I’m looking at the French edition of 2005 lectures given at the Sorbonne by German philosopher Kurt Flasch, who is responsible for the modern editions of the Latin translations of Averroes, Avicenna, and Maimonides, as well as publication of the Latin works of Albert the Great’s students Dietrich of Freiberg, Ulrich of Strasbourg, and Berthold of Moosburg.

Flasch has contributed greatly to scholarship on Meister Eckhart, who also stands in the tradition of Albert the Great, and may have studied with him at Cologne. Eckhart has been known in modern times as a “mystic”, mainly on the basis of his popular German writings. But a consideration of his Latin works suggests that he was also and primarily a scholastic philosopher, close to Albert the Great and Dietrich of Freiberg. Even when he comments on scripture, he explicitly does so per rationes naturales philosophorum, “in terms of natural philosophical reasons”. This post will mainly cover Flasch’s discussion of Averroes.

I think this all makes a fascinating counterpoint to Rorty and Brandom’s provocative but nearsighted Deweyan historical storytelling about the rational maturation of humanity, which tends to treat premodern philosophy as if it were monolithic and all the same, and as if only in modern times did any worthwhile philosophy emerge. My own view is that there have been at least three other “Enlightenments” that substantially recognized the autonomy of reason, before the modern Enlightenment — one initiated by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; another with the rise of philosophy in the Islamic Golden Age; and another with the spread of Aristotelian learning to previously backward Europe. Just as with the modern Enlightenment, these developments were sharply contested, and very uneven in their results. The historical picture is far more complex and nuanced than any simple “Whiggish” linear progress.

Flasch first gives an account of Averroes. Later, he will discuss how Averroes’ work is used by Albert, Dietrich, and Eckhart. He calls heretical “Averroism” an invention of theologians and of the 19th-century scholar Ernest Renan. Averroes and those who are sometimes called Averroist simply thought of themselves as Aristotelians.

Flasch highlights four broad characteristics of the thought of Averroes — a strong insistence that accidents depend on substance; sharp distinction of a “metaphysical” or first-philosophical point of view from ordinary logical and physical points of view; an exclusion of efficient causality from metaphysics (in favor of an emphasis on substantial form); and a notion of natural intellectual beatitude. Most of Averroes’ Long Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics has still only been published in Latin, and Flasch mentions something new to me, that Averroes excludes not only efficient causality but also final causality from metaphysics, giving pride of place to substantial form instead. From Flasch’s account, it sounds like Averroes is the major proximate source for Latin scholastic notions of substantial form, which do not come from Aristotle.

“The way in which Averroes constructs the relation between the individual human and the intellect is not very different from the way in which Christian theologians envisage the action of divine grace in the human: having a certain degree of accomplishment of representation (indeed of imaginatio [imagination], the individual human is united with the intellect that illuminates the images of representation by making their universal character appear. The perfection of the human consists in her union, her copulatio, with the intellect that contains all the intelligibilia. This union is realized in each act of intelligence, since knowledge of the universal liberates the individual human from spatio-temporal determination. This universalization of mental contents can also be interpreted as a certain divinization, given that it makes the human participate in the supratemporality of the universal” (D’Averroés á Maître Eckhart: les sources arabes de la “mystique” allemande, p. 37, my translation throughout, emphasis in original).

“In a human life consecrated to intellectual work, the singular human becomes more and more close to the intellect. The active intellect, which produces all the intellectual contents, becomes in this case more and more our form, and no longer an efficient cause. This transformation is our highest perfection, in this life and possibly in a future life. It is in this conjunctio [conjunction] that our beatitude resides” (ibid).

“According to Averroes, intellect is not a superhuman being, a sort of angel in the beyond, but a virtus animae [virtue of the soul]” (p. 40).

“Aristotle… proceeds to introduce a series of extraterrestrial, quasi-divine predicates for intellect, even as he calls it a part or a power of the human soul. In fact, these are negative predicates: to be capable of knowing ‘all’ (omnia), all that one could see or imagine, it is necessary that intellect be none of that all, it must be amiges, that is to say unmixed with things…. Indeed it has no determinate essence, non est hoc aliquid [it is not a this-something], so that it is capable of becoming all things…. To describe the non-natural nature of intellect, Aristotle repeats the Platonic formula in saying: the intellective soul is the place of ideas (topos eidon)” (p. 41).

“Its activity is its substance, it is what it thinks…. This identity signifies not only that its activity and its object are identical, but that the action of intellect is its substantial nature” (p. 43).

“[K]nowledge is (also) receptive…. But as we have seen, intellect is immaterial and impassible. Intellect cannot be directly determined by a thing of the exterior world. If it has a phase of receptivity, it is necessary to understand this receptivity according to the measure of its intellectual nature; it is an active receiving of an intellect that accepts something from an intellect…. Before being realized, this function is nothing…. It cannot be actualized by any bodily thing…. Only intellect — as active intellect — can actualize it. This active principle is the other face or function of intellect, that is the intellect called agent that produces all the intelligible contents. Intellect as center of activity merits all the predicates Aristotle attributes to nous: it is the light that illustrates all, it is activity in its essence, identical with its content” (p. 44).

