Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 176 - A Man for all Seasons - al-Tusi.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 LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net, today's episode, A Man for All Seasons, Nasir ad-Din Atouzi. Just as Blanche du Bois in A Streetcar Named Desire has always depended on the kindness of strangers, philosophers have almost always depended on the kindness of the rich and powerful. Already in the ancient world, Plato and Aristotle consorted with political leaders, Plato with the tyrant Dionysius of Syracuse and of course Aristotle with Alexander the Great. Even Plotinus fraternized with senators and called on their support for his plan to found a new city. Down the line, patronage will play a decisive role in Renaissance philosophy and Descartes will die shortly after moving to Sweden to tutor the Queen. Isn't this a bit unsettling, not to say tawdry, not to say outrageously hypocritical? Surely the true philosopher ought to disdain the compromises, flattery, and diplomacy involved in a life at court. Philosophy should be a dispassionate inquiry into the truth, not an attempt to flatter the powerful. It's an issue that still confronts us today, with philosophers and other academics wary of any government or university policy that might infringe on their intellectual freedom. If the spectacle of the court philosopher does indeed unsettle you, then the Islamic world offers plenty of reason for disquiet. Many of the major figures we've looked at benefited from patronage relationships, from Akindi, tutoring the Caliph's son, to Iverroes, supposedly writing his commentaries at the behest of the An-Muhad-i-Mir. Even worse, there's good reason to think that political pressures affected the ideas put forward by these philosophers. Consider for instance the striking resonances between Akindi's ideas and those of the Ma'atazilite theologians. Acceptance of the Ma'atazilite position on the createdness of the Qur'an was being made compulsory by the very same caliph that engaged Akindi's services as a tutor. That might be a coincidence, but I tend to doubt it. A more subtle effect of patronage is its influence on the literary form philosophers choose for their writings. Avasana and others constructed their works with an eye fixed firmly on the pedagogical needs and interests of their readers, and that meant in the first instance the needs and interests of wealthy patrons. No thinker of the Islamic world brings these issues to the fore as much as Nasir ad-Din At-Tuzi. To this day, controversy rages over the question of just how much his political connections even determined the content of his writings. At-Tuzi espoused different opinions at different times, and rather conveniently those opinions tended to match the ones promoted by his masters. Were his changing ideas nonetheless held sincerely, or was he a philosophical weathervane, changing direction with the gust of new political winds? The main shift in his writings concerns his religious allegiances, and in particular whether he joined the Ismaili community of Shi'i Muslims out of sincere conviction, or rather as a hypocritical career move. Somewhat surprisingly, the charge of hypocrisy has often been pressed by admirers of At-Tuzi. So great a scholar would be apprised to be claimed for one community or another, so Twelver Shiites have often been eager to say that At-Tuzi held to their version of Shi'ism throughout his life. This was the tradition in which At-Tuzi was raised, and he returned to it in the end. On this interpretation, he only claimed to adopt Ismailism while he was enjoying the patronage of Ismaili rulers. Once they were swept away by the Mongols, he was free to repudiate that branch of Shi'ism openly and to proclaim the Twelver beliefs he had secretly held all the while. The debate extends even to the authenticity of those works ascribed to At-Tuzi which most obviously uphold Ismaili teachings. Before passing judgment, we are going to need to understand the political and religious situation a bit better. In fact, we practically need a flow chart. The Nizaris, whose patronage At-Tuzi enjoyed for some time, are a subgroup of the Ismailis. The Ismailis are in turn a subgroup of the Shi'ites who are of course on one side of the major divide in Islam between Sunnis and Shi'ites. In other words, some Muslims are Shi'ites, some Shi'ites are Ismailis, and some Ismailis are Nizaris. Apart from the Nizaris, we've seen all these groups before. To review, Shi'ites are Muslims who believe that rightful authority is passed down through the family of the prophet, beginning with his cousin Ali. Different groups of Shi'ites then accept different lines of imams, or rightful successors, to Ali. The Twelvers and Ismailis broke with one another over the question of succession, with the two groups championing two different sons of the imam Ja'far Asadik, who died in the year 765. The name of the Itna Asheri, or Twelver Shi'ites, refers to the line of 12 imams recognized by this group, while the Ismailis get their name from Ismail, the older brother whose claim they accepted. We saw in episode 135 that some Ismaili missionaries embraced Neoplatonic texts drawn from the Greek tradition, using this philosophical material to put forward a distinctive version of Shi'ite theology. This was at a time when