Al-Kindi was the first important Arab philosopher. He was a polymath whose written output was prodigious: 242 written works are attributed to him, although few are extant. His works dealt with logic, arithmetic, metaphysics, music, geometry, astronomy, medicine, theology, politics, alchemy and meteorology. He vigorously encouraged and participated in the burgeoning movement of the eighth and ninth centuries to translate the writings of Greek and Indian thinkers into Arabic and he sought at all times, by means of his thorough assimilation of Greek rationalism, to provide philosophical justification for Islamic theological dogma.
Information about al-Kindi’s early life is scant. He was a prince born in the Mesopotamian city of Basra, into the eminent southern Arabian tribe of Kindah, during the time when his father was governor of the city of al-Kufa. As a young man he moved to Baghdad, the centre of Islamic culture, where he worked under the patronage of successive caliphs. A story is told of an unhappy incident in his life when two courtiers at Baghdad, hostile to his ideas, entered into an intrigue against him with the result that he was deprived of his huge library of books for a time. All that is known of his character is that he seems to have been regarded as a somewhat mean man. In a book written shortly before his death, the Book of Misers, he is described as avaricious.1
Al-Kindi’s philosophy, although distinctively Islamic in character, owes much to the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic ideas that were impacting vigorously on Islamic thinkers in the ninth century, and he brought the methods and concepts of Greek philosophy to bear on Muslim ideas. He defined philosophy in general as ‘the knowledge of the realities of things, according to human capacity’, and metaphysics as ‘the knowledge of the First Reality which is the cause of every reality’.2 Within the tradition of Islamic theology he adhered to Mutazilite doctrine. The Mutazila were Muslims who in about 720 CE formed their own group by separating themselves from the issue of whether a sinful Muslim was to be described as a believer or an unbeliever. They wanted any such sinner to be described as ‘a reprobate’. From this position of separation the group developed a rational and scholastic theology known as Kalam. This theology asserted the absolute unity of God and held that God had created the world rather than that it was eternal. The Mutazila also affirmed the doctrine of the freedom of the will, arguing that the concept of divine justice required the condition of freedom in humankind. They maintained, too, that good and evil may be known through the exercise of reason and independently of any knowledge of them imparted by revelation. These views shocked the orthodox of Islam who believed that God left nothing to the human will but ordained every detail and event of the universe; that he ‘guides whom he wills and turns astray whom he wills’ and that he re-creates the universe according to his own will at every successive instant. As well as adopting the Mutazilite belief that God created the world out of nothing, al-Kindi seems to have espoused the Neo-Platonist view that reality is a perpetual outflow or emanation from God rather than the product of an act of creation. What he does not tell us is how it is possible to accept those two contradictory accounts of the universe.3
Al-Kindi’s thought, like early Muslim philosophy as a whole, was much influenced by the translation of a philosophical work that was wrongly attributed to Aristotle. The work was known as the Theologica Aristotelis (The Theology of Aristotle) and it was translated into Arabic at al-Kindi’s request at about the same time as Aristotle’s Metaphysics was translated. The Theologica has since been shown to be a paraphrasing of books IV, V and VI of the Enneads of Plotinus. It sets forth the Neo-Platonic doctrine of Emanation in considerable detail, expounding a cosmology in which the One, the Cause of all causes, generates the entire universe through a process of emanation which is the flowing forth of the divine Essence. Plotinus’ philosophy derives from Plato’s and he is chief among a group of philosophers who flourished in the first four centuries CE and who were known as the Neo-Platonists. He produced a close-knit metaphysical system the dominant themes of which are the One, the Intellectual Principle, and Soul. Soul is central in his philosophy and is the concept which enables us to understand his account of reality and the place of the human being within it. In his system the ultimate reality is the One, the ineffable unknowable that is beyond existence, but is at the same time its source. Below the One in the hierarchy of reality, Plotinus places the Intellectual Principle, which pertains to knowledge and thought. The Intellectual Principle stands above Soul, but Soul has the capacity to come to the knowledge embraced by the Intellectual Principle.
