The Education of the Inner Eye
Faculty Development and the Formation of the Knower from Aristotle to Sohrawardi
“To any vision must be brought an eye adapted to what is to be seen, and having some likeness to it. Never did eye see the sun unless it had first become sunlike, and never can the soul have vision of the First Beauty unless itself be beautiful.” — Plotinus, Enneads I.6.9 (trans. MacKenna)
The Tortoise Trainer (Kaplumbağa Terbiyecisi) is a painting by Osman Hamdi Bey (1906/1907)
Introduction: The Problem of the Unprepared Knower
There is a question that recurs across the history of philosophy with a persistence that suggests it touches something fundamental: why do intelligent people, confronted with the same evidence, reach radically different conclusions about the things that matter most? Why does one person see the force of a moral argument that another, equally educated, simply cannot perceive? Why does the same religious evidence compel one mind to faith and leave another entirely unmoved?
The dominant tendency in modern epistemology has been to locate the answer in the evidence itself — in the quality of argument, the weight of data, the logical structure of the case. If two people disagree, the assumption runs, one of them must have better reasons, and the task is to identify which reasons those are. The knower is treated as a more or less transparent medium through which evidence passes on its way to a conclusion.
But there is an older and more radical answer, one that has been articulated independently across Greek, Christian, and Islamic philosophical traditions: the problem is not in the evidence but in the eye. The most important forms of knowledge — moral perception, practical wisdom, spiritual insight, the apprehension of first principles — require a faculty that must be developed, trained, and in some cases transformed before it can function properly. The knower is not a passive recipient of truth but an active participant whose capacity for reception must be cultivated. Education, on this view, is not primarily the transmission of information but the formation of the one who will receive it.
This essay traces that insight across six thinkers — Plato, Aristotle, John Henry Newman, al-Ghazālī, Sohrawardi, and John Vervaeke — who represent three distinct civilizational traditions and the contemporary cognitive sciences, spanning roughly twenty-four centuries. The claim is not that these thinkers are saying the same thing; the differences between them are real and philosophically significant. The claim is that they converge on a shared structural insight with three consistent elements: that the highest knowledge is perceptual or presential rather than merely propositional; that the faculty which apprehends it must be formed through practice, habituation, and often moral purification; and that discursive reason, while necessary, is by itself insufficient to carry the knower across the threshold.
If this convergence is real, it constitutes one of the most important unwritten chapters in comparative philosophy — and one with direct implications for how we think about education, moral formation, and the conditions under which human beings can know what is most worth knowing.
I. Plato: The Turning of the Whole Soul
The locus classicus is the allegory of the cave in Book VII of the Republic. Plato’s image is familiar to the point of cliché, but its epistemological radicalism is often missed. The prisoners in the cave are not lacking in information — they have a perfectly coherent account of the shadows they see. They name them, predict their movements, and award honors to those who are best at doing so. The problem is not a deficit of data but a misdirection of the knowing faculty. The eye is pointed at the wrong thing.
Plato’s word for the correction is periagōgē holēs tēs psychēs — a “turning of the whole soul.” Not just the intellect, not just the will, but the entire person must be redirected toward what is real. And Plato is explicit that this cannot be done by simply depositing knowledge into the mind, the way one might pour water into an empty vessel. The capacity to see is already present; what is needed is reorientation. Education, he says, is “the art of this turning around” (Republic 518d).
The Symposium gives us the erotic version of the same ascent, and it is in some ways more revealing. Diotima’s speech describes a progression from love of a particular beautiful body, to love of beauty in all bodies, to love of beautiful souls, to love of beautiful practices and laws, to love of beautiful forms of knowledge, and finally to the sudden (exaiphnēs) vision of Beauty itself. Each stage is not a new argument but a development of the same faculty — eros — refined and redirected toward higher objects. The lover does not learn new facts about beauty; the lover’s capacity for perceiving beauty is transformed.
The Phaedrus offers a third and perhaps the most vivid image of all: the soul as a winged charioteer driving two horses — one noble and obedient, one unruly and base (Phaedrus 246a–249d). Before its incarnation, the soul follows the gods in a great celestial procession, and if its wings are strong enough it rises to behold the Forms — true Being, Justice itself, Beauty itself — in what Plato calls the “place beyond heaven” (hyperouranios topos). But the wings can be damaged. The unruly horse drags the chariot down; the soul loses its feathers, falls to earth, and enters a body. Philosophy, on this account, is the regrowing of the wings. And the mechanism is eros: when the philosopher encounters beauty in the world, the stumps of the feathers swell and itch and begin to sprout again. The erotic response to beauty is the soul remembering its capacity for flight.
