Resacralization of knowledge: Difference between revisions

Content deleted Content added

Inline

Revision as of 20:56, 13 February 2022

In philosophy of religion, resacralization of knowledge is the reverse of the rationalizing process. The central premise is that knowledge is intimately connected to its divine source, which has been overlooked in modern times. The process of resacralization of knowledge seeks to reinstate the role of intellect in place of reason, as well as to revive the role of traditional metaphysics in acquiring knowledge, especially knowledge of God, by drawing on sacred traditions and sacred science that confirm the spiritual or gnostic teachings of each of the world religions. Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr elaborated on the process of resacralization of knowledge in his book Knowledge and the Sacred, which was presented as the Gifford Lectures in 1981.

Origin

According to Jane I. Smith, the Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr seeks to reverse the process by which "secularized reason has been brought to bear on sacred traditions" in his 1981 Gifford Lectures, published under the title Knowledge and the Sacred, in order to revive the sacred quality of knowledge.^[1] Nasr argues in his Gifford Lectures that the Western intellectual tradition “is in need of a resacralization of knowledge”.^[2] He seeks to revive the sacred character of knowledge in order to revitalize the Western intellectual tradition, with the help of his Islamic tradition and the "living traditions of the Orient," stating that knowledge has never been separated from the sacred in the Orient.^[2]^[3]

Background

According to Ali Zaidi, Nasr and other Traditionalists regard modernity as an "anomaly" in world history, "a renewed jahilliya or "an Age of Ignorance", because forgetfulness of the Sacred becomes dominant only in modern Weltanschauung, despite the fact that such forgetfulness has always been a feature of human existence. In the absence of an unifying theological framework, mankind loses touch with Divinity in unprecedented ways, forgetting the divine roots of human phenomenon. Nasr emphasizes the "symbolic element of reality" which he believes "has been lost under the literalist reign of modern science".^[4] In reference to the Sufi view of the "veil of perception", Nasr contends that knowledge of Self and the physical world of modernity is superficial, resulting in "an externalized image away from the cosmic center" because modern civilization confuses the "quantitative accumulation of information" with "qualitative penetration" into the deeper dimensions of reality. Nasr accuses modern sciences of eroding the theological and metaphysical basis of knowledge by generating "the most anthropocentric form of knowledge conceivable", relying solely on human reason and empirical data to determine the validity of all knowledge. All human sciences, for Nasr, deny the possibility of other orders of reality and, as a result, exclude all other means of knowing, rejecting that the world's reality may extend beyond the physical dimensions.^[4]^[5]

Historical development

Nasr believes that when the secularization process appeared to be approaching its natural conclusion in favor of completely removing the influence of the sacred from all areas of human existence and thought, as indicated by Nietzsche's declaration that God is dead, some modern individuals sought to reclaim the sacred. In contrast to the mechanical and rationalistic views of the cosmos and man of individuals such as Bacon, Newton, and Locke, poets such as Goethe, Blake, and Emerson sought to return to a more holistic vision of man and nature.^[6] They couldn't, however, restore tradition in the West or revive the scientia sacra which is at the center of all tradition.^[7] According to Nasr, the sapiental perspective in the West had become too weak due to the lack of direct contact with the Oriental traditions, which had retained their basic teachings intact in their doctrinal and operational dimensions. For Nasr, it was up to the Orient to revive sapiential tradition in the West through individuals influenced by its light. Nasr mentions Rene Guenon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and Frithjof Schuon among others as having sought to restore the sapiential dimension in the West.^[6]

Themes

Although Nasr believes that Islam is the authentic religion that contains the absolute truth, he also believes in the reality of other "genuine revelations" outside of Islam.^[8] Nasr contends, in the spirit of other traditionalist thinkers, that every religious tradition contains the eternal truth of God. All religions are united in the fact that they all have their origins in the Absolute, which is both truth and reality and the source of all revelation and truth. According to this perspective, knowledge that is not accompanied with a sense of the divine cannot be regarded as true knowledge.^[2]

