Ruzbeh Saadati – March 19, 2020
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Doubt is the hesitation between two contradictions, without giving priority to either. In doubt, the two contradictions are on equal footing, and skepticism may represent a pre-cognitive and pre-knowledge stage.
Imam Ghazali, an Ash‘ari theologian, examined various sects and doctrines of his time and came to doubt his own intellectual and doctrinal certainties. This doubt, which held him captive in sophistry for months, ultimately led him to Sufism. Initially, he doubted sensory perceptions according to reason, and later, through his dreams and by questioning even rational judgments, he came to doubt some apparent self-evident truths: “How can you be sure that one day you will not experience a state whose relation to this waking is like the relation of your waking to your dreams?” A skepticism that consumed his whole being and from which he could only be liberated by clinging to Sufism and its particular states.
Descartes’ doubt, however, was of a different kind. It was not true skepticism but methodological doubt—a doubt used as a method to reach certainty and knowledge. He doubted everything that could be doubted except the doubting self. He never questioned the reality of his own existence, which became the foundation of his philosophy in the proposition: Cogito ergo sum.
Ghazali, whether as an Ash‘ari or later as a Sufi, could not and did not want to strengthen the foundations of rational philosophy; it can even be said that he opposed philosophical thought. In contrast, Descartes’ thinking became a turning point for Western philosophy. Perhaps the intellectual backgrounds of each and the heritage they inherited from predecessors are the main reasons for these differences, but it seems that what matters most today is how we engage with this intellectual heritage.
Eyvaz Taha uses the arrival of spring and the transformation of nature as a pretext to question our ideas and thoughts, to revisit them in order to see better and live better, and to break free from the rigidity we sometimes succumb to. A Descartes-like skepticism. Perhaps Taha’s invitation is a paradox in light of a sentence he wrote earlier: “I burn, but thinking is faster!”—a sweet paradox, at least for me, promising what his future writings would offer.
Certainly, reading what has been briefly written above about doubt, in one’s mother tongue and in Taha’s own expression, carries a unique charm. Additionally, if the author implicitly warns the reader against Ghazali-like doubt while encouraging a Descartes-like skepticism through personal experience, I, relying on my own personal experience, also invite the reader to a journey I undertook over two of the most beautiful years of my life—a Ghazali-like doubt I experienced without knowing Ghazali. It led me to denial and ultimately to the Sufi lodges of the village of Khanqah. Tanbur, daf, and nightly ecstasies. At times it was difficult and painful, as Taha writes: “It burns a man like fire, it shakes the fields of existence like an earthquake.” Yet overall, it was beautiful, as Ghazali writes: “It was all states, not fuss and noise.” Why not? Let spring be the season for being Descartes-like, and autumn the time for becoming Ghazali-like!
Link to the post with Eyvaz Taha’s note attached on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/ruzbeh.saadati/posts/861307477249076