Resacralization of knowledge

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In traditionalist philosophy, resacralization of knowledge is the reverse of the process of secularization of knowledge. The central premise is that knowledge is intimately connected to its perceived divine source—God or the Ultimate Reality—which has been severed in the modern era. The process of resacralization of knowledge seeks to reinstate the role of intellect—the divine faculty believed to exist in every human being—above and beyond that of reason, as well as to revive the role of traditional metaphysics in acquiring knowledge—especially knowledge of God—by drawing on sacred traditions and sacred science that uphold divine revelations and the spiritual or gnostic teachings of all revealed religions. It aims to restore the primordial connection between God and humanity, which is believed to have been lost. To accomplish this, it relies on the framework of tawhid, which is developed into a comprehensive metaphysical perspective emphasizing the transcendent unity of all phenomena. Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr elaborated on the process of resacralization of knowledge in his book Knowledge and the Sacred, which was presented as Gifford Lectures in 1981.

Origin

The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World states that Nasr's 1981 Gifford Lectures, which were published under the title Knowledge and the Sacred, reflect "his hope of reviving what he calls the sacred quality of knowledge as opposed to secularized reason". Nasr argues in his Gifford Lectures that the Western intellectual tradition "is in need of a resacralization of knowledge". He contends that Islamic tradition and the "living traditions of the Orient" can aid in revitalizing the Western intellectual tradition because knowledge and the sacred have never been separated in the Orient.

Background

Main article: Desacralization of knowledge

In the Orient knowledge has always been related to the sacred and to spiritual perfection. To know has meant ultimately to be transformed by the very process of knowing, as the Western tradition was also to assert over the ages before it was eclipsed by the postmedieval secularization and humanism that forced the separation of knowing from being and intelligence from the sacred.

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr quoted in Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, Geoffrey Hill's Serpents and Dragons in Dynamics of Desacralization: Disenchanted Literary Talents, 2015

Nasr and other Traditionalists believe that modernity is an "anomaly" in world history, "a renewed jahilliya" or "an Age of Ignorance," because forgetfulness of the Sacred only occupies the forefront of modern worldviews, despite the fact that such forgetfulness has always been a characteristic of human existence. In the absence of a unifying theological framework, humanity has forgotten the divine roots of "both outer and human nature" and has fallen out of touch with divinity in hitherto unheard-of ways. Nasr emphasizes the "symbolic element of reality" which he believes "has been lost under the literalist reign of modern science". In reference to the Sufi view of the "veil of perception" which is said to conceal the Ultimate Reality, Nasr contends that knowledge of Self and the physical world of modernity is superficial, resulting in "an externalized image away from the cosmic center" because modern civilization confuses the "quantitative accumulation of information" with "qualitative penetration" into the deeper dimensions of reality. Nasr accuses modern sciences of eroding the theological and metaphysical basis of knowledge by generating "the most anthropocentric form of knowledge conceivable", which relies solely on human reason and empirical data to determine the validity of all knowledge. All human sciences, for Nasr, deny the possibility of other orders of reality and, as a result, exclude all other forms of knowing, dismissing the idea that the world's reality extends beyond physical dimensions.

Predecessors

According to Liu Shu-hsien, Nasr claims that when the secularization process appeared to be approaching its natural conclusion in favor of completely removing the influence of the sacred from all areas of human existence and thought, as indicated by Nietzsche's declaration: God is dead; some modern individuals sought to reclaim the sacred. In contrast to the mechanical and rationalistic views of the cosmos and man of individuals such as Bacon, Newton, and Locke, poets such as Goethe, Blake, and Emerson sought to return to a more holistic vision of man and nature. Nasr credits individuals such as A. H. Anquetil Duperron, J. Hammer-Purgstall, and Sir William Jones, as well as Thomas Taylor, Walt Whitman, and the New England Transcendentalists, among others, for paving the way toward the rediscovery of the sacred in the West. However, Nasr claims that they were unable to restore tradition in the West or revive the scientia sacra, which is at the center of all sacred traditions. According to Nasr, the sapiental perspective in the West had become too weak due to the lack of "authentic contact" with the Oriental traditions, which had retained their basic teachings intact in their doctrinal and operational dimensions. For Nasr, it was up to the Orient to revive sapiential tradition in the West through individuals influenced by its light. Nasr mentions Rene Guenon, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, and Frithjof Schuon among others as having sought to restore the sapiential dimension in the West.

Frameworks

Reversal of rationalization

According to Steve Yim, resacralization of knowledge for Nasr entails restoring knowledge to its original state prior to the process of secularization. He describes the process of resacralization of knowledge as the process of reviving spiritual and transcendent dimensions of knowledge, which have their origins in divine revelations. Although Nasr believes that Islam is the authentic religion that contains the absolute truth, he also believes in the reality of other "genuine revelations" outside of Islam. Nasr contends, in the spirit of other traditionalist thinkers, that every religious tradition contains the eternal truth of God. All religions are united in the fact that they all have their origins in the Absolute, which is both truth and reality and the source of all revelations and truth. According to this perspective, knowledge that is not accompanied with a sense of the divine cannot be regarded as true knowledge.

One key aspect of this undertaking is to reverse the process whereby desacralized reason has been brought to bear on sacred traditions and then to revive an awareness of the sacred quality of knowledge. Such sacred knowledge, according to [Nasr], is not the exclusive preserve of Islam, but is to be found wherever there is fidelity to the sacred origin of any revealed tradition. Therefore, he asserts that while traditional Islam provides the structure for assimilating the sacred, that which is traditional in other religions also offers an appropriate structure. Even though it differs out-wardly from Islam, it gives access to the sacred in itself, which is one with Islam in its essence.

— Haifaa Jawad, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and the Study of Religion in Contemporary Society, 2005

In opposition to supposed reductionist tendencies of modern human sciences, Nasr contends that the sapiential tradition of world religions provides a comprehensive account of the hierarchy of knowledge that correlates to different orders of reality. While the natural and social sciences are said to confine legitimate knowledge to a rationalist interpretation of the physical realm, which has allegedly given rise to an analytical and compartmentalized view of the universe, a holistic perspective of knowledge is believed to be founded on intellect and reason, i. e., on both intuition and reason. For Nasr, "knowledge extends in hierarchy from an empirical and rational mode of knowing to the highest form of knowledge" which he terms as the "unitive knowledge" or al-ma'rifah. Nasr emphasizes over and again that the knowledge to which the Quran alludes to is placed inside a sacred framework, just as previous Islamic sciences were constrained by a metaphysical framework of the harmony and complete order of the cosmos. Knowledge thus must be reconstructed in terms of both a true metaphysics of God's essence and a science of the revealed cosmic order, which points to a higher order of reality. The process of resacralization necessitates the restoration of the place of the intellect above and beyond the place of reason, in order for mankind to reestablish connection with God, and the relative with the Absolute. Since the intellect is capable of knowing the Absolute, it must serve as the foundation for a resacralized paradigm of knowledge. According to Nasr, "the ground of the intellect is the Divine and so is its ultimate goal". It is a "divine spark" within humans, which emanates from the "Divine Light". While "the Intellect shines within the being of man", he is "too far removed from his primordial nature" or fitra. As a result, he is not capable of fully utilizing this gift without assistance. The assistance comes in the form of revelation, which is necessary for the intellect to function properly and be fully realized.

With the recognition of the anthropocentric nature of modern knowledge, the reconstruction of knowledge must re-turn to the concept of tawhid to reveal the underlying "unity and interrelatedness of all that exists". Tawhid, in the first instance a theological notion referring to the strict unity and oneness of God, is here elaborated into a comprehensive metaphysical perspective of the unity of all phenomena. So, while it may be tempting to view the emphasis on tawhid as a nostalgic return to the undifferentiated unity of pre-modern times, Nasr's conception of re-turning to tawhid is one of rediscovering the primordial bond between God and humanity that has been severed. The reconstruction of knowledge within the framework of tawhid amounts, therefore, to a re-enchantment of the world, a re-sacralization, a reversal of the process of rationalization, the Entzauberungprozess.

