←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 2: The Philosophical Test of the Revelations of Religious Experience

Section 9 of 10

The Ultimate Ego and the Reality of Time

Section summary

In brief

Iqbal names what the whole lecture has been building toward: pure duration cannot exist without a self that endures, and the Ultimate Reality is therefore an all-embracing concrete Ego. Nature is the 'habit of Allah,' the study of nature is a form of worship, and McTaggart's famous proof against time dissolves once the future is recovered as open possibility rather than a pre-formed line.

This is the section in which the entire metaphysical architecture of Lecture II reaches its apex — and in which Iqbal finally names what has been implicit throughout: the Ultimate Ego, the Absolute Self whose creative duration is the ground of all reality. Having established that time is real (Section 4), that mechanism cannot account for life (Section 5), that pure duration is an organic whole (Section 6), that taqdīr is creative self-unfolding (Section 7), and that reality is through and through teleological (Section 8), Iqbal now draws the consequence that binds all of these together. Pure duration cannot exist without a self that endures. To exist in time is to be a self. To be a self is to be able to say 'I am.' And the degree of one's 'I-amness' determines one's place in the scale of being.

The section advances through two major movements. The first is constructive: Iqbal argues that Bergson's error was to treat pure time as prior to selfhood, when in fact time is only intelligible as the experience of a self. This leads to the concept of the Ultimate Self — an all-embracing concrete Ego whose 'I-amness' is independent, elemental, and absolute, unlike our finite selfhood which arises from the distinction between self and not-self. Nature, in this account, is not an external material world but the character of the Divine Self — 'the habit of Allah,' as the Qur'an puts it — and the study of nature becomes, quite literally, a form of worship: the pursuit of intimacy with the Absolute Ego through observation of its behaviour.

The second movement is defensive. Having staked everything on the reality of time, Iqbal must confront the most formidable philosophical argument against it: J.M.E. McTaggart's famous proof that time is unreal, published in The Nature of Existence (1927). McTaggart argued that every event must be past, present, and future — characteristics that are mutually incompatible — and that this contradiction proves time to be illusory. Iqbal's response, drawing on C.D. Broad, is that the argument rests on treating the future as if it already exists in a fully shaped form waiting to happen. It does not. The future exists only as open possibility. McTaggart's paradox dissolves once we abandon the picture of time as a static line of pre-formed events and recover the experience of time as living, creative duration.

The section closes with a characteristic Iqbalian move: intellectual humility held together with metaphysical conviction. He confesses that 'it is not easy to solve the mystery of time,' quotes Augustine's famous admission of bafflement, and yet insists that real time is not serial time but pure duration — 'change without succession' — which McTaggart's argument does not touch. Serial time, the time of clocks and calendars, is pure duration 'pulverized by thought.' The Qur'an, in its references to the alternation of night and day, points not to the mechanism of the clock but to the creative activity of God expressing itself in temporal change.

For the Tadreej project, this section establishes two things of foundational importance. First, it makes Khudi — sovereign selfhood, the capacity to say 'I am' — the central ontological category: not a poetic metaphor or a motivational slogan but the criterion by which reality itself is measured. Second, it sacralises the scientific enterprise: the study of nature is not a secular activity that theology must tolerate or accommodate but an intrinsic mode of intimacy with the Divine. These two claims — the metaphysical centrality of selfhood and the spiritual dignity of natural science — are the twin pillars on which Iqbal's entire programme of reconstruction rests.

Original text

We are now, I hope, in a position to see the meaning of the verse — ‘And it is He Who hath ordained the night and the day to succeed one another for those who desire to think on God or desire to be thankful.’³⁵A critical interpretation of the sequence of time as revealed in ourselves has led us to a notion of the Ultimate Reality as pure duration in which thought, life, and purpose interpenetrate to form an organic unity. We cannot conceive this unity except as the unity of a self — an all-embracing concrete self — the ultimate source of all individual life and thought. I venture to think that the error of Bergson consists in regarding pure time as prior to self, to which alone pure duration is predicable. Neither pure space nor pure time can hold together the multiplicity of objects and events. It is the appreciative act of an enduring self only which can seize the multiplicity of duration — broken up into an infinity of instants — and transform it to the organic wholeness of a synthesis. To exist in pure duration is to be a self, and to be a self is to be able to say ‘I am’. Only that truly exists which can say ‘I am’. It is the degree of the intuition of ‘I-amness’ that determines the place of a thing in the scale of being. We too say ‘I am’. But our ‘I-amness’ is dependent and arises out of the distinction between the self and the not-self. The Ultimate Self, in the words of the Qur’an, ‘can afford to dispense with all the worlds’.³⁶To Him the not-self does not present itself as a confronting ‘other’, or else it would have to be, like our finite self, in spatial relation with the confronting ‘other’. What we call Nature or the not-self is only a fleeting moment in the life of God. His ‘I-amness’ is independent, elemental, absolute.

