Council of Heroes: Page from a Dispersed Mahabharata (Great Descendants of Mahabharata), circa 1800

This article is a preview from the Winter 2018 edition of New Humanist

There is a reassuring narrative that, with the exception of a few glitches, history is a more or less linear story of an emergence from myth and superstition towards a more rational, scientific understanding of the world. It’s a tale western philosophy tends to repeat, maintaining that the birth of philosophy in Ancient Greece came when people started to look beyond gods and myths and tried to understand the world in a naturalistic way. Thales of Miletus took the first stumbling steps, with his suggestion that everything was made of water. One of his successors, Democritus, did much better when he proposed that everything was made up of discrete atoms.

There is some truth in this story, but it is highly selective and conceals more than it reveals. The complexities become more apparent when we stop making the assumption that philosophy is a uniquely western phenomenon and look at the birth of philosophy around the world.

One of the great unexplained wonders of human history is that written philosophy first flowered entirely separately in different parts of the globe at more or less the same time. The early Upanishads – the foundational texts of Indian philosophy, of unknown authorship – were written between the eight and sixth centuries BCE. China’s first great philosopher, Confucius, was born in 551 BCE, while in Greece, Thales was born around 624 BCE. The Buddha’s traditional birthdate also places him in the sixth century BCE, although scholars now believe he probably wasn’t born until around 480 BCE, around the same time as Socrates.

The 19th-century German philosopher Karl Jaspers dubbed philosophy’s birth in the eighth to third centuries BCE the “Axial Age”. This was a period of transition from understanding the world in terms of myths accepted on authority to more systematic explanations that could withstand the scrutiny of reason. This move, however, was far from straightforward or uniform. Religious and mythological world-views were generally adapted rather than overturned. This is perhaps clearest in India, where there has never been a widespread secularisation of philosophy.

Scholars generally divide the early development of philosophy in the subcontinent into two periods. The Vedic period preceded the Axial Age, roughly between 2500 and 600 BCE, and is described by Charles Moore and Sarvepelli Radhakrishnan in their book on Indian philosophy as “an age of groping, in which religion, philosophy, superstition and thought were inextricably interrelated and yet in perpetual conflict”. Four key Vedas treated as revealed scriptures, sruti, were written during this period.

The epic period followed (c.500/600 BCE–200 CE), when the Mahabharata, of which the Bhagavad Gita is part, was written. With the Upanishads and the Brahma Sutras, the Bhagavad Gita forms the “triple foundations” (prasthana-traya) of orthodox Indian philosophy. Although not yet works of systematic philosophy, the doctrines developed in these earliest periods have, say Moore and Radhakrishnan, “determined the tone if not the precise pattern of the Indian philosophical development ever since.” Chief among these is the idea that ultimate reality is brahman, an infinite, unchanging, universal soul. The individual self, atman, only has the illusion of independence. Our ultimate goal is to dissolve the ego and return to brahman.

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In Greece, the new philosophies tended to to accommodate the old gods. This didn’t present a great obstacle to a more naturalised world-view because these deities were portrayed as human-like superheroes in myths, interacting with mortals in the same physical spaces. Nonetheless, this is not naturalism in the contemporary sense and it is anachronistic to see Greek thought as lacking any kind of religious dimension. Plato’s dialogues, for instance, always feature mythological passages. Contemporary philosophers have tended to treat these as poetic flourishes, not to be taken literally. But increasingly scholars are accepting that they should be taken more seriously and that Plato, like many of his contemporaries, was not the fully secular thinker many like to pretend he is.

The story of philosophy as one of the ineluctable growth of secular reason becomes even more problematic as it develops after the Greeks. Mediaeval philosophy in the west was entirely religious. Key thinkers such as Aquinas and Anselm were Christians whose philosophy was steeped in theology. In mediaeval Europe, faith and reason were seen as being in harmony, with reason’s role not to provide the foundations of faith, merely to explain it. Philosophy was largely the rational justification of revealed truths.

As late as the 17th century, a philosopher who by the use of reason reached conclusions that contradicted Church doctrines would be suppressed, even if they supported the existence of the Christian God. Such was the fate of Descartes, whose works were put on the Roman Catholic Church’s list of banned books, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, in 1663, until its discontinuation in 1966.