— Ali Zaidi, Muslim Reconstructions of Knowledge: The Cases of Nasr and al-Faruqi, 2011

Zaidi presents Nasr's idea of resacralisation of knowledge as the polar opposite of Weber's Entzauberungprozess. He quotes Nasr as saying that "Certainly my goal is to move in the opposite direction than what Max Weber called the Entzauberungprozess". Nasr's appeal to intuition as the foundation of knowledge stems from his belief that intuitive or sapiential knowledge fosters an intimate relationship between the knower, the act of knowing, and the object to be known. Nasr therefore broadens the idea of tawhid from its narrow orthodox view of God's unity to the Unity of Being. The concept of tawhid here has implications on both the ontological and epistemological levels, since it eliminates the subject-object duality that lies at the heart of the post-Enlightenment paradigm of thought. According to Nasr, rationality without intuition along with the idea of the knowing subject separated from the known object cause us to become preoccupied with the particular, relative, and ephemeral or the Universal, Absolute, and Eternal, without really being able to correlate the two. According to Nasr, the process of knowledge reconstruction must call into question not just the ontological status of physical reality, but also the epistemological validity of the knowledge that purports to explain that reality. Nasr's reconstruction thus seeks to utilise metaphysics as a "necessary reversal" of modernity's rationalization process.

Revival of Tradition

Main article: Tradition (perennialism)

According Jane I. Smith, Nasr seeks to restore the sacred quality of knowledge by reversing the process by which "secularized reason has been brought to bear on sacred traditions." For Nasr, the resuscitation of Tradition is vital to resacralizing knowledge, because "a de-traditionalized world cannot manifest the sacred", nor can modern science, or the modern world in general, transcend its inherent flaws, and because "The rediscovery of the sacred is ultimately and inextricably related to the revival of tradition". For Nasr and other traditionalists, Tradition centers on the Divine or the Sacred. It specifically refers to the "transmission of sapiential knowledge found in the spiritual, esoteric, or Gnostic traditions in each of the World Religions, a knowledge that recognizes the sacred and divine origin of the cosmos".

In response to the crisis of modernity, which, according to the Traditionalist view, is caused by modern science and its secular worldview, Nasr suggests that a return to tradition is the only way to bring about the rediscovery of Sacred knowledge, which has been obscured by secular science. In this sense, tradition lies at the heart of every revelation and is the center of the circle, which encompasses and defines tradition.

— Seyedamirhossein Asghari, Sufism and Challenges of Modern and Secular Philosophy: Nasr's Perspective, 2021

The Dictionary of Literary Biography also describes Nasr's response to the issue of desacralization of knowledge as a return to tradition, which entails "truths or principles of a divine origin revealed or unveiled to mankind and, in fact, a whole cosmic sector through various figures envisaged as messengers, prophets, avataras, the Logos or other transmitting agencies" as well as their implications in various domains of human life and thought. Ernest Wolf-Gazo asserts that "In Nasr's universe of discourse the concepts of revelation, unity, origin, source, tradition, perennial wisdom, sophia, and intellectual intuition of God are interrelated like a cobweb." He views the recovery or rediscovery of man's intellect, which is "the fundamental insight of humankind," as the ultimate goal of "the reenchantment project." This intellect is "the instrument of knowledge within man" and "is endowed with the possibility of knowing the Absolute." According to Gai Eaton, instead of theoretic knowledge, Nasr places his emphasis on "realized" knowledge. For Nasr, "The unknown is not out there, beyond the present boundary of knowledge, but at the Center of man's being here and now where it has always been". The only reason humans are unaware of it is because they have forgotten that it exists. Nasr compares such knowledge with a sun that keeps shining despite the fact that humans can no longer see its light due of their blindness. This knowledge can only be attained through "the acquisition of spiritual virtues, which is the manner in which man participates in that truth which is itself suprahuman". Such realized knowledge is never divorced or disconnected from revelation, religion, tradition and orthodoxy.

Resacralization of science

According to Daiwie Fu, Nasr's call for the resacralization of science is "gnosis-oriented". Scholars such as Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Alparslan Açkgenç, and Osman Bakar maintain that religion and science cannot be reconciled without changing the philosophical foundations of modern science because modern science is essentially secular and is responsible for desacralizing the universe. Nasr, along with members of the Traditionalist School such as Frithjof Schuon, René Guénon, and Titus Burckhardt, contends that the premodern and modern sciences differ in their conceptions of nature, methods, cosmological presuppositions, epistemological perspective, and the parametric structure used to process the "facts" discovered through observation and experimentation. According to Kathleen Raine, Nasr does not oppose "science itself, as such and within its own field", but rather scientism, which Gai Eaton defines "as the whole body of thought and speculation constructed upon the working theories whereby scientists attempt to coordinate their observations and to explain rationally a phenomenal world to which they do not possess the key".

Revival of the sacred view of sciences

See also: Scientia sacra

In order to overcome the perceived constraints of modern science, Traditionalists argue for the resuscitation of "the traditional sacred outlook of sciences", without subscribing to the metaphysical principles of modern science. According to Nasr, the primary distinction between traditional science and modern science is that, in the former, the profane and purely human remain constantly marginal and the sacred is central, whereas, in the latter, the profane has taken center stage. For this reason, despite the fact that certain intuitions and discoveries made possible by modern science reveal the Divine Origin of the natural world, it has been so marginalized that it is hardly acknowledged. Thus, traditionalists propose that the modern worldview be deconstructed by altering the foundational assumptions about the nature of reality, which are believed to be governed by the prevailing "dualist-mechanistic-anthropocentric paradigm". In Nasr's view, science is hierarchical, or subservient to a higher order. According to this perspective, modern science is deficient because it only addresses some aspects of reality while dismissing others. Traditional sciences, on the other hand, maintain the "hierarchy of realities, the primacy of the spiritual over the material, the sacred character of the cosmos, and the unity of knowledge and interrelatedness of beings." Epistemologically, such science is based on revelation, intellect, and reason.

For Nasr, science should operate within the limits set by metaphysics, the ultimate science. He is concerned that placing religion under the authority of a secularized science will lead to the desacralization of religion itself. As a traditionalist, he believes that religious forms are sacred revelations rather than human constructions, and hence not subject to rational or scientific criticism… Nasr's theology of science corresponds with his doctrine of God insofar as he envisions metaphysics resacralizing science by surrounding and permeating it in an "all‐encompassing" way; metaphysics should also control and have power over science, like its king.

— Ian S. Mevorach, The Divine Environment (al-Muhit) and the Body of God: Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Sallie McFague Resacralize Nature, 2017

Nasr thus seeks to reinstate "the traditional hierarchy of metaphysics over physics". He condemns any attempt to combine science and religion in such a way that religion conforms to modern scientific theories. Traditional religion, in his opinion, must not be influenced by modern science; rather, modern science should be placed in its appropriate perspective and, if required, corrected by traditional metaphysics. Nasr believes that the only way to counteract scientism, which he predicts will gain strength as scientific applications in the form of technology continue to undermine the sanctity of the human person while also hastening ecological degradation of the planet, is through sacred science, which upholds the hierarchy of knowledge and sapiential teachings of the world religions.

Effects

The resacralization of knowledge is said to have the potential to reconnect man with the divine. Because, according to Nasr, the intellective or intuitive perception of higher orders of reality is ultimately what permits Man to know God. According to Nasr, the rediscovery of the sacred dimension of knowledge would cast fresh light on Greek wisdom, the wisdom of Plato, Plotinus, and other Graeco-Alexandrian sages as well as teachings such as Hermeticism, not as mere "human philosophy" but as sacred teachings of divine inspiration comparable to Hindu darśanas rather than modern philosophical schools of today. In this regard, Nasr points to "the belief of Muslim philosophers that the Greek philosophers had learned their doctrines from the prophets", particularly Solomon, and that "philosophy derives from the niche of prophecy". Nasr argues that this claim, while historically unverifiable, embodies a fundamental truth, namely the connection of their philosophical wisdom to the sacred and its foundation in revelation, even though this revelation is distinct from that of Abrahamic religions.

