The Difficulty of Impossibility

To read Ibn Khaldun and the Social Sciences is to be educated in what I’ll explore here as the difficulty of impossibility. Javad Tabatabai’s discourse prods, rebukes, and opens out, in the manner of a khulasa (an exegetical oral discourse), layered, heightened senses of impossibility. Foremost are the “conditions of im-possibility”: this “method” (xxxi) grapples with how modernity and reason epistemically bloom out of one (European) Renaissance while from another (“Iranshahri”) renaissance followed the “sclerosis of tradition” (17), that is, intellectual habits of evasion resulting in the self-denials or abnegations of modernity (17–19). Throughout, Tabatabai also guides us to acknowledge our pervasive experience of im-possibility. Of how “exit-ed,” stranded outside tradition we are (Odabaei “Outside”), stuck pondering the ensuing impossibilities: the impossibility of seeing like an ancient. The impossibility of inhabiting tradition as a modern. Most hauntingly, Tabatabai wants us to see that, as moderns, we face the impossibility of not knowing even how to ask our own questions.In these remarks I am concerned with the particular difficulty that Tabatabai is asking us to see in and through im-possibility. I explore how this impossibility relates to recent commentary on the conceptual vulnerabilities and conceptual loss that mark modern life. In doing so, of necessity, I can respond only selectively to this para-Hegelian riposte to the world history of reason. Tabatabai gives us an aql-nāmā: a contrapuntal genealogy of the vicissitudes of intellect in modernity against that of reason. Indeed, this polemic attends to the “poetry of concepts” (Odabaei, Introduction vii, xv). Arguably, it does so in dosukhne (lit. redoubled words). Dosukhne were bilingual couplets, addressed to one’s beloved, devised by Amir Khusrau (d. 1325) to comprehend and give form to the dislocations of the Delhi sultanate which exceeded sense. The dosukhne form demands that the first line be in the language one finds oneself at home in. Completing the rhyme, the reply to the beloved, follows in their tongue. And so Tabatabai’s resolutely Hegelian discourses consider Ibn Khaldun’s new science as moving between novel readings of Marx, Montesquieu, and Machiavelli and of Masudi, Miskawayh, and Ghazali.The nature of these numerous interventions matters. Tabatabai demands patience. He will not let us hastily “settle accounts” (150, also xxvi, 23), as Karl Marx and Michel Foucault did with G. W. F. Hegel or how, to Tabatabai’s eyes, Iranian intellectual discourse had settled with its revolution. Foucault’s account of the conditions of possibility of the human sciences slyly bracketed “the great game of contradiction” (Archaeology 153) and with it the trajectory of the sciences in colonialism. Reversing the analytical gaze and inverting its object, Tabatabai’s “conditions of im-possibility” attend to abnegation beyond negation; the postcolonial self and the epistemic “now” are co-implicated in every contradiction (xxxi). If critique is a viewpoint, Tabatabai demands a fuller presentation, one never innocent of the different trajectories of Ajam and Arab, one that will not set down the “Iranian anomaly,” its kalami-falsafi (lit. theological-philosophical), contingent possibilities, those “voids within which the theory of Islamic Revolution could develop” (Tabatabai, “Anomaly” 121). Tabatabai is questioning the destiny of knowledge in that aftermath.These concatenated reasons make Ibn Khaldun’s new science interesting for Tabatabai. What did Ibn Khaldun see himself as doing? Why does this remain so inscrutable to us? Tabatabai shows us that Ibn Khaldun knew of the dawn of the European Renaissance; he knew of its pursuit of reason, but he remained on his own path (67). Tabatabai shows us how the dream of a rational theology connects Thomas Aquinas to Hegel (131–67). Tabatabai uses Mulla Sadra’s logic to circumscribe Hegel’s, explaining how the quest of reason to designate an object, intelligible in “the vessel of the mind” (152), would secure first a science of faith, and then a metaphysics of subject and state. This very “essential intelligible object” (152) secures the social, its (logical) independence, and its force as our presumptive grounds of being. This secularity, for Tabatabai, properly unchains the political.Through all of this, I take it, Tabatabai wants us to attend most of all to our incapacity, our wordlessness when we leap, in introducing Ibn Khaldun, terming his ‘ilm al-‘umrān a sociology, a science of civilizations, or an interpretation of cultures. We know Ibn Khaldun knew not this social, our certainty, but we are still compelled to think this ourselves. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s insight into how we come to concepts, by “seeing-aspects,” is at stake here (secs. 203–25). And in this unhappily shared inheritance of reason that makes modernity, Tabatabai is warning us, those aspects we can see-in might just as often betray us. It is this aspect-betrayal and its corollaries, this conceptual incapacity that Tabatabai pictures that interest me. In his resolutely tacit way, he is pointing to the particular impossibility of not knowing how to think without the social.As corollary, Tabatabai is asking us to question where our solace in the sociological, the comfort we feel when we can give an account of a problem in terms of the “socioeconomic,” comes from. Talal Asad asked of us not to give in to the “coercive limits of Sociological Truth,” to pursue an anthropology that could sustain a standpoint “that the sociological is not the grounds of being” (206). With Tabatabai’s im-possibility we are bequeathed different difficulties. He leaves us in the space of our incapacity. We might think of this incapacity as a