NATURE OF EXPERIENCE IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SELF

A. H. KAMALI

Multiplicity of autonomous spheres of knowledge has almost become the academic fashion of our times. Averrossean scheme of the separate spheres of Moral-Religious Knowledge and Scientific-casual inquiry, on whose basis Kantianism provides a frame of reference to a deeper penetration of Reality, is revealed as a projection of the departmentalism that is inherent in the destiny of our present Commercial Civilization. Human life is wrecked in the multiplicity of act-organisations; spheres after spheres of knowledge are invented and treated as if they have nothing to do with each other. In this age, man is not an identity but a clustre; not a system but a constellation; not one massive being but a set of tiny particles. He does not harbour one comprehensive loyalty, but is torn to pieces by countless conflicting loyalties.

In this age Iqbal appears to be one who addresses himself to the restoration of identity in life. His relentless criticism of the Contemporary Civilization and of its fundamental ideologies is positive towards a new theory of life, necessitating a new approach to knowledge, preserving the richness of experience and the multi-dimensionality of its character, but at the same time deepened in the vastness of a unity that regains for life its pristine vigour and glory, meaningfulness and rationality.

Following is an attempt to develop the main outlines of a theory of experience which employs not only the 'raw-feels' but also rational judgements of the poet-philosopher in its constructions and which may serve as an objective manifestation of the spirit of Iqbal's philosophy of self.

 

Ideational Form of Knowledge

The world is an appearance. Viewed from a distance it is at the most an idea. Consciousness is out to capture the Realm of Existence, but has to be content with the seizure of its phantom; a 'show' intervenes between the sentient being and the process of reality. Our memories are filled with the virtual images of the past episodes; our reminiscences are depressed in dull ideations of the cherished moments of our life. We are carried away from the happiest situations of our life in the forward rush of time and are now left with the empty corpse of their concretion and ghostly ideas of their animation. It is all ideation.

Ideation is a mode of consciousness which maintains contact with the world of facts through the medium of ideas. To the Greek mind it is the only possible form of knowledge. The highest Greek virtue is contemplation, an effort to disappear into a silent mirror. And, who is a better Grecian than al-Farabi or Ibn Rushd ? They want to surpass every one in becoming a mirror pure and simple.

Speculating is the essence of Ideation, the archeform of all experience. The Sage of the Allegory of Cave[1] prepares, nevertheless, a blue print of knowledge, wherein departure from the blazing and intense, variegated and rich, evanescent and fleeting ideas is besought so that in the end their vague patterns and figurhead profiles remain to captivate the emptied minds of those initiated in the pursuit of truth. Thus, undecorative, intangible, and colourless presentations of things and entities are enshrined in the temple of knowledge as the most celebrated idols to be worshipped in contemplation.

Aristotle, the pupil of the Sage, lays down within the framework of this methodology of knowledge the total scheme of gnosis. In its immediate surrounding, the Eye is but to witness the bubble-like ideas; they are particulars; here and now and no more. The gnostic has to abstract away similarities and uniformities from the experiential fluid of these objects; gradually there dawn before his mind the permanent features, stable facsimiles, and regular shapes impressed on the undelineated events mirrored in emerging particularities. The ground of their vision lies in Imagination. Imageries and fantasies are relatively permanent ideas immune from the lot and accidents that betake the immediately present storming ideas. The mind must not be content with this imaginative knowledge as it is still nearer to the perishing sphere; it must move further, and go far far away operating with abstraction in selecting and picking up the common characters shared by all of them (the images). This process is denoted by 'Conceptualization' which results in the apprehension of the immutable forms, eternal universals and permanent models of all beings in general. Their direct intuition formulates the supreme goal of all knowledge, the final emancipation from the hurdles of life and the unprecedented height of all awakening and illumination.

