Sculpting the Self: Islam, Selfhood, and Human Flourishing 9780472132621, 9780472129164

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Sculpting the Self

Sculpting the Self Islam, Selfhood, and Human Flourishing

Muhammad U. Faruque

University of Michigan Press Ann Arbor

Copyright © 2021 by Muhammad U. Faruque All rights reserved For questions or permissions, please contact [email protected] Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-­free paper First published August 2021 A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication data has been applied for. ISBN 978-­0-­472-­13262-­1 (hardcover : alk. paper) ISBN 978-­0-­472-­12916-­4 (e-­book)

To my parents and teachers who opened the gateway to learning and self-­discovery ‫ثبت است بر جریده عالم دوام ما‬

‫هرگز نمیرد آن که دلش زنده شد به عشق‬

Never shall perish the hearts of those revived by love, For their eternity is inscribed in the parchment of the universe. —­Hafez

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

Transliterationsxv Introduction

1

Part I Chapter 1. The Problematic of the Self Is the Self a Modern Invention? The Opacity of the Self Degrees and Dimensions of Selfhood First-­Person vs. Third-­Person Perspective Descriptive vs. Normative Approaches A Multidimensional Model Overcoming the Terminological Fray Summary

9 9 19 27 28 33 44 49 59

Chapter 2. The View from and beyond the “I” The Paradox of Self-­Knowledge Non-­reflective Self-­Knowledge Self-­Knowledge as Abiding Presence The Varieties of Non-­reflective Self-­Knowledge The Kantian Dilemma Summary

60 61 70 78 86 93 103

Chapter 3. Self-­Knowledge and the Levels of Consciousness The Humean Challenge and the Referentiality of the “I” The Onto-­phenomenological Structure of Consciousness What Is It Like to Be a Self? Unity of Self and Consciousness Summary

104 104 111 121 133 140

x  Contents

Part II Chapter 4. Self, Body, and Consciousness Consciousness in Neuroscience Neurobiological Theories of Consciousness The Center of the Self: Neurons or Consciousness? The Nerve Impulse and the Structure of Consciousness Graeco-­Islamic-­Indian Conversations Deciphering the Self through the Subtle Bodies Emotion and Subjectivity Summary

143 143 153 159 162 170 179 186 195

Chapter 5. Sculpting the Self Philosophy, Spirituality, and Self-­Knowledge Self-­Cultivation and Human Flourishing Self-­Perfection and the Ideal Self Meditation and Self-­Transparency Self-­Transcendence and Transformation Self, Freedom, Being-­Toward-­Beyond-­Death Summary

197 197 210 221 233 239 246 254

Chapter 6. Consummation: “I” or “I and I”

256

Bibliography

267

Index Locorum

293

Index of Names

301

Index of Subjects

307

Digital materials related to this title can be found on the Fulcrum platform via the following citable URL: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.11955316

Preface and Acknowledgments

Let me begin with the story of how I came to the study of self and subjectivity in Islam. I was studying financial economics at the University of London when the catastrophic financial crisis of 2008 shook the world. Focusing on stock markets at that time, I really began to think seriously about the big questions of life, especially whether or not we can understand and predict what happens in the external world (in the economic sphere) without taking into account some conception of human subjectivity. As is known, the models that are used in economics hardly consider any subjective factors, although there are some exceptions such as the ones developed by the Yale economist Robert Shiller, who was instrumental in making me think about the role of human psychology in these models. And the rest, as they say, was history. Eventually I came to the realization that unless we understand ourselves fully, we will not be able to understand what we observe around us. I consequently left my lucrative career in economics for good and traveled to Iran (and other parts of the Islamic world) to explore the Islamic intellectual tradition in depth. After many years of training, I eventually came to write my doctoral dissertation on selfhood and subject formation in Islamic thought at Berkeley. This book thus derives from my doctoral dissertation, although the manuscript has been thoroughly revised and transformed since my defense, based as it is on further research, reflection, and conversations. When preparing my monograph for publication, I thought of writing a book for specialists in Islamic Studies only. But after presenting aspects of my research on the self at many academic venues around the world and teaching a seminar on religion, ethics, and selfhood at Fordham, I realized that the topic has a wider audience than I had initially anticipated. Hence, I decided to write this book for a global Anglophone audience by constantly bringing Sufism

xii  Preface and Acknowledgments

and Islamic philosophy into creative dialogue with non-­Islamic (e.g., Western and Indian) philosophies. I have also elucidated theories and concepts familiar to specialists so that the book as a whole will be accessible to non-­specialists. I am indebted to a large number of people who have directly or indirectly contributed to the making of this book, especially to my present and former teachers and mentors, students, and colleagues. I wish to express my heartfelt gratitude to Asad Ahmed, who has mentored me with the utmost care and attention ever since I commenced my graduate years at Berkeley by motivating me to think independently, and by challenging me to step beyond my comfort zones and tolerating my many limitations—­for all of which I am truly grateful. I am also grateful to my professors at Tehran University, where I had the opportunity to study advanced logical, philosophical, and mystical texts in both Arabic and Persian. In Iran, Gholamreza Aavani introduced me to the vast territory of philosophical Sufism and later Islamic philosophy, and I am profoundly grateful to him for his attention and intellectual support. Moreover, I have benefitted greatly from participating in collaborative research with Shahram Pazouki, Hamid Farzanyar, and Saeed Anvari of the Iranian Institute of Philosophy, to all of whom I am very thankful. I must also thank Jonardon Ganeri, Carl Ernst, Peter Adamson, Souleymane Diagne, Jari Kaukua, Sayeh Meisami, Mohammad Azadpur, Sajjad Rizvi, Fabrizio Speziale, Dimitri Gutas, Tony Street, Reza Pourjavady, William Chittick, Jon Hoover, Jamil Ragep, Suheyl Umar, Robert Wisnovsky, Wali Ahmadi, Munis Faruqui, Saba Mahmood, Massimo Mazzotti, and Daniel Boyarin for their insightful comments and feedback concerning aspects of my research. I have presented my work on self and subjectivity at the American Academy of Religion, American Philosophical Association, the Middle East Studies Association, and the American Comparative Literature Association on several occasions. Thanks to all the audiences for their critical comments and helpful feedback. A version of the material in chapter II was presented at a workshop on self and self-­ knowledge at NYU Shanghai, March 2018, and the philosophy department at New York University, April 2019. Material that would morph into chapters I and IV was presented at conferences held at Ludwig-­Maximilians-­ Universität (December 2018) and Birmingham University (April 2019). Many thanks in particular to the participants at these gatherings: Jonardon Ganeri, Curie Virág, Shalini Sinha, Evan Thompson, Amit Chaturvedi, Jake Davis, Shenghai Li, Xu Yi, Adriana Renero, Hagop Sarkissian, Nicolas Silins, Fedor Benevich, Hanif Amin, Abdurrahman Mihirig, Andreas Lammer, Sophia Vasalou, Giovanni Martini, and Richard Todd. In addition to numerous stimulating conversations over the years, Shankar Nair,

Preface and Acknowledgments  xiii

Oludamini Ogunnaike, Ayodeji Ogunnaike, and Davlat Dadikhuda also provided detailed feedback that greatly improved the chapters which make up this book. At Fordham, Patrick Hornbeck has been a very supportive and encouraging department chair. I also owe a special debt to Stephen Grimm, Kathryn Kueny, Philip Walsh, Emanuel Fiano, Bob Davis, Sarit Kattan Gribetz, Bradford Hinze, Patrick Ryan, and several others at Fordham for being such great conversation partners and helpful colleagues. While at Berkeley, my intellectual life could not have been better. To James Porter I owe some of the most fascinating conversations I ever had concerning the self, subjectivity, materialism, and immortality. I would also like to thank both David Presti and Robert Sharf for their numerous conversations with me about the neuroscience of consciousness and Buddhist theories of the self that made me aware of my project’s cross-­cultural significance. Thanks go to Daniel Warren for his courses on Kant and for his valuable suggestions on tackling the Kantian self. I am grateful to Sarah Magrin and Klaus Corcilius for their memorable seminar on Plotinus and for guiding me through Greek notions of the self. At Harvard, I extend my gratitude to Charles Stang, Khaled El-­ Rouayheb, Sean Kelly, and Kimberley Patton for their numerous conversations on self and subjectivity that broadened the horizon of my thinking. I would also like to thank my friends at the Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard with whom I had the opportunity to share my ideas and test their feasibility. A special note of thanks goes to Azra Ghandeharion and Ferdowsi University of Mashhad for kindly inviting me to Mashhad, which allowed me to conduct manuscript research at the famous library of Āstān-­i Quds. Many heartfelt thanks go out as well to my friends, Nicholas, Nicole, Seda, Rachel, Gregory, Rana, Kadir, Siddique, Eahab, Ali, Rizwan, Amin, Munjed, Hassan, Nariman, Latifeh, Chishty, Khalil, Arjun, Nasir, Axel, Yousef, and Justin who have all encouraged me and supported my research over the years. Thanks also to Mohammed Rustom for his constant support and for his help with the title. The completion of this book was made possible thanks to the support of grants from the Ames Foundation, to whom I am very grateful. I would also like to thank my research assistants James Dechant and Noah Hahn for their invaluable help. For their detailed and helpful feedback on a complete draft of the book, particular thanks are due to Cyrus Zargar, and the two anonymous reviewers called upon by the University of Michigan Press (UMP). And, finally, I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to the entire team at UMP, especially to Elizabeth Demers, Haley Winkle, Kellye McBride, and Mary Hashman.

Transliterations

Arabic, Persian, and Urdu words, proper names, and book/article titles have been transliterated in accordance with the system employed by the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies (IJMES) and the Journal of Urdu Studies. The names of authors who write in European languages in addition to Arabic or Persian have not been transliterated. Arabic and Persian words/names that have become part of the English language and are found in general literature have not been transliterated, for example, Qur’an, Rumi, and Hafez.

Introduction

That theories of selfhood and subjectivity are going through a major crisis today and have almost reached a dead end is no exaggeration.1 This is evident in much of the contemporary literature in disciplines as wide-­ranging as neuroscience, analytic philosophy, phenomenology, anthropology, and religious studies; in which one encounters endless debates concerning the self, with thinkers such as William James, Carl Jung, Dan Zahavi, and Galen Strawson affirming the existence of the self in some sense; and those such as David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche, Anthony Kenny, and Daniel Dennett denying it.2 Despite hundreds of studies, philosophers seem to disagree about whether there is such a thing called the self, or whether the idea of the self might help or constrain our ethical and mental life. Some might even argue that “self” is a term of abuse posited through the dominance of the Enlightenment paradigm and the civilizing mission of the West in order to preach to the colonized that their conceptions of “who they are” must be superseded by modernity and secularization. Added to all this is the fact that understanding our “selves”—­our natures, capabilities, and possibilities—­is the most challenging of all questions because, in the final analysis, it cannot be attained through empirical research alone.3 That is, there are no 1.  The historical origin of the word “self” goes back to John Locke’s famous An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which he tries to develop a new philosophy of human nature. For more information, see Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject: Self-­Consciousness and Personal Identity from Descartes to Hume (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 35ff. 2.  This is not to say that some of these thinkers (e.g., Hume and Nietzsche) had no conception of the self whatsoever. 3.  See, e.g., A. A. Long, Greek Models of Mind and Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), “Introduction.”

2  Sculpting the Self

scientific facts which can help us determine decisively whether our selves constitute parts of our bodies, or are incorporeal substances which somehow relate to our bodies, or are epiphenomena of our brains. Given the challenging state of affairs outlined above, there are two possibilities at one’s disposal: either (1) to reject the notion of “self” altogether, or (2) to salvage the notion in such a way that one would be able to resolve all the apparent contradictions concerning it. Now, if we opt for the former, it would be akin to throwing the baby out with the bathwater, since regardless of whether there is a real self or not, there is little doubt that much of our ordinary life hinges upon a presumption of a sense of the self. Moreover, it can be argued that the notion of the self is indispensable as we think of our moral and ethical flourishing. This is because according to virtue ethics, ethical theories respond to the profoundest of human desires, which is the desire for self-­perfection that lies at the core of being a human. Furthermore, many people find their sense of self as the source of all that gives meaning to their life, since it guides them to take stock of their present mode of being and exercise the agency to become something different and better. That is to say, a sense of the self allows individuals to cultivate a specific narrative of what they should become, which is the creation of a new, transformed subjectivity. All this is to say, a rejection of the self in toto will lead to a disorder and disharmony in the ethical life, loss of meaning, and an obfuscation of human potential. Alternatively, if one wants to reinstate meaning to the self, one faces the massive challenge of reconciling all the opposing and often contradictory theories of the self. The burden of the present study is thus to explore and analyze selfhood and subjectivity in order to develop a new, multidimensional model of the self that underscores self-­knowledge, self-­cultivation, and human flourishing. I will also argue that one reason why there is so much scholarly disagreement about the self is that oftentimes scholars tend to focus on a particular dimension of the concept (e.g., physical, psychological, cultural, etc.) to the exclusion of another, even though the self is a multidimensional entity. This can be likened to the famous parable of the “elephant and the blind men” in which each blind man feels a different part of the elephant’s body—­but only one part, such as the side or the tusk—­ after which they describe the elephant based on their partial experience, thus contradicting each other on their descriptions of the elephant.4 There4.  For the “elephant analogy,” see the twelfth century Persian poet Sanāʾī’s Ḥadīqat al-­ḥaqīqa, in John Renard (ed.), Seven Doors to Islam: Spirituality and the Religious Life of Muslims (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 115.

Introduction  3

fore, we must first recognize the inherent multidimensionality of the self if we are to make any viable progress. In the present study, my aim is to show that the proper response to the conflicting notions of the self lies in recognizing that it is a “spectrum” concept (a notion which is elaborated below), having different dimensions, much like the electromagnetic spectrum with different wavelengths of light (radiation). From the spectrum nature of the self, one may deduce two different levels of selfhood and subjectivity, namely “descriptive” and “normative” levels. The descriptive level can be further analyzed in terms of the self’s bio-­physiological, socio-­cultural, and cognito-­experiential dimensions, while the normative level can be analyzed in terms of the ethical and the spiritual.5 Hence the net result is a multidimensional model that seeks to resolve some of the persistent methodological issues pertaining to the self, while at the same time showing how conflicting perspectives may nevertheless be fruitful.6 This may be intuited from the intrinsic normativity of the concept, which leads to endless formulations of “what it means to be a self” or “what kind of self should one become,” irrespective of its descriptive underpinnings that are usually uncovered by science, e.g., the cognitive functions of the sense organs. So, it may not be very far-­fetched to say that when both the descriptive nature and normativity of the self are taken into account, multiple, pluralistic conceptions follow as a natural outcome, enabling us to make sense of the self in contexts as wide as Sufism, neuroscience, phenomenology, and Buddhism. Since a plurality of cultures is a fact of our existence on this planet, such an understanding of the self has the desirable consequence of reinstating meaning, fulfilment, flourishing, and order as far as our ethical life is concerned.7 My goal, in the following chapters, is thus to diagnose the problematic 5.  In general, scientific theories tend to be descriptive, while religious and philosophical accounts of the self often focus on the moral and ethical dimensions of the self. 6.  This is developed systematically in the following chapters. 7.  One might nonetheless argue: what if various normative theories of the self are false? An elaborate response to this would have to wait until the end of the book, but very briefly, one may point out that by definition, “normative” conceptions defy empirical, scientific analysis. This means while it is legitimate to argue against a given normative conception, one must do so through philosophical arguments, unless one embraces an eliminativism or physicalism of some sort that simply equates the mind with the brain (which, however, is a normative argument dressed in scientific garb). In any case, the distinction between the descriptive and the normative is not as watertight as it might appear at first sight. More on this later, especially in chapter 6.

4  Sculpting the Self

of the self and investigate its relation to human flourishing. The rest of the book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 discusses several theoretical challenges besetting the study of the self and lays out a framework for conducting the investigation. I will first argue that given the ambiguity of the term “self,” it is best to characterize it as a spectrum concept that encompasses a multidisciplinary perspective. I will then unpack the distinction between the first-­person and the third-­person perspective, which plays a vital role in my exploration of the self. Finally, weaving together insights from several disciplines such as philosophy, social anthropology, phenomenology, and neuroscience, I will develop a two-­pronged, multidimensional model of the self that comprises the bio-­physiological, socio-­cultural, and cognito-­experiential degrees on the one hand and the ethical and spiritual on the other. Chapter 2 deals with the paradox of self-­knowledge in which the subject-­object relationship, the referentiality of the first-­person pronoun “I,” and the interrelationship of self-­knowledge and first-­person subjectivity are analyzed. By probing different philosophical traditions such as Islamic philosophy, continental philosophy, Sufism, and phenomenology, and engaging with thinkers including, but not limited, to Augustine, Shankara, Avicenna, Suhrawardī, Mullā Ṣadrā, Shāh Walī Allāh, Husserl, Muhammad Iqbal, A. C. Mukerji, Heidegger, Zahavi, and McDowell, I argue that any perceptual acts, e.g., thinking, reflecting, or doubting already presuppose a prior acquaintance of the self with itself, which means that non-­reflective self-­knowledge precedes any form of reflective and conscious act, be it mental or physical. This chapter also discusses Kant’s particular treatment of self-­knowledge, which presents a curious challenge to the theory of “non-­reflective self-­knowledge” I seek to defend. Chapter 3 begins with the “Humean challenge” that the self is but a bundle of perceptions without which it is a non-­entity. I argue that Hume’s account mistakes an objectified image of the self for the self, and hence attributes a bundle theory to it, whereas the bundle of different perceptions holds true only of the objectified self, and not the self itself. After discussing the Humean challenge and the phenomenology of how the “I” as subject is related to the “I” as object, which is crucial to any discussion of self-­knowledge and self-­identity, chapter 4 analyzes arguments for the unity of the self and consciousness. This chapter also develops a model of the onto-­phenomenological structure of consciousness that illuminates the relationship between the self, self-­knowledge, and consciousness by putting Islamic philosophers such as Suhrawardī and Ṣadrā into dialogue with Wittgenstein, Sartre, and Anscombe.

Introduction  5

The second part of the book begins with an investigation of the relationship between the self and the body. By bringing together Islamic philosophy and neuroscience and expounding various neurobiological theories of consciousness, chapter 5 explores how consciousness is related to neural activities, and what exactly is at stake in questions such as, “How does the self relate to the brain?” Moreover, drawing on a panoply of sources ranging over Stoicism, Islamic Neoplatonism, the Graeco-­Islamic-­Indian medical tradition, and Sufism, this chapter shows how the question of embodiment can be analyzed through the subjectivity of the “subtle bodies.” In addition, this chapter uncovers the inter-­constitutionality of emotions and the subtle fields of consciousness known as the laṭāʾif in Sufism. This chapter also criticizes the reductive theories of consciousness that undermine moral agency. In chapter 5, I take up the issues of self-­cultivation and “sculpting the self.” This chapter advances the view that any conception of human flourishing is contingent upon a prior theory of selfhood and self-­ knowledge; hence I begin with a synoptic analysis of the importance of self-­knowledge as a stepping-­stone into the normative aspect of the self. Subsequently, I dwell on the widely held claim that the flourishing and transformation of the self is contingent upon embracing a philosophico-­ spiritual life containing spiritual exercises that are integral to a process of self-­transformation. That is to say, in order to realize the self’s higher dimensions, it has to attain a heightened state of consciousness by systematically pursuing a philosophico-­spiritual life that entails, among other things, detachment from the world, the acquisition of virtues, and meditative practices such as self-­examination. Additionally, this chapter draws attention to Sufi meditative practices and the transformation of consciousness by showing how meditation trains our self, reprogramming it toward subtle forms of awareness that are more mindful. Finally, chapter 6 discusses the merits and demerits of various normative conceptions of the self by drawing attention to some theories that emphasize immanence, individuality, dynamism, activity, life, and self-­ affirmation, and others that accentuate anthropocentrism, wisdom, and self-­transcendence. Contrasting some of these theories with the liberal and the communitarian notions of selfhood, I argue that the self which is perhaps most desirable is neither individualistic nor communitarian, nor should it be called “impersonal,” which would imply that it is completely detached from the world, busy pursuing its self-­enclosed spiritual life on some isolated island. Rather, the self propounded in this study is best characterized as “anthropocentric” and deeply personal, but also one that tran-

6  Sculpting the Self

scends individualism as it strives for oneness with the rest of nature and humanity at large.8 This book aims to make several contributions to both the existing literature on the self (as mentioned above) and to the study of the self in Islamic thought. The book’s primary contribution is perhaps methodological. When I first began my investigation of selfhood in Islam, I was confronted with an insurmountable methodological problem, as there was a bewildering variety of terms and concepts associated with selfhood in Islam, and scholars were not using any coherent framework to discuss the self. So, this book develops a “spectrum theory” of selfhood to resolve the above methodological issue. The spectrum theory of selfhood presented in this study would also be applicable to similar issues in disciplines outside of Islamic studies such as anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, etc. On another level, this study is the first book-­length treatment of the concept of the self in Islamic thought. Aside from a handful of narrowly-­framed articles, there is no in-­depth study devoted to the complexity and multifacetedness of the phenomenon of the self in Islam. The book also shows the fluidity of the Muslim self across time. Additionally, the interdisciplinary approach of this study makes it a significant contribution to the growing field of cross-­cultural dialogue, as it opens up the way for engaging premodern and modern Islamic sources from a contemporary perspective by going beyond the exegesis of historical materials. It thus initiates a critical conversation between new insights into human nature as developed in neuroscience and modern philosophical literature and millennia-­old Islamic perspectives on the self, consciousness, and human flourishing as developed in Islamic philosophical, mystical, and literary traditions.

8.  In the latter sense, it is also “anthropocosmic.”

Part I

C h a pte r 1

The Problematic of the Self Is the Self a Modern Invention? This book is an exercise in cross-­cultural philosophy and philosophy of religion. It reflects that approach by constantly drawing parallels or allowing critical conversations between Islamic and non-­Islamic (also, Western and non-­Western) philosophers. Methodologically, I take my lead regarding such a cross-­cultural approach to philosophy from Jonardon Ganeri, who puts it thus: “A cross-­cultural philosophy claims that it is methodologically essential to consider theories from a plurality of cultural locations if one’s ambition is to discover a fundamental theory true of the human mind as such, for theories of mind developed exclusively within individual scholarly communities will inevitably be prone to narrowness and provincialism, freighted with vested interests.”1 Likewise, regarding the importance of dialogue between modern and premodern philosophers, Strawson states in Selves that philosophers from the past feature constantly in his work because their ideas lie in the vanguard of thought. In his view, philosophers from the past regularly express ideas and formulate inquiries with greater clarity, directness, or insight than their most-­read twentieth and twenty-­first-­century counterparts. Their lack of certain present-­day assumptions shows how problematic some of these contemporary assumptions are. Strawson continues by asserting that philosophers of mind who reckon that recent developments in science have somehow radically changed the map of their discipline provide little concrete evidence for their long-­existing hypotheses.2 1.  Jonardon Ganeri, Attention, Not Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 341. 2.  See Galen Strawson, Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), xvi. 9

10  Sculpting the Self

However, the notion of a cross-­cultural philosophy is not without caveats, especially regarding what many see as the disturbing attitude that merely seeks to make non-­Western philosophy relevant to the analytic grand project of contemporary philosophy. In a recent essay, Amy Olberding has persuasively argued that it is not enough for cross-­cultural philosophers to demonstrate how non-­Western philosophies can benefit and enrich mainstream Western philosophical conversations. Following Eric Schliesser, she calls it a “servile” attitude that often embraces a handmaiden approach to non-­Western philosophy.3 This servile attitude takes shape when members of outlier intellectual territories seek entry points into the mainstream or “core” philosophy by commending the usefulness of their work to those resident and working in the more prominent and prestigious areas.4 However, as Ayon Maharaj has pointed out, Olberding is not claiming that the very project of demonstrating the relevance of non-­Western philosophies to the analytic “grand project” is servile and, therefore, should be rejected altogether. Rather her point is that one risks making non-­Western philosophy servile when one pursues cross-­cultural philosophy in order to show how non-­Western philosophies can benefit mainstream analytic conversations. So, what is desired is the possibility of exploring how non-­Western philosophies introduce myriad new problems, perspectives, and priorities, instead of allowing Western philosophy to dictate the terms and boundaries within which philosophical debates and problems are to be framed.5 In light of the above critique, I embrace a “cultural and epistemic pluralism” as my methodological principle, which I define as follows: Cultural and epistemic pluralism is the recognition that fundamental questions of philosophy have been addressed by major cultures, and that there are multiple valid epistemological frameworks to address the questions of truth, knowledge, and being. Next, we must deal with the charge that premodern cultures lacked a conception of selfhood. Philosophers such as Charles Taylor have claimed that selfhood is a distinct modern phenomenon associated with inward3.  See Amy Olberding, “Reply to Eric Schliesser,” Philosophy East and West 67, no. 4 (2017): 1045. 4.  See Eric Schliesser, “Response to Amy Olberding, ‘Philosophical Exclusion and Conversational Practices,’” Philosophy East and West 67, no. 4 (2017): 1040ff. 5.  Ayon Maharaj, Infinite Paths to Infinite Reality: Sri Ramakrishna and Cross-­ Cultural Philosophy of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 312–­313.

The Problematic of the Self  11

ness, inner depths, and self-­determination.6 Moreover, in this connection, selfhood is defined in terms of agency and self-­empowerment, and is contrasted with passivity that should be abandoned in favor of a sense of assertiveness, volition, and action. For instance, referring to the Islamic tradition, sociologist Farzin Vahdat claims that no conception of the self ever existed in premodern Islamic thought.7 Vahdat writes: [T]he notion of human subjectivity is the pivotal concept in the phenomenon we associate with modern times. . . . It refers to the idea of human empowerment and agency. Modernity begins, from this point of view, when a critical mass of society abandons the life of passivity and acquires a sense of assertiveness, vigor, volition, resolve and action. In a nutshell, modern people are not passive and possess agency and power.8 Vahdat’s verdict is clear: it is only with modern people that we see the appearance of subjectivity, whereas premoderns did not conceive of subjectivity because they were passive and lacked agency. Such an understanding of subjectivity and its ascription to modern society is fairly widespread among many other scholars, so it would be worthwhile to unpack and explain what “agency” means for these scholars and why they believe that premodern societies did not have any notion of subjectivity. 6.  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), passim, but especially, 143–­198. One can trace the source of such a claim to sociologists such as Marcel Mauss, who proposes that our seemingly self-­evident conceptions of selfhood are the result of a series of evolutionary steps in social history stretching back to the earliest human communities. According to Mauss, these other communities held such different notions of the self that they would be virtually unrecognizable when compared with the modern self: “From a simple masquerade to the mask, from a ‘role’ (personnage) to a ‘person’ (personne), to a name, to an individual; from the latter to a being possessing metaphysical and moral value; from a moral consciousness to a sacred being; from the latter to a fundamental form of thought and action—­the course is accomplished.” See Marcel Mauss, “A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self,” 22, trans. by W. D. Halls, in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, ed. by M. Carrithers et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 7.  I prefer the term “nonmodern” to premodern, since the latter can be laden with negative connotations and value judgments. Nonetheless, to avoid unnecessary complications, I decided to stick with the more standard term “premodern.” 8.  Farzin Vahdat, Islamic Ethos and the Specter of Modernity (London: Anthem Press, 2015), x–­xi.

12  Sculpting the Self

In his classic Subjectivity, Donald Hall expounds the notion of agency, which for him entails responsibility in personal action, aesthetic creation, interpersonal norms, and social valuations.9 Hall also concurs with Vahdat that premodern societies did not have a conception of subjectivity because of their conviction of a transcendent paradigm of preordained order that excluded any notion of free agency.10 According to Hall, as modern people, we are widely led to believe “that we have the freedom and ability to create and re-­create our ‘selves’ at will, if we have the will.”11 And in his book The Horizontal Society, legal theorist and social historian Lawrence M. Friedman explains why and how moderns have come to develop such a notion of selfhood. In his view, we live in an age “in which old forms and traditions seem to be breaking down—­forms and traditions that trapped the individual in a cage of ascription; that fixed human beings in definite social roles, pinned them to a given position in the world, no matter how they might wriggle and fight.”12 That is to say, we are witnessing a gradual shift from a “vertical” (hierarchical, inflexible) to a more “horizontal” (negotiable, agency-­driven) mode of defining our relationships to each other, one in which we are responsible for making something out of ourselves. To shed more light on the human condition in medieval times, Gary Day notes that in the Middle Ages society was divided into three principal estates: (1) the clergy, whose function was with prayer and spiritual wellbeing of the masses; (2) the warriors, who defended the land and the people with their arms; and (3) the laborers who supported the other two classes. Moreover, it was believed that these divisions within a society were predetermined and that one’s birth and given social rank determined one’s destiny.13 To be sure, scholars such as Hall do admit that human beings have always pondered the question “Who am I?” and yet the degree to which the pondering “I” is perceived as having any specific role in, or responsibility for, creating its own selfhood, has changed dramatically over time. According to Stephen Greenblatt, although one can find among the philosophical elite of the classical world a few instances of a notion of the self   9.  Donald Hall, Subjectivity (London: Routledge, 2004), 5. 10.  No less a figure than Heidegger also denies that there is any notion of subjectivity before Descartes. For the falsity of such a claim, see Alain de Libera, “When did the Modern Subject Emerge?” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 82, no. 2 (2008): 181–­220, at 181ff. 11.  Hall, Subjectivity, 1. 12.  Lawrence M. Friedman, The Horizontal Society (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), vii–­viii. 13.  Gary Day, Class (London: Routledge, 2001), 19.

The Problematic of the Self  13

that is mediated through “self-­consciousness,” Christianity eclipsed such inquiries by discouraging humans’ power to shape their identity.14 However, even during the classical era, Hall and Greenblatt maintain, we find no real equivalent of the emphasis on self-­creation that arises during the Renaissance and spreads dramatically during later centuries. Basing himself on Charles Taylor’s seminal study on the self in Western civilization, Hall mentions Plato as a notable case in point. According to Hall’s reading of Taylor’s assessment of selfhood in Plato, what makes life a worthwhile pursuit for humans is the understanding that human nature consists of a rational paradigm. Humanity is part of the large cosmic order, in which everything strives to reach its perfection and hence fulfills its nature. As agents, striving for ethical excellence, humans thus participate in the same rational order which they can also contemplate and admire.15 In Hall’s interpretation of the Platonic weltanschauung, we only act ethically when we act in fulfillment of our preordained purpose, which must be in concert with our duty to our society and its subunits.16 Thus, the logical conclusion of Vahdat’s and Hall’s reasoning is that selves in premodern contexts were rather analogous to cars in the assembly line—­wholly passive, having a predetermined prototype which they strive to duplicate. This is because premodern selves did not have a sense of agency and self-­empowerment. And they could not break the norm because that would be seen as threatening the stability of the divine order; hence they had to conform to a preexisting order. Moreover, unlike their modern counterparts, premodern selves did not question their identity and social placement, being docile and submissive to God’s will. Furthermore, they lacked any conception of self-­consciousness or self-­knowledge that would imply agency-­related functions. In contrast, modern notions of selfhood, according to these scholars, are marked by the awareness that the self is not something divinely formed and statically placed; it is rather changeable, constructible, and cultivatable through one’s own creative agency.17 Moreover, modern selves assume agency and responsibility for their own life and ask not only “who they are” but also to what extent they have both the capacity and the ability to 14.  Hall, Subjectivity, 7–­8. 15.  Taylor, Sources of the Self, 115–­125. While Taylor’s reading of Plato is sound, it is incomplete in many ways. A better study of the self in Plato is Lloyd P. Gerson’s Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1–­30. 16.  Hall, Subjectivity, 8. 17.  Hall, Subjectivity, 17.

14  Sculpting the Self

become something different.18 Yet, it must be pointed out that not all modern conceptions of the self rest on a robust sense of agency. In Lacan, for instance, the self is the result of a linguistic system; it occupies the place of a gap in the other.19 Moreover, contemporary social constructionists such as Althusser and Foucault argue that the self is given to us both historically and culturally, and also that it is refashioned through various external factors, with much less scope to exercise agency. Furthermore, postmodern authors such as Deleuze and Guattari explicitly reject self-­sufficient agency that can qualify as intentional. Judith Butler also points out the challenge of theorizing agency when one recognizes the power of interpellation. Thus, it appears that in some modern theories of the self, agency and self-­creation are overrated.20 Regardless, if the above account of premodern society and its lack of subjectivity holds, then much of what I am going to explore and analyze in the following chapters would not bear any substantial import, since some of the philosophers who feature constantly in my argument, such as Mullā Ṣadrā (a seventeenth-­century Persian philosopher) and Shāh Walī Allāh (an eighteenth-­century Indian philosopher), belong to the premodern (or early modern) era.21 However, one ought to ask whether or not the aforementioned view will hold up to critical scrutiny when it comes to Mullā Ṣadrā, Shāh Walī Allāh and others, whose musings on the self I will discuss at length. For instance, in my analysis of Mullā Ṣadrā, we see an articulation of the threefold distinction between non-­reflective, reflective, and intersubjective consciousness. Such an understanding of consciousness evidently entails “reflexivity” in a given theory of the self, which means one cannot be an owner of agentive actions if one does not possess some form of reflexivity which would make one aware that one is indeed the agent of one’s own action. In addition, both Mullā Ṣadrā and Walī Allāh argue that consciousness (in its most primitive form) is the defining feature of human subjectivity, without which it would be impossible to account for any men18.  Hall, Subjectivity, 5. 19.  For a basic of sense of the Lacanian self in his famous “mirror stage” theory, see Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. by Alan Sheridan (London, New York: Norton, 1977), 1–­7. 20.  See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 457–­458; Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 15–­17. 21.  It must be noted, however, that the strict division between “modern” and “premodern” is problematic to say the least. See fn22 and fn24.

The Problematic of the Self  15

tal actions. This is because any phenomenal states or mental events that the self ascribes to itself already presuppose an underlying consciousness. For this reason, Ṣadrā says that even instinctive actions, such as quickly withdrawing from something too hot or too cold, bear witness to an underlying awareness of the self which is identical with one’s “I-­ness.” So, it would be wrong to argue for the existence of the self on the basis of any general actions such as attending, thinking, believing, or even doubting, because these are not self-­subsisting phenomena, and hence presuppose an underlying subject to which they occur. It is hard to see how all of this can be inferred without assuming some form of active agency on one’s part. Similarly, while explaining various functions of the intellect, both Ṣadrā and Walī Allāh point to its features, such as “decision-­making power,” and other cognitive and emotional capacities that are inextricably linked to the notion of agency. In short, there is hardly anything in these thinkers’ conception of selfhood which might lead one to conclude that they downplay agency-­related functions, such as personal action, aesthetic creation, interpersonal norms, or social valuations. Above all, there is no textual ground for saying Ṣadrā et al. constructed a notion of selfhood that asserted or espoused “passivity.” Similarly, the question of whether or not traditional societies were passive should be settled on the basis of empirical evidence. It is instructive to note that in the wake of Peter van der Veer’s works on tradition and modernity in India and China, it would be difficult to accept a view that draws a sharp line between these opposing categories.22 At any rate, in light of what we know of the intellectual history of the Safavid-­ Mughal era (and this is still in the making), it would be a huge understatement to claim that these premodern societies were passive. Since the focus of this study is not selfhood in Medieval Europe, I try to limit myself to Islamic thinkers and their contexts—­although these discussions are interrelated, since many scholars and intellectuals working on modern Islam often succumb to subtle forms of Hegelian Eurocentrism (and the linear progress of history) and end up back-­projecting European history onto other civilizations.23 In fact, recent scholarship has done much to discredit the Whig22.  See Peter van der Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). 23.  On Hegel’s Eurocentrism, see G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree (Kitchener, ON: Batoche, 2001), 156–­193. See also Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon, 1998), 55ff; Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 34ff.

16  Sculpting the Self

gish view of the premodern era in light of new evidence that brings out the complexity of the Middle Ages beyond simplistic conceptions of hierarchical, deterministic, and immobile social orders.24 As for conceptions of selfhood and subjectivity in medieval and ancient times in both East and West, one can mention numerous works by such authors as Anthony Long, Lloyd Gerson, Pauliina Remes, Phillip Cary, Charles Stang, Alain de Libera, Therese Cory, Jonardon Ganeri, Gavin Flood, Jay Garfield, Mark Siderits, and Jari Kaukua (and many others). It is, therefore, somewhat puzzling that some scholars still insist on maintaining Hegelian biases, asserting that premodern authors did not have a notion of subjectivity. But, I must emphasize that the real debate is not whether or not there is a self in premodern times; rather, one should talk about “what kind” of selfhood one finds in premodern times. This is because, similar to the contemporary era, there existed multiple notions of selfhood in premodern times. Moreover, one should also note that the categories of “modern” and “premodern” are much more fluid than they are usually thought and deployed. Coming now to Plato’s emphasis on rationality and conformity to a preexisting order, one must note that this is only half the story as far as his conception of the self is concerned. As Gerson rightly explains, Platonic selfhood is best understood in terms of the distinction between human and person.25 The human being, which is a composite of body and soul, is an embodied endowment, or what is given to us regardless of our efforts; 24.  The German medieval historian Johannes Fried attributes such cultural prejudices to great Enlightenment thinkers such as Immanuel Kant. For more information, see Johannes Fried, The Middle Ages, trans. by Peter Lewis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 505ff. As for the cultural realities of the Islamic Middle Ages, one can point to many studies. See, e.g., Finbarr Flood’s path-­breaking study on dynamic patterns of mutual engagement between Hindus and Muslims across the Indian “contact zone” from as early as the ninth century, engagement that suggests not pre-­formed, monolithic, and impermeable religious or proto-­national identities, but mutually implicated, relational ones. As Flood puts it, his presentation of the material culture stresses “relations” over “essences,” and “routes” over “roots.” One of the chief ways in which his book brings out this relational reading is by stressing that the interactions between “self” and “other” were rarely conducted by agents whose identities were not already fractured along ethnic, regional, and political lines, such that social relations had the effect of reconfiguring selves along new contours, both in relation to self and other. Finbarr B. Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval ‘Hindu-­Muslim’ Encounter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 61–­88, 261–­268. See also Paul Hamilton, Historicism (London: Routledge, 1996), for evidence against a neat and linear historical trajectory of progress and expansion. 25.  Gerson, Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato, 1–­7.

The Problematic of the Self  17

but person, by contrast, is our achievement, the philosophical project of becoming a proper person or a self.26 In Plato’s paradigm, to be human is to recognize that one’s endowed humanity is a composite and an image of the eternal forms, from which two things follow: (1) the practice of isolating the soul from the body and unifying its distinct nature, and (2) the practice of having that isolated and unified soul strive to achieve identity with its ideal or eternal archetype. For Plato, as Gerson puts it: “embodied persons are the only sorts of images that can reflectively recognize their own relatively inferior states as images and strives to transforms themselves into their own ideal.”27 So these accounts evidently involve self-­consciousness, freedom, and self-­creation. In other words, the practice of achieving identity with one’s eternal archetype requires one to ask not just “who one is” in an endowed state, but also to have the capacity and the ability to become something different from one’s inferior states as an image. And this is precisely what Hall considers the hallmark of modern self (according to his criteria): that the self is not statically placed but is rather changeable and cultivatable through one’s own creative agency. However, Hall might still contend that to be a modern self is not just to make use of one’s agency; rather, one also has to be a nonconformist who would dare to break the norms.28 Perhaps a certain understanding of modern subjectivity also includes features such as anguish, absurdity over rationality, the meaninglessness of life, etc. In a word, one thinks of the existentialism of Albert Camus and Sartre as the paradigmatic model of modern subjectivity.29 If one argues along these lines, then one might pos26.  Gerson, Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato, 4–­6. 27.  Gerson, Knowing Persons: A Study in Plato, 4. 28.  Hall points to the case of Joan of Arc: today we love her because she seems so modern, brave, and individualistic, whereas the Inquisition reviled her because she represented a manifestation of aberrant agency outside of tradition. See Hall, Subjectivity, 14. 29.  Consider, for example, the slightly contrasting existentialist “philosophies” of Camus and Sartre. Broadly, for both philosophers, the world does not have any intrinsic meaning and the experience of human consciousness is one of anguish, angst, and alienation vis-­à-­vis nature. Against this backdrop, Camus suggests that there can essentially be three responses: (1) suicide, (2) philosophical suicide (i.e., trying to convince oneself through science, philosophy, or religion that there is “meaning”), and (3) accepting the absurd. Camus’s philosophy of the absurd (l’absurde) thus leaves us with a striking image of the human fate, which is best captured through the myth of Sisyphus. The myth describes how Sisyphus strains to push a huge rock (i.e., life’s absurdity) up the mountain, watches it roll down, then descends after the rock to start all over, in an endless cycle. See Albert Camus,

18  Sculpting the Self

sibly assert that there is no conception of subjectivity in the premodern world, since whatever most premodern philosophers might say about the self, it involves a commitment to a transcendent order, rationality, God, tradition, and so on. However, it is not difficult to see that these are rather metaphysical issues which are not directly relevant in a philosophy of self, at least not in the first-­person accounts of it. As Strawson has shown, the question of the self is primarily phenomenological, and only secondarily metaphysical.30 Indeed, long before Strawson, Ṣadrā, Walī Allāh, and others have argued for the self’s existence on the basis of first-­person experience, as we shall see in the following chapters. It would be hardly plausible to argue otherwise and say that they believed in the self as a hypothetical entity whose existence is postulated in a God-­of-­the-­gaps fashion to account for human experiences that cannot yet be explained in empirically verifiable terms. As Islamic philosophers have argued, any perceptual acts (e.g., reflection) already presuppose a prior acquaintance of the self with itself. This is because the “I” cannot be absent from itself, since its reality is ever-­present to itself through the uninterrupted self-­awareness that is indistinguishable from its “mineness.” In my assessment, phenomenological arguments of these sorts involving self-­consciousness should be construed as the primary criteria for adjudicating a conception of subjectivity because of the irreducibility of first-­person experiences. The distinction between the first-­person versus third-­person perspectives will be analyzed in the following sections. Nonetheless, the weakness of making a third-­ person concept such as “agency” the basis of subjectivity becomes clear when the matter is seen from the vantage point of neuroscience or those philosophers who deny the reality of selfhood altogether. This is because, for these latter groups, the self is nothing more than a “pack of neurons,” a “center of narrative gravity,” or simply a “grammatical error,” i.e., a nonexistent category. In light of these arguments it is not very difficult to see that Muslim philosophers have made original contributions to our understanding of the self by putting the first-­person perspective at the center of their conception of the self. Such first-­person accounts of the self, I will argue, have important implications for the neuroscientific perspective on the self-­brain relationship, or what Buddhist philosopher Alan Wallace calls the “idolization of The Myth of Sisyphus, trans. by Justine O’Brien (New York: Penguin, 1979), 9–­63. Cf. Jean-­Paul Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1996). 30.  See below. This is not to say that the views of Mullā Ṣadrā et al. are fully commensurate with Strawson when it comes to their respective theories of the self, since for Ṣadrā the self is set in a metaphysico-­moral context as well.

The Problematic of the Self  19

the brain.” In his Contemplative Science, Wallace observes that for many neuroscientists, the brain influences the self but not vice-­versa. In his view, fixating one’s attention on the brain in the self-­brain relationship puts it in the role of an idol.31 Yet, this is a common stance embraced by numerous neuroscientists. In chapter 4, I will examine and critique this stance, commonly embraced by neuroscientists such as Daniel Wagner, who writes: “It seems to each of us that we have conscious will. It seems we have selves. It seems we have minds. It seems we are agents. It seems we cause what we do. Although it is sobering and ultimately accurate to call all this an illusion, it is a mistake to conclude that the illusory is trivial.”32 As Wallace notes, the implication of such a viewpoint is that the human self is reduced to the brain, which is regarded as the ultimate source of all happiness and sorrow. In such a scenario, it would be natural to think of psychopharmaceutical drugs as a means of happiness and relief for suffering. The rise of “happiness pills” perhaps attests to the influence of such a perspective. More philosophically, however, such an eliminativist conception of the self might lead to the disappearance of moral responsibility, for as Wallace argues, if we were truly automatons programmed by our brains and genes, we should not be held accountable for our behavior, leading to a dissolution of punishment and reward (see chapter 4).33 Against such reductionism that reduces the self to a set of cognitive functions or identifies it exclusively with various brain-­states, my argument establishes the connection between human ethical agency and moral responsibility that is inextricably related to self-­knowledge and the overcoming of a variety of moral and spiritual obstacles which impede the process of self-­understanding and self-­discovery.34 The Opacity of the Self It must be noted that the word “self” is notoriously opaque and evokes all sorts of connotations in contemporary scholarly discourse. So, we should first get clear on how to use the word “self” in various philosophical con31.  B. Alan Wallace, Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 152. 32.  Daniel M. Wagner, The Illusion of Conscious Will (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018), 324. 33.  Wallace, Contemplative Science, 152. 34.  For instance, one can argue that knowledge of the self consists in improving our cognitive faculties so that we reliably perceive what promotes our self-­ perfection and are able to act in accordance with this perception.

20  Sculpting the Self

texts and what ambiguities to avoid. Important methodological issues arise concerning the term “self,” whose use is riddled with terminological confusion both in English and in the source-­text languages, such as Arabic and Persian. For this reason, it would be helpful to look at how various self theorists have used the term. The following is a selection drawn from a wide range of sources. For instance, according to William James, “the ‘Self’  .  .  .  , when carefully examined, is found to consist mainly of the collection of these peculiar motions in the head or between the head and throat.”35 Carl Jung defines the self “as a sort of compensation in reference to the contrast between inward and outward. . . . Such a definition could well be applied to the self in so far as the latter possesses the character of a result, of an aim to reach, of a thing that has only been produced little by little and of which the experience has cost much travail.” Thus, in Jung’s estimation, “the self is also the aim of life, for it is the most complete expression of that combination of destiny we call an ‘individual’, and not only of man in the singular but also of a whole group, where the one is the complement of the others with a view to a perfect image.”36 From an altogether different perspective, Miri Albahari, an analytic philosopher of Buddhism, defines the self “as a bounded, happiness-­seeking/dukkhā-­avoiding (witnessing) subject that is a personal owner and controlling agent, and which is unified and unconstructed, with unbroken and invariable presence from one moment to the next, as well as with longer-­term endurance and invariability.”37 Drawing on Greek sources, Christopher Gill notes a structural pattern in the definition of the self, and calls it the “structured self,” which “sees human beings, like other animals, as structured wholes or units rather than as a combination of a psychic ‘core’ and a body or as a complex of distinct psychic parts.”38 E. J. Lowe, a Neo-­Aristotelian, analytic philosopher, describes the self as “a possible object of first-­person reference (assuming for the moment that there are such objects): a being that can identify 35.  William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Cosimo, 2007 [1890]), I:301. 36.  Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (New York: Meridian Books, 1969), 240. 37.  Miri Albahari, Analytic Buddhism: The Two-­Tiered Illusion of Self (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 73. 38.  Christopher Gill, The Structured Self in Hellenistic and Roman Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), xv. According to Gill, the Stoic and Epicurean self is also associated with a moral structure based on the Socratic ideal of wisdom.

The Problematic of the Self  21

itself as the necessarily unique subject of certain thoughts and experiences and as the necessarily unique agent of certain actions.”39 For Ganeri, a scholar of Indian philosophy, “the self is a unity of immersion, participation, and coordination; the first-­person stance is at once lived, engaged, and underwritten.”40 Strawson talks about the sense of the self that people have of themselves “as being, specifically, a mental presence; a mental someone; a single mental thing that is a conscious subject, that has a certain character or personality, and that is distinct from all its particular experiences, thoughts, hopes, wishes, feelings, and so on.”41 The phenomenologist Zahavi puts “experience” at the center of the self and defines the experience of the self as being whatever it is like for someone to have this experience. In Zahavi’s view, although we live through various different experiences, there is consequently something experiential that remains the same, namely their first-­personal character. Consequently, he says that “all the different experiences are characterized by a dimension of mineness, or for-­me-­ness, and we should distinguish the plurality of changing experiences from their persisting dative of manifestation.”42 From the above, one can hardly find any recognizable pattern in what these authors describe as the nature of the self. To make matters worse, in addition to such eclectic ways of defining the self, there are also those who refuse to admit any reality to the self. Foremost among these thinkers are Hume, Nietzsche, and a number of analytic philosophers. The following, then, enumerates those views that deny that there is such a thing as the self.43 In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume claims that the self 39.  E. J. Lowe, “Substance and Selfhood,” Philosophy 66, no. 255 (1991): 81–­99, at 82. 40.  Jonardon Ganeri, The Self: Naturalism, Consciousness, and The First-­ Person Stance (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2012), 332. Ganeri develops his model on the basis of insights found in Indian (notably Cārvāka) and Western philosophies (Analytic). 41.  Galen Strawson, “The Self,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 4, no. 5/6 (1997): 405–­428, at 4. He also refers to the self as SESMET or “Subject of Experience that are Single Mental Things”, see Strawson, “The Self and the SESMET,” Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6, no. 4 (1999): 99–­135, at 118. 42.  Dan Zahavi, Self and Other: Exploring Subjectivity, Empathy, and Shame (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 19. 43.  For more on the analytic denial of the self, see Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); and Thomas Metzinger, Being No One (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). Drawing on various psychiatric and neuroscientific evidence, Metzinger asserts that there is no immutable, unchanging soul-­ substance, although most people might have an experience of being a self in their

22  Sculpting the Self

“as far as we can conceive it, is nothing but a system or train of different perceptions.”44 Nietzsche is more vocal in his denial of the self when he argues that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, and becoming.” In his measure, “the doer is merely a fiction added to the deed—­the deed is everything.” This is because “it posits the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect.” Nietzsche goes further and claims that scientists do no better when they say “force moves  .  .  . force causes,” and the like, since “our entire science still lies under the misleading influence of language and has not disposed of that little changeling, the ‘subject.’”45 Some analytically-trained philosophers also express radical denial of the self. According to Kenny, “the self . . . is a mythical entity,” and “a philosophical muddle to allow the space which differentiates ‘my self’ from ‘myself’ to generate the illusion of a mysterious entity distinct everyday life. Rather, the self is an illusion created by a multitude of interrelated cognitive modules in the brain. See Metzinger, Being No One, 370, 385, 390. See also Metzinger’s deconstruction of the soul in “The Pre-­Scientific Concept of a ‘Soul:’ A Neurophenomenological Hypothesis About its Origin,” in Auf der Suche nach dem Konzept / Substrat der Seele. Ein Versuch aus der Perspektiv der Cognitive (Neuro-­) Science, ed. by M. Peschl (Würzburg: Königshaursen und Neumann, 2003), 185–­211. It is interesting to note that such a denial of the self, based on hard scientific facts, seems to have emerged from one’s faith that “empirical observation” should be enough to settle all philosophical issues. Consider this excerpt from a revealing editorial by Thomas Wakley, former editor of The Lancet (printed on March 25, 1843): “From the fact that the philosophy of the human mind has been almost wholly uncultivated by those who are best fitted for its pursuit, the study has received a wrong direction, and become a subtle exercise for lawyers and casuists, and abstract reasoners, rather than a useful field of scientific observation. Accordingly, we find the views, even of the most able and clear-­headed metaphysicians, coming into frequent collision with the known facts of physiology and pathology”; quoted in Ian Hacking, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personality and the Sciences of Memory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 221. 44.  David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. by David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), 657 and Abstract §38. It is somewhat unclear, in light of Hume’s later musings on the self in the Appendix to the Treatise, if he really wanted to deny any reality to the self. For more on this, see Alan Schwerin, Hume’s Labyrinth: A Search for the Self (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 29–­96. 45.  Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), I.13: 4. For a recent appraisal of the concept of the self in Nietzsche, see Paul Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self: Moral Psychology, Agency, and the Unconscious (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 164ff.

The Problematic of the Self  23

Fig. 1. Theories of Selfhood

from . . . the human being.”46 Finally, Dennett explains that “a self . . . is not any old mathematical point, but an abstraction defined by the myriads of attributions and interpretations (including self-­attributions and self-­interpretations) that have composed the biography of the living body whose Center of Narrative Gravity it is.”47 The figure above summarizes the various accounts that are prevalent in contemporary discourse on the self.48 Given the conflicting nature of the aforementioned views, one might ponder if the self was a philosophical problem for the Muslim philosophers as well, or if this is distinctly a Western problem for Anglophone 46.  Anthony Kenny, The Self (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1988), 3–­4. 47.  Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained (Boston, MA: Little, Brown 1991), 426–­427. 48.  Admittedly, the picture of “no-­self” theories is more complicated than presented here, since the Buddhists, as argued earlier, do not deny some form of “transcendence” when it comes to the highest level of spiritual realization. See also John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 87–­105, for a complex, analytic theory of the self that does not necessarily deny the self as such.

24  Sculpting the Self

thinkers first and foremost, who are constrained by the factors that led to a complicated development of philosophy of the self since the seventeenth century.49 One way to approach the issue would be to find certain common connotations of the various expressions of the self in Arabic and Persian in order to show that they all in fact belong to the same spectrum concept,50 which will yield what the self might be for these Arabic and Persian texts. Let’s suppose that we try to find the common connotations of terms such as nafs (self/soul), rūḥ (self/spirit), nafs nāṭiqa (rational self), anāniyya (selfhood), khūd (self), dhāt (self), etc. in our texts. This will lead to one of the two possibilities: (a) we fail to find any such connotations; or, (b) we succeed in discovering common connotations X, Y, and Z. If (a) then there is no common notion of self in these texts; but even if (b) we might worry that we cannot be sure if it will lead us to a notion of self in the texts. How can I ascertain that these X, Y, Z connotations do in fact correspond to a notion of self, when any such exercise already presupposes that I know what a self should look like, if there is one? In other words, would not my claim that these connotations refer to some notion of the self already imply that I know what a self is, or what it is supposed to be like, because my understanding of the word “self” might have been shaped (for instance) by my linguistic grounding in English or my familiarity with the literature on the self? Would not any attempt to establish a claim that says that “such and such is the notion of the self” in Arabic texts be at best arbitrary (i.e., it may be right, wrong, or simply coincidental)? The situation is exacerbated by the fact that most, if not all, of the early texts are fragmentary, elusive, and unsystematic when it comes to their discussion on nafs, rūḥ, etc. So, we need to develop a strategy that would involve minimal assumptions. In light of the above situation and the inevitability of operating with a prior notion of the self, let us adopt a new strategy and assume that we know nothing about the controversies regarding the self in English or in 49.  A number of excellent surveys exist that investigate the seventeenth-­century background (notably, taking into account the rise of modern science and its effect on the way philosophers were reformulating traditional concepts of the self) to various modern conceptions of the self. See, e.g., Udo Thiel, The Early Modern Subject (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 35ff; Raymond Martin and John Barresi, The Rise and Fall of Soul and Self: An Intellectual History of Personal Identity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 123ff; and Jerold Seigel, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 87ff. 50.  On the notion of “spectrum,” see the section “Degrees and Dimensions of Selfhood.”

The Problematic of the Self  25

any other languages. All I know is the word “self,” simpliciter. Moreover, I also know the basic lexical meanings of the English word “self” in Arabic, Persian, and Urdu. That is, I only know that the words in Arabic and Persian are nafs, dhāt, khūd, khwīshtan, etc., and nothing about their philosophical or theological undertone. And I also know that sometimes these words are used simply in the reflexive sense, e.g., “Zayd himself.” Now I am ready to begin my investigation, and luckily, someone has just informed me about the problems with early kalām (Islamic theology) and Sufi texts and has pointed out that Mullā Ṣadrā is someone who has voluminous writings on these terms. So, I proceed to analyze all the relevant texts in Ṣadrā in the hope of producing a theory out of all these terms (but I still do not know if there would be anything like a theory of the self in the end). When I am done with my analysis, one of the following results would hold:

1. All the thousands of instances in which Ṣadrā employs these words show that they have no philosophical import beyond their ordinary meaning, reflexive or otherwise.

Hence either there is no theory of self in Ṣadrā, or

2. All the thousands of instances in which Ṣadrā uses these words show that such words as nafs or dhāt produce clear statements such as “the nafs is an immaterial entity,” “the nafs is the first actuality of an organic natural body,” “the nafs is a sacred substance (jawhar qudsī),” “the nafs is other than the body,” “the nafs is all of the faculties,” “the nafs undergoes substantial motion,” “the nafs has many dimensions and states,” “the nafs is capable of self-­knowledge through self-­consciousness,” “the nafs is always present to itself,” and so on. Moreover, such statements are not disparate, rather they are systematically related to various arguments in relevant contexts and they occur throughout his forty to forty-­five works innumerable times. Furthermore, there are several compound words such as maʿrifat al-­ nafs (self-­knowledge) or shuʿūr bi-­l-­dhāt (self-­consciousness) that also suggest technical usage.

If my analysis yields such an outcome then I believe it would be sufficient to show that Ṣadrā, or any Muslim philosopher for that matter, has a theory of the nafs (self).51 However, someone can still object and say 51.  The lexical meanings of nafs in Arabic include soul, self, spirit, mind, desire, and appetite, among others. However, it also denotes reflexivity, as in nafsī (myself)

26  Sculpting the Self

that whatever I said above rather corresponds to what we call “soul” in English, and not “self.” She would indeed be right if, by using the term “soul,” we are able to refer to all such philosophical statements. However, as will be shown, the word “soul” is ill-­equipped to meaningfully refer to some of these statements, especially the ones involving a first-­personal phenomenological stance. One may still artificially stretch the extension of the word “soul” to include everything under the nafs, but why do so when there is a candidate that can serve us better—­that is, self—­and when that sort of stretching might lead to a private language fallacy? Indeed, textual evidence from the Islamic intellectual tradition shows that very early on Muslim thinkers took stock of the opacity of the term nafs.52 Avicenna clarifies how the word nafs might refer to both “soul” and “self” in his De Anima of al-­Shifāʾ and also in other treatises.53 For example, in his Aḥwāl al-­nafs, Avicenna explains that the term nafs is the very thing that each one of us would refer to as “I.”54 He further elucidates his point by suggesting that the “I” refers to one’s essence while one’s bodily organs are denoted by “it” which are distinct and separate from what is “I.”55 and bi-­nafsihi (by himself). What is important to note, however, is that in mystical and philosophical texts (unless it is used as a compound word) the word normally connotes either self or soul. The issue of whether self and soul denote the same reality has been debated a great deal by scholars. For instance, Richard Sorabji has affirmed that there is already a concept of self (autos) alongside soul (German, psuche; Latin, anima) in ancient and medieval philosophy. See Richard Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights about Individuality, Life, and Death (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 17ff. This does not, however, mean ancient philosophers do not use the term psyche to talk about self. Also, despite nafs being the key Arabic word for self, there is more than one term that renders the self in Islamic discourse, such as wajh and dhāt. There are also terms denoting selfhood or subjectivity, such as huwiyya (identity), anāʾiyya or anāniyya (I-­ness, selfhood, or I-­subjectivity), and nafsanī (mind-­related). Broadly speaking, these terms refer to the relationship between consciousness (or the human self), God, and the cosmos. 52.  However, this is not to suggest that Muslim thinkers reached the same conclusions as their Western counterparts. 53.  See for instance, Avicenna, Avicenna’s De anima (Arabic Text). Being the Psychological Part of Kitāb al-­shifāʾ, ed. by Fazlur Rahman (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 4–­6. 54.  Avicenna, Aḥwāl al-­nafs: risālah fī al-­nafs wa-­baqāʼihā wa-­maʻādihā, ed. by Aḥmad Fuʼād al-­Ahwānī (Cairo: Dār Iḥyāʼ al-­Kutub al-­ʿArabīyah, 1952), 183. 55.  Avicenna, al-­Nukāt wa-­l-­fawāʾid, ed. by J. Kenny, Orita 29 (1997): 68–­98, at 73–­76. Concerning the Nukāt’s attributability to Avicenna, see Yahya M. Michot, “Al-­Nukāt wa-­l-­fawāʾid: An Important Summa of Avicennian Falsafa,” in Classi-

The Problematic of the Self  27

Degrees and Dimensions of Selfhood Given the opacity, diversity, and polyphonic use of the term “self,” it seems to me that it (and concepts like it) can be best understood as what I would call a “spectrum” concept—­one that encompasses a multidisciplinary perspective, forming a wide range of often non-­overlapping spectrums. Let us first see how the self can be understood as a spectrum concept. Examples of spectrum concepts include but are not limited to self, time, space, imagination, science, and consciousness. To elaborate: just as there is a “continuous spectrum” when white light is passed through a prism and a “discontinuous spectrum” (often called the line spectrum) when it is passed through gases due to some absorption, there are concepts, such as space, self, and imagination, which show a wide range of meanings that are related to each other as in a continuous spectrum, while also being completely unrelated at other times as in a discontinuous spectrum. Take for instance the concepts of “space” and “imagination” respectively. On the one hand, there are well-­known theories of space in physics and philosophy that are different in their meaning but still form a continuous spectrum. Thus Aristotle’s definition of space (i.e., place) as “the innermost motionless boundary of what contains it”56 can be discussed alongside other theories (in the sense of continuity) such as (1) space is only a determination or a relation of things, yet would exist even if it were not intuited (Leibniz’s relational view); (2) space as universal container of all material objects (Newton’s absolutist view); (3) space and time belong only to the form of intuition, and therefore to the subjective constitution of our mind, apart from which they could not be ascribed to anything whatsoever (Kant’s “idealist” view); and, (4) space and time are intertwined and have both absolute and relational “structures,” as in special and general relativity.57 On the other hand, social scientists talk about “social space” and cal Arabic Philosophy: Sources and Reception, ed. by Peter Adamson (London: The Warburg Institute, 2007). 56.  Aristotle, Physics IV, 212a20–­212a21. 57.  For Minkowski, spacetime is “absolute” in a certain sense. For Minkowski’s own interpretation of this, see Hermann Minkowski, “Raum und Zeit,” Physikalische Zeitschrift 10 (1909): 104–­111. The nature of space and time as a philosophical problem is yet to be settled, despite the success of Einstein’s theory of general relativity. For a wide-­ranging critique of space in both modern and ancient physics, see Max Jammer’s classic, Concepts of Space: The History of Theories of Space in Physics, forwarded by Albert Einstein (New York: Dover, 1993). It is to be noted that both Indian and Islamic theories of space can also be added to the “continuous

28  Sculpting the Self

mystics often bring up the idea of “inner space,” neither of which bear any direct relation to the theories of space mentioned earlier. In this way, we have a discontinuous spectrum, even though the grammatical and linguistic points of reference remain the same. The same argument can be applied to the concept of “imagination,” which ranges from meaning “the ability to think of something that is not presently perceived, but is, was, or will be spatio-­temporally real,” “the non-­rational operations of the mind” to “the ability to create works of art,” and “the entirety of phenomenal existence” (Ibn ʿArabī’s mystical view), among a dozen others.58 Moreover, aesthetes talk about “aesthetic imagination” while religious thinkers often broach the phrase “religious imagination,” all of which points to the spectrum nature of these concepts. As will be seen throughout this study, thinking of the self as a spectrum concept will be useful when it comes to delineating its multifaceted nature. First-­Person vs. Third-­Person Perspective Strawson has argued that if one wants to understand the condition of being a self, one should look at the experience that appears from the viewpoint of an individual “I” (i.e., the first-­person perspective), since self-­experience provides us with a vivid sense that there is something it is like to be a self. Strawson further argues that if there is such a thing as a self, then it must have properties which feature in any genuine form of self-­experience or first-­personal stance. That is to say, nothing can fail to seem a self if it possesses such properties.59 Otherwise it leads to the following contradictions: (1) that there are entities which have the properties attributed in spectrum” I cited above. 58.  Some of these notions of the imagination are drawn from Leslie Stevenson, “Twelve Conceptions of Imagination,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 43, no. 3 (2003): 238–­259. See also E. T. H. Brann, The World of the Imagination: Sum and Substance (Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1991). 59.  Galen Strawson, “The Phenomenology and Ontology of the Self,” in Exploring the Self, ed. by Dan Zahavi (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000), 40; and Selves, 56–­57. Similarly, Ganeri sets forth two conditions of being a self, although from a slightly different angle: “A theory of self must do two things. It must tell us what kind of thing a self is: an immaterial substance; a suitably interconnected series of conscious experiences; the categorical basis of such a series; or something else. But a theory of self must also give us materials to answer, within the specified kind, the question: ‘Which one is me?’ This question is often overlooked, but to neglect it is to court solipsism.” See Jonardon Ganeri, The Self: Naturalism, 6.

The Problematic of the Self  29

self-­experience, but nonetheless it doesn’t follow that selves exist; and (2) that even though there might be selves, we have no understanding of their fundamental nature. These arguments pose serious challenges to the purely empirical approaches to the self that are prevalent in the neuroscience of the self and that seek to probe it in terms of brain-­states or neuronal events. For instance, neuroscience asks us to see the self as a system of neuroelectric impulses, while ironically, we are asked to accept such a view as reasoning, evaluating, and reflective beings! Before I present arguments as to why such approaches are bound to be problematic, it will be apposite to explain the first-­person versus the third-­person perspective with the help of the following thought experiment. Imagine lifting your right hand and pinching gently the skin on your left forearm. What happens when you do so? First, as neuroscientists tell us, the pressure of your thumb and forefinger sets up a sequence of neuron firings at the sensory receptors in your skin, and from there nerve impulses travel to the spinal cord through sensory neurons. In the spinal cord, the sensory neurons synapse with relay neurons that carry these impulses to the sensory cortex area of the cerebrum in your brain. Second, a few hundred milliseconds after you pinch your skin, something else occurs, something you know without any neuroscientific details. You feel pain. Nothing significant, but just a mild, unpleasant sensation in the skin of your forearm. Still, this unpleasant sensation has a certain subjective feel to it, a feel which is only accessible to you, since only “you” can describe what it is like to feel that particular pain. This experiment demonstrates that mental phenomena such as pain and pleasure can be analyzed both from the first-­person and the third-­person standpoints. From the third-­person or the scientific viewpoint, we can analyze a given mental event and observe the corresponding brain-­state, e.g., a neuron firing at the time and its causal effect on other parts of the brain, and the behavior to which it gives rise. Later the scientist can provide the world with all the scientific details and results.60 Yet scientific observation, which inevitably takes place from the 60.  See, e.g., David Chalmers, “How Can We Construct a Science of Consciousness?” in Michael Gazzaniga, ed., The Cognitive Neurosciences III (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 1111–­1120, at 1111ff. Cf. also Thomas Nagel’s “objective” versus “subjective” self in The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 67ff. It is to be noted that philosophers such as Daniel Dennett challenge such first-­person accounts of the self. See Daniel Dennett, The Fantasy of First-­Person Science, available at: https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/ chalmersdeb3dft.htm. For a counter response to Dennett, see Dan Zahavi, “Killing the Straw Man: Dennett and Phenomenology,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive

30  Sculpting the Self

third-­person view and which may exhaust all the physical descriptions of the phenomenon under scrutiny, still leaves out the question, “what-­it-­ is-­like-­to-­experience” or “what-­it-­is-­like-­to-­feel” such and such a mental state, i.e., pain. In other words, the subjective feel of pain, or any mental states for that matter, can only be “experienced” from the first-­person stance, or what we might call the “domain of the ‘I.’” Notice, however, that a physical system (e.g., the brain, no matter how complex it is) is, after all, a physical system, which, like all other such systems, is constituted at bottom by atomic and subatomic particles which obey the laws of physics. So even though its behavior could be analyzable and predictable, it cannot encompass the first-­person stance by the very definition of subjectivity that restricts the “I” to its individual possessor.61 The analysis above calls into question the scientific method that does not take into account first-­person subjectivity while investigating the self. This is because there is no way one can step outside one’s subjectivity and see how it fits into the rest of reality. To wit, one cannot occupy a standpoint from which one can regard all of one’s thoughts and experiences as psychophysical manifestations and neurochemical impulses. This is important to note, since one of the crucial features of science has been to objectify the natural world, including its human subjects, so that scientific knowledge will remain uncontaminated by “subjective” considerations. Thus, it is no surprise that scientific knowledge is often equated with objective knowledge. The principle of objectivism demands that science deals with empirical phenomena testable by empirical methods and verifiable by third-­person means.62 It must be noted that this principle has proven to be very resourceful in revealing a wide range of phenomena that are equally accessible (at least in principle) to every science researcher. However, there are many other empirical phenomena, such as our own subjective mental states, that are accessible only by first-­personal means. Put another way, in terms of science, we frame ourScience 6, no. 1/2 (2017): 21–­43, and Daniel Hutto, “Consciousness Demystified: A Wittgensteinian Critique of Dennett’s Project,” Monist 78, no. 4 (1995): 464–­479. 61.  Some psychologists dismiss first-­personal accounts of self-­knowledge by referring to children who consistently report wrongly about some of their own immediately past psychological states. But this conclusion follows from the failure to distinguish “reflective” from “non-­reflective” self-­knowledge which is discussed at length in chapter 2. See Alison Gopnik, “How We Know Our Minds: The Illusion of First-­Person Knowledge of Intentionality,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (1993): 1–­14. 62.  Alan Wallace, The Taboo of Subjectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 20–­30.

The Problematic of the Self  31

selves within a world of forces, mechanisms, processes, and functions; while in terms of a subjective standpoint, we locate ourselves within a world of purposes, intentions, and moral norms. So, a dogmatic insistence on objectivism which asserts that scientific knowledge must be free of any subjective, non-­scientific influences, would fail to accommodate the investigation of subjective phenomena, for it directs one’s mind only to those objects that exist independently of one’s own subjective awareness.63 It is no wonder then that neuroscience presents us with a one-­sided picture of the self which, although valuable as regards the self’s bio-­physiological dimension, is utterly unsuccessful when it comes to dealing with first-­person subjectivity and “intentionality” (aboutness of the mind), which are fundamentally irreducible.64 That is to say, regardless of whether I am a physical system, I am also an intentional agent whose subjective considerations take the forms of semiotic (symbolic, interpretive, and meaningful) determinations, and whose actions are usually the results of intentions that are irreducibly purpose-­oriented.65 Thus, any good phenomenological description of my current subjective state would be one that could never be reduced to a physical description of atomic, molecular, or even brain events. The upshot of all these arguments is to bring to light the fact that scientific method cannot give us access to subjectivity independent of itself. When we use a scientific method to investigate subjectivity, we are always necessarily objectifying it using and relying on our subjectivity. As Evan Thompson argues correctly, perceptual observation, which is necessarily first-­personal, and the intersubjective confirmation of perceptual experience, which necessarily presupposes the recognition of others as having the same kinds of experiences as oneself, are the bedrock of the scientific method, which means it can never transcend subjective experience, even though it can enlarge this field and open up new vistas.66 63.  Wallace, The Taboo of Subjectivity, 22. 64.  Both first-­person subjectivity and intentionality are treated in detail in chapters 1–­4. 65.  See, e.g., Raymond Tallis, Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity (Durham: Acumen Publishing, 2011), 106ff; Maxwell Bennett, Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3–­72. For a detailed critique of the neuroscientific conceptions of the self and consciousness, see chapter 4. 66.  Evan Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being: Self and Consciousness in Neuroscience, Meditation, and Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 99–­100.

32  Sculpting the Self

It must be added, however, that there is nothing in science or scientific method67 itself that prevents it from incorporating the first-­person perspective, which one can already see in the works of Francisco Varela and Thompson, even though it remains a minority position.68 Also, according to many critics, science is to be distinguished from scientism, which these critics see as a metaphysical commitment that embraces the radical dualism between the subjective and the objective, seeking altogether to eliminate the former.69 Commenting on “the implausibility of the reductive program,” which is a key assumption of scientism, philosopher Thomas Nagel notes that if we want to understand the world as a whole, we must start with an adequate range of data, and those data must include the evident facts about our own subjectivity.70 That science itself is an open-­ended avenue, not requiring one to commit to metaphysical doctrines such as that of physicalism or that of causal closure (i.e., the doctrine that physical events in nature must be explained by other physical events), is not widely shared, although there are notable exceptions. For example, the mathematician-­physicist Hermann Weyl writes: “Modern science, insofar as I am familiar with it through my own scientific work, mathematics and physics make the world appear more and more as an open one, as a world not closed but pointing beyond itself. . . . Science finds itself compelled, at once by the epistemological, the physical and the constructive-­mathematical aspect of its own methods and results, to 67.  Although science can be understood and defined in a variety of ways, generally speaking, it is a mode of inquiry that entails, inter alia, rigorous observation, hypothesis formation, experimentation, and logical analysis. Its theories make predictions that can be tested or verified empirically, predictions which may turn out to be either true or false. It is important to note that the different stages of the scientific method (e.g., formulating hypotheses or analyzing data) will not be possible or even intelligible as a human activity without presupposing consciousness and subjectivity. For some classic readings on the nature of science and the scientific method, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 10ff; Paul Feyerabend, Against Method (London and New York: Verso, 1993), 9–­20, 51–­80; Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 17–­54, 191–­250. 68.  See, e.g., Francisco Varela and Jonathan Shear, “First-­Person Methodologies: What, Why, How?” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6, no. 2–­3 (1999): 1–­14. 69.  For a detailed treatment of “scientism,” see Richard N. Williams and Daniel N. Robinson, Scientism: The New Orthodoxy (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1–­20. 70.  Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-­Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 20.

The Problematic of the Self  33

recognize this situation. It remains to be added that science can do no more than show us this open horizon [sic].”71 Descriptive vs. Normative Approaches The aforementioned critique allows us to recognize the limits of the scientific or the third-­person objectivist approach to the self. But, as we shall soon see, scientific findings concerning the self’s bio-­physiological dimension can nevertheless be incorporated into the descriptive dimensions of the self. As mentioned earlier, two distinct but interrelated levels, namely descriptive and normative, can be discerned from the spectrum nature of the self. In what follows, I will first examine the descriptive level in terms of its bio-­physiological, socio-­cultural, and cognito-­experiential degrees, before turning to the normative level, which can be further elaborated in terms of its ethical and spiritual aspects. In the theory laid out in this book, the “bio-­physiological self” refers to that dimension or mode of the self, wherein its nature is explained by way of bodily structures and their functions and the role they play in self-­ constitution, e.g., the fact that the self has various cognitive capacities such as the senses through which it can relate to the external world. The bio-­ physiological self includes the entire body as well as the brain,72 and all the major organ systems in the human body, including the circulatory, respiratory, digestive, excretory, reproductive, nervous, immune, and endocrine systems. This is because the self is a psycho-­physical entity whose mental processes have a bodily basis. It is to be noted that the different dimensions of the self are not superimposed on each other. Rather, as a spectrum entity, the self is the totality of its various interconstituting aspects. This interconstitutionality or interpenetration is also true of the various aspects of a particular dimension. For instance, when the level of one’s blood sugar drops and neurons in one’s hypothalamus detect the decrease, several organ systems in the body interact to respond to the situation. Together with the hypothalamus, the neural circuits act to select a response consisting of instituting a hunger state which will eventually drive the self to eat. However, and crucially for our purposes, it is important to note that 71.  Hermann Weyl, Mind and Nature: Selected Writings on Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 34. 72.  Although the brain is a part of the body, its central role in perception and cognition is underscored by a separate mention.

34  Sculpting the Self

the process does not involve any overt knowledge or explicit display of options and consequences or conscious mechanism of inference until one becomes aware of being hungry.73 This shows that the bio-­physiological self is distinct but not separate or isolated from the other dimensions of the self (e.g., the cognito-­experiential self) that involve self-­consciousness and intentionality. To further illustrate the point, let us consider immunology (the science that studies an organism’s defense against any foreign entity capable of invading it) in which scientists, following the virologist Frank Burnet, have been using the terms “self” and “non-­self” since the 1950s.74 Broadly speaking, immunological theories state that an organism is capable of an immunological recognition of self and non-­self, which allows it to trigger a defensive response against all foreign or non-­self entities, i.e., pathogens (bacteria, viruses, fungi, etc.) as well as grafts. So, whenever there is a threat, the organism is able to distinguish between its own components and any foreign one, thereby eliminating any non-­self entities that would penetrate it.75 The abovementioned cases demonstrate the pertinence of the bio-­physiological self, even though matters become problematic if one loses sight of the self’s multidimensionality and begins to limit selfhood within the confines of neurobiological processes only. As a case in point, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio claims that the self is a “perpetually re-­created neurobiological state.”76 This is because, in Damasio’s view, in order to have an experience of the self, numerous brain systems must interact and coordinate, as must numerous organ systems. Thus it is that in their desire to give a full account of the human being through neurobiological 73.  Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994), 166. 74.  Thomas Pradeu, The Limits of the Self: Immunology and Biological Identity, trans. by Elizabeth Vitanza (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 4. See also Frank M. Burnet and Frank Fenner, The Production of Antibodies (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1949), 50ff; and Jean Hamburger, Discovering the Individual (New York: Norton, 1978), 25–­40. 75.  Pradeu, The Limits of the Self, 4–­6. Pradeu rejects the distinction between self and non-­self because an organism is a jumble of various particles for which the self/non-­self distinction does not always seem to work. But one can admit that biological or neural processes determine various activities of the self at the bio-­physiological level, without themselves involving self-­consciousness. One could also mention other phenomena which demonstrate the validity of the bio-­ physiological self, such as “proprioception” and “asomatognosia” (a neurological disorder characterized by a loss of recognition of part of the body). 76.  Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 100.

