Insight Editions · No. 122
Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought
The History of Taking Metaphysics Seriously
Peter Coates
Peter Coates examines how Ibn Arabi’s Unity of Being reframes modern philosophy, sociology, and psychology, treating theories of knowledge, society, and self as partial disclosures of one reality.
A study guide to Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought by Peter Coates. Shared free for personal reading; not for sale and not endorsed by the authors or publishers. Please read and buy the original.
About the Book
Peter Coates asks a plain question with large consequences: what happens to modern philosophy, sociology and psychology if we take seriously a thirteenth-century metaphysics in which there is only one Being, and every knower, every era and every theory is a form in which that Being shows itself?
Argument map
What the book is
Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought: The History of Taking Metaphysics Seriously was published by Anqa Publishing in Oxford in 2002 and reprinted with amendments in 2008. It is dedicated to Barbara, Ursula and Paul. Coates thanks the late Bulent Rauf, who introduced him to Ibn Arabi, and the late Ninian Smart of Lancaster. The book has four chapters:
- The orientation of this study (pp.1-36): reality, self-knowledge, metaphysics and "immanencing".
- Ibn 'Arabi: philosophy and reason (pp.37-80): Averroes, Kant, Spinoza, the Vienna Circle, existentialism.
- Ibn 'Arabi and the era (pp.81-122): new creation, the Divine Names, sociology, technology, Habermas and Lyotard.
- Ibn 'Arabi and the self (pp.123-186): the heart, psychology, mind as computer, therapy, feminism, Postscript.
Each chapter ends with endnotes. The main text and notes run to about 76,000 words.
Twelve ideas to carry
- There is one Being, transcendent and immanent, in infinite forms.
- Ask "Who is known?" All knowledge rests on self-knowledge.
- Immanencing: the Real shows itself according to the receiver.
- Secondary causes are real means of access, and veils.
- Reason has its own field; as final judge it misleads.
- Key concepts are essentially contested, rooted in predisposition.
- Each era is a Divine Day; modernity included.
- Every theory is positioned; neither Habermas nor Lyotard reaches the whole.
- The heart knows; intellect serves it, reason serves intellect.
- Modern psychology lost the self as a central category.
- The self is sui generis and relational.
- Ibn Arabi is not a throwback but part of the modern era.
1. Orientation: Taking Metaphysics Seriously
The first chapter sets the terms. It explains what Ibn Arabi means by the Unity of Being, why that idea turns the question of knowledge around, why metaphysics cannot simply be dropped, and how one can read modern thought through Ibn Arabi without dismissing it.
The aim and the debts
Coates opens with an epigraph from the Futuhat in Chittick's translation: reflection "can only roam in its own specific playing field, which is one of many fields". That image of reason's proper field returns throughout the book. His stated aim is to examine contemporary thought in the light of Ibn Arabi's metaphysics. His complaint is that modern thought has not taken metaphysics seriously. The early twentieth century saw a revolution in British philosophy, while science and technology became aligned with the "calculative rationality of industrial capitalism". Metaphysics, he says, "has had a chequered career", from Plato's Republic through Wittgenstein's Tractatus to postmodernism, and capitalism has ended up "engendering its own metaphysical crisis."
He names his debts: Corbin, Addas, Austin, Chodkiewicz, Chittick, Izutsu and Morris. For readers new to Ibn Arabi he recommends Addas's Quest for the Red Sulphur, Izutsu's Sufism and Taoism, Chittick's The Sufi Path of Knowledge and Hirtenstein's The Unlimited Mercifier. He warns that he offers no detailed historical analysis. Instead: "The basic orientation of this study is to analyse the underlying conception of knowledge that permeates the metaphysics of Ibn 'Arabi and compare it with the paradigmatic assumptions about knowledge that permeated much of twentieth-century theoretical culture."
Ibn Arabi's picture of reality
For Coates "the key to understanding the entire corpus of Ibn 'Arabi lies in the central idea of wahdat al-wujud". The word wujud means being, and also "to find". His summary is the most-quoted sentence of the chapter:
This is not pantheism. The One Being transcends its "theatre of manifestation". The notes add precision. Ibn Arabi does not use the exact phrase wahdat al-wujud (n.4, citing Chittick). Addas says it was first used by Sadr al-Din Qunawi, while Austin suggests Ibn Arabi coined it. God (al-Haqq) and creation (al-khalq) are separable in concept but not in being; transcendence must always be accompanied by immanence. Affifi's formula is quoted: "in one sense the one is the other; in another it is not." (n.7)
At the centre stands the insan-i-kamil, the Perfect Man, a bridge or isthmus between the inward and outward sides of Being. Behind the whole cosmos lies God's love to be known, and man is made in His image. Coates draws a mood as well as a doctrine from this. He quotes Rumi's invitation, "Come, come whoever you are", and Addas's judgement that the teaching has "the quality of a universal message of hope". He adds at once: "It implies no Utopian idealism".
The question about questions
All knowledge is grounded in self-knowledge. Coates calls Ibn Arabi's view "participatory". The decisive shift is from "What is known?" to "Who is known?". In the end there is only One Knower, and the knower ('arif) is the one who realizes this.
He illustrates the point with mathematics. The early Russell, in Platonic mood, spoke of mathematics as a habitation eternally standing; the later Russell found it "as trivial as the statement that a four-footed animal is an animal." Ibn Arabi was called the Son of Plato and himself called Plato "the Divine Plato". The Indian mathematician Ramanujan is the counter-example to the later Russell. Littlewood said that "every positive integer was one of his personal friends", and Ramanujan said "an equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God". Coates aligns this with Ibn Arabi's claim that "there is not one single thing that cannot be known through revelation or spiritual experience".
From Unamuno he takes "It is man that philosophizes." From Macquarrie he takes the distinction between knowing facts and knowing persons, where "such knowing is characterized by participation". From the Quran he takes the line that frames the whole book: "Each day He is upon some task."
Fragmentation is a perception, not a fact. The multiplicity we see comes from the structure of our cognition (Izutsu) and from finite minds (Affifi). Return to the vision of original Unity is "the fundamental human project", and tawhid is "the epistemological gold standard". Science can veil the cosmos as theophany, but it need not. Coates quotes Einstein: "The most beautiful and profound emotion" is "the sensation of the mystical."
Why metaphysics matters
Coates gives the classic agenda of metaphysics: being (Plato, Aristotle), what can be known (Kant, Hume) and becoming (Aquinas, Spinoza, Marx, Freud). Its task is a "comprehensive account of the whole as a whole". Ibn Arabi supplies a sequence: the Absolute Unknowable, the "First Presence", the "First Individuation" and the "Most Holy Effusion" (al-fayd al-aqdas). God is nearer "than our jugular vein". Coates recounts a youth steadfast in devotion who said: "I am knowledge, the known and the knower."
He finds allies among scientists, naming Bohm, Sperry, Goodwin and Mae-Wan Ho, for whom observer and observed are interconnected, and Harré, for whom metaphysics is central to physics. The ethical fruit of this is tolerance, a "metaphysically inspired generosity of outlook" that is "antithetical to any narrow religious fundamentalism".
Traditional thought, science and fundamentalism
Robin Horton argued that traditional thought and science share rational strategies: both seek unity beneath diversity and a wider causal context. They differ in idiom (personal against impersonal) and openness. Traditional culture has "no developed awareness of alternatives to the established body of theoretical tenets"; science does. Coates accepts the contrast but adds Parekh's account of fundamentalism as "a specific kind of response to a religion facing a crisis of identity and authority", "a highly simplified and ideological system of beliefs". Ibn Arabi is the opposite case. He teaches "that the person of knowledge ('arif) does not get caught up in any one form of belief", and he wrote: "My heart has become capable of every form".
| Horton: traditional | Horton: science | Ibn Arabi (Coates) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seeks | Unity under diversity | Unity under diversity | The One in every form |
| Idiom | Personal | Impersonal | Who is known? |
| Alternatives | Not developed | Built in | All beliefs as partial forms |
| Risk | Closure | Reification | Mistaking a form for the whole |
The Enlightenment gap
The Enlightenment opened a gap between knower and known: Descartes's pineal gland, Deism's "a radically non-theophanic cosmos", Newton's argument from design (later criticized by Hume) and the reification of knowledge in Diderot, D'Alembert and Voltaire. Coates notes that Newton was also interested in the occult. Romanticism, existentialism and quantum physics reopened the question. Habermas's name for the programme, the "Enlightenment Project", returns in chapter 3. Coates's own question is: "what is the nature of the relationship and responsibility between knower and known?"
