Blind Genius

Beginning with Being and Time, Martin Heidegger built his philosophical reputation on an extended argument about the state of philosophy in our Evening Lands. He complained that it had lost its way, that philosophers had stopped asking the vital questions--had stopped interrogating "Being" and become obsessed, instead, with "beings." He admitted that this shift had produced one happy accident (the rise and development of the natural sciences) but, in his view, that too had become deeply problematic. Since the philosophers had abandoned their leading role in the development of Eveninglander intellectual life and become subservient to scientists, science itself had lost its way and devolved into "scientism." With philosophers out of the "wisdom business," scientists turned towards the production of technology. As a direct consequence, the Evening Lands lost their soul to capitalism and technicalism. Heidegger spent his intellectual energies trying to "retrace" philosophy's steps, to divert the Evening Lands from an historical trajectory that would be their ruin. In this respect, he was an heir to Thoreau and Tolstoy.

Like most Eveninglanders before and since, the German thinker was unaware that falsafa (also known traditionally as hikmah or wisdom) had not lost its way: that it had continued to develop a cosmological vision that was essentially ethical and aesthetic and (perhaps Quixotically) devoted to interrogating the Gordian knot that is the problem of the One and the Many--a knot that most Evening Land intellectuals, with characteristically Alexandrine impatience, had peremptorily severed.

How can they possibly be so blind? Ironically, Eveninglanders are largely incapable of considering Islamicate culture or civilization as a possible repository of wisdom because of its apparent social and technological "backwardness." So even an astute critic like Martin Heidegger would not imagine that falsafa had anything to offer him. After all, history had clearly favored the Evening Lands; the only conceivable future for them lay somewhere in the mists of their distant past. Of course, the irony here lies in the fact that it is Evening Land technicalism (the very thing Heidegger criticized) that creates this impression.

We often forget that even genius can be tragic; even genius can be blind.