- Mahmoud Khatami
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Mahmoud Khatami محمود خاتمی 
Full name Mahmoud Khatami محمود خاتمی Born 
IranianEra 21st-century philosophy Region Philosophy School Existential philosophy
OnteticsMain interests Metaphysics · Subjectivity
Morality · AestheticsEpistemology ·Notable ideas Ontetic Philosophy
"Human Subjectivity and Action"Influenced by- Persian Illuminative Philosophy · Mulla Sadra · Phenomenology ·
Mahmoud Khatami(Persian: محمود خاتمی) (b. January 4, 1963 in Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian philosopher. He is best known for developing "Ontetic Philosophy."
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Early life
Mahmoud Khatami grew up in Tehran. Showing an early interest in humanities, he attended the Seminary of Islamic Studies which gained him the traditional degree of Ijtihad, the highest level in Islamic religious and theological learning. Concurrently, he attended the University of Tehran to pursue his secular education for both a BA and MA in philosophy, a MTh in Islamic theology, and finally a PhD in philosophy. Afterwards, he continued his post-graduate studies in University of Durham, England, where he was awarded his second PhD and post- doc.
Returning to Iran, he was appointed to the Department of Philosophy at University of Tehran in 1997 where he is now a Professor of Contemporary Philosophy. In 2002, he was appointed as Fellow of Iran’s Academy of the Arts. In the meantime, Khatami has been invited, and visiting professor at Iranian as well as Western universities, and has been rewarded and awarded for his academic excellence both inside and outside Iran.
Philosophical influences and development
Trained in phenomenology as well as classical Islamic philosophy, and profoundly affected by the philosophies of Suhrawardi and Mulla Sadra, and encouraged by philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Khatami developed a distinctive approach that rejects subjectivism and relativism, abjures any simple notion of interpretive method, and focuses on the study of the nature of being.
His work is concentrated in the development of what Khatami terms "ontetic philosophy", encompassing cognitive and conative aspects of being. Khatami's main concern is humanity and human being. His works provide a specific interpretation of humanity, the self and consciousness, and an understanding of the idea of subjectivity. Khatami argues for the efficiency of action as primordial constituent of human being.His philosophy provides an account of the proper ground for human subjectivity while rejecting modern subjectivism. This is not a rejection of modern concerns, but an insistence on the limit of modern understanding.He has also worked intensively on morality and religion as well as the theory and application of art. Khatami's thinking began and remained connected with the Persian thought. The "Persian" character of Khatami's approach is evident, not merely in the central theoretical role he gives to the concept of philosophy in his thinking, but also in his own personal commitment to intellectual engagement and exchange. Indeed, he is one of the few philosophers for whom the "Persian" has become a significant category to "supply" a positive output of modern philosophy. His early engagement with this tradition determined much of the character and direction of his thinking.
Ontetic philosophy
Coined by Khatami himself, the term "ontetic" does not merely mean "ontological" or "existential" in the western sense; in addition to these, this term also means "fuzzy" and "hierarchic". It indicates the order of Being and its purity. Consequently, the ontetic philosophy is the intellectual articulation of human approach toward a complete grasp of the order of Being. "ontetic" in his terminology refers to the old understanding Persian conception of light which simultaneously indicates being,consciousness,life and action. this conception constituted on a graded logic which is called in hiss terminology the logic of "Tashkik". All the way, this conception and logic is fundamental for human being and his relations. Being contemplated by philosophy is expressed by man himself, and therefore man's relations with the world, as also with Him, become central for the sphere of philosophy. Man is an acting subject, a free agent, capable of choosing between various ends compatible with the circumstances of his life, and insofar he is responsible for those relations; and, on the other hand, he has an end appointed him by nature which is obligatory upon him as his moral end. A philosophical knowledge of the world, then, must entail a philosophical knowledge or thorough explanation of the reasons of man's duties flowing from his relation to things and to Him.
Furthermore, man has the power of reflecting on his own knowledge; as is seen from the fact that the understanding of what knowledge is, is distinct from knowledge, that the study of the logical structure of science is distinct from the knowledge he acquires of real things. Hence do we arrive at the more comprehensive definition, that philosophy is the full understanding of the order of Being, and in its shadow, of man's situation in it, and of his moral duties and responsibilities resulting from it, and of his knowledge of reality.
