A Brief Reflection on the Beginning of the Surah The Prophets and the Idolatry of Worshiping the Nearest in Four Philosophical Moments: Descartes, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Foucault
“Ever closer to people draws their
reckoning, while they turn away, heedless.
Whenever any fresh revelation comes to them from their Lord, they listen
to it playfully with
frivolous hearts. The evildoers conferred in secret: ‘Is this man anything but
a mortal like yourselves? Are you going to fall under his spell with your eyes
wide open?’ He said, ‘My Lord knows
everything that is said in the heavens and the earth: He is the All Hearing,
the All Knowing.’ Some say, ‘Muddled
dreams’; others, ‘He made it up’; yet others, ‘He is just a poet, let him show
us a sign as previous messengers did.’
But of the communities We destroyed before them not a single one believed.
Will these now believe? And even before
your time [Prophet], all the messengers We sent were only men We inspired–– if
you [disbelievers] do not know, ask people who know the Scripture–– We did not
give them bodies that ate no food, nor were they immortal. We fulfilled Our promise to them in the
end: We saved them and those We wished to save, and We destroyed those who
exceeded all bounds.” (21:1-9)
The surah The Prophets is about characteristics of prophets. They are usual people like any other; they
have needs and are mortal. “Muddled dreams”, “he made it up” or “he is a poet”:
These are usual excuses to disregard their messages. If one is not inclined and guided to believe,
no confirmation can convince him or her.
Life is no argument and any argument that is not at the disposal of
truth, can’t be at the disposal of life too.
And any argument that rejects the truth or sees it merely as a practical toolkit for
the worldly results, or as that which reveals itself only in observational and phenomenal verifiable or
falsifiable propositions is blind to the ultimate falsifiability, where our conscience will
attest to the non-linear Truth, in front of the Lord. Then we can’t answer this question: “why did
you not heed My messages sent through a host of prophets? I gave you the reason and conscience to
measure it for yourself, but you brought faith in your materialism and
immediate results, like all idolatries you just trusted your shortsighted eyes
and entertained yourself with what came about as the nearest. Did God’s anti-idolatry message not reach you
and did you put enough time and heart to fathom the meaning of the
message? Why did you turn a blind eye
and follow your own ‘reason standing on its own alone’—because after all ‘who
are you?’—a mortal abject being wired into the biosphere with the life span of a
worm, compared to the universe, angels, and God? If there is a light of reasoning and morality
in you, it is given to you by God.” God
probably would say, “I gave you the measure of conscience and power of knowledge and you ignored how
limited you are and declared yourself as God, against the Truth of conscience!”
“And now We have sent down to you
[people] a Scripture to remind you. Will you not use your reason? How many communities of evildoers We have
destroyed! How many others We have raised up in their places! When they felt Our might coming
upon them, see how they tried to escape it! ‘Do not try to escape. Go back to
your homes and the pleasure you reveled in: you may be questioned.’ They said, ‘Woe to us! We were wrong!’ and
that cry of theirs did not cease until We made them burnt-off stubble.” (21:10-15)
When I look back at the history of philosophy, I am surprised that how
slowly we opened up the horizon of our understanding. The Quran, the last revelation of God, came
down to us as the miracle of “words”, not images or what satisfies our
immediate sense of wonder, bending natural laws in miracles. I have been pondering the anti-idolatry message
of Abrahamic religions. Their central message: "Refrain from worshiping any image or anything in the phenomenal world: people, the
moon, the sky, the sun, the universe" can be translated into one simple proposition: Don’t worship what is the nearest! Or what is seemingly the farthest and
invisible is the nearest. The biosphere
is nearer than this tree and the bird singing or the latter happens because of
the former. The solar system is nearer
than biosphere or the latter happens because of the former. The universe is nearer than the solar system
or the latter happens because of the former.
God is the nearest—nearer than the universe or anything else, or
the latter happens because of the former. The “causal” connection should not be understood in the way
that as if the universe and the earth are caused in time and then function on
their own. This is another nearsightedness of human interpretation. Because the nearest Eternal is also the nearest in
time[1]—God is that which sustains every single moment of our lives, every single
tree and singing bird and the universe in loving-bestowing by the Merciful [1].
