Episode #019 - Transcript

Thank you for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday, and I hope you love the show.

The theme of today’s episode is truth. Now, when you think of truth as its own entity, there’s not really that much controversy. I mean, I don’t think most people disagree that it seems likely there’s an absolute truth about each individual facet of everything that exists—some blanket, single code about everything that is the truth. That concept is pretty straightforward in itself. It’s when humans start talking about the truth that things get pretty crazy. The real tough question is, what is that truth, and what makes it true when viewing it through the lens of a human? It gets tough because we’re all viewing the same exact scene unfolding out in front of us, but we’re all viewing it through a different filter and from a slightly different vantage point.

Now, because of that—and this is something that’s actually a big issue in philosophy moving forward—we might have to be willing to accept as humans that we can’t arrive at the truth. We might have to accept that, as beings living on this planet—whatever you think we are—that discovering the absolute truth about everything, or anything for that matter, isn’t a function of our existence. I mean, we might not even have the equipment to find the truth. So, to understand this, it’s kind of related to your own personal worldview.

For example, if you think we evolved from monkeys, you might not think that we even have a brain that’s necessarily designed to understand the fabric of space and time, all the complexities of existence. You might think our brains are more designed to socialize with each other, to pick bananas, to exercise and reproduce with each other. Now, on the other hand, if you think we’re spiritual beings programmed into this body by God or some creator, maybe you think God didn’t put us here to understand how he did everything. Maybe he put us here just to follow certain behavioral restrictions and to be judged on our actions.

I mean, whatever you think, the key thing is that it’s never been obvious to us what the truth is. And because of that ambiguity, truth has always been a subjective term to us. I mean, people arrive at their own truth about things. You hear it all the time. “This is my truth.” Well, one other important question to ask yourself is, if you arrived at the truth, would you even know it? How could you know that that truth isn’t just another step on your journey towards arriving at the truth some other date?

Now, this subject is actually one of the biggest problems in philosophy. And it’s ten times more complicated than this, and we’re going to talk about all of it. But it’s focused on so much for good reason. Just think of what’s at stake when we think about the truth. Now, this is going to be a shocker to everybody listening, but throughout history people haven’t always agreed on what the truth is. We see the same story repeat itself all throughout human history.

Some guy arrives at what he sees as the absolute truth, and then he uses that truth as the basis for doing a bunch of evil stuff—for subjugating entire groups of people, for committing mass genocide, for trying to take over the world. What’s even scarier about that is that most of these truths, at least at the time that they were arrived at, seemed to be based on sound logic. And what do you do when two really smart people arrive at what they call the truth, and they’re diametric opposites of each other? One of them has to be wrong. And it has to be a problem with the method they used to arrive at truth.

So, philosophers from the very beginning recognized that. They realized the importance of this question: what is truth, and what is the proper method to arrive at that truth? They realized that their answers to these questions not only had their lives in the balance, but the future of all humanity. They were thinking of us at the time, really. And make no mistake, if they didn’t do this, if they didn’t go through this process, the world would be a very different place for us today.

And that’s what today’s episode is: three genius thinkers from the Islamic world and their three completely different approaches to the best way to arrive at truth. They came to very different conclusions, but all three approaches are based on sound logic. And really, they had to be. In fact, the entire Middle Ages, at least when it comes to philosophy, is distinguished by a heightened focus on logic. What’s even more cool about their different approaches is that all three of them relate to us in modern times in some unique way. And we’re going to talk about that too. By the end of the show, we’ll not only see how thought progressed in the Islamic world throughout the centuries, but we’ll understand more about the two time periods on either side of Avicenna. Because remember, the period is typically broken down into two parts—before Avicenna and after Avicenna.

So, I guess the best way to start is to talk about that before-Avicenna part. It began in the seventh century. There was this violent clashing of two different cultures coming together. But it’s funny, if you were to just look at it, it wouldn’t really appear to be that violent of a clashing. I mean, when we think of a violent clashing, we think of, like, fireworks, explosions, some Jason Statham movie, right? But it didn’t happen like that in an instant. Sometimes when two cultures violently clash, it’s more like that violent clash that happens when two tectonic plates slam together and make a mountain. It’s still a violent clash, but it takes place over a long period of time.

