The Human Ego – His Freedom and Immortality

-To the Muslim school of theology of which Ghazz«lâ is the chief exponent, the ego is a simple, indivisible, and immutable soul-substance, entirely different from the group of our mental states and unaffected by the passage of time. Our conscious experience is a unity, because our mental states are related as so many qualities to this simple substance which persists unchanged during the flux of its qualities. My recognition of you is possible only if I persist unchanged between the original perception and the present act of memory. The interest of this school, however, was not so much psychological as metaphysical. But whether we take the soul-entity as an explanation of the facts of our conscious experience, or as a basis for immortality, I am afraid it serves neither psychological nor metaphysical interest. Kant’s fallacies of pure reason are well known to the student of modern philosophy. The ‘I think’, which accompanies every thought is, according to Kant, a purely formal condition of thought, and the transition from a purely formal condition of thought to ontological substance is logically illegitimate. Even apart from Kant’s way of looking at the subject of experience, the indivisibility of a substance does not prove its indestructibility; for the indivisible substance, as Kant himself remarks, may gradually disappear into nothingness like an intensive quality or cease to exist all of a sudden. Nor can this static view of substance serve any psychological interest. In the first place, it is difficult to regard the elements of our conscious experience as qualities of a soul-substance in the sense in which, for instance, the weight of a physical body is the quality of that body. Observation reveals experience to be particular acts of reference, and as such they possess a specific being of their own. They constitute, as Laird acutely remarks, ‘a new world and not merely new features in an old world’. Secondly, even if we regard experiences as qualities, we cannot discover how they inhere in the soul-substance. Thus we see that our conscious experience can give us no clue to the ego regarded as a soul-substance; for by hypothesis the soul-substance does not reveal itself in experience. And it may further be pointed out that in view of the improbability of different soul-substances controlling the same body at different times, the theory can offer no adequate explanation of phenomena such as alternating personality, formerly explained by the temporary possession of the body by evil spirits.

Yet the interpretation of our conscious experience is the only road by which we can reach the ego, if at all. Let us, therefore, turn to modern psychology and see what light it throws on the nature of the ego. William James conceives consciousness as ‘a stream of thought’ - a conscious flow of changes with a felt continuity. He finds a kind of gregarious principle working in our experiences which have, as it were, ‘hooks’ on them, and thereby catch up one another in the flow of mental life. The ego consists of the feelings of personal life, and is, as such, part of the system of thought. Every pulse of thought, present or perishing, is an indivisible unity which knows and recollects. The appropriation of the passing pulse by the present pulse of thought, and that of the present by its successor, is the ego. This description of our mental life is extremely ingenious; but not, I venture to think, true to consciousness as we find it in ourselves. Consciousness is something single, presupposed in all mental life, and not bits of consciousness, mutually reporting to one another. This view of consciousness, far from giving us any clue to the ego, entirely ignores the relatively permanent element in experience. There is no continuity of being between the passing thoughts. When one of these is present, the other has totally disappeared; and how can the passing thought, which is irrevocably lost, be known and appropriated by the present thought? I do not mean to say that the ego is over and above the mutually penetrating multiplicity we call experience. Inner experience is the ego at work. We appreciate the ego itself in the act of perceiving, judging, and willing. The life of the ego is a kind of tension caused by the ego invading the environment and the environment invading the ego. The ego does not stand outside this arena of mutual invasion. It is present in it as a directive energy and is formed and disciplined by its own experience. The Qur’an is clear on this directive function of the ego:

‘And they ask thee of the soul. Say: the soul proceedeth from my Lord’s Amr [Command]: but of knowledge, only a little to you is given.

In order to understand the meaning of the word Amr, we must remember the distinction which the Qur’an draws between Amr and Khalq. Pringle-Pattison deplores that the English language possesses only one word - ‘creation’ - to express the relation of God and the universe of extension on the one hand, and the relation of God and the human ego on the other. The Arabic language is, however, more fortunate in this respect. It has two words: Khalq and Amr to express the two ways in which the creative activity of God reveals itself to us. Khalq is creation; Amr is direction. As the Qur’an says: ‘To Him belong creation and direction.’ The verse quoted above means that the essential nature of the soul is directive, as it proceeds from the directive energy of God, though we do not know how Divine Amr functions as ego-unities. The personal pronoun used in the expression Rabbâ (‘my Lord’) throws further light on the nature and behaviour of the ego. It is meant to suggest that the soul must be taken as something individual and specific, with all the variations in the range, balance, and effectiveness of its unity. ‘Every man acteth after his own manner: but your Lord well knoweth who is best guided in his path’ (17:84). Thus my real personality is not a thing; it is an act. My experience is only a series of acts, mutually referring to one another, and held together by the unity of a directive purpose. My whole reality lies in my directive attitude. You cannot perceive me like a thing in space, or a set of experiences in temporal order; you must interpret, understand, and appreciate me in my judgements, in my will-attitudes, aims, and aspirations.

