. In contrast,
Alexander (135.18-23), after quoting some of the actual hexameter fragment,
speaks first of bone or whatever entity being “ratio and what is,” and then of
“ratio and form.” This could either mean “ratio, i.e., what is” and “ratio,
i.e., form” or the entities considered disjunctively. If the latter is meant it
is as if the essence or form of bone were something besides the
proportion granted by Nestis and Hephaestus.
C51b
is essentially a straightforward paraphrase of Aristotle’s clarification that
the “ratio” is explicitly not the four elements and love and strife, albeit
Averroës takes the occasion to say that it should be embraced “equally” (sawā)
with these. Then in C51c, after ignoring the point that it would be other
people examining the doctrine of Empedocles who would say what was contingent
of it, forcing Empedocles to comply if he heard them, Averroës implies
that his problem was simply not to explain himself adequately, as if he knew
what it entailed but did not say so. For his part, Alexander (135.25-28)
recognizes the claim that Empedocles would have to agree, and then
(135.28-136.2) interprets his actual problem as not treating all things the
same way, i.e., not being methodical.
In
the final sentence in Book A Aristotle says that although the issues have now
been treated, he will go over them again next, to assist in later arguments. As
to this, first, in C51d Averroës understands the material having been
treated in “the foregoing” (taqaddum, translating Greek proteron)
to mean earlier works, although Aristotle actually means here that the material
was covered earlier in this text. (To be sure, it does appear in both.) Then,
for C51e-f, the translator has inverted the last two clauses of Aristotle’s
sentence, thus destroying his connection between them, whereupon Averroës
treats them separately. First, in C51e he says that that metaphysics resolves
doubts encountered in the physical sciences. This is a curious statement, in
that it might be taken to imply that metaphysics is “higher” than physics, a
notion which Averroës is concerned to criticize in the work of Avicenna in
particular (see above, on C15e).
Then as to C51f, Aristotle has of course said we will go over the same
things again, i.e., in the alternative introduction provided by Book a. The
translator’s errors have assisted Averroës in thinking that the next
subject is “uncertainties” per se, whereas Aristotle actually says we will go
over the same material again in order to resolve such residual
discomfort as the reader may experience, but to be sure, uncertainties per se
are the subject of the book that is next in Averroës’s ordering, Book B.
And for his part, Alexander (136.7-17) recognizes that it would be easy to
think that Book B is next given its subject matter.
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(go to concluding
remarks)
[1] See in particular 985b10 earlier, in the part
of Book A Av. does not treat, and 988a12 later (on which Av. comments at C9f-g). Added
[2] Many translators misconstrue the middle voice
here as “grasped.”
[3] We have no comment from Av. on any of these
citations, since all fall within lacunae in the text he transmits.
[4] See most recently Sheldon M. Cohen, Aristotle
on Nature and Incomplete Substance (
[5] He does express the proposition
“matter=potentiality” as such in a non-physical context, i.e., at De anima
412a9, 414a16. However, Mary Louise Gill, Aristotle on Substance: The
Paradox of Unity (Princeton, 1989), 23 with n. 17, believes that the
apparently bald statement there is nonetheless only intended to refer to matter
as potentially some definite entity.
[6] The doctrine is cited on occasion in his Metaphysics
commentary, but especially within his Quaestio 1.8; see Alex.
Quaestiones 17.9-10 (Sharples I 43). For an introduction to
Alexander see Sharples’s essay in Sorabji, ed., 83-111.
[7] See al-Fārābī, Philosophy
of Plato and Aristotle 99.
[8] See in particular Tafsīr
1030.7-10, on Metaph. G 1, 1042a32; 1031.15-1032.1, on G 1,
1042a34-1042b2; and 1439.6-1452.2, on K 2, 1069b15-32 (Genequand 82-88; Martin
77-88). Outside the Metaphysics, see Comm. Med. in de Gen. et Corr. 117-8,
on de gen. et corr. II 5, 332a17-18. (I cite the latter text in the
Latin because, while it does exist in the original Arabic, that is only in
manuscripts at various locations. The critical apparatus to the Latin takes the
Arabic into account.) Apart from his Aristotle commentaries, Av. elaborates on
the subject as part of his own philosophy, namely in De Substantia Orbis,
esp. 49-59.
