The 'faculties' in the Quran (Part 3)

Function vs Faculty

What’s the difference between a function and a faculty? A faculty is obviously more inclusive and contains the functions. It’s that to which belongs the spectrum in which the functions are arranged. Thus, in our analysis of the three perceptual functions, only one of them satisfies the criterion of ‘faculty’, and the others are related to it as its beginning and continuity. Thus, the spectrum of Ruya, Nathar, and Basar, make up the general faculty of Basar. We say here that the understanding, if defined as a process, would make more sense as the limit or ‘telos’ of the perceptual activity whose beginning point is Ruya (perception) and continuity (observation) Nathar. Thus, Basar (the understanding) is the sum total of a perception and its observation.

The other faculty that stands equally to Basar is السمع, which is closely related to Basar, but operates differently. Where Basar is an active assimilation and understanding of perceptual data, السمع is the faculty of recognizing and/or identifying objects based on preformed patterns. It’s a mnemic faculty, i.e., pertaining to memory, but as we discussed earlier, memory is meaningless if we don’t explain how it works, and how it works is by recognizing in something the underlying pattern of another that causes us to make an immediate and often unjustified connection. To draw an example used previously, the formula السَّمِيعُ الْعَلِيمُ: The faculty of السمع here modifies or qualifies that of علم (i.e., phronesis or practical knowledge), which makes possible the application of knowledge to the situations or conditions in which their application is required. This process runs contrary to induction or abstraction, where we generalize a concept to understand it at a more general level. In السمع, we go from the general to the particular,

"Thus we can proceed from a general mathematical formula — for example, from the formula of a curve of the second order — to the special geometrical forms of the circle, the ellipse, etc., by considering a certain parameter which occurs in them and permitting it to vary through a continuous series of magnitudes."— Ernst Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Vol. 1, p. 182)

Now the same rule we applied to Basar with respect to Ruya and Nathar can be applied here. Here we say that the same modular state can be found; the understanding we achieve in interacting with a particular object is a relation established by recognition. The understanding is an understanding of something as something. It’s a continuous process, an active assimilation of something. However, the instance where the understanding is achieved in an instant is not understanding, though it’s easily thought of as such. This instance where ‘understanding’ is achieved is actually Sam’, since it involves recognition, i.e., identifying the general pattern of something in the immediate object. Now the connection we’ve just established between these two faculties, that is, the understanding (Basar), the assimilation of data, and the recognition of ‘meaning’ or ‘ideality’ in the object is obtained by a third faculty.

To this third faculty, we owe the connection or linkage of Basar to Sam’. الفؤاد, the imagination, or as Kant calls it, the productive imagination, provides the criteria for the understanding; since the understanding is concerned with the assimilation of the object, it cannot know what it’s assimilating unless this knowledge is given to it prior by another faculty. Thus, الفؤاد (imagination) freely generates concepts, images, shapes that supplant the ideas which the understanding (Basar) begins to assimilate. The imagination generates objects based on given material stored in memory. It allows the mind to relate things that don’t seem related to each other. In fact, it’s what makes the act of recognition possible since in recognition we make an analogy between the given universal pattern, i.e., an imagined object, and something immediate. For example, the relation between a curve, the ellipse, and the circle is made possible because the imagination gives us the unity that allows us to see what these things have in common. The understanding here performs the successive relating process of curve, circle, and ellipse, and the Sam’ assigns this unity of the imagination to each case.

"The ˹Prophet’s˺ heart did not doubt what he saw."— Quran 53:11

"مَا كَذَبَ ٱلْفُؤَادُ مَا رَأَىٰٓ"

"So that the hearts of those who disbelieve in the Hereafter may be receptive to it, be pleased with it, and be persistent in their evil pursuits."— Quran 6:113"

وَلِتَصْغَىٰٓ إِلَيْهِ أَفْـِٔدَةُ ٱلَّذِينَ لَا يُؤْمِنُونَ بِٱلْـَٔاخِرَةِ وَلِيَرْضَوْهُ وَلِيَقْتَرِفُوا۟ مَا هُم مُّقْتَرِفُونَ"

