Classical philosophy emerged out of wonder,modern philosophy has moved beyond wonder just to relapse into doubt. Thuspost-Descartian philosophy is one rooted in doubt. Scepticism is reason forlarger corpus of post renaissance philosophy. Whereas for Pre-Socratics and forlarger band of Platonists, language was a priori and meaning was rooted inbeing, modern day invasions on semiotics, linguistics and emergence of entire enterpriseof “philosophy of language” has pushed away the original project of philosophy-the project of quest for meaning. The dissociation of meaning from itsontological roots and its remapping onto epistemological sub-narrative hascreated a paradigm shift in the history of philosophy. Plato’s ideal of formand idea, Hegel’s concept of spirit and such metanarratives have been abandonedin wake of postmodernist subjectivity and epistemic relativity. What hasremained is a squabble of rhetoric committed to divorce sign from signified andreality from representation. This has no doubt lead to, to borrow Gadamer’sterm “fusion of horizons”, but the principal horizon, the horizon of Being andits process of self actualisation has imploded to such an extent that modernphilosophers no longer bother to talk about it. Heidegger was perhaps the lastin that galaxy of profound thinkers who engaged with this question of Being.Here, an attempt shall be made to trace the evolution (possibly devolution) ofwestern philosophy from Plato’s enquiry into world stuff toWittgenstein’s reflections on theory of language. This process shall be tracedonly to monitor its influence of human conditioning and to underscore the factof deflection of philosophy from its original mission of enquiry into Being (Metaphysics)to its later day obsession with issues least concerning the human subject andour conditioning here on earth. While making sky high claims about variedepistemic aspects, it will be seen to what extent has modern philosophyremedied human anxiety, alienation and existential chaos and what is to beexpected of it in case it continues to work in its present orientation ofmomentum.
Philosophy as a discipline rose to occasionas an enquiry into the nature of Reality and the discovery of ground of Being.This truth hunt was what was actually known at Metaphysics, the term thathas lately been confused with occultism and peeping into skies. This questfor ground of Being steered Greek philosophers in the directionof Logos and set Indian sages to indentify that ground of Beingwith Brahman while as inspiring Semitic prophets to identify thatGround of Being with Yahweh (Literal meaning : He Brings intoExistence Whatever Exists). It was believed that gnosis of Logos or Brahman orYahweh will bring with it unadulterated Truth, and thus unlimited joy andinfinite wisdom. This trilogy of Sat, Chit, Ananda (Truth, consciousness andBliss) was seen as the apex which all human endeavours must culminate at. Thusan account of philosophy even as partial and subjective as that given byRussell could not escape but reveal the fact that founding fathers of Greekthought were no dabblers, but were deeply concerned about the existentialrealities that the facticity of life has always pressed upon mankind. The humananxiety and alienation that has only been rediscovered by existentialists wasrealised at much deeper level by Greek philosophers, Indian Sages and Semiticprophets. The existential claims to originality vis a vis pin pointing of suchissues human as anxiety, dread, alienation etc needs little reconsideration.Can modern existentialism claim to have inspired subjectivity and dread greaterthan that as recorded in lives of Buddha and Ibrahim? The answer is resoundingnegation. Little bit of digression from my stream of thought. So philosophy, inits original sense was a genuine quest for the sacred, transcendent andmeta-ontological realm. This spirit was carried forward for quite a largeperiod of time, unless we enter early Middle Ages, where we see philosophylosing its original meaning and form, sum and substance, so much so that itlost almost its all contacts with its own essence. With the spread ofChristianity and Islam like a thunderbolt, a problem of unique nature arosewhich was never witnessed before and which continues to haunt human mind tothis day. Both Christian and Muslim scholastics failed to realise the essenceof philosophy so much so that a new oxymoronic discipline of theology came intoexistence. Theology primarily arose out of two confusions
·The perversion of philosophy from itstranscendental ideal and its obsession with things of inferior degree
·The failure on part of theologians thatearly philosophers were not actually antagonistic or indifferent to religion.They were just religious and spiritual in their own way.
