The crisis of metaphysics

Modern philosophy, in general, has abandoned the goals of earlier metaphysics for several reasons.
At the heart of the matter is the age-old debate over universal principles, a conflict between the essentialist approach of the “realists” or the “moderate realists,” committed to what became known as the old way (the “old way”), and the nominalist approach committed to the modern way (the “modern way”), advocated by William of Ockham (d. 1347) in the Christian world, and possibly by Ibn Taymiyyah (d. 728/1328) in the Muslim world.
Increasingly in Europe philosophy and theology were separated, and the “maiden of the queen of sciences”, untethered to theology, was now free to establish her own dominion, with a special emphasis on the empirical sciences; This, of course, failed to recognize that replicable subjective experience is also deeply empirical.
Finally, the general project of strengthening belief with reason, which so preoccupied philosophers in the past, was largely abandoned.
Only in the Catholic tradition and in Eastern Islam did some vestiges of this project remain.
Today, the religious sciences are totally divorced from the “secular” sciences, and the physical sciences, in turn, are divorced from the ethical considerations of the religious sciences.
Herein lies the root of our current crisis: in the West, we have elevated a particular kind of reason and divorced ourselves completely from revelation, and, in the Muslim world, Muslims have rightly elevated revelation, but have largely divorced themselves from reason, which would give it a solid metaphysical foundation.
Muslims have long since abandoned philosophy, both speculative and empirical branches and their attendant activities, and in recent times have naively adopted Western science and its concomitant technologies, which are loaded with materialistic metaphysical assumptions; Little or no attention has been paid to the personal and social upheaval that the wholesale importation of these technologies might have on people and places.
In doing so they have failed to grasp something fundamental and consequential: Western science cannot be divorced from its metaphysics.
These two are inseparable.
It is this metaphysics that produced his science, and if one adopts the science of a civilization without understanding that it is the product of a particular worldview, he is unknowingly adopting that civilization with all its attributes, including its social and spiritual ailments.
This is not a critique of science; On the contrary, it is an assertion that science is worthwhile when it serves a society, and can only serve a society when the assumptions that are part of it are spiritually sound, but this can only be determined if those assumptions are fully exposed and understood.
It is only then that a society can make a conscious decision about these assumptions and whether they are compatible with its own worldview, values, and religious traditions; if they are not compatible, they will suffocate and delete the pre-existing ones.
In many ways, the adoption of Western science and its inherent materialistic worldview has had a negative effect not only on Muslim societies but on the entire planet and its inhabitants, including its flora and fauna.
The moral concerns of a culture are too often set aside in pursuit of scientism and the worship of the idol of progress. Ethics, in particular, is impoverished when metaphysics is ignored.
In America and in European countries, and in their satellite societies that have adopted Western science wholesale, we find certain humanistic ethical considerations based primarily on utilitarian concerns, but their proponents do not offer a coherent rational method for determining what is ethical and what is not.
Currently in the West, only the Catholic Church maintains a rigorous ethical approach rooted in its metaphysical principles, but the metaphysical foundation is not easily accessible to the laity, and the Church has lost its centrality in the lives of many believers.
As such, the results of the Church’s rigorous ethical reasoning are often ignored by many of its followers, who decide for themselves which path to take, which is the essence of heresy (from the Greek, “to choose for oneself”).
In the Muslim world, current ethical concerns are not methodically addressed.
The philosophical tools that enable scholars to do so are rarely taught, and when they are, they usually lack the depth and rigor needed to craft creative responses to ethical and other challenges.
Even theology, when taught in the major Islamic centers of learning, is mostly a truncated version, stripped of the profound metaphysical ideas of its previous proponents.
By the nineteenth century, students at Cairo’s Al-Azhar University and other institutions were receiving very reductive summaries of deeply complex theological works; most did not have the necessary background to understand the content of such works.
This intellectual, moral, spiritual, and invariably political and economic decline left Muslims with a total inability to respond creatively to the current challenges of civilization, something that previous generations had been able to do when faced with a crisis.
In the absence of these effective responses, Muslim societies were overwhelmed by the challenges and increasingly fell into disorder and self-destructive reactionary modes.
Invariably, this provoked criticism from disgruntled non-scholarly sectors within society.
New narratives were put forward to explain the malaise of Muslim societies, placing the blame squarely on the abandonment of “worldly” sciences and on scholars who emphasized spirituality and the “otherworld,” all of which were seen as having weakened the competitive advantage of Muslims vis-à-vis their historical rivals in Europe, culminating in the colonization of Muslim lands.
There is undoubtedly a part of the truth in this reasoning, but the main cause of the decline, it seems, was the deviation from the philosophical method of inquiry into the physical and metaphysical sciences, which had flourished in the early period of Muslim dynamism.

This article is an excerpt from the Is the Matter of Metaphysics Immaterial? by Shaykh Hamza Yusuf published by Renovatio