And the Satan enters through our shortsightedness and the door of
excess. As soon as I disregard and
reject this world as the nearest and devote myself only in contemplating seemingly
the farthest: Being and God, then I can’t see that Being and God are present in
the world and universe too, though they are not identical with it (this is what
Heidegger calls Ontological Difference)[2]. The falling state occurs in losing our balance
while walking on the tightrope of “identity” and “difference”. The medievalists who ignored the study of
nature and sciences for worshiping what is seemingly the farthest—Being and God—lost
their balance. The modernists and postmodernists
who ignore the seemingly the farthest, Being and God, and merely study nature
or historical discourses in human sciences—they fall. And Satan enters through the door of excess.
Swedenborg's explication of the falling of 'material person' is to the point:
"Such was the destiny of
the third posterity of the Antiquissima Ecclesia: doubt. It was the
destiny of people who maintained that there should be no faith in revealed
things, that the existence of suprasensory spiritual worlds should not be
accepted, except on condition that they were seen and perceived by common
empirical knowledge. The serpent, all
kinds of serpents, in ancient times always designated those who had more trust
in things presented to their senses than in revealed and suprasensory things.
Their guile has been increased even more in our time, when they command an
entire arsenal of knowledge called “scientific,” which was unknown to the
ancients. Sometimes it is the person who believes only his senses; sometimes it
is the scientist, sometimes the philosopher. Here Swedenborg returns to his
favorite theme, for his entire work—that of thinker and that of visionary—is
testimony to the existence of a spiritual world more substantial, richer in
images and forms, than the sensory world, whereas the deniers agree in
rejecting its existence.” (Swedenborg & Esoteric Islam, by Henry
Corbin, p.24)
I was wondering the meaning of my existence, studying philosophy, and
taking pleasure in the nearest: the passing world, as the ultimate. My philosophy was the nearest: materialism, economy,
mode and relations of production, behaviorism—truth reveals itself merely through
external manifestations. In my shift to
Cartesian moment, truth still was the nearest: it reveals itself through my “thinking
subject”: “I think, therefore I am.” In my
Foucauldian shift, it became the question of “how” things are organized in the dominant discourses of time and relations of power, in the history of institutions:
the nearest.
Still we struggle to make sense of the history of Western philosophy and
can’t overcome our shortsightedness. I
consider four historical moments: Descartes, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and
Foucault. Is it not strange that
Descartes sat by the fire entertaining logically conceivable ideas (logical possibility)
and logically inconceivable ideas (logical impossibility) and came to the
conclusion that the most certain is my personal solipsistic subjective thinking,
and by “thinking subject” he meant “willing, desiring, imagining …” anything
that happens to one’s subjective world.
So, we have the commercialized cliché now that “I think, therefore I
am”. Not completely false, but wrong and
limited by excess. It never came to his
mind, given our historical shortsightedness it couldn’t, that maybe the way to
look at it is all the way around: the subjective experience—I think, desire,
etc.—is as well universal. The
universality of language, Being, human soul is the condition of possibility of
my individual thinking, otherwise I couldn’t learn a language and share my
ideas and needs with my fellow human beings.
However, and this is an important ‘however’ against excess, my individual
thinking soul is not completely reducible to the conditions of my
existence. Our linear, atomistic, and
reductionist thinking can’t joggle these two together: neither complete identity,
nor complete difference. Instead of
looking at what is the most certain as collective-individual, particular-universal,
he was mesmerized by the logical possibility that the whole world could be a
delusion and “I” am the only real thing, entrapped into the “inside”. The fact is that my understanding of logic is possible because of the common use of
language as being-in-the-world along-with-coextensively-simultaneously-equiprimordially
(gleichursprunglich) having innate capacities. I understand my own desires and thoughts
because of… concentric layers of false and true consciences and consciousnesses,
because of my universal connection to other human beings, because of diversity
of life on this planet, because of being wired into biosphere, because of being
a speck of dust in the horizon of events in the universe, and first and
foremost because of God’s endowment of my and your individual-particular innate
capacities of thinking, conscience, and soul. They
come together and it is asymmetrical. It
means if anything is supposed to come first is the ocean not the drop.
