Islamic Philosophy of the Golden Age: Al-Farabi, Avicenna, Al-Gazali, Averroes

History is not my strong point, largely because I avoided it on principle when I was younger. (My dad is a history professor, so I thought refusing to learn it would be funny.) One of these days, perhaps when I “finish” this reading list, I’ll take some time to learn who Hitler was and how many prime ministers we’ve had, but until then, I’ll remain rather blissfully ignorant. This caveat is necessary because the really fascinating part of today's post involves the history of the Arab world, which is pretty much a dead zone in my learning. So take the historical aspects with a grain of salt, and if there are any glaring errors in my claims, dear reader, kindly point them out.

Personally, I had never heard of any of the philosophers from today's post before compiling my reading list. Whether or not this is due to my hilarious level of historical illiteracy, I would not be surprised if many of the names are unfamiliar even to reasonably well-read people. Therefore, I'd like to take a moment to give a quick overview of the basics of Islamic philosophical history before discussing the ideas of each individual philosopher. 

The details of the golden age of medieval Islamic philosophy (c. 9th - 12th century, AD) are quite incredible, due in no small part to the era in which the philosophers lived and the far-reaching implications of their work. While the works of Aristotle were lost to the West until a later date, his writings found their way to the Middle East. There, Aristotelianism inspired a wave of scientific exploration and discovery; the scientists of the time longed to use Aristotle's worldview to harness the powers of the world, to become true masters and proprietors of nature. Those were the days when alchemists and mystics worked side by side, when Plato’s philosopher-king seemed an ideal within reach, and when learning and erudition were prized above all. 

The first in the line of Aristotelians were al-Farabi and Avicenna, who married Islamic theology and Aristotelianism if not for the first time, at least in the most influential manner. This union precipitated, or perhaps was concurrent with, the development of a great deal of science under the influence of Aristotle – being adjoined to religion, science was in a sense “allowed,” at least until the criticisms began. Aristotelianism was accused of being against Islam, and the harshest blow was dealt by al-Gazali, an Ash’arite Muslim and mystic philosopher. By criticizing philosophy with the indisputable authority of Islam, al-Galazi took Middle Eastern society off the path forged by Aristotelianism and did irreparable damage to the scientific milieu.

Attempts were made to revive the flourishing of the Golden Age, most valiantly by Averroes, who defended Aristotelianism from al-Gazali and even declared that Avicenna’s thought was inimical not to Islam but to philosophy. But the damage had been done. Though Averroes found fame later on, as did they all, with medieval philosophers in the West who slowly rediscovered the philosophy of Aristotle, Aristotelianism never flourished in the Middle East again the way it did during the Golden Age. 

Al-Farabi

In the progression of important Islamic philosophers, al-Farabi is the first, and those who came after, especially Avicenna, are indebted to his interpretations of Aristotle and of the Qur'an. We will only discuss one aspect of his philosophy because, to be quite honest, his metaphysics went way over my head. I read it, and maybe I even understood it, but I can’t say anything interesting about it.

One idea that Avicenna borrowed and Moses Maimonides made his own is al-Farabi’s interpretation of prophecy. In his treatise on metaphysics, al-Farabi discusses the causes that are familiar to us from Aristotle (i.e., formal, efficient, etc.), and then moves on to the Intellect, even giving that topic a little neoplatonic flavor. It all leads to a question: how does the Intellect (that is, God's intellect) descend to us? Al-Farabi's answered that it is through prophecy.

However, prophecy can’t come to just any layman; rather, there is a hierarchy to human intellect and worthiness. Al-Farabi compares it to how an infant first gains basic perception, then understanding of his perception, and finally reason based on that understanding. For most, this is where it stops. As humans, we can use our reasoning skills to logically understand the world; such understanding is alien to, say, a young child who has not yet reached this stage. Similarly, al-Farabi argues that in order to receive prophecy, one must be at an even higher level of intellectual plane.

What is this higher level? Al-Farabi answers, the imaginative faculty. For just as uneducated children may sometimes show glimpses of understanding, so does the layman show glimpses of prophetic ability in dreams, which he claims are not irrational, but superrational, belonging to the realm of God. That is why the earliest forms of prophecy in the Bible, for example that of Joseph, involve interpreting dreams. Prophets then are very similar to philosophers, who have a more highly developed rational faculty than most, but lack imagination. And just as someone of shallow understanding may deny the truth of facts that he cannot comprehend, so too do men with a limited imaginative faculty reject the prophecies of men closer to God in intellect.

