Heidegger, Mulla Sadra and the Path to Home - brahim Kaln - Daily Sabah https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/ibrahim-kalin/2014/08/15/heidegg...

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artin Heidegger, the great German philosopher of the 20th

century, had a rather dark view of modern civilization. He saw
modernity as an aberration, and criticized it for being too Articles

materialistic, pragmatic and profit-driven. In his famous "Letter on COLUMNS

BRAHIM KALIN
Humanism," he spoke of alienation as a malaise produced by modern President Erdoan
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machines. Technology, he noted, has enabled humans to produce things
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and establish sophisticated systems. But the same humans who take
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pride in producing them lost control over them. Frankenstein has
overgrown its master and turned against him. COLUMNS

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In essence, every great thinker has one big thought. Heidegger's big of Gaza
thought was his insight that without answering the question of 'what is,'
we cannot make sense of the world, and decide what we should become.
The real question is not what sorts of things exist, but rather what it
means to exist in the first place. The reason why a chair exists is the more
fundamental question than what physical properties, shape, color,
weight, et cetera. it has.

Heidegger's intellectual task was to bring this question of Being back to

the center of philosophical thinking. For him, the Western thought had
lived in an illusion ever since Plato when it forgot the question of Being
(Dasein), and sought to substitute it with false questions. Once the
foundation was set wrong, everything else became crooked.

Heidegger himself had his own share of the 'crooked timber of humanity,'
to use Kant's phrase, when he flirted with Nazism in the 1930s. He
supported the Nazis with the belief that they would overcome both Soviet
communism and American capitalism, and initiate a third path for the
German nation. He saw Europe squeezed between Russia and America,
both of which were based on "the same dreary technological frenzy, the
same unrestricted organization of the average man."

Germany was supposed to offer something new. But things did not turn
out as Heidegger had hoped. The Holocaust shocked the world. Instead
of empowering the German nation, the Nazis came close to destroying it.
Heidegger rejected the idea of treating Being as a "thing," and turning it
into an "entity." Such a view leads to the commodification of Being, and
reduces the reality of things to their use-value. We have to accept things
as they are before we put them to use.

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Heidegger, Mulla Sadra and the Path to Home - brahim Kaln - Daily Sabah https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/ibrahim-kalin/2014/08/15/heidegg...

For instance, the carpenter has to work on the wood, his basic material,
with the kind of knowledge, competence and care that is needed to carve
something with shape, beauty and function. The painter has to give color,
light, paper, brush, et cetera their "due" in order to paint something
meaningful and beautiful. We have to treat Being with a similar attitude.
Enslaving Being for our own wishes is a ticket to destroying both Being
and ourselves. This requires putting Being before utility, use-value,
mechanization, profitability and instrumentalization. Otherwise, we
degrade existence, and turn ourselves into homeless subjects set against a
rootless world.

In his Der Spiegel interview published posthumously, Heidegger said,

"Everything essential and great has only emerged when human beings
had a home, and were rooted in a tradition."

This is an important call in a world in which we have lost the sense of

both home and tradition. To better appreciate it, we can go a few
centuries back and look at what the great Muslim philosopher Mulla
Sadra (d. 1640), a contemporary of Descartes, had to say about it.

Like Heidegger, Sadra establishes Being as the principal reality that

precedes and constitutes all things. But unlike the German philosopher,
he does not define Being as self-referential. Being, which encompasses all
things, is a reflection of still a higher reality, and it can be discovered
through different epistemic means. Sadra's "Transcendent Wisdom" thus
seeks to dovetail three kinds of knowledge: revealed knowledge (Qur'an),
demonstrative knowledge (burhan) and mystical or realized knowledge
('irfan). Each of these types of knowledge corresponds to a particular
level of reality in the ontological hierarchy of things. Therefore there is no
contradiction between them.

Unveiling the meaning of Being is key to the proper task of philosophy.

But this entails more than just conceptual knowledge. It requires an
existential transformation of our own being. It invites us to connect with
a higher reality that gives meaning and truth to all things. It elevates
philosophy to the level of wisdom as a path to attaining the truth. It
combines knowledge and love. It dovetails logical precision with intuitive
and personal knowledge.

Heidegger spoke of the 'path' without saying much about the destination.
He spoke of Being as man's home, but fell short of overcoming the
tautological homo-centrism it involves. Mulla Sadra, too, spoke of the
journey, but underlined that all paths lead to an end. He saw the path as
having a 'beginning' (mabda') and an 'end' (ma'ad). Walking on the path
alone cannot be an end itself, he said. One always walks towards a
destination. That destination cannot be our own making. Otherwise
everything becomes a self-centered construction. One needs to connect
with a higher reality that cannot be monopolized by a self-deceiving ego.

For Sadra, home is where we prepare ourselves for an existential and

spiritual transformation. It is where we reach fullness, integrity and

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Heidegger, Mulla Sadra and the Path to Home - brahim Kaln - Daily Sabah https://www.dailysabah.com/columns/ibrahim-kalin/2014/08/15/heidegg...

repose.

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