SELF – NONSELF – THE OTHER!

The concept of the Other is often transformed into a tool of domination by humans. Where does this split, this duality occurs? Can it turn to unity again?

The link between ‘Self’ and ‘NonSelf’/’The Other’ has existed since ancient philosophy. In medieval philosophy, the connection between the ‘Self’and the ‘Non-Self’ was established through God. Saint Augustinus expresses this connection as follows: “Whoever knows God, knows all.” However, with Galileo, the subject ‘Self’ has become the obligatory part of the ‘Non-Self’, by the ‘Non- Self ’ leaving the ‘Self ’. This is the prerequisite to know and grasp ‘NonSelf’ by the ‘Self’.

The same duality, which started with Descartes’ Cartesian World Design in the 17th century, was later followed by the spiritualist philosophy movements based on Res Cogitans (thinking being) and by the materialist philosophy movements based on Res Extensa (being thought). Moreover, it has turned into a great struggle between these two currents of thought.

However, the classical age philosopher Plato believed that the universe was a manifestation of the Absolute Good Idea. The mind that exists in humans was the same as the mind of the cosmos (Heraclitus / Logos ). A conflict or chaos was created in this environment only when human indulgences or desires did not fit into the measure of Logos. Logos, the cosmic laws, was a universal measure that even the gods had to follow.

In Islamic philosophy, the Word is Kalam, and this utterance is God’s act of creation. The very fact that God’s command to all is Kun! (Be!) meaning that He is the owner of the idea, the potential, the divine manifestation, and the source of all existence. Within this existence both the Commander of the Being, and the being itself take a mutual share while coming into existence. This act of creation is expressed in Qur’an as follows: “All it takes, when He wishes something to be, is simply to say to it: ‘Be!’ Moreover, it becomes!” (Surah Yasin, verse 82)

At the same time, it is the Supreme Creator’s grace that He provided humans Kalam (divine Word) which carries meaning and through which we find a meaning.

The perception that humans should live in harmony with the cosmos continued during the period of Aristotle and Stoics. In the medieval Christian world, the belief emerged that the world is not the homeland of the humans, but it is only a scene where the human fell due to his/her sinful nature, and that the fall was into a war scene between Good and Evil and all punishments and rewards await in another universe. This dogma has weakened the sense of belonging and alienated the human from nature. The human being was seen as an exile in this world waiting to return to his/ her homeland!

In a sense, it can be said that the same perception is found in the Islamic world, but the content is somehow different; The fall of Adam with the first sin is regarded by Muslims as a gift, a grace to humans to be honored with Allah’s Asmas (Names) as Rahman and Rahim (the Most Beneficent and the Most Merciful). By this way, Adam is graced with potential ability (istidad) to learn himself by eating the forbidden fruit. He awakens from his unconscious state to a more conscious state through this fall.

Self-knowledge is self consciousness. The self-knowledge of the self-thinking self is called the consciousness of consciousness, That is, self-consciousness. That is why self-knowledge is called self-consciousness in Sufism. Adam’s awareness that he is naked is a symbol implying that his gaze turned toward himself. A feeling of shame adds an ethical dimension to his being, which distinguishes him from animals! He picked up the cost of his consciousness as a sin. This is the point where his freedom to choose begins. From this point on, humans become obliged to take responsibility for their existence. Alienation in the form of exile upgrades a person’s former state to a more mature state in the hierarchy of consciousness as an initiation stage, as his fall from heaven to earth.

After modern philosophy defined the mind as the only source of all truths and the absolute of all immutable measures, the world (the Other) and the Self are divided into two as well, they started to oppose each other, and these concepts transformed into opposition, domination, and conflict.

This separation in the form of Self and the Other is a necessary stage in building a person’s self-consciousness. However, one should ponder on how to position the Self as opposed to the Other. It may evolve into conflict or violence in case of emotional denial or turn into a unifying stage that may start by accepting differences.

The aim of Islamic philosophy is to see and accept the differences and thus to move to this unity stage. A person’s journeys towards the Others are actually leaving himself/herself only in order to understand and truly know himself/herself. This is the simplest expression that one can attain self-consciousness only by looking at the mirror of the other.

