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Philosophy
Reza Yaghoubi's essay “The World and We Are Renewed at Every Moment”
The world is changing, yet the Enlightenment, with its claim to scientific certainty, conceived of nature as fixed—a belief that demanded a single answer for every question and led to despotism: the clash between perpetual change and the danger of certainty-seeking in politics.
The World and We Are Renewed at Every Moment
Reza Yaghoubi
The world and we are renewed at every moment, Unaware of renewal within permanence.
This couplet by Rumi is read without a pause or stop on “we,” and this reading is correct. Not that the couplet does not imply our renewal—this meaning emerges in the second hemistich. Albeit with some ambiguity: are we in the world and unaware of its renewal, or are we also renewed along with the world and unaware of it? But my emphasis here is on the first hemistich; suppose the second hemistich does not exist and only this sentence lies before us: “The world and we are renewed at every moment,” which means we and the world are renewed at every instant.
Since antiquity, the question of change and stability in the world, the mutability and immutability of the universe, has been raised, and apparently the first person to hold that the world is mutable was Heraclitus. Heraclitus was from Ephesus, and all we know with certainty about his life is that in 500 BC he was forty years old, meaning he was middle-aged at the end of the sixth century BC.[1] His famous saying about the mutability of the world concerns the flowing of a stream or the changing nature of a river. But the phrase “the sun is new each day” precedes those two. The late Sharaf quoted these two phrases from Diels’s book Fragments of the Pre-Socratics[2] and translated them as follows: “Upon those who step into the same river, different and ever different waters flow” (The First Greek Philosophers, p. 237); “It is not possible to step twice into the same river” (ibid., p. 241). Heraclitus has a more expressive allegory for the perpetual transformation of the world, one stronger than the allegory of water and river, which fully conveys his intended meaning: “The world is an ever-living fire” (History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 1, p. 509). In his Metaphysics, Aristotle holds that the theory of Forms arose from this very thought, and because Plato, influenced by the perpetual flux of things, considered the world to be in constant change, he was compelled to posit other, fixed natures not subject to change, which could serve as the basis for knowledge (episteme), since knowledge does not pertain to mutable things.[3] For this reason, Heraclitus considers fire the primary element of the world. Every tongue of flame leaps upward at every moment, and another flame takes its place, and simultaneously, with its intense blazing and instability, it also alters the burning object at every moment. Thus, the changing world is an ever-kindled fire (literally or metaphorically). In Book Gamma of the Metaphysics, Aristotle refuted his theory in order to refute the Platonic Forms and undermine the foundations of the theory of Forms. Using the principle of non-contradiction, Aristotle rejected the possibility that something could both be and not be at the same time (which is also among Heraclitus’s sayings, and even if he had not said it, it is an inevitable consequence of his theory), and he affirmed both, i.e., stability and motion, and the discussion of motion took shape in Peripatetic philosophy.
With the advancement of the sciences and the advent of the Renaissance, the ideal of certainty in science gained prominence, and modern-era scientists claimed that the sciences must attain the certainty found in mathematics. It was not long before “must” turned into “is,” and the philosophers of the Enlightenment believed that the natural sciences possessed complete precision and certainty, and they viewed nature as having a precise, fixed order and a harmonious, measured stability that could be discovered and demonstrated through the natural sciences, and with such certainty and conviction, nature could be subdued and progress and truth attained. The pinnacle of the Enlightenment movement was the writing of the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, edited by Diderot and d’Alembert. D’Alembert was a master mathematician who sought to bring all sciences to the precision and clarity of mathematics. His claim was not, of course, mere hyperbole. The advances of Newton, Galileo, and Kepler had sufficiently convinced them that nature possesses a fixed order and a unified structure that can be understood through the new sciences. Galileo had said that the book of the universe “is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it.”
This ideal caused problems in several respects. First, in the twentieth century, great scientists and philosophers called into question the certainty and logical consistency of certain scientific disciplines. Kurt Gödel, with his incompleteness theorems, demonstrated the inconsistency of mathematics, while Frege and Russell, with the failure of the logicism project and their encounter with contradictions such as Russell's paradox, arrived at contradictions in set theory. Heisenberg showed that our measurements lack total precision and proposed the uncertainty principle, along with other advances that discredited the claim to complete accuracy and certainty.