Khatami's concept of philosophy requires man to be central for the philosophical discussion, and he is faithful to this requirement. However, he enters to the philosophy scene from the "modernity door." Influenced by Heidegger, Khatami radically understands modernity as a subjectivistic process in which a very specific concept of man has developed. He writes: "Heidegger who questioned the subjectivistic foundation of modern concept of man and the world called for an original thinking to determine what and how man is." Khatami tries to respond to his quest. Not dealing with Heidegger's answer, but not disregarding it, Khatami suggests an otherwise notion of Man and Subjectivity by stepping back toward Persian illuminative thought within which he tries to glimpse a hint of a human subject which is the source of the world, and even created and in this respect he is nothing without God, yet he is eternal, absolute, prior to the world, master of the world, and all the things are manifested from his light.
Khatami's reference to this perspective provides "an interesting frame, and a spur to look for patterns that other accounts of the material treated in modern time were likely to miss." In this matter, Khatami offers a hermeneutic reading of the conception of Man in the Persian illuminative philosophy. Khatami innovatively inquires about the potential philosophical possibilities by virtue of which this philosophy would assist the current debates that attempt to overcome the influences of modern subjectivism on the conception of Man, of his self and of his subjectivity. To reach this goal, Khatami has reconstructed a method tacitly employed by Mulla Sadra in his doctrine of the illuminative existentialism.
This reconstruction happens to Khatami in the light of Persian Illuminative Philosophy and his hermeneutic assessment of phenomenology. Khatami's chief aim of this reconstruction was to present a transcendent notion of fuzzy reduction that is crucial for his discussion of his ontetic model. Herein, his hermeneutic reading of Sadra’s philosophy is set within a broader consideration of the course of development of theories of subjectivity as manifested in the works of Descartes, Hume, Kant, and Husserl. In this context, he reaches the conclusion that the modern conception of subjectivity, that has no corresponding field of experience, or of empirically based qualities, does not amount to being more than a vacuous concept.
Against this, Khatami shows how he is able to overcome this conception in the name of an ontetic subjectivity gained by stepping back to the Persian traditional philosophy. There are two crucial elements to Khatami's appropriation of Persian philosophy: first, the focus on cognition, and the connection of cognition with Being; second, the focus on Being itself as the event of prior and partial disclosure in which we are already involved and that can never be made completely transparent. Both of these elements are connected with Khatami's response to the subjectivist element in modern thought. By turning back to the direct experience, and to the concept of Being as prior and partial disclosure, Khatami was able to develop an alternative to subjectivism that also connected with the ideas taken from Suhravardi, and Mulla Sadra, and of the hermeneutical ontology of Heidegger.
Just as the human being is taken as central and determining in the experience of Being, so is cognition similarly determined by the matter to be recognized; as the experience of Being reveals, not in spite of, but precisely because of the way it also conceals, so cognition is possible, not in spite of, but precisely because of its prior involvement. In Khatami's theory, the concept of "presence" has an important role here. Khatami takes presence as the basic clue to Being, emphasizing the way in which presence something that has its own order and structure to which man is given over. Presence has obvious affinities with all of the other concepts at issue in his ontetic philosophy. Indeed, one can take it as providing slightly different elaboration of what is essentially the same basic conception of mind that takes our finitude, that is, our prior involvement and partiality, not as a barrier to human "being", but rather as its enabling condition. It is this conception that is worked out in detail in Sadraean Meditations.
One might react to Khatami's emphasis on our "ontetic presence" involvement, that such involvement cannot but remain subjectivistic simply on the grounds that it is always determined to experience things in certain ways rather than others. Such an objection can be seen as a simple reiteration of the basic tendency towards subjectivism that Khatami rejects, but Khatami also takes issue directly with this view, and the negative connotations often associated with the notion, arguing that, rather than closing us off, our presence is what open us up to what is to be recognized.
In Sadraean Meditations and in From a Sadraean Point of View, Khatami redeploys the notion of our presence as it is worked out in more particular fashion than in Sadra's Asfar. Khatami's positive conception of presence can be seen as connected with a number of different ideas in his philosophy. The way in which our presence opens us up to matter at issue in such a way that our presence capable of being revised exhibits the character of this concept, and its role in human life. The ontetic priority Khatami assigns to presence is also tied to Khatami's emphasis on the priority of the question in the structure of human being. Moreover, the indispensable role of presence in human being connects directly with Khatami's rethinking of the practical life. All human being are necessarily oriented to present concerns and interests, and it is those present concerns and interests that allow us to enter into the communication with the world. The presence character of man means that, he is involved in a connection that encompasses both his own self-realization and his cognition of the environment. Our self-realization and cognition always occurs against the background of this prior presence.
On this basis, Khatami thus advances a view of subjectivity that rejects the idea of subjectivity as achieved through modern philosophy that indicates gaining access to some inner realm of subjective meaning. For him, subjectivity is an ongoing process, rather than something that is ever completed, so he also rejects the idea that there is any final determinacy to human subjectivity.
