journal of philosophy 15

O beloved Pan and all other gods of this place, grant that I may be made beautiful within, and that all outer things may be in amnity with that inner life.[1]

The depth psychology of Donald Winnicott marks a radical change—even if unadmitted—from Freudianism. Winnicott rejects the rationalist and individualist presuppositions of Freudianism, and reinterprets naturalism in a way that makes room for mysticism and mystical communication. Winnicott argues that the basic challenge of human development is not (the pursuit of) id-satisfaction, but feeling real. He offers a genealogical account of the emergence of our sense of the real which necessarily takes a mystical caste: for our sense of the real, he contends, rests on a paradoxical dichotomy according to which it is true both that the object is created, and that it is there to be found.

The discipline of psychoanalysis is a modern discipline, both historically and largely in subject-matter. I know that psychoanalytic theory, to the despair of many philosophers, typically assumes the uniformity of human nature so the general relevance of its findings. I don't think this is useless but I do think that in our case psychoanalysis is the inside story. This pun is offered as partial justification for my approach. For I begin with some remarks situating the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott's[2] distinctiveness by considering his position on the modern shibboleths of Naturalism, Rationalism, and Individualism. Indeed the pun goes deeper, for these shibboleths structure Freud's psychoanalytic work, and while Winnicott claimed to work inside the Freudian tradition, his psychoanalytic theory involves a radical reinterpretation of the first, and a rejection of the second and third. Understanding this reinterpretation and rejection 'from the inside' leads us to the unique and paradoxical account Winnicott gives of the real or, as it might better be called, the realist spirit.

If there is a specifically philosophical point to the paper, it lies with the realist spirit. Why do we talk, think, wonder, argue, about what is real and what is not? I do not mean, why do we argue about the reality or otherwise of particular entities within the world (is that a mirage? are there unicorns? are we in recession? etc.) That much is usually obvious. I mean rather why do we sometimes argue about, as it were, whether or not there is a world of a certain type or kind, such as we might take to be revealed in the various modalities of experience, the empirical, the religious, the moral, the aesthetic, and so forth? What hangs on such questions, for something certainly does. To be told that that which one takes oneself to be asserting of the world does not, in fact, contact it at all, even if only to get things wrong; that such apparent claims are simply unsuited to assessment in terms of their truth or otherwise; is to feel both that what one has said has been somehow debunked, downgraded, treated as less important than it is, and that, in an important sense, one's very person, one's being as a being in the world, has been slighted. This is what gives philosophical dispute its sting. But why is this? Why may we feel hurt in such circumstances? Why is it that the concept of the real, and applying it rightly, obsesses us in this way? It is not, in the contemplative mood, whether realism is 'true' or not that is important, not, at least, at this point, but why we bother talking and thinking this way at all. This is a question for practical reason, so no purely theoretical reflection reaches it. It is not that sort of problem.

It is the interest of Winnicott's ideas that he suggests that our concern with the real is equally a concern for establishing and sustaining the conditions of a genuinely personal existence. More than this, the connection Winnicott makes between the real and personal existence enables us make a new sense of certain theological themes concerning the connections between reality and omnipotence, omnipotence and creativity, and omnipotence and dependence. As we shall see, there is an important sense in which the Winnicottian account of the real fits into that familiar tradition which reacts to the 'death' of a transcendent God by giving to the living human individual the powers and tasks that used to be His. But whereas those such as Sartre centrally focus on the question of (the creation of) moral value, for Winnicott there is a fundamental sense in which we are required (or condemned) to create the world itself, ourselves included. Thus while Winnicott’s account helps us see what is at stake in debates about the real - in a sense to be revealed, it is our personal existence ‑ he throws too a novel light on the very structure of such philosophical debates. For Winnicott’s account of the origins and value of our concern with the real involves the conjunction of two claims normally thought exclusive. So Winnicott will argue that it is a condition of realistic experience that the external object is both created (a product of the subject’s ‘omnipotence’), and found (outside and conditioning the subject’s experience). As we might say, Winnicott shows us the way in which the fundamental claims of metaphysical realism and metaphysical idealism are both required to be true if we are to inhabit a life in the world, and so in a position to find ourselves faced with the pressures of philosophical inquiry.

I begin with the idea—a canon of the Enlightenment Project—that a systematic account of human experience, so of our psychological life, must be formulable in entirely naturalistic terms. Now I have nothing against such a project—on the contrary, it is essential in a post-theistic age—the difficulty is that it lacks, as yet, definitional maturity. Naturalism remains an essentially re-active movement, trapped within the oppositional circumstances of its birth. No naturalist today knows what certainly and genuinely counts as natural; or rather no-one knows independently of an ontological affirmation of that specification delivered by the theory they presently favour. But this does not mean there is no independent constraint on naturalistic theories, so that there is no traffic between them. Unity, if only unity in argument, is defined by means of exclusion. As there is no agreement on what is natural, it is required there be agreement on what is unnatural, so unacceptable.

To give that rejected in contemporary naturalism a single name, good as any and better than some, call it the mystical.[3] A way of thinking counts as mystical in this sense if its reflective self-understanding involves both of the following.[4] First it makes a licit epistemological distinction between mere 'knowing', and, as it were, 'knowing with one's soul', and second, focusing now on the relevant objects of knowledge, it upholds an ontological distinction between that which is publicly knowable, and that which, of its nature, cannot be known that way, but essentially depends on personal recognition.

The internal tie mysticism posits between a form of knowledge and the purely personal and private does not mean that we lack all words for such inner and private experiences—though sometimes it feels this way[5]—it is rather that something important in these words lies in being able sincerely to say them, and in finding in oneself the person who can say them. These are words that come from deep inside. And while such words are the words of an essential privacy, I do not think Wittgenstein's objections to a purely private language apply. Wittgenstein's private language argument invokes an agent who is actively concerned to avoid the realm of public intelligibility embodied in a commitment to, or the use of, “ordinary language”; their language is, in principle, utterly opaque to anyone else. As he writes:

But could we also imagine a language in which a person could write down or give vocal expression to his inner experiences—his feelings, moods, and the rest—for his private use?—Well, can't he do so in our ordinary language?—But this is not what I mean. The individual words of his language refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.[6]

