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Though both Plato and Aristotle have been regarded as the representatives of rationalism, in fact, Aristotle was not so consistent in his attitude; he also attached great importance to the sensory experiment and to the role of the knowledge gained in this very way.

Aristotle’s statements against Plato, which give the impression of struggle, in fact, caused the two teachings to become clearer and to come ‘cleared out’ until today. As mentioned by the famous researcher of the Ancient philosophy V. Asmus, the criticism of Plato’s theory of forms constitutes the main line of Aristotle’s book Metaphysics.Footnote 1 Namely, for Plato idea (form) and notion are not merely our opinions about existence, but existence itself. Aristotle, in turn, considers that if there is not anything cognized then the knowledge about it does not exist too. (Otherwise, it would be knowledge about nothing.)

For having the idea about the correct and comprehensive view of reality, it is not sufficient to divide it into the indefinite and conditional notions like thinking and substance. Then the place that he occupies and the role that he plays could not be clearly conceived. For us, the optimum model is to define the ultimate idea on the one hand and the ultimate matter on the other; and the peculiarities of the world and the human being that are placed between the two poles as well as the relationships between them could be elucidated only after this.

After understanding God as the only Ultimate Being, which includes in him the poles of the ultimate idea and matter, we are going to elucidate the status of the ultimate idea and the ultimate matter which are completely separated from each other. Some researchers identify the ultimate idea with God. Matter in this case is left aside and two alternatives remain to explain it; either matter was derived from idea, or by not depending on God, it has existed from the very outset. None of these explanations could lead to the efficient conclusion for understanding the world.

The first approach reminds us of the teaching of Plato. That is, the only true being is the world of forms (ideas). The material world as well as the things and events in it, are supposedly the copies of ideas, and so they are deprived of the real existence. The temporality and conditionality of things and events in the world leads to the denial of their real existence in general. Nevertheless, the path of the human being to God, in fact, goes through the material world. The absolutization of the soul and the denial of the body, in one sense, could not play the role of the optimal methodological basis for learning the gist and mechanism of the events that happen in real life.

By being, in fact, a dualist standpoint, the second approach considers matter and God at the same status. This standpoint could be considered as an equivalent to the conceptualization of the duality of light and darkness, good and evil, idea and substance, fire and earth (in Empedocles) – which goes back to Zoroastrianism – in the form of idea and matter.

By having the body, the human being himself is a part of the middle world. Other things consist of the unity of idea and materiality, or more precisely, they are made of matter-material on the basis of a certain idea; likewise, the human being is also the carrier of the idea of the body. To tell the truth, unlike all other creatures, the human being is also the carrier of another idea – the idea of the universe, namely he is microcosm, he is as well the idea which could become active in certain times, that is, he is an idea which is transformed into consciousness. In other words, though, the human being gets the opportunity to approach the ultimate idea and travel to the world of ideas (and to be absorbed in himself, to head towards his inner and spiritual world), due to having the soul, he could appear as the same organized side with things and events if he is in this world. That is to say, he has to obey the laws of this world and adjust himself to its harmony.

The human being, who includes the world in himself as a passive idea, ‘learns’ it in parts at the time when he is in the concrete contact with it. That is to say, by depending on the contact points with this world, the inner world of the human being is illuminated and opened. However, by not being dependent on the external world, the human being could also travel to his inner cosmic world if he would like to turn back and find or create in this world what he saw there. This very point stands on the basis of the creative process.

If the human being wants to reveal (in himself) the idea that is conveyed by either other things and events or his own body, then it will be clear that not only one idea but many ideas are included in these things. Then which idea appears at the first approach and what do the things, which do not appear, mean for us? The whole question is that the human being accepts the sign, peculiarity, form, structure and regularity, in a word, the idea that he could discover in objects and events, as idea, and the rest, which are obscure and unknown, he accepts them as matter and material. For the reason that the material substance has a complex structure, the higher levels, which are revealed in the hierarchy of ideas that it includes, are accepted as idea and the lower levels, which are obscure, as matter. By the idea of ‘table’, for example, the macrostructure and form, which provide its function, are meant. What it was made of, as well as the structure of its ‘material’, and the lower structural layers of this structure (molecules, atoms etc.) silently belonged to content and matter. When the human being looks at the object not with the naked eye, but with the microscope, what he observes are cells, molecules etc. In this case he will not be able to observe the microstructure.

