On Love

So context.

I remembered asking my friend (who becomes the N in this dialogue) regarding the below question. I have no intention in mind to talk about the nature of loving, for this matter is repeated ad nauseam by the sophists our age. What I had in mind was to gain the attention of the audience by talking a topic familiar to them, which one of them happened to be love. I also think that it is apt to relate speculation regarding the Forms, Souls and soul under the topic of love for the act of birth itself is a symbol of love. No matter whether we knew who gave birth to us or not, or how she treated us after that, the fact still stands that we have been carried inside her for 9 months. 

The new style of writing in dialogue I acquired after reading Plato's Complete Work (but only up to and before Protagoras). I have found out that eventhough the line of questioning would restricts the field of investigation, it nevertheless carried a certain weight in learning the flow of arguments. It is sad that in our age, intellectual activity has been focused only brute memorizing of facts and statistics rather than the art of developing arguments. But, anyway, consider me as a newbie in this style of writing, there must be some correction to the crude line of questioning et cetera. I have also included a brief discussion and summary at the end of the dialogue to help digesting this "On Love" essay.

S: Do you think there’s such thing as a Platonic love?

N: What kind of Platonic love are you speaking, Sidi?

S: What I mean by Platonic love is the philosophical kind, not of the kind people speak of today.

N: And what is the layman’s version of Platonic love you spoke of?

S: The people spoke of Platonic love with at least two versions on their mind. The first is where two mutual persons love each other without any sexual relationship whatsoever, and this is what most of the people believe of. The second is a relationship, whether mutual or unreciprocated love, with no sexual relationship too.

N: What’s the difference between the two?

S: The former, my friend, is what the people universally understood to. But the second we see much more frequent in the philosophical and spiritual persons. An example would be the love of Dante for her saviour, Beatrice. Though Dante can never possess Beatrice (and neither she him) due to her untimely death, his love for Beatrice longs on, immortalised in the Divine Comedy we read today.

N: And I suspect you had another idea of Platonic love in mind aside from these two?

S: Unfortunately yes, we can never hinder people from misnomers. Even the linguists believe that the many kinds of languages branched off from their mother-tongues through bastardisation of words and concepts. The original meaning of Platonic love, is the love for the Forms, instead of the material that fashioned after the Forms. In people’s tongue, we frequently hear them talking of love for itself, in contrast with the love for her physical attributes, for an example. And so, I’m asking you whether this kind of love noble people speaking of exists.

N: I see. But what is the Forms, firstly?

S: The Forms, my friend, is the mass rather than qualities. When we knocked the table, we learnt of its hardness, and hardness is obviously a quality of the table rather than it being the table itself. We obviously can never infer of the hardness of the table without our sensory apparatus. The qualities also are of dependent identities, for it require the mass to manifest itself, and its birth are known by us, as I said, through our senses. To wit, we never see “hardness” or “colour” floating around independently, for this is absurd.

N: And so, what is its relation to our current discussion?

S: Be patient with me, my friend, for I am slow and ignorant. Do you know that people always said that they love their partner for their souls? Do you think they mean the soul as a visible or invisible entity?

N: Invisible, obviously!

S: But please kindly see my confusion. You say that the soul is an invisible entity. Do you feel or cognise the existence of the soul?

N: Why, of course!

S: With the same certainty you know that you are standing on the ground?

N: Even more, for the soul is the most intimate thing a person can have!

S: Of course, but see, you yourself said that the certainty of owning the soul is the same as you know that you are stepping on the ground, and you know this by the sensation of stepping on the ground, the firmness of the soil, am I right?

N: Yes.

S: So you are saying that you know the existence of soul by sensory perception, the same way you know you are stepping on the ground by sensation given by your feet?

N: By God, are we then facing a contradiction, for if we know the existence of soul with the same certainty of external sensation, then the soul would not be an invisible entity, but a visible one? But this, too, is absurd! 

S: Peace, my friend, we have discussed on the nature of souls in another occasion. But let me tell you this, how do you know that you are a diligent person. Say yes to either of these two choices. Firstly, do you know that you are a diligent person when you introspect yourself and found an entity within with the quality of diligence, or, secondly, you know that you are a diligent person when you saw your room, your surroundings are all kept in an orderly manner?

