This is the second volume of Amin Ramin’s “Man in Islam”. The first volume can be purchased on Amazon at this link.
We said that modern Western civilization is, first of all, a system of material power over this physical world. It is based on a fear of reality, projected outward as the will to power. It seeks to grab this world by the hair, to shackle it into a rigid system of concepts, rules, laws, and then technical means, like all these wires, machines, murder weapons, etc.
Let us now take a sort of excursion through Western schools of philosophy to see together a confirmation of what we have said.
There is one introductory note to be made here. As you know, the West has not created any great religion. But it did create philosophy. That is, philosophy was such a peculiarly Western form of self-reflection and self-programming. You have to keep this in mind. Philosophy in the West became the nerve of society, projecting its perspectives, permeating all its pores with its understanding. It experienced battles and struggles, ups and downs, had its generals and soldiers, states and parties. Philosophy was the bearing structure of the West, its main stream, from which thousands of smaller streams ran in all directions.
We see a very different structure of history and society where meanings are unfolded from one fundamental and unchanging Text. Here everything else, in fact, becomes just a commentary on such a Text. In this society, too, there can be “philosophy” – as it was and is in the Islamic world – but only in the form of a kind of commentary.
So, different forms of thinking are possible. The thinking that follows Revelation and the Imam draws from the cup of the Universal Intellect, which is never wrong. We have already said that the Quran is a cast of the Universal Intellect, which is the white light, the upper right pillar of the Throne, and the Writing Cane that writes what was, is, and will be on the Preserved Tablet. The angel draws from the sea of this Intellect and pours it into the heart of the Prophet in the form of a Revelation.
The human intellect is only a reflection of this higher Intellect – its light in each of us. It is like the reflection of the same lamp in different mirrors: the reflection will be different depending on curvature or straightness, haze or transparency of the mirrors. Therefore, all individual intellects are different.
So, the human intellect is an imprint of a very powerful force – the most powerful after the first light of creation, that is, after Muhammad and the Household of Muhammad (S) – but as an imprint and shadow, it is weak and powerless in itself: “Does not man see that We have created him from the small seed? Then lo! he is an open disputant” (36: 77).
Philosophy is a form of thought that derives from man’s private, individual intellect, which is subject to delusion and error. And therefore, that private, personal and independent intellect, which philosophy has in mind, is the intellect of clay, easily capable of turning into its opposite – irrationality and even madness: in this respect, it is quite telling that the history of Western European philosophy ended with the madness of one of its last representatives.
Thus, our intellect acquires true reasonableness through a connection with Argument (Hujjat), that is, Revelation and the Wali (the Prophet or the Imam). Only then does it ascend to its beginning, which is the First Intellect that underlies all limited existence. And when mankind joins the Intellect of Imam, all the theories and constructs of philosophers will seem so ridiculous and childish that people will wonder how they could follow it.
And so, this cycle is not philosophical. The way of thinking presented here is not borrowed from philosophy. Everything said here is taken from the depths of the ayats of the Quran and the hadiths of the Prophet and the Imams of his infallible Family.
Now let’s look at where philosophy came from. The Greek word itself means “love of wisdom” and, according to tradition, was first used by Pythagoras, who said in a conversation with King Leontes that he was not a sage but a lover of wisdom. And ancient philosophy was a normal way of pagan thinking – a comprehension of the manifestationistic picture of the world. Here, the big Cosmos dominates, periodically igniting and burning out. All passes into all since all ends up at a formative center, which Plato refers to as the “Good,” Aristotle refers to as “the unmoved mover,” Heraclitus refers to as “fire,” and the Stoics call “Pneuma.”
The ancient philosopher is one of the varieties of that basic character for pagan culture, which we meet in the image of a shaman, a priest, a magician, a yogi, an ecstatic – in a word, a contemplative. Plato’s definition of the philosopher: he who contemplates the heavenly world of ideas. The task of man, according to Plato, is to attain godlikeness through merging with the Good.
The nearest analog of the Greek philosophers was the Indian Brahmans. The Greeks did not have a special class of priests, and philosophers performed their functions. Hence the easy convertibility of the ancient systems of thought into each other. It is possible to speak of Plato in Peripatetic terms and of Aristotle in Stoic terms. In essence, ancient thought is one philosophy on one and the same theme. The outer symbolism varies, while the inner content remains unchanged.
If we look at ancient culture as a whole, we see that they lived as if surrounded by all these gods, demigods, heroes, titans, ether… For them, it was absolutely real – the battles between gods and titans, the exploits of heroes somewhere on non-existent continents. Modern science simply laughs that, yes, they were not rational enough, they could not yet distinguish between fiction and reality. But it is unclear how people who created a civilization higher than ours could not do what even a five-year-old child can do.
In fact, they lived in a constant state of an expanded mind. They were a kind of psychonauts swimming in this sea of Barzakh, the world of images. And not as an exception, but collectively – so to speak, massively. And so, such things were absolutely real for them. Such was the way of life at the time; they existed in a different mode, in a different style. A world where man half-lives in the realm of sleep…
The civilization we are used to is a completely different one; it is highly technical and materialistic, dedicated exclusively to the exploitation of this planet. Therefore, it is characterized by a very different philosophy, and the connection between ancient philosophy and Western European philosophy of the New Age is, in fact, greatly exaggerated.