[9] Alex. is only mentioned once by Av. on Book A,
and peripherally there (at C17d),
as opposed to briefly in Z, and frequently in K since he used a translation of
that book containing Alex’s commentary). The 10th century Fihrist
index of works existing in Arabic does not cite Alex. on Book A, and Av.
himself tells us at the beginning of his commentary on Book K (Tafsīr 1393) that he only knows Alex.’s commentary on
that book (see Genequand 59, Martin 25). (In passing, the point has
implications for Genequand’s position [7 n. 9] that Av. could only have gotten
the view that the Presocratic Anaximander thought of the initial principle as a
material denser than air but lighter than water from Alex., who sites it ad
Metaph. A 7, 988a30-31. If so, Alex. will have had to mention it in his
(now lost) commentary on K as well, even if Av. does not quote him as saying
so.)
[10] I have reviewed this point in “Hegel and the
Milesian ‘Origin of Philosophy,’” Classical and Modern Literature 13
(1993), 241-56, at 241, 245-47 (click the “philosophy” link above to see a
summary of the article on this site’s main philosophy page). More recently there
has been renewed discussion of the possibility that the so-called “boundless”
principle of Anaximander was something less than sophisticated; see, e.g., Ivan
Gobry, La cosmologie des Ioniens (Paris, 2000), 23-59. Giovanni Cerri, “L’ideologia
dei quattro elementi da Omero ai presocratici,” Annali dell'Istituto
Universitario Orientale di Napoli (sez. filol.-lett.) 20 (1998), 5-58,
argues that the Greeks owed their stress on the four “elements “of fire, air,
water, and earth to Indo-European myth.
[11] E.g., in commenting on the discussion of
theories of earthquakes at Meteor. 365b7, Av. confuses the Milesian
Anaximenes with Anaxagoras, even though the translation he follows itself cites
the former figure by his correct name. Other indications of his lack of
historical knowledge will appear below.
[12] For his part, Alex. (37.6-16; cf. 46.15-20)
errs in a different way, thinking only of Leucippus and Democritus as coming
after some of the Pythagoreans.
[13] Indeed, at least the Latin translation of
Averroës’s middle commentary on this passage speaks of “bone” rather than
marrow (see Lat. V fol. 381I, within his comment #46 on Book II).
[14] The best modern discussion of the Pythagoreans
is still probably that of Burkert’s 1972 work (from the German of 1962), who in
particular gives (28-52) a good analysis of Aristotle’s treatment of them. See
also Guthrie I 146-340, esp. 229-38.
[15] But see n. 13
to comments 1-8.
[16] It is more natural in particular from the
standpoint of the root meaning of archō.
[17] See Reale III 34-35 n. 34.
[18] For references see Burkert 40 n. 63.
[19] The two clauses at 987a22 are connected by te
… kai, and see R. ad loc. N. employs the simple copula wa.
[20] Indeed, Reale (II 33) also construes the
second clause as dependent on the first, introducing the second with giacché
in his translation.
[21] To be sure, R. ad loc. has it that one
becoming many being “what happened to them” refers innocuously to Aristotle’s
statement after first introducing the Pythagoreans (985b29-30), that they were
moved by the primacy of number to include everything (that is, “many”) in their
schema.
[22] al-muta’aḫḫir (المتاخر). To be sure, Walzer (126)
believes that N. simply read a manuscript variant êáὶ ôῶí ὕóôåñïí; however, no such reading is otherwise
attested.
[23] As Bauloye (1997, 80) notes. Reale (III
316-17) in particular thinks of temporal priority, following pseudo-Alex. and
Aquinas.
[24] For a recent collection of modern
interpretations of Plato’s Forms, see Weldon, ed. Of course A. criticizes the
theory in a number of other places, upon which Av. comments. As a leading
example where we have translations of him, on Metaph. K 3, 1070a27-30 (where
A. says the forms simply are not needed), Av. expands his criticism so as to
review the opinions of Them., al-Fārābī, and Avi. on the question; see Genequand
105-12, Martin 127-40.