N: When you put it that way, it would be the second.

S: And when you are, say, chased by a dog, you know yourself running from the dog as “I-am-running-from-the-dog”, instead of looking from a vantage point that “I-am-running-from-the-dog”?

N: I can’t understand. What’s the difference between the two.

S: The difference is that, in the first occasion, you know yourself running from the dog within the picture of a world, so to speak, from external sensation. While, on the second occasion, you know that you are running from the dog from a distance, isolated from the external world.

N: Ah, so it would be the first occasion.

S: You agreed with me, because no matter how hard you close your eyes and search within, you can’t find any miniature of you, and moreover, the best findings you can feel is you tripped up upon an invisible something, as Kant said. 

N: Perhaps.

S: And so, the only way you know the most intimate part of you, that is what we called as the soul, from experience. And by experience, we mean, sensual experience.

N: Yes.

S: And thus, the human body is the best picture of human soul.

N: It seems so.

S: And we have, perhaps, sufficiently showed that the best way to get into a serial killer’s mind is not by introspection, but by examining the trails he left.

N: Yes.

S: And so, this is the meaning of soul we have arrived. And the soul, it seems, still remains a product of sensuous experience. Furthermore, the shape of the soul, so to speak, acquire a degree of concreteness when we remembered an episode in the past in order to prove that we have the quality of diligence. And this is the function of memory, no?

N: Yes, memory. And memory registers in our mind as an experience first and then deposited within. Memory, remains, a collection, a compendium of sensuous experience.

S: Splendid. So the soul, in the past, present, and thus future, remains through and through a sensuous entity.

N: But, Sidi, aren’t we bothering on heresy for saying that the soul is material?

S: My friend, these are subtle subjects we are talking of. It is a sign of a lazy mind to quickly subject a discussion into a classification. If you get what I was hinting of, which I have elaborated somewhere else, the unity of sensual experience we called soul is through and through material, and no material can stand without a perceiver. And, so the soul as material unity is perceived by the Soul of abstraction, if we are to make everything coherent. But this Soul, could only be conceived in abstraction, we have neither the knowledge nor the apparatus to divine this entity. 

N: What is then the relation of these to our talk?

S: We then perhaps have sufficiently explained that when the noble people speak of loving their lovers for their souls, they either mean this or they commit a contradiction. And we have also shown that even these still roamed in the sphere of the sensuous, and we have explained that the true meaning of Platonic love can’t be found here. It is important for us to get this right for these poor noble people might lose every of his lover in confusion for this fallacious thinking. For he was thinking that the soul is a rigid and complete entity, while every moment of his lover breathes in longing for him in the night, her soul (or, indeed the sum of experiences) increases. Love is not rigid and written at the stars, it is an active process, an eternal wonder and awe-struckness of the evermore colours, horizons and frontiers of his loved ones.

N: That is an apt description of love.

S: I hope so. And so, Platonic love in the purest meaning can’t be found here. And so, my friend, if there’s there the sensible there must be the non-sensible. And the sensible in general possessed outwardness, while its opposite thought looked inwards. Now this process of inwardness consists of at least three forms, rumination, thinking and contemplation. The first two still hovers around the edges of the sensible sphere, while the second not.

N: Do tell us more of this division.

S: That I would do gladly. Thinking involves the ordering of spatial material in a non-spatial field, that is inside our minds. It is here that we order the manifolds of experiences into types, genera et cetera. What differs it from rumination, is thinking is a proper work, in physics terms, that it produces results. Even if there is wrong ordering of the spatial inside our minds, it still liable to be called as results. Rumination, unfortunately, more often than not, do not involve any process of ordering. Rumination is a vicious cycle and produces no results at all. Contemplation, on the other hand, involves in abstracting the abstract. What I mean is that what we mean by thinking as an example would be holding this image of apple inside our minds. Thinking also involves us analysing the qualities of the image, a process of abstraction. Here we abstract from it the qualities of redness, smoothness and sweetness. The abstraction of the abstract is to further dissociate these qualities from its masses, and perceive the Form itself.

