Download PDF | (Suny Series in Islam) Seyyed Hossein Nasr - Islamic Philosophy from Its Origin to the Present_ Philosophy in the Land of Prophecy-State University of New York Press (2006).
395 Pages
Preface
This book is the result of nearly fifty years of study and meditation upon philosophy and philosophical issues as seen in light of the realities revealed through prophecy both objective and inward in the form of illumination. In a world in which philosophy has become so divorced from revealed realities and secular thought has sought to marginalize and even annihilate knowledge imbued with the sacred, it is necessary to return, whenever possible, to the theme of the relation between philosophy and prophecy through different perspectives and angles of vision. Years ago we dealt with the heart of the question of the relation between knowledge and the reality of the sacred in Knowledge ad the Sacred and have returned to this subject from other angles of vision in later works such as The Need for a Sacred Science. In the present work we turn our gaze specifically upon philosophy and especially Islamic philosophy.
We deal with over a millennium of Islamic philosophy, its doctrines, history, and approaches, from the angle of vision of the relation between that long philosophical tradition and the realities of prophecy that have always dominated the horizon of the Islamic cosmos and the intellectual climate and space of the Islamic people. Some of the chapters of this book were written as essays over the years. They have all been thoroughly revised and integrated into the framework of this book. Many other chapters are new and were written specifically as integral parts of the present work in order to complete the picture that we have sought to depict in the pages that follow. We wish to thank the Radius Foundation, which provided financial help to make the preparation of this text possible. We are also especially grateful to Katherine O’Brien, who prepared and readied the text for the press. Having had to endure reading hundreds of pages of handwritten material and numerous alterations required patience, knowhow, and energy to carry out a Herculean task. Without her help it would not have been possible to present the text for publication.
Introduction
Philosophy and Prophecy In the current cultural climate in the West as well as other parts of the globe affected by modernism and postmodernism, philosophy and prophecy are seen as two very different and, in the eyes of many, antithetical approaches to the understanding of the nature of reality. Such was not, however, the case in the various traditional civilizations preceding the advent of the modern world. Nor is it the case even today to the extent that the traditional worldview has survived. Needless to say, by “prophecy” we do not mean foretelling of the future, but bringing a message from higher or deeper orders of reality to a particular human collectivity. Now the modes of this function have differed from religion to religion, but the reality of “prophecy” is evident in worlds as diverse as the ancient Egyptian, the classical Greek, and the Hindu, not to speak of the Abrahamic monotheisms in which the role of prophecy is so central.
If we do not limit our understanding of prophecy to the Abrahamic view of it, we can see the presence of prophecy in very diverse religious climes in nearly all of which it is not only of a legal, ethical, and spiritual significance but also of a sapiental one concerned with knowledge. We see this reality in the world of the rishis in India and the shamans of diverse Shamanic religions as well as in the iatromantis of the Greek religion and the immortals of Taoism, in the illumination of the Buddha and later in the Zen Buddhist masters who have experienced illumination or satori, as well as the prophets of the Iranian religions such as Zoroaster and of course in the Abrahamic prophets. Consequently in all of these worlds, whenever and wherever philosophy in its universal sense has flourished, it has been related to prophecy in numerous ways. Even if we limit the definition of philosophy to the intellectual activity in ancient Greece known by that name, an activity that the modern Western understanding of history considers to be the origin of philosophical speculation as such, the rapport between philosophy and prophecy can be seen to be a very close one at the very moment of the genesis of Greek philosophy.
We also come to realize that the two drifted apart only later and were not separated from each other at the beginning of the Greek philosophical tradition. Let us just consider the three most important figures at the origin of Greek philosophical speculation. Pythagoras, who is said to have coined the term philosophy, was certainly not an ordinary philosopher like Descartes or Kant. He was said to have had extraordinary prophetic powers and was himself like a prophet who founded a new religious community.1 The Muslims in fact called him a monotheist (muwa÷÷id) and some referred to him as a prophet.
