Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 143 - Special Delivery - al-Ghazali.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Special Delivery. Al-Razali. If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you have heard an awful lot of philosophy by now. How has it made you feel? Hopefully curious, entertained, and occasionally even enlightened. But it doesn't always produce these beneficial effects. Some people, unbelievably enough, actually think it is pointless and boring. Losers. Others find it all too gripping. Philosophy bothers them, and can even cause anxiety, and a kind of existential paralysis. We might associate that with characters in 20th century novels by Camus, Sartre, or Kafka, but it's something that happened already long ago to one of the greatest and most complex thinkers of the Islamic world, Abu Hamad al-Ghazali. In his philosophical autobiography, the Munkid Minad Dalal, or Deliverer from Error, Al-Ghazali speaks of a crisis brought on by reflection on the nature of knowledge. This was philosophy as illness, and the name of the disease was skepticism. As you might remember, ancient skeptics like Sextus Empiricus claimed that skepticism could be a road to ataraxia, or freedom from disturbance. They reported that, once they suspended judgment about all possible topics of inquiry, they found that a deep and lasting peace settled upon them, freed as they were from the stressful search for knowledge. But one man's calm is another's calamity. When Al-Ghazali argued himself into a skeptical corner, he found himself not liberated, but frustrated, at an intellectual stalemate. This is one of two life crises he speaks of in The Deliverer from Error, the other being a far more serious breakdown in the summer of the year 1095. In that case, religious reflection on the meaninglessness of his daily occupation as a teacher caused him to stop eating, and even rendered him unable to speak. Only after deciding to devote himself fully to God and give up on his teaching position in Baghdad did he find peace in spiritual retreat. In much the same way, it was by seeking refuge in God that Al-Ghazali was able to overcome his crisis of skepticism. The argument that led Al-Ghazali to his impasse is reminiscent of a report about the pre-Socratic atomist Democritus. If you have an absurdly good memory, you might recall my saying in episode 9 that Democritus drew rather skeptical conclusions from his atomic theory. Our senses tell us that honey is sweet, for instance, but the sweetness is only a matter of convention. Really, there are only atoms and void. Democritus then imagined sensation saying to the mind that it is in no position to overturn the deliverances of sense experiences like this, for without the senses the mind could know nothing at all. Similarly, Al-Ghazali imagines sense perception complaining after it is corrected by the mind. He gives the example of how shadows look to eyesight as if they are standing still, but are known by the mind to be slowly moving as the sun crosses the sky. Another example, taken from Aristotle, is that the sun looks very small yet is known to be very large on the basis of astronomy. Stung by this chastisement, sense perception might say to the mind, how do you know that there is no higher court of appeal that could correct you, the way you have corrected me? You might be like a man asleep and dreaming, blissfully unaware that you could awake and understand things as they truly are. This argument undercut Al-Ghazali's confidence in the deliverances of his own reason. Formerly, not unlike an ancient skeptic, remember that as Sextus emphasizes, skeptic means someone who is seeking, Al-Ghazali had been relentlessly seeking after certain knowledge. He was, he tells us in The Deliverer from Error, simply born with an innate thirst for understanding. He proposed a kind of test that certain knowledge would need to pass. Consider one of your beliefs, such as the belief that 10 is more than 3. And suppose someone comes along with a staff and says, I tell you that 3 is really more than 10, and here is my proof. And then he casts down his staff, which suddenly and miraculously becomes a snake. As Al-Ghazali says, you would be bewildered, but that would not tempt you to believe that 3 really is more than 10. Even such snake-proof deliverances of the mind, though, could fall prey to the skeptical doubt raised about the mind as a whole. You might remember me pouring cold water on the idea that Avicenna's flying man argument plays anything like the same philosophical role as Descartes' cogito. By contrast, Al-Ghazali's skeptical argument does seem to do more or less the same job as the radical doubt at the beginning of Descartes' meditations. Like Descartes, Al-Ghazali sees skepticism as a challenge to be overcome, not as the reassuring outcome the ancient skeptics took it to be. But Al-Ghazali does not point to anything like the Cartesian cogito to get himself