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The
Human Ego – His Freedom and Immortality (continued)
This view of the matter
raises a very important question. We have seen that the ego is not something
rigid. It organizes itself in time, and is formed and disciplined by its own
experience. It is further clear that streams of causality flow into it from
Nature and from it to Nature. Does the ego then determine its own activity?
If so, how is the self-determination of the ego related to the determinism of
the spatio-temporal order? Is personal causality a special kind of causality,
or only a disguised form of the mechanism of Nature? It is claimed that the
two kinds of determinism are not mutually exclusive and that the scientific
method is equally applicable to human action. The human act of deliberation
is understood to be a conflict of motives which are conceived, not as the ego’s
own present or inherited tendencies of action or inaction, but as so many external
forces fighting one another, gladiator-like, on the arena of the mind. Yet the
final choice is regarded as a fact determined by the strongest force, and not
by the resultant of contending motives, like a purely physical effect.29
I am, however, firmly of the opinion that the controversy between the advocates
of Mechanism and Freedom arises from a wrong view of intelligent action which
modern psychology, unmindful of its own independence as a science, possessing
a special set of facts to observe, was bound to take on account of its slavish
imitation of physical sciences. The view that ego-activity is a succession of
thoughts and ideas, ultimately resolvable to units of sensations, is only another
form of atomic materialism which forms the basis of modern science. Such a view
could not but raise a strong presumption in favour of a mechanistic interpretation
of consciousness. There is, however, some relief in thinking that the new German
psychology, known as Configuration Psychology,30 may succeed in securing
the independence of Psychology as a science, just as the theory of Emergent
Evolution may eventually bring about the independence of Biology. This newer
German psychology teaches us that a careful study of intelligent behaviour discloses
the fact of ‘insight’ over and above the mere succession of sensations.31
This ‘insight’ is the ego’s appreciation of temporal, spatial,
and causal relation of things - the choice, that is to say of data, in a complex
whole, in view of the goal or purpose which the ego has set before itself for
the time being. It is this sense of striving in the experience of purposive
action and the success which I actually achieve in reaching my ‘ends’
that convince me of my efficiency as a personal cause. The essential feature
of a purposive act is its vision of a future situation which does not appear
to admit any explanation in terms of Physiology. The truth is that the causal
chain wherein we try to find a place for the ego is itself an artificial construction
of the ego for its own purposes. The ego is called upon to live in a complex
environment, and he cannot maintain his life in it without reducing it to a
system which would give him some kind of assurance as to the behaviour of things
around him. The view of his environment as a system of cause and effect is thus
an indispensable instrument of the ego, and not a final expression of the nature
of Reality. Indeed in interpreting Nature in this way the ego understands and
masters its environment, and thereby acquires and amplifies its freedom.32
Thus the element of guidance
and directive control in the ego’s activity clearly shows that the ego
is a free personal causality. He shares in the life and freedom of the Ultimate
Ego who, by permitting the emergence of a finite ego, capable of private initiative,
has limited this freedom of His own free will. This freedom of conscious behaviour
follows from the view of ego-activity which the Qur’«n takes. There are
verses which are unmistakably clear on this point:
‘And say: The truth
is from your Lord: Let him, then, who will, believe: and let him who will, be
an unbeliever’ (18:29).
‘If ye do well to
your own behoof will ye do well: and if ye do evil against yourselves will ye
do it’ (17:7).
Indeed Islam recognizes
a very important fact of human psychology, i.e. the rise and fall of the power
to act freely, and is anxious to retain the power to act freely as a constant
and undiminished factor in the life of the ego. The timing of the daily prayer
which, according to the Qur’«n, restores ‘self-possession’ to
the ego by bringing it into closer touch with the ultimate source of life and
freedom, is intended to save the ego from the mechanizing effects of sleep and
business. Prayer in Islam is the ego’s escape from mechanism to freedom.
It cannot, however, be
denied that the idea of destiny runs throughout the Qur’«n. This point
is worth considering, more especially because Spengler in his Decline of
the West seems to think that Islam amounts to a complete negation of the
ego.33 I have already explained to you my view of Taqdâr (destiny)
as we find it in the Qur’«n.34 As Spengler himself points out,
there are two ways of making the world our own. The one is intellectual; the
other, for want of a better expression, we may call vital. The intellectual
way consists in understanding the world as a rigid system of cause and effect.
The vital is the absolute acceptance of the inevitable necessity of life, regarded
as a whole which in evolving its inner richness creates serial time. This vital
way of appropriating the universe is what the Qur’«n describes as Im«n.
