Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 123 - Philosopher of the Arabs - al-Kindi.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverhulme Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Philosopher of the Arabs, Al-Kindi. This episode is devoted to a man I've spent much of my adult life coming to know. He was a pioneer in his field, who drew inspiration from an earlier tradition, but expressed that inspiration in a new medium. In so doing, he created some of the earliest, and still classic, works of their kind. Yes, it's Buster Keaton. No, just kidding, I'm actually talking about Al-Kindi, one of the few historical figures who has occupied more of my attention than Buster has over the last 15 years of my life. I've written a book about Al-Kindi, and with my colleague Peter Poorman, translated all of his philosophical works into English. Though this never occurred to me until now, maybe my enthusiasm for Al-Kindi can be explained by his having a lot in common with Keaton. Apart from their names beginning with K, they were indeed both pioneers, with Buster using ideas from his vaudeville youth in the new medium of silent film, while Al-Kindi was the first to make explicit use of Greek philosophy while writing in Arabic. Whether Al-Kindi walked the streets of Baghdad wearing a pork pie hat, though, is more doubtful. As we saw last time, Al-Kindi could read the Greek philosophical works hot off the presses, so to speak, as they were translated into Arabic. A devout Muslim, he oversaw the work of a circle of Christian translators. Probably he did not himself read Greek, but he improved the translated texts, possibly just in terms of style, possibly also with respect to content, and may have played some role in choosing the works selected for translation. Certainly he was an intermediary between the translators and the patrons who whose wealth was making the whole thing possible. Al-Kindi's family background put him in touch with the higher echelons of the Abbasid society of 9th century Iraq. The name Al-Kindi indicates that he belonged to the Arab tribe of the Kinda, which had been very powerful in earlier times, including the period before the coming of Islam. Our Al-Kindi was, we are told, a direct descendant of their kings, one of whom had been a companion of the prophet. Al-Kindi's own father was a Mir of the city of Kufa. To emphasize his noble lineage, Al-Kindi was honored in the later tradition with the epithet, philosopher of the Arabs. The honorific also alludes to the fact that he was unusual among philosophers in claiming descent from an Arab tribe. On the strength of this privileged background, Al-Kindi ascended about as high as a philosopher could at this time, becoming attached to the court of at least one caliph, Al-Mu'atasim. He was tutor to this caliph's son Ahmad, and dedicated several works to him. Al-Kindi's masterpiece, On First Philosophy, was addressed to the caliph himself, which is rather amusing since Al-Mu'atasim was more the type to crack together the skulls of enemies, like the Byzantines, than to crack his own skull against the formidable ramparts of Aristotelian metaphysics. In On First Philosophy, and other works, Al-Kindi was doing not just philosophy, but also public relations. He was explaining in detail why the newly translated texts emanating from his circle were valuable for a Muslim readership, especially the wealthy elite who sponsored the translations. In On First Philosophy, Al-Kindi responds stridently to certain unnamed critics, religious scholars who protested against the use of Hellenic philosophical materials. These opponents may have thought that the revelation of the Qur'an made such materials superfluous at best. Al-Kindi responds that the truth is valuable wherever we find it. He puts that sentiment into practice in his philosophical writings, showing that Greek ideas can provide support and explication for Muslim beliefs, ranging from the oneness of God to the immortality of the soul. The title, On First Philosophy, indicates that Al-Kindi is here giving us his version of the highest philosophical science covered in Aristotle's metaphysics. But, whereas that work deals with a variety of topics to do with principles, from principles of reasoning to the nature of substance, Al-Kindi seems to understand metaphysics rather narrowly as philosophical theology. For him, First Philosophy should study the first cause, which is of course God. Thus, one of the main topics of the work is what we can say about God, or rather what we can't say. The other main topic is the eternity of the universe. Why is this on the agenda? One might expect his reason to be that, if the universe is not eternal, it must have been created, which proves that there is in fact a Creator God. But if this is what Al-Kindi is thinking, he keeps that to himself. Instead, the point would seem to be that if God alone is