As an expression of the process of human evolution and self- consciousness, Hegel’s Master and Slave dialectic reveals that a different and opposing “Self” and “Non-Self” are meeting each other. The same situation is expressed as “alienation” of the Self in Hegel’s philosophy and it is determined as a void that negates the positive content into a negative one. Here, a person desires to incline to a different nature and structure. In Hegel, this desire of reaching the state of consciousness as a distinctive feature will bring the individual to a state that is objectively approved by everybody.

The evolution of consciousness is the manifestation of the Absolute Being or the Spirit, which is God Himself.

This divine dialectic has prevailed throughout history and in the whole universe. In Hegel, the effort to integrate the Self and the NonSelf in the Absolute Spirit is an attempt to pull back the transcendent being (God) into the natural and social reality, which was previously isolated from the world of phenomena by Kant. Such a divine evolution is remarked in Leibniz and Spinoza as well.

As it happens with the Being, the folding of consciousness on itself by separating from and returning to itself, is also the process of evolution. For the formation of self-consciousness, an opposition to one’s consciousness is required.

The opposition is the catalyst of dialectical progress. In the dialectical process, during the negating phase of the development of consciousness, the “Other” is an entity opposed to one’s consciousness. However, in Hegel, above all, this opposition is not a simple and irreconcilable opposition that is completely destructive. Rather it is an opposition that serves to objectify the consciousness to a higher stage. Dialectical negation between the master and slave will result in the homogenizing of both to one, because both depend on the existence of the other. Dialectic negation between the master and slave will result in a dedifferentiation although both parties need each other. Because in the process, a desire comes into existence in a person; the other denies it, but ultimately it ends up being a value of desire for the denying party as well. In Marxist philosophy, which is known as a more materialistic interpretation of Hegelian philosophy, Marx expresses the difference of his system from Hegel’s system as follows:

“My dialectical method is not only different from the Hegelian method, but also the opposite of it. Hegel transforms the life- process of the human brain, that is, the process of thinking, into an independent subject under the name of ‘Idea’ as the creator and architect of the real world and therefore, the real world is only the external and phenomenal form of the ‘Idea’. For me, on the contrary, ‘Idea’ is nothing more than the reflection of the material world in the human mind and its transformation into forms of thought.”

As another architect of the system, Engels states: “Matter is not a product of spirit, the spirit itself is nothing but the highest supreme form of the matter.”

Hegel’s opposition of the Self and the Other, as the concept of alienation, is handled together with the concept of reification, or objectification in Marxist theory. The human is alienated from the products s/he produced and with his/her own effort.

Moreover, these products do not only become alienated as material products to the human but also as institutions of philosophy, religion, art, state, and law. Thus, humans objectify themselves against these values they have created in the first place.

Marx said that all material and spiritual values led to such an alienation by the expansion of an understanding that was determined by Feuerbach: “religion is a field in which the human alienates himself/herself”. The alienation of the subject points to an intersubjective power relation in the subject’s relation to the other and nature. In Marx, human’s alienation from humans and nature is considered as a positive progress. Because of this, Marx argues that the feeling of alienation motivates humans to return to a society with no class or private property. That would mean that humans go back to the primitive communal period, which was the first form of society and therefore it was the golden age of humanity. This return will occur with a conscious will and activity and it will stimulate humans, awaken them and transform them in the process of returning to their original true Selves. This transformation is so profound that it is regarded as a revolutionary instinct.

With Marx, materialism has ceased to be mechanical and has become dialectical instead. In this dialectical materialism, there is still a room for spiritual values and a social ideal which saves the whole humankind.

In the differentiation of the Self and the Other in the ethical area, Nietzsche replaces the negation of the Hegelian dialectical with the affirmation. He does not raise a need for such a negation during the evolution of self-consciousness. On the contrary, the person discovers the difference reflected to the other by himself/herself and approves it. As Deleuze expresses; “What is demanded is the approval of the difference.”

