To Tell the Truth

            When I was leaving for Philosophy class on Tuesday morning I thought about checking to make sure that I had my bike lock and chain. But then I was sure I had it because I didn’t remember removing it from my backpack after doing my laundry on Sunday. Plus, it gets tiresome second-guessing myself because I start feeling that I’m being obsessive-compulsive if I re-check my pack every time I leave the apartment.

            When I got to the bike rings on St George beside the U of T Bookstore I discovered that I didn’t have my bike lock and chain. If only I’d thought about it before leaving home! I remembered then that what I’d done on Sunday was coiled up my chain, attached my lock to it and shoved it into one of my laundry bags, which was still on my kitchen table. There was nothing to do but to try to sneak my velo into the lecture theatre. It’s a good thing that security isn’t oppressively present at U of T. At OCADU the security desk is right at the front entrance and you can’t swing a purple and blue haired foundation student without hitting a security guard. I had no problem bringing my bicycle into the building, taking it downstairs and into the back door of the classroom. I wedged my bike behind a couple of spare podiums in the left-front corner of the theatre.

            Professor Black began her first lecture on the early 14^th Century Islamic philosopher, Ghazali by telling us that his philosophy was similar to Augustine, although Ghazali had not studied him. They had both drawn some of their thinking from Neoplatonism though. She commented that Ghazali and Descartes were uncannily similar, again with no connection other than that great minds with similar goals think alike.

            Ghazali was Persian but he wrote in Arabic. His formal profession was that of jurisprudence. He went from law to theology (kalām) and was one of the representatives of the later kalām school of the Ash’arites. He detoured to Philosophy and studied Avicenna. His scathing critique of Avicenna, “Tahafut al-Falasifah” (The Incoherence of the Philosophers” was translated into Latin and circulated in the west. In later life Ghazali seemed more sympathetic to Avicenna. He finally moved from Philosophy to Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.

            She commented that Ghazali had so many sides that it reminds her of an old game show, “Will the real Ghazali please stand up!” She said she don’t remember the name of the show. I suggested that it was “What’s My Line”. She declared that we were dating ourselves.

            Ghazali was sceptical of law and theology although he admitted that they had their place. He went through a spiritual crisis (read nervous breakdown) and lost the ability to speak. He finally decided that theology and philosophy were not enough and so he turned to mysticism. Mysticism rests on dhawg (the sense of taste) used as a metaphor for direct experience of the divine source. True knowledge must be infallible and not subject to doubt. Don’t base beliefs on taqlid (blind obedience to authoritative knowledge) alone. For example, something isn’t true just because Aristotle says so. Theologians and Philosophers accused each other of taqlid.

            Ghazali and Descartes both had the same worry that we could even be deceived about basic truths like 2 + 2 = 4. They both insisted that one must be absolutely certain before accepting a truth. If someone shows themselves to have astounding magical powers by turning a stick into a snake, accept that they are powerful but don’t accept it if they say something that is false like 10 is smaller than 3.

            Ghazali kept finding things that he thought ere certain but he fell short.

            One can be deceived by the senses like with the illusion of a stick bending in the water. A dream can seem vivid and sure, but then you wake up. If the senses and dreams can deceive us, how do we know we can depend on the intellect? How can we be convinced that the truth cannot be overturned? Perhaps mystical knowledge is the answer.

            Islamic theologians were generally atomists. God causes everything, including irregularity.

            Even after becoming a Sufi, Ghazali still wrote like an Asharite theologian, which is basically apologetics, polemic and dialectical (rooted in debate and discussion. A theologian’s role is to accept the faith, defend it from outside attacks and refute heresies from within.

            Early Islamic theologians were suspicious of Greek philosophy. Ghazali was okay with Aristotelian logic but thought that most philosophers succumbed the disease of hubris. They would take their love of logic even against the Qu’ran. He says the problem is metaphysics and its claims about what is necessary for god. He said it was kufr. Denial of the truth (unbelief or heresy).

There are three basic philosophical beliefs that are kufr:

1.      Pre-eternity of the world.

2.      God knows particulars in a universal way.

3.      Denial of bodily resurrection. 

Ghazali says it is clear there is bodily resurrection.

Avicenna says there is personal immortality but Ghazali says that is unbelief.

Ghazali concluded that philosophers don’t have the path to certain truth and so what is needed is direct knowledge of the divine.

At the end of class I mentioned to Professor Black that the game show she was thinking of might be “I’ve Got A Secret”. Later though I looked it up and discovered that the actual show in which the lines were, “Will the real (so and so) please stand up!” was “To Tell the Truth”.

I immediately grabbed my bike, carried it upstairs and headed home to get my lock and chain because I couldn’t take the chance on having someone stop me from bringing my bike into University College for tutorial. I had an hour and ten minutes before tutorial and so I figured that would give me time to get home and back before it started.

As I was riding west on Dundas near Trinity Bellwoods Park a fairly young (perhaps homeless) guy with a beard and pushing a shopping cart was waiting to cross the street. As I passed he was muttering, “All those fuckin lies! All those fuckin lies!”

As soon as I came in the door of my apartment I saw my coiled up chain with the lock attached clearly visible on my kitchen table and not buried under laundry like I’d expected. I grabbed it and put it in my backpack, and then I took a pee and headed back downtown.

