On Rationality: The Unconventional Views of Noam Chomsky and Paul Feyerabend

A couple of books by Paul Feyerabend have radically changed my perspective about knowledge and rationality. I highly recommend his "Three dialogues on Knowledge" and "Science in a Free Soceity". Especially if one's rationality prevents one from appreciating something, say for example, the dance of the whirling dervishes, I think the Three dialogues is a very good antedote for it. I have never read a book which changed/freed my perspectives more than this one. It basically shows that there is nothing pure about reason except perhaps some bit of logic; that mostly what matters is aesthetics and taste (bias/intuition/insight/baseera). Thus our beliefs are based on our prior proclivities, rather than the purported deductions from axioms of rationality to logically justified conclusions.
In my reading this is consistent with what Ghazali(ra) has to say about faith based on reason:
‘Whoever supposes that faith is realized through speculative theology, abstract proofs, or academic divisions is an innovator. On the contrary, faith is a light that God, the Sublime and Exalted, casts in to the hearts of His servants with bounty and grace from His presence. Sometimes faith is evidenced internally and is impossible to express; sometimes, through a vision while asleep; other times, by witnessing the state of a pious man and receiving the emanation of his light as a result of his companionship and presence; and there are times when faith comes by the concurrence of circumstance. Indeed, a Bedouin came to the Prophet denying and disavowing him. But when his eyes fell upon his radiant aspect—may God increase its dignity and nobility—he saw in it the light of prophethood and exclaimed, “By God! This is not the face of a liar!” He then implored the Prophet to explain Islam to him and immediately embraced it.’
Realizing what one thinks to be the truth has a lot to do with direct (intuitive) perception of things. I do not belive it is arrived through reasoning; reasoning perhaps follows retroactively, perhaps to add intellectual respectability, and only in simple, straightforward and uninteresting cases.
What does that say about epistemology? It makes nonsense of the idea of "justified true belief", where reasons need to be articulated. Mostly what we believe is what we are already inclined to believe. A believer is inclined to prefer the intellectual proofs of the existence of God. None of the proofs are in of themselves conclusive. Actually the proofs themselves do not have any meaning, only readers impute some value and meaning to them, depending on the time, their background, and their inclination...i.e. whether they are interested in intellectual proofs. We know many pious people in our own history weren't very interested nor impressed with theology, on the other hand the believer's face has always been the "best argument". Aesthetics (perhaps same as sincerity/ikhlas/sidq) takes the front seat. What is in the Prophet's (saw) face that would lead one to draw conclusions and he is truthful (perhaps conclusions aren't drawn, its a direct perception of truth). No axiomatic inferences here.
The state of one's knolwedge/skepticism is mostly dependent not on formal conditions of proof, but rather on the state the heart is in: Its seeing and witnessing. I am not implying that rationality, as a calculater, as something which compares and produces analogies is useless. It has its uses in problem sovling, when the premises are given. But has no power to produce premises.
Even fiqh judgements are intuitive and their justifications retroactive. I can't imagine anyone axiomatically reasoning to a conclusion in fiqh, except only as an after thought, or to justify his view when writing down a fatwa. Furthermore, Feyerabend claims that the highest form of intellecutal exchange is story-telling. And that is again the way God speaks to man in the Quran. And sunnah is like a story too. Stories contextualize knowledge fully.
Hence, knowledge, rather than being something absolute and Platonic, is a living tradition, and understandings which are in the hearts and minds. Knowledge can be taken from books only because those symbols already mean something to the reader, and the text is able to suggest linkages and relations which perhaps the reader was unaware of, and thus, knowledge is ‘gained’ from books, and also because the reader can contextualize the statements. On the other hand if one cannot contextualize it properly, as in the case of a misreading (say a wahhabi reading of the Quran) one is just imputing meanings not intended by the author of the text. Thus meanings are thus the reader’s commentary on the text; in fact, the reader is the commentary (Shaykh Nuh). Even if one is to grant, in fact quite rightly, that the intended meanings are in the knowledge of God, those meanings aren’t accessible. Logicists and semanticists believe meanings are given, static, and unchanging. But given the above considerations, there is no such static thing which is accessible to human beings. Rather each human being approaches the text with his/her own background, reading meaning into the symbols, sometimes with interpretations close to what was intended, and sometimes not. Either way looking up a dictionary has limited benefit, because matters are not settled this way. Meanings are conventional uses of words, and dictionaries are posterior to the conventional use of words, and therefore not more authoritative than the speaker of that language or a member of the relevant culture.

On Philosophy of Science: The Unconventional Views of Noam Chomsky and Paul Feyerabend

Below are some rather unique conclusions that follow from reading Chomsky's "New Horizons in the study of language and Mind" his article "Language and Nature' and Wittgenstein's "Philosphical Investigations" and of course Feyerabend's “Three dialogues”, “Killing Time”, and “Science in a Free Society”, and his commentary "Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations" ).
Some of the unique consequences of these views are:
(1) Everything is conceptualized by the mind before we can see it. This is how we perceive. So, there is no such thing as sense data theory of meaning. We do not have anything prior to it being conceptualized. So, there is no apple outside of a concept apple which gets invoked in our minds. Just like there are no colours before the prism which creates the spectrum, just as there are no meanings prior to the conceptualization of the mind. The existence is there, just as the light is, but there is no differenciation, and no colours.
Corollary: Ibn Arabi said that God is not known through a concept. My reading of some of his easier works, though it may sound immodest, seems to suggest that he held the same Kantian/Chomskyan view that everything we see is conceptualized by the mind/language. And thus he says God is not known through a concept, rather directly through the soul. And he says those who worship Him through a concept ("All-foriving, All-merciful, All-compassionate...) will never really know Him, but only through a concept, even in the akhira. And hence, Ibn Arabi delineates the limitaitons of rationality. And thus the emphasis on the direct experience of the Divine, for this is the only real way to know Allah.