Nietzsche states in his own words that the universal ethical concepts and the master-slave morality always have a negative and power-consuming influence on others. He emphasizes that it has a destructive side because it eliminates the differences with a sense of slave resentment, defines enemies, and demonizes those who do not fit into its own table of values. Nietzsche’s noble morality evolves by saying yes to himself, while his slave morality says no to the outsider, denying anything or anybody right in the beginning. The noble, the master, does not need anybody that is different from himself, or any evil outside himself while establishing his morality and setting out what the noble values. On the other hand, the slave needs an evil outside himself/herself which denies and devalues everything that the master considers as good. Slave morality denies human existence and the becoming by setting the good against the evil and making them fight in the name of truth, devaluing the concept of good. Thus, life points only to evil from the perspective of slave morality.

At this point, Nietzsche’s attempt to build his morality beyond good and evil gains its true meaning. His ethics aims to enrich life by accepting it with all the variety in it and preventing the human from developing a hostile attitude towards those who are not like himself/herself.

The relationship, or more precisely the tension, between Self and the Other, is carried into the existentialist philosophy and it even extended to Levinas.

In fact, we meet this self-centered view of the subject in Western philosophy in the work of the first great thinker of Christianity St. Augustine in his book named “Confessions”. The concept of internality emerged when Augustine transformed the human being into a subject that carries truth in his/her existence.

Born as the son of a pagan father and a dark Catholic mother, Saint Augustine was a searcher of the truth. One day while in deep contemplation in the garden of his home, he opened up the Holy Bible when heard a child’s voice whispering “Take, read, read”’ and he found the righteous path when he read the following verse as a warning:

“...Go, sell what you have, give to the poor, the treasure in the skies will be yours; come on, follow me.” (Matthew 19:21).

Until that day, he had tried to find his way through teachings such as Manichaean, Cicero, Plato, and Skepticism in the search for truth, but none of them satisfied him. With the birth of faith in his garden on that day, he was to devote himself entirely to God in the route of Christianity.

St. Augustine has put medieval Christian philosophy into the service of theology with the words Credo berry intelligam! (I believe to understand!). He believed that the way to God passes through humans, although God has a transcendent Being. We go to God imminently as God comes to us imminently. Therefore, we can only know God through our own soul.

He begged to his Lord as: “What do you mean to me, my Lord, my God, with all your forgiveness. Tell my soul only: ‘Your salvation is mine!’ I will run after this voice, and I will catch you.”

Augustine’s work Confessions has made him a groundbreaking figure not only in philosophy but also in Western literature. Augustine started the tradition of confessing (sins) in this book. The book is filled with the repentant tears of a sinner from beginning to the end. This confession tradition later occupied an essential place in Western literature and philosophy as a confession ritual of internal reckoning. The practice and the construction of the subject as the carrier of truths in the soul along with the confession tradition of the individual has influenced the representatives of existentialist philosophy such as Pascal, Nietzsche, Sartre and Kierkegaard.

According to Augustine, confession is a manifestation of a search for the truth as well as it is a basic need of asking God’s forgiveness when one sins. Wishing to gain the love of God and forgiveness of his sins, Augustine asks God:

“Who can make me find peace in you? Who will bring you to my heart, who will enchant this heart and make me forget the evil I have done, and make me embrace You, the only one of my goodness? What do you mean to me? Have mercy so that I can speak. What am I for you? What do I mean to You that you command me to love You? Who am I that if I do not love You, you are angry with me and threaten me and tell me that You will suffer great pain? If I don’t love You anyway, is that only a little suffering? Have mercy for me!”

In his book De Civitate Dei (City of God), Augustine also stated that God guides the universe along with the human communities according to a particular purpose. The world is a scene of the struggle between good and evil and that the ultimate victory will be God’s. We see that he has established the basis of the inspiration of Hegel’s absolute and developing history in western terms. However, when Hegel said that the center of the absolute spirit was in Europe at the age he lived, he also formed the mental background of the ‘dominating Europe’ notion and shaped the path of others accordingly.

The spiritual transformations of the Infinite, which Hegel expressed with his faithful optimism, have unfortunately manifested in history as the destruction of the material wealth and cultural backgrounds of non-Western societies.

Existentialism is the common philosophical term which states that the being comes before the essence. It also argues that there is no defined essence of human beings when they are born. Thus, humans are supposed to gain effect and actualize themselves with the choices they make within the potential possibilities and, as a result of interacting with the environment.