The Phaedrus myth adds a crucial dimension to the faculty-development tradition that neither the cave allegory nor Diotima’s ladder fully captures: the idea that the knowing faculty is native to the soul. The wings are not given from outside; they are regrown. The soul’s capacity for ascent is intrinsic but has been occluded — damaged by incarnation, weighed down by appetite and forgetting. Faculty development, on this reading, is not the acquisition of something new but the restoration of something original. This image will reappear, centuries later and continents away, in Sohrawardi’s Philosophy of Illumination, where the soul is described as a light that has become occluded by its immersion in matter — and where the complete sage is characterized as the one who has recovered “both wings.”
Three features of Plato’s account, taken across these dialogues, deserve emphasis. First, the ascent is painful and disorienting. The freed prisoner, dragged into the sunlight, is initially blinded and wants to return to the shadows. The development of the faculty involves a period of incapacity — what was formerly clear becomes confused before a higher clarity emerges. This is not a minor detail; it suggests that the formation of the knower may require a kind of death to previous ways of seeing. Second, the ascent is not solitary. The prisoner is “dragged” upward; Diotima is a guide; Socrates is always in dialogue. The faculty develops in relationship, not in isolation. Third, the capacity for ascent is innate but must be recovered. The Phaedrus makes this explicit: the wings are regrown, not manufactured. The philosopher does not construct a new faculty; the philosopher clears the way for one that was always already there.
II. Aristotle: Phronēsis and the Perception of Particulars
Aristotle inherits Plato’s insight but relocates it. Where Plato directs the soul’s eye toward transcendent Forms, Aristotle turns attention to the concrete situation — the particular moment that demands right action. The faculty in question is phronēsis, practical wisdom, and its development is the central concern of the Nicomachean Ethics.
Phronēsis is not a body of knowledge that can be codified and transmitted. It is a trained capacity to perceive what a particular situation requires — the right action, at the right time, in the right way, toward the right person, for the right reason. Aristotle draws an explicit analogy to perception: the person of practical wisdom sees the right thing to do the way a trained eye sees the right proportions in a work of art. This is why he says the phronimos — the practically wise person — is himself the standard and measure (kanōn kai metron) of right action (NE 1113a33). There is no rule above the wise person to which one could appeal; the wise person’s perception is the rule.
How is this faculty developed? Aristotle’s answer is emphatic: through habituation (ethismos), not through instruction (mathēsis). We become just by doing just things, brave by doing brave things, temperate by doing temperate things (NE 1103a–b). The virtues are not natural endowments; we are not born with them. But neither are they contrary to nature; we have the capacity to receive them, and this capacity is brought to completion through practice. The analogy is to craft: a lyre player becomes skilled by playing, not by studying a manual about playing.
This is why Aristotle insists that young people cannot possess phronēsis. A young person can be a mathematical prodigy, because mathematics deals with abstractions that can be grasped by pure intellect. But practical wisdom requires lived experience — not just any experience, but experience reflected upon within a community of practice, under the guidance of those who already possess the virtue. The faculty is inherently temporal; it cannot be rushed.
There is a crucial circularity here that Aristotle acknowledges without fully resolving. To develop phronēsis, one must practice the virtues. But to practice the virtues correctly, one needs phronēsis to discern what the situation requires. The resolution, insofar as there is one, lies in the social dimension: the beginner acts under the guidance of a mentor who already has practical wisdom, imitating good action before fully understanding it, and through sustained practice the faculty gradually matures. The community of the virtuous is not incidental to moral development; it is its necessary condition.
III. Newman: The Illative Sense and the Cable of Certitude
John Henry Newman (1801–1890) takes the Aristotelian framework and extends it into the broadest possible domain: how do human beings arrive at certitude about anything real — moral, historical, personal, religious?
Newman’s central work on this question, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870), begins from a simple observation: in actual human life, people reach genuine certainty about all sorts of things — the trustworthiness of a friend, the rightness of a vocation, the truth of a historical event, the existence of God — through reasoning that looks nothing like formal logical demonstration. No one falls in love by syllogism. No jury reaches a verdict through pure deduction. The reasoning is informal, cumulative, and often impossible to fully articulate, but the certitude it produces is real and rational.