This is the Platonic-Aristotalean theory of knowledge, which has to govern the future course of the Greeko-Roman civilization. Being made to prostrate in the morbid standpoint of remote observation, and confounded in the mesh of imageries, mankind has to rotate in a close circle, passing through the clustre of perishing ideas and the constellation of universals, for ever removed from the internal glance of the reality. It is on the scaffolding of this philosophy that Muslim Culture has attempted to build itself up, but simply to crack down under its impact like a house of cards destined to be levelled to the ground. Platonic-Aristotalian theory is not only a theory of knowledge, it is also a theory of morality, not only of gnosis but also of life. The concept of Mirror is, at once, the methodology of knowledge, the way of life, and the philosophy of religion, thoroughly defining all the higher pursuits of existence projected in the development of the Muslim frame of mind, though not without powerful inttermitent voices against its permeation.

Neitzsche saw beneath this ideology of life the deterioration of the Dionysian. Spirit in the ascension of Apolloxianism with the impending transvaluation of values with the consequence that Homer has been loathed to become the poet of the infantile savagery, and Plato is crowned to become the High Priest of mature civilization. Nietzsche's penetrating insight discerned in the enthronement of Plato the root genesis of the decadence sapping from within the entire Western Civilization of our own time. Therefore, he is the first giant intellectual who disentangles himself, in the history of the West, from the mounting heritage of the Platonic traditions.

Neitzsche is a philosopher of life; he is always contemptuous towards the Rationalism of Plato which makes a mirror of life. But, Schopenhauer and Bergson criticise Rationalism from the epistemological point of view. They discovered in the phenomenon of ideation not knowledge but appropriation. Ideation, they claimed, is a function of the living organism in the movement of satisfaction. Its sole justification is appropriation of the environment and gratification of the organic impulses.

Iqbal singles out himself, in the newly anti-platonic movement, from Neitzsche by outstripping the limited prespective of life in the cosmic problem of Existence.

Iqbal strikes out a new note of the first magnitude by recognizing in the givenness of ideation a degree of knowledge which must be significant if assigned to its proper place in the total scheme of experience. The commentators of Iqbal have generally been unable to grasp the nature of his attack on Platonism. They confuse his line of opposition with that of Bergsonian mysticism, and unhesitatingly read in his expressions a camp-follower of the French School of Thought, which seduced to immediacies and besieged in Ahwal (feeling-states), cannot raise itself up to hold the ideas of things. Iqbal dives into the immediate flow of experience, returns to entertain their ideas and remarks, "It is in the nature of feeling to seek expression in thought"[2].

Iqbal assigns the ideational knowledge to the angels. In the hierarchical structure of reality, angels are stationed at a lower stratum of existence in relation to mankind and they have access only to the outermost vision of the reality.

Idea mediates between the knower and the known; it is not the reality, it is simply a snapshot, a sketchy portrait of flourishing concretion and blooming mobility of the real. Idea stands to the real as a photostat looks in relation to the moving and spirited person: dead and static, inert and cold. Ideation enacts a dense populace of fragmentary snaps, atomic ideas and isolated impressions. Mind overcomes them, by delivering itself from their rush, in another act of externalization, which posits an "idea of many ideas". Such posited ideas are also quite large in number; in a series of enactments mind constitutes the ultimate Idea (of the ideas . . .. of the ideas) at the highest matrix of ideation which is, nonetheless, a reflection (of the reflection . . .. of the reflection) of reality. Reflective thinking, as it is called, is a procession of intermediation; it does not fall upon object; it is self-reflexive; falls upon itself; demonstrates a total exile and perfect alienation from the warmth and zeal of the perennial occurrences.

