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ABSTRACT
Al-Ghazālī’s engagement with scepticism in the Deliverance from Error has received much attention in recent literature, often in the context of comparing him with Descartes. However, there is one curious text that has gone largely unnoticed by commentators. In his account of how he overcame scepticism vis-à-vis a divine light cast unto his heart, al-Ghazālī makes a cryptic claim that suggests that primary truths are inherent to the mind, and that said cognitive status of primary truths is related to his overcoming of scepticism. Although this one text does not straightforwardly prove that al-Ghazālī is a nativist, I argue that there are other texts that plausibly reveal his nativism. As such, I argue that al-Ghazālī can be read as a nativist, and I reconstruct a way in which his nativism helps explain how he overcomes scepticism. In doing so, I defend the (standard) strong divine interventionist reading of al-Ghazālī’s response to scepticism, against Hadisi’s recent weak divine interventionist reading.
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Acknowledgements
For excellent feedback on this paper I would like to thank Blake Dutton, an audience at Loyola University Chicago, and two anonymous referees of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy.
Notes
1 I employ the following abbreviations for editions of primary texts: ‘DE’: Deliverance from Error; ‘MD’: al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl [Ayyad and Saliba Edition]; ‘FT’: Fayṣal al-Tafriqa; ‘MF’: al-Maqāsīd al-Falāsifa; ‘NL’: Niche of Lights; The Revival of the Religious Sciences is cited by book title and page.
2 See, for example, Hadisi, “Ghazālī’s Transformative Answer”; Kukkonen, “Al-Ghazālī’s Skepticism Revisited”; Menn, “Tradition of Intellectual Autobiography”. For studies of the relationship between al-Ghazālī and Descartes, see, for example, Albertini, “Crisis and Certainty”; Azadpur, “Unveiling the Hidden”; Götz, “The Quest for Certainty”; Lewes, The Biographical History; Moad, “Comparing Phases of Skepticism”; Naumkin, “Some Problems”; Parvizian, “Al-Ghazālī and Descartes”; Ruddle-Miyamoto, “Regarding Doubt and Certainty”; Sharif, A History; Van Ess, “Quelques Remarques”; and Zamir, “Descartes and al-Ghazālī”.
3 Commentators often claim that al-Ghazālī's resolution of scepticism restores trust in both the senses and the intellect. However, as we will see, he never makes this claim. He only claims that the divine light helped restore primary truths.
4 Famously, Descartes’ innate ideas – and his clear and distinct perceptions of them – are central to his defeat of scepticism. For an account of Descartes’ nativism, see Nelson, “Cartesian Innateness”.
5 For an excellent overview of nativism see Samet, “The Historical Controversies”. In what follows, I will work with a non-controversial sufficient condition for nativism (see section 3), bracketing the controversial details for the purposes of this paper.
6 While I will assume that on al-Ghazālī's view it is through the intellect that primary truths are accessed, this is a complicated claim given al-Ghazālī's views of the cognitive architecture of the heart, and the various faculties within it.
7 Like al-Ghazālī, Avicenna’s standard examples of primary truths include: ‘The whole is greater than the part’; ‘All things that are equal to one thing, are equal to each other’; ‘There is no middle between the negative and the affirmative’, etc. For a detailed account of how Avicenna views primary truths as being ultimately abstracted from experience see Gutas, “The Empiricism of Avicenna”. Black also denies that Avicenna ascribes to innate ideas, (“Certitude, Justification”, 126). For a more recent treatment of Avicenna on primary truths see Mousavian and Ardeshir, “Avicenna on the Primary”.
8 Hadisi also claims that primary truths are innate for al-Ghazālī, but as we will see, the status of their innateness does not play a role in his reading (Hadisi, “Ghazālī’s Transformative Answer”, 121).
9 For a detailed account of al-Ghazālī’s conception of fiṭra see Griffel, “Al-Ghazālī’s Use”.
10 I do not think that al-Ghazālī's divine intervention commits him to the claim that knowledge depends on faith or revelation. His view of the divine light is more philosophical and subtle than that. This may be a verbal dispute, but I nonetheless want to avoid the terminology of ‘fideism’.
11 Plausibly, there might be an infallibility criterion as well, that al-Ghazālī is conflating with the absolute certainty criterion. That is, al-Ghazālī might also be claiming that knowledge must be infallible, in the sense that there it is not possible for the subject to be in error. I will bracket this issue, and focus on the absolute certainty criterion instead.
12 What Hadisi calls ‘actual-certainty’ could be aptly described as a form of psychological certainty, and thus it cannot satisfy the conditions for Ghazalian Knowledge.
13 It is important to note that (unlike Descartes), al-Ghazālī does not regard himself as generating hyperbolic doubt or global scepticism, particularly because he never questions the existence of God in these sceptical arguments. This implies that the experience of the divine light is not supposed to reveal or prove that God exists to al-Ghazālī, rather its function lies elsewhere (see Section 4).
14 Notice that what al-Ghazālī earlier called al-awwaliyyāt (primary truths) he now calls ḍarūriyyāt (necessary truths or self-evident truths). Later, the translation of ḍarūriyyāt in the Revival will be rendered as ‘axiomatic knowledge’. Although primary truths and necessary truths would be the best translations for these terms, respectively, for our purposes we will treat them synonymously (in part because al-Ghazālī employs the same examples to illustrate both concepts).
