CONSCIOUSNESS AND EGO

• Published date: 31 December 2022

Unfortunately, for a pure physicalist (monistic materialist), there may be no joy in this verse. For him material is the beginning and material is the end. There is no room for soul or ego in his lexicon, especially the manner in which it occupies a central place in the activity of life as understood by dualists, and as unfolded in the revealed knowledge. Yet, there is plenty of room for the psychologists to ponder over it and seek evidence for the Divine time and space in the domain of religious experience (mysticism).

Our journey towards an understanding of consciousness is beset with a number of difficulties. There are dark as well as gray areas which give only marginal insight into the nature of consciousness. However, in recent decades the subject has attracted the attention of physicists, biologists, psychologists and philosophers with equal enthusiasm. Yet, none of the recent data from any of these sources, as we examine it in depth, provide convincing evidence which may enable us to formulate a single unified theory of consciousness. In spite of this, sufficient information is now available which may help us carve out a path, tentatively at least, which can bring us closer to a judgment about consciousness and thus implicitly of religious experience as conceived by Iqbal. In his lecture on: The Human Ego- His Freedom and Immortality, Iqbal presents a candid analysis of human consciousness within which, as we examine it carefully, is wrapped his philosophy of ego (self).

Drawing his inspiration from the revealed knowledge, he places emphasis on the “unity of life” and rejects the idea of “redemption” on the ground that man is the chosen of God, that man with all its faults, is meant to be representative of God on earth, and that man is the trustee of free personality which he accepted on his peril.1 In sympathy with this approach, he turns to the “unity of human consciousness”, which, as he rightly recognizes, constitutes the centre of human personality. He is right that this aspect, surprisingly, never really became a “point of real interest in the history of Muslim thought. With little information on this count, Mukallimeen2 were led to propose that Soul (for our purposes, we prefer to use the word ego, or consciousness as we proceed further in our analysis) was a finer kind of matter; it dies with the body and is recreated on the day of judgment.

This view of soul, however, is contraindicated when we speak of “unity of life” or even “unity of consciousness”. If this be so, what then is the basis of unity of life or for that matter of inner experience, for which Iqbal has laboured hard to draw evidences from philosophy, psychology, physical sciences, and religion which he considers as one of he sources of knowledge. Irrespective of other considerations, Iqbal states that it is “Devotional Sufism alone which has tried to understand the meaning of the unity of inner experience”3,-finding culmination in the words of Hallaj “I am the creative truth.” Such a ‘bold affirmation', as Iqbal accepts, is merely indicative of the finite coming in contact with the infinite and finding a permanent abode in a ‘profounder Personality'4. This raises the question-how do we validate this phenomenon epistemically? Let us see how is this defended by Iqbal? To begin with, the following quote from him may be illustrative:5

The difficulty of modern students of religion, however, is that this type of experience, though perhaps perfectly normal in its beginnings, points in its maturity to unknown levels of consciousness- modern psychology has only recently realized the necessity of such a method, but has not yet gone beyond the characteristic features of the mystic level of consciousness. Not yet being in the possession of a scientific method- we cannot avail ourselves of its possible capacity as a knowledge yielding experience. Nor can the concepts of theological systems, draped in the terminology of a practically dead metaphysics, be of any help to those who happen to possess a different intellectual background. … the only course open to us is to approach modern knowledge with a respectful but independent attitude and to appreciate the teachings of Islam in the light of this knowledge, even though we may be led to differ from those who have gone before us.”

Keeping this in view, we will first examine in detail the nature of consciousness (ego, self) as substantiated by Iqbal, and then follow it up with some recent advancements in this area subjecting his views to a more searching analysis.

Having extracted from Bradley6 the reluctant admission on philosophical grounds that the self ‘in some sense is ‘real' and ‘in some sense is an indubitable fact'; Iqbal proposes that the reality of consciousness (ego, self) is too profound to be intellectualized. The predictive truth of this statement is so exact that even after seven decades of intensive research on the subject a fuller understanding of consciousness remains elusive. Iqbal considers ego (self, consciousness) as a “unity of mental states… which do not exist in mutual isolation (but) are “phases of a complex whole called mind.” Here, Iqbal leads us to the time old controversial “mind- brain problem”. A problem which remains even today the focus of research into the neurophysiology of the brain.

Recently, the problem has been addressed in two ways: first, the materialistic monism, which means that there is no reality other than that of space-Time-matter-energy-universe, and that there is no immaterial or spiritual reality. According to this view mental states just are physical brain states which can be explained on the basis of the worldview of physics (reductionism, physicalism, metaphysical naturalism). Second, dualism, the philosophical view which holds that both the material and spiritual domains have real existence. Iqbal certainly holds the latter view, though in his search for arguments, he, somehow cautiously, lands himself in the physical world, trying to draw support from the physical nature of the universe as well as psychology. There is nothing wrong about this since the voluminous literature on consciousness emerging from the works of scholars in physics or psychology is equally divided in its support for materialistic monism and dualism.

Enumerating the caracteristics of ego (self, consciousness), Iqbal enlightens us about his concept of ego.

First, that ego is not space bound in the sense in which the body is space bound …. the time space of the ego (self, consciousness) is fundamentally different from the time-space of the physical events, though mental and physical events are both in time. The ego's (self, consciousness) duration is concentrated within it and linked with its present and future in a unique manner. True time duration belongs to ego alone. Here, it appears to us that Iqbal is trying to make a distinction between the serial time and “Divine time” to which he has referred in several of his discourses7.

However, if relativity theory is operating in the physical universe, as we understand it today (time being the fourth dimension of space), and that neither absolute time nor absolute space exists, then, it becomes increasingly difficult to conceive the operational significance of Divine time in the schema of materialistic monism as a world view of choice for explaining functionality of...