The Problematic of the Self  35

explanations alone, many biologists and neuroscientists are led to ignore the complexity of the perceptual processes that characterize first-­person subjectivity. I will come back to this issue in chapter 4, where I argue against the view that takes consciousness to be a function of the brain. But for our present purposes, the point is simply that there is a physiological basis to selfhood, which forms a part of its reality. Next, the “socio-­cultural self” is defined in reference to a particular cultural group and its sense of what it means to be human in a particular socio-­cultural space, which is shaped by the structural features of a society, namely ethnicity, gender, race, language, religion, nationality, and sexual orientation. As such, the socio-­cultural dimension of the self has a “collectivist” tinge to it, which shares structural similarities to the concept of “identity.”77 Hence it is no surprise that contemporary socio-­ anthropological research often characterizes selfhood as a fluid concept, subject to continual negotiation resulting from the competing social interactions and diverse social networks that individuals encounter in their everyday lives. It is argued that a person’s selfhood is formed by different influences of life experience, and that it is complex, being composed of distinct elements which are constantly negotiated by various roles one plays as a member of a nation, a community, a family, a public institution, a social circle, or a combination of any of these categories.78 There is a venerable tradition going back to Hegel and mediated 77.  For our purposes, one’s identity can be thought of as that particular set of traits, beliefs, and allegiances that, in short-­ or long-­term ways, gives one a consistent personality and mode of social being, while subjectivity always implies a degree of thought and self-­consciousness about identity. It is important to note that although some people define “identity” in terms of individual moral commitments, there is no way one can separate such an identity from the larger socio-­cultural-­ linguistic-­historical framework. For illuminating comments on this, see Taylor, Sources of the Self, 3–­52. 78.  For more information on the relationship between the self and society and how identity is constructed through their interaction, see Viktor Gecas and P. J. Burke, “Self and Identity,” in Karen S. Cook, Gary Alan Fine, and James S. House, eds., Sociological Perspectives on Social Psychology (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1995), 41–­67; and Jan E. Stets and Peter J. Burke, “A Sociological Approach to Self and Identity,” in Handbook of Self and Identity, ed. by Mark Leary and June Tangney (New York: Guilford Press, 2003), 128–­152. On religious and political identities, see Gerald Izenberg, Identity: The Necessity of a Modern Idea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 228–­232, 297–­298, and 360ff; and Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006), 18ff.

36  Sculpting the Self

through such diverse writers as Marx, Baldwin, Simmel, Vygotsky, Mead, Althusser, and Foucault, which argues in various ways that one cannot be a self on one’s own, but only through its integration within the community and the order of the semiotic system. That is to say, selfhood is something that can only be grounded within a social context, rather than in some immediate form of consciousness. The social embeddedness of the self was expounded in great detail by sociologists such as Mead and Simmel at the turn of the twentieth century. In his monumental work Mind, Self and Society, Mead, for instance, describes how the mind and the self emerge through social interaction. In his view, only within the social process at its higher levels, and only in terms of the more developed forms of the social environment or social situation, does the individual become an object to itself, and hence self-­conscious.79 Mead argues that the self is not something that comes into being first and then becomes an object to itself through its interactions with others; rather, “it is a process in which the individual is continually adjusting himself in advance to the situation to which he belongs, and reacting back on it.”80 In a similar fashion, Simmel theorizes the relationship between the subjective experience of the individual and objective culture of various social forms, which gives rise to self-­identity.81 Similar ideas can also be found in the influential writings of Foucault, who, in the later part of his career, concerned himself with tracing the “genealogy” of the modern subject.82 Reacting against the Cartesian and the 79.  George H. Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 135–­226. This view is challenged in chapter 2. 80.  Mead, Mind, Self and Society, 182. 81.  Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms; Selected Writings, ed. by Donald N. Levine (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 217–­248. 82.  Earlier in his career, Foucault attempted to show how discursive formations order and shape our lives and thinking. This undertaking shows up in such original works as Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (1961), Naissance de la Clinique (1963), Les Mots et les Choses (1966), and L’Archéologie du savoir (1969). This view undermines the importance of the individual self as an agent by challenging those who argue that it is we who consciously order and determine the structure of our discursive formation. It is to be noted that although Foucault’s later works are still genealogical in scope, they do not overtly deny the subject’s agency, or at least there is a tension between affirming and denying agency. For instance, in The Hermeneutics of the Subject, Foucault wanted to find out what sorts of cultural phenomena or intellectual concepts in antiquity can still be useful in the modern mode of being a self, as he says: “[T]he challenge for any history of thought, is precisely that of grasping when a cultural phenomenon of a determinate scale actually

The Problematic of the Self  37

Kantian notions of the subject, which is the source of thought and action, and which is the origin of change in the world, Foucault goes to great lengths to show that the subject is formed as one engages in the practices of self-­cultivation and self-­regulation within contexts of linguistic conventions, power dynamics, and discursive formation. That is to say, Foucault’s term “subject” refers to the agent who is subjected to the prevailing political and social order, as governed by the established rules and practices. As he writes in his late work “The Subject and Power,” the rule of “power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects.”83 Explaining the different senses of the term “subject,” Foucault further claims that one can be either subjected to control and dependence by someone else or to one’s conscience or self-­knowledge, both of which suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to.84 Either way, selfhood resulting from subjecthood is the consequence of struggles against subjection, forms of subjectivity, and submission, in which little room is left for forms of consciousness that may be innate to a given self, and hence crucial for its agency.85 It is to be noted that the views espoused by the aforementioned thinkers are instances of what is known as “social constructionism,” which constitutes within the history of thought a decisive moment that is still significant for our modern mode of being subjects.” Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1981–­82, ed. by Frédéric Gros, trans. by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2006), 9. See also Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. by Paul Rabinow, trans. by Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 1994), xiff; The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3, trans. by Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 37–­81. It is to be noted that Foucault’s work on the self in antiquity has been criticized on historical grounds. See, for example, Pierre Hadot, “Un Dialogue Interrompu avec Michel Foucault: Convergences et Divergences,” in Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique (Paris: Etudes Augustiniennes, 1987), 229–­233; and James Porter, “Time for Foucault? Reflections on the Roman Self from Seneca to Augustine,” Foucault Studies, 22 (2017): 113–­133. 83.  Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982): 771–­795, at 781. 84.  Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” 781–­782. 85.  The neglect of “agency” in Foucault’s genealogy of the self has been noted by other scholars as well. See Lois McNay, Gender and Agency: Reconfiguring the Subject in Feminist and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000), 9ff.

38  Sculpting the Self

attempts to locate the self in the matrix of the social, while neglecting the built-­in features of individual subjectivity which is shown by the “cognito-­ experiential” dimension of the self (see below).86 Still, despite this neglect, there is little doubt that much utility can be gained from a collectivist, socio-­ cultural sense of the self, which does reflect certain important features of a given subjectivity at a particular moment in history. For instance, while explaining postcolonial subjectivity, contemporary postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha have drawn attention to the practices of “representation,” which reproduce an image of subordination that endures even after former colonies gain independence. Putting into use concepts including “mimicry,” “hybridity,” and “third space,” Bhabha deciphers selfhood in terms of endless “performance,” which is a response to the “signifier” and the “signified.” Bhabha thus makes clear that there is no a priori, metaphysical identity to which one can refer, since selfhood or the act of self begins by imitating the “other.” As such, selfhood is always a production of “image” of an identity (here he adopts Lacan’s “mirror stage” theory of self) and the transformation of the subject. Bhabha capitalizes on broad-­ brush categories such as the “colonizer” (or the settler) or the “colonized” (or the native) to illustrate his conception of selfhood, which is conditioned by various socio-­cultural-­historical identities that are always in a state of flux.87 Similarly, Adorno and Horkheimer have articulated an ambitious theory of Enlightenment subjectivity (i.e., modern Western selfhood) vis-­ à-­vis pre-­historical Magical subjectivity. According to them, the self of the Enlightenment is characterized by (1) the subject-­object dichotomy, (2) a tendency to control nature, (3) a faith in progress, (4) a denial of anything religious, and (5) a propensity to quantify things. They further argue that the self of the Magical Age (before the Myth of Odysseus) is the opposite of all the aforementioned features.88 One can give many other examples by drawing attention to the modern concept of selfhood, which is seen as the site of a series of moral conflicts and dilemmas represented by the contrast between public and private life, between rationality and emotionality, and 86.  On the notion of “social constructionism” in general, see Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Anchor Books, 1966). 87.  See Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 28–­92. 88.  See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, ed. by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 1–­90.

The Problematic of the Self  39

between personal freedom and social determination in the face of a growing mass culture.89 Overall, I maintain that social constructionism is useful in delineating how a given, collective subjectivity embodies its place in the world by carving out a shared space of values, expectations, limits, and prohibitions, since it is hard to see how such a collectivist self would not bear some influence upon the individual through its structural features.90 Consequently, a given theory of the self must incorporate the socio-­cultural dimension in its framework. However, similar to the bio-­physiological self, the socio-­ cultural dimension too constitutes the self partially, while leaving out other aspects. For instance, if we take social constructionism to its logical end, it will be as though every individual self is subsumed under a collective subjectivity, which would undermine our conscious agency to a great extent. Moreover, as we shall see in chapter 2, social constructionism does not satisfactorily answer the epistemological question: How is it that the subject is able to attribute social knowledge or facts to herself, i.e., what is the subject’s primary mode of knowing herself? What cognitive structures must the subject assume in order to construct a “meaningful” picture of the world? These are some of the questions that require a phenomenological strategy to probe the structure of human consciousness (see chapter 2). The analysis of the bio-­physiological and socio-­cultural dimensions of the self thus suggests that the self must be more than a social or physical entity. In particular, one has to refer to the cognito-­experiential aspect of the self in order to account for the irreducibility of first-­person subjectivity, intentionality, reflective and non-­reflective consciousness, and other cognitive structures that constitute selfhood. As mentioned before, the different 89.  See, e.g., Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 35ff. See also Talal Asad, Secular Translations: Nation-­State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 91–­94. 90.  For instance, Christopher Lasch argues that the postwar American self is characterized by a deep sense of “narcissism” (defined as the integration of grandiose object images as a defense against anxiety and guilt) that leads to: a fear of old age and death, a fear of commitments and lasting relationships, an inner void and a persistent feeling of emptiness and depression, a sense of boundless admiration for fame and celebrity, and so on. See Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (London, New York: Norton, 1991), 3–­51. For a more optimistic account of the postwar American self, see John Hewitt, Dilemmas of the American Self (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 3ff.

40  Sculpting the Self

dimensions of the self must be thought in conjunction with each other, as their natures interpenetrate. With this in mind, let us proceed to define and explain the cognito-­experiential self in detail. The cognito-­experiential self refers to the first-­personal subjective stance, which is the ground of cognition and cognitive functions. As Richard Sorabji has pointed out, one reason why the notion of the self inevitably figures in our first-­person experience is that human beings could not cope with the world at all unless they saw things in terms of “I.”91 This is because human beings relate to one another not as objects but as subjects, as creatures who address one another as “I” to “you.” The practice of giving, receiving, and criticizing reasons for action depends upon the correct use of first-­person pronouns for those reasons; and, in general, all our intersubjective responses rely on the belief that others attribute beliefs, attitudes, reasons, and emotions to themselves. In the words of Roger Scruton: “I react to you with resentment because you consciously intended to hurt me, and that means that you consciously attributed to yourself just such an intention. I express my resentment with accusations of you, which I expect you to meet with a confession or plea phrased in terms of ‘I.’”92 And it is evidently absurd to respond to an accusation by means of third-­person pronouns. From another point of view, one may argue that human subjectivity is characterized by an experiential self, whose mode of self-­acquaintance differs from the acquaintance it has with the experiential life of others and vice versa.93 Since any experience, at minimum, has the characteristics of what-­it-­is-­like-­ness or for-­me-­only-­ness (recall the first-­person vs. third-­ person distinction), the cognito-­experiential self does not denote an experiential item or object among other objects, but rather refers to the very first-­personal mode of experiencing. More specifically, the first-­person character of experience is not a quality or datum of experience on par with, for example, the scent of flower petals or the taste of ice cream. In essence, the for-­me-­only-­ness of experience doesn’t point to any specific experiential content, nor does it refer to the diachronic or synchronic totality of such content. Rather, the first-­personal character of experience refers to the distinct mode of experiencing and knowing the world. It refers to the fact that the experiences one is living through present themselves differently (but not necessarily better) to one than to someone else. According to 91.  Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern Insights, 20ff. 92.  Roger Scruton, On Human Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 42. 93.  Zahavi, Self and Other, 24.

The Problematic of the Self  41

Zahavi, to deny such a feature of our experiential life is to fail to recognize an essential, constitutive feature of experience. This failure amounts to the claim that my own mind is either not given to me at all, which would make me mind-­or self-­blind, or else it is present to me in exactly the same way as the minds of others, which is inadmissible.94 Not unlike the phenomenologists, the Islamic philosopher Suhrawardī (d. 1191) also brings to light the following experiential features of the self or the “I” (discussed in detail in chapter 2): that it is “simple,” i.e., cannot be split in two; it is indivisible (as it cannot be a composite of genus and species); it must be self-­given and no part of it can remain hidden from itself; it is self-­referential; and finally, its self-­awareness is continuous, that is, unbroken even during sleep.95 Additionally, in his Asfār (The Journeys), Mullā Ṣadrā sheds light on the three interrelated cognitive modes (al-nashaʾāt al-thalāth al-idrākiyya) of human subjectivity:96





1. In the first mode, the structure of subjectivity presents itself as a natural sensory form (al-­ṣūrat al-­ḥissiyya al-­ṭabīʿiyya), whose loci of manifestation (maẓhar) are the five external senses. Ṣadrā compares this mode of the self to the empirical world because it is perceived by the senses. 2. In the second mode, it is of the nature of forms and representations veiled from the five external senses, whose locus of manifestation are the internal senses, such as the imagination which is creative, dynamic, and active. 3. In the third mode, it is a noetic being (al-­ʿaqliyya), which is the abode of the intellect and the intelligible, whose locus of manifestation is the intellective faculty (al-­quwwa al-­ʿāqila) when it reaches the degree of the actual intellect (al-­ʿaql bi-­l-­fiʿl). The noetic faculty can be at once analytic and synthetic, exteriorizing and interiorizing, discriminative and unitive.

While asking what comprises the nature and structure of selfhood, one can also ask what it means to be a self (or, what kind of self one should 94.  Zahavi, Self and Other, 22. 95.  See Shihāb al-­Dīn Suhrawardī, Majmūʿah-­yi muṣannafāt-­i Shaykh-­i Ishrāq, ed. by Henry Corbin (vols. 1–­2) and Seyyed Hossein Nasr (vol. 3) (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1976–­77), passim. 96.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Ḥikma al-­mutaʿāliya fī al-­asfār al-­ʿaqliyya al-­arbaʿa, ed. by Gholamreza Aavani et al. (Tehran: Bunyād-­i Ḥikmat-­i Islāmi-­yi Ṣadrā, 2001–5), 9: 31–­32.

42  Sculpting the Self

aspire to be), so that one may come to ponder the meaning of one’s existence. So, the self is bound up with a normative element, which stems from the very phenomenological structure of human consciousness comprising reflective, non-­reflective, and intersubjective consciousnesses (see chapter 2); and from one’s ability to distance oneself from one’s desires, natural inclinations, and mental activities and to take a critical stance toward them. In her The Sources of Normativity, Christine Korsgaard examines the concept of normativity and argues that “concepts like knowledge, beauty, and meaning, as well as virtue and justice, all have a normative dimension, for they tell us what to think, what to like, what to say, what to do, and what to be.”97 “Normativity” differs from “description” because, unlike the latter, it does not merely “describe a way in which we in fact regulate our conduct.”98 Rather, normative standards make claims on us since they command, oblige, recommend, or guide. In her words, “When I say that an action is right I am saying that you ought to do it; when I say that something is good I am recommending it as worthy of your choice.”99 That is to say, if I think of myself as a caring parent, which inevitably is a normative stance, what makes my life worth living is being a caring parent and the values and actions that ensue from such an attitude. Taking leads from Korsgaard’s analysis of normativity, I argue that the normativity of the self is best described as “aspirational.” This is because although every individual self is subjected to socio-­historical conditionings, it has the freedom to cultivate and recreate a new self by undoing and reconstructing its habitual modes of being. In other words, while people’s selfhood is continually formed and reformed by a host of socio-­cultural factors, there is also an aspirational account of self-­formation according to which certain norms are considered ideals that shape the course of one’s actions. This is what I call the “self-­impulse” that drives individuals to think of a better life that is more conducive to happiness and flourishing. The self-­impulse somehow results from a dissatisfaction with one’s current life; status; relationships; and physical, mental, and ethical modes of being. The aspirational move thus reflects an attempt to live a different sort of life, one that would maximize happiness and flourishing. This can manifest in all walks of life through both short-­term and long-­term goals. For example, a person might start going to a fitness center in order to develop a better, 97.  Christine M. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 9. 98.  Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 9. 99.  Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, 8–­9.

The Problematic of the Self  43

more athletic physical shape, a student may aspire to achieve a better grade by putting in more effort, or a person may embark on a life-­long aspiration to cultivate compassion for all sentient beings. One might note a certain similarity between the idea of aspiration and the narrative view of the self. The narrative account of the self asserts that the self is the product of a narratively structured life constructed variably through social and linguistic conventions.100 Situating himself within the hermeneutic-­phenomenological tradition, Paul Ricoeur interprets human subjectivity as being “fictive” in the sense that it is a product of the imagination which takes the form of storytelling over time.101 In other words, the narrative view considers each individual as having a unique story to tell about their lives that has moral and ethical implications. Although the narrative self is very similar to what I am describing here, the difference perhaps lies in our respective emphases on “agency,” since the narrative self tends to be descriptive in that it seeks to delineate the agent’s life-­world from a third-­person standpoint, while the idea of “aspiration” portrays the self as “a work in progress” that requires an active first-­person agency. At any rate, the insight to be gleaned from incorporating “normativity” into a theory of selfhood is that it enables us to see how it is possible to articulate multiple conceptions of the self (more on this later) without succumbing to the temptation of reducing it to a scientific description that by definition cannot address the self’s normative reality. For this reason, it is possible to have a discourse on constructs such as “Muslim identity,” “Hindu identity,” “American identity,” and so forth. While one may certainly discuss various socio-­cultural factors that give rise to a collective notion of selfhood, there are also normative ideals by which individuals try to create a specific, new reality of the self. Thus, many Americans may think about the “American dream” and seek to conform to a specific mold of the American self that underscores individualism, hard work, and independence. In a similar manner, many Muslims think of the normative Muslim self that they aspire to realize in their life. Notice, however, that one may not talk about an inanimate object such as the electron in aspirational terms. It would be meaningless to say that an electron can aspire to be a better electron at some point in the future. In fact, I would argue that it 100.  The two most prominent proponents of the narrative view of the self are MacIntyre and Ricoeur. See Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (London: Duckworth, 1985), 237ff. and Paul Ricoeur, Soi-­même comme un autre (Paris: Seuil, 1990), 15ff; Oneself as Another, trans. by Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, 1992). 101.  Ricoeur, Soi-­même, 140ff.

44  Sculpting the Self

would be impossible to find a non-­human animal which has the capacity for self-­reflection in such a way that it would be able to ponder the meaning of its existence in moral and spiritual terms, even though such a non-­human animal might possess some degree of consciousness and might be trained to change its behavior over time. In contrast to other creatures, humans can perform a set of self-­conscious actions on their mind and body so as to bring about a desired mode of being over time. Such a repeated performance, although it need not be spiritual or ethical, transforms one’s self depending on one’s moral or morally neutral outlook. All in all, the normative dimension of the self allows us to consider various accounts of the self that may provide meaning and direction to our ethical and spiritual life. For instance, definitions of the human self such as a “story-­telling animal,” “language animal,” “meaning-­making animal,” “autonomous rational agent,” “compassionate, loving being,” “steward of nature,” “microcosm or the small world,” and “reflection of God’s image” are all normative in nature (see chapter 6 for the relative merits of some of these accounts). A Multidimensional Model The picture that emerges from the above analyses is that the self is a not a given object whose essential nature is unchangeable. The normativity of the self means selfhood is both received and achieved. It can be described in terms of scientific and social facts, but at the same time can be articulated with the help of aspirational ideals that are yet to be realized. That is, the self can be described and explained from the atomic and molecular to the psycho-­social details, but that does not exhaust its overall reality, for we also experience ourselves in a unique way that encompasses all our thoughts, states, intentions, and values. Our capacity to form a normative stance enables us to form judgments about right and wrong in a given socio-­cultural space and initiate a process of personal growth incorporating ethico-­spiritual values. With all this in mind, we can now summarize the framework that elucidates the topography of selfhood in the following diagram. The multidimensionality of the self also implies that certain residual ambiguities are meant to remain unresolved concerning its nature. For instance, Mullā Ṣadrā admits the difficulties that beset any investigation of selfhood owing to its multidimensionality and manifold nature, both of which defy simplistic considerations and characterizations. As he says:

The Problematic of the Self  45

Fig. 2. The Architectonic of the Self

[T]he human self (al-­nafs al-­insāniyya) does not have a known level when it comes to its identity,102 nor does it have a determined level in existence like other natural, psychic and intellectual existents, for each of these has a known station. Rather, the human self has different levels and dimensions (maqāmāt wa-­darajāt), and it has both antecedent and subsequent modes of being (wa-­lahā nashaʾāt sābiqa wa-­lāḥiqa), and in each station and world it takes a different form. As it is said: My heart has become capable of every form: It is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks.103

102.  To remain consistent, I render huwiyya as “identity,” although in Ṣadrā’s usage, the term sometimes has the connotation of “I-­ness.” 103.  Ibn ʿArabī, Tarjumān al-­ashwāq, trans. by R. A. Nicholson (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1911), XI, 5: 67.

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However, it is very difficult to perceive and hard to comprehend both the nature of its reality and its identity (huwiyyatihi). The [philosophers’] tribe has only understood the reality of the self insofar as what is necessary for its existence with respect to the body and its accidents of perception and motion. They have not grasped its states except from the aspect of what is attached to it from perception and movement.104 The above passage is representative of how Ṣadrā approaches the problem of selfhood. Although he accepts the Aristotelian definition of the nafs (self or soul) as the “first perfection of an organic natural body that has life potentially,”105 he criticizes the philosophers for failing to understand the self’s intricate nature beyond its functional activities such as nutrition, locomotion, and perception that correspond to nutritive, sensitive, and rational souls, respectively. The poem of Ibn ʿArabī that Ṣadrā cites above sets the tone for his conception of selfhood and subjectivity, since through this poem he affirms that the self is capable of embracing every form (i.e., various religious and cultural identities, including being a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, or even an idol worshipper)106 depending on the beliefs and customs associated with one’s environment and upbringing. Consequently, the descriptive-­normative distinction enables me to analyze the self in terms of different dimensions: bio-­physiological, socio-­cultural, aspirational, etc. It is worth noting that one central issue that any studies of the self must take into consideration is whether different characterizations of the self refer to diverse aspects of some unitary phenomenon, or whether they pick out different and unrelated phenomena (see chapter 2).107 However, too often 104.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 398–­399. 105.  See, e.g., Aristotle, De Anima, 412b5, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. by Jonathan Barnes (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1017b, 1035b. 106.  The full poem reads as follows: My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, And a temple for idols and the pilgrim’s Ka‘ba and the tables of the Tora and the book of the Koran. I follow the religion of Love: Whatever way Love’s camels take, that is my religion and my faith. See Ibn ʿArabī, Tarjumān al-­ashwāq, XI, 5: 67. 107.  This point is also noted by Gallagher in Shaun Gallagher, ed., The Oxford Handbook of the Self (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 27.

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theories of the self either set out to focus on a particular dimension to the exclusion of others, or when they do frame a multidimensional theory, the link between descriptive and normative dimensions remains rather weak. For instance, Jari Kaukua’s Self-­Awareness in Islamic Philosophy, which presents a one-­dimensional account of selfhood in Islamic philosophy through the concept of self-­awareness, conceives of the self as being a minimal, first-­personal self-­awareness. Consequently, Kaukua’s study fails to take into account the relation between the self, self-­knowledge, and moral psychology.108 It is thus no surprise that in the absence of a multidimensional model of the self, the nuances are often lost. Admittedly, there are multidimensional accounts of the self that can be termed “weak version multidimensionality,” or WVM, but these still fail to draw the distinction between descriptive and normative aspects of the self. For example, among various neuroscientific theories of the self, Damasio’s emergentist model stands out for its rigor and comprehensiveness.109 Similar to his earlier Descartes’ Error, in which he contends that various kinds of practical and social reasoning depend upon the proper functioning of our emotions and feelings, Damasio addresses two major issues concerning the self and consciousness. The first is the issue of how the brain gives rise to mental images comprising thoughts, objects, feelings, and actions through its interactions with the environment; and the second is the issue of how the brain also produces a sense of the self in the knowing subject.110 He starts off with the concept of a “proto-­self,” which is “a coherent collection of neural patterns which map, moment by 108.  Jari Kaukua, Self-­Awareness in Islamic Philosophy: Avicenna and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). It must be noted, however, that the Kaukua’s study does an excellent job of fleshing out the concept of “self-­ awareness” in early Islamic philosophy. 109.  Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (London: William Heinemann, 1999). Exact references are provided below. In addition, a number of scientists deny that there is anything called the self. They either think the mind can be reduced to the functions of the brain, or they claim that there is no such thing as “human nature.” For instance, Steven Pinker says that “[t]he mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation.” Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 2009), 324–­27; The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Viking, 2002), 5–­13. For a response to the modern denial of “human nature,” see Marilynne Robinson, Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 3ff. 110.  Damasio, The Feeling of What, 3ff.

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moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions.”111 In Damasio’s schemes, such a proto-­self is necessary if the organism is able to maintain itself in its current physical state. However, there is no associated “consciousness” at this level, as the functions of the organism are confined mostly to bio-­physiological processes. Nevertheless, the proto-­self, Damasio claims, is sufficient to give birth to what he calls “core consciousness” (with its correlative “core self”) that endows the organism with a feeling of how it is affected by aspects of the surrounding environment at a given time.112 It is at this stage that humans begin to develop a sense that certain present experiences belong to their core self.113 Finally, humans are able to develop “extended consciousness,” which is a capacity to connect the present with the past and an anticipated future. At this level, the sense of the self can be termed “autobiographical,” which is responsible for myriad artistic and scientific activities.114 Damasio’s central claim is that his three-­tier, multidimensional self is capable of explaining the neuroscience of the self, along with the attendant claim that language is not necessary for the proto-­and core selves, both of which are responsible for the emergence of the most complete form of selfhood, i.e., the autobiographical self. As we shall see in chapter 4, such a theory, although useful in delineating the bodily basis of the self, begs questions on many counts. However, for our present purposes, it is enough to point out that such a descriptive model says little about the moral and spiritual potential of the self. Besides Damasio, James in his celebrated The Principles of Psychology deploys a three-­dimensional scheme of “selfhood-­analysis” to explicate the nature of the human self: (1) the material self, (2) the social self, and (3) the spiritual self. In James’s account, the body is the innermost part of the material self, some of whose parts are closer to us than the rest. James then proceeds to explain the social self by suggesting that it consists of “recognition” and “images” that others confer on the individual. As for the spiritual self, James 111.  Damasio, The Feeling of What, 154. 112.  Damasio, The Feeling of What, 160. 113.  Damasio explains “core consciousness” as follows: “Core consciousness occurs when the brain’s representation devices generate an imaged, nonverbal account of how the organism’s own state is affected by the organism’s processing of an object, and when this process enhances the image of the causative object, thus placing it saliently in a spatial and temporal context.” Damasio, The Feeling of What, 169. 114.  Damasio, The Feeling of What, 177.

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opines that it can be regarded as a person’s psychic dispositions, including the abilities to argue and discriminate and to have moral sensibility, conscience, and an indomitable will. He further maintains that the spiritual self can be regarded as “the entire stream of our personal consciousness.”115 In his study of Western notions of the self since the seventeenth century, the historian Jerold Seigel also proposes a WVM theory of the self. According to Seigel, the basis of selfhood in Western philosophy since Descartes can be sought in three ways, namely (1) materially, (2) relationally, and (3) reflectively. In his view, the first aspect of the self refers to the corporeal existence of individuals, the second to social and cultural interactions that give rise to a collective identity, and the third to the human capacity to experience the world and objectivize that experience.116 In comparison with the models just described, my theory, while inspired by both James’s and Seigel’s multidimensional approach, departs from them in significant ways, as it grounds selfhood in self-­knowledge, first-­person subjectivity, and self-­cultivation through their interrelationship (see chapters 1–­2 and 5). Overcoming the Terminological Fray In this study, my aim is to develop a theory of the self through philosophical argumentation and hermeneutics. While I draw upon various theories of the self in Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and other languages, I do so without wishing to misrepresent the textual rigor or ignoring the nuances of their historical contingencies. With this in mind, this study defines the self in terms of “having a sense of ‘I’ that involves self-­awareness and self-­knowledge.” That is to say, the basic sense of the human self involves self-­knowledge, first-­person subjectivity, and agency. The above line of demarcation allows me focus to on those issues that are directly related to the first-­person perspective, such as self-­knowledge, consciousness, and ethico-­spiritual transformation, while avoiding a detailed analysis of issues such as the mechanism of the external or the internal senses although they are not entirely unrelated. Also, in English, words such as “person,” “individual,” “human,” “self,” and “consciousness” are often interrelated or intertwined, which sometimes leads scholars to distinguish between these terms, but which itself becomes the source of dispute as to what consti115.  James, Principles of Psychology, 1: 294–­401. 116.  See Seigel, Idea of the Self, 5ff.

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tutes the self.117 It is thus crucial to clarify some of these terms before we proceed further. First, it may appear rather intuitive that if there were no human beings, there would be no “selves” to begin with; but then, unlike the former, the latter category (i.e., selves) refers to the question of what it means to be an “I,” or what parts of the human being are considered “most our own.” In like manner, the word “person” can be taken to mean someone who owns psychological states and actions, along with various bodily characteristics,118 although many authors use the words “self” and “person” interchangeably (e.g., Gerson as in his study of the Platonic self).119 In the present study, the relationship between human, person, individual, self, and consciousness can be summarized through the help of a concentric circle, where the outermost circle represents “human,” and then the circle inside it “person” and “individual” (assumed to be synonymous in this study) respectively, while the innermost circle represents both “self” and “consciousness.” It should, however, be noted that this is only one of the possible modes through which the relationship can be demonstrated. One further distinction that must be clarified has to do with the misidentification of the term “soul” with “self.” That is, if we assume both soul and self to be synonymous, we would be prone to identify the latter with a set of cognitive functions only, e.g., memory, imagination, and intellection. Another way to explain this would be to say that philosophical psychology and philosophy of the self are not coextensive.120 This is because even though the topic of the self is not conceptually independent from issues of philosophical psychology, a discussion of the self nevertheless brings to the fore a distinct dimension of the sense of “I-­ness” or what I call “self-­talk” that would otherwise be absent in the former. Moreover, since the concept of the self revolves around that distinct sense of I-­ness, many issues—­such as the details of the internal perception, soteriological deserts, and the reincarnation of the soul that are usually discussed in philosophical psychol117.  Other related terms are ego and mind, which, when used in this study, have no technical import. 118.  Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern, 21. Yaḥyā b. ʿAdī (d. 363/974), who is said to have become al-­Fārābī’s student, also distinguishes between the person and the self. According to ʿAdī, a human in its true being is called the rational self (al-­ nafs al-­ʿāqila), which is a single thing (shayʾ wāḥid), whereas personhood implies having multiple souls. See Yaḥyā b. ʿAdī, The Reformation of Morals, trans. by Sydney Griffith (Provo, UT: Brigham University Press, 2002), 107. 119.  See Gerson, Knowing Persons, 4–­6. 120.  This point is also developed by Pauliina Remes in Plotinus on Self: The Philosophy of the ‘We’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Introduction.

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ogy (ʿilm al-­nafs)—­are not necessarily germane to the philosophy of the self. On the contrary, the topic of the self raises metaphysical and ethical issues that may be of little interest from a purely psychological point of view. This means when scholars discuss the concept of the soul, they do so from a third-­person perspective that usually leaves aside any references to “subjectivity,”121 something which is bound up with the notion of the self. At this juncture, I should also clarify the term “subjectivity” (Subjecktivität in German; subjectivité in French), which came into use during the nineteenth century, but whose connotations were certainly present in premodern philosophical discourse. The term derives from the Latin subiectum, which translates the Greek hypokeimenon, a term which designates an underlying foundation. Generally speaking, it refers to self-­consciousness as the basis of all possible knowledge. Minimally speaking, subjectivity is indicated simply by the first-­person pronoun, the subject of first-­person predicates. In this study, I use the term to refer to the states of being an “I” or being an individual subject that involves self-­consciousness. Subjectivity so defined refers to the phenomena that are present to an experiencing subject, to which she has access from a first-­personal standpoint. In what follows, I draw attention to the wide array of terminologies Muslim philosophers use while discussing the self, which will facilitate a consistent dialogue with these authors. While Mullā Ṣadrā (and the Islamic philosophers in general) makes consistent use of the word nafs (self/soul) to capture the idea of the self in a systematic manner, such is hardly the case with Walī Allāh and the 121.  For more discussions on “subjectivity,” see Gavin Flood, The Ascetic Self: Subjectivity, Memory and Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 17–­19. Daston and Galison note that the word “objective” meant something very different when it was first used in its medieval context. In medieval philosophy “objective” had meant “an object of the mind,” as opposed to the essence of the subject, which can be thought of as “subjective.” However, in the post-­Kantian period the word “objective” became nature “in its passive and material sense”, whereas the word “subjective” came to denote “everything that can be understood through the self or intelligence.” Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity, 29–­33, 36–­37, 63, 197–­198, 205, 228, 258, 361. See also Ronald de Sousa, “Twelve Varieties of Subjectivity: Dividing in Hopes of Conquest,” in Knowledge, Language, and Representation, ed. by J. M. Larrazabal and L. A. Pérez Miranda (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), 147–­164. See also de Libera, “When did the Modern Subject Emerge?” who argues that subjectivity is a medieval theological construct based on two conflicting models of the mind (nous, mens) inherited from ancient philosophy and theology. For de Libera, the self is the idea of some “thing” that is both the owner of certain mental states and the agent of certain activities.

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Sufis, whose musings on the topic are often characterized by shifting perspectives.122 So it is necessary to settle the terminological debate over the word “self” in Walī Allāh’s works at the outset. To begin with, Walī Allāh uses a dizzying number of Arabic and Persian terms to explicate the nature and various aspects of the self, viz., nafs (self/soul), rūḥ (self/ spirit), nafs nāṭiqa (rational self/soul), anāniyya (I-­ness/selfhood), khūd (self), dhāt (self/essence), nafs bahīma (animal self), nafs muṭmaʾinna (tranquil self), nafs ammāra (evil-­inciting, vulnerable self), nafs kullī (universal self), nafs insānī (human self), nafs shahwānī (appetitive self), nafs ādamī (human self), rūh ḥayawānī (animal spirit), rūḥ ʿulwī (higher self/ spirit), rūḥ malakūtī (angelic self/spirit), qalb (heart), ʿaql (intellect), sirr (secret), khafī (arcane), akhfā (super arcane), ḥajar-­i baḥt (philosopher’s stone), anāniyya khāṣṣa (individual selfhood), anāniyya kubrā (ultimate selfhood), anāniyya muṭlaqa (absolute selfhood), ṭabīʿat-­i bashar (human nature), and ḥaqīqat-­i insān (human reality). But it should be pointed out that most of the abovementioned terms denote aspects of the self rather than the self itself. Among the lead terms for the self, the most notable candidates are nafs, rūḥ, nafs nāṭiqa, anāniyya,123 and khūd,124 for which 122.  A prime example of this is Ibn ʿArabī, whose mystical exposition is known for its shifting perspectives. See William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn al-­‘Arabī’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), ix–­xx. However, as Giovanni Martini points out in his recent study on Simnānī’s mysticism, one has to be careful before dismissing the character of such thought as irrational. It may be that an unsystematic usage of nafs and rūḥ would reveal something profound about the nature of the self—­which, as Ṣadrā has pointed out, is elusive and multidimensional. Martini uses the example of “body” and the terms used by Simnānī to describe it (such as badan and shabaḥ) as a case in point. According to Martini, the use of different words and terms to refer to the same concept should not be considered a sign of inconsistency, nor should it be explained as a stylistic exigency. This is because each time, the topics are approached with and illustrated by slightly different points of view in order to enrich and the deepen understanding by obliging the reader, each time, to reengage with the text. See Giovanni Maria Martini, ʿAlāʾ al-­Dawla al-­Simnānī between Spiritual Authority and Political Power: A Persian Lord and Intellectual in the Heart of the Ilkhanate (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 415–­416. 123.  The following is an example where the term anāniyya is used: “Either the individual selfhood (anāniyyat-­i khāṣṣ) subsists in the absolute selfhood (anāniyyat-­i muṭlaq) or [the gnostic regards] the individual selfhood as the absolute selfhood; otherwise, he might become oblivious to his individual selfhood (anāniyyat-­i khāṣṣ), neither affirming nor denying it.” Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds (Gujranwala: Madrasa Nuṣrat al-­ʿUlūm, 1964), 123. 124.  An example of khūd as a self term: “This means the individual should be

The Problematic of the Self  53

textual evidence will soon be provided. My goal here is to show that the common connotations of these terms belong to the same spectrum concept understood as “self.” With this in mind, let me now examine how Walī Allāh employs various terms to define the self. One of Walī Allāh’s most frequently used terms for self is nafs. For instance, the word nafs is used in the definition of self in the following text: There are still more forms that are specific to individuals only. These are called selves (al-­nufūs), which are the origins of the individual [human’s] specific characteristics and by which Zayd is Zayd, Amr is Amr, you are you and I am I (wa anā anā), just like the human form makes a human a human and the animal form makes an animal an animal.125 So, the term nafs denotes “forms” (ṣuwar) that individuate each person by their specific characteristics and make them distinct entities, e.g., Zayd, Amr, I, or you. That is to say, nafs or self is that which makes “me” or “you” a specific “me” or “you.” Moreover, in this case, the term has a “neutral” sense, devoid of any moral or ethical connotation. For now, I will not discuss the Aristotelian overtone of this definition, since my purpose is simply to pick out and clarify Walī Allāh’s lead terms for the self. In another context, Walī Allāh uses the expression the “rational self/soul” (al-­ nafs al-­nāṭiqa) as a synonym of nafs to refer to the individuating form by which every human acquires his individuality: Know that the rational self is the individuating form by which every human acquires his individuality (fardiyya).126 That is, Shāh Walī Allāh here adopts the Avicennan term for self, i.e., the “rational self/soul” and uses it interchangeably with nafs.127 arduous in fighting against his self (tā ādamī khūd bar khūd jūsh zanad), and should dislike himself and be the judge of his own self (khūd bar khūd ḥākim bāshad).” Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 79. 125.  Shāh Walī Allāh, al-­Budūr al-­bāzigha, ed. by Ṣaghīr Ḥasan al-­Maʿṣūmī (Hyderabad, Sindh: Shāh Walī Allāh Academy, 1970), 15. 126.  Walī Allāh, al-­Budūr al-­bāzigha, 38. 127.  For Avicenna, the rational soul is characterized somewhat differently. Generally speaking, in the Avicennan paradigm the rational part of the self has two faces: one that looks downwards to the body and the sensitive part of the soul, and another which looks upwards. See Avicenna, De anima I.5 (94.8–­94.14).

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To further corroborate whether they can indeed be used as “self” terms, Walī Allāh, in much agreement with Ṣadrā and others, refers to features such as self-­knowledge, first-­person subjectivity, incorporeality, and agency. Here are some examples:128 The perception of incorporeal things (umūr-­i mujarrad) belongs exclusively to the rational soul (nafs-­i nāṭiqa), and not to the imagination or estimation. . . . What characterizes the rational soul (nafs-­i nāṭiqa) is that it is free of material attributes (ṣifat-­i ān barāʾat ast az lawāḥiq-­i mādda).129 When we disembody ourselves (idhā tajarradnā) to our inner self (wijdāninā), we come to know that our substance (jawharinā) is made of intellectual existence (wujūdan ʿaqliyyan). Moreover, we know that it is always awake and possessing presential knowledge (ʿilman ḥuḍūran) of itself, just as it knows the rational self through itself (al-­nafs al-­nuṭqiyya bi-­nafsihā).130 Not unlike Ṣadrā, Walī Allāh also uses the concept of “presential knowledge” (al-­ʿilm al-­ḥuḍūrī) to explain how the self or the rational soul knows itself without any intermediary.131 It is also important to note that Walī Allāh is aware of how these terms are used by the philosophers, as he notes their Aristotelian background: The faculties of the rational soul (nafs-­i nāṭiqa) have been divided into three categories by the philosophers: natural faculties (quwā-­yi ṭabīʿiyya), animal faculties (quwā-­yi ḥayawāniyya), and perceptual faculties (quwā-­yi idrākiyya). These have been located respectively in the liver, the physical heart, and the brain.132 However, he tweaks the Aristotelian conception of the rational soul by adopting the Neoplatonic notion of the hypostasis of the Soul, which is further transformed by way of Sufism as the “universal soul” (nafs-­i kullī). Here is how he conceives of the rational soul’s relation to the universal soul: 128.  I will analyze the content of these texts in later sections. 129.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 133. 130.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya (Hyderabad, Sindh: Shāh Walī Allāh Academy, 1967), 1: 225. 131.  See chapter 2. 132.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 39.

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[T]he rational soul is a bubble in the ocean of the universal soul, or an image formed from its wax, or an individual within the universal, or a part of Reality from a certain aspect. Each of these analogies is valid.133 If Walī Allāh had restricted himself to using only nafs and nafs-­i nāṭiqa while constructing his theory of the self, matters would have been both consistent and uncontroversial. However, he introduces yet another malleable term, namely rūḥ, to talk about the self. Since in Walī Allāh’s usage, the term rūḥ is sometimes used to mean “spirit” and sometimes as a synonym of nafs, we will need textual evidence to see its contrasting connotations. The texts below show how nafs and rūḥ can be synonymous insofar as they both mean the “principle of life”: Sometimes the word nafs is used to mean the principle of life (mabdaʾ-­i ḥayāt). In this sense it is synonymous with the rūḥ (bi-­īn maʿnā murādif-­i rūḥ bāshad). . . . 134 By the rūḥ is meant that which, when associated with the body (jasad), is the source of the latter’s life, while when divorced from it is the cause of its death.135 However, the rūḥ can also mean “fine air” (nasīm-­i ṭayyib) that percolates through the body or the angelic spirit (rūḥ-­i malakūt) in which case it will not be synonymous with nafs. But before expanding on this, one should also note that nafs for Walī Allāh also means the “lower self” that satisfies the carnal desires, or one of the five laṭāʾif (subtle fields of consciousness)136 that 133.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 113. Walī Allāh further clarifies this relationship: “Every soul has its own particular matter (har nafsī rā mādda-­yī hast khāṣṣ) and manifests the universal soul according to the preparedness (istiʿdād) of its matter. Thus, for each distinct matter the universal soul appears in a particular manner. Once such a matter is purified by the grace of the universal soul, it is able to receive a soul (nafs) of its own. In the same way, when through a fresh emanation (fayḍ) it is further purified, it inevitably becomes capable of receiving a soul which is subtler, purer, and more intelligent than the first.” Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 114. 134.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 73–­74. 135.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 23. 136.  The five laṭāʾif are nafs, qalb, ʿaql, sir, and rūḥ. It should be noted, however, that in his early treatise al-­Qawl al-­jamīl, Walī Allāh lists six laṭāʾif, the sixth one being anā, which he would refine later. See Walī Allāh, al-­Qawl al-­jamīl (Bombay: ʿAlī Bhai Sharf ʿAlī and Company, n.d.), 105. For a detailed investigation of the laṭāʾif, see chapter 4.

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constitutes the rational self.137 Moreover, to further complicate the matter, there are other terms such as qalb (heart), ʿaql (intellect), etc., each of which have their particular meaning and are related to the self.138 Interestingly, Walī Allāh himself acknowledges the vagueness surrounding all these terms and sets out to clarify each of them one by one. He begins by stating that there is a lot of loose talk in Sufi discourse concerning this issue (dar īn maqām az tasāmuḥ dar taʿbīrāt-­i ṣūfiyya khilalī padīd āmadih ast).139 At any rate, it is instructive to note that the inconsistent use of these terms, namely nafs, qalb, rūḥ, and ʿaql in Sufi literature, was observed by al-­Ghazālī nearly seven hundred years before Walī Allāh, when the former was writing his Iḥyāʾ (The Revival), with which Walī Allāh was intimately familiar.140 While the above discussion might seem somewhat taxing and pedantic, its significance becomes evident when we look at the large body of recent literature on Sufism and psychoanalysis in the Arabic-­speaking world, where terms such as nafs inevitably figure in the conversation. In her recent book The Arabic Freud, Omnia El Shakry attempts to show how postwar Egyptian thinkers such as Yusuf Murad employ the Sufi notion of the self to read psychoanalytic thought.141 Quite intriguingly, Murad adopts the term lā-­shuʿūr (literally, “unconsciousness”) from Ibn ʿArabī to explain the Freudian unconscious. It is to be noted that the term does occur four times in Ibn ʿArabī’s Futūḥāt (The Openings) alongside its opposite shuʿūr (consciousness), which occurs twelve times.142 However, it appears to me that the term lā-­shuʿūr does not have any technical import in Ibn ʿArabī’s writings. Yet, El Shakry never seems to question Murad’s problematic reading of Ibn ʿArabī, assuming instead that this is an authentic rendering of the text. She thus claims that lā-­shuʿūr is a deeply resonant concept in the work of Ibn ʿArabī.143 But the closest Ibn ʿArabī gets to describe something like the unconscious can be found in the following passage: 137.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 24. 138.  For a detailed explanation, see chapter 4. 139.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 74. 140.  Abū Ḥāmid al-­Ghazālī, Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-­dīn, ed. by Muḥammad Ḥusayn (Cairo: al-­Maktabat al-­Thaqāfī, 1937), 8: 1343–­1346; modified translation taken from Walter James Skellie, Kitāb sharḥ ʿajāʾib al-­qalb (The Marvels of the Heart: Book 21 of the Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-­dīn, the Revival of the Religious Sciences) (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2010), 5–­10. 141.  Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 142.  Ibn ʿArabī, al-­Futūḥāt al-­makkiyya, ed. by Nawāf al-­Jarrāḥ (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1997), passim. 143.  El Shakry, The Arabic Freud, 1–­9, 22–­24.

The Problematic of the Self  57

The waystation includes the fact that God deposited within man knowledge of all things, then prevented him from perceiving what He had deposited within him. Man is not alone in this. On the contrary, the whole cosmos is the same. This is one of the divine mysteries which reason denies and considers totally impossible. The nearness of this mystery to those ignorant of it is like God’s nearness to His servant, as mentioned in His words, “We are nearer to him than you, but you do not see” (Q. 56: 85). . . . In spite of this nearness, the person does not perceive and does not know. . . . No one knows what is within himself until it is unveiled to him instant by instant.144 On the surface of it, the above text does seem to resonate with the unconscious, especially if we recall that for Sufis the nafs in the sense of the lower self or al-­nafs al-­ammāra is the storehouse of negative emotions and desires. Yet, when one analyses the actual context of the above-­mentioned passage, one discovers that Ibn ʿArabī is not discussing psychology here; rather, he is elaborating on human knowledge in relation to the divine. But more significantly, El Shakry, like many others, takes it for granted that terms such as nafs can be conveniently translated as “self,” without noting that in Sufi literature this term can be as elusive as one can imagine, whose meaning changes from context to context (recall the analysis earlier). The significance of all this is that if one wants to talk about the self in Sufism, one has to find common connotations of the various expressions denoting the self in Arabic and Persian, showing further that they all in fact belong to the same spectrum concept. As for Muhammad Iqbal, he uses a number of terms to talk about the self, including the word “self” itself, since he also wrote in English. Although one might think that his primary term for the self is khūdī (self), it is not the only term he uses in discussing the self. Moreover, he is aware of the existence of other terms—­such as nafs (self/soul), anā (I), shakhṣ (person), and anāniyyat (selfhood)—­that have been employed to render the English word “self.” Not unlike Walī Allāh and others, Iqbal provides reasons for choosing the word khūdī over other terms.145 “The word ‘khūdī’ was chosen with great difficulty and most reluctantly,” Iqbal informs the reader, because “from a literary point of view 144.  Ibn ʿArabī, al-­Futūḥāt, II, 684.4, quoted in Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge, 154. 145.  However, when Iqbal writes in English, the problem of translation does not arise.

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it has many shortcomings and ethically it is generally used in a bad sense both in Urdu and Persian.” Moreover, in his view, “the other words for the metaphysical fact of the ‘I’ are equally inconvenient, e.g., anā, shakhṣ, nafs, and anāniyyat.” So “what is needed,” Iqbal asserts, “is a colorless word for self, ego, having no ethical significance.” But since “there is no such word in either Urdu or Persian,” the word man (I) in Persian being equally inappropriate, “I thought that the word ‘khūdī’ was the most suitable.”146 Iqbal then claims that there is some evidence in the Persian language of the use of the word khūdī in the simple sense of self, i.e., the colorless fact of the “I.” So the metaphysical use of the term khūdī expresses an indescribable feeling of “I,” which forms the basis of the uniqueness of each individual.147 In Iqbal’s usage, then, khūdī does not convey any ethical significance for those who emphasize its metaphysical connotation.148 It is thus clear that Iqbal understands the term nafs differently from his predecessors such as Ṣadrā and Walī Allāh. Nonetheless, khūdī, in Iqbal’s philosophy, also has an “ethical” connotation, as opposed to its “metaphysical” usage. Iqbal himself categorically states this by saying, “Ethically, the word ‘khūdī’ means (as used by me) self-­reliance, self-­respect, self-­confidence, self-­preservation; even self-­assertion when such a thing is necessary, in the interests of life and the power to stick to the cause of truth, justice, duty, etc., even in the face of death.”149 For Iqbal, such usage of khūdī is ethical “because it helps in the integration of the forces of the Ego, thus hardening it, as against the forces of disintegration and dissolution.”150 In all, Iqbal makes it clear that khūdī has both metaphysical and ethical connotations, and it does not mean the egotistical self, full of pride. However, it should be noted that an earlier definition of khūdī included the terms anā and man as its synonyms, as in the first edition of the Asrār in which Iqbal asks the following: “What is this luminous center of the unity of intuition or mental awareness which intensifies human thoughts and feelings, this mysterious thing which is the repository of the diversified and unlimited potentialities of human nature, this ‘khūdī’ (self) or ‘anā’ (I) or ‘man’ (I) which is practically known but essentially hidden, which is the maker of appearances, yet cannot bear to be seen itself? . . . From the viewpoint of ethics, the way of life of individu146.  Iqbal, “An Exposition of the Self,” in Discourses of Iqbal, comp. and ed. by Shahid H. Razzaqi (Lahore: Ghulām ʿAlī, 1979), 201–­202. 147.  Iqbal, “An Exposition of the Self,” 201–­202. 148.  Iqbal, “An Exposition of the Self,” 201–­202. 149.  Iqbal, “An Exposition of the Self,” 203. 150.  Iqbal, “An Exposition of the Self,” 203.

The Problematic of the Self  59

als and actions depends on the answer to this question.”151 There is much evidence to suggest that Iqbal uses the words khūdī and “I” interchangeably (i.e., man and anā) in the post-­Asrār period. Summary This chapter does several things. It calls into question the hypothesis that selfhood is a distinctly modern phenomenon associated with inwardness and agency. It argues that if one wants to talk about the self in Islam, one has to find common connotations of the various expressions denoting the self in Arabic and Persian, showing further that they all in fact belong to the same spectrum concept. In particular, this chapter shows that it would be anachronistic to use the word “self” in English to talk about its counterpart(s) in Arabic or Persian, without first clarifying all the conceptual confusion that accompanies the term. This chapter also shows why it would be problematic to investigate the self from a merely third-­person, objectivist stance. Finally, this chapter develops a two-­pronged, multidimensional model of the self containing bio-­physiological, socio-­cultural, and cognito-­experiential modes on the one hand, and ethical and spiritual modes on the other.

151.  Cited in Riffat Hassan, “Iqbal’s ‘Khūdī’—­Its Meaning and Strengthening Factors,” Iqbal 23, no. 3 (1976): 1–­26, at 1.

C h a pte r 2

The View from and beyond the “I”

In the previous section, I delved into the different dimensions of the self, e.g., the bio-­physiological and socio-­cultural selves, and argued that a theory of the self must be multidimensional in scope if it is to address the limitations of one-­dimensional accounts that either focus on the descriptive or the normative self. For instance, while the socio-­cultural theories proposed by Mead et al. explain how we come to develop an extended idea of the self by continually adjusting our identity in relation to the environment to which we belong, they fall short of accounting for more fundamental questions about the self: What enables the self to attribute social facts to itself? What is the basic structure of consciousness that the self must assume in order to construct a meaningful picture of the world of which it is a part? Notice, however, that to talk about the socio-­cultural self is to already implicate the self in a self-­other relationship, which already presupposes self-­consciousness and reflexivity on its part. But the self-­other relation that is indispensable for the socio-­cultural self does not explain how the self knows itself, since any reflective statements concerning the nature and structure of the self presuppose the existence of a conscious self that is able to make all such statements. For this reason, a theory of the self is initially determined by the question of self-­knowledge, as we shall see in a moment. However, this is not to deny that the human self goes through the process of ontogenesis that also involves psychological developments and encounters a linguistic community along the way that influences its mode of being.1 Nonetheless, the structure of human consciousness differs from 1.  For a recent study on human ontogeny that develops an account of the qualities that make us human, see Michael Tomasello, Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), passim. 60

The View from and beyond the “I”  61

other animals in that one cannot produce a fully-­fledged human consciousness just by nurturing another animal in a human environment, although some animals do possess a measure of self-­consciousness.2 Besides, it does not seem to be the case that if a human being lived all alone on an isolated island for the entirety of her life, she would never develop any self-­ consciousness. At the very least, one would expect her to develop it when she encounters other beings, which is sufficient to argue that human beings have the potential to manifest self-­consciousness and reflexivity regardless of their socio-­cultural origin and development, since this is something intrinsic to being human or the human condition. All of these introductory remarks show that self-­knowledge, in its most basic form, cannot simply be assumed in a theory of selfhood. Accordingly, I will begin this chapter with what I call the “paradox of self-­knowledge,” before proceeding to investigate various theories of self-­knowledge in thinkers such as Suhrawardī, Mullā Ṣadrā, Augustine, Shankara, Mukerji, Heidegger, and Kant. In all, my goal is to develop an account of “non-­reflective self-­knowledge” that is more basic and foundational than reflective self-­knowledge, which is the general starting point of most philosophical inquiries. Moreover, it will be made clear that although the self possesses various modes of self-­ knowledge that interconstitute each other, its non-­reflective mode is perhaps the most important of all of them, as it grounds both reflection and intersubjectivity. The Paradox of Self-­Knowledge It behooves the human mind to ask: how might one know anything about the world if one did not know oneself at all, at least the bare fact that one is?3 2.  The gorilla Koko, for instance, managed to learn American Sign Language, but such behavior still falls short of the complexity of human consciousness. For more information on the Koko scenario, as well as the ethical issues that emanate from it, see Peter Singer, Rethinking Life and Death: The Collapse of Our Traditional Ethics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 175–­176; and Roger Fouts and Deborah Fouts, “Chimpanzees’ Use of Sign Language,” in Paola Cavalieri and Peter Singer, eds., The Great Ape Project: Equality Beyond Humanity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 28–­41. 3.  It is to be noted that in Islamic philosophy, “knowledge” (ʿilm) is understood in many ways. For various definitions and types of knowledge, see Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 3, chapters 1–­5. See also, Ibrahim Kalin, Knowledge in Later Islamic Philosophy: Mullā Ṣadrā on Existence, Intellect, and Intuition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), chapter 2.

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Mullā Ṣadrā, perhaps the most influential Islamic philosopher after Avicenna, goes as far as to claim that “knowledge of the self is the mother of philosophy and the root of happiness, and that if one fails to attain the certainty of the non-­physicality and subsistence of the self, one fails to attain the rank of a philosopher. . . . 4 And how is it possible,” he asks rhetorically, “to have any certainty concerning anything, if one did not have knowledge of one’s self in the first place?”5 He then goes on to aver that “whoever knows herself attains the transcendent state of apotheosis” (man ʿarafa dhātahu taʾallaha), a saying that he attributes to ancient philosophers.6 Shams al-­Dīn al-­Shahrazūrī (d. ca. 1288), one of the most important commentators of Suhrawardī’s The Philosophy of Illumination, similarly claims: “In sum, understanding his [Suhrawardī’s] words and unraveling his writings and their mysteries are contingent upon knowing one’s self.”7 Such views, which seem to assert the “primacy of the self” in epistemological matters, have an interesting parallel in the analytic philosopher Donald Davidson, who has also acknowledged the foundational role of what he calls “subjective knowledge”: “That knowledge of the contents of my own mind is special, and basic to all my knowledge, is, of course, part of the Cartesian and empiricist dreams. And this much is correct: such knowledge is basic in the sense that without it I would know nothing (though self-­knowledge is not sufficient for the rest), and special in that it is irreducibly different from other sorts of knowledge.”8 Yet, the fact of self-­knowledge which may appear so intuitive leads us to an inescapable paradox that is central to any conception of the self. The paradox is the following: On the one hand, the self must be known prior to everything else, since anything known must presuppose a subject for which it is 4.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Mabdaʾ wa-­l-­maʿād, ed. by by Muḥammad Dhabīḥī and Jaʿfar Shāh Naẓarī (Tehran: Bunyād-­i Ḥikmat-­i Islāmi-­yi Ṣadrā, 2002), 1: 6. 5.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Mabdaʾ wa-­l-­maʿād, 1: 6. 6.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Mabdaʾ wa-­l-­maʿād, 1: 7. 7.  Bi-­l-­jumla, maʿrifat kalāmihi wa-­ḥall kutubihi wa-­rumūzatihi mutawaqqaf ʿalā maʿrifat al-­nafs. See Shams al-­Dīn al-­Shahrazūrī, Nuzhat al-­arwāḥ, in Majmūʿah-­yi muṣannafāt-­i Shaykh-­i Ishrāq, ed. by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, vol. 3 (Tehran: Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, 1976–­1977), 14. 8.  See Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 87. However, for Davidson, the “intersubjective” mode of knowledge (or third-­person knowledge), whose basis lies in the social and in language, is more primary than subjective knowledge. See Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, 3–­12, 40–­49, 85–­90, 205–­215.

The View from and beyond the “I”  63

known, while on the other hand, for something to be known it must be an “object”—­which leads to the paradox that while everything is known through the self, the self itself remains forever unknown (since the self or the subject can never be an object).9 There are three issues at stake here. First, self-­knowledge is the primary building block of all other knowledge, since everything is known from the perspective of a given self in a community of intersubjective selves, which is to say that without there being a knower, nothing would be known.10 Second, any act of cognition comprises both the subject and the object poles that must be distinct from each other for there to be a judgment. Third, self-­knowledge is the gateway to knowledge of everything else. That is, without possessing a basic sense of self-­identification that “I am me,” we may not attribute knowledge statements to the self (see below). Before we proceed further, let me also clarify the terms “subject” and “object” to avoid any unnecessary misunderstanding. As noted earlier, the term “subject” can mean either (1) the agent who is the source of thought and change in the world, or (2) the agent as subjected to rules and practices set up by regimes of power. However, the term may also refer to the self which can self-­consciously direct its gaze at anything other than itself, thereby entering into an epistemic relationship with various objects of cognition. Now just as the subject may direct her attention to or fix her gaze on external entities we call “objects,” she may likewise turn her attention inward and take herself as the object of consciousness, which means the term “object” includes not only physical objects, but also mental and psychic objects including images, dreams, thoughts, emotions, memories, etc., that belong to a subject. Mait Edey explains the subject-­ object distinction succinctly by saying that regardless of the ontological status of these terms, “Any time you are aware of some object, or attend to some object, you won’t have any trouble distinguishing it from yourself. That is, you’re likely to know, immediately, without having to stop   9.  For a different formulation of this paradox, specifically in the work of the Indian philosopher A. C. Mukerji, see Anand J. Vaidya, “The Paradox of Egocentricity,” Sophia 58, no. 1 (2019): 25–­30. 10.  This is not to say that the conditions of cognition do not play any roles. While the conditions of cognition may precede the knowing subject ontologically, they are coextensive with the subject phenomenologically. In any event, a detailed inquiry into the conditions of knowledge will take us too far afield, although one should note that they have been discussed by many non-­Western philosophers such as Gaṅgeśa (fl. fourteenth century) and Mullā Ṣadrā.

64  Sculpting the Self

and think it over, or having to collect any evidence, which is you and which is the object.”11 Coming back to the paradox of self-­knowledge, one may now say that in the act of cognition, the knowing subject stands for the performative “I” (i.e., the self-­conscious agent who is performing the act of cognition), which is established by the very nature of its epistemic authority to act or attend, and not to be acted or attended upon.12 This state of the performative “I” can also be called pure first-­person subjectivity, since nothing other than the “I” can participate in the realm of its epistemic acts. So, any such states that have the feature “I . . .” mean just the bare “I,” nothing beyond that. It follows from the previous statement that everything else can be considered as an “it” in relation to the “I,” including even the representation of the “I” itself by itself, since it is a representation. With this premise in mind, if I now say “I know myself,” it would imply “I” know “it,” since “myself” in this case is a representation of my “I.” Thus, I can deduce from the previous that the “it” in “I know it” is something external to me, hence an object, which means “it” cannot be “myself,” which then leads to: I know myself = I know it = I know “not myself” (since “it” = not myself). In all this, the statement “I know myself” implies “I do not know myself,” which is detrimental to any meaning-­making acts. However, such an absurdity would not occur in the case of external objects, in which the “I-­it” relationship remains meaningful. From another point of view, consider the statement “X is Y,” which boils down to saying the subject “P” cognizes the proposition “Q” that “X is Y” (from the paradox, we learned that the subject must be assumed if we are to have knowledge). That is, from the first-­personal standpoint, I know (correctly or incorrectly) that the statement “X is Y” holds, which, however, implies that I know myself a priori and am aware of myself as being an epistemic agent because I attribute the “knowledge of X and Y” to myself. In other words, the “I” which has the minimum self-­knowledge in the sense of bare self-­consciousness affirms some proposition. Now consider the situation where the “I” does not know itself (i.e., does not possess the minimum self-­knowledge necessary to affirm something) and yet goes 11.  See Mait Edey, “Subject and Object,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 4, no. 5/6 (1997): 526–­531; online version (slightly different) at http://www.imprint. co.uk/online/edey.html. 12.  This argument owes its impetus to Yazdī’s book on epistemology in Islamic philosophy. See Mahdī Hāʾirī Yazdī, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy: Knowledge by Presence (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 75ff.

The View from and beyond the “I”  65

on to say “I know X.” This will lead to “I know X” but at the same time I do not know “who” knows “X,” since the “I” does not know itself. The absurdity of such a conclusion is self-­evident, which implies that one has to presuppose self-­knowledge or self-­consciousness as the primary condition for making any meaningful statement about reality, including the self. However, the paradox of self-­knowledge, as stated above, makes it impossible to reconcile the subject-­object duality in relation to the self—­ and by implication, to the world—­since the minimum, foundational self-­ knowledge is the prerequisite for all knowledge. To see this concretely, let us recall the proposition of self-­judgment “I know myself,” which means I know “it” (since “myself” is objectivized here and is a representation in relation to the “I”). Now, in order to safeguard communication and any meaningful scientific or philosophical conversation, we need to be able to show that the “I” in the above proposition is identical with the “it.” But how might one do so? Through reflection or introspection? Might there be a third way? In what follows, I will consequently explore and engage philosophers from the Islamic, Western, and Indian traditions to come to terms with the paradox of self-­knowledge. It was not perhaps until Avicenna (and Suhrawardī after him) that the question of how self-­knowledge is possible at all was addressed in a systematic manner in Islamic philosophy. Although Avicenna is read in some circles as being a forerunner of Cartesianism and a proponent of substance dualism because of his sharp distinction between the body and the soul as being two different substances, in reality, Avicenna’s philosophy of self is much more nuanced in that it begins with a concept of the self that must be phenomenologically discerned at the level of non-­reflective, background awareness preceding any conscious action, perception, or reflection.13 This means consciousness and self-­knowledge precede any third personal psycho-­physiological descriptions involving various external and internal senses. In other words, consciousness is not explicable on the basis of the self’s bio-­physiological activities alone. Suhrawardī, the founder of Illuminationist philosophy (one of the schools of Islamic philosophy which is based on the ontology of light), like Avicenna, stresses the significance of phenomenological approach when it comes to investigating the basic nature of the human self.14 The 13.  For a detailed analysis of Avicenna’s account of consciousness, see Kaukua, Self-­Awareness in Islamic Philosophy, 30–­100. 14.  See Shihāb al-­Dīn Suhrawardī, Majmūʿah-­yi muṣannafāt-­i Shaykh-­i Ishrāq, passim. Exact references are given below.

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first argument that can be reconstructed from Suhrawardī’s musings on self-­knowledge is what I call the “negative self-­knowledge view” or NSV. Broadly, the NSV shows what the self is not and how you cannot have the most basic, foundational type of self-­knowledge through a representation or mental form. At bottom, Suhrawardī argues that the way one has knowledge of one’s self or one’s “I” cannot be through a representation or a mental form because the representation always presents itself as an “it” (hiya) in relation to the “I.” In other words, my representation of myself is something other than my self, precisely because it is a representation in relation to my “I.” However, as noted earlier, this situation does not arise as far external objects are concerned. Suhrawardī says: The self-­subsistent, self-­conscious thing does not apprehend its essence by an image of its essence in its essence. If its knowledge is by an image and if the image of its self is not the self itself, the image of the self would be an “it” in relation to the self. In that case, that which was apprehended would be an image. Thus, it follows that while the apprehension of its self is precisely its apprehension of what it is itself, its apprehension of its essence would also be the apprehension of what it is itself, its apprehension of its essence would also be the apprehension of something else—­which is absurd. This is not the case with external objects, since the image and its object are each an “it.”15 Another way to argue about why knowledge of the self cannot be attained through a representation is to say that one either knows that the representation is identical to one’s self or one does not. However, if one says that one does not know oneself, it implies a contradiction because it is still a form of cognition, and hence implies knowledge. So, this is ruled out. If, on the other hand, one knows that one’s representation is identical to oneself, then one knows that it is identical to oneself. However, the twist in the argument, according to Suhrawardī, lies in second-­order awareness16 because “I come to know that my ‘I’ is identical with its representation,” i.e., I know that “the I is indistinguishable from its representation,” which is enough to 15.  Shihāb al-­Dīn Suhrawardī, The Philosophy of Illumination (Ḥikmat al-­ ishrāq), ed. and trans. by John Walbridge and Hossein Ziai (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1999), 85. 16.  In other words, the awareness whereby we reflect on our conscious activities.

The View from and beyond the “I”  67

show that the “I” is other than its representation. Suhrawardī’s argument is presented below: Know that when you know yourself, you do not do so because of a form of thou-­in-­thou, because knowing your thou-­ness by a representation can be in only two ways: either you know that the representation of your thou-­ness is equal to thou or you do not. If you do not know that the representation is the same as your thou-­ness, then you would not know your self, while we are here assuming that you do know it. If you do know that representation of your thou-­ ness is equal to thou, then you would have known yourself with the representation of your thou-­ness so as to know that it is equal to your thou. Therefore, your knowledge of yourself is not through representation. It can only be that your self is a self-­subsistent entity, free from corporeality and always self-­conscious.17 Likewise, in his Asfār, Mullā Ṣadrā argues that the most basic form of “self-­cognition” is always characterized by what can be called the argument from the “particularity of I-­experience” or PI-­ex. According to PI-­ex, the self or the “I” can be ascertained through its particular, subjective feel. That is to say, if I were to know myself through a representation, then that representation, insofar as it is a mental concept, has to be a “universal” (kullī) that does not individuate (universals such as the human can be predicated of several individuals at the same time), whereas my knowledge of myself as being a “me” is always particular and has the character of “for-­ me-­only-­ness.”18 In other words, my knowledge of myself has the feel that it is only me who is the subject of this particular experience; and such an experience, for reason of its particularity, will not be applicable to another self. Ṣadrā writes: When a human comes back to his self and feels his inner reality, he sometimes becomes unaware of all universal concepts, even the notion of being a substance or a person or the one govern17.  Shihāb al-­Dīn Suhrawardī, The Book of Radiance: Partow Nāma, trans. by Hossein Ziai (Costa Mesa, CA: Costa Mesa, 1998), 3, translation modified. 18.  For some contrasting views on “what-­it-­is-­like-­ness,” see Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83 (1974): 435–­450; and P. M. S. Hacker, “Is There Anything It Is like to be a Bat?” Philosophy 77, no. 300 (2002): 157–­174.

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ing the body. When I attend to my self I only perceive the being which perceives itself in a particular way (yudriku nafsahā ʿalā wajh al-­juzʾiyya). Whatever is other than that particular identity to which I refer by “I” is outside of myself, including even the very concept of “I,” the concept of existence, the concept of the perceiver itself, the concept of the one governing the body or the self, and so forth. All of these consist of types of universal knowledge, and each one of them is indicated by an “it,” whereas I refer to myself as an “I.”19 In this very important passage, Ṣadrā puts forward the first-­personal character of the self’s subjectivity, which can only be experienced by a particular “I.” That is to say, when the self turns its gaze inward and attends to itself, it has a subjective experience of what-­it-­is-­like-­to-­be-­itself, which is non-­universal and which excludes all other “I’s.” In other words, the self can think of the quiddity of human, i.e. humanness, to identify itself, or other universals such as substance, person, or even the very concept of “I” (which is a universal as a concept) to refer to itself, but in such cases it would be mediated universal knowledge, and as such, would fail to refer because each “I” experiences itself as a concrete and particular “I.”20 Hence, even the concept of “I” would be an “it” in relation the particular “I,” or the owner of a given subjectivity. The analysis of PI-­ex thus shows that there is a crucial difference between having knowledge of oneself from the first-­person versus the third-­person view, since having knowledge of the “I” as a concept is still within the bounds of representation, which is different from experiencing oneself as oneself. Yet, one may ponder whether or not the “I” that is experienced still appears as an object to the “I” that experiences it. If so, then the paradox of self-­knowledge remains unre19.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 50–­51, 3: 315. Cf. Avicenna, al-­Ishārāt wa-­tanbīhāt, li-­ Abī ʻAlī Ibn Sīnā maʿa sharḥ Naṣīr al-­Dīn al-­Ṭūsī, ed. by Sulaymān Dunyā (Cairo: Dār al-­Maʿārif, 1957–­). 2: 343–­345; and Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-­ishrāq, 85–­86. 20.  One can point to every quiddity as an “it.” But to the reality of the self one can only point by the indexical “I,” which implies that the self’s reality is without a quiddity. However, this does not mean the self’s existence must be an intellectual existence. A huge number of studies exists in analytic philosophy concerning the true reference of the “I.” See, e.g., G. E. M. Anscombe, “The First Person,” in Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, vol. 2 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 2: 21–­36; Sydney Shoemaker, “Self-­Reference and Self-­Awareness,” The Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 561–­563; and Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference, ed. by John McDowell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), passim. The referentiality of the “I” will be discussed further in the next chapter.

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solved, since the subject or the “I” cannot be an object. It can, of course, be known as an object, but in that case knowledge of the “I” would be through a representation, and we would be back to square one. The difficulty can be better formulated in the following:



1. When I attend to my self, I am performing an act of “introspection” on my self. 2. This already implies an objectivation of the self, which can be called the “introspected self.” 3. Let this “introspected self” be Ө and the “self” doing the introspection be Ф (the real self). 4. Now, in order to have self-­knowledge, there must be a complete identity between Ф and Ө. 5. But how might one ascertain this identity? 6. Should I try to ascertain it through a further introspection? If I do this, I will then have Ө1, and then the challenge would be to affirm the identity between Ө1 and Ф. But then in order to affirm this identity, I will need to carry out yet a further act of introspection, and ad infinitum. 7. So, the only way to avoid this infinite regress would be to assert that I am already acquainted with my self in some a priori, non-­ objectifying fashion, which is existentially identical with the very being of the reality of my self. In other words, I know my self immediately through my consciousness that is the very nature of the self because the essence of my self at its most basic level is this very consciousness.

If I am right about the argument above, we cannot establish foundational self-­knowledge through introspection in order to resolve the paradox of self-­knowledge. At this point, one might think of reflection as being a solution to this conundrum, which, however, is countered in the argument below: How should the reflective subject be able to know that it has itself as an object? Obviously only by knowing that it is identical with its object. But it is impossible to ascribe this knowledge to reflection and to ground it in reflection. The act of reflection presupposes that the self already knows itself, in order to know that that which it knows when it takes itself as an object is indeed identical with the one that accomplishes the act of reflective thinking. The theory that

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tries to make the origin of self-­awareness comprehensible through reflection ends necessarily in a circle that presupposes the knowledge it wants to explain.21 That is to say, in order for me to identify myself as myself, I need to accept something true of it that I already know to be true of myself, and the only way to avoid circularity is to grant that my self possesses a prior non-­ objectifying self-­acquaintance with itself that precedes any reflective acts. So, we need arguments that can be offered in support of what can be called the “non-­reflective self-­knowledge view” (NRSV). Broadly, the NRSV shows why the self cannot be known through introspection or reflection.22 In particular, the NRSV intends to show how self-­consciousness and reflexivity are conditioned by non-­reflective consciousness, which is the ground of reflective consciousness. Non-­reflective Self-­Knowledge To analyze non-­reflective self-­knowledge,23 let me start off with a passage from Avicenna’s Ishārāt wa-­l-­tanbīhāt (Remarks and Admonitions) that provides initial clues as to how non-­objectifying self-­knowledge is prior to any human activities, including elementary perceptions: Return to your self and reflect. If you are healthy, or rather in some states of yours other than health such that you discern a thing accu21.  Konrad Cramer, ‘“Erlebnis.’ Thesen zu Hegels Theorie des Selbstbewußtseins mit Rücksicht auf die Aporien eines Grundbegriffs nachhegelscher Philosophie,” in Hans Georg Gadamer, ed., Stuttgarter Hegel-­Tage 1970 (Bonn: Bouvier, 1974), 563; cited in Dan Zahavi, Collective Intentionality and Plural Pre-­Reflective Self-­Awareness, forthcoming, 2. 22.  I do not mean to deny that no knowledge of the self is possible through introspection or reflection, since self-­knowledge comes in degrees. For a wide-­ranging study on self-­knowledge, including introspection, that combines perspectives from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience, see Alvin Goldman, Simulating Minds: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Mindreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3ff. 23.  In this study, I use “awareness” and “consciousness” interchangeably. Following the principle of Ockham’s razor, I also make no particular distinction between “self-­awareness” and “self-­consciousness.” This is to avoid an unnecessary proliferation of technical terms, although some writers do make a distinction between these terms. But in my rendering, “consciousness” is to be distinguished from “self-­consciousness.”

