Al-Ghazali: Muslim Destroyer of Philosophy
by Paul Austin Murphy (October 2013)
Introduction
Avicenna and Averroes (still well-known in the West) were largely forgotten in the Muslim world but their influence in Europe was very strong. Ghazali, on the other hand, was more or less ignored in Europe yet his philosophy gained a supreme position in the Muslim world and it kept that position all the way to the 20th century and beyond. In other words, two important sustainers of philosophy were forgotten in the Muslim world, whereas the destroyer of philosophy (in his own words) gained an overwhelming hegemony.
Consequently it is best not to regard Ghazali as simply another Muslim Avicenna or Averroes. His attitude to philosophy was very illiberal. In fact his position on philosophy was so extreme that he even had a (religious) problem with the Greek syllogism. The ironic thing, however, is that he used very good philosophical and logical arguments to criticise both the syllogism and philosophy as a whole. (In this he was a kind of 11th century logical positivist or even a Wittgensteinian.)
X or Philosopher YX or Philosophical School Y. He was against ‘the philosophers’ – that is, all philosophers. Ghazali himself wrote:
derived from the philosophers.
Ghazali set out to place severe limits on philosophy. In fact those limits were so severe that philosophy in the Muslim world hardly survived his remonstrations.
Incoherence of the Philosophers, he tells us what is in and what is out, philosophically speaking. What is in, or what is acceptable, is logic and mathematics. Why? Because, as Ghazali himself said, they have no ‘bearing on religion’. It followed from this that when logic and mathematics are properly used, they shouldn’t be questioned. In fact any Muslim who does criticise logic and mathematics, according to Ghazali, is ‘an ignorant friend, who is worse than a learned foe’.
But apart from logic and mathematics, all the other parts of philosophy were highly suspect.
When it comes to ethics, or moral philosophy, Ghazali believed that everything should be derived from the teachings of the prophets and the Islamic masters. These teachings should not be questioned. This effectively meant that there should be no ethics or moral philosophy.
What about physics (science) and metaphysics?
must, keep away from the natural sciences and even from independent thought itself. Instead they should rely exclusively on the words of Muhammad, the Koran, and hadith as well as on the interpretations and commentaries of the scholars and masters.
takfir (‘unbelievers’) by Ghazali. Ghazali himself put the situation this way:
Causal Necessity
positivistic or empiricist demolishing was done for Allah and Islam.
Ghazali sounds even more Humean when he argued that experience (mushahadah) shows only that the effect occurs at the same time as the cause. You do not experience any necessity and neither can you reason to any form of necessity. Indeed necessity can never be experienced because it is a logical or metaphysical doctrine.
C.S. Peirce later said that Cartesian doubt, as expressed in the well-known Cogito, was sophistical doubt and that it too was not ‘believed in the heart’. In Peirce’s case, it was unreal doubt which was also philosophically and scientifically unproductive or not pragmatic.)
This is the interesting bit. Ghazali rejected necessary causation to prove the power of Allah. Averroes embraced necessary causation in order to prove exactly the same thing.
nomic, nature of the world made science possible; as so many thinkers have explained. Denying necessary causation, or the nomic nature of the natural world, is to deny order and symmetry and therefore the very things which make science itself impossible. Indeed it can be argued that Ghazali’s rejection of all this did make science impossible in the Muslim world. If Muslims had followed the words of Averroes (whom they largely forgot about), rather than Ghazali, they would have realised that the ordered and causal nature of the world is fully discoverable by the human mind precisely because it is ordered and causal. Through discovering the (necessary) causal nature of the world, Averroes believed that we could discover many truths about the Maker of all that causal regularity and necessity. We could discover the First Cause – God.
The Greek Syllogism
Greek syllogism are very strong when one bears in mind when they were advanced. They were part logical/philosophical and part psychological.
‘psychologism’. How can logic rely on things being either ‘self-evident’ or ‘intuitive’? Or, as Ghazali put it, those persons who are considering the premises of syllogisms will have different aptitudes and varying degree of cognitive skill. Consequently any positions persons take on the premises – and the conclusions derived from them – will be suspect or questionable. If the self-evident nature of the premises can’t be guaranteed, then the conclusions of the syllogisms will be even more suspect.
man, mortals – and even apple and the syllogism itself – are far removed from what philosophers, and Ghazali, call ‘particulars’ or ‘individuals’. Socrates is a particular man and Fritz the cat is a particular mortal thing. Ghazali argued that we know about Socrates and Fritz the cat, but we know nothing about man in the abstract or the class of mortals. Or at least such universal are some large distance from everyday life and experience. In fact Ghazali was not only a proto-logical positivist in certain respects, he was also a nominalist – living roughly 200 years before the great Western nominalist, William of Ockham (1285-1347). (Ockham of ‘Ockham’s razor’ fame. In this case, Ghazali was making using Ockham’s razor to get rid of universals.)
So it is ironic that all this very good and advanced philosophising was carried in order to destroy philosophy. Even partly to destroy logic itself. All this was simply to show that, in the end, only Islam, or the Koran and hadith, can provide certain knowledge and certain truth. Thus it was important, to Ghazali, to take philosophy, and even logic, down a peg or two. In this endeavor he was very successful, at least philosophically and logically (whether or not many Muslims, or even most educated Muslims, relied on his reasoning is another matter).
Ghazali singled out Avicenna (Ibn Sina, 980-1037) for special attack.
universal, not particular. (At that time universals were usually seen in terms of species and genera, as they still often are.) To Ghazali, this was a clear limitation on Allah’s omniscience as well as perhaps on his omnipotence. After all, doesn’t Allah know everything? Or, as Ghazali put it, in the Koran (34:3) it says that ‘not a single atom’s weight in the heavens or on earth is hidden from Him’. It follows, then, that Allah must have knowledge of particulars too. How could it be otherwise? (Of course all this hinges or how Ghazali – and other philosophers at the time – actually saw universals and particulars in philosophical terms.)
Averroes (Ibn Rushd, c1126-98), some 50 years later, attempted to rebut all these positions of Ghazali.
The Incoherence of the Incoherence. In that book Averroes said that Ghazali made the mistake of conflating human knowledge with Allah’s knowledge. (Something you wouldn’t expect Ghazali to do.) The basic point, according to Averroes, is that humans distinguish between universals and particulars but Allah does not. This is shown with a strange argument.
The Eternity of the World
The Resurrection of the Body
Conclusion
Interestingly enough, if there had been a prior Ghazali (as it were), then the actual Ghazali would neither have had any philosophy to destroy nor would he have had the philosophical skills with which to destroy it. Ghazali and his memory effectively killed philosophy in the Islamic world.
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2. Ibid. Preface 4, pg. 11.
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