Desacralization of knowledge
In traditionalist philosophy, desacralization of knowledge or secularization of knowledge is the process of separation of knowledge from its perceived divine source—God or the Ultimate Reality. The process reflects a paradigm shift in modern conception of knowledge in that it has rejected divine revelations as well as the idea of spiritual and metaphysical foundations of knowledge, confining knowledge to empirical domain and reason alone.
The theme of desacralization frequently appears among Traditionalist writers, starting with French metaphysician René Guénon, who earlier spoke of "the limitation of knowledge to its lowest order." Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr most notably examined and defined the process of desacralization of knowledge in his 1981 Gifford Lectures, which were later published as Knowledge and the Sacred.
Origin of the concept
The theme of desacralization of knowledge has been an important topic among writers of the traditionalist school, going back to the French mystic and intellectual René Guénon, who previously spoke of "the limitation of knowledge to its lowest order", that is, the reduction of knowledge to "the empirical and analytic study". However, the systematic conceptualization of the desacralization of knowledge or secularization of knowledge was first introduced by the Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr in his 1981 Gifford Lectures. These lectures were subsequently published as a book titled "Knowledge and the Sacred".Themes
According to Nasr, desacralization of knowledge is one of the most significant aspects of secularism, which he defines as "everything whose origin is merely human and therefore non-divine and whose metaphysical basis lies in ontological hiatus between man and God". The core idea of desacralization of knowledge is that modern civilization has lost the transcendent dimensions of knowledge, which are based on revelation and intellection, by confining knowledge solely to rational and empirical domains.In Nasr's exposition, the terms "to know" and "knowledge" forfeit their unidimensional character. In his view, knowledge proceeds in a hierarchical order from empirical and rational modes of knowing to the supreme form of knowledge which he calls the "unitive knowledge" or "al-ma’rifah". Similarly, "to know" begins with ratiocination and progresses to intellection, a process that entails the attainment of spiritual knowledge through the human intellect—the perceived "universal faculty which is within the individual yet transcends his individuality". Nasr argues that while human beings possess the intellect, which is a divine gift that shines within their being, they are unable to fully utilize this gift because they have become too distant from their original nature or fitrah. He contends that as knowledge is inseparable from being, it is inherently connected to the sacred, which is synonymous with the Ultimate Reality. To be human is to know, which ultimately means knowing the Supreme Self—God—who is the source of all knowledge and consciousness. According to Nasr, it is the post-medieval process of secularization and a humanism that have eventually forced the separation of knowledge from being and intelligence from the Sacred, which "is both the Knower and the Known, inner consciousness and outer reality".
In Nasr's view, modern science has reduced multiple domains of reality to a psycho-physical one. In the absence of a spiritual vision, science is said to become concerned with changes in the material world alone. According to this viewpoint, since modern science has rejected the notion of a hierarchy of being, scientific theories and discoveries are no longer capable of appreciating the truths that belong to a higher order of reality. Nasr thus views modern science as an "incomplete" or a "superficial science" that is only concerned with certain parts of reality while invalidating others. It is believed to be founded on the distinction between the knowing subject and the known object. This perspective maintains that modern science has lost its symbolic spirit and the transcendental dimension because it has repudiated the role of intellect in pursuing knowledge and truth by adopting a purely quantitative method. Nasr blames secularism for the desacralization of science and knowledge. In this process, science and knowledge is said to become separated, losing the uniformity that they had in the form of traditional sacred knowledge. According to Nasr, the structure of reality remains constant, but human perception and vision of that reality change. Modern Western philosophy, with no perceived sense of permanence, has reduced reality to a temporal process. According to Jane I. Smith, this reductionism is what Nasr identifies as the desacralization of knowledge and the loss of the sense of the sacred, necessitating a choice between a form of knowledge that tends to focus on change, multiplicity, and outwardness, and "one that integrates change within the eternal, multiplicity within unity, and outward facts within inward principles."
Historical development
The process of desacralization of knowledge began with the ancient Greeks. According to Nasr, the rationalists and skeptics of ancient Greek philosophical traditions played a major role in the process of desacralization by reducing knowledge either to ratiocination or to cognitive exercise. In substituting reason for intellect and sensuous knowledge for inner illumination, the Greeks pioneered the process of desacralization of knowledge. Other major stages in the process of desacralization include the formation of Renaissance philosophical systems that had developed a concept of nature, which is independent and self-creative. The process, however, reached its climax in the thought of René Descartes, "the father of modern Western philosophy," who "made thinking of the individual ego the center of reality and criterion of all knowledge". Thereafter, knowledge eventually became rooted in the cogito.According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography:
In his contribution to the volume of the Library of Living Philosophers, which was devoted to Nasr's life and thought, Liu Shu-hsien, a Neo-Confucian philosopher, writes:
One "powerful instrument" of desacralization in history includes the theory of evolution, which according to Nasr "is a desperate attempt to substitute a set of horizontal, material causes in a unidimensional world to explain effects whose causes belong to other levels of reality, to the vertical dimensions of existence". He says the theory of evolution, and its use by modernists and liberal theologians including Aurobindo Ghose and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin has been a "major force" in the process of desacralization of knowledge. According to David Burrell, the "roots of the betrayal" may be found "on the other side of Descartes", in the high scholasticism that includes the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and Duns Scotus. According to Nasr, their syntheses "tended to become over-rationalistic in imprisoning intuitions of a metaphysical order in syllogistic categories which were to hide, rather than reveal, their properly speaking intellectual rather than purely rational character".