“[I]t has nothing in common with anything, it must be void of the physical character of its objects to be identical with them, in the same way that the eye must be without color to be capable of seeing all the colors. We find all these metaphors in the texts of Albert the Great, of Dietrich, and of Eckhart…. These phrases of Aristotle speak with such insistence of the proper character of intellect and of its substantial negativity that those who have not mastered Aristotelian terminology inevitably take them for ‘mystical'” (p. 45).

“These are the Aristotelico-Averroist formulas and the metaphors that we find again in Dietrich and Eckhart. All these expressions are formulas of the negative philosophy of mind [esprit]. This is the principal message of [Averroes’] commentary on the De Anima…. Categories derived from physical nature and usual conceptions no longer serve: to understand intellectual knowledge, the philosopher must make a radical change of perspective.”

“From this point of view, Averroes has established a concrete criterion for our evaluation of the philosophers of the 13th and 14th centuries: have they or have they not realized the radicality of this general conversion in the way of thinking? Have they understood, have they accepted this challenge? If I speak of a challenge, I am not thinking of the heresies of the unity of the possible intellect and the eternity of the world, but of the consequences of the negative philosophy of the intellect” (p. 48).

Here I think we also see the ultimate origin of Hegel’s specialized discourse about the negative. I don’t mean that Hegel read Averroes, but he reached a similar Aristotelian conclusion that goes beyond anything Aristotle explicitly said.

“Averroes insists in any case on the following fact: if intellect, as Aristotle suggests, is impassible, (apathes), if it is separable and simplex, then it is not permitted to speak of it in the terms that are characteristic of the world of generation and corruption. It becomes necessary to reform the theory of mind, in proceeding to its ‘de-physicalization’. Intellect is not hoc aliquid, it is not a ‘this something’. It is not an individual. By its intellectual movements, it separates itself from every kind of material individuality” (ibid).

“Averroes always speaks of the intellect that is found in us. He writes: intellectus existens in nobis habet duas actiones [“the intellect existing in us has two actions”]. He underlines that thinking or not depends on our decision. Averroes describes this active phase as a process of detachment, of undressing or denuding (denudare). When we think, our concrete experience consists very exactly in the combination of the actions of these two faculties: invenemus no agere per has duas virtutes intellectus. It is we who act, by the two intellectual virtues” (p. 49).

“In the Latin translation, Averroes designates the activity of the agent intellect as a creation. It is intellect that makes or produces the universal. If it is necessary to make it, it did not already exist before. The intellectual activity of denudare is a facere [a making or doing], it is a veritable creative act: Intellectus qui creat et generat intelligibilia [intellect that creates and generates intelligibles]. In showing in relief the creative character of intellect, Averroes goes further than Aristotle. The fact that one designated the activity of intellect in the Latin of the ‘Christian’ middle ages as a creare is quite remarkable…. Averroes explains the ‘creative’ force of our intellectual virtue thusly: in intellectual knowledge, we formulate judgments regarding innumerable particulars by means of a sole and unique common judgment; and in this way, by this knowledge of what is common, we can attain a certain form of infinity” (ibid).

Here I think of Kant’s insistence on the active role of the understanding, and of Husserl’s talk about putting existence in brackets. We see that Averroes insists on the generally active character of Aristotelian intellect, to the point where it becomes challenging to explain its receptive aspect. This is quite opposite to the unfortunate prejudice that Aristotelian intellect is passive in an unqualified way — simply receiving the given — expressed by Robert Pippin in his otherwise excellent work on Hegel. Flasch says Averroes concluded that neither Aristotle’s Categories nor concepts from the Physics are adequate to address the questions raised in the Metaphysics. This makes perfect sense, because much of the Metaphysics is devoted to developing new concepts. We saw this in detail with substance in relation to the Categories, and with potentiality and actuality in relation to the Physics.

I have been extremely curious what lies within the Latin text of Averroes’ Long Commentary on the Metaphysics, most of which has yet to be translated to any modern language. As I would have hoped, Flasch’s summary remarks suggest that Averroes sees efficient causality as basically irrelevant to first philosophy. But unexpectedly, he also says that Averroes rejects the metaphysical use — let alone centrality — of final causes. Where I would have expected or hoped for a development highlighting the unity of Aristole’s use of teleological explanation in both biology and first philosophy, Flasch reports that Averroes instead presents a notion of “substantial form” that is probably the source of that term’s leading role in Albert and Aquinas.