(2) Science is merely model making based on the conceptualizations in the mind which our faculties can carry out (Kant). There is no Bunge's "realism" about science. Physical objects are conceptualized in the mind. Electron is a concept, atom is a concept, at par with acceleration and force. We make mathematical connections which we test. There are no entities outside the mind as such. Because we have no access to them outside of what our mind can conceptualize. So, we have no direct apprehension of the so called mind-independent reality through by-passing the inevitable conceptualizations of the mind. Hence our perseptions are all personal. Science has little to do with mind-independent reality, because we don’t have direct access to it, and the moment we apply language to it, it means we are assigning meanings to things we can identify (after conceptualizing them), either through our intuitive appratus, or through some scientific apparatus which translates input into something we understand intuitively (like a black spot on the screen), so either way we are only dealing with conceptualizations. Thus, Being/being, whatever it is, we only know it through our own, perhaps reductive, conceptualizations. Any comment remark on the acutality of the Being/being is unjustified, because that would mean by-passing our own language, and conceptualization, and once we do that, we aren’t being coherent, we can’t make sense. So, perhaps Sufis can experience Being/beings (God, realities) directly, and not mediated through the senses and the mind. Hence the intellecutal limits to access the Being/being are severe.
I believe the works cited above would relieve one from a lot of technical hair-splitting which results from an exceptional and mistaken use of language by so-called intellectuals (realists). The mideavel talk of substance is a typical example. One has to match the use of the word 'substance' to something we can conceptualize in order to make sense of what is going on in the mideavel texts; the closest concept being a point in space dressed up with properties, or as Russell suggested, a bundle of properties without any essence. As chomsky says, there is no clear sense of the word ‘matter’ (because matter is an intuitive concept: something solid we run into). He also suggests that contrary to widely held scientific opinion, water is not H2O. Rather water is that which is usually and conventionaly referred to as water, and which is never pure H2O. Things are not equal to their chemical compositions. Chemical compositions is a certain way of looking at things, i.e. through a set of conceptualizations called the periodic table (i.e. divide the physical being as it reacts to our prodding, or experimentation, into this scheme rather than the intuitive scheme of chairs and tables), and with certain ends in mind such as on how to get different elements to react with each other to produce something useful. But none of these schemes have any claims to ultimate realities; rather these are ways in which we interact with Reality or Being.


Thus it is immodest to project our own conceptualizations to the point of claiming them to be realities in the absolute sense.

The Continuum of Knowledge: Philosophy and the Sciences

There are many ways in which phillsophy is connected to the sciences.
(1) There is no line separating philosophy and any of these disciplines: sociology, literature, political science, economics, mathematics and computer science. For example: Take computer science. In the undergrad program eventually the courses get quite theoretical and difficult and there is no way to manage then execpt through the realization that most of the founders of the field were philosopher-mathematicians, and it was through studying their works that one could really understand what computer science was all about. For example you have to understand the work of Godel. Now Godel is taught in mathematics department, in computer science department and of course in the philosophy department. But Godel's proof is so crucial that even sociologists and anthropologists use the ideas (but without understanding the full-blown proof).
(2) It is evident from the history of philosophy, that many of the other subjects which have become independent fields at university were first studied and written about by philosophers, and because of the practical success of those writings that subject became independent, and took a life of its own. But the core principles of these sciences continue to be studied in philosophy department. For example take economics. The only way to understand the core of economics is to understand the history of economics, and that cannot be done without reading through those who are counted among the philosophers. (For example a recent work, a very good one, on economists was called "Worldly Philosophers").
(3) There is no line (not even a vague one) that separates philosophy and science. There were physicists who wrote philosophy, and vice versa. In fact the development of Relativity Theory was motivated by Ernst Mach, a philosopher whose writings inspired Einstein on the lines of his Relativity Theory. And those at the core such as Dirac and Bohr continued to contribute to the philosophical understanding of Relativity Theory and Special Relativity, and they quite naturally wrote in both philosophy and science journals.
(4) Any scholar of any of the western sciences has to study philosophy. For that matter any conscientious student has to do the same. My friends who did their undergraduate studies from McGill were forced to study philosophy and logic, because that was the only way they could really understand their field because most of the leading writers in any field are eventually philosophers (or are versed in philosophy and inevitably their writing assumes that background).
(5) My view is that only mathematics (applied mathematics leads to most of the ideas in the hard sciences) and philosophy are two pure fields, in the sense, that all other fields are derived from these two (mostly a combination of the two). For example: computer Science is a branch of number theory, and the theory turns on Godel's Proof and other results that were arrived at in 1936. The theory has remained the same, and the founders of this field were for example Alonzo Church, Alan Turing, Kurt Godel, all of them philosopher-mathematicians and wrote in philosophy journals.
These are among the many arguments that lead to the position that philosophy is not a well-defined core of ideas. In fact, it straddles every field and the only way to understand any field is to go to its philosophical and historical roots. Newton was called a natural philosopher, because there was no physics at his time. Just because physics is an independent field taught outside the philosophy department does not imply it does not have philosophical ideologies hiding beneath it.