Ontetic model of subjectivity
Briefly, Khatami is seeking for a model of subjectivity capable of meeting modern requirements, and convening the privileges of modern subjectivism, but has more to say about man and its spiritual nature. Regarding this goal, one may organize his endeavour in three steps; first he tries to reevaluate modern subjectivism and ventures to amend it by interpreting the legionnaires of modernity; second, he tries to construe the classic Persian conception of man as an ontetic absolute subject who can be reformulated in modern terms; third, he tries to show a rhezomatic turn in the depth of modern subjectivism toward a neutral spirituality and divinity.
Step one: Rethinking the Transcendental Subjectivity
Supporting Heidegger, Khatami says that modernity is philosophically characterized by subjectivism whose history began with Descartes. Historically speaking, the modern sense of man formulated later by Kant's Copernican Revolution, according to which man become an autonomous agent of knowledge and action. Kant's pluralistic approach to the problem of subject and object relation led him to presuppose a transcendental characteristic for human subjectivity. Khatami considers Kant's "subjectivistic turn" to analyze this characteristic in order to go beyond its formal sense and revise either aspects of subjectivity. While he regards Hegel’s early critique of Kant’s transcendental reflection as a significant step in surpassing the formal approach to the transcendental subjectivity, he nevertheless continues to deformalize the transcendental and consider it as "latent".
Khatami considers that the transcendental is the most important characteristic of the subjectivity. In his view, it is not crucial, for Kant, to know what produces the Being of beings but what determines the objectivity of the object. The existence of the object is not in question, being implied by the very experience of self-consciousness that refutes material idealism (whether problematic or dogmatic in form).
The internal experience by which a person determine his/her own existence in time becomes possible by means of external experience. This internal experience assures one of the existence of exterior objects immediately, making use of a sensible intuition which, according to the Transcendental Aesthetic, "determines my existence solely in relation to given objects." Khatami claims that Kant, by concerning himself with the objectivity of the object - with the intelligibility of the real, escapes the impasses in which Leibniz was caught.
Thus Kant circumvents the problematic passage from the possible to the real by claiming that the real is primarily given, along with self-consciousness. Kant also avoids the pitfall of pre-established harmony, which the consequence of making the universe mental and which reduces the sensible world to being a well-founded appearance; the monad is enclosed in the subjectivity of a psychic development, so that the transition from the monad to the monadology requires a deus ex machina - the operation of a divine wisdom willing the maximum of being at each instant and submitting this being to the laws of compossibility. But Kant avoids the return to metaphysical dogmatism only by introducing the idea of subsumption.
Kantian dualism requires this idea, this "subjective constitution", since it facilitates the subjectivistic relation to the object and construes the justification of "transcendental subjectivity". Khatami tries to introduce the problematic aspect of Kantian project. Khatami's innovative aim here is to show that the transcendental can not be assumed without the empirical, or correctly speaking, the transcendental is implanted in the empirical, in the sense that the transcendental is the structure of the empirical object that appears in experience. This is necessary for Khatami's project of amending of modern subjectivity; because he needs to make the subject concrete to put man as a terminus through which the order of Being is intellectually expressed.
To this end, Khatami extends a complex discussion to show that "it is not the subject who is transcendental or who introduces the transcendental into the given; it is rather the transcendental which introduces itself into the subject. The subject himself is given, and on this condition, the empirical and the transcendental may be conjoined in the subject as a world". Deformalizing the transcendental, he implants it in the empirical as far as it is late; "because we can ask what exemplifies this implantation. The answer may be formulated in such a phrase: the latent make the transcendental appears as given in the experience through the psychological in the form of a pure memory. In fact, the latent signify what is not known at first, what I know only afterwards when I say: I already knew it or I have always known it. In principle, the latent is the presence of the self to self—in Bergsonian terms, the immanence of the past in the present: "that our whole past still exists."
The latent, in Khatami's view, is what I am because I am essentially memory, full of my past; this plenitude is not, however, specified into images, but determines the meaning of my being in the present. Thus bruteness must be understood in reference to being rather than in relation to knowing. Knowledge may also be referred to, if it is defined not as a process of aiming at, but as one of coinciding with: if, that is, it is a manner of being and not a manner of acting or of preparing for action by elaborating of concepts. In this sense, one can say the past is wholly knowledge, or more exactly, self knowledge. It is knowledge to the extent that it is not known i.e., detached from the self in order to be represented - because knowledge here is nothing other than presence to self. Therefore, so far as the latent is concerned, knowledge can only be self knowledge, on the condition that the relation between self consciousness and self knowledge.
