Why poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal believed Plato’s ideas contribute to intellectual stagnation

Greek philosophy is conventionally divided into the Pre-Socratic and Socratic periods. This division, however, seems arbitrary to the point that Anthony Gottleib sarcastically remarks, “The only fault with Philosophers we classify as Pre-Socratics is that they were born before Socrates”. The Pre-Socratics were metaphysicians in the real sense of the word and were interested in the investigation of Being/God Qua Being. Parmenides, Heraclitus, Pythagoras and other Pre-Socratics tried to understand the relationship between Being and Becoming; Body and Soul; Man and Universe; Eternal and Ephemeral; Transitory and Timeless. These philosophers were “God-intoxicated” and were committed to nothing short of establishing God/Being.

With Socrates, Greek Philosophy seems to have taken an ethical turn. Without compromising on the first principles, Socrates shifted his gaze from metaphysics to ethics. This transition could be attributed to the ethical decay in the Greek society, the condition captured by Bertrand Russell in his book A History of Western Philosophy. At times, Socrates seems to have had a prophetic character, though it must be noted that the Greeks had no well-defined concept of prophethood like the Semitic people. This prophetic character is visible from many of the Socratic statements, the most explicit being Socrates describing himself as a gadfly appointed by God to awaken his people. This shift occurred around the time that the 20th-century philosopher Carl Jaspers described as the “Axial Age”. While discussing Socrates, we need to bear in mind that his primary objective was man’s ethical and spiritual formation, and his method of teaching was “Dialogical”.

Iqbal and Socrates

While there’s no explicit reference to Socrates in Muhammad Iqbal’s poetry, he has levelled a charge of damaging nature against Socrates. Recalling the influence of Greek Philosophy on Muslim intellectual thought, Iqbal, notes, “Socrates concentrated his attention on the human world alone. To him the proper study of man was man and not the world of plants, insects, and stars”. Pre-Socratic philosopher Protagoras had announced quite earlier, “Man is the measure of everything”, which many interpreters took to the limits of ethical relativism and solipsism.

Iqbal’s error in interpreting Socrates is that he has given an epistemological turn to an ethical observation. Socrates brought about the ethical turn in philosophy and was primarily concerned with the re/formation of man. Socrates believed that philosophy is preparation for death and wanted to align human lives with the “logos” operating throughout the gamut of creation. He emphasised the ethical aspect of his philosophy by stating, “What I fail to say in words, I shall demonstrate by my deeds”. Thus, Iqbal is not justified in placing the blame for anti-realism at Socrates’s door.

The Prophetic aspect of Socrates places him at the intersection of the modern day image of a philosopher and with a medieval maniac. Pierre Hadot reminds us that Socrates represents an equilibrium between the celestial and terrestrial aspects of existence, and this equilibrium is the spirit of any genuine religion and spirituality. Though Iqbal was pleading his case for the revival of empirical sciences and the importance thereof in the larger scheme of Quranic epistemology, his misinterpretation of Socrates caused chaos and confusion.

Plato, the disciple and main interpreter of Socrates, and an everlasting influence on the history of Western thought, was the next important figure in Western intellectual thought. So immense has been his influence that Alfred White Northhead went on to remark, “Two thousand years of Western Philosophy is a footnote to Plato”. Plato was supremely successful in formulating an integrated theory of Metaphysics, Epistemology and Ethics. His Theory of Forms was supremely successful in reconciling Being with Becoming. To find similarities to his theory of ideas, one needs to turn to Ibn Arabi’s cosmology or Sankara’s exposition of Advaita Vedanta.

Plato believed that ideas are like Cosmic blueprints and master copies from which the terrestrial creations derive their existence by way of “participation”. These ideas have an existence of their own in a realm of unchanging eternity and permanence. The world of flux and change, which we live in, is a fleeting reflection, a faint copy, an imitation or at best an adumbration of this world of unchanging ideas. Based on his division of the world between unchanging ideas as revealed to the intellect and the changing phenomena as revealed to the senses, Plato defined knowledge as the understanding of ideas in their eternal, unchanging form. What one gathers from senses yields the ground for opinion, which is not knowledge, but in fact, lower. This idealism of Plato, which finds its ultimate expression in the “allegory of the cave”, invited a torrent of criticism, in antiquity, in classical times, and in the modern era as well.

