Introduction
This
paper deals with the Arabic translation taṣawwur
in Averroes' Great Commentary
of
the term τῶν ἀδιαιρέτων νόησις (ton adiaireton noesis) (thinking of the
indivisibles) in
Aristotle's De anima
and the Latin translation from
Arabic with (in-)formatio
as
quoted by Albertus Magnus. I briefly report on the development of the
ontological
(informatio materiae)
and
epistemological meanings of informatio
in the Middle Ages as well as on the loss of the ontological meaning in
Modernity. Eventually, I interpret informatio
in the context of Heidegger's "hermeneutical as". In the conclusion I
suggest a future research dealing with Heidegger and Mullā Sadrā and
point to
Barbara Cassin's concept of the "untranslatables" as a possible path
of thinking concerning "Capurro's trilemma".
Greek,
Latin, Arabic, and Persian Roots of the Concept of Information
For a detailed analysis of what
follows see (Capurro 2014).
Taṣawwur and taṣdīq in Averroes‘ Great Commentary of Aristotle‘s
De anima, were
translated into Latin by
Michael Scot with (in)formatio and fides. The first concept
addresses the representation
of "indivisible things" (the "ideas") while the second
concept means the predicative judgement (logos apophantikos)
about things using
the composition of names or signs where there is right and wrong.
Informatio or
just formatio or
"conception" (Alain de Libera), as apposed to fides or "assentiment"
(Alain de Libera) means the "thinking of the indivisible" or of the
"simple objects of thought", the Greek term being: τῶν ἀδιαιρέτων νόησις (ton adiaireton noesis). There
is no single Greek term in Aristotle's De
Anima corresponding to the Latin translation by
Michael
Scot of the Arabic term(s) used by Averroes in his Great Commentary quoted by
Albertus
Magnus.
Albertus Magnus
(1193-1206)
makes
a short comment on the concept of informatio "apud
Arabes" in the context of Aristotle's De anima and indirectly to
Averroes, called „the
Commentator“:
"Indivisibilium quidem igitur,
quae sunt incomplexa intelligentia sive intelligere, quod est actus
intelligendi,
in omnibus his est circa quae non est falsum, eo quod,
sicut
INFERIUS ostendemus, numquam accidit error intelligibilium in talium
intellectu. Hic autem intellectus vocatur apud Arabes informatio,
eo quod intelligere talia est informari intellectum possibilem naturis
formalibus eorum." (Quote apud Capurro, p. 114
http://www.capurro.de/info3.html)
Aristotle's νόησις (noesis) or,
more precisely, νόησις
τῶν ἀδιαιρέτων (noesis ton
adiaireton)
thinking the indivisibles, that was translated from Greek into Arabic
with taṣawwur, from
Arabic into Hebrew with ẓiyyur, and
from Arabic into Latin with (in-)formatio is
an example of a complex history of translations of a Latin concept that
has
become paradigmatic for our age.
Throughout the Middle
Ages informatio and informo are commonly used
in
epistemological, ontological, and pedagogical contexts by several
authors (see
Capurro 1978 and Capurro 2009 for details). The Aristotelian
influence on
the higher-level philosophical concept of informatio is
shown at best in the work of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274). Schütz
(1958)
distinguishes in his Thomas-Lexikon between informatio in the sense of
"providing something with a form" in an epistemological or
ontological context and the pedagogical sense of education or
instruction.
Probably the most
intriguing
question from the point of view of the history of ideas concerns the
ontological use of informatio — both
in the lower-level sense of "molding matter" as well as in the
higher-level sense used by Scholastics as informatio
materiae — which became obsolete not only in
modern
languages that, like English, inherited the Latin word and slightly
transformed
it into information,
retaining the epistemological meaning (Capurro and Hjørland
2003).
Information
in Modernity
In the
following I summarize
some findings from (Capurro and Hjørland 2003, Capurro 2009 and
Capurro 1978).
The modern
uses of information
show a transition period in which the medieval ontological concept of
"molding matter" is not just abandoned but reshaped under empirical
and epistemological premises.
The action
of 'informing' with
some active or essential quality" had, according to the Oxford English Dictionary "a
quite restrictive use" not only in English, but also in other modern
European languages, and references on "formation or molding of the mind
or
character, training, instruction, teaching" date from the 14th century.
This transition from
Middle
Ages
to Modernity in the use of the concept of information — from
"giving a (substantial) form to matter" to "communicating
something to someone" — can be detected in the natural
philosophy
of René Descartes (1596-1650), who calls ideas the "forms of
thought," not in the sense that these are "pictured"
("depictae") in some part of the brain, but "as far as they
inform the spirit itself oriented to this part of the brain" ("sed
tantum quatenus mentem ipsam in allem cerebri partem conversam
informant."
