A PLEA FOR PHILOSOPHY’S LIBERATION

Absar Ahmad

Contemporary Anglo-American philosophy is at a dead end. Its academic practitioners have all but abandoned the attempt to under-stand the world, let alone change it. They have turned philosophy into a narrow and specialised academic subject of little relevance or interest to anyone outside the small circle of professional philosophers. The result has been that. serious philosophical work beyond the conventional sphere has been minimal.

In pronouncing this judgment I am not at all being highhanded or presumptuous, rather it is informed by my personal experience of studies at British universities a few years ago. Moreover, I have an authority, Bacon, on my side when he said: “For where philosophy is severed from its roots in experience, whence it first sprouted and grew, it becomes a dead thing.” The great mass of human beings undoubtedly have a real need for a philosophy—that is, for a consist­ent worldview and a body of guiding principles and clearly defined aims. This mass is effectively deprived by contemporary academic philosophers of any ideological material which might prove relevant to their existence.

Complacency, The present-day academic philosophy is created and transmitted in an atmosphere of “scholarly detachment”. It appears to be entirely remote from the struggles and needs of the world. Academic philosophers, both in their thought and in their lives, it would appear, have almost entirely withdrawn from any relationship with the concrete social reality around them. They fre­quently boast of their “coolness,” their “detachment,” their “ethical neutrality,” etc., etc. In short, they seem to have abdicated from any socially valuable role, and their work consequently appears to be entirely trivial and irrelevant. It is characteristic of this type of philosophers that they come to think they can dismiss a complex theoretical system such as a theistic point of view in a few deft “moves” or with a few clever points, and to distrust whatever is not put in the professional patois of “claims,” unpacking, entailment, and which does not have the sleek professionalism and glibness that now passes for rigour and brilliance.

But clearly the claim of ethical neutrality and dispassionateness on their part is a farce. The social and political function of present-day analytical and linguistic philosophy is diabolically conservative and reactionary in the main. In fact, these philosophers exhibit total complacency towards any idea of changing and revolutionizing the established order. I knew and befriended many a radical students in Western universities who regarded the whole academic set-up as a fraud, perpetuated to group up the status quo.

Philosophical thinking, historically speaking, is closely related with religious beliefs, with science, and with art. It has often culminated in the attempt to do intellectually what religion has done practically and emotionally : to establish human life in some satisfy­ing and meaningful relation to the universe in which man finds him-self, and to get some wisdom in the conduct of human affairs. There has been a general agreement on the type of problems with which “wisdom” and hence philosophy is centrally concerned. They are those which raise the question of the meaning of human life, and the significance of the world in which human life has its setting, in so far as that character has a bearing on human destiny. And what is that destiny itself? What activities and pursuits should he follow? What kind of life is most worthwhile individually and collectively? To the best of my knowledge, linguistic and analytical philosophers of the West do not address themselves to any of these questions. But surely we in the developing countries cannot afford the teaching of a philo­sophy which, though replete with technical jargon, is empty, formal and sterile. We should stand for less academics and more self-understanding and concrete social change.

Third World We must not negelect, as is now fashionable with the Western thinkers, the cultural problems of the Third World. Anthropology left the Third World with a theory of acculturation, but Marx was far closer to reality when he wrote of the Indian subcontinent

“England has broken down the entire framework of Indian society, without any symptom of reconstruction yet appearing. This loss of his old world, with no gain of a new one, imparts a particular kind of melancholy to the present misery of the Hindoo [and, I add, the Muslim also] and separates Hindustan, ruled by Britain, from all its ancient traditions, and from the whole of its past history” (Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization).

The alienation of the native from his own culture is a problem that hangs over much of the cultural activity in the Third World. Western experts are not reluctant to fill the debate with the most ludicrous philosophical rubbish—like the idea of converting the entire Third World to secular scienticism in order to foster economic growth. Philosophy in the heroic sense provides the key to the reconstitution of national culture, the necessity for which Sayyid Ahmad Khan and Allama Iqbal clearly saw.

Yet philosophy is often regarded as an unnecessary luxury in the Third World. The bourgeois economists, who otherwise accuse Marx of reducing human life entirely to economic relations, happily reduce the people of the Third World to homo economicus, pure and simple. Philosophy, they assert, should be abandoned for more useful economic pursuits. I shall narrate a very interesting episode here which I came to know from private communication with a Nigerian friend. Professor Ernest Gellner of London Schcol of Economics was asked by a Nigerian University on the advisability of setting up a philosophy department, and he replied that a developing country does not need one. But such an answer attains its plausibility entirely through the mystification of words. Replace “philosophy” with a synonym like “clear and ordered thinking” (or “critical understanding”) and we get:

(a) A developing country does not need clear and ordered thinking.

