Lovers of Sophia

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Lovers of Sophia Page 13

by Jason Reza Jorjani


  In this sense only, are the virtue s of character a precondition for the true eudaimonia of contemplation. The philosopher must be

  able to practice them and to do so perfectly, but he must also live beyond the need for them and the social order that they structure

  and sustain. “Man is by nature a political animal”,49 but Aristotle’s 47 Ibid., 1170b7-19; 1171b30–1172a15.

  48 Ibid., 1178b3-8.

  49 Ibid.,

  Politics 1253a3.

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  most provocative idea is the overcoming of the “merely human”

  animal in the philosophic life. Those who have attained to such a state of being, do however retain a responsibility to craft the context for human flourishing, and consequently, for the actualization of

  natural potentialities. This is the aim of the art ( techne) of Politics, which Aristotle sees as the master craft.

  Aristotle explains how the ends pursued in various arts (some

  of which we would refer to as crafts) are subordinated to the ends of master arts, and then he describes ethics or knowledge of the “good”

  as “the master art”. He goes on to equate this “most authoritative art... which is most truly the master art” with Politics. His rationale for this is that this art determines who, in a properly ordered state, ought to learn all of the other arts and sciences, and to what extent

  they should do so. But who makes this determination? Aristotle’s

  equation of the other arts subordinate to Politics with “sciences” is

  also noteworthy. Even the mathematical sciences say a great deal

  about the beautiful, which is also found in motionless things.50 The

  greek word here is techne – which is the root of both technology and craft in the sense of “arts and crafts”. Its root is the verb techto, which means “to bring forth or to produce.” Statecraft is, then,

  according to Aristotle, the Master Craft that fosters mankind’s

  collective fulfillment of its end or goal and employs all of the other arts and sciences as means towards this end. If this were not so,

  Aristotle claims, there would be an infinite regress of ends for-the-

  sake-of-which various crafts are practiced.51 Who could the master

  craftsmen ( technites) be other than the “god-like” thinkers whose creative intellect first shapes the bare potentialities of Nature into the beings that we encounter in our world?

  Understanding the role of chance in art is indispensable to

  properly conceive of human activity. Art is concerned with those

  things that could be otherwise, that may come into being through

  our producing or building them, but that would not be but for us.

  The conception of “chance” at work here is not at all synonymous

  50 Ibid., 1087a31–1078b6.

  51 Ibid., 1094a1–1094b10.

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  with ‘blind chance’ in the sense of random effects of an ever-receding causal chain. Furthermore, Aristotle defines the building activity

  characteristic of art as “a reasoned state of capacity to make” and he claims that not only is it the case that there is not “any art that is not such a state”, it is also the case that there is not “any such state that is not an art.” In other words: “art is identical with a state of capacity to make, involving a true course of reasoning... i.e. with contriving and considering how something may come into being which is capable

  of either being or not being, and whose origin is in the maker and

  not in the thing made... for art is concerned neither with things

  that are, or come into being, by necessity, nor with things that do

  so in accordance with nature.” Aristotle also defines a lack of art,

  or artlessness, as “a state concerned with making, involving a false

  course of reasoning.”52 What these statements amount to, is a claim

  that any human reasoning that is concerned with bringing into being that which is not bound to be by necessity or by nature, is the

  exercise of an aesthetic faculty. This is as much as to say that purely logical or analytical reasoning, which are fit to describe structures

  of necessity, are artlessly inadequate when it comes to deliberative production. The grandest project of deliberative production, which

  establishes the context for all others, is the regulation of the polis.

  Through the exercise of statecraft, the “god-like” master builders

  first make both theoretical research and ethical action possible.

  The master builders are the supreme artists. Such a view allows

  us to make more sense of Aristotle’s repeated use of the term

  kalon – which means not just ‘fine’ or ‘fitting’, but “beautiful” – as the descriptor for ethical action and the manifestation of Justice.

  According to Aristotle “it is for the sake of the beautiful that the

  courageous person endures”53 and he chooses to die a beautiful

  death in war, amidst the “most beautiful sort of danger”.54 In his

  Poetics,55 Aristotle defines Tragedy as a serious imitation of action 52 Ibid., 1140a1-24.

  53 Ibid., 1115b 24-25.

  54 Ibid., 1115a30-1115b5.

  55 Ibid., 1449b20–1453b16.

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  that has a magnitude complete in itself, with an integral beginning,

  middle, and end (and that is aimed at the arousing of fear and pity

  towards the end of catharsis). This suggests that the life of excellence (of which Tragedy is a serious imitation) ought to also be ordered

  by a project, which has an internal structure with an inception and

  culmination, and wherein any given moment is deeply interrelated

  to others. At 1115b15 in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle straight out defines “the beautiful” as “the end that belongs to virtue.” This

  is repeated even more elegantly at 1120a25: “Actions in accord with

  virtue are beautiful and are for the sake of the beautiful.” It appears in yet a third formulation, in the context of the discussion of friendship, at 1168a28-29: “a decent person acts on account of what is beautiful,

  and the better a person he is, the more on account of the beautiful,

  and for the sake of a friend, while he disregards his own interest.”