Reception

According to Nidhal Guessoum, the concepts of God's "robust unity" and the function of intuitive knowledge bring nothing new to our understanding of scientific processes. He believes that deconstructing science in order to resacralize it is unnecessary because the ultimate objective is to reconcile "religious tradition with rational and scientific modernity." Likewise, Mehdi Golshani claims that Nasr's metaphysical objections are unnecessary since "science and metaphysics are complementary rather than contradictory." Sacralization initiatives, according to Syed Farid Alatas, do not provide alternatives to modernist discourse. However, Ernest Wolf-Gazo sees a possibility of reconciling Nasr's philosophy with the Western tradition, if positive worldviews in this regard can be reconstructed, taking into account the philosophies of figures such as Plato, Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, Cusanas, Spinoza, Goethe and German romantics such as Novalis, Schlegel, Schelling and Steffen. Then it might become possible to see that intellectual intuition of God is quite legitimate even within the Western tradition. For Wolf-Gazo, the reconstruction must be carried out in such a way that the Neo-Platonic tradition and the nominalists of late medieval philosophy, from Ockham to the analytic schools, from Newton to Whitehead, may be reconciled.

Other scholarly trends

Maslow's resacralization

According to the American psychologist Abraham Maslow (1966), the desacralization of science has produced "the type of science that lacks emotion, joy, wonder, awe, and rapture." Thus, he embraced the concept of a scientific ethos that is founded on "a humanistic, holistic approach that is not value free and that has scientists who care about the people and topics they investigate." He encouraged scientists to reintroduce values, creativity, emotion, and ritual to their work. In order to accomplish this, science needs to be resacralized, which entails infusing it with ceremony, fervor, and human values.

Wexler's resacralization of research

The educational sociologist Philip Wexler argues that the social sciences and education should no longer take secularization for granted because we have now reached a post-secular era that that demands a "religious turn" and a "re-sacralization of research". In order to accomplish this, scholars may need to reexamine early sociological works by Weber, Durkheim, Eliade, and others not only for their relevance but also for their shortcomings in contemporary analysis. Resacralization, in this view, entails more than simply returning to religion; rather, it requires a reconstruction of social life that recognizes the continued significance of religion and the potential value of looking at it from a religious perspective.

Pontifical and Promethean man

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontifical_and_Promethean_man 

 

In traditionalist philosophy, pontifical man is a divine representative (vicegerent of God) who serves as a bridge between heaven and earth. Promethean man, on the other hand, sees himself as an earthly being who has rebelled against God and has no knowledge of his origins or purposes. This concept was notably developed in contemporary language by the Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

Symbolism

Nasr used the term "Pontifical" in its etymological sense to convey that the human being is the gateway between Heaven and Earth, living on a circle of which he is always conscious and to which he strives to reach in his life. For Nasr, Pontifex is the "sacred man", who connects physical and spiritual realms, whereas Prometheus is the "profane man", the robber of fire from the dwelling of the gods. Nasr used the Prometheus image differently from Aeschylus and Shelley in Prometheus Bound and Prometheus Unbound. In these legends, he is portrayed as a hero, a demi-god or Titan who is prepared to endure endless torment in order to impart light to an ignorant and suffering humanity, even if it means defying the divine authority. In Nasr's perspective, however, the symbolism acquires a new meaning. Prometheus is portrayed as a thief of celestial fire, a rebel against the Divine, and a man who has lost sight of his own purpose.

Gai Eaton, commenting on Nasr's views of humanity, says that Pontifex is a notion that is similar to khalifatullh fi'l'ard (vicegerent of God on earth) and symbolizes the same underlying premise. The Prometheus myth, on the other hand, reflects Western man's perception of himself as a "little god", who takes pride in taking that which does not belong to him from heaven, disobeying the divine authority.

History

According to David Burrell, Nasr regards Promethean man as a product of the thirteenth-century Aristotelianization of Western philosophy, which some attribute to Averroes. For Nasr, the Promethean man, who is a self centered being, emerged during the Renaissance as a reaction against the traditional understanding of pontifical man. This event is said to correspond with the definitive loss of the sacred character of the universe. Nasr argues that the "exteriorization" of Christian philosophy was reinforced in the seventeenth century by the secularization of cosmological science, which was itself a consequence of "naturalization" of Christian conception of man as a satisfied citizen of this world.

For Nasr, the secularization of science in the seventeenth century mechanized both the notion of the universe and the notion of man, resulting in a world where man was an alien. He argues that the scientism that evolved during this century, along with the seeming success of Newtonian physics, culminated in the establishment of human sciences, which to this day resemble an already obsolete physics. Nasr agrees with Gilbert Durand's notion of "the disfiguration of the image of man in the West" in developing the picture of Promethean humanity. He distinguishes the "proto-Nietzschean construction" of man from the "primordial and plenary nature of man that Islam calls the 'Universal or Perfect Man' (al-Insan al-kamil) and to which the sapiental doctrines of Graeco-Alexandrian antiquity also allude,"—a man "who is the mirror of the divine qualities and names and the prototype of creation".

Polemics

Traditionalism maintains that the anthropology of modernity is 'Promethean' in nature, which has left the "humanum" alone in a meaningless cosmos. For Traditionalists, this is an illusory depiction of man that deviates from the essence of recurring divine revelations. They argue in favor of "pontifical man", a perspective that sees the human as the link between heaven and earth. Nasr contrasts the notion of the pontifical human with that of the modern man. For him, a "pontifical man" is traditional, spiritual, and religious. Modern humans, on the other hand, are promethean beings, who, according to Nasr, deny the existence of God. A Promethean person is irreligious and materialistic in both his or her beliefs and actions.

To characterize modernity’s secularization of the universe, Nasr borrows from Greek mythology. Like Prometheus, man has revolted against the heavens.... ]The Promethean model, in contradistinction to what he terms “Pontifical Man” – the understanding that mankind is the lynchpin between the cosmos and the Sacred – is both unethical and sacrilegious. Moreover it is recklessly leading to the current erosion of our environment.

— Lucian W. Stone Jr., Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 2005

According to Liu Shu-hsien, Nasr sees Promethean man as a creature of this world who has revolted against Heaven. He "feels at home on earth" and perceives life as a large "marketplace" where he is free to explore and choose whatever he wants. He is submerged in transience and impermanence, having lost his sense of the sacred, and has become a slave of his nafs or lower self, which he considers as liberty. According to this understanding, Promethean man stands against the sacred tradition. Pontifical man, on the contrary, connects the terrestrial and celestial realms. For Nasr, such a man never forgets that he is God's viceroy (khalifat Allah), who exists in a world that he recognizes as having an origin and a center, whose "primordial purity and wholeness he seeks to emulate, recapture and transmit". Pontifical man recognizes his divine responsibilities as a mediator between heaven and earth, as well as "his entelechy as lying beyond the terrestrial domain over which he is allowed to rule provided he remains aware of the transient nature of his own journey on earth", whereas Promethean man rejects this function and declares independence from the divine.

