Al-Ghazali Story - Part 3

D. ATTACK ON THE PHILOSOPHERS

1. Introduction.-Al-Ghazālī’s critical examination of the method and doctrines of the philosophers is the most exciting and important phase of his intellectual inquiry. He was not at all against philosophical investigation as such. His early interest in philosophy is evidenced by the treatises that he wrote on logic such as MiÐyar al-`Ilm fi Fann al-Mantiq: “The Touchstone of Science in Logic” (quite an elaborate treatise) and Mihakk al-Nazar fi al-Mantiq: “The Touchstone of Speculation in Logic” (a smaller work). In the history of Muslim thought his is the first instance of a theologian who was thoroughly schooled in the ways of the philosophers; the doctors of Islam before him either had a dread of philosophy, considering it a dangerous study, or dabbled in it just to qualify themselves for polemics against the philosophers. But al-Ghazālī very strongly realized that to refute a system before literally inhabiting it and getting thoroughly immersed into its very depths was to act blindly. “A man,” he tells us, “cannot grasp what is defective in any of the sciences unless he has so complete a grasp of the science in question that he equals its most learned exponents in the appreciation of its fundamental principles and even goes beyond and surpasses them . . . .”28 In all intellectual honesty he refrained from saying a word against the philosophers till he had completely mastered their systems.



He applied himself so assiduously to the study of the entire sweep of Greek philosophy current in his time and attained such a firm grasp of its problems and methods29 that he produced one of the best compendia of it in Arabic entitled as Maqasid al-Falasifah (The Intentions of the Philosophers). This compendium was such a faithful exposition of Aristotelianism that when it {592} came to be known to the Christian scholastics through a Latin translation made as early as 540/ 1145 by the Spanish philosopher and translator Dominicus Gundisalvus,30 it was taken to be the work of a genuine Peripatetic. Albert the Great (d. 679/1280), Thomas Aquinas (d. 673/1274), and Roger Bacon (d. 694/1294) all repeatedly mentioned the name of the author of the “Intentions of the Philosophers” along with ibn Sina and ibn Rushd as the true representatives of Arab Aristotelianism.31 But never did Arab Aristotelianism find a more vigorous foe than al-Ghazālī.

His compendium in philosophy was merely propaedeutic to his Tahāfut al-Falasifah (The Incoherence of the Philosophers)32 in which he levelled a devastating attack on the doctrine of the Muslim Peripatetics with a dialectic as subtle as any in the history of philosophy. Al-Ghazālī, for the purposes of his scrutiny, divided the philosophers into three main groups: The materialists (dahriyyun),33 the naturalists or the deists (tabi’iyyun), and the theists (ilāhiyyun). The materialists completely dispensed with the idea of God and believed that the universe has existed eternally without a creator: a self-subsisting system that operates and develops by itself, has its own laws, and can be understood by itself. The naturalists or the deists, struck by the wonders of creation and informed of a running purpose and wisdom in the scheme of things while engaged in their manifold researches into the sciences of phenomena, admitted the existence of a wise Creator or Deity, but rejected the spirituality and immortality of the human soul. They explained the soul away in naturalistic terms as an epiphenomenona {593} of the body and believed that the death of the latter led to the complete non-existence of the former. Belief in heaven, hell, resurrection, and judgment they considered as old wives’ tales or pious fictions.

Al-Ghazālī discussed the theists at length for they, according to him, held a comparatively more final position and exposed the defects of the materialists and the naturalists quite effectively, thus saving him from doing so for himself. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle he listed as theists but concentrated on Aristotle who had criticized all his predecessors and even had refuted his own teacher, excusing himself of this by saying: “Plato is dear to us. And truth is dear, too. Nay, truth is dearer than Plato.”34

As far as the transmission of Aristotle’s philosophy in Arabic was concerned, al-Ghazālī found that none of the Muslim philosophers had accomplished anything comparable to the achievements of al-Farabi and ibn Sina. These two were Aristotle’s most faithful and capable translators and commentators; the works of others were marked with disorder and confusion. Thus al-Ghazālī came finally to concentrate on that philosophical thought of his day which had emerged from the writings of these two theistic philosophers (particularly ibn Sina) and applied himself to its examination in a systematic manner. He divided the philosophical sciences into mathematics, logic, physics, politics, ethics, and metaphysics, and went into their details in order to see if there really was anything false or untenable.

