Sadra and German Idealist Philosophy: On the Problem of Intellectual Intuition

BY: Ernest Wolf-Gazo

Introduction

at the present stage of international scholarship we are entering into what we may call “global research and scholarship”. This is part of a process known as globalization. This process took on its formative aspects in the 1990s and finds itself in an inauguration stage in the beginning of the 21^st century. We are entering in a truly global stage of interaction between peoples and their respective civilizations. The internet, the satellite television and telephone, or mobile make this globalization possible, even for the non-elite and common people. The present essay is a presentation in a global sense, i.e. it proposes research and scholarship possibilities that had been unthinkable during the undergraduate years (the 1960s) of the present writer. This includes philosophy. Although philosophy has always had a “universal outlook”, still, philosophers develop their perspectives and researches in their respective cultural context. Western philosopher had absolutely no idea about Islamic philosophy conducted in Safavid Persia. It was a matter of medieval philosophy: a philosophy that was considered historical and for a few specialists. Developments in the Near East and other areas of the globe made it clear that such kind of ignorance can’t be tolerated. In the process of globalization historical elements of any civilization turns out to be of vital importance for understanding and coming to terms with contemporary process of interaction between parts of the world. Mulla Sadra and the German Idealist philosophy tradition is a topic as part of the globalization process. Sadra, a contemporary of Descartes, never knew of Cartesianism, nor did Descartes at the end of his life in Stockholm, instructing Queen Christina of Sweden, have any idea of Sadra and the Isfahan of Abbas II. Imagine a meeting between the two, first in Amsterdam, then in Isfahan? Likewise, representatives of the German idealist philosophy school, Fichte, Schelling, the poets Novalis and Hoelderlin, the theologian Schleiermacher and the literary critics the Schlegel brothers, had some idea of Persian poetry and culture, yet little, if not ignorant of Sadra and the Isfahan school of philosophy. Again, imagine a meeting of the German idealist and Sadra? Needless to say, these are ideas of the imagination that were not possible in historical reality; yet, in our world they are possible as virtual reality. And virtual reality is a reality of the 21^st century.

In this essay we not only observe historical and systematic contexts of Islamic philosophy in the East, but also the scenery of 18^th century revolutionary Europe, especially the Germany of Goethe. The center of attention for all Europeans at the time was the French revolution and then the Napoleonic wars. Even more important was the onset of industrialization of western Europe. Economically and politically England and France responded, yet, it was Germany that conceptualized the change of the times in the form of philosophy, to use a metaphor from one of its towering thinkers of the times, namely Hegel. Classic German philosophy, as it is now known, was another fortunate event in the history of philosophy, equal to the Classic Greek philosophically events, that invigoratingly formatted the modern mind. Not only that, it searched the dark corners of the human mind as to provide positive impulses to new generations of master thinkers. We need only to think of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, or Einstein. These are the modern masters that were highly receptive to the ideas of German Idealist philosophy. Needless to say, the enormous task of Mulla Sadra, prepared by Suhrawardí, Mír Damad and others intellectually active in Safavid Persia, synthesized the basic positions of Classical Greek philosophy with Islamic thinking in a most original way. Both, Sadra and the German idealist were synthesizers; they turned contrasting traditions and insight and made them their own, without compromising either one, or the other. The fact that Sadra has been rejuvenated especially in contemporary Iran, the fact that basic idea of the German idealists provided creative impulses on a global level, from the environmental concerns to feminism, from poetic inspirations to formative elements dealing to multicultural discourse, give us ample evidence just how powerful these two traditions really are. The books needed to assess the contributions of Sadra and the Isfahan school of philosophy in conjunction with the representatives of German idealist philosophy have not yet been written and await future generations of thinkers and scholars. The present essay is only a very small initiative and doesn’t pretend to be anything else. Since the fall of the iron curtain many documents and literature by the idealist philosophers and poets have been found and accessed to by respective scholars. The events in Iran in the last quarter of the 20^th century also promoted philosophic research into Sadra’s work and the school of Isfahan that give us a better insight into the development of Islamic philosophy in the East.