N: This is very hard to comprehend.

S: It should be, it is for this reason, the contemplation of Forms are a noble activity, untouched by the masses and comprehended by the very few. Imagine if everyone possess the understanding of the Forms, that is to love is to love the Forms, won’t every hostilities and enmity among people stopped, for every each of us share these Forms. And it is this Forms that allow us to exist, as the clay pot can only exist if there is a mould of it. And to love the Forms is to love the Former, for if there is the clay pot, there must be tradesman who built it. And as the clay pot cannot be the same with its maker, there stood a clear distinction from cause and effect. and here is your God. 

N: It seems so. But, my friend, would not this mean that if everything and everyone shares the same kind of Forms i.e. the mass, would not everything reduced into a unity? And if there’s unity waiting us at the end of abstracting the abstract, does it mean that we love everything and everyone? Is this worthy to be called as love, for love is good?

S: My friend, you have discovered the answer to our question. To love is at its very bottom, is to possess. Could we possess something that is boundless? Certainly not. And at the end of our abstraction of abstraction, we cannot conclude anything except that the Other is one, for to be multiple is to be distinct, and to be distinct is to possess sensual qualities. Therefore, there is no such thing as Platonic love even in this purest terms. 

N: By God, so it is impossible to love someone because of its Soul, and on top of it, it is also impossible to love someone because of its Soul of Soul. Why we reached a simple conclusion in such a roundabout and complex way?

S: My friend, everyone knew there is elegance in simplicity, but not many knew the elegance of deriving proofs and arguments. And as we all know, this business of Love is no mere topic, it is a must for us to talk it in a such high and contemplative way, not in a way that I found a sophist talked about love. I remembered I was invited to a talk in one of the universities, and this sophist attended as one of the panel, most people only came just to hear his speech. And the topic is about maintaining toilet cleanliness, but this sophist proceeded talked about love and toilets. Indeed, we have reduced to such pettiness and desperateness to become famous that we even relate love while talking about shit in the toilet!

N: It’s a disgrace, indeed. But enough of these heavy stuffs. I want to ask you, what kind of women do you love?

S: You make me blush talking about this, my friend. I just told you that it is a sign of end of times when people who do not have the qualification go to talk about things they do not know. How can I, the ugliest person among our circles, and perhaps the whole lot of humanity, are able to talk to you about this topic? Go and ask one of those beautiful persons in the market, they might tell you some of their thoughts.

N: Enough of that. It is a simple question and I expect a simple answer.

S: []

N: But you have spoken well, my friend.

And so. The essay concluded with the debunking of two forms of Platonic love proclaimed by sophists and romanticists. Firstly, that we are able to love someone solely due to her soul, and by soul they mean as an abstract entity. As the soul itself is a unified pole of sense-experience, to love as they meant in the first sense would be impossible. How about to love someone as an Ideal, as a Form. The Form, like the mould, precedes the substances thus necessary. But the Form remains aloof from any touch of the physical world, it functioned as the necessary "X" variable for a defined problem. A defined problem might define "X" as a class of numbers, but never a single number. Thus, if to love (in the usual sense), is to gain her/him as an individual rather than a class, it is also impossible to love them as a Form.

But then what leave us as the choice? My aim is to bring down the romanticists from their Icarus sky and also to free the people chained from their own rumination, like Tantalus. Sense-experience, while stands opposite from intellectual qualities, do not stand inferior or morally evil. Besides its the only thing we can gain perception of!

On Reality

Above the Sea of Fog- Caspar David Friedrich

Hi guys,

Some of my writing dated back to few years back, and I usually let them ferment for a while before revisiting them. Many of the writings are then rejected and abandoned, some of them are edited and very few of them still retain the same belief that I came upon to now. Now, this particular piece was intended as an answer to a question by someone, "What is faith?". Now, regarding faith, we would naturally look into our syahadat, for that is the most fundamental aspect of our religion. But, not many, I think, look beyond the physical utterances of syahadat, nor explore the secrets behind it. As the discussion expands, it turn into more of an expeditionary pieces not only regarding faith, but also of concepts and as the title suggest, of the World. Enjoy.

The short answer for your question is,

To belief in God is to affirm that he is not here, and to truly belief that, we must in a sense, affirm to nothingness.

You might think this is kind of a fancy question, thus perhaps a fancy wordplay. But many scholars, both Muslims and non-Muslims, have elaborated the answer as above. For now, let us review the answer according to the Islamic scholar’s answer.

Our syahadat, “La ilaha illa Allah” contains two parts, nafi and isbat. The nafi, as the name suggests, connotes an absolute denial or negative affirmation towards something. Thus, the nafi in the syahadat would mean as such; “There is no god at all…” Now, what does it means here is that there can be no God in either time, space or even in our abstract reasoning.

God can never be found in time and space, for if he is in time and space, he must assume a material form and this is absurd. And, if he is to affirm a material form, then he can be perceived by our senses and thus able to be reflected and to be formed concepts, by our abstract reasoning. And this is, double the absurdity. This would be referring implicitly behind your question. Why belief in God can be an option, like choosing a dish out from many dishes in the menu? Belief in God should not be even the only option; it should be the reality itself.

Narcissus- Caravaggio

How does the belief in God reduced to become one of the options in life, instead of the reality itself? By reducing him into concepts. Concepts are born from abstract reasoning, and there can be no abstract reasoning without objects of perception. Thus, abstract reasoning is the product of reflecting the objects of perception. It is like watching a moon from its reflection on the water. If we are to watch the moon directly, it is absurd for us to ask, “Am I seeing the moon?” Perception gives us an immediate and naïve truth. But, if we were to see the reflection, then the doubt and questions would arise normally, for an instance, “As I am not seeing the moon directly, could it be that the reflection here would be a lamp instead of the moon?” Thus, a perception is open to error and doubts when it is reflected, when it change form from a perception, to something-perceived, enabling it to form relations with other concepts et cetera. But, we have elaborated before that firstly, it is absurd that God can be perceived (because he exists out of time), and thus cannot be compared with other object-of-perceptions-turned-to-concepts (because to be compared is to be reflected in the abstract reasoning, and to be reflected is to be perceived in the first place).

The second part of the syahadat, the isbat, connotes a conclusion that supports the preceding premise, so it must 1) believe the preceding premise and 2) not contradicting the preceding premise. But, the preceding premise is to deny everything about God to be knowable by our senses or reasoning. Why the isbat is confirming something that cannot be known by our reasoning and senses, thus contradictory? This is not at all contradictory, if we are to know how limited the world conveyed by our senses and our reasoning.

Our faculty of reason, as elaborated before, only deals with concepts. The supreme manifestation of concepts is the law of logic, and even the most skilled logician would not employ such laws in his daily reasoning. The concepts has no whatsoever practical purposes at all, because it does not exist in the real world in the first place i.e. it is just a combination of relations between objects of perception (Think of the concept “man”. What does man even means? It could be our body, our reasoning, our virtue and infinite of relations that gives us the meaning of the concept “man”, even if the whole of relations is to be brought together, we still get nothing except relations. Thinking of 200 euros does not make my wallet thicker by 200 euros). The concepts do have limited practical purposes in giving form of the knowledge, i.e. to perform choosing a choice (that involves several relations), or to give us sense of past and future (boundless extension of relations forward and backwards), but that is all.

Our world of perception only brings us the phenomena. The things as we perceived, i.e. the matter presupposes time and space. That is to say, our knowledge of the world are conditioned by the forms of knowledge, i.e. time and space. Say, the apple on the table. To gain understanding of the apple, we need sensory datum from the apple to our brain, our prior conception of matter and the concept “apple” in our mind. If there is no conception of time and space in our mind, there can be no way we can know the existence of the apple. In other words, sensory datum without form is ignorance, while form without sensory datum is blind. We are saying that, without our forms of knowledge, there can be no way the world can be disclosed to us at all. It is not about there is a sun or earth, but it is about there is an eye to see the sun and the body to earth. Thus, our knowledge of the world is subordinated to the object-subject relation, and thus is relative. Don’t misunderstand me, what we see are truly complete, but it is relative to us. If there’s no subject to know, there is no object to be known. To put is short, the perception presents us the world as it is, but the existence of the world is subjected to us, which as a human already is limited by our meager sense.

