1 Introduction
“Can God make a blind man see?” This question does not sound especially Aristotelian at first glance. Yet it is not a question about miracles, nor a theological question at all; as I will show in this chapter, it is a question discussed by ninth–eleventh century practitioners of kalām1 in order to address the mechanics of perception. At issue was whether or not sense perception involves some causal efficacy – either on the part of the object of perception or, in the extreme case suggested above, by virtue of an instance of divine agency. For one school of kalām, the Bahshamīs of the tenth–eleventh centuries, there is no place whatsoever for causality in accounts of sense perception; it is an automatic process which occurs when the conditions are right. For their theological opponents, the Ashʿarites, God is the sole cause of all accidental and substantial change, regardless of any conditions that may obtain. In the following, we will see how the arguments of the Bahshamīs were designed not only to defeat the Ashʿarite position, but to challenge the prominent contemporary Aristotelian model of perception as occasioned upon present perceptible qualities producing actual perception (or actualising a state of perception) in the perceiver. The ‘conditions’ of perception are meant to obviate any causal efficacy in the objects while preserving the empirical coherence of sensation.
Before introducing the controversy concerning the role of causality in perception, I will have to present the philosophical context in which it arose. The sub-sections of this introduction will cover (section 1.1) ninth century kalām and its relevant cosmological commitments, (section 1.2) the concurrent emergence of Arabic Aristotelianism and the technical terminology developed to convey it, and (section 1.3) the intellectual genealogy of the two major tenth–eleventh century schools of kalām (Bahshamī and Ashʿarite) between which this controversy was to play out. In section two, I will introduce the controversy itself, as it is found in a systematic Bahshamī treatise in the eleventh century. This will lead to an unpacking of the sources which led to the Bahshamī evaluation of the opposing, Ashʿarite position. Then I will present (section three) the Bahshamī argument against any role for causality in perception, and (section four) for their own position – that perception is automatic when the right conditions obtain. In the final section (section five), I will argue that the entire controversy is characterised by a technical and theoretical engagement with Aristotelian positions as found in the Arabic reception of De anima and, later, in the Avicennan model of perception. Thus, I will show that what appeared to be a theological dispute leading to claims about divine efficacy in unnatural processes (God making a blind man see) turns out to be a philosophically recognisable contest concerning the natural occasion of sense perception (i.e., whether the actuality of perceptible qualities has an effect upon perceiving faculties).
1.1 The “Materialist” Context: Ninth Century Kalām
Kalām is the characteristic mode of speculative rationalism practiced by theologians; as such, it has historically been distinguished from classical Arabic philosophy. The earliest practitioners of kalām, those who flourished in the later eighth and throughout the ninth century, held diverse views on topics in cosmology and psychology: contemporary sources point to their apparently unanimous insistence on human free will, and refer to them accordingly as Qadariyya (proponents of human free will) or as Muʿtazilites.2 Ashʿarites, introduced below, are a school of practitioners of kalām named after the theologian Abū l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (d. 936), who famously broke from the dominant Muʿtazilite school of kalām. Muʿtazilite doctrine became more systematic during the tenth and eleventh centuries; the Bahshamīs were a prolific group of Muʿtazilites during this period.3 The rationalist stance of earlier and later Muʿtazilites put them at odds with scriptural Islamic theology (with which Ashʿarism aligned itself) on the one hand, and into a competition with the nascent Graeco-Arabic philosophical movement on the other.
Although Ashʿarite theologians sharply diverged from their Muʿtazilite predecessors (who were hardly uniform in their own theoretical output), it is clear that all of these groups shared some fundamental cosmological principles that determined their approach to psychology generally, and to questions concerning sense perception in particular. Most notably, they posited a materialistic, atomistic universe composed of atomic units (jawāhir, sing. jawhar – the term which came to stand for ousía in translations from Greek) and discrete accidents inhering in them. The Muʿtazilite insistence on some form of atomism put them in direct conflict with contemporary philosophers, who were in the process of adopting Aristotelian hylomorphism. Applied to psychology, the Muʿtazilite reluctance to posit non-corporeality with respect to any existent thing besides God, coupled with Islamic eschatological commitments, led to a materialist theory of the soul. Thus the human being was considered as a material spirit (rūḥ, corresponding precisely to Greek pneûma in contemporary translations) in some kind of bond with a collection of atomic parts, in which accidents such as “living,” “moving,” and, eventually, “knowing,” might inhere,4 alongside more pedestrian accidents such as “red” or “hot.” The distribution of such super-accidents as “knowing,” and especially those conferring agency on the human being, was a topic of continuous dispute in kalām – does the entire human “know” in the sense that each atom “knows,” or does knowledge inhere in the totality of the human being, or, indeed, in one very important part of the human being? These two predilections, for atomism in physical explanations and for materialism in psychological explanations, made Muʿtazilites and Ashʿarites alike hostile to the forms and faculties according to which Peripatetic analysis of sense perception was accomplished.
Nevertheless, practitioners of kalām discussed the same problems in sense perception as those inherited from the Greek tradition. They were concerned about the manner in which objects of sensation are distinguished, and how the senses themselves are distinct from one another.5 Some early Muʿtazilites questioned the enumeration of the senses, positing a sixth sense (or more).6 They worried about common sensibles – motion, especially.7 They disagreed about whether we perceive bodies or the properties inherent in bodies.8 And they discussed issues of transparency and the necessary medium for sensation: in a materialist context, sensible properties are especially susceptible to dilution. Since the entire atomist apparatus turned on an account of discrete entities (accidents and atoms) insofar as they undergo change (by virtue of God’s incessant creative activity, according to the Ashʿarites; or by virtue of natural processes, according to some Muʿtazilites), and perception seems to involve a change for the perceiving subject, the atomist theory of sense perception sought to provide a causal account of this type of change. The main body of this chapter will examine this effort.
1.2 The “Aristotelian” Context: Arabic Aristotelianism and Avicenna’s Psychology
At the same time that practitioners of kalām were discussing these topics, of course, the vast cultural project known as the Graeco-Arabic translation movement was in full swing.9 The De anima circulated in at least two translations.10 It is not clear whether a faithful translation of the De sensu was available,11 but already in the early ninth century paraphrases, compendia, and commentaries on the De anima were appearing in Arabic.12
For our purposes, it is constructive to consider a few instances of translation that impacted the basic Aristotelian claim that the perceiving faculty, like anything potential, “is affected and moved by what is capable of producing such a result and is in actuality,”13 that is, an object of perception. The extant Arabic translation renders this passage as follows:
Everything is affected and is moved only by virtue of an act (bi-fiʿl) which is manifested from an agent (al-fāʿil) such that it reaches it.14
This translation introduces a substantive – “an act” – operating between the cause (the object of sensation, here the “agent” of the event of perception) and the affected object (in this case, the perceiving faculty). We might dismiss this as a rhetorical quirk were it not for the perfectly reasonable and economical way the same idea is presented at the end of this very sentence: fa-yaṣilu ilayhi (“such that it reaches it”).15 Why, then, “by virtue of an act”? We might wish to apply bi-fiʿl to the preceding clause, the way one would say something occurs bi-l-fiʿl, “in actuality,” were it not for the conjugated verb (yabdū) which follows it, creating a clause dependent upon the indefinite fiʿl (“an act which …”). What we can see here is that the Arabic translators were already struggling with the energeía concept and its referents.
