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 12^th 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 (5^th 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 U.S. politician involved in a certain 1990s political scandal, “it depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is.” The Pythagoreans said that things “were” numbers, not that things were “based on” them or were related to them through some other kind of correlation that could be defined. If physicists do not really mean that quarks are literally mathematical entities, neither do they spell out the relationship. They are content with algorithms that allow them to predict which quark correlates with which member of a set of mathematical entities, without spelling out any ontological (or epistemological, etc.) basis of the algorithm itself. To be sure, they may say that this is not their job, which is only to point out the correlations (and simply to learn the algorithms that yield them is certainly difficult enough), but then they cannot refute the charge of Pythagoreanism.

            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.