TIMING AND TEMPORALITY IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE

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1 TIMING AND TEMPORALITY IN ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGY OF LIFE

2 Islamic Philosophy and Occidental Phenomenology in Dialogue VOLUME 3 Founder and Editor: Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka Co-Editors: Gholam Reza A awani, Sadra Islamic Philosophy Research Institute Nader El-Bizri, Department of History & Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge Editorial Board: Mehdi Aminrazavi, Department of Classics, Philosophy and Religion, Mary Washington College Angela Ales Bello, Rome William Chittick, Comparative Studies, State University of New York at Stony Brook Lenn E. Goodman, Department of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University Hassan Hanafi, Department of Philosophy, College of Arts, Cairo University James G. Hart, Department of Religious Studies, Indiana University Walter Lammi, Department of English, The American University in Cairo Robert D. Sweeney, Department of Philosophy, John Carroll University Seyed Mostafa Mohaghghegh Damad Ahmad Abadi, Sadra Islamic Philosophy Research Institute Reza Davari Ardakani, Sadra Islamic Philosophy Research Institute Ibrahim Dinani, Sadra Islamic Philosophy Research Institute Seyyed Mohammed Khamenei, Sadra Islamic Philosophy Research Institute

3 Timing and Temporality in Islamic Philosophy and Phenomenology of Life Edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka The World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning

4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available ISBN (HB) ISBN (e-book) Published by Springer, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved 2007 Springer No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PREFACE vii ix SECTION I WILLIAM C. CHITTICK / The View from Nowhere: Ibn al- Arabī on the Soul s Temporal Unfolding 3 ANNA-TERESA TYMIENIECKA / The Great Metamorphosis of the Logos of Life in Ontopoietic Timing 11 REZA AKBARIAN / Temporal Origination of the Material world and Mulla Sadra s Trans-substantial Motion 73 DANIELA VERDUCCI / The Timing of the Ontopoiesis of Life 93 SECTION II MICHAEL F. ANDREWS / Edmund Husserl: The Genesis and Origin of Time 113 SEYYED MOHAMMED KHAMENEI / Time, Temporal, and Temporality 129 NADER EL-BIZRI / Some Phenomenological and Classical Corollaries on Time 137 SECTION III MEHDI AMINRAZAVI / Mīr Dāmād on Time and Temporality 159 MASSIMO DURANTE / Historical and Messianic Time: The Structure of Subjectivity and the Question of Judgement 167 v

6 vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ABDUL RAHIM AFAKI / The Historicality of Linguistic Signs and the Ahistoricality of Meanings: The Role of Divine Neologisms in the Making of Islamic-Arab Tradition 195 SECTION IV MARIA-CHIARA TELONI / Time and the Formation of the Human Person: A Comparison of Edith Stein s and Martin Heidegger s Thoughts 225 A.L. SAMIAN / Virtues in Al-Biruni s Philosophy of Science 267 KATHLEEN HANEY / The Ontopoietic Timing of Life Versus the Kairic Unfolding of the Trans-Natural Destiny (A-T. Tymieniecka) 285 JAD HATEM / Pure Love in Mulla Sadra 295 SECTION V ROBERT J. DOBIE / The Phenomenology of Wujud in the Thought of Ibn Al- Arabi 313 MICHEL DION / Ibn Khaldûn s Concept of History and the Qur anic Notions of Economic Justice and Temporality 323 Appendix 341 Name Index 343

7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is with a considerable joy and pride that I am bringing the present collection of studies to the public. In the main it comprises studies read at, or intended for, our fifth symposium held by the World Institute for Advanced Phenomenological Research and Learning at our Annual convention of American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division, in New York, December 27 30, 2005, in the Institute s program of Islamic Philosophy and Phenomenology of Life in Dialogue. My appreciation and thanks go first of all to the authors, whose enthusiasm and dedication to the cause of the dialogue keeps this research project going. I thank in particular Professor William Chittick for his precious advice and to Dr. Nader El-Bizri for his editorial help. My secretary Jeff Hurlburt deserves warm thanks for his expert work at the logistics of this enterprise, and Springer Publishers for the moral support and technical help in copy-editing. I believe that in these three volumes of the series we have set down cornerstones for the desired dialogue between two great traditions of thought as they stay at the present moment, dialogue, which will not fail to unfold toward the enrichment of our philosophical culture. A-T.T. vii