Indeed, the illuminated side is accepted as idea and the obscure one as matter, exactly like that of Illuminationism (Ishraqiyya).

Analogically, the illuminated side in the brain-microcosm corresponds to consciousness (the idea, which is brought to a focus – intentionality) and the passive side to unconsciousness and unrevealed-consciousness (in the obscure part of the brain). Therefore, the main question is to which structural level the human being gives his attention. The material object and event are maybe the carriers of many things. However, what we know is its part that coincides with his cognitive view. The obscure part has been called differently by different philosophers. In fact, it corresponds to Kant’s notion of ‘the thing-in-itself (das Ding an sich)’.

Aristotle also tried to determine the mutual relationship and correlation between form and matter. He brilliantly noticed that there was a problem here. By reason of the fact that it was difficult to fully clarify the problem, he used another notion – the notion of substratum. For Aristotle, everything refers to substratum but it does not refer to anything. “And in one sense matter is said to be of the nature of substratum, in another shape, and in a third, the compound of these. (By the matter I mean, for instance, the bronze, by the shape the pattern of its form, and by the compound of these the statue, the concrete whole.) Therefore if the form is prior to the matter and more real, it will be prior also to the compound of both, for the same reason”.Footnote 2

In this search Aristotle came to the idea of ‘thing in itself’, which, considering the knowledge level of his time, was a brilliant notion: “because each thing is inseparable from itself, and its being one just meant this”.Footnote 3

The human being sees, hears (gets information with his sense organs) when he is in contact with this world, and each time a certain life table appears in front of him. It gives the human being the impression that truth is outside and the aim is ‘to reflect’ this outsider with senses and thus to get knowledge about the world in this way.

When philosophers approached the problem more deeply, they started to be sceptical about the degree of adequacy of the information, which was gained through senses, to the truth. The idea of reaching the ultimate truth by means of the purposeful thought or intuition or revelation was diversely expressed in Indian and Chinese philosophies as well as in Ancient Greek philosophy. This idea was leading in medieval Islamic philosophical thought. Shahab al-Din al-Suhrawardi also mentions that the knowledge gained through the outside senses misled the human being and alienated him from the ultimate truth. In the New Age philosophy Descartes took the same approach and claimed that the truth is not gained due to the sensory experiment but to the purposeful thought.

However, the notions, which claimed that the ready ideas in the human mind existed without being dependent on material realities, have also been met with resistance. The discussion of this problem was clarified in the teaching of John Locke at its best. Kant, in turn, by accepting either the results of the sensory experiment or pure reason, claimed that the real panorama of the world arose from the synthesis of these two truths. Thus, throughout the whole history of philosophical thought, the seeking of truth has realized by being based sometimes on the sensory experiment and sometimes on the purposeful rational thought.

At the same time, there were the cases in which accepting the human being as an independent being and comparing him with the material world as an independent substance and even regarding idea as the only being were subjected to a humiliating attitude; this attitude was also taken towards the material world and the human body. Plato, for instance, accepted the material world as a shadow of ideas (forms) and only ideas were considered by him as real. However, Plato’s ideas were able to stand not only above things and events but also above human consciousness. Whereas what is clear to the human being is his inner world as well as it is the only reality for man. This world, in turn, does not always become clear and illuminated for the human being. Only certain points of this world become clear and illuminated when the human being is in contact with external objects and events, as well as when he focuses his thought on his inner world. What we saw yesterday and our past experiences are no longer alive, they have moved towards the archive and towards the stock section (memory) as well as towards the dark and passive section, and have lost their reality. What are real for me are only the sensations, ideas and experiences – phenomena that I now experience. My own reality, in fact, consists of these very phenomena.

