Fate & Faith (History & Science)

Introduction to Historical Perspective

History is an immense liturgical text where iotas and dots are worth no less than entire verses or chapters, but the importance of each is indeterminable and profoundly hidden.

I recall one of my oldest ideas: The Czar is the leader and spiritual father of a hundred and fifty million men. An atrocious responsibility, which is only apparent. Perhaps he is not responsible to God, but rather to a few human beings. If the poor of his empire are oppressed during his reign, if immense catastrophes result from that reign, who knows if the servant charged with shining his boots is not the real and sole person guilty? In the mysterious dispositions of the Profundity, who is really Czar, who is king, who can boast of being a mere servant?

Leon Bloy 'God's Script)

The Weight of Ideas Versus Historical Events

The idea Bloy is alluding to here is profound. After all, it’s not unusual for ideas to carry more weight than whole catalogs of history of which no records exist; whose representatives—heroes and villains, inventors and poets, merchants and sailors—lay in obscurity. These are histories as profound, perhaps even more profound than our own, but who for some reason or another have not been documented. If anything, this contrast shows a difference which not many will immediately recognize, between history as such and the idea of history; let alone that the latter, the idea of history, is the more real, more tangible of the two, however paradoxical this idea may seem at first.

Philosophical Reflections on Knowledge and Awareness

Isn’t there a difference between knowing something and knowing that you know something? is not the difference between them is as sharp as that of night and day:

"Are those who know equal to those who do not know?" "Can the blind and the sighted be equal? Or can darkness and light?" (39:9)

What’s called the mind arises from these conditions, and not when it understands, but when it understands that it understands; not when it sees, but when it sees that it sees. This is why the faculty of memory is so highly prized, and those who have what we call a long memory are extolled, like the elders of a clan who carry with them the stories of old, the legends, and the words and the soon-to-be-extinct language.

The Function and Significance of Memory

Memory is a direct accessing of a state that’s previously been codified, a state on which was imprinted an act of consciousness. Thus, the time that this memory is recalled is akin to the meeting of two minds; therein ensues a relation between them similar to that algebra calls homotopy—a word describing how two portions of space or objects can be deformed into each other, stretch and bend, expand and contract, but without tearing or losing their individuality.

History as a Collective Memory

As important a function as memory serves for the mental side of life, so does history for the collective mind of man. And although it’s thought of as durational, history is actually as much a construction as ideas we call memories, and just like memory, a coinciding between the mind and one of its acts, but in history, a coinciding between the individual and that primeval expanse in which he imagines his mind suspended; or, as Doctor Frazer calls it a 'depth honeycombed by unseen forces' (J. G. Frazer, Psyche’s Task, p169. The Meaning of Meaning, p25).

The Timelessness of Intellectual Ideas

All our greatest, most intellectually impressive ideas are of this species of mental activity; they’re crystallines: timeless, multi-dimensional, enduring, with which we interact as geometers in an abstract space. Combining, recombining, configuring, reconfiguring, altering, deforming, reshaping. The mind permits upon its own creation the same acts by which it first comes to form them.

History and Natural Science: A Comparative Study

Spangler, author of The Decline of the West, compares the space of nature, that which is studied by the geometer, the physicist, and mathematician, to the space of history, that’s equally as vast and complex, urging the historian to study it with the same methodological rigor as the former; for the space of history is permeated by forms adhering to laws which parallel those of nature. But this cannot be done without applying the presuppositions of natural scientific epistemology which involves the suspension and manipulation of ideas and the reconstructability, out of them, of those mass-ideas of which they are components. There’s, one may conclude in this case:

"something that we may call a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, something that is essentially independent of the outward forms." (p3)

Cyclical Nature of History and Determinism

This admission will involve admitting that history repeats itself, that there’s nothing new under the sun; or that history is cyclical, and that those who define it are personalities, as Arnold J Toynbee put it, 'who have played their allotted parts on a thousand different stages, under different names'. Here indeed form and function do not conflict; that is, the form of history may be as fixed and unchanging as the laws of physics, but those entities in whom those laws are dressed are subject to the greatest possible variety, like nature and her laws. But can those ideas which are equivalent to the laws of physics be inferred from each other?

Can whole historical epochs be reconstructed out of what appears as contingencies of free will whose incalculable repercussions only an intelligence as perfect as God’s could divine? Or could these repercussions be determined were their laws found to be as mathematically precise as those of nature? (and thus mechanically forecasted, like a computer). It’s clear here that basing history on the model of natural science leads inevitably to determinism. The same outcome from which the bulk of historians have steered clear.