During the two World Wars, the most important representative of this trend was Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism in Sartre’s words is:

“If we want to explain it in philosophical terms, we can say that every object has an existence and an essence. The essence is an immutable collection of an object’s properties, while the existence is its presence in the universe as a reality. Many people believe that the essence comes first; existence comes after it. This is due to religious thought; indeed, anyone who wants to build a house must know what kind of place to make, where the essence precedes existence. Likewise, those who believe that God created human beings also conclude that God performs this job by the ideas He already possesses about them. Those who do not believe in God cannot get rid of the same influence and may come to the conclusion that an object can only exist if it is compatible with their ideas.”Jean-Paul, Sartre. “Existentialism is a Humanism.” (1996).

All the 18th century philosophers believed in an essence known as human nature. According to existentialism, existence in humans (and humans only), comes before their essence. Briefly, this means that the human comes first, anything else comes later.

For this reason, an ideology of humanism, which idolizes the human-beings as godlike creatures, has emerged. That is the root of the understanding “whatever humans do is acceptable”, regardless whether it means to destroy the planet and nature. Moreover, some humans are considered more human than others, so they have more power to do what they want. As said in Animal Farm by George Orwell: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

There are two types of existentialism which express that the human’s existence cannot be separated from its existence in the world: Atheistic existentialism and Christian existentialism. The representative of atheist existentialism is Jean-Paul Sartre and for Christian Existentialism it is Soren Kierkegaard. According to both of these schools of thought, the human being is seen as a whole being who can comprehend the meaning of the choices made with their will, within the potential possibilities, and in terms with their historical-social conditions.

After the destruction, vulgarity, savagery, and loss that resulted from the Second World War, Existential philosophy can be seen as a lament that was cried out into the uncertainty and absurdity of a time when the world had become a total minefield, and the dignity of humanity was lost together with all other meaning. People lived in a meaninglessness that was left behind after mountains of human arrogance had blown up. They breathed in the uncertainty of God’s absolute existence, which was becoming more and more invisible. Was it a price paid for future welfare or for accumulated sins of humankind?

Pascal, who prioritized existentialism, said that humans are always in a misery between existence and nothingness. Uncertainty arising from destructions and upheavals had caused anxiety, distress, nausea, and despair. Pascal can be considered an exception in Europe, where religion had fallen off the list, because he still believed that the way to reach God went through faith.

Kierkegaard said with a pleasant shiver:

“The Self is something intangible, it can only be understood through possibilities, fears and decisions. When I look at the possibilities I have, I experience that ‘dizziness of freedom’; my choice occurs in trembling fear.”

In such uncertainty, Kierkegaard found that the solution was getting closer to God. According to him, the truth of God, the absolute, and the eternal could not be grasped by the mind, but by leaps of an inner intuition:

“Because the place where faith begins is where thinking leaves.”

In the process that started more precisely with Descartes, the modern paradigm has transformed philosophy into a discipline which studies knowledge and wisdom by asking the following questions: What do we know? How can we know what we know? What is to know? What are the limits of our knowledge? Thus, the existentialists began to search, to put it more clearly, we can say that the existentialists started to ask the question ‘What does one- time existence mean?’ at the starting point from ‘existence’. One- time existence is defined as the zero point of a person.

As Bernard-Henri Levy stated: “This subject has no pre-. It is what it aims for. S/he is it. It is the targeting of the thing itself, the rush towards it, the move...This rush leads to an incredible amount of individualization of each person who is left without a unifying soul at the end of this process. Then, character or temperament is used as an imitation of the Self in an attempt to fill this cavity. The Self or ‘I ‘is not a place, nor is it a little god who sits in a place, embracing his/her freedom like a metaphysical virtue. It does not have immanence, nor does it have the integrity to bring scattered Selves together with a flute as it happens in the tale The Pied Piper7 Steiner, C. (2003). Emotional literacy: Intelligence with a heart. Personhood Press.

For this reason, Sartre certainly believed that one should speak of the subject only in terms of plural. Being a subject is not a state but an action, a movement.