This is a person who would seem to be consumed by the desire not to express or communicate anything of themselves, and it is the point of the private language argument that this desire means having nothing to express or to communicate. The desire to flee the public world entirely, turns out to be the desire for one's complete disappearance. But this is not at all how it is with mystical communication. It may be that the subject is trying to express to others how it is, or was, for them to be inserted into a life and the world, and that this is crucially a first-personal matter, but still the person who speaks in a mystical idiom wishes to be understood, and—an essential part of the same impulse—wishes to understand themselves. What is special about this want, and about mystical efforts at communication, is that it is connected with the idea of position. Only those able to position themselves in the right way to what is said, so able to appreciate what is involved in the need to say this, can properly appreciate what is going on; and this positioning is itself essentially a practical matter, a matter of finding it necessary to express how it is with oneself and the world, by sincerely saying or thinking these things. It is for this reason that mystical talk enters the public realm with the epistemological demand of 'participation' or the testimony of 'personal experience', for here knowledge is a matter of acquaintance.[7]

For the mystic one can only come to know that which, in a real sense, one already knows, and this is captured by the epistemic demand for right positioning. It implies too that this kind of knowledge, this kind of truth, is different in character from that concerned with the purely public manifestations of the world. It is not a question of 'Objective Truth'—that cannot even begin to express the privacy of our lives—but rather, as Kierkegaard said, of 'Subjective Truth'. According to him, subjective truth is:

An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness… [This] is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual.[8]

If we understand this 'objective uncertainty' not as a matter of some unbelievable empirical claim, but rather as a claim that cannot be, without depletion and distortion, expressed in the terms of a bluff publicity, then Kierkegaard is illuminating. The important point is that this 'passionate inwardness' is not a matter of just sticking to a view come hell or high-water. Obstinacy is not the existential criterion of subjective, or mystical, truth. It is only those things which are an authentic part of ones 'existing individuality', which are so much a part of oneself that an obstinate holding on to is impossible and unnecessary, which can (and must) be held with this passion. In mystical epistemologies such as Kierkegaard's those things we hold as true are crucially a matter at the same time of, as it were, being true to ourselves. Truth becomes a matter of truthfulness rather than a merely objective property which attaches to (say) the propositions of natural science. Following Marcel, Winnicott marks the difference by speaking of the difference between belief that, which is the propositional fare of the natural, and belief in, which is the adverbial mark of the mystical.[9] For Winnicott, as we shall see, our sense of objective truth depends upon the achievement of a certain kind of mystical belief in the world. A belief which is also and equally a mystical belief in our own existence, for it is necessary that we may believe in (and have beliefs about) the world if it is to appear before us at all.

It is characteristic of mystical communication that it has a somewhat carefree—though not irresponsible—attitude to the demands of the public and impersonal, and so to orthodox logic and the generally recognised standards of public meaning, and this goes along with it being a language of the private in the way, Kierkegaard and, say, St. John of the Cross, write in a personal and private idiom. This is why the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus wishes it would exist in silence—he wanted, as he said to Paul Engels, to put a stop all this claptrap, all this gassing about important things. But, as his life came to show him, mere reason, aimed at discovering and illuminating 'the propositions of natural science'[10] cannot expunge the need to express, so express in the medium of our language, the privacy of our life and experience as we live and move among others. (And if one wants to see this interpretative dependence of the private voice and public language, there is no finer example than his Philosophical Investigations.[11]) But still for the analytic puritan of the Tractatus, the desire for silence is understandable. For when such communication is pursued in the spirit of mere knowing, it rapidly disintegrates into paradox and a mess of contradictions, though just because of this much mystical thought takes precisely this form (I think particularly of Hamaan), the very mysteriousness of its thoughts to public reason seemingly a crucial component of their validity.

It is a mistake inimical to self-understanding to begin our inquiry with an a priori repudiation of particular ways of life and experience. In approaching any sort of psychological (and philosophical) inquiry we do well in the beginning to take the idea of the mystical seriously. But how should we approach the mystical? It is clear that traditional philosophical epistemology understood as concerned with delineating the conditions of public intelligibility is unsuited to understanding it. But there is an alternative to the silence, and meaninglessness, of solipsism. We might look at the mystical in terms of practical reason. Why do we need, sometimes, to engage in mystical communication? Why this need to communicate how things go with one which equally, through its flouting of the public, expresses a need not to be found? Call this Winnicottian formulation of the nature of mystical expression—a need to communicate how things go with one which equally expresses a need not to be found—the psychoanalytic response to the early Wittgenstein's philosophical demand for the silence of the mystical.[12]

It is a response that marks Winnicott's distance from the reactive formulation of contemporary naturalism. Our naturalist relies on exclusion to define their position against its competitors, and the means of exclusion presupposes that the world, that what is real, is in principle transparent to us. However strange and however shocking psychological life might turn out to be on first sight, it is both desirable and possible to lay it out for public scrutiny and understanding. Even if that life is not the product of reasoned reflection, still reasoned reflection can encompass it in theory and expert practice. Descriptions of life, say, which appeal to a purely personal reality more real than the world about, which, indeed feels unreal and hollow, and whose communicative efforts appal or threaten one, or descriptions of moral experience which appeal to the idea of an Absolute Good utterly outside the reach of the world of contingency and death, or simply utterances like Winnicott's late prayer, 'Oh God, may I be alive when I die!',[13] are not, to the naturalist's eye, valid descriptions of genuinely mystical experiences, but diagnostic metaphors awaiting reformulation in the deflationist language of an impersonal, public, intelligibility.

Much contemporary naturalism repudiates, I think represses, these ways of description, and so the licitness of those experiences and ways of life in which they have their part. When it confronts them its best figures are polite, but they bring with them what Paul Ricoeur has called the hermeneutic of suspicion. What is presented is subject to authoritative translation by a knowing and debunking intelligence. So, for instance, Freud will only discuss the nature of religion as illusion and its future as the future of an illusion. This hostility to the mystical is inherent in the intelligence of Rationalism, and it is this intelligence that inspires and sustains the traditional naturalist project. Thus we should understand Winnicott's defence of the mystical not as a defence of the metaphysician's category of the 'supernatural', but as part of an attempt to disengage naturalism from the effects of the rationalist assumption.

