I think that you have gone too far in criticizing Gazali. He does not deserve that much.
His only mistake was that he totally rejected the questioning and insisted on faith far more than required.
He did not maintain the balance between the spirituality and practicality.
Most guanine religious scholars like Gazali use to become idealistic and expect the same level of sincerity and commitment form the masses what they themselves have. They miss a very simple point that all people cannot be the same thus they should not expect that from the masses what is beyond their capacity.
Secondly, his criticism of the Aristotle and Plato was because of the fear of Islam also following the path of Christinaity. He did not want that happening.
Secondly, i think that you missed a very important point about Gazali.
In his days, every stream of the knowledge was included in the philososphy. Like the study of physics, astronomy and mathematics were also considered as philosophy, not to mention metaphysics.
Gazali was critic of other philosophers only in the terms of metaphysics, not scientific streams like physics, medicine or mathematics. He challenged only the notions about the God, not all.
I may be wrong but your criticism is giving the impression that Gazali opposed all scientific progress, which is not the case.
You cannot blame anyone for his heritage. The heritages depends far more on later followers than initiaters.
You cannot blame Rutherford for the killing of innocent Japanese in H&N. And, neither Jesus for all those Crusades, which were executed in the name of Christianity.
Things and notions should be seen the orignal context.
He had to criticize Aristotle.
It were not the western philosophers that made Aristotle famous, but Muslim ones like Averroes and Avicenna. Aristotle was very once very respected within Muslim intellectual populace. They named his as the first teacher. Later, western Christian philosophers like Thomas Aquinas read the Arabic translations of his works and translated into European languages.
Later, Aristotle became the symbol of reason and logic, along with Plato. Though, Aristotle did not say much about the God in particular, but as Christian intellectuals started considering him as an authority, Instead of the Chruch, Gazali feared that the same may happned in Islam too.
That is why he criticized Aristotle, but only for his ideas of metaphysics, not as a whole.
Thanks, Sanjay - that corroborates everything I said, actually. Due to an irrational allegiance, or allegiance to irrationality ( I do not know if you have read the Koran ) he dismissed Aristotle. The ground, that religion was supposed to be untouched by reason, is very dangerous and proved fatal, deliberately depriving the minds of the future billions who would have to carry the consequences of his actions of their right to think about God, divinity. Implicity, denying the their right to come to understand themselves.
I can hardly think of a more powerful act in favor of darkness. In fact, I can’t think of any.
This is without competition the greatest evil in the world - the idea that religion (moral thought) and science (a-moral thought) should be disconnected, rather than humbly acknowledging that they are often hard to reconcile for humans. Be honest. Is that supreme arrogance (the idea that a human could decide this in the first place) not the recipe for tyranny and oblivion and the destruction of the human spirit?
The prophet and the philosopher are architects of man, they imprint their will (you will say their wisdom) on millennia. To do so by taking away mans power to think his divinity is to be the bridge-builder to hell. It is literally the chained pair of the Devil card. Chained not by understanding - pure, but by understanding coupled with the belief that knowledge is ungodly.
As I said in the OP, Newton proved the final resolution of this error, and it is a shame that the muslims do not revere him as a true prophet that unmasked Al Ghazali.
He dismissed only a part of Aristole, in which he was in directl conflict with basic doctrines of Islam, like whether the soul take rebirth or not. Gazali was not dismissive of Aristotle as a whole. He accepted may of his other premises.
What he is actually trying to say that Atistotelian logic is an ontology, which runs on its own declayerd definitions/premises. It has not demostrated successfuly thus considering those as fundamental thruth is wrong.
And, he was not as narrow minded either as you are thinking.
Look at this-
I forgot to mention his most significant contribution to islam and the world too.
Before Gazali, Sufism was considered as some sort of black magic by Islam and was opened to blasphemy too. It was only Gazali, who fought for it and established it as a subset of mainstream Islam.
again you give more credibility to my judgments of Al Ghazali.
The passages on him that you quote to demonstrate his open mindedness demonstrate precisely the insanity I accuse him of having spread.
How can you be lenient and forgiving to someone who thinks that demonstration can by definition not contradict ‘revelation’? How can you take someone seriously who holds these three purely undemonstrated ‘truths’ as a standard for what demonstration is allowed mean?
No, he was indeed insane, quite as bad as I had intuited.
It was perhaps nice of him to allow sufism. But I do not care about that. I care about his influence on the billions. In this sense he caused an evil of demiurgic proportions.
From where he stands, demonstration does not contradict revelation. Having said that, it is quite difficult for the pure intellectal persons to digest.
He had his reasons.
FC, you need to understand a basic thing about true spiritual scholars like Gazali. They do not say such just things because they find all that in any book. You are completely mistaken if you think so.
I do not know whether you are aware or not, there was a period of a serious intellectual/spiritual stuggle in his life, which lasted many years. During that time, he gave away all his wealth in donation and just roamed here and there in the search of his quest of answers. After some years, he came back and started teaching and writing again.
He must had some personal demonstration during that period of what is considered as relevation by you. But, the problem of such people is that they cannot prove it to others thus find it difficult to put that in such logical way as philosophy demands.
When he insists on doing some basic premises of Islam not to put on test, he must have confirmed those, at least to some extent. You can certainly doubt that but he cannot do anything regarding that.
You can say the same thing about Moses, Christ, Buddha, Mahavira and millions others too. None of them gave any proof either. You have to look at the life and the charecter of the person to see his intentions.