Because if we pass from these bearded philosophers-psychonauts, who tried to formulate their wanderings in the Big Cosmos in some rational way, directly to Descartes, the starting point of the New Age philosophy, what do we see?
Descartes lived in the first half of the 17th century, just as the Reformation ended in Europe, and it was time to reap the philosophical benefits of the Black Myth that the Reformers were pushing with even more energy than their Catholic enemies.
Accordingly, we see that Descartes thinks in strictly dualistic terms. He divides all reality into two beginnings: extended substance and thinking substance, matter and thought. According to Descartes, thinking and matter are two entirely different modalities. Where there is thinking or spirit, there is no matter, and where there is matter, there is neither thought nor spirit.
What does this mean in practice? Nothing less than the recognition of nature as dead, devoid of all life – a giant corpse. As the only bearer of the thinking element, man opposes nature and the whole world. The world appears as “non-human,” as a quantitative space to be used and exploited.
Remember we talked about the Western intuition of man as a kind of deity, elevated above the dead world and called to dominate it? Well, Descartes gives this program a clear and unambiguous philosophical form. And it is no coincidence that he considers even animals to be mere complex apparatuses devoid of life. The “evilˮ and “corrupted by original sin” nature of the Manichean-Augustine turns here into a mathematical model of an empty, dead, quantifiable world.
And so, the program of the scientific and technological attack on the world is already present in Descartes with complete clarity. We might say that Western civilization is still following the plan outlined by Descartes. His model of man as a solitary rational subject confronting a world of dead things becomes the starting point from which physical and mathematical science will rush to conquer nature. And it is telling that Descartes himself made crucial discoveries in physics and mathematics. For example, he discovered rectilinear motion by inertia and created analytic geometry.
And here, by this example, we can understand how the modern man thinks (and Descartes is the beginning of modernity). Whether he understands it or not, he thinks by division, according to the principle of “either/or.” In every act of thought, he cuts reality into certain dual pairs, drawing a boundary between them.
This is because Western metaphysics, after the triumph of Christianity, was built on Dualism. The Western way of thinking is essentially dualistic. It constantly divides reality into two parts: subject-object, soul-matter, earthly-heavenly, bodily-spiritual, faith-knowledge, theology-science, life-death… Such is Western thinking, which decomposes the world into rigid antinomies. Over time, other pairs will develop here: “working class – bourgeoisie,” “superior race – inferior race,” “Middle Ages – New Age,” “unconscious – consciousness”… Hence, the modern computer numbering is based on “one-zero.” The basis of all computer programs is the same dual pair: 1-0.
But this is a fundamentally wrong way of thinking. Because the reality is not decomposable into dual pairs; it is completely differently organized. Dualistic thinking is, in a sense, the rape of reality, its artificial dissection. Because there is no opposition between soul and body, subject and object, earth and heaven, faith and reason. They pass into each other; there is no isolation of the one from the other. In the first parts of this cycle, we saw that, for example, the material and the soul, the subject and the object are united in indistinguishable unity at a higher level of reality.
But that thinking has already become global; it is part of the flesh and blood of all people who identify themselves with “modernity,” and it is very difficult to free themselves from it.
There have been periods in European history when alternative models have been proposed. First of all, the Renaissance with its holistic, non-polar thinking project. But the Reformation brought Europe back into the mainstream of the Black Myth, rejected the Renaissance project and finally went the way of Dualism.
Now let’s move on to the next figure in our panorama of dualistic thinking, and that would be Kant. He lived in the second half of the 18th century, and the program of Western civilization is expressed in him even more clearly and consciously than in Descartes.
If we put in simple terms what Kant says (and his books are very complex, full of cumbersome terminology), we get roughly the following. There is the world-self, the famous Ding an sich, the “thing in itself,” the noumen. We cannot know it at all. According to Kant, reality itself is inaccessible to us.
Why? Because the raw material that reaches our consciousness from the outside is immediately processed by this consciousness. Our consciousness is a machine that stamps reality according to various categories, gestalts, which are already built into it (into this consciousness). Imagine a factory where the raw material comes in from outside, and the factory immediately stamps and packages it according to certain templates (Kant describes these templates in detail, falling into ecstasy and being unable to stop in his effort to paint everything within the framework of some overarching system).
For the observer inside this apparatus, the material will appear already packaged. So, if we proceed from this understanding, it turns out that man always deals with himself: reality is his own product. It is at his mercy. He himself stamps it. Every reality known by man is created by himself, and the unknowable one plays no part.
We see that Kant here goes one step further than Descartes. In Descartes, “thinking substance,” that is, human, simply confronts reality. In Kant’s case, it is man himself who creates reality. In essence, there is no longer the task of subduing reality since what we create has already been subdued and grasped: all that remains is to solve the question of its correct use – the utilization of the world.