In verse 11 of chapter 53, God relays how he approached the Prophet to reveal his message to him, saying that his heart did not doubt what it saw. It’s said here that it’s the ٱلْفُؤَادُ, translated here as the heart, that saw something. But this is the imagination, not with the dreamy and fictional connotation often associated with the term. For even when perceiving objects in general, the imagination is what really gives them their shape, color, and size. In reality, nothing really is permanent, everything changes in shape and color, and this variance is accounted for by the imagination. In chapter 6, on the other hand, those who disbelieve in the hereafter are asked to yield their ‘heart’, i.e., their imagination to the words of God. The ability to have revelation, to conceive of the hereafter, of God, of judgment day, of paradise, and of all other related ideas is possible only through the faculty of imagination since they’re not immediate realities and can only be imagined or contemplated. It’s for this reason that the verses cite the imagination specifically.

Abraham's Meditation

In the beginning, we noted how Abraham, during his meditation, was expressly looking for that which our mind can never not be conscious of, that’s always the object of our attention. We add here that it’s possible to understand the meaning now that we’ve defined the faculties. The faculties, though they are our only way of interacting with the external world, only work focally, that is, they are designed to limit things, to define and thereby contain and delineate things. Thus, they are not suited for the task which Abraham originally embarked upon, which is that of ‘defining’ God in the same way as we do everything else. But our consciousness is the consciousness of other things, and this the faculties help us achieve, but things are, as Abraham found, fleeting, and tend to vanish from our sight. What persists is our self-consciousness, which is but the continuous application of these same faculties, and if consciousness in general is consciousness of other things, what’s my self-consciousness caused by? Is it not one and the same faculties that we apply every time, by which we understand everything in existence?

"He is the One Who created for you hearing, sight, and intellect. ˹Yet˺ you hardly give any thanks."— Quran 23:78"

وَهُوَ ٱلَّذِىٓ أَنشَأَ لَكُمُ ٱلسَّمْعَ وَٱلْأَفْـِٔدَةَ ۚ قَلِيلًۭا مَّا تَشْكُرُونَ"

And although God calls himself السَّمِيعُ الْعَلِيمُ, He who possesses the faculties of Sam’ and Elm, He’s given us the same faculties. The difference, linguistically, is in the addition of the definite article. What explains it? Are these faculties that we freely use our own? Those moments of understanding, of seeing, how is it possible to conceive of something as small as a molecule, but as large as a galaxy? Is this supposed to be normal? Does this ability truly belong to me and my own self-consciousness, or am I actually experiencing these things indirectly by way of something else?

For Abraham, the transience of the sun, the moon, and the constellation was the decisive point. It’s wanting to ask, in such a moment, what’s permanent, and the answer which the mind seeks outside, among those things which it finds transient, turns out to be on the opposite side, in the ability to see these things as fleeting, to apprehend them and make judgments about them, to find them fleeting, to find them ‘things as such’. This is the permanent with which they are continually contrasted. What’s more subtle is our consciousness of those acts of reason and judgment, which are permanent by contrast to those things which they apprehend. The order we see in the world, the various objects, are these things which we find in nature, or things which our faculties recognize and thereby assign to them? It’s as if each time we become aware of something, we are simultaneously assigning order to it, we’re calling it to existence, we’re, in some sense, creating it, that the objects of experience are but these patterns our minds ascribe to them, and we do this continuously.

When things disappear, and reappear, and more than that, appear in the order in which they are, it’s the faculties that make us aware of them, and this is something which happens involuntarily. The question then arises, in my immediate and involuntary awareness of things, and in the order in which they assume each time they are perceived, are these not acts which mimic God’s account of creation? By extension, are these faculties that we use not His? As in, every time we use them, are we not using them indirectly, that perception is His perception, that comprehension is His comprehension that we experience through Him? For this realization to take place, it seems necessary that things be transient, as only in their transience that the acts of creation can be simulated through these episodes of perception and understanding. Do not the ways we construct our objects of experience, the intentional and schematic nature by which we do so, point back to a source, a creator, whose scheme of creation we relive each time we use our faculties?

Thus, that which limits things cannot itself be limited, and this is something which those moments of understanding achieve that give the contrast required to see what Abraham saw.