Lecture 7. Al-Ghazali on the incoherence of the philosophers

From the day we are born, we learn. We have been taught to speak, think and act in certain ways. We go to school and they will tell you: this is how history happened, this is how math works and this is how our society works. We learn and we study, and we accept that what our schools and universities tell us is true. Sure, at university you are asked to critically think about what is being taught, but often this has only to do with formulating your own opinion on a subject. We are not doubting whether the actual substance of the information given might be false, but rather if you agree with it or not. When I am being told about Plato’s world of ideas by my Ancient professor, I immediately accept ‘this was a doctrine Plato formulated and this is how it worked’. I might be critical of the concept that everything in the ‘real world’ is an abstract of an idea (which to me seems ridiculous), but I never doubt that it is not true such a doctrine existed.

I wonder, do we ever stop and think whether everything we think we know is in fact, true? We now have all this evidence that the earth is in fact round, but who is to say we are not just floating in a marble owned by an alien like in the Man in Black movie? We have built up all this knowledge over the centuries, and because we have been doing it for such a long time, we think everything we know now is almost certainly true.

We also have had to reject things we believed were true, only strengthening the idea that what we after rejecting think is true, is extra true.

I am not saying everything we know is not true, but maybe we should wonder if that what we think we know may sometimes be false. This is something we can learn from Al-Ghazali and his incoherence of the philosophers. In his work he shows that philosophers build their own doctrines on ideas of other philosophers, believing these ideas to be true. He shows that popular philosophical propositions that have been accepted for centuries, were based on unproven premises. Philosophers were not saying anything new; they were just imitating each other. Maybe this is what we all are doing, because let’s face it, not many people are capable of complete independent and original thought.  We learn things and from this build our own conception of the world, which is just an imitation of all you’ve been taught. Al-Ghazali has shown that we cannot just reproduce knowledge and never doubt whether it was true. Even now when we think we know so much, it is time to stop and think if this is indeed the case.