For Nasr, man's pontifical essence transcends him if he remains true to himself. Man cannot go against his inner essence unless he pays the price of separation from all he is and everything he wishes to be. With his roots in transcendental reality, man has an insatiable desire to be reborn in the spiritual realm with its limitless possibilities, free of the constraints of contingency and finiteness that encircle him. Being human, as Nasr argues, includes a desire to be more than just a human. Hence he has a spiritual longing for the Absolute and the Perennial. A pontifical man is destined to know the absolute and to live in accordance with the will of the Heaven. The Promethean man, on the other hand, is a weak and forgetful individual who succumbs to the spell of the secular and material world. He separates himself from the cosmic and immutable archetypes and becomes completely terrestrial. He loses his actual path in the world by accepting the changing aspects of things as the sole aspects of reality. Such a man thinks he can "live on a circle without a center",  while trying "to misappropriate the role of the Divinity for himself". He represents a shift from the viewpoint of man being created in the image of God to God being created in the image of man. Oblivious to his origin and purpose, Promethean man has caused havoc on the world over the course of five centuries, disrupting the natural order, and has lost sight of what it actually means to be a human, because he only seeks to achieve perfection by reforming his earthly finite existence.

In contrast, pontifical man is aware that, exactly because he is human, everything he does and thinks has both grandeur and peril. He knows that his activities have an impact on his existence that extends beyond the constrained spatiotemporal settings in which they take place. He understands "that somehow the bark which is to take him to the shore beyond after that fleeting journey" is made of what he achieves and how he lives while in the human realm. Pontifical man is both the mirror of the Center on the periphery and the echo of the Origin in subsequent cycles of time and generations of human history. According to the traditional perspective, this Center is eternally existent inside man himself. Because Eternity is mirrored in the present now, "Pontifical man" has access to the eternal while being outwardly in the province of becoming. He fulfills his full human potential since he possesses a true intellect.

Epistemological perspective

According to Mehdi Aminrazavi, the Promethean and Pontifical man symbolize two distinct "modes of being", each with its own method of cognition. Promethean man, according to Nasr, is the outcome of pure informative or discursive knowledge, whereas pontifical man is the reflection of transformative or realized knowledge. The Promethean man rejects tradition in favor of pure "rational thought." The Pontifical man, on the other hand, relies on esoteric method which is bound by religious law, and which the Promethean man seeks to deconstruct and annihilate. For Pontifical man, only realized knowledge of Reality can alleviate man's unrest and inner disquiet and restore the tranquility and calm that can only be attained by devotion to one's own Divine nature.

Modern science, according to Nasr, has embraced the "Promethean perspective of man," which sees man as "the measure of all things" in comparison to the Pontifical man, who lives in a theocentric universe. Modernism rejects such theocentric views of reality, removing God from the center of existence and substituting God with man. Instead, it focuses on the individual and individualism, as well as human reason and the senses. Its epistemology, Nasr argues, is mostly based on rationalism or empiricism, and it evaluates everything using human values as the ultimate standard. Traditional science, on the other hand, incorporates metaphysical principles and is theocentric, or God-centered.

For Nasr, man is greater than what science has discovered about him, and he is neither angel nor animal in the ultimate sense. His intellect, psyche, and spirit have bestowed upon him qualities and characteristics that far exceed the greatest aspirations of the scientific community. According to Sulayman S. Nyang, Nasr sees man as a "pontifical being", yearning for a meeting with the source of his life and existence. He refuses to "enclose" man within the biological framework of Darwinian theory. He claims that the source of man is not the atoms from which he is formed. Man is rather a metaphysical and transcendental entity whose existence is beyond human comprehension, despite the fact that signs of his presence and existence can be found everywhere.

Farthest South

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farthest_South 

Amundsen's Norwegian party stand at the South Pole, 17 December 1911. They had reached 90°S two days earlier.

Farthest South refers to the most southerly latitude reached by explorers before the first successful expedition to the South Pole in 1911.

Significant steps on the road to the pole were the discovery of lands south of Cape Horn in 1619, Captain James Cook's crossing of the Antarctic Circle in 1773, and the earliest confirmed sightings of the Antarctic mainland in 1820. From the late 19th century onward, the quest for Farthest South latitudes became a race to reach the pole, which culminated in Roald Amundsen's success in December 1911.

In the years before reaching the pole was a realistic objective, other motives drew adventurers southward. Initially, the driving force was the discovery of new trade routes between Europe and the Far East. After such routes had been established and the main geographical features of the Earth had been broadly mapped, the lure for mercantile adventurers was the great fertile continent of "Terra Australis" which, according to myth, lay hidden in the south. Belief in the existence of this supposed land of plenty persisted well into the 18th century; explorers were reluctant to accept the truth that slowly emerged, of a cold, harsh environment in the lands of the Southern Ocean.

James Cook's voyages of 1772–1775 demonstrated conclusively the likely hostile nature of any hidden lands. This caused a shift of emphasis in the first half of the 19th century, away from trade and towards sealing and whaling, and then exploration and discovery. After the first overwintering on continental Antarctica in 1898–99 (Adrien de Gerlache), the prospect of reaching the South Pole appeared realistic, and the race for the pole began. The British were pre-eminent in this endeavour, which was characterised by the rivalry between Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton during the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Shackleton's efforts fell short; Scott reached the pole in January 1912 only to find that he had been beaten by the Norwegian Amundsen.

Early voyagers

Antarctica and surrounding islands, showing Tierra del Fuego and the Auckland Islands

In 1494, the principal maritime powers, Portugal and Spain, signed a treaty which drew a line down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and allocated all trade routes to the east of the line to Portugal. That gave Portugal dominance of the only known route to the east–via the Cape of Good Hope and Indian Ocean, which left Spain, and later other countries, to seek a western route to the Pacific. The exploration of the south began as part of the search for such a route.

Unlike the Arctic, there is no evidence of human visitation or habitation in 'Antarctica' or the islands around it prior to European exploration. However, the most southerly parts of South America were already inhabited by tribes such as the Selk'nam/Ona, the Yagán/Yámana, the Alacaluf and the Haush. The Haush in particular made regular trips to Isla de los Estados, which was 29 kilometres (18 mi) from the main island of Tierra del Fuego, suggesting that some of them may have been capable of reaching the islands near Cape Horn. Fuegian Indian artefacts and canoe remnants have also been discovered on the Falkland Islands, suggesting the capacity for even longer sea journeys. Chilean scientists have claimed that Amerinds visited the South Shetland Islands, due to stone artifacts recovered from bottom-sampling operations in Admiralty Bay, King George Island, and Discovery Bay, Greenwich Island; however, the artifacts—two arrowheads—were later found to have been planted, possibly to reinforce Chilean claims to the area.

While the natives of Tierra del Fuego were not capable of true oceanic travel, there is some evidence of Polynesian visits to some of the sub antarctic islands to the south of New Zealand, although these are further from Antarctica than South America. There are also remains of a Polynesian settlement dating back to the 13th century on Enderby Island in the Auckland Islands. According to ancient legends, around the year 650 the Polynesian traveller Ui-te-Rangiora led a fleet of Waka Tīwai south until they reached "a place of bitter cold where rock-like structures rose from a solid sea". It is unclear from the legends how far south Ui-te-Rangiora penetrated, but it appears that he observed ice in large quantities. A shard of undated, unidentified pottery, reported as found in 1886 in the Antipodes Islands, has been associated with this expedition.

Ferdinand Magellan

Main article: Ferdinand Magellan

Ferdinand Magellan

Although Portuguese by birth, Ferdinand Magellan transferred his allegiance to King Charles I of Spain, on whose behalf he left Seville on 10 August 1519, with a squadron of five ships, in search of a western route to the Spice Islands in the East Indies. Success depended on finding a strait or passage through the South American land masses, or finding the southern tip of the continent and sailing around it. The South American coast was sighted on 6 December 1519, and Magellan moved cautiously southward, following the coast to reach latitude 49°S on 31 March 1520. Little if anything was known of the coast south of this point, so Magellan decided to wait out the southern winter here, and established the settlement of Puerto San Julian.

