Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Receptive to Reality: Al‐Ghazālī on the Structure of the Soul

2012; Wiley; Volume: 102; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/j.1478-1913.2012.01412.x

1478-1913

Taneli Kukkonen,

Islamic Studies and History

Apart from his views on causality, few things in the study of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (1056–1111) have incited as much controversy as his understanding of the human soul. The spectrum of available interpretations runs the gamut from a materialist and kalāmī take on Ghazālī's psychology, through an understanding that allows for a philosophical influence but seeks to limit its impact, all the way to a fully Avicennian reading. Any proposed solution is instantaneously rendered contentious by the way Ghazālī's vocabulary, focus, and style of presentation vary from treatise to treatise: in some instances Ghazālī's formulations inch very close to falsafī territory, while in others he gives the impression of wishing to remain within the ambit of Sufi or kalāmī analyses and the attendant terminology. This has led to charges of incoherence from some quarters, while others have suspected Ghazālī of disingenuity and dissimulation–it is hard to say which camp is more unkind. A third school of thought, meanwhile, posits that any perceived discrepancies in either thought or expression must lead to the rejection of at least some of the offending texts as spurious.1 The most comprehensive review of the materials so far has been made by Timothy Gianotti, who in his doctoral dissertation and subsequent monograph collates many of those pertinent texts that without a question come from Ghazālī's own hand.2 Steering clear of the many psychological works whose authorship is contested has the indisputable advantage of allowing one to sidestep the often circular arguments that accompany the reception of a complex and problematic body of texts. As Gianotti's study makes plain, however, even sticking to the safe core of Ghazālī's texts–Gianotti barely steps outside the ambit of the Incoherence of the Philosophers and the Revival of the Religious Sciences–does not wholly shield one from serious puzzles and problems. Somewhat short on analysis, Gianotti's preferred approach is to invoke the trope of esoteric/exoteric learning. In Gianotti's view, Ghazālī purposely leaves things unsaid for fear of their unorthodox implications, or because not everybody is adequately equipped to handle such unconventional and potentially unsettling knowledge. Any reader of Ghazālī will have to make peace with Ghazālī's shifting terminology and his occasional habit of speaking in hints and allusions. But I tend to think that the esoteric/exoteric distinction raises more problems than it solves, and accordingly shall pursue a different line of investigation in this article. By pointing out some features in Ghazālī's mature ontology that guide his psychological views, I hope to cut through some of the thicket and to pinpoint some facets of his doctrine that are to him indispensable. The most pertinent of these is his theory of worlds within worlds: the domains of mulk and malakūt, the visible kingdom and the invisible dominion, hold a central place in explaining the way the world takes shape, just as they determine the placement of humankind's origin and destination (mabda' wa-ma'ād) within this grand design. Whatever Ghazālī's psychological convictions, these have to find their place within this larger cosmological framework and, as it turns out, this makes of his psychology a relatively straightforward business after all. What this approach additionally does is point to some of the real problems Ghazālī has with the Avicennian psychology he so obviously appropriates. These problems, I submit, have less to do with the ontology of the rational soul than they have with questions of ontology as such. It is Ghazālī's view of the reality of things, of their true natures (ḥaqā'iq al-ashyā'), that renders the Avicennian picture ultimately unsatisfactory to him. As regards Ghazālī's attitude towards the philosophical tradition, I am inclined to agree with Gianotti, Griffel, and others that the Incoherence of the Philosophers only has limited utility when it comes to establishing Ghazālī's own views. The primary purpose of the Incoherence is to undermine the reader's confidence in the rigour of the Muslim Peripatetics' reasoning and to show their inability to demonstrate the elevated claims made in their metaphysics and natural philosophy. In the case of Aristotelian psychology as developed by Ibn Sīnā, which forms the topic of the 18th through the 20th discussions of the Incoherence, what is denied is the philosophers' ability to demonstrate a few choice doctrines relating to the ontology of the soul: that the human soul is a spiritual and self-subsistent substance (jawhar rūḥānī qā'im bi-nafsi-hi), that it is neither a body nor impressed upon one, that it is necessarily eternal (sarmadī) and its passing away