When Aristotle wants to distinguish sense perception from knowledge, he argues as follows:
Actually perceiving is spoken of in a way similar to contemplation. But there is a difference: what is capable of producing this actuality, the object of sight and hearing and so on for the remaining objects of perception, is external.16
Aristotle uses this argument to establish that the objects of sensation are particulars, whereas the objects of knowledge are universals. But for our purposes, the key claim here is that objects of perception, which are external, are what produce perception in the perceiver. Once again, the extant Arabic translation emphasises the causal nature of this relation:
The case of perception due to an act of sensation is like the case of contemplation and thought. The difference between them is that the motivating factors (dawāʿī) of sensation only exist externally, like the visible thing and the thing which is heard, and so on for the rest of the senses.17
Once again we have the construction bi-fiʿl, here bi-fiʿl al-ḥiss, “due to an act of sensation.” The term dawāʿī (sing. dāʿiya) is not one of the usual terms for “causes,” but carries strong jurisprudential overtones; it appears elsewhere in kalām as “motives” for performing a particular action in lieu of another.18 A dāʿiya is one who “calls for” something to happen. The agency of the object of sensation is emphasised.
1.3 Developments in Kalām in the Tenth–Eleventh Centuries
The controversy regarding the role of causality in perception is recorded in Ibn Mattawayh’s eleventh century compendium on Muʿtazilite natural philosophy, al-Tadhkira fī aḥkām al-jawāhir wa-l-aʿrāḍ (a treatise “on the properties of substances and accidents”). Ibn Mattawayh, whose precise dates are not known, belonged to the Bahshamī line of Muʿtazilite thought, so-called because it went back to Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī (d. 933), from whose father, Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī (d. 915), al-Ashʿārī had defected; the theological school associated with the latter, that is, the Ashʿarite school, included al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1210). All of these figures counted the early Muʿtazilites (such as Abū l-Hudhayl, d. 841, and others who will be discussed below) among their antecedents, although not always with abundant pride. Ibn Mattawayh himself had studied under Abū Rashīd al-Nīsabūrī (eleventh century) and ʿAbd al-Jabbār (d. 1025), who was a contemporary of Avicenna, and who (allegedly) met him while they were both situated in Rayy. In other words, this controversy involved everyone active in kalām for some 250 years, and would have been known to Avicenna.
Al-Ashʿarī had broken from the Muʿtazilites on several theological issues. Most famously, he rejected any metaphorical reading of divine attributes, aligning himself with the literalist interpretation of “traditionist” Muslims. On the topic of human action, his position became the cornerstone of Islamic “occasionalism”: every event occurs solely on account of God’s free choice, such that every change among the constituent elements of the world (atoms and accidents) is due to God’s act.19 The foundation for such a position was prepared by the ninth-century materialist analysis of nature described above. Crucial to that analysis, as we shall see, was the treatment of perception as an “act.” Since perception entailed the presence or emergence of a new accident in the perceiving subject, it too was subject to the occasionalist model. Post-Ashʿarite Muʿtazilites, obviously, saw this as a threat to their principle that humans act freely; perception, at least for the perceiver, would seem to be an act that is not “free.”20
2 The Controversy: How Perception Occurs
According to Ibn Mattawayh, the Ashʿarites had followed Abū l-Hudhayl in positing perception as “a maʿnā such that our being one who perceives is dependent upon it.”21 This term, al-maʿnā, indicating some particular cognisable factor, has a rich history in Arabic philosophy and Islamic theology: see chapter two in volume three.22 Against the position he ascribes to Abū l-Hudhayl, Ibn Mattawayh presents Abū Hāshim’s view that perception is not a maʿnā: rather, I am one who perceives on account of the following conditions:
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(1) [the subject’s] being one who is living;
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(2) the existence of an object of perception;
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(3) the soundness of the senses;
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(4) the absence of hindrances.23
This becomes the standard Bahshamī position.24 The former position, that perception is a maʿnā, is Ibn Mattawayh’s interpretation of the Ashʿarite understanding of perception. In both cases, and throughout kalām reporting, “perception” (al-idrāk) is presented as a maṣdar, that is, a verbal noun (“perceiving”). By dint of the quirky conventions of kalām, “perception” is almost always discussed without a particular object in mind.25 The controversy hangs on how “perception” should be analysed as an attribute, that is, how it may be said of a subject: for all of the figures to be discussed agree that it occurs. Abū Hāshim, like Ibn Mattawayh and the Bahshamīs who took up his position, held that it occurs not by virtue of any distinct cause, but rather due to the fulfilment of those four conditions. The distinction is subtle, and as we shall see, Ibn Mattawayh spends a lot of time making sure that we do not consider the conditions to be causally efficacious, and therefore maʿānī. Yet as for a distinct maʿnā which determines our perception, Abū l-Hudhayl posited no such thing, at least not explicitly.
In the few relevant passages in al-Ashʿarī’s Maqālāt, all that Abū l-Hudhayl is recorded as saying on the matter is that “perception inheres in the heart, not the eye; it is necessary knowledge.”26 Elsewhere he calls it “knowledge of the heart” (ʿilm al-qalb).27 Al-Ashʿarī noted that Abū l-Hudhayl had something to say about the “visibility” of bodies and accidents, however:
Abū l-Hudhayl said that bodies are visible, as are motions, incidents of rest, colours, combination and separation, sitting, and lying down. We see motion when we see a thing in motion, and we see rest when we see a thing at rest, by virtue of seeing it at rest (bi-ruʾyatihi lahu sākinan) [and so on for the other accidents listed above]. Whenever we see a body in a particular disposition, we make two distinctions: we distinguish between it and other things that do not have the same appearance, and we distinguish between it and other things that are not apparent at all. This how we see the thing.28
This position is interesting insofar as it introduces a capacity for making such distinctions about objects of perception, but it does not involve any maʿnā by which perception, distinct from the event itself, may occur. That it “inheres in the heart,” however, was enough to upset the Bahshamīs. (Not because of the “heart”; rather because inherence would make it an accident, and as such a distinct maʿnā.) When it comes to human perception, Abū l-Hudhayl has little to say in the earliest sources.29
The first hint that we find in the sources of an Ashʿarite flavour to Abū l-Hudhayl’s position comes in ʿAbd al-Jabbār. The “Ashʿarite” quality of the position is evident:
Abū l-Hudhayl (God have mercy upon him) said that perception is an act brought about by God as something initiated [by Him], just as our master Abū ʿAlī [al-Jubbāʾī] had said. But [Abū l-Hudhayl] said that one’s vision can be sound, and stripped of hindrances, yet God need not create perception; in that case one will not perceive what is present to him.30 God can create knowledge of colours in the heart of a blind person who cannot see any colour at all. Abū ʿAlī demurred.31
In this passage, Abū l-Hudhayl is made to acknowledge two of the Bahshamī ‘conditions’ for perception (soundness; lack of hindrances) while throwing a monkey wrench into the system by ceding all control to God’s will. This version of Abū l-Hudhayl only conforms to what we find in al-Ashʿarī’s reports in the sense that perception is “knowledge in the heart” – a commonplace, but a decidedly Hudhaylian one.32 The picture of God dropping accidents (colours, or “knowledge of colours” – the distinction is important and, of course, the subject of its own debate33 ) willy-nilly into the heart without regard for non-divine causal regulation conforms to the later Ashʿarite cosmology. The position cited here could be made to agree with that given by Ibn Mattawayh, if we take the maʿnā in the latter formula to be God’s act as found in the former (indeed, as we shall see, ʿAbd al-Jabbār does make this identification explicit in another context).
