Arabic philosophy

All dogs are animals

All dachshunds are animals

necessity (5a_) obtains in the two premises and necessity (5a__) obtains

in the conclusion, while necessity (5b) obtains in the act of inferring

the conclusion from the premises. Put another way, necessity (5a_)

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Avicenna 117

refers to the necessity that a cause possesses (in this case, the causes

are the premises) and necessity (5a__) refers to the necessity that a

cause produces in its effect (in this case, the effect is the conclusion).

Necessity (5b), by contrast, refers to the necessity that obtains in the

cause’s act of causing or producing its effect: given the (5a_) necessity

possessed by the cause (or the premises), the (5a__) necessity of the

effect (or conclusion) follows by (5b) necessity. In a way, (5a_) and

(5a__) both refer to necessity, whereas (5b) refers to necessitation.

At the conceptual level, as opposed to the lexical or terminological

level, Metaphysics, V.5 provided Avicenna with most of the

raw material he needed to fashion his distinction between (A) “[the]

necessary of existence in itself” (wa¯ jib al-wuju¯ d bi-dha¯ tihi) and (B)

“[the] necessary of existence through another” (wa¯ jib al-wuju¯ d bighayrihi).

But before explaining how and why Avicenna appropriated

this material I shall first describe the terminological sources

of Avicenna’s distinction, since, as mentioned above, the term used

in the Arabic translation of the Metaphysics for anankaion (“necessary”)

is mud.t.

arr and notwa¯ jib as in Avicenna’s distinction. Instead,

the most likely terminological source of Avicenna’s distinction is De

Interpretatione, XII–XIII, the chapters of the De Interpretatione in

which Aristotle is concerned with the nature of modality. That is to

say, Aristotle wants to determine as precisely as he can what it is

we mean when we say that a proposition is necessary, possible, or

impossible; or, put another way, what it is we mean when we say that

it is necessary, possible or impossible that predicate P (e.g., “dog”)

holds of subject S (“dachshund”). Why should Aristotle want to do

this? The reason is that in the next treatise of the Organon Aristotle

is very concerned with the implications of necessity. In the Prior

Analytics, Aristotle begins by investigating the structure and behavior

of assertoric syllogisms, but quickly turns to the structure and

behavior of modal syllogisms, i.e., those syllogisms whose premises

and conclusion contain modal qualifiers such as “necessarily” or

“necessary [that].”

In the course of rendering De Interpretatione, XII–XIII into Arabic

the translator made two important lexical moves. First, he

started to use the more existential Arabic root w-j-d (as in wuju¯ d,

“existence”), instead of the more copulative k-w-n, to translate

Aristotle’s copulative uses of the Greek verb einai, “to be.” The second

move was using w-j-b instead of d.

-r-r to translate anankaion,

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118 robert wisnovsky

“necessary.” In my opinion the move from k-w-n to w-j-d in

translating einai is evidence that the translator worried about

Aristotle’s uncertainty over whether possibility is one-sided (i.e.,

opposed in a contradictory way only to impossibility) or twosided

(opposed in a contradictory way to impossibility and to

necessity); and that the greater existential weight conveyed by

the root w-j-d (in contrast to the more copulative k-w-n) helped

the translator come down on the side of two-sided possibility.

This is because w-j-d appeared to be usable both as a copula

in propositions, where the logical mode mumkin – “possible

[that S is P]” – is the contradictory of the mode mumtani‘ –

“impossible [that S is P]”; and as an existential signifier in descriptions

of real beings, in which the existential state wa¯ jib – “necessary

[of existence],” here meaning “a being which is uncaused” – is

the contradictory of the existential state mumkin – “possible [of

existence],” here meaning “a being which is caused.” In other words,

the translator chose w-j-d because that Arabic root better ensured

that mumkin was able to performthe dual role that Aristotle seemed

to expect of dunaton, as meaning both “possible” (i.e., the contradictory

of “impossible”) and “contingent” (i.e., the contradictory of

“necessary”).

As for the translator’s move from d.

-r-r to w-j-b in translating

anankaion, my sense is that whereas d.

-r-r could have conveyed

the (5a_) and (5a__) senses of necessity – that is, the necessity possessed,

respectively, by the premises and by the conclusion in a

valid syllogism – only w-j-b could also have conveyed the (5b) sense

of inferential necessity – of necessitation, that is. This is because

the Arabic verb wajaba/yajibu was the standard term one turned

to when one wanted to say that a conclusion “follows necessarily

from” its premises.

