HUMAN NATURE

HUMAN NATURE

and the doom of humanity

D. R. Khashaba

Our kin in the animal kingdom have a clear advantage over us humans. They live their lives without check or hindrance (except for constraints and interferences imposed by humans) and when they die their death is a natural accomplishment of life.

Within certain limits, humans enjoy the life common to all animals; but, with the acquirement of conceptual thinking, humans have also created for themselves a ‘higher’ plane of being. Before proceeding further I have to make two cautionary remarks. (1) The word ‘higher’ here has only a locational, not an axiological, significance. The conceptual plane is only ‘upper’ as it rests on the biological plane just as the biological plane rests on the physical plane. (2) I do not rule out the possibility that some other animals, or maybe all animals, have some sort of cognizance corresponding to human conceptual thinking. This we can never know as it can only be known subjectively within ourselves.

In conceptual thinking humans have found for themselves a plane and a mode of being that properly defines the human character, the characteristic by virtue of which we are human, that (for all we know) sets us apart from other living beings. This was the core insight in Socrates’ moral philosophy. We are human inasmuch as our life and our action are governed by ideas, ideals, aims and purposes. It is this plane or mode of being that endows us with our spiritual life, our aesthetic enjoyments, our moral experiences, our imaginative flights. It is this plane or mode of being that Socrates regularly referred to as that within us that flourishes when we do what is morally right and is harmed when we commit what is morally wrong. It is this plane of being that Plato refers to as psuchê, nous, phronêsis. That is why I maintain that our soul is not something attached to our body or inhabiting our body but is our living body raised to the spiritual plane of being and why I believe that when I die my whole being will dissolve into the primary elements of which it was composed.

Thus in acquiring thinking human beings arrived at vistas of glory but, alas! the glory was bought at an onerous price. When human beings were able to form and to enjoy ideals of justice and nobleness and loyalty and amity, along with that came the possibility of forming and perpetrating vicious aims and purposes; like stink from a rotting swamp there arose greed and envy and vengeance and hate. When a tiger devours a deer, the tiger does not hate the deer or wish it harm or intend to give it pain. The tiger is simply appeasing its hunger as a human being might stretch out a hand to pluck an apple from a tree to quiet her or his hunger. But Macbeth murders his king moved by the deceptive prospect of pomp and vainglory.

Under normal conditions in a reasonably well ordered society most members of the society are governed by an assorted mix of mild virtues and tame vices and only an exceptional few exhibit outstanding virtue or exceeding vice. Throughout human history men and women of outstanding virtue have been rare, very rare, and also exceptionally vicious mn and women have not been too many. When the human population was divided into relatively small separate groups that sufficed for the human race to move on. But in our present-day world, while the human population is still divided into separate groups, that separation has become a flimsy remnant from the past; the apparent separateness deceptively hides a practically complete interdependence. A bomb exploded in Syria reverberates in France. The greed of weapon producers in the United Kingdom kills men, women, and children in Yemen. The avarice of pharmaceutical manufacturers in America is related to the death of millions in Africa. Today while the virtue of a few individuals cannot save humanity, the vice of even a fewer number of individuals can spell the doom of the whole of humanity. It seems, to me at any rate, that that doom is inescapable.

D. R. Khashaba

February 25, 2018

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GOD AND I

GOD AND I

D. R. Khashaba

God and I have had a lifelong unstable and uneven relationship. More than once I have described my philosophy as a continued wrestling with God, though along its extended course God has not remained the same but has undergone a radical transformation.

As a child I was taught that the world has been made by a mighty being, all-knowing and all-powerful. The term ‘created’ was introduced at a later stage along with a mass of dogmatic teachings originating, as I in time learned, from a book referred to collectively (in Arabic) as the Holy Book although it consists of two groups of assorted books – the Old Testament and the New Testament – differing widely in content and tone. Though, impelled by a number of abhorrent tales especially in the Old Testament, I shed off most of the dogmatic teachings in my early teens, the concept of a mighty being out there who created the world and continues to oversee and to rule the world — this concept hanged on somewhat longer.

When I began to philosophize – before I knew there was such a thing as philosophy – two questions ignited the aporia, the painful unrest that is the origin of all philosophy, possessed my mind, one after the other. The first question was moral. World War II was raging with the news of killing and destruction pouring in day and night. I found it puzzling that humans were so stupid as not to know that peace and goodwill would bring them gains far exceeding anything they can obtain by slaughtering one another.

The second question was metaphysical. How did this world come about? Indeed how could there be anything at all? How could anything that is not perfect, that does not have the self-sufficiency of perfect being, be? As soon as the question presented itself to my mind in this form, the concept of a God outside the world, creating the world out of nothing, was seen to be evidently absurd, for the being of God was itself problematic, as problematic as the being of any particular thing in the world.

