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Ibn Miskawayh, Ahmad ibn Muhammad (c.940-1030)
Ibn Miskawayh, Ahmad ibn Muhammad (c.940-1030) Like
so many of his contemporaries in the
fourth and fifth centuries AH (tenth
and eleventh centuries AD) Ibn
Miskawayh was eclectic in
philosophy, basing his approach upon
the rich variety of Greek philosophy
that had been translated into
Arabic. Although he applied that
philosophy to specifically Islamic
problems, he rarely used religion to
modify philosophy, and so came to be
known as very much an Islamic
humanist. He represents the tendency
in IIslamic philosophy to fit Islam
into a wider system of rational
practices common to all humanity.
Ibn Miskawayh’s Neoplatonism has
both a practical and a theoretical
side. He provides rules for the
preservation of moral health based
on a view of the cultivation of
character.
These describe the ways
in which the various parts of the
soul can be brought together into
harmony, so achieving happiness. It
is the role of the moral philosopher
to prescribe rules for moral health,
just as the doctor prescribes rules
for physical health. Moral health isbased upon a combination of
intellectual development and
practical action. 1 Metaphysics Like
so many of his philosophical
contemporaries, Ahmad ibn Muhammad
ibn Miskawayh, born in Rayy in
Persia c.AH 320/AD 940, combined an
active political career with an
important philosophical role.
A
historian as well as a philosopher,
he served as a Buwayhid official at
Baghdad, Isfahan and Rayy. He was a
member of the distinguished group of
intellectuals including al-Tawhidi
and al-Sijistani. He died in AH
421/AD 1030. Although not an
important figure on the creative
side of Islamic philosophy, he is a
very interesting adaptor of existing
ideas, especially those arising out
of the Neoplatonic tradition in the
Islamic world (see Neoplatonism in
Islamic philosophy). Ibn Miskawayh
wrote on a wide variety of topics,
ranging from history to psychology
and chemistry, but in philosophy his
metaphysics seems to have been
generally informed by a version of
Neoplatonism. He avoids the problem
of reconciling religion with
philosophy by claiming that the
Greek philosophers were in no doubt
concerning the unity and existence
of God. He goes so far as to suggest
that Aristotle’s identification of
the creator with an unmoved mover is
a powerful argument in favor of a
creator acceptable to Islam, since
the very distinct nature of such a
being prevents our normal categories
of description from making sense.
Such a creator can only be described
in terms of negative concepts, an
interesting prefigurement of the
tradition of the via negativa in
philosophy.
He has an unusual
account of emanation, wherein the
deity produces the active intellect,
the soul and the heavens without
intermediaries, making one suspect
that he did not have a firm grasp of
the distinction between emanation
and creation. The normal Neoplatonic
account of emanation then current in
Islamic philosophy used the notion
of a scale of being that separates
these different divine products far
more radically. It is difficult to
see how Ibn Miskawayh really
reconciles metaphysical difficulties
at this point. 2 Ethical writings
Ibn Miskawayh’s work on ethics,
however, is of a much higher order,
and does show evidence of
considerable conceptual complexity.
In his Taharat al-a‘raq (Purity of
Dispositions), better known as
Tahdhib al-akhlaq (Cultivation of
Morals) - which is not to be
confused by the work of the same
name by Yahya Ibn ‘Adi - he sets
out to show how we might acquire the
right dispositions to perform
morally correct actions in an
organized and systematic manner. The
basis of his argument is his
account, adopted from Plato, of the
nature of the soul, which he sees as
a self-subsisting entity or
substance, in marked contrast to the
Aristotelian notion (see Soul,
nature and immortality of the). The
soul distinguishes us from animals,
from other human beings and from
things, and it uses the body and the
parts of the body to attempt to come
into contact with more spiritual
realms of being. The soul cannot be
an accident (or property of the
body) because it has the power to
distinguish between accidents and
essential concepts and is not
limited to awareness of accidental
things by the senses.
