Seyyed Hossein Nasr
Traditionalism,
Islamic Esotericism
& Environmental Ethics
Anne Marieke Schwencke 8607745
BA Thesis Religious Studies/ World’s Religion Institute of Religious Studies/ Leiden University Leiden, the Netherlands
Prince Charles in speech delivered Wilton Park Seminar on the Sense of the Sacred: ‘A Sense of the Sacred: Building Bridges between Islam and the West’, 1996:
I start from the belief that Islamic civilization at its best, like many of the religions of the East—Judaism, Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism—has an important message for the West in the way it has retained a more integrated and integral view of the sanctity of the world around us. I feel that we in the West could be helped to rediscover those roots of our own understanding by an appreciation of the Islamic tradition's deep respect for the timeless traditions of the natural order. I believe that process could help in the task of bringing our two faiths closer together. It could also help us in the West to rethink, and for the better, our practical stewardship of man and his environment in fields like healthcare, the natural environment and agriculture, as well as in architecture and urban planning.
Content
1 Introduction ... 4 1.1 General outline ... 4 1.2 Research questions ... 9 1.3 Significance ... 10 1.4 Academic context ... 12 1.5 Method ... 12 1.6 Structure ... 142 Seyyed Hossein Nasr ... 15
2.1 The Scholar of Islam, Philosopher ... 15
2.2 The Environmentalist ... 17
3 Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man ... 20
3.1 Introduction ... 20
3.2 Environmental Crisis ... 21
3.3 Critique of Modernity ... 22
3.4 Traditional metaphysics ... 26
3.5 Solving the Crisis: Religion as the Master Key ... 35
3.6 From Worldview to Practice ... 37
4 Traditionalism, Perennial philosophy and Esotericism ... 41
4.1 Introduction ... 41
4.2 Traditionalism ... 42
4.3 Perennial Philosophy ... 45
4.4 Western Esotericism ... 47
4.5 Traditionalism and Islam ... 51
5 Traditional Islam, Sufism ... 52
5.1 Introduction ... 52
5.2 Traditional Islam ... 52
5.3 Sufism, Islamic mysticism ... 57
5.4 Spiritual Practice ... 61
5.5 Islamic esotericism ... 63
5.6 Islamic Environmental Ethics ... 66
5.7 Discussion ... 71
6 Circles of influence ... 74
6.1 Introduction ... 74
6.2 Traditionalist network ... 76
6.3 New Age Environmentalism ... 89
6.4 Esotericism and environmentalism ... 95
6.5 Islamic Environmentalism ... 98
7 Conclusion ... 105
1 Introduction
1.1 General outline
Anyone with an interest in Islamic perspectives on ecological issues is likely to come across the name of the Iranian-American scholar of Islam and comparative religion, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (b. 1933). He is presented as one, if not the ‘founding father’ of Islamic environmentalism and is said to have laid the ‘foundations for the current discussions on Islam and the environment’1.
Indeed, Nasr was certainly one of the first to approach the topic from an Islamic perspective. Having lived and worked in the US most of his life, he was also one of the first to draw attention to the spiritual dimensions of the ecological crisis in the West. In fact, his 1965 essay was published in the US a few months before Lynn White Jr’s famous thesis about the ‘historical roots of our ecological crisis’2. Although, Nasr has written and lectured unabatedly
and consistently about the topic, his message never received the response Lynn White’s thesis had triggered in the West. Whereas White was attributing the roots of the crisis to Christianity and was instrumental in the collective cultural trend, moving away from religion, Nasr was possibly advocating a less popular view, i.e. return to authentic religion. For whatever reason, Nasr’s ecological views appear to have largely gone unnoticed and have only been picked up fairly recently.
Nasr is mostly known for his historical work about Islamic philosophy, Islam within the context of modernity, comparative religion and his more ‘perennial’ work about ‘knowledge, science and the sacred’ and is cited widely by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Nasr is said to be ‘the best known contemporary Iranian philosopher … who has written extensively on Islamic cosmology, mysticism and metaphysics and is widely respected in academic circles’3. He is also
known to be one of the leading figures behind the recent A Common Word initiative aiming towards constructive dialogue with the Catholic Church4.
1 Entry: ‘Seyyed Hossein Nasr’ in: Taylor, B. (eds), Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, 2 volumes, New York:
Continuum, 2005, 2008.
2 This thesis links the ‘ethos of medieval Christianity to the emergence of […] an exploitative attitude towards
nature in the Western World’. Also see the entry ‘White, Lynn’, in: Taylor, B. (eds), Encyclopedia of Religion
and Nature, 2 volumes, New York: Continuum, 2005, 2008. Original title: White, Lynn, ‘The Historical Roots
of Our Ecological Crisis’ in: Science 155:3767, 10 March 1967, p1203-1207.
3 Fakhry, M, A History of Islamic Philosophy, p322. 4 A Common Word. See: www.acommonword.com/
Several books about Nasr have seen the light in recent years discussing and criticising, the reception of Nasr’s work on science in Indonesia, his views about religion, pluralism and interfaith dialogue and his involvement with Traditionalism5. His ecological message was
picked up at the turn of the century by a circle of scholars interested in exploring the ‘relationships among human beings, their environments, and the religious dimensions of life’. References to Nasr have since been included in the seminal Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature’6. Although these sources provide us with some insight, a systematic analysis of his
ecological views appears to be lacking as yet.
This thesis is to be seen as a first attempt to analyse and contextualize Nasr’s ECO-PHILOSOPHY.
We will see how concepts of ‘religion’, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’ are central to his argument. In fact, Nasr is proposing that the modern world needs to rediscover traditional principles and knowledge about nature and the cosmos, and the relation of us humans within it. Garbed in contemporary terms, ‘traditional cosmologies’ will provide us with the only veritable and viable keys to a solution to the ecological crisis. These cosmologies are to be found at the heart of all authentic traditions or religions, and will need to be excavated from its now often forgotten heritages. We will see how his conception of traditional cosmologies can be contextualised as ‘traditionalism’ or ‘perennial philosophy’, stressing the ‘inherent unity of all religions’, which is strongly related to (western) currents of thought that have been labelled as ‘western esotericism’. Each of these categories are highly problematic in an academic sense and need careful definition.
Islam, Nasr believes, has a particular essential role to play in the contemporary world. Within the secular West much of the traditional understanding was lost on the advent of ‘modernity’. Within the world of Islam, Nasr argues, the sense of the sacred is still kept alive, and as such Islam has something essential to offer to the West. Prince Charles’ words, quoted at the start of this thesis, reverberate strongly with Nasr’s views in this respect. A large part of this thesis will therefore focus on Nasr’s understanding of ‘Islamic tradition’, the Islamic perspective on the environmental crisis and Islamic environmental ethics.
Nasr’s traditional Islam has an esoteric and exoteric, an inner and an outer dimension. The inner dimension of Sufism is a type of neo-platonic, mystical, gnostic or theosophical philosophy,
5 Aslan, Adnan, Religious Pluralism in Christian and Islamic Philosophy, The Thought of John Hick and Seyyed
Hossein Nasr, Richmond: Curzon Press, 1998. Widiyanto, Seyyed Hossein Nasr on Science and the Reception of his Ideas in Indonesia, MA thesis Leiden University, 2005. Sedgwick, M, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth century, New York: Oxford University Press,
2004.
