I take the expression “anthropocosmic vision” from Tu Weiming, Professor of Chinese History and Philosophy and Confucian Studies at Harvard University, and Director of the Harvard-Yenching Institute. Professor Tu has used it for many years to encapsulate the East Asian worldview and stress its salient differences with the theocentric and anthropocentric worldviews of the West.17 By saying that the Chinese traditions in general and Confucianism in particular see things “anthropocosmically,” he wants to say that Chinese thinkers and sages have understood human beings and the cosmos as a single, organismic whole. The goal of human life is to harmonize oneself with heaven and earth and to return to the transcendent source of both humans and the world.
As long as Chinese civilization retained its anthropocosmic vision, it could not develop instrumental rationality, the Enlightenment view that sees the world as a conglomeration of objects and understands knowledge as the means to control the world. In the anthropocosmic vision, the object cannot be disjoined from the subject. The purpose of knowledge is not to manipulate the world but to understand the world and ourselves so that we can live up to the fullness of our humanity. The aim, to use one of Tu Weiming’s favorite phrases, is “to learn how to be human.” As he writes, “The Way is nothing other than the actualization of true human nature.”18
With slight revisions in terminology, Tu Weiming’s depiction of the anthropocosmic vision could easily be employed to describe the overarching worldview of Islamic civilization in general and the intellectual tradition in particular. For the purposes of this chapter, I will focus more on the philosophical side of the tradition. I do so because, first, among all the Islamic approaches to knowledge, philosophy has produced figures who have been looked back upon by Western historians and modern-day Muslims as “scientists” in something like the current meaning of the word; and second, only this approach has discussed the significance of being and becoming without presupposing faith in Islamic dogma, so its language can more easily be understood outside the context of specifically Islamic imagery.
In Western civilization, a sharp distinction has commonly been drawn between reason and revelation, or Athens and Jerusalem. In order to understand the role that the intellectual sciences have played in the Islamic tradition, we need to understand that the predominant Islamic perspective has seen reason and revelation as harmonious and complementary, not antagonistic. The very content of the Qur’anic message led to a viewpoint that diverges sharply from what became normative in the Christian West. Without understanding the divergent viewpoint, we will find it difficult to grasp the role that wisdom has played in Islam.
If we look at Christianity in terms of the dichotomy between intellectual and transmitted knowledge, what immediately strikes the eye is that the fundamental truths are indebted to transmission, not intellection. The defining notion of the Christian worldview – to the extent that it is meaningful to generalize about a complex and many-sided tradition – is the incarnation, an historical event whose occurrence is known through transmitted knowledge. To be sure, the incarnation was seen as a divine intervention that transmuted history, but it was also understood as occurring in the full light of historical actuality. In order to know about it, people needed the transmission of historical reports.
The Islamic tradition has a very different starting point. It is often assumed by both Muslims and non-Muslims that Islam began with the historical event of Muhammad and the Qur’an. There is some truth in this, of course, but the Qur’an paints a different picture, one that has had a deep effect on the way people have conceived of their religion. In this perspective, Islam began with the creation of the world. In its broadest meaning, the word islām (submission, submittedness, surrender) designates the universal and ever-present situation of creatures in face of the Creator. “To Him is submitted everything in the heavens and the earth” (Qur’an 3:83). This helps explain why the first and fundamental dogma of the religion is tawḥīd, which has nothing to do with the historical facts of Muhammad and the Qur’an.
Tawḥīd is the acknowledgment of a universal truth that expresses the actual situation of all things for all time and all eternity, since everything submits to God’s Unity by the very fact of its existence. Only human beings among all creatures have the peculiar status of being able, in a certain respect, to accept or reject this truth. To accept it freely is to utter the first half of the Shahadah and give witness to the unique reality of God. The Qur’an attributes tawḥīd and the free acceptance of its consequences to all rightly guided people, beginning with Adam and extending down through all the prophets and all those who correctly and sincerely followed them.
It might be objected that the statement of tawḥīd is itself historically particular. But the issue is not its linguistic formulation, but rather the unique, unitary reality that gives rise to the universe. Note that the Qur’an says that God sends every message in the language of the prophet’s people (14:4) and that “Each community has a messenger” (10:47). The basic content of every message was tawḥīd: “And We never sent a messenger before you save that We revealed to him, saying, ‘There is no god but I, so serve Me’ ” (21:25). “There is no god but I” is the first truth of every message, the first half of its Shahadah. “Serve Me” lays down the necessity for a second Shahadah to delineate the specific forms of “service” (‘ibāda = “worship”) appropriate to the cultural and historical context of the people to whom the message is addressed.
