The Appreciative Act: Iqbal beside Bergson and Whitehead

An opening

For Iqbal, the appreciative act is the deed of a self that gathers time into itself. In the second lecture of the Reconstruction he writes that "it is the appreciative act of an enduring self only which can seize the multiplicity of duration” and give it "the organic wholeness of a synthesis” (Reconstruction, pp. 44–45). The phrase is small, almost tucked away, yet a whole metaphysics rests on it.

Two of Iqbal’s contemporaries stand very near this thought. Henri Bergson had already taught him to distinguish lived duration from clock time, and Alfred North Whitehead had shown him a Nature made of events rather than inert stuff. Iqbal read both with real gratitude, and with a quiet independence. This short essay sets the three side by side, to see what the appreciative act borrows, what it shares, and where it goes its own way.

Iqbal: the two sides of the self

Iqbal begins from inner experience. The self, he says, "has, so to speak, two sides which may be described as appreciative and efficient” (Reconstruction, p. 38). The efficient self is the practical self of daily life. It deals with the world of space, and its states fall apart into a countable series. Its time is the time "of which we predicate long and short,” a time "hardly distinguishable from space” (p. 38).

The appreciative self lies beneath this. We rarely see it, because "in our constant pursuit after external things we weave a kind of veil round the appreciative self which thus becomes completely alien to us” (p. 38). Only "in the moments of profound meditation, when the efficient self is in abeyance,” do we "sink into our deeper self and reach the inner centre of experience.” There the states of consciousness "melt into each other,” and the unity of the self is "like the unity of the germ” (p. 38).

Iqbal’s loveliest image comes next. The time of the appreciative self "is a single ‘now’ which the efficient self, in its traffic with the world of space, pulverizes into a series of ‘nows’ like pearl beads in a thread” (p. 39). He offers a homely example too. In one glance at something red we hold together a wave frequency that would take "more than six thousand years” to count. "That is how the mental act transforms succession into duration” (p. 39).

So the appreciative act is not a withdrawal from time. It is a gathering of time. The appreciative self "synthesizes all the ‘heres’ and ‘nows’ … into the coherent wholeness of personality” (p. 39). Later Iqbal adds that "the life of the self consists in its movement from appreciation to efficiency, from intuition to intellect, and atomic time is born out of this movement” (p. 61).

The poet says the same thing with more music. In Masjid-e-Qurtuba, the chain of days and nights is a two-coloured silk from which the Essence weaves its robe of attributes, yet love keeps another calendar:

عشق کی تقویم میں عصر رواں کے سوا
اور زمانے بھی ہیں جن کا نہیں کوئی نام

(Bal-e-Jibril, "Masjid-e-Qurtuba,” Kulliyat p. 416). In love’s calendar there are times besides the passing age, times that have no name. That nameless time is the time of the appreciative self.

Bergson: duration and intuition

The debt here is open, and Iqbal names it himself: spatialized time "is not true time, according to Bergson” (Reconstruction, p. 38). In Time and Free Will (1889), Bergson had described two selves. One is the self that truly endures, where states permeate one another like the notes of a melody. The other is its "spatial and social representation,” a surface self whose states lie side by side like objects in space. Iqbal’s efficient and appreciative selves follow this map closely, often in Bergson’s own vocabulary of interpenetration and qualitative multiplicity.

Bergson’s method for reaching the deeper self is intuition. In "An Introduction to Metaphysics” (1903) he calls it the "intellectual sympathy” by which we place ourselves within a thing to coincide with what is unique in it. Intellect, by contrast, goes around its object and fixes it in concepts. Iqbal accepts this contrast warmly. In the Reconstruction intuition "reveals life as a centralizing ego,” and gives us "a first-hand knowledge of the appreciative aspect of life from within” (p. 49).

In Creative Evolution (1907), Bergson widened duration into a cosmic principle. Life becomes a creative current, the élan vital, pushing forward without a fixed goal, and the future must stay open if reality is to be free. Iqbal agrees that the future is open. Yet here, as we shall see, the two begin to part.

Whitehead: events, prehension and concrescence

Whitehead enters the Reconstruction from the side of Nature rather than the side of the self. Iqbal draws on The Concept of Nature (1920) and Science and the Modern World (1925), where Whitehead rejects the "bifurcation of Nature” into colourless matter and mental impressions. Iqbal sums up the result: Nature "is not a static fact situated in an a-dynamic void, but a structure of events possessing the character of a continuous creative flow which thought cuts up into isolated immobilities” (Reconstruction, p. 28). He returns to the same sentence when he turns to the inner life, calling Nature’s passage in time "perhaps the most significant aspect of experience” (p. 36).