The person often called the “father” of Western logic and philosophy was Parmenides, who is usually presented as a rationalist who happened to have written a poem of mediocre quality. But as the recent brilliant studies of Peter Kingsley have clearly demonstrated, far from being a rationalist in the modern sense, he was deeply immersed in the world of prophecy in its Greek religious sense and was a seer and visionary.2 In his poem, which contains his philosophical message, Parmenides is led to the other world by the Daughters of the Sun who came from the Mansion of Light situated at the farthest degree of existence.3 The answer to the question as to how this journey took place is “incubation,” a spiritual practice well known in Greek religion, one in which a person would rest completely still until his or her soul would be taken to higher levels of reality, and the mysteries of existence would be revealed. Thus Parmenides undertakes the inner journey until he meets the goddess who teaches him everything of importance, that is, teaches him what is considered to be the origin of Greek philosophical speculation.
It is remarkable that when the goddess confronts Parmenides, she addresses him as kouros, that is, young man. This fact is remarkable and fascinating because in the Islamic tradition the very term for spiritual chivalry (futuwwah in Arabic and jawånmard¥ in Persian) is associated with the word for youth (fatå/jawån), and this spiritual chivalry is said to have existed before Islam and to have been given new life in Islam where its source is associated with ‘Al¥,4 who received it from the Prophet of Islam and where it was integrated into Sufism. Furthermore, ‘Al¥ has been associated by traditional Islamic sources with the founding of Islamic metaphysics.5 Another Greek figure who was given the title kouros was Epimenides of Crete who also journeyed to the other world where he met Justice and who brought back laws into this world. Like Parmenides, he also wrote poetry. Now Epimenides was known as a healer-prophet or iatromantis to whom everything had been revealed through incubation while he lay motionless in a cave for years.
Parmenides was associated with this tradition. The iatromantis journeyed into other worlds like shamans and not only described their journeys but also used language in such a way as to make this journey possible for others. They used incantations and repetitions in their poems that we also see in Parmenides. They also introduced stories and legends of the East even as far as Tibet and India, which is of great interest because the community of Parmenides in southern Italy itself hailed originally from the East in Anatolia where the god Apollo was held in special esteem as the divine model of the iatromantis whom he inspired as his prophets to compose hypnotic poetry containing knowledge of reality.
Excavations in recent decades in Velia in southern Italy, which was the home of Parmenides, have revealed inscriptions that connect him directly to Apollo and the iatromantis. As Kingsley writes, “We are being shown Parmenides as a son of the god Apollo, allied to mysterious Iatromantis figures who were experts in the use of incantory poetry and at making journeys into other worlds.”7 If we remember that, esoterically speaking, “Apollo is not the god of light but the Light of God,”8 it becomes clear how deeply philosophy as expounded by its Greek father Parmenides was related at the moment of its genesis to prophecy even conceived in Abrahamic terms provided one does not overlook the inner meaning of prophecy to which we shall turn soon. A whole tradition of healer priests was created in the service of Apollo Oulios (Apollo the Healer), and it is said that Parmenides was its founder. It is interesting to note that although these aspects of Parmenides were later forgotten in the West, they were remembered in Islamic philosophy where Muslim historians of philosophy associate not only Islamic but also Greek philosophy closely with prophecy.9 One must recall here the famous Arabic dictum yanba‘ al-÷ikmah min mishkåt al-nubuwwah, that is, “philosophy issues from the niche of prophecy.”
It is also of interest to note that the teacher of Parmenides is said to have been obscure and poor and that what he taught above all else to his student was stillness or hesychia. This was so important that later figures such as Plato, who sought to understand Parmenides, used the term hesychia more than any other word to describe the latter’s understanding of reality. “For Parmenides it’s through stillness that we come to stillness. Through stillness we come to understand stillness. Through the practice of stillness we come to experience a reality that exists beyond this world of the senses.”10 Again it is of remarkable interest to remember the usage of ‘hesychia’ associated with the founder of Greek logic and philosophy in Hesychasm, which embodies the esoteric teachings of the Orthodox Church, teachings whose goal is the attainment of sanctity and gnosis.
