The Genesis of the Spatial Grid

Prohibition and the Birth of the Efficient Self in Bergson and Iqbal

Abstract

This essay proposes that the human journey runs from a whole, through a division, to a whole again, and that the first prohibition, the parent’s "don’t”, is the hinge on which that journey turns. A bird catching an insect, or an infant reaching for a bright object, performs what I call an appreciative act: the movement is grasped as one undivided whole, not as a series of points and moments. Yet neither the bird nor the infant has an appreciative self, a self that can gather its life and say "I am”. When the child meets the caregiver’s "don’t”, a gap opens between impulse and action. In that gap the efficient self is born, and with it the measured world of here and there, near and far, before and after. My claim is that the efficient self does not destroy the appreciative self but makes it possible. Only a life that has been divided can be gathered again, and only a gathered life can be owned. I trace this movement through Bergson’s duration, Iqbal’s two sides of the self, the Qur’anic story of Adam and the tree, recent research on infants and caregivers, and an old distinction of my own between three kinds of understanding.

1. Two ways of living in time

Henri Bergson taught that we live in time in two ways. In Time and Free Will (1889) he described a deeper self whose states melt into one another like the notes of a melody, and a surface self whose states lie side by side like objects in space. The first lives in duration, duree, the real flow of time. The second lives in a time that has been laid out like a line and cut into equal pieces, the time of clocks and calendars. Later, in An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), he gave these two modes their ways of knowing: intuition, which places itself inside a thing, and analysis, which goes around it from outside and fixes it in concepts.

Iqbal took up this distinction and gave it a place in his account of the human ego. The self, he says in the second lecture of the Reconstruction, "has, so to speak, two sides which may be described as appreciative and efficient” (p. 38). The efficient self deals with the world of space. It is the practical self of daily life, and its time is the time "of which we predicate long and short” (p. 38). The appreciative self lies deeper. We reach it only "in the moments of profound meditation, when the efficient self is in abeyance” (p. 38). Its time, in Iqbal’s lovely image, is a single "now” which the efficient self "pulverizes into a series of ‘nows’ like pearl beads in a thread” (p. 39).

Both thinkers were answering an older picture. For Kant, space and time are not learned from experience at all. They are the fixed forms through which the mind receives anything whatever, present before the first sensation arrives. Bergson and Iqbal deny that measured, divided time is the whole truth of time. But if the measured grid is not given in advance, a question follows which neither of them fully answered: how does it arise? Every one of us was once an infant who did not count, measure or map. How did we come to live in a world of coordinates?

Bergson did give a general answer. The intellect, he argued in Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution, was shaped by the needs of action and of social life; it divides the world because acting on the world requires division. I accept this answer, but I believe it can be made more precise. In this essay I propose that the needs of action and social life first take hold of a human being through one particular event, an event every parent knows and every child has lived through: the first "don’t”.

2. The whole before division

Watch a swallow take an insect out of the evening air. The bird does not draw a coordinate system, compute the insect’s speed and then plot a course to meet it. The flight, the prey and the curve of interception are one movement. The same is true of a boy on a cricket field running to catch a high ball. He does not calculate where the ball will land. He runs, and the running and the falling ball are tuned to each other until they meet in his hands. Research on how fielders catch fly balls has shown something close to this. Peter McLeod and Zoltan Dienes found in the 1990s that fielders do not predict the ball’s landing point; they move so that the ball keeps rising steadily in their view, and in doing so they arrive exactly where it comes down. Building on the work of James Gibson and David Lee, this research describes perception and movement as coupled into one continuous act. The catcher and the ball are not two things meeting at a calculated point. For the length of the catch, they are one whole.

I call such a movement an appreciative act. It is appreciative because it does not divide the movement into points of space and moments of time, but grasps it as one. Birds have it, animals have it, and the infant has it in full. Bergson himself held that instinct lives closer to duration than intellect does, and his own favourite image for duration was the melody, in which each note carries the ones before it. A child absorbed in play, a singer lost in a song and a falcon in its stoop all live, for that moment, in a single unbroken "now”.

