Table Of ContentLE VIE EST PLUS BELLE QUE LES IDEES
EXISTENTIALIST HUMANISM, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, AND TRANSCENDENCE IN
THE UNIFIED CIVIC HUMANISM OF IBN MISKAWAYH
John Peter Radez
Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Near Eastern Languages
and Cultures, Indiana University
April 2015
ii
Accepted by the Graduate Faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Doctoral Committee
____________________
John Walbridge, PhD.
____________________
Salman Al-Ani
____________________
Akram Khabibullae v
____________________
Paul Vincent Spade
October 14, 2015
iii
Copyright 2015
John Peter Radez
iv
Acknowledgments
I am greatly indebted to my doctoral adviser, Dr. John Walbridge. His patience, advice, and
encouragement made this dissertation possible. Dr. Walbridge is mentor, adviser, and friend.
Additionally, I would like to thank my readers for their generous support and assistance.
v
Preface
I wrote this dissertation in such a way that one can read it on two levels. On one level, this
dissertation is about Miskawayh as an existential humanist who melded together the cultural and
religious elements of Islamic humanism creating a special kind of Islamic existentialist
humanism to teach us how we can rise above ourselves, how to transcend our own human
subjectivity to experience an ever-rewarding mystical union with God. Through the social and
intellectual, through the ethical and practical, Miskawayh shows us how to consider more fully,
more consciously, the purpose of our own existence. In short, Miskawayh’s brand of
existentialist humanism is a tool to understand life.
On another level, I wrote this dissertation as an apologia for a liberal arts education. The new
mantra for education today is the infamous acronym, STEM (i.e., science, technology,
engineering, and math). STEM is popular and pushed because it provides practical and
applicable results. Its benefits are usually immediate with some guarantee of social and fiduciary
rewards. A liberal arts education, however, is hard pressed to compete in this environment
because its value is less apparent, its results less applicable. Society does not readily recognize,
much less appreciate, those rewards gained from a liberal arts education.
Nevertheless, I believe, there is still hope. In the spirit of Miskawayh, we have only to look to
history to understand the value of such an education. In both the Islamic and European
Renaissance, one needed the accoutrements of civility acquired from either adab or humanitas in
addition to those skills necessary for his particular trade or vocation. A good lawyer needed to
speak well and argue eloquently, therefore he studied rhetoric, for example.
vi
I believe that a liberal arts education serves the same purpose that curtains do for a window—it
frames how we see the world. In other words, the Ancients, mediaeval Muslims, and mediaeval
Europeans all realized long ago that the world needs both—namely the humanities and the
sciences. In a letter to the art critic, Cedric Wright, Ansel Adams captured the spirit of adab or
humanitas and how it enriches us and teaches us about the beauty of spirit on which the world
can put no price, and that life is, indeed, more beautiful than ideas.
Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It
is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it more than kindness which
is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning
out to the light of the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation
on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities
of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.1
11 Ansel Adams, “Letter to Cedric Wright,” Yosemite National Park, June 10, 1937 in Ansel Adams: Letters 1916–
1984 (New York: Little, Brown & Co., 2001), 98.
vii
John Peter Radez
LE VIE EST PLUS BELLE QUE LES IDEES
EXISTENTIALIST HUMANISM, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, AND TRANSCENDENCE IN
THE UNIFIED CIVIC HUMANISM OF IBN MISKAWAYH
The dissertation investigates how the three primary works on metaphysics, history, and moral
philosophy of Miskawayh, an 11th century Islamic ethicist, can be read in toto as one existential
work that exhibits three Sartrean existential properties, namely, the materialization of self, the
encountering of self, and the defining of self. My inquiry focuses on how Miskawayh’s three
works intersect with one another in one existential work with two dominant Islamic humanist
themes—intersubjectivity (that is, learning about the other to discover the truth about one’s self)
and transcendence (that is, one’s relationship with divinity). I begin by giving an account of
Miskawayh’s life in 11th century Baghdad. I then examine how his job as a royal court librarian
inspired him as a historian and philosopher. Next, I discuss Miskawayh’s contributions to 11th
century Islamic humanism and how these contributions led Miskawayh to create a kind of civic
humanism that shaped his moral philosophy. Finally, I conclude by arguing that Miskawayh was
an Islamic existentialist humanist who anticipated Kierkegaard and Sartre. Traditional
Miskawayh scholarship has focused primarily on Miskawayh as an Aristotelian philosopher in
the Iranian tradition of political thought and courtly culture. My research goes beyond this notion
and shows instead that Miskawayh’s philosophy in particular—and Islamic philosophy in
general—is not merely derivative of Greek philosophy. Rather, Islamic philosophy possesses and
integrates something quite unique and foreign to Greek philosophy, namely, elements of
existentialism, theology, metaphysics, mysticism, and humanism.
