Editing Seyyed Hossein Nasr (section)

===Critique of modernism===

Nasr says that it was in the Renaissance in the West (14th–16th centuries) that the "modernist" or [[Reductionism|reductive]] vision of the human condition and the universe began to take shape,{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=182}} and spread to other continents during the past two centuries.{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=381}} This ideology is characterized by "the rejection of the theocentric view of reality",{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=209}} hence an absolutization of the human to the detriment of the Divine,{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=182}} but of a human denying his "pontifical nature"{{efn|Joseph E. B. Lumbard: "The sharp and uncompromising distinction that Nasr makes between tradition and modernity also entails a sharp contrast between modern man and traditional man, or what he refers to as pontifical man, who functions as a bridge between heaven and earth, and promethean man, who has rebelled against heaven. Regarding the former he writes: ‘‘Pontifical man, who, in the sense used here, is none other than traditional man, lives in a world which has both an Origin and a Center. He lives in full awareness of the Origin which contains his own perfection and whose primordial purity and wholeness he seeks to emulate, recapture, and transmit." ''Seyyed Hossein Nasr on Tradition and Modernity'', 2013, p.179.}}, therefore reduced "to his rational and animal aspects, [wandering] in a desacralized wasteland, oblivious to his origin" and living only at the periphery of his being and of the universe.{{sfn|Lumbard|2013 |p=182}}

Nasr considers that after the Renaissance, faith no longer had the monolithic cohesion of the Middle Ages. The "new man" is no longer defined by "his celestial archetype and his Edenic perfection", nor by his "symbolic and contemplative spirit", but by his "individuality, reason, the senses, corporeality [and his] subjectivism".{{sfn|The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr|2007 |p=139-140}} Nasr contends that this marked the beginning  of the ever increasing secularization of man and of knowledge,{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=22}} which, step by step, lead the West to [[skepticism]], [[relativism]], [[individualism]], [[materialism]], [[progressivism]], [[evolutionism]], [[historicism]], [[scientism]], [[agnosticism]], [[atheism]] and, ultimately, what he considers the present chaos.{{sfn|The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr|2007 |p=30, 31, 78, 140, 143, 158, 165, 224}}

According to Nasr, given that the wisdom conveyed by the various traditional civilizations finds its origin in a divine revelation,{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=166}} these civilizations have always transmitted a fair representation of man and his purpose.{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=165}} Thus, as [[Joseph E. B. Lumbard]] notes, for Nasr, "only tradition can provide the weapon necessary to carry out the vital battle for the preservation of the things of the spirit in a world which would completely devour man as a spiritual being if it could".{{sfn|Lumbard|2013 |p=182}} According to Nasr:

{{blockquote|To defend the traditional point of view is not to negate the reality of all kinds of evil in the premodern world ranging from wars to philosophical skepticism among the Greeks in the dying moments of that civilization. The major difference is that in traditional civilizations while there was evil, the sacred was ubiquitous and people lived in the world of faith. Today evil continues in many more insidious ways while the very meaning of life which is the quest and discovery of the sacred is taken away.{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=273}}}}

====Theory of evolution====
Professor Judy D. Saltzman recalls in an article dedicated to Nasr, that the vast majority of [[Charles Darwin|post-Darwinian]] scientists claim that life appeared after matter, while for Nasr no inert matter can transform into living matter in the absence of a pre-existing life energy, just as it is impossible, according to mathematical theory of information, to extract more information from a system than it contains.{{sfn|Saltzman|2001 |p=595}}{{sfn|On the question of biological origins|2006 |p=5-6}} For Nasr, "life comes before matter, the subtle world before life, the Spirit before the subtle world, and the Ultimate Reality before everything else".{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=204}}
 