The present essay intends to focus on the notion of intellectual intuition for the simple reason that it is a concept that serves as a common denominator for both philosophic endeavors: Sadra and the German idealist school of philosophy. Although, at first sight these thinkers seem not have much in common, considering their respective cultural and religious backgrounds; yet, a closer look reveals that they do have many significant aspects of philosophic insights in common and one of them is the phenomenon of intellectual intuition. At this point we can only hint at these matters while subsequent researches will provide us more material. In that sense the present essay is to be understood as a sketch of the subject matter at hand. What makes intellectual intuition an attractive focus point relating Islamic philosophy, especially Sadra and the Isfahan of Abbas II, and classical German idealist philosophy, is its interacting potential of thinkers on a global scale that initiated discourses among civilizations. This sort of activity is highly recommended considering the uneasiness with which present day communicators communicate the news of global events to the world. Philosophy understands itself as a global enterprise and is well suited for such a task. Thus, let us start our sketch and try to conceptualize in nutshells philosophic insights developed in Safavid Persia and Goethe’s Germany that provided the basic cultural foundation of their respective civilizations.

 

Historical and systematic contexts

 

At the time of the Latin medieval philosophy, the classical tradition in Europe included classical Greek philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus and Neo-Platonism. In the subsequent development of Islamic philosophy we find, likewise, the Greek classical tradition, with emphasis upon Plato and Neo-Platonism, as well as Aristotle and Plotinus. The two different strands developed into highly sophisticated philosophic systems and acumens; yet, never losing sight of the basic dogma of Islam. The metamorphosis of Greek philosophy at the hand of Islamic thinkers such as al-Farabí, Ibn Sína, Ibn Rushd, or al-Ghazalí is remarkable. Likewise, the transformation of classic Greek philosophic positions by German idealist thinkers was highly original at the hands of Hegel, of Schelling, of Hoelderlin, or Novalis, not to mention the classic German translation of Plato by Schleiermacher. Friedrich Rueckert, friend of Goethe with a leaning towards the romantic aspects of idealist thinking, did the same with classic Persian poetry: make Åafiî speak beautiful German. The legacy of the romantic period of the German idealist thinkers, that included not only philosophers, but also poets, translators, literary critics, not to mention pre-modern feminists like Caroline Schlegel (later Schelling), Dorothea Veit, or Henriette Herz, give us ample testimony that idealist thinking was alive and well in Goethe’s Germany until it resurfaced in the 1960s of the 20^th century and reshaped the psychology of western societies.

There is a shared historical dimension between Islamic philosophy and German idealist thinking, namely, classic Greek thinking, especially Plotinus and Neo-Platonism. This is especially true if we focus on intellectual intuition. Yet, this common denominator has only recently been rediscovered during the subsequent conferences that included thinkers from the East and the West. By the Late Latin medieval times the former shared common denominator was no longer the case. As soon as the West rediscovered how to read original classical Greek again western European students forgot about the commentaries of Averroes and were encouraged to look into the classic Greek writings of Plato. Of course, there were avid translation activities in Medici Florence such as Ficino later to be incorporated into the Neo-Platonic perspective of Nicolas Cusanus and then Schelling. Cartesianism took the Arts faculties in western European universities by storm initiated in Leyden and Amsterdam, while many universities in southern Europe, under the watchful eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, continued with classical Aristotelianism adopted for the church faithful by Thomas Aquinas. The eastern part of Islam, especially Persia, was basically unknown and of no great interest. The scientific revolution did the rest to unlink the classical Greek tradition between the West and Islamic East.

