Sacred Science vs. the Machine: Nasr on Nature, Technology & Modernity

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What if modernity's greatest crime isn't economic or political, but spiritual, a severing of humanity from the sacred language written into nature itself? In this episode, Serpetie and Emma dig into Seyyed Hossein Nasr's 1993 collection The Need for a Sacred Science, taking a critical look at his perennialist argument that the harmony, symbols, and laws of the natural world carry an ontological reality that modern scientific reductionism has all but destroyed. The conversation moves through Nasr's critique of technological progress, the idol of innovation, and some surprising common ground with Deleuze, James Hillman, and anti-civilization thought, including what any of this means in the age of AI. Part two goes deeper into Nasr's sacred order and its tensions with strife and Nietzschean cosmology, and that one is for Patreon subscribers only. Link below.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Hey everyone, welcome back to Left Hand. Today's episode comes to you in two parts, or at least the second part will be waiting for you over on our Patreon. If you are a subscriber, Emma and I have been sitting with the work of Syed Hussein Nasser, specifically several essays from his 1993 collection, The Need for a Sacred Science. We're taking a critical look at Nasser's argument, among many others in the book, that modernity has severed us from the spiritual significance of nature, and what it might mean to recover that. Speaking of which, if these themes are grabbing you in today's episode, Emma has a course coming up at Acid Horizon Research Comments on anti-civilization thought starting on August 4th. And we've got one kicking off on July 7th on Nietzsche, Marx, Batai, and the Myth of Dionysus. Links for all of those courses are in the description. All right, let's get into it. And don't forget that part two is on Patreon. Let's listen. I'm not sure yet. We haven't done anything exclusively for patrons in a while. And I think this one is a good one because, well, for one, we're doing this as a more casual discussion. And number two, this material I'm a little less surefooted in. This is really both yours and my first contact with the work of Syed Hossein Nasser and this book from the 1990s, entitled The Need for a Sacred Science. And we want to introduce who Nasser is and why we picked this particular text. And it'll all become very clear in a moment. But one thing that Emma and I have been talking about for a while now is tackling the opposition, as it were, which is to say, looking at figures that aren't necessarily on the left and really just unpacking certain claims and seeing perhaps what the problem or challenge with embracing these views are. And this particular book, I think is important for us or stands out as a paradigmatic case because it talks about the excesses of modernity, technology, and so forth. And I think it ties almost directly, like while we were reading it, like I said to you, Emma, I think this ties in very closely with some of the work that you're doing in your upcoming course on anti-civilization. And before I just give the rundown on Nasser, maybe just say a few things about your upcoming course and like what this text did for you in relation to other things that you're working with.

SPEAKER_00 3:02

There's a paradox at the core of the very premise of a course that is about anti-Sid literature. The idea of teaching an academic course, something approximate to a traditional college course on anti-Sid, it's it's interesting because this is a body of literature that doesn't cohere by a particular set of epistemic, ontological, metaphysical, ideological principles. It resists its own institutionalization. And this is the point of departure for me. I'm not teaching this course as somebody who subscribes to anti-sifgot. I'm not teaching it as somebody who is strictly critical of it, but I want to treat it both on its own terms, which means looking at specific authors and specific texts in their own context, but also as an epistemic object, insofar as it's outside of institutional norms. And in the most radical sense, I think that anything we could call a coherent body of literature could be. And again, by coherent, I don't mean that it's in internally coherent, but it's at least its own thing enough to deserve this particular category. So the question of treating it as an objective knowledge that is sort of an ultimate confound to institutionalized knowledge is where we'll be starting from. And as I was reading through this through this recording, reading through the need for a sacred science, I kept thinking about Nasser's views on representation, that which can be represented, that which accommodates Western scientific epistemologies and the science that does not, which is the science he's arguing for, that needs to be reintegrated into our image of science. Thinking about the relationship between representation, what can be made manifest, what can be manipulated, quantified, and so on, and institutionalization, and thinking about what all of this means for religion as an institution, because this is fundamentally a work of religious philosophy. So I've been considering assigning some of this for the course. I'm I'm still not 100% sure about that. But if I do it, uh it it would be from that interest, thinking about what the challenge of the unrepresentable looks like in what's normally considered anti-Sit and how the unrepresentable for Nasser and his way of understanding Islamic thought and how it relates to his views on scientific knowledge. This would sort of be a a bit of a case study in that.

