Editing Seyyed Hossein Nasr (section)

====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=}}