Return of the “Native”
Muhammad  Suheyl Umar

Somewhere, during the course of its historical development, western thought took a sharp turn in another direction. It branched off as a tangent from the collective heritage of all humanity and claimed the autonomy of reason. It chose to follow that reason alone, unguided by revelation and cut off from the Intellect that was regarded as its transcendent root.[1]  Political and social realms quickly followed suit. Autonomous statecraft and excessive individualism in the social order were the elements that shaped a dominant paradigm that did not prove successful.[2]  A few centuries of unbridled activity led Western phi­losophy to an impasse.[3]

Commenting upon the situation, Huston Smith remarked, “the deepest reason for the crisis in philosophy is its realization that autonomous reason--reason without infusions that both power and vector it--is helpless. By itself, reason can deliver nothing apodictic. Working, as it necessarily must, with variables, vari­ables are all it can come up with. The Enlightenment's “natural light of reason” turns out to have been a myth. Reason is not itself a light. It is more than a conductor, for it does more than transmit. It seems to resemble an adapter which makes useful translations but on condition that it is powered by a generator.”[4] The nature and direction of these “infusions” is still being debated.[5]

A similar awareness could be discerned in the arena of politics, humanities, and social sciences. The impasse, though with different implications, was reached by the parallel paradigm of autonomous politics and social sciences which had refused to accept any “infusion” from a higher domain. This time the need for a revision of the paradigm was felt in the United Nations itself. The awareness materialized in the convening of the World Summit for Social Development, in Copen­hagen in March 1995. The agenda, in broad terms, was summarized in the issues of poverty, unemployment, alienation and social disintegration. In order to enrich the dominant discourse and to make it less technocratic and materialistic, the secretariat of the Summit decided to convene a seminar to clarify and highlight the ethical and spiritual dimension of the issues before the Social Summit.[6]

The views expressed by most of the participants about the present human predicament converged. The opinions about the nature and origin of the “infusions” that could rectify or change it for the better were, however, divergent. It was similar to the case of philosophy mentioned at the beginning. Some of the participants tried to find an alternative from within the dominant paradigm. Others suggested the possibility of a search for these “infusions” in a different direction: different cultures, other civilizations, religious doctrines, sapiential traditions.

The issues discussed were just as important for the contemporary world as they were for the past. This point needs a little elucidation, since we are often unaware that contemporary arguments continue in the same lines as earlier theo­logical debates. Take, for example, the issue of free will and predes­tination, a central bone of contention among the schools of Kalām. This debate, which has also been important in Christian civilization, lives on in modern secular society, though it is no longer posed in terms of God. For example, many contemporary scholars—biolo­gists, psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, political scientists—are actively involved in the discussion of nature versus nurture. The basic question is simple: Does nature determine human devel­opment, or can people change themselves substantially by means of training and education? Free will and predestination, like nature and nurture, is merely a convenient way to refer to one of the most basic puzzles of human existence.

Professor F. J. Aguilar, one of the participants and a leading authority on organizational analysis presented his analysis of successful busi­ness organizations, saying that one of the fundamental elements of corporate success and business excellence was adoption of ethical limits and rules of behavior. Participants questioned whether these rules and limits were adopted due to mere opportuneness or if the motive for the choice was sup­plied by some other set of principles. Here was the age-old debate of sincerity and its opposite: Is honesty, or for that matter any other positive attitude, good because it produces palpable results or is a virtue in itself with transcendent roots and repercussions beyond the immediate realm of human experience.

“Cut off from self-interest”, wrote Thibon, “virtue loses the weight by which it is incarnated; nothing binds it any longer to the earth. But self-interest, in its turn, separated from virtue, loses the power of flight which is its deliverance; there is no longer anything to raise it to heaven. This is the divorce between the ideal and the real: on the one hand a verbal and inoperative morality, on the other an anarchic swarming of unbalanced egoisms which devour one another, with, as an inevitable result, the degradation of individuals and the dissolution of societies.” [7]

 Or, when the role and duties of Governments vis-ō-vis the people are debated, the core problem is that which, in older parlance, was discussed under the title of “spiritual authority and temporal power,” though we no longer refer to it in the older context. Similarly, the issues broached and discussed in the context of “religious pluralism” are, in fact, the questions that used to be referred to as the transcendent unity of religions, in the Islamic civilization, and “salvation outside the Church,” in the Christian context.

Closely allied is the issue of tolerance and intolerance that was referred to by the terms “discrimination,” “oppression,” “violence,” etc. This, once again, is another way to put the timeworn question that related these attitudes to their metaphysical roots. From the metaphysical point of view it can be asserted categorically that only the Supreme Principle, the Ultimate Real or what, in the climate of monotheism, is usually referred to as the Godhead, the Divine Essence or the Divine Ground has no opposite, for it transcends all duality. The very act of creation or the cosmogonic process implies, of necessity, duality and opposition. Even in the Divine Order which embraces not only the Supreme Essence or the One but also Its Energies, Hypostases—or what in Islam is called the Divine Names and Qualities, where already the domain of relativity commences—one can observe duality, multiplicity and also the roots of opposition.