Iqbal is out to dismantle this scheme of knowing activity which stretches veils upon veils on the broad countenance of reality. He calls  it spatializing activity in which the reflective intellect is unsparingly engaged to bury itself in the debris of the pyramid of ideas made of impressions, images, concepts, categories and forms. The most sweeping denunciation of the Platonic Forms is indeed directed against the contemplative intellect which generates distances after distances between sentience and Reality. Plato, a sheep in the guise of man who is final authority to the Sufi, drives his intellect to the skies and declares the causal world a fiction. Plato's thought judges the harmful to be useful; and the existent, non-existent. His nature is sleepy and produces dreams; his eye of prudence generates illusions.[3]

گوسفندے در لباس آدم است

حکم او بر جان صوفی محکم است

عقل خود را بر سر گردون رساند

حالتم اسباب را افسانہ خواند

فکر افلاطون زیان رو سود گفت

حکمت او بود را نابود گفت

قطرتش خوابید و خوابے ٱفرید

چشم ہوش او سرابے ٱفرید

Iqbal turns the direction of our attention; substitutes the concrete wholes for the abstract forms and asks to return from ideation to perception. Ideation is only a limited segment of thinking life; it is only a moment of the active rationality, which must be surpassed. This act of transcendence beyond the idea is anti-Greek and anti-classical.

II

Perceptual Flow of Experience

An idea is a sign of reality, however empty it may be yet it is a signal. Mind must travel on under its guidance. From a distance a garden appears like a green spot, like something vague; the active subject must move towards it; and he would witness the disclosure of the green spot, the far off idea, before his eyes; it turns into the blooming of many trees; he comes nearer and hears the chirping birds; he makes a further approximation; and all the richness, beauty, fragrance and pleasant breeze refresh him. This process means the transformation of the idea into percept.

Iqbal realizes in this approach to knowledge the essential property of Muslim thought which revolts against the Greek philosophy of Ideation. "The appeal to the concrete combined with the slow realization that, according to the teachings of the Qur'an, the universe is dynamic in its origin, finite and capable of increase, eventually brought Muslim thinkers into conflict with Greek thought which, in the beginning of their intellectual career, they had studied with so much enthusiasm".[4] "Knowledge must begin with the concrete. It is the intellectual capture of power over the concrete that makes it possible for the intellect of man to pass beyond the concrete."[5]

Like Iqbal, Bergson is also a philosopher of concrete experience. But, unlike Iqbal, Bergson shuns ideation. The characteristic originality of Iqbalian approach keeps up a traffic between idea and percept and discerns an unimpeded continuity running through them. "Thus, the character of man's knowledge is conceptual, and it is with the weapon of this conceptual knowledge that man approaches the observable aspect of reality."[6]

Perception is the closest external view of reality, in which every idea is immersed in every other; the chirps pour into the fragrance which again is carried over into the greenery; and all of them in mutual fusion make one concrete whole; the inertia of the particular impressions, their static isolations are clipped aside and all of them are mobilized into one gestalt flowering. The remote green spot is, now, one compact wholeness in which the tiny ideas, little impressions are held together in the unity of a flowering and flourishing garden. Iqbal explains that the table perceived is a mutual fusion of countless impressions, a concrete unity of their interpenetrating mobility. The abstract category of space is derivative[7]; it is the product of ideation and abstraction; it exists as a pointer towards reality; and the reality perceived is an immense dynamic whole of which the separate impressions are isolatory and abstracted moments. In its indivisibility and concrete wholeness, it is perception.

Perception is not made of sensation. The atomistic view is false; its reverse is true; sensations are the consequences of perceptions. "Life is only a series of acts of attention"; and every act of attention is disjunctive; it bifurcates the dynamic wholeness into a discontinuity of static sense-data, a conglomerate of atomic entities. Reflective thought is bifurcatory; it instantializes the flux of reality into a series of instants, each existing in its own right, self-imposed and self-contained. This reveals the spatializing property of the ideational thought. But the progress of human knowledge has done away with the particle-like atoms of Democritus with the realization of a category of Matter, which is an advanced conjecture towards the holistic nature of the external world. But, even that category is tampered with in the evolution of scientific thought. Modern physics, in its concept of the Relativity which integrates time as the fourth dimension, cannot go along with the concept of matter which involves "simple location in time".[8] The temporal character of reality, which reveals changing dimensions of the dynamic events breaks through the static category of matter. The situation is that we have to admit primacy of the dynamic wholes and conceive staticism of things derivative. Movement cannot be derived from static substances and entities; rather it is the simple location sand discrete boundaries that can be marked off on a speedy continuum.[9] This logical understanding _going side by side with the real experimental conclusions in contemporary physics throws enormous light on the genesis of sense-data and their relation to the concrete events, as well as on the problem of ideation as related to perception. The sensations are signs of the existing and moving wholes. From ideation one could and should move towards perception. Moreover, perception is capable of expressing itself in ideas.