Positioned discourses
History is the test case. Carr wrote that "the facts speak only when the historian calls on them", and advised: "study the historian before you begin to study the facts." Jenkins sees history as a "series of readings, all of which are positioned"; there is no "unpositioned center". Hayden White shows the metaphors at work. Coates draws the lesson that a metaphysical vision like Ibn Arabi's cannot be reached through positioned discourses.
Two responses: Corbin and Coates
Corbin answered by setting two incommensurable paradigms side by side: the sacred, oriental one against the modern, secular one. He attacked the idea of "man as being in history" and "the mirage of a historical causality", and wrote: "This is what is known as agnosticism." Corbin and Nasr both speak of the "desacralization" of knowledge. Coates thinks this strategy leads to a "judgmental impasse". He does not want to set one era against another. His alternative is the principle of immanencing.
Secondary causes
Economic, social, biological and physical causes are secondary causes; the primary, unseen cause is God. They are "outward forms of unseen realities", and God did not establish them aimlessly. They veil theophany and remind us of our dependence. Coates lists the stock market and telecommunications, and says poverty follows its causes like a shadow follows its originator. This allows "differentiated seeing", as against Corbin's flat contrast. Harré's physics helps: particle-creating equipment reveals particles. Nietzsche's perspectivism helps too: "the more eyes, different eyes, we can use to observe one thing" the more complete our concept of it. Ibn Arabi allows this differentiated seeing without denying knowledge that is not perspectival.
A reconfigured topography
The book covers three areas: philosophy, sociology and psychology, ending with computational theories of mind. Coates promises to avoid both dogmatism and an eschatology of secular collapse, and to show "the unexpectedly and thoroughly modern nature of much of Ibn 'Arabi's thought". He compares Pico della Mirandola, who defended the dignity of man "against the increasing tendency of medieval religion to depreciate man's nature", and Nicholas of Cusa, for whom God is the one "in whom all opposites coincide". What sets Ibn Arabi apart is the universality of his viewpoint. Darwin wrote: "It may freely be admitted that no animal is self-conscious". Feuerbach wrote that "in religion man contemplates his own latent nature", but Ibn Arabi does not reduce theology to anthropology.
The meeting with Averroes
The chapter's set piece is the young Ibn Arabi's meeting with Averroes, told in Sufis of Andalusia. Asked whether mystical insight matches philosophy, he answers "Yes!" and then "No!", and then explains:
Averroes turned pale and said: "There is no power save from God." Coates calls it an "existential wobble". The lesson is about the limits of reason, not irrationality: tawhid is a condition that can be verified, not an obscure medieval specialism.
Affifi's misreading
Affifi called Ibn Arabi a pantheistic monist who misused the verb "to be". Following Kant, Affifi charged him with "treating the existential proposition as a predicational one". Coates calls this "a profound misconstruction", like dismissing the Upanishads with Ayer's logical positivism. Wujud means "to find"; it is not a predicate. Coates prefers Izutsu's comparison with Lao Tzu and his account of "a disposition to appear as". Ibn Arabi's metaphysics is not an axiomatic system like Spinoza's or Bradley's: "it is a living metaphysics full of cadences, moods, modalities, and breath-taking vision". The Fusus has two themes: the Oneness of Being and the raison d'être of the human (Adamic) kind. Its "attractor", in the language of chaos theory, is the Love to be Known.
2. Philosophy and Reason
Chapter 2 asks what reason can and cannot do. Coates sets Ibn Arabi beside Averroes, Kant, Spinoza, the Vienna Circle and the existentialists, and argues that his account of the limits of reason is itself eminently reasonable.
Two senses of philosophy
Philosophy can mean love of wisdom or reflective thinking. The two senses are told apart by their source of authority. Ibn Arabi aligns Plato with the "men of revelation and contemplation". Wisdom (hikma) is a divine gift, set in "settings" or "bezels": prophets, saints and knowers. This is where the title Fusus al-Hikam (Bezels of Wisdom) comes from.
Reflective thinking takes one of two views. Either reason is the only avenue to truth, the Enlightenment view (Diderot: "We must ride roughshod over all ancient puerilities"), or it is not the only avenue, the view of Averroes in his Harmony of Religion and Philosophy. For Averroes, falsafa was demonstrative science, "the systematic application of demonstrative reasoning to the world." For Ibn Arabi, the ground of knowledge from God's presence ('ilm laduni) is revelation, and its place is "in the contemplation of" self-experience, a phrase drawn from Niffari.
Five reasons reason is unreliable
Reflective thinking is a divine gift found only in humans, but it is "a test and a trial". Pursued by itself through the via negativa, it leads to a God of pure incomparability, transcendent beyond reach. Coates draws five grounds for caution from Ibn Arabi.
| # | Problem with unaided reason | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wrong method | Inference cannot reach what must be given |
| 2 | It veils | Concepts stand between knower and Real |
| 3 | It becomes final judge | Reason turns into the "gold standard" |
| 4 | It posits a separate self | A separate reasoner denies wahdat al-wujud |
| 5 | It rejects the "impossible" | It refuses what it judges self-contradictory |
Imagination: where the impossible takes form
Between the senses and pure meaning lies the intermediate world of divine creative imagination. Morris places it "between each individual's 'self-deluding imagination' and the ongoing Divine 'Imaging' underlying all creation". There "the impossible is given form": imagination "sees knowledge in the form of milk, honey, wine, and pearls". Ibn Arabi states the paradox exactly: "The sensory thing cannot be a meaning, nor can the meaning be a sensory thing". Yet in this presence it happens.
In this light the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Blake's line fits: "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees". So does the chemist Kekulé, who saw in a dream a snake seize its own tail, and so found the ring structure of benzene. Jaegwon Kim admits the mystery from the other side: "How meaning and understanding could arise out of molecules and cells is as much a mystery as how they could arise out of strings of zeroes and ones."
Reason is caught in a dilemma. It must either judge this order of knowing by its own rules or acknowledge a different epistemic order. Normally the impossible thing belongs to the hereafter, and imagination is "posterior to sense perception".
Kant: the same boundary, a different verdict
Hume and Kant curbed speculative reason. Kant saw in metaphysics "a dialectic of illusory inferences" and held the noumenon unknowable: "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought". Yet he also saw in reason "a deep, but insatiable, need of human reason for the complete explanation of experience".
Differ: for Kant reason remains judge and jury, and there are no noumenal ways of knowing; this plants "seeds of a profound ineliminable agnosticism". For Ibn Arabi, reason can "come to understand that the only way to know God is for God to give it knowledge", and the presence where the impossible takes form gives access to what lies beyond it.
Wittgenstein's closing line, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence", marks the same border. Coates argues that Kant's faith was finally in reason. What is Enlightenment? asks for the "freedom to make public use of one's reason in all matters". His self-examination of reason became a veil. Ibn Arabi's counsel is to use reason as it should be used and "Give to each that has a due its due."
Spinoza: isomorphic, but thinner
Spinoza's Ethics proves by geometry that there is one substance, God, whose "essence involves existence". He even names a "third kind of knowledge", intuitive knowledge. Coates calls the parallel isomorphic, and notes that both men have been wrongly called pantheists. He quotes the Turkish poet Yunus Emre to give the Akbarian flavour: "I wrapped myself in flesh and bones and appeared as Yunus."
Ibn Arabi does not deny that "the science of the philosopher is not totally in vain". But for the "People of the heart" courtesy (adab) decides ascription: "that only good and beautiful acts be ascribed to God, while evil and ugly acts must be ascribed to the servants". The Perfect Man images the freedom of the Original. Addas adds that unaided reason yields no decisive certainty.
