All
along I made a conscious decision to forgo non-Western philosophy in this and
other sections. It is not only because Western culture by itself is already a
handful, but, having had some experience with non-Western philosophy, I have
come to realize that it is virtually impossible, and even counterproductive, in
the sense of often being misleading, to judge a foreign culture from the outside. (I am assuming here, albeit not
without some reservations, that Western culture is native culture to the scions of Western Civilization.) Even if one
has caught bits and pieces from it, little knowledge in this case can be worse
than none. (Mind you, we are not talking about general erudition, but about a
real in-depth understanding of the subject matter, which, I insist, requires
much more than an ambitious course of learning about the soil, in which you
have sprung no roots.)
There
are, however, a few exceptions to this general rule. The subject of the present
entry is Avicenna [Abu Sina] (980-1037), the great Uzbek-born Persian
prodigy-polymath, who combined in his person a veritable encyclopedia of
learning, which he himself literally composed… He was an outstanding
physician, whose legendary skills would by themselves secure his historical
fame; he was a mathematician, an astronomer, a physicist, a chemist, a geologist,
a logician, a paleontologist, a psychologist, a poet, and a teacher, and he excelled
in everything he put himself to doing. But above all, he was a preeminent
philosopher, educated in the Western tradition of Plato and Aristotle; and at
the time when Europe, despite a few rare occasional sparks, was immersed in
total intellectual darkness, he was a genuine torchbearer of Western
philosophy, and, as such, his place in the history of Western philosophy, and
surely among the entries of this section, is well deserved and unassailable.
His
philosophical outlook is closer to Aristotle than to Plato. He can be
rightfully called a precursor of the Christian scholastics of Europe, although
his influence on them was not as strong as that of another eminent Islamic
thinker Averroes, whom we shall be speaking of in a later entry. His writings
are primarily in Arabic (the
predominant language of science in that age), but some are also in Persian. He
became very popular in Europe, particularly as a physician extraordinaire, but
also as an excellent philosopher, due to the numerous translations of his works
into Latin.
Preoccupied
with the problem of the universals, he invented the formula repeated after him
by Averroes and Albertus Magnus: “Thought brings
about the generality in forms.” This formula strives and
partly succeeds in reconciling Plato’s theory of forms with Aristotle’s
teachings, or rather, reconciles two Aristotelian views on this subject:
pro-Plato and contra-Plato. Here is how Bertrand Russell comments
upon it:
“From this formula it might be supposed that he did not believe in
universals apart from thought. However, this would be an unduly simple view. Genera
[universals] are, he says, at once before things, in things, and after
things. They are before things in God’s understanding. (God decides, for
instance, to create cats. This requires that He should have the idea of cat,
which is thus anterior to particular cats.) Genera are in things in
natural objects. (When cats have been created, ‘felinity’ is in each of them.)
They are after things in our thoughts. (When we have seen many cats, we
notice their likeness to each other, and arrive at the general idea cat.)
This view is obviously intended to reconcile different theories.”
The
main problem of this theory, as far as I am concerned, is in the concept of
anteriority as applied to the timeless Deity. (To make this point clearer, it
is enough to remember the world-famous question about anteriority: Which came first, the chicken or the egg?)
Otherwise, the transition from immanence to posteriority is smooth and
flawless. But, with anteriority effectively missing, it is no longer as
complete and logically convincing as in the original flawed version.
Other
aspects of Avicenna’s philosophy are less interesting to me than this
particular formula, and now the long-expected question must surely come up: Why
Avicenna? The answer is threefold. Here is a foreigner more native to
Western philosophy than his contemporaries who are her natives. Here is also a
prominent stepping stone toward the next stage of her historical development,
namely, the Aristotelian scholasticism, which although usually depicted as some
pathetic throwback was still a step forward in her dialectical and spiritual
experience. And, thirdly, the name of Avicenna has acquired such fame within
the context of our Western Civilization that omitting it here would have
constituted a lapse of unspeakable shame.
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