This failure on part of scholastics andthis perversion on part of philosophy was what laid grounds for theology – agymnasium trying to reduce spiritual and religious geometry to philological andscholastic algebra. What all this surveillance brings home is the fact that bymedieval times philosophy was already receding farther away from its ideal andwas turning into what Schoun has described as “democratic misosophy”, wisdomwas replaced by mere love of wisdom to Quote Guenon. But even in this era ofdecadence and scholastic brawl one comes across illustrious figures likeBoethius, St. Augustine, Sankara, Ibn Arabi and Mulla Sadra among otherswho tried to restore to philosophy its pristine glory and kept reminding theirfellowmen ,the original functions of philosophy (Hikmah, Sophia, Darsana) . Butrenaissance brought with it its own one dimensional empiricist epistemology.With the slogan that “only perceptible is possible” and insistence on dogma ofirrationality that “Non experience implies non existence” created ontologicalcalamity of highest order. Prior to this one dimensional epistemic confinement,man aspired for higher levels of being and used to leash his intellectual andspiritual energies to become more than what he was. But to inform man that hewas himself the ultimate end and the last level in the ontological hierarchy ofbeing proved anything but a colossal catastrophe. Now there were no ideals tolook for, no higher levels of being to be aspired, nothing, but man bereft ofvertical dimension of existence and made to survive the saga of selfalienation. Iftikhar Arif sums up this loss of transcendence as :-
“kabhi aflak se naalu kay jawab aatay thay
In dinoo aalami aflaak se khauf aata hai”
What started as a simple project inpositive science under euphemism of renaissance soon engulfed social scienceand in particular philosophy. With vertical dimension chopped off, men oflearning strived and starved for meaning within the perimeters of immanence.But this, as Godel’s theorem has taught us was mission impossible.Thus it is no wonder that a large bunch of philosophers from post renaissanceera mourned this loss of meaning. With meaning of life gone to do dooldrums,most of the philosophers kept themselves and the masses at large opiated withthe technological revelations of this new one dimensional science. But isscience justified to hide its epistemological redundancy behind the facade ofits technological achievements. Let me quote Rene Guenon’s conclusive remarksabout it. Rene notes “in taking on its present form, science has lost not onlyin depth but also, one might say, in stability for its achievement to theprinciples enabled it to share, in their immutability in the full measure thatits subject matter allowed, whereas being now completely confined to the worldof change, it can find nothing in it that is stable and no fixed point on whichto base itself”. Now philosophy, resting like a lid on top of contemporaryscience came to be infected with same flaws as characterised the science of theday.
With the arrival of “Reign ofQuantity” and submergence of the qualitative approach to life, a host ofexistential issues have arrived floating in our lives. The scientific doctrinethat “what can’t be measured can’t be known” was ruthlessly appliedto all dimensions of human life, which led to the chaos of unforeseen order.The failure to appreciate Transcendence and to contextualise everything interms of immanence brought with it the “courage to disbelieve”. Thetransition of epistemology and ontology from the expansion of humanunderstanding, to its limitation, proved to be a most grievous crime committedby pundits of Western philosophy.. Philosophy, in the post-renaissance eraoperated under the influence of science, and this led philosophical methodologyto be characterised by the same shortcomings as were inherent to the science ofthe times. In placing entire emphasis on the sensory faculties of man, thephilosophers of this era paid no attention to the rational and spiritualfacilities of man. Hegel, Kant and others of their species metamorphosed thelandscape of western philosophy, which later had its repercussions of thewidest and worst possible nature. From what one can know, the nature of thequestion now changed to what one cannot know. From what one can understand, theemphasis laid on what one can perceive by mere sense organs. Locke thought thatthe role of philosophy was not to extend the boundaries of knowledge butprecisely to limit it. This limited epistemology and consequently boundedontology, constrained the trajectories of human imagination.