To actualize the latent, to give the unconscious access to consciousness without causing it to lose its being as unconscious is generally to realize in another perspective what Kant took to be impossible: a non-objectifying knowledge of the self. And it is also to claim to combine two very different senses of self relation; the relation to oneself as negation of the self - thus as the emptiness which defines selfconsciousness for Sartre, and the relation to oneself as presence to self, hence as the plenitude which defines selfconsciousness for Bergson.
If the latent, when it characterizes knowledge, can be referred to self knowledge, then, this would seem to prevent a latent knowledge of the transcendental so long as the transcendental considered as face of the world, hence as turned toward the world, not toward the self. But if latent knowledge is limited to the self the reason is that seemingly only the self can exist with itself in the relation to presence which here defines knowledge. I am not related to things as I am to myself; when memory is pure, I remember only myself. But when memory begins to become representative and transforms itself into conscious intuition, when intuition is produced with the aid of memory, the knowledge also relates to the world; because here the human monad is not self enclosed and condemned to knowing only itself and the world considered as a mere well founded phenomenon. Knowledge of the self becomes knowledge of the world as well. I am myself present, with the totality of the self, to it. It is in this sense that I know myself: I do not know myself as identical with the object, but as present to it with all my past, and the object is present to me with all its present. The verb "to know" indicates both a dimension of my being and a form of my knowledge. It is true that this knowledge is no longer latent.
Khatami argues that, by attributing the transcendental as latent to memory, we seem to make it empirical. Nevertheless, Khatami retains an ontological meaning for memory. With Bergson, for example, Khatami distinguishes it from the empirical in kind as is distinguished from it by duration, and meanwhile, gives it a cosmological meaning: duration is concentrated and brought together in memory, and duration is creative. By means of memory, Khatami claims, I am not only an heir, but bear my heritage within me: the history of the world; and this is why I am united with the world. In my consciousness, when it is purely unconscious, life knows itself and present to itself: "if you abolish my consciousness, the material universe subsists exactly as it was." Since memory offers to duration the means for achieving itself, Khatami continues to deduce, the life manifesting duration is brought together in me, and the world produced by this life is in a certain sense interior to myself. This meaning that I know is basically the direction that is taken by life, which expects to be extended by me; I know this meaning because I am its terminal point.
Now Khatami serves this cosmology to justify the ontological meaning of memory, a meaning for which memory is not only the recollection of my own history or the résumé of my own experience, but also the very possibility of experience: the transcendental as latent. To say that memory is the bearer of an experience older than me is to say that it always anticipates and conditions what my experience will be. This pre-personal memory, which is not merely the seat of particular memories, but an implicit knowledge, does not belong to me; it is the echo of a past which is not mine or anyone's: the echo of the world so far as I appear in it. It seems to found my personal memory – in the sense that my past can remain present to me only within a broader field of presence having the dimensions of the world. If personal memory, understood as implicit knowledge, is first of all knowledge of self and then knowledge of the object, the converse is true of my pre-personal memory: it is first of all substantial knowledge of the world, a singular disposition to recognize and orient myself in it. And, to Khatami's eye, we can say that it founds the subject, if he is defined in terms of a receptive power possessing the transcendental and opening the individual to the world. Consequently, he infers, when the transcendental is considered in its activity with respect to the object, we must say that it is implicitly known, and in its relation with the subject, it is this implicit knowledge, the latent, itself. Such knowledge is latent in two ways: it waits for experience to be put into operation, and it waits for transcendental reflection to be systematized and made explicit.
This knowledge, according to the formal reality, is the structure of subject. This structure has an activity: it guarantees for the subject a profound being both universal and singular, and it promotes intersubjectivity – understood as the communication of the similar subjects. But its activity is not in Kantian sense: because to say that the transcendental is immediately given in experience is also to escape from an activity by which the subject would introduce a form into matter or, by which the subject, posited as the unity of apperception, would perform syntheses building in the object a unity required by his own unity and thus constituting the world as a world for a subject. For the world, even if it is in harmony with the subject, is always the other of the subject; and if there are unities in it, that is, identifiable objects or sequences, allowing the subject to apprehend it, these centres of meaning are present in experience without being elaborated by syntheses.
The Body-Mind Relation
Given the above mentioned interpretation of the transcendental subjectivity, Khatami proceeds to explain the corporeal aspect of the subjectivity. His innovative approach to this aspect consists of three correlative steps: (i) first he criticizes contemporary philosophy of mind for its paradoxical claim of the elimination of metaphysics of Man. He has widely rejected its physicalistic approach to Man, and his mind, consciousness and self; and shown that such an approach is void and vacuous as such, because these conceptions, as accepted by analytic philosophers, "seems to have no corresponding field of experience, or of empirically based qualities"; (ii) he revises the ideas of corporeality and consciousness through a hermeneutic recovery of the body in phenomenological movement; (iii) Khatami suggests that such an approach and concepts could be amended by application of the experiential insights as gained from oriental traditions including Islamic-Persian Illuminative and transcendent philosophy. The latter two steps are taken together to shape an idea which is examined first by discovering body in consciousness and then by embodying consciousness to recover the being of the body.
