EARLY ARABIAN PHILOSOPHY

Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A(Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D

Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India

Western Europe first became acquainted with the Aristotelian writings through translations from the Arabian texts, and through the systems and commentaries of Arabian philosophers who interpreted Aristotle in the spirit of Neoplatonism.

The followers of Mohammed, in their zeal to convert all unbelievers to the teachings of Islam, had set out to conquer the world (632) ; by the year 711 Syria, Egypt, Persia, Africa, and Spain were in their hands. In Syria the scholars of the new militant religion became acquainted with the Aristotelian philosophy, which, tinctured with Neoplatonism, had for centuries formed the chief object of study in the Eastern Empire, among Christian theologians and heretical philosophers alike, and had been carried to Syria by the exiled Nestorian sect. Arabic translations were made, first from the Syrian, later from the Greek texts, not only of Aristotle’s works, but of the works

of commentators like Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius, Porphyry, and Ammonius, as well as of Plato’s Republic, Timceus, and Laws (876). The Arabians also studied translations of Greek works on mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and other natural sciences, and made valuable contributions to some of these fields. Aristotle came to the Arabian scholars in the Neoplatonic dress in which his later commentators had clothed him; it was owing to this fact, as well as to the existence of pseudo- Aristotelian books of Neoplatonic origin that little difficulty was found in interpreting the Peripatetic philosophy in terms of the emanation theory.

With the help of this literature the scholars of Islam succeeded in placing their religion on a philosophical basis and creating a scholastic system. The pivotal problem was the relation of divine revelation to human knowledge and conduct ; the purpose of their science was to bring the teachings of the Koran into harmony with the deliverances of reason, or to rationalize the faith.

The questions which, led to controversy among them were the relation between divine predestination and human freedom, and the relation of the unity of God to his attributes.

The orthodox party accepted the teachings of the Koran without any attempt to justify them: there is one omnipotent, omniscient God, who has predetermined everything. Objections were urged against the traditional orthodox views by dissenters, or free-thinkers (called Mutazilites), who made reason the test of truth. These thinkers came to feel the need of a philosophy, and so drew upon various Greek theories in support of their views, without, however, at once constructing a system of their own.

In the tenth century there arose within the rationalistic school a reaction against philosophy and in favor of orthodoxy ; both the Aristotelian conception, with its passive contemplative God and its eternal universe, and the Neoplatonic emanation theory were rejected as out of harmony with the Islam notion of a personal Creator of the world. The Asharites, as these reactionaries were called (after their leader Ashari, 873-935), showed a great preference for atomism, with the essential prin- ciples of that theory left out. Atoms were conceived as continuous creations of God while the notions of causation and the uniformity of nature were discarded in order to save the absolute, arbitrary power of God and the possibility of miraculous interference.

The part of the rationalistic school which remained faithful to philosophy developed a number of systems, in which Aristotelian and Neoplatonic, sometimes Neopythagorean, elements are combined in varying proportions. Some of these emphasize the Neoplatonic aspects, bringing the practical, ethical, and religious teachings to the front; others accentuate the Aristotelian thoughts, insisting on the study of logic as a preparation, and construct their metaphysics on what seems to them a natural scientific basis.

A typical example of Arabian Neoplatonism is the Encyclopedia of Sciences, a series of fifty-one treatises, which was produced in the tenth century by members of a religious philosophical order called the Brothers of Sincerity, and which exercised great influence throughout the Mohammedan world. This popular society, which reminds us of the old Pythagorean order in Italy, had as its ideal the perfection of the human soul in the likeness of God by means of philosophical study. Its ethical-religious teaching was based on the Neoplatonic emanation-theory, according to which all things flow from, and return to, the absolute unity of God. Man, the copy of the universe, the microcosm, must free himself from the bondage of matter and return,purified, to the source from which he sprang. The Encyclopedia culminates in occultism; the final part is given over to serious discussions of astrology, magic, alchemy, and eschatology.

Ibn Miskawayh, Ahmad ibn Muhammad (c.940-1030),was eclectic in philosophy, basing his approach upon the rich variety of Greek philosophy that had been translated into Arabic. Although he applied that philosophy to specifically Islamic problems, he rarely used religion to modify philosophy, and so came to be known as very much an Islamic humanist. He represents the tendency in Islamic philosophy to fit Islam into a wider system of rational practices common to all humanity.

