Chapter Guide
Chapter VII names Plato as the philosopher of the sheep's doctrine: for Iqbal, any wisdom that despises the living world can lull the Self away from action.
This chapter continues the fable of Chapter VI by giving the sheep's doctrine a philosophical name. Iqbal presents Plato as an ascetic sage whose flight into the Ideal makes bodily perception, movement, and struggle seem unimportant. The point is not a calm textbook account of Plato, but a warning about a tendency: philosophy can become hostile to the world in which the Self must act.
The middle movement turns influence into intoxication. Plato's cup sends peoples to sleep, makes phenomena look like myth, and teaches loss to appear as gain. Nicholson's footnote keeps the history careful: the influence on Muslim thought was often indirect, through Neoplatonic materials associated with Aristotle, but Iqbal treats the result as a Platonic spell over Sufi and literary imagination.
The closing images oppose living phenomena to a dead world of Ideas. Gazelles cannot move there, seeds do not desire to grow, and birds have no breath. Iqbal wants the reader to resist any spirituality that prefers a quenched flame to a burning one, or withdrawal to deeds; the Self is strengthened in contact with the noisy world, not by escaping it.
- Plato
- Iqbal presents Plato as the emblem of a world-denying philosophy. The historical Plato (429?-347 B.C.E.) is one of the central Greek philosophers; Nicholson notes that Iqbal's target is also the later Neoplatonic influence that entered Islamic thought indirectly. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
To the effect that Plato, whose thought has deeply influenced the mysticism and literature of Islam, followed the sheep’s doctrine, and that we must be on our guard against his theories.[56]
Persian text from Ganjoor · 21 bayts
FOOTNOTES:
[56] The direct influence of Platonism on Muslim thought has been comparatively slight. When the Muslims began to study Greek philosophy, they turned to Aristotle. The genuine writings of Aristotle, however, were not accessible to them. They studied translations of books passing under his name, which were the work of Neoplatonists, so that what they believed to be Aristotelian doctrine was in fact the philosophy of Plotinus, Proclus, and the later Neoplatonic school. Indirectly, therefore, Plato has profoundly influenced the intellectual and spiritual development of Islam and may be called, if not the father of Muslim mysticism, at any rate its presiding genius.
[57] I.e. it is worthless in either case. The egg-shaped wine-jar is supported by bricks in order to keep it in an upright position.
FOOTNOTES:
[56] The direct influence of Platonism on Muslim thought has been comparatively slight. When the Muslims began to study Greek philosophy, they turned to Aristotle. The genuine writings of Aristotle, however, were not accessible to them. They studied translations of books passing under his name, which were the work of Neoplatonists, so that what they believed to be Aristotelian doctrine was in fact the philosophy of Plotinus, Proclus, and the later Neoplatonic school. Indirectly, therefore, Plato has profoundly influenced the intellectual and spiritual development of Islam and may be called, if not the father of Muslim mysticism, at any rate its presiding genius.
[57] I.e. it is worthless in either case. The egg-shaped wine-jar is supported by bricks in order to keep it in an upright position.
Persian text from Ganjoor · 21 bayts