Second, in the very era when the natural sciences were thought to be inviolable, philosophers and scholars in the humanities began to consider extending this claim to the human sciences, asserting that there is one and only one truth, and that by attaining this truth we would achieve an ideal society and an ideal human being, built upon the foundation of exact, certain sciences and inviolable truth. They arrived at the point where, for every question, there is only one answer, and that answer is singular and inviolable. Once you grasp this point, you will no longer be surprised that in the modern age, the age of reason, the age of science, the age of enlightenment, the twentieth century, the bloodiest tyrannies and crimes were committed by those who claimed to be saving humanity and achieving discovery, illumination, and truth. When for every question, even questions in the social, political, and cultural spheres, there is only one answer, and truth becomes the exclusive domain of a particular person or persons, it is natural that the possessors of that truth would grant themselves the right to call others to that singular truth, beside which there is no truth, and to bring back those who have deviated from it, or to destroy them in order to preserve it. A clear example of such a person is Robespierre.
Robespierre is known for the Reign of Terror in France and the guillotine revolution, whose beginning is dated to 1793. He was openly influenced by Rousseau and had even visited him earlier. The book The Social Contract had a profound impact on him and the French revolutionaries. Rousseau was a promoter of simple living and an enemy of the sophistication and culture of the nobility. In his view, a simple villager, in the simplest form of life, is closer than anyone to his innate nature and to “Nature,” and knows wherein his good lies; whereas people accustomed to modern culture and modern life have distanced themselves from nature and no longer know wherein their good lies or in which direction they should go. He says, “Thank God we are now delivered from the dreadful apparatus of philosophical reasoning; that is, we can be human without being learned. We shall no longer be obliged to spend our lives studying books of ethics, and with less effort, under the guidance of a sure leader, we can find our way through the boundless labyrinths of public opinion. But it is not enough that this guide exists; we must be able to recognize him and follow him. If he speaks to all hearts, why then do so few hearts hear his voice and listen to his words? The reason is that he speaks the language of nature” (Emile, p. 288). It was from this point that, by exploiting the ambiguity of terms like nature, innate disposition, and conscience, he emphasized inner discovery and observation and made truth and reality dependent upon it. Then, according to his habit, he speaks of the concept of freedom and democracy but ultimately arrives at something that is the opposite. Freedom is good, but what is freedom? Forcing the individual to be free (that is, bringing him to the innate and natural state in which the person is free from futile constraints). What is democracy? Democracy is good, but it is realized only among gods; what we call democracy is in fact a kind of meritocracy. Then he arrives at the concepts of the general will and the social contract. Robespierre is only our example; Lenin, Marx, the communists, and many bloodthirsty despots of the modern era are accused of having been followers of Rousseau’s ideas. In fact, with this view of Rousseau’s, when the sole truth and the sole answer is to reach the natural state and be freed from the constraints and chains of civilization, and only the elect who have attained that station rule the people, directing them toward it and forcing them to be free according to his definition, there remains no room for doubt for Robespierre to eliminate the enemies of true human nature with the guillotine. “A merchant once reproached Thomas Carlyle, the author of The French Revolution, for being too fond of pure ideas. Carlyle replied: ‘There was once a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who had laughed at the first.’”[4]
Let us return to the first question. History has shown what place the idea of certainty and definitiveness in the sciences—which had thus influenced the humanities, culture, politics, and society—now holds in our age, where dynamism, fluidity, and pluralism are spoken of everywhere. Let us pose it even more elementarily: now that it has become clear that the measure of precision, certainty, and definitiveness in the natural sciences must be separated from the way we answer social and human questions, should we believe in change or stability?