Thus, Iqbal validates the conceptual knowledge; and approves the description of concrete events in the language of sense-data in the domain of reflective thought; provided that it should be considered as a statement of sign-systems of the reality. Iqbal restores the Platonic forms, the Spatio-temporal framework of Physics, the reflective knowledge of religion to their proper places.

His philosophy is successful exactly at the same point where Bergsonianism disintegrates into a mystic trance. Existentialism is the ultimate consequence of Bergsonianism, as has also been demonstrated by the history of recent French thought. The prospect for Iqbalian thought is a thoroughbred conceptual knowledge bordering on the solid core of perception.

Perception of the Whole

Perceptual structure of experience is a profusedly interlaced stream of events which maintains openness and develops into multi-directional becoming. It is a spatiality in temporal expansion sharply edging towards the future. Within the categories of conceptual knowledge it appears to be an inference; the external world seems to be a logical construct; it may be projected in the reintegration of the separate sensations into an interactional system. The rehabilitation of the dust like sense, in multilateral organization, works out an approximate adequation of the perceptual Gestalt of the Real. In its immediateness the object world is a perceptible structure of dynamic realities expanding into temporal spread. It is out of this continuous formation that differentiations are made, memories are disassociated, expectations are discriminated, distinctions are extenuated, and things are carved out.[10]

Scattered events are functional counterparts of the abstractive disengagement, imaginative marks are drawn, separation lines are stretched. The result of this activity is seeming millions of ruptured ideas and fissured entities. The stresses are petrified intellection in which the possibilities of infinite consciousness shrink to small gravitational stabilities of observation, each cutting a section of the universe round its nexus. Sciences come to stay in the stresses of the attention field. And "there is no doubt that the theories of science constitute trustworthy knowledge".[11] But we must not forget that what is called science is not a single systematic view of reality. It is a mass of sectional views of reality—fragments of "total experience which do not seem to fit together".[12] In fact the various natural sciences are like so many "small vultures falling on the dead body of Nature, and each running away with a slice of its flesh". "The moment you put the subject of science in the total of human experience it begins to disclose a different character".[13]

The movement of consciousness is fettered in the stresses of close rotations with the multiplication of disordered dissection of the universe. Therefore, release from their grip is necessary for the free movement of consciousness. It must achieve independence from their determinations in order to have a direct access to the reality. Perceptual knowledge is disrupted into various segments under their pull; they have to be overcome; their mediation must have to be broken asunder.

Perceptual knowledge does not remain a problem of theoretical reason; now it becomes a moral issue. Bracketting the stresses controlling the pulls and arresting their concentric arti-crafts is the logical condition of the cognitive consciousness operative to witness the flow of the objective world. In our time, the vocation of practical life is conceived independant of the knowledge a person possesses; the licentious life he passes, accordingly, does not modify the opinions he expresses. This idea has created the greatest non-sense of the contemporary world. The pressure of the stresses carries its logical character to the world a man envisions; consequently, the real world is coloured in the modes of his life, moulded in the bulwark of his wishes, and articulated in the patterns of his demands. Only a free life has the privilege to pass through the gate-way of the objective reality given in its own right. And, therefore, purification is the basic requirement of the intuitive grasp of the structural wholeness of the given world. Human mind, closely related to the bio-physical stresses grasps only those abstractive poses of the reality which correspond to them; the absorbing engagements in their pulls disclose only those fields of the universe in which they could move and fulfil themselves. Their prejudicial character, a priori disposition disallows the consciousness to act according to its own dictates. Growing on the bio-physical bases is an ever increasing set of uncountable cravings civilization has imposed on life; and all of them 'run away' with a piece of the reality. The logical outcome is a disordered erosion and unsystematic access to events of various stresses, leaving out many of the events which were essential bricks of the structural dynamics of the reality.