Descartes, in his Discourse on Method, gives succinct expression to the rationalist faith:

...there can be nothing so distant, that one does not reach it eventually, or so hidden that one cannot discover it...[14]

For the rationalist everything is thinkable, and if everything is thinkable then, for the self-conscious mind, the rights of interrogation are unlimited. Nothing and nobody can hope to elude forever the cold inquiring eye of reason. The unspoken presupposition in this is not only that everything in the internal and external world is such that it can be bought under the auspices, so the control, of public reason, but that this publicity and this control is essentially benign. To Winnicott's anti-rationalist eye the communication publicity demands, and especially the suspicious and knowing communication of the expert in inner reality, may well constitute a violation, an exploitative intrusion, an irresponsible playing with, what lies deep in another. His is the response of a romantic individualist (and none the worse for that), and in his eyes rationalism's commitment to public reason amounts to a demand for the compliant surrender of its subject-matter. Whatever happens that subject-matter is not to be allowed a spontaneity with which to forever elude the grasp of generalising theory. The object must be willing to expose and conform itself to reason, and for Winnicott it activates his fear of being found, of, as he says, 'being infinitely exploited'.[15] It accounts too for his otherwise puzzling, un-Freudian, ambivalence about psychoanalysis.

We can understand, the hatred people have of psychoanalysis which has penetrated a long way into the human personality, and which provides a threat to the human individual in his need to be secretly isolated.[16]

Even more pointedly he will describe it as 'a hallmark of madness when an adult puts too powerful a claim on the credulity of others.'[17]

This ambivalence and this diagnosis of rationalism as a form of madness, of, we might say, the madness of a sanity which cannot exist without the signs of public compliance, can only be fully understood in the context of Winnicott's idiosyncratic theory of the self, and I shall go into some of its details later. In particular I look at his concept of the True Self, for it is the idea of the True Self that bears Winnicott's uniqueness. With it he opposes the exclusion of the mystical from the world, and specifically from psychological theory, and with it he articulates his fear of the compliance rationalism demands of its objects. It is the True Self which resists and, as long as it exists, must resist, the demands of an insistent publicity.

The third idea important for an approach to Winnicott's distinctiveness is individualism. By individualism I do not just mean the evaluative stance according to which to be an individual is supremely valuable—something Winnicott has no problem with, but insists on—nor, subsequently, a guiding concern with what goes into becoming an individual. I mean, and before all this, the view that the category of the individual is an explanatory primitive, so that the developmental story is that of a centre of cognitive or affective being, progressing from primordial conflict to a negotiated accommodation with the world.

In this way of looking at things the individual appears as an explanatory monad. True, he or she may have a history, even a developmental history which involves the articulation of differential psychic structures, but that history begins as the history of a being loosed upon, or 'thrown' into, the world. We may say that Freud's innovation in this area was to conceive of the individual in this ontogenic sense not only as something essentially non-cognitive but also deeply unknown to itself.[18] But the individual remains as a unit of instinctual forces, driven by frustration and the need to master it into more complex forms of individuality.

For Winnicott individualism is a subtler matter. While it is still basic: every normal human baby, Winnicott insists, has an innate nisus, a primary developmental capacity, to become an individual which, if frustrated, ruins a life, this begins as potential, not a standing actuality. Such potential requires a certain environmental provision if it is to develop adequately, or at all. Indeed the dependence of the infant is such in the beginning that the story of its individuality begins with a relationship in which the emerging self at first exists only as gathered together and held by the mother. The individual arises from a condition of absolute environmental dependence, and in this condition talk of monads is senseless. Thus the famous, or notorious, words:

There is no such thing as an infant, meaning, of course, that whenever one finds an infant one finds maternal care, and without maternal care there would be no infant[19]

On one side there is the absolutely dependent infant, on the other the mother in the grip of what Winnicott calls her 'primary maternal preoccupation', deeply attuned to her infant's requirements (and so herself dependent and vulnerable[20]). The individual emerges slowly from an environment of total maternal care. If things go well the stage of absolute dependence becomes one of relative dependence. There is 'a disentanglement of maternal care from something which we then call the infant.'[21], and all things being equal from here there is a move towards full independence. But it is always a movement towards independence, for in its absolute realisation (as for Wittgentein’s aspirant private language speaker) independence defeats itself in its withdrawal from the world:

Independence is never absolute, the healthy individual does not become isolated, but becomes related to the environment in such a way that the individual and the environment can be said to be interdependent.[22]

This where Winnicott's intriguing notions of the Transitional Object and Transitional Space enter. Transitional objects are at the same time of both the inner and outer worlds; they are our own, inner and personal, and they are the world's too, outside and public. This duality of existence creates a transitional space, a meeting place of public and private, which constitutes the intermediate area of lived, mystical, experience which exists between the isolating madness of a withdrawal into utter subjectivity and the soul emptying futility of a withdrawal into total objectivity. For Winnicott the 'realist spirit' is not a matter of aspiring to the detached impartiality of the God's Eye View, nor is the appropriate sort of fantasy or illusion its enemy. To constitute a world is, as Plato taught, to relate 'inner' and 'outer' reality and the challenge, and the challenge transitional space is forever called upon to surmount, is that these remain always at a certain distance.

This interweaving of subjective and objective gives Winnicott's answer as to what goes into our real-making. For Winnicott it is only by insisting on the eternal interdependence of Inside and Outside, Me and Not-Me, Objective and Subjective, that we can we hope to provide a coherent account of our sense of the real. It is a striking result of this that our idea of the real becomes an idea of the mystical in my sense. For what counts as real for us turns out to depend, at least in part, on our inner world; on personal patterns of illusion and fantasy which cannot become merely public phenomena without being damaged and lost.

I have argued that Winnicott's psychoanalytic theory is distinguished from its naturalistic rivals by its hostility to the unrestrained publicity rationalism insists on, and a corresponding willingness to allow, and on the most fundamental level, for mystical experience and communication. I have also argued that while Winnicott is concerned with the individual even to the degree of tying the real to certain expression or style of individual fantasy, he does this in the context of rejecting Freud's monadic explanatory account for one in which the individual gradually emerges from a state of absolute environmental dependence. At base human beings are not, as Freud thought, ambivalent animals attempting to construct an always precarious sexual identity in an essentially alien environment, but dependent animals who from an original condition of helplessness, and if things go well, may fulfil their developmental potential and come to inhabit a life which has meaning for them. The value of life, as Winnicott reports his clients, lies in feeling real, not primarily in id-satisfaction.

