Delba Winthrop: Aristotle: Democracy and Political Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

 

Note: This review was first published in Social Science and Modern Society, Volume 56, Number 5, September-October 2019.

 

“That democracy is the best, not to mention the only legitimate, form of government is undoubtedly the most vigorously asserted and least examined political opinion of our day.” So the late Delba Winthrop wrote in 1974 in a manuscript published in 2019, more than a decade after her untimely death. She was right then, and she is right now, at least in the West, although the regimes of today’s China and Russia no longer trouble to call themselves democracies. A philosopher will interrogate holders of unexamined opinions, having judged the unexamined life not worth living. In so doing, Winthrop consults that eminent questioner of regime partisans, Aristotle.

Aristotle finds democrats valorizing freedom, which they define as “living as one wishes.” Knowing that such a life requires government protection against those who would constrain them, democrats agree “to rule and be ruled, so far as is necessary, equally with other men who similarly do not wish to be ruled.” This puts democrats in a dilemma: What kind of rule results from the rule of those who want no-rule? If the principle of strict numerical equality—of ‘one person, one vote’—animates the democratic regime, will this not result in the tyranny of the majority, that is, in un-freedom for the minority? More, is living as one wishes good?

The question of goodness raises the further question of whether a numerical, a quantitative, criterion suffices for understanding politics. Can each person within a given political community, a political union or ‘whole,’ be understood adequately as equal to every other? “The democrat’s opinion about what a whole city is depends upon his opinion about what a whole man is.” More generally (a philosopher will ask), what do we mean when we speak of a “whole,” political or other? What’s the relation of the parts to a whole, especially if the parts composing that whole are dissimilar? Whether we look at political communities or at nature, how far does any analysis based on arithmetic, with its principle of “numerical equality,” really get us? “The difficulty with political democracy and the demotic principle of justice is that man seems to differ qualitatively from the beings he counts”; that is, man’s very assertion of his freedom distinguishes him from other elements in nature. “Democracy needs philosophy” and, lest it commit this characteristic democratic mistake when it contemplates the whole, the cosmos, philosophy may need to think seriously not only about democracy but about politics tout court—about all the possible forms political life may take.

Winthrop accordingly considers Book III of Aristotle’s Politics with both philosophic acuity and political astuteness. Book III presents “Aristotle’s comprehensive judgment on democracy,” without neglecting the regimes ruled by one or few. Book III is the core of the book. Winthrop has written a book at the core of the book that arguably forms the core of political science as subsequently understood for a very long time, if not all time.

In reviewing her book, one confronts a perhaps unique problem. What’s likely to remain the best ‘review’ has already been published in the book itself. In the Foreword, Winthrop’s husband, Harvey Mansfield, models what a marriage of true minds must be. His account of her argument will not be surpassed or even equaled, at least here. On the ‘plus’ side, it may be allowed that this fact exemplifies the distinction between numerical equality and equality of quality, making inferior reviews illustrative, if hardly indispensable.

Aristotle’s Politics takes the form of a treatise. It was Leo Strauss who described it as something more than that—as a kind of dialogue, a dialogue between a democrat and an oligarch. Most of Strauss’s readers have taken him to mean simply that ever-equitable Aristotle lays out the strongest arguments for both regimes. Winthrop proposes a more challenging possibility: Aristotle not only puts the democrat and the oligarch into a debate with one another, but he addresses parts of his own argument to democrats and oligarchs, in turn. What looks like a treatise ‘works’ like a set of speeches or interchanges between a philosopher and two kinds of citizen, partisans of two different, indeed rival, regimes. The Politics is Socratic at its heart.

Winthrop finds in the book’s “several arguments” “two educations”: the education of a “political man” who “learns what manliness is and what about himself is worth taking seriously” by learning “about philosophy,” if not necessarily to philosophize; and the education of “a philosopher, a would-be knower of the whole of nature,” who learns that politics “is far more important than he had thought.” “Both educations culminate in a teaching about the human soul and about one might surmise about politics and all things in the light of that knowledge.” Book I of the Politics describes politics in terms of sub-political things, particularly the family. Book II approaches politics in terms of trans-political aspirations, the ‘ideal’ or utopian regimes proposed by men we would not call ‘ideologues.’ Book III brings us to real politics, to arguments over regimes that exist in practice.

What is a citizen? Citizens then and now want to know. A democrat calls a citizen “one who partakes without restriction of time in jury and assembly membership,” judgment and rule. An oligarch, however, insists that the regime or form of rule matters; exactly who is entitled to judge and to rule varies from city to city. Meanwhile, rhetoricians like Gorgias object that the relevant criterion for citizenship is a teachable skill, adroit speech. The philosopher, Aristotle, counters that speech needs to be use “to understand speech,” to bring the speeches of democrats, oligarchs, and rhetoricians to the bar of logic and thereby to assess their rival claims to rule.

The philosophic quest confronts a problem when considering politics: If the city consists preeminently in its regime, not in its population or its physical features, the philosopher must think about something invisible, not a physical object. At the same time, both speeches and regimes address physical objects, from lands and waterways to human bodies. The citizen “is part of the whole that should reveal the whole”; in establishing a regime, citizens participate in the “first cause,” the archē, of the city. But they also generate a form of rule. The pre-Socratic “natural philosophers” who reduced nature to a single, simple material first cause (fire, water) think like democrats; Plato’s Socrates, with his theory of the forms, thinks like an oligarch anxious to distinguish himself from the rabble; Gorgias the rhetorician wants to treat the city and citizenship as artifacts, objects to be made and manipulated. Aristotle aims at a more comprehensive understanding of politics, and with it a more comprehensive understanding of nature. In addition to material, formal, and efficient causes, he wants to understand the telos of the city, and of all things—the ‘end’ or purpose. If one’s regimes inflects the citizens’ understanding of nature, of being, of all reality, then the philosopher, who lives in a city with a particular regime, must understand the (as it were) epistemological limitations or prejudices the regime imposes. And if, therefore, “one can only understand natural beings and natural wholes by looking at them in the light of what one can know about political beings and political wholes,” then “the philosopher would have to take politics very seriously indeed.”

Taking politics seriously means, among other things, understanding what ruling, what governing, is. Rulers legislate and enforce, but before that they must decide, and before that they must think, deliberate. As it’s better to think well than badly taking politics seriously means above all to think well not theoretically but practically, that is, prudently. To think prudently about ruling one must take account not only of citizens’ physical needs but of their demands for honor (often mixed in with demands for justice)—of their spiritedness. Prudence, however, also points to theory, given its tendency to ‘pull back’ from the spirited demands of citizens and to consider what is good for the city and the citizens comprising it. Prudence leads to thought about what ‘the good’ is, of what human nature, is, beyond the goods posited by a given city with a given regime. This suggests that there is a regime beyond the regimes of cities, the regime “comprised of Aristotle and his reader, who, in working to make the spoken clear, makes [that regime] manifest” to those who think along with Aristotle’s arguments.

