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If I know myself “by presence”, why am I so bad at knowing my own motives? Suhrawardi meets psychology

Elif Yıldız Fellow
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Knowledge & beliefIslamicPersianIlluminationismIbn SinaSuhrawardi#illuminationism#knowledge-by-presence#self-knowledge
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Its coordinates: 2.1 Theories of Knowledge · 2.1.1 The Gettier Problem · 2.2.3 Memory +3 more

In my psychology courses, self-knowledge is treated as a model the brain builds of itself, and a fairly unreliable one. People misreport their own motives all the time. So I was surprised to find, in a book about Persian philosophy, the claim that Suhrawardi thought knowing yourself is the clearest case of a kind of knowledge that involves no representation at all: ʿilm ḥuḍūrī, knowledge by presence, as opposed to ʿilm ḥuṣūlī, acquired or representational knowledge.

I grew up with my grandmother reading Sufi poetry aloud, so the language is familiar, but I want to know whether this is an argument or a description of a mystical state. Two specific questions:

  1. What exactly is the difference between the two kinds of knowledge? Is "presence" just a metaphor?
  2. Why should self-knowledge be the model case, when modern psychology says self-knowledge is where we are most often wrong?

Plain answers very welcome; I am not a specialist in Islamic philosophy.

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5 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Reza Tehrani

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    It is an argument, and a neat one. Here is the core as I understand it.

    Representational knowledge works through a form or image: the tree is known by way of a mental likeness of the tree. Knowledge by presence is when the thing known is itself present to the knower, with no intermediary standing in for it.

    Now try to know yourself by representation. You would have an image, and you would need to recognise that image as an image of you. But recognising it as yours already requires that you know yourself. So either an infinite regress starts, or there is a self-awareness underneath that does not go through any image. Suhrawardi concludes the second: the self is present to itself directly, and that presence is the most basic knowledge there is.

    He tells, in one of his works, of a dream-vision in which Aristotle advises him to begin with knowledge of himself. Whatever you make of the dream, the philosophical point it introduces is the regress above. In his larger system the self is a light that is manifest to itself, and he builds an entire metaphysics of light from that starting point.

    On your second question, see below; others will put it better than I can.

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Other answers

  1. Layla Sfeir

    Fellow

    A historical footnote that matters. Ibn Sina had already argued that the soul is constantly aware of itself without any intermediary; the "floating man" thought experiment is meant to make that vivid. Suhrawardi's innovation is to make presence a general category of knowledge and to extend it further, including to vision and to God's knowledge of things. Mulla Sadra later takes it up again. So "knowledge by presence" is a technical term with a long life, not a passing image.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Elif Yıldız

    Fellow

    Thank you both. But my second question still bothers me. If I am present to myself directly, why am I so bad at knowing why I do things? The confabulation studies are not subtle.

    1. Priya Raghavan

      Fellow

      I think the two claims are about different things. The confabulation literature shows that people are poor at reporting the causes of their choices. Knowledge by presence, as Reza describes it, concerns the bare fact that there is a self aware of itself, not the contents of its motives. You can be immediately present to yourself and still be wrong about why you chose the blue shirt.

      I'm a materialist and I would describe that bare self-awareness in neural terms. But I do not think the psychology refutes Suhrawardi; it targets a claim he did not make.

      Helpful · 1
  3. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    Fellow

    For comparison, though with the usual caution: Buddhist epistemologists in Dignāga's line also argue that every cognition is aware of itself, and Husserl speaks of a pre-reflective self-awareness. All three resist the idea that self-awareness is just one more representation. But the selves involved are very different. Suhrawardi's self is real and luminous; for Dignāga there is self-awareness without an enduring self. Same structural move, very different metaphysics.

    Helpful · 2