Being, Veiling, and the Theophanic Abyss: An Akbarian–Ṣadrian Critique of Heidegger’s Dasein

 

We present a short metaphysical critique of Martin Heidegger’s concept of Dasein from the perspectives of Ibn ʿArabī’s doctrine of waḥdat al-wujūd (Unity of Being) and Mullā Ṣadrā’s ḥikmat al-mutaʿāliyah (Transcendent Theosophy). This is a summary of a larger ongoing critique of Heidegger’s ontology by us.

While Heidegger’s existential analytic recovers the question of Being from metaphysical oblivion, his notion of Dasein remains ontologically incomplete, as it occludes the vertical, theophanic dimension of Being central to Islamic metaphysics. Through the doctrines of tashkīk al-wujūd (modulated being), tajallī (divine self-disclosure), and ḥarakat jawhariyah (transubstantial motion), we argue that Heidegger’s ontological hermeneutics, while profound in its critique of modern nihilism, ultimately reduces the human condition to finitude, anxiety, and death, failing to account for the metaphysical ascent and divine realization afforded in the Akbarian–Ṣadrian tradition.

In Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), Heidegger famously reopens the “question of Being” (Seinsfrage) by proposing an existential analytic of the human as Dasein—literally “being-there” (Heidegger, 1962:  27). Unlike the classical Cartesian subject or the rational animal of Aristotelian metaphysics, Dasein is defined not by what it is but by how it exists: it is always already being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein), characterized by thrownness (Geworfenheit), projection (Entwurf), and care (Sorge). Dasein is that being for whom Being is an issue (32), a being toward death (Sein-zum-Tode) whose existential structure is grounded in temporality (Zeitlichkeit). As initially a Heidegerrian, and the French translator of What is Metaphysics, Henry Corbin subtly but robustly criticized this overall position in his final interview: From Heidegger to Suhravardi <https://irp.cdn-website.com/e401e78b/files/uploaded/corbin_heid_suhr.pdf> (retrieved 22 July 2025).

That said, for all of its ontological profundity as compared to some of his contemporaries, Heidegger’s analysis remains resolutely this-worldly, eschewing both the metaphysical hierarchies of Neoplatonism and the vertical axis of the divine. Others, such as John Caputo have also drawn attention to the fact that Heidegger has horizontalized the ontological verticality of medieval German Neoplatonism (see The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, 1978). This secularization of ontology, while intended to overcome the “forgetting of Being” in Western metaphysics, constitutes, from an Akbarian–Ṣadrian perspective, a deeper concealment: not only of Being as such, but of the Real (al-ḥaqq) as the luminous source and end of all beings.

Now, Heidegger situates Dasein as the “clearing” (Lichtung) in which Being becomes manifest, writing: “The essence of Dasein lies in its existence” (67). It is not a substance but a site of disclosure. Yet this disclosure is always shadowed by Angst and nullity—“the nothing [das Nichts] itself nihilates” (Heidegger, What is Metaphysics?, 1993: 101). For Heidegger, Being gives itself only in withdrawal; it is never present as object, face, or fullness.

Ibn ʿArabī, by contrast, affirms that Being (wujūd) is identical to the Real (al-ḥaqq) who discloses Itself in degrees. In al-Futūḥāt al-Makkiyyah, he writes: “Being is One in its essence, manifold in its forms” (Ibn ʿArabī, Futūḥāt, I:47). Each existent thing is a maẓhar (locus of manifestation) of a Divine Name. The “clearing” of Lichtung is, in this view, not an impersonal space but the heart (qalb) of the insān al-kāmil (Complete Human), which serves as the mirror (mirʾāt) of the Divine. In contrast, Heidegger’s refusal to speak of God—indeed, his insistence that Being is not a being (Heidegger, Letter on Humanism, 1993: 252)—erases the possibility of tajallī, divine self-disclosure. Yet in Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics, all being is nothing but al-ẓuhūr al-ilāhīyah: “the appearance of the Real in the mirrors of forms” (Ibn ʿArabī, Fuṣūṣ al-ḥikam, ed. ʿAfīfī: 90).

