Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 144 - Miracle Worker - al-Ghazali against the Philosophers.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, Miracle Worker, Al-Khazali Against the Philosophers. In his autobiographical work Deliverer from Error, which we talked about last time, Al-Khazali considers a piece of advice given by the earlier theologian Ahmad ibn Hanbal. The advice is that if you're going to argue with someone, you shouldn't carefully explain their views and then go on to refute them. After all, your readers might stop before you get to the refutation part. Better just to deny them the air of publicity. This is a lesson the History of Philosophy had already taught. Think, for instance, of the pagan Neoplatonist, Simplicius, painstakingly copying out quotations from his arch-enemy, the Christian thinker John Philoponus, in order to display their idiocy. With the result that modern day scholars are able to read the otherwise lost words of Philoponus, and even to publish them without Simplicius's accompanying polemic. In the words of Mrs. O'Leary's cow, who kicked over a lamp and started a fire that burned down the city of Chicago in 1871, oops. After repeating this bit of advice, Al-Khazali explains that he did not follow it when he was attacking the Ismailis, because everyone knows what they think anyway. But when it came to attacking philosophy, perhaps he should have listened to Ibn Hanbal. Repeating Simplicius's tactical error, Al-Khazali wrote a work summarizing the views of Avicenna, calling it Maqasid al-Falasifa, which means aims of the philosophers. This was followed by a second treatise called Tahaft al-Falasifa, usually translated incoherence of the philosophers, although the word tahaft doesn't quite mean incoherence, rather it means a trip or stumble. The tahaft then is a study of cases where the philosophers have tripped up, going astray by teaching false doctrines or simply asserting doctrines without sufficient proof. This well thought out project was itself tripped up in Latin Christendom, where for a long while only the Maqasid was known. More than a century went by until they finally translated Averroes's rebuttal of Al-Ghazali, the tahaft a tahaft, or incoherence of the incoherence. In Latin, it was known under the exciting title, destruction of the destruction. This led to the further irony that Latin readers knew of Al-Ghazali's polemic only thanks to the counter-refutation of Averroes. But until that happened, Latin readers took Al-Ghazal, as they called him, to be a faithful follower of the philosophical tradition, useful for his lucid and apparently sympathetic presentation of the theories of Avicenna. Oops. It is of course the tahaft that reveals Al-Ghazali's true intentions concerning the philosophers. There has been a good deal of misunderstanding about this, even among people who have been able to read the work. It used to be thought, in fact it probably is still widely thought, that philosophy more or less died out in the Islamic world after the 12th century. On this version of events, Averroes was the last to defend philosophy from the fires of religious criticism, and it was Al-Ghazali who set the blaze going with his tahaft. But in fact, as we'll see in later episodes, philosophy was alive and well in the later tradition. There's even a case to be made that, far from being the arsonist who incinerated philosophy, Al-Ghazali played a major part in helping it to survive and stay relevant in the East. He makes the important but tacit assumption that explaining and then criticizing Avicenna is the same as explaining and criticizing philosophy itself. This helped Avicenna to replace Aristotle as the main point of reference. Also, while Al-Ghazali did criticize Avicenna, he did so selectively. He was very clear in his Deliverer from Error that some aspects of philosophy should be welcomed, especially logic. This is why I want to insist that the tahaft isn't about some sort of systematic incoherence in Avicenna and philosophy. It is not a wholesale rejection of the tools bequeathed by the philosophical tradition. Rather, it identifies the places where Avicenna has stumbled, attempting to go beyond what can be established with rational demonstration. Which is not to say that these are only minor and forgivable mistakes in Al-Ghazali's eyes. At the end of the tahaft, he identifies three philosophical teachings that are completely unacceptable and qualify for the label of heresy. They are the claims that the universe is eternal rather than created, that God has no knowledge of particular things but only of universals, and that only the soul lives on after death, with no possibility of bodily resurrection. Especially the second doctrine, about God's knowledge, is one that is specifically associated with Avicenna. Al-Ghazali is saying here that Avicenna and his followers have actually abandoned Islam. They are not merely wrong, they are apostates and can be punished accordingly. On other topics, the philosophers are wrong, but no more so than other misled Muslims, for instance the Mu'tazilites. Then, there are some cases where the philosophers are