The Place Where The Two Seas Meet Again

A Free Man's Worship

When Heidegger spoke of "the divinities" or "the gods," he does not appear to have had in mind any of the deities presently worshiped in any existing religion. In his view, those deities are all reified; they are "idols" unworthy of what Bertrand Russell called a "free man's worship."

For Heidegger, the religious imagination of the Occident was exhausted. Dasein would have to repair to the Clearing to await the return of gods. What such a reunion would be like, if it were even to occur, he did not say. He appears to have anticipated that such a meeting would be unlike anything that anyone could or would expect.

We are too late for the gods and too early for being. At present, we make do with religions.

The Simple Essence Of Dwelling

"To preserve the fourfold, to save the earth, to receive the sky, to await the divinities, to initiate mortals--this fourfold preserving is the simple essence of dwelling."

--Martin Heidegger, "Building, Dwelling, Thinking," Basic Writings, 360.

"Mortals dwell in that they initiate their own essential being--their being capable of death as death--into the use and practice of this capacity, so that there may be a good death. To initiate mortals into the essence of death in no way means to make death, as the empty nothing, the goal. Nor does it mean to darken dwelling by blindly staring toward the end...Rather, dwelling itself is always a staying with things. Dwelling, as preserving, keeps the fourfold in that with which mortals stay: in things."

--Ibid., 352-353.

Dervish Divinity

Both...and...neither...nor...

A study of the 99 most beautiful names of God demonstrates the contradictory character of Dervish divinity--for which the Dervish makes no apology.

That-which-is is always already both approaching and receding, both present and absent.

"God" or "Allah" are but syllables that point towards this confounding state of affairs.

They are poetic syllables on the edge of speech that say "nothing" and "everything" simultaneously.

So the Dervishes typically substitute the pronoun hu ..."it"... Knowing full well that "it" is not it.

Theology is nothing but pretense: whistling in the graveyard after dark to reassure a frightened soul that all is not lost.

The Dervish casts only a side-glance at theology, preferring to recite poetry instead.

She enters the ruined tavern and takes her seat in the red leather chair facing the window, looks out, and sings.

"A dog taught me all I needed to know about being a Dervish," Shibli announced. "I saw him dozing in the courtyard of a house. The owner came out and drove him away. The dog returned unperturbed. 'What a foolish beast,' I thought to myself. The dog, perceiving my thoughts, addressed me thus: 'Tell me, O Shaykh, where else can I go, when he is my master?'"

[See Nurbakhsh, Spiritual Poverty, 59].

Dervish Poetics

"There is a standard conception of poetry as an 'expression of the soul, of lived experience,' individual or collective...[In other words, it] owes its essence to human subjectivity. Departing from this widespread conception, Heidegger understands poetry as 'the fundamental event of historical being,' the way that 'historical being brings itself to itself in words'...Exploiting both Teutonic and Greek roots of dichten [to compose, create, invent], Heidegger characterizes it as 'saying in the manner of making apparent by pointing.' What poetry points to and makes apparent is not something on-hand, but the mystery of historical being."

--Dahlstrom, THD, 166.

The predominant genres of Muslim pietism are poetry, aphorisms, brief tales and vignettes, jokes, dream narratives and complex combinations of the foregoing embedded in a kind of exegetical discourse. This is no accident as the poet, in Heidegger's thinking, is a liminal figure: for she has to be able to "attend to divine hints and at the same time intimate them to humanity, to a people. Thus, the poet is cast into the 'realm-between' divinities and humans [what Ibn al-'Arabi termed the barzakh], where it is decided who the human being is and where he settles in his Dasein [there-being]...Heidegger's conception of poetry heavily influences his efforts to rethink being historically and its appropriation of human beings. At times his remarks about the need for the transformation of human beings into Dasein appear as an attempt to reinterpret them in his image of the poet, disabusing them of the pretense of mastering being, with a view to transforming them into its shepherds."

--ibid., 168-169.

Every plowman a Dervish-poet; every Dervish-poet a plowman.

A Heideggerian Shepherd Of Being

The thoroughly modern Dervish is a Heideggerian shepherd of being whose dignity rests on being called by being itself to preserve its truth.

And what is the truth of being?

"Being is the most empty and yet fecund, the most common and yet unique, the most intelligible and yet hidden, the most worn-out and yet the source of every being, the most relied upon and yet an abyss, the most said and yet silent, the most forgotten and yet recollection itself (recollecting us into and towards beings), the greatest constraint and yet liberating. In an attempt to ward off the almost inextirpable habit of representing being as something standing somewhere for itself and occasionally confronting human beings, Heidegger crosses out 'being' and notes that the four points of the cross refer to the four regions of the fourfold" [i.e., earth, sky, mortals, divinities].

--Dahlstrom, THD, 34-35.