Avicenna

By training, Avicenna (pr: 'a-ve-sen-na) was a physician, and one of his most influential treatises is an early medical guide called the Book of Healing. In philosophy, he was the first to give religion "the hallmark of intellectual respectability." Among his most important contributions to Islamic philosophy is the distinction he makes between essence and existence. To Avicenna, essence and existence are ontologically distinct because the answers to the questions "What is it?" and "Does it exist?" may be different. Specifically, essence is prior to existence, a fact which he proves with his "flying man" argument: Consider a man who is suspended in space; he is unable to touch anything, including himself, and all his senses are effectively shut off: he cannot see, hear, taste, smell, or touch. Without any sense input, the man would still be able to affirm, "I am," his essence, on the basis of which he could then postulate, “I exist,” affirming his existence.

The importance of the distinction between existence and essence is that it allows Avicenna to prove the existence of God. The details are murky to me, but the argument is as follows: Essence is prior to existence, and moreover, existence is accident to essence; that is, existence is only possible, not necessary, for a given essence. (We can describe a unicorn’s essence – a horse with a horn – but cannot demonstrate its existence.) Moreover, existence is contingent not only upon essence, but upon any number of things; essence is required for something to exist, but it is not sufficient. Specifically, existence is contingent also upon the existence of other beings.

But if this is true, there would be an infinite regression of beings whose existence is contingent upon the existence of other beings, unless we posit a being whose existence is identical to its essence, i.e. God, so that we have a starting point. We can imagine it this way: a person is a twig on a tree. The existence of any small twig is dependent upon being part of a larger branch, but the existence of that larger branch depends on the existence of an even larger branch. There must then be some root to hold all these branches together; that root is God. This argument also conveniently frees us from the possibility that God, as the author of the universe, could have chosen not to create the universe. Since God's existence is identical to his essence, the trunk of our metaphorical tree exists, which then promotes the growth of subsequent, dependent branches.

Al-Gazali

Al-Gazali (also spelled al-Ghazali) is a much more interesting character to me than his predecessors. He was a Muslim of the Ash’arite sect, a group that didn’t believe in cause and effect per se. Ash’arites refused to acknowledge that there were immutable physical laws, i.e., laws outside the power of God to change. Instead, implicit in every action-reaction pair is God’s hand at work, and He reserves the right to change any reaction, for example, to cause a fire doused with water to grow as if fed gasoline. The answer, then, to the question of “Why?” was for Ash’arites like al-Gazali, “God willed it,” in the most literal possible sense.

Requiring God to be the sole causal force leads al-Gazali to an incredible conclusion, one that he in his time period could never have expected. Al-Gazali recognizes that though God is omnipotent, He cannot do what is logically impossible. It would be absurd, he reasons, to say that God could make a proposition equivalent to its negation, because it cannot be by definition. This extends not only to logic: God also cannot make black equivalent to white because black is by definition not white. That which is logically impossible is outside of the realm of God (as would the paradox of the stone be).

But hold on a moment. In moving from the world of logic (propositions) to the physical world (black and white), al-Gazali has opened the floodgates. Since, for example, mathematics is based on logical propositions, and physical science (in our sense of physics and chemistry) is based on mathematics, and natural science (again, in our sense of biology) is based on that, then conclusions in those fields are immutable truth with which God cannot interfere, according to al-Gazali.

Let us take a moment to recognize the problem this creates. At one point, Al-Gazali argues that the changing of Moses’ staff into a serpent is not outside the realm of literal possibility. He reasons that since things change state all the time – ice to water, dirt to mud – it is certainly possible that given the right conditions and sufficient time a piece of wood could change into a snake. So God could accelerate the process and make it happen instantaneously. And yes, before knowledge of modern chemistry and thermodynamics, this is plausible, if a little farfetched. But now? Now we know that the changing of a piece of wood into a snake is as absurd and illogical as equating black and white. By al-Gazali’s own argument, the staff could not have changed into a snake.

Al-Gazali’s argument, then, is still incredible, but leaves us in want. For by his own words, the miraculous would be impossible for God, because we as scientists have mapped the terrain of the natural world to such a degree that there is no room for deviation from physical laws. But then again, al-Gazali puts no stock in physical laws in the first place. As if preempting this argument, al-Gazali writes, “For if your faith is based on a reasoned argument involving the probative force of the miracle, then your faith is destroyed by an ordered argument showing the difficulty and ambiguity of the miracle. Admit, then, that wonders of this sort are one of the proofs and accompanying circumstances out of the totality of your thought on the matter; and that you attain necessary knowledge and yet are unable to say specifically on what it is based.” In effect, he is saying, There are things outside the realm of God, but if you spend all your time thinking about what God can’t do, you’ll miss all the things He can.