Newman’s key distinction is between notional assent and real assent. Notional assent is agreement with a proposition considered abstractly — the way one might assent to a theorem in geometry. Real assent is concrete, vivid, and engages the whole person — the kind of conviction that actually moves you to act, to risk, to commit. The vast majority of the things that matter most to human life operate in the domain of real assent, and the faculty that delivers real assent is what Newman calls the illative sense.
The illative sense is the mind’s capacity to weigh converging lines of evidence — none of which is individually conclusive — and to arrive at a judgment that amounts to certitude. Newman’s analogy is a cable versus a chain. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link: that is formal deductive argument, where one bad premise destroys the whole. A cable is strong because many strands, each insufficient alone, are wound together into something that holds. The illative sense is the faculty that winds the cable — that perceives the convergence and recognizes when the accumulation of probabilities has crossed the threshold into certainty.
Now here is the point that connects Newman to the broader tradition: the illative sense is not equally developed in everyone, and its proper functioning depends on the formation of the knower. Newman draws the parallel to Aristotle’s phronimos explicitly. Just as the person of practical wisdom perceives the right action through a trained faculty that cannot be reduced to rules, the person with a well-formed illative sense perceives the force of converging evidence that another person — less honest, less experienced, less morally attentive — will simply miss.
Newman introduces the concept of “antecedent probability” to explain this: what you are able to see depends partly on what you are already disposed to see. A person of good will, intellectual honesty, and genuine openness to truth will recognize the weight of evidence that a person of bad faith or willful indifference will overlook — not because the evidence is different, but because the faculty that receives it has been differently formed. The implications are profound: two people of equal intelligence, confronted with identical evidence, can rationally reach different conclusions if their characters differ. Epistemology and ethics are entangled at the root.
IV. Al-Ghazālī: The Taste That Exceeds Argument
Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111) provides what may be the most vivid autobiographical account of faculty development in the entire philosophical tradition. His al-Munqidh min al-Ḍalāl (Deliverance from Error) is a narrative of intellectual crisis, methodological exhaustion, and the discovery of a mode of knowing that exceeds discursive reason.
The structure of the Munqidh is a systematic elimination of insufficient epistemologies. Ghazālī describes how he mastered kalām (dialectical theology) and found it useful for defense but incapable of delivering certainty about ultimate matters. He studied the philosophers (falāsifa) — particularly the Aristotelian tradition as transmitted through al-Fārābī and Ibn Sīnā — and produced a devastating critique of their metaphysical claims in the Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (Incoherence of the Philosophers). He examined the Ismaili claim to authoritative esoteric knowledge and found it hollow.
At each stage, the mode of knowing on offer proved insufficient. Not wrong, necessarily, but incomplete — unable to deliver the kind of certainty Ghazālī was seeking. Then he turned to the Sufis, and what he found was not a new set of arguments but a new mode of apprehension altogether. The key term is dhawq — tasting. His famous analogy: knowing the definition of drunkenness, knowing its causes and conditions, is fundamentally different from being drunk. Knowing the definition of health is different from being healthy. The Sufis, he says, are people of experience (aḥwāl), not merely of utterance (aqwāl).
But the crucial point — and this is what distinguishes Ghazālī from an anti-intellectual mysticism — is that the tasting comes after the discursive work, not instead of it. Ghazālī went through kalām, through philosophy, through every available rational discipline. The faculty of dhawq was developed on the far side of intellectual rigor, not as a shortcut around it. The rational faculties had to be trained and then exceeded. And the means of that exceeding was not more argument but practice: ascetic discipline, prayer, detachment from worldly preoccupation, and the sustained cultivation of the soul’s receptivity to what lies beyond the reach of inference.
Ghazālī also introduces a concept that echoes Newman’s antecedent probability with startling precision: the idea that moral and spiritual states condition what the intellect is able to apprehend. A soul enslaved to appetite or ambition is not merely distracted from truth; it is constitutively incapable of perceiving certain truths. The faculty of tasting requires a prepared palate, and the preparation is simultaneously intellectual and moral.
V. Sohrawardi: Illumination and the Sage Who Has Both Wings
Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyá Sohrawardi (1154–1191) takes the tradition of faculty development to its most systematic and philosophically ambitious expression. Where Ghazālī narrates the journey from discursive reason to experiential knowledge, Sohrawardi constructs an entire philosophical system — Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, the Philosophy of Illumination — that integrates both modes and makes their relationship architecturally explicit.