In September 1520, the voyage continued down the uncharted coast, and on 21 October reached 52°S. Here Magellan found a deep inlet which proved to be the strait he was seeking, later to be known by his name. Early in November 1520, as the squadron navigated through the strait, they reached its most southerly point at approximate latitude 54°S. This was a record Farthest South for a European navigator, though not the farthest southern penetration by man; the position was north of the Tierra del Fuego archipelago, where there is evidence of human settlement dating back thousands of years.

Francisco de Hoces

Main article: Francisco de Hoces

The first sighting of an ocean passage to the Pacific south of Tierra del Fuego is sometimes attributed to Francisco de Hoces of the Loaisa Expedition. In January 1526 his ship San Lesmes was blown south from the Atlantic entrance of the Magellan Strait to a point where the crew thought they saw a headland, and water beyond it, which indicated the southern extremity of the continent. There is speculation as to which headland they saw; conceivably it was Cape Horn. In parts of the Spanish-speaking world it is believed that de Hoces may have discovered the strait later known as the Drake Passage more than 50 years before Sir Francis Drake, the British privateer.

Sir Francis Drake

Main article: Sir Francis Drake

Sir Francis Drake

Sir Francis Drake sailed from Plymouth on 15 November 1577, in command of a fleet of five ships under his flagship Pelican, later renamed the Golden Hinde. His principal objective was plunder, not exploration; his initial targets were the unfortified Spanish towns on the Pacific coasts of Chile and Peru. Following Magellan's route, Drake reached Puerto San Julian on 20 June. After nearly two months in harbour, Drake left the port with a reduced fleet of three ships and a small pinnace. His ships entered the Magellan Strait on 23 August and emerged in the Pacific Ocean on 6 September.

Drake set a course to the north-west, but on the following day a gale scattered the ships. The Marigold was sunk by a giant wave; the Elizabeth managed to return into the Magellan Strait, later sailing eastwards back to England; the pinnace was lost later. The gales persisted for more than seven weeks. The Golden Hinde was driven far to the west and south, before clawing its way back towards land. On 22 October, the ship anchored off an island which Drake named "Elizabeth Island", where wood for the galley fires was collected and seals and penguins captured for food.

According to Drake's Portuguese pilot, Nuno da Silva, their position at the anchorage was 57°S. However, there is no island at that latitude. The as yet undiscovered Diego Ramírez Islands, at 56°30'S, are treeless and cannot have been the islands where Drake's crew collected wood. This indicates that the navigational calculation was faulty, and that Drake landed at or near the then unnamed Cape Horn, possibly on Horn Island itself. His final southern latitude can only be speculated as that of Cape Horn, at 55°59'S. In his report, Drake wrote: "The Uttermost Cape or headland of all these islands stands near 56 degrees, without which there is no main island to be seen to the southwards but that the Atlantic Ocean and the South Sea meet." This open sea south of Cape Horn became known as the Drake Passage even though Drake himself did not traverse it.

Willem Schouten

Main article: Willem Schouten

On 14 June 1615, Willem Schouten, with two ships Eendracht and Hoorn, set sail from Texel in the Netherlands in search of a western route to the Pacific. Hoorn was lost in a fire, but Eendracht continued southward. On 29 January 1616, Schouten reached what he discerned to be the southernmost cape of the South American continent; he named this point Kaap Hoorn (Cape Horn) after his hometown and his lost ship. Schouten's navigational readings are inaccurate—he placed Cape Horn at 57°48' south, when its actual position is 55°58'. His claim to have reached 58° south is unverified, although he sailed on westward to become the first European navigator to reach the Pacific via the Drake Passage.

Garcia de Nodal expedition

Main article: Garcia de Nodal expedition

The next recorded navigation of the Drake Passage was achieved in February 1619, by the brothers Bartolome and Gonzalo Garcia de Nodal. The Garcia de Nodal expedition discovered a small group of islands about 60 nautical miles (100 km; 70 mi) south-west of Cape Horn, at latitude 56°30'S. They named these the Diego Ramirez Islands after the expedition's pilot. The islands remained the most southerly known land on earth until Captain James Cook's discovery of the South Sandwich Islands in 1775.

Other discoveries

Other voyages brought further discoveries in the southern oceans; in August 1592, the English seaman John Davis had taken shelter "among certain Isles never before discovered"—presumed to be the Falkland Islands. In 1675, the English merchant voyager Anthony de la Roché visited South Georgia (the first Antarctic land discovered); in 1739 the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Bouvet de Lozier discovered the remote Bouvet Island, and in 1772 his compatriot, Yves-Joseph de Kerguelen de Trémarec, found the Kerguelen Islands.

Early Antarctic explorers

Captain James Cook

Main article: Second voyage of James Cook

Captain James Cook

The second of James Cook's historic voyages, 1772–1775, was primarily a search for the elusive Terra Australis Incognita that was still believed to lie somewhere in the unexplored latitudes below 40°S. Cook left England in September 1772 with two ships, HMS Resolution and HMS Adventure. After pausing at Cape Town, on 22 November the two ships sailed due south, but were driven to the east by heavy gales. They managed to edge further south, encountering their first pack ice on 10 December. This soon became a solid barrier, which tested Cook's seamanship as he manoeuvered for a passage through. Eventually, he found open water, and was able to continue south; on 17 January 1773, the expedition reached the Antarctic Circle at 66°20'S, the first ships to do so. Further progress was barred by ice, and the ships turned north-eastwards and headed for New Zealand, which they reached on 26 March.

During the ensuing months, the expedition explored the southern Pacific Ocean before Cook took Resolution south again—Adventure had retired back to South Africa after a confrontation with the New Zealand native population. This time Cook was able to penetrate deep beyond the Antarctic Circle, and on 30 January 1774 reached 71°10'S, his Farthest South, but the state of the ice made further southward travel impossible. This southern record would hold for 49 years.

In the course of his voyages in Antarctic waters, Cook had encircled the world at latitudes generally above 60°S, and saw nothing but bleak inhospitable islands, without a hint of the fertile continent which some still hoped lay in the south. Cook wrote that if any such continent existed it would be "a country doomed by nature", and that "no man will venture further than I have done, and the land to the South will never be explored". He concluded: "Should the impossible be achieved and the land attained, it would be wholly useless and of no benefit to the discoverer or his nation".

Searching for land

Despite Cook's prediction, the early 19th century saw numerous attempts to penetrate southward, and to discover new lands. In 1819, William Smith, in command of the brigantine Williams, discovered the South Shetland Islands, and in the following year Edward Bransfield, in the same ship, sighted the Trinity Peninsula at the northern extremity of Graham Land. A few days before Bransfield's discovery, on 27 January 1820, the Russian captain Fabian von Bellingshausen, in another Antarctic sector, had come within sight of the coast of what is now known as Queen Maud Land. He is thus credited as the first person to see the continent's mainland, although he did not make this claim himself. Bellingshausen made two circumnavigations mainly in latitudes between 60 and 67°S, and in January 1821 reached his most southerly point at 70°S, in a longitude close to that in which Cook had made his record 47 years earlier. In 1821 the American sealing captain John Davis led a party which landed on an uncharted stretch of land beyond the South Shetlands. "I think this Southern Land to be a Continent", he wrote in his ship's log. If his landing was not on an island, his party were the first to set foot on the Antarctic continent.

James Weddell

Main article: James Weddell

James Weddell was an Anglo-Scottish seaman who saw service in both the Royal Navy and the merchant marine before undertaking his first voyages to Antarctic waters. In 1819, in command of the 160-ton brigantine Jane which had been adapted for whaling, he set sail for the newly discovered whaling grounds of the South Sandwich Islands. His chief interest on this voyage was in finding the "Aurora Islands", which had been reported at 53°S, 48°W by the Spanish ship Aurora in 1762. He failed to discover this non-existent land, but his sealing activities showed a handsome profit.