arguing for the right conclusion but not doing a good enough job of it. An example is their attempt to prove that the soul is immaterial. Al-Ghazali probably agrees that the soul is not a body, he just doesn't think Avicenna and friends have managed to prove it beyond doubt. Al-Ghazali is very interested, one might almost say obsessed, with the question of whether arguments are demonstrative. This is another legacy he passes on to later Muslim theologians. The way he proceeds in the tahafut anticipates what we will find among generations of authors in the Ash'arite tradition. Doctrines and arguments, especially from Avicenna, will be laid out and then criticized as false or simply inadequate. We often find Al-Ghazali saying that a certain philosophical argument is the product of what Avicenna called wahm, or estimation, the faculty that sheep use to perceive the hostility of wolves, but in humans it is also responsible for misleading impressions that we find almost impossible to resist. For instance, it is your wahm that would tell you that there must be empty space surrounding the physical universe, something Avicenna firmly denies. Turning Avicenna's idea of wahm against its author, Al-Ghazali says that such philosophical arguments as those offered to prove the eternity of the world proceed on the basis of wahm and misleading supposition. More careful reflection shows that the universe need not be eternal, and in fact that anyone who says it is eternal is effectively denying that God created it. This is the first topic taken up in the tahafut. Establishing the dialectical pattern he'll use throughout, Al-Ghazali summarizes several arguments to show that the universe is eternal and refutes each one in turn. These arguments are clearly drawn from Avicenna, and in fact Al-Ghazali is on pretty shaky ground with his assertion that all the philosophers would endorse them. In fact, plenty of philosophers who wrote in Arabic denied the eternity of the universe. Among Muslims there were al-Kindi and al-Razi and we could add the Persian thinker Miskohe. Among Jews there was Sa'adiyya Gaon, who, like al-Kindi, borrowed arguments from Philoponus to show that the universe was created with a first moment in time. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that this was the mainstream philosophical view before Avicenna. But Al-Ghazali isn't going to let that bother him, and mentions only Plato and Galen as exceptions to the supposedly universal philosophical belief in eternity. Like the universe according to Al-Ghazali, my time is limited, so I can't go through all the arguments and counterarguments we find in the tahafut. I'll focus on the first one, which Al-Ghazali identifies as the most persuasive argument of the philosophers. On their behalf, he argues that a temporally limited effect cannot come from an eternal cause. God is eternal, so his will should likewise be eternal. And if he has an eternal will to produce the universe, then surely the universe too will be eternal. Not necessarily, replies Al-Ghazali. God could eternally will that something happen at a certain time. For instance, he may always have willed that you would be listening to this episode right now, in which case I'm grateful for his help with building the podcast audience. The philosophers aren't persuaded. If nothing at all exists, then what could lead God to choose one moment rather than another for the universe to begin? Something must change to make the moment he chooses be the right moment for him to create. We are given the culturally resonant example of a man pronouncing that he will divorce his wife. This must be effective either immediately, or contingent on some other event. The husband could, for instance, say that the divorce will be official as soon as the woman enters their house. But in God's case, there are no other events that could trigger the creation, so the universe must exist whenever God wills it, namely eternally. Again, Al-Ghazali admits that this is a seductive argument, but it falls below the level of demonstration. The divorce case is just an example, not a proof that eternal decisions must produce eternal effects. Unless the philosophers can give further argument for their claim, they and Al-Ghazali will just have to follow the example of the divorcing couple and go their separate ways because of irreconcilable differences. The philosophers try to do better by saying that before the universe exists, all moments of time are indistinguishable. Any moment would do as well as any other to be the time at which the universe begins to exist. This means that in order to create, God would have to choose one moment arbitrarily. But how can God do anything arbitrarily? We saw this argument before in Ahrazi, who proposed as a solution that a foolish soul would be responsible for selecting the fateful moment of creation. This is because Ahrazi thought arbitrary choice unsuitable for a perfectly wise deity. For Avicenna, the argument would be even more powerful since he thinks that all aspects of God are necessary, and how could God's selection of a moment for the start of the universe be both necessary and arbitrary? This