In the second moment,
we have Wittgenstein. It took a long time for him to rid himself of the Tractatus'
atomistic thinking to arrive at Philosophical Investigation's holistic
understanding of language. Not strange that he has a difficult time to digest
the fact that to understand a language, as human beings universally do,
requires that human beings share also a universal subjective-objective world to
be able to understand each other. So, one does not have to imagine someone
else’s pain merely on the model of one’s own—as Wittgenstein assumes. He is
unable to stop thinking in the linear movement from A to B to C, from the
inside of one individual to another individual and as he can’t pin this
movement down, he rejects the inner world altogether and comes to the
conclusion that everything has to be seen from outside—behavior— to be
perceived clearly, another excess. As well, he thinks as there is no private language, so there
can’t also be a private and internal-subjective world for human beings--another excess. The
fact is that we understand each other’s subjective feelings because we have a
holistic access to both universal shared feelings--which make us human--and our
behavior as being-in-the-world. And we have also individual, unique and original, souls. They come together, it is not one or the other,
my feelings are not completely alien and different from your feelings, nor is it completely reducible to our collective behavior or vice versa.
The third moment is Heidegger who showed us how all philosophers since
Descartes (English empiricism, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel) were
representing the historical movement of Being in subjective and representational
relation between a subject and an object, i.e., the outside (object) represents
itself to an inside (subject). This is another
example of taking what is the nearest as the most real, moving from A to B to
C, not being able to see that we are already on the line, and the line is the
condition of possibility of this movement.
It is like an ant who can’t see that it is finding food from hive
eusocial behavior on chemical trails and its antenna to detect minute odors is
not simply a movement from an “inside” to an “outside” and from A to B to C but it functions as part of a bigger whole and this bigger whole is its “referential totality”—the nearest. Heidegger’s phenomenology was startling, and
it is difficult for so many to digest.
They can’t see that human understanding and logical possibility are not
a movement from “inside” of a subject to the “outside” as an object. They can’t digest that I can’t understand "hammer" if I don’t understand referential totality in which hammer can be
used. This way of understanding myself
and the world doesn’t level off my existence to behaviorism and to merely what
is outside (for example, there is “no self” arguments), nor does it confine my
understanding to my inner subjective understanding. Heidegger completely changes the paradigm of
thinking and introduces a holistic understanding in which Being speaks us in
our language and we have a choice to listen to the call of conscience or not. However, in excess he assumes Being reveals itself only to the phenomenology of what appears and conceals itself, ignoring revelations. He doesn’t dare to commit himself to
revelations and the fact that Being and Event (Ereignis) come from God.
The fourth moment is postmodernism and I take Foucault as one
representative of postmodernism.
Postmodernism declares the death of subject or subjective, similar to
Wittgenstein, but along with the declaration of the death of subject, Foucault announces the death of objective truth too.
He reduces knowledge to power, "knowledge is for cutting not understanding". Knowledge is for doing things and pragmatists, such as
Rorty, adore him for this matter.
