Henry Corbin and the Esoteric Roots of History

THE French philosopher, Henry Corbin (1903-1978), was hugely influenced by Heidegger's Being and Time and set out to demonstrate that consciousness cannot be reduced to physical, social or historical forces. As a result, he developed a fascinating interpretation of both space and time. In the case of the former, he argues that we are not existing in space in the way that the Newtonian positivists suggest, but rather that we spatialise the world in accordance with the distinction Heidegger makes between the existential (what it means to be) and the existentiell (life from a mundane perspective). As Corbin explains:

“Orientation is a primary phenomenon of our presence in the world. A human presence has the property of spatialising a world around it, and this phenomenon implies a certain relationship of man with the world, his world, this relationship being determined by the very mode of his presence in the world. The four cardinal points, east and west, north and south, are not things encountered by this presence, but directions which express its sense, man's acclimatisation to the world, his familiarity with it. To have this sense is to orient oneself in the world.”

The way in which we interpret space is not predetermined, therefore, in the sense that we somehow have to fit into the world and make the best of it, but the manner in which we focus on the act of presence.

Turning now to Corbin's analysis of time, the Frenchman further echoes the philosophy of his German counterpart by employing the Heideggerian notion of historicality. This is the hidden, ontological framework that actually makes history - and, thus, a more fundamental temporality - possible. The reason this is not immediately apparent, from Heidegger's perspective, is due to the prevalence of the mundane. Even culture, according to Corbin, reinforces our inability to see beyond the surface of time in its most basic and profane form. Corbin pays tribute to Heidegger's philosophy in the following manner:

“I must say that the course of my work had its origin in the incomparable analysis that we owe to Heidegger, showing the ontological roots of historical science, and giving evidence that there is a historicity more original, more primordial than that which we call Universal History, the history of external events, the Weltgeschichte, History in the ordinary sense of the term [...] There is the same relationship between historicality and historicity as between the existential and the existentiell. This was a decisive moment.”

More interestingly, the inspiration that Corbin himself drew from this uniquely phenomenological interpretation of time led him to conclude that a hidden structure of ontology does not render us completely powerless and that it comes down to two things, “either to throw oneself into the current or to struggle against it”. Ironically, perhaps, Corbin rejected both options on account of the fact that to either submit or fight is to accept the limitations of quantitative space and therefore we must remember that the objects of the world are at our mercy and not vice versa.

By refusing to acknowledge the “historicity of History,” as Corbin describes it, we thus validate a historicality involving “the secret, esoteric, existential roots of History and the historical”. This, in other words, is the only effective method of waging spiritual warfare upon the linear passage of time.