Preamble for a conception of an ethical system
Preliminary reflections
Wissal tiqa
In a previous article entitled “the conscientious void, the project of moral formation and the questioning of values”, we addressed a questioning, which we find difficult to identify in a single article. What is more difficult is to study the solutions required in a detailed and definitive manner. The objective of this charter was rather to alert us to the illogical way in which man conceives his relationship with God, with the universe and with himself. Between the questioning of values, their abjurations and their extirpation from daily life and the standardization of Homo Sapiens, with the creation of a cloned “homo consummator” devoid of any conscience in his decision-making and deprived of spiritualities in his projects. Therefore, in the light of the foregoing, we have concluded that the human race is in urgent and vital need of recovering his soul and value as well as his fabric and its conscientious interaction, neglected to the detriment of the hegemony of rationalism and praxis, in the total absence of great and small stories. Thus, the reformation of a value system, its conceptualization and implementation, requires a lot of reflection and research. Through this research, we hope to be able to probe this questioning a little more, not to put forward standard answers and even less to pretend to present a work that will ultimately be sterile, but rather to broaden the field of questioning in order to deepen the reflection and clarify this subject of values, to formulate a priory as a ground for recovering ethics and values.
This increased reversal, as well as this rate of unbridled mutation, has generated ethical evils, which have turned Man into a greedy monster that undermines the safety and well-being of his fellow human beings, because of nuclear technology, violence of all kinds, weapons of mass destruction, environmental pollution, the enslavement of human beings by reducing them to robots that execute the agenda of modernism to the letter, hacking and invasion of privacy with cyberbullying, extorting confidential photos, financial fraud, cloning, and all its evils generated as a result of the counterproductive overuse of technology.
The first questions we would be confronted with, given the pernicious phenomena of today and which we have previously highlighted, and their negative effects on social safety and well-being, the questions of causality and genesis which therefore prompt us to question the causes of this moral impasse. Is it necessarily because of the obsolescence of the current moral code, or because of the lack of its implementation and enforcement? Especially in a world that has become based on paradoxes? Or the importance of these evils and their variety far exceed the codes and punctuate the need for a possible redesign?
And if, as a hypothesis, the redesign would be the solution, will it be achieved by combining aesthetics, knowledge, and spiritualities on the one hand, and ethics on the other? Or will the idea of this combination lack the conception divided between ethics and spiritual, spiritual and beyond, and ethics and aesthetics? Or rather, will it require the reformulation of new notions of spiritualities and ethics, in order to give it a conception inherent to modernity, thus enabling it to enrich its theoretical field?
Our approach to the question of values and ethics from an Islamic point of view, which is at the heart of the vocation of this forum, will spare us from presenting those that diverge in their perspective from the approach of Islamic jurisprudence, and will also avoid comparing them, and will make it easier for us to start from a set of assumptions, which will not force us to ban the text, and to break a cognitive culture for a perfect understanding of the universe, but even less to ignore aesthetic criteria in order to open oneself to existence and creatures and without ignoring our sense of sight and discernment, in our observation and reflection on the universe and, ultimately, to remedy these problems in the end.
Go back to the genesis of the therapeutic role of ethics, which is a custom in Arab-Islamic civilization and is characterized by a cure for suffering and heart disease by correcting vices with good morals. But the persistent question is how we will design an ethical value system with an integral Islamic conception and a realistic approach, borrowed from Islamic jurisprudence that goes hand in hand with the demands of today’s world, and which faces different cases of ineptitude due to a misinterpretation of modernism and daily life on the one hand, and which on the other hand, creates balances of values that curb psychological disorders on the personal and social level? How can we convert the causes of loss into achievements that take into account in their controversial and antagonistic project between evil and good, the role of morality and spirituality? What arrangements do we need to make in the redesign of ethical systems in order to keep pace with evolution while facing chaos?
The foundation of a Muslim society in conformity with morality requires, above all, compliance with the texts but also reforming them and questioning their capacities, and thus freeing oneself from legitimate intellectual enslavement and false assumptions that have obstructed intellectual freedom and freedom of expression among Muslims. The same freedom that gives him the short scale so that he can conceive these most important resolutions, thanks to a combination of the acquisition of intellectual norms, brain training, purification of the heart, sublimation of the gaze and education in discernment. All this training, which requires even more in-depth reflection and more detailed elaboration of its problematic, is only the result of an attempt to optimize and examine the work tools conducive to the realization of a complete, well-crafted and practical moralizing training much more than it is theoretical. Thus, these combinations will challenge the person interested by a set of insistent questions such as the norms of knowledge on the one hand, and the norms of the effort of reflection on the other hand, in order to establish the pillars of a value system that goes hand in hand with modernity. Thus, he wonders, if it would be useful to abandon the text in order to be in phase with the requirements of the present era, or to refer to it in this perpetual journey of change, or even in the face of a heap of insistent existential questions, he will find himself embarked on an exodus towards a world that escapes the spatiotemporal notion and which will therefore oppose him in the face of a serious problem of knowledge, which can lead to dreadful recidivism, if it fails to overcome the unilateral philosophical vision, for an integral philosophical vision, which will allow it an existential assimilation and a reconciling melee with itself and with others within the framework of the religious element, even in the event of inability to elaborate theses in aesthetics, philosophy and the arts, and even, in the absence of a distinction between the choice of a constitutive moralizing project or as an issue for the future. And even if there is no balance between rationality, instinctive inheritance, psychological thesis, and ethical code, or even if there is no emancipation of ethical teaching from the tyranny of preaching current religious, which presents in its entirety therapeutic treatments without making the required diagnosis of the pathology.
We will see in the following, the important fields in which he (person interested in this project) should look in order to find satisfactory answers on the question of how and this in the realization of his moralizing project, after having again disentangled the notions and norms of knowledge.
The points that we will simply list above should be addressed in a detailed and detailed manner in separate articles.
1- Challenging its conception of the civilizational project, and renewing the understanding of the succession project, and the mechanisms for managing differences, by finding a civilizational receptacle, which integrates all the diversity of this cultural abundance.
2- Elucidate the causes of religious decadence and worldly decline.
3- Untangle some terms and notions, such as the term of worship, between conception and practice, and the term of ethics and virtue and their concept, and the notion of divergence, etc.
4- Dust off the notion of freedom.
5- Challenge the way in which the moralizing religious text is approached, in order to set in motion its effects, in order to establish a value system and its reform, in order to be in phase with recent developments.
6- Dust off the standards of knowledge.
7- Overcoming cognitive ambiguities.
8- A perfect knowledge of reality by opting for lucidity at the expense of a cognitive culture.
9- Dust off the relational and legal notion, by establishing some neglected values, by going beyond the preponderance of some current values by replacing them with values that go hand in hand with the aspiration for change, whether for political reforms, for the realization of development or for self-moralization.
The nine points we have discussed above are only a reduced, succinct and simplified model as an inventory of the fields to be addressed by all researchers who aspire to have an answer to the question of how and by all those who wish to found a moralizing project, which will therefore lead them to look at aesthetic, ethical and knowledge combinations in order to substitute, the civilizational clause by the civic clauses on the one hand, and on the other hand the handicaps to this civism and the problems that dissolve this moralizing project, in the perfect way to formulate answers to all the questions that will be amplified in order to found a complete value system capable of containing all the paradoxes, and to overcome the crises from the text.