Bibliography on Rationality and Relativism

Paul Feyerabend. “Realism and the Historicity of Knowledge.”

Noam Chomsky. Language and Nature.

Noam Chomsky. New Horizons in the Study of Language and Mind.

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations.

Paul Feyerabend. Science in a Free Society.

Paul Feyerabend. Farewell to Reason.

 

 

 

On Rationality and Realism: The unconventional views of Chomsky and Feyerabend

A couple of books by Paul Feyerabend have radically changed my perspective about knowledge and rationality. I highly recommend his "Three dialogues on Knowledge" and "Science in a Free Soceity". Especially if one's rationality prevents one from appreciating something, say for example, the dance of the whirling dervishes, I think the Three dialogues is a very good antedote for it. I have never read a book which changed/freed my perspectives more than this one. It basically shows that there is nothing pure about reason except perhaps some bit of logic; that mostly what matters is aesthetics and taste (bias/intuition/insight/baseera). Thus our beliefs are based on our prior proclivities, rather than the purported deductions from axioms of rationality to logically justified conclusions.

In my reading this is consistent with what Ghazali(ra) has to say about faith based on reason:
‘Whoever supposes that faith is realized through speculative theology, abstract proofs, or academic divisions is an innovator. On the contrary, faith is a light that God, the Sublime and Exalted, casts in to the hearts of His servants with bounty and grace from His presence. Sometimes faith is evidenced internally and is impossible to express; sometimes, through a vision while asleep; other times, by witnessing the state of a pious man and receiving the emanation of his light as a result of his companionship and presence; and there are times when faith comes by the concurrence of circumstance. Indeed, a Bedouin came to the Prophet denying and disavowing him. But when his eyes fell upon his radiant aspect—may God increase its dignity and nobility—he saw in it the light of prophethood and exclaimed, “By God! This is not the face of a liar!” He then implored the Prophet to explain Islam to him and immediately embraced it.’
Realizing what one thinks to be the truth has a lot to do with direct (intuitive) perception of things. I do not belive it is arrived through reasoning; reasoning perhaps follows retroactively, perhaps to add intellectual respectability, and only in simple, straightforward and uninteresting cases.

What does that say about epistemology? It makes nonsense of the idea of "justified true belief", where reasons need to be articulated. Mostly what we believe is what we are already inclined to believe. A believer is inclined to prefer the intellectual proofs of the existence of God. None of the proofs are in of themselves conclusive. Actually the proofs themselves do not have any meaning, only readers impute some value and meaning to them, depending on the time, their background, and their inclination...i.e. whether they are interested in intellectual proofs. We know many pious people in our own history weren't very interested nor impressed with theology, on the other hand the believer's face has always been the "best argument". Aesthetics (perhaps same as sincerity/ikhlas/sidq) takes the front seat. What is in the Prophet's (saw) face that would lead one to draw conclusions and he is truthful (perhaps conclusions aren't drawn, its a direct perception of truth). No axiomatic inferences here.

The state of one's knolwedge/skepticism is mostly dependent not on formal conditions of proof, but rather on the state the heart is in: Its seeing and witnessing. I am not implying that rationality, as a calculater, as something which compares and produces analogies is useless. It has its uses in problem sovling, when the premises are given. But has no power to produce premises. 
Even fiqh judgements are intuitive and their justifications retroactive. I can't imagine anyone axiomatically reasoning to a conclusion in fiqh, except only as an after thought, or to justify his view when writing down a fatwa. Furthermore, Feyerabend claims that the highest form of intellecutal exchange is story-telling. And that is again the way God speaks to man in the Quran. And sunnah is like a story too. Stories contextualize knowledge fully. 

Hence, knowledge, rather than being something absolute and Platonic, is a living tradition, and understandings which are in the hearts and minds. Knowledge can be taken from books only because those symbols already mean something to the reader, and the text is able to suggest linkages and relations which perhaps the reader was unaware of, and thus, knowledge is ‘gained’ from books, and also because the reader can contextualize the statements. On the other hand if one cannot contextualize it properly, as in the case of a misreading (say a wahhabi reading of the Quran) one is just imputing meanings not intended by the author of the text. Thus meanings are thus the reader’s commentary on the text; in fact, the reader is the commentary (Shaykh Nuh). Even if one is to grant, in fact quite rightly, that the intended meanings are in the knowledge of God, those meanings aren’t accessible. Logicists and semanticists believe meanings are given, static, and unchanging. But given the above considerations, there is no such static thing which is accessible to human beings. Rather each human being approaches the text with his/her own background, reading meaning into the symbols, sometimes with interpretations close to what was intended, and sometimes not. Either way looking up a dictionary has limited benefit, because matters are not settled this way. Meanings are conventional uses of words, and dictionaries are posterior to the conventional use of words, and therefore not more authoritative than the speaker of that language or a member of the relevant culture.