brings us to the real core of Al-Ghazali's disagreement with Avicenna. Against Avicenna's necessitarianism, Ahrazali wants to uphold God's untrammeled power and choice. Here, his Asharite training is showing through, since, as we saw, Al-Ashari and his followers, like Ahrazali's teacher Al-Jawaini, wanted to make all things subject to God's inscrutable and unfettered will. In fact, Ahrazali is downright eager to say that God can arbitrarily choose a moment for creating the world. That would be the clearest possible case of free choice, when somebody is presented with more than one option and just picks one. Al-Ghazali gives the example of being offered two equally succulent dates, of which you can only have one. You wouldn't just stand there, unable to take either date because they both look so delicious. You'd grab one. Here, Al-Ghazali is anticipating a famous thought experiment devised by the medieval Christian thinker John Buridan, who instead envisioned a donkey standing between two equally appealing bales of hay. The moral of the story is clear. If we humans are able to choose one of two dates, then certainly a free God can arbitrarily choose a date to create the universe. In fact, the philosophers are really committed to this too. Surely the universe could be just a little bit bigger or smaller, for instance. Or the poles of the heavens could have different locations. Repeatedly, Al-Ghazali accuses the philosophers of a double standard. They allow arbitrary choice when it comes to the universe's spatial properties, like its size, but not when time is at stake. As the tahafut goes on, Al-Ghazali further argues that, unless God is freely choosing in this way, he cannot be counted as the real agent or maker of the universe. For, what we mean by an agent is someone who does something out of choice with an understanding of what he does. The philosophers instead abuse language by applying the word agent even to lifeless things like fire, which is supposedly the agent for burning what it touches. Al-Ghazali is alluding to the fact that in Arabic, the word for agent, fa'il, was used to refer to Aristotle's notion of an efficient cause. Against this usage, Al-Ghazali insists that we should restrict talk of agency to causes which act out of well-informed choice. By this standard, the Great Fire of Chicago apparently was caused by no agent at all, since the fire that broke out was not choosing to burn anything. Nor was Mrs. O'Leary's cow in a position to choose consciously to start the fire, since cows are famous for their lack of understanding and choice. If it seems unacceptable that the Great Fire of Chicago has no agent at all, then Asharite theology is ready with a different answer, God is the agent. If only he can create things after they do not exist, then only he is the real agent of the universe and of everything in it. Al-Ghazali returns to this question towards the end of the tahafut in a famous section devoted to the possibility of miracles. The philosophers, he says, deny miracles because they want causes to give rise to their effects necessarily. When Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over that lamp, and the flames touched the hay in her stall, burning was the necessary consequence, as was the disappointment of Bird and Stonkey, whose delicious bales of hay both went up in flames before he could decide which one to eat. Al-Ghazali, though, denies that it is necessary for something flammable to burn when touched by fire. We habitually expect to see burning, because every time we've seen fire touch something, like cotton or hay, it has burst into flame. But that doesn't mean the fire really makes the burning necessary. Rather, God is simply creating these two things side by side with the result that we infer a necessary connection between them. From this, we can infer that God could always create things differently. For instance, when Abraham was thrown into fire, he miraculously survived unscathed. We can explain the miracle by saying that God broke from his usual routine and declined to create burning, consequent to the presence of fire. This passage of the tahafut has frequently reminded readers of the famous treatment of causation by the Scottish philosopher David Hume. To anticipate, by a few hundred episodes, Hume will likewise say that it is only habit that leads us to expect apparent effects to follow from their apparent causes. The causation itself is something we can never observe. Of course, the context of Al-Ghazali's discussion is very different from that of Hume. Whereas the empiricist Hume is investigating the extent to which causation can be encountered through perception, Al-Ghazali is asserting an Ash'arite occasionalist picture of reality. Or is he? In fact, one of the most long-running controversies about philosophy in the Islamic world concerns this part of the tahafut and Al-Ghazali's understanding of causation. One possible interpretation does have him asserting the Ash'arite view and saying that, barring miracles, God always creates things in the way that we expect him to do. Fire doesn't do anything. As we've seen, it is not an agent. Instead, God