The clash of civilizations: Greek philosophy meets Islam
al-Kindi’s role as reconciler in ‘On First Philosophy’
A whole civilization living under the prescriptions of a single religious text. This is the remarkable heritage of Islam, and one of the most striking events in human history. The Quran, along with accounts of its intermediary’s life, structured the entire ethical and social structure of a society for hundreds of years. Perhaps in no other time did the written word have such a direct impact on the lived experience of so many people.
As this religion was developing, the idea of the highest truth was the text of the Quran. For a Muslim, God’s word was not only true, but the truth that mattered the most, being the source of their highest values. Under this conception, truth was intimately tied with ethics: to follow truth was to to be properly guided and thereby be righteous. And of course, for the Muslim nothing compares to the Quran for proper guidance.
In the early centuries of Islam, Muslims were being introduced to the philosophy of the Greeks, mostly by means of Syriac translators. More than 800 years earlier, the ancient Greeks had developed their own conception of truth that had no resemblence whatsoever to that of Islam. In Greek philosophy the highest truths were called apodixis, meaning incontrovertible proof, and following this powerful methodology they had developed such things as logic and geometry. The words of a god, no matter how integral to the social order, could not be truer than those.
There was evidently a conflict between these two notions of truth. We might anachronistically call it the clash between religious and secular truth. Ya’qub al-Kindi, an Islamic philosopher from 800 AD who was among the first generation of Muslim philosophers exposed to Greek thought, addressed many of his works to an audience that was hostile to this new way of thinking.
The source of the hostility
To an early Muslim of excellent faith, his proof that Islam is true was the statement of the Quran. The book asserts that Islam is true, and therefore, it is true. To a non-believer, this can only seem like the most absurd tautology: as if the religious person is saying ‘I believe, and therefore I believe.’ But to the Muslim, to whom truth means proper guidance, the fact that Islam constitutes his lived social and ethical reality is proof of itself.
The Quran describes truth and falsehood in the following metaphor:
He sends down from the sky rain, and valleys flow according to their capacity, and the torrent carries a rising foam. And from that [ore] which they heat in the fire, desiring adornments and utensils, is a foam like it. Thus Allah presents truth and falsehood. As for the foam, it vanishes, cast off; but as for that which benefits the people, it remains on the earth. Thus does Allah present examples. (13:17)
In this descrption truth takes on a pragmatic dimension What is true endures, has social efficacy, ‘benefits the people’. Adding to the metaphor, here the word falsehood or batil also means useless or invalid. So for a Muslim with this conception of truth, the fact that Islam represented the source of moral guidance and social cohesion presented him with a proof of its veracity.
A similar idea is expressed in this verse:
Say, “O mankind, the truth has come to you from your Lord, so whoever is guided is only guided for his soul, and whoever goes astray only goes astray against it. And I am not over you a manager.” (10:108)
These verses underscore the separation between the Greek philosophical and Islamic notions of truth. In Islam, truth is related to the most intimate striving of mankind, his well-being, and his ethical engagement, whereas in Greek thought, it was removed from any anthropological considerations. Similarly, religious truth in general is related to the proper orientation of a person towards life, being inherently subjective, whereas secular truth is strictly objective.
The solution
As its title suggestsion, al-Kindi’s major treatise On First Philosophy argues that there is something like a ‘mother of all philosophies’. For him, this position is held by theology, and by placing the study of religion as the first philosophy, he attempted to resolve the conflict between Greek and Islamic notions of truth.
First, al-Kindi implores his audience — which, we can deduce from his statements, is suspicious towards Greek philosophy — not to reject the peripatetic school as a legitimate source of truth and worthy object of study. In fact:
The human art which is highest in degree and most noble in rank is the art of philosophy, the definition of which is knowledge of the true nature of things, insofar as is possible for man.
But then he argues that, rather than being opposed to philosophy, theology is in fact the ‘first philosophy’:
Knowledge of the first cause [i.e. God] has truthfully been called First Philosophy, since all the rest of philosophy is contained within its knowledge. It is, therefore, the first in rank, the first in nobility, the first in genus, the first in rank with respect to that the knowledge of which is most certain, and the first in time, since it is the cause of time.
And how does al-Kindi describe
In the knowledge of the true nature of things there is knowledge of divinity, unity and virtue, and a complete knowledge of everything useful, with approaches to it; while there is a distance from anything harmful, with precautions against it.
At first, we might get the impression that al-Kindi is simply restating the Islamic conception of truth here. But what’s remarkable about al-Kindi’s approach here is the fact that he appropriates the truth of the Greek philosophers within the domain of Islamic truth. He accomplishes this by arguing that God is the cause of truth, and that therefore any investigation into God is a primary
Modern applications
al-Kindi’s attempt to reconcile Islam with Greek philosophy is similar to the modern tension beween religious and secular truth. Today a popular view of religion is represented by new atheism, a prevailing view that modern scientific discoveries have in some sense supplanted religion as a source of truth. For the new athiest, only what can be scientifically verified can be designated as true. By this perspective, for example, the truth of the story of Noah would depend on material factors like the historicity of the event; under that account, it would be considered untrue.
This view has recently come under renewed criticism. In a recent discussion between neuroscientist Sam Harris and psychologist Jordan Peterson for example, the notion of pragmatic truth was invoked with the statement that truths about the world are ‘nested in a Darwinian framework’. That is to say, our ability to perceive and learn about our enviornment is preceded by certain biological imperitives, such as the will to survive and detect danger.
What is this if not an analogy with al-Kindi’s project in On First Philosophy? Once again, there is an attempt to frame facts about the objective world, which appear to exist outside and independently of human affairs, back into the fold of subjectivity. It seems that generally speaking the secular, non-humanistic account of truth, which views the world from some Arichmaedean point well-removed from human affairs, will always be in conflict with some aspect of our subjectivity.
