• Complain

Tariq Ramadan - The Quest for Meaning

Here you can read online Tariq Ramadan - The Quest for Meaning full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2010, genre: Religion. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Tariq Ramadan The Quest for Meaning
  • Book:
    The Quest for Meaning
  • Author:
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2010
  • Rating:
    5 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 100
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Quest for Meaning: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Quest for Meaning" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

In The Quest for Meaning, Tariq Ramadan, philosopher and Islamic scholar, invites the reader to join him on a journey to the deep ocean of religious, secular, and indigenous spiritual traditions to explore the most pressing contemporary issues. Along the way, Ramadan interrogates the concepts that frame current debates including: faith and reason, emotions and spirituality, tradition and modernity, freedom, equality, universality, and civilization. He acknowledges the greatest flashpoints and attempts to bridge divergent paths to a common ground between these religious and intellectual traditions. He calls urgently for a deep and meaningful dialogue that leads us to go beyond tolerant co-existence to mutual respect and enrichment. Written in a both direct and meditative style this is an important, timely and intelligent book that aims to direct and shape debate around the most important questions of our time.

Tariq Ramadan: author's other books


Who wrote The Quest for Meaning? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Quest for Meaning — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Quest for Meaning" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

TARIQ RAMADAN

The Quest for Meaning

Developing a Philosophy of Pluralism

The Quest for Meaning - image 1

ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS

ALLEN LANE

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia
(a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL , England

www.penguin.com

First published 2010

Copyright Tariq Ramadan, 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

ISBN: 978-0-14-191957-7

To the semi-colon;

Despite the diversity of languages, there is some form of punctuation that is universal and common to them all.

In a world of simplified communications and simplistic binary judgements, the semi-colon reconciles us with the plurality of propositions, and with the welcome nuances of the sentence and of complex realities.

To my former students, who will rediscover here the fragrances of a teaching of philosophy.

And who will not forget to say to those they love that they love them.

Life is fragile.

Ocean and Windows

This book is a journey, and an initiation. It is actually about setting out and travelling the paths of the heart, the mind and the imaginary.

There has never been more talk of diversity and plurality than in this era of globalization and modernization, and yet, more so than ever before, we seem to be trapped into our identities and differences. The global world is a village; they say a village of villagers who know nothing of each other. In more senses than one: they do not know who they are, and they do not know who they are living with. This situation can only lead to half-hearted, fearful and dormant conflicts rather than a confident celebration of our riches: Edward Said suggested it would lead to the clash of ignorance; I propose it will lead to a conflict of perceptions. Perceptions are more telling than ignorance: perceptions can certainly result from ignorance, but they express a relationship with ourselves and others that has to do with more than knowledge. Perceptions have to do with feelings, emotions, convictions and psychology. We are lacking in confidence. Confidence in ourselves, confidence in others, confidence in God and/or man, and/or the future. We are lacking in confidence, no shadow of a doubt about that. Fear, doubt and distrust are imperceptibly colonizing our hearts and minds. And so the other becomes our negative mirror, and the others difference allows us to define ourselves, to identify ourselves and, basically, gives us some reassurance. The other becomes our diversion, in Blaise Pascals sense of the term. The other distracts us from ourselves, our ignorance, our fears and our doubts, whilst the presence of the other justifies and explains our suspicions. We have projections, but at the same time we have to admit that we have no projects.

We therefore have to get back to some elementary truths. Simple, profound truths. We have to set out, ask the essential questions and look for a meaning. We have to travel towards ourselves and rediscover a taste for questions, constructive criticism and complexity. We begin by establishing a first thesis of truth that should naturally foster an attitude of intellectual modesty and humility: we all observe the world through our own windows. A window is a viewpoint over a horizon, a framework, a piece of glass that is always tinted to some extent, and it has its orientation and its limitations: all this, together, imparts its colour and qualities to the surrounding landscape. We have to begin, humbly, by admitting that we have nothing more than points of view, in the literal sense, and that they shape our ideas, our perceptions and our imagination. Coming to terms with the very essence of the relativity of our gaze does not imply that we have to doubt everything and can be sure of nothing. It might mean quite the opposite, and the outcome might be a non-arrogant confidence, and a healthy, energetic and creative curiosity about the infinite number of windows from which we all observe the same world. The plurality is such that we have doubts as to whether we are talking about the same world, the same questions and the same humanity. Within the global village, in the meantime, our increasingly pronounced individualism even leads us to doubt the fact that there are such things as fragments of philosophy behind the calculations of our respective drive for power and self-interest. And what can the ego make out of egoisms?

The point I am making is that we cannot go on standing at our windows. Off we go, we said, along the paths of the heart, the mind and the imaginary! The horizon ahead of us offers us a choice between two paths: we can go from window to window, from one philosophy to another and from one religion to another, and try to understand, one by one, traditions and schools, their teachings and their principles. As we go from one to another, from ourselves to others, we will find many similarities, many things in common and many shared values. Or we can take the other path, which leads us into the very heart of the landscape and then invites us to turn our gaze on the windows around us. Once we take that path, it is no longer a question of considering the multiplicity of the observers but of plunging into the object we are all observing, and then apprehending the diversity of our points of view and the essence of their similarity. Once we have accepted the existence of our window, we therefore have to travel, set ourselves free, plunge into the ocean, set sail, go on, stop, founder, resist, set off again, set sail once more, and remember that the ocean exists only because of the presence of the many shores that make it one ocean, and that their presence is also our only hope of survival. And vice versa.

We have chosen the second path, and we wish to accompany our reader to the heart of what we are observing, so as to apprehend with confidence and humility the myriad observers. This is what I call a philosophy of pluralism, which states that, by immersion in the object per se, we will be able to meet human beings, or subjects, with their traditions, their religions, their philosophies, their aesthetics and/or their psychologies. Each chapter will therefore deal with one theme, with one element in the landscape of philosophy: the quest for meaning, the universal, freedom, fraternity, education, memory, forgiveness, love, and so on, and we will try, as we stand in the centre, to address and understand the diversity and creativity that well up from the windows. The notions of equality, freedom, humanity, emotion and memories belong, for instance, to all traditions and all philosophies, but their absolute truth is in no ones possession. And, as we shall demonstrate, the universal can only be a universal that is shared.

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Quest for Meaning»

Look at similar books to The Quest for Meaning. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Quest for Meaning»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Quest for Meaning and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.