TARIQ RAMADAN

The Quest for Meaning

Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism

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ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

Contents

Ocean and Windows

1. The Quest for Meaning

2. Of the Universal

3. Faith and Reason

4. Tolerance and Respect

5. Freedom

6. Fraternity and Equality

7. Female, Male

8. The Ethics of Independence and the Independence of Ethics

9. Emotion and Spirituality

10. Education

11. Tradition and Modernity

12. The Sense of Belonging

13. Of Civilizations

14. Love, Forgiveness and Love

Through the Ocean, Windows

To the semi-colon;

Despite the diversity of languages, there is some form of punctuation that is universal and common to them all.

In a world of simplified communications and simplistic binary judgements, the semi-colon reconciles us with the plurality of propositions, and with the welcome nuances of the sentence and of complex realities.

To my former students, who will rediscover here the fragrances of a teaching of philosophy.

And who will not forget to ‘say to those they love that they love them’.

Life is fragile.

Ocean and Windows

This book is a journey, and an initiation. It is actually about setting out and travelling the paths of the heart, the mind and the imaginary.

There has never been more talk of diversity and plurality than in this era of globalization and modernization, and yet, more so than ever before, we seem to be trapped into our identities and differences. The global world is a village; they say … a village of villagers who know nothing of each other. In more senses than one: they do not know who they are, and they do not know who they are living with. This situation can only lead to half-hearted, fearful and dormant conflicts rather than a confident celebration of our riches: Edward Said suggested it would lead to ‘the clash of ignorance’; I propose it will lead to a ‘conflict of perceptions’. Perceptions are more telling than ignorance: perceptions can certainly result from ignorance, but they express a relationship with ourselves and others that has to do with more than knowledge. Perceptions have to do with feelings, emotions, convictions and psychology. We are lacking in confidence. Confidence in ourselves, confidence in others, confidence in God and/or man, and/or the future. We are lacking in confidence, no shadow of a doubt about that. Fear, doubt and distrust are imperceptibly colonizing our hearts and minds. And so the other becomes our negative mirror, and the other’s difference allows us to define ourselves, to ‘identify’ ourselves and, basically, gives us some reassurance. The other becomes our ‘diversion’, in Blaise Pascal’s sense of the term. The other distracts us from ourselves, our ignorance, our fears and our doubts, whilst the presence of the other justifies and explains our suspicions. We have projections, but at the same time we have to admit that we have no projects.

We therefore have to get back to some elementary truths. Simple, profound truths. We have to set out, ask the essential questions and look for a meaning. We have to travel towards ourselves and rediscover a taste for questions, constructive criticism and complexity. We begin by establishing a first thesis of truth that should naturally foster an attitude of intellectual modesty and humility: we all observe the world through our own windows. A window is a viewpoint over a horizon, a framework, a piece of glass that is always tinted to some extent, and it has its orientation and its limitations: all this, together, imparts its colour and qualities to the surrounding landscape. We have to begin, humbly, by admitting that we have nothing more than points of view, in the literal sense, and that they shape our ideas, our perceptions and our imagination. Coming to terms with the very essence of the relativity of our gaze does not imply that we have to doubt everything and can be sure of nothing. It might mean quite the opposite, and the outcome might be a non-arrogant confidence, and a healthy, energetic and creative curiosity about the infinite number of windows from which we all observe the same world. The plurality is such that we have doubts as to whether we are talking about the same world, the same questions and the same humanity. Within the ‘global village’, in the meantime, our increasingly pronounced individualism even leads us to doubt the fact that there are such things as fragments of philosophy behind the calculations of our respective drive for power and self-interest. And what can the ego make out of egoisms?

The point I am making is that we cannot go on standing at our windows. Off we go, we said, along the paths of the heart, the mind and the imaginary! The horizon ahead of us offers us a choice between two paths: we can go from window to window, from one philosophy to another and from one religion to another, and try to understand, one by one, traditions and schools, their teachings and their principles. As we go from one to another, from ourselves to others, we will find many similarities, many things in common and many shared values. Or we can take the other path, which leads us into the very heart of the landscape and then invites us to turn our gaze on the windows around us. Once we take that path, it is no longer a question of considering the multiplicity of the observers but of plunging into the object we are all observing, and then apprehending the diversity of our points of view and the essence of their similarity. Once we have accepted the existence of our window, we therefore have to travel, set ourselves free, plunge into the ocean, set sail, go on, stop, founder, resist, set off again, set sail once more, and remember that the ocean exists only because of the presence of the many shores that make it one ocean, and that their presence is also our only hope of survival. And vice versa.

