Archives for August 2020

Abū Hāmid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Tusi al-Ghazāli: The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Michael E. Marmura translation. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2000.

 

Born in 1058 and trained in Islamic law, al-Ghazāli is famous—in some circles, notorious—for claiming that Allah acts according to his will, not according to reason. He has been interpreted as teaching this by many Muslims, who have been known to abominate reason as the bringer of heresy and atheism. And it is surely true that the will plays a decisive role in al-Ghazāli’s understanding of Allah. As Michael E. Marmura remarks in his excellent introduction, the Asharite school of Islamic theology in which al-Ghazāli was trained regarded not only the original creation of the cosmos as an act of God but “regarded all temporal existents as the direction creation of God, decreed by His eternal attribute of will and enacted by His attribute of power.” That is, “what humans habitually regard as sequences of natural causes and effects are in reality concomitant events whose constant association is arbitrarily decreed by the divine will.” Miracles or divine disruptions of the apparently natural course of things are perennially possible, and the familiar Muslim coda, “God willing,” reflects this mindset. An examination of The Incoherence of the Philosophers suggests that the matter is more complicated than that. What is the status of reason according to al-Ghazāli, in this polemic?

“I have seen a group,” he writes, “who, believing themselves in possession of a distinctiveness from companion and peer by virtue of a superior quick with and intelligence, have rejected the Islamic duties regarding acts of worship, disdained religious rites pertaining to the offices of prayer and the avoidance of prohibited things, belittled the devotions and ordinances prescribed by the divine law, not halting in the face of prohibitions and restrictions.” For these duties, these rites, and the divine law they substitute “multifarious beliefs” produced by “speculative investigation, an outcome of their stumbling over the tails of sophistical doubts that divert from the direction of the truth”—mere “imaginings akin to the glitter of the mirage.” This group consists of philosophers, men who deny “revealed laws and religious confessions” and reject “the details of religious and sectarian [teaching], believing them to be man-made laws and embellished tricks.” In “disdaining to be content with the religious beliefs of their forebears,” however, they have only “mov[ed] from one [mode of] imitation to another”; that is, far from ascending from the cave of customary opinions where they worshipped the shadows of man-made idols to the daylight of nature, they have merely encamped in another cave. Worse, they have abandoned the true light of divine, not merely natural law, for a cave beneath the cave of mere heresy, the cave of atheism and materialism. There is no lower rank in “God’s world” than that of these men, as “imbecility is… nearer salvation than acumen severed from [religious belief]; blindness is closer to wholeness than cross-eyed sight.” Al-Ghazāli’s stated intention “is to alert those who think well of philosophers and believe that their ways are free from contradiction by showing the [various] aspects of their incoherence.” He does not deny that Muslim theologians also contradict one another, contenting himself with saying that this isn’t his topic here.

He accuses philosophers of obscurantism, of claiming that “the metaphysical sciences” are esoteric, accessible only to those well versed in the arcana of mathematics and logic. On the contrary, al-Ghazāli replies, mathematics has nothing to do with metaphysics and logical argumentation can be understood by many more than the very few men who become philosophers. He proceeds with twenty “discussions,” sets of arguments similar in form to the writings of Christian Scholastics, who present the arguments of their opponents followed by point-by-point refutations. Discussions 1-16 address metaphysics; discussions 17-20 pertain to physics or nature. The two metaphysical issues in dispute are the philosophers’ claim that the cosmos is eternal and that God knows only universals, not particulars, and therefore does not intervene providentially in the cosmos He has created. The physical or natural issue in dispute is the philosophers’ (but especially Avicenna’s) teaching on the human soul and his denial of the resurrection of the body.

In arguing that the cosmos is eternal, philosophers offer three proofs. First, they say, if God is eternal and has created a cosmos at some point in time, making a possibility into a reality, this must mean that God Himself changed from a non-creator to a creator. But this is a contradiction, unless religionists pretend that there has been a “proceeding of the temporal from the Eternal without a change of affairs in the Eternal by way of power, instrument, time, purpose, or nature.” To counter this, al-Ghazāli says that there is no contradiction if the world was created in time “by an eternal will that decreed its existence at the time in which it came to be.” To this view is not to think that the “willer” changed to such a degree that He was no longer Himself; eternity isn’t sameness. Nor is creation in, or before, time necessarily impossible, a fact defying reason, if the willer withheld His act of creation—especially if “duration and time are both created.” “It is incumbent on you [philosophers] to set up a demonstrative proof according to the condition of logic that would show the impossibility of this.” When conjoined with power, will “differentiates a thing from its similar.” Light and darkness are opposites; they contradict one another. But to will into existence two opposite things is not to exercise one’s will in a self-contradictory way if the underlying intention behind that act serves some overarching rational purpose. The idea of willed creation would only be a violation of reason if one claimed that the Creator created ‘blackwhite.’ If philosophers were to assert that the inability to create ‘blackwhite’ calls into question divine power, omnipotence, al-Ghazāli answers: “the impossibility of realizing what is not possible does not indicate impotence.”