inconceivable, and that its pleasures and torments in the afterlife are only of the spiritual and not of the bodily kind. That none of these doctrines is demonstrable solely through the use of reason leaves entirely untouched the issue of whether they might be true nonetheless or established through some other means.3 In the Deliverer from Error Ghazālī says that the human heart, which is the true nature of his spirit (ḥaqīqat rūḥi-hi) and the locus of any understanding of God (maḥall ma'rifat Allāh) a human being may have, is something other than the flesh and blood which we share with the beasts and the dead.4 Frank Griffel sees in this a clear indication that Ghazālī subscribes to the philosophical view of the rational soul as an immaterial, self-subsistent substance.5 Though I am ultimately sympathetic to Griffel's point of view, as will become clear from the following essay, I really do not see Ghazālī committing to that much on the basis of this passage alone. Nor does the formulation given in the Revival of the Religious Sciences according to which "the body is a vessel for the soul, while the soul is the locus for knowledge" manage to say anything that would not be broadly acceptable either to a kalām theologian, a Muslim Peripatetic, or a Sufi reader.6 Ghazālī's further contention that knowledge is the aim of every human being (maqṣūd al-insān) and the distinguishing mark (khāṣṣiyya) of his creation is more substantive, but hard to parse in the immediate context; we shall have reason to return to it later. Still, when it comes to establishing on the negative side that Ghazālī in fact holds no truck with any materialist reading of the soul, the Deliverer passage does square with what is said elsewhere in the Revival. This is helpful, insofar as it obviates the need to turn to any of the contested psychological works and their battery of familiar Avicennian arguments. Ghazālī does not engage directly with kalām authors; instead he heaps scorn upon the medical profession's (aṭibbā') habit of equating the spirit with the subtle body that is responsible for coordinating our bodily movements (Iḥyā, 4:100.9, 4:100.25). According to Ghazālī, the spirit in this sense of the word is a paltry thing, barely worthy of attention. If the spirit is one of the Lord's charges, as the Qur'ān indicates (Q. 17:85), then the person who approaches God through acquaintance with what the physicians call spirit is akin to one who claims to have knowledge of some king through acquaintance with the ball that the king's polo-players shunt around a playing field (Iḥyā', 4:101.7–15). It is not that this kind of principle could or would not also be operative in the physical workings of the human being and indeed also the animal (cf. Iḥyā', 3:4.20–26); Ghazālī's protest is only that investigating such a corporeal instrument brings us nowhere when it comes to establishing the reality of the centre from which issue its motions and its many tasks. How, then, to go about such an investigation? Here is a starting point, as good as any: Ghazālī's occasional allusions to a psychological framework in his account of his own intellectual journey in The Deliverer from Error. Ghazālī's fullest remarks come from a chapter dedicated to establishing the possibility of prophecy. Here, in order to prove that the inability of some to countenance prophetic visions does not render the latter inconceivable in the logical sense of the word, Ghazālī develops an extended analogy between the prophetic or holy power (al-quwwat al-qudsiyya) and the other faculties of the soul. The possession of an appropriate passive capacity, or receptivity, is a prerequisite for every type of apprehension, and because of this we should not be surprised to see prophecy denied by those to whom this eye, metaphorically speaking, has not been opened, in the same way that the blind are unable to comprehend the nature of visual information and are liable to deny that it describes anything real. The same line of argument is repeated with variations across Ghazālī's works:7 what is eye-catching about the Deliverer's chapter on prophecy is the way it expands into a general point about the relation between ontology and psychology. The human substance in its original, innate nature (jawhar al-insān fī aṣl al-fiṭra) is created bare and innocent, with no information of God's worlds. These worlds are many and nobody but God can number them, as He says: "No-one knows the Hosts of your Lord but He." (Q. 74:31) A person receives information of the worlds by means of perception: each type of perception is created in order that one of the worlds of existents may be disclosed to him. By worlds I mean [distinct] genera of existents.8 Much could be said about the innate nature or fiṭra to which Ghazālī alludes here, but for now let it simply be noted that it is in and of itself a blank slate in that no news or report (khabar) has come to it regarding any of God's creation. The point will become important later on. As for what follows in the extract