For Nasr, the results of modern scientific investigation of nature are defined by the "oblivion of intellect" and, thus, are "severed from Divinity and highly compartmentalized". He maintains that the [[Big History|scientific explanations for the origins of the natural world]] are "[[Naturalism (philosophy)|purely physical]]" and "aimed at [[Reductionism|reducing man to matter]] while excluding divinity and [[teleology]] from nature".{{sfn|Bigliardi|2014|p=14}} On this basis, Nasr rejects the [[Evolution|theory of evolution]],<ref>{{Cite book|last1=Deniz|first1=Hasan|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=EXlhDwAAQBAJ&q=%22hossein+nasr%22+%22evolution%22&pg=PA299|title=Evolution Education Around the Globe|last2=Borgerding|first2=Lisa A.|date=2018-06-21|publisher=Springer|isbn=978-3-319-90939-4|language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Hameed|first=Salman|date=2008|title=Bracing for Islamic Creationism|journal=Science|volume=322|issue=5908|pages=1637–1638|doi=10.1126/science.1163672|issn=0036-8075|jstor=20176996|pmid=19074331|s2cid=206515329}}</ref> claiming that it is "an ideology, it is not ordinary science,"<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Nasr|first=Seyyed Hossein|date=Winter 2006|title=On the Question of Biological Origins|url=https://cis-ca.org/_media/pdf/2006/2/TEM_temotqobo.pdf|journal=Islam & Science|language=en|volume=4|issue=2|page=182}}</ref> that it is "more a pseudo-religion than a scientific theory,"<ref>{{Cite book|last=Nasr|first=Seyyed Hossein|url=https://archive.org/stream/HosseinNasr/Nasr%2C%20Seyyed%20Hossein%20-%20The%20Philosophy%20of%20Seyyed%20Hossein%20Nasr%20%282001%29%20%28Scan%2C%20OCR%29#page/n39/mode/2up/search/darwinism|title=The Philosophy of Seyyed Hossein Nasr|publisher=Open Court|year=2001|location=Chicago and La Salle, Illinois|pages=21}}</ref> that it "requires more faith than is claimed by any religion for its founder or even for God,"{{sfn|Bigliardi|2014|p=14}} and that evolution is both metaphysically and logically impossible.{{sfn|Ghaly|2014|p=220}}{{efn|Nasr rejects this theory for the following reasons. In ''Knowledge and the Sacred'', 1989: the sudden appearance, noted by scientists, of new species in various geological periods and over very extended areas, such as some unrelated vertebrate groups, which contradicts an evolution in the direction of progressive complexity (p. 206); the almost total absence, in the stratigraphic records, of fossils that should exist as intermediates between the major groups (p.206); the testimony of biologists and paleontologists who, while accepting the theory of evolution in the absence of a plausible scientific alternative, remain "fully aware of the fantastic and even surrealistic character" of this theory (p.207 + Hahn, 2001, p. 755); the variations which are presented by advocates of evolution as "buds" of a new species are only variants within the framework of a single species, each species possessing a potential for development which can only manifest itself within the species in question; this micro-evolution is the only possible evolution (pp. 206–207 + ''On the Question of Biological Origins'', 2006, p.4). In ''On the Question of Biological Origins'', 2006: the impossibility of the appearance of sight in a blind animal or a pair of wings in an insect or a fish which, moreover, would have to practice flying (pp. 6, 10); the impossibility, starting from an animal intelligence, of developing a capacity of reasoning as sophisticated as that which characterizes the human being, whose consciousness is able to reflect on itself, to be conscious of being conscious (p. 12 + Saltzman, 2001, p. 595); finally, the impossibility, on a qualitative level, that the "less" can generate the "more" (p. 5).}} The sociologist Farzin Vahdat sees this as part of Nasr's relativization of secular reason and secular science, and more broadly of his criticism of the modern mentality.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Vahdat|first=Farzin|title=Islamic Ethos and the Specter of Modernity|date=2015|publisher=Anthem Press|isbn=978-1-78308-436-4|pages=215–216|jstor=j.ctt1gsmz2q}}</ref>

[[Marietta Stepanyants|Marietta Stepaniants]] observes that, for Nasr, "the absurdity of that theory" is that it offers only "horizontal and material causes in a unidimensional world, to explain effects whose causes belong to other levels of reality".{{sfn|Stepaniants|2001|p=801}} As an alternative, Nasr defends his vision of an Islamic [[philosophy of science]] that accepts "limited biological changes" occurring throughout time, but rejects the idea that solely natural mechanisms account for what he calls "creativity". He contends that [[evolutionary biology]] is a "[[Materialism|materialist philosophy]]" rather than a "real science with a true empirical foundation" and contrasts a [[Darwinian]] vision of life with his God-centered perspective of nature based in the traditional Islamic understanding of life and creation.{{sfn | Edis | BouJaoude |2013| pp=1679}} Nasr contends that [[evolutionism]] is one of the cornerstones of the contemporary worldview and has contributed directly to the modern world's degradation of the spiritual significance and sacredness of God's creation, as stated in "sacred scriptures" such as the [[Torah]], the [[Bible]] or the [[Quran]].{{sfn|Ghaly|2014|p=220}}

For Nasr, the modern scientific world is incapable of conceiving that each species emanates from the "immutable world of archetypes",{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=204}} – a subtle world beyond the material world –, by "crystallizing" on earth at "a particular moment in the history of the material cosmos", in accordance to the divine "will".{{sfn|On the question of biological origins|2006 |p=3}} The human being, for example, appeared on earth as a human being.{{sfn|On the question of biological origins|2006 |p=11}}