In the poem of Parmenides he is told explicitly by the goddess to take what she has taught him back to the world and to be her messenger. Kingsley makes clear what the term messenger means in this context. “There is one particular name that well describes the kind of messenger Parmenides finds himself becoming: prophet. The real meaning of the word ‘prophet’ has nothing to do with being able to look into the future. In origin it just meant someone whose job is to speak on behalf of a great power, of someone or something else.”11 This “prophetic function” of Parmenides included not only being a philosopher, poet, and healer but also, like Epimenides, a bringer of law.
The relation between Parmenides and prophecy was not, however, primarily social, legal, and exoteric but inward, initiatic, and esoteric. His poem, if correctly understood, is itself initiation into another world, and “all the signs that only a fool would choose to miss, are that this is a text for initiates.”12 In this he joins both Pythagoras and Empedocles whose philosophy was also addressed only to those capable of receiving its message and was properly speaking wed to the esoteric rather than exoteric dimension of the Greek religion, requiring initiation for its full understanding. It is remarkable how again in this question Islamic philosophy resembles so much the vision of philosophy of these pre-Socratic figures such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Empedocles, all of whom were deeply revered by Islamic philosophers, especially of the ishråq¥ (Illuminationist) school. Coming to the mysterious figure of Empedocles, again we see a philosopher who was also a poet as well as a healer and who was considered by many to be also a prophet. “As well as being a sorcerer, and a poet, he was also a prophet and healer: one of those healerprophets I have already talked about.”13
Empedocles also wrote on cosmology and the sciences of nature such as physics, but even in these domains these works were not written only to provide facts but “to save souls,”14 very much like the cosmology of a number of Islamic philosophers, including Suhraward¥ and even Ibn S¥nå in his Visionary Recitals. 15 What is essential is to realize most of all that Empedocles saw himself as a prophet and his poem as an esoteric work. It is of interest to mention that all three of these figures who came at the origin of the Greek philosophical tradition were also poets.
This is a characteristic of much of philosophy that flourished over the ages under the sun of prophecy. One need only recall the ancient Hindu sages who were poets and also fathers of Hindu philosophical thought in its traditional sense or the many Chinese sages who expressed themselves in poetry. In the world of Abrahamic monotheism this is to be seen among a number of Jewish and Christian philoso-phers but is again to be found especially among Islamic philosophers from Ibn S¥nå , Nå∑ir-i Khusraw, Khayyåm, and Suhraward¥ to Af∂al al-D¥n Kåshån¥, M¥r Dåmåd, and Mullå S• adrå to ¡åjj¥ Mullå Håd¥ Sabziwår¥, who lived in the thirteenth/nineteenth century.16 In a world such as the one in which we live today where philosophy is reduced to rationalism or more and more irrationalism and in which not only esoterism but religion itself is either denied or marginalized, the interpretation given above of the founders of Western philosophy will be rejected in many circles, and the nexus between philosophy and prophecy in general and philosophy, poetry and esoterism in particular will be dismissed or considered as being of little consequence. But strangely enough for the Western reader the relation among philosophy, prophecy, and esoterism, affirmed by a number of contemporary Western scholars, are found to be central to the Islamic philosophical tradition with which most of this book will be concerned.
We have included the discussion of these Greek figures here in order to demonstrate that the relation between philosophy and prophecy, although severed to an ever greater degree in the West from the end of the Middle Ages onward, is of great significance not only for the understanding of Islamic philosophy but also for a deeper comprehension of the origins of Western philosophy itself, origins that Western philosophy shares with Islamic philosophy but that have come to be understood in radically different ways by these two currents of thought as Western philosophy has come to distance itself to an ever greater degree from both the perennial philosophy and Christian theology.
