Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 125 - Reasoned Belief - Saadia Gaon.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, Reasoned Belief, Saadia Gaon. When you hear the word medieval, various things may leap to mind. Knights in shining armor. Monks laboring in monasteries. Peasants working in unrelieved squalor on feudal estates. Lords and ladies eating huge chunks of meat without the aid of a fork. Productive inter-religious dialogue, though, is probably pretty far down on this list. We tend to assume that such dialogue is a recent development made possible by today's more enlightened and tolerant attitude. Ecumenicism is in, persecutions and crusades are out, or at least we'd like to think so. But in these podcasts, I hope to persuade you to give up this prejudice about the medieval era. In due course, we'll see how Christian medieval thinkers writing in Latin drew extensively on Muslim and Jewish authors. For now, it's one reason I am weaving the story of Jewish medieval philosophy into the history of philosophy in the Islamic world, rather than separating it out as a story of its own. Especially in the Islamic medieval world, conditions were good for interfaith discourse and debate. For the most part, Muslims were happy for Jews and Christians to live peacefully in the vast swath of territory dominated by Islam. Admittedly, these other peoples of the book were subject to special conditions, such as higher taxes. This occasionally had the ironic result that Muslim rulers quietly discouraged members of other faiths from converting to Islam, because they needed the added revenue. One might compare the way governments nowadays are secretly quite happy for people to keep smoking, since it brings in extra funds through the cigarette tax. Of course, one shouldn't be blind to the hardships and oppression that were sometimes visited on non-Muslims. We'll see an extreme case of that when we get to the rule of the Almohads in Muslim Spain a few centuries down the line. Also, we should admit that interfaith discussion often took the form of vigorous refutation. For an example of that, you only have to wait a few minutes, since we'll discuss one in this episode. Still, there is an unanswerable case to be made that Jewish and Christian philosophers in the Islamic world creatively engaged with Muslim thinkers and vice versa. Exhibit A in proving that case? A man who decided more than a few cases of his own. The judge, biblical commentator, linguist, and philosopher Sa'id ibn Yusuf al-Fayyumi, more commonly known as Sa'idiyah Gaon. The last part of his name indicates that he hailed from Fayyum in Upper Egypt. He was born there in 882, just a few years after the death of al-Kindi. As we'll be seeing, these two near-contemporaries had a lot in common despite their different faiths. At the age of 23, Sa'idiyah left Egypt for Palestine, and 13 years after that he moved to Iraq, where he was appointed the Gaon of the Jewish Academy in the city of Sura. Which raises the question, what is a Gaon? Well, the Gaonim were heads of the rabbinic academies in Babylon from the 6th to the 11th centuries. This means that Sa'idiyah was first and foremost a scholar of Jewish law, and thus an expert not only in the Hebrew Bible, but also the oral traditions collected in the Mishnah and the vast commentary of the Talmud, as we discussed last time. Sa'idiyah was a staunch defender of the value of these teachings in the face of the Karaites, the critics of the oral teaching whom we met in the previous episode, and he wrote works of refutation against them. This was only one of several controversies that consumed his energies. A dispute over one legal decision saw the local Exilarch, a leader of the Jewish community in Babylonia, try to remove Sa'idiyah from his post. Along with his expertise in law, Sa'idiyah was also a leading exponent of linguistics. He produced a much-used Arabic translation of the Hebrew Bible and the earliest surviving work of Hebrew grammar. It's appropriate that Sa'idiyah was such an expert on words, because in his philosophical writings, he was much influenced by the Islamic science of the word kalam. He is often thought of not so much as a philosopher, but as a Jewish muta kalam, meaning an exponent of kalam. Since he seems especially close to the theologians known as the Mo'otazilites, who I talked about a few episodes back, you'll even see him called a Jewish Mo'otazilite. In this respect, he is comparable to the earlier Jewish thinker David Anwukamos. It may seem amazing that these Jewish philosophers should have such intellectual affinity with Islamic theologians. But, Sa'idiyah was not signaling his allegiance to the Mo'otazilites as such. For one thing, as I pointed out before, in the 9th century, the Mo'otazilites were not yet a unified school or movement to which one could declare allegiance. They were rather independent-minded theologians arguing with one another from some shared assumptions. Furthermore, I read Sa'idiyah not so much as a Jewish Mo'otazilite, but as an intellectual magpie who used all the materials available to him to mount a systematic, rational account of Jewish belief. It was the beliefs of his scriptures and of the legal traditions that claimed his allegiance. So, it's again appropriate that Sa'idiyah's