Weddell's ships, Jane and Beaufoy, under full sail

In 1822 Weddell, again in command of Jane and this time accompanied by a smaller ship, the cutter Beaufoy, set sail for the south with instructions from his employers that, should the sealing prove barren, he was to "investigate beyond the track of former navigators". This suited Weddell's exploring instincts, and he equipped his vessel with chronometers, thermometers, compasses, barometers and charts. In January 1823 he probed the waters between the South Sandwich Islands and the South Orkney Islands, looking for new land. Finding none, he turned southward down the 40°W meridian, deep into the sea that now bears his name. The season was unusually calm, and Weddell reported that "not a particle of ice of any description was to be seen". On 20 February 1823, he reached a new Farthest South of 74°15'S, three degrees beyond Cook's former record. Unaware that he was close to land, Weddell decided to return northward from this point, convinced that the sea continued as far as the South Pole. Another two days' sailing would likely have brought him within sight of Coats Land, which was not discovered until 1904, by William Speirs Bruce during the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, 1902–1904. On his return to England, Weddell's claim to have exceeded Cook's record by such a margin "caused some raised eyebrows", but was soon accepted.

Benjamin Morrell

Main article: Benjamin Morrell

In November 1823, the American sealing captain Benjamin Morrell reached the South Sandwich Islands in the schooner Wasp. According to his own later account he then sailed south, unconsciously following the track taken by James Weddell a month previously. Morrell claimed to have reached 70°14'S, at which point he turned north because the ship's stoves were running short of fuel—otherwise, he says, he could have "reached 85° without the least doubt". After turning, he claimed to have encountered land which he described in some detail, and which he named New South Greenland. This land proved not to exist. Morrell's reputation as a liar and a fraud means that most of his geographical claims have been dismissed by scholars, although attempts have been made to rationalise his assertions.

James Clark Ross

Main article: James Clark Ross

James Clark Ross's 1839–1843 Antarctic expedition in HMS Erebus and HMS Terror was a full-scale Royal Naval enterprise, the principal function of which was to test current theories on magnetism, and to try to locate the South Magnetic Pole. The expedition had first been proposed by leading astronomer Sir John Herschel, and was supported by the Royal Society and the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Ross had considerable past experience in magnetic observation and Arctic exploration; in May 1831 he had been a member of a party that had reached the location of the North Magnetic Pole, and he was an obvious choice as commander.

Captain Sir James Clark Ross

The expedition left England on 30 September 1839, and after a voyage that was slowed by the many stops required to carry out work on magnetism, it reached Tasmania in August 1840. Following a three-month break imposed by the southern winter, they sailed south-east on 12 November 1840, and crossed the Antarctic Circle on 1 January 1841. On 11 January a long mountainous coastline that stretched to the south was sighted. Ross named the land Victoria Land, and the mountains the Admiralty Range. He followed the coast southwards and passed Weddell's Farthest South point of 74°15'S on 23 January. A few days later, as they moved further eastward to avoid shore ice, they were met by the sight of twin volcanoes (one of them active), which were named Mount Erebus and Mount Terror, in honour of the expedition's ships.

The Great Ice Barrier (later to be called the "Ross Ice Shelf") stretched away east of these mountains, forming an impassable obstacle to further southward progress. In his search for a strait or inlet, Ross explored 300 nautical miles (560 km; 350 mi) along the edge of the barrier, and reached an approximate latitude of 78°S on or about 8 February 1841. He failed to find a suitable anchorage that would have allowed the ships to over-winter, so he returned to Tasmania, arriving there in April 1841.

The following season Ross returned and located an inlet in the Barrier face that enabled him, on 23 February 1842, to extend his Farthest South to 78°09'30"S, a record which would remain unchallenged for 58 years. Although Ross had not been able to land on the Antarctic continent, nor approach the location of the South Magnetic Pole, on his return to England in 1843 he was knighted for his achievements in geographical and scientific exploration.

Explorers of the Heroic Age

Main article: Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration

The oceanographic research voyage known as the Challenger Expedition, 1872–1876, explored Antarctic waters for several weeks, but did not approach the land itself; its research, however, proved the existence of an Antarctic continent beyond a reasonable doubt.

The impetus for what would become known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration came in 1895, when in an address to the Sixth International Geographical Congress in London, Professor Sir John Murray called for a resumption of Antarctic exploration: "a steady, continuous, laborious and systematic exploration of the whole southern region". He followed this call with an appeal to British patriotism: "Is the last great piece of maritime exploration on the surface of our Earth to be undertaken by Britons, or is it to be left to those who may be destined to succeed or supplant us on the Ocean?" During the following quarter-century, fifteen expeditions from eight different nations rose to this challenge. In the patriotic spirit engendered by Murray's call, and under the influence of RGS president Sir Clements Markham, British endeavours in the following years gave particular weight to the achievement of new Farthest South records, and began to develop the character of a race for the South Pole.

Carsten Borchgrevink

Main article: Southern Cross Expedition

Carsten Borchgrevink, who led the Southern Cross Expedition, 1898–1900

The Norwegian-born Carsten Egeberg Borchgrevink had emigrated to Australia in 1888, where he worked on survey teams in Queensland and New South Wales before accepting a school teaching post. In 1894 he joined a sealing and whaling expedition to the Antarctic, led by Henryk Bull. In January 1895 Borchgrevink was one of a group from that expedition that claimed the first confirmed landing on the Antarctic continent, at Cape Adare.^[ Borchgrevink determined to return with his own expedition, which would overwinter and explore inland, with the location of the South Magnetic Pole as an objective.

Borchgrevink went to England, where he was able to persuade the publishing magnate Sir George Newnes to finance him to the extent of £40,000, equivalent to £4.51 million in 2019, with the sole stipulation that, despite the shortage of British participants, the venture be styled the "British Antarctic Expedition". This was by no means the grand British expedition envisaged by Markham and the geographical establishment, who were hostile and dismissive of Borchgrevink. On 23 August 1898 the expedition ship Southern Cross left London for the Ross Sea, reaching Cape Adare on 17 February 1899. Here a shore party was landed and was the first to over-winter on the Antarctic mainland, in a prefabricated hut.

In January 1900, Southern Cross returned, picked up the shore party and, following the route which Ross had taken 60 years previously, sailed southward to the Great Ice Barrier, which they discovered had retreated some 30 miles (48 km) south since the days of Ross. A party consisting of Borchgrevink, William Colbeck and a Sami named Per Savio landed with sledges and dogs. This party ascended the Barrier and made the first sledge journey on the barrier surface; on 16 February 1900 they extended the Farthest South record to 78°50'S. On its return to England later in 1900, Borchgrevink's expedition was received without enthusiasm, despite its new southern record. Historian David Crane commented that if Borchgrevink had been a British naval officer, his contribution to Antarctic knowledge might have been better received, but "a Norwegian seaman/schoolmaster was never going to be taken seriously".

Robert Falcon Scott

Main article: Discovery Expedition

The Discovery Expedition of 1901–1904 was Robert Falcon Scott's first Antarctic command. Although according to Edward Wilson the intention was to "reach the Pole if possible, or find some new land", there is nothing in Scott's writings, nor in the official objectives of the expedition, to indicate that the pole was a definite goal. However, a southern journey towards the pole was within Scott's formal remit to "explore the ice barrier of Sir James Ross ... and to endeavour to solve the very important physical and geographical questions connected with this remarkable ice formation".

The southern journey was undertaken by Scott, Wilson and Ernest Shackleton. The party set out on 1 November 1902 with various teams in support, and one of these, led by Michael Barne, passed Borchgrevink's Farthest South mark on 11 November, an event recorded with great high spirits in Wilson's diary. The march continued, initially in favourable weather conditions, but encountered increasing difficulties caused by the party's lack of ice travelling experience and the loss of all its dogs through a combination of poor diet and overwork. The 80°S mark was passed on 2 December, and four weeks later, on 30 December 1902, Wilson and Scott took a short ski trip from their southern camp to set a new Farthest South at (according to their measurements) 82°17'S. Modern maps, correlated with Shackleton's photograph and Wilson's drawing, put their final camp at 82°6'S, and the point reached by Scott and Wilson at 82°11'S, 200 nautical miles (370 km; 230 mi) beyond Borchgrevink's mark.