There are of course different modes and degrees of prophecy, a fact that one realizes if one studies various religious traditions and even if one limits oneself to a single tradition as we see in Judaism and Islam where the prophetic role of Jonah or Daniel is not the same as that of Moses or the Prophet of Islam. And yet there are common elements in various understandings of prophecy as far as the challenges posed to philosophy are concerned. First of all prophecy implies levels of reality whether these are envisaged as an objective or a subjective hierarchy. If there were to be only a single level of reality associated objectively with the corporeal world and subjectively with our ordinary consciousness considered as the only legitimate and accepted form of consciousness, then prophecy as the function of bringing a message from another world or another level of consciousness would be meaningless because there would not be another world or level of consciousness, and any claims to their existence would be rejected and considered as subjective hallucinations. Such is in fact the case with modern scientism and the prevalent desacralized worldview, both of which exclude in their perspectives the transcendent Reality and even higher levels of existence vis-à-vis this world as well as the Immanent Self and levels of consciousness deeper than the ordinary.
But in all the worlds in which the reality of prophecy has been operative in one mode or another, acceptance of higher levels of reality and/or deeper levels of consciousness has been taken for granted as the correct manner of understanding the nature of the total reality in which human beings live.17 Formulated in this way, this assertion includes Abrahamic monotheisms along with the Indian religions, Taoism and Confucianism as well as the ancient Mediterranean and Iranian religions, and Shamanism along with Buddhism, which emphasizes levels of consciousness rather than degrees of objective existence. In all these worlds, prophecy, which is a central reality, creates consequences with which philosophy has to deal. Prophecy provides laws and moral teachings for society that ethical, political, and legal philosophy have to consider. Moreover, prophecy claims to provide knowledge of the nature of reality, including knowledge of the Origin or Source of all things, of the creation of the cosmos and its structure or cosmogony and cosmology, of the nature of the human soul, which would include both what should properly be called “pneumatology” and traditional psychology and of the end of things, or eschatology.
The fruit of prophecy is knowledge of all the major aspects of reality experienced or speculated about by human beings, including the nature of time and space, form and substance, causality, destiny, and numerous other issues with which philosophy in general is also concerned. Furthermore, certain forms of prophecy have had to do with inner knowledge, with the esoteric and the mystical, with visions of other levels of reality not meant for the public at large. We have already seen the relation of the origin of Greek philosophy to the esoteric dimension of the Greek religion, and we can find many other examples in other traditions including Buddhism and especially Islam where philosophy became related more and more in later centuries to the inner dimension of the Quranic revelation. The relation between philosophy and esoterism, which is a dimension of prophecy as defined here in its universal sense, also has a long history in the West lasting until the German Romantic movement. From the seventeenth century onward Western philosophy felt forced to philosophize about the picture of the world painted by modern sciences and became more and more a handmaid of modern science especially with Kant and culminating with much of twentieth century Anglo-Saxon philosophy, which is little more than logic tied to the scientific worldview.
In an analogous way, in various traditional worlds in which the reality of prophecy and revelation was central, whether the embodiment of this prophecy has been a book or some other form of the message brought from heaven or the messenger himself as in the case of the Hindu avatårs, the Buddha, or Christ, philosophy has had no choice but to take this central reality into consideration. Philosophy has to philosophize about something, and in the traditional worlds in question that something has always included the realities revealed through prophecy, which have ranged in form from the illuminations of the rishis of Hinduism and the Buddha, to God speaking to Moses on Mt. Sinai or the archangel Gabriel revealing the Quran to the Prophet of Islam. In the traditional worlds in question, philosophy has not been simply theology as some have contended unless one limits philosophy to its modern positivistic definition in which case there is in reality no non-Western philosophy or for that matter medieval Western philosophy to speak of. But if we accept the definition of philosophy given by the person who is said to have first used the term—that is, Pythagoras— and see it as love of sophia, or if we accept its definition according to Plato as “the practice of death” according to which philosophy includes both intellectual activity and spiritual practice, then certainly there are many schools of philosophy in various traditional worlds, some existing until now only in oral form as among the Australian aborigines and Native Americans,18 while others having produced volumes of philosophical writings over the centuries.
