The Teleological Ethics of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī

"For one thing, it’s about a philosopher that almost no one has ever heard of; and ‘teleological ethics’ is not exactly a household phrase. Of the five books, this is probably the one that would be most challenging for the average reader. The reason I picked it is that it is the best book about this figure, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, who died in 1210. He is a good example of the kind of figure who, if you’re just following the tradition of philosophy in the Islamic world, would seem to be incredibly important. He was extremely influential; he provoked lots of responses in the following generations—people were always attacking him, quoting him, using him to understand Avicenna and so on. “You’ll see this idea that philosophy in the Islamic world dies after Averroes. This is complete nonsense” You have to remember that the Arabic-Latin Translation Movement happened around 1200, and he lived all the way out in Central Asia and Persia. So, he lived too late for his works to be translated into Latin. This contributes to the illusion and myth that philosophy in the Islamic world ended with Averroes, because he was the last figure whose works were translated into Latin. But really what happened is that, especially in the eastern part of the Islamic Empire, there was a continuing production of philosophical and philosophically-informed theological works which went on century after century, all the way up to the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century. Even in otherwise very good introductions to the history of philosophy, you’ll see this idea that philosophy in the Islamic world dies after Averroes, that it all becomes mysticism or whatever. This is complete nonsense. Just in terms of the number of texts, there were many more philosophical works after that period than before. But they’re very badly studied—and the main reason is that they had no influence on European culture. Specialists in the field have only started looking at them recently. Absolutely. The book shows Rāzī adopting an astonishingly prescient and original ethical theory which looks very similar to versions of utilitarianism that we have in contemporary philosophy. The whole story is a bit complicated but, basically, Rāzī is a theologian and he wrote voluminously. We have huge numbers of texts and a lot of the texts are very long. One of the good things about this book is that Shihadeh figures out when they were all written and talks about his biography and helps you navigate your way through this enormous corpus—almost none of which, by the way, is translated. He then concentrates on this one area of ethics and shows that Rāzī’s views on ethics changed across the course of his career, but gravitated more and more to the idea that what’s good and bad for us is really just a matter of what’s pleasurable and painful for us. He sounds very like a utilitarian. Then, he says this requires us to reject a longstanding theological idea which is that God’s commands determine what’s good or bad for us. Yes, especially for him because he is a follower of the Ashʿarite school of theology, and the Ashʿarites were famous for thinking that all ethics is founded in God’s commands. Rāzī managed to reconcile the two ideas by saying that good and bad is pleasure and pain, but God’s commands are still crucial because we will survive our death and then we will either go to hell or not. Complying with God’s commands is a good idea on the utilitarian grounds that you don’t want to go to hell. Exactly. It’s like a religious version of utilitarianism. He’s so clever and sophisticated. For instance, Rāzī asked why is it that we sometimes do things where we sacrifice our own pleasure—or undergo pain—for the sake of someone else, for the sake of a child, for example. Why would you risk death or agony to save someone else? And he says, ‘well it’s because you’re following a general rule which tells you to help other people because that maximises pleasure.’ So he even sounds like what nowadays we would call a rule utilitarian: you don’t just evaluate things on a one-off basis, you follow general policies that are designed to maximise utility. He doesn’t put it that way, but in Shihadeh’s presentation that’s basically what it boils down to. One thing that’s quite characteristic of Rāzī, though, is it’s often hard to tell whether he’s telling you what he really thinks or whether he’s just imagining a position that someone would or could occupy. He likes to give you both sides of every argument and then just sort of move on. I don’t think so. In general, there was very little intellectual persecution in the Islamic world. Rāzī had lots of enemies because he made people angry by defeating them in public debate. In fact, there’s a story that, when he was dying, he had to leave instructions to be buried in a secret place so that people wouldn’t dig him up and desecrate his body. He was very contentious. “He had to leave instructions to be buried in a secret place so that people wouldn’t dig him up and desecrate his body” But there was a lot more openness and freedom for intellectual debate in the Islamic world than in the Latin medieval world because there was no Church. There was no one who had authority to come along and say, ‘you can’t say that.’ Although there are some exceptions to this rule, generally speaking, it doesn’t really make much sense to think that the way that books were written in the Islamic world had to do with avoiding persecution, because there was so little persecution to be avoided. There were religious scholars but they were independent of political institutions. They were the people you would consult if you wanted to know the answer to a question and they were involved in the law. But they couldn’t necessarily have ordered soldiers to come down and arrest you and execute you. It really varied from time to time and place to place. For one thing, not all of the rulers claimed to rule with religious authority, especially after the fracturing of the Abbasid caliphate. Some of them were just warlords. The Abbasids did claim religious authority and, in fact, they tried to enforce a theological doctrine that the Qur’an was created and not eternal—which is a complicated story. But they made an effort to enforce a theological dogma in the 9th century and this effort was defied and they failed to get their will recognised. In the end they said, ‘Okay forget it. We won’t enforce this anymore.’ And maybe, because that policy was a failure, you didn’t see Abbasid Caliphs after that trying to require obedience to any particular theological dogma. “The Abbasids tried to enforce a theological doctrine that the Qu’ran was created and not eternal” You did have people like al-Ghazālī, a theologian who lived into the early 12th century. He said that there are certain things that you can’t teach or say or think, because they’re heretical, and if someone says them then they should be put to death. But he was just saying this should happen in theory; there was no political apparatus that made it happen; there was no Inquisition; there was nothing that could be compared to the way that scholastic philosophers and theologians could be hauled before a trial and put on charges on heresy by the church. It’s a continuing tradition. That’s why I wanted to mention the Rāzī because he, in a way, stands at the beginning of that later tradition, as a conduit through which people respond to earlier figures like Avicenna. Avicenna really became the main figure for subsequent generations. If you move ahead to philosophy in the Safavid period, there was a really important figure called Mulla Ṣadrā—if I had had a sixth book to choose, I would have picked something on him. He was contemporary with early modern thinkers, dying in 1640. He commented on the Qur’an, he wrote huge theological treatises on every area of philosophy fundamentally within an Avicennan framework. I’m really oversimplifying here of course—imagine someone trying to describe what happened in European philosophy between 1300 and 1900 in a few sentences. It’s the same sort of problem. That’s a good question. First of all, I should say that I’m not an expert on 20th century Islamic thought, but it’s still worth getting into a little bit. As far as I can tell, the real change happens in the period of colonialisation. It’s not just because the empires were smashed and split up, although that was a factor. It also had an intellectual effect in that figures in the Islamic world start responding to and engaging with ideas from Europe again. So they responded to Marxism, or Heidegger, or existentialism, or even materialism. There was a period in the late 19th century where many figures in the late Ottoman Empire became materialist atheists because they were influenced by ideas from France. You’ve had this story of the Greek transmission into Arabic, and then Arabic into Latin, and then, in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, there was a lot of influence from European ideas on the Islamic world again. “Imagine someone trying to describe what happened in European philosophy between 1300 and 1900 in a few sentences” But it didn’t happen the other way because European intellectuals didn’t learn Arabic and Persian so they couldn’t read what the Islamic intellectuals were doing. But the Islamic intellectuals did learn to read English, French and German. There are certainly very significant philosophers in the early twentieth century, people like Mohammed Iqbal who died in 1938. He was an Indian Muslim who, again, responded to ideas from Europeans, like Nietzsche, for example. Ideas from the classical Islamic tradition have continued to be important. Think about the Iranian revolution: the teachers of the Iranian revolutionaries were reading some of these Avicennan philosophers like Mulla Ṣadrā. So my take on the Islamic tradition is that it’s continuous. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s ironic because people often think that there was this break or collapse of Islamic philosophy. In a way, the contrast with Europe is not so much that it collapsed but that it didn’t. You didn’t have an Enlightenment where they made a big show of setting aside everything that came from the scholastic traditions, and starting from scratch (not that they really did this in Europe either, but they pretended to). In the Islamic tradition they kept working on what were often very technical areas of Avicennan philosophy, trying to negotiate between Avicennan philosophy and Islam. They were innovative; they made progress in logic , metaphysics, psychology , and so on. But they didn’t have a real restart as happened in modern Europe. The result of that is that when the colonialist period happened, you had a confrontation between a very longstanding intellectual culture—that came from the period we’ve been talking about—and a new wave of ideas from Europe. They clashed and then more intellectual developments grew out of that, like, for example, radical Islam and Salafism which have been inspired, in part, by European philosophy. Whether they would admit that or not is another matter."