And the interesting thing is this. Kant is a dualist, dividing the world into unknowable “things-in-itself” and things that exist for us (accessible to us) – the noumenon and the phenomenon. But what underlies this distinction? It is based on the same fear of the world, which is fundamental to European civilization and Western man of the New Age. Kant simply fears reality “in and of itself” and therefore seeks to replace it with the forms of our ordering consciousness. The world is merely a phenomenon subject to the overbearing claims of the cognizing Self, which is like a spider at the center of a web, and that which is not subject to these claims has no meaning and de facto does not exist.
From here also comes Kant’s pathological desire to confine all possible reality to the framework of his system, like a philosophical concentration camp. He wants, at any cost, to encase the world in a barbed system of notions. Isn’t there the “elective affinities” with Western imperialist aspirations, which try to subject the whole planet to the imperatives of capital, or with Western technology, which wraps the globe in a web of wires?
And another aspect of the Kantian system: it perpetuates what we have called the deontologization of the world, the washing out of concrete content, the thinning of being, in a word – nihilism. In his “Critique of Pure Reason,ˮ Kant closes off access to knowledge of “things in themselves,” Ding an sich. According to Kant, what things are in themselves outside our consciousness, we are unable to know. Kant denies the experience on which any sacred culture has stood – the experience of connecting subject and object, the inner and the outer, the experience of direct access to the essence of things. He recognizes only the Sisyphean labor of the profane intellect, forced to glide endlessly over the surface of things, never to penetrate their essence. Behind this position is the exhaustion of sacred experience, the washing away of its traces from Western culture, the closing of the windows of the transcendent.
In essence, by this teaching, Kant seals the movement to destroy man’s divine mission as khalifa on earth. Existing in the modus operandi of a passive receptor of external information and its reasoning processor, man does not realize his profound metaphysical function. This is the Cartesian or Kantian subject. A man who has forgotten his mission. But he becomes fully human by passing to the stage of heartfelt knowledge, discovering the crystal of pure humanity within himself.
In this function of the upright sense-holder, in the knowledge of names, he is the king of creation, “Allah’s vicar on earth.” According to the Quran, man’s goal is to know the Lord and get closer to Him. This means to know the vertical paradigm of Presence. In profane optics, the consciousness makes a horizontal movement instead of a vertical one. Kant best described the inner mechanism of this horizontal movement. In principle, he closed the subject by showing how horizontal reasoning consciousness works. Receiving sensual material from outside, it processes it, like a factory, by means of its internal categories. That is, the movement does not come from the bottom up, but from side to side, in the form of expansive processing of more and more layers of sensual experience.
The human mind, according to Kant, has no content. It has only mechanisms of functioning. It is an operative system, indifferent to what information to process. That is, the higher aspects of personality are washed out of it; it turns out that man is a “talking coffin,” a being who simply knows how to count. He analyzes the world using the simplest combinations, elementary algorithms, embedded in him as in a computer – and Kant shows these algorithms.
In this view, man is a walking automaton. There is an extreme reduction and deontologization of man. In general, as we have already said, modernity is a reduction in the spiritual and growth in the material. At its center is the model of a black golem, a beastly automaton, masterful in technology but insensitive to the sphere of genuine thinking and spiritual practices. Gradually this phantom loses even its connection with its vitalism, turning into a kind of ghost – a bearer of pure calculus, a walking brain.
Significantly, Kant denies reason (intellect) as an adequate organ of cognition at all. This is very symptomatic. According to Kant, intellect – that is precisely the metaphysical, solar, spiritualized organ having direct access to the essence of things – is only the bearer of antinomies (contradictions), into which it always falls when it tries to penetrate this essence. True, he restores to reason its lost significance in the ethical field, but only as the purveyor of the formal and dead “categorical imperative.”
According to Kant, concepts such as “God,” “afterlife,” and “soul” have no theoretical significance since no empirical reality accessible to the senses corresponds to them. Strangely enough, however, having dealt with these concepts in the “Critique of Pure Reason,ˮ he reestablishes them in his second work, the “Critique of Practical Reason.ˮ Having no meaning in the field of cognition, they have a practical meaning. In practice, according to Kant, we should act as if God existed, as if we had a soul and as if we were free.
That is, it turns out that there is nothing “above” the human subject: he is his own legislator, his own lord, and even God is only one of his “ideas,” which he generates from himself for the purpose of moral self-restraint. There is no longer an objective value order – there is only a subjective value order.
Thus, Kant created a complete program of Western civilization of the modern age, explicitly expressing its innermost aspirations. At the same time, he is extremely optimistic; he says a joyful “yes” to what is happening and sees no tragedy in this.
Hegel is a different matter. Hegel appears to have been the man who recognized the dualistic impasse of Western civilization. He rebelled against the one-sided reasoning of the Cartesian-Kantian model and sought again to break through to a heartfelt logic where subject and object are one. To a certain extent, Hegel tried to restore the traditional knowledge model. Only he did it in a strange way. Reading Hegel, one cannot get away from the thought that all these artificial, highly abstract constructions are an attempt to convince oneself of something – the presence of unity, integrity, and harmony, which in fact does not exist.