The human mind, with its sensory, rational,imaginative, intellectual and spiritual possibilities of understanding, isintrinsically infinite. The infinity of human imagination is not circumscribedby the finitude of human physicality. Man’s quest for infinity with all itspossible implications finds its satisfaction in the perception of God, theinstitution of the sacred and the concept of the divine. When this infinitudeof the human mind is made to vibrate on the membrane of finitude and made tofeast on half backed philosophies of logical positivism, materialism,existentialism, Marxism or Freudian philosophy, it starts revolting against itsown essence- the essence of the infinite and feels a sense of isolation, dreadand despair. That is why religion, anticipating this self revolting essence ofman’s finitude, introduced the concept of God in the paradigm of infinity. Theissue of stress emerging between classical theology and modern philosophy wasaddressed by Kierkegaard in his “Fear and Trembling”. Kierkegaard resolved this dichotomy by his “leap of faith” doctrine.Kierkegaard opined that faith ought not to be a subject matter of philosophicalrationalisation or scientific materialisation. He stressed the notion that thegreatness of belief lies not in the theorisation, but in complete surrender tothe object of belief. Kierkegaard in his own words said that,
“But he who expected the impossiblebecame greater than all”.
But his successors failed to appreciatethis leap, and henceforth from Nietzsche to Sartre, we come across a series ofthinkers who could not escape this self-imposed finitude. Nietzsche, perplexedby his individual context, went on to pronounce the death of God. His famousstatement that “God is dead”, seems to have earned him universalfame. By substituting the notion of God by his Superman, he laid thefoundations of modern-day philosophical atheism. But many later dayphilosophers like William James, Wittgenstein, Plantinga, Rashdall, Tillich andscores of others, reclaimed to religion, its philosophical merit.
Anthony Kenny pertinently reminds us of thephenomenon that though Nietzsche declared the death of God, but he could notkill religion. Though the notion of religion without the concept of the divineremains a hoax with its own shortcomings, the zest of reconfiguration ofreligion and theology did not come without a cost. For a long time, it led tothe all-round pervasiveness of notions like chaos, dread, anxiety, each termhaving a specific philosophical connotation.
One of the deleterious aftermaths of thisconstrained epistemological approach has manifested itself in the form of blindscientism, and unchecked materialism that has made the entire civilizationcrawl on the surface of material finitude. It has utterly failed to let mandiscover the transcendental aspects of being intuitive and spiritual aspects oflearning. This has been the tragedy of prominent philosophers like Nietzsche,Heidegger, Sartre and others, who in their quest for higher possibilities ofbeing, were shackled by their own limited epistemological paradigm. This ledthem to deny the transcendental realms of existence. Such approach to realityhas, instead of opening the human finitude into the ocean of the infinite,confined the human infinite within material finitude.
The failure to look beyond the manifest andto fix our gaze on actuality, and denying the future of possibility, has mademan to revolve in short-circuited immanence. Focusing their attention onhandpicked issues of theodicy and eschatology, the later day philosophers havecompletely severed the roots of religious tradition. The overwhelming evidencepointing towards the existence of God and the transcendental realm is rubbishedagainst a bunch of misplaced scientific statistics. The veracity of religiousscriptures is sacrificed by the single stroke of a pen. This reflects thedismal state of scholarship that is taking over the intellectual world.
What is needed at this instant, is thatpeople resort to genuine scholarship before drawing any conclusions, having itsbearings on man’s individual and collective life. Simultaneously, the religiousscholarship is expected to raise its standards in addressing the issuesencountering the modern mind. The postmodern era has put us in a volatile statewhere the institutions of tradition need to be furthered and strengthened toensure that society does not fall apart.
World today, with all its conundrums standsin a dire need to grasp and perceive things and the realities beyond themanifest. The journey to Transcendence is not only necessary, but the onlycondition to ensure the mitigation of human anxieties. Any failure in thisdirection will intellectually, morally and spiritually leave our world an uglyplace to live in. Deepak Chopra, realising the same urge has put it eloquentlyby saying,
“Then God matters, more than anythingelse in the creation because God is the word we applyto the source of creation.It isn’t necessary to worship the source, although reverence is certainlydeserved if we want to give it. The necessary thing is to connect. Across thegap in the transcendent world is some totally necessary things that can’t becreated, not by hand, by imagination, or by thought”.
The world is crying for ideological andphilosophical beautification, and this restoration of beauty calls for a lookback at tradition, Transcendence and our glorious religious heritage. In theseperennial treasures of wisdom, we shall discover panacea to the posers ofexistence
Amir Suhail Wani works as R&D engineerwith S.A power utilities besides being a student of comparative studies.