Somehow I formed for myself the view that the origin of all being, the ultimately real, must be good and intelligent. What was the nature of that ultimate reality? When I posed the question to myself in that form I was convinced that the origin of all things must be Will. Will, I saw, is of its own nature purposive. Will is thus affirmative of being and as such is good, is Love. That good and intelligent Will displaced the god of my childhood.

I had reached that far before I began to read philosophy. As far as I can remember my earliest philosophy schooling was in the Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition. I read the articles about the major philosophers and about the main philosophy departments and themes. Then, as I remember, I discovered Plato and was captivated. Also at a very early stage (late teens to early twenties) I had the good fortune of reading Spinoza’s Ethics, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. Spinoza’s Pantheism fitted well with the convictions I came with.

In Plato’s early dialogues I found the answer, in principle, to the moral question. I saw that Socrates found that what constituted our specific character as human beings was that our action was governed by ideas, ideals, purposes, formed in and by the mind. Our good is in the wholesomeness of our mind (soul, nous, psuchê) and our misery is in the unwholesomeness of our mind. The early and middle dialogues also gave me my epistemology. All knowledge and all understanding come from the ideas born in and by the mind.

In the Republic I found everything. In the Form of the Good I found confirmation for my conception of ultimate Reality as intelligent and good and creative. But I also learned that while that conception is the vision of Reality that satisfies our mind, there are two most important qualifications. (1) That vision and the insight that gives birth to that vision cannot be captured by any formulation of language or thought and that is why any such formulation can be nothing but a myth intimating the insight. The various conceptions of ultimate Reality produced by different philosophers can be nothing but myths intimating the various philosophers’ vision of Reality. (2) We find our vision of Reality in our mind and nowhere but in our mind. The vision of Reality we offer is nothing but our insight into our own inner Reality.

Where does that leave God? We have no access to any reality other than our own inner reality. No empirical experience and no reasoning can give us access to any reality other than our own reality. Therefore I do not say that my vision of ultimate Reality is true of the actual world nor do I say that it is a true representation of God. If my vision of ultimate Reality is equated with my vision of God, then that God is nowhere but in my mind.

Hence I say that all philosophers, with the sole exception of Plato, are deluded when they maintain that their visions are true of the actual world. What is the use of philosophy then? Our struggle with the insistent, persistent questionings about the All and the Whole is what gives us our wholeness and integrity. Our wrestling with the idea of God is what gives us the god within us.

I wrestled for a lifetime with God to find at last that the only God I know of certainly and lucidly is the God I create for myself within myself.

D. R. Khashaba

February 12, 2018

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BRAIN AND MIND

BRAIN AND MIND

D. R. Khashaba

Neurologists and neuroscientists are constantly announcing some new advance or some new discovery in their field of study. As far as it goes that is all right and all for the good. But underneath the legitimate pride and jubilation there is always the hardly veiled promise that we are on the verge of explaining the mind away, of doing away with this trouble-maker that refuses to submit to the scientific methods of examination and verification.

Let me first bluntly state, for the nth time, my conviction. Even when we have amply shown that all thought, all emotion, all feeling, down to the minutest flicker of the mind, is bedded in the brain and is shown to takes its rise in and from the brain, even then we will not have done away with the mystery of the mind. Again, even when we make an intelligent machine that is self-conscious, even when we make a robot that has emotions and can speak of its own ego — even then we cannot say that we have understood the mystery of the mind.

To my mind, all being is two-sided, is bidimensional, is subject and object at once, is eternal noumenon and evanescent phenomenon. We cannot be immediately aware of both subject and object at once except in one place, within ourselves. But I cannot conceive anything existing as sheer object. All things outside ourselves can only be known to us as objects, but I find an object existing all by itself to be unintelligible: being essentially transient, evanescent, it cannot support itself. Of course I cannot imagine how mind is connected to a stone, but my mind tells me that without mind a stone cannot exist. Thus for Spinoza the world, all nature, is natura naturata inseperable of natura naturans.

You might say, what is the point of all this? If we can only know all things, including ourselves, as objects objectively studied by the methods of science, why bother about the unknowable subject/ My brief answer is that all our values, all that we treasure, all that constitutes our specifically human character, is in the subjective realm: even all science has no abode, no fount, other than the mind. Science studies all objects objectively, but science itself, as an intelligent activity, has no place but the mind: physics, mathematics, biology, even proud IT, where would all that be without the human mind?

When we forget about the mind and be immersed in the gifts of the mind – science and the conveniences and facilities of our material civilization – we are rewarded with the ailments of our present day: consumerism, competetiveness, greed, animosity, overproduction coupled with poverty and hunger within and without. I apologize to the reader for this gloomy ending which I tried to put in as few words as possible.

D. R. Khashaba

February 10, 2018

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EVIL

EVIL

D. R. Khashaba

I do not see evil as a philosophical problem. Evil is a human product, a disease brought about by the species proudly parading the banner ‘Homo sapoens’and has to be treated by humans.

