al-Razi, Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya’

(250–313 or 323/864–925 or 935)

   One of the most respected and influential physicians in the medieval period, al-Razi (Latin: Rhazes) wrote extensively on the subject of philosophy as well as medicine, viewing it as a ‘medicine of the soul’. His philosophical contributions, however, generally elicited criticism and hostility within the Islamic tradition, and were often branded as heretical. Only a handful of his philosophical texts are extant today. In one of them, the Spiritual Medicine (al-Tibb al-ruhani), al- Razi draws upon his reading of Greek philosophy, as well as his own considerable experience as a physician, to elaborate a Platonic-Epicurean account of pleasure as the return to a natural state of harmony from a prior dislocation, which he defines as pain. He goes on to espouse a prudential, hedonistic ethics which aims at minimizing pain through the guidance of reason, as well as the strategic use of mildly ascetic practices. In his Book of the Philosophical Life (Kitab al-sira al-falsafiyya), he defends philosophy as a way of life (focusing particularly on the paradigmatic figure of Socrates) and assumes a more critical stance towards asceticism, as potentially excessive and unproductive.

   Al-Razi’s rather naturalistic hedonism is, however, only one of the doctrines that earned him his reputation as a bold and potentially dangerous freethinker. Elsewhere, he argues that all human beings have the same fundamental capacity for reason and that the apparent inequality of people in this respect is ultimately a function of opportunity, interest and effort. Accordingly, al- Razi takes a rather dim view of prophecy, which in his view is both unnecessary and delusional, and indeed he criticizes all revealed religions as provincial and divisive. No one individual or group can legitimately claim a monopoly on the truth; each succeeding generation has the ability to improve upon and even transcend its predecessors’ insights through rational argumentation and empirical inquiry.

   Al-Razi thus holds out the possibility of progress not only in medicine and science, but in ethics and metaphysics as well. He sees his own unique metaphysics as an example of this: in an attempt to avoid the conceptual problems generated by both Islamic creationism and Greek eternalism, he posits the existence of five eternal, uncreated principles: God, soul, time, space and matter. From these building blocks he fashions a philosophical myth of the ‘fall of the soul’, in which the world comes to be out of preexisting matter, within a framework of absolute time and space, as a result of the pre-rational, spontaneous urge of an immaterial life-force (the soul) and the compensating design of a divine, benevolent intelligence (God). The aim of the soul, according to al-Razi, is eventually to escape from its embodiment through the exercise of our Godgiven reason and return to its original state. Yet despite his claims about the immortality and ontological independence of the soul, he retains an element of agnosticism about our ultimate fate. At the end of the Spiritual Medicine, while attempting to dispel the painful fear of death, he employs two very different kinds of therapeutic argument: a Platonic argument for the deathlessness of the soul and – in case that is unpersuasive – an Epicurean argument that death is nothing to us, since the soul dies with the body. Although, like Socrates, al- Razi believes the former, he is too much of a pragmatist and falliblist to reject the latter out of hand, especially when it too can help us lead a more rational – and less painful – life.

   See creation vs. eternity of the world; ethics; freethinking; metaphysics; philosophy; Plato; prophecy; psychology; rationalism

   Further reading: Goodman 1999a; Pines 1997; al-Razi 1950, 1993; Stroumsa 1999