Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 126 - High Five - al-Razi.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, High Five, Abu Bakr al-Razi. One they say is the loneliest number, but I find that hard to believe. After all, it has an infinite number of companions, and that's only counting the positive integers. And it has only to turn around to see that another infinity of negative numbers has got its back. But that's all assuming there is more than just one number. It would take a bold mathematician to doubt this and a bold philosopher to raise the same doubt in the context of metaphysics. Some have doubted it nonetheless. We call them monists. These are people who believe that all reality is one. Quite a while ago, we saw an example with the pre-Socratic thinker Parmenides. Down the line, monism will rise again, albeit in a quite different form, in the philosophy of Spinoza. In between Parmenides and Spinoza, we occasionally find medieval thinkers flirting with a kind of monism. For instance, the 9th century Irish philosopher Eriugina was accused of being a monist because he suggested that God can ultimately be identified with all that he creates. Still, for the most part in medieval philosophy, when monism appears at all, it is seen as a danger to be avoided rather than a doctrine to be embraced. Yet most medieval thinkers would have thought it at least possible for there to be only one thing, namely God. God would just have to decide not to create anything other than himself. Certainly, some, especially in the Islamic world, did hold that God necessarily gives rise to the universe. The Neoplatonists had claimed as much with their doctrine of emanation. We recently saw that the Jewish philosopher Isaac Israeli might have held such a view. Before long, we'll see it asserted with great force and sophistication by Avicenna. But for the most part, Jews, Muslims, and Christians wanted to say that the universe is created in a gratuitous, freely-willed act of divine generosity. As we've already seen, and will be seeing again in the future, medieval philosophers paid a good deal of attention to the question of whether the universe is eternal. This was partially because it seemed to them that denying the eternity of the universe would prove that it is not necessary. If the universe came into existence after not existing, that could only be because God chose for it to exist rather than giving rise to it automatically, as light would always shine forth from an eternally existing light source. Thus, although it would indeed have taken a bold thinker to assert actual monism in this period, it would also have been bold to deny the possibility of monism, the possibility that God might have chosen to remain by himself, alone to enjoy his perfection. All of which brings us to this week's subject, who as it happens was one of the boldest philosophers in the Islamic world. His name was Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi. He devised a theory according to which the universe was created in time, but was preceded by no fewer than five entities, all of them eternal principles. Before the universe came to be, God was never in danger of being lonely. He was eternally in the company of four other principles—soul, matter, time, and place. In putting forward this innovative, and rather shocking, theory, al-Razi showed that he cared little for convention. Perhaps he felt free to speculate in this way because he was not primarily a philosopher. His main vocation was that of a doctor. Here too, though, he showed an irreverent attitude towards authorities of the ancient medical tradition. Ironically enough, he may have learned this irreverence from the greatest of those authorities, Galen. Al-Razi agrees with Galen that, while respecting one's predecessors, one should never hesitate to question their views and modify those views in light of one's own ideas and experience. He applies that policy to Galen himself in a work called Shukuk Allah Jalinus, Doubts About Galen. He begins by affirming his great admiration for Galen, but reminds us that nothing could be more Galenic than the criticism of predecessors, even the ones we admire. After this tactful introduction, Al-Razi can't resist going on to a sarcastic and biting enumeration of mistakes he has discovered in Galen's works. His critique ranges over both philosophical issues like the eternity of the universe and the possibility of void space, and medical topics like Galen's list of the types of pulse and the ancient debate as to whether the body is ruled from the heart or the brain. In fact, we know from Al-Razi's voluminous surviving writings on medicine that he broadly accepted Galen's medical ideas. His work entitled Introduction to Medicine could easily have been called Introduction to Galenic Medicine. More in-depth medical works by Al-Razi likewise base themselves closely on Galen's anatomy, methodology, therapeutics, and so on. Al-Razi's independence of mind is also on show when it comes to medicine, however. He wrote a pioneering work on differential diagnosis, explaining how to tell the difference between smallpox and measles, and carefully collected observations from his medical practice. Practice is something he had plenty of, since he worked in hospitals in both Baghdad and the Persian city of Ra'i. His name, Al-Razi, by the way, simply means that he came from Ra'i. Many of his clinical observations are recorded in the