The Eudaimonist Ethics of al-Fārābī and Avicenna by Janne Mattila

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Eudaimonist Ethics of al-Fārābī and Avicenna by Janne Mattila Jari Kaukua MATTILA, Janne. The Eudaimonist Ethics of al-Fārābī and Avicenna. Leiden: Brill, 2022. vii + 247 pp. Cloth, €104.94 Scholarship on Islamic virtue ethics is surprisingly scarce; indeed, Janne Mattila's book is the first systematic study of the ethics of Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (d. 950/1 CE) and Abū ʿAlī ibn Sīnā, or Avicenna (d. 1037), two figures central to the formative period of Islamic philosophy. The book makes three substantive claims: (1) Fārābī and Avicenna did have a consistent ethical theory; (2) their ethics was not straightforwardly derivative of ancient philosophy, but instead, both developed a complex ethical theory that combined ancient Greek and Islamic elements within the framework of their respective philosophical systems; and (3) their ethics was inseparable from their psychology, cosmology, and metaphysics. Arabic thinkers worked from a collection of ancient material that was loaded with an internal tension between an intellectualist conception of the human good, conveyed especially through Neoplatonic texts, and a more practically oriented one found in Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Mattila [End Page 555] shows that Fārābī and Avicenna achieved a systematic resolution of this tension. The first of the book's two parts presents a sustained argument for Fārābī's and Avicenna's eudaimonism, or the view that happiness is the ultimate objective of human life. They both endorsed a thick concept of happiness that identifies it with intellectual contemplation, grounding it in the ancient conception of the human essence: the activity distinctive of human being is the use of reason, and consequently, the best possible use of reason is the highest goal and the most pleasurable kind of activity any human being can engage in. Although Fārābī and Avicenna were developing ideas familiar from the Nicomachean Ethics, the systematic underpinnings were found in the late ancient amalgam of Aristotelian psychology, cosmology, and metaphysics with the Neoplatonist theory of emanation. Importantly, though, Mattila shows that neither followed the Neoplatonists in holding that there is a goal superior to reason and intellection. For Fārābī and Avicenna, the universe is intelligible through and through, and the contemplation we should strive for has the objects of complete scientific knowledge as its object. In the second part of the book, Mattila turns to investigate the tension in Fārābī's and Avicenna's metaethics. Although they both conceived happiness as an exclusively intellectual affair, they also endorsed Aristotle's virtue ethics. The question now is, why should we care about cultivating virtues, if our only goal is the acquisition of knowledge? Of course, the tension is familiar from Aristotle himself, who in the Nicomachean Ethics seems to endorse both an inclusive understanding of happiness as consisting of all the virtues, and an exclusive, intellectualist understanding. Late ancient Neoplatonists resolved the tension by making the virtues necessary conditions for the acquisition of knowledge: a life devoted to learning is impossible unless one is properly disposed to tame one's own body and its desires. Mattila shows that both Fārābī and Avicenna were heirs to the Neoplatonic move, but he also argues that there is an interesting difference between the two: Where Fārābī subscribed to the theory of virtues presented in the Nicomachean Ethics, Avicenna was more Platonic in his conception of virtue as radical independence of the body. In chapter 9, Mattila situates Fārābī and Avicenna in the metaethical debate between Islamic theologians. He shows that although both were realists about the general rational values that can be grounded in the human essence, they also manifested considerable antirealist tendencies. Both held that only the philosophical elite can grasp moral values by unaided reason, while others must simply follow their word and example. Mattila also tackles a problematic thought experiment, in which Avicenna seems to argue that moral values are radically relative to cultural context. He suggests that while this may be true for isolated moral norms, such as that lying is reprehensible, Avicenna was not a relativist about the goal...