Negativity With a Future

As I continue reading Henry Corbin’s book on Iranian Sufism, I keep connecting it to ideas I’ve been interested in for years—the other day I connected it to Nietzsche. Now I’m going to connect it to an essay I wrote about an obscure philosopher named Alfred Seidel a while back. It seems to me that they’re describing the same problem.

The Corbin book focuses on the soul’s journey toward its “witness in Heaven”—its celestial twin, the figure of light it has to reunite with. The obstacle is Iblīs, the demonic shadow, which is not out there in the world, but in you, welded to your soul by the shadow you refuse to acknowledge.

Corbin describes how natural existence is composed of four elements—Earth, Water, Fire, Air—and all of them are forms of darkness that bury you beneath them. The way out is not to fight them directly. The way out is to act so that each element returns to its counter-part. Earth receives the earthy part. Water, the watery. Air the etheric. Fire the fiery. When each has been restored to what it rightfully belongs to, the elements cancel each other out. And when they cancel each other out, you are delivered to the higher level of being.

This connects up very well with Alfred Seidel, a Polish philosopher who died at twenty-nine, who focused on the question of why revolutions fail. He concluded that they fail because they’re too positive. Historical materialism (the dominant—Marxist—theory of revolution) posits the proletariat as an objective force, a mechanical engine that will naturally, almost inevitably, develop toward classless society. But that’s exactly the problem—if revolution is a mechanical necessity, there’s no room for the idea of revolution—the actual vision of what you’re trying to build. And without the idea, you get productive forces expanding, but conditions of life unchanged. The thought never becomes life.

Seidel’s answer was to go even further into the negative. “Nihilistic against nihilism,” he wrote. Not to oppose the darkness with light but to use darkness against itself—the nihilization of nihilism, in his terms.

Both philosophers—the sufi mystic, and the theorist of socialist revolution—are describing the same metaphysical structure.

Corbin: you can’t separate yourself from your shadow by fighting your shadow. Fighting it is still giving it form, still treating it as something solid. What you have to do is return each element to its proper counter-part, let the elements exhaust themselves against each other, and in that exhaustion, dissolve.

Seidel: you can’t defeat nihilism with hope. Hope in the face of nihilism is still operating on nihilism’s terms, still treating the emptiness as something to be filled. What you have to do is go into the nihilism further, until the nihilism turns against itself and opens.

The difference is that Seidel is writing political philosophy and Corbin is writing about the soul’s cosmological journey. But the operative logic is identical—negation undoes itself not through mere opposition, but through intensification. You don’t conquer darkness by bringing in light—you let the darkness be dark enough to become its own negation.

One thing I want to emphasize is the word deliver. Corbin uses it at the end of the passage—“you will finally be delivered of these burdens.” Not freed, not victorious. Delivered. Like something being released back into the right hands. It seems to be that this is a much better way to think about revolution (or transcendence—which is what sufi mysticism is really about: revolution of the soul), not as freedom, but delivery. Freedom invites all the negativity and uncertainty of wandering off into empty space—deliverance is freedom into a place that is filled with content, and therefore suitable for an elevated existence, for the achievement of a higher level of being.

Revolution, properly understood, is a form of delivery. Not the imposition of a new order on top of the old one, but the return of things to where they actually belong. Which means the revolutionary act is not additive but subtractive. You’re not building something new on top of the ruins—you’re removing what doesn’t belong until what remains can finally be itself.

The elements cancel each other out—only then there is room for light.

Seidel understood this, (and it killed him). The logic demands you follow it all the way down. Most people, sensibly, stop short of that. But the deepest philosophical question—and this is where it becomes existential rather than historical—is whether you can go far enough into the negation to let it dissolve, without going so far that you go with it.

That’s the narrow passage. Both Corbin and Seidel are pointing at it from different sides.