staggeringly huge Hawi, or comprehensive book, along with notes on learned medical literature of the ancient world. Al-Razi certainly earned his esteem as an outstanding contributor to the history of medicine. In this respect, his only rival from the Islamic tradition was another philosopher, Avicenna. These two became the greatest medical authorities of the Arabic tradition, and were also used extensively in Latin translation by medical scholars of Europe, who called our man Ra'azis. Avicenna's systematization of medical learning would be even more influential than the writings of Al-Razi, but it's clear that the man from Ra'i was far more active and experienced in hands-on medicine. Unfortunately for Al-Razi's later reputation, but fortunately for us, he also turned his hand to philosophy. It's striking that, whereas his medical writings survive today in extraordinary abundance—the volumes of the modern printing of his comprehensive book can by themselves fill a long bookshelf—his philosophical writings are almost entirely lost. This is presumably because they were thought to be outrageous, even heretical. Yet the hostility provoked by his views also explains why we know anything about them at all. Though his writings on the five eternal principles are lost, his theory is discussed by a number of other authors. This is almost always because they need to explain what Al-Razi said before they go on to refute him and accuse him of heresy. Thus, reconstructing the theory is a bit like gathering the evidence concerning pre-Socratic thinkers or early Stoics, on the basis of later critics like Aristotle and the Church Fathers. We are at the mercy of witnesses who are often hostile and who always tell us less than we'd like to know. One hostile witness was a philosopher who actually debated Al-Razi in person. Rather confusingly, this other man was also from Ra'i, so he is also called Al-Razi, Abu Hatim Al-Razi. He was a member of a group within early Shi'ite Islam called the Ismailis, who we'll meet again in future episodes. In a work called On the Signs of Prophecy, Abu Hatim recounts the heated and occasionally hilarious arguments he had with our Al-Razi. They debated two main issues. The first was the theory of the five eternal principles, the second the topic of prophecy. Abu Hatim depicts Al-Razi as a convinced opponent of all prophetic revelation. After describing his face-to-face encounters with Al-Razi, he goes on to quote and refute a book Al-Razi had written on the subject. Between his denial that God is unique in having the status of an eternal principle, and his supposed rejection of the validity of prophecy, you can certainly see why Abu Hatim and other authors wished that Al-Razi had stuck to medicine. In fact, Abu Hatim and others frequently referred to him not by name, but simply as the heretic. Nonetheless, the evidence at our disposal is sufficient to reconstruct the five eternal theory in some detail. I'll come back at the end of this episode to the question of prophecy. To repeat, the five principles recognized by Al-Razi are God, soul, matter, time, and place. He is serious in holding that the last four are eternal, and in this respect on a par with God, even if God is superior to them in certain ways. God does not create any of them. Rather, they are the principles that need to be in place in order for God to create a universe at all. Let's try to see why this should be the case, taking the principles one by one. We'll start with matter. Already Aristotle had argued that if there were a first-ever event in the cosmos, then there would have to be some matter already existing before that event, with the potential for changing or moving. By the time of Al-Razi, many philosophers had already denied this and insisted that God is capable of creating things with no need for matter. Ancient Christian philosophers frequently said as much, for instance, even though the idea of creation from nothing is not obviously endorsed by the book of Genesis. More recently, both the Muslim Al-Kindi and the Jew Isaac Israely had stated that God alone is capable of absolute origination. If you or I want to start a ball rolling, then we first need to have a ball, and if there's no ball we need to go find some material ingredients for one. God, by contrast, can set the cosmos spinning even as he creates the cosmos out of thin air, or rather out of nothing at all. Al-Razi, though, thinks that there did need to be some potential or passive principle out of which God created the universe. It's worth repeating that, unlike Aristotle, he does think the universe was created. It began to exist after not existing. But for this to happen, there had to be something for God to make into a universe, and this was matter. Much as Aristotle describes matter as a principle of potentiality, Al-Razi says that matter is a passive principle which receives form or determination from God, who is an active principle. Of course, on this view, matter itself cannot be created, since that would give us a regress. God would have to create the matter out of something else, that is, out of some other kind of matter, which itself would have to be created out of some other matter, and so on. In all of this, Al-Razi is probably influenced less by Aristotle than by Plato, and in particular the Timaeus. You may remember that in that dialogue, Plato has the main character explain that the universe came to be when a divine craftsman imposed form