The View from and beyond the “I”  71

rately, do you ignore the existence of yourself and not affirm it? To me this [ignoring and not affirming] does not befit one who has intellectual vision. One’s self does not escape even the one asleep in his sleep and the intoxicated in his intoxication, even though its representation to oneself is not fixed in memory.24 In the above, Avicenna argues that one never ceases to be aware of oneself, even during sleep or in a state of drunkenness (a thread which Suhrawardī elaborates further, as we shall see shortly) because any human action, conscious or subconscious, presupposes the existence of a background self or subject that must be there to experience it, e.g., to experience the state of intoxication. Building on Avicenna’s insights, Suhrawardī argues that our awareness of ourselves is never-­interrupting, even when we are not reflectively aware of ourselves. This means I can’t be absent from my self because my reality is ever-­present to myself through the uninterrupted self-­awareness that is indistinguishable from my “mineness.” Suhrawardī writes: Know that you are never absent from your self and never unaware of it. Even though you may be in a state of wild intoxication, and forget yourself and become unaware of your limbs, yet you know that you exist and your self too exists . . . every now and then your flesh and skin changes but your “thou-­ness” does not. In like manner, the knowledge of your parts, limbs, heart, brain, and whatever is inside can only be obtained through dissection, without which you are hardly aware of their states. However, you become aware of yourself through self-­perception. This shows that your reality lies beyond your bodily organs and that your thou-­ness cannot be found in your body. Your self cannot be found in something of which you are sometimes aware and sometimes forgetful. Know that what is indicated by your “self” is called “I,” and whatever lies in the material world belongs to the realm of “it.” And whatever is indicated by “it” can be either universal or particular, since you dissociated your self from it by your “I-­ness.”25

24.  Avicenna, Ishārāt, 2: 343–­345, trans. by Shams C. Inati, modified in Ibn Sina’s Remarks and Admonitions: Physics and Metaphysics: An Analysis and Annotated Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 94. 25.  Suhrawardī, Bustān al-­qulūb, in Majmūʿah-­yi muṣannafāt-­i Shaykh-­i Ishrāq, 3: 363–­364.

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Several points can be noted from the above. In the first part of the passage, Suhrawardī refers to the “never-­absent awareness” of the self. At first blush, his statement that even in a state of intoxication where one forgets one’s ordinary self, one is not really absent from oneself, may strike us as rather strange, since it is a commonplace that one’s consciousness does seem to get cloudy in those moments. However, the argument starts to make much sense as soon as we discern the phenomenological differences that exist between various kinds of actions. For instance, when my eyes focus very attentively on the computer screen in front of me, there are three components that can be analyzed distinctly from one another: (1) the subject (my eyes alongside my consciousness), (2) the object (the screen), and (3) the experience of seeing. Now, under normal circumstances when we operate with our ordinary awareness, we can always identify these components as being distinct from one another. However, what happens when my eyes are too focused on the screen because I have just seen something extremely interesting? Immediately after having that kind of experience we come to a momentary realization that “It seems as though for a few moments I lost myself in that experience, or as though ‘I’ was not there for a while!” But can it really be granted that “I was not there” while the “act of seeing” took place? Can there be an act without presupposing a bearer of that act, i.e., a subject? If the obvious answer is “no,” how else might one explain the fact that there are indeed those moments, e.g., being completely absorbed in something when one seems to lose one’s awareness? One would explain such phenomena by asserting that in the absorbed or focused moments the “subject of experience” and the “experience” itself are not ontologically distinct, giving one the impression that the subject or the underlying consciousness somehow disappeared from the scene, which cannot be the case because of its ontological impossibility. That is to say, even when one is intoxicated, there is a background awareness operative in those moments, even though the intoxicated person may not be aware of that awareness. This is because without this background consciousness or self-­knowledge it makes little sense to say that “there is the experience or the phenomenon of intoxication, while there was no one (i.e., subject) to experience it!” With this now established, Suhrawardī can say that one’s awareness of oneself is continuous and unceasing. However, one may still point out that our ordinary experience of first-­order and second-­order awareness is never uninterrupted, and Suhrawardī must be aware of this commonplace observation. Thus, the background consciousness to which he refers must be non-­reflective,

The View from and beyond the “I”  73

i.e., one that does not involve conscious reflection.26 Suhrawardī is now in a position to argue that our awareness of the various parts of our body is hardly continuous or unmediated. But this is not so with regard to our self about which we have a direct knowledge (as proved earlier). This also shows that the reality of our self must be nonphysical. Finally, like Ṣadrā, Suhrawardī also identifies the self with the first-­personal indexical “I.” The same argument, with some modification, is also presented in his Hayākil al-­nūr (The Temples of Light): Know that you are never unaware of your self, while there is no part in your body of which you remain constantly aware sometimes or the other. However, you never forget yourself. And since knowing anything depends on knowing its parts, if you do not know the particular you cannot know the universal. So, if your “thou-­ness” (i.e., selfhood) belonged to the body or parts of it, you would not have known it at the time [when you forget your body]. Therefore, 26.  A number of modern philosophers have developed the concept of “pre-­ reflective awareness” to talk about what I have been calling “non-­reflective self-­ knowledge,” albeit via a different route than the one Suhrawardī pursued. I have reasons for using the term “non-­reflective” (which will become clearer as we proceed with our inquiry), even though this type of self-­knowledge is not always prior to reflection, as the instances of “pure awareness events” demonstrate. Also, although some recent philosophers (e.g., the early Sartre) extract a non-­egological concept of the self from the phenomenon of pre-­reflective awareness, this is not the case with Suhrawardī or other Islamic philosophers. On the non-­egological self, see Aron Gurwitsch, “A Non-­Egological Conception of Consciousness,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1, no. 3 (1941): 325–­338; Jean-­Paul Sartre, La transcendance de l’ego (Paris: Vrin, 1936); and Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, trans. by F. Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: The Noonday Press, 1957), 67ff. Many other phenomenologists, including Husserl, Stein, Heidegger, and Merleau-­Ponty, defended Sartre’s view. For a comprehensive discussion, see Dan Zahavi, Self-­Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 14ff. Apart from phenomenology, similar ideas can be found in the work of a group of German philosophers known as the “Heidelberg School,” comprising Dieter Henrich, Konrad Cramer, Ulrich Pothast, and Manfred Frank. For more information, see Dan Zahavi, “The Heidelberg School and the Limits of Reflection,” in Consciousness: Studies in The History Of Philosophy of Mind, ed. by Sara Heinämaa et al. (Springer, Dordrecht, 2007), 267ff. Recently, analytic philosophers of mind have defended comparable ideas by advocating a type of neo-­Brentanian self-­representationalism. See, e.g., Uriah Kriegel, “Consciousness and Self-­Consciousness,” Monist 87, no. 2 (2004): 182–­205.

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your “thou-­ness” is neither this body, nor some of its parts; rather it is beyond all these.27 Although Suhrawardī’s arguments go a considerable way to establish the validity of the NRSV, its full-­blown expression is encountered in Mullā Ṣadrā’s philosophy. To take stock of things so far: I have been arguing against reflection and introspection as satisfactory responses to the paradox of self-­knowledge, since any reflective statements about the self presuppose the existence of a cognizing subject that is able to make such statements. This can be put in the form of the following question: How is self-­identification that escapes the paradox of self-­knowledge possible? Even though this way of putting things rings familiar with the Cartesian inquiry into the cogito, it will be seen by the end of this section that the Ṣadrian response to this question is diametrically opposed to Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum. Briefly, in his Discourse on the Method, “Second Meditation,” Descartes famously claims “I think (or, am thinking), therefore I exist” in order to affirm both the infallibility of “I am thinking” and the infallibility of “I exist” (premised on the infallibility of “I am thinking”). Much ink has been spilled over the centuries discussing the soundness of Descartes’ claim. Kant, for example, criticizes Descartes’ cogito by arguing that one’s consciousness of one’s own thinking fails to tell one anything at all about what one is, except for the fact that one (the self currently engaged in thinking “I think”) thinks.28 I will deal with Kant’s rebuttal in the following sections; but for now, I will analyze Mullā Ṣadrā’s response to the question of how foundational self-­ knowledge is possible at all.29 Ṣadrā writes: 27.  Suhrawardī, Hayākil al-­nūr, in Majmūʿah-­yi muṣannafāt-­i Shaykh-­i Ishrāq, 3: 85. 28.  For a sophisticated modern analysis of Kant’s and other philosophers’ take on the cogito, see Béatrice Longuenesse, I, Me, Mine: Back to Kant, and Back Again (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 73–­95. For a wide-­ranging understanding of Descartes’ claim and various controversies surrounding it, see Jerome Katz, “Descartes’ Cogito,” in Demonstratives, ed. by Palle Yourgrau (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 154–­181; and Jean-­Claude Pariente, “La Première personne et sa fonction dans le Cogito,” in Le Langage à l’œuvre (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2002), 89–­113. For Descartes’ own view, see both René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, trans. by Robert Stoothof, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 [1637]), 1: 111–­151; and Principles of Philosophy, trans. by John Cottingham, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985 [1644]), 1: 177–­291. 29.  It should be noted that Ṣadrā is not concerned here with those aspects of self-­

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A thing’s perception of itself is identical with the thing itself, and its essence possesses continuous awareness of itself. Its continuous self-­awareness is proven when humans attend to their mental states and find therein that their self-­perception is contingent upon the [existential] continuity of their self (dāʾim bi-­dawām al-­dhāt). . . . All perceptual acts presuppose a prior self-­knowledge (ʿilmihi bi-­ dhātihi). So, it is evident that humans’ self-­knowledge and their selves precede all other knowledge, and that [self-­knowledge] is always present to them without a break.30 That is to say, my perception of myself is identical with my “I-­ness,” or else there will be a misidentification. But how do I know that I am that “I” which is perceiving itself now? Is it possible to be certain of the “I” that is currently perceiving itself through self-­perception? Perhaps it can be argued that I have an immediate awareness or experience of my self as me which is simply indubitable. Nonetheless, one may still wonder if stronger arguments can be provided. So Ṣadrā begins with the phenomenological premise that our awareness of our self is continuous and never-­interrupting, which is established by Suhrawardī’s non-­reflective consciousness. Ṣadrā then goes on to argue that such a continuous awareness is proven when we reflect on the act of self-­perception, which shows that such an act is contingent upon the continuity of self-­awareness. This is because any perceptual act already presupposes a prior knowledge of the self that is the subject of such an act. Ṣadrā explains further: It is wrong to say that “I can argue for the knowledge of my self on the basis of my actions, since my knowledge of myself is mediated through my actions.”31 Here we come to the focal point of his argument: self-­knowledge or the fact that I know that I am “me,” i.e., the subject that has the minimum knowledge of itself as itself, is prior to self-­perception. That is why he forcefully asserts that one cannot have knowledge of one’s self as a bare “I” by means of one’s actions: knowledge that are contingent on external factors such as one’s linguistic or socio-­ religious identity. Rather, he is probing the most basic form of self-­knowledge that can establish the self’s identity as a particular “I.” 30.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 3: 505. 31.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 3: 505. Cf. Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Shawāhid al-­rubūbiyya fī manāhij al-­sulūkiyya, ed. by Muḥaqqiq Dāmād (Tehran: Bunyād-­i Ḥikmat-­i Islāmi-­yi Ṣadrā, 2003), 254.

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It is as though I were to argue for the existence of my self on the basis of actions simpliciter (al-­fiʿl al-­muṭlaq) or on the basis of actions that emanate from me. If I were to argue for the existence of my self on the basis of actions [simpliciter], it would so happen that an unspecified action requires nothing but an unspecified agent. It thus affirms only an unspecified agent, and not a specific agent which is me. Indeed, if I were to argue for the existence of my self on the basis of my own actions, it would not be possible for me to know my action, except after having knowledge of my self. And if I did not know myself except after knowing myself, it would result in a vicious circle, which is inadmissible. This shows that humans know themselves through themselves (i.e. know themselves directly) without the mediation of their actions.32 In other words, no phenomenal states of mind, even though they may be in the form of my “I,” can bear testimony to the existence of my self as an “I.” This is because any phenomenal states or mental events that the self ascribes to itself already presuppose an underlying awareness of the self. For this reason, Ṣadrā says that even instinctive actions such as quickly withdrawing from something too hot or too cold bear witness to an underlying awareness of the self which is identical with one’s “I-­ness.” That is to say, it is incorrect to infer my self from my action, since my action already presupposes knowing my self, i.e., insofar as the action is my action. Similarly, it would be wrong to argue for the knowledge of my self on the basis of any unspecified action such as thinking, believing, or even doubting, because they are not self-­subsisting phenomena, and so presuppose an underlying subject to which they occur. Another way to explain Ṣadrā’s argument would be to say that if knowledge of my action functions as a cause of my knowledge of myself, it will lead to circularity because knowledge of my self is already implied in and serves as the cause of the knowledge of my very action. This is so because the moment I try to infer existence or knowledge of my self through a perceptual act such as doubting, I notice that it would not be possible for me to know my act of doubting, except after having knowledge of my self. And if I did not know myself except after knowing myself, it would result in a vicious circle. So, no matter how I try to infer my knowledge of myself though thinking, it is bound to fail, since such performative actions already presuppose an underlying subject that makes thinking possible first. The only way to avoid this 32.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 3: 505. Cf. Avicenna, Ishārāt, 3: 347–­348, for a preliminary sketch of this argument.

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vicious circle would be to assert that I am already acquainted with my self in some a priori fashion, which is existentially identical with the very being of the reality of my self. In other words, I know my self directly through my consciousness that is the very nature of the self because the essence of my self at its most basic level is this very consciousness. If this is granted then one does not need to perform perceptual acts such as doubting in order to infer self-­knowledge. We can see that Ṣadrā’s view is opposed to that of Descartes33 because, for Ṣadrā, it is on the basis of the reality of the self which is present to itself that one is able to ascribe perceptual acts to it, and not the other way round, i.e., inferring knowledge or the reality of the self on the basis of actions such as thinking.34 There is an intriguing parallel between Ṣadrā’s arguments above and a contemporary reflection on the topic: The reason one is not presented to oneself “as an object” in self-­ awareness is that self-­awareness is not perceptual awareness, i.e., is not a sort of awareness in which objects are presented. . . . But it is worth noting that if one were aware of oneself as an object in such cases (as one is in fact aware of oneself as an object when one sees oneself in a mirror), this would not help to explain one’s self-­ knowledge. For awareness that the presented object was φ, would not tell one that one was oneself φ, unless one had identified the object as oneself; and one could not do this unless one already had some self-­knowledge, namely the knowledge that one is the unique possessor of whatever set of properties of the presented object one took to show it to be oneself. Perceptual self-­knowledge presupposes non-­perceptual self-­knowledge, so not all self-­knowledge can be perceptual.35 33.  This is contrary to Yazdī’s view that Ṣadrā anticipates Descartes’s cogito. Cf. Mahdī Hāʾirī Yazdī, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy, 55. 34.  One finds a similar line of argument in Suhrawardī’s al-­Talwīḥāt, in which he argues that one’s awareness of the self is nothing other than itself. Moreover, he asserts that one knows the self by the self. This is because even the concept of the “I,” qua concept, is a universal, and as such, is of no help in affirming self-­ knowledge. He further maintains that one knows the self as a particular “I” or simply oneself in such a way that one’s “I” refuses to be shared by other selves. So, the reality of one’s selfhood is a unity of self-­knowledge, the self-­knowing subject, and the self-­knowing object. See Suhrawardī, al-­Talwīḥāt, in Majmūʿah-­yi muṣannafāt-­i Shaykh-­i Ishrāq, 1: 70–­74, 116. 35.  Sydney Shoemaker, “Personal Identity: A Materialist’s Account,” in Shoemaker and Swinburne, eds., Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 105.

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For Shoemaker, this is also true of self-­knowledge obtained through introspection. This is because even though, through introspection, one is able to claim exclusive private knowledge of oneself (since no other self can share this private experience of my self), it will be insufficient to establish foundational self-­knowledge, since one will still be unable to identify an introspected self as oneself by the fact that it is introspectively (still a mental action) observed by one, unless one knows it is the object of one’s introspection, i.e., unless one knows that it is in fact one that undertakes this introspection. But this knowledge cannot itself be based on identification if one is to avoid an infinite regress.36 As a result, it is impossible to account for foundational self-­knowledge in terms of a successful object-­identification, which means one must consider the validity of non-­objectifying self-­knowledge that conditions any reflective stance. Above all, if we accept the NRSV, the “paradox of self-­knowledge” ceases to be a challenge, since in this particular mode of cognition, the subject-­ object dichotomy—­necessary in every other mode of cognition—­is simply transcended. Self-­Knowledge as Abiding Presence In the previous section I have shown that self-­knowledge is coextensive with all forms of mental actions, including “self-­perception or perceiving that one is perceiving,” since one cannot be said to know anything without having non-­reflective self-­knowledge in the background. However, this knowledge of oneself as oneself without involving the subject-­object dichotomy can also be affirmed through “self-­presence,” which is an indubitable feature of subjectivity. To tease out the concept of self-­presence, we need to first explain a central distinction in Islamic epistemology, namely the distinction between “representational knowledge” (al-­ʿilm al-­ḥuṣūlī al-­irtisāmī) and “presential knowledge” (al-­ʿilm al-­ḥuḍūrī). When knowledge of the self is obtained through its faculties (e.g., the imagination) it is mediated and represented; while when it is obtained as presence it is direct and unmediated (without involving any representation) because the self is identical with its presence. On the surface of it, the distinction between “representational knowledge” and “presential knowledge” might appear not very different from Russell’s distinction between “knowledge by acquaintance” and “knowledge by description,” which states that when 36.  See Shoemaker, “Self-­Reference and Self-­Awareness,” 561–­563.

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the subject has an immediate awareness of something, she is said to have knowledge through direct acquaintance; when her knowledge of things is inferential, mediated, or indirect, it is “knowledge by description.” In Russell’s own words, “We have acquaintance with anything of which we are directly aware, without the intermediary of any process of inference or any knowledge of truths.”37 However, by the end of this section, we will come to see some of the differences between the Russellian distinction and its Islamic counterpart. According to Mullā Ṣadrā, “Knowledge of the self is the same as the self itself,”38 since “it has been shown that the perception of human’s inner identity (huwiyyat al-­insān) and the attaining of his own self (dhātihi) through presential unveiling (bi-­l-­kashf al-­ḥuḍūrī) is different from the perception of his quiddity (māhiyya).”39 Moreover, in presential knowledge, the self experiences its distinct subjectivity directly, which is independent of any conceptual or definitional knowledge that consists of a “genus” (jins) and a “differentia” (faṣl). Hence, Ṣadrā says: [T]he existence of the self (nafs) that is denoted by everyone by the first-­personal pronoun “I” is other than what is denoted by the word “it” (i.e., the mental form of the self). So, it is possible to witness the one while remaining unaware of the other.40 Interestingly, contemporary psychologists such as Stanley Klein also mention “presence” as being the self’s intrinsic feature. Klein first explains the difference between the ontological self, the conscious self, experienced as first-­person subjectivity, whose character as self-­awareness means 37.  See Bertrand Russell, “Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description,” in The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell, ed. by Robert Egner and Lester Denonn (New York: Routledge, 2003), 217; The Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), chapter 5. For an earlier treatment of this, see Russell, “On Denoting,” Mind 14 (1905): 479–­493. 38.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Ajwibat al-­masāʾil al-­kāshāniyya, in Majmūʿah-­yi rasāʾil-­i falsafa-­yi Ṣadr al-­Mutaʾallihīn, ed. by Ḥāmid Isfahānī (Tehran: Intishārāt-­i Ḥikmat, 1990), 127. 39.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Masāʾil al-­kāshāniyya, 128; Asfār, 8: 50–­51. Cf. Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-­ishrāq, in Majmūʿah-­yi muṣannafāt-­i Shaykh-­i Ishrāq, 2: 110–­116. 40.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Shawāhid, 254. Although it takes place in a completely different context, Martin Buber has a fascinating discussion on the “I-­it” relation. For Buber, the “I” of the “I-­It” (Ich-­Es) relation, in contrast to the “I” of “I-­thou” (Ich­Du) relation, is a limited, solitary individual (der Einzige) that takes itself as the subject of experience against a world of objects. For more information, see Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. by Ronald G. Smith (New York: Scribner, 1984), passim.

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it entails subjectivity, which in turn implies that it cannot be treated as an object of analysis; and the epistemological self, the assumed psycho-­ physical basis of self-­experiences, which is multifaceted, comprising functionally independent systems of self-­knowledge, each of which is propertied by features and processes (primarily neuro-­cognitive) of the material body. Following this distinction, Klein affirms that “while the content of awareness can and do vary, the experiencing subject remains present and invariant throughout; and lacking properties, it cannot be directly known. Rather it (i.e., the self) is given as experience and can be sensed by virtue of its felt-­presence.”41 However, unlike Ṣadrā, Klein’s overall aim is to provide neuro-­psychological evidence for the existence of the “ontological” and “epistemological” selves. Moreover, unlike Ṣadrā, Klein’s analysis does not grant that the self is ever-­present to itself, even in dreamless sleep. To shed further light on “self-­presence,” I will now look at the writings of Shāh Walī Allāh. In his late work al-­Tafhīmāt al-­Ilāhiyya, Walī Allāh offers a series of reflections on first-­person subjectivity through the distinction of presential and representational knowledge. While Walī Allāh draws on the writings of other Islamic philosophers to explain self-­knowledge and the basic structure of self-­consciousness, he also presents an original synthesis that links presential knowledge to the Sufi cosmological doctrine of “deployed existence” (al-­wujūd al-­munbasiṭ).42 According to Walī Allāh, “presential knowledge” (al-­ʿilm al-­ḥuḍūrī) is that which “leads [one] to the Necessary” (al-­wājib) and His Attributes, whereas “representational knowledge” (al-­ʿilm al-­ḥuṣūlī) cannot arrive at this forbidden territory except by means of reasoning.43 Following Suhrawardī, Mullā Ṣadrā, and fellow Indian philosophers, Walī Allāh thus distinguishes between presential and representational knowledge, although it must be noted that the general tenor of his philosophical writings lacks the refined systematicity and rigor of the other philosophers. Regardless, Walī Allāh’s main point is that since representational knowledge makes do with “form” (ṣūra) rather than “presence” (ḥuḍūr), it 41.  See Stanley B. Klein, The Two Selves: Their Metaphysical Commitments and Functional Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 77. 42.  The term al-­wujūd al-­munbasiṭ is also called al-­nafas al-­raḥmān (the Breadth of the all-­Compassionate) in the Ibn-­ʿArabian cosmology. It is the reality through which the entire cosmos, including the angels, the heavens, and all other entities, is manifested. See Muhammad Faruque, “Sufism contra Shariah?: Shāh Walī Allāh’s Metaphysics of Waḥdat al-­Wujūd,” Brill Journal of Sufi Studies 5, no. 1 (2016): 49–­51. 43.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 2: 46.

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can only provide a form of the Necessary Being, even though this form may be identical with Its reality. He also draws a connection between self-­knowledge and knowledge of God by saying “whoever knows his self through presential knowledge, knows his Lord through this knowledge (man ʿalima nafsahu bi-­l-­ʿilm al-­ḥuḍūrī faqad ʿalima rabbahu fī dhālika al-­ʿilm), and this is the distinguishing mark between the knower and the ignorant.”44 But what is the nature of this “self-­knowledge” or self-­consciousness in Walī Allāh? The following passage sheds some light on this: When we disembody ourselves (idhā tajarradnā) to our inner self (wijdāninā), we come to know that our substance (jawharinā) is made of intellectual existence (wujūdan ʿaqliyyan). Moreover, we come know to that it is always awake and has presential knowledge (ʿilman ḥuḍūran) of itself, which is similar to its knowing the rational soul through itself (al-­nafs al-­nuṭqiyya bi-­nafsihā).45 Several things can be noted from the above. First, Walī Allāh comes tantalizingly close to Avicenna, Suhrawardī, and Mullā Ṣadrā by mentioning the word tajarrud in its verbal form. If we recall the thought experiment of the “flying human,”46 we would see that the general idea there is to conceive of a disembodied state that would enable the subject or the subject of experience to realize the incorporeality of her “self” or “I.” There is still some controversy as to whether or not the incorporeality of the flying human experiment leads to a “substance-­based” notion of the self.47 Regardless, 44.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 2: 46–­47. 45.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 1: 225. 46.  In this thought experiment, it is suggested that if a human were to come into being in an adult condition but floating in space so that she could not affirm the existence of her body, she could still be certain of her existence as a self. See Avicenna, De anima I.1 (36.49–­37.68); V.7 (162.51–­163.64). 47.  Against the Avicennan inference of the self’s substancehood from its immateriality, Abū al-­Barakāt (d. 1165) [and also, al-­Rāzī (d. 1210)] claims that the connection between the “I” as incorporeal substance and the “I” that one is constantly aware of is not self-­evident. That is, the phenomenon of self-­awareness which Avicenna appeals to, although uncontroversial in itself, does not have sufficient purchase power to answer the question about the proper category and correct metaphysical classification of the self. In other words, no one will feel compelled to commit either to the hylomorphic theory of the soul as the enmattered form of the body or to the dualist notion of the self as an independent entity that acts by means of the body but is immaterial in itself. According to Abū al-­Barakāt, the

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Walī Allāh, unlike Suhrawardī, leans toward a substance-­based view.48 Yet Walī Allāh also makes the claim that through such an act of disembodiment, one comes to know that one’s substance or essence is made of intellectual existence, which might be an explanatory term for “incorporeality” (see below). Next, he asserts that the self in such a state is present to itself and is always awake, which is reminiscent of Suhrawardī’s insight that the self’s presence to itself is never-­interrupted. Finally, Walī Allāh makes his most important claim, which is that the self’s knowledge of itself through presential knowledge is similar to how it knows the rational soul (another term for “self” as mentioned earlier) “through itself” (bi-­nafsihā). This means the self’s knowledge of itself through self-­presence does not involve an intermediary, i.e., self-­knowledge in this case is direct and immediate. This is because knowing the self through another (e.g., a concept or a medium such as a mirror) is assuredly different from knowing itself through itself. In what seems to be his longest rumination concerning self-­knowledge, consciousness, and first-­person subjectivity, Walī Allāh explains: Now you are capable of understanding the transcendent matter. I have perceived it with an authentic mystical unveiling (dhawq) and am surprised that you would deny it. Surely the reason for this is that you are trying to comprehend God through representational knowledge, which is impossible since you can only know Him through presential knowledge. The least you should know is that presential knowledge is pure consciousness (shuʿūr-­i maḥḍ), which is bereft of any relationality. And it is not possible to arrive at this [knowledge] by means of a second-­order knowledge (ʿilm al-­ʿilm) (i.e. representational knowledge). Representational knowledge fails to obtain [pure consciousness], as it consists of a subject and a predicate connected via a judgment. Your way around this [issue] would be to recognize true presential knowledge and empty your heart from the engendered form, which lies at the heart of representational knowledge. This would enable you to grasp your “I,” and to realize where it is going and what lies at its origin. After you have performed such self’s immateriality does not prove anything about its being a material or immaterial substance or a body or an accident in the body. See Kaukua, Self-­Awareness in Islamic Philosophy, 114–­123. 48.  Although Suhrawardī accepts Avicenna’s “flying human” argument, for him, the argument only shows that the self is nonphysical and that it is not “being in another,” not that the self is a substance in the Aristotelian sense. See Yazdī, Principles of Epistemology, 91–­92.

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an act you can then apply representational knowledge to the Real (al-­ḥaqq). We do not doubt that at that time representational knowledge would obtain its objective. All in all, you are capable of directing your attention (tawajjuh) to something devoid of time and space (mujarrad az zamān u makān), about which there is little doubt but regarding which you are still mistaken and confused. But it is not possible that through representational knowledge you can direct your attention to the nonphysical (mujarrad).49 If we piece together all the quoted texts so far (including the one above), we get a holistic picture emerging from them. One can only know God through presential knowledge, since representational knowledge involves a form and relationality, whereas God is beyond any relationality. But one cannot have true knowledge of the “I” based on representational knowledge either, since representational knowledge inevitably involves an engendered form, which becomes a barrier or an intermediary between the “I” as presence/subject and the “I” as a form/concept/object. That is the reason Walī Allāh equates presential knowledge with “pure consciousness” (shuʿūr-­i maḥḍ), which is bereft of any relationality, or the subject-­object dichotomy. After that he asks the reader to recognize presential knowledge and empty the self from the engendered form, which then would enable her to grasp her “I” and its origin. The end result of this exercise would be not only unalloyed self-­knowledge through self-­presence, but also knowledge of the divine, hence his statement that I cited earlier: “Whoever knows his self through presential knowledge, knows his Lord through this knowledge.” More to the point, Walī Allāh shows his penchant for synthesizing ideas across different intellectual traditions, as he seamlessly situates the philosophical concept of presential knowledge in service of the Sufi cosmology of “being” (wujūd) and “manifestation” (tajallī/ẓuhūr). Walī Allāh writes: In the terminology of the folk, the witnessing of “deployed light” (mushāhada al-­nūr al-­munbasiṭ) on the temples of existents is called arcane (al-­khafī). And the light that descends on the self (al-­ nafs) like the light of Moses is called super arcane (al-­akhfā). And presential knowledge which we expressed as “I” is the particular manifestation that the universal soul manifests on it (i.e., the “I”), and it is called the self (wa-­l-­ʿilm al-­ḥuḍūrī alladhī ʿabbarnā ʿanhu 49.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 2: 113–­114. Cf. Walī Allāh, al-­Khayr al-­ kathīr (Maktaba al-­Qāhira, 1974), 55–­57.

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bi-­anā wa-­huwa al-­barza al-­khāṣṣa allatī barazahā al-­nafs al-­kullī summiya bi-­l-­nafs).50 The term al-­nūr al-­munbasiṭ is another technical expression for “deployed existence” or al-­wujūd al-­munbasiṭ.51 Although Sufis in the tradition of Ibn ʿArabī use the expression al-­wujūd al-­munbasiṭ in the context of ontology, Walī Allāh relates this to the self via another innovative move, namely ascribing the reality of al-­wujūd al-­munbasiṭ to the universal soul.52 This allows Walī Allāh to claim that what everyone conceives of as their “I” is a particular manifestation of the universal soul to a given self.53 In the following text, he further suggests that the distinguishing mark of one’s humanness is one’s “immateriality,” the origin of which lies in the realm of Mercy (al-­raḥamūt), which again is another term for al-­wujūd al-­munbasiṭ, now considered from the aspect of its Mercy (incidentally, Ibn ʿArabī uses al-­wujūd al-­munbasiṭ and nafas al-­raḥmān [the breath of the All-­Merciful] interchangeably). Walī Allāh says: Just as that which distinguishes the reality of animals from plants are not colors, shapes or shades, that which distinguishes this human from that human are not colors or other things, as has been mentioned. Rather all of this [distinction] follows from another reality which is nonphysical, and the origin of this is the realm of Mercy (al-­raḥamūt). But the realm of Mercy has several degrees of descent, all of which are its conditionings and determinations. It is from the realm of Mercy that presential knowledge emanates, which is called the “I” [or “self”]. When the human being directs his attention to this subtle center of consciousness or laṭīfa, his presential knowledge is purified and he becomes aware of his “I”. Then he comes to know that his subsistence is submerged in the abode of the Real, and he 50.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 1: 235. 51.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 1: 251. 52.  In Alṭāf al-­quds, Walī Allāh explicitly identifies the universal soul with deployed existence, e.g., “There are others who have passed beyond the universal soul and understood the Pure Self (dhāt-­i baḥt) as the First of the First (awwal al-­ awāʾil), and the universal soul as the first emanation (ṣādir-­i awwal) and deployed being (wujūd-­i munbasiṭ) upon the temples of existents,” while in the Tafhīmāt he says, “Raḥamūt is deployed existence (al-­wujūd al-­munbasiṭ), which is capable receiving all the different forms that exist. It is also one of the names of God.” See Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 155; al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 1: 251. 53.  This does not mean that the phenomenology of the first-­person experience itself is overshadowed by this metaphysical anthropology. Walī Allāh is only using such language to account for the “origin” of all first-­person experiences.

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finds that the “deployed light” pervades the temples of everything (fa-­wajada nūran munbasiṭan ʿalā al-­hayākil kullihā).54 That is, the realm of Mercy descends and manifests in degrees, and the ontological origin of the phenomenal “I” that each individual experiences and whose essence is “presence” is nothing other than this realm of Mercy or deployed existence. The mystical turn of this phenomenological analysis comes full circle when Walī Allāh avers that (see below) the goal of the “gnostic” (ʿārif) is to reach the “apogee of the Divine Self” (dhāt-­i ilahī) by traveling through one’s subtle centers of consciousness or the laṭāʾif, so that at the moment of mystical realization when the divine takes the place of the human self, one comes to see the entire cosmos within oneself through presential knowledge: The perfection of the gnostic surpasses the station of the philosopher’s stone (ḥajar-­i baḥt) at which point the universal soul takes the place of his body and the Pure Self (dhāt-­i baḥt) his self. Then, through presential knowledge he sees the whole cosmos within himself (hama ʿālam rā dar khūd bīnad). 55 Leaving aside cosmological and normative considerations of the self for the time being (I will return to these issues in chapter 6), what appears to be Walī Allāh’s central argument is the following. There is a difference between knowing the self through itself versus knowing it through a medium, e.g., a mirror. That is, similar to the difference between knowing oneself through a mirror image (call it the “mirror view” or MV) and knowing oneself without it, one can assert the difference between knowing the “I” in one’s mental mirror (i.e., imagination, thinking, etc., where the “I” appears as an object) and knowing it directly through self-­presence, since in the latter case the “I” does not exist apart from its presence. The gist of all this is that the MV fails as a theory of self-­knowledge, since it is caught in the “I-­it” distinction mentioned earlier. The corrective, therefore, is to affirm the NRSV along with its complementary perspective of “self-­ presence” that avoids the subject-­object dichotomy.

54.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 1: 233. 55.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 126. Note that this expansive perspective does not negate individual identity: “Now presential knowledge belongs fundamentally to the Divine Essence, so he regards his particular selfhood as something distinct like other forms of selfhood.” Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 126.

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The Varieties of Non-­reflective Self-­Knowledge I will now augment my arguments for “non-­reflective self-­knowledge” by engaging thinkers from different philosophical traditions. Also, if I am right in arguing that self-­knowledge (i.e., foundational self-­knowledge) cannot be attained through reflective or introspective consciousness, then we must take into account another mode of consciousness that is necessarily non-­ reflective and non-­relational, which means it is both pre-­linguistic and pre-­predicative. As such, theories of the self that do not take into account “non-­reflective consciousness” risk ignoring one of the most important features of the self that is also laden with ethical implications, as we shall see in chapters 5 and 6. In what follows, I will explore the varieties of non-­ reflective self-­knowledge in philosophers as diverse as Augustine, Shankara, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger, and Mukerji, in order to bring out the centrality of non-­reflective self-­knowledge in a theory of the self and help the reader apprehend it better. Let me also note that when I will discuss various cross-­cultural texts on this topic, my goal is not to provide an exhaustive interpretation of these texts/philosophers, but to initiate a fruitful conversation that will allow me to better construct my own argument. Although there is no evidence of historical contact between Augustine and the Islamic philosophers such as Suhrawardī and Mullā Ṣadrā, it is remarkable to observe that, like these philosophers, Augustine also affirms non-­reflective self-­knowledge and the self’s continuous self-­presence. While discussing the conundrum of self-­knowledge, Augustine, like Mullā Ṣadrā, argues that the self cannot remain unaware of itself, even though it might think it does not know itself. Augustine writes: But where does it know its own knowing, if it does not know itself? For it knows that it knows other things, but does not know itself; therefore, it also knows what knowing is. How then does that which does not know itself, know itself as knowing something? For it does not know another mind as knowing, but itself. Therefore, it knows itself. Thus, when it seeks to know itself, it already knows that it is seeking itself. Therefore, it already knows itself. Hence, it cannot be altogether ignorant of itself, since it certainly knows itself, insofar as it knows that it does not know itself. But if it does not know that it does not know itself, then it does not seek itself in order to know itself. And, therefore, the very fact that it seeks itself clearly shows

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that it is more known than unknown to itself. For it knows itself as seeking and not knowing, while it seeks to know itself.56 Augustine’s first strategy is to show that the self must have some kind of self-­knowledge even if we suppose that it does not know itself. This is because the self, despite self-­ignorance, knows other things. However, it cannot know anything else without attributing some form of self-­awareness to itself (recall our discussions in the previous sections), hence Augustine’s saying, “How then does that which does not know itself, know itself as knowing something?” Moreover, the fact that it “seeks” to know itself already shows that it knows that it is seeking itself, which means it possesses basic self-­knowledge. Most of all, the very fact that the self knows that “it does not know itself” shows that it has self-­knowledge of some sort. In other words, if the self were absolutely unknown and unknowable, the very idea of “not knowing oneself” would not occur. Augustine’s whole point in discussing this is to show that self-­knowledge cannot be attained, on pain of circularity or regress, through discursive or reflective thinking. Thus, in the passage below, Augustine distinguishes between two primary modes of cognition, namely se nosse and se cogitare, when it comes to self-­knowledge:57 What are we to say, then, about the mind of an infant that is still so small and plunged in so great an ignorance of things that the mind of a man that knows something shudders at the darkness of the infant’s mind? Are we also to believe that it knows itself, but is too intent on those things through which it begins to experience pleasure through the senses of the body, a pleasure that is so much the greater the more unfamiliar it is? That it cannot be ignorant of itself, yet it 56.  Augustine, De Trinitate, in On the Trinity Books 8–­15, trans. by Stephen McKenna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10.3.5; cf. Aurelii Augustini Opera, PL 42 (Turnholti: Brepols, 1954), 10.3.5; also available at http:// www.augustinus.it/latino/trinita/index2.htm. For some relevant secondary literature, see Andrea Nightingale, “The ‘I’ and ‘Not I’ in Augustine’s Confessions,” Arion 23, no. 1 (2015): 55–­78; and Pauliina Remes, “Inwardness and Infinity of Selfhood: From Plotinus to Augustine,” in Ancient Philosophy of the Self, ed. by Pauliina Remes and Juha Sihvola (Dordrecht and London: Springer, 2008), 155–­176. 57.  These terms are left untranslated, as their literal meaning sounds unconventional in English.

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cannot think of itself? Furthermore, we can infer how strongly it is attracted toward those sensible things that are from without from this one fact alone, the greediness with which it looks at a light; thus if someone incautiously or unaware of what might happen places a light at night where an infant is lying down, and at such an angle that from its prostrate position it can turn its eyes to it without being able to turn its neck, the gaze of that infant is not withdrawn from it. Thus we know of some who have even become squint-­eyed as a result, since their eyes, while still tender and soft, retained that form which habit had in some way impressed upon them. So too with the other senses of the body: the souls of children so confine themselves, as it were, by their concentration upon them, insofar as that age permits any concentration at all, that they either intensely abhor or else desire nothing else except that which harms or entices them through the flesh. They have no thought of their inner self, nor can they be admonished to do so; for they do not yet know the signs of an admonition, among which words occupy the principal place, for of these as well as of other things they are absolutely ignorant. But we have already shown in this same book that it is one thing not to know oneself, and another thing not to think of oneself.58 Augustine’s intent is clear in the text quoted above. The mind of an infant cannot have se cogitare or reflective mode of cognition, since that is the feature of an adult mind, which possesses a full-­blown self-­consciousness. However, this does not prevent the infant from manifesting a more foundational and immediate form of knowledge, namely se nosse. Consequently, although the infant does not have the ability to think like an adult, it remains aware of itself. This can be inferred from its being attracted to light and other objects of the senses to which it can attend and upon which it can fix its concentration, despite lacking the discernment to judge the good or bad in them. For this reason, Augustine asserts that it is one thing not to know oneself and quite another not to think of oneself, because even without discursive thinking the self can know itself non-­reflectively. Like Suhrawardī and others, Augustine also seeks to prove the idea of se nosse or non-­reflective mode of cognition through “self-­presence.” He argues that if the self fixes its attention upon itself, it will see that “there never was a time when it did not love itself, and never a time when it did not know itself.”59 58.  Augustine, De Trinitate, 14.5.7. 59.  Augustine, De Trinitate, 10.8.11.

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Commenting on the ethical significance of the Delphic injunction gnothi seauton (Know thyself), Augustine suggests that when it is said to the self “‘Know thyself,’ it knows itself at the very instant in which it understands the word ‘thyself;’ and it knows itself for no other reason than that it is present to itself.”60 From Suhrawardī we learned that this idea of being present to oneself remains constant regardless of whether we are awake or asleep or in a state of intoxication; hence this self-­presence is non-­reflective and one in which the self is incessantly aware of itself. All this is to say that there is a difference between knowing the self discursively, in bit-­by-­bit successive moments as it were, and knowing it immediately, which is prior to reflection and rules of thinking and which, moreover, grounds reflection, since in this mode the self never ceases to be unaware of itself.61 Leaving the Christian-­Platonic world of Augustine and turning to Indian philosophy, and in particular to the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara (fl. eighth century), we find that Shankara and his followers also expound non-­ reflective self-­knowledge from yet another point of view, holding that the self cannot be known as an object. Explaining how self-­knowledge cannot be obtained through objectified knowledge, Shankara writes: [I]t is logically impossible to search for knowledge of knowledge. If knowledge were initially unknown, like the object of knowledge, then we should have to seek knowledge of knowledge, just as we seek knowledge of an object. In the case of an object of knowledge, like a pot, the knower seeks to encompass the object with his knowledge. If this were also the case with knowledge [itself], the knower would seek to encompass every cognition with another cognition. But this would lead to an infinite regress and we do not find this to be the case. Knowledge, therefore, is immediately evident, as also is the knower. Hence no effort has to be made to gain knowledge of the self (ātman).62 60.  Augustine, De Trinitate, 10.9.12. 61.  For an interpretation of some of these texts which does not draw attention to “non-­reflectivity,” see Sorabji, Self, 212–­226. 62.  Shankara, Bhagavad Gītā Bhāṣya, ed. by D. V. Gokhale, Poona 1931, XVIII, 50, in Śaṅkara on the Absolute, vol. I, trans. by A. J. Alston (London: Shanti Sadan, 2004), 124. A wide array of studies exists on Shankara’s philosophy of the self; see, e.g., Richard De Smet, Understanding Śaṅkara: Essays by Richard De Smet, ed. by Ivo Coelho (Delhi: Motilal Banrasidass Publishers, 2013); and Sthaneshwar Timalsina, Consciousness in Indian Philosophy: The Advaita Doctrine of ‘Awareness Only,’ (New York: Routledge, 2009), 16–­33.

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As one might have noticed, what Shankara says in the above is not very different from what we encountered in Mullā Ṣadrā and Augustine. The core argument is that one cannot know the self in the manner of knowing an object, since one’s self, being always a subject, can never be the object of one’s own knowledge. In other words, if we try to know ourselves from the outside or from a third-­person standpoint, we will terminate in an infinite regress. It would be like a hammer trying to hit itself, which is to say that the self, whose very essence is consciousness and subjectivity, can never step outside of itself without also giving up its status as a subject. The above argument is further illuminated in the work of the twentieth-­ century neo-­Advaitin philosopher A. C. Mukerji. Since Mukerji is not very well known outside a limited circle of specialists, I will provide some context to his work first. The universities of late colonial India boasted a large number of prominent academic philosophers. The rich academic life of philosophy was set in a larger context defined in part by the agendas of important public intellectuals who contributed to setting the philosophical discourse that framed and problematized much of Indian philosophical discourse. The public figures who exerted much influence on academic philosophy were Aurobindo Ghosh, Swami Vivekananda, Mohandas Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, and Dayanand Saraswati. It is also important to note that Mukerji, like other philosophers in India at this time, was writing in English. And English had a dual character. On the one hand, it was the international language of philosophy and so the vehicle for interaction in the world of philosophy. On the other hand, it was the language of a colonizing power, and so was politically suspect.63 This is perhaps the reason why many are unwilling to use “Indian philosophy” to describe the writings of these thinkers. Regardless, as one surveys the actual body of writings that were produced in this period (by both Hindus and Muslims), one finds an impressive display of philosophical innovations. For instance, according to Jay Garfield, Mukerji anticipates some aspects of Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and Davidson’s “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”—­two of the most influential articles in the canon of analytic philosophy.64 In his The Nature of Self, Mukerji sets out to defend the Advaita theory 63.  See Jay Garfield and Nalini Bhushan, “Anakul Chandra Mukerji: The Modern Subject,” in Jonardon Ganeri, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Indian Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 750–­751. 64.  Nalini Bhushan and Jay Garfield, eds., Minds without Fear: Philosophy in the Indian Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 255–­257.

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of the self, which is based on the self-­revelatory character of consciousness explained through the term svaprakāśa.65 Mukerji first notes that philosophers use the term “consciousness” in three different senses, namely (1) objectified consciousness that treats consciousness as an object among other objects, (2) mediated consciousness that treats consciousness as a subject which is mediated by objects, and (3) foundational consciousness, which is the unobjectifiable immediate experience of the self or the transcendental ground of all subject-­object experiences.66 As one might expect, Mukerji clashes with the first two definitions of consciousness and aims to defend the third. In his view, both David Hume and the Nyaya school of Indian philosophy fail in their understanding of the self, since they both take it as an object among other objects and proceed to affirm it.67 Once it is assumed, Mukerji continues, that everything, including the self, must be proven as an object of proof in the same sense in which, for instance, the table or the tree is proven, there is no room left for the self not to be taken as one object among other objects, at which point any talk about the self being the unobjectifiable ground of experience would look like a futile attempt to prove what does not exist at all.68 As for “mediated consciousness,” it is not only conditioned by the consciousness of the object, but also by a pure conscious principle which is the ground of even the consciousness of objects. Thus, it would be premature, Mukerji says, to hold that the self comes to existence only when there is an “I-­consciousness” in relation to an external object, since “both common sense and logic demand that the self must exist first, in order that it may become self-­conscious by the knowledge of objects with which it contrasts itself.”69 Moreover, mediated consciousness cannot account for phenomena such as of deep sleep in which there is no object of consciousness, and yet there is an “identity feeling” that the subject of deep sleep (i.e., dreamless sleep) experiences upon waking up. That is, even though there is no object of consciousness in deep sleep, upon waking one remembers that one was the subject of a dreamless sleep, which can only be explained in terms of the continuity of 65.  A. C. Mukerji, The Nature of Self (Allahabad: The Indian Press, 1938), 175–­176. 66.  Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 312–­313. 67.  For a discussion of the Humean self, see chapter 3. For the advaita view that the self can never be an object, see also, Chakravarthi Ram-­Prasad, Indian Philosophy and the Consequences of Knowledge: Themes in Ethics, Metaphysics and Soteriology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 98–­99. 68.  Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 229–­230. 69.  Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 317.

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consciousness (even when there is no object to be conscious of) coupled with autobiographical memory which refers to a combination of episodic memory and autobiographical knowledge.70 This also shows that consciousness is to be distinguished from self-­consciousness, since the latter involves a kind of tension or a subtle duality between self and other as it constantly seeks to affirm a self, while whatever it affirms ends up being an “other” or an object to itself. Consequently, one cannot ascertain knowledge of the self on the basis of reflexivity or states of self-­consciousness, since the self, which is identical with consciousness, is the undefinable and unconditioned principle behind all knowledge and subject-­object experience.71 That is to say, in order to be defined, the self must be brought under a higher genus, and also differentiated from things other than itself belonging to the same genus, which would be to contradict the idea that it is the transcendental ground of all knowable objects.72 Hence, self-­knowledge at its most foundational level is characterized by an absolute immediacy that transcends all objectifiable experiences. The idea of self-­knowledge being non-­reflective at its most foundational level has been eclipsed by modern philosophers such as Descartes, Locke, and Hume, because of their preoccupation with reflexivity, but one sees its reemergence in the phenomenological tradition of Husserl, as hinted earlier. In the text below, Heidegger, for example, explicitly refers to a mode of self-­knowing that precedes reflection: Dasein [the modes of human existence] as existing, is there for itself, even when the “I” does not expressly direct itself to itself in the manner of its own peculiar turning around and turning back, which in phenomenology is called inner perception as contrasted with outer. The self (Selbst) is there for the Dasein itself without reflection and without inner perception, before all reflection. Reflection, in the sense of a turning back, is only a mode of self-­apprehension, but not the mode of primary self-­disclosure.73 70.  For an extended treatment of consciousness in deep sleep, see Arvind Sharma, Sleep as a State of Consciousness in Advaita Vedānta (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 49–­72; and Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being, 231ff. 71.  Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 323. 72.  Mukerji, The Nature of Self, 258. 73.  Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. by Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 159, translation slightly modified; cf. Zunächst müssen wir das eine klar sehen: Das Dasein ist

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Interestingly, like the svaprakāśa (self-­revelatory) theory of consciousness and self in Advaita Vedanta or the Suhrawardīan concept of consciousness being a self-­illuminating light, Heidegger too coins the German phrase primären Selbst-­Erschließung (primary self-­disclosure) to capture the mode of non-­reflective self-­knowledge. For Heidegger, reflection is still a mode of the subject’s self-­understanding, but it is not the primary mode in which the subject (i.e., Dasein) is disclosed to itself. Heidegger’s predecessor, Husserl, also upholds a mode of perception in which consciousness does not appear to itself as an object of judgment. As Husserl puts it: “That an appropriate train of sensations or images is experienced, and is in this sense conscious, does not and cannot mean that this is the object of an act of consciousness, in the sense that a perception, a presentation or a judgement is directed to it.”74 The Kantian Dilemma Notwithstanding what I have been arguing so far, Kant’s epistemology presents a curious twofold challenge to the varieties of non-­reflective self-­ knowledge. On the one hand, it seems to call into question the idea of knowing oneself non-­reflectively or through self-­presence that is immediate and non-­interrupting. On the other, it aims to show that all representations (Vorstellungen) are subject to the synthetic unity of apperception. The implication of the latter, i.e., the synthetic unity of apperception, is that one has to presume a cognizing subject whose self-­consciousness must be able to accompany all the representations, for otherwise something would be represented in the subject which could not be thought of in the first place. However, to unpack Kant’s complex notion of self-­knowledge (Selbsterkenntnis), we will first spend some time reproducing the relevant arguments from his Kritik der reinen Vernunft. existierend ihm selbst da, auch wenn sich das Ich nicht aus-­drücklich auf sich selbst in der Weise einer eigenen Um-­und Rückwendung zu sich selbst richtet, die man in der Phänomenolo-­gie als innere Wahrnehmimg gegenüber der äußeren bezeichnet. Das Selbst ist dem Dasein ihm selbst da, ohne Reflexion und ohne innere Wahrnehmung, vor aller Reflexion. Die Reflexion im Sinne der Rückwendung ist nur ein Modus der Selbster/as-­sung, aber nicht die Weise der primären Selbst-­Erschließung. Martin Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, Gesamtausgabe Band 24 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1989), 226. 74.  Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, I, trans. by J. N. Findlay (New York: Routledge, 2001), 273; cf. Husserliana Band XIX/I Logische Untersuchungen (Boston, MA: Springer, 1984), 165.

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Let it be noted at the outset that in the Kritik, Kant is concerned with perception and the possibility of knowledge, so the disparate remarks that he offers there regarding self-­knowledge and the self should be understood in their proper contexts.75 Broadly, Kantian epistemology asserts that the possibility of experience in general and cognition of objects rest on three subjective sources of cognition, namely sense, imagination, and apperception (self-­consciousness or transcendental consciousness). Here, sense is the a priori appearances in empirical perception, while imagination refers to the association and reproduction of sensible intuitions, and apperception to the empirical consciousness of identity of these reproductive representations.76 Further, Kant makes a distinction between “empirical consciousness” (empirisch Bewußtsein) and apperception by saying that the former is consciousness of oneself and one’s psychological states in the “inner sense” (inner Sinn), while the latter signifies bare consciousness of oneself in which it is the transcendental ground of the sensory manifold. In Kant’s view, cognition is subjected to the unity of apperception that precedes all data of the intuitions, and in relation to which all representations of objects are alone possible. Kant writes: All representations (Vorstellungen) have a necessary relation to a possible empirical consciousness (empirisch Bewußtsein): for if they did not have this, and if it were entirely impossible to become 75.  A full-­blown account of the Kantian theory of the self and self-­knowledge should also incorporate his views presented in treatises such as Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, where he talks about the psychological and moral potential of the self; see Anthropology from A Pragmatic Point of View, ed. and trans. by Robert B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 15ff. But apart from such texts, one can agree with Arthur Melnick that Kant’s self, at least in the Kritik, is presented as an “intelligence-­in-­act,” which, however, is only a partial account. See Arthur Melnick, Kant’s Theory of the Self (New York: Routledge, 2008), 3–­6. For a discussion of alternative views, see Colin Marshall, “Kant’s Metaphysics of the Self,” Philosophers Imprint 10, no. 8 (2010): 9ff. See also footnote 75n. On Kant’s views on self-­knowledge, see the extended analysis by Luca Forgione in Kant and the Problem of Self-­Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 2019). Forgione develops an account according to which the unity of apperception does not presuppose the identity of a real subject, but rather a formal identity based on the representation “I think.” I read Kant differently, as we shall see soon. 76.  Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1956), A115; Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), A115 [References to CPR/KRV are in the standard pagination of the 1st (A) and 2nd (B) editions]. All translations are from Guyer and Wood, trans., Critique of Pure Reason.

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conscious of them, that would be as much as to say that they did not exist at all. All empirical consciousness, however, has a necessary relation to a transcendental consciousness (transzendental Bewußtsein) that precedes all particular experience, namely the consciousness of myself, as original apperception (ursprünglich Apperzeption). It is therefore absolutely necessary that in my cognition all consciousness belongs to one consciousness (of myself). Now here is a synthetic unity of the manifold (of consciousness) that is cognized a priori, and that yields the ground for synthetic propositions concerning pure thinking in exactly the same way that space and time yield such propositions concerning the form of mere intuition. The synthetic proposition that every different empirical consciousness must be combined into a single self-­consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein) is the absolutely first and synthetic principle of our thinking in general. But it should not go unnoticed that the mere representation of I in relation to all others (the collective unity of which it makes possible) is the transcendental consciousness.77 That is, the unity of transcendental consciousness is the necessary condition of all representations, since we are conscious a priori of the thoroughgoing identity of ourselves with regard to all the representations that can ever belong to our cognition. More importantly, the numerical unity of transcendental consciousness (along with the categories) is what grounds the concept of an object in the mind, just as the manifoldness of spacetime grounds intuitions of sensibility.78 In fact, Kant goes so far as to aver that the principle of the unity of transcendental consciousness is the “supreme principle in all of human cognition;” hence it is to this that “one must affix all use of the understanding, even the whole of logic and, after it, transcendental philosophy.”79 From another point of view, Kant employs the expression “I think” to talk about the “unity of apperception” and argues that the cogito (the “I-­think”) must be able to accompany all the representations, for otherwise something would be represented in the subject which could not be thought of in the first place.80 Kant says:

77.  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, footnote to A117 (translation slightly modified). 78.  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A107. 79.  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B134–­135. 80.  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B153–­154.

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The I think (das: Ich denke) must be able to accompany all my representations; for if otherwise something be represented in me that not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me. That representation that can be given prior to all thinking is called intuition. Thus all manifold (Mannigfaltig) of intuition has a necessary relation to the I think in the same subject in which this manifold is to be encountered. But this representation is an act of spontaneity (Spontaneität), i.e., it cannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility (Sinnlichkeit). I call it the pure apperception (rein Apperzeption), in order to distinguish it from the empirical one, or also the original [transcendental] apperception, since it is that self-­ consciousness which, because it produces the representation I think, which must be able to accompany all others and which in all consciousness is one and the same, cannot be accompanied by any further representation.81 Kant further argues that while we can think the transcendental subject (Subjekt)—­and necessarily must think it as a condition of the possibility of knowledge itself—­we cannot directly cognize the transcendental subject, or the self as it is. This is because human cognition requires sensible intuition, and the forms of intuition are spatiotemporal (i.e., space and time are forms of intuition); and since the self (i.e., the transcendental self) lies outside of space and time as their transcendental condition, Kant is led to believe that the self also lies outside of the domain of experience.82 There81.  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B132 (translation slightly modified). 82.  As is well-­known in Kant scholarship, such a view of the self is at odds with Kant’s philosophical anthropology and moral philosophy as expressed in such works as Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft, and Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. So whatever Kant the author of the Kritik may have said about the unknowability of the self, Kant the real person, or at least the author of these other works, seems to have believed in a grand conception of the self, captured vividly by the following example (which is one among many): “The fact that the human being can have the ‘I’ in his representations raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth. Because of this he is a person, and by virtue of the unity of consciousness through all changes that happen to him, one and the same person—­i.e., through rank and dignity an entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes. This holds even when he cannot yet say ‘I,’ because he still has it in thoughts, just as all languages must think it when they speak in the first person, even if they do not have a special word to express this concept of ‘I.’” See Kant, Anthropology from A Pragmatic Point of View, 15.

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fore, the self in itself cannot be the object of any judgment, although we can be assured of its existence. Kant explains: The I think expresses the act of determining my existence (Das, Ich denke, drückt den Aktus aus, mein Dasein zu bestimmen). The existence is thereby already given, but the way in which I am to determine it, i.e., the manifold that I am to posit in myself as belonging to it, is not yet thereby given. For that self-­intuition (Selbstanschauung) is required, which is grounded in an a priori given form, i.e., time, which is sensible and belongs to the receptivity of the determinable. Now I do not have yet another self-­intuition, which would give the determining in me, of the spontaneity of which alone I am conscious, even before the act of determination, in the same way as time gives that which is to be determined, thus I cannot determine my existence as that of a self-­active being, rather I merely represent the spontaneity of my thought, i.e., of the determining, and my existence always remains only sensibly determinable, i.e., determinable as the existence of an appearance (Erscheinung).83 So, we must conceive of the self as a thinking subject expressing an indeterminate perception that signifies something real and given, albeit as a formal condition, but this does not imply self-­cognition or self-­knowledge, regardless of all the categories that constitute thinking about an object in general through the combination of the manifold in an apperception. In other words, through the unity of apperception, one infers the existence of a conscious self without directly experiencing it. Thus, Kant’s verdict on self-­knowledge is complicated by the fact that, on the one hand, the unity of apperception demands that foundational self-­ knowledge be affirmed in order to have any knowledge of the world or of the self, while on the other hand, such self-­knowledge is inferred as a formal condition of cognition rather than something that is experienced. As Kant puts it, “Because . . . the only condition accompanying all thinking is the I, in the universal proposition ‘I think,’ reason has to do with this condition insofar as it is itself unconditioned. But it is only the formal condition (formale Bedingung), namely the logical unity of every thought, in which I abstract from every object; and yet it is represented as an object that I think, namely I itself, and its unconditioned unity.”84 If anyone were to ask, 83.  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, footnote to B158, translation slightly modified. 84.  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A398–­399.

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“What is the constitution of a thing that thinks?” Kant offers a response: “Then I do not know the least thing to answer a priori, because the answer ought to be synthetic (for an analytic answer perhaps explains thinking, but gives no extended cognition of that on which thinking rests as to its possibility),” while for every synthetic judgment, intuition is necessary, which is inadmissible.85 Kant disentangles the above argument further in reference to the categories and the paralogism of the soul (Seele): But that the being (Wesen) that thinks in us supposes that it cognizes itself through pure categories (rein Kategorien), and indeed through those under each heading that express absolute unity, follows from this: Apperception is itself the ground of the possibility of the categories, which for their part represent nothing other than the synthesis of the manifold of intuition, insofar as that manifold has unity in apperception. Self-­consciousness in general is therefore the representation of that which is the condition of all unity, and yet is itself unconditioned. Hence of the thinking I or the denkenden Ich [the soul (Seele)], which [thus represents] itself as substance, simple, numerically identical in all time, and the correlate of all existence from which all other existence must be inferred, one can say not so much that it cognizes itself through the categories, but that it cognizes the categories, and through them all objects, in the absolute unity of apperception, and hence cognizes them through itself. Now it is indeed very illuminating that I cannot cognize as an object itself that which I must presuppose in order to cognize an object at all; and that the determining Self (the thinking) is different from the determinable Self (the thinking subject) as cognition is different from its object. Nevertheless, nothing is more natural and seductive than the illusion of taking the unity in the synthesis of thoughts for a perceived unity in the subject of these thoughts.86 Let us provide more context to these arguments. Kant first broaches the topic of the unity of apperception in the “Transcendental Deduction” and then again in the “Paralogisms of Pure Reason,” where he tackles and refutes the Cartesian ego. First, Kant’s argument seems to be that the cognition of an object cannot occur by mere thinking, for cognition has to deter85.  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A398–­399. 86.  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A402, emphasis mine, translation slightly modified; Cf. A401, 407.

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mine a given intuition in relation to the unity of apperception (in short, the “I think” must accompany all representations). In other words, in order to cognize an object, I must presuppose myself as a subject, which is identical in the manifoldness of representations. Second, Kant agrees with Descartes (pace Ṣadrā et al.) that while thinking the self we are made aware of its existence, since in each instance of thinking we somehow know ourselves to exist. Moreover, the “I” which remains constant in all the representations of the “I-­think” is the only representation that does not spring from sensibility as it belongs to spontaneity or understanding. However, Cartesian meditations on the soul can only get us so far, for there is no way we can infer from the thinking “I” to a self or soul that is also a thinking substance, simple and numerically identical through time, although it may be very natural and tempting to do so. That is, there is no way to experience a self with the abovementioned properties such as its being a substance from the mere thought of the unity of apperception, which is but a formal condition of all cognition. Kant explains it further by arguing that the most one may hope to learn about the thinking subject is to know what predicates it has, apart from which one can never know anything about it. Thus, he concludes that in attaching “I” to our thoughts, we represent the subject only transcendentally, without noting in it any psychological properties whatsoever.87 One thus wonders what Kant’s final verdict on self-­knowledge is, especially in light of our foray into Mullā Ṣadrā, Augustine, Shankara, and Heidegger. From one point of view, it does appear as though Kant comes very close to affirming “non-­reflective self-­knowledge,” since in the text above he mentions that we cannot cognize as an object that which we must presuppose in order to cognize any object at all. This is another way of saying whenever the self is apprehended in our self-­consciousness, it is apprehended as an object, and hence appears as an “it” in relation to the real “I,” and there is no way in which we can apprehend the subject as a subject through a reflective act such as thinking. That is, in thinking, my “I” always appears to be as my “thinking self,” which is but a particular mode of self-­ apprehension, and not the only one, as Augustine, Suhrawardī, Ṣadrā, and Heidegger have pointed out. Nonetheless, one has to presuppose a unified subject in order to cognize anything at all, which precedes even the categories as their transcendental ground. So, unlike Hume and others (see chapter 3), Kant in the Kritik does not deny the self or the subject, since it is the transcendental ground of all of our experience. Yet this Kantian transcendental subject, whose existence is 87.  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A355.

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affirmed through thinking, is not something we can be directly aware of, as it is merely the formal condition of all cognition, and not a substantial reality with various psycho-­spiritual properties.88 This amounts to saying I can only know myself through thinking mediated by the inner sense, since the “I exist thinking” (Ich existiere denkend) is an ontological given (which itself is question-­begging), but that is not my real “I” in itself. It does not seem to occur to Kant that I can be aware of myself non-­reflectively, for thinking is not the only way by which I have access to myself. The self’s mode of being can be both reflective and non-­reflective. In Heideggerian terms, the self is there for Dasein, even when the “I” does not disclose itself by directing itself to itself in the manner of its own peculiar turning around and turning back. It seems this subtle point has escaped Kant’s analyses of self-­knowledge and apperception. But one has to be careful here, since language can be sometimes misleading. I am not saying we can be aware of ourselves non-­reflectively through reflection or self-­consciousness, which would be inadmissible. Yet, this does not mean we have to make do with the unity of apperception as being a mere logical condition either. Rather, the force of non-­reflective self-­knowledge comes from the phenomenological examples such as self-­ presence, self-­absorbed moments, dreamless sleep, etc. that we explored 88.  However, in at least one place in the Kritik (B430), Kant says that the function of the “I think” extends beyond being a mere formal or logical condition: “But the proposition ‘I think,’ insofar as it says I exist thinking, is not a merely logical function, rather determines the subject (which is then at the same time an object) in regard to existence, and this cannot take place without the inner sense, whose intuition always makes available the object not as thing in itself (Ding an sich) but merely as appearance.” Unfortunately, Kant’s description of the “inner sense” (inner Sinn) is rather obscure. According to him, the perceptions of the inner sense have no transcendental reference, unlike the transcendental subject of the “I think.” The latter is the spontaneous source of synthesis, while the former, as a sense, is passive and receptive. More importantly, Kant claims that just as we perceive objects by means of the external senses, we intuit ourselves through the inner sense as we are internally affected by ourselves. That is, we do not cognize ourselves as noumena, since our access to the self is mediated by the inner sense. See Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B156. For some current debates on this, see Luca Forgione, “Kant and the Problem of Self-­Identification,” Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu, 22, no. 2 (2015): 178–­198; and Andrew Brook, “Kant, Self-­Awareness and Self-­Reference,” in Andrew Brook and R. C. DeVidi, eds., Self-­Reference and Self-­Awareness (Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins, 2001), 9–­30. On the problem of the “inner sense,” see Garth W. Green, The Aporia of Inner Sense: The Self-­Knowledge of Reason and the Critique of Metaphysics in Kant (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 1–­27.

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in Augustine, Suhrawardī, Walī Allāh, and Mukerji. Also, what is known through non-­reflective self-­knowledge is that the self is identical with bare existence, presence, awareness, and knowledge in an undifferentiated way (this last point will be elaborated in the next chapter). Hence, the “I think” proves only that something is out there as a subject, but we cannot know its real nature, let alone its higher moral and spiritual possibilities. Considered in this way, Kant’s position on self-­knowledge turns out to be very complex, hanging between affirmation and denial (i.e., whether self-­knowledge is possible or not). Moreover, Kant leaves unanswered how it is that we are able to infer existence from mere thinking or doubting without getting around the vicious circle, as we observed in Mullā Ṣadrā’s analysis of non-­reflective self-­knowledge. Furthermore, according to Kant, in the absence of any sensible intuition about the self, we only become aware of our apperception through the act of representing, or synthesis, which practically leaves no room for those moments when we are evidently not thinking, as in states of dreamless sleep, intoxication, or coma. Most of all, there is something deeply unsatisfactory and counterintuitive about the proposition that in my own self-­consciousness I am somehow absent from myself (i.e., do not know myself) because of all the reasons Kant proffered above. It is thus not surprising that post-­Kantian and contemporary thinkers such as Bergson, Strawson, Chisholm, McDowell, and Iqbal have distanced themselves from Kant’s view of the self and self-­knowledge, as we shall see soon.89 For instance, in his celebrated Mind and World, McDowell chastises Kant for a “thin” conception of the self. The book’s main goal is to chart a middle course between two extremes. The first extreme, coherentism, does not acknowledge an external rational constraint on thinking and so cannot make genuine room for empirical content at all. The other extreme, the “Myth of the Given,” interprets experience as a given with a non-­ 89.  There are those who would disagree with this assessment of Kant. In her recent study, Longuenesse, for instance, claims that Kant makes important contributions in identifying a type of self-­consciousness that is distinct from bodily self-­consciousness although intimately connected with it. In her view, this particular self-­consciousness allows us to integrate rational unity into the contents of our mental states. See Longuenesse, I, Me, Mine, 231. However, in order to incorporate a strong sense of “embodiment” into the Kantian theory of consciousness, Longuenesse had to denounce Kantian noumenalism about the self: “There is no need to think of ourselves as the appearances of a purely intelligible entity, no need to appeal to the notion of purely intelligible entities at all.” See Longuenesse, I, Me, Mine, 234.

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conceptualized content in virtue of which it can somehow warrant empirical belief without further explanations. McDowell’s aim is to exorcise this confusing scenario by appealing to the Kantian insight that “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”90 For Kant, intuition and concepts together constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can produce knowledge. In McDowell’s terminology, “receptivity” (sensibility) is not separate from “spontaneity” (understanding); hence the cooperation of both is necessary in order to justify empirical knowledge. Relying on Kantian epistemology, McDowell makes a compelling argument that spontaneity is already inextricably implicated in the deliverances of sensibility themselves. This is because the contents of perceptual experience that impinge on our senses already have conceptual content. Thus, spontaneity extends all the way out to the world, hence it is unbounded.91 Although McDowell praises Kant for his heroic effort to curtail the Cartesian dualism of res cogitans and res extensa, he thinks that the Kantian self is too thin to account for any bodily presence in the world, which is necessary for the functioning of everyday life. According to McDowell, Kant’s epistemological insight would be able to take a satisfactory shape only if it could accommodate the fact that a thinking and intending subject is a living animal. However, since Kant held a firm conviction that conceptual powers are non-­natural in the sense that they belonged to the realm of practical reason, and since he could not avail himself of a pregnant notion of second nature in the Aristotelian sense, he was debarred from incorporating our nature as living animals.92 Consequently, the best that Kantian epistemology can provide by way of an experiencing subject is the merely formal referent it grants to the “I,” in the expression “I think,” which must be able to act as the transcendental ground of all representations. But such a subject cannot have a substantial presence in the world since it is, at best, a point of view. That is to say, if we begin with a subject that is only geometrically there in the world, it seems impossible to build up to an embodied perceiver and agent, which has a substantial presence.93 From a slightly different perspective, P. F. Strawson also takes Kant to task for having directly 90.  Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, B75. 91.  McDowell, Mind and World, 46–­47. 92.  McDowell, Mind and World, 104. Of course, this is the well-­known tension between Kant’s critical and moral philosophy to which I referred earlier. 93.  McDowell, Mind and World, 111.

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derived the notion “I” in the “I think” from the unity and connectedness of experiences, without considering that that unity and connectedness must first make possible the distinction between experience and what experience is about. This is because the distinction between experience and the aboutness of experience itself hinges on the representation of the spatiotemporal location of an empirical subject traveling through objective reality.94 Summary This chapter discusses the epistemological foundation of the self by probing into different forms of self-­knowledge. It argues that what guarantees the self’s knowledge of itself is a non-­reflective mode of self-­knowledge that transcends reflection and introspection. In its non-­reflective mode, the self is identical with its presence, existence, and knowledge in an undifferentiated manner. Moreover, this chapter shows that an analysis of self-­ knowledge seriously undermines theories such as “social constructionism,” as the latter fails to account for the basic structure of consciousness that the self must presuppose in order to construct a meaningful relation to the world. Additionally, this chapter investigates Kantian epistemology, which presents a curious challenge to the notion of non-­reflective self-­knowledge. Kant’s verdict on self-­knowledge turns out to be a complex one, hanging between affirmation and denial.

94.  For a detailed argument, see P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), 162–­166. For a critical assessment of Strawson’s position, see Longuenesse, I, Me, Mine, 160–­162.

C h a pte r 3

Self-­Knowledge and the Levels of Consciousness

The Humean Challenge and the Referentiality of the “I” In the previous chapter, I made a case for “non-­reflective self-­knowledge” as the key phenomenological feature of the self that I think seriously undermines both social constructionism and physicalism, since these theories fail to show how self-­knowledge (i.e., non-­reflective self-­knowledge) is coextensive with all forms of mental actions, including reflection and introspection. Also, the analysis of non-­reflective self-­knowledge shows that the self is identical with its existence, presence, awareness, and knowledge in an undifferentiated way. That is, the self exists as presence or consciousness simpliciter even before there appears an “I” or “I-­consciousness” that gives birth to self-­consciousness and reflexivity. At this juncture, we thus need to make clear how is it that non-­reflective self-­knowledge relates to the “I” and other modes of consciousness. This question is bound up with another thorny issue in philosophy of mind, namely whether the first-­ person pronoun “I” refers to anything at all or not. But before we proceed to elucidate the modes and structure of consciousness, we must face the “Humean challenge” according to which the self is but a bundle of perceptions and that without perceptions it is a non-­entity. Yet, if I am right about non-­reflective self-­knowledge, the Humean challenge, which is based on a version of introspectionism, must be proven wrong.1 1.  One may also note that Kant’s “I-­think” is too formal and logical to adequately resolve the Humean challenge. On this same point, see Roderick Chisholm’s criticism of the Kantian theory of self-­knowledge in “On the Observability of the Self,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 30, no. 1 (1969): 7–­21, at 19–­20. 104

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While responding to Locke’s “identity over time,” Hume claims that our error in positing the self emanates from mistaking the connectedness of consciousness (relation) for the existence of a self (identity over time). For Locke, the nature of the self is inextricably bound up with one’s reflections on one’s memory-­consciousness, while for Hume this means that the self is nothing over and above a constantly varying bundle of experiences. Locke thinks of the self as a “thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and considers itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places.”2 This suggests that for Locke, the self is defined by our actions and what we can attribute to ourselves through memory-­consciousness. Locke states explicitly that such “personal identity,” or identity over time, “extends itself beyond present existence to what is past, only by consciousness, whereby it becomes concerned and accountable; owns and imputes to itself past actions, just upon the same ground and for the same reason as it does the present.”3 For Hume, such a Lockean self implies that there is nothing other than a constant stream of fluctuating experiences, lacking any fixed identity: For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time, as by sound sleep, so long am I insensible of myself and may truly be said not to exist. And were all my perceptions removed by death and could I neither think nor feel nor see nor love nor hate after the dissolution of my body, I should be entirely annihilated, nor do I conceive what is further requisite to make me a perfect nonentity.4 On Hume’s view, the structural feature of our perception leads us to mistakenly attribute a substantial identity to the object in our consciousness, when in reality consciousness is more like “a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away,

2.  See John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Peter H. Nidditch (Clarendon: Oxford University Press, 1975), II.27.ix. 3.  Locke, Essay, II.27.xxvi. 4.  Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, I.4.6, 526.

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and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.”5 To make a better sense of Hume’s theory of the self, one has to resort to his epistemology in which perceptions are divided into “impressions” (including both sensation and reflection) and “ideas.” Hume maintains that ideas are faint copies of impressions, lacking in forcefulness and vivacity.6 Based on this epistemology, Hume further substantiates his account of the self: We know nothing but particular qualities and perceptions. As our idea of any body, a peach, for instance, is only that of a particular taste, colour, figure, size, consistence, etc.; so our idea of any mind is only that of particular perceptions, without the notion of anything we call substance, either simple or compound.7 There seem to be several inconsistencies in the Humean theory of the self. To begin with, when Hume asserts that “when I enter most intimately into what I call myself,” he is inadvertently objectifying his self, thereby falling prey to the “I-­it” distinction I discussed in the previous chapter. That is, the “myself” that he is referring to is already an objectified image of the self, and therefore falls in the realm of “itness,” which means it is no longer the “I” or the real subject. Once this is recognized, it is not difficult to see that the self that according to Hume is nothing but a bundle of different perceptions holds true only of the objectified self, and not the self in itself. That is to say, Hume’s bundle theory of the self already presupposes that there is a self, or else how could he have reported his data in a selfless way? The difficulty with this sort of theory, as I pointed out in the previous chapter, is that one assumes that the self comes to existence only when there is an “I-­ or ego-­consciousness” in relation to an external object, whereas (as has been shown) the self must exist first, in order that it may become self-­conscious by the knowledge of objects with which it contrasts itself. If this is not so, how is it that Hume was able to claim that he finds himself stumbling on certain things and not on certain other things?8 That is, the fact that Hume stumbles upon some particular perceptions such as love and hate and not 5.  Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, 302. 6.  David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Peter Millican (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 12–­14. 7.  Hume, “Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature,” in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, 142. 8.  That is, what enables Hume to claim that that he finds himself to be stumbling upon something?

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others shows that he himself, as the subject of perception, is other than these perceptions. Hume makes reference to certain evidence to show that there are only perceptions when it comes to the idea of the self, and when he tells us what this evidence is, he implies not only (i) that there is, as he states in his example, heat or cold, love or hate, light or shade; but also (ii) that there is someone, i.e., a certain subject, who finds heat or cold, light or shade, love or hate; and moreover (iii) that the one who finds heat or cold is the same as the one who finds love or hate and the same as the one who finds light or shade; and finally (iv) that this same one does not in fact stumble upon anything but perceptions.9 Therefore, if Hume wishes to remain consistent in his reports, he has to admit that he had presupposed an underlying subject, i.e., himself, that experiences various perceptions. In other words, he found that there was indeed someone who came across various perceptions such as heat or cold, and that this same someone did not in the same sense find himself. All of this goes to show that the self always remains an underlying subject regardless of whatever it experiences, and that it can only be known non-­reflectively, which transcends the subject-­object dichotomy altogether.10 That is to say, since both reflection or introspection “objectify” the self, we can only know ourselves non-­reflectively in which we are already acquainted with ourselves in an a priori, non-­objectifying fashion. Additionally, Hume’s argument that our idea of something is only that of particular perceptions is misleading. While we can agree with Hume that introspection or thinking does not necessarily lead to a Cartesian substantialism of the self; it is not clear that our idea of a peach, for example, is only that of a particular taste, color, figure, size, etc. As Roderick Chisholm points out, it would be more accurate to say that our idea of peach is something that is sweet and round and fuzzy. To be precise, our idea of a peach is an idea of a distinct object “X,” such that “X” is sweet, round, and so on. By thus using variables and descriptions, one expresses the fact that the object of our perception is not a set of qualities (sweetness, roundness,    9.  Cf. Chisholm, “On the Observability of the Self,” 10. However, I disagree with Chisholm’s distinction between objective apprehension and affective apprehension. In my view, it is rather the distinction between reflective and non-­ reflective apprehension that explains the Humean conundrum. Otherwise one has to presuppose a vague concept such as “person” that yet again needs a “self” and “consciousness” to explain what it stands for. 10.  The crux of the matter is that the “I” or the “self” is the subject, and looking for it as an object resulted in total failure. It was not to be found.