The next question is: how does the ego emerge within the spatio-temporal order? The teaching of the Qur’an is perfectly clear on this point:

‘Now of fine clay We have created man: Then We placed him, a moist germ, in a safe abode; then made We the moist germ a clot of blood: then made the clotted blood into a piece of flesh; then made the piece of flesh into bones: and We clothed the bones with flesh; then brought forth man of yet another make.

‘Blessed, therefore, be God - the most excellent of makers’.

The ‘yet another make’ of man develops on the basis of physical organism - that colony of sub-egos through which a profounder Ego constantly acts on me, and thus permits me to build up a systematic unity of experience. Are then the soul and its organism two things in the sense of Descartes, independent of each other, though somehow mysteriously united? I am inclined to think that the hypothesis of matter as an independent existence is perfectly gratuitous. It can be justified only on the ground of our sensation of which matter is supposed to be at least a part cause, other than myself. This something other than myself is supposed to possess certain qualities, called primary which correspond to certain sensations in me; and I justify my belief in those qualities on the ground that the cause must have some resemblance with the effect. But there need be no resemblance between cause and effect. If my success in life causes misery to another man, my success and his misery have no resemblance with each other. Yet everyday experience and physical science proceed on the assumption of an independent existence of matter. Let us, therefore, provisionally assume that body and soul are two mutually independent, yet in some mysterious way united, things. It was Descartes who first stated the problem, and I believe his statement and final view of the problem were largely influenced by the Manichaean inheritance of early Christianity. However, if they are mutually independent and do not affect each other, then the changes of both run on exactly parallel lines, owing to some kind of pre-established harmony, as Leibniz thought. This reduces the soul to a merely passive spectator of the happenings of the body. If, on the other hand, we suppose them to affect each other, then we cannot find any observable facts to show how and where exactly their interaction takes place, and which of the two takes the initiative. The soul is an organ of the body which exploits it for physiological purposes, or the body is an instrument of the soul, are equally true propositions on the theory of interaction. Lange’s theory of emotion tends to show that the body takes the initiative in the act of interaction. There are, however, facts to contradict this theory, and it is not possible to detail these facts here. Suffice it to indicate that even if the body takes the initiative, the mind does enter as a consenting factor at a definite stage in the development of emotion, and this is equally true of other external stimuli which are constantly working on the mind. Whether an emotion will grow further, or that a stimulus will continue to work, depends on my attending to it. It is the mind’s consent which eventually decides the fate of an emotion or a stimulus.

Thus parallelism and interaction are both unsatisfactory. Yet mind and body become one in action. When I take up a book from my table, my act is single and indivisible. It is impossible to draw a line of cleavage between the share of the body and that of the mind in this act. Somehow they must belong to the same system, and according to the Qur’an they do belong to the same system.‘To Him belong Khalq (creation) and Amr (direction), how is such a thing conceivable? We have seen that the body is not a thing situated in an absolute void; it is a system of events or acts. The system of experiences we call soul or ego is also a system of acts. This does not obliterate the distinction of soul and body; it only brings them closer to each other. The characteristic of the ego is spontaneity; the acts composing the body repeat themselves. The body is accumulated action or habit of the soul; and as such undetachable from it. It is a permanent element of consciousness which, in view of this permanent element, appears from the outside as something stable. What then is matter? A colony of egos of a low order out of which emerges the ego of a higher order, when their association and interaction reach a certain degree of coordination. It is the world reaching the point of self-guidance wherein the Ultimate Reality, perhaps, reveals its secret, and furnishes a clue to its ultimate nature. The fact that the higher emerges out of the lower does not rob the higher of its worth and dignity. It is not the origin of a thing that matters, it is the capacity, the significance, and the final reach of the emergent that matter. Even if we regard the basis of soul-life as purely physical, it by no means follows that the emergent can be resolved into what has conditioned its birth and growth. The emergent, as the advocates of the Emergent Evolution teach us, is an unforeseeable and novel fact on its own plane of being, and cannot be explained mechanistically. Indeed the evolution of life shows that, though in the beginning the mental is dominated by the physical, the mental, as it grows in power, tends to dominate the physical and may eventually rise to a position of complete independence. Nor is there such a thing as a purely physical level in the sense of possessing a materiality, elementally incapable of evolving the creative synthesis we call life and mind, and needing a transcendental Deity to impregnate it with the sentient and the mental. The Ultimate Ego that makes the emergent emerge is immanent in Nature, and is described by the Qur’an, as ‘the First and the Last, the Visible and the Invisible.

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