Averroes Quote on Reason: Philosophy and the Law

Quote

"If the activity of philosophy is nothing more than the study of existing beings and reflection on them as indications of the Artisan — I mean, since they are signs of the Artisan — then the Law invites us and urges us to undertake this reflection." — Averroes (Ibn Rushd), The Decisive Treatise (c. 1178)

Author

Averroes (Ibn Rushd, 1126–1198) was a philosopher, physician, and judge of Islamic Spain (al-Andalus), the most important Aristotelian commentator of the Middle Ages — known to the Latin tradition simply as "the Commentator." He served as qadi (judge) in Seville and Cordoba and as court physician to the Almohad caliphs. His great commentaries on Aristotle shaped the medieval Latin reception of the Philosopher, and his defense of reason in The Decisive Treatise made him the supreme representative of philosophical rationalism within Islam.

Source

The quotation comes from Kitab Fasl al-Maqal (The Decisive Treatise), composed around 1178 and translated into English by George F. Hourani as Averroes on the Harmony of Religion and Philosophy (1961). The treatise is unusual in form: it is a legal ruling (fatwa) arguing, on the authority of the Qur'an and Islamic jurisprudence, that the study of philosophy is obligatory for those capable of it.

Context

The Decisive Treatise was written in response to the crisis provoked by al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers (c. 1095), which had argued that the philosophers' claims about the eternity of the world, God's knowledge, and bodily resurrection were either heretical or unprovable. Averroes's reply is not a work of speculative philosophy but of jurisprudence: he argues from the Law itself, quoting the Qur'an's repeated commands to "reflect" and "consider" the creation, that the study of existing beings is enjoined upon believers. Since philosophy is precisely the study of existing beings, philosophy is an obligation. The argument's brilliance is its reversal: the authority that had been used to condemn philosophy is used to command it.

Meaning

The quotation contains the core of Averroes's rationalism. The premise is that the created world is a sign of its Creator — a standard doctrine of Islamic thought. The argument is that if the world is a sign, then reflection upon the world is a form of reflection upon the divine — and the Qur'an commands reflection. Since philosophy is the systematic reflection upon existing beings, the study of philosophy is not a luxury or a heresy but a duty: "the Law invites us and urges us to undertake this reflection." The deeper claim is about the harmony of reason and revelation: the two cannot conflict, because they are two routes to the same truth — one through the Book, the other through creation. When they appear to conflict, the apparent conflict must be resolved by interpretation. Averroes's defense made him the patron of philosophical rationalism in the Islamic world and, through translation, a decisive influence on the Latin scholastic tradition, where Thomas Aquinas would echo his doctrine of the harmony of faith and reason.

Related Wisdom

The quotation is a landmark in the philosophical exploration of reason and knowledge. Its claim that the world is a book to be read connects the Islamic tradition's natural theology to the wider question of how reason and faith relate — a question that runs from Aquinas's account of faith and reason to the modern debates about science and religion. And as a work of Islamic philosophy, it is a reminder that rationalism is not a purely Western achievement: the philosophers of the Islamic world defended the rights of reason at a time when the Latin tradition was only beginning to recover them.