The Human Ego – His Freedom and Immortality

-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. 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, 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. 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.

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.

‘If you do well to your own behoof will you do well: and if you do evil against yourselves will you do it.

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. I have already explained to you my view of Taqdâr (destiny) as we find it in the Qur’«n. 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. 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.’ Thus arose, in spite of open protests by Muslim divines, a morally degrading Fatalism, and the constitutional theory known as the ‘accomplished fact’ 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. 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.

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