Skip to content
Coordinates of ThoughtHome of Philosophy
Join
Reading Group

Reading group: Miskawayh’s Refinement of Character, and Tusi’s Persian reworking of it

Layla Sfeir Fellow
· 6 replies
Virtue & characterGreek & RomanIslamicPersianAristotelianismFalsafaAl-KindiAristotleMiskawayhNaṣīr al-Dīn al-ṬūsīPlato#akhlaq#character-formation#greek-reception#islamic-ethics
Follow

I'd like to read Miskawayh's Tahdhib al-Akhlaq together over the next couple of months. It is one of the most systematic works of philosophical ethics in Arabic, and it is a good place to watch Greek ethics being made at home in an Islamic setting rather than merely copied.

Miskawayh (c. 932–1030) was a historian and librarian at Buyid courts as well as a philosopher. The Tahdhib takes Plato's division of the soul, Aristotle's doctrine of the mean and habituation, and much else from late Greek sources, and builds a programme for refining character. It is practical: the aim is to become a certain kind of person, not to win an argument.

Texts. For English, Constantine Zurayk's translation, The Refinement of Character. Those reading Arabic can use any of the Beirut editions; I will post the Arabic of key terms as we go.

Plan (four sittings, two weeks each):
1. The opening on the soul, its powers and its distinctive activity.
2. The virtues and vices, the mean, and justice.
3. The long discussion of happiness, love and friendship.
4. The closing part on the "medicine" of souls: anger, fear of death, grief.

For anyone who reads Persian, it is worth having Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī's Akhlaq-i Nasiri alongside, since its first part is a Persian reworking of Miskawayh. Comparing the two shows what a later reader kept and what he changed.

Post what struck you in each section, including what bored or annoyed you. Questions about terms are very welcome; I'm happy to help with the Arabic.

LikeReply
Follow6 replies

Join the conversation: members reply here, and joining is free. Reading is always free.

Join free to reply Sign in

6 replies

  1. Reza Tehrani

    Fellow

    I'll be the Persian reader. Ṭūsī's book is in three parts: ethics, then the household, then the city. The first part follows Miskawayh closely, sometimes almost sentence by sentence, and the household and political parts are his additions. It was written for an Ismaili governor in Quhistan, whose name is in the title, and Ṭūsī later replaced the preface. So the book itself has a biography, which I find moving. I'll report on where the Persian departs from the Arabic.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Elif Yıldız

    Fellow

    Sitting 1. What struck me is how much of a psychology textbook this is. Three powers of the soul, the rational, the irascible and the appetitive, each with its own excellence: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice as the harmony between them. That is Plato's Republic, but Miskawayh's interest is in how the powers are trained, which is closer to what my lecturers in Istanbul call emotion regulation. I was not expecting a tenth-century text to talk about the appetitive soul the way my textbook talks about impulse control.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Hamza Qureshi

    Fellow

    Sitting 2. I was interested that justice is treated first as a condition of the soul, when its other virtues stand in the right relation, and only then as something between people. In court you only see the second kind. Miskawayh's point seems to be that someone whose own soul is disordered will not reliably give others their due, however good the rules are. Hart would call that a confusion of law and morals. I'm less sure it is.

  4. Bilal Rashid

    Fellow

    Sitting 3. The section that stayed with me argues, if I've read it right, that the virtues cannot be perfected in solitude: someone who withdraws from people to be good has no occasion for justice, generosity or friendship, and so cannot really have them. Al-Ghazālī devotes a whole book of the Iḥyā' to the etiquette of seclusion and weighs its benefits against companionship, and he is more sympathetic to withdrawal than Miskawayh. Most days I'm on Miskawayh's side.

    Helpful · 1
  5. Zainab Kadhim

    Fellow

    The pages on bringing up the young were my favourite. He treats a child's sense of shame as an early sign that reason is waking up, something to be protected rather than exploited. I keep a copy of the Arabic in the shop near the cash desk, and I've started reading bits aloud to the schoolteachers who come in. One said it was more sensible than the new curriculum. I did not argue.

    Helpful · 2
  6. Layla Sfeir

    Fellow

    Closing thoughts on sitting 4. The remedies for grief and the fear of death draw openly on earlier consolation literature, including al-Kindī's epistle on dispelling sorrows, which you can see in the arguments about loss: what we lose was only lent to us. What I admire is that Miskawayh names and adapts his sources rather than hiding them. Thank you all, especially Reza for the Persian. Ṭūsī next year?

    Helpful · 3