These elements come together in Winnicott in a way which is endlessly intriguing. To take just one instance, his account of the emergence of the individual promises to make psychological and ontogenic sense of the Platonic thesis of the priority of the Good, and sense too to the further Platonic claim that this Good can only be fully conceived in a mystical or transcendent way. In the Winnicottian account the ontological priority of the Good becomes the claim that the world must present itself first, and forever in underlying fantasy, as favourably disposed towards the agent, while its mystical aspect follows from this ontogenic priority and its embedding in individual fantasy. At bottom Reality is Good Reality‑is the Good, the True, the Beautiful. But where Plato embeds this insight into an account which savagely opposes appearance and reality to the sorrow of the former, for Winnicott reality emerges from a world of personal omnipotence, so a world of appearance entire to itself, free from the limiting friction of anything outside, though also, and at the same time, entirely dependent on the provisions of that outside.

This complexity brings Winnicott into contact with a more Kantian tradition. For as Winnicott defends the real by setting it, from the point of view of the emergent subject, within a prior and sustaining sphere of individual omnipotence, his mysticism becomes the proposal that experience of the real presupposes the truth‑developmental, psychological, and, without going beyond his revisionist reading of naturalism, “metaphysical”‑of something that deserves to be called a Transcendental Subjectivism. It is transcendental because it delineates “the conditions of the possibility” of realistic experience, of experience of our own and the (external) worlds existence. And it is a subjectivism because it is cast in terms of the emergence of the individual as an individual for themselves and in the world; though it is certainly not a variant of the monadic individualism which, in Freudian accounts, tends towards an incredible and, I say, offensive empirical solipsism. The epistemic implications of such a transcendental subjectivism is that the subject, their nature and mode of existence, cannot be finally understood in those terms we use to describe what is—already—real. The language of the already real is that which already lives with the friction of interdependence from which emerges the object-world, and it is the province of Rationalism, but here we are trying to talk about what makes it possible for the object-world to be present to us at all.[23]

It seems right then to see Winnicott's transcendental subjectivism as a variation on Kant's transcendental idealism, and as one which is, in Strawson’s words “domesticated” in that involves reference to ourselves as (in Winnicott’s extended sense) “natural selves”.[24] Thus we do not literally create the world as out of nothing—there is the world-in-itself (but not merely as a theoretical postulate, a Ding an Sich, for we begin our lives in a condition of absolute environmental dependence)—and for the sake of our developing individuality it is crucial that the world is there to receive our communications. We must be able and permitted to make sense of our condition, so to find ourselves and the world. In the idiom of practical reason, these requirements constitute the conditions of the possibility of humanity, of life and experience.

For Winnicott the psychoanalyst the idiom of practical reason seems more fundamental than those of theoretical reason, and rightly so, for things have to get underway, either way. Our sense of the real emerges not as an a priori demand of pure, even pure practical, reason, but in our coming to ourselves, and to the world, and there—naturally—finding it important to pursue a life and to value the real. Interest and value, so meaning itself in all its varied clothes, depend on our ability to find ourselves in the world. And this finding is not a matter of our 'spreading' our mind on to the world, like jam on toast, for there is no mind independent of that 'spreading', nor any toast. It is a matter rather of finding the world as our world. So Winnicott will write:

The object must be found in order to be created. This has to be accepted as a paradox.[25]

While this paradox does not involve us in the absurdities of crude empirical idealism, it does contain the thought that as for what it is we find in the world, and so what it means to us to be in a world, that, crucially, is a matter of what we bring to it. What matters to us is realistic experience, and so a philosophy of the real, and whatever else it must do, must explore the conditions of this experience. Without it, after all, there would not be a question of realism. And where Kant gives us an impersonal psychology of the a priori, with all its attendant mysteries, Winnicott gives us a naturalistic account in developmental psychology, and an account which leads him into sharp contradiction with Freud.

In much philosophical literature the realist is someone who insists that the external world is fully independent of us; more particularly of our epistemic states and procedures.

The objects the realist posits exist and have their character fixed independently of the dispositions of participants in the relevant discourse to assert and believe things about them. Thus the epistemic states of the participants have no causal influence on the existence or character of those objects, nor are the objects non-causally dependent—say, dependent in a supervenient way—on such epistemic states. In short, the entities posited in the discourse enjoy a substantial kind of objectivity.[26]

It follows that that about which we must live, think, and move, depends in no way for its existence and character on the merely human. Ontology is distinct from, and prior to, epistemology, and thus, in a deep sense, the real is something fundamentally alien to humanity.

Winnicott does not oppose this conception of the real. While he rejects its explanatory imperialism, he insists not merely that it is vital to science, but that it is crucial for our sense of empirical reality, and so our own empirical nature. By embracing the Kantian insight he does not reject the truth captured in empirical realism, but explains it. His contribution is to show how the empirical understanding of the world depends in the beginning and indeed forever in fantasy, on our taking that world as not merely made for us, which is bad enough from the point of view of the secular realist, but made by us, and so something it is in our power to destroy. If the philosophical realist insists that the world of objects must be discovered, and not created (let alone to be destroyed), Winnicott shows how the very idea of the real involves the latter. What lies at the heart of our sense of a real world is only that which is in our power. In traditional theology God out of his omnipotence created the world in which we must live, in Winnicott's alternative the infant, in the right circumstances, creates the world out of his omnipotence, and there he must live.

It is natural after reading Winnicott to connect up the idea of the real with the idea of home, in particular of being at home, and so being at home, and this is a crucial connection for him. The self that feels real and which he calls the 'True Self' is the self at home with itself. And the point holds for external objects; indeed, it is the same point approached from another direction. It is only when we are at home in the environment that we can allow ourselves to recognise and appreciate its independent existence. At home we can comprehend the truth of realism, and so prepare ourselves for its inevitable frustrations. At heart (or hearth) the realist spirit is a domestic prerogative. But if the realist spirit in its continuing beginning is always at home with itself, why is it that in philosophy it is perpetually threatened with exile?

