Mantiq منطق & Other concepts

All progress in conceptual knowledge and pure theory consists precisely in surpassing this first sensory immediacy. 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", an endless task; and yet, in this apparent distance, it achieves its ideal specification

Ernest Cassirer 'Philosophy Of Symbolic Forms" (Vol1, p182)

Interpretation, application, contemplation, walking, running, working etc.., any process you can think, physical or mental is one or another form of 'objectification’. The object of any activity is, as Cassirer says, only an index, something that serves to induce and catalyze action and motion, only if the object of desire or intention is far enough from where you stand will you move towards it. We respond to such stimuli with reaching, grasping, stretching, or mentally, thinking, reasoning, and analyzing, those, let’s call them, prehensive functions vary depending on the nature of their object, by the same token, the nature of the object becomes associated with the mode of prehension, i.e the way in which it causes us to tend to it. 

The more complex the object is, the more complex is our tendency towards it. Objects are instrumental in the same way; our understanding and our use of an object are the same, the mental exercise of naming and explaining an object corresponds to the physical exercise of using it, or let’s say the mental analysis is the square root of its physical translation. The physical activity is a recapitulated mental activity. Thus a thought process is only truly consistent and scientific when the name of the object reflects its use, or, if you can infer the idea of this object without having directly observed it, constructing it apriori from the raw language concepts.

Think of any object; an object that you see every day, e.g. 'Iron'. We understand by 'Iron' an object of sense; something we can touch, see and use, if you’re a chemist you might give me an equation, if a blacksmith you might show me, but an independent contemplation of this material leads us, incidentally, to pragmatism; that iron is simply the use which we make of it, its idea is the idea of using it

. The difference is that of what you see and what a material engineer and metallurgist sees. What I mean is: iron is the properties that make 'iron', it's what we:

1. Understand as its essential 'qualities'

2. The 'purposes' or 'uses' for which we know it to be employed

3. The 'conceptual', or, 'nominal' 'object' which captures the above two in a simple semantic formula.
   

The fact that we, people untrained in metallurgy and material engineering, see is not the same as what a metallurgist or chemist sees (being they see finer details) is in no way grounds for dismissing, as dubious, the validity of our experience, as Heidegger holds, the actual experience of seeing and using the material (iron) is what truly constitutes it; people have been using iron long before they could peer into and analyze its molecular structure using the instruments of modern science. Understanding iron at those intricate levels only improved our use of it by improving our understanding of it, but not the pure experience of 'using it', its intrinsically instrumental relation to me will not and cannot change however sophisticated or (primal) my 'instrumentalizing', i.e whether it’s used by an iron age blacksmith or an industrial age aeronautical engineer, they’re one and the same in being instrumentations of iron.

Modern science confuses, or let's say, sees no distinction between the material composition of iron, its robustness, density etc.. and its instrumental nature. It sees no distinction, and this indistinction is justified in a way, but (ironically) not scientifically so, because although it's given that iron is an instrument, our analysis, our study of this material, i.e the mental exercise is not thought of as instrumental in itself, or even related to iron the substance, or that the very analyticity or intelligibility of iron presupposes or at least anticipates its instrumental nature, the properties which it lays bare to us, the motive which drives us to view it analytically are somehow not related to their product...

It's not strange to us that we're able, in the first place, to treat this material or any other material in this way. It's not bizarre that our environment appears somewhat instrumental to us, because, we forget that other part of the equation which the scientist is prone to ignore, that's not simply a piece of iron, but a human being looking at a piece of iron.

Thus a truly logically descriptive semantic representation of this phenomenon, a truly timeless linguistic formula that would consistently apply in all fields of knowledge would be one that directly captures this basic fact. This we find nowhere else but in the Quran in which the term iron is animated through metaphorical extension; iron ‘Hadid’ (حديد) is also used to mean ‘limit’ or ‘boundary’ (حدود); something that ‘severs’, and in combination with the general use of iron, we see that iron has something to it, in human experience, of enforcing; the limits of God, for example, are only limits if they’re enforced or demarcated as such; the act or process of enforcing a limit or demarcating is the essential practical, human realization of iron, or in the Haidaggerean sense, its mode of equipment or ‘readiness’ at hand, in short, its definition.

The quality of enforcing is meaningful on the presupposition of a state of flux; thus we grant that the world or the given situation into which ‘iron’ is to be factored as homogenous and undefined or as wanting of definition, and iron as a mode of equipment (Das Zeug) as marking off one thing with respect to another. 