SPEAKER_01 6:16

Yeah, and so just to get clear about the particular book that we're looking at, the title, like we've said, is The Need for a Sacred Science. Emma and I looked at two particular chapters, chapter eight, the spiritual significance of nature. And we also looked at the concept of human progress through material evolution, a traditional critique. After having paged through, and I have to say, I have a very complicated relationship with this book. I would say there's a certain philosophical approach and tendency that I just reflexively engender when I contact something like this that immediately throws out all of the critical darts, so to speak. But from a distance, and dare I say, this book has an aura, which I'm quite comfortable inside. And there's something about it that that that really draws you. Nasser's a beautiful writer, and this might be a trite thing to say, but he thinks beautiful thoughts. I just don't know if all of the claims are necessarily true. But we can dig into that. And maybe just a few things first about why we picked Syed Hussein Nasser. For those of you who know me personally, of course, you know my boundless affinity for the music of Boards of Canada, namely the their newer album, Inferno. On the track Prophecy at 1420 megahertz, there is this distorted, vocoded voice that comes in in the middle of the track and begins speaking these sort of ominous, prophetic statements. And what these particular clips and words and phrases, where they come from, is a track that was sampled from Nasser's 2003 Harvard Divinity School lecture. And I think it's interesting that for the Boards of Canada obsessives out there, immediately this video probably had something on the order of like maybe 13,000 views over a period of like 10 or 15 years and now has like hundreds of thousands of views. So this particular, I maybe I'm wrong about that. I'll have to take a look. But it's just interesting to me when a cultural phenomenon, such as this long overdue release by Boards of Canada, centers this particular thinker in the the first track. Like the question for me is like, okay, maybe they just did it for the vibes, maybe it's a cool lecture, but now we've all taken notice of this figure, and Nasser, that is, and his philosophy. And so just a little bit about him, just pulling from like the Wikipedia here. He was born in Tehran, 1933. I believe he's still alive. So he would be in his 90s. He trained as a physicist and geologist at MIT and Harvard before he pivoted to philosophy and Islamic studies. He was the University Professor of Islamic Studies at George Washington University. And we would call him a perennialist or a traditionalist, alongside figures like Gwynon or Titus Burkhart. And interestingly, he was exiled from Iran after the 1979 revolution and has taught in the US ever since. And so the question is: what is a perennialist? So it's the view essentially that all of the great spiritual traditions share this common metaphysical core or thread, the Philosophia perennis. And this is not meant as a kind of relativistic view. It's this idea that there is this central truth in the cosmos, but it's one that is projected through the prism of the many religions that exist. And maybe this is one of the things that we'll get into a little bit, because what we see in these particular chapters, well, at least the religions that I see tend to be the monotheistic religions of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and references to Buddhism and Hinduism and so forth. We don't see much in the way of polytheistic religions or, let's say, tribal religions, although I have not read enough Nasser to know to what extent those particular religions are represented in his larger discourse. But the important thing nonetheless is that I think Nasser's view is, on its face, deeply anti-modern, but not necessarily, and we'll dig into this in a fundamentally reactionary way, in the sense that it's trying to pull from a kind of nostalgia about the past. It's not reaching back and valorizing the Knight's Templar or even aestheticizing necessarily a particular image of Sufi mystics. What it's saying is that there is this cosmological force that has been occluded with the dominion that is modernity. And then this particular book that we're looking at was published in 1993. It's a collection of essays, and that's why we kind of jumped around in it. And I'm just thinking, you know, Boards of Canada, they do their thing when it comes to religion and music. But it's it's interesting to me that this particular lecture is sampled and sits right at the front of the track and encompasses all of Nasser's claims right at the beginning, almost as if to encompass or or wrap around all of the other sort of ambivalent religious criticisms that we see in that album. But what we really want to do here today is not talk about Boards of Canada, but to go into these claims and find out what Nasser is all about. And I don't know, Emma, is there anything that you want to add to that?

