Welcome back to the Deep Dive. We've got a stack
of notes today that honestly feels a bit heavy,
not just physically, but historically. It does.
We are looking at a figure who is, well, titan
is a word that gets thrown around a lot. It really
does. But in this case, it might actually be
an understatement. I completely agree. We're
talking about someone who exists in the background
of, I mean, almost all modern intellectual history.
Right. Yet if you stop someone on the street,
they probably couldn't tell you a single thing
he actually believed. Right. They might know
the name or, you know, maybe they've seen a statue
of him in Spain, but they don't really know him.
We're talking about Ibn Rushd. Ibn Rushd. Or
as he's much, much more famously known in the
Western world, Averroes. The man from Cordoba.
Exactly. And looking at the research here, the
biography, the philosophy, the medical treatises,
it feels like we aren't just looking at a scholar.
We're looking at an intellectual bridge. That's
the perfect word for it. The specific human link
between the Islamic Golden Age and what became
the European Renaissance. That's the key takeaway
right at the top. I mean, if you want to understand
how the works of Aristotle survived the, quote,
dark ages and eventually sparked the fire of
the Renaissance, you can't just jump from ancient
Greece to Renaissance Italy. It doesn't work
that way. You have to go through Cordoba. You
have to go through Ibn Rushd. You have to. So
to give you a sense of the weight this guy carried,
just picture the Middle Ages. You're a student
in Paris reading, say, Thomas Aquinas or Dante,
if they referred to the philosopher with a capital
P, who are they talking about? They meant Aristotle.
No name needed. It was just understood. He was
simply the philosopher. But then if they said
the commentator with a capital C. That was Averroes
every time. He was the guy. He wasn't just someone
who read Aristotle. He was the lens through which
the entire Western world came to understand him.
Which is a massive legacy on its own. I mean,
that's enough for one lifetime. But what's wild
about digging into this research is that his
resume is it's frantic. It's all over the place.
He wasn't just a philosopher. Not at all. Not
even close. He was a quaddie. A high -ranking
judge. Okay. He was a physician who, and this
is incredible, basically revolutionized how we
understand the human eye. We're definitely getting
to that. And he was an astronomer who was tracking
sunspots long before telescopes were a thing.
And, of course, the philosopher who made the
incredibly brave orb. Or maybe dangerous argument
that religion and reason aren't enemies. Which,
spoiler alert, is an argument that got him into
a whole lot of trouble. So that is our mission
today. We are going to unpack the life of the
man who saved Aristotle for Europe, who challenged
the entire medical establishment of his time,
and who proposed a theory about our minds that
was so controversial it literally got his followers
condemned by the Catholic Church. It's a story
of genius, political intrigue, and really a legacy
that split the world in two. Let's start at the
beginning. Set the scene for us. Where does a
guy like this even come from? All right. So we're
in Al -Andalus. That's modern day Spain. The
year is 1126. He's born in Cordoba on April 14th.
And you have to understand, Cordoba at this time
wasn't just the city. It was, for all intents
and purposes, the city. It was the intellectual
capital of the entire Western Islamic world.
A center of learning, science, culture, everything.
And he's not exactly born into obscurity, is
he? I mean, his family background is significant.
Oh, far from it. Ibn Rushd comes from a dynasty
of law. His grandfather, who confusingly was
also named Ibn Rushd. Of course. So historians
usually clear it up by calling him the grandfather.
He was the imam of the great mosque of Cordoba.
He was a massive, massive legal authority. That
is some serious pressure. That's like being born
into a family where your grandfather was the
chief justice of the Supreme Court. Yeah. And
everyone is just looking at you and expecting
you to keep up. And he was put on that track
from day one. His education is described in all
the sources as excellent. which in that context
means exhaustive. He memorized the muwata. It's
the magnum opus of Maliki jurisprudence. Maliki
being one of the four major schools of Sunni
Islamic law. Correct. So he's studying Hadith,
the traditions of the prophet. He's studying
theology, jurisprudence, the whole religious
curriculum. But then he pivots. He starts studying
medicine and philosophy. And he's not just sitting
in a library reading dusty scrolls. He's out
there. He's networking. He is. This is key. I
found this note about him joining a regular meeting
of philosophers and physicians in Seville. to
picture it like the ultimate intellectual salon
of the 12th century. The place to be. It really
was. This is where the magic happened. He's rubbing
shoulders with people like Ibn Tufayl. Now, Ibn
Tufayl is a big deal in his own right. He's a
famous philosopher and, more importantly, the
court physician to the caliph. So this networking
wasn't just social. It was his gateway to power.