====Philosophy====

Commenting on an article that Muhammad Suheyl Umar dedicated to him, Nasr speaks of his own "philosophical position":

{{blockquote|I am a follower of that ''philosophia perennis'' and also universalis, that eternal ''sophia'', which has always been and will always be and in whose perspective there is but one Reality which can say "I" [...] I have tried to become transparent before the ray of Truth that shines whenever and wherever the veil before it is lifted or rent asunder. Once that process is achieved, the understanding, "observation" and explication of the manner in which that light shines upon problems of contemporary man constitute for me philosophical creativity in the deepest sense of the term. Otherwise, philosophy becomes sheer mental acrobatics and reason cut off from both the intellect and revelation, nothing but a luciferian instrument leading to dispersion and ultimately dissolution.{{sfn|Umar|2001 |p=90}}}}

For Nasr, the true "love of wisdom" (''philosophia'') was shared by all civilizations until the emergence, in the West, of a thought which dissociated itself more and more from the spiritual dimension{{sfn|Umar|2001 |p=110}} as a result of the occultation of the sapiential core of religion and the divorce of philosophical intelligence from faith. Apart from the case of certain Greek currents such as [[sophistry]] and [[Philosophical skepticism|skepticism]],{{sfn|Religion and the Order of Nature|1996 |p=171-172}} as well as the episode of [[nominalism]] towards the end of the [[Middle Ages]],{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=33}} it was really during the [[Renaissance]], continues Nasr, that "the separation of philosophy and of revelation" began,{{sfn|Religion and the Order of Nature|1996 |p=170}} despite the maintenance in certain isolated circles of a true spirituality.{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=33}} With the development of individualism and the emergence of rationalism and skepticism,{{sfn|Religion and the Order of Nature|1996 |p=171}} only the purely human faculties – reason and the senses – "determined knowledge, although faith in God still persisted to a certain extent", but that was not enough to hold back "the progressive [[desacralization of knowledge]] which characterizes European intellectual history" from this period on{{sfn|Religion and the Order of Nature|1996 |p=177}}  and which "led to the completely profane philosophy of today".{{sfn|Umar|2001 |p=110}} However, "the very separation of knowledge from being, which lies at the heart of the crisis of modern man is avoided in the Oriental traditions, which consider legitimate only that form of knowledge that can transform the being of the knower".{{sfn|Umar|2001 |p=110}}

[[Adnan Aslan]] notes a passage from Nasr in which he endorses [[Plato]]'s commentary in the ''[[Phaedo]]'', which equates philosophy with "the practice of death"; this death, for Nasr, corresponds to the extinction of the "I", a necessary stage for the realization of the "Self"{{efn|The following extract makes it possible to identify the meaning of the terms "I" – the ego – and "Self" as Nasr understands them: "Man's responsibility to society, the cosmos, and God issues ultimately from himself, not his self as ego but the inner man who is the mirror and reflection of the Supreme Self, the Ultimate Reality which can be envisaged as either pure Subject or pure Object since It transcends in Itself all dualities, being neither subject nor object." Nasr, ''Knowledge and the Sacred'', 2007, p. 149-150.}} or of the "Truth".{{sfn|Aslan|2004 |p=25}}

Several works by Nasr support critical analyzes of those he considers to be engines of modern deviation: [[Descartes]], [[Montaigne]], [[Francis Bacon|F. Bacon]], [[Voltaire]], [[David Hume|Hume]], [[Rousseau]], [[Kant]], [[Auguste Comte|Comte]], [[Charles Darwin|Darwin]], [[Marx]], [[Freud]], [[Aurobindo]], [[Pierre Teilhard de Chardin|Teilhard de Chardin]] and others. In addition, his writings abundantly cite those who, for him, convey authentic wisdom: [[Pythagoras]], [[Socrates]], [[Plato]], [[Plotinus]], [[Augustine]], [[Adi Shankara|Shankara]], [[Erigena]], [[Avicenna]], [[al-Bīrūnī]], [[Shahab al-Din Yahya ibn Habash Suhrawardi|Suhrawardī]], [[Ibn Arabi|Ibn Arabī]], [[Rumi|Rūmī]], [[Thomas Aquinas]], [[Meister Eckhart|Eckhart]], [[Dante]], [[Mullā Sadrā]], [[Guénon]], [[Frithjof Schuon|Schuon]], [[Ananda Coomaraswamy|Coomaraswamy]], [[Titus Burckhardt|Burckhardt]], [[Martin Lings|Lings]], etc.{{sfn|The Need for a Sacred Science|1993 |p=}}{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=}}{{sfn|The Essential Seyyed Hossein Nasr|2007 |p=}}

