Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 134 - Balancing Acts - Arabic Ethical Literature.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 Lieberman Trust. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Balancing Acts, Arabic Ethical Literature. Next to the room where I am recording this, there is a bathroom in which you can currently see a bar of soap still in its wrapping. The label promises that this soap can help to re-establish the balance between the mind and the body. Amazingly, it was only slightly more expensive than normal soap, which limits itself to helping you wash your hands. And we're fortunate to live in a day and age when one can not only get soap for one's mind but also chicken soup for one's soul, as in the title of a line of popular self-help manuals. This sort of thing hasn't been possible since the Abbasid Empire. During the formative period of philosophy in the Islamic world, we find several authors writing their own popular self-help manuals with titles like On Dispelling Sadness, Benefits for Bodies and Souls, Refinement of Character, and most tellingly of all, Spiritual Medicine. That last one is the title of a work by Abu Bakr al-Razi, inventor of the widely deplored Theory of Five Eternals. You may recall that the works in which he set forth that theory no longer survive, perhaps because they were too controversial for anyone to want to copy them. The same cannot be said for the Spiritual Medicine, which on a casual reading seems like a rather harmless, if rather hectoring, collection of ethical advice. It was written as a partner piece to one of al-Razi's large medical treatises, the Book for al-Mansur, who was the patron to whom both texts were dedicated. The Book for al-Mansur tells you everything you need to know to have a healthy body. And the Spiritual Medicine completes the job by telling you how to have a healthy soul. To some extent this may seem familiar. Not only do we buy books called things like Chicken Soup for the Soul, but we routinely talk about mental or psychological health. What is less familiar, though, is the idea that ethics itself might be a kind of medicine. Here al-Razi is looking back to his chief influence from the Greek tradition, who was neither Plato nor Aristotle, but Galen. The greatest of ancient doctors, Galen wrote voluminously on every area of his art, creating a body of work that would underlie medical literature for many centuries, something we heard about in the interview with Peter Poorman. Galen also wrote about an idea that was prevalent in the ancient world, that the soul, like the body, can be ill or healthy. We find it, for instance, in Epicureanism, with its fourfold remedy of ethical advice. In Galen, ethical advice is part of what a skilled physician is able to offer his patient. Indeed, there can be no sharp divide between caring for the body and caring for the soul. As he argues in a work with the self-explanatory title, The States of the Soul Depend on the Mixtures of the Body, the effects of alcohol on people who drink is a particularly clear example of the way the body can affect even the rational part of the soul. Because of this intimate relation between body and soul, doctors can actually modify a person's ethical character by prescribing certain diets. The goal of Galenic ethics is not just, as my bar of soap would have it, establishing a balance between mind and body. It is also a matter of achieving balance within the soul, much as the doctor tries to balance the four humours in the body. As an admirer of Plato, Galen adopted the theory we find in dialogues like The Republic and Timaeus, according to which every person's soul has three aspects—reason, spirit, and desire. Ethically speaking, health consists in the appropriate interrelation of these three parts. Reason should dominate desire, with the assistance of the righteous indignation provided by spirit. Psychological disorders happen when the lower soul is out of control. For instance, when one is particularly prone to anger because of a strong-spirited part of the soul, something Galen admits affected his own mother. Libertines and gluttons, similarly, allow their desire to dominate their reason. Galen speaks at length about these failings of character in two ethical works that were known in the Arabic tradition. In fact, one, called On Character Traits, is lost in Greek but survives in Arabic. Darazi alludes to Galen's ideas with the very title spiritual medicine, and in the text itself he exploits and expands on the Galenic program of psychological medicine. He begins by telling us that God's greatest gift to mankind is akhl, meaning intellect or reason. It is in virtue of reason that we differ from non-human animals, as we can observe from the fact that they plunge headlong after pleasures, such as food or sex, without bothering to consider the consequences of what they are doing. On the other hand, animals naturally limit their pursuit of pleasure. For instance, they will stop eating once they are no longer hungry. By contrast, there are many