SPEAKER_00 12:12

Like you, I saw the conservatism in this text, but I agree that it could be read as a reactionary move, but well, I'll I'll mention here, and I'm sort of embarrassed, sort of not embarrassed, but I actually forgot that we said that we were gonna read these two chapters, and then I read the whole thing.

SPEAKER_01 12:38

I I did too. I read, well, I didn't read every I read the Philosophia, the Perennial Philosophy chapter, and one more besides, but this is a very readable book.

SPEAKER_00 12:49

It it really is, and there are rhymes throughout the entire thing. In fact, in the introduction, he mentions that these essays were published independently. So I don't think they were meant to be collected into one coherent book, and so that's why you you get so much similarity between the chapters. So there's there's a lot of repetition. And I also will say that I didn't read the last chapter, which is on Hans Kuger, I think is his name. So yeah, that that is one that I didn't get to. But I mentioned that because I don't know if what I want to mention here is in the two that we were originally assigning to ourselves that I I then forgot and read four times as much as I guess I should have. But there's a a moment where he discusses Hegel and the idea of the dialectical unfolding of time. And I think to view it as reactionary would buy into the premise that he's hoping to decenter, which is that it's it's not that there's no such thing as linear time or that it's it's not always correct in certain contexts for certain purposes, philosophically or otherwise, to absolutize linear time. There are goals scientifically and philosophically that make it necessary to step away from this view of time as being both eternal and not eternal and relative and measurable. But when we when we don't see absolutize time as as relatively absolute, which he has this part where he talks about why the the concept of something being relatively absolute is not a contradiction in terms. So I think he would say that in certain Western philosophies, including uh Hegelian notion of time, and a lot of the ideas about time that are in the DNA, if not explicitly governing, a lot of the the thinkers that show up on this podcast and on Asset Horizon, that if we don't treat them as sort of traditionally absolute, then we're always going to be caught in a certain logic. And that's the logic that would read this as reactionary, as all too accommodating of tendencies that can evolve into oppression, into a a kind of totalitarian thought, and and yeah, I mean that that's there. But I I don't think that that is the most graceful way to read it, and I really and truly don't believe that that's what he wants people to get out of it.