It was everything. And that leads us to the...
The cinematic moment, the real turning point
of his life. It's 1169. Averroes is introduced
to the Almohad Caliph, Abu Yaqub Yusuf. OK, so
paint the picture. This is a high stakes room
to be in. Extremely high stakes. The Almohads
were a religious dynasty and they were generally
considered quite strict, even fundamentalist
in some ways. They came to power on a platform
of religious reform. So. Not exactly the kind
of guys you'd expect to be chatting about philosophy.
Not at all. But this particular caliph, Abu Yaqub,
had a secret. He was an intellectual. He loved
philosophy. He was a closet nerd. So Avros walks
in, introduced by his powerful friend, Ibn Tufayl.
And the caliph doesn't ask him about the weather.
He hits him with a trap question. It's the ultimate
trap. The caliph looks at him and asks, are the
heavens eternal or did they have a beginning?
Okay, let's just pause and unpack why this is
terrifying. To a modern ear, that sounds like
an astrophysics question, a fun debate. Why is
he sweating bullets? Because in 1169, that's
not a question about astrophysics. It's a question
of heresy versus loyalty. Explain that. Okay,
so if you say the heavens are eternal, meaning
the universe has always existed with no beginning,
you are agreeing with Aristotle. That's the philosopher's
answer. But you are directly contradicting the
orthodox religious view that God created the
universe at a specific moment in time. Ex nihilo.
Out of nothing. Okay, so if he says eternal,
he's a heretic in the eyes of the religious establishment.
A potential heretic. At the very least, he's
on thin ice. But if he says, no, they had a beginning.
He's contradicting the very philosophy he spent
his life studying. He's committing intellectual
suicide in front of a caliph who he knows is
interested in philosophy. That's so lose -lose.
Yeah. There's no right answer. None. And Averroes
knows it. The sources say he just stayed silent.
He was terrified. He probably thought his career
was over before it began. Or worse. The silence
in that room must have been agonizing. You can
just imagine it. But then the caliph does something
completely unexpected. He sees that Averroes
is panicked, so he turns to Ibn Tufayl and starts
answering the question himself. The caliph starts
quoting Plato and Aristotle. He starts discussing
the nuance of the argument. So he was testing
him. He wanted a thinking partner. I think it's
a bit of both. He was signaling, it's okay, I'm
one of you. You can speak freely here. He was
showing his hand. And it works. It works. Once
Averroes realizes the caliph is one of them,
intellectually speaking, he relaxes. He joins
the conversation and he impresses the caliph
so much that the caliph admits something to him.
He says that Aristotle's original works are just
difficult to understand, too obscure. And that
is the moment. That's when the commentator is
born. That is the exact moment. The caliph gives
him the commission of a lifetime. Explain, Aristotle.
Write commentaries. Make his work accessible.
That single conversation launched a career that
would literally shape Western thought for the
next. 400 years. But here's the thing I want
to drill down on. Yeah. He wasn't just summarizing
Aristotle for a book club. This wasn't a casual
project. He was stepping into an absolute war
zone. Oh, yeah. The intellectual climate at the
time wasn't exactly friendly to philosophy, was
it? Not at all. This brings us to the core conflict
of his life, what he called the harmony of religion
and philosophy. You have to understand, just
before Averroes, there was this massive sustained
attack on philosophy led by the brilliant theologian
Al -Ghazali. Al -Ghazali, the guy who wrote Ta
Fut Al -Fal Asifa. Which translates to the incoherence
of the philosophers. Which, frankly, is just
a brutal title for a book. It's a diss track.
