The alchemy of happiness: knowing and loving God

The Alchemy of Happiness

Al-Ghazali 1058 · 1111Reason has limits: certainty comes from experiencing God.

What it claims

True happiness is the knowledge and love of God, the enjoyment of God.

Why

Each faculty has its delight in its own object; the soul's is to know, and its highest object is God, hence its greatest delight.

The same idea through history

Aristotle330 BCNicomachean Ethics, I, 7 and X, 7: happiness is the activity proper to the highest thing in man, and at its highest this activity is contemplation. Al-Ghazali keeps the shape of the idea (the highest faculty on its highest object) but makes it the knowledge and love of God.

Augustine of Hippo397Augustine: our heart is restless until it rests in God. Al-Ghazali states the same need for rest, but derives it from the delight proper to each faculty.

In short

"The alchemy of happiness: knowing and loving God" is an argument by Al-Ghazali (The Alchemy of Happiness (Kimiya-yi sa'adat), c. 1105, ch. I, II and VIII) on the question "What is happiness?" (answer: in god). Its claim: True happiness is the knowledge and love of God, the enjoyment of God. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P6). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Alchemy of Happiness (Kimiya-yi sa'adat), c. 1105, ch. I, II and VIII

Valid with an implicit premise

Al-Ghazali wrote in Persian a summary of his great work, The Revival of the Religious Sciences. He called it The Alchemy of Happiness: as the alchemist wanted to turn lead into gold, he wants to transform the heart through knowledge of self, of God, of this world and of the next. His central idea is simple. Each human faculty has its own delight in the object for which it was made: desire in being satisfied, anger in vengeance, the eye in beauty, the ear in harmony. The highest faculty of the soul is the knowledge of truth. Nothing is higher than God, so its greatest delight is to know and love God, and that is happiness.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.

Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P6, the computer finds a world where knowing God does give the greatest lasting delight to the highest faculty, but where happiness also needs something else, such as a good life with friends and external goods. The premises hold, the conclusion does not.

The argument is valid with P6. P1 to P5 say that the knowledge of God gives the greatest delight to the highest faculty, leads to love, and lasts after death. One must still say that this is enough to make happiness: that is P6. Objections target P6 (is happiness only that?) and P3 (can one really know God?).

Analogy. To explain to a child the pleasure of ruling, one can only compare it to his pleasure in playing ball, though the two have almost nothing in common. Al-Ghazali uses this image: we who know only bodily pleasures have only a very dim idea of the delight of knowing God.

Objections

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Aristotle 330 BC · attacks premise 6

Happiness is the activity of the best faculties, but it also needs external goods: it is impossible, or not easy, to do noble acts without the proper equipment. Happiness is not reducible to the activity of the soul alone.

a defender replies

Al-Ghazali defender of the argument

Al-Ghazali accepts that the body has needs, but makes it a means. The soul should look after the body as a pilgrim looks after his camel; if he spends all his time on it, the caravan leaves him behind.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: agreement that bodily needs exist. The disagreement is about their place: Aristotle counts them in happiness (at least as a condition), Al-Ghazali subordinates them. No widely accepted answer.

Immanuel Kant 1787 · attacks premise 3

Reason can know nothing beyond possible experience. Kant says he had to abolish knowledge to make room for belief: one can believe in God, but not know him in the sense of knowledge.

a defender replies

Al-Ghazali defender of the argument

In the Alchemy, Al-Ghazali himself says that the knowledge of God within our reach is imperfect, and that it is not a merely speculative knowledge: it must go with devotion and worship.

Al-Ghazali defender of the argument

In Deliverance from Error, he tells that his way out of doubt (about the first truths of reason) did not come from marshalled arguments, but from a light God cast into his breast.

The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: this passage, written seven centuries before Kant, is about trust in reason, not directly about the knowledge of God. It only shows that, for Al-Ghazali, the highest certainty does not come from a demonstration.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: Kant and Al-Ghazali agree on one point, reason alone does not prove God. They part on what follows: for Kant, moral faith remains; for Al-Ghazali, the lived experience of a light remains. Whether that experience is knowledge is the debated point.

Ludwig Feuerbach 1841 · attacks the conclusion

Man's knowledge of God is man's knowledge of himself, of his own nature. The delight said to be found in God is the delight taken in human qualities, projected onto an imagined being.

a defender replies

Al-Ghazali defender of the argument

Al-Ghazali opens the Alchemy by saying that knowledge of self is the key to the knowledge of God, but for him the path leads from the soul toward what exceeds it. One must see in oneself signs that point to something other than oneself.

Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: both start from the same idea, knowing God and knowing oneself go together. Feuerbach concludes that God is man projected; Al-Ghazali, that man is a sign of God. The debate is about the direction of the link and remains open.