Reinterpreting Ibn Sina's Apophaticism Through Aristotelian Negation — Epoche B2
Avicenna's God is not hidden but underspecified The wrong quarrel It is often said that when a philosopher describes God only by negations, the result is a God about whom nothing can be known: strip away body, place, time, quantity and quality, and what remains is a name with no content. The charge is a real one and it has real targets. Ibn Sina [1] , called Avicenna in the Latin West, is not among them. Avicenna does deny a great deal of God. But he also holds, and argues at length, that the First is intellect, that it intellects itself, that it is pure good, that it is the highest object of desire, and that all other things proceed from it. That is not a philosopher who thinks nothing can be said. He states the position on the divine attributes plainly in the closing chapters of the eighth book of the Ilahiyyat , the metaphysics of his Shifa [2] : what we predicate of the First reduces either to a negation or to a relation. A negation is not a silence. It is a proposition, it has a truth value, and it can be a premise. So the question worth asking is not whether Avicenna's negations leave us with knowledge; he says they do, and this essay agrees with him. The question is what they cost. My claim is that Avicenna's God is not unknowable but underspecified: the doctrine that makes the negations possible, that the First has no quiddity beyond its very existence, removes what would be needed to make it a determinate individual, and the positive attributes Avicenna wants cannot then be reattached. That is where al-Ghazali struck [3] , and the strike lands. A defender of Avicenna can deny this, and the last two sections say how. What Aristotle supplies, and what he does not Avicenna's negations are not free-standing; they depend on a piece of Aristotelian machinery, and the essay's argument requires seeing which piece. In the Categories Aristotle sorts what can be said of a thing into ten headings [4] , with substance first and the other nine, from quantity and quality to being acted upon, describing what belongs to a substance. If this were the whole story, a being outside all ten would be a being about which nothing could be said, and the standard charge would be correct. But it is not the whole story, and the crucial texts are elsewhere in the Metaphysics . At Metaphysics B.3, 998b22-27, Aristotle argues that being cannot be a genus, on the ground that a genus is not predicated of its own differentiae, whereas being is predicated of everything. And at Metaphysics Gamma.2, 1003a33-34, he says that being is said in many ways but with reference to one thing, so that the many senses are ordered to a primary sense rather than being ten unrelated meanings. The doctrine that being is said in many ways is stated again at the opening of Book Z, where the primary sense is identified with substance; it is Gamma, not Z, that adds the ordering to one focal sense. These two theses are what Avicenna needs. If being were a genus, then any being would fall under it as a species, and a species is a genus plus a differentia, which is composition. A simple being would be impossible by definition, and there would be nothing for Avicenna's argument to conclude to. Because being is not a genus, and because it is said in many ways, there is room for something that is, without being any kind of thing. Aristotle himself does not draw that conclusion. He supplies the space; Avicenna occupies it. The negations are premises, not concessions Avicenna's route to the First runs, in the metaphysical part of the Isharat and at greater length in the Ilahiyyat , from a distinction between what a thing is and that it is. For anything whose quiddity does not include existence, existence is something it receives, and what receives requires a giver. Follow the chain of givers and either it runs on without termination, which Avicenna rejects, or it terminates in something whose existence is not received: the Necessary Existent. Everything else is drawn out of that. If existence were added to a quiddity in the First, it would be received, and the First would not be necessary; so the First has no quiddity other than its existence. Avicenna states this in the fourth chapter of Book VIII of the Ilahiyyat , and the negations follow as consequences rather than as expressions of modesty. Having no quiddity, the First is not in a genus, since a genus is part of a quiddity. Not being in a genus, it has no definition and no differentia. It is not a substance in the strict sense in which substance is defined as a quiddity that is not in a subject, because there is no quiddity to be so described. It is not a body, since body is a composite of matter and form and a composite depends on its parts. It is not in time or place, since these bring potentiality. Every one of these is a conclusion drawn from a stated premise. None is a confession that inquiry has run out. Read this way, the usual charge misses entirely: Avicenna's God is the terminus of an argument, and the negations are its steps. What it costs Now the bill. A quiddity is what makes something the kind of thing it is and distinguishes it from other things. Remove it and a question arises that Avicenna must answer: what makes the Necessary Existent this rather than something else? What individuates it? Avicenna's answer is that necessity of existence individuates by itself: there could not be two, since two would require something to distinguish them, and any distinguishing feature would be a further determination, hence a composition, hence contingency. The argument for uniqueness is good. Whether it supplies individuation is another matter, and the two are not the same. To show that at most one thing satisfies a description is not to show that the description picks out a determinate individual rather than a limiting case. Al-Ghazali saw this and made it the eighth of the twenty discussions of the Tahafut al-falasifa [5] , which is directed precisely at the claim that the First is e