Seeing the World, Again

Narcissus, Caravaggio, ca. 1597.

In this essay I want to reflect on reflection. In our age, the primordial desire to reflect has been replaced with a wanton desire to consume; God has been replaced with an egotistical “I” whose raison d'être is consumption. The world is left bereft of the grandeur of God, animated only by the mana of money. How can we recover reflection in a world misenchanted by capitalism? Reflection, if it is true to its name, is always critical. It is critical, not in the nihilist sense, but in its capacity to negate meanings of a world bequeathed to us by capitalism and to create new meanings. To reflect is to reclaim what is interior to the self; that is, the self that exists independent of the structures of meaning projected by a hegemonic order. The Argentine-Mexican philosopher and theologian Enrique Dussel gives the example of a taxi driver. To the non-reflective self, the taxi driver is a mere extension of a vehicle, whose value is instrumental: to get us from point A to point B. The critical, reflective self recognizes the taxi driver not as an instrument in his own narrow world, but as an authentic “Other”—that is, someone with an existence independent from him.

To reclaim reflection in the modern age, we might turn to the Qur’ān, which provides a helpful framework for understanding the nature of reflection. According to the Qur’ān, through the interiority of reflection, the subject turns towards the world, seeing not through the nafs (lit. the ego) but through the ‘aql (lit. the intellect), which in Arabic means to comprehend, or ascertain true knowledge. The Qur’ān signifies the “interiority of reflection” as tafakkur (lit. thinking), which amounts to a form of recognition culminating in the act of shahada (lit. witnessing). The Qur’ān fosters this emergent consciousness by demanding that man reflect upon the cosmos as a sign of divinity. The purpose is to activate our consciousness so that it emerges from the limits of its narrow world and bears witness to the divine grandeur that underlies reality.

This activation of consciousness is two-fold. First, it reveals the self to itself. Second, it reveals the reality of the world as being grounded in that which is beyond the narrow horizons of the self. Reflection reveals one’s existential situation and gives the self a sense of responsibility toward that situation. The Qur’ān describes this passage, from the narrow world of individual existence to an order imbued with the grandeur of God, as one from basar (or “sight”) to basīrah or (or “insight”). The former is the mere acquisition of consciousness. The latter is conscientization. Enrique Dussel explains:

This prise de conscience [acquisition of consciousness] is not yet conscientization. The latter consists of the deepening of the prise de conscience itself. It signifies then the critical development of the prise de conscience; conscientization implies going beyond the spontaneous level of mere perception of reality, by a critical level that makes it possible for reality to be grasped as a cognizable object in a relationship to the human being who assumes a position anchored in the search for knowledge.

Basīrah (lit. insight) as conscientization begins with the immediate world: to dhikr (lit. to reflect or remember) upon that which is always already present but forgotten or veiled. For Kierkegaard, we achieve this insight—or “recognition,” as he terms it—through repetition. In his essay “The Relevance of the Beautiful,” the twentieth century German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer writes:

But what is recognition? It is surely not merely a question of seeing something for the second time. Nor does it imply a whole series of encounters. Recognition means knowing something as that with which we are already acquainted. The unique process by which man ‘makes himself at home in the world’, to use a Hegelian phase, is constituted by the fact that every act of recognition has already been liberated from our first contingent apprehension of it and is then raised into ideality. This is something that we are all familiar with. Recognition always implies that we have come to know something more authentically than we were able to do when caught up in our first encounter with it. Recognition elicits the permanent from the transient.

Seeing, therefore, is not reducible to a sensory perception but a way of being that pivots on the difference between basar (sight) and basirah (insight). According to the Moroccan philosopher and scholar Taha ‘Abd ar-Rahman, “The spirit of the human being possesses a special force (quwwa khāṣṣa), mostly resembling an archetypal memory, and existing prior to his in-this-world memory.” This amounts to a liberation of our first comprehension of the world towards a new comprehension by re-situating the world against a new background which in turn gives the world new meaning,

Through tadhakkur (lit. reflection or remembrance) as recognition, the reflecting person undergoes a passage from the world-as-dunyā (lit. that which is ‘near’)—a domesticated world in which the self is alienated from and closed off to the reality of God and His creation—to the ‘âlam (lit. that which is a sign), an open world situated in an open cosmos that testifies to the grandeur of the divine.  The difference between the dunyā and the âlam also represents two ways of being-in-the-world. The former is a state of alienation, whereas the second is a form of what Paul Tillich calls spiritual self-affirmation—that is, a drive toward the sublime.

Recognition becomes, as Byung-Chul Han writes in The Disappearance of Rituals, “a perception of the permanent: the world is shorn of its contingency and acquires durability.” What the interiority of reflection reveals is that which is interior to everything that exists: their reality as God’s creation. What is revealed in tadhakkur-as-recognition is that the cosmos exists independently of the narrow world projected by the totalizing ego, beyond the dunyā. The cosmos originates in exteriority (the beyond) because everything which constitutes the cosmos is a sign of God and an instrument of perpetual divine activity. Muhammad Iqbal writes, “The immediate purpose of the Qur’ān in this reflective observation of Nature is to awaken in man the consciousness of that of which Nature is regarded a symbol.”

The Qur’ān re-signifies things in the world as signs. It does so by making existents the subject of our conscious reflection and draws our attention to their first sense: the ontologically prior category of createdness, or their universal and ultimate meaning. In other words, it is the recognition that the interior meaning of all existents other than God is their createdness and their being instruments of divine activity.

The “I” of the nafs is decentered and now stands in a relationship with that which is beyond. This perception of the cosmos reveals the uniquely transcendent nature of the cosmos: God, who is the “absolute Exteriority,” created the cosmos ex nihilo.” As Syed Muhammad Naqib al-Attas puts it in A Prolegomena to the Metaphysics of Islam, the “I” achieves recognition of “the proper places of things in the order of creation, such that it leads to the recognition of the proper place of God in the order of being and existence.” The culmination of this reflection is the discovery of the absolute Exteriority: God. Indeed, this discovery of God was the ultimate purpose of creation. As the Prophet narration states: “I was a Hidden Treasure and I desired to know known, so I created Creation that I might be known.”

The world, now ‘âlam, becomes a unity that expresses the creative and divine will, irāda khalqiyya. The recognition of the Other leads to a transcending of the subject-object dichotomy: the I-It and I-Thou relation to the world wherein both sides—be it oneself and the natural world, or oneself and “the Other”—are subsumed into the category of createdness. This, in turn, demands the decentering of the self, a negating of the totalizing “I” (the nafs, the ego). In its consciousness of the unity and oneness of God as the center of invariable presence (tawhid), the self negates itself as an illusory center and re-interprets the world in its totality and gives it meanings that are now disclosed, or revealed, by virtue of one’s receptivity. The disclosure of the world as 'âlam culminates in tashhiīd (lit. the act of witnessing) which is shahada, a word which has a dual meaning: it is both an awareness of reality and a testament to that discovered reality.

Ali S. Harfouch is a writer and researcher focusing on secularity, contemporary Islamic thought, and political theology. He obtained his Master of Arts in Political Science from the American University of Beirut. Twitter: @asharfouch