IQBAL'S METAPHYSICS – II

(20.4.1968)

Having established the concrete nature both of the relative and the Absolute Reality on an experiential basis, Iqbal goes further and shows both of them as subsisting in time. Self-movement of phenomenal and the noumenal as an inner development in the conceptual stage where he parts company with mechanical materialism.

It is here that the orthodox theologian catches up with him. Or rather it is here that it is. possible for the orthodox theologian and his political followers to make use of Iqbal's highly allusive and emotionally charged poetical phrases for anti-Iqbalian i.e. anti-revolutionary purposes --especially in the realm of politics, but also, and fundamentally in the realm of ideas about the nature of reality.

The orthodox theologian has been constantly positing a dichotomy between the realms of the concrete and the abstract, the reality and the idea, the matter and the spirit, the world and religion. On this dichotomy he also builds his theory of secular and sacred in life, and theocracy (even if he does not call it that) and the secular State in politics.

Iqbal has again and again warned against this un-Islamic division of human consciousness. "This ancient mistake," he says referring to the dichotomy of church and State," arose out of bifurcation of the unity of man into two distinct and separate realities which somehow have a point of contact, but which are in essence opposed to each other. The truth however, is that matter is spirit in space time reference. The unity called man is body when you look at it as acting in regard to what we call the external world; it is mind or soul when you look at it as acting The Ultimate Reality, according to the Quran, is spiritual, and its life consists in its temporal activity. The spirit finds its opportunities in the natural, the material the secular. All that is secular is therefore sacred in the root of its being... There is no such thing as a profane world. All this immensity of matter constitutes a scope for the self realisation of spirit. All is holy ground. As the Prophet so beautifully put it: 'The whole of this earth is a mosque'. The State according to Islam is only an effort to realise the spiritual in a human organisation. But in this sense all state, not based on mere domination and aiming at the realisation of ideal principles, is theocratic", (Lectures p. 154-155).

This affirmation of the materiality of the real, or the reality of the material, was necessary for Iqbal, precisely because the Aristotelian logicians, masquerading as specialists in the Islamic faith, had made the dialectical relationship between the body and the soul, the unity and identity of the organic being of man and of the universe, into separate and irreconcilable opposites. The world was here, now, and the spiritual was over there, somewhere. The neo- Platonists seized on this bifurcation and preached to the ignorant a doctrine of "pure" spiritualism, emptied of all concrete, ethnical, content, hence of all political and social action, hence of total submission to what they called fate and God's will, but was actually the exploitation and usurpation of the rights of common Muslims by the ruling classes.

"Matter is spirit in space-time reference". This is a very bold philosophical position to take. Because on one hand it does away with the claptrap of empty spiritualism and the rule of "fate" and quietism, and prepares man to confidently participate in the general movement of this material universe, and on the other it gives him freedom from the mechanistic materialism of European Imperialist culture. The bourgeois lived on the product of the machine, into which he had forced the working people as just so many cheap and easily replaceable cogs and wheels and levers. So his vision of the universe was also that of a machine. He conceived of God as the maker of this machine, and flattered Him with the designation of the "Great Artificer". He conceived of Him as having made the world machine and handed it over to the bourgeois to run, whereafter He was supposed to have sat back without a thought about what happened to his handiwork

The mechanistic materialism of the European bourgeois, and the ethics and politics which arose out of it, was abhorrent in the eyes of Iqbal. He conceived of the universe not as a clockworlk machine, finished once for all and destined to go on mechanically working in an uncreative soulless manner, but as a growing, expanding, endless process of continuous creation. God is not outside the universe -- "The Ultimate Ego who, being all inclusive, cannot be conceived as having a perspective like the finite ego, The universe, as we have seen before, is not an 'other' existing per se, in opposition to God ... From the standpoint of the all-inclusive Ego there is no 'other'. In Him thought and deed, the act of knowing and the act of creating are identical ff history is regarded merely as a gradually revealed photo of a predetermined order of events, then there is no room in it for novelty and initiation. Consequently, we can attach no meaning to the word "creation", which has a meaning for us only in view of our capacity for original action. The truth is that the whole theological controversy relating to predestination is due to pure speculation, with no eye to the spontaneity of life, which is a fact of actual experience". (Lectures, p. 77, 79).

Modern scientific attitude -- not the Mechanistic Materialism -- conceives of no duality between being and consciousness, theory and practice, spirit and matter. Iqbal's great contribution to our thinking is to make us aware that this modern scientific attitude is not an invention of the West, whether in the form of the various theories of evolving universe, or in the theory of dialectical materialism. They are all theories of spontaneous creation, the inner impulse of phenomena which makes them not identical replicas of the preceding entities, but the increasing quest of new forms out of the old through a purposive activity which is inherent in them. Matter is no longer the dead amorphous mass of the ancients, nor is it the mechanistically determined series of actions of the Newtonian physicists and mechanical materialists. It is life, organism, activity. "It is not a thing but an act". (Lectures, p. 51).