He was most scientific in his approach: ready to accept whatever he found to be based on the evidence of factual data or susceptible of proof by argument in conformity with the principles of reason. He had least hesitation in accepting as true much of what the philosophers taught with regard to their sciences of mathematics, logic, and physics; he even had no serious quarrel with them in the spheres of politics and ethics. The most grievous errors of the theistic philosophers, he found, consisted in their metaphysical views which, unlike mathematical and natural sciences, were not grounded in compelling reason or positive inquiry but on conjecture and fanciful speculations. Had their metaphysics been so very well grounded in sound reasoning as their mathematical sciences were, they would have agreed amongst themselves on metaphysical issues as they did on the mathematical ones. But, above all, what al-Ghazālī saw to his dismay was that the philosophies of al-Farabi and ibn Sins, at points did violence without any philosophic warrant or justification to the principles of religion as enunciated in the Qur’an. His empirical and theological spirit revolted very strongly against this.

The positive facts of religion could not be sacrificed for sheer metaphysical speculations, nor could they be interpreted externally from the point of view of a preconceived system of philosophy. These had to be interpreted intrinsically and reckoned on their own grounds. The Muslim philosophers had failed to take this empirical standpoint. They had also been slow in realizing that notwithstanding a great breadth of outlook that the {594} study of Greek philosophy had brought to the Muslims, there was in the ultimate analysis quite a gulf between the inspiration of the Qur’anic teachings and the spirit of Hellenism.35 Carried away by their enthusiasm to bring a reconciliation between philosophy and religion, al-Farabi and ibn Sina, according to al-Ghazālī, had so compressed the dogmas of Islamic religion within the moulds of Aristotelian and Plotinian systems as to fall either into a morass of inconsistencies or get implicated into heretical positions.

All this al-Ghazālī brought out with most accomplished understanding and admirable skill, and with a “transcendental” dialectic as subtle as that of Kant’s in his Tahāfut al-Falasifah which indeed is the most important of all his works from the point of view of our present study. Within less than a hundred years it called forth the most stimulating rejoinder (entitled Tahāfut al-Tahāfut) from the celebrated ibn Rushd and then a rejoinder of a rejoinder from Muslih al-Din Mustafa ibn Yusuf al-Bursawi generally known as Khwajah Zadah, a Turkish theologian who died in 893/1488.36 These works, particularly the first two, taken together epitomize the essential problems arising from the impact of classical philosophy on the teachings of religion.37

2. Method and Problems of Tahāfut.-It is generally believed that al-Ghazālī wrote his Tahāfut al-Falāsifah during the period of his doubts, but in fact the work is essentially of a polemical nature and shows in him an odd combination of scepticism and ecstatic assurances. The general effect of the teaching of the philosophers, al-Ghazālī felt, was so ruinous to the religious and moral life of the masses that his well-nigh apostolic humanism revolted against it and he dedicated himself to an open warfare against the philosophers.

There is no doubt about the theological inspiration and the polemical spirit of the Tahāfut but then we add most emphatically that neither of them seriously affects the great philosophical value of this work.38 The modern reader cannot fail to be struck with clear anticipations of Hume (d. 1190/1776), Schleiermacher (d. 1250/1834), Ritschl (d. 1307/1889), and others, and even of the logical positivists of our day in some of the arguments and the general motif of the Tahāfut. His general position may be briefly described to be that the truths {595} of the positive facts of religion can neither be proved nor disproved, and to do otherwise leads the philosophers to take more often than not quite nonsensical positions.

Al-Ghazālī assails the philosophers on twenty points39 (beginning with creation and ending with the last things) and endeavours to show that their dogmas of the eternity and the everlastingness of the world are false; their assertion that God is the creator of the world is dishonest for it is flagrantly inconsistent with their dogma of the eternity of the world; that they fail to prove the existence, the unity, the simplicity and the incorporeality of God or God’s knowledge either of the universals or of the particulars; that their views with regard to the souls of the celestial spheres, and the spheres’ knowledge of the particulars and the purpose of their movement are unfounded; that their theory of causation which attributes effects to the very nature of the causes is false; and that they cannot establish the spirituality of the soul, nor prove its immortality; and, finally, that their denial of the resurrection of the bodies in the life hereafter is philosophically unwarranted. Al-Ghazālī charges the philosophers with infidelity on three counts, viz.,

(1)   eternity of the world;
(2)   denial of God’s knowledge of the particulars, and
(3)   denial of bodily resurrection.

For the rest their views are heretical or born of religious indifference. But in all they are involved in contradictions and suffer from confusion of thought.