Philosophers also claim “that whoever asserts that the world is posterior to God and God prior to it” means either that God is “prior in essence, not in time, in the way that one is prior to two” or that God “is prior to the world and time.” If the former, then the Creator-created relationship is causative in the way a person’s movement causes his shadow to move with him; but these events presume the coexistence both the person and the movement. If the latter, then there must have been a time in which the world did not exist but God did; “before the existence of time, infinite time would have existed, and this is contradictory.” 

Al-Ghazāli replies that “time is originated and created, and before it there was no time at all,” as “God is prior to the world and time.” “By priority we mean only the appropriation of existence to Himself alone.” God exists with or without the world. In terms of reason, not of will, “a first beginning that is preceded by nothing” is not “disallow[ed],” that is, it is not self-contradictory. This doesn’t prove that ex nihilo creation occurred, only that it is not an irrational concept. When philosophers argue that “it is impossible for [the world] to be impossible and then to become possible,” he answers that he world “is eternally possible” in the sense that God could conceive it at any time, but it only became possible when He made it so.

Philosophers also observe that every “temporal existent” consists of both form and matter. Matter is prior to form, thus prior to every temporal existent, since existence consists of some form, a form distinguishing it from all other existents, imposed upon matter. Since “matter does not have matter [receptive of it]”—because there is no pre-matter matter, matter must not originate in time. It must be eternal. Al-Ghazāli answers that the question “reverts to a judgment of the mind.” No self-contradictory judgment of the mind is possible, in the sense that no one can form a mental image or idea of ‘blackwhite.’ Why, then, assume that matter is eternal, rather than God? Or vice-versa, one might add, but al-Ghazāli does not need to prove the eternality of God, only the rational possibility of an eternal God rather than eternal matter. He can afford to leave the question of whether matter or God is eternal, so long as he can show that the claim that God is eternal, not matter, is not irrational. “As regards affirming the true doctrine,” instead of merely refuting the philosophers’ doctrine, “we will write another book concerning it after completing this one, if success comes to our aid, God willing, and we will name it The Principles of Belief.“

“To refer possibility, necessity, and impossibility back to rational judgments is correct.” In that, the philosophers are right. They are also right to say that “the meaning of the mind’s judgment is [its] knowledge and that knowledge requires an object of knowledge.” Their mistake is to assume that this means that this knowledge need be knowledge of matter—that matter is prior to mind. But, for example, “one cannot conceive in existence a color which is neither white nor black nor some other color. The form of being a color, however, is established in the mind without detailing [different species of color], and one says of it that it is a form whose existence is in minds, not in concrete things.” “If this is not impossible, then what we have mentioned”—namely, ex nihilo creation—is “not impossible.” 

Philosophers also claim that the world is eternal—indeed, “pre-eternal,” if eternity means perpetuity in time ‘going forward.’ That is, they claim that the world not only has “no beginning for its existence” but also has “no end.” It will “continue to be,” always. Al-Ghazāli replies to this claim with the same arguments he used against the anti-creation claim. “The bringing about of existence and annihilation obtains through the will of the one endowed with power”; in both creation and annihilation, God “in Himself does not change, what changes being only the act.” “So long as the occurrence of an event by an eternal will is conceivable, there is no difference in the state of affairs whether what occurs is a privation or an existence.” 

Al-Ghazāli accuses philosophers of “obfuscation” when they call God “the world’s enactor and maker”; “with them this is metaphor, not reality.” He defines “agent” as “a willer, a chooser, and a knower of what He wills,” but philosophers use that term to mean “not one who wills, but has no attribute at all,” and for them ‘God’ is really the eternal cosmos, which “proceeds by compulsory necessity.” Logic is a form of necessity; to the philosophers ‘God’ acts rationally but without will, and ‘God’-nature-cosmos causes all things to happen by rational necessity. This is why al-Ghazāli emphasizes the will of God, the freedom of God, and it is also one reason why he can be interpreted as considering will to be prior to reason.