8 PREFACE 1. Timing and temporality has become the great issue of our times. Our civilization must meet their puzzling requirements in order to survive. The striking scientific discoveries of modernity, whose far-reaching implications we are slowly deciphering, along with technological inventions unforeseeable in the past are not only transforming the modalities of human existence on earth but are also reaching into the cosmos. Most of all, these developments enter into the systems of our gregarious and societal sharing-in-life and communication and into the singular individual and personal realm. It is the timing of life and life s essential temporality that are at stake. Timing is so primordial to our existence that we are as if permeated by it. Indeed, all the factors and lines of vital development as well as all undertakings and projects, whether human, animal, or vegetative, turn on some or other modality of timing, or to put it better, time themselves in order to evolve. Temporality pervades our human horizon of life, feeling, reflection, hope. Whatever our mind encounters and conceives of is timed in its own turn. The timing of events, encounters, plans, etc. is the reference point not only for human communication but also of the symphony of nature s life. Every functional operation times itself in an irrevocable way. From time immemorial our temporality has suffused us to the bone. Seemingly it governs existence. Indeed, awareness of timing and temporality has so grown in our minds as to assume an autonomous sovereign position and to loom over us like the monstrous Chronos of Greek mythology, who devours his own offspring. In sum our inmost human concern with the timing of life and with life s temporal nature is an axis upon which turns our vision of existence, our worldview, into an embrace of the universe, reality, nature-life, and transcendent realms, and that in life s practice, in personal experience, and so in human destiny. This combination of theoretical and practical concerns, of ultimate and immediate, of knowing and doing, makes the right apprehension of temporality s and timing s meaning an extremely urgent charge for philosophers. ix

9 x PREFACE 2. With the great progress made in deciphering the results of scientific inquiry, we have been made more and more aware of the role of temporality, seeing timing variously, the part it plays in such diverse fields as genetics, embryology, biology, psychology, sociology and even in so rigorous and abstract a field as mathematics (as has been demonstrated by René Thom). But human beings have always been interested in the history of their ancestors, nations, the world itself. Sagas, myths have been handed down from generation to generation. We have always seen in the past dependencies and influences on the present, not only the effects of cataclysmic events that in their drama insure their memory (earthquakes, hurricanes, famines, wars) but imponderable effects also that can only be guessed at (of language, literature, law, religion, representative figures). Modern discoveries have only sharpened the questions of evolution and historical development, of generation and interaction, and of prospects. All of the sciences, physics, chemistry, biology, ecology, medicine, psychology, sociology are brought to bear on the discovery of the inner workings of individualizing life in its symbiotic exchange with circumambient conditions and within life s networks. The inquiry into the ecological conditions of life stretches far into geological spheres, into elementary organic processes and how they are affected by ground conditions and changing climatic and atmospheric conditions. The emphasis on change and evolution has also radically transformed our view of the heavens, with the stars no longer being seen as permanently affixed but as participating and carrying on the transformative course of the universe. This is modern astronomy/astrophysics. Origin, genesis, extinction these hidden yet crucial questions have brought emphasis on change and development to the fore. Emphasis is on questions of change, transformation, continuity, succession, articulation, of existential dependencies and conditions subject to change. The sphere of life/existence, whether of nature or of human society, sharing-in-life, is beset with concerns of temporality, with how to negotiate change, with latching on to available opportunities and with losing them. Given the depth of awareness now had of human subjective, inner psychological temporality, of how the experienced duration of existence is expressed in the stream of consciousness, of the foundational role this plays in life, there can hardly be any illusion left among philosophers that Time constitutes a unique and autonomous force or that duration is a mysterious and absolute infinity. Change has become now the measure of things. One most significant upshot of this is that consciousness can no longer be given priority over the unfolding of life and the cosmos. We see that consciousness calls for explanation of its origin, development, inner symbiotic genetic conditions. In short, it calls for the justification of its own temporality, its own time of