It is Husserl’s phenomenology that profoundly influences this philosophy as a method. Husserl phenomenology, which means self-knowledge in short, adopts the method of going back to the essence (phenomenological reduction) and knowing oneself as an entity by turning to himself/herself. According to him, this core does not appeal to the senses and therefore it can only be grasped intuitively. Where existence starts from a zero point and begins to be felt, there is a breaking point which appears as an “emotion” in humans. This feeling generally indicates a negative, pessimistic, hopeless mood such as feelings of anxiety, fear, inner distress, nausea, absurdity, and uncertainty.

According to Kierkegaard, this “absurd” feeling is sensed intuitively and not by the logical processes of thinking. It is this uncertainty that causes one to turn to his/her Creator. He says that truth is experienced subjectively, and divine and religious truths cannot be proven by reason.

Like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard stood against Descartes’ “I think. Therefore, I exist,” statement, and opposed rational traditions by saying, “What our age lacks is not the mind, but passion.”

Kierkegaard is the only one who did not cut ties with the Divine, when Nietzsche saw religion (Christianity in particular) as an obstacle to humans’ self-realization which is only achieved through breaking off from religion.

According to Karl Jaspers, the mentioned emotion is the “suffering” state of the human when s/he reaches the limit of reason, and everything falls down. Jaspers says that loneliness is required to show courage for self-realization. In this loneliness, he says that one can make one’s existence real by turning towards the “You in Me” (or the other) with passion!

When he says, “I wish everyone to be what I try to be, and that is to become sincere and true to the self,” Jaspers again meets all other existential philosophers on common ground: They all state that the real existence of being chooses itself over anything else again and again by overcoming any obstacle.

Heidegger’s philosophy, which started with Plato and ended with Nietzsche, is a song to the Being, made together with the conscience. It has been a fresher breath of the tune that has been on scene since Nietzsche, in time and here:

“You, unflinching seekers, seducers, those who sail to raging seas with tricky sails, you, ecstatic with riddles, joyful in the twilight, do not want to go along a narrow passage with fickle hands, who follow the melodies in their soul and

slings into every twist, those who hate to hit the mind wherever they predict.”

Heidegger said: “Singing in the open air is a unique breath (like the wind), and this breath is for nothingness.” For Heidegger, this is the forgotten melody of existence.

Returning to the basic experience of Being is making Dasein meaningful and this is only possible by death because humans become able to question the meaning of life only when faced with death as the absolute possibility. By looking death in the eye and recognizing it as the last and certain possibility that annihilates all other possibilities, the person can reach the ultimate consciousness of the being and contemplate his/her mortality and how finite his/her existence in time is. This is the person being aware of the moment (Dasein). To our best knowledge, humans are the only creatures

Heidegger uses the expression Dasein to refer to the experience of being that is peculiar to human beings. Thus, it is a form of being that is aware of and must confront such issues as personhood, mortality and the dilemma or paradox of living in relationship with other humans while being ultimately alone with oneself who are able to contemplate their existence.

The perceiving being of Dasein is the basis of its ontological relation to being Dasein will reveal the being only by understanding or comprehending the being in itself.

Humans cannot know why they are chosen to exist on earth and for which purpose, and which power decides for the same. This enigma of coming into being did not lead Heidegger to become an atheist like Sartre.

The meaning of the Self, as the subject of finiteness that is revealed in the infinitude, can be grasped by its presence here and in association with all others. Heidegger describes coexistence here and together as follows: “Being-in-the-world, in the sense that existence is established through my projects and through my relationships with the objects I use and develop as tools. At this point, again, the existence of others is not just an accident, but it is a necessity. It is one of the building blocks of my being, and it is within my being. To understand such a necessity, we can think of the example of a barber being together with his customer, or a needle being together with the thread, the fabric and the tailor. In these examples, the meaning of the barber is complete because he is with the customer and the being of the needle is meaningful because it is with the thread and fabric and tailor. "

Similarly, Dasein’s nature is based on coexistence. Human existence is a shared co- existence, and the social interdependence of our daily experiences is preliminary and constitutive.

