Averroës
on Aristotle’s Criticism of his Predecessors:
An annotated translation of the long commentary on
Aristotle’s Metaphysics A
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Concluding
Remarks
|
Averroës did as much to
distinguish philosophy from theology as anyone could in the 12th century
-- and he even tells us in one place in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics
Z that the embrace of the Neoplatonism he opposed in al-Fārābī
and Avicenna was conditioned by religion.[1] It is one of the paradoxes of intellectual
history that his vehicle for this opposition was a return to Aristotle,
although Aquinas would later wed Aristotelianism to Christianity, and the
scientific revolution would still later embrace Plato. In any case, in his anti-Neoplatonist project
he perforce developed positions on what the philosophers before Plato and
Aristotle thought, given that the latter mentioned them so much. To be sure, it was difficult for him to
formulate such positions from the most important text of all for this purpose, Metaphysics
A, given that the Arabic translation of it had been badly done. Thus his commentary frequently makes points
which, while perhaps cogent in other contexts, have little to do with what
Aristotle is saying in the given location, and thus with understanding the
Presocratics.
Yet in some places Averroës is
able to make comments on Presocratic thought, either in spite of the poor
translation or where it is faithful for a change, that in a meaningful way go
beyond what Aristotle himself, or the most important of earlier Aristotle
commentators, Alexander of Aphrodisias, had said.[2] In particular, it is consistent with our
commentator’s opposition to neo-Platonism, in the sense that that system
reduced the world to the mental, that nowhere is his criticism of pre-Platonic
philosophy sharper than in discussing the Pythagoreans. Again and again (C3c, C19a,
C21d)
he chides them on the basic point of not allowing physical things to be
affected by properly physical principles.
And in some places his attack is not only intense, but insightful. His eyebrows are raised, at least, by their
implication that one and unlimited underlie everything, given that number in
turn underlies one and unlimited (C3d)
(granted that it might not really be an objection to have “substance underlying
substance”).[3] You cannot, he says, employ eternally
motionless things (numbers) as the principles of things that move (the stars, C19b). You cannot, he implies, become a physicist
just by discussing the subject matter of physics (C19d-e,
although Aristotle himself may have hinted at the point as well). And of course, you cannot make a continuously
extended object, i.e., any piece of material as it was understood in ancient
times, from entities that are inherently separated, i.e., numbers (C21b).[4] In most of these insights Averroës goes
considerably beyond the relatively straightforward paraphrases of Alexander,
granted that the latter is more accurate since he wrote in Greek and did not
have to read Aristotle in translation, let alone a bad translation. And to be sure, Averroës’s
neo-Platonist-influenced, and perhaps thereby more conceptually inclined
predecessor Avicenna (Ilāhīyāt 7.2) is able to penetrate
more deeply into errors on the order of “equating double with two” (Aristotle,
987a22-26; Averroës, C4a-c),
by focusing on such issues as the difference between a thing having some
property inherently versus having it contingently (cf. the end of annotation
23).
Aristotle does not universally
dismiss the Pythagoreans, or at least not all Pythagoreans, but it would seem
that Averroës has nothing good to say about them.[5]
But Averroës, like Aristotle,
will have little to do with reduction to the material either. Only in one place in the commentary on Metaph.
A does the commentator suggest that it was a positive step for the early
material monists to seek a principle not subject to becoming and decaying, and
not to think that the answer could be found in pure mathematics, even though
their actual answer of a bare material entity was impossible, namely, at C11d. Most of his commentary on Aristotle’s actual
criticism of the monists at the beginning of Metaph. A 8 is compromised
by the bad translation, but at the very beginning of the overall commentary
Averroës does offer the key insight that, within Aristotelian thought, the
monists were wrong not only because they neglected other causes, but because matter
as such cannot be reduced to one of its specific forms such as fire or air (C1a,
cf. annotation
to C1a).
Apart from these two poles, the
material Averroës comments on includes some of what is attributed to two
later (5th century, B.C.E.) Presocratics, Empedocles and
Anaxagoras. On the former Averroës
says essentially nothing going beyond Aristotle’s own criticism of Empedocles,
as expressed here and in other works (see C2b, C15b-h,
C51a-c,
and the corresponding annotations). For
Anaxagoras (C16-18) he perhaps makes one point going beyond what Aristotle (or
Alexander) states in so many words, that that particular Presocratic thought of
the “mixing” process as simple intermingling, whereas it would actually have to
involve a transformation of the ingredients (C16e). In any case, none of this rises to the level
of his insights on the pure material monists and the pure mathematicians.
Finally, I remark that in today’s
drive to reduce the world to something basic the bare materialist and
mathematicist ideas are still very much with us, but curiously enough are
merged. It is common for historians of
science to say that there has been an impetus to reduce the world to molecules,
then atoms, then electrons and protons, and now quarks, and that it goes back
to the Ionian monists in its fundamental impetus.[6] There is even a philosophical position to the
effect that the quarks correspond to the supposedly Aristotelian (but probably
only Alexandrian) theory of prime matter as a substrate which is potentially
actual matter, given that the quarks cannot exist in isolation (as physicists
now presume, after several experiments failed to turn them up).[7] But unnoticed in such comparisons is that the
physicists who champion quarks do so in connection with relating them to
mathematical entities deriving from, for example, what is known as group
theory. Namely, elementary particle
physicists used to say[8]
that a quark of given signature “is” a particular “representation” of a given
“group.” But to cite one
All of which is to say that
Averroës would not care for today’s physics, although to be sure, it is
rooted in an historical movement, modern science, which has claimed since
Galileo to have overthrown the “dogmatism” of the Aristotelian philosophy to
which he was dedicated, in favor of Plato.