One might also object that this unitary reality is itself historically particular, because it was invented by human minds. People who hold this position still have to justify it, so they cannot escape a metaphysics. On what basis do we declare history, language, politics, gender, atoms, energy, the brain, genes, or whatever else foundational? Notice, moreover, that such theories are always rooted in forms of transmitted knowledge that go back to historical authorities who function as prophets for believers in the theories. One is reminded of the old joke, heard among scholars of Islam at least, that Marxism boils down to this Shahadah: “There is no god, and Karl Marx is his messenger.”
In the Islamic perspective, tawḥīd stands outside history and outside transmission. It is a universal truth that does not depend on revelation. Understanding it is an inherent quality of the innate disposition (fiṭra) of Adam and his children. The fall from paradise does not represent a serious shortcoming, but rather a temporary lapse, a single act of forgetfulness and disobedience. The lapse had repercussions to be sure, but it was immediately forgiven by God, and Adam was designated as the first prophet. His divine image was in no way blemished by the fall, even if it does become obscured in many if not most of his children.
Tawḥīd precedes Muhammad and his revealed message, because it does not pertain to history. It informs all true knowledge in all times and all places. Every one of the 124,000 prophets brought it as the basis of the message. They did not teach it, however, in order to establish an authoritative belief system that could be transmitted to others. Rather, they taught it because people have a tendency to forget it and need to be “reminded” (dhikr).
This word dhikr (along with its derivatives tadhkīr, tadhkira, and dhikrā) designates one of the most important concepts in the Qur’an. It informs Islamic religiosity on every level of faith and practice. It means not only “to remind,” but also “to remember.” In the sense of reminder, it indicates the primary function of the prophets, and in the sense of remembrance it designates the proper human response to the prophetic reminder. The whole process of learning how to be human depends first upon being reminded of tawḥīd, and second upon active and free remembrance.
If the first half of the Shahadah stands outside history, the second half – “Muhammad is God’s messenger” – is firmly grounded within it. It refers to the historical particularities of the Islamic tradition, which began in the seventh Christian century with the revelation of the Qur’an. Thus the two halves of the Shahadah implicitly distinguish between a universal, ahistorical truth and a particular, historical, and conditioned truth. Simultaneously, they distinguish between intellectual and transmitted knowledge. The first half articulates a knowledge innate to the original human disposition and accessible to all human beings; and the second half establishes the authority of a specific, historical message embodied in the Qur’an, the message of Muhammad, with all its detailed teachings.
Among all the schools of Islamic thought, the philosophers were the most careful to distinguish between transmitted and intellectual learning. They themselves were not primarily interested in transmitted knowledge. Compared to jurists, theologians, and Sufis, philosophers paid little attention to the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the religious sciences. It is true, nonetheless, that most of them were well versed in the transmitted religious learning, and some even wrote Qur’an commentaries and juridical works. They were not hostile to the transmitted learning, but rather focused their attention elsewhere. They wanted to develop their own intellectual vision by working out the implications of tawḥīd in theory and in practice.
The philosophers undertook the quest for wisdom with the ultimate aim of transforming their souls. As Tu Weiming says of the Confucian anthropocosmic vision, “The transformative act is predicated on a transcendent vision that ontologically we are infinitely better and therefore more worthy than we actually are.”19 This is a “humanistic” vision, but a humanism that is elevated far beyond the mundane, because the measure of all things is not man or even rational understanding, but the transcendent source of all. As Tu puts it,
Since the value of the human is not anthropocentric, the assertion that man is the measure of all things is not humanistic enough. To fully express our humanity, we must engage in a dialogue with Heaven because human nature, as conferred by Heaven, realizes its nature not by departing from its source but by returning to it. Humanity, so conceived, is the public property of the cosmos, not the private possession of the anthropological world, and is as much the defining characteristic of our being as the self-conscious manifestation of Heaven. Humanity is Heaven’s form of self-disclosure, self-expression, and self-realization. If we fail to live up to our humanity, we fail cosmologically in our mission as co-creator of Heaven and Earth and morally in our duty as fellow participants in the great cosmic transformation.20
For the Islamic wisdom tradition, grasping the full nature of our humanity necessitates investigating the nature of things and the reality of our own selves. This meant that intellectuals could not limit themselves to the mere acceptance of transmitted learning. They could not ignore the human imperative to search for knowledge in every domain, especially not when the Qur’an explicitly commands the study of the cosmos and the soul as the means to know God. Although some philosophers paid little attention to the transmitted learning and had no patience with the quibbling of theologians and jurists, they did not step outside of Islam, because they could not doubt the universal and ahistorical axiom upon which it is built. In other words, there was no historical chink in their intellectual armor. Historical contingencies cannot touch tawḥīd, because, once it is grasped, it is seen as so foundational that it becomes the unique certainty upon which the soul can depend.