The systematic context, of course, is quite another matter. Sadra is a philosopher, or theosopher, whose philosophic system is clearly theomorphic in structure and intend. The German idealists aim at an anthropomorphic scheme that wants to enquiry into the nature of the subjective conditions of human knowledge. The aim of the idealists is to know humankind, while Sadra’s aim is to know the divine essence. Both schemes claim comprehensive insights on a holistic level. In Sadra’s scheme we find different sorts of methods of inquiry that employs revelation, angels, miracles, intellectual intuition, and reason. In the idealist project we find, aside intellectual intuition, dialectics, poetics, and discursive exercises into what we may call deep subjectivity. Sadra’s journey, following the hints of the master of illumination philosophy, namely Suhrawardí, leads us into the oriental sphere of the world. It is the world of the East, the Orient, or the Light. Sadra’s oriental journey show upward visions towards the light in the name of revelation. The German idealists too, are on a journey, namely into the West, or what may be called the occidental journey into the innermost dark corners of the human soul. These two journeys are, in a way, complementary. Darkness and lightness complement each other as to reveal the absolute of the known and the unknown. In spirit the oriental and the occidental journey seem opposite, yet, a closer look will reveal that they are actually one. This needs to be explicated in the future. In this case imagination will have to do the job. Both reveal hierarchical structures of reality: in the Islamic tradition we speak of Divine Essence, Universal Intellect, or Pure Being, or spirits and the transcendent world encompassed by imagination and psychic entities, while world affairs are conducted by bodies of the material world. For Sadra, with this respective background, the idea of unity is primordial adding the perpetual gradation of being. He entertains the original idea of transubstantial motion, while the knower and the known form a unity and the imaginative faculty leads its own life apart from the body. Revelation, prophecy, reason and intellectual intuition are epistemic cornerstones of Sadra’s thought.

To be fair to both sides, this essay will not consider all categories of thought entertained by Sadra nor the German idealist, but concentrates on a specific category, namely intellectual intuition. It has the advantage of a shared category and positive promotion of creative synthesis in both journeys. Dealing with other categories, such as revelation, for instance would need a special study and yields potential research projects for the future. Plotinus especially, as recent researches by German Schelling scholars such as Walter Schulz and Werner Beierwaltes have shown, had a decisive influence on Schelling and the poet-philosopher Novalis. More precisely, the Plotinus-aesthetic-connection, as we may call it, was very specific in its paradigmatic intend. In other words, we find the aesthetic contemplation of the absolute, the mirror world we find in The Enneads, transformed in the works of the later Schelling, especially in his philosophy of art and the poetics of Novalis. The initial critique of Kant by the German idealist of the Romantic Movement such as Schelling, Novalis and the Schlegel brothers, was done in the name of Plotinus and Neo-Platonism. Kant’s concept of experience limited the epistemological inquiry into a Newtonian mechanical world and could only make sense if there is a complementary scheme such as sensibility and conceptuality. This is the meaning of the famous, perception without concepts are blind, concepts without perception meaningless. This claim can be considered legitimate if we limit our understanding of what we mean by experience, i.e. experience in the sense of empirical science. As Sadra pointed out in his al-Asfar, meditating on the psychological elements of intuition, don’t people sometimes think there is a sixth sense in the world. Only secular oriented people seem to deny it. In Newton’s and Kant’s world there is no sixth sense, except as delusion. Plotinus will help to bridge this gap between Sadra and the German idealist. No doubt, in Suhrawardí and Sadra we find Plato and Plotinus operating in disguise. This is certainly the case in classical German idealist philosophy such as Schelling, Novalis and Schleiermacher who made Plato speak in beautiful German. In Hegel we find a subtle synthesis of Plato and Aristotle, yet, even some of his metaphors in the Phenomenology are certainly of romantic roots. Fichte is a curious mix of essential Descartes of the Meditation, Kantianism and Platonism. Yet, in a curious way, if Fichte had a chance to read Suhrawardí, no doubt, he would have immediately found his soul brother. Again, these are general comments and need to be researched in some detail. The language of Plotinus and Neo-Platonism in found in Suhrawardí, Sadra, the Isfahan school, as well as among the German idealist thinkers. Aåmad Ghazalí would have fitted in well with the poetics of Novalis. The metaphorology, to use the late Hans Blumenberg’s vocabulary, of East and West in the form of Sadra and the German Idealists are remarkable. Here too, detailed research must warrant the claim of common cause. The religious dimension of the idealist school comprises Lutheranism, pietism and mysticism along the genealogy of Meister Eckhart. It is secular in the name of religious language; an apparent contradiction, yet, a subtle imaginative project that initiated a very original occidental journey.

