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De mysteriis ), an appraisal of the urān,
a critique of Mutazilism, another on the
infallible Ismāīlī Imām, a work on how
to measure intelligence, an introduction
to and vindication of algebra, a defence
of the incorporeality of the soul, a debate
with a Manichaean, and an explanation of
the difficulty people have in accepting the
sphericity of the earth when they are not
trained in rigorous demonstration. Other
works deal with eros, coitus, nudity and
clothing, the fatal effects of the Simoom
(or simply, of poisons, sumūm ) on animal
life, the seasons of autumn and spring, the
wisdom of the Creator, and the reason for
the creation of savage beasts and reptiles.
One work defends the proposition that
God does not interfere with the actions
of other agents. Another rebuts the claim
that the earth revolves. Al-Rāzī discussed
the innate or intrinsic character of motion,
a sensitive point at the juncture between
Democritean and Aristotelian physics. He
wrote several treatments of the nature of
matter, and one on the unseen causes of
motion.
The ibb al-rūānī , written for Manūr
as a companion to the Manūrī , develops
a moderately ascetic ideal of life from the
premise that all pleasures presuppose a
prior pain (or dislocation). This means
that peace of mind or lack of perturba-
tion is the optimum of pleasure, as al-Rāzī
explains in his widely-cited lost work on
pleasure. Pleasures cannot be amassed
or hoarded, and what some hedonists
might think of as “peak experiences” are
reached only by traversing a correspond-
ing valley. To feed an appetite, moreover,
is only to enlarge it. So the attempt to
maximise one's happiness by serving the
appetites and passions is a self-defeating
strategy, as Plato showed when he argued
that such a life is comparable to trying
to carry water in a sieve. Epicurus took
that argument very much to heart when
he sought to devise a hedonistic alterna-
tive to the sybaritic outlook of the Cyre-
naic philosophers, and al-Rāzī does so as
well. His ethical treatise follows al-Kindī's
precedent in treating ethics as a kind of
psychic medicine or clinical psychology,
an approach later used by Ibn Gabirol
and Maimonides. But the basis of the art
in question, which is the Socratic ten-
dance of the soul, is not primarily the
Platonic “second voyage,” the endeavour
to flee to a higher world—although that
theme is important to al-Rāzī. Expressing
grave doubts about the demonstrability
of immortality, he falls back on the less
metaphysically demanding and more dia-
lectically persuasive position that, if death
is the ultimate end of our existence, it is
nothing to be feared but only a surcease
of our pains and troubles.
Wisdom, then, springs not from the
thought of death, as many philosophers
and pious teachers have supposed, but
from overcoming that thought. For,
even more than the appetites themselves,
the fear of death is the goad of the pas-
sions that hamper human rationality and
undermine human happiness. As al-Rāzī
explains: “As long as the fear of death
persists, one will incline away from reason
and toward passion ( hawā ).” The argu-
ment is Epicurean. The passions here,
as in Epicurus, are thought of as neuro-
ses, compulsions, pleasureless addictions,
to use al-Rāzī's description (his word for
an addict is mudmin ). The glutton, the
miser, even the sexual obsessive, are, by
al-Rāzī's analysis, as much moved by the
fear of death as by natural appetites. For
natural needs, as Epicurus would explain,
are always in measure. The unwhole-
some excess that makes vice a disease
comes from the irrational and unselfcon-
scious mental linking of natural pleasures
and gratifications with security, that is, a
sense of freedom from the fear of death.
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