15 Notice that al-Ghazālī claims that the divine light only helped restore his trust in the intellect and its primary truths. He does not make any claims about restoring an unqualified trust in the senses (see also DE: 59–60).
16 It is important to note that the phrase ‘in the mind’ was, understandably, added in the McCarthy translation, but is not present in the Arabic. The original Arabic only claims that primary truths are present (ḥāḍira), but the implication is that their presence is located in the mind. Watt offers the following translation: “For first principles are not sought, since they are present and to hand” (The Faith and Practice, 26). Again, the Arabic does not claim that primary truths are ‘to hand’; however, it seems that Watt is grasping for the sense in which primary truths are readily available. The best reading is that they are present or ready at hand in the mind.
17 Related to the issue of Nativism is one aspect of the epistemic status of primary truths, namely, that they are necessary truths (Principles of the Creed, 60; MF: 12). It is important to make the distinction between a content C being a necessary truth and whether C is innate to the mind. We are interested in the latter question regarding the cognitive status of the primary truths.
18 The spiritual heart or what we would call the ‘mind’ constitutes the essence of a person. It is where perception, experience, and knowledge obtains, and it is the aspect of the person that is subject to moral responsibility. Expanding on the nature of the heart and its epistemic capacities, al-Ghazālī writes:
Know that the seat of knowledge is the heart, by which I mean the subtle tenuous substance that rules all the parts of the body and is obeyed and served by all its members. In its relationship to the real nature of intelligibles, it is like a mirror in its relationship to the forms of changing appearances. For even as that which changes has a form, and the image of that form is reflected in the mirror and represented therein, so also every intelligible has a specific nature, and this specific nature has a form that is reflected and made manifest in the mirror of the heart. Even as the mirror is one thing, the forms of individuals another, and the representation of their image in the mirror another, being thus three things in all, so here, too, there are three things: the heart, the specific natures of things, and the representations and presence of these in the heart. The ‘intellect’ is an expression for the heart in which there exists the image of the specific nature of things. The ‘intelligible’ is an expression for the specific nature of things. ‘Intelligence’ is an expression for the representation of the image in the mirror.
19 For a more detailed account of how primary truths are abstracted from sensory experience on Avicenna's account, see Gutas, “The Empiricism of Avicenna”; Taylor, “Avicenna and the Issue”; and Black, “Estimation (wahm) in Avicenna”.
20 For a discussion of al-Ghazālī's varying and often inconsistent uses of tamyīz and ‘aql see Treiger, Inspired Knowledge, 23–5.
21 In another context Kukkonen ascribes a Platonic form of nativism to al-Ghazālī:
[I]n good Platonic fashion, Ghazālī believes that everything in the sensible world – everything that can be cognized and apprehended, anyway – is merely a reflection or an after-image of an intelligible archetype. And he believes that knowledge is ultimately about recollection: if knowledge required reaching up to the heavens or into the bowels of the earth, nobody could ever retrieve it, which is why our only hope lies in the truth being in our hearts all the time.
We mean that the heart is constantly in a state of change and being influenced by these secondary causes. The most important of these influences that come into the heart are involuntary suggestions [khawāṭir]. By involuntary suggestions I mean the ideas [afkār] and recollections [adkhār] that take place therein. By these I mean its perceptions of knowledge, either by way of renewal or recollection.
22 The claim that some types of knowledge are (in some sense) innately present in the mind is picked up by figures in post-Classical Islamic philosophy. For example, Griffel writes that “[Fakhr al-Dīn] al-Rāzī defends Meno’s paradox as it applies to conceptualizations and argues that concepts are not acquired. Rather, there is a ‘sheer presence’ (ḥuḍūr mujarrad) of concepts in the mind” (The Formation, 341). For a discussion of a similar view in the work of Yaḥyā al-Suhrawardī, see Griffel, The Formation, 355–8 and Eichner, “‘Knowledge by Presence’”.
23 For an account of al-Ghazālī's view on the conditions of (religious) faith see FT: 121–4; Principles of the Creed, 91–116; and Faith in Divine Unity, 9–16.
24 A lower epistemic state than faith (as used in this context) for al-Ghazālī would be blind imitation (taqlīd) of the beliefs of others.
25 According to Kukkonen (“Meditating on the Meditations”, 122–3), God’s mercy only gives one the resolve or commitment to engage such transformative practices, it does not guarantee the immediate experience of dhawq itself.
26 Again, the point of contrast is that kashf in this context is a mystical experience that does not require spiritual practices. If one wants to call this a type of dhawq, given al-Ghazālī's varying uses of this term, that is fine as long as this difference is stressed.
27 Now, what exactly is the divine light? Here is a suggestion. In the Niche of Lights al-Ghazālī countenances “rational lights” that exist in a hierarchy that flow from the light of God:
The world in its entirety is filled with both manifest, visual lights and nonmanifest, rational lights … The low lights flow forth from one another just as light flows forth from a lamp … Some of the high things kindle each other, and their hierarchy is a hierarchy of stations. Then all of them climb to the Light of lights, their Origin, their First Source. This is God alone, who has no partner. All other lights are borrowed.