eternal, then his eternity distinguishes him from everything he creates. If we consider again the motives of the Mu'tazilites in denying the eternity of the Qur'an, we may be struck by a parallel here. They too wanted to say that nothing is eternal other than God, not even God's own Word. This might help account for Al-Kindi's interest in the eternity question. But when Al-Kindi comes to give arguments against the eternity of the universe, he does not draw on contemporary theologians. His main source is instead the ancient Christian philosopher John Philoponus. You'll remember that Philoponus wrote works against the eternity of the universe, aiming refutations against both Aristotle and Proclus. Al-Kindi borrows from Philoponus extensively in this section of On First Philosophy, but avoids mentioning that Aristotle was one of Philoponus's targets. What with all this reticence, maybe the comparison to silent film stars isn't so far-fetched. Of course, as a public relations man for Hellenic thought, it would hardly do for Al-Kindi to criticize the great Aristotle. Indeed, he seems to be trying to agree with Aristotle as far as he can. He provides a meticulous proof that no body, including the body of the universe, can be infinitely large. He then asserts, with less argument than we might ideally have liked, that any feature of a finite body must itself be finite. Since time measures motion, as Aristotle said, and since motion applies to body, neither motion nor time can ever be infinite if there is no infinite body. Aristotle would agree with almost all of this, up until the last step. He would want to distinguish between the kind of infinity at stake in an unending body, where the infinite is actually present in its entirety, and the kind of infinity involved in eternal time. The second kind of infinity is not actual, but potential. It is like the infinity of numbers. Just as you can count as high as you want without ever reaching an actually infinite number, so you can count backwards how many years have already elapsed without reaching a starting point for the universe. By simply assuming that eternal time is on a par with infinite size, Al-Kindi misses the whole point of the Aristotelian distinction between actual and potential infinity. Somewhat more convincing is another consideration that Al-Kindi takes from Philoponus. If the universe has already existed eternally, then an infinite time must already have elapsed in order to reach the present moment. But an infinite time cannot finish elapsing. This proves that the past is not eternal. But that leaves it open that the future could still be potentially infinite. After all, the universe might simply continue to exist for an indefinitely increasing, but always finite, number of years. Despite the central role played by Philoponus in this discussion, Al-Kindi continues his selective silence by saying nothing about the biggest point of contention between Philoponus and Aristotle, the nature of the celestial spheres. Aristotle had argued that the heavenly bodies are made out of a so-called fifth element, which unlike air, earth, fire, and water, can be neither generated nor destroyed. Philoponus spent most of his refutation of Aristotle arguing against this conception of the heavenly bodies. Al-Kindi, by contrast, wrote a little treatise defending Aristotle's conception of the heavens as being made from a unique, indestructible material. This at first seems inexplicable until we get to a little caveat towards the end of that treatise. Indeed, Al-Kindi says, the heavenly spheres are indestructible, so they will exist forever, so long as God wants them to. Here, he's changed the rules by implying that even a body whose nature is not subject to destruction will vanish if God stops making it exist. This is perhaps why Al-Kindi thinks the universe's eternity is a matter for metaphysical theology and not physics. It is not the nature of the universe that determines how long it exists, but the will of God. When it comes to the question of how that divine will is exercised, Al-Kindi again thinks he can mostly agree with Aristotle. Drawing on works by Aristotle's most faithful ancient commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias, Al-Kindi says in several treatises that the heavens serve as an instrument of divine providence. They move at God's command, and their motions stir up the four elements in our realm—good old air, earth, fire, and water—so that they come together to form more complex bodies like rocks, plants, and yes, giraffes. This means that Al-Kindi's God is a rather standoffish chap. He does not directly cause things to happen down here among us, but works indirectly through the heavens, which Al-Kindi calls the proximate cause of such things. That may seem like a high price to pay for fidelity to Aristotle. Theologians like the Mu'tazilites conceived God as a much more hands-on deity, seeing