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etc.), but the concrete thing that is sweet and round.11 Furthermore, it is simply not true that in the absence of any perceptions, there is no self, as Hume suggests in the quotation above. The rich phenomenological evidence of dreamless sleep or the states of intoxication and a coma shows that consciousness as the underlying subject may still persist even when the sense of “I” or self-­consciousness recedes into the background. This last point brings to the fore the salient issue of the onto-­phenomenological structure of consciousness, which will be explained shortly. Hume’s contention that the “I” is nothing more than a collection of perceptions can also be proven wrong by considering recent discussions on the “referentiality of the ‘I’” in analytic philosophy. As is well-­known, a great deal has been said in recent analytic philosophy concerning the first-­ personal indexical “I” and its “ambiguous” reference(s). For instance, Saul Kripke thinks that Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus 5.632, 5.64) develops his account of the self based on the Hume-­Lichtenberg thought experiment, which enables him to see it as a rather mysterious “limit of the world” that does not belong to the world and shrinks to an extensionless point. According to Kripke, the self that emerges out of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations has the characteristics of something not to be identified with any entity picked out in any ordinary manner, but it is thought of as deriving from a grammatical peculiarity of the first-­person pronoun, and not from any special metaphysical mystery.12 It seems to me that what Wittgenstein says concerning selfhood and the “I” is that solipsistic thought experiments à la Descartes do not refer to the “I” of the individual self. But this does not imply that we have to give up the notion of the “self” altogether. This is because Wittgenstein also hints at the idea of “immunity to error through misidentification” or IEM (an expression coined by Shoemaker later) that says that judgments about the self in terms of reference can only be true when the self is regarded as subject (and 11.  See Chisholm, “On the Observability of the Self,” 8. 12.  See Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 144–­145. For Wittgenstein’s reflections on the nature of the “I,” see Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 2, ed. by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980); Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 1, ed. by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, trans. by C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); and William Child, “Wittgenstein on The First Person,” in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, eds. by Oskari Kuusela and Marie McGinn (Oxford Handbooks Online, 2011). DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199287505.003.0018.

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not as object).13 That is to say, if someone is in pain it would be nonsensical to ask, “Someone has a pain, is it me (I)?” In other words, the first-­person pronoun as the “subject I” cannot be mistaken in regard to whom it refers. This does not hold, however, when the “I” is regarded as object, hence the intelligibility of Elizabeth Anscombe’s famous remark that “the ‘I’ does not refer.”14 In my view, this distinction is vital because P. F. Strawson ascribes a theory of nonownership to Lichtenberg and Wittgenstein, which I think is somewhat arbitrary.15 This is because even though Wittgenstein criticizes a theory of “ownership,” it does not really follow that Wittgenstein accepts a nonownership theory of the self. At any rate, according to Anscombe, the “quasi-­inexpressible” nature of ego-­centered language does not amount to complete ineffability, but rather it manifests itself in the use and application of language. This “quasi-­ inexpressibility” should not therefore be understood in terms of a rejection of the self. The grammatical experience rather shows that to give expression to solipsistic desires with regard to ordinary language leads us to nothing other than changing these desires in the first place. The implication of all this is that the indexical “I” is not like other referring expressions. It is even different from the demonstrative “this,” as is shown by a certain use of the “I” where no possibility of failure exists.16 Anscombe demonstrates this by citing the story of Baldy and his inability to refer to himself. The story runs as follows: Baldy and his friends were driving and suddenly the door flew open and Baldy fell out on the road. His friends pulled up by his side at once, and then Baldy confusingly said, “Did anyone fell out?” When told that Baldy was the one who fell out, he exclaimed, “Did Baldy fall out? Poor Baldy!”17 So it was no coincidence that Baldy used his name “Baldy” and not “I” in what he said. This is because his thought of the happening, falling out of the carriage, was one for which he looked for a subject, and that could be explained even if we didn’t have “I” or distinct first-­person inflexions. In other words, Baldy, whose behavior already showed a lapse of self-­consciousness, did not require a distinct first-­person indexical “I” to 13.  On IEM, see Shoemaker, “Self-­Reference and Self-­Awareness,” 555ff. For an alternative take on this Wittgensteinian argument, see Longuenesse, I, Me, Mine, 20ff. 14.  For an in-­depth discussion of these issues, see Anscombe, “The First Person,” 21–­36. 15.  See P. F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (London: Methuen, 1977), 90–­99. 16.  Anscombe, “The First Person,” 28–­29. 17.  Anscombe, “The First Person,” 36.

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refer to himself, as his state was one in which the subject was the same as the object. Incidentally, the case of Baldy also shows that consciousness is different from self-­consciousness, which involves a thematic orientation in terms of the ego or the “I.” Following Wittgenstein, Anscombe thus suggests that the use of “I” as subject is immune to reference-­failure: But “I”—­if it makes a reference, if, that is, its mode of meaning is that it is supposed to make a reference—­is secure against reference-­ failure. Just thinking “I . . .” guarantees not only the existence but the presence of its referent. It guarantees the existence because it guarantees the presence, which is presence to consciousness. But note that here “presence to consciousness” means physical or real presence, not just that one is thinking of the thing. For if the thinking did not guarantee the presence, the existence of the referent could be doubted. For the same reason, if “I” is a name it cannot be an empty name. I’s existence is existence in the thinking of the thought expressed by “I.”18 The above passage, if read in conjunction with Suhrawardī’s theory of “self-­presence” and the “I-­it distinction,” makes good sense in that it brings out the “presential” character of the self, which is immune to error through misidentification. That is, the “I” can fail to refer if we have in mind an objectified image of the self, which is really a “representation” or an “it” in relation to the true subject. And this objectified image of the “I” can be a Humean bundle of incessant perceptions, or a theater with an infinite variety of postures and situations that has no fixed reference. However, the objectified self portrayed in the Humean account is not the true subject, which functions as the Archimedean point of our experiential life. Anscombe seems to be on the same page as Suhrawardī et al., contra Hume, when she writes: Self-­knowledge is knowledge of the object that one is, of the human animal that one is. “Introspection” is but one contributory method. It is a rather doubtful one, as it may consist rather in the elaboration of a self-­image than in noting facts about oneself.19 18.  Anscombe, “The First Person,” 28. 19.  Anscombe, “The First Person,” 34. She says further: “If ‘I’ were a name, it would have to be a name for something with this sort of connection with this body, not an extra-­ordinary name for this body. Not a name for this body because sensory deprivation and even loss of consciousness of posture, etc., is not loss of ‘I.’”

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The gist of the above discussion is that when the indexical “I” is employed as a subject term (in the grammatical sense), it is not used to signify the reality of “I-­ness” or selfhood. Rather, it is used to refer directly to the factual reference that is the reality of the objectified “I.” The subject language is, therefore, referential to the “presential I,” which makes itself known as a living consciousness. The indexical “I,” accordingly, functions as an arrow pointing to the realm of the “presential I” (which can be non-­reflective as well) in any self-­statement as we saw in the case of Baldy, and not as a term used for the reality of the self itself, though it can do so in introspection, in which case it is already converted into “it,” and is no longer the “I.” The Onto-­phenomenological Structure of Consciousness With the Humean challenge now answered, we can turn to the onto-­ phenomenological structure of consciousness that will shed light on the relationship between the self, self-­knowledge, and consciousness. It is important to note that terms such as “self-­knowledge” and “consciousness” are not simply ad hoc categories in the present theory of the self. We may recall from the architectonic of the self in figure 2 that the descriptive level of the self contains three distinct dimensions, namely the bio-­physiological, the socio-­cultural, and the cognito-­experiential. We also know from the previous chapter that the self’s knowledge and awareness of itself, at the non-­reflective level, are inseparable from each other. So, the next question we should ask is how non-­reflective self-­knowledge relates to the self and other modes of consciousness. To address this crucial question, I will bring the writings of Mullā Ṣadrā and Sartre into creative dialogue. After arguing for non-­reflective self-­knowledge (as presented in the previous chapter), Mullā Ṣadrā turns his attention to consciousness20 and its modalities, which further substantiate the self’s knowledge of itself. He begins by affirming that the self (al-­nafs) “is not a body, and that it has self-­ consciousness (shāʿira bi-­dhātihā).”21 That is, self-­consciousness is non20.  For Ṣadrā’s definition of “consciousness” (shuʿūr), see Ṣadrā, Asfār, 3: 526. 21.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Mafātīḥ al-­ghayb, ed. by Muhammad Khwājawī (Tehran: Bunyād-­i Ḥikmat-­i Islāmi-­yi Ṣadrā, 2005) 2: 818. Ṣadrā talks about self-­ consciousness in various places; see, e.g., Asfār, 4: 222, 8: 77–­79, 265, 395; and Taʿlīqāt li-­Sharḥ Ḥikmat al-­ishrāq, in al-Ḥikma al-ishrāqiyya: Majmūʿah-­yi muṣannafāt-­i Shihāb al-­Dīn Yaḥyā al-­Suhrawardī, ed. by Muḥammad Malikī (Tehran: Pazhūhishgāh-­i ʿUlūm-­i Insānī wa Muṭālaʿāt-­i Farhangī, 2012), 66ff. See also Kaukua, Self-­Awareness in Islamic Philosophy, 161–­191.

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physical and is distinct from bodily consciousness. Then he distinguishes between the first-­order and second-­order self-­awareness. Ṣadrā says: Our knowledge of ourselves is the very same as the existence of our selves (ʿilmunā bi-­dhātinā nafs wujūd dhātinā), whereas our knowledge of our knowledge of ourselves (ʿilmunā bi-­ʿilminā bi-­dhātinā) is other than our own existence and it is a mental form (ṣūra dhihniyya) superadded to it. This mental form is not equivalent to our personal identity (huwiyyatinā al-­shakhṣiyya); rather, it has a different mental identity. Similarly, our knowledge of our knowledge of ourselves by means of this knowledge is a form added to the two former identities of knowledge (huwiyyat al-­ʿilmayn).22 In the above, Ṣadrā discerns two distinct levels of self-­awareness. To begin with, I can have knowledge of my self in terms of first-­order propositions such as “I am in pain” or simply “I am.” It should be noticed that in such propositions the subject and the predicate are one and the same.23 That is, when “I am in pain” or when “I simply am,” my being in “pain” or my being “me” is inseparable from my existence. For this reason, Ṣadrā asserts that in such cases existence is identical with self-­knowledge, or knowledge of the self is the same as the existence of the self, which, at the non-­reflective level, involves no subject-­object dichotomy. However, such an instance of self-­knowledge is different from a second-­order reflection of self-­knowledge.24 In other words, ʿilmunā bi-­ʿilminā bi-­dhātinā (our knowledge of our knowledge of) is different from simply ʿilmunā bi-­dhātinā (our knowledge of ourselves). This is because a second-­order reflection of self-­knowledge involves a mental form (ṣūra dhihniyya) that is superadded to our true identity, in which knowledge and existence of the self are one and the same, as mentioned earlier. But since our self is capable of such reflexive actions, it is still part of our identity, albeit a different one. More interestingly, such a reflective act of self-­awareness can be performed indefinitely, in which case it will continue to add more “identities” 22.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 3: 321. 23.  Note that first-­order propositions are still in the realm of reflection, whereas the actual state of being in pain, in which the subject and the predicate are one and the same, occurs prior to reflection. 24.  Ṣadrā goes to great lengths to clarify the connection between the self and self-­knowledge in terms of self-­consciousness; see, e.g., Asfār, 1: 134–­135; 3: 408, 435–­436, 501–­506; 4: 458–­464; 8: 50–­51, 70–­79, 151; Mafātīḥ, 2: 818, 836, 851–­852, 854–­855, 939–­944, 1003, 1083.

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in the form of “Tom 1, Tom 2, Tom 3 . . . and so on” to our primary identity. That is the reason Ṣadrā argues that our self-­consciousness of the self is never identical with our self, since secondary statements are about the self and not the self itself: Also, we perceive ourselves through ourselves because we are never absent from ourselves. But our self-­consciousness of the self (ammā shuʿūrunā bi-­shuʿūri dhātinā) is never identical with our self, just like when we perceive things external to ourselves.25 That is, I cannot be absent from myself because my reality as consciousness simpliciter is ever-­present to myself through the uninterrupted self-­ awareness which is indistinguishable from my “mineness.” Ṣadrā provides another argument to prove how self-­awareness of the self is different from first-­order, non-­reflective awareness of the self: The perception of a thing involves the coming-­to-­obtain of its form to the perceiver, and whoever perceives his self (man adraka dhātahu) must be separate from its substratum (i.e., the locus of perception). This is because if it were to inhere in the substratum, the form of its self would be obtained for its substratum rather than for itself, because that which inheres by nature can only exist in its substratum. And this involves a contradiction.26 This is because if the perception of something were to consist of the grasping of its form in the perceiver, whoever perceives herself would be different from the locus of perception, which is herself. This results in a contradiction because it would be like saying, “I perceive myself” and yet “I do not perceive myself,” since “I” and my “self” are different, which is inadmissible. 25.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Shawāhid, 253. Cf. Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 3: 321: Self-­knowledge in the sense of self-­identification is different from a second-­order reflection of self-­ knowledge. The latter is representation and is not identical with the very reality of the self. On some Safavid background to the analysis of this passage, see Jalāl al-­Dīn al-­Dawānī, Shawākil al-­ḥūr fī sharḥ Hayākil al-­nūr li-­l-­Suhrawardī, ed. by Muḥammad ʿAbd al-­Ḥaqq and Muḥammad Kawkan (Beirut: al-­Furāt li-l-­Nashr wa-­al-­Tawzīʻ, 2010), 73ff; and Ghiyāth al-­Dīn Manṣūr Dashtakī, Ishrāq Hayākil al-­nūr li-­kashf ẓulumāt Shawākil al-­gharūr, ed. by ʿAlī Awjabī (Tehran: Mīrāth-­i Maktūb, 2003), 93ff. 26.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Shawāhid, 253.

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After talking about the first-­order and second-­order awareness, Ṣadrā also broaches the issue of how one can be aware of other selves. He broaches the phenomenological experience of shame (al-khajāla) in order to shed light on one’s awareness of others: If there occurs to a human being an awareness that others (shuʿūr bi-­anna ghayrahu) have come to know of an ugly act that he has committed, then that awareness is followed by a passive [mental] state in his self called shame (al-khajāla).27 So, an act of shame makes one aware of other selves because such an act puts oneself in a passive state from which one can deduce the existence or presence of others. This is because the experience of shame is a distinct experience that requires the presence of others. Unfortunately, Ṣadrā does not elaborate further on this distinct form of awareness that requires the intervention of the other. In modern parlance, this form of awareness is known as “intersubjective consciousness,” thanks to Sartre’s famous analysis of shame in the third part of his L’Être et le Néant.28 After discussing reflective and prereflective modes of consciousness (see below), Sartre argues that there is a form of awareness that is intersubjectively mediated, or that has the other as its condition of possibility. According to Sartre, shame is the subject’s experience of being discovered in an embarrassing situation because of her awareness of another self. Sartre asserts that the experience of shame presupposes the intervention of the other, and not merely because the other is the one before whom one feels ashamed, but also, and more significantly, because the other is the one that constitutes that of which one is ashamed. Sartre writes: Consider for example shame. . . . I have just made an awkward or vulgar gesture.  .  .  . I realize it in the mode of for-­itself. But now 27.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 107. 28.  “Intersubjectivity” and “intersubjective consciousness” are loaded terms with wide-­ranging applications in psychology, philosophy, and social science. Here, I use the terms in the sense of having an ability to form an awareness of the other (including the body). For some relevant literature on the terms, see Dan Zahavi and Søren Overgaard, “Intersubjectivity,” in Hugh LaFollette et al., eds., The International Encyclopedia of Ethics (New York: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2013), 2755–­2765; Dan Zahavi, Husserl und die transzendentale Intersubjektivität. Eine Antwort auf die sprachpragmatische Kritik (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996); and “Intersubjectivity in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness,” Alter 10 (2002): 265–­281.

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suddenly I raise my head. Somebody was there and has seen me. Suddenly I realize the vulgarity of my gesture, and I am ashamed. It is certain that my shame is not reflective, for the presence of another in my consciousness, even as a catalyst, is incompatible with the reflective attitude; in the field of my reflection I can never meet with anything but the consciousness which is mine. But the Other is the indispensable mediator between myself and me. I am ashamed of myself as I appear to the Other. By the mere appearance of the Other, I am put in the position of passing judgment on myself as on an object, for it is as an object that I appear to the Other.29 So far, we have been talking about two principal modes of consciousness in relation to self-­knowledge and the structure of the self:

1. Reflective consciousness = first-­order and second-­order consciousness 2. Intersubjective consciousness

However, from our extensive discussion on non-­reflective self-­knowledge in chapter II, we can infer a more primitive form of consciousness which can be called “non-­reflective consciousness,” since awareness at this level transcends reflexivity. For instance, in chapter 2 we saw how Ṣadrā discusses the self’s prior knowledge of itself vis-­à-­vis its reflective acts such as thinking, which can also be cited as a case in point for the phenomenon of non-­reflective consciousness, since such an instance of self-­knowledge, by its internal logic, escapes any reflective stance. Moreover, my analysis has thus far shown how consciousness, self, and knowledge are mutually implicated, so that any discussion of one of them inevitably involves some explanations of the others. In any event, Ṣadrā brings further clarity to this particular mode of awareness in the following argument. He argues that our ordinary reflective actions such as writing, walking, eating, and drinking are preceded by a form of knowledge which is additional to them. And if we did not presuppose a preconceptual, pre-­linguistic subject to which these acts can be attributed, it would not be possible to give assent to these acts, in 29.  Jean-­Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes (London: Methuen, 1958), 221–­223. For extensive analyses on Sartre’s notions of shame and intersubjective consciousness, see Dan Zahavi, “Shame and the Exposed Self,” in Jonathan Webber, ed., Reading Sartre: On Phenomenology and Existentialism (London: Routledge, 2011), 211–­226.

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which case there would be actions but no agent performing them, which is a contradiction. As for the bodily acts, Ṣadrā suggests that we can only be aware of them by being aware of our self first.30 In addition, he makes use of Suhrawardī’s oft-­repeated phrase anta lā taghību ʿan dhātika (you are never absent from your self) to affirm non-­reflective consciousness: You are never absent from your self (anta lā taghību ʿan dhātika), even while you are asleep or intoxicated, whereas it is possible that sometimes you may be unaware of all of the organs of your body or at least some of them, which means that you are more than your physical totality. 31 As I explained earlier, the only way one can describe phenomena such as dreamless sleep or an intoxicated state is by asserting that in these moments the subject of experience and the experience itself remain ontologically indistinguishable, giving one the impression that the subject or the underlying consciousness have somehow disappeared from the scene. But this cannot happen because it makes little sense to say that there is the experience or the phenomenon of intoxication or sleep, while there was no one (i.e., no subject) who experienced it. And yet such background awareness transcends even the first-­order reflective stance in which one simply posits “I am.” That is the reason it is helpful to call it non-­reflective consciousness, i.e., one that does not involve conscious reflection. Here, as with “intersubjective consciousness,” it would be illuminating to bring Ṣadrā into conversation with Sartre. Sartre’s starting point, along with his famous en-­soi and pour-­soi categories of being, is “intentionality” or the claim that “all consciousness is consciousness of something,” which he borrows from Brentano (via Husserl). As is well-­known, intentionality in Brentano’s and Husserl’s perspective emphasizes “directedness” or “aboutness” as the key feature of the mind. Similarly, Sartre has been influenced by Heidegger, since the latter also asserts something very similar about the prereflective mode of Dasein.32 Sartre explicitly uses terms such as conscience préréflexif and conscience réflexive in his La transcendance de l’ego and L’Être et le néant to draw a distinction between these two fundamental levels of consciousness as they feature in the structure of the self 30.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 79. 31.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Shawāhid, 254. 32.  See Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, 226ff.

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(le soi). In both of these texts, Sartre offers a phenomenological description of how conscience préréflexif is different from conscience réflexive. It should be noted at this point that my articulation of non-­reflective self-­ knowledge or consciousness differs from “pre-­reflective consciousness” in Sartre or phenomenology in general, although the two notions are not mutually exclusive. In my view, the pre-­reflective consciousness of Sartre et al. is a subset of non-­reflective consciousness, since the latter encompasses the higher states of the self, such as “pure consciousness,” that transcend a reflexive stance.33 Be that as it may, let us now turn to La transcendance de l’ego, which contains Sartre’s early and less developed views on modes of consciousness.34 Sartre writes: It is however certain that the “I” appears on the non-­reflected level (le plan irréfléchi). If I am asked, “What are you doing?” and I reply, preoccupied as I am, “I am trying to hang up this picture,” or, “I am repairing the rear tire,” these phrases do not transport us on to the level of reflection, I utter them without ceasing to work, without ceasing to envisage just the actions, insofar as they have been done or are still to be done—­not insofar as I am doing them. But this “I” that I am dealing with here is not, however, a simple syntactic form. It has a meaning; it is quite simply an empty concept, destined to 33.  This last point will be taken up again in chapters 4 and 5. 34.  One notable pitfall in Sartre’s argument is that he navigates his writings with a very narrow concept of the self/ego. He himself seems to be aware of this particular problem, as in La transcendance de l’ego he characterizes the pre-­reflective field of consciousness as non-­egological, whereas in both L’Être et le néant and in the article “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi,” he overturns this view by granting pre-­reflective consciousness some kind of egoity. For instance, he argues that it is not the ego which personalizes consciousness, but rather that it is consciousness which, by means of its fundamental self-­givenness or “selfhood” (ipséité), allows the ego to appear. This is a major point of difference between Ṣadrā and Sartre et al. The former, while holding to a view of the self as pre-­reflective awareness, does not move from there toward any form of non-­egological view of the self. For more information on Sartre’s views, see Sartre, “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi,” Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie 42 (1948): 49–­91, at 63; cf. Sartre, L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 114, 142–­143, 284. For a helpful treatment of these issues, see Dan Zahavi, ed., “Self and Consciousness,” in Exploring the Self: Philosophical and Psychopathological Perspectives on Self-­Experience (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000), 64–­66.

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remain empty. Just as I can think of a chair in the absence of any chair and by virtue of a mere concept, in the same way I can think of the I in the absence of the I.35 Similar to my example in chapter 2, or Ṣadrā’s own example of being asleep or intoxicated, Sartre asserts that the “I” or the self can manifest itself even when it is not reflectively aware of itself. So, when I am too preoccupied with hanging up a picture I am no longer reflectively aware of myself. Yet my “I” goes on to do the work in which it was engaged—­the “I” can be an “I” in its absence. Therefore, the “I” has a pre-­reflective consciousness of itself that is prior to our act of reflecting on our experience, just as Ṣadrā argued earlier (see chapter 2). Indeed, like Ṣadrā, Sartre also claims that reflective self-­consciousness is possible only because there is a pre-­reflective self-­awareness that is constitutive of all reflective acts and never absent from itself. Sartre also calls it non-­thétique or conscience non positionnelle36 because the self or consciousness in the pre-­reflective mode does not have a particularized position.37 In his L’Être et le néant, Sartre elaborates on these categories at length: In other words, every positional consciousness of an object (conscience positionnelle d’objet) is at the same time a non-­positional consciousness of itself (conscience non positionnelle d’elle-­même). If I count the cigarettes which are in that case, I have the impression of disclosing an objective property of this collection of cigarettes: they are a dozen. This property appears to my consciousness as a property existing in the world. It is very possible that I have no positional consciousness of counting them. Then I do not know myself as counting.  .  .  . Yet at the moment when these cigarettes 35.  Jean-­Paul Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: A Sketch for a Phenomenological Description, trans. by Andrew Brown (London: Routledge, 2004), 23, translation slightly modified; cf. Sartre, La transcendance de l’ego, 70–­71. 36.  Sartre is infamous for his careless use of terminology. So “consciousness” in his philosophy may mean (1) the entity that is conscious, (2) the essential property of the conscious entity or body as “for itself,” or (3) an occurrent state of that entity. The context usually sheds light on which meaning is prevalent in each case. For more information on this, see Longuenesse, I, Me, Mine, 68. 37.  Cf. Sartre, La transcendance de l’ego, 3–­6. According to Longuenesse, the unity of non-­thetic consciousness is sufficiently maintained by the synthesis of conscious states generated by the directedness at an object, whether that object is a concrete object that is empirically given, or whether it is an abstract object such as a mathematical object. See Longuenesse, I, Me, Mine, 46.

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are revealed to me as a dozen, I have a non-­thetic consciousness of my adding activity. If anyone questioned me, indeed, if anyone should ask, “What are you doing there?” I should reply at once, “I am counting.” This reply aims not only at the instantaneous consciousness which I can achieve by reflection but at those fleeting consciousnesses which have passed without being reflected-­on, those which are forever not-­reflected-­on in my immediate past. Thus reflection has no kind of primacy over the consciousness reflected­on. It is not reflection which reveals the consciousness reflected-­on to itself. Quite the contrary, it is the non-­reflective consciousness which renders the reflection possible; there is a pre-­reflective cogito which is the condition of the Cartesian cogito.38 The analysis thus far has shown that self-­knowledge has to be affirmed of the self if we are to make sense of any mental events or phenomenal states. It is, however, crucial to note that by “self-­knowledge,” Ṣadrā et al. do not mean to suggest that the self at this stage (i.e., at the level of pre-­reflective awareness) knows itself to be a cosmic intellect or a divine consciousness of some sort.39 Rather, self-­knowledge at this level implies the self’s knowledge of itself simpliciter in the form of “I am.”40 In other words, at this level, knowledge, existence, and consciousness are identical with the self. Nevertheless, the basic phenomenological structure of the self also contains both a reflective and an intersubjective consciousness, as shown in the following figure (next page). Some philosophers have argued against the phenomenal consciousness of the “I.”41 For example, Michael Tye upholds realism concerning the first-­personal experience of consciousness because, in his view, phenomenal properties are independent of experience. The argument begins 38.  Sartre, Being and Nothingness, liii (translation modified); cf. Sartre, L’Être et le néant, 19. 39.  For Ṣadrā, self-­knowledge comprises in degrees, as we shall see in chapter 5. With the self’s gradual perfection through “spiritual exercises,” its knowledge too attains a greater degree of perfection. 40.  This, however, should not be understood in the reflexive sense. 41.  Here phenomenal consciousness or consciousness that has the character of “what-­it-­is-­like-­ness” encompasses both reflective and non-­reflective consciousness. On the distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, see Ned Block, “On a Confusion about a Function of Consciousness,” Brain and Behavioral Sciences 18, no. 2 (1995): 227–­247. Block’s “access consciousness” will correspond to “reflective consciousness” in my scheme.

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Fig. 3. Modes of Consciousness

with the premise that the only experiences of which we are introspectively aware are the qualities of external things. That is to say, there is no pure or unmediated experience of consciousness if it is not already presented with some data from the outside. The phenomenal character of a perceptual experience consists in, and is no more than, what is out there in the world, which is what the experience represents.42 Tye’s argument seems to imply that consciousness is characterized by a peculiar passivity: in itself it does not reveal anything, since its phenomenal quality is contingent upon experiencing the world out there. But this is contradicted by those phenomena in which the subject does not experience anything (e.g., dreamless sleep) and yet maintains its non-­egological consciousness, which is also continuous. Moreover, I have argued in the previous chapter that no phenomenal states of mind, even though they may be in the form of the “I,” can bear testimony to the existence of the self as an “I.” This is because any phenomenal state or mental event that the self ascribes to itself already presupposes an underlying consciousness.

42.  See Michael Tye, Consciousness Revisited: Materialism without Phenomenal Concepts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 119ff.

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What Is It like to Be a Self? Let us take stock of things so far. Consciousness can be understood in a wide variety of ways. If we were to take consciousness to mean something strictly physical, namely something that experiences sensory stimulations, then there would be no possibility of exploring other categories that are present within the repository of the philosophical traditions under consideration here. However, the neuro-­physiological experiment of “pain” in chapter 1 showed that the subjective feeling of pain or any mental state for that matter, can only be “experienced” from the first-­person stance, or what we might call “the domain of consciousness,” which is none other than our very “I.” Moreover, mental states such as pain make us aware that we are self-­conscious and that consciousness is the very stuff of “experience” itself. In a word, consciousness is what constitutes and grounds the “I,” and it is the very essence of human subjectivity. Additionally, one can also say that within human experience, the consciousness of the “I” is unique and indivisible, since it is impossible to add to this consciousness another consciousness of “I,” and also impossible to split it in two. The “I” thus is unique, and it is simple. And yet, human consciousness is not delimited by “self-­consciousness” alone. My discussion of non-­reflective consciousness shows that any perceptual acts, e.g., thinking, reflecting, or doubting, already presuppose a prior acquaintance of the self with itself, which means “non-­reflective self-­knowledge” precedes any form of reflective and conscious act, be it mental or physical. Thus, there is no way we can avoid presupposing the self, which eventually leads to its grounding in non-­reflective states that precede reflection. All of these considerations go to show again that the reality of the self cannot be exhausted by the conditioning of socio-­cultural and bio-­physiological facts alone. With this framework in place, we can now explore the twentieth-­century Muslim philosopher Muhammad Iqbal’s views on the self, consciousness, and self-­knowledge, in order to further develop the account of the self I have proposed. Iqbal is a controversial modern philosopher whose concept of selfhood seeks to forge some kind of middle ground between Islamic sources on the self and the views of Western philosophers such as Hegel, Nietzsche, James, and Bergson. In many ways, Iqbal and Ṣadrā stand at opposite ends of the spectrum. They both show unusual interest in non-­ Islamic thought (for Ṣadrā it is mostly ancient Greek thought, while for Iqbal it is Western thought broadly construed). However, when it comes to the Islamic philosophical tradition, Ṣadrā’s works show a thorough and

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critical engagement with the greats of that tradition such as Avicenna, Fakhr al-­Dīn al-­Rāzī, and Ibn ʿArabī, while Iqbal’s engagement with these and similar figures are at best obscure and at worst misleading.43 These problems are exacerbated by Iqbal’s status as a national figure and an object of adulation.44 Despite the existence of several books and articles (mainly from India) on various aspects of Iqbal’s thought, there is hardly any serious academic study that critically evaluates his conception of the self in relation to his Islamic predecessors.45 We must first begin by outlining the epistemological framework or the range of human experiences that makes the analysis of the self possible. Placing himself squarely against Kantian epistemology which assumes that all experience other than empirical experience is beyond human reach, Iqbal argues that in view of the more recent developments in science such as the nature of matter as “bottled-­up light waves,” the idea of the universe as an act of thought, the finitude of space and time, and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the case for metaphysical knowledge does not appear to be as far-­fetched as Kant would have us believe.46 As noted in the previous chapter, Kant argues that while we must think the transcendental subject as a necessary condition of knowledge itself, we cannot cognize the subject as it is. This is because our cognition is mediated by “sensible intuition.” Moreover, since the forms of intuition are spatiotemporal, the self, as the transcendental condition of knowledge, lies outside of the domain of experience. As such, the self cannot be the object of any judgment. Nonetheless, 43.  It could be argued that Iqbal’s project was to build a new foundation for Islamic thought in the face of modernity, and that he did not see the need to engage deeply with these figures, since he thought much of the premodern Islamic tradition is irrelevant to modern challenges. But this cannot be right, for Iqbal refers to various Muslim thinkers numerous times in his writings. 44.  See for instance, the following remark by Fazlur Rahman, an otherwise fine scholar of Islam: “Strictly speaking . . . the only philosopher of modern Islam is Sir Muhammad Iqbal.” Fazlur Rahman, “Iqbal and Modern Muslim Thought,” in Studies in Iqbal’s Thought and Art, ed. by M. Saeed Sheikh (Lahore: Bazm-­i Iqbal, 1972), 43. 45.  On the need for such a reassessment, see the recent article on Iqbal by Sajjad Rizvi, “Between Hegel and Rumi: Iqbal’s Contrapuntal Encounters with the Islamic Philosophical traditions,” in Chad Hillier and B. Koshul, eds., Muhammad Iqbal: Essays on the Reconstruction of Religious Thought (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 123. 46.  See Muhammad Iqbal, The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, ed. and annot. by M. Saeed Sheikh (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 144.

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in Kant’s view, it must be possible for the “I think” to accompany every representation, and so we must conceive of the self as a thinking subject expressing an indeterminate perception that signifies “something real that is given.”47 But the “I think” itself not a sensible intuition. Notwithstanding his disagreements with Kant, Iqbal, unlike his Muslim predecessors, seeks to establish self-­knowledge on the basis of intuition and introspection rather than non-­reflective consciousness. Taking clues from Henri Bergson, whose philosophy can be seen as an attempt to overcome Kant who eliminates the possibility of absolute knowledge, Iqbal, pace Kant who denies “intellectual intuition,” argues that “thought” and “intuition” spring up from the same source and complement each other.48 For Iqbal, as for Bergson, thought or intelligence grasps reality bit by bit, “traversing the whole by slowly specifying and closing up the various regions of the whole,” while intuition grasps it in its wholeness and all at once. Moreover, while thought fixes its gaze on the temporal aspect of reality, intuition focuses on the eternal. However, both need each other, since they both seek visions of the same reality which reveals itself to them in accordance with their function in life.49 According to Bergson, the function of the intellect (or intelligence) is to divide and analyze things according to 47.  See Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, fn. (a) B422, B153–­4. Cf. chapter 2. 48.  Although largely neglected today, Henri Bergson (1859–­1941) was one of the most famous and influential French philosophers of his own time. He also won the Nobel Prize and had public debates with such famous scientists as Einstein. Einstein considered Bergson’s theory of time to be a putative, psychological notion, irreconcilable with the quantitative realities of physics, while Bergson argued that time should not be understood exclusively through the lens of science, criticizing Einstein’s theory of time for being a metaphysics grafted onto science, one that ignored the intuitive aspects of time. It is somewhat ironic, as Canales’s recent book rightly points out, that while in the early decades of the twentieth century, Bergson’s fame, prestige, and influence far surpassed that of Einstein, the latter is the most famous scientist in today’s world. See Jimena Canales, The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate that Changed Our Understanding of Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 3–­14. Bergson’s cult-­like fame decreased after the Second World War, even though such French philosophers as Merleau-­Ponty, Sartre, and Lévinas explicitly acknowledged his influence on their thought. However, with Gilles Deleuze’s book Bergsonism (1966) one observes a renewed interest in Bergsonism. See also some of the more recent publications that mark this renewed interest: Keith Ansell-­Pearson, Bergson: Thinking Beyond the Human Condition (London: Bloomsbury, 2018); and Christiane Baka Okpobé, Élan vital et mystique dans la pensée d’Henri Bergson (Strasbourg: Presses universitaires de Strasbourg, 2016). 49.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 2.

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the perspectives taken. Comprehensive analytic knowledge then consists in reconstruction or re-­composition of a thing by means of synthesizing the perspectives. This synthesis, while helping us gain a certain form of understanding, never gives us the thing itself; it only gives us a general idea of things. However, intuition reverses the normal working order of intelligence, which is interested in analysis. Unlike the intellect, intuition consists in entering into the thing, rather than going around it from the outside. This “entering into the thing” is attained by placing ourselves within its undivided mobility and reaching it through an intuition of duration, and it gives us absolute knowledge. At the beginning of his Introduction to Metaphysics, Bergson presents intellect and intuition as the two different ways of cognizing an object. He writes that there “are two profoundly different ways of knowing a thing. The first implies that we move round the object; the second that we enter into it. The first depends on the point of view at which we are placed and on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first kind of knowledge may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases where it is possible, to attain the absolute.”50 Iqbal thus rejects Kant’s famous verdict that the “thing-­in-­itself” (das Ding an sich) is inaccessible to our experience, because Iqbal’s epistemology makes room for mystical, higher states of subjectivity, as in the following: “The mystic state is a moment of intimate association with a Unique Other Self, transcending, encompassing, and momentarily suppressing the private personality of the subject of experience. Considering its content, the mystic state is highly objective and cannot be regarded as a mere retirement into the mists of pure subjectivity.”51 Having established the distinction between thought (analytic faculty) and intuition, Iqbal proceeds to affirm the impossibility of denying the reality of the self. Drawing on the British idealist Bradley this time, Iqbal asserts that it is one thing to say that the self is illusory or unreal, as Bradley does, but quite another to hold that it simply does not exist: 50.  Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. by T. E. Hulme (London and New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1903), 1; cf. also Bergson, The Creative Mind (La Pensée et le mouvant), trans. by Mabelle L. Andison (New York: The Citadel Press, 1992), 175–­176, 185; Matter and Memory, trans. by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (New York: Zone Books, 1994), 184–­85; and Creative Evolution, trans. by Arthur Mitchell, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 114, 153, 230. On the influence of Bergson’s evolutionist paradigm on Iqbal’s concept of the self, see Damian A. Howard, Being Human in Islam: The Impact of the Evolutionary Worldview (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 58–­64. 51.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 15.

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In the history of modern thought it is Bradley who furnishes the best evidence for the impossibility of denying reality to the ego. In his Ethical Studies he assumes the reality of the self;52 in his Logic he takes it only as a working hypothesis. It is in his Appearance and Reality that he subjects the ego to a searching examination. Indeed, his two chapters on the meaning and reality of the self may be regarded as a kind of modern Upanishad on the unreality of the Jivatman.53 According to him, the test of reality is freedom from contradiction and since his criticism discovers the finite center of experience to be infected with irreconcilable oppositions of change and permanence, unity and diversity, the ego is a mere illusion. Whatever may be our view of the self–­feeling, self-­identity, soul, will–­it can be examined only by the canons of thought which in its nature is relational, and all “relations involve contradictions.” Yet, in spite of the fact that his ruthless logic has shown the ego to be a mass of confusion, Bradley has to admit that the self must be “in some sense real,” “in some sense an indubitable fact.”54 We may easily grant that the ego, in its finitude, is imperfect as a unity of life.55 Like the philosophy of Bergson, British Idealism too is a largely forgotten affair in today’s academic philosophy, and it is not difficult to see why. In contrast to today’s analytic focus on philosophy, Idealism is marked by a moral and metaphysical tone deeply influenced by the philosophies of Hegel and Kant. From the 1870s onwards, it began to appear in Britain and rose rapidly to dominance with a new spirit in philosophy quite unlike either the empiricist or common-­sense systems which had hitherto dominated. While it was never characterized by anything like a single dogmatic creed, its various champions—­which included such figures as T. H. Green (1836–­1882), Edward Caird (1835–­1908), F. H. Bradley (1846–­1924), Bernard Bosanquet (1848–­1923), Henry Jones (1852–­1922), D. G. Ritchie (1853–­1903), R. B. Haldane (1856–­1928), J. M. E. McTaggart (1866–­1925), and R. G. Collingwood (1889–­1943)—­held views that were recognizably similar. Although it continued as a discernible strand of philosophical tradition well into the twentieth century, the ascendancy of British Idealism lasted only until about 1900, at which point more empiricist forms of 52.  Iqbal uses “self” and “ego” interchangeably. 53.  As opposed to the Atmān—­the “Divine Self.” 54.  Cf. F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930), 89. 55.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 78. Cf. Bradley, Ethical Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), 80ff; Appearance and Reality, 90–­103.

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philosophy forcefully reasserted themselves. Recent years, however, have seen a renewed interest in this forgotten and disparaged tradition. Since British Idealists are concerned with the fundamental nature of reality, as opposed to its conventional understanding, their metaphysics can largely be construed as a dialectic of appearance and reality, at the center of which lies the self.56 For the British Idealists, selfhood constitutes the model for reality itself. One sees it in the writings of some of the central figures of British Idealism. Bradley, for instance, asserts that it is impossible to abstract out the element of our experiencing them from the things which we experience, while Ferrier forcefully argues that no object is ever given except along with a subject.57 Similarly, Green deduces a “working mind” from the relational structure of the world that is known. However, even though the self might stand as the ground for reality, it does not automatically imply that its deeper mode of being is the same as what is encountered in everyday life. This is because while experience is foundational, appearances can be deceptive. Thus, one can see a distinction between the true nature of the self and its illusory appearance. For Idealists, the true self lies behind the conventional self we ordinarily take ourselves to be. Moreover, the notion of the true self, Idealists argue, enables us to understand what it means to speak of value or goodness, for genuine and final value may be understood as that which would satisfy our true or ideal self. As we shall see in chapter 5, there is much that Iqbal appropriates from the Idealists (alongside influences from Hegel, Nietzsche, and Bergson) when it comes to the self’s freedom, immortality, and road to perfection; but in the text above his main concern is to show that despite the self’s finitude and imperfect nature, its reality, as “unity of life,” cannot be denied. In an article entitled “McTaggart’s Philosophy,” Iqbal contends that notwithstanding the talk of the self’s being an illusion, there has to be a “subject of illusion,” to which all the tensions and contradictions of the self must be attributed, thereby affirming its reality: If you say that the “I” is a mere illusion—­(agar gūʾī kih man wahm u gumān ast) An appearance (namūd) among other appearances—­ 56.  For more discussions, see W. J. Mander and Stamatoula Panagakou, eds., British Idealism and the Concept of the Self (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); 1–­10; David Boucher and Andrew Vincent, British Idealism: A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum, 2012); and W. J. Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 57.  Mander and Panagakou, British Idealism and the Concept of the Self, 4.

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Then tell me who is the subject of this illusion? (dārā-­yi gumān kīst) Look within and discover. The world is visible, Yet its existence needs proof! Not even the intellect (fikr) of an angel can comprehend it! The “I” is invisible (khūdī pinhān) and needs no proof! Think awhile and see thine own secret! The “I” (khūdī) is Truth; it is no illusion. When it ripens, it becomes eternal! Lovers, even though separated from the Beloved, live in blissful union! It is possible to give wings to a mere spark, And to make it flutter ever and forever! The Eternity of God (dawām-­i ḥaqq) is elemental and not the reward of his action! That eternity is superior, which a borrowed soul Wins for herself by love’s frenzy (shawad az ʿishq u mastī pāydārī). The being of mountains and deserts and cities is nothing, The universe is mortal, the ego immortal, and nothing else matters (jahān fānī, khūdī bāqī, digar hīch).58 Before commenting on the above poem, one might note briefly that a number of Western thinkers have claimed that the self is an illusion. Dennett, for instance, says the following: “Are there entities, either in our brains, or over and above our brains, that control our bodies, think our thoughts, make our decisions? Of course not! Such an idea is either empirical idiocy (James’ ‘pontifical neuron’) or metaphysical claptrap (Ryle’s ‘ghost in the machine’).”59 Similarly, Owen Flanagan thinks that it is a mistake to suppose that there is an “I” that stands behind all conscious experience and constitutes the essence of the self. The mind’s “I” that is supposed to stand for our conscious control, actions, and all agency-­related functions is an illusion.60 Likewise, for Paul Churchland the self is a quaint holdover of 58.  Muhammad Iqbal, “McTaggart’s Philosophy,” in Discourses of Iqbal, 209–­ 210. This is Iqbal’s own translation from The New Garden of Mystery, i.e., Gulshan­i rāz-­i jadīd. See Iqbal, Kulliyāt-i Iqbāl Fārsī (Lahore: Ghulām ʿAlī, 1973), 562–­ 563. The last verse is from another poem. 59.  See Dennett, Consciousness Explained, 413; cf. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), 5–­43. 60.  Owen Flanagan, Consciousness Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 177–­178.

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folk psychology, while for Francis Crick it is merely a “pack of neurons.”61 On the other hand, other philosophers strongly assert the reality of the self. For example, like Iqbal, Gary Cesarz thinks that no matter how one tries to explain the self away as a “mere story we tell ourselves” (Dennett), a “storyteller” is still required to tell the story—­thereby proving the reality of the self. Otherwise, the story becomes the storyteller; a self-­caused story about itself, an epiphenomenal demigod, a situation which ignores the asymmetry between the storyteller and story. If the story includes anything more, it will include chapters on body and its neurophysiology. And if one insists that the body generates the storyteller, then all we have, according to Cesarz, is an expansion of the tale wherein the body is a character in the story that produces a storyteller that tells the story, which is circular.62 The above poem is Iqbal’s own translation from his Persian work Gulshan-­i rāz-­i jadīd, which is itself a response to the Persian Sufi metaphysician Shabistarī’s (ca. fourteenth century) famous work Gulshan-­i rāz, which deals with the question of the self and self-­inquiry. The main argument of the poem seems to be that the “I” or the self is not an illusion in the sense of having no existence of its own. In contrast to the external world, which is visible and perceived by the senses, the self is invisible and needs no proof for its existence, since it is perceived when one turns one’s gaze within. Moreover, the self is immortal, even though its immortality needs to be attained through a ceaseless struggle by overcoming its imperfections.63 In the context of the present discussion, the important point to consider is that for Iqbal “self-­knowledge,” i.e., how the self ascertains itself, is obtained intuitively,64 a mode which Iqbal sometimes calls “inner reflection.”65 In his scheme of things, there is no concept of “presence” (ḥuḍūr) or “self-­revelation” (svaprakāśa) when it comes to 61.  See Paul Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 322; and Francis Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 3, respectively. 62.  Gary Cesarz, “Renovating McTaggart’s Substantial Self,” in The Concept of the Self in British Idealism, 264. For similar arguments, see Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro, A Brief History of the Soul (Malden, MA: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2011), 182ff; and David Lund, The Conscious Self: The Immaterial Center of Subjective States (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2005), 36–­50. 63.  Iqbal, “McTaggart’s Philosophy,” 209. 64.  In other words, in the Bergsonian sense of intuition. 65.  For instance: “It is obvious that we know our own self and Nature by inner reflection and sense-­perception respectively.” Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 15.

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self-­knowledge. More importantly, Iqbal’s affirmation of self-­knowledge through intuition or inner reflection puts him at odds with Ṣadrā et al., who argue at length about the impossibility of self-­knowledge through reflection or introspection. Recall from chapter 2 Ṣadrā’s argument that any phenomenal state or mental event which the self ascribes to itself already presupposes an underlying awareness of the self, meaning that one cannot have self-­knowledge on the basis of introspection and attending to one’s self. Now, I agree with Iqbal that introspective gaze may also yield self-­ knowledge. However, introspection and other methods are only meaningful once we accept non-­reflective self-­knowledge, which is the ground of all forms of self-­knowledge. It is noteworthy that even though both Bergson and Iqbal reject the Kantian denial of direct self-­knowledge, their notion of “intuition” somehow has to assume self-­knowledge. Regarding the intuition of the self, Iqbal quotes from Bergson’s L’Évolution créatrice, and explains as follows: What do I find when I fix my gaze on my own conscious experience? In the words of Bergson: “I pass from state to state. I am warm or cold. I am merry or sad, I work or I do nothing, I look at what is around me or I think of something else. Sensations, feelings, volitions, ideas–­such are the changes into which my existence is divided and which color it in turns. I change then, without ceasing.” Thus, there is nothing static in my inner life; all is a constant mobility, an unceasing flux of states, a perpetual flow in which there is no halt or resting place. Constant change, however, is unthinkable without time. On the analogy of our inner experience, then, conscious existence means life in time. A keener insight into the nature of conscious experience, however, reveals that the self in its inner life moves from the center outwards.66 While one can debate what one really experiences when one fixes one’s gaze on one’s consciousness, from Ṣadrā’s viewpoint, which I endorse, this already assumes the identity between the self which is gazing introspectively and the self whose states are being experienced, so, Iqbal’s articulation falls into the trap of circularity and infinite regress. When Iqbal says “my perception of things that confront me is superficial and external; but my perception of my own self is internal, intimate, and profound,” it 66.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 37–­38. Cf. Bergson, L’Évolution créatrice (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1908), 1.

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seems to escape his mind that there is a gap between one’s act of perception and the object which is perceived that simply cannot be assumed.67 In any event, drawing again on Bergson’s distinction between the superficial and the fundamental self,68 Iqbal asserts that a phenomenological analysis of our conscious experience reveals that we have a deeper self, namely the appreciative self, in addition to a more mundane, social self, known as the efficient self: A deeper analysis of conscious experience reveals to us what I have called the appreciative side of the self. With our absorption in the external order of things, necessitated by our present situation, it is extremely difficult to catch a glimpse of the appreciative self. In our constant pursuit after external things we weave a kind of veil round the appreciative self which thus becomes completely alien to us. It is only in the moments of profound meditation, when the efficient self is in abeyance, that we sink into our deeper self and reach the inner center of experience. In the life-­process of this deeper ego the states of consciousness melt into each other.69 That is, a deeper look into the nature of conscious experience reveals that the self in its inner life moves from the center toward the periphery, which can be described as the appreciative and efficient self respectively. The effi67.  It is, however, interesting to note that while explaining Avicenna’s and Suhrawardī’s philosophy, Iqbal shows awareness of the unmediated character of consciousness, as in the following: “Moreover, the fact that the soul is immediately self-­conscious—­conscious of itself through itself conclusively shows that in its essence the soul is quite independent of any physical accompaniment.” See Muhammad Iqbal, The Development of Metaphysics in Persia (A Contribution to the History of Muslim Philosophy) (Lahore: Bazm-­[i]-­Iqbal, 1964), 35. And, “The Abstract Light knows itself through itself, and does not stand in need of a non-­ego to reveal its own existence to itself. Consciousness or self-­knowledge, therefore, is the very essence of Abstract light, as distinguished from the negation of light.” Iqbal, Development of Metaphysics, 101. Matters would have turned out to be quite different had Iqbal chosen to engage Islamic philosophy in a serious manner. Also, these kinds of passages made the Iranian philosopher Dīnānī surmise that Iqbal’s khūdī (self) was influenced by Suhrawardī’s philosophy, although there is no direct evidence to verify this. See Ghulām Ḥusayn Ibrāhīmī Dīnānī, Shuʿāʿ-i andīsha u shuhūd dar falsafa-­yi Suhrawardī (Tehran: Ḥikmat, 1996), 534. 68.  Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. by F. L. Pogson (Montana: Kessinger Publishing Company, 1910), 127–­128. 69.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 38.

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cient self, Iqbal maintains, is the practical self of everyday life in its dealing with the external order of things which determine our passing states of consciousness and stamp on these states their own spatial feature of mutual isolation. The self here lives outside itself, as it were, and while retaining its unity as a whole, it discloses itself as nothing more than a series of specific states. The time in which the efficient self lives is, therefore, the time which we conceive as long and short. But time so regarded is not true time, since existence in serial time is spurious existence. However, in our profound meditative experiences, we come across another dimension of the self that is perceived as a synthetic unity, in which various states of consciousness melt into one another to give us a sense of the whole. It will be worth our while to elaborate on the relationship between temporality and consciousness in this context. As we saw in Suhrawardī and Mullā Ṣadrā (chapter 2), consciousness is thought to be continuous and never-­interrupting, which can be likened to an ever-­flowing stream but which at the same time enables us to be aware of this very fluctuating stream of experiences. Still, this would only be intelligible if we keep in mind the various modes of consciousness (as delineated in figure 3), since our consciousness modulates between waking, dreaming, and dreamless sleep. Moreover, as Iqbal rightly points out, when we sink into deeper meditative states, our experience of time dilates and we become aware of the difference between what can be called objective and subjective time.70 Objective time refers to the ordinary experience of time, which is measured by a clock and flows serially in a continuum. It is the time which we associate with changing phenomena around us, e.g., the changing of the day into the night and vice-­versa. In contrast, subjective time is experienced directly by the human consciousness without any external measurement. For example, we cannot quantitatively measure the “experience” of the inner time that involves deep meditative states. This inner, subjective time can be experienced in numerous ways, in a state of contraction or expansion, in pain or in joy, in separation from loved ones or in their proximity. The very duration or continuous flow of subjective time differs according to the varying constitutions of one’s given subjectivity. Thus, when one is in a state of prolonged suffering, subjective time expands and an hour mea70.  Discussing here the vexed question of the nature of time in philosophical/ scientific discourse would lead us too far afield. For an overview of the various issues involved in the problem of time, see Barry Dainton, Time and Space (Ithaca, NY: McGill-­Queens University Press, 2010); and Bradley Dowden, The Metaphysics of Time: A Dialogue (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2009).

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sured in objective, serial time is experienced as a much longer period. On the contrary, when one is in a state of euphoria or ecstasy, subjective time contracts and many hours feel like a few moments. The above analysis can be further elucidated with reference to Husserl’s threefold structure of the inner time-­consciousness (das innere Zeitbewusstsein), which complements the view of consciousness I am defending, namely that it is continuous and never-­interrupting while manifesting itself in different modes of being. Husserl’s account, which bears some notable resemblance to Bergson’s, suggests that our perception of temporal objects including our objectified self would be impossible if consciousness provided us with access only to the pure now-­phase of the object, and if the stream of consciousness itself was a series of disconnected points like a line of pearls.71 According to Husserl, the basic structure of consciousness presents a “duration block” or a temporal field that encompasses all three temporal modes of present, past, and future. There is, first of all, a “primal impression” (Urimpression), which is the moment that captures the now phase of the temporal object. Secondly, the primal impression is accompanied by the elements of “retention” and “protention.” Retention provides the consciousness with the just-­elapsed phase of the object, while protention provides the implicit and unreflective anticipation of the phase of the object about to occur. So, the concrete and full structure of all lived conscious experience comprises protention-­primal impression–­retention. Thus, the inner structure of consciousness itself encompasses more than that which is given at a particular moment, which is consistent with the idea of the continuity of awareness.72

71.  On Husserl’s exposition of the inner time-­consciousness (das innere Zeitbewusstsein), see Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins: mit den Texten aus der Erstausgabe und dem Nachlass; mit einer Einleitung herausgegeben von Rudolf Bernet (Hamburg: Meiner, 1985), 374ff; and Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke: Phänomenologische Psychologie. Vorlesungen Sommersemester, vol. 9 (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 200–­212. A sizeable literature exists on Husserl’s notion of the inner time-­consciousness. For an overview of the notion and the controversies surrounding it, see Dan Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood: Investigating the First-­person Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 49–­64. 72.  Cf. Zahavi, Subjectivity and Selfhood, 55–­57.

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Unity of Self and Consciousness After analyzing Iqbal’s view that the self or one’s “I” is the indubitable fact of experience, we can turn now to explicating the unity of the self and consciousness. Even though Iqbal does not address how the “I” as subject is related to the “I” as object, which is crucial in any discussion of self-­knowledge or self-­ identity, he points out that an important characteristic of the self, namely its essential privacy, reveals the unity and indivisibility of every ego. Iqbal says: [M]y desire for a certain thing is essentially mine. Its satisfaction means my private enjoyment. If all mankind happen to desire the same thing, the satisfaction of their desire will not mean the satisfaction of my desire when I do not get the thing desired. The dentist may sympathize with my toothache, but cannot experience the feeling of my toothache. My pleasures, pains, and desires are exclusively mine, forming a part and parcel of my private ego alone. My feelings, hates and loves, judgments and resolutions, are exclusively mine. God Himself cannot feel, judge, and choose for me when more than one course of action is open to me.73 This passage shows that any experience, at the very least, is characterized by “first-­person exclusiveness.” It also anticipates the insight of Nagel and the phenomenologists on the first-­person irreducibility of the self. Recalling our first-­person vs. third-­person distinction of conscious experience (see chapter 1), it is not difficult to see where Iqbal is going with all this. If I desire something, its fulfilment will be my own private enjoyment. From a third-­person view, the rest of humanity may observe that I am reaping the benefit of satisfying a particular desire and the scientists may analyze all the relevant stimuli causing my private enjoyment and pin down all the corresponding neural activities, but none of these would be sufficient to capture the first-­personal character of my experience which is irreducible through its what-­it-­is-­like-­ness and for-­me-­only-­ness. This is true of every mental event that is experienced from the first-­person perspective. Hence Iqbal underlines some obvious examples such as a toothache and feelings of love or hate that are irreducible vis-­à-­vis the third-­person standpoint because of their mineness or for-­me-­only-­ness. 73.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 79–­80.

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One may also interpret this text as an argument for what is known as the “privileged access to the self,”74 a thesis which has generated much controversy in recent philosophy since it clashes with forms of externalism about mental content championed by Putnam, Burge, and others. For some of these philosophers, the idea of a privileged access to the self is not philosophy, but part of the ordinary folk notion of the mental, enshrined in literature and drama, that makes us believe that each of us stands in a special relationship, denied to others, to our own mental lives so that a significant range of our mental states and attributes are directly available to us and only indirectly available to others. This special relationship is supposed to embrace each sensation, mood, emotion, belief, desire, fear, intention, action (what I am doing), memory (what I am remembering), perception (what I am seeing), thought (what I am thinking), imagination, and meaning.75 After stating his case for the privileged access to the self, Iqbal advances the view that the nature of the self is constituted by consciousness, which has three subdivisions. He articulates the view in his masterwork, Jāwīd-­ nāma (The Book of Javed): Whether you be alive, or dead, or dying—­ for this seek witness from three witnesses. The first witness (shāhid-­i awwal) is self-­consciousness (shuʿūr-­i khwīshtan), 74.  Iqbal himself uses the word “privilege” in relation to this phenomenon. See Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 37. 75.  For various kinds of debates concerning this issue, see Sanford Goldberg, ed., Externalism, Self-­knowledge and Skepticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Hilary Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7 (1975): 131–­193; Tyler Burge, “Individualism and the Mental,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1979): 73–­121; reprinted in Burge, Foundations of Mind: Philosophical Essays, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) 100–­150; Paul Snowdon, “How to Think about Phenomenal Self-­Knowledge,” in A. Coliva, ed., The Self and Self-­knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 243–­262; John McDowell, “Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein,” in Klaus Puhl, ed., Meaning Scepticism (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1991), 148–­169; Michael McKinsey, “Anti-­Individualism and Privileged Access,” Analysis 51 (1991): 9–­16; and Quassim Cassam, Self-­Knowledge for Humans (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 50ff. Cf. also Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), chapters 1–­3, for a discussion of innate self-­knowledge through the possession of “universal grammar.”

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to behold oneself in one’s own light; the second witness is the consciousness of another (shuʿūr-­i dīgarī), to behold oneself in another’s light; the third witness is the consciousness of God’s Self (shuʿūr-­i dhāt-­i ḥaqq), to behold oneself in the light of God’s Self (khwīsh rā dīdan bih nūr-­i dhāt-­i ḥaqq). If you remain fast before this light, count yourself living and abiding as God! Life is to attain one’s own station (bih maqām-­i khūd rasīdan), life is to see the Divine Self (dhāt) without a veil; the true man of faith (mard-­i muʾmin) will not make do with Attributes—­ the Prophet was not content save with the Divine Self.76 That is to say, the first witness of the self is self-­consciousness (shuʿūr-­i khwīshtan), which is ascertained when one turns one’s gaze upon oneself or sees oneself in one’s light. The next modality of consciousness has to do with consciousness of another being (shuʿūr-­i dīgarī), which is established when we become conscious of the other. In our foray into Mullā Ṣadrā’s concept of the self, we saw that he used the phenomenon of shame (khajāla) to demonstrate intersubjective consciousness. In his Reconstruction, Iqbal throws some light on how one might affirm intersubjective consciousness. Iqbal argues that the only ground for our knowledge of a conscious being before us is the physical movements similar to our own from which we can infer the presence of another conscious being. He further expounds the notion of intersubjective consciousness by suggesting that we can be sure of other conscious beings because they respond to our signals and thus constantly supply the necessary supplement to our own disparate thoughts.77 So far, Iqbal is in agreement with Ṣadrā about the modalities of reflective and intersubjective consciousness, although their arguments for deducing them are different. However, whereas Ṣadrā and others talk about “non-­reflective consciousness” that, for them, is the precondition of self-­knowledge, Iqbal mentions “consciousness of the divine” as the third mode of consciousness, which is affirmed when the self becomes conscious of the Divine Self. He further maintains that the purpose of life is to see the Divine Self without 76.  Iqbal, Jāwīd-­nāma, in Kulliyāt-­i Iqbāl Fārsī, 607, trans. by Arberry, modified, 29–­30. 77.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 15.

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a veil, in contrast to Ṣadrā et al. for whom the same goal is attained when one attains the degree of pure consciousness, since for them the Divine Self cannot be perceived as an object or a Thou. One related issue that merits further attention in the context of Iqbal’s discussion of the modalities of consciousness is the nature of consciousness itself. This is significant since Iqbal criticizes James’s famous notion of consciousness as a “stream of thought,” as it is unable to account for the unity of the self and consciousness, which is foundational in linking disparate perceptions. For James, every thought forms an indivisible unity with all the previous thoughts. He points out further that all people unhesitatingly believe that they feel themselves thinking and that they distinguish the mental state as an inward activity from all the objects with which it may cognitively deal. He thus takes it as axiomatic that some form of cogitation is indubitable. As for consciousness as a stream of thought, he argues that it boils down ultimately to the stream of one’s breathing. “The ‘I think’ which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects is the ‘I breathe’ which actually does accompany them. . . . 78 There are other internal facts besides breathing (intracephalic muscular adjustments, etc., of which I have said a word in my larger Psychology), and these increase the assets of consciousness, so far as the latter is subject to immediate perception; but breath, which was ever the original of ‘spirit,’ breath moving outwards, between the glottis and the nostrils, is, I am persuaded, the essence out of which philosophers have constructed the entity known to them as consciousness.”79 James then concludes that this entity is fictitious, while thoughts in the concrete are fully real. With this prelude, let me now turn to Iqbal’s ruminations on consciousness. Iqbal writes: 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.80 It is a case of tension, a state of self concentration, by means of which life manages to shut out all memories and associations which have no bearing on a present action. It has no well-­ defined fringes; it shrinks and expands as the occasion demands. To describe it as an epiphenomenon of the processes of matter is to deny 78.  William James, “Does Consciousness Exist?,” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods 1, no. 18 (1904): 477–­491, at 491; Cf. The Principles of Psychology, I.ix, 237–­248. 79.  James, The Principles of Psychology, I.ix, 237–­248. 80.  This part is adopted from Bergson. See his Creative Evolution, 189ff.

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it as an independent activity, and to deny it as an independent activity is to deny the validity of all knowledge which is only a systematized expression of consciousness. Thus consciousness is a variety of the purely spiritual principle of life which is not a substance, but an organizing principle, a specific mode of behavior essentially different from the behavior of an externally worked machine.81 The above passage explains Iqbal’s notion of consciousness as an organizing principle, which is not a substance. Based on our earlier analysis, it can be argued that consciousness is not reducible to the spectrum of experiential qualities that characterize sense-­differentiated objects of experience, sensory qualities, emotions, mood, memory, or the imagination. Rather, a correct understanding of consciousness should treat it as a qualitative, multifaceted phenomenon that is explicable in terms of various mental states. Although in the present paradigm, consciousness is the defining feature of human subjectivity, it does not mean it is a sort of “witness-­self” or Cartesian substance over and above each and every mental activity. Rather, the most basic form of consciousness is non-­egological, i.e., one in which there is no distinct sense of the self as an “I.” Nevertheless, one observes certain inconsistencies in Iqbal’s account. On the one hand, he affirms that consciousness is a “spiritual principle of life,” whose function must be to organize disparate elements of the mind in order to bestow upon them some kind of order, since Iqbal also states that it is an “organizing principle.” On the other, he asserts that consciousness is a “deflection from life.” Moreover, if consciousness is a specific mode of behavior, e.g., a feeling of astonishment, it is difficult to see how it can also act as an “organizing principle” which must, in some sense, be distinct from a mode of behavior; otherwise, why should consciousness, as a specific behavior, be different from other kinds of behavior or mental phenomena? Notwithstanding these inconsistencies, Iqbal makes clear that consciousness cannot be regarded as an epiphenomenon of matter and is distinct from the working of a machine, e.g., artificial intelligence. For Iqbal, understanding the true nature of consciousness is vital, as it illuminates the nature of the self. Iqbal then turns to James’s conception of consciousness as a stream of thought, which is a conscious flow of changes with a felt continuity. In Iqbal’s view, James comes up with a kind of inclusive principle to explain our conscious experiences, which are somehow interlinked to form a flow 81.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 33.

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of mental life. On this view, the nature of the self comprises the feelings of personal life, in which every pulse of thought, present or perishing, is an indivisible unity which knows and recollects. The self is the principle that appropriates the passing of pulses—­present and future. According to Iqbal, such a description of the mental life is ingenious, although it fails to unravel the true nature of consciousness. Iqbal then defends a “unitary” view of consciousness by arguing that it is an organizing principle underlying all behavior. That is to say, consciousness is something single and irreducible, which is presupposed in all mental life and does not consist in bits that mutually report to one another.82 In Iqbal’s view, James’s interpretation of consciousness entirely ignores the relatively permanent element in our experience. In James’s account, Iqbal continues, “There is no continuity of being between the passing thoughts. When one of these is present, the other has totally disappeared.” As such, the passing thought, which is irrevocably lost, cannot be known and appropriated by the present thought, and so on. Iqbal reminds us that his criticism does not imply that the “ego is over and above the mutually penetrating multiplicity we call experience,” for this would lead to a positing of the ego that stands outside experience and watches over all thoughts and mental events, which is absurd: The life of the ego is a kind of tension caused by the ego invading the environment and the environment invading the ego. The ego does not stand outside this arena of mutual invasion. It is present in it as directive energy and is formed and disciplined by its own experience. . . . The Qur’an is clear on this directive function of the ego: “And they ask thee of the soul. Say: the soul proceeded from my Lord’s Amr [Command]: but of knowledge, only a little to you is given” (Q. 17: 85).83 For Iqbal, the ego or the self is already enmeshed in conscious experience. It does not stand outside experience because experience itself can be considered the “self at work” in its act of perceiving, judging, and willing.84 Up to this point, Iqbal’s analysis is philosophically rigorous, and very much in line with the view I am advancing; but things begin to look somewhat opaque and debatable when his interpretation of the aforementioned Qur’anic verse suggests that the essential nature of the self is directive, as 82.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 81–­82. 83.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 82. 84.  Cf. Zahavi, Self and Other, 3–­40.

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it proceeds from the directive energy of God. Iqbal further claims that the personal pronoun used in the expression rabbī (my Lord) is meant to suggest that “the soul must be taken as something individual and specific, with all the variations in the range, balance, and effectiveness of its unity.”85 Citing another verse, “Every man acteth after his own manner: but your Lord well knoweth who is best guided in the path” (Q. 17: 84). Iqbal concludes that the real personality of the self is not a thing; rather it is “a series of acts, mutually referring to one another, and held together by the unity of a directive purpose.”86 It is hard to see how one can get from a discussion on the nature of consciousness to the nature of the self as some entity “held together by the unity of a directive purpose” through a creative hermeneutics (taʾwīl) of scripture.87 At any rate, Iqbal reinforces the self’s unity by deploying the following interrelated arguments: The ego reveals itself as a unity of what we call mental states. Mental states do not exist in mutual isolation. They mean and involve one another. They exist as phases of a complex whole, called mind. The organic unity, however, of these interrelated states or, let us say, events is a special kind of unity. It fundamentally differs from the unity of a material thing; for the parts of a material thing can exist in mutual isolation. Mental unity is absolutely unique. We cannot say that one of my beliefs is situated on the right or left of my other belief. Nor is it possible to say that my appreciation of the beauty of the Tāj varies with my distance from Agra.88 Iqbal strengthens the above argument by pointing out that when we think about the conclusion of a certain syllogism, all of its premises must be believed in by one and the same mind. This is because if one believes in the proposition “All men are mortal,” and another mind believes in the proposition “Socrates is a man,” no inference would be possible. That is to say, the inference is only possible if both the major and minor prem85.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 82. The “soul” is used synonymously with “self” in this context. This is an instance of inconsistent use. 86.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 82. 87.  On taʾwīl, see The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, available at http://www. oxfordislamicstudies.com/article/opr/t125/e2358?_hi=0&_pos=7998, accessed on Jun 06, 2018. For a classical treatment of Qur’anic hermeneutics, see al-­Ghazālī, Qānūn al-­taʾwīl, ed. by Bījū (Damascus, 1992), 15. 88.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 79.

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ises are believed in by one and the same mind.89 Similarly, our conscious experience must show a unity of consciousness, since our mental states are related as numerous distinct qualities to the self, which remains unchanged during the flux of its qualities. Moreover, Iqbal argues that one’s recognition of another person is only possible if one’s self continues to be the same self between the original perception and the present act of memory.90 Furthermore, the unity of the self, Iqbal continues, “is like the unity of the germ in which the experiences of its individual ancestors exist, not as a plurality, but as a unity in which every experience permeates the whole. There is no numerical distinctness of states in the totality of the ego, the multiplicity of whose elements is, unlike that of the efficient self, wholly qualitative.”91 Summary This chapter challenges Hume’s bundle theory of the self by arguing that Hume’s account mistakes an objectified image of the self for the self. In so doing, Hume claims that the self is but a bundle of uninterrupted perceptions lacking any substantial identity. After discussing the Humean challenge, this chapter develops a model of the onto-­phenomenological structure of consciousness that explains the relationship between the self, self-­knowledge, and consciousness. The chapter also elaborates on the relationship between temporality and consciousness by drawing on Husserl’s threefold structure of the inner time-­consciousness. Finally, by bringing Iqbal into dialogue with James, this chapter assesses arguments for the unity of the self and consciousness.

89.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 79–­80. 90.  Such arguments for personal identity in relation to memory would be problematic from a contemporary viewpoint. For various contemporary perspectives, see Raymond Martin and J. Barresi, Personal Identity (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), passim; and Bernard Williams, Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), chapters 1–­2. 91.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 38.

Part I I

C h a pte r 4

Self, Body, and Consciousness

Consciousness in Neuroscience In the previous chapter, I discussed, inter alia, Iqbal’s criticism of James’s notion of consciousness as a “stream of thought,” as it is unable to account for the unity of the self and consciousness, which is foundational to linking disconnected perceptions. In contrast, Iqbal defends a unitary view of consciousness by arguing that it is the organizing principle underlying all behavior. This view lends support to my theory of “non-­reflective consciousness,” although Iqbal himself did not take steps toward developing such a notion. Additionally, I agree with Iqbal’s criticism of both epiphenomenalism and the substantialist account of the self. More generally, in the preceding pages I have been arguing for a multidimensional model of the self in which two distinct levels must be discerned, namely the descriptive and the normative levels. I have also shown that the descriptive level itself is further divided into the bio-­physiological, the socio-­cultural, and the cognito-­experiential dimensions. I have also argued that any cognitive stance toward the world or ourselves must comprise two distinct ontological elements, namely the subject and the object. Since epistemic statements only make sense in relation to a self-­conscious subject, one has to presuppose some form of “self-­knowledge” every time we utter something that has a cognitive import. In chapter 2, we saw why we cannot ground such self-­knowledge in reflection or introspection, hence the intelligibility of non-­reflective self-­knowledge. Thus, there is no way we can avoid presupposing the self while trying to investigate it, which leads eventually to its grounding in non-­reflective states that precede reflection. If what I have been saying is true, then my account of the self poses serious challenges to those theories that limit the self to its socio-­cultural 143

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or bio-­physiological aspects only. For instance, the neuroscientist Damasio calls the self “a perpetually re-­created neurobiological state.”1 This is because, on Damasio’s view, in order to have an experience of the self, numerous brain systems must interact and coordinate, as must numerous organ systems. Now, such a view takes the self or consciousness as the function or an emergent property of the brain, which essentially makes the self a biological phenomenon. Worse still, such theories evade the question “how does the self know itself” altogether, since they are concerned with the self’s cognitive ability (e.g., visual awareness) to perceive a given object or express a given emotion, which would enable them to infer its nature. Yet, when it comes to our experience of the self or our knowledge of ourselves, neuroscientific theories like the above hardly map onto reality (see below). Also, from the Introduction we can recall the argument that if there is such a thing as the self, then it must have properties that would correspond to the first-­person experience of the self. Otherwise, we simply have to deny all genuine form of self-­experience. This is not to deny the important role of the brain in our understanding of the self, but recent neuroscientific theories seek to provide an all-­encompassing model of the self and consciousness, which, if true, would seriously undermine the theoretical worth of the proposal I am defending in this study. For instance, in a widely-­acclaimed textbook on the neuroscience of consciousness, Michael Gazzaniga et al. write: Throughout this book, we have come to see that our essence, who we are and what we do, is the result of our brain processes. We are born with an intricate brain, slowly developing under genetic control, with refinements being made under the influence of the environment and experience. The brain has particular skill sets, with constraints, and a capacity to generalize. All of these traits, which evolved under natural selection, are the foundation for a myriad of distinct cognitive abilities represented in different parts of the brain.2 1.  Damasio, Descartes’ Error, 100. 2.  Michael S. Gazzaniga et al., Cognitive Neuroscience: The Biology of the Mind (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 606. Similarly, in Kandel et al., eds., Principles of Neural Science (New York: McGraw-­Hill Medical, 2013), 384, we read: “At the beginning of this book we stated that what we commonly call mind is a set of operations carried out by the brain. Because consciousness is a fundamental property of mind, it too must be a function of the brain and in principle we should be able to identify neural circuits that give rise to it.”

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Anticipating the radical nature of some of these claims, they acknowledge that “What makes some of these brain findings difficult to accept, however, is that we feel unified and in control: We feel that we are calling the shots and can consciously control all our actions. We do not feel at the mercy of multiple neural systems battling it out in our heads.”3 The above is one among numerous other controversial theories that have emerged from the recent neuroscientific literature on self and consciousness. Since this literature is vast and contains a variety of issues, I will first outline the theories that I, along with many others, find deeply problematic:

i. The identity thesis (our identity is our brain) ii. Eliminativism (“self” or “consciousness” are fictional entities created by the brain) iii. Neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) explain neural causation. iv. Anthropomorphization of the brain, e.g., attributing mental/emotional states to the brain (mereological fallacy) v. The double-­aspect theory (the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of the same reality) vi. Computational theories of consciousness (the view that the brain is a digital computer or that the mind can be simulated on a computer) vii. Neural emergentism (the view that the self or consciousness gradually emerges from intricate brain processes)

In order to engage and critique the aforementioned controversial claims, it would be helpful to begin with a brief history of the neuroscience of consciousness and explain the arguments of some of the influential theories in neuroscience, such as the global workspace or the integrated information theory. But I must make it clear that my goal in this chapter is not to survey this literature but to point out, from a philosophical point of view, the problematic nature of these neuroscientific conceptions of the self and consciousness. In his most recent book on consciousness, the neuroscientist Christof Koch (who, along with Francis Crick, has authored several books and articles 3.  Gazzaniga et al., Cognitive Neuroscience, 606. One wonders, however, if brains were indeed calling the shots, what about the conscious perspective that allowed one to be aware of the latter’s “calling the shots?” This would imply some form of Manichean dualism of “consciousness” which could not be more mysterious!

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on consciousness) informs us that for a long time writing about topics such as consciousness was considered a taboo. However, things began to change when “Together with a handful of colleagues—­Bernie Baars, Ned Block, David Chalmers, Jean-­Pierre Changeux, Stanislas Dehaene, Gerald Edelman, Steven Laureys, Geraint Rees, John Searle, Wolf Singer, and Giulio Tononi, to mention a few—­we gave birth to a science of consciousness.”4 It will be clear in a moment why I am quoting Koch while narrating the history of the neuroscience of consciousness. It is symptomatic of the work of many neuroscientists that they seem to neglect the vast literature on the self and consciousness in both Western and non-­Western philosophies until the late modern period. Turning a blind eye to the recent research on consciousness in ancient, Indian, and Islamic philosophies, Koch goes on to claim that the reason “why so much of philosophy about the self, the will, and other aspects of our mind has been barren for more than two thousand years” is because philosophers rely on “introspection” when it comes to explicating the nature of the self.5 Now such facile and simply untrue claims have been repeated in one way or another by many other so-­called founders of the science of consciousness. For instance, despite his contributions to the philosophy of consciousness, Searle also claims that “from the time of the ancient Greeks up to the latest computational models of cognition, the entire subject of consciousness, and of its relation to the brain, has been something of a mess.”6 This is not the place to engage the Eurocentric, teleological conception of science and history, or the thesis of “the two cultures” (to 4.  Christof Koch, Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 5–­6. Among cognitive and neuroscientists who have written about consciousness are Bernard Baars, A Cognitive Theory of Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Michael Gazzaniga, Mind Matters (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1988); Rodney Cotterill, Enchanted Looms: Conscious Networks in Brains and Computers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Crick, The Astonishing Hypothesis; Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens; Gerald Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1989); Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness: How Matter Becomes Imagination (New York: Basic Books, 2000); Walter Freeman, How Brains Make Up Their Minds (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Benjamin Libet, Neurophysiology of Consciousness (Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 1993); and Lawrence Weiskrantz, Consciousness Lost and Found: A Neuropsychological Exploration (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 5.  Koch, Consciousness, 6. 6.  John Searle, The Mystery of Consciousness (New York: New York Review of Books, 1997), 4–­5.