The only way to come out of the simulation of the arrays of stresses, resulting in the inevitable fissure and abstract segmentation of the reality, is to be liberated from them. The one, whose being is not free from the earthly attraction, has no right to the pleasure of flight in the universe.[14] The liberated consciousness is the most vital ground of the direct external apprehention of the Gestalt of Reality. Consequently, Islam has laid down fundamental emphasis on the purity of life as the prior condition of knowledge and of other responsible assignments. The testimony of the impious, the evidence of a fasiq (the slave of wishes) are unacceptable in Islamic law. The dubius character of experience of a slave of stresses, sham states of a licentious person, the abstractive occurrences (waridat) of a spirit mortified in the disassociative pulls and contractions cannot constitute the foundational protocols of the objective knowledge encompassing the entire stretches of Reality. It is due to this reason that in Muslim traditions a knower dictated by the agitating dispositions is a complete contradiction in terms. Tazkiyyah al-Nafs (purification and cleansing of the psyche) have been granted the status of the prime most methodology of knowledge. All ways of reality (Rah-i-Suluk) pass through the self-purification process in order to have the direct cognition of the concrete whole of reality. This is an initiation into the series of negations; stresses after stresses are surrounded, grasped and negated; every negation is self-forwarding with the positive restoration of the abstract moments and figments to the original spread of reality. At the apex of self-purification, the restoration of complete concretion is affected; the original unmediated ocean like vibrations of the single united configurate of reality is perceived. Its original flow and patterns, styles and operations shine forth before the pure mind; all its, henceforth neglected, moments present in their total setting are open to the liberated man.

It is he who is the witness of reality. He is the unmixed percipient; he pollutes not the given by mingling his thoughts in it; he never projects his own spirit the aboriginal flow; anthropocentricism, ego-centric predicament are thoroughly transcended in his presence. He is one whose words are the translations of reality, whose gestures are rader-pointers to the given, whose turns and movements indicate the flow and direction of the whole.

Western thought, even, in its most spectacular leaps could not reach at the apprehension of the perceptual continuum. W. James' celebrated stream of consciousness makes but a very narrow threshold of the widespread flux; it gives simply series of ideas passing one by one through the consciousness. The ideational stand-point is confirmed in the Radical Empiricism whose axiomatic statements come out to construct the mental world and the physical world out of these initial ideas. Ernst Mach's 'Pan Impressionism' is an abstract ideation of the dust of impressions which in one organization are physical things; in another are mental events. Russell's and Neo-Realists' "neutral stuff " is a series of strangulated contents which in their different togethernesses are different things. Bergsonian "flux" is arresting luminary of the feelings carried in unindirectedness generating the phenomenon of serial continuity.

In fact, all of them are absorbed in the echoes of the aboriginal flux without reaching the flux; they are ideating the ideas of (the perception of) the flux.

The flux is the multidirectional patterning integrated in one single wholeness. The neutral stuff of Perry and Russell or the 'impressions' of Wittgenstein and Moor are trails of this universal developing constellation growing and organizing itself continuously. The percipient observes its Grand Form integrating in innumerable manners the relics, traces contours and lines of becoming. This Total Singleness is the ultimate matrix of all external knowledge. Emotions, ideas, impressions, memories, expectations, colours, sounds, pressures, touches, etc. etc., all are embroidered on this outer garb of the Reality, around which are beseated the sublimated knowers enjoying it all among themselves. It is incommunicable; only those who know it share it; for others, fettered in stresses, it is beyond comprehension. All the sectional views are submerged in its vision wherein one concrete expanding wholeness imposes itself on the faculty of knowledge, as the bold insignia, bright emblem and splendid sign of the still deeper reality.

