Tahafut_al-Tahafut-transl-Engl-van-den-Bergh

by the philosophers, of the emanation of the world from God’s absolute
Oneness.
Plotinus’ conception of God is prompted by the problem of plurality and
relation. All duality implies a relation, and every relation establishes a new
unity which is not the simple addition of its terms (since every whole is
more than its parts) and violates therefore the supreme law of thought that
a thing is what it is and nothing else. Just as the line is more than its
points, the stone more than its elements, the organism transcending its
members, man, notwithstanding the plurality of his faculties, an identical
personality, so the world is an organized well-ordered system surpassing
the multitude of the unities it encloses. According to Plotinus the Force
binding the plurality into unity and the plurality of unities into the allcontaining
unit of the Universe is the Archetype of unity, the ultimate,
primordial Monad, God, unattainable in His supreme Simplicity even for
thought. For all thought is relational, knitting together in the undefinable
unity of a judgement a subject and a predicate. But in God’s absolute and
highest Unity there is no plurality that can be joined, since all joining needs
a superior joining unit. Thus God must be the One and the Lone, having
no attribute, no genus, no species, no universal that He can share with
any creatures of the world. Even existence can be only referred to Him
when it expresses not an attribute, but His very Essence. But then there is
no bridge leading from the stable stillness of His Unity to the changing and
varied multiplicity of the world; all relation between Him and the world is
severed. If the One is the truly rational, God’s rationality can be obtained
only by regarding His relation to the world as irrational, and all statements
about Him will be inconsistent with the initial thesis. And if God is
unattainable for thought, the very affirmation of this will be selfcontradictory.
Now, the philosophers in Islam hold with Plotinus that although
absolutely positive statements are not admissible about God, the positive
statements made by them can be all reduced to negative affirmations (with
the sole exception, according to Averroës, of His possessing intellect) and
to certain relative statements, for neither negations nor external relations
add anything to His essence.
In this and several following chapters Ghazali attacks the philosophers
from two sides: by showing up the inanity of the Plotinian conception of
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