on a so-called receptacle. There was an ancient debate as to whether Plato had in mind an actual event here, or whether the universe is eternally brought into being by this divine craftsman. Unlike the Neoplatonists, Al-Razi apparently thinks that for Plato, the universe did come to be with some first moment. He would have known the Timaeus thanks to his love-hate object Galen, who wrote a commentary and summary of the Timaeus, both of which were known in Arabic. We can be fairly sure that Al-Razi was inspired by the Timaeus, because in his debate with Abu Hatim he says he is following the lead of Plato. Characteristically, he adds that he has made a few improvements of his own to the Platonic theory. One such improvement is his conviction that eternal matter consists of atoms, which he conceives not as geometrical shapes, as in the Timaeus, but as particles moving in the void, more like the atomism of the pre-Socratics Democritus and Leucippus. This mention of void takes us on to the next two eternal principles I want to explain, what Al-Razi calls absolute time and absolute place. There must already be time before God creates the universe, because He will need to perform His creating action at some moment, which implies that time is already present. If you're wondering why God can't simply create time, just as He creates the universe, the answer is pretty obvious. To create time is to do something, and you can't do something without doing it at a time. Likewise, God will need a place to put the universe He is going to create. Again, He cannot first create a place for the universe, because He would need somewhere to put the place He wanted to create. So, in the case of both time and place, He can argue in much the way He did for matter. If these things were not eternal, then we would have an infinite regress, with time created at some other time, place created in some other place, matter made out of some other matter. One of the most interesting and novel features of Al-Razi's theory is his comparison of the eternal, or absolute, time and place that God requires in order to create a world, and the sort of time and place we experience in daily life. When Abu Hatim asks Al-Razi to explain what he means by absolute place, Al-Razi simply says, it is here where we are. One imagines him gesturing vaguely about him as he says this. Elsewhere, he more helpfully describes it as the infinite void into which God places the universe, like putting a liquid into an empty vessel. In this respect, he would agree with the Stoics, who also believed the cosmos is surrounded by infinite void. On the other hand, his atomic understanding of matter would be anathema to the Stoics. As for absolute time, when Abu Hatim asks for an explanation of this, Al-Razi enigmatically responds tick, tick, tick. His point is that absolute time and place are independent of any body, and of any motion or change in the universe. Absolute time simply passes, like a kind of cosmic metronome. By contrast, what he calls relative time and relative place are the time and place that depend on bodies and their motions. A day is an example of a relative time. It is a segment of absolute time that is marked off by one motion of the sun around the earth. A relative place would be, for instance, the location of your body, as you listen to me now. Relative time and place are thus the sort of time and place recognized and discussed by Aristotle, who emphasized the dependence of place and time on physical things and physical change. In one sense, Al-Razi thus accepts Aristotle's understanding of time and place. But with his typically critical attitude and desire to improve on the ancients, he also exposes this understanding as superficial. Now four was a number beloved of ancient philosophers. They recognized four elements, four bodily humors, four ages of man, and four quarters of the heavens. Akindi pointed out the prevalence of the number four in a work on music, and said that this is why the lute has four strings, from which I infer that his favorite Motown group would have been the four tops. Why in the face of these facts and an excellent singing group from Detroit does Al-Razi feel the need to posit a further fifth principle, an eternal soul? The answer is not that the five eternals would also have been a great name for a Motown band, though this is true enough. Rather, it may have to do with Al-Razi's day job as a doctor. As anyone in that line of work might be, he was very struck by the large amount of suffering in the world. Since he assumed that God is perfectly benevolent and wise, he could not believe that the universe of his experience was simply willed into existence by God. Many people nowadays would contend that there is too much suffering in the universe for it to have been created by an unhampered, benevolent creator, so it's striking to see a thinker of the early Islamic world saying precisely the same thing. But of course, Al-Razi does not react by becoming an atheist, which is what many would now see as the inescapable conclusion of the argument from evil. Rather, he says that to explain the creation of such a defective universe, we need to posit not just the perfectly wise active principle, that is God, but another active principle, which is foolish and ignorant. This is the eternal soul. Again, Al-Razi seems to be thinking here of the Timaeus, since there Plato likewise ascribes a soul to the entire universe. But again, there