him as the direct cause for all created things and events in our world, except, perhaps, freely-willed human actions. But Al-Kindi had an ulterior motive to say that the heavens are an instrument of providence. He was a staunch believer in astrology, and thought that observing heavenly motions would allow us to predict specific events in our lower world. Like Ptolemy before him, Al-Kindi thus managed to get astrology and Aristotelianism into a single theory, along with an emphatic endorsement of divine providence. It's looking as though Al-Kindi has a lot to say about God. But, if we take a closer look, this is all concerned God's effects in our world. We have learned that they are providentially ordered through divinely commanded heavenly motion. But we haven't learned much regarding God himself, and we aren't going to. Indeed, a ketonesque silence is forced upon us once we take seriously Al-Kindi's portrayal of God as what he calls a true one. This theme takes up the rest of On First Philosophy. Al-Kindi offers us a proof that there must be such a true one on the basis that all the things we see in our world are characterized by both unity and multiplicity. A single body, for instance, will have multiple parts. A single species, like humanity, will have many particular instances, like Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harold Lloyd. The single genus of animal to which human beings belong will contain other species, like goat, horse, and cow. Okay, and giraffe. In general, Al-Kindi insists that anything we can conceive as a unity will also involve some kind of many-ness. Now remember that Al-Kindi knew his Neoplatonism. The works of Plotinus and Proclus were translated in his circle. So, he has no hesitation in drawing the same conclusion they did, namely that there must be a principle of unity which bestows oneness on all these things that are both one and many. This will be the true one, which Al-Kindi wants to identify with God. Although the Greek sources of the doctrine are clear, what Al-Kindi is doing here also resonates with Islam and, yet again, with those Ma'atazilite theologians I keep mentioning. We've seen how much emphasis they placed on the doctrine of tawhid, the oneness of God. One can only imagine how pleased Al-Kindi must have been to leaf through the translated works produced in his circle, the ink still wet on the page, and to discover the harmony between the unrestricted unity of the Neoplatonist first principle and the utter oneness of the Muslim God. Here's something he isn't going to keep quiet. Ironically, though, the message he is so eager to deliver is precisely one about not being able to speak. He now addresses the concerns of theologians who denied the applicability of divine attributes to a simple god, but also of Neoplatonists like Plotinus and, possibly, the Pseudo-Dionysius, who was well known to authors of the Syriac tradition and may even have influenced the Kindi circle's version of Plotinus. Both groups indulged in what is often called negative theology, the attempt to characterize God by explaining how he transcends human understanding and human language. In this same spirit, Al-Kindi launches into a complete catalogue of every kind of speech or predicate we can use. For this, he draws on logical works like Porphyry's Introduction. These would seem to have been well known to him because, as we saw last time, logical writings were among the first texts translated into Arabic and had already been a focus of attention among Syriac authors. In fact, there is another brief work by Al-Kindi which uses Porphyry's Introduction to refute the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. Going through each of the types of predicates recognized by Porphyry, such as genus, species, accident, and so on, Al-Kindi argues that none of these are applicable to God. But to call God a Trinity is to apply terms to him like father and son, and these would have to fall under one or another of Porphyry's types of predicate. Al-Kindi adds that he has used Porphyry's work here simply because the Christians he is attacking are familiar with it. On First Philosophy makes the same point, but without applying it specifically to Trinitarian predications. Rather, it looks like he has all predicates in his sights. We have already seen why. Language always refers to things that possess both unity and multiplicity, and God is the true one, only a unity with no multiplicity at all. The rest is, apparently, silence. But hang on for a moment. Wasn't Al-Kindi just telling us that God is unique in being eternal? So there's a predicate that applies to him. Or what about the word one? It looks like we're allowed to apply that to God too. And actually, elsewhere Al-Kindi says that God is a pure agent with no trace of passivity much as he is a pure unity with no trace of multiplicity. In this, he is unlike the heavens, for instance, which