This question i.e. the supposed antithesis between ‘philosophy’ and ‘religion’ often pops up, thanks to a worn out cliché, that ‘philosophy is a rebellious rationalistic linguistic discourse’. This is one of the most popular commonplace misconceptions regarding philosophy and that is philosophy is reduced down to Descartes, Kant or Hegel; in other words, under this misconception, the whole philosophy per se is equated with western philosophical tradition, that too post-Aristotelian, which is largely critiqued by traditional philosophers. This misconception is a product of a reductive Eurocentric view/definition of philosophy. We need to note that there is Indian tradition, Chinese tradition, Islamic philosophical tradition, Pre-Socratic mystical traditions in the west itself and so on and so forth.
It is here that we need to mention that philosophy etymologically means ‘cultivating love for wisdom’. Philosophy, as traditionally understood, is wisdom i.e. “hikmah” in Islamic tradition. Hikmah/philosophy and kitaab/law, both stem from same revelatory source. Prophet comes to teach both “kitaab” and “hikmah” (yu’allimuhumul kitaaba wal hikmah). The first clarificatory disclaimer, therefore, that we need to put out there is that philosophy is not what Descartes or Kant said — that is in fact only a small portion of western philosophical tradition, rather philosophy as traditionally understood is Sophia/wisdom/hikmah which every Prophet comes with and which then is explicated upon by the followers of Prophets i.e. the sages/hukamaa/philosophers within a tradition — fleshing out the deeper essential truths of religion. Hikmah is the final fruit of religion rather than being antagonistic to it.
One of the most commonplace misconceptions, as we have already mentioned above, that has gripped the Muslim mind about philosophy is that they equate it with pure rational inquiry. They fail to realize that they are parroting west’s definition of philosophy that too post-Aristotelian (as even pre-Socratics won’t agree with such a definition). This is not how Islamic philosophy or traditional philosophy conceives the meaning & task of philosophy. Equating philosophy with mere “reason” is a mistake simply because traditional account does not reduce human being down to mere “reason”. Human being has higher noetic gnostic intuitive intellectual faculty. This is what Iqbal criticized Kant on who had reduced human knowing down to mere twelve categories of understanding.
Philosophy in traditional understanding is not rational dry logic chopping exercise but rather it is moist hikmah/wisdom/Sophia. Ancient Hindus defined philosophy as “darshana” i.e. a direct vision of reality/Truth rather than abstract ratiocination. Plato defined philosophy as the “preparation for death”. Plato was a mystico-philosopher/sage rather than a rationalist. This is also true of most pre-Socratics whose traditional symbolism is literally & thus wrongly translated into naturalism by later post-Aristotelian commentators of western philosophy.
Philosophy within a traditionalist cosmos is a proper way of life. One can read the works of Pierre Hadot who reclaims ancient philosophy as a way of life rather than a mere rationalistic “discourse”. Hadot explains in detail as to how philosophy in ancient Greece was composed of a set of spiritual practices aimed at a transformation of self i.e. “becoming” wise. Systematic philosophy/discourse, Hadot says, was only to simplify the teachings in few sequential propositions to ensure their easy transmission to students.
Similarly within Islamic tradition it is primarily ethics as Hamiduddin Farahi and Anwar Shah Kashmiri interpreted “hikmah” to be in reaction to Imam Shafi who tried to restrict hikmah (sophia/wisdom) to only hadeeth-sunnah. Ethics is a way of life. It is an attitude. Traditional philosophy, rather than being dry logic chopping, demands ethical discipline because it is a vision/darshan; but vision of what & ethical discipline for what? It is to see limitations and nothingness of one’s own ego before eternal Reality/God — The One/Whole. Philosophy, traditionally amounted to ‘theosis’ i.e. ‘likeness to God’ which means leaving ego-centrism and adopting God’s perspective i.e. seeing world/life/reality from God’s eye i.e. shunning one’s egotistical, rational, partial, sentimental presuppositions & participating in reality (as totality) as it is. This is what traditional philosophers mean by ‘cleansing of perception’ or ‘new vision’ i.e. escaping the confusions and assertions of ego and seeing disclosure of God as it is. To adopt this ‘theosis’ and ‘seeing things as they are’ without creating mental abstractions is what Plato means by ‘preparation for death’ i.e. coming out of ego (ego death) and seeing reality as it is in totality i.e. being completely open to the disclosure of Life/world/experience without demanding/abstracting anything. To achieve this, one needs ethical discipline to transcend ego pathology.
To enjoy life one actually has to come out of ego tantrums — all the moments of joy are moments of spirit and not of ego i.e. all moments of joy are moments when one lives outside of himself/herself, for example, conversing with family/friends, watching an intense drama/movie/story, playing a game or watching one, participating in a collective function/feast; when one leaves ego tantrums i.e. comes out of ego, forgets it and lives in “collective” spirit — joy erupts on its own. This is what philosophy as “contemplation” means because every act of contemplation is ego death as one comes out of ego whilst contemplating on ‘other’.