Sohrawardi’s fundamental epistemological distinction is between ʿilm ḥuṣūlī (representational or acquired knowledge) and ʿilm ḥuḍūrī (presential or knowledge-by-presence). Representational knowledge works through concepts, definitions, and syllogisms — the standard toolkit of Peripatetic (mashshāʾī) philosophy. Presential knowledge is direct, unmediated awareness: the soul’s immediate apprehension of an intelligible reality without the intermediary of a mental representation. Sohrawardi’s signature example is self-awareness: your knowledge that you exist is not arrived at by argument; it is immediately present to you. ʿIlm ḥuḍūrī is this kind of knowing extended to higher realities.
Dhawq — tasting — operates within the domain of presential knowledge. It is the moment when the soul’s apprehension of an intelligible truth becomes direct and experiential rather than merely inferential. But for Sohrawardi, this is not a mystical bypass of reason. It is the activation of a faculty that exists in every rational soul but that requires specific conditions to function.
Those conditions constitute the Ishraqi program of faculty development. The soul must be purified through ascetic discipline (riyāḍa) and detachment from material preoccupation. As it is purified, it becomes increasingly receptive to illumination (ishrāq) from the higher lights in Sohrawardi’s metaphysical hierarchy — ultimately from the Nūr al-Anwār, the Light of Lights. The process is not arbitrary or merely devotional; it has a precise ontological basis. The soul is itself a light, but it has become occluded by its immersion in matter and appetitive attachment. Purification removes the occlusion and allows the soul’s innate luminosity to resonate with the higher lights from which it derives.
Sohrawardi’s most important contribution to the tradition of faculty development is his typology of knowers. He distinguishes four types: the philosopher who has mastered discursive reasoning (bahth) but lacks experiential knowledge; the mystic who has dhawq but lacks philosophical training; the sage who possesses both but has not written; and the complete sage — the ḥakīm mutaʾallih — who has both discursive mastery and illuminative experience and who articulates the integration in writing. This last figure, whom Sohrawardi identifies with Plato, Hermes, and certain Zoroastrian sages, represents the full development of the human knowing faculty.
The ḥakīm mutaʾallih is the one who has, in Sohrawardi’s image, “both wings”: the wing of discursive philosophy and the wing of illuminative experience. A bird with one wing cannot fly. The philosopher who has only bahth reasons correctly but sees nothing. The mystic who has only dhawq sees but cannot articulate or systematize what he sees. Only the sage with both wings can soar — and can guide others along the path of faculty development that he himself has traversed.
The image of the winged soul inevitably recalls Plato’s Phaedrus, where the soul’s wings enable its ascent to the Forms and philosophy is their regrowing. Sohrawardi explicitly claimed Plato as a predecessor in the illuminationist lineage and positioned his entire project as a recovery of what he called the “Platonic Leaven” (al-khamīra al-aflāṭūniyya). Whether Sohrawardi had direct access to the Phaedrus is uncertain — no full Arabic translation is attested, and his Plato was likely received through Neoplatonic intermediaries, doxographic summaries, and the pseudo-Aristotelian Theology (itself drawn from Plotinus). But the structural resonance is not diminished by the indirectness of the transmission; if anything, it is deepened. Sohrawardi takes the Platonic image of the soul’s native capacity for flight and transforms it from a psychological myth into an epistemological architecture. Where Plato’s two horses represent the noble and base dimensions of appetite governed by reason, Sohrawardi’s two wings represent the two modes of knowing — discursive and illuminative — whose integration constitutes complete wisdom. The soul’s capacity for ascent is, as in the Phaedrus, innate but occluded: the soul is itself a light that has been dimmed by its immersion in matter, and the Ishraqi program of riyāḍa is, in essence, the regrowing of its wings.
This creates a structural arc across the essay’s argument: Plato introduces the image of the winged soul whose capacity for flight must be restored; the intervening thinkers develop various accounts of how the restoration proceeds — through habituation, through the cultivation of judgment, through tasting, through ascetic discipline; and Sohrawardi returns to the image with full philosophical self-consciousness, now specifying the two wings as the two modes of knowing whose integration the entire tradition has been working to articulate.