We have chosen the second path, and we wish to accompany our reader to the heart of what we are observing, so as to apprehend with confidence and humility the myriad observers. This is what I call a philosophy of pluralism, which states that, by immersion in the object per se, we will be able to meet human beings, or subjects, with their traditions, their religions, their philosophies, their aesthetics and/or their psychologies. Each chapter will therefore deal with one theme, with one element in the landscape of philosophy: the quest for meaning, the universal, freedom, fraternity, education, memory, forgiveness, love, and so on, and we will try, as we stand in the centre, to address and understand the diversity and creativity that well up from the windows. The notions of equality, freedom, humanity, emotion and memories belong, for instance, to all traditions and all philosophies, but their absolute truth is in no one’s possession. And, as we shall demonstrate, the universal can only be a universal that is shared.

In the course of this initiation, which works backwards from existential questions and shared philosophical notions to the pluralism of answers and points of view, the reader will begin to see the contours of a philosophy of pluralism. By recognizing the existence of one’s window, and then taking the risk of moving away from it and becoming decentred, one will, thanks to the essence of debates about one notion, gain access to the shared fate and hopes of subjects, men and women from all walks of life, throughout the whole of history. Like any initiate, the reader will sometimes wonder: ‘Where am I being taken?’ There is no one answer, and no final answer. We are heading for that realm of consciousness and mind where all wisdoms remind us that it is its shores that make the ocean one, and that it is the plurality of human journeys that shapes the common humanity of men.

Ella Maillard (1903–1997), who was one of the twentieth century’s greatest travel writers, once said: ‘The hardest part is getting to the station.’ And the first steps are indeed the hardest: leaving behind your family and friends, your habits, your comfort, your certainties, and setting off for new horizons. It takes an effort, will power … the appeal of travelling and discovering distant shores is incompatible with laziness, self-importance and arrogance. It takes self-awareness, determination, humility, modesty, curiosity and a certain taste for risk to venture into strange worlds, new references and new vocabularies. It means accepting insecurity and appreciating empathy.

I have tried to introduce these complex notions in the simplest and most approachable way so as to ensure that the reader does not get out of her or his depth. No philosophical or religious knowledge is required before setting off. And besides, the reader will quickly understand that this initiation takes place in stages and that every reader will get something out of it and will discover the luggage and supplies he or she set out with. I have tried not to make complexity needlessly complex, or to confuse simplicity with the absence of profundity. The poverty of the landscape mirrors that of our gaze, murmured the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and the same is true of its wealth. A man who is lost is vulnerable, and rarely complacent. It is therefore a good thing if the reader sometimes gets lost, finds his way again, thinks he has understood and then finally understands that he does not understand, or does not understand enough. This is a good school of wisdom. On its benches, we learn to reserve and to suspend our judgement. These chapters open a thousand windows but they do not offer absolute truths or definite answers; they offer perspectives that remind us that, ultimately, human beings are all alike in their joys, their sufferings and their loves. And in their quest for truth and peace.

The goal of the journey is the journey itself … poetically put, it is a journey that takes us far away, and back to ourselves. In order to find there our being, a liberated ego, God, reason, the heart, or the void. But always, always tenderness and love. And hope too: the last of evils according to the myth of Pandora, and the first act of faith in God or man. By setting out from these shared ideals, values and principles, the traveller who goes in search of initiation sets foot on the shores of a rich diversity and of pluralism, begins to find a path and sees doors and windows opening. He lives the paradox of travelling to the periphery of traditions and of settling into the essence of their teachings. And then he can murmur, confidently and with an open mind: my philosophy is travel, and pluralism is my destination. Humility is my table, respect is my garment, empathy is my food and curiosity is my drink. As for love, it has a thousand names and is by my side at every window.

