“We contend that Hasan Spiker’s Things as They Are has fixed, in an irreversible way and with unrivalled clarity and cogency, the guideline and orienting question for all future normative and truly philosophical engagement with the Islamic philosophical heritage”

Mustafa Aziz, Doctoral Candidate, Faculty of Philosophy, Harvard University

Review of Things as They Are

by Mustafa Aziz, philosopher at Harvard University

FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE JOURNAL OF THE MUHYIDDIN IBN ARABI SOCIETY, VOLUME 72, 2022.

Hasan Spiker’s Things as They Are is a philosophical investigation into objective metaphysical truth centered thematically around a fundamental problematic of Islamic philosophy, i.e. nafs al-amr (lit. “the thing as it is”). A technical term in the Islamic philosophical lexicon, nafs al-amr denotes, in the author’s own words, ‘the ‘domain of reference’ that makes true propositions true, and in which the objects or states of affairs to which they refer ultimately subsist’ (p. 4). Any entity that shows up to us or exists does so insofar as its essential and intrinsic reality subsists in nafs al-amr; any knowledge-claim about entities bears whatever sense and truth it has insofar as it grasps those entities as they are in nafs al-amr. The relation between nafs al-amr and objective metaphysical truth therefore consists in the fact that the ‘determination of the nature of nafs al-amr’ (ibid.) just is a determination of the ontological grounds of the truth and sense of all our claims to knowledge. The first chapter of the book motivates the problematic of nafs alamr by considering the case of abstract, purely intelligible entities such as universal concepts, logical principles, non-existent objects, etc. Since they by definition have no referents in the realm of sensible particulars, such entities call upon us to make a decision about where in the order of reality they find their ontological footing. That is, they motivate us to make a decision ‘about how broad our notion of reality should be’ (p. 60). The second chapter presents a comprehensive and illuminating historical overview of the major strands of thinking in the Greek, Islamic, Christian and modern European philosophical traditions about what is denoted by nafs al-amr. The most significant claim in this discussion is that the various disagreements in the history of this issue—as in the case of other fundamental problematics in philosophy—boil down to a difference between, on the one hand, a broadly Platonic, and on the other, an Aristotelian or ‘broadly Peripatetic view’ (p. 29). The latter, after receiving its first articulation in Aristotle, recurs in the Islamic context with various thinkers such as Avicenna, Averroes and Nasir al-dīn al-Tūsī. Here we find what the author calls an ‘immanentist’ understanding of nafs al-amr—immanentist in the sense that for those who hold this view, the existence and intelligibility of entities, and also the truth of our propositions about them, is considered to be exhaustively accounted for, even in the case of abstract and purely intelligible objects, by reference to a combination of two domains of subsistence that are, for the most part, immanently given and accessible to us: the realm of extra-mental sensible particulars, al-khārij, and, the mind, al-dhihn. The existence of entities is thereby interpreted as the obtainment either of extramental particulars (individuals fi’l-khārij) or entities conceived and present in the mind. Given that there are only these two domains of subsistence, the meaning and truth of all purely conceptual (i.e. non-sensible) moments in our apprehension of entities come to be understood, on this view, as products of the mind’s capacities for abstraction and logicalconceptual understanding, as they are exercised upon what is originally given fi’l-khārij. The principal opponent of this broadly Peripatetic, immanentist position is the ‘exemplarist’ approach to nafs al-amr, which finds its earliest expression in the Greek context with Plato and his later followers such as Plotinus and Proclus, and in the Islamic tradition with such thinkers as Fakhr al-din al-Razi and the ‘broadly Platonizing school of Ibn ‘Arabi’ (p. 23) including such philosophical luminaries as Dawud al-Qaysari, Mullā Fenāri, Ibn Bahā’uddin, and Taskopruzāde. The uniting principle for the thinkers in this ‘Akbarian’ tradition is the insight that the extramental existence of entities and their logicalconceptual apprehension in minds is only possible on the basis of a still higher level of subsistence for entities. Hence, they conceive nafs al-amr as a third, transcendent ontological domain of subsistence wherein the exemplary forms or immutable archetypes of entities abide; it is precisely these forms or archetypes which are taken to ground the instantiation of all entities as sensible and mental phenomena, and it is conformity to these forms and archetypes—and not to their merely immanent mental-sensible instantiation—that is taken to endow all our knowledge-claims about entities with their sense and truth. The author expressly affirms the philosophical superiority of this Akbarian, exemplarist conception of nafs al-amr, and the third and fourth chapters of the book can in part be seen as attempts precisely to develop and substantiate this position. The two main lines of critique of the alternative Peripatetic-immanentist view, developed respectively in the second chapter and at length in the third, are: (i) that the mind is inherently unfit to serve by itself as the truth-making domain for our logical-conceptual grasp of entities, since it perennially has the capacity to house much abject falsehood and