Some of the topics that the German idealist dealt with will be handled in a nutshell, again, in view of intellectual intuition. They deal with the apparent contradictions between nature and freedom, with the problem of identity in terms of the subject-object epistemological situation, and not the least with the absolute. Again, decisive differences to the German idealists we find in the theomorphic structure of Sadra’s epistemology underpinned by the metaphysical foundation of Divine Essence, not to repeat revelation and prophethood, which don’t play a decisive role among the German idealists. This is understandable, since Sadra’s oriental journey operates within the Islamic dimension. Yet, we do see common possibilities of the two journeys meeting: do they not have the common destination, in the long run to the absolute? Can we not conceive a cognitive possibility of a joint journey on behalf of the Divine Essence?

 

Epistemic topics: Identity or the subject-object mode of cognition

 

Some of the basic themes entertained by the German idealists was that of identity, of the apparent contradiction between nature and freedom, of the problem of basic principles of guiding research (Wissenschaft) towards true knowledge, of the aesthetic element and symbolic value coming to terms with a transcending world, of the possibility of poetic transcending the empirical world (as Novalis stated, we transform the world poetically), and not the least the problem of the absolute (epistemologically speaking). These topics have been researched in detail by Paul Kluckhohn, Manfred Frank, or Dieter Henrich within a European context of perspective, but have not been used to come to terms with, say Sadra, the Isfahan school, or generally Islamic philosophy. It seems that the topics that the German idealists worked on provide a platform to engage especially the Plato, Neo-Platonic tradition in Islamic philosophy, not to say Sufism or ‘irfan. If, as the Malay-Islamic scholar Zailan Moris claims that in Sadra’s work we find a grand synthesis between revelation, gnosis and discursive thinking, than Sadra is the right thinker of the Islamic East to enter into a dialogue with the German idealists. Needless to say, a new generation of scholars is needed to tackle this sort of prospective project, since, at present, there are hardly any scholars that command the tradition of the German idealists in the Islamic world, while there are very few in the western world that even handle Islamic philosophy, not the least Sufism, if they are mainstream academic philosophers. What is needed in this coming age of global scholarship is a generation that looks beyond their specific specialties within the context of national and ideological purpose and intellectual traditions, such as the western tradition of philosophy and the Islamic philosophic heritage and seek for the common roots and what they have in coming. And, if we may add, there is plenty both traditions and perspectives do have in common. We must sift out this commonality and work out platforms for future dialogues and discourses. From there on, perhaps, global philosophy will be possible.