To live in the world of manifestation is, therefore, to live in a world of opposites which can be transcended only in that reality which is the coincidentia oppositorum and which on their own level are often in opposition and usually intolerant of each other. That is why tolerance and intolerance are not only moral issues but have a cosmic dimension. This is a point which is emphasized by traditional doctrines in the Orient, where human and moral laws have not become divorced from each other, and was also true in the traditional West until modern times, when the link between human morality and cosmic laws became severed.

Another example of “old wine in new bottles” discussed at the Seminar, was the Agenda document concerning “Self interest and common good” which remarked about “transcending the God of Fear.” The issue that was at the core of the discussion was the perennial question of the ternary aspects of the human psyche which pertained to knowledge, love and fear. The question was not to make a choice between alternatives of fear and knowledge or love. It was in fact, a matter of emphasis. All the three aspects exist side by side and, from Hinduism to Islam, every great religion and tradition contains the three perspectives. These perspectives determine inward human attitudes. “Fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom,” say the Psalms.[8] Moreover, one can only transcend something that one possesses. In this regard we recall an anecdote about a Zen master visiting the West. The master was giving a lecture at one of the Western universities when somebody from the audience stood up and said, “Is it not the teaching of Zen to burn up the scrolls and throw away the Buddha images?” The master, replying calmly, said, “Yes, but you can burn only something that you have and throw away something you possess.”

One of the most remarkable and striking features of the debates in the Seminar was that the basic assumptions of the dominant discourse and the prevalent world-view were brought into question.[9]  The participants were making a probe, in their diverse manners and from the point of view of different disciplines, into the viability of even authenticity and soundness of the underpinnings of the contem­porary mind-set. Discussions about “human dignity,” “human rights,” “human predicament,” eventually lead the participants to ask the inevitable question, “What is Man”? The other inevitable ques­tion, which dovetails the earlier one, lurked in the wings, “What is the cosmos”? The answers were neither easy nor unanimous. “To be human means to be more than human,” St. Augustine recalled. What does this “more” indicate? The supra individual dimensions of human personality as well as the cosmic order is linked up with the concept of reality itself: reality as a multistory building or as a mansion that has no upper story. This in turn is connected to the microcosmic reality of the human self, of which we have two models. One regards the human self as the point of intersection where the Divine touches the human realm, and this view situates the human microcosm in a hierarchical relationship with other levels of being. This model and its governing concept of reality are the shared heritage of all the known spiritual, metaphysical and religious traditions of mankind. Lord Northbourne summarizes the two ap­proaches to the question, “What is Man?” in a simple and straightforward manner:

“Are you in fact a being created by God in His own image, appointed by him as his representative on earth and accordingly given dominion over it, and equipped for the fulfillment of that function with a relative freedom of choice in thought and action which reflects the total absence of constraint attributable to God alone, but at the same time makes you liable to err? Are you essentially that, and only accidentally anything else?

Or, alternatively, are you essentially a specimen of the most advanced product so far known of a continuous and progressive evolution, starting from the more or less fortuitous stringing together of a protein molecule in some warm primeval mud, that mud itself being a rare and more or less fortuitous product of the evolution of the galaxies from a starting point about which the physicists have not yet quite made up their minds?”[10]

In other words, the two models suggest that man could either be a Viceroy, Vicegerent or Pontiff or else a cunning animal with no destiny beyond the grave.[11]  Regarding the former model, S. H. Nasr says:

“The concept of man as the pontiff, bridge between Heaven and earth, which is the traditional view of the anthropos, lies at the antipode of the modern conception of man which envisages him as the Promethean earthly creature who has rebelled against Heaven and tried to misappropriate the role of the Divinity for himself. Pontifical man, who, in the sense used here, is none other than the traditional man, lives in full awareness of the Origin which contains his own perfection and whose primordial purity and wholeness he seeks to emulate, recapture, and transmit .... He is aware that precisely because he is human there is both grandeur and danger connected with all that he does and thinks. His actions have an effect upon his own being beyond the limited spatio-temporal conditions in which such actions take place. He knows that somehow the bark which is to take him to the shore beyond after that fleeting journey which com­prised his earthly life is constructed by what he does and how he lives while he is in the human state.”[12]

Tremendous is the difference that separates the perspective represented by the foregoing texts and the contemporary paradigm of progress and social development that Tage Lindbom has aptly described as “the kingdom of man.”  Given that the prevalent paradigm is losing its viability and there is a growing mistrust about its future, we are hardly in a position at this juncture to reject any alternative out of hand. “Infusions” from other domains hitherto considered alien to social development may be carefully examined and we can ask ourselves individually as well as collectively, as in the case of the Bled Seminar, which of the alternatives has a greater ring of truth. In this respect the Seminar, and hopefully the Summit itself, may prove to be the spearhead of a broader process of revising the future with the help of the past. The message which this overall intellectual exercise gives to the actors of change and to the world at large is not to underestimate the magnitude of the challenge presented by these unfamiliar “infusions” and systematic claims of past philosophies and sapiential doctrines. For what they say to the current thought and the contemporary mind-set is in effect “either accept this overall standpoint or do better by finding or inventing a superior system of thought.” The Bled Seminar suggested that we, in all probability, do not have a superior system of thought that provides sufficient grounds for disregarding the traditional system. If the message is registered and fresh “infusions” are incorporated in the emerging discourse, we may take it as a sign that the wheel has come full circle and the “native” has decided to come back home.