Essential contestability
Here Coates introduces a tool he uses for the rest of the book. W. B. Gallie defined essentially contested concepts as "concepts the proper use of which inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper use on the part of their users." Metaphysics, democracy, art, religion, power and education are examples.
Essentially contested: "What constitutes a good education?" or "How ought we to live?" Disputes persist, rational progress is slow, yet the positions are not irredeemably subjective and traditions stay open to revision.
Behaviourism is Coates's example of a paradigm presenting itself as the paradigm. Watson set its "theoretical goal" as "the prediction and control of behaviour." Coates calls this "an almost veterinary view of the human animal". Ibn Arabi's diagnosis is that the advocates of a view "make the mistake of believing they are absolute". Phillips and Mounce give a homely case: a rationalist and a Catholic housewife disagree about birth control, and "what they differ over is precisely the question of what constitutes good and harm." Contestability does "not entail the liberty to argue as one chooses".
Reason and commitment
Reason matters, but it does not decide. Rational strategies articulate insights rather than originate them; their roots lie in imaginative vision. Coates cites the critique in Feminists Rethink the Self of homo economicus, the "free and rational chooser and actor whose desires are ranked in coherent order and whose aim is to maximize desire satisfaction", a picture they find "incomplete and fundamentally misleading". Against it he sets the Futuhat: "God never commanded His Prophet to seek increase of anything except knowledge". Kierkegaard supplies the note of commitment: "That is what my soul longs after, as the African desert thirsts for water."
The teacher in her nineties
Ibn Arabi's teacher Nunah Fatimah bint Ibn al-Muthanna, in her nineties, said of him: "he comes to me with all of himself", and "That is how it should be on the Way." Another teacher advised, in the Ruh al-Quds: "If you will shut out the world from you, sever all ties and take the Bounteous alone as your companion, He will speak with you without the need for any intermediary." When all experience is seen as theophany, the seeker reaches the Station of Proximity. "Vision" then means taste (dhawq), not only eyesight, "be it a person, a sunset or a poem". Strawson notes that endemic disagreement in philosophy may "reflect in part his individual taste and temperament."
Scientific philosophy: the Vienna Circle
The Vienna Circle met from 1926 to 1938, as the book dates it. Its members included Schlick (the founder), Carnap, Neurath, Waismann, Gödel and Frank, with Ayer, Quine and Popper as visitors. The note adds that Gödel never held its doctrines (n.63). Wittgenstein's Tractatus was hailed as "a decisive turning point in philosophy." The Circle held that "the totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science". The meaning of a statement was its method of verification. Carnap: "there is no question whose answer is in principle unattainable by science".
Philosophy became clarification: "Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity." Ayer's essay "The elimination of metaphysics" called metaphysical claims "pseudo-propositions" and held that "all metaphysical assertions are nonsensical." Coates notes that the verification principle is neither analytic nor empirical, so it can only be a "fruitful methodological recommendation". Logical positivism was a "philosophy of the tangible". It was not value-free; it mirrored industrial culture. Phillips and Mounce: "The notion of what all men want is as artificial as the common evidence which is supposed to support it."
Two counterpoints close the section. Carnap said Wittgenstein's attitudes were "similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer"; Wittgenstein rejected Schlick's view that religion was a childhood phase. And Ibn Arabi, too, valued verification. Corbin quotes him: "I have never spoken of an opinion or doctrine without building on the direct statements of persons who were its adepts." Corbin calls this "perfect scientific probity". Coates adds Ibn Arabi's own principle: "knowledge of God takes on the measure of your view, your preparedness and what you are in yourself."
Philosophy of the subject: existentialism
Existentialism took the opposite road, towards the truth of authentic being. Jaspers spoke of Existenz and decision; Kierkegaard sought "the idea for which I can live and die", insisted that "the crowd is untruth", and championed "the single individual, which everyone can be and should be." Sartre's for-itself and Heidegger's Dasein follow, with the themes of freedom, decision, authenticity and being-with-others. "We are not manufactured objects."
| Theme | Existentialism | Ibn Arabi |
|---|---|---|
| Primary datum | Existence before essence | Wujud, existence, "to find" |
| Self | Process, project, self-alteration | Locus of perpetual self-disclosure |
| Thought | "the only thing-in-itself which cannot be thought is existence" (Kierkegaard) | Existence prior to thought |
| Individual | Solitary chooser (Sartre) | Unique receptivity (qabul, isti'dad) within one Being |
| Goal | Authenticity | Return to the original vision |
The decisive difference is the unity of a Single Existence. In Coates's words: "our path is not to seek God but to seek God's vision of Himself as us." Kierkegaard comes closest; Coates leaves open how close. Critics say existentialism neglects the social. For Ibn Arabi even historicity is "too narrow a compass". The Fusus is a "universal spiritual cartography", and the Quranic and Socratic "Know thyself" is its key: "No one knows the dignity of Man and his place in the universe except those who know how to contemplate God perfectly."
Three features of the existential self
Coates draws three features from existentialism that he finds close to Ibn Arabi. First, the self is a process, not a thing; we are always becoming. Second, the self lives through imaginative consciousness, projecting what it is not yet. Third, the self is self-reflexive, and so capable of self-alteration; Kierkegaard's leaps of faith are the extreme case. Existentialism also had a social edge. It was a moral protest against dehumanizing industry, and it gave women a language for transcending stereotypes. Coates notes Izutsu's comparison of Ibn Arabi with Heidegger's distinction between Being (das Sein) and beings (das Seiende), and the existentialist claim that "the eternal has come into being in time". For Ibn Arabi, he adds, time is a matter of perspective, not of being.
Wisdom and reason reconciled
The paradox, Coates admits, is that his account of the limits of reason is eminently reasonable. Kashf, unveiling, is like scales falling from the eyes. Hirtenstein: "It is a transformation that takes one out of the temporal successions of ordinary life." It yields decisive certainty. Plato said philosophy begins in wonder; for Ibn Arabi the organ is the heart. Affifi saw "the whole creation is a rational structure from the lowest mineral to the highest type of man", with God as "the creative and rational Principle". In the inspired intellect, knower, knowledge and known are one. Coates's formula: "This is the wisdom of its logic and the logic of its wisdom."
3. The Era
Chapter 3 turns from the knower to the age. Coates reads the modern era twice, first as a Divine Day ruled by certain Names, then through the eyes of its own sociologists, and finally through the quarrel between Habermas and Lyotard about reason itself.
Creation and change
Tarnas called modernity "a triumph of the Heraclitean flux." Heraclitus said you cannot step twice into the same river, "for fresh waters are ever flowing on you". McLuhan's "global village" and the television screen are the icons of constant change. Coates sets beside them Ibn Arabi's doctrine of al-khalq al-jadid, perpetual new creation: the cosmos is annihilated and recreated at every moment. Those unaware of this "lag behind the moment".
Each thing has its immutable archetype ('ayn al-thabita) in God's knowledge. Al-Qashani writes that "God brings them out to actuality incessantly and perpetually". For Ibn Arabi, "the creation of individual human beings is in fact infinite". An era is a configuration of Divine Self-disclosure. The hadith says: "Revile not the era for I [God] am the era." Coates also cites "God was and nothing was with Him", and insists that immanence and transcendence must be held together "to follow the right course". In Ibn Arabi's scheme the modern era falls between Muhammad and the second coming of Jesus.
The Divine Names and their Days
The Names are as many as there are things; the Ninety-Nine are a summary. "Every name in the cosmos is His name, not the name of other than He." "Every person is a place for the manifestation of one or other Name". And: "Each name possesses days, which are the time for the ruling property of that name". The Days of the Names commingle, interpenetrate and cover each other. An era has an inward side and an outward side.
| Name | Sense (as the book glosses) |
|---|---|
| jalal / jamal | Majesty / beauty |
| hadi / mudill | The one who guides / leads astray |
| khaliq, musawwir | Creator, shaper |
| badi' | Rendered by Coates as "The Most Beautiful Scientific Constructor" |
| 'adl, rahman | Justice, mercy |
Mirror, chameleon, heart
The cosmos is a mirror in which God sees His form, and in this world everything appears inverted. A note explains with a spoon: in the bowl your image is upside down, on the back it is reversed left to right (n.14). The chameleon is Ibn Arabi's emblem, "since there is no animal that shows more clearly that the Real possesses the property of transmutation". Spenser's "the ever whirling wheels of change" are, for Ibn Arabi, "a reminder of the Root, for him who has a heart". The heart itself fluctuates: God is the "Turner of Hearts", and hearts lie between "two fingers of the Merciful". The Perfect Man is a "mercy to the universes", and existence is the "Breath of the Merciful".
