The material in this blog is now available at amazon.com under the title: Ideas Inspired by the Qur’an.
As you read these thoughts about GOD, Truth, creation, subjects, objects, and so on, you may well wonder what good any of it is for our day-to-day lives. What difference does it make whether we believe this or that about the world, when the upshot is that we go on living the same way? A famous historian (now much discredited, unfortunately) who wrote The Decline of the West made the same point, and with greater flair and vehemence.
With his typical magisterial disdain, Oswald Spengler* pronounces his verdict on what he considers the pseudo-life of the mind:
* I am quoting Spengler here because he makes his point about practicality versus theory more forcefully than anyone I know, and does it with a stentorian élan and stimulating disregard for polite opinion that I have long enjoyed. He remains one of my favourite authors (whom I first discovered in my 20s while living abroad), despite his obvious arrogance and bias, academic missteps, and extreme generalizations. I cannot help but admire his audacious rhetoric and the thrust and flow of his ideas; they remind me of the same stern tone of fearless passion for truth that we find in the Qur’an.
There are born destiny-men and causality-men. A whole world separates the purely living man . . . from the man who is destined either by the power of his mind or the defect of his blood to be an “intellectual” – the saint, priest, savant, idealist, or ideologue. . . .
Destiny has made the man so or so – subtle and fact-shy, or active and contemptuous of thought. But the man of the active category is a whole man, whereas in the contemplative a single organ can operate without (and even against) the body. All the worse, then, when this organ tries to master actuality as well as its own world, for then we get all those ethico-politico-social reform-projects [sic] which demonstrate, unanswerably, how things ought to be and how to set about making them so . . . Such theories, even when they have taken the field armed with the full authority of a religion or the prestige of a famous name, have not in one single instance effected the slightest alteration in life. They have merely caused us to think otherwise than before about life. . . .
For, in the last resort, only the active man, the man of destiny, lives in the actual world, the world of political, military, and economic decisions, in which concepts and systems do not figure or count. . . .
Men of theory commit a huge mistake in believing that their place is at the head and not in the train of great events. . . . He [i.e. the man of theory] belongs with his principles and programs to no history but the history of a literature. Real history passes judgement on him not by controverting the theorist, but by leaving him and all his thoughts to himself. A Plato or a Rousseau – not to mention the smaller intellects – could build up abstract political structures, but for Alexander, Scipio, Caesar, and Napoleon, with their schemes and battles and settlements, they were entirely without importance. The thinker could discuss destiny if he liked; it was enough for these men to be destiny.1
Spengler’s pontifical style of emphasis and exaggeration is on full display here, but he nevertheless manages to clear away the low-lying intellectual shrubbery that conceals what many contemporary leaders probably believe about themselves and their mastery of events. You will not find this kind of discourse in today’s mass media, for to admit it would be to negate the very purpose of the media. To discover it in any book is refreshing . . . and unsustainable. It ultimately refutes itself, and Spengler manages to render his sweeping statements absurd in the very act of making them.
What does it mean to make “decisions, in which concepts and systems do not figure or count”? How can one decide anything without the aid of concepts or conceptual structures, i.e. systems? When an act takes place in the heat of the moment, without a conscious theory backing it up, the concepts that come into play are merely those that one never questions because they lie more deeply in one’s disposition and habits.
Or again, if “real history” metaphorically “passes judgement” on a thought by leaving it behind, then what about the course that it does take? Was there not an alternative set of thoughts – perhaps only affirmation of the status quo or the calculations of self-interest – informing that judgement as well? Maybe the idealism of Plato is too rarefied to be applied in the “actual world”. But is the rough-and-ready practice of countless minds agreeing on a path of least resistance, based on their experience, any less conceptual? A principle is no less a principle for being unwritten and by consensus, and a scheme conceived by Alexander or Napoleon is still a program.
1 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, translated by C.F. Atkinson, vol. 2, pp. 16-18 passim.
The GOD You Already Know 