It's a philosophical diss track, and it was incredibly
effective. What was his argument? Al -Ghazali
argued that philosophers, especially those who
followed Aristotle, were essentially non -believers.
He picked apart their logic on about 20 different
points, specifically things like the creation
of the world and God's knowledge of particulars,
and said it was incompatible with Islam. And
this was the prevailing mood. Philosophy was
seen as suspect, foreign, maybe even dangerous.
Exactly. So Avaros decides to write a point -by
-point rebuttal, and he titles it, wait for it,
Tawfud al -Tawfud. The incoherence of the incoherence.
He's throwing it right back. He's saying, no,
your attack on philosophy is what's actually
incoherent. But beyond the snappy titles, what
was his actual defense? This is the crucial part.
How do you reconcile reason and revelation when
they seem to say completely opposite things?
His core thesis is found in a shorter book, a
little gem called The Decisive Treatise. And
the argument is beautiful in its simplicity.
He just says truth cannot contradict truth. OK,
expand on that. What does that mean in practice?
Well, he argues that the revelation in the Quran
is true. That's his baseline. He's a devout believer.
Right. But he also argues that philosophy, which
is just the rigorous use of human reason, also
leads to truth. Since there is only one ultimate
truth. These two paths, revelation and reason,
cannot possibly conflict in the end. They have
to lead to the same place. Okay, but they often
seem to conflict. I mean, scripture says one
thing, science or logic says another. That's
the whole problem. And this is his brilliant
move. Averroes says that if they appear to conflict,
it's not because reason is wrong. It's because
we are interpreting the scripture too literally.
So if science proves... say that the earth revolves
around the sun and reversing the Quran seems
to say the sun moves, he's saying you shouldn't
throw out the science. Correct. He argues that
in those specific cases, the scripture must be
interpreted allegorically, metaphorically. He's
saying the sacred text is using an image to convey
a deeper truth to the common people. But the
philosopher, the person of demonstration, can
understand the literal scientific reality behind
that metaphor. That feels incredibly modern.
That's basically how many religious scientists
operate today. It was revolutionary. But he went
even further. He didn't just say philosophy was
allowed. He argued that the Quran actually obligates
the intellectual elite to study it. How did he
justify that? He pointed to verses that tell
believers to reflect on God's creation, on the
heavens and the earth. He said, look, God gave
us minds. He gave us this incredible creation.
He clearly wants us to use our brains to understand
his work. The creation reveals the creator. The
artisan, as he called him. The artisan. So for
him, philosophy wasn't just allowed. It was the
highest form of worship. It was mandatory for
those capable of it. But he didn't think everyone
should be doing this, right? This is a key distinction.
He wasn't a Democrat about knowledge. No, absolutely
not. And this is where we have to be careful
not to paint him as a modern liberal. He was
an elitist through and through. He believed in
a very strict hierarchy of intellect. Right.
He broke society down into three classes based
on how they digest truth. Yes. And this is fascinating.
Let's go through them. OK. First, you have the
rhetorical class. This is the vast majority of
people. the masses they are moved by persuasion
by sermons by poetry emotion and simple stories
so that's the sunday sermon or a politician giving
a stump speech they respond to the literal surface
level text of scripture exactly and that's what
keeps them virtuous it's what they need then
you move up a level to the dialectical class
and these these are the theologians The debaters,
they use logic, but they use it to defend premises
they already believe in. They aren't really searching
for new truth. They're defending the fort. The
apologists. The apologists. And finally, at the
very top of the pyramid, you have the demonstrative
class. The philosophers. The philosophers, the
guys who do the math. They use pure, cold, logical
deduction to arrive at absolute proof. For Averroes,
this demonstrative truth was the highest form.
But, and here's the catch. He believed it was
incredibly dangerous to mix the levels. Dangerous
how? What did he think would happen? He thought
if you took these high -level philosophical proofs,
which might sound like they contradict the literal
scripture, and you tried to explain them to the
rhetorical masses, you wouldn't enlighten them.