Now, in our example today, the two tectonic plates that are slamming together are this newly created Muslim empire in the seventh century and this large land region that in modern times is comprised of Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The intellectual history of the region would eventually become embodied in the city of Baghdad, which would eventually become the capital city of this newly founded Muslim empire. See, the truth for Baghdad was legitimized by their hundreds of years of rich history of science and philosophy—the pursuit of truth. Truth for the Muslim empire was legitimized by the sword. They just conquered the entire region. That whole land region was under the control of the Persian empire at the time.

And if you were living there when the Muslim empire conquered you, you had two choices: you could convert to Islam or pay an extremely high tax that most people couldn’t afford. What I’m trying to get at is that it certainly wasn’t paradise for anybody living as a non-Muslim during this time period in this region. And all of these things came together to create a lot of tension between these two cultures when they tried to exist alongside each other.

It was kind of a weird place to be in if you’re the Muslim empire. I mean, nobody’s going to beat you in a direct military engagement. You don’t got to worry about that. The question just becomes, how do you command the front lines of this culture war that’s going on simultaneously? Could the history of thought in the area—you know, thought based around truth being arrived at through reason with this Hellenic philosophy deeply entrenched in the culture—could that be reconciled with truth based on fulfillment of prophecy, truth given to us by God and recorded in a book? Is it even possible to reconcile the two?

Not only is it possible, but what’s the best way to deal with this problem? Should we forcefully take over cultural control of the entire area, stamp out everything that isn’t exclusively Islam? Or should we try to find some sort of common ground between the two, find some way that they can coexist with each other?

Well, luckily for us, they decided to try to coexist. And the attempt of philosophers to try to reconcile these two very different ways of looking at truth is really what defines this before-Avicenna stage where they mostly just translated work by Greek philosophers into Arabic. But it’s important to note, it wasn’t just translating. They were also writing commentaries on all these earlier works to try to make them relatable to people during their time period. And this is where people like al-Farabi come into the picture.

There would not be a revolutionary thinker like Avicenna if there was nobody to set the stage for him like al-Farabi. In fact, there’s a story Avicenna tells in one of his books where he tries to read Aristotle’s Metaphysics and understand it, but he can’t understand it. And so, he reads it again and again and again and still can’t understand it. He says he read Aristotle’s Metaphysics 40 times and still didn’t understand it. The most impressive part about that is that he didn’t literally read it 40 times; 40 is just a number they used back then for “I can’t even count how many times I read it. Let’s just call it 40.” Back then it’s like saying “I read it a million-kagillion times,” which, by the way, how messed up is that? In modern times, if you’re turning 40, you’re already a little insecure about your age creeping up there. How must it feel to know that your age is the hyperbole that humans used to use for a number that’s so vast, let’s just not even worry about the actual number? Let’s just call it 40. I mean, that’s just terrible.

But the important part is that Avicenna read Aristotle’s Metaphysics a lot of times and didn’t understand it until he read al-Farabi’s commentary on it. And then he instantly understood it. And that’s actually very important. Even someone as brilliant as Avicenna—even he couldn’t understand Aristotle’s Metaphysics because there was just too large of a cultural and time period gap between when Aristotle lived and when Avicenna lived. And al-Farabi made it accessible to him.

This is actually something al-Farabi talks about. He said, “Aristotle expressed the canons of logic by means of words customary among the people of his language and used examples that were familiar to and current among the people of his day. But since the explanations of the people of the Arabic language are not customary to the people of Greece, and the examples of the people of this time are different from the examples familiar to the Greeks, the points that Aristotle intended to clarify by means of these examples have become unclear to and not understood by the people of our time.”