humans who can never fulfill their immoderate desires. As Arazi says, offered power over half the world, many would still want to conquer the other half. From his own experience, Arazi tells the story of eating dates with a glutton who stuffed himself to bursting and then lamented that he could not go back to the beginning and start eating all over again. Arazi chastised him, pointing out that the pain caused by overeating was bound to outweigh the pleasure of the food. Remarks like that have led some to see Arazi as a kind of sophisticated hedonist along the lines of Epicurus, advising us to plan ahead to maximize our pleasures rather than heedlessly grabbing every pleasure that comes along. But in fact, Arazi was no hedonist at all. He accepted Plato's analysis of pleasure as resulting from the restoration of the body to its natural state, out of a state of deficiency. For instance, when you drink, it is pleasant because you are remedying the dryness of your body. Thus, pleasure is only possible because of the harmful states you are trying to remedy. So serious was he about this, that he supposedly offered the following explanation of what happens when you enjoy seeing a beautiful face, it's because you've been hanging around with ugly people and are yearning for a change. The good life though, lies not in the restoration of the body to its natural condition, but in a life of reason that is entirely free of the body. As Arazi says, the lower parts of the soul are given to us only to help keep us alive, so that we can keep trying to acquire knowledge. Ultimately, we should look forward, not to any bodily pleasure, but to the freedom from body we will enjoy in the afterlife. If Arazi cautions us to think about long-term pleasure rather than short-term pleasure, that is only a first stage of moral improvement in which we become better at least than irrational animals. The philosophical way of life is to go beyond this first stage and value only knowledge and justice. That of course fits with his theory of the five eternals, which as we saw, also speaks of the need for the soul to free itself from entanglement with the body. The teaching of the spiritual medicine also fits nicely with another, shorter work of Arazi on ethics, whose title is, none other than, The Philosophical Way of Life. Here Arazi responds to some unidentified detractors, who blamed him for refusing to lead the life of ascetic self-restraint. They said that he was failing to live up to the example of a philosopher he claims greatly to admire, Socrates. "'We know,' said these critics, that Socrates was highly ascetic, lived out in the wilderness in a large wine jar, eating nothing but grass, and fearlessly speaking his mind to the hypocrites of his society. So why doesn't Arazi do the same?' All this sounds familiar, but not from what we know of Socrates. Here the detail about the wine jug shows that Arazi's critics have confused Socrates with Diogenes the Cynic, a common mistake in the Arabic tradition. Arazi accepts that this picture of Socrates is historically accurate, but then adds that it describes him as a young man, when enthusiasm for philosophy led him to utter disdain for the body. As he matured, Socrates relaxed into a life of moderation, such as Arazi himself leads. This is sufficient to demonstrate that one has achieved mastery of desire through reason, the goal also recommended in the spiritual life. Arazi was not the first writer in the Islamic world to valorize Socrates as a moral exemplar. He also appeared in his guise as a Cynic-style ascetic in the works of al-Kindi. Al-Kindi gathered a collection of reports and sayings attributed to Socrates, and this too assigns to Socrates ancient anecdotes that had once belonged to Diogenes. For instance, we are told how Socrates ordered a great king to stop blocking his sunlight. Like Diogenes, Socrates gets some good one-liners such as, "'God gave man two ears, but only one tongue, so he would listen more than he talks.'" Al-Kindi worked some of this Socratic material into a little treatise on ethics that itself offers a kind of spiritual medicine, specifically against the malady that is sorrow. This treatise, called On Dispelling Sorrows, quotes Socrates saying that he is never sad, because he has nothing whose loss he would regret. He is teased about living in a wine jar by someone who asks what he'd do if his jar broke, and he replies that he'll still have somewhere to call home, since the place where the jar is won't break. Al-Kindi also relays stories about Alexander the Great. On his deathbed, Alexander tells his distraught mother to invite to his funeral everyone who has never suffered misfortune. She does so, and no one shows up, teaching his mother that her loss is simply the universal condition of mankind. This material, which wraps its tough-love message in a pleasing package of memorable anecdotes, might seem philosophically lightweight. But just as Arazi's spiritual medicine quietly upholds a set of values motivated by his theory of the five eternals, so Al-Kindi is basing