You would just confuse them, shake their faith,
and cause social chaos. So he was basically saying
the masses need the story. The philosophers need
the proof. It's all the same truth, but it has
to be packaged differently for different audiences.
Precisely. He effectively said to his fellow
philosophers, don't talk about this stuff in
public. It was a survival strategy for philosophy.
He wanted to protect the right to think freely,
but he thought the only way to do that was to
keep it within an elite closed circle. Which,
ironically, is probably one of the things that
got him in trouble later on. People don't like
being told there's a secret truth they're not
smart enough to handle. No, they do not. But
before we get to his downfall, we have to talk
about the idea that made him famous and infamous
in Europe. The one that really set the world
on fire. Ah, yes. Unity of the intellect. Monopsychism.
This is the big one. If you're a student of medieval
philosophy, this is the radioactive core of Averroism.
Okay, walk us through this. He's writing his
long commentary on Aristotle's On the Soul. And
he comes up with a theory that, you said it before,
it sounds like science fiction. It really does.
So he's trying to solve a problem in Aristotle
about how human beings come to know universal
truths. How do I know the concept of dog, not
just my specific dog, Fido? With the abstract
idea. Exactly. And his solution is to propose
that there is only one material intellect for
all of humanity. One mind. One mind. Shared by
everyone. Essentially, yes. He argues that this
intellect is a separate, eternal substance. It's
unmixed with any individual body, and it's singular.
Okay, I have to stop you there. Because... I'm
definitely thinking my own thoughts right now.
I hope so. I'm thinking about this microphone.
I'm thinking about lunch. You're thinking about
Aristotle. How can we possibly share one mind?
If we are all thinking different private things.
That is the million dollar question. And Averroes
had a very specific, very clever answer. He distinguished
between the universal intellect and something
he called FIC. FIC. F -I -K -R. In Latin, it
was translated as Cagitatio. And what is FIC?
FIC is the active consideration of specific things.
It's your brain processing sensory data. The
images you see from your eyes, the memories you
have of your childhood, the specific dog you
are looking at right now. Those are individual.
Those belong. So my memories are mine. My sensory
experiences are mine. That part is personal.
Yes. But the capacity to abstract that sensory
data into a universal concept, to understand
that this dog and that dog and every dog are
all part of the universal idea of dogness, or
to understand a mathematical proof like 2 plus
2 equals 4, that higher level processing happens
in the shared universal intellect. Okay, I'm
going to try an analogy here. Tell me if this
works. Go for it. It sounds like cloud computing.
Okay, go on. We all have our own laptops. That's
our bodies and our individual brains. I have
my own files on my desk. My laptop, my own photos.
That's my ficker, my memories. Right. But when
I want to run a massive calculation or access
the vastness of the Internet, I'm connecting
to the cloud. The cloud is one thing shared by
everyone. My laptop is just a terminal. That
is a surprisingly and slightly unnerving accurate
analogy for a 12th century metaphysical concept.
Yes. The cloud is the material intellect. It's
where true universal knowledge resides and happens.
Your brain is just the access point. So why was
this so controversial? On the surface, it sounds
kind of poetic. We're all connected. One humanity,
one mind. What's the problem? It sounds poetic
until you ask the immediate follow -up question,
what happens when I die? Oh, right. If the part
of me that is eternal, that is rational, the
part that truly thinks, if that part isn't mine
but just belongs to the shared cloud, then when
my laptop breaks, when my body dies, what's left
of me? My local files are gone. My terminal is
offline. And the cloud just keeps going without
me. Exactly. It directly implies there is no
personal immortality, no individual soul that
survives death to be judged, to be punished in
hell or rewarded in heaven. And for the medieval
Catholic Church and for mainstream Islam, for
that matter, that is an absolute deal breaker.
It's a massive heresy. It destroys the entire
moral fabric of revealed religion. If I don't
survive death as an individual, why should I
be good? Why should I fear God's judgment? The
whole system collapses. I can see why Thomas
Aquinas was. Not a fan is putting it so mildly.
Aquinas wrote a specific book, a polemic, called
On the Unity of the Intellect Against the Avarists.