Foucault sees everything as arbitrary though intelligible and falls astray into reducing human soul to the historical force field of relations of power: "power creates the individual"--he believed. This is
another kind of idolatry in which we take what is the nearest as the most certain. In excess, he can’t remember that Being makes knowledge possible. There is a universe out there. Revelations show the source of our existence, and nominalism and nihilism are fallacious. He forgot we are connected to our source, we breathe
air, light literally touches our eyes, and universally we all long for the
source of our being. He was Being-God
blind. With the death of subject and dissolving
human self into historical institutions, discourses, and relations of power, he also buried "Truth and Meaning" and fell
into the hell of the nearest pleasure:
“We did not create the heavens and
the earth and everything between them playfully. If We had wished for a pastime, We
could have found it within Us– if We had wished for any such thing. No! We hurl the truth against falsehood, and
truth obliterates it– see how falsehood vanishes away! Woe to you [people] for
the way you describe God! Everyone in
the heavens and earth belongs to Him, and those that are with Him are never too
proud to worship Him, nor do they grow weary; they glorify Him tirelessly night
and day.” (21:16-20)
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[1] Bruce B Adam's comment on this part of reflection: "Don’t worship what is the nearest! Or what is seemingly the farthest and invisible is the nearest. The biosphere is nearer than this tree and the bird singing or the latter happens because of the former. The solar system is nearer than biosphere or the latter happens because of the former. The universe is nearer than the solar system or the latter happens because of the former. God is the nearest—nearer than the universe or anything else, or the latter happens because of the former. The “causal” connection should not be understood in the way that as if the universe and the earth are caused in time and then function on their own. This is another nearsightedness of human interpretation. Because the nearest Eternal is also the nearest in time—God is that which sustains every single moment of our lives, every single tree and singing bird and the universe in loving-bestowing by the Merciful. "
I think you'll agree that JS Haldane puts this very clearly in the followin closing words for "The Philosophy of a Biologist"
"It will now be evident enough that instead of beginning the discussion of philosophy with physical science we might equally well have begun with some other branch of science, or, as Socrates in effect did in his discussion of 'virtue' and knowledge, with religion, by describing the fundamental experience which religion embodies. We could then, as Socrates did not himself do, havepassed in succession to psychology, biology, physical science, and mathematics. These sciences would then represent successive stages in which our experience is stripped more and more of its actual content by a process of artificial abstraction.
The question would then remain as to why we apply this process of abstraction, and the answer given was that in matters of detail our perceptions are so imperfect that we are unable to reach more than abstract or imperfect conceptions. Yet these abstract conceptions are of the utmost service, so that we cannot dispense with them. They are nevertheless only our own devices, and if, as Descartes and many others have done, we regard them as complete representations of experience, confusion necessarily results, as shown in detail in the preceding chapters.
All of these sciences neglect elements in our experience, mathematical interpret- ation neglecting most, and psychological interpretation least. On the other hand mathematical or physical interpretations are far more frequently applicable in matters of detail than psychological interpretation, and in this respect are of very great importance. We can count and measure all sorts of aspects of our experience, but even when we can add a physical interpretation this by itself tells us nothing about biological significance or about values, though it may nevertheless be sufficient for many practical purposes where we do not require to see more deeply. From the standpoint of philosophy, however, the important matter is to realize that in whatever way we may approach philosophy the sciences represent reality only partially, so that their results must not be taken for more than this partial representation.
We have now reached the end of this outline of present-day philosophy as it appears to the writer. The general conclusions reached may be summed up in the statement that the real universe is a universe of personality and the manifestation of God, its scientific aspects being only partial interpretations of it, the imperfect nature of which is revealed by philosophical criticism."
[2] A comment by Giovanni Maximus on the following part of the reflection:"God is the nearest—nearer than the universe or anything else, or the latter happens because of the former. The “causal” connection should not be understood in the way that as if the universe and the earth are caused in time and then function on their own. This is another nearsightedness of human interpretation. Because the nearest Eternal is also the nearest in time."
I was recently rereading an excerpt from Max Scheler and what you say brings this to mind:
"In relation to all possible multiplicity of numbers and quantities, God is the being which of its nature has no quantitative restriction and is therefore incalculable. In other words, he is the being to whose very essence it belongs to be the unique instance of its species. Thus, God is God as the absolutely unique. And so to God's absolute unity and formal simplicity we must add his absolute uniqueness. As such it precludes any numerical definition—and of course even the numerical definition represented by the figure 'one'. 'The' unique being just is not 'one'—it is by nature that which is innumerable.
In relation to time the infinite mind bears the name of the eternal. This is not simply the sempiternal, that which has absolute duration or fills all time, for that is an attribute which may at least meaningfully be predicated of matter and energy. No, what it expresses is that God, as 'supratemporal', may (just as he please) be also intratemporal, is able to fill every instant and period of time in a manner and order chosen by himself and not prescribed to him by the order of time (that is, the natural laws appropriate to time). Precisely by virtue of his eternity God is also able to enter any irrevocable moment of history in his oneness and undivided state, without thereby detracting one jot from his eternity.