out of his skeptical fix. Instead, he tells us that it was God who released him. A light was unexpectedly cast into his bosom. It is through this light that we must seek the kashf, or unveiling, of truth, and it is given only by divine generosity. Here we have Al-Ghazali's life story in a nutshell. A philosophical train of thought winds up being derailed, but then put back on track with divine assistance once Al-Ghazali is granted a mystical insight that both transcends and guarantees the truths of reason. As the whole anecdote suggests, Al-Ghazali's attitude towards philosophy was an ambivalent one. He made careful study and careful use of philosophy in his writings, but he also criticized its pretensions. Ultimately, philosophy was only one facet of his many-sided thought. His various intellectual allegiances were disdainfully described by Averroes, who remarked that Al-Ghazali was an Asharite with the Asharites, a philosopher with the philosophers, and a Sufi with the Sufis. This is unkind, but anyone who has spent time with Al-Ghazali's works will probably be tempted to agree. He is a protean thinker, and each of his works seem to show the reader only one part of a larger picture. In trying to understand how the puzzle pieces might fit together, we should probably start where Averroes does in this remark—with Asharism. You'll remember that this tradition of Islamic Rational Theology, or Kalam, had been founded when the more tazalite-trained theologian Al-Ashari turned against his teachers. One of his greatest followers was Al-Jawaini, whom I quoted several times in the episode on the Asharites. In turn, Al-Jawaini taught a young Al-Ghazali in the city of Nishapur, in the northeast of modern day Iran. The setting of this encounter was one of a system of schools, or madrasas, named nidamiyya in honor of their sponsor, the pro-Asharite vizier Nidaam al-Mulk. These madrasas are something new in our history of philosophy in the Islamic world. We've seen philosophy in court settings before, with thinkers like al-Kindi, al-Farabi, and Avicenna all receiving support from various aristocrats and even from royalty. But though I have spoken of some groups as schools, for instance the Baghdad Peripatetics, we have not yet seen philosophy being done in the context of state-sponsored educational institutions. The nidamiyya schools will change that, and the change is here to stay. As we'll see in more detail in future episodes, some parts of philosophy, especially logic, became a standard part of the curriculum in the madrasas that educated legal scholars and theologians beginning around this time. The presiding force behind all this, the powerful vizier Nidaam al-Mulk, was not only a contemporary of Al-Ghazali's, but even had him in his entourage for some time until he was assassinated in the year 1085. After that, Al-Ghazali came to Baghdad to teach at the nidamiyya school there, only to give up his post in the wake of his spiritual crisis in 1095. As with Avicenna then, the cultural ambitions of political rulers set the scene in which Al-Ghazali was formed. We have now moved on from the time of Avicenna though. He died in 1037, whereas Al-Ghazali was born about 1053, and, as I've mentioned once before, died in the exquisitely memorable year 1111. In Al-Ghazali's day, the reigning power was no longer the Buyids or the Samanids, but the Turkish Seljuks, who had the dubious fortune of being the dominant force in the Islamic heartlands when those lands started to come under attack from the European crusaders. Our new friend Nidaam al-Mulk was vizier under the Seljuks for about 30 years. His educational system was part of a development sometimes called the Sunni revival. After power was held by the Shi'ite Buyids for generations, it now fell into the hands of the Seljuks, who were Sunni Muslims. This enabled Asharite theology to become dominant across much of the Islamic empire. Meanwhile, even as the Seljuks were establishing and extending their power throughout Persia and as far as modern-day Turkey, the ideas of Avicenna were being established and extended throughout the Eastern Islamic lands. They penetrated into Kalam just in time to reach Al-Ghazali, thanks to his teacher al-Juwaini, who was the first theologian to integrate Avicennan philosophy with Asharism. Al-Ghazali adds yet another ingredient to this already rather heady mixture—Sufism. I haven't had much to say about this mystical tradition yet, and I'll wait a bit longer still to introduce Sufism properly when we get to the great philosophical mystic Ibn al-Rabi. But I should mention now that it has been a going concern in Islam since long before the 11th century. Already in the 8th century, the female mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya pioneered the characteristically Sufi genre of poems, declaring her love for God. More about her later. For now, I'll just say that al-Ghazali was drawing on a rich wellspring of Sufi tradition