The problem of the place of sensation and idea in the structure of experience is also very important. Edmund Husserl, who, throughout his whole philosophical activity, was against psychologism and took the standpoint of avoiding its influence and expressing scientific teachings with mathematical exactness, attached great importance to clear ideas in the structure of human consciousness and suggested the experiences, which are out of all kind of sensational influences and at a level of idea, as real. Due to directing and intending consciousness, every object or event that is known to us from the sensory world is fixed by different models and phenomena.

Then what is of concern here? What is of concern here is the acceptance of a certain image, which has been formed in our consciousness, as reality; that is to say, not a material thing or object, which stands behind the image, but the image itself is accepted as reality. On the other hand, a question arises here: What is the difference between the image, which appears in the sensory experiment, and this intellectual image? The difference is that this image, in fact, is not an image of the single-of any object, which is taken in isolation, but an image of the whole.

Everything was clear in the pre-Kantian philosophical teachings, because the problem of the preference of either idea or matter, either God’s will or human’s sensory experiment, as well as the problem of giving priority either to senses or reasoning in the cognitive process, were unambiguously solved there. Although there were different standpoints and sometimes they contradicted each other, there was no need for controversies, because there was a clearness in every teaching about what should have been taken as substance as well as what should have been accepted as initial or derivative. Even Aristotle, who moved away from the teaching of Plato and took neither a systematic idealistic nor a systematic materialistic position, took a clearer epistemological and ontological position than Kant. It is unquestionable that Aristotle accepted the objective existence of the sensory world. In his teaching, idea is not taken as an independent substance; furthermore by identifying it with ‘form’ it is even presented as a way of the existence of the things and events of the material world. The things and events, which are cognized through the sense organs, as well as the logical principles, which have been generalized later and which are the bases of intellectual activity, are in fact chosen from material real processes. In Kant, in turn, ‘the thing in itself’, whose independent existence is not denied, does not play in the cognitive process a main role but a supporting one. Cognition takes its sources not only from the material world but also from the intellectual world itself. Furthermore, this dualism is not simply a dualism, that is, this teaching gives no ground for accepting both the material and ideal beginning as the same formed dual substances.

The teaching of Kant has synthetic character. On the one hand this teaching shows an initiative towards preserving the rationalist tradition, which by corresponding to those of R. Descartes B. Spinoza and G.W. Leibniz assumes intellectual thinking as a basis; and on the other hand is seen here the obvious and nonobvious impacts of the English empiricism, which were developed by F. Bacon and J. Locke, and even the influences of Berkeley’s sensualism, which is the idealist variant of this tradition. The reason why Kant’s successors gave different and sometimes incompatible explanations to his teachings is related to the standpoint from which philosophical tradition they approached the problem. The efforts towards explaining Kant’s teaching on the basis of rationalism, empiricism, agnosticism or even subjective idealism are the main reasons that condition the motleyness of Neo-Kantism. In fact, the philosophy of Kant cannot find its explanation in the context of all these traditional teachings, because this philosophy has a new essence.

This is, in fact, a newness for Western philosophy. For six centuries before Kant, in the East, in medieval Islamic philosophy, the bases for the syncretic philosophical teaching were founded, and the great Azerbaijani philosopher Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi was the first who took the first step in this direction.

The transition from the moral and material polarization as well as from the polarization of thought and nature towards the system of the internal relationship between the trinity of God, nature and man, was the main reason that conditioned this syncretism. Indeed, the world is seen from the prism of the relations between poles, when man goes out and observes the world from outside. When man enters himself into these relations he has either to be absorbed by one of these poles or he has to give a new explanation of the world. The movements that accept man as a part of nature, as a living and physical being, and even the most vulgar materialism lead in the last instance to the very bipolar explanation of the world that was created by God. On the other hand, the absorption of the human nature into the divine idea and taking him only as an ideal-spiritual being, as an ‘ego’ or an emotional-spiritual world and as an arena of sensual experiences, make it necessary, willingly or unwillingly, to take into consideration another pole in the form of the shadow of ideas or in the form of virtual world and ‘non-ego’.