"The Sign" is beheld and firmed; it is Taslim wiz Rida; the percipient is calmly, silently. a witness of the becoming.

 

III

Activistic Category of Knowledge

Positivism is an entailment at the station of perception in the journey of knowledge. From Platonic envisioning of the empty forms down to the beholding of the concrete patterns the attitude is outrightly set—the attitude of submission. Consequently, inactivity and calmness, patience and forefeiture are the governing principles of life. It is from this station that the Sage and the Sufi speak of utter resignation and the positivist like Russel in his "Free Man's Worship" advises wholesale bowing down before the facts.

Iqbal terms it as a negative attitude and points out to passing beyond it. His gesture to go beyond is a new movement of knowledge which discloses the depths of the real, penetrates through the inmost crusts of the Sign. The excavation is instituted in the deeper movement of consciousness which is active on the basis of cognitive illumination unfolded in the Logic of Participation.

Encountrance with the real and interaction with it is the activistic element integrated with cognitive thinking. It is in participation with the given that the new mode of knowledge opens to lay bare the hidden features of the real. Out of one group of interactions develops the science of physics; out of another chemistry; out of a third the biological studies. The methodology of knowledge necessarily entails the conative groups of operations which decipher the layers of the Being peculiar to their nature. This is the logic of science; physiology, psychology, economics, etc. emerge out one by one along with the typical action categories immanent in their axiomatics.

Pure perception floats at the surface; its high achievement is mathematics; the science of patterns and shapes, figures and forms, lines and sketches. Participation is purva sive: its high discoveries are casuality and development, energy and waves, stimulus and response, force and resistance, gravitation and magnetism. To the Sight reality is endless juxtaposition; to the Grip it is internal boundedness; To the calm Spectator it is divisible band of accidents; to the active Agent it is unbreakable system of necessities. To the one it is static; to the other it is moving. The former catches hold of the 'become' and the 'past'; the latter of the becoming, piercing into the future.

Vision is external; participation is internal. Situation in participation is the essential constitutive principle of life. Life is in perpetual active relationship of assimilation adaptation and transfiguration with the environmental forces and casual sequences. "Consciousness may be imagined as a deflection from life. Its function is to provide a luminous point in order to enlighten the forward rush of life."

The idea of life is unintelligible without the concept of consciousness. Casual interactions, pulls and pushes, shorne off consciousness, are devoid of life. It is only when the element of consciousness, however feeble and flimsy it may be, is immanent in the springing events, that the life-concept is applicable to them. Now, as soon as life throws out its luminous core to install an external sensitivity, the moment of liberation from the immediate involvement comes. It is only in man, on earth, that awareness has achieved a considerable degree of deliverance from the immediacy of life to view the entire situation from the outside. The Bergsonians and Instrumentalists are not right to reduce consciousness to Intelligence which is enchained to the immediate commitments. Iqbal sees in the givenness of consciousness a principle and reality which is capable of infinite liberation and unrestricted developments.

Internal involvement participation and equilibrium pour into the span of consciousness its data, supply it with the contents it must keep in view, offer it the material it must attend to. The perceptual structure of experience is incessantly consolidated in the dynamic states of life which throws at its disposal the stuff and outputs that substantialize its vision.

Thus, perceptual knowledge permanently feeds on the provisions won in participation and involvement. Activities component is the grounding formulae of Perception. The external system throngs over the nervous system, interacts with it and generates the experience of colour, sound, temperature and smell. "The cause of your sensation of red", says Iqbal, "is the rapidity of wave motion the frequency of which is 400 billions per second". The nervous system reacts to it and the redness (a visual content) is before the eye. The conclusion is: perception in its genesis, is a shining speck casting rays on the end-results without illumined of the acts in which they are posited. The consequence is: subject and object of experience stand disjointed from each other; there seems an abrupt demarcation; two separate unconnected realms come into being.

