Jacques Lacan claimed that humans were brought up to view themselves as a lack. Within the conflict between the helpless child and the more complete adult figures surrounding it, arose an ingrained sense of deficiency. In a cry to rid themselves of this lack, the child identified with the possibility of becoming like the Other, and deeply ingrained in its ego remained a fundamental disparity between this desire and the object intended to satiate it (SEoP, Lacan). Around the 8th century, debates surrounding the existence of God arose in the Islamic tradition. Through argument, God was assigned attributes of a human category. Various sects began to form an identity around their conception of God. Is it possible that there is connection between the lack which Lacan describes and the anthropomorphism of God? If so, is there a way to break down this sense of lack, and strip it of its influence?
Within the Islamic tradition, arguments were made for the existence of God. Through logical necessity, God’s existence must be of absolute authority relative to any other being. God’s existence was described through predication, yet it was only possible to assign him attributes available in a language constructed by humans. Thus, God was assigned, through necessity, attributes whose eminence rose above that of any human, for it would be absurd for the power and goodness of God to be less than the power and goodness of anything else. It is at such a moment, I propose, that human beings heightened their sense of lack, for through their assignment of human attributes to an omnipotent God they identified with a conception impossible to attain.
Various sects began to identify with their conception of God. The diversity of sects within a compact region signified an imminent clash of perspectives. The threat of a sect’s identity could suggest three routes of action: first, the marking of boundaries, and the solidification of whatever existed within their limits, in order to protect their new-found object of attachment; second, the surrender of a sect’s identity to its appropriation by another; and third, an overturning of the concept itself to which each sect was attached.
Most sects took the first option. With every thrust of their opponent, their notion of identity was strengthened and solidified. The result was probably a vicious circle, since as identity strengthens, the phenomenology of lack strengthens with it. I propose this because, the more we focuses on attributes outside of grasp, the more necessary it becomes that we neglect those attributes within our grasp. In such a process, a loss of identity would also suggest a void of lack as extreme as the identity to which one was attached. I offer the idea that it was because of this, that the protection of identity was of great importance.
At one point, the Muʿtazilite took the third route. They proposed that the concept to which each sect attached was devoid of any intelligent foundation, and instead created a conception of God which was unable to be identified with on a human level, since they suggested that God necessarily existed prior to the existence of any human attributes. This resulted in an incommensurable distance between God and the subject, and in this way, I suggest that the lack which arose through their mutual identification diminished. Abd al-Jabbār gives an argument which may support this:
“…the blind man who cannot see at all and does not know the manner of the operation of this sense, when it is granted to him and it is permitted that he see by it and know, by it, some of the objects of knowledge, recognizes the deficiency in himself” (The Book That Makes Others Superfluous).
I understand this is merely speculation, yet I venture to make the following remarks. Firstly, if we do not know of a deficiency in ourselves, we do not view ourselves as deficient. Secondly, in order to break free from a sense of deficiency, we should, like the Mu’tazila, “reduce to an absurdity” the knowledge which brought about its existence.
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