However, if the one foot of man is taken in this world and another foot in the other, that is, if he is taken on the one hand as a physical being and on the other hand as ideal-spiritual being, as a unity of contradictions and as a complex syncretic system, then the necessity of going out of traditional ontology appears. In other words, by dividing man into two parts and then adding one of them (the body) to the material world and another one (reason, morality) to the world of ideas, it is possible however to get one more variant of the traditional polarization. Nevertheless, if we do not divide man into these two parts and in case we take him as one independent being, then the world becomes not bipolar but tripolar. This is, in turn, absurd from the standpoint of geometrical logical tradition or more precisely it is absurd for the one-dimensional space. Namely one line may have not three, but two poles and two edges. The multipoleness is normal in two and three-dimensional space. It means that the transition to syncretic teachings in philosophy, in one sense reminds us of the transition from one-dimensional space to multidimensional space.

Accepting man as a substance by abandoning traditional beings, and beside simple movements, like solipsism, the duty of finding the new combinations of the trinity of God, nature and man are the central problems of a number of modern philosophical movements.

Although the material being, the world of things is not the main source of human cognition in Kant’s teaching, or more precisely, though the information that we get from this world does not express the real truth, however its independent existence and its participation in the cognitive process are accepted. On the other hand, the human being enters the information that he gets into his unique thinking system as well as he regulates and packs them. It is supposed that the categories of time, space and causality play this very role. However it is questionable where and how man gets this inborn ability? Another question arises that if the things, which are drawn to the cognitive process and which are the partners of the sensory experiment, as well as their nature still remain unknown for us, then what kind of thing is the object that we cognize? Whose reflections are the knowledge gained from nature? Where has the place been left for the idea of God; has it been left in the nature of a priori knowledge or in the nature or essence of ‘the things in themselves’?

Some researches of Kant blamed him for subordinating the object to the subject. N. Hartmann emphasized that the subject in Kant’s teaching was not only the individual subject, but subject in general. Namely the empirical subject and empirical object stand vis-à-vis and both of them enter space and time at the same time. The thought of the subject includes the empirical object through ‘the transcendental ideality’.Footnote 4 Hartmann, however, unfortunately continues this point of view and hurries to abandon the scheme of Kant in this problem: It is not possible to cognize the appearance outside the ‘thing in itself’: either both of them are cognizable, or none of them.Footnote 5 However Hartmann forgets that what is of concern here is not essence and manifestation, but is ‘the thing in itself’ and manifestation. The thing in itself, in turn, is single and every single does not include any ordinary essence, but the hierarchy of essences. It is, of course, possible that any essence may appear from this complex system and hierarchy and it could be cognized as a sensory image and then as an empirical idea. However, the reason why the cognized idea does not correspond to ‘the thing in itself’ is that the thing still keeps in itself many uncognized essences (generals, forms, eide) and there could be an infinite number of these last-named essences. There is an indefiniteness here and its adequate cognition, of course, is impossible.

Is the subject of science really the dehumanized objective world, or the world of meaning as it has been accepted by the community of scientists, or the general scientific panorama of the world, or a model, which has become a paradigm and the mode of thought that corresponds to this model? To what extent does what a neutral person sees and feels in the sensorial course of the event correspond to what a scientist, who has researched that event for years, sees and feels? For what accounts does the difference appear?

The thing is inexhaustible, infinite and indefinite. Then what does man cognize adequately? He does not cognize the thing itself, but its model; as well as he cognizes a concrete form and concrete structure, which have been foregrounded by being simplified and taken out from the hierarchy of infinite essences, forms an eidoses.

What are cognized here are the structure and wholeness. Is the thing entire then? Each thing is different under different angles, scales, perspectives and under different structural levels. That is to say, it includes a large number of wholenesses.

Matter, in turn, is unattainable for cognition. It is not possible to see absolute darkness. However, it is also impossible to see absolute light. Al-Suhrawardi writes: “The light of lights (nur al-anwar) is invisible because of the severity of his clarity”.Footnote 6 What we see are those who are between two invisibles.

The human being is at the crossroads of idea and matter. He is in twilight, lights up now and again and then is extinguished once again. He shines and then sets like twinkling stars.