Heidegger goes on by saying:

“My full consciousness of myself and self-affirmation arises from my consciousness of others.” “What makes ‘Me’ is to be the Self in every situation, although it requires the existence of others.” In other words, the Self is not to become the Other or the Others. If a person forgets who s/he is and gets lost among others without searching for the meaning of his/her existence, s/he becomes alienated from his/her Dasein, which is himself/herself. We did not choose to be here, so, the fact that we were thrown into the world by an unknown force creates a sense of insecurity within us. In Dasein’s world, when the feeling of being thrown into the world reaches a stage of an awareness that comes to the point of separation with the others, his self is thrown in front of Dasein and begins to appear. Thrown in front of himself, Dasein begins to design the self as a set of potential possibilities. Heidegger puts it this way:

“The structural integrity of Dasein’s description as ‘worldliness’ cannot be defined only as the building constructed without all the constituent parts or structures, so that each structure or constituent part constituting this unity can be understood together with another in each case. The meaning of unity here can only be understood as the design of architecture. The place and significance of each structural part in the integrity are that Dasein’s existence lies based on each structural part’s possibility.”

This design, revealing potentials and making them actual, is the result of a state of anxiety.

As long as a person is together with others, s/he is indifferent to his/her own existence. Separating one’s self from the others and swimming to the opposite shore of the world, to the shores of one’s own, causes anxiety. Because it forces the person to face one’s Self which is thrown in front of them.

Heidegger defines anxiety as some sort of possibility of fear. However, fear is an emotion that occurs due to a particular threat or against a specific thing. On the other hand, there is no threat from something specific in case of anxiety. The main subject of anxiety is “nowhere or nothing”; it implies a search for the meaning in the entire possibilities one can reach.

Heidegger identifies this case as being away from oneself but together with everything else. It can be seen as a fallen state. In this case, the person finds himself submerged in guilt. The guilty self-reveals itself between the state of being fallen and in other alternating possible states. It is at this point that Dasein begins to hear the call of conscience. This call is for listening to the voices rising from his/her Self. It is also a manifestation of a desire to achieve self-conscience; it is a call for confrontation. The person is drawn into himself/herself from the world s/he has fallen into and tries to hear the voice(s) of his/her Self.

Sartre owned the brain of an infidel but the heart of a believer, as this was mentioned in Ali Sharia’s Kevir. This example is enough to explain this description: Heidegger invited conscience into his subject (Dasein), but meanwhile he supported the Nazi’s rulership. Sartre, on the other hand, was standing against the hells created for others when he said, “Hell is others.” Wherever there was a human rights violation Sartre stood against it, regardless of whether the injustice was done by the block he supported intellectually or the ones against it! If we try to count some of his oppositions, we can give many of examples: He protested against anti-Semitism in the USSR, opposed the French war against Algeria, and parted ways with the communists after the Hungarian occupation of 1956!

Sartre started a new path with his book Nausea. He argued that one had to be the creator of his/her values if there is no God but should not take it as an excuse to become selfish. In Sartre’s approach, the individuals are responsible for themselves because they are left to their own devices. If there is no God; it means that there are no universal rules to be accepted by all, nor are there moral laws valid for all places and times and there is no written destiny or a graced essence to save the person from being responsible! Humans are free to choose from potential possibilities which reveal themselves according to the choices they make, and they can shape their existence and determine their own essence. According to him, a human being is an entity that designs himself with an eye towards a future where one can start to exist. The individual is a project for himself/herself which s/he must self-actualize with his/her own conscious choices.

Sartre rejected Freud’s theory that the subconscious influences consciousness of the self and argued that this consciousness arises from one’s choices. That is to say, unlike what Freud suggested, one is aware of his/her awareness as it is described in Descartes’

Cogito. In his work, The Transcendence of Ego,

Sartre deals with the concept of ego as follows:

“For most philosophers, the ego resides in consciousness. Some argue that its material existence is in the middle of ‘experiences’ as an empty, unifying principle. Others, mostly psychologists, think that they have discovered its material existence as the center of desires and actions that can be seen in every moment of our psychic life. Here we want to show that the ego is in consciousness, neither as a form nor as a material: it is outside, it is in the world; it is a worldly being belonging to the world like someone else’s ego.”