10 PREFACE xi origins and ends. Consciousness may overwhelmingly govern our lives and our experience of it, but it is itself subject to life s timing. To use Husserlian phenomenological parlance, finding the unconditioned status of our knowledge does not involve its reduction to consciousness. Already Husserl found that to be so. Though Husserl ultimately came to believe that our knowledge can be reduced to the lifeworld, that also cannot be so, for as I have suggested above, the lifeworld is conditioned by a net of factors in cosmos and bios, from which net the world and life are suspended. This is life at its fulcrum, the cosmic network and conditions to which life refers. 3. In our times it seems as if the temporality of the moves of the lifeworld is undergoing further intrinsic variation. Time together with space is shrinking and acquiring new modes of significance according to a new inventive \ interpretation of life. It is a general phenomenon of our life today that owing to the already spoken of unprecedented technological developments we cannot rely on a temporal routine; in our everyday life we now feel as if we compete with time. We feel as if all current world affairs, societal life, and personal existence have lost their usual pace, that is, the pace to which we had become accustomed, and have so accelerated that we as human beings now have to be reeducated to meet the requirements of the life struggle. We wonder how far this acceleration of human affairs can and may go. We calculate the probabilities in order to counter the unforeseeable and so avoid insoluble difficulties and so work to arrange sustainable circumstances for our societal and individual existence. And so timing has become a critical theoretical and practical concern for us. What accounts for the acceleration of our lives in spite of our protest against it? In spite of ourselves we are left breathless by life s pace. What is the nature of temporality? This question takes on an urgency as we seek to orient our lives in today s world and estimate our prospects for the future. Is indomitable Kronos itself undergoing transformation along with the changes in our way of life? Or are changes in how we live affecting our overall experience of temporality? Is it not that life practices are shaping time differently? 4. As philosophical thinkers we find here a striking situation in that the practical and the theoretical now meet so intimately in our concern with the temporality of existence that they seem almost to convert into each other. The necessities of practical life are here as stringent as the driven theoretical interrogation seeking understanding of the metaphysical quest. These two seemingly quite divergent concerns in fact inform each other and have done so in the depths of the human struggle for life from time immemorial. In the present day the generation of knowledge for the betterment

11 xii PREFACE of human life proceeds along with human consciousness asking ultimate questions. They both take part in the basic human attention to ways and means of objectifying, measuring, comparing the occurrences of life so that an intersubjective coordination indispensable to human vital existence may be established. In this interaction we clarify our speculative understanding of the world also. This unique convergence of theory and practice is particularly obvious in the history of how Islamic and Occidental cultures took wisdom from the inheritance of the great Greek thinkers, from Plato and Aristotle in particular, and so share innumerable insights. The succinct historical account given by Nader El-Bizri (pp. XXX) shows how Aristotle refers to motion and number to specify time s nature a measure pertinent to physics and practicality equally, and pertinent to psychology also given the soul s observing and measuring. This perspective has resonated through history. El-Bizri details how it entered medieval Islamic philosophy after Ishaq Ibn Hunayn s translation of Aristotle s Physics into Arabic (and covers as well other views, in particular views inspired by atomism). And he covers reflections of classical thought in Occidental philosophy too, in Augustine, Maimonides, and the Scholastics. He tells as well of the divide in modern Occidental philosophy between analytic and a priori approaches to time, an era that most sharply went in two directions, making either the timing of nature or the timing of the soul prime. Turning to phenomenology, El-Bizri again visits the subject of time in its theoretical and practical aspects in in-depth reviews of time in the ontic thought of Heidegger and the ethical thought of Levinas. With all the speculative efforts of philosophy and science, temporality and the timing of all life horizons remain still a puzzling mystery that, as argued above, has become in our times a pressing urgency to be resolved. The temporality of life, of everything in our horizon, demands fresh attention. I present here to the reader a gamut of approaches to the questions on our theme. They share the insight that a renewed inquiry must take into account the dramatic transformation of life now essential to our vision of life. The world and our destiny depend on our treating this theme in a spirit that harmonizes perennial wisdom and the contemporary climate. Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka

12 SECTION I

PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE NON-HUMAN ANIMAL

PHENOMENOLOGY AND THE NON-HUMAN ANIMAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHENOMENOLOGY IN COOPERATION WITH THE CENTER FOR ADVANCED RESEARCH IN PHENOMENOLOGY Volume 56 Editor: John J. Drummond, Fordham University Editorial