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Ibn 'Arabi and Modern Thought
Extract from Chapter 3: Ibn 'Arabi and the era
Both modernist and postmodernist theories of knowledge are human intellectual constructions which, if we are to follow the warnings of Ibn 'Arabi, cannot arrive at decisive certainty concerning knowledge of the Real. Modernism extols the efficacy of human reason and postmodernism affirms its inevitable relativity. Both are simply theories of knowledge which, from the point of view of Akbarian metaphysics, lack the theophanic epistemological credentials of wahdat al-wujud.
When Giddens asserts that "modernity is enigmatic at its core, and there seems to be no way the enigma can be 'overcome' ", he is perhaps not only attesting to the inability of the circularity of reason to overcome this enigma but implicitly recognising also the boundaries of reason's own proper playing field. According to Ibn 'Arabi it is a kind of progress for reason to recognize its own epistemological boundaries, for it attests to the incapacity of human beings to reach knowledge of the Real via unaided reason.
The enigma of modernity can therefore be seen as an indication that we take seriously the possibility of alternative epistemic means of grasping and recognising the significance of the era. We can therefore be reminded of what George Berkeley in The Principle of Human Knowledge records, "We should believe that God has dealt more bountifully with the sons of men than to give to them a strong desire for that knowledge which he had placed quite out of their reach."
For Ibn 'Arabi, the modern era with its particular determining qualities of science, technology, calculative rationality, globalization, its polytheism of values and its matrix of meta-narratives testifies, like all eras, to the ontological fact "Each day He [God] is upon some task". The unique configuration of predominating qualities of the modern era which constitute what the historian Eric Hobsbawn described as "the greatest transformation in history since remote times" are none other than part of the infinity and inherent contents of the Self-disclosure of Being in Its love to be known. To envisage the era in this manner, or to contextualize it from the universal point of view of Ibn 'Arabi, is not to alter phenomena – for they are what they are – but to begin to see "the theatre of manifestation" from its own point of origin and essence rather than it being coloured by the predisposition of a particular theorizer.
That such a universal wisdom is essentially possible and attainable is at the heart of Ibn 'Arabi's metaphysics.
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