condition, less of abnegation, but marked by the “not-knowingness” (Golub 11) the sociological involves, the “choice of no choice” (2) we believe we face in speaking of it.The social sciences partake of the tarrying with skepticism that conditions modern knowledge. They promote a whittled conception of human life as exhaustible by rational knowledge. They have led me to ask: what is faith in a life carved into domains? (Trivedi, “Genealogies”) Tabatabai, as I understand him, is pointing to conditions of life in which thought and reality come apart, thus raising the im-possible. In a widely influential discussion, Cora Diamond grasped such occasions as “disturbances of the soul” (10) that unseat reason. She characterized their impossibility as not contradictions or aporia, not new topoi in need of intelligibility, but as instances of a conceptual “difficulty of reality” (2). In the face of this, the “difficulty of Philosophy” lay in “staying turned towards” (24), this acknowledgment of the fullness of our condition beyond the claims of reason. Hence philosophy, as Stanley Cavell argued, must return to life and the everyday. Tabatabai hesitates over whether such a return is possible. Indeed, what ordinary language return to zindagi (life) remains possible? What return would not pin life, necessarily, consecutively, to that modern grammar of āzādī (freedom)? Perhaps this is the difficulty of im-possibility as Tabatabai saw it: we are returned not to life but to limits. Returned, that is, to the im-possible limits and betraying aspects of what we see, how we see, and what that makes sure we do not see. We do not have concepts or grounds for any way ahead that we collectively desire.Im-possibility of this kind is also difficult to exemplify. In closing, I offer two pictures, one of an impossible science, and what it reveals about what we think is impossible to “know.” The other, pondering on Ibn Khaldun’s time and ours, suggests we might perhaps still re-attune particular sciences, archaeology in my case, in conditions of impossibility to other ends. So, first, Tabatabai’s resolute focus on rethinking the past of reason for the present it mirrors meant that he focused more on what Ibn Khaldun’s stuttered negations reveal and much less on the enigmatic use of concepts like tamuddun and ‘aṣabiyyah, which we are compelled to translate as “civilization” and “group feeling,” respectively. And yet the world-historic sweep in which Tabatabai implicates Seljuq Turks (24) and Afghans (13) for their disruption of the possibilities of the development of ‘aql is perhaps Khaldunian in spirit. We might even say Tabatabai partakes of a hint of what ‘aṣabiyyah intends.Could we frame an impossible question around approximations of these Khaldunian desires conceptualized as ‘aṣabiyyah? The modern social sciences ineluctably rely on the fact/value distinction. The primary casualties of this are the evaluative faculties we live by. These ground our sense of character beyond the roles we inhabit in this segmented life, and we judge ourselves and others through them (MacIntyre). Still, what is character when it is shared? Can reason alone know this without the estimations of feeling? A science of character was John Stuart Mill’s dream; but the mathesis of the modern social sciences ruled out his ethology. Relatedly, we could ponder why affect is unproblematically available to the social sciences today as the other of reason while the modernist fear of emotion persists, the separation of feeling from thought remaining essential. While Mill wanted this ulterior science of character to fulfill the proximate observations of psychology, this pursuit passed, as S. Pearl Brilmyer persuasively shows, out of scientific im-possibility into the modern projects of realist fiction.Three years before Timur gave Ibn Khaldun an audience in Damashq, he was in Delhi. Of all the anecdotes from his conquest of 1398 one recounts his pleasure at the gifts and actions of a local chieftain, someone who had embraced Islam and came to be known as Bahadur Nahar Khan. For the last decade, I have been excavating the city this man and his companions built at Indor, in Mewat, northern India. In the same age as Ibn Khaldun, in Hind and Sind, we witness the embrace by many of tradition, a collective softening of qalb (the heart), not the morbid hardening that Tabatabai saw in the prospects of ‘aql (intellect). I have been interested in an archaeology of the gendered embrace of tradition, especially as it also helps make sense of our exits, that “archaeology of defeat” (Odabaei, Introduction viii). I can only gesture here at the prospects of this archaeology of virtue and tradition, only point to how it requires abnegating the instincts of secular social science (Trivedi, “Archaeology”), how it helps us see impossibility anew.Consider this instance of im-possibility across categorial orders and secular translations that ground intelligibility: “economic” pressures, across Mughal and British revenue “settlements,” instruct how place is today not discerned by dwelling or community or memory; rather, all land, of necessity, is reckoned by fertility, into grades of the cultivable (Trivedi, “Archaeography”). The qasba (city) and qabristan (burial grounds) of Indor are today ruin-strewn mounds at the edge of fields. They survive despite the actions of plough and tractor, despite the disdains of national, secular, and partisan historiography they remain, material traces, latent im/possibilities. From these grounds a reoriented archaeology, an archaeology sensate to the ethical cultivations and disciplines central to the embrace of Islam in South Asia can begin anew (Trivedi, “Archaeology”). To Tabatabai’s point, these lands are now classed, by the modernist settlement, to be ghayr-mumkin, the uncultivable impossible.