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Chapter II - A Philosophy of the Individual
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Chapter II A Philosophy of the Individual One of the most well-known Islamic mystics, Hussein ibn Mansur al-Hallaj, was beheaded in Baghdad in 922 for having declared, in a famous theopathic utterance: ana’l Haqq, which is to say, as Louis Massignon translates, 'I am the creating Truth = my ‘I’ is God'.22 But which 'I' is speaking in the man who says 'I am the Truth'? It should be truth itself, so inconceivable is it that such a predicate could be attributed to a finite ego. Truth alone being able, truthfully, to testify for itself, only an 'I' previously annulled by it, and in it, could, not profess regarding itself: 'I am the Truth', but be the instrument of this testimony. Only in such a way can the very act of positing oneself as a witness not change the unicity, the 'aloneness' of what it bears witness to. When this unicity that leaves nothing outside of it is fully realised, to say 'I am the Truth', like a drop of water saying 'I am the Ocean', is not to make a scandalous statement but simply to recognise the impossibility of being fully oneself, of being able to claim a separate position in one’s finiteness in order to speak to the infinite in the accusative and say to it: 'you are the truth'. This utterance thus appears as the sign of an absorption of the 'I' into the totality, and its ultimate meaning would be the same as an indefinite repetition of the third person: 'Him'… Muhammad Iqbal invites us to transform our perspective, to turn aside from this path of absorption, and the metaphysics it expresses, to one of 'the loving embrace of the finite': 'In the higher Sufism of Islam', he writes, 'unitive experience is not the finite ego effacing its own identity by some sort of absorption into the Infinite Ego; it is rather the Infinite passing into the loving embrace of the finite'.23 He thus invites us to turn our back on a Sufism of extinction for a philosophy of action founded, on the contrary, on a self-affirmation that is more faithful, according to him, to what represents the true Quranic conception both of 'the value and destiny of the human ego'.24 Islam and Open Society 6 Self-affirmation In his presentation of The Development of Metaphysics in Persia, Muhammad Iqbal draws on the metaphysics of Sufism, and on the notion, which is an essential feature of this metaphysics, of the 'impersonal absorption' which he says appears for the first time in Bayazid Bistami; and as a consequence of such a notion, he explains that we will inevitably be led to the famous and 'hopelessly pantheistic' logion of Hussein ibn Mansur al-Hallaj 'who, following the true spirit of Indian Vedantism, exclaimed: 'I am God' (Aham Brahma asmi)'.25 This is a case of the condensed expression of a pantheistic metaphysics which, turning its back on an emanative and neo-Platonic theory of creation,26 will conceive it rather as being, in a passive mode so to speak, the reflected image of eternal Beauty. An image reflected in nature and equally in human being, who would thus be wrong to think of themselves as entities apart: all sense of separation according to such a doctrine would simply be the result of ignorance of this essential truth that alterity is mere appearance, a dream, a shadow that could never, when faced with the sole Reality, achieve the consistency of an 'I' or mark the emergence, in the heart of Being, of personality. A necessary consequence that follows such a set of premises is that immortality is always impersonal. In the terms of an Aristotelian such as Ibn Rushd (Averro ès), for example, immortality only properly belongs to the universal active Intellect alone; who is, in effect, no one. And such an immortality would have no other significance then than being the final reabsorption of the false multiplicity of shadows into the light of the impersonal totality. Intelligence, according to Ibn-i-Rushd', writes Iqbal: 'is not from of the body; it belongs to a different order of being, and transcends individuality. It is, therefore, one, universal, and eternal. This obviously means that, since unitary intellect transcends individuality, its appearance as so many unities in the multiplicity of human persons, is a mere illusion. The eternal unity of intellect may mean, as Renan thinks, the everlastingness of humanity and civilization; it does...