He attacked this idea relentlessly. He felt it
was a poison that would destroy the foundations
of Christianity if it wasn't stamped out. It's
just amazing that a commentary on an ancient
Greek text could cause such a theological panic.
But it shows how seriously they took these ideas.
They took them as seriously as we take political
ideologies or economic theories today. This was
the battleground of truth. We've talked a lot
about the philosopher, but we cannot ignore the
scientist. Because as you said, if he had never
written a single word about Aristotle, he'd still
be famous for his medicine, right? Absolutely.
He wrote a medical encyclopedia called Al -Khuliat
Fi Al -Tib, which was known in Latin for centuries
as the Collegé. And again, just like with philosophy,
he wasn't just copying old texts. He was observing
and correcting them. The I -thing. When I was
reading about that, it blew my mind. The retina.
Yes. Explain what the prevailing theory was before
him. Who was the authority? The authority was
Galen, the ancient Greek physician who was basically
the god of medicine for over a thousand years.
What Galen said went. And Galen thought that
the lens of the eye was the photoreceptor. He
thought it was the part that actually sensed
light. Which I guess makes intuitive sense. It's
the clear part right in the middle. It seems
important. It does. But Averroes, based on his
understanding of anatomy, said, No, that can't
be right. The lens just focuses. It's the retina,
that net light coating at the back of the eye.
That's what actually receives the light and sends
the image to the brain. That is a fundamental
leap in anatomy and neuroscience. And he was
completely right. He was. And he didn't stop
there. He challenged Galen on the cause of strokes,
too. Galen had this theory that strokes were
caused by obstructions in the peripheral nerves.
Not right. Not right at all. Averroes realized,
no, this is happening in the brain. He proposed
that it was an obstruction of the arteries leading
from the heart to the brain. He was getting much,
much closer to the modern understanding. He was
literally mapping out the vascular system's connection
to neurology. He was. And there's more. He gave
one of the earliest clinical descriptions of
what we now recognize as Parkinson's disease
symptoms. He didn't name it, of course, but he
described the tremors. And he identified the
concept of acquired immunity. With smallpox,
yes. He observed that if a patient got smallpox
and survived, they never got it again. He understood
on some level that the body learned to defend
itself. Which is the entire basis of all modern
immunology and vaccination. It is. He was a keen
observer. That's the common thread. He didn't
just accept authority. He looked at the world,
whether it was a text, a patient, or the sky.
And he did look at the sky, too. He did. He was
an astronomer who actually had big problems with
the Ptolemaic system. Why? I thought everyone
used Ptolemy's model of the universe back then.
They did, but Averroes was a purist. He was an
Aristotelian purist. The problem with Ptolemy's
system was that it was messy. To explain why
planets seem to move backwards sometimes, Ptolemy
had to invent these things called epicycles,
little circles that planets made while moving
on their bigger circles. Circles within circles.
Exactly. For Averroes, this was an ugly mathematical
hack. He believed Aristotelian physics demanded
that celestial motion had to be perfectly uniformly
circular around a single center. He couldn't
come up with a better mathematical model. He
admitted he failed to reform astronomy completely.
But his critique was so powerful it inspired
later astronomers to keep looking. And didn't
he spot something on the sun? He did. He and
another astronomer, Ibn Baja, observed dark spots
on the sun. Now, their worldview didn't allow
for the sun to be imperfect or have blemishes.
Right. So they interpreted what they saw as the
transits of Venus and Mercury passing in front
of the sun. But modern calculations have shown
they were almost certainly observing sunspots
with the naked eye. The man was a polymath in
the truest sense of the word. But we have to
remember his day job through all of this. We
touched on it earlier. He was a judge. And not
just any judge. His legal work, particularly
his book Bidayat al -Mujtahid, is still studied
in Islamic law schools today. It's considered
a masterpiece of comparative jurisprudence. What
made it so special? Was it just a list of rules
like other law books? That's what most legal
texts were. This is forbidden. This is allowed.
The punishment for X is Y. Averroes took a completely
different approach. He didn't just give the answer.