As for the theologians and jurists and their claims to authority in religious matters, the representatives of the wisdom tradition saw those claims as pertaining to transmitted learning, not intellectual learning, and they found no reason to submit themselves to the limited understandings of pious dogmatists. To a large degree they kept themselves apart from theological and juridical bickering, and this helps explain why the philosophers among them (in contrast to the Sufis) preferred to employ a language colored more by Greek models than the imagery and symbols of the Qur’an.
Once we recognize that Islamic intellectual learning stands aloof from transmitted learning, it becomes clear why the modern scientific enterprise could not have arisen in Islam. Science gains its power from rejection of any sort of teleology, brute separation of subject and object, refusal to admit that consciousness and awareness are more real than material facts, exclusive concern with the domain of the senses, and disregard for the ultimate and the transcendent. Instrumental rationality could appear in the West only after the baby had been thrown out with the bath water. Having rejected the bath water of theology – or at least the relevance of theological dogma to scientific concerns – Western philosophers and scientists also rejected the truth of tawḥīd, the bedrock of human intelligence. Once tawḥīd was a dead letter, every domain of learning could be considered an independent realm.
Instrumental rationality did not appear suddenly in the West, of course. A long and complex history gradually brought about an increasingly wider separation between the domains of reason and revelation. Many scientists and philosophers remained practicing Christians, but this did not prevent them from considering the rational domain free from the trammels of revealed givens. It is precisely because these givens were posed in the dogmatic and historical terms of transmitted learning rather than the open-ended and ahistorical terms of intellectual learning that the separation between reason and revelation could occur.
In contrast, the Muslim intellectuals kept themselves rooted in the vision of tawḥīd. No matter what sort of misgivings some of them may have entertained concerning the historical contingency of the Arabic language, the events surrounding the appearance of Muhammad, the transmission of the Qur’anic revelation, and the interpretation of the revelation by the theologians and dogmatists, they did not see these as impinging on the fundamental insight of tawḥīd, which for them was utterly transparent.
My first conclusion, then, is this: many historians have suggested that medieval Islamic learning declined when Muslim scientists neglected to build on their early discoveries. But this is to read Islamic history in terms of the ideology of progress, which in turn is rooted in contemporary scientism – the belief that science has the same sort of unique reliability that was once reserved for revealed truth. Scientism gives absolute importance to scientific theories and relativizes all other approaches to knowledge. This is not to deny that there was a decline in Islamic learning; it is simply to call into question the criteria by which such things are normally judged. Why should historical oddities such as the ideological presuppositions of modernity be the yardstick for civilization? If we keep in view Islamic criteria (e.g., adherence to tawḥīd, the Qur’an, and the Sunnah), there was certainly a serious decline, but that decline cannot be measured by the criteria that are normally applied.
Moreover, historians who talk in broad terms of the decline of Islamic “science” fail to acknowledge the profound difference between two historical contexts. The first is the Islamic, in which the axiom of tawḥīd infused all intellectual endeavor. The philosophers saw all things as beginning, flourishing, and ending within the compass of the One Source, so they could not split up the domains of reality in more than a tentative way. They were not able to disengage knowledge of the cosmos from knowledge of God or knowledge of the soul. It was impossible for them to imagine the world and the self as separate from each other or from the One Principle. Quite the contrary, the more they investigated the universe, the more they saw it as displaying tawḥīd and the nature of the self. They could not have agreed more with Tu Weiming, who writes, “To see nature as an external object out there is to create an artificial barrier which obstructs our true vision and undermines our human capacity to experience nature from within.”21
The second context that people tend to forget when they claim that the Muslim intellectual tradition declined is the Christian. Christian civilization, qua Christian civilization, did in fact decline and, many have argued, disappeared, because it experienced the breakdown of a synthetic worldview. Part of the reason for this breakdown and the concurrent rise of a secular and scientistic worldview was that the transmitted nature of the basic religious givens was not able to withstand the critical questioning of non-dogmatic thinkers. In the Islamic case, Muslim intellectuals did not depend on revelation and transmission for their understanding of tawḥīd, so theological squabbles and historical uncertainties could not touch their basic vision of reality.