SPEAKER_01 15:47

Maybe I'll just say what I think is a simple rendering of his ideas, but I think it's a correct one, and and it it it's it's really important to the argument that you're highlighting here. When we think of different philosophies of time, I mean, think about those of us, for example, who are in the acid horizon Deleuze reading group right now. We're looking at the logic of sense, and Deleuze is juxtaposing these two concepts of time, aonic and chronological. And I'm not saying that Nasser has the same sort of competing senses of time here, but in a way he does, at least with respect to the onset of modernity, because there's a way of thinking about time that is developmental and progressive, and that within the continuum of the time of modernity, we see our world as a constant upward upscaling of everything that that that we are building towards civilizationally, right? And one of the challenges that that Nasser is pointing out is that that sort of leaning over and knocking down of that verticality then completely distorts a sense of time that he thinks is ever-present and eternal, and is one that I find to be very close to the the conception of time and cosmos that we find in the work of James Hillman. And of course, I'm going to mention a few things about James Hillman, but it's actually with very good reason because what Hillman and Nasser share in common is they see Henri Corban as essentially their teacher. So there are Corbanist elements. I mean, Nasser is a Corbanist essentially. Hillman is a Corbanist, in as much, if not more, than he is a Jungian in some sense. And the way that I look at the concept of the cosmos, especially as we see it in the spiritual significance of nature, which was like, I'm considering for myself, I consider that the primary essay that we looked at because that's that's one of the things that we wanted to interrogate here was is there a productive way of looking at nature as being spiritually significant in some sense? At least as I understand it, Emma, some anti-Siv folks use that as a guiding, if not an establishing premise for their ideas. And for Nasser, that means all the integral spiritual traditions engage with, at some level, nature's spiritual significance, although depending on the tradition, that has varying emphasis. What's interesting to me is that he talks about nature in terms of its rhythms, its harmonies, the forms, movements, the appearance of symbols, and a kind of grace that emanates from the origin with a capital O. And I think for, I mean, I'm not going to speak for Emma, but I think for both of us that might be a tough pill to swallow. But one of the ideas that that has proven compelling to me time and again is James Hillman's notion of the anime mundi or the soul of the world. And so I will recommend a book right off the bat. There is a book called The Thought of the Heart that also has his essay, Anima Mundi, the return of the soul to the world. Basically, the way that James Hillman uses this is it's in a very similar way to Nasser, that the creation of the tradition of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, counseling, stems from ultimately this Cartesian view of the self that separates mind and body. There's an argument to be made. I make it in Anti-Oculus that Freud is at base a kind of Cartesian. But for Hillman, what that means is the short version is that because we've done this mind-body split, we've projected this split into the world. So when it comes to human pathology or psychopathology, we tend to blame ourselves. Like when we we feel a certain, we experience a certain neurosis, a paranoia or a mania, that's your problem as the individual. But in Hillman's notion of the anima mundi, it goes beyond a traditional notion of the sort of isolated, siloed-in subject. It goes beyond a notion of even intersubjectivity. And what Hillman wants to say is that there's a way in which our understanding of pathology and our critiques of pathology are flawed. One, because pathology has historically it has referred to pathologizing the human mind or the human body, right? And finding all of the etiology for our psychopathological symptoms inside the body. But what Hillman says is that everything is out there. So when we talk about mania, for example, we're going to talk about the mania of technology, the paranoia of surveillance systems, the paranoia of social media. So all of the technological apparatuses have in them some sort of pathological character. Now, one might argue that this it seems like it goes beyond the a problematic notion of pathology, but it doesn't. Somebody might argue, well, it just expands it and it projects it onto the outer world. Well, this is where Hillman, I think, finds some common ground with Nasser. What pathology really means is a kind of suffering and a relationship to suffering where something wants to speak in a certain way. Something wants to be noticed. And what that means for Hillman is that when we have certain psychological symptoms, let's say, or we're plagued. By certain images, certain dreams, certain reveries, that these are not ours and ours alone. This is something that we share with the cosmos in some sense. And so his concept of the psyche resonates directly with Nasser's framing of nature as a kind of spiritually charged, prior to human interpretation. And one of the problems of modernity is that our acceptance of the course of developmental progress has occluded this cosmic milieu that we exist within, where there can be no progress. There is no development. There is just this being, but there can be a deepening. There can be an aestheticization of our experiences that happen within that milieu. And I think this is one of the things that Nasser is getting at too, is that when we think in terms of development and progress in the way that we've done in the modern idiom, we separate ourselves further from this originary cosmic matrix.