In relation to space the infinite mind has the property of ubiquity. This means that because of his absolute superiority over space God can in one and the same act be everywhere and act everywhere, without having in his being to partake of the divisibility and natural laws of space, and without submitting his located presence to geometric and kinetic laws. Thus ubiquity is as distinct from omnipresence (in the sense of being at every point in space) as God's eternity is from sempiternity. It signifies that God, as supraspatial, can be and act whole and undivided (being simple) at whatever point in space he chooses.
In relation to all that partakes of the form of being, and of the corresponding ideal form, known as magnitude, God's infinity of being bears the name of immeasurability. This does not mean that God has magnitude, which, however, is infinite and therefore not measurable, but rather that as an absolutely simple being God has no part at all in the category of divisible magnitude and is immeasurable only because whatever is measurable postulates magnitude. God can therefore be and act whole and undivided in whatever thing he chooses that possesses magnitude, whatever be that magnitude.
And so God, who as the *ens a se* is already infinite, unitary and simple, is in his attributive definition as mind also unique, eternal, ubiquitous and immeasurable.
Finally, God has omnipresence: the *immanentia Dei in mundo* belongs to the essence of God. God is in every existent, so far as it is. Omnipresence is not exhausted by the fact that God effects (creates and sustains) every thing, has power over all and knows all. On the contrary, it underlies his omnipotence and omniscience as a precondition. Both knowledge of a thing and power over a thing are but specified modes of participation in one being by another. God is in everything according to his very essence and existence, and only for that reason is he able to know everything and have power over everything. But it is not correct to say also that everything is in him, as is said in panentheism and acosmic pantheism; there is no *immanentia mundi in Deo*. For the world is according to reality distinct from God, and only because God is infinite mind can God notwithstanding be in everything."
—from_On the Eternal in Man_, Problems of Religion, pp. 192-193
[3] A comment by Giovanni Maximus on this part of reflection: "As soon as I disregard and reject this world as the nearest and devote myself only in contemplating seemingly the farthest: Being and God, then I can’t see that Being and God are present in the world and universe too, though they are not identical with it (this is what Heidegger calls Ontological Difference)."
Or to put it simply, you're proposing a balance between *immanence* and *transcendence*. If so, I agree, perhaps this is one of the reasons I have been drawn to the notion of "panentheism" (in contrast to "pantheism"), since it seems to maintain this balance between immanence and transcendence. Thus, the modern and postmodern worlds are lacking in, or are bereft of a sense of the "transcendent." And what you characterize as the view of the "medievalists" is one which puts all the accent or emphasis on God's transcendence (although there are some exceptions: John Scotus Eriugena, St. Bonaventure, etc, who seemed to have had a sense of God's immanence, especially Eriugena who was big on the distinction between "natura naturans" and "natura naturata"). The "monotheistic" traditions, as you suggest, put the emphasis on "transcendence"; pantheism on God's immanence. But the secular-scientific worldview deny divinity altogether and physical-material "Nature" is all there is. And I agree that these excesses have created difficulties. It seems to me that salvaging the notion of "immanence-transcendence" is crucial to strike the balance you allude to, in helping us realize that there are, ontologically, superior states or levels of being (transcendence) without losing sight of the "earth" or the dimension of "here-and-now." And it seems to me that most major religious traditions understand or acknowledge this concept, as we find in the Gita, the New Testament, Buddhism (in apophatic form), etc. Even the "Prince of pantheism" - Baruch Spinoza, may not have been, it turns out, a "pantheist" but a "panentheist." And "Nature" when referring to "God" is "natura naturans." So, we can totally infer the notion of "immanence-transcendence" from his system of thought. Right in the beginning of his_Ethics_where he defines "Substance," his definition is consistent with the Scholastic notion of "aseity" or what Aquinas calls "ipsum esse subsistens" or self-subsistent Being itself. Spinoza, thus, eschews the notion of pantheism in a letter to a friend. My point, in any case, is that Spinoza strove to maintain this balance of immanence and transcendence in his conception of the divine and the world, thus his monism with respect to "Substance."