وَلَا تُبَـٰشِرُوهُنَّ وَأَنتُمْ عَـٰكِفُونَ فِى ٱلْمَسَـٰجِدِ ۗ تِلْكَ حُدُودُ ٱللَّهِ فَلَا تَقْرَبُوهَا ۗ كَذَٰلِكَ يُبَيِّنُ ٱللَّهُ ءَايَـٰتِهِۦ لِلنَّاسِ لَعَلَّهُمْ

يَتَّقُونَ

Do not be intimate with your spouses while you are meditating in the mosques. These are the limits set by Allah, so do not exceed them.

(2:187)

The advantage of this semantic formula ‘Hadid’ is that it covers all alloys or metals but always within the parameters of human experience, thus we read in verse 97 of chapter 18, of ‘Zubur al Hadid’ (ءَاتُونِى زُبَرَ ٱلْحَدِيدِ ۖ) which we find is quite appropriate for the underlying purpose of building a barrier. Plus the Quranic conception of iron brings a whole new phenomenological understanding of this material; as various reductions of the concept of ‘enforcing’ or ‘delimiting’ can be made into corresponding activities; like chiseling, drilling, welding, forging, grinding, shredding etc… all of which are offshoots of this single conceptual framework supplied by the Quran. 

The industrial engineer juggles around copper, zinc, lead, nickel, mercury, tin (Zubur al-hadid - زبر الحديد); but always as different ‘metals’ or ‘alloys’ as their common medium, and we see this ‘commonness’ when we see them as equivalent to one another, although at times ‘implicit’ to someone who only deals with this or that type, is indispensable, and relates to them as their general or underlying motive, as what unites them, we find on closer analysis, is this very function of ‘enforcing’ or ‘delimiting’. But to see it we must, like Descartes' wax, look for that property which does not change as we vary from one metallic substance to another. 

"When we form the concept of metal by connecting gold, silver, copper, and lead, we cannot indeed ascribe to the abstract object that thus comes into being the particular color of gold, or the particular luster of silver, or the weight of copper, or the density of lead; however, it would be no less inadmissible if we simply attempted to deny all these particular determinations of it. For the idea obviously does not suffice as a characterization of metal, that it is neither red nor yellow, neither of this or that specific weight, neither of this or that hardness or resisting power; but the positive thought must be added that it is colored in some way in every case, that it is of some degree of hardness, density and luster"

H.Lotze ‘Logic’, chp1, 23, Abstraction is not omission’

Thus Hadid, though often equated with iron would be whatever the general name we use to represent any metallic substance, or in use, any metallic property. Thus ‘metal’ or iron’ would be the context vector, and the different types of metal are various exponents represented on the same line.

These examples are simply meant to show that where instrumentalism is concerned we must always account for the fact that the instrumental experience is essentially a human experience. We say this because the reduction in the mode of experience from gold, tin or lead to the genus metal corresponds or is simultaneous with a reduction of my own vocation as the human observer. For instance, whereas I might fancy myself as being a goldsmith, a brassworker or a nickel plater; when I come to think of either nickel or gold as types of metal, my vocation as a goldsmith is accordingly adjusted to that of a metallurgist, i.e to a level isomorphic to the genus of the object. Thus, to state the matter clearly, to each experience vector its appropriate vocation, and vice versa.  Hence the proposition that the mental exercise as regards any experience must be understood to correspond exactly with the object of description; that the object is the mode of objectification, vice versa.

 Schopenhauer means the same when he says that

"The world is my representation" "a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him. It then becomes clear and certain to him that he does not know a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun, a hand that feels an earth"

The World As Will & Representation

This truth, as conceived by Schopenhauer, runs, like Ariedne’s thread through the theory of knowledge. A truth which, If given its due, would have a stronger impact on science and our general view of the world than the Copernican revolution, and would leave us as stunned as Cardinal Bellarmine when he looked through Galileo's telescope. I say 'stronger impact' because, an epistemology grounded on a perfect cognizance of human sensibility, that understands that our world is a world modulated by human sensibility (as was David Hume's project) could only have a positive, enriching, and diversifying effect on our worldview. As it would teach and show us what to look at, or principally, not to take objects independently from the way we are led to judge them (naive realism). C.S Pierce & James' project of pragmatism represents a reaction to that.

