Whirl Is King

Whirl is King, having driven out Zeus.

--Aristophanes, The Clouds.

Welcome, Ramadan!

Because asceticism is such a scandal in a consumerist society, Ramadan is associated in the minds of many with feats of fasting. To be sure, fasting is an important part of Ramadan, just as Ramadan is itself an important period in the liturgical year for the followers of Muhammad. But each is a part of a larger whole: the struggle of the human being to come to maturity, i.e., to learn to conform one's desire to what is possible.

The Laughing Dervish

In old Stamboul there lived a dervish who led a dissolute and disreputable life. But whenever he wished to speak with his Pir, the Pir always made himself available to this dervish, and conversed with him as if he were talking to a pious man and a dear friend. Many of the Pir's murids were disturbed by the relationship of these two men and asked, "How is it that our Pir, who demonstrates uncanny insight into the character of so many others, cannot see this dervish for the hypocrite that he truly is? And, if he does recognize the truth about this hypocrite, why does he continue to associate with him on such familiar terms?"

After whispering their dismay among themselves for several months, the Pir's murids decided to confront him with their questions. He responded as follows:

"Oh, he doesn't fool me one bit; nor does he even try to. He is a shameless fellow, that one. But you know how I cherish good humor and despise dejection. Well, when this man sins--and he does so quite often--he takes obvious pleasure in his acts. He has no regrets, sheds no false or futile tears. Others behave as he does, but then repent and feel sorry for a day or two, only to return to their evil ways shortly thereafter. This dervish laughs without hesitation and his laughter is infectious. It is his lusty and robust laughter that has captured my heart."

Enlightened Heirs of the Counter-Enlightenment

The thoroughly modern Dervish is an enlightened heir of the Counter-Enlightenment.

The European Enlightenment of the 18th century spawned its own Counter-Enlightenment in the figure of J. J. Rousseau. The Counter-Enlightenment continued to develop through the 19th century among the Romantics of Great Britain and Continental Europe, the Transcendentalists of New England and, late in that century, the great Russian novelists, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The first half of the 20th century witnessed the Great European Implosion (in two parts: 1914-1918 and 1939-1945). During the second act of that catastrophe, certain intellectuals who had survived the first act brought the Counter-Enlightenment to "philosophic expression" in a loose movement that acquired the name "Existentialism" (see William Barrett, Irrational Man, 274-275).

Proponents of the movement (such as the American intellectual William Barrett) argued passionately that:

Contrary to the rationalist tradition, we now know that it is not his reason that makes man man, but rather that reason is a consequence of that which really makes him man. For it is man's existence as a self-transcending self that has forged and formed reason as one of its projects. As such, man's reason is specifically human (but no more and no less than his art and his religion) and to be revered. All the values that have been produced in the course of the long evolution of reason--everything that goes under the heading of liberalism, intelligence, a decent and reasonable view of life--we wish desperately to preserve and enlarge, in the turmoil of modern life. But do we need to be persuaded now, after all that [happened in the] twentieth century, how precariously situated these reasonable ideals are in relation to the subterranean forces of life, and how small a segment of the whole and concrete man they actually represent?

[Barrett, 279].

The thoroughly modern Dervish does not need persuading. She is acutely conscious of the "subterranean forces of life," and her embrace of the Dervish way in the late modern context is not a wholesale rejection of Enlightenment rationalism but a manifestation of her conscious awareness that such rationalism is a two-edged sword. She counters the thrust of that sword with a combination of Montaignean reasonableness and humble gratitude.

For the thoroughly modern Dervish, Heidegger's pairing of thinking and thanking is more than a clever pun: it is her way of being-in-the-world.

Dervish Is...

as Dervish does...