But we don’t call René Descartes or John Locke “Christian philosophers”, even though they were in fact both philosophers and Christians, identities that were not hermetically sealed from each other. Locke, for instance, praised toleration as “the chief characteristic mark of the true Church” but insisted “those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God” because “promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist.”

Despite this, many western philosophers use the overtly religious character of a lot of philosophy beyond the west as a reason to ignore it. Even western philosophers who are open to other traditions often struggle to deal with their broadly theological strands. It seems to me that they often find themselves caught between a cosmopolitan enthusiasm for the unfamiliar and a parochial disdain for the dilution of pure philosophy with faith. The result is that they often play down or even deny the seemingly religious nature of the ideas they study. Leah Kalmanson, associate professor at Drake University, recognises this. “Some philosophers have a tendency to read all references to the supernatural out of the texts,” she told me. I saw something of this tendency in India. There were those who felt that to defend Indian philosophy it was necessary to claim it was distinct from religion, even as others wanted to make their integration of philosophy and religion a matter of pride.

In separating theology from philosophy, the modern west is the global exception, not the rule. Talking about the Maori philosophy of his people, for example, historian Hirini Kaa says, “What we have in common with most of the world is that we don’t separate out the spiritual from the physical. I think that’s what makes Europe different. You’re the ones who have separated it out, you’re the ones who are abnormal.”

But as we have seen, this abnormality is recent. If we’re looking for a philosophical tradition that is and has been naturalised for millennia, you have to look east, not west. In China, even before the Axial Age there was an absence of a strong religious culture featuring gods or other-worldly heavens. Confucius (551–479 BCE) based his teachings on the cultural norms of order, respect for elders and tradition. The other major tradition, Daoism, valued harmony with nature above all else and its foundational text, the Daodejing, was written between the fourth and third centuries BCE. Both traditions claimed they were not offering new teachings but preserving ancient wisdom.

For those schooled in secular thought, it’s a challenge to respond to other traditions in ways that fully acknowledge both their philosophical value and their religious or spiritual dimensions. Somehow, we must find a way to do this if we are to have an open dialogue across traditions. We must acknowledge that the strict secularisation of philosophy is itself a philosophical position that requires justification. To simply stipulate that faith separates you from philosophy is as deeply unphilosophical as stipulating that a sacred text must have the last word.

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Islamic philosophy is the most obvious example of a philosophical tradition often dismissed as more religious than philosophical, and therefore safe to avoid. The standard way of posing the “problem” of the religious nature of this philosophy is to focus on the battle for supremacy between falsafa and kalam in the Middle Ages. Falsafa is usually translated as “philosophy” while ilm al-kalam, to give it its full name (literally “the science of the word/discourse”), represents the harder to translate idea of a kind of theological philosophy specific to Islam. However, we have to be careful here, because falsafa does not mean philosophy in its modern, general sense. Falsafa is a transliteration of the Greek word philosophia. It referred to the sciences generally, as inherited from the Greeks, not just what we would call philosophy today.

The key protagonists in this historical dispute were Avicenna and Averroes, who spoke in support of the falasifa (philosopher), and al-Ghazali, whose Incoherence of the Philosophers attacked the pursuit of reason without revelation. The crude version of history is that al-Ghazali won, and the decline of falsafa heralded the decline of secular philosophical thought in the Islamic world, which has not been reversed to this day.

Although no serious scholar would entirely subscribe to the simplistic narrative today in which theology drives out philosophy, in less strident terms it does represent a received wisdom which many fiercely contest. However, having listened to leading scholars debate these issues with me and among themselves, it looks to me as if the disagreement is not as polarised as it might first seem. The argument appears to be whether Islamic thought is truly philosophical or instead a kind of theology. This is often assumed to be inherently value-laden: Islamic thought is “proper” philosophy (good) or “just” theology (bad). But of course the belief that proper philosophy has to be purged of all theological taint is itself an expression of a value that not everyone would agree with. In other words, it is possible to accept that Islamic thought has not been secularised in the same way as western philosophy and to say it is all the better for it.