If we ask why philosophy involves a dialogue with reality-denying scepticism, then a crucial part of the answer is simply that realism lives in the realist spirit, and that spirit continues to move (in) us. The divisions, the boundaries, between the Real and the Unreal, Appearance and Reality, Subject and Object, Inner and Outer, Me and Not-Me, Private and Public, are central to experience, and only through them do we constitute and sustain our identity in the world. The puzzle of philosophy is that they are not, as they matter to us, liable to a merely sceptical dissolution. This is what Hume is discovering when he notes, and responds with an ironical detachment, to the way scepticism seems to him philosophically irrefutable, but disappears and without trace when he closes the study door behind him and sets out to play backgammon with his friends. This image, with its domestic flavour, is pleasantly apt. It is when he is at home in the world and with others, that things seem irrefutably real. Winnicott (leaving aside some difficulties with time) could have helped him understand this.

To understand the ontogenesis of that domestic spirit which is realism Winnicott is forced to go deeper and further back in his developmental psychology than Freud. In the usual psychoanalytic stories theory begins with the infant as a bearer of instinctual demands which she brings to an already existing world; a world which, existing in itself, possesses for the subject a fearfully inscrutable power. I mean here a world which already exists for her, more accurately, against her, a transcendent world, with nothing immanent in it. Thus Freud loads up a monad with various instinctual drives and sets it adrift in a world of independent objects, leading to the view that frustration not only mediates our sense of the real but, at the very deepest level, constitutes it, so that it is the nature of reality to frustrate, and this is something we know to our (now sceptical and superstitious) bones. It means too, to the delight of rationalist generalisers, that our particular relationship to the world and its objects is essentially unimportant. As our real concern is with instinct and its satisfaction, substitute objects may do just as well.

To Winnicott's way of seeing things, the Freudian world mirrors the Hobbesian State of Nature. In the latter state nothing is permanent. No-one (not even oneself) is reliably trustworthy, and everyone and anyone may be the agent of our annihilation. Equally while the Freudian world will not, one hopes, invariably frustrate us as if it were positively malicious (though this is not an unnatural line of thought), its implacable hostility lies in the way it both refuses any intimate or essential connection with us—everything is substitutable, nothing is permanent—and insists on its right always to frustrate any purpose we may have. In both worlds we are in that 'State of Nature' Hobbes characterised as a State of War, where the capacity to relax is a deadly danger, and reliability always a desperate illusion. In such circumstances, Hobbes says, life is not worth living, but nasty, brutish and short, in the Freudian object-world it is, at the very least, pretty nasty. In a such a world our existence is rendered conditional on the favour of objects which systematically refuse to make personal contact with us. This is a world which refuses to let us find anything of ourselves in it and confronts us as an alien territory. This alienness is not an example of mystical transcendence, but a reflection of our total vulnerability. The fear, as in the State of Nature, is of annihilation, not the Freudian bagatelle of (mere) frustrated desire.

In part Winnicott objects to the bleak Freudian vista on humanitarian grounds just as many people quite rightly object to Hobbes. But beneath this is the idea that the Freudian beginning really makes no sense of our sense of the real at all (and so no sense of our concern with realism), just as Hobbes' brutes would have lacked all idea of a social contract. In criticising the Freudian account Winnicott's key point is that a rather sophisticated level of integration on the part of the subject is simply assumed. Those drives with which the infant confronts the world are supposed to be forces to which it is already committed. And being committed it has no choice but to leap into a frustrating involvement with the object-world. But a self that can commit itself to that which delivers at best a profoundly ambivalent relationship to things has already come a long way. To see how far consider for a moment what it is to make demands of the world: what it is to have, and using the term for any affective orientation to the world, a desire.

In philosophy it is common to characterise the psychological state of desiring by talking of its 'direction of fit' with the world. This is a metaphor, but it is not mysterious: whereas the psychological state of believing is one in which our aim is to fit our thought to the world, in desiring our aim is to make the world conform to our demands. In desiring, rather than our being obedient to the world as belief requires, it is as if we are laying claim to the worlds obedience (at the very least, we claim the possibility of rational agency). We require of it, and require of it as prospective agents, that it be, or become, a certain way, and if it refuses us here then naturally we are frustrated. This, it would seem, is Freud's idea. But how is it we feel able to level a claim to the worlds obedience? How is it that we see the world as a venue for purposive action, and so ourselves as agents? After all, it remains that we just do confront a world of independent objects.

As with any claim to obedience, desiring expresses both a confidence in ourselves as agents of command, and, equally, a certain confidence in the obedience of the world. Desire reflects, and is conditional on, a certain ontological security, a security with the world, and, at the same time and nowhere else, a security with oneself. One claims the obedience essential to agency only when sustained by a faith, however despairing it may have become, that one will be heard and what is needed given in return. If this faith goes missing, or never appears in the first place, there is not a frustrated desire: there is no desire, and here at least, no desiring subject. Take this faith away on a wide enough front and by annihilating their world you annihilate a person.

The capacity to make demands of the world, Winnicott argues, means being able to see our desires as sources of possibility for us. Only this way can we make sense of their being there for us, so available for (potential) frustration. The primordial promise of desire is not the disillusionment of frustration as the world denies us contact, but, and necessarily, the world's enrichment of the self. In desire is expressed the fundamental belief that allowing ourselves to feel and act a certain way will bring us good, so also that the world will understand us and meet us a whole lot closer than half way. Of course the world is not made for us, and this is what we must learn. The paradox is that to learn this we must begin with and forever carry the opposite faith. Only if it is our world is it (able to be) not ours. We understand this paradox, this mystical insertion in, and creation of, the world, even if we do not explain it away, when we think of things in developmental terms.

The desiring individual, ready to lay demands on, so to recognise, the world, arises in and from an initial situation of absolute environmental dependence. (One can think of this as the brutal truth of metaphysical realism.) This beginning in absolute dependence means that development is conditional on a properly adaptive environmental provision.

Without someone specifically orientated to his needs, the infant cannot find a working relationship to external reality.[27]

This someone—the 'good-enough mother'—must be at the same time acutely attuned to the infants needs, and benevolent and reliable in dealing with them.

At the beginning the infant is in a position of 'primary unintegration' (this should be compared with Rousseau's picture of man in the state of nature), a bundle of disconnected feelings whose id-demands are as yet not only something it is not yet committed to, but which strike it like a hit or a clap of thunder, as yet neither inside nor outside, and needing to be contained in the infant if they are not to activate the terrifying defence of disintegration.[28] Rather than potentially annihilative intrusions which threaten what he calls the infants 'going-on-being'—that is, its capacity to hold and so live through its experiences, so for it to have a life and to live it—they must be taken into the infant and become owned as its desires. 'The rider', says Winnicott, in an image like, but importantly different from Plato's, (for there are two actors, not three; and it is a matter of riding not driving) 'must ride the horse, not be run away with.'[29] And for this to happen the infants unintegrated id-demands must be (re)presented to it, at the right time and in the right way.