So, Hegel is trying to create a comprehensive system based on a deity (“absolute spirit”), which develops according to the laws of dialectical logic to this world, then creates the world, embodies these laws in history, and finally comes to self-consciousness in the person of Hegel himself. That is, God thinks the world according to Hegelian categories. It is not important for us whether he himself believed in such a strange hypothesis; what is important is that he tried to develop a way of thinking in which opposites would be constantly overcome in a higher synthesis. His Logic begins with a pair of opposites – being and nothing. In synthesis, they give rise to the category of “becoming.” This synthesis gives birth to a new antithesis, then a new synthesis, and so on.
However, Hegel’s project failed, probably because he himself couldn’t formulate it properly. All those opposites he overcame with such difficulty appear again in their original form in his followers. In the Young Hegelians, the reason is again opposed to religion. Stirner, the teacher of a female gymnasium, makes the individual personality the only autocratic reality and denies all morality. And Marx constructs a dualistic system based on the Manichaean myth of the “struggle of the two classes.”
Judging by the results, the Marxist doctrine is the most monstrous ideological invention in the history of mankind. No other ideology has produced such hecatombs of victims – tens, perhaps hundreds of millions in Russia, China, Cambodia, etc. And all these sacrifices were pointless: seas of blood were spilled for the sake of insane experiments, ultimately generating nothing, no lasting results. Everywhere Marxism went, hell on earth prevailed; it was the true apocalyptic scourge of the 20th century, like the Black Death or the invasion of Genghis Khan in the Middle Ages.
For example, as a result of the Leninist experiment in Russia, in a few years, the economy of the great country was destroyed to the ground; the cultural elite was physically exterminated; millions of people died in the civil war, from starvation and repression. In Cambodia, the 2.5 million population of the capital Phnom Penh was evicted from the city in 72 hours; most of those evicted died. Money was abolished, books were burned, children were separated from their parents, and the population was broken up into collective farms where people were forced to work 18 hours a day.
According to some estimates, as a result of the Pol Pot experiments, a fifth of the population of Cambodia died. The flourishing country was turned into a cemetery.
What are the reasons for all this? Primarily, three things.
First, Marx transferred Manichean-type dualism to society. He divided it into two classes, between which there is supposedly an irreconcilable struggle. One class is “good,” the other “bad,” one “Ormuzd,” the other “Ahriman.” On a practical level, this has resulted in people being killed not for any crimes or at least for their personal qualities, but simply for their formal affiliation with a “class.” And the flywheel of violence is such that it begins to develop on a completely unpredictable trajectory, constantly multiplying itself. First the “bourgeois” are killed, then they switch to enemies within their own ranks; “purgesˮ begin; purges spawn new murders, and so on in ascending order.
If we look at the matter realistically, the first premise from which Marxism proceeds – that all complex societies consist of classes – is beyond question. Although these classes are not two, as Marx imagined, but many. His second thesis is more doubtful: historical dynamics grow out of class struggles. He writes in The Communist Manifesto: “Free and slave, patrician and plebeian, landlord and serf, master and journeyman, in short, oppressor and oppressed were in eternal antagonism to one another, waged a continuous, now hidden, now explicit struggle, which always ended in the revolutionary reorganization of the entire social building or the general destruction of the fighting classes.”
We will agree that they waged an “uninterrupted struggle” among themselves, but we might as well say that all people in general “uninterruptedly struggle” with one another. The struggle of interests between classes is an unavoidable fact of life itself, but Marx says nothing about its other side, the cooperation of classes. The entrepreneur and the worker, the merchant and the buyer, the “master and the journeymen” all need each other, even though each tries to pull the blanket over his side. The worker may harbor all the feelings he wants for the entrepreneur, but this does nothing to change the fact that without him, he cannot organize production on his own and, therefore, will be left without a piece of bread. One might as well talk about a “struggle” between buyer and seller. When I go to buy something on the market, my interests and those of the seller are diametrically opposed: I want to buy cheaper, and he wants to sell more expensive. But this does not mean that we must immediately at each other’s throats. Moreover: we need each other, despite the complete opposite of our interests.
Finally, the third point of Marxist doctrine, the idea of a “classless society” in which there is neither ruler nor subject, is completely absurd. A society without power would be a strange bastard, and to imagine such a society would be like imagining a round square. The tragedy for any society is not the strengthening but precisely the weakening of its power base.
This was the first point. The second is that the bearer of Marxism in all the countries where it won was not the proverbial “workers and peasants” but the intelligentsia. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” in practice meant the dictatorship of those who appropriated to themselves the right to speak on behalf of the proletariat, and that was the intelligentsia. It is reported that Pol Pot was born into a wealthy landowner’s family, was well educated in France, studied Sartre, and loved Rimbaud’s sophisticated poetry. Lenin came from the family of a tsarist official. Marx was a descendant of Talmudic rabbis.