(b) A developing country does not need critical understanding.

Certainly Gellner would have a case if he meant that a developing country does not need philosophy as presently carried on in the English-speaking world ; but then who does ? Such a philosophy is “an attempt to combine the appearance of being in earnest and taking trouble about the subject with an actual neglect of the subject alto­gether”. In Consciencism, one of the best books on general philosophy from contemporary Africa, we read:

“Whereas the great philosophers, the Titans, have always been passionately interested in social reality and the welfare of man, many of their twentieth-century descendants in the West serenely settle down to a compilation of dictionary of sentences as opposed to a dictionary of words engulfed in their intellectual hermitage, they excuse them-selves from philosophical comment on social progress or social oppres­sion, on peace or war. While they thus pursue they exact sense of the word,’ all authority, political or moral, passes ever more firmly into the hands of the politicians” (Kwame Nkrumah).

It would be entirely mistaken to view the argument presented here as merely ideological or dogmatic. Philosophy in the true sense is an intrinsic part of man’s self-fulfilment, and the case argued for here is that the Third World developers its philosophical resources in order to help its societies flower creatively and intellectually, to become instances of humanity fully becoming itself. In contrast to the issues that are usually associated with the Third World in Western discus­sions, such as population explosion, birth control, more or less aid, infiltration of “dangerous” ideas, etc., two themes can be said to occupy the major part of intellectual activity in this region:

(1) How to counter racist imperialist aggression emanating from the West but often mediated by local agents. This aggression is not to be taken in a limited political or economic sense only, rather in a very broad sense of cultural, moral and educational aggression and oppression.

(2) The ends and means of developing wholesome and independent society where each man is free to fulfil himself—to “be him-self” in the true Quranic sense.

All this, it might be thought, is not of much concern to the West. “If the Third World wants to develop its own philosophy let it do so, but we are concerned with our own problems.” Not only is this wrong because the problems which beset and obsess Western intellec­tuals closely affect members of the Third World, but also wrong be-cause the search for a vision of the whole man, proclaimed by eminent sages of the past, is a matter concerning all men. Surely we do not intend to replace a Western chauvinism by a Third World chauvinism. Take for instance the question of growing interest in the social responsibility of science and ideological orientation of the scientific paradigms which a society adopts. It is clear that what is needed is ism be established within its very centre, for it is inadequate merely to humanise science: there must be the creation of science as a humanism. In the Third World where science departments are not heavily encrusted by a tradition and where sciences are often/just being established, such a vision has great and urgent relevance.

A Third World philosopher should participate in the tasks of (i) liberating the study of Third World societies, cultures and economics from inhuman and enslaving philosophical presuppositions and reconstrue it within a broad religio-humanistic framework; (ii) creating science as a humanism, as a technology at one with the whole spirit of Man and development of an anthropology of the spirit that would destroy the tearing apart of man from himself, that has epitomized both the West and its blind imitators in the Third World; and restore to man his essential unity, having as its purpose the increased awareness of what makes man fully human and the exploration of the nature of man’s fulfilment.

Islamic Eclecticism. When the words “physics,” “chemistry,” “medicine,” or “history” are mentioned in a conversation, the participants usually have something in mind. No matter how many points of dispute there may be in these fields, at least the general line of their intellectual work is universally recognised. The prominent representatives more or less agree on subject-matter and methods. The situation in philosophy, however, is diametrically opposed to this. Here refutation of one school by another usually involves com­plete rejection, the negation of the substance of its work as funda­mentally false and misconceived. This attitude would not be shared by want I propose to call, for want of a better expression, “Islamic Eclecticism”—a kind of dialectical philosophy. Islamic eclecticism, for example in keeping with its principles, will tend to extract the relative truths of the individual points of view and introduce them in its own comprehensive theory. Other philosophical doctrines, such as contemporary positivism, have less elastic and accommodating principles, and they simply exclude from the realm of knowledge a very large part of the philosophical literature, especially the great meta-physical systems of the past.

The idea of Islamic eclecticism is firmly based on one of the that the conceptual structure of science be constituted and a human - sayings of the Holy Prophet (peace and blessings of Allah be upon him) according to which wisdom and gems of knowledge are a Mumin’s lost property, and he is advised to acquire them from which-ever quarter they are available. A Muslim mind is rightly characterized as an open one, ready to accept truth from any source or region it may emanate. Obviously many philosophies and thought-systems, even Marxism and psychoanalysis, contain an amalgam of truth and untruth, and it is the duty of a Muslim thinker to sift the genuinely true elements from falsehood and incorporate it into the Islamic thought. ,It is in this sense that Iqbal speaks of “them principle of movement” in the structure of Islam. In the following lines I shall further delineate the characteristics of Islamic eclecticism.

