Khayal (Imagination) according to Ibn al-'Arabi

Written by Professor William Chittick. From: [http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/ibn-arabi/]

Imagination (khayâl), as Corbin has shown, plays a major role in Ibn ‘Arabî's writings. In the Openings, for example, he says about it, “After the knowledge of the divine names and of self-disclosure and its all-pervadingness, no pillar of knowledge is more complete” (Ibn ‘Arabî, al-Futûhât, 1911 edition, 2:309.17). He frequently criticizes philosophers and theologians for their failure to acknowledge its cognitive significance. In his view, ‘aql or reason, a word that derives from the same root as ‘iqâl, fetter, can only delimit, define, and analyze. It perceives difference and distinction, and quickly grasps the divine transcendence and incomparability. In contrast, properly disciplined imagination has the capacity to perceive God's self-disclosure in all Three Books. The symbolic and mythic language of scripture, like the constantly shifting and never-repeated self-disclosures that are cosmos and soul, cannot be interpreted away with reason's strictures. What Corbin calls “creative imagination” (a term that does not have an exact equivalent in Ibn ‘Arabî's vocabulary) must complement rational perception.

In Koranic terms, the locus of awareness and consciousness is the heart (qalb), a word that has the verbal sense of fluctuation and transmutation (taqallub). According to Ibn ‘Arabî, the heart has two eyes, reason and imagination, and the dominance of either distorts perception and awareness. The rational path of philosophers and theologians needs to be complemented by the mystical intuition of the Sufis, the “unveiling” (kashf) that allows for imaginal—not “imaginary”—vision. The heart, which in itself is unitary consciousness, must become attuned to its own fluctuation, at one beat seeing God's incomparability with the eye of reason, at the next seeing his similarity with the eye of imagination. Its two visions are prefigured in the two primary names of the Scripture, al-qur’ân, “that which brings together”, and al-furqân, “that which differentiates”. These two demarcate the contours of ontology and epistemology. The first alludes to the unifying oneness of Being (perceived by imagination), and the second to the differentiating manyness of knowledge and discernment (perceived by reason). The Real, as Ibn ‘Arabî often says, is the One/the Many (al-wâhid al-kathîr), that is, One in Essence and many in names, the names being the principles of all multiplicity, limitation, and definition. In effect, with the eye of imagination, the heart sees Being present in all things, and with the eye of reason it discerns its transcendence and the diversity of the divine faces.

He who stops with the Koran inasmuch as it is a qur’ân has but a single eye that unifies and brings together. For those who stop with it inasmuch as it is a totality of things brought together, however, it is a furqân…. When I tasted the latter…, I said, “This is lawful, that is unlawful, and this is indifferent. The schools have become various and the religions diverse. The levels have been distinguished, the divine names and the engendered traces have become manifest, and the names and the gods have become many in the world”. (Ibn ‘Arabî, al-Futûhât, 1911 edition, 3:94.16)

When Ibn ‘Arabî talks about imagination as one of the heart's two eyes, he is using the language that philosophers established in speaking of the soul's faculties. But he is more concerned with imagination's ontological status, about which the early philosophers had little to say. Here his use of khayâl accords with its everyday meaning, which is closer to image than imagination. It was employed to designate mirror images, shadows, scarecrows, and everything that appears in dreams and visions; in this sense it is synonymous with the term mithâl, which was often preferred by later authors. Ibn ‘Arabî stresses that an image brings together two sides and unites them as one; it is both the same as and different from the two. A mirror image is both the mirror and the object that it reflects, or, it is neither the mirror nor the object. A dream is both the soul and what is seen, or, it is neither the soul nor what is seen. By nature images are/are not. In the eye of reason, a notion is either true or false. Imagination perceives notions as images and recognizes that they are simultaneously true and false, or neither true nor false. The implications for ontology become clear when we look at the three “worlds of imagination”.

In the broadest sense of the term, imagination/image designates everything other than God, the entire cosmos inasmuch as it is contingent and evanescent. This is what Ibn ‘Arabî calls “Nondelimited Imagination” (al-khayâl al-mutlaq). Each of the infinite words articulated in the All-Merciful Breath discloses Being in a limited form. Everything without exception is both God's face (wajh), revealing certain divine names, and God's veil (hijâb), concealing other names. Inasmuch as a thing exists, it can be nothing but that which is, the Real Being; inasmuch as it does not exist, it must be other than the Real. Each thing, in Ibn ‘Arabî's most succinct expression, is He/not He (huwa/lâ huwa)—Real/unreal, Being/nonexistence, Face/veil. “In reality, the ‘other’ is affirmed/not affirmed, He/not He” (Ibn ‘Arabî, al-Futûhât, 1911 edition, 2:501.4).

In a narrower sense of the word, imagination denotes what Corbin calls the mundus imaginalis (‘âlam al-khayâl). Like most traditions, Islam conceives of the cosmos as a hierarchy of worlds, usually two or three; the Koran contrasts the Unseen (ghayb) with the Visible (shahâda), and these are typically called the world of spirits and the world of bodies, or, in philosophical terms, the intelligible and the sensible realms. The Koran also speaks of “heaven, earth, and everything in between”, and one of Ibn ‘Arabî's contributions was to bring out the full implications of the in-between realm, which in one respect is unseen, spiritual, and intelligible, and in another respect visible, corporeal, and sensible. This is precisely the mundus imaginalis, where spiritual beings are corporealized, as when Gabriel appeared in human form to the Virgin Mary; and where corporeal beings are spiritualized, as when bodily pleasure or pain is experienced in the posthumous realms. The mundus imaginalis is a real, external realm in the Cosmic Book, more real than the visible, sensible, physical realm, but less real than the invisible, intelligible, spiritual realm. Only its actual existence can account for angelic and demonic apparitions, bodily resurrection, visionary experience, and other nonphysical yet sensory phenomena that philosophers typically explain away. Ibn ‘Arabî's foregrounding of the in-between realm was one of several factors that prevented Islamic philosophy from falling into the trap of a mind/body dichotomy or a dualistic worldview.

The third world of imagination belongs to the microcosmic human book, in which it is identical with the soul or self (nafs), which is the meeting place of spirit (rûh) and body (jism). Human experience is always imaginal or soulish (nafsânî), which is to say that it is simultaneously spiritual and bodily. Human becoming wavers between spirit and body, light and darkness, wakefulness and sleep, knowledge and ignorance, virtue and vice. Only because the soul dwells in an in-between realm can it choose to strive for transformation and realization. Only as an imaginal reality can it travel “up” toward the luminosity of the spirit or “down” toward the darkness of matter.