Self, Other and Nothingness in Western Philosophy and in Islamic Mysticism

This chapter sympathetically examines Kenan Gürsoy’s comparison of Islamic mysticism (tasavvuf) and twentieth-century French existentialism. It argues that the Western dichotomy between self and world, found in Descartes and Sartre, undermines the possibility of meaning and freedom. Drawing on İlham Dilman’s “affective solipsism” and Wittgenstein’s “attitude towards a soul,” the chapter contends that the tasavvuf understanding of “nothingness” avoids such a dichotomy, enabling a person’s realization of being through dynamic interaction with the world.

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Abstract

This chapter explores Kenan Gürsoy’s attempted comparison between Islamic mysticism (tasavvuf) and twentieth century French existentialism. Kenan Gürsoy is a contemporary Turkish thinker whose recent book entitled Etik ve Tasavvuf (English: Ethics and Tasavvuf ) explores similarities as well as differences between the two perspectives mentioned above. The present chapter is a sympathetic analysis of Gürsoy’s main line of thinking and attempts to strengthen it and elaborate further upon it. For this purpose it introduces İlham Dilman’s notion of “affective solipsism” as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s much discussed notion of “an attitude towards a soul.” It argues that the Western dichotomy between the self and the world—seen in both Descartes and Sartre—cancels out the possibility of sense and, so, inevitably of freedom, as well. It also suggests that the understanding of “nothingness” present in the tasavvuf is not infected by such a dichotomy; consequently, that it can enable a person’s realization of being through a dynamic interaction with the world.