are differences. In Plato, the world soul is created by a divine craftsman, not eternal, and Plato does not depict this world soul as foolish and ignorant. In this respect, Al-Razi seems closer to some late ancient Platonists, especially Plutarch, who does talk about a foolish soul that is responsible for imperfections in the cosmos. At any rate, in Al-Razi's theory, this soul at some point foolishly conceives of a desire to entangle itself with matter. This incidentally explains why the creation of the universe can happen at an arbitrary moment within eternal time. Whereas God, being perfectly wise, would need a good reason to choose the first moment for the universe to exist, the foolish soul can simply lurch towards matter with no warning or good reason. In his debate with Abu Hatim, Al-Razi satirically compares the sudden unwise motion of soul towards matter to a sudden unwanted eruption of flatulence. This brings their discussion to an end as the audience breaks up in appalled recriminations against Al-Razi for this scandalous remark. Al-Razi's God, being wise and powerful, knew that an ill wind would blow if he allowed the soul to fulfill its desire to be with matter. So why didn't he stop the soul and prevent the existence of our universe with its abundance of evil and suffering? Al-Razi answers this challenge by comparing the soul to a child and God to a wise father. Just as the father might allow his child to go into a beautiful but dangerous garden full of thorns and stinging insects in order to teach the child a lesson, so God allows soul to envelop itself in matter. Mercifully, God intercedes to bestow form on matter. This explains why there is order and beauty in the world and not only the chaos and suffering that would have resulted from an unassisted engagement of eternal soul with eternal matter. Now that the universe exists, our purpose is to work towards the liberation of soul from matter. Humans can do this by living a life which ignores bodily concerns and pleasures and ultimately by achieving an afterlife of bliss when the soul will finally be free from the body. Al-Razi refers to this as a kind of liberation, which lies at the core of his ethical doctrines as we'll see in a future episode. Al-Razi draws another notable consequence from his conviction that God wants us to be free of suffering. He holds that God, in His benevolence and justice, has bestowed upon all humans the gift of reason or mind, in Arabic aql. With this emphasis on justice and reason, we may see a sign that he is drawing on ideas from contemporary Mu'tazilite theologians. In fact, we know that he debated with such theologians as well as with the Ismaili, Abu Hatim. In his debate with Abu Hatim, Al-Razi goes on to say something that would outrage a Muslim theologian of any persuasion. He observes that it would be unjust and counterproductive for God to single out only certain people as prophets, such that only they would receive a divine revelation that is withheld from the rest of us. That would only lead to strife, as groups gather around the various prophets and wage war against each other. We should therefore put our trust in reason, and not in prophecy. This is the most notorious aspect of Al-Razi's thought. Not only did he deny God's uniqueness as an eternal principle, questioning the central Islamic tenet of divine oneness, or tawhid, he also denied the very prophetic revelation given to Muhammad and to the biblical prophets recognized by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. It's hard to imagine a more fundamental rejection of Islam. No wonder they called him a heretic. But we need to be careful here. I suspect that Abu Hatim is misrepresenting Al-Razi's view. His critique may not have been aimed at Islam or revealed religion in general, but at more focused targets, for instance the Ismaili teaching espoused by Abu Hatim. Certainly, as we know from his attitude towards Galen, Al-Razi was a staunch opponent of the uncritical acceptance of authority, what in Arabic was called taqlid. The Ismailis, with their dependence on the guidance of inspired Imams, would have seemed to Al-Razi the ultimate practitioners of taqlid. This may explain the bitterness of his dispute with Abu Hatim. As for his attitude towards Islam more generally, there is good evidence that Al-Razi in fact emphasized the agreement between the Qur'an and his theory of the five eternals. He probably welcomed the Qur'an, not as something to be accepted on faith, but because his rational reflection showed its teachings to be true. If this was his attitude, he was not far from the rationalist view of his near contemporary, the more famous Al-Farabi. We will soon be turning to him and his school of Aristotelian philosophers in Baghdad. Before that though, I have chosen next week for our first interview in this series of episodes on philosophy in the Islamic world. Unlike the ignorant soul, my selection of this moment is not arbitrary. Having just looked at Al-Razi, this is the perfect time to have a broader discussion about medicine and philosophy in the Islamic world. After all, many philosophers of various faiths in this tradition were doctors. We've already seen two examples, namely Al-Razi and Isaac Israeli, and there are more to come. To diagnose this phenomenon, I'll be joined by Peter E. Poorman, who has a healthy understanding of the history of medicine, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. Thank you.