  A little further down in the same discussion, we have this striking

  passage where a beautiful life is contrasted with a “random” one –

  which is to say a life lived by someone without purpose, someone

  without a project, a drifter who is ‘all over the place’:

  …a person of serious worth... will give up… all the goods people

  fight over, to gain what is beautiful… he would choose to… live

  in a beautiful way for a year rather than in a random way for

  many years, and to perform one great and beautiful action rather

  than many small ones… he seems appropriately to be someone

  of serious stature, since he prefers the beautiful above all things.56

  Failure in virtue is more often characterized as something shameful,

  i.e. being malformed or misshapen, than it is in terms of wickedness

  or what we commonly think of as moral ‘evil’.57 Taking pleasure in

  what one ought and as one ought, is also described by Aristotle

  as desiring only that which is “not contrary to what is beautiful”.58

  Aristotle writes that: “anything that has a lot of growth while

  56 Ibid., 1169a19-35.

  57 Ibid., 1115a13-14; 1116a14-15; 1117a17; 1144a25-27.

  58 Ibid., 1119a15-22.

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  stretching out toward ugly things nee
ds to be kept back,” and he

  claims that “the aim to which both [the desiring part of the soul and

  its right reason] look is the beautiful.”59

  Even when the language of virtue and vice is employed, Aristotle draws on analogies to aesthetic harmony: “a person of serious

  stature… enjoys actions in accord with virtue and disdains those

  that result from vice, just as a musical person is pleased by beautiful melodies and pained by bad ones.”60 Final y, the “complete virtue” of

  Universal Justice – which encompasses the “proportion”61 or proper

  measure of particular justice – is also described in aesthetic terms,

  namely as a beauty surpassing that of the sunrise or sunset.62 What

  it is in the human soul that is capable of living beautiful y is the very same in-forming principle at work in the beautiful natural order

  of things. The latter does not stand in a hierarchical relationship

  to the immortal Soul of Man (which ontological y transcends any

  given individual), because the immortal Soul of Man is identical to

  the in-forming principle at work in natural beings in the way that

  an organism is identical to the organs that constitute it and the

  processes that sustain it.

  59 Ibid., 1119b5-15.

  60 Ibid., 1170a9-11.

  61 Ibid., 1131a29.

  62 Ibid., 1129b29-30.

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  AGAINST PERENNIAL PHILOSOPHY

  Perennial Philosophy is not Philosophy at al. In fact, it

  is fundamental y anti-philosophical. In particular, the

  attempt on the part of traditionalist thinkers such as

  Julius Evola to claim that there is an Islamic Philosophy

  that is one expression of the Sophia Perennis is neither historical y grounded nor conceptual y sound. To the extent that there was

  ever anything approaching Philosophy within an Islamic context,

  its epicenter would have been Greater Iran. Although principle

  texts were forcibly written in Arabic, under the dominion of the

  Caliphate, nearly all of the thinkers of this so-called ‘Golden Age’

  were Persians – in other words, ethnic Āryans. What becomes clear

  when you take a closer look at this period is the extent to which

  the Islamic conquest straightjacketed the once promising Indo-

  European genius of Iran.

  Although Christianity was overall destructive of European

  civilization, and cause for a major retardation of European science

  and culture, there are two major structural factors that make

  Christianity different from Islam in a way that allowed for a kind

  of Reformation that created the atmosphere where a Hegel and

  Nietzsche were possible, a kind of Reformation that did not and

  cannot ever take place in Islam.

  First, there is the internal incoherence of the Gospels and

  their incompatibility with key parts of the Old Testament. These

  books were written over the course of hundreds of years by tens of

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  different authors, and the resulting contradictions, in turn, required an even larger group of people to constantly engage in different

  interpretations of the scripture in an effort to make some sense out

  of it. This makes Christianity much more flexible than Islam, the

  scripture of which was composed by only one man, is relatively more

  internal y consistent, and claims not to be amenable to any change

  whatsoever.

  Second, this man, namely Muhammad, was also the founder of

  a political state and the Quran is, in essence, a legal constitution. By comparison, in the Gospels we see an emphasis on the separation

  of Church and State as well as the rejection of the use of force to

  propagate the message of Christ. Of course, in actual fact, many

  Christians did subsequently use force to spread their faith, but at

  least those in the Reformation who insisted on personal conscience

  had both Christ’s pacifism and his secularism to lean on in order to

  oppose the politics of the Catholic Church.