with his mystical leanings, just as he drank from Avicennan waters in philosophy and from Asharite sources in theology. So well established was Sufism by this time that he was at one point able to reside in a Sufi convent in Baghdad right across from his sometime employer, the Nizamiya school. All this provides us with a social and intellectual context for The Deliverer from Error, in which al-Ghazali tells us the story of his own development as a thinker. As an autobiography, it needs to be taken with a good dose of the skepticism described by al-Ghazali. He is using well-worn tropes in describing his spiritual journey. Some of these are borrowed from Galen, who likewise told of how he needed to overcome an intellectual impasse brought on by skepticism. In any case, The Deliverer from Error is structured not so much by al-Ghazali's life story as by an evaluation of four different paths to the truth. Three of them we have already met in this episode, Kalam, philosophy, and Sufism, while the fourth is an old friend, the Shiite tradition known as Ismailism. But it was no friend of al-Ghazali's. Whereas he finds something to recommend in both Kalam and philosophy, and finds his ultimate rest in the mystical union of the Sufis, the Ismailis can offer him nothing apart from taqlid. As you'll remember, taqlid means the uncritical acceptance of authority. In this respect, al-Ghazali's polemic is a familiar one. As we've seen before, accusations of taqlid were thrown around constantly in the formative period. Theologians regularly accused other theologians of slavish adherence to authority, while philosophers like al-Farabi happily tarred non-philosophers with the taqlid brush. Al-Ghazali repaid the compliment, pointing out that the philosophers are apt to follow Aristotle wherever he leads. But this is not to say that he would always consider authority a bad thing. Not unlike al-Farabi, he considers acceptance of authority appropriate for most people. But those who claim to be scholars should, he believes, earn that title, through careful personal reflection, the independent judgment that in Arabic is called ijtihad. Even Muhammad's status as a prophet is something he encourages us to confirm for ourselves. By learning about his deeds and sayings as gathered in hadith literature, we can see for ourselves that Muhammad was a paragon of wisdom and virtue. In this way, independent reflection can give us a reason to depend on authority, so that our acceptance of that authority is no longer uncritical or slavish. Of course, al-Ghazali claims that the Ismailis represent the opposite of this approach, since they encourage us to depend on the teachings of a divinely appointed imam for our understanding of Islam. He mocks them by asking what a pious Muslim should do if he finds that it is time to pray and does not know which direction Mecca is. If he waits until he gets an authoritative judgment from the imam, he will violate his obligation to pray at the appointed hour. So he should just do his best to work out the right direction to face during prayer. While this is a persuasive argument that religion does sometimes require independent judgment, or ijtihad, it doesn't really touch the Ismailis. After all, they needn't insist that we rely on the imam for all decisions in religious practice, only that on certain issues the imam's guidance is indispensable. When it comes to kalam, al-Ghazali yet again sounds like the hardline philosopher al-Farabi. You'll recall that for him, rational theology can play a useful, albeit limited, role by defending a virtuous religion against its detractors. In other works, al-Ghazali writes as an Asharite theologian, albeit an independent-minded and innovative one, so it's quite surprising to see him giving the same, rather reductive, defensive role to kalam here in the Deliverer from Error. His complaint about the theological tradition is more or less what you might find in al-Farabi or Avasana, or later in Averroes. The arguments offered by theologians do not rise to the level of demonstrative proof. Here we are witnessing a real change in the kalam tradition. Earlier theologians were usually happy to restrict themselves to dialectical disputes with one another, or at least give every impression of doing so. Starting with al-Juwaini and al-Ghazali, though, theologians will be much more self-conscious in their methods, rising to the challenge laid down by Avasana's rigorous and influential studies in logic and epistemology. Later Asharites, for instance Fakhr ad-Din al-Razi, will continue to make a careful study of Avasana. This will lead them to write works that preserve the dialectical character of the kalam tradition, but also to strive for argumentative rigor and proof, rather than just trying to score points off their theological rivals. It was from philosophers, and especially Avasana, that al-Ghazali learned to be so strict about demonstration, though Greek philosophers are