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Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

a book on philosophy

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which the view in question leads, which is very much like babbling in

metaphysics, is stupid and senseless talk. The artificial product in the

empirical world is produced, indeed, by only one agent, even if it

possesses the ten categories. How untrue is this proposition that the one

can produce only one, if it is understood in the way Avicenna and Farabi

understand it, and Ghazali himself in his Niche for Lights, where he

accepts their theory of the First Principle.’

Ghazali says:

I say:

One might say: ‘Perhaps there are in the principle

different kinds of plurality which do not result from its being a

principle, only three or four are manifest to us, and the rest

we do not perceive, but our incapacity for observation does

not shake our belief that the principle of plurality is plurality

and that from the one no manifold can proceed.’

If the philosophers made such a statement, they would have to believe

that there is in the first effect an infinite plurality, and one would

necessarily have to ask them whence plurality comes in the first effect.

And since they say that from the one no manifold proceeds, they would

have to concede that the manifold cannot proceed from the One, but their

statement that from the one only one proceeds contradicts their statement

that what proceeds from the First Monad possesses plurality, for from the

One one must proceed. Of course they can say that each term in the

plurality of the first effect is a first term, but then there must be a plurality

of first terms. It is most astonishing how this could remain hidden from

Farabi and Avicenna, for they were the first who made these silly

statements, and many followed them and attributed these theories to the

philosophers. For when Farabi, Avicenna, and their school say that the

plurality in the second principle arises through its self-knowledge and its

knowing another, it follows for them that its essence has two natures or

two forms, and it would be interesting to know which form proceeds from

the First Principle and which does not. And there is a similar difficulty in

their statement that the second principle is possible by itself, but

necessary by another, for its possible nature must necessarily be different

from its necessary nature, which it acquires from the necessary being. But

204

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