The coordination of the term of ‘light’ with intellect and the term of ‘darkness’ with ‘the thing in itself’ and matter in al-Suhrawardi, makes it possible to draw certain parallels between these two epistemological systems. In the philosophical teaching of al-Suhrawardi, the cognitive problems were solved differently and uniquely from the Platonic, Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian views which had existed until that time. Though at first glance, the epithets of light and darkness corresponds here to the world of forms and the world of things, in fact, what is of concern here is the unity of these two worlds personified by the human consciousness (the thinking soul). That is to say, unlike Plato, he does not see the truth in comprehending forms, namely in merely being united with light. In fact, what is of concern here is the illumination of the physical being and its becoming clear to the human being. Only at the level of illumination and unveiling (kashf), the true essence of the thing and event is unfolded and the forthcoming duty is to purify this essence from the knowledge that we get them via our sense organs and cognize it purely.

The views about not taking knowledge from the world of events and their appearance as products of thought had existed in the pre-Kantian period. However, as a general rule, in the previous philosophies one of the two extreme views was chosen. By taking the material world- the objective reality as initial, materialists regarded all knowledge as derivative, as well as idealists, who by completely abandoning the material word and matter as a form of existence, sought the truth only in the world of ideas, which exists outside of man, or in the feeling world of man himself. Kant was the first who accepted the participation of both bases in the cognitive process and divided knowledge into two parts- one comes from experiment (a posteriori) and another is the product of pure reason (a priori).

Unlike the claims of materialists Kant does not accept experiment as a reflection of the material world. ‘The thing in itself’ is unattainable for cognition. That is to say, what is cognized is not matter. What is cognizable then? For Kant, it is the form, which is manifested and explained in the relation of ‘the thing in itself’ with us (in experiment). In other words, what we cognize is not matter and ‘the thing in itself’, but the certain manifested signs of it. But how are the manifested and hidden signs determined.

“A deaf person understands what is in his heart” as it is said in an Azerbaijani proverb. Namely, during the contact of man with object, man cannot recognize the sign, which he has not possessed before, that is, which has been never programmed in his world of genetic or genetic-social-intellectual knowledge. In other words, what is clear for us is only the sign of a thing and event when we can see its form and hear its voice as well as we (our brain, nervous system and mentality) are the carriers of it (of its idea and basic forms). In the spectrum of electromagnetic waves, for instance, we can see only the waves in the interval of 4–8 Å. The ultra-violet rays, whose wavelength is less than 10, as well as the infra-red rays, whose wavelength is larger than ultra-violet rays, go out of our view. At the same time, we cannot hear what bats hear. Our possibility to receive sound waves has been determined in advance. It means that the human being takes the information from the event that he encounters only within the scope of his natural abilities. This opinion could also be considered valid for the form. If any form, which has been known and ‘native’ to us in advance, is not observed in object, then we consider it as amorphous. Continuing these views we could conclude that if we went beyond the human egoism and did not claim the mutual interaction of man and object, the resonance points in this process (recognition, cognition) are the same with object and object consisting of these points. Then we would not discuss the material being, but we would discuss its process of contact with object as well as its known aspects to our cognition.

What we should talk about is not the transition of ‘the thing in itself’ to ‘the thing for us’, but taking ‘the thing for us’ from ‘the thing in itself’. Each ‘thing in itself’ has infinite signs as well as it is inexhaustible and eternal, or more precisely, it is infinite inasmuch as indefinite. All the indefiniteness is equal to one another (just because we are deprived of the possibility of evaluating them).

Thus experiment, in fact, is the point of mutual relationship of man (ego) with matter, or more precisely it is the point of their sameness; the point of sameness between the ideal world of man and the material world. This point is finite that has been chosen from infinity. Especially the knowledge that is expressed by language is now a knowledge which is finite, definite, and capable of being made mathematical as well as which is established under logical forms, in a word, which is formal knowledge-information. Living knowledge, in turn, has not yet been deprived of its relationship with existence as well as it has not been broken off, separated, put into language frames and ‘preserved’. The idea, which by the influence of ‘the thing in itself’ has been transformed from the passive existence in the world of ideas into the form of active existence and which returns to life and is refreshed, is the very empirical cognition. (And then it is put into the Procrustean frame of formal logic and utilized for preserving and then preserved – with material ways out of burning cognition).

