←IndexThe Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam

Lecture 7: Is Religion Possible?

Section 6 of 11

Religious experience as cognitive fact

Section summary

In brief

Iqbal defends the cognitive status of religious experience against the charge that it is merely neurotic or pathological. Conceding for the sake of argument that George Fox may have been a neurotic and Muhammad may have been (as the Orientalists claimed) a 'psychopath,' he insists that the historical effects of their experiences — the transformation of slaves into leaders, the shaping of whole civilisations — cannot be explained as responses to a mere fantasy inside the brain, and demand an objective situation as their cause.

Section 5 completed the triptych of timeliness arguments by demonstrating that every available secular remedy for the crisis of modernity — medieval mysticism, nationalism, atheistic socialism — has failed, leaving religion in its highest manifestation as the only remaining possibility for 'biological renewal.' Section 6 now pivots from diagnosis to defence. Having established that the question 'Is religion possible?' is legitimate, timely, and urgent, Iqbal must now defend the cognitive status of religious experience against the most common modern objection: that such experiences are merely neurotic or pathological phenomena with no epistemic value.

The section advances through three movements. First, Iqbal asserts the factual reality of religious experience: it 'cannot be denied,' the entire religious literature of the world testifies to it, and these experiences possess both 'cognitive value for the recipient' and 'a capacity to centralize the forces of the ego and thereby to endow him with a new personality.' Second, he addresses the neurological-pathological objection head-on with a provocative argumentative strategy: even if George Fox was a neurotic and Muhammad was (as Orientalists claimed) a 'psychopath,' the results of their experiences — the purification of England's religious life, the transformation of 'slaves into leaders of men' — cannot be explained as responses to 'a mere fantasy inside the brain.' The effects demand an adequate cause: an 'objective situation generative of new enthusiasms, new organizations, new starting-points.' Third, Iqbal reframes the 'psychopath' not as a pathological case but as 'an important factor in the economy of humanity's social organization' — one who 'thinks in terms of life and movement with a view to create new patterns of behaviour for mankind' and who is 'not less alert than the scientist in the matter of eliminating the alloy of illusion from his experience.'

The section is strategically crucial because it addresses the objection that any naturalistic critic would immediately raise against the argument of Sections 1–5. If religious experience is merely a neurological artefact — a misfiring of the brain that happens to produce useful social consequences — then the question 'Is religion possible?' is answered not with 'yes' or 'no' but with 'the question is mal-formed: what you call religion is really neurology.' Iqbal's counter is that the reductionist explanation fails on its own terms: it cannot account for the transformative power of the experiences it dismisses.

Original text

As I have indicated before,¹² religion as a deliberate enterprise to seize the ultimate principle of value and thereby to reintegrate the forces of one's own personality, is a fact which cannot be denied. The whole religious literature of the world, including the records of specialists' personal experiences, though perhaps expressed in the thought-forms of an out-of-date psychology, is a standing testimony to it. These experiences are perfectly natural, like our normal experiences. The evidence is that they possess a cognitive value for the recipient, and, what is much more important, a capacity to centralize the forces of the ego and thereby to endow him with a new personality. The view that such experiences are neurotic or mystical will not finally settle the question of their meaning or value. If an outlook beyond physics is possible, we must courageously face the possibility, even though it may disturb or tend to modify our normal ways of life and thought. The interests of truth require that we must abandon our present attitude.

It does not matter in the least if the religious attitude is originally determined by some kind of physiological disorder. George Fox may be a neurotic; but who can deny his purifying power in England's religious life of his day? Muhammad, we are told, was a psychopath.¹³ Well, if a psychopath has the power to give a fresh direction to the course of human history, it is a point of the highest psychological interest to search his original experience which has turned slaves into leaders of men, and has inspired the conduct and shaped the career of whole races of mankind.

Judging from the various types of activity that emanated from the movement initiated by the Prophet of Islam, his spiritual tension and the kind of behaviour which issued from it, cannot be regarded as a response to a mere fantasy inside his brain. It is impossible to understand it except as a response to an objective situation generative of new enthusiasms, new organizations, new starting-points. If we look at the matter from the standpoint of anthropology it appears that a psychopath is an important factor in the economy of humanity's social organization. His way is not to classify facts and discover causes: he thinks in terms of life and movement with a view to create new patterns of behaviour for mankind. No doubt he has his pitfalls and illusions just as the scientist who relies on sense-experience has his pitfalls and illusions. A careful study of his method, however, shows that he is not less alert than the scientist in the matter of eliminating the alloy of illusion from his experience.

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5. The failure of medieval mysticism and its false substitutes

7. The limits of modern psychology

Original text