The basic problem of personal identity turned center-stage among the romantics of the German idealists, especially Novalis and Schelling, and less romantically by Fichte. Yet, the problem of identity has its roots, in the German idealist tradition in problem that Kantian philosophy seemed to have left unresolved. If it is true, as Kant claims that it is the transcendental subject, the subject that constructs the basic categories of understanding and comprehension of the empirical world, who, then, is that self? Kant himself seems not have been too much occupied that this question, since, the self is enmeshed with the empirical world in terms of space and time, perception being forms of space and time, that we will never find out, or be able to, who exactly this is, “ I “ the knowing subject. Things in themselves (Dinge an sich selbst betrachtet is the explicite phraseology by Kant according to the minute research of the Kant scholar Gerold Prauss) cannot be known and that includes the self. No doubt, this put people like Fichte, then Schelling in a bizarre situation. Would we not know first our self? Of course, at this point, for the sake of presentation, we simplify and point to some of the respective scholars and their works in the select bibliography that follows. It is “I”, or as the German has it, das Ich, that needed to be understood in terms of its structure and constitution. The method Fichte chooses is that of the dialectic. The “I” cannot be apprehended without its negation, the “non-I”. Thus, in the dialectic relationship of the I and non-I we arrive at a sort of personal identity within the empirical world. It was Fichte’s critique of Kant and leads to a profound and engaged thinking not only about the constitution of the “ I “, but also about the idea of what constitutes basic and fundamental knowledge (Wissen) that provide sufficient reason and valid knowledge claims to satisfy rationality at large. In this enterprise Fichte engaged himself not only professionally but with great passion and purpose. Fichte lived philosophy and the story of his life, from a very poor family to a celebrated thinker in Weimar and Jena, with some intellectual scandals on the way, ends up the first president of the newly found Humboldt University in Berlin in 1811. That university was to be the beacon of intellectual life and scholarship for the rest of the world for a century until Nazi Germany put an end to that.

The young Schelling, student friend and colleague of Hegel and the poet Holderlin, made a name for himself. He was a sort of wunderkind in a Mozart style. Brilliant, versatile, ego-centric oriented, yet always engaged in intellectual debate understood early the problem with which the older Fichte battled. Schelling comes from a Protestant theological background (with Swabian Pietism) leaning, who had inherited the vast knowledge background of his father who was professor and head of another well-known theological foundation at Waltershausen (Theological Seminary). Schelling’s father was prolific in Semitic language. How much Schelling knew Arabic we don’t know and how much he knew about Islamic philosophy (in those days known as Arabic philosophy) is also not known because no one seems to have any interest in this sort of questions. Be that as it may, in the confrontation (Auseinandersetzung) with Fichte, Schelling developed his own system of subject-object epistemology that he called Transcendental Idealism (see the work by Reinhard Lauth on this confrontation in the select bibliography). This text, published in 1800, amazes any reader: Schelling deals with the newly emerging natural sciences and tries, somehow, to make sense of them in terms of philosophy, more specifically, casting philosophy into a system of transcendental idealism. At one point he contends that a complete theory of nature would be in which nature could reveal itself into total intelligence. He speculates how natural law could be understood as a complete spiritualization (Vergeistigung) of the laws of nature in accordance to the laws that regulate intuition (Anschauung) and thinking. These claims force him to take a deep look at exactly how Fichte’s “I” is developed out of nature. The I as subject must objectify itself in such a way that it can recognize itself as objectified subject. The dialectic relationship between subject and object is clear: the subject cannot understand itself without first objectifying itself in order to “reflect” upon it and is thereby transformed into a state of self-consciousness. This self-consciousness turns out to be constitute a sort of personal identity in terms of “thinking myself as a thinking being “. The thinking I in its reflective mode of cognition constitute a perpetual intellectual intuition. Intellectual intuition becomes, as Schelling points out, for transcendental philosophy what space is to geometry. Thus, this kind of intuition (Anschauung) is not something static, but a dynamic process of perpetual intuiting and thereby producing the objectified subject as a thinking process. There is a kind of similarity to Sadra’s trans-substantial motion: what in Sadra understands is done by the soul, to accommodate form of cognition to the object prehended, Schelling’s perpetual intellectual intuition take on that job. The difference, at this point between Sadra and Schelling is their respective structure of reality. This needs still to be sifted out. The difference between the two thinkers is a contrast in their initial historical and systematic context. Sadra “ sees “ the Divine Essence as the basics of his hierarchy of knowledge, while Schelling is trying, in a more empirical experimental fashion, to work out an anthropomorphic structure of knowledge based upon perpetual intellectual intuition that has, as its primary goal, freedom of the subject in mind. Schelling pursues the question already; at the time he spends researching the epistemological foundations of the natural sciences, as to how freedom of the individual thinker is possible. Of course, following Fichte somewhat, Schelling wants to bridge the gab between theoretical and practical knowledge and finds it in the free-act of thinking. For Fichte, too, the process of dialectic between the I and non-I is a matter of action (Thathandlung) and not a static affair between two entities. Thinking, for both Fichte and Schelling, is action, or to use, in an analogous fashion to the British analytic philosopher J.L. Austin’s concept of speech act, think act. The think act is process, is perpetual intellectual intuiting the thinking self in a dialectic progression. Thus, the principle of all knowledge is expressed in the cryptic statement borrowed from Fichte: the I (das Ich) equal the I (dem Ich gleich) because it expresses identity and synthesis of a perpetual intellectual intuition. The I as self-conscious thinking and reflective activity is paraded in front of the reader of Schelling’s writing around 1800. Schelling comes to the conclusion that the alpha and omega of the thinking subject that has emancipated itself in terms of the dialectic between subject-object and in terms of perpetual intellectual intuition is Freedom (die Freiheit).