Theoretical cognition, in turn, is the product of the thought which is directed to the inner man and to his ideal world, not to the material world and to ‘the thing in itself’.

These epistemological problems are expressed in Eastern (Islamic) philosophy with the term of ‘illumination’ (ishraq).

The attempts towards the explanation of epistemological problems by means of the notion of ‘illumination’ were also known in ancient Greek philosophy. Referring to an unknown philosopher, Aristotle said in a passage of Rhetoric: “God kindled our reason to be a lamp within our soul”.Footnote 7 His comparison of reason with the light within the human soul shows that relating light to the divine source of human thought and entering wajd (the state of ecstasy in Sufism) and revelation to epistemology do not belong only to medieval Islamic philosophy. However what is of concern in Aristotle’s teaching is the phenomenon of intellect as a whole; the relationship between object and the knowledge about it are not a subject of discussion within this context. Al-Suhrawardi took a step further in this problem and tried to reveal the mechanism of the cognitive process. What is important here is to determine the initial carrier of information. Namely, to what extent the thing-object is initial, compared to our knowledge, and to what extent it is the carrier of truth; or, truth is a phenomenon, which was given to man by nature and revealed in the light of the divine contact and, in fact, is an independent phenomenon compared to the thing-object. If so, then the adequacy between the information that the thing carries and our knowledge is not only the result of the sensory experiment, but the result of deriving both of them from the same divine beginning and the transformation of the same idea from the same beginning into the human ego and things (in the shape of form).

One of the main differences of the modern philosophy with ancient Greek philosophy and medieval philosophy is that not only did it remove the indifference to the sensory experiment but it also tried to base scientific knowledge on observation and experiment. Unlike the rationalism of Descartes, F. Bacon and Spinoza, the development of Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature) by Galileo and Newton as well as the attempts of F. Bacon and J. Locke towards establishing new science on the basis of the methodology based on sensory cognition divided philosophy into two diametrically opposite lines. These two lines were in fact the extension and struggle of the lines of Aristotle and Plato, which were founded in ancient time, in modern time.

One of the main problems that philosophical thought faced in eighteenth century was the problem of passing from empirical knowledge to theoretical knowledge. In this very period, it seems as if I. Kant showed an initiative to combine these two lines and to establish the entire conception of cognition, and tried to found the entire unit system that included the relations between sensory and rational cognitions. In this sense, Kant’s teaching could also be accepted even as a bridge between materialism and idealism. Kant does not regard matter as derivative from idea and as a form when he speaks of the relation between the sensual image and the sensory object. “It has been sufficiently demonstrated by the critique of pure reason that there can be absolutely no theoretical knowledge beyond the objects of the senses, nor any theoretico-dogmatic knowledge, since in that case everything would have to be known a priori through concepts; and this for the simple reason, that all concepts must be capable of resting upon an intuition of some sort, to provide them with objective reality; but all our intuition is sensuous.”Footnote 8

By looking at the later development line of philosophical thought we can see that these peace efforts were not so successful as well as the initiative towards establishing theoretical knowledge and scientific theories on empirical material and basing them on the philosophical plane did not justify itself. The analysis of the development way of scientific knowledge shows that theory is possible only due to generalizing idea. Such ideas, in turn, are not taken from experiment and they become possible only as a product of rational thinking. Especially the development of mathematics, and the possibility of the relative-independent formation of abstract theoretical constructions without being dependent on experiment, reinforced the necessity of the return to the line of Plato once again. That is to say, gaining the truth and founding perfect theoretical teachings demonstrated the necessity of the abstraction from the sensory world as well as the necessity of seeking for the connection with the world of forms. Indeed, the above-mentioned examples from al-Suhrawardi show that the ideas about the two independent sources of cognition were put forward still in the Middle Ages. Namely, it was claimed in these teachings that the basic way to reach the truth was not based on the sensory experiment but on the divine illumination (ishraq), ecstasy and unveiling (wajd and kashf). The analogical approaches in nineteenth and twentieth centuries continued in the different branches of intuitivism and irrationalism and this process, in turn, demonstrates the appearance of the necessity of the return from the Aristotelian line, which has been methodological basis in science for a long time, to the line of Plato.