In order to suggest some of the implications of the anthropocosmic vision, I need to expand a bit more on the distinction between intellectual and transmitted. The experts in transmitted learning claimed authority for their knowledge by upholding the truthfulness of those who provided the knowledge – that is, God, Muhammad, and the pious forebears – and the authenticity of the transmission. They asked all Muslims to accept this knowledge as it was received. The basic duty of the Muslim believer was taqlīd, imitation or submission to the authority of the transmitted knowledge. In contrast, the intellectual tradition appealed to the relatively small number of people who had the appropriate aptitudes. The quest for knowledge was defined in terms of taḥqīq, verifying and realizing the truth for oneself.
If we fail to see that knowledge achieved by realization is not of the same sort as knowledge received by imitation, we will not be able to understand what the Muslim intellectuals were trying to do or what modern scientists and scholars are trying to do. We will continue to falsify the position of the Muslim philosophers by making them precursors of modern science, as if they were trying to discover what modern scientists try to discover, and as if they accepted the findings of their predecessors on the basis of imitation, as modern scientists do.
Given that scientism infuses modern culture, it is difficult for moderns to remember that the whole scientific edifice is built on transmitted learning. Despite all the talk of the “empirical verification” of scientific findings, this verification depends on assumptions about the nature of reality that cannot be verified by empirical methods. Even if we accept for a moment the scientistic proposition that scientific knowledge is uniquely “objective,” it is in fact verifiable only by a handful of specialists, since the rest of the human race does not have the necessary training. In effect, everyone has to accept empirical verification on the basis of hearsay. As Appleyard puts it, “Scientists who insist that they are telling us how the world incontrovertibly is are asking for our faith in their subjective certainty of their own objectivity.”22
It was noted that the word taḥqīq derives from the word ḥaqq, meaning true, truth, real, right, proper, just, appropriate. When the word ḥaqq is applied to God, it means that God is the absolutely true, right, real, and proper. But the word is also applied to everything other than God. This secondary application acknowledges that everything in the universe has a truth, a rightness, a realness, and an appropriateness. God is ḥaqq in the absolute sense, and everything other than God is ḥaqq in a relative sense. The task of taḥqīq is to build on the knowledge of the absolute ḥaqq, beginning with the axiom of tawḥīd, and to grasp the exact nature of the relative ḥaqq that pertains to each thing, or at least to each thing with which we come into contact, whether spiritually, intellectually, psychologically, physically, or socially.
The formula of tawḥīd tells us that there is no god but God, no ḥaqq but the absolute ḥaqq. This ḥaqq is transcendent, infinite, and eternal, and nothing else can be worthy of the name. Nonetheless, all things are creations of God, having received everything that they are from him. He creates them with wisdom and purpose, and each has a role to play in the universe. Nothing that exists is inherently bāṭil – false, vain, unreal, inappropriate. This is not to say that there is no such thing as “evil.” The issue of discerning the ḥaqq of “evil” is one of the more subtle dimensions of taḥqīq. Recognizing a thing’s ḥaqq may well entail acknowledging that part of its proper role is to be an occasion for evil and that the appropriate human response is to avoid it. The very need to avoid evil alerts us to something of its cosmic function: its possibility bestows meaning and significance on human freedom.
The ḥaqq s of individual things are determined by God’s wisdom in creation. It is in respect to these individual ḥaqq s that the Prophet said, “Give to each that has a ḥaqq its ḥaqq,” a command that sums up the goal of taḥqīq. To achieve this is obviously more than a simple cognitive activity. We cannot give things their rightful due simply by knowing their truth and reality. Over and above knowing, taḥqīq demands acting. It is not simply to verify the truth and reality of a thing, it is also to act toward the thing in the appropriate and rightful manner.