In general, over time, Marxism formed into something resembling a world church, with its own clergy, orthodoxy, list of apostates and heretics. And the priests of this church were none other than intellectuals, who had very little relation to the real “proletarians.” Once a worker who was a member of the circle in which Lenin was interpreting Capital stole his coat. After that, Lenin preferred not to deal directly with the proletarians, and in moments of honesty, he spoke very contemptuously of them. Not a single worker was a member of his “workers’ party” until his victory in October 1917.
Thus, social experiments along the lines of Marxism were carried out by intellectuals, but not by traditional intellectuals from non-Western countries (where Marxism usually won), but by Westernized intellectuals who had absorbed in their flesh and blood the Western technical attitude to reality, dualistic thinking, and a view of the world as a giant corpse to be controlled, manipulated, and tortured. The only difference between them and the founding fathers of physical-experimental science is that the latter approached nature with these views, while they approached society and living human beings.
In other words, these bearers of technical consciousness did not perceive society as something organic, consisting of concrete people: they imagined it as an abstract field for manipulations and experiments, where, like pieces on a chessboard, it is possible to move so many millions of people here and there, eliminate unnecessary elements, change something according to a prearranged plan… That is, they looked at society just as Descartes looked at nature. Pol Pot, already removed from power, refused to recognize the criminal nature of his actions and insisted that he wished only to make mankind happy. In his view, resettlement of a city of 2.5 million was a good thing because cities are sources of depravity. Yet it never occurred to him that most of those 2.5 million would die in the process because human beings are actually alive, do not exist according to plan, and tend to suffer and die.
Similarly, in conversations with Lenin, contemporaries were struck by his inability to think in individual categories. He always spoke only of masses, classes, parties, and states. For Lenin, there were no people in their concrete, personal manifestations: instead of a living person, he saw only an external social uniform. Back in 1891-92, when a famine broke out in the Volga region, he opposed aid to the starving, and on this basis: the famine took the peasants off the land and drove them to the cities, where they turned into the proletariat, which, according to Lenin, was “a progressive phenomenon.” This property of abstract inhumanity probably led Gorky to call him a “thinking guillotine.”
Quite possibly, these figures who built hell on earth were not violent themselves. In Pol Pot’s case, attempts to detect any pathology or complexes in his psyche dating back to an unhappy childhood failed. By all accounts, he was a quiet child from a well-to-do family, loved by his relatives, and then a socially friendly young man. The limit of Lenin’s personal cruelty was also quail hunting… The most terrible thing in this whole story is that the cruelest man, the pathological sadist, could not have committed a tenth of the crimes that these fantasists and bearers of rational-dualistic thinking committed if he had the power.
But in the end, the rule of Westernized intellectuals, inspired by a technological utopia, proved so terrible that it made one dream of the power of the “sharks of capital” as a lost paradise. This brings to mind the hadith that the Imam of the Time (A) would not come until there was no group left to rule – so that when he came, no one could say, “If we ruled, we would rule justly.”
And the third aspect: Marxism is a fundamentally materialistic ideology that does not recognize any higher authority in the way of violence. After all, authentic Marxism denies truth: for it, there are only various forms of lies (“ideologies”) to cover up “class domination.” The “slave-owners,” “feudal lords,” and “capitalists” all have their own lies. Marx, therefore, quite cynically claims to have invented a new form of lie for the “proletariat.”
And what is materialism? On the surface, it seems simple: the doctrine that matter is primary. But what exactly is matter? Marx’s definition of this concept is nowhere to be found. The most famous definition in Marxist philosophy belongs to Lenin: “Matter is a philosophical category for denoting objective reality, which is given to man in his sensations, which is copied, photographed, displayed by our sensations, existing independently of them.” It is clear that this definition is internally contradictory. Matter is something that is given in the senses and, at the same time, exists outside of them. It is like saying that a mosquito is something that buzzes above my ear while at the same time existing outside my ear.
If we proceed from such a definition, it is not clear whether those elementary particles, waves, or strings that modern physics talks about and that, in principle, cannot be observed or recorded in experience are matter. Or I have fallen into an altered state of consciousness – and I see some strange creatures that, for me, exist quite objectively. Are they material or not? After all, my senses seem to represent them, and at the same time, they seem to exist outside of me…
And so, we understand: what Lenin intuitively imagined as “matter” is not at all what his definition says. In practice, anyone who endowed nature and the world with any signs of life or consciousness was declared an “idealist,” that is, a non-materialist. Marxist “matter” is really not so much something tangible as something dead. “Matter” is nothing other than a world-corpse.
Materialism represents, above all, the cutting off of the sensuous things from their “backside” – the severing of ontological connections. The things we see no longer have a light “underside” or depth. Their reverse side is darkness, the black amalgam of the mirror. And so, the materialist is none other than the heir of the Gnostics and the Manicheans, who considered the world “black,” devoid of life, an ugly mechanism created by some “Yaldabaoth.” And in such a world, Manichean fanatics, like Lenin, begin to beat the sparks of the proletariat out of the raging darkness of the bourgeoisie…
On the horizon of this doctrine looms the same dogma of “original sin” that distorted creation, a dogma that has its roots in even older, pre-Christian myths about an “evil demiurge” and a “black god” who created a bad world, about a cosmic catastrophe at the heart of creation. And the underlying esoteric conclusion, which was not usually spoken, was that one had to respond to the catastrophe with a catastrophe. If our world is hopelessly corrupted, why not take the Catastrophe to its limit? This maxim – “all things are permitted” – constantly accompanied the dualist myth as a kind of shadow. And now, in the 20th century, it has once again walked the Juggernaut wheel around the world.