Nasr contends that, in contrast to modern human sciences, the sapiential tradition of world religions provides a comprehensive account of the hierarchy of knowledge that correlates to different orders of reality. While the natural and social sciences confine legitimate knowledge to a rationalist interpretation of the physical realm, giving rise to an analytical and compartmentalized view of the universe, a holistic perspective of knowledge relies on intellect and reason, i. e., on both intuition and reason.^[9] Nasr emphasizes over and again that the knowledge to which the Quran alludes is placed inside a sacred framework, much as previous Islamic sciences were constrained by a metaphysical framework of the harmony and complete order of the cosmos. As a result, knowledge must be reconstructed in terms of both a true metaphysics of God's essence and a science of the revealed cosmic order, which points to a higher reality.^[10] As a result, the process of resacralization necessitates the restoration of the place of the intellect above and beyond the place of reason, in order for mankind to reestablish connection with God, the relative with the Absolute. Because the intellect is capable of knowing the Absolute, it must serve as the foundation for a resacralized paradigm of knowledge.^[10]

With the recognition of the anthropocentric nature of modern knowledge, the reconstruction of knowledge must re-turn to the concept of tawhid to reveal the underlying “unity and interrelatedness of all that exists”. Tawhid, in the first instance a theological notion referring to the strict unity and oneness of God, is here elaborated into a comprehensive metaphysical perspective of the unity of all phenomena. So, while it may be tempting to view the emphasis on tawhid as a nostalgic return to the undifferentiated unity of pre-modern times, Nasr’s conception of re-turning to tawhid is one of rediscovering the primordial bond between God and humanity that has been severed. The reconstruction of knowledge within the framework of tawhid amounts, therefore, to a re-enchantment of the world, a re-sacralization, a reversal of the process of rationalization, the Entzauberungprozess.^[11]
— Ali Zaidi, Muslim Reconstructions of Knowledge: The Cases of Nasr and al-Faruqi, 2011

Zaidi quotes Nasr as saying that “Certainly my goal is to move in the opposite direction than what Max Weber called the Entzauberungprozess".^[12] Nasr's appeal to intuition as the foundation of knowledge stems from his belief that intuitive, sapiential knowledge fosters an intimate relationship between the knower, the act of knowing, and the thing to be known. Nasr therefore broadens the idea of tawhid from its narrow orthodox view of God's unity to the Unity of Being. The concept of tawhid here has implications on both the ontological and epistemological levels, since it eliminates the subject-object duality that lies at the heart of the post-Enlightenment paradigm of thought. According to Nasr, rationality without intuition, and the idea of the knowing subject separated from the known object, causes us to become preoccupied with the particular, relative, and ephemeral or the Universal, Absolute, and Eternal, without really being able to correlate the two.^[13]

In Nasr's universe of discourse the concepts of revelation, unity, origin, source, tradition, perennial wisdom, sophia, and intellectual intuition of God are interrelated like a cobweb. There is no doubt about the matrix of intuiting the world in its relation to the Absolute. The reenchantment project is the basic program that shows the way towards regaining, that is, recalling, the fundamental insight of humankind, according to Nasr: "Intelligence, which is the instrument of knowledge within man, is endowed with the possibility of knowing the Absolute. ^[14]
— Ernest Wolf-Gazo, Nasr and the Quest for the Sacred, 2000

According to Nasr, the process of knowledge reconstruction must call into question not just the ontological status of physical reality, but also the epistemological validity of the knowledge that purports to explain that reality. Thus, Nasr's reconstruction goes deeply into metaphysics as a necessary reversal of modernity's rationalization process.^[15] For Nasr, the resuscitation of Tradition is vital to resacralizing knowledge, because "a de-traditionalized world cannot manifest the sacred", nor can modern science, or the modern world in general, transcend its inherent flaws,^[12] and becuase "The rediscovery of the sacred is ultimately and inextricably related to the revival of tradition".^[16] For Nasr and other traditionalists, Tradition centers on the Divine or the Sacred. It specifically refers to the "transmission of sapiential knowledge found in the spiritual, esoteric, or Gnostic traditions in each of the World Religions, a knowledge that recognizes the sacred and divine origin of the cosmos".^[17] Nasr believes that only sacred science, which confirms the hierarchy of knowledge and sapiential teachings of the world religions, can check scientism, which he believes will grow in strength as scientific applications in the form of technology will continue to undermine the sanctity of the human person while simultaneously hastening the world's ecological degradation.^[12]^[9]