This is done at first through 'good enough mothering'. Through her empathic adaptation to her infant the good enough mother is able to make sense of its id-forces for it. As it were, she collects them together and, through her reliable and understanding benevolence, gives them back to the infant in a way that does not exceed its capacity to contain them. Winnicott calls the mother under this aspect the environment-mother, and to begin with and always in fantasy she is at the primitive heart of our sense of the real. With her we are truly at home. Here, if we want, we may exercise our right to make demands, secure in their provision. Or we may make no demands and relax, for when we are absolutely safe we can afford to be alone with ourselves and to renew contact with our personal life. Only with a sustaining belief in a benign environment can we start to feel real, and feeling real ourselves, are we ready for the external world.

The adaptiveness of the mother gives the infant the opportunity to develop a primary or properly basic belief in the real, and this belief is both the condition and the refutation of scepticism. If we look at the refutation from the point of view of the infant, the reason is again a paradox; for what is in fact a state of absolute environmental dependence, of complete vulnerability, is experienced by the infant as its rightful omnipotence. In truth it is not really God's omnipotence, for there is nothing especially knowing about it. It arises rather from a magical lack of friction between the infants id-fantasy and its realisation in the object-world; an absence of ontological slippage between the desire and the presentation of its object. Thus Winnicott imagines that when the infant is hungry he fantasises a satisfying breast, at which point the real breast is made available by the mother. Through the mother's empathic identification with the desire of her infant he can believe, when he is hungry, that he has made what he has, in fact, found. But this essential moment of illusion requires the overlap of two inner worlds:

I think of this process, as if two lines came from opposite directions, liable to come near each other. If they overlap there is a moment of illusion—a bit of the experience which the infant can take as either his hallucination or a thing belonging to external reality.[30]

This necessity for a foundational and frictionless experience of transitivity between the creative omnipotence of the subject and objective reality is the reason Winnicott insists that first contact with external reality happens in a moment of illusion.

At the start simple contact with external or shared reality has to be made by the infants hallucinating and the world's presenting, with moments of illusion for the infant in which the two are taken by him to be identical, which they never in fact are.[31]

Fantasy, indeed the essentially religious fantasy of creative omnipotence, is, it seems, the route to the real. If we wish, as at times we all do, to talk impersonally, to construct a public world in which we reveal only that which everyone might know, then there is nothing to be said against it. But we should not forget that even this world can lose its reality, can lose its meaning, if it is not continually (re)created in those fantasies of self/object identity on which the realistic spirit depends.

If the possibility of our sense of the real originates in the fantasy of creative omnipotence as it is (from our point of view, invisibly) held and protected by the environment-mother, our sense of those particular opaque and resistant objects which populate the real world arises through the fantasy of the omnipotent destruction of the object-mother, with the breast the first target of this natural aggression. Here is where, considering things from the point of view of the emerging individual, transcendental subjectivism comes together with empirical realism. Winnicott presents the connection in a jokey dialogue:

The subject says to the object: 'I destroyed you', and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: 'Hello object!' 'I destroyed you. 'I love you. You have value for me because of your survival of my destruction of you. While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy.[32]

To understand this mock dialogue it helps to introduce with its Winnicottian name something we have been obliquely dealing with all along. This is the idea of the True Self.[33]

The True Self appears in a number of ways in Winnicott's thought, but the crucial point here is that the True Self is not to be distinguished from the infant's initial right to omnipotence. This omnipotence, for Winnicott, is a manifestation of the infants aliveness, and it finds its first expression in the infants spontaneous gestures and sensory hallucinations (in Sartrean language the True Self is the infants pour moi). The True Self, Winnicott says, is 'essentially not reactive to external stimuli, but primary'. He sometimes calls it our primary creativity, and it is at the basis of our capacity to feel real (and, in the full story, at the basis of our capacity for meaningful experience of any kind, moral, aesthetic, political and religious). It is this capacity for internally generated spontaneity (as it were, for imagination, rather than mere fantasy) which the good-enough mother protects and nurtures in the period of absolute dependence. And it is this spontaneity which has the potential to make objects real to us. The problem Winnicott sets himself is to see how this primary creativity makes contact with external objects without undermining the formative confidence the infant has in his power to act in the world. If this is lost then creativity is given over to the reactive imperatives of compliance, then at best independence becomes the sort of collusive unreality Rousseau stigmatises as amour propre, at worst it becomes an active disintegration as creativity tries, hopelessly, to sustain itself by turning on itself.[34]

Winnicott describes the transition from primary omnipotence to the object-world as between two ways of relating to objects. In the first way the object is within our omnipotence and offers no ontological resistance, in the second way it is placed outside omnipotent control, so available to be found and used. Successfully managing the move from the first to the second way of contacting the world is described by Winnicott as, 'the most difficult thing, perhaps, in human development'. And for it to happen both object and subject must co-operate. This co-operation involves the object in surviving and without retaliation, the full blast of the infants primary omnipotence. We might call this non-retaliatory survival the primordial acknowledgment of the object-world. If the object allows itself to be destroyed the infants omnipotence is not compromised, and if it retaliates, if it determinedly rejects the infants claim on it, then it undermines the infants formative confidence in the world and forces it into a reality-denying and precocious compliance.[35]

This necessity for a precocious compliance if the individual is to survive is the origin of what Winnicott calls the False Self, a notion that may be usefully compared with Rousseau's idea of the self structured by amour propre. I shall not have much to say about the False Self, though much could be said. The False Self 'results in a feeling unreal or a sense of futility'; and the basic idea seems to be that in the conditions of full environmental compliance the individual cannot, and cannot afford, to think of themselves as set apart from the world which, in turn, is set apart from them. Under pressure to live and develop in an hostile world the individual is forced in their vulnerability to a reactive identification with that hostility, undermining the conditions of a genuine interdependence. Those objects, on the other hand, which are resilient and in a non-retaliatory way, allow the infant the illusion that he has placed them outside the limits of his omnipotence. He has loosed them from his control in somewhat the way God must be imagined to have loosed Adam and Eve from his control. This illusion—and we have always hoped the same of God—allows the child to keep the objects alive as part of their personal life at the same time as recognising their independent existence. These resilient and non-retaliatory objects are what Winnicott calls Transitional Objects, and they are the bridge between the subjective and the objective.

