Among al-Ghazali's lasting contributions to the Islamic intellectual tradition was his uncompromising refusal to conflate 'ilm (ordinary knowledge acquired through the senses and tested by reason) with ma'rifa (certainty achieved by "extrasensory" means--see, e.g., Sherman A. Jackson, Sufism for Non-Sufis?, OUP (2012), 36).
As Ludwig Wittgenstein pointed out (in a manuscript left unpublished at his death but later edited and published as On Certainty), Western philosophy has been burdened, since at least Descartes, by this particular confusion: in ordinary usage, the statements "I know x to be true" and "I am certain that x is true" are interchangeable. For Wittgenstein, it is "through this misuse [that] a queer and extremely important mental state seems to be revealed" [OC remark 6]. Certainty, for Wittgenstein, is a mental state--an attribute of human psychology--that derives from experience: "My life shews that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, and so on--" (remark 7). Of course, as Wittgenstein recognized, the feeling of certainty is not evidence of the truth of the matter asserted (pace someone like Jeffrey Kripal--see Kripal's deeply confused The Serpent's Gift, University of Chicago [!] Press, 2007; cp. OC remark 22).
By distinguishing 'ilm from ma'rifa, al-Ghazali associated the mental state of certainty with the latter, leaving the former free for continual revision in light of reason and new evidence. By the same stroke, however, he insulated from doubt what we would call (in the West today) "religious experience." What may appear, at first blush, to be a victory for religion (or at least religious experience) is, upon further inspection, a Pyrrhic one: for religious experience is rendered completely unavailable to anyone but the individual who has the privilege of such an experience. In other words, al-Ghazali rendered religious experience entirely private and--like Wittgenstein's famous metaphor of the "beetle in the box"--unavailable for public inspection. As such, it is beyond empirical proof. There is only one person in the world who may find him or herself under any obligation to believe claims made about such an experience: the person who has had it.
This state of affairs never satisfies religious people with an "evangelical" bent (like Kripal--a bent, to be fair, that he denies; in my view, however, Jeffrey Kripal is a case study in self-deception). So they "compare" experiential claims and satisfy themselves and one another that, because their claims are comparable, their underlying experiences are comparable as well. But such comparisons amount to little more than what Wittgenstein termed "pretensions": "a mortgage which burdens a philosopher's capacity to think" (OC remark 549; see also remark 574).
"An inner experience cannot shew me that I know something" (OC remark 569)--here, al-Ghazali would agree with Wittgenstein--if his "know" corresponded to 'ilm. But by applying ma'rifa in such a case to "know," al-Ghazali places the thing claimed to be known outside of publicity and testability. It "convinces" only those who require no convincing. Such is the nature of belief built upon the quicksand of "religious" experience.
The truly fascinating aspect of al-Ghazali's thinking in this regard is that he appears to understand the problem completely. He accepts, in principle, the impossibility of acquiring knowledge of God (see, e.g., the remarkable 4th chapter of Part One of al-Maqsad al-asna fi sharh asma Allah al-husna)--a peculiar stance for someone who is remembered by the Islamic tradition as its great Renewer.
I will write more about the enigmatic al-Ghazali in future posts.
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