Abstract
Any reader of René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy would be amazed at the close resemblance the skeptical beginnings of this work bear to the work of the well-known Muslim philosopher and theologian, Abu Hamid Muhammad alGhazzali, titled Deliverance from Error and Attachment to the Lord of Might and Majesty. This amazement would only multiply when the reader recognized that these two thinkers are not only separated from each other culturally, but that they are also more than five centuries apart historically. Ghazzali was born 1058 AD in northeastern Iran, taught at Baghdad in the Nizamiya, and after travelling widely throughout the Islamic world died in Tus, Iran, in the year 1111 AD. Descartes was born in a village in Tourain, France, in 1596, traveled as a soldier and then as a philosopher throughout Europe, and died in Sweden in 1650. Despite the cultural and historical gulf separating these two thinkers, an investigation of their relevant works is ideal for comparative philosophy, because the momentous cultural and temporal differences weaken the need for (distractive) efforts to establish historical lines of influence. In saying this, I am not dismissing the value of historical scholarship in philosophy.1 What I am disputing is a tendency towards historicizing philosophy, treating it as merely a subject for historical sciences.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Reference
have encountered two versions of how Ghazzali’s works found their way to Europe. Both sources indicate that Ghazzali’s works were available between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Harry A. Wolfson in “Nicolaus of Autrecourt and Ghazzali’s Argument Against Causality”, Speculum, 44: 2 (April 1969), pp. 234–38, maintains that Ghazzali’s works, especially the Incoherence of Philosophers, were available to Nicolaus of Autrecourt and Bernard of Arezzo. Wolfson argues this etymologically and philosophically by referring to a particular argument in the Incoherence of Philosophers. This argument concerns the causal factors that are involved when a piece of cotton is brought next to the fire. The official version of Ghazzali’s Incoherence of Philosophers was translated into Latin by Jewish scholars, Kalonymous ben Kalonymous (1328), and Kalonymous ben David (1527). These versions included Averroes’ commentaries. Wolfson also indicates that some of Ghazzali’s arguments were available to Albert the Great through the works of Maimonides (1135–1204) and Averroes.
R. E. A. Shanab, in “Ghazzali and Aquinas on Causality,” The Monist, 58: 1 (January 1974), pp. 14150, refers to another source for the availability of Ghazzali’s works to European Scholars. Shanab maintains that the Dominican Raymund Martin had exposure to many of Ghazzali’s works, which were available in Toledo in the thirteenth century. Shanab wants to argue that Thomas Aquinas, through the study of the works of Raymund Martin and correspondence with him, was at least indirectly exposed to the thought of Ghazzali. In particular, Shanab’s argument concerns Aquinas’ attacks on Muslim Peripatetic philosophers. Shanab argues that the Peripatetic doctrines under attack were the ones that Ghazzali attacked in the Incoherence of Philosophers. It is important to note that Shanab maintains that Deliverance from Error, Al-Munqidh min ad-Dalal, was one of the texts available in the thirteenth century.
It is interesting to note that Lenn E. Goodman argues that Descartes’ argument for the existence of the ego cogito has its source in Avicenna’s argument for the immortality of the soul (“Ibn Sina’s Argument for the Existence of the Soul”, Philosophical Forum I: 4 (Summer 69), pp. 547–62). This point may go some distance in explaining the similarities between Ghazzali’s Deliverance and Descartes’ Meditations, since Ghazzali was a careful reader and critic of Avicenna. Goodman’s argument is persuasive, but it is based on philosophical evidence; it is much harder to make the case historically. In this essay, I will not develop Goodman’s account.
Henry Corbin, The Concept of Comparative Philosophy, Peter Russell (trans.), Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1981, p. 5.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Henry Corbin: The Life and Works of the Occidental Exile in Quest of the Orient of Light,” in Traditional Islam in the Modern World, New York: KPI, 1987, p. 276.
Steven M. Wasserstrom, Religion after Religion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, p. 146.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr, “Recollections of Henry Corbin and Reflections upon his Intellectual Significance,” Temenos Academy Review (Spring 1999), pp. 34–45.