concerning the origins of perception, Ghazālī's argument is in line with Aristotle's remarks in De anima and with the Peripatetic tradition more in general. Each sense-modality exists in order to access a specific aspect of reality, one that is irreducible to the others in at least some relevant respect. Ghazālī's chosen example is that "touch falls decisively short of colours and sounds: these are as it were nonexistent according to the reality of touch". He underlines the ontological import of the distinction by calling the different realms of sense-perception by the name of worlds: in the Revival these get fleshed out as the world of colours, world of sounds, world of smells, etc.9 There then follows a developmental account of the way we come by our cognitive faculties. The senses are created first; then the capacity for discernment (tamyīz), whose advent Ghazālī pegs at seven years; then again the power of reasoning, otherwise known as intellection, at some unspecified age. (We may suspect fourteen or puberty, but Ghazālī does not commit to a date.)10 Even within the senses there is a hierarchy: touch is created first, likely thanks to the Peripatetic commonplace according to which touch is the one sense that is both common to and indispensable for every kind of animal.11 After this there follows sight, which is perhaps curious given sight's exalted status among the senses as the most refined and wide-ranging and the one closest to abstraction. The rest of the five senses are dispensed with a hand-wave, with it being said that hearing and taste follow upon sight: the sense of smell is not even mentioned. This is in contrast to the more detailed presentation found in the Revival, bk. 32, where smell comes second in Ghazālī's genetic account of the senses (Iḥyā', 4:96.13–29). In the latter context Ghazālī also finds Qur'ānic grounds for a staggered picture of human development in God's statement, "We have created you in stages" (Q. 71:14; see Iḥyā', 4:101.1). Arriving at the stage (ṭawr) of discernment, noticeable once more is Ghazālī's insistence that this has an existence (wujūd) distinct from the senses because the discerning subject "perceives things in addition to the sense-objects, things that have no existence in the world of sensation". Despite the ambiguity of the formulation I believe we are safe in assuming that by discernment–a term that originally carried legal rather than cognitive connotations–Ghazālī in fact means Ibn Sīnā's five so-called inner senses. Though Ghazālī makes something of a hash out of representing the inner senses in the Revival of the Religious Sciences–his initial list is missing estimation and Ghazālī therefore has to assign variable names to various functions in order to come up with the canonical number five–Ghazālī does eventually get around to mentioning all five.12 The Intentions of the Philosophers traces Ibn Sīnā's many expositions of the subject in more precise terms (as does the Jerusalem Ascent, a work which, however, is of contested authenticity) and so I see no reason to assume that such a conception would be missing from the background of Ghazālī's account of human psychology in the Deliverer as well.13 Ghazālī calls both memory and the retentive imagination a power or faculty (quwwa: Iḥyā', 3:9.28–30), which is a singularly Peripatetic turn of phrase. Even plants are created with nutritional powers (quwā) identical to those of human beings.14 The objects of the internal senses for Ibn Sīnā range from the common sensibles (motion, size, etc.) to those corporeal intentions (ma'ānī) which allow the animal to flee intuitively any creature hostile to it.15 Within the Avicennian psychological framework the internal senses are needed to explain the animal's awareness of aspects of corporeal reality not entirely reducible to the proper objects of the five external senses and its corresponding ability to respond to such stimuli. This is all replicated in Ghazālī: what is more, in bringing up estimation and Ibn Sīnā's standard example of the sheep that instinctively flees the wolf, Ghazālī is explicit in saying that the inner senses all attach to animal life and to animal psychology.16 This implies that even though the objects of the inner senses may not belong to the "world of sensation", they still remain part of corporeal reality in all its particularity. The same goes for animal–and by extension human–awareness of rudimentary psychic states such as hunger, thirst, fear, and joy. Though these cognitions do not count as sense-perceptions, they do not belong among the intelligibles, either, precisely because animals share in them.17 This leaves the intellect and what Ghazālī in the Deliverer calls perceptibles of a prophetic nature (mudrakāt al-nubuwwa, Munqidh, 42.3).18 Ghazālī explains that some time after the onset of the ability to discern "the human being advances to another stage, as his intellect is created. Thus he perceives the necessary, the possible, and the impossible, as well as [other] things that