"Pausing for Breath: The Politics of Esotericism and Philosophical Form in Leo Strauss and Walter Benjamin" (original) (raw)
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It is well known that medieval Arab philosophers had a rather ambivalent attitude towards committing philosophy to writing. They regarded this act as a dangerous endeavor, one to be undertaken only with great caution. In their view, the nonphilosophical environment in which the philosopher lives and acts imposes on him the obligation to choose his words with care for his own safety as well as for pedagogical reasons. Common people, who are by nature incapable of grasping the truth or have not been properly trained, are likely to misunderstand the truth if it is presented to them in unequivocal terms. They may harm the philosopher, thinking that he represents a threat to society or religion, or-perhaps a still greater danger-they may be led to adopt wrong ideas leading them away from the truth rather than bringing them nearer to it. The danger that truth might fall into the wrong hands led medieval Arab philosophers to resort to an esoteric way of writing. Since they considered the prophets to be true philosophers, they also held that the scriptures propagated by the prophets should be read as esoteric philosophical writings. The esotericism of medieval Arab philosophers, both Jews and Muslims, has been extensively studied, in particular by Leo Strauss and his followers. Scholars may disagree about the extent to which esoteric writing was actually practiced or its applicability to a given text, but 39
Islamic philosophy from its origin to the present: philosophy in the land of prophecy
Choice Reviews Online, 2007
This book is the result of nearly fifty years of study and meditation upon philosophy and philosophical issues as seen in light of the realities revealed through prophecy both objective and inward in the form of illumination. In a world in which philosophy has become so divorced from revealed realities and secular thought has sought to marginalize and even annihilate knowledge imbued with the sacred, it is necessary to return, whenever possible, to the theme of the relation between philosophy and prophecy through different perspectives and angles of vision. Years ago we dealt with the heart of the question of the relation between knowledge and the reality of the sacred in Knowledge ad the Sacred and have returned to this subject from other angles of vision in later works such as The Need for a Sacred Science. In the present work we turn our gaze specifically upon philosophy and especially Islamic philosophy. We deal with over a millennium of Islamic philosophy, its doctrines, history, and approaches, from the angle of vision of the relation between that long philosophical tradition and the realities of prophecy that have always dominated the horizon of the Islamic cosmos and the intellectual climate and space of the Islamic people. Some of the chapters of this book were written as essays over the years. They have all been thoroughly revised and integrated into the framework of this book. Many other chapters are new and were written specifically as integral parts of the present work in order to complete the picture that we have sought to depict in the pages that follow. We wish to thank the Radius Foundation, which provided financial help to make the preparation of this text possible. We are also especially grateful to Katherine O'Brien, who prepared and readied the handwritten material and numerous alterations required patience, knowhow, and energy to carry out a Herculean task. Without her help it would not have been possible to present the text for publication. ix text for the press. Having had to endure reading hundreds of pages of Transliteration Furthermore, 'Al¥ has been associated by traditional Islamic sources with the founding of Islamic metaphysics. 5 Another Greek figure who was given the title kouros was Epimenides of Crete who also journeyed to the other world where he met Justice and who brought back laws into this world. Like Parmenides, he also wrote poetry. Now Epimenides was known as a healer-prophet or iatromantis to whom everything had been revealed through incubation while he lay motionless in a cave for years. 6 with the corporeal world and subjectively with our ordinary consciousness considered as the only legitimate and accepted form of consciousness, then prophecy as the function of bringing a message from another world or another level of consciousness would be meaningless sents many figures and ideas not known in the West at all. This emphasis on later Islamic philosophy is also of interest from the point of view of comparative studies for it shows how two philosophical traditions, the Islamic and the Christian, parted ways and followed such different destinies from the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries onward. In the West philosophy became more and more distanced from theology after the eighth/fourteenth century, and
In the Middle Ages, in both the East and the West, the problem of the nature, sources and limits of knowledge was one of the issues of controversy between philosophers and theologians. In this article, I will compare the approaches of Ghazālī (d. 1111) and Bonaventure (d. 1274), two representatives from the Islamic and Christian theological traditions respectively, to the problem of knowledge and their criticism of philosophical knowledge. For this purpose, I will first examine their approaches to the nature, sources and limits of knowledge with particular reference to their mystical inclinations. Then I will give their classifications and evaluations of philosophical sciences. Finally, I will discuss their approaches to the problem of the eternity of the world to show in more detail, the similarities of their approaches in their criticism of philosophical knowledge.