Regarding philosophy of science (which is pretty much the same subject as 'western rationality' or the 'history of western rationality'), I have come to a rather unusual view through reading Chomsky's "New Horizons in the study of language and Mind" his article "Language and Nature' and Wittgenstein's "Philosphical Investigations" and of course Feyerabend's “Three dialogues”,  “Killing Time”, and “Science in a Free Society”, and his commentary "Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations" ).
Some of the unique consequences of these views are:
(1) Everything is conceptualized by the mind before we can see it. This is how we perceive. So, there is no such thing as sense theory of meaning. We do not have anything prior to it being conceptualized. So, there is no apple outside of a concept apple which gets invoked in our minds. Just like there are no colours before the prism which creates the spectrum, just as there are no meanings prior to the conceptualization of the mind. The existence is there, just as the light is, but there is no differenciation, and no colours.
Corollary: Ibn Arabi said that God is not known through a concept. My reading of some of his easier works, though it may sound immodest, seems to suggest that he held the same Kantian/Chomskyan view that everything we see is conceptualized by the mind/language. And thus he says God is not known through a concept, rather directly through the soul. And he says those who worship Him through a concept ("All-foriving, All-merciful, All-compassionate...) will never really know Him, but only through a concept, even in the akhira. And hence, Ibn Arabi delineates the limitaitons of rationality. And thus the emphasis on the direct experience of the Divine, for this is the only real way to know Allah.  
(2) Words do not have determinate meanings. Dictionaries which list meanings only do so posterior to some use of that word. So, absolutely speaking, words are not associated to this or that meanings, rather the association only comes about once words are used. Thus meanings are fluid and open-ended, and outside of context there is no meanings associated with words. This does away with analytic associations of words and meanings. Meanings are taken from context and they are open ended, there are ways to produce meanings which are not given in dictionaries, but somehow the speakers have a creative ability to produce them, and hearers able to extract them from the context, but not from the dictionaries. So, one can't say that this word includes these items under its meaning, because meanings only arise in contexts, and there is nothing out of context. So, according to Feyreabend there is no essece of words. See Feyerabend's summary of Wittengesetin's Philosphical Investigations for a very easy synopsis of what Wittgenstein tried to put across in Philosphical Investigations.

So, the conventional use of language is the highest form of language that there is, in the sense that it cannot be perfected by an intellecutal. If the intellecutal tries to spell out meanings which leave the speakers of that language dumb-founded, then it is the intellecutal who is making the mistake, because the use of language is not his province, rather it is as much the province of the non-intellecutal. Everyone can suggest, hint and tell stories, bend the words, play with meanings, and so on. Some fear that this leads to relativism, I think it just allows for the creativity which will otherwise become impossible.
 (3) Science is merely model making based on the conceptualizations in the mind which our faculties can carry out (Kant). There is no Bunge's "realism" about science. Physical objects are conceptualized in the mind. Electron is a concept, atom is a concept, at par with acceleration and force. We make mathematical connections which we test. There are no entities outside the mind as such. Because we have no access to them outside of what our mind can conceptualize. So, we have no direct apprehension of the so called mind-independent reality through by-passing the inevitable conceptualizations of the mind. Hence our perseptions are all personal. Science has little to do with mind-independent reality, because we don’t have direct access to it, and the moment we apply language to it, it means we are assigning meanings to things we can identify (after conceptualizing them), either through our intuitive appratus, or through some scientific apparatus which translates input into something we understand intuitively (like a black spot on the screen), so either way we are only dealing with conceptualizations. Thus, Being/being, whatever it is, we only know it through our own, perhaps reductive, conceptualizations. Any comment remark on the acutality of the Being/being is unjustified, because that would mean by-passing our own language, and conceptualization, and once we do that, we aren’t being coherent, we can’t make sense. So, perhaps Sufis can experience Being/beings (God, realities) directly, and not mediated through the senses and the mind. Hence the intellecutal limits to access the Being/being are severe.  
I think all of these are related issues. And somehow I believe the works cited above would relieve one from a lot of technical hair-splitting which results from an exceptional and mistaken use of language by so-called intellectuals (realists). The mideavel talk of substance is a typical example. One has to match the use of the word 'substance' to something we can conceptualize in order to make sense of what is going on in the mideavel texts; the closest concept being a point in space dressed up with properties, or as Russell suggested, a bundle of properties without any essence. As chomsky says, there is no clear sense of the word ‘matter’ (because matter is an intuitive concept: something solid we run into). He also suggests that contrary to widely held scientific opinion, water is not H2O. Rather water is that which is usually and conventionaly referred to as water, and which is never pure H2O. Things are not equal to their chemical compositions. Chemical compositions is a certain way of looking at things, i.e. through a set of conceptualizations called the periodic table (i.e. divide the physical being as it reacts to our prodding, or experimentation, into this scheme rather than the intuitive scheme of chairs and tables), and with certain ends in mind such as on how to get different elements to react with each other to produce something useful. But none of these schemes have any claims to ultimate realities; rather these are ways in which we interact with Reality or Being.

Thus it is immodest to project our own conceptualizations to the point of claiming them to be realities in the absolute sense. 

 

Problem with Frege's philosophy of language

Problem with Frege’s puzzle of identiy:

Frege believes that words have a public meaning. That signs are connected to objects of the world independently of the human cognition or intermediation of the individual’s psychology. That is Frege’s platonic world of language. But this view is incorrect.