 

Nature and freedom

 

Another essential topic dealt with by the German idealists was the problem of the relation between nature and freedom, to be more precise, between natural law and personal freedom. Already Richard Bentley, deacon of the Church of England and friend of Isaac Newton, had inquired by letter how he, Newton, could explain miracle and freedom within his system of mechanical philosophy, or nature constituted nothing but by laws of mechanics. This specific problem, of course, is raised again in Fichte’s critique of Kant, in Schelling, in Schiller and in Novalis.

In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (B136) we find the passages about the “transcendental synthesis of apperception”. This act of thought is still treated in a serious scientific manner according to Newton’s mechanical philosophy. The transcendental subject can be explained in terms of the forms of space and time and spontaneity. Nature takes on the sets of laws that are prescribed to her by the transcendental subject. Nature is no longer treated as an English landscape or northern German landscape painting of Casper David Friedrich, Germany’s foremost painter of man, nature, and the Divine. Sets of laws regulate events in nature; they are, in fact, nature. The romantic critique, not only by Fichte or Schelling in Germany, but also in England by Coleridge (who paid Schelling a visit on his Continental Grand Tour) and Tennyson has it that apparently the mechanistic universe run blind according to the dictates of natural law; yet, how is freedom and moral values possible? According to natural laws?  These problems accompany the tradition in German philosophy from Leibniz to Kant to the older Schelling. The tension remained and provided enormous potential for creative thinking along that line. Here again, we see great potential in a discourse between the German idealist tradition and Islamic philosophy, specifically Sadra and his school. How does human freedom relate in philosophy understood in terms of Islam? How does revelation and miracles relate to the tenets of German idealist philosophy? These questions have not yet been asked and need to be treated by a new generation of scholars who have their education in global scholarship. Schelling, as professor of philosophy, actually gave lectures at the Humboldt University in Berlin in the late 1820 entitled The Philosophy of Revelation. Here is another moment that must be seized by Islamic scholar to sift out the Schelling version of revelation within the German idealist tradition. Ironically, during the time of these lectures, attending were Kierkegaard, Bakunin, Engels and many 1848 future revolutionaries. The young Marx, of course, heard about these lectures and was very much immersed in the discussions that surrounded the idealists. Later, the young Marx of 1844 was to be an empirical version of many aspects that the idealists had entertained. Already in a letter to the older Hegel, young Schelling writes to him on 4 February 1795, that whereas for Spinoza the world was object, for him, Schelling the world is the “I” . Philosophy must proceed from the unconditioned (dem Unbedingtem) in the I or non-I . That the pinnacle of philosophy is the pure absolute I, which is set up by freedom and not yet transformed by the object. Again, the alpha and omega of all philosophy, as far as Schelling is concerned, is freedom. Consciousness has to be attained in the unity of the thinking subject as an object-subject reflected. Only this way self-consciousness is possible at all. The big question now appears, how can the idealist, especially Schelling and his friends in the Jena Circle (known in literature as Jenaer Romantiker Kreis), demonstrate this act of freedom as an expression of the high point of philosophy. In fact they did find a demonstrable field of research and speculation, namely aesthetics, art and religion.