The problem which al-Ghazālī considers the most important is that of the eternity (qidam) of the world to which he allots the greatest space, almost a quarter of his book. This has been one of the most challenging and uncompromising problems in the conflict between religion and philosophy. The advocates of orthodoxy considered the eternality of the universe to be the most pernicious thesis of the philosophers and vehemently combated against it. Al-Ash’ari (d. 324/935) wrote a refutation of it in his Kitab al-Fusul which probably is the earliest scholastic treatise dealing with this question,40 and ibn Hazm (d. 457/1064) made the doctrine a dividing line between the orthodox and the heterodox sects. The orthodox could not possibly concede the philosophers’ claim of the eternality of the world, for with them there is nothing eternal but God; all else is created (hadith). To make anything co-eternal with God is to violate the strict principle of monotheism, for that infringes the absoluteness and infinity of God and reduces Him to the position of an artificer: a Demiurge. Virtually, the doctrine drives one to the materialists’ position that the world is an independent universe, a self-subsistent system, which develops by itself, and can be understood by itself. All this was hard to swallow for a theologian like al-Ghazālī.

The philosophers like al-Farabi and ibn Sina as Muslims did not deny that {596} God is an eternal creator of the universe, but as true Aristotelians believed that God’s activity consists merely in bringing forth in the state of actuality the virtual possibilities inherent in the prime matter which was alleged to be co-eternal with Him. This was in conformity with the Aristotelian notion of change not as a passage from non-being into being, which would make it unintelligible, but as a process by which what is merely “potential being” passes over, through “form,” into “actual being.”41 So God as an eternal creator constantly combines matter with new forms; He did not create the universe out of sheer nothingness at a definite time in the past. As a corollary they believed in the infinity of time.
Al-Ghazālī, on the other hand, in accordance with the obvious teachings of the Qur’an, firmly holds the position that the world was created by God out of absolute nothingness42 at a certain moment in the past which is at a finite interval from the present. He created not only forms but also matter and time along with them which had a definite beginning and hence is finite.

The two positions as outlined above readily remind one of Kant’s thesis and antithesis in the first antinomy43 which present an impossible problem in the sense that conditions requisite for their verification or falsification are de facto impossible. One is tempted to say that al-Ghazālī does recognize the impossibility of the problem for he clearly proclaims that he does not intend to defend his own position but only to refute that of the philosophers. This is true in general of all the other disputations in Tahāfut al-Falāsifah. The arguments of the philosophers are presented with very considerable plausibility, but the dialectical skill and philosophical acumen which al-Ghazālī employs to refute them are also overwhelming. Though the whole discussion is surcharged with a polemical spirit, yet one cannot fail to see that al-Ghazālī’s standpoint throughout remains highly scientific and logical; he does not succumb merely to verbal quibbles. He clearly says that he does not have any quarrel with the philosophers on the usages of terms.44

Al-Ghazālī’s quarrel with the philosophers is because many of their particular arguments are logically false and the various positions that they take in their system as a whole are inconsistent with one another, but, above all, because some of their basic assumptions are unfounded. These assumptions, al-Ghazālī proves most powerfully, can neither be demonstrated logically, nor are they self-evident through “intuition.” Such, for example, is the assumption that every event has a cause or that causes produce their effects necessarily. The  {597} Muslim philosophers have accepted these assumptions merely in the dogmatic tradition of Aristotelian philosophy. The faulty reasonings of the philosophers or the inconsistencies in their positions are remediable but not so the uncritical acceptance of their assumptions. Al-Ghazālī for himself is not prepared to accept any part of the Aristotelian system except the first principles of logic and rules of syllogism-nothing else until and unless it has logical coerciveness about it. On the other hand, he is not prepared to reject any of the doctrines of religion until and unless it is disproved with a similar logical rigour and cogency. Nothing is “possible” in philosophy till it is logically necessary, and nothing is “impossible” in religion till it is logically self-contradictory. Apparently, this is a double-faced criterion to judge variously the truths of philosophic assumptions and those of religious assumptions, but from the point of view of philosophy of religion it is perfectly justified. Philosopher qua philosopher has to accept the facts of religion as given by religion; this is the sine qua non of any empirical philosophy of religion. Thus, in spite of the fact that al-Ghazālī’s whole polemic against the philosophers derives its inspiration from the Asst `arite theology, his method remains in its essentials purely philosophical, fulfilling in its own way some of the most important requirements of the modern and even contemporary approaches to the problems of the philosophy of religion.45

These few observations with regard to al-Ghazālī’s method in the Tahāfut were necessary before we could enter into some of the detailed arguments which he gives in the refutation of the philoapphera’ various positions.