No longer would it be necessary, or even 'reasonable' to quite indiscriminately place the incredibly rich array of life on a spectrum with man as their 'most developed' form, that interprets the languages of animals as a rudimentary phase that the human had eclipsed by a stupendous distance, instead, it would recognize that, as the saying goes, to each their own; and wildlife, will be understood by analogy to our humanly-colored Weltanschauung, as other complex worlds, as intellectually rich as ours is, but closed off to us as our is to them. Instead of imagining deer, turtles, and birds as in some sense unlucky not to have been born human, we may look at it in terms of Spinoza's conatus, that 'each thing seeks to persist in being', "the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger" (J.L Borges 'Borges and I), that perhaps, the sense of superiority we feel over them, is just an expression of this self-preserving principle, which they feel just as strongly as we do ours. 

Thus we read in the Quran how Soleman communicated with birds; or as the verse reads 

We have been taught the language of birds, and been given everything (27:16)

يَـٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلنَّاسُ عُلِّمْنَا مَنطِقَ ٱلطَّيْرِ وَأُوتِينَا مِن كُلِّ شَىْءٍ ۖ إِنَّ هَـٰذَا لَهُوَ ٱلْفَضْلُ ٱلْمُبِينُ

The term ‘Communicated’ here is only putting it loosely, the word used in the Arabic verse is ‘Mantiq’ مَنطِقَ, translated as ‘speech’ or ‘language’, the same word used by Abraham in verse 92 of chapter 37 in reference to the effigies; 'Why won’t you speak’ (مَا لَكُمْ لَا تَنطِقُونَ) , the same word used in describing how God will make Skin talk to testify against its owner. We see that the word is specifically applied in exceptional conditions, where something which does not or should not speak, speaks, like the statue, the skin, or even Solemen speaking the language of birds, telling us that Mantiq, refers to speech as an ontic or emergent phenomenon, as the direct expression of a being, or as Herder put it, the ‘souls’ first judgement’. In Arabic, the word, Mantiq is used synonymously with ‘Logic’, or let’s say, Mantiq means logic in Arabic.

What Aristotle calls ‘entelechy’ mirrors Mantiq being that Mantiq, like entelechy points to something primal sense. The act of speech, that is, language as opposed to this or that specific sentence, word, or proposition, is always and ever an original act, being it’s a certain will exhibited by a certain species, but also expressive of the whole nature or logic of this species. At the highest level of abstraction, details blur out, multiplicity vanishes, circumstances and contexts vanish, we’re left with something like a Euclidean or metrical space, of points and forces, modes of experience as basal as that which we discerned in the word Iron earlier, here motion and speech are not different, since, as said context is done away with. 

A whole species, like man, though a genus housing billions of people, a wide array of ideologies, physical appearances, cultures, languages, histories, but at the level of abstraction we’re dealing with, that gave us the Quran, humanity, with all its bustle breaks down to a general attitude and its various manifestations, all that we think we know about humanity now consists in this attitude and its unique relation to the environment. Thus in certain places, God addresses man as one man, and in other instances, speaks of genders, nations, and tribes, but always as diminutions or offshoots of some general attitude.

This is owing to the different levels of abstraction between which the Quran strategically oscillates, in accordance with the vector-vocation principle, and again, this helps maintain the consistency of our reasoning, higher logical classifications apply to broader areas and in turn, allow us to make ontic or ontological propositions such as Mantiq مَنطِقَ falls under. We can only call an orange tree a plant, or an ant an insect because we’re reasoning or classifying at a level higher than ‘genre’, the lack of color, i.e circumstances, distinctions is traded for permanence of form.

Bashar بشر

This is highly relevant as far as the view that all distinct species subsist in their own logical sphere, spheres unique to them and closed off to other species. In Soleman we see a rare exception,  this isn’t a case of a man who happened to hear the sound that birds emit and associated them, after the method of behaviorism, to instinctual impulses like hunger, fear, desire and such; rather, we’re talking a world as psychologically rich and complex as ours,a world never before accessed by a human being was suddenly unveiled to him, by Mantiq, Soleman intends to say, not the language of birds per se, but the weltanschauung of the bird species.

Not only would he have understood their speech, but he will have known their different subspecies, their diverse psychological attributes, what distinguishes one class of bird from another, to be able to distribute to them their appropriate assignments, a difference that we can’t tell by simply looking. To make the picture clearer, imagine a bird having access to the human world, to fire making, trade, the wheel, construction, agriculture, the table of elements, calculus, Maxwell’s equations etc.. 

All living beings roaming the earth and winged birds soaring in the sky are communities like yourselves.