error, and (ii) that the requirements of logical necessity and demonstrative proof, which provide one possible basis for the objective truth of knowledge-claims, cannot by themselves be equated with nafs al-amr, for they come to be expressed and applied in the mind yet are not thereby justified; lacking such justification and indeed an ontological basis, they are reduced to nothing but ‘mere convention, in the final analysis scarcely more compelling as a designator of truth than animal instinct’ (p. 86). The fourth and final chapter presents a powerful and comprehensive statement of the exemplarist conception of nafs al-amr as it recurs in the writings of the Akbarian tradition. Undoubtedly, the contents of this chapter are the richest in the whole book, despite the exceptional erudition and comprehensiveness of the preceding chapters. In this final segment of the book, the author presents the Akbarian tradition as the culmination point of the Islamic philosophical reflection on truth and being to the extent that it productively appropriates the principal insights of both the Avicennan and kalam conceptions of nafs al-amr while avoiding the internal inconsistencies and deficiencies stemming from their common immanentist logic. What distinguishes the understanding of being, and by extension nafs al-amr, in this tradition is its emphasis on unity and transcendence—or the fact that any being is what it is insofar as it possesses the unitary determinacy of a nature, essence, or quiddity which can be instantiated mentally or extramentally only insofar as it originally abides in its archetypal form and immutable self-identity in a higher domain of subsistence. What is unique about the author’s discussion in this chapter is his juxtaposition of characteristically Akbarian ontological insights with their counterparts in the Platonic-Neoplatonic tradition. The author’s exceptional mastery of the problematics and history of both these traditions—evidenced in, among other things, the way he brings to light the common henological orientation of the Platonic-Neoplatonic and Akbarian understandings of being—tremendously enriches his discussion of each, and we contend that it is at the heart of the book’s principal contribution; this is, in our view, to have conceptualized the Islamic philosophical tradition in its innermost essence as the authentic and dialectical-historical expression of the strife between the Platonicexemplarist and Peripatetic-immanentist visions of reality. The illustrative power and import of this conceptualization is hard to exaggerate; we shall accordingly conclude the review with some remarks precisely in this regard. Firstly, the work gives rise to the question of why it is that in the Islamic philosophical tradition, as opposed to its Christian-medieval and modern European counterpart, it is not the immanentist but exemplarist, Platonic ontological standpoint that is established as the dominant philosophical position by the post-classical period, through the persons and works of the myriad luminaries of the Akbarian school, who, it is worth mentioning, are not only the foremost representatives of the discursive-rational sciences but also universally recognized master-practitioners of ‘irfān and, in countless instances, poets of the highest caliber. At the same time, the author’s work teaches us that any serious engagement with the texts and ideas of Islamic philosophy essentially requires attunement to the ontological dispute between the Platonicexemplarist and Peripatetic-immanentist paradigms as a genuine philosophical problem. The scholar who thinks, or merely assumes, that the Platonic-exemplarist orientation is a naïve and primitive error, which does not get worked into a serious and sober philosophical position until Aristotle (a standard position in contemporary Anglo- American scholarship on Greek thought) can only look upon the tradition with a prejudiced eye and is therefore constitutively incapable of grasping it on its own terms and by means of its inner animating principle: a strife or tension between the exemplarist and immanentist understandings of being that remains vital and productive right up to and even beyond the tradition’s post-classical phase. But perhaps the most significant and thought-provoking question raised by the author concerns the issue of the Islamic philosophical heritage’s relevance for today’s Muslims. We contend that Things as They Are has fixed, in an irreversible way and with unrivalled clarity and cogency, the guideline and orienting question for all future normative and truly philosophical engagement with the Islamic philosophical heritage—namely, whether it is the exemplarist or immanentist ontological standpoint, as Muslim philosophers have conceived and developed each, that will best serve the theoretical purposes of contemporary Muslims. The relevance and urgency of this problem derives in no small part from the visceral antagonism to all traditional understandings of being, truth, and rationality that has risen to great prominence in the post-modern Western context and today calls upon Muslims to declare their stance on the question of whether reason, and our cognitive apparatuses more generally, enjoy a constitutive and profound intimacy with reality in its innermost and objective character, or are essentially and irredeemably mired in the ‘finitude’ of their dependence upon relative context and perspective. Hasan Spiker has made the invaluable contribution of showing us that any pronouncement upon this matter that does not first mark the distinction between the exemplarist and immanentist understandings of being and thinking is neither truly philosophical nor Islamic.