The justification offered is that language cannot be a private enterprise because that will preclude communication. However our pronunciation of words is also private, each person has his own slightly different ways of pronouncing, and yet we are able to effectively communicate.

Hence our meanings are private even while allowing for communication (Chomsky). Each word is conceptualized in the mind and according to that conceptualization, if there is a reference to that word, it is determined accordingly.

Furthermore, we also have to grant the following: that everything is conceptualized. There is not such thing as a real world, independent of our conception of it. If there is we have no access to it, because everything we access is through the repertoire of our concepts given by our faculties and those we have put together artificially or given through language.

So, there is a concept Bertrand Russell in our head, which is instantiated when we come across Bertrand Russell. If we come across Russell in some guise that we are unfamiliar with then even though he is Russell, our concept of Bertrand Russell is not instantiated. We don’t see or think of that person as Russell.

So, if a concept is a name, then it is attached to a concept of that person that we have constructed and stored in our memory, and if that concept is invoked then we know who is being talked about. In this light, lets analyse the apparent puzzle between the morning star and the evening star. Morning star  corresponds to a concept in the head, through which it is mediated and through which is it individuated. So, if we in our conceptual knowledge know that the concept of morning star and the evening star actually talk about the same object individuated in our conceptual scheme then we say they are the same.

Sameness deserves an extended comment: In this case a particular sense of sameness is employed according to which two stars are same iff their physical bodies are same. We could have a notion of sameness, that if stars appear at different times of the day then they are not same. So we invoke a particular sense of sameness attached to the concept and our understanding of stars, and therefore, if we have knowledge that the physical bodies (another concept) of the morning star and the evening stars are same, then they are same. So, then we can say that evening star is the morning star (with a particular implied sense of sameness used in the word is). Alternatively, it won’t make sense to say that the ‘half moon’ is the ‘full moon’ in spite of the fact that both are talking about the same physical moon and yet the equation will not make sense, because the equation is not between the physical bodies, but between the conceptualization of the ‘half-moon’ and the conceptualization of the ‘full-moon’, and the criterion of sameness as it applies to these conceptualization is different from one which applies to the morning star and evening star. Furthermore, the criteria of sameness differs based on the interests of the parties involved. For example for a scientist studying the celestial bodies, the sun that rises each day is different from the previous day, because it has a different mass.

Therefore, Frege’s puzzle of identity only arises only because of his metaphysical assumptions about language in which terms have a reference, which is unmediated through our conceptual faculties. Such an object cannot be, because in order for objects to be, they have to be conceptualized first, and thus individuated.  

To further elucidate the points covered above:

a.      Just as Frege claims that numbers are not attached to objects but to concepts, according to which objects are individuated, and thus counted; likewise, what constitutes an object is a concept as well. Only when and once the object is individuated according to some concept is it considered an object. Nothing in of itself is an object, at least as far as human perception goes, unless it is brought under some concept.

b.     Individuation is according to the conceptual scheme—different schemes will lead to different individuations (compare the conceptual scheme at atomic level, with the level at which human beings regularly interact with objects such as chair, table etc.). What counts as one depends on which conceptual scheme is employed.

c.      A consequence of the above is that objects are not available outside of human cognition. Rather, they are posterior to perception. Only by the mediation of perception are things called objects i.e. individuals which are different from other individuals.

d.     Thus, Frege’s referents can’t be talked about in the kind of language we use. Referents presuppose individuation, and individuation presupposes concepts or sense. Hence, there is no simple concept-free way to talk about referents as objects.

Imam Ghazali (ra) on Reason

‘Whoever supposes that faith is realized through speculative theology, abstract proofs, or academic divisions is an innovator. On the contrary, faith is a light that God, the Sublime and Exalted, casts in to the hearts of His servants with bounty and grace from His presence. Sometimes faith is evidenced internally and is impossible to express; sometimes, through a vision while asleep; other times, by witnessing the state of a pious man and receiving the emanation of his light as a result of his companionship and presence; and there are times when faith comes by the concurrence of circumstance. Indeed, a Bedouin came to the Prophet denying and disavowing him. But when his eyes fell upon his radiant aspect—may God increase its dignity and nobility—he saw in it the light of prophethood and exclaimed, “By God! This is not the face of a liar!” He then implored the Prophet to explain Islam to him and immediately embraced it.’ (trans. Hamza Yusuf in “Creed of Tahavi”)

 

On literal interpretations

What is a literal interpretation? The issue isn’t that easily decided. Take the hadith: A believer is not stung from the same hold twice. What is the literal interpretation of this? Clearly, it can’t be that a believer is literally stung from the same hole. Now, another related problem presents itself: Which interpretation comes before the other, in the sense, the literal apparently is before the figurative. When we talk of God’s hand, the first interpretation seems to be figurative, and only an outrageous and a mindless stretch of imagination would lead one to say, as many wahhabis do, that God has hands. When wahhabis say that the literal comes first, the sense of this is not clear. In that sense the hadith of “stung from the same hole” would completely lose its clear meaning.

On visiting graves

This is in response to the question: How can one in the right mind suggest that it is not wrong to visit graves. This is a deviant sub-continental practice, now exposed by the Salafis.

There are a couple of points that need to be kept in consideration for a fair discussion of this topic.

