Critique of Marxist Philosophy Part 2

The Nature of Knowledge

The most important issue of epistemology, according to al-Sadr, is the one concerning the reality of knowledge: Is knowledge a material or an immaterial phenomenon? Marxism asserts that knowledge and thought are material, organic processes of the brain.

Scientific exploration of the processes of sensation and consciousness has revealed beyond doubt that there are physical, chemical and physiological events involved in the functioning of the sense organs and the nervous system. However, these findings do not prove that perception, knowledge, thought and consciousness are material processes and that mind is grounded in matter. Such an assertion about the reality of the mind lies outside the scope of experimental science. Similarly, psychology, either through introspection or objective observation, studies psychological phenomena; but the nature of knowledge and the reality of the mind are questions that have to be dealt by the philosophy of mind.

Al-Sadr takes up the nature of the perceived image in visual perception as an example to argue in favour of the immateriality of the mind.

When we enter a vast garden extending for thousands of meters, at a glance we perceive its extent together with most of the trees and objects that are in it. Is the image of the garden that we grasp a material? It is, according to materialism. It image existing in a part of our brain is not, according to the metaphysical view; it is a metaphysical entity outside the realm of the material world. It is true that the light rays form an image on the retina, and this image is transferred in some form to the brain. Nevertheless, the image transferred to the brain is other than the mental image. Al-Sadr offers two reasons for believing so.

Firstly, he states, the mental image does not have the same "geometrical properties" as those of the material image transferred to the brain, because the former resembles the garden in extent, form and geometric properties, whereas the brain and its image are small and the imprinting of a large thing on a small thing is impossible. Therefore, it must be an immaterial image.

Secondly, the mental image is inclined to stability and does not change in accordance with the changes of the image reflected in the nervous system. What al-Sadr means by the 'stability' of the mental image is this: If, for example, 1 place a pencil at a distance of one meter from me it will form an image of a specific size on the retina. If this distance is doubled, the retinal image would be reduced in size accordingly. However, al-Sadr claims, in spite of this reduction in the size of the retinal image, the mental image we have of the pencil remains stable in size. This also proves, according to him, that the mental image is immaterial.

Both of the above arguments offered by al-Sadr appear to be invalid. In the first argument, the actual size of the mental image is assumed to be the same as that of the viewed object (garden, in the example). However, when one is inside a room, the visual field presents a part of the room; when viewing a landscape, it covers a much wider space consisting of near and distant objects. When viewing the sky at night, the same visual field presents stars located at astronomical distances. It is not logical to claim that the mental image assumes the extent of the room in the first case, the extent of the landscape in the second, and the extent of the Milky Way in the third. That the second argument is invalid will be revealed by a simple visual experiment. Every student of drawing familiar with the laws of perspective knows that objects of similar size should be drawn on a scale proportional to their distance of location. The 'stability' of size, referred to by al-Sadr, is simply an illusion.

However, the failure of these arguments does not mean that the philosophical position asserting the immateriality of the mind is indefensible. An argument that may be offered in favour of this position is the following. If we assume the contents of the mind to be material, then it can be said that the mind should be in direct contact with the fundamental reality of matter when perceiving the data of the senses, as well as while experiencing any of its phenomena, such as thoughts, dreams, feelings, emotions, and everything else that enters the consciousness. That is, the fundamental reality of matter must be the object of the mind's direct experience if its phenomena are of a material nature. However, we see that we do not come across any molecules, atoms or sub-atomic particles, which are what matter is composed of according to science, in any sphere of our consciousness.

Moreover, it is believed that the reality of matter is one, while the phenomena that manifest themselves in consciousness are fundamentally various. The data of the senses smells, tactual impressions, impressions of taste, sounds, colours are fundamentally of a different nature from one another. Further, perceived impressions of each class are different from imagined, dreamt, or recalled impressions of that class. Again, all the impressions of the senses are fundamentally different from thoughts.

None of them can be imagined as being reducible into another, nor all of them can be reducible to any single substratum called matter.

Furthermore, each of the impressions of the senses, and so also thoughts, are fundamental realities experienced by the mind. They are signs and images in that they represent something other than themselves, but in themselves they are things in that they are what they are. Material objects are represented by them in that they are images; but nothing that we know about matter enters their actual constitution as things.

Now, going back to al-Sadr's discourse, if there are two sides to a human being, one spiritual or immaterial and the other material and physical, how do the two sides constantly affect each other? Plato was unable to bridge the gulf between the soul and the body. Descartes' theory of parallelism denied that there was any causal relation between physical and mental events, and hence admitted an unbridgeable gulf between the body and the mind. This failure leads to the crystallization of the inclination in European philosophy to explain man's being on the basis of one principle, matter or mind, leading to the opposite tendencies of materialism and idealism.

In the Islamic world, the explanation of human being on the basis of two principles, spiritual and material, found its most convincing formulation in the thought of Sadr al-Muta'allihin or Mulla Sadra.

According to Mulla Sadra, movement does not occur only in the accidents, but goes on in the substances and in the core of the being of things. He called it al-harakat al-jawhariyyah, substantial movement.

According to his theory, matter in its substantial movement pursues the completing of its existence until it assumes an immaterial being, becoming free from all materiality. Thus, there remains no dividing line between spirituality and materiality. Rather, they are two levels of existence. in spite of the fact that the soul is not material, yet it has material relations, because it is the highest stage of the completion of matter in its substantial movement. The difference between materiality and spirituality is just a matter of degree. However, it does not mean that the soul is a product of matter and one of its effects. Rather, it is a product of substantial movement, which does not proceed from matter itself. The reason is that every movement is a gradual emergence of a thing from potentiality to actuality. Potentiality cannot bring about actuality, and possibility cannot bring about existence. Therefore, substantial movement has its cause outside matter. The soul is a product of this movement, which itself is the bridge between materiality and spirituality. Concluded - wa al-hamdu lillah.