2.1 “Perception Is an Act Brought about by …”: Early Muʿtazilite Positions on Perception
The claim that “perception is an act brought about by God,” which ʿAbd al-Jabbār attributes to Abū l-Hudhayl, is a fixed position in kalām disputation. It is clear from the context in al-Mughnī that ʿAbd al-Jabbār is running down the list of positions on that question; immediately prior to the citation provided, he mentions al-Naẓẓām’s (d. c.840) position – namely, that “perception is a property which God performs as a necessary consequence of His having created it, and by virtue of the senses.”34 As van Ess pointed out,35 this seems to be a corruption of the version of al-Naẓẓām’s position presented in al-Ashʿarī: there, perception “is brought about by God and nobody else, as a necessary consequence of His having created the senses.”36
Al-Ashʿarī lists the various positions on this topic in a section headed “On what occurs by means of the senses with respect to the perception of objects of sense,”37 and it is clear that causality is already the most important aspect of this question: indeed, it is the same problem of causality that will animate Ibn Mattawayh’s framing of the controversy. The positions reported by al-Ashʿarī take it as a given that there will be “causes” (here, asbāb) for the perception of objects of sense: in the first position he reports, they must be attributed either to the one who senses, or to God (i.e. not to the objects of sense).38 According to al-Ashʿarī, most of the early Muʿtazilites held the latter position; we have already seen al-Naẓẓām’s position (“brought about by God”), but other positions (which will recur in Ibn Mattawayh; see below) are given without specific proponents. Ḍirār ibn ʿAmr (d. 796) is presented as holding a characteristic view: “perception is something acquired by the human, but created by God.”39 Only one group, referred to as the Baghdadis, takes up the first position: “perception is an act brought about by the human, and it is impossible for it to be an act of God.”40
In al-Ashʿarī’s account, however, there is one strain which does not fit into this dichotomy. It is associated with the “proponents of the elemental natures,” the aṣḥāb al-ṭabāʾiʿ, whose position on causality is evident in the following:
Some said: Perception is from the one who senses, and it is brought about by him, but it is not by means of choice. Rather, it is an act of the elemental natures. What confirms the doctrine of the proponents of the elemental natures is that perception is an act brought about by the substrate by virtue of which it subsists. This is the doctrine of the followers of Muʿammar.41
The proponents of this “naturalist” position were well-known bugbears in the early Muʿtazilite intellectual world; they rejected temporal creation and (as we see here) promoted natural, materialistic causality. A subsequent position attributed to the so-called ahl al-ithbāt42 retained the “natures,” but made them temporally generated by God in the organ of sense;43 this was evidently an attempt to “save” the Muʿammarian position. Muʿammar (d. 830) consistently attributed causal efficacy to such natures, from which all properties (now, including “perception,” as an “act”) emerge.44 Curiously, these two groups (the proponents of the elemental properties, and the ahl al-ithbāt) were as dogmatically opposed as two groups can be: the eternal-world materialists on the one side, and those who would become the ahl al-ḥadīth, insisting on the literal acceptance of any and all Qurʾānic attributions with respect to God, on the other.
Al-Ashʿarī documented another way to look at the causal relationship between objects of perception and perceiving subjects: perception is still considered an act, but the question is whether it is “an act brought about by the object which the perceiver perceives”45 – this is rejected, according to al-Ashʿarī, by “most of the practitioners of kalām.” He reports that some, however, allowed for this, “as when a person opens his eyes to see an object and it presents itself to him (yaridu ʿalayhi).”46 Such a view seems to approach the actualising capacity of sense-objects in Aristotle. Al-Ashʿarī appends to these positions a third view, also unattributed, which verges curiously on anamnesis if it were applied to sense perception:
One [theorist’s] view on perception was of a different kind than these positions. Namely, he claimed that vision is subsistent in the human even when his eyelids are closed, for he is endowed with sight (baṣīrun). If this is the case, when the object is before him, and any impediments are removed, it occurs to him (waqaʿ ʿalayhi) – and knowledge occurs to him at the same moment. Before that, according to [this theorist], this knowledge was concealed in the heart, prevented from occurring by means of the known object (bi-l-maʿlūm). When its impediment is removed, it occurs. It is not generated, for before that it had been existent, as we have described. [The theorist’s] position on hearing47 was like this as well.48
This position is remarkable because it corresponds to the Platonising epistemology found concurrently in al-Kindī’s (d. c.870) works on the soul, according to which “sensation […] prompt[s] us to remember intelligibles.”49 Indeed, it might well evade the problem of causality in a way sympathetic to the later Muʿtazilite (Bahshamī) approach: the conditions are considered, and the phrase bi-l-maʿlūm need not be read with such causal force – it could simply be that knowledge had been prevented from occurring “with respect to” the known object.
These, then, are the early Muʿtazilite (and Muʿtazilite-adjacent) positions on the activity of perception as related by al-Ashʿarī; Abū l-Hudhayl is not mentioned. Almost all of them refer to perception specifically as an act, and most make it an act performed by God; this would explain ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s report above. We have sought in vain for any early source for Ibn Mattawayh’s attribution to Abū l-Hudhayl of the position that perception is “a maʿnā such that our being one who perceives is dependent upon it,” but we have found plenty of evidence that early Muʿtazilite positions support an occasionalist model of perception, depending upon the whim of God. The classical form in which that arrangement is discussed has already been alluded to before: it concerns the ability of God to create “vision” in a blind person.
