The Thoroughly Modern Dervish

To be modern is to live a life of paradox and contradiction. It is to be overpowered by the immense bureaucratic organizations that have the power to control and often to destroy all communities, values, lives; and yet to be undeterred in our determination to face these forces, to fight to change their world and make it our own. It is to be both revolutionary and conservative: alive to new possibilities for experience and adventure, frightened by the nihilistic depths to which so many modern adventures lead, longing to create and to hold on to something real even as everything melts. We might even say that to be fully modern is to be anti-modern: from Marx's and Dostoevsky's time to our own, it has been impossible to grasp and embrace the modern world's potentialities without loathing and fighting against some of its most palpable realities. No wonder then that, as the great modernist and anti-modernist Kierkegaard said, the deepest modern seriousness must express itself through irony.

--Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air, pp. 13-14.

It is not the privilege of the Dervish to conduct her life as one would in the Middle Ages. Instead, she must rise to the Heideggerian challenge "to be conditioned by [the modern] world, and then [learn] to 'keep the fourfold in things' by building and nurturing things peculiarly suited to [her] fourfold" (Mark Wrathall, How To Read Heidegger, 117). How is this accomplished? First, by attending to one's own peculiar context, discovering its dynamic and ever-evolving "essence," and then discerning how best to dwell there. Wrathall remarks (quoting Heidegger):

"We dwell 'in saving the earth, in receiving the sky, in awaiting the divinities, in accompanying mortals'" (ibid., 113).

Are these but mysterious and high-sounding platitudes, impossible to fulfill? Or is there something to this Heideggerian gospel? Who can even essay an answer to such questions?

The thoroughly modern Dervish, I suppose...