But that is not the claim he makes here. On the contrary, “if we suppose that a temporal event depends for its occurrence on two things, one voluntary and the other not, reason relates the act to the voluntary.” This is why, if one man murders another by throwing him into a fire, we call the man the killer, not the fire; the man has agency. At the same time, unlike men, the creator-God always wills rationally; His acts have a rational necessity backed by His power, which gives them physical necessity, but He chooses what acts He takes freely. Whether before or after the creation of time and space, God chooses among a set of acts, any one of which must be rational because His intention is without self-contradiction. It is true that human beings—created, limited beings—cannot fully understand “the essence of God.” Therefore “do not think on the essence of God” but on His creation. But that doesn’t mean that God has no essence, nor that He is not essentially rational; it means that He is all-knowing, and you are not.

Having discussed the philosophers’ inability to prove that the creator-God does not exist, and that ‘God’ is really the eternal world or cosmos, al-Ghazāli next denies their ability to prove that God does exist, and that He is one, not many. The ‘God’ of the philosophers is a First Principle, an impersonal, unmoved mover. They argue that without assuming the existence of such a First Principle, one commits the fallacy of infinite regress. While affirming the logical necessity of avoiding an infinite regress, al-Ghazāli simply points out that positing the existence of a creator-God equally avoids it. Further, if the cosmos is eternal and necessarily generates individual things over time, would this not mean that the number of things is infinite? Yet how can physical things, even things as small as atoms, be infinite in number and still increase in number?

Philosophers attempt to prove the oneness of their ‘God’ by tracing causation back to an origin which necessarily must have been singular, inasmuch as there can be only one causeless Causer. Once causation began, plurality began, but not before that. “The basic point for understanding their doctrine consists in their saying [that] the essence of the First Principle is one, the names becoming many by relating something to it, relating it to something, or negating something of it.” “The existence of [what is] other than Him is from Him.” Their ‘God’ is Intellect; He is a being “aware of Himself” who “apprehends Himself.” “Hence, His essence is an intelligible,” devoid of matter. “The existing order is a consequent of the intelligible order in the sense that [the former] comes through [the latter”; “His knowledge of the whole is the cause of the emanation of the whole from Him,” the consequence of His self-knowledge. He is not really a ‘He,’ a person, at all, but an impersonal, all-powerful, self-knowing and therefore all-knowing power.

Muslim theologians take a very different view. “Our knowledge” has two “divisions”: “knowledge of a thing that occurs as a result of the form of that thing”; and “knowledge which we invent, as with something whose form we did not perceive but which we formed in our souls, then brought into existence, in which case the existence of the form would be derived from knowledge, not knowledge from [the] existence [of the form].” God’s knowledge is “in accordance with the second division.” Given their “shortcomings,” our lack of supreme power, “our conception is not sufficient to bring about the existence of the form but requires, in addition to that, a renewed will that springs forth from an appetitive power” that “moves the muscles and nerves,” which then attempt to make things happen. It might be said that human beings lack perfect knowledge, perfect power, and indeed perfect will, inasmuch as we do not unfailingly will the good. That is why human beings need God to rule them. 

By contrast, the philosophers deploy such terms as knowledge, power, and will in describing God only as metaphors, since in their opinion God is not a person. As an impersonal being, their ‘God’ ‘knows’ only universals, not particulars. That is, there is no providence in the Biblical sense, only a set of general laws that prevail in the cosmos as it proceeds in its course. ‘God’ therefore does not intervene on behalf of any individual or set of individuals. But again, al-Ghazāli maintains, they have no proof that this is necessarily the case. “The realities of divine matters are not attained through rational reflection—indeed… it is not within human power to know them.” It is within human power to know His creation, including his revealed law. That is, we know what He has willed, and what His will is, insofar as He has chosen to reveal those things to us. We are entitled, even obligated, to reason about those things. When we attempt to reason about His essence, however, we quickly come to the limit of our reasoning. This doesn’t mean that His essence is unreasonable or arbitrary, nor that His will is unreasonable or arbitrary. 