The Dervish is therefore not concerned with God; God can take care of him/her/it-self. Instead, the Dervish is concerned with the two-fold nature of the four regions of the fourfold: in their coming to presence and passing into absence. The Dervish is ibn-al-waqt ("offspring of the present moment").

Humanism In The Most Extreme Sense

The human being is not the master of beings. The human being is the shepherd of being. In this...the human being loses nothing but gains because he attains the truth of being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd whose dignity rests on being called by being itself to preserve its truth...Is that not humanism in the most extreme sense? Certainly, it is the humanism that thinks the humanity of the human out of the nearness of being.

--Martin Heidegger, "Letter On Humanism," cited in Dahlstrom, THD, 104.

[See also posts of June, 2014].

The Last God

Early and late, Heidegger makes no secret of his rejection of metaphysical approaches to the divinity. He dismisses "Christian philosophy" as a "wooden iron" and, in the course of demonstrating the onto-theological character of metaphysics, observes that one can neither pray nor fall down on one's knees before the God of philosophy.

In the Contributions he goes even further, refusing to look for God among beings, decrying the effort as destructive of anything divine. Nor is God to be identified with historical being as the appropriating event since God is in need of the latter no less than humans are. Historical being is the "between" in which "Gods and humans know each other, i.e., decide where they belong."

--Daniel O. Dahlstrom, The Heidegger Dictionary, 118-119.

The Defamiliarization Of The Everyday

Heidegger, despite his own deep misgivings about modernity, was a Modernist artist of the word. His project was to defamiliarize the everyday in order that we [the inhabitants of the Evening Lands] might encounter it [again] for the very first time.

He was an abdal, a hidden dervish, hidden even from himself.

A Simple Question

A question every Christian should ask him or herself:

What kind of a god would murder Jesus?

This question was, in fact, one of the main queries that Gnostic Christians posed to their co-religionists in the early church.

Rather than offer a persuasive answer to that question, their co-religionists named themselves "Orthodox" in contrast to the Gnostics who were now named "heretics" and expelled from the community.

And so began the history of church dogmatics.

Heideggerian Openings

"Heidegger...always emphasized the finitude of every mittence of Being and seem[ed] ready to concede the finitude of even his own efforts at thought...Witness the author's abiding effort continually to re-trieve his own un-said, the dissatisfaction with his own formulae, the relentless effort at a 'spiral'-interrogation. Given this finitude of Heidegger's own efforts, we are moved to pose two questions. In the first place, is it not possible to re-trieve this un-said differently than Heidegger himself has done? '...For everything that foundational thinking has genuinely thought retains--and, indeed, by reason of the very essence [of the process]--a plurality of meanings....' More concretely, let us ask: does Heidegger II have any more right to re-trieve the un-said of Heidegger I than, let us say, Jean Paul Sartre?

Again, if every thinker is in dialogue with his predecessors, but still more, perhaps, with posterity, is it not possible that another thinker [a dervish, par example--ed.] may re-trieve even Heidegger II and bring his un-said into language? If this is the case, is it not premature to speak of an 'eschatology' of Being and a 'new dawn' of World-history that would have arrived with Heidegger, as if the mittence that has been bestowed on him were, at last, definitive?"

--William J. Richardson, S.J., Heidegger, 4th edition, 637-638.

Dervishes Distinguished

What distinguishes a dervish from other human beings?

A dervish is an individual who regards the world as a school in which one is enrolled at birth and from which one "graduates" only at death (if then).

The subject of study is humanitas or "how to be human."

Humanitas is an in-born potential for every human being, but it is not in any case given. Human beings are born homo sapiens, i.e., part of the Animal Kingdom; they are not born knowing how to be human. The latter way of being-in-the-world must be learned (one must be "educated").

According to Heidegger, authentic human condition is one of ek-stasis or "standing out" in "the clearing" that is Being. The dervish is an individual who apprehends the ek-static nature of her condition and longs to align her experience of her condition with this Heideggerian apprehension. Put another way, she desires to consciously enter the emptiness of the "all in all."

Hence, the classical American dervish Ralph Waldo Emerson's attachment to Hafez. For Emerson, Hafez truly kenned St. Paul.

As David Greenham remarks, Emerson reinterpreted the "Pauline moment of the 'all in all' (I Cor. 15:28)" to be "at the centre of his beliefs." For Emerson, one's relation to the "all in all" is "what is true now" (i.e., an imminent eschatology) and not an eschatological promise for the future (as in Paul). "It is our failure to see this that Emerson will come to define as the Fall." [Greenham, Emerson's Transatlantic Romanticism, 2012, 17].

Those dervishes who intuit an imminent eschatology are distinguished as gnostics.

To be a dervish is to be an ecstatic humanist and an aspiring gnostic. It is to locate oneself, perpetually, at the place where the two seas meet.

