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21 2. A Responsibility to Seek the Truth: 40 Revisiting Averroes’s Decisive Treatise

© 2021 for Academic Freedom’s Missing Imperative 2021

Alexis Gibbs University of Winchester

Abstract: This article argues that, in contemporary formulations of academic freedom, insufficient attention has been given over to the responsibility to seek the truth, as one which provides a moral precondition for the more common assertion of academic freedom as the right to speak the truth. The article seeks to restore something of this balance by looking at Averroes’s text the Decisive Treatise (c. 1180), an apologia for philosophy in the face of the charge that it constitutes a heretical pursuit. Averroes argues that, because the law compels “reflection upon all existing things,” reflection must include the work and ideas even of those predating the Prophet Muhammad. Indeed, Averroes goes further in suggesting that those who would prevent access to the ancients’ work are themselves barring people from reflection upon knowl- edge of God. Some thoughts on the implications of Averroes’s argument for academic freedom are offered in the conclusion.

Keywords: academic freedom, rights, responsibility, truth, Averroes

© 2021 Alexis Gibbs - http://doi.org/10.3726/PTIHE012021.0002 - The online edition of this publication is available open access. Except where otherwise noted, content can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0). For details go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 22 Alexis Gibbs

Introduction: Academic Freedom’s Imbalance of Right and Responsibility

If we imagine that academic freedom, much like any concept, needs constant revaluation in order to stay relevant to the times in which we find ourselves, perhaps we need to be asking once again whether we know what academic freedom really consists in today? Is it, as Henry Reichmann has argued, “an imperiled gain that must be repeatedly won anew,”1 or do we just expect that, as academics, we are guaranteed a kind of institutional liberty that is protected by law? The question seems pertinent because the combative status of campus discourse today seems largely to rely on a sense that everyone is entitled to their own voice, and therefore that voice is as entitled to assert itself as any other. The consequence of these assertions, unfortunately, risks being that academic freedom comes to be seen as the facilitator of various shouting matches, rather than the conduit and mediator of mutual interest and exchange. Whilst in earlier formulations of the concept, particularly Wilhelm von Humboldt’s mutually complementary motions of lehrfreiheit and lernfreiheit, the freedom to research was as important as the freedom to teach, disputes over academic freedom have become a lot more concerned with the freedom to offend than it has with the freedom to listen and understand. At the same time, students are coming under increasing attack from academics and the media for bringing about the widespread censorship of their own curriculum and learning. It is for this reason that the impasse in modern conceptions of academic freedom may require something of a rethink. Furthermore, if we are to rethink academic freedom along slightly different lines, it may be of use to look outside of the tradition that has cultivated our current (mis-)concep- tions, the attitude toward entitlement. For these purposes, this article turns to a premodern thinker, the Medie- val Arab-Islamic philosopher Averroes (Ibn Rushd), for some inspiration on how an educational ethics that compels us to listen to the thought of others, might be supported—though not presupposed—by a juridical right to do so. Significantly for these purposes, Averroes was writing under conditions under which he had no protection for some of his more polemical claims, and therefore he seeks to ground the right to do so in a preexisting commitment to seek out (God’s) truth, rather than making the former a precondition of

1 Henry Reichman, The Future of Academic Freedom (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2019). A Responsibility to Seek the Truth 23 the latter. Averroes’s Decisive Treatise is of particular interest here because it both attempts to offer a legal argument for the study of philosophy from within a religion that might view such a discipline as heretic, whilst revealing an attitude toward knowledge that expresses a desire to listen to the thought of others, rather than one which seeks to assert its thoughts over them—or even to deliberately cause harm. This article will explore the notion that any right to research and teach on subjects of an academic’s choosing carries with it a concomitant responsibility to seek out the truth, otherwise entitlement prevails over ethics in the profession’s attitude toward free expression. The phenomenology of responsibility presented here is not one reducible to du- ties and obligations, but rather serves a precondition (imperative) for a com- mitment to something beyond the self.

Rights and Responsibilities, Seeking and Speaking

In his 1990 work, The Idea of Higher Education, Ronald Barnett observed of academic freedom that it was largely seen “on both sides of the Atlan- tic as a matter of rights which owe to fully paid-up members of the academic community.”2 The three items of emphasis that I wish to draw out from this statement are firstly that academic freedom is understood as a matter of right (and not, say, of a duty to recognize and/or uphold the freedom of others in the community); secondly, that it is a right that is owed (as opposed to one earned); and thirdly, that the persons to whom this right is owed constitute a “fully paid-up” membership. The sum of these parts describes a freedom to which particular individuals are entitled, but this entitlement seemingly carries with it no concomitant sense of duty or obligation on their part. Of course, this much is true of the discourse of freedoms-as-rights more generally, in that freedom does not semantically denote any attendant no- tion of responsibility: by extension, the right to life or freedom of movement do not conventionally carry within them some sense of a reciprocal burden on the part of the bearer. On the other hand, it is important to remember that there is nothing about the word “freedom” that necessarily implies a right—when it comes to academic freedom, we are dealing with a concept as much as a term. So inasmuch as freedoms are often spoken of as (synonymous with) rights, there is no reason to see why the idea of responsibility should not inhere in them also, and as something more than just a set of obligations