Secondary causes as ropes
The Arabic asbab means ropes or cords: "connecting things or factors", "means of access", "means of accomplishment". They have no ontological independence. Gravity and climate can produce poverty; still, God has no temporal priority over the era.
Social science and the modern era
Hobsbawm dated the industrial revolution to the 1780s and called it "the greatest transformation in human history since remote times." Coates stresses that what was unique was the alignment of science, technology and capitalism, the "Great Transformation". Sociology arose as the new intellectual authority. The book gives the dates Marx (1818-83), Durkheim (1858-1917) and Weber (1864-1920), and names Comte and Saint-Simon as precursors. Its themes were the move from land to cities and factories and the separation of work from family. Kumar speaks of a "powerful image of industrialization as a social system and a way of life", and Dickens and George Eliot are its novelists.
Reflexivity
Giddens sees in modernity "the presumption of wholesale reflexivity": "We are abroad in a world which is thoroughly constituted through reflexively applied knowledge". The Encyclopédie of 1751 was a "new secular bible", and Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great read it. The Enlightenment project was an "intellectual time-bomb", because "the claims of reason replaced those of tradition". Popper drew the consequence: "We cannot identify science with truth, for we think that both Newton's and Einstein's theories belong to science, but they cannot both be true, and they may well both be false".
Coates: traditions too can be rediscovered reflexively; the modern revival of Ibn Arabi is one example. Reflexivity is the redescription of secondary causes, and it mirrors Divine Self-reflexivity. Yet the world "is to itself its own veil and thus cannot see God, due to the very fact that it sees itself."
Speed, globalization and the commodified self
Two developments mark late modernity: the speed of change, driven by technology, and globalization. Stephen Hill argues that commodity culture "mediates our consciousness of self" through a "technological frame". Unintended consequences follow, from the ecological crisis to reproductive technology. Weber foresaw the "iron cage" and "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart".
Founders as moralists
Kumar observes that the founders' accounts are also exhortations, resting on "artistic intuition": Weber's Protestant ethic, Simmel's metropolis, Marx's alienation, Durkheim's anomie. Weber gives a theory of change, not a history. He allows charismatic individuals (the Buddha, Jesus, Hitler) and rejects mono-causal explanation. He accepts a "polytheism of values" and a world process of meaningless infinity, an "eternally onward flowing stream of culture".
| Founder (dates as printed) | Key diagnosis | Religion seen as |
|---|---|---|
| Marx (1818-83) | Alienation; class | "the opium of the people" |
| Durkheim (1858-1917) | Anomie | Symbol of society |
| Weber (1864-1920) | Rationalization, iron cage, disenchantment | Value systems |
| Simmel | The metropolis | (not developed in the book) |
The reorientation of the self
Weber quotes Tolstoy: "Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question". He asks: "What man will take upon himself the attempt to 'refute scientifically' the ethic of the Sermon on the Mount?" Runciman sums up Weber's conviction "that reality cannot be grasped by the human mind as a meaningful whole". Coates replies that if one asks "Who is known?", science is part of the Self-disclosure, and the fact/value split is "epistemologically inverted".
Mumford's Technics and Civilization says the machine had been developing for seven centuries, and "there was also a change of mind": "a reorientation of wishes, habits, ideas, goals was necessary." By the seventeenth century "the power of the technical imagination had far outstripped the actual capacities of workmen and engineers". For Mumford, "The machine came forth as the new demiurge that was to create a new heaven and a new earth". Yet the machine is a human product, and understanding it is "a means towards understanding society and towards knowing ourselves".
- Encyclopédie: 1751. Industrial society: the 1780s.
- Before about 1750, in Heckscher's phrase, "Nature audited her account with a red pencil".
- From 1650 to 1850 the annual rate of world population growth doubled, and doubled again by the 1920s (Kumar).
- China, late 1500s to early eighteenth century: population doubled from 60 million to 120 million (Weber), yet no industrial capitalism followed.
Weber's explanation for China was the mind-set of the literati, the patriarchal state and the extended family. So demography is not a sufficient condition. Newtonian physics contributed almost nothing to the technologies in the Encyclopédie's engravings. Technology often breeds technology ("Given the boat and the steam engine, is not the steamboat inevitable?"), and much invention is a "perpetual accretion of little details", as Gilfillan found with ships.
Technology is never neutral
Coates rejects technological determinism, the claim that the microchip will make us "change our ideas of work and leisure". Technology is a human product and depends on human values. Ruth Cowan noticed that histories of technology ignore the baby bottle. Every technology sits within contexts of power, social life and ideals. Heidegger said "the essence of technology has nothing to do with technology". Modern technology is "a revealing" that treats nature as "standing reserve": "earth now reveals itself as a coal-mining district, the soil as a mineral deposit". It "enframes" our view and devalues other ways of revealing, including self-knowledge. David Cooper adds that in a technological society "moral conviction, religious sense, taste and sensibility play only bit parts", but "regrettably, the person is unable to live by these alone".
Disenchantment and re-enchantment
All this is a variation on Weber: instrumental rationality (Zweck-rational) gains over value rationality (Wert-rational) in the "disenchantment of the world". If so, Coates suggests, it is apt that Ibn Arabi, once called the "revivifier of religion", is now reaching English readers. Wahdat al-wujud gives "a re-enchanted picture of the world".
Weber himself came close. He saw "an infinite multiplicity of successively and coexistently emerging and disappearing events", knew social science cannot give a causal explanation "in any final sense", and knew presuppositions are imposed on reality. Coates finds three Akbarian insights in Weber: reason grasps only a tiny fraction of reality; the world is in flux; and the investigator's presuppositions colour the result. What Weber lacked was the unitive ontology, and so he reached a bleak conclusion. Turner sums up Weber's question: "How can reason be rationally justified?"
Modernity, postmodernity and relativism
Habermas: the unfinished project
For Habermas "metaphysical" is a term of abuse. He extends rational discourse to art and morality as well as science, and he defends the Enlightenment as an ongoing, unfinished project, while admitting "the brutal history" of the twentieth century. Through communicative action, "the self-determination of all was to be joined with the self-realization of each." But he excludes "the mythological, cosmological, religious and ontological modes of thought".
Coates finds much to admire. Respect for persons is a principle that could win rational consensus. Ibn Arabi agrees that reason should rule caprice: "For reason delimits its possessor, not allowing him to enter into that which is improper." But such principles are always embedded in larger pictures of human nature. For Ibn Arabi the human being is "the highest and most venerable creature God ever created", and "God so exalted man that he placed under his control all that is in the heavens and the earth from its highest to its lowest". The preservation of the species ranks above "religious bigotry". Scientifically man is a speck; spiritually the heart of the Perfect Man embraces the cosmos. That inversion is visionary, not inferred.
Lyotard: incredulity towards meta-narratives
Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition is subtitled "A report on knowledge". Consensus, he writes, does violence to the heterogeneity of language games; and "invention is always born of dissension." Postmodern knowledge "reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable." He has been accused of "uncritical polytheism". Coates notes that incredulity itself presupposes universal criteria. The meta-narratives Lyotard rejects include "the historical march of Reason, Civilization, Wealth or the Proletariat", to which one might add religion. Science is spared the label but not the suspicion when it allies itself with progress and commodity culture.
| Habermas | Lyotard | Ibn Arabi (Coates) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reason | Purified, universal, arbitrates | Plural language games | Valid in its field; not the arbiter |
| Consensus | Goal of discourse | Violence to difference | Diversity follows predisposition |
| Metaphysics | Pejorative | A meta-narrative | Taken seriously |
| Outcome | Extols reason | Affirms relativity | "Who is known?" |
Harré: a world of dispositions
Rom Harré gives Coates his bridge. It is "a fundamental error" to think "that science is the pursuit of truth"; scientists have "some local facts and a few experiments". "The world is a very rich source of dispositions", and "the world will show what we ask of it." He adds: "There is a myth that people have fixed personalities". If reality reveals different aspects to different approaches, then science is one form of access. For Ibn Arabi self-knowledge is another, and the central one: "He who knows himself knows his Lord." "Hence he made you a signifier."