[25] See Alex. 51.5. At Crat. 385a, for
example, Plato has Socrates speak of mixing up the names of human and horse;
cf., e.g., Theaet. 195d, Phaedo 73e, 78e. A. himself mentions the
juxtaposition in Book B (997b8-9).
[26] For a list of recent studies of Plato’s methexis,
see Weldon, in Weldon, ed., 25 n. 35.
[27] To be sure, Av.’s interpretation here is
challenged by Albertus Magnus in his own commentary on the Metaphysics
(61.59-67, cf. 131.77-78), where he states that philosophers do not identify
the two “ones” in the way Av. suggests.
[28] See Phys. I 3, 186a22 ff. On this Av.
comments at length, noting, e.g., that the various things that are white differ
in other properties; see Lat. IV fol. 17B-K. A.’s comment on Parmenides later
in the Metaphysics itself, Book B, 1001a29-b25, is, rather, to the
effect that if all things are one it is difficult to see how anything else can
exist, although there Av. (Tafsīr 271.14-272.3; Bauloye 2002, 276) is able to make a connection to the Physics
criticism.
[29] To be sure, Alex. complains there that, A.
notwithstanding, Plato does treat the details of participation to some extent
in the Parmenides. And A. also fails to credit the role of the Demiurge
in the Timaeus; see Reale III 59 n. 6.
[30] Av. is cursory in commenting on this citation
at C28b, but Alex. (83.34-85.12) treats the argument exhaustively. Weldon (in
Weldon, ed., 26-27 n. 40) lists modern discussions of it written in English
through 1997.
[31] Dooley (80 n. 169) gives references to
discussions of Alexander’s thinking here. Plato’s actual views on the relation
between mathematics and forms are to some extent found in the dialogues (in
particular, Rep. Books 6 and 7), but mostly come from attestations to
his unwritten teachings; for discussion see Reale III 61-62 n. 9.
[32] The root of the problem here and in the two
previous clauses appears to me to be that N. has interpreted the syntax so that
what “differs” (Greek diapheronta, Arabic ‘ānadū) applies to the Pythagoreans vs. Plato, not
mathematics vs. sensory things and forms.
[33] Notwithstanding A. as well as Alex. (53.4-11,
a simple paraphrase), the statement is not easy to derive from the dialogues we
have; see Reale III 59-60 n. 8.
[34] For Plato in particular, this occurs
especially at 991a8-b1 (texts 31-33 for Averroës).
[35] On where this
Arabic term means “subject” and where it means “substratum,” see n. 56
to comments 1-8.
[36] Cf. n. 31
to comments 1-8, with reference to Aristotle’s text for #6.
[37] Cf. T6
and n.
37 to comments 1-8.
[38] E.g., in M 8, 1083a1-b21, the views of Plato
himself, Speusippus, Xenocrates, and the Pythagoreans are criticized in order,
in view of how units must be related to one another; see Reale III 653-55 ns.
2-12.
[39] I refer to Ilāhīyāt 7.2.3-14, where various parties are
distinguished on the relation of forms to numbers, prior to criticizing them,
and cf. Marmura 412 ns. 2-3. Lizzini (1201 n. 62) notes that the more obscure
variants of Platonism are referenced at Z 2, 1028b21-32, but to me Avi.’s
inclusion of them as well as the Pythagoreans looks more like Book M.
[40] That is, if B.’s reading is correct; see n. 59
to comments 1-8.
[41] Some modern translators also ignore the
difference. To be sure, Reale (III 65 n.13) asserts that specifying the bringer
of the form implies an efficient cause.
[42] See Martini (2001, 199), who also notes
(197-98) that the stylistic device is also characteristic of the Latin fragment
from Metaph. A 1 that her article argues was translated from Arabic
rather than Greek.
[43] Even though he may have just implied that
Plato included it (above, n. 41).
