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Reading group: Miskawayh, The Refinement of Character, on happiness

Zainab Kadhim Fellow
· 5 replies
Happiness & well-beingGreek & RomanIslamicPersianFalsafaAristotleMiskawayh#adab#character#eudaimonia#happiness
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I keep a secondhand bookshop off Mutanabbi Street, and the book I most often press on young customers who say they want philosophy is Miskawayh's Tahdhīb al-akhlāq, The Refinement of Character. Miskawayh (c. 932–1030) worked as a librarian and treasurer in the service of Buyid viziers, and he wrote the most systematic ethics of his time in Arabic, bringing together Aristotle's ethics, Plato's account of the soul and much else.

For those who don't read Arabic, Constantine Zurayk's English translation (1968) is the standard one.

Plan, three weeks, covering the first half of the book:

  1. The first discourse: the soul and its faculties, and why its perfection is the starting point of ethics.
  2. The second discourse: character, whether it can be changed, and how children should be brought up.
  3. The third discourse: the good and happiness, sa'āda, and its levels.

I'd like us to ask what Miskawayh thinks makes a life go well, and how far his answer is Aristotle's eudaimonia in Arabic, and how far it becomes something of its own.

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5 replies

  1. Layla Sfeir

    Fellow

    Week one. Zurayk's translation reads well, though it smooths some technical terms. It helps to know how much Miskawayh is weaving together: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which was available in Arabic translation; the Platonic division of the soul into rational, irascible and appetitive parts; and Galen's treatise on character, which survives largely through Arabic sources. The first discourse is mostly the Platonic part. The happiness of the soul is the perfection of its rational faculty, and the rest follows from that.

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  2. Hessa Al Mazrouei

    Fellow

    Week two is the one I have been waiting for. Miskawayh argues that character can be changed, against those who think it fixed by nature, and his evidence is that we educate children and they change. The section on bringing up children is wonderfully practical: attention to a child's sense of shame as the first sign of reason, plain food, exercise, and poems about good conduct rather than love poems. It reads like a manual and a philosophy at once, which is what adab was.

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  3. Youssef Berrada

    Fellow

    Week three. The levels of happiness rise towards a life of the intellect that is close to Aristotle's contemplative life in Book X of the Ethics. But what struck me as a history teacher is his criticism of those who withdraw from society to live as hermits. They think themselves virtuous, he says, but justice, generosity and temperance can only be practised among other people. Human beings are social by nature, and so happiness is impossible alone. That is Aristotle, but also a quiet argument with the ascetics of his own time.

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  4. Bilal Rashid

    Fellow

    A note for anyone who later reads al-Ghazālī's Iḥyā'. Scholars have long noticed how much of the book on disciplining the soul draws on Miskawayh, sometimes closely. Al-Ghazālī puts the material in a different frame, with knowledge of God as the end. But the psychology of character, its sicknesses and their treatment, is often Miskawayh's. The philosopher and the critic of philosophers share more than either side likes to admit.

  5. Zainab Kadhim

    Fellow

    What I take from it is that Miskawayh's answer to "what makes a life go well" is Aristotle's, but carried by a culture of adab that made it a practice: something you raise a child in, not only a theory you defend. That is why I keep selling the book. Next month, if anyone is willing, the second half: justice, friendship and the medicine of souls.

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