Al-Ghazali

Their big question

What do you do when you stop being sure?

Al-Ghazali had everything a thinker could want: the best teaching post in Baghdad, a reputation, students who came from far away. Then he stopped being sure of anything.

He did not lose his faith in the usual way. He lost the ground underneath it — he found that when he pushed on what he believed, it moved. The senses can be fooled, so they cannot be the final court of appeal. Reason, which was going to correct the senses, could also make mistakes. Where do you stand if nothing is certain, including the memory of why you thought so in the first place?

He left. He gave away his position, travelled, and lived quietly for years, mostly alone. What he came back with was not a proof but a difference: certainty of the demonstrative kind is rarer than philosophers claim, and the things that actually hold a life together are habits of the whole self rather than arguments. He wrote that he had been trying to understand by looking, when the understanding he wanted was not the kind you can look at.

His argument with the philosophers of his day was precise. He did not say they were wrong about everything — he said they claimed a certainty they did not have, and then used that claim as a weapon. What they offered as proof, he said, was mostly a habit of thought dressed as a demonstration. Whether he was right is still live ground, which is why he is worth arguing with rather than simply admiring.

“I examined what I believed, and found nothing that would not fall when I pushed it.”

A summary of the crisis he describes in his own account of his intellectual life, Deliverance from Error, rather than a single sentence of it.

Three things worth knowing

• He was the most famous teacher of his generation in Baghdad, with the most prestige anyone could want, and he walked away from it.
• He described a collapse of certainty so complete that he could not be sure the things in front of him were real — and wrote that the senses cannot be their own judge.
• He wrote The Incoherence of the Philosophers, arguing that philosophers who claimed certainty were doing something shakier than they admitted.

Try it — think like Al-Ghazali

Choose one thing you are completely sure of. Now try to give three reasons for it that do not depend on someone telling you. Notice how many of your certainties turn out to be borrowed.

We have no portrait of Al-Ghazali that is both authentic and free to use, so this page uses a drawn mark rather than an invented face. About the pictures.