But this is necessary; to treat history by analogy to nature would be to grasp it by our own hands, to undertake the task of finding out what it is; for to say that the method of natural science is a form of lifeless materialism would be as dismissive as calling history a farrago of accidents. Rather, we’re of the opinion that natural science should be approached as the place in which our intellectual methods are sharpened before we turn them toward history and the human sciences, but where things stand; natural science and history are like Israel and Palestine, where the majority opinion favors a farcical two-state solution. Where things stand, neither can we apply our advanced scientific methods to the study of history, nor can we develop a method for historical study that can parallel that of science.

It seems, we’re waiting for someone to say that the two are not mutually exclusive; but rather, mutually inclusive; that the study of nature is that of man studying nature, is an investigation that, though pure and Cartesian in its approach, is deeply historicizing, inasmuch as the study of history shaped by assumption of laws, of systems and mechanics, the criteria of cause and effect, of regularities.

The Quranic View of History

But believe it or not, the Quranic view of history is deterministic, that is, modeled on nature, as is to be expected, or rather, no distinction is made between nature and history, it is also a world of forms, governed by archetypes and motifs, organic, variable, permanent, inasmuch as nature. There’s no distinction because both are a world of becoming; static only insofar as things are only ever in the state of becoming.

The word used here for ‘writing’ is نَكْتُبُ, the same word used to describe the Quran, الكتاب, and all other holy books. الكتاب is to be understood as a structural element of the quran, (episteme), rather, as law, whose tenets though permanent, their expressions as diverse as those of nature; implying that they are valid in all cases, and in all circumstances.

There’s something to be said here which makes this analogy so significant.

Immutable Laws of Nature and Totality

That the laws of nature are immutable is a statement that cannot be separated from the totality of nature; we can only say of nature that it's total, that it’s nature, because of its law-binding role, however ignorant of such laws we happen to be. The word nature itself is an expression of permanence, but in this summation, we imply depth, a timeless statement that includes all that which was, is, and will and won’t be. Permanence and law are synonymous, and together they make up individuality.

Historical and Ideational Analogy

The analogy we drew in the beginning between history and ideas, or that history is an idea, is based on this principle, because the mind is nothing more than that which recognizes laws; where there are no laws, there are no ideas, and by extension, nothing.

Variety and Change Within Nature

It can also be said that the infinite variety of forms, of species which arise from nature, aren’t independent of her, that what changes, what’s judged as new, is nature, if by nature we understand this law-forming principle and process, hence becoming. What new forms of life arise, then, are just new forms of order.

Thus, we need a discourse on method and not an encyclopedia of facts.

Quranic 'Al-Ketab': Beyond the Holy Book

in the Quran الكتاب is a concept that’s more inclusive than its use as a description of the Quran may suggest, It’s not that the الكتاب is a holy book, it’s that the holy book is a الكتاب; but there’s more to be said here, something that stops الكتاب from being a metaphor of a permanent law, that makes it richer than to be a synonym for nature, something which makes it justifiable as a description for ‘holy book’

Teleology in Nature and Al-Ketab

This is teleology. Teleology with respect to nature, and as Aristotle describes it, is no more than the highest expression of form to which an entity can ascend, such an explanation, though true, is restricted to this world; it does not include the hereafter. Teleology with respect to الكتاب, includes both, this world, as well as the hereafter. This form of teleology is thus to be called eschatology.

"The end, that for the sake of which a thing is, is its cause"

Aristotle (Physics II.3, 194b32-33).

Eschatology and Law

Here the laws are separated from their dressing; the law will have revealed itself as a record of that which has happened, and by extension all that which hasn’t, and which could have, and ultimately of what’s to happen as a result; it’s quite interesting to see how the determinism of nature moves in this fourfold way, and how it becomes its own judge.

Al-Ketab as a Comprehensive Record

The Ketab is a record, analogous to Borges’ total library; not only is it complete and contains a detailed record of the past, of every action and every unthinkable repercussion of it, but also a detailed history of the future, and the possible futures, how every possible action will, would, has, and can play out.

"The librarian deduced that the Library is "total"-perfect, complete, and whole-and that its bookshelves contain all possible combinations of the twenty-two orthographic symbols (a number which, though unimaginably vast, is not infinite)-that is, all that is able to be expressed, in every language. All-the detailed history of the future, the autobiographies of the archangels, the faithful catalog of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogs, the proof of the falsity of those false catalogs, a proof of the falsity of the true catalog, the gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary upon that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book into every language, the interpolations of every book into all books"

J.L Borges 'The Library Of Babel'

Epistemological Dimension of Al-Ketab

Hence in verse 56 of chapter 30, we read how, in judgment day, the believers will say to the non-believers; ‘you have stayed in the book of God, until the day of resurrection’; again, the word Ketab is repeated; to have stayed in the book of God, as it says, until the day of resurrection so as to imply having never died, or as the verse previous to it tells us (30:55), having only stayed a brief period can only mean one thing; that what lived on as the person aboded in his grave, was his deeds; which left their imprint throughout time, which contributed to history however minutely one would assume, but when judged by that one person’s merit, are no less than the sum total of all history.