Im«n is not merely a passive belief in one or more propositions of a certain
kind; it is living assurance begotten of a rare experience. Strong personalities
alone are capable of rising to this experience and the higher ‘Fatalism’
implied in it. Napoleon is reported to have said: ‘I am a thing, not a
person’. This is one way in which unitive experience expresses itself.
In the history of religious experience in Islam which, according to the Prophet,
consists in the ‘creation of Divine attributes in man’, this experience
has found expression in such phrases as ‘I am the creative truth’
(Àall«j), ‘I am Time’ (Muhammad), ‘I am the speaking Qur’«n’
(‘Alâ), ‘Glory to me’ (B«Yazâd). In the higher Sufism of Islam
unitive experience is not the finite ego effacing its own identity by some sort
of absorption into the infinite Ego; it is rather the Infinite passing into
the loving embrace of the finite.35 As Rëmâ says:
‘Divine knowledge
is lost in the knowledge of the saint! And how is it possible for people to
believe in such a thing?’
The fatalism implied in
this attitude is not negation of the ego as Spengler seems to think; it is life
and boundless power which recognizes no obstruction, and can make a man calmly
offer his prayers when bullets are showering around him.
But is it not true, you
will say, that a most degrading type of Fatalism has prevailed in the world
of Islam for many centuries? This is true, and has a history behind it which
requires separate treatment. It is sufficient here to indicate that the kind
of Fatalism which the European critics of Islam sum up in the word Qismat
was due partly to philosophical thought, partly to political expediency, and
partly to the gradually diminishing force of the life-impulse, which Islam originally
imparted to its followers. Philosophy, searching for the meaning of cause as
applied to God, and taking time as the essence of the relation between cause
and effect, could not but reach the notion of a transcendent God, prior to the
universe, and operating upon it from without. God was thus conceived as the
last link in the chain of causation, and, consequently, the real author of all
that happens in the universe. Now the practical materialism of the opportunist
Umayyad rulers of Damascus needed a peg on which to hang their misdeeds at Karbal«,
and to secure the fruits of Amâr Mu’«wâyy«h’s revolt against the possibilities
of a popular rebellion. Ma’bad is reported to have said to Àasan of BaÄra
that the Umayyads killed Muslims, and attributed their acts to the decrees of
God. ‘These enemies of God’, replied Àasan, ‘are liars.’36
Thus arose, in spite of open protests by Muslim divines, a morally degrading
Fatalism, and the constitutional theory known as the ‘accomplished fact’37
in order to support vested interests. This is not at all surprising. In our
own times philosophers have furnished a kind of intellectual justification for
the finality of the present capitalistic structure of society. Hegel’s
view of Reality as an infinitude of reason from which follows the essential
rationality of the real, and Auguste Comte’s society as an organism in
which specific functions are eternally assigned to each organ, are instances
in point. The same thing appears to have happened in Islam. But since Muslims
have always sought the justification of their varying attitudes in the Qur’«n,
even though at the expense of its plain meaning the fatalistic interpretation
has had very far-reaching effects on Muslim peoples. I could, in this connexion,
quote several instances of obvious misinterpretation; but the subject requires
special treatment, and it is time now to turn to the question of immortality.
No age has produced so
much literature on the question of immortality as our own, and this literature
is continually increasing in spite of the victories of modern Materialism. Purely
metaphysical arguments, however, cannot give us a positive belief in personal
immortality. In the history of Muslim thought Ibn Rushd approached the question
of immortality from a purely metaphysical point of view, and, I venture to think,
achieved no results. He drew a distinction between sense and intelligence probably
because of the expressions, Nafs and Rëh, used in the Qur’«n.
These expressions, apparently suggesting a conflict between two opposing principles
in man, have misled many a thinker in Islam. However, if Ibn Rushd’s dualism
was based on the Qur’«n, then I am afraid he was mistaken; for the word
Nafs does not seem to have been used in the Qur’«n in any technical
sense of the kind imagined by Muslim theologians. Intelligence, according to
Ibn Rushd, is not a form of the body; it belongs to a different order of being,
and transcends individuality. It is, therefore, one, universal, and eternal.
This obviously means that, since unitary intellect transcends individuality,
its appearance as so many unities in the multiplicity of human persons is a
mere illusion. The eternal unity of intellect may mean, as Renan thinks, the
everlastingness of humanity and civilization; it does not surely mean personal
immortality.38 In fact Ibn Rushd’s view looks like William James’s
suggestion of a transcendental mechanism of consciousness which operates on
a physical medium for a while, and then gives it up in pure sport.39
Page [1,
2, 3, 4, 5]
[See
Notes]
Date/Time Last Modified: 6/18/2002 8:03:26 AM
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