6 Taylor, B. (eds), Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, 2 volumes, New York: Continuum, 2005, 2008. Entries:
which can probably best be understood as a ‘non-western’ manifestation of ‘western esotericism’. The outer dimension is orthodox in practice, entailing adherence to classical shari’ite injunctions on the levels of ritual (ibadat) as well as social practice (mu’amalat) and is firmly rooted in the Quran and Hadith. Yet, in contrast to fundamentalists, Nasr includes the fruits of fourteen hundred years of Islamic culture, of philosophy, arts, poetry, architecture and urban planning in his concept of Islam. This forms the basis for Nasr’s Islamic environmental ethics. Although his own views are general in scope and leave many questions as to its practical translation unanswered, these point towards the newly emerging disciplines of Islamic environmental law, Islamic economics and Islamic reformist political theories. In fact, these fields may be seen as the most direct, practical applications of Nasr’s Islamic worldview, as concrete ‘translations of metaphysical cosmology into practice’.
This strong direct connection between worldview and practice may in fact be one of the most interesting aspects of the Islamic discourse about the environment. Islam, in Nasr’s view, and many share it with him, provides a comprehensive world view, but also provides the ‘tools’ to translate cosmology into practice or as Nasr would put it: connect the Heavens to the Earth. These tools helping us to formulate the ethical norms which can be applied to environmental issues are essentially derived from the classical schools of sharia (madhab). Of course, with this, we enter a highly politicized landscape with widely varying and competing views about the application of sharia in the contemporary context. In this thesis, an attempt will be made to contextualise Nasr’s views within the wide spectrum of contemporary Islamic ‘ideologies’. This thesis will also explore the RECEPTION of Nasr’s ecological message. Nasr has lectured about
the environmental crisis to widely diverse audiences, varying from the United Nations, the
World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the World Economic Forum7, to Traditionalists,
eco-theologians, academic scholars and philosophers of religion, Muslim student associations, Islamized science circles, ‘regular’ Western mainstream environmental scientists, environmentalists and environmental policy administrators to ‘sacred’ or ‘deep ecologists’ and the mainstream public.
Each of these circles is worth exploring in more detail. Of particular interest, is Nasr’s apparent affinity with, but also criticism of contemporary forms of spirituality or religiosity, sometimes
7 UNESCO programmes such as the Dialogue of Civilizations, Alliance of Civilisations, Global Ethics and
others. Also: see Nasr’s World Bank lecture in the context of ‘Development and Muslim Societies’ series: Discussion about the heart of Islam: http://info.worldbank.org/etools/BSPAN/PresentationView.asp? PID=697&EID=360;
labelled as ‘new age’ and often closely tied up with ecological discourse. A 2004 lecture delivered at a conference on Climate Change in San Rossore, Italy8 is telling in this respect. It
was said to have been attended by an impressive number of high ranking climate officials, activists and opinion leaders from the leading institutions on climate change9. The now famous
climate change advocate, Al Gore, and the eco-activists Vandana Shiva and Edward Goldsmith were amongst its most prominent environmentalist speakers. Nasr was scheduled in a panel with an Inuit Elder speaking about ‘traditional Inuit teachings’, a Japanese Buddhist promoting spiritually inspired traditional farming and Carlo Petrini, the founder of the Slow Food Movement, three representatives of what could be referred to as contemporary ‘spiritual’ movements. Evidently, the conference programmers considered Nasr to be an exponent of ‘spirituality’, as well.
Indeed, we will see, Nasr’s thought, especially its perennial and inner mystical interpretation of Islam, has a close affinity to some contemporary forms of ‘spirituality’. This is interesting because it connects his thought to significant cultural changes in the West that have taken place since the sixties and that have been described eminently by the sociologist Colin Campbell in his Easternization of the West (2007). Nasr’s thought has developed within this cultural context and it can be argued that Nasr is a product and perhaps also a contributor to the Easternization of Western (environmentalist) thought. We will also see how ‘new age’ thought can be related to ‘western esoteric’ currents, providing us with a framework to understand this affinity of thought.
However, there are also important differences to consider. On the level of practice, Nasr is proposing an ‘orthodoxy’ or ‘ortho-praxis’ that is unlikely to appeal to Western spiritual sensibilities.
Nasr’s work about the environmental crisis touches on a number of distinct, but interrelated debates and discourses, carried out within various groups and movements. Some of these are
8 According to the publicly available information: ‘San Rossore – a New Global Vision’ is an annual meeting
convened by the Regional Government of Tuscany which is set up to “bring together institutional leaders at the local and regional levels, leaders of creative citizens movements, and leading personalities in the political, social, academic, philosophical, religious, literary and communications fields from Italy and other countries of the world. These leaders meet at San Rossore to exchange views and to forge alternative paths for building a more just and equitable world”. See: ‘San Rossore – a New Global Vision’ Background Note at:
http://www.primapagina.regione.toscana.it/indew.php?codice=6234
The list of attendants was drawn from the Draft Programme. Whether this ambitious programme was actually realized in this form, could not be verified.
9 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the World Bank, the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP), the European Commission and various research institutes from Italy, Germany, USA, the United Kingdom and Ghana.
confined to Muslim circles (in the West and the Muslim world), such as the discourse about Islamized science, others are secular or perhaps ‘spiritual’, such as the sacred and deep ecology movements and are mainly confined to the West. On closer analysis seemingly regionally or ideologically unrelated discourses turn out to have important points of overlap, sharing common ground or affinity of thought. The affinity of thought between Islamic mysticism and new age spirituality was already mentioned, but other interesting hybrids are emerging in contemporary debates. For instance, certain islamist reformists with a socio-political eco-activist agenda favouring the re-establishment of the caliphate, an Islamized monetary and economic system, and a radical reform of society in line with the ‘sharia’, connect Islamist concepts to radical environmentalist concepts such as ‘bioregionalism’ or ‘ecological economy’. Western environmentalists advocating small-scale indigenous technologies, eco-communities, organic farming or ‘ecological economy’ receive a warm response within certain Islamic environmentalist circles, who garb these concepts in distinctly Islamic terms. Intriguing fusions of Islamist and environmentalist thought are emerging nowadays10.
Part of the aim of this thesis is therefore also to explore this common ground. Nasr’s ecological work and its reception may be one of the pivots connecting ‘parallel discourses’. This is in my view also the significance of analysing his thought and the reception of his thought.