1. Most popular sufism practiced in Pakistan is deviant. My experience a great deal of  sufis aren't really. There are certain clear conditions mentioned in scholarly texts which a sufi must meet in order to be one. Our ulema hold that if someone claims to be a sheikh of the sufi order, and he isn't one, then he is a shaytan. Thus they are misleading their followers, who are too ignorant to tell the difference between a true sheikh and a charlatan. Now, whatever these groups do on the graves, just like everything else they do, is usually not halal.

2. While you may look at the situation within the local context, in which practices around the graves sound alarming, from a historical point of view there is another angle. Most of the individuals you see are typically not well-versed in the religious sciences, and do not even know how to perform their basic ibadaat. Islam has not reached them in its proper form. So, just like in other aspects of their belief, they need some margin, otherwise, if we go along with the modern trends of intolerance, they will most likely fall outside the pale of Islam. For example according to classical standards, denying something of religion which is known of necessity will take one outside of Islam. Hijab is necessarily known part of religion, yet many ignorant believers deny that it is a requirement. But when we ask the scholars they try to give all sorts of excuses to explain their behaviour.(Abu Hanifa once said that he would rather err a thousand times on the side of calling a non-Muslim a Muslim, than once in calling a Muslim non-Muslim.) Also, there is a rigorously authenticated hadith that: "If one calls another kafir, then one of them definitely is."

3. I feel, that we have to understand that these people are broken-hearted, with no one to turn to, and they go to these graves. Now just as when we need help we turn to other people, but that does not mean we are not turning to God. Turning to other people is a means, while we know that without God's will nothing can take place. Now people did turn to the Prophet (saw). We know a lot of people came to the Prophet (saw) with something like "O Prophet! help me. I have sinned." Yet I do not know of one instance where the Prophet (saw) refused them, or rejected them on account of an alleged confusion in belief. The question actually turns on this: whether a person who is passed away can in some sense be addressed in one's duas. Here I think the problem is in our materialist culture with its emphasis on the physical and the living, the here and now, rather than the spiritual. If we are primarily physical beings then we indeed meet our end with death, and the matter is finished; but if we are primarily spiritual beings then we merely taste death, and continue to be alive. "They think they will be dead, but they will be alive" (Quran).

4. Some prominent deobandis (the school representing the majority sunnis in Pakistan) have caught on the modern trend of labelling any religious activity which falls outside of narrow wahabi lines as bidaa. This is because of the massive funding this school is receiving from Saudi Arabia. This has shifted the tide of so called scholarly opinion, as well as the general religious culture, against Sufis. While there is some justification, because many sufi orders have deviated, it does not justify blanket condemnation of Sufi practices. Munkir hadith do not delegitimize  the enterprise of hadith collection; similarly, deviant sufis do not invalidate Tassawwuf. And if you look at history of Islam in India, Sufism was alive and thriving in all parts of India, and was the basic impetus behind the large-scale non-violent conversion to Islam.

5. Another problem is that wahabbis have always emphasised the physical, to the point that they have made God physical, with hands, shin, and face. This is because they are illiterate and ignorant and have a lot of money with which they publish their version of Islam, but they possess little imagination. Considering these views, the other wahabi views cannot be trusted and relied upon. One has to make one’s own assessment, and not just become part of the fashionable wahabi culture.

 

 

Reason isn't the final arbiter

This entry below was a reponse to the following question: Certain hadiths especially regarding women do not make sense. These are not correct according to the dictates of reason and common sense.

How I have learnt to understand issues has a lot to do with what I have come to understand of "reason" itself: Once you get acculturated into historical debates on science, mathematics and theology (the crisis in the foundations of mathematics is an important episode) you realize that no idea, religion, or school of thought turns out to be water tight when it connects with "reason". There are always statements, ideas around the edges which reason has to overlook-even for hard sciences and mathematics, which were long considered to be outcome of purely rational activity. Otherwise much of what we have achieved in terms of scientific and intellectual progress will be undermined. A lesson one learns is that if one can't square everything with reason, one doesn't throw the idea out of the window. Rather one looks for something deeper. For example the contradictions in mathematics in the early part of 20th century led to our deeper understanding of numbers (that they are intuitive, and not reducible to logic), and led to far more modest view of our understanding of mathematical truths: the faith in the necessity of mathematics was forsaken, but it lead to new lines of mathematical growth, more open-ended. When the positivists (followed by sociologists/historians) began to analyze science they ended up radically changing the very conception of science: They (historians) showed that: (1) There is no way to tell if science is progressing; (2) Showing a superiority of a theory over another is not a simple matter; (3) Our observations are theory-laden i.e. presuppose the very theory being tested, and thus there are no independent observations; (5) Much of science is based on aesthetic considerations such as that of symmetry which are intuitive and not rational. 
I think there are various competing conceptions of reason, all arbitrary to a certain extent. Perhaps there is something abiding at the core, but that is difficult to articulate. And these conceptions are entire cultures and world-views which become one's rational cognitive structure though which one processes beliefs, but are seldom themselves scrutinized. This cognitive disposition is determined/altered by one's own psychological inclinations, culture, background and importantly one's reading of the history of reason itself (How one reacts to Zeno's paradoxes; say, are they really that important?). This is basically our readiness to believe a certain kind of thing, even as it violates strictures of reason. Who would have believed that light is particle or wave depending on how the observer expects it to behave.
Therefore, I think to overlook somewhat, and not always insist on the logical consequences, is still an intellectually responsible position since reason itself is not immune to absurdities and one just can't expect a true theory/faith/religion to entirely correspond with it. (Example: Zeno's paradoxes, showing that motion is impossible, are as instructive as they are shocking: innocuous assumptions leading to insurmountable contradictions).
In fact, there is no such thing as reason standing apart from every idea and theory and judging it-reason itself is affected by and involved in those ideas. It's an admixture of reason/intuition/insight which coalesce to bring one to see things as we do. A number of people converted to Islam when they saw the face of the Prophet Muhammad (saw)-they said it couldn’t be a face of a liar. Or, what I once heard: "A believer's best argument is his face". Will we discount this intuition as inferior to reason. I know I am not really answering your argument, but I just wanted to say that there are other faculties than reason which are also important. Furthermore, I think your belief lies is some place other than your reason, and you use the latter just to give it retroactive intellectual respectability and, to take  comfort in the thought that it makes sense-it would make us mighty uncomfortable if it didn't but that would not make us give up a belief. It isn't that easy. Try this thought experiment: "Killing children is wrong" just can't be shown to be true through reason alone, yet you are so hard-wired to believe it that you will not accept any ideology/religion which holds to the contrary.