One of the interesting aspects of Khatami's doctrine is to detect the body in the mind, and not simply to join one to the other in Cartesian fashion. Our consciousness of our body, according to Khatami is not conceptual and representative. Nor is that all however: in the light of his discussion on the body-mind relationship, Khatami goes far beyond traditional general positions. In fact, transcendent philosophy in this version presents us a theory to remove, in the ontetic field, the dualism of body-mind in the light of Sadraean theory of Being to accord with our everyday experience. "The mind and its relation to the body is a fruit of commonsense experience. It is this relation to experience in which is firmly grounded the essentially metaphysical significance of the notions of 'body' and 'mind' and only in which they acquire their complete meaning for metaphysics."
Khatami conceives the idea of a real unity on the basis of man's being, lived in diverse experiences, though without these experiences being able to introduce a principle of dissociation into this unity. When the vicissitudes of this union – e.g., the mind acting on the body and vice versa, or the mind trying to cut itself loose from the body – are invoked to illustrate fully lived experiences, they are usually of the order of the "as if" because they presuppose dualism.
Taking the human reality in an existential dynamic movement on the basis of Sadraean theory of Being, Khatami sees that the body in its existential movement pursues the completion of its existence and continues its completion, until it is free from its materiality, and becomes, under specific conditions, an immaterial being. In the case of human being, this leads to what is called the "human soul" or "mind". In spite of the fact that the mind does not remain material in its essence and existence, it has a material source in body. For Khatami, the mind is not only connected with the body, but is itself nothing but a material made superior by the existential movement.
This does not, however, mean for him that the mind is a product of the body and one of its effects. It is a product of the existential movement which does not proceed from matter itself. By this meaning he considers that the body is to be the "near side" of the unique reality appearing to us in our everyday experience. The "other side", traditionally called mind or mind, generated by the ontetic purification of the body’s being, is the depth of that reality. According to Khatami, as to Sadra, this is because the body is the genetic origin of the mind. At the beginning, there is only the body. Then, getting deepened through its existential dynamic movement, the body opens and its depth comes out and embraces its existentially genetic origin. The mind is depth of the body. This enforces Khatami to detect the body in the mind, and not simply to join one to the other in Cartesian fashion. To do this task, Sadra identifies body-mind as an ontetic unity: I do not know my body, in its existential state, as an object; rather, I am aware of it as my "self"; I discover it in my ontetic consciousness as my experience of my presence—my being.
Khatami does not plan to find the body as if it were already there, existing independently of the mind, and ready for a kind of pact with it. Then he does not deduce the body: "either in the Cartesian sense of the word, according to which it is subordinated to consciousness both in the order of being and in the order of knowing (for if the body has a meaning it is to be always already there, thanks to causes, not our understandings), or in the Kantian sense of deduction, since the body is unjustifiable; it is neither a right nor a possession".
According to Khatami, I do not possess a body, in the way that I own a cloth; instead, my ontetic consciousness, my existential experience of my being teaches me that I am my body. I do say that I have bad eyes as I say that I have a stomach ache; but in holding my body at a distance in this manner, I affirm that I am more than a body, not that I am not a body. We must, then, find the body in the mind, and conceive of the mind as a body.
Khatami starts from this fact that the mind bears witness to the body by the very fact that the body is present to it. At first, the mind is existentially conscious of body. In this level, for Khatami, there is not a question of the body-as subject: we are on the plane of the ontetic consciousness, not of reflective knowledge. Khatami teaches that corporeality (rather than the multiple and divisible body) is immediately my first living experience in the plane of the ontetic consciousness. A child, for example, becomes conscious of his entire body before exploring and recognizing the diversity of its parts: consciousness of the body is prior to the reflective distinction between external and internal perception, and does not result from a co ordination or interpretation of sensation. The body is given as a primary unity which is the expression of a corporeal being, not as the result of a synthesis or as the conclusion of a judgment of finality.
Then the human reality is initially revealed and shaped as a totally corporeal entity. There is one being which passes through various stages of perfection, and in every stage it exhibits unique behavioural patterns appropriate to that stage. This indicates the corporeal origin of the mind. This by no means, however, indicates that the mind is considered as a quality of the body (as we see in type physicalism). On the contrary, to Khatami, the mind is a substance which is immaterial in essence while material in origin and performance. This means for Khatami that all biological and intellectual functions of human organism are nothing but outward manifestations of a single and simple reality. Khatami tries to support his doctrine by the following principle (all extracted, formulated and reapplied by Khatami from within the transcendent Philosophy of Mulla Sadra):
(I) Physical Emergentism – The mind bodily emerges in its origin but remains spiritual in its survival.