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use C. P. Snow’s famous phrase) which contributes to the ever-­widening gulf between the science and the humanities departments, with the result that researchers working in science departments are hardly aware of the enormous recent body of evidence in history of science and philosophy that topples the assumption of a triumphalist view of Western science and philosophy.7 Nevertheless, it will soon be clear how the neglect of the history and philosophy of science translates into some of the persistent methodological issues in the neuroscience of self and consciousness. To begin with, compare the following contrasting claims by the two philosophers of consciousness. According to Searle, “the neurosciences have advanced to the point that we can now treat consciousness as a scientific problem like any other.”8 For him, it is merely the question of figuring out “how brain processes cause consciousness and how consciousness is realized in the brain.”9 By way of contrast, Alva Noë, Searle’s colleague at Berkeley, thinks that “after decades of concerted effort on the part of neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—­how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, subjectivity—­has emerged unchallenged: we don’t have a clue.”10 According to Noë, “Even enthusiasts for the new neuroscience of consciousness admit that at present no one has any plausible explanation as to how experience—­the feeling of the redness of red!—­arises from the action of the brain. Despite all the technology and the animal experimentation, we are no closer now to grasping the neural basis of experience than we were a hundred years ago.”11 If the above remarks indicate anything, it is that there is no reason to treat the claims by many neuroscientists or philosophers of consciousness as gospel truths when they tell us that we are just an inch away from solving the ultimate mystery of the self and consciousness. With this prelude, we can now enter into the main debate concerning the neuroscience of consciousness. Let us begin with Searle’s definition   7.  See, e.g., C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), passim. On the recent history of science in world civilizations, see, e.g., Alok Kumar and Scott L. Montgomery, A History of Science in World Cultures: Voices of Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), passim.   8.  John Searle, “How to Study Consciousness Scientifically,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences 353, no. 1377 (1998): 1935–­1942, at 1935.   9.  Searle, “How to Study Consciousness Scientifically,” 1935–­1942, at 1935. 10.  Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why You are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), xi. 11.  Noë, Out of Our Heads, xi.

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of consciousness that is widely accepted by many neuroscientists. Searle writes: Consciousness consists of inner, qualitative, subjective states and processes of sentience or awareness. Consciousness, so defined, begins when we wake in the morning from a dreamless sleep—­and continues until we fall asleep again, die, go into a coma or otherwise become “unconscious.” It includes all of the enormous variety of the awareness that we think of as characteristic of our waking life. It includes everything from feeling a pain, to perceiving objects visually, to states of anxiety and depression, to working out cross word puzzles, playing chess, trying to remember your aunt’s phone number, arguing about politics, or to just wishing you were somewhere else. Dreams on this definition are a form of consciousness, though of course they are in many respects quite different from waking consciousness.12 The first thing one observes in the above definition is that it is nearly tautological. Searle had to use the word “awareness” a couple of times to define consciousness. It is similar to the problem of defining being in that one cannot undertake to define being without beginning in this way: “It is.” That is, in order to define being one must say, “It is,” and hence employ the word to be defined in its definition.13 The same happens with the term “consciousness,” which cannot be defined inasmuch as it is the ultimate ground of all knowable objects. Whatever is known as an object must be presented to consciousness, and in this sense, it is both the reflective and non-­ reflective ground of all things and of all intersubjective relations. In order to be defined, consciousness, much like being, would have to be brought under a higher genus, while at the same time differentiated from entities other than itself belonging to the same genus. However, this would violate the premise that it is the ultimate knowing subject of all known objects. More importantly, Searle’s definition neglects the multimodal structure of consciousness that comprises reflective, non-­reflective, and intersubjective modes—­the multimodal structure which poses the greatest threat to the neuro-­reductionist paradigm that seeks to explain consciousness in terms 12.  John Searle, “Consciousness,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 23, no. 1 (2000), 557–­578, at 559. 13.  Blaise Pascal, Pensées et Opuscules, ed. by M. L. Brunschvicg (Paris: Hachett, 1912), 169.

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of sentience or functional properties of the mind. This paradigm prompts the scientists to transfer all mental characteristics to consciousness and analyze it in terms of specific mental events or states. It is thus no wonder that, according to Searle, consciousness “begins” when we start our day from a dreamless sleep until we fall asleep again, i.e., consciousness is a subset of the wakeful state. Hence, consciousness is excluded from non-­reflective phenomena such as dreamless sleep, coma, or intoxication. Consequently, scientific literature shows that “dreamless sleep” lacks mentation, whereas both Indian and Islamic traditions consider it an instance of peaceful, non-­ intentional, and non-­conceptual awareness.14 The concept of non-­reflective consciousness, along with its corollary, non-­reflective self-­knowledge, brings into the open the furthest limit of the purely empirical approach to the study of consciousness. As discussed earlier, consciousness is a first-­person phenomenon, and such phenomena are irreducible to a third-­person objectivist stance that characterizes the neuroscience of the self and of consciousness. Since consciousness is the very essence of human subjectivity, there is no way to step outside consciousness in order to peek into it, as it were. In other words, since the starting point of science is reflective judgement, it already presupposes the subject-­object structure as well as non-­reflective self-­knowledge at the most foundational epistemic level. And as I have mentioned repeatedly, it is non-­reflective consciousness that grounds reflection, and not vice versa. All of this leads to the question that if consciousness is multimodal and also has a non-­reflective ground, how are we to analyze it empirically through scientific instruments? The non-­reflectivity of consciousness implies that the moment we try to grasp it through our mind we find an objectified image of our consciousness therein rather than consciousness itself (recall the “I-­it” distinction mentioned in chapter 2). Hence, no process of reflection or introspection will ever succeed in zeroing in on consciousness itself. One thus wonders how it would be possible to grasp the nature of consciousness through scientific instrumentation when it is not even possible to grasp it through one’s mind. Recalling our argument about self-­knowledge and the fact that there is no way to access the world except by way of the self and consciousness, this situation appears to be more problematic than 14.  For a detailed analysis, see Evan Thompson, “Dreamless Sleep, the Embodied Mind, and Consciousness—­The Relevance of a Classical Indian Debate to Cognitive Science,” in T. Metzinger and J. M. Windt, eds., Open MIND: 37 (2015), 19–­20; Frankfurt am Main: MIND Group. DOI: 10.15502/9783958570351. But it must be noted that within the Indian tradition itself there are some notable exceptions such as the Nyāya school of thought.

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the Humean challenge in which one takes consciousness as an object and then proceeds to disprove it. This is because, unlike the Humean case, the neuroscience of consciousness objectifies consciousness twice: first when it conceives consciousness in the mind as an object of scientific investigation, and second when it seeks to demystify it by observing and then theorizing various psycho-­physical states, which are but manifestations of consciousness rather than consciousness itself. The conceptual difficulty besetting the empirical approach lies precisely in its inability to see the multimodal structure of consciousness, which persists as a continuum despite its reflective and intersubjective modes. It also will not help to simply deny this multimodal structure because any time we try to deny non-­reflective consciousness, we are inevitably employing reflective consciousness to do so—­which shows, in a way, that the refutation of consciousness as the underlying ground of subjectivity already presupposes its very reality. Nevertheless, at this juncture, I must make it clear that I agree in part with Searle’s definition (or rather description) of consciousness. As Searle says, consciousness is present in all of our mental and intellectual activity, whether it is about playing chess or about arguing politics and philosophy. However, one has to draw a distinction between a conscious activity e.g., thinking and consciousness as such. More often than not, what goes by the name neuroscience of consciousness often turns out to be a neuroscience of a given conscious activity such as visual awareness, as we shall soon see. But when it comes to consciousness as such, i.e., its multimodal structure, what can be said of its nature at the most basic level is simply its pure selfhood. That is to say, at its most basic, non-­reflective level, consciousness is simply itself—­neither a substance nor an accident. But this is not to say that in its state of simplicity consciousness is devoid of existence, since that would be absurd. Rather, at its most basic level, consciousness is indistinguishable from its existence and presence. All of this goes to show that consciousness is not merely characterized by a “subjective feel,” as Searle and other philosophers have argued. Rather, there is an aspect of consciousness that is more basic and foundational than even the subjective irreducibility of consciousness. Notwithstanding the above-­mentioned nuances, I fully agree with Searle regarding his critique and rejection of eliminativism and reductionism. The most enthusiastic supporters of what has come to be known as “eliminativism” or “eliminativist reductionism” are Paul and Patricia Churchland. In their view, the standard philosophical account of the irreducibility of consciousness as put forth by Nagel, Searle, et al., is based on the following erroneous argument:

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1. Sam knows his feeling is a pain. 2. Sam does not know that his feeling is a pattern of neuron firings. 3. Therefore Sam’s feeling is not a pattern of neuron firings.15

Paul Churchland argues that this argument is fallacious, which is true; but he is mistaken in attributing this view to the philosophers. In other words, the Churchlands are making a strawman argument. The argument they are attacking pertains to epistemology, whereas the argument for the irreducibility of consciousness pertains to ontology. In other words, the sheer subjective feel of pain is very different from the pattern of neuron firings that is correlated or causally related to the pain, which means a complete causal account of why one feels pain does not negate the fact that pain exists as a subjective phenomenon. The eliminativist account, as Searle has pointed out, is also counterintuitive in that it ends up denying such everyday experiences of life as pains and sorrows, happiness and joys, memories and perceptions, thoughts and feelings, moods, regrets, and hungers.16 In a manner not unlike eliminativist reductionism, the computational theories of consciousness seek to show that computer languages hold the key to unravel how a system of matter in motion (i.e., the brain) might produce rationality and intelligence. The image of the brain as a computer has become so pervasive and influential that many people think something terribly important will be lost, unless we are able to prove that the mind is just another kind of computer. Searle notes perceptibly that such strong feelings come from the conviction that computers seem to provide the foundation of modern civilization by being able to explain ourselves in accordance with the scientific worldview.17 Moreover, the computational theories of consciousness express a certain technological will to power in that if we are able to create artificial intelligence (AI) simply by designing computer programs, we will have achieved the final technological mastery of humans over nature.18 Since Searle, Roger Penrose, and others have refuted the computational theory of consciousness quite convincingly, I will sketch briefly one of the decisive arguments, namely the Chinese Room argument against the view that the brain is a digital computer.19 According to 15.  See Churchland, Engine of Reason,195–­208. The reconstruction of the argument is from Searle, Mystery of Consciousness, 30–­32. 16.  Cf. Searle, Mystery of Consciousness, 30–­31. 17.  Searle, Mystery of Consciousness, 190. 18.  Searle, Mystery of Consciousness, 189–­190. 19.  Using insights from quantum mechanics and Gödel’s “incompleteness theorems,” Penrose mounts a scathing criticism on computational theories of con-

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Searle’s famous Chinese Room argument, the language in which computer programs are written down consists entirely of rules concerning syntactical entities (i.e., rules for manipulating symbols), while human minds undoubtedly have a “semantic” content, e.g., when using an English word we understand what it means or signifies.20 The argument can be expressed in a simple three-­step structure:

1. Programs are syntactical. 2. Minds have a semantic content. 3. Syntax is not the same as, nor by itself sufficient for, semantics. Therefore, programs are not human minds.21

It is also instructive to note that since computer operations are incredibly fast and complex, and the machines that perform them are usually hidden from our view, the entire process takes on an air of mystery that somehow gives the impression that this is how the human mind works: billions of neurons and synaptic connections in the brain are working together in synchrony to give rise to consciousness, thought, and meaning.22 One finds the popular image of such construal in the works of prominent neurobiologists such as Crick. In his notable The Astonishing Hypothesis, Crick puts forward the “astonishing hypothesis” that states that “You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.”23 He then adds that “This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can truly be called astonishing.”24 One wonders whether or not it is sciousness. See Roger Penrose, Shadows of the Mind: A Search for the Missing Science of Consciousness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 350ff. 20.  Computers function by encoding information and instructions in the binary code of zeroes and ones, translating the encoded information into electrical impulses and then processing the information according to the rules of the program. According to Searle, while the Chinese Room argument shows that semantics is not intrinsic to syntax, the physical workings of the computer show that even syntax is not intrinsic to its physics. See Searle, Mystery of Consciousness, 15–­17. 21.  Searle, Mystery of Consciousness, 11–­12. For Dennett’s qualms about the Chinese Room argument and Searle’s counter response, see Searle, Mystery of Consciousness, 97–­131. 22.  See Caner Dagli, “Language is not Mechanical, and Neither are You,” Renovatio: The Journal of Zaytuna College 2, no. 2 (2018). 23.  Crick, Astonishing Hypothesis, 3. 24.  Crick, Astonishing Hypothesis, 3.

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at all astonishing to be told that there is an entity inside each of us that carries out all mental activities, since such Cartesian “ghosts in the machine” (to use Gilbert Ryle’s famous phrase) have long been denounced as the remnants of an antiquarian dualist ontology. Moreover, such materialistic views about the brain are hardly new, as the following quote attributed to Hippocrates evinces: Men ought to know that from the brain, and from the brain only, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. Through it, in particular, we think, see, hear, and distinguish the ugly from the beautiful, the bad from the good, the pleasant from the unpleasant.  .  .  . It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear . . . brings sleeplessness . . . aimless anxieties . . . These things that we suffer all come from the brain. 25 Neurobiological Theories of Consciousness As one reads closely authors such as Crick, one realizes that although they seem to go in the direction of eliminativist reductionism, what they really have in mind is what I have called “neural emergentism,” namely the view that the self or consciousness gradually emerges from intricate brain processes. In fact, neuroscientists such as Crick, Koch, Edelman, Damasio, Gazzaniga, and Tononi do not seem to deny the existence of the self or consciousness (although there is a good deal of cross-­talking when it comes their use of these terms); rather, they want to demonstrate how various neurochemical activities in the brain eventually give rise to what we call the self or consciousness. One of the most influential approaches that seeks to explain consciousness through neural processes, called the “integrated information” approach, is variously expounded by Edelman, Tononi and Baars, Crick and Koch, Damasio, Freeman, and others. The integrated information approach begins with the premise that conscious sensations are characterized by their integrated nature. This is 25.  Hippocrates, “The Sacred Disease,” in Hippocrates, vol. 2, trans. by W. H. S. Jones (London and New York: William Heinemann and Harvard University Press, 1923), 175. For an account of the differences between Crick’s and Hippocrates’s conception of the brain, see Stanley Finger, Minds behind the Brain: A History of the Pioneers and their Discoveries (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 3.

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because when we perceive something, our perceptual awareness is marked by a single, unified experience, and not isolated percepts. For instance, when holding a flower, we smell its fragrance, see its petals, and feel its textured stem—­all at once. According to many neuroscientists, the neural basis of such perceptual activities must involve some form of cooperative activity, mediated by electrical and chemical synapses between forebrain neurons which are responding to different aspects of the same conscious experience.26 The challenge is to come up with evidence that the brain indeed “binds” together various neural activities in order to generate a unified perceptual experience. This is known as the “binding problem” in the neuroscience of consciousness literature.27 In other words, although there are neural subsystems that correlate with different perceptual elements such as color, smell, feeling, etc., how and where in the brain do they come together to form an integrated conscious experience?28 In the last few decades several proposals have been suggested, with most neuroscientists trying to locate the spot at the level of neurons and synapses; some, such as Edelman, proposing we need to examine higher functional levels such as “neuronal maps”; some, such as Freeman, suggesting “whole clouds of neurons” as the most suitable candidate;29 and others, such as Penrose and Hameroff, who think neurons are already too big to solve the binding problem, hence we have to go below the level of neurons and synapses to the level of the microtubules.30 In their earlier investigations of the binding problem, or the problem of what is known as the “unity of consciousness” in philosophical literature, 26.  See, e.g., Francis Crick and Christof Koch, “What is the Function of the Claustrum?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 360, no. 1458 (2005): 1271–­1279. 27.  On the “binding problem,” see Tallis, Aping Mankind, 114–­120. 28.  However, many philosophers argue that there is no reason to think that an integrated percept requires anatomical integration, for the same reason that perceiving the color red does not logically require something in the brain to turn red. That is, the brain can represent something as integrated without itself displaying that integration. See O’Regan and Noe, “A Sensorimotor Account of Vision and Visual Consciousness,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 24, no. 5 (2001): 939–­973, at 967. It is difficult to see how this argument avoids “the mereological fallacy.” 29.  See, e.g., Edelman, The Remembered Present, passim; and Freeman, How Brains Make Up Their Minds, passim. 30.  See, e.g., Stuart Hameroff, “Quantum Computation in Brain Microtubules? The Penrose-­Hameroff ‘Orch OR’ Model of Consciousness,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 356 (1998): 1869–­1896; and “Quantum Computing in Microtubules: An Intra-­neural Correlate of Consciousness?” Cognitive Studies: Bulletin of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society 4, no. 3 (1997): 67–­92.

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Crick and Koch proposed that neurons responsive to shape, sound, movement, etc., fire in synchrony in the general range of 40 hertz, acting as a reference point for binding all the perceptual activities together.31 However, they discarded this theory in their later studies and claimed instead that the structure in the brain where perceptual activities come together is a thin, irregular, sheet-­like neuronal structure hidden beneath the inner surface of the neocortex in the general region of the insula called the claustrum.32 In earlier studies, while investigating visual awareness, Crick and Koch showed that there is a correlated activity among the different neuronal representations which encode the different visual aspects of the same object or event. In their view, this correlated activity assumes the form of cooperation between active neurons in the cortex, thalamus, and closely associated structures whose electrochemical activity reaches a special threshold point, and whose interactions tend to support each other.33 Citing Edelman’s and Tononi’s concept of the “reentrant dynamic core” (explained below), Crick and Koch suggest that a key feature of many neuroscientific theories of consciousness is the need for coordinated interactions among groups of dispersed neurons which express themselves in the ongoing stream of conscious experience. Crick and Koch think that, although neuroscientists working to solve the problem of consciousness through neural emergentism employ different terminologies and frameworks, there is an emerging consensus among them which recognizes the need to rapidly integrate and bind information in neurons that are situated across distinct cortical and thalamic regions.34 Because of the claustrum’s massive reciprocal connectedness, Crick and Koch conclude that it is the brain structure located in an ideal position to integrate the most diverse kinds of information which underlie perception, thought, and cognition.35 It will be fruitful to also bring in Edelman et al. at this stage, since 31.  Francis Crick and Christof Koch, “Towards a Neurobiological Theory of Consciousness,” Seminars in the Neurosciences 2 (1990): 263–­275. 32.  Crick and Koch, “What is the Function.” 33.  Francis Crick and Christof Koch, “A Framework for Consciousness,” Nature Neuroscience 6 (2003): 119–­126; Christof Koch, The Quest for Consciousness: A Neurobiological Approach (Englewood: Roberts & Company, 2004), 87ff. 34.  Crick and Koch, “What is the Function,” 1271–­1272; and Talis Bachmann, Microgenetic Approach to the Conscious Mind (Amsterdam: Johns Benjamins 2000), 185ff. 35.  Crick and Koch, “What is the Function,” 1276–­1277. Other places have been suggested, such as the subthalamic nucleus, which lies between the cerebral hemispheres and the brain stem. In addition, global availability, strange loops, attractor networks, etc., have all been nominated for the location of the essence of consciousness. See Koch, Consciousness, 114ff.

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their theory of consciousness complements Crick and Koch and further substantiates neural emergentism. Edelman, Tononi, and Baars (like Crick and Koch) have produced several studies on the neuroscience of consciousness in the last few decades. Following the philosophers, they accept that consciousness is characterized by unity, intentionality, and qualia (the subjective feel). Moreover, they explicitly (especially Edelman) endorse the first-­person versus the third-­person perspective, and they agree that a scientific theory cannot presume to replicate the experience that it describes or explains. As Edelman explains: A third-­person description by a theorist of the qualia associated with wine tasting can, for example, take detailed account of the reported personal experiences of that theorist and his human subjects. It cannot, however, directly convey or induce qualia by description; to experience the discriminations of an individual, it is necessary to be that individual.36 It will be curious to see whether or not the neural emergentism that Edelman et al. propose can be reconciled satisfactorily with the above non-­ reductionist theses concerning consciousness. Although, in the early nineties, Edelman and Baars had approached the problem of consciousness independently, by 2011 they realized that their respective theories, alongside that of Crick and Koch, share important similarities that can be reworked to propose an integrated model.37 Thus in their coauthored article, Edelman, Baars, and Joseph Gally suggest that Baars’s global workspace theory can be combined with Edelman and Tononi’s dynamic reentrant model to show that consciousness is not a property of a single brain location or neuronal type, but is rather the result of dynamic interactions among widely dispersed, interconnected neural networks constituting a global workspace.38 To make better sense of this “integrated information” approach to consciousness, we first need to clarify certain key concepts in Edelman’s theory of consciousness, which has gone through a number of refinements over the years. First, for Edelman, the behavior of neurons can be 36.  Gerald Edelman, “Naturalizing Consciousness: A Theoretical Framework,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 100 (2003): 5520–­ 5524, at 5522. 37.  Edelman et al. and Crick and Koch refer to each other’s models explicitly. See for instance, Gerald Edelman et al., “Biology of Consciousness,” Frontiers in Psychology 2, no. 4 (2011): 1–­7. See also Koch, Consciousness, 125–­131. 38.  Edelman et al., “Biology of Consciousness.”

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expressed through the idea of the map. A map is a sheet of neurons in the brain where the points on the sheet are systematically related to the corresponding points on a sheet of receptor cells such as those found in the skin.39 The human brain contains countless such maps that play a crucial rule in the process of perceptual awareness. Second, Edelman propounds a selection theory called “neural Darwinism” or the theory of neuronal group selection which asserts that the brain is genetically equipped from birth to develop a selection mechanism that eliminates some neuronal groups and strengthen others in the course of time.40 In other words, through a selection process, the brain gives rise to repertoires of variant neuronal groups of vast complexity and diversity that match the multifacetedness of experience in an integrative and adaptive fashion. Finally, the most important part of Edelman’s theory is the concept of “reentry.” It is instructive to note that Edelman et al. are aware of the similarities between their theory and computational theories of consciousness, but they reject the thesis that the brain is a computer or an instructional system. Instead, for them, the brain has a selectional mechanism that can choose and select from a large number of variant circuits that are generated epigenetically.41 Be that as it may, the brain needs a further mechanism for spatiotemporal coordination, and this is provided by “reentry,” the operation of which is central to the emergence of consciousness. According to Edelman, reentry is an ongoing process of recursive signaling among neuronal circuits taking place across parallel reciprocal fibers that link mapped regions such as those found in the cortex.42 In simpler terms, reentry is a process by which parallel signals go back and forth between maps, e.g., map A signals to map B and map B signals back. The signals enter B from A and then reenter back into A. Edelman insists that reentry differs from the feedback mechanism, which is instructional and involves an error function that is serially transmitted over a single pathway, whereas reentry involves many parallel pathways operating simultaneously. More specifically, two kinds of signals are crucial in reentrant pathways: those from the self, i.e., those constitut39.  The idea of the “map” goes back to Edelman’s earlier work. See Edelman, The Remembered Present, passim. 40.  On “neural Darwinism,” see Gerald Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 4–­7. 41.  Edelman, “Naturalizing Consciousness,” 5521. See also Gerald Edelman and Vernon Mountcastle, The Mindful Brain: Cortical Organization and the Group-­ Selective Theory of Higher Brain Function (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1978). 42.  Edelman, “Naturalizing Consciousness,” 5521.

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ing value systems and regulatory elements of the brain and body; and those from non-­self, i.e., signals from the world that are transformed through global mappings. Signals related to the self and signals from the world are correlated and lead to memory, which is capable of conceptual categorization.43 According to Edelman, as a result of the correlations that reentry facilitates between competing neuronal groups, synchronously active neural circuits across widely distributed brain areas are selectively favored.44 Edelman further claims that such a mechanism is able to resolve the binding problem mentioned earlier because it binds the activity of functionally segregated cortical areas for each sensory modality in the absence of an executive program or superordinate map.45 In other words, reentry provides the means by which the activities of the segregated cortical areas driven by signals from the body and the environment are linked, bound, and then dynamically altered in time during perceptual categorization. The critical reentrant activities within an integrated circuit are metastable and, in time periods of 500 milliseconds or less, give way to a new set of integrated circuits in the brain. This process occurs uninterruptedly over successive time periods within the thalamocortical system, which, as a functional cluster, interacts mainly with itself. This functional cluster, according to Edelman and others, can be called the reentrant dynamic core, since it involves a complex system capable of generating differentiated yet unitary states.46 Edelman et al. further argue that consciousness arises as a result of integration of many inputs by reentrant interactions in the dynamic core, i.e., the thalamocortical system. The theory of global workspace complements this view, since the dynamic core involves integration of activities in widely distributed cortical areas.47 It is important to note that for Edelman et al., the reentrant dynamic core, along with the global workspace theory, account for what they call “primary consciousness,” which is a lower-­order awareness that connects objects and events through the memory of previous value-­laden experiences. To wit, much like Damasio’s distinction between core and extended consciousness, Edelman also distinguishes between primary and higher-­ order consciousness (Edelman introduced the distinction prior to Damasio). At any rate, primary consciousness accounts for basic sensory modalities 43.  Edelman, “Naturalizing Consciousness,” 5522. 44.  Edelman, “Naturalizing Consciousness,” 5521. 45.  Edelman, “Naturalizing Consciousness,” 5521. 46.  Edelman, “Naturalizing Consciousness,” 5522. Cf. Edelman and Tononi, A Universe of Consciousness, 113–­138. 47.  Edelman et al., “Biology of Consciousness,” 5.

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such as sight, touch, and so forth, and it can integrate perceptual and motor events together with memory to construct a multimodal scene in what Edelman calls the “remembered present.” In contrast, higher-­order consciousness emerges later in evolution and is seen in animals with semantic capabilities such as humans and chimpanzees. The combination of primary and higher-­order consciousness, Edelman et al. claim, is what gives rise to self-­consciousness, as well as a narrative capability to reflect on past experience and plan for the future. In addition, the ability to reflect on one’s own consciousness provides a higher ground for the development of complex subjectivity.48 All in all, Edelman et al. argue that consciousness emerges from a series of neuronal processes, beginning with perceptual categorizations (not perceptual awareness) and ending with global reentry pathways, which are themselves not conscious. Apart from Edelman, Tononi, and Baars, Walter Freeman has proposed a species of “integrated information” model that supports the hypothesis of the global activity patterns of the neurons. In Freeman’s view, every neuron and every local domain of cortex participates in every conscious experience and behavior, even if its contribution is to silence its pulse train or stay dark in a brain image. The emergence of consciousness depends on the sequences of global amplitude-­modulation patterns of oscillatory neural activity that coordinate the neuropil (a dense network of interwoven nerve fibers) of an entire cerebral hemisphere.49 Freeman also shows how the limbic system, which is essential for all intentional actions, including perception and most forms of learning, contributes to the global activity patterns of neurons through its multisensory convergence in the entorhinal cortex.50 The Center of the Self: Neurons or Consciousness? There is little doubt that the aforementioned theories amount to some of the brilliant ways neuroscientists have attempted to account for the origin of consciousness. Although these theories undeniably establish the neural basis of conscious experience, it is still unclear whether they also succeed in demonstrating that consciousness is a neurally emergent phenomenon. In fact, Edelman et al. themselves have stated repeatedly that their the48.  Edelman, “Naturalizing Consciousness,” 5523; Edelman et al., “Biology of Consciousness,” 4. 49.  Freeman, How Brains Make Up Their Minds, 109. 50.  Freeman, How Brains Make Up Their Minds, 101.

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ory, i.e., the theory of reentrant interactions of the dynamic core, “provides a fundamental basis for subjectivity or the self-­referential aspects of consciousness.”51 Yet, they also conclude, quite confusingly, that their theory actually provides a causal explanation of how consciousness emerges from the brain processes. For instance, Edelman et al. write: It should be added that consciousness itself is not causal. It is the neural structures underlying conscious experience that are causal. The conscious individual can therefore be described as responding to a causal illusion, one that is an entailed evolutionary outcome of selection for animals able to make plans involving multiple discriminations. Once one recognizes that qualia cannot be causal but correspond to internal discriminations that are reliable correlates of underlying causal neural mechanisms, the hard problem as a barrier to scientific explanation disappears.52 For Edelman et al., although consciousness is not a material entity, it is a process that arises from neural events. And those events are part of the physical world, which is causally closed since only matter-­energy can be causal.53 “A scientific view,” they continue, “that assumes that consciousness arises from reentrant interactions among neural populations must therefore conclude that it is the neural activity of the dynamic core that is causal.”54 But they also admit that in the present circumstances scientists must accept that they are “unable in a living animal to trace causal chains at all levels of complexity in the brain circuits that contribute to consciousness.”55 This is because “We simply cannot observe, nor causally explore and influence in vivo, the myriad dynamic biological mechanisms underlying conscious processes.”56 51.  Edelman, “Naturalizing Consciousness,” 5523. Also, Edelman et al., “Biology of Consciousness,” 1: “Advances in neuroscience have now made it possible to study the biological basis of consciousness. . . . Our own efforts to account for key aspects of consciousness at a biological level have taken two forms. The first involved the proposal of a neuroscientifically based global brain theory commonly referred to as Neural Darwinism.” 52.  Edelman, “Biology of Consciousness,” 5. 53.  Edelman, “Naturalizing Consciousness,” 5523. These are controversial metaphysical claims, but treating them here would take us too far afield. 54.  Edelman, “Naturalizing Consciousness,” 5523. 55.  Edelman et al., “Biology of Consciousness,” 5. 56.  Edelman et al., “Biology of Consciousness,” 5.

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Be that as it may, although neuroscientists such as Edelman, Crick, Koch, and Damasio do not deny the subjective, irreducible aspect of consciousness, they nonetheless want to argue for a “neural emergentism” that purports to be a full-­fledged explanation of how the brain causes consciousness. This runs us into all sorts of philosophical muddles. To begin with, all the theories narrated above hardly tell us anything about the nature of consciousness as such. Indeed, many facets of consciousness (such as the first-­person givenness, subjective feel, and intentionality, not to mention multimodality, which contains both reflective and non-­reflective dimensions that many neuroscientists readily accept) have been revealed through philosophical analyses, and not through neuro-­physiological investigations. If there were intrinsic facts about consciousness that could have been discovered through the scientific study of neural events or processes, one wonders why is it that none of the above-­mentioned features of consciousness became known by way of neuroscience. But this should not come as a surprise since I have already mentioned that the neuroscience of consciousness objectifies consciousness twice; first when it assumes that consciousness can be an object of scientific investigation, and second when it seeks to explain consciousness through observing the underlying neural activities of various perceptual states of consciousness, which are but various ways consciousness manifests itself. It will be recalled from our arguments in chapters 1 and 2 that consciousness is always known as a subject, and can never be an object, except in its non-­reflective mode when the subject-­object dichotomy is transcended. If this is understood, then one is entitled to say that various scientific studies of consciousness are like the case of a hammer trying to hit itself. That is to say, just as a hammer cannot hit itself, consciousness cannot know itself by attempting to go outside of itself because such an outside does not exist. Or, from another point of view, just as we cannot know the nature of a hammer by merely observing its actions (that it is made of iron or some other metal), we cannot hope to unveil consciousness by simply analyzing its external effects through sense perception or introspection. It is thus no wonder that neuroscientific studies of consciousness have almost nothing to say about the multimodal structure of consciousness, especially about non-­reflective consciousness. These are some of the methodological difficulties that plague neuroscience of consciousness today, which is not to suggest that there is no neural basis to consciousness. Our arguments are against full-­fledged causal accounts, which presume that consciousness can be explained through bio-­ physiological processes alone. Importantly, if one claims that consciousness is a process that arises

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from neural events, one must give an account of how neuroscientists describe and analyze these neural events or electrochemical activities that supposedly cause subjective experience. Put another way, what exactly is the nature of these “physical” processes that are supposed to explain conscious activities? What do scientists understand by “nerve impulses” that lie at the heart of neural activities? In order to better understand some of my claims in the previous paragraph, we have to probe these questions. Moreover, the answer to these questions will help us better understand other well-­known objections against neuroscience of consciousness, which claim that NCC is sufficient to explain the neural causation of consciousness. Additionally, many neuroscientific theories of consciousness anthropomorphize the brain by ascribing mental and emotional states or agency to it, which leads to the mereological fallacy as pointed out by Max Bennett and Peter Hacker.57 In what follows, I will thus analyze the nature of “neural activity” first before moving on to briefly discuss some of the well-­ known arguments against what the neuroscientist Raymond Tallis polemically calls “neuromania.”58 The Nerve Impulse and the Structure of Consciousness Based on a cumulative body of empirical and experimental evidence gathered over the last few centuries, neural activity or neural communication is currently understood to be of an electrochemical nature.59 Roughly speaking, it has an intercellular and an intracellular component, each of which corresponds to one aspect of this electrochemical chain of events. The intercellular component is based on the transmission of chemical signals, encoded by the graded release of various neurotransmitters and neuropeptides. The 57.  M. R. Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), chapter 3. 58.  Tallis, Aping Mankind, passim. See also Markus Gabriel, Ich ist nicht Gehirn: Philosophie des Geistes für das 21. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Ullstein, 2015), 11–­44, for a similar critique of neurocentrism. 59.  The neuroscientific details of the present paragraph are mostly adapted from Kandel et al, Principles of Neural Science, 21ff; David Presti, Foundational Concepts in Neuroscience: A Brain-­Mind Odyssey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016), 48–­60; Benjamin Drukarch et al., “Thinking about the Nerve Impulse: A Critical Analysis of the Electricity Centered Conception of Nerve Excitability,” Progress in Neurobiology 169 (2018): 172–­185; Tallis, Aping Mankind, 16–­19; and Kevin Patton and Gary Thibodeau, Structure and Function of the Body (St. Louis, MO: Elsevier, 2015), 178ff.

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intracellular component of neural communication is electrochemical in nature. Neurons rely on the rapid conduction of electrical signals (known as nerve impulses) for their intracellular communication—­that is, for their receiving, integrating, and spreading of information. A nerve impulse is a self-­propagating wave of electrochemical disturbance and recovery that passes along the surface of nerve cells or neurons, thereby encoding and transmitting information within the nervous system. The neuron is the basic building block of the nervous system. The primary components of the neuron are the cell body, the axon (a long, slender projection, often as little as a few thousandths of a millimeter in diameter, that conducts impulses away from the cell body), dendrites (tree-­like structures that receive signals from other neurons), and synapses (connections between neurons). According to the Hodgkin-­Huxley (HH) model (which is the most widely used model for nerve impulses), the nerve impulse should be thought of as a purely electrical phenomenon and the axon, along whose surface membrane the nerve impulse travels, is to be modeled as an electrical circuit in which the cell membrane is a capacitor and the attendant ion channels are resistors.60 At any given point on the axon, the nerve impulse, which usually results in response to an external stimulus, consists of a transient alteration in the electrical potential across the membrane of the neuron. When neurons are in a resting state, they are negatively charged on the inside relative to the outside. However, when they are excited by a stimulus, there is a change in that potential difference which propagates along the axon. Neuronal excitation consists of an influx of positively charged sodium ions through the ion channels across the membrane that constitutes the boundary of the axon, separating the fluid within from the outside. This influx results in a reversal of the negative charge inside the nerve cell, a phenomenon known as “depolarization.” This is followed by “repolarization,” a restoration of the resting state through an efflux of positively charged potassium ions. The cycle of depolarization followed by repolarization is known as the “action potential.” In a typical neuron in the human brain, the cycle lasts about one millisecond at any given point in the membrane, and the passage of this electrochemical wave is the nerve impulse. Nerve impulses thus described lie at the basis of homeostatic control mechanisms (e.g., blood pressure regulation) and various higher-­order processes such as sensation and cognition. More significantly, as Tallis has pointed out, the nerve impulse is not in 60.  Rob Phillips et al., Physical Biology of the Cell (New York: Garland Science, 2013), 681–­714.

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itself a local passage of sodium or potassium ions or in itself part of a crowd of billion other waves; otherwise it would have to be both of these at the same time.61 What is often forgotten is the fact that the nature of a nerve impulse depends on how it is viewed. We are misguided if we think that scientific instruments reveal the in itself of an entity. It is thus easy to forget this when we confuse the representation(s) of the nerve impulse with the thing in itself. So, we have to realize that that there are numerous competing ways of representing a nerve impulse, and the HH model seems to offer the best explanation as of now.62 This last point cannot be overemphasized, for it has implications for neural emergentism, along the lines of both history and philosophy of science. To begin with, a recent study by Andersen et al. criticizes the HH model for representing the “action potential” as an exclusively electrical phenomenon that seems to obey physical laws but ignores changes in any other variables than charge and electrical potential, thus failing to account for the multitude of nonelectrical manifestations (mechanical, thermal, and optical) that have been found to (co-­)occur with the nerve impulse propagation.63 Indeed, if the long, eventful genealogy of the “animal electricity” paradigm that lasted for nearly two millennia provides any clue, it is that “scientific models” are contingent upon a mediating consciousness that is entangled in the dominant language, conventions, and knowledge systems of the day. The history of pneuma (Greek for air, wind, breath, spirit, soul, among others), intimately associated with the Greek word psuche (soul, but it also meant “breath” in early Greek thought), shows the fascinating trajectory of an ancient idea that was once accepted by the most sophisticated thinkers across cultures for a long time but was ultimately superseded by the modern paradigm of animal electricity and various electrical ideas in the 1700s. It will not be possible to capture the rich tapestry of 61.  Tallis, Aping Mankind, 139. 62.  One should also remember that neuroscience is still in its infancy, in the sense that a good deal of the brain is still unknown to us. 63.  Søren Andersen et al., “Towards a Thermodynamic Theory of Nerve Pulse Propagation,” Progress in Neurobiology 88 (2009): 104–­113. Similarly, Drukarch et al. state: “To fully understand the primary task of individual neurons and neuronal networks, i.e., the processing of information at multiple spatial and temporal scales, a comprehensive conception of the nerve impulse connecting different levels of description, from the molecular to the behavioral, is required. However, such a comprehensive conception, accounting for the way in which microscopic entities are ultimately linked to macroscopic properties, has not yet been developed.” Drukarch et al., “Thinking about the Nerve Impulse,” 182.

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this concept, but a few brief remarks may be pursued. It was the Ionian philosopher Anaximenes (d. 528 BCE) who first postulated the idea of air (aer) and its flowing impulse (pneuma) to be the “soul” of the universe. Air in movement is thus breath or pneuma with the holding power of life. The concept played a notable role in almost all major Pre-­Socratic and classical philosophers. Aristotle conceived of pneuma as “hot air,” an understanding he inherited from Diogenes, but at the same time developed the idea of connate pneuma as the “substrate” of vital heat in the heart. For the action of the vital heat on blood, from which all other bodily parts are formed, necessarily produces in it the pneuma. Thus, connate pneuma is the initiator of various formative processes and vital heat in it is the active phusis. In contrast, the Stoics developed the idea of the soul as constituted of pneuma with the admixture of air and fire. The Stoics claim the “pneumatic soul” to be composed of eight parts, seven of them being branches that would stem from a reasoning center, the hegemonikon, which is located in the chest. After Aristotle, Erasistratus (304–­250 BCE) developed the crucial ideas of pneuma zootikon (vital spirit) and pneuma psychikon (animal spirit), which were then refined by Galen through the mediation of the Alexandrian medical school. Galen had performed a good number of animal vivisections and nerve ligation experiments through which he argued that the nerves serve as the communication channels within the nervous system. Pneuma was believed to flow through the nerves and to mediate sensory and motor signals between the sense-­organs and the brain.64 As we move on to medieval Islamic medical tradition, we see that thinkers were divided as regards their investigation of pneuma and pneuma psychikon. Thus Ḥunayn b. Iṣḥāq (d. 873) sides with Galen (despite criticizing him at times), while others such as Avicenna tried to strike a fine balance between Aristotle and Galen. Galen, in contrast to Aristotle, argued that the brain, and not the heart, is the physiological center of sensation and voluntary motion. In his al-­Qānūn fi-­l-­ṭibb, Avicenna follows Galen and his Islamic predecessors in accepting that the animal spirit in the brain is confined to three ventricles. This gave rise to the famous ventricular theories of the internal senses. However, Avicenna retained the Aristotelian cardiocentric model as well. In all, beginning with Ḥunayn and his 64.  For an extensive discussion of pneuma, see Julius Rocca, “From Doubt to Certainty: Aspects of the Conceptualisation and Interpretation of Galen’s Natural Pneuma,” in Manfred Horstmanshoff, Helen King, and Claus Zittel, eds., Blood, Sweat and Tears: The Changing Concepts of Physiology from Antiquity into Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 629–­659.

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al-­Masāʾil fi-­l-­ṭibb li-­l-­mutaʿallimīn, Zakariyyā b. al-­Rāzī (d. 925) and his Kitāb al-­Ḥāwī fi-­l-­ṭibb, ʿAlī b. al-­ʿAbbās al-­Majūsī (d. 994) and his Kitāb Kāmil al-­ṣināʿat al-­ṭibbiyya, Avicenna and his Canon of Medicine, and Ibn al-­Nafīs (d.1288) and his Kitāb al-­Mūjaz fi-­l-­ṭibb, the Islamic medical tradition developed a range of views concerning the pneumata, i.e., the pneuma zootikon and the pneuma psychikon. Unfortunately, the intellectual history of later Islamic medicine, which encompasses the Persianate world of the Ottomans, Safavids, and the Mughals, is yet to be written fully; nonetheless, it is apparent that Walī Allāh, who also authored treatises on medicine, inherited this Galenic-­Aristotelian-­Islamic synthesis of pneuma and reconceptualized it, as we shall soon see.65 Around this period, the pneuma psychikon doctrine in Europe was already being challenged and discarded at the hands of Albrecht von Haller (d. 1777), John Hunter (d. 1793), Luigi Galvani (d. 1798), Felice Fontana (d. 1805), and others. In particular, Galvani’s 1791 concept of “nerve electricity” proved to be the decisive demise of the concept of pneuma psychikon.66 In the nineteenth century, when electrical communication systems became widespread, scientists began to compare nerve fibers to telegraph wires in order to elucidate the workings and organization of the neural network. However, the discovery of neurons later led to the collapse of the analogy between the neural network and the telegraph network, since the neural network turned out to consist of discrete units instead of being a continuous entity.67 Further developments in neurophysiology finally led to the current HH model, which, as I mentioned earlier, is not without its own shortcomings. 65.  There are some exceptions. See, e.g., Miri Shefer-­Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500–­1700 (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009); and Fabrizio Speziale, Soufisme, Religion et médecine en Islam indien (Paris: Karthala, 2010). 66.  For more information on the history of pneuma from the beginning until its extinction in the West, see C. U. M. Smith et al., The Animal Spirit Doctrine and the Origins of Neurophysiology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). For a good Aristotelian account of pneuma, see Gad Freudenthal, Aristotle’s Theory of Material Substance: Heat and Pneuma, Form and Soul (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999), 106ff. On the contrary, the writings of Shāh Walī Allāh (and most likely his contemporaries as well) do not seem to show a sign of unease with the idea of the pneuma psychikon as the “animating force” responsible for sensation. Walī Allāh develops his account of pneuma (nasama) in a number of his major works. See Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, I: 23, 45–­47, 51–­56, 71–­73, 161–­163, 224, 225, 260–­261, 307, 324, 326, 329, 341; II: 96ff; and al-­Budūr al-­bāzigha, 28–­31, 171–­192. 67.  Armando de Palma and Germana Pareti, “The Ways of Metaphor in Neuroscience, or Being on the Right or Wrong Track,” Nuncius 22 (2207): 97–­124.

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This long history of the animal spirit and animal electricity paradigms shows that there are multiple ways one can represent and explain neural activity. Yet none of these physical explanations of neural activity seem to suggest anything that may remotely resemble consciousness. If Edelman et al. are right, we are to believe that the electrochemical goings-­on in the brain cause the nonphysical phenomenon that is consciousness. For instance, the hypothesis of “reentry” ascribes nothing less than consciousness itself to the electrochemical signaling that occurs among neuronal circuits, whereas such a phenomenon is anything but a physical process. At this point, philosophers such as Searle who argue that consciousness is a biological phenomenon contend that while there is only one set of events (what we observe in the brain through instruments), these events have both a neural aspect and an experiential aspect. In his particular version of the double-­aspect theory, Searle draws attention to the analogy of water, claiming that conscious experience is to neural activity is what water is to H2O molecules.68 In other words, just as water is identical with H2O molecules and yet appears so different from them, consciousness is the same as nerve impulses yet nothing like nerve impulses since it has a subjective feel. However, as Tallis shows convincingly, the analogy of water fails because both shiny water and H2O molecules require observation (i.e., consciousness) in order to be revealed as one or the other. They thus correspond to two different modes of observation: one in which our ordinary experience of water is at work, and the other in which complex equipment and representations are employed to render H2O molecules “visible” and neural activity recordable. The two aspects of water are the two modes of experiencing it, a schema which can hardly be applied to neural activity as electrochemical activity and as experience.69 In a similar vein, nothing in neuroscience of consciousness seems to account for “intentionality,” an undeniable feature of consciousness that many neuroscientists accept. Intentionality implies that perception is a two-­ way process. That is, while photons bounce off of an object and get into the brain by physical means, the gaze that looks out is not a continuation of that chain of physical events. It is a conscious human being that looks out, not a brain. It is thus not merely a case of “registering” neural events, since we not only register events, but also register them as belonging to something other than our self. The outward arrow of intentionality makes it possible to 68.  John Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 197ff. 69.  Tallis, Aping Mankind, 85–­88.

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be aware of objects as objects and aware of them as “over there.”70 Relatedly, Bennett and Hacker charge the neuroscientists with committing the “mereological fallacy,” which is the practice of ascribing psycho-­cognitive terms to the brain that in reality should only be applied to the person. Such a practice, as we saw in the aforementioned analysis of various neuroscientific theories of consciousness, makes it easy to think of the brain as responsible for thinking or organizing, and more importantly, to imagine that the act of organizing neural events consists only of brain activity with no “intentionality” involved. Additionally, there are reasons to be concerned when one comes across claims by neuroscientists such as Semir Zeki asserting that gaining knowledge is a primordial function of the brain such that neuroscience is in an ideal position to “to solve the problems of epistemology.”71 Similarly, J. Z. Young speaks of knowledge and information encoded and stored in the brain “just as knowledge can be recorded in books or computers.”72 Likewise, Milner et al. opine that the brain is capable of storing what they call “declarative memory.”73 Against such mereological fallacies, Bennett and Hacker rightly argue that the brain is not a logically appropriate subject for psychological predicates, since only the human self as a whole (of which the brain is only a part) can be said to think or perceive. In their own words: It makes no sense to ascribe psychological predicates (or their negations) to the brain, save metaphorically or metonymically. The resultant combination of words does not say something that is false; rather, it says nothing at all, for it lacks sense. Psychological predicates are predicates that apply essentially to the whole living animal, 70.  Cf. Tallis, Aping Mankind, 103–­111. It must be noted, however, that recent studies in teleosemantics have tried to accommodate “intentionality” within a naturalistic paradigm. For more information, see Karen Neander, “Teleological Theories of Mental Content,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012, available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/content-teleological/. 71.  Cited in Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 75. For similar claims about beauty, love, and hate, see Semir Zeki and H. Kawabata, “Neural Correlates of Beauty,” Journal of Neurophysiology 91 (2003): 1699–­ 1705; Semir Zeki, “The Neurobiology of Love,” FEBS Letters 581, no. 14 (2007): 2575–­2579; and Semir Zeki and J. P. Romaya, “Neural Correlates of Hate,” PLoS ONE 3, no. 10 (2008): e3556. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0003556. 72.  J. Z. Young, Programs of the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 192. 73.  Brenda Milner et al., “Cognitive Neuroscience and the Study of Memory,” Neuron 20 (1998): 445–­468, at 450.

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not to its parts. It is not the eye (let alone the brain) that sees, but we see with our eyes (and we do not see with our brains, although without a brain functioning normally in respect of the visual system, we would not see). . . . The organs of an animal are parts of the animal, and psychological predicates are ascribable to the whole animal, not to its constituent parts.74 To provide more context for the mereological fallacy, Bennett and Hacker cite the example of the term “representation,” which can be used for the string of letters “c-­a-­t” to say that “cat represents a cat.” To be precise, the term stands for causal correlation. Thus, when neuroscientists argue that a certain region of the visual cortex represents the visible surface of a given object, they mean that this particular area of the brain is causally correlated with the visible surface. But neuroscientists commit mereological fallacies when “they typically do forget this and proceed to cross the new use with the old, generating incoherence.”75 One should also not forget that the neural correlates of consciousness presume that the subject already has cognitive access to her consciousness and that she is awake, conscious, and living. This means it is futile to try to fathom consciousness from the NCC experiments without begging questions, since there is no way of getting outside of consciousness that pervades all of our experiences.76 Moreover, while neuroscience of consciousness aims to account for various cognitive capacities such as the unity of consciousness, memory, and sense of time, it is hardly successful in explaining these features of the self in neural terms. For instance, in chapter 2 we saw how Kant explains the unity of apperception as the necessary condition of all representations, since we are conscious a priori of the thoroughgoing identity of ourselves with regard to all the representations that can ever belong to our cognition. According this view, cognition is subjected to the unity of apperception that precedes all 74.  Bennett and Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, 72–­73. Bennett and Hacker draw on Wittgenstein, who commented that it is only of a human being that it is legitimate to say “it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears, is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.” See Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §281. 75.  See Maxwell Bennett et al., Neuroscience and Philosophy: Brain, Mind, and Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 26. A great deal of neuroscience research is devoted to mapping regions of the brain (neuroanatomy) and studying the functions of the various regions (neurophysiology). 76.  For an elaborate refutation of the NCC, see Tallis, Aping Mankind, 99–­102; Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being, 26ff.

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data of the intuitions, and in relation to which alone all representations of objects are possible. It is hard to see how a neuroscientific analysis of the nerve impulse can inform us about such essential structures of consciousness. We may also mention the cases of “inner-­time consciousness” and memory to further substantiate our arguments against neural emergentism, NCC, and the identity thesis (the thesis that the mind is the brain)—­but hopefully I have been able to bring out some of the major limitations in the current attempt to explain consciousness through neuroscience. Graeco-­Islamic-­Indian Conversations In the previous section I argued that there is a difference between saying consciousness has a neural basis and saying it is caused by neuronal activities. We also learned that scientific representations of neuronal activities can take on different forms that are laden with differing normative implications for a theory of the self. In the present section, my goal is to show that, like neuroscience, certain non-­Western conceptions of the self do not deny that consciousness has a bodily basis (although the term “body” in these conceptions has a different formulation). For instance, Walī Allāh argues that the self, being immaterial and the most subtle of all the forms, cannot but be dependent on a body which is also the most subtle of all the bodies (alṭaf al-­ajsām), maturing at the finest degree of subtlety and equilibrium. Walī Allāh calls this “subtle Body” nasama or pneuma, which is an intermediary between the self (immaterial) and the body (material). In this way he is able to resolve the tension between the material nasama (pneuma) and the immaterial self by reinterpreting Aristotelian hylomorphism, so that pneuma becomes the “matter” for the “form” of the immaterial self. What is more, by making skillful use of his medical knowledge, Walī Allāh was able to synthesize a conception of the self that is based on the physiology of the humoral theory of pneuma. Thus, unlike his Sufi predecessors such as al-­Ghazālī, he was able to fill in the “physiological” gaps of consciousness by mooring it on a physiological base: a novel synthesis of the Galenic-­ Islamic medical tradition. As I mentioned earlier, Walī Allāh presents an original concept of the self that shows threads of influences from Stoicism, Neoplatonism, the Graeco-­Islamic-­Indian medical tradition, and Sufism. Central to Walī Allāh’s exposition of the self are the concepts of pneuma (nasama), subtle fields of consciousness (laṭāʾif ), and self-­knowledge through first-­person subjectivity. Also, it seems fair to assert that Walī Allāh is unique in syn-

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thesizing a conception of the self that is based on the physiology of the humoral theory of pneuma (nasama) and the laṭāʾif.77 To articulate such a notion of selfhood, he draws on the Galenic tradition on the one hand, and the Sufi (especially the Naqshbandīs) and the philosophical traditions on the other. However, his conception of the laṭāʾif also resembles yogic cakra system. In this section, my task is to put Walī Allāh’s particular formulation of the pneumatic self in dialogue with the Stoic and Indian theories of the mind. In Stoic cosmology, everything that exists is corporeal—­including God and soul.78 Pneuma (breath which is hot air or a mixture of air and fire) is the central explanatory principle of both Stoic physics and Stoic psychology.79 In contrast to the atomists, the Stoics put forward a continuum theory which denies the existence of void in the cosmos. The cosmos was seen as a single continuum pervaded by pneuma.80 The physicalism underlying 77.  This, however, does not mean other Sufis or Islamic philosophers before him had failed to see the connection, in varying degrees, between the humors and the laṭāʾif. In his recent book, Zargar documents how Sufi ethics of the human self often assumes a “humoral substructure.” For an excellent treatment, see Cyrus Zargar, The Polished Mirror: Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islamic Philosophy and Sufism (Oxford: Oneworld, 2017), 19–­20, 37–­8, 40, 67–­71, 264. 78.  The Stoics adopted what we might call a “vitalist” understanding of nature, which is permeated by two principles: an active one (identified with reason and God, referred to as the Logos) and a passive one (substance, matter). The active principle is un-­generated and indestructible, while the passive one—­which is identified with the four classical elements of water, fire, earth, and air—­is destroyed and recreated at every, eternally recurring, cosmic conflagration. The content of the first few paragraphs is based on Massimo Pigliucci, Stoicism, available at https:// www.iep.utm.edu/stoicism/; Scott Rubarth, Stoic Philosophy of Mind, available at http://www.iep.utm.edu/stoicmind/; Hendrik Lorenz, Ancient Theories of Soul, available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ancient-soul/#5.2; John Sellars, Stoicism (London and New York: Routledge, 2014); and Sellers, ed., The Routledge Handbook of the Stoic Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 79.  Pneuma is the vehicle of divine intelligence, although it only imparts intelligence to the specific portions of matter where it is most pervasive. See Philo, Allegories of the Laws 2.22–­23 (H. von Amim, Stoicorum veterum fragmenta [Leipzig, 1903–­1905] = SVF 2.458 part) and Diogenes Laertius 7.138–­139 (including SVF 2.634), in A. A. Long and David Sedley, eds., The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1: 284; Nemesius, On the Nature of Man, trans. by R. W. Sharples and P. J. van der Eijk (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2008), 6, 100–­101, 12, 117. 80.  Pneuma or “breath” pervades the whole universe. Since in Stoic physics, only bodies can act upon bodies, the causal efficacy of pneuma was taken to require its presence throughout all substance or matter. See Long and Sedley, Hellenistic

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Stoic psychology implies that active substances (e.g., God) could pervade passive substances (e.g., matter). Hence the soul or pneuma, which is a body, is able to pervade the body. However, it is noteworthy that the soul does not pervade the body like the water in a sponge, that is, by occupying interstitial spaces; rather, the soul or pneuma occupies the exact same space as the passive matter, i.e., both substances are mutually coextended (antiparektasis). The soul pervades the body just as heat pervades the iron rod, occupying the same space but being qualitatively distinct. But it is also crucial to note that pneuma can be of different kinds, as Galen says: There are two kinds of innate pneuma, the physical kind and the psychic kind. Some people [i.e. the Stoics] also posit a third, the tenor kind. The [pneuma] which sustains stones is of the tenor kind,81 the one which nurtures animals and plants is physical, and the psychic pneuma is that which, in animate beings, makes animals capable of sensation and of moving in every way.82 The two terms associated with pneuma and its nature are “blend” and “pervade,” which, as we shall soon see, were adopted by Walī Allāh in his account of nasama (pneuma) through the Galenic intervention,83 which itself is mediated through the Islamic medical tradition.84 According to the Philosophers, 292. See also Alexander, On Mixture 216, 14–­218, 6 (SVF 2.473) in Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 1: 282. 81.  The “tenor” (hexis) of something is its constitutive pneuma, e.g., the hardness of iron or the whiteness of silver. Tenor thus constitutes the defining characteristics of entire classes of things whose members admit of specific variations. Thus, if two wines differ in their sweetness, or two dogs in their size or responsiveness to training, these are not the differences of tenor. See Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 1: 282. 82.  Galen, Medical Introduction 14.726, 7–­11 (SVF 2.716, part), in Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 1: 282. Long and Sedley rendered pneuma as “breath,” which is changed to pneuma following the Greek original. For the Greek original, see Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2: 284. 83.  In addition, see Galen, Galen on the Natural Faculties, trans. by A. J. Brock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916); Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans. by Margaret Tallmadge May (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968). 84.  For a survey of this, see Peter Adamson and Peter E. Pormann, Philosophy and Medicine in the Formative Period of Islam, Warburg Institute Colloquia, vol. 31 (London: Warburg Institute, 2017), 1–­33, 104–­169; Peter E. Pormann and Emilie Savage-­Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 10–­22, 166–­169; Peter Pormann, ed., Islamic Medical and Scientific

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Stoics, pneuma is constituted by a total blending (crasis) of air and fire. Pneuma blends with the inert elements, earth and water,85 which means that any portion of it, irrespective of size, is characterized by hot and cold. This complex motion was described as tension or tensile movement. It calls to mind the idea of elasticity expressed by the verb teinein, “to stretch.” The special character of this motion is its simultaneous activity in opposite directions, outwards and inwards, whereby one should understand fire and air to be pulling, as it were, against each other in the blend which they constitute.86 At any rate, the body of an animal (human or nonhuman) contains pneuma of all the three kinds, with the lowest kind responsible for the cohesion and character of parts like teeth and bones; physical pneuma in charge of metabolism, growth, etc.; and finally soul (psuche), accounting for distinctively mental or intellectual functions, such as perception, assent, and impulse.87 As Aetius88 writes: The Stoics say that the commanding-­faculty (hêgemonikon) is the soul’s highest part, which produces representations (phantasiai), assents, perceptions and impulses (hormê). They also call it the reasoning faculty. From the commanding-­faculty there are seven parts of the soul which grow out and stretch out into the body like the Tradition, Critical Concepts in Islamic Studies, 4 vols. (London and New York: Routledge, 2011) passim; and Ahmad M. Al-­Dubayan, Galen: “Über die Anatomie der Nerven. Originalschrift und alexandrinisches Kompendium in arabischer Überlieferung” (Berlin: K. Schwarz, 2000). 85.  Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 1: 292. 86.  Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 1: 288. Tensional motion (tonikê kinesis) seems to be the motion of the pneuma in a body that simultaneously moves from the center to the surface and from the surface back to the center. Passive elements (earth and water) and dense bodies have a low degree of tensional activity, while active elements (fire and air) and the soul were seen to possess a high level of tensional motion. See Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 1: 288. 87.  See A. A. Long, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 564, for a discussion and references. Also, as pneuma, the soul is characterized by its tensile motion with important bearing on a person’s moral condition. For more details on this, see Stobaeus, 2.86, 17–­87, 6 (SVF 3.169, part); Plutarch, On Stoic Self-­contradictions 1037F (SVF 3.175, part); Plutarch, On Stoic Self-­Contradictions 1057A (SVF 3.177, part) and Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 8.275–­276 (SVF 2.223, part). 88.  Greek doxographer (ca. 100 CE). His text has been conjecturally reconstructed out of later doxographical material, transmitted under the names of Plutarch, Stobaeus, and others, by H. Diels. Doxographi Graeci (Berlin 1879).

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tentacles of an octopus. Five of these are the senses, sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch. Sight is pneuma which extends from the commanding-­faculty to the eyes, hearing is pneuma which extends from commanding-­faculty to the ears.  .  .  . Of the remainder, one is called seed, and this is breath extending from the commanding-­ faculty to the genitals. The other . . . which they also call utterance, is pneuma extending from the commanding-­faculty to the pharynx, tongue and appropriate organs.89 That is to say, the soul (psuche), which is constituted by pneuma,90 pervades the whole of the body through all of its eight parts, which contains the five external senses and some of the internal senses such as phantasia. Walī Allāh also holds that once penuma reaches the brain, it is divided into ten parts of the external and the internal senses. I will flesh out some of the major differences between the Stoics and Walī Allāh, such as the latter’s incorporation of the laṭāʾif theory of Sufism into his conception of the pneumatic self. The origin of the idea of the laṭāʾif in Sufi literature goes back to al-­ Junayd (d. 910), who first conceived of them in the human body,91 along with his contemporaries such as Sahl al-­Tustarī (d. 896), ʿAmr b. ʿUthmān al-­Makkī (d. 909), and al-­Ḥallāj (d. 922).92 Abū ʿAbd al-­Raḥmān al-­Sulamī 89.  Aetius 4.21.1–­4 (SVF 2.836, part), translation in Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 1: 315–­6. Cf. Galen, On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, trans. by P. de Lacy (Berlin: Akademie-­Verlag, 1980), in (SVF 2.841, part). 90.  See Calcidius 220 (SVF 2.879, part); Plutarch, On Stoic Self-­Contradictions 1053D (SVF 2.806, part). For the texts reporting the soul’s nature as pneuma and the proof of its corporeality, see Long and Sedley, Hellenistic Philosophers, 1: 315–­322. On the nature of the Stoic soul, see A. A. Long, “Stoic Psychology,” in The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. by Keimpe Algra, Jonathan Barnes, Jaap Mansfeld, and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 560–­584; “Soul and Body in Stoicism,” Phronesis 27 (1982): 34–­57; Julia Annas, Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 37–­120; and Sellars, Stoicism, 81–­106; Annas, The Art of Living: The Stoics on the Nature and Function of Philosophy (London: Duckworth, 200), chapter 5. 91.  The Shādhilīs, whose spiritual anatomy consists of the seven laṭāʾif, also consider al-­Junayd to belong to their spiritual lineage. See Arthur Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshbandiyya and the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998), 106. 92.  Al-­Tustarī mentions a laṭīf giving life to the dense natural self and another laṭīf associated with the spiritual self. The latter laṭīf is from invocation (dhikr). See Gerhard Böwering, The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam: The Qurʼānic Hermeneutics of the Ṣūfī Sahl At-­Tustarī (d. 283/896) (Berlin: De

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(d. 1021), al-­Ghazālī, and ʿUmar al-­Suhrawardī (d. 1234) further refined and expanded the concept of the laṭāʾif.93 From these brief descriptions the idea of the laṭīfa began in the ninth century as a generic subtle entity before being defined functionally as a subtle body.94 Two centuries later the laṭīfa became a more localized subtle entity associated with the body. The major conceptual development of the laṭāʾif, however, grows out of a central Asian Sufi order, the Kubrawiyya, whose founding figure, Najm al-­Dīn Kubrā (d. 1221), analyzed the inner morphology of the human body in terms of three subtle entities: the heart (qalb), the spirit (rūḥ), and the “secret” (sirr).95 Najm al-­Dīn Rāzī (d. 1256), who was a disciple of Najm al-­Dīn Kubrā, came up with a fivefold structure by adding two other subtle entities: the intellect (ʿaql) and the arcanum (khafī).96 As a transmitter of the Central Asian Kubrawī tradition, ʿAlā al-­Dawla Simnānī (d. 1336) elaborated upon Rāzī’s pentad of inner perceptual fields to sevenfold arrangement by adding the physical frame (qālab) and the super-­arcanum (akhfā).97 Equipped with this schema, Simnānī established correspondences between these seven laṭāʾif and seven colors, seven prophets, and seven levels of the cosmos.98 Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā (d. 1420), a successor of Bahā al-­Dīn Gruyter, 1980), 244–­245. Abū Ṭālib al-­Makkī conceived of the laṭāʾif to be like veils wrapped in one another, e.g., the nafs in qalb, qalb in rūḥ, and rūḥ in sirr, which would be removed successively as one approaches God. See Louis Massignon, La Passion de Ḥusayn Ibn Manṣūr Ḥallāj, trans. by Herbert Mason, The Passion of Al-­Ḥallāj: Mystic and Martyr of Islam (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3: 17. 93.  Sulamī discusses (in ascending order) nafs, qalb, sirr, and rūḥ. See Roger Deladrière, “Les premiers Malāmatiyya: les gardiens du secret,” in Nathalie Clayer, Alexandre Popovic, and Thierry Zarcone, eds., Mélamis-­Bayramis, Études sur trois mouvements mystiques musulmans (Istanbul: Isis, 1998), 1–­14. 94.  Cf. Marcia Hermansen, “Shah Wali Allah’s Theory of the Subtle Spiritual Centers (Laṭāʾif): A Sufi Theory of Personhood and Self-­Transformation,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies (1988): 1–­3. 95.  Najm al-­Dīn Kubrā, Die Fawāʾih al-­jamāl wa-­fawātiḥ al-­jalāl des Najm al-­ Dīn Kubrā (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1957), 168–­174. 96.  Najm al-­Dīn al-­Rāzī, Mirṣād al-­ʿibād, ed. by Muḥammad Amīn Riyāḥī (Tehran: Shirkat-­i Intishārāt-­i ʻIlmī va Farhangī, 1987), 116–­117. 97.  Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien: aspects spirituels et philosphiques (Paris: Gallimard, 1971–­72), 3:275–­355. 98.  See Jamal Elias, The Throne Carrier of God: The Life and Thought of ʻAlāʾ ad-­Dawla as-­Simnānī (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1995), 80–­99 and Henry Corbin, L’homme de lumière dans le Soufism iranien (Paris: Éditions Présence, 1971), 132–­154.

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Naqshband whom Walī Allāh mentions in his Alṭāf al-­quds,99 defined the laṭāʾif in exactly the same order and with the same corresponding prophets as Simnānī had done.100 The Indian Naqshbandī-­Mujaddidīs then created their own synthesis of the sevenfold nature of the inner human being. By the latter half of the eighteenth century two things were certain. First, the position and colors of the laṭāʾif were already in the process of being standardized; and second, the overall Mujaddidī version of the human spiritual morphology had become firmly established. This meant that each of the seven laṭāʾif, which are receptors for divine energy (fuyūḍ) that comes from more subtle cosmic realms, not only coincides with the human microcosm, but also corresponds to a prophet, a colored light, and (except for the nafs and qālab) a specific cosmic emanation.101 But this was not a completely standardized system, at least in India, until the nineteenth century, by which time each laṭīfa had become associated with a definite part of the body and conceptualized in Sufi training as subtle entities.102 In the Naqshbandī-­Mujaddidī order the schema of the laṭāʾif is a heuristic device for the initiate to develop a subtle body or a subtle field with which she can travel in the nonphysical realms. This is very much linked to Simnānī’s concept of the acquired body (al-­badan al-­muktasab).103 Simnānī describes the acquired body composed of light as that which comes into being by partaking in divine energies (fuyūḍ), just as the Naqshbandī laṭāʾif are developed by receiving divine energy (fayḍ).104 Before investigating Walī Allāh’s own version of the laṭāʾif, it will be necessary to say a few words about the correspondence or similarity between the laṭāʾif and Indian notions of channel (nāḍī) and wheel (cakra), with which Walī Allāh might have been familiar through his brother Shāh Ahl Allāh (d. 1776).105 As scholars have pointed out, the Hindu-­Yoga equiv  99.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 77. 100.  Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā, Tuḥfat al-­sālikīn: taḥqīqāt-i Khwāja Muḥammad Pārsā (Delhi: Afghānī Dār al-­Kutub, 1970), 377. 101.  Henry Corbin, L’homme de lumière dans le Soufism iranien, 132–­142. 102.  Arthur Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet, 109–­110. 103.  Henry Corbin, En Islam iranien, 3: 279; Elias, Throne Carrier, 81. 104.  Simnānī, Khitām al-­misk, 73, cited in Arthur Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet, 112. 105.  Woodroffe notes that in his Risāla-­yi ḥaqq-­nāma, Dārā Shikūh provides a description of the three cakra like centers: spherical heart (dil-­i mudawwar), the pine-cone shaped heart (dil-­i ṣanūbarī), and the lily heart (dil-­i nilūfarī). According to Woodroffe, the Naqshbandīs are said to have devised or adapted some of their systems of meditative practices from the Indian yogis. See John Woodroffe, The Serpent Power (New York: Dover, 1974), 2–­3, 248. On the multifaceted relationship between the Sufi conception of the self and Yoga psychology, see Mario

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alent of the laṭāʾif is seven cakras located at the base of the spinal column, sacral plexas, navel, heart, throat, between the eyebrows, and the crown of the head.106 Scholars have also shown the parallels between the Indian theory of three humors and Greek humoral pathology employing four humors; between the Chinese idea of qi and Greek pneuma; and between the Persian idea of a fire of life and Greek innate heat (emphuton thermon), an energy source powering the vital functions of the body.107 But it should be noted that the Chinese version of the cakra physiology involves many channels (mai) through which energy (qi) flows. In China, the practices related to qi are generally associated with the Daoist tradition, and are essentially the part of a processes aimed at physical and spiritual transformation. In general, though, both Indian and Chinese practices require directing, refining and purifying the prāṇa or qi, a process that is both spiritual and physiological.108 The subtle body in the Indian contexts consists of a visualized internal structure to the human body, comprising channels (nāḍīs) and wheels (cakras), through which flow a substance (prāṇa, bodhicitta, etc.) that is closely related to breathing, the mind (citta), and sexual energy (vīrya). A critical question for the connection between mind and body is how one understands the substance that is flowing through the nāḍī. In Indian thought, this is seen primarily as a form of prāṇa or breath. Prāṇa covers a considerably wider territory than the English terms breathing or respiration. For instance, five internal forms of prāṇa were classically associated with mind and with emotion, including sexual energy (vīrya).109 In a recent study, Neil Theise argues that one may imagine alternate models of the body such as a fluid model in which biological cells do not exist, or a model wherein cells are described as overlapping fields of molecular organization in space and time. Thus, the subtle bodies may represent precise, if somewhat poetically expressed, representations of the body at different levels of scale.110 Kozah, The Birth of Indology as an Islamic Science: Al-­Bīrūnī’s Treatise on Yoga Psychology (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 151–­188. 106.  See Mircea Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, trans. by Willard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 241–­242; and Gavin Flood, The Tantric Body: The Secret Tradition of Hindu Religion (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2006), 157. 107.  See Pormann and Savage-­Smith, Medieval Islamic Medicine, 22–­23. 108.  See Geoffrey Samuel, “Subtle-­Body Processes: Towards a Non-­Reductionist Understanding,” in Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West, ed. by Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 250. 109.  Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston, eds., Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West, 5. 110.  Neil D. Theise, “Beyond Cell Doctrine: Complexity Theory Informs Alter-

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As noted earlier, similar to its place in Sufism, the subtle body concepts in the tantric traditions, such as Shaivism and Buddhist tantrism, are more practical than theoretical.111 For the most part, the aim is not simply to understand but to use (primarily, though not only) for the purpose of spiritual transformation. Therefore, Buddhist tantric understandings of the circulation of prāṇa through the nāḍī and cakra of the subtle body are linked to a series of meditative exercises aimed at working with the flows through the nāḍīs and cakras.112 Finally, let us draw the connection between Graeco-­Islamic medicine and Walī Allāh’s writings. Although, similar to the case of Islamic phinate Models of the Body for Cross-­Cultural Dialogue,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1172 (2009): 263–­269. Theise argues that one may imagine alternate models of the body such as a fluid model in which biological cells do not exist or a model wherein cells are described as overlapping fields of molecular organization in space and time. Thus, the subtle bodies may represent precise, though somewhat poetically expressed, representations of the body at different levels of scale. 111.  Tantra or tantrism can be many things to many people, but in general it refers to a body of beliefs and practices that seek to channel the divine energy that grounds the universe, in creative and liberating ways. As David White correctly describes, tantra aims to realize a metaphysical journey. In such a system, the subtle body becomes the stage for the return of the absolute from existence to essence through the descent and ascent of the kundalinī or serpent power. In tantric philosophy, the absolute or Brahman emanates into the manifest universe and human bodies as a means to enjoying Its boundless possibilities. The return, however, to unity and wholeness is, for those human manifestations of this emanatory dynamic, anything but natural, requiring as it does a forceful (haṭha) reversal (ulaṭā) of what are, in mortal creatures, irreversible tendencies such as aging, disease, and death. Thus, while it is the case that the process of return is, from a divine or absolute standpoint, internal to the process of emanation, it is nevertheless an arduous task for the individual who would attempt to realize it through her own subtle body. See David G. White, The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4, 207, 223, 263, 273. For an authoritative study that covers a wide geographical and temporal scope of tantra by examining thirty-­six texts from China, India, Japan, Nepal, and Tibet, ranging from the seventh century to the present day, and representing the full range of tantric experience—­Buddhist, Hindu, Jain, and Islamic—­see David G. White, ed., Tantra in Practice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 3–­40, 285–­98. For an analysis of tantric yoga vis-­à-­vis modern empirical science, see Joseph S. Alter, Yoga in Modern India: The Body between Science and Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 41–­43. 112.  Geoffrey Samuel and Jay Johnston, eds., Religion and the Subtle Body in Asia and the West, 6.

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losophy, research on the history of Islamic medicine in India is at its early stage, a recent monograph on the topic by Fabrizio Speziale argues convincingly that Sufis played a crucial role in the development and transmission of Greek/Galenic and Islamic medicine in Muslim India. In Speziale’s survey, Sufis are shown to have studied and transmitted Galenic medicine; the medicine of the Prophet (al-­ṭibb al-­nabawī) and the Shia Imams; and theories and practices related to the occult sciences (al-­ʿulūm al-­gharība), alchemy, and medical knowledge (āyurveda) coming from India.113 Arguing against those who claim a decline of Graeco-­Islamic medicine after the thirteenth century due to the influence of Sufism, which was allegedly opposed to scientific medicine, Speziale shows not only that Sufis did not object to scientific thought, but also that they actually made a significant contribution to the transmission of medical science in India. In a further study, Speziale documents the link between Sufism and Galenic medicine that was established among the early generations of Indian Sufis and physicians. Speziale underscores the important role played by the Sufis in the process of adapting the Graeco-­Islamic medicine in India and their role in sustaining the relationship and the process of cross-­pollination between Indo-­Muslim and āyurvedic pharmacopoeias.114 Deciphering the Self through the Subtle Bodies With the above historical backdrop in place, let me now turn to the treatment of the laṭāʾif in Walī Allāh scholarship. First, it should be noted that although aspects of Walī Allāh’s psychology (i.e., the laṭāʾif) have been 113.  Speziale, Soufisme, Religion et médecine en Islam indien, chapter 3. He also debunks the “decline theories” by arguing that such theories are based on essentialist oppositions such as science/religion, philosopher/Sufi, or Galenic medicine/ prophetic medicine, which are strongly influenced by positivist assumptions and find no correspondence in the Indian Muslim world. 114.  From the Moghul epoch until the revival of yūnānī medicine that took place during the British Raj, it is evident that a large number of ḥukamāʾ (physicians) were either Sufis or had Sufi affiliation. See Fabrizio Speziale, “The Relation between Galenic Medicine and Sufism in India during the Delhi and Deccan Sultanates,” East and West 53, no. 1/4 (2003): 149–­78. See also the name of the famous Sufi-­ḥukamāʾ mentioned in the biographies concerning Moghul and Colonial epochs, such as the corresponding volumes of the cited Nuzhat al-­khawāṭir of ʿAbd al-­Ḥayy and Tadhkira-­yi aṭibbāʾ-­i ʿahd-­i ʿUthmānī by Ḥakīm Shifāʾ, a work which gives a detailed description of the practitioners of yūnānī medicine in Deccan during the beginning of the twentieth century.

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analyzed, his theory of selfhood has never received any sustained scholarly treatment. This is despite the fact that the self has been central to his overall metaphysics. In particular, existing scholarship has ignored Walī Allāh’s conception of self-­knowledge and first-­person subjectivity, which he analyzes through presential knowledge (al-­ʿilm al-­ḥuḍūrī), a concept which shows his debt to earlier Islamic philosophers. One reason why scholars have generally neglected selfhood in Walī Allāh’s thought is that the self is often taken to be synonymous with the concept of “soul” or as a constellation of various laṭāʾif, rather than as a multidimensional entity. Both Baljon’s and Hermansen’s treatments of Walī Allāh’s psychology suffer from such a conceptual stumbling block.115 In any event, Walī Allāh’s own conception of the laṭāʾif or the subtle centers of consciousness presumes that they can only be perceived through a suprarational mode of cognition called dhawq, and not through the senses. Moreover, in his view, the knowledge of the laṭāʾif is a great scale of balance that God has bestowed on latter day Sufis. That is, the better one is able to weigh the subtle fields of consciousness, the better one is able to purify them.116 To illustrate the difference between someone who possesses the knowledge of the laṭāʾif and those people who may have devoted their whole life to Sufism without ever gaining this knowledge, Walī Allāh likens the former to the physician (ṭabīb) who is skilled in the diagnosis of various types of illnesses, who knows their causes (asbāb), symptoms (ʿalāmāt), methods of treatment (muʿālajāt), and all the rules which ancient physicians developed through long, protracted experience; and the latter to someone who is like an unqualified physician who can merely prescribe some medicine on the strength of his own defective experience and incomplete understanding. He further adds that whoever is acquainted with the laṭāʾif is like a leader who has spent a lifetime wandering in the wilderness and has learnt each hill and dale, each path across it, whether it be well-­worn or as yet untrodden.117 At this point, one should ask what exactly Walī Allāh’s conception of the laṭāʾif is. The answer to this question would be none other than nasama or pneuma. But this only prompts a further question: what is pneuma in Walī Allāh’s theory of the self? Again, one can answer it with a word: the 115.  J. M. S. Baljon, Religion and Thought of Shāh Walī Allāh Dihlavi (Leiden: Brill. 1986); and Hermansen, “Shāh Walī Allāh’s Theory of the Subtle Spiritual Centers,” 1–­25. 116.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 14–­15. 117.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 15.