Aristotle identifies three dimensions of the city’s regime: the “ruling body,” that is, the persons who rule the city; the purpose for which “the city is put together” or “the benefit in common”; and the “forms of rule,” the institutions by which the rulers rule. If “by nature the human being is a political animal,” as Aristotle famously asserts, then both democrats and oligarchs are mistaken in defining their self-interest as “their own physical well-being.” But are they mistaken? Are human beings naturally political? “Aristotle must compare men to other natural beings in order to determine what, if anything, in man’s nature makes him political.” Unlike modern political philosophers, who posit a ‘state of nature’ or ‘original position’ and derive political right from it, Aristotle examines the nature of political rule itself, identifying two kinds: one that claims to rule by “doing services” for the ruled (this might be either democratic or despotic in form); the other that claims to rule in accordance with some idea of the good, in particular the good of the ruled. The first kind of rule focuses on what human beings want, the other on what they should have and be. Both kinds of rule, but especially the second, requires some claim about human nature, and even the nature of “the whole of being” in which human nature exists.

One impediment to understanding politics and human nature is self-interest; the other is the abstraction from self-interest seen in the natural-science attempt to understand politics via mathematics, to “count bodies and then abstract from the bodies to understand the very numbers buy which they count.” But such a scientist cannot explain by means of his science why he undertakes to understand human things scientifically. As Socrates would remark, he lacks self-knowledge. The scientist cannot explain the freedom he exercised to choose the scientific way of life by means of the science he judges authoritative. But “the city exists not for life only, but more for the good life,” and science conceived mathematically cannot distinguish better form worse. “Who,” Aristotle asks, “ought to be sovereign in the city?” Mathematics cannot tell us.

“Virtue or justice is necessary…to overcome the natural preference of each man for what is useful to himself, especially if he deems unsharable wealth most useful.” The lawgivers of the city therefore assert “a common good that is the greatest good for each political being qua political being,” namely “the good for life for the sake of the complete and self-sufficient life,” which individuals and families cannot secure without forming cities with other individuals and families. To do this, they must agree upon or at least accept some way of life; the way of life is the fourth element of what a regime is. Such agreement proves difficult because the human soul consists not only of reason and the desires but thumos, meaning spirit, anger, willfulness. The many who are poor, the tyrannical ‘one,’ the virtuous, or the wealthy, or the respectable ‘few,’ the “one most serious” (that is, the genuine philosopher), and even the impersonal law—all but the latter two often succumb to the promptings of thumos. Even the law, which seems entirely dispassionate, must originate from some ruling body, some real person or person, likely gripped by this ruling passion this passion for ruling.

The democratic regimes which seem so attractive today because they appeal to the bodily desires for peace and prosperity betray the same decidedly un-bodily bent. But if thumos fuels the ambition to rule, and if thumos forms a permanent part of human nature, then “political being is being.” This does not mean tyranny is natural; “free men differ from beasts not by lording it over others”—who has not seen animals seeking dominance over others?—but “by ruling themselves.” Here philosophy, and philosophers, come in, but only if they are “political philosophers,” not “natural philosophers,” ‘pre-Socratics’ who fail to understand the political character of human nature. Before teaching political men, a philosopher needs to learn “from the political man to understand himself as a man who asserts the freedom that nature requires him to assert,” including the freedom to philosophize. That is, before embarking on philosophizing, which seeks to understand nature by reason not by mere assertion, the philosopher must understand the nature of assertion, which he can learn best from that most skilled of asserters, the political man.

Where does this leave ‘our’ regime, “the mixture of regimes that we now call liberal democracy”? It leaves them in need of political philosophy, by which Aristotle most emphatically does not mean what we have come to call ‘ideology,’ some doctrine designed to prescribe a code of belief and conduct. A citizen “intends to be part of a whole that encompasses the fullest human possibilities,” but to achieve those possibilities he must choose and act. Given the “multiplicity, variety, and unity” of a human being as man and as citizen—we are many in number, various in our regimes, one as a species—we need the guidance of philosophy in our quest to find a standard of conduct both sufficiently firm and sufficiently capacious to accommodate both our nature and our circumstances. As for philosophers, they need to become ‘politic’ if they intend to avoid the hostility of citizens offended by their heterodox opinions, but they also need to philosophize about politics in their attempt to understand the whole, the cosmos in which political animals live and form one part. Philosophers, for example, need to understand that ideas are not the whole; sheer physical force, never far from the surface in politics, must never be gainsaid. Speech may be the distinctive human characteristic, but neither human nature but the whole of nature is all talk. ‘Being’ itself is a mixed regime.

Therefore, “the first principle of politics is not dependent upon theoretical natural science,” whose simplicity misses the heterogeneity of things. Such science especially misses the complexities of the human soul, as seen in the perplexities seen in the attempt to establish a science called ‘psychology.’ At the same time, given the need of citizens to assert, given the fact that human assertiveness leads to politics itself, how can philosophers, men who wonder, who question everything navigate political life without disrupting it for the worse and getting themselves killed by spirited, manly men (whether pious or not) in the chaos the philosophers induce?

Rightly understood, “political philosophy does not quash manliness; it educates it.” By engaging ‘manly’ citizens in speech about what ends, what purposes, citizens should pursue, philosophers meet those citizens in precisely the realm citizens share with philosophers as human beings. “What all men share in varying degrees with each other and with Aristotle’s nature or god is speech or reason.” This education or ‘drawing out’ of citizens won’t make philosophers out of them, but if the philosopher takes care not to offend citizen assertiveness or manliness, it may point them in the direction of a way of life that does credit to their humanness.

Is there “a science of human excellence,” which could guide educators in this task? No political science that conceives of itself as a science of the passions, an ’empirical’ science of bodies, can do so. “Nature or chance sets limits, and one’s political”—and educational—aspiration “must therefore be moderate, but one must assert oneself and take public virtue seriously.” To take public virtue seriously, as an educator, is to take kings seriously—not necessarily as rulers in the ordinary sense, but as examples of what a political man should be, with particular attention to his capacity as a wise judge. The science of human excellence—one might call it the royal science or royal way—presents young men with examples of what a good man is. The image of the good king gives the young someone whose character, not merely whose position, they might aspire to, engaging their consent in a quest to become noble, rather than trying to ‘teach’ nobility, impose it from outside—an approach no spirited youth would hesitate to resist. “What is needed in order to give a public defense of man’s politics is to give a plausible account of a natural rule by which thumos, which is necessary for the rule of bodies, is exercised in a nontyrannical way,” by “imposing forms upon themselves.” Nature consists not only of matter but of forms; that spirited young would-be ruler needs the example, the ‘form,’ of the wise king to be set before him, the king whose soul mirrors the symmetries of nature. It is one thing to establish the existence of natural right rationally by philosophizing. The philosopher Aristotle has learned enough about human nature to know that reasoning will not suffice, that the heart itself, thumos, must be prepared to open itself to the rule of reason.