"For Heidegger, 'death lays claim to [Dasein] as an individual' and 'individualizes Dasein down to itself'. What others say I should do or think I should do is, in the face of death, revealed as irrelevant. This is the non-relationality of death--in it, my relations to other people around me are thus severed, and I am revealed as not ultimately dependent on the others around me. In anticipating death, I take responsibility for myself. I become authentic, my own person, meaning that I accept that my decisions are not required or essential, because there is no right way to be a human being. As a consequence of my anxiety in the face of death, I am set free to live my life as my own rather than doing things merely because others expect me to do them.

Because it makes it possible to be authentic, Heidegger believes that death is not in and of itself to be resented and avoided. Indeed, far from interfering with life, anxiety in the face of death beings 'an unshakable joy' (Being and Time, p. 358). After all, the fact that our lives will end only gives that much more weight and significance to the particular choices that we make in life."

--Mark Wrathall, How To Read Heidegger, 70.

Dervish Politics

Dervish Hymnody

When I was a little child and dwelt in the kingdom of my Father’s house and delighted in the wealth and splendor of those who raised me, my parents sent me forth from the East, our homeland, with provisions for the journey…..They took off from me the robe of glory which in their love they had made for me, and my purple mantle that was woven to conform exactly to my figure, and made a covenant with me, and wrote it in my heart that I might not forget it: “When you go down into Egypt and bring the One Pearl which lies in the middle of the sea which is encircled by the snorting serpent, you will put on again your robe of glory and your mantle over it and with your brother our next in rank be heir in our kingdom.”

I left the East and took my way downwards, accompanied by two royal envoys, since the way was dangerous and hard and I was young for such a journey. I passed over the borders of Maishan, the gathering-place of the merchants of the East, and came into the land of Babel and entered within the walls of Sarbug. I went down into Egypt, and my companions parted from me. I went straightway to the serpent and settled down close by his inn until he should slumber and sleep so that I might take the Pearl from him. Since I was one and kept to myself, I was a stranger to my fellow-dwellers in the inn. Yet saw I there one of my race, a fair and well-favored youth, the son of kings (anointed ones). He came and attached himself to me, and I made him my trusted familiar to whom I imparted my mission. I warned him against the Egyptians and the contact with the unclean ones. Yet I clothed myself in their garments, lest they suspect me as one coming from without to take the Pearl and arouse the serpent against me. But through some cause they marked that I was not their countryman, and they ingratiated themselves with me, and mixed me drink with their cunning, and gave me to taste of their meat, and I forgot that I was a king’s son and served their king. I forgot the Pearl for which my parents had sent me. Through the heaviness of their nourishment I sank into deep slumber.

All this that befell me, my parents marked, and they were grieved for me. It was proclaimed in our kingdom that all should come to our gates. And the kings and grandees of Parthia and all the nobles of the East wove a plan that I must not be left in Egypt. And they wrote a letter to me, and each of the great ones signed it with his name. “From your father the King of Kings, and from your mother, mistress of the East, and from your brother our next in rank, to you our son in Egypt, greeting. Awake and rise up out of your sleep, and perceive the words of our letter. Remember that you are a king’s son: behold whom you have served in bondage. Be mindful of the Pearl, for whose sake you have departed into Egypt. Remember your robe of glory, recall your splendid mantle, that you may put them on and deck yourself with them and your name be read in the book of heroes and you become with your brother, our deputy, heir in our kingdom.”

[The letter flew through the air and alighted beside him. He read it and remembered who he was and why he had come there.]

I remembered that I was a son of kings, and that my freeborn soul desired its own kind. I remembered the Pearl for which I had been sent down to Egypt, and I began to enchant the terrible and snorting serpent. I charmed it to sleep by naming over it my Father’s name, the name of our next in rank, and that of my mother, the queen of the East. I seized the Pearl, and turned to repair home to my Father. Their filthy and impure garment I put off, and left it behind in their land, and directed my way that I might come to the light of our homeland, the East. My letter which had awakened me I found before me on my way; and as it had awakened me with its voice, so it guided me with its light that shone before me, and with its voice it encouraged my fear, and with its love it drew me on.

