The Genius Of Omar Khayyám: Part Five

The Genius Of Omar Khayyám: Part Four

The Genius Of Omar Khayyám: Part Three

The Genius Of Omar Khayyám: Part Two

The Genius Of Omar Khayyám: Part One

Iran-Neyshabur

"Khayyam"

"Throughout this work, I have referred to 'Khayyam' as a mysterious figure who is more than a historical personality and one who may or may not have written the Ruba'iyyat. For me, Khayyam represents the bewilderment of those perplexed humans who spend their entire life going between reason and revelation, never resting in peace, and holding fast to the fundamentals of intellectual integrity with an uncompromising spirit."

--Mehdi Aminrazavi, The Wine of Wisdom, 280.

Omar Khayyam

A lecture by Mehdi Aminrazavi.

Dervish And Daimon

The thoroughly modern Dervish is guided and instructed always by her daimon, working out her own salvation without fear or trembling but, rather, with a profound (if perpetually chastened) love for her host, the world.

She asks not for eternal bliss; only to live as one ought, i.e., as what Santayana called "traveling Spirit," an "ever-renewed witness, victim, and judge of existence, divine yet born of woman...continually turning the passing virtues and sorrows of nature into glimpses of eternal truth" (Santayana, My Host The World, 144). It is towards such a life that her daimon guides her; yet, inevitably, she feels the pull of Heidegger's das Man and, caught in the middle, composes her own story through the choices she makes during the ensuing struggle.

The goal of the dervish is faithfulness to her daimon and her life is the record of her struggle to be faithful.

Ja'far al-Sadiq, in discussing the Opening (al-Fatihah) of the Qur'an, identified three cardinal dimensions of this struggle as faith, desire, and gnostic wisdom. Faithfulness to one's daimon is never a given; the desire to be faithful must be awakened and action taken in pursuit of that goal. The end result is the gnostic wisdom capable of "turning the passing virtues and sorrows of nature into glimpses of eternal truth." The road is a long one and the hazards are many.

Harold Bloom

The Daemon Knows.

Thomas Hardy

When a sophomore in high school, I was assigned to read Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge. My first thought was, "Of all the great novels we could be assigned, why this one?" I knew Hardy as a poet whom I had read ("The Man He Killed") and as a novelist by reputation (Far From The Madding Crowd). I had never heard of Mayor and assumed that there was probably a good reason for that.

But I was wrong. Within the first few pages, the novel swept me off my feet, and Hardy's notion that "character is fate" continues to haunt me some four decades later. Reading further into his work, I discovered that Hardy was not limited to that one notion; moreover, his worldview was layered and complex.

My favorite Hardy novel was his last: Jude the Obscure. In that novel, one can see how much Hardy taught D. H. Lawrence about deriving great art from personal suffering and stifling societal mores. It is, in many respects, an excruciating read--but well worth the time and trouble. Properly handled, the novel trains our sensibilities; it educates us morally. Or did, at any rate, through the 20th century.

Rhazes

Abu Bakr ibn Zakariyya al-Razi (d. 925 or 935 CE) was a past Future-One.

One of the most respected and influential physicians of the medieval period, al-Razi (Latin: Rhazes) wrote extensively on the subject of philosophy as well as medicine, viewing it as a "medicine of the soul."

In al-Tibb al-Ruhani (Spiritual Medicine), al-Razi drew upon his reading of Greek philosophy, as well as his own considerable experience as a physician, to elaborate a Platonic-Epicurean account of pleasure as the return to a natural state of harmony from a prior dislocation, which he defines as pain.

He espoused a prudential, hedonistic ethics which aims at minimizing pain through the guidance of reason, as well as the strategic use of mildly ascetic exercises.

In his Kitab al-Sira al-Falsafiyya (Book of the Philosophic Life), al-Razi proclaimed Socrates "our Imam," and sounded a cautionary note on excessive askesis.

He maintained that all human beings have the same fundamental capacity for reason (what Noam Chomsky refers to as "Cartesian common sense," since Descartes made a similar assertion over half a millennium after Rhazes) and that the apparent inequality of people in this respect is ultimately a function of opportunity, interest and effort. He took a rather dim view of prophecy as both unnecessary and delusional and criticized all revealed religion as provincial and divisive. No one individual or group can claim a monopoly on truth; each succeeding generation has the ability to improve upon and even transcend its predecessors' insights through rational argumentation and empirical inquiry.

He appears to have been undecided about the ultimate fate of the human being after death as he found therapeutic value in both the Platonic notion of the soul's immortality and in the Epicurean idea that the soul dissipates with the body. His aim in such speculation appears, however, to have been the same: to provide consolation to all who feel the weight of their own mortality.

For Rhazes, as for Epicurus and Montaigne, to philosophize is to learn how to die.

[Portions of the preceding were adapted from Peter S. Groff, Islamic Philosophy A-Z, 2007].

The Future-Ones

If human beings are to be transformed into being-here, and, what is the same, if the truth of historical being is to be grounded-and-sheltered, then there must be those few individuals who create this possibility...Those who make the leap into the other beginning must "go under" in the essential sense of "anticipating what is coming (the future) and sacrificing themselves to it as their future, invisible ground."

Dahlstrom, The Heidegger Dictionary, 81-82.

Letter On Humanism

Expelled from the truth of Being, man everywhere circles round himself as the animal rationale.

But the essence of man consists in his being more than merely human, if this is represented as "being a rational creature." "More" must not be understood here additively, as if the traditional definition of man were indeed to remain basic, only elaborated by means of an existentiell postscript. The "more" means: more originally and therefore more essentially in terms of his essence. But here something enigmatic manifests itself: man is in thrownness. This means that man, as the ek-sisting counter-throw [Gegenwurf] of Being, is more than animal rationale precisely to the extent that he is less bound up with man conceived from subjectivity. Man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this "less"; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being's truth. The call comes as the throw from which the thrownness of Da-sein derives. In his essential unfolding within the history of Being, man is the being whose Being as ek-sistence consists in his dwelling in the nearness of Being. Man is the neighbor of Being.

--Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, 245.

A Santayanan Verdict

On the macro level, Democritus provided us with an adequate inventory of the universe: atoms, void, and opinion. But on closer inspection, we find that there is more at play where human opinion is concerned: the "more" of opinion cannot be lightly dismissed as so much wind--Democritus himself was not so simple-minded (although here, as in much of the Democritean corpus, it is difficult to discern genuine attributions from spurious).

As the Sophists demonstrated, we ignore opinion only at our peril. But what opinions are worthy of us and how shall we decide? This is what Heidegger called "deciding to have a conscience"--and in this regard, as in so much else, we cannot do better at the present moment than look to him for guidance. For Heidegger proceeds by way of questioning: of asking hitherto unasked questions--hitherto "unaskable" questions--and therein lies his strength and (if we accept it) our own.

A Santayanan verdict: By all means, let us enjoy Democritean, Aristophanic, laughter; but let us not neglect for a moment Heideggerian seriousness in all sincerity.

Homecoming, The Holy, Ereignis, The Adab Called Verhaltenheit, The Turn

Heidegger glosses the poet's calling as "homecoming" in the Holderlin poem by this name. Coming home requires traveling to the origin. Homecoming is the "mystery" of the joy of coming home to the nearness to the origin. "To write poetically means to be in the joy that safeguards in word the mystery of the nearness to the most joyful"...The poet has the delicate task of saying yet safeguarding the "mystery," bringing it near us, by keeping it far away. Accordingly, the poet does not name but wordlessly sings or, better, strums the holy...

Because [the holy] is only as something that is coming, the poet never represents or grasps it as an object. Still, even the poetic gesture of mediating the holy would threaten it, were it not the case that everything is only by being gathered into the wholeheartedness of the holy...The holy is sheer unselfishness, the appropriating event [Ereignis] is the holy, fitting gods and humans to itself and to one another...

Yet the appropriating event itself keeps to itself, it withdraws, and this withdrawal is part of what is peculiar to it...The appropriating event determines time, including the withdrawal of the having been and the withholding of the future, and, by the same token, "disappropriation [Enteignis]" is inherent in it...

Ereignis can no more be translated, Heidegger contends, than the Greek logos or the Chinese tao [or, we should add, the Arabic hu]. In ordinary German, Ereignis signifies an event. However, since it opens up time-space altogether, in advance of any reckoning with time, it is not an occurrence in time.

The adab called Verhaltenheit ("reserve") attunes us to the appropriating event and, in the process, demands that we begin to think anew. It demands, that is, that we think "from out of this appropriating event," as it were, steadfastly and decisively yet humbly about the truth of the historical being of beings--as the appropriating event that grounds their unhiddenness to us and our openness to them. Although we are no longer preservers of the astonishing unhiddenness of beings (as the Greeks putatively were), reserve transforms us into vigilant guardians of the clearing for the self-concealing of historical being. Reserve is anything but a retreat or recoil from beings. To the contrary, by not trying to turn them into objects or master them, it lets them be. Reserve is the ground of care, sheltering the truth and its unfolding into concerns and transactions with beings...

The adab called Verhaltenheit "unwinds" that characteristic of modernity in which "human beings assert themselves over everything through objectification." This "unwinding" Heidegger called "the turn" (Kehre) or "...the appropriating event counter-swinging in itself."

[Selections from Dahlstrom, The Heidegger Dictionary, 2013].

Ritual (i.e., symbolic) performances of the Unwinding:

The Twinkle In Martin's Eye

Seen only too rarely...But without it, no dervish...

The Dervish's Aristophanic Mode

More than any other art, comedy is tied to the realities of its own time and place. Although that fact makes it fascinating from a historical point of view, its sole purpose, in portraying ephemeral events and personalities, is to represent certain aspects of their eternal humanity which are overlooked by loftier types of poetry like epic and tragedy...

The fundamental facts are always the same--the polar oppositions between the individual and the community, the mob and the intellectual, the poor and the rich, liberty and oppression, tradition and progress. But there is another factor. Despite its passionate interest in politics, Aristophanic comedy contemplates its subject from such a height and with such intellectual liberty that it abolishes the irrelevant ephemeral aspects of even the most trivial fact. What the poet describes is eternal, because it is in Nietzsche's phrase the All-too-human Humanity; and he could not describe it unless he could stand at some distance from it. Again and again his picture of temporary reality dissolves into the timeless higher reality of imaginative or allegorical truth. The most impressive example of this is The Birds, where the poet gaily shakes off the pressing anxieties of the present, and makes a wish-picture of an ideal state, Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, where all the burdens of earth vanish and everything is winged and free, where only human follies and weaknesses may remain and flourish harmlessly, so that the finest of all delights may not be lacking, the delight whose absence would spoil even this paradise--immortal laughter.

--Werner Jaeger, Paideia, tr. Gilbert Highet, vol. 1, 359, 369-70.

The Dervish Mission

The Antichrist can be born from piety itself, from excessive love of God or of truth, as the heretic is born from the saint and the possessed from the seer. Fear prophets...and those prepared to die for the truth, for as a rule they make many others die with them, often before them, at times instead of them...Perhaps the mission of those who love mankind is to make people laugh at the truth, to make truth laugh, because the only truth lies in learning to free ourselves from insane passion for the truth...

The order that our mind imagines is like a net, or like a ladder, built to attain something. But afterward you must throw the ladder away, because you discover that, even if it was useful, it was meaningless.

--Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose, 491-492.