Sooner or later in an infant's development there comes a tendency on the part of the infant to weave other-than-me objects into the personal pattern.[36]

Being woven into the personal pattern, these objects, while observable by others, do not, and cannot, have the same significance for them. They have meaning, and meaning as external objects, only through the necessarily personal fantasy of omnipotent destruction. This is why Winnicott insists that 'Fantasy is more primary than reality, and the enrichment of fantasy with the world's riches depends on the experience of illusion.'[37]

The primordial example of a transitional object is, of course, the mother as object-mother, in particular the breast, but he also explains the notion in terms of that particular toy or object the infant claims for itself and which is indispensable for it. Think of Linus and his blanket. This object cannot be imposed on the infant and though it may have been given him cannot be given to him as a Transitional Object but only as something he may choose to turn into one. This teddy-bear, or blanket, or whatever, is a public object, but still entirely the infants, to be loved and destroyed by him, and to survive all this without retaliation.

To this point we have described how the realist spirit arises and comes to a populated reality. What we have not done is show how philosophical concerns with the real arise from this, nor to this stage, could we have done this. For the realistic spirit is, as we have seen, a domestic prerogative, and to describe it is to describe it at home with itself. But that very description shows us too how it might come about that the realist spirit never manages to achieve a genuine domesticity, so that the real is always on the verge of abandoning us. As Winnicott's writes in his one explicit discussion of 'The Philosophy of "Real"'.

I would put it this way. Some babies are fortunate enough to have a mother whose initial active adaptation to their infant's need was good enough.. This enables them to have the illusion of actually finding what was created (hallucinated). Eventually, after a capacity for relationships has been established, such babies can take the next step towards recognition of the essential aloneness of the human being. Eventually such a baby grows up to say 'I know that there is no direct contact between external reality and myself, only an illusion of contact, a midway phenomenon that works very well for me when I am not tired. I couldn't care less that there is a philosophical problem involved.'

Babies with slightly less fortunate experiences are really bothered by the idea of there being no direct contact with external reality. A sense of threat of loss of capacity for relationships hangs over them all the time. For them the philosophical problem becomes and remains a vital one, a matter of life and death, of feeding or starvation, of love or isolation.[38]

Winnicott does not deny that there are 'philosophical problems' with realism—how could there not be when everything arises from a paradox?—but like Wittgenstein he thinks that the pursuit of such problems as problems reflects a kind of pathology of existence in which both self and world manifest an obsessive distrust of each other, endangering the reality of both. Like Wittgenstein he understands philosophical concerns with realism not as primary—the realist spirit is primary, and without its paradoxical being no philosophical concerns exist—but as secondary elaborations of an underlying ontological insecurity.

¹ Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) was Physician with his own department at Paddington Green Children’s Hospital for 40 years. His interests gradually changed from physical paediatrics to psychiatry. He was analysed by James Strachey and Joan Riviere, and twice became President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.

[2] Donald Winnicott (1896-1971) was Physician with his own department at Paddington Green Children’s Hospital for 40 years. His interests gradually changed from physical paediatrics to psychiatry. He was analysed by James Strachey and Joan Riviere, and twice became President of the British Psycho-Analytical Society.

[3] I prefer this to the 'religious', for I do not wish to suggest that that which naturalism wrongly excludes is in any special metaphysical sense, supernatural.

[4] Often mysticism is defined in terms of its (ineffable) content (that 'All is One', or 'All is One Organism', or 'Life is Eternal' etc.) rather than its reflective self-understanding as a form of thought. This is a mistake. Mysticism matters to us as it fits into our lives, and necessarily these lives are not limited to the mystical experience.

[5] It is just this that tempts some—including the early Wittgenstein—to read mysticism as reflecting nothing more than our imperfect understanding of the inadequacies of natural language.

[6] Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), S243.

[7] This talk presupposes, not opposes, that 'natural' unity of mind Wittgenstein establishes as the condition of language.

[8] S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, tr. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 182.

[9] D.W. Winnicott, 'Morals and Education", in his The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment, (London: Karnac Books, 1990), p. 93.

[10] Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 6.53.

[11] In the Tractatus Wittgenstein wrote (6.522):

'There are, indeed, things which cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.'

In the Investigations he agrees that such things cannot be said in the bluff and undiscriminating tones of public intelligibility, but it is a key theme of the later work that there is much more to language, and so to what we might say and set ourselves to say, than is allowed in this uncompromisingly severe conception.

[12] In the Tractatus art, ethics and religion are relegated to the realm of that which is and should always remain silent, which makes it very hard to see what, for instance, an artist is trying to do in doing anything. Here is Winnicott's subtler view of the relationship of silence and expressive communication in the case of the artist. The mystical is not just a withdrawal from the world, but is twinned with a need to be in the world:

'In the artist of all kinds one can detect an inherent dilemma, which belongs to the co-existence of two trends, the urgent need to communicate and the still more urgent need not to be found. This might account for the fact that we cannot conceive of an artist's coming to the end of the task that occupies his whole nature.'

(Winnicott, 'Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites', in The Maturational Process and the Facilitating Environment, p. 185. Those familiar with Freud's thought will appreciate the radical character of Winnicott's suggestion.)

[13] D.W. Winnicott: a Reflection', by Clare Winnicott, in S. Grolnick (ed.), Between Reality and Fantasy, (London: Jason Aronson, 1978).

[14] Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), p. 42.

[15] 'Communicating and Not Communicating', op. cit., p. 179.

[16] Ibid., p. 187. Cf, Ibid, p. 190:

'Adolescents eschew psycho-analytic treatment, though they are interested in psycho-analytic theories, because their preservation of personal isolation is part of the search for identity, and for the establishment of a personal technique of communication which does not lead to a violation of the central self.'

[17] 'Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena', in his Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psycho-Analysis, (London: Tavistock, 1958), p. 231.

[18] Certainly not a being who, from the start, is capable of intelligently contemplating a social contract.

[19] Ibid., quoted by Masud Khan, p. xxxvii. Cf. D. W. Winnicott, 'Further Thoughts on Babies as Persons', The Child, the Family, and the Outside World, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), p. 88.