The most obvious example of stability in modern physics was the law of inertia, that is, the tendency of a body to remain at rest and preserve its previous state. In Newton’s first law, this rule was applied to the velocity of an object, but it was called into question in the theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Yet the law of conservation of mass and energy still proves a kind of conservation, which, regarding mass, does not hold true only in nuclear reactions. So, as Aristotle also tried to prove, we must believe in stability in some places and change in others. In science, the need for constants has always been and remains urgent, because without constants, the possibility of performing calculations would not exist. Further discussion on this matter—that is, the availability or unavailability of inviolable constants or other issues related to the foundations of any science—concerns the scientists of that field. But in the human world, and in the realm of thought, society, culture, and politics, the situation is quite different.
Concerning the human sciences and humanities in the twentieth century and after the problems arising from the intrusion of mathematical precision into the humanities and social affairs were exposed, philosophers and thinkers each went their own way and put forward new theories to separate these two kinds of science. Figures such as Husserl and Dilthey each adopted an approach based on phenomenology and hermeneutics to distinguish these two domains and show that the methodology and nature of these two disciplines are fundamentally different. In Iran, however, the person who grasped this important point, recognized the difficulties of the previous view, and devised a remedy for it—but was unfortunately not properly seen or understood—was the last original Iranian philosopher, ʿAllāma Muḥammad Ḥusayn Ṭabāṭabāʾī. With a correct and precise understanding of the point that, in order to prevent or respond to the problems that had arisen from the interference of the natural sciences in the human sciences, he put forward the theory of iʿtibāriyyāt (constructive perceptions), and he perceived this subtle point at a time when no one was yet aware of such a problem and its consequences and no one (in the Iranian and Islamic sphere) had yet devised a remedy for it. But the misunderstandings of his interpreters caused this theory to be regarded as a kind of relativism and to be marginalized by lifeless and shallow considerations (in which the late Muṭahharī’s critiques were not without influence).
A critique of those views, their correspondence with the opinions of certain modern philosophers, and a further elucidation of the theory in light of more recent philosophies require another occasion and article, and here, after a brief exposition, we will show how ʿAllāma, with this theory, neutralized the poison of the dominance of determinism in the human sciences and steers it onto a path that not only does not lead to relativism but also prevents one-sidedness, narrow-mindedness, an exclusive conception of truth, and monistic thinking in responding to human questions and, consequently, the emergence of political, social, and intellectual totalitarianism (whether at the hands of scientists, like the Encyclopedists, or at the hands of intellectual and social movements).
If one begins ʿAllāma’s philosophy from the beginning, with Bidāyat al-Ḥikma, one sees that not only do iʿtibāriyyāt (constructive perceptions) play a pivotal role in his thought and works, but because many issues are based on these perceptions, one will not be able to properly understand his philosophical works. Firstly, he considers three categories of things to possess thubūt nafs al-amrī (factual subsistence): 1) the subsistence of existence, 2) the subsistence of quiddities by means of existence, 3) the subsistence of rational constructive concepts; and the discussion concerns the third of these categories. According to the theory of “constructive perceptions,” these concepts “are not taken directly from the external world; rather, the intellect, out of necessity and need, has obtained and constructed them through a kind of rational analysis. Such as the concepts of necessity, causality, and the like” (Āghāz-i Ḥikmat, p. 37). This is the very point that the late Muṭahharī overlooked in his critiques of ʿAllāma’s theory, treating being iʿtibārī (constructive) as equivalent to not being objective and not being realized, which opens the way to relativism. Among modern Western philosophers, Wittgenstein, with his rejection of private language and his other writings on this matter (which we will address in their proper place and clarify their relation to constructive perceptions), is aligned with ʿAllāma in this respect.
ʿAllāma’s statement is that the subject of certain propositions is mental, whether they have an external referent or are mental, such as “Human is a species”; since the locus of subsistence for these propositions is the mind, the truth of these propositions consists in their corresponding to the mind (ibid., p. 38). In fact, if ʿAllāma is criticized that by rendering propositions mental (as the late Muṭahharī objected), he has judged them to lack objectivity, the answer is that “the accommodative nature of a proposition does not contradict its having nafs al-amrī subsistence” (ibid., p. 41). That is, being merely mental is not a reason for its being false. For example, if there are no clouds, there is no rain. The proposition is entirely negative and mental, but it is not false.