The Place Where The Two Seas Meet

Each time I've read and re-read Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" over the past thirty years or so, I've taken from it both insights and confusions.

It was not until I read it again, closely, in June of 2014 on the Turkish Mediterranean, that I began to understand it whole.

I still required months of Nietzschean rumination of the text before I finally relaxed my suspicions about the author's sincerity and began to take him at his word when he said, in effect, "I don't really know the way to the clearing, but I am following a hunch. If you accompany me, we may reach our destination--but, then again, we may not. I think it's this way..."

What prevented me from gaining a full appreciation of Heidegger's genius was always my sneaking suspicion that he was being less than candid with his reader: that he had an agenda up his sleeve and was only pretending to wander about the dark wood, poking here and there with his walking stick, questioning, inquiring...A clever ruse designed to catch the unwary in his crypto-metaphysical system.

I thought, "What do you take me for? I'm not falling for that!" And repeatedly left his side.

But if one recognizes in Heidegger a genuinely Socratic figure--an "historical" Socrates, without a hidden Platonic agenda, then his frustrating and maddening peregrinations are just that. He remains a difficult read, but not a fundamentally dishonest one.

After four decades of journeying with Heidegger, I have concluded that he was not a con-man but a ken-man: where "to ken," from the Old Norse, is Rortian redescription as a way of "knowing."

Heidegger's "Letter On Humanism"

How often have I read Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" over the years? I couldn't begin to say. What I can say is that I am only now beginning to understand it.

Better late than never.

Ontology "...fails to recognize that there is a thinking more rigorous than the conceptual...Such thinking is, insofar as it is, recollection of Being and nothing else. Belonging to Being, because thrown by Being into the preservation of its truth and claimed for such preservation, it thinks Being. Such thinking has no result. It has no effect...For it lets Being--be."

In this letter, Heidegger critiques the "humanisms of the tradition" for being "intrinsically correlative with the metaphysics" that he intends to surpass through his conception of the human being as "ek-sistence." But inasmuch as redescribing the human being as ek-sistence "discerns man's true value, is it not by that very fact a humanism of a higher kind?" [See William J. Richardson, Heidegger, 4th edition, 552].

The task of the thoroughly modern dervish is to engage Heidegger in "conversation" and, in the process, to inscribe what dervishes say and do in a Heideggerian redescription of Being. In so doing, Heidegger's project will be drawn out into the "openness" of Being in ways that he could not have foreseen--and that few, if any, Heideggerians presently writing or thinking have foreseen. And the Heidegger conversation will be changed, once again, as it was when Sartre joined it, and Derrida, and Rorty, etc.

Heidegger, Again.

Reading Lukacs on reification prepares the way for Heidegger's tripartite "first law of thinking": rigor of meditation, carefulness in saying, frugality with words. "Letter on Humanism" in Basic Writings, pp. 264-265.

Fools Honor The Mosque

Fools honor the mosque
yet seek to destroy those in whose heart God lives.
That mosque is of the world of things;
this heart is real.
The true mosque is nothing but the heart of spiritual kings.
The real mosque that is the inner awareness of the saints
is the place of worship for all: God is there.

Mevlana, Mesnavi, II, 3108-3111.
tr. Kabir Helminski.

The Two Classes Of Men

According to Al-Hujwiri, Abu 'L-Sari Mansur b. Ammar belonged to the school of Iraq but was also acceptable to the people of Khorasan. It is related that he said: "There are two classes of men: those who have need of God--and they hold the highest rank from the standpoint of the sacred law--and those who pay no regard to their need of God, because they know that God has provided for their creation and livelihood and death and life and happiness and misery: they need God alone, and having him are independent of all else."

Al-Hujwiri comments: "The former, through seeing their own need, are veiled from seeing the Divine providence, whereas the latter, through not seeing their own need, are unveiled and independent. The former enjoy felicity, but the latter enjoy the Giver of felicity."

[Nicholson's translation of Kashf al-Mahjub, 127].

Among the "unveiled and independent" are Sa'adi and Hafez.

And so the red dervish enters through the blue door, leaving his mark at the threshold.

Blues For Allah

Life

Tertullian and Disneyanity

An honest reader of biblical literature cannot avoid the impression that the god of Abraham, Isaac, Ismail, and Jacob is a human, all-too-human deity: by turns irascible and cruel, loving and merciful. This is the god that the majority of the world's religious practitioners (Jewish, Christian, Muslim) worship.

In the modern period, however, human beings began to anchor some of their understandings of the world in physical evidence: alchemy gave way to chemistry and other disciplines of modern science. This innovation, when applied to history, allowed for distinctions to be made between religious faith and credulity.

Not all modern practitioners of religion find such distinctions welcome; they cling, instead, to the notion that faith is credulity and that their god will reward their credulity with paradise.