Heidegger does not distinguish ontological grades of Being. All entities, including Dasein, participate in Being (Sein) equally in the sense of ontological difference—Being is not a being, and beings are not Being. But there is no vertical tashkīk—no gradation in the intensity or clarity of ontological disclosure. By contrast, Mullā Ṣadrā’s doctrine of tashkīk al-wujūd (the modulation of Being) asserts that Being is one in reality (ḥaqīqa wāḥida) but modulated by intensity and priority. “Existence,” he writes, “is a single Reality possessing priority and posteriority, strength and weakness” (al-Asfār al-arbaʿa, I:30). Dasein is not the privileged site of Being’s self-showing; rather, all things—rocks, plants, angels, spirits, jinn—participate in the unfolding arc of Being, each according to its ontological station (maqām). This metaphysical hierarchy allows Ṣadrā to affirm a doctrine of ontological ascent: through ḥarakat jawhariyah (transubstantial motion), the soul moves from potency to act, traversing levels of being until it reaches its perfection. Heidegger’s Dasein, by contrast, ends in death. There is no eschaton, no return (rujūʿ) to the source, no subsistence (baqāʾ) in the Real. Just death as nullity rather than death as palingenesis.

Death, for Heidegger, is Dasein’s “ownmost possibility,” the event which discloses the truth of Being as finite (Heidegger, 1962: 307). To anticipate death authentically is to realize one’s freedom from the illusions of the they (das Man). But death is also the limit; it is the impossibility of Dasein’s further possibilities. In the Akbarian-Sadrian tradition, on the other hand, death is not an end but a transformation—as we said, palingenesis. Ibn ʿArabī declares, “Death is the lifting of the veil” (al-mawt rafʿ al-ḥijāb) (Futūḥāt, II:6). For Ṣadrā, death is the migration of the soul to a higher ontological plane (al-Asfār, IX:220). What Heidegger interprets as finitude, they see as the threshold of the Infinite. The sorrow of Being-toward-death is replaced by the joy of Being-toward-theophany. Moreover, the fanāʾ (annihilation) of the mystic is not a dissolution into nothingness but into the plenitude of the Real. As Ibn ʿArabī writes, citing a famous ḥadīth, “He who knows himself knows his Lord” (Fuṣūṣ, p. 97)—and to know one’s Lord is to be transformed by the disclosure of the Names, since the Lord of each thing is the unique Name specific to it.

A final critique lies in the absence of love (maḥabba) in Heidegger’s ontology. Sorge (care) is not ʿishq (passionate love). Dasein’s relation to Being is one of anxiety and responsibility, not longing and union. Heidegger once remarked that “philosophy does not think love” (What is Called Thinking?:  29). But Akbarian metaphysics insists that love is the root of all Being. The Real says, “I was a hidden treasure and I loved (aḥbabtu) to be known” (ḥadīth qudsī). Ṣadrā echoes this: “Existence is love. It is through love that the soul ascends” (al-Asfār, IV:270). The human is not merely the site of Being’s disclosure but its mirror and lover. Heidegger never speaks of the Face (wajh) of the Real; but in the Qur’an, “Every thing perishes except Its Face” (Q. 28:88). This Face is the goal of all metaphysical longing.

Heidegger’s retrieval of the question of Being is a profound rupture in the trajectory of Western metaphysics. Yet from the perspective of the Akbarian–Ṣadrian tradition, his thought remains suspended in a twilight: it sees the shadows of the Real, but not its radiance. Dasein is the broken remnant of an insān al-kāmil barred from actual realization (taḥqīq)—estranged from the Names, veiled from the tajallī of the One. To complete Heidegger’s turn requires the re-inscription of Being within the order of divine manifestation, the acknowledgment of the hierarchy of Being, the possibility of ascent, and the primacy of love. Only then does Being cease to be a veiled absence and become, once again, the Face that seeks to be known.
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Responding to an Iranian Heideggerian's critique of my critique

 