Neither modern nor postmodern
Postmodernism has been summed up as a commitment "to refuse the tyranny of wholes." Tarnas: "Reality is not a solid, self-contained given but a fluid, unfolding process". Coates grants the insight but finds the conclusion relativist, an example of the world being its own veil: "Postmodernism only appears to be able to re-certify relativism." Modernism extols reason; postmodernism affirms its relativity. Both, for Ibn Arabi, lack the credentials of wahdat al-wujud. Giddens's admission that the enigma of modernity cannot be overcome may be a sign of reason's proper boundary. Berkeley wrote: "We should believe that God has dealt more bountifully with the sons of men than to give to them a strong desire for that knowledge which he had placed quite out of their reach."
4. The Heart: Metaphysics of Self-Knowledge
The last and longest chapter begins with Ibn Arabi's conception of the self before it confronts modern psychology. Its centre is the heart: the organ that knows God, the mirror in which God sees Himself, and the faculty that reason and intellect should serve.
The heart as organ of knowing
For Ibn Arabi the heart is that which knows God; it is the centre of Divine activity and the core of each self. It is tempting to call it the organ of mystical perception, but Coates warns against a dualism of mystical and ordinary perception. All perception is theophanic, whether or not the perceiver realizes it. Only the heart can recognize this, and so it is the heart to which God looks and which He addresses.
There is no dualism of knower and known, subject and object, original and image. The heart is the kernel of the self through which "the clarification of the mirror of the world" takes place, so that God can manifest by it "His mystery to Himself".
A passage from the Fusus describes the logic of the mirror. The vision a being has of himself in himself differs from the vision another reality provides as a mirror; the mirror shows him in a form that depends on the place of vision, the plane of reflection and "the ray which is reflected therein." The essential vision is the "most-saintly effusion", which "consists in the self-revelation of God manifesting Himself from all Eternity to Himself". The outward manifestation, the universes and everything in space, time, history and culture, follows from it logically.
The Perfect Man
The heart is a witnessing isthmus that unites the Divine and human aspects of the single reality. The Perfect Man is the cause of creation and the one in whom its purpose is realized: the jewel of the world. Because his luminosity varies with God's love to be known, "it is according to God, and not itself". So it can be said, provided no egotism is implied, that the Perfect Man is the macrocosm and the universe the microcosm. Affifi puts it that the heart is where God is known to Himself through Himself.
Partial pictures of ourselves can be reified, parade as universal truths, become identity-defining, and send us "hurtling along a particular existential life trajectory". Ibn Arabi cites Junayd: "the colour of the water is the colour of its receptacle". Our colourings veil our original nature, yet they also point to their origin, since they depend on what they colour.
The heart in everyday psychology
Everyday speech already uses the heart for a person's inner orientation: integrity, authenticity, intention. Strawson showed that our reactive attitudes, from resentment to forgiveness to love, rest on the good or bad intentions of others. Coates takes generosity as an example. What then of the Divine generosity in creating man in His image? It is fully appreciated only when the receiver is stripped of every other consideration. That stripping away is Ibn Arabi's counsel to the seeker (salik). What results is not "a black hole" but the removal of ignorance.
Many things can possess the heart: power, wealth, family, country, art, science, resentment. A "change of heart" is a change in a person's orientation. For Ibn Arabi it realigns a person with their archetype, the 'ayn al-thabita. The heart is a Divine gift: "it is God who puts love of God into the heart". Coates's image is the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz, crying "if I only had a heart". The tin man's plea is a cry for the awakening of the heart. The method is "Know thyself": "He who knows himself knows his Lord", and the practice is "the polishing of the mirror of the heart".
Heart, intellect and reason
The heart's knowledge, received even when we are unaware of it, can inform every other faculty. It can represent itself in sensations, images, memories, dreams, "and even in syllogistic arguments and number theory." Blake saw "a World in a grain of Sand". Ibn Arabi's most famous line says: "My heart has become capable of every form".
Following Souad Hakim, Coates describes the intellect as a "centre of judgement". It receives from the senses, reason, memory and imagination, and assents or dissents. It can judge that a dream is a dream, as in Descartes. In a deeper sense, Ibn Arabi's chapter on Joseph calls the Prophet's whole life "a dream within a dream", and says "people are asleep and when they die they awake". Coates compares life to frames in a cosmic film. The saying is: "The world is illusion but it is the Truth in Truth." Without this realization "men will remain asleep".
Coates calls this remark, quoted via Hakim, more astute than anything in Berkeley's Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision, though Berkeley too saw the changing world as a language through which God speaks. When reason judges alone, a paradigm is hard to shift. Atomism was hard to challenge until quantum physics and chaos theory reasserted the interconnectedness of reality and of observer and observed. Those advances came from thought experiments and imaginative reconceptions as much as from reason and observation. Reason articulated imaginative insights; it did not originate them.
The intellect that serves reason is one-winged and cannot travel beyond the truths of reason. The fully-fledged intellect flies to the heart and becomes heart-inspired. When heart and mind are aligned, Intellect, Mind and Heart form one reality that Ibn Arabi sometimes calls Light. Even reason is a kind of light, but a subordinate one. This explains the passage from the Futuhat quoted at the start of the book: God told His Prophet to seek increase only in knowledge, "since all good (khayr) lies therein", and "Idleness with knowledge is better than ignorance with good works".
The heart as the Self of Compassion
The heart is the core of the self; in essence it is the self. Of the many related terms (breast, intellect, soul, breath), heart is the one that signifies that God made man in His image out of His own beauty and compassion. The heart is the nafs al-rahman, the Self of Compassion. Nothing exists over which God's compassion does not prevail; compassion is the inner reality of all things. In chaos-theory language, it is the hidden attractor of everything. But for Ibn Arabi it is not hidden at all. In Sufis of Andalusia he says that if you "take the Bounteous One alone as your companion", He will speak to you with no intermediary. The reality of the self is God's wanting "to see His own Essence in one global object".
- The heart knows; the intellect judges; reason serves.
- The self is a mirror and a point of vision, not a thing.
- The Perfect Man's heart reflects the whole Divine order without distortion.
- Partial pictures of the self veil, but also point to their origin.
5. Psychology and the Self
With Ibn Arabi's vast conception of the self in place, Coates surveys modern psychology: its experimental core, its discursive critics, computational theories of mind, its founders Wundt and James, post-empiricist science, therapy and feminism. His verdict is consistent. Each school sees something real, and each leaves the self itself out of the picture.
The psychological century
Modern psychology shaped the twentieth century's picture of itself: Freud and Jung, the focus on individual differences, psychometric testing in schools, armies and industry, humanistic counselling, cognitive science and its links with artificial intelligence, and computational theories of the mind. Roger Smith's summary is the one Coates endorses: "there is a significant sense in which everyone in the twentieth century learned to be a psychologist", and "The twentieth century was a psychological age, and in this it differed from earlier ages."
Psychology has no unifying law comparable to gravitation in physics. Its pioneers (Fechner, Wundt, James) took consciousness as their object, but later academic psychology defined itself by method. It followed James's advice that mind "works under conditions; and the quest of the conditions becomes the psychologist's most interesting task". Coates compares the hoped-for widening of psychology to the way Aristotelian logic, once thought to be the whole of logic, became one fraction of it.
The invisible self
Experimental psychology won the claim to be psychology as such, against humanistic psychology and psychoanalysis, despite the fame of Freud, Jung, Rogers and Maslow. Thagard's account of cognitive science shows the method: experiments on human subjects interpreted through computational models. Cognitive science drew in AI, mathematics, linguistics, philosophy and neuroscience, which shows that the mind cannot be studied within experimental psychology alone.
