Transcription
[Music]
Renee Descartes' iconic quote, "I think, therefore I am," argued that if one was able to doubt their own existence, by necessity, they must firstly exist. His method, which used doubt as a central tool to prove the existence of a self, would shift the Western philosophical landscape and facilitate the inception of modern philosophy.
But what if Descartes was beaten to this mode of philosophy much earlier? In the 11th century, a Persian scholar from Tus roamed through the far-reaching lands of the Seljuk Empire, dragging himself through a distressing, yet profound, existential episode. Just as it is with Cartesian skepticism, he began his reflections by questioning all of his beliefs, destroying and reconstructing the claims of others, which at once acted as a source of dynamism or despair for many philosophical movements.
This version of doubt would function as the catalyst for an unprecedented medieval intellectual paradigm. Firmly attached to this revolution of thought would be the name of the most famous academic of his age, the intellectual proof of Islam, or the bane of the philosophers. He was born in 1058 CE into a poor but deeply pious family. From childhood, Al-Ghazali's inquisitiveness and unquenchable thirst for comprehension of reality stood unmatched, often being scolded by teachers for asking too many questions and engaging in debate.
Al-Ghazali's passion is recalled in a story where, as a student, he once encountered highway robbers. They searched his bags and robbed him of his possessions. He begged that they at least spare his study notes. The leader of the bandits laughed in his face and asked, "Young scholar, what good can all this knowledge be if it was so easily taken from you?" Later recounted as the best piece of advice the young Al-Ghazali received, from then on, he never failed to memorize all that he wrote, so it couldn't be taken from him.
Indeed, Al-Ghazali blossomed as he studied at the prestigious Nizamiya Institute in Nishapur, ultimately resulting in his teachers being outshone by him but also praising his breadth of knowledge as a sea one could drown in. Al-Ghazali's journey entailed teaching at the greatest institutes of Baghdad under the patronage of the grand Sultan himself. His works would catapult him into fame, as they predated modern thought experiments and theories like the trolley problem and ideas about infinity. Famously, he would stand as both a rational and spiritual icon against a charge brought against religious adherents.
Even today, before the age of 20, Al-Ghazali complained of people's passivity and gullibility in accepting the beliefs of elders with no research or critical thought. He witnessed that for many, religious, scientific, and philosophical beliefs were merely a product of environment and upbringing. Despite the rationalism in the works of Ibn Sina and Al-Farabi dominating during his working years, today it is common to think of religious people as blind followers. But those who were most guilty of conformist ideology, for Al-Ghazali, were actually the philosophers or the Neoplatonists of Aristotle.
Even Sina and Al-Farabi, after being praised by the Neoplatonists themselves for his grasp on philosophy, with the publication of his *Aims of the Philosophers*, Al-Ghazali's repudiation for credulity climaxed in the release of his popular text, *The Incoherence of the Philosophers*. In it, he specifically targets three of 18 metaphysical propositions naively taken from the Greeks, which for him were permeated in gross error, even by the Neoplatonists' own standards.
"Has the universe always existed?" explored earlier in our series, rejected the notion that along with God, the universe has existed forever. This idea, espoused by Ibn Sina, that God did not create the universe in time, as it would entail God changing his mind, fallaciously making something within God contingent, is criticized by Al-Ghazali as merely an unproven assumption. For Al-Ghazali, time and the universe were created by Allah through an eternal decree, which means that God essentially always existed without the universe and had the will to bring the universe into being independent of time.
One way the Neoplatonists responded is that this would make God's choice arbitrary. "Why exactly would God delay or bring forward the creation of the universe without an explanation?" But for Al-Ghazali, this is exactly what eternal will is. Consider a man with the free choice to eat one of two equally succulent and tasty dates. If we, as humans, could do this arbitrarily, Al-Ghazali asks, "What would stop God from making seemingly arbitrary decisions?" In fact, it is arbitrary will in the first place that allows God to be a completely free agent. Humans, on the other hand, make choices which seem free but are ultimately determined by external, sometimes uncontrollable, factors. Additionally, Al-Ghazali notices a double standard for the philosophers. Could one not ask why God decided to make the universe with the exact properties it has? Could he not make it colder or warmer, bigger or smaller? If arbitrariness is allowed there, it is the same with the creation of the universe in time.