Of such a self it is impossible for us to form an adequate conception. As the Qur’an says, ‘Naught is like Him; yet He hears and sees’.³⁸ Now a self is unthinkable without a character, i.e. a uniform mode of behaviour. Nature, as we have seen, is not a mass of pure materiality occupying a void. It is a structure of events, a systematic mode of behaviour, and as such organic to the Ultimate Self. Nature is to the Divine Self as character is to the human self. In the picturesque phrase of the Qur’an it is the habit of Allah.³⁹ From the human point of view it is an interpretation which, in our present situation, we put on the creative activity of the Absolute Ego. At a particular moment in its forward movement it is finite; but since the self to which it is organic is creative, it is liable to increase, and is consequently boundless in the sense that no limit to its extension is final. Its boundlessness is potential, not actual. Nature, then, must be understood as a living, ever-growing organism whose growth has no final external limits. Its only limit is internal, i.e. the immanent self which animates and sustains the whole. As the Qur’an says: ‘And verily unto thy Lord is the limit’ (53:42). Thus the view that we have taken gives a fresh spiritual meaning to physical science. The knowledge of Nature is the knowledge of God’s behaviour. In our observation of Nature we are virtually seeking a kind of intimacy with the Absolute Ego; and this is only another form of worship.

The above discussion takes time as an essential element in the Ultimate Reality. The next point before us, therefore, is to consider the late Doctor McTaggart’s argument relating to the unreality of time.⁴¹Time, according to Doctor McTaggart, is unreal because every event is past, present, and future. Queen Anne’s death, for instance, is past to us; it was present to her contemporaries and future to William III. Thus the event of Anne’s death combines characteristics which are incompatible with each other. It is obvious that the argument proceeds on the assumption that the serial nature of time is final. If we regard past, present, and future as essential to time, then we picture time as a straight line, part of which we have travelled and left behind, and part lies yet untravelled before us. This is taking time, not as a living creative moment, but as a static absolute, holding the ordered multiplicity of fully-shaped cosmic events, revealed serially, like the pictures of a film, to the outside observer. We can indeed say that Queen Anne’s death was future to William III, if this event is regarded as already fully shaped, and lying in the future, waiting for its happening. But a future event, as Broad justly points out, cannot be characterized as an event.⁴²Before the death of Anne the event of her death did not exist at all. During Anne’s life the event of her death existed only as an unrealized possibility in the nature of Reality which included it as an event only when, in the course of its becoming, it reached the point of the actual happening of that event. The answer to Doctor McTaggart’s argument is that the future exists only as an open possibility, and not as a reality. Nor can it be said that an event combines incompatible characteristics when it is described both as past and present. When an event X does happen it enters into an unalterable relation with all the events that have happened before it. These relations are not at all affected by the relations of X with other events which happen after X by the further becoming of Reality. No true or false proposition about these relations will ever become false or true. Hence there is no logical difficulty in regarding an event as both past and present. It must be confessed, however, that the point is not free from difficulty and requires much further thinking. It is not easy to solve the mystery of time.⁴³ Augustine’s profound words are as true today as they were when they were uttered: ‘If no one questions me of time, I know it: if I would explain to a questioner I know it not.’⁴⁴Personally, I am inclined to think that time is an essential element in Reality. But real time is not serial time to which the distinction of past, present, and future is essential; it is pure duration, i.e. change without succession, which McTaggart’s argument does not touch. Serial time is pure duration pulverized by thought — a kind of device by which Reality exposes its ceaseless creative activity to quantitative measurement. It is in this sense that the Qur’an says: ‘And of Him is the change of the night and of the day.’⁴⁵

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8. Teleology and Freedom

10. Divine Life and the Concluding Synthesis

Original text