Here I must state plainly that I am going a step beyond Iqbal’s words. For Iqbal, the appreciative act is always "the appreciative act of an enduring self” (p. 44). I do not say that the bird or the infant has an appreciative self. A self, in Iqbal’s sense, is that which can say "I am”, and the bird cannot. My claim is narrower: the bird and the infant perform the act without the self. They have the wholeness but not the ownership of it. To keep this clear, one might call their state pre-reflective appreciation: appreciation with no one yet standing behind it to say that it is theirs.

One objection must be met at once. Animals do find their way through space, and some do it with remarkable precision. Neuroscience has found "place cells” and "grid cells” in the brains of rats, a discovery for which John O’Keefe and May-Britt and Edvard Moser received the Nobel Prize in 2014. A rat, it seems, carries a kind of metric map in its head. Does this not show that the spatial grid exists before any prohibition? I think it shows something more modest. There is a difference between living in space and standing over against space. The rat’s map is lived and used; it is never looked at. The infant, too, reaches and crawls with growing skill. What neither has is space as an object of thought: a field of regions marked as permitted and forbidden, distances judged before they are crossed, a "there” that I am not yet allowed to reach. It is this objectified, measured and counted space whose origin I am seeking.

3. The first "don’t”

The infant’s unbroken flow is not first broken by things. A wall stops a crawling child, a heavy box will not move, but these are simply resistances; the child pushes, fails, and turns to something else, and the flow goes on. What breaks the flow is something of another kind: a prohibition. Long before a child understands words, it meets the caregiver’s "don’t” in many forms. There is the sharp voice, "No!”, or an alarmed cry. There is the hand that catches a small wrist, or the body that steps between the child and the stairs. And there is the face: the frown, the widened eyes, the sudden stillness of a mother who has seen the child near the stove.

The difference between a wall and a "don’t” is the whole difference. A wall stops the hand from outside. A prohibition stops the impulse from within. The child still wants the bright thing on the table, and nothing physical prevents the reach, yet the reach does not happen. For the first time, a gap opens between wanting and doing. Into that gap enters something that was not there before: a pause, a looking-around, a weighing.

Developmental psychology has observed this moment closely. Joseph Campos and his colleagues found that when infants begin to crawl, usually in the second half of the first year, the number of prohibitions they hear from their parents rises sharply. At about the same time, infants begin what researchers call "checking back”: before going further, they turn and look at the caregiver’s face. In the well-known "visual cliff” experiments, a one-year-old is placed on a glass table that seems to drop away halfway across. Its mother stands at the far side. James Sorce and his colleagues showed in 1985 that most infants crossed the apparent drop when the mother’s face showed joy or interest, and almost none crossed when it showed fear. The child no longer simply moves. It consults another person before it moves.

The Austrian-born psychoanalyst Rene Spitz went further. In No and Yes (1957) he argued that the infant’s learning of the gesture "no”, the shaking of the head, is the first true abstraction in human life, the first time a child uses a sign that stands for a judgment rather than a thing. If he is right, the "don’t” is not only the first rule a child meets. It is the child’s first step into the world of concepts.

4. From the pause to the grid

What does a child need in order to obey a "don’t”? It needs, first of all, to know where the forbidden thing is. Then it must know how far it may go before the warning comes again, and which way leads around the danger. The room, which until now was simply a field of attractions, begins to be divided into regions: the safe floor and the dangerous stairs, the permitted toys and the forbidden shelf, the space near mother and the space beyond her sight. This is the beginning of the grid. Space stops being only lived and starts being mapped, because a map is what one needs in order to stay within a boundary.

The same happens to time. A "don’t” is very often a "not yet”: not now, wait, after dinner, when you are bigger. The child who must wait has to hold the present apart from a future that has been promised but withheld. The single "now” of the appreciative act is broken into a before and an after, a now and a not-yet. This is serial time, the time of the efficient self, the pearl beads that Iqbal saw strung upon a thread. I do not claim the child at this age can count hours or tell left from right; those finer skills come years later, as the grid is refined. My claim is that the grid itself, the very habit of dividing the world into regions and intervals, first takes root here.