VI. Vervaeke: The Cognitive Science of Faculty Development
John Vervaeke (b. 1966) occupies a unique position in this tradition — not as a contemplative practitioner or a theologian, but as a cognitive scientist who has recognized that the classical philosophical traditions were tracking something real about how human cognition works. His work, developed across two decades at the University of Toronto and crystallized in his public lecture series Awakening from the Meaning Crisis (2019), provides what the historical thinkers could not: a process account, grounded in dynamical systems theory and contemporary cognitive science, of what faculty development actually is at the level of information processing.
Vervaeke’s foundational concept is relevance realization — the mind’s ability to determine, from a functionally infinite field of information, what matters. Every moment of conscious experience involves this act of selection: distinguishing signal from noise, foreground from background, the significant from the trivial. This is not a body of knowledge; it is a process. And it is, Vervaeke argues, the central process underlying all intelligent cognition.
The depth of this concept becomes apparent when we consider what relevance realization is not. It is not an algorithm — no fixed procedure can determine in advance what will be relevant, because relevance is radically context-sensitive. It is not a set of rules — the class of things we find relevant is heterogeneous and constantly shifting. Vervaeke draws an explicit analogy to Darwinian fitness: just as there is no theory of fitness (only a theory of how fitness is realized), there can be no theory of relevance — only a theory of relevance realization. The content cannot be pre-specified; only the process can be described. This is a point of extraordinary convergence with the apophatic dimension of the traditions examined above: Sohrawardi cannot tell you what the illuminated sage will see, only describe the process by which the sage comes to see. Ghazālī cannot define what dhawq tastes; he can only narrate the path that leads to tasting. The ineffability is not a failure of description but a structural feature of the phenomenon itself.
Relevance realization is, in Vervaeke’s account, a self-organizing process — it generates and maintains its own patterns through dynamic feedback loops, constantly calibrating itself to changing conditions. This self-organizing character explains both its power and its vulnerability. When functioning well, it enables the fluid intelligence that allows human beings to navigate an infinitely complex world. When it goes wrong — when the self-organizing process locks into a parasitic feedback loop — it produces self-deception, the persistent misframing of situations that Vervaeke identifies as the cognitive core of foolishness.
This leads to Vervaeke’s most important theoretical contribution: his account of wisdom as rationality that rationally transcends itself. The argument unfolds through a recursive structure. Intelligence is the basic capacity for relevance realization — for finding and using information. Rationality emerges when intelligence is reflexively applied to its own operations: using intelligence to improve how intelligence is being used. This is learning to learn. Wisdom, in turn, emerges when rationality is reflexively applied to its own operations: using rationality to improve how rationality is being used and developed. Wisdom is the recursive self-transcendence of reason — not its abandonment, but its deepening application to its own conditions of possibility.
This recursive structure maps with remarkable precision onto the historical tradition. Ghazālī’s journey through discursive philosophy to something beyond it is exactly what Vervaeke means by rationality transcending itself rationally. Sohrawardi’s insistence that the complete sage must have both bahth (discursive mastery) and dhawq (experiential insight) mirrors Vervaeke’s insistence that wisdom requires both the rationality of computation and the rationality of construal — and their integration within a higher-order meta-cognitive style. Aristotle’s phronēsis, which operates through a trained perceptual capacity rather than rule-following, is what Vervaeke calls the rationality of construal: the ability to frame and reframe situations so as to perceive what is relevant within them.
Vervaeke’s account of the kinds of knowing provides the conceptual vocabulary that makes the cross-traditional convergence explicit. He distinguishes four types: propositional knowledge (knowing that something is the case), procedural knowledge (knowing how to do something), perspectival knowledge (knowing what it is like to be in a particular situation), and participatory knowledge (knowing by virtue of being — the kind of knowing that is constituted by the knower’s participation in a reality rather than their observation of it). The whole argument of this essay can be restated in Vervaeke’s terms: the thinkers examined here all discovered that propositional knowledge alone is insufficient for wisdom, and that the higher registers of knowing — perspectival and participatory — require a transformation of the knower, not merely an addition to the knower’s stock of information.