The Netherlands
Although Nasr’s more popular work about Islam is available in the Dutch bookstores, he is not widely known, especially not by non-Muslim audiences. Nasr was invited to lecture about Islamic views of nature at the exhibition Religion, Nature, Arts in Amsterdam in October 200511. In the presence of the Dutch Queen, Nasr spoke about the ‘sacred’ in nature, the need to
be susceptible to the beauty and truth expressed by nature and the value of religion and tradition in maintaining a healthy balance with nature. The exhibition resulted in the beautifully illustrated Spiegel van de Natuur (Mirror of Nature) edited by the Dutch scholar of Buddhism Matthijs G.C. Schouten12 and was financed by Staatsbosbeheer. Two years later, in December
2007, the editor of the environmentalist Friends of the Earth- magazine referred to Nasr in her
10 Other researchers have also noted similarities in the agenda’s and ideologies of certain Islamist and
antiglobalist movements. See: Devji, F., Landscapes of the Jihad: Militancy, Morality and Modernity, series Crises in World Politics, Hurst, 2005. According to the outline ‘features of militant Islam are compared with global movements such as environmentalists and anti-globalists’.
11 Exhibition ‘Wereld Natuur Kunst’ in the Nieuwe Kerk (fall 2005). A film was made by ‘Boeddhistische
Omroep Stichting’ (Buddhist Broadcasting): http://www.buddhistmedia.com/uitzending.aspx? lIntEntityId=150&lIntType=0
12 Schouten, M.G.C. Spiegel van de Natuur: het natuurbeeld in cultuurhistorisch perspectief, KNNV Uitgeverij/
opening commentary to a special feature on ‘Religion and Spirituality’. Reflecting on the question how religion affects the human attitude towards the earth, she mentioned Nasr who ‘considers the ecological crisis, as a crisis of values’13. Although she admitted not to have read
any of his work, she had come across his name a number of times searching for Muslim responses to the environmental crisis, she had become curious about his views. In my view, this is suggesting an emerging interest and openness to Islamic views in general and to perhaps also to Nasr’s message in particular.
1.2 Research questions
The aim of this BA thesis is twofold:
(1) IDEAS: systematically analyse, as well as contextualise Nasr’s eco-philosophy.
(2) RECEPTION: investigate the reception of Nasr’s eco-philosophy, identify some of the
groups or people who are inspired by his ideas, and analyse to what aspects of Nasr’s work these are attracted.
The first aim is of a more philosophical nature, the second is more sociological.
This turned out to be an ambitious project, extending beyond the formal requirements of a ‘BA thesis’. The intention is to rework and extend this thesis into a master or even PhD thesis in due time.
As concern the analysis of Nasr’s ideas the main guiding question is: how do religious metaphysics translate into practice? Why and how would a ‘traditional paradigm’ provide a solution to a wide range of practical problems such as energy shortage, pollution, global
warming, ozone layer depletion and nature conservation? What are the practical implications of the traditional paradigm when translated into the social, political and economic realms? Does this entail a return to an idealized past as critics are ready to assert or will new forms develop from ‘traditional’ principles? What new structures may we expect to develop? Also: What kind of Islam is Nasr promoting? How does it relate to other currents of Muslim thought? How does it relate to his Perennialist thought?
Charting the full landscape of the reception of Nasr’s work, soon proved to be impossible, not least because Nasr’s influence extends into India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Turkey and other countries of the Muslim world. Research was confined to the Western English-speaking world, which includes Malaysia.
13 Milieudefensie Magazine, December 2007. Email correspondence with the editor, Anne Marie Opmeer,
1.3 Significance
What is the significance of this study focussing on the thought of one man and his philosophy only? Some of its significance was already pointed out: Nasr’s serves as a focal piont, connecting various fields of discourse that are now often taking place in separate spheres, either regionally or ideologically.
I believe this topic to be significant for other, more general reasons as well, and this is summarized pointedly by political analyst Graham Fuller in his analysis of Political Islam:
Today many Westerners are themselves uncomfortable with some of the directions that Western society is taking that they view as unhealthy. Many wonder how Western society can weather the challenges of the post-modern era with its massive atomization of society, release of untrammelled individualism, lessening sense of community and social obligation, broadening diversification, if not chaos, among competing ideas, values interests and interrelationships, widening income gaps, and domination of the marketplace as the most powerful force upon society. Movements abound that search for correctives to glaring social afflictions.
In this sense no-one can be sure whether or not some kind of convergence could eventually develop between the modern Western world and religious traditions, including Islam over shared issues of concern for the moral foundations of a healthy society.
I am not speaking about an alliance between Muslim and Christian fundamentalists but a broader shared vision of the common moral problems and dilemma’s faced by all societies14.
Environmental issues are vivid examples of ‘shared issues of concern’ which can function as focal points of ‘convergence’ between the secular and religious sectors of globalized societies. I share Fuller’s observation that many people in the West are critical about the dominant ‘Western’ culture. Western counter-cultures reaching back into the eighteenth and nineteenth century (and even further back) have voiced concerns about this culture for a long time, but have generally remained marginalized undercurrents. Often these counter-culture concerns are remarkably similar to the concerns voiced by many Muslims today. Both criticize materialism, reductionism, individualism, social and economic injustice, the financial market systems. The recent financial crisis has made the media more receptive to these critical voices speculating about the root causes of the crisis, proposing alternative perspectives and paradigms. Often the environmental crisis is presented as one of several interrelated crises: financial crisis, food crisis, energy crisis.
Nasr is one of these critical voices, articulately criticizing the dominant Western culture from an Islamic perspective without resorting to the kind of ‘West bashing’ that is very much in vogue in many Muslim quarters today. He formulates his critique from an insider perspective, having
lived and worked in the West most of his life and having studied Western thought and culture in-depth. He is a fervent critic of the ‘secular’ neglect of religious values and ethics in global debates. His voice - as we will see - is picked up by some environmentalists, but is hardly heard by Western environmental ethicists. In fact, environmental ethics has largely been a secular affair, religious or metaphysically legitimated ethics are not popular at all among mainstream ethicists15. A recent conference organized by the Green-Left party in the Netherlands discussed
the role of ‘ethics’ in the climate change debate, but refused to discuss role of religious ethics, which was simply discarded on grounds of being ‘metaphysics’. Strong pleas for a reappraisal of religion in this domain can be heard occasionally, but hardly seem to find a significant follow-up. A 2006 UNESCO publication on Environmental Ethics and International Policy, for example, stresses the significance of religious environmental ethics in the introduction, but does not work any of it out in its volume16.
Whatever the philosophical underpinnings of a particular ethical perspective, I am convinced that religious environmental ethics deserve a wider platform. The main argument is pragmatic: the largest part of the world’s population live, work and think from a distinctly religious framework. Religions, as ‘worldviews’ and ‘value systems’ guide human behaviour and form powerful driving forces, both in individual lives as in societies and cultures. These views cannot be disregarded. Considering the global scope and urgency of environmental issues, it can be expected that increasing numbers of Muslims will reflect on these issues from an Islamic perspective in the years to come.
Religious values do not necessarily conflict with secular value systems, although many in the West fear they will. Many Islamic movements today ‘seek to identify common values with other faiths… religious belief stated in universal terms for people that don’t use specifically Muslim cultural vehicles’. Fuller points out that this ‘value-centred approach’ is less threatening to outsiders than an approach based on dogma or ritual. Many Muslim communities and mosques in America today are [..] reaching out to non-Muslim members of the community to find
common answers to common problems’17.