[44] R. ad 988a9 cites a number of places
where it seems implied in the Dialogues. Alex. (59.28-60.2) is aware of this
(and of a final cause in Plato), but thinks it is a matter of Plato not using
the principle gleaned from the examples in actual physical processes.
[46] ġayru aṯ-ṯunā’iyya (غير
الثنائة). In Arabic syntax the phrase does not mean simply “other
than two-fold” in general, given the definite article.
[47] li-l-kulli ṭabī‘atun mā wāḥidatun kāna-hā hayūlī (للكل
طبيعة ما
واحدة كانها
هيولى).
[48] lā ḍāta l-wāḥidi, bal šay’a huwa l-wāḥid (لاذات
الواحد بل شيأ
هو الواحد).
[49] ‘araḍa lahu l-wāḥid (عرض
له الواحد).
[50] Earlier (56.19-21), Ascl. had gone so far as
to say in response to A.’s opening statement on the monists (988b22) that the
principle of both bodily and non-bodily must be non-bodily, claiming
that it is the demiurge principle from Plato’s Timaeus. On his
commentary in relation to Ammonius, see K. Verrycken in Sorabji, ed.,
204-5. On all this, to be sure, Reale (III 68 n. 3) speaks generally
of a “theological component.”
[51] The text is Talḫīs mā ba‘d aṭ-ṭabī‘a (تلخيس
ما بعد
الطبيعة). The attribution to Averroës is not without controversy;
see Genequand (10-11), who stresses that the piece is rather Neoplatonic for
him. I would also note that he normally uses the designation talḫīs (تلخيس) for his middle commentaries, not
the epitomes as here.
[52] See Talḫīs III 41 (van den Bergh 88-89).
[53] Cf. Reale (III 68 n. 4), who also notes
Aquinas (55 6182) making much the same point.
[54] The terms are in the same grammatical case in
the Greek, i.e., the accusative: tēn ousian aitian.
[55] al-hayūlā hiya ǧawharun min ḥayṯu hiya mawḍūdatun li-l-ṣūrati wa-ṣ-ṣūratu ǧawharun min ḥayṯu hiya muqawwimatun li-l-mawḍū‘ (الهولى
هى جزهر من
حيث موصضوعة
للصورة والصورة
جوهر من حيث
هى مقومة
للموضوع ).
[56] See Siger’s “Comment 3” to “Question 6” (
[57] As Reale (III 69 n.7) points out, A. ignores
Xenophanes citing earth (in 21B27 D-K). To be sure, as he also points out, A.
does not take Xenophanes very seriously as a philosopher; see Metaph.
986b21. However, Ascl. (57.29-30) thinks the issue is that he posited both
earth and fire as principles, whereas Simplicius says (21B29 D-K) that he used
both earth and water, in either case implying that he was not a monist in the
first place.
[58] See Chandogya Upanishad 6 and Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 3 (ignoring diacriticals in the names), respectively.
[59] For references see Barnes (600 n. 17),
although he himself (esp. 60-64) holds to an essentially Aristotelian view of
Heraclitean monism.
[60] This is the case even though historians of
Greek philosophy consistently ignore or discount the point. Concerning N.’s own
statement that the opinion was “well known,” not in J.’s text of Aristotle, he
may have followed a variant similar to “Ab,” the Codex Laurentianus; cf. B.’s
note, Tafsīr
86.21 (n. 4).
[61] Th. 116-8: “first came Chasm; and then/
broad-bosomed Earth, the eternally unfailing seat of all/ the immortals who
hold the peak of snowy
[63] That is, Th. 22-34 has Hesiod called by
the Muses while tending sheep; and it is well known that this parallels
Yahweh’s call to Amos at Amos 7:14-15.
[64] See Lat. IV, fols. 123 v and 124r,
respectively, on Phys. 208b29. Moreover, there is confusion in the only
other place where Hesiod is cited in our own text, the Metaphysics
(apart from 984b27-29 as just noted in n. 61), in Book B. There Aristotle
complains in effect that those who give mythological accounts like Hesiod say
the gods both do and do not need sustenance, but Averroës’s translator
speaks, rather, of “Epicurus” and he follows suit (see T15, C15c [cf. n. 39
to comments 9-16], and C15k to B, Tafsīr 247.2, 251.8, and
253.14, respectively, notwithstanding Bauloye’s decision to print
“Hésiode” in all three places.)
