Language between God and the Poets by Alexander Key

Author:Alexander Key
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520970144
Publisher: University of California Press.

EVERYTHING IS KNOWLEDGE

When maʿnā worked to establish the strict monotheism of the Islamic God, it did so by moving the action into the human mind. We have seen scholars in this chapter reminding us that the words “description” and “attribute” refer to linguistic acts of description. We have not seen them engage in similar reminders that maʿnā refers to human cognition, but perhaps the reason no scholar said that maʿānī were cognitive is that there was no one around to disagree, whereas some creeds did indeed deny that God’s descriptions and attributes were human and linguistic. The closest we get to a noncognitive maʿnā is the theory of Muʿammar, and in the absence of extant texts we cannot be sure exactly where he would have positioned his causal maʿānī between the mental and extramental realms. All we can be sure of is that he was using a core conceptual vocabulary that he shared with contemporary Arabic accounts of how language worked. However, with Ibn Fūrak we can at least consider the prospect that his cognitive maʿānī were located in human minds and that the effort he expended to prevent God being associated with internal multiplicity was focused on human cognition of God rather than on the extramental constitution of the divine being.

When the action moves to the sphere of human cognition, it starts to make more sense that language would be heavily involved. Again, this enables us to explain how so much of Islamic theology was about naming: the names given to things mattered because they reflected mental contents, and the mental contents reflected the extramental reality of the world. These two vectors of reflection were then critically evaluated according to the standard of accuracy. Theologians asked whether the vocal forms of language did in fact accurately reflect mental contents, and they could turn to the lexicon to adjudicate and negotiate their conclusions. Theologians also asked whether their mental contents accurately reflected the extramental world that their senses observed, and they could turn to reason and logic to adjudicate their conclusions. Theology was science for Ibn FÅ«rak and his contemporaries; the stuff of their debates was human mental content, and they wanted to make that content as accurate as possible. Humans had mental contents that resulted from their interactions with the world and mental contents that resulted from their considerations of the divine. Both needed to be assessed according to lexical precedent, revelatory precedent, reason, and sensory data as appropriate.

Ibn Fūrak’s Ašʿarī theory of the acquisition of acts, as discussed above,167 was relevant to this picture of human mental content. When we consider that theory, it seems logical to conclude that God had exactly the same control over human mental contents as he did over every single other atom or thing in his creation. If this is the case, then theology was less about human cognition and reason and more about what God did with human mental contents. This makes theories like acquisition seem quite different: God created the human and created the extramental objects with which the human interacted.

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