(Descartes 1996, VII, 161). but also, for instance, in German where the
word Information was
actually used in the sense of education and communication since the
15th
century.Informatio was
literally translated — first in a mystical context as in-Bildunge or in-Formunge; later on in a
general
pedagogical sense, such as used by Christoph Martin Wieland
(1733-1813) — with Bildung,
a term heavily charged with higher-level meaning (Capurro 1978, p.
176).
A plausible explanation
for
the
loss of the ontological higher-level sense is the decline of Scholastic philosophy caused by the rise of
modern science.
Nevertheless, the concept
of
information ceases to be a higher-level concept until the rise of
information
theory in the 20th century. Philosophers such as Francis Bacon
(1561-1626),
John Locke (1632-1704), George Berkeley (1685-1753), David Hume
(1711-1776),
and Thomas Reid (1711-1796) criticize scholastic hylomorphism and
particularly
the theory of abstraction.
It is interesting to
observe
how
the concept of information is closely connected to views of knowledge.
This
conclusion is important with regard to the use of the concept of
information in
information science, because it indicates a severly neglected
connection
between theories of information and theories of knowledge (Capurro and
Hjørland
2003).
Information
as Hermeneutical As
The Aristotelian
„thinking
(of)
the indivisibles“(νόησις τῶν ἀδιαιρέτων) (noesis ton
adiaireton) (taṣawwur,
(in-)formatio) that precedes the action of the intellect
dealing
with the composition in predication (taṣdīq,
fides), can be translated into Heidegger's difference
between the
"hermeneutical as" and the „apophantic as“ (Heidegger 1976, § 33).
The philosopher and
theologian Thomas Sheehan writes in his "Hermeneia and
Apophansis:
The early Heidegger on Aristotle":
"The
noun hermeneia (or the verb hermeneuo) in Aristotle has a
generic
meaning and
two specifications. Generically it means expression, manifestation, or
communication (semainein). In
increasingly determinate specification it
can
then mean: verbal semainein,
called lexis or dialectos; and declarative
verbal semainein, called apophansis or logos apophantikos.
That is:
hermeneia-1 hermeneia-2 hermeneia-3 [semainein]: [legein]:
[apophainesthai]:
self-expression
or communication in any form;
self-expression
or communication in discourse;
self-expression
or communication in declarative sentences.
To
synthesize is to distinguish, and the assertoric synthesis-distinction
(the
"apophantic as" operative in hermeneia-3) rests on the prepredicative
synthesis-distinction of entities and their practical essence; and for
Heidegger that composition and division is performed on the basis of
the
original (i.e. the hermeneutical) as. This unified as-structure, rooted
in praxis, that Heidegger
retrieved from Aristotle's discussion of hermeneia led
to the issues of transcendence and ultimately temporality. Heidegger
interpreted human beings, insofar as they already know the
beingness-dimension
of entities, as transcendence, i.e., as being already beyond entities
and
disclosive of the possibilities in terms of which entities can be
understood.
This kinetic exceeding of entities he called the human being's
Immer-schon-vorweg-sein, his condition of being "always already
ahead" of entities.
This
movement is the co-performance of disclosure in humanely primordial
sense, and
it corresponds to the diairesis-moment of the hermeneutical as. In the
oral
version of his course Die
Grundbegriffe
der Metaphysik (February 27, 1930) Heidegger said that diairesis, seen as
human transcendence, "pulls us as under, as it [p.
80]
were, and grants us a stretching-ahead, takes us away into the
possible...
." But at the same time the human being returns from that
transcendence to entities so as to know them in terms of possibility,
i.e.,
"so as to allow the possible — as what
empowers the actual — to speak
back
to the actual in a binding way... , binding or bonding it: synthesis.
Clearly
the unity of diairesis as
transcendence to the essence of beings and synthesis as the return to beings
in their essence points to the
kinetic
structure that
grounds the hermeneutical as, just as the hermeneutical as in turn
makes
possible the truth and falsehood of Aristotle's hermeneia-3." (Sheehan
2008)
In other words, the
„thinking
(of) the indivisibles that was translated into arabic as taṣawwur and into Latin as
„(in-formatio)," i.e., that
what precedes the action of the
intellect
dealing with the composition and division that takes place in
predication (taṣdīq, fides),
can be translated into
Heidegger's difference between "hermeneutical as" and "apophantic
as“.
Conclusions
The insight into human
existence as time
is
metaphysically and theologically preceded by understanding humans as already being and
becoming part,
after death, of a divine being with or without their individuality, an
issue
that was and is controversial and fundamental for Greek, Latin, Arabic,
Hebrew,
and Persian thinkers of the Middle Ages no less than in the Islamic and
Western
tradition after Averroes all the way up until today.