2 Ronald Barnett, The Idea of Higher Education (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1990). 24 Alexis Gibbs or measure of accountability.3 The trouble with the idea of freedoms concep- tualized exclusively as synonymous with, or analogous to, rights lends itself to a psychology much more concerned with egoism over altruism. This much is evidenced even in Barnett’s elaboration on the situations in which aca- demic freedom comes to be contested, whereby “academics’ public debate over academic freedom is grounded in their wish to defend their rights,” and therefore “issues of academic freedom attract heated public discussion when academic staff see themselves as being prevented from pursuing the research in which they are personally interested.”4 Recent incidences such as the rescission of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson’s visiting fellowship to Cambridge University backlash from students and staff, and sociologist Noah Carl’s dismissal from Cambridge have served to fan disputes about who gets to say and study what on campus territory. But as the indignation around these events, and Barnett’s phrasing both suggest, there is a possibil- ity of discourse concerning academic practice becoming too oriented to the protection of personal interests, whilst losing sight of what being part of the academic community asks of its members in return. In a previous article, I described a need to distinguish between two mo- tions inherent in a modern conception of academic freedom: on the one hand, academic freedom as a right, and on the other, academic freedom as a responsibility (reference removed for anonymization). I now want to deepen that discussion by looking at two subdivisions of both the rights and the responsibility aspects of academic freedom, which have to do with the uni- versity’s truth-oriented mission, which I will describe as the “seeking” and “speaking” aspects to both right and responsibility. Just as academic freedom awards the academic the right to both speak and seek the truth, it also asks of the academic that they be responsible for seeking and speaking the truth. The role can, therefore, be seen as divided between right and responsibility, but also as further subdivided in both instances into motions of seeking and speaking: Academic Freedom Right Responsibility Seeking Speaking Seeking Speaking

3 For a discussion of responsibility as accountability, see, for example, Robert Berdahl, “Academic Freedom, Autonomy and Accountability in British Universities,” Studies in Higher Education 15, no. 2 (1990): 169–180. A Responsibility to Seek the Truth 25

I want to argue here that all four motions of academic freedom be of equal concern if we are to fulfil our responsibilities to others in the academic com- munity, by being both well informed and unafraid to speak the truth—wheth- er as staff or students. Whilst the actual practice of these four motions may still be internally in evidence, it is apparent that external perception of higher education is more concerned with just one of these four aspects over all oth- ers: the right to speak the truth (which today is confused further by the right to speak “one’s” truth). Concerns over academic censorship fall neatly into this bracket, as do those of no-platforming, and cancel culture. This is not to say that the right to speak within the scholarly community is not an issue of importance, and one that requires vigilant attention; rather, it is to affirm a more multidimensional character to academic freedom that sustains a bal- anced commitment to community alongside individual liberty. Most conceptions of academic freedom will orient themselves more toward one subdivision or another of the motions sketched above, with the majority of constitutional formulations favoring some version of the right to speak and seek the truth within the university, without necessarily empha- sizing a concomitant notion of responsibility. Philip Altbach, for example, follows Barnett in describing the more commonly accepted modern concep- tion of academic freedom clearly as “the right of professors to teach without constraint in their field of expertise, do research and publish, and express themselves in the public space (newspapers, the Internet, and so on).”5 In the United Kingdom, as Eric Barendt has pointed out, academic freedom tends only to be a matter of law (and not of ethics), and therefore resides in the domain of right exclusively. In Academic Freedom and the Law, Barendt writes that:

Professors typically argue that academic freedom gives them the rights to deter- mine for themselves the topics of their research, their research methodologies and the manner in which they teach their subjects. They may further claim that they have freedom to choose what they teach, irrespective of the requirements of their departments or directions issued by their deans or heads of department.6

Barendt’s emphasis on statutory rights rewards the role with greater security but does not demand from it a necessary concomitant risk. If academic were unconditionally protected as a right, there would be little moral injunction on