do act upon us but are also acted upon by God. So, it looks as though Al-Kindi's thoroughly negative theology is not so thorough after all. There are a few predicates, at least one, eternal and agent, that do apply to God. Al-Kindi's treatment of God is not the only context in which he uses Aristotelian logic to do a bit of metaphysics. He also wrote a short treatise deploying ideas from Aristotle's categories to prove that the soul is immaterial. Here we can see him straining to use his still rather incomplete library of Greek philosophical texts to establish rational grounds for the core beliefs of Islam. He has a relatively poor knowledge even of Aristotle, who will in due course be the most widely read Hellenic thinker in Arabic translation. His incomplete acquaintance with Aristotle is clear from a catalogue of Aristotle's books written by Al-Kindi. Whereas he is able to give detailed information on what happens in a work like the categories, he sometimes seems to know very little about the Aristotelian treatises he is describing. In my favorite example, he tells us the title of the Aristotelian work on shortness and length of life, and then adds simply, it is about the shortness and length of life. Thanks for that. Although he must eventually have gained access to Aristotle's work on the soul, Al-Kindi's own writings about the soul mostly emphasize Platonist ideas. The soul is, as we just saw, immaterial. It has three parts, as Plato said, with the chief part being reason. Our goal as humans should be to make this rational part dominant, and to wean ourselves away from concern with the body. This is like cleaning the mirror of the soul of its stains and rust. What will we reflect, or rather, reflect upon, once this process of polishing is complete? As any good Platonist would tell you, the answer is, the things in the world of the intellect, a phrase Al-Kindi takes from his version of Plotinus. This disdain for the body was presumably restated in some of the numerous works on ethics and political philosophy we know were written by Al-Kindi. A highly informative list of works known in Arabic in the 10th century by the bookseller Ibn al-Nadim lists quite a few entries on these topics, but along with literally hundreds of other treatises by Al-Kindi, they are mostly lost. One Kindian ethical work does survive though. It is called On Dispelling Sorrow, and provides numerous bits of advice and memorable anecdotes to help us avoid sadness over the trials and tribulations of this world. Much of it could have been written by a Stoic author with a popular touch, but it begins with the standard invocation of the world of the intellect. If we value only intelligible things, which are stable and cannot be taken away from us, then we need never fear losing what we cherish, and so will never be sad. This Platonist psychological theory, and its made-to-match ethics, don't look particularly Aristotelian. But what may be Al-Kindi's best-known work in this area, A Letter on the Intellect, engages directly with the tradition of commentary on Aristotle's treatment of the intellect in the third book of On the Soul. Here, Al-Kindi manages, as so often, to get there first. He inaugurates a long tradition in which Muslim philosophers explain human knowledge in terms of a superhuman, separate intellect. The basic theory is that the human mind starts out in a state of merely potential knowledge, and is then activated, or illuminated, by this separate intellect. Al-Kindi calls it the first intellect, but later in the tradition it will frequently be called the active intellect. We'll be talking about this in more detail when we get to later thinkers like Al-Farabi, Avicenna, and Averroes. In fact, a standard itinerary in the study of Islamic philosophy would go just like that. Al-Kindi, Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes, and then we'd be ready to move on to the Latin European tradition. But, although we've now looked at the philosopher of the Arabs, we've only begun to examine early philosophy in Arabic. For one thing, I've promised to deal with Jewish philosophers along the way, and we're now in an excellent position to start doing just that. We've examined Al-Kindi and the Mu'tazilites, who are respectively the two chief influences on two early Jewish thinkers who wrote in Arabic, Isaac Israely and Saadia Gaon. The last Jewish philosopher we looked at was Philo of Alexandria, who lived way back in the first century AD. Next time, we'll be asking what has been happening in the Jewish tradition since him, and how Jewish philosophy began to blossom again in the soil of Islamic culture. I may not say much about Buster Keaton or any other star of the silent screen, nor about the stars that exercise providence in Al-Kindi's universe. Instead, it will be the Star of David that will light our way here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.