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.