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Lecture 4: The Human Ego — His Freedom and Immortality

Section 10 of 13

Immortality — metaphysical and ethical arguments

Section summary

In brief

With the freedom argument complete, Iqbal turns to immortality and surveys the strongest available approaches — Ibn Rushd's metaphysical universal intellect, Kant's ethical postulate, and William James's transmissive theory against materialism — and finds each of them unable to deliver what his philosophy requires: the persistence of this particular ego with its specific directive history. Each saves something immortal but loses the individual.

Section 9 completed the freedom argument by diagnosing the degrading fatalism that has distorted Muslim self-understanding and distinguishing it from the higher fatalism of the ego's confident embrace of its creative destiny. With Section 10, the lecture turns to its second great theme — immortality — and begins by surveying and critiquing the principal arguments that have been offered for personal survival after death.

The section advances through three movements of escalating subtlety. First, Iqbal considers the purely metaphysical approach to immortality, embodied in the Islamic tradition by Ibn Rushd. Ibn Rushd's distinction between Nafs (soul/sense) and Rūḥ (spirit/intelligence) led him to the conclusion that intelligence is universal, eternal, and one — which means it transcends individuality. But universal immortality is not personal immortality: the everlastingness of a universal intellect says nothing about the survival of this particular ego with its particular experiences, memories, and directive orientation. Metaphysical arguments for immortality, Iqbal concludes, 'cannot give us a positive belief in personal immortality.'

Second, Iqbal examines the ethical approach, principally Kant's argument that immortality is a postulate of practical reason. Moral consciousness demands the unity of virtue and happiness; this unity cannot be achieved in a finite life; therefore immortality is required as the condition under which the moral demand can be fulfilled. Iqbal finds this argument inconclusive on two grounds: it is unclear why the consummation of virtue and happiness should require infinite time, and it is unclear how God can effectuate the confluence of notions that Kant himself has declared 'heterogeneous' and 'mutually exclusive.'

Third, Iqbal turns to the materialist objection — that consciousness is a function of the brain and therefore ceases when the brain ceases — and considers William James's response. James argued that the brain-consciousness relationship need not be productive (the brain generating consciousness) but might be transmissive or permissive (the brain channelling or filtering a consciousness that exists independently). Iqbal finds James's transmissive model no more satisfactory than the productive model: it reduces the ego to a 'transcendental mechanism of consciousness' temporarily occupying a physical medium, offering no assurance that the content of actual experience — my particular memories, judgements, aspirations — survives. The section closes with Iqbal's own methodological position: materialism's error is not in what it studies but in what it excludes. Science legitimately analyses the spatial aspect of reality, but to claim that the spatial is the only aspect is 'pure dogmatism.' The ego possesses aspects — evaluation, purposive unity, the pursuit of truth — that require categories other than those science employs.

This section is essentially a clearing operation, parallel to the structure of Sections 2–4 in the first half of the lecture. There, Iqbal cleared away inadequate theories of the ego's nature (substance, stream) before offering his own (directive energy). Here, he clears away inadequate arguments for the ego's persistence (metaphysical, ethical, transmissive) before offering his own in subsequent sections. The pattern is consistent: engage the strongest available positions, concede what they get right, identify where they fail, and then build something better on the cleared ground.

Original text

No age has produced so much literature on the question of immortality as our own, and this literature is continually increasing in spite of the victories of modern Materialism. Purely metaphysical arguments, however, cannot give us a positive belief in personal immortality. In the history of Muslim thought Ibn Rushd approached the question of immortality from a purely metaphysical point of view, and, I venture to think, achieved no results. He drew a distinction between sense and intelligence probably because of the expressions, Nafs and Rūḥ, used in the Qur'an. These expressions, apparently suggesting a conflict between two opposing principles in man, have misled many a thinker in Islam. However, if Ibn Rushd's dualism was based on the Qur'an, then I am afraid he was mistaken; for the word Nafs does not seem to have been used in the Qur'an in any technical sense of the kind imagined by Muslim theologians. Intelligence, according to Ibn Rushd, is not a form of the body; it belongs to a different order of being, and transcends individuality. It is, therefore, one, universal, and eternal. This obviously means that, since unitary intellect transcends individuality, its appearance as so many unities in the multiplicity of human persons is a mere illusion. The eternal unity of intellect may mean, as Renan thinks, the everlastingness of humanity and civilization; it does not surely mean personal immortality.³⁸ In fact Ibn Rushd's view looks like William James's suggestion of a transcendental mechanism of consciousness which operates on a physical medium for a while, and then gives it up in pure sport.³⁹

In modern times the line of argument for personal immortality is on the whole ethical. But ethical arguments, such as that of Kant, and the modern revisions of his arguments, depend on a kind of faith in the fulfilment of the claims of justice, or in the irreplaceable and unique work of man as an individual pursuer of infinite ideals. With Kant immortality is beyond the scope of speculative reason; it is a postulate of practical reason, an axiom of man's moral consciousness. Man demands and pursues the supreme good which comprises both virtue and happiness. But virtue and happiness, duty and inclination, are, according to Kant, heterogeneous notions. Their unity cannot be achieved within the narrow span of the pursuer's life in this sensible world. We are, therefore, driven to postulate immortal life for the person's progressive completion of the unity of the mutually exclusive notions of virtue and happiness, and the existence of God eventually to effectuate this confluence. It is not clear, however, why the consummation of virtue and happiness should take infinite time, and how God can effectuate the confluence between mutually exclusive notions.

This inconclusiveness of metaphysical arguments has led many thinkers to confine themselves to meeting the objections of modern Materialism which rejects immortality, holding that consciousness is merely a function of the brain, and therefore ceases with the cessation of the brain-process. William James thinks that this objection to immortality is valid only if the function in question is taken to be productive.⁴⁰ The mere fact that certain mental changes vary concomitantly with certain bodily changes, does not warrant the inference that mental changes are produced by bodily changes. The function is not necessarily productive; it may be permissive or transmissive like the function of the trigger of a crossbow or that of a reflecting lens.⁴¹ This view which suggests that our inner life is due to the operation in us of a kind of transcendental mechanism of consciousness, somehow choosing a physical medium for a short period of sport, does not give us any assurance of the continuance of the content of our actual experience.

I have already indicated in these lectures the proper way to meet Materialism.⁴² Science must necessarily select for study certain specific aspects of Reality only and exclude others. It is pure dogmatism on the part of science to claim that the aspects of Reality selected by it are the only aspects to be studied. No doubt man has a spatial aspect; but this is not the only aspect of man. There are other aspects of man, such as evaluation, the unitary character of purposive experience, and the pursuit of truth which science must necessarily exclude from its study, and the understanding of which requires categories other than those employed by science.⁴³

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9. Destiny, fatalism, and Spengler's misreading

11. Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence

Original text