وَمَا مِن دَآبَّةٍۢ فِى ٱلْأَرْضِ وَلَا طَـٰٓئِرٍۢ يَطِيرُ بِجَنَاحَيْهِ إِلَّآ أُمَمٌ أَمْثَالُكُم ۚ (6:38)

These are things that are incomprehensible to them, not because they are too difficult, or that they are intellectually too simple, have smaller brains or infinitely fewer brain cells, but simply because our psyche is of a fundamentally different composition than theirs. Ours is a purely instrumental world, we have access, to the molecular structure of other things, we can examine and study them, observe, abstract, classify, tabulate, analyze and calculate, all in anticipation to make use of them.

Take away this ability, and it will immediately seem as though we’ve taken away all that is human, rather, all that characterizes life period, but in reality, what would remain, is much more than what we suppose has been subtracted, that is, all other world-views unique to every other non-human life-form. Likewise, there are tendencies that we observe birds to make but can’t really explain, like why birds have certain migratory patterns or how to navigate while covering such vast distances. The truth of the matter is; all life forms, animate or inanimate are so many teleologies or objectification of nature,  

If we glance at the developed structure of the world of our thoughts and ask what the conditions are upon which its construction depends, the objectification of impressions and their concomitant formation in the sense of the parts of speech must always appear as the most indispensable, and in that sense the first, of all operations of thought. It is certain that without it the framing of sentences, simple or complex, through which we express the work and results of our thinking, would have been quite impossible. But we must not be taken to mean that the logical spirit, at the beginning of its intellectual work, before it ventured a step further, performed this, the first of its necessary operations, on the entire matter of its ideas once for all

H.Lotze ‘Logic’, chp1, 8, ‘Concept and Judgement’

The creation of words, if we disregard mere formeless interjections and expressions of excitement, implies the fundamental form of thought, the form of objectivization.

E.Cassirer Philosophy OF Symbolic Forms, p281

But what’s that?, what’s that strange ability to interact with the environment at such an intimate level, to plant, build, displace, manipulate, utilize, calculate, measure etc.., what’s this apparent dominion, or the perception thereof, over every environment that we find ourselves in?. The Quran answers with the term ‘Bashar’. Standing before an empty swatch of land, you perceive objects everywhere around, immediately, you start to think, maybe I could use the wood from that tree to make fire, or weave some rope, or use the leaves for thatching, or for medicinal purposes, or if you can grow food. That industrious turn is subject to adaptation according to the environment in which you find yourself. The difference between us and animals is that animals are bound to certain environments. A gorilla could not survive in the Arctic, nor the polar bear in the savanna. 

 your Lord said to the angels, “I am going to create a human being from clay.

إِذْ قَالَ رَبُّكَ لِلْمَلَـٰٓئِكَةِ إِنِّى خَـٰلِقٌۢ بَشَرًۭا مِّن طِينٍۢ ٧١

(38:71)

The word Bashar is commonly translated as ‘human’ or ‘man’, but so is insan انسان; there must be a difference between those two terms to justify their independence from each other. This difference is purely taxonomic. When we define things in general, we’re are in practice putting our objects of definition in context, and this context is other relations which this object has; for example, you’re asked to define ‘crimson’; you answer with ‘a shade of red’, you, in turn, define red as a color’, then you define color by including it under a larger sphere of relations, and so on. In this way the theory of taxonomy is shown to be an empirical theory of definition.

Likewise is the case with Bashar; it must be explained in terms of what relations it encompasses, but we must justify God’s choice for not using Insan in those places which he used ‘Bashar’, this is easily answered by analogy to color; you can easily define ‘Crimson’ or ‘Scarlett’ as a color, but none disputes that defining ‘Scarlett’ as a shade of red’ is much more accurate, and works better in contexts requiring more precision. 

There’s a reason for choosing to call something ‘Scarlett’ and not red’ in the first place. We may ask, in the same manner; are the terms bashar and insan related; Bashar here is the genus under which falls the concept of ‘insan’; meaning that a supergenus that includes the jinn and angels. What distinguishes Bashar from the rest is this instrumental worldview. We see it used in the Quran in the same idiomatic sense as the English term human; namely, ‘i’m only human’ to express fallibility and proneness to error, as in the following verse:

Their messengers said to them, “We are ˹indeed˺ only humans like you, but Allah favours whoever He chooses of His servants

قَالَتْ لَهُمْ رُسُلُهُمْ إِن نَّحْنُ إِلَّا بَشَرٌۭ مِّثْلُكُمْ وَلَـٰكِنَّ ٱللَّهَ يَمُنُّ عَلَىٰ مَن يَشَآءُ مِنْ عِبَادِهِۦ ۖ

(14:11)

Or the expression from chapter 12 

حَاشَ لِلَّهِ مَا هَٰذَا بَشَرًا إِنْ هَٰذَا إِلَّا مَلَكٌ كَرِيمٌ

This cannot be human; this must be a noble angel!” 