So, what he’s obviously alluding to there is that al-Farabi is kind of like me. Al-Farabi was doing his own version of Philosophize This! way back in the day. See, he realized something. When Aristotle was writing all this stuff down, he was communicating it through a lot of unnecessary limitations. He was writing it in the very limited language of his day. He was explaining it to the culture of his day and using examples that they could relate to. He wasn’t thinking about future generations. What al-Farabi thought is, maybe some of the blame for the current time period not relating to Aristotle as well as they could has to do with the way that it’s being explained. He updated the examples. He explained it in a way that people actually cared about. He was a peacemaker between the two cultures. And this is really what defines the philosophy of the time period, this peacemaking between two very different time periods.

But if you think al-Farabi is a peacemaker, you got to hear about al-Kindi. Al-Kindi—if I had to sum him up—he just wanted everybody to get along already. He actually spent a lot of his time trying to create a full philosophical system that fused together all the best parts of Plato’s philosophy and Aristotle’s philosophy, who, as we know, are typically seen as way too different to ever be fused together. But he tried. But by far the most important peacemaking venture that he ever embarked on was making a case for the fact that using philosophy to search for the truth and arriving at the truth through fulfillment of prophecy are not mutually exclusive things. They both can exist alongside each other perfectly.

Really, I think it comes down to the slightly different way that al-Kindi defines philosophy. That’s what allows for the two to coexist. He says, “Indeed, the human art which is highest in degree and most noble in rank is the art of philosophy, the definition of which is the true knowledge of things insofar as is possible for man.” Insofar as is possible for man—that’s the beauty right there in one sentence. See, what al-Kindi believed is that we can’t reasonably expect to be able to arrive at all truth through our ability to reason. I mean, just imagine how giant that encyclopedia would be. How can we expect to know everything through reason? But he would point out that we can certainly find out a lot of things through reason. So, what we should do is use reason to know as much as we possibly can, and then add on divine knowledge given to us through the prophets to fill in the gaps.

Whatever we do, though, the thing of paramount importance to al-Kindi is that the truth is the most important thing, not our feelings about the truth or what it says about who we are. In fact, he said this, “We ought not to be ashamed of appreciating the truth and of acquiring it wherever it comes from, even if it comes from races distant and nations different from us. For the seeker of truth nothing takes precedence over the truth…The status of no one is diminished by the truth; rather does the truth ennoble all.” Now, this is a beautiful sentiment from al-Kindi. The truth is the most important thing, not how the truth makes you feel, not how different the person looks who’s bringing you the truth, not how stupid you’ll feel for having not known the truth up until this point. The truth ennobles all.

Now, the type of people al-Kindi’s lecturing with this statement—we still deal with these types of people all over the place in modern society. One search for truth we can all relate to in some capacity is trying to find where you fit in the spectrum of modern politics. I think that’s something everybody goes through. You look at modern politics; you see these people obviously disagree on a lot of things. Both sides cite their own statistics proving their side to be correct and the other side to be wrong. But they can’t both be correct, right? So, what do I think the truth is? And I think this is the reason so many people grow ambivalent about American politics, is because these commentators on TV don’t think about the truth like al-Kindi did.

How can anybody looking for it possibly know what the truth is? And I guess that’s what both sides are banking on to a certain degree. But the average person has a lot of things going on: a full-time job, a family, hobbies, a home to maintain, personal goals. When they start looking for what the truth is, and they turn on MSNBC and they hear about how George Bush and his evil syndicate of minions are destroying the world still, and then they flip over to Fox News and they hear about how all of what they just heard is completely false, and it’s really Obama that’s destroying the world—what are they supposed to think? Especially considering that if any of these commentators ever heard—like, if news came out that science has proven irrefutably that they’re wrong and the other side is right, they’d find some way to spin it so that they’d never have to make a concession. And then they’d keep going on with what they do best. They aren’t interested in the truth or the real news; they’re not interested in ennobling all, as al-Kindi would say. And given how much the media affects the decision-making of the average person, just imagine if they did take a page out of al-Kindi’s book.