Ernest Shackleton

Main article: Nimrod Expedition

From left to right: Jameson Adams, Frank Wild and Eric Marshall (photographed by Shackleton) plant the Union flag at their southernmost position, 88°23', on 9 January 1909.

After his share in the Farthest South achievement of the Discovery Expedition, Ernest Shackleton suffered a physical collapse on the return journey, and was sent home with the expedition's relief vessel on orders from Scott; he bitterly resented it, and the two became rivals. Four years later, Shackleton organised his own polar venture, the Nimrod Expedition, 1907–1909. This was the first expedition to set the definite objective of reaching the South Pole, and to have a specific strategy for doing so.

To assist his endeavour, Shackleton adopted a mixed transport strategy, involving the use of Manchurian ponies as pack animals, as well as the more traditional dog-sledges. A specially adapted motor car was also taken. Although the dogs and the car were used during the expedition for a number of purposes, the task of assisting the group that would undertake the march to the pole fell to the ponies. The size of Shackleton's four-man polar party was dictated by the number of surviving ponies; of the ten that were embarked in New Zealand, only four had survived the 1908 winter.

Ernest Shackleton and three companions (Frank Wild, Eric Marshall and Jameson Adams) began their march on 29 October 1908. On 26 November they surpassed the farthest point reached by Scott's 1902 party. "A day to remember", wrote Shackleton in his journal, noting that they had reached this point in far less time than on the previous march with Scott. Shackleton's group continued southward, discovering and ascending the Beardmore Glacier to the polar plateau, and then marching on to reach their Farthest South point at 88°23'S, a mere 97 nautical miles (180 km; 112 mi) from the pole, on 9 January 1909. Here they planted the Union Jack presented to them by Queen Alexandra, and took possession of the plateau in the name of King Edward VII, before shortages of food and supplies forced them to turn back north. This was, at the time, the closest convergence on either pole. The increase of more than six degrees south from Scott's previous record was the greatest extension of Farthest South since Captain Cook's 1773 mark. Shackleton was treated as a hero on his return to England. His record was to stand for less than three years, being passed by Amundsen on 7 December 1911.

Polar conquest

Main articles: Amundsen's South Pole expedition and Terra Nova Expedition

Roald Amundsen, leader of the first expedition to reach the South Pole, 15 December 1911

In the wake of Shackleton's near miss, Robert Scott organised the Terra Nova Expedition, 1910–1913, in which securing the South Pole for the British Empire was an explicitly stated prime objective. As he planned his expedition, Scott saw no reason to believe that his effort would be contested. However, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who had been developing plans for a North Pole expedition, changed his mind when, in September 1909, the North Pole was claimed in quick succession by the Americans Frederick Cook and Robert Peary. Amundsen resolved to go south instead.

Amundsen concealed his revised intentions until his ship, Fram, was in the Atlantic and beyond communication. Scott was notified by telegram that a rival was in the field, but had little choice other than to continue with his own plans. Meanwhile, Fram arrived at the Ross Ice Shelf on 11 January 1911, and by 14 January had found the inlet, or "Bay of Whales", where Borchgrevink had made his landing eleven years earlier. This became the location of Amundsen's base camp, Framheim.

After nine months' preparation, Amundsen's polar journey began on 20 October 1911. Avoiding the known route to the polar plateau via the Beardmore Glacier, Amundsen led his party of five due south, reaching the Transantarctic Mountains on 16 November. They discovered the Axel Heiberg Glacier, which provided them with a direct route to the polar plateau and on to the pole. Shackleton's Farthest South mark was passed on 7 December, and the South Pole was reached on 14 December 1911. The Norwegian party's greater skills with the techniques of ice travel, using ski and dogs, had proved decisive in their success. Scott's five-man team reached the same point 33 days later, and perished during their return journey. Since Cook's journeys, every expedition that had held the Farthest South record before Amundsen's conquest had been British; however, the final triumph indisputably belonged to the Norwegians.

Later history

The Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station, photographed in 2006

After Scott's retreat from the pole in January 1912, the location remained unvisited for nearly 18 years. On 28 November 1929, US Navy Commander (later Rear-Admiral) Richard E. Byrd and three others completed the first aircraft flight over the South Pole. Twenty-seven years later, Rear-Admiral George J. Dufek became the first person to set foot on the pole since Scott, when on 31 October 1956 he and the crew of R4D-5 Skytrain "Que Sera Sera" landed at the pole. Between November 1956 and February 1957, the first permanent South Pole research station was erected and christened the Amundsen–Scott South Pole Station in honour of the pioneer explorers. Since then the station had been substantially extended, and in 2008 was housing up to 150 scientific staff and support personnel. Dufek gave considerable assistance to the Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1955–1958, led by Vivian Fuchs, which on 19 January 1958 became the first party to reach the pole overland since Scott.

Resacralization of nature

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resacralization_of_nature

 

Resacralization of nature is a term used in environmental philosophy to describe the process of restoring the sacred quality of nature. The primary assumption is that nature has a sanctified aspect that has become lost in modern times as a result of the secularization of contemporary worldviews. These secular worldviews are said to be directly responsible for the spiritual crisis in "modern man", which has ultimately resulted in the current environmental degradation. This perspective emphasizes the significance of changing human perceptions of nature through the incorporation of various religious principles and values that connect nature with the divine. The Iranian philosopher Seyyed Hossein Nasr first conceptualized the theme of resacralization of nature in contemporary language, which was later expounded upon by a number of theologians and philosophers including Alister McGrath, Sallie McFague and Rosemary Radford Ruether.

Historical development

According to Tarik M. Quadir, Seyyed Hossein Nasr is "the first person ever to write extensively about the philosophical and religious dimension of the [environmental] crisis." Quadir comes to this conclusion "based on [his] inability to find any comparable scholarly work prior to Nasr’s The Encounter of Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1968) dealing with the religious and philosophical roots of the contemporary environmental crisis at length." Nasr first presented his insight in a 1965 essay, expanding it in a series of lectures given at the University of Chicago the following year, in May 1966, several months before Lynn White, Jr. gave his famous lecture before the American Academy of Arts and Sciences on December 26, 1966 (published in Science in 1967 as The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis). Nasr's lectures were later published as The Encounter of Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man in 1968 in which he argued, in a detailed manner, "for the revival of a sacred view of the universe in order to combat the contemporary environmental crisis". The theme of resacralization of nature later became an important issue in the writings of many theologians and philosophers.

Background

Almut Beringer, commenting on Nasr's work, states that several historical processes, most notably the emergence of secular humanism during and after the Renaissance, contributed to the "absolutization of earthly man" and the formation of a secular reductionist science within the Christian civilisation. Nasr believes that the environmental catastrophe is the result of a spiritual crisis in "modern man," which was sparked by the reduction and trivialization of religious ideas about nature, the universe, and humanity. Nasr is opposed to scientific reasoning that compares the human body with a machine and the world with a collection of resources that humans may manipulate. He calls into question the alleged conceptual limits of science in a secular framework, which preclude interpretations that are not governed by physical principles.

It is the secularized worldview that reduces nature to a purely material domain cut off from the world of the Spirit to be plundered at will for what is usually called human welfare, but which really means the illusory satisfaction of a never-ending greed without which consumer society would not exist.

