The Intellect’s finest hour in history
I take it as a self evident that, whatever objections Hegel, neo-Darwinians, or the self-styled apostles of “progress” might claim, the latest nanosecond on the historical clock is not necessarily the pinnacle of some historical summa bonum. This means that we are allowed to ask ourselves the “what was history’s greatest age?” without “Now!” posing as the only acceptable answer. In recent years the self-evidence of this premise has acquired greater credibility, but I would still not disallow “now” as one valid opinion. For the historically minded, there are a multitude of plausible and implausible answers, plausible as Periclean Athens and the Buddhist empire of Asoka, implausible as Atlantis, Camelot, or the Kingdom of Prester John.
At the risk of seeming implausible, I would nominate Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) at least for some of its history, as the brightest moment in the history of the human intellect. Needless to say, it was not an era lacking in bigotry or oppression, and I am not defending it on all counts. However it may have been the best time in history to be an intellectual, at least a Muslim or a Jewish intellectual. Christians got into the act later, mostly as translators (into Latin) and sub-commentators on the overflow of rich scholarship written in, or at least passed down through, Arabic.
Real unity, and real diversity
“Unity through diversity” has become so hackneyed and political that the slogan should be banned from polite company. The intellectuals of al-Andelus would have understood that civil society was something to be suffered and eulogized with varying degrees of sincerity. Yet within the world of the philosophers a creative tension between unity and diversity reigned in the kingdom of the mind. Like a twisting double helix, the two major streams of neo-Platonic and neo-Aristotelian tradition converged and diverged in the writings of the old Andelusians. There were no universities, which was just as well. Livelyhood was based on patronage, clerical posts within religious communities, or “day jobs.” I’m not saying it was easy, but it meant that the tensions between ideology and original thought were obvious rather than subliminal. Hence there were no professors, but there were professions, i.e., poets, doctors, astro-logers and/or -nomers, (al-) chemists, lawyers and preachers, just to name a few. While above and behind this plurality of gainful activities were, not departments of specialized sciences, but the twisting helix of knowledge inherited ultimately from the bivalenced Greek sources (Platonic-mystical/Aristotelian-rational), always struggling for unification, but never completely unified.
Nothing like it before or afterwards
If I am right, that for a happy few, the al-Andalus epoch was an island of rationality in the turbulent river of human ideology, I must contrast it with whatever came before and what came afterwards, at least in terms of the narrative of the West. In contrast to the past, it was the first time in history when the gates of philosophy were safely guarded by the gates of law. I don’t mean that the philosophers were protected from persecution by the law, which of course they weren’t, as could be instantiated by many a melancholy tale. Rather that the world was protected from the philosophers.
This seems a strange thing to say, but I rely of the work of Leo Strauss and his school in this regard. Whatever the merits and demerits of that school’s understanding of the post-Machiavellian world, they uncovered the secret of Andalusian philosophy, which constituted a solution to the conflict between Socrates and Athens, i.e., between the corrosive impact of dialectical thought and the stability of social norms. One is free to object to this thesis. However I think that the case for it is better today than it was when it was originally brought forward by Strauss in 1935. Or are we to think that the contemporary dissolution of Western societies into relativity and chaos is the result of some spiritual malady which has nothing to do with with teleology of dialectical thought?
What is unique to the Andalusian epoch is that the mystics and philosophers did not think that it was beneath their dignity to be jurisprudents, even though they could not exercise their philosophical creativity in that office, since there was only One creator (of law and all other things). In this respect they were different from Socrates, who was compelled by his daemon to probe into all matters, sacred or profane, in or outside the Areopagian legislature. Of course, even a Socrates was the soul of restraint in comparison to modern “law-makers” and the ranks of policy thinkers who guide their hands.
Before the onslaught of subjectivity and the irrational
Not only were the philosophers of old Andalusia pre-professional, (a good thing) they were also pre-psychological, which was an even better thing. Of course, I am painting with a very broad brush here, and I am certainly not implying that the ancients “didn’t have a subconscious” although that might be more reasonable than the Jayens hypothesis claiming the subconscious was the only mind they had. Certainly, the Andalusians had nightmares, but they had not yet come to the point of turning their nightmares into philosophy. In the world of the sages of al-Andalus, there was a relatively clean interface between metaphysics and physics, where logic (“the logos” if you will) operated directly on the substance of its investigation, without mediation. This didn’t mean that they were unaware of the problem of subjectivity, just that they were inclined to see it as more of an accident than an essence. This is true of even the more “pneumatic” schools, like ibn Gabirol’s hylomorphic philosophy, not to mention the neo-Aristotelians. The closest thing to a school which made psychology the basis of its world view might be the astrology of ibn Ezra, with its grotesque descriptions of zodiacal influences. Yet even ibn Ezra frames his work as an excursion into a technical science, a kind of psychiatry of astral accidents, not to be taken up as phenomenology of human consciousness in general. He begins his work with a scriptural quotation “The beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.” (Ps. 111) as a kind of disclaimer against excessive entanglement with the lesser gods of the astral plane, or as we would say, the subconscious.
Hence the world view of the Andalusians might be likened to a person standing on terrra firma (the physical world) gazing up into a clear sky (i.e., metaphysics). In contrast the modern thinker is like a person standing on the bed of a ocean, looking up through the water (subjective mind) at the surface where, hopefully, an objective world commences. For the post-modern thinker there may not even be a surface at all, but an ocean of subjectivity extending to infinity.
After the deluge
Rene Descartes gets a bad press for initiating the epistemic ego, which is often confused with the “bourgeois” individual in the West, which again, may or may not be a good thing. What I consider to be an unqualified bad thing is the breach which opened up between the thinker and the cosmic order. This was rethought, but in some ways aggravated by Kant and his successors. Yet these johnny-come-latelys in the subjectivity game, were standing on the shoulders of the early medieval Scholastics who dismissed the essence of the Andalusian world-view, while adopting much of the latter’s insights and nomenclature. In a sense, the Scholastic claim to be “better Aristotelians” than the Andalusians was correct, for the Christian monks were more thorough in their application of what Aristotle called “turning towards phantasms” i.e., the use of the imagination in the human mind to build up ideas. Technically, this may even be a necessary aspect of concept-formation, but its emphasis opened up a Pandora’s box which would some day lead to psychology and sociology reigning jointly as “queen of the sciences”…an outcome which certainly would have been rued by the Scholastics themselves.
Granted that some anti-psychological thinkers might be too scrupulous in the other direction. For example Maimonides sometimes talks as if the imagination is a kind of vice, and that the worst noetic sin would be to mix up poetry and logic. Yet the modern social world, awash in imagery of a highly questionable, if not ruinous nature, testifies to the perspicacious, indeed prophetic, profundity of the Andalusian sages. It may be that, if indeed they were not as good Aristotelians as their monkish rivals to the north, perhaps they were, after all, better philosophers.
Pico Ultraorientalis 