Refer to Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (trans.), New York: Harper & Row, 1962, 71–75/H45–50.
Ibid., 190–1/H150.
Ibid., 200/H158.
Robert Brandom, “Heidegger’s Categories in Being and Time,” Monist 66: 3 (1983), p. 403.
Refer to Being and Time, 409-H358, where Heidegger advances the claim that “[t]heoretical research is not without a praxis of its own”.
Ibid., 266/H223.
Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Albert Hofstadter (trans.), Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 312.
John Haugeland, “Heidegger on Being a Person,” Nous 16: 1 (1982), pp. 19–20.
Brandom, p. 388. I should mention that my endorsement of Brandom’s reading of Being and Time and Haugeland’s Brandomism is not wholesale. What I find problematic in Brandom is his reductive approach to epistemic authority, and his insertion of this philosophically problematic view into Heidegger’s Being and Time. He attributes to Heidegger’s early philosophy the notion of the primacy of the category of the social; he writes: “The ontological primacy of the social can be justified by appeal to a more specific thesis, pragmatism concerning authority. This is the claim that all matters of authority or privilege, in particular epistemic authority, are matters of social practice, and not objective matters of fact” (Ibid., pp. 389–90). I agree with Brandom that the category of the social is of paramount importance in accounting for epistemic authority, but I believe that he goes too far. Brandom wants to maintain, for example, that perceptual judgments are not justified by what is perceived, but by social structures that throw legitimacy on the claim. I have argued against this view in my dissertation, Experience Conceptualized: Between Coherentism and the Myth of the Given (UVA Philosophy Dissertation), pp. 91–97. I believe that the view I defend in my dissertation is, in many ways, similar to the one advanced by Heidegger in Being and Time. The defense of this claim, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.
Haugeland, p. 20.
Ibid., p. 22.
It is clear then that although Dasein as such is not a fancy way of referring solely to human beings, Dasein is not possible without human beings.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 184–5/H145.
The world as an existential of being-in-the-world is constituted by signifying relations. These relations are the unity of the conditions of the possibility of the world, the worldhood of the world. What exactly is this system of signifying relations and how does it relate to the intelligible coherence of Dasein’s world? Heidegger maintains that “the relational totality (das Bezuganze) of this signifying we call `significance’ (Bedeutsamkeit). This is what makes up the structure of the world” (Ibid., 120/H87). Furthermore, Heidegger’s mentions “the relational totality of this signifying(be-deuten).” What is “this signifying”? In a rather revealing passage, Heidegger describes the system of signifying relations as follows: “The `for-the-sake-of-which’ (Worumwillen) signifies an `in-order-to’ (Um-zu); this in turn, a `towards-this’ (Dazu); the latter, an `in-which’ (Wobei) of letting something be involved; and that, in turn, the `with-which’ (Womit) of an involvement. These relations are bound up with one another as a primordial totality” (Ibid.). The system of signifying relations is the worldhood of the being-in-the world, Dasein. It would not be inappropriate to maintain that the worldhood of the world is something like the structural framework constitutive of all social practices.
For further exploration of Heidegger’s claim that Dasein is essentially in truth, refer to Being and Time, 262–9/H219–226. Also see 300/H256.
In Being and Time, Heidegger claims that “inauthenticity is based on the possibility of authenticity” (303/H259).
Haugeland, p. 23.
Ibid., p. 24.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 435/H383.
Ibid., 50/H28, 58/H34.
Ibid., 59/H35.
Ibid., 61–2/H37.
Corbin, pp. 14–5.
In Islamic thought, kashf al-mahjub is a term that has wide usage. It means the unveiling the veiled, the shy, or rather the one that conceals himself. Along with its usage in philosophical texts, there are two mystical treatises that bear it as their title: 1) Abu Ya qub Sijistani’s “Kashf al-Mahjub,” in An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia, Vol II, S. H. Nasr & M. Aminrazavi (eds.), London: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2) `Ali ibn ‘Uthman al-Hujwiri, The Kash al-Mahjub, The Oldest Persian Treatise on Sufism, R. A. Nicholson (trans.), London: Luzac, 1959.