1

The Quest for Meaning

In the beginning, there is childhood. Life has already begun, and childhood is its most immediate, most material, liveliest and most exuberant expression. It is sometimes said that this is its most beautiful expression. Babies and children express life with a sort of crystalline purity. ‘Life is there, simple and serene,’ says the poet Paul Verlaine in his Sagesse. Childhood is innocence. That might be a universal truth, if we did not recall the words of St Augustine in the Confessions when he observes that even a baby at the breast feels jealousy and already bears the stigmata of sin that runs through the human condition from the very beginning.1 The innocence of being and of origins is therefore neither a fact nor a universal postulate. Childhood may even be, as in the Hindu or Buddhist tradition, the new beginning of ‘something’ or of a life that came before it. If that is the case, origins, purity and innocence are so many illusions that are fostered by our shortsightedness and/or ignorance.

So, it is very complicated from the very beginning. Where do we begin? And how can we speak of ‘apparent’ origins, or of childhood as it is lived, and not as we observe it, from our viewpoint, with our reason, our judgements, our philosophies or our religions? If childhood is neither primal, pure nor even innocent … then is there such a thing as a truth that can express it or a quality that can describe it? That is a difficult question, and yet the extraordinary thing that attracts and fascinates us to the point of moving us to tears is palpable as we sit at the bedside of a child and of life: childhood is life, but it asks no questions about life. The ‘being of being’ immediately clings … to life. It asks no questions and is not mediated by either consciousness or the intellect.

Childhood is carefree in the literal sense: a child lives but has no worries about life. That does not mean that a child feels no pain, is never hurt and never suffers. It does not mean that a child experiences only pure joy and happiness. No. Children do experience pleasure and pain, laughter and tears, fullness and lack, but they do so unquestioningly. Childhood does not need answers or philosophies. It falls short of that, or perhaps it is beyond that. The painter Pablo Picasso used to say how difficult it was to ‘become young again’ because he was so eager to rediscover a carefree creativeness – and finally outgrow his precocious mastery of forms and colours. Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who was so in love with art, had already described childhood as the final stage in three basic transformations: his prophet Zarathustra proclaimed that human beings had to become rebellious lions and no longer submissive camels if they wished to accede at last to the free and carefree liberty of a child.2 Nietzsche did believe in innocence, but what looked like the final completion of the philosophical quest was a combination of lack of concern and freedom: the freedom of the carefree, of those who are not worried about life, the freedom of the child. He thought that we have to get beyond useless questions about meaning if we are to experience the fullness of being in its immediacy. The philosopher’s only hope of success was to transform himself into a child-artist. He was not hoping for an answer to questions about life but trying to get beyond them, and that is a much more profound experience. Nietzsche’s insight was profound, and so true: in philosophy, the ideal of childhood is the end of philosophy.

QUESTIONS, A QUESTION

Escaping consciousness is, however, difficult. And perhaps we can never really do so. The intellect gradually awakens as it discovers the realities of life and asks the first questions: why, or why not, are there things to eat? Why, or why not, are there toys, a swimming pool and rain, presence or absence? The first ‘whys’ are about immediate causalities that are obvious at an immediate level – at the heart of the life that is given us – and not about life itself. Time passes, and the questions become deeper and more focused as our consciousness has to deal with the real: our carefree existence, and part of childhood vanishes as we begin to ask the basic existential question: why life? Why me, here and there?

We reach the age of reason as we take the path that leads to maturity. We have to become adults whether we like it or not. This journey – these stages, the immediacy of the carefree existence that ceases as we approach the mediation of conscience is the most intimate and the most universal experience of all. It is a universal intimacy, or the universal nature of human intimacy. Ancestral traditions punctuated this journey with rites and/or initiations, rites of passage, symbolic ordeals and new responsibilities. They helped being, consciousness and the intellect to enter the world of meaning. Religions and prophecies, like traditions, spiritualities and philosophies, find their raison d’être at the very threshold of this question of meaning: they are so many of the answers that are given to human consciousness – either in advance (by a family or community) or in the course of the personal quest – when consciousness accedes the existential preoccupation (life’s worries about life) and asks the question ‘Why?’