Even if one were to decide to deal only with written philosophical works, one could compose volumes on the subject of philosophy in the land of prophecy dealing with the Taoist and Confucian Chinese philosophical traditions, with those of Tibetan and Mahåyåna Buddhism including the schools of Japan, all of which possess their own special characteristics, and of course with the very rich philosophical traditions of Hindu India. One could also turn to the Abrahamic world and write on Jewish, Christian, and Islamic philosophical schools from the perspective of philosophical activity in worlds dominated by prophecy. Nor would such a treatment be completely parallel for the three sister Abrahamic traditions—despite notable similarities—because while the Jewish and Islamic conceptions of prophecy and the sacred book are close together, that of Christianity, in which the founder of the religion is seen as the incarnation of the Divinity, is different in many ways from both the Jewish and the Islamic views of the matter. This difference is especially important philosophically as we see in the philosophical treatments of the incarnation in Christian philosophy and “prophetic philosophy” in its Islamic context.
In this work we shall limit our discussion of philosophy in the land of prophecy primarily to Islamic philosophy. This limitation is due mostly to the nature of our own studies in philosophy over the past five decades, which have been concerned mostly with Islamic philosophy. But we have also studied other traditions enough to be able to assert that a similar work could be written for the Greek, Jewish, Christian, or for that matter Neo-Confucian and Hindu philosophical traditions with both the similarities and differences that are to be found between these traditions. In a sense the similarities would be much more fundamental than the differences for they concern the basic metaphysical truths common between them, truths for which we use the term philosophia perennis. But there are also differences of expression of the perennial philosophy depending on the intellectual climate in which the perennial philosophy is expressed in the same way that there is an inner unity among religions along with diversity on the formal level.20
In any case our attempt in this work is to present Islamic philosophy in its teachings as well as history as a philosophy that functions in a world dominated by prophecy and, this being the world of Islam, by a sacred book. We have concentrated especially on the later periods of Islamic philosophy especially in Persia, which, after the Mongol invasion in the seventh/thirteenth century, became the main arena for the continuation of the life of Islamic philosophy and where philosophy drew even closer to the inner realities made available through prophecy. There is also the important reason that this later period is still not well known in the West despite the research carried out during the second half of the twentieth century by a number of scholars in European languages. In fact the last part of the book presents many figures and ideas not known in the West at all.
This emphasis on later Islamic philosophy is also of interest from the point of view of comparative studies for it shows how two philosophical traditions, the Islamic and the Christian, parted ways and followed such different destinies from the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries onward. In the West philosophy became more and more distanced from theology after the eighth/fourteenth century, and gradually the main schools of philosophy, in the West ceased to be Christian philosophy, and in fact philosophy in many of its schools turned against religion in general and Christianity in particular, pitting philosophy as the main rival to religion. In contrast, in the Islamic world philosophy continued to function within a universe dominated by the reality of prophecy, and this situation has persisted to a large extent to this day despite the appearance of secular philosophies here and there in various Islamic countries. Strangely enough, while a number of secularized Muslim scholars of Islamic philosophy who write about it but do not belong to the Islamic philosophical tradition tend these days to criticize the very notion of “prophetic philosophy” and want to separate philosophy from prophecy à la the modern West, a notable number of American philosophers, have now joined the society of Christian philosophers, while interest in Jewish philosophy as a living philosophy is also on the rise in the West.
In such a context the continued living presence of the Islamic philosophical tradition, which has always functioned in a world dominated by prophecy, can also be of interest as living philosophy to Western philosophers in quest of the resuscitation of Jewish or Christian philosophy. Furthermore, this study can perhaps also be of some help to certain Muslims who are philosophically inclined but who have become severed from their own philosophical tradition without having forsaken the reality of prophecy.
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