Seekers of wisdom, then, were trying to verify and realize things. They could not do this by quoting the opinions of Aristotle or Plato, nor by citing the words of the Qur’an and Muhammad. They could take the prophets and the great philosophers as guides on the path to realization, but they could not claim to know what the prophets and sages knew unless they discovered it for themselves. The quest demanded training the mind and disciplining the soul. It demanded the achievement of an authentic vision of reality, a correct perception of the world, a sound understanding of the self, a true knowledge of the First Principle, and activity in terms of what one had come to know.
The intellectual tradition refers to the underlying substance of a human being as nafs, the basic reflexive pronoun in the Arabic language. The word is translated as “self” or “soul,” depending on context. In its philosophical sense, it designates the invisible something that makes its appearance in the cosmos wherever there is life, and hence it is ascribed to every living thing.
Verifying the nature of soul was one of the foundational activities of the Muslim intellectuals. A standard way to do so was to begin by investigating the apparitions of soul in the visible world. The visible realm is a conglomeration of bodily appearances, yet we constantly differentiate among them in terms of their modalities of appearance. We know the difference between living things and dead things precisely by the way they appear to us. “Soul” is the generic name for what shows itself when we recognize life and awareness. When we recognize these qualities in things, we simultaneously recognize them in ourselves. It is soul that knows soul. We know a living thing because we are alive, and we recognize a self-acting thing because we have self-activity. What we see outside we find inside. Finding the external apparitions of soul is to experience the soul’s presence to itself. Life and awareness are precisely properties that we find in ourselves in the very act of discerning them in others.
There are degrees of soul, which is to say that this invisible something is more intense and influential in some things than in others. As Tu Weiming writes about the Chinese understanding, “Rocks, trees, animals, humans, and gods represent different levels of spirituality based on the varying compositions of ch’i.”23 In the typical Islamic version, the ch’i or invisible power that animates rocks is called “nature” (ṭabī‘a). Only at the plant level is a second modality of ch’i, “soul,” added to the first. Nor are rocks “only matter.” In the hylomorphism adopted by the intellectual tradition, the role of matter (mādda) is largely conceptual, because there is no such thing as matter per se. The name is given to an observed receptivity for the apparition of “form” (ṣūra). Form itself is an intelligible reality that descends into the realm of appearances from the spirit or intellect and ultimately from God, who is, in Qur’anic language, “the Form-giver” (al-muṣawwir). Since all things are “forms,” there is nothing in the universe that does not manifest the living presence of intelligence and the intelligible.
The classification of creatures into inanimate, plant, animal, human, and angel is one way of acknowledging different degrees of soul. The most complex and layered soul is found in human beings. Outwardly, this appears in the indefinite diversity of their activities, which clearly has something to do with vast differences in aptitude and ability. Because of the diverse and comprehensive powers of human souls, people can grasp and replicate all the activities that other modalities of soul cause to appear in the world.
In discussing the human soul, the texts frequently elaborate on the intimate correspondence between soul and cosmos, which were understood in something like a subject–object relationship. The human soul is an aware subject that can take as its object the whole universe. So closely intertwined are soul and cosmos that, in Tu Weiming’s term, their relationship can properly be called “organismic.” They can be understood as one organism with two faces.
It follows that there can be no microcosm without macrocosm, and no macrocosm without microcosm. The vital cosmic role of human beings was always affirmed. It was recognized that the macrocosm appears before human beings, but it was also understood that the macrocosm is brought into existence precisely to make it possible for human beings to appear and for them to learn how to be human. Without human beings (or, one can surmise, analogous beings), there is no reason for a universe to exist in the first place. The teleology was always acknowledged.