15 Marcel Düwell (research director of the Ethics institute of Utrecht University. Conference: Ethics and Politics
of Climate Change, Challenges for Individual Rights? 23 and 24 January 2009, Utrecht.
http://www.ethicsandpoliticsofclimatechange.nl/
16 This report signals the following trend: ‘Numerous efforts have been made to recognize and understand the
resources that different cultural traditions (such as Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Confucianism and Taoism) have to offer environmental ethics’. But the authors leave it with the observation that ‘the construction of an environmental ethics with a global and multicultural perspective is under way’, and do not substantially refer to religion in the pages that follow’. In: Environmental Ethics and International Policy (2006), p.27.
Nasr eco-philosophy embodies such a ‘value-centred approach’ searching for solutions to ‘common’ problems that are shared by the world’s communities, in this instance the environmental crisis. Whether he manages to bridge the contemporary Muslim and secular environmental discourses will be evaluated in the conclusion.
1.4 Academic context
This thesis is written from the perspective of a relatively young academic field, the subfield religion and ecology, which was already mentioned before. This has partly grown out of the older discipline of theology of nature or eco-theology. A major impetus behind the development of this subfield was the conference series on ‘Religion and Ecology’ that was organized by the Harvard Divinity School’s Center for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) from May 1996 to July 1998. This project aimed to explore ‘the diverse manner in which religious traditions view nature and construct symbol systems and ritual practices relating humans to nature18’. It resulted
in the World Religions and Ecology-series on Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, Indigenous and Shinto. Nasr contributed to the 1998 conference about Islamic or Muslim perspectives of the ecological issues. Present research is published in the journal Worldviews: Global Religions, Culture, and Ecology and an active forum: The Forum on Religion and Ecology. The conference coordinators, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim of Yale University, are still very active advocates of this academic field.
Another offshoot of the Harvard project is the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture (ISSRNC), which was established in 2005. It has a more scholarly and less ‘activist’ approach than the Forum on Religion and Ecology19. It grew out of the seven year
project orchestrated by Bron Taylor20 on The Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature that
‘critically explores the relationships among human beings, their environments, and the religious dimensions of life’21.
1.5 Method
The research underlying this thesis was carried out in two phases, mirroring the twofold aim of concentrating on (1) the content and context of Nasr’s eco-philosophy, and (2) its reception. The analysis of Nasr’s eco-philosophy is mainly based on Nasr’s own work (literary desk research). A bibliography of his environmental work was drawn up using publications about
18 Forum on Religion and Ecology: http://fore.research.yale.edu/
19 Personal communication with the President elect of ISSRNC, the Dutch historian Kocku von Stuckrad,
University of Amsterdam, 1 September 2008.
20 Director of ISSRNC.
Nasr22, the catalogues of library at Leiden University, cross-references in the literature and the
internet. The subject was approached from the outside inward, first reading Nasr’s articles or lectures intended for an audience with no previous knowledge of his work and then - like a photographer slowly zooming in on his subject - reading deeper into the subject guided by the questions arising on the way. The San Rossore lecture proved to be a helpful starting point. It was intended for a non-Muslim, secular environmentalist audience, reflecting my own professional background as an environmental policy researcher. I first limited myself to Nasr’s environmental work, but soon moved on to read some of his other work to get a better view of his understanding of religion and Islam. I was also fortunate to be able to question Nasr himself during a half hour interview23.
The theoretical framework, categories and concepts of ‘Western Esotericism’ were used to analyse Nasr’s philosophy.
The second part of my research concentrated on the reception of Nasr’s philosophy. This proved to be a laborious task.Theanalysis of the ‘networks’, the groups and people, associated with or inspired by Nasr is probably best described as network analysis. This analysis was based on a search for literature about Nasr and an intensive internet search. The internet is a particularly helpful tool for this type of analysis, exposing previously unexpected connections between groups and people. Another source of information was an email correspondence with some of the leading scholars of the various fields: Richard Foltz (Muslim environmentalism), Marcia Hermansen (Western Sufism), William Stoddard (‘insider’ to the Traditionalist school), Mark Sedgwick (about the traditionalist school) and David Catherine (eco-Traditionalist), all of whom were very helpful. Sedgwick invited me to add a request for information on his Traditionalist blog24. This did not trigger much response, although eventually I was contacted
by David Catherine, a Muslim Sufi ‘eco-traditionalist who draws his inspiration from Nasr’s work and fuses Islamic mystical concepts with eco-spirituality.
Again the theoretical framework of ‘western esotercism’ was used to understand a particular overlap, commonalities between the various audiences.
22 Bibliography of Hahn, L.E., Auxier, R.E., Stone., L.W jr (eds), The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The
Library of Living Philosophers, Volume XXVII, Chicago and La Salle: Open Court Publishing Company, 2001.
23 Interview with Seyyed Hossein Nasr on 31 October 2008.
24 Sedgwick’s weblog Traditionalist.org: http://www1.aucegypt.edu/faculty/sedgwick/Trad/index.htm. See:
‘Seyyed Hossein Nasr and the Environment: “Ecoside is suicide”’, entry Friday, September 12, 2008,
1.6 Structure
The structure of this thesis is as follows:
The first Chapters are dedicated to Nasr’s eco-philosophy, his ecological message. It starts with a short biography in Chapter 2 introducing the protagonist of this thesis and then moves on to the content of his message in Chapter 3. What does he have in mind when discussing the environmental crisis? What causes it and what alternative is he proposing?
Chapter 4 and 5 are then dedicated to the context of Nasr’s environmental thought, leading us first into the colourful world of Traditionalism, Perennial Philosophy and (Western) Esotericism (Chapter 4) and then to Traditional Islam and Sufism (Chapter 5). This Chapter concludes with evaluation of Nasr’s thought within the wider spectrum of ‘types of Islam’: what kind of ‘Islam’ is actually Nasr representing?
Chapter 6 is dedicated to the reception of Nasr’s environmentalist thought. Various ‘circles of influence’ or audiences are identified and discussed. The section about the Traditionalists is worked out most extensively, because Nasr can be shown to hold a prominent position within the American Traditionalist groups. Other circles are Western environmentalist movements, Islamic environmentalists, Islamic science groups and Western Sufi-groups.
On reaching a conclusion in the last Chapter 7, we will have encountered Persian Islamic mysticism, Schuonian Traditionalism, a peculiar brand of Westernized Sufism, Perennial Philosophy and Western Esotericism, ‘Islamized’ science, Prince Charles, E. F Schumacher of the influential Small is beautiful and one of the icons of the Western environmental movement, Muslim activists with distinctly Islamist agendas, an Islamic Deep Ecology, spiritual eco-activists and politicized Sufism.
2 Seyyed Hossein Nasr
2.1 The Scholar of Islam, Philosopher
Who is Seyyed Hossein Nasr? On the back covers of most of his books, in articles or at conference lectures, Nasr is introduced to us as a ‘scholar’, a professor of Islamic Studies and/ or comparative religion, an expert on Islamic science and spirituality. It takes more detailed biographical information to be found in other sources to build up a completer profile25. We will then find him to have several roles, some public, some more private: as a scholar, philosopher, theologian, a practicing Sufi mystic and teacher, ‘Traditionalist’, an advocate of ‘Islamized science’, a participant of interfaith dialogue and the global ethics debates or as an advocate of an ‘alternative’ Islam. More of this will be addressed later on.