“The standard for political justice is known only with reference to man’s necessity to reason about political or human excellence.” Political philosophy is that measure,” derivative “not from either natural science or theology, but from a consideration of what man reasonably cares to reason about”—first and foremost, his own soul. “Philosophy as substance is more a way of life than a corpus of dogma,” just as statesman is more law-making and prudential response to changing circumstances than it is simple law-abidingness. Aristotle’s “political intention seems to have been to make politics friendly to philosophy by demonstrating the friendship of philosophy to politics,” “win[ning] the trust necessary to treat his patient by giving the best possible defense of democracy, which is at the same time a proposal for its improvement.” 

Clifford Angell Bates, Jr.: The Centrality of the Regime to Political Science. Warsaw: Wydawnicra Universytetu Warsawskiego, 2016.

 

This is exactly the kind of book that has long needed to be written, a book correcting the tendency of political scientists to reduce politics to sub-political categories—race, class, and gender being only the latest iteration of the practice. In so doing, political scientists have supposed it more scientific to make political science apolitical, confusing the political with mere partisanship. It is as if America’s civil-social egalitarianism—its democracy, in Tocqueville’s sense of the word—has inclined students of politics to such atomizing reductionism. Bates stoutly refuses to go along, aiming to restore the classical idea of the regime to its rightful place in political thought.

I look forward to a second edition. The excellencies of this one are vitiated by a few missteps; they are easily corrected. Meanwhile, the first edition is well worth inclusion in the reading list of any introductory university course in political science.

Bates begins by rightly distinguishing the modern state—that modern invention of Machiavelli, who intended it as an instrument for his projected conquest of ‘Fortuna’ and of nature—from the longstanding polis or ‘city-state.’ He goes too far, however, in contending that Machiavelli’s lo stato actually replaces the regime. He contends that the fundamental contrast isn’t between the state and the polis but between the state and the regime. The modern state, according to its philosophic progenitors, amounts to an act of human will aiming at a unified whole; this is indeed no regime. The modern state aims at being a “truly one united whole” having a supposed ‘general will.’ True enough, but it would be much better to say that Machiavelli himself distinguishes two regimes in the modern state—principalities and republics, rule of the one and rule of the many—and that his silence about regimes of the few, of aristocrats and of oligarchs, bespeaks his intention to centralize political communities, to get rid of those intermediary rulers through whom the regimes, the rulers, of ancient city-states and empires, along with those who tried to rule the more recent feudal ‘states,’ had needed to filter their authority in order to govern the people.

This has meant that all modern states have needed bureaucracies of some sort, agents of the regime of those states, and that bureaucrats’ loyalties to the regime are often suspect, as they maneuver themselves into a position of quasi-independence within the states. In so doing, bureaucrats become elements of the regimes of modern states, a status that has bedeviled presidents and prime ministers but also tyrants and despots—making bureaucracy a regime problem that cuts across all regimes in modernity.

How did political communities begin? After all, there remain places in the world in which extended families or clans count for more than any association of families, and even well-established modern states often see important family networks achieving predominance. Bates agrees with Aristotle in considering the family or household to differ from the polis in kind and not merely in size, the polis being the most authoritative form of association among humans. Oddly, he claims that Aristotle’s Politics never shows “how or why the polis became authoritative,” although Aristotle clearly describes the inadequacy of the family to the task of achieving a self-sufficient human life. But in foreclosing an (as it were) intra-Aristotelian account of political authority, he turns to an excellent and older source, Aeschylus’ Oresteia trilogy; in this he cogently follows the scholarship of Heinrich Meier, who sees the political significance of the Greeks’ shift from worshipping the gods of the Underworld to the worship of the Olympians. “As Meier contends, the discovery of the political occurs when political life through community derived decisions override family/kinship derived decision processes.”

In the first play, the Agamemnon, the great military leader of their Greeks, returning to his city, Argos, after defeating the Trojans, brings home “many great prizes,” not the least being Cassandra, a Trojan princess. His wife, Clytemnestra, has proven no less unfaithful, forming a erotic-political alliance with Aegisthus, Agamemnon’s “political enemy.” She justifies her animosity in view of Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter, Iphigeneia, whom he made an offering to the gods as a means of winning their aid in the war. Clytemnestra murders her husband and king in revenge, enabling Aegisthus to accede to the throne. The citizens of Argos—really the subjects of the usurping royal couple—can think of nothing more than to wait for Agamemnon’s son, Orestes, “to remove the newly imposed tyranny.” “Although the citizens can easily rise up and kill both murderers, they lack the authority or sanction” to do so. Only the son has divine sanction to take vengeance on his father’s killers. “The city of Argos is thus reduced to the household of Agamemnon, where only the head of the household has authority to pursue policy”—ruled, as it is, under the authority of the gods of the Underworld, the Furies, the gods of families.

Orestes does return, and does kill his mother and stepfather, on command from the Olympian god, Apollo. The goddess Athena calls a jury trial of Orestes, and persuades the Furies, who would otherwise continue the family revenge-cycle, to integrate themselves into a new political order. The Furies pursue Orestes because he killed his mother, whereas his mother merely killed her husband, no blood relative. (This is the significance of the Biblical injunction, that a woman shall leave her parents upon wedding her husband, and they “shall be one flesh”—constitute a new ‘blood tie.’)  “The household bonds, expressed as kin loyalty, force one to a cycle of revenge, in order to right wrongs done to the family. There is no end to vengeance and no peace. The desire for peace, which is needed for the fulfillment of human happiness (eudaimonia), entails that one rise above one’s own—kin ties—to some other claim that is more authoritative. This other claim is that of the polis.” “Human beings must associate with more than their own kin in order to live well.” “The old gods are aligned with the household and the new gods are aligned with the city”; if human beings intend to live well, they must change their gods—or rather add some who are capable of making peace with the old gods. Human beings must become citizens.

The old gods don’t surrender easily. They hate the city, partly because they denigrate speech. “They will not let any mere words dictate to them,” the building-blocks of the law by which the city will be ruled, or rather through which the new gods will rule in the better interest of the citizens. More, the Furies are too powerful to be forced into line. Apollo unwisely uses words in an attempt to “exclude, reject, or spurn the Furies,” who are far too spirited to bow to the contempt of the Olympians. But Athena “offers them a new and more important role to play in the new dispensation. She offers them beauty and a role in defending the political community, whereas Apollo merely desires their downfall.” Bates calls this “an appeal to the vanity of the Furies,” but it is really an appeal to their thumos, their spiritedness. For Aristotle, it is well to notice, the bond between husband and wife is political, based on oaths, on choice, not merely on ‘biology’—generation or ‘blood.’ 

With respect to the political, Bates observes, Aeschylus identifies two cities with two different regimes. Argos is an elected kingship, Athens “some form of limited democracy.” Once elected, an Argive king passes on his title to his son. In murdering her husband and installing her lover as the monarch, Clytemnestra changes the Argive regime to tyranny. “It is tyrannical in that it both violates the law, nomos, of succession of the title of king from father to son and is rule over unwilling subjects.” That is, under the Argive regime “it is too easy to confuse the household of the king with the city”; “the inaction of the citizens of Argos and their awaiting Orestes to set things right shows that in Argos there is no distinction between household and city,” and that the lack of this distinction inclines the citizens (really subjects) to passivity. Political assassination is really anti-political, striking at the household—in which bond between husband and wife constitutes the one, limited, political dimension of life—and “also at the basis of all non-violent human association,” and “therefore the possibility of human flourishing—happiness.” The rule of sheer force emulates not the political, consensual, husband-wife bond in the family, nor the kingly rule of parents over children—rightly aimed at the good of the children. The rule of force emulates rather the rule of master over slave, a form of rule performed for the good of the master not the slave, the familial equivalent of despotism in the city. And tyranny is even worse than despotism, lacking even legal status and “treating persons as though they are merely slaves.”