The essence and the prospect remain the same, from the tribal religions of Asia to the Aztecs and the Mayas, from the religions of the Andes to the traditions of Africa: understanding, doing and giving meaning. Egyptian, Greek and Roman polytheisms, like Hinduism and Buddhism, and even the Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheisms, offer frameworks and systems that allow us to answer the basic existential question, and then all the other related questions: what is the meaning of death, suffering, love, morality, and so on? Philosophers and philosophies try to reconstruct what religions have already grappled with by asking the initial question, by using their autonomous reason and exploring truths that have, to some extent, been established or verified (postulates). They try to arrive at a meaning by asking questions and in the process elaborate systems that strive for consistency and for answers. Socrates has often – and quite wrongly, as it happens – been described as the first systematic philosopher, but he is the first and emblematic representative of the philosophical project and the philosophical experience. The Socratic dialectic is a pedagogy based upon a series of leading questions. The thousands of questions he asks are designed to elicit from his interlocutor truths he did not know were in his possession. And those truths allow the interlocutor to apprehend, with the intellectual gentleness that is implicit in logical reasoning, the question of questions: the question of meaning, and the question of truth.

The geneticist Albert Jacquard observed, with a certain humour, that human beings are born too early, and quite incomplete. It is impossible for a baby to survive without help. Left to its own devices, it is physically doomed to die. It is therefore naturally in a state of need. The physical need to be cared for, fed and protected until it reaches physiological maturity is most obvious and most pressing at the very moment when it is most carefree. Total physical dependency in order to stay alive is associated with an absolute freedom and lightness: our being is part of life. And then time passes and perspectives are inverted: as we become physically independent, we gradually begin to ask existential questions, and those questions are so many needs. At the very moment when the body realizes its potential and becomes autonomous, the mind becomes aware of its questions, limitations, needs because its dependency mirrors its incompleteness, doubts and truths. We spend our time coming to terms with our physical, emotional and intellectual dependency. We move perpetually from one state to the other: man is a being who is ‘in need’. That is why our relationship with peace – inner or collective – is always a question of autonomy and power. That is as true of individuals and couples as it is of social relations. ‘Why?’ expresses the quest for meaning, and an awareness of our needs, limitations and powers.

TIME

All religions, all spiritualities and all philosophies take a natural interest in the question of time. It is perhaps the experience of passing time that gives consciousness access to life’s first questions about life. Life is there, time passes, and life passes away. The question of time shapes an awareness of death. The awareness of death is reflected in and reflects the essence of existence, its origins and future, and the meaning of destiny and hope. The three basic philosophical questions formulated by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant clearly relate the awareness of time to the existential quest: What can I know? What should I do? What may I hope for?3 This very last question encompasses the others and has to do with time. Our origins, our being in time, our hopes for the future and our death inscribe the human consciousness in time, and the nature of the answers to these questions will necessarily determine its relationship with space, with Nature and with human beings, in both their similarities and their differences. There is no spirituality, tradition or religion – or at least none that is systematic – that does not provide answers to these questions. The metaphysical philosophers never imagined that they could be avoided, while more recent philosophies (such as phenomenological and analytic philosophies) which posit these existential questions are, by their very nature, problematical and debatable.

Without getting lost in these complex debates, which are sometimes quite pointlessly technical and nebulous, we do have to dwell on the question of origins. It is, in both religious and philosophical terms, essential and concrete. ‘Source’ points us toward the ‘meaning’. If we know where we come from, we know our way. The human consciousness has a very special relationship with the question of origins, of beginnings, or the beginning: that is the secret or truth we have to succeed in apprehending in spiritual and intellectual terms. Basically, Kant’s three questions could be summed up in one other question whose essence holds the key to all the others: where do I come from? It synthesizes all the others: is there a Creator, Spirit, Being, Substance or Cause? Is meaning determined from the origin? Are we products of a will, an accident or chance? These questions are the very substance of the search for meaning. Time asks questions, and consciousness tries to answer them, or fails to answer them. The meaning that is produced by the question of passing time and approaching death naturally transforms our relationship with space, Nature and the elements. If life does have a meaning and if the source does show a way, then the elements are transformed into signs … and they reveal that meaning because they are individual and singular.