Nasr was born in Iran in 1933. He received his academic training in the United States, graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology with an undergraduate degree in Physics and Mathematics. He went on to Harvard University where he studied Geology and
Geophysics, and then completed a PhD in the History of Science and Philosophy26. After
graduating, Nasr moved back to Iran. He was appointed professor of philosophy at Tehran University, specializing on Iranian esoteric philosophers and continued his education within the ‘traditional educational system’ with a number of masters (Assar, Tabatab’i and Qazwini). In 1973, Nasr founded the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy under the patronage of the Queen of Iran. This was intended as a school for the study and dissemination of the traditional sciences, especially Islamic philosophy and attracted distinguished scholars in the field, both from the East and the West, such as Henry Corbin and Toshihiko Izutsu. Having to leave Iran after the revolution in 1979, Nasr moved back to the United States. Since 1984, he has held a position as a professor of Comparative Religion and Islamic studies at the George Washington University.
Nasr has written more than fifty books, hundreds of articles and lectured on topics varying from ‘traditional’ Islamic cosmology, metaphysics, science, philosophy, theology, Sufism, Persian
25 Biographical information may be drawn from: the website of the Nasr Foundation:
http://www.nasrfoundation.org/default.html; Chittick, W.C. (eds) The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Perennial Philosophy series, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2007; Sedgwick, M. Against the Modern World, 2004 and the ‘Autobiography’ in: The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 2001.
26 Website George Washington University, Department of Religion,
mysticism, Islamic art and architecture to religious pluralism and modernity. He contributed to and edited several anthologies or encyclopaedias, such as Islamic Spirituality (1991)27, which is
part of a series on World Spirituality, History of Islamic Philosophy (1996)28, An Anthology
Philosophy in Persia (1999, 2000)29, and The Heritage of Sufism (1999)30.
Apart from his academic work, quite a few of his publications are intended for a general public, introducing Islam or discussing its relation to modernity, such as Traditional Islam in the Modern World (1985), Islam and the Plight of Modern Man (1975) and A Young Muslim Guide to the Modern World (1998). Many of these were translated into languages as varied as Indonesian, Japanese, Bosnian-Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Polish, Tamil, French, Dutch and others (a total of twenty-two languages). His latest books, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity (2004) and The Garden of Truth: The Vision and Promise of Sufism, Islam’s Mystical Tradition (2007) are particularly dedicated to presenting a more positive image of Islam and Sufism to non-Muslim audiences.
Although Islam is central to Nasr’s work, his perspective is also distinctly comparative or as we shall see ‘perennial’, addressing and comparing the other major ‘traditions’ or philosophical or metaphysical systems. ‘Tradition’, we are soon to find out, is one of the key concepts characterizing his work. Nasr is said to be an exponent of the ‘Traditionalist school’. His perennial or Traditionalist philosophy permeates all his work, but is most clearly laid out in what Nasr considers his most important philosophical work: Knowledge and the Sacred (1989)31. It is based on a series of lectures, the prestigious Gifford Lectures at the University of
Edinburgh32 delivered in 1981. This marked a crucial moment in his career. Having just left Iran
and uncertain about his future, he remembers how ‘the actual writing of the text of the lectures …came as a gift from Heaven. The text would be able to “descend” upon me and crystallize clearly in my mind I was able to write each Chapter in a continuous flow like a running
27 Nasr, S.H., (ed.) The Encyclopaedia of Islamic Spirituality, Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2000.
28 Nasr., S.H. Leaman, O. (eds.), History of Islamic Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, 2007
of the Routledge History of World philosophies.
29 Nasr, S.H., Amanirazavi, M. (eds) An Anthology of Philosophy of Persia, Lahore: Suhail Academy, 2005. 30 Lewisohn, L. (ed.), The Heritage of Sufism, Oxford: Oneworld, 1999.
31 Nasr, S.H., Knowledge and the Sacred, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989.
32 The purpose of prestigious Gifford is ‘to promote and diffuse the study of Natural Theology in the widest
sense of the term - in other words, the knowledge of God.’ …’Since the first lecture in 1888, Gifford Lecturers have been recognized as pre-eminent thinkers in their respective fields. Among the many gifted lecturers are Hannah Arendt, Niels Bohr, Etienne Gilson, Werner Heisenberg, William James, Max Mueller, Iris Murdoch, Reinhold Niebuhr, Albert Schweitzer and Alfred North Whitehead’.
river….33 Soon after, Nasr was able to continue his academic career at George Washington
University, dedicating himself:
to the various dimensions of traditional metaphysics, the other sciences of nature and cosmologies than modern science;
to discover ways of studying the history of science other than the prevalent method based upon positivism (drawing here from the many works of Pierre Duhem) and to create especially what I hold to be authentic methodology to study both Islamic science and Islamic philosophy from within;
to resuscitate the whole of the Islamic intellectual tradition including Sufism, philosophy, arts and the sciences within the contemporary setting; to pursue the study of Western philosophy from the point of view of the Islamic intellectual tradition;
to deal intellectually and philosophically in the deepest sense of the term with the tensions between east and West and tradition and modernity34.
Apart from recognition as a specialist about Islamic philosophy, Nasr also finds recognition as a philosopher. Majid Fahkry, a widely respected scholar on Islamic philosophy refers to Nasr as ‘the best known contemporary Iranian philosopher … who has written extensively on Islamic cosmology, mysticism and metaphysics and is widely respected in academic circles35’. In 2000,
The Library of Living Philosophers series – also listing names such as Dewey, Sartre, Buber and Popper - featured a volume on The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr.
It was already noted in the introduction that Nasr is very active in the sphere of interfaith and intercultural dialogue.36 This public role is essential if we wish to understand the significance of
Nasr and his work in our times and will be touched upon later in this thesis.
2.2 The Environmentalist
A lifelong interest in the environmental crisis is added to the many scholarly interests outlined above. In his own words: this is one of his ‘other major philosophical preoccupations’. Nasr’s doctoral thesis (1958) was dedicated to traditional philosophies of nature and cosmologies. This was published years later as An Introduction to Islamic Cosmological Doctrines (1993). Religion and the Order of Nature (1996)37 is Nasr’s most recent book about the environmental
crisis. It crowns, in his own words, the ‘series of works written on the subject of the relation between religion or ‘the sacred’ and science and nature38’. He had been writing consistently
33 ‘Autobiography’ in: The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 2001, p77-78. 34 ‘Autobiography’ in: The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 2001, p27-28. 35 Fakhry, M, A History of Islamic Philosophy, p322.
36 During the nineties various UNESCO programmes were involved with dialogue: Dialogue of Civilizations,
Alliance of Civilisations, Global Ethics and others.