2.2 Can God Make a Blind Person See?
Recall ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s version of Abū l-Hudhayl. The first part of that report (that “perception is an act brought about by God as something initiated by Him”), with which Abū ʿAlī had agreed, squares with typical early Muʿtazilite theory as reported by al-Ashʿarī. The Maqālāt version includes two positions which share virtually the same terminology (i.e., ikhtirāʿ), but those two versions diverge on the issue of God’s capacity:
(A) [Perception] is brought about by God, Who originates and initiates it. If He wills, He may remove it even from someone whose vision is unimpaired, whose eyes are open, who is right in front of something he would otherwise be able to see, with light conducive to seeing; if He wills to create it even in a dead person, He can do it. This is the position of Ṣāliḥ Qubba.
(B) Some said: Perception is an act of God, Who initiates it. It is not possible for a human to perform it. It is not possible for God not to produce perception when a person’s eyes are healthy and there is sufficient light for seeing. It is not possible for God to make perception coincide with blindness, or for Him to produce it in the dead.50
In the position attributed to Ṣāliḥ Qubba (he was a student of al-Naẓẓām, so he lived during the first half of the ninth century), the conditions for vision are irrelevant to its occurrence. God can make the blind man – indeed, the dead man – see, and the event of perception is still classified as an “act” in keeping with the general early Muʿtazilite approach. In the second position, the conditions are binding; God cannot go against nature, as it were, even though it remains “His” act.
Position (B), which turns out to be that of Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī, may seem to make God into a perception-computer, diligently producing the requisite perceptible content according to an unvarying protocol. But it turns out that the real motivation here is God’s power with respect to opposing (i.e. mutually contradictory) properties. Elsewhere al-Ashʿarī mentions the example (of God “creating perception with blindness”) as something over which God may not be ascribed power, according to Abū ʿAlī (he is cited by name); this is contrasted with the opposition of bodies, over which God does have power – that is, God may “join fire and cotton without creating conflagration,” or “suspend a rock in the air, and have it stay there without anything beneath it for support.”51 This difference, although al-Ashʿarī does not explain it clearly, is due to the latter cases having to do with bodies, in which one or another opposing accident may inhere; the former case involves two opposing accidents in the same substrate. That is, the cotton may be either burning, or not burning – and in any case the cotton and the fire will never actually be in the same place.52 So too, the rock may be plummeting, or not plummeting. God cannot make it both plummeting and not plummeting. The key to understanding the example, which al-Ashʿarī does not provide, is that “blindness” is in fact a defect inhering in the eye – that is, an accident, as is perception (recall, however, that al-Ashʿarī seems to always consider perception an “act”). The presence of the one accident is the absence of the other. Al-Ashʿarī, as we noted, knew Abū ʿAlī personally, and well, but we will have to wait until ʿAbd al-Jabbār to find a sophisticated analysis of the position (see immediately below). It is worth noting that in the same section al-Ashʿarī represents Ṣāliḥ’s position (“A”) accurately and memorably, saying that a nearby elephant and a distant speck of dust (al-dharra) are equally dependent upon God’s creation of “perception” in one who would see them.53
3 The Bahshamī Objections to Perception as “Caused” by Anything
ʿAbd al-Jabbār refines this material in his account. He sets out to reject the position that one is a perceiver by virtue of some instance of perception (mudrikan bi-drākin), beginning with a claim that anticipates Ibn Mattawayh’s reconstruction of the Bahshamī line:
Know that one of us who sees only sees a thing when his (organ of 54 ) sense is sound, and [any] hindrances are lifted. With respect to his being one who sees, or one who perceives, there is no need for a cause by which he becomes that way. For it cannot be the case, given soundness of his (organ of) sense, the presence of the object of vision in front of him, and the absence of hindrances, that he would not see the thing in some way.55
ʿAbd al-Jabbār gives three of Ibn Mattawayh’s conditions for vision here: soundness, absence of hindrances, and the existence of the object of perception. Vision is accomplished automatically when the conditions are met.
The overly precise wording of some of these predicates in English as “one who perceives” (mudrik) or (from the Ibn Mattawayh passage which I used to frame this controversy) “one who is living” (ḥayy), that is, a perceiver or a living being, as being one who perceives, etc., comes from the regular application by Bahshamī theorists of the term kawn, “to be,” such that we get the expression kawnuhū mudrikan, “his being one who perceives,” or in the case of ʿAbd al-Jabbār here, kawnuhū rāʾiyan, “being one who sees.” This usage has to do with the theory of modes of being, or “states,” introduced by Abū Hāshim, and will be discussed when we (finally) return to Ibn Mattawayh below.
After several dialectical arguments refuting objections to the Bahshamī position, ʿAbd al-Jabbār announces the collapse of the positions of his two most significant (Muʿtazilite) antecedents, Abū l-Hudhayl and Abū ʿAlī al-Jubbāʾī, in a way which demonstrates how he has refined them to meet the standards of contemporary (now late tenth century, i.e. some hundred years after the latter and nearly two hundred years after the former) kalām:
All of this destroys what was related from our Shaykh Abū l-Hudhayl (God bless him), that perception is a maʿnā, allowing, given sound vision and the absence of hindrances, that God might not create it (the maʿnā), such that we would not perceive what is made present by it. It also destroys the position of one who would claim that it is a maʿnā, but God must generate it, or generate its opposite, which is also a maʿnā, because a substrate cannot be empty of one or the other. Such was the position described by our Shaykh Abū ʿAlī (God bless him), which he once held, saying: blindness is a deficiency in the structure of the eye.56
Thus Abū ʿAlī’s concern about opposites, which had to be carefully pried out of al-Ashʿarī, is made explicit. In an earlier passage in the text, ʿAbd al-Jabbār purports to quote directly from one of Abū ʿAlī’s books (Kitāb al-Tawallud, which would be a nice book to have57 ): “Corruption of the sense (organ) of the eye (ḥāssat al-ʿayn) is called blindness, in terms of causality; blindness, in reality, is that which is opposed to vision.”58 Abū ʿAlī has moved perception from the heart (Abū l-Hudhayl) to the sense organ. ʿAbd al-Jabbār’s objection is just that he and Abū l-Hudhayl keep treating “perception” as though it were a separate maʿnā; ʿAbd al-Jabbār (and Ibn Mattawayh, as we shall see) sees the imposition of maʿānī as leading directly to Ashʿarism.
To summarise the Bahshamī interpretive moves when dealing with earlier Muʿtazilite doctrine: certainly some (most?) Muʿtazilites held perception to be some kind of an act involving some kind of causal impetus (this is already established in al-Ashʿarī). Bahshamīs, beginning with ʿAbd al-Jabbār, took this to mean that it there must be a maʿnā (namely, the act of perception) by virtue of which one is perceiving. The only sort of attribute perception might be, according to the Bahshamīs, is an attribute li-l-maʿnā, that is, one “arising from” a maʿnā.59 Indeed, as we saw in the case of the early reports concerning Abū l-Hudhayl, it seems that early Muʿtazilites were comfortable treating perception as some kind of attribute precisely because it was possible for God not to approve its inherence in some substrate (whether it be in the heart or in a particular sense organ). If it could not be considered in such a way, it would not be an attribute – rather, an accident – in their scheme.