main philosophical treatise should be called Kitab al-'Amarnat wal-Etikadat, the Book of Beliefs and Doctrines. In this treatise, he does not just set out the fundamental beliefs of Judaism, he explains how these beliefs are in accordance with reason. If he draws on Mo'otazilites and Greek authors in Arabic translation, it is because he thinks they have done a good job establishing principles of reason and arguing on that basis. Sa'idiyah shows his interest in correct philosophical method at the very beginning of his work. He tells us that when we are in search of knowledge, we should begin by coming to our senses, literally. Sensation is the first means by which humans can grasp truth. By this, Sa'idiyah means, in the first instance, everyday experiences, like seeing that a giraffe is standing in the field. Sensation also gives rise to general concepts of reason, such as the concept giraffe. However, reason can also grasp certain truths on its own, without using the senses. Here, we might be expecting an example like mathematical truths or laws of logic, but Sa'idiyah instead mentions how we instinctively approve of the truth itself and disapprove of falsehood. This immediate rational insight, then, is a second source of knowledge. A third route to knowledge is inference from the first two sources, as when I see smoke and infer that there is fire, or build up more complex mathematical truths from the simple ones I can grasp immediately. Finally, these three means to knowledge are supplemented by what we can learn from testimony. Here, as we might expect, Sa'idiyah is thinking above all of truths gleaned from religious texts. But it could also include more banal examples, as when you believe that Sa'idiyah lived in Iraq in the early 10th century because I just told you so. I think I forgot to mention that he died in 842. Take my word for it. Banal or not, though, Sa'idiyah seems to have strayed into more controversial ground with this fourth route to knowledge. Certainly, we acquire beliefs by means of testimony, but can we really acquire knowledge? That is a question that will turn up many times in episodes to come, not least next time when we look at the philosopher Arazi. As we'll see, he disdained uncritical dependence on authority, which in Arabic was called taqlid. Al-Farabi too will be unimpressed by claims to knowledge based on authoritative testimony, and we'll even see theologians like al-Ghazali throwing the accusation of taqlid at their opponents. For many proponents of kalam, just as for philosophers, we understand the truth by using our capacity for reason and not by believing what others have said. But Sa'idiyah is not claiming that we should blindly follow whatever tradition tells us. Rather, tradition itself is verified through the three other routes to knowledge. Not only did prophets perform miracles, giving sensible demonstrations of their authenticity, but the message of the Scriptures is in harmony with reason. We can figure out for ourselves that murder is wrong, for instance. So when the Ten Commandments include the order not to kill, we don't need to just take God's word for it. We know that the commandment is right. A thoughtful reading of the Bible shows that its messages are uniformly in keeping with the deliverances of reason. This may make it sound like human reason is standing in judgment over a divinely revealed text. But Sa'idiyah hastens to add that the process of confirmation also goes the other way. He supplies quotes from the Bible to prove that the Scriptures endorse the use of sensation, reason, and inference, just as these three sources ratify the truth of prophetic revelation. There is then a virtuous circle of mutual support between our inborn capacity to reach knowledge and the revealed truths that have additionally been granted to us. Systematic thinker that he is, Sa'idiyah goes on to apply the lessons of this methodological discussion, starting with the most important objects of human knowledge, God, and His creation of the universe. Unfortunately, this most important case of knowledge also presents the greatest difficulties. Unlike giraffes, God does not present Himself to the senses, so we might worry that the first route of sensation will be completely useless here. But as Sa'idiyah points out, not everything accessible to us through the senses is immediately accessible. He gives the example of snow, which upon inspection proves to derive from water, while water in turn comes from condensed vapor. In general, as we inquire using the senses, we go from the less to the more subtle in both the basic physical sense of what is less dense, like water vapor, and in the broader sense of what is abstract and difficult to experience. The same sort of procedure works with the universe as a whole. We begin by observing the world around us, and realize that it must derive from some cause. This of course will be God. As with snow and water vapor, we begin with the senses but come to accept the existence of something that cannot be sensed. At the risk of raining on Sa'idiyah's parade, we should consider a potential problem with his view before we steam on ahead. If God's existence is only inferred from what we can experience with the senses, then will we remain completely in the dark as to God's actual