Ibn Miskawayh’s sees soul  as a self-subsisting entity or substance. The soul distinguishes us from animals, from other human beings and from things, and it uses the body and the parts of the body to attempt to come into contact with more spiritual realms of being. The soul cannot be an accident (or property of the body) because it has the power to distinguish between accidents and essential concepts and is not limited to awareness of accidental things by the senses.

In the book on the Refinement of Morals, Ibn Miskaweihi (+ 1030) presents an ethical system which is a curious mixture of Platonic, Aristotelian, and Neoplatonic ideas. In Sufism the mystical side of Neoplatonism is emphasized: the phenomenal world is an illusion and matter the lowest emanation of Deity by asceticism and ecstasy the soul penetrates the veil of illusion and is merged in God. Buddhistic influences are observable in that form of Sufism which teaches the absolute absorption of the individual soul in nothingness.

Ibn Miskawayh’s thought proved to be influential. His style, combining abstract thought with practical observations, is attractive and remained popular long after his death. Sometimes he merely presents aspects of ‘wisdom’ literature from previous cultures; sometimes he provides practical comments upon moral problems that are entirely unanalytical. At its best, however, his philosophy is highly analytical and maintains a high degree of coherence and consistency.

The other branch of the Arabian school, the chief representatives of which in the Orient are Alkindi (+870), Abu Yusuf Ya‘qub ibn Ishaq Al-Kindi (ca. 800–870 CE) was the first self-identified philosopher in the Arabic tradition.. Al-Kindi’s own thought was suffused with Neoplatonism, though his main authority in philosophical matters was Aristotle. Al-Kindi  argues that the world is not eternal and that God is a simple One. He also wrote numerous works on other philosophical topics, especially psychology  and cosmology. Al-Kindi’s work in mathematics and the sciences was also extensive, and he was known in both the later Arabic and the Latin traditions for his writings on astrology.

Philosophy in the Islamic world was itself a broader legacy of al-Kindi’s, and this in two respects. The translations become standard philosophical texts for centuries to come.

Alfarabi (870-950), a Sufi (a mystic) as well as a philosopher seems to agree with Alkindi on their compatibility. He is comfortable reinterpreting philosophical positions into Islam theological ideas; he argues that the ultimate end of every human being is union, through knowledge and love, with the separate agent intellect, which union the Prophet realizes supremely.

God’s existence: proven by the supposition that things are passively moved, therefore there is a first mover.In Alfarabi’s metaphysics, the entire universe depends upon God for its existence, and God acts on lesser orders of reality only through the medium of intervening orders. The metaphysical distinction between essence (what a thing is) and existence (that a thing is). Formulated as a means to distinguish God from creatures, and defend creation. Existence is a kind of reality given to an essence by the act of God (emanation).

Alfarabi argued for the existence of TEN Intelligences (created spiritual beings), that emanated from God, the One. As in classic neo-platonism, this emanation is necessary, and the product of thought. Alfarabi seems to have determined the number of the Intelligences by accepting Ptolemy’s astronomy.

Ibn Sina (Avicenna)( AH 370/AD 9800)  is one of the foremost philosophers in the Medieval Hellenistic Islamic tradition His philosophical theory is a comprehensive, detailed and rationalistic account of the nature of God and Being, in which he finds a systematic place for the corporeal world, spirit, insight, and the varieties of logical thought including dialectic, rhetoric and poetry.

Ibn Sina’s philosophy isbased on his concept of reality and reasoning. Reason, in his scheme, can allow progress through various levels of understanding and can finally lead to God, the ultimate truth. He stresses the importance of gaining knowledge, and develops a theory of knowledge based on four faculties: sense perception, retention, imagination and estimation. Imagination has the principal role in intellection, as it can compare and construct images which give it access to universals. Again the ultimate object of knowledge is God, the pure intellect.

In metaphysics, Ibn Sina makes a distinction between essence and existence; essence considers only the nature of things, and should be considered apart from their mental and physical realization. This distinction applies to all things except God, whom Ibn Sina identifies as the first cause and therefore both essence and existence. He also argued that the soul is incorporeal and cannot be destroyed. The soul, in his view, is an agent with choice in this world between good and evil, which in turn leads to reward or punishment.