[His return journey corresponded to the stages of his descent.]

My robe of glory which I had put off and my mantle which went over it, my parents sent to meet me by their treasurers who were entrusted with it. Its splendor I had forgotten, having left it as a child in my Father’s house. As I now beheld the robe, it seemed to me suddenly to become a mirror-image of myself: myself entire I saw in it, and it entire I saw in myself, that we were two in separateness, and yet again one in the sameness of our forms…And the image of the King of kings was depicted all over it….

[The robe is described in human terms, singing.]

And with its regal movements it pours itself wholly out to me, and from the hands of its bringers hastens that I may take it; and me too my love urged on to run towards it and to receive it. And I stretched towards it and took it and decked myself with the beauty of its colors. And I cast the royal mantle about my entire self. Clothed in it, I ascended to the gate of salutation and adoration. I bowed my head and adored the splendor of my Father who had sent it to me, whose commands I had fulfilled as he too had done what he promised… He received me joyfully, and I was with him in his kingdom, and all his servants praised him with organ voice, that he had promised that I should journey to the court of the King of kings and having brought my Pearl should appear together with him.

Hymn of the Pearl, tr. Hans Jonas (1958).

Weltnacht and the Dervish

In the midst of a still powerful critique of Heidegger, published in 1958, F. H. Heinemann observed:

Weltnacht designates an age, in which the old gods are dead and the new gods not yet born. God is absent; He withholds Himself; there is no god who visibly and univocally could unite men, fill the world with splendour and give meaning to it. The time is barren, for it does not even notice God's absence. Nothingness has replaced God. "God is dead," Hegel's and Nietzsche's dictum remains dominant and is subjected [by Heidegger] to a profound analysis. An extreme nihilism emerges: "everything in History as well as in Nature is nothing in every respect"; Hegel's Absolute, his absolute mind, which replaced God and revealed itself at every stage of history, and therewith all its realizations, are now nothing, although every one of them claims to represent true reality. Thus, in the shadow of Hegel, a kind of inverted Hegelianism arises, transformed into an ontological mysticism. Nothingness and, based on it, nihilism now appear as the driving power and even as the law of European history. They pervade, moreover, the whole realm of Being, for this Being is Nothing. "Being conceals itself in its truth," it does not reveal itself. This represents a profoundly pessimistic interpretation of man and universe. Whereas Hegel affirmed every step in the history of thought as a one-sided contribution to truth, Heidegger interprets them as albeit inevitable failures in the revelation of truth."

For Heidegger, dark as our Weltnacht may appear, it makes possible faint glimmerings of light on the horizon.

"Yet this extreme nihilism is counterbalanced by positive tendencies. The 'deputy of Nothingness' (Platzhalter des Nichts) is simultaneously the 'shepherd of Being' (Hirte des Seins). He knows that only the Christian God, but not God Himself, is dead. Like Nietzsche [Heidegger] remains in search of God, and it is in this search that he turns to poets such as Holderlin and Rilke, because he holds that the poets name gods and that it is they who discover their traces."

The Dervish bears witness to Heidegger's Herculean struggle, nods, and smiles.

[Quotations from Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, 107].

Heidegger Reading

The Deliverances of Dervish Dasein

Dervish Dasein consists of moments of Heideggerian mindfulness, diligently practiced; such moments yield, in turn, occasions of Balzacian observation and Paterian appreciation. It is in the deliverances of Dervish Dasein that Being becomes articulate, meanings are made tangible, and art and artist indistinguishable.

In the language of the Islamic tradition: it is in the deliverances of Dervish Dasein that the sacrifices of surrender (islam) and the agon of faith (iman) yield, over time, the Near Eastern prophetic tradition's human ideal: the muhsin or insan al-kamil.