So, from where the isbat wants us to derive knowledge to affirm the nafi? It is not in the concepts, nor in the perception then from where? Don’t think, but feel! Is there anything around us that gives us immediately the intuitive feeling of existence of something that is beyond perception or reasoning? Yes, in the realm of art. The art gives us directly what is not in the reasoning and in the world of perception with what is already given in perception. When we look at the painting or listening to the music, it is not the painting on the canvas or the music played by the orchestra that gives us the feeling of meaning, but it is something beyond that. Our reasoning and our perception can never explain the feeling given to us by the object of art. Does that shows that my feeling is false and non-existent? Then, how about this world that does not give me any sense of belonging at all, is it double the false and non-existence? But, then it is absurd. 

Scientists are really good in downgrading our feelings, by saying it just mere chemical properties. But, that is merely showing the condition for a feeling to arise but not answering the question “What is feeling?” Science are good in explaining how the things happened, but not what is the thing itself. It is like us having a housewarming party, and suddenly is greeted by a group of people. “Who are you?” we asked. And then one of them answered, “Ah, I am their father. This is my eldest son, this is my youngest son and this is my only daughter”. We would answer, “Yes, yes, I know that you are their father, but really who are you? Why do you come here?” Science is like the father, only good in explaining how things relate to each other, but when the day is done, it leaves the inexplicable matter as it is with no difference at all.

To open ourselves towards a true possibility in believing God, is to understand that reasoning are limited, everything is only appearances, and thus every field that belongs in the world of appearances are only good in explaining the appearance, not why there is appearances at all. Now, that we briefly limited the scope of the world of phenomena, it is clear that God could not exist here, in the world of phenomena. Even if he is to win against all phenomena, he is still a phenomenon, like the king of the jungle is still an animal. And, it is absurd because God is not a phenomena which is relative to us, even if the world to cease to exist at all, we cannot shake the feeling of there is something beyond.

Thus, God or something beyond that exists absolutely in-itself is the reality itself; everything else beside it is just phenomena and appearances. God is absolute and independent, while the phenomena are relative to us. I hope that it has become clear to you that until we arrive to this conclusion, to this very border and limit of human inquiry of reason and thinking, we cannot make the leap of faith to the unknown. How can we affirm the unknown if the known still remains to us as the absolute? How can we wake ourselves from the dream, if we take the dream to be the reality? How can, then, we start living, if all this time we are playing at living? It is only by arriving at the very edges of the world of perception; we can see the cliff of nothingness, yawning back to us.

Looking into the Abyss- Mikhail Savchenko

This dark, primordial cliff that yawning back to us, this abyss that is the proof that the whole world is like a mirage, dream or even an illusion that every thinker must arrive. Don’t look to long at it! And if we gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back to us. Many great thinkers confused this abyss to be the destination, and in our context, that the nafi is the absolute. This is where nihilism and atheism arise, from the cliffs of the yawning abyss. It is said that the atheists and the nihilists has really affirm half of the syahadat, the nafi but due to their love-struck of the abyss, mistaking the abyss as the truth, they stopped their enquiry and gaze the abyss in eternity. And the abyss, having no eye to avert its gazes, only its absolute darkness, gazed back to the abyss-gazer, engulfing them in its nothingness.

Now, let us prepare ourselves to jump across the abyss. Right here, my friend, it is saddening for me to say, that even I yet able to cross the abyss. Everyone will cross the abyss, even the atheists and the nihilists, but only after they are dead. For, everyone will return to beyond the phenomena, the abyss itself standing somewhere between the phenomena and the absolute. It is only through our God’s grace and love to bestow us enlightenment and understanding to cross here. Vague, you say? It is vague before because you are looking at those words from afar. Everything is vague if it is to be seen from afar. Right now, after our discussion, you have arrived at the reason why we need enlightenment at all instead of parroting the word as everybody else. Yes, you are yet to obtain it, but now you have the ability, knowledge and true reason to gain it. No man has arrived at the abyss if he does not think, and no wise man ever cross the abyss if he does not gain the love of his God.

At this point, it should be clear to you how absurd the question why we must believe in God. It is because, God is the reality and everything else is phenomena and relative. It is also absurd to know the proof of the existence and working of God like seeing how my hands moved to write this document. It is said that when you ask for a miracle, then you have really strayed to the workings of Satan, because you wanted to what is not here to be here, and then of course you will never get it here and now, and of course you will despair and given up to belief in God. This is the reason why our greatest miracle is the Quran, not the splitting of the moon or water spouting from the Prophet’s hands. The Quran is directly revealed to the prophet, in a medium not from the reasoning or the faculty of perception, but in what directly connected to the absolute. I have yet to elaborate on this part of us that is directly connected to it and thus will proceed to elaborate it briefly.

Our body, i.e. that what can we immediately see is indeed matter, belonging in time and space, but we are not entirely material. For, when we see our body, immediately and simultaneously we have seen the body as the object and we as the knowing subject. I have elaborated briefly on how the object belongs to world of phenomena and exist only for the subject (there can be no object and subject). Now, if there is no object at all, even my body, I still have the sense of myself that is free from being subordinated to subject-object distinction, thus free form time and space. If the world is to be annihilated or not exist at all, I still cannot doubt my existence. I can doubt that I am seeing a flying pink elephant, but I cannot doubt the existence of me performing that act of perception. But, this part of myself, exist not in time and space thus not belonging into the world of phenomena. And, it is this part of me that exist not in the phenomena but in the noumenal, as in the absolute existence of the thing-in-itself. Every of my movement comes from the upsurge of the part of me that is noumenal. There is no whatsoever gap between my movement and me wanting to move. There can only be doubt, gap and time space between my will and my movement, in reflection. Reflection, as we elaborated before, is a relation of perception, thus it occurs after the perception that is the movement. But during the movement, there can be no doubt whatsoever that my will and my movement comes from the same upsurge but manifested in different ways. I know my will to move directly, but only to see its effects indirectly i.e. via perception, and this is what causes the confusion in the science. In short, I am my body.

Thus, we have shown that while our body is material, we are not entirely so. This part of us that exists beyond time and space, yet its upsurge is within it but manifested in the world of phenomenon, exists in the realm of the absolute. If there is God, it should be in the realm of the absolute, but there can be no way at all for us to gain knowledge of such world. We can only gain knowledge of that world through our upsurge of the will, but only at this particular time and space. But, everything else is the upsurge of will and the absolute manifested in the world of phenomena. It is to affirm to the existence of the absolute by examining this part of ourselves that would bring us to an affirmation of the existence of God beyond time and space. It is for this reason they say that to know God, is to know our self.

What are we to do with this knowledge? First of all, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. We have seen that the world are mere appearances, and the absolute is inconceivable, because all we can know is the forms of knowledge that the upsurge of absolute and will goes into and manifested in the world of phenomena. But, the thing-in-itself, the absolute and the will itself can never be expressed. One must be silent in things he cannot speak of, and if there is any shorter way to truth, honesty is the one instead of pretending to know and foolish parroting.

Then, what else? Live, and live fully. There is no greater distasteful sight, than the people who refuse to live in the world only to seek refuge in other province of the world. They think that by denying this world, they can go to that world but there’s only one world to the masses. It is either this part of the world they want to run either from folly or guilt, or that part of the world they created for themselves. Either part, it is the same world. If you are to fall, then fall graciously and then rises again ever more graceful, for there is never a greater sight than seeing a human to fall and rise again. For, that is the only way of being human. As I have said to you before, the world is a symphony. This parable is apt, for we have elaborated briefly before that the feeling for art is something out of this world, thus the world is nothing more than the manifestation of the absolute. I never know whether my dancing is correct to the tune and genre, but I do know that it is wrong to not dance at all. For to desire for truth, is already half from getting it.

The Walk- Luc Tuymans