did not exist in the previous stages" (Munqidh, 41). As the modal designators are given in the plural form (al-wājibāt, al-jā'izāt, al-mustaḥīlāt) there is really no room for misunderstanding: the intellect's objects are not the modal notions as such but those things, states of affairs, and/or propositions which the intellect judges to be necessary, possible, or impossible. Ghazālī's appropriation of Avicennian modal syllogistic furthermore specifies the judgements in question as being about beings and their properties; in terms of logic, what we have are propositions in which predicates are said to hold (necessarily, contingently, or absolutely) of a subject. Ghazālī therefore assumes here a modally tempered insight into the underlying rational structure of the universe. What catches the eye here is how both the fruits of the intellect and those of the holy, prophetic spirit (rūḥ qudsī nabawī, Mishkāt, 37.7) are characterized as perceptions. Would we not rather assume that the judgements of the intellect, at least, are arrived at through syllogistic, discursive reasoning, along the lines of what is said elsewhere about the workings of the cogitative spirit (rūḥ fikrī) and the method of ascertainment (ṭarīq al-i'tibār)?19 Ghazālī's compressed style of presentation in the Deliverer in fact masks a basic distinction which he makes consistently across his other works. The intellect since its inception is endowed with certain intelligible axioms ('aqliyyāt) which in the opening pages of the Deliverer are called first principles (awwaliyyāt: Munqidh, 12.18). But it also gains further insight into the true natures of things (ḥaqā'iq al-ashyā') through reasoning as well as through a more intimate form of intellectual exposure which Ghazālī labels ma'rifa. The latter two processes result in the acquisition of intelligibles (ma'qūlāt), while all three brands of knowledge can be said to pertain to intellectual realities (ḥaqā'iq 'aqliyya: Iḥyā', 3:8.11–15) insofar as their objects are universal and not particular, this being the crucial dividing line that separates animal from human cognition. The distinction between axiomatic and speculative intellection follows the contours of one made in Islamic theology between necessary and acquired knowledge ('ilm ḍarūrī, 'ilm muktasab).20 Ghazālī makes use of the definite plural form "the necessary" (ḍarūriyyāt) often enough in connection with his axiomatic knowledge to make it plain that the allusion is deliberate (Munqidh, 13.23; cf. Iḥyā, 1:83.31, 3:16.14–15). The principal difference, and it is an important one, is that whereas earlier Muslim theologians had been willing to include among their candidates for axiomatic and innate knowledge (and thus necessary in the sense of "indubitable") items ranging from God's reign in heaven to one's awareness of oneself, Ghazālī purposefully limits the range of these self-evident truths to either analytic truths or the denial of one or another obvious contradiction. His favourite examples are the knowledge that ten is greater than three and that a single thing cannot be in two places at once.21 The fact that Ghazālī often evokes the standard Ash'arite example of any one thing being necessarily either eternal or originated should not be allowed to distract from the central principle: necessary knowledge for Ghazālī has to do with how all putative scientific knowledge is structured, things said de omni et nullo–in this instance, the principle of the excluded middle–not with pronouncing judgement on any particular point of dogma. Ghazālī's stock examples of necessary truths include the principle that whenever the more specific is predicated, the more general is thereby also included (example: if a human being exists, an animal also exists), from which we may conclude that for him such structures even include something resembling Porphyry's tree.22 To the extent that it serves our present purpose, a few further features of axiomatic knowledge can be presented in outline. For Ghazālī, innate knowledge is found in all people of sound mind since childhood or youth, though perhaps not from birth.23 It is also equally possessed by everybody in that whosoever knows one axiomatic truth, necessarily knows them all (Iḥyā', 1:85.22–24). Necessary knowledge is furthermore present, as it were (ka-annahu ḥāḍir), since it is immediate and self-evident and since it requires no validation from outside. This contrasts with the proper intelligibles, which do not go hand in hand with the intellect (lā yuqārinu l-'aql) but instead must be kindled within it, making of the latter but not the former objects of speculation (naẓariyyāt: Mishkāt, 9.17–10.10). This last remark I take to mean that unlike speculative or theoretical knowledge, axiomatic knowledge is not representational: it is not yet knowledge of anything–it has not arisen out of the reception of some outside information, the khabar mentioned in the Deliverer–at the same time that it is a condition for the knowledge of everything else. All of this is to