This last formulation is odd. Are slaves not persons? Persons treated as if they are not persons, but machines, to be sure, but by nature persons nonetheless. Aristotle does of course identify a human category of ‘natural slaves,’ those whose best work is not self-directed because they are incapable of reasoning and need to be commanded by those who are capable. Aristotle suggests that such persons are fewer in number than one might want to think, if one is a master of slaves. Bates’s later critique of Abraham Lincoln should probably be considered in this light.

“If Argos were truly a city, the citizens themselves could have set affairs right and avoided the fate of Orestes. But Argos is not a city and the chorus are not citizens, rather they are subjects of the household and are totally without authority in this matter. This is why after Orestes takes vengeance on the murderers, the dramatic action must leave Argos and go to Athens.” That is the setting of the final play in Aeschylus’ trilogy.

The Athenian regime is a form of the rule of ‘the many.’ Even the goddess Athena “defers to the city.” Being the goddess of reason, Athena will not challenge the Furies directly. “In originally agreeing to having Athena hear the case, the Furies submitted their case to be judged by a deity who was a third party, not directly involved in the case. however, by deferring the authority of the case to the city, Athena defers divine sanction to political sanction. Or she establishes the legitimacy of decisions by the political body concerning such matters, whereas before these matters were contained within the moral realm of the household.” Athena casts her vote in favor of Orestes, indicating that marriage, which is political, trumps parenthood, which is ‘blood.’ For their part, the Furies will redirect their thumotic energy toward defending the city; unlike Apollo, Athena understands that “the political community as such needs the power of the Furies so that the city is able to defend itself”; “the alliance of the Furies to the city is intended to strengthen the city as the source of human fulfillment,” moderating the love of one’s own by widening it to the city, the home of speech, which recognizes marriage instead of parenthood as the fundamental familial bond because it is oath-based, not blood-based. Like Socrates, Aeschylus sees that the other extreme claim, that speech alone suffices to constitute the city, will not do. “Coercion or force is to be understood in this particular context, as the exercise of law,” putting teeth into the mouth that speaks. Accordingly, the Furies must “be tamed and managed rather than eradicated.” What Nietzsche would call the Apollonian must be supplemented not so much by the Dionysian but by the Furious, all under the rule of the reasonable, which reasonably sees its own limitations. 

Under this dispensation, justice no longer means vengeance but the rule of law. The city, with its laws and juries, “will indeed do what the Furies did—right wrongs and protect the family.” But it won’t right wrongs “with the same ruthless and destructive manner of the Furies,” which leads to an endless cycle of retaliation. “Rather, the justice of the city will be a compromise between the peace, which is an essential precondition for human happiness, and the demands that wrongs be righted and those who commit them be punished.” The terms of this compromise mean that “not all acts of injustice will be sought out and punished; rather, only those that threaten to destroy the peace or happiness of the human association.” To go further “would be irrational and harmful to the greater human good,” destroying many good things “to remove one single evil.” “Moderation is now to be the qualifier of justice.” 

Aristotle ranks moderation among the principal virtues, and it is to “the continuing significance of Aristotle for social and political science” that Bates now turns. Often criticized for having ignored the empire under which he lived and concentrating his attention on the Greek poleis, by now subordinate to Macedonia, Aristotle in fact did no such thing. As a citizen of Stagira living as a resident foreigner in Athens, Aristotle had to watch his step when it came to commenting on contemporary politics. Further, his emphasis on the polis has a heuristic purpose. It is in the small polis, not the big, sprawling, polyglot, multi-city empires that the regime is most clearly visible. The empires of his time had regimes—monarchies of one sort or another—but except for the annual exaction of tribute, one’s city didn’t much feel the pinch of rule. Day-to-day governance continued to occur within the city; that was what mattered in the lives of imperial citizen-subjects.

The regime or politeia “is something separate and distinct from the polis but gives shape and direction to the polis.” Bates links its definition to Aristotle’s four ’causes’: in its material character, every regime has institutions and offices; in its formal character, it “looks different” from other regimes; its efficient cause is the ruling body or politeuma of the city; its teleological or final cause is its view of justice or right. This may be a bit too schematic. Aristotle identifies four dimensions of a regime: its politeia strictly speaking, its form or institutional structure; its ruling body or politeuma; its way of life or Bíos ti; and its end, its purpose, its telos. Its ‘formal’ cause therefore is its institutional structure; its ‘material’ cause is its ruling body; its ‘efficient’ cause or archē is its founding. The way of life relates to the purpose as the means to an end. 

“The politeia is that which orders all the parts that constitutes the given political community” or polis. “Therefore, no politeia, no political community.” He proceeds to summarize Aristotle’s quantitative and qualitative criteria for regime classification: the one, the few, and the many; good and bad. These result in six basic regime types or species; although Bates says that Aristotle subtly undermines this simple classification, it is more accurate to say that he refines it, identifying ‘subspecies’ within each type. Bates carefully distinguishes Aristotelian from Hobbesian political science. “Contra the teaching of Hobbes and the modern teaching that follows from his understanding of government representing the whole body politic as such, and not merely a ruling part, Aristotle’s teaching about the nature of political rule is that a part of the political community acts on behalf of the whole (either for its own sake or for the common benefit).” Each polis has parts, especially the few who are rich and the many who are poor, each typically advocating a regime, including a way of life, which serves its own interest, both claiming to serve the interests of the whole. Political rule itself “is divided on the basis of functions suited to each political community: deliberating, deciding, implementing what’s been decided, and adjudication of legal cases arising as a result of those decisions and acts of implementation—law being “relative to the type of politeia.” Regimes change, but there is no fixed cycle of regimes, as propounded by Plato’s Socrates (probably for heuristic purposes) and more literally by Polybius. Regimes change because no one regime, even the good ones, will lack enemies who scheme against it. But this doesn’t make politics a futile endeavor. Far from it. “In contrast” to such modern utopians as Karl Marx, “Aristotle’s writings suggest the attempts to overcome politics or escape from it would fail, or end in despotism.”