Ismailis held the reins of power in Egypt, before being tossed out by Syrian forces, including Saladin. Finally, the Nizaris were a group that broke off from other Ismailis. Again, the split was over a question of succession in the line of imams. Which brings us to At-Tuzi. As I say, he was raised as a Twelver Shi'ite, but he may have had leanings towards Ismailism early in life. A decisive moment came in the year 1220, when the young man immersed in his studies in the Central Asian province of Khorasan looked up from his books and noticed that the Mongols were rampaging in his direction. He fled to the shelter of the Nizari rulers, whose conflicts with other Muslims had given them good reason to build nearly impregnable fortresses, a base from which the Nizaris sometimes ordered targeted deaths for their political and religious opponents. Our word assassin comes from the group of killers who carried out these missions. While At-Tuzi was enjoying the safety, and even friendship, of the Nizari leaders, he wrote works with clear Ismaili commitments. One is an intellectual autobiography entitled Contemplation and Action. It is apt to remind us of the life stories written by Avicenna and Alghazali, except that in Alghazali's Deliverer from Error, the Ismailis are mercilessly attacked, whereas At-Tuzi tells of how this community finally offered him the truths he had been seeking since childhood. By the time he is writing his works under the sheltering wing of the Nizaris, At-Tuzi is already a formidable scholar, a polymath who is expert in the mathematical sciences and philosophy, especially the theories of Avicenna. He does not hesitate to use philosophical arguments to defend the Ismaili view of things. Already the earlier Ismaili philosophers had promoted the idea that God in himself remains utterly transcendent and relates to the world only through a command. Now At-Tuzi supports this line of thought with a claim taken straight from Avicenna, God being purely one can have only one effect. This effect will not be, as in Avicenna, a first celestial intellect. While At-Tuzi does here recognize a chain of intellects descending through the heavenly spheres, he says that these are preceded by the divine command, which serves as an intermediary between God and the universe that he creates. Philosophy is also deployed to prove the central Ismaili doctrine of the imam. For At-Tuzi, Avicenna epistemology proves the possibility of such a perfectly enlightened teacher by explaining what it would mean for a human to have a completely actualized intellect. It also shows that the rest of us who are not perfect need an external teacher. As Avicenna and indeed Aristotle have shown us, potentiality can be realized only through some external cause that is already actual, so a potential learner needs a teacher on the outside, that teacher being, of course, the imam. These same arguments are put forward in another explicitly Ismaili work called Paradise of Submission. This is one of the works whose authenticity is questioned by those who would prefer At-Tuzi not to be such a forthright defender of the Ismaili community, but it again does what you would expect At-Tuzi to do, mount a defense of that community using the arsenal provided by philosophy. He argues against the view that all humans are equal in intellect. This would inevitably lead to a kind of relativism in which all believers would be equal and there would be no point sorting true from false. Thus, the more imperfect minds should look to a perfect mind to help them, again, this will be the imam. Nor is this guidance a matter only of belief, we also need the imam to help us perfect our moral character. Moral character is the topic of another work from At-Tuzi's Ismaili period entitled Ethics for Nasir. The title refers to the fact that it is dedicated to the Nizari ruler Nasir ad-Din ibn Abi Mansur. Yes, this ruler was called Nasir ad-Din while At-Tuzi was named Nasir ad-Din. That's just in case you weren't sufficiently confused by the Shi'ism flowchart earlier. In this treatise, At-Tuzi sets out to provide a complete discussion of what Aristotelians had always called practical philosophy. As already suggested by Aristotle, philosophy's contribution to our practical affairs is divided into three parts concerning the individual, the household, and the city. Thus, the title Ethics, a more accurate character trait, really only applies to the first major section of the work on individual action. Here, At-Tuzi sticks closely to the work called Refinement of Character, written by the earlier Platonist thinker Miskaway. We covered it in episode 134 on Arabic ethical literature. Concerning the household, he uses a work written by Avicenna, and for politics he draws especially on Al-Farabi. Though this treatise is thus heavily dependent on earlier authors, it had a huge popularity in subsequent centuries. This is in no small part because of the simple fact that it was written in Persian. At-Tuzi's decision to write many of his works in Persian is in itself symptomatic of the Nizadi context in which he was writing. They have sometimes been seen as a self-consciously Iranian movement, and they promoted the use of Persian in their writings. At-Tuzi helped to launch Persian as a philosophical language, in part by integrating Arabic terminology into works written in this