So, it was the translations and commentaries by people like al-Kindi and al-Farabi that led to a great thinker like Avicenna. But then, shortly after Avicenna stopped writing, people started commentating on what Avicenna had to say. And one of his most famous detractors, and a man that more than almost anyone else looked into what it meant to arrive at the truth, was al-Ghazali. Now, it’s spelled G-H-A-Z-A-L-I, but it’s pronounced with a very nice, beautiful rolling of the G sound and the R sound together. Personally, I’m not even going to try. It’s going to be nothing but a butchering of this man’s name and the beautiful language. So, I’m just going to call him al-Ghazali from now on, and everyone’s going to know what I mean.

Now, al-Ghazali’s search for what the truth is began at a very early age. He said, “Consequently, as I drew near the age of adolescence the bonds of mere authority ceased to hold me and inherited beliefs lost their grip upon me, for I saw that Christian youths always grew up to be Christian, Jewish youths to be Jews, Muslim youths to be Muslim…. My inmost being was moved to discover what this original nature really was and what the beliefs derived from the authority of parents and teachers really were. And also to make distinctions among the authority-based opinions and in distinguishing between the true and false in them…. Therefore, I said within myself, to begin with, what I am looking for is knowledge of what things really are, so I must undoubtedly try to find what knowledge really is.”

He looked around him, and he saw that most people just kind of believe whatever the authority figures tell them to believe. He looked around him; he noticed that children that grow up in the various religious settings always end up being the same religion as their parents. He noticed that teachers told students the way things were, but he never saw people really ever questioning it. In the quote we just read, he calls these sorts of things authority-based opinions. Al-Ghazali saw that the authority figures were usually right about things but not always. And they certainly weren’t right simply because they were authority figures. So, this led him to start questioning. He started questioning all the things around him.

He asked himself, what should truth be based on? And when I find that basis, what can I know for certain? And this conclusion he came to changed his life. The only things we can know for certain are things that are so true that it’s impossible for anyone to even cause doubt in your mind about them, things that are so true they’re practically self-evident. Now, as people that study philosophy, we already know this dark, depressing path he’s about to go down. I mean, we’ve already heard stories of renowned skeptics like Carneades standing up in front of the Romans and arguing for justice and winning the entire crowd over; and then the next day arguing the complete opposite viewpoint against justice, and winning the entire crowd over again. How is al-Ghazali going to arrive at a place where anything is self-evident to him?

Well, what he decides after thinking about it for a while is that there’s only two things as far as he can see that we can be certain about. And those are sense perceptions and necessary truths. By sense perceptions he’s talking about—unless you’re dreaming or hallucinating—when we see something in front of us like a chair, for example, we can be pretty sure it’s there. By necessary truths, he’s talking about things that are the case because their essence makes it so—things like a square has four sides. If for some reason a square didn’t have four sides, then it wouldn’t be a square anymore by definition. It’s necessary that a square has four sides.

But al-Ghazali goes even further. See, this is what you do when you’re brilliant. He pulls a Socrates on himself. He ends up asking himself, well, how can I ever know that I’m not dreaming or hallucinating? And when it comes to the necessary truths, how can I ever be sure that I’m never going to exist in some realm where the necessary truths no longer apply? He said, “Is my reliance on sense-perception and my trust on the soundness of necessary truths of the same kind as my previous trust in the beliefs I had merely taken over from others and as trust most men have in the results of thinking? Or is it justified trust that is in no danger of being betrayed or destroyed?”

A quick rule of thumb for anybody listening—never pull a Socrates on yourself. Because when al-Ghazali did, it really messed him up. His story goes that apparently for ten years he had this terrible disease of skepticism about everything. He had no idea what to think about anything around him. He was so distraught by this skepticism that it affected his physical health. He felt sick. No doctor knew what to do to cure him. He ended up getting so sick he had to quit his prestigious job teaching and go on a spiritual quest to try to find himself, to cure himself of this skepticism. Well, it worked. He ends up coming back; he found the fundamental flaw in the way that he was thinking about everything that cursed him for so many years.