Why was Aristotle’s understanding of politics as regime-centered brushed aside by later political philosophers? Imperialism challenged the value of political rule itself. Although the polis superseded the clan and the tribe, as Aeschylus shows, the empires overwhelmed many poleis with sheer military force, and ruled the cities despotically (if often desultorily) after their conquests. “Empire tended to emerge prior to the polis as a heterogeneous construct of numerous peoples/tribes (ethnoi) conquered by the armed followers of a tribe and its leader.” As in Argos, a family rules an empire; politics strictly speaking, ruling and being ruled mutually, finds little or no purchase. Following Aristotle, the Roman empire emerged from a republican regime, the res publica. The first, republican, Roman empire “incorporat[ed] local elites into Roman citizens,” but the regime changed in typical fashion, as anti-republican factions arose within it. Once consolidated under Augustus, the empire “was led to create newer forms of rule: (1) Caesar, Kaiser, tzar; (2) princeps, which in Latin is First Citizen… the term Augustus took rather than the title of Rex.” Finally, after Augustus died the later monarchs dropped the pretense of republicanism altogether, calling themselves imperators or emperors—issuers of commands, imperatives, the edicts of one-way rule, not of reciprocal ruling and being ruled. With no serious regime rival or rivals, Roman political thought began to neglect the regime question, and it began to fade from political science altogether.

By the Middle Ages it is no longer clear that thinkers knew Aristotle’s Politics, at all. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers got their sense of regimes from Plato and Polybius, and thus never had the Aristotelian inclination to deliberate openly over the character of regimes. Further, the Christian doctrine of the separation of sacred from secular government understandably preoccupied the best minds. It was therefore not until Thomas Aquinas in the Thirteenth Century that Aristotelian regime theory was recovered, but necessarily in a ‘Christianized’ manner; Thomas “does not give us Aristotle qua Aristotle, but an Aristotle that has been cleaned up and made compatible with Christian teachings.” For example, in following Aristotle’s argument that the rule of a good king is desirable but improbable, given “the objections to absolute kingship made by Aristotle,” particularly its instability, Thomas goes on to say that the kingly rule of God will solve that problem, once God returns earth, then transforms the cosmos itself, making a new heaven and a new earth. Aristotle might have doubted that promise, had he lived to hear it.

Starting with Machiavelli and his “modern concept of the state,” political science moved even farther from Aristotelianism. Machiavelli “does not use the concept of the politeia or anything remotely similar to it.” By this, Bates means that the moderns understand lo stato as “a product of will,” whether it be the will of the founding prince or the “collective will” of the individuals who form that state according to a ‘social contract.’ Because willed, the modern state “must have a unitary character,” inasmuch as a divided or schizophrenic will cannot be “good or healthy,” as will. The ruling institutions or forms of the modern state “are merely tools that are created by and serve on behalf of the sovereign will,” in contrast to “the concept of political community articulated by Aristotle—where the political community composed of the fundamental parts—the household and other communities—give [the political community] body.” In the polis, unlike the modern state, these “many discrete parts” enjoy “commonality” thanks to “their shared life together, and perhaps a shared benefit or utility from that life together.” But for Machiavelli, Hobbes, and their followers, the political community “is not by nature but is instead a humanly made construct.” For Hobbes, the ‘body politic’ that is Mighty Leviathan amounts to “a metaphor” for the relationship between the monarch and his realm; the sovereign isn’t any one, existing monarch but “the embodied will” that authorizes the existence of the political community. Hence the emphasis on the will in Rousseauian and Kantian ethics and politics, and eventually the shift away not only from natural right, not only from such natural-rights substitutes as Rousseau’s general will and Kant’s categorical imperative, but to the elaboration of historical right in Hegel, in whose writings “the modern state reaches its intellectual peak” as an entirely impersonal instantiation of the impersonal ‘Absolute Spirit,’ a being that encompasses natural even humanly willed right, explaining all of these theories as moments in its own unfolding.

If the modern state is a willed construct of the individuals who consent to it, then the substantial political bodies in the world no longer consist of families and intrastate factions but of the states themselves, which pit their wills against one another in a war of all against all. Since sovereign wills refuse to relinquish their sovereignty while at the same time wishing for the peace that the polis afforded when it subordinated the families and their Furies, “the establishment of modern international law becomes the only means by which the concept of natural right can remain in any way meaningful for the modern state.” Such writers as Grotius, who applies Aristotelian natural right to international relations, and Vattel, who applies Lockean natural right to them, attempt to moderate the Hobbesian state of international war. Such conceptions were challenged, however, when historicist notions of nation-states, “cultural and racial/ethnic” constructions “that people cannot control” because they are the result of laws of historical development, replaced the ‘willfulness’ of social-contract theory. Bates wrongly charges Abraham Lincoln with fostering this notion in America; he is on firmer ground in assigning the responsibility to the Progressives and, it might be added, the Social Darwinists before them, their ontological if not socio-economic twins. 

The managers of political science’s “behavioral revolution” in the twentieth century found even Hobbesian materialism insufficiently materialist, with its willed social contract. “The scientific pretensions of later moderns as well as their materialism and reductionism led to a reaction against the willing agency of the modern Hobbesian state”; for them, real science tracks “the various impersonal forces of mass society acting and interacting with each other through the various institutionalism that historically emerged in each socio-ethnic grouping.” Eschewing all ‘qualitative’ claims as unscientific ‘value judgments,’ behaviorists retain his numerical regime criterion (one, few, many) and then calculate the level of measurable political ‘participation’ in relation to the numerical criterion. As democrats, they often betray a tendency to prefer the rule of the few, with high participation levels, as “rule for the common advantage,” but they aspire to ‘value-free political science.’ More recently, political scientist with such as Charles Tilly and Theda Skocpol have added an institutional dimension, concentrating their attention on the state, which they consider an independent variable in political outcomes, rather like an Aristotelian formal cause. “But when we look at much of the regime analysis of those who came to champion the ‘Return to the State,’ all too often they employed many of the same overly democrat5ic and pluralistic assumptions” of the behaviorists. For them, ‘democracy’ “no longer is to be considered a form of regime, but rather as a universal human political form that all human communities should strive to achieve.” With great effort, today’s political scientists have scrambled back to quasi-Hegelian statism without the ontology that justifies it. 

None of these modern forms of political science is genuinely political. Instead of beginning with the household, with its already-political relationship of husband and wife and its grounding in real human associations aimed at achieving the real human end of eudemonia or “liv[ing] fully as a human being,” modern political science begins with individuals. It is atomistic or, at best, atomistic within a structuralist framework. By contrast, Aristotelian political science “does not understand the political community as a unitary composite that must be homogenized and centralized.” Rather, for Aristotle, “the regime is fundamental to a political community because it is that which holds it together as a whole; a whole composed of discrete parts.” This is the reality of political life, Aristotle’s therefore the truer science.

The problem is that modern states have regimes, too. It makes a difference to me if I live in contemporary France or Germany, in a commercial republic, or in contemporary China, an oligarchy. A second edition of this book should correct the argument in light of that obvious fact, thereby showing that Aristotelian regime theory ‘works’ for modern states as well as for city-states.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Abū Hāmid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Tusi al-Ghazāli: The Incoherence of the Philosophers. Michael E. Marmura translation. Provo: Brigham Young University Press, 2000.