language. Even though I unfortunately can't read Persian, I can easily recognize many technical terms in Persian philosophical works, because these words are often just the same as in Arabic. Another characteristic feature of this work on practical philosophy is the occasional, usually rather subtle allusion to Ismaili doctrines. Unsurprising, perhaps, given the intended recipient of the work. Nonetheless, it's a piece of evidence in support of the idea that At-Tuzi was sincere in his support of the Nizadi cause at this stage of his career. It's interesting to note that Avicenna plays a relatively small part in this work by At-Tuzi. Indeed, it would be fair to say that ethics and politics are the only areas of philosophy in which Avicenna did not dominate the later Eastern tradition. The fact that an Avicenna expert like At-Tuzi turned to Miskaway for ethics and Al-Farabi for political philosophy is telling in this regard, and there's certainly no doubting At-Tuzi's expertise when it came to Avicenna, as we can see from yet another work he wrote during his stay with the Nizaris, a commentary on the Pointers and Reminders. As I've mentioned before, the Pointers is a deliberately compressed and difficult work, much briefer than Avicenna's magisterial healing. It seemed to cry out for commentary, and that is what it got. Fakhradina Razi already turned the project of commenting on the Pointers into an opportunity for raising doubts about Avicenna's philosophy. In effect, At-Tuzi's commentary is a response to Razi, in which the doubts are answered or exposed as mere, sophisticated quibbles. The result is one of the most staunchly pro-Avicennian works produced in the whole long history of responding to Avicenna. Let's go straight to the top and consider how At-Tuzi responds to Fakhradina Razi's complaints about Avicenna's portrayal of God. We already saw in the episode on Razi how he dealt with Avicenna's claim that God is an intellect. If this is so, says Razi, then God must have objects of knowledge which are distinct from God himself. This shows, Razi gleefully claims, that Avicenna is committed to something like the Asherite understanding of God. The Asherite theologians, after all, recognize divine attributes that have their own distinct reality but reside in God's essence. In just the same way, Avicenna must admit that there are bits of knowledge residing in God's mind. To this, At-Tuzi replies that there is no distinction between God and what God knows. Rather, as Avicenna said loudly and clearly, God knows all other things by knowing himself as their cause. Of course, this is a particularly exalted case of self-knowledge, but as At-Tuzi points out, it does have something in common with our more humble knowledge of ourselves. When you know yourself, there is no distinction between the thing that knows and the thing that is known. Rather, as At-Tuzi puts it, you occur to yourself without of course being a second thing that resides in your own mind. The same is true of God, except that he needs no further knowledge apart from self-knowledge the way that we do, for in knowing himself, he already knows everything. The two commentators fight a similar battle when it comes to Avicenna's famous identification of God as the necessary existent. On this point, Razi again detects a kind of composition or multiplicity in Avicenna's supposedly simple God. For Avicenna, the difference between God and created things is that God's essence guarantees his existence, whereas a created thing like Hiawatha the giraffe, or anything else apart from God for that matter, has an essence that needs to receive existence from some external cause. Fine, says Razi, but in that case the essences of God and Hiawatha both receive the same thing, existence, and in both cases this is something distinct from the essence. It's just that God supplies himself with his own existence, whereas Hiawatha, for all her charms, cannot manage this trick. Much as Razi claimed before that God's knowledge would be something distinct that resides in God, he claims now that God's very existence would have to be a distinct thing that permanently comes to his essence. At-Tuzi's response to this far-reaching consequences, both philosophically and historically. He identifies a crucial premise in Razi's attack, namely that Hiawatha and God must both receive the same kind of existence for their essences, if they are to exist. This is wrong, says At-Tuzi. In fact, God's existence is of a fundamentally different kind from ours. In particular, it is an existence which is in no way distinct from the essence to which it belongs. Perhaps this would be clearer if I give you an analogy. On Razi's interpretation, the difference between Hiawatha and God is like the difference between me and the nice man who drives the ice cream truck. We can both get ice cream, but I need to get it from the nice man, whereas the nice man can supply it to himself. That might be why he needs to go on a diet. On At-Tuzi's understanding, the difference is more like that and a banana split. Whereas I need to get ice cream from some other source, the banana split just is ice cream. So if we say that I have ice cream and also that the banana split has ice cream, we are using the phrase in rather different ways. Likewise, if I say that Hiawatha exists and that God exists, I am using the word exists in