He says it here: “Faith in prophecy is to acknowledge the existence of a sphere beyond reason; into this sphere, an eye penetrates whereby man apprehends special objects-of-apprehension. From these reason is excluded in the same way as the hearing is excluded from apprehending colors and sight from apprehending sounds and all the senses from apprehending the objects-of-reason.” Basically what he’s saying is, look, reason is cool and all, but we’re humans. We have limitations. How can we think that we can know everything through reason? Some things, al-Ghazali says, we just can’t know through reason alone. And it’s a very narrow-minded way of thinking to restrict yourself to only reason when arriving at conclusions.

When it comes to all those things, the things that we can’t know through reason alone, we need the prophets to tell us the truth. He recognized that philosophy had some value, but we needed to keep it in its proper place, cut down a couple notches. Philosophy needs to speak when spoken to and never more. After all, at best philosophy is using reason to arrive at conclusions. But that isn’t the ultimate form of understanding. When you only use reason to understand something, you’re never experiencing the truth first-hand. He actually makes a very good point. He said, “What a difference between knowing the definition of health together with its causes and being healthy.”

Al-Ghazali right here reminds me a little bit of Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting. Remember when he says to Matt Damon’s character, “I could ask you about art, and you’d probably be able to quote me every art book ever written; you’d be able to explain stylistic choices and all sorts of stuff. But I bet you don’t have the faintest idea of what it feels like to look up at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and to experience that.” See, he makes a distinction between knowing a ton about something and actually experiencing it. There’s certainly a difference between the two.

The key for al-Ghazali was to understand that you can never think your way to arriving at the conclusions that the prophets laid out. It’s futile to even try. Instead what you should do is accept on faith all the things that the prophets said. And once you do, it’ll become clear to you when you look around and see the truth in the world around you. Al-Ghazali just looked around him and saw all these philosophers that claimed to be free from these authority-based opinions, but in his eyes they had just shifted where they were imprisoned. Now they were imprisoned in the confines of using only reason to arrive at truth.

Through all this, al-Ghazali brings up a really good point. And we actually touched on it briefly at the beginning of the show. Maybe human reason in itself is incapable of grasping certain elements of the truth. Maybe the only way to know them is to first accept them as the truth and then look around you and see all the effects of that truth. Personally, I think that’s a pretty dangerous recipe. If there’s one thing human beings are good at, it’s mistaking correlation with causality. You don’t have to look very far in any direction in modern times to see people that think one thing is causing something, and then it turns out later there was no correlation between the two things; it was actually something completely different causing it.

The example that comes to mind is the indigenous tribe throwing people into the volcano because that’s how you appease the volcano gods and make them not shoot lava at your town. It’s dangerous because if you accept something on faith first, you’re relying on your own judgment to make an accurate correlation. And I think that’s something we’ve proven we’re not very good at. But it seems like al-Ghazali thought that the philosophers were even more lost. In fact, he thought they were downright incoherent, which explains the title of his most famous work, The Incoherence of the Philosophers.

Well, the last guy we’re going to talk about today didn’t agree with al-Ghazali on most things, which explains the title of his most famous work, The Incoherence of the Incoherence. His name was Averroes. Now, Averroes was living during a time long after al-Farabi and al-Kindi, long after the time when the relationship between religion and philosophy in the East could be symbolized by one of those COEXIST bumper stickers. Things were heating up. Now philosophy was way beyond finding some alternative way of looking at older philosophy and finding a way that it’s compatible with Islam. Now Islam had its own philosophy. They had centuries to study what everybody else had to say, and by this time they pretty much knew who they agreed with and who they didn’t agree with. That’s where Averroes comes in.

He was a little bit of a Renaissance man. Sometimes I wonder if he wished he lived a few generations before during the time before Avicenna when people were writing commentaries on Aristotle. Because that’s almost all he did. But what he’s most famous for is his response to al-Ghazali and his theory of the best way to arrive at truth.

