Psychology

As in many respects, so in psychology it is difficult to gauge the actual distance between (Gazall’s views and those of the philosophers whom he criticizes. In some places, (Gazall speaks of the soul as if it were a bodily accident in the kalam sense, while in others he advances the Avicennian picture of soul as separate substance and hylomorphic form. He also insists on the reality of bodily resurrection in the Incoherence, yet describes the pleasures and pains of the afterlife in imaginative and incorporeal terms in the final section of the Revivification. (Gazall even declares the reality of the heart (his preferred term for soul) a mystery on a par with the divine essence.

Such vacillations notwithstanding, (Gazall in his mature work clearly adapts the explanatory framework of Peripatetic teaching, with the five outer senses feeding the five inner senses, which in turn are in charge of unifying the perceptual field and providing information for the purposes of action and contemplation - the provinces of the practical and theoretical intellects, respectively. (Gazall also appropriates Platonic moral psychology, in which the appetitive and irascible impulses are unruly elements to be brought under the rational soul’s control, and the Avicennian understanding of the soul’s executive powers (see, e. g., Revivification, bk. 21 and the Jerusalem Ascent, passim).

The central problem that (Gazall encountered in his philosophical sources had to do with how the vaunted ‘‘true realities,’’ that is, essences of things are grasped. In true Aristotelian fashion, al-FarabI had emphasized the role of abstraction (tajrld) in the acquisition of knowledge, while the school ofal-Kindi (d. c. 870), extending at least as far as al-‘jAmirI, contended that the eye of the intellect opens up to a world all its own, in a process from which the senses are excluded. Avicenna appears to have wanted to split the difference, with an elaborate process of abstraction leading up to an emanation of the intelligibles from the Agent Intellect (see Gutas’ and Hasse’s contributions to Wisnovsky 2001). (Gazall more or less follows Avicenna, with two important differences: (1) the highest intelligibles are the divine attributes themselves, for which no true likeness exists in the created world and whose emanation therefore cannot be a matter of necessity, (2) the preparatory work required for the reception of these exalted principles need not be exclusively the province of the scientist or Sufi, instead, the purificatory virtues available to all are sufficient for such a diffusion of divine grace to take place. (Gazall sees an allusion to this doctrine in the Prophetic tradition citing God’s ‘‘gusts of beneficence,’’ and also in the famous ‘‘light verse’’ of the Qur’an (24:35). The latter gave rise to a whole elaborate exegesis in (Gazall’s Niche of Lights, the most notorious of his mystical treatises.