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Al-Ghazali says some knowledge has to be tasted. Is that an argument, or a way out of one?

Fajar Nugroho Fellow
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Mysticism & spiritualityIslamicSufismAl-Ghazali#deliverance-from-error#dhawq#religious-experience#sufi-epistemology
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Last month I read al-Ghazali's Deliverance from Error in an English translation I found online, and one part keeps bothering me.

He goes through the theologians, the philosophers and the Batinites, finds each of them lacking, and then turns to the Sufis. What is special about their knowledge, he says, cannot be got by study at all. It comes by dhawq, "tasting", and by a change in the state of the person. His comparison is that knowing the definition of health or of drunkenness is very different from actually being healthy or being drunk. A doctor can define illness perfectly while he himself is ill.

I understand the comparison. What I don't understand is how this is supposed to work as knowledge rather than as a way to stop the conversation. If I say "you have to experience it to understand," anybody can say that about anything. My cousin says it about a particular football club.

So my questions, from someone who is not a student of any of this yet:

  1. Was al-Ghazali giving an argument that tasting is a source of knowledge, or just describing what happened to him?
  2. Did he think someone who has not tasted has any reason to believe the people who say they have?

I know he left his teaching post in Baghdad after some kind of breakdown, so maybe the book is more autobiography than philosophy. But it reads like he wants to convince me of something.

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5 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Layla Sfeir

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Fajar, asking what kind of claim it is is exactly the right instinct.

    In the Munqidh al-Ghazali distinguishes, roughly, three ways of holding something true: by demonstration (that is 'ilm, knowledge in the strict sense), by direct acquaintance with the state itself (tasting), and by accepting it on good grounds from those who have tasted, which he calls faith (iman). So he is not saying "taste it or believe nothing". He explicitly leaves room for your second question: the non-taster can have reasonable belief based on testimony and on observing the people who report it.

    How does he say you should judge them? Partly the way you judge a physician without being one: you do not need medical knowledge yourself to notice that his prescriptions cure people. He uses this kind of analogy for prophecy too, asking the reader to look at the effects of practice on the heart over time.

    So: it is not a proof for the sceptic, and he knows it. It is a classification of kinds of knowledge plus a criterion for trust. Two cautions. The book is a carefully shaped retrospective, written years after the crisis, so read it as a constructed argument rather than a diary. And "tasting" was a Sufi term before him; he is joining a vocabulary, not inventing one.

Other answers

  1. Arvind Poojary

    Fellow

    I'll be the awkward one. The drunkenness comparison cuts against him as well as for him. The drunk man really is in a state the sober doctor is not, but he is also the last person whose judgement about the world we should trust while he is in it. Being in a vivid state is not the same as being in a reliable one.

    Layla's physician analogy is better, because there we check outcomes. But "effects on the heart" are reported by the same people whose reports are in question.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Bilal Rashid

      Fellow

      Arvind, I don't think the drunkenness line is about reliability at all. Al-Ghazali's point is the gap between knowing that and knowing what it is like: you can know all the propositions about a state without being in it. He is classifying, not certifying.

      For what it's worth, in the opening book of the Ihya' he separates the knowledge of practice, which can be taught and written down, from the knowledge of unveiling, which he says books can only point towards. He then spends forty books on the first kind. That proportion tells you something. He did not think tasting replaced discipline, study or ordinary moral effort; he thought it crowned them, and he was suspicious of people who claimed the crown without the work.

      I have met many people who have had what they call an experience of God. The ones I trust most are rarely the ones who talk about it most.

      Helpful · 2
  2. Fajar Nugroho

    Fellow

    This helps a lot. So the honest version is: he is not trying to make me taste anything by argument, he is telling me what my options are if I haven't. Demonstration where it is possible, trust where it is earned, and experience if it comes.

    Arvind's point still bothers me a bit, but Bilal's distinction between knowing that and knowing what it is like makes it feel less like a trick. I think I was reading the book as if it were trying to win a debate.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    If you want a modern comparison, William James's lectures on mysticism list a "noetic quality" among the marks of mystical states: they feel like knowledge, not just feeling. James then says such states may be authoritative for the person who has them but give outsiders no duty to accept them uncritically. That is surprisingly close to the three-way division Layla describes, arrived at independently eight centuries later.