The origin is always the axis and/or refuge of those who believe in meaning. If life is an accident, a chance event – or a mistake – then origins express nothing more than its brute, unfathomable reality: it is an event of which nothing can be said and from which nothing can be learned. The origin of meaning always seems more ideal or more alive than the meanings we encounter on our path. That is the source of the nostalgia for origins that runs through all traditions and all religions; at the origin, meaning seems to appear pure and complete in all its fullness and then, as time passes, it becomes corrupt, perverted and self-destructive and self-contradictory or even becomes lost. We advance towards the horizon so as to return to our origin. Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian and Muslim mysticisms all give out the same message: we have to go forth in order to come back, plunge into time in order to be born anew, and roam the world in order to get back to ourselves at last. This universal experience is summed up as simply and as profoundly as it could be by Paolo Coelho’s novel The Alchemist: leave Andalusia to look for a treasure that is hidden in Egypt and discover, once in Egypt, that you have to go back to Andalusia. Andalusia is not, however, self-sufficient, and requires the mediation of Egypt. The source is not sufficient unto itself; the Andalusia from which we come is not the same as the Andalusia to which we return. In the order of spirituality, the Andalusia we come from needs the path that leads to it and thus reveals its meaning and essence. It exists thanks to the discernment of the consciousness that gives and restores its meaning.

When we are haunted by questions and driven by the quest for answers and meanings standing between the origin and the destination, we are in a better position to understand spiritual, religious or philosophical representations of circular or linear time. Is man advancing freely towards an indeterminate future? Or is he tirelessly retracing his steps? Given that birth and death are celebrated in an eternal renewal, isn’t an individual life just one more illusion. Shouldn’t our consciousness of the singularity of the self and of the path begin by grasping the truth of repetition, of the return of the same and of the eternity of renewal? These questions too have never stopped being repeated in all ancestral, spiritual, religious or philosophical traditions. They all speak of and express the quest, the initiation and the way: the Lesser or Great Vehicle (Hînayâna, mahâyâna), the Kabbalah, mysticism and Sufism are methodical and systematized expressions of that same truth. For some of them, however, cosmic time is cyclical, and we must both apprehend it and escape from it in its essence, as in the determinations of the Hindu and Buddhist samsâra. For others, it is linear time that makes sense because it speaks of origins and determines destinations: gods, God, a judgement. For still others, linear time is in fact a disguised form of a cyclical time, or perhaps it is the other way round and perhaps cyclical time evolves in linear fashion: ‘we never bathe twice in the same river’, remarked Heraclitus. Everything is repeated, but never in the same way. This is another way of speaking of the experience of the quest: we must walk down roads and through towns as we seek, and that is a temporal experience. A being will live what others have already experienced, the days will repeat themselves, experiences will be similar, as will the questions, the doubts and the suffering … we will even return to our place of origin, to ourselves, but nothing – the self, the questions, the experiences or the quest – will ever be the same. The quest for meaning, which is always begun again by every human intellect, is to human consciousness what a fingerprint is to the body: shared by all, and unique to every individual. A universal singularity.

BACK TO THE SELF

As we have said, the quest for meaning is a journey through time and across the world, but it always ends by bringing us back to ourselves. All paths lead us back to ourselves. In his Muqaddimah, which is aptly subtitled An Introduction to History, the mystic and philosopher Ibn Kaldun (1322–1406), who was the first sociologist, concludes from his study of history and the macrocosm that the evolution and demise of civilizations are cyclical. The past is the future, and the future is the road to a new past. The microcosm of consciousness reveals the same truths. Human beings, be they believers or atheists, idealists or rationalists, philosophers or scientists, are on what Ibn Qayyim called ‘the seekers’ way’ (Madarrij Saalikeen (‘Stations of the Seekers’)), and it leads us back to ourselves. In the face of self-awareness, in the face of death or love, in the face of loneliness or suffering, in the face of doubt or absences … on the road, and in the heart of life, we must return to ourselves one day.