[65] That is, in Book È,
as noted in n. 31
to comments 9-16.
[66] See C15a-e to È;
Tafsīr 1187.1-88.3.
[67] See Alex. 65.27-33 and Dooley’s (100 n. 207)
note.
[68] In particular this disinterest is notable in
Book Ä; see Arnaldez 32-34.
[69] See Avi., Al-Kawn wa-l-Fasâd,
96.1-3; similarly air (96.3), earth with different problems (96.3-10), and fire
with others (96.11-97.4), followed by intermediate possibilities (97.5-100).
See also Gérard Verbeke’s introductory comments (in French) to the Latin
translation, 25*-27*.
[70] Dooley (101 n. 213) notes that on the lack of
formal cause Alex. goes beyond A.’s text itself on Empedocles. Ascl. (Ammonius)
(60.1-6) says that Empedocles has the same problems as the monists in not
positing “non-bodily” principles, and insofar as his elements are not subject
to alteration. Aquinas (56 6 190) says the problem is both the lack of formal
cause and the difficulties with making fire vs. earth most primary; cf. Reale
III 69 n. 12.
[71] As, e.g., Reale
III 70 n. 14 notes. Alex. (67.13-14)
already points out the first reference.
[72] I.e., at 985a22 ff (so Reale III 70 n. 15), in
the part Averroës does not cover. A.’s point there is that Empedocles was
not clear on where love and strife respectively act, and as noted above on
C15c, Alex. (67.21-68.1) actually makes that point in commenting on the present
passage.
[73] So Arnaldez
33-34.
[74] So in particular
Aquinas (57 6 193; cf. Reale III 70 n. 16).
[75] As to the actual views of Empedocles, there is
new data, obtained from recognizing papyrus fragments in the 1990s, which may
revolutionize our understanding. A recent work standing at what may be the
initial stages of the process is Simon Trépanier, Empedocles: An
Interpretation (
[76] In addition,
A. mentions Empedocles in Book B at 996b6-7 (he said unity and being were not
in actual things but in the substratum of love), 998a30-32 (he said fire, water,
etc., were elements, not genera, of existing things), and 1001a (again on
identifying unity and being with love). Av. paraphrases these citations
essentially straightforwardly. So also on the mention in Book à 5, 1009b17-20
(human thinking [phronēsis]
changes with human condition). On Ä
4, 1014b37-1015a2 (there is no “nature” except mixing and unmixing), Av. (C5l
to Ä, 512.9-15)
paraphrases, but adds that for Empedocles mixing only means “assembly” (tarkīb) of parts, thus again
making the point as in C15b
that for the early materialists change did not involve actual transformation.
At Z 1, 1028b4-5 A. says some say there is more than one “substance,” to which
Av. adduces the examples of Empedocles and Anaxagoras. These statements are
reiterated at various places in Book Ë, but a further point of interest there
is Aristotle’s attack on Empedocles for equating love and the good (1075b1-7),
where I refer the reader to the translations (Genequand 203-4, Martin 282-83)
for Averroës’s straightforward paraphrase (at 1722.1-1723.4).
[77] To be sure, Alex. takes account of the
inconsistency in commenting on the present passage; see above on C15b.
[78] See Tafsīr 256.8-13 (quotation: 12-13),
C15t to Book B, on 1000b12-13 (Bauloye 2002, 265).
[79] What we have of Anaxagoras’s own words, as
listed in the Diels-Kranz collection, was primarily preserved in Simplicius’s Physics
commentary, which apparently was not available to the Arabs. It is to be noted
that Anaxagoras himself is not attested as using the exact term homoiomerēs,
and it seems overly technical for him (see Guthrie II 325-26).
[80] On such discussion see Reale III 70-1 n. 17.