The result of these two shifts in translation patterns is that

Avicenna was provided with an Aristotelian text in which the

phrases wa¯ jib al-wuju¯ d (“necessary of existence”) and mumkin

al-wuju¯ d (“possible of existence”) were both prominently used.

However, the last remaining pieces of raw material – the qualifiers

bi-dha¯ tihi (“in itself”) and bi-ghayrihi (“through another”) – though

they appeared in al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı’s Commentary on the “De Interpretatione,”

seem in fact to have come to Avicenna from kala¯m

treatments of the problem of God’s attributes, a topic I shall turn

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Avicenna 119

to now, in my discussion of the two main problems that Avicenna

was trying to solve by coming up with his new distinction.

Objectives

The first problem dealtwith byAvicenna’s new distinction was: how

is a duality – conceptual, if not real – in God to be avoided? Like the

Mu‘tazil¯ıs, the Neoplatonists had insisted on a strict understanding

of God’s oneness – as simplicity, and not merely as uniqueness.

Yet the efforts by commentators of the Ammonian synthesis to reconcile

Plato’s and Aristotle’s theories of God’s causality ultimately

produced a God who was a composite of efficient causality and final

causality. God as efficient cause was either the Demiurge of Plato’s

Timaeus, who creates the world out of matter but in view of the

transcendent Forms; or it was the Neoplatonists’ One, who is the

original source of the downward procession (proo¨dos) of existence (to

einai) to each thing in the universe. God as final cause was either the

Unmoved Mover of Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, who serves

as a goal, impelling the eternal circular motion of the heavens; or it

was the Neoplatonists’ Good, who is the ultimate destination of the

upward reversion (epistrophˆe) of each thing toward the well-being (to

eu einai) that is peculiar to its species. For Avicenna it was simply

not good enough to assert, as some Greek Neoplatonists had, that in

God no real duality is entailed by his being both an efficient cause

and a final cause, and that what appears to us to be a conceptual

duality between God’s two causal roles is a reflection of the fact that

human minds are just too feeble to apprehend the real identity of

efficient and final causality in God. Avicenna’s discomfort with this

dodge may have been exacerbated by the fact that the Ammonians

had actually papered over a more fundamental disjunction. After all,

God’s final causality and his efficient causality not only served as

explanations of the ways inwhich God causes the universe, they also

expressed in what were then seen as scientific terms the two basic

qualities that God should possess: on the one hand being utterly separate

from and transcendent of the world (a quality more compatible

with God’s being a final cause), and on the other hand being creatively

involved with and productive of the world (a quality more

compatible with God’s being an efficient cause).

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120 robert wisnovsky

Avicenna was able to take a fresh approach to this first challenge

because by his time the Ammonian synthesis had pretty much run

out of steam. By this I mean that Avicenna, born and raised and

educated at the periphery of the Islamic world, had no professional

teachers to instill in him the hermeneutical commitments of the

Ammonian synthesis. As a result Avicenna felt under little obligation

to adhere to the original interpretive premises that had caused

earlier Ammonians to cut philosophical corners in order to harmonize

Plato and Aristotle – or more specifically, in order to advance

the Ammonian project of folding the greater harmony into the lesser

harmony. These hermeneutical commitments were still operative

in works as recent as those of Avicenna’s predecessor al-F ¯ar¯ab¯ı, who

had received his philosophical education in the Aristotelian school

in metropolitan Baghdad.25

Because of Avicenna’s peripheral education – because he was

almost entirely self-educated, in fact – he inherited the old set of

problems created by the Ammonian synthesis yet without any motivation

to keep him working within its rules; without any motivation,

that is, to keep him from simply discarding or moving beyond

those old Ammonian problems. True, some of the problems Avicenna

inherited had already been solved within the context of the

Ammonian synthesis, a prominent example being the question of

the soul’s relationship to the body, as I discussed earlier. But the

conceptual duality entailed by God’s being both a final and efficient

cause remained an unsolved problem.26

The way that Avicenna side-stepped the Ammonians’ commitment

to God’s troublesome combination of efficient and final causality

was to propose a new formula to describe God: “[the] necessary of

existence in itself.” Avicenna’s new formula enjoyed the enormous

advantage of being syntactically amphibolous. That is to say, “necessary

of existence in itself” can be construed both intransitively and

transitively, and therefore can be understood as referring to a being

who is transcendent of the world and productive of it at the same

time. Understood intransitively, Avicenna’s God satisfies the criteria

of Aristotle’s type (4) necessity, when type (4) necessity is viewed

as the grab-bag of intransitive divine qualities, such as simplicity,

immutability, and eternality; as well as the criteria ofAristotle’s type

(5a_) necessity, that is, the necessity with which a predicate holds

of a subject, when that subject-predicate combination is viewed in

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itself, as a stand-alone proposition. Understood transitively,

