Love and Desire
Varediş – A Metaphysics of Orientation
This book rethinks human existence around two foundational concepts: presence
(mevcudiyet) and self-actualization (varediş). What is given to the human being -body,
time, reason, will, nature, and relationships- is an unchosen, already-present condition;
the direction in which it is worked out, however, is the person’s own responsibility. The
concept binding these two poles is trust (amānah): the human being is neither the source
nor the absolute owner of his own existence, yet is accountable for it. On this foundation,
the book works through fourteen chapters on being and agency, the ontology of time, the
hierarchy of reason, memory and imagination, the dialectic of freedom and fate, self-deception,
the ontology of morality, desire and will, the structure of emotion, love and fear,
a new conception of the human being, society and civilization, and the relation between
happiness and liberty. Its central claim is to bring the freedom-concept of existentialist
phenomenology (Sartre, Heidegger, Kierkegaard), the character-concept of classical virtue
ethics (Aristotle, MacIntyre), and the creation-and-freedom metaphysics of Islamic
theology (Ash’arite occasionalism, vürûd, âdetullah) together within one conceptual architecture:
presence–trust–orientation–self-actualization–personhood. The appendices
convert this synthesis into technical, arguable propositions on three fronts: an “open
future” response to the tension between divine foreknowledge and human freedom; a
theory of personal identity grounded not in a persisting substance but in three traces left
by the agent’s acts; and a “metaphysics of nearness” (kurb) that consciously departs from
the Sufi doctrine of the oneness of being (wahdat al-wujud), answering Hegel’s critique of
“bad infinity” with a spiral, asymptotic model. The work recasts human incompleteness
not as a defect but as a capacity for orientation, and freedom not as a contentless void but
as a responsibility directed toward truth.
Keywords: Self-Actualization (Varediş); Presence (Mevcudiyet); Trust (Amānah); Orientation;
Personhood; Freedom and Fate; Islamic Metaphysics