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rational soul, which is the self. To unpack all of this step by step, let me begin with the following quote: What I find in my self (mā wajadtuhu fī dhātī) regarding human nature, its eyes, hands and feet is that the human being is not an [entity] that comes into existence all at once (anna al-­insān laysa bi-­mawjūd marrat wāḥida). Rather in him lie many dimensions (bal fīhi ṭabaqāt kathīra) and levels, and each of these levels has an appointed time from its inception until its end. Whoever looks at only his particular level and does not consider other levels thinks human knowledge is confined to this. Thus the visible level (al-­ ṭabaqa al-­ẓāhira) or dimension is the body (al-­badan), which is the lowest dimension. . . . It is followed by the level of the laṭīfa called pneuma.  .  .  . The human in reality is this pneuma (fa-­l-­insān fi-­l-­ ḥaqīqa huwa hādhihi al-­nasama), while his body is like an envelope above that protects him. When the body is severed [at death], the pneuma endures with its states, and attaches itself to the moral qualities (al-­akhlāq) and the external and internal senses (al-­iḥsās al-­ẓāhir wa-­l-­bāṭin).118 In this very important passage, Walī Allāh outlines the framework of his theory of the self in relation to the laṭāʾif. Resembling other Islamic philosophers, he asserts that the self is a multidimensional reality, having many levels, each having an appointed time from its beginning until its end. This is further stressed by his statement that “the human being is not an [entity] that comes into existence all at once,” implying that there is a developmental aspect to the reality of the self, which can be compared to the Ṣadrian notion of “motion in substance.” Moreover, the lowest dimension of human nature is the body, which is followed by the dimension or level of pneuma that underlies the human self. For Walī Allāh, as for the Stoics, pneuma survives the death of the body, along with all the external and internal senses. But what is the nature of pneuma as such? We are told that it is something other than the visible body, but does this mean it is completely immaterial or something between the material and the immaterial? Moreover, what is the precise relationship between this pneuma and the self (or the rational soul), which for Walī Allāh is nonphysical (as we’ve seen in chapter 2)? The text below provides a response: 118.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 1: 229.

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Know that the rational soul is the individuating form by which every human acquires his individuality. This [individuality] of each person depends on a subtle body (jism laṭīf) produced from the vapor (bukhār) of the humors (al-­akhlāṭ). This is because the nature of the forms is to be dependent on suitable matter (al-­hayūlā al-­munāsaba) possessing a prepared configuration that will be conferred on it. Since the self (al-­nafs) is the most subtle, most pure and most solid of all the forms, it cannot but be dependent on a body which is the most subtle of all the bodies, maturing at the finest degree of subtlety and equilibrium (iʿtidāl). . . . We will call this subtle body pneuma (nasama), which pervades the dense body (al-­badan al-­kathīf) in order to manifest the perfections of the self (kamālāt al-­nafs) in it.119 In this crucial text, one can see how the synthesis of Graeco-­Arabic-­Indian medical tradition, Platonizing Aristotelianism, and Stoicism comes into play in Walī Allāh’s theory of the self. The rational soul for Walī Allāh is the individuating form by which the human self acquires its individuality or its specific “I-­ness.”120 This is more or less standard Aristotelianism. However, Walī Allāh goes on to note that the individuality or the “I-­ness” of every human in turn depends on a on a subtle body produced from the vapor of the humors.121 And this is a complex synthesis of Stoicism and the Galenic tradition, with some notable differences. For Walī Allāh, unlike Stoicism or Galenism, the self, being immaterial and the most subtle of all the forms, cannot but be dependent on a body which is also the most subtle of all the bodies maturing at the finest degree of subtlety and equilibrium. And Walī Allāh calls this subtle body nasama or pneuma, which is an intermediary between the self (immaterial) and the body (material), and whose function is to manifest the perfections of the self in the body. However, what is more important in Walī Allāh’s theory is that he fills in the “physiological” gaps of the laṭāʾif theory through an original synthesis 119.  Walī Allāh, al-­Budūr al-­bāzigha, 38. Cf. Walī Allāḥ, Ḥujjat Allāh al-­ bāligha, ed. by Muḥammad Hāshim (Beirut: Dār al-­Kutub al-­ʿIlmiyya, 1995), 1: 65, which states that pneuma pervade the entire body as a substratum. 120.  Cf. Aristotle, De Anima, 412a27. 121.  In the Ḥujjat, Walī Allāh notes that there is a subtle vapor in the body, which is produced in the heart from the quintessence of the humors. It carries the faculties of perception, movement, and the distribution of food according to the dictates of medicine. The various states of this vapor, whether fine or thick or pure or turbid, has a particular effect on the faculties and the functions that proceed from these faculties. Walī Allāḥ, Ḥujjat Allāh al-­bāligha, 1: 38.

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of the Stoic-­Galenic-­Islamic traditions, which, as far as I am aware, is original to him. In a passage from his late work al-­Budūr al-­bāzigha, Walī Allāh expands the bio-­physiology of pneuma and its relationship with the self: The Pneuma, which is united with the self (nafs), is a subtle body that pervades the dense body and bears the faculties and functions. When food reaches the stomach where it is cooked, it generates the pneuma which, as a subtle vaporous body,122 travels to the liver, where it is cooked for a second time. The cooked [stuff] is then divided into the four. A subtle body emitted from the blood is then drawn to the heart, where it is collected in a cavity and is transformed into a subtle air. This air is collected in another cavity, from where a portion of it ascends to the brain (al-­dimāgh) where it is divided into ten parts, five of which are for the external senses, i.e., the faculties of sight, hearing, smell and taste, etc., while the remaining five are for the internal senses such as the sensus communis (al-­ḥiss al-­mushtarak), the imagination (al-­khayāl), estimation (al-­wahm), and memory (al-­ḥāfiẓa) and perception (al-­mudraka).123 Unlike the Stoics, Walī Allāh holds that the pneuma is not the self as such; rather it is the corporal basis (i.e., matter) of the immaterial self (i.e., form).124 Nevertheless, to a large extent like that of the Stoics, Walī Allāh’s pneuma contains all the faculties of perception. To clarify further the nature of pneuma, Walī Allāh states that it has three branches. According to his classification of pneuma, the first branch corresponds to what is called nafs in the language of the Sufis, which is like an aperture through which Satan inspires it to incline toward evil, wickedness, and bestiality. He further notes that the same term, i.e., nafs, is called al-­nafs al-­shahwiyya (the appetitive self) by the philosophers. The second branch is called qalb (heart) in 122.  Cf. Walī Allāh, al-­Khayr al-­kathīr, 56, where he says nasama is a subtle, imperceptible body. 123.  Walī Allāh, al-­Budūr al-­bāzigha, 39. 124.  Moreover, in the Ḥujjat, Walī Allāh makes the argument that pneuma is the essential matter (mādda bi-­l-­dhāt) of the self. This is because every form needs matter wherein it may inhere (kull ṣūra lā budd lahā min mādda taqūm bihā), and it must be only that matter which is suitable for it. The self does not discard matter once it dies. The rational soul possesses an essential matter (mādda bi-­l-­dhāt), which is nasama, and an accidental matter (mādda bi-­l-­ʿaraḍ), which is its earthly body (al-­jism al-­arḍī). According to Walī Allāh, when the self dies, it remains lodged in the matter of pneuma. See Walī Allāḥ, Ḥujjat Allāh al-­bāligha, 1: 66.

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Fig. 4. The Branches of Nasama (pneuma)

the language of the Sufis, while it is called al-­nafs al-­sabʿiyya (animalistic self) by the philosophers. Similarly, the third branch of pneuma is known as ʿaql (intellect), which is the same in both the Sufis’ and the philosophers’ terminology.125 Additionally, “heart” and “intellect” have higher dimensions such as the “secret” and the “spirit.” Walī Allāh then goes on to claim that all of these branches of nasama, i.e., the laṭāʾif, are accepted by the Sufis, the philosophers, and the folk of the transmitted sciences.126 To give a better sense of the laṭāʾif, and why it makes more sense to conceive of them as “subtle fields of consciousness,” let us consider how Walī Allāh describes their functions. In his account, the laṭīfa of the nafs (the everyday self) is characterized by its ability to form the intention to 125.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 1: 229–­231. 126.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 1: 232.

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carry out a particular action, entertain feelings of love and hatred, look after the carnal desires, and pursue whatever is pleasurable. In addition, it has to maintain the constitution of the body, in accordance with the latter’s requirements, and has to discharge what the body naturally has to discharge. Furthermore, basic bodily needs such as hunger and thirst, fatigue and pain, and sexual urge, which are necessary for the continuation of life, are all connected with the lower self (nafs).127 Next, the laṭīfa of the qalb (heart) has to do with emotions such as showing courage or cowardice (jubn), anger (ghaḍab), shame (khajālat), fear (khawf), generosity (sakhāwat), avarice (shuḥḥ), love (ḥubb), and hatred (bughḍ). Walī Allāh illustrates this by arguing that everyone knows, without failing, why he dislikes a particular thing, why his heart burns with a desire to repel it, why his spirits (arwāḥ) seem almost on the point of leaving his body, and why his veins dilate and his skin turns red. Similarly, in times of fear, he knows why his heart trembles, making his spirits recede into his body, and why his face becomes pale and his mouth goes dry.128 That is to say, the natural sensations and feelings that one goes through due to the stirring of his emotions and passions, are to be attributed to the laṭīfa of the heart. We shall have more to say about the self and its emotions in a moment, as Walī Allāh treats emotions of the self at length by linking it with what I call “spiritual emotion” (wajd). But for now, let us complete the discussion on the properties of the laṭāʾif. According to Walī Allāh, the functions of the laṭīfa of the intellect (ʿaql) are comprehension, knowledge, and the capacity to make decisions. Moreover, the intellect has the feature of recollecting things of the past (yād dāshtan-­i chīzī kih gudhasht) and making plans for the future (tadbīr kardan-­i kār-­i āyandah).129 The above description systematically attributes both agency-­related capacities (such as the ability to make decisions) and perceptual capacities (such as the ability to experience various emotions and make judgements about their moral content) to the self, which is difficult to imagine without some form of “consciousness” in the background. To wit, it is not possible to attribute agency-­related actions or states to human beings without admitting some sort of consciousness. That is why I find it most suitable to render the laṭāʾif as “subtle fields of consciousness.” They are “subtle” because they have a subtle bodily basis, and it is more plausible to think of them as “fields” rather than “points,” since they pervade the whole body 127.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 38–­39. 128.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 39–­40. 129.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 40.

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and interpenetrate each other. However, as Walī Allāh stresses frequently, although there are seven such subtle fields of consciousness, it does not entail that there are seven selves sitting behind them.130 This is why the idea of the multidimensionality of the self, explicitly asserted by Walī Allāh and others, can be so crucial. Walī Allāh writes: Each of us individually experiences all of these realities. In one sense, these three categories (i.e. the laṭāʾif) are separate from each other, while in another sense they are united together.131 We have already discussed the cause of their differentiation; the cause of their unity lies in the fact that, although the rational soul directs these various faculties and functions, it is itself fundamentally a single entity, and fundamentally, its constitution is one.132 That is to say, the self is one at the level of its substance-­hood, or as an immaterial entity, but multiple at the level of its functions, states, and actions. For this reason, a spectrum model of selfhood containing multiple dimensions can be heuristically helpful, as it offers a way of reading the apparently disconnected reflections on the self in a coherent and unified way. Emotion and Subjectivity A distinctive mark of Walī Allāh’s complex notion of the self, unlike that of Ṣadrā and others, is that it pays a great deal of attention to psychological factors, mental states, and emotions that are bound up with the self. In fact, Walī Allāh recasts the standard mystical concepts of state (ḥāl) and stations (maqāmāt), and ordinary emotions such as fear, through the concept of wajd or spiritual emotion. However, since theories of selfhood rarely treat emotions as a frame through which the emotional life of the self can be understood, let me first set the context by providing an account of emotion in the Graeco-­Islamic-­Western tradition. Recent literature on the philosophy of mind shows a surge in emotion research in various disciplines. For instance, anthropology and evolution130.  See, e.g., Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 35–­36, and 146. 131.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 40. 132.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 41.

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ary psychology have explored which emotions and which facial expressions of emotion are basic universals among human beings, and shared with non-­human animals; developmental psychologists have engaged with the emotions in young children, and with the emotions in our sense of self and in various kinds of psychopathological behavior; and neuroscientists have investigated the neural correlates of emotion in humans and other animals.133 Moreover, with a change in the landscape of philosophical ethics that was once dominated by Kantian (deontological) and utilitarian ethics, which allowed little space for the emotions, virtue ethics has been revived, accompanied by a return to Aristotelianism. This has allowed the importance of emotion in ethics to be properly appreciated.134 However, before addressing how modern philosophers analyze emotion, let me first survey early discussions on emotions that can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle. The Greeks had no word equivalent to our Latinate “emotion.” The term they commonly used in its place, pathos, had the most general meaning “that which happens to a person or thing.” It came commonly to be applied to experiences to which a person is subject, and also lasting states manifested in such experiences, or initiated or altered by them. Hence it became the term standardly applied to emotions, occurrent or dispositional, and other mental states.135 Since the Greek term pathos and the Latin term passio do not usually suggest extreme emotions as the word “passion” nowadays might suggest, one may use the terms “passion” and “emotion” interchangeably without intending any important difference in meaning. Also, many of the emotional phenomena to which past philosophers refer are similar to those we are familiar with, though this does 133.  See Peter Goldie, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 1–­3; Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (London: Harper Collins, [1872] 1998), 1–­26, 198–­221, 278–­309; Paul Ekman, “Universals and Cultural Differences in Facial Expressions of Emotion,” in Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, ed. by J. Cole (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971), 207–­283; P. Harris, Children and Emotion: The Development of Psychological Understanding (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 51–­80; James Blair, Derek Mitchell, and Karina Blair, The Psychopath: Emotion and the Brain (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 7–­12, 39–­40; Joseph E. LeDoux, The Emotional Brain (London: Orion Books, 1998), 267ff; and Peter Singer, “Ethics and Intuitions,” The Journal of Ethics 9 (2005): 331–­352. 134.  G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33 (1958): 1–­19. 135.  See A. W. Price, “Emotions in Plato and Aristotle,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. by Peter Goldie (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 121.

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not hold of all emotions. Moreover, the variability of emotions between cultures is associated with various practices. So, for instance, some of the emotions dealt with by the Desert Fathers are not common in our days, nor are the practices in which they were embedded; on the other hand, many descriptions of particular emotions in ancient or medieval philosophers do not differ from those described by contemporary writers.136 In their writings, Plato and Aristotle point to the compositional intricacy of emotions, which involves body and mind, cognition and desire, perception and feeling.137 This means the complexity of emotional phenomena resists any simplistic categorization. Emotions, after all, are states that we feel; at the same time, emotionally is how we often think. Plato and Aristotle thus stress the interconnections of body and soul within the emotions, and those of perception, imagination, feeling, and thinking, which were later adopted by Avicenna and others. Moreover, Aristotle provides a physiological account of emotions, which gained traction in the Galenic tradition that would eventually reach Walī Allāh. In Aristotle’s scheme, virtues and emotions interconstitute each other. These are largely the result of our physiology that rests on the material composition of blood. That is to say, moral habituation of virtues involves training our emotions, which are psychophysical states (or processes), which in turn involve both a psychological component and a physiological component. For instance, acquiring patience or good temper (the virtues associated with anger) involves doing and feeling certain things, accompanied by characteristic physiological processes, especially the heating and cooling of the blood.138 As noted by Aristotle scholar David Charles, an emotion is a psychophysical state (or process) that is inseparable in definition into two separate components, a purely formal or psychological one and a purely physical one.139 A recent 136.  For more on this, see Simon Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3. 137.  See Gabriela R. Carone, “Akrasia and the Structure of the Passions in Plato’s Timaeus,” in Akrasia in Greek Philosophy, ed. by Christopher Bobonich and Pierre Destrée (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 101–­118; W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion (London: Duckworth, 2002); Paul Nieuwenburg, “Emotion and Perception in Aristotle’s Rhetoric,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 80 (2002): 86–­100; and Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), passim. 138.  Mariska Leunissen, From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle (Oxford University Press, 2017), 9–­31. 139.  David Charles, “Desire in Action: Aristotle’s Move,” in Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle, ed. by Michael Pakaluk and Giles Pearson (Oxford University Press, 2011), 83; quoted by Leunissen, From Natural Character

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study on Aristotle’s ethics offers the following definition of anger as an example: a boiling-­of-­the-­blood-­type-­desire-­for-­revenge-­after-­pain-­felt-­at-­ a-­supposed-­slight.140 After Plato and Aristotle, Augustine (354–­430) offers an extended inquiry into the nature of emotions in his late work The City of God, where his chief target is the Stoic theory of the emotions.141 Like the Platonists, he maintains that there is an emotional level in the human self that corresponds to Plato’s appetitive and spirited parts of the soul.142 Operating as he does in a Christian framework, Augustine also suggests that emotions belonging to the present condition of human beings after the Fall are bound up with moral implications. This is because after the Fall, humans’ emotional dispositions have changed and they suffer from exaggerated carnal suggestions, which they should continuously repel.143 Following Augustine and the Aristotelian-­Platonic tradition, most medieval thinkers conceived of emotions as cognitively penetrable and somatic, which means that emotions are influenced by and oscillate with changes in thought and belief, and that they are also related to their physiological underpinnings. But since research on medieval Islamic philosophers’ and Sufis’ conception of emotions is exceedingly scant, one can only suggest some general comments with reference to key primary sources at this stage. First of all, one should look for a theory of emotion in not only standard philosophical treatises such as Avicenna’s Kitāb al-­nafs of al-­Shifāʾ, but also in medical works such as the first book of Avicenna’s al-­Qānūn fi-­l-­ṭibb (The Canon of Medicine), Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq’s al-­Masāʾil fi-­l-­ṭibb li-­l-­mutaʿallimīn, Rāzī’s Kitāb al-­Ḥāwī fi-­l-­ṭibb, al-­Majūsī’s Kitāb Kāmil al-­ṣināʿat al-­ṭibbiya, and Ibn al-­Nafīs’ Kitāb al-­Mūjaz fi-­l-­ṭibb, to name but to Moral Virtue in Aristotle, 108n12; see also David Charles, “Aristotle’s Psychological Theory,” Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium of Ancient Philosophy 24 (2008): 1–­49. 140.  Mariska Leunissen, From Natural Character to Moral Virtue in Aristotle, 105n15. This definition draws not only on Charles’s work on De Anima (cited above), but also on Jamie Dow’s work on the Rhetoric. See Jamie Dow, “Aristotle’s Theory of the Emotions: Emotions as Pleasures and Pains,” in Moral Psychology and Human Action in Aristotle, ed. by Michael Pakaluk and Giles Pearson (Oxford University Press, 2011), 47–­74. 141.  Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, trans. by R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 9.4–­5 and 14. See also, Augustine, De Civitate Dei, ed. by Bernard Dombart and Alphonsus Kalb (Turnhout: Brepols, 1955). 142.  Augustine, City of God, 14.5. 143.  Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 157.

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a few. Secondly, just as the most detailed twelfth-­century Latin treatments of the emotions are found in theological and spiritual treatises influenced by the monastic tradition of Christian spirituality,144 Arabic-­Islamic theories of emotion were also found in mystical works such as Walī Allāh’s Alṭāf al-­quds, in addition to medical works composed by the Sufis. In general, emotions were explored from the point of view of the behavioral changes they produced. The detailed analyses of the causal connections between the faculties of the soul, the localization of these faculties in different parts of the brain, and the emotional effects of the systems of humors (akhlāṭ) and spirits (arwāḥ), were all crucial in a theory of emotion. In Avicenna’s works, emotions are acts of the moving power of the sensitive soul, preceded by various cognitive acts and accompanied by bodily affections and behavioral changes.145 But it should be noted that even though Avicenna was interested in spiritual emotions, these do not have the same central status in his theory which they enjoy in Sufi literature. Nonetheless, Avicenna’s faculty psychology and his conception of emotions provided the foundation for the subsequent tradition. As noted by Knuuttila, an important doctrinal innovation in the Avicennan paradigm was the new taxonomy in which emotions were classified into the contrary pairs of the concupiscible power and the irascible power, pre-figurations of which can be found in Plato. Following Aristotle’s compositional intricacy, Avicenna also asserts that the emotions of the soul such as distress, fear, joy, and anger are also called the emotions of the spirit (rūḥ), since they are accompanied by cardiac and spiritual changes.146 However, unlike that of Aristotle, Avicenna’s self is an nonphysical substance, and hence it functions through a material medium; its acts are influenced by the qualities of the spirits and, more indirectly, of the humors. Before delving into Walī Allāh’s theory of wajd, which is multifaceted, I would also go over some contemporary conceptions of emotion, as these discussions will provide a better theoretical context for my own investigation. In an original study on “Emotions in Heidegger and Sartre,” Anthony Hatzimoysis argues that the essential insight of the phenomenologists is to place emphasis on the world-­directedness of emotion, attaching less impor144.  Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 177. 145.  Avicenna, al-­Shifāʾ: Fī al-­nafs, in Avicenna’s De Anima. 146.  Avicenna’s views on the emotions of the sensitive soul show similarities to Aristotle’s compositional theory. Emotions have cognitive causes, and they involve feelings, behavioral suggestions, and bodily affections. See, e.g., Avicenna, De Anima I.3, IV.4, V.1; cf. Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, 222–­224.

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tance to the subjective experience of emotion.147 It is to be noted that the common modern German terms for emotion, Gefühl and Affekt, are hardly used by Heidegger. Instead, in Being and Time, we read mostly about Stimmung, a term often translated as “mood.” It might be thought that this is not a real issue; it simply indicates that, when it comes to the details of his account, Heidegger’s concern is not with emotion proper but with moods. However, this reasonable suggestion does not offer an easy way out of our interpretative difficulties. Consider, for a start, the fact that when Heidegger attempts to illustrate his view of moods, he discusses fear, which has always been taken as a paradigmatic case of emotion. It would not help either to think that, for Heidegger, the traditional taxonomy of affective states has got it wrong, and that fear is a mood and not an emotion, since Heidegger attributes to fear precisely those characteristics (specificity of intentional target, limited duration of relevant experience, explicit concern about our wellbeing in view of an identifiable threat), which mark fear not as a mood but as an emotion.148 This methodological point, along with what we learned from the ancient and medieval use of the terms related to emotion, will provide important clues as to why it is possible to conceptualize wajd as spiritual emotion, since what is at stake is not about finding a word that corresponds to emotion in English. Rather, one has to see what concepts are being expressed through a given term (see below). For instance, Heidegger holds that affective states are inextricably connected with our cognition and perception, which implies that unless we attend to the world in an appropriate affective state—­with the right “attunement”—­we will not grasp the world as it really is. As is well known, Heidegger’s main concern in his magnum opus, Sein und Zeit, is the meaning of being.149 Among the various notions he employs for characterizing Dasein’s coming to the truth of being, Heidegger emphasizes the phenomenon of disclosure (Erschlossenheit) which meets the following desiderata: (a) it discloses the Da of Dasein, the fact of its being-­ in-­the world; (b) it discloses entities encountered within-­the-­world; (c) conditions (a) and (b) are achieved simultaneously, in equal measure, and 147.  Anthony Hatzimoysis, “Emotions in Heidegger and Sartre,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. by Peter Goldie (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 215–­235. 148.  See Hatzimoysis, “Emotions in Heidegger and Sartre,” 217. 149.  On Heidegger’s treatment of the meaning of being and its parallels and contrasts in Islamic philosophy, see Muhammad Faruque, “Mullā Ṣadrā and Heidegger on the Meaning of Metaphysics,” Philosophy East and West 67, no. 3 (2017): 629–­650.

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with no metaphysical priority, i.e., “equiprimordially”; (d) the disclosure is not deliberately brought about, it is not the outcome of voluntary effort, but it is something that befalls Dasein; (e) it is a disclosure that should be sharply contrasted with any kind of cognition or observation, including theoretical intuition, perceptual understanding, beholding, looking at, staring, reflecting, cognizing, and knowing.150 In Heidegger’s view, the awareness enabled by “affective experience” meets all of the above desiderata. He illustrates his case by pointing to the emotion of fear: “fearing about something, as being afraid in the face of something, always discloses equiprimordially entities within-­the-­world and being-­in—­the former as threatening and the latter as threatened.”151 From a different vantage point, philosopher Robert Solomon approaches emotions as they constitute the meaning in life. Solomon argues that emotions are a precondition for the intelligibility of all our goal-­directed activities. If no actual or possible states of affairs were ever judged by us to be preferable to any other, we would have no grounds for action. Without emotions, therefore, we would lose motivation to strive for anything worthwhile or meaningful. Solomon says: I suggest that emotions are the meaning of life. It is because we are moved, because we feel, that life has a meaning. The passionate life, not the dispassionate life of pure reason, is the meaningful life (The passionate life of reason is the passionate life in disguise). . . . Our passions constitute our life.152 As Solomon puts it, we do not experience a neutral, objective reality; rather, we live in a surreality of purpose, value, and significance.153 Solomon leaves it unclear as to which emotions one should cultivate in order 150.  Sections 28, 29, and 30 abound with Heidegger’s warnings against the confusion of Befindlichkeit or Stimmungen with any kind of cognitive or perceptual awareness. See Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), 134, 136. 151.  As Heidegger often says, “Fear is a mode of Befindlichkeit.” See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 141. 152.  Robert Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1993), ix–­xiv. 153.  Solomon, Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, 18. For more details, see Matthew Ratcliffe, “The Phenomenology of Mood and the Meaning of Life,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. by Peter Goldie (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 350–­370; and Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 50ff.

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to have a fulfilling life, since not all emotions are considered good—­greed, hatred, anger, etc. In any event, the discussion on the relation between emotion and the meaning of life, alongside the cultivation of certain desirable emotions, smoothly segues into Walī Allāh’s idiosyncratic conception of emotions as wajd, which literally means ecstasy, and spiritual ecstasy in particular. But as we shall see in a moment, it makes more sense to think of wajd as spiritual emotion (or passion), since Walī Allāh’s formulation of wajd not only incorporates spiritual states, but also everyday emotions such as anger and love. The following passage delineates Walī Allāh’s conception of wajd: The term spiritual emotion (wajd) is used to describe the preoccupation of the heart with various states such as shame, grief, repentance, aversion to the world, etc. And it is implicit in this notion that bodily organs are likewise controlled by such preoccupations. When, through continuous worshipping, both this capacity and that of sincerity are created in man, and the spirits of the heart are somewhat reduced in stature, then the various states which ensue may be attributed to God. Because one’s attention is turned toward God and because of the diminished stature of the spirits of the heart, it becomes more difficult to ward off these states; and the bodily organs become more passive. As a result, fainting and other deranged actions are observed. This or that particular transport of spiritual emotion represents a state; while the capacity for such transports, which is permanently fixed in the individual, represents a stage.154 So, wajd describes states of the heart, and we know that for Walī Allāh the heart is one of the laṭāʾif to which emotions such as courage, cowardice, anger, shame, fear, generosity, avarice, love, and hatred are attributed. As in Aristotle and Avicenna, wajd is characterized by its compositional intricacy that involves both a psychological and a physiological component. But, unlike Aristotle and many contemporary theorists, Walī Allāh holds that wajd also includes heightened spiritual states that are aroused through spiritual exercises such as the invocation (dhikr). In Walī Allāh’s account, such spiritual states can be caused by intense attention (tawajjuh) to the divine in which bodily organs are overpowered, resulting in fainting and other deranged actions. In other places Walī Allāh talks about common 154.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 91.

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emotions such as anger that are objectual in the sense that they involve a definite object and cognitive judgements about them. Walī Allāh writes: When a man is outraged, his intellect will realize upon reflection that his anger was roused only on account of his having perceived the harm caused by the object of his anger or because of having been delighted that revenge could be taken. Likewise, blood will not come into one’s face or skin and make it red, nor will hot breath issue from one’s mouth, unless a sequence of physical actions is initiated in nature. He also will realize that anger may come about from one word having one source, and that those physical actions may be initiated simply after one explosion. But how many times is it observed that a man with a large brain and liver but a weak heart is unable to show anger?155 Once again, the reader would notice the Aristotelian underpinning of Walī Allāh’s theory of emotion that involves a psychophysical account. However, it is important to note that in Walī Allāh’s account, emotions are understood in the context of meanings they generate in the spiritual life. Here a spiritual emotion is a function of the heart and its purpose is to transform the heart by subduing the lower self (nafs): The real nature of spiritual emotion (wajd) is to effect a transformation in the heart so that it is transformed in all respects, and its control over the bodily members is destroyed. Sometimes this spiritual passion may take the form of swooning or unconsciousness (bīhūshī), sometimes tearing one’s clothes or making other [involuntary] movements. At times it appears as weeping and grieving, or as a complete hatred of everything except the Real (ḥaqq) and being drawn toward Him. . . . Spiritual emotion is a function of the heart and the lower self’s being subjugated by it. Afterwards, wakefulness follows implying both vigilance and awareness (khabardārī).156 Next, Walī Allāh notes the cognitive aspect of emotions that involves intentionality. For him, emotions can be affective states that occur when, e.g., certain sayings impress the heart, making the impression last for a long time. This happens because the heart is also ruled by the perceptive faculty. 155.  Walī Allāh, al-­Budūr al-­bāzigha, 39. 156.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 80.

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It may happen that a person sees the world’s vicissitudes and suddenly recoils from himself and desists from sin. Or it may be that he hears the sermon of a preacher at an opportune moment and his heart suddenly turns toward him. Or, perhaps through company with the folk of God, he may slowly become inclined to the straight path. According to Walī Allāh, all of these intentional states involve wajd.157 As with Augustine, Walī Allāh’s theory of “spiritual emotion” is also tinged with moral implications. So, the emotional life of the self is controlled by eating little, sleeping little, speaking little, and associating little with people. Unlike contemporary theorists such as Solomon, Walī Allāh is explicit in taking control of negative emotions such as restlessness and self-­entanglement consisting of self-­doubt (khūd bar khūd pīchīdan). He thinks controlling negative emotions is like whipping and goading a restless horse into submission.158 In all, for Walī Allāh, emotions involve both the soul and the body, and are loaded with moral and spiritual content. In his view, although the self is characterized by an emotional life, not all the emotions are good. Also, emotions are intimately related to the subtle centers of consciousness that can be desirable if accompanied by the reasoning faculty and if they lead to overcoming the lower self. Summary This chapter shows that there is more than one way to represent or talk about neural activities and nerve impulses. Although the Hodgkin–­Huxley model seems to work best so far, it neglects non-­electrical manifestations such as mechanical, thermal, and optical that have been found to be coextensive with nerve impulse propagation. This is where the concept of the “subtle body” may prove to be useful because one’s conception of the “body” ultimately depends on one’s initial scientific and metaphysical assumptions. Indeed, the long history of theories based on notions of pneuma and animal electricity shows that what we call “electricity” was considered a form of subtle body by numerous non-­Western thinkers. Although the physiology of pneuma and humoral theory is no longer tenable in light of modern scientific evidence, one can nonetheless argue for the persistent significance of the subtle bodies by showing how one’s accounts of selfhood still rely on various forces within the body, especially the influence of these forces 157.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 79–­80. 158.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 82–­83.

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on our emotions that have electrochemical correlations in the brain. For instance, the placebo effect in psychoneuroimmunology demonstrates how the mind affects the body.159 More importantly, by showing how the nonphysical self is embodied through pneuma, Walī Allāh’s model of selfhood allows us to draw the connection between the body and its ethical inclinations. Additionally, the analysis in the preceding paragraphs also shows how the self is characterized by a rich mental life and emotional subjectivity, which have crucial implications for human flourishing—­the theme of the next two chapters.

159.  For an insightful analysis of this point, see Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (New York: Ecco, 2007), 274–­305. See also, Zargar, The Polished Mirror, 297–­299. It bears mentioning that certain meditation techniques such as g-­Tummo meditation can raise the body temperature, just as various yogic techniques enable the body to achieve amazing feats through the use of the subtle bodies. See, e.g., Maria Kozhevnikov et al., “Neurocognitive and Somatic Components of Temperature Increases during g-­Tummo Meditation: Legend and Reality,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 3 (2013): e58244. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0058244.

C h a pte r 5

Sculpting the Self

Philosophy, Spirituality, and Self-­Knowledge So far, my aim has been to show the multidimensionality of the self, which is one at the level of its undifferentiated core but multiple at the level of its functions, states, and manifestations. The multidimensionality of the self is best captured through the notion of “spectrum” (see chapter 1) from which we can derive both its descriptive and normative dimensions. As stated earlier, the descriptive self can be further analyzed in terms of its bio-­physiological, socio-­cultural, and cognito-­experiential dimensions, and the normative in terms of its ethical and spiritual. It is important to emphasize that the distinction “descriptive vs. normative” is not as watertight as it appears to be, for in real life the two are inseparable in the configuration of a given self (see figure 5).1 For instance, my analysis in the preceding chapters showed how self-­knowledge and consciousness constitute as the intrinsic, defining features of selfhood under its subcategory, the cognito-­experiential self. It will soon be seen that both self-­knowledge and consciousness are laden with normative implications, since both of these features of selfhood can be molded, expanded, and transformed through various “spiritual exercises” (see below). In fact, the normativity of the self is woven with “spirituality,” which goes hand in hand with what Pierre Hadot famously called “philosophy as a way of life” (la philosophie comme manière de vivre).2 Since terms such as “spirituality” and “philosophy as a 1.  As discussed earlier, selfhood is a first-­person phenomenon and such phenomena are irreducible from a third-­person objectivist stance. 2.  On “philosophy as a way of life,” see Pierre Hadot, Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique (Paris: A. Michel, 2002). 197

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Fig. 5. Descriptive and Normative Selves in a Multidimensional Model

way of life” are marred by various controversies, one has to disambiguate these notions first. In what follows, I will thus unpack these two notions, before proceeding to expand on the normative dimension of the self. In the main, my goal is to advance the view that any form of human flourishing is contingent upon a prior normative conception of selfhood, and theories that incorporate spiritual practices such as self-­cultivation are preferable to those that are either individualistic or indifferent to any such ideas. Let us then begin with the notion of philosophy as a way of life. As Hadot and others have pointed out, philosophy in ancient and Hellenistic Greece, China, India, and the Islamic world involved both a cultivation of the self (i.e., a transformed way of seeing the world) and a conceptual achievement.3 Accordingly, philosophers would practice self-­cultivation 3.  See, e.g., Michael Chase et al., eds., Philosophy as a Way of Life: Ancients and Moderns—­Essays in Honor of Pierre Hadot (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2013). For views that challenge some of Hadot’s interpretation, see J. M. Cooper, Pursuits of Wisdom: Six Ways of Life in Ancient Philosophy from Socrates to Plo-

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through prescribed regimens of spiritual exercises in order to neutralize passional elements in their character. Such exercises are “spiritual” insofar as they help reorient the self toward a higher mode of being. These exercises would include meditative, cognitive, or even somatic (e.g., dietary) practices that one would perform on the body and mind in order to bring about a gradually transformed state. In other words, the various spiritual exercises, such as self-­examination or meditation, have the objective of reorienting the subject toward a clearer understanding of its true nature in contrast to its infirmities, such as sloth, anger, greed, envy, pride, and prejudice. Although it is not my purpose here to delve into the history of when and how such a view of philosophy was eclipsed and how philosophy has come to mean what it means today (i.e., as an academic discipline) it must be pointed out that long before Hadot, Nietzsche had already observed in the nineteenth century that instead of real philosophers there now exist only “professors of philosophy.” Nietzsche writes: The learned history of the past has never been the business of a true philosopher, neither in India nor in Greece; and if a professor of philosophy involves himself in such work he must at best be content to have it said of him: he is a fine classical scholar, antiquary, linguist, historian—­but never: he is a philosopher.4 Nietzsche laments the situation of philosophy in his day, which has been reduced to a study of its philological, historical, and cultural aspects rather than as a way of life that has practical implications. It is intriguing that he focuses his critique on Kant as someone who helped perpetuate the image of a professor of philosophy: tinus (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1–­50; and Sellars, The Art of Living, chapters 1–­2. For the Islamic context, see, e.g., Sajjad Rizvi, “Approaching Islamic Philosophical Texts Reading Mullā Ṣadrā Shīrāzī (d. 1635) with Pierre Hadot,” in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Ancients and Moderns—­Essays in Honor of Pierre Hadot, 132–­147; Mohammad Azadpur, Reason Unbound: On Spiritual Practice in Islamic Peripatetic Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2011), 8–­20. For the Indian context, see Jonardon Ganeri, “Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from the Buddha to Tagore,” in Philosophy as a Way of Life: Ancients and Moderns—­Essays in Honor of Pierre Hadot, 116–­131. Cf. T. L. Perreira, “ ‘Die Before You Die’: Death Meditation as Spiritual Technology of the Self in Islam and Buddhism,” The Muslim World 100 (2010): 247–­267. 4.  Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Untimely Meditations, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 186.

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Kant clung to his university, submitted himself to its regulations, retained the appearance of religious belief, endured to live among colleagues and students: so, it is natural that his example has produced above all university professors and professorial philosophy. Schopenhauer had little patience with the scholarly castes, separated himself from them, strove to be independent of state and society—­ this is his example, the model he provides—­to begin with the most superficial things.5 In other words, Kant, contra Schopenhauer, submitted to the formalization of philosophy and did much to make it a “scholarly” discipline among other disciplines that one studies at a university. But Nietzsche has little patience with such “university professors,” since he can only “profit from a philosopher only insofar as he can be an example.”6 In other words, a philosopher, as in antiquity and other parts of the world, must “live” her philosophy so that she would able to provide a living model for others. Nietzsche mentions several non-­Western traditions where one may find such examples.7 More importantly, the living example that a philosopher is supposed to embody must come from her own life rather than her written works, since philosophers aim to teach through their bearing, conduct, and morals. Comparing the pursuit of philosophy in ancient Greece with the Germany of his time, Nietzsche laments: “How completely this courageous visibility of the philosophical life is lacking in Germany!”8 It is interesting to note that Nietzsche’s lament had a counterpart from the Roman world in the following observation of Seneca: No one to my mind lets humanity down quite so much as those who study philosophy as if it were a sort of commercial skill and then proceed to live in a quite different manner from the way they tell other people to live. . . . That kind of man can be of no more help to me as an instructor than a steersman who is seasick in a storm.9 5.  Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 136–­137. 6.  Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 136–­137. 7.  See for instance, Richard Sorabji, Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 8.  Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” 136–­137. 9.  Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, trans. by Robin Campbell (London: Penguin, 1969), 211–­212.

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The above analysis is meant to cast light on the relationship between the normativity of the self and the lived dimension of philosophy (i.e., philosophy as a way of life), since if the latter is to be understood in its narrow academic sense—­which is the prevailing attitude today—­we would be prone to limit our analysis of selfhood to a set of propositional attitudes, or some form of logical analysis, or some sort of scientific investigation that only explains its descriptive aspects at the expense of the normative. But it was already argued that we as selves are capable of reflexivity, of self-­determination, and of distancing ourselves from our given existential situation, all of which allow us to create and develop new forms of selfhood and subjectivity based on the parameters of human nature. In other words, selfhood is both given and constructed, descriptive and normative. Unlike other natural kinds in the cosmos which are incapable of reflective self-­transformation, the human self is given in the mode of a capacity, a potentiality that is yet to be actualized. That is to say, unlike rocks, mountains, trees, or animals, the self is like a seed that contains the possibility of either flourishing as a tree or being wasted, depending on the surrounding ecosystem.10 In other words, a seed, which is not yet a tree, is created in such a way that it contains the possibility of moving in both directions. Likewise, the self’s normativity implies an incomplete form that contains the germ of both flourishing and misery. Put another way, the human self is not morally neutral, since at its base it contains the seed of both moral success (when positive traits dominate) and failure (when negative thoughts and emotions reign supreme). But, unlike a seed, whose blossoming or the lack thereof depends on its surroundings (e.g., soil condition), the road to flourishing or misery is also determined by a reflective stance that lands us in the domain of normativity. In other words, we as selves actively participate in the making of our own subjectivity. Although the precise nature of this “active participation” varies from one person to another, it can hardly be denied that how we choose to live and how we develop our latent possibilities depend on the self-­image that we carry within ourselves. Thus, the normative self is entwined with aspiration, self-­cultivation, self-­transcendence, and human flourishing. The second element that is crucial in this discussion is spirituality, which is understood in widely variant ways. On the one hand, spirituality is often pitted against religion (Solomon and Metzinger, for instance), while 10.  Cf. Stefania Pandolfo, Knot of the Soul: Madness, Psychoanalysis, Islam (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 318–­319.

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on the other, it is identified with a cosmic, sacred dimension that transcends one’s ordinary experience (Cottingham and McPherson, for example). For instance, in his Spirituality for the Skeptic, Robert Solomon defines spirituality as follows: Spirituality means to me the grand and thoughtful passions of life and a life lived in accordance with those grand thoughts and passions. Spirituality embraces love, trust, reverence, and wisdom, as well as the most terrifying aspects of life, tragedy, and death. . . . But ultimately, spirituality must also be understood in terms of the transformation of the self.11 Solomon also makes clear that spirituality is an “expansion of the self,” a Nietzschean process of growth and self-­transcendence which takes the passions of the human self seriously.12 However, for Solomon this process of self-­transcendence does not take place in some Platonic heaven, since the ideal of transcending the self is to be realized through life itself. Moreover, Solomon identifies spirituality with the practice of philosophy and claims that it is fully compatible with science.13 Like Solomon, the German philosopher Thomas Metzinger valorizes spirituality while chastising religion for being irrational, authoritarian, dogmatic, and delusional. For Metzinger, “spirituality is an epistemic stance of persons for whom the sought-­after form of knowledge is not theoretical.”14 Moreover, spirituality implies practicing certain virtues, the chief among them being “intellectual honesty,” whose living embodiments are none other than serious and sincere scientists. This is because scientists, according to Metzinger, are always open to criticism, and their empirical search for formal elegance and simplicity forms the core of the spiritual practice.15 It is clear from 11.  Robert Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic: The Thoughtful Love of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 6. 12.  Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic, 7. 13.  Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic, 26–­27. 14.  Thomas Metzinger, “Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty,” available at http://www.blogs.uni-mainz.de/fb05philosophie/files/2013/04/TheorPhil_Metzinger_SIR_2013_English.pdf, 7. 15.  Metzinger, “Spirituality and Intellectual Honesty,” 26. Such an idealistic account of science as spiritual practice is to be contrasted with Steven Shapin’s analysis and documentation of the scientific life, where he explains how and why science enjoys a privileged position as a source of knowledge vis-­à-­vis religion. See Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008); and Never Pure: Historical

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the foregoing that both Metzinger and Solomon seek to define spirituality on the basis of a nonreligious, noninstitutional, and nontheological foundation—­one which is rational, philosophical, and also scientific.16 In contrast to Solomon and Metzinger, David McPherson defines spirituality as “a practical life-­orientation that is shaped by what is taken to be a self-­transcending source of meaning, which involves strong normative demands, including demands of the sacred or the reverence worthy.”17 For McPherson such a definition of spirituality might involve a gamut of practices including prayer, meditation, self-­examination, repentance, mindfulness, study, contemplation, worship, thanksgiving, communal living, charity, fasting, keeping the Sabbath, ritual observance, going on retreats or pilgrimages, imitating saints, habituation in virtue, and so on.18 More importantly, the praxis of spirituality demands a spiritual transformation, which involves a journey toward a more fulfilled life. Thus, spirituality is equally concerned with a meaningful life, where the sense of meaning is determined by one’s attitude toward and response to the sacred.19 McPherson also argues that in addition to the material needs, humans have spiritual needs that can be fulfilled through embracing a radical reorientation of the self. Thus the spiritual life is highly aspirational and aims at sanctification of the ordinary self through a sustained relationship with the sacred in thought and action.20 James explains the meaning of such sanctification: “The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 16.  There is a plethora of recent works that defend a nonreligious view of spirituality. See, e.g., André Comte-­Sponville, The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality, trans. by Nancy Huston (New York: Viking, 2006); Michael McGhee, Transformations of Mind: Philosophy as Spiritual Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Thomas Nagel, Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002–­2008 (Oxford University Press, 2010); and Ronald Dworkin, Religion without God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 17.  David McPherson, “Homo Religiosus: Does Spirituality Have a Place in Neo-­Aristotelian Ethics?” in Spirituality and the Good Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 64. 18.  McPherson, “Homo Religiosus,” 64. 19.  McPherson, “Homo Religiosus,” 66. 20.  McPherson, “Homo Religiosus,” 66. Cf. John Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 3; and “Spirituality,” in Charles Taliaferro et al., eds., The Routledge Companion to Theism (New York: Routledge, 2013), 654–­655.

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the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals.”21 Moreover, McPherson concurs with John Cottingham’s thesis that spirituality involves a “cosmic dimension,” or a concern for the ultimate nature of things and our relationship to them.22 According to Cottingham, the cosmic dimension of spirituality manifests clearly when one undergoes an authentic spiritual experience, which transcends the psychological plane as it is bound up with a kind of spiritual transformation that has a distinct moral character. Moreover, Cottingham argues that spirituality responds to the deepest aspirations of the self in its quest for meaning in that it points to us something which substantially transcends the experience of ordinary life.23 The views on spirituality presented above could not be more contrasting, yet they all seem to suggest that it involves some sort of practice and transformation of the self. In this respect, spirituality complements the concept of “philosophy as a way of life,” since both emphasize the lived dimension of philosophy. For instance, in his What is Ancient Philosophy, Hadot writes that philosophy “demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle and conversion of one’s entire being.”24 In Hadot’s words, the goal of the philosophical life is to “raise the individual from an inauthentic condition of life, darkened by unconsciousness and harassed by worry, to an authentic state of life, in which she attains self-­awareness, an exact vision of the world, inner peace, and freedom.”25 However, as with the word “religion,” it is nearly impossible to formulate a universally acceptable definition of spirituality. Nonetheless, it is somewhat naïve to assert that it has no relation with religion, since such a view is predicated on the assumption that the term “religion” itself is universally applicable across cultures, times and histories—­an assumption that neglects the term’s recent, complex genealogy in the modern West.26 For 21.  William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004 [1902]), 230. Cited in McPherson, “Homo Religiosus,” 68. 22.  John Cottingham, “Philosophy, Religion, and Spirituality,” in Spirituality and the Good Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 16. 23.  Cottingham, “Philosophy, Religion, and Spirituality,” 16–­21. 24.  Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? trans. by M. Chase (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap, 2002), 3. 25.  Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, trans. by M. Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 83. 26.  See, e.g., Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015); and Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).

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these reasons, I will not attempt an all-­encompassing definition of spirituality here. Rather my goal is to underscore the features of spirituality that are most applicable to the traditions with which I am concerned in this chapter. Accordingly, I would concur with Cottingham and McPherson in emphasizing flourishing, self-­cultivation, self-­transcendence, and the transformation of the self as the key facets of spirituality, while at the same time adding the element of “self-­knowledge” that is neglected in their account. At the beginning of this study, we mentioned how selfhood is intimately related to the question of how one may have self-­knowledge at all, but at this point, I should like to point out how it is also laden with ethico-­spiritual implications. Islamic philosophers such as Mullā Ṣadrā claim that in order to have true knowledge of one’s self, one must overcome the spiritual and moral obstacles that prevent one from seeing one’s true nature. For Mullā Ṣadrā, the self is in many ways the Archimedean point from which one is able to make sense of the nature of reality. He argues that all that we see or experience in the world, we can only see through our self, and that there is nothing out there that is not already within the self, which means nothing is completely mind-­independent.27 For Ṣadrā, the world, in a certain sense, is the knowing subject. Since Ṣadrā places unusual emphasis on the ethics and spirituality of self-­knowledge, I would like to spend some time going over some of the texts that flesh out this particular aspect of his thought. In Iksīr al-­ʿārifīn (The Elixir of the Knowers), Ṣadrā makes the point that there is something in humans that naturally motivates them toward knowing things, probing them, and cogitating on them.28 According to Ṣadrā, the human self 27.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Mafātīḥ al-­ghayb, 2: 945. This puts Ṣadrā’s perspective very close to that of Yogācāra Buddhism, although a fuller comparison of this is beyond the scope of this study. See, e.g., Vasubandhu, Paving the Great Way: Vasubandhu’s Unifying Buddhist Philosophy, trans. by Jonathan Gold (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Seven Works of Vasubandhu: the Buddhist Psychological Doctor, trans. by S. Anacker (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984). Cf. F. W. J. Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism (System des transcendentalen Idealismus), trans. by P. Heath (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 204ff; Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (Of Human Freedom), trans. by J. Gutmann (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1936). 28.  The theme of “self-­knowledge” as the beginning and the end of humankind’s search for truth and reality is ubiquitous in the history of philosophy. Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 980a21: “All men by nature desire to know.” See also Ursula Renz (ed.), Self-­knowledge: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), passim.

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is unique in that the more it increases in knowledge the more desirous it becomes in seeking even more knowledge: Human reality is innately inclined toward knowing things, scrutinizing them, and penetrating deeply into them. Humans cannot restrain themselves from striving to understand things that are elevated beyond their ken. . . . The more one increases in knowledge the more one increases in seeking and yearning without any pause, except for the weaklings or the one who is immersed in worldly pursuits.29 Moreover, on Ṣadrā’s view, the self has the receptivity for every form, since all existent things are parts of it in the sense that it has the potential to know everything that exists.30 To explain this more fully, Ṣadrā transforms the traditional macrocosm-­microcosm analogy. Instead of portraying the world as a macrocosm and the human self a microcosm, Ṣadrā claims that the self is the macrocosm while its body the microcosm. For Ṣadrā, this means that the human self encapsulates all of reality, since it can also identify itself with the Divine Self after experiencing the spiritual, noetic states of annihilation (fanāʾ) and subsistence (baqāʾ) and reaching the utmost degree of self-­perfection. Ṣadrā writes: It belongs to human to know everything, and his self has the receptivity for every form (wa-­li-­dhātihi qābilat kullu ṣūra), since there is nothing without an equivalent within him. So all existent entities are parts of his self, and despite his oneness, he is all things (waḥdatuhu jamīʿ al-­ashyāʾ), because his self is a macrocosm, his body a microcosm. There is nothing in reality that is not under his subjection.31 Whosoever knows his self attains the transcendent state of apotheosis (man ʿarafa dhātahu taʾallaha). That is to say, he becomes a lordly knower—­by being annihilated from his human self—­and is drowned in witnessing the beauty of the First and His glory. The First Teacher (Aristotle) says, “he who fails to know himself, fails to know his Creator as well,” for knowing one’s self and its attributes is the ladder to knowing one’s Creator.32 29.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Iksīr al-­ʿārifīn, 36–­37, translation modified; in The Elixir of the Gnostics, ed. and trans. by William Chittick (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2003). 30.  Even though an individual self may not know all things, humans as a species have the capacity to know everything. 31.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Iksīr al-­ʿārifīn, 19, trans. by Chittick, substantially modified. 32.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Maẓāhir al-­ilāhiyya fī asrār al-­ʿulūm al-­kamāliyya, ed.

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Ṣadrā continues further by suggesting that the goal of philosophy is to prepare the self to ascend to the higher realm of being and attain its ultimate perfection: What is intended by philosophy is that it prepares the self to ascend to the higher plenum and reach the ultimate goal. . . . And no one attains it unless he detaches himself from both the world and the self through god-­consciousness, piety, and true askesis.33 Furthermore, Ṣadrā lists numerous benefits of self-­knowledge in the more spiritually flavored exegetical work Asrār al-­āyāt (The Mysteries of the Verses). The main argument of these pithy statements is that self-­knowledge is the gateway to a knowledge of everything else, i.e., the world, which in turn causes the self to know God. More importantly, Ṣadrā underscores how self-­knowledge is an ethical pursuit as well. For instance, he argues that those who know themselves never try to find faults with others and never resort to backbiting. Even when they observe any flaws in others, they rather ascribe them to themselves and strive to rectify themselves accordingly.34 The following is a translation of all such sayings from his Asrār al-­āyāt:35 It is through the self that everything else [in the world] is known. If one remains ignorant of the self, one will remain ignorant about everything else. The human self is the aggregate of all existent things as will become clear (al-­nafs al-­insān majmaʿ l-­mawjūdāt kamā sayaẓharu). Hence whoever knows it knows the totality of all beings (al-­ mawjūdāt kullahā). Whoever knows the self knows the world, and whoever knows the world witnesses the divine in it. . . . 36 by Sayyid Muḥammad Khamani-­yi (Tehran: Bunyād-­i Ḥikmat-­i Islāmi-­yi Ṣadrā, 1998), 4–­5. 33.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Maẓāhir al-­ilāhiyya, 7. 34.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asrār al-­ āyāt wa-­anwār al-­bayyināt, ed. by Muḥammad Khwājawī (Tehran: Intishārāt-­i Ḥikmat, 1981), 133. This is so because Ṣadrā seems to believe that if one has knowledge of God, then one is fully virtuous, implying that one is kind, compassionate, forgiving, just, generous, humble, and so on. But Ṣadrā has already suggested that self-­knowledge is implicated in knowledge of God, which means that if one truly knows God, one already knows one’s self. 35.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asrār al-­āyāt, 131–­134. 36.  Cf. Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-­ḥikam, ed. by ʿĀṣim Ibrāhīm al-­Kayyālī (Beirut: Dār al-­Kutub al-­ʿIlmiyya, 2009), 134.

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It is by means of the spirit of the self that one comes to know about the spiritual world and its permanence, just as it is by means of knowing the body one comes to know about the physical world and its impermanence. Whoever knows the self knows its enemy too—­an enemy which remains hidden through it. The Prophet said the most dangerous enemy is one’s own self (i.e., the ego), and he always sought protection from it. In knowing the self, one is able to control and manage it, and this can bring much good to the world. Such a person deserves to be called God’s viceregent in the world. Whoever knows the self never finds faults with others and never tries to backbite or speak ill of them. Whenever he notices any blemishes in others, he ascribes them to himself and strives to correct himself accordingly. The Prophet prays for such a person: “May God shower mercy on the one who is occupied with correcting himself rather than trying to find fault with others.” Ṣadrā’s emphasis on the connection between self-­cultivation, ethics, and self-­knowledge has numerous precedents in cross-­cultural philosophy, extending from ancient Greece to China.37 For example, in Plato’s Alcibiades I, Socrates argues that in order to know what promotes our wellbeing and how to cultivate the self, we need to have knowledge of who we are.38 From a slightly different perspective, philosophers in the Stoic tradition consider self-­knowledge a means for self-­cultivation, since they recognize the crucial role that human nature plays in the constitution of our moral and epistemic outlook.39 While surveying various ancient and modern forms of “self-­knowledge,” Ursula Renz categorizes them in four different ways: 37.  On the relationship between self-­cultivation and knowledge in Buddhist thought, see, e.g., Śāntideva, The Bodhicaryāvatāra, trans. with introduction and notes by Kate Crosby and Andrew Skilton (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 115ff. As for Chinese thought, see Curie Virág, “Self-­cultivation as Praxis in Song Neo-­Confucianism,” in P. Marsone and J. Lagerwey, eds., Modern Chinese Religion I: Song-­Liao-­Jin-­Yuan (960–­1368 AD) (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 1187–­1232. 38.  Plato, Alcibiades I, 128e–­9a, in The Complete Works of Plato, ed. by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997). Scholars disagree about the ascription of this work to Plato. 39.  Marcel Ackeren, “Self-­Knowledge in Later Stoicism,” in Self-­Knowledge: A History, ed. by Ursula Renz, 61ff.

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1. Self-­knowledge of one’s actual states, which involves awareness or knowledge of one’s own mental states such as sensations, perceptions, imaginations, impressions, or passing thoughts. 2. Self-­knowledge of one’s standing attitudes, which relates the epistemic subject to her standing attitudes. This particular form of self-­ knowledge comprises one’s beliefs and propositional attitudes, alongside the values and ends one aims for. 3. Self-­knowledge of one’s dispositional properties, which involves the subject’s knowledge of her dispositions, such as character traits, patterns of behavior, capacities, and limitations, including certain features stemming from socio-­cultural influences. 4. Socratic self-­knowledge, which is one’s being subject to the human condition. According to Renz, Socratic self-­knowledge is different from the trivial self-­knowledge we display in daily life, since the former is considered an achievement and a prerequisite for attaining wisdom.40

These four categories of self-­knowledge can be boiled down to (a) reflexive self-­knowledge and (b) Socratic self-­knowledge. This is because knowledge of one’s states, attitudes, and dispositions, all emanate from the reflexive power of the self, i.e., the capacity to turn one’s attention upon oneself. Thus, our earlier discussions on the modalities of consciousness (chapter 3) would fall under reflexive self-­knowledge. However, as the preceding paragraphs make clear, the relation between self-­knowledge and ethical cultivation is undeniable, especially when it comes to the normative dimension of the self. In fact, it would be more appropriate to argue that reflexive self-­knowledge is inseparable from Socratic self-­knowledge, although most of contemporary analytic philosophy tends to limit itself to the former. According to Foucault, a major shift from Socratic to reflexive self-­knowledge first occurred in the seventeenth century when Descartes gave impetus to the view that one’s ethical and spiritual behavior is not a necessary condition for attaining self-­knowledge, as the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa only presupposes a functioning rational mind.41 The ascendancy of Cartesianism thus implies a shift away from Socratic self-­knowledge to reflex40.  Renz, Self-­Knowledge: A History, 6. 41.  Cited in Foucault, Ethics, xxxix. Needless to say, this is a contentious interpretation, but a complete analysis of it falls beyond the scope of the present discussion.

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ive self-­knowledge. In the new paradigm, which dominates much of contemporary philosophical thinking, ethics and spirituality are no longer seen as a precondition for self-­knowledge. Yet, the manifold relationship between reflexive and Socratic self-­knowledge means that knowledge of the self consists in both improving our cognitive faculties, so that we can perceive clearly and distinctly what does in fact promote our self-­ perfection, and act in accordance with this perception. Self-­Cultivation and Human Flourishing It is evident from the foregoing that the account of the normative self which I am seeking to defend here is to be constructed against the backdrop of a philosophical life combined with spirituality in which self-­ knowledge takes the centerstage. But since spirituality implies a radical self-­transformation, what is important in this picture is not merely the question of “what a given self is,” but rather “what a given self must become.” It is thus no surprise that the process of constructing a normative self begins by challenging our everyday conceptions of the self. It can be argued that our ordinary existential situation is generally marked by disruptive desires and negative emotions such as anxiety, fear, frustration, anger, greed, lust, envy, and alienation, which can make life very unsatisfactory. Even when we might think we are more or less happy with life, we might end up living far below our moral and spiritual potential. As Nietzsche says in his Schopenhauer as Educator, if someone does not wish to follow the masses, let her follow her inner voice that calls forth for a transformation of the ordinary self. Let her realize, Nietzsche advises, that all of her ordinary doing, thinking, and desiring are other than her true self.42 What Nietzsche is urging here, with which numerous other philosophers from different traditions would concur, is that the process of self-­transformation should begin with an existential critique of one’s situation and one’s everyday self.43 As Nietzsche writes:

42.  Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, 127. 43.  Cf. Christopher Gowans, Self-­Cultivation Philosophies in Ancient India, China and Greece (forthcoming), introduction. This theme is also found in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit with its critique of the “das Man” in contrast to our authentic mode of being (Eigentlichkeit). See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 114–­226.

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Let the youthful soul look back on life with the question: what have you truly loved up to now, what has drawn your soul aloft, what has mastered it and at the same time blessed it? Set up these revered objects before you and perhaps their nature and their sequence will give you a law, the fundamental law of your own true self: Compare these objects one with another, see how one completes, expands, surpasses, transfigures another, how they constitute a stepladder upon which you have clambered up to yourself as you are now; for your true nature lies, not concealed deep within you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take yourself to be.44 Given a critique of the ordinary default condition of human beings, the natural move is to propose that one should undergo a transformation program by which one is able to transition from one’s problematic existential starting point to the ideal state by embracing spirituality and a philosophical life.45 Accordingly, one should be concerned with “what kind of self one should aspire to be” or “how one should sculpt oneself” in a given milieu, so that one can achieve the goal of human flourishing. For this reason, philosophers such as Ṣadrā are not simply interested in making a philosophical argument about how the self is capable of reflexive self-­knowledge, or how it is capable of perception through the external and internal senses. Rather, these philosophers also assert that the self contains the seed of spiritual self-­perfection that can be realized by the therapeutic use of spiritual exercises. The therapeutic use of such spiritual exercises, along with cultivating good character traits, is what I call “sculpting the self,” which has a celebrated history in both Sufism and Islamic philosophy (although each tradition deals with it in a different manner). To better analyze the idea of “sculpting the self” that leads to the creation of an aspirational self, I will examine what a number of Islamic philosophers have to say about it, beginning with Avicenna. The very last paragraph of Avicenna’s magnum opus, al-­Shifāʾ (The Healing), in a sense, summarizes how a budding philosopher should sculpt her self in order to realize flourishing, as it furnishes a comprehensive account of how the

44.  Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, 129. 45.  Cf. Gowans, Self-­Cultivation Philosophies, introduction.

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ordinary, empirical self46 should purify itself through self-­discipline and the attainment of prophetic qualities: Since the motivating powers are three—­the appetitive, the irascible, and the practical—­the virtues consist of three things: [(a)] moderation in such appetites as the pleasures of sex, food, clothing, and comfort, [as well as] other pleasures of sense and imagination; [(b)] moderation in all the irascible passions, such as fear, anger, depression, pride, rancor, jealousy, and the like; [and (c)] moderations in practical matters. At the head of these virtues stand restraint, wisdom, and courage; their sum is justice, which, however, is extraneous to theoretical virtue. But whoever combines theoretical philosophy with justice is indeed the happy man. And whoever, in addition to this, wins the prophetic qualities (al-­khawāṣṣ al-­nubuwwa) becomes almost a human god (rabban insāniyyan). Worship of him (ʿibādatuhu), after the worship of God, exalted be He, becomes almost allowed. He is indeed the world’s earthly king and God’s deputy in it.47 In a similar fashion, in his various treatises on the self and what it should strive for, Bābā Afḍal al-­Dīn al-­Kāshānī (d. 1210),48 a thirteenth-­ century Sufi metaphysician, uses the notion of disembodiment (tajrīd) to explicate how one should attain the state of flourishing.49 Unraveling the 46.  In general, it can be argued that what we call the everyday embodied experience of life involving our immediate desires, hopes, fears, expectations, thoughts, memories, and daily activities, seems to hide another, more fundamental level of experience which is not obvious to everyone and which involves a different mode of consciousness. So, the goal of the spiritual exercises is to transcend the ordinary, empirical self in order to access a more fundamental aspect of the self that is tied to the question of human flourishing. The trace of this argument can also be found in Plotinus. For more information, see Long, Greek Models of Mind and Self, 15–­16. 47.  Avicenna, al-­Shifāʾ: The Metaphysics of the Healing, trans. by M. E. Marmura, translation modified (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2005), 378. 48.  Bābā Afḍal’s influence on Ṣadrā can be seen in the latter’s Iksīr al-­ʿārifīn, which is a substantial reworking of Bābā Afḍal’s Jāwidān-­nāma. For more information on this, see Mullā Ṣadrā, Iksīr al-­ʿārifīn, xviiff. On Bābā Afḍal’s thought in general, see William Chittick, The Heart of Islamic Philosophy: The Quest for Self-­ Knowledge in the Writings of Afḍal al-­Dīn Kāshānī (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), chapters 1–­2. 49.  Tajrīd can be used both in the sense of “disembodiment” when referring to

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body-­self relationship and what one must know to disembody the self from the body, Bābā Afḍal writes: Since it is clear that the body is not like the self, and it is clear that a thing becomes strong through its own like, it is also clear that a thing becomes weak and bad in state from its own incompatible. Hence, the self becomes weak and bad in state from mixing with the body. The self’s mixing with the body is to appoint its seeing over the body and over nurturing the body’s states, to become heedless of self and to attend to the body, to seek bodily enjoyments, and to be occupied with the alien, bodily life rather than with the essential life of self. This is the blight that obstructs the human self from arrival at perfection.  .  .  . The self is held back from the spiritual nourishment, which is knowledge and which corresponds with it, and it becomes weak. The body comes to be dominant and the self dominated over. . . . Because of so much looking upon the body, it fancies the body as self. This is the worst state of the human self (nafs-­i insānī).50 According to Bābā Afḍal, one must first of all have knowledge about the true nature of the body-­self relationship in order to sculpt one’s self through the spiritual exercises, because oftentimes theoretical insight determines the course of one’s practical life. In his view, the self’s mixing with the body prevents it from seeing its true nature, and this mixing causes the self to become weak and heedless and to seek physical pleasures. In short, the self gets entangled in the bodily life and forgets its essential nature. And this obstructs the self’s spiritual nourishment and knowledge that corresponds to it. In fact, excessive involvement with bodily things makes it fancy the body as its true nature, which is the worst human state. According to Bābā Afḍal, the self will reach its desired state once it learns to direct its attention and consciousness inward and to restrain the senses from being the self, and in the sense of “disengagement” (or separation from matter) when referring to epistemology. In the previous section, I analyzed the notion from an epistemological point of view. However, as the quoted passages demonstrate, one cannot really separate the psychological from the epistemological dimension, since “happiness” for these thinkers also consists in being able to grasp the intelligibles. 50.  Bābā Afḍal, Muṣannafāt-­i Afḍal al-­Dīn Muḥammad Maraqī Kāshānī, ed. by Mujtabā Mīnuwī (Tehran: Intishārāt-­i Khwārazmī, 1987), 43, translated by Chittick, significantly modified, in Heart of Islamic Philosophy, 266.

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occupied with the corruptible sensibles.51 The Neoplatonic overtone of these passages cannot be missed. One of the most frequent themes in Plotinus’ Enneads concerns his exhortation to dissociate the self from things that are bodily and impure. In the Ennead III.6.5, Plotinus suggests that one of philosophy’s prime goals is to free the self from negative states and emotions, such as fear, anger, intemperance, etc. Reason seeks to remove the affection by removing its cause, the false opinion, to ensure the wellbeing of the self. Plotinus says at the end of chapter 6 that sense perception belongs to the descended soul, which is sleep, and the awakening from this sleep is through purification (katharsis) and withdrawal of the body from the sensible world, which lacks the real “being” of the intelligible world.52 It is instructive to note that in the Islamic world, Plotinus’ Enneads was mistaken for a work of Aristotle, becoming known as Theologia Aristotelis.53 To measure the importance of this text, one need only consider how various Islamic thinkers constantly refer to it for inspiration. This becomes all the more evident when Mullā Ṣadrā, while explaining the paradigm of his “transcendent philosophy,” compares the life of the author of the Enneads with that of the great Islamic philosopher Avicenna (taken here as the paradigmatic discursive philosopher). Sadrā says: Most of the words of this great philosopher [i.e., the author of Uthūlujiyā (Theologia Aristotelis)] indicate his power of unveiling, his inner light, and his proximate position before God. He is indeed from one of the perfect friends (awliyāʾ al-­kāmil) of God. For his occupation with the affairs of the world, the government of the people, the welfare of the worshippers, and the restoration of the nations all took place after going through those spiritual practices and struggles. After his self was perfected, his inner core was also perfected, and he became perfect in his inner self so that nothing could preoccupy him. And he desired to unify the two positions and perfect the two modes of being [i.e., the theoretical and the practical].54 51.  Bābā Afḍal, Musannafāt, 728. 52.  Cf. Plotinus, The Enneads, translated by A. H. Armstrong, Loeb Classical Library, 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966–­1988), I 1.10.5–­13. 53.  It should be noted that the work itself, known as the Uthūlujiyā, was a translation and paraphrase of the Enneads. 54.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 146–­147.

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It is not clear from the above whether Ṣadrā has in mind Aristotle or Plotinus—­which, in any event, is irrelevant in this context, since for him, the author of Uthūlujiyā (whoever he is) represents the model par excellence of his “transcendent philosophy.” The contrast becomes sharper when he comments on Avicenna: As for the Shaykh, the author of al-­Shifāʾ [i.e., Avicenna], his preoccupation with the affairs of the world was not according to the above way [i.e., à la the author of Uthūlujiyā]. It is strange that when he completed his discussion at the end of the investigation of the existential identities, and not the general matters which contain the rules regarding them, his mind became dull-­witted, and there manifested in him the incapability [to penetrate beyond them]. This is true of him in many matters.55 The above citations show clearly how Plotinus is venerated by Ṣadrā, so much so that he is considered the paradigmatic philosopher, in contrast to even the greats of the Islamic tradition such as Avicenna. This is important to note, since Ṣadrā’s account of “sculpting the self,” although it retains a great number of peripatetic elements, departs significantly from the Avicennan paradigm. In his Sharḥ al-­hidāya al-­athīriyya, which is an early philosophical summa, Ṣadrā argues that the self has two essential faculties, namely the theoretical and the practical.56 While his division of the theoretical intellect hardly shows any departure from the standard peripatetic model, Ṣadrā’s scheme of the practical intellect incorporates key ideas from Sufi spiritual psychology, such as self-­purification and “annihilation of the self.”57 Ṣadrā explains the relationship between the “theoretical intellect” and the “practical intellect” by noting that the former needs the help of the latter to reach perfection.58 He notes that the practical intellect must be 55.  Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 147. 56.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Sharḥ al-­hidāya al-­athīriyya, ed. by Maqṣūḍ Muḥammadī (Tehran: Bunyād-­i Ḥikmat-­i Islāmi-­yi Ṣadrā, 2014), 1: 417–­421. 57.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Sharḥ al-­hidāya, 1: 418–­421. 58.  The theoretical intellect contains several degrees, each of which represents a higher level in the process of intellection that reaches its perfection in the acquired intellect. The theoretical intellect requires an external agency (i.e., the Active Intellect) to actualize its ability to grasp the universals. The Active Intellect acts like the sun, illuminating human intellectual faculties and making it possible for them to

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purified in several steps. First, the outer layer of the ordinary self must be molded according to the Shariah and the prophetic example, i.e., how the Prophet lived his own life. Next, the inner layer of the self should be purified through ethics and self-­disciplinary activities such as cleansing it from appetitive qualities that dismantle its equilibrium. After that, the self should adorn itself with virtuous qualities and get rid of undesirable character traits. It should also adorn itself through right knowledge. Finally, the self arrives at the end of the journey by annihilating itself from itself, i.e., transforming and transcending the habitual, empirical self of everyday life.59 In all of these processes of self-­construction, it becomes abundantly clear that it is up to the individual and her freewill whether or not she wants to realize her latent spiritual possibilities or to choose some other destiny by embracing a different set of values. In other parts of his oeuvre, Ṣadrā details in concrete terms how the self should realize its true reality by casting aside its illusory appearance, which is another way of explaining “annihilation of the self from itself” (fanāʾ al-­nafs ʿan dhātihā). Just as Avicenna delineates a comprehensive account of how the ordinary, empirical self should purify itself through moderation and attaining prophetic qualities, Ṣadrā too draws our attention to the importance of self-­cultivation. Ṣadrā avers that the self attains happiness (saʿāda) by performing deeds that purify itself from negative traits.60 Ṣadrā also makes use of the Platonic tripartite model to explicate how the self should control its negative tendencies and desires.61 In line move from potentiality to actuality. However, it should be noted that a great of contention exists regarding the process of acquiring the intelligible forms, with Dag Hasse strongly supporting “abstraction” while Black opts for “emanation.” For their respective views, see Dag N. Hasse, “Avicenna on Abstraction,” in Debates in Medieval Philosophy Essential Readings and Contemporary Response, ed. by Jeffrey Hause (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 102–­125; and Deborah Black, “How Do We Acquire Concepts? Avicenna on Abstraction and Emanation,” in Debates in Medieval Philosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Response, ed. by Jeffrey Hause (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 126–­144. For a fresh take on the debate between emanation and abstraction, see Mohammad Azadpur, Analytic Philosophy and Avicenna: Knowing the Unknown (New York: Routledge, 2020), 83ff. 59.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Mafātīḥ, 2: 843. 60.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 169. 61.  Cf. Yaḥyā b. ʿAdī, The Reformation of Morals, 15. For a discussion of the Platonic tripartite self and Plato’s self in general, see Rachel Barney et al., eds., Plato and the Divided Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), parts I and II. Plato discusses his tripartite soul in the Republic, Phaedrus, and Timaeus. These dialogues portray human nature as both multiple and diverse—­and yet somehow also one—­divided into a “reasoning part” (logistikon), a “spirited part”

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with the Neoplatonic tradition, Ṣadrā distinguishes three faculties that are responsible for one’s moral behavior. These three principal faculties are also called souls: the appetitive soul, the irascible soul, and the reasoning soul. Following Plato, he puts reason in charge of all other faculties, and claims that when the faculty of knowledge is balanced and made beautiful, it is able to perceive the difference between truth and falsehood in speech, the real and the futile in beliefs, and beauty and ugliness in deeds.62 Moreover, he maintains that when the irascible faculty/soul (quwwat al-­ghaḍab) is in a deficient state, the traits of lowliness, weakness, and low self-­esteem become apparent in one’s personality. However, he also claims that the excess of this faculty results in hastiness, conceit, haughtiness, uncontrolled anger, false pride, and vanity; while its balanced constitution gives rise to bravery.63 Furthermore, the excess of the appetitive faculty/soul (quwwat al-­shahwa) brings about viciousness and dullness; while its deficiency causes covetousness, impudence, boasting, flattery, jealousy, and malice; and its balance results in chastity, modesty, and generosity.64 Ṣadrā also adds that the faculty of justice restrains the irascible and the appetitive faculties through religious injunctions and the intellect.65 Moreover, in line with Avicenna and Bābā Afḍal, Ṣadrā asserts that the self needs to shun the bodily if it is to attain self-­perfection. According to him, our self-­awareness (shuʿūr bi-­l-­dhāt) at the moment of our separation from the body is very intense because our self-­presence at that time is more complete and more intense. But, since the majority of people—­ due to their immersion in material bodies and their obsession with them—­ forget their self, God also causes them to forget their self.66 Still, Ṣadrā duly acknowledges the positive role of the senses, as it is through them that the self reflects on knowledge at the beginning of its existence. However, the senses (al-­ḥawāss) become an obstacle in the end, as they hinder pure intellection.67 The following summarizes Ṣadrā’s musings on the disembodiment of the self:

(thumoeides) and an “appetitive part” (epithumetikon). However, the overall Platonic self is much more complex than what is presented in the tri-­partite model; see, e.g., Sorabji, Self: Ancient and Modern, 6, 34–­37, 44, 115–­117. 62.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 119. 63.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 120. 64.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 120. 65.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 119; cf. Asfār 8: 161–­162. 66.  Q. 59:19: “They forget God, so He caused them to forget their selves.” 67.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 170.