Eschatological and Epistemological Dimensions of Al-Ketab

This covers the eschatological dimension of the Ketab, however, the other dimension is purely epistemological. As we read in verse 40 of chapter 27, in response to Solomon's appeal to his ministers to bring him the throne of the Queen of Sheba, that one of them, whom the Quran says had knowledge of the book, offered to bring it before his envoy returned:

What exactly does it mean to have knowledge from the book? The answer hinges on what we think the book means. Popular opinion interprets the book in its strictly theological context. And although it’s true that the term does cover philological, jurisprudential, and canonical aspects of the text, those things are only a region of the realm which it spans. In fact, the realm it covers is not a certain realm or sphere outside of which it does not apply; rather, Ketab is a word that describes the general laws of nature, it’s that which binds and which itself is unbounded, like how we understand the laws of nature.

Integrating Science and Faith in the Concept of Ketab

Why, one may ask, if the Ketab is the same thing as ‘the laws of nature’ the playground of the mathematician, the physicist, the chemist, and the hard sciences, should it be ascribed, as an attribute, to the Quran, and other holy books? As said, the Quran does not make and does not acknowledge the artificial distinction, made in modern academia, between science and faith, the hard and soft sciences. It doesn’t because such a distinction inherently contradicts the idea embodied in the Ketab; i.e., that of the unity of nature. It presupposes that the means by which we arrive at physical, scientific truths, and other forms of truths are different.

God uses the term ‘Ketab’ as a way of bringing the continuity of nature into the book, of emphasizing that aspect of the Quran that represents the timeless unity of the laws; but not the laws of tradition, or grammar, but of laws as such. There’s only one system of laws, a system to which all existence adheres; and this system of laws underlies everything. Knowledge from the book means simply knowledge of the underlying mechanics of the world. Solomon’s secretary or assistant was somebody who was quite knowledgeable in that respect.

Misunderstandings and Definitions

But to add to this point, a great deal of misunderstanding can be remedied if our words are properly defined, like for example, the throne of the Queen, which Solomon requested one of his men bring. We said in a previous video that the throne is the engine, the machinery that runs society; think about it, when one country wants to invade another, like Solomon had considered, what do they target first? Is it not the economy? Is it not the source of the country’s wealth, prosperity? Of course. This then is the throne, not some piece of furniture.

Understood this way, we can see how the man of knowledge may have approached the matter, and what the Genie, whom the verse tells us is a craftsman (27:39), proposed; we also see, how unlike popular interpretation, the task is quite straightforward in its execution; Solomon was considering a war effort, and needed to overcome a logistical problem, he turns to his ministers for assistance, two volunteered of which one, offered to bring it before the envoy, the hoopoe whom he sent back with a message, returned. The problem is purely logistical, and so was the solution; an intellectual exercise, like Alan Turing breaking the Enigma machine; an imitation game; of one trying to access the system by which a certain rival entity operates.

The Ketab as a Philological Concept

To return to the Ketab. The concept appears as a philological concept because, in some sense, this is where it attains its highest expression; as here emphasis is made as to their formulation, as opposed to their givenness or accidental-ness; the laws, it tells us are constructions, an explanation that’s corroborated by the metaphorically extended forms of this concept where, as we read in verse 79 of chapter 2; the concept is used in the sense of writing or jotting down; what link can this possibly have with natural law?; especially as we read that it’s something that can be distorted, changed, fabricated.

This can be answered by saying that what’s being judged by the concept, is the intention, to write, is to place down, to make ‘lasting’, inclusive, permanent; there’s something here to the effect of law-giving; an intention, a decision that merits the adjective ‘Al Ketab’ because it’s the intention embodied in the act that’s judged; we formulate laws and regulations so as to comport to them, and in this process, we presuppose the Ketab, however much a distortion, a travesty it ends up being compared to the real thing. But more than this, when we formulate those laws we do so with respect to the Ketab as an ultimate standard of reference and measure.