Evil can be seen as a theoretical probkem only in the context of transcendent theism. On the hypothesis that the world has been created and is ruled by an all-knowing and all-powerful God the existence of evil is an insuperable challenge defying all theologies and all theodicies. The stale argument that to have freewill humans had to be capable of perpetrating wrong is a sham. In the first place, human freedom is best realized not in choice but in the spontaneity of deeds of love and creative activity. Secondly, choice need not be between good and bad; it can be between alternatives that are equally god but mutually exclusive. The alternative to sitting at my desk writing a philosophical essay need not be going to a brothel but going to a concert.

Leaving theologies and theodicies behind, what is evil? Death is not an evil but an ontological necessity, for whatever comes into being as a finite existent has to pass away. Pain is a biological function, not an evil; and although once, under excruciating pain I thought that such pain must be accounted evil, when the pain abated I knew that that passing thought was a misjudgment. I am convinced that only pain willfully inflicted by a human being on a living thing is evil.

But alas! our world is full and overfull of that one inexcusable evil. It is not only that there are the carnages committed by (1) those whose minds have been captivated by superstitions, and (2) those whose minds have been corrupted by various misfortunes in their life experiences, but, leaving aside the acts of terrorism fuelled by superstitions (of religion, of nationalism, etc.) and the atrocities committed by diseased minds — apart from that, our world is full of injustice: (1) advanced countries are usurping the less advanced countries, and (2) within the advanced countries a rich and powerful minority is usurping the poor and powerless majority. As long as these injustices are rampant it is almost impossible for normal individuals to be morally wholesome. In an unjust and insane worrld order even the best of us are tarnished.

When I started to write this paper I had intended to speak of the ordinary sins of us ordinary individuals and to propose that they are all, as Socrates maintained, due to ignorance and to exonerate Socrates’ moral philosophy of the charge of ‘intellectualism’. But I have already done this in my earlier writings and may revert to the subject again in a future paper.

D. R. Khashaba

February 5, 2018

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KNOWING AND UNDERSTANDING

KNOWING AND UNDERSTANDING

D. R. Khashaba

Throughout my writings I have stressed the need for a radical distinction between knowledge and understanding, a distinction which, I maintain, is clearly made and emphasized by Plato.

In common usage the terms ‘know’ and ‘understand’ overlap and are often used interchangeably. For Empiricists there can be no such distinction since for them all cognition is objective and of the objective while understanding, to my mind, is essentially subjective. Thus for all who speak of a metaphysical reality or a metaphysical plane of being the distinction is crucial even if it is not reflected in their terminology. After all, it is notorious that Plato was the worst offender against terminological uniformity. The problem is further complicated by Kant’s ‘concepts of the understanding’ which correspond to the Platonic Forms that lend intelligibility to the dumb ‘givennesses’ of experience. The nearest thing in Kant to the realm of understanding (as in the terminology I adopt) are the Ideals of Pure Reason.

It occurred to me to further clarify that distinction – primarily in my own mind – by running through some specific examples.

What do I know? In Plato’s dialogues whenever there is question about someone having or not having knowledge of this or that it is implied that he could only have that knowledge if (1) he had found out for himself, or (2) he was taught by another. I think that this exhaustively covers the sources of knowledge: we have knowledge (1) from personal experience, and (2) we have reported knowledge.

I know that the sun comes up every morning and goes down at the end of the day. I have seen this happening day after day. Then I was taught that it is not the sun that journeys daily from one horizon to the other, but it is the earth that rotates facing the sun in one region of the globe after another. Empiricists say that this ‘explains’ the sun’s apparent movement. Does it? Does it make me understand why the earth rotates? Early astronomers, whether they adopted a heliocentric or a geocentric theory, only described what happens. They did not say or know why the earth rotates or why it revolves around the sun. Newton ascribed the movements of the earth and the other planets to gravity but confessed he had no idea what gravity was. Einstein ascribed these movements to the curvature of space but no one can even imagine that curvature. That is true of all scientific knowledge. It enables us to calculate, to anticipate, to manipulate natural phenomena but does not explain, does not make us understand, anything. That is knowledge: knowledge is that and nothing but that.

What about understanding? Let me first state my position bluntly. All understanding is subjective; in other words, all unserstanding is cooked in the mind by the mind. When a stranger helps my ninety-year-old bones and near-blind eyes to cross the street, I understand that as an act of kindness, not as the operation of glands and neurons in the stranger. When I read: “Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind / I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom / But Thee, long buried in the silent Tomb” (Wordsworth) — when I read these words I understand the pathos, the joy wrapped in grief, the tender love for the departed; I understand the experience that dictated the words because my mind infuses the words with feelings emanating from experiences similar to the poet’s experience.

Thus understanding, being an outpouring by the mind of meaningfulness and intelligibility on what it receives has the sufficiency of its self-evidence in subjective intelligence. Hence the outcome of genuine philosophical creativity, like inspired poetry, needs no exterior evidence or demonstration and is not arrived at by inferential reasoning but is the gift of insight into the reality of the philosopher’s owm mind.

D. R. Khashaba

February 2, 2018

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