[81] For a study of what Anaxagoras actually meant by
“mind,” see J. H. Lesher, “Mind’s Knowledge and Powers of Control in Anaxagoras
DK B12,” Phronesis 40 (1995), 125-42. (DK B12 is the main
Simplicius fragment.) A.’s principal comments on his concept are found at De
an. 404b1-6, 405a13-19, 405b19-23, where the discussion is mainly
descriptive, and 429a10-430a5, where A.’s own theory of mind is presented with
that of Anaxagoras essentially playing the role of a backdrop. (A recent
discussion of the relation of their concepts is Frank A. Lewis, “Is there room
for Anaxa-goras in an Aristotelian theory of mind?,” Oxford Studies in
Ancient Philosophy 25 [2003], 89-129.)
[82] One exception occurs where A. says that
Anaxagoras does not explain precisely how mind knows (405b21-23): In the long
commentary Av. interprets the deficiency as not specifying whether mind is an
active or a passive entity (see Commentarium Magnum in Aristotelis de Anima
45; #34.26-31), which of course is a major issue in A.’s own theory and those
of subsequent commentators including Av. (In the middle commentary the
criticism is, rather, that granted that Anaxagoras deviated from the old idea
that one knows like by its like, he still did not explain how mind knows; see Middle
Commentary 16-17, #41.)
[83] See Phys. 187b7-188a18; also cf.
203a19-24 (59A45 D-K), and then 203a24-b2 (not cited by D-K).
[84] See Lat. IV fol. 23B-26E and Vol. 5 fol.
201K-203H, on the Physics and De caelo passages, respectively.
[85] By way of comparison, Simplicius (460.12)
paraphrases Anaxagoras as saying that everything is “nourished” (trephesthai)
by something alike. To be sure, one would have to account for the view
generally attributed to him that “everything is in everything.” On all this see
Guthrie II 282-88, Barnes 323-26.
[86] See Lat. V fol. 202F, on De caelo
302b20-24; cf. 203H, on 302b30-303a3.
[87] Later in Book
A (991a14-19), A. says that Anaxagoras anticipated the opinion of the Platonist
Eudoxus that the forms contribute to sensory things by “mixing” with them, a
view easy to refute, but Av. (C31f) is forced by N.’s mistranslation to give an
irrelevant argument about reducing many things to one. In à 4, 1007b25-26 (cf.
23-25) A. tars Anaxagoras with the same brush as the so-called sophist
Protagoras, saying that if all is mixed in all there is no truth in their belonging
to one another, just as when two contradictory statements are both held to be
true neither is; Av. (C15f-i to Ã) says to this, among other things, that the
comparison is valid because if all is mixed in all then so are any two
contraries. A. feels similarly at à 5, 1009a24-27, which Av. (C19q-s to Ã)
simply paraphrases, while A. (Ã 5, 1009b26-28) reports a rumor that Anaxagoras
had told his friends that to them truth was in their minds, which Av. (C21o to
Ã) says meant that for them there was no truth outside oneself. At à 8,
1012a24-28 A. compares Anaxagoras with the Heraclitean view of things both
being and not being, because (A. says) he held that there was an intermediate
thing between two contraries, thus making everything false; Av. (C28e-g to Ã) simply
paraphrases. At I 6, 1056b28-32 A. says that Anaxagoras should have further
qualified his statement that the original mixture was boundless both in
largeness and smallness because large and small are relative concepts; Av.
(C20o to I) explains straightforwardly. For Book Ë see Genequand (84, 142,
204-5, 205-6) or Martin (81, 203, 284-84, 287).
[88] Av. is able to cite these features in his
paraphrase because he is aware of them in other contexts, e.g., in commenting
on Phys. I 4.187a25-26 (see Lat. IV, fol. 21L).
[89] So in particular A. himself earlier in our
Book, at 984b15-19 and 984a11-16, respectively. To be sure, A. uses the word
“elements” (stoicheia) in the present location, giving rise to different
opinions on A.’s view of the nature of the mind principle in particular, such
as that it approaches an “immaterial substance” (R.), or that it plays the role
of formal cause (so now Reale III 70-71 n. 17, where he discusses these
opinions). Av. himself states that it is the efficient cause.