====Scientism====

[[Patrick Laude]] submits that Nasr is "the only foremost perennialist writer to have received an intensive and advanced academic training in modern sciences"{{sfn|Laude|2003|p=6-7}}{{efn|"Although Guénon was a mathematician of background, he was not directly involved in the study of modern sciences nor did he manifest much interest in going beyond a general critique of modern scientific reductionism. Titus Burckhardt, and to a lesser extent Frithjof Schuon, has left us with remarkably perceptive arguments and analyses against such scientific axioms as macro-evolutionism and the superstition of materialism." Laude, "Seyyed Hossein Nasr in the Context of the Perennialist School" in ''Beacon of Knowledge: Essays in Honor of Seyyed Hossein Nasr'', 2003, p. 6-7.}} while [[Joseph E. B. Lumbard]] contends that "as a trained scientist", Nasr is well suited to argue about the relationship between religion and science.{{sfn|Lumbard|2013 |p=180}}

Summarizing Nasr's thought, Lucian W. Stone, Jr. writes in ''[[The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers]]'': "According to Nasr, while the traditional sciences – which include biology, cosmology, medicine, philosophy, metaphysics, and so on –, understood the natural phenomena and humanity as ''vestigia Dei'' (signs of God), modern science has severed the universe, including humans, from God. The natural world or cosmos has a meaning beyond itself, one of which modern secular science is intentionally ignorant".{{sfn|Stone|2005 |p=1801}}

Nasr argues that historically Western science is "inextricably linked to Islamic science and before it to the Greco-Alexandrian, Indian, ancient Iranian as well as Mesopotamian and Egyptian sciences". Denying this heritage, the Renaissance already – despite some resistance –, but especially the 17th century ([[Descartes]], [[Galileo]], [[Kepler]], [[Isaac Newton|Newton]]), imposed new paradigms in accordance with the ambient anthropocentrism and rationalism, and with the secularization of the cosmos, which have resulted in a "unilateral and monolithic science, [...] bound to a single level of reality [...], a profoundly terrestrial and externalized science".{{sfn|The Need for a Sacred Science|1993 |p=37}}

While not denying the prowess "of a science limited to the physical dimension of reality", Nasr nonetheless argues that "alternative worldviews drawn from traditional doctrines remain constantly aware of the inner nexus which binds physical nature to the realm of Spirit, and the outward face of things to an inner reality which they at once veil and reveal".{{sfn|Man and Nature|1991 |p=4}} For the traditional sciences of all civilizations, the universe is formed by a hierarchy of degrees, the most "external" or "lowest" degree being the physical world, the only one that modern science recognizes; this lower degree reflects the higher degrees of the universe "by means of symbols which have remained an ever open gate towards the Invisible".{{sfn|The Need for a Sacred Science|1993 |p=50}}

Nasr speaks of "certain intuitions and discoveries" of contemporary scientists, "which reveal the Divine Origin of the natural world",{{sfn|The Need for a Sacred Science|1993 |p=50}} a deduction that scientism does not want to admit, "the scientific philosophers are much more dogmatic than many scientists in denying any metaphysical significance to the discoveries of science".{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=101}} Scientism presents "modern science not as a particular way of knowing nature, but as a complete and totalitarian philosophy which reduces all reality to the physical domain and does not wish under any condition to accept the possibility of the existence of non-scientistic worldviews".{{sfn|Man and Nature|1991 |p=4}} However, Nasr notes, a large number of eminent physicists "have often been the first to deny scientism and even the so-called scientific method [...], seeking to go beyond the scientific reductionism which has played such a great role in the desacralization of nature and of knowledge itself".{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=101-102}}

According to Lumbard, Nasr considers that:

{{blockquote|Science in and of itself is neutral, and the information that scientific discovery provides is true on its own plane, but science falls into error when it crosses from the realm of scientific investigation into that of scientistic ideology, generalizing and absolutizing a particular vision of the physical domain of the universe that science is able to study and then judging the other disciplines in accord with that narrow vision. [...] Nasr calls for a reintegration of modern science into metaphysics and the traditional cosmological sciences in which knowledge of the level of reality that each discipline is equipped to analyze is perceived through the light of higher forms of knowledge, at the apex of which stands the knowledge of the One before which all is reduced to nothingness.{{sfn|Lumbard|2013 |p=181-182}}}}