Resacralization of science

Scholars such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Alparslan Açkgenç, and Osman Bakar say that religion and science cannot be reconciled without changing the philosophical foundations of modern science because modern science is essentially secular and is responsible for desacralizing the universe. The only way to prevent this outcome is to resuscitate traditional sacred sciences which would not subscribe to the metaphysical principles of modern science. Nasr, along with members of the Traditionalist School such as Frithjof Schuon, René Guénon, and Titus Burckhardt, contends that the premodern and modern sciences differ in their conceptions of nature, methods, cosmological presuppositions, epistemological perspective, and the parametric structure used to process the "facts" discovered through observation and experimentation. They propose that the modern worldview be deconstructed by altering the foundational assumptions about the nature of reality, which are governed by the prevailing "dualist-mechanistic-anthropocentric paradigm".^[18]

For Nasr, science should operate within the limits set by metaphysics, the ultimate science. He is concerned that placing religion under the authority of a secularized science will lead to the desacralization of religion itself. As a traditionalist, he believes that religious forms are sacred revelations rather than human constructions, and hence not subject to rational or scientific criticism… Nasr’s theology of science corresponds with his doctrine of God insofar as he envisions metaphysics resacralizing science by surrounding and permeating it in an “all‐encompassing” way; metaphysics should also control and have power over science, like its king.^[19]
— Ian S. Mevorach, The Divine Environment (al-Muhit) and the Body of God: Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Sallie McFague Resacralize Nature, 2017

Nasr thus contends that the problem may be remedied by reinstating the hierarchy of knowledge, namely "the traditional hierarchy of metaphysics over physics". As a result, he condemns any attempt to combine science and religion in such a way that religion conforms to modern scientific theories.^[20] Traditional religion, in his opinion, must not be influenced by modern science; rather, modern science should be placed in its appropriate perspective and, if required, corrected by traditional metaphysics.^[21]

Effects

The resacralization of knowledge would allow man to reconnect with the divine. Because, according to Nasr, the intellective or intuitive perception of higher orders of reality is ultimately what permits Man to know God.^[10] According to Nasr, the rediscovery of the sacred dimension of knowledge would cast fresh light on Greek wisdom, wisdom of Plato, Plotinus, and other Graeco-Alexandrian sages and teachings such as Hermeticism, not as mere "human philosophy" but as sacred teachings of divine inspiration comparable to Hindu darśanas rather than modern philosophical schools of today.^[22] In this regard, Nasr points to "the belief of Muslim philosophers that the Greek philosophers had learned their doctrines from the prophets", particularly Solomon, and that "philosophy derives from the niche of prophecy". Nasr claims that even though such a claim is historically unverifiable, it embodies a fundamental truth, namely the connection of their philosophical wisdom to the sacred and its foundation in revelation, even if this revelation is not similar to Abrahamic religions.^[22]

Reception

According to Nidhal Guessoum, the concepts of God's “robust unity” and the function of intuitive knowledge bring nothing new to our understanding of scientific processes. He believes that deconstructing science in order to resacralize it is unnecessary because the ultimate objective, for Guessoum, is to reconcile "religious tradition with rational and scientific modernity."^[23] Likewise, Mehdi Golshani claims that Nasr's metaphysical objections are unnecessary since “science and metaphysics are complementary rather than contradictory.”^[23] Sacralization initiatives, according to Syed Farid Alatas, do not provide alternatives to modernist discourse.^[24] However, Ernest Wolf-Gazo sees a possibility of reconciling Nasr's philosophy with the Western tradition, if positive worldviews in this regard can be reconstructed, taking into account the philosophies of figures such as Plato, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Cusanas, Spinoza, Goethe and German romantics such as Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling and Steffen. Then it might become possible to see that intellectual intuition of God is quite legitimate even within the Western tradition. For Gazo, the reconstruction must be carried out in such a way that the Neo-Platonic tradition and the nominalists of late medieval philosophy, from Ockham to the analytic schools, from Newton to Whitehead, may be reconciled.^[25]