  The fact that Islamic scripture is relatively internal y consistent,

  at least with respect to law, that it is repeatedly and explicitly made clear nothing in the Quran can change, that the Quran establishes

  a form of government and renders separation of religion from state

  impossible, that the Quran justifies Jihad and that Muhammad

  himself used force to spread the religion – all of these factors make a Reformation of the kind that took place in Europe impossible within

  a Muslim country.

  Let me give you two examples of the straightjacket that Islam put

  on Iranian thinkers in the period of the so-called ‘Islamic Golden

  Age.’ The first is the duplicitous relationship that Abu Rayhan Biruni (973–1048) had to the culture of India, and the second is the way in

  which Islam forced Abu Ali Sina to waste his tremendous intellect

  with his hypocrisy.

  Biruni’s most famous work, more renowned than any of his

  scientific writings, is his book Tahqiq ma li’l-hind (Researches on India).1 This work offers us a masterful exposition of Indian

  1 Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Mehdi Aminrazavi [Editors], An Anthology of Philosophy in Persia: Volume 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 376–395.

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  thought on the nature of the cosmos and the human psyche, for

  example, Patanjali, which Biruni takes pains to distinguish from

  crass popular forms of the Hindu religion. He discusses in detail,

  and with an objective scholarly attitude, subjects that would be

  considered heretical from an Islamic standpoint, such as the

  theory of reincarnation. He even explicitly targets bigoted Muslim

  misconceptions about the Sanskrit spiritual and intellectual

  tradition. When he engages in a comparison of the Hindu and

  ancient Greek worldviews, it becomes clear that this man whose

  native language is Persian, and who is writing in Arabic, is capable

  of careful y reading texts in ancient Greek as well as Sanskrit. We

  are looking at an Indo-European savant who could in principle

  have resumed the historic role of the Persians in drawing from both

  Western and Eastern ways of thinking to arrive at new insights that

  would broaden the intellectual horizon of all of humanity. If the

  Renaissance and Enlightenment had happened in Iran, it would

  truly have resulted in a universal civilization rather than a modern

  Western civilization dominating the rest of the planet.

  But Biruni could not have helped to bring that about. Why?

  Because his researches on India and much of the rest of his work was

  done under the patronage of the Turkic-Mongol Sultan Mahmud

  of Ghaznah (971–1030), a genocidal Islamic fundamentalist who

  invaded India in order to destroy Hindu temples and impose Islam

  by force on that territory that we now know as Pakistan. Biruni

  essential y got away with doing some good research on India in

  the course of Sultan Mahmud’s campaign of conquest, which had

  exactly the opposite aim as the one that we can discern in between

  the lines of Tahqiq ma li’l-hind.

  Abu Ali Sina (born 370 Hijri, 980 Miladi) was an extraordinarily

  energetic polymath who produced more than two hundred works

  before his death at the age of 57. Most of these were
written during

  a 15 year period of rare peace and quiet in Isfahan, which was an

  exception in his otherwise troubled life of perpetual persecution

  and dislocation. Interestingly, with respect to what I just remarked

  about Biruni, Ibn Sina’s productive Isfahan period was brought

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  to an end by an attack on the city by Mahmud of Ghaznah’s son,

  Masud. It is quite possible that if Ibn Sina had been able to think

  freely the quantity of his writings would have been matched by a

  quality and caliber of thought equal to that of the greatest European

  philosophers.

  Unfortunately, instead, Islamic oppression turns him into a

  consummate hypocrite. Towards the end of his life Sina writes

  a book called Mantiq al-mashriqiyyin where he disowns all of his earlier philosophical work (all of his thought that goes beyond the

  scope of practical y-oriented science and technology). He claims

  that the peripatetic outlook of his philosophical writings were

  an exoteric façade that he was forced to erect in order to protect

  himself from “people devoid of understanding who considered

  the depth of thought as innovation ( bid’ah) and the opposition to common opinion as sin…”2 Presumably, such people included some

  of the Muslim potentates who withdrew their patronage once they

  discovered his true views, forcing him to spend much of his life as a

  refugee.

  What is even worse is that the one final work in which Sina

  exposes his true philosophy, meant only for a spiritual elite, wound

  up being almost completely destroyed. We do not have a single

  intact copy of the book. What few tantalizing fragments remain

  from the Introduction to Mantiq al-mashriqiyyin include Sina’s claim that the views he sets forth in this work are based on his study of ancient Persian philosophy.3 In other words, he is Shahab al-din

  Suhrawardi’s direct predecessor in the attempt to somehow resurrect

  the pre-Islamic wisdom religion of Iran in the form of a Hekmat

  al-Eshraq. Of course, Suhrawardi was executed as a heretic by the Muslim authorities.

  In light of the fact that we have almost nothing left of Mantiq al-mashriqiyyin, Sina’s confession that what is written in, for example, Kitab al-shifa consists of Aristotelian or Neo-Platonic platitudes meant for “commoners” is real y a disaster. It makes it impossible to

 

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