Religious Criticism of Scientism: The Subjectivity of Taufīq al-Ḥakīm in the Short Story “Fī Sanah Milyūn”

Year 2023, Volume: 34 Issue: 1, 257 - 281, 24.07.2023

Mohammad Muslih , Yulia Latifi

https://doi.org/10.26650/di.2023.34.1.1249910

Abstract

This paper studied the Egyptian modern short story “Fī Sanah Milyūn” by Taufīq al-Ḥakīm. The story tells us about the advancement of science and technology which was at its peak in 1000 CE, when people were made immortal. Then, they abandoned metaphysics. The radical Subject that destroyed the scientism structure then appeared by giving up his life. The question to be answered in this paper is: how did the Subject destroy tyrannical scientism and why? The analysis revealed that scientism deprived humanity of human beings and it was necessary for the radical Subject to destroy it. Through his scientific findings, the radical Subject created a transcendental paradigm of science as his criticism of positivistic scientism. The Subject built a fantasy about the eternity of God and the mortality of human beings as the replacement for scientism that had thrown God away from the picture and made human beings immortal. The movement of the author is a movement of an empty and split Subject. To seek fulfillment, the Subject kept moving to approximate The Real, namely a scientific order that had a transcendental-religious paradigm containing ordered values and honored the humanity of human beings.

Keywords

Criticism of Scientism, Relation Between Science and Religion, Arabic Literature, Taufīq al-Ḥakīm, Žižek’s Subjectivity

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