Time and Consciousness In The Quran (Part 1)

Part 1: Two modes of experience

Of the many points we’ve made over the years regarding the question of methodology in relation to the Quran, from understanding every word by observing how it’s used exclusively within the limits of the book, to the notion of numbers as basically a notation system for different and unique modes of experience, to gender as a relation that starts off in the mind as a process of producing ideas, thoughts, and language, and of being immediately aware of the fact, i.e aware of our productivity or agency. In this segment, we want to elaborate upon the concept of experience, as we see that the clarity of everything we’ve said so far hinges on the clarity of this concept. 

Two key intellectual personalities come to mind here, Martin Heidegger and Henri Bergson, whose examination of this idea, which, on the surface does not seem to warrant much thought, let alone, thousands of pages of hair-splitting expositions, led them to collectively emphasize and, ironically some might say, dogmatize, the notion of Life, Leben, in opposition to the stringently logical and rather technical approaches of science. Where the scientific tendency is highly instrumental, relying on data, and relations between classifications, experiments, and statistics, life observes the subject who's engaged in the experience, i.e the scientist who, occupied with the object with all its painstaking details, has subsequently completely lost himself in it, to whom no serious distinction exists between his own mode of experience and the facts which his objects disclose to him. 

His aim, as Jung put it in describing what we believe is the psychological temperament that dominates the sphere of science is ‘always to influence his environment, to unite it with himself, or annex himself to it." in contrast to the opposite temperament which likes to preserve a certain distance and independence, and, if you will ‘integrity’ of the subject from the environment. Throughout his work, Heidegger, stresses the distinction between the scientific and phenomenological experience, emphasizing the importance of understanding the world not just through scientific analysis but also through our lived, phenomenological experience. There’s a difference, he suggests between merely seeing an object as a scientific entity (a collection of physical properties) and understanding it in terms of its use or purpose in the context of human activity, elaborating through the famous analogy of the hammer, which he uses to distinguish between the concepts of ‘readiness at hand’ and ‘present at hand’, saying that:

When we are simply using it to hammer a nail, we don't focus on its physical properties or scientific aspects. Instead, our experience is practical and contextual. A tool, is what it is when it’s in my hand, not the ensemble of material designed and framed in a certain way, I know what a hammer is when I use it or see it being used, not when I read a handbook detailing how a hammer is a tool that has a handle, that weighs a certain number of ounces, whose head is made of that material, that has a claw that’s shaped like this etc.. No, none of this has any meaning until we’ve seen the hammer in action; when we’ve held it, when we’ve used it. In this same manner is the concept of life as an intellectual mode of experience distinguished from the scientific and its classifications, its tables, and graphs, its technical terms, its statistics etc.

Kant demonstrates this with a simple example from arithmetic: why should 7 + 5 = 12?. 7 + 5, he says, 

“Shows nothing beyond the union of two numbers into one, whereby nothing is being thought as to what this single number may be which combines both”, “we, by no means arrive at a concept of twelves by thinking of the union of seven and five”

(Critique Of Pure Reason, B15, 16)

We may analyze our concept of this sum till kingdom come, and not find anything in the combination of 5 and 7 that says 12, we do, however, obtain 12, Kant says, when we enumerate, that is, when, “Starting with the number 7, and 

“Calling in the aid of the fingers of my hand as intuition in order to form with it the concept of 5, I gradually add to the number 7 the units which I previously took together to make up 5, and by means of the image of my hand, I thus see the number 12 arise”. “That 5 should be added to 7, this I had no doubt already thought of in the concept of sum = 7+5, but not that this sum be equal to the number 12” (B17)

In other words, what Kant’s saying is that we obtain sums of things from the experience of counting, by crossing that distance separating two things, by an act of ‘assembly’, by counting 5 from 7 or 7 from 5. Such an approach is way different from one which simply calculates mechanically, whereby the functions of mathematics are treated as no more than rules of addition, and the numbers which, by their mere conjunction give us other numbers. 

On the other hand, there’s Leibniz who, in the monadology, makes the same distinction as Kant, Bergson and Heidegger, only with the ‘mill’ as his analogy of choice. Supposing that there was a machine whose structure produced thought, sensation, and perception (i.e an object of experience)” he writes “ we could conceive of it as increased in size with the same proportions until one was able to enter into its interior, as he would into a mill. Now, on going into it we would find only pieces working upon one another, but never would we find anything to explain Perception” inasmuch as in Kant’s analogy, we find nothing in the combination 7 + 5 that explains 12 as their sum, we see the modules or parts of the mill pushing one another, but we don’t have a concept of what we’re seeing until we’ve seen the product which these various modules are employed to produce. Thus the result which a certain process leads is, to an extent, the mark of the experience, a positive interruption which we routinely encounter in experience. Thus think of perception as the completeness of a certain experience, or relative completeness if we consider that any given experience consists of ‘parts’, details, in which every detail is an experience, valid in itself, that it has the same structure as logic informs; a premise and a conclusion, and the relation between them; of implication and presupposition. 

It’s rather a certain experience, of actually understanding, like Hiedagger’s hammer, the machinery of the mill, through the observation of its functioning, the same way 12 is obtained by counting 5 from 7 or 7 from 5; this gives us perception. I.e understanding the experience or ‘machinery’ to the extent that the name assigned to the experience allows. So if the experience is called ‘the mill’ which in latin means ‘to grind’, then perception covers that very process, that would be, for the mill, in the Aristotelian phrase, its nature. 

In other words, we have an experience when we’ve actually beheld the very mechanisms which form the idea of the ‘mill’ by seeing how it grinds, crushes and cuts solid masses into smaller pieces. It’s also called an experience because in it, the elements are not the object of our experience, but that which they are instrumental to. The modules are therefore expedient and merely guide us, frame by frame, towards that conclusion which we then call ‘mill’ or ‘molere’, which means, We see that the original word replaces the mechanical details with an infinitive ‘to grind’, recognizing that the proper limit of the experience is the transformation which the grinding content undergoes. 

This is the mode of experience which we all share, and inform our common idea of objectivity, however, the scientist’s vision differs from this only to the extent that he’s able to see diminutions of this overall experience, i.e the mechanisms of grinding, the levels of pressure to which a given mass must be placed under, mechanical operations, the rotation of the balls or rods which do the grinding, the functions of the mill liners, the mill shell, the movement of the grinding media, the discharge system, the speed at which the grinding modules must operate in order to the produce the desired effect, and other highly technical details which the scientist, as opposed to the average person, must have access to, in other words, the scientist would possess a more nuanced mode of experience, pertaining to the theoretical scheme by which the simple experience of seeing the mill in action is performed.