In the more religious language, this is to say that God created the world with the specific aim of crowning his achievement with human beings, who alone are made fully in his image and are able to function as his vicegerents. They alone can love God, because they alone are able to embody every divine attribute. Genuine love demands loving the Beloved for himself, not for something less than he. If one loves God with the aim of receiving some gift or benefit, such as avoiding hell and going to paradise, one has not in fact loved God, but the gift or benefit. This may sound like a “Sufi” idea, but notice what Avicenna, the greatest of the Peripatetic philosophers, has to say about those who have entered the path of achieving self-knowledge:
Knowers desire the Real, the First, only for His sake, not for the sake of something else. They prefer nothing to true knowledge of Him. Their service [‘ibāda] is directed only to Him, because He is worthy of service, and service is a noble relationship with Him. At the same time, knowers have neither desire nor fear. Were they to have it, the object of desire or fear would be their motive, and it would be their goal. Then the Real would not be their goal but rather the means to something less than the Real, which would be their goal and object.24
In short, the only creature that can love God for God’s sake alone, without any ulterior motive, is that which is made in his image. God created human beings precisely so that they can verify and realize their own divine images and love their Creator, thereby participating in his infinite and never-ending bounty.
For the intellectual tradition, the purpose of studying the macrocosm is to come to understand the powers and capacities of the microcosm. By understanding the object, we simultaneously grasp the potentialities and abilities of the subject. We cannot study the natural world without learning about ourselves, and we cannot learn about ourselves without coming to understand the wisdom inherent in the natural world.
Social reality was often studied for the same purpose – as an aid to understanding the human soul. It was not uncommon for Muslim philosophers to provide descriptions of the ideal society. But they were not interested in the utopian dreams which have so often preoccupied modern political theorists and which form the backbone of ideology. Rather, they wanted to understand and describe the various potentialities of the human soul that became manifest through social and political activity. They did not want to set down a program, but rather to illustrate to aspiring philosophers that every attribute and power of the soul, every beautiful and ugly character trait, can be recognized in the diversity of human types. When seekers of wisdom recognize their own selves as microcosms of society, they can strive to know and realize the true sovereign of the soul, the real philosopher-king, which is the intellect, whose duty is to govern both soul and body with wisdom and compassion.
If the philosophers analyzed the souls of plants, animals, humans, and even angels, and if they described all the possibilities of human becoming in ethical and social terms, their purpose was to integrate everything into the grand, hierarchical vision of tawḥīd. It was self-evident to them that the intellect within us – the intelligent and intelligible light of the soul – is the highest and most comprehensive dimension of the human substance. The intellect alone can see, understand, verify, and realize. The intellect alone gives life, awareness, and understanding not only to our own souls, but to all souls. The intellect alone is able to grasp and realize the purpose of human life and all life.
What then is this intellect that is the fountainhead and goal of intellectual learning? To define it is impossible, because intellect is the very understanding that allows for definitions. It cannot be limited and confined by its own radiance. However, we can describe it in terms of its role in cosmogenesis, whereby all things are created through it. And we can also depict it in terms of the human return to God, which can be experienced in its fullness only by the actualized intellect, which is the self-aware image of God. Let me deal with cosmogenesis first.
The wisdom tradition typically discussed the birth of the cosmos as beginning with God’s creation or emanation of the first creature, which is called by names like intellect, spirit, word, pen, and light. Things appear from the One Principle in a definite, intelligible order and in keeping with a fixed and known hierarchy (known, that is, to God and to the intellect, but not necessarily to us). It was obvious to Muslim thinkers that the One God creates intelligently, and that the first manifestation of his reality, the contingent being closest to his unity, the stage of created actuality nearest to his utter and absolute simplicity, is pure intelligence and awareness. Within this awareness are prefigured the universe and the human soul.
This living intelligence is the instrument through which the Real ordered, arranged, and established all creatures, and it liesat the root of every subject and every object. It is a single reality that is the self-aware and self-conscious source of the cosmos and the soul. Among all creatures, humans alone manifest its full and pure light, a light that the Qur’an calls the spirit that God blew into Adam. Inasmuch as the “fall” of Adam has a negative significance, it is nothing but the obscuration of this light.
When we look at the intellect from the point of view of the return to God, we see that the goal of human existence is to remember God by recollecting the divine image within the self and awakening the intellect. The task of seekers is to recover in themselves the luminous consciousness that fills the universe. This recovery is the fruition and fulfillment of human possibility. Although the intellect is dimly present in every soul, human or otherwise, in human beings alone is it a seed that can sprout and be cultivated, nourished, strengthened, and fully actualized.
The human soul is a knowing and aware subject that has the capacity to take as its object the whole cosmos and everything within it. However, it is typically blind to its own possibilities, and it takes on the color of souls that are not fully human. The soul needs to learn how to be human, and truly human activity does not come easy. Most of us have to be reminded about what being human implies, and even budding “intellectuals,” with all their gifts, have a steep and rocky road ahead if they are to achieve the goal.