All the above referred philosophers insist on the importance of logic as an introduction to the study of philosophy, and emphasize the necessity of grounding meta-physics on a study of nature. But their conception of natural science is extremely crude, being shot through with fantastic notions, religious superstitions, and occult theories of all kinds The interpretation of dreams, theurgist, alchemy, astrology, and natural magic are regarded by these men of science as legitimate parts of natural science; they believe in astral spirits, which they identify with the angels of the Koran and the Bible, and nearly all of them are mystics. The only subjects not infected with superstition are logic and mathematics. That these thinkers, for the most part, failed to grasp the real teachings of Aristotle and interpreted them as Neoplatonic, is not remarkable; it was no easy task to discover the genuine Aristotle under the mass of Neoplatonic commentaries and interpretations under which he had lain buried for centuries.

In their logical studies, the Arabian philosophers generally exhibit good judgment and dialectical skill. They too are interested in the question which formed so important a part of Christian scholasticism, the question of universals. According to Alfarabi, universals have no existence apart from particulars, they are in things; but even individual forms have a place in the mind. Avicenna, likewise, holds that they do not exist as separate entities prior to things, except in the mind of God; in our own minds they exist after things, as abstractions from particulars ; and they exist also in things, but not unmixed with their accidents.

In their metaphysics, Alfarabi and Avicenna make concessions to the demands of their religion. They try to weaken the Aristotelian notion of an eternal universe by making a distinction between necessary and potential existence. The eternal original being, which with Aristotle they conceive as intelligence (the primary and only direct product of God), is necessary and uncaused; everything else depends for its existence on this cause and is conditioned, that is, is potential in God. The evolution of a world from its ground is a process of emanation. For Alfarabi, matter is a phase of this process ; for Avicenna, matter is eternal and uncreated. But according to both, creation means the actualization or realization of the potential in matter ; form is somehow given to matter by God; God seems to place forms, as potencies, in matter and then to realize them, or bring them out, by means of his active intellect. This is, according to Alfarabi, a process in time; with Avicenna, the emanation of the lower from the higher is an eternal process, on the ground that the effect must be simultaneous with the cause, which is eternal; hence, the universe is eternal.

One of the numerous emanations from God is active or creative thought, the spirit of the lunar sphere, which gives every- thing the form it has been prepared to receive. And it is through this universal active intellect that the potential intellect is realized, or knowledge brought out in man. According to Alfarabi, the human intellect, thus actualized, becomes a simple immortal substance. The goal of philosophy is to know God and to be like God, so far as this is possible. It can be reached, according to Avicenna, by instruction as well as by divine illumination; Alfarabi, however, regards a mystical union of the soul with God as “an old wives’ tale.”

Arabian philosophy comes to an end in the Orient at the turning point of the eleventh century. Algazel (+1111) attacks the teachings of the philosophers in the interests of the popular religion, in his book, Destruction of the Philosophers, and denies  the competence of philosophy to reach truth. Al-Ghazali also played a very major role in integrating Sufism with Shariah. He was also the first to present a formal description of Sufism in his works. His works also strengthened the status of Sunni Islam against other schools. l-Ghazali has been referred to by some historians as the single most influential Muslim after the Islamic prophe tMuhammad. Within Islamic civilization he is considered to be a Mujaddid or renewer of the faith, who, according to tradition, appears once every century to restore the faith of the community. His works were so highly acclaimed by his contemporaries that al-Ghazali was awarded the honorific title “Proof of Islam” (Hujjat al-Islam) Others have cited his opposition to certain strands of Islamic philosophy as a detriment to Islamic scientific progress. Besides his work that successfully changed the course of Islamic philosophy—the early Islamic Neoplatonism that developed on the grounds of Hellenistic philosophy, for example, was so successfully criticised by al-Ghazali that it never recovered—he also brought the orthodox Islam of his time in close contact with Sufism.

He misses in the systems the doctrines especially emphasized by Islam orthodoxy: the theory of creation, the doctrine of personal immortality, and the belief in the absolute prescience and providence of God, the view that God knows and foresees all the minute occurrences of life and can interfere with them at any time. The appearance of Algazel’s work not only silenced the philosophers, but led to the burning of their books by the public authorities.