Avicenna’s God also satisfies the criteria of Aristotle’s type (4) necessity,

when type (4) necessity is understood as the basic necessity from

which all other necessities derive; as well as the criteria of Aristotle’s

type (5a_) necessity, the necessity with which a predicate holds of a

subject, when that subject-predicate combination is viewed not as

a stand-alone proposition but rather as a premise in a syllogism –

when it is viewed, in other words, as productive of the necessity of a

conclusion. And in this latter, transitive case, the effect which is produced

corresponds to Aristotle’s (5a__) necessity, the necessity that a

conclusion possesses but which is produced by the (5a_) necessity of

the premises. This effect of the transitive necessary of existence in

itself is the necessary of existence through another.

The second problem that Avicenna’s new distinction helped to

solve was: how is one to distinguish between God and other eternal

things? The elaborate pleromas constructed by various Neoplatonic

thinkers – cosmologies that reached their peak (or depth) of complexity

in the works of Proclus – cried out for a simple and basic

way to differentiate the First Cause from the monads and henads

and gods and intellects all crowding round it. Amongst the Sunn¯ı

mutakallimu¯ n, the problemwas expressed in terms of finding a way

to distinguish between God’s self (dha¯ t) and God’s eternal attributes

(s.

if ¯ at), such as his knowledge (‘ilm), power (qudra), and life (h.

aya¯ t).

The Sunn¯ıs had insisted on the reality, eternality, and distinctiveness

of the divine attributes. This was in contrast to the Mu‘tazil¯ıs,

who refused to grant the divine attributes any separate reality, arguing

that while the attributes can be distinguished from each other

and fromGod’s self (dha¯ t) at a purely conceptual level, in reality they

are all identical to God’s self. By the Mu‘tazil¯ıs’ reckoning, a cluster

of eternal, real, and distinct attributes violated Islam’s cardinal tenet

of God’s oneness (tawh. ¯ıd). If, for example, the divine attributes were

really distinct from God’s self, then there would be a plurality of eternal

entities, and God’s oneness, understood as his uniqueness, would

be infringed upon. If, on the other hand, the divine attributes were

not really separate from God’s self but were instead containedwithin

it, yet were still distinct enough to be really differentiated one from

the other, then God’s oneness, understood as his simplicity, would

be violated. Solving this second problem – finding a watertight way

to distinguish between God and other eternal things – was clearly in

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122 robert wisnovsky

Avicenna’s mind when he composed his first philosophical treatise,

which I shall discuss in the next subsection.

Evolution

How did the various ways in which Avicenna articulated, justified,

and employed his distinction between (A) “necessary of existence

in itself,” and (B) “necessary of existence through another” – (C)

“possible of existence in itself,” evolve over his career? Is there as

much evidence of inconsistency and uncertainty as there was with

his distinction between essence and existence? The answer to the

second question is no: the ways Avicenna expressed, argued for and

employed his distinction between (A) and (B–C) are more coherent –

and hence his overall theory is less underdetermined – than the

ways in which he expressed, argued for, and employed his distinction

between essence and existence. Nevertheless, in answer to the

first question, two trends in his approach to the distinction between

(A) and (B–C) can be detected, trends that are clearly distinct at the

beginning of his career but which became increasingly interwoven

as his career progressed.

Avicenna’s distinction between (A) and (B–C) first appears in his

earliest philosophical summa, the Philosophy for ‘Aru¯ d. ı¯ (al-H. ikma

al-‘Aru¯ d. iyya), dating from around 1001, when Avicenna was just

twenty-one years old, and commissioned by a neighbor of his in

Bukh¯ar¯a. In that work, most of which remains unedited, Avicenna

introduces two ways of distinguishing between different types of

necessary existence: necessary of existence in itself as opposed to

necessary of existence through another; and necessary of existence

at all times as opposed to necessary of existence at some time and

not at other times. Avicenna plumps for the former way of distinguishing

between different types of necessary existence, because he

thinks the “in itself” vs. “through another” method will better warrant

an identification of the necessary of existence in itself with the

uncaused and the necessary of existence through another with the

caused than the “at all times” vs. “at some times and not other

times” method will.

