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Importance of Cultivating the Inner Self

Wael Hallaq

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Wael Hallaq: Reforming Modernity, October, 2021[1]


Wael Hallaq is a Palestinian-American scholar and the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, specializing in Islamic law, ethics, and intellectual history.


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Transcript of the video section

”And so ethical time, ethical time is a process. And this is where I think the work of people like Levinas, Binyami and even, but mostly like Pierre, Adot and Taha is very important because it talks about: 


The importance of the cultivation of the inner self, something that we have forgotten. 


We don't do that anymore now. 

We left our inner selves to be run by the state, educational and other institutions. We have no attention whatsoever today for our inner beings. 


There was a whole history of humanity over 5,000 years, at least 2,500 at a minimum, and we can document this. Two and a half thousand years, a history of in fact, working on the self inside[3]. 


We, as much as you clean your house every day, wash the dishes, put everything and make your bed and shine your shoes and wear nice clothing and buy flowers, put them on the table, all of these taking care of your home 


(We) have no equivalent in terms of our taking of the self, (whereas now-a-days to) take care of the self is limited to therapy. It is either through yoga, or in even Sufi forms now, which have absolutely nothing to do with the old forms of Sufism, they are therapeutic like yoga or some sort of ayahuasca or some sort of a drug, God knows where they get with the the pyro(?) or the Ecuador(?) can provide in order to deal with our problem. 


But there is no systematic, no intentional, no system of practice or rather, I would say, praxis that centers in the way everybody attends to their home, everybody should attend to their inner self. 


More importantly, this is the first terrain that we have in the world. 

Before we own our houses, we already owned ourselves from the inside. It takes us 30 years to buy a house, but we are born with the self from the inside. And therefore, the technologies of the self that people from Plato, Aristotle to the sophists or the Epicurians, all of these people had a technology of the self. If you look at the Indian traditions, the Hindus, James, all of the Muslims, Jews, everyone for the longest, biggest traditions, religious traditions in the world, all had what I call the architecture of the self that was studied, practiced, applied and implemented in the self so as to create a certain harmony between your physical movements and your mental movements. 


So the physical and the mental have to correspond with each other in order to produce this kind of ethical subject. What we have today is a total segregation of the two. This is why mental disease is on the increase, because we have lost touch between our lives, our physical life and with our mental lives. These two are compartmentalized (i.e. separated) in two places. 


The recent statistics about mental disease in the world are alarming, not to mention, of course, suicide. Mental disease is not simply something that, well, you know, it happens. No, it doesn't happen. It shouldn't happen. It could happen once every blue moon for a very small segment to society. 


But to say that actually about one out of five people now suffers from mental disease around the world, that is a little too much. And notice one out of four, (or) one out of five seems to be the magical number for many things. One out of five people has a serious heart disease. One of five people has a serious cancer issue. One of five people has mental disease. One of five people, one of five, one of four. 


It is so, so dominant that we are not attending to the order. We deal with this with the bandage solution (i.e. looking only at symptoms and trying to treat them). We just simply create a therapy and we think that therapy will solve. 


That's why it is very possible and very reasonable to call the liberal tradition[2] a tradition of therapy, because it's a liberal tradition (that) never goes into the roots of things to look for the real causes for what is causing these things, because it will disturb the materialist order, i.e. capitalism and the forms of governance that protects capitalism. So this is a holy cow. This is the holy cow of liberalism. 


If we mean business, we need to begin to think seriously about who we are from the inside. How are we going to remake ourselves from the inside as subjects, as active, intentional subjects, subjects that can look at/ one can look at the inside of oneself and say, I have to build, to enhance, to nurture, to promote and to solidify. 


The attention to the subjectivity is our prime/ should be our prime concern and interestingly enough and, and problematically enough, it is actually our last concern. In fact, it is not a concern at all.”


  1. Wael Hallaq: Reforming Modernity (Critical Islamic StudiesMF CASR Book Talk, October, 2021)
    The importance of the cultivation of the inner self,
    ↩

  2. Liberalism: where you can choose anything you like, irrespective if it is promoting the flourishing of people and society at large or not.
    Quote from 'the father of liberalism,' - which included racism towards the non-whites - John S Mill:

    Mill says, "The only freedom which deserves the name," and this is really the nub of the matter, "is that of pursuing our own good, not the good, not the real good, not the objective good, but our own good, the one we're making up, self-determining, self-constructing good.
    Quoted from:
    Hierarchy & Freedom: An examination of some classical metaphysical and post-Enlightenment accounts of human autonomy: Spiker, Hasan: Amazon.com: Books
    ↩

  3. On the 'self': The Meaning of Nafs
    The Self (nafs) - St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology

    Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1050/1640), perhaps the most influential Islamic philosopher after Avicenna (d. 428/1037), goes as far as to claim that ‘knowledge of the self is the mother of philosophy (umm al-ḥikma) and the root of happiness (aṣl al-saʿāda), and that if one fails to attain assured certainty of the immateriality (tajarrud) and subsistence (baqāʾ) of the self, one then fails to attain the rank of a philosopher’.

    ‘And how is it possible’, he asks rhetorically, ‘to have any certainty concerning anything, if one did not have knowledge of one’s self in the first place’.
    ↩

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