 

Mirror image of the cosmos and the absolute

 

The older Schelling moved more and more into the area of art and aesthetic consideration (see the work of Werner Beierwaltes). The religious dimension and the influence of Schleiermacher, who published his sermons On Religion to the educated and cynics in 1799, provided a forum for Schelling and the romantics in Jena and Berlin to discuss the problem of the absolute in the mode of aesthetic considerations. It is here again were we find a link between Neo-Platonism, Plotinus, Islamic philosophy and the German idealist tradition. For Plotinus the artist imitates nature in the sense that the artist recognizes the “mirror image” of the cosmos within himself. Some of these topics we have encountered in Plato’s Phaedrus and Timaeus; yet, it was the works of Plotinus that had a lasting impression on Schelling and Sadra. Anyone reading Plotinus, Sadra and Schelling, side by side, will immediately “see” that these thinkers relate intuitively concern fundamental philosophy. Plotinus speak of the proto-picture in our self and that we recognize via intellectual intuition the harmony, balance, symmetry of the cosmos as it is expressed in various forms of art and aesthetics. We find in Plotinus the idea of purification of the soul from the body and how the soul takes on beautiful form and comes near the Divine Essence which is the source of the mirror image that the soul is able to express. He speaks of the “inner eye” that reveals the beauty and goodness of the cosmos. No doubt, if we follow Sadra and the German idealist we see intellectual traces everywhere. It is here that we find a serious trace that we must follow up in order to uncover the “secret affinity” between traditions in Islamic philosophy and especially the classic German idealist tradition.

The religious sphere was introduced into modern critical German philosophy by Hamann, a confidant of Kant. Although Hamann admired Kant he, nevertheless, was critical of Kant’s dealing with the religious sphere. His critique did influence the romantic circles. It was art and religion that were treated with respect and seriousness by Schelling and his associates, especially the literary critics Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel. Later when Hegel talked about art, philosophy and religion, towards the end of his Phenomenology, being different versions of the same thing he, no doubt, was influenced by the romantics, despite his critique of their doctrine in his later writings (see Otto Poggeler on this topic). The poetic form of critique of the empirical world was also no stranger in Persia. Åafiî and Sa‘adí certainly understood the contradiction of humankind and the illusory situation of the world of bodies. Not to mention the Sufi poetics of Aåmad Ghazalí, the brother of Abê Åamid, whose quintessential verses brings to ecstasy the power of intellectual intuition expressed in poetics verse. A man like Novalis would have been overjoyed reading Ahmad’s verses. Novalis’s idea to make the world more poetic (die Verzauberung der Welt) is a sort of program that would have been endorsed by Sufi thinkers with the exception that the structure of endorsement would take on a theomorphic one. We must pursue these virtual reality meeting in order to come to terms with difference that are, in hindsight no differences at all, but all contrasts of the same thing. It’s the habits and our education that made us different, but in essence the matter is the same. Certainly the German romantic thinkers did a great effort to translate the East into the West, consider Friedrich Ruckert’s translation of Åafiî and Sa‘adí and many other Persian verses. The romantic influence was manifest in great lady of Islamic scholarship, the late Annemarie Schimmel. Art and religion were endeavors which are not treated as “different fields” in the typical academic classification by the romantics. In fact art and religion comprehend each other. It is not surprise, or unexpected, when the older Heidegger would close one of his philosophic sermons with the words that philosophy is the prayer of secular thinkers.