Plotinus used the word ‘soul’ to refer both to the world-Soul and to individual souls. He held that the body that obeys its soul achieves a harmony with the higher elements of reality and is able to approach a state of union with the world-Soul, or reality as whole. But a soul dominated by its body loses its unity with the world-Soul and becomes dispersed among the individual physical things that command its attention. The ultimate mystical state is a complete union with the One, a union in which the soul is eventually separ ated from all matter. The emanation of all things from the One occurs in a gradation from the shining lightness of the One to the disintegrated heaviness of matter. Taken in its totality, this graded reality is the best and fullest expression of the One. Thus, reality as a whole is the best possible world, even though some individual parts of it are less than perfect. But it is always possible, Plotinus maintains, for the less perfect to achieve an excellence peculiar to itself within the total unity. Matter, for instance, although of low status, is the necessary stuff for the embodying of Forms from a higher level and a felicitous embodying of a Form is efficacious in raising a soul to a higher level.4
Both the direction and the detail of Plotinus’ ideas were extremely appealing to al-Kindi, intent as the latter was on developing a philosophical rationale for Islamic theology. In particular, Plotinus’ account of the interdependence of the things of the world and of their forming together the best of all possible worlds was of considerable significance for him, for it showed a way to treat an important problem arising from Islamic monism, namely, that of accounting for evil in a reality that is conceived of as entirely the product of the one God who is also good. Plotinus maintains, in Aristotelian vein, that the soul is the principle of life and the ‘rational form’ of the species in which it inheres, conferring essence and definition on the species. In affirming this he seems to be in agreement with Aristotle’s claim that body and soul are a single substance. At the same time, he adopts the Platonic understanding of the soul as separate, whose union with an organic body is contingent and temporary and whose true affiliation is with the incorruptible, heavenly spheres. On this Platonic view, soul substance is analogous to the substance of the Creator, much as the light of the sun is analogous to the sun.
Al-Kindi set forth a view concerning the attributes of God which was adopted by many subsequent Muslim philosophers. He maintained that God’s chief attribute is unity and that anything possessing unity has derived that unity from God. God’s unity is a simple unity, without matter or form and not to be differentiated in any way. God is able to bring forth things from nothing and this is what action is in its primary sense. The seeming actions of humankind are merely derivative and, properly understood, are in fact the passively received effects of primary action. In his account of secondary action it is clear that al-Kindi is seeking to reconcile the AL-KINDI 18 Islamic belief in Allah’s unqualified control of every detail of the universe with accounts of the universe characteristic of Greek philosophical enquiry in which is posited a causal network of changes and events. The tensions within al- Kindi’s concept of an immanent and allpervasive God who is nevertheless transcendent and indescribable guaranteed the prosecution of a virtually inexhaustible philosophical debate within the ensuing tradition of Muslim philosophy.
Al-Kindi was succeeded by philosophers such as al-Farabi, Ibn Sina and al-Ghazali who eventually became better known than he. But his founding work for Arab philosophy and, in particular, his understanding of the need to establish rational as well as revelatory grounds for Islamic doctrine inspired and significantly informed the thought of those who inherited his ideas. In one of his earliest works he wrote some words that epitomize the character of the high centuries of Islamic philosophy:
It is fitting to acknowledge the utmost gratitude to those who have contributed even a little to truth, not to speak of those who have contributed so much . . . We should not be ashamed to acknowledge truth and to assimilate it from whatever source it comes to us, even if it is brought to us by former generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks the truth there is nothing of higher value than truth itself; it never cheapens or abases him who searches for it, but ennobles and honours him.5
1 The author of the Book of Misers was al-Jahiz, who was alive during the middle years of the ninth century.
2 In his First Philosophy, quoted in Majid Fakhry, A History of Islamic Philosophy, London, Longman, 1983, p. 70.
3 There is a fuller account of Mutazilite doctrine in W. Montgomery Watt, Islamic Philosophy and Theology, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1962, Pt Two, p. 7.
4 For a fuller account of Plotinus’ views see Diané Collinson, Fifty Major Philosophers, London, Routledge, 1991, pp. 26, 27.
5 Quoted in Richard Walzer, Greek Into Arabic, Oxford, Bruno Cassirer, 1962.
Al-Kindi was author of the earliest metaphysical work in Arabic. It is translated by Alfred A. Ivry as Al-Kindi’s Metaphysics, New York, Albany State University Press, 1963.
There is an Arabic text of twenty-four scientific and philosophical texts:
Rasa’il al-Kindi al-falasafiyyah, ed. and int. Abd al- Hadi Abu Ridah, 2 vols, Cairo, 1950–1953
See also
‘Al-Kindi’s treatise on intellect’, trans. R.J. McCarthy in Islamic Studies, vol. 3, no .4, 1964, pp. 119–149.
Muhammad, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd, Muhammad Iqbal
Leaman, Oliver, An Introduction to Medieval Islamic Philosophy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985
Walzer, Richard, Greek Into Arabic, Oxford, Bruno Cassirer, 1962, ch. 11
Watt, W. Montgomery, Islamic Philosophy and Theology, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1962; revised edn, 1987