While your defense of Heidegger is earnest, it ultimately reproduces the very phenomenological provincialism I am calling into question. The assertion that comparing Heidegger’s ontology to Ibn ʿArabī’s waḥdat al-wujūd or Mullā Ṣadrā’s ḥikmat al-mutaʿāliya constitutes “philosophical injustice” only reinforces the Eurocentric foreclosure of metaphysical pluralism (never mind an earlier argument of mine that Iranian Heidegerrians, from Fardid to yourself are missing a huge forest for the trees)—as if Heidegger’s existential analytic must remain quarantined from cross-civilizational as well as cross-historical critique. This is itself a metaphysical position, one that assumes the universality of Dasein and Heidegger without permitting dialogue with other ontologies that ground Being in divine self-disclosure (tajallī), gradated modulation (tashkīk), and theophanic love (maḥabba).

To claim that Heidegger’s withdrawal from emotional or religious categories preserves philosophy from “sentimentality” misses the deeper critique entirely: Heidegger’s Dasein is *metaphysically amnesiac*. Its refusal to engage with the vertical axis of Being—its ascensional, luminous, and transpersonal dimension—is not philosophical discipline but ontological poverty—and nihilism. In *Being and Time*, death becomes Dasein’s “ownmost possibility,” but there is no baqāʾ, no subsistence in the Real. No ascent (miʿrāj), only entrenchment in Geworfenheit (thrownness). Death is terminal, not transformative.

You assert that Heidegger’s “care for Being” is a kind of primordial longing. But care (Sorge) in Heidegger is a *structurally anxious disposition*—it is not ʿishq, not eros, not love. Re-read him, and you'll see it for yourself. It is never directed toward the Face of the Real (wajh al-ḥaqq), nor does it culminate in Union. To be clear: Heidegger’s Being is not al-ḥaqq, it is not a Divine Name, not an active, self-disclosing plenitude, but rather a hidden economy of withdrawal—an impersonal gift whose source cannot be named, addressed, or loved. Thus, your claim that Heidegger “makes possible a more primordial recovery of love” is speculative at best and evades the fact that Heidegger explicitly disavows love as a category of thought entirely (cf. What is Called Thinking?).

By contrast, in Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics, Being is the Real, and the cosmos is nothing but the unfolding of Divine Names in the mirrors of form. Tajallī is not a vague mysticism—it is an ontology of radiant disclosure. Mullā Ṣadrā builds upon this: Being is a single reality (ḥaqīqa wāḥida) modulated in intensity, and through ḥaraka jawhariyah, the soul moves through levels of being toward actualization in the Real. This is a robust metaphysics of verticality, gradation, and transformation—utterly missing in Heidegger’s flattened, horizontal Sein.

To suggest that death in Heidegger discloses love is to romanticize ontological nullity. In Islamic metaphysics, death is not the end but the unveiling—“the lifting of the veil,” as Ibn ʿArabī says. In other words, it is palingenesis—transformation as in a worm becoming a butterfly. Death is not the cessation of possibility, but the threshold of divine intimacy. Your argument stops at the abyss; ours traverses it. So the question is, why are so many Heideggerians utterly enamored by the abyss but not what lays on the Other Side of it? This is the question—and to wax Nietzschean, it is postmodern, all too postmodern!

In short: Heidegger reopens the question of Being but then refuses the answer. That answer, in Akbarian–Ṣadrian terms, is that Being is not merely to-be-there (Dasein), but to-be-transfigured (verklärt-zu-sein)—an yatanawwara. It is not merely the site of disclosure, but the Light that discloses, the Love that animates, the Face that beckons. A philosophy that cannot think love cannot think Being in its fullness either. That is not a sentiment—it is a metaphysical indictment. And, yes, I am very much indicting.

These confused European philosophers, such as Heidegger, have unleashed too much damage on the psyche of the world for people such as I to continue remaining silent. The sledgehammer is out, and I will be tearing down these white male European taghouts one by one—and Ibn ʿArabī, Mullā Ṣadrā and others from our part of the world will help me do it. Think of me as a sort of anti-Nietzsche Nietzsche and anti-Heidegger Heidegger rolled into One. Think of it as ꜤAlī and Muḥammad smashing the idols in the KaꜤba of contemporary thought. In other words, what I am doing is philosophical taṭhīr (purification).