Part of learning how to be human involves differentiating the qualities of the human soul from the qualities of other souls, which represent limiting and confining possibilities of soulish existence. The moral injunctions to overcome animal instincts rise up from the understanding that animals cannot manifest the fullness of intellectual and ontological possibility. This is not to denigrate animal qualities, since they play positive and necessary roles in the world and in the human make-up. The issue is rather one of priorities. People need to put things in their proper places. They must order the world and their own selves in an intelligent manner, and this means that they must understand everything in terms of the ruling truths of the cosmos. They must give to everything that has a ḥaqq its ḥaqq, and all things have their ḥaqq s, both outside and inside the soul.
The soul, then, is the subjective pole of manifest reality, and its counterpart is the cosmos, the objective pole. The soul in its human form has the unique capacity to know all things. However, the soul possesses only the potential to know all things, not the actuality of knowing. Actuality is a quality of intellect. Every act of knowing actualizes the soul’s potential and brings it closer to the intelligent and intelligible light at its core. But what exactly is the limit of the soul’s potential? What can it know? What should it strive to know? The intellectual tradition answers that there is no limit to the soul’s potential, because nothing exists that the soul cannot know. The goal of learning is to know everything that can possibly be known. However, knowable things need to be prioritized. If we do not search for understanding in the right manner and the correct order, the goal will remain forever unattainable. If we do not give knowing its ḥaqq, we will remain forever ignorant.
As long as the soul remains occupied with the search for wisdom and has not yet actualized its full potential, it remains a soul – that is, an aware self with the possibility of achieving greater awareness. Only when it reaches the actuality of all-knowingness in the innnermost core of its being can it be called an intellect in the proper sense of the word. At this point it comes to know itself as it was meant to be. It recovers its true nature, and it returns to its proper place in the cosmic hierarchy. The philosophers frequently call the human soul a “potential intellect” (‘aql bi’l-quwwa) or a “hylic intellect” (‘aql hayūlānī), which is to say that it has the capacity to know all things. Only after it has ascended through the stages of actualizing its own awareness and achieving its own innate perfection is it called an actual intellect.
Philosophers sometimes refer to the actualization of the intellect by employing the Qur’anic terms “salvation” (najāt) or “felicity” (sa‘āda). They would agree with Tu Weiming, who writes, “Salvation means the full realization of the anthropocosmic reality inherent in our human nature.”25 For them, this anthropocosmic reality is the intellect that gave birth to both macrocosm and microcosm and that is innate to the human fiṭra.
If the Muslim philosophers saw the quest for wisdom as a search to know all things, can we conclude that they were simply imitating Aristotle, who says as much at the beginning of the Metaphysics? I think not. They would say that they are trying to live up to the human potential, and if Aristotle also understood the human potential, that is precisely why they call him “The First Teacher.” They would remind us that the Qur’an discusses human potential in rather explicit terms. It tells us, after all, that God taught Adam all the names, not just some of them. They might also point out that this quest for omniscience is implicitly if not explicitly acknowledged not only by all the world’s wisdom traditions, but also by the whole enterprise of modern science. But, from their perspective, omniscience can only be found in the omniscient, and the only created thing that is omniscient in any real sense is the fully actualized intellect, the radiance of God’s own Selfhood. Omniscience, in other words, can never be found in the compilation of data, the collections of facts, and the spinning of theories. It is not an “objective” reality, but a “subjective” awakening – though no distinction can be drawn between subject and object when one has actualized the very being of the omniscient.
Nothing differentiates the Islamic intellectual quest from modern scientific and scholarly goals more clearly than the differing interpretations of the quest for omniscience. Both the Muslim intellectuals and modern scientists are striving to know everything, but the Muslim intellectual does so by looking at roots, principles, and noumena and by striving to synthesize all knowledge and to unify the knowing subject with its object. In contrast the modern scientist looks at branches, applications, and phenomena and strives to analyze objects, multiply data, and spin out theories.
