Phenomenology Ibn Arabi 978-1-4020-6160-8 - 15

ROBERT J.
DOBIE
THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF WUJUD IN THE

T H O U G H T O F I B N A L - ‘A R A B I
The concept of wujud or “existence” stands at the center of Ibn ‘Arabi’s

thought with his most immediate successors attempting to capture the essence
of his thought with the formula, wahdat al-wujud, or “the unity of existence.”1
But like most translations from Arabic, the word “existence” only gives us
a flat and abstract idea of what Ibn ‘Arabi means by wujud. Wujud means
“existence” or “being” only derivatively and in its passive sense: originally
and actively it means, “to find,” “to hit upon,” “meet with,” “get” or “obtain,”
“to invent” or “to find (good or bad).” In other variations of pattern upon
the basic root, which makes the meaning of every Arabic word so rich and
polyvalent, wajada can mean, “to produce, originate, create or bring about,”
or it can mean, “to be passionately in love with” or “to grieve for,” or, yet
again, “to turn up,” “appear,” “be there.” I submit that if we look at all of these
different but related meanings of the root wajada we have before us in the
thought of Ibn ‘Arabi and in the Arabic language itself a phenomenological
understanding the “matter” or Sache of Being and time. “To be” is “to be
found” or “to turn up,” “to be there” or, in other words, “to appear” or “to
presence” out of the flow of temporality. As such truth is the self-disclosure
of Being out of the flow of created temporality that evokes or should evoke
a human response of appropriation or, as Heidegger puts it, of er-eignis – of
“en-owning.” For, by doing so, the human subject finds his or her true ground
in the divine Essence, in which lies his or her “secret of destiny” (qadr).
To explore the phenomenological nature of Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought, I shall look

at the thought of the later Heidegger and, in particular, the relatively late
lecture, On Time and Being. This is because I find Heidegger’s thinking, of
those in the phenomenological tradition, closest in content and spirit to Ibn
‘Arabi’s. In his lecture, Heidegger attempts to think yet again the relationship
between Being and time some thirty-five years after Being and Time. For
313
A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.),

Timing and Temporality in Islamic Philosophy and Phenomenology of Life, 313–322.
© 2007 Springer.
314 ROBERT J. DOBIE
him, the great puzzle that he did not adequately address in his great work
is the idiom, when we talk about what is there in the world, that “there is”
Being or time or, as the idiom is in German, “it gives (es gibt)” Being or
time. Being or time “is,” and yet Being or time is no-thing; it is not an entity
like other entities. As Heidegger puts it:
Being is not a thing, thus nothing temporal, and yet it is determined by time as presence. Time is
not a thing, thus nothing which is, and yet it remains constant in its passing away without being
something temporal like the beings in time. Being and time determine each other reciprocally,
but in such a manner that neither can the former – Being – be addressed as something temporal
nor can the latter – time – be addressed as a being.2
Time determines Being as a “presencing” or “making present” to the “being-

there” or da-sein of human existing; Being determines time insofar as without
the coming-to-presence of being, there would be no time. Thus, for Heidegger,
what we need to think is not “Being” or “time” insofar as they are things or
entities, but we need to think their presencing: the “there is” or “It gives” of
time and Being.
Heidegger argues that the German form of the idiom, “there is,” – “It
gives” or es gibt – is the most pregnant with possibilities for understanding
the relationship of time and Being. We must think not the being that is
given nor even the “being” or “entity” that is presumed to give being but
the giving of Being itself: “To think Being explicitly requires us to relin-
quish Being as the ground of beings in favor of the giving which prevails
concealed in unconcealment, that is, in favor of the It gives.”3 But it is
Heidegger’s contention that the Western philosophical tradition has forgotten
and ignored the “it gives” in favor of that which is given: “At the beginning
of Being’s unconcealment, Being, einai, eon is thought, but not the ‘It
gives’, ‘there is’. Instead, Parmenides says ein gar einai, ‘For Being is’.”4
According to Heidegger, then, the temporality of Being has been forgotten;
the primal giving or presencing of being has been obscured in favor of
what is given in the “present” as such. It follows that the primal nature of
truth as aletheia or “unconcealment” or “bringing-to- presence” has been
forgotten.
Heidegger argues that this is the historical destiny of a particular “epochal
sending” of Being that has its origins in the Greeks. If to think the “It gives” of
Being is the more primordial thinking of Being, then the primordial meaning
of Being is always conditioned by temporality: a sending and simultaneous
withdrawal of the “It gives”: “The history of Being means the destiny of
Being in whose sendings both the sending and the It which sends forth
hold back with their self- manifestation. To hold back is, in Greek, epoche.
Hence we speak of the epochs of the destiny of Being.”5 Since this original

Phenomenology Ibn Arabi 978-1-4020-6160-8 - 15

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Phenomenology Ibn Arabi 978-1-4020-6160-8 - 15

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Phenomenology Ibn Arabi 978-1-4020-6160-8 - 15

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

ROBERT J.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF WUJUD IN THE

The concept of wujud or “existence” stands at the center of Ibn ‘Arabi’s

To explore the phenomenological nature of Ibn ‘Arabi’s thought, I shall look

A-T. Tymieniecka (ed.),

Time determines Being as a “presencing” or “making present” to the “being-

You might also like