Iqbal and Plato

Iqbal’s criticism of Plato occupies an important place in his philosophical and poetic writings. Iqbal saw in Plato the origin of an intellectual tendency that divorced thought from life and spirit from matter. He believed that Plato’s philosophy introduced into human thinking a dualism between the world of ideas and the world of phenomena, creating a gulf between the ideal and the real. This division, according to Iqbal, led to a weakening of man’s creative and active spirit by turning his attention away from the concrete realities of life towards abstract and static ideals. Plato, in Iqbal’s view, transformed philosophy into a mere contemplation of eternal forms, rather than a dynamic engagement with the ever-changing process of existence.

Iqbal regarded Plato’s idealism as anti-life and world-denying. By exalting the world of Ideas as true and permanent, and by dismissing the sensory world as illusory and imperfect, Plato encouraged a tendency to shun worldly involvement and practical action. For Iqbal, this was a fatal error. The material world, he argued, is not a shadow or deception, but the very stage on which man’s spiritual growth and self-realisation unfold. Life, in his conception, is a ceaseless movement of creation and self-affirmation, not a retreat into static perfection. In his poem Asrar-e-Khudi, Iqbal calls Plato “the mother of ancient error” who “taught men to shun the world,” expressing his view that Platonic thought paralysed human energy and fostered passivity.

This critique also extended to the historical influence of Plato on both Western and Muslim thought. Iqbal believed that Platonic ideas, transmitted through Christian theology and later absorbed into medieval Islamic philosophy, contributed to an intellectual stagnation that emphasised contemplation over action. Many Muslim thinkers, he felt, had fallen under the spell of Greek metaphysics and thereby neglected the Quranic call to creative effort and practical engagement. The contemplative ideal of Plato, when merged with ascetic tendencies in Sufism, led to an otherworldly spirituality that stood at odds with Islam’s life-affirming ethos.

In contrast to Plato’s static idealism, Iqbal upheld the Quranic vision of a dynamic, creative, and evolving universe. The Quran, he argued in The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, does not view the world as an illusion to be escaped, but as a reality to be transformed through human will and divine guidance. Islam, for Iqbal, affirms the unity of spirit and matter, the continuity of becoming, and the moral significance of action. Perfection, therefore, lies not in withdrawal from the world but in striving within it. Where Plato sees the highest good in contemplation, Islam sees it in creative participation and moral endeavour.

But Iqbal’s critique of Plato displaces metaphysical Truths with pragmatic conventions. Iqbal was duly impressed by the Western idea of a dynamic world and emphasis on action – something which he thought Plato’s ideas undervalued and overshadowed. Iqbal took the metaphysical nescience of this world, leading to ethical escapism and total collapse of human action and endeavour. But what Iqbal failed to distinguish is the boundary between metaphysical fact and pragmatic necessity.

If, by his “Theory of Ideas”, Plato implied the non-existence or somewhat inferior status of this world, he should never have written a book like The Republic, which, through and through, deals with this world of matter and action. It is also to be remembered that sages and seers from this or that spiritual tradition have always emphasised the idealistic, ie, Platonic picture of the universe. The consensus of men of enlightenment across wisdom traditions lends not only a firm support to the Platonic worldview, but thinkers like Al Arabi and Sankara went ahead to expound the Platonic picture of Cosmic existence in terms of the religio-spiritual idiom as supplied by their respective religious traditions. It is true that Iqbal wanted to awaken the spirit of action and dynamism in the slumbering Muslim world, but he can’t be declared innocent in view of the misattributions and misinterpretations that he placed at the door of various philosophers – the Greeks being the foremost victims of this tragedy.

The author places on record that this study is undertaken in a purely academic spirit, meant to open ways for dialogue and dialect, and doesn’t in any way undermine Iqbal’s stature.