 

Born in 1058 and trained in Islamic law, al-Ghazāli is famous—in some circles, notorious—for claiming that Allah acts according to his will, not according to reason. He has been interpreted as teaching this by many Muslims, who have been known to abominate reason as the bringer of heresy and atheism. And it is surely true that the will plays a decisive role in al-Ghazāli’s understanding of Allah. As Michael E. Marmura remarks in his excellent introduction, the Asharite school of Islamic theology in which al-Ghazāli was trained regarded not only the original creation of the cosmos as an act of God but “regarded all temporal existents as the direction creation of God, decreed by His eternal attribute of will and enacted by His attribute of power.” That is, “what humans habitually regard as sequences of natural causes and effects are in reality concomitant events whose constant association is arbitrarily decreed by the divine will.” Miracles or divine disruptions of the apparently natural course of things are perennially possible, and the familiar Muslim coda, “God willing,” reflects this mindset. An examination of The Incoherence of the Philosophers suggests that the matter is more complicated than that. What is the status of reason according to al-Ghazāli, in this polemic?

“I have seen a group,” he writes, “who, believing themselves in possession of a distinctiveness from companion and peer by virtue of a superior quick with and intelligence, have rejected the Islamic duties regarding acts of worship, disdained religious rites pertaining to the offices of prayer and the avoidance of prohibited things, belittled the devotions and ordinances prescribed by the divine law, not halting in the face of prohibitions and restrictions.” For these duties, these rites, and the divine law they substitute “multifarious beliefs” produced by “speculative investigation, an outcome of their stumbling over the tails of sophistical doubts that divert from the direction of the truth”—mere “imaginings akin to the glitter of the mirage.” This group consists of philosophers, men who deny “revealed laws and religious confessions” and reject “the details of religious and sectarian [teaching], believing them to be man-made laws and embellished tricks.” In “disdaining to be content with the religious beliefs of their forebears,” however, they have only “mov[ed] from one [mode of] imitation to another”; that is, far from ascending from the cave of customary opinions where they worshipped the shadows of man-made idols to the daylight of nature, they have merely encamped in another cave. Worse, they have abandoned the true light of divine, not merely natural law, for a cave beneath the cave of mere heresy, the cave of atheism and materialism. There is no lower rank in “God’s world” than that of these men, as “imbecility is… nearer salvation than acumen severed from [religious belief]; blindness is closer to wholeness than cross-eyed sight.” Al-Ghazāli’s stated intention “is to alert those who think well of philosophers and believe that their ways are free from contradiction by showing the [various] aspects of their incoherence.” He does not deny that Muslim theologians also contradict one another, contenting himself with saying that this isn’t his topic here.

He accuses philosophers of obscurantism, of claiming that “the metaphysical sciences” are esoteric, accessible only to those well versed in the arcana of mathematics and logic. On the contrary, al-Ghazāli replies, mathematics has nothing to do with metaphysics and logical argumentation can be understood by many more than the very few men who become philosophers. He proceeds with twenty “discussions,” sets of arguments similar in form to the writings of Christian Scholastics, who present the arguments of their opponents followed by point-by-point refutations. Discussions 1-16 address metaphysics; discussions 17-20 pertain to physics or nature. The two metaphysical issues in dispute are the philosophers’ claim that the cosmos is eternal and that God knows only universals, not particulars, and therefore does not intervene providentially in the cosmos He has created. The physical or natural issue in dispute is the philosophers’ (but especially Avicenna’s) teaching on the human soul and his denial of the resurrection of the body.

In arguing that the cosmos is eternal, philosophers offer three proofs. First, they say, if God is eternal and has created a cosmos at some point in time, making a possibility into a reality, this must mean that God Himself changed from a non-creator to a creator. But this is a contradiction, unless religionists pretend that there has been a “proceeding of the temporal from the Eternal without a change of affairs in the Eternal by way of power, instrument, time, purpose, or nature.” To counter this, al-Ghazāli says that there is no contradiction if the world was created in time “by an eternal will that decreed its existence at the time in which it came to be.” To this view is not to think that the “willer” changed to such a degree that He was no longer Himself; eternity isn’t sameness. Nor is creation in, or before, time necessarily impossible, a fact defying reason, if the willer withheld His act of creation—especially if “duration and time are both created.” “It is incumbent on you [philosophers] to set up a demonstrative proof according to the condition of logic that would show the impossibility of this.” When conjoined with power, will “differentiates a thing from its similar.” Light and darkness are opposites; they contradict one another. But to will into existence two opposite things is not to exercise one’s will in a self-contradictory way if the underlying intention behind that act serves some overarching rational purpose. The idea of willed creation would only be a violation of reason if one claimed that the Creator created ‘blackwhite.’ If philosophers were to assert that the inability to create ‘blackwhite’ calls into question divine power, omnipotence, al-Ghazāli answers: “the impossibility of realizing what is not possible does not indicate impotence.”

Philosophers also claim “that whoever asserts that the world is posterior to God and God prior to it” means either that God is “prior in essence, not in time, in the way that one is prior to two” or that God “is prior to the world and time.” If the former, then the Creator-created relationship is causative in the way a person’s movement causes his shadow to move with him; but these events presume the coexistence both the person and the movement. If the latter, then there must have been a time in which the world did not exist but God did; “before the existence of time, infinite time would have existed, and this is contradictory.” 

Al-Ghazāli replies that “time is originated and created, and before it there was no time at all,” as “God is prior to the world and time.” “By priority we mean only the appropriation of existence to Himself alone.” God exists with or without the world. In terms of reason, not of will, “a first beginning that is preceded by nothing” is not “disallow[ed],” that is, it is not self-contradictory. This doesn’t prove that ex nihilo creation occurred, only that it is not an irrational concept. When philosophers argue that “it is impossible for [the world] to be impossible and then to become possible,” he answers that he world “is eternally possible” in the sense that God could conceive it at any time, but it only became possible when He made it so.

Philosophers also observe that every “temporal existent” consists of both form and matter. Matter is prior to form, thus prior to every temporal existent, since existence consists of some form, a form distinguishing it from all other existents, imposed upon matter. Since “matter does not have matter [receptive of it]”—because there is no pre-matter matter, matter must not originate in time. It must be eternal. Al-Ghazāli answers that the question “reverts to a judgment of the mind.” No self-contradictory judgment of the mind is possible, in the sense that no one can form a mental image or idea of ‘blackwhite.’ Why, then, assume that matter is eternal, rather than God? Or vice-versa, one might add, but al-Ghazāli does not need to prove the eternality of God, only the rational possibility of an eternal God rather than eternal matter. He can afford to leave the question of whether matter or God is eternal, so long as he can show that the claim that God is eternal, not matter, is not irrational. “As regards affirming the true doctrine,” instead of merely refuting the philosophers’ doctrine, “we will write another book concerning it after completing this one, if success comes to our aid, God willing, and we will name it The Principles of Belief.“

“To refer possibility, necessity, and impossibility back to rational judgments is correct.” In that, the philosophers are right. They are also right to say that “the meaning of the mind’s judgment is [its] knowledge and that knowledge requires an object of knowledge.” Their mistake is to assume that this means that this knowledge need be knowledge of matter—that matter is prior to mind. But, for example, “one cannot conceive in existence a color which is neither white nor black nor some other color. The form of being a color, however, is established in the mind without detailing [different species of color], and one says of it that it is a form whose existence is in minds, not in concrete things.” “If this is not impossible, then what we have mentioned”—namely, ex nihilo creation—is “not impossible.” 