say that necessary knowledge provides the matrix of possible relations in which objects of knowledge are to be set, even as it does not yet constitute actual knowledge of any real thing. A more radical realignment occurs with the way Ghazālī appropriates acquired knowledge. Such knowledge, Ghazālī says on multiple occasions, is the only means of attaining proximity to God (qurb Allāh: see, e.g., Iḥyā', 3:16.14–15); but just because of this, the three types of knowledge acquisition recognized in kalām will not do. Neither the collation and assessment of second-hand reports, nor formal reasoning from accepted premises, nor the immediate evidence derived from one's own senses can win us beatitude in this life (although they may yet contribute to salvation in the next: Ghazālī toys here with the two meanings of "the other world" or al-ākhira, an expression which can mean either the transcendent dimension that underlies our reality at any and every moment or else the hereafter). On occasion Ghazālī nods in the direction of each of the three kalāmī sources of acquired knowledge (e.g., Munqidh, 40.8–14), yet his distinctive epistemological project leads him consistently to downplay their importance, if never to disavow them entirely. (The topic as such, besides lying beyond our purview, is somewhat beside the point, but briefly: the testimony of the senses, though on the rudimentary level not admitting of doubt, can still lead to misunderstandings, in particular when it is manipulated and interpreted by the less reliable inner senses, common sense, memory, and above all the imagination. Sense-perception also can never hand us first-hand acquaintance with the divine because God is not a sense-object. Argumentation, meanwhile, can go wrong in a number of ways, either because of reliance on questionable premises, a simple error in reasoning, or–most commonly and worst of all–intellectual pride and combativeness for its own sake. And hearsay is often too close for comfort to appeals to blind authority or taqlīd.24) Where Ghazālī steers his ship next is of immediate and pressing interest to us. Instead of relying on a theory of acquired knowledge that builds on a cumulative reasoning from premises, Ghazālī's preferred model for the acquisition of the intelligibles is their direct emanation with the aid of divine grace–what Ghazālī in the Deliverer and elsewhere calls the divine light, in reference to certain eye-catching Prophetic traditions (Munqidh, 13.24–14.9). This lends heft to the perceptual metaphor of knowledge as a kind of seeing; it is time now to consider what the implications of his view are. The first thing to notice is that Ghazālī does indeed follow the Peripatetic practice of likening intellectual knowledge to seeing. Thinking is tantamount to speculation or reflection (naẓar) and, following the logic of the metaphor, it involves both a recipient and one or more external agents. The fact that naẓar is also a standard term for reflection in kalām only serves to heighten the contrast between the theologians' use of the concept and Ghazalī's: whereas the theological majority opinion was that knowledge is something God instils directly in humans, Ghazālī here wishes to develop a naturalized epistemology built on ontological correspondences.25 This leads Ghazālī's first and most forceful assertion in the Book of Knowledge, where his initial treatment of the rational soul in the Revival is located. Axioms and acquired knowledge are not enough, instead, one must posit a general receptacle for knowledge that bears the appropriate kind of relation to the thing being received. Of the various meanings attached to the intellect, accordingly, The first is the quality by which the human being is separated from other beasts and by which he becomes fit to receive the theoretical sciences ('ulūm naẓariyya) and govern the hidden, speculative arts (sinā'āt khafiyya fikriyya). . . it is, as it were, a light cast into the heart by which it becomes fit for the perception of things. The one who denies this and who restricts [the scope of] the intellect merely to necessary knowledge ('ulūm ḍarūriyya) does not judge correctly, since a person ignorant of the sciences is still called rational, as indeed is the sleeper. This is by virtue of affirming the existence of such an innate disposition (gharīza) to the person, together with an ignorance of the sciences. (Ihyā', 1:83.13–26) What Ghazālī here calls a disposition translates into Aristotelian potentiality, or perhaps first actuality: an infant is called potentially knowing in the same sense as it is described as being potentially a writer (this is as yet a remote possibility for the infant but a real potentiality nonetheless, in a way that would not be true, say, of a marmot or a rock), while the person who has grasped the principles of intellectual knowledge is potentially knowing in a stronger sense, and someone who has acquired a piece of actual knowledge but does not happen to be thinking about it just at the moment is