To top it all, Al-Ghazali argues that the Neoplatonists commit themselves to fallacies of infinite regress, especially when presenting the universe as eternal, something they wish to avoid in the first place. This is an objection that remains popular even today.
Another proposition Al-Ghazali attacks in *The Incoherence* is the claim that God is only aware of universals, not of particular matters in that time. One way of doing metaphysics was to split reality into universals and particulars. For instance, there is the universal notion of "man," which entails the non-specific and ideal concept of man, and then there are particular instances of men that contain specific qualities like being short, tall, skinny, fat, and so on. For the Neoplatonists, God is unaware of particular people and times and places, such as you or me, but only knows of the universal, Platonic person, which is independent of space and time. In this way, the Neoplatonists protect God's eternal knowledge by stating that it is not subject to temporal or spatial change, like humans is.
Al-Ghazali might have simply stopped at the statement that such ideas contradict clear scriptural verses, as any old cleric might. Yet, he demonstrates the limitation in the philosophers' argument systematically by expressing that change in the nature of knowledge does not necessarily entail change in the essence of the knower, as the philosophers wrongly presume. God can have knowledge of particulars, and his knowledge could constantly change with his essence left unscathed. In the effort of trying to preserve God's majesty, the Neoplatonists strip him of the essential attributes of power and knowledge, reducing him to the status of the dead.
Finally, Al-Ghazali refutes the Neoplatonic claim that bodies will not resurrect on the day of judgment, an orthodox Muslim belief, and that only the human soul persists. To which he simply claims they make no conclusive argument for this. This was a matter of the truth of scripture, not one of science, since science cannot comment on matters beyond death.
In this way, Al-Ghazali maintained the healthy epistemic differences between religion and empirical sciences, whilst also demonstrating the inconsistencies of the philosophers. Logically possible matters of the unseen realm were to remain with literal scripture as the authority, while other knowledge could validly be scrutinized either empirically or rationally. The philosophers wrongfully overestimate their rational and empirical abilities, since the scripture clearly affirms the resurrection of the body and the fact that bodily resurrection is logically possible. The philosophers are left with no choice but to accept it at face value and have no reason to reduce scripture to simple allegory.
It is crucial to note that Al-Ghazali was not against the general field of philosophy itself. Rather, he considered the instrument of logic to be paramount to any method of thought and even worried that the impression of certainty derived from a field like math would deceive careless readers into assuming that all of philosophy was equally as reliable. Still, Al-Ghazali approved of the field of philosophical ethics from the Greeks, noticing the many overlaps between Islamic and ancient virtue ethics.
At some point, however, Al-Ghazali suffered a psychological, intellectual crisis. He abandoned his teaching posts, left money for his family, and became a simple mediator in the mosques of Jerusalem. This led to his eventual disillusionment with theoretical philosophy, causing him to adopt a certain skepticism, a refutation of *taqlid*. Even in our everyday experiences, here he predated the ideas of Descartes in asking how one could trust their senses when they so often deceive us. While intuitive logic might correct our sensory understanding, he asked whether there could be higher forms of learning, even greater than the systems of logic, in case logic suffered from the same fallibility as our senses. It was this line of thinking which informed his 40-volume magnum opus on ethics and practical reason, a desperate attempt to revive spirituality and pragmatically aid the ordinary man in finding contentment, that would be a topic for another video.
Some public intellectuals today preach that Al-Ghazali was the ultra-orthodox religious cleric that declared math as the work of the devil and burnt down the academic paradise at the center of the Golden Age of the Muslim world. Nothing could be further from the truth. Philosophy and the natural sciences prospered for centuries after Al-Ghazali's death, most prominently through his fierce critic, Ibn Rushd. However, he should be remembered as someone who harmonized rationality and faith, bringing order and guidance to humanity's search for the oasis of wisdom. He died in 1111 after retiring to his hometown of Tus, reminding us, in an age of mindless deference to news outlets and pseudo-intellectuals obsessed with fear-mongering and personal profit, to just stop and think for ourselves.
"Whoever determines truth from the people alone will remain lost in the plains of bewilderment. Rather, know the truth, and you will know its people."