The cost was noticed from within. A president of the American Psychological Association said in 1994, as Schneider reports, that psychologists "stand very close to being [involved in] a discipline concerned with superficial problems", and called for a return to "a psychology of meaning in the broadest sense". Wundt himself had said that myth, religion, morality, art, culture and law need a cultural psychology (Volkerpsychologie) with historical, not experimental, methods. Late twentieth-century discursive psychology agrees that "all social psychological phenomena are properties of discourse".
Personality theory and the predisposed theorist
Sloan observes that "many of psychology's subfields implicitly or explicitly incorporate one personality theory or another". These theories aim at "the big picture on human nature" but deliver a cultural snapshot aligned with industrial, entrepreneurial ideas of the individual. Students are not taught to assess them "as theories". Sloan's verdict: "mainstream approaches have systematically reduced our capacity to understand personality."
Schneider comes close: "The investigator is a participant" who "understands that he or she is part of the phenomenon that is being studied." Tarnas comes closer: "the world tends to ratify, and open up according to, the character of the vision directed towards it." Peirce (1839-1914, as the note dates him) is said to have remarked that the only thing worse than bad metaphysics is believing you have none. A proposed "psychology of experience" says: "Experimental, phenomenological and transformative approaches will all have their part to play." Coates welcomes this but adds that for Ibn Arabi unity cannot be assembled from perspectives; it already is.
The discursive turn
Critical-discursive psychology holds that all theories of the self are socially constructed and historically located. People inhabit symbolic and conversational universes; they are not causal happenings. Coates calls this the nearest Western approach to a metaphysics of the self, embracing history and biology, society and individual, morality and causation. Ian Parker is sceptical "of a unified self that lies underneath discourse". The self becomes a "complex subjectivity", and essentialist ideologies of the self are an iron cage.
Differ: Ibn Arabi also says "(The world) is to itself its own veil". Treating discourse, history and culture as the ultimate grounds of the self mistakes secondary causes for primary ones. Discursive psychology corrects reductionism, but "it is still far from a metaphysics of the whole as a whole."
Wendy Hollway points to an asymmetry in the experiment: "While the scientist-psychologist retains reason or mind in the full sense, the mind which is the object of psychology is reduced". Coates notes that even she speaks of mind, not of the self that has a mind, a self that keeps its dignity even when it cannot exercise full rationality.
Hardware, software and multiple realizability
For Ibn Arabi the body, including the brain, is part of the self's phenomenal field but not co-extensive with it. Death dissolves a form, not its reality. Drawing on Thurman (n.36), Coates writes: "The brain and body are a kind of dismantleable and reorganizable hardware. The software, if you want, is the heart". Jaegwon Kim names the idea behind computational theories of mind: "the multiple realizability of mental properties". Kim even allows that if angels are a consistent idea, "there is nothing in the idea of mentality itself that precludes purely non-physical, wholly immaterial realizations of psychological states", though for him "Minds, if they exist, must be embodied."
What Kim calls embodiment, Ibn Arabi calls form, image or frame, varying in coarseness, subtlety and luminosity. Objects are like pictures on a screen or holograms. Izutsu: "The ontological status of phenomenal things is rather that of relations". Reality, "God's Vast Earth", cannot be caught in any single representation. The perfected self is a heart devoid of wrong beliefs.
Computational theories of mind
Fodor saw his project as "the reduction of minds to symbols", and wrote: "I sort of like the work. The pay is no good, and the progress is very slow. But you do get to meet interesting people on the way." Coates credits cognitive science with opening non-empiricist doors: it admits mental causation, which behaviourism forbade, and some advocates warn against "putting too much in the head", pointing to the mind as "a brain/body/world system".
| Question | Computational theory | Ibn Arabi (Coates) |
|---|---|---|
| What is mind? | Symbol manipulation, multiply realizable | Love and knowledge, multiply realized in all forms |
| Self-knowledge? | Coates asks how a computer could have self-knowledge in Plato's sense | The key to knowledge of the Real |
| Status of findings | Conjectural (Popper) | Conjectural and only a small fraction |
| Missing questions | "What ends ought we to pursue?" "How ought we to live?" | Central |
| Verdict | "Computational theories of mind seem singularly devoid of any adequate metaphysics of the self." | |
Plato, unlike Fodor, held that phenomena are shadows and that we know their origin by recollection (anamnesis, n.45). The theorists of computation may have access to comprehensive knowledge; the processes they model cannot. Sperry insists the new trends towards wholeness do "not presage a further degree of general loosening" in the foundations of science. Computational theories of mind encode the mindset of the new millennium, and like every mindset they can veil the very mind they explain.
Wundt and James
Roger Smith: "psychology is a cluster of activities with a family resemblance but no common identity". Wundt hoped psychology could set aside Kant's "God, Freedom and Immortality", much as Carnap believed "there is no question whose answer is in principle unattainable by science". In 1873 Wundt hoped psychology might give "a total comprehension of human existence".
| Wilhelm Wundt | William James | |
|---|---|---|
| Method | "experimental self-observation", not introspection | Empirical inner perception; brain conditions |
| Consciousness | Elements combined by "apperception" | "does not appear to itself chopped up in bits" |
| Two orders | Physiological psychology and Volkerpsychologie (ten volumes) | Later radical empiricism, A World of Pure Experience |
| Self | "the unity of volition plus the universal control of our mental life which it renders possible" | Empirical me (body, social selves) and the I as a passing thought |
| Weak point | A "wafer-thin physiology of feeling" | Defers meaning to "the total sense or meaning of the world" |
Wundt's distinction between Naturwissenschaft and Geisteswissenschaft places the self in two orders, causal and cultural. His three-dimensional theory of feeling (pleasant or unpleasant, arousal, attention) leaves untouched the meanings of love, patience, hope or compassion. Coates asks whether his volitional self would mean some people have less self than others.
James defined mind by purposive action and gave a memorable contrast:
"A man's social self is the recognition he gets from his mates." James admitted he could not say why successive thoughts inherit each other's possessions. He eventually left psychology for larger questions. Of Wundt he said: "he isn't a genius, he is a professor". Then came Jung: "A high regard for the unconscious psyche is by no means such a delusion as our Western rationalism likes to suppose."
Microcosm or macrocosm
Late twentieth-century psychology, Coates concludes, pictures the self as "an intelligent adaptive organism": a speck in a vast universe. For Ibn Arabi this inverts the truth; the self is macrocosmic. The Fusus says: "Man is to God that which the pupil is to the eye", and "By his existence the world was completed." The Perfect Man is the "manifested consciousness of God". Of such a person God says: "I am his hearing and his sight". In the Station of Light Ibn Arabi lost all sense of front and back: "I recognized my spatial position only as a hypothesis, not as a reality."
Post-empiricist science
Philosophy of science moved from science as a mirror of reality to science as a tool, one epistemic affordance among many. Rorty attacked the "spectator theory of truth". Heisenberg: "What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning." A summary Coates quotes ends: "the real is what we manipulate."
Einstein said the scientist must seem to the systematic epistemologist "a type of unscrupulous opportunist". So may the seeker seem to the rationalist. The principle is: respond to Me and I will respond to you, contained in the Name mujib, the One who responds. Watson's behaviourist manifesto, whose "theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior", is Coates's paradigm case of predisposition limiting what reality can show.
Psychology as an essentially contested field
Coates reads the history of psychology as the history of an essentially contested concept. Because the self has so many dimensions, no single discipline can explain it, and rival schools have produced either a fragmented self or a reduced one: self to brain, or mind to machine. When experimental psychology sees itself as an aloof mirror of nature, its own assumptions become unquestionable. Seen instead as a human social construction and an emancipatory practice, psychology is visibly coloured by the conceptions of the self that it serves.
The widening of psychology to linguistics, artificial intelligence and philosophy reflects, and feeds back into, changes in how the self is understood. Coates writes that modernity has "somewhat traumatized the theoretical understanding of the self": old theories are less compelling, and new ones are unproven and relativistic. People still need a defining picture of themselves, and under strain old views return with dogmatic vigour.
