Maslow and the Fourth Jihad

Dr. Robert D. Crane

Posted Sep 30, 2006      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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Maslow and the Fourth Jihad

                                by Dr. Robert D. Crane


A.  The Hierarchy of Human Motivation

    The modern psychology of human motivation was not invented by Abraham Maslow, though most American college students would have every reason to think that it was.  Few of them are aware that before he died, Maslow revised his basic framework of thought, reversed his priorities, and essentially rejected his entire life’s work.  This was almost the equivalent of St. Thomas Aquina’s “eureka moment” when he cast his entire 40-volume Summa Theologica aside as what he called “nothing but straw compared to what I now know.” 

    We might even argue that in his last essay, “The Farthest Reaches of Human Nature,” published after he died a relatively early death in 1970, Abraham Maslow became what is known nowadays as a generic Sufi and functionally a Muslim.

    Maslow was chairman of the Psychology Department half a century ago at Brandeis University near Boston, which is the world’s preeminent Jewish institution of higher learning.  He was what one would call today a “Reform Jew,” who had bought into the utilitarian paradigm, then regnant throughout American academia, which was based on the concept that man is little more than a smart animal and is motivated only by the desire to avoid pain and seek pleasure. 

    Maslow came of intellectual age during the 1930s when Marxism in the Ivy League universities was in its heyday.  He was twenty-one when the Great Depression struck in 1929.  Maslow never bought into the idea that economics provides the superstructure of reality, but he agreed with the Marxists in rejecting spiritual awareness as irrelevant to the real world.  He was skeptical that injustices could be cured by institutional change but was convinced that violent revolution would merely bring on more of the same.

    Every educated American, defined as one who has completed four years of college, knows that Maslow invented the “Hierarchy of Human Needs” as a pyramid of five human priorities.  The first four, as I analyze them, constitute the primitive instincts of self-centered survival through the pursuit of power, though Maslow’s supporters are more euphemistic in their interpretations.  These share the common characteristic that the need disappears when it is met, though one could argue that as elements of the search for power they can never be satisfied.  These four “needs” are:

1)  Biological: air, water, food, sleep, and sex;

2)  Security:  order, structure, safety, and predictability;

3)  Group identity: family, community, and nation; and

4)  Status: recognition and prestige

    The fifth of the four “human needs” is “self-actualization.”  This is an open-ended concept that refers to fulfillment of one’s potential as a human being, the idea being that fulfillment of each level in the pyramid of needs makes it easier to reach the next higher one. 

    The logic of this pyramid suggests that the urgency of needs decreases from one level to the next.  This may suggest erroneously that the importance of the levels decreases correspondingly.  This, in turn, may reinforce the underlying assumption that the human person is basically merely an animal in the sense of a creature whose highest purpose in life is individual and species survival in competition for power among like-minded creatures.

    In his last years, Abraham Maslow added two still higher levels to his original five and perceived that these could be both more urgent and more important than the lower ones.  In this he reinvented the wheel that earlier psychologists, known as Sufis, had been using for more than a thousand years.

    Maslow’s two highest levels are the following:

    1) Cognitive: The need to seek and process knowledge in pursuit of beauty.  This aesthetic need of human beings has been the motivation for most of the Nobel Prize breakthroughs in every field of science, because human reason alone rarely leads to anything new and usually impedes escape from established patterns of thought.  The cultural dynamic of aesthetics produces awareness of normative goals within a framework of justice, which, in turn, motivates humans to seek community in the form of civilizations.

    2) Transcendence: The highest level of self-actualization results from the need to transcend oneself so that one identifies one’s own being with higher levels in an ascending order of unity culminating in the un-nameable Oneness of the Ultimate.  The subjective experience of one’s relative non-existence in a higher level of being is known in Buddhism as nirvana and in Islam as wahdat al shuhud (for the distinction between traditionalist ontologies of mysticism and the extremist concept of wahdat al wujud see Crane, “Spirituality: Oneness of Being, Fact or Fiction,” in http://www.theamericanmuslim.org, August 9, 2004).

    Maslow says that this highest level of reaching one’s full potential is usually transitory, and may alternate with “cosmic sadness,” which seems to be what Christian mystics, relying on St. John of the Cross and his borrowings from Muslim Sufis, call “the dark night of the soul.”  It does not seem to be known whether Maslow was a student of the Kabbalah, but as a Jew he must have been aware of it with considerable understanding.

    The question has been asked by Norman Kurland, founder of the Center for Economic and Social Justice, whether there are any similarities between Maslow’s ascending levels of human needs and the levels of jihad in Islam.

    The first answer must address the question whether there is a comparable system with a typology of human needs.  In classical Islamic thought, which may be defined as the high point of Islamic culture from the fourth to seventh Islamic centuries, there are indeed parallels rooted firmly in the Qur’an. 

    In Islamic “theology” the human being has three levels of being.  The first is the physical body, known as the jizm, which has all the needs described in Maslow’s first four levels. 

    The second is the nafs or soul, which is the decision-making aspect of the human person and is independent of the physical body but influenced by its needs.  This is similar to what some people call the mind, as distinct from the physical neurons of the human brain.

    The third is the ruh or spirit, which exists beyond space and time in the presence of God and therefore came into being “before” the creation of the physical universe.  This is the core of human nature and can convey understanding to the soul and the heart through a process of ilham or inspiration beyond what can be intellectually processed by the brain.

    These three levels of every human person can produce three corresponding levels of “needs,” though the Islamic position is that one’s inherent free will, necessary for love, requires one to express these needs more as purposes. 

    The first of the three Islamic levels in a Maslow-like hierarchy is the nafs al ammara or “commanding soul.”  This corresponds to the first four levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.  Some Muslims say this aspect of a person is in a constant, solipsistic war with one’s higher faculties.  Christians postulate the existence of “original sin.”

    The second level is the nafs al lawamma, which is the level that the soul reaches when it becomes aware of its own limitations and its need for divine mercy.  This might correspond with Maslow’s fifth level of self-actualization, but only if this is understood in the sense of the higher so-called cognitive level.

    The third and highest level is the nafs al mutma’ina.  This is the level of cosmic peace found in what would appear to be exactly what Abraham Maslow calls transcendence.  This level that cannot be limited in human words but can be experienced, as Maslow must have done during his transition from this life to the next.

    Every culture has its own language to express ideas that are similar to, though never identical with, ideas developed in the context of a different path to the same truth.  Levels of understanding usually cause more diversity within cultures than among them.  Maslow’s concept of the transcendent nature of the human person is universal.


B.  The Fourth Jihad

    How does one address the startling question whether Maslow’s concept of human needs corresponds in any way with the Islamic levels of jihad?  To answer this question, perhaps we would need to invent the neologism of the “fourth jihad.”  This follows from the third or intellectual jihad (jihad al kabir, the only one specifically mentioned in the Qur’an), and, in turn, reinforces the first two (akbar and saghrir), which are mentioned only in the hadith. 

  The fourth jihad may equate with the Christian concept of “Church Militant,” but what is that?  A quadrapartite typology of jihad would constitute rank bida’ or innovation, which is the ultimate sin in literalist Muslim dogmatics.  An un-named fourth jihad would make sense only if it emerged logically from the first three as a necessary expansion of traditionalist thought to bring the basic spirit of Islam to bear in addressing the profound injustices of the modern world and the resulting pathological syndrome of global terrorism.

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