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Allama Iqbal on ‘Immortality’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Extract
The common notion of ‘immortality’ presupposes a ‘dualism’ of mind and body, with the former alone surviving death. Such eminent Muslim thinkers as al-Kindi (A.D. 801–873), known as the Father of Muslim philosophy; al-Farabi (870–950) called ‘The Second Teacher’; ibn Sina (980–1037), that encyclopaedic genius of the Muslim world; and ibn Roshd (1126–1198), have all advocated a very strict kind of ‘dualism’, anticipating Descartes, the Father of modern philosophy, down to the present-day realist-idealists led by Professor H. D. Lewis of the University of London. The dualistic position, however, made even Descartes realize the difficulty of explaining ‘interaction’, or for that matter any kind of relation, which we experience between mind and body in our everyday life - a problem which he and his followers found hard to solve. As every student of modern Western thought knows, Descartes resorted to –interactionism’, Spinoza (like ibn Roshd) took refuge in ‘parallelism7rsquo;, while Leibniz advocated ‘pre-established harmony’ implied in the position of Asharites. Iqbal argues against any such view, ‘I am inclined to think that the hypothesis of matter as an independent existence is perfectly gratuitous. It can only be justified on the ground of our sensations of which matter is supposed to be at least a part-cause other than myself’ (a position taken up by both Locke and Kant). Iqbal contends against the Cartesian hypothesis that ‘We cannot find any observable facts to show how and where exactly their interaction takes place, and which of the two takes the initiative’. Against both ‘parallelism’ and ‘pre-established harmony’ his contention is that they reduce ‘the soul to a mere passive spectator of the happenings of the body’. Thus, Iqbal rejects both ‘interactionism’ and ‘parallelism’ as unsatisfactory.
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References
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