This principle implies three interrelated principles:
- First it indicates that there is a mind-body attachment or dependence:
(II) Mind-body dependence – The mind depends on the body in its identity and generation but not in its substance.
This principle indicates that the mental forms can not be emerged regardless of physical conditions and occasions, but this dependence is not happily viewed as causal; namely, it is not as if the mental is brought about by the physical.
- Second, it indicates that there is a special kind of change through which the mind emerges:
(III) Substantival change of the mind – The mind emerges on the body through a substantival motion which is in its turn ontetic and existential.
On this principle which is in its turn based on the Sadraean specific theory of Being on one hand, and a reformulation of the principle of potency-act in the traditional metaphysics on the other hand; the mind comes into being in the form of bodily existence and then through its substantival motion it passes through physical stages towards its refined nature. It is not the case that the mind comes to the body from outside; rather, the very reality of the mind, as Sadra saw it emerges on the material body at the beginning of its temporal course; and then the actualisation of the physical reality under the principle of substantival change ends in the spiritual stage. In other words, human existence changes and develops by itself and this change is from the less instance to more instance; this change and movement constitutes the entity of the mind, and because of this developmental motion, new possibilities open up.
- The same principle demands that, since the mind emerges on the basis of matter it can not be absolutely material, for "emergence" requires that the emergent be of a higher level than that which it emerges out of or on the basis of; and then the identity of the body is due to the mind which is its final form. This idea is accomplished in the following principle:
(IV) The irreducibility of the emergent mind – The emergent mind (including its forms, events and processes) is irreducible to and unpredictable from the lower-level matter from which it emerges.
These principles all indicate that the natural phase of the existence of the mind begins with a physical nature.
In this manner, Khatami claims, the traditional dualism of human nature tends to a unity. Man, instead of being a composite of body and mind, is considered as a single and simple reality which comes into being in a body and gradually becomes transformed into its spiritual substance, as if the body of man were a catalyst by which the physical reality ascends to the spiritual.
The substantival change of the mind from a bodily genesis to a spiritual entity leads to the total actualisation of the rational faculty which is just a potentiality in the primitive stages of the development of the mind, that is, when the mind has not yet cast away its vegetable and animal shells. The mind is inner force behind all the developmental processes; it is in its vegetable stage when man is still a fertilised cell; then it passes through animal kingdom, which in turn culminates in the initial stage of manhood, wherein the rational faculty is about to achieve actualisation. Thus, the intellect becomes manifest after the full realisation of the sense organs and the internal faculties like perception, memory and the others.
The mind has its being as a continuous reality at all these levels and at each of these levels it is the same in sense and yet different in a sense because, as the hierarchic doctrine of existence demands, the same being can pass through different levels of development. So considered, the mind becomes purified and realised its actualities as it is existentially provided with variety of faculties and powers. Faculties are the "modes" or "manifestations" of the mind. Following Sadra, Khatami attributes the quality of having powers, organs and faculties to the mind and not to the physical body which makes the mind a function of the body prima fascia.
This celebrated position is indeed a radical departure from the cardinal approaches in classic as well as contemporary philosophy of mind. Khatami claims that this interpretation of the mind removes the difficulties experienced by the definition of the mind; further, it raises the mind from the status of a purely physical form to a form which, although in matter, is capable of transcending it, for the extent of its immanence in matter is less than that of a simple physical form. This position frankly corresponds with the principles of physical emergentism and substantival change. Indeed, when the mind which is an existential unity in all experience achieves its highest form through its substantival change, it contains all the lower faculties and forms within its simple nature. The mind, although generated with/in the body, is not of the body; but something higher than it, and employs bodily functions.
As for sense perception, its subject is also the mind, not the sense organs. Physical organs are required for sense perception but only thanks to the accidental fact that we exist in a material world. The reason for this is that the external sensibles and the affections of the sense organ are merely preparatory and provide the "occasions" for the creation of the perceptible forms in and by itself from within. This is because the mind is provided with such faculties by its ontetic substantival movements.
Taken thus, the mind is not the object of observations and inductions which belong to the eidetic field. In other words, to the extent that it does not give rise to a reflection – which always risks impurity – conferring properties and prerogatives on it, this self can claim neither the being of an object nor that of a subject which would somehow remain motionless in its being as the ontetic consciousness. It has only the precarious and absolute being of the ontetic consciousness. This being, however, seems from a reflective point of view, as non-being or empty simply because it is not accessible for the reflective knowledge.