The mapping is precise. Sohrawardi’s ʿilm ḥuḍūrī (presential knowledge) is participatory knowing: the soul’s direct, unmediated awareness of an intelligible reality, constituted by the soul’s presence to that reality rather than by any representational intermediary. Newman’s illative sense operates primarily in the perspectival register: it is the faculty that perceives the convergence of evidence from within a particular situation of judgment, informed by the knower’s character and accumulated experience. Aristotle’s phronēsis integrates procedural and perspectival knowing: the practically wise person both knows how to act and knows what it is like to be in the situation that calls for action. Ghazālī’s dhawq is the transition from propositional knowledge (the definition of drunkenness) to participatory knowledge (being drunk) — the moment when knowing about becomes knowing by being.
Perhaps most strikingly, Vervaeke provides a cognitive-scientific account of the mechanism by which faculty development occurs: what he calls internalizing the sage. Drawing on Vygotsky’s theory of internalization within the zone of proximal development, Vervaeke argues that cognitive transformation happens when one takes on the perspective of someone further along the developmental path and, through sustained practice, that perspective becomes one’s own. The learner adopts the sage’s “salience landscape” — what the sage finds relevant becomes what the learner finds relevant — and through this perspectival appropriation, the learner’s own relevance realization machinery is restructured.
Vervaeke notes that this mechanism is ubiquitous across wisdom traditions. St. Paul says it is “not I who live but Christ who lives in me.” Buddhism speaks of realizing one’s own Buddha nature. Stoicism has been described as the process of becoming like Socrates. The followers of Epicurus explicitly practiced imagining how Epicurus would reflect upon their actions. Plato’s dialogues function as “spiritual exercises” for internalizing Socrates and his method of elenchus. The Tao Te Ching continually speaks of the sage and how the sage sees the world.
To this list we can add what is perhaps the most developed institutional expression of the mechanism: the Islamic tradition of suhba, companionship with the sheikh or spiritual guide. In the Sufi tradition, the murīd (aspirant) does not simply receive instruction from the murshid (guide); the murīd enters into the murshid’s presence and, through sustained proximity, begins to perceive as the murshid perceives. The knowledge transmitted is not primarily propositional — it cannot be written down and handed over — but perspectival and participatory. It requires the formation of a relationship and the passage of time. The faculty of dhawq is developed not in isolation but in the field of another person’s realized awareness. This is Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development rendered as spiritual pedagogy, and Vervaeke’s framework explains why it works: the aspirant’s relevance realization machinery is being restructured through perspectival appropriation of the guide’s salience landscape.
Vervaeke’s contribution to the tradition of faculty development is therefore not simply to add a sixth voice to the historical chorus. It is to provide the explanatory framework that accounts for why the chorus exists — why five thinkers across three civilizations independently arrived at the same structural insight. The answer, on Vervaeke’s account, is that they were all tracking the same underlying cognitive reality: that relevance realization is a self-organizing process, that its higher-order development constitutes wisdom, that this development requires the transformation of the knower’s processing (not merely the addition of new content), and that the transformation occurs through recursive self-transcendence within a relational and communal context. The convergence is not accidental. It reflects the deep structure of human cognition itself.
VII. The Convergence: Three Insights Across Three Traditions
The six thinkers examined here differ in their metaphysics, their theology, their cultural contexts, and their ultimate accounts of what the developed faculty apprehends. Plato’s soul ascends to the Form of the Good. Aristotle’s phronimos perceives the demands of the concrete situation. Newman’s person of certitude grasps the convergence of probabilities. Ghazālī’s Sufi tastes the reality that lies beyond inference. Sohrawardi’s illuminated sage receives light from the celestial hierarchy. Vervaeke’s wise person has optimized the self-organizing dynamics of relevance realization. These are not the same destination.
And yet the structural convergence is remarkable, and it resolves into three consistent claims.
First: the highest knowledge is perceptual or presential, not merely propositional. For every thinker in this tradition, the culminating act of knowing is more like seeing, tasting, or being present to a reality than like concluding a syllogism. Plato’s vision of Beauty arrives suddenly; Aristotle’s phronimos perceives without deliberation in the moment of action; Newman’s illative sense grasps the convergence in a single act of judgment; Ghazālī’s dhawq is tasting, not inferring; Sohrawardi’s ʿilm ḥuḍūrī is presence, not representation; Vervaeke’s participatory knowing is constituted by being, not by describing. The consistent testimony is that the summit of knowledge transcends the discursive mode through which it was prepared.
