Based on the early Compendium of the Metaphysics (155-156 Amin), Averroes originally subscribed to an emanationist cosmology and metaphysics, complete with a Giver of Forms and a staggered procession of the many from the One. al-(Gazall’s trenchant criticism seems to have forced a rethink and, beginning with the Incoherence of the Incoherence, Averroes rejects one by one several key Avicennian doctrines. Among these are emanation as an explanatory model (see Kogan 1981); Avicenna’s metaphysical proof for God’s existence; the attendant modal framework of contingency; the way that Avicenna conceives of the relation between the heavens and the immaterial domain; and the way that providence is supposed to flow from this arrangement. As in psychology, Averroes took his project to be that of uncovering the original Aristotelian teaching, which he believed would happily coincide both with the philosophical truth and with the demands of revealed religion. The results, again similarly to psychology, look more satisfying seen from a Hellenic philosophical point of view than from the standpoint of traditional Islamic orthodoxy.
Already in the Compendium (8-11 Amin), Averroes rejects the notion that existence could be treated as an accident. Mirroring al-Farabl’s criticism of al-Kindl (see Menn 2008), Averroes says that to take existence for a real accident is to mistake a secondary intelligible for a primary one. To speak of being univocally is to talk of ‘‘being as truth’’ (Aristotle, Met. 5.7.1017a31-35): but this is a second-order term. Being in the primary sense, meanwhile, falls directly under one of the ten categories and is thus subject to pros hen equivocity, just as Aristotle had outlined. Accordingly, the being of beings is in reality indistinguishable from their essence, meaning that Avicenna’s essence-existence distinction fails as well. (Later on in the Commentary Averroes develops his own interpretation of Metaphysics Zeta, arguing that essence is to be equated with form).
These critical remarks give Averroes the necessary tools to address anew coming-to-be in the sublunary realm. Starting with the Incoherence (179ff. Bouyges) Averroes sees the doctrine of emanation for the later accretion it is, essentially Platonic in spirit (407 Bouyges), and jettisons it in favor of a theory that sticks to the established four Aristotelian causes and a fully immanent model of sublunary causation. This leads to a rejection of Avicenna’s attempts at equating efficient causality (agency) with granting existence, for the reason that this comes too close to the unacceptably arbitrary theology of creation ex nihilo. In a famous passage in the Commentary (bk. 12, comm. 18, 3:1497-1505 Bouyges) Averroes sets forth his own mature theory of generation, which is the same as Aristotle’s, namely that coming-to-be is nothing other than the eduction into actuality of what potentially exists in the subject, and this either through efficient or final causality or (as is the rule in nature) through both. Placing a great deal of weight on Aristotle’s words to the effect that ‘‘man and the sun together generate man’’ (Phys. 2.2.194b13), Averroes traces the lines of generation in natural processes to the chains of parents and offspring, on the one hand (these he nominates accidental causes), and to the push and pull exerted by the various heavenly
Bodies on the elements, on the other (these he calls essential, seeing as how they fix the occurrence of a given sublunary form within the larger cosmic system: see the Commentary on the Physics, bk. 8, comms. 15 and 47; Incoherence, 20-23 Bouyges). These two are the only agencies needed to explain coming-to-be and passing-away, meaning that the emanationist framework is superfluous in addition to being open to the charges brought up by al-(Gazall (cf. Incoherence, 184ff. Bouyges).
The celestial rotations, with their need for a mover with infinite power, are sufficient to bridge corporeal reality with what lies beyond it. Thus, Aristotle’s promise of nature pointing beyond itself is fulfilled, and the threat of physics becoming first philosophy is deflected (see Phys. 2.7.198a26-31 together with Averroes’ comments ad loc.; also Met. 6.1 and comments). Avicenna was therefore mistaken in initiating his supposedly metaphysical proof for God’s existence. Since no science is able to demonstrate its own first principles, it is only as an Unmoved Mover that God is scientifically proved to exist. Metaphysics then takes over this notion and further clarifies the immaterial substances’ mode of being and causality.