Sartre thinks that there is a difference in nature between the existence of humans and the existence of things. According to him, the object/thing is a being in itself, whereas human beings are beings for themselves. Being in itself does not have consciousness of itself but appears in the human consciousness from the moment it is reflected upon. Being in itself is not a necessary condition and is uncaused; it is extra and nonsense. This absurd phenomenon creates a nausea in the person. Existence comes before the essence in the case of a human who is a being for himself/herself.

“An event in the tiny world of humans is absurd only according to another reality; that is, it is absurd according to the situation and circumstances accompanying it.”

For example, a madman’s speech is not absurd from the perspective of his madness, but it becomes absurd only in terms of the situation he is in. Sartre gives a perfect example of this:

“But I’ve just experienced the absolute, the nonsense. There was nothing else to this (tree) root that was not absurd except itself. Oh, how can I put that into words? I looked around with anxious eyes. There was nothing but “now”. The true essence of the “now” was revealing itself. It existed now, nothing else existed except now. The past was not a thing, and it was nothing at all. It did not exist in any object or even in my thought. I had long realized that my past had escaped me. And I believed it escaped out of my reach. In my eyes, the past was a kind of retirement, another way of being, a vacation and inactivity. Every event finishes, slips itself

into a box and becomes a voluntary event. It’s that hard to think of nothingness. But now I understand that the thing has no existence beyond its appearance. Behind them... nothing.”

Roquentin, the hero in the novel Nausea, perceives the absurdity of the world of phenomena by reducing his becoming to nothingness, which causes the existential person to feel nausea. Experiencing the same nausea, Roquentin says, “So this is nausea: this glaring openness. I wrote articles on it, I got confused. Now I know I exist, the world exists, and I know that the world exists. That’s all. It doesn’t matter to me. Strangely, nothing matters to me, and I’m afraid of it.”

“The concept of consciousness appears only in beings for oneself. The owner of consciousness becomes the subject when s/ he starts to recognize his/her existence and the object in himself/ herself at the moment s/he turns towards the object. To exist in objects that exist without a cause and without connection, is to present. Anything available becomes an object in an ignorant fashion only when it becomes the subject of my consciousness. Therefore, whether it exists or not does not have an independent value as a being. If being conscious is defined as the separation of the self from the object, then it can be understood once more that the self is the opposite of being in the object. In this sense we can say that the consciousness does not exist. It is nothingness. It is the ignorance of the subject with regards to the object. The person discovers his/her freedom in this world that rises to nothingness against his/her consciousness because the world presented to human’s consciousness is not created by God with a determined purpose and regularity and there are no determining moral values and religious teachings, universal omnipresent laws. Individuals, who have not been designed beforehand, must try to determine their own essence and actualize themselves by making choices in their social life in accordance with their designs.”

The road to this freedom was possible through nothingness for Sartre. The feeling of nausea that arises where the notion of I and others is captured then leads to being responsible for others. The concept of morality starts to appear as a sense of responsibility in Sartre’s philosophy.

Dostoyevsky’s saying,”Everyone is responsible for everyone and for everything....” This inspired Sartre to say:

“If an injustice is committed anywhere in the world, we all begin to take responsibility for it.” According to him, nausea is to hear one’s responsibilities: Just as a person chooses all other people while choosing himself, he also chooses himself when choosing all other people, and when he is responsible to himself, he becomes responsible to all people.”

“Nausea is hearing your responsibility. Thus, it makes man anxious. He can alleviate this nausea by masking his commitments, yet he still would not be comfortable. Most people try to convince themselves that whatever they do only binds them, making them responsible, but they still cannot get comfortable. Because both responsibility and nausea come from human’s humanity, it is the result of his actions. Nausea does not separate people from the action; on the contrary, it leads them and forces them to act.”

Cogito (thinking) is a monologue that cancels the dialogue with the other. Levinas tries to overcome this lack of communication and blockage and confronts the other by coming face to face with it. I can only define myself by turning to someone else!

In the words of Levinas, “maybe the source of humanity is the Other.” In Levinas, the mutual orientation of the Self and the Other to each other will end up in eliminating one or the other, as a relation of opposition that will dissolve the other one’s values. The war of opposites is not in the form of destructive violence but is based on an ethical basis within the framework of mutual responsibility. Both will be a voluntary meeting area for each other, where they can face one another.