The key takeaway from this is that Averroes didn’t think that either religion or philosophy was a useless way to arrive at the truth. He actually thought they both were good. He just thought they specialized in different areas. Some things philosophy is better at; some things religion is better at. He thought there should be something like a business arrangement between the two of them. Because after all, they both greatly benefit each other when they’re both doing what they’re best at.

He says that philosophy should appreciate religion because there’s no way people could dedicate their lives to thinking about stuff if it wasn’t for all the civil order that religion provides. See, he thought that not everybody is intellectually capable of understanding philosophy or of grasping certain concepts. So, what religion does is provide an easily digestible version of the truth, which they accept on faith because they’re never going to arrive at those truths based on reason.

He said, “The religions are, according to the philosophers, obligatory, since they lead towards wisdom in a way universal to all human beings, [for] philosophy only leads a certain number of people to the knowledge of intellectual happiness, and they therefore have to learn wisdom, whereas religions seek the instruction of the masses generally. Since the existence of the learned class is only perfected and its full happiness attained by participation with the class of the masses, the general doctrine is also obligatory for the existence and life of this special class.”

Because of this, philosophers shouldn’t stir up trouble. They shouldn’t worry about shouting out to the masses all the problems with religion because that’s the best the masses are ever going to do, as far as Averroes saw it. What possible benefit can you get from that? What possible benefit can you get from casting doubt into the hearts of people that believe something? In fact, Averroes thought, if philosophers do make people question their faith in religion, it’s downright irresponsible.

What Averroes thinks people capable of understanding philosophy should do is carefully pick the best religion of their time period and then endorse it wholeheartedly. That’s the responsible thing to do. But the catch is, they should leave themselves open to a new religion coming along that does an even better job at conveying the truth to the masses, and then they should convert to that. He says, “Further, he is under obligation to choose the best religion of his period even when they are all equally true for him, and he must believe that the best will be abrogated by the induction of a still better.”

Now, I don’t agree with Averroes that most people are incapable of understanding philosophy. But then again, it’s easy for me to disagree with him living in modern times knowing how much more we know about human psychology and genetics. But I like to think that if Averroes was privy to modern science and saw the world that we live in today, he wouldn’t say that most people are incapable of understanding philosophy; he’d just say that most people are unwilling. And that doesn’t make them bad people.

Humans typically take the path of least resistance. From a survival-oriented perspective it makes sense. I mean, if you need water and you have two choices—you got a fresh-water stream directly in front of you and a fresh-water stream on the other side of that dangerous rockface—which one is more reasonable for you to get water from? Now, knowing that, if people are born into a world nowadays where they have a choice—the ethical doctrine that’s right in front of them or the ethical doctrine that’s arrived at through hundreds of hours of contemplation weighing the pros and cons of each individual virtue—which path can we expect most people to take?

I mean, there’s two ways to go about it. You can be told by a parent or a pastor that lying is wrong, that only bad people lie, and if you do it, bad things are going to happen to you, and then accept that. Or you can think about the benefits of being an honest person versus a dishonest person. For example, when you’re honest, you have more meaningful relationships with people, which positively affects you emotionally. If you’re an honest person, people are going to trust you more. So, naturally, more opportunities are going to be thrown your way because people trust you with them, etc. And there’s a hundred more.

And both examples are reaping the same benefits of being a virtuous person. Both people are acting as if they are wise people. If the only difference between them is that one person attributes all the good in their life to a supernatural God reaching his hand down and blessing them for doing things right, and the other person attributes all the good to being a natural byproduct of living virtuously, I wonder—and Averroes would wonder too—why is there a significant group of people that think religion as an institution should be abolished?

Now it’s time for the question of the week. I want you to think about the second example of truth in our episode today, al-Ghazali. Now, if you remember, he said to arrive at truth you first need to accept things based on faith; and then through experiencing the world around you, you can arrive at truths that are much stronger than truths based merely in reason alone. Well, think about that for a second. And philosophize this: are there things we cannot prove with reason alone, things that aren’t magical in the slightest bit, things that every day, whether we realize it or not, we accept them on faith?

Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you soon.