creates burning when and where he has also created fire. This interpretation is encouraged by a passage in which Al-Ghazali imagines the philosophers objecting that if Al-Ghazali were right, then our world would be chaos and we would never know what might occur. If we left our house and then returned, we might find that our slave boy has turned into a dog, that one of our books has turned into a horse, or that a glass of water has become an apple tree. To this, Al-Ghazali calmly replies that God has spared us from such skeptical worries precisely by creating things in a predictable and regular sequence. Thanks to his following regular habits in his creative actions, we have developed habits of expectation about what will occur. Other interpreters find a less radical Al-Ghazali in these pages. They point out that it is one thing to say that causes do not necessitate their effects and another to say that causes do nothing at all to produce their effects. Suppose that a cow flinches and knocks over a lamp. Yes, I'm going to milk this example for all it's worth. Someone who admits the possibility of miracles might say that God could intervene and stop the flame in the lamp from setting the hay alight. For this reason, the flame by itself does not make the burning necessary. But the flame is still what burns the hay so long as God does not interfere. On this reading, Al-Ghazali is making his characteristic move of chastising the philosophers for seeing necessity where there is none. Fire does burn unless something prevents it from doing so, but that condition is only fulfilled if God decides not to prevent the burning. Thus, God is involved in every event, not usually as the direct cause of the event, but because his tacit permission is required for the event to occur. At stake in this debate is Al-Ghazali's whole intellectual stance. Is he basically an Avicennan philosopher, albeit one who is far more aware of the limitations of philosophy than Avicenna was? Or is he basically an Asharite? It's hard to tell just from the tahafut, since as Al-Ghazali himself says, his aim in this work is not to establish positive doctrine, but only to identify the philosopher's mistakes. His main target for most of the work is Avicenna's picture of God as a necessary cause, who eternally gives rise to a chain of secondary causes which in turn necessitate their own effects. He has numerous complaints about this picture. It rules out genuine agency on God's part, and also removes God from any direct relationship with almost all of his creation. As Al-Ghazali says, the philosophers adhere to the rule that, from one thing comes only one thing, famous under its Latin version as the ex uno unum principle. Because of this rule, Avicenna had God necessarily emanating only one single effect, namely the celestial intellect associated with the highest heavenly sphere. God's causal influence would then be passed down through the heavens until the lowest celestial intellect, the so-called agent intellect, which is responsible for giving forms to things in this world. Our interpretive problem, then, is that there is more than one way for Al-Ghazali to reject Avicenna's Necessitarian Theory. It would certainly do the trick if he were to adopt Asharite occasionalism, and insist that God directly makes everything happen, in each case choosing freely to do so. But it would be just as effective to admit that God creates things as secondary causes. They would cause their effects, but not necessarily so, since they would always be subject to God's interference. This would leave God's power unfettered, and also preserve at least the possibility of a direct relationship between God and each of his effects. Al-Ghazali may even want to leave both options open here. Either will give him the result he needs, and cow the Avicennans into submission. This would explain why he writes this section on miracles the way he does. First, he dismisses the claim that fire necessitates burning by insisting that we are dealing here with something habitual, and not something necessary. But then, he presents two alternative versions of what might be going on, an occasionalist one, and then another one that retains secondary causation. As I mentioned in the last episode, later authors like Averroes would complain that Al-Ghazali is a rather slippery character, a philosopher with the philosophers, an Asharite with the Asharites, and so on. But this may be just what he intended. The dialectical method of works like the tahafut is designed not to demonstrate doctrine, but to puncture philosophical pretension. He comes not to praise his own theories, but to bury those of Avicenna. This nuanced, critical stance towards Avicenna is one important thing that Al-Ghazali bequeathed to his successors. So, before we go west to look at philosophy in Andalusia in two weeks, I want to round off our look at the formative period by talking to an expert on this very aspect of Al-Ghazali's writings. I'll be utterly distraught if you don't join me as I speak to Frank Griffel about heresy, orthodoxy, and philosophy in Al-Ghazali next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Caps.