The traditional intellectual undertakes the quest for omniscience as an individual. He knows that he must accomplish the task within himself and that he can do so only by achieving the fullness of humanity, with everything that this demands ethically and morally. The modern scientist undertakes his quest for facts and information as a collective undertaking, knowing that he is one insignificant cog in an enormously complex apparatus. He sees omniscience as something that can be achieved only by the sacred enterprise of Science with its uniquely privileged methodologies and brilliantly sophisticated instruments. He rarely gives thought to the possibility that every knowledge makes ethical demands on the knower. If he does so, he does so not as a scientist, but as an ethicist or a philosopher or a believer.
Traditional seekers of wisdom aim to actualize the full potential of intelligence in order to understand everything that is significant for human ends, and these ends are defined in terms of a metaphysics, a cosmology, a spiritual psychology, and an ethics that take Ultimate Reality as the measure of man. Modern seekers of facts aim to accumulate information and to devise ever more sophisticated theories in order to achieve what they call “progress.” In other words, they want to achieve a transformation of the human race on the basis of scientistic and ideological pseudo-absolutes.
The quest for wisdom is qualitative, because it aims at the actualization of all the qualities present in the divine image and named by the names of God. The scientific quest for knowledge and theoretical prowess is quantitative, because it aims to understand and control an ever-proliferating multiplicity of things.
The more the traditional intellectual searches for omniscience, the more he finds the unity of his own soul and his own organismic relationship with the world. The more the modern scientist searches for data, the more he is pulled into dispersion and incoherence, despite his claims that overarching theories will one day explain everything.
The traditional quest for wisdom leads to integration, synthesis, and a global, anthropocosmic vision. The modern quest for information and control leads to mushrooming piles of facts and the proliferation of ever more specialized fields of learning. The net result of the modern quest is particularization, division, partition, separation, incoherence, mutual incomprehension, and chaos. No one knows the truth of this statement better than university professors, who are typically so narrowly specialized that they cannot explain their research to their own colleagues in their own departments – much less to colleagues in other departments.
As for the claim that science will soon achieve a theory of everything, this “everything” is in any case defined in mathematical and physical terms. Such a theory can have nothing to say about the higher levels of being, the first of which is the being of the knowing subject who declares himself the inventor or discoverer of the theory. By the necessities of its own presuppositions, science ignores that basic constituent of reality that is the very self of the scientist. Appleyard makes the point nicely:
Scientific knowledge is fundamentally paradoxical. The paradox is that all of science’s “truths” about the “real” world are based upon the most flagrant distortion. In creating an understandable universe, we have committed ourselves to the most gross and obvious oversimplification. We have excluded the understanding mechanism, the self.26
Moreover, the whole enterprise is built on the shifting sands of empirical observation and rooted in the imitation of the findings of others, not firsthand knowing. How can anyone know anything firsthand when all depends on observations made through scientific instruments and calculations by computers?
In short, for the Islamic intellectual tradition, the study of the universe was a two-pronged, holistic enterprise. In one respect its aim was to depict and describe the world of appearances. In another respect its goal was to grasp the innermost reality of both the appearances and the knower of the appearances. The great masters of the discipline always recognized that it is impossible to understand external objects without understanding the subject that understands. This meant that metaphysics, cosmology, and spiritual psychology were essential parts of the quest. The final goal was to see earthly appearances, intelligible principles, and the intelligent self in one integrated and simultaneous vision. It was understood that intelligence is not only that which grasps and comprehends the real nature of things, but also that which gives birth to things in the first place. Everything knowable is already latent within intelligence, because all things appear from intelligence in the cosmogonic process.
The anthropocosmic vision allowed for no real dichotomy between the subject that knows and the object known. The structure and goals of the enterprise precluded losing sight of the ontological links that bind the two. To do so would be to forget tawḥīd and to fall into the chaos of dispersion and egocentricity. Ignorance of the reality of the knower leads to the use of knowledge for achieving illusory ends, and ignorance of the reality of the known turns the world into things and objects that can be manipulated for goals cut off from any vision of true human nature.
The possibilities of human understanding define the possibilities of human becoming. To know is to be. To ignore the reality of either the object or the subject is to fall into foolishness, error, and superstition. An impoverished and flattened universe is the mirror image of an impoverished and flattened soul. The death of God is nothing but the stultification of the human intellect. Social and ecological catastrophe is the inevitable consequence of psychic and spiritual dissolution. Cosmos and soul are not two separate realities, but two sides of the same coin, a coin that was minted in the image of God.