62. I therefore collected and marshaled those utterances [of the Ta‘limites], combining thoroughness and accuracy, and answered them at great length. The result was that one of the Sunnites found fault with me for overstating their argument. He said: “This is an effort on their behalf. For they would have been unable to defend their doctrine by such specious arguments had it not been for your pinpointing and marshaling them.” This criticism is justified in a way. Long ago Ahmad ibn Hanbal found fault with al-Harith al-Muhasibi — God have mercy on them both! — for his writing books in refutation of the Mu‘tazilites. Al-Harith said: “Refuting innovation is a duty.” Ahmad replied: “Yes, but you have first reported their specious argument and then answered it. What assurance have you that a man may not read the specious argument and it will stick in his mind, but he will pay no attention to the answer, or he will study the answer without understanding its real import?”
63. Ahmad ibn Hanbal’s remark is true. But it concerned a specious argument that had not become widespread and notorious. However, once such an argument becomes widespread, replying to it becomes imperative: and replying is possible only after setting the argument forth. To be sure, one should not burden oneself with a difficulty with which they have not bothered. Nor did I do that. On the contrary, I had heard such argument from one of my associates who frequented my company after he had affiliated himself with them and professed their doctrine. He told me they used to laugh at the works of those who wrote in refutation of them, since those writers had still not grasped their argument. He then cited that argument, relating it in their own words. So I could not personally be content with having it thought that I was unaware of their basic argument, and for that reason I presented it; nor did I want it thought of me that, even though I had heard the argument, I had not grasped it, and for that reason I reported it systematically. My aim was to give the fullest account possible of their specious argumentation and then to prove its error to the hilt.--Al-Ghazali Deliverance of Error", translated by Richard J. McCarthy.
My headline is a bit of click-bait, of course. But when I returned to Al-Ghazali after a year ((recall here; here), here), the quoted passage jumped out at me. (And the fact that he anticipates Pascal's wager, which i learned he develops more greatly in The Alchemy of Happiness, chap. 6, but there is a scholarly literature on that!) The passage is, in fact, part of a larger argument throughout the Deliverance on how to think about dangerous knowledge.
This argument Al-Ghazali sprinkles through the text. His favorite metaphor to treat the problem is in terms of snakes and their poison (sometimes he also uses money-changer). So for example, while he thinks the works of the philosophers need to be censored, he clearly also conveys thereby that an informed elite can read them in order to draw profit from it or learn how to unmask philosophers: "a child must be prevented from handling a snake, not the skilled snake charmer." (par. 53) And a few paragraphs later, he makes the point more explicit "just as the snake charmer must not handle a snake in the presence of his little boy, since he knows that the boy will imitate him thinking he is like his father, but rather must caution his boy against that by being cautious himself in the boy’s presence, so also the man of deep learning must comport himself. Furthermore, when a skilled snake charmer takes a snake and separates the antidote from the poison and draws forth the antidote and renders the poison harmless, he is not free to withhold the antidote from anyone in need of it." (par. 59)*
As an aside, it is clear that Al-Ghazali, not unlike his philosophical targets, thinks the social hierarchy must reflect, in part, the cognitive hierarchy. And the political hierarchy, in turn, must take care of the people. In this instance, the people (the boy) must be protected from harm. These points are also hinted in his treatment of why the philosophers are to be taken as heretics. They (Al-Farabi and Ibn-Sinna) deny, "that men’s bodies will not be assembled on the Last Day, but only disembodied spirits will be rewarded and punished, and the rewards and punishments will be spiritual, not corporal." Now, let's grant Al-Ghazali that this is indeed heretical. It is noteworthy that the problem here is that Al-Ghazali clearly thinks that if ordinary people also come to believe that there are no "corporal rewards and punishments," (par. 47) they are more likely to be licentious and social/political life (and obedience) will become more difficult. But, and to speculate, this only makes sense if Al-Ghazali assumes that ordinary people don't really take talk of disembodied souls that seriously.
Okay, let's turn to the quoted passage above. Al-Ghazali reports that he was criticized for engaging carefully with misguided views and he was (unintentionally) thereby supporting their views. Here the objection is not [A] that in virtue of engaging with misguided views they are made more legitimate (something at the root of no-platforming.) Rather, the objection is that [B] that in virtue of engaging with misguided views these views are thereby strengthened. And while Al-Ghazali is not one of our charitable analytic philosophers, it's clear that in the process of criticizing misguided views, Al-Ghazali spent some time reconstructing them and providing the means by which they could be strengthened. Note that at precisely this moment Al-Ghazali (who undoubtedly takes some pride in his capacity to do a better job at presenting a misguided view than the person peddling the misguided view) acknowledges the reality of the inductive risk (the "criticism is justified in a way,") and in case you missed it, he attributes the point to one of the highest authorities in Islam (Ibn Hanbal, and says it is "true.")
If you engage with misguided and dangerous positions the risk of thereby strengthening those positions is enhanced. Al-Ghazali suggests in light of inductive risk that one should basically ignore misguided views that have little uptake, and should engage with views that are "widespread." He even operationalizes "widespread" in terms of, 'is the cognitive elite aware of the misguided view.' Presumably at that point, a misguided view runs the risk of becoming the norm and/or influence policy. He implies that ignoring the view at such a point becomes riskier than actually accidentally strengthening it. A form of intellectual damage control is an obligation on the intellectual elite (recall this post on Manski's post-publication review of The Bell Curve.)
I have some sympathy for Al-Ghazali's argument here. (So some of you may wonder why I have not taken on Jordan Peterson yet--thankfully others have done so!) But it strikes me there are two clear concerns. First, as Hume implies in the first Enquiry (E 10.22, SBN 120) it would be better if misguided views would be challenged early in order to prevent uptake in the first place. Preventing the spread of misguided policies is less risky and may, in fact, be less costly and easier. Of course, there are huge opportunity costs involved if one is ever-vigilant against all misguided views.
As an aside, I have presented Al-Ghazali in terms of a largely consequentialist argument. One may well argue that his own perspective is also deontic or virtue-theoretic; he clearly thinks that there is a duty for him to engage with misguided widespread views. But it is notable that he responds because of reputations costs: "I could not personally be content with having it thought that I was unaware of their basic argument, and for that reason I presented it." (And this form of vanity is also consequentialist.)
Second, Al-Ghazali's response to the objection does not generalize or is not really reassuring. He clearly thinks that because of his brilliance he will end up doing less harm than if he had remained silent. There is a good chance that he will be victorious in the battle of wits/arguments, etc. But this may be an expression of overconfidence. Al-Ghazali clearly thinks not everybody should try to engage with misguided views even if only to refute them. The whole point of the snake metaphor is that skilled snake charmers should be in charge of defanging snakes. But this pushes the problem, which knows no easy solution, back a step: how does one decide that one is skilled snake charmer? The ones that die in the process of handling snakes may well put the kids in harms way.
* While this all sounds rather Straussian, the business of poisons and antidotes has a Platonic veneer as Derrida has emphasized.
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