Across the River: On the Poetry of Mak Dizdar

Notes

Notes Preface 1. The Philosophia perennis is primarily concerned with the unity of the Principle and the principle of Unity. This is the question of God’s reality as the essence of the manifold of being. This reality is such that it is manifest both mediately and immediately. The question of immediate knowledge of the real is the heart of the perennial philosophy. That some individuals have such knowledge and that they pass it on to others as doctrine, ritual, and virtue may be accepted or rejected. Both responses have been made throughout the history of humankind. As is evident from the now generally accepted name for this phenomenon, the philosophia perennis relates to wisdom or Sophia. Such wisdom has always existed at the core of the various religions and traditional philosophies. Wisdom is one, but it has found expression in different languages. The love of wisdom is the love of God as Wise, a love which leads away from separation, as He has no other. The purpose of perennial philosophy is to establish, maintain, and strengthen human connection with the Divine. Given that human existence derives from God as Perfect, our goal can be nothing less than perfection. This is our potential. It does not depend, in principle, on the circumstances of our lives: it is a matter of human being as such. Circumstances may facilitate or hinder our discovery or distortion of our original perfection. They cannot, however, destroy or render entirely impossible the realization of the purpose of humanity. Accordingly, the perennial philosophy is not a matter of history or the future, which lie beyond the reality of any given self: it is, above all and beyond all, a matter of our individual self-realization. The ontology, metaphysics, cosmology, anthropology, and psychology of the perennial 218 / Notes to pages x–7 philosophy affect our self realization in our highest moment—the discovery of ourselves as fully in God’s image. On the history of the concept of the philosophia perennis in the West see: Schmitt, Perennial Philosophy: from Steuco to Leibnitz. For more on this and the perennial philosophy itself, see the following works: Schuon, Islam and Perennial Philosophy; Guénon, Man and His Becoming according to the Vedanta; idem, The Multiple States of Being; Schmitt, Studies in Renaissance Philosophy and Science; Lings, The Eleventh Hour; idem, Symbol and Archetype; Nasr, Knowledge and the Sacred; idem, Islamic Philosophy from its Origin to the Present; Pallis, The Way and the Mountain; Perry, The Treasury of Traditional Wisdom; Burckhardt , Fez, City of Islam; Idem, Chartres and the Birth of the Cathedral; Smith, Forgotten Truth; Laibelman, The Other Perennial Philosophy; Chittick , The Heart of Islamic Philosophy; Veljačič, Philosophia Perennis; Huxley , The Perennial Philosophy; Schmidt-Biggemann, Philosophia Perennis; Kazemi, Paths to Transcendence. I: Prologue 1. It was Hegel’s view that the historical process was not an indeterminate flux, oriented to no particular destination, but would attain its end with the creation of a really existing this-worldly free society. This would be the so-called ‘‘end of history.’’ Hegel expounded his understanding of history in the lectures that go under the name of The Philosophy of History (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree, New York, Dover Publications, 1956). Hegel’s legacy has been transferred, for the most part, via Karl Marx, who used it for his own purposes . Marx shared Hegel’s belief in the ‘‘end of history.’’ Hegel believed that alienation—the division of man against himself and his subsequent loss of control over his destiny—would be adequately resolved at the end of history , through the philosophical recognition of the freedom possible in the liberal state. Marx, by contrast, took the view that in the liberal state, man remained alienated from himself, because his creation, capital, had become his master, ruling over him. For the Marxist, the ‘‘end of history’’ would come only with the victory of the true, ‘‘universal class’’ of the proletariat and the consequent realization of the global communist utopia, which would end the class war, once and for all. For more detail on the Marxist reformulation of the ‘‘end of history’’ see: Shlomo Avineri, The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971. 2. Qur’an 2:255. 3. Imam al-Bukhari, Sahih al-Bukhari, trans. Muhammad Muhsin Khan, 9 vols. (Beirut: Dal al-Arabia, 1985), 8:336–337. I.1. The Poet 1. Formally speaking, the language, meanings, and symbols deployed in...