Which we also find in chapter 6 (6:50)

and I do not claim to be an angel  وَلَا أَقُولُ إِنِّي مَلَكٌ

 Both of which, in addition to others may be cited against the claim that Bashar is a genus that also includes the angels, but the fact is, they are Bashar, however they share to it a transcendental relation; operating strictly in line with God’s commands and not engaging in any other activities save worshipping and the maintenance of the universe, we can say that the label Bashar which connotes the shortcomings, of trial and error, of use and misuse is something over which the Angel represents a transcendence, but this does not mean that they don’t belong to this genus.

Martin Heidegger is known for the term Dasein, the center-piece or substrate of his entire philosophy, defined as the form of Being or existence of the human individual. To belong to the genus means that you share an essential psychological feature, the same Dasein, you have no choice as to how the world may reveal itself to you, and as Bashar, we are ‘thrown’ as it were, into a world consisting of objects to which we assign value based on their potential usefulness; we feel this with absolutely anything we come across, we look at asteroids and we think how can we mine it for resource, we move to a country and think of how best we can take advantage of its services to better ourselves.

“It’s conceivable,” writes Toynbee “as Bergson suggests, the mechanisms of our intellect is specifically constructed so  as to isolate our apprehension of physical nature in a form which enables us to take action upon it”.

(A.J. Toynbee 'A Study Of History', Industrialization OF Historical Thought)

The term Bashar also is used in the Quran to mean ‘prospect’ or ‘glad tidings’; as in this verse 

Give Glad tidings ˹O Prophet˺ to those who believe and do good that they will have Gardens under which rivers flow

وَبَشِّرِ ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُوا۟ وَعَمِلُوا۟ ٱلصَّـٰلِحَـٰتِ أَنَّ لَهُمْ جَنَّـٰتٍۢ تَجْرِى مِن تَحْتِهَا ٱلْأَنْهَـٰرُ ۖ كُلَّمَا

(2:25) 

The Quran here is giving us a definition of the concept of Bashar by employing it in all these different contexts. Beyond the ability to reason or the faculty of instrumentalism, which animals seem to also possess to a degree, what truly distinguishes human beings or Bashar is something a little more nuanced. We see for instance, that instrumentalism is meaningless unless we include it under the notion of teleology; to use anything or even to analyze the properties of things is itself a purposive activity, the material offered by our environment, from animals to inanimate substances like Iron, serve only as ingredients for us by which to establish the sort of societies that we see.

We see that even in their abundance, we always seek to refine our methods, to automate certain operations to make way for higher ones; we went from donkeys, horses, and camels as means of transport to automated vehicles, and in those we sought to develop them, improving their engine performance, their speed, incorporating navigation systems, electricity etc.. even with all of this we remain restless, constantly seeking ways of taking whatever we happen to have to the next level.

The precise meaning of Bashar lies exactly here; this unceasing act of ‘reaching for’ or grasping at’ a point beyond the current, an enterprising and futurizing flare; the faculty of Bashar allows us to plan, to have ambitions; any activity involving ‘planning’, or enterprising, from studying for a test, to setting up traps to hunt, fall under the category; enterprising’ approximate ‘Bashar’, but it only truly becomes Bashar when we factor in the notion of universal instrumentalism, animals can likewise plan, like we see in honey bees, ambush predators, ants, but they only do so strictly in those instances and for those purposes, they don’t have the spontaneity which we observe in human beings, of ambition.

They have desire but not ambition, they have intent but not motive; ambition, motive, aspiration, are forms of desire and intention, but there’s something more in them, they apply when their object does not involve survival, or let’s say they don’t cover the essentials of life, of sustenance and shelter. Food acquisition when modified by Bashar becomes agriculture, mass production, factories, i.e, it becomes entangled with other areas and this entanglement eventually amounts to a society, finance, politics, military, etc…

it’s this initial transcendental impulse, concatenating into a vast operation that involves other members of the species that distinguishes our genus from animals; it’s virtually impossible, or let’s say unthinkable to imagine a mode of being that does not entail this, to picture an absence of ambition or aspiration, the inability to do this defines the limit of the human world.

