What is it about?
The article is on understanding how the "self" has evolved over time, starting with a more traditional outlook where the self is believed to be comprised of a higher immaterial soul that governs the lower material body, to one that is now devoid of anything beyond this physical self. To do so, we consider how the “self ” is seen from two perspectives; the Islamic tradition as one example of the Traditionalist school versus the current understanding of the self based on modern science from the lens of philosophy and psychology. Second, we juxtapose these two perspectives on their takes on the “self,” and third, we ask if this never-ending contestations on the “self ” can ever be reconciled.
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Why is it important?
Because the “self ” is fundamental to the understanding of who we are. In modern science’s conceptualization of reality, the transcendent God, the Creator, has become natural. Everything is believed to move along mindlessly, refined by time and material laws, and with humans cast into this scene by chance or forces utterly indifferent to our welfare. In this sense, things just happen. Life has no meaning, no larger context or a grand narrative that will allow us to speak of it having a "purpose." Hence, we bring our lived-in understanding of Islam as one example of the Traditionalist school or philosophia perennis to show that there other ways of understanding who we are.
Perspectives
We wrote the article to highlight the centrality of religious traditions in our time. And, we speak from our lived-in experience of the religion of Islam. For us, Islam is an embodied religion where the outer and the inner aspects of the self must be in harmony with one another. To focus only on one makes us incomplete, for we live concurrently in two distinct “worlds;” a physical world of matter and energy, and an inner world of subjective experience. Religious traditions confer meaning to our existence for inherent in the cosmologies, there is a narrative for our purpose in this world, in contrast to science’s empirical description of reality that ends only with itself. We hope readers will be open to our perspective.
Professor Noraini M. Noor
Ibn Haldun Universitesi
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Contestation of the “self” in modern and religious psychologies., Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, August 2023, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/teo0000237.
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