In Ibn Mattawayh’s hands, the entire Muʿtazilite programme is arranged around these maʿānī. He begins with the position he takes to be that of Abū l-Hudhayl, that perception is a maʿnā, and that “our being one who perceives is dependent (mawqūfan) upon it.” According to Ibn Mattawayh, Abū l-Hudhayl agreed in principle with the ‘conditions’ which were later established by Abū Hāshim for perception, but held that, in the end, “the object of perception could only be perceived on account of that maʿnā.”60 Ibn Mattawayh notes that this is the germ of the Ashʿarite position, but he does not make Abū l-Hudhayl responsible for introducing God’s ability to flaunt these conditions; rather, that position is attributed to Ṣāliḥ Qubba:
Ṣāliḥ Qubba allowed for the non-existence of perception despite the fulfilment of these conditions [i.e., the Bahshamī conditions] in the case of objects of vision and incidents of pain, etc., such that there some body part could be cut off without the subject feeling pain. This led to [the occasion upon which Ṣāliḥ Qubba] was once in Mecca, and a tent (qubba) collapsed upon him, but he did not know that it had happened, because God had not created the [corresponding] instance of knowledge for him.61
The joke at the expense of Ṣāliḥ’s nickname (qubba) is repurposed from earlier accounts: apparently, he originally obtained this nickname because he claimed that if he were asleep in Iraq, but dreaming that he was sitting in a tent (qubba) in Mecca, then he was really, at that moment, under that tent.62 In the version from al-Ashʿarī, the conditions (“his eyes are open,” etc.; see above, “A”) are also mentioned, and equally irrelevant. The example of the severed body part is, of course, a favoured case study in kalām, used in discussions about the integral identity of the body, the location of spirit, and so on. Ibn Mattawayh deploys the severed hand argument liberally; even in this context, it appears in the refutation of one who would assert that perception requires contiguousness (ittiṣāl): “such contiguousness,” Ibn Mattawayh replies, “may exist without perception obtaining, as in the case of fingernails and hair, or a withered hand (al-yad al-shallāʾ).”63
Ibn Mattawayh provides Abū ʿAlī’s position in precisely the same terms (every substrate contains either an attribute or its opposite) as had ʿAbd al-Jabbār, adding only that, according to Abū ʿAlī, “there is a maʿnā in every substrate by which one may perceive what is specified by it (yakhuṣṣuhū, lit. “it bestows it”).”64 Ibn Mattawayh presents a fourth position:
Bishr ibn al-Muʿtamir and the Baghdadis who followed him posited perception as a maʿnā, but they made it momentary with respect to our act, upon opening the eyelids – or with respect to somebody else’s act, when it occurs upon us, or with respect to God’s act, when He performs a sound or some other object of perception.65
This ambivalence (?) concerning the source of the object of perception democratises the options but tacitly fixes for any object a sabab, or proximate cause, without affirming a sensible property inhering anywhere in particular. The trichotomy appears to be exclusive: it accounts for miraculous events (God speaking to a prophet: the sabab of that sound would not inhere in God, but neither would it inhere in any terrestrial object; it would be an indeterminate particular maʿnā), the secondarily generated effects of others’ actions, or simply the fact of having open eyes. With regard to the sabab produced by others, it will be recalled that Bishr’s (d. c.825) contribution to kalām was the theory of tawallud, that is, the “generation” of effects at a distance from the first agent in a chain of atomic events. Thus, accidents like the pain instantiated when one person shoots another with an arrow is the “generated” effect of the shooter of the arrow; or, more to our point, as al-Ashʿarī records it,
if a person opens someone else’s eyes with his hand and the other person perceives, that perception is the act of the one who opens the other person’s eyes […] in this way, a person acts upon another by virtue of a proximate cause (sabab) which he generates in himself.66
Note that once again, an act has been resolved as a proximate cause, and then further resolved, in the Bahshamī reception, as a maʿnā.
These four positions are thus codified as maʿnā-based perception, or effectuated perception; they are set against the theory of Abū Hāshim (cited at the beginning of this chapter), which we might call “condition-based” perception. Now, whether maʿnā-based perception is taken to be the result of human action (an act brought about by the subject), divine action (an act brought about by God, whether He creates it in our heart, in our sense organ, or wherever He wills), automatic causality (“as a necessary consequence of God’s having created the senses,” in al-Naẓẓām’s formulation, above, or simply from opening the eyes), or the requisite presence of an attribute or its opposite (Abū ʿAlī) – in any of these cases, it is always unacceptable for Bahshamīs insofar as it derives from some maʿnā.
As a postscript to this section, it should be pointed out that the Ashʿarites did indeed adopt this maʿnā-based perception whole-heartedly. Two examples will suffice to demonstrate this. First (al-Bāqillānī, d. 1013): “In reality, perception is something besides ‘touching,’ or the contiguity of the other sense organs to the objects of sense, or their substrates – nor is it any other type of contiguity.”67 Second (Ibn Fūrāk, d. 1015): “Perception is a maʿnā added to knowledge; it is from perception that knowledge is generated.”68 The technical terminology of the Ashʿarite theologians had evolved in precisely the same way as that of the Bahshamīs, so that Ibn Fūrāk can utter, as an Ashʿarite axiom, precisely what Ibn Mattawayh would condemn. As we shall see below, Ibn Mattawayh was content to distinguish perception and knowledge, however.
4 Condition-based Perception: The Bahshamī Line
Now, condition-based perception must be explicated with maximal subtlety lest one or another condition be called out as a maʿnā, that is, a determining factor. This is how Ibn Mattawayh sets out to explain it:
Know that the one who perceives, by virtue of his being one who perceives, has a particular mode-of-being: for we distinguish between his perceiving an object and his not perceiving an object insofar as something obtains which goes back to the soul of the perceiver. This must be on account of a mode-of-being by virtue of his being one who perceives, just as we [speak of a mode-of-being by virtue] of his being one who wills, or who exerts antipathy, or who believes, such that it (the mode-of-being) comes to be existent with respect to the soul.69
The idea here is that these modes-of-being (or, to put it simply, “states”) apply to any affection of the soul such that it is on account of such states that one is being such a way.70 If this seems like an overly fussy way to put it, we should note that these formulae were posited as a way to talk about divine attributes without threatening God’s unity – so that God might, for example, be able to know a particular object by virtue of His “being knowing” without insisting upon individual instances of knowledge (and all their vicissitudes) plaguing His divine consciousness.71
The relationship of perception to knowledge belongs properly to another chapter of kalām. Ibn Mattawayh used several arguments to establish the distinction: for example, one may perceive fleabites while asleep without “knowing” them.72 For our purposes, it is sufficient to note that for both Bahshamīs and Ashʿarites, perception is the “path” to knowledge: as such, for Ibn Mattawayh, the fact of perception may be a maʿnā for a particular instance of knowledge.