two ways. Hiawatha receives existence, whereas God just is existence. On the other hand, At-Tuzi believes that the two uses of the word are related. As At-Tuzi says, using some terminology also found in Avicenna, there is a relation of tashkik, or analogy, between created existence and divine existence. Now, like the nice man giving me a free sample of ice cream, at the moment I'm just giving you a taste of something bigger and better. We'll look again at the analogy idea in the next episode when we have a more wide-ranging look at interpretations of Avicenna's essence-existence distinction in the later tradition. The Pointers' commentary, like the Ismaili works and Ethics for Nasir, were written while At-Tuzi lived in the strongholds of the Nizari leaders. But even the strongest leader tends to lose his hold when the Mongols come to town, and so it was in this case. Led by Hulagu, they arrived at the main Nizari fortress in Alamut, which is in northern Iran, in the year 1256. At-Tuzi was sent as a negotiator to speak to the Mongols, and I don't know about you, but I'm giving him serious points for bravery there. But, like a grocery shopper who refuses to get a store card, At-Tuzi doesn't earn many points for loyalty. Once Alamut fell, At-Tuzi announced that he had never really sympathized with the Ismailis. He made his services available to Hulagu and accompanied him to Baghdad where the Mongols successfully overwhelmed the city and executed the last of the Abbasid caliphs, Al-Musta'asim. It's even reported that At-Tuzi suggested the brutal means by which the caliph was executed, to avoid spilling his blood, roll him to death in a carpet. Other versions of the story have him being rolled up in a carpet and then trampled by elephants or horses. While this may make it sound as if At-Tuzi sold his soul to the devil, at least he got a good deal. As a Shiite, whether Twelver or Ismaili, he may well have welcomed the end of the line of Sunni caliphs, and perhaps he really did spend his years with the Ismailis under duress, in which case the coming of the Mongols would have been very welcome. Certainly, his intellectual career blossomed thanks to his friendly dealings with the Mongols. The execution of the caliph occurred in early 1258. Just one year later, with Hulagu's support, At-Tuzi became director of a research center and observatory at Maragha in modern-day Azerbaijan. Recreating something of the intellectual ambition of ancient Alexandria, Maragha would, in due course, have an enormous library as well as the observatory and attract scholars from across the Islamic world. The work done at Maragha has been called a scientific revolution before the Renaissance, and one part of the case for that claim would be At-Tuzi's own writings, among them a work dedicated to the Mongol ruler Hulagu. So, was At-Tuzi a hero or a villain, a turncoat or a turning point in intellectual history? Perhaps the answer is all of the above. After all, nothing prevents a great thinker from switching teams when there's suddenly a new playing field. It's even been proposed that we should not apply the usual standards of political and even religious allegiance to a man like At-Tuzi. Some have argued that he was answering to a higher calling, seeing himself primarily as a philosophical advisor to kings, a role he could play for rulers of very different religious persuasions as long as they were enlightened enough to accept his counsel. Perhaps. But it seems to me a problem with this view that in his Ismaili phase At-Tuzi stridently argued that philosophy cannot reach the truths made available through the imams recognized by Shiite Islam. In these same works, assuming they are authentic, he also defends a specifically Nizari understanding of those truths. This doesn't sound like a man who thinks his philosophical gifts allow him to stand above the differences of religious opinion that divided his contemporaries. At-Tuzi's role in the history of Shi'ism seems bound to remain a matter of controversy. By contrast, his role in the history of philosophy is secure. He was the foremost defender of Avicennism in the 13th century. He wrote the most influential and eagerly read work of ethics in the later Eastern tradition. And he led an extraordinary scientific center at Maragha which all by itself gives the lie to any suspicion that the arrival of the Mongols ended serious intellectual inquiry in the Islamic world. To the contrary, in this case the Mongols actually sponsored such activity. This is one sign of the scientific and philosophical continuity that was possible across either side of the Mongol invasion. Next time, we're going to look further at another example of this continuity. Before the Mongols came, philosophy in the East centered on arguments over the legacy of Avicenna, with one issue looming perhaps larger than any other, his distinction between existence and essence. After the Mongols came, Avicenna continued to dominate philosophical and theological debate, and that distinction remained as controversial as ever. If you've ever seen philosophers arguing about metaphysics, you'll know that it takes more than the collapse of a great civilization to shut them up. Don't let anything less stop you from joining me as I look at the debate over the nature of existence next time on The History of Philosophy, Without Any Gaps. you