Arabian philosophy, however, continued its existence and flourished in the Moorish caliphate of Spain, particularly at Cordova, the seat of a celebrated school at which School Mohammedans, Jews, and Christians studied with- out interference. The most important among the Arabian thinkers in the West are: Avempace (+1138), Abubacer (+1185), and Averroes (Ibn Roshd, 1126-1198). These men were physicians as well as philosophers. In the greatest of them, Averroes, whose ideas influenced Christian scholars, Arabian thought reaches its culmination.

Avempace denied individual immortality, regarding as immortal only the universal intellect which manifests itself in particular human minds. He also opposed mysticism; the ideal is, indeed, to rise beyond the lower stages of soul-life to complete self-consciousness, in which thought becomes identical with its object, but this goal is reached not by ecstasy, but through a gradual and natural development of our mental functions. With this Abubacer largely agrees in his philosophical romance, in which he describes the gradual evolution of the natural capacities of a human being, living alone on a desert island, and his final union with God by means of asceticism and ecstasy.

The 13th Century Arab philosopher Averroës (also known as Ibn Rushd) has been described as the founding father of secular thought in Western Europe. He lived in southern Spain and Morocco and based his work on interpretations of Aristotle and thereconciliation of Aristotelianism with the Islamic faith. Devoted to the teachings of Aristotle, he often disagreed explicitly with his Islamic predecessors, particularly with the Ash’arite al-Ghazali and Avicenna. Averroes had a high opinion of Aristotle, regarding his intellect as the perfection of the human mind. His chief ambition was to reproduce the true Aristotle, an ambition, however, which he can hardly be said to have realized. The task was impossible for him, partly owing to the Neoplatonic preconceptions with which he approached the interpretation of the great Greek’s teachings, partly because of the desire, characteristic of nearly every medieval philosopher, to accommodate his theories to the demands of his religion. At any rate, Averroes accepts the fundamental dogmas of the corrupted Aristotelianism of Islam: the emanation-theory and the doctrine of the universal intellect.

Forms, he teaches, are implicit in matter; not superadded, as Alfarabi and Avicenna had held, but unfolded, or evolved, or realized, by the action of higher forms, of which the highest is the divine intellect. Creation, in the ordinary sense, is therefore rejected. There is  universal active mind, which influences particular individuals and brings them to knowledge. This is explained by Averroes in the following manner: Individual souls are naturally predisposed to such influence; by the action of the universal active mind the predisposed soul becomes a potential mind and so has implicit intelligence. The union of the universal mind with a soul capable of receiving it, yields an individualized soul: just as the sunlight is individualized or particularized by striking a body capable of receiving light, so a soul, capable of receiving intelligence, is individualized by the entrance into it of the universal spirit. By further action of the universal mind on this individualized soul, the knowledge implicit in the latter is made explicit or realized ; it rises to the highest self-consciousness, and in this form becomes one with the universal spirit or absorbed in it (mysticism) ; it becomes a phase or element in the mind which is common to all human beings. In this sense, and in this sense only, is the individual soul immortal, not in the sense of personal immortality; the universal spirit alone is immortal. The universal mind itself Averroes conceives as one of the many emanations of God ; it is an emanation of the spirit or mover of the sub lunar sphere.

With all of the Arabian philosophers of his school, Averroes holds that the common man cannot grasp the whole truth, that in religion it is given to him in symbols which the philosopher interprets allegorically, but which the common man takes literally. Hence, a thing may be true in philosophy that is not true in theology, and vice versa. Thus, Averroes affirms that he necessarily infers the unity of intelligence by reason, but firmly holds to the opposite view by faith. Averroes was accused in his old age of teaching doctrines harmful to Mohammedanism and banished from the court of the Califa of Cordova, whose physician he was.

It is not hard to understand why the Christian Church received with distrust the philosophical gifts of the Arabians. She had pantheistic heresies of her own to contend with, and had no desire to open the doors to the heresies of the infidels.

Referances:

FRANK THILLY – HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY-HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY – NEW YORK , 1914,

 

 

 

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