Ibn 'Arabi's Imaginal World as an Epistemological Corrective to Phenomenological Reduction in Religious Experience — Epoche C2
Two accounts of what a visionary sees Ibn al-ʿArabī (1165–1240) holds, across the five hundred and sixty chapters of al-Futūḥāt al-makkiyya — the "Meccan Openings", begun at Mecca in the years after 1202 and finished in a second recension at Damascus shortly before his death — that when a Sufi sees a figure in a vision, he sees neither a body standing outside him nor a picture assembled inside him, but a thing of a third rank: an isthmus, barzakh , of which the only accurate description is "he/not he" ( huwa lā huwa ). Edmund Husserl's Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie (1913) supplies a method whose first move is to make that claim unsayable. The epoché — the bracketing that opens the reduction — suspends precisely the question Ibn al-ʿArabī is answering, namely what rank of being belongs to the thing seen; everything phenomenology says thereafter is said about the residue that remains once that question is out of play. This essay argues, as its shorter version did, that Ibn al-ʿArabī's imaginal world ( ʿālam al-khayāl ) supplies an epistemological corrective to phenomenological reduction in the study of religious experience. But it corrects the shorter version's account of why , and the correction matters, because the reason given there does not survive contact with either author. The trouble is not that Husserlian consciousness is intentional — always consciousness of something — while mystical experience is not. That charge is weaker than it looks, and applied to Ibn al-ʿArabī it is simply false: nothing in his cosmos is more emphatically object-directed than imaginal vision, whose entire business is that a meaning appears as a form. The trouble is doxic positing: the belief-character that acts carry, which the reduction neutralises and which the doctrine of khayāl is entirely about. What the reduction actually suspends Because the argument turns on the exact scope of the bracketing, it is worth being precise about it rather than invoking it. In Ideen I, §§27–30, Husserl describes the natural attitude and isolates within it a standing, unthematised commitment he calls the general thesis ( Generalthesis ): not a judgement anyone makes, but the continuous positing of the world as factually there, which underlies every particular judgement about it. Sections 31 and 32 then perform the epoché . Husserl is unusually careful about what it is not. It is not doubt, not denial, not the Cartesian move of provisionally treating the world as false. The thesis is "put out of action" ( ausser Aktion gesetzt ), placed in brackets; it remains what it was, and so does the world, and the phenomenologist simply declines to join in its performance. What is lost is not a single item of content. What is lost is the right to use any of it as a premise about what exists. The residue is transcendental consciousness with its correlational structure: the act and, on its objective side, the object exactly as meant, with its positing character now itself something to be described rather than something to be performed. Then comes the second reduction, from fact to essence. One takes an example and varies it in imagination, discarding what can be varied away, until one reaches the features whose removal destroys the example as an example of its kind. The organ of this procedure is phantasy — and Husserl says so with a flourish that is easy to read past: in Ideen I §70 he calls fiction the vital element of phenomenology, as of every eidetic science. Free variation works because imagined cases are as good as real ones for reading off essences, and they are as good precisely because nothing hangs on their existing. Section 111 makes this systematic. Phantasy is the neutrality modification of positing presentification: taking an act that re-presents something (memory, expectation, image-consciousness) and switching off its belief-character, so that in the modified act nothing is believed, doubted, denied, or held probable. Imagining is, for Husserl, the ontologically weightless act par excellence. That weightlessness is not a defect he tolerates; it is the property that makes imagination the instrument of essential insight. Why the usual charge against Husserl fails The received complaint — that a philosophy of intentional consciousness cannot reach experiences described as unitive, non-dual or ineffable, because in them the subject–object distinction dissolves — needs to be set aside before the real one can be made, and two considerations set it aside. First, intentionality is not the subject–object dichotomy. It is the claim that acts have a directedness with a content, together with an apparatus of modes in which content can be given: empty and filled, thematic and horizonal, presentative and presentified. An object given as boundless, or as the horizon within which everything else appears, is still given somehow , and it is the somehow that Husserl's descriptive vocabulary is built to record. Second, and decisively, the programme has been carried out on the disputed material. Anthony Steinbock's Phenomenology and Mysticism (2007) gives a broadly Husserlian description of three mystical corpora — Teresa of Ávila, Rabbi Dov Baer, and the Persian Sufi Rūzbihān Baqlī — and argues that religious experience has its own mode of givenness, which he calls vertical, with its own evidential structure and its own characteristic distortions. One may reject his conclusions. One cannot claim that the descriptive apparatus was unable to engage the material, because it engaged it. That settles the easy case. It also forces the withdrawal of a sentence from the earlier version of this essay, which said that experiences within the ʿālam al-khayāl are "non-conceptual and non-intentional in the Husserlian sense". They are not. Khayāl is the form-giving faculty; its defining operation is taṣawwur , the conferring of shape. In the Futūḥāt the imaginal is where meanings become horses, youths, books, l