In addition to his economic studies, Marx was also a poet and, as is often the case, expressed his deep intuitions in poems. The founder of the “only scientific doctrine” in these verses praises destruction, violence, and Satan. For example, in his poem “Oulanem,” we read:
The hellish vapors rise
and fill the brain,
till I go mad
and my heart is utterly changed.
See this sword?
The prince of darkness sold it to me.
The world must be destroyed with curses.
I will squeeze his stubborn being with my hands.
And, embracing me,
he must silently fade away.
And then down – plunge into nothingness,
to disappear altogether,
not to be, that would be life…
Oulanem is a magical anagram, a reversal of the name “Immanuel,” denoting the Antichrist. In fact, the same atmosphere of universal destruction expressed in this poem is also the background of Marx’s theoretical writings, such as “Capital.ˮ The lyrical hero Oulanem, who destroys the world and sells his soul to Satan, is clothed in the mantle of the proletariat in The Communist Manifesto. Just as in the radical Gnostics, Cain and Judas sow the seeds of revolution in a world governed by the law of the blind Demiurge.
So we understand that materialism was not just a “scientific doctrine” – it was a certain kind of religion. A religion inverted, based on the reversal of normal proportions in the universe and man. An attempt to turn the pyramid of the light base up, the human heikel head down. “And I will command them, and they will distort Allah’s creation” (4: 118), says Iblis in the Quran. Materialism has its own black esotericism; it is not just a neutral doctrine.
Otherwise, you can’t explain his supporters’ frenzied, fanatical struggle against any form of worship of the Creator. Marx created a new version of the religion of Lucifer worship, disguising it as a “strictly scientific worldview” and a “struggle against exploitation and oppression.”
The last philosopher we will talk about in this part will be Martin Heidegger. The man who stated the death of European philosophy. The man who created a kind of summary of all European thought, an apotheosis and requiem of Western thought at the same time.
It is customary to divide Heidegger’s intellectual biography into two parts. The first is marked by his major work, “Being and Time,ˮ published in 1927. Heidegger’s central theme is “Being.” That’s what they call him “the philosopher of Being.” But, interestingly, at the same time, he nowhere gives a definition of what “Being” actually is. For Heidegger, Being is a kind of basic and comprehensive intuition not subject to strict definition, just like Marx’s “matter.” And so, the entire course of Western history is conceptualized by him as a movement of gradual loss and inflation of Being.
In work “Being and Time,ˮ this theme is comprehended from the perspective of such a concept as Dasein. Literally, this word means “here-being,” “existence.” Dasein is a concept that expresses the primary constructions of human existence, let us say, human reality. And not just any reality, but the reality of Western man – how he exists, how he relates to himself and being.
For example, his most important feature is Geworfenheit – “abandonment.” Dasein is always abandoned somewhere; he is thrown into the situation of the world in which he lives. The response to this is that Dasein forms himself as a kind of throw into something. The other existential is fear. Dasein is afraid because he is abandoned to the world.
Further, according to Heidegger, the most important property of Dasein is being-to-death, in which fear turns into horror, Angst. Facing death, Dasein is terrified because it faces its own limit, its own finitude, its own nothingness. Related to this is the fact that Dasein is always and knowingly guilty; he exists in a situation of guilt.
So, in describing Dasein’s existentialities, Heidegger is actually referring to Western man’s way of being. Here we see how Western man existentializes, what his fundamental subterranean structures are. According to Heidegger, it turns out that Western man is a being facing Nothingness, experiencing guilt, immersed in horror, and turned toward Death. These are his underlying structures. Western man is fundamentally turned toward the abyss and nothingness, fundamentally finite and mortal. He exists and acts in the face of the abyss. That is, when Western man somehow communicates with the world, he proceeds out of horror before this world and himself. Once again, we are talking about deep structures; the average man may not notice any of this at all and consciously not fix it in any way.
So, this horror, we shall say, this soaring over the abyss, this “protrusion into nothing,” forces him somehow to manipulate things. This is why the Western man is a man of will: he tries to organize the world around him by his will, to subdue it. Hence Nietzsche’s Wille zur Macht, “the will to power.” The underlying internal pressure of fear causes the rising, self-willed will.
As a result, the entire European civilization is built on the primary idea of Death. In the previous parts, we have talked about this in detail. In comprehending the subject of death, Heidegger remains entirely within the framework of the Christian worldview. One of the characteristic moments in the dualistic picture of Christianity is the image of death as something terrifying and infernal. Death was perceived not as a step in the chain of cosmic existence but as a shocking precipice, a terrible event. Death is, above all, something to be feared, an end, a limit. It is immensely frightening; it brings the gnashing of teeth, punishment, and anguish. Hence the rush and race of Western civilization, the desire to accomplish everything as quickly as possible – before the Queen-Death comes.