It is not difficult, then, to see that a man like al-Gazali would take issue with some claims of philosophers like Avicenna, who sought common ground between Allah and Aristotle. But it is more interesting not to dwell on the differences in their beliefs, but to notice the incredible amount of overlap in their worldviews. Al-Gazali, despite his extreme fundamentalism (as we might call it), was an Aristotelian who was simply trying to show the limits of philosophy. He believed that Avicenna had overstepped the bounds of what was possible with philosophy on only three points – the eternity of the world, the possibility of bodily resurrection, and whether God has knowledge of particulars or only of generals. Though he tried to refute these points on philosophical grounds, he more often than not ended up arguing on the basis of theology.

Al-Gazali was also a huge influence on Moses Maimonides, who is coming up soon. For example, Maimonides stresses that men must never learn what they are incapable of tolerating, and this idea is indebted to al-Gazali, although it seems it also has roots in Jewish theology. Al-Gazali talks about how different people are receptive to different levels of knowledge, facts, and truth, and how exposing someone who is not ready for a higher plane of truth can in fact discourage them. “It is therefore necessary, I maintain, to shut the gate so as to keep the general public from reading the books of the misguided [those who teach everyone the same information] as far as possible.” Not everyone is ready for the same information, and to help them, sometimes we must hide it from them. Again, we will deal with this in more depth when we get to Moses Maimonides.

Averroes

Averroes (a-‘vare-oh-ees) is the final philosopher in our chronology. An important philosopher in his own right, he is partially famous for his response to al-Gazali’s takedown of Avicennan philosophers (which was called “The Incoherence of the Philosophers”), titled “The Incoherence of the Incoherence.” Averroes, then, didn’t agree with al-Gazali, and in fact, was more of a hardened Aristotelian than even Avicenna; he felt that the latter gave in too much is theological considerations when he, that is, Avicenna, wrote his philosophical treatises.

Which is not to say that Averroes was some sort of atheist. In fact, he is often misunderstood in this regard, because the writings that made it to the West in the Middle Ages were his commentaries on Aristotle, which are rather divorced from theology, and not his proofs of the existence of God. He became known, then, as a naturalist, the “father of the theory of the double truth, according to which philosophy and religion can stand in contradiction” though he never held such a belief.

The similarities between Averroes and the other Islamic philosophers abound. For example, he asserts, “demonstrative truth and scriptural truth cannot conflict.” Since scripture calls for us to use our reason to understand God’s words, natural science, what he would consider “demonstrative truth,” can never run counter to God’s word, and vice versa. “For truth does not oppose truth but accords with it and bears witness to it.”

As Moses Maimonides will make painfully clear, there is a double meaning to scripture; allegorical and metaphorical meanings are there to hide a deeper truth, so that everyone, even the simplest people, can grasp the outer meaning (i.e., everyone can interpret scripture literally), but those for whom the outer meaning is not sufficient can search out and understand the inner meaning as well. Averroes, on the same topic, writes, “The reason why we have received a Scripture with both an apparent and an inner meaning lies in the diversity of people’s natural capacities and the difference of their innate dispositions with regard to assent.” He especially takes issue with al-Gazali calling al-Farabi and Avicenna unbelievers for holding different beliefs on the issues of bodily resurrection, et al. Those topics, Averroes argues, are not based in “fact” – that is, they have not been proven impossible with reason – and so al-Farabi and Avicenna are not unbelievers by definition, but only tentatively, until such a time as those beliefs are proven or disproven.

Stray Observations

I wish I could've found a place for this somewhere else, but I felt it deserved to be set off from the rest. A bold and rather cryptic statement from al-Gazali: “Believing presupposes understanding.” Really? The converse is (probably) true. Is understanding necessary for belief? This would follow from the notion that everyone should be educated at their individual level: teaching everyone the same esoteric knowledge would dissuade many from belief due to lack of understanding.

From the editors of my edition, regarding al-Farabi’s stance on prophets and prophecy: “According to al-Farabi, the various religions are a more or less close and accurate imitation or mimesis of philosophic truth. This means of course that there is no essential difference between monotheistic prophetic religions, though they can be distinguished and evaluated according to the degree of their approximation to philosophic truth.”

Al-Gazali: “The lowest degree of education is to distinguish oneself from the ignorant ordinary man. The educated man does not loathe honey even if he finds it in the surgeon’s cupping-glass; he realizes that the cupping-glass does not essentially alter the honey.” Cf. Augustine’s Egyptian gold.