This presupposes that every activity is an attempt at representing some perfect, epitomic principle; rather, in acting, we borrow from the epitomic notion the form, the minimum, the critical mass, that makes a certain activity possible → like how, as Kant says

“inasmuch as a body acts, it endeavors to attain a state in which it does not act”

(Immanuel Kant 'Thoughts On The True Estimation Of Living Forces'; sec3),

What he means is, this ultimate rest is the perfect state to which something which moves aspires; it’s for the same reason that Aristotle, calls God, the unmoved mover, because, to him motion is a striving, and only that which is imperfect can strive, not the creator. Aristotle drew from this principle, what he calls ‘entelechy’; the goal here exists before the process, the ideal must exist before its acquisition; in the seed is encoded the image of the ‘fully-grown’ palm tree.

"And since that which is moved must be moved by something, there is a first mover, which is itself unmoved."

Aristotle (Metaphysics XII.7, 1072a24-26)

The abstraction Aristotle makes allows us to see this principle as universal; it applies as much to the seed as to principles like motion, or something like speech, or interpretation.

There’s everywhere some perfect image or model of something of which the activity is both a proof and an approximation; Aristotle schematizes Plato’s world of forms and makes it a standard by which anything, even physical and mechanical phenomena can be judged. Kant, the expositor of the categorical imperative, modifies this principle further by introducing it under the name ‘regulative ideas’, though here it’s something that regulates, i.e., organizes our understanding; and guides the intellect in its pursuit of knowledge; by applying a framework that standardizes our approach,

"Regulative principles, in contrast, do not determine an object directly, but they serve as a guide to systematic coherence in our investigations. They have an excellent and indispensably necessary regulative use, namely, that of directing the understanding to a certain goal respecting which the lines of direction of all its rules converge at one point"

Immanuel Kant, 'Critique Of Pure Reason' (A644/B672).

We ask, for example, what is the limit of such an such activity, say knowledge, if aesthetic beauty is what occupies the person’s mind, there naturally arises the thought of the ‘most aesthetically pleasing thing can be’, if speed, then the fastest possible thing, if poetry, then the most poetic thing.

Each conforms to its own standard, and if there’s a standard there’s an ideal, and its existence can be rationalized only as a strife or tendency towards that exemplary, quintessential state, but as Cassirer says

“The object of knowledge recedes more and more into the distance, so that for knowledge critically reflecting upon itself  it comes ultimately to appear as an infinitely remote point, and endless task and yet, in this apparent distance, it achieves its ideal specification, in the logical concept develops that mediate grasp which charactarizes reason”

Ernst Cassirer, 'Philosophy Of Symbolic forms', Vol1, p181

A question here that’s particularly relevant to the Quran is, does the ideal qualify as a judge?, can we judge an activity, though it be a far cry from the real thing, from the ideal, as distant from it, as we are from the farthest star, as an expression of it?. Is not the ideal simply a standard, and that the standard serves only to point the way?. As we see in this verse with the concept ‘Ketab’?

This is given in the use of Ketab in this verse (cite), because, it’s not a matter of comparison, of seeing in something what’s missing from it, because that would assume the act to be complete, and thus perfect or ideal, which mistakes the roles which each is to assume with respect to the other; the role of say, the imperfect act, is only to approximate, and ‘approach’; it fulfills, in that way its role with respect to its ideal, because it will have shared with it a relation akin to that between the genus and the genre.

This dynamic, is actually the answer to much of what we think is enigmatic about the universe; and the answer to the riddle of gravity, because something only gravitates to its ideal; which says that it contains this ideal inherently, and agency in the universe, which involves subjectivity, is in some sense, a sum of predispositions, and its activity is shaped by the ideal to which at any moment it's predisposed, and gravitation is only the expression of this dynamic at the mechanical level of being.

We opened up our discussion with a statement on history; and our discussion led naturally to the Ketab; this transition isn’t accidental; we were seeking, as our unpronounced ideal, to bring history into order; how do we judge this chaos, what mechanism, let’s say, moves this the wheel, are the springs that move this great wheel of history, the same as those about which those of nature turn. We answered this in the positive, to the pain of having to justify why the latter, nature seems comparatively more orderly? What else possible answers this riddle than the fact of our ignorance of the laws?

Is nature, particularly wildlife, nature in its raw form as we like to think, not ‘red, in tooth and claw’ as Alfred Tennyson says (In Memoriam A.H.H." (1849), or a ‘struggle for existence’ as Darwin’s known for saying ("On the Origin of Species." London: John Murray, 1859, p. 62), until we discover things like the ecosystem, symbiosis, seasons, whole dynamical systems moved seemingly by necessity, and that in representing this necessity, it is prepared to do what may seem, to the parochial view of some of us, as counterproductive, worse yet, totally anti-productive, yet considered holistically, is the most rational course that nature could have taken at that moment. Take the example of something that today we consider to be the greatest blight in human history; something that no rationale save greed and love of power, was given, the world wars. Had the world wars not taken place, would we have attained as high a civilization as we have?.

