Mohamed El-Tahir El-Mesawi

Regardless of the multiple factors that were in play and that finally shaped the historical destiny and cultural character of Europe from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, reason and science emerged as the crowned twins with whom ultimate authority should rest. The reason that was now claiming universality for its principles and dictates was one whose bêtes noires – tradition, authority, emotion, example, etc. – had to be confronted and fiercely combated.2 As for science, it found its model in physics as philosophically conceptualized by Descartes and mathematically formulated by Newton in terms of his clock-like, self-sufficient universe.

Accordingly, beliefs and values could only be sanctioned if they pass the test of reason and science. Reality and truth are only what can be vindicated by the canons of reason and measured by the yardstick of science. This is all well and fine, but it is not the actual problem. Indeed, throughout its age-long experience mankind has always resorted to reason and science, no matter how both reason and science might have been conceived in different civilizations and by different peoples. Humans throughout their long history have done so in order to vindicate their beliefs and values, to understand their position in the world, to comprehend reality and truth, to regulate the affairs of their life, and to deal with nature and the different realms of existence.

What has really characterized reason and science within the context of Western modernity and constituted their problem at the same time, is their reductionist secular and materialistic orientation. Driven by a desire to free values from the parochialism that allegedly surrounded them in so-called pre-modern societies and cultures, the process of rationalization resulted in the deconsecration of values and desacralization of life. Due to a strong drive to demystify and control nature and attain certainty in knowing it, science ended up limiting nature to physical phenomena and equating the latter with the quantifiable that can and must ultimately be subsumed under precise mathematical equations.

Thus, reason, with its universal canons and ontological principles as advocated by early philosophical theorists of modernity such as Descartes, was progressively receding in favor of a conception of human rationality in which it was narrowly identified with science. The narrowing of human rationality and reason was based on “the enormous metaphysical assumption that the reality to which science has access is the whole of reality.” This means that human beings “have no other source of knowledge nor any other means of reasoning.” A doctrine or ideology of scientism thus emerged whose first victim was universal reason itself. Likewise, human rationality had to be “subordinated to contemporary science whatever it may happen to be saying.” It followed from this that philosophy and rationality became “the handmaiden of science rather than its rational underpinning.” This, indeed, was a major development of modernity towards reductionism in human knowledge and vision of the world. This reductionism sought to bring “everything down to the level of physical explanation.”3 By reducing rationality from a holistic outlook to a physicalist conception of the world and reality and by making reason a mere instrument of science as patterned after physics, modernity left the door wide open to relativism in the various aspects of thought and life.

Perhaps one of the most devastating outcomes of these developments can be seen in the loss of meaning that has pervaded almost all aspects of human life. Even physical objects, which in the beginning constituted the subject of study for the natural sciences, have been torn asunder and no more constitute an objective reality. This has been further consolidated and given more philosophical grounding by revolutionary developments in the physical and natural sciences. Quantum mechanics, in particular, “deprived matter of the solidity it was thought to possess”4 and destructively affected “the program of modern philosophy.”5 The subject-matter of scientific knowledge itself was now at stake. Actually, “the very notion of an objective nature of the world independent of our knowledge of it came under attack.”6 Thus, “scientific knowledge is no longer knowledge of things as they are ‘out there’ in an objective world but only in relation to an observer. In a sense, we see what we expect to see in accordance with our own mental patterns.”7 Under these circumstances, it is only natural to speak about the eclipse and end of reason, to bid farewell to it, or to announce the end of science, and, indeed, to herald the end of everything including modernity itself.8

This situation, a logical consequence of modernity’s own fundamental premises, has been severely aggravated by post-modern trends. In modernity’s project reason was assigned the position of authority and was therefore considered the reference for human thought and life, while science taught us that there was some rationality and hence a certain structure in the world. By contrast, post-modernity has almost done away with all that. As it pulled man out of his traditional worldviews and value systems, modernity promised him alternatives that would be based on reason and enlightened by science. It did not thus deprive him totally of a frame of reference and certain absolutes in which to ground himself and his experience. Post-modernism, on the contrary, is effecting a real dislocation of the human condition and experience. This dislocation is tied up with a number of assumptions about reality that go “far beyond mere relativism.” One main feature of post-modernist thought with its new assumptions is that “things and events do not have intrinsic meaning” and that there is “only continuous interpretation of the world.”9 Accordingly, reality, whether natural or social,10 has always to be invented and reconstructed time and again. Nothing has truth or meaning in itself. Everything is in permanent flux. The only absolute is total “fluidity” and permanent change. For post-modernist thinkers such as Jean François Lyotard, the epistemological mark of “post-modernity is the loss of authoritative conceptual structures to serve as the “foundation” of rational knowledge.”11 Regardless of the various brands of post-modernism that writers have tried to map out, one of them seems to hold sway over the others. It is a kind of post-modernism characterized by absolute relativism according to which “objective truth is intolerable and non-existent.”