The self as sui generis
Logan proposed that "the prevailing sense of self" be viewed "as central in historical and cultural change". Modernity has shaken the self; fundamentalisms, secular and religious, react. Coates wonders whether Ibn Arabi's arrival in the West now is a coincidence.
For Ibn Arabi individual selves are "Himselfnesses", expressions of the Divine Identity: "I wrapped myself in flesh and bones and appeared as Yunus". "There is no metaphysics of individualism in Ibn 'Arabi." A note cites Harré: individuality does not imply individualism (n.72). The self cannot be reduced to brain, biology or culture. It is the locus of freedom, choice and feeling, and it produces art, mathematics, law, religion and science. Ninian Smart's formula is "a historical, decision-making, imaginative animal". And for Ibn Arabi there is more: "This one global object is forever in the making."
Therapy
Therapy kept subjective experience alive and can repair "the exclusion of subjectivity". Even cognitive therapy starts from the client's first-person account. If cognitive science concludes "that there is no self, no mind or observer sitting at the center of the brain", Coates asks: "Did anyone ever believe that there was a self sitting at the centre of the brain anyway?"
| Modernist therapy | Postmodern therapy | Ibn Arabi | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Therapist's account | Scientific, privileged | One narrative among many | Partial form |
| Goal | Replace a "failure story" with a "success story" | Explore many self-understandings | Liberation so the Self is grasped |
| Risk | "a constriction of life possibilities" | No commitment to any account | None named by Coates |
The many therapies
The founders of psychotherapy are legion: Freud, Jung, Maslow, Rogers, Kelly, Erikson and Beck, with their concepts of the Oedipus complex, individuation, the hierarchy of needs, unconditional positive regard, personal constructs, normative crises and cognitive distortion. Some work one to one; others with families, groups, genders or communities. Coates does not try to sort the labyrinth. He asks how the whole field stands between modernist and postmodernist theories of knowledge, and then how both stand to Ibn Arabi.
Gergen and Kaye describe the modernist therapist as a scientifically trained professional whose account has privilege over the client's folk psychology. The danger is that "the therapist's narrative becomes the client's reality", so that "life options for the client are severely truncated", set on a single course of ego autonomy, self-actualization, rational appraisal or emotional expressiveness, depending on the brand of therapy chosen. Postmodernism adds Gadamer's point that we can never get behind language. The "truth of self" sought by modernist therapy is, on this view, a non-starter.
Gergen and Kaye give the postmodern objection a sharp edge: "To emphasize self-fulfilment to a woman living in a household with three small children and a mother-in-law with Alzheimer's is not likely to be beneficial." Coates values postmodernism for freeing people from dogmatic self-narratives. His caveat is that for Ibn Arabi liberation from limiting beliefs serves one end, the realization of the universal Self. There is no dissolving of the Self, only of misconceptions about it. "You think of yourself as a small thing, whereas in you there is hidden the biggest of the universes". "Whatever may happen the gnostic will not be caught up in one definite belief because he is wise unto himself."
Feminism and the relational self
Feminists Rethink the Self starts from the view that the "implications of one's account of the self reverberate throughout one's world-view". Trigg is quoted: "just as important as the kind of beings we are is the kind we think we are". Ibn Arabi's ontology, by contrast, includes every human possibility, Mill's "experiments with living" among them. There is no Divine coercion, though the Divine Wish is for each to return. The predisposition is not final: humans have the "aptitude to embrace the essential Truths". Addas calls it a universal message of hope, though Coates adds it is not naive moralizing.
Susan Brison's essay recounts the "undoing of the self" after rape. Her symptoms "were no more psychological, if that is taken to mean under my conscious control, than were my heart rate and blood pressure." Recovery begins with narrative and "bearing witness" before an empathic listener. The loss of her former self was "analogous to the loss of a beloved other", and the deepest truth about the self is its relational nature. Coates finds this axiomatic for Ibn Arabi: the Perfect Man is an isthmus, the need for others is the need for God, and the seeker is the sought. The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq, "The Interpreter of Desires", traces the lover's search for the Beloved, and Ibn Arabi's name Muhyiddin makes him "the revivifier of the religion of love."
Postscript: "Who are we?"
The twentieth century made a renewed sense of unity urgent. Interest in Ibn Arabi is not "a throw-back to a pre-scientific" age; modernity is itself a dimension of the Unity of Being. The question facing everyone is "Who are we?" Ibn Arabi's answer is categorical: "the era is no other, we are no other, there is no other." Plato is quoted: "nothing can be more antagonistic than meanness to a soul which is ever longing after the whole of things both divine and human". Ibn Arabi's work is "an epistemology of Who is known rather than what is known".
6. Reading the Notes
The endnotes are mostly references, to Chittick, Izutsu, Burckhardt's Fusus, Giddens, Kumar, Weber and others. A handful add substance, and a few show the book's own small inconsistencies. This section gathers them.
Notes that add substance
| Note | What it adds |
|---|---|
| Ch.1 n.4 | Ibn Arabi does not use the exact term wahdat al-wujud; Addas credits Qunawi with first using it, while Austin suggests Ibn Arabi coined it |
| Ch.1 n.5 | "Akbarian" comes from Shaykh al-Akbar, "The Greatest Teacher" |
| Ch.1 n.7 | God and creation are separable in concept, not in being |
| Ch.1 n.59 | Nasr: the great works of Oriental metaphysics, Shankara's or Ibn Arabi's, are also literary masterpieces |
| Ch.1 n.63 | Austin compares satchidananda with wahdat al-wujud |
| Ch.2 n.63 | Gödel attended the Vienna Circle but never held its doctrines |
| Ch.3 n.14 | The spoon illustration of mirror inversion |
| Ch.4 n.1 | The convention of "Self" (Akbarian) against "self" (empirical) |
| Ch.4 n.25 | "Intentional diversity" is credited to Bulent Rauf, at the Muhyiddin Ibn 'Arabi Society meeting of 26 October 1985 |
| Ch.4 n.28 | Peirce (1839-1914), American pragmatist, influenced by James |
| Ch.4 n.36 | The hardware and software image is drawn from Thurman, "Sophisticated software for the human brain" |
| Ch.4 n.45 | Platonic recollection is anamnesis |
| Ch.4 n.72 | Harré: individuality does not imply individualism |
| Ch.4 n.80 | "Whoso Knoweth Himself" is no longer attributed to Ibn Arabi |
| Ch.4 n.93 | "Ah, what will convey unto thee" is a Divine mode of address, as in Surah 97, "Power" |
The sources behind the Ibn Arabi quotations
Coates reads Ibn Arabi almost entirely in English translation. The main sources in the notes are:
- Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge (1989) and The Self-Disclosure of God (1998), for the Futuhat.
- Burckhardt and Culme-Seymour, The Wisdom of the Prophets (1975), a partial Fusus.
- Rauf, Bursevi's commentary on the Fusus (four volumes, 1986-91) and the Kernel of the Kernel.
- Austin, Sufis of Andalusia (1988), for the Averroes meeting and Ibn Arabi's teachers.
- Nicholson, The Tarjuman al-Ashwaq (1911).
- Affifi, The Mystical Philosophy (1979), and Izutsu, Sufism and Taoism (1984).
- Hobsbawm's phrase is quoted once as "the greatest transformation in human history since remote times" (ch.3) and once as "the greatest transformation in history since remote times" (ch.3 close).
- James's dictum appears as "the quest of the conditions" (p.136) and as "the quest conditions of the conditions" (p.157), apparently a typesetting slip.
- Berkeley's sentence reads "to give to them" on p.118 and "to give them" on p.134.
- Watson's manifesto is spelled "behaviour" in ch.2 and "behavior" in ch.4; Mumford's title appears as "Civilization" in the text and "Civilisation" in the notes.
- Ch.4 n.28 cites a web page "[cited 10 July 2001]", the only online source in the book.