But of course the Bahshamīs could not simply say that we see by virtue of being seeing, with the help of the state of seeing: Abū Hāshim had introduced the four ‘conditions.’ Ibn Mattawayh goes to great pains to make sure that none of them become determining maʿānī. Although the condition of living applies to the perceiver, “being one who perceives does not derive from his being one who is living.”73 Similarly, “the existence of the object of perception cannot be a cause (ʿilla),” for various reasons. His argument about the soundness of the (organ(s) of) sense is more carefully elaborated:
The (organs of) sense and their soundness cannot be an “effective ground”74 in this case, effectuating causes, for the senses considered in themselves derive from the part [i.e., the physical organs], whereas the one who perceives derives his being one who perceives from the totality; the causality applicable to that which is derived from the totality cannot be that which is derived from the parts. It follows that the senses do not correctly obtain unless he [i.e., the whole subject] is one who perceives, even if the object of perception is non-existent – for that (too) would be due to causes.75
The language used here for the way in which the sense organs are efficacious (taʾthīr) strongly suggests an Aristotelian model in the background. Recall that of the early Muʿtazilites, only al-Naẓẓām involved the sense organs themselves in the causal programme for the experience of perception, and even he made them tools of God’s act. One possible target here, however, could be Bishr ibn al-Muʿtamir, whose “secondarily generated effects” model of causality, applied (as we have seen) to perception, did indeed put proximate causes (asbāb) in the sense organs; arguing that the “attribute” of perception must apply to the entire living being, and not to one or some of its parts, Ibn Mattawayh mentions Bishr’s position.76 Yet Ibn Mattawayh’s claim has a broader significance with respect to totalities: one is not perceiving, knowing, living, or willing by virtue of a part, but as a whole. This argument is crucial for Bahshamī theology as a theory of divine attributes which preserves the unity of God, but it also serves as a tacit rejection of faculty psychology.
The final condition, the absence of hindrances, is easily explained, unless one posits the non-existent as causally efficacious (of course, the early Muʿtazilites did precisely that!77 ). In the end, “there is nothing left to this but to say that one is a perceiver on account of a cause, which is perception.”78 That “cause” is just the fact of perception itself, however: Ibn Mattawayh has carefully ruled out the causal efficacy of each of the four conditions. There is no maʿnā we can point to.
5 Conclusion: Revisiting the (Arabic) Aristotelian Context
Richard Frank noted that this kalam discussion
is rendered somewhat complicated by the authors’ desire to maintain the univocity of the expression ‘to be perceiving’ while explaining, at the same time, how the corporeal being and how God, the incorporeal, can be said truly and strictly to perceive the perceptible.79
In Frank’s view, the conflation of human and divine modes of perception was the major challenge facing Bahshamī theorists. But by reading the entire controversy (which is just one node in the overall discussion of perception) from the human side, I propose that we can see these writers girding themselves for a fight against the philosophers, and not their Ashʿarite rivals.
The technical terminology is consistent with, and the Bahshamī categories of ‘conditions’ to be denuded of maʿnā-efficacy are recognisable in, contemporary philosophical literature. This is especially striking in the late ninth-century translation of the Placita philosophorum. Here we find the Stoics claiming that an instance of perception (idrāk) occurs “by virtue of the senses, and by virtue of the primary organ [i.e., the hēgemonikón] itself.”80 Leucippus and Democritus are said to claim that sensation “occurs by virtue of forms which occur to us from outside.”81
The entire Bahshamī argument is informed by the Arabic reading of Aristotle I drew out in section 1.2 above. It is not an exceptional reading; to cite one modern interpreter (Marmodoro): in Aristotle, “the power to perceive, defined more generally, is the ability of the senses to be causally acted upon by perceptible objects in the world.”82
The development of this objection to maʿnā-based perception is designed to apply to the Aristotelian model as well, insofar as it was reconfigured by Avicenna. For Avicenna, sense perception is the reception by some means of a ‘form’ from the sensible object or, in some cases, from another source.83 The parallel development of ‘states’-based psychology, in which the whole being of the perceiver experiences perception, though it is based in divine ontology, allowed latter-day Muʿtazilites to proceed without recourse to faculty psychology. The peculiarities of Ashʿarite maʿnā-based perception, however, paved the way for later Ashʿarites to embrace the Avicennan model of perception: al-Ghazālī did not object to it, and indeed exploited the Avicennan process to argue for God’s knowledge of particulars; Fakhr al-Dīn accepted sense impression models while arguing for yet another sort of maʿnāic intervention – the definition of perception as a “relation” (al-nisba al-iḍāfiyya) obtaining between the perceiver and the object.84 Post-Avicennan writers were often flummoxed by the proliferation of mental events in Avicenna’s psychology, which included (in ascending order of rarefication) forms, maʿānī, and objects of intellection in a complex web of immaterial transactions, but only the Bahshamīs were willing to throw them all out. The baby with the bathwater was the theory of internal faculties, but the Bahshamīs were not at all sorry to see it off as well.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Sten Ebbesen, Christina Thomsen Thörnqvist, Mika Perälä, Michael Noble, and Jari Kaukua, as well as the rest of the Representation and Reality team, for suggestions and comments; the anonymous reviewer assigned by Brill was particularly helpful.
This term will be explained below (section 1.1), along with its Ashʿarite and Bahshamī variations (section 1.3).
The most comprehensive study of the growth and diversification of Muʿtazilite thought in the eighth–ninth centuries is Josef van Ess, Theologie und Gesellschaft im 2. und 3. Jahrhundert Hidschra, 6 vols. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1991–97).
The Bahshamī movement defined itself as the successors to Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī (d. 933), the son of al-Ashʿarī’s Muʿtazilite master. They are also known as the “Basran” lineage of later Muʿtazilism, as opposed to the “Baghdad” Muʿtazilites. The classic study of Basran/Bahshamī Muʿtazilite theory is Richard Frank, Beings and Their Attributes: The Teaching of the Basrian School of the Muʿtazila in the Classical Period (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1978).
See al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt al-islāmiyyīn, ed. H. Ritter, 4th ed. (Beirut: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2005), 329–34. An accident such as “knowing” or “knowledge” would, of course, require an object. Knowledge of such-and-such an object would be an accident distinct from knowledge of another object. It is only in later Muʿtazilism, and specifically in the Bahshamī tradition, that “modes” or “states” of knowing (for example) were introduced to streamline what could only become an increasingly top-heavy taxonomy of accidents. Like many Muʿtazilite innovations, this was designed to apply to the problem of divine attributes. See Jan Thiele, “Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī’s (d. 321/933) Theory of ‘States’ (aḥwāl) and Its Adaptation by Ashʿarite Theologians,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology, ed. S. Schmidtke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 364–83.