Philosophers also claim that the world is eternal—indeed, “pre-eternal,” if eternity means perpetuity in time ‘going forward.’ That is, they claim that the world not only has “no beginning for its existence” but also has “no end.” It will “continue to be,” always. Al-Ghazāli replies to this claim with the same arguments he used against the anti-creation claim. “The bringing about of existence and annihilation obtains through the will of the one endowed with power”; in both creation and annihilation, God “in Himself does not change, what changes being only the act.” “So long as the occurrence of an event by an eternal will is conceivable, there is no difference in the state of affairs whether what occurs is a privation or an existence.” 

Al-Ghazāli accuses philosophers of “obfuscation” when they call God “the world’s enactor and maker”; “with them this is metaphor, not reality.” He defines “agent” as “a willer, a chooser, and a knower of what He wills,” but philosophers use that term to mean “not one who wills, but has no attribute at all,” and for them ‘God’ is really the eternal cosmos, which “proceeds by compulsory necessity.” Logic is a form of necessity; to the philosophers ‘God’ acts rationally but without will, and ‘God’-nature-cosmos causes all things to happen by rational necessity. This is why al-Ghazāli emphasizes the will of God, the freedom of God, and it is also one reason why he can be interpreted as considering will to be prior to reason.

But that is not the claim he makes here. On the contrary, “if we suppose that a temporal event depends for its occurrence on two things, one voluntary and the other not, reason relates the act to the voluntary.” This is why, if one man murders another by throwing him into a fire, we call the man the killer, not the fire; the man has agency. At the same time, unlike men, the creator-God always wills rationally; His acts have a rational necessity backed by His power, which gives them physical necessity, but He chooses what acts He takes freely. Whether before or after the creation of time and space, God chooses among a set of acts, any one of which must be rational because His intention is without self-contradiction. It is true that human beings—created, limited beings—cannot fully understand “the essence of God.” Therefore “do not think on the essence of God” but on His creation. But that doesn’t mean that God has no essence, nor that He is not essentially rational; it means that He is all-knowing, and you are not.

Having discussed the philosophers’ inability to prove that the creator-God does not exist, and that ‘God’ is really the eternal world or cosmos, al-Ghazāli next denies their ability to prove that God does exist, and that He is one, not many. The ‘God’ of the philosophers is a First Principle, an impersonal, unmoved mover. They argue that without assuming the existence of such a First Principle, one commits the fallacy of infinite regress. While affirming the logical necessity of avoiding an infinite regress, al-Ghazāli simply points out that positing the existence of a creator-God equally avoids it. Further, if the cosmos is eternal and necessarily generates individual things over time, would this not mean that the number of things is infinite? Yet how can physical things, even things as small as atoms, be infinite in number and still increase in number?

Philosophers attempt to prove the oneness of their ‘God’ by tracing causation back to an origin which necessarily must have been singular, inasmuch as there can be only one causeless Causer. Once causation began, plurality began, but not before that. “The basic point for understanding their doctrine consists in their saying [that] the essence of the First Principle is one, the names becoming many by relating something to it, relating it to something, or negating something of it.” “The existence of [what is] other than Him is from Him.” Their ‘God’ is Intellect; He is a being “aware of Himself” who “apprehends Himself.” “Hence, His essence is an intelligible,” devoid of matter. “The existing order is a consequent of the intelligible order in the sense that [the former] comes through [the latter”; “His knowledge of the whole is the cause of the emanation of the whole from Him,” the consequence of His self-knowledge. He is not really a ‘He,’ a person, at all, but an impersonal, all-powerful, self-knowing and therefore all-knowing power.

Muslim theologians take a very different view. “Our knowledge” has two “divisions”: “knowledge of a thing that occurs as a result of the form of that thing”; and “knowledge which we invent, as with something whose form we did not perceive but which we formed in our souls, then brought into existence, in which case the existence of the form would be derived from knowledge, not knowledge from [the] existence [of the form].” God’s knowledge is “in accordance with the second division.” Given their “shortcomings,” our lack of supreme power, “our conception is not sufficient to bring about the existence of the form but requires, in addition to that, a renewed will that springs forth from an appetitive power” that “moves the muscles and nerves,” which then attempt to make things happen. It might be said that human beings lack perfect knowledge, perfect power, and indeed perfect will, inasmuch as we do not unfailingly will the good. That is why human beings need God to rule them. 

By contrast, the philosophers deploy such terms as knowledge, power, and will in describing God only as metaphors, since in their opinion God is not a person. As an impersonal being, their ‘God’ ‘knows’ only universals, not particulars. That is, there is no providence in the Biblical sense, only a set of general laws that prevail in the cosmos as it proceeds in its course. ‘God’ therefore does not intervene on behalf of any individual or set of individuals. But again, al-Ghazāli maintains, they have no proof that this is necessarily the case. “The realities of divine matters are not attained through rational reflection—indeed… it is not within human power to know them.” It is within human power to know His creation, including his revealed law. That is, we know what He has willed, and what His will is, insofar as He has chosen to reveal those things to us. We are entitled, even obligated, to reason about those things. When we attempt to reason about His essence, however, we quickly come to the limit of our reasoning. This doesn’t mean that His essence is unreasonable or arbitrary, nor that His will is unreasonable or arbitrary. 

It also does not mean that human beings cannot entertain reasonable suspicions about God’s essence. He must have an essence because “existence without quiddity and a real [nature] is unintelligible.” For example, “A rational person would indeed by astonished by a party that claims to delve deeply into [the world of] the intelligibles but whose reflection in the end leads to [the conclusion] that the Lord of Lords and the Cause of Causes has basically no knowledge of what occurs in the world.” If that were true, “What difference is there between Him and the dead, except for His knowledge of Himself? And what perfection is there in His knowledge of Himself, with His ignorance of what is other than Himself?” On the contrary, “all things other than Him” have “originated from His direction through His will”; as an agent in the true sense of the term, God’s will entails God’s knowledge, “for that which is willed must necessarily be known to the willer.” Because all things “are willed by Him and originated in His will,” God is all-knowing. This includes self-knowledge, which is necessary for Him to know what He wills, to know His own will.

According to the philosophers, “God enacted the world by way of necessity from His essence, by nature and compulsion, not by way of will and choice. Indeed, the whole [of the world] follows necessarily from His essence in the way that light follows necessarily from the sun.”; The ‘God’ of the philosophers “has no power to stop His acts,” which means, as he has emphasized that the ‘acts’ of ‘God’ do “not at all entail knowledge for the agent,” which isn’t really an agent in al-Ghazāli’s fuller definition of the term. But they have no sound proof of that claim which does not assume what they are trying to prove, namely, the existence of ‘God’ as they define ‘Him.’