4 Barnett, The Idea of Higher Education. 5 Philip Altbach, 'Academic Freedom: A Realistic Appraisal.' In: The International Imperative in Higher Education. Rotterdam: SensePublishers, 2013 6 Eric Barendt, Academic Freedom and the Law: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2010). 26 Alexis Gibbs the academic to seek a truth worth speaking of, because there would be no risk involved in the act speaking. To a certain extent, academic freedom must be seen as an imperative to hazard even the very right that protects academic practice, in the name of truth. Responsibility has not been entirely omitted from the discourse on academic freedom. The 1997 Dearing Report into Higher Education in the United Kingdom did make a stronger connection between academic free- dom and the professional responsibility that accompanied it, in saying that there must be “academic freedom within the law, properly understood and combined with academic responsibility.” In this articulation, the report gives the impression that academic responsibility is not internal to academic free- dom, but rather something that must accompany it. What’s more, academic responsibility in the report is configured as a wonderfully British “proper regard for [one’s] colleagues” and “the usual rules of professional academic engagement.” Its emphasis on good old-fashioned propriety has little bearing upon a responsibility to seek or speak the truth whatever the cost. Whilst academic responsibility as an adjunct to academic freedom would not be an altogether undesirable notion should the two share an equal empha- sis in university constitutional principles, responsibility loses out when it does not have equivalent theoretical counterweight. Put simply, there are not many champions of academic responsibility in the public sphere, which means that the more common association with academic freedom is that of the right to seek and speak the truth. Furthermore, simply being courteous—whilst a commendable quality in any professional environment—does not compel the academic to stretch the domain of current knowledge into areas presently unexplored or unarticulated. The more public role of the American academic arguably compels their sense of ethical duty toward a wider public than their immediate audience of students and peers. The American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) founding 1915 document, the Declaration of Principles, explicitly leans toward this more public orientation, citing the three components of a teacher’s academic freedom as “freedom of inquiry and research; freedom of teaching within the university or college; and freedom of extra-mural utter- ance and action” (aaup-ui.org). Thus was born the distinctly American con- cept of the public intellectual, whose duty was to speak the truth within or without the confines of the campus environment. The AAUP Declaration defined what it meant to see one’s freedom as a professional entitlement, but does little to show how that freedom can—or even should—be earned through reflection on the work of others also (the responsibility to seek the truth). There is a key question of reciprocity at stake A Responsibility to Seek the Truth 27 here, that is of particular importance for an understanding of academic virtue and citizenship that is founded not just on entitlement but also on being earned (see, for example, Macfarlane 2004, 2006, 2010). To be aware of a requirement to earn our freedom instead of just being owed it, is what gen- erates the kind of self and other-awareness around polemical issues that are lacking in many current debates around the issues of the censorious campus. Other conceptions of academic freedom range from the more psycholog- ical (i.e., an attitude toward one’s work) to the more theoretical. Some of the latter are covered in Stanley Fish’s renowned Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution. Fish diagnoses five “schools” of academic freedom, all of which lean toward different aspects of the diagram outlined above. The “It’s just a job” school, for instances, tilts heavily toward the rights to seek and speak the truth, even if these does not extend beyond the campus boundaries into the public sphere; the “For the common good” school has different horizons (i.e., society at large) but the same remit. Fish’s own attitude sways more toward a responsibility to seek and speak the truth, as the right to do these things might be too heavily determined by a sense of social (in)justice.7 In a 2017 article on “Academic Freedom and the Critical Task of the Uni- versity,” Judith Butler pointed out that academic freedom distinguishes itself from other forms of freedom of expression that can be exercised by the per- son on the street, by virtue of its institutional character that entails not only a right but an obligation. “… academic freedom implies a right to free inquiry within the academic institution, but also an obligation to preserving the insti- tution as a site where free inquiry can and does take place.”8 Butler emphasizes two important dimensions to academic freedom here, both of which are often overlooked: the first is that there is contained within the concept an orienta- tion to free inquiry and not just free expression; the second is that with any right comes an obligation also. Inquiry and obligation have fallen somewhat by the wayside in recent debates over the status of academic freedom today, with the right to express opinions and beliefs given significantly more press attention over issues such as no-platforming. But Butler’s articulation allows not only for responsibility to fall mostly on the institution, rather than the indi- vidual, but also for free inquiry to be something that “can and does take place” (my emphasis), rather than something that must take place if academics are to have the concomitant right to voice what they have inquired after.