For Schelling the idea of art was a process of self-consciousness in terms of the identity of the subject and object “revealed” during the course of world history. And during this process of world history we find, as Hegel explicated the matter, the course towards the Absolute, namely, freedom as spirituality. Novalis once pointed out succinctly that we are searching everywhere for the absolute (das Unbedingte), but only find entities (das Bedingte). For Holderlin the subject-object was forever separated by the proposition, since they had been united in intellectual intuition. It was the mirror image of the absolute that haunted the romantic philosophers of the German tradition. It is no surprise that some of them, among them Ruckert, should find and take recourse to Persian Sufi poetics. Yet, the philosophic aspects of transcending theosophy were too little known to make any impact. Fichte tried to solve problems of transcendence by defining intellectual intuition (intellektuelle Anschauung) by the self positing the self as an act (Thathandlung) of self-perpetuation. This intuition is not mediated by an unmediated vision itself. It is epistemic certainty entertained by Cartesian intuition of rules for directing the mind and its native powers. Fichte could not get rid of some Cartesian elements in this thinking that we can study as a synthesis, Descartes and Fichte, in the later Husserl and his project of pure phenomenology. Conceptually, and in this Sadra agrees, the absolute can’t be reached except in terms of symbolic representation. Thus, art becomes a vehicle to transfer symbolically propositional knowledge. The rest is silence. In the treatment of art we see Schelling transforming Plotinus ideas into his own system of transcendental idealism. A work of art respects the conditions laid down by transcendental intuition representing eternal beauty and harmony of the cosmos deriving its source from the Divine Essence. The idea of mimesis, made famous by Erich Auerbach in his literary studies researched in war time Istanbul, was taken up by Schelling from the Neo-Platonic idea of beauty as the Divine’s splendor. Art reveals proto-images that are revealed in religious symbolism. Here we would turn into the ocean of the absolute as the form of art.

Preliminary conclusion

 

Intellectual intuition is not simply an act of cognition, but a process of transformations from one state into another. It is the journey home, for eastern thinker an “ Oriental Journey “, for western thinkers an “ Occidental Journey “; yet, in the future it will be a “ Global Journey “. The true journey will be the one that leads home to the true self; the self that has not forgotten itself during the slavery of alienation. Our intuition tells us that the true self is in search of us along the divine road towards our essential self as spirit. This was one theme we find in Plato and Plotinus. The true self is the divine self in us and striving in the long run to join up with liberated self. We can attain transcendental self, that self that reaches beyond the empirical world and ushers into divine spirituality. That was one of the messages of the German (romantic) idealist thinkers. The process of intellectual intuition is a major process in this transformation of the self. This theme is still alive in the mystical tradition of the Christian Church as well as in the tradition Gnosis. Asian religious traditions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, or Taoism reserve a large role for the same process of transforming the empirical self into a spiritual self: the great journey to the unknown home. The European-Mediterranean tradition provided a cultural context that brought philosophic questioning and speculation to sophisticated heights, while Zen Buddhism recommended direct empirical intuition of the self as a purification process.

Dazzling landscape gardening, inspired by Zen spirituality, in Kyoto is another witness to a self turned into nature, aesthetically contemplated. In the meeting, on a global level, of the western tradition of philosophy, especially the German idealist school, and the Islamic tradition of the East we see an opportunity to come to terms with powerful currents that may seem antithetic, but upon closer inspection speak the same language.

 

Select Bibliography

 

Beierwaltes, Werner, Platonism und Idealismus. Frankfurt a.M.: Klosterman Verlag 1972.

Bubner, R., ed., German Idealist Philosophy. London: Penguin Books 1997.

Bertaux, Pierre, ed., Friedrich Holderlin: Dichtung, Schriften, Briefe. Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Verlag 1957.

Bohrer, Frederick N., ed., Sevrugin and the Persian Image. Seattle, Washington: University of Washington Press 1999.

Burke, Peter, A Social History of Knowledge. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press 2000.

Cerf, Walter and Harris, H.S., eds., Hegel: Faith and Knowledge. SUNY Press 1977.

Copenhaver, B. and Schmitt, Charles B., Renaissance Philosophy. Oxford University Press 1992.

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