Is it not the urgency which the wars created that precipitated most of the technologies that we use today?, and by extension every branch of human society, in medicine, industry, telecommunication, shipbuilding, aerospace, petroleum and energy, transportation, railroads. The techniques and methodologies employed before the war are not what they were after the war; one muscle tightened and the whole body convulsed. This muscle being fear of annihilation. These industries not only supported the war efforts but also laid the groundwork for post-war economic growth and technological innovation. Almost like the war was a training ground for that world after the war. What principle steered the course of humanity during such moments as seems to end it?, is it not the same principle that decides the fates of everything that walks?.

Are not the laws which govern human activity the same?, have they not been the same since time immemorial, and in the context of those laws that have been ordained for man, are there not laws which govern their use? That is, that they should apply differently to different strata of human existence, from the individual up to the genus.

Lastly, are they not the same laws which are laid out in abundance in the Quran. We see for instance, how God enacts the same principles in both large and small scales, the how the journey of Moses, his trials and tribulations are identical to that of the people of Israel; the fact that he undertook the same journey for which he was tasked with his people. Was not Qaroon to whom God gave immense riches (28:81), annihilated in the same manner as the people of Aad (69:7), a leading civilization of its time?. Looking at it closely, we see that the same laws that govern humanity are the same because the ways of humanity are always the same; the reasons on the basis of which God prohibited Riba and all the financial practices that revolve around it are the same reason as those by which he decreed the destruction of the people of Shuaib (7:91); what we see here is a scale, showing how microsocial phenomena can lead into large-scale macrosocial phenomena; more than that, how at their macrosocial level, they become infinitely harder to deal with, and as such, the measures taken are be much more drastic, cataclysmic.

Thus we find that harsh measures have been decreed by God in the Quran against certain acts, mandates for war, migration, trade relations etc.. All of these are measures that can be viewed as lying somewhere between the micro and macro social levels of human activity, mediating and governing the transactions between the two spheres. This shows us that the laws that govern individuals are the same as those which govern society , and that certain events which befall societies, and which may seem inexplicable and completely unrelated to the meager individual, must still affect this individual at the end unless God sees otherwise.

Because society is an organism; a vast hub within which the various fates of its individuals are intertwined; and intertwined in such a way as to shorten the distance between the micro and macro levels. And as relates to our discussion of ideals and the epitomic principle, I believe that the goal and end of society, that is, the perfect and platonic model of society can be judged by how short or wide, that gap is, how universal the individual is and individual the society is. As Schiller aptly put it

May be urged that every individual man carries within himself, at least in his adaptation and destination, a purely ideal man. The great problem of his existence is to bring all the incessant changes of his outer life into conformity with the unchanging unity of this ideal. This pure ideal man, which makes itself known more or less clearly in every subject, is represented by the state, which is the objective, and, so to speak, canonical form in which the manifold differences of the subjects strive to unite

(Schiller, Letters Upon the Aesthetic Education of Man. Letter IV)

Thus two things to deduce from this; that the laws as revealed in the Quran are an expression of the laws which have governed society since its formation; that the rationale and justifications for the events which have and are effecting civilization, which seem chaotic abound in the book of God. This completes our understanding of the Ketab; in the realization of the timelessness of the laws, and our ability to judge and forecast current affairs by them, and to answer the original question raised by Spengler; there is, indeed, a metaphysical structure of historic humanity, because, from any point in history, the fate of humanity and of individuals, famous or not can be comprehended, the mechanics that steer them, their repercussions, we have a method by which to analyze them, and understand them in their fourfoldness.

To add to this, we find that our understanding of the Ketab involves, seemingly by logic, a holistic, eschatological view of historic humanity; that in the Quran we find that the ultimate standard, as regards human society, is always the genus, mankind. but mankind in Schiller's sense of 'This pure ideal man, which makes itself known more or less clearly in every subject'. That at any moment, God’s relation to humanity, is a relation primarily to the genus, and that every divine decision that he’s ordained, was ordained in view of the fate of the genus. This is what explains prophethood, Nubuwa, for the prophets were sent not to one society or another, but to historical man, modern and future man. Noah, Joseph, Ibrahim, Jesus (Isa), Muhammad, are all individuals whom God sent during times which we can say were critical for mankind in general, but critical from an eschatological view.

Here we can understand the vicissitudes of the prophets by analogy to those of the common man, insofar as this man has his place both in this world, and in the hereafter.