Who am I? asks the human being, the believer, the atheist, the philosopher or the poet. All religions and all philosophies convey the same truth: wherever you are, whatever your origins, your colour or your social status, your very humanity means that you must become introspective – for a moment or for life. ‘Know thyself,’ the Delphic oracle told the philosopher, and, from the Epicureans to the monotheistic religions, we find the same basic concern for the self, for the ego. It causes us pleasure and pain, and the first apprehensions of consciousness reveal that it is always in a state of tension. Knowledge of God lies ‘between man and his heart’, says the Quran (‘The Spoils, VIII 24), and it also locates the quest for the One and His peace (islâm, salâm) in immersion in the heart’s tensions. All the paths of life lead to the heart. They teach us to understand ourselves, our being, qualities and weaknesses in the light of our own aspiration, of others and of the world. In his quest for the truth, the philosopher Descartes asked himself what he could be certain of, in the same way that the Brahmans before him sought to identify the prisons of the inner self. Every human being must one day take stock of what she/he is, of her/his being, beliefs, certainties and contradictions, and of both her/his freedoms and prisons. We can decide to choose a philosophy of introspection, a faith, morality or religion, the practice of initiation or self-denial, but we must choose: and one day, for all that, life will force us to question our choice. As we have said, existence cannot escape consciousness.

We then have to make allowance for acquired characteristics. What we get from our parents and what shapes us: the strange way in which we resemble them physically, our body-language, the emotions we feel and express, and even some aspects of our intellectual dispositions. Our past, which is always so present, our experiences, our questions, our encounters and our wounds make us what we are, determine us and decide part of our identity. Our contradictory aspirations, our doubts, our dark side, often perturb and disturb us: Who are we? Who decides who we are? Do we have the ability to change, to transform ourselves? ‘We cannot remake ourselves,’ says the adage that places limitations on our freedom. Getting back to ourselves and to the heart of our consciousness means entering the natural world of tension, of contradictory ‘postulations’, of the battlefield described by the novelist-psychologist Dostoyevsky. It means knowing where we come from and asking the simple question of what we want, what we can do and what we can make of ourselves. It means accepting that something about us is indeterminate and, like Rimbaud, stating that ‘I is an other’, taking stock of our qualities, of what we are lacking and of what we need, and of setting off. We have no choice: we have already set sail on our existential journey. We already have our convictions, and the die has already been cast. We have to give things a meaning, even if we postulate that they have none. In the light of that meaning (or non-meaning), we must try to know ourselves better (or to know nothing of ourselves), take decisions (or take no decisions) and make choices (or decide not to choose). A human being is a being ‘in need’ and who must make choices: when it comes to making existential choices, deciding not to choose is still a choice. The return to the self is the first and the final stage of all human experience: the reflections of the ‘I’, of the ego, of consciousness and the unconscious, of the emotions and the mind mirror the adult’s questions about freedom, meaning and truth.

IN SEARCH OF PEACE

Our conscious adult state is naturally a state of tension. Our doubts, our aspiration towards the ideal and (perhaps) immateriality, the calls of our instincts and their potential for what can be a bestial violence, our dreams, our imaginary, our fantasies and even our conscious or unconscious traumas all indicate that our origins are fraught with problems. We are looking for peace: for answers to our questions, for a few certainties beyond our doubts and for solutions to our tensions. The quest for meaning is indeed a quest for peace.

The oldest Asian and African tribal religions project on to the world and the elements meanings and signs that tame the world, make it less hostile and allow communications that soften the relationship between human being and Nature. Both spiritualities and religions teach the way and the means to be at peace with oneself, with God, with others and also with the environment and/or Creation. Theoretical and metaphysical theory seeks to explain and, therefore, to answer and appease analytical reason. Dante’s Divine Comedy, which is midway between philosophy, religion and art, is in that sense an imaginary description of a beyond that answers the painful and serious questions of an awakened consciousness which inevitably experiences angst. The existentialists openly describe the same experience: the Christian Kierkegaard could not help but acknowledge the fatal disease and the heartbreaking inner conflict that lies at the very heart of faith in the experience of Abraham, torn between his love for God and his love for his son. The atheist Sartre also held that anxiety was central to human experience: we have to recognize it, accept it and transcend it. What are we to make of our doubts, contradictions, fears and anxieties, with or without God? How can we contemplate death calmly, live and then pass away in peace? What is the ultimate meaning of the last question asked by the biblical Jesus – ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ – of Socrates’ request to be allowed to settle his debts before he passed on, or of Kant’s ‘It is good’ as he closed his eyes for ever?