“Who says that a philosopher cannot be motivated by church and God?” the expert on Islamic philosophy Frank Griffel told me. “You have major figures in the British tradition who we consider philosophers, deeply pious people who didn’t write about their faith, yet their motivation for understanding and explaining the world is still theological. Arabic authors are open about that.” Similarly, his colleague Luis Xavier Lopez-Farjeat says that “you will have a very narrow conception of philosophy if you insist it must conform to the strongly secular parameters of the Enlightenment.”

All experts agree that there is no clear-cut distinction between theology and philosophy in Islamic thought and arguably in most other intellectual traditions. The American philosopher Richard Taylor says that there is “absorption back and forth” between theology and secular philosophy in the Islamic world, “parallel intellectual tracks which quite often come together and come apart, and they’re watching one another to some extent.”

Peter Adamson, who has written extensively on Islamic philosophy, also thinks it unhelpful to see the falsafa and kalam distinction as a battle between faith and reason. “Rather there was a struggle within kalam itself between more and less rationalist approaches to understanding the revelation brought by Muhammad.” The distinction is not really about two different ways of thinking. Rather it is a division within a single body of Islamic-philosophical-theological thought. Al-Ghazali, an archetypal proponent of kalam, not only argues philosophically, he appeals to arguments by Plato and Galen, claiming that the falasifas have misunderstood them. Similarly, the falasifa al-Kindi begins one of his philosophical treatises with “May God grant you long life in the happiest of states and the purest of deeds, O son of noble lords and pious leaders. The beacon of faith, the precious gem, the best of both worlds!” Even as he reaches his conclusion based on Neoplatonic reasoning, he does so in religious terms: “Therefore, there are not many agents, but One without any multiplicity whatsoever (glorious and exalted is He above the descriptions of the heretics!)”

Averroes is also keen to establish the theological licence of falsafa, arguing that the Koran mandates it. He takes lines such as “Reflect, you [who] have vision” as Koranic authority for the obligation to use philosophical methods. He is clear that philosophy cannot be done without piety and that its ultimate end is also piety. He also uses Scripture in his arguments, arguing against those who believe there was no being or time before God created the present being and time, saying, “These opinions about the world do not conform to the apparent [i.e. evident] meaning of scripture” and that “It is not stated in Scripture that God was existing with absolutely nothing else: a text to this effect is nowhere to be found.”

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The struggle to find the right balance between revelation and reason continues across the Islamic world today. There have been times and places where the theological constraints on reasoning have been loosened and secular ideas have gained ground. For instance, Christopher de Bellaigue has chronicled what he calls the “Islamic Enlightenment” of the 19th century when creative Muslim thinking thrived in Cairo, Istanbul and Tehran. However, even de Bellaigue, who debunks the idea that Islam and open-minded philosophy are incompatible, acknowledges that this was preceded by centuries in which free inquiry was almost impossible, and that much of the direction of travel in recent decades has also been towards intolerance.

“If Islam engaged so successfully with modernity until the First World War,” he asks, “why since then has reactionary revivalism been able to impose itself on ever larger swathes of the Muslim world?” Broadly, the rest of the world has not given this sober reflection, demanding an extensive Islamic Enlightenment along the lines of the European one (overlooking the very long time it took for the Enlightenment to result in women’s emancipation, racial equality and equal rights for homosexuals). We should know by now that urging the Islamic world to follow the same path as the west is more likely to spark resistance than enthusiasm. In the west, secular knowledge has been engaged in an ongoing tussle with religious authority, in a kind of zero-sum game. As de Bellaigue warns, we should not fall for the fallacy, promoted by “progressives” and “reactionaries”, alike, “that modernity is a fixed value to which there are only two possible responses – acceptance or rejection in favour of the status quo.”

The history of Islamic philosophy suggests that the Muslim world’s accommodation of secular knowledge will have to be sui generis. There is little to no prospect of the emergence of a fully secular philosophy. There is every prospect, however, of a distinctly Islamic philosophy which is open, tolerant and which embraces secular knowledge by making it compatible with theology. It has happened in the past and it could happen again. Those who claim otherwise, that we are heading for an inevitable clash of civilisations, do not have history on their side.

Julian Baggini is the author of "How the World Thinks: a Global Hsitory of Philosophy" (Granta)