more actually still a knower.26 The language of "fittedness" (isti'dād) is more revealing still, as it shows Ghazālī distancing himself from any occasionalist epistemology that would make instances of knowledge dependent solely on God's habit ('āda). If this were the sole explanation, Ghazālī says–if donkeys did not differ from humans except through arbitrary nuggets of knowledge created in the latter to which the former are not privy–then there could be no principled objection to putting inanimate nature on a par with ensouled beings. All would be alike in being a direct creation of God, with stones possibly created with instances of sensation and the attribute of choice (Iḥyā', 1:83.16–22). But plainly this is nonsense: therefore, The human being differs from the beasts through perceiving the theoretical sciences by means of an innate disposition which is called the intellect. This is like the mirror, which differs from other bodies in that it reflects shapes and colours by a specific attribute, namely polish. Similar to this, the eye differs from the forehead through attributes and characteristics which make it fit for vision. The relation, therefore, of this innate disposition to the sciences is like the relation of the eye to vision; the relation of the Qur'ān and the Law to this innate disposition, in their leading to their respective sciences, is like the relation of the light of the sun to the faculty of vision. It is in this way that this innate disposition should be understood. (Iḥyā', 1:83.22–26; cf. Iḥyā', 3:16.16–18) Ghazālī concludes that even though the intellect qua receptive disposition is the only thing referred to by that term whose existence is under dispute (axiomatic knowledge, empirical knowledge, and practical deliberation all being recognized by everybody), it must in fact be regarded as foundational when compared to the rest (Iḥyā', 1:84.22–23; cf. 1:83.29–31, 1:84.3–5). Besides necessary knowledge, it is the second type of intellect we possess by nature (bi-l-ṭab'), and it is only by its presence that acquired knowledge becomes possible. In a separate piece I have attempted to give some content to Ghazālī's peculiar claim that the Qur'ān and the revealed law would have a positive impact on our cognitive capacities.27 For now, let me home in on the mirroring relation which according to Ghazālī underlies the structure of any actual knowledge of reality. Such a relation is implied by Peripatetic psychology and is brought to the fore in the Avicennian materials: the correspondence relation between what is the case, on the one hand, and our knowledge of it, on the other, is not just a matter of representational tokens but a stronger case of formal and hence ontological unity (see, e.g., Maqṣad, 83.8–9, and cf. 138.1–3). This starts with the senses taking on the form of a proper sense-object without the matter and proceeds to our intellectual grasp of a thing's essence, which in Ibn Sīnā is explained in terms of his influential theory of common natures or quiddities (māhiyyāt).28 Ghazālī reproduces just enough of all this to make it clear that he subscribes to Ibn Sīnā's theory. This is plain even though–and admittedly this is rather annoying–we are missing a systematic presentation of all of the soul's cognitive faculties in any of the works whose provenance is wholly undisputed. As far as psychic imprints are concerned, Ghazālī's favoured example is the way that the heavens, which are first registered by the senses, have their overall form (ṣūra) imprinted on the imaginal faculty (khayāl) and then submitted to memory (Iḥyā', 19.34–20.1; Maqṣad, 18.11–14). Ghazālī's further reference to a cleansing process whereby the reports handed by the senses are relieved of everything extraneous bears a close resemblance to the Aristotelian/Avicennian notion of abstraction, or "the reception of form without the matter".29 Finally, Ghazālī says that when a human being perceives a particular individual by means of the senses, the intellect comes to acquire from that same perception a common and absolute meaning (ma'nā'āmm muṭlaq). This is in contrast to the animals, whose spirits are only capable of dealing with particulars and particular situations (Mishkāt, 38.18–19). All of this points unmistakably in the direction of the human rational soul working on the abstracted common items derived from nature in order to obtain true universals, as the following passage from the Revival makes clear: Know that the locus (maḥall) of knowledge is the heart, by which I mean the subtle principle (laṭīfa) that governs all the limbs, that which is obeyed and served by all the [body] parts. It relates to the true natures of known things (ḥaqā'iq al-ma'lūmāt) as the mirror relates to coloured forms (ṣuwar). As the likeness of the coloured form is impressed on the mirror and appears in it, so for every known reality there is a form (ṣūra) that is impressed on the mirror of the heart and shines forth from it. Additionally, just as the mirror is one thing, the forms of pa