As regards modal metaphysics, Averroes heaps scorn on Avicenna’s notion of something possible in itself, necessary through another. For Avicenna’s who subscribed to a temporal and statistical interpretation of the modal terms, this is simply a contradiction in terms: the necessary just denotes the eternal, and vice versa (see Kukkonen 2000). Because Averroes takes Avicenna’s concept to refer to the celestial bodies - an interpretation shared by key post-Avicennian thinkers in the East - he perceives it also as doing irrevocable damage to Aristotle’s cosmological proof for an immaterial mover. In an effort to rectify the situation, he goes through the option of treating the heavenly motions as being contingent in themselves, yet necessary through another (Commentary on the Metaphysics, bk. 12, comm. 41, 3:1632-1636 Bouyges), before settling on the view that the whole cosmic system is unequivocally necessary in and of itself (Questions in Physics, q. 9).
This is a truly radical view, yet Averroes does not shy away from the implications. The reason the world needs an Unmoved Mover is that every motion requires a mover, and in the case of an eternal motion only an immaterial mover will fit the description. This does not imply any contingency in the world order: to the contrary, it assures its necessary character through and through. Averroes seems to have grasped the fundamentally nonnegotiable nature of Aristotelian essentialism for the functioning of a robust Aristotelian science and to have accepted the consequence that worldly processes of generation and corruption are of a piece in their unassailable character, leaving no space, for example, for miracles. In Averroes’ estimation, Avicenna went several steps too far in accommodating the Ash'arite theologians’ insistence on divine voluntarism and direct creation (Kogan 1985; Leaman 1988:42-81). Conventional or sentimental notions of how divinity must relate to the world have no place in a scientific worldview such as the one Averroes is after.
A similar sense of detachment informs Averroes’ understanding of divine knowledge and providence. The Commentator contends that the First Mover knows other things not as universal or particular, but through being the cause of their being (Commentary on the Metaphysics, bk. 12, comm. 51; Decisive Treatise, 13.8-14.9 Butterworth). It is unclear whether this amounts to anything more than the knowledge a perfectly actual principle potentially has of the varying degrees of potentiality and actuality. Like Alexander before him, Averroes contends that providence can only extend so far as the perpetuation of the species: unlike Alexander, Averroes has a detailed story to show how this occurs, and why it speaks in favor of monotheism. According to the Peripatetic doctrine transmitted through Alexander and al-Kindl’s school, the rotations of the heavenly spheres are responsible for sublunary cycles of generation and corruption. Averroes seizes the question of how these motions are coordinated and why. Because the higher cannot as a matter of principle care for the lower - all of nature is teleologically oriented and strives for individual perfection - it is inconceivable that the heavenly spheres should actually wish to benefit what lies beneath them. So why do the providential effects nonetheless accrue? Averroes’ answer is that the inner hierarchy of the heavenly movers, whose possibility has been established in philosophical psychology (see Taylor 1998), is arranged according to a hierarchy of knowing, and that each of the heavenly intellects has an incomplete share of the full intellectual perfection enjoyed by the First Mover. It is because all of these intellections (in some hard-to-describe fashion) coincide in the First that the motions they produce likewise come together in a harmonious whole. This is the gloss Averroes puts on the Aristotelian dictum that the order of the universe, like the order of the army, is found both in the arrangement of the whole and in its leader, but primarily in the latter (Commentary on the Metaphysics, bk. 12, comms. 52 and 58; Incoherence, 185-193; see Kukkonen 2002).
See also: > Arabic Texts: Natural Philosophy, Latin Translations of > Arabic Texts: Philosophy, Latin Translations of > Aristotle, Arabic > Ibn Rushd (Averroes), Latin Translations of > al-(GazalI, Abti Hamid Multammad
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