lurking not far in the background. Aristotle, with his rigorous definition of demonstrative knowledge in the posterior analytics, is certainly relevant. It is also worth again mentioning Galen, who in a lost work called simply On Demonstration, turned Aristotle's strictures against their author, complaining that many of Aristotle's supposed proofs were actually nothing of the sort. They say that history repeats itself, and so does the history of philosophy. Al-Ghazali likewise complains that the philosophers fall short of their own high standards with many of their arguments. By philosophers, he of course means Avasana, whose metaphysics receives a searching criticism in al-Ghazali's famous Incoherence of the Philosophers. But he is not a man to throw out logical babies along with the metaphysical bathwater. In The Deliverer from Error, he has nothing but scorn for people who doubt the utility and reliability of logic. Indeed, he ranks the rules of logic, along with his snake-proof beliefs in mathematics, as being totally certain. The stakes here are in any case, like your average snake, pretty low. Al-Ghazali emphasizes that logic has no bearing on religious belief, and it would be a misunderstanding of both logic and religion to think that they could come into conflict. Yet again, we see al-Ghazali rather unexpectedly taking the side of the Baghdad school in a heated cultural debate. Had he been present when the Christian logician Abu Bishr Mata clashed with the grammarian As-Sirafi, it seems he would have been on Abu Bishr's side. Still, the certainty of mathematics and logic has unfortunate consequences in al-Ghazali's view. It can lead people into thinking that the philosophers always attain the same kind of certainty, whereas actually their writings are stuffed full of errors, especially when it comes to metaphysics. Referring back to his earlier incoherence of the philosophers, al-Ghazali reminds us that he has already diagnosed the failings of Avicenna in this regard. By contrast, the philosophers' views concerning natural philosophy can mostly be accepted, while their theories on ethics and politics are simply plagiarized from earlier prophetic traditions. Here, al-Ghazali issues another warning. Just as one should not think that all of philosophy has the snake-proof certainty of mathematics and logic, so one shouldn't disdain these two rigorous arts because of the company they keep. This, he says, would be like refusing to taste honey because it is being served out of a glass that is also sometimes used in surgical operations. Al-Ghazali then wants to do a bit of surgery of his own on the philosophical tradition, removing the falsehoods and leaving behind what is demonstrative. That makes him sound like he might style himself as a philosopher, albeit a rather critical one. But remember that al-Ghazali experienced doubt concerning even mathematical certainties until he received reassurance from God. Such direct contact with the divine can offer something beyond even demonstration. It is impossible to express this level of insight fully to those who have not attained it. Al-Ghazali uses the Sufi term dhauk, or taste, for the immediate perception of divine truth afforded the true mystic. He also offers a visual analogy. For the mystic to tell the non-mystic about what he has grasped would be like trying to explain colors to a blind person. And what about the rest of us, who are not so fortunate as al-Ghazali and have not tasted the sweetness of God or seen his radiance? Well, we should demonstrate whatever we can, following the philosophers as far as they can take us, which is not nearly as far as they claim. But we must also trust in the guidance of true prophets, who should be assessed and verified through careful reflection on their words and deeds. To those who say that it is impossible for prophets to receive a knowledge beyond that normally available to mankind, al-Ghazali asks, if you did not see it, would you think that there was a substance so dangerous that a tiny speck of it could destroy a whole town? Yet a spark of fire can start a conflagration that levels great cities. Or take the lethal power of opium, which is beyond human reckoning. In short, there are many things we cannot understand and predict, so there is no reason to reject the possibility of prophecy out of hand. Thus al-Ghazali pulls epistemological rank on the philosopher in two ways. He lays claim to a mystical insight that is beyond the reach of their arguments, no matter how solid, and he also points out that many of their arguments aren't that solid anyway. Next time, we'll be seeing how the pride of philosophers like Avicenna has led them into error according to al-Ghazali, and what punishment he thinks they deserve for their hubris. The sheikh of the philosophers will get well and truly rattled as we roll on with al-Ghazali's incoherence of the philosophers. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gepps.