Qunawi

The dissolution of the Western-dominated Postwar Order, and the Eurocentric myths that sustain it, presents a unique opportunity to ponder an old question posed by every new generation: How can philosophy, which Islamic and ancient Greek learning traditions have long defined as the pursuit of “wisdom,” resume its millennial civilizing role? This paper looks beyond passing political events to reconsider why philosophy was viewed in this role. As different as al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā, Ibn Khaldūn, Mullā Ṣadrā, Hegel and Heidegger are from each other, they all approached the question of civilization philosophically by way of the fundamental question of beingness (mawjūdiyya) and existence (wujūd). Moreover, they strove for “completeness” of thinking with the “practical,” where, however, they resisted the temptation to reduce man to his practical or biological functions. Given the magnitude of the present challenges we all face, no dialogue across cultural boundaries can ignore the caution with which philosophical tradition has laid out the terms of this completeness in being.

This paper examines some key aspects of the formal and figurative discourse on ‘nature’ as manifested in the philosophical tradition and with reference to contemporary life. Instead of building a straightforward, self-enclosed argument for the sake of argument, it will demonstrate how someone living today may arrive at certain kinds of judgments in the light both of our collective human inheritance, of which Ḥikma is a major element, and a philosophical reasoning that penetrates into areas of life with which philosophy is not directly or primarily concerned but which are of fundamental importance to all human beings. It begins by sketching a picture of the present historical moment, which many specialists consider a historical anomaly precipitated by the abrupt rise to world domination by a single geographical region. A few basic themes relating to ‘nature’, which by tradition has been approached either figurately or formally, will then be discussed. Their upshot is that for man to live ‘naturally’, he cannot reduce his own nature to that of other animals. Every being has its particular nature. Therefore, the concept of nature cannot be considered only unconditionally or as something common to all animals. Finally, this paper poses two basic questions: Why has our necessary—but equally ‘natural’—separation from the nature of other beings been allowed to go as far as it has? Are we so alone in our modern troubles that we must cast off our human inheritance and pretend to reinvent the universe at every turn?