Then comes a decisive change. Lev Vygotsky observed that the commands a child hears from adults gradually become a speech the child addresses to itself, and Alexander Luria studied how this inner speech comes to steer a child’s actions. A small child near a hot cup may be heard to say, quite seriously, "No, no, hot”, and then to draw its hand back. The "don’t” has moved inside. The child now carries within itself the watcher who measures, divides and holds back. This inner watcher is, I suggest, the efficient self in its first form.

There is something wonderful hidden in this. Consider fire. A child who has never been warned learns what fire is in only one way: by being burned. The "don’t” offers a second way. It gives the child knowledge of the danger without the wound. In place of the burn, it puts a word. This, I think, is the deepest reason why the efficient self is born, and why it is so precious. It allows human beings to know the world without suffering every lesson in their own bodies. Science, law, medicine and every form of foresight are, in the end, the grown-up forms of this first exchange of a wound for a word.

5. The first prohibition in Iqbal

"…but do not approach this tree.” (Al-Baqarah 2:35)

What I have described in the life of each child, Iqbal found in the story of the first human being. In the fourth lecture of the Reconstruction, he reads the Qur’anic account of Adam and the forbidden tree not as a story of sin and punishment, but as an account of the birth of the human ego. As Iqbal tells it, the Fall is man’s rise from a primitive state of instinctive appetite to the conscious possession of a free self, a self capable of doubt and of disobedience. Adam’s first act of disobedience was also his first act of free choice. Iqbal does not regard the earth as a prison into which Adam was cast. It is the place where a self, having discovered that it can choose, must now learn to grow.

The parallel with the developmental story is close. In both, there is first a state of wholeness: the Garden, where every want is met, and the infant’s world, where impulse and act are one. In both, the wholeness is broken by a prohibition, "do not approach”. And in both, what follows the prohibition is not simply loss. It is the appearance of a self that can stand back from its own desire, weigh it, and decide. The child who hesitates before the stairs and the Adam who hesitates before the tree are, in this sense, the same figure.

I am not suggesting that the Qur’anic story is a disguised piece of child psychology, nor that Iqbal meant it so. I am suggesting that both point to one structure in human life: the self is not born from fulfilment but from a limit. A being whose every impulse flowed straight into action would never discover that it is someone. It is the "don’t”, the line drawn around the tree, that first shows a creature the difference between what it wants and what it is.

6. Three kinds of understanding

In an earlier Urdu essay I proposed a distinction between three kinds of understanding: fahm-e-ghair-shauri, fahm-e-shauri and fahm-e-haqiqi, unconscious understanding, conscious understanding and real understanding. I used the word fahm not in its everyday sense but as a single name for three quite different ways of being acquainted with something. The distinction belongs here, because it is the same journey seen from the side of knowledge rather than of action.

Unconscious understanding belongs to the animal and the infant. It is the understanding in the swallow’s flight and the infant’s reach, direct and whole but owned by no one. Conscious understanding belongs to the reasoning adult. It is knowing that: knowing that fire burns, that the stairs are dangerous, that smoking harms the lungs. Real understanding belongs to the person who has come to know a thing or a skill from within, so that the knowing and the being are no longer separate.

An ordinary example shows the difference between the second and the third. Tell a man a hundred times that cigarettes are harmful. Let him read all the research himself, until he can explain every finding. He now has conscious understanding, complete and correct. Yet very often he goes on smoking. Then one day he falls ill, and something changes that no argument could change. He now knows in a way he did not know before. The knowledge has not grown in quantity; it has changed in kind.

I once thought a burned child was also an example of real understanding, since the burn teaches what no warning can. But I now see that the burned child and the sick smoker are not in the same place. The child’s burn is direct, but it falls on no one who already knew; it is closer to the animal’s way of learning. The smoker’s illness falls on a mind that had already passed through conscious understanding. That is why it transforms him. Real understanding, then, is not a return to the infant’s immediacy. It is immediacy arriving at a self that has already divided and reasoned. It is, once more, the whole after division.

