THE PHILOSOPHY OF GIBRAN

“A philosopher is an ordinary person who thinks more deeply and obstinately than other people.”

The American philosopher, William James, defines philosophy as “an unusually stubborn attempt to think clearly.”

The word “Philosophy” comes from Greek and means “love of wisdom.” It is the process of observing the facts and events of life, in both the mental and the physical worlds, with intelligent analysis of their causes and effects, and especially the laws that govern them, for the purpose of deducing sets of general principles and concepts, usually with some practical application of these as a final goal.

Because we live in such a complex and distracting world, few of us see the effect of the principles of the great philosophers upon our lives, our relations with each other and indeed upon the very concepts we take for granted. For example, even hunger is a much more sophisticated process to man today than in the past: he measures his desire for food not merely by his appetite and the accessibility of foodstuffs, but also by his ability to pay for it and his peculiar tastes. This self-control is the result, of course, of thousands of years of legal, religious and political training.

Our world is so complex that we take for granted engineering processes that would dwarf any of the ancient Seven Wonders of the World; we ride railroad tracks that do not follow faithfully the curvature of the earth, for the train would jump the tracks if they were level. We pass skyscrapers whose stress and strain are figured to the millionth of an inch, yet take for granted the fact that the Empire State Building actually sways constantly many feet. If we are religiously inclined, we take going to the church of our choice for granted; if we are non-believers, we give no second thought to the fact that we do not have to attend religious services if we do not choose. Yet the very privilege of non-belief represents the victory of philosophy; otherwise the non-churchgoer would still face the lions or the stake.

Gibran did not write treatises about philosophy; but as soon as he began his great book The Prophet, dealing with the question of birth and death, he placed himself within the Socratic maxim: “Know thyself.”

A woman hailed him, asking, “Prophet of God … tell us all that has been shown you of that which is between birth and death.”

As soon as Gibran wrote, “I did not love man-made laws and I abhor the traditions that our ancestors left us,” he placed himself in the sphere of the theologians, illustrating particularly one of the principles of St. Augustine: “One could not doubt unless he were alive and thinking and aware that there is such a thing as truth.”

Before man was able to read or write he pondered the meaning of his existence on earth. He came from where? He was going where? And why?

And as man learned to write, though in a simple and crude manner, he left for us his conception of life and death. Modern writers called this writing philosophy.

However, in these few pages, we cannot explore at length this great and vast subject, examples of which fill the shelves of libraries throughout the world. We will attempt to determine only the belief and reflections in the heart and soul of Gibran. Much of his writing reveals that he asked himself the same perplexing questions as ancient man. He did accept the premise that there is a God, but was criticized for his definition of God.

Gibran’s ancestors in Lebanon and the Middle East described God as a merciful Father and hewed His image from rock in the likeness of an old man with a long beard. This conception was expressed in the three great religions of the West: Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Some philosophers, particularly the Arabic ones, searched for a more comprehensive definition of God.

Averröes (1126-1198), a great Arabic philosopher, wrote that a simple-minded believer would say, “God is in heaven.” However, he said, “A man of trained mind, knowing that God must not be represented as a physical entity in space, would say, ‘God is everywhere, and not merely in Heaven.’

“But if the omnipresence of God be taken only in a physical and special sense, that formula, too, is likely in error.”

“Accordingly, the philosopher more adequately expresses the purely spiritual nature of God when he asserts that God is nowhere but in Himself; in fact, rather than say that God is in space he might more justly say that space and matter are in God.”

Gibran, educated in Lebanon, must have accepted the explanation of Averröes. In his Garden of the Prophet, he has one in a group of men ask, “Master, we hear much talk of God hereabout. What say you of God, and Who is He in very truth?” Gibran answered saying: “Think now, My Beloved, of a heart that contains all your hearts, a love that ecompasses all your loves, a spirit that encompasses all your spirits, a voice enfolding all your voices, and a silence deeper than all your silences, and timeless.

“Seek now to perceive in your self-fullness a beauty more enchanting than all things beautiful, a song more vast than the songs of the seas and the forest, a majesty.…”

“It were wiser to speak less of God, Whom we cannot understand, and more of each other, whom we may understand. Yet I would have you know that we are the breath and the fragrance of God. We are God, in leaf, in flower, and oftentimes in fruit.”

When it came to questions about the soul the biographers and critics of Gibran were at a loss. Some biographers said that Gibran believed in the transmigration of the soul, which is better known as the doctrine of Nirvana. Others, because Gibran assailed the activities of some religious men, accused him of being a heretic.

Therefore, to understand the philosophy of Gibran, we must discard part of what his biographers have written and consider objectively what Gibran himself wrote. He wrote many articles in Arabic about the great philosophers, among them Avicenna, Al Farid and Al Ghazali. Gibran regarded the belief of Avicenna nearest to his own. The following are Gibran’s words translated from the Arabic:

“A Compendium on the Soul” by Avicenna

by Gibran

There is no poem written by the ancient poets nearer my own beliefs and my spiritual inclination than that poem of Avicenna, “A Compendium on the Soul.”

In this sublime poem, the old sage embodies the greatest hopes engendered by man’s aspiration and knowledge, the deepest well of imagination created by man’s thinking; and he raises those questions which are the first in man’s quest and those theories which result from great thought and long meditation.

It is not strange for such a poem to come from the awareness of Avicenna, the genius of his age; but it is paradoxical for it to be the manifestation of the man who spent his life probing into the secrets of the body, into the peculiarities of physical matter. I believe he reached the mystery of the soul by studying physical matter, thus comprehending the unknown through the known. His poem, therefore, provides clear proof that knowledge is the life of the mind, and that practical experiments lead to intellectual conclusions, to spiritual feelings and to God.

The reader is bound to find, among the great writers of the West, passages which remind him of this sublime poem. For example, there are lines in Shakespeare’s immortal plays similar to this one of Avicenna:

“I despised my arrival on this earth and I despise my departure; it is a tragedy.”

There is a resemblance to the writing of Shelley in the following:

“I dozed, and in a revelation, I saw what it is not possible to see with open eyes.”

There is in the writing of Browning this parallel thought: “It shone like lightning, but it vanished as if it had never shone.”

Nonetheless, the sage preceded all these English writers by centuries, yet he embodied in a single poem ideas which have appeared in a variety of writers of many ages. This is what confirms Avicenna as the genius not only of his century but of the centuries following and makes his poem “A Compendium on the Soul” the most sublime poem ever composed upon this most glorious subject.1

Al Farid

Al Farid was a devout poet. His unquenchable soul drank the divine wine of the spirit, wandering intoxicated through the exotic world where dwell the dreams of poets, lovers and mystics. Then, sobered, his soul returned to this earth to register what it saw and heard in words of beauty.

If we examine the merit of Farid’s work, we find him a holy man in the temple of free thought, a prince in the great kingdom of the imagination and a general in the mighty army of mysticism. That mighty army inches steadily, nevertheless, toward the kingdom of God, conquering on its way the petty and mean things in life, ever seeking the magnificent and the majestic.

Al Farid lived in an era (1119-1220) void of creativity and original thinking. He lived among a people who parroted tradition, energetically commenting upon and explaining the great heritage of Islamic learning and philosophy.

He was a genius; a genius is a miracle.