From Flasch’s remarks, it sounds like Averroes favored this option because he believed that first-philosophical reality must in general be purely and strictly eternal and necessary, even though he also says there is a special case in that the “material” intellect depends on humans living in time for its existence and its contents. A teleology-first point of view like Aubry sees in Aristotle is not compatible with this kind of pure and strict eternity. In reviving a form of Aristotelian teleology as a meta-interpretive framework in his Logic, Hegel finds it necessary to conclude that the eternity of first-philosophical reality is not pure and strict — that what we call eternity actually has a dependency on becoming, rather than being its immaculate origin. I am also reminded of Avicenna’s claim that the human soul has no pre-existence, and yet persists in eternity.

Albert the Great set the standard for Latin scholasticism, treating Averroes as generally the best commentator on Aristotle, but also eclectically making substantial use of Avicenna and Maimonides. I read elsewhere that up to the 16th century, Albert the Great’s commentaries on Aristotle were better regarded and more used in European universities than those of Aquinas. Albert has a very favorable view of Averroes overall. When he criticizes him, he does so in moderate and respectful terms. (Aquinas’ early remarks about Averroes are closer in tone to those of Albert. But in the 1260s and 1270s, there was a growing clamor among conservative Augustinians against Greek and Arabic philosophy in general. I think Aquinas, as a moderate and a diplomat within the Church, made a tactical or strategic decision to try to focus all that ire on Averroes and sacrifice him, so to speak, so that Aristotle could be made acceptable to the Church. And he was successful. As a result, Aristotle’s works were not all burned by the forces of darkness, or permanently banned from being taught, as they actually were during part of the 13th century.

Flasch insists on the radicality of Averroes’ claim that intellect is nothing before it thinks, that it is simply not a this-something like other things at all.

“But other problems remain. We say that universal forms exist in individual things potentially, in potentia. What does this mean? In reality what does the agent intellect do with the forms? Is it content to take off their clothes? Do these forms exist in reality if they are present potentially, in potentia? But in that case, intellect does not make or produce them, and even less could it create them. What exactly does ‘being in potentiality’ signify in the exact sense of Aristotelian ontology?” (p. 50).

“To be in potentiality is indeed to be real, but not actual. For, according to Aristotle as well as Averroes, actual being is the measure of being in potentiality. But from another perspective, Averroes requires the permanence of species, and indeed the eternity of the world, in order to guarantee the potential of our intellectual knowledge for objectivity. But why require the permanence of species, even in potentiality, if our intellect can create them? No one better recognized the difficulty of this problem than Averroes. He never ceases to groan and complain about the extreme difficulty of this inquiry. At stake in the analysis of intellectual knowledge is the encounter of the eternal and the corruptible, and indeed of the universal with the individual: how can a single action, directed by my will, result in these two components? Aristotle’s explanations on this point are insufficient, and the philosophical analysis is very difficult, valde difficilis et ambigua, Averroes confesses” (ibid).

“The more one reads the commentaries of Averroes, the more distant is the Arab thinker from a scholastic rigidity of Aristotelian orthodoxy. He continually evokes his doubts, and indicates problems in suspense. In a great number of doctrines, he goes well beyond Aristotle. He knows very well that intellectual activity is a personal action of a singular human. The knowledge of the universal is the highest achievement of the human, it is her perfection. One cannot displace or transfer the supreme perfection of the human outside of her, and as a consequence one cannot transfer her beatitude to another world. According to Averroes, it is necessary to think of the ultimate stage as a conjunctio or copulatio with a supra-temporal intelligence. Averroes shows himself very preoccupied with the subject of intellectual individuality, but he does not hesitate to formulate aporias…. Aristotle left a great number of questions without solutions, says Averroes, and this is ‘why I thought about writing about this subject what I think myself. If what seems right to me is not perfect, it can at least be the beginning of a perfecting. And in this case, I bid my brothers who read my work to write their objections. Perhaps in this way the truth can become manifest, if I have not found it'” (pp. 50-51).

“Averroes conceived intellectual knowledge as capable of augmentation and intensification. The human who thinks adapts herself little by little to the intellectual and universal world. She becomes what she knows…. Intellect must become my proper essential form…. [T]he human in a certain measure becomes all things in knowing them. All the things are nothing else than her knowledge…. Intellect is reality; it produces reality, not arbitrarily, not insofar as it is individual, but insofar as it receives the impression of the universal, the spirit of humanity” (p. 52).

“This divinized life is the beatitude of the human. According to Aristotle, the nous, the intellect, is in reality the human. Intellect is substantial activity and felicity. Eudaimonia [true happiness] cannot be added, it cannot be thrown over our shoulders like a cloak. The mind or spirit is beatitude by its proper activity…. It is not reserved for the life of the beyond; it begins with our terrestrial life, as our ascension and nobility…. [T]he intellectual life is the true nobility, it is the life of the noble human, as Meister Eckhart says” (p. 53).

This is also broadly similar to the ethical stance of Plotinus, who says that the goal of a human being is to live by her proper act of intellect, and in this way to become as like to the divine as is possible for a mortal.