7 Stanley Fish, Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 8 Judith Butler, “Academic Freedom and the Critical Task of the University,” Globalizations 4, no. 6 (2007): 857–861. 28 Alexis Gibbs

The “Right to Offend”: Intent and Contempt

A more bizarre evolution of the right to speak the truth on campus has become the right to cause offense. This seems to have taken the more farcical form of academics defending their “right to offend,” as seen in the work by British scholars such as Joanna Williams and Frank Furedi, and US academics such as Greg Lukianoff. Lukianoff defends this position in Unlearning Liberty:

… we must learn to take a deep breath when we hear speech that deeply offends us and remember the principles at stake. Both the law and the theory of academic freedom accept that oftentimes a speaker’s entire objective is to be provocative. We must not punish such speech because it is successful in its goal of provoking.9

What Lukianoff seems to accept here is that there is a necessary distinction between the seeking and speaking functions of academic freedom, at least in terms of a responsibility to perform the latter on the basis of the former, when there is no real reason to accept that. Why shouldn’t we be just as inclined to think that only a person who has a careful and judicious attitude toward seek- ing the truth will exercise that same caution and sensibility toward its expres- sion? Despite what Lukianoff says—bearing in mind that he says a speaker’s entire objective might be to provoke—there is little evidence that either the law or theories concerning academic freedom do recognize the deliberate wholesale provocation of others as a legitimate aspect of its exercise. If people are inclined to speak on subjects more as a means to provocation than in the spirit of truth-telling, doesn’t that evince some contempt on the part of an individual or an institution for the principles of a higher education? I think we have every reason to be suspicious of the language of those who seek to defend the right to offend. In this, we see a perversion of the orientation toward earning one’s freedom, turned instead into a simple as- sertion of a liberty with questionable legitimacy or value. “Poking the bear” is not in fact a public service, especially when it is met with the hostility it is deliberately designed to provoke. The more you offend, the more it serves your argument that people are offended too easily, and the more it stokes a sense of moral rectitude and righteousness—but little else is advanced in the process. The exercising of the right to offend becomes a performative circle, made all the more absurd by the fact that it is defended by appeals to disinterested reasoning, even as it recognizes that its enactment only comes about in the full consciousness of the harm it has the potential to

9 Greg Lukianoff, Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate (London: Encounter Books, 2014). A Responsibility to Seek the Truth 29 cause. The teacher’s right to speak truths at their students irrespective of whether those truths are welcomed or deemed offensive is set against the students’ right to speak back, to demand not to be subjected to the tyranny and dogmatism of a univocal academic rationality. The arguments descend into what Jason Stanley has described as “a cacophony of opinions and out- landish possibilities,” which has the potential to then “undermine the basic background set of presuppositions about the world that allows for productive inquiry.”10 In short, with so many people talking over one another, we create the conditions for high levels of righteous indignation with no corresponding motion of reflective attention. A contempt for others—particularly those we teach—is no precondition for a healthy scholarly community. But it is extremely hard to diagnose the performative dimensions to statements uttered in an academic context, that is, the degree to which they emerge from a desire to provoke or harm as opposed to sincere attempts to inform or challenge accepted wisdom. Con- sider some of the following examples from Ronald Dworkin:

A professor is disciplined because he teaches that blacks are inferior to whites. Another is punished because he teaches that Jews are the enemy of blacks. A professor is severely criticized because he assigns the journals of slave-owning plantation managers as reading in a course on American history, and he does not receive what many of his colleagues consider appropriate support from university officials when students complain. Another professor is disciplined because, to illustrate a complex point in contract law, he quotes Byron’s line in Don Juan about the woman who, whispering, “I shall ne’er consent,” consent- ed, and another because he describes belly dancing as like holding a vibrator under a plate of Jell-O. Universities adopt speech codes that make “insulting” or “stigmatizing” utterance a punishable offense.11

Dworkin was writing over twenty years ago, and yet the examples he uses still feel surprisingly uncomfortable and contemporary at a time in which we con- tinue to see the same sorts of disputes, only they have either been given names or are associated with particular movements. Dworkin suggests that this “shift in causes célèbres has produced a new uncertainty about what academic free- dom actually is” (ibid.), and yet what I take from the set of examples Dworkin uses is not so much that the times have not changed in terms of the content of our academic freedom infringements, but that we still suffer from some