Given the human, all-too-human deity of biblical literature, this view is not untenable. If it is true, are we not at the mercy of a strange god?

When the church father Tertullian (d. 220 CE) wrote in De Carne Christi, V, 4, "Prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est" ("It is wholly believable, because it is incongruous"), he may have been arguing for the credibility of improbable claims--a not unreasonable position to take (just because something is unlikely does not render it necessarily impossible). Of course, the burden of proof increases with the relative improbability of the particular claim in question (e.g., the bodily resurrection of Christ).

But Tertullian is not usually remembered to have made so reasonable an argument. Instead, he is typically quoted: "Credo quia absurdum" ("I believe [it] because it is absurd"). This view, perhaps inaccurately attributed to the famous church father, reflects well the essential position of Disneyanity--a modern religious counter-innovation that delivers all of humanity into the hands of a strange, unpredictable, and anti-rationalist deity.

The Laughing Philosopher

According to Diogenes Laertius, Democritus (?460-357 BCE), though originally from Thrace, was "a pupil of certain Magians and Chaldeans" at the court of Xerxes. He traveled to "Egypt to learn geometry from the priests, and he also went into Persia to visit the Chaldeans as well as to the Red Sea." He created a small study for himself in his garden and used to "shut himself up there" for hours on end. He also visited Athens during the lifetime of Socrates (?470-399 BCE) but, "because he despised fame," avoided contact with the gadfly. He said, "I came to Athens, but no one knew me."

Among his views were these:

The first principles of the universe are atoms and empty space; everything else is merely thought to exist. The worlds are unlimited; they come into being and perish. Nothing can come into being from that which is not nor pass away into that which is not.

The end of action is tranquility, which is not identical with pleasure...but a state in which the soul continues calm and strong, undisturbed by any fear or superstition or any other emotion.

He was a father of Perso-Hellenic humanism.

Dervish Meta-Metaphysics

The appearance of all things is by contraries,
but the Real has neither likeness nor contrary.

Since his Essence has no likeness nor contrary,
I don't know how you'll come to know Him.

The contingent world has no sample of the Necessary;
how then can one understand It, how?



Alas, the fool who for the sake of the brilliant sun
wanders the desert seeking it by the light of a candle.

--Shabistari, Garden of Mystery, tr. R. A. H. Darr, 37.

Dervish Piety Distinguished From Disneyanity

In Late Modernity, religion is increasingly complicit with the consumerist ethos of McWorld. Late Modern religion (what I term "Disneyanity") places inordinate emphasis upon personal experiences and, especially, belief.

The god of Disneyanity promises much (i.e., paradise) in return for very little (i.e., credulity). Belief coupled with confirmatory personal experiences deliver the immediate gratification necessary to keep consumerists coming back for more...

The god of the Dervish, however, offers impoverishment (emptiness) in return for a lifetime of devotion.

Poverty is the substance;
All else accident.

Poverty is the remedy,
Everything else a malady.

The world is a lie,
All pride, all vanity;

Poverty is a mystery
And raison d'etre of the world.

--Mevlana

[J. Nurbakhsh, Spiritual Poverty, 28]

Consumerism delivers emptiness as a by-product of empty promises.
Dervish emptiness, on the other hand, is achieved through acts of pious renunciation.

Shah Cheragh (The King of Light)

Shiraz, Iran.

Natural Mystic

They call all of the experiences of the senses mystic, when the
experience is considered.
So an apple becomes mystic when I taste in it
the summer and the snows, the wild welter of earth
and the insistence of the sun.
All of which things I can surely taste in a good apple.

Though some apples taste preponderantly of water,
wet and sour
and some of too much sun, brackish sweet
like lagoon-water, that has been too much sunned.
If I say I taste things in an apple, I am called mystic,
which means a liar.
The only way to eat an apple is to hog it down like a pig
and taste nothing
that is real.

But if I eat an apple, I like to eat it with all my senses awake.
Hogging it down like a pig I call the feeding of corpses.

--D. H. Lawrence

The Secret Rose Garden (of Mahmud Shabistari)

Schimmel On Shabistari

In 1311 Shabistari, who lived not far from Tabriz, wrote a Persian poem called Gulshan-i raz, "Rose Garden of Mystery," as a reply to eighteen questions posed to him by a Sufi friend. This poem is the handiest introduction to the thought of post-Ibn 'Arabi Sufism; it deals with the Perfect Man, the stages of development, and mystical terminology, among other things. Shabistari describes the divine beauty that is hidden under the veil of every single atom, because "the Absolute is so nakedly apparent to man's sight that it is not visible"--an idea often expressed by the mystics: overwhelming nearness blinds the eye, just as unveiled light becomes invisible, "black." The Perfect Man is, in Shabistari's definition, he who goes the twofold way: down into the world of phenomena, then upward to the light and divine unity.

--Mystical Dimensions of Islam, 280.