7. Synthesis
Key takeaways
- Metaphysics is unavoidable. Every theory of knowledge, society or mind carries one; the only choice is whether to examine it.
- Knowledge is participatory. "Who is known?" comes before "What is known?"
- The receiver shapes what is received. Immanencing explains both the diversity of belief and the persistence of disagreement.
- Secondary causes deserve study, not worship. Economics, technology and biology are real means of access, and veils when taken as ultimate.
- Reason is a servant. In its own field it is indispensable; as final judge it clips the intellect's wings.
- Imagination is an epistemic faculty. New paradigms in science come from imaginative reconceptions that reason then articulates.
- Modernity is a Day, not a mistake. Science, technology and economics are the Names ruling this era.
- Technology is never neutral. It always expresses an attitude to nature and a picture of the person.
- The self is not a thing. It is a relational point of vision, irreducible to brain, biology or discourse.
- Pluralism needs a centre. Postmodern openness frees; without unity it re-certifies relativism.
Frameworks table
| Framework | Source in book | How to use it |
|---|---|---|
| Wahdat al-wujud | Ch.1 | Treat every view as a partial disclosure of one reality |
| "Who is known?" | Ch.1 | Ask what an inquiry assumes about the knower |
| Immanencing | Ch.1, ch.4 | Map how a predisposition shapes what is found |
| Secondary causes (asbab) | Ch.1, ch.3 | Trace causes as ropes and means, not final powers |
| Five limits of reason | Ch.2 | Audit where inference is the wrong tool |
| Essential contestability | Ch.2 | Separate factual disputes from value disputes |
| Divine Names and Days | Ch.3 | Name the ruling qualities of an era or organization |
| Epistemic affordances | Ch.3 | Choose methods for what they can reveal |
| Order of faculties | Ch.4 | Heart, then intellect, then reason and the senses |
| Sui generis self | Ch.4 | Refuse reduction of persons to one dimension |
A closer look
- A rare, sustained attempt to put Ibn Arabi in conversation with sociology and psychology, not only with philosophy.
- Generous to opponents: Habermas, Lyotard, discursive psychology and Weber are each credited with real insight.
- The principle of immanencing gives a non-dismissive way to read rival theories.
- The notes flag doubtful attributions honestly, as with "Whoso Knoweth Himself".
- Unfalsifiable frame? If every theory is a partial disclosure and every disagreement reflects predisposition, it is hard to see what could count against the Akbarian view itself. Coates appeals to kashf, which he calls verifiable, but verification is open only to those who have it.
- Secondary sources. Ibn Arabi is read through English translations and summaries. Psychology is often read through textbooks and survey articles.
- Asymmetry. Modern theories are measured against Ibn Arabi, rarely the reverse. The book does not ask what modern psychology might correct in Akbarian anthropology.
- Dated targets. The psychology discussed runs to the late 1990s; the book appeared in 2002.
- The "immanencing" bridge carries much weight. Coates's careful caveat (reality often does not conform to belief) limits it, but the line between disclosure and projection is not fully drawn.
Who's Who
Dates are given only where the book prints them. Where the book gives none, the entry says so.
| Person | Dates in book | Role in the argument |
|---|---|---|
| Ibn Arabi | none printed | Shaykh al-Akbar; source of wahdat al-wujud as Coates reads it |
| Averroes (Ibn Rushd) | none | Philosopher whom young Ibn Arabi answered "Yes and no" |
| Nunah Fatimah | none (in her nineties) | One of Ibn Arabi's teachers |
| Al-Qashani; Qunawi; Junayd | none | Commentator; possible coiner of wahdat al-wujud; early Sufi of the water image |
| Yunus Emre | none | Turkish poet, "flesh and bones" line |
| Plato; Spinoza; Kant; Berkeley | none | Philosophical comparisons |
| Marx | 1818-83 | Founder of sociology; religion as opium |
| Durkheim | 1858-1917 | Founder; anomie; religion as society |
| Weber | 1864-1920 | Disenchantment, iron cage, polytheism of values |
| C. S. Peirce | 1839-1914 (ch.4 n.28) | Remark on bad metaphysics |
| Wundt | none (edition of 1873 cited) | Experimental and cultural psychology |
| William James | none | Stream of consciousness; the I and the me |
| J. B. Watson | none (manifesto 1913, in notes) | Behaviourism |
| Vienna Circle | 1926-1938 | Schlick, Carnap, Neurath, Waismann, Gödel, Frank |
| Habermas; Lyotard; Giddens | none | Modernity debate |
| Corbin; Nasr; Izutsu; Chittick; Affifi; Addas | none | Interpreters of Ibn Arabi |
| Harré; Tarnas; Fodor; Kim; Sloan | none | Science, mind and personality theory |
Discussion questions
- Coates says "Who is known?" should come before "What is known?" What changes in your own field if you take that order seriously?
- Is the principle of immanencing a theory of knowledge or a theory of tolerance? Can it be both?
- Which of the five limits of reason do you find most persuasive, and which least?
- Name an essentially contested concept in your work. What predispositions keep the dispute alive?
- If science, technology and economics are the ruling Names of the modern era, what Names rule your organization?
- Does Coates treat Habermas fairly? What would Habermas reply about "intentional diversity"?
- Could a computational system ever ask "How ought we to live?" in Coates's sense?
- Is "the self as relational" in feminist psychology the same claim as Ibn Arabi's, or only similar?
- What would count as evidence against wahdat al-wujud, on Coates's own terms?
- Is the growing Western interest in Ibn Arabi part of modernity, as Coates claims, or a reaction to it?
Glossary
Arabic and technical terms as the book uses them, in simplified transliteration.
| Term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| wahdat al-wujud | Unity or Oneness of Being; the key to Ibn Arabi's corpus for Coates |
| wujud | Being, existence; also "to find" |
| al-Haqq / al-khalq | The Real (God) / creation |
| insan-i-kamil | The Perfect (Universal) Man; isthmus and mirror |
| 'ayn al-thabita | Immutable archetype of a thing in God's knowledge |
| al-khalq al-jadid | Perpetual new creation, every instant |
| al-fayd al-aqdas | The Most Holy Effusion (emanation) |
| nafs al-rahman | The Self (Breath) of the Compassionate |
| tawhid | Affirmation of unity; "the epistemological gold standard" |
| 'arif | Gnostic, "the one who knows" |
| salik | Seeker, wayfarer |
| kashf | Unveiling; direct certain knowledge |
| 'ilm laduni | Knowledge from God's presence |
| dhawq | Taste; experiential knowing |
| hikma | Wisdom; set in the "bezels" (fusus) of the prophets |
| falsafa / nazar | Philosophy as demonstrative science / reflective thinking |
| adab | Courtesy, spiritual good manners |
| asbab | Secondary causes; literally ropes or cords |
| qabul / isti'dad | Receptivity / preparedness, predisposition |
| mujib | The One who responds (a Divine Name) |
| Muhyiddin | "Revivifier of religion", a title of Ibn Arabi |
| Modern term | Meaning in the book |
|---|---|
| Immanencing | The Real's self-disclosure according to the receiver's opinion and predisposition |
| Dispositional ontology | Reality as a disposition to appear as this or that |
| Essentially contested concept | Gallie's term for concepts whose use involves endless dispute |
| Epistemic affordance | What a given method of inquiry can reveal |
| Reflexivity | Giddens: chronic revision of practices by knowledge about them |
| Zweck-rational / Wert-rational | Weber: means-end rationality / value rationality |
| Meta-narrative | Lyotard: overarching story that gives meaning (progress, emancipation) |
| Multiple realizability | Kim: mental properties can run on different substrates |
| Volkerpsychologie | Wundt's cultural psychology, using historical methods |
| Anamnesis | Platonic recollection |
| Sui generis | Of its own kind; irreducible |
About this book
Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought: The History of Taking Metaphysics Seriously by Peter Coates, 2002. This is a chapter-by-chapter study of the book, with summaries, maps, tables and diagrams; short quotations keep their page references. It is shared free for personal study, is not for sale, and is not endorsed by the author or publisher. Please read and buy the original.
Insight Editions · rajeshrmahapatra.com/insight-editions