Heidegger, Being and Time, 54–5/H31.
In an effort to relate his project to that of Kant, and, at the same time, distinguish it from Kant’s critical philosophy, Heidegger writes: “If we keep within the horizon of the Kantian problematic, we can give an illustration of what is conceived phenomenologically as a `phenomenon’, with reservation as to other differences; for we may then say that that which already shows itself in the appearance as prior to the `phenomenon’ as ordinarily understood and as accompanying it in every case, can, even though it thus shows itself unthematically, be brought thematically to show itself; and what thus shows itself (the `forms of intuition’) will be the ”phenomena“ of phenomenology. For manifestly space and time must be able to show themselves in this way — they must be able to become phenomena — if Kant is claiming to make a transcendental assertion grounded in the facts when he says that space is the a priori ”inside-which“ of an ordering” (Ibid., 55/H31). Having tied his account of phenomenon to Kant’s account of space and time, which condition the possibility of any appearance and are themselves appearances, Heidegger considers time more fundamental than space and rejects Kant’s account of time: “in spite of the fact that he (Kant) was bringing the phenomenon of time back into the subject again, his analysis of it remained oriented towards the traditional way in which time had been ordinarily understood; in the long run this kept him from working out the phenomenon of a `transcendental determination of time’ in its own structure and function”( Ibid., 45/H324). I take this to mean that Kant understood time as mathematicized and not in the original, lived, sense of the word, which Heidegger is trying to resuscitate.
Ibid., 374/H326.
Ibid., 458/H406.
Leo Groarke, “Descartes’ First Meditation: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 12: 3, p. 291. Sami N. Najm also advances this thesis. In “The Place and Function of Doubt in the Philosophies of Descartes and Ghazzali,” he writes: “The method of doubt in both cases proceeds by a process of elimination or reduction. Every type or source of knowledge is set aside as inadequate until a completely certain foundation is discovered” (Philosophy East and West 16 (1966), p. 138).
René Descartes, “Meditations on First Philosophy,” in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, & Dugald Murdoch (trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984, p. 12.
Abu Hamid Muhammad Ghazzali, “Deliverance from Error and Attachment to the Lord of High and Majesty,” in The Faith and Practice of Ghazzali,W. Montgomery Watt (trans.), London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1967, p. 20.
Ibid., pp. 32–54.
Ibid., p. 21.
Ibid., p. 23.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., Ghazzali’s intellect is Descartes’ understanding, the faculty that relates various perceptions and is able to distinguish between them.
Descartes, p. 12.
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 13–14.
Ibid., p. 14.
Harry G. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen, New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1970, p. 74.
Descartes, p. 14.
Ibid., p. 15.
Ghazzali, p. 24.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., pp. 24–25.
Ibid., p. 25.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 26.
Descartes, pp. 16–17.
Ibid., pp. 16–17.
Ibid., pp. 16–17.
Ibid., p. 29.
Earlier Descartes asserted that ideas are a mode of thinking which is, itself, an attribute of the mind.
Descartes does not give matter the status of substance until the sixth Meditation. A discussion of that argument is beyond the scope of this paper.
Ibid., p. 28.
The same thing about modes and accidents in relation to substances can be said of attributes in relation to substances. Mind as a substance has the attribute of thinking while the body has the attribute of extension.
In the French version of the Meditations, Descartes’ term for understanding is entendement. Entendement has its roots in the Latin intendère which means stretching out towards something. According to Descartes, I perceive the objective reality of ideas through understanding. The concept of objective reality is not Descartes’ invention. In Medieval philosophy, the concept of objective reality has its first appearance in St. Anselm’s ontological argument. More modem treatments of this concept can be found in the works of Franz Brentano especially Psychologie Vom Empirischen Standpunkt. Edmund Husserl also treats this concept extensively.