 

Atrocities down the memory hole...

Something I wrote on preceived nobility of intentions behind the Kerry-Lugar Bill, as it appeared in a DAWN piece. Surprisingly, DAWN didn't edit it out!
 
"Which country has ever been helped by US aid? Read stuff like Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States (for a detailed account of an endless list of atrocities and genocides carried out and sponsored by US starting with the killing of 10 million natives and continuing into the 21st century), or William Blum’s Killing Hope (which talks about more than 50 US invasions in sovereign states since the WWII, there were more than 100 before that) or Chomsky’s Deterring Democracy (which lists detailed accounts suppression of democracy, through mass killing, slaughter, threat and destructive economic sanctions). Our media ignores these crucial details, and pretends these never happened and have nothing to do with Pakistan. Pakistan is just another chapter in this rampage. What US has wrought, our politicians can’t even imagine-I mean they are corrupt and all that, but shedding blood, carrying out out genocides as policy is unheard of in our political tradition (look at Berzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard -same person who conceived the “Bear Trap”- in which he discusses the possibility of genocide as a policy tactic!) Being against terror doesn’t imply supporting US, in fact it is to be directly opposed to US foreign policy, which, these books will show, is replete with its own terrorism, much worse, and much greater in scale. How can we trust such a state? Why doesn’t the media talk about bombing of Cambodia and Laos (1300 villages were wiped off the face of the earth by aerial bombing which was personally supervised by Henry Kissinger), or East Timor (1 million slaughtered), or Vietnam (2 million civilians dead, My Lai massacre), the Hiroshima/Nagasaki Nuclear bombing and countless others to give us some context in which we can understand current affairs. Isn’t one against all kinds of terrorism, of radical groups but also of the states, especially when one carried out by the state dwarfs by a huge margin anything done by the radical outfits (can anything Taliban have done match the fire bombing of Dresden, or the Hiroshima bombing?). So shouldn’t one give proportionate weightage to each. Aren’t newspapers based on the moral principle that people have a right to know. I would like the columnists to explain these crucial and important omissions?"
 
http://blog.dawn.com/2009/11/02/hillarys-headache/ 
 
-Haroon
Einstein

Letter of the Chief of Seattle to All

 

Chief Seattle's Letter To All
THE PEOPLE

Chief Seattle, Chief of the Suquamish Indians allegedly wrote to the American Government in the 1800's - In this letter he gave the most profound understanding of God in all Things. Here is his letter, which should be instilled in the hearts and minds of every parent and child in all the Nations of the World:

 

CHIEF SEATTLE'S LETTER

"The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?

Every part of the earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, every humming insect. All are holy in the memory and experience of my people.

We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family.

The shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you our land, you must remember that it is sacred. Each glossy reflection in the clear waters of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

The rivers are our brothers. They quench our thirst. They carry our canoes and feed our children. So you must give the rivers the kindness that you would give any brother.

If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares its spirit with all the life that it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also received his last sigh. The wind also gives our children the spirit of life. So if we sell our land, you must keep it apart and sacred, as a place where man can go to taste the wind that is sweetened by the meadow flowers.

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

One thing we know: our God is also your God. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted with talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone! And what is to say goodbye to the swift pony and then hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survival.

When the last red man has vanished with this wilderness, and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any of the spirit of my people left?

We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat. So, if we sell you our land, love it as we have loved it. Care for it, as we have cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Preserve the land for all children, and love it, as God loves us.

As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you.

One thing we know - there is only one God. No man, be he Red man or White man, can be apart. We ARE all brothers after all."

Kantian View of Perception

Perception

1.1. Whenever we see/perceive, we always see/perceive it as something. We do not just see without having determined what we are seeing.

