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Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence)

Averroes defends cause and effect, an eternal world and the philosophers themselves against al-Ghazālī's charge that their teaching was unbelief.

by Averroes546 passages held

  • Arabic, the original language
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Original title
Tahāfut al-tahāfut
Original language
Arabic

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Overview

Around 1095 al-Ghazālī, the most celebrated theologian of his day, then teaching in Baghdad, wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers: twenty arguments that the philosophers, Avicenna above all, could not prove what they claimed, and that on three points their teaching amounted to unbelief — that the world has no beginning, that God knows particular things only in a universal way, and that the resurrection of the body is a figure of speech. Averroes answered around 1180, when al-Ghazālī had been dead for nearly seventy years. Tahāfut al-tahāfut is an independent work of argument, not a commentary on Aristotle, though it is built like one: it quotes al-Ghazālī by name, passage by passage, and replies to each in turn, through all twenty questions from the eternity of the world to the resurrection. Its best-known pages defend cause and effect. Al-Ghazālī had argued that fire does not burn cotton; God creates the burning whenever the two meet. Averroes replies that whoever denies causes denies reason itself, since to know a thing is to know it through its causes. Again and again he grants that al-Ghazālī has scored a point against Avicenna, and then argues that the weak argument was Avicenna's, not Aristotle's, so that much of the book defends Aristotle from both of them. The book left little mark on later thought in the Islamic world. In Europe it became the Destructio destructionum: one Latin version was made in 1328, and another, translated from a Hebrew version, appeared in 1527. Averroes ended it by asking God's pardon for having written on such matters at all, pleading only the need to seek the truth with those fit to seek it.

Key concepts

Which three teachings did al-Ghazālī call unbelief?

Three of his twenty charges went beyond error to unbelief: that the world has no beginning, that God knows particular things only in a universal way, and that the resurrection of the body is a figure of speech. The other seventeen he counted as mistakes or innovations. Averroes answers all twenty in order, but these three carry the weight, because on them hung the question of whether a philosopher could be a Muslim.

What is a thing's "nature" in the argument about causes?

A nature is the power in a thing by which it acts in its own way: the heat by which fire burns, the weight by which a stone falls. Averroes holds that natures make things what they are, since we define fire by what fire does. If fire had no power to burn, it would not be fire at all. Denying natures therefore takes away the things themselves, not only their effects.

Why does Averroes keep calling arguments "dialectical" in this book?

A dialectical argument starts from opinions that are widely held, not from premises known to be certain, so it can persuade but not prove. Averroes uses the word as a verdict, again and again, on al-Ghazālī's arguments and on many of Avicenna's. His point is that the book is mostly an exchange of such arguments, and that the real proofs belong to the sciences, where they take far longer.

Why does every coming-into-being need matter, according to Averroes?

Before something comes to be, it must have been possible, and a possibility needs something it belongs to, a subject that is able to become the new thing. Averroes calls that bearer matter. A world that came to be after absolute nothing would have had no bearer for its possibility. The argument is one of his chief replies to al-Ghazālī's claim that the world was possible before it existed.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Fire, Cotton and Reason

Does fire burn cotton, or does God burn it each time the two touch? At stake is whether the world can be understood at all.

Al-Ghazālī had argued that nothing in fire makes cotton burn: God creates the burning whenever the two meet, and what we call a cause is only a sequence we are used to seeing. Averroes answers that things have natures, powers by which each acts in its own way, and that a thing's definition names what it does. Take the causes away and nothing can be known, because to know a thing is to know it through its causes. God acts through the order he gave things, not against it.

  • causation
  • knowledge
  • demonstration
  • possibility
  • divine action
  • matter and form
  • analogy

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A World Without a First Day

Could the world have no beginning and still be God's work? Averroes thinks the eternal world is the better account of creation, not a denial of it.

The first and longest discussion takes up al-Ghazālī's charge that the philosophers deny creation. Averroes argues that an eternal will cannot postpone its act without a reason, that time cannot begin because every before is already time, and that every coming-to-be needs a matter that was able to become. None of this makes the world independent of God. It is eternally brought into being by him, and the dispute with the theologians is over what kind of making creation is, not whether there is a maker.

  • eternity
  • time
  • creation
  • divine will
  • motion
  • celestial motion
  • infinite regress
  • cosmology
  • first cause

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What God Knows

Does God know each single thing and person, or only the general order? The answer has to avoid making God's mind change with the world.

Al-Ghazālī's second charge was that the philosophers made God ignorant of individual things. Averroes replies that both sides make the same mistake, measuring God's knowledge by ours. Ours is caused by things and comes in two kinds, of the general and of the single case. God's knowledge is the cause of things and is neither kind. Along the way he concedes that many of Avicenna's arguments about God's unity and attributes are weak, and argues that the weakness belongs to Avicenna, not to the philosophers he followed.

  • divine knowledge
  • divine attributes
  • divine simplicity
  • divine unity
  • necessary existence
  • intellect
  • soul
  • composition
  • metaphysics

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
546
distinct concepts
406
by passages held, corpus-wide
#131

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “causation” and “eternity”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 24 pairings. 88 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
causationeternity36
causationmetaphysics26
causationdivine knowledge21
causationcosmology18
causationdivine attributes17
causationintellect16
divine knowledgeintellect10
causationdemonstration9
demonstrationintellect8
cosmologyeternity7
demonstrationdivine knowledge6
divine attributesdivine knowledge6
cosmologydemonstration4
cosmologyintellect4
divine attributesintellect4
divine attributesmetaphysics4
divine knowledgemetaphysics3
intellectmetaphysics3
demonstrationdivine attributes2
demonstrationmetaphysics2
eternitymetaphysics2
cosmologymetaphysics1
divine attributeseternity1
divine knowledgeeternity1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Decisive Treatise and Epistle Dedicatory (Faṣl al-maqāl)

    The legal case for philosophy, written around 1179: the first of three works from those years on religion and reason, followed by an exposition of the proofs of doctrine and by the Incoherence of the Incoherence.

     AR
  2. Tafsīr mā baʿd al-ṭabīʿa

    One of his last commentaries, from around 1190, and the fullest of his three on the Metaphysics, after an early epitome and a middle commentary finished in Córdoba in 1174.

     AR
  3. Tahafut al-Tahafut (The Incoherence of the Incoherence) (Tahāfut al-tahāfut) you are here AR
  4. Talkhīṣ manṭiq Arisṭū

    The earliest layer of his work on Aristotle: most of these commentaries were finished by the mid-1170s, though the long commentary on the Posterior Analytics belongs to his last years.

     AR
  5. Talkhīṣāt al-ṭabīʿiyyāt

    His first commentaries on Aristotle's science of nature; the long commentaries on On the Heavens and On the Soul, which reached Latin in the thirteenth century, came much later.

     AR
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