his advice on the Platonist philosophy we know from his other works. He says right at the beginning of On Dispelling Sorrows that if we really want to be immune to sorrow, the only surefire method is to place no value whatsoever on things that can be destroyed. That goes not only for fancy soap and wine jars, but everything that exists in the physical world around us. Even the life and welfare of our loved ones, presumably, though Al-Kindi doesn't dwell on that potentially disturbing implication of what he is saying. Instead, he recommends that we cherish things in the intelligible world, valuing eternal objects of knowledge, rather than the passing things of this life. Apart from this Platonist rationale though, Al-Kindi's advice resonates strongly with Stoic authors like Epictetus. In fact, Al-Kindi also relates a parable found originally in Epictetus which compares life to a brief disembarkation during a journey by sea. Whoever is ready to race back to the boat without distraction or regret when the voyage home begins again, in other words when we die, will get the most pleasant seats on the ship of the afterlife. It's possible that there is a link between Al-Kindi and Ar-Razi in the form of a student of Al-Kindi's named Abu Zayd Al-Balhi. That last part of his name, Al-Balhi, simply means that he was from the city of Balkh in modern-day Afghanistan, just as the name Ar-Razi means someone from the Persian city of Rai. We know that our Ar-Razi studied with someone named Al-Balhi, but not whether it was this Al-Balhi. It's chronologically possible, certainly. So it's intriguing that the Abu Zayd Al-Balhi who studied with Al-Kindi produced a medical and ethical work that is highly reminiscent of Ar-Razi's matched treatises on bodily and spiritual medicine. In the case of Al-Balhi, the two types of medicine are placed side by side in a single work. Here again, both sections are clearly influenced by Galen. The part on medicine for the soul deals with disorders like anger, sorrow again, and the pathological obsessive thinking that was known in Arabic by the rather wonderful word waswas. Like his master Al-Kindi and his possible student Ar-Razi, we find Al-Balhi giving a range of practical advice for combating these difficulties. He also emphasizes the link between the body and the soul, saying for instance that those obsessive thoughts can be the result of a buildup of yellow bile. On the other hand, they can also be caused by demons. This gives me a thought of my own. It reminds me of the battles against the literal demons of distraction waged by late ancient ascetics like Evagrius. Now Galen was not the only game in town when it came to Hellenic sources for writing about ethics in Arabic. There was also Aristotle. The ten books of his Nicomachean Ethics were translated into Arabic, with a bonus eleventh book of inauthentic material sandwiched in the middle. This extended disco version of Aristotle's Ethics also had an impact on ethical writing in Arabic. Al-Farabi wrote a commentary on it, which is unfortunately lost, and later on so did Averroes. His commentary is also lost in Arabic but survives in Hebrew and Latin translations, which as we'll see later is not atypical for his commentaries. Back in the 10th century, you'd expect Aristotle to have a particularly powerful influence on, well, Aristotelians, and as we saw, there was no more prominent Aristotelian in 10th century Baghdad than the Christian thinker Yahya ibn Addi. So it's puzzling to turn to Ibn Addi and find him still working mostly within the Platonist ethical framework bequeathed to the Arabic-speaking world by Galen. Ibn Addi wrote a treatise called Taqdib al-Ahlak, usually translated as the refinement of character. The word Ahlak is also sometimes translated as character traits or even simply morals. Here again, we find the Platonic distinction of soul into reason, spirit, and desire, along with an insistence that ethical goodness is subduing the lower aspects of the soul to the judgments of reason. The reason that people become evil is simply that they give in to their animal nature. In fact, Ibn Addi rather pessimistically remarks that most people tend towards evil because human nature has so much of the animal in it. Obviously, he had never met my audience of podcast listeners. One striking aspect of Ibn Addi's treatise is its remarkably flexible attitude towards morality. He allows that what is virtuous for one person might be evil if found in another. For instance, it is wrong for almost everyone to amass wealth ostentatiously, to conceal one's ill will towards other people, or plot treachery against them. But all of these character traits are necessary for kings, who thus seem to be in a kind of special moral category. When reading passages like this, one can't help wondering about the intended audience of the work. In fact, all the writers we've looked at, al-Kindi, his student al-Balhi, and al-Razi, include anecdotes or advice about virtuous kings in their ethical writings. That doesn't by itself mean that all these works were directed