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

hand, just as much a big black hand as a small white one. The fallacy of
the theory lies, of course, in the word ‘representing’, which as a matter of
fact assumes what it tended to deny, namely, that we can think of a hand
in general which has neither a particular shape, nor a particular colour, nor
is localized in space.
The next point Ghazali tries to refute is the argument of the philosophers
for the immortality of the soul. According to the philosophers, the fact that
it is a substance independent of a body and is immaterial shows that a
corruption of the body cannot affect it. This, as a matter of fact, is a truism,
since the meaning of substantiality and immateriality for the philosophers
implies already the idea of eternity. On the other hand, if the soul is the
form of the body, as is also affirmed by them, it can only exist with its
matter and the mortality of its body would imply its own mortality, as
Ghazali rightly points out. The Arabic philosophers through their
combination of Platonism and Aristotelianism hold, indeed, at the same
time three theories inconsistent with each other, about the relation of body
and soul: that the soul is the form of the body, that the soul is a substance,
subsistent by itself and immortal, and that the soul after death takes a
pneumatic body (a theory already found in Porphyry). Besides, their denial
of the Platonic idea of pre-existence of the soul vitiates their statement
that the soul is a substance, subsistent by itself, that is, eternal,
ungenerated, and incorruptible. Although Averroës in his whole book tries
to come as near to the Aristotelian conception of the soul as possible, in
this chapter he seems to adopt the eschatology of the late Greek authors.
He allows to the souls of the dead a pneumatic body and believes that
they exist somewhere in the sphere of the moon. He also accepts the
theory of the Djinn, the equivalent of the Greek Daimones. What he
rejects, and what the philosophers generally reject, is the resurrection of
the flesh.
In his last chapter Averroës summarizes his views about religion. There
are three possible views. A Sceptical view that religion is opium for the
people, held by certain Greek rationalists; the view that religion expresses
Absolute Truth; and the intermediate view, held by Averroës, that the
religious conceptions are the symbols of a higher philosophical truth,
symbols which have to be taken for reality itself by the non-philosophers.
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