Philosophers argue as follows: God is unchanging; particulars change; knowledge of change changes the knower; ergo, God cannot know particulars, only universals. God knows that solar eclipses occur, but knows nothing about any particular eclipse. Such knowledge is ‘beneath’ Him. Similarly, God “does not know the accidents of Zayd, Amr, and Khālid, but only man [in the] absolute [sense] by a universal knowledge.” By this doctrine “they uprooted religious laws in their entirety, since it entails that if Zayd, for example, obeys of disobeys God, God would not know what of his states has newly come about, because He does not know Zayd in his particularity.” God would be incapable of punishing violations of His own law. In response, Al-Ghazāli simply repeats that no one, even a philosopher, can know the limits of God’s knowledge, if in fact there are any.

Having established the limits of human knowledge of God, al-Ghazāli turns from metaphysics to the natural sciences. These are “rational sciences”; “the religious law does not require disputing them,” but they are within human powers to dispute, to investigate, to reason about. There are eight rational sciences pertaining to nature: physics, astronomy, knowledge pertaining to generation and corruption, meteorology, geology, botany, zoology, and psychology (which includes the science of both human and animal souls). “There is no necessity to oppose [the philosophers] in terms of the revealed law in any of these sciences,” except in four areas: their claim that the relation between observable causes and effects is necessary, making miracles impossible; their claim that “human souls are self-subsisting substances, not imprinted in the body,” and therefore death permanently severs the soul from the body; their claim that souls cannot be annihilated; their claim that “it is impossible to return these souls to bodies.”

Regarding the first question, philosophers do admit that miracles or disruptions of “the habitual courses of nature do occur” in “three instances”: in prophecy, when the imagination becomes so powerful and accurate that it surpasses ordinary sensual perceptions; in intuition, especially the perception of the several steps of a logical argument before the argument has been fully laid out; and in the “practical faculty,” which induces the body to obey the soul—perhaps as the result of ascetic exercises, for example. 

Al-Ghazāli begins with a critique of our understanding of causation, a critique that anticipates the critique David Hume advanced nearly seven centuries later. “The connection between what is habitually believed to be a cause and what is habitually believed to be an effect is not necessary.” We suppose that fire is necessary to burn cotton, but that is only because we have seen this occur so many times that we assume a cause-and-effect relationship. But “a thing’s existence with a thing does not prove that it exists by [the thing].” “The continuous habit of their occurrence repeatedly, one time after another, fixes unshakably in our minds the belief in their occurrence according to past habit.” But God might have caused the cotton to burn. “He knew that He would not do it at certain times, despite its possibility, and… He creates for us the knowledge that He will not create it at that time.” But that is all.

Al-Ghazāli’s choice of occurrences that are naturally uncaused are unfortunate, as he supposes that some animals are spontaneously generated from the earth, and not by sexual reproduction. He goes so far as to claim that such matters are “beyond human power to know.” He retreats to firmer ground by defining the impossible as that which “is not within the power” of being enacted. He offers several examples of genuine impossibilities, things impossible even for God. “Combining blackness and whiteness” is impossible. For an individual to put himself in two places at once is impossible. To truly will something without knowing what one is willing is impossible. And it is impossible “to create knowledge in inanimate matter” inasmuch as “we understand by the inanimate that which does not apprehend.” That is, a self-contradictory action is impossible. But if we read in sacred Scripture that God moved the hand of a dead man, this is against nature but not impossible, since although the previous willer of movement is dead the current willer is alive, knowledgeable, and powerful.

Nor is the human soul necessarily self-subsistent, a substance that does not occupy space—as suggested in the Platonic dialogues, for example. Al-Ghazāli makes no objection to the philosophers’ description of the attributes of the human soul into “motive” and “apprehending” parts. The “motive” parts, the ones that ‘make things happen,’ include the desires, the power to activate nerves and muscles, and the “discerning” part, which can consider theoretical and prudential matters. The “apprehending” parts of the soul include the imaginative faculty, which perceives forms and the “estimative” faculty, which perceives meanings; so, for example, a baby goat perceives the form of a wolf along with its meaning, that is, the fact that it is dangerous to baby goats. The third “apprehending” part of the soul is the “cogitative” faculty, which combines the forms the imagination perceives to envision a flying horse or a flying machine. It is the “discerning” part of the soul which discovers whether a flying horse or a flying machine is possible in principle and, if possible, how one might come into existence. The practical dimension of the discerning part also can be made to rule the bodily faculties; when it does so we say that the soul has virtues.

Notice that none of this assumes that God treats human beings as if they are puppets whose every movement He directs, as per Ash’arite doctrine. Rather, we Muslims only “object to their claim of their knowing through rational demonstrations that the soul is a self-subsistent substance.” “We deny… their claim that reason alone indicates” that this is so, that a human being could know this without the guidance of revelation, “the religious law.” At best, their proofs indicate probabilities. They cannot demonstrate such claims. Nor can they demonstrate the immortality of the human soul. It is indeed immortal, but we know this with certitude only by revelation, not by reason. 

As to the disposition of the human soul after death, philosophers hold that souls endure “everlastingly” in a condition either of indescribable pleasure or pain, the life of pleasure having been reserved for “perfect, pure souls,” the life of pain for “imperfect, tarnished souls.” A soul attains perfection in this life through knowledge, purity through action. Knowledge leads to perfection because it perfects the rational faculty, whereas “preoccupation with the body makes [one] forget himself,” fail to cultivate the distinctively human characteristic of his soul. We know that “the intellectual pleasures than bodily pleasures” because “ferocious animals and pigs” seek only bodily pleasures, and because men are ashamed when caught in the commission of acts of adultery or cowardice. Action—works and worship—are needed for “the soul’s purification,” as the undisciplined body will cause the soul to become preoccupied with bodily desires, pleasures, and pains.

Muslims do not disagree with “most of these things.” The soul survives the separation from the body; certain pleasures are superior to others. “But we know this through the religious law,” not “by reason alone.” What Muslims deny is the philosophers’ contention that bodies are not resurrected along with souls. Life in God’s Paradise will offer “both kinds of happiness, the spiritual and bodily”; Hell will impose both kinds of misery. The one will be the more perfect pleasure, the other the more perfect pain. “What the religious law has conveyed [as true must be believed” if the soul would enjoy eternity in Paradise, avoid eternity in Hell. As usual, philosophers cannot disprove the possibility of the religious law’s teachings and commands by convicting it of self-contradiction.

In conclusion, al-Ghazāli calls the philosophers infidels on three main grounds. They claim that the world is eternal. They deny that God’s knowledge encompasses “temporal particulars”—i.e., they deny God’s providential rule. And they deny the resurrection of bodies on Judgment Day. He also calls philosophic doctrine “close to that of the Mu’tazila,” the main Islamic sect rivaling the Asharites.

With regard to the incoherence of philosophic doctrines—that they are not merely diverse but contradictory—al Ghazāli’s charge cannot be denied, any more than he would deny the countercharge that the doctrines of pious Muslims contradict on another. He shows the difficulty in formulating a logical proof of the existence either of God or of ‘God,’ leaning conspicuously on Koranic assertions to tip his argument in the direction of piety. Averroës replied in defense of Aristotelianism with his own polemic, The Incoherence of the Incoherence.