nature? He will be simply an unknown principle, postulated to explain where sensible things came from. But this would be to forget the second source of knowledge, the immediate deliverances of reason. These can tell us several things about God and His relation to the world. Firstly, using nothing but reason, we can prove that the universe is not eternal. In fact, that everybody must be created, which can be explained only by positing an incorporeal and eternal cause. Sa'idiyah provides a whole battery of arguments for this which are eerily reminiscent of the arguments given by al-Kindi. This is no coincidence, since both are reproducing proofs against the eternity of the universe devised by John Philoponus. Al-Kindi, by the way, also made the point that the question whether the universe is eternal is one that is settled by intellectual speculation alone. There are other points of overlap. For instance, both follow the eternity discussion with a proof that nothing can cause itself, and then go on to provide a consideration of God's attributes. Since Sa'idiyah wrote the Book of Doctrines and Beliefs when he was already in Iraq, where al-Kindi lived, I can't help wondering whether he was drawing on al-Kindi himself. Be that as it may, we have not yet exhausted the resources of reason in coming to understand God. We just saw that he is eternal and incorporeal. A bit of further reflection shows that he must also have several other features. First, as al-Kindi also said, God must be perfectly one. After all, he is not a body and thus has no parts, so he is completely simple. Also, as a creator, he must be alive, powerful, and knowledgeable. Alive, in order to be able to create anything at all, possessed of the immense power needed to summon an entire universe into being from nothing, and knowledgeable in order to make the world as well-designed as we see it to be. Again, Sa'idiyah insists that all this is grasped by reason itself, though it is also confirmed by scriptural authority. But, he is also showing his Mautazilite sympathies. As we saw, they were worried that ascribing numerous features to God would compromise his total oneness, his tawhid. Sa'idiyah agrees, saying many times that anyone who thinks that God has a multiplicity of features is reducing him to a body. Sa'idiyah avoids this by insisting that the distinction between God's power, knowledge, and life is an illusion. It may seem to us that God's power couldn't be the same thing as his knowledge and his life, but that's simply a sign of our limited perspective. In God, all three are the same. Sa'idiyah even suggests that it is specifically the limitations of our language that caused the problem. If we had a single word for something's being alive, powerful, and knowing, we could use that to describe God, and there would be no appearance of multiplicity. This may seem a rather dubious line of thought, but remember that Sa'idiyah asserted these three features of God purely on the basis that he created the world. And, Sa'idiyah emphasizes that we have no other means of access to God or his attributes. At the level of reason, then, we are simply grasping God as a creator. It is only when we try to explain what that means in words that we get into trouble, since our language leads us to speak of him in terms of three aspects, so compromising his unity. You may already be suspecting a lurking anti-Christian agenda here, and soon the agenda becomes explicit. We saw that al-Kindi criticized the Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and this is yet another thing he has in common with Sa'idiyah. But unlike al-Kindi, Sa'idiyah has a story about where the Christians went astray. Indeed, he seems sympathetic to the more sophisticated breed of Christian. They understand God to be a Trinity, not because they crassly think of him as a body with three parts, but because they have grasped the necessity that there is a creator who is alive, powerful, and knowing. Their error is to be misled into postulating a genuine threeness in God, assigning each of these attributes to a distinct divine person. An easy enough mistake to make, Sa'idiyah admits, but a mistake nonetheless. He helpfully points out to them that if God had any form of multiplicity, he would be a body, something this more sophisticated type of Christian rightly rejects. If the Christians are sophisticated enough, they will probably respond that things can be multiple without being bodies. Even the Platonists said so. Just think of the intellect which Plotinus said was immaterial and one, but also many. Sa'idiyah, though, wants to draw a firm line between two kinds of things—those that are created, limited, and characterized by multiplicity, and the creator, who is eternal, incorporeal, and utterly one. By now, you're hopefully beginning to see why people connect Sa'idiyah so strongly with Mo'atazilism. His insistence on divine unity, even in the face of the apparent diversity of God's attributes, looks like what we saw in thinkers like Abu'l-Udeil. But can we really think of him as a Mo'atazilite sympathizer if he doesn't also argue, as they did, that God must give us freedom over our actions if we are to be morally responsible for what we do? This is my cue to mention that Sa'idiyah also argues that God must give us freedom over our