I got to UC with twenty minutes to spare. I sat in the window cove outside the classroom next to Noel, the pastor’s son. I was doing some writing until I looked down at the lower part of the left collar of my jacket and saw a very large insect crawling upwards. I said, “Jesus!” and brushed it off. The pastor’s son immediately got up and moved away from me. I think the bug was a type of centipede but whatever it was it seemed to fit with the damp old stone walls of University College.

At the beginning of tutorial I voiced my objection to Avicenna’s claim that there has to be a singular Necessary Existent that is the cause of everything else that exists. I said that existence could just as easily be random and perpetual. Noel suggested that the Necessary Existent might simply be the laws of physics. That’s an interesting possibility.

Cilia talked about Ghazali having come from a pluralistic society in Persia where there were Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and several sects of Islam. People tended to follow their parents but Ghazali wanted to find out the truth and a way to approach it without going wrong. He started by building a foundation of firm knowledge made of indisputable truths embodied in first principals. He found the most reliable things were direct sense experience and necessary truths like “ten is bigger than three”.

Testimony in Islam is a huge source of knowledge. He would look at the chain and dismiss it if it had unreliable links. All the while though he would use what he found to prove Islam.

I voiced my objection to the idea that someone would be going to such lengths to find the truth and then would sacrifice objectivity by bending it all to use it to prove one’s religion. Cilia used the analogy that if her doctor tells her she has strep throat she’s not going to dispute it. I didn’t really get the comparison. Noel said he would never trust a doctor’s diagnosis.

Only the intellect can tell the difference between phenomenologically identical sense perceptions to figure out which are right and which are wrong. But what tells the intellect if it’s wrong? He’s worried about false generalizations and intellectual laziness. A higher faculty is needed.

Ghazali had a nervous breakdown trying figure it out. He decided he was a fraud and went into seclusion for ten years until he’d achieved union with the divine mind.

Ghazali concluded that Avicenna knew what he was doing but couldn’t pull it off.

Cilia said that our Professor Deborah Black is an anti-obstructionist. I don’t know what that means in philosophical terms.

Sufis are about achieving oneness with god. You stop existing and are subsumed.

I pointed out that one can misinterpret a mystical experience.

The pastor’s son said that studies have shown that psilocybin produces the exact same effect on the brain as mystical experiences.

Cilia talked about taking a leap of faith to accept 2 + 2 = 4. This won’t commit you to an absurdity.

Ghazali tries to prove Sufism from the start. Theologians are supposed to argue with heretics. If mathematicians say false things about Islam it doesn’t mean their math is wrong. One has to evaluate each claim independently with a reliable method.

Ghazali concluded that philosophers weren’t doing it right. He believed that any properly done rational enquiry would conform to Islam.

She told us that our upcoming essay should be two-thirds comparison and explanation and one-third assessment. She warned us that we must understand the mechanics of inference to assess properly.

After tutorial I went down to OCADU to pick up some unclaimed student drawings of me that one of the Design instructors, Bob Berger had held onto until he retired last year. Tracy Buchanan, the model coordinator had emailed me about them a couple of weeks before. When I got there she wasn’t in because she only works mornings three days a week but another guy in the office knew about the drawings because there was a pile of them in large folders each modeled with a different model’s name. Mine seemed to be much thicker than the others. I didn’t bother to go through them since whatever I didn’t take would probably be trashed anyway so I just took everything. I asked if the guy had a bag and he found me a fairly large one from Ikea.

Everything was in the bag vertically and they sat too high in the bag for me to tie the handles over the top. I tried riding my bike but the Ikea bag was catching in my front spokes. I stopped and rearranged the contents by separating all the paintings and then rolling up the drawings all together so I could lay them sideways in the bag. That allowed me to tie the handles and make the bag shorter as it hung on my right handlebar so it didn’t catch in my wheel.

I rode up to the Jackman Humanities Building at St George and Bloor to sit in an easy chair in the lobby and write while I was waiting for my TA’s office hour at 15:30. I was there for more than half an hour before it was time to go upstairs. Ahead of me outside of Cilia’s office was Noel, the pastor’s son. I said hi to him but he ignored me. I heard him have a conversation a few minutes later though with the other TA and he was telling him that he was going that night to a lecture by controversial U of T professor, Jordon Peterson on the psychological significance of the Biblical stories. The pastor’s son said Peterson is “Awesome”. I’ve heard Peterson on YouTube suggest that Feminism is the manifestation of a woman’s instinct to play hard to get. Noel just saw Cilia briefly and when he left he didn’t acknowledge me either even though he walked right past.

I talked with Cilia about my recent essay because I wanted to see what I’d done wrong to get a C-plus. Apparently I made a major mistake in missing that Anselm’s main proof that we are alive is that we can be deceived. That seems so stupid. But I guess he was focusing on the sceptical argument and the sceptics say you might be deceived about knowing you are alive while Anselm says that being deceived is proof. It also proves that I’m alive in the same way if I think Anselm is an idiot. I told Cilia that being deceived doesn’t prove we are alive if all we are is a bunch of thoughts floating around. She said I should have used that argument. She advised me for my next essay to go with my gut and if I have a major objection then write about it.