its original purity. Ibn Rushd’s exegetical endeavors
culminated in the long commentaries (Arabic tafsī r),
scrupulous word-for-word commentaries of a rigor-
ous literary form resembling that used in traditional
Qur’ ānic exegesis: and appropriately so, for the words
of Aristotle had by that time gained almost divine au-
thority for Averroës.
The long commentary on De Anima, fruit of a life-
long exploration of Aristotelian psychology, contains
Averroës’s fi nal and most mature solution to the prob-
lems posed by Aristotle’s notoriously diffi cult remarks
on the nature of the “agent intellect.” According to
Aristotle, there is an active and a passive aspect to the
human mind: the intellect, which is passive insofar as
it receives the immaterial forms of sense percepts, is
seen as active inasmuch as it must, prior to their recep-
tion, abstract these forms from the material conditions
of sense perception. Averroës believed that both the
active (or “agent”) and the passive (“material,” “pos-
sible”) powers of the intellect were one for all human
beings. The possible intellect, being the receptacle for
the forms of material things, could not itself possess such
a form; otherwise it would interfere with and distort the
forms it received. But if it was immaterial, it had to be
unique, for it is matter that causes plurality. The unic-
ity of the agent intellect, on the other hand, safeguards
the universal validity of human cognition in that the
individuals’ data of sense perception are abstracted and
universalized by one faculty common to all. The activity
of thought can on this interpretation only be ascribed to
the individual inasmuch as his or her material organs of
sense are necessary to furnish the transpersonal intellect
with data to abstract. The thoughts themselves are no
single person’s possession; rather, the intellect is envis-
aged as a common pool of knowledge participated in
by the individual according to each person’s abilities.
Full “conjunction” with the transcendent intellect, the
possession of all possible knowledge, is the end and rare
fulfi llment of intellectual activity. Despite the denial
of personal immortality that it implies, this theory of
“monopsychism” exercised a deep and lasting infl uence
on the development of philosophy in the Latin west.
Its adoption by some Parisian masters in the latter half
of the thirteenth century provoked the most profound
intellectual crisis in the as yet young history of medieval
Aristotelianism, but even the condemnations of 1270
and 1277 could not, in the long run, thwart its attraction.
As Philip Merlan has brilliantly argued, the structures
of Averroean psychology continue to be discernible in
contemporary philosophy, especially in the Kantian
tradition (compare with Kant’s transcendental unity of
apperception/Bewußtsein überhaupt).
Averroës never held the theory of “double truth”
often falsely attributed to him: in his view, the truths of
philosophy and religion were in perfect agreement. As
he wrote in chapter 2 of the Fa s.l al-maq āl, “truth does
not oppose truth but accords with it and bears witness
to it.” Hence, contradictions between religious and
demonstrative truth can only be apparent, caused by
the fact that the Qur’ ān frequently uses symbols and
rhetorical or dialectical arguments in order to reach the
majority of the people. The superfi cial oppositions thus
arising must be resolved by an allegorical interpretation
(ta’wī l) of Scripture that penetrates from the level of
its apparent (z.ā hir) to that of its hidden (b ā.tin) mean-
ings. But ta’wī l is only for the philosophers and should
be taught esoterically, as it would endanger the faith
of those untrained in demonstrative reasoning. With
philosophy thus becoming the ultimate judge of the
meaning of revealed truth, Averroës takes a rational-
ist stance toward religion: it has nothing to offer that
reason cannot reach autonomously and without the veil
of symbols. This attitude, while replacing faith with
intellectual conviction, does not overtly challenge the
truth of Islam (which does not contain any supernatural
mystery in the Christan sense); however, it relegates it
to the pragmatic role of teaching the “simple people”
through symbols what the philosophers know with the
clarity of reason.
As in the speculative branches of philosophy, Aver-
roës also championed a resolute return to the principles
of pure Aristotelianism in the natural sciences. In what
has been called the “Andalusian revolt against Ptolemaic
astronomy,” (A.I. Sabra) Averroës and his contemporary
Al-Bi.trū jī (Alpetragius) censured Ptolemy for departing
from Aristotelian physics by postulating epicycles and
eccentrics; but unlike Al-Bi.t rū jī , Averroës’s grasp of
the Aristotelian alternative to epicycles and eccentrics
remained unsatisfactory and vague. Averroës was not
prepared to meet Ptolemy on the level of empirical
observation; indeed he dismissed his computational
evidence as “arrived at by the use of instruments” and
“based on the senses,” opposing to the empirical method
“the true theories based on rational precepts” (especially
in the Long Commentary on the Metaphysics). Accord-
ing to Averroës, Ptolemaic astronomy was in outright
contradiction to these rational principles, mainly be-
cause it assumed circular movement not around the
center of the universe and two contrary motions for
one planet (nature would not employ two movements
for what it could possibly achieve with one, Averroës
claimed, for “nature does nothing in vain”). He hoped
to account for the movement of the planets by positing,
in Aristotelian fashion, simple homocentric spiral mo-
tions in one direction—without, however, checking the
empirical viability of this proposition. It is interesting
that Averroës’s criticisms of Ptolemy, although almost
exclusively negative in their failure to provide an alterna-
tive theory, later infl uenced Copernicus by convincing
him of the shortcomings of traditional astronomy.AVERROËS