Seyyed Hossein Nasr

Nasr begins with a genealogy of the word. Metaphysics is an editorial accident — the title that the disciples of Aristotle gave to the treatises after the Physics (tà metà tà physiká). The true thing is ḥikmah and maʿrifah in Arabic, theosophia and gnosis in Greek, philosophia prima in medieval Latin.

The tragedy of the modern West: gnosis was placed under interdict by Catholic orthodoxy from the first centuries, and English has lost the word. There remains ignorance but no longer its opposite. Nasr and the traditionalists have restored the word principial (from aṣīl, aṣālah) to translate it.

A major distinction: metaphysics begins beyond pure Being. The ōn of Aristotle, the pure Esse of Bonaventure and Aquinas, the wujūd of Mullā Ṣadrā, are not the summit. Above them still: adh-dhāt bi-lā ism wa-lā rasm, the Essence without name or description, the Tao that cannot be said, the Beyond-Being. It is this that the first half of the shahādah says: lā ilāha — “there is no god” — that is, more radically: there is nothing to which the word “reality” can be referred, illā Llāh, save Him.

A frontal critique of Heidegger: his Sein is not the wujūd. Henry Corbin, the translator of Was ist Metaphysik?, said to Nasr: “For Heidegger, existence leads to death; for Mullā Ṣadrā, it opens onto the eternal.”

This knowledge is not information. Information is not knowledge. What we speak of here is a knowledge that wounds the soul and, in doing so, transforms it. What Is Metaphysics?, p. 5

How is metaphysics to be studied? Who is qualified? Nasr here defends a legitimate elitism: one does not teach relativity to a beginner. Metaphysics first requires a faculty within us — al-ʿaql, the Intellect in the traditional sense (nous, intellectus), which modernity has reduced to calculating reason.

This is why Rūmī, in the Mathnawī, writes:

پای استدلالیان چوبین بود
پای چوبین سخت بی‌تمکین بود The leg of the rationalist is of wood — and the wooden leg is very unsteady. (Rūmī, Mathnawī, 1:2128)

What Rūmī criticises is rationalism, not the ʿaql. Metaphysics demands a ʿaql salīm (عَقْل سَلِيم) — a sound intellect, irrigated by revelation and vivified by faith. Without īmān, one can understand metaphysics theoretically, never realise it.

The eye of the heart (ʿayn al-qalb, عَيْنُ القَلْب). Principial knowledge does not reside in the brain but in the heart — not the affective organ, but the spiritual centre. The Quran repeats it: “the heart knows,” not the head. This inner eye, closed in most people, can open through virtue, love, spiritual practice, and above all through grace.

Why study metaphysics? Because no religion survives long without a living metaphysical tradition. Nasr is categorical: there is no Hindu metaphysics without Hinduism, no Chinese metaphysics without Neo-Confucianism or Taoism, no Christian metaphysics without Christianity. The Greeks themselves received their metaphysics from the dying Greek religion — Plotinus is its last breath, and Greek civilisation dies shortly after him.

Environmental crisis. A long and grave passage: the destruction of nature is a spiritual crisis before being a technical or economic one. The desacralisation of nature in the seventeenth century (Descartes: res extensa, pure quantity) made possible its exploitation without restraint. Nasr cites Rūmī:

کاشکی هستی زبانی داشتی
تا ز هستان پرده‌ها برداشتی If only existence had a tongue, that it might lift the veils upon the Mysteries. (Mathnawī, 3:4725)

Art and beauty. No separate aesthetics in Islam — because beauty is already a metaphysical way. Inna Llāha jamīlun yuḥibbu-l-jamāl: “God is beautiful and He loves beauty.” And in Arabic ḥusn (حُسْن) means inseparably beauty and goodness: Islam refuses to separate them. Islamic art — calligraphy, architecture, music, poetry — is metaphysics given form, accessible to those who do not read the treatises.

To religion. Without metaphysics, religion becomes a shell — hence the massive desertion of Christianity in the West since the seventeenth century. The burning questions — why evil? why suffering? why the world? — have no satisfying exoteric answer. Only metaphysics answers: the Infinite, being infinite, must include the possibility of its own negation, and this possibility is the world, therefore separation, therefore the root of evil. Dante: hell too is beautiful, because it is separation.

To ethics. Why be good? A question that no secularised ethics answers in depth. Metaphysics founds ethics: one is good because one participates in the Good which is the Real itself. Outside of that, ethics becomes either hypocritical (external) or taʿabbudī (blind acceptance).

To science. Modern science = science declared independent of God (seventeenth century). Nasr cites with sympathy Wolfgang Smith, Karl Popper, John Eccles — physicists and neurobiologists who have tried to reopen verticality. Classical Islamic civilisation, for its part, founded each science (the medicine of Ibn Sīnā, the mathematics of al-Khwārizmī, the algebra of al-Khayyām) on an explicit metaphysical base.

To art and poetry — as transmission to the unlearned people. Nasr recounts a founding episode: one evening near the tomb of Mīyān Mīr in Lahore, he climbs into a tonga (a cart drawn by a horse). The driver, a poor peasant, recites throughout the journey — forty-five minutes — poems of Ḥāfiẓ and Rūmī by heart:

During those forty-five minutes, that driver expounded to me more authentic metaphysics than I had learned in any classroom at Harvard, where I had nevertheless followed the courses of some of the greatest masters of medieval philosophy in the West. What Is Metaphysics?, ch. 3

Platonic anamnesis and the ḥadīth of “knowing oneself.” Christ said: “Seek, and you shall find”; the Prophet said: man ʿarafa nafsahu fa-qad ʿarafa Rabbahu — “Who knows himself knows his Lord.” All metaphysics is, in a sense, an anamnesis — a remembering of what one has never ceased to be.

The pure knowledge we have sought has always stood right before us, and within us. We need only seek it — and, if we do so sincerely and the Grace of God renders us apt for it, we shall find the source of principial knowledge, of authentic metaphysics, and we shall be able to drink from it. What Is Metaphysics?, conclusion of ch. 1