at royalty, but we know that al-Kindi had connections to the Caliph's family, and al-Razi's spiritual medicine is explicitly dedicated to a powerful patron. One often gets the sense that our authors are at least aspiring to reach an aristocratic audience, a readership that itself aspires to be thought of as kingly. There is a genre of literary ethical works known as mirrors for princes, which can sometimes be philosophical, just think of Machiavelli, and our authors to some extent fall into that category. As a result, they often suggest that noble persons operate under rather special moral constraints. Al-Razi, for instance, states that a person raised as a prince cannot be expected to adopt the kind of ascetic lifestyle of a poorer person even if he devotes himself to philosophy. As we saw, al-Razi was in any case rather unimpressed by the idea of asceticism. Here Yahya ibn Adi is different, because he seems to take the radical ascetic as the ultimate ethical hero. He no doubt looks back to the Christian tradition of ascetics like Evagrius that we ourselves looked at in a previous episode. For most people, ibn Adi would recommend a life of moderation. But unlike al-Razi, he thinks that radical asceticism could be the right lifestyle for a select few and that these ascetics would be particularly admirable. This is clear not only from his remarks about ascetics in the refinement of character, but also from a fascinating little treatise he wrote on the subject of abstaining from sex. Muslims were frequently critical of celibacy. Al-Razi tends to agree with these critics on the basis that their recommended path to self-improvement would lead to the extinction of the human race if carried out on a universal scale. No sex means no children, and before long no children means no humanity. Confronting this problem, ibn Adi again says that asceticism is best, but not for everyone. Only those with a particularly powerful intellect should turn their backs on moderation with respect to sex and other pleasures and devote themselves wholly to the life of the mind. Since this will be a very small number of people, philosophically motivated celibacy won't make a dent in the population. I'll finish by looking at a final work with a familiar name, The Refinement of Character, by the Muslim Platonist philosopher and historian Miskawe, who lived well into the 11th century. He shares not only the title of ibn Adi's ethical treatise, but many of the same ideas. Yet again, Miskawe emphasizes that reason should dominate the lower soul. He also would agree with ibn Adi that we can envision more than one ethical standard to pursue. We might want to live lives of worldly virtue, in which case we should adopt a life of moderation as recommended by Aristotle's theory of the golden mean. Alternatively, we could pursue a life of pure intellectual contemplation, though Miskawe seems to think that this would not need to mean being a radical ascetic like the Christian heroes of ibn Adi. Both kinds of life would be lived in accordance with reason. To act moderately in the world does involve a concern with the body and not just the soul, but it still means letting one's action be governed by rationality. That sounds pretty Aristotelian actually, and indeed of all the authors I've discussed, Miskawe is the one who does the most with Aristotle's ethics. He clearly knows the Arabic translation of this work very well and refers to it often. On the other hand, he is still drawing on Galen, the indispensable source for Platonic ethics. The three-part soul is alive and well in Miskawe, as is the idea that ethics is a kind of medicine for the soul, as we saw in Ar-Razi and Al-Balhi. This is typical of Miskawe, who was not a particularly original philosopher but was extremely well read. His philosophical works tend to weave together themes from a wide range of sources, everything from Plotinus and Aristotle to Islamic religious proverbs. He thus represents a kind of cultured, popular understanding of philosophy that was current in the 10th and early 11th centuries. This was philosophy taken from Greek sources, freely mixed together with Islamic religious themes and displayed with literary style. It was a kind of philosophy that lacked the technical edge offered by sharper minds like Al-Farabi and Ibn Adi, but it might have endured as the dominant style of Hellenizing philosophy in the Islamic world, if not for a contemporary of Miskawe's, Avicenna. We'll be getting to him soon, but first I want to dwell a bit more on the context that led up to him. What sorts of philosophical options were there outside of the unblended Aristotelianism of the Baghdad school? We'll find out by looking further at Miskawe and at other authors who sought to achieve a balance between the Hellenistic philosophical heritage and the teachings of Islam. I'd like to see the bar of soap that could manage that. So join me next time as we take a luxurious soak in the waters of Islamicized Platonism during the age of the Buyids, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.