viii
_______________________________
Dr. John Walbridge
_______________________________
Dr. Salman Al-Ani
_______________________________
Dr. Akram Khabibullaev
_______________________________
Dr. Paul Spade
ix
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments.......................................................................................................................... iv
Preface............................................................................................................................................. v
Le Vie est Plus Belle Que les Idees ................................................................................................. 1
Chapter 1: Miskawayh, His Life and Works .................................................................................. 1
Miskawayh—An Overview of His Life & Times ................................................................................. 1
The Sage................................................................................................................................................ 5
Miskawayh, the Man: A Personal Aside ............................................................................................... 7
Civil Service in Baghdad ...................................................................................................................... 9
Miskawayh—His Works ..................................................................................................................... 12
A Brief Survey of Miskawayh’s Works .............................................................................................. 14
Miskawayh—A New Interpretation .................................................................................................... 18
Research & Methodology ................................................................................................................... 19
Chapter 2: Setting the Philosophical Stage ................................................................................... 21
The Making of a Sage ......................................................................................................................... 23
Miskawayh and the Perfection of the Soul ......................................................................................... 28
Nature of Humanism ........................................................................................................................... 32
The Islamic Philosopher as Sage—a Possible Starting Point ............................................................. 33
Chapter 3: Facets of Miskawayh’s Civic Humanism ................................................................... 35
Miskawayh, the Historian ................................................................................................................... 35
Codifying an Islamic Existentialist Humanism—Individual and Society .......................................... 36
Miskawayh’s Concept of Love ........................................................................................................... 38
Miskawayh’s Concept of Friendship .................................................................................................. 39
Social Justice qua Community ............................................................................................................ 40
Social Justice—Philosophy of Praxis ................................................................................................. 42
Happiness and Justice ......................................................................................................................... 42
Chapter 4: The Structure of Islamic Medieval Society ................................................................. 46
Mediaeval Islam’s Societal Superstructure ......................................................................................... 47
Historical Perspective ......................................................................................................................... 49
The Beginning of the End ................................................................................................................... 50
Deterioration of the Economy ............................................................................................................. 51
x
Moral and Political Corruption ........................................................................................................... 53
Possible Inkling of an Islamic Renaissance ........................................................................................ 53
Hellenic Influences ............................................................................................................................. 54
Chapter 5: Overview of the European Renaissance ...................................................................... 57
Mediaval/Renaissance Christian Humanistic Philosophy ................................................................... 57
Chapter 6: History of Islamic Humanism ..................................................................................... 65
Mediaeval Islamic Humanistic Philosophy ......................................................................................... 65
Islamic Existential Humanism ............................................................................................................ 66
Islamic Civic Humanism ..................................................................................................................... 69
Humanism and Its Relationship to Community .................................................................................. 70
Humanitas ........................................................................................................................................... 71
Part I: The Ancients, Humanism, and Assimiliation ........................................................................... 72
The Ancients ....................................................................................................................................... 72
Theological Aspects of Humanism ..................................................................................................... 73
Part II. Arguing Against an Islamic Humanism .................................................................................. 74
Ashgar Ali Engineer on Islam and Humanism ................................................................................... 79
Part III: Existentialism and Islamic Humanism .................................................................................. 85
Chapter 7: Al–Fauz al-Asghar (Metaphysics) .............................................................................. 91
Al-Fauz al-Asghar—An Introduction ................................................................................................. 92
Existence of God—Part One of Al-Fauz al-Asghar ............................................................................ 93
Psychology—Part Two of Al-Fauz al-Asghar .................................................................................... 97
Aristotle, Augustine, and Bonaventure on the Soul/Mind ................................................................ 100
Miskawayh and the Immortality of the Soul ..................................................................................... 107
Chapter 8: Tajarib al-Umam (Experiences of Nations) .............................................................. 112
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 112
Miskawayh’s Moralistic View of History ......................................................................................... 113
Notable Features of Miskawayh as an Historian ............................................................................... 116
Overview of Islamic Historiography ................................................................................................. 117
Miskawayh’s Philosophy of History and the Persian Influence ....................................................... 127
Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 131
Chapter 9: Tahdhib al-Aklaq (The Refinement of Character) .................................................... 132
Description:By way of adab, Miskawayh saw cultural cultivation in the Islamic literary tradition as a .. 'Abidin al-Khawansari ascribes to Miskawayh some Persian treatises (Rawdat al-Jannah, .. 82 Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval and Modern, 3rd ed., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,.