It also does not mean that human beings cannot entertain reasonable suspicions about God’s essence. He must have an essence because “existence without quiddity and a real [nature] is unintelligible.” For example, “A rational person would indeed by astonished by a party that claims to delve deeply into [the world of] the intelligibles but whose reflection in the end leads to [the conclusion] that the Lord of Lords and the Cause of Causes has basically no knowledge of what occurs in the world.” If that were true, “What difference is there between Him and the dead, except for His knowledge of Himself? And what perfection is there in His knowledge of Himself, with His ignorance of what is other than Himself?” On the contrary, “all things other than Him” have “originated from His direction through His will”; as an agent in the true sense of the term, God’s will entails God’s knowledge, “for that which is willed must necessarily be known to the willer.” Because all things “are willed by Him and originated in His will,” God is all-knowing. This includes self-knowledge, which is necessary for Him to know what He wills, to know His own will.

According to the philosophers, “God enacted the world by way of necessity from His essence, by nature and compulsion, not by way of will and choice. Indeed, the whole [of the world] follows necessarily from His essence in the way that light follows necessarily from the sun.”; The ‘God’ of the philosophers “has no power to stop His acts,” which means, as he has emphasized that the ‘acts’ of ‘God’ do “not at all entail knowledge for the agent,” which isn’t really an agent in al-Ghazāli’s fuller definition of the term. But they have no sound proof of that claim which does not assume what they are trying to prove, namely, the existence of ‘God’ as they define ‘Him.’

Philosophers argue as follows: God is unchanging; particulars change; knowledge of change changes the knower; ergo, God cannot know particulars, only universals. God knows that solar eclipses occur, but knows nothing about any particular eclipse. Such knowledge is ‘beneath’ Him. Similarly, God “does not know the accidents of Zayd, Amr, and Khālid, but only man [in the] absolute [sense] by a universal knowledge.” By this doctrine “they uprooted religious laws in their entirety, since it entails that if Zayd, for example, obeys of disobeys God, God would not know what of his states has newly come about, because He does not know Zayd in his particularity.” God would be incapable of punishing violations of His own law. In response, Al-Ghazāli simply repeats that no one, even a philosopher, can know the limits of God’s knowledge, if in fact there are any.

Having established the limits of human knowledge of God, al-Ghazāli turns from metaphysics to the natural sciences. These are “rational sciences”; “the religious law does not require disputing them,” but they are within human powers to dispute, to investigate, to reason about. There are eight rational sciences pertaining to nature: physics, astronomy, knowledge pertaining to generation and corruption, meteorology, geology, botany, zoology, and psychology (which includes the science of both human and animal souls). “There is no necessity to oppose [the philosophers] in terms of the revealed law in any of these sciences,” except in four areas: their claim that the relation between observable causes and effects is necessary, making miracles impossible; their claim that “human souls are self-subsisting substances, not imprinted in the body,” and therefore death permanently severs the soul from the body; their claim that souls cannot be annihilated; their claim that “it is impossible to return these souls to bodies.”

Regarding the first question, philosophers do admit that miracles or disruptions of “the habitual courses of nature do occur” in “three instances”: in prophecy, when the imagination becomes so powerful and accurate that it surpasses ordinary sensual perceptions; in intuition, especially the perception of the several steps of a logical argument before the argument has been fully laid out; and in the “practical faculty,” which induces the body to obey the soul—perhaps as the result of ascetic exercises, for example. 

Al-Ghazāli begins with a critique of our understanding of causation, a critique that anticipates the critique David Hume advanced nearly seven centuries later. “The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary.” We suppose that fire is necessary to burn cotton, but that is only because we have seen this occur so many times that we assume a cause-and-effect relationship. But “a thing’s existence with a thing does not prove that it exists by [the thing].” “The continuous habit of their occurrence repeatedly, one time after another, fixes unshakably in our minds the belief in their occurrence according to past habit.” But God might have caused the cotton to burn. “He knew that He would not do it at certain times, despite its possibility, and… He creates for us the knowledge that He will not create it at that time.” But that is all.