Step two: Human Subjectivity as Absolute
According to Khatami, the integration of the mind and the body signifies that human subjectivity is a performative process in which man transcends through his action, will, choice and decision. It is a living and current experience through which, and because I am a being-toward-perfection, I am always the negation of what I am; this negation is entirely spontaneous, and is made explicit only when I reflect; I am my body on the condition of not being it, since I say “I”. Yet it occurs all the time, and, is my very existence.
By this line of reasoning, Khatami comes to an interesting conclusion in the last paragraph of his Sadraean Meditations: "the unitarity of these two dynamisms [of body and mind] has to have a common origin with man's transcendency… they will also reveal a capacity of a spiritual nature that seems to lie at the root of man's transcendency." Elsewhere, Khatami tries to reformulate this capacity in order to make the human subject, this core of modernity, absolute. He reconsiders here the illuminative tradition of Persian thought a notion of man who is both more than the world and less than the world. As for the former, man, descending from God, is a comprehensive totality as macrocosm within which and through which the world is created; while as for the latter, he, ascending to God, is a singular individual as microcosm shattered and fallen down to the earth, but still has the same colour of the divine essence within him. Khatami highlights the former aspect of this notion which is the source of the latter, and, at the same time, sheds light on the "concealed" essence of human being which is "forgotten" in modern subjectivism.
Referring to Zarathushtra's hymns "which provided Persian thought with the Spirit of the Good Subject… through which God created a plan or blueprint for the universe… [and] later interpreted as the divine image of human being carries the divine essence within itself," Khatami tries to rebuild his ontetic model of subjectivity in terms of the dialectic of immanence and transcendence of this subject (vicegerent of God) as developed by the later Persian illuminative thought.
This notion of man constitutes his essence as the integration of the divine inward as well as outward names. Thus, the illuminative man is homocosm of the divine and the worldly realities. He was created as God's vicegerent while the entire world is a particularization of what exists in him. The world was thus created through man and for man, even though in the visible world man appeared the last. The illuminative man, in this capacity, can like Him create by uttering the command "be", is keen on exhibiting his ability to control nature, and above all an absolute subject who comprehends all creation and, by means of that comprehension, comes to dominate over the world and name that which it comprehends. For his dominion over them would go astray if he did not know the things which he was to rule. In a strange kind of resonance with the modern subject (analyzed and embodied in Hegel, for example), man here rules creation through the knowledge that grasps or takes hold of it.
Step three: Subjectivity and Technology
The ontetic model of subjectivity offered by Khatami led him to a very crucial point in the modern world: technology. The emergent model here of an ultimate subject who at the same time comprehends and dominates all creation implies that the created subject who proves incomprehensible in the very manner of its Creator is also a subject intended by that Creator to dominate the world through the comprehension of insight, the rational power of naming – and finally, the technological self-assertion that proves both possible and necessary only for a subject of naming who is a human being.
The human creature also mimics God in freedom and dominion which implies a control or possession both of self and of world – and such freedom exercises its rule over others in and through a creative capacity and a naming power enjoyed only by that creature who is capable, literally, of manipulation. This shows the innovative rational power of man which is important for him as living on the earth. As an individual, man comes to this earthy life to fulfill the singular aspect of his universal life. Lacking most notably the natural arms or tools, man is forced to innovate technologically in such a way that his power eventually exceeds – and controls – that of other creatures; and hence the human subject is at the same time the subject who can manipulate and rule the world technologically. As much as technological manipulation, the hands signal speech and thus the dignity and power of the naming subject who alone exercises a technological rule.
Insofar as we can discern a figure of the celestial as well as technological characteristic for man rebuilt in this way, Khatami maintains, this model sheds light on the modern world and subject which can seem to be so thoroughly "de-divinized," so devoid of any illuminative presence at all, thanks to the self-assertion of a purely human reason that, by comprehending itself and its world, aims to manipulate and master that world technologically – above all in the technologies of image that come so fully to frame our world today.
In sum, in the illuminative anthropology, Khatami discovers an intriguing intersection between all-encompassing vision and ultimate unknowing, an all-encompassing vision of the cosmos in and through which the incomprehensible appears, but to a comprehending subject who, through the hand and through the rational capacity signaled by the hand, masters that cosmos technologically. Though illuminative, this shows the technological characteristic of the theophanic man – a characteristic which, without loss of Divinity, again opens this perspective unexpectedly close to the requirements for modern life.