37 Nasr, S.H. Religion and the Order of Nature, New York Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 38 ‘Reply to A.K. Saran’, in: The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 2001, p441.
about this topic since end of the sixties39. In 1966, his Rockefeller Series Lectures were
published as The Encounter of Man and Nature (1968)40 and reprinted later as: Man and
Nature: the Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (1987)41. These works are general and comparative
in scope, focussing on various religions. The Islamic perspective is also worked out in it, but also in several other publications: in Sufi Essays (1972) focussing on the Sufi perspective on the ecological crisis, Knowledge and the Sacred (1989)42 and its sequel The Need for a Sacred
Science (1993)43. The latter contains a Chapter on the Islamic perspective and was later
reworked as a contribution to Harvard Divinity School series on Religion and Ecology mentioned in the introduction: Islam and Ecology: a Bestowed Trust (2003)44.
To this day, Nasr is frequently invited to lecture about the subject. In 2004, for example he was asked to address an audience of ‘deep ecologists’ and ‘eco-spirituals’ at the ‘Nature and the Sacred: A Fierce Green Fire’ conference at Oregon University45. In that same year, he addressed
the ‘environmental sector’ at the San Rossore conference already mentioned in the introduction. Of more recent date, we can mention a conversation about the environmental crisis between Nasr and Muzaffar Iqbal intended for specifically Muslim audiences. Iqbal is an active proponent of Islamized science, as we will see later on.46 Nasr can be found addressing many
other audiences, as well47.
It is important to note that Nasr was amongst the first league of people in the West to draw attention to the environmental crisis. Rachel Carson’s influential Silent Spring (1962), which is generally recognized as the first book to really bring environmental issues to the forefront of public attention had only recently been published, when Nasr published his first book on the
39 A bibliography of (part of) these article and lectures is included as an appendix. This was collected from
various sources: Bibliography The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr (till 1999), the internet, references in other publications, etc..
40 Nasr, S.H. The Encounter of Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man, London: Allan and Unwin,
1968. Reprinted as Man and Nature (1987).
41 Nasr, S.H., Man and Nature: the Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man, London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1987, new
edition: London: Unwin and Hyman and Harper-Collins, 1990, Chicago: ABC International Group, 1997.
42 Chapter 6: ‘Cosmos as Theophany’ in: Nasr, S.H., Knowledge and the Sacred, Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1989.
43 Chapter 9 ‘Sacred Science and the Environmental Crisis: An Islamic Perspective’. In: Nasr, S.H., The Need
for a Sacred Science, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
44 Nasr, S.H., ‘Islam, the Contemporary Islamic World, and the Environmental Crisis’ in: Foltz, R.C. Denny, F.
Baharuddin, A. (eds), Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2003.
45 Conference on Nature and the Sacred ‘A Fierce Green Fire’, October 2004 http://springcreek.oregonstate.edu/
nature_sacred/index.html.
46 ‘The Islamic perspective on the environmental crisis: Seyyed Hossein Nasr in conversation with Muzaffar
Iqbal’. Accessed at www.thefreelibrary.com (october 2008).
47 Public lecture ‘Faith and the Environment’ 17 May 2008, Revival Series:
http://www.revivingtheislamicspirit.com/ . This related to Hamza Yusuf, an American convert to Islam, who is also active in the Common Word initiative.
subject. Silent Spring confirmed his ‘intuition of an impending disaster’ and inspired him to ‘seek the causes of this situation’ realizing, while in his early twenties, that ‘the environmental crisis was in fact the result of a spiritual crisis within the soul of modern man and not simply a result of bad engineering’48. He first came to realize that something was wrong in the fifties,
when he witnessed the destruction of large pristine forest areas.
My own concern with issues of the environmental crisis goes back to the early 1950s and my student days at M.I.T. and Harvard University. Always sensitive to the beauty of nature, I used to walk alone, like Thoreau, around Walden Pond when the natural scenery of the area was still well preserved. It was the construction of Route 128 around Boston and the consequent separation, ecologically speaking, of the area inside the beltway from the relatively unhindered countryside beyond that brought home to me the fact that something was basically wrong in our relationship to nature. …I was led to foresee a major environmental crisis, whose real causes were spiritual, looming on the horizon. I saw the blind development of modern industry as a cancer in the body of nature…which would finally lead to the destruction of the harmony and balance of the natural world and of its ‘death’ in the form that we knew it49.
From my childhood years …. I had a special love for nature in her many forms, from mountain peaks, which have always exercised a magical power on me, to the vast starry nights of the Iranian plateau where heaven seems to descend to the earthly realm, to flowers, trees and animals, to running streams, placid lakes, sandy beaches and even rocks and earth. The immediate experience of virgin nature, not spoiled by human intrusion, has always been for me a foretaste of paradisal beatitude50.
This experience of the close connection existing between ‘nature’ and ‘paradise’ is at the core of his environmental thought. It made him conclude that:
The environmental crisis is primarily a result of an inner spiritual crisis of modern man and the darkening of the soul within man who then projects this darkness upon the environment and destroys its balance and harmony51.
What Nasr means with this, I will attempt to clarify in the next chapters.
48 ‘Reply to Giovanni Monastra’, in: The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 2001, p.516 49 Foltz, R.C (eds), Islam and Ecology: A Bestowed Trust, 2003. p.85-86.
50 ‘An Intellectual Autobiography’ in: Hahn, L.E. (eds), The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 2001, p28. 51 ‘Reply to Giovanni Monastra’, in: The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, 2001, p.516
3 Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man
3.1 Introduction
The Earth is bleeding from wounds inflicted upon it by a humanity no longer in harmony with Heaven and therefore in constant strife with the terrestrial environment. The world of nature is being desecrated and destroyed in an unprecedented manner globally by both those who secularized the world about them and developed a science and technology capable of destroying nature on an unimaginable scale and by those who still live within a religious universe, even if the mode of destruction of the order of nature by the two groups is both quantitatively and qualitatively different.
…
The environmental crisis now encompasses the entire Earth. Strangely enough, although the destruction of the sacred quality of nature by modern man dominated by a secularist perspective is entirely responsible for this catastrophe, the vast majority of the human species … still lives within a worldview dominated by religion. The role of religion in the solution of the existing crisis between man and nature is therefore crucial
…
A need exists to develop a path across religious frontiers without destroying the significance of religion itself and to carry out a comparative study of the “Earths” of various religions…. 52.
The opening paragraph of Religion and the Order of Nature (1996) is cited here at some length, because it characterizes Nasr’s eco-philosophy or ‘ecological message’ so well. It contains all the elements that mark his argument: an almost compassionate sense of urgency about the severity of the environmental crisis (the earth is ‘bleeding’); the lack of ‘harmony with Heaven’ as the true nature of the crisis; science and technology developed by a secularized humanity as the main causes and also, the crucial role of religion as a solution to the crisis i.e. traditional knowledge about nature, comparative study of the earths’. ‘Secular modernity’ is contrasted to ‘traditional religious cosmology and metaphysics’ as the cause and solution to the crisis respectively.
In this Chapter we will analyse Nasr’s ‘ecological message’. What exactly is his message? What is the line of his argumentation? What are in his view, the ‘real’ root causes behind the environmental crisis? What alternatives does he have in mind? What kind of solutions does he propose? What role does ‘religion’ have to play? What is his agenda?
