As we all know...

As we all know, it was Kant who first raised the question: ‘Is metaphysics possible?’2 He answered this question in the negative; and his argument applies with equal force to the realities in which religion is especially interested. The manifold of sense, according to him, must fulfil certain formal conditions in order to constitute knowledge. The thing-in-itself is only a limiting idea. Its function is merely regulative.

If there is some actuality corresponding to the idea, it falls outside the boundaries of experience, and consequently its existence cannot be rationally demonstrated. This verdict of Kant cannot be easily accepted.

It may fairly be argued that in view of the more recent developments of science, such as the nature of matter as ‘bottled-up light waves’, the idea of the universe as an act of thought, finiteness of space and time and Heisenberg’s principle of indeterminacy3 in Nature, the case for a system of rational theology is not so bad as Kant was led to think. But for our present purposes it is unnecessary to consider this point in detail.

As to the thing-in-itself, which is inaccessible to pure reason because of its falling beyond the boundaries of experience, Kant’s verdict can be accepted only if we start with the assumption that all experience other than the normal level of experience is impossible. The only question, therefore, is whether the normal level is the only level of knowledge-yielding experience.

Kant’s view of the thing-in-itself and the thing as it appears to us very much determined the character of his question regarding the possibility of metaphysics. But what if the position, as understood by him, is reversed?

The great Muslim Sufi philosopher, Muhyaddin Ibn al-‘Arabâ of Spain, has made the acute observation that God is a percept; the world is a concept.4 Another Muslim Sufi thinker and poet, ‘Ir«qâ, insists on the plurality of space-orders and time-orders and speaks of a Divine Time and a Divine Space.5 It may be that what we call the external world is only an intellectual construction, and that there are other levels of human experience capable of being systematized by other orders of space and time - levels in which concept and analysis do not play the same role as they do in the case of our normal experience.

It may, however, be said that the level of experience to which concepts are inapplicable cannot yield any knowledge of a universal character, for concepts alone are capable of being socialized.