1.2. The world is represented to us in our minds. But if our minds did not have a way to understand what is being represented, the picture would just be a confused jumble and we will be disoriented. If we put a goldfish in front a television screen it cannot make sense of the images, because it does not have a developed perceptual apparatus to understand the signs/symbols as human beings do. The goldfish might react to sudden brightness, or change of light intensity, but not to individual objects as they emerge. This is because it cannot understand those objects; its perceptual system cannot process the image, which to it is just a bunch of raw uninterrupted signs.

1.3. These signs/symbols when represented in the mind are processed by the human perceptual system. This perceptual system subconsciously makes judgements regarding these signs. It picks out objects from their surroundings, labels these objects, labels their surfaces (colour, texture), it judges the depth of vision, the brightness of light, identifies the space (as one’s bedroom or school), and identifies objects which were not there earlier, or highlights things which have newly appeared, and only after a complex set of judgements, this picture completely labelled is presented to us. That is what we call seeing!

1.4. If we want to investigate particular parts of what we are seeing, then we focus on those parts, and our visual apparatus yields us more specific knowledge of these parts.

1.5. Example: We do not consciously separate objects that we pick out from their background. It would take a tremendous amount of calculation to clearly identify the silhouette of a rabbit sitting against the background of a tree. It would require knowledge of how the shades which appear closer to the shade of the skin of the rabbit belong to the rabbit and so on. Or for example when we see a man holding a hat in his hand, we immediately recognize as such, and not as another organism with a slightly different limb on the right side of the body. Neither do we ever see protons, neutrons, photons, and not just because they are so small, but because our visual system is not interested nor designed to see them. Whatever is presented to it, the visual system will try to understand it using the concepts that are hard-wired into it.

1.6. Example: we are able to pick out objects from their background on the basis of depth perception. Now this judgement is not an obvious one, and requires two eyes to work simultaneously, with slightly conflicting angles. If we close one eye and put two fingers out in front of your eyes in such a way that one is closer than the other, then one cannot judge which one is closer. You need to as if look behind the fingers, with the other eye, from an angle. And to put these two angles, of conflicting images together, requires a complex judgement. And that is performed by the perceptual system.

1.7. Processing the light that impinges on the visual system is so complicated that it can be compared to the following situation: Imagine lot of people simultaneously jumping into a pool, but you can’t see them, you can only register a splash, and on the basis of the particulars of the splash you determine exactly who has jumped and at which part of the pool. This kind of a confused jumble of light signals reaches the visual system, which is immediately and automatically able to make judgements regarding what is what and where.

1.8. Thus this input data only appears as such because the perceptual system has the categories and the apparatus which enables it to interpret the way it does. This situation is also similar to light being refracted in a prism whereby the entire spectrum becomes visible. Now the spectrum is an aspect of light, which only comes to light in the presence of some apparatus which can separate wavelengths. And, if that apparatus was no where available one would never know that light had this quality. Our perceptual system is similar to this. Without it, there is no such thing as an apple, or an orange. These objects emerge only after the perceptual system processes the data in its own particular way. So, while one may grant that there is some extra-mental existence which produces the data, but the form/shape of the data is beyond our understanding. Because our understanding is of things as they appear after they have been processed by the visual system, not before it. So, whatever is before it is necessarily unrecognizable.

1.9. If one suggests that there must be some thing corresponding to the apple which produces the apple in our minds then one may respond in the following way: (1) Apple as we know it is not uninterrupted data which we do not recognize, it has a particular form which we do recognize, so that thing is not an apple (This is analogous to the difference between a chocolate sitting on a shelf, and chocolate being tasted on the tongue. The taste is not identical to the chocolate on the shelf. It necessarily requires a human interpreter of chocolate to bring about that taste.) (2) The problem with associating a particular thing corresponding to an apple amounts to a claim that we can pick this object out from existence. How does one pick out red from a stream of light without a prism?

1.10. Thus apples and oranges do not enter our visual system. Data does, which is then labelled by our perceptual system as apples and oranges. Outside of human scheme of objects there are no such things as apples and oranges-because “apples” and “oranges” is an imposed scheme that arises in the mind, and which necessarily require a mind to arise. When we close our eyes, there is no interpretation on the input data, then there are no apples and there are no oranges. But if you say you can touch them and tell, then again, the same arguments apply: your tactile systems are again at work in a way that create forms out of the tactile data and identifies it as an object. (Note: Without the visual apparatus one would never know what an apple looks like, but only how it feels like. Stretching it further, without the tactile apparatus, one could only taste the apple and not feel it. If we did not have the perceptual and tactile apparatuses could we in any way speculate how the thing that tastes would look like or feel like? Likewise, there may be 10 other ways of interpreting data (we have 5 ways) but this depends on the interpreter. What is the objective way of interpreting data? One may interpret the world by just looking at electromagnetic activity (and there won’t be any apples, and the judgements regarding separating objects will probably introduce an entirely new classification of things). What is wrong with that? Only that human beings don’t do it that way.

1.11. Outside of a human judgement there are only marks, symbols, lacking an interpretation, lacking any human meaning, like random scribbling on a piece of paper. The world is a language, a set of signs, which without human beings (as interpreters) would be without the meanings we (are designed to) associate to it.

1.12. A less philosophical corollary: Perhaps one could say, in the light of this, that outside of human judgement there are marks, symbols, lacking an interpretation, lacking any human meaning, like random scribbling on a piece of paper. The world is a language, a set of signs, which without human beings (as interpreters) would be without the meanings we (are designed to) associate to it.