Allah Attacks Aristotle: The Philosophical Roots of 9-11

[CAPITALISMMAGAZINE.COM] How do you get young Middle Eastern men to fly a jet full of Americans into the side of a skyscraper? You tell them their creator will love them for it and reward them beyond their wildest dreams. But they have to believe in such a creator first.

To instill this belief you educate them from a very young age. You tell them things like: in death, the true believer lives. In life, the true believer, when directed by god, kills unbelievers. In both death and life, a true believer's happiness is fulfilled by a grateful and all-powerful god. You keep these thoughts alive by training them to pray five times a day.

To make sure they don't stray you give them a book of Absolute Truth and provide interpretation along with it. Since all men by nature desire to know, as Aristotle claimed, a book with all the answers will be a lifelong treasure.

Of course, when Aristotle wrote those words in ancient Greece he had something a bit different in mind. He sought to understand the world we live in through reason -- the practice of non-contradictory identification. Reality, for Aristotle, was the here and now, not some otherworldly realm ruled by a moral dictator. Aristotle's corpus became a kind of unmoved mover in itself, setting in motion a chain of events that, in later centuries, freed men from intellectual prohibitions and eventually sparked the American Revolution.

But we narrowly missed disaster. His most important works were lost for centuries, and only rediscovered when, ironically, the followers of Mohammed came upon them during a military campaign in Syria.

In the years following Aristotle's death in 322 B. C., the independent Greek city-states fell victim to Rome's imperium. By 146 B.C. Greece had become a Roman province and was eventually rolled up into the Empire.

When the small city-state was sovereign, men generally had the feeling of being able to work out their own fate. But "in a large-scale organization like the Empire," philosophy historian W. T. Jones notes, "it was obvious one did not control one's own destiny." People became passive and withdrawn. Over time, their focus shifted from this life to the one they believed would follow.

Mystery cults flourished in ancient Rome, one of them forming the seeds of Christianity. How different were Jesus and Aristotle? Aristotle's focus was man, his tool reason; Jesus' focus was god, his tool revelation. Aristotle saw man as a responsible adult, Jesus saw him as a child. The good life for Aristotle was realizing one's potential; for Jesus, it was pleasing god. Aristotle spoke of the importance of courage, a virtue about which Jesus had nothing to say. For Aristotle pride was the greatest virtue, while Jesus taught it was a grievous sin. (To be precise, Aristotle encouraged "proper pride," a mean between "empty vanity" and "undue humility.")

When the Empire collapsed in 410, only Aristotle's early works survived, and those in poor translation. Philosophers in the centuries that followed became little more than religious scholars who studied and debated fine points of scripture, always fearful of straying outside the bounds of orthodoxy under threat of eternal damnation.

Early Christians believed the end of the world was imminent and thus focused their efforts on their relationship with god. As the centuries passed and the sun still shined, and as men gradually rebuilt culture and civilization, an interest in the things of this world began to grow. The thinkers of this era asked: how do you resolve the conflicting claims of faith and reason? A fortuitous discovery provided a possible answer.

During the 12th century Arabic armies swept into Syria and other parts of Asia Minor, a predominantly Greek culture emanating from the conquests of Alexander the Great. There they found the works of the Classical philosophers, which they translated from Syriac or Hebraic into Arabic and took with them as they continued their march into North Africa and Spain.

As the Christians arrived in Spain, especially in Toledo, the two cultures met, and Christian scholars began translating the Arabic works into Latin to make them accessible to the West. Included were Aristotle's Physics, Metaphysics, and De Anima -- three major treatises.

"Men began to feel the temper of Aristotle's mind," Jones writes. "Here was a method radically different from the authoritarian debates of earlier medieval scholarship. It was sensationally empirical compared with anything the West then knew."

Borrowing Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, generally regarded as the era's greatest intellect, attempted to reconcile faith and reason, dressing Christian dogma in the respectability of rational argument. Duns Scotus, in trying to improve Thomas, ended up achieving what he wanted to avoid: the further isolation of faith from reason. William of Occam, whose famous razor still guides scientific thought ("What can be explained on fewer principles is explained needlessly by more"), completed the separation of faith and reason and released Aristotle's thought unencumbered by religion into a world starving for knowledge.

Many commentators play down Aristotle's role in leading the West into the Renaissance, but in fact the assimilation of his thoughts was a watershed in mankind's history. In stark contrast to Christian doctrine of the Middle Ages, Aristotle did not believe in a personal god, he did not threaten man (in the name of love) with eternal torture for disagreeing with him, he did not see people as "crooked, sordid, bespotted, and ulcerous," as Augustine and his followers did. Though his philosophy was incomplete and not without flaws, Aristotle became man's liberator, showing him how to use reason to live the best possible life.

Both East and West held the "bomb" of Aristotle's philosophy, but only in the West did it detonate. While Arabic culture flourished in many fields, Greek learning never found a secure institutional home under Islam. For true believers, nothing is more important than salvation. Fundamentalists came to rule Islamic society and have never lost their grip.

In revolutionary America, when Aristotle's ethics were dominant politically, we had the moral courage to fight for our independence. As Christian ethics intervened in the years that followed, our freedom bowed out to the welfare state and a suicidal foreign policy.

Mix a repudiation of Western values on one side with a proud display of such on the other, and getting fundamentalists to fly planes into our heart is surprisingly easy.