Iqbal views the Relativity theory as an affirmation of truth already contained in the Quranic attitude to reality. "The philosophical value of the theory is twofold. First, it destroys, not the objectivity of Nature, but the view of substance as simple location in space -- the notion of 'matter' is entirely replaced by the notion of 'organism'. Secondly the theory makes space dependent on matter". (p. 38)

What, then makes the universe a living reality?

"When we rise to the level of life and mind, the concept of cause fails us, and we stand in need of concepts of a different order of thought. The action of living organisms, initiated and planned in view of an end, is totally different to causal action. The subject matter of our enquiry, therefore, demands the concepts of 'end' and 'purpose' which act from within unlike the concept of 'cause' which is external to the effect and acts from without". (p, 42).

"Life is, then, a unique phenomenon and the concept of mechanism is inadequate for its analysis". (p.44).

"This quality of Nature's passage in time is perhaps the most significant aspect of experience which the Quran specially emphasises, and which offers the best clue to the ultimate nature of reality". (p. 45).

"Time, regarded as destiny forms the very essence of things. As the Quran says" 'God created all things and assigned to each its destiny'. The destiny of a thing, then, is not an unrelenting fate working from without like a task master: it is the inward reach of a thing, its realisable possibilities which lie within the depths of its nature, and serially actualise themselves without any feeling of external compulsion … If time is real and not a mere repetition of homogeneous moments, which make conscious experience a delusion, then every moment in the life of reality is original" giving birth to what is absolutely novel and unforeseeable … To exist in real time is not to he bound by the fetters of serial time, but to create it from moment to moment, and to be absolutely free and original in creation. In fact all creative activity is free activity. Creation is opposed to repetition which is a characteristic of mechanical action. That is why it is impossible to explain the creative activity of life in terms of mechanism". (50)

"What we call things are events in the continuity of nature which thought spatialises and thus regards as mutually isolated for purposes of action. The universe which seems to us to be a collection of things is not a solid stuff occupying a void. It is not a thing but an act". (51).

"In conscious experience life and thought permeate each other. They form a unity. Thought, therefore, in its true nature, is identical with life". (52).

"The world process, or the movement of the universe in time, is certainly devoid of purpose, if by purpose we mean a foreseen and -- a far off fixed destination to which the whole creation moves. To endow that world process with purpose in this sense is to rob it of its originality and its creative character. Its ends are terminations of a career; they are ends to come, arid not necessarily pre-meditated. A time process cannot be conceived as a line already drawn. It is a line in the drawing -- an actualisation of open possibilities. It is purposive only in this sense that it is selective in character, and brings itself to some sort of a present fulfillment by actively preserving and supplementing the past. To my mind nothing is more alien to the Quranic outlook than the idea that the universe is the temporal working out of a preconceived plan… It is a growing universe and not an already completed product which left the hand of its Maker ages ago, and is now lying stretched in space as a dead mass of matter to which time does nothing, and consequently is nothing". This is" … a notion of the Ultimate Reality as pure duration in which thought, life and purpose interpenetrate to form an organic unity. We cannot conceive this unity except as the unity of a self - an all embracing concrete self -the ultimate source of all individual life and thought ... It is the degree of the intuition of 'I-am-ness' that determines the place of a thing in the scale of being …What we call Nature, or the 'not-self' is only a fleeting noment in the life of God. His 'I-am-ness' is independent, elemental absolute. Of such a self it is impossible for us to form an adequate conception ... Now a self is unthinkable with out a character, i.e. a uniform mode of behaviour ... Nature is to the Divine Self as character is to the human self. In the picturesque phrase of the Quran it is the habit of Allah. From the human point of view it is an interpretation which, in our present situation, we put on the creative activity of the Absolute Ego. At a particular time in its forward movement it is finite; but since the self to which it is organic is creative, it is liable to increase, and is consequently boundless in the sense that no limit to its extension is final. Its boundlessness is potential, not actual. Nature, then, must be understood as a living, ever-growing organism whose growth has no final external limits. Its only limit is internal, i.e. the immanent self which animates and sustains the whole. As the Quran says: And verify unto thy Lord is the limit. 'Thus the view that we have taken gives a fresh spiritual meaning to physical science. The knowledge of Nature is the knowledge of God's behaviour. In our observation of Nature we are virtually seeking a kind of intimacy with the Absolute Ego: and this is only another form of worship". (p 54-57).

NOTES:

1. Published in The Pakistan Times. 20.4.68