Alfarabi As Precursor

Isaiah Berlin's insight into the "deep structure" of Tolstoy's thought requires further development. His sense that Tolstoy's epistemology was "somewhat Aristotelian" (Berlin, Russian Thinkers, 71) is right on the money. Unfortunately, Berlin was not able to capitalize on that insight: he did not know quite what to do with it. And this is because he suffered from the blind-spot that afflicts even the best minds that a European education can produce: a kind of cultural amnesia about Europe's own past and the importance of Muslim intellectuals in the development of Hellenistic thinking.

Here is an example of European cultural amnesia combined with simple bigotry in an otherwise superb scholar of Muslim intellectual traditions, T. J. DeBoer:

The so-called "Theology of Aristotle" was still considered by Farabi to be a genuine work. In Neo-Platonic fashion, and with some attempt at adaptation to the Muslim faith, he seeks to demonstrate that Plato and Aristotle harmonize with one another. The need which he experiences is not for a discriminating criticism, but for a conclusive and comprehensive view of the world; and the satisfaction of this need,--which is rather a religious than a scientific one,--induces him to overlook philosophic differences" (DeBoer, History of Philosophy in Islam, 109).

DeBoer here characterizes the great 10th century Muslim intellectual Abu Nasr ibn Muhammad ibn Tarkhan ibn Uzlag al-Farabi's "harmonization" of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle as a function of his ignorance ("The so-called 'Theology of Aristotle' was still considered by Farabi to be a genuine work"--as if anyone in Europe at the time knew better). It would not do for DeBoer to acknowledge, instead, Alfarabi's determination to work with his Hellenistic inheritance.

Alfarabi (as he has come to be known) did not invent the attempt to see Aristotle as more of a Platonist than he was: European philosophers had already undertaken that task. Today, the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction that we forget that Aristotle was ever Plato's student or that he was, in any sense, a Platonist (in 2006, L. P. Gerson published Aristotle and Other Platonists in an effort to correct our present misunderstandings). The point is that Alfarabi was no more or less ignorant about the relationship of Platonic thought to Aristotelian than any other intellectual of his historical period; moreover, the "harmonization" of the philosophies of those two great Athenians was a project of the Hellenistic period that Alfarabi inherited from Europe and that he saw no reason to challenge. DeBoer gets right the reason Alfarabi did not challenge the harmonization of Plato and Aristotle: he wished to construct "a conclusive and comprehensive view of the world"--no less than his Hellenistic intellectual ancestors. But, again, DeBoer's bigotry causes him to poison the well of historical accuracy with the additional comment about "the need which he experiences" not being for "a discriminating criticism." These remarks are to be read in the light of DeBoer's contrast of religious "need" with scientific (code for "Oriental" irrationality contrasted with Occidental reason).

As it happens, Alfarabi's work is filled with "discriminating criticism"--so much, in fact, that Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111 C.E.) essentially labels him an apostate in his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers. The search for truth is rarely, if ever, undertaken without some attempted exercise of the will-to-power over another human being.

In any event, the prejudice that openly deforms DeBoer's scholarship likewise occludes from view the data that could render Isaiah Berlin's judgment that Tolstoy's epistemology was "somewhat Aristotelian" more than a vague hunch. Unencumbered by European cultural amnesia, Tolstoy's genius reveals an "Asiatic" streak present--though unconsciously repressed--in European thought from the pre-Socratics on. This "Asiatic" streak or, perhaps, project is nicely summarized by DeBoer as the premise that philosophy "is the science of Being as such, in the acquisition of which science we come to resemble the Godhead" (DeBoer, 110).

This premise is far more pronounced in Plato than in Aristotle and it is what makes Tolstoy's thought only "somewhat" Aristotelian. Tolstoy's penchant for empirically driven criticism of philosophical ideas is what makes his thought Aristotelian in any sense at all. This "amalgam" (not to say "harmonization") of Plato and Aristotle was inherited by Alfarabi (and other "Asiatic" thinkers) as a result of the banishment from Europe of any philosophy deemed threatening to the Christian faith. Numerous purges of pagan philosophers were conducted by Christian emperors after the 4th century C.E. In order to escape from persecution, they (and their libraries) traveled eastward, eventually ending up in Muslim lands.

The more that one studies Tolstoy's thought in light of its Hellenistic antecedents, the more one comes to recognize Alfarabi as a strong (though hidden) precursor to Lev Nikolaevich's "somewhat Aristotelian" way of thinking.