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr quoted in Sarah Elizabeth Robinson, Common Ground in Sacred Nature: Unearthing Ecological Solidarity between Nasr and Ruether, 2014

For Nasr, the environmental crisis is a "crisis of the soul" that "technologized science" cannot cure alone since "modern man" is in need of a spiritual rebirth. According to Nasr, "modern man" has lost sight of who he is in respect to God and nature. This forgetfulness implies a disregard for the sacred foundation of the human body and the body of nature. The environmental catastrophe is portrayed as an outward representation of an inner malaise that resides within the souls of men and women who have abandoned heaven for earth and are now on the verge of destroying it. Thus, for Nasr, spiritual imbalance is the primary source of environmental problems. To resolve this problem, he investigates the perspectives of various religions on the order of nature and urges "modern" individuals to perceive nature through a sacralized perspective.

According to Alister McGrath, "the decline of modernist antipathy to religion" has contributed to substantial debate of religion's significance in human culture and intellectual life. Through the resacralization of nature, which has generated renewed interest in "religious readings of nature," the significance of religion in environmental concerns is becoming more generally recognized in the contemporary age. For McGrath, religion is a natural, unavoidable component of human existence and culture, notwithstanding modernist social engineering initiatives aiming at its extinction in many places. According to Almut Beringer, a cursory examination of history reveals that living without awareness of a sacred cosmos is a cultural misunderstanding and historical anomaly that Western civilization should reconsider.

Concept

Environment

In the same way that there are many heavens, each belonging to a particular religious cosmos, and yet a single Heaven of which each of the particular heavens is a reflection and yet in essence that Heaven Itself, so are there many earths and forms of religious knowledge of these earths. But there is a perspective that encompasses many salient features of those diverse forms of religious knowledge, despite their differences, leading to a knowledge of the Earth that would be recognizable by the various religious traditions at least in their sapiential dimension if not in their [particular] theological, social, and juridical formulations. It is in the light of this knowledge, drawn from various traditions—which can in fact enrich other traditions in many ways today—that we must seek to reassert the sacred quality of nature and to speak of its resacralization.

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr quoted in Ismail Al‐Hanif, A hedgehog bleeds green: Seyyed Hossein Nasr's Religion & The Order of Nature, 1998

According to Nasr, resacralization of nature does not imply bestowing sacredness on nature because this is beyond man's capacity. It just entails removing the veils of ignorance and pride that have obscured the sacredness of nature from the sight of humanity. According to Nasr, preserving the sanctity of life necessitates the rediscovery of nature's sacred quality.

Nature has been already sacralized by the Sacred Itself, and its resacralization means more than anything else a transformation within man, who has himself lost his Sacred Center, so as to be able to rediscover the Sacred and consequently to behold again nature’s sacred quality.

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr quoted in Sarah Robinson-Bertoni, Key Thinkers on the Environment, 2017

According to Nasr, nature is forever sacred because it has been sacralized by the divine, despite human ignorance of its sacredness. Resacralization occurs when individuals become aware of the divinity in nature. He refers to inner transformation through a shift in perspective; thus, resacralizing nature means reorienting people towards the divine in everything, including the functioning of nature. As stated by Almut Beringer, "resacralizing nature is not so much a task of intervening and “doing” in nature but much more a task of self-transformation, a way of “being” relying on humility." According to Reza Shah-Kazemi, the sacrilege committed by men's hands on land and at sea can only be remedied through re-sacralization, which can only be accomplished by individual spiritual effort on the one hand, and God's mercy on the other. Farzin Vahdat quotes Nasr as saying that it is only conceivable if metaphysical knowledge pertaining to nature is revived.

Themes

Reenchantment of nature

In his book The Reenchantment of Nature, Alister McGrath seeks to analyze the contemporary environmental crisis and its alleged roots in Western history, stating that "The roots of our ecological crisis lie in the rise of a self-centered view of reality that has come into possession of the hardware it needs to achieve its goals." He refers to the "secular creed of twentieth-century Western culture" as "the most self-centered religion in history", with roots in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and the underlying premise that "humanity is the arbiter of all ideas and values". For McGrath, "a right attitude to nature rests on the revival of our capacity for wonder, resting on our appreciation of the nature of reality itself". If nature has been disenchanted, the remedy, according to Mcgrath, is to reenchant it. According to him, "to re-enchant nature is not merely to gain a new respect for the integrity and well-being; it is to throw open the doors to a deeper level of existence". He advocates for restoring the concept of nature as God's creation and acting appropriately, aligning attitudes and actions with beliefs. John Hart compares McGrath's and Nasr's ideas on nature, pointing out similarities in both. According to him, both of these thinkers "call for a religious recovery of traditional attitudes toward and actions upon Earth, so that Nature might be 'resacralized' (Nasr) and 'reenchanted' (McGrath)”.

God as al Muhit

In Islam and the Environmental Crisis (1992), Nasr offers an Islamic doctrine of God in which he highlights the Quran's portrayal of God as the All Encompassing (Muhit), as stated in the verse, "But to God belong all things in the heavens and on earth: and He it is who encompasseth (muhit) all things" (4: 126). He points out that the term muhit also refers to the environment. According to him, "humans are immersed in the Divine Muhit and are only unaware of it because of their own forgetfulness and negligence (ghaflah)", which he considers to be the "underlying sin of the soul" that must be overcome by remembrance (dhikr). Thus, remembering God is seeing Him everywhere and experiencing His reality as al Muhit. According to Nasr, the environmental crisis may be attributed to humanity's failure to recognize God as the true "environment" that surrounds and sustains everything. The contemporary endeavor to regard the natural environment as an "ontologically independent order of reality", detached from the Divine Environment, without whose liberating grace it gets suffocated and dies, culminates in environmental calamity. According to Nasr, remembering God as al Muhit means being aware of nature's sacred quality and viewing nature as signs of God which is permeated by the Divine Presence of His Reality. According to Ian S. Mevorach, Nasr seeks to resacralize nature "by lifting up the divine name al‐Muhit" and recognizing nature's intimate relationship with God.

The world as God’s body

Sallie McFague proposes a new model of the God–world relationship in place of dominant Christian theological model of God as king of the world. According to this new model, both God's immanence and God's transcendence are connected to the universe. For McFague, "if God is the inspirited body of the whole universe, then both God’s transcendent dimension—the Spirit—and God’s immanent dimension—the body—are intimately connected to the natural world in which we live." According to McFague, when people perceive God as being above and away from the universe, they tend to imagine themselves as being disconnected from the world and having dominion over it. McFague believes that bringing God closer to the world will cause us to identify with and love the world.

Ecofeminist theology

Ecofeminists question representations of nature and women as passive resources for exploitation, with a particular emphasis on the traditions of Western science and religion. According to Rosemary Radford Ruether, global ecofeminism reveals how these tendencies of environmental degradation and emaciation are interconnected in a global economic system biased in favor of the richer beneficiaries of the market economy. According to Ruether, ecofeminism integrates the studies of ecology with feminism by demonstrating the ideological and social-structural links between forces that wish to dominate nature and women. According to Melissa Raphael, a feminist conception of the sacred would, in some ways, render all things sacramental in its efforts to resacralize nature; but only to a certain point. Although, in terms of the divine's immanence in creation, all things are deemed sacred in their created state.

Eco-ascetic practices

Nasr advocates for asceticism in Western societies in order to address environmental crisis. He rejects the notion that asceticism implies anti-nature sentiment, reiterating a traditional Muslim warning against greed as a highly destructive force for religiosity and injurious to the environment. Nasr extols St. Francis' worldview of connection with nature while criticizing people who dismiss ascetic knowledge in a world marketplace tainted with greed that commercializes and destroys nature. According to Nasr, the modern world must accept asceticism as a means of controlling one's desires and slaying the monster inside, without which the greed that is driving the current degradation of nature cannot be addressed.

Similarly, Rosemary Radford Ruether contemplates on the "contrasts" within the Christian asceticism and how they relate to environmental and anti-exploitative ethics. For her, "Christian anti-materiality" shows "[P]atterns of neglect of and flight from the earth". However, "asceticism can also be understood, not as rejection of the body and the earth, but rather as a rejection of exploitation and excess, and thus as a return to egalitarian simple living in harmony with other humans and nature".