10 Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them (New York, NY: Random House, 2018). 11 Ronald Dworkin, “Why Academic Freedom?” in Freedom’s Law: The Moral Reading of the American Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 30 Alexis Gibbs confusion around how to defend and respond to these infringements. The more we are inclined to focus on the infringement of the law and how it might be invoked, the more we become distracted from the moral impetus that is not reducible to it. The latter is guided more by good judgment on the part of the speaker than the knowledge that one’s actions are defensible in the court of law. The idea that harmful truths are still beneficial ones only carries water by virtue of intent: if the intent is to harm, then the truth value of the statement is null and void. On the other hand, if harm is a by-product of intending to tell the truth, as per the (unfortunate) examples of Socrates and Galileo, then the integrity of academic freedom is upheld. But because we can get nowhere trying to assess intent, it becomes much easier to locate legitimacy of truth-telling statements in the reaction of their audience. This approach often appears bolstered by a spurious utilitarianism that argues that doing harm will also amount to a greater good, if students learn to toughen up as a consequence of listening to the things that most upset them. But there is something quite different in declaring oneself insulted, stig- matized, or offended by an act, to the act of consciously or deliberately insult- ing, offending, or stigmatizing another individual. Degrees of snowflakedom as regards the former may prove a matter for further student psychological investigation, but if we are concerned (for now) with academic freedom, then this is not such a matter of whether we are entitled to insult or offend our students (a trivial if not demeaning matter) but rather concerned with what sort of ethical attitude that is adopted toward research and teaching that can be justified by the law. In short, the ethical (responsibility) must exist in tan- dem with, if not prior to, the legal (right), if it is to have force in the defense of a university education and higher education environment today. If the one is valued over the other, as in the example of the UK approach to academic freedom, then there is little burden on the academic (or student) to seek, as well as speak, the truth.

A Responsibility to Seek the Truth: Averroes and Intellectual Freedom

Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), or Averroes, occupies something of a unique posi- tion in the history of philosophy, but also of the early university. Not only was he instrumental in bringing the work of Aristotle to the attention of Latin Christendom (earning him the sobriquet of “the Commentator” to Aristotle’s “the Philosopher”), but as a result he then became the posthu- mous victim of Renaissance cancel culture as neo-Platonism brought about A Responsibility to Seek the Truth 31 a deliberate suppression of his influence in the fourteenth century.12 The fact that Averroes is so little studied in today’s curricula may even owe something to this early suppression (cf. Horowitz 1960; Carboni 2007), a possibility which lends more than an element of irony to the fact that Averroes provides us with one of the earliest defenses of intellectual freedom. His account is notable for the fact that its emphasis lies significantly more on the scholar’s duty to seek beyond the boundaries of their ordained domain of knowledge, than it does on a plea for (self-)protection. In exploring Averroes’s arguments here, I am looking less to construe the Treatise as a literal defense of academic freedom, or to directly translate his syllogisms into arguments around academic freedom; rather, I will explore whether Averroes adopts and expresses a particular kind of philosophical at- titude—or an ethical attitude toward the exploration of truth and knowl- edge—that might be useful to adopt in relation to academic freedom today also. That is to say, couldn’t an emphasis on the pursuit of truth as prior to its expression be valuable in cultivating reciprocal motions in academic freedom that require of a community that they seek the truth as well as speak it? If we are to describe four motions in academic freedom, whereby free expression comes about only as a consequence of free inquiry, and both require protection as well as compulsion, then it may help to further explore whence arguments for the latter might derive. I want to explore an argument that predates the institutionalization of academic freedom (though not the university itself), as one which clearly sets forth the case for truth-seeking as a necessary dimension of the academic life, but which requires formal protec- tion in order for it to be undertaken.

The Decisive Treatise

In this section, I will follow the various stages in Averroes’s argument for an intellectual freedom that remains in tune with divine injunction, instead of - dissenting from it. Written in about 1179, the Decisive Treatise (Fas.l al-Maqal) was responding to the view of a number of Averroes’s fellow Muslim scholars, not least the philosopher and theologian Al-Ghazali, that all philosophy and science written prior to the revelations of Muhammed was not to be trusted because it had no foundation in Islam. In particular, the Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle was the source of greatest suspicion, because it could

12 In a letter to scholar Luigi Marsili, Francesco Petrarch explicitly advised his friend that “As soon as you have gained the position you are longing for … set all your strength and all your nerves to fight against that frantic dog Averroes” (in Kristeller et al., 1956: 143). 32 Alexis Gibbs corrupt a true believer’s way of thinking. Averroes, one of the most formi- dable commentators on Aristotle’s work, gave the following defense: surely, as good Muslims, we have nothing to fear from the work of people of other faiths and beliefs, because as long as we are true to our own faith, we can only be enriched by that which is good in other ways of thinking, and pro- tected from that which is not? Furthermore, he argued, the Qur’an explicitly - - - instructs Muslims to “reflect, you who have vision” ʿ( tabiru ya-ʾulī l-ʾabs.ar, Q 59, 2)—in other words, if you are capable of learning more about the world, which is tantamount to learning more about your God, then it is your duty to do so, wherever that knowledge may be found. Averroes, of course, was interested in matters of the truth, and which truths were to be found in philosophy, and which in religion. But what is equally interesting about his argument here has as much to do with matters of truth, or philosophy or religion, as it does with a question of (scholarly) attitude. When his peers are determined to keep looking inward, rejecting everything outside their religious belief as heretic and unnecessary, trying to close down the possibilities for truth outside of one worldview, Averroes demands that we look toward other people, and other ways of thinking, to listen to what they have to say and what has already been thought, before we exercise our good judgment in deciding what seems to be sensible and useful, and what seems to be silly and unhelpful. After all, even he acknowledges that the ancient Greeks came up with some very silly ideas as well as some very good ones. Averroes’s Introduction immediately declares his intention to legitimize the study of philosophy from within Islam, as a point of law. Ziad Bou Akl has shown how the need to find legitimacy within the law is one that will equate philosophy as an act consistent with divine will, rather than a pursuit that is independent of, and therefore antagonistic to, religion:

The law deals primarily with human actions, and the object of investigation an- nounced in the beginning of the Decisive Treatise is an action: practicing philos- ophy (fil al-falsafa). Philosophy is defined as an activity consisting in “the study of existing beings and reflection on them itibarihim( ) as proofs of the Artisan.” The fulfilment of this activity is achieved in three steps or actions which are devel- oped in the first part of the treatise: (1) engaging in the philosophical quest; (2) acquiring the specific tools to fulfil the activity; and finally (3) reaching a con- clusion, which can be considered as the end of a unified philosophical sequence. Averroes submits all three actions to juridical examination.13

13 Zaid Bou Akl, “Splitting the Process and the Result: Philosophy from a Legal Perspective in Averroes' Decisive Treatise,” in Philosophy and Jurisprudence in the Islamic World, ed., P. Adamson (Berlin/Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2019). A Responsibility to Seek the Truth 33

This declaration of intent has to be seen in part as a matter of necessity: any other claim to the validity of the enterprise (for moral good, out of schol- arly interest, etc.) would set Averroes up for charges of heresy. So he states from the outset that he intends to “investigate, from the perspective of Law- based reflection, whether reflection upon philosophy and the science of logic is permitted, prohibited, or commanded—and this as a recommendation or as an obligation—by the Law”14 (my emphasis). The law to which Averroes refers is the sharia, which combines and binds both religious belief and civil obedience:

the religion announced by Muhammad, in contrast to Christianity, had at its center neither faith nor dogma but an element at once theological and politi- cal: the Law (shar īʿah), the single revealed body of prescriptions and prohibi- tions understood by the Islamic tradition to be simultaneously civil and religious, temporal and spiritual.15

It is precisely because all activity within Islam is determined by its legal sanc- tioning that Averroes pursues a line of argument that will satisfy both legal and religious requirements. To do so, Averroes boldly contradicts Al-Ghaza- li’s absolute dismissal of philosophy by declaring that philosophy is, in fact, “obligatory.” In this first claim, Averroes underplays philosophy’s stature as a discipline (possibly deliberately employing rhetorical meiosis) in order to then assert its necessity within the law:

If the activity of philosophy is nothing more than reflection upon existing things and consideration of them insofar as they are an indication of the Artisan—I mean insofar as they are artifacts, for existing things indicate the Artisan only through cognizance of the art in them, and the more complete is cognizance of the Artisan—and if the Law has recommended and urged consideration of exist- ing things, then it is evident that what this name indicates is either obligatory or recommended by the Law.16

If all things must have come into existence via the knowledge of the Creator, then their existence is not to be ignored, because the Creator himself com- mands a due consideration of all things in existence to gain a better knowl- edge of him. In this, Averroes fits with Stanley Fish’s ideal of the academic called to their role as a vocation, and not simply as a job.

14 Averroes, Decisive Treatise and Epistle Dedicatory, trans. Charles Butterworth (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2001). 15 Daniel Heller‐Roazen, “Philosophy before the Law: Averroës's Decisive Treatise,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (2006): 412–442. 16 Averroes, Decisive Treatise. 34 Alexis Gibbs

To further support his claim that philosophical study is not only rec- ommended but commanded by the law (and thus by God), Averroes cites the Quranic verse 59:2, “Consider, you who have sight.” In this he iden- tifies a divine commandment to reflect on all existing things, including the best means for their consideration (i.e., syllogistic reasoning). Knowledge of the world (and therefore of God), according to Averroes, cannot simply be imparted via scripture, but requires some form of hermeneutic capacity as well, that allows for “inferring and drawing out the unknown from the known.”17 Various skills will be required if one is to sort the good from the bad, to exercise good judgment in what the artifacts of knowledge (as exist- ing things like any others) have to offer the faithful seeker after truth. Here Averroes makes the point that only syllogistic reasoning can supply “the one who has faith in the Law” with the “tools to work” that will allow him [sic] to carry out the discerning exercise of reflection upon existing things for greater knowledge of God. It is at this point that he confronts Al-Ghazali head on, trying to ward off the charge that this mode of understanding is itself heretical because it predates the revealed religion (and therefore the only mandates for under- standing either God or the world that a Muslim will need as contained within the Quran and hadith). He states that