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The external veil is the body and its senses are like a covering on the polished mirror. . . . 68 Know that as long as the self is attached to the body, not arrived at the perfect, intellectual mode of being, its disposal is only in the animal faculties (and it cannot reach the higher intellectual states).69 When preoccupation with the body, the whisperings of fantasy, and the delusions of the imagination fade, the veil is lifted. . . . 70 When the attachment between the self and the body (al-­ʿalāqat bayn al-­nafs wa-­l-­badan) is severed, then this mixing [between the self and the body] ceases, and the intelligibles become the object of witnessing, since awareness of them becomes a presence in the self.71 Ṣadrā then goes on to quote a number of ancient philosophers to bolster his arguments for disembodiment. He quotes Plotinus Arabus as saying “A philosopher is rewarded for his philosophy after the separation of his self from his body,”72 and “The self is not in the body, rather the body is in it because it is vaster than the body.”73 He refers to Empedocles as saying “The self was in a lofty place, but when it committed an error, it fell down to this world.” Ṣadrā then claims that Empedocles used to call people in a loud voice and urge them to abandon their attachment to this 68.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 170. 69.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 163. 70.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 170. 71.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 168. 72.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 360. 73.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 360. Plotinus too argues that the soul is not in the body; rather, the body is in the soul. This way of looking at things is opposed to reducing the soul to its various faculties, some of whose activities, he would admit, are located in the body. It also safeguards, according to Plotinus, the unity and incorporeality of the soul. Thus, according to him, the parts of the soul are not “in” the three main bodily organs (i.e., the brain, the heart, and the liver) in the ordinary sense—­only their “activity” takes place there. Plotinus avers that the essential functions of the soul consist in contemplating the forms and finding a paradigm of the sensible world in it. Thus, it is the logos of everything, and its main functions are intellection and perception, respectively. For an extensive analysis of these points, see Teun Tieleman, “Plotinus on the seat of the soul: reverberations of Galen and Alexander in Enn. IV, 3 [27], 23,” Phronesis 43, no. 4, 306–­325; Damian Caluori, “The Essential Functions of a Plotinian Soul,” Rhizai 2, no. 1 (2005): 75–­94; and Muhammad Faruque, “The Internal Senses in Galen, Plotinus and Nemesius: The Beginning of an Idea,” Ancient Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2016): 119–­139.

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world and journey to the higher realm.74 Ṣadrā also mentions Pythagoras, who, according to him, was the author of the science of number. Ṣadrā reports that Pythagoras said to Diogenes at the end of his [al-­Aqwāl] al-­ Dhahabiyya (The Golden Verses): “When you detach yourself from the body, you are in that void in the higher atmosphere. Then you are a traveler not returning to the human-­state, and not receptive to death.”75 Finally, he informs the reader that it was reported of Plato in the Uthūlujiyā that he said beautiful things about the attributes of the self. However, Ṣadrā also notes that these descriptions of Plato are complex, since in making them he neither accepts the utility of the senses nor denies their use completely. But Ṣadrā states that Plato does repudiate the self for being attached to the body (ittiṣālahā bi-­l-­badan) because the self in the body is confined, being devoid of rationality. According to Ṣadrā, Plato was in agreement with Empedocles, except that he called the body an “obstacle” by which he meant this world.76 Seen from within, it is not so much the question of an effort to literally separate oneself from the body as much as a matter of continuous attention to the inner self through focused concentration. What is at issue is that in the Ṣadrian perspective, reality is considered in terms of being (wujūd) and its inner reality. Thus, the perfection of the self, too, is a particular mode of being. And knowledge of being or wujūd as a concrete state of consciousness cannot take shape until the self is able to separate itself from matter, i.e., worldly attachments. This is because in its untutored state, the human self is a combination of both baseness and perfection. The essence of the self possesses a perfection that stretches to the very limit of the transcendent One.77 Therefore, a philosophical life requires honing both theoretical and practical faculties in order to attain what Ṣadrā calls illuminative presence (ḥuḍūr ishrāqī).78 Despite all this, the self, due to its immersion in matter, cannot attain such a lofty state of presence unless it is able to separate itself from material (worldly) attachments. Although theoretical or speculative philosophy may enable one to gain knowledge of being through rational argumentation, it will only result in mental ossification in contrast to presential knowledge, as modes of consciousness will not correspond to the modes of being in 74.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 360–­361. 75.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 361. 76.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 361. 77.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 1: 23–­25. 78.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Mashāʿir (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-­yi Ṭahūrī, n.d.), 24.

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such a condition. Hence, such a philosopher will remain trapped in an existential impasse. For this reason, Ṣadrā asserts that even though the self and the intellect were once a single entity, they became two and separated when the self turned away from the intellect due to its desire for individuation.79 The self can still attain immateriality by transcending bodily attachments, and Ṣadrā believes Plotinus to be someone who was able to demonstrate its truth. Ṣadrā quotes Plotinus: At times I withdrew into my self and removed myself from my body (innī rubbamā khalawtu bi-­nafsī wa-­khalaʿtu badanī) and became as though I was a disembodied substance (jawhar mujarrad) without a body. I was inside my self, but outside of all things. I saw in myself (fī dhātī) beauty (husn) and loveliness (bahāʾ), and I remained utterly astonished about all this. Then I came to know that I was a part of the preeminent divine world possessing active life.80 To compare Ṣadrā’s method of sculpting the self with that of Plotinus, let us now cite the famous passage from the Enneads in which Plotinus uses the analogy of “sculpting an unformed statue:” Go back into yourself and look; and if you do not yet see yourself beautiful, then, just as someone making a statue which has to be beautiful cuts away here and polishes there and makes one part smooth and clears another till he has given his statue a beautiful face, so you too must cut away excess and straighten the crooked and clear the dark and make it bright, and never stop “working on your statue” till the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, till you see “self-­mastery enthroned upon its holy seat.” If you have become this, and see it, and are at home with yourself in purity, with nothing hindering you from becoming in this way one, with no inward 79.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 413. 80.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 360. Cf. Enneads IV.8.1.1–­11: “Often I have woken up out of the body to my self and have entered into myself, going out from all other things; I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of all I belonged to the better part; I have actually lived the best life and come to identity with the divine; and set firm in it I have come to that supreme actuality, setting myself above all else in the realm of Intellect. Then after that rest in the divine, when I have come down from Intellect to discursive reasoning, I am puzzled how I ever came down, and how my soul has come to be in the body when it is what it has shown itself to be by itself, even when it is in the body.”

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mixture of anything else, but wholly yourself, nothing but true light, not measured by dimensions, or bounded by shape into littleness, or expanded to size by unboundedness, but everywhere unmeasured, because greater than all measure and superior to all quantity; when you see that you have become this, then you have become sight; you can trust yourself then; you have already ascended and need no one to show you; concentrate your gaze and see.81 Plotinus urges his readers to be sculptors of their selves. That is to say, one should cut away all that is excessive (i.e., negative emotions and character-­ traits), straighten what is crooked, and illuminate all that is overcast. The subtleties of the analogy can be grasped better by explicating its reminiscences of Plato. “Superfluous” refers to the immoderate care of the body in the Republic, “crooked” to the life of bodily pleasures and falsehoods without virtue that leaves its marks on the self (discussed in both the Phaedrus and the Gorgias), and “straightening” to the role of reason in sculpting the self.82 Plotinus refers to ethical self-­improvement as a matter of turning inward and actualizing powers that are innate to the self. The final goal of such a process is a pure intelligible being, a true self and a fully integrated unity. Only this kind of being can properly see the goodness of the One.83 Self-­Perfection and the Ideal Self So far, we have seen how the process of sculpting the self entails self-­ cultivation and spiritual practices, especially detachment from the objects of the senses. From a rather different but related angle, Ṣadrā also describes the movement of the self and its spiritual implications from the moment its career begins as a fetus in the womb. Ṣadrā says that the corporeal faculties which are attributed to the plants are generated at this level. However, he conceives the self as having a form that potentially contains all the perfection of animals, humans, and the intellects. So, the human embryo, although it functions more or less like a plant, is a potential animal. Next, the human embryo attains the level of the animal self with all its cognitive powers (e.g., the capacity to cognize as animals), until it reaches maturity 81.  Plotinus, Enneads, I.6.9.7–­25. 82.  Cf. Plato, scholia in Gorgias, 525a; Phaedrus, 253e, perhaps also Theaetetus, 173a; katharos, kathairein in Phaedrus, 67c; 69c. 83.  Cf. Remes, Plotinus on Self, 179ff.

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of the human form when it actualizes the powers of the rational self. At this level, the self is capable of perceiving the world around it through its reflective faculties. The self’s becoming continues until it reaches spiritual maturity, while developing practical intelligence which facilitates internal growth by the strengthening of good habits and moral qualities. According to Ṣadrā, it is at this point that the self becomes conscious of its identity as an actual human self, while still being a potential angel or demon. Then, if the self is perfected through self-­knowledge and self-­cultivation, and if its inner core is purified through a renunciation of excessive worldly desires, it attains proximity to the divine. Ṣadrā also makes it plain that these later developments occur only in a small number of individuals—­based, as it were, on their spiritual efforts. Ṣadrā writes: So long as the Adamic self remains in a fetus in the womb, its level is the level of the vegetal self (al-­nafs al-­nabātiyya) with all its dimensions. It realizes these levels after traversing the levels of the mineral faculties in nature. So the human embryo is an actual plant (nabāt bi-­ l-­fiʿl) while still being a potential, and not actual animal, because it can neither perceive nor move [like the actual animal]. . . . When the baby emerges from the womb of its mother, its self attains the level of animal self until it reaches maturity of form (i.e., adulthood). Then the person is actually a human animal (ḥayawān basharī bi-­l-­fiʿl), and potentially a human self. At this point, his self perceives things by reflection and deliberation, employing them for the development of the practical intellect. This process continues until the period of spiritual maturity and internal growth is reached by the strengthening of habits and inner ethics. And most of the time this happens when one is around forty. At this level of [self-­development], he becomes an actual human self, while still potentially an angelic or a satanic human being. . . . His intellect is perfected by knowledge and his heart is purified by disembodiment from matter (or things bodily), and he becomes one of the angels of God who possesses the higher rank and proximity to Him.84 The following diagram represents the relation between different stages of selfhood by means of what I would call “the circle of the self.” Although the diagram below shows Ṣadrā’s famous doctrine of “substantial motion” at work, it should not give us the impression that every 84.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 156–­157.

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Fig. 6. The Circle of the Self in Ṣadrian Philosophy

step of the self’s journey is naturally determined so that human agency is denied.85 This is because, as Ṣadrā insists, even though the self inevitably 85.  Unlike Avicenna and his followers, Mullā Ṣadrā allows motion in the category of substance. Ṣadrā’s most important argument in favor of substantial motion takes the primacy and gradation of being as its starting point, situating his discussion in the context of the all-­expansive reality of being (al-­wujūd al-­ʿāmm al-­ munbasiṭ) that underlies all substantial change. If being is fundamental in the order of reality, it follows that the categories “substance” and “accident” are nothing but the different modes of the self-­same being. That is to say, substance and accident do not form two distinct orders of reality; rather, they are two different “degrees” of being. And, while an accident ineluctably inheres in its underlying subject, namely is substance, the being of an accident depends on the being of substance since the former is being-­in-­itself (al-­wujūd fī nafsihi) whereas the latter is being-­for-­itself (al-­wujūd li-­nafsihi). See Ṣadrā, Asfār, 3: 97–­136; cf. Muhammad Faruque and Mohammed Rustom, “Rajab ʿAlī Tabrīzī’s Refutation of Ṣadrian Metaphysics,” in

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returns to its origin, which is rooted in its own potentiality to reach the state of ultimate self-­perfection (the station of the perfect human), it nonetheless acquires various habits, either noble or lowly, and opinions and beliefs, either true or false, during its earthly life through self-­consciousness and freewill. In other words, although the socio-­cultural self is not denied, it is the cognito-­experiential self working in tandem with the normative self that determines the nature of the self’s return to its origin.86 To elaborate, Ṣadrā does leave room for the socio-­cultural milieu to either positively or negatively influence the self’s becoming. He quotes in this context the famous tradition of the Prophet, which states that every child is born in a state of fiṭra (one’s primordial state), after which their parents turn them into either a Jew, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, etc., implying that as the child grows he or she is prone to acquire various beliefs, habits, and other characteristics from the surrounding cultural processes.87 In his Kasr ­aṣnām (The Breaking of the Idols), Ṣadrā explicitly mentions how people’s nature may be shaped by common beliefs that are transmitted to them and how being in a particular socio-­cultural context influences one’s religious outlook.88 Like many of us, Ṣadrā saw his society in light of the dominant socio-­cultural groups of his day. In the abovementioned treatise, he himself provides a typology of the two main trends that he observes among his fellow countrymen. In Kasr ­aṣnām, Ṣadrā informs the reader that people of his era can be broadly categorized into either pseudo-­spiritual aspirants or miracle-­seekers. The pseudo-­spiritual aspirants mostly busy themselves with various ceremonial functions that are part of some Sufi orders. Thus, they show themselves off by participating in ostentatious forty-­day seclusion, paying allegiance to the Sufi master, wearing the Sufi cloak (the patched costume), and performing the ecstatic dance, while paying little attention to acquiring knowledge of God, the self, or the transformative practices of the spiritual path, such as the invoPhilosophy and the Intellectual Life in Shīʿah Islam, ed. by Sajjad Rizvi and S. N. Ahmad (London: Bloomsbury, Shīʿah Institute Press, 2017), 203–­206. 86.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 39. Consequently, the postmortem stage of the self is shaped by the actions it performs or the beliefs it harbors in this world. For a detailed exposition of Ṣadrā’s views on how self-­making activities shape the form of the self in the postmortem stage, see Henry Corbin, Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: from Mazdean Iran to Shīʻite Iran, trans. by N. Pearson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977), 165–­170. 87.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Kasr aṣnām al-­jāhiliyya, ed. by Muḥsin Jahāngīrī (Tehran: Bunyād Ḥikmat-­i Islāmi-­yi Ṣadrā, 2002), 21–­22. 88.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Kasr aṣnām, 26–­27.

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cation (dhikr). Similarly, the other group, namely the miracle seekers, is mesmerized by anything extraordinary, charismatic, or exotic. They are deceived by people who claim to have supernatural powers, or by fortune tellers, soothsayers, and charlatans, who play tricks on them.89 This critique sits well with Ṣadrā’s doctrine of substantial motion, which implies that the essence of the self does not remain static from the beginning of its existence as a fetus until it reaches the state of self-­perfection. Ṣadrā offers a thorough critique of people who—­relying on the findings of premodern physics—­surmise that the human self is composed of a natural form (ṣūra ṭabīʿiyya) having three souls only, namely vegetal, animal, and human. In his view, these people get it wrong when they observe in humans certain psycho-­somatic functions and assume that there is nothing beyond them. Such functions include the traces of various natural principles, such as heat and cold, attraction and repulsion (dafʿ), dissolution and ripening etc.; or other traces related to plants, such as nutrition, growth, and reproduction; or to animals, such as sensation and imagination; or even traits that are specifically human, such as rational perceptions and reflective movements.90 In other words, the descriptive dimensions of the self (i.e., bio-­physiological, socio-­cultural, and cognito-­experiential selves) do not exhaust its reality, as I have been arguing in this study. According to Ṣadrā, the self has one identity (huwiyya wāḥida) comprising several modes of being (nashaʾāt) and stations, and its unity, which is comprehensive, reflects divine unity.91 Ṣadrā writes: The self  .  .  . has the existential levels in the noble, vertical order from one rank to another. Its substantial perfection (al-­istikmāl al-­jawharī) is characterized by an [upward] motion. Whenever it reaches a degree of perfection . . . it becomes more expansive and more complete in its ability to encompass all the previous degrees of [existence]. The most particular and complete species existentially contains the imperfect species, e.g., the animal species (and its nature) is the perfection of the plant species and its nature, the plant is the perfection of the composite mineral nature, and the nature of the minerals is the perfection of the nature of the body. In a similar manner, human nature, I mean its self and essence, is the perfection of everything that precedes it, i.e., the animal, vegetal and elemental 89.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Kasr ­aṣnām, 11–­12. 90.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 153–­154. 91.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 154.

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species. . . . The human [self] encompasses all these species, and its form is the form of all of them.92 The above passage makes good sense when we conceive the reality of the self in terms of the circle shown in figure 6. The circle of the self depicts different levels of the self, culminating with the station of the perfect human, which is the pinnacle of selfhood. Also, by virtue of substantial motion, every subsequent degree of selfhood contains all of its antecedent modes of perfection, e.g., the human form contains all the perfections of plant and animal forms. Hence, when the self comes full circle, it reaches the degree of the perfect human, which contains all the possible moral and spiritual perfections associated with the human form. Ṣadrā says: We have explained earlier that all things in this world are travelling toward God, even though they may not be aware of it due to the thick veils and piling up of darkness over them. But this essential movement and journey toward God is more evident and manifest in humans, especially in the perfect human (al-­insān al-­kāmil), who crosses all these levels of the arc of ascent. This is like half of the circle from creation to the Real.93 Let us pause here and try to elaborate on the multifaceted concept of the perfect human, which is crucial to my formulation of the normative dimension of the self. It may be argued that the idea of the perfect human responds to the profoundest of human desires, that is, the desire for self-­perfection that lies at the core of being a human. It begins from the premise that we as selves contain a latent capacity for wholeness and perfection, whose roots lie in God’s own self-­perfection. Interestingly, one can find the epistemological resonances of this idea across many different philosophical traditions, albeit with important differences. For instance, the notion of anthrōpos teleios (the complete human) in Hellenistic sources, the jivan-­mukta (the liberated sage) in Advaita Vedanta, the figure of the sage in Chinese philosophy, the tathāgata (the idea that all sentient beings are potential buddhas) in Mahayana Buddhism, the divinely human being (göttlich Mensch) in Kantian thought,94 and the Übermensch of Nietzsche, 92.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 8: 263–­264. 93.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 9: 67. The other half is the “arc of descent” (al-­qaws al-­nuzūl) from the “Origin” (mabdaʿ) to the human state. 94.  Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, trans. by Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2009), 71.

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all express some form of ideal state that transcends the everyday interpretation of the ordinary self. For instance, although it is not so much emphasized in the general account of Kantian moral philosophy, Kant nevertheless argues, in his Die Religion, that the only thing which makes creating human beings worthwhile in the eyes of God is their realization of moral perfection. According to Kant, the origin of this ideal human being is atemporal, since it emanates from God’s Essence. Moreover, this ideal human being, whom Kant identifies with Christ, reflects divine splendor. In a somewhat imposing tone, Kant also asserts that it is a universal duty to try to elevate ourselves to the ideal of moral perfection associated with the divinely human being (göttlich Mensch). Kant writes: That which alone can make a world the object of divine decree and the purpose of creation is humanity (the rational creature per se of the world) in its complete moral perfection (in ihrer moralischen ganzen Vollkommenheit); in the will of the Supreme Being (höchsten Wesens), the direct consequence of this perfection of humanity, as supreme condition, is happiness. This human being, alone pleasing to God, “is in God from eternity;”95 the idea of him emanates from God’s Essence; he is to that extent not a created thing but God’s only begotten Son, “the word (the Let it be so!) through which all other things are, and without which nothing exists that has been made . . .”96 “He is the reflection (Abglanz) of God’s splendor . . .” Now, to elevate ourselves to this ideal of moral perfection (Ideal der moralischen Vollkommenheit), i.e., to the archetype (Urbild) of the moral attitude in all its purity is a universal human duty; and this idea itself, which reason puts before us for emulation (Nachstrebung), can give us power for this.97 In other words, Christ is the ideal of moral perfection, and his life is meant to provide an example for others. However, in line with his moral philosophy, Kant also asserts that this idea of moral perfection resides in our morally-­legislative reason, so that we can dispense with any individual instantiation to actualize this idea.98 That is, even if one doubts the exis95.  Cf. John 1:1–­2: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Holy Bible: King James Version). 96.  Cf. John 1:3: “All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made.” (Holy Bible: King James Version). 97.  Kant, Religion within the Bounds, 66–­67 (translated by Pluhar, with significant modifications). 98.  For more information, see Manfred Kuehn, “Kant’s Jesus,” in Kant’s Reli-

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tence of the historical Jesus, one may still hold on to the idea of moral perfection insofar as it is guided by practical reason. In a similar fashion, just as Kant’s divinely human being or the figure of Christ sheds light on the idea of the perfect human to some extent, Nietzsche’s appeal to the phenomenon of the “saint” explains its transcendent nature in other respects: And so nature at last needs the saint, in whom the ego is completely melted away and whose life of suffering is no longer felt as his own life—­or is hardly so felt—­but as a profound feeling of oneness and identity with all living things: the saint in whom there appears that miracle of transformation which the game of becoming never hits upon, that final and supreme becoming-­human after which all nature presses and urges for its redemption from itself. It is incontestable that we are all related and allied to the saint, just as we are related to the philosopher and artist; there are moments and as it were bright sparks of the fire of love in whose light we cease to understand the word “I,” there lies something beyond our being which at these moments moves across into it, and we are thus possessed of a heartfelt longing for bridges between here and there.99 In order to unpack the above text from Schopenhauer as Educator, we need to draw our attention to the description of the four levels of selfhood outlined therein. In Nietzsche’s scheme, the fourfold conception of the self can be sketched as follows: (1) a person’s deepest self, embracing all that cannot be educated or molded; (2) a person’s “I” or ego which is the bearer of all conscious thoughts and desires; (3) a person’s “ideal” or “higher self”; (4) a person’s “true self” or “true nature,” lying “immeasurably high” above her.100 One might wonder, in light of Nietzsche’s anti-­ essentialist conceptions of the self in his other texts, what he might have meant by “true self” or “true nature.”101 As Alexander Nehamas notes, the gion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: A Critical Guide, ed. by Gordon Michalson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 156ff. 99.  Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, 160–­161. 100.  My interpretation is based on Robert Miner’s recent study of the Nietzschean self. See Robert Miner, “Nietzsche’s Fourfold Conception of the Self,” Inquiry 54, no. 4 (2011): 337–­360. 101.  Readers of Nietzsche often come across both essentialist and anti-­essentialist elements in his writings. For instance, Daniel Breazeale points to Zarathustra’s speeches on “self-­overcoming” and “remaining true to the earth,” where one sees essentialist and anti-­essentialist elements coming together and knocking each other

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Nietzschean self is not a constant, stable entity; rather, it is something one constructs.102 To “construct” a self means to take antecedently given materials such as thoughts, intelligence, and desires, belonging to the “I” or ego and perhaps the deep self, and channel them into a harmony. “An admirable self,” Nehamas claims, “is one whose thoughts, desires, and actions are not haphazard but are instead connected to one another in the intimate way that indicates in all cases the presence of style.”103 Since Nietzsche also suggests that one never stops becoming what one is, Nehamas argues that there is no question of discovering what one’s true nature is.104 Yet a closer look at Nietzsche’s various writings reveal that the picture is more nuanced than simply not being able to discover one’s true nature. Nietzsche describes the movement of the self in terms of an ascent from the lowest degree of selfhood—­the ego—­to the highest level conceivable, which is one’s true nature (wahr Wesen) that lies at an immeasurable height beyond the das Ich or the ordinary “I.”105 While Nietzsche’s later writings suggest clearly that self-­overcoming is a never-­ending task that does not terminate in any state corresponding to one’s true nature, they do not imply that one may not achieve what Nietzsche calls the “ideal” or “higher self.” Thus, the saint, the artist, or the philosopher may nonetheless attain the higher self that transcends her ego, enabling her to realize a state of oneness with all beings and feel the suffering of everyone else as her own (note the Buddhist influence via Schopenhauer here). In Nietzsche’s view, by attaining a higher self that differs significantly from the ego, which spends its life thinking and acting as part of a herd, the saint exemplifies the “no-­ longer animal” condition of the higher self, while still continuing her ascent toward the immeasurably high station of the true self.106 For Nietzsche, the highest value and deepest significance of life can be achieved by “living for the good of the rarest and most valuable exemplars, and not for the good of the majority.”107 out. See Daniel Breazeale, “Becoming Who One Is: Notes on Schopenhauer as Educator,” New Nietzsche Studies, 2–­3/4 (1998): 1–­25, at 15. 102.  Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 7. Nehamas can be criticized here for failing to distinguish between the descriptive and the normative self. 103.  Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 7. 104.  Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature, 191; 251n6. 105.  Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, 129. Cf. Katsafanas, The Nietzschean Self, chapter 8. 106.  Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, 159. 107.  Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, 162. Cf. “[We] want to become those we are—­human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.” Nietzsche, The Gay Science: With a Prelude

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The above accounts of the moral and spiritual ideal go a long way to explain the nature of self-­perfection latent within every self. Coming now to Islamic/Sufi metaphysics, the doctrine of the perfect human seeks to interpret human nature and its latent capacity for wholeness and perfection at all levels. For instance, similar to what we saw in Kant, the supernormal perfection of the prophets and the great saints can be explained through the cosmic dimension of the perfect human. In a way that is akin to Nietzsche’s idiosyncratic conception of the saint, the perfect human is said to come full circle when the ordinary self is able to overcome and transcend the “accidentalities” of her personal identity, i.e., the individual consciousness, usually shaped by heredity, personality, personal tendencies, capacities, fate and vocation, the fact of being born at a given place and a given moment, undergoing given influences and experiences, and so on.108 In short, human perfection is achieved when one transcends the socio-­cultural milieu responsible for the construction of one’s identity and conditioned self. According to Sufi metaphysics, the spiritual goal of “annihilation of the self,” or melting the ego into its transcendent substratum, is to cast aside all such accidentalities, thereby paving the way for the realization of the cosmic and meta-­cosmic dimensions of the self associated with the perfect human. Accordingly, the perfect human or the highest self-­perfection exists as a possibility within every individual self that can be actualized in different degrees by embracing a philosophico-­spiritual life. Nietzsche expresses a similar sentiment when he says that “everyone has inborn talent, but only a few have inherited and cultivated such a degree of toughness, endurance, and energy that they really become a talent, become what they are—­that is, release it in works and actions.”109 in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), 335. 108.  It should, however, be noted that self-­perfection and self-­transformation become more complex in Nietzsche’s later works, and that there are some marked differences between Nietzsche’s Übermensch and the “perfect human” of the Islamic thinkers. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is very relevant for a cross-­cultural discussion on transcending the everyday self and progressing toward a state of self-­ perfection, since one of the key Muslim figures in the present study, namely Iqbal, reinterprets the concept of the perfect human in light of the Nietzschean superhuman or Übermensch (see section 6 of chapter 5 and chapter 6). More importantly, regardless of the significant differences between Nietzsche’s Übermensch and the doctrine of the perfect human, Nietzsche does remain committed to the idea of transcending the everyday self even into his late works such as The Gay Science, Human, All Too Human, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 109.  Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 263.

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However, unlike Kant’s divinely human being or Nietzsche’s ideal self, the concept of the perfect human also implies an ontological perfection, since according to Sufi metaphysics, it is the form of God’s all-­ encompassing name “Allah” that contains all other infinite names and attributes of the Absolute (al-­muṭlaq). As Ṣadrā explains: Know that “Allah” is the name of the Divine Self (al-­dhāt al-­ilāhiyya) which, through its comprehensiveness (jāmiʿiyyatihi), encompasses all the perfections of the attributes, and the perfect human (al-­insān al-­kāmil) is the form of this name.110 The greatest name of God (ism aʿẓam) encapsulates all other divine names in an undifferentiated manner (al-­ijmāl).111 He is the spirit of the universe, and the locus of manifestation of the name Allah. He is also His vicegerent.112 In Ṣadrā’s philosophy, the ideal of the perfect human can only be realized when the ordinary self is delivered from its veil—­the bondage of its conditioned existence.113 This can only happen when the ordinary, habitual self is transcended in the spiritual experience of annihilation (fanāʾ) by a higher mode of consciousness. And this whole process requires embracing a philosophico-­spiritual life that would facilitate such an end, a life which involves several key stages. First of all, the would-­be philosopher should comprehend the metaphysical doctrines theoretically, which involves self-­ knowledge, as well as knowledge of Absolute Being (al-­wujūd al-­muṭlaq) and the modes of Its self-­manifestation (ẓuhūr).114 Then she should concentrate on spiritual exercises that include, inter alia, detachment from worldly desires, retreats (khalawāt), self-­discipline, and meditation. Moreover, she should attain intrinsic, spiritual virtues such as compassion, truthfulness, charity, patience, humility, etc., that will purify the ego and purge it of undesirable qualities, and will prepare it for the reception of divine illumination.115 As the philosopher-­seeker progresses on the path and continues to focus on spiritual exercises, she reaches a point where her ego-­ consciousness/I-­ness is transcended, making her realize that the reality of her true nature is identical with the Divine Self, i.e., the mirror-­image of the perfect human. Ṣadrā expresses this doctrine as the “identity of the invoker, 110.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Maẓāhir, 40. 111.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Maẓāhir, 41. 112.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Maẓāhir, 72. 113.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Maẓāhir, 13. 114.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Asfār, 2: 331ff. 115.  See the previous section.

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invocation and invoked,” which constitutes a single reality.116 It is worth emphasizing that such a culminating moment occurs through the practice of the invocation (concentrated repetitions of a sacred formula as in the Jesus prayer or Japa yoga),117 which brings the mind to a one-­pointed focus.118 It may be asked at this point, if the traditional ideas such as the concept of the perfect human can be accepted without criticism in today’s science-­ driven world. Physicalists may point to its purportedly transcendent origin as objectionable. Others may worry about its idealistic nature, arguing that it is impossible to achieve such a normative ideal. In response, I should clarify that in presenting the ideal of the perfect human as a possible normative self, my intention is not to probe its metaphysical foundations, since such an inquiry would require a project unto itself. Rather, my goal is to consider the phenomenological and spiritual implications of embracing such notions of self-­perfection. Put differently, how does one’s self-­ constitution change as a result of embracing a certain ideal that holds great promise for meaning, purpose, happiness, and flourishing? Since what is at issue here is the normative dimension of the self, it is up to us to pick the right mix of values in order to construct our aspirational self. One particular point in favor of the Ṣadrian picture is that the doctrine of the perfect human seeks to provide a spiritual response to the time-­honored question, “What it is to be human?” According to Sufi metaphysics, the meaning of being human hinges on realizing the perfection associated with the divine reality (and this includes such desiderata as ultimate love, beauty, knowledge, and bliss). That is to say, the idea of self-­perfection, in this perspective, occurs through the perfect human when in the course of life’s infinite variety of circumstances and experiences, one learns to realize the specific perfection associated with each divine name (the divine names are infinite and contain every possible perfection). The ideal of self-­perfection can be a win-­win situation, since most of the time we act way below our human potential, meaning we hardly make use of our moral and spiritual capital. More importantly, the ideal of the perfect human is not a fact to receive but a task to achieve, hence it is not a given. 116.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Tafsīr sūrat al-­jumuʿa, ed. by Muḥammad Khwājawī (Tehran: Intishārāt-­i Mūlā, 2010), 290. 117.  On Dhikr and its importance in Sufism, see al-­Ghazālī, Invocations & Supplications: Book IX of The Revival of the Religious Sciences, Iḥyāʼ ʻulūm al-­dīn = Kitāb al-adhkār waʼl-­daʻawāt, trans. by by K. Nakamura (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2010). 118.  Mullā Ṣadrā, Tafsīr sūrat al-­jumuʿa, 287–­292.

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Let me drive the argument home with a more concrete example involving chronically ill people. When it comes to human flourishing or the meaning of life, what matters is how one is able to define one’s purpose, identity, and contributions to others. However, the meaning of one’s life is seriously challenged when one is coping with extremely stressful situations. When achieving secular goals no longer serves life’s purpose, as in the cases of individuals living with a chronic illness, one has to look inward and develop a sense of inner peace with the most serious life-­change one can imagine. As a result of chronic illness, an individual is abruptly forced to redefine her identity, give new sense to life’s significance and purpose, and to shift what the meaning of life is. The chronically ill now have to redefine the meaning of life through a higher sense of the self, and pursue practices that will help them move closer to a sense of deep peace with themselves as individuals. And, in successful cases, a positive acceptance of chronic illness will be able to bring about a heightened sense of optimism and deeper sense of peace for the remainder of an individual’s life. Thus, the example of chronic illness shows how perfections associated with cultivating specific virtues such as inwardness, patience, gratitude, and hope can not only help a person cope with stressful situations, but also help her develop a new, heightened sense of the inner self that can greatly diffuse the mind’s agitations. The above is but one of the countless life-­situations where the doctrine of the perfect human can motivate the individual to strive for inner virtues and accept but not concede to life’s challenges. This is because the ideal of the perfect human teaches that every individual is potentially capable of achieving the ultimate perfection associated with the divine name Allah. Meditation and Self-­Transparency To better understand the reality of the perfect human, it would be worthwhile to also explore spiritual practices, such as meditation, that transform the self and reorient it toward a journey of self-­perfection and inner peace. In general, Sufis assert that selfhood is an on-­going and ever-­changing manifestation of the divine names, and the full actualization of this reality is seen as demanding a disciplined body, mind, and heart. The primary impetus behind such a conception seems to have come from the Qur’an, which presents a multidimensional model of the self, containing both negative (e.g., the evil-­inciting, vulnerable self or the al-­nafs al-­ammāra)

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and positive dimensions (e.g., the profoundly tranquil self or al-­nafs al-­muṭmaʾinna).119 Be that as it may, let us now look at the twentieth-­century Sufi thinker, Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī (d. 1943) who expands upon the Qur’anic model by incorporating various spiritual exercises. It should be noted at the outset that for Thānavī the word nafs and its equivalents in Persian and Urdu such as khūd or khwīshtan refer to the “self” in the sense of either (1) the inner reality of human nature, or (2) the “aspiration” of realizing the ideal of the perfect human. Moreover, the term nafs in Sufi literature is also signified by the first-­personal pronoun “I” (man in Persian), as in the following verse from the Dīwān of Hafez on which Thānavī comments: I do not know who is there within my worn-­out heart; For while I am silent, it makes all sorts of commotion.120 The verse expresses a dual identity about the referent “I.” It suggests a reflexive stance through which the “I” ponders over its true identity. That is to say, the “I” itself is split into two different “I”s, one of which is silent while the other is making noise outside. The silent “I” symbolizes the inner self, while the noisy “I” signifies the outer self.121 Notice that the referent of the “I” in this verse could not have been something other than the self, even though we do not know what the nature of this self is.122 Even so, such a verse does not fail to ask the question “who or what is the ‘I,’” the answer to which determines the nature of the self. Rumi furnishes us with a further example: 119.  See Gavin Picken, Spiritual Purification in Islam: The Life and Works of al-­Muḥāsibī (New York: Routledge, 2011), 129–­138; and Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam: A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 254–­282. 120.  Hafez, The Divan of Hafez: A Bilingual Text, Persian-­English, trans. by Reza Saberi (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 32–­33, translation modified. 121.  See Ashraf ʿAlī Thānavī, ʿIrfān-­i Ḥāfiẓ: Ḥāfiẓ-­i Shīrāzī ka mashhūr wa maqbūl Fārsī Dīvān ka ashʿār kī ṣūfīyāna wa ʿārifāna Urdu sharḥ (Karachi: Nafīs Academy, 1976), 85; and Abū al-­Ḥasan Khātamī Lāhūrī, Sharḥ-­i ʿirfāni-­yi ghazal-­ hā-­yi Ḥāfiẓ, ed. by by Bahāʾ al-­Dīn Khurramshāhī et al. (Tehran: Nashr-­i Qaṭrah, 1995), 1:264ff. 122.  On the translation of “self” as anā in Arabic, see Giuseppe Scattolin, “The Realization of the ‘Self’ in Islamic Mysticism: ‘Umar Ibn al-­Farid [576/1181–­ 632/1235],” La Critica Sociologica 119 (1996): 1–­20.

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All day long I only have this thought and all through night I ponder the question why am I ignorant of the states of my own heart? Where have I come from, and what meaning does my existence have? Where am I going, which is not toward the destination of my own country?123 Sufi works are replete with such passages, both in poetry and prose, that posit the self as an “I” with a unique existential situation.124 This is different from being a person (shakhṣ) because the word person, as we mentioned earlier, can be taken to mean someone who owns psychological states and actions, along with various bodily characteristics. For Thānavī, the primary sense of the self refers to the “inner reality of human nature,” although it is important to note that this “reality” is best understood in terms of a spectrum.125 This is because for Thānavī the nafs also signifies inward dimensions or states of the self, such as the vulnerable or the tranquil self, that are only actualized through spiritual development. For this reason, the bulk of Thānavī’s writings on the self are about a spiritual ethics of the self in the normative form: “one ought to perform X, Y, and Z spiritual exercises about one’s nafs.”126 So, for instance, in his exegetical work Ashraf al-­tafāsīr (written in Urdu), Thānavī states that the self (nafs) is characterized by two fundamentally opposite characteristics, namely the tendency to incite evil (al-­ammāra bi-­l-­sūʾ) and the tendency to stimulate

123.  Attributed to Rumi. Cf. Jalal al-­Din Rumi, Kulliyāt-­i Shams-­i Tabrīzī, ed. by Badīʿ al-­Zamān-­i Furūzānfar (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1977), 53–­55. 124.  One can think of ʿAṭṭār’s Manṭiq al-­ṭayr, Hafez’s Dīwān, Bīdil’s Kulliyāt, Mīr Dard’s Dīwān, and Lālan’s Bengali poems. Here is an example from Thānavī’s own poems: While the lower self (or, the ego) (khūdī) remained, God was not discovered, I became non-­existent when God was found. Were you even anything at all but a human of lament? All of this was the grace and generosity of Imdād [Ḥājjī Imdād Allāh]. See ʿAzīz al-­Ḥasan, Ashraf al-­sawāniḥ, 3 vols. (Thana Bhawan: Maktaba-­yi Taʾlifāt-i Ashrafiyya, 1984), 1: 188. 125.  This is also supported by Walī Allāh’s analysis of the word nafs. According to Walī Allāh, nafs has three connotations: (1) human nature, (2) the lower self, and (3) the principle of life. See Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 73–­74. 126.  See, e.g., Thānavī, al-­Takashshuf ʿan muhimmāt al-­taṣawwuf (Multan: Idāra-­yi Taʾlīfāt-­i Ashrafiyya, 2006), 45–­80; and Bawādir al-­nawādir (Lahore: Shaykh Ghulām ʿAlī, 1962) 94–­177.

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good (al-­ammāra bi-­l-­khayr).127 That is, both goodness and evil are innate possibilities of human nature. However, according to Thānavī, evil dominates over human nature (except for the prophets and the saints) because of its indulgence in bodily pleasure, which is the source of all negative personality traits such as greed, pride, arrogance, and envy.128 So the lower self, which is governed by the senses and follows their desires, must be disciplined in order to recover the tranquility of the higher self. Thānavī quotes Rumi’s Masnavī in order to affirm that the “tranquil state” of the self which the Qur’an mentions (i.e., nafs-­i muṭmaʾinna) is the primordial state of the human self, which is sought by everyone, even though they are chased by the cravings of the lower self.129 This means the lower self needs to go through a process of purification or catharsis in order to recover its pristine nature. After this brief foray into the mechanics of the word nafs, we can now move on to discuss Thānavī’s normative self. Although Thānavī sometimes draws on the writings of classical Sufis such as al-­Qushayrī and al-­Ghazālī, the broad contours of his selfhood are molded by the cosmological doctrines of Ibn ʿArabī and the love-­poetry of Rumi and Hafez.130 Thānavī devotes several treatises to elucidate the practices of the self. For example, in his Bawādir al-­nawādir, he explains extensively the inner architecture of “thought patterns” that often prevents the initiate from reaching their ultimate spiritual goal. He identifies various features of the inner life such as perpetual soliloquy, sub-­vocal thinking, indecision, etc., as great impediments to the fulfillment of spiritual selfhood.131 In order to combat such obstacles on the spiritual path, Thānavī develops several strategies. The purpose of these strategies is to develop “techniques of attention,” which play a pivotal role in the most important of all the spiritual practices, i.e., dhikr (invocation) during the spiritual retreat. In his 127.  Thānavī, Ashraf al-­tafāsīr, ed. by Muḥammad Taqī ʿUthmānī (Multan: Idāra-­yi Ta’līfāt-­i Ashrafiyya, 2003), 2: 325. 128.  Thānavī, Ashraf al-­tafāsīr, 2: 325–­327. 129.  Thānavī, Ashraf al-­tafāsīr, 4: 295–­297. He cites the following verse of Rumi from the Masnavī: “Anyone one who has remained far from his roots, seeks a return (to the) moment of his union,” See Rumi, Masnavī-­yi maʿnawī, ed. and trans. by R. A. Nicholson as The Mathnawī of Jalālu’ddīn Rūmī (London: Luzac, 1924–­40), I: 4, trans. by Nicholson. 130.  Thānavī also wrote a defense of Ibn ʿArabī’s mystical philosophy, especially the latter’s notion of sainthood (walāya) based mostly on ʿAbd al-­Wahhāb al-­Shaʿrānī’s (d. 1565) ruminations on the subject, see al-­Tanbīh al-ṭaribī fi tanzīh Ibn al-­ʿArabī (Thana Bhawan: Ashraf al-Maṭabiʾ, 1927), passim. 131.  Thānavī, Bawādir al-­nawādir, 94, 109, 129, 131, 165, 177, 454–­464.

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capacity as a spiritual master, Thānavī observes that the neophyte on the spiritual path has the most difficulty in developing concentration. Thānavī relates that in most Sufi orders the disciple is given a specific formula of the invocation to repeat as a spiritual practice. However, while engaged in this practice, the neophyte may have to give up many other virtuous acts, like supererogatory prayers, listening to sermons, etc. Anticipating that some exoteric scholars would be critical of such practices, Thānavī explains that the reason behind it is that in the beginning, the neophyte’s internal state is subordinate to her external state. Over a period of time, however, the opposite will come about, so that the external state will be subordinate to the neophyte’s internal state. Therefore, Thānavī argues, if the neophyte, at the beginning of her spiritual journey, occupies herself with several different practices, it will be nearly impossible for her to achieve the mental and spiritual attention that is a sine qua non in all spiritual disciplines.132 Thānavī draws on the rich legacy of Indian Sufism, especially the Chishtī and the Naqshbandī orders, to elaborate on the techniques of attention. Prior to Thānavī, Indian Sufis had developed very sophisticated methods of practicing meditation (fikr) and invocation. For instance, in his Kashkūl-­i Kalīmī (Kalīmī’s Alms Bowl), Kalīm Allāh Shāhjahānabādī (d. 1729) of the Kalīmī order (which has its roots in the Chīshtī tradition) lays out twelve rules that should be followed when one meditates.133 Kalīm Allāh recommends that one should sit cross-­legged. One should place both hands on the knees. One should fill the atmosphere with incense. The place of meditation should be a dark room. One should wear clean clothes while meditating or invoking, and should keep one’s eyes and ear openings closed. One should visualize one’s spiritual guide. One should be absolutely truthful and sincere in what one is doing, so that one is not affected by hypocrisy. One should choose formulae that express God’s unity. And finally, one should pay close attention to the meaning of the invocatory formula in order to dispel any vain or subvocal thoughts that might distract one’s concentration.134 Kalīm Allāh also describes two breath-­control techniques that are used during meditation. The first technique, known as “suspension of breath” (ḥabs-­i nafas), is used to kill off stray thoughts and 132.  Thānavī, Haqīqat al-­ṭarīqa min al-­sunna al-­ʿanīqa, published as part of al-­Takāshshuf ʿan muhimmāt al-­taṣawwuf (Deoband: Maktaba-­yi Tajallī, 1972), 464–­465. 133.  Kalīm Allāh Shāhjahānabādī, “Kashkūl-­i Kalīmī,” in Sufi Meditation and Contemplation: Timeless Wisdom from Mughal India, trans. by Scott Kugle (New York: Omega, 2012), 40–­41. 134.  Kalīm Allāh, Kashkūl-­i Kalīmī, 41–­42

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wandering of the mind, while the second technique, known as “restraining of breath” (ḥashr-­i nafas), refers to taking breaths shorter than normal so as to regulate heat in the body.135 Kalīm Allāh then goes on to delineate the minutiae of this process that involves making use of various organs of the body, which need not concern us here.136 As noted earlier, the aim of such exercises is to develop focused attention, which is a key component in meditation and invocation. Thānavī asserts that the purpose of various spiritual disciplines practiced by the Sufis is to enhance the powers of concentration and develop one-­pointed focus on a single object.137 He explains that through such techniques, Sufi masters aim to instill a certain presence of mind or oneness of concentration which, once it has become one’s second nature, will greatly facilitate one’s attention to the sole object of meditation, which is the divine reality. Thānavī is also aware that to achieve such a state of one-­pointed focus on one’s spiritual practices, one requires a great deal of effort and spiritual will because the mind is usually cluttered with disparate thoughts that are difficult to dissolve.138 He devotes pages to talk about the negative effects of distracting thoughts (khawāṭir) that stifle the mind during the course of the meditative invocation and destroy the neophyte’s concentration.139 These distractions are believed to have come from devil and are called whisperings. In order to calm the mind and control distractions, Sufi masters also ask their disciples to take long periods of seclusion known as retreat, in which they are supposed to engage in the invocation for the entire period. The purpose of such practices is to direct the mind toward attaining deep and lasting inner peace described by the phrase the tranquil self in the Qur’an. 135.  Kalīm Allāh, Kashkūl-­i Kalīmī, 41–­42. These techniques resemble yogic practices. On the relation between Sufism and Yoga in the Indian context, see Carl Ernst, “Situating Sufism and Yoga,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, series 3, 15:1 (2005): 15–­43; “Muslim Interpreters of Yoga,” in Yoga: The Art of Transformation, ed. by Debra Diamond (Smithsonian Books, 2013); “Accounts of Yogis in Arabic and Persian Historical and Travel Texts,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, vol. 33 (2008): 409–­426; and “Two Versions of a Persian Text on Yoga and Cosmology, Attributed to Shaykh Muʿīn al-­Dīn Chīshtī,” Elixir 2 (2006): 69–­76. 136.  Kalīm Allāh, Kashkūl-­i Kalīmī, 45–­47. Ḥabs-­i nafas is a popular method among the Chishtī, Kubrawī, and Qādirī Sufi orders. 137.  Thānavī, Haqīqat al-­ṭarīqa, 535. 138.  Thānavī, Haqīqat al-­ṭarīqa, 455–­456. 139.  Thānavī, Haqīqat al-­ṭarīqa, 444ff. Cf., al-­Ghazālī, On Disciplining the Soul & On Breaking the Two Desires: Books XXII and XXIII of The Revival of the Religious sciences = Kitāb riyāḍat al-­nafs, & Kitāb kasr al-­shahwatayn: Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-­dīn, trans. by T. J. Winter (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1995), LXVII.

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Self-­Transcendence and Transformation At this point, it must be added that a normative conception of self must take into account different human predispositions and inclinations. As Walī Allāh notes, there are many and various types of human selves (nufūs-­i banī ādam), implying that the means of self-­purification for each of them will also be different.140 A few might be happy spending their entire life in the Himalayas or in Shaolin temples as yogis and monks, whereas others might be content to live in the midst of people in big cities. Moreover, within this spectrum, different persons may choose to play different roles in their lives. This, however, does not mean the normative self is so subjectively determined that there are no principles of contemplation that are relevant to a range of different personality types. Regardless, the goal is not to come up with a theory that will provide an overarching vision of the self for all people on the globe, since that would be highly impractical. Rather, my aim is to open up spaces for further conversations and debates about a desirable model of self-­construction, which is based on philosophical reflection and spirituality. I should clarify that although a discussion of the spiritual exercises involves talk of “virtue” and “happiness,” my understanding of these terms differs from the Neo-­Aristotelian virtue ethicists who tend to consider them in terms of individual benefit.141 Rather, I concur with Jennifer Frey and Candace Vogler’s recent observation that virtue and happiness should be considered self-­transcendent goods, alongside the general notion of “self-­ transcendence,” because these goods are often acquired at the expense of great personal sacrifice for the sake of something greater than the self.142 It is important to stress, however, that such personal sacrifice does not mean one suffers the fate of a “moral saint” (i.e., a boring unhappy person), as Susan Wolf argues (see the next chapter). In fact, recent research in the humanities and the social sciences suggests that people whose 140.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 47. 141.  See, e.g., John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” The Monist 62, no. 3 (1979): 331–­350; “The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics”, in A. O. Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 359–­376; Julia Annas, “Virtue Ethics,” in David Copp, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 515–­536; and Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 142.  Jennifer Frey and Candace Vogler, eds., Self-­transcendence and Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Psychology, and Theology (New York: Routledge, 2019), introduction.

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self-­conception involves the idea of self-­transcendence, and whose life is immersed in practices such as spiritual exercises geared toward a realization of the sacred and the oneness of humanity, or toward social justice, work to improve the life of the community, tend to feel happier and have a deeper sense of purpose and meaning in their lives.143 However, since “spiritual practices” can sometimes be a vague term, we need to recall that “self-­transformation” is a key element of spirituality. That is, spiritual practices must be able to reform, reshape, and transform the habitual, empirical self in order to bring about a permanent state of inner peace and tranquility. Hence, I will now look at more examples of spiritual exercises in the writings of Walī Allāh that may provide ways to transform the everyday self into a state of self-­transcendence. Recall that the self has both descriptive and normative dimensions. That is, part of the self is given but part of it exists only as a potential that one aspires to achieve. In Walī Allāh’s scheme of things, the nature of the self consists of subtle fields of consciousness called the laṭāʾif (similar to the cakras) that one must purify in order to reach the ultimate selfhood (anāniyya kubrā). In view of the fact that the subtle fields of consciousness are hierarchically structured and that they form the matrix of one’s given subjectivity (see chapter 4), it would be helpful to use the metaphor of traveling or journeying within these fields, as they lead to a transcendent state of the self, in which one feels at one with everything in the cosmos. In his Alṭāf al-­quds, Walī Allāh explains that the whole point of engaging oneself in spiritual activities and exercises is that every laṭīfa or subtle field of consciousness should be cultivated (parwarish) with due consideration.144 Walī Allāh also makes it clear that the real nature and the effects of 143.  See D. P. McAdams and B. D. Olson, “Personality Development: Continuity and Change over the Life Course,” Annual Review of Psychology, 61, no. 1 (2009): 517–­542; J. J. Bauer et al., “Narrative Identity and Eudaimonic Well-­ being,” Journal of Happiness Studies 9, no. 1 (2008): 81–­104; and P. T. P. Wong, The Human Quest for Meaning: Theories, Research, and Applications (New York: Routledge, 2012). 144.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 87. In Walī Allāh’s view, when the wayfarer is released from the influence of the lower self (nafs), she should focus her attention to the other laṭāʾif, namely qalb and ʿaql. At this point, her heart becomes her spirit (rūḥ) and her intellect her secret (sirr). See Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 35. Moreover, when the seeker has completed the purification of the self, the heart, and the intellect, and has gained the benefits accruing from this, the next requirement is the purification yet again of the self, but this time in conjunction with the spirit and the secret. See Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 98.

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these laṭāʾif are unfamiliar to most minds, and most people do not benefit from being informed of them. Nonetheless, there are two types of people who might benefit from hearing about these things. The first is someone who has already come close to perfecting them completely, and who has acquired the preparedness to purify them. If such a person turns his attention to this present discussion, the conception of the forms of these things will be the correct one, and it will open the door to success. The second type is someone who has been blessed with a general knowledge of the laṭāʾif but lacks the capacity to understand them in detail. If such a person reads this discussion, Walī Allāh says, his general knowledge will be transformed into a comprehensive one.145 However, one may wonder, why is there a need to purify one’s self or the laṭāʾif that comprise it? To answer this, Walī Allāh argues that without such purification, one would not be able to know the real nature of the self and how it differs from what we ordinarily perceive, think, and treat the self to be. For instance, since the laṭīfa of the lower self seeks to fulfil its carnal desires, one is prevented from seeing one’s true nature: Since the essential nature of the lower self (nafs)146 is to realize the satisfaction of its appetitive qualities (shahawāt), it is necessary that it should be purified through repentance and renunciation (zuhd). Since the essential nature of the lower self is guided by its fickle-­ mindedness (ṭaysh) and impetuousness in pursuit of its desires, its remedy then inevitably lies in its taking stock of the beastly self (nafs-­i sabʿiyya). This means the individual should be arduous in fighting against his lower self, and should dislike himself and be the judge of his own self. And as has been observed on numerous occasions, sometimes a man begins to rebuke himself, takes himself to task, and expresses his regret and shame [because he realizes that he has fallen victim to the lower tendencies within the self].147 145.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 112. 146.  As mentioned earlier, one of the meanings of nafs in Sufism is “the lower self,” which corresponds to the lower degrees of selfhood such as the evil-­inciting self in the Qur’an. 147.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 79. Cf. According to Walī Allāh, the lower self is moved by sexual desire and lust, and when it is overcome by them, its nature is worse than that of an animal. See Walī Allāḥ, Ḥujjat Allāh al-­bāligha, 1: 136. Cf. Walī Allāḥ, Ḥujjat Allāh al-­bāligha, 1: 109, where the lower self is likened to a veil that conceals the true nature of the self.

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That is, the nafs (i.e., lower self) is that undesirable part of the self that needs to be overcome, for it is always craving the satisfaction of its base desires for such things as sensuality or superiority and dominance over one’s peers. As the philosopher-­novelist Iris Murdoch also avers, “In the moral life the enemy is the fat relentless ego.”148 Although we feel somewhat embarrassed to talk about the self using such terms as sensuality, carnal desires, etc.—­due in large measure to our secular-­liberal conception of human nature that portrays it as a site of freedom, rationality, equality, and autonomy (see chapter 5)—­this does not alter the fact that our basic instincts remain the same and have been unleashed from time to time. In the words of the Harvard historian Niall Ferguson: No matter how complex the administrative structure we study, we should not lose sight of the basic instincts buried within even the most civilized men. These instincts were to be unleashed time and again after 1900. They were a large part of what made the Second World War so ferocious.149 To shed more light on the lower self, Walī Allāh also maintains that at times the individual tries to restrain his lower self and oppose it, with the result that a fierce conflict arises within him. At that time, a great deal of bitterness is experienced, but when the dust settles and agitation ceases, a wonderful light descends from the Spirit (rūḥ) and whelms the wayfarer both inwardly and outwardly.150 Since the subtle fields of consciousness also manifest various emotions, as discussed in the previous chapter, Walī Allāh mentions the “heart” that plays a crucial role in the purification of the self. He asserts that it is the characteristic of the heart (i.e., the faculty in charge of emotions) to subjugate the appetitive self and ignore its frivolity and greed, and to keep it under firm control. The effect of this aspect of purification is called patience. A further characteristic of the heart is to conform to the intellect and to heed and accept its command. The effect of this is termed surrender to providence. Yet another of its characteristics is loyalty to friends and close adherence to their beliefs and opinions.151 The 148.  Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1970), 51. 149.  Niall Ferguson, The War of the World: Twentieth-­century Conflict and the Descent of the West (New York: Penguin, 2006), xlvi–­xlvii. 150.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 108–­109. 151.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 90.

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effect of this is called piety, love, and holy ritual. One further characteristic of the heart is that due to its inclination toward the real, the heart suppresses any impulse of anger, avarice, love of dignity, or extravagant hopes. The effect of this is called generosity.152 After describing how the heart can suppress, subdue, and transform the lower self (i.e., the empirical self), Walī Allāh goes on to suggest that if the laṭīfa of the intellect dominates over both the lower self and the heart, then even more praiseworthy qualities will result. Drawing on the Qur’anic terminology, Walī Allāh affirms that the self in this condition is called the profoundly, tranquil self (nafs-­i muṭmaʾinna).153 For instance, when someone comes to realize through her intellect that her happiness lies in performing good actions, while bad actions will only bring her misery, then her lower self no longer goes against or objects to the command of the intellect; her heart, too, begins to show love (maḥabbat) and spiritual longing for what reason requires. It often happens that someone with great intelligence thinks of some desirable worldly or religious objective. Then, however much her heart may dislike certain aspects of it, and even though sweet pleasures may meanwhile be slipping through her hands, still her heart and the lower self do not disobey her intellect.154 Even though it may appear as if the heart and the intellect can control the appetitive self and curb its blameworthy characters, there are times when the lower or the appetitive self fights back strongly, making the self experience its “dark nights”155 when everything appears blank or there is a complete black-­out: 152.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 83. 153.  In the Ḥujjat, Walī Allāh describes the way one obtains ultimate happiness, which takes place when one is able to overcome one’s animalistic nature. In his view, this can be attained by turning complete attention to what lies beyond the invincible realm (jabarūt). This state brings about a pleasure which is different from familiar pleasures. When this happens the person no longer mixes with other people, nor desires what others desire, nor fears what others fear, since she is in a remote place and is far removed from ordinary folks. Walī Allāh states that this is the happiness realized by the transcendent philosophers (mutaʾallihūn min al-­ḥukamāʾ) and the ecstatic Sufis (majdhūbūn). See Walī Allāḥ, Ḥujjat Allāh al-­ bāligha, 1: 100. 154.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 43–­44. Cf. Walī Allāḥ, Ḥujjat Allāh al-­bāligha, 1: 44, where he says the ʿaql must dominate the qalb and the qalb must dominate the nafs. 155.  Cf. John of the Cross, The Dark Night of the Soul (London: Baronius Press, 2015), 110ff.

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It may so happen that the lower self has now forgotten its own needs—­its appetitive and beastly desires. Whatever way you may search, you will no longer find in the lower self any image of the beloved (ṣūrat-­i maʿshūq) or any delight in sexual pleasures; and however much you probe, you will not find in it any sign of love of rank or honor or greed for wealth. And yet a black pall of smoke rises up from the lower self, which obliterates the face of both the spirit (rūḥ) and the secret (sirr); a fog is stirred up which sullies these two mirrors, a bitterness proceeds from the lower self, which spoils the sweet taste of the spirit and the sirr. No matter how meticulously he may search for the origin of that fogginess, he cannot understand what it is; however much he uses his intellect, he is unable to fathom where it is coming from. But the discerning gnostic realizes that all of this is the work of the lower self, whose viciousness never ends, and that there is no way one can escape its ruses.156 Despite such “dark nights of the soul,” the higher, discerning part of the self recognizes that all of these are ruses by the lower self, which can be transformed and freed from its own inherent constitution by means of the appropriate spiritual exercises.157 Among many such spiritual exercises Walī Allāh mentions self-­examination or the examination of one’s conscience (muḥāsaba-­yi nafs), which is attending to the self moment by moment and remaining constantly aware of its state (yaʿnī har zamānī wāqif-­i ḥāl-­i khūd bāshad) to see whether its time is being elapsed in negligence and sin, or is being spent in acts of devotion. If the desired objective is achieved, Walī Allāh continues, we should thank God, and think hard of ways to continue this trend and enhance this practice. But if it is the reverse, we should repent.158 After mentioning self-­examination, Walī Allāh elucidates four cardinal virtues that the self should cultivate in order to purify itself from the temptations of the lower self. The first of these cardinal virtues is purity, through which the self is related to angels. The second is humility, through which the self acquires an affinity with the highest assembly (malaʾ al-­aʿlā). The third is generosity, by means of which the self obliterates stains left by base human nature such as animal-­like behavior and lust. The fourth is justice, through which the self may appear pleasing in the 156.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 99–­100. 157.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 39. 158.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 81–­82.

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sight of highest assembly, and may gain favor with it and receive its mercy and blessings.159 A related issue, which emerges from the journey through the laṭāʾif and the degrees of ascension that mark its every way-­station, is the following question: what does the world look like in such a transformed state of the self? To answer this question, Walī Allāh asserts that the degree of ultimate selfhood is one in which the consciousness of the self pervades all existents (al-­munbasiṭa fī jamīʿ al-­mawjūdāt). Then, in a manner which is strikingly similar to that of Mullā Ṣadrā, he asserts that in such a transcendent state, the self is transmuted into cosmic consciousness of a sort, in that it is able to see the entire cosmos within itself: When the coarseness of earthly existence in the gnostic is replaced by the highest assembly, his identity such as being the son of so and so and possessing a body of so and so disappears.160 The guiding feature of the ultimate selfhood is that through the manifestation of its self-­subsistence it sees the entire cosmos within itself and that it [the cosmos] subsists through it. And it takes the form of angel with an angel, stone with a stone, and tree with a tree, and so on.161 In Walī Allāh’s view, the reality of the human (ḥaqīqat-­i insān) is vastly increased (taʿaddud paydā mī-­shawad) by the diversity of these relationships within the laṭāʾif.162 The texts cited make it plain that such a state of the self is unlike anything one experiences in one’s daily life. One cannot help but notice that these kinds of passages have a remarkable parallel with the Indian Tantric traditions such as Kashmiri Shaivism. For instance, in his Tantrāloka, Abhinavagupta (ca. 950–­1016 CE), the great exponent of Kashmiri Shaivism, defines aham or “I” as absolute subjectivity, which, as reflexive awareness, is omnipresent in the non-­duality of Shiva and Shakti, that is, the supreme and cosmic emission within which all is contained. Abhinavagupta writes in his Tantrāloka: “The flowing forth [of the cosmos] whose nature is energy begins with the incomparable a and ends with 159.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 52–­53. 160.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 1: 248. 161.  Walī Allāh, al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya, 1: 243. 162.  Walī Allāh, Alṭāf al-­quds, 125.

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ha. Condensing the whole universe, it is then reabsorbed in the supreme. This entire universe abides within energy and she in the highest absolute. This is truly an enveloping by the omnipresent one. In this way, the enveloping of energy [is described] in the revelation of the Trīshikā. The universe shines there within consciousness and on account of consciousness. These three factors combine and unite in pairs to form the one, supreme form of Bhairava, whose nature is the ‘I.’”163 In other words, the cosmos emerges from the divine “I” and returns to it, although this separation and return can never be outside of that consciousness. The three elements of the word aham combine to form the totality of the cosmos. The cosmos is within the absolute subject, as the word aham contains the first and last letters and, by implication, all between them from a to ha. The three combinations of a and ha, ha and m, and m and a create a continuous flow of sound, with aham becoming maha, the former being the expansion of the cosmos, the latter being its contraction: both expansion from a and contraction into anusvara, the m, or bindu, are mediated through the energy of ha. The word aham is, therefore, treated as a mantra; indeed, it is regarded as the force of all other mantras and the power that animates all living beings. According to the commentator Jayaratha, this aham (which is also the “I” of every human being) is unitary consciousness, the supreme beyond everything, the place where all rests, the light of knowledge, knower, and object of knowledge.164 Self, Freedom, Being-­Toward-­Beyond-­Death Although I have been trying to develop a normative account of the self that is centered on self-­knowledge, self-­cultivation, self-­transformation, and human flourishing, there are accounts both within and outside of the Islamic intellectual tradition that emphasize other elements such as autonomy, dynamism, and freedom. As I noted at the very beginning of this study, the normativity of the self makes it possible to develop multiple accounts without negating their individual worth. However, this does not mean self-­construction is entirely subjective so that each possible formulation is equally favorable to happiness and flourishing. In the concluding part of this study, I will evaluate the relative worth my account vis-­à-­vis others, but for now I want to dwell on a particular con163.  Cited in Flood, The Tantric Body, 147. 164.  Cited in Flood, The Tantric Body, 147–­148.

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ception of the self that was developed by Iqbal in order to respond to the challenging circumstances of colonial modernity.165 In doing so, my purpose is twofold: to bring to light the diversity of self-­conceptions in the Islamic tradition, and to acknowledge possible alternatives with which I will eventually disagree. It is to be noted that Iqbal’s philosophy of the self marks a departure from classical Muslim thought, which is significant because Iqbal himself claims to have derived the ingredients of his conception of the self from classical Sufism. Although Iqbal, like Muslim philosophers, focuses on the self from the first-­person perspective, and although he underscores the irreducibility of its first-­person character, his account of the self’s moral development leading to the degree of the perfect human highlights his differences with them. Relatedly, very early on after the publication of Asrār-­i khūdī (The Secrets of the Self), critics accused Iqbal of incorporating Nietzschean themes into his exposition of the self and the perfect human, which Iqbal denied vehemently. Nonetheless, some aspects of Iqbal’s articulation of the self and the perfect human do seem to show a Nietzschean influence (see below). Moreover, even though Iqbal at times chastises Nietzsche for his materialism, one does not fail to notice his admiration and sympathy for the German philosopher throughout his career. In his Jāwīd-­nāma, which is a late work, Iqbal likens Nietzsche to al-­Ḥallāj and reserves a respectable place for him in the intermediate heaven: My eyes had beheld a hundred six-­day worlds and at last the borders of this universes (ḥadd-­i īn kāʾināt) appeared; each world had a different moon, a different Pleiades (parvīn), a different manner and mode of existence. . . .166 On the frontiers of this world of quality and quantity dwelt a man with a voice full of agony, his vision keener than an eagle’s, his mien witness to a heart afire; every moment his inward glow increased. On his lips was a verse he chanted a hundred times: ‘No Gabriel, no Paradise, no houris, no God, only a handful of dust consumed by a yearning soul (jān-­i ārizūmand).’ 165.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 149. 166.  Iqbal, Jāwīd-­nāma, in Kulliyāt-­i Iqbāl Fārsī, 739, trans. by Arberry, modified, in Jāvid-­nāma, 111.

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I said to Rumi, ‘Who is this sage?’ He answered: ‘This is the German genius whose place is between these two worlds; his reed-­pipe contains an ancient melody. This Ḥallāj without gallows and rope has spoken anew those ancient words; his words are fearless, his thoughts sublime, the Westerners (gharbiyān) are struck asunder by the sword of his speech. His colleagues have not comprehended his ecstasy (jadhba) and have reckoned the ecstatic mad.167 In his Stray Reflections, Iqbal laments that Nietzsche, whom he calls the “great prophet of aristocracy,” was universally condemned in Europe because only a few were able to realize the meaning of his madness, i.e., his critique of modernity.168 Iqbal approvingly quotes Nietzsche on the topic of immortality to suggest that the immortality of a people depends upon their incessant creation of worth.169 In the Reconstruction, Iqbal calls Nietzsche a visionary genius and says that the latter received some kind of “divine imperative” to carry out his mission. But in the same breath, Iqbal also criticizes Nietzsche for his spiritual failure: “Instead of looking for a spiritual rule which would develop the Divine even in a plebeian and thus open up before him an infinite future,” Iqbal complains, “Nietzsche was driven to seek the realization of his vision in such schemes as aristocratic radicalism.”170 167.  Iqbal, Jāwīd-­nāma, in Kulliyāt-­i Iqbāl Fārsī, 739–­740. trans. by Arberry, modified, in Jāvid-­nāma, 111–­112. Again, in his Ḍarb-­i kalīm: The European ecstatic (majdhūb-­i farangī) by guile and skill New lease of life to nation (waṭan) gave: The path for the birth of the Guide (mahdī) By valour great he strove to pave. Iqbal, Ḍarb-­i kalīm, in Kulliyāt-­i Iqbāl Urdū, 521, translated by Syed Akbar Shah, modified, in The Rod of Moses, 34. 168.  Iqbal, Stray Reflections: A Note-­book of Allama Iqbal, ed. by Javid Iqbal (Lahore: Iqbal Academy, 2008), 46. 169.  Iqbal, Stray Reflections, 79. 170.  Iqbal says that Nietzsche needed a master to guide him, but he could not find one. He cites the following from one of Nietzsche’s letters to his sister: “I confront alone an immense problem: it is as if I am lost in a forest, a primeval one. I

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In any case, when critics pointed out the resemblance between Iqbal’s concept of the perfect human and Nietzsche’s Übermensch, Iqbal retorted by saying that “the conception of the Superman in Nietzsche is purely materialistic,” which is “the same as the idea of the Overman in Emerson.”171 More intriguingly, Iqbal surmises that Nietzsche might have borrowed the concept from the literature of Islam and then tainted it by his materialism. Either way, Iqbal’s articulation of the three stages of the growth of the self appears suspiciously similar to Nietzsche’s “three metamorphoses” or the three stages of progress toward the Übermensch in his Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). In Iqbal’s rendering, the first metamorphosis of life is camel, which is a symbol of load bearing strength. The second is lion, which symbolizes the strength to kill without pity, for pity is a vice and not virtue in Nietzsche. The third metamorphosis is child, which is the Superman passing beyond good and evil like the child and becoming a law unto himself. In Iqbal’s view, this is materialism turning the human ego into a monster, which, according to Nietzsche’s idea of immortality, has repeated itself and will repeat itself an infinite number of times.172 For Iqbal, Nietzsche’s error lies in that he failed to distinguish clock time from real time. Iqbal further claims that Nietzsche never grappled with the problem of time and accepted it without criticism, for his conception of time is circular.173 Iqbal claims that the similarities between Nietzsche and him are superficial, since Nietzsche does not believe in the spiritual fact of the self and its will to power.174 However, Iqbal fails to explain why his theory of the self also has exactly three stages, as opposed to four or five. But he rightly notes that for Nietzsche, the “I” is a fiction because there is no autonomous self standing need help. I need disciples: I need a master. It would be so sweet to obey. . . . Why do I not find among the living men who see higher than I do and have to look down on me?” See Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 154. Cf. Daniel Halévy, La vie de Frédéric Nietzsche (Paris: Calmann, 1900), 314. 171.  Iqbal, “An Exposition of the Self,” 200. He further denies any connection with Nietzsche: “I wrote on the Sufi doctrine of the Perfect Man more than twenty years ago—­long before I had read or heard anything of Nietzsche.” See Iqbal, “In Defense of the Self,” in Discourses of Iqbal, 190. 172.  See Iqbal, “An Exposition of the Self,” 200. For Nietzsche’s explanations of the “three metamorphoses,” see Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. by Graham Parkes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 23–­24; cf. Beyond Good and Evil, trans. by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966). 173.  For a Nietzschean view of time and becoming, see Robin Small, Time and Becoming in Nietzsche’s Thought (London: Continuum, 2011), chapters 6–­7. 174.  Iqbal, “An Exposition of the Self,” 198–­199.

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behind the drives, capable of constructing their order. There is only the play of drives that mold the ego. According to Iqbal, Nietzsche followed Kant’s lead in the Kritik’s conclusion that God, immortality, and freedom are more of a fiction, though useful for practical purposes. Against this he reiterates the Bergsonian intuition of the self, saying that, from the viewpoint of inner experience, the “I” is an indubitable fact, which stares at us in spite of our intellectual analysis of it. Moreover, Iqbal argues that the perfection of the perfect human in Islam consists in realizing the eternal Now, which one does not find in Nietzsche.175 Also, Iqbal suggests that Nietzsche’s Übermensch is a biological product, whereas the Islamic perfect human is the product of moral and spiritual forces such as virtue, justice, duty, and love.176 In addition, Iqbal denies that his coal-­diamond analogy in the Asrār has anything to do with Nietzsche, since unlike Nietzsche he does not mean callousness or pitilessness when he says, “Be as hard as the diamond.”177 Despite all that Iqbal can say in his defense, there is no denying that his conception of the perfect human as the highest mode of self-­development shows influences from both Nietzsche and Darwin. Even though Iqbal claims that he adopted the doctrine from the Sufis, his exposition of the perfect human bears only superficial resemblance to the original Sufi doctrine. Iqbal significantly modifies the doctrine of the perfect human when he asserts that it represents the “completest ego, the goal of humanity, and the acme of life both in mind and body” in whom “the discord of our mental life becomes a harmony.”178 Moreover, according to Iqbal, the perfect human is the last fruit of the tree of humanity, who justifies “all the trials of a painful evolution” because he is to come at the end. Iqbal’s evolutionist interpretation of the perfect human is evident: The more we advance in evolution, the nearer we get to him. In approaching him we are raising ourselves in the scale of life. The 175.  Iqbal, “An Exposition of the Self,” 200. 176.  Iqbal, “An Exposition of the Self,” 200–­201. Despite these differences, the Nietzschean influence is clearly traceable in Iqbal’s doctrine, as in the following: “You must give up all those modes of activity which have a tendency to dissolve personality, e.g., humility, contentment, slavish obedience, modes of human action which have been erroneously dignified by the name of virtue. On the other hand, high ambition, generosity, charity and a just pride in our traditions and power fortify the sense of personality.” Iqbal, Stray Reflections, 29. 177.  Iqbal, “An Exposition of the Self,” 202. 178.  Iqbal mentions Nietzsche in this regard, saying he had a glimpse of the concept. Iqbal, Asrār-­i khūdī, trans. by Nicholson, xxviii–­xxix.

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development of humanity both in mind and body is a condition precedent to his birth. For the present he is a mere ideal; but the evolution of humanity is tending toward the production of an ideal race of more or less unique individuals who will become his fitting parents. Thus the kingdom of God on earth means the democracy of more or less unique individuals, presided over by the most unique individual possible on this earth.179 Needless to say, such an interpretation of the perfect human would hardly make sense to the likes of Ṣadrā, Walī Allāh, and Thānavī, for whom the doctrine is primarily understood in its spiritual and metaphysical context. Iqbal’s idiosyncratic understanding of the perfect human becomes even more apparent when one examines his views on the self’s freedom and immortality. According to Iqbal, the end of the self’s journey is not freedom from the limitations of individuality; it is, rather, a more precise definition of it.180 As Iqbal says: Whatever may be the final fate of man it does not mean the loss of individuality. The Qur’an does not contemplate complete liberation from finitude as the highest state of human bliss. . . . It is with the irreplaceable singleness of his individuality that the finite ego will approach the infinite ego to see for himself the consequences of his past action and to judge the possibilities of his future.181 Iqbal then goes on to add that “pantheistic Sufism”182 cannot accept such a view, because this would imply the mutual exclusion of the infinite and the finite self, which contravenes God’s infinitude. Iqbal responds by arguing that such difficulties rest on a misunderstanding of the true nature of the infinite. In his view, true infinity does not mean infinite extension (which cannot be conceived without embracing all available finite extensions). Rather, the nature of true infinity consists in intensity and not extensity; hence the moment we hold our attention on intensity, we begin to see that the finite ego must be distinct, though not isolated, from the infinite.183 Moreover, Iqbal maintains that it is highly unlikely that “a being whose 179.  Iqbal, Asrār-­i khūdī = The Secrets of the Self, trans. by Reynold A. Nicholson (Lahore: Muhammad Ashraf, 1964), xxvii–­xxviii. 180.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 156–­157. 181.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 93. 182.  Iqbal’s pejorative term for the metaphysically-­minded Sufis. 183.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 56.

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evolution has taken millions of years should be thrown away as a thing of no use.” Rather, “it is only as an ever-­growing ego,” Iqbal says, “that he can belong to the meaning of the universe.”184 Now there is little evidence to suggest that Sufi metaphysicians (whom Iqbal calls pantheists) considered God’s infinitude extensively in spatial form. For instance, Mullā Ṣadrā’s expression “ʿidda, mudda wa shidda” (numericality, duration, and intensity), in relation to mā lā yatanāhī bimā lā yatanāhī (infinite by virtue of its own infinity)—­i.e., God—­is well known.185 As for the loss of individuality, it is clear from the writings of many Sufi metaphysicians that for them, there is no “individuality” to begin with because, as Lāhījī explained, “there is no possibility of duality in the divine unity” (dūʾī rā aṣlan dar maqām-­i tawḥīd rāh nīst). That is, all conceptions of “individuality” separate from the Divine are ultimately illusory, arising due to God’s self-­determination.186 In any case, Iqbal goes on to explain that life offers an opportunity for self-­growth, and “death is the first test of the synthetic activity of the ego.” In Iqbal’s view, acts are not to be considered pleasure-­giving or pain-­ giving, since acts can only be either ego-­sustaining or ego-­dissolving. To wit, it is the deed that prepares the self for dissolution or disciplines it for a future career. As such, “personal immortality,” Iqbal asserts, “is not ours as a right; it is to be achieved by personal effort.”187 Iqbal never fails to underscore “action” or dynamism that helps the self grow toward its immortality.188 And he stresses that the climax of this dynamism is reached when the self is able to retain full self-­possession, even when it is in direct contact with God, the all-­embracing Self. For him, such a climax represents “the ideal of perfect manhood in Islam.”189 Along the way, Iqbal also derides Plato and the Sufis for being inactive and for preferring death to life. Iqbal says: 184.  He then quotes the verses from Q. 91: 7–­10: “By the soul and He Who hath balanced it, and hath shown to it the ways of wickedness and piety, blessed is he who hath made it grow and undone is he who hath corrupted it.” Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 95. 185.  Mullā Ṣadrā, al-­Shawāhid, 135. 186.  Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā Lāhījī, Mafātīḥ al-­iʿjāz fī sharḥ-­i Gulshan-­i rāz, ed. by Maḥmūdī Bakhtiyārī (Tehran: ʿIlm, 1998), 233. 187.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 95. 188.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 95. 189.  Iqbal then states the Prophet’s vision of the Ultimate Ego: “His eye turned not aside, nor did it wander,” (Q. 53: 17). See Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 94.