There’s in addition to this, the apparent affinity between the human body and the environment, it may be said that the body is an index or measure of the mode of being; as Cassirer notes, 

‘The Human body and the differentiation of its parts serves as one of the first and necessary pillars of linguistic orientation. In certain languages the differentiation of the parts of the body serves as a general schema for the articulation of the world as a whole; each particular thing designated by language is first linked with a part of the body, the mouth, the legs, the head, the heart, etc, and according to this basic relation assigned to a specific class or genus’

Philosophy Of Symbolic Forms, Vol1, p296

We find in the Quran, a confirmation for this; the use of hands, feet, chest, and heart as ways of denoting certain metaphysical principles is everywhere apparent; particularly the use of hand, as a metaphor for ‘equipment’,

And remember Our servants: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—the men of strength and insight.

وَٱذْكُرْ عِبَـٰدَنَآ إِبْرَٰهِيمَ وَإِسْحَـٰقَ وَيَعْقُوبَ أُو۟لِى ٱلْأَيْدِى وَٱلْأَبْصَـٰرِ ٤٥

(38:40)

And We gave Jesus, son of Mary, clear proofs and supported him with the holy spirit.

ٱلْبَيِّنَـٰتِ وَأَيَّدْنَـٰهُ بِرُوحِ ٱلْقُدُسِ ۗ

(2:87)

This may be used as a building point for a general theory concerning the relation between the particular bodily structure of a species and its psychological or ‘mental’ orientation. We can say our mode of being, our enterprising bent may be deduced from the anatomy of the human body. Also, we see that the system of ethics proposed in the Quran seems especially tailored for those faculties that pertain to the quality of Bashar, take eschatology which has to do with destiny and the hereafter, where justice is served on the basis of the quality of this enterprising faculty and how it was expended.

Also, we see that certain organs used as metaphors such as ‘chest’ ‘Sadr’ (صدر), Heart ‘Qalb’ (قلب), Yameen ‘Right hand’ (يمين), Shemal ‘left hand’ (شمال), Yad ‘hand’ (يد), apply strictly to Bashar, because, only Bashar can have possessions, or can be said to own things as in the term ‘Yameen’, or, only a Bashar can be said to have a Sadr and ‘Qalb’, chest and heart, because, in the Quran, the chest is used as a metaphor for the act of setting up a goal or establishing motive, or simply, method, and the heart as the particular nature of the goal or motive.  Hence the Heart appears in certain contexts to mean ‘fluctuation’ ‘Taqalub’, referring to the change in one’s priorities, goals, and objectives, and the chest as to the means or vehicle by which those objectives or goals are reached. Thus logically, when we speak of the Qalb, we do so by way of the chest, and when speaking of the chest, we do so by way of Qalb. the relation is that of a word and the act of annunciation, the vehicle and its content...

أَوْ يَأْخُذَهُمْ فِى تَقَلُّبِهِمْ فَمَا هُم بِمُعْجِزِينَ

16:46

Thus God says 

قُلْ إِن تُخْفُوا۟ مَا فِى صُدُورِكُمْ أَوْ تُبْدُوهُ يَعْلَمْهُ

“Whether you conceal what is in your hearts or reveal it, it is known to Allah.

(3:29)

How can the Chest which we said is used as the ‘vehicle’ through which a goal or objective is attained is used to conceal things in the context of this verse?. Since we said that the chest is a goal or objective determining function, Hiding something in one’s chest means something like 'ulterior motive', sinister intentions, etc..it refers to those instances where morally questionable intentions or motives begin to develop. 

Thus we see that human anatomical parts qualify as metaphorical concepts for certain modes of human (Bashar) activity, and that their qualification is exclusively built upon the uniquely enterprising faculty called Bashar which man possesses, and Bashar are distinguished from the rest of the animal kingdom by the extension which they enjoy from certain basal or instinctual dispositions, like desire to ambition and aspiration, and of being methodical, resourceful, eclectic and so on.

. 

In conclusion

We ought to avoid interpreting animal behavior by analogy to human behavior, as they are incommensurable, and instead think of the world as composed of different logic spaces, that what exists, for instance, in a bird’s logical space will be things as essential to ornithological being. Things that we can’t really see. 

A bird’s logical space will be different, a fly, a fish, but we can’t really picture that without imputing our instrument-laden worldview, thus when we read that Soleman was taught the speech of birds, their ‘mantiq’, we understand by it that he could understand their reasoning, their psyche, as it were. Mantiq would allow us to understand all there is to know about a species, its unique and normally closed-off logical space.