Islamic eclecticism will explicitly aim to avoid the academicism of the existing Western philosophical schools: an academicism which trivializes philosophy and manifests itself in an uncritical attitude to social ideologies and metaphysical worldviews. It will make a point of taking a synoptic and integrated approach to knowledge—an approach which cuts across academic departmental divisions. It will draw on alternative philosophical traditions as a way of overcoming the inadequacies of prevalent analytical philosophy. This is not to say that any of the other dominant traditions offers a ready-made alter-native, which could be adopted wholesale. To be fair, it would be wrong to neglect altogether the analytical tradition. It would of course be absurd to dismiss all the work that has been done within it as futile and irrelevant. Even where one is critical of analytical and linguistic philosophy, it is important to assess it and reckon with it, not just to turn one’s back on it. Most clearly, analytical philosophers tend to stop the inquiry just where a practical man in the world begins to ask questions. There has been virtually no attempt among analytical philosophers to press further, to ask critical questions about the origin and development of social institutions and practices which shape what we are. This failure has especially left its mark on social and political philosophy which have been virtually non-existent, and on ethics which has tended to become an arid, scholastic jungle.

Philosophy in the framework of Islamic eclecticism cannot be squared with an anti-activist or “spectator” view of it which aims merely at an enlargement of the understanding, Indeed it here becomes an essentially practical subject: it seeks to get people to do things. It cannot remain uncommitted to social action. The attack on spectatorism which we find in Existentialism and in the pragmatists is very relevant to current philosophical scene. Moreover, Anglo-American academic philosophy is presently built around the assump­tion that its true centre is epistemology. This assumption is apparent particularly in the structure and content of university courses. Now, the approach to the various areas of philosophy via the problem of knowledge is one possible way of organising one’s conception of philosophy. But the outcome has been the abstraction of “man as knower” from the rest of human life, and in particular from human practice. This has been a distinguishing feature of the empiricist tradition and epistemology is still dominated by that tradition : the so-called “problems of knowledge” are the problems of the isolated individual knower confined to the world of his own sense-perceptions. Conversely, it is essential to see the activity of “knowing” as arising out of, and part of, man’s general attempt to organise and cope with his world, in order to vindicate the status of human knowledge as a meaningful totality rather than a series of discrete sense-impressions.

During my stay in England I met a number of students who became fed up with the Oxford mixture served up to them as philo­sophy. The endless and usually pointless analysis, the clever, showy logic-chopping, the crossword-puzzle attitude of the professionals bored them stiff ; they had expected something far better from philosophy, something with a real-life purpose, not just an esoteric game. Perhaps it is in the bizarre meanderings of the so-called moral philosophers that they realized the boredom of the subject masks something more important—its pretended a-morality .and a politically. Surely, philosophy should be a moral activity, not merely a discussion of piano practice (Stevenson) or red motor cars (Hare). They saw that the boring triviality of linguistic philosophy is inextri­cably bound up with the general isolation of the academic, the ivory tower atmosphere of the universities. What they want to do is to change things, not to be mere elitist intellectuals. What Russell did in public had nothing to do with his limited “theory of knowledge,” though everything to do with his “philosophy of life”. And that is the point; for us Muslims the faith philosophy of Islam is the one system of thought that requires the marriage of theory and practice, the one metaphysics available to us which is a complete philosophy of life and plan of action. We should not expect any deep understanding of social, moral and economic oppression from a straight philosopher. Only religiously committed thinkers can take seriously in their lives and in their thinking the need for, and possibility of, a radical and liberat­ing transformation of human life on earth.

In the Islamic context, philosophy has not only a conceptual spiritual being, but also a social-material existence. Islam has never allowed the speculative and active lives to become totally divorced from each other: thought and reflection have always been wedded to action. On the one hand, according to a Prophetic tradition, an hour of thoughtful reflection is better than sixty years of acts of worship. But knowledge without action has been described as a tree without fruit. Contemplative thought (tafakkur) and reflection in Islamic spirituality is essentially a knowledge that relates the knower to higher modes of being. Only in this manner we hope to remove the root cause of a strong dissatisfaction with the present state of philosophy. Fortunately,’ a great deal of work has recently been done by Muslim thinkers in detecting the subtler mechanisms of widespread false consciousness perpetrated by materialistic philosophies, An enormous amount remains to be done along the same lines.