Dervish Modernity

As William Chittick noted in his study of Mevlana, The Sufi Path of Love, Rumi subscribed to traditional Islamic [Neo-Platonic] cosmology because he found it "an adequate representation of his own physical observations and mystical experience [phenomenological witness], and it provided an excellent symbolical vehicle for expressing his metaphysical knowledge" [Chittick, 72].

In the 19th century, British Romantics turned to that same Neo-Platonic cosmology for similar reasons [see, M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism]. Nevertheless, for the Romantics, Neo-Platonic cosmology was grist for their poetics, not natural science. The Romantics were, after all, children of the 18th century Enlightenment--critical of their intellectual parentage but, in the end, loyal to it despite deep philosophical differences.

In the 20th century, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein produced works that have been termed "the crest of the second wave of Kant's Copernican revolution" [see Ross Mandel's essay in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, ed. by Michael Murray]. Kantian philosophy, with its emphasis upon human agency, the active and creative construction of knowledge, and individual responsibility to craft one's own life, provided significant underpinning to Romantic thought. Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger were heirs to Kant and to German Romanticism more generally.

Heidegger in particular "wanted to do something more radical than romanticism" while still appropriating aspects of the Romantic project as he had inherited it [see Pol Vandevelde, Heidegger and the Romantics, 15].

The thoroughly modern dervish subscribes to the Second Wave of Kant's Copernican revolution for reasons analogous to those which attracted Mevlana (and, indeed, almost all of the classical Islamic intellectual tradition) and the 19th century British Romantics to Neo-Platonism.

She looks over Heidegger's shoulder in order to see what lies ahead...