The reason why Avicenna makes this choice is that he has inmind

the second major challenge discussed in the previous subsection,

namely, finding some way to distinguish between God and other

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Avicenna 123

eternal things, or, put another way, finding some way to distinguish

between something eternal which is uncaused and something eternal

which is caused. In Avicenna’s case, the eternal things that are

caused consist in the celestial spheres, the celestial souls that motivate

them, and the celestial intellects whose serene (and motionless)

eternality serves as the object of the celestial souls’ desire. For Neoplatonists

such as Proclus, as mentioned above, this category (eternal

but caused) comprises the full complement of gods, henads, monads,

and intellects. For the Sunnı¯ mutakallimu¯ n, “eternal but caused”

(or better, “eternal but not uncaused”) applies to the eternal divine

attributes, each of whose individual reality was distinct enough from

God’s self to raise warning flags about the consequences of creating a

pleroma of eternal and divine – though not causally self-sufficient –

things. Since the problem facing Avicenna revolved around differentiating

between eternal things, the “necessary at all times” vs.

“necessary sometimes” distinction was of little help, since the qualifier

“at all times” covers all eternal things, instead of distinguishing

between them.

By contrast, the “in itself” vs. “through another” method of distinguishing

between types of necessary existence was better equipped

to ensure the distinctness of God, the only uncaused being, from

all caused beings, be they eternal (such as the celestial spheres,

souls, or intellects) or temporally originated (such as you or I). In

the Philosophy for ‘Aru¯ d. ı¯ Avicenna justified his identification of

the necessary of existence in itself with the uncaused, and his identification

of the necessary of existence through another with the

caused, by asserting that the necessary of existence in itself, unlike

the necessary of existence through another, is not divisible into

two modes or states (h.

a¯ latayni). His reasoning was that whatever

is divisible into two modes or states will be a composite of those

two modes or states, and since every composite requires a composer

and is therefore caused, everything divisible into two modes

or states will be caused. By contrast, everything simple – here meaning

not even conceptually divisible – will be uncaused. But what

do the two modes or states refer to? Here Avicenna is unclear. The

two modes or states could refer to (1) the fact that a being which

is necessary of existence through another is also possible of existence

in itself, and will therefore be divisible into those two modes

of being (i.e., B and C). This is in contrast to a being which is

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necessary of existence in itself, which is only ever conceivable as

being necessary of existence in itself (i.e., only A), and hence is indivisible

into two modes of being. The problemwith this interpretation

is that Avicenna also asserts in this passage that whatever is subject

to change will possess neither mode in itself. But whatever is necessary

of existence through another and possible of existence through

itself does possess one of those two states in itself, namely, being

possible of existence.

Alternatively, the two modes or states could refer to (2) the state

of nonexistence and existence which obtain in the necessary of existence

through another, with nonexistence obtaining before the necessary

of existence through another comes into being and also after it

passes away, and existence obtainingwhile the necessary of existence

through another actually exists. The problem with this interpretation

is that it cannot account for beings which are caused but also

eternal, since they are never nonexistent and hence never divisible

into the states of nonexistence and existence. A final alternative is

that the two modes or states into which the necessary of existence

through another is divisible refer to (3) the state of potentiality (or

imperfection) and the state of actuality (or perfection) that simultaneously

obtain in something subject to change. After all, a log is

conceptually divisible into two states: actuality (i.e., as actual wood)

and potentiality (i.e., as potential fire). This interpretation works

a bit better than interpretation (2) in accounting for eternal things

which are caused, for even though the celestial spheres are never

nonexistent, they are subject to change and therefore exhibit potentiality

(they move in an eternal circular motion); and even though

the celestial souls are never nonexistent, they are perfectible (they

yearn to be assimilated into the celestial intellects that are paired

with them). Nevertheless, interpretation (3) still fails to account for

the celestial intellects, which by Avicenna’s reckoning are all fully

actual and perfect, uninfected by any potentiality or imperfection