Second: the faculty that apprehends this knowledge must be developed through practice, habituation, and moral formation. The eye must be trained before it can see. For Plato, this requires the turning of the whole soul under the guidance of a teacher. For Aristotle, it requires years of virtuous practice within a community. For Newman, it requires intellectual honesty, good will, and the accumulated experience of a well-lived life. For Ghazālī, it requires ascetic discipline and detachment from worldly attachment. For Sohrawardi, it requires the systematic purification of the soul through riyāḍa. For Vervaeke, it requires the cultivation of cognitive styles — active open-mindedness and mindfulness — and their integration through the internalization of wiser perspectives. In every case, the formation is simultaneously intellectual and moral — the character of the knower and the capacity to know are inseparable.
Third: discursive reason is necessary but insufficient. None of these thinkers is an irrationalist. Plato’s dialectic, Aristotle’s demonstrative science, Newman’s careful weighing of evidence, Ghazālī’s mastery of kalām and falsafa, Sohrawardi’s bahth, Vervaeke’s rationality of computation — all are indispensable stages. The faculty of higher knowing is built on the foundation of rational inquiry. But in every case, reason alone cannot carry the knower across the final threshold. Something else is needed: the periagōgē of the soul, the habituated perception of the phronimos, the illative sense’s grasp of convergence, the dhawq that arrives on the far side of argument, the ishrāq that illuminates the prepared soul, the recursive self-transcendence that restructures the very process of knowing.
VIII. Implications: What the Convergence Means
If this cross-traditional convergence is real — if six thinkers across twenty-four centuries and four intellectual traditions independently arrived at the same structural insight about the conditions of knowing — then several implications follow.
For education, it suggests that the modern university’s emphasis on information transfer and methodological training, however valuable, is radically incomplete. If the most important knowledge requires the formation of the knower, then an education that neglects the moral and experiential dimensions of intellectual development is not merely deficient but structurally incapable of achieving its stated aims. The Centers for Human Flourishing proliferating at universities may be reaching for the right goal while working within an institutional framework that makes it unattainable. Vervaeke’s framework makes the diagnosis precise: these institutions cultivate propositional and procedural knowledge but largely neglect the perspectival and participatory dimensions — the very dimensions that the entire tradition identifies as essential to wisdom.
For epistemology, it challenges the assumption that the ideal knower is a disembodied rational agent whose personal qualities are irrelevant to the truth of what they know. The tradition examined here insists, on the contrary, that who you are determines what you can see. This is not relativism — the truth being perceived is objective and mind-independent — but it is a recognition that access to certain truths has preconditions that are as much moral as intellectual. Newman’s antecedent probability, Ghazālī’s insistence that the appetitive soul cannot perceive spiritual realities, Sohrawardi’s typology of knowers, and Vervaeke’s account of how self-deception locks the mind into parasitic processing all converge on the same point: the character of the knower is an epistemic condition, not merely a moral preference.
For the dialogue between traditions, it opens a space of genuine philosophical encounter. The conversation between Greek, Christian, and Islamic thought has often been framed in terms of doctrinal comparison or historical influence. The convergence on faculty development suggests a deeper meeting point: a shared recognition, arrived at through independent philosophical reflection, that the human soul must be transformed before it can apprehend what is most real. This is not syncretism; the traditions differ profoundly about what the transformed soul ultimately sees. But they agree that it must be transformed, and they offer complementary accounts of how that transformation proceeds. The addition of contemporary cognitive science to this conversation — through Vervaeke’s work — suggests that the convergence is not merely a cultural coincidence but a reflection of the deep structure of human cognition, rediscovered across civilizations because cognition itself is universal.
Sohrawardi’s image of the sage with both wings may serve as a final figure for the insight itself — and as a figure that closes the arc opened by Plato’s Phaedrus twenty-four centuries ago. The soul has wings; it is natively capable of ascent. But the wings have been damaged — by incarnation, by appetite, by the occlusion of matter, by parasitic processing, by the entrenchment of foolishness. The wing of discursive reason and the wing of experiential knowledge must both be regrown; neither alone suffices. The history of philosophy, read through the lens of faculty development, is the story of the human mind’s repeated discovery that it must grow beyond its current form in order to know what most deserves to be known — and that this growth is not automatic, not guaranteed, and never finished.
I cannot but ask though, why did you choose the picture “The Tortoise Trainer”? What’s the meaning of tortoises and what are they trained for?
Thank you, Joshua!
You are introducing me to the Greek philosophy (together with other ones) and I quite cherish it.