In Principles of Philosophy, Descartes maintains that “pain, color, and other things of that sort are clearly and distinctly perceived when they are considered just as sensations or thoughts. However, it must be noticed that when they are judged to be certain things existing outside of our mind, it is absolutely impossible to understand in any way what things they are”, Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller (trans.) Boston: Kluwer, 1983, Part I, §68. We suffer from error when we do not perceive our sense perceptions distinctly and ascribe to them an objective reality that is not theirs. Color is not a thing but a mode of an extended material thing. Pain is not a thing but a mode of the union of mind and body. As long as “I simply refrain from making a judgment in cases where I do not perceive the truth with sufficient clarity and distinctness, then it is clear that I am behaving correctly and avoiding error” Descartes’ Meditations, p. 41.
Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, Dorion Cairns (trans.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970, pp. 7–8.
In the Meditations, Descartes offers three arguments for the existence of God. The ontological and the cosmological arguments are rather standard. His third argument, the causal argument, can be paraphrased as follows: (1) I have the idea of God (formal reality of this idea). (2) I understand this idea clearly and distinctly (objective reality of this idea). (3) This idea has greater objective reality than I have formal reality. (4) The cause of an idea must have at least as much formal reality as the idea has objective reality. (5) Therefore, I cannot be the cause of this idea. (6) Therefore, something other than me must have been the cause of this idea. (7) Any other finite substance will have less formal reality than the idea of God has objective reality. (8) Therefore, no other finite substance could be the cause of this idea. (9) Therefore, the cause of this idea cannot be any substance whatever. (10) Therefore, the cause of this idea must be an infinite substance. (11) Therefore, there exists an infinite substance, which corresponds to and is the cause of my idea of God. (12) Therefore, God exists, and necessarily exists (pp. 28–31).
Once Descartes establishes the existence of God, he argues that God is perfect and good. Furthermore, he states that deception is a defect. Therefore, God cannot be a deceiver; therefore, what we clearly and distinctly perceive is necessarily true. However, Descartes does not want to state the above conclusion too strongly. In the fourth Meditation, Descartes argues that “for since I now know that my own nature is very weak and limited, whereas the nature of God is immense, incomprehensible and infinite, I also know without more ado that he is capable of countless things whose causes are beyond my knowledge. And for this reason alone I consider the customary search for final causes to be totally useless in physics; there is considerable rashness in thinking myself capable of investigating the (impenetrable) purposes of God”. (Ibid., p. 39).
In this argument, Descartes wants to establish that although God is not a deceiver, the comprehension of his purposes lie beyond the reach of understanding. Therefore, Descartes wants to assert that what I clearly and distinctly perceive is not necessarily real. Descartes emphasizes this point in a number of his works. In the Appendix to Fifth Objections and Replies, Descartes maintains that “while the soul is in doubt about the existence of all material things, it knows itself praecise tantum -- `in the strict sense only’ ... I showed that by the words `in the strict sense only’ I do not at all mean an entire exclusion or negation, but only an abstraction from material things; for I said that in spite of this we are not sure that there is nothing corporeal in the soul, even though we do not recognize anything corporeal in it” (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. II, p. 276, my Italics). The important point here is that Descartes does not want to talk about the world as it is in itself, as planned by God. This is beyond the powers of understanding. Hence, Descartes does not want to say that the soul is in reality incorporeal. But, he does want to say that the soul is recognized by understanding to be incorporeal.
Husserl, p. 26.
Ghazzali, pp. 23–25.
Plato, “Theaetetus,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (eds.) Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962, 190a.
Plato, “Sophist,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Hamilton and Cairns (eds.), 263e.
The writings of Aristotle’s Hellenistic commentator, Alexander of Aphrodisias, were instrumental in strengthening the impact of Aristotle’s psychology on Islamic philosophers, beginning with al-Kindi (Henry Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, Liadain Sherrard (trans.), London: Kegan Paul International, 1993, p. 156.)
Aristotle, “De Anima,” in The Complete Works of Aristotle, Jonathan Barnes (ed.), W.D. Ross (trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984, 430a 14–17.
Ibid., 430a 25.
Plato, “Republic,” in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Hamilton and Cairns (eds.), 515c-518d.
Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazzali, The Niche of Lights, David Buchman (trans.), Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1998, p. 4.
bid., pp. 12–13.
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., p. 14.
Abu Nasr al-Farabi, On the Perfect State, Richard Walzer (trans.), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985, p.406.
See, for instance, Avicenna’s “On the Proof of Prophecies and the Interpretation of the Prophets’ Symbols and Metaphors,” in Medieval Political Philosophy: A Sourcebook, Ralph Lerner and Muhsin Mandi (eds.), Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961, p. 115.
Refer to Henry Corbin’s “Divine Epiphany and Spiritual Birth in Isma`ilian Gnosis” in Cyclical Time and Ismaili Gnosis, Ralph Manheim (trans.) London: Kegan Paul International, 1983.
Refer to W. Montgomery Watt’s “Ghazzali and Later Ash`arites,” in Islamic Philosophy and Theology, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1985, p. 86.
The Buyid court’s support for Avicenna is rather undisputed. It should also be noted that Alfarabi enjoyed the protection of Hamadanid Shi`ite dynasty in Aleppo (refer to Corbin’s History of Islamic Philosophy, p. 158.
Refer to Carla S. Klausner’s The Seljuk Vezirate, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973, pp. 5859.
Refer to Bayard Dodge’s Muslim Education in Medieval Times, Washington D.C.: The Middle East Institute, 1962, pp. 20–22.
Refer to Ghazzali’s Deliverance, pp. 48–54. Also Refer to Watt, p. 88.
For an Islamic Peripatetic reply, refer to Averroes’ famous The Incoherence of the Incoherence, London: Luzac & Co., 1954. In the History of Islamic Philosophy, Corbin also mentions a voluminous Isma`ili response to Ghassali, p. 183, also refer to Corbin’s “The Ismaili Response to the Polemic of Ghazali,” in Ismaili Contributions to Islamic Culture, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (ed.) Tehran: The Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1979, pp. 67–98. This work is as yet unavailable for scholarly examination.
The similarities between the form of Islamic prayer and the meditations of Descartes and Ghazzali are noteworthy. They all begin with an act of cleansing the self from attachment to the world, they move to a contemplation of God, and they end with retuming to the world. Some such similarities might also be observed in regard to Catholic ritual worship.
Husserl also adopts a meditational approach to initiating his phenomenological investigations. In the Paris Lectures, he writes: “To be a meditating philosopher who, through these meditations, has himself become a transcendental ego, and who constantly reflects upon himself, means to enter upon often endless transcendental experience ... It means to see all that which is to be seen, to explain and penetrate it, to encompass it descriptively by concepts and judgments. But these latter must only be terms which have been derived without alteration from their perceptual source ... I am detached inasmuch as I ”suspend“ all worldly interests (which I nonetheless possess)” Peter Koestenbaum (trans.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975, pp. 12–14.
See Jacques Maritain’s The Dream of Descartes, Mabelle L. Andison (trans.) New York: Philosophical Library, 1944, pp. 13–17.
Refer to the wax experiment, in the second Meditation, where Descartes maintains that the essence of wax is not a sensory idea (Descartes, pp. 20–21). This point becomes elaborated in the opening lines of the fifth Meditation where Descartes gives his mathematical account of the essence of matter, i.e., extension (Ibid., p. 44).
Heidegger’s Being and Time, 130/H97.
Ibid., 130/H98.
lbid., 131/H98.
According to Heidegger, Descartes’ impact is visible in all subsequent philosophy (Ibid., 45–7/H24–5), including Husserl’s phenomenology. What is unique in Heidegger’s phenomenology is perhaps a sustained effort to remove the last remnants of Cartesian mathematicism.
Corbin’s The Concept of Comparative Philosophy, p. 14.
Please refer to footnote 85.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Azadpur, M. (2003). Unveiling The Hidden: On the Meditations of Descartes and Ghazzali. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Passions of the Soul in the Metamorphosis of Becoming. Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue, vol 1. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0229-4_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-0229-4_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-6359-5
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-0229-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive