This a 75 page paper and is waaay too long to fit on here. I've included the cover page, table of contents, and some of my favorite passages. If you'd like the full paper hit me up. 

​

“There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been identified by us.

This universal force is LOVE.”

                       -Albert Einstein in a letter to his daughter Lieserl Einstein

 

“With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured, the first thought forbidden, the first freedom denied, chains us all irrevocably.”

                        - Judge Aaron Satie from Star Trek: The Next Generation
 

Table of Contents

Freedom in the Old and New Worlds 

​

What is Freedom? 

 

Al-Farabi: The Virtuous Cosmopolitan City

………………………….Historical Context

……………………….....Al-Farabi’s Political Paradigm

………………………… Epistemic Hierarchy and Anarchy 

………………………….Epistemic Injustice: The Status of Women and Natural Slaves

………………………….Theological or Secular Pluralism of a Cosmopoly 

 

Kant’s Rational Self-Determination with Respect to the Moral Law

………………………….Early Signs of the Collapse of Pure Reason 

………………………….What Came First? The Free State or the Free Person?

………………………….The Spectators and Agents of History: A Post-Colonial Analysis

 

Frankfurt’s Volitional Necessities of Love & Love as Divine Law

………………………….Caring as Necessity 

………………………….God’s Love 

………………………….Love of God

 

Recounting the Journey

 

Bibliography 

Appendices

​

​

Freedom in the Old and New Worlds  
While the quest for freedom has not evaded any period of human intellectual history, the purported location of these keys has changed depending on the thinker, the period, and the form of freedom in question. Freedom from causal determinacy of the material world has often been interpreted as freedom from our own impulsive drives for pleasure and survival, or even from the ontological continuity of time and contiguity of space. Personal liberation of minds through a state-assisted rational investigation of the Good in the ancient Greek and medieval Arab worlds was prevalent in early political thought. Collective liberation of the disenfranchised from a tyrannical elite through civil disobedience or revolt on the other hand, with a few exceptions in early Greek and medieval thought, has largely gone unframed until the 18th century. It’s important to note that while philosophers will be developing their conceptual foundations of freedom in dialogue with the historical facts and ideological norms of their times, it is common for their views to diverge from the collective and epochal conscience. This work will explore the history of the philosophical concept of political freedom. 

​

The following pages will investigate the reasons why this concept morphed into three distinct forms at four historical junctures: 375 BCE ancient Greece, 8-12th century Middle East, 18th century Europe, 20 and 21st century Americas. The first shape of political freedom is Plato and Al-Farabi’s models of rational autonomy developed by the epistemic elite’s pedagogical-political and religious programs. The second shape of political freedom is Immanuel Kant’s concept of rational self-determination in obedience to the moral law, attained independently and critically of any rational or theological doctrine of the Good and empowered by one’s ability to use their reason publically. The third shape of freedom is in part captured by Harry Frankfurt’s innovation on the volitional necessities of Love, and in part by an investigation of Empedocles and Ibn Arabi on the metaphysical, theological, and personal practical conditions for political freedom motivated by Love. The central claim of this paper is that the concept of freedom has most notably been reconfigured by two catalysts in the history of human thought. The first being, early signs of the collapse of pure reason, which brought with it the procedural sovereignty of popular will, challenges against divine rights to rule, legislate and withhold rights from citizens on the basis of epistemic injustices towards women, colonized and racialized peoples. The second cause for the revision of the ancient and medieval concepts of political freedom, is the diversification of the properties of God. Plato, Aristotle and Al-Farabi understood God to be transcendent, Nous and the Good, whose principles were attained through speculative reason, and freedom motivated in view of these divine, rational, and moral principles. Ibn Arabi and notably Spinoza consider God to be immanent within creation, and the former to live in view of Love as the primary motivating force behind God’s design and presence. This second catalyst, I argue, situates civic societies in nature rather than outside of it, presents nature as productive rather than a mechanical product, and extends the divine Law’s scope of political freedom and rights to animals, natural ecosystems, and humans.        

​

This paper will be divided into four sections. The first section will provide a discussion and definition of freedom, namely Berlin’s two concepts of liberty, along with Descartes, Albritton, and Frankurt’s discussion on the limits and necessities of the will. The second will develop an account of the main features of Al-Farabi and Plato’s political programs with regard to freedom. In this discussion, a charitable analysis of the Virtuous City’s epistemic hierarchy, distribution of political freedom, prioritization of the harmony of the city rather than individual liberties, and the epistemic injustices employed against natural slaves and women, will be presented. The third section, following the conclusions of the previous one, will detail Kant’s innovations on the ancient concept of freedom. Namely, the collapse of pure reason and theocracies, prioritizing personal liberty in any political project or divine Law, and the sourcing of political rights from one’s basic human dignity rather than from a capacity for reason or the state’s beneficence. Nevertheless, after discussing Kant’s ‘reading public’ as a collection of disinterested ‘world-spectators’, the affective mandates of human agency and participation in history, the importance of lived experience in public forums and of care in Kant’s ‘enlarged mentality’, we find that Kant’s concept of political freedom is also amiss. In providing a post-colonial analysis by drawing on the works of Fanon, Saïd and Al-Saji, we arrive at our third transformation of the concept. The fourth and final section will detail Frankfurt’s departure from Kant’s concept of freedom by outlining the volitional necessities of care in addition to the moral law. Just as the ancient and medieval philosopher’s concept of rational autonomy was grounded in an understanding of Nous as the nature of God which orders the cosmos and human life in accordance with reason, we’ll attempt to ground the role of love in structuring our wills in an account of God as Love. By drawing on Frankfurt, Empedocles and Ibn Arabi’s discussions of the role of God’s Love in organizing the world, we will arrive at a more nuanced understanding of how love can be an organizational principle of human life. 

​

1. What is Freedom?

Freedom can be a fairly mysterious term. Is freedom a natural feature of human life? Is it gained only in social formations? Is it lost only in social formations to claims of property, deeds to bodies, rules of laws, and civic hierarchies? Can we be free from natural forces? From the determinacy of motion in a material world? Is reason sufficient to liberate us from nature, or is reason subject to its own form of conceptual determinacy? Does the spirit liberate living beings from the ontological continuity of time? Are the practices of any one of our faculties responsible for the freedom of a human being, or is it the nature of our will to be radically free? All good and fine questions that have yet to establish: what exactly is freedom? In this section the following definition will be put forth: Freedom is the choice of living in line with the organizational principles of nature. I will first discuss Descartes’s notion of freedom as the choice not to reproduce the past, the limits to the essentially limitless nature of the will, and Berlin’s two concepts of liberty in relation to the ancient Greek and medieval understanding of freedom.  

 

Descartes celebrates humanity’s unique ability to reason and think on a transcendental plane that partially evades the deterministic conditions of corporeal existence. Thought not only makes human existence certain, but I argue that Descartes would also take this faculty to liberate us from the continuity of time given that his description of the discontinuity of time is only intelligible from the perspective of God or a free-willed agent. For Descartes, without continuous sustenance, the first act of creation was not sufficient to maintain the enduring existence of finite minds and bodies. The capacity for sustained existence isn’t self-contained within the finite existent nor as a productive force inherent to nature, but rather none “pouvaient subsiter sans lui [Dieu] un seul moment” (Frankfurt 55). While the composite of materials and the form of a house may undergo the reorganization of its matter into different forms such as rubble, only God is responsible for the persistent existence of the matter and the form of ‘house’ as anything other than an annihilated state of non-existence. The singular act of Creation then, also contains the act of continuous preservation of the existence of finite things. 

 

This notion of ontological inertia makes inseparable the existence of a finite object and their duration in a state of continuous change. In Descartes’ Third Meditation, he argues for God’s continuous creation and preservation of the world by assuming that time is substantively but not formally discontinuous. He considers that if a lifetime (or history for that matter) were divided into infinite slices of infinitely divisible time (62), each slice would persist or perish independently of the preceding slice of time. Conversely, each slice would depend solely on God for its sustained existance by means of what Frankfurt denotes as ontological inertia (58). Gilson and Gueroult interpret this doctrine to mean that there is no efficient cause other than God, and that the First Cause of temporal creation doesn’t conceive of time at a single moment and lets it unfold, rather, each moment of time is simultaneously being conceived by God as reciprocally independent. Every moment is an instance of Creation, which, taken in succession creates the illusion of an intrinsically dynamic reality. Geroult takes this a step further and finds Descarte’s view to imply the absence of enduring objects, or their motion for that matter, whose displacement would instead be accounted for by a new instance of creation at every point of the object's trajectory (65). Frankfurt lays to rest these objections by charging Gueroult and Gilson with conflating between the discontinuity of time and the independence of each part of time in an infinitely divisible continuum of time. The difference, he supposes, is that the continuity of a temporal sequence belongs to the formal character of the series rather than its substantive character which accounts for the reciprocal independence of its events. 

 

As this discussion clarified, the independence of each slice of time from the previous one challenges our understanding of mechanical chains of causally interdependent events in a physical system. In contrast to Descartes’ theory of kinetic inertia which dictates that an object in motion will persist in motion unless stopped by an external object, ontological inertia deals with substantive relations between existents and insists that the act of sustained existence can only be halted by the Cause of its existence rather than another finite being (58). This distinction between the continuity of time from the perspective of material relations and that of a substantive discontinuity of time, we find, can only be made by thinking beings. Descartes argues that because no substance continues existing despite its endurance in time, “la durée n’est distincte de la substance que par la pensée” (60). When Descartes formulates his notion of continuous creation and ontological inertia he does so in conflation of “la nature du temps” and “la durée de notre vie.” Descartes describes the continuity of creation and assumes the discontinuity of time as the nature of time in the context of free-willed experiences of time. He prefaces his conclusion by proposing that “ce qu’un peu auparavant j’ai été, il ne s’ensuit pas que je doive maintenant être” (56) While his experience of a discontinuous time might be marked by his capacity to become other than what he previously was, and God’s by the ability to withhold the act of continuous preservation of existence, it is not clear whether non-rational animals can be said to be other than what they’ve been becoming. 

 

Individual finite beings are contrasted with the physical world in their perpetuation of preceding causes as opposed to the distinct ability of free-willed beings to decouple from the continuity of time. Human beings can deviate from material causes, deny impulsive appetites or desires, and renounce paths of depression or addiction. Descartes attributes this capacity to a self-consciousness made available by thought. All mental states require for Descartes, propositional content and an attitude towards the content (Rosenthal 455). While a human being can be conscious of a pain in their foot as being distinct from the self observing this pain, non-human animals lack this capacity to “apprehend and affirm” the proposition of ‘pain’ (457). Given that thoughts, including the mental representation of ‘pain’ (457), are “all those things that are in us consciously” (456) and notably “non-corporeal and nonspatial”, the sentiment of pain is unavailable to unthinking animals which Descartes views as sophisticated machines. Instead, because these creatures lack the “second grade of sensation” of a thinking mind perceiving pain as a mental state, their aversions to pain would be nothing more than “machine performance”, instinctive and reflexive yet unaware of the nature of their pain (456). Human thought then, liberates our perception of affective experiences from an otherwise choicelessly reactive relation to our physical environment. Not only can individuals be free of the mechanic perpetuation of previous causes, but groups of free-willed agents can also break from the inertial continuity of history through acts of revolutions against systems of oppression persisting by sheer force of historicity. The modern question is whether this ability belongs to all or some living beings, whether non-human animals are capable of some form of liberating thought, and thus equipped to break from retroactive causal determinacy. Descartes's stance is clear, that only humans have this ability by virtue of reason, and that other animals along with the rest of the material world are incapable of breaking away from the formal continuity of time.

 

Human wills are distinctly free from the ontological continuity of time and from perpetuating material causes. Descartes attributes this liberty to the human capacity for thought. A few questions remain. What is the extent of the will’s freedom? Does every living thing have a will? Are they all free to the same extent? For Descartes the will is seemingly limitless, “so free in its nature that it cannot be constrained” (Frankfurt 71). Albritton advances Descartes’ position that the will is “perfect”, “absolute”, and “perfectly free.” Albritton concludes that by nature, without considering the will’s embodiment in nature, geography, and history might I add, “wills are unlimited and that their freedom is absolute” (Frankfurt 72). Albritton attributes this freedom to the simple and void nature of the will, having “nothing in it, in a sense” (243). The ex-nihilo nature of the will avails it to limitless possibilities of choice. Descartes clearly shares his position, that “god has given us a will with no limits…[an] infinite will.” It is generally agreed upon that the power of the will is to “affirm or deny, to pursue or avoid” (Frankfurt 75). The will is the power of choice. Interestingly, Descartes argues that no will can be greater or inferior to his, not even God’s! In considering the “will in the essential and strict sense”, Descartes argues that all wills, mortal or divine are an expression of this limitless capacity for choice. The limits that surround this will and the powers attributed to it will certainly differ between finite and infinite beings, depending on the spatiotemporal or eternal context these wills are active in. However, by nature, all wills for Descartes perform the same functions. Much like Ibn Arabi, Descartes recognizes the will as more “extensive than our intellect” (75). While both thinkers would concur that the will is “indivisible”, and that all conscious beings would be equipped with a will, only Ibn Arabi takes non-human animals, plants and artifacts for that matter, to be capable of confronting the divine Law of God. Awareness of the divine Law remains for Descartes solely a process of rational speculation into the logically necessary laws of nature. While this divine Law is transcendent for Descartes and accessible through apriori demonstrations, Ibn Arabi considers the divine Law to be accessible through the sensuous experience of the immanent self-disclosure of God through the heart rather than reason. The wills of all conscious beings might be identical in view of God’s however Descartes exemplifies a tradition of human exceptionalism in light of the revelatory capacities of reason, and its unique ability to overturn the ontological inertia of time and causality. Whether Ibn Arabi affords this same break from the continuity of time to other living beings is to be further investigated. While all wills are equal, not all wills are equally free because of their social environment, the capacities this environment deems conducive to power. For Plato, Al-Farabi, and Descartes, this liberating capacity is exclusively human and rational. It is no surprise that this condition for freedom of will also serves as a condition for political power in the ancient and medieval worlds, one that has been notably denied to women and slaves on the basis of the absence of authoritative rational capacity.  While Descartes’ doctrine poses that “neither the will itself nor its possession admits of any variation in degree”, it will become clear from Frankel’s discussion of variations in the degrees of autonomy of wills in Al-Farabi and Plato’s political programs that the powers of the will to act in its freedom will be intimately tied to rational capacities in the first shape of political freedom. 

 

Nevertheless, Albritton does consider some epistemic limits to the will, some “‘grammatical’ or ‘conceptual’ or ‘logical’” (244). In the same vein, Kant would later identify two other categories of voluntary yet authoritative necessities on our free will. The necessities of ambition and prudence, as well as the limitations that the moral law imposes on our freedom of the will. Frankfurt would later add that the mandates of love similarly constrain the limitless freedom of the will with volitional necessities. In addition, critical race theorists and feminist scholars would extend that the will can also be constrained by external modes of repression that limit not only the resources available to the colonized, racialized peoples and women, but also place inhibitions on their realm of possibilities and impair their will’s capacity to choose from the already diminished set of choices available to them. In this sense, Frankfurt distinguishes between the “power to do something” and the freedom to do it. This difference between autonomy and agency is exemplified in Hobbes's suggestion that although the will may have a limitless capacity of choice inherent to it, its freedom is a reflection of external dynamics of power whereby “...freedom, signifieth, properly the absence of…external impediments of motion” (Leviathan XXI). Frankfurt accepts Hobbe’s argument that “unlimited power entails unlimited freedom” (Frankfurt 74). This understanding of freedom reorients the question of autonomy towards the social contexts of power distribution at any given point in history. How we view power, in turn, whether as an extension of wealth, education, race or gender, accidental or essential properties, or being invariably borrowed from Nature, even in social and political contexts, can alter significantly the climate of freedom in context of these relations of power.

 

In his inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Oxford in 1958, Isaiah Berlin identified two concepts of political freedom. The first, negative freedom, is freedom from the world’s interference in my personal affairs (Berlin 15). To be free in this sense means that my actions are neither the product of another person’s coercion nor guided by the command of a slave master. Whether the slave master uses iron chains and deeds to a body, or socio-economic and legislative arrangements to deprive one of material sustenance, negative freedom is challenged (16). The state’s concern with a citizen’s freedom from personal or systematic coercion on the basis of the citizen’s mental or physical attributes is relatively novel in the history of political thought. Much more prominent in the ancient Greek and medieval Islamic conception of political freedom, is positive freedom. Berlin defines this liberty as the personal desire to be one’s “own master” by having a rational, purposeful, and self-directed will (22). Positive freedom is not solely a freedom from the political or legal forces that be, but first and foremost a liberation from one’s lower self. The process of purifying our self-directed will from “spiritual slavery, or slavery to nature” involves the subordination of our mechanistic, “irrational impulse” to our rational, “ideal” and higher self. Ironically, when the state takes charge of promoting citizens’ positive freedom from their lower selves in the name of their “real” self’s latent rational interests, they no longer become self-directed. The paternalistic co-option of positive freedom, Berlin notes, grants states the ability to “ignore the actual wishes” of the empirical selves it reigns over, and coerce, “bully, oppress, [or] torture” them on behalf of their ‘real’ self (24). 

 

Positive political freedom is most notably a feature of Plato and Al-Farabi’s political theories. For these philosophers, freedom was captured by rational autonomy and our motion in view of the rationally apprehended Good. Autonomy is derived from the word autonomos, from the Greek root of autos meaning self, and nomos meaning law, reason, or principle. No longer strictly subject to the laws of nature, but by establishing an internal law that shapes our will, we become autonomous beings. The principles of these internal laws can either integrate us into the harmony of nature, or it can deviate from the organizational principles of nature. Similarly, an ideal state can either function in line with the laws of nature, or corrupt them. In identifying God as Nous, the ancients and medievals consider Reason to be the motivating force behind nature’s design. In turn, it is the role of Plato’s philosopher-legislator to organize the city, and the citizens’ personal lives, in accordance with what is rational and thus divinely Good. It can be difficult to find the place of autonomy and freedom in a theocracy ruled by such a divine Law. Crone notes that in the medieval Islamic world, the concept of political freedom as such was foreign. Their choices, Crone recounts, were not between slavery to the state or freedom but rather between “slavery to other human beings and slavery to God”. Islam gave dominion over human affairs to God, and in that respect “no human had the right to impose obligations on other humans”, neither rulers nor masters, “fathers or husbands”, not even Prophets (Crone 315). Rather, that authority was relegated to God. All power was borrowed from God, or nature, and belonged to God only without any partner. The divine Law or Shari’a was considered to be derived from revelation and legal rulings from consensus and dialogue on the mandates of the revealed Law. Naturally, this protected citizens from one another’s over-extended interests, but it also protected the state's laws and institutional authority in a way that surpassed any human-made laws. A slave to God would have to abide by the mandates of the law as though it was a duty of their worship. 

​

...

​

....Kant’s sensus communis is a “sense common to all” and a mental capacity that situates our private judgments in community. It is representative of the “collective reason of humanity” which functions as an apriori account of a collection of general or inter-subjective standpoints and is unique to humans given that it depends on communication and sociability ([MM] Kant 30). It serves as a counterbalance against our private judgments when being critical of our own thoughts and desires. It also serves as a determinant for the coherence and internal consistency of our internal lives. Both Kant and the Freethinkers agreed with the ancients and Al-Farabi in the importance of a contemplative life, however, the former pair insisted that this basic function was available to all humans in their development of positive freedom. Al-Razi’s critiques were many. The first is that it seems immoral and illogical that God should single out a single human being and favor them above all others in receiving insight into a divine Law that gives them authority to rule over all others and incite wars in the name of this one true legitimate divine authority to govern (Stroumsa 96). Similarly, Kant calls into question why nature would favor the philosopher with the “partial distribution of her gifts” in his Critique of Pure Reason (Kant B838). The notion of Prophets, or even Al-Farabi’s philosopher king, equipped with superior intellectual disposition to receive revelation, was for Al-Razi “biologically and logically false” (Stroumsa 111). God’s compassion would have equipped all humans with the capacity to know what is “beneficial or detrimental to them” in this world and the next (96). In contrast, Al-Farabi’s class of political and intellectual elites had exclusive access to instructions of the theoretical sciences needed to independently determine the rational and divine Good. Echoing Plato’s well-documented sentiments, Al-Farabi believed that instruction in the theoretical and divine sciences should be well guarded from the wandering eyes of members outside the political and intellectual class of elites. Just as Al-Razi takes issue with the Ismaili’s tradition of concealing the deeper principles of their beliefs from the “uninitiated” (98), he would certainly take issue with Plato and Al-Farabi’s similar attitude in concealing the theoretical and divine sciences from the “vulgar” class. Kant also goes on to critique such epistemic avarice in what Arendt denotes as “unusual vehemence” towards the “obscurantist sages” who guard wisdom from the public (Arendt 31). Al-Razi adds from his views outlined in the K.Mahāriq al-Anbiyā, that a rigid and immovable conception of the divine Law facilitated “obscurantist bigotry”; in turn, religious and political institutions with such habits were quite often intolerant and tyrannical (Stroumsa 105)....

 

... Kant’s critique demonstrated that the apprehension of such pure and immutable principles that are enshrined into the intelligible fabric of reality, is impossible. Even if it were possible, Kant takes issue with the delay of a people’s freedom on the grounds that they are not yet equipped for freedom. A delay in the civil freedoms of women and slaves for example, until they are rationally equipped to apprehend and move in view of the Good, or a delay in the liberation of a colony until they are ready for the freedom of governing themselves. In Kant’s view “according to such a pre-supposition freedom will never arrive.” Primarily because Kant considers the condition for “ripen[ing]” to freedom to be liberation; we must be free before we can exercise our rational autonomy. Kant adds that we only take to reason when we are free, and that denying humans their freedom by maintaining that they are “unfit for freedom”, be it as a result of their capacity for reason, or the color of their skins might I add, is to “usurp the prerogatives of Divinity itself, which created man for freedom” ([LR] Kant 176-77). Much like Kant, Ibn Arabi takes freedom to be a fundamental condition of any claim to the divine Law. Having denied the functionality of theocracies, however, only Ibn Arabi would go on to claim that any theocracy would have to secure the freedom of its inhabitants as a condition of the divinity of its laws rather than place paternalistic conditions on liberty. This fundamental principle of freedom in the divine Law equips both Kant and ‘Arabi to necessitate revolution in some cases of necessity.... 

​

...A public of spectators discludes actors in history, and marginalized communities from circles of knowledge production through implicit racial hierarchies informed by the unreflected cultural logic of imperialism. Notably, Husserl once noted that philosophy proper was “pure thêoria”, and unlike Indian and Chinese philosophy, only the derivate traditions of ancient Greek philosophy could qualify as philosophy. While Kant acknowledges the private conditions of his own judgment, there remains the task of challenging the private conditions of the ‘public’ Kant communes in. This significant force in the cultural and intellectual activities of western ‘publics’ at once glorifies the universal character of western enlightened thought as well as dismisses non-western thought as infantile, unsophisticated, or in some cases, subhuman. Edward Said collects a great litany of the dominant cultural and intellectual traditions that emerged from 18th and 19th-century French and English imperialism. On the one hand, the conqueror was glorified. In his comments on the British education in India derived from the ideologies of Macaulay and Bentinck, Charles Trevelyan viewed the role of the colonizer as “Platonic Guardians”. “In a Platonic sense”, the role of the enlightened British settlers was to “awaken the colonial subjects to a memory of their innate character, corrupted as it had become…through the feudalistic character of Oriental society” (Said 109). As Berlin has noted of positive freedom, the goal of the Platonist empire was to spur the innate rational character of their constituency on behalf of their true and buried self. It should come as no surprise that the principles laid out in Plato’s Republic, reflect the conditions of the Greek Empire of 375 B.C. The socio-political and global stage was defined by the colonizing experience, of the colonizers who got to write about its virtues; and that of the colonized that surrendered to the inevitability of the warring man. The founder of a Greek colony (oikistēs) would organize its institutions based on a rigid and written code of law, devised either by another lawmaker (nomothetēs) or the founder themselves (Crone 171). Al-Farabi was writing in a similar historical context, in a world founded on the early Muslim conquests of the 7th century guided by Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) in Medina, and expanded by the Rashidun and Umayyad Caliphates. Much like Alexandre the Great of Macedonia’s imperial conquests, the Muslim enterprise of expansion into new colonies was substantially broad, culturally transformative, and spanned over three continents. In the eyes of a post-colonial interlocutor, this strategy of formalizing the colonial enterprise in a foreign state by codifying the Empire’s values and divine Laws into the calcifying laws and constitution of the new colony, can be destructive and an affront to freedom. Perhaps the most immediate of lasting colonial legacies can be attributed to the European conquest of the Americas, African continent, and Middle East from the 15th to 20th centuries. While the global attitudes towards the inhumane social force of conquest and colonialism, and international laws were established in the 20th century to prevent its devastations, there remain many active colonial projects and legacies in the modern age. 

 

Said notes that there was an implicit mission of the conquest of Africa, the Orient and Asia, to universalize cultural discourses in a globalizing world, according to Western ideals that were self-professedly transcendent of non-western cultures (Saïd 108). Trevelyan notes that Indians “must naturally aspire” to the ideal British republic (109). Even under French imperialism, the Platonic notion of homogenizing the character of the state under the unified and transcendent ideals of the philosopher-legislators can be noticed. In his reflections on the colonization of Congo and Egypt Leroy-Beaulieu notes that “la formation des sociétés humaines, pas plus que la formation des hommes, ne doit être abandonée” to the local communities who would instead rule “au hasard”. The goal of colonization he considers is to “mettre une société nouvelle dans les meilleures conditions de prosperité et de progrès” (107). Cultural representations of British and French identity up till the mid-19th century carried with them the confirmation of European power and superiority understood in the antithesis of non-European barbarism. In Basil Davidson’s survey of writings of travelers, writers, and commanders visiting Africa until the mid-20th century notes a common character of these writings, “a single domination attitude” that was convinced in their representation of indigenous populations as “primeval”, remnants of “humanity as it had been before history began”. Convinced also in their election as vicegerents of God sent to this continent to liberate the local population from themselves (100). The firm and unmoving belief in the English imperial destiny as a mandate of God’s will is echoed in Ruskin’s 1870 Slade Lectures at Oxford University. Supported by the rise in ethnographic literature in linguistics, racial theory, and history, Ruskin praises the British man as a race of “the best northern blood”, civilized, superior, and charged with the liberation of the primitive and “subject races (108). The superiority of British blood, culture, “a religion of pure mercy”, advances in natural science, pre-empted Britain rule, and naturalized the subservience of the colonized whose land is “fruitful waste ground” without a British master to “plow and sow for”, for “little pay”, to “behave kindly and righteously for” and to “bring up their children to love” (104) the British master otherwise suffer the consequence of their hatred. 

 

In Alia Al Saji’s Racialized Time and the Closure of the Past she develops the work of Martiniquan philosopher and psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in giving an account of the phenomenology of racialized and colonized experience. The freedom of the colonized is impaired not only under the material restrictions of colonization but also in the will’s capacity for meaning-making. Colonization, as Said observed, demands a cultural logic of imperialism that will have the likes of Carlyle in his Past and Present decree the status of Black slaves as an “eternal Act of Parliament” (Saïd 102) justified by a self-serving logic of European superiority evidenced by military, industrial, technological and moral dominance (106). In the works of Fanon and Dubois the role that this cultural logic plays in forming the ‘public’, the sensus communis, or social imaginary of the colonial and colonized cultures, is volitionally debilitating. It leaves a last legacy of ‘double consciousness’ that fractures the will of the colonized or racialized subject by enforcing a social imaginary that considers the subject culture as barbaric, uncivilized, and uncultured members of the world community (Du Bois, 8). The cultural logic of imperialism and the legitimacy of French and British colonialism were glorified as moral crusades. They either ensure the status of European culture as a hegemonic force in an increasingly globalizing world, or they liberate the colonized from their own barbarism and inability to lead rational or moral lives without the guidance of European paternalism. This process involves the colonizer projecting onto the other “what is undesirable in the self”. Fanon describes the encounter of the European with the African ‘other’ as leading to  “Black...[being] oppositionally constructed as that which ‘white’ identity disavows”(Al-Saji 4). Military, financial or cultural power, built through the exploitation of this inferior ‘other’, was operationalized by the dominant power in the asymmetric relation as circular proof of the superiority of the colonizer, and codified these hierarchies through the social imaginary and legal structures of the colonized territories. 

. 

This social imaginary and its implicit racial hierarchies are imposed by the colonial social imaginary “through childhood education, language, media, stories and images” (Al-Saji 4). Both my parents and I were taught under French Lebanese curriculums that praised French imperialism in Africa and the Orient as the advent of morality and culture in an otherwise backward society. The lasting legacy and cultural force of the logic of imperialism  “configure the kinds of past and field of possibility available to subjects” (4). Given that our sensus communis serves in Kant’s view as a counterbalance against our private judgments, it poses as the objective mode of meaning-making, and forces the racialized to construct their identity and define their scope of meaning-making through the eyes of others, to “measure one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity” (Al-Saji 8). While Fanon proposes that this double-consciousness fragments “bodily affectivity” and defers one’s sense of agency (3), Al-Saji extends that colonialism also splits the racialized subject’s experience of the past into two frames of reference, a dominant “white civilizational history” and the subsidiary frame that “positions colonized and racialized peoples as foils to this history, as swept up in it without contributing to it” (6). Prior to the colonial encounter there “were coexistent cultures and temporalities”; the post-colonial world frames colonized history as being caught up in the western “linear civilizational time”(Al-Saji 6). Al-Saji adds that colonization interrupts the cultural continuity of the colonized (7) thereby co-opting the colonized population’s freedom to decouple from their own historical inertia by framing the cultural group in a foreign “white civilizational history”. In contrast to Kant’s evacuation of the ‘public’ from lived and particular experiences of agents of history who must instead assume the impartial and disinterested role of the “world spectator” it would be a valuable epistemic practice to investigate one’s biases when it comes to the accidental properties of members of a public forum, their sex, gender, race. Rather than merely abstracting from them as innocuous to the conclusion of our critical investigation where an enlarged mentality is the goal of deliberation, we could fail to include the perspective of the marginalized groups. Failure to investigate these biases could result in the lack of representation of these groups in public forums, lack of sufficient imagination or empathy to include their anticipated views in their absence, or due to the private biases that call into question the credibility or relevance of the marginalized group’s perspective when taking an account of the views that make up a public realm founded on cultural values deemed superior to those of the marginalized community. 

 

An important question is who forms the public realm. Kant argues that world-spectators rather than actors for this public community of minds. An enlarged mentality that acknowledges the different particular standpoints before reaching a “general standpoint”, while useful for a “spectator” of human affairs to reflect on, does not in fact “tell one how to act” within human affairs (Arendt 44). Kant maintains that the public realm is a space for opinions rather than action, for spectators who leave their personal and lived experiences outside the door of the public forum (50). He neglects to consider however, that lived experience invariably influences public discourse and critical judgments, and can serve a valuable function in public forums for ground civic discourse in the actual and present conditions of society...

​

God’s Love & Love of God

The ancients and medievals sought the divine Law through rational speculation into the nature of a world organized with reason in Mind. In turn, freedom was identified as rational autonomy in in view of the rational organizational principles of nature and being. If the nature of God and the organizational principles of the cosmos were to differ, freedom would also reorient our motion in view of these new principles. Aristotle supposes that Hesiod, was the first to consider love (erôs) to be a first principle of being, as did Parmenides and Empedocles (Met. 984b21-26). Aristotle interprets however that such a principle of motion would make the appetites a dominant faculty of the soul (984b23). The account of Frankfurt clarified the duties of care to belong neither to the cognitive nor the appetitive faculty for pleasure. Rather, as Ibn Arabi would explore, love is a function of the heart or spirit. In this section, I will discuss Aristotle, Plato, Anaxagoras and Empedocle’s views of the divine first principles. In taking God to be Love as Empedocles, Frankfurt and Ibn Arabi do, certain conditions on the nature of selfhood are revealed, and in turn expand the scope of political freedom and rights to living beings capable of love rather than solely to rational souls. 

 

Aristotle and Plato identify two names for God, Good (agathon, tagathon) and Nous. While Plato takes God to be a self-moved mover, Aristotle considers God to be an unmoved mover. As a reference to the first principles of being, the first causes of the widest set of causal chains, the Good is taken by Plato to be the first and highest divine principle, seconded only by nous as the “king for us of heaven and earth” (28c6-8) and the source of order in the cosmos (Menn 546). Contrastingly, Aristotle considers Good and nous to be names of the same divine principle, holding neither priority nor posteriority from one another. While we can qualify the order of nature as good, the Good itself exists separately as a cause for the effect of the goodness of order (Met. 1075a11-15). In this respect, the Good for Aristotle is neither an idea or form of the good, nor a virtuous characteristic, but rather a final cause for-the-sake-of-which all good things move, the Good itself (1218b7-12).  For Aristotle this Good could materialize in as many ways as being can, whether as “substance…quality, quantity or time, and also moving and being moved” (Nico. 1096a23). In any case, this Good was just as much a feature of nous as it was Good. Not without objections on the types of causes posited as nous, Aristole and Plato praise Anaxagoras for making nous, or understanding, a first principle of being. In the Phaedo Plato takes Empedocles who posits love (philia) and strife, to be in agreement about the organizational force of a divine nous (Menn 555). Curiously, Plato takes nous to be identical with phronēsis and sophia, and thus considered a virtue rather than an intellect or mind (28d8-9). Given his account on sophia and nous as being dependent on soul to exist in his Philebus (30c9-10), Plato takes issue with Anaxagoras positing only material causes to nous by rejecting the notion of a cosmic rational soul. Instead, Anaxagoras takes nous to be distributed amongst the bodies of inhabitants of the universe rather than their souls (Menn 557). Aristotle goes on to praise but challenge Anaxgoras’s view that nous is solely an efficient cause of motion and a material cause of order in the cosmos as opposed to a final cause qua good as he understands it. 

 

Mentioned as being in general agreement with Anaxagoras, Empedocles of Acragas offers a third name to the first principles: love and strife. Aristotle considers it a matter of consensus that the first principles are composed of contraries, what these contraries are differ amongst his counterparts. To some they’re “odd and even”, hot & cold, being one and being many, being and non-being, limited and unlimited, and some like Empedocles take the contraries to be “love (philia) and strife” (1004b29-35). Aristotle groups Empedocles and Anaxagoras together. Empedocles determines that the nature of the First Cause is Love, and considers it an element or force which brings matter together. Love is the Good, “a starting point both as a mover (since it brings together) and as matter, since it is part of the mixture” (1071b1-5). In this respect, it is both transcendent as a motivating organizational principle of the cosmos, and an immanent force Aristotle denotes as an “element” that groups Empedocle’s elements of fire, water, earth, and wind (or matter in general) together and breaks it apart in strife. 

 

“Nothing that is has a nature,

But rather there is only mixing and separating of things

Mixed, and “nature” is but a name bestowed on them by men” 

Empedocles (Met. 1015a1-4)

 

Love is the reason behind the order of the cosmos, the Good, and is the cause of unity between the elements in the universe, while strife is the cause of their division (985a22-29). In civic life, love and strife are the moral good and bad themselves. Love fits contraries together in precise ratios, it evens out the cosmos and harmonizes its multiplicitous parts. In addition, Empedocles names the world soul being conscious of itself, the collective organism in which humanity is only a part of in the sublunar world, the Sphyros. This singular life force finds humanity committing itself in unity as one animal and requires love from all of us to try to fit together in harmony. In the Sphyros love helps us approximate Oneness and promotes the synthesis of seemingly contrary fragments of the natural world. As opposed to the Platonic effort at emulating or enforcing an artificial unity in the polis, love as a driving force for unity allows civic societies to harmonize organically and consciously. Aristotle responds that even if there were a good itself it wouldn’t be the form of good. Aristotle challenges the absence of the Good, or Love, as a final cause for the sake of which souls move, in Empedocles and Anaxagoras’ accounts. 

 

Alternatively, some conceived of these first principles of the good, orderly, and loving organizational force in the cosmos, as mathematical and unfeeling. Plato followed the Pythagoreans in thinking of numbers as substance. The Good for Plato, or the first principles, were the One and the diad of the Great and Small principles. The Pythagoreans and Plato had a mathematical understanding of the One. Pythagoras posited material or efficient causes as the first principles. Plato on the other hand proposed formal or material causes and conceived of the One as a continuum. Much to Aristotle’s dismay, both Plato and the Pythagoreans failed to conceive of the first principles as final causes, or efficient causes in Plato’s case. Plato posits the One is the Good, but only as a formal cause of numbers, not an efficient or final cause. This numerical reduction of the Good has largely been criticized as the depersonalization of the Good. For Plato the One is Good because the numbers say it, he mechanizes the Good, goodness seems incidental to the unfeeling and indifferent numbers  (985b21-986a2). This view of the first divine principles is more pronounced when Speucipus proposes that there is no good in the first principle, the numbers are beautiful, they make equillibrious and geometric sense but are not good per say, there is no qualitative characteristic to the One and plurality (1072b30-35). Plato denounces that a single principle is the Good, instead Good is the relationship between the One, and the dyad of the Great and Small principles. Contrastingly, Aristotle takes the Good to be a first principle, and other goods to be derived from the Good. 

 

On one hand, we have Empedocles proposing a loving God, whose motivation behind the orderly and geometric design of matter, along with the Good that rises from its rational design, was Love. On the other hand, Plato and more pressingly, Speusipus envision an unfeeling and impersonal God whose organization of the cosmos was the product of a solely calculating rational endeavor. While I don’t intend to weigh the merits of each view given that my conclusions would be irrelevant to a reader’s personal convictions, I will instead develop the view of God as Love. Frankfurt reasons that God is the only lover who isn't subject to the “profoundly distressing anxieties and sorrows” that come with loving a person who may be harmed, lost, or taken away from us in the course of their lives. While the wounds that love may importantly teach us caution in how much or trustingly we love, how many people we allow in our hearts, God is not subject to these restrictions (Frankfurt 173). For some, like Empedocles or Ibn Arabi, the creation, design, and sustenance of this cosmos is itself motivated by God’s love. For Frankfurt, this uninhibited and inexhaustible love “desires an altogether unconstricted plenitude in which every possible object of love is included” (173). Following Aquinas’ observations, Frankfurt recognizes God’s love of Being, of the living world as opposed to non-being. God’s love, he continues, does not discriminate between one beloved in existence from the next, and has as its central tenant the “limitless expansion of the varieties of existence.” This claim, seemingly innocuous, sheds some light on the love and preservation of multiplicity (of cultures for example, political views, identities, sovereign nations) when striving for unity. The love of Being for Frankfurt leaves only one purpose for the Universe, to simply exist (173). Interesting as this may be, this added feature to the first principles and the governing forces of the cosmos, the nature of freedom finds a new avenue for living in harmony with the rational and moral properties of nature, Love. 

 

For Ibn Arabi, the nature of God’s love is much more comprehensive. Let’s consider the analogy between Love, the Beloved, and the Lover on one hand, and God’s Essence and Light, God as they’re loved apart from Creation, and the loving Worshiper on the other. Ibn Arabi employs a unique metaphysical and theological notion of God that can be quite revealing, namely the Unity of Being or Existence. Although he never used the term himself, Ibn Arabi’s students compiled and named his account of the nature of the God-Cosmos-Human relation the Unity of Existence or wahdat al-wujûd. God for Arabi is both transcendent and immanent (and a third mode that would require too wide a diversion). For ‘Arabi it wasn’t sufficient to claim the unity of God within itself, ‘there is no God but God’, it would be more proper to supplement the claim with God’s Names (See figure 2), that there is ‘no Reality but the Real’ or ‘there is no Love but the Loving’. For Ibn Arabi, there is no existence apart from God, including humans and animals, trees and rivers. A believer holds “two visions” (nazar) of the Real. The first vision of the divine Law is as the transcendence of God; if you see a book and say it is not God, you thereby qualify God, limit Them, imply a duality between creation and Creator, and thus imply a reality distinct from the singular Reality of God. In the second vision, the immanence of God suggests that the book is God, now we have restricted God to this particular book, we have qualified Them in time and place knowing full well God is the incorporeal, eternal, and necessary Being on which material Creation depends. A healthy faith respects both paradoxical visions, that God is both outside of time and place, and in time and place, all of creation and none of creation, both the Ever-Living and the Sustainer. Now that we’ve cleared that concept let's review the analogy. The notion of a Unity of Being allows us to claim that “there is no Love but the Loving. From the Real’s perspective, there is no real distinction between the Love, the Beloved, and the Lover. ‘Seeking to unite’ with the Beloved, is a process Ibn Arabi describes as developing one’s capacity and authenticity of love, one’s akhlaq, or volitional character on the path of the divine Law. At this perspective or degree of clarity, he holds that the Lover’s act of loving God, is really the self-disclosure of God’s spirit, given that Love is the sustaining force that animates the cosmos and this act of Love. This loving is also an expression of God’s Loving Essence, Being-itself, and the mediating force that holds the cosmos together as Empedocles suggested. The recipient, source, and medium of expression of this Love is the Beloved, as they stand apart from the corporeal world, in-themselves, the ‘luminous’ Reality. All Love is borrowed from God, received from God, expressed through God, and expressed towards God. 

 

A curious notion that is helpfully clarified by noting that this in actuality, is a perspective of the second vision ‘Arabi describes, ‘the self-subsisting Reality’ as they stand apart from the corporeal world. ‘Arabi’s view is not unlike that of Hindus in the Advaita Vedanta that Brahman, the immutable and ultimate consciousness of Reality, is one and the same as its Creation that is dependent on the Reality much how a dream is dependent for existence on its Dreamer. In addition, much like Arabi, the Vedas make synonymous Brahman, the progenitor and pure consciousness of Reality, and the internal spirit, the highest self, named atman from the Sanskrit root for breath, or rûh for ‘Arabi. Ibn Arabi’s first vision is for the Hindus that of Saguna Brahman, or God in Their instantiated form with their empirical qualities. The second vision is that of Nirguna Brahman, God as They exist apart from Creation, without form, qualities and incomprehensible to participants in space-time. Ibn Arabi differs from the Hindus however, in taking our experiences in the material world to be nevertheless real; just that these experiences of the divided world of material relations and the matter itself that is sensed, take root in the One Reality and Light of God that transcends division, and have no existence apart from the Real. The collapse of Beloved, Love and Lover, into the singular Reality of Love, thus belongs to the perspective of Nirguna Brahman who remains incomprehensible to the limited experiences of finite beings. Our view of things is individuated, embodied and relative to our place in history, limited to the sensible world of lived experiences within whom we have agency, moral responsibility and duties of love. Nevertheless, Arabi considers this corporeal world to be very much real, and our Love a true drop in the “two seas”, the sea of the corporeal world and the sea of the spiritual Reality. 

​

Love of God 

Our understanding of freedom developed significantly when we considered God to be Love in addition to Good and nous. A second way divine love may change our understanding of freedom is if it gives us a reason to revisit our conception of selfhood. In this section, I propose that a divine Law of Love requires a relational view of the self rather than an individualistic one. If this turns out to be the case freedom would have to include our organization and personalization of our volitional character to serve not the self heteronomously, or the community selflessly, but rather the self as an indivisible part of the community and the community as a constitutive extension of the self. 

 

Love for Frankfurt creates a unique symbiosis, or entanglement between the beloved and the lover. Betraying our duties of love towards our beloved is also a betrayal of one’s self, one’s volitional character shaped by their care for the beloved. This self-betrayal certainly entails for Frankfurt, “a rupture in his inner cohesion or unity”, a rift in their will. Reminiscent of Al-Farabi’s condition for Happiness to have unity within one’s self, betraying one’s love fractures our volitional unity in what would amount to psychic distress, and would mobilize, Frankfurt adds, the betraying person towards “self-preservation” (Frankfurt 139). If we extend the notion of selfhood in relationality with the beloved as well, this would mobilize the lover towards preserving the sanctity of the unity of the beloved’s volitional character by making amends or avoiding harming them. Frankfurt argues that love is authoritative most irreducibly as an outcome of the instinctive need to “protect the unity of the self” (139). A unity of the self that is threatened by self-betrayal, and in turn our basic need for self-respect. Love then makes it so that harming the beloved is harm to the self, and I add that harm to the self certainly causes psychic or even existential distress in the lover. The question then remains, whether love expands the scope of selfhood to also ontologically include the beloved or our communities of love. This concept of selfhood is not solely relational as Aristotle and Al-Farabi take it, that the self is better off living in a community and dependent on sociability to exercise their virtues or to live a Good life. Rather it invites a rather modern view of selfhood, whereby the beloved, or the community, constitutes a part of the indivisible seed of the self. 

 

Frankfurt proposed a curious characteristic of the nature of self and divine love. The self’s love for one’s self and God’s love for a self, cannot by nature “require the lover to jeopardize or sacrifice his own true interests.” (168). By true interests, I take Frankfurt to mean the interests of the essential nature of their wills. What if one’s self-interests are at odds with anothers’, how then can God preserve the conflicting and opposing interests of this pair? There are two ways in which the essential natures of their wills can be accorded by God’s love. The first is offered by Al-Farabi, who suggests that the true purpose of the individual can only be understood in the context of the purpose of the world they inhabit. God need only serve the true purpose of the world with Love, in order to capture the true interests of two living beings who are living in accord with their true natures. To the same end, the second solution is found in Ibn Arabi’s concept of God the immanent spirit of history which offers a relational view of the Self, in which an individual spirit or rûh is not only indistinguishable from the spirit which is housed in the friend we conflict with, but from the collective Spirit of human history as well. 

 

Consider the following passage from Al-Farabi’s work on Aristotle’s philosophy:

 

[I]f the human being is a part of the world, and if we wish to know his end, activity, advantage and rank, first we have to know the end of the whole world so that it will become clear to us what the end of the human being is and that the human being is a necessary part of the world because through his end the ultimate end of the world is attained. If, therefore, we wish to know the thing for which we must strive. We need to know the end of the human being and the human perfection for which we must strive. For this reason, we must know the end of the world in its entirety; and we cannot know this without knowing all the parts of the world and their principles: what it is, how it is, from what it is, and for what it is. And this [we need to know] concerning the whole world and concerning each of the parts of which it is composed. 

(Falasafat Aristûtâlîs, 79-80)

 

Al-Farabi makes synonymous knowledge of the ends towards which a human being must strive with knowledge of the end of “the whole world”. Presumably, this is a conclusion derived from Aristotle’s argument for the necessity of a First Cause of being due to the incoherence of an infinite regress of material, formal, efficient, and final causes (Met. 994a19). From this view, we find that all participants in Creation owe the elements that constitute their bodies, the intelligent design that these bodies were formed in, and the motion of their lives in time and in this corner of the cosmos, to the same Mover. All of existence originated from the same Cause and is moving towards the same Final Cause. Now, Fraenkel notes that understanding this universal dependence, and “grasping the world’s purpose” through consistent education in metaphysics and the natural sciences is a condition for Al-Farabi’s concept of freedom. In order to be self-directed and a participant in the sovereignty of the Virtuous City, an inhabitant must be familiar with the principles that shape the world and for the sake of which the world moves, in order to situate themselves in and act in accordance with the perfection of the world as a whole ([TA] 353 Fraenkel). In the previous section, we found Aristotle considers a few contenders for this end, the Good, nous, and Love as he suggests in his critique of Empedocles and Anaxagoras’ accounts. Al-Farabi would attempt to resolve Frankfurt’s contentious proposition by arguing that if the two friends were knowledgeable of the purpose they share in the ends for-the-sake-of-which the natural world moves, their true interests wouldn’t conflict. Right knowledge of their essential natures then, brings these two friends into accord. 

 

Alternatively, Ibn Arabi proposes that the two friends not only share in the first principles that motivated their existence, that organize nature, or the final ends they move towards, but also in the immanent and loving Spirit they house. For Ibn Arabi, God is the Spirit of the cosmos, which extends beyond its borders, and acts within the cosmos as the life force that animates the bodies (jism) of living beings and gives form to the matter of the cosmos which ‘Arabi takes to be God’s body ([FM] Chittick 92). Ibn Arabi considers Adam and his children to have been made as “a miniature of the world”, their bodies contain an imprint or the form of the cosmos, a collection of all universals and forms, a familiarity at least, with the forms of “rivers, mountains, and stars” and other existants. The spirit of human beings contain the form of the divine and gather together the “truths of the divine Names” (Hakim 281) and in the ideal humans are actualized and balanced with one another. Explicitely, the 99 names of God (see figure 2) are contendors for the qualities gathered in the fitra, or the original and universally shared human disposition. In the context of our discussion we can consider ‘the Good’, ‘Nous’ and ‘Love’ to be Names as well.  The spirit differs from the soul and body in that the spirit as the ‘breath of God’ already embodies the virtues of the fitra, while the soul has to contend with the desires of the body and actively orient its life towards these Names or principles ([IW] Chittick 99). The rûh or spirit of a living being grants humans “knowledge and awareness, luminosity, desire, power, speech, generosity, justice, and so on” (93). All our internal faculties in addition, our senses, “imagination, memory”, intellect (‘aql) are all modes of the same internal spirit (97). The goal of the divine Law’s path is to actualize these potential forms in experience and action in view of the ‘governing spirit’ in the internal world (al-batin) and in the external world (al-zahir), rather than the matter, or base things as Al-Farabi denotes them, of bodies. The true essence of our conflicting friends is thus but the embodied self-disclosures of the same Spirit of God. In this regard, while my interests may be at odds with anothers’, our true essences will be in accord with the natural design of human history. Both selves from the Spirit’s perspective are the same Self, and their true interests will always be preserved in line with the totality of the Spirit rather than its individuated, locally and temporally situated, self-disclosure. 

 

Al-Farabi attributes the relationality of the conflicting friends to the rational apprehension of the Principles of Being, and thus to be self-directed is a feature reserved to human rational souls. Animal souls and vegetative souls in contrast to human ones, don’t share in God’s quality as nous, and are thus precluded from any meaningful discussion of freedom, cognition of the unity of being, or the capacity to voluntarily move in view of the divine Law. Curiously enough, Ibn Arabi considers plants and inanimate objects to be better equipped to receive the self-disclosures of the divine Law despite their inability to communicate it ([FM] Chittick 100). This living fabric which encompasses all of creation derives this life from “the divine self-disclosure” (al-tajallî al-ilahî) of God’s Spirit in all existing things. These self-disclosures of God in every corner of creation are witnessed passively by all existing things except for “angels, mankind and the jinn” who know God only by what is taught to them (Quran 18:64). Contrastingly, inanimate objects and “plants” don’t need to acquire this knowledge, these existents experience the self-disclosures of God “from behind the veil of the unseen” (100).  While it is common for Muslim thinkers to believe all beings come from God, and to God they must return, Ibn Arabi’s concept of Unity of Existence affords him a more intimate vision of affective unity that all rational or irrational participants in the cosmos can experience on their way from the First to the Final Cause. The sensuous experience of this unity of Spirit, becomes not only the condition for self-direction and ideal political legitimacy, but it also generates the belief that the fates of all living and existing beings, rather than just humans, are indivisibly entangled.

 

It is troublesome enough to conceive of the self’s ontological relationality with their loved one, to be not only constituted by our duties of love towards them, but invariably composed of the same spirit. What perhaps requires a more thorough and precise investigation is the relationality humans hold with animal and vegetative souls in our World Soul, or Sphyros, of natural providence for Kant, or even in the Spirit of History of Ibn Arabi’s 73d chapter of his Futûhat Makkiyā. Love of an immanent Spirit is certainly cause to reconsider how separable and isolated our love is from the common Breath all living beings under the Sun share. Frankfurt carries forward Descarte’s tradition of human exceptionalism in the necessities of care on the will. He remarks that while “subhuman animal species” are subject to desires and preferences, it doesn't entail a capacity for Happiness outside cycles of “the pleasures of gratification and to the pains of frustration” (Frankfurt 157). Rather, he submits that non-human animals lack the “psychic complexity..to care about anything” (158). Traditionally non-human animals are regarded as inescapably propelled by the impulsive drives of their appetites, taken astorm by their passions, and incapable of both reason and liberation from causal determinacy for the ancients. If care truly is neither solely a cognitive attraction to benefit nor an affective attachment to pleasure, one need to look no further than any non-human Mother nursing her cubs and protecting them from harm to attribute them the capacity for care and love that doesn't simply rise from the biological need for self-preservation. Whether the enduring desire to care for their younglings is an exercise of their “own volitional activity rather than…[desire’s] own inherent momentum” requires further investigation in animal behavior. While this discussion might seem tangential it serves a very pertinant role in a more complete discussion of freedom. If reason nor rational morality are the sole avenues towards which a living being may express their freedom in a world organized solely by nous and the Good, it would be valuable to ask which living beings this expanded view of organizational principles of nature includes. Love can liberate a will and bring them in harmony with the natural world, in turn all living beings capable of love ought to also be included in our discussions of political freedoms and rights secured by the state. The humanism of the 18th century championed by 20th century idealists might have resulted in the establishment of universal and inalienable human rights that follow from one’s basic human dignity. An expansion of the conditions necessary to liberate oneself to their dignity would also find us including communities of non-human animals and the natural ecosystem among the right bearers of our community under the Sun.