====Art====

In his reflections on art, Seyyed Hossein Nasr bases himself on "the traditional perspective which is by nature meta-historic and perennial".{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=381}} For him, all art "must convey the truth and beauty" and "a meaning that is ultimately universal" because it is independent of "the ego of the individual artist".{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=239}} He cites as examples the traditional art, "whether it be Persian and Arabic in the Islamic world, Japanese and Chinese in the Far East, Hindu and Buddhist in the Indian world, medieval Christian in the West", as well as the arts of the "primal people of the Americas, Australia and Africa, who in a sense, belong to one family".{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=242}} "That art is the reflection of a [[Plato]]nic paradigm, idea, or archetype, in the Platonic sense, in the world of physical forms."{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=239}}

Thus, in traditional art, specifies Nasr, the artist "is an instrument for the expression of certain symbols, of certain ideas, [...] which are beyond the individual and are executed artistically through traditional techniques" because they belong to the "spiritual world"; "this is where the great difference between traditional and modern art comes from".{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=238}} An art is considered traditional "not because of its subject matter but because of its conformity to cosmic laws of forms, to the laws of symbolism, to the formal genius of the particular spiritual universe in which it has been created, its hieratic style, its conformity to the nature of the material used, and, finally, its conformity to the truth" as expressed by the religious milieu from which it comes.{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred |1989 |p=222}}

As for sacred art, "which lies at the heart of traditional art [, it] has a sacramental function and is, like religion itself, at once truth and presence";{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred|1989 |p=221}} it "involves the ritual and cultic practices and practical and operative aspects of the paths of spiritual realization".{{sfn|Knowledge and the Sacred |1989 |p=237}} In a traditional society, says Nasr, one does not distinguish between sacred art and religious art but "in the post-medieval West and also outside of the Western world since the 19th century, in fact wherever you already have had the decadence of the traditional arts",{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=248}} religious art is characterized only by its subject, at the expense of "its means of execution and its [supra-individual] symbolism" which "belong to the suprahuman realm".{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=247}} Today "much of what is called religious art is no longer traditional but individualistic and psychological."{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=248}}

For Nasr, the degeneration of Western art since the Renaissance is the consequence of a "view of man as a purely secular and earthly being".{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=391}}{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=236}} From symbolic as it was, art became more and more [[Realism (arts)|naturalistic]], as can be seen, for example, by comparing the sculptures of [[Chartres Cathedral]] to those of [[Michelangelo]],{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=238, 240}} or paintings of the [[Madonna (art)|Virgin]] by [[Raphael]] to those of the Middle Ages.{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=240-241}} But, tired of indefinitely reproducing beings and objects deprived of life, naturalism faded in the second half of the 19th century in front of "this new very ingenious wave of impressionist art which tries to capture some of the qualities of nature […] using light and colors [...], without simply emulating the external forms of nature".{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=241}} This movement, however, was only a "transient phase, and soon the whole world of form broke down from below, [...] starting with [[Picasso]] and continuing to our own day".{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=241}} The "cracks in the confines of the solidified mindset created by centuries of humanism, rationalism and empiricism" have opened access to the most "inferior" influences.{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=386}}

According to Nasr, most modern artists "become completely enmeshed in their own egos [...], leading lives which are in many cases not morally disciplined, whereas the traditional perspective", on the contrary, "seeks to free us through spiritual discipline [...] destroying the stranglehold that the lower ego has upon our immortal soul".{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=388}} The traditional artist "does not try to express his own feelings and ideas", as the modern artist does;{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=238-239}} "[[Art for art's sake]]" is not his credo, nor is "innovation, originality and creativity" because, unlike the modern artist, he knows that art has as its goal "the attainment of inner perfection and [...] human need[s] in the deepest sense [...], which are spiritual", intimately linked to "beauty and the truth."{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=242}}{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=392}} "All beauty", writes Nasr, "is a reflection of Divine Beauty and can lead to the Source of that reflection";{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=246}} but the contemporary rubs shoulders with "ugliness, unaware that the need for beauty is as profound in the human being as the [...] air that we breathe".{{sfn|Jahanbegloo|2010 |p=242, 244–245}}

For Nasr, there are artists in the present day, rooted in a true spirituality and who express it or attempt to express it in their art,{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=387, 392}} with the humility demanded by "light of the truth and the millennial heritage of traditional art, most of which was produced […] by anonymous artists who humbled themselves before the reality of the Spirit and through their transparency were able to reflect the light of the spiritual world in their works".{{sfn|Hahn|2001 |p=392}}