In this brand of post-modernism, “not only is any transcendent center of reality disavowed, but the unrelieved flux that replaces it has no center.”12 As many postmodernist philosophers tell us, humanity is at present experiencing the total collapse of all grand narratives (i.e., religion, philosophical systems, ideologies, etc.), which in the past underpinned and sustained human experience and consciousness.

Thus, if modernity advocated a reductionist, materialist and secular view of the world, post-modernity is advocating a completely fragmented world in which there is no anchoring point for human consciousness and experience. Not only has the object fallen apart, but the subject himself has also vanished. Instead of modernity’s subject, who of course implies the existence of an object, invention is being made of “a floating individual with no distinct reference points or parameters.”13

In the wake of modernity’s struggle against tradition and religion, man was left without heart and soul, but at least it was said that reason and its time-honored ally, science, would take care of him. Now post-modernity is cutting up his head and stripping him of his mind. What is then left is a soulless and mindless body that is being pampered by a sweeping culture of consumerism and nihilism. With the post-modern turn of mind, the problem has assumed alarmingly more dangerous dimensions. The evil-guided, power-thirsty, and business-oriented manipulations of genetic engineering are indeed precipitating humanity not only into the unknown, but also into the assuredly destructive.14 Thus, it is no more a question of increasing dehumanization as René Dubos, for example, long ago complained.15 The problem now is not that we are facing the end of man in the philosophical and sociological sense that had appeared to Michel Foucault in his archeological critique of modern social sciences.16 In what seems to be a reconsideration of his thesis on the end of history, Francis Fukuyama has actually warned against what he considers the most significant threat from biotechnology consisting in the possibility of altering human nature and thereby moving the world into a “post-human” stage of history. Thus, we are informed that we are ushering towards man’s end in a psychological, biological, and physical sense.17

It is, in my opinion, against this intellectual and historical background that Bennabi’s severe criticism of Cartesian rationalism and his strong rejection of scientism in his book The Qur’anic Phenomenon can better be appreciated. With the foresight of a visionary, he was able to discern to what consequences Descartes’ rationalism and the scientism whose philosophical foundations he was laying down could ultimately lead. In criticizing the Cartesian rationalist doctrine, Bennabi’s concern was not in fact with Descartes’ belief or disbelief, nor was he having any problem with reason and science as such. What was of the utmost concern for Bennabi was the conception of reason and science as utterly antithetical to religion and revelation. His argument in The Qur’anic Phenomenon and in other works too is unmistakably informed by a sharp awareness of what may be called modernity’s self-negation, which included almost all its major ’isms, including even its most cherished notions of rationalism, humanism, and scientism.18

This self-negation can only be seen as a logical consequence of modernity’s fundamental inclination towards magnification. In other words, the magnification, for instance, of reason and science led to an absolutizing of the scientific worldview and to a belief in the absolute capability of human reason and power to control nature and history and to answer all the ultimate questions that have never ceased to be of serious concern for the human mind. Understandably, this magnification and absolutizing could only take place with the price of rejecting all supernatural or extra-human authority and negating all transcendent reality. By rejecting divine authority and negating metaphysical reality as expressed in Nietzsche’s infamous announcement of the death of God, modernity, to put it in Bennabi’s terms, had to fall into a process of deifying other entities, thereby absolutizing other authorities. But once it is realized that those absolutized authorities and deified entities cannot provide the promised panacea, the only alternative is to lose faith in them and to usher in the post-modern age with its absolute fluidity and continuous flux.

Dr. Mohamed El-Tahir El-Mesawi is associated with the Department of Fiqh and Usul al-Fiqh,
International Islamic University – Malaysia, Gombak campus.
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