Lovers of Sophia
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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