This three-fold distinction has deep roots. The Qur’an speaks of ilm al-yaqin and ayn al-yaqin, the knowledge of certainty and the eye of certainty (Al-Takathur 102:5-7), and of haqq al-yaqin, the truth of certainty (Al-Waqi’ah 56:95). The Sufis explained these three with the very image of fire: to hear of fire is the knowledge of certainty, to see fire is the eye of certainty, and to be burned by it is the truth of certainty. In modern philosophy, Bertrand Russell distinguished "knowledge by description” from "knowledge by acquaintance”. Frank Jackson imagined a scientist, Mary, who knows every physical fact about colour but has lived all her life in a black-and-white room. When she first sees a red rose, does she learn something new? Most readers feel that she does. Mary’s first sight of red is the smoker’s illness in another form.

7. The whole after division

In my youth I wrote, in one of my books, that life travels a road from instinct to intellect to intuition: from the animal kingdom, to the human being, to the ease of habit and skill, and in some mystics to higher states of mind. I see now that this is the same road this essay has been following. Instinct is the bird’s undivided act. Intellect is the efficient self, born of the "don’t”, which divides. Intuition is the wholeness that a divided being wins back.

Bergson and Iqbal each saw one half of this road. In Creative Evolution, Bergson describes intuition as instinct that has become disinterested and conscious of itself; for him, intuition reaches back toward instinct. Iqbal, in the first lecture of the Reconstruction, says that intuition is only a higher kind of intellect; for him, intuition grows out of intellect. I think both are right, and the road explains why. Intuition has the wholeness of instinct, but it cannot be reached except by passing through intellect.

Iqbal’s own words show why the passage through division cannot be skipped. The appreciative act, he says, seizes a duration "broken up into an infinity of instants” and transforms it into "the organic wholeness of a synthesis” (pp. 44-45). A synthesis is a putting-together, and only what has been taken apart can be put together. The bird’s flight is whole, but it was never broken; it is undivided, not synthesised. The infant’s reach is whole in the same way. The appreciative self, the self that says "I am”, appears only when a life that has been scattered into instants is gathered again. This is why I say the efficient self does not destroy the appreciative self but makes it possible. Without the beads, there would be nothing for the thread to gather. And this is surely what Iqbal meant when he wrote that the life of the self consists in its movement from appreciation to efficiency, and from intuition to intellect (p. 61): the self lives by going out into division and returning.

This gives a new meaning to the trained driver, the musician and the craftsman. A beginner at the wheel thinks of every movement: the mirror, the clutch, the distance to the car ahead. After long practice the driving becomes one smooth act, as whole as the swallow’s flight. Bergson would warn us here, for he regarded habit as mechanical, the very opposite of duration. But the skilled driver is not a machine. Maurice Merleau-Ponty described how a skilled body "knows” its task without calculation, and Hubert Dreyfus showed that the expert sees a situation as a whole and simply responds, where the beginner follows rules. The driver’s ease is not a return to the bird’s state. It is wholeness after division, an act now owned by a self that has passed through the efficient stage.

We should not, however, put the driver and the mystic on one level. Their journeys have the same shape but not the same depth. The driver regains the wholeness of a movement. The musician regains the wholeness of a melody. The contemplative, in what Iqbal calls "profound meditation”, regains the wholeness of the self itself, and of the self’s relation to the Ultimate Ego. These are levels of one return, not one experience.

8. Parallels and limits

Readers who know psychoanalysis will think of Jacques Lacan. Lacan held that the child enters the world of language and law through what he called the Nom-du-Pere, the Name of the Father, a phrase that in French sounds the same as Non-du-Pere, the Father’s "No”. For Lacan, this prohibition breaks the closed unity of mother and child and opens the child to the symbolic order. The resemblance to my thesis is real, and I take encouragement from it. But the two should not be confused. Lacan’s "No” is the symbolic Law of the Oedipal period, usually placed between the ages of three and five, while the prohibitions I have described begin in the first year, when the infant starts to crawl. I offer Lacan as a parallel, not as a foundation. If his account is right, prohibition shapes the child’s entry into language; if mine is right, an earlier prohibition shapes its entry into measured space and time.