Levinas says that humans can only present themselves in a non-power relationship in contrast to Western metaphysics, which tries to transcend the diversity and differences by diminishing the differences and enhancing the similarity of everything. We also see this ignorance in Hegel’s dialectic based on identification. Derrida also rejects this dialectic of homogenizing (similarizing) with the concept of différance. According to him, the difference is not a situation that needs to be eliminated; on the contrary, it is a situation that should continue. Otherwise in the case of similarization, the other would be partially or completely excluded from the field of existence due to the reduction of the self to another self which would be a serious threat to the subject’s independence.

Philosophy of enlightenment is precisely an attempt to secularize the mind.

Many thinkers and artists of the Enlightenment era mention that they believe in God. However, commemorating God does not make a person religious. Religion needs unity, a complete framework. All prayers and rituals of faith are practices for the believer to become open to Divine control through surrendering.

We have seen that the philosophy of Enlightenment is an axiomatic system. The axiom is a proposition that the philosopher accepts but that cannot be proved, but still insists that its certainty is accepted. At this point the philosopher says, “Even though it cannot be proved, I must stand here so that I can establish my system consistently, without falling into absurdity.”

In a sense, we can say that it is the dogma of the philosopher.

Well, does it mean that a consistent system is always the truth?

If it is, does that mean the axiomatic thought system of each philosopher would be the same?

So why does the enlightenment mind try to prove that its intelligence is the highest (!) and cause devastating effects to the world at the cost of being severely drifted apart from the Divine Truth?

The so-called progressive understanding of the enlightenment is still progressing (!) today in a devastating manner by inflicting irreparable fatal wounds to human history, human psychology, and spirituality, leaving every day behind!

With an infinite self-confidence, the modern mind started its journey with high optimism that it could establish a paradise on earth by rationally organizing the world.

Still, all these rational sanctions turned into exploitative displays of power and domination.

Postmodernism is currently being born as a criticism of this rigid rationalism.

While philosophers like Adorno and Horkheimer criticize the Enlightenment approach, which makes the thinking mind, as in Descartes, the chief authority that is deified and then used as an instrument to define the truth.

Foucault argues that modernism tries to destroy and marginalize any kind of difference in the society by pushing everyone into a strict framework of norms and isolating minorities from society by cramming them into prisons, mental health institutions and back streets.

“One that is unlike us, in other words the other, shall be destroyed.”

Thus, late capitalism is on its way to build a sterile, passive, uniform consumer society, with the aim of destroying everything that does not fit in the slightest into the framework it imposes!!! Look at what is happening now!

Postmodern skepticism has developed in the last twenty years. It became popular in a period in history when people’s trust in ideologies had been shaken due to the collapse of the Socialist Bloc, which stood against capitalism and seemed to be the only hope against capitalist exploitation. While postmodernism’s reaction has very justifiably been an opposition to the domination of the alienating mind; unfortunately, the agnostic theory of multiple truths has also dragged people into new spiritual depressions, fake Nihilism and a growing flow of Agnosticism.

Because the single Truth is reflected in multiple mirrors in accordance with each person’s genetic code composition, postmodern thinkers have fallen into the delusion of thinking that the Truth is multiple! It is One Truth; we only witness different reflections or realities of it.

This core statement of Islamic Sufism that “The Truth is a single, but its reflection is individualized” indicates that everyone’s potential to experience the truth varies depending on the composition and degree of the Divine Names coded to each human being!

Such beauty! We all search for One Truth, but we are given rich ways to discover it.

The Creator is One, and therefore the Truth is one. If the creators were more than one, the Truth would be more than one. Having more than one Creator would definitely result in a “war of gods”, which means Chaos. In such a situation, Cosmos could never be united, it would never be manifested as Unity.

“If there were, in the heavens and the earth, other gods besides Allah, there would have been confusion in both! but glory to Allah, the Lord of the Throne: (High is He) above what they attribute to Him!”(Qur’an, Surah Al-Anbiya, verse 22)