Rather, it can
apprehend a great variety of
immaterial and abstract entities. If
the soul were only an accident it
could do none of these things, but
could only perform in the limited
way of the physical parts of the
body. The soul is not an accident,
and when we want to concentrate upon
abstract issues the body is actually
an obstruction that we must avoid if
we are to make contact with
intelligible reality. The soul,
then, is an immortal and independent
substance that controls the body. It
has an essence opposite to that of
the body, and so cannot die; it is
involved in an eternal and circular
motion, replicated by the
organization of the heavens. This
motion takes two directions, either
upwards towards reason and the
active intellect or downwards
towards matter. Our happiness arises
through upwards movement, our
misfortunes through movement in the
opposite direction. Ibn
Miskawayh’s discussion of virtue
combines Aristotelian with Platonic
ideas (see Virtue ethics). Virtue is
the perfection of the aspect of the
soul (that is, human reason) that
represents the essence of humanity
and distinguishes it from lower
forms of existence. Our virtue
increases in so far as we develop
and improve our ability to
deliberate and apply reason to our
lives. We should do this in
accordance with the mean, the point
most distant from two extremes, and
justice results when we manage to
achieve this. Ibn Miskawayh combines
the Platonic division of virtues
with an Aristotelian understanding
of what virtue actually is, and adds
to this the idea that the more these
virtues can be treated as a unity,
the better. This is because, he
argues, that unity is equivalent to
perfection, while multiplicity is
equivalent to a meaningless
plurality of physical objects. This
idea is not just based upon a
Pythagorean aesthetic
(see Pythagoreanism). Ibn
Miskawayh argues further that the
notion of justice when it deals with
eternal and immaterial principles is
a simple idea, while human justice
by contrast is variable and depends
upon the changing nature of
particular states and communities.
The law of the state is based upon
the contingent features of the time,
while the divine law specifies what
is to be done everywhere and at
every time. Ibn Miskawayh uses the
notion of friendship to distinguish
between those relationships that are
essentially transitory and variable
(in particular those based upon
pleasure) and those based upon the
intellect, which are also
pleasurable but not in a physical
way.
Our souls can recognize
similarly perfected souls, and as a
result enjoy intense intellectual
delight. This is very different from
the normal kind of friendship, in
which people form relationships with
each other because they want to get
something out of it. Still, even
those capable of the most perfect
form of relationship have to involve
themselves in the less perfect
levels of friendship, since they
must live in society if they are to
achieve perfection, and so must
satisfy at least some of the
expectations of society (see
Friendship). The highest form of
happiness exists when we can abandon
the requirements of this world and
are able to receive the emanations
flowing from above that will perfect
our intellects and enable us to be
illuminated by divine light. The
eventual aim seems to be the
throwing off of the trappings of our
physical existence and following
entirely spiritual aims in mystical
contemplation of the deity. 3
Practical ethics and humanism This
mystical level of happiness seems to
rank higher than mere intellectual
perfection, yet Ibn Miskawayh is
particularly interesting in the
practical advice he gives on how to
develop our ordinary capacity for
virtue. He regards the cultivation
of our moral health in a very
Aristotelian way as akin to the
cultivation of physical health,
requiring measures to preserve our
moral equilibrium (see Aristotle
§§23-6). We ought to keep our
emotions under control and carry out
practices that help both to restrain
us on particular occasions and also
to develop personality traits that
will maintain that level of
restraint throughout our lives.
To
eradicate faults, we must
investigate their ultimate causes
and seek to replace these with more
helpful alternatives. Take the fear
of death, for example: this is a
baseless fear, since the soul is
immortal and cannot die. Our bodies
will perish, but they must do so
since we are contingent; to
acknowledge that contingency and
also to wish that we were not thus
contingent is some sort of
contradiction. If we are worried by
the pain involved in dying, then it
is the pain we fear, not death
itself. Ibn Miskawayh argues, along
with al-Kindi (§3) and the Cynics
and Stoics who no doubt influenced
him on this issue, that to reconcile
ourselves to reality we have to
understand the real nature of our
feelings (see Cynics; Stoicism). We
have to use reason to work out what
we should do and feel, since
otherwise we are at the mercy of our
feelings and the varying influences
that come to us from outside
ourselves (see Death).This emphasis
upon the capacity of the human mind
to use reason to help us determine
what we should do and who we are has
led the most distinguished
commentator on Ibn Miskawayh,
Mohammed Arkoun (1970), to call him
a humanist and part of the general
humanist movement of his time. It is
certainly true that religion plays a
small part in Ibn Miskawayh’s
writings, and when he does consider
Islam he often gives its religious
practices a rather instrumental
rationale. Al-Ghazali (§2) was
infuriated by Ibn Miskawayh’s
suggestion that the point of
communal prayer is to base religion
upon the natural gregariousness of
human beings in society. This seemed
to al-Ghazali to disparage the
religious enterprise, since he
argued that the significance of
religious rituals is that they are
specified by the religion, and there
can be no other reason. Their
rationale is that they are
unreasonable. God indicates the huge
gap that exists between him and us
by setting us unpleasant and
difficult tasks. For Ibn Miskawayh,
the reason for the ritual is that it
has a part to play in helping us
adapt to religious life, using the
dispositions that are natural to us,
so that the rules and customs of
religion are essentially reasonable.