actions if we are to be morally responsible for what we do. Using Mo'atazilite terminology, he remarks that it belongs to the justice of God to give man the capacity to do what God has commanded and to avoid what God has forbidden. Sa'idiyah also adds a discussion of the divine foreknowledge problem, which we saw turning up in Augustine and Boethius, the gist of Sa'idiyah's remarks being that although God does know what I will do before I do it, his knowledge doesn't actually cause me to do what I do. Sa'idiyah borrows so heavily from the Mo'atazilites in these parts of his book of beliefs and doctrines that one could almost forget that one is reading a Jewish author if it weren't for his constant allusions to the Bible as confirming his philosophical claims. Even his style of writing is typical of a kalam author. He often proceeds by listing possible positions on a given topic and then pedantically itemizing the ways that each of the wrong positions can be refuted. Paging through the work, you'll see him, for instance, describing Plato's ideas about the creation of the world and then asserting that Plato can be refuted in no fewer than twelve ways, all of which Sa'idiyah will be more than happy to explain. This dialectical style of writing, where one advances by means of refuting all other theories to leave the true one standing at the end, will be a future of kalam writing for centuries to come. Yet, for all his borrowings from kalam, Sa'idiyah also looks back at the centuries of Jewish heritage that have come and gone. He sharply differs from Muslim theologians on a variety of points. For instance, Muslims believed that some provisions of the Quranic law were abrogated, which means that they were effectively repealed by a subsequent revelation. Some Jews also accepted the possibility of abrogation, but Sa'idiyah firmly denies it, insisting that God's law can never be overturned. One might suppose that this only stands to reason, literally, since we saw earlier that reason and God's commandments are in full accord. If the law and the deliverances of reason always agree, it seems that to change his law, God would have to go against reason. Things are a bit more complicated than I let on, though, because in fact not all of God's commandments line up with things we can discover by reason. Sa'idiyah thinks that much of the Jewish law does simply endorse what reason can determine without revelation. But a whole class of laws, which are inaccessible to reason, are additionally laid upon the Jewish people. God's reason for this is to increase our happiness. For instance, laws concerning purification may seem arbitrary, but they encourage us to think little of our bodies and to concentrate on God. Or, the stipulation to keep one day as a Sabbath helps us by giving us respite from our labors and leading us to pray more than we otherwise would. Other laws offer additional specificity to a general rule of reason. For instance, reason tells us that man and woman should commit to one another and that stealing is wrong, but good luck using nothing but reason to discover the correct way to design a marriage ceremony or figure out exactly when something counts as one person's property so that it will be theft if another person takes it. What Sa'idiyah is saying here is to some extent commonsensical. Think, for instance, of how the British drive on the left, whereas people in normal countries, like Germany and the United States, drive on the right. It stands to reason that you need to pick one side or the other to drive on, but which side you pick is an arbitrary matter. What Sa'idiyah adds to this observation is that the need for arbitrary stipulation in lawmaking leaves space for Scripture to lay down commands that are not simply establishing what reason would independently have affirmed. Of course, as a rabbinic Jew, Sa'idiyah would also grant this status to the legal judgments preserved in the Mishnah and Talmud. Thus, even Sa'idiyah recognizes that reason does have its limits. By giving humans the power of reason, God has bestowed upon us a tool by which we can discover most of what we need to know, but God goes further than that and reveals commands and laws we could not otherwise have known. Though Sa'idiyah is here trying to explain something about the Jewish law, the moral of the story applies to Islam and Christianity too. Philosophers of all three faiths were typically very optimistic about reason and its ability to discover the most important truths—that's what made them philosophers, after all. But many of them also carefully defined boundaries past which reason could not go, at least not without help in the form of revelation. Though that is the most common stance we'll find among medieval philosophers, some are more rationalist still. Soon, we'll come to a famous example, the Muslim thinker Al-Farabi, who thought of religion as nothing but a user friendly version of the truths discovered by philosophy. Before we get to him, we'll be looking at a thinker who is less renowned today, but downright notorious in his own age. His name was Ar-Razi, but his opponents usually contented themselves with just calling him the heretic. What did he do to upset them so much? All will be revealed next time, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.