To do justice here, Khatami aims to discern an ontetic rhizome in modern technology. He describes a figure of the technological in order to locate "the technological" within his ontetic philosophy. He also suggests that the modern technology implies "the ontetic"; the ontetic rhizome turns up within the depth of modern technology where a human being envisages anew the divine attributes in the modern subjectivistic world, where he becomes, like the ontetic God visible – as invisible – in and through a world that is thoroughly his by taking over the very production or framing of that thoroughly de-mystified world, that appears in the technologies of image.
Much as modern technological virtualization implies dialectic of everyone and no one, of the endlessly named and the finally nameless, so can we find in ontetic philosophy a dialectic of immanence and transcendence according to which God is both all in all and nothing in anything, named infinitely and infinitely nameless, everywhere and nowhere, illuminating all and beyond all in a brilliant darkness. As developed by the ancient mystics this dialectic seeks to indicate that God is distinct precisely by his indistinction, different thanks to his indifference, absent in his presence – in short, transcendent through his incomprehensible immanence.
Khatami tries to support this idea that an ontetic subject is still alive behind the technological veil of the modern world. In one sense, a human subject first acts as a subject of inquiry in relation to that modern world which can seem to be so thoroughly "de-mystified," so void of any ontetic presence at all, thanks to the self-assertion of a purely human reason that, by comprehending itself and its world, aims to manipulate and master that world technologically – above all in the technologies of image that come so fully to frame our world today. Rhizomatically however, it turns to a "humanized" world within the depth of modern technology where human being envisages anew the divinic attributes in the modern subjectivistic world, where he becomes, like the ontetic God visible – as invisible – in and through a world that is thoroughly his.
In sum, Khatami's ontetic model suggests that we can discern not only a shadow of the ontetic subject in today's technological world but also a figure of the technological subject already in more traditional metaphysics.
Morality, Religion and Art
The engagement with morality, religion and art has been a continuing feature throughout Khatami's life and work. his model led him to a specific theory of action,upon which he has based his moral and religious theory, and his philosophy of art. Meanwhile, in particular, Khatami has critically written on the modern western understanding of religion and Art. In contrast to much contemporary studies in secular academia, Khatami guards against the modern subjectivistic concepts of and approach to morality, art and religion.
Books
1.Phenomenology of Art, Academy of the Arts, Tehran 2008 (P)
2. Phenomenology of Religion, Sazeman Entesharat, Tehran, 2004 (P)
3. Heidegger's Notion of the World, Moasseseh Andisheh Islami, Tehran 2001. (P)
4. Sadraean Meditations: Toward a Transcendent Philosophy of Mind, Lekton 2003 (E)
6. From a Sadraean Point of View: Towards an Elimination of the Subjectivistic self, London Academy of Iranian Studies, London 2004 (E)
7. An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind, University of Tehran Press, Tehran 2003.(P)
8. Aesthetics from a Phenomenological Point of View, Iran's Academy of the Arts, Tehran 2005 (P)
9. Mind, Consciousness, Self, Tehran: Elm Publisher, 2008 (P)
10. Sadrian Issues on Transcendent Philosophy of Consciousness and Body, Tehran: Elm Publisher, 2008 (P)
11. Philosophical Psychology, Tehran: Elm Publisher, 2008 (P)
12. Lectures on Contemporary Western Philosophy, Tehran: Elm Publisher, 2008 (P)
13. Sadrian Thoughts on Humanity, Tehran: Elm Publisher, 2008 (P)
14. Philosophy of Mind, Tehran: Elm Publisher 2008 (p)
15. Background of Modernity, Tehran: Elm 2009 (p)
English books
16. Metaphysics of Man: Outline of a Philosophy, Published by Dr.Muller House, 2010(E)
17. Psychosomatology: Cognition and Conatiomn, Published by Dr.Muller House, 2010(E)
18. From Consciousness to Conscience: An Introduction to the Transcendence of the Self, Published by Dr.Muller House, 2010(E)
19. The Ontetic Self, Published by Dr.Muller House, 2010(E)
20. Transcendental Subjectivity:A Reflection, Published by Dr.Muller House, 2010 (E)
21. Beauty: An Aesthetic Approach,Published by Dr.Muller House, 2010(E)
22. Morality, Published by Dr.Muller House, 2010(E)
23. The Ethical, The Aesthetical: Essays, Published by Dr.Muller House, 2010(E)
24. Basic Problems of Epistemology, Published by Dr.Muller House, 2010(E)
25. Axiology of Art: A Prolegomenon, Published by Dr.Muller House, 2010(E)
See also
Secondary Sources
Sophia Taylor, Mahmoud Khatami: A Primer of His Ontetic Philosophy of Human Subjectivity, Müller, 2009.
External links
Categories:- Muslim philosophers
- Iranian philosophers
- Living people
- 1963 births
- Alumni of Durham University
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