Al-Ghazāli’s choice of occurrences that are naturally uncaused are unfortunate, as he supposes that some animals are spontaneously generated from the earth, and not by sexual reproduction. He goes so far as to claim that such matters are “beyond human power to know.” He retreats to firmer ground by defining the impossible as that which “is not within the power” of being enacted. He offers several examples of genuine impossibilities, things impossible even for God. “Combining blackness and whiteness” is impossible. For an individual to put himself in two places at once is impossible. To truly will something without knowing what one is willing is impossible. And it is impossible “to create knowledge in inanimate matter” inasmuch as “we understand by the inanimate that which does not apprehend.” That is, a self-contradictory action is impossible. But if we read in sacred Scripture that God moved the hand of a dead man, this is against nature but not impossible, since although the previous willer of movement is dead the current willer is alive, knowledgeable, and powerful.

Nor is the human soul necessarily self-subsistent, a substance that does not occupy space—as suggested in the Platonic dialogues, for example. Al-Ghazāli makes no objection to the philosophers’ description of the attributes of the human soul into “motive” and “apprehending” parts. The “motive” parts, the ones that ‘make things happen,’ include the desires, the power to activate nerves and muscles, and the “discerning” part, which can consider theoretical and prudential matters. The “apprehending” parts of the soul include the imaginative faculty, which perceives forms and the “estimative” faculty, which perceives meanings; so, for example, a baby goat perceives the form of a wolf along with its meaning, that is, the fact that it is dangerous to baby goats. The third “apprehending” part of the soul is the “cogitative” faculty, which combines the forms the imagination perceives to envision a flying horse or a flying machine. It is the “discerning” part of the soul which discovers whether a flying horse or a flying machine is possible in principle and, if possible, how one might come into existence. The practical dimension of the discerning part also can be made to rule the bodily faculties; when it does so we say that the soul has virtues.

Notice that none of this assumes that God treats human beings as if they are puppets whose every movement He directs, as per Ash’arite doctrine. Rather, we Muslims only “object to their claim of their knowing through rational demonstrations that the soul is a self-subsistent substance.” “We deny… their claim that reason alone indicates” that this is so, that a human being could know this without the guidance of revelation, “the religious law.” At best, their proofs indicate probabilities. They cannot demonstrate such claims. Nor can they demonstrate the immortality of the human soul. It is indeed immortal, but we know this with certitude only by revelation, not by reason. 

As to the disposition of the human soul after death, philosophers hold that souls endure “everlastingly” in a condition either of indescribable pleasure or pain, the life of pleasure having been reserved for “perfect, pure souls,” the life of pain for “imperfect, tarnished souls.” A soul attains perfection in this life through knowledge, purity through action. Knowledge leads to perfection because it perfects the rational faculty, whereas “preoccupation with the body makes [one] forget himself,” fail to cultivate the distinctively human characteristic of his soul. We know that “the intellectual pleasures than bodily pleasures” because “ferocious animals and pigs” seek only bodily pleasures, and because men are ashamed when caught in the commission of acts of adultery or cowardice. Action—works and worship—are needed for “the soul’s purification,” as the undisciplined body will cause the soul to become preoccupied with bodily desires, pleasures, and pains.

Muslims do not disagree with “most of these things.” The soul survives the separation from the body; certain pleasures are superior to others. “But we know this through the religious law,” not “by reason alone.” What Muslims deny is the philosophers’ contention that bodies are not resurrected along with souls. Life in God’s Paradise will offer “both kinds of happiness, the spiritual and bodily”; Hell will impose both kinds of misery. The one will be the more perfect pleasure, the other the more perfect pain. “What the religious law has conveyed [as true must be believed” if the soul would enjoy eternity in Paradise, avoid eternity in Hell. As usual, philosophers cannot disprove the possibility of the religious law’s teachings and commands by convicting it of self-contradiction.

In conclusion, al-Ghazāli calls the philosophers infidels on three main grounds. They claim that the world is eternal. They deny that God’s knowledge encompasses “temporal particulars”—i.e., they deny God’s providential rule. And they deny the resurrection of bodies on Judgment Day. He also calls philosophic doctrine “close to that of the Mu’tazila,” the main Islamic sect rivaling the Asharites.

With regard to the incoherence of philosophic doctrines—that they are not merely diverse but contradictory—al Ghazāli’s charge cannot be denied, any more than he would deny the countercharge that the doctrines of pious Muslims contradict on another. He shows the difficulty in formulating a logical proof of the existence either of God or of ‘God,’ leaning conspicuously on Koranic assertions to tip his argument in the direction of piety. Averroës replied in defense of Aristotelianism with his own polemic, The Incoherence of the Incoherence.