Articles on Metaphysics and Sufism

Author's name: Immanuel Kant

The texts that we are translating into Arabic in this book, for the first time in most of them, are found in contexts whose boundaries are barely discernible to the reader at first glance, nor are their methods of organization or connection, so that they ultimately lead to a unified whole that revolves around specific purposes: such as metaphysics, mysticism, philosophical and natural theology, the philosophy of religion, and others... which brings together issues that preoccupied Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) over a period of time that almost covers his entire philosophical life: from the late fifties to the late nineties (1759-1796) of his career. While metaphysics - in all its forms, purposes, and stages - as well as religion, its philosophical arrangements, and methods of interpretation are “classical” issues for Kant’s readers in general, “mysticism,” and the experiences of “esotericism” and “illumination” that are close to it, and the flashes of feeling and their “thrusts,” or the fads popular among the intellectuals of that time, as summarized, for example, by the common phrase “Schwärmerei” and the suspicions surrounding it, are not among the philosophical titles included in their calculations, nor do they find a justification or explanation for them from the head of rationalism in the modern era: Is it permissible for him, with his positions and assessments in metaphysics, theology, or the philosophy of religion, to be considered a Sufi or one of the owners of a “point of view” that is not without collusion with the esotericism of his time, some of whose leaders were his close friends, or a “taqiyya” that conceals some of this collusion, or covers it up, from someone who once said about himself in a letter to Mendelssohn: “I “I think with the clearest possible conviction, and with the greatest satisfaction I can muster for myself, of many things which I would never dare to utter, though I do not utter anything which I have no right to think.”