The experience of external confrontation is but a case of limited consciousness, which may be conceived either as a dwarfed awareness or a fallen cognition. It reveals only some of the parts of the whole and as such is abstract partial and incomplete in its very nature. Therefore, it needs completion, development and perfection. The principle of participation provides the cue to go beyond the surface observation; restores the acts in which the external object is posited, uncovers the dynamic relationship in which the subject and object are part of a total structure, and restores to knowledge the order of internal connection between man and his environment.

This methodological technique of reproducing the acts of formulation and reconstructing the perennial interactions is essentially a movement from the Spatiality of phenomenon to the temporality of the neumenon. Yet, this movement is arrested by its own inherent shortcomings and cannot comprehend the reality in its staggering totality. It discovers only very small and meagre processes and features of the universe. In it the world appears as Nature, a whirlpool of unbridled energies and blind forces. It simply gives us the set of natural sciences which undoubtedly have their loci inside the reality. However, it still remains nearer to externality rather than to the deep internality which is the essence of Existence.

Consequently, the principle of participation or activistic cognition is nothing but Efficient Intellect as Iqbal calls it. Its content is mechanistic; it can capture the atomic valence, can go into the structures of physical collisions and beyond these spheres it is helpless and undone.

 

IV

Pathos: The Adequate Mode of Knowledge

Activistic consciousness provides the training ground for a higher intellect which contains in its Kernel Pathos 'Shauque' as the law of its emergence. Revelation in its nature is the most adequate form of knowledge which unfolds the world as the Sign of a living universal personality, and gives flashing eperque of its ultimate character. Pathos tears to pieces the hardest core of the universe and brings forth its concealed enclosed nature.

Sympathy, apathy, antipathy, etc., are distinct forms of pathos whose universality may be evaluated by the fact that it alone is the organizing law of all the acts of knowledge. The physical operations are co-ordinated in its range to produce the terrible havoc of devastating atomic bombardments to express the antipathy; the chemico-physiological processes are arranged in its design to cure the sympathised unfortunates; astonishing technological artifices are embodied in its move to develop the civilization. The one single principle of Pathos is the ultimate integral movement in the essence of the universe; and it alone has to be crowned as the most comprehensive mode of knowledge.

Pathos is referential in its character, and necessitates the existence of a living being in its enactment. It is the most excellent privilege of a living entity and entails an immanent self-affirmation in its being possible.

Pathos is an act of formation; it formulates a living otherness. In its early stages it merely postulates the living otherness, but does not remain closed in its own formulation and supposition. It is the law of its own verification; in its further realizations and acts, it verifies the correctness of its own reference. Living otherness responds to the pathos and thus puts a seal of correctness upon the referential act of the subject, who in his turn, again replies to the other. Thus there is no limit in mutual transactions of the living persons.

It is in Pathos that the world is finally known and verified as an open system of responding individuals.

It is in Pathos that one discovers one's own reality as a living Ego. But, this Self-acknowledgement is the most superficial truth in the system of the deeper truths, deploying the entire concrete reality as the sign system of one's own self-hood. This experience, although superficial in comparison with other ranges of experience, yet is enormously big so as to engulf the total spatiality to express it as one of its own modality. It simply comes to its kneels at the shuddering heights of the Duration from where all the events come down like pearls and drops one after another, disallowing self-involvement to persist as the -ultimate truth in the system of the universe. Time is self-transcending movement which can be grasped in the principle of pathos which is itself other-directedness in its total expression.