He explained why the great jurists disagreed.
He showed his work. He showed all the work. He
identified the causes of difference. He would
say, look, the Maliki school says this and the
Hanafi school says that. The reason they disagree
is because this word in the Quran is ambiguous
or because they're using different analogies
to a known case. He treated the dissent with
profound respect. That sounds incredibly fair
minded and intellectually honest. It was. He
was an independent thinker, even in law, a field
that values tradition above all else. And this
independence, this willingness. to think from
first principles led him to some social views
that were, well, pretty radical for the 12th
century. You're talking about his views on women.
Specifically, yeah. This is one of the most fascinating
parts of his commentary on Plato's Republic.
So Plato, in his ideal state, argued that women
should be guardians. They should rule and fight
alongside men. Right. And most medieval commentators,
Christian or Muslim, would probably just gloss
over that part or say, well, that's some crazy
Greek talk. Let's move on. But Averroes didn't.
He doubled down on it. He looked at his own society
and Al -Andalus and said, essentially, we are
wasting half our potential. He made an economic
argument, didn't he? It wasn't just about fairness.
It was a deeply practical argument. He lamented
that women in his society were limited to childbearing
and domestic duties. He said this reduced them
to a burden on the state because they weren't
contributing to the economy or the common defense.
He argued that women could and should be soldiers,
philosophers and even rulers if they were just
given the same education and opportunity as men.
That is a massive what if moment for history.
Yeah. I mean, imagine if that view had actually
taken hold in the 12th century. It's tragic in
a way. He saw the potential for a much stronger,
more dynamic society, but the culture just wasn't
ready to hear it. Speaking of things the culture
wasn't ready for, let's talk about the fall from
grace. Because for a long time, Avros was the
golden boy. He's the friend of the caliph, the
chief judge of Seville, a court physician. But
then 1195 happens. The wheel of fortune turns,
as it always does. The old caliph, his patron,
has died. His son, Abu Yusuf Yaqub, who took
the title Al -Mansur, is in charge now. And Al
-Mansur has a problem. He has a big political
problem. He needs to rally support for a massive
jihad against the Christian kingdoms in the north
of Spain. And to get that support, he needs the
religious conservatives on his side. He needs
the Orthodox Ulema. Yeah. The theologians and
jurists. The very same Ulema who do not like
Averroes. They see his philosophy as foreign,
dangerous, and heretical. So Averroes becomes
a political pawn to appease the fundamentalists
and drum up support for the war that Caliph throws
him under the bus. And it wasn't just a quiet
firing. It was a public humiliation. It was a
show trial. A tribunal was convened in Cordoba,
and he was formally condemned. They ordered that
his books on philosophy be collected and burned.
Ugh, that image always hurts. Burning books.
It's the ultimate symbol of rejecting knowledge.
He was then banished to a small town called Lucina,
which was mostly inhabited by Jews. He was isolated,
disgraced, and forbidden from continuing his
work. He did get a reprieve at the very end,
though, right? It wasn't the end of the story.
He did. A couple years later, once the political
winds shifted back again, the caliph called him
back to favor in Marrakesh. But he was an old
man by then, likely broken by the exile. He died
shortly after, in December of 1198. And here
is the great final twist of the knife. He dies.
He's eventually reburied in his hometown of Cordoba.
But what happens to his legacy in the Islamic
world? It largely evaporates. It fades away.
The intellectual center of the Islamic world
had shifted east to Cairo and Damascus, and they
had moved on. They were more interested in the
philosophy of Avicenna or had turned away from
Greek philosophy entirely towards mysticism.
So in his own world, he becomes a minor figure.
A respected jurist, but a philosophical dead
end. But in the West. In the West, he explodes.
He becomes a giant, an absolute titan. It's the
ultimate irony. The man who was banished and
had his books burned by a Muslim caliph becomes
the father of rationalism for Christian Europe.
His commentaries were translated first into Hebrew
by Jewish scholars in Spain and France, and then
from Hebrew into Latin. They fled it into the
new universities, being born in Paris, Padua,
Bologna, and they started a movement. Latin Averism.