A comparison
between Mulla Sadra (1572-1640) and Martin Heidegger
seems to me
an interesting topic for future research not only concerning the
relation
between essence and existence but also with regard to the relation
between understanding
and pre-understanding and tasawwur and tasdiq. I
quote from Wikipedia
(Mulla Sadra):
"According
to Oliver Leaman, Mulla Sadra is arguably the single most
important and
influential philosopher in the Muslim world in the last four hundred
years. [...] Mulla Sadra metaphysics gave priority "Ab initio" to
existence, over quiddity. That is to say, essences are determined
and
variable according to existential "intensity", (to use Henry Corbin's
definition), and as such essences are not immutable. The advantage
to this
schema is that it is acceptable to the fundamental statements of the
Qur'an, even
as it does not necessarily debilitate any previous Islamic
philosopher's
Aristotelian or Platonic foundations.“
What is information? It
is one
of the „untranslatables“ addressed by Barbara Cassin in her
„Vocabulaire européen
des philosophies. Dictionnaire des intraduisibles“ when
she
writes:
„Parler
d‘intraduisibles n‘implique nullement que les termes en question, ou
les
expressions, les tours syntaxiques et grammaticaux, ne soient pas
traduits et
ne puissent pas l‘être
– l’intraduisible, c’est plutôt ce qu’on ne cesse pas de (ne pas)
traduire. Mais cela signale que leur traduction, dans une langue ou
dans
l’autre, fait problème, au point de susciter parfois un
néologisme ou
l’imposition d’un nouveau sens sur un vieux mot: c’est un indice de la
manière
don’t, d’une langue à l’autre, tant les mots que les
réseaux conceptuels ne
sont pas superposables […]” (Cassin, 2004, p. xvii-xviii)
("To
speak about
untranslatables does mean that the terms themselves or the expressions,
their
syntactic and grammatical forms, cannot be translated at all -
intranslatable
means what cannot cease (not) being translated. This points to the fact
that
their translation, from one language to the other, is problematic, even
to the
point when it gives rise sometimes to a neologism or to impose a new
meaning
over an old word: this shows that, from one language to the other, not
only the
words but also the conceptual networks cannot be put one over the
other.
(...)").
This might be a path of
thought
(and action) for dealing with „Capurro‘s trilemma“ as addressed by
Peter
Fleissner and Wolfgang Hofkirchner. The concept of
information may
have:
- The same
reference
in all contexts, such that qualitative changes are not grasped.
- Similar
aspects
between the references. In this case there a question arises about the
primary
or basic reference to which analogical concepts refer.
- Finally,
qualitatively distinct references may exist. In this case the
concepts of
information are equivocal (Fleissner and Hofkirchner 1995).
This research is not just
historically relevant but also a key issue for an intercultural
philosophical
dialogue about the information society.
Acknowledgment
I thank Joseph Brenner for critical comments.
References
1. Capurro,
R.
Apud Arabes.
Notes on the Greek, Latin,
Arabic, Persian, and Hebrew Roots of the Concept of Information. 2014 http://www.capurro.de/iran.html
2. Capurro,
R. Information. Munich: Saur 1978. http://www.capurro.de/info.html
3. Capurro,
R. Past, present and future of the concept of information. tripleC 2009, 7, 125-141. http://www.capurro.de/infoconcept.pdf
4. Capurro,
R.; Hjørland, B. The Concept of Information. In Annual Review of Information Science and
Technology (ARIST),
B. Cronin Ed.; Information Today: Medford, New Jersey,
2003,
pp. 343-411. http://www.capurro.de/infoconcept.html
5. Cassin,
B.
Vocabulaire
européen des philosophies. Dictionnaire des
intraduisibles. Paris: Seuil, 2004.
6. Fleissner,
P.; Hofkirchner, W. In-formatio
revisited. Wider dem dinglichen Informationsbegriff. Informatik Forum 1995, 3, 126-131.
http://cartoon.iguw.tuwien.ac.at/igw/menschen/hofkirchner/papers/InfoConcept/Informatio_revisited/in-format.pdf
7.
Heidegger, M. Sein und Zeit.
Tübingen: Niemeyer 1976 (Engl. transl. Being and Time, J.
Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Basil Blackwell 1987).
8. Sheehan,
Th. Hermeneia
and
Apophansis: The early Heidegger on Aristotle. In Heidegger et l'idée de la
phénoménologie, Franco
Volpi et al. (Eds.), Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 1988; pp. 67-80.
https://studylib.es/doc/5037649/hermeneia-and-apophansis--the-early-heidegger-on-aristotle
9. Wikipedia:
Mulla Sadra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulla_Sadra