It is not for someone to say, “Now, this kind of reflection about intellectual syllo- gistic reasoning is a heretical innovation, since it did not exist in the earliest days [of Islam].” For reflection upon juridical syllogistic reasoning and its kinds is also something inferred after the earliest days, yet it is not opined to be a heretical innovation.18

To distinguish different types of syllogistic reasoning here (one of which he sees to be thriving in legal practices with no complaint from Islamic scholars), in order to denounce one and advocate the other, is suggested by Averroes to be a splitting of hairs according to self-interest. The next stage in the argument is one that tries to navigate the problem of heresy by separating epistemological pursuits from their necessary adher- ence to religious doctrine. And here Averroes seems to make either a grave mistake or a serious compromise, in terms of how he wants his audience to understand the nature of philosophy:

If someone other than us has already investigated that, it is evidently obliga- tory for us to rely on what the one who has preceded us says about what we are

17 Ibid. 18 Ibid. A Responsibility to Seek the Truth 35

pursuing, regardless of whether that other person shares our religion or not. For when a valid sacrifice is performed by means of a tool, no consideration is given, with respect to the validity of the sacrifice, as to whether the tool belongs to someone who shares in our religion or not, so long as it fulfils the conditions for validity.19

Averroes makes a play for the disinterested practice of philosophy, in order to remove any air of suspicion surrounding its abstract modes of thinking that might lead the faithful astray. He wants his readers to accept that there is little to fear from something that operates less like a corruption of mind or soul, and instead functions much more like a knife or a saw, practical for particular purposes at particular times. This bid for philosophy’s objectivity (or philos- ophy as method) may have been logically convincing at the time, but there remains a question over how convinced its author was of the argument, or whether it was made only in order to preserve a more important heritage that simply couldn’t be justified along the same lines.

Against Offense: Intellectual Freedom as an Orientation toward the Truth

From today’s perspective, it is only possible to speculate about the intent or motivations underpinning Averroes’s argumentation here, but it appears as if a claim for the disinterested character of philosophy can only come at the cost of downgrading it to the status of a tool for reflection, as opposed to being the spirit of reflection itself. In making this move, Averroes risks compromising a core tenet of Greek philosophy, that is, that it is a “way of life” rather than a tool box for thinking. The legacy of this approach might also be evidenced in later medieval European scholasticism. Another argument might be to say that this was the compromise that needed to be made if philosophy was to survive the Islamic Golden Age, and endure into European thinking (as Dan- iel Heller-Roazen puts it, “It was the price the classical practice paid for its survival beyond the confines of the Hellenistic world”20). But these contest- ing views are a matter of intellectual history; the point I want to explore in this article is whether the Decisive Treatise represent something of an attitude or openness toward alternative ways of thinking that was considered so antag- onistic to ways of thinking in his time that they required legal justification if they could find any kind of acceptance, let alone receptivity.

19 Ibid. 20 Daniel Heller-Roazen, “Philosophy before the Law: Averroës's Decisive Treatise,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (2006): 412–442. 36 Alexis Gibbs

Having committed himself to this compromise, however, Averroes is able to proceed with his argument from disinterestedness/objectivity with greater force. Because the use of tools has never been dictated the religion of the user, then the writings of the ancient Greeks ought to be taken up with enthusi- asm: “we ought perhaps to seize their books in our hands and reflect what they have said about that.” Equally, applying the inherited instruments of syl- logistic reasoning allows the reader to make good judgments about what of use and benefit is to be drawn from these texts: “if it is all correct, we will ac- cept it from them; whereas, if there is anything not correct in it, we will alert [people] to it.”21 If Averroes has downgraded philosophy to have it accepted as a scholarly tool, he then proceeds to play up the notion that it is both an area of study and an instrument best developed in a community—perhaps again to mitigate notions of the corruption of individuals engaged in inde- pendent scholarship: “For there is not an art among them that a single per- son can bring about on his own. So how can this be done with the art of arts—namely, wisdom?”22 Already Averroes is giving us a picture less of what is in the individual scholar’s interest than in the principles that best serve a scholarly community. This approach can already be seen as an intertextual homage to Aristotle, whose De Anima introduces its study of the soul by arguing that “it is nec- essary, while formulating the problems of which in our further advance we are to find the solutions, to call into council the views of those of our prede- cessors who have declared any opinion on this subject, in order that we may profit by whatever is sound in their suggestions and avoid their errors.”23 If people have done good work before us, then it helps to pay close attention to that before casting judgment as to whether it is still of relevance and signifi- cance, rather than dismiss out of hand for whatever reason. Clearly, he takes this principle to apply as much to those well advanced in their scholarship as those who are new to the community. Unlike his mentor Ibn Tufayl, whose text Hayy Ibn Yaqzan imagined what it would be like for a young boy to learn about his religion in the absence of an educator, Averroes indicates here that we are reliant on communities of learning for the better understanding of the world, and therefore ultimately of God. These communities, on Averroes’s view, have preexisted the arrival of Mohammad, and therefore “we will accept, rejoice in, and thank them for whatever agrees with the truth: and we will alert to, warn against, and excuse