Throughout the ages, we find the same questions, the same thirst and the same hope that we will find a spring that can at last quench it. This is how we manage our tensions and this is how we achieve fullness. And that is, as it happens, the true meaning of jihad in the Islamic tradition: managing our natural, individual and/or collective contradictions, and seeking peace. The very word for faith – imân – expresses not the idea of ‘faith’, but a state of security, well-being and peace (al-amân). This answer echoes the personal and universal experience of every consciousness, whatever choices it makes. Modern psychology, in all its forms, and psychoanalysis, with all its schools, serve the same function: observing, seeking, finding the key, an event, or a rift that explains and allows us to transcend distress, imbalance or neurosis. Making peace, feeling well. The promise of nirvana, complete faith, communion, unconditional love … a return, yet again, to the fullness of childhood: an instant of life that takes away the cares of life. A consciousness that is as assured and as free as the child’s carefree existence. Do we return to the self in order to transcend the ego, or are we trying to draw closer to the One and lucidly face up to the loneliness of our consciousness and our indeterminate destiny? The answer is never, ever, strictly rational: as we travel the road that leads to the origin, follow the meanders of cyclical and/or linear time, and come back to the self, we discover both a horizon of tensions and a hope for harmony and peace; the road we travel, therefore, always involves emotions, affection and well-being. Spiritualities, religions and philosophies, whatever they may be, cannot escape either the questions of reason or those of the heart. Those questions exist, and they owe as much to consciousness as they do to love.

2

Of the Universal

There is a lot of talk these days about which values and principles are universal and which are not. It is as though, in these times of general relativity, we needed to recall that there is some form of absolute, or some point of reference, that can transcend our many different points of view or, more indirectly, our loss of points of reference. In an age of postmodernity, deconstruction and postmodernism (of a conceptual inflation that causes our old relations with truth to implode), and in which so many concepts speak of the end of orders and logical systems, of narrations and coherent narratives, and, finally, of ideologies of political totality and human finalities, we suddenly begin to describe the status of certain values and principles as ‘universal’. If we look at things from afar, or even a little more closely, it seems that the feeling of loss of meaning and all points of reference internally is overcompensated for externally (i.e., vis-à-vis other civilizations), by a strong, determined will to speak out, express or even possess the universal. Perhaps the claim that we, as opposed to the Other, are in possession of universals restores to us what the postmodernist experience has taken away from us. There is a certain intellectual, and even psychological, logic to these communicating vases: this has to do with doubts. And it always has to do with power.

But what do we mean by ‘universal’? Given that, as we have seen, we are all – each and every one of us – searching for meaning, truth and peace … then where will we place that which is universal in human experience? In the nature of the questions we all ask, or in the possible similarities between our different answers? Or in both? Where does he or she who sees, defines and speaks of universals speak from? These are not new questions, and they were formulated increasingly naturally (and recurrently) in Western philosophy with the emergence of the autonomous rationalism of Descartes and especially Spinoza. An answer had to be found to what is, after all, a basic question: do we discover universals ‘top down’ by identifying a Being, Essence or Idea that is the cause of everything, or thanks to a ‘bottom-up’ process which allows human reason to identify common features that we all share, despite the diversity of human beings and elements? Hegel used the term ‘concrete universal’ to describe the idea of a Type or ideal Being (or a transcendental Given) that is the cause of beings and things as opposed to the ‘abstract universals’ we construct thanks to the use of a reason that identifies the generic characteristics of beings and things. This is also the meaning of Schopenhauer’s distinction between Ideas and Concepts: the very essence of the universal means that it has different origins and a different nature. Even at the very heart of Western philosophy, or in the dialogue between civilizations and religions, we cannot get away from these questions about the origin and nature of the universal. The simplicity of this exposition might give the impression that Socrates, who postulated the existence of Ideas, opted for ‘top down’ or a concrete universal, whilst the Kant who described the categories and qualities of pure Reason opted for an abstract universal constructed by rational deduction. But if we look more closely, we find that things are much more complex than that: Socrates deduced his a prioris from what he thought were inductions, just as Kant clearly had an a priori idea of what he thought he had discovered thanks to the rigour of his deductions. All this is highly complex and paradoxical. There is, nonetheless, a simple truth, and we must have the wisdom to accept it: the way in which we say we accede to the universal says a lot about our preconceptions (or even our state of mind) when we begin to think. We should remember that.

