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.
[1]
Namely, he says, they in effect agree with “the representatives of our religion
that the agent of all things is one,” l-mutakallimūnu min ahli
millatinā anna l-fā‘ila li-l-ašyā’i kullihā wāḥidun
(واحد), C31o to Book Z, Tafsīr
885.17-886.6 (part of an excursus to comment #31 on 1034a30-b7).
[2]
As to other commentators, the present work has of course only been concerned
tangentially with Aristotle’s Physics, where in particular there is a
commentary that is highly important for study of the Presocratics by
Simplicius, that is to say, as evidence for their views if not so much for
commentary on them. To be sure, while I have mentioned it on occasion herein,
the Arabs were unaware of it as far as we know (
[3]
Certainly in modern philosophy one can legitimately think of, e.g., physics
underlying chemistry, and that in turn underlying molecular biology (although
in my opinion it is not legitimate to carry the process to biology in general
and then to social systems, as in so-called sociobiology).
[4]
This is at the root of many of the “paradoxes” of Zeno. To be sure, it is
sometimes alleged that some of the later Pythagoreans recognized the problem,
and therein discovered the continuum of “irrational” numbers that do not have
spaces between them, as do whole numbers and fractions made from whole numbers
(see Burkert 404). In modern mathematics the problem is solved by recognizing
that infinity is of two varieties, “aleph-nought” (the integers and their
fractions) and “aleph-one” (the incommensurable numbers).
[5]
At Metaph. H 2, 1043a18-26, A. is concerned to uphold definitions that
include both matter and form, not just one of the two, and (1043a21-22)
supports the nominal Pythagorean Archytas for following this principle; see now
C. A. Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher and
Mathematician King (Cambridge, 2005), 492. Av. paraphrases this passage
straightforwardly, and says of the person his text of Aristotle calls
“Arsūṭās (ارسوطاس)” in particular that he was “so-and-so,
that is, a famous man in proficiency at definition among (those concerned with
it)” (Tafsīr 1051.13-1052.2, C6n to H). (Here he uses a formulaic
manner of expression that is the same as his characterizing Hesiod without
naming him as “a famous man among them in ... ,” C14b)
He may or not be speaking here from actual knowledge gained elsewhere, but
there is nothing in what he says to indicate that he knew Archytas was supposed
to have been a Pythagorean.
[6]
So, e.g., G. Holton, Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought (Cambridge,
Mass., 1988), 14.
[7]
See in particular
[8]
I speak of the 1960s when I was active in the field. Nowadays the mathematical
schemes are even more esoteric.