References

^ Smith 1991, p. 81.
^ ^a ^b ^c Neville & Smith 2001, p. 247.
^ Neville & Smith 2001a, p. 310.
^ ^a ^b Zaidi 2011, pp. 62.
^ Alkatiri 2016, p. 207-208.
^ ^a ^b Shu-hsien 2000, pp. 259–260.
^ Shu-hsien 2000, p. 259.
^ Yim 2020, p. 53.
^ ^a ^b Zaidi 2011, pp. 62–63.
^ ^a ^b ^c Zaidi 2011, pp. 63.
^ Zaidi 2011, pp. 63–64.
^ ^a ^b ^c Zaidi 2011, pp. 64.
^ Zaidi 2011, pp. 65.
^ Wolf-Gazo 2000, pp. 290.
^ Zaidi 2011, pp. 65–66.
^ Wolf-Gazo 2000, pp. 279.
^ Zaidi 2011, pp. 60.
^ Koca 2020, p. 237-238.
^ Mevorach 2017, pp. 323.
^ Mevorach 2015, pp. 135.
^ Mevorach 2015, pp. 136.
^ ^a ^b Saltzman 2000, pp. 600.
^ ^a ^b Koca 2020, p. 238.
^ Alatas 1995, pp. 102.
^ Wolf-Gazo 2000, pp. 295.

Sources

Alatas, Syed Farid (1995). "The Sacralization of the Social Sciences : a Critique of an Emerging Theme in Academic Discourse / La Sacralisation des sciences sociales : la critique d'une nouvelle notion dans le discours académique". Archives de sciences sociales des religions (in French). 91 (1). PERSEE Program: 89–111. doi:10.3406/assr.1995.996. ISSN 0335-5985.
Alkatiri, Wardah (2016). "In Search of Suitable Knowledge: The Need of Ontological Epistemological Pluralism". International Journal of the Asian Philosophical Association. 9 (2): 197–230.
Smith, Jane I. (1991). "Seyyed Hossein Nasr: Defender of the Sacred and Islamic Traditionalism". The Muslims of America. Religion in America series The Muslims of America. Oxford University Press, USA. ISBN 978-0-19-802317-3.
Koca, Özgür (2020). "Islamic Theories of Causality in the Modern Context: The Religion and Science Debate". Islam, Causality, and Freedom. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781108866965. ISBN 978-1-108-86696-5.
Mevorach, Ian S. (2017). "The Divine Environment (al-Muhit) and the Body of God: Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Sallie McFague Resacralize Nature". The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Religion and Ecology. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Mevorach, Ian (2015). In search of a Christian-Muslim common path from desacralization to resacralization of nature: Sallie McFague and Seyyed Hossein Nasr on the ecological crisis (PhD Dissertation). Boston University.
Neville, R.C.; Smith, J.Z. (2001a). Religious Truth: A Volume in the Comparative Religious Ideas Project. SUNY Series, The Comparative Religious Ideas Project. State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-4778-9.
Neville, R.C.; Smith, J.Z. (2001). Religious Truth: A Volume in the Comparative Religious Ideas Project. Religious Truth. State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0-7914-4777-2.
Saltzman, Judy D. (2000). "The Concept of Spiritual Knowledge in the Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr". In Hahn, Lewis Edwin; Auxier, Randall E.; Stone Jr., Lucian W. (eds.). The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Open Court. ISBN 978-0812694147.
Shu-hsien, Liu (2000). "Reflections on Tradition and Modernity: A Response to Seyyed Hossein Nasr from Neo-Confucian Perspective". In Hahn, Lewis Edwin; Auxier, Randall E.; Stone Jr., Lucian W. (eds.). The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Open Court. ISBN 978-0812694147.
Wolf-Gazo, Ernest (2000). "Nasr and the Quest for the Sacred". In Hahn, Lewis Edwin; Auxier, Randall E.; Stone Jr., Lucian W. (eds.). The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Open Court. ISBN 978-0812694147.
Yim, Steve (2020). "Reforming the Islamic Intellectuality :'Re-sacralization of Knowledge' in Seyyed Hossein Nasr's Thought". Muslim-Christian Encounter. 13 (1). Torch Trinity Center for Islamic Studies: 53–85. doi:10.30532/mce.2020.13.1.53. ISSN 1976-8117.
Zaidi, Ali (2011). "Muslim Reconstructions of Knowledge: The Cases of Nasr and al-Faruqi". Islam, Modernity, and the Human Sciences. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. doi:10.1057/9780230118997_3. ISBN 978-1-349-29281-3.