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Plato, the foremost sage and hermit, Was one of that ancient flock of sheep (az gurūh-­i gūsfandān-­i qadīm). His Pegasus (rakhsh) went astray in the darkness of idealism (ẓulmat-­i maʿqūl), And dropped its hoof amidst the rocks of actuality. He was so fascinated by the immaterial (nā-­maḥsūs) That he made hand, eye, and ear of no account. “To die,” said he, “is the acme of life: (sar-­i zindagī dar murdan ast) The candle is glorified by being put out.” He dominates our imagination (takhayyul), His cup sends us to sleep and takes the sensible world away from us. He is a sheep in man’s clothing (gūsfandī dar libās-­i ādam ast), The soul of the Sufi bows to his authority. He soared with his intellect to the highest heaven And called the world of phenomena a myth (ʿālam-­i asbāb rā afsāna khwūnd).190 Iqbal further sheds light on his criticism of Plato by saying it is directed against those philosophical systems that hold death rather than life as their ideal.191 Such a Nietzschean interpretation of Plato ignores the fact that the latter also composed several dialogues to discuss ethics, society, and politics, all of which are directly relevant to the practical life.192 In any case, the Iqbalian self attains freedom and immortality by proclaiming “yes” to life and by actively pursuing deeds that make it ever stronger. In Iqbal’s estimation, the self is partly free and partly determined, and it reaches fuller freedom by approaching the Individual who is most free, i.e., God.193 Iqbal affirms the self’s freedom and its ability to steer its 190.  Iqbal, Asrār-­i khūdī, in Kulliyāt-­i Iqbāl Fārsī, 32–­33; trans. by Reynold A. Nicholson, 56–­57. 191.  Iqbal, Asrār-­i khūdī, trans. by Nicholson, xxi–­xxii. This, again, is a gross simplification of the Platonic worldview. Even though Plato does talk about philosophy being “the practice of dying,” Cf. Phaedo (64a3–­4), it is not to be misunderstood as some kind of otherworldly mysticism. For an understating of “philosophy as the practice of dying,” see Michael Pakaluk, “Degrees of Separation in the ‘Phaedo,’” Phronesis 48 (2003): 89–­115; and Roslyn Weiss, “The Right Exchange: Phaedo 69a6–­c3,” Ancient Philosophy 7 (1987): 57–­66. On Plato’s rational mysticism, see Michael LaFargue, Rational Spirituality and Divine Virtue in Plato: A Modern Interpretation and Philosophical Defense of Platonism (Albany, NY: SUNY, 2017), chapter 1. 192.  See, e.g., The Republic, Laws, etc. 193.  Iqbal, Asrār-­i khūdī, trans. by Nicholson, xxi.

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own course of action against all sorts of philosophies that he thinks restrict or deny its freedom. He criticizes Averroes for failing to provide an ethical notion of immortality.194 Similarly, he claims that Muslim theologians failed to reconcile human freedom with divine foreknowledge, hence they were determinists.195 He also criticizes a mechanistic conception of human action in psychology that reduces ego-­activity to a succession of thoughts and ideas, ultimately reducible to units of sensations. Against all these views, Iqbal argues that the essential feature of a purposeful act is its vision of a future situation that is not subject to physiological explanations.196 For Iqbal, the final act of the self is not an intellectual act. It is rather a vital act which deepens the entire self and whets its will with the assurance that the world is not something to be merely seen or known through concepts, but something to be made and remade by continuous action.197 Summary This chapter provides a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between self-­cultivation, ethics, and self-­knowledge with reference to several philosophers across times and cultures but with a strong focus on the views of Mullā Ṣadrā. It problematizes the ordinary self by arguing that human flourishing is contingent upon a transformation process that involves pursuing a 194.  Iqbal’s criticism of Averroes does not do full justice to the complexity of the latter’s doctrine of the material intellect and immortality. For Averroes, the material intellect is one and eternal for all humans, whose division can only occur within material forms. Thus, it is the human body that divides and individualizes the material intellect. For excellent analyses of this issue, see Richard Taylor, “Averroes’ Philosophical Conception of Separate Intellect and God,” in La lumière de l’intellect: La pensée scientifique et philosophique d’Averroès dans son temps, ed. by Ahmad Hasnawi (Leuven: Peeters 2011), 391–­404; “Intellect as Intrinsic Formal Cause in the Soul according to Aquinas and Averroes,” in The Afterlife of the Platonic Soul: Reflections on Platonic Psychology in the Monotheistic Religions, ed. by Maha El-­Kaisy Friemut and John M. Dillon (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 187–­220; and “Averroes on the Ontology of the Human Soul,” Muslim World 102 (2012): 580–­596. 195.  Iqbal, Stray Reflections, 159. This is only true of some theological schools. For some analyses of freewill and determinism in Islam, see Maria de Cillis, Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought: Theoretical Compromises in the Works of Avicenna, al-­Ghāzālī and Ibn ʿArabī (London and New York: Routledge, 2014), 5–­30. 196.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 85–­86. 197.  Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 157.

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philosophico-­spiritual life. This programmatic effort can be called “sculpting the self,” which entails performing such self-­cultivation practices as meditation and detachment (i.e., detachment from the senses). It is argued that such a process of sculpting the self can transform the everyday self and reorient it toward a journey of self-­perfection, flourishing, and inner peace. Finally, this chapter also looks at Iqbal, whose reading of Nietzsche, persuades him to argue that the self attains freedom and immortality by saying “yes” to life and by actively pursuing actions that make it ever stronger. In Iqbal’s view, the self is partly free and partly determined, and reaches fuller freedom by approaching God, who is the freest Individual.

C h a pte r 6

Consummation “I” or “I and I” What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by. Richard loves Richard; that is, I and I. Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am. Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason why: Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself? Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good That I myself have done unto myself? O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself For hateful deeds committed by myself. I am a villain. Yet I lie. I am not. Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter.1

This study has investigated the problem of selfhood in a cross-­cultural context in order to advance a multidimensional model. The overall picture that emerges from my analyses in the preceding pages is that the self is a multidimensional entity comprising both descriptive and normative degrees. Consequently, it is not merely to be conceived as a given object whose essential nature is unchangeable. The normativity of the self implies that selfhood is both received and achieved. It can be examined, explained, and described in scientific and socio-­cultural terms, but it can also be articulated through aspirational ideals that are yet to be realized. More specifically, the self’s descriptive dimension can be expressed in terms of consciousness and first-­person subjectivity, while its normative dimension can 1.  William Shakespeare, Richard III, ed. by John D. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 5.3, 131–­132. 256

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be expressed in terms of an anthropocentric ideal that underscores self-­ knowledge, self-­cultivation, and self-­perfection. That the self propounded in this study should be best characterized as “anthropocentric” does not mean it has to lean toward an individualism of some sort, since the purpose of sculpting such a self through various self-­ cultivation exercises is to transcend a limited conception of the self as an ego that is confined to its “little circles” (as Tocqueville aptly described) and that only considers its own private benefit.2 Rather, as Walī Allāh observed, the guiding feature of a transformed self is its ability to realize oneness with the rest of nature, since in such a state its identity of being a particular “I” with a particular body-­mind complex is transcended. This, however, does not mean that the individuality of the self dissolves completely in its transformed state so that no vestiges of the “I” remain. Rather, in such a transformed state of consciousness, the reality of the self is no longer located or reified in the conventional, empirical “I” that was once thought to be the essence or the center of one’s identity. Thanks now to the transformative power of the spiritual exercises, the reality of the “I” is also experienced in the “non-­I” (i.e., everything other than the individual self) that simultaneously constitutes its own identity. At this point, one may begin to wonder if we are referring to some kind of ineffable, mystical state of the self, a notion which is mired in all sorts of scholarly disputes.3 It is important to clarify that I am not talking about mysticism while trying to drive home an argument about self-­ transcendence and the oneness of everything. In the previous chapter, we learned that the normativity of the self implies that the process of sculpting the self depends on what values or virtues we deem important when we self-­consciously endeavor to reconstruct our given self. For example, we may consider compassion to be a great ethical ideal that can mold and 2.  See Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. by Eduardo Nolla, trans. by James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2012), II.2. Cf. Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), Chapter 6. Cf. Ralph W. Emerson, who celebrates “individualism” in his famous essay entitled “Self-­ Reliance.” See Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-­Reliance and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1993). 3.  For the famous “Katz-­Forman” debate concerning this, see Robert Forman, ed., The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), “Introduction”; Steven Katz, ed., “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (London: Sheldon Press, 1978), 25ff; and Steven Katz, ed., Mysticism and Religious Traditions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

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transform our ordinary self. To wit, if we believe that the normative “human nature”4 is defined by compassion, then it will have the implication that we should be concerned with the suffering of others. It is also very relevant to mention here that in both Buddhist and Islamic thought the respective concepts of karunā (loving compassion) and raḥma (compassion and mercy) imply a moral perspective of exercising compassion and mercy to all. It thus comes as no surprise when the Dalai Lama, for instance, asserts that the quality of “compassion lies at the heart of the teachings of both Islam and Buddhism.”5 In the Dalai Lama’s view, every sentient being has a self or consciousness whose fundamental nature is unpolluted by mental defilements. This fundamental nature, the Dalai Lama affirms, is none other than the Buddha nature that contains the seed of enlightenment, just as in my formulation the perfect human is one’s latent capacity for wholeness and perfection, including the capacity for human flourishing. According to the Dalai Lama, the Buddha nature is what enables every sentient being to “eventually achieve perfection.”6 However, since every individual self has such potential, they each should be treated with equal concern, and should each possess the right to be happy and overcome suffering. Thus, it is easy to see that if one acts on the basis of compassion, when one believes that compassion is what defines one’s normative self, one would gradually be able to see the same self in others and be instinctively moved and touched by their conditions, which is another way of saying one would gradually be able to realize oneness with all. Moreover, one would also realize through the practice of compassion that it is not merely a sentiment that appears and vanishes; rather, it is an existential quality.7 But this existential quality presupposes a concrete sense of participation in the suffering of others (and not just armchair thinking about the ethical consequences of compassion), as is expressed by the etymology of the word itself: “com-­passion” means to “suffer with” another. The cultivation 4.  In the post-­Darwinian world, there is hardly any agreement among philosophers about what constitutes “human nature.” For a general survey, see Elizabeth Hannon and Tim Lewens, eds., Why We Disagree about Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018); see also David Hull’s classic paper on human nature: “On Human Nature,” PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association, 2 (1986): 3–­13. 5.  The Dalai Lama, Foreword to Reza Shah-­Kazemi, Common Ground Between Islam and Buddhism (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2010), vii. 6.  The Dalai Lama, Foreword to Common Ground Between Islam and Buddhism, vii. 7.  Shah-­Kazemi, Common Ground Between Islam and Buddhism, 92–­93.

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of compassion toward the wellbeing of others is crucial to overcoming selfish attachments and seeing oneself as part of a much greater whole. And such an exercise allows one to take joy in the happiness of others, as the distinction of self-­other itself becomes much more porous in such a state. So, when self-­centeredness and egotistical behavior are overcome, together with negative emotions and the desires of the lower self which feed them, then the quality of compassionate love will spring forth spontaneously. From the perspective of the ideal of the perfect human, self-­perfection and human flourishing are predicated on cultivating such a compassionate nature, since the divine name al-­Raḥmān (the All-­Compassionate) is the synonym of the name Allah which is the very form of the perfect human.8 Nevertheless, philosophers may still question the metaphysical basis of such compassion as it figures in the Buddha nature and the perfect human. But as noted earlier, the phenomenological and spiritual efficacy of compassion remain untarnished, even if one may doubt its metaphysical origin. This is because the normative self is the result of one’s reflective deliberations and moral agency, which is to say that one tends to develop a compassionate nature (which exists only as a potential) by the practice of compassion, provided one also purifies oneself of various negative thoughts and emotions and grows in Socratic self-­knowledge. The issue then seems to be whether the human condition, ceteris paribus, will improve if more and more people seek to develop a compassionate nature (as opposed to developing a hateful nature or simply remaining indifferent to the plight of the other). I reckon the answer is rather obvious. However, one might nonetheless argue that the aspiration to a thoroughgoing spiritual transformation through self-­cultivation can threaten our wholeness and dignity as human beings, as it might require leaving behind altogether the constitutive conditions of our humanity and seeking a life that is really the life of another sort of being, which is not necessarily better. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, thinks we would be better off reining in our aspirations “by recalling that there are some very general conditions of human existence that are also necessary conditions for the values that we know, love, and appropriately pursue.”9 In a word, the argument is that 8.  Q. 17:110. 9.  See Martha Nussbaum, “Transcending Humanity,” in Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 379. See also, Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Cf. McPherson, Spirituality and the Good Life, 78–­80; and Charles Taylor, “Critical Notice of Martha C. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck

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the urge to “transcend humanity” by aspiring to be god-­like (as in Greek and Islamic philosophy) may actually takes us beyond our ordinary human flourishing. However, Nussbaum does not deny that a certain kind of transformation of the self would always be bad, since for her “it is all too plain that most people are much of the time lazy, inattentive, unreflective, shallow in feeling; in short, that most human action falls well short of the fully human target of complete virtue.”10 Now, I agree with Nussbaum that if the transformation of the self involves a sort of self-­mutilation, then it would be a counter-­productive normative self. But the model of the self that I am proposing does not at all imply “transcending humanity.” If anything, the doctrine of the perfect human implies “completing” one’s humanity rather than transcending it. As the story of ʿAlī in Rūmi’s Masnavī demonstrates, the saints (the exemplars of the perfect human) still experience passions and negative emotions.11 For example, they still struggle with anger like the rest of us. But anger does not have to move them to action, as they are able to pause and let these emotions pass through them without being acted upon, as Omid Safi rightly notes.12 Thus, the goal of sculpting the self through philosophy and spiritual practices is not divinity, but full humanity. That said, it must not be forgotten that the intrinsic normativity of the self points toward multiple formulations of “what it means to be a self,” which means one should embrace pluralism when it comes to a cross-­cultural understanding of the self.13 Consequently, the various notions of the self in such diverse contexts as Yoga, Abhidharma Buddhism, and the Shaolin tradition (to name but a few) should offer viable options for human flourishing to those who might want to sculpt their self in unique ways, given their individual inclinations and aptitude. For instance, in both Patañjali Yoga and Abhidharma Buddhism, self-­transformation is conceptualized as a gradual overcoming of the ordinary self (the locus of suffering), which is the irreversible transcendence of self-­centered psychological functioning.14 Both Yoga and Buddhism share a strong commitment to moral and and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 18 (1988): 805–­814. 10.  Nussbaum, “Transcending Humanity,” 378. 11.  See Rumi, Masnavī-­yi maʿnawī, I: 3721–­3733, 3745–­3751, 3787–­3809. 12.  Omid Safi, “Sheath Your Sword: The Man Who Spat on Saint Ali,” available at https://onbeing.org/blog/sheath-your-sword-the-man-who-spat-on-saint-ali/. 13.  This does not mean embracing every notion of the self, as mentioned before. 14.  See, e.g., Matthew MacKenzie, “Virtue, Self-­Transcendence, and Liberation in Yoga and Buddhism,” chapter 10 of Frey and Vogler, eds., Self-­transcendence and Virtue. Cf. Edwin Bryant, The Yoga sūtras of Patañjali: A New Edition, Trans-

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spiritual self-­discipline not unlike Sufism (although the practices in each of these traditions differ from one another) as central to the transformation of the empirical self toward a path of enlightenment or spiritual deliverance. Similarly, in the Shaolin tradition, the threefold practice of Chan-­Wu-­Yi involves a way of life in which the heart, body, and chi are in total harmony with each other and with nature.15 Chan is the training of the mind to develop a calm, peaceful, and compassionate nature through meditative practices in Zen Buddhism, while Wu is aimed at creating a healthy body and a strong chi through the mastery of Kung Fu. It is important to note that Chan forms the essential basis of Kung Fu, since if Wu is practiced from the vantage point of anger it would be detrimental both to the student and to the people around her. Finally, Yi is the art of keeping oneself healthy and healing others. Overall, the practice of Shaolin Kung Fu is also aimed at enlightenment, although the emphasis, in this context, is not placed on the mind (as in philosophy) but on the body. Even so, one may still ponder if the pursuit of self-­perfection or an enlightenment is worth the toil it entails. Are self-­perfected or the enlightened selves necessarily better off than the rest? According to Susan Wolf’s definition of “moral saints,” the answer is no. For Wolf, a moral saint is someone “whose every action is as morally good as possible . . . that is, who is as morally worthy as can be.”16 Wolf divides moral saints into two categories: (1) the loving saints for whom happiness lies in making others happy, and (2) the rational saints who, in line with their sense of duty, sacrifice their happiness for the sake of others. In Wolf’s opinion, moral saints are unattractive because they lack the ability to enjoy the enjoyable in life. They are so nice with everyone that they have to be “dull-­witted or humorless or bland.”17 Moreover, they have no time for literature, music, or sports, and hence they live a life that is utterly barren and boring. I have to admit at this point that I find such descriptions of moral saints rather strange because last time I checked on YouTube I found the Dalai Lama lation, and Commentary with Insights from the Traditional Commentators (New York: North Point Press, 2009). 15.  For more information on the Shaolin tradition and Chinese philosophical life, see Meir Shahar, The Shaolin Monastery: History, Religion and the Chinese Martial Arts (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2008), 1–­8, 197–­202; and Edward Slingerland, Effortless Action: Wu-­wei as Conceptual Metaphor and Spiritual Ideal in Early China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 77ff. 16.  Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints,” Journal of Philosophy, 79, no. 8 (1982): 419–­ 439, at 419. 17.  Wolf, “Moral Saints,” 422.

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(an eighty-­four-­year-­old Buddhist monk) still chuckling, joking, teasing, and making others laugh in the process, through his ever-­playful sense of humor. Similarly, the life of the Prophet Muhammad shows numerous instances of his playful behavior toward many of his companions, where one observes the manifestation of his fecund sense of humor.18 One could cite numerous other examples across different traditions. Moreover, in the Islamic tradition, Sufis and their devotees are known to have produced a massive quantity of literature (especially on love and beauty) and a huge repertoire of music over the centuries. It would be difficult to turn a blind eye to the aesthetic joy and pleasure that one may derive from immersing oneself in such literature and music.19 Most of all, as noted earlier, the realization of spiritual perfection entails not divinity but complete humanity, which implies the perfection of all-­too-­human qualities such as humor, simplicity, and childlike purity. It is also important to note that although the account of the self advanced in this study depends on the cultivation of an authentic self and personal selfhood, it is different from the self of liberal individualism. That is to say, although the liberal self can come in different stripes, they all share the commitment that moral outlooks are, or should be, the product of individual choice, in which the individual is characterized in such morally secure terms as autonomous, rational, equal, unique, and free.20 In his widely influential and deeply learned A Theory of Justice, John Rawls thus notes: The parties [in the original position] regard moral personality and not the capacity for pleasure and pain as the fundamental aspect of the self.  .  .  . The main idea is that given the priority of right, the choice of our conception of the good is framed within definite limits. The principles of justice and their realization in social forms define 18.  See, e.g., Abī ʿĪsā Muḥammad b. ʿĪsā b. Sūra al-­Tirmidhī, Sunan al-­Tirmidhī, edited by Khālid ʿAbd al-­Ghanī Maḥfūẓ (Beirut: Dār al-­Kutub al-­ʿIlmiyya, 2019), # 1990, # 1991, among others. 19.  One is reminded of the universal appreciation that a Sufi poet such as Hafez or Rumi enjoys, east and west. See for instance, the reception of Hafez in authors as diverse as Goethe and Tagore: Johann Wolfgang Goethe, West-­östlicher Divan (Berlin: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 2010); and Leonard Lewisohn, “Rabindranath Tagore’s Syncretistic Philosophy and the Persian Sufi Tradition,” International Journal of Persian Literature, 2.1 (2017): 2-­41. 20.  See, e.g., Alisa L. Carse, “The Liberal Individual: A Metaphysical or Moral Embarrassment?” Noûs 28, no. 2 (1994): 184–­209; and Paul Fairfield, Moral Selfhood in the Liberal Tradition: The Politics of Individuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 80–­98, 166–­183.

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the bounds within which our deliberations take place. The essential unity of the self is already provided by the conception of right.21 To be precise, Rawls’s ethical and political philosophy in A Theory of Justice allows little space for any robust conception of selfhood, since his deontological self is primarily a legal entity, constituted by the liberal conception of “right” (i.e., the inviolability of the individual). As such, the moral and spiritual dimensions of the self are subsumed under the legal, making the self a rational chooser more than anything else. But how can one choose correctly if one does not know what one should choose, given the kind of being one is, i.e., if one is lacking in Socratic knowledge? More importantly, in Rawls’s marginalized notion of the self, “human vulnerability”22 is completely removed from the picture, since it is assumed that everyone is capable of moral reasoning.23 In contrast, the normative self propounded in this study begins with an existential critique of the everyday, conventional self, which is conceived in morally loaded terms as a bundle of desires, including negative emotions and tendencies that need 21.  John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 493. 22.  Another way to think of “human vulnerability” would be to say that human nature contains something absurd and unaccountable, which is hard to explain in terms of rational understanding. In other words, human nature contains the possibility of being swept away by passions and desires, thereby giving birth to irrational behavior or what some contemporary philosophers called the “surd factor.” The surd factor can also be called our double or the “other” within the self that is rooted in our tendencies to seek what is harmful and unreasonable. On the surd factor, see John Rist, Real Ethics: Reconsidering the Foundations of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 71–­72; Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (London: Duckworth, 1990), 140. An earlier, limited use is by Donald Davidson, “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” in Essays on Action and Events (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 42. 23.  According to Rawls, the self is capable of self-­reflective acts such as the capacity to form, revise, and pursue aims, commitments, values, plans and relationships, and to develop moral qualities. See John Rawls, “The Independence of Moral Theory,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 48 (1974–­1975): 5–­22, at 12. Perhaps such a marginalized notion of the self can be traced back to the Cartesian-­Lockean “thinking self” that ignores our desires, instincts, and beliefs because of its conviction that the ultimate of the self is defined by our capacity to turn on ourselves by careful examination. Taylor describes such a self as the “punctual self” that disengages itself from everything else while trying to relate to objects, situations, and ideals based on its self-­awareness only. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 49–­51.

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to be overcome through spiritual exercises in order to reach the desired transcendent mode of being. In other words, for the present author, as for Shakespeare, there is not just the “I,” there is rather “I and I,” one of which must be disciplined and overcome.24 Moreover, the atomistic conception of the liberal self as an entity that is “self-­sufficient outside of society” is also at odds with communitarian critics of liberal individualism such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Michael Walzer, and Michael Sandel.25 Communitarian proponents of the self reject the liberal conception of the individual self that impinges its will on others by arguing that individuals are embodied and embedded agents in the world. On the communitarian view, moral and political judgment depend on the language of reasons and the interpretive framework within which selves view their world, hence it will make little sense to consider the moral outlook of the individual outside the interpretive dimensions of human beliefs, cultural practices, and social institutions.26 In addition, there are philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes who opine that many, if not all, of our actions are prompted by selfish desires. This view, which paints the normative human nature in utterly pessimistic terms, maintains that self-­oriented interests are what ultimately motivate all human actions.27 For 24.  Cf. Hannah Arendt, “Thinking and Moral Considerations: A Lecture,” Social Research 38, no. 3 (1971): 417–­446. On the manifold significance of the “I and I” in relation to the self in the Rastafarian tradition, see Ennis B. Edmonds, Rastafari: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–­50. 25.  See Charles Taylor, “Atomism,” in Philosophy and the Human Sciences: Philosophical Papers 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 187–­210. Modern-­day communitarianism is said to have begun as a response to Rawls’s conception of the liberal self in relation to his famous “Original Position.” For general information on communitarianism, see Daniel Bell, “Communitarianism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed., https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2016/entries/communitarianism/. 26.  See, e.g., Charles Taylor, Philosophy and the Human Sciences, part 1; Alasdair MacIntyre, Against the Self-­Images of the Age (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1978), chapters 18–­22; and Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), chapter 1. But it should be noted that some liberals do recognize that vast areas of our lives are governed by unchosen habits and routines so that the choosing self may well be the exception rather than the rule. They emphasize, however, that the main justification for a liberal politics concerned primarily with securing the conditions for individuals to lead autonomous lives rests on the possibility and desirability of normative self-­ determination. See Gerald Doppelt, “Is Rawls’s Kantian Liberalism Coherent and Defensible?,” Ethics 99, no. 4 (1989): 815–­851. 27.  Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), passim.

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Hobbes the normative self is restricted to our animal nature, leaving each of us to live independently of others, acting only in our own self-­interest, without any regard for others. Yet according to Hobbes scholar John Gaskin, what makes Hobbes’s proposal so relevant is that “modern man, if not all mankind, is ominously close to Hobbes’s account of us—­competitive, acquisitive, possessive, restless, individualistic, self-­concerned, and insatiable in our demands for whatever we see in isolation as our own good.”28 I am not sure if Gaskin gets his observation entirely right, but I certainly hope that it is a wrong one. In any event, such views of human nature are to be contrasted with the compassionate self that I discussed earlier. Similarly, although both Nietzsche’s and Iqbal’s accounts of the self have considerable merits, I find them rather unpersuasive. Iqbal’s conception of the self, with its emphasis on individuality, dynamism, and action, might work at the popular level when a given community experiences lack of life or vigor; but it is difficult to see, in the absence of an elaboration of the spiritual exercises, how such a self might bring about a spiritual transformation acutely needed for human flourishing. Nietzsche’s fourfold scheme of the self along with the Übermensch is likewise a suspect; it would only work for people who are already geniuses and hence can create whatever values or meanings they deem desirable. And even then, this scheme of the self runs the danger of grounding “meaning” or “value” entirely in the subjective domain, which is but a step removed from nihilism, as Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly have argued convincingly.29 This is because if meanings or values are created freely through subjective feelings, they can also be taken back freely, leaving the self in a state of utter desolation. In all, the normative self should neither be too individualistic nor too impersonal; it is also not to be completely detached from the world, busy pursuing its self-­enclosed spiritual life on some isolated island. Rather, the normative self explored and proposed in this study is best characterized as anthropocentric and deeply personal, while at the same time transcending individualism through the pursuit of a philosophico-­spiritual ideal.

28.  J. C. A. Gaskin, “Introduction,” in Hobbes, Leviathan, xliii. 29.  See Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011) 118–­ 142. In their book (pp. 22–­57), Dreyfus and Kelly also level a scathing criticism at the American writer David Foster Wallace’s nihilistic worldview.

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Index Locorum

ʿADĪ, YAḤYĀ B. The Reformation of Morals 15: 216n61 107: 50n118 ANSCOMBE, ELIZABETH “The First Person” 1–­19: 187n134 21–­36: 68n20, 109n14 28, 110n18 28–­29: 109n16 34: 110n19 36: 109n17 ʿARABĪ, IBN Fuṣūṣ al-­ḥikam 134: 207n36 al-­Futūḥāt al-­makkiyya II, 684.4: 57n144 passim: 56n142 Tarjumān al-­ashwāq XI, 5; 67: 45n103, 46n106 ARISTOTLE De Anima 412a27: 182n120 412b5: 46n105 Metaphysics 980a1.:205n28 1017b, 1035b.: 46n105 Physics IV, 212a20-­212a21: 27n56 AUGUSTINE De Civitate Dei

9.5–­5 and 14: 189n141 14.5: 189, 189n142 De Trinitate 10.3.5: 87, 87n56 10.8.11: 88, 88n58 10.9.12: 88, 88n59 14.5.7: 89, 89n60 AVICENNA Aḥwāl al-­nafs 183: 26n54 De anima 4–­6: 26n53 I.3: 136n491 I.5 (94.8–­14): 53n127 I.1 (36.49–­37.68): 81n46 IV.4: 190n145 V.1: 190n146 V.7 (162.51–­163.64): 63n203 Ishārāt wa-­l-­tanbīhāt 2:343–­45, 94: 68, 68n19 al-­Ishārāt wa-­al-­tanbīhāt, li-­Abī ʿAlī Ibn Sīnā maʿa sharḥ Naṣīr al-­Dīn al-­Ṭūsī 2: 343–­345: 70, 71n94 3: 347–­348: 76n32 al-­Nukāt wa-­l-­fawāʾid 68–­98, at 73–­76: 25–­26, 26n55 al-­Shifāʾ 378: 211–­212, 212n47

293

294  Index Locorum

CHISHOLM “On the Observability of the Self” 7–­21, at 19–­20: 104n1 8: 108n11 10: 107n9 DASHTAKĪ, GHIYĀTH AL-­DĪN MANṢŪR Ishrāq Hayākil al-­nūr li-­kashf ẓulumāt Shawākil al-­gharūr 93ff.: 113n25 DAVIDSON “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” 42: 263n22 Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective 3–­12, 40–­49, 85–­90, 205–­215: 62n8 87: 62n8 AL-­DAWĀNĪ, JALĀL AL-­DĪN Shawākil al-­ḥūr fī sharḥ Hayākil al-­nūr li-­l-­Suhrawardī 73ff.: 113n25 FOUCAULT The Care of the Self: The History of Sexuality, vol. 3 37–­81: 37n82 Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth xiff: 37n82 xxxix: 209n41 The Hermeneutics of the Subject 9: 37n82 The Subject and Power 771–­795, at 781: 37n83 781–­782: 37n84 GALEN Galen on the Natural Faculties 172n83 Galen on the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body 172n83 Medical Introduction 14.726, 7–­11: 172n82 On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato

SVF 2.806 AL-­GHAZĀLĪ, ABŪ ḤĀMID MUḤAMMAD Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-­dīn 8.1343–­46: 56n140 Kitāb riyāḍat al-­nafs, & Kitāb kasr al-­shahwatayn: Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-­dīn LXVII, 238n139 Qānūn al-­taʾwīl 15: 139n87 HADOT Exercices Spirituels et Philosophie Antique 37n82, 197, 197n2 Philosophy as a Way of Life 83: 204n25 What is Ancient Philosophy? 3: 204n24 HAFEZ The Divan of Hafez: A Bilingual Text, Persian-­English 32–­33: 234, 234n120 HEGEL The Philosophy of History 156–­193: 15n23 HEIDEGGER The Basic Problems of Phenomenology 159: 92, 92n73 Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie 226: 93n73 226ff: 116n32 Sein und Zeit 134, 136: 192n150 141: 192; 192n151 114–­226: 210n43 HIPPOCRATES The Sacred Disease 175: 153, 153n25 HOBBES Leviathan passim: 264n27 HUME An Enquiry concerning Human

Index Locorum  295

Understanding 12–­14: 79, 106n6 142: 79, 106n7 Treatise of Human Nature 657 and Abstract §38: 22, 22n44 I.4.6, 526: 78–­79, 105n4 302: 79, 106n5 HUSSERL Husserliana Band XIX/I Logische Untersuchungen 165: 71, 93n74 Husserliana: Phänomenologische Psychologie 200–­212: 132n71 Logical Investigations, I 273: 71, 93n74 Zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewusstseins 374ff: 132n71 IQBAL, MUHAMMAD Asrār-­i khūdī xxviii–­xxiv: 250n178 xxvii–­xxviii: 251n179 xxi: 253n193 xxi–­xxii: 253n191 The Development of Metaphysics in Persia  35: 130n67 “An Exposition of the Self” 198–­199: 249n174 201–­202: 58n146, 58n148 200: 249n171, 249n172 202: 250n177 203: 58n149, 58n150 Kulliyāt-­i Iqbāl Fārsī 562–­563: 127n58 607: 135n76 739: 247n166 739–­740: 248n167 32–­33: 253n190 Kulliyāt-­i Iqbāl Urdū 521: 248n167 “McTaggart’s Philosophy” 209–­210: 127n58 209: 128n163

The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam 1: 129n66 2: 123n49 15: 124n51, 135n77 33: 137n81 37: 134n74 38: 130n69, 140n91 56: 251n183 79: 139n88 79–­80: 133n73, 140n89 81–­82: 138n82 82: 139n85 85–­86: 254n196 90–­103: 125n55 93: 251n81 94: 252n189 95: 252n184 123: 122n45 144: 122n46 149: 247n165 154: 249n170 156–­157: 251n180 157: 254n197 Stray Reflections 29: 250n176 46: 248n168 79: 248n169 159: 254n195 JAMES “Does Consciousness Exist?” 477–­491, at 491: 136, 136n78 The Principles of Psychology I: 301: 20, 20n35 1: 294–­401: 49n115 I.ix, 237–­248: 136n78 I.ix, 237–­248: 136n78 The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature 230: 204, 204n21 JUNG Two Essays on Analytical Psychology I: 301: 20, 20n36 KANT

296  Index Locorum

Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View 15: 94n75, 96n82 Kritik der reinen Vernunft A107: 95n77 A115: 94, 94n76 footnote to A117: 95, 95n77 A355: 97n87 A398–­399: 97, 97n84 A401: 98n86 A402: 98, 98n86 A407: 98n86 B75: 102n90 B132: 96n81 B134–­135: 95, 95n79 B153–­154: 95n80 B156: 75n245, 100n88 footnote to B158: 97, 97n83 footnote (a) B422, B153–­4 B430: 75n245 Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason 66–­67: 227, 227n97 71: 226n94 AL-­KĀSHĀNĪ, BĀBĀ AFḌAL AL-­DĪN Jāwidān-­nāma 212n48 Muṣannafāt-­i Afḍal al-­Dīn Muḥammad Maraqī Kāshānī 43: 213n50 728: 214n51 LACAN Écrits: A Selection 1–­7: 14n19 LĀHĪJĪ, MUḤAMMAD B. YAḤYĀ Mafātīḥ al-­iʿjāz fī sharḥ-­i Gulshan-­i rāz 233: 252n186 LĀHŪRĪ, ABŪ AL-­ḤASAN KHĀTAMĪ Sharḥ-­i ʿirfāni-­yi ghazal-­hā-­yi Ḥāfiẓ 1:264ff: 234n121 LOCKE An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding 1n1 II.27.ix.: 105, 105n2 II.27.xxvi: 105n3 MACINTYRE After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory 237ff.: 43n100 Against the Self-­Images of the Age Chs. 18–­22: 264n26 Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry 140: 263n22 Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Ch. 1: 264n26 MCDOWELL “Intentionality and Interiority in Wittgenstein” 148–­169: 134n75 Mind and World 46–­47: 102n91 87–­105: 23n48 104: 102n92 111: 102n93 MUKERJI The Nature of Self 175–­176: 91n65 229–­230: 91n68 258: 92n72 312–­313: 91n66 317: 91, 91n69 323: 92n71 MURDOCH The Sovereignty of Good 51: 242, 242n148 NIETZSCHE Beyond Good and Evil 249n172 The Gay Science 335: 230n107 Human, All Too Human 263: 230n109 On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo

Index Locorum  297

I.13:4: 22n45 “Schopenhauer as Educator” 127: 210n42 129: 211n44, 229n105 136–­137: 200n5, 200n6, 200n8 159: 229n106 160–­161: 228n99 162: 229n107 186: 199, 199n4 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 230n108 23–­24: 249n172 PASCAL Pensées et Opuscules 169: 148n13 PHILO Allegories of the Laws 2.22–­23: 171n79 PLATO Alcibiades I 128e–­9a: 208n38 Gorgias 525a: 221n82 Phaedo 64a3–­4: 253n191 Phaedrus 216n61 253e, 67c, 69c: 221n82 Republic 217, 216n61 Theaetetus 173a: 221n82 Timaeus 217, 216n61 PLOTINUS The Enneads I 1.10.5–­13: 214n52 IV.8.1.1–­11: 220n80 I.6.9.7–­25: 221n81 PLUTARCH On Stoic Self-­contradictions 1037F: 173n87 1053D: 174n90 1057A: 173n87

RICOEUR Soi-­même comme un autre 15ff.: 43n100 RUMI Kulliyāt-­i  Shams-­i  Tabrīzī 53–­55: 235n123 Masnavī-­yi maʿnawī I. 4: 236n129 I: 3721–­3733, 3745–­3751, 3787–­ 3809: 260n11 ṢADRĀ, MULLĀ Ajwibat al-­masāʾil al-­kāshāniyya 127: 79, 79n38 128: 79, 79n39 Asrār al-­āyāt wa-­anwār al-­bayyināt 131–­134: 207n35 133: 207, 207n34 al-­Ḥikma al-­mutaʿāliya fi-­l-­asfār al-­ʿaqliyya al-­arbaʿa 1: 23–­25: 219n77 1: 134–­135: 112n24 2: 331ff.: 231n114 3, Chs. 1–­5: 61n3 3: 97–­136: 223n85 3:315: 68n19, 79n31 3: 321: 112n22 3: 408, 435–­436, 501–­506: 112n24 3: 505: 75n30, 75n31, 76n32 3: 526: 111n20 4: 222, 458–­464: 111n24 8: 50–­51, 70–­79: 112n24 8: 79: 116n30 8: 153–­154: 225n90 8: 154: 225n91 8: 156–­157: 222n84 8: 161–­162: 217n65 8: 163: 218n69 8: 263–­264: 226n92 8: 360: 218n73, 219n74, 220n80 8: 360–­361: 219n74 8: 361: 219n75, 219n76 8: 398–­399: 46n104 8: 413: 220n79 9:3–­32: 41n96 9: 39: 224n86

298  Index Locorum

9: 67: 226n93 9: 107: 114n27 9: 119: 217n62 9: 120: 217n63, 217n64 9: 146–­147: 214n54 9: 147: 215n55 9: 168: 218n71 9: 169: 216n60 9: 170: 217n67, 218n68, 218n70 Iksīr al-­ʿārifīn xviiff: 212n48 19: 206, 206n31 36–­37: 206n21 Kasr aṣnām al-­jāhiliyya 11–­12: 225n89 21–­22: 224n87 26–­27: 224n88 al-­Mabdaʾ wa-­l-­maʿād 1: 6: 61–­62, 62n4, 62n5 1: 7: 61–­62, 62n6 Mafātīḥ al-­ghayb 2: 818: 111n21 2: 818, 836, 851–­852, 854–­855, 939–­944, 1003, 1083: 112n24 2: 843: 216n59 2: 945: 205n27 al-­Mashāʿir 24: 219n78 al-­Maẓāhir al-­ilāhiyya fī asrār al-­ ʿulūm al-­kamāliyya 4–­5: 206–­207, 207n32 7: 207n33 13: 231n113 40: 231, 231n110 41: 231, 231n111 72: 231, 231n112 Sharḥ al-­hidāya al-­athīriyya I: 417–­421: 216n56 I: 418–­421: 215n57 al-­Shawāhid al-­rubūbiyya fī manāhij al-­sulūkiyya 135: 252n185 253: 113n25, 113n26 254: 75n31, 79n40, 116n31 Tafsīr sūrat al-­jumuʿa 287–­292: 232n118 290: 232n116

Taʿlīqāt li-­Sharḥ Ḥikmat al-­ishrāq 66ff. 111n21 ŚĀNTIDEVA The Bodhicaryāvatāra 115ff: 208n37 SARTRE Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology liii: 87–­88, 119n38 221–­223: 115n29 “Conscience de soi et connaissance de soi” 49–­91, at 63: 117n34 La transcendance de l’ego 73n26, 117n34 3–­6: 118n37 70–­71: 118n35 L’Être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique 19: 119n38 114, 142–­143, 284: 117n34 L’existentialisme est un humanisme 18n29 The Transcendence of the Ego 23: 118, 118n35 67ff.: 73n26 SCHELLING Philosophische Untersuchungen 205n27 System of Transcendental Idealism 204ff.: 205n27 SEARLE “Consciousness” 557–­578, at 559: 355, 148n12 The Mystery of Consciousness 4–­5: 146, 146n6 11–­12: 152n21 15–­17: 152n20 30–­31: 151n16 30–­32: 151n15 97–­131: 152n21 190: 151n17 189–­190: 151n18 “How to Study Consciousness Scientifically” 1935–­1942, at 1935: 147n8, 147n9

Index Locorum  299

Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind 197ff: 167n68 SENECA Letters from a Stoic 211–­212: 200, 200n9 SEXTUS EMPIRICUS Against the Professors 8.275–­276: 173n87 AL-­SHAHRAZŪRĪ, SHAMS AL-­ DĪN Nuzhat al-­arwāḥ 14: 62n7 SHAKESPEARE Richard III 5.3, 131–­132: 256, 256n1 SHANKARA Bhagavad Gītā Bhāṣya XVIII, 50: 89, 89n62 SINGER Ethics and Intuitions 331–­52: 187n133 The Great Ape Project 28–­41: 61n2 Rethinking Life and Death 175–­176: 61n2 SUHRAWARDĪ The Book of Radiance: Partow Nāma 3: 67n17 Ḥikmat al-­ishrāq 2: 110–­116: 79n39 85: 172, 52–­53, 66n15 85–­86: 68n19 Majmūʿah-­yi muṣannafāt-­i Shaykh-­i Ishrāq passim: 41n95 passim: 65n14 Bustān al-­qulūb

3: 363–­364: 71n25 Hayākil al-­nūr

3: 85: 184, 57–­58, 74n27 al-­Talwīḥāt

1: 70–­74, 116: 77n34

TAYLOR, CHARLES “Atomism” 187–­210: 264n25 “Critical Notice of Martha C. Nussbaum” 805–­814: 260n9 Philosophy and the Human Sciences pt. 1: 264n26 Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity 3–­52: 35n77 49–­51: 263n23 143–­198: 11n6 115–­125: 13n15 THĀNAVĪ, ASHRAF ʿALĪ al-­Takashshuf ʿan muhimmāt al-­ taṣawwuf 45–­80: 235n126 al-­Tanbīh al-­ṭaribī fi tanzīh Ibn al-­ ʿArabī passim, 236n130 Ashraf al-­tafāsīr 2: 325: 236n127 2: 325–­327: 236n128 4: 295–­297: 236n129 Bawādir al-­nawādir 94–­177: 235n126 94, 109, 129, 131, 165, 177, 454–­ 464: 236n131 Haqīqat al-­ṭarīqa 444ff.: 238n139 455–­456: 238n138 464–­465: 237n132 535: 238n137 ʿIrfān-­i Ḥāfiẓ 85: 234n121 TOCQUEVILLE Democracy in America II.2: 257n2 WALĪ ALLĀH, SHĀH Alṭāf al-­quds 14–­15: 180n116 15: 180n117 23: 55, 55n135 24: 56n137

300  Index Locorum

35: 240n144 35–­36: 186n130 38–­39: 185n127 39: 54n132, 244n157 39–­40: 185n128 40: 185n129, 186n131 41: 186n132 43–­44: 243n154 47: 239n140 52–­53: 245n159 73–­74: 55, 55n134, 235n125 74: 56n139 77: 179n99 79: 53n124, 241n147 79–­80: 195n157 80: 194n156 81–­82: 244n158 82–­83: 195n158 83: 243n152 87: 240n144 90: 242n151 91: 193, 193n154 98: 240n144 99–­100: 244n156 108–­109: 250n150 112: 241n145 113: 55, 55n133 123: 52n123 125: 245n162 126: 85, 85n55 133: 54, 54n129 146: 186n130 al-­Budūr al-­bāzigha 15: 53, 53n125 28–­31, 171–­192: 166n66 38: 53, 53n126, 182n119 39: 467–­468, 183n123, 138–­139, 194n155 Ḥujjat Allāh al-­bāligha 1: 38: 182n121 1: 44: 243n154 1: 65: 182n119 1: 66: 183n124

1: 100: 243n153 1: 109: 241n147 al-­Khayr al-­kathīr 55–­57: 83n49 56: 183n122 al-­Qawl al-­jamīl 105, 155: 55n136 al-­Tafhīmāt al-­ilāhiyya 1: 225: 54, 54n130, 81, 81n45 1: 229: 129, 181n118 1: 229–­231: 181n118, 184n125 1: 232: 184n126 1: 233: 85, 85n54 1: 235: 84, 84n50 1: 243: 245n161 1: 248: 245n160 1: 251: 84n51 1: 251: 84, 84n51 I: 23, 45–­47, 51–­56, 71–­73, 161–­ 163, 224, 225, 260–­261, 307, 324, 326, 329, 341: 166n66 II: 96ff: 166n66 2: 46: 80n43 2: 46–­47: 81n44 2: 113–­114: 63–­64, 83n49 WITTGENSTEIN Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology I: 108n12 Philosophical Investigations 108, §281: 169n74 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology II: 108n12 Tractatus Logico-­Philosophicus 5.632, 5.64: 108 YAZDĪ, MAHDĪ HĀʾIRĪ The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philosophy 55: 77n33 75ff.: 64n12

Index of Names Abhinavagupta, 245 ʿAdī, Yaḥyā b., 50n118, 216n61 Adorno, Theodor W., 38, 38n88 Aetius, 174n89 Allāh, Shāh Ahl, 176 Althusser, Louis, 14, 36 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 4, 68n20, 109, 109n14, 109n16, 109n17, 110, 110n18, 110n19, 187n134 ʿArabī, Ibn, 28, 45n103, 46, 46n106, 52n122, 56, 56n142, 57, 57n144, 80n42, 84, 122, 207n36, 236, 236n130, 254n195 Arendt, Hannah, 264n24 Aristotle, 27, 27n56, 46n105, 165, 166n66, 182n120, 187, 187n135, 188, 188n137, 188n138, 188n139, 189, 189n140, 190, 190n146, 193, 205n28, 206, 214, 215, 239n141 Asad, Talal, 39n89, 204n26 Augustine, 4, 37n82, 61, 86, 87, 87n56, 88, 88n58, 88n59, 89, 89n60, 90, 99, 101, 189, 189n141, 189n142, 195 Averroes, 254, 254n194 Avicenna, 4, 26, 26n53, 26n54, 26n55, 53, 53n127, 62, 65, 65n13, 68n19, 70, 71, 71n24, 76n32, 81, 81n46, 81n47, 82n48, 122, 130n67, 165, 166, 188, 189, 190, 190n154,190n146, 193, 211, 212n47, 214, 215, 216, 216n58, 217, 223n85, 254n195

al-­Barakāt, Abū, 81n47 Bellah, Robert N. 257n2 Bergson, Henri, 101, 121, 123, 123n48, 124, 124n50, 125, 126, 128n64, 129, 129n66, 130, 130n68, 132, 136n80, 250 Bhabha, Homi, 38, 38n87 Bradley, F. H., 124, 125, 125n54, 125n55, 126 Brentano, Franz, 116 Buber, Martin, 79n40 Butler, Judith, 14, 14n20 Camus, Albert, 17, 17n29 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 39n89 Chalmers, David, 29n60, 146 Chisholm, Roderick, 101, 104n1, 107, 107n9, 108n11 Chomsky, Noam 134n75 Churchland, Paul, 127, 128n61, 150, 151, 151n15 Corbin, Henry, 41n95, 175n97, 175n98, 176n101, 176n103, 224n86 Cottingham, John, 74n28, 202, 203n20, 204, 204n22, 204n23, 205 Crick, Francis, 128, 128n61, 145, 146n4, 152, 152n23, 152n24, 153, 153n25, 154n26, 155, 155n31, 155n32, 155n33, 155n34, 155n35, 156, 156n37, 161 Dalai Lama, 258, 258n5, 258n6, 261 Damasio, Antonio, 34, 34n73, 34n76, 47, 47n109, 47n110, 48, 48n111, 301

302  Index of Names

48n112, 48n113, 48n114, 144, 144n1, 146n4, 153, 158, 161 Darwin, Charles, 187n133, 250 Dashtakī, Ghiyāth al-­Dīn Manṣūr, 113n25 Davidson, Donald, 62, 62n8, 90 al-­Dawānī, Jalāl al-­Dīn, 113n25 Deleuze, Gilles, 14, 14n20, 123 Dennett, Daniel, 1, 23, 23n47, 29n60, 30, 127, 127n59, 128, 152n21 Descartes, René, 34n73, 34n76, 47, 49, 74, 74n28, 77, 77n33, 92, 99, 108, 144, 209 Dīnānī, Ghulām Ḥusayn Ibrāhīmī, 130n67 Dreyfus, Hubert, 265, 265n29 Dworkin, Ronald, 203n16 Edelman, Gerald, 146, 146n4, 153, 154, 154n29, 155, 156, 156n36, 156n37, 156n38, 157, 157n39, 157n40, 157n41, 157n42, 158, 158n43, 158n44, 158n45, 158n46, 158n47, 159, 159n48, 160, 160n51, 160n52, 160n53, 160n54, 160n55, 160n56, 161, 167 Eliade, Mircea, 177n106 Einstein, Albert, 27n57, 123n48 Emerson, Ralph W., 249, 257n2 Empedocles, 218, 219 Erasistratus, 165 Evans, Gareth, 68n20 al-­Fārābī, 50n118 Feyerabend, Paul, 32n67 Flanagan, Owen, 127, 127n60 Forman, Robert, 257n3 Foucault, Michel, 14, 36, 36n82, 37, 37n83, 37n84, 37n85, 204n25, 209, 209n41 Freeman, Walter, 146n4, 153, 154, 159, 159n49, 159n50 Fukuyama, Francis, 15n23 Galen, 165, 165n64, 166, 170, 171, 172, 172n82, 172n83, 173n84, 174n89,

179, 179n113, 179n114, 182, 183, 188, 218n73 Gandhi, Mohandas, 90, 200n7 Ganeri, Jonardon, xii, 9, 9n1, 16, 21, 21n40, 28n59, 90n63 Garfield, Jay, 16, 90, 90n63, 90n64 Gazzaniga, Michael, 29n60, 144, 144n2, 145n3, 146n4, 153, 199n3 Gerson, Lloyd P., 13n15, 16, 16n25, 17, 17n26, 17n27, 50, 50n119 al-­Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad, 56, 56n140, 139n87, 170, 175, 232n117, 236, 238n139, 254n195 Gödel, Kurt, 151n19 Gopnik, Alison 30n61 Guattari, Felix, 14, 14n20 Hadot, Pierre, 37n82, 197, 197n2, 198, 198n3, 199, 199n3, 204, 204n24, 204n25 Hafez, 234, 234n120, 236, 262n19, 278 Hegel, G. W. F., 15, 15n23, 16, 35, 70n21, 121, 122n45, 125, 126 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 12n10, 61, 73, 86, 92, 92n73, 93, 93n73, 99, 100, 116, 116n32, 190, 191, 191n147, 191n148, 191n149, 192, 192n150, 192n151, 210n43 Heisenberg, Werner, 122 Hippocrates, 153, 153n25, 174n89 Hobbes, Thomas, 264, 264n27, 265, 265n28 Horkheimer, Max, 38, 38n88 Hume, David, 1, 1n1, 1n2, 4, 21, 22n44, 91, 91n67, 92, 99, 104, 104n1, 105, 105n4, 106, 106n5, 106n6, 106n7, 106n8, 107, 107n9, 108, 110, 111, 140, 150 Husserl, Edmund, 73n26, 86, 92, 93, 93n74, 114n28, 116, 132, 132n71 Ibn al-­Nafīs, 166, 189 Iqbal, Muhammad, 4, 57, 58, 59, 101, 121, 122, 122n43, 122n44, 122n45, 122n46, 123, 123n49, 124, 124n51, 125n52, 125n55, 126, 127n58, 128,

Index of Names  303

128n63, 128n65, 129, 129n66, 130, 130n67, 130n69, 131, 133, 133n73, 134, 134n74, 135, 135n76, 135n77, 136, 137, 137n81, 138, 138n82, 138n83, 139, 139n85, 139n86, 139n88, 140, 140n89, 140n91, 143, 230, 247, 247n165, 247n166, 248, 248n167, 248n168, 248n169, 248n170, 249, 249n170, 249n171, 249n172, 249n174, 250, 250n175, 250n176, 250n177, 250n178, 251, 251n179, 251n180, 251n181, 251n182, 251n183, 252, 252n184, 252n187, 252n188, 252n189, 253, 253n190, 253n191, 253n193, 254, 254n195, 254n196, 254n197, 255 Iṣḥāq, Ḥunayn b., 165, 189 James, William, 1, 20, 20n35, 48, 49, 49n115, 121, 127, 136, 136n78, 136n79, 137, 138, 140, 143, 203, 204n21 John of the Cross, 243n155 Jung, Carl, 1, 20, 20n36 Kant, Immanuel, xiii, 4, 16n24, 27, 37, 51, 61, 74, 74n28, 86, 93, 94, 94n75, 94n76, 95, 95n77, 95n78, 95n79, 95n80, 96, 96n81, 96n82, 97, 97n83, 97n84, 98, 98n85, 98n86, 99, 99n87, 100, 100n88, 101, 101n89, 102, 102n90, 102n92, 103, 104n1, 122, 123, 123n47, 124, 125, 129, 136, 169, 187, 199, 200, 226, 226n94, 227, 227n97, 227n98, 228, 230, 231, 250, 264n26 al-­Kāshānī, Bābā Afḍal al-­Dīn, 212, 212n48, 213, 213n50, 214n51, 217 Katz, Steven, 257n3 Kelly, Sean, 265, 265n29 Klein, Stanley, 79, 80, 80n41 Koch, Christof, 145, 146, 146n4, 146n5, 153, 154n26, 155, 155n31, 155n32, 155n33, 155n34, 155n35, 156, 156n37, 161 Korsgaard, Christine, 42, 42n97, 42n98, 42n99 Kripke, Saul, 108, 108n12

Kubrā, Najm al-­Dīn, 175, 175n95 Kuhn, Thomas, 32 Lacan, Jacques, 14, 14n19, 38 Lāhījī, Muḥammad b. Yaḥyā, 252, 252n186 Lāhurī, Abū al-­Ḥasan Khātamī, 234n121 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 27 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 123 Libet, Benjamin, 146n4 Locke, John, 1n1, 92, 105, 105n2, 105n3, 263 Long, Anthony A., 1n3, 16, 171n79, 171n80, 172n80, 172n81, 172n82, 173n85, 173n86, 173n87, 174n89, 174n90, 212n46 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 43n100, 263n22, 264, 264n26 Marx, Karl, 36 Massignon, Louis, 175n92 McDowell, John, 4, 23n48, 68n20, 101, 102, 102n91, 102n92, 102n93, 134n75, 239n141 Mead, George H., 36, 36n79, 36n80, 60 Merleau-­Ponty, Maurice, 73n26, 123 Metzinger, Thomas, 149n14, 201, 202, 202n14, 202n15, 203 Minkowski, Hermann, 27n57 Mukerji, A.C., 4, 61, 63n9, 86, 90, 90n63, 91, 91n65, 91n66, 91n68, 91n69, 92n71, 92n72, 101 Mullā Ṣadrā, 4, 14, 18n30, 25, 41, 41n96, 44, 46n104, 51, 61, 61n3, 62n3, 62n4, 62n5, 62n6, 63n10, 67, 68n19, 74, 75n30, 75n31, 76n32, 79, 79n38, 79n39, 79n40, 80, 81, 86, 90, 99, 101, 111, 111n21, 112n22, 113n25, 113n26, 114n27, 116n30, 116n31, 131, 135, 191n149, 199n3, 205, 205n27, 206n29, 206n31, 206n32, 207n33, 207n34, 207n35, 212n48, 214, 214n54, 215n56, 215n57, 216n59, 216n60, 217n62, 217n63, 217n64, 217n65, 217n67, 218n68, 218n69, 218n70, 218n71,

304  Index of Names

Mullā Ṣadrā (continued) 218n72, 218n73, 219n74, 219n75, 219n76, 219n77, 219n78, 220n79, 220n80, 222n84, 223n85, 224n86, 224n87, 224n88, 225n89, 225n90, 225n91, 226n92, 226n93, 231n110, 231n111, 231n112, 231n113, 231n114, 232n116, 232n118, 245, 252, 252n185, 254 Murad, Yusuf, 56 Murdoch, Iris, 242, 242n148 Nagel, Thomas, 29n60, 32, 32n70, 67n18, 133, 150, 203n16 Naqshband, Bahā al-­Dīn, 176 Nehamas, Alexander, 228, 229, 229n102, 229n103, 229n104 Nemesius, 171n79, 218n73 Newton, Isaac, 27 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 1, 1n2, 21, 22, 22n45, 121, 126, 199, 199n4, 200, 200n5, 200n6, 200n8, 210, 210n42, 211n44, 226, 228n99, 228n101, 229, 229n101, 229n102, 229n103, 229n104, 229n105, 229n106, 229n107, 230, 230n108, 230n109, 247, 248, 248n170, 249, 249n170, 249n171, 249n172, 250, 250n178, 255 Nussbaum, Martha, 188n137, 259, 259n9, 260, 260n10 Parfit, Derek, 21n43 Pārsā, Muḥammad, 175, 176n100 Pascal, Blaise, 148n13 Penrose, Roger, 151, 151n19, 152n19, 154, 154n30 Philo, 171n79 Pinker, Steven, 47n109 Plato, 13, 13n15, 16, 16n25, 17, 17n26, 17n27, 174n89, 187, 187n135, 188, 188n137, 189, 190, 208, 208n38, 216n61, 217, 219, 221, 221n82, 252, 253, 253n191 Plotinus, 50n120, 87n56, 212n46, 214, 214n52, 215, 218, 218n73, 220, 221, 221n81, 221n83

Plutarch, 173n87, 173n88, 174n90 Putnam, Hilary, 134, 134n75 Rawls, John, 262, 263, 263n21, 263n23, 264n25, 264n27 al-­Rāzī, Fakhr al-­Dīn, 81n47, 122 Rāzī, Najm al-­Dīn, 175, 175n96 Ricoeur, Paul, 43, 43n100, 43n101 Rumi, 122n45, 234, 235n123, 236, 236n129, 248, 260, 260n11, 262n19 Ryle, Gilbert, 127, 127n59, 153 Sandel, Michael, 264 Śāntideva, 208n37 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 4, 17, 17n29, 18n29, 73, 111, 114, 114n28, 115n29, 116, 117, 117n34, 118, 118n35, 118n36, 118n37, 119n38, 123, 190, 191n147, 191n148 Schelling, F. W. J., 205n27 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 199n4, 200, 200n5, 200n6, 200n7, 210, 210n42, 211n44, 228, 228n99, 229, 229n101, 229n105, 229n106, 229n107 Scruton, Roger, 40, 40n92 Searle, John, 146, 146n6, 147, 147n8, 147n9, 148, 148n12, 149, 150, 151, 151n15, 151n16, 151n17, 151n18, 152, 152n20, 152n21, 167, 167n68 Seneca, 37n82, 200, 200n9, Sen, Amartya, 35n78 Sextus Empiricus, 173n87 Shabistarī, 128 Shāhjahānabādī, Kalīm Allāh, 237, 237n133 Shakespeare, William, 256n1, 264 al-­Shahrazūrī, Shams al-­Dīn, 62, 62n7 Shankara, 4, 61, 86, 89, 89n62, 90, 99 al-­Shaʿrānī, ʿAbd al-­Wahhāb 236n130 Shikūh, Dārā, 176n105 Shoemaker, Sydney, 68n20, 77n35, 78, 78n36, 108, 109n13 Simmel, Georg, 36, 36n81 Simnānī, ʿAlā al-­Dawla, 52n122, 175, 175n98, 176, 176n104 Singer, Peter, 61n2, 187n133 Snow, C.P., 147, 147n7

Index of Names  305

Solomon, Robert, 192, 192n152, 192n153, 195, 201, 202, 202n11, 202n12, 202n13, 203 Sorabji, Richard, 26n51, 40, 40n91, 50n118, 200n7, 217n61 Strawson, Galen, 1, 9, 9n2, 18, 18n30, 21, 21n41, 28, 28n59 Strawson, P. F., 101, 102, 103n94, 109, 109n15 Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-­Dīn, 4, 41, 41n95, 61, 62, 65, 65n14, 66, 66n15, 67, 67n17, 68n19, 71, 71n25, 72, 73, 73n26, 74, 74n27, 75, 77n34, 79n39, 80, 81, 82, 82n48, 86, 88, 89, 93, 99, 101, 110, 111n21, 113n25, 116, 130n67, 130n67, 131 Tagore, Rabindranath, 90, 199n3, 262n19 Tallis, Raymond, 31n65, 154n27, 162, 162n58, 162n59, 163, 164n61, 167, 167n69, 168n70, 169n76 Taylor, Charles, 10, 11n6, 13, 13n15, 35n77, 259n9, 263n23, 264, 264n25, 264n26 Thānavī, Ashraf ʿAlī, 234, 234n121, 235, 235n124, 235n126, 236, 236n127, 236n128, 236n129, 236n130, 236n131, 237, 237n132, 238, 238n137, 238n138, 238n139, 251 Thompson, Evan, 31, 31n66, 32, 92n70, 149n14, 169n76 de Tocqueville, Alexis, 257n2 Tomasello, Michael, 60n1 Tye, Michael, 119, 120 van der Veer, Peter, 15, 15n22 Varela, Francisco, 32, 32n68 Vasubandhu, 205n27 Vivekananda, Swami, 90

Walī Allāh, Shāh, 4, 14, 15, 18, 51, 52, 52n123, 53, 3n124, 53n125, 53n126, 54, 54n129, 54n130, 54n132, 55, 55n133, 55n134, 55n135, 55n136, 56, 56n137, 56n139, 57, 58, 80, 80n42, 80n43, 81, 81n44, 81n45, 82, 83, 83n49, 84, 84n50, 84n51, 84n52, 84n53, 85, 85n54, 85n55, 101, 166, 166n66, 170, 171, 172, 174, 175n94, 176, 176n99, 178, 179, 180, 180n115, 180n116, 180n117, 181, 181n118, 182, 182n119, 182n121, 183, 183n122, 183n123, 183n124, 184, 184n125, 184n126, 185, 185n127, 185n128, 185n129, 186, 186n130, 186n131, 186n132, 188, 190, 193, 193n154, 194, 194n155, 194n156, 195, 195n157, 195n158, 196, 235n125, 239, 239n140, 240, 240n144, 241, 241n145, 241n147, 242, 242n150, 242n151, 243, 243n152, 243n153, 243n154, 244, 244n156, 244n157, 244n158, 245, 245n159, 245n160, 245n161, 245n162, 251, 257 Walzer, Michael, 264 Weyl, Hermann, 32, 33n71 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 4, 30n60, 108, 108n12, 109, 109n13, 110, 134n75, 169n74 Wolf, Susan, 239, 261, 261n16, 261n17 Yazdī, Mahdī Hāʾirī, 64n12, 77n33, 82n48 Zahavi, Dan, 1, 4, 21, 21n42, 28n59, 29n60, 40n93, 41, 41n94, 70n21, 73n26, 114n28, 115n29, 117n34, 132, 132n71, 132n72, 138n84 Zeki, Semir, 168, 168n71

Index of Subjects

Affekt, 191 agency, 2–­19, 36–­37, 39, 43, 49, 54, 59, 127, 162, 185, 215, 223, 259 aham, 245–­246 ʿālam, 85, 253 anger, 185, 188–­190, 193–­-­194, 199, 210, 212, 214, 217, 243, 260, 261. See also emotion anima, 26n51 Apperzeption, 95–­96 al-­ʿaql bi-­l-­fiʿl, 41 artificial intelligence, 137, 151 ātman, 89, 125 autos, 26n51 badan, 52n122, 181–­182, 218, 219–­220 being-­toward-­beyond-­death, 246–­254 body, 170-­186; acquired body, 176. See also subtle bodies brain. See neuroscience of consciousness cakra, 171, 176–­177, 178, 240 Christianity, 13 circle of the self, 222–­223, 226 cogito, 74, 77n33, 95, 119, 280, 284 conscience non positionnelle, 118. See also consciousness conscience non-­thétique, 118. See also consciousness conscience préréflexif, 116–­117. See also consciousness

consciousness: “animal-­electricity” model of, 164–­167, 195; as organizing principle, 137–­138, 143; “core” vs. “extended,” 48; and the divine, 119; history of Greek models of, 171–­ 174; history of Islamic models of, 65–­67, 174–­176; intersubjective, 14, 114–­116, 119, 135; Iqbal’s “three witnesses,” 134–­135; Mukerji’s theoretical taxonomy of, 91–­92; multi-­modal structure of, 148, 149–­150, 159, 161; non-­egological, 73n26, 117n34, 120, 137, 277; non-­reflective, 39, 70, 75, 86, 115–­117, 119, 121, 123, 135, 143, 149, 150, 161 (see self-­knowledge); onto-­phenomenological structure of, 4, 108, 111–­112, 140; pre-­reflective, 70, 73, 117, 119, 292; primary vs. higher-­order, 72, 112, 113, 114, 115–­116; Searle’s definition of, 148; stream of, 49, 105, 131, 132, 155; transcendental, 94–­95; unity of, 96n82, 140, 154, 169. See also self “dark night” of the self, 243, 279 Dasein, 92, 93, 97, 100, 116, 191, 192 deep sleep, 91, 92n70 deployed existence, 80, 84–­85 descriptive and normative levels of the self, 3, 33, 43, 46, 47–­48, 60, 143, 197, 198, 201, 225, 229, 240, 256; bio-­ physiological level, 3, 4, 307

308  Index of Subjects

descriptive and normative levels of the self (continued) 31, 33–­34, 39, 46, 48, 59, 60, 65, 111, 121, 143, 144, 161, 197, 225; cognito-­ experiential level, 3, 4, 33–­34, 38, 39, 40, 59, 111, 143, 197, 224, 225; socio-­cultural level, 3, 4, 33, 35, 38–­ 39, 42–­43, 44, 46, 59, 60, 61, 111, 121, 143, 197, 209, 224, 225, 230, 256 dhawq, 82, 180 dhikr, 174, 193, 225, 232n117, 236. See also spiritual exercises divine names, 231, 232–­233 Divine Self, 85, 125, 135, 136, 206, 231 dualism, 32, 65, 145 ego, 50, 58, 98, 110, 117, 125, 127, 130, 133, 138, 139, 140, 208, 228, 229, 230, 235, 242, 249, 250, 251, 252, 257 Eigentlichkeit, 210n43 emotion, 186–­195; conceptual history of, 187–­191; and meaning of life, 192; and phenomenology, 190–­192; in Walī Allāh’s philosophy, 186–­187, 193–­195. See also spiritual emotion empirisch Bewußtsein, 94 Enlightenment, 1, 16, 38, 278 Erschlossenheit, 191 ethics: virtue ethics, 2, 187, 239n141, 269; Kantian ethics, 187, spiritual ethics, 216, 222, 235; utilitarian ethics, 187 Eurocentrism, 15, 146 evolution, 124n50, 159, 186, 250, 251–­ 252 fardiyya (individuality), 53 first-­person perspective, 18, 28–­33, 133, 247 freedom (including autonomy), 12, 17, 39, 42, 125, 126, 204, 242, 246, 250–­255 Gefühl, 191 “ghost in the machine,” 127, 153 God, 18, 57, 81, 82, 83, 135, 171, 180,

193, 207, 208, 212, 217, 224, 226, 227, 250, 252, 255 göttlich Mensch, 226–­227 Heisenberg uncertainty principle, 122 human flourishing, 2, 4, 5, 6, 196, 198, 201, 210–­221, 233, 246, 254, 258, 259, 260, 265 human vulnerability, 263 hylomorphism, 170 huwiyya, 26n51, 45n102, 46; huwiyya wāḥida, 225. See also nafs Hypokeimenon, 51 das Ich, 93, 96, 97, 229 das: Ich denke, 96–­97 identity (socio-­cultural), 13, 17, 35, 37, 43, 45, 46 ʿilm, 61. See also self-­knowledge al-­ʿilm al-­ḥuḍūrī, 54, 78, 80, 180 al-­ʿilm al-­ḥuṣūlī, 78, 80 ʿilm al-­nafs, 51 imagination, 27–­28, 41, 50, 54, 78, 85, 94, 137, 183, 218 immunity to error through misidentification (IEM), 81 immunology, 34 individualism. See individuality individuality, 5, 37, 53, 182, 251, 252, 257, 265 inner Sinn, 94, 100n245 das innere Zeitbewusstsein, 132 insān, 181, 207, 245; al-­insān al-­kāmil, 226, 231. See also the perfect human intentionality, 31, 34, 39, 116, 156, 161, 167, 168, 194 intuition, 95, 96–­97, 99, 102, 123–­124, 129 ipséité, 117n34 jism (body), 182–­183. See also body jivan-­mukta, 226 al-­khajāla, 114. See also shame khūdī, 57–­59, 127. See also nafs/self

Index of Subjects  309

laṭāʾif: akhfā, 52, 83, 175; anāniyya kubrā, 52, 240; ʿaql, 175, 184–­185, 240, 243; ḥajar-­i baḥt, 52, 85; history of, 174–­175; khafī, 52, 83, 175; nafs, 176, 182, 183, 184, 185; qālab, 175–­176, qalb, 175, 183, 184, 185, 240, 243; rūḥ, 24, 52-­55, 56, 175, 190, 240n144, 242, 244; sirr, 52, 175, 240n144, 244 liberalism, 262–­264 maʿrifat al-­nafs (self-­knowledge), 25, 62n7 Mannigfaltig, 96 materialism, 247, 249 meaning of life/existence, 2, 192–­193, 233, 257–­261 mental states, 30, 51, 75, 101, 121, 134, 137, 139, 140, 186, 187, 209 modes of consciousness, 104, 111, 114, 115–­120, 131, 219 “moral saints,” 261–­262 muḥāsaba-­yi nafs (self-­examination), 244 mujarrad, 54, 83, 220. See also tajrīd nāḍī, 176–­177, 178 nafs: anāniyya, 24, 26n51, 52; as “self” in Islamic philosophy, 23–­26, 51–­59 (see also “self”); dhāt, 24–­25, 26n51, 52; ḥaqīqat-­i insān, 52, 245; khūd, 24, 25, 52, 53, 85, 135, 195, 234, 244; khudī, 57–­59, 127, 130n67, 235n124; nafs ādamī, 52; al-­nafs al-­insāniyya, 45, 52; nafs ammāra, 52, 57, 233, 235, 236; nafs bahīma, 52; nafs kullī, 52; nafs muṭmaʾinna, 52; nafs nāṭiqa, 24, 52; nafs shahwānī, 52; rūh ḥaywānī, 52; rūḥ malakūtī, 52; ṭabīʿat-­i bashar, 52; wajh, 26n51 narrative self, 43, 159 nasama, 166n66, 170, 171, 172, 180, 181, 182–­184. See also pneuma nashaʾāt, 41, 45, 225 neurobiological theories of the self: “animal electricity” theory, 164–­167,

195; anthropomorphization of the brain, 145, 154n28, 162, 168, 169; the binding problem, 154, 158 (see neural emergentism); computational theories, 145, 151, 157; double-­aspect theory, 145, 167; eliminativism, 3n7, 145, 150; Global Workspace theory, 145, 156, 158 (see neural emergentism); Hodgkin-­Huxley model, 163–­164, 195; identity thesis, 145, 170; “integrated information” approach, 145, 153, 156, 159 (see neural emergentism); nerve impulses, 162–­170, 195; neural correlates of consciousness, 145, 168n71, 169, 187; neural emergentism, 145, 153, 155–­ 156, 161, 164, 170 neuroscience of consciousness, 144, 145, 146, 147, 150, 154, 156, 161, 162, 167, 169 onto-­phenomenological structure of consciousness, 4, 108, 111, 140 pantheism, 252 perfect human, 224, 226, 228, 230–­234, 247, 249, 250, 251, 258, 259, 260. See also al-­insān al-­kāmil personal identity, 105, 112, 140n90, 152, 230, 282 philosophy: Advaita Vedanta, 89, 90, 91–­93, 226, 288; analytic, 1, 68n20, 90, 108, 209, 216n58; Aristotelian, 46, 53, 54, 82n48, 102, 165, 166, 170, 182, 187, 189, 194, 239; British Idealism, 125–­126, 128; Buddhist, xiii, 18, 23, 178, 205, 208, 229, 258, 262, 290; Cartesian, 36, 62, 74, 98, 102, 107, 119, 137, 153, 263; Chinese, 177, 239, 260, 261; existentialist, 17, 115; Greek, 13, 20, 51, 121, 164, 172, 177, 179, 187, 260; Indian, 21, 81, 89, 90, 91; Islamic, 4, 5, 47, 61, 64, 65, 77, 130n67, 191, 211, 260; Kantian, 37, 51, 93–­103, 104, 122, 129, 187, 226, 227; Neoplatonic, 54, 214, 217; Nietzschean, 22, 202, 228–­229, 230, 247, 249, 250, 253; non-­Western, 10, 63,

310  Index of Subjects

philosophy (continued) 146, 170, 195, 200; phenomenology, 1, 3, 4, 28, 73, 84, 92, 117; Platonic, 13, 16, 50, 189, 202, 216, 217, 253n191, 254; Stoic, 5, 170, 171–­174, 182, 208; Sufi, 3, 4, 5, 54, 56, 57, 80, 170, 174–­ 177, 178, 179, 180, 211, 237, 238, 241, 247, 251, 261; Yogic, 171, 176–­178, 196n159, 238, 260 physicalism, 3, 32, 104, 171 physics, 27, 30, 32, 123n48, 152, 171, 225 pneuma, 164–­176, 177, 180, 181–­184, 195, 196; psychikon, 165, 166; zootikon, 165, 166 postcolonial, 38, 39 “presential knowledge,” 54, 78, 79, 80–­85, 180, 219 primären Selbst-­Erschließung, 93 protention. See time-­consciousness psychoanalysis, 56, 201 qi, 177 “representational knowledge,” 78, 80, 82, 83. See also presential knowledge res cogitans, 102, 209 res extensa. See res cogitans retention. See time-­consciousness scientific method, 30–­32 scientism, 32 Seele, 98 Selbst, 92–­93 Selbstanschauung, 97 Selbstbewusstsein, 95 Selbsterkenntnis, 93 self: and the body, 179–­186; appreciative vs. efficient, 130–­131; denial of, 21–­22, 47n109; “bundle theory” of, 4, 106, 140; multidimensionality of, 3, 34, 44, 47, 186, 197; narrative self, 43, 159; and personhood, 35, 49, 50, 173, 228; “privileged access” to (see what-­it-­is-­like-­ness); and spiritual

exercises (see spirituality); and unity of consciousness, 133–­140; vs. soul, 25–­26. See also consciousness; descriptive and normative levels of the self; neurobiological theories of the self self-­knowledge: as abiding presence, 78–­85; introspection, 65, 69–­70, 74, 78, 103, 104, 107, 110, 111, 123, 129, 143, 146, 149, 161; Kantian dilemma for, 93–­103; non-­reflective, 86–­93; paradox of, 4, 61–­70, 74, 78; relationship to consciousness, 111–­117; se nosse vs. se cogitare, 87–­88; and spirituality, 197–­210 self-­perfection, 2, 19, 206, 210, 211, 217, 221–­233, 255, 257, 259, 261 self-­transcendence, 5, 201, 202, 205, 239, 240, 257, 260 shame, 114–­115, 135, 185, 193, 241 shuʿūr (consciousness): 56, 111n20, 113, 114, 134, 135; idrāk, 41, 54; ʿilmunā bi-­dhātinā, 112; la-­shuʿūr, 56; shuʿūr bi-­l-­dhāt, 25, 113, 217; shuʿūr-­i maḥḍ, 82–­83 social constructionism, 37–­37, 103, 104 soul. See nafs and self space, theories of, 27–­28, 177–­178 “spectrum” theorizing, 3, 4, 6, 24, 27–­ 28, 33, 53, 57, 59, 186, 197, 235 spiritual exercises: 5, 193, 197, 199, 211, 212n46, 213, 231, 234, 235, 239, 240, 244, 257, 264, 265; invocation, 193, 232, 236, 237, 238; meditation, 5, 130, 196, 199, 203, 231, 233–­238, 255; prayer, 203, 232, 237; sculpting the self, 5, 211, 220–­221, 235, 257, 260; self-­cultivation, 2, 5, 37, 49, 198, 201, 205, 208, 210–­221, 222, 246, 255, 257, 259. See also self-­knowledge spirituality, 197–­205. See also spiritual exercises Stimmung, 191 Subjecktivität, 51 Subjectivité, 51 Subjekt, 96

Index of Subjects  311

Subjectivity. See self and self-­ knowledge subtle bodies, 5, 177–­178, 179–­186, 195. See also laṭāʾif ṣūra: ṣūra dhihniyya, 112; al-­ṣūrat al-­ḥissiyya al-­ṭabīʿiyya, 41; ṣūra ṭabīʿiyya, 225 “surd factor,” 263n22 Svaprakāśa, 91, 93, 128

time-­consciousness, 132, 140 transzendental Bewußtsein, 95

taʾalluh, 62, 206 tajrīd (disembodiment, disengagement), 212, 212n49. See also mujarrad Tantra, 178n111 tathāgata, 226 theoretical vs. practical intellect, 215–­ 216 time, theories of: Bergsonian, 124, 131, 132; Husserlian, 132; Minkowskian, 26n63; objective (serial, clock time) vs. subjective, 131

wajd (spiritual emotion), 185, 186, 190, 191, 193–­195 Wesen, 98, 229 what-­it-­is-­like-­ness (for-­me-­ness, first-­person exclusiveness), 21, 67, 119n41, 133 wujūd: 83, 112, 219, 223; al-­wujūd al-­munbasiṭ, 80, 84, 223, al-­wujūd al-­muṭlaq, 231

Übermensch, 226, 230, 249, 250, 265 Urimpression, 132 universal soul, 54, 55, 83, 84, 85 virtues, 5, 188, 202, 212, 231, 233, 244, 257

Yoga, 176–­178, 238, 260