All (non-theistic) spiritual or religious traditions have some notion of the universal. The concept of a universal refers, in one way or another, to a Being, Idea or Way (a concrete universal) that speaks, a priori, of the essence of human experience. No matter whether we believe that Nature is inhabited by a soul or souls, that we must free ourselves from the ego and the prison of the eternal rebirth through an initiation or self-transcendence, or that we must recognize the One and practise a rite … each and every one of us implicitly assumes that truths and ritual and ethical exigencies must, respectively, be regarded as universally true. Truth (insofar as it is a value) and meaning (for itself) are, quite logically, regarded as the truth and meaning of everything. The assumption that there is such a thing as an a priori universal does not, however, necessarily imply that, for spiritualities and religions, there is no legitimacy in constructing the universal on a rational basis, or that the two paths can never converge. As we shall see, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive, but that depends, once again, on the mental attitude of the thinker or seeker in question. This is not simply a matter of determining how we believe we can discover the universal, but of being able to listen to (though one might not always understand) the other’s apprehension of the universal. It is a matter of listening to what she/he says about it, of understanding where she/he is speaking from, and of learning to apprehend different forms of the universal: the transcendental universal, the immanent universal, the inner universal, the universal of the heart, the universal of reason … and even the nihilist universal of nothingness and non-meaning. The question of the universal is therefore primarily a question of ways, paths and states of minds.

PATHS

If we follow a path of initiation and fulfilment, or we believe in God the Creator, then that path or God is an expression of the universal that grants human beings truths, values, ethics and rules for behaviour. Idealist or rationalist philosophies use the human faculties, sense-data, intuition and sometimes even the image-stock common to archetypes, symbols and signs to elaborate constructs whose universality is, to a greater or lesser extent, either abstract or concrete. As we have seen, these are not the only ways of elaborating the universal. We can do so also by relying upon human faculties, and spiritualities and religions insist on doing this because their goal is to reveal the correspondence between the macrocosm of the universe and the microcosm of our innermost being. The universal of meanings, of consciousness, of the heart and the ego, for example, is present in mysticisms and rituals that relate to our relationship with knowledge, the gnosis, truth and liberation. We can thus understand that the universal, which reveals the transcendent cause of All, also reveals common qualities and values that are immanent in everything, or identifies the similar essence of the human faculties of all human beings, and that, as we were saying, the universality of what we have in common, and which is expressed in the name of a faith or postulate, actually expresses the undisputed truth of the plurality, of the multiplicity and diversity of the ways that lead to it and its representation. There can be no universal without diversity: the quest for the ultimate commonality would be pointless if we did not recognize the initial differences that explain just why we have to go in search of the universal. We often tend to forget that when we set out on our quest because we are already convinced of the certainties or doubts we have come to accept.

Ancient traditions and contemporary spiritualities, like religions, have a similar relationship with the real on to which they project meanings, directions, destinations or teachings. The Spirit or universal spirits and the paths to liberation or God give birth to truths that are meant to be shared by all and to be true for all men. They are universal in a primary sense. The essence of each of these traditions or religions is that they call upon our consciousness to find a way, to make choices and to act accordingly. The universal that calls upon us to choose a path should, for example, never, by definition, deny either the reality of the essential necessity – which is quasi-ontological – of other paths. I must experience other truths if my responsibility for having chosen my truth in all conscience is to be meaningful. Without the truth – or errors – of others, my truth is no longer my choice or my responsibility. If it were forced upon me in its uniqueness, it would lose its meaning, and there would be no justification for its existence. That is the profound intuition we find in the teachings of Hinduism and Buddhism, but it is also central to the most profound messages of the monotheisms. The mystical and Sufi traditions constantly remind us that there are many ways, just as there are many paths up the mountainsides that their initiates scale to reach the same summit, ideal or truth. That there are many ways does not detract from the nature of the essential truth, just as the fact that there are different paths up the mountain does not mean that the peak is not transcendent – quite the contrary. The absolute is not relative to the paths that lead to it. Not everything is relative.