Avicenna's Account of Evil as a Cosmic Necessity — Epoche C2
Introduction: one chapter, and the question it is actually answering Avicenna's sustained treatment of evil occupies a single chapter of the Kitāb al-Shifāʾ (The Healing): Book IX, chapter 6 of the Ilāhiyyāt or Metaphysics, which takes up providence ( ʿināya ) and the manner in which evil enters the divine decree. An earlier version of this essay located the discussion in 'the Metaphysics, Chapter 7'; the correct reference is IX.6, and the misplacement matters because the chapter's position in the book is part of its argument. It stands after the account of the emanative order and immediately before the eschatology, which is to say that Avicenna reaches the problem of evil only once he has committed himself to a fully specified cosmology, and must solve it with the resources that cosmology leaves him. The standard reading, in both Western and Islamic scholarship, assimilates Avicenna to the Neoplatonic and Augustinian analysis of evil as privatio boni , the mere absence of a good, and treats that analysis as his answer to the problem. The thesis here is that the assimilation is not false but radically incomplete, and that the incompleteness has a definite shape. The privation analysis answers an ontological question — what kind of thing is an evil? — and answers it well. It does not answer the question that generates the problem in the first place: why the order proceeding from a wholly good principle contains the privations it does. That question is answered by a distinct argument, modal rather than ontological, turning on what a world containing generation and corruption must contain if it is to exist at all. Reducing Avicenna to privatio boni discards the half of his account that does the work. What the privation analysis says, and the Arabic that names it A correction of terminology is needed before the doctrine can be stated, because an earlier version of this essay gave the technical vocabulary in a form that does not exist. The abstract noun is sharr (evil), plural shurūr ; the pair of technical terms is al-sharr bi-l-dhāt , evil in itself or essentially, and al-sharr bi-l-ʿaraḍ , evil accidentally or per accidens. The forms given previously, built on sharīr , denote a wicked person, not an abstract evil, and are not Avicenna's. The distinction also runs the other way from the way the earlier text ran it. For Avicenna, evil in itself is not the culpable existent but the privation: specifically, the absence from a thing of a perfection its nature requires and would otherwise have — blindness in an eye, ignorance in a rational soul, the loss of form in a body that has been destroyed. This is evil essentially, because it is what the word picks out when nothing else is presupposed. Evil accidentally is then the existent that occasions such a privation: fire is called evil accidentally when it destroys, not because burning is a defect in fire, but because burning is fire's perfection and its exercise happens to remove a perfection from something else. Nothing that exists is evil in its own essence, since existence as such is a perfection conferred by the Necessary Existent ( wājib al-wujūd bi-dhātihi ), the being whose non-existence is impossible and on which everything else depends for the fact of its being. The earlier statement that 'substantial evil is impossible' is therefore right about existents and wrong about the term: al-sharr bi-l-dhāt is not an impossible category but the name for privation itself. Augustine had reached the same ontological result some six centuries earlier: in the Enchiridion (c. 421) evil is nothing other than the absence of good, and there is no such thing as an evil nature. But the structural difference between the two systems makes the parallel misleading if it is left there. Augustine's God creates freely out of nothing, so the privation analysis combines naturally with an appeal to the misuse of created wills: God made what is good, and the defect is introduced by a free turning away. Avicenna's God does not choose among alternative worlds; the order proceeds from His essence by necessity, not from an intention formed and executed. Providence, on his definition in IX.6, consists in God's knowing in Himself the order of the good ( niẓām al-khayr ), His being the cause of that order, and His being satisfied with it — with the decisive rider that all of this follows from what He is and not from any purpose or seeking. Strip the free choice out of the Augustinian picture and privation explains nothing at all: if the order necessarily follows from a wholly good principle, any privation in it is exactly what needs accounting for. Why privation cannot be the whole answer: the emanative machinery The sharpness of that difficulty depends on the details of the emanation, so those details have to be on the table before Avicenna's solution can be assessed. Two commitments generate the whole structure. The first is the principle that from what is one, in so far as it is one, only one thing proceeds. The second is the distinction between what is necessary through itself and what is possible in itself ( mumkin al-wujūd ) — a possible existent being one whose existence and non-existence are alike compatible with its essence, so that it requires a cause and, given that cause, becomes necessary through another. Herbert Davidson's reconstruction (1992) sets out the resulting cascade. From the Necessary Existent proceeds a single intellect. That intellect, unlike its source, has more than one object of thought: it thinks its principle, it thinks itself as necessary through another, and it thinks itself as possible in itself. From these three acts proceed, respectively, a further intellect, the soul of a celestial sphere, and the body of that sphere; and the process repeats. The count is fixed by the astronomy Avicenna inherits: there are nine celestial spheres — the outermost sphere of the diurnal motion, the sphere of the fixed stars, and the spheres of Saturn, Jupiter