Istanbul

The streets of Istanbul teem with humanity, pulsate with Heidegerrian Being. Once the capital of Christendom and, later, the capital of the Ottoman empire, the city has become a post-imperial republican marvel: a nexus of late ancient, medieval, and modern ways of being-in-the-world. It is a living organism in perpetual motion; a miracle of mad energy, industry, and poetry.

If Paris deserved a Balzac (and she did), how much moreso Istanbul!

Why Read Heidegger?

To build, calculate, investigate, create; to see, hear, say, and cultivate; to think; all are ways men and women involve themselves with beings as a whole. For humans are among the beings that for the time being are. The question of Being is not [a] bloodless [academic exercise], but vital.

For what?

For recovery of the chance to ask what is happening with man on this earth the world over, not in terms of headlines but of less frantic and more frightful disclosures.

For maintenance of the critical spirit that can say No and act No (as Nietzsche says) without puncturing the delicate membrane of its Yes.

For nurturing awareness of the possibilities and vulnerabilities implied in these simple words, am, are, is, since Being may be said of all beings and in many senses, though always with a view to one.

For pondering the fact that as we surrender the diverse senses of Being to a sterile uniformity, to a One that can no longer entertain variation and multiplicity, we become immeasurably poorer--and that such poverty makes a difference.

--David Farrell Krell

Humanism in the Extreme Sense

Mazeppism is Heideggerian humanism with its debts to the Romantics fully disclosed. In other words, "it is a humanism that thinks the humanity of man from nearness to Being [i.e., from an attentiveness to how things hang together in the found world]. But at the same time it is a humanism in which not man but man's historical essence is at stake in its provenance from the truth of Being [i.e., the "truth of Being" is inescapably historical; consequently, the "essence" of the human is not constituted metaphysically but with constant reference to the changes which occur over time]." See Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism.

The horizon of the present (or, "how things hang together in the found world") delimits anthropological understanding. Anthropological understanding acquires the dimension of depth when attentiveness to the present is informed by an appreciation for the debts which the present configuration of things owes to the past.

Humanitas

It is time to break the habit of overestimating philosophy and of thereby asking too much of it. What is needed in the present world crisis is less philosophy, but more attentiveness in thinking; less literature, but more cultivation of the letter.

The thinking that is to come is no longer philosophy, because it thinks more originally than metaphysics--a name identical to philosophy [in the modern West]. However, the thinking that is to come can no longer, as Hegel demanded, set aside the name "love of wisdom" and become wisdom itself in the form of absolute knowledge. Thinking is on the descent to the poverty of its provisional essence. Thinking gathers language into simple saying. In this way language is the language of Being, as clouds are the clouds of the sky. With its saying, thinking lays inconspicuous furrows in language. They are still more inconspicuous than the furrows that the farmer, slow of step, draws through the field.

--Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism.

How Mortals Dwell

Mortals dwell in that they await the divinities as divinities. In hope they hold up to the divinities what is unhoped for. They wait for intimations of their coming and do not mistake the signs of their absence. They do not make their gods for themselves and do not worship idols. In the very depth of misfortune they wait for the weal that has been withdrawn.

--Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking.

Being's Poem, Just Begun, Is Man

The "man of heart" is the All. When you have seen him you have seen everything. The whole hunt is in the belly of the wild ass, as the saying goes. All the people in the world are parts of him, and he is the whole.

All good and bad are part of the dervish.
Whoever is not so is not a dervish.

Now when you have seen a dervish you have certainly seen the whole world. Anyone you see after him is superfluous. Dervishes' words are the whole among words. When you have heard their words, whatever you may hear afterwords is repetitious.

Mevlana, Fihi Ma Fihi (Discourse 16, trans., Thaxton).

The dervish (the "man of heart") is conscious of himself as "Being's poem." The tariqa is not this or that religious community or institution, it is the world. The dervish steps into the breach between earth and sky, mortals and divinities, as the microcosmic bridge among the elements of the fourfold.

The dervish is the unacknowledged legislation of the world.