Some materialists in the Muʿtazilite Umwelt held that the objects of sense perception – instances of colour, taste, scent, sound, and palpable qualities – were essentially interchangeable or identical, distinguished only upon the imposition of some impediment. Since the perceiving subject is also made up out of perceptible properties, a relation of the
redness in an object to the redness latent in a perceiver could be conceived as a relation of identity or assimilation.
Several Muʿtazilites are reported to have advocated for a sixth (and sometimes seventh) sense for the perception of pleasure and pain. Ḍirār ibn ʿAmr (d. 796) held that a sixth sense is generated in resurrected humans so that they may perceive God’s māhiyya (essence). Problems concerning the theological promise of a “vision of God” abounded in kalām literature; some theologians even went so far as to posit sensible properties for God.
For example, Abū l-Hudhayl (d. 841) held that “motion” is an object of vision: al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 361.
In the continuation of the passage just referred to, Abū l-Hudhayl suggests that we “touch” motion by touching a body in motion and distinguishing it from that which is not in motion. Others held that colours are themselves bodies, and that the composite substances we take to exist around us are only combinations of corporeal, sensible properties. Still others held that we “see bodies, [denying] that we could see colour, motion […] or any other accident.” These positions are reported in Maqālāt, 361–63.
The most recent comprehensive survey of this phenomenon, including a detailed account of the texts translated and their current status (extant or lost) is Dimitri Gutas, “The Rebirth of Philosophy and the Translations into Arabic,” in Philosophy in the Islamic World, vol. 1, 8th–10th Centuries, ed. U. Rudolph et al., trans. R. Hansberger (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 95–142. See also his seminal work on the subject: Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: The Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ʿAbbasid Society (2nd–4th/8th–10th Centuries) (London: Routledge, 1988).
The only extant version is an edition purporting to be the translation of Isḥāq ibn Ḥunayn, published by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Badawi, Aristūṭālīs fī l-nafs (hereafter: “Badawi, Aristūṭālīs”) (Cairo: Dirāsāt islāmiyya, 1954), 3–88. Avicenna used another translation in addition to this one for his “glosses” on the text: see Dimitri Gutas, “Avicenna’s Marginal Glosses on De anima and the Greek Commentarial Tradition,” in Philosophy, Science and Exegesis in Greek, Arabic and Latin Commentaries, ed. P. Adamson et al. (London: Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, 2004), 2:77–88. On the puzzles regarding which translation was in use by whom, and the problems with Badawi’s attestation of Isḥāq for his text (first questioned by R. M. Frank), see Alfred Ivry, “The Arabic text of Aristotle’s ‘De anima’ and Its Translator,” Oriens 36 (2001): 59–77. In the few passages cited in this chapter, I use the text in Badawi’s edition: for my purposes, it does not matter whose translation it is, especially since scholars are now in agreement that it is earlier than Isḥāq’s.
The surviving Arabic version of the Parva naturalia is a free adaptation incorporating Neoplatonic and other non-Aristotelian elements: see Rotraud Hansberger, “Kitāb al-Ḥiss wa-l-maḥsūs: Aristotle’s Parva naturalia in Arabic Guise,” in Les Parva Naturalia d’Aristote, ed. C. Grellard and P.-M. Morel (Paris: Sorbonne, 2010), 143–62. The Arabic version, however, is missing the bulk of the first section, which corresponded to the Sens.
Among the most notable of these was a compendium attributed to the translator Ibn al-Biṭrīq and consistent with the style of the “al-Kindī circle.” This work seems to rely upon Philoponus’ commentary (on de An.) and the Alexandrian tradition; thus it was based on a later Greek source. That it was subsequently translated into Persian as late as the thirteenth century testifies to its abiding influence. For this text, see Rüdiger Arnzen, Aristoteles’ De anima: Eine verlorene spätantike Paraphrase in arabischer und persicher Überlieferung (Leiden: Brill, 1998). The most useful study of Arabic sources related to De anima remains Helmut Gätje, Studien zur Überlieferung der aristotelischen Psychologie im Islam (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1971). Much of Alexander’s output on the soul and that of Themistius was transmitted into Arabic as well; on the influence of the Greek commentary tradition on Arabic philosophy (particularly in psychology), see Robert Wisnovsky, Avicenna’s Metaphysics in Context (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003).
De An. 2.5, 417a17–18 (all translations of de An. are from Aristotle, De anima, trans. C. Shields (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016)):
Badawi, Aristūṭālīs, 42 (all translations from Arabic are by the author):
In itself, that construction – the verb is w-ṣ-l (I) ilā – has the special connotation of “connection,” or of putting (two) things into a relation, which will come into play below.
De An. 2.5, 417b19–21.
Badawi, Aristūṭālīs, 43:
See, for example, al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 380.11–12. I am grateful to an anonymous reader for drawing my attention to Frede’s recognition of the juridical aspect also present in the development of the Greek concept of “cause”: see Michael Frede, “The Original Notion of Cause,” in Doubt and Dogmatism: Studies in Hellenistic Epistemology, ed. J. Barnes, M. F. Burnyeat, and M. Schofield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 217–49.
For a recent survey of Islamic occasionalism see Ulrich Rudolph, “Occasionalism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Islamic Theology, ed. S. Schmidtke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 347–63.
Another significant dispute between Ashʿarites and later Muʿtazilites concerned the vision of God, which the latter held to be impossible or nonsensical. Leaning on the literalist reading of the Qurʾān and applying the rule of God’s omnipotence, al-Ashʿarī allowed it.
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira fī aḥkām al-jawāhir wa-l-aʿrāḍ, ed. D. Gimaret, 2 vols. (Cairo: Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale, 2009), 700.17–18:
David Bennett, “Introducing the Maʿānī,” in Forms of Representation in the Aristotelian Tradition, Volume Three: Concept Formation (Leiden: Brill, 2022), 78–94. See also Seyed Mousavian, “Avicenna on the Semantics of Maʿnā,” (ibid., 95–140). As we will see below, the term often establishes some sort of causal efficacy, but it generally stands for anything which can be cognised as a distinct and abiding concept.
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 701.6–7:
See Frank, Beings, 154–55.
This way of talking about states as properties is characteristic of kalām: “knowledge” (ʿilm) is discussed the same way, without reference to the object of knowledge except insofar as it is an object of knowledge (maʿlūm). In this way, kalām may be considered a “grammar” for philosophy; a particular practitioner may consider only accidents, or only certain accidents, to be suitable objects of knowledge (or perception), but the general logic would still have to apply. We will see this very clearly when we go in detail over Ibn Mattawayh’s reconstruction of earlier viewpoints as positing that perception is a maʿnā: that maʿnā, for the later commentator, stands for any conceivable causally efficacious ground.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 312.1–2:
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 569.10.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 361.9–15.
As for divine attributes (which include the Quranically sanctioned properties of “seeing” and “hearing”), we will find Abū l-Hudhayl’s views more influential (see below).
Reading, with van Ess and Bernand, yaḥḍuru bihi: van Ess, Theologie, 5:439n49.