[20] Some are prone to thinking Winnicott lays all responsibility and so all (potential) fault and blame on the mother or primary carer, but this is a clear mistake. The point is not only that the infant brings his or her own innate developmental capacities to the interaction, but that for the mother to be receptive to the infant's requirements she must be allowed by others, by her partner and the society, to identify with the infant.

[21] 'The Theory of the Parent-Infant Relationship', in The Maturational Processes, op. cit., p. 40.

[22] 'From Dependence Towards Independence in the Development of the Individual', in The Maturational Processes, op. cit., p. 84.

[23] Cf. Wittgenstein, TLP 6.44:

'It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.'

[24] Sir Peter Strawson, “Kant’s Philosophy of Mind”, in R. L. Gregory (ed.) The Oxford Companion to the Mind, (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1989), p. 408.

[25] 'Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena', op. cit., p. 234.

[26] Phillip Pettit, 'Realism and Response-Dependence', in Peter Menzies (ed.), Response-Dependent Concepts, (Working Paper in Philosophy 1, RSS, ANU, 1991), p. 7.

[27] 'Residential Management as Treatment for Difficult Children', in his Deprivation and Delinquency, (London: Tavistock, 1984), p. 58.

[28] Cf. 'Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self', The Maturational Processes, op. cit., pp. 140-152.

[29] 'The Location of Cultural Experience', op. cit., p. 116.

[30] My Italics.

[31] 'Group Influences and the Maladjusted Child', in his, The Family and Individual Development, (London: Tavistock, 1964), p. 154.

[32] 'The Use of an Object and Relating Through Identifications', in his Playing and Reality, (London: Tavistock, 1971), p 106.

[33] Talk of the 'true' and the 'false' self is antithetical to Freudians, to whom it seems unscientific and implicitly moralistic. Winnicott rejects the claim of unscientific practice and is unconcerned with the normative charge of the terms. His conception of psychological explanation is not the Freudian conception, which he considers flawed by its attachment to the predictive aspirations of the physical sciences. His preferred model of explanation is that championed for natural history generally by Stephen J. Gould. Winnicott argues for the possibility of explanation without strict predictive power in order to recognise the way history is itself irreducibly 'enfolded' into the subject-matter. Equally the normative charge seems just what is needed, for Winnicott takes his terms here, and their existential value loading, from the reports of his patients on the nature of their life and experience.

[34] In an Orwellian world there is no—there is no space for—philosophical concerns for the real. A full account of the concept of the real cannot then ignore the conditions under which the concept is potentially available, and those under which it is not.

[35] Survival-without-retaliation then is the ontological condition necessary if omnipotence is to escape empty fantasy for creative imagination.

[36] 'Transitional Objects', op. cit., p. 233.

[37] 'Group Influence and the Maladjusted Child', op. cit., p. 153.

[38] Winnicott, Human Nature, (London: Free Association Books, 1988), pp. 114-115.

The Presence of Worship in Ibn Arabi’s Ontology and Theology

Laith Al-Saud, USA

Abstract

Amidst the wide ranging spectrum of Ibn Arabi’s work, including his ontology and theology, the common theme of worship emerges, suggesting its important role in his delineation of the Muslim’s religious experience. When the breath of Ibn Arabi’s work is appreciated with the hope of glimpsing a systematic theme, we find worship to be the essential motive of the constant and dynamic manifestation of the cosmos, as well as the growth and perfection of man.

All those even remotely familiar with the vast corpus of Ibn Arabi’s work are well aware of the difficulty in systematizing his philosophy. Yet scholars have continually tried to do so, perhaps less out of disregard for the nature of Ibn Arabi’s work, than as an attempt to make applicable and accessible his philosophy. Nowhere is this trend more evident than in the realm of ibada’ or Islamic worship, where the entire concept of worship serves as a means of spiritual and intellectual realization and attainment of knowledge. Worship serves as a fundamental tenant in Islam, as it does of course elsewhere; however, for Ibn Arabi worship unveils reality as the object of Islam, its purpose and mission. Philosophy, and I think it is fair to describe Ibn Arabi as a philosopher (amongst many things: mystic, theologian, and jurist), has as its object of intention reality; and as such is always concerned with the state of epistemological endeavors and their capacity to reveal truth. Ibn Arabi is no different in this regard and epistemology was one of his chief concerns; however, his masterful synthesis of Islamic theology (as well as practice) and ma’rifa has left a most indelible mark on Muslim and non-Muslim thinkers search for certainty and truth. Ibn Arabi’s newly appreciated status amongst the world’s great thinkers, both in the East and West, is in large part due to the failure of Western philosophy to defeat skepticism and provide a viable philosophy by which man may relate to one another, and ultimately, the cosmos. Within the context of Ibn Arabi’s work, the spirituality he is appreciated for is related to providing an unswerving foundation of Islamic theology, inducing a genuine Islamic state of knowledge.

The World and Withdrawal

Perhaps the only statement we could make regarding Sheik Al-Arabi’s cosmology emphatically and with little risk of offending his intentions or misinterpreting his work is the centrality of the oneness of Being (and even that “oneness” would be difficult to capture). How man comprehends this unity, especially confronted with apparent multiplicity, is the driving force of Ibn Arabi’s remarks and observations. Pluralistic or even dualistic concepts (Creator-created or infinite-finite) are illusions of the limited comprehension of man. However, such an impression about Reality is hardly a fault or even arbitrary, but rather a necessary feature of the world. That is, the illusion of plurality is imposed by the imagination, not as deceitful, but rather as a functioning feature of Being. Man’s faculty of imagination serves as the foundation for imposing and achieving meaning in the world. Between the world of the unseen and the world of the visible, the void of comprehension and understanding is filled by imagination, thereby, bridging the intellectual gap between man’s similarity with ultimate Reality and his incomparability with Reality.[1]

The outcome of imagination or meaning, more often than not, is the transfixation of the Absolute into a theologically accorded image or concept that corresponds with a particular conception of the Divine. It is often this conception of the Divine that acts as the “object” of worship. This “binding” of God, however, into a socio-historical object of belief, or rather a “fixed image” of theology, delimits the Absolute and contextualizes His Essence.[2] Such a transfixation furthermore sets boundaries on the possibility of human knowledge. It is these boundaries and limitations that are the cause of theological incoherence, philosophical shortcomings and personal estrangement. The root and foundation of human knowledge for Ibn Arabi is the heart, not as a physical enti