Whitehead’s fuller system came in Process and Reality (1929), probably too late to shape the lectures, but it throws a soft light back on them. Its basic units are actual occasions, momentary acts of experience. Each one prehends, or feels, the occasions before it, and draws them into a single new unity in a process Whitehead calls concrescence. His own formula is that "the many become one, and are increased by one.”

The likeness to Iqbal is striking. The appreciative act, too, takes a scattered many, the pulverized "nows,” and makes of them one living whole. Both thinkers also treat the knowing of Nature as an intimacy with its life rather than a cold survey. For Iqbal, "the knowledge of Nature is the knowledge of God’s behaviour,” and observing Nature is "only another form of worship” (p. 45).

Convergences and departures

All three refuse to let clock time be the whole truth of time, and all three hold that we know reality best from within. They differ on what holds the flow together.

The first departure is from Bergson, and Iqbal states it with characteristic courtesy: "I venture to think that the error of Bergson consists in regarding pure time as prior to self, to which alone pure duration is predicable” (Reconstruction, p. 44). For Bergson the flow comes first. For Iqbal there must be someone who endures, or there is no duration at all. "To exist in pure duration is to be a self, and to be a self is to be able to say ‘I am'” (p. 45).

The second departure concerns purpose. Bergson feared that any goal would make time unreal, and Iqbal agrees that a fixed plan would do so. But he does not give up purpose. The world-process "cannot be conceived as a line already drawn. It is a line in the drawing—an actualization of open possibilities” (p. 44). Purpose here is selective and creative, not premeditated. It lives in the forward look of consciousness, where "memory and imagination” both work in the present (p. 43).

With Whitehead the departure is gentler but real. Whitehead’s unity is achieved again and again, in occasions that perish as they complete themselves; an enduring person is a society of such moments. Iqbal’s appreciative self does not perish with each act. It is the one who acts, and its unity is a lasting centre. And where Whitehead’s process ends in aesthetic satisfaction, Iqbal’s appreciative act reaches toward intimacy with a living Ego, an attitude "which religion describes as prayer” (p. 49).

A closing reflection

Iqbal took from Bergson the inward road and from Whitehead a Nature alive with events, and then asked a question neither answered quite as he wished: who is it that holds the moments together? His answer is the appreciative act of an enduring self. It is an act and not a state, so the self is always at work, always gathering. It is also an act of a self, so the flow never dissolves the person into a current.

Perhaps this is why the idea reads so naturally as poetry. The appreciative act is the moment when "the efficient self is in abeyance” and the beads fall back into one pearl. Iqbal’s counsel in another ghazal of Bal-e-Jibril says it simply: do not stay entangled in this day and night, for you have other times and spaces too.

اسی روز و شب میں الجھ کر نہ رہ جا
کہ تیرے زمان و مکاں اور بھی ہیں

References

Primary: Iqbal

• Iqbal, Muhammad. The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam. Ed. M. Saeed Sheikh. Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan, 2011 printing. Lecture II, pp. 28–49; Lecture III, p. 61.
• Iqbal, Muhammad. Bal-e-Jibril (1935). In Kulliyat-e-Iqbal (Urdu). Lahore: Iqbal Academy Pakistan. "Masjid-e-Qurtuba,” Kulliyat p. 416.

Primary: Bergson and Whitehead

• 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. Creative Evolution (1907). Trans. Arthur Mitchell. New York: Henry Holt, 1911.
• Whitehead, Alfred North. The Concept of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920.
• Whitehead, Alfred North. Science and the Modern World. New York: Macmillan, 1925.
• Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (1929). Corrected edition, ed. D. R. Griffin and D. W. Sherburne. New York: Free Press, 1978.

Secondary

• Diagne, Souleymane Bachir. Islam and Open Society: Fidelity and Movement in the Philosophy of Muhammad Iqbal. Trans. Melissa McMahon. Dakar: CODESRIA, 2010.
• Mir, Mustansir. Iqbal. London: I. B. Tauris, 2006.
• Schimmel, Annemarie. Gabriel’s Wing: A Study into the Religious Ideas of Sir Muhammad Iqbal. Leiden: Brill, 1963.
• Sheikh, M. Saeed. "Editor’s Introduction” and "Notes and References.” In Iqbal, Reconstruction, 2011 printing.