Secondly, most of the philosophy does not rely on proof. Can you tell me which philosopher gave proof of his premises, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Plato ot even N?
Did Descartes show by demostration that he thinks, therefore he is?
Did kant demostrate his metaphysics?
Did N demostrate his wtp to others?
It is all in the mind, not on the ground.
Philosophy is all about premises and ontologies derived by those and most of those are still not confirmed physically.
That is why philosophy has to rely either on science or spirituality for ultimate confirmation. It can confirm a very few of its premises on its own.
One may believe Kant, Hume, N or Gazali. That does not make any difference on the benchmark of demonstration. Remember, all are mere beliefs, not demonstrated facts.
This explains why you never understood what I told you about Nietzsche and value. You were prejudiced about me, thinking I don’t know about spirituality.
I find you a far more head-stuck person than myself. I think with my brain, sure, but I ground my thoughts in my heart. You do not display much heart in your writings, little passion, little spirit. (all these mean the same thing: courage)
So did Caligula.
He is the opposite of spiritual. He took away mans spirit and replaced it with servitude to his favorite book.
The koran is anything but spiritual. It’s a prison for the spirit.
And?
What meaning does such a quest have if it led to him cluttering up mans destiny with mud and causing future billions to live in deprivation?
He must had some personal demonstration during that period of what is considered as relevation by you. But, the problem of such people is that they cannot prove it to others thus find it difficult to put that in such logical way as philosophy demands.
So he should have stayed away form philosophy and stuck to his revelations. But instead he chose to defile the noble art of philosophy (honesty) with his hallucinations.
Yes. He confirmed it but he could not prove it so everyone just had to obey on blind faith.
You don’t understand this at all, Sanjay.
My objection is to his claims to logic and thought. Not to the fact that he shared his little fantasy with the world. His evil is that he imposed his fantasy on free spirits and stole from them the faculty of mind.
As you may know ‘mind’ relates to ‘mannas’, the higher thought faculty in sanskrit, and also to ‘Man’. Due to Ghaxzali, the muslim man is no longer man, but back to ape.
Al Ghazali is thus literally the reverse of Prometheus. He is the one that took the fire away from man. He brought man back into darkness.
All these thinkers did is demonstrate and justify. That is what philosophy is. They made mistakes, because until Nietzsche they too still relied on the possibility of objective analysis. But their work was to liberate man from such ideas, from the hallucinations of prophets and madmen like Ghazali.
It is all in the mind, not on the ground.
Then you believe that mind is unreal?
If you had a notion of spirit, you would know that “as above, so below”.
I guess you have to believe this to keep misreading Nietzsche, to serve your own beliefs.
You are describing your own mind. The mind of the philosopher is beyond your comprehension, apparently – the idea that a man could be honest to himself,choose to not delude himself with fairytales, seems alien to you.
Signing of with “with love” when all you’ve given is falsity is not smart. It shows that you do not know what love is. Love is not something you can bring about by saying the word. It’s in your actions. The love you could show me would be in correctly representing my views, and to try responding to them (as hard as it is to understand someone like me for either an atheist or a theist), and not to preconceived notions of what a philosopher can be.
Honesty and courage, my friends. That is all it takes. God may give you courage, but will thwart your honesty. And to be courage for a lie isn’t that hard.
Having heart while seeing the world in the eye is a far greater courage.
Consider the relation of courage and intelligence. It is a precarious relation, but a crucial one in the face of all other beings. The task of philosophy is to leave and love all things in their self-nature. This is the Way, as the greater Dogen of Shobogenzo practiced it. It is sitting in lotus and being rooted in oneself. And considering, this is the ecstatic bliss of the spirit, all other beings in their self nature.
I sort of regret saying this as it is exceptionally harsh thing to say. Please see it as the full range of my anger at you for insinuating that I do not operate from spirit or love, that my intellect is incapable of grasping spiritual revelation and divinity. That is an incredibly grave insult, and your signing off on that with the automatic ’ with love’ adds to its cynicism.
Still, I am certain that if you had encountered my writing with heart and courage, that you would not have seen the need to lecture me on the very first thing that all meditative people learn when they set out on the path, which is that a sanctifying intelligence is awakened once the teleological mind is silenced.
All I am asking is that we do not disregard the tragedy. The Islamic world was magnificent in its outset. Its splendid mastership of the horse-energy, its attempts to decipher God in aesthetics (of which the Mosque is still an impressive testament) and its appreciation of the Hellenic spirit - all this was far superior to what Christianity represented in that time.
But then… spirit waned, and Al Ghazali came, it seems to me much like Paulus, to block the road to health and lure man into a future of metaphysical dust, error, a cloud like ground zero at first, suffocating, the mind dying in terrible ways, torture, falsification of love and finally the dawn of belief.
I am not saying that Al Ghazali is the sole caue of the demise - the Islamic world had to be ready for it. Its glory days may simply have been played out. Around the time of its demise the renaissance started in Europe. Al Ghazali can in the most favorable light I can shed be seen as the swan-song of a beautiful culture. The starkest light shows him precisely like that - party’s over, now to home and then the hangover.
As so often the hangover lasts longer than the party.
All silliness aside the starker light shows Ghazali as the one who enabled the stupid and arrogant to take over from the inquisitive and profound.
I am certain he was a nice man. That is not the point. This is a warning to all nice men who just try to be honest and then conclude that they might as well refer to their honesty as divine truth.