The strongest objection to this essay is easy to state. Children who grow up with very few prohibitions still come to understand space. So do children born blind, who cannot read a frowning face. If prohibition were the only cause of the spatial grid, these children should lack it, and they do not. I accept this objection, and it obliges me to state my claim with care. I do not say that the "don’t” is the sole cause of objectified space and serial time. I say it is their privileged occasion: the first and most powerful moment in which the needs of action and social life take hold of a child from within, and the clearest example of the gap between impulse and act from which the efficient self grows. Other limits, such as pain, failure and the plain resistance of the world, can open the same gap more slowly. The prohibition opens it most sharply, and it opens it in the presence of another person, which is why it carries meaning and not only force.

A claim of this kind can also be tested. If the thesis is right, one would expect a child’s ability to treat space as a map, for example to find a hidden object by its position relative to landmarks rather than by retracing its own movements, to develop alongside its experience of prohibition and of "checking back”, and to be shaped by how prohibitions are given: calmly or anxiously, often or rarely, with words or without them. Some studies of crawling infants already point in this direction. I leave the full testing to developmental psychologists, but I would be glad if a philosophical idea could offer them a question worth asking.

9. Conclusion

Movement does not first happen inside a ready-made container called space. It is the need to regulate movement, and above all the need to hold it back, that first gives us space and time as things we measure. The infant lives in a whole that it does not own. The "don’t” breaks that whole, and in the break a self is born that can wait, look around, weigh and choose. That self divides the world into regions and intervals, and it is right to do so, for division lets us know the fire without the burn. But division is not the end of the road. The divided life longs to be gathered again, and when it is gathered, by a skilled hand, by a melody, by a sickness that turns knowledge into understanding, or in the depths of prayer, it becomes for the first time a life that can say "I am”.

The whole, the division, and the whole again: this is the shape I find in the swallow and the child, in Bergson’s duration and Iqbal’s ego, and in the story of Adam beneath the tree. If I am right, the first "don’t” a mother speaks to her child is not only a word of caution. It is the first line drawn in a long drawing, a line that will one day allow the child to find itself.

References

Iqbal and the Qur’an

• Iqbal, Muhammad. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Ed. M. Saeed Sheikh. Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 2011 printing. Lecture I; Lecture II, pp. 38-45; Lecture III, p. 61; Lecture IV.
• The Qur’an: Al-Baqarah 2:35; Al-Waqi’ah 56:95; Al-Takathur 102:5-7.

Philosophy

• Bergson, Henri. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (1889). Trans. F. L. Pogson. London: George Allen, 1910.
• Bergson, Henri. An Introduction to Metaphysics (1903). Trans. T. E. Hulme. New York: Putnam, 1912.
• Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory (1896). Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. London: George Allen, 1911.
• Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution (1907). Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt, 1911.
• Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Stuart E. Dreyfus. Mind over Machine. New York: Free Press, 1986.
• Jackson, Frank. "Epiphenomenal Qualia.” Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982): 127-136.
• Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). Transcendental Aesthetic.
• Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits (1966). Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 2006.
• Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962.
• Russell, Bertrand. "Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 11 (1910-11): 108-128.

Psychology and neuroscience

• Campos, Joseph J., et al. "Travel Broadens the Mind.” Infancy 1, no. 2 (2000): 149-219.
• Gibson, James J. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.
• Hafting, Torkel, Marianne Fyhn, Sturla Molden, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser. "Microstructure of a Spatial Map in the Entorhinal Cortex.” Nature 436 (2005): 801-806.
• Lee, David N. "A Theory of Visual Control of Braking Based on Information about Time-to-Collision.” Perception 5 (1976): 437-459.
• Luria, Alexander R. The Role of Speech in the Regulation of Normal and Abnormal Behavior. Oxford: Pergamon, 1961.
• McLeod, Peter, and Zoltan Dienes. "Do Fielders Know Where to Go to Catch the Ball or Only How to Get There?” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 22 (1996): 531-543.
• O’Keefe, John, and Lynn Nadel. The Hippocampus as a Cognitive Map. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978.
• Sorce, James F., Robert N. Emde, Joseph J. Campos and Mary D. Klinnert. "Maternal Emotional Signaling: Its Effect on the Visual Cliff Behavior of 1-Year-Olds.” Developmental Psychology 21 (1985): 195-200.
• Spitz, Rene A. No and Yes: On the Genesis of Human Communication. New York: International Universities Press, 1957.
• Vygotsky, Lev S. Thought and Language (1934). Trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1962.