The late Allameh, in Nihāyat al-Ḥikmah, by drawing linguistic distinctions among the various types of iʿtibār (construct/convention), has clarified what he means by iʿtibār, and a discussion of these is beyond the scope of this promotional article. However, we will content ourselves with noting that in Nihāyat al-Ḥikmah, after dividing acquired knowledge into real (ḥaqīqī) and constructual (iʿtibārī), constructual acquired knowledge is considered to be those sciences that “have mental instances” (see Nihāyat al-Ḥikmah, p. 339). In the aforementioned book, before beginning the discussion of these two types of knowledge and refuting claims that lead to sophistry (such as the relativity of all knowledge), they also explicitly point out that “of course, in the practical sciences (ethics, etiquette, and politics) ‘a kind of relativity’ exists” (ibid., p. 338). The subtlety of the point lies precisely here: “a kind of relativity exists” does not mean they are purely relative, and with a full understanding of the discussion of constructual perceptions, we realize that Allameh’s intent is precisely that the human sciences, such as ethics, politics, and thought, do not have a single answer and are not eternally certain.
When we return to Allameh’s exposition in Uṣūl-i Falsafah, we see that Allameh considers constructual perceptions (after the specific linguistic distinctions he has pointed out) to be things that the mind has fabricated to meet its own needs. Such as the concept of universality and necessity; these are among the constructual perceptions prior to society and are the mind’s own original need for understanding the external world. Because in the external world, there is neither universality nor necessity in a tangible form. In this domain, the scope of constructual perceptions is so broad that “one of the constructual perceptions is the authoritativeness of knowledge” (Uṣūl-i Falsafah, p. 439). Even the authoritativeness of knowledge, and the fact that knowledge is authoritative for a person, is among constructual perceptions, because even the authoritativeness of knowledge and knowledge itself exist entirely in a mental context, and we ourselves have constructed that knowledge is authoritative. But constructual perceptions after society are fabricated to meet social needs. One of Allameh’s examples is the principle of ownership. Another, which is close to Wittgenstein’s theory about the impossibility of a private language, is the constructual nature of speech. Others are command and prohibition, and the equality of two parties.
The very important point for which we have striven in this article, and for the sake of which all these preliminaries were presented, is that, in Allameh’s interpretation, constructual knowledge is not an external, absolute, unique, definitive, and immutable truth that humanity must serve and take as a criterion for how to live. The matter is quite the reverse; this knowledge is in the service of humanity and is for the advancement, well-being, and perfection of human life, society, and the world. “The knowledge that is directly and immediately the means for the actual perfection (istikmāl) of humans and other animals is constructual knowledge, not real knowledge. The explanation of this theory is that, as we pointed out at the beginning of the article, the instrumentality of knowledge for human activity comes about through this path: knowledge shows what lies behind and beyond itself, and the human being grasps it, and undoubtedly, grasping what lies beyond knowledge is so that the human being may discern their own perfection (i.e., recognize that which removes need and deficiency from that which does not), and therefore, inevitably, the human being must mingle the desires of their active faculties—which are manifestations of need and perfection-seeking—with knowledge and perception, and then connect those desires to external matter and conform their form to matter, so as to bring their active faculties into contact with them through various movements; and it is here that the human being’s active faculty establishes a connection with the matter that is the object of their activity” (Uṣūl-i Falsafah, p. 453). It is necessary to mention that since Allameh’s writing has a traditional style influenced by his cultural milieu, we must interpret the terms he uses according to the tenor of the text. The meaning of human perfection (istikmāl) in the text above is precisely living well and progressing in this-worldly life, and as is clear from the following lines, what he means by discerning perfection is exactly what he has placed in parentheses and carries no ethical or spiritual burden.