[90] On this cf. Dooley
103 n.216.
[91] I.e., in T6; see n. 36
to comments 1-8.
[92] See Arnaldez 33-34.
[93] Differently,
Ascl. (Ammonius) (64.2-7) says A.’s ektopōterōs means both stranger
and “more common” (koinoterōs),
the latter meaning that numbers for the Pythagoreans are “common” to bodily and
non-bodily things.
[94] In Arabic as in many languages the context
determines whether the elative is comparative or superlative. The former choice
would imply “worse than” the later materialists in particular, and he has just
been speaking of their denial of motion as A. says at 989a26-27 of Empedocles
(I disagree with Neuwirth, followed by Martini, that that segment is a
paraphrase of 985a3-7).
[95] More brashly,
Ascl. (Ammonius) says (66.21) that their principles “squander” (katadapanōsi) those of the
physicists aside from agreeing with them, i.e., presumably, give them a bad
name.
[96] See Metaph.
A 5, 986a8-12; cf. Burkert (344 n.33).
[97] For some
reason that I cannot retrieve N. construes “better than,” mallon ē,
as “a property of,” ḫāṣṣa [خاصة].
[98] See R. ad 990a15-16. In particular,
Alex. (73.2-3) interprets A. in such a way that what the Pythagoreans say about
bodies in general does not “suit” (harmozei) natural ones any more than
mathematical ones, i.e., assumes that A. makes a value judgment about
their treatment of natural vs. mathematical things rather than attributing one
to them.
[99] Burkert’s
(465-82) concluding discussion of “number and cosmos,” at least, does not
suggest that the subject has any more rational basis than primitive number
symbolism or Jungian psychology.
[100] As in other
examples noted by Martini 2002 78 n. 12.
[101] Alex. (74.12-16) also says that they assigned
“1” to the center of the universe, with larger numbers accruing to successively
further locations from the center. A. himself may give some of the correlations
in Book M, 1093a1 ff, e.g., that “7” is in the region of the Pleiades because
that constellation has seven stars, although Burkert (40 n. 64) cautions that
some of this may refer to Plato rather than the Pythagoreans.
[102] For the other assignments see Burkert 467-68.
[103] Burkert
(40-41) interprets A.’s problem here as caused by a variety in how the
Pythagoreans used numbers.
[104] N.’s
misunderstanding of para touton allos as “something close to this,” šay’un qarībun minhu chooses the wrong
nuance for the preposition para (cf. n. 31 of
comments 1-8).
[105] As was
already noted briefly above (n. 39).
In addition, Avi. earlier (Ilāhīyāt
3.6.8-9) criticizes the grouping in the Pythagorean table of opposites. He says
that the column containing the one, the good, etc., corresponds to “presence” (al-malaka)
and that containing plurality, evil, etc., corresponds to “absence” (al-‘adam).
(Marmura construes these as “possession” and “privation,” respectively.) Then he
objects that, on the contrary, unity has absence, namely absence of parts or
divisions, while plurality has presence, namely of parts and divisions, and
also that problems arise because unity exists in plurality in that it is
“shaped” (muqawwama) by that.
[106] For a summary
of this and the other four arguments see Anawati II 213-14, Lizzini 672.
[107] At least according to the Latin translation
(Lat. I.1, fol, 1K-L of the Priorum Resolutoriorum). (The Arabic of the
first chapter has been published, but in a journal article to which I have not
had access.)
[108] These are especially Phys. II 3,
194b16-195a3, and II 7, 198a14-21. To be sure, the four causes will be
revisited in the Metaphysics itself, in Book Ä (1013a24-b3), on which Averroës comments
as summarized by Arnaldez (34-35).
[109] To be sure,
as noted in n. 8
to comments 50-51, Av. wrote a full commentary on the Republic,
which I have not studied.
[110] Also mentioned
by Empedocles as the opposite of Discord (31B122 D-K). Originally she was known
as the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, who as such was the sister of Fear and
Panic, but who eventually married Cadmus, the mythical founder of
[111] See LSJ
Suppl. (1996) 218 (ad Íήóôéò).