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Quest of Reality Quest of Reality D. R. Khashaba “Quest of Reality,” by D.R. Khashaba. ISBN 978-1-62137-252-3. Published 2013 by Virtualbookworm.com Publishing Inc., P.O. Box 9949, College Station, TX 77842, US. 2013, D.R. Khashaba. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of D.R. Khashaba. Manufactured in the United States of America. CONTENTS PREFACE………………………………………………………..i I IN THE BEGINNING…………………………………..1 II THE IONIAN VENTURE……………………..………17 III SOCRATES.……………………………………………31 IV PLATO…………………………………………………45 V ARISTOTLE…………………………………………...61 VI SPINOZA………………………………………………65 VII KANT…………………………………………………..75 VIII WHITEHEAD……………………………………...…115 IX REALITY………………………………………..........131 X PHILOSOPHICAL THINKING………………….......139 XI REASON, RATIONALISM, AND RATIONALITY...159 XII EMPIRICISM…………………………………………175 XIII THE SOUL……………………………………………187 XIV GOD…………………………………………………..199 XV TIME, DURATION, AND ETERNITY……………...211 XVI THREE METAPHYSICAL PRINCIPLES…………...225 XVII CREATIVE ETERNITY……………………………...241 XVIII HUMANITY …………………………………………249 Annex I: AN INTERVIEW…………………………….…..…257 Annex II: THOUGHTS ON LANGUAGE…………...………265 PREFACE This book offers a philosophy. Yes, a philosophy. For that is all any philosopher has ever given or can ever give: a personal, private vision of life, of the world, of Reality. Embedded in the vision here presented is the view of the nature of philosophical thinking implicit in these preceding words. We can say, then, that this book has a dual theme: a special view of the nature of philosophical thinking and, conformably with that view, a special vision of Reality. This, like all of my books and other writings, is a personal statement. I make no pretence of learning. My sources are a limited selection, largely dictated by chance, of such classics as are accessible to all. I do not count this among my misfortunes. Every single truly good book raises all the fundamental questions that face humanity, and the true value of such a book does not reside in any conclusions it reaches, but in the challenge it offers the reader to wrestle with those fundamental questions herself or himself and articulate her or his own position. I have often found more enlightenment and inspiration in re-reading a book I had read before – perhaps more than once before – than in ten new books. So in this book I give my personal account of my wrestling with the questions that have puzzled all thinking humans from the beginning and this personal account is not offered for acceptance, but as an incitement and a challenge to help the reader puzzle on, for it is in this ferment of puzzling that we live as thinking human beings. There is nothing in this book that I have not already said before in essence. My main purpose here has been to highlight the two features of my philosophy that, being opposed to common acceptations, readers find difficult to absorb despite all my insistence and reiteration: (1) the oracular nature of i philosophy and, in consequence, the essentially mythical character of philosophical expression; (2) the principle of creativity as an original dimension of reality which alone renders free will possible and renders becoming intelligible. The book traces the human quest for Reality from the first gropings of primitive humans through the speculations of modern philosophers to my own confessedly personal vision. Chapter one, “In the Beginning”, gives a sketchy outline of the human quest of Reality in the earliest times. No erudition or originality is claimed. This is a simple outline drawn from commonly available sources. Chapter two, “The Ionian Venture”, a brief survey of the earliest Greek philosophers. Again, no pretence of scholarship or originality, though the interpretation may be ‘personal’. Chapter three, “Socrates” and chapter four, “Plato”: In these two chapters I claim to offer an original interpretation, opposed to the mainstream academic reading, laying the foundation for my original version of Platonism. Chapters five to eight on Aristotle, Spinoza, Kant, and Whitehead respectively: I show my agreements and disagreements with these four great thinkers to develop my own vision. My intention is neither expository nor critical; my approach is not scholarly and I have no use for ‘secondary literature’. Chapter nine, “Reality”, mainly explaining my special terminology where I distinguish between and oppose ‘reality’ and ‘existence’, a distinction which I think is needed to clear much confusion in philosophical thinking. Chapter ten, “Philosophical Thinking”, expounding one of two radically original features in my philosophy, namely, the oracular nature of philosophy. The other feature is what I call the Principle of Creativity. Chapters eleven and twelve are critical of Analytical and Empirical approaches in philosophy. Chapters thirteen to eighteen, “The Soul”, “God”, “Time, Duration, and Eternity”, “Three Metaphysical Principles”, “Creative