از اینجا به غرض اصلی مقاله كه در ابتدا اشاره كردم، رسیدیم. نو شدن اگر در حیطه مسائل خارج از دسترس انسان نباشد، در تمام چیزهای دیگر ممكن است. «باید اذعان نمود به اینكه ممكن است انسان یا هر موجود زنده دیگر(به اندازه شعور غریزی خود) در اثر احساسات درونی خویش كه مولود یك سلسله احتیاجات وجودی مربوط به ساختمان ویژهاش میباشد، یك رشته اداركات و افكاری بسازد كه بستگی خاص به احساسات مزبور داشته و به عنوان نتیجه و غایت، احتیاجات نامبرده را رفع نماید و با بقا و زوال و تبدل عوامل احساسی یا نتایج مطلوبه زایل و متبدل شود»(اصول فلسفه، ص398). ما در حیطه این علوم كه ادراكات اعتباریِ بعد از اجتماعاند، میتوانیم هر روز نوتر و نوتر شویم و آنها را به نحوی بسازیم كه زندگی و حیات را برای ما آسانتر و راحتتر كنند و پس از آزمودن آنها در عرصه زندگی و جامعه، بدیلهای دیگری برایشان پیدا كنیم و وقتی این اعتبارات به زندگی بشر و رفاه و آسایش و بهزیستی جامعه كمك نكردند و حتی باعث تخریب شدند، آنها را نو كنیم. شاهد مثال بسیار است. وقتی ماركسیسم اعتبارات خود را به میان میكشد و معلوم میشود كه آن اعتبارات نه در خدمت بشریت كه به هدف خیانت به بشریت است و فردیت و شخصیت انسان را به حزب و چارچوب تنگ تاریخ، محدود و منحصر میكند از اعتبارهای دیگر و بدیلهای دیگری بهره میبریم كه كرامت انسانی را لگدمال نكنند و انسان را در خدمت امیال فرد یا افراد خاصی در نیاورند. از اینجاست كه آرمان قطعیت و حتمیت در علوم انسانی به خیالی بدل میشود كه قائل شدن به آن هلاك جامعه و فرد را در پی خواهد داشت. در پرتو چنین نظریهای میتوانیم با قائل شدن به پاسخهای مجزا و تكثر ارزشها نه تنها به رواج تساهل و تسامح در جامعه دست بزنیم و امكان صلح و گفتگو را هر روز بیشتر كنیم، بلكه با نوسازی ارزشها و ساختارها و اندیشهها هر روز جهان را به جای بهتر و امنتری تبدیل كنیم. باری، هر زمان نو میشود دنیا «و ما».
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كتابشناسی:
- متافیزیك(مابعدالطبیعه)، ارسطو، ترجمه شرفالدین خراسانی(شرف)، نشر حكمت، 1385 .
- نخستین فیلسوفان یونان، شرفالدین خراسانی، انتشارات علمی فرهنگی، 1395 .
- تاریخ فلسفه یونان، دبلیو. كی. سی. گاتری، ج1، ترجمه مهدی قوامصفری، انتشارات دانشگاه تهران، 1395 .
- مجموعه آثار6(اصول فلسفه و روش رئالیسم)، مرتضی مطهری، انتشارات صدرا، 1393 .
- آغاز فلسفه(ترجمه نهایهالحكمه)، محمدحسین طباطبایی، ترجمه محمدعلی گرامی، بوستان كتاب، 1387 .
- نهایهالحكمه، محمدحسین طباطبایی، ترجمه مهدی تدین، مركز نشر دانشگاهی، 1392 .
- امیل، ژان ژاك روسو، ترجمه غلامحسین زیركزاده، نشر ناهید، 1385 .
- تاریخ فلسفه غرب، آنتونی كنی، ج1، ترجمه رضا یعقوبی، نشر پارسه، 1398 .
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[1] . برای مطالعه بیشتر ن. ک. به شرف: 1395، کنی: 1398، گاتری:1395 .
[2] . Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker
[3] .ن. ک. به متافیزیک(مابعدالطبیعه)، ارسطو، ترجمه شرفالدین خراسانی، 1078b
[4] .به نقل از السدير مكاينتاير در
A Short History of Ethics (London: Routledge, 1976), p. 182.
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