This understanding of death, imposed by Christianity, was atypical of almost all traditions. Greek sarcophagi depicted dancers, Etruscan graves depicted a feast. That is, it would seem that the person died, but nothing terrible has actually happened; it is more of a cause for joy…
In reality, death is a new birth. It is like a butterfly coming out of a cocoon. When we drop the cocoon of our body, the butterfly of the new body will be born. A famous Prophetic hadith says, “People sleep. When they die, they wake up.” What does this mean? That is, people sleep, and when they enter Barzakh, they will wake up; people of Barzakh sleep, and when they are resurrected, they will wake up; people of Resurrection sleep, and when they enter Paradise, they will wake up; people of Paradise sleep, and when they reach a state of contentment (Rizwan), they will wake up, and so on to infinity. And each of these stages correlates with the next one as a person in the mother’s belly correlates with this world with all its beauties, which would be impossible to explain to one in the mother’s belly. And just as we are born into this world, leaving the mother’s belly that seemed comfortable to us, so are we born into the world of Barzakh, leaving our physical body in this world. And the beauties, wonders, and expanse of Barzakh will be for us the same as the beauties of this world are for a person who has emerged from his mother’s narrow and dark womb. In the same relation is the world of the Barzakh to the world of the Resurrection, and so on.
And so, the hadith says that people are asleep now, and when they die, they will wake up. That is, if we look from a true perspective, what we call “death” is actually not death, but birth. It is a birth into another, wider and more magnificent world. “Death” is rather our condition now in our world.
The Messenger of Allah (S) likens this state to sleep, for sleep is the “brother of death.” That is, from the true perspective, everything looks quite different. Usually, people look at their existence in this world as life and death as death. Whereas, in fact, the opposite is true: this life is death, and death is birth and transition to a more intense life.
This is what we can say of early Heidegger. In the second period of his work, he moves away from the analysis of the individual structures of Dasein (“Being and Timeˮ remains unfinished) and turns now to a world-historical perspective, constructing a kind of eschatology of Being, which is at the same time the apocalypse of the Western world. In short, the leitmotif of his thought during this period is that the history of the West is a process of gradual oblivion of Being.
Let us consider what this might mean. As we said, “Being” is nowhere precisely defined by Heidegger. It is a primal concept, a fundamental intuition that cannot be exhaustively defined. In order to make sense of it, there is a series of meanings that intuitively describe what it is about. Being is life, fullness, saturation, support, foundation, pillar, depth, presence…
In this respect, it is quite clear that the history of Modernity has indeed been a history of “oblivion of Being,” that is, a process of gradual impoverishment (in the deepest sense of the word) of the ontological richness (the impoverishment of what in Quranic terminology we would call Fitra).
It could not be otherwise because Being is life, and the main subject of the Christian West is Death. The development of European metaphysics is a consistent loss of the basis, the ontological backbone, the principle of wealth and abundance, the spiritual structure. Postmodernity is the end of this process. The loss of ontological power is so great that it is barely remembered today. Postmodernity is a world of masks, empty shells, a world without an ontological backbone. Indian chiefs dance the tango, the Pope becomes a comic book hero, the Dalai Lama is photographed with top models. The circle of virtual images without ontological roots forms a second version of the medieval dance of the holy Death – Death brought by the Crucified.
And so is the case in all areas of the modern world. Take, for example, the modern economy, which, as you know, is built on the usury system. After all, usury has always been considered the embodiment of “spinelessness” and fictitiousness. The association of bankers with vampires is not accidental. The basis of the modern economy is not real wealth but fiction in the form of self-generating money, which long ago ceased to be even paper money and grew simply into electronic units and zeros.
The technological world of the modern economy, boasting of its “abundance,” does not satisfy natural human needs but suppresses them by replacing with artificial ones. It cannot even provide basic human needs, such as a healthy environment, air, or natural foods. The “information society,” abstract science detached from life, virtual reality, Hollywood, the consumer race, the spectacle industry, the total skepticism of the “postmodern,” and interest slavery are all manifestations of the fundamental deontologization, the nihilism under which the modern world stands. In this respect, the fall in fertility is symptomatic, for procreation has always been seen as a sign and consequence of the ontological power of society and its vitality. Modern society of larvae, guises and masks is childless above all.
And if we look at this world without prejudice, freeing our minds from all kinds of propaganda clichés, we will see that the progress it so boasts of does not exist. The average peasant five hundred years ago lived much better than the average city dweller today. He had a separate house, his own farm, a large family, a natural environment and products, free time, and what they call “leisure.” The modern townspeople live in some two-room concrete box bought on credit, work day and night at meaningless jobs, do not have a normal family and children, experience constant depression, breathe poisoned air, eat chemicals…
That is, if we look at it objectively, we see that there really is no progress. There is only the illusion of progress caused by the fact that there is a monstrous industry of artificial things all around us, supported by an equally monstrous system of brainwashing. But these things have no effect on the quality of human life; rather, they make it worse. Just as the brainwashing industry imposes on us the illusion that something is constantly happening around us, that everything is changing and improving, when in fact, there is nothing of the sort. In an old country house, well-made chairs could last for generations. Today, if you buy chairs in a supermarket somewhere, they break after a year or a few months.