SPEAKER_00 23:05

I think about the problem of technology constantly. It has fueled my entire career as a scholar. And up until I started becoming interested in anti-Siv literature and taking more seriously ideas that, especially when I was younger, when I was in graduate school and recently out of graduate school, just saw as maybe anti-intellectual or just not quite as sharp as what I thought was proper philosophy and proper theory. Once I started to open my mind up a little bit to material that's more in this register, which many, many years ago when I was a teenager, I was much more interested in stuff like this, and then put it on the shelf because I thought it was too woolly minded, not serious enough. But now that I'm coming back to it, the question I grapple with is if I take seriously a premise that for the most part I haven't taken seriously, which is that there was a wrong move, so to speak. And that's a very simplistic way of putting it. But let's say that there was something like a wrong move in the course of human history where progress got to a point or took a qualitative form that is antithetical to the good, whether we see the good as the affirmation of life, of the true, of the beautiful, or something else, that progress became a confound to the good. The question is when when did that happen? Or maybe perhaps a question that would give us a little more traction is what what was really going on when that happened? You know, maybe it's not fair to try to look for a specific moment or era, but the the matter of what exactly happened as we moved away from being hunter-gatherer societies, moved towards agricultural living, land enclosures, and so on. What was the nature of the qualitative change that made what we call progress an enemy of the good? And reading through this, and this this is a response to what you just said, Cragus, just sort of taking it a bit indirectly, but I'm just thinking of this in the moment right now. For Nasser, the world is in a constant state of becoming. God, which as a perennialist is affirmed in all religious traditions for Nasser. He says that in in this particular moment, Islam reverberates most vividly or especially vividly. So I don't want to equivocate and say that he's making an equal case for all religious traditions. He really is is writing as a scholar of Islam and as a Muslim, I believe, that this isn't all religions. God contains the infinite or all of the infinity, which includes the possibility of God's own negation. And the mundane world is an artifact of the movement towards negation, which is never realized fully. But in fact, in an early chapter, not one of the ones that we were supposed to read, that it has this beautiful turn of phrase. It says on page six. The world of worldly affairs as a crystallization of nothingness, an indication that God contains infinite possibilities, including that of its indication, which is never reached fully, but we approach it in our finite and imperfect world. So so really what I was just saying, this is something that he believes is the this is the condition of the mundane world, the world that we can perceive with the senses, the world that we belong to as incarnate beings that are not infinite. And so we're always in motion because we're always becoming, we're always sort of getting closer to something that is realizing the very infinite nature of God, which can include this I would call it a kind of entropy. But motion is always happening, basically. Time is always unfolding, the time that we believe in and talk about linear measurable time. And because nothing is ever still, because everything is always in motion, when you conceptualize motion and call it progress, in a way you're kind of freezing motion, you're objectifying the state of nature, or I shouldn't even say nature, you're you're objectifying the ultimate state of reality, you're freezing it and turning it into an object and glorifying it. I mean, it's basically idolatry. When we idolize progress for the sake of progress, when we believe that material evolution, as in evolution in our technologies, innovation, everything that we mean when we say innovation, when we believe that it is simply faded or natural, that it follows the course of natural evolution, as in the evolution of biological species, then we're objectifying the state of the world. And in objectifying it, we are killing it in a way. We're we're rendering it profane. And so this would be sort of a a radical religious argument against technological progress that takes place by dint of explicitly valorizing progress. And of course, human beings and animals create tools. Actually, my my dissertation mentor, one of them, wrote a whole book about animal tool use, and they're philosophers of technology who just work on animals and tools. So I'm not gonna sign off on the idea that technology is an exclusively human thing or that tool use is an exclusively human thing. But was there a moment where we transitioned to loving technology for the sake of technology, loving progress for the sake of progress? I'm not saying I personally believe this, but to me, this is an argument worth worth taking seriously. That um this is the moment that we are now that really like we're we're reaping, we're reaping what we've sown right now. I mean, AI is is to me actually AI and nuclear technologies are actually like the purest expression of the horrors of this. That this really is this terrible thing that we've done in objectifying what is the ultimate condition of the universe and bringing it down to our petty human interests.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

You know, I'm really stuck on what you said about progress and the notion of progress, and let's say uh a specific point on the continuum of progress almost being like an idol and compelling a kind of idolatry. Because one of the sort of weird connections that I made, and of course, this this might get me in trouble with the Deleuzians and the Naserians, perhaps, but there is a case to be made that there is come join us on Patreon to finish the discussion. Just drop down into the show notes and click the link, and we'll see you there.