Exactly. You had these radical thinkers, guys
like Segaroff of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia
at the University of Paris. Averroes' most controversial
ideas, like the eternity of the world and the
unity of the intellect, and they ran with them.
They were pushing the absolute boundaries of
what the church could tolerate. And as we mentioned
with Aquinas, the church pushed back. Oh, they
pushed back hard. In 1270, and again in 1277,
the Bishop of Paris issued formal condemnations.
They listed 219 specific philosophical theses
that were forbidden to be taught or even discussed
at the university. A huge number of them were
pure Averroes. Yet, despite the ban, He stuck
around. You can't really kill an idea once it's
out there. You can't. He was too important, too
useful to ignore. Even his enemies had to respect
his intellect. We talked about Dante. In his
divine quality, he places Averroes in limbo.
That's the nice part of hell. It is. It's for
the virtuous pagans, the great minds who lived
before Christ or outside the faith. He's there
in this noble castle of thought, sitting alongside
Euclid, Ptolemy, and even Saladin. And Dante
describes him as the one who made the great commentary.
And then Raphael puts him right in the middle
of the Vatican. In the school of Athens, one
of the most famous paintings in the world. It's
a celebration of human knowledge. And if you
look closely... Peering over the shoulder of
Pythagoras, there's a man in a green robe and
a white turban. That's Averroes. He is literally
inside the heart of the Vatican, immortalized
as one of the pillars of Western wisdom. I love
that story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis
Borges about him, Averroes' search. Oh, that's
a brilliant, brilliant piece of literature. It
just captures the... the tragedy of the translation
gap so perfectly. It's about Averroes trying
to translate Aristotle's poetics. He comes across
the words tragedy and comedy, but he has no frame
of reference. None at all. Theater as we know
it didn't exist in the Islamic world of his time.
So Borges describes him looking out his window,
seeing some children playing make -believe, and
trying to deduce from that what a play or a stage
could possibly be. He's a genius trying to grasp
a concept without any of the cultural context.
It's such a powerful metaphor for the whole project,
the difficulty of one culture understanding another.
But it also humanizes him. He was a giant, but
he was still a man working with the tools and
the information he had. So let's try and bring
this all together. What does this all mean for
us? We have a devout Muslim judge born in Spain
whose books were burned by his own government,
who ends up becoming the foundation for Western
scholasticism and a hero to secular rationalists.
It's the ultimate irony of history, isn't it?
Averroes represents a path not taken by his own
civilization, but a path that, in a way, saved
another. He drew a line in the sand and said
that faith and reason could coexist, that you
didn't have to choose between God and Aristotle.
And that idea that you don't have to check your
brain at the door of the mosque or the church
or the synagogue. His truly enduring legacy.
Absolutely. He was a champion of the intellect.
He believed, fundamentally, that human beings
were designed to think. That using our reason
to understand the world was not an act of rebellion
against God, but the highest form of worship.
It really makes you wonder about those what -ifs.
If the Almohad Caliphate hadn't turned on him,
if his rationalism had become the dominant strain
of thought, if that argument for women in society
had been heard. How different would the last
800 years have looked? It's one of the great
counterfactuals of history. A world where Cordoba,
not Paris, remained the center of avant -garde
philosophy might have accelerated the scientific
revolution by centuries. We just don't know.
I want to leave you with one final thought to
mull over. We talk about his most controversial
theory, the unity of the intellect, this idea
that we all share one big mind, like a cloud
server. Right. In his time, that was heresy.
It seemed to erase the individual. But think
about us today. We are constantly plugged into
the Internet. We offload our memory to Google.
We process information and form opinions collectively
on social media. We are feeding all our thoughts
and all our knowledge into AI models that aggregate
everything humanity has ever written. That is
a slightly chilling thought. Isn't it? Are we
right now building a technological version of
Evero's single shared mind? Maybe he wasn't wrong.
Maybe he was just 800 years early. Perhaps the
material intellect is just a server farm in the
desert somewhere. On that note, thanks for diving
deep with us. Keep thinking. See you next time.