Eternity”, ii “Humanity”, these six chapters give the substance of my special philosophy. The two annexes are self-explanatory. The method I followed in composing this book gives parts of it a chaotic shape. It consists mostly of distinct passages or reflections arranged under various headings. All the passages taken together form a consistent and integrated whole but successive passages are not always linked consequentially. To have tried to streamline the whole would have required more effort and time than one past his mid-eighties could reasonably expect to have at his disposal. Nevertheless I proudly, one might say arrogantly, aver that the book presents a system of philosophy in the grand manner that has been out of fashion for nearly a century but that I believe is the only genuine form of philosophy worth the name. D. R. Khashaba Sixth-October City, Egypt, 6 March 2013 iii CHAPTER ONE IN THE BEGINNING I. RELIGION, SCIENCE, AND PHILOSOPHY We cannot know what the earliest members of the human species thought or what they experienced. Moreover, as it is not really possible to draw a sharp line to mark the emergence of the human species, it is futile to speculate – and utterly idiotic to dogmatize – on the subjective condition of our animal kin. But we may perhaps safely say that religion accompanied the emergence of humans from the very start. For we can imagine that when humans found themselves encompassed by a world harsh, bountiful, hostile, friendly, mysterious, all at once, they must have been awed and puzzled. The roaring thunder was a more frightful animal than the roaring lion and the raging storm was as fierce an enemy as the deadly tiger. The sun that brought warmth and light was as gracious as the cooling and refreshing stream, as the tree that freely gave its fruit. More close at home, woman for 1 Quest of Reality man and man for woman were no less puzzling, no less propitious, at times no less menacing. We can understand how humans worked out myths to explain the puzzle of the sun waning, dying, and being swallowed up on one side and then coming up again on the other side; the puzzle of water falling from the sky above; and the ultimate puzzle of death. We can understand how humans sought, by gifts and supplications, to appease the angry god in the dark cloud that thundered and hurled bolts of fire from on high; to propitiate the willful sky-water; to ensure the goodwill of the sun-god. From the start these two parallel strains stood side by side in all religion: the attempt to explain, to understand, how things came about and the attempt to conciliate the powers behind the things. The explanatory myth-making produced dogmatic beliefs and the attempt to influence and win over the forces and powers controlling the natural processes produced the rites, rituals, and forms of worship in the various religions. In time the urge to find explanations and to understand broke loose from the confines of religion and developed into science and philosophy: again twins that issued from the same womb but each having a distinct character and destined to have a distinct life history. Primitive peoples did not have to infer or to hypostatize the existence of gods. They were all the time confronting the gods, coming in contact with them. The gods are the forces beyond our control. There are benevolent gods and there are malevolent gods. When the gods were personalized and gathered in a pantheon, it was natural that there should be chief gods and a first-ranking god. At first there were several different ways in which the world was thought to have come about. Some time, in certain cultures, the chief god had a hand in shaping the world. It seems that only the Hebrews had the preposterous idea that their favorite god (or the god who favored them) made the world out of nothing — an idea absurd in itself and which leaves the 2 In the Beginning problem of the origin of things exactly where it was in the beginning. To go back to the gods that primitive peoples knew — when modern science advanced considerably in the art of manipulating and directing those ‘gods’ – a process which had begun very early in the human venture – scientists foolishly thought that they had emptied those gods of life: they created the myth of matter and the useful fiction of mechanical forces was believed to be the whole truth; what is more, those forces were believed to be completely subject to the ‘laws’ the scientists formulated for them. Kant’s insightful but half-hearted ‘Copernican revolution’ did not open the eyes of the Empiricists drunk with the strong wine of their practical successes. When Wittgenstein wrote, “The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena” (Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus, 6.371), his heresy was indulgently overlooked because of his earlier fervent declaration of faith — though it is hard to say faith in what.
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