This work explores “what went wrong” in Islam. The repression of reason facilitated the transformation of the teaching of Islam from a religion of reconciliation to a religion of confrontation. The repression of reason resulted in a corruption of knowledge. The corruption of knowledge emerged in the shape of the teaching of “aggressive jihad” or jihad al-talab. The articulation of aggressive jihad was enabled by recourse to the teaching of abrogation. The idea of spreading Islam by the sword was engineered at the behest of rulers that required a religious justification for waging wars of aggression. Spreading Islam by the sword was decreed to be a sixth pillar of Islam by hawkish ulema, eager to please their rulers. Aggressive jihad is derived from the teaching of abrogation. Both the teaching of abrogation and jihad al-talab represent aberrations in Muslim thought. The teaching of abrogation represents an aberration because it assumes that God “changed” His mind and “contradicted” Himself multiple times. A few ulema assert that there are as many as five-hundred instances of abrogation. The allegation that Allah “abrogates” His verses ascribes a personal trait to Him, that of “confusion.” In different words, the allegation that Allah “abrogates” His words is an expression of anthropomorphism. This runs counter to the verses in which we are assured that we will never find a change on the words of Allah. The teaching of aggressive jihad is an aberration because it enabled the replacement of Islam as a religion of peace by Islam as a political manifesto of aggression and empire building. This contradicts verses that teach that there is no coercion in religion. These aberrations were enabled by the deterioration of reasoning. This emerged from the encounters between the rationalists and the traditionalists regarding the exegesis of revelation. The repression of reason resulted in a paralysis of reason. The assumption that reason has no significant role to play in exegesis resulted in a breakdown of exegesis and jurisprudence. The paralysis of reason produced a range of adverse effects. It facilitated a misunderstanding of revelation, the elevation of tradition to revelation, the subordination of revelation to tradition and the subordination of revelation to the rulings of the ulema. The ulema became the chief authorities, with the power to "abrogate" and "replace" revelation. The results of the repression of reason by tradition were catastrophic. They encompass the emergence of Islamism, the treatment of aggressive jihad as a pillar of Islam, and the teaching of predestination. Because traditional exegesis and jurisprudence are predicated on the rejection of reason, exegetes and jurists that jettison reason withdraw from the ranks of the mukallafun, legally responsible persons in full possession of their rational faculty. In what way could work generated without the use of reason be treated as different from that produced by persons bereft of reason? The abandonment of reason facilitated the abandonment of revelation and its replacement first by tradition and then by the work of the ulema. The retreat from reason accounts for a range of problems in traditional exegesis and jurisprudence. It explains why jurists treat the prophetic traditions as “equal” and “subordinate” to revelation, at the same time. It also explains how jurists could reject reason and insist on its protection as a purpose (maqasid) of the sharia, simultaneously. These aberrations require attention. They require a “reconstruction of religious thought,” as Muhammad Iqbal put it. For by refusing to use reason in their work, traditional exegetes and jurists render their work unreliable and incoherent. Furthermore, it is to be recalled that relying on the work of a scholar written a millennium ago is akin to referring to a map that was prepared a thousand years earlier. The landscape changed and the map may not guide us to the right destination.
Philosophy as a Symbolic Institution in Medieval Judaism: Sacred Texts and Social Control
Comment articuler la volonté de faire triompher une vision philosophique de la religion avec une tradition a-ou antiphilosophique axée sur la récitation et la mémorisation des textes sacrés ? Cet article examine la manière dont deux penseurs du judaïsme (Saadia Gaon et Maïmonide) ont affronté cette redéfinition, et les stratégies discursives qu'ils ont employées pour imposer leurs idées. (Saadia Gaon and Maïmonide) have affronted this redefinition, as well as the discursive strategies they have used to impose their ideas..
It is often claimed that medieval Jewish philosophy is unashamedly elitist. In contrast to Socrates who had been content to discuss philosophy with whomever he met, both freemen and slaves, the medieval philosophers shunned contact with the ignorant multitude. The Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides (d. 1204) is often seen as personifying this trend. According to him, human beings achieve salvation in accordance with the measure in which they succeed in channeling the emanation of the divine intellect, an activity which requires considerable intellectual ability and expertise. "As for the ignorant and disobedient, " he says, their state is despicable proportionately to the lack of this emanation, and they have been relegated to the rank of the individuals of all other species of animals: 'He is like the beasts that speak not. ' 2 For this reason, it is a light thing to kill them, and has been even enjoined because of its utility. 3 1 This paper is dedicated to Harry Fox to whom I am very grateful for having initiated me in the mysteries of the Guide of the Perplexed during my senior year of college. His close-readings of the Guide have continued to influence the way I read the works of Maimonides and his successors. I would also like to thank James Robinson and my father, Milton Verskin, for having commented upon previous versions of this paper.
Esoteric Transfers and Constructions Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a German-American political philosopher and historian of philosophy of Jewish decent, dedicated his whole career to the study of classical texts of political thought. He rehabilitated political philosophy as a prominent discipline and field of research after its decline under the attacks of twentieth-century positivism and behavioralism. No dimension of Strauss's thought has attracted more controversy than his claims about the "art of writing," or esotericism. It is not, however, surprising to find Strauss's discussion of esotericism particularly problematic: esotericism was at the center of Strauss's thought. A defender of philosophy understood as a way of life dedicated to the study of permanent questions, Strauss concentrated his efforts on reading what he called "Great Books," the classic writings of major philosophers from Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle, to Spinoza, Hobbes, and Rousseau. As he did not believe that eternal questions are susceptible to receive final answers, he thought that no thinker can claim he or she has definitely refuted the doctrines of