To achieve this theosis, joy, wisdom, preparation for death, one needs not merely rationalistic linguistic logic chopping but an ethical discipline, a humble acceptance of one’s nothingness before God. One cannot attain joy if one is not ethical/humble. Ethics is first philosophy as Levinas would say. This is how Muslims understand hikmah/philosophy to be. One can see that the ancient philosophy, as Hadot points out, predominantly subscribes to “virtue ethics” rather than deontological or consequentialist — which focus on “actions” or “will”. Virtue ethics is centered upon “cultivation” of certain modes of being (virtues) that lead to an organically good life. This practice of the cultivation of virtue is philosophy.
Philosophy, therefore, is not mere ‘jargon’, in fact if one gets arrested within ‘jargon’, it amounts to a bad fever of mind i.e. getting trapped in words. Traditional philosophy liberates us from all fevers of mind by showing us our ways out of our egos and all its dualist binary linguistic representationalist confusions, skepticisms, doubts, uncertainties and trappings. Aim of philosophy, as traditionally understood is moksha/nirvana/liberation which is seeing things in new light and not mere linguistic rambling of words. Seeing Reality as it is i.e. escaping ego centrism, its binaries and confusions — causes perception to ultimately dissolve into objects such that only “seeing” remains and thus all notorious problems of epistemology are dissolved. Western philosophy, particularly after Descartes and then Kant, got boiled down to epistemology with consequent confusions and abysses which it has not been able to recover till today as pointed out by the likes of Heidegger. Traditional philosophy bypasses these routes and saves us from all such trouble.
Traditional philosophy ultimately intersects with poetry & meditative thinking, the way Heidegger argues in his later work. The reason for that is that in the ‘calculative thinking’, a subject is already divorced from an object which it tries to figure out in isolation and thus is caught up in Plato’s cave. It tries to get more and more clarity of details as to what this ‘object’ is all about; not realizing that the whole energy is spent on studying the ‘way’ that object is ‘appearing’ to someone rather than on the ‘object’ itself. To quote Ben Rogers, “we struggle with the proving of the being instead of with the being itself”. In ‘meditative thinking’, subject so to say ‘flows’ with the object i.e. ‘participates’ in it and with it and thus allows Being to disclose itself organically. This is the reason as to why Heidegger prioritizes poetic/meditative thinking over propositional thinking, simply because in poetic thinking, language has more vastness, freedom, participation and greater expressive power through various nuances, metaphors, unusual style of speech, to express ‘Being’. Being/Reality/Life is complex and diverse so therefore it is better disclosed by complex poetic language, where as propositional calculative thinking tries to make things as ‘specific’ as possible, during the course of which many other aspects of Being get neglected, marginalized or concealed. Ben Rogers’ short paper entitled “Poetic Uncovering in Heidegger” best clarifies this point.
We call Ibn Arabi a philosopher/sage & not a rationalist. That’s how traditional worldview defines philosophy. Can we classify Pythagoras, Shankara, Ibn Arabi or Suhrawardi or Sadra as logic chopping pure ‘rationalistic philosophers’? In Islamic tradition, philosophy and tassawuf are two faces of the same coin. Under traditional worldview, philosophy is not dissolved into armchair academic rational logic chopping philosophizing (for the sake of it) but rather it defines philosophers as ‘sages’/hukamaa. A true philosopher as traditionally understood, needs both intellection as well as spiritual purification. The more heart/nous/ayn-al-qalb gets purified, the more higher orders of reality become clearer. The kind of critiques we find in Ghazali and Ibn Taymiyyah against philosophy are largely critiques of over-ambitious projects of speculative reason/ratiocination (rationalism) and not wisdom/philosophy as traditionally understood. Both of these two intellectual giants subscribed to a form of intellectual/intuitive/noetic faculty of knowledge in the form of “dhawq” or “fitra” knowledge. Philosophy is not opinions of some philosophers that one may find un-orthodox rather philosophy is the very mode of being which prepares one for meeting with God.
Traditional philosophy, therefore, has its own notion of “intellect” (aqli kulli) which is not to be confused with mere “reason”; rational faculty is a separate faculty which helps us survive; intellect is something else; it means “nous” or the “eye of the heart” i.e. the direct rootedness of human being in sacred/reality/being; it directly participates in Reality such that knowledge intersects with being — avoiding all epistemological spin-offs. An elaborate treatment of the traditional notion of “intellect” is not possible here.
Please see William Stoddart’s chapter “What is the intellect”, M. Ali Lakhani’s chapter “On Faith & Intellect” & Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s article “Intellect & Intuition: Their relationship from the Islamic
perspective”.
(Author is Columnist and has done Masters in Philosophy from JNU, Delhi. Email: [email protected])