This part is based on Nasr’s general (or Perennialist) ‘environmental’ message intended for Muslim and non-Muslim audiences. The San Rossore lecture is taken as the starting point and blueprint for the analysis; it outlines the main arguments53. This is complemented with
references to his other work.
His argumentation contains five distinct parts: (1) an assessment of the reality and urgency of the environmental crisis, (2) a critique of modernity, (3) a suggested route towards a solution: a transformation of our world view, (4) the alternative ‘traditional’ worldview and (5) the means to achieve such a transformation or paradigm change.
3.2 Environmental Crisis
For Nasr the ‘environmental crisis’ includes the whole range of problems that are generally categorized under the ‘environment’: the extinction of species, pollution of the oceans, soil, water resources, global warming or climate change, destruction of forests and coral reefs etc. The reality and urgency of these problems is evident to Nasr.
The consequence of the environmental crisis can now be observed everywhere for those who have eyes to see, and it becomes ever more difficult, even for the ideologues of linear human progress and indefinite economic development and the few scientists that they can muster to support them, to neglect the great threat facing humanity as a result of what modern man has done and continues to do to the natural environment54.
We have created a civilization that is in such a state of disequilibrium with the natural environment that if one takes the longer view one can assert that this civilization is itself the greatest weapon of mass destruction. Ecocide is also suicide.55
In his view, these are all symptoms of one and the same phenomenon: the destruction of the balance and harmony of the natural world. The ‘environmental crisis’ is essentially a crisis in the relation between human beings and nature. ‘Crisis’, he explained in one of his interviews, refers to a ‘state that is not normal, that is dangerous and in disequilibrium56’. With
‘environment’ Nasr means ‘nature’ or ‘virgin nature’ which he defines as ‘all that is not made by human beings nor affected by human activities’57. This includes the ‘inner environment’ of
our bodies, which is also threatened by the pollution entering our food chain. There need be no mistake, as far as Nasr is concerned: humanity as whole has taken a suicidal turn. If we destroy
53 The San Rossore Lecture was printed as ‘Man and Nature: Quest for a Renewed Understanding’ in: Sophia,
The Journal of Traditional Studies, vol. 10, number 2, winter 2004, p5-14.
54 San Rossore lecture, in: Sophia, 2004, p5-6. 55 Sophia, 2004, p12.
56 ‘The Islamic perspective on the environmental crisis: Seyyed Hossein Nasr in conversation with Muzaffar
Iqbal’. Accessed at www.thefreelibrary.com (october 2008).
57 Interview with Nasr by Spanish journal Agenda Viva, October 2006, printed as ‘Traditional Man, Modern Man
nature, the very foundation of our existence, we will ultimately destroy ourselves: ‘Ecoside is suicide58’. This is a view that in due time, Nasr has come to share with many of our
contemporaries, Al Gore with his Inconvenient Truth being the most recent to receive a global audience.
Radical action, directed at the root causes of the crisis is necessary, if we want to avert catastrophe. The initiatives and environmental action that have been taken by individuals, governments and various institutions in the past few decades, such as ‘better environmental engineering, creation of environmental ethics, conservation practices and the like are all laudable and important’. However, these initiatives will only slow down the destructive trends, Nasr warns us. ‘There is no external task in this world before any government, social group or individual more important and urgent than the protection of the earth which is our home and the home of all terrestrial creatures. But all the efforts can only at best give humanity more time – before a major catastrophe strikes’59.
To wake up from that dream of forgetfulness that we associate with ordinary life and to break away from that paradigm that has precipitated the greatest natural crisis in human history. We are like sleepwalkers walking on the edge of a precipice. … We have raped nature with unprecedented ferocity during the past few centuries, thinking that nature is simply a passive entity with which we can do what we will. But that is no more than a Promethean dream that is now turning in a nightmare60.
To find a veritable solution to the problem at hand, one must look beyond today’s prevalent worldview and seek within the perennial wisdom of humanity for an understanding of what it means to be human61. …
Our worldview has to change, Nasr is suggesting. What is wrong with our worldview and how should it change?
3.3 Critique of Modernity
The root cause of the environmental crisis, in Nasr’s view, is the worldview that has come to dominate and form Western modern civilization: the ‘modern paradigm’. This has resulted in a ‘spiritual crisis of modern man’. Meticulously tracing the historical development of modern Western philosophical thought in several of his books, Nasr indicates how, gradually, the modern paradigm had come to replace the ‘traditional’ medieval Christian paradigm62. 58 Sophia, Volume 10, Number 2, 2004, p.14
59 Sophia 2004, p.14 60 Sophia 2004, p.14
61 Sophia 2004, p.8. The accent is mine.
62 The analysis of the historical developments building up to the contemporary dominant worldviews of
‘modernity’ takes up a significant part of Religion and the Order of Nature and Knowledge and the Sacred. Because I wish to focus on his argumentation as a whole I choose not to expand on this important aspect of his
Watershed moments marking this gradual transformation were the Renaissance Humanism, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Western man gradually came to think of himself, of nature and the divine realities in a manner that radically differed from the worldviews of pre-modern times and societies. Although Nasr acknowledges the enormous variety and diversity of thoughts, currents, cultures and movements that together make up ‘Western culture’, he points out that one particular paradigm – the modern ‘scientistic’ paradigm - became the main driving force behind the developments in the Western world in the past three to four centuries.
The modern worldview is secular, materialist, reductionist, positivist, rational and anthropocentric (or human centred). The ‘modern’ view of nature – nature as a great machine – fuelled the development of modern science. This enabled mankind to unravel some of the earth’s greatest mysteries, from DNA to quantum physics, resulting in the development of powerful technologies such as space-, military-, ICT technology and bio-engineering. Powerful societies emerged with strong political and financial institutions, high living standards (at least in the Western world) and laudable ethical guidelines protecting individual human rights. Nasr does not reject these fruits of Western civilisation; neither does he reject modern science and technology as such. What he does reject is the ‘scientistic’ claim to absolute knowledge. The worldview presented to us by modern science provides us with no more than a limited, particularistic view of reality.
‘Scientism’ is based on two fundamental errors: (1) a disregard of the deeper nature of man and (2) a disregard of the sacred reality of nature. This view is fundamentally flawed, and Nasr spent a large part of his life attempting to counter it. It is also at the heart of the ‘spiritual crisis’. With ‘spiritual crisis’ he means: the limited view of reality, a general disregard of the spiritual dimensions of reality. Two aspects of the modern paradigm are essentially problematic according to Nasr:
(1) the absolutization of the human state (anthropocentrism);
(2) the reductionist or limited materialistic view of reality and nature.
First, man came to see himself as the centre of the universe, as autonomous, as ‘Promethean Man’. The modern view only accepts constraints to human behaviour that are imposed by human kind on itself; it does not accept revealed or Divine Law. All laws and regulations are manmade, are seen as having developed out of concrete historical and social contexts and can
work. See: Chapter 3 ‘Philosophy and the Misdeed of Philosophy’ in Nasr, S.H. Religion and the Order of
Nature, Oxford University Press, New York Oxford, 1996. Also: Chapter 1 ‘Knowledge and its Desacralization’
therefore be altered over time. In Nasr’s view, man came to neglect his responsibilities towards and ultimately his dependency on the rest of creation.