People of the past, who lived thousands of years ago, created works of art and buildings still admired today. Millions travel to Athens and Rome just to see the wonders of their architecture. But has today’s humanity, despite its enormous technical capabilities, created something that could be looked at with envy or admiration by the man of the future? If some sudden catastrophe destroys our civilization, and hundreds of years later, people dig up its remnants, they will find pieces of concrete, iron wires, shards of cheap glass, and piles of undecomposed plastic. And they will probably just bury this ugliness back in the ground.
So, contrary to all the illusions of massiveness and solidity, everything modern civilization creates is cheap, fragile and illusory, like dust in the wind. Buildings built in ancient Rome still stand today. However, those buildings being constructed now will collapse in a couple of decades. The modern economy is such a fragile structure that a power outage of just a few hours in a major metropolis is enough to cause a collapse and disaster on the scale of an entire country or even a planet.
So, the modern technical world is opposed to the natural Fitra of man, following in this its dualistic Christian basis from which it has emerged. We have seen in previous parts how Christianity declared war on life, the world, man, and gender. The New Age continued this war, but only in a different capacity.
We said above that the modern world has shifted the weight of the scales to the opposite pole. This is true. But we will not fully understand the dialectics of this world unless we say that in this very displacement, it still remains in the same paradigm from which it emerged. As we know, anyone who denies is fatally dependent on what he denies. Yes, the modern Western man sings the praises of life and revels in it; he does not want to hear about death; he has created a cult of pleasure and consumption – but is this still real life? Has Western man returned to full vitality after centuries of denying it? Not at all. The life he revels in is an artificial life, an ersatz life, through the shell of which the same fundamental figure of Mrs. Death is still visible.
Take, for example, the sexual sphere. It would seem that the Western man of the New Age has left no stone unturned from medieval prohibitions; he has completely liberated himself in the sexual field, allowed everything that could be allowed. But is this sex life a real and organic one? The answer is obvious. Look at the army of perverts glued to the screens of television sets and monitors, tasting the fruits of the porn industry, look at the mass of synthetic drugs and “substitutes,” at the flourishing cult of all kinds of perversions, at how many mature men and women are sexually inferior, and you will answer the question yourself. Sexually, modern civilization is not “liberated sensuality” in the good sense of the word, but ugly inferiority, which is no better than the total prohibition of sexual life practiced in the Middle Ages.
Thus, Heidegger is quite correct about the “oblivion of Being” in the modern era. From our point of view, his only mistake is that he did not understand the origins of this oblivion, raising them to Plato and even to the Presocratics, that is, falsely identifying the history of the West with the history of philosophy. In reality, the crisis of modernity is rooted in the fateful mixing of Abrahamic discourse with dualistic myth during the decline of the Roman Empire. The result was a dualistic civilization that developed an unprecedented historical dynamism at the cost of the loss of the roots of being and the godlessness of the world.
Hence Heidegger’s “being-to-death.” Hence the “decline of Being,” the gradual erosion of the ontological backbone of life that constitutes the essence of modernity. Hence the quantitative linear time flowing in one direction and the quantifiable, “universal” space of the Newtonian picture of the world. Hence the treatment of people as “human capital” or “the material of communism.” Hence Descartes’ dualism with its radical separation of consciousness and the world, res cogitans and res extensa. Hence Kantian philosophy closing off access to knowledge of “things in themselves,” Ding an sich, and recognizing only the Sisyphean labor of the profane mind. Hence postmodernity and the “society of the spectacle,” Hollywood and pop music, to which are now added such phenomena as global terrorism and forced medical procedures.
The synthesis that underlies the modern world took place only once in the history of mankind, for the world Roman Empire, which created the prerequisites for it, took place only once. Therefore, the modern world could be born only in Western Europe and nowhere else. Where the synthesis was made, the corresponding conclusions were drawn from it. In no other place could the transition to modernity have taken place. If the Chinese or Indian civilizations had existed for another tens of thousands of years, they still would not have given birth to anything like modernity. Its birth was the consequence not of a “natural development” passing from stage to stage but of an accidental and singular mutation.
In his lecture “What is Metaphysics?” Heidegger says: “The solid pervasiveness of our being by nothingness is evidence of the constant and, of course, shaded openness of the Nothing, in its primordiality detectable only by horror. But it is precisely because of this constant hidden presence that the primordial horror in our being is mostly suppressed. The horror is with us. It only sleeps. Its pervasive breath is in our being…”
The horror pushes us beyond this world, not into another world but into the void. Man, according to Heidegger, is “the substitute of Nothing” – a splendid formula for the anthropological attitude of dualistic civilization, where Heidegger is joined by figures such as Sartre and Jemal. It is not the shining brilliance of absolute fullness that man discovers within himself but the terrifying poverty of the Nothing. “Only God can save us” – this is how Heidegger sums up his path, putting an end to the two-thousand-year development of Western thought.
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