If only the Arabs had still embraced Aristotle as we did, what kind of world would we have today?

References:

http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/nicomachaen.2.ii..html - Nicomachean Ethics, Book II
W. T. Jones, Classical Mind (History of Western Philosophy), Vol. I, (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1952)

-- George Smith lives in Atlanta where he is busy writing screenplays and articles on liberty. In addition to parenting, he enjoys staying fit, tomato gardening, and making the occasional "killer sandwich."

Only around 60 million people were killed in the name of atheism last century. Many, many more times the amount of people killed in the name of religion from that century and the one preceding it.

Well I'm sure all Christians will appreciate your defense of religion on the basis that it kills less people then other systems of belief.

Of course, if you happen to be one of these killed by religion, you probably wouldn't be able to see much difference.

Hank

Well I'm sure all Christians will appreciate your defense of religion on the basis that it kills less people then other systems of belief.

Please Hank, in what part of any of my posts did I make a defense of Christianity on this thread? I thought I was quite lucid in the point I was trying to make in post 38. I admire your insights on all the threads I've seen you post on.

Cordially

And what might that supreme good be for Aristotle? The same as it is for you; to exist.

This answer does not go far enough, although Aristotle would no doubt agree in principle that a supreme good is only valid for what exists. The answer is given in the post above where Aristotle's own words from the Nicomachean Ethics show that the supreme good involves more than mere existence. We are complex on account of our ethical nature. In sum, Aristotle conceives of the good in two ways: the good involves more than one day, and more than one person. The last is the named political science, the first is anthropological and he sums it up with a nice aphorism:

The Good of man is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue.... Moreover this activity must occupy a complete lifetime; for one swallow does not make spring, nor does one fine day; and similarly one day or a brief period of happiness does not make a man supremely blessed and happy.
--bk. 1, ch. 7, sct. 1098a.

It's a good question and makes for worthwhile discussion.

Thanks for the link, Dumb_Ox. Good thoughts from JasonC:

Chesterton once said the most vital freedom is the freedom of man to think, meaning by it not absence of repression but the belief that human thoughts matter. In philosophy, skepticism destroys this, where even pragmaticim preserves it sufficiently. In theology, literalism destroys this, where even the most centralised authority allowed interpretation preserves it sufficiently. These issues are still live ones in our own civilization. We usually overlook how much we owe to these arguments not being settled, and in favor of the less fruitful sides.

Is there an Islamic version of Thomas Aquinas?

Yes, there is, and he was conveniently not mentioned in the posted article. His name was Ibn Averroes, and he had commented on the works of Aristotle (and appropriated them for Islam) before Aquinas was born. In fact, Aquinas undertook his work with the philosophy of Aristotle as a Christian response to the work of Averroes. Thus, not only did Islam have an Aquinas--it had the man without whom Aquinas' philosophy may have never come into existence.

There is nothing about Allah in the piece, nor of him attacking Aristotle, nor any philosophical roots about violence. There is, however, a distinct attitude toward religion. The implied conjecture is preposterous and uncivil.

You picked up on that, did you? I also detected a distinct disdain for the true believer, but I thought the presentation was quite civil. Anyone who attempts to take every word of any religious text as completely and literally true will go mad (or already is).

Flame away.

Hint: there have been so many interpretations over the centuries as to what "completely and literally true" means, that I doubt if you could find any random group of believers to agree on any major issue.

What exactly do you mean by "the human condition" that makes it impossible to take God out of it?

I mean that a political science that excludes the God question from the table is false to its constituencies. Cicero is a good example of a skeptic who recognized this. Since all mankind desires to be ethical by nature, it is our human condition to be religious.

Islam also brought the concept of zero back from India -- not just the placeholder, but also the rules for multiplying and dividing by zero, and for handling multiplication and division of mixed positive and negative numbers.

The Muslims thought zero was such a good idea they executed anyone who refused to accept it as a valid number.

Such a commitment to truth.

Since all mankind desires to be ethical by nature, it is our human condition to be religious.

IC. I'd just say that I agree with the 1st part of that statement, but the 2nd part only follows if you assume the facts of the natural world cannot give us any basis for ethics.

A very interesting discussion, this has been. (Also the earlier thread someone pointed out above.)

"Christ may not have, but unless you were absent in history class, you know damn well Christians did. This in and of itself is clearly a lesson!"

It maybe a lesson that there is evil in the world, but it is not a lesson that Christian is evil. You do see the difference?

"When you fail to comprehend the very point to which you respond you ought be careful in questioning the comprehension of others."

No my friend, I understood your point. Evidently you failed to see mine.

"No, Christians are not, by the nature of their being Christian, "evil". But given the example of Christ's life, people who purport to follow that example, have acted quite evil in the name of Christ. The lesson is that this is not logic and is not based upon reasoning, but rather fundamental belief in religion."

Returning to the article and my original point, the author was attempting to equate religious fundamentalism with terror and attempting to equate the triumph of logic over fundamentalism in western civilization with the rejection of terror. An Islamic fundamentalist, one who follows explicitly the words of Muhammad, will engage in terrorism since that is what Muhammad directed. A Christian fundamentalist, one who follows explicitly the words of Christ, will not engage in terrorism since Christ directed just the opposite. It is not the embrace of logic that steered Western Civilization away from this, it was the basic fundamental difference between the religions. You do see that point, don't you?

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