21 Averroes, Decisive Treatise. 22 Ibid. 23 Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul) (London: Penguin, 1987). A Responsibility to Seek the Truth 37 them for whatever does not agree with the truth” (Averroes 2001, 6). And there is an element of humor to this point as well, wherein Averroes seems to laugh off the suggestion that philosophy can really pose that much of a threat to either the truly devout or the truly wise; instead, Averroes uses a kind of analogy deliberated meant to mock the level of threat posed, and therefore those who see it as such. He says that there will certainly be those who come across certain texts, and either being untrained in how to interpret them, or being “overwhelmed by his passions,” are led to mistakes in their beliefs and actions as a result. But to prevent access to these texts to those that are better equipped to engage in their proper exegesis would be like “one who prevents thirsty people from drinking cool, fresh water until they die of thirst because some people choked on it and died” (Averroes 2001, 7). This gesture of gen- tle sarcasm makes its point that those who fear philosophy adopt an attitude of superstition that gets in the way of their being properly equipped to under- stand it. Suspicion discounts the scholar from effective syllogistic reasoning. For those that do adopt the right attitude, there is nothing to fear from philosophy, as they are equipped to sort the wheat of truth from the chaff of heresy. Averroes sums up this defense of critical reading in saying that “it is not obligatory to renounce something useful in its nature and essence because of something harmful existing in it by accident” (Averroes 2001, 7). Averroes here makes the point that we are all possessed of a kind of intellec- tual sieve, that can discern the good from the ill in any argument, and that our capacity to do so increases with exposure to a variety of arguments. The Decisive Treatise continues from here to discuss points of more specific difference with Al-Ghazali and his Ash’arite followers, whilst the third chapter makes the case for not exposing the masses to philosophical interpretations of Scripture, as they are best served in their moral and intellectual instruction by the Sharia.24 I will not pursue these arguments here, as I my intention has been to focus on the precedent that this first part to the document sets for a kind of intellectual freedom that can be compelled as well as justified by law, that is, not just the defense of one’s right to seek out knowledge and sort good thought from the bad, but an argument that suggests that the scholar is compelled to conduct such activities. In short, there is an ethic of respon- sibility toward seeking the truth that extends beyond just our right to do so.

24 Averroes fears that demonstrative reasoning is not for those who are not equipped to understand it, because they will simply assume its messages in more reductive fashion that can only seek to undermine their belief in the Scripture. 38 Alexis Gibbs

Conclusion

Averroes’s argument is that any responsibility, or obligation, to seek the truth comes from the highest authority: God. In a secular age, the compulsion to rise to that responsibility has no ultimate source. It is for this reason that the defense of any freedom lapses back into protection of personal interest, rather than the commitment to think beyond the boundaries of one’s current cul- ture, canon, or discipline. Fighting for the freedom to offend others reaches a farcical apotheosis in this respect, with its defense built entirely on prose- lytizing what one takes to be the case, rather than learning from others and elsewhere. Is it possible, then, to either assert or reinstate such an authority in the absence of the divine or pure reason? One such avenue that Averroes points toward in his defense of free inquiry is the exercise of listening, over the indulgence of speaking. To listen is an active engagement in a dialogue on the subjects of things that one may not find intellectually savory, but which may prove conducive to refining the palette nonetheless. The model I pro- vided at the beginning, then, may go some way in answering other impor- tant questions about academic freedom, particularly that of whether students are or should be entitled to it also. We might say that a student enters the academic community with both right and responsibility also, but unless the responsibility to seek (or listen to) the truth is affirmed alongside—if not prior to—the right to do speak it, everyone in the academic community ends up either in echo chambers or shouting matches. There is something radical about listening, in that to listen is not attendant upon the law in order to do so: we can be prevented from listening, but we do not need a license to do it. The academic community, therefore, needs to strengthen its resolve not only to speak out whatever the cost but to listen whatever the content.

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