Since the Renaissance and the seventeenth century, modern man came to envisage himself, as a purely terrestrial being without responsibility towards either God or creation. The sacred reality of nature was cast aside and nature came to be seen in purely quantitative and mechanical terms63.
Man increasingly neglected not only the rights of God, but also the rights of the rest of creation, while failing to emphasize human responsibilities. Man has come to see himself as master of his own destiny and of the world, but he had little concern for the innate rights of God’s creatures64.
In the modern secular worldview, there is no inherent or God-given reason why humans would take on responsibility for the earth’s creatures. Why should we care at all? This fundamental question is at the heart of all environmental ethics and it has been subject of intense debate amongst environmental ethicists for years. Various approaches - biocentric, ecocentric- were developed to answer this question. Nasr, we will see, will propose a God-centred or theocentric approach.
Second, by reducing nature to mere ‘quantity and mechanical relationships’, nature lost its inherent meaning or significance; nature has become to be a kind of ‘machine or quantity in motion, bereft of any qualities, not to speak of spiritual reality65’. The science developing out of
this materialistic worldview was based on ‘control and domination of nature’, ‘impervious to the spiritual dimension of nature, and which has in fact brought about the destruction of the
balance and harmony of the natural environment’66. Modern science also reduced the human
being – his human consciousness, psychic and even spiritual abilities to ‘material’ reality. In this view, a human is no more (and no less) than flesh and bones, a bundle of electric currents and neural synapses, hormones and DNA structure, a complex machine having evolved from matter into singular cells into apes and eventually humans.
The economic system as institutionalized greed
Now, why is this ‘scientistic’ worldview problematic and why should this cause the environmental crisis? The direct cause of the crisis is the present economic system, which in Nasr’s view is a ‘system of institutionalized greed’ manifesting itself in the ‘rampant consumerism’ we are witnessing everywhere today. The modern paradigm views human beings
63 Interview Agenda Viva, in Sophia, Vol 12, No2, 2006, p.29. 64Sophia, Volume 10, Number 2, 2004, p.7
65Sophia, Volume 10, Number 2, 2004, p.11 66 Sophia, Volume 10, Number 2, 2004, p.7
as ‘flesh and bones’ and as ‘economic animals’67, defined solely by material criteria, ‘material
needs’ and their drive for ‘acquisition of things’. From this view, an economic system evolved which in essence is fuelled by the ‘appeal to the passion of greed’.
This crisis is driven by the modern economic system appealing to the human passions, especially the passion of greed intensified by the creation of false needs, which are not really needs but wants. This is in opposition to the view which religions have espoused over the millennia, that is, the practice of the virtue of contentment, of being content with what one has. The modern outlook is based on fanning the fire of greed and covetousness, on trying to do everything possible to attach the soul more and more to the world and on making a vice out of what for religion has always been a virtue, that is to keep a certain distance and detachment from the world, in other words a certain amount of ascetism68.
Happiness became identified with the acquisition of things and ascetism came to be seen as “sin”. It is but one step away from the rampant consumerism which is creating never ending desires soon turned into needs for material goods, these desires having to be satisfied by the resources in a finite world69.
So, consumerism is the direct cause, but underlying this most visible cause is the root cause: a worldview that fundamentally disregards the spiritual realities. The modern economic system and the resulting environmental destruction are the outward manifestations of the modernist worldview or ‘scientism’. Since the Industrial revolution ‘the inner spiritual crisis became ever more projected outwardly’ as a crisis in nature70.
Nasr’s critique of modernity is very central to his thought, also colouring most of his other, non-environmental work. Nasr is said ‘to challenge the assumptions and values of the modern world and of the modern scientistic philosophy’. Yet, ‘not as a pure reaction against modernity, but as an informed engagement with modernity71’ Nasr shares this critical assessment of modern life
with many others. This type of criticism has been voiced in the West from the onset of the Industrial Revolution, first by the Romantic movements of the nineteenth century, to surface again a century later in the counterculture era of the seventies. We will see how Nasr draws his inspiration from Western environmentalism later. More recently, large parts of the environmental or anti-globalist movements of the nineties share similar views. Nasr also shares his modernist critique with many of the reformist, modernist and fundamentalist thinkers of the
67 Sophia, Volume 10, Number 2, 2004, p.7
68 Nasr, S.H. ‘Religion and the Environmental Crisis.’, in: Chittick, W.C. (eds) The Essential Seyyed Hossein
Nasr, The perennial Philosophy series, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2007. p.31-32.
69 Sophia, Volume 10, Number 2, 2004, p7
70 Interview Agenda Viva, in Sophia, Vol 12, No2, 2006, p29
Muslim world. This criticism is also an essential characteristic of the traditionalist outlook. This will be discussed in the next Chapters.
3.4 Traditional metaphysics
Considering the fundamental flaws of the prevalent modernistic worldview, it makes sense to call for a radical transformation of this paradigm. The modernist paradigm has left humanity with partial knowledge, a reductionist and ‘truncated’ vision of reality. What is needed now a new ‘greater vision’, new metaphysical and cosmological doctrines. Nasr passionately pleads for a critical re-examination of our collective worldview, of our understanding of what it means to be human, of what nature is, of man’s position within the ‘greater scheme of things’. ‘Paradoxically, this radical transformation requires, not a new discovery, but the rediscovery of our relation to nature, which’, according to Nasr, ‘has always been evident to a large extent in the life of traditional societies over the ages’72. Essential truths about the nature of reality were
once expressed in traditional systems of thought; the time has come to rediscover this ‘traditional wisdom’.
We need a sacred science, as well as religion, art, philosophy and mysticism, all in their traditional forms. We also need a new philosophy of nature which cannot be but the perennial philosophy of nature reformulated in contemporary terms.
In this task the non-Western religions, from the primal ones to Islam and historically speaking those within, can and must play a most important role. It is also essential that the Western spiritual tradition concerning nature be revived, whilst those of other traditions need to be reformulated before they too become forgotten as the Western tradition was forgotten73. …
Traditional paradigms are religious in essence and therefore, Nasr asserts, ‘religion’ has a very central role to play in solving the environmental crisis. Knowledge about the ‘truth’, of reality’ and also about nature had always been part of the great religions of the world, but this was forgotten by modern man. The real tragedy, according to Nasr, is that religion and therefore also knowledge of the truth was pushed out of modern society. What is left of ‘religion’ now has lost its vital connection with the inner perennial or millennial wisdom. So, what humanity needs is a renewed understanding of the perennial knowledge about nature, about the ‘Earth’. This knowledge is lying dormant within our ‘traditions’, our cultural heritages. We need to redevelop and discover this ‘sacred science of the order of nature’.
With the concept of ‘sacred science’ we have landed at the heart of Nasr’s philosophy. The term ‘sacred science’ refers to timeless and universal knowledge – or perennial wisdom - that is
72 Sophia., 2004, p..6. 73 Sophia, 2004, p.12.