ʿAbd al-Jabbār, al-Mughnī fī abwāb al-tawḥīd wa-l-ʿadl, vol. 9: Tawlīd, ed. Ṭawfīq al-Ṭawīl and Saʿīd Zāyid (Cairo: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa wa-al-Irshād al-Qawmī, n.d.), 9.12.13–17:
Note that fiʿl li-llāh, “an act brought about by God,” is an editorial emendation of fiʿl allāh, “an/the act of God.”
Van Ess stressed Abū l-Hudhayl’s naivety, or comparative disinterest, towards the problem: “obgleich [Abū l-Hudhayl] die Vorstellung der Seele nicht kennt und auch die Notwendigkeit eines sensus communis noch nicht entdeckt hat, versteht er Wahrnehmung doch als seelischen Vorgang; sie gehört zu den afʿāl al-qulūb [the acts of hearts]. Gerade deswegen ist sie natürlich auch der Verfügung des Menschen entzogen; daß dieser seine Augen öffnen und schließen kann, ist dabei völlig unwesentlich.” (Theologie, 3:250.)
Briefly: we will see below how “knowledge” and “perception” are distinguished by Ibn Mattawayh. But even among the early Muʿtazilites, there was extensive discussion about the material extent of perception. Figures such as Abū l-Hudhayl would be careful to keep colour out of the “organ” (as it were: for Abū l-Hudhayl, this is just the [mind-like] heart), whereas more devoted materialists such as al-Naẓẓām held that colour (as a corporeal property-body) is really manifested in the “organ” (in his case, spirit). It does not arrive there in a very Aristotelian way, but rather “leaps” from the object of perception. Al-Naẓẓām’s position is difficult to explain, especially given his more general statements about perception, which we will encounter immediately below.
ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Al-Mughnī, 9.12.11–12:
Van Ess, Theologie, 6:119.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 382.7.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 382.8–9.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 383.10: this is precisely Ḍirār’s position with respect to acts.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 383.11–12. This group would be those associated with Abū l-Qāsim al-Balkhī (d. 931); see Racha el Omari, The Theology of Abū l-Qāsim al-Balkhī/al-Kaʿbī (Leiden: Brill, 2016), who does not mention this passage, but whose conclusions regarding al-Balkhī in the Maqālāt would suggest the identification.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 382.12–14:
Those who “posited” the real nature of the divine attributes.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 383.1.
See van Ess, Theologie, 3:68–70 for a pithy summary.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 386.15–16:
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 386.17–18.
The MSS read baṣar, i.e. “vision,” here, but as the editor points out, this must be a mistake?
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 387.1–6.
Gerhard Endress and Peter Adamson, “Abū Yūsuf al-Kindī,” in Philosophy in the Islamic World, vol. 1: 8th–10th Centuries, ed. U. Rudolph et al., trans. R. Hansberger (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 197.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 383.3–9.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 570.1–6. This is in a section of the Maqālāt about which there are authenticity issues; see James Weaver, “A Footnote to the Composition History of the Maqālāt al-islāmiyyīn: the Internal Parallels in al-Ashʿarī’s Material on the Shia,” Journal of Abbasid Studies 4 (2017): 142–86.
This is a longstanding rule in kalām, that two bodies may not occupy the same place – it was flaunted, notoriously, by al-Naẓẓām, who insisted that opposing jawāhir (for him, bodies) always existed in the same substrate, at mutually opposing degrees of latency/manifestation. See David Bennett, “Abū Isḥāq al-Naẓẓām: The Ultimate Constituents of Nature Are Simple Properties and rūḥ,” in Abbasid Studies IV: Proceedings of the 2010 Meeting of the School of Abbasid Studies, ed. by M. Bernards (Exeter: Gibb Memorial Trust, 2014), 207–17.
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 570.7–10.
I have to be careful with the English expression here, since it is by no means clear whether the Muʿtazilites distinguished between an organ of sense and the action of sensation when they use the term al-ḥāssa.
ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Al-Mughnī fī abwāb al-tawḥīd wa-l-ʿadl, vol. 4: Ruʾyat al-Bārī, ed. M. M. Ḥilmī and Abū l-Wafāʾ al-Junaymī (Cairo: Wizārat al-Thaqāfa wa-l-Irshād al-Qawmī, n.d.), 4.50.2–6:
ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Al-Mughnī 4.55.15–20 (notice how polite he is about his predecessors, as long as they are Muʿtazilites!):
Like nearly all of the hundreds of texts attributed to 9th century Muʿtazilites, it is lost.
ʿAbd al-Jabbār, Al-Mughnī, 4.51.2–3.
On the taxonomy of attributes, see especially the study by Frank, Beings.
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 700.18.
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 700. 19–21:
See van Ess, Theologie, 3:423–24.
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 699.11–12.
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 701.1–2.
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 701.4–5:
Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 402.1–3.
Al-Bāqillānī, Kitāb al-Tamhīd, ed. R. J. McCarthy (Beirut: al-Maktaba al-Sharqiyya, 1957), 11.11–13:
Ibn Fūrāk, Mujarrad Maqālāt al-Ashʿarī, ed. D. Gimaret (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1987), 18.1:
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 697.3–5:
On states, see Thiele, “Abū Hāshim.”
Abū Hāshim al-Jubbāʾī introduced the usage of akwān for divine attributes. Abū l-Hudhayl had held that God is “knowing by virtue of a knowledge which is He” (Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt 165, and many other places), that is, he identified God’s knowledge with God; other Muʿtazilites posited discrete instances of knowledge as the objects of God’s being a (the) knower. Muʿammar left his signature in this discussion as well, claiming that “God is knowing by virtue of an instance of knowledge, and […] the instance of knowledge He has in turn has a maʿnā, and that maʿnā has a maʿnā, and so on without end” (Al-Ashʿarī, Maqālāt, 168.9–10). You can see how this would annoy the Bahshamīs, among others.
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 697.
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 698.11.
Borrowing Frank’s terminology: Beings, 155.
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 700.9–12:
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 698.17.
See David Bennett, “Things,” in Essence and Thingness, ed. M. Lamanna and F. Marrone (Turnhout: Brepols, forthcoming).
Ibn Mattawayh, al-Tadhkira, 700.15.
Frank, Beings, 154.
Hans Daiber, Aetius Arabus (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1980), 196/53.5.
Daiber, Aetius, 196/53.15.
Anna Marmodoro, Aristotle on Perceiving Objects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 80.
See for example Dag Hasse, “Avicenna’s Epistemological Optimism,” in Interpreting Avicenna: Critical Essays, ed. P. Adamson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 109–19.
On these post-Avicennan developments, see now Laura Hassan, “Sense Perception in Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī: A Theologian’s Encounter with Avicennan Psychology,” in Philosophical Problems in Sense Perception: Testing the Limits of Aristotelianism, ed. D. Bennett and J. Toivanen (Cham: Springer, 2020), 161–84.