A whole range of authorities may be
consulted to help us understand our
religious duties concerning how we
are to live and what we are to
believe; some of these are Islamic,
while others are not. Ibn Miskawayh
seems on the whole to accord greater
respect to Greek rather than
specifically Islamic authorities.
Ibn Miskawayh’s thought proved to
be influential. His style, combining
abstract thought with practical
observations, is attractive and
remained popular long after his
death. Sometimes he merely presents
aspects of ‘wisdom’ literature
from previous cultures; sometimes he
provides practical comments upon
moral problems that are entirely
unanalytical. At its best, however,
his philosophy is highly analytical
and maintains a high degree of
coherence and consistency. The fact
that he mixes together aspects of
Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Galen
and other thinkers influenced by
Greek philosophy is not an
indication of cultural looting but
rather a creative attempt at using
these different approaches to cast
light upon important issues. Ibn
Miskawayh shows how possible it is
to combine a Platonic conception of
the soul with an Aristotelian
account of moral development. The
idea of a still higher realm of
being at which the soul comes into
contact with divine reality is a
perfectly feasible addition to the
account he gives of social and
intellectual life. He never imports
the notion of revelation to resolve
theoretical difficulties, and we
have seen how his approach both
annoyed and stimulated al-Ghazali.
It is perhaps the combination in Ibn
Miskawayh of elegance of style,
practical relevance and
philosophical rigour that prolonged
his influence in the Islamic world.
See also: Ethics in Islamic
philosophy; Neoplatonism in Islamic
philosophy; Soul in Islamic
philosophy OLIVER LEAMAN Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version 1.0, London:
Routledge
List of works
Ibn Miskawayh (before 1030) Tahdhib al-akhlaq
(Cultivation of Morals), ed. C.
Zurayk,
Beirut: American
University of Beirut Centennial
Publications, 1966; trans. C. Zurayk,
The
Refinement
of Character, Beirut: American
University of Beirut, 1968.(A
summary of Ibn
Miskawayh’s
ethical system. This work is also
known as Taharat al-a‘raq (Purity
of
Dispositions).)
References
and further reading
Arkoun, M. (1961-2) ‘Deux épîtres de
Miskawayh’ (Two Treatises of
Miskawayh), Bulletin
d’ةtudes
Orientales
(Institut Français de Damas)
17: 7-74.(A clear account of Ibn
Miskawayh’s
general metaphysics as well as his
ethics.)
Arkoun,
M. (1970) Contribution à l’ةtude
de l’humanisme arabe au IVe/Xe siècle:
Miskawayh, philosophe et historien
(320/325-421) = (932/936-1030)
(Contribution to
the
Study of Arab Humanism in the
4th/10th Century: Miskawayh,
Philosopher and
Historian),
Paris: Vrin; revised 2nd edn, 1982.
(The standard exegesis of Ibn
Miskawayh’s
contribution
to philosophy and history.)
Fakhry, M. (1975) ‘The
Platonism of Miskawayh and its
Implications for his Ethics’,
Studia
Islamica
43: 39-57.(A careful account of the
Platonic and Neoplatonic influences
on Ibn
Miskawayh.)
Goodman,
L. (1996) ‘Friendship in
Aristotle, Miskawayh and al-Ghazali’,
in
O. Leaman (ed.)
Friendship
East and West: Philosophical
Perspectives, Richmond: Curzon,
164-91.(A
range
of views on friendship, and their
philosophical significance
explained.)
Kraemer,
J. (1984) ‘Humanism in the
Renaissance of Islam: a Preliminary
Study’, Journal of
the American Oriental Society 104 (1): 135-64.(An account of Ibn
Miskawayh’s place in the
culture of Islamic humanism.)
Leaman,
O. (1996a) ‘Ibn Miskawayh’, in
S.H. Nasr and O. Leaman (eds)
History of Islamic
Philosophy,
London: Routledge, 252-7.(An account
of the context within which Ibn
Miskawayh
worked and the influence of his
views.)
Leaman, O. (1996b)
‘Islamic Humanism in the
Fourth/Tenth Century’, in S.H. Nasr and O.
Leaman (eds) History of Islamic
Philosophy, London: Routledge,
155-61.(Survey of a group
of
thinkers including Ibn Miskawayh,
al-Tawhidi and al-Sijistani.)
Leaman,
O. (1996c) ‘Secular Friendship and
Religious Devotion’, in O. Leaman
(ed.)
Friendship
East and West: Philosophical
Perspectives, Richmond:
Curzon.(Account of Ibn
Miskawayh’s
notion of friendship and comparison
with contrary views.)
Routledge
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Version
1.0, London: Routledge
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