Pathos is an emanation from one subjectivity radiating towards another subjectivity. It does not mitigate but rather sharpens the distinction of their separate givenness. Resolution (of one subjectivity) into its alter as happens in the phenomenon of identification, degenerates the whole experience into ego-experience. Self-divestment accompanied any total mergence in the alter is a knowledge of single subjectivity; again cancellation of the identity of an alter in the enhancement of selfhood is also the same experience of single subjectivity. Therefore, the logical condition of pathos lies in the enhancement and intensification of mutual otherness. Consequently, Iqbal is vigorously insistent on self-affirmation as methodological procedure in the movement of Shauque whose various forms viz., anger, hate, sympathy and help are only possible on the basis of Ego and Alter-Ego as pluralistic centres of reality.

However, all the forms of Pathos have different degrees of universality and contain diverging intensities of appropriation to reality. But, it is only Love that discloses the highest form of movement, adequate to comprehend the whole range and intensity of the Being. I and Thou define the ultimate category of reality and of knowledge. Denial of thou-ness is egoistic experience; and self-divestment in thou-ness is again an experience of I-ness. Therefore, in love the distinction become more refined and cultivated, the demarcating separations are heightened in its progression. The structure of love experience belies the category of concentric experience which is incident upon the reduction of either side of the reality. This is a point of the greatest significance in the whole body of Iqbalian thought that provides the key-note to his philosophy of Khudi. In Neitzche, the experience is self-centric; it is the same in Bergsonian vitalism; but in Iqbal's philosophy it is bi-centric, constituting the logical condition of the ma'arifat (real knowledge).

 

V

Revelation: The Height of all Knowledge

Iqbal picks up in the property of self-possession the logical essence of Ego-existence. Consequently, every ego in its individuality possesses a core of Privacy in its unmixed uninfiltrated primacy. Consequently, there is always a cordon of concealment in the very inwardness of every person. Every particularity in the universe, every stretch of the space is laid open for tresspass; "the dead" and "the become" has no resistance; it has no inner circle of vacation that cannot be seen, touched or heard. Only the living personality has an untouchable vacation (Takhliya-i-Harim) that cannot be traversed; no one can pass through it, or dare to peep into it. Consequently this sphere, of being is laid beyond the experience of love.

In Idealistic philosophy of knowledge and experience of love, the principle of privacy and uniqueness does not find place. Mutual infiltration logically guarantees the expansion of knowledge in the process of identification. Therefore, in this philosophy love or implantation into each other's heart constitutes ma'arifat. But, it bows down before the threshold of the Inner Circle and cannot enter into it without the consent of the alter-ego. Ultimate knowledge is dependant on the voluntary disclosure of self to other self; even the unfathomable love cannot be a substitute for voluntary disclosure. The Beloved may keep secret whatever He likes, and may whisper to the lover whatever He likes. This knowledge is revelation.

The category of the bearer of secrets surpasses the category of lover. The highest reciprocation of love is love; and not knowledge.

The distribution of personal secrets to others is a prerogative of the personal life, which cannot be questioned.

The inter-subjective world of plurality is a network of intimacies limited by privacies. Speech provides the inter-personal system of communication.

Iqbal believes that the inmost essence of reality is non-transferable, it cannot be shown to others. "The dentist may sympathise with my toothache but cannot experience the feeling of my toothache. My pleasures, pain, and desires are exclusively mines a part and parcel of my private ego alone."[15] Therefore, an ego may disclose his willingness, pleasures and pains and other articulations of his life, in the mode of language only. Revelation is linguistic in its highest form, denoting the deepest secrets of the reality.

Revelation  in its lower form is intuition beyond the category of love; the Alter shines forth to the Ego and directly presents, himself to the vision. But it develops into Kalam (discourse) as soon as the knowledge of the events of the Untouchable vacation is involved; it is given in the form of language.

Every word of a language system is a name, it names some idea; therefore, the linguistic revelation is an idea-system, an external vision of the inmost events.

The revelation can further be conceptualized in the most abstract and general ideas.

This shows that there is necessary continuity between thought and revelation, language and reality, concept and experience.

The final aim of all knowledge, therefore, is intuition and revelation, which for the purpose of communication can be conceptualized.

 

Notes and References