“Hegelian in Method. Deleuzian in Mood”: Thoughts on My Modus Operandi

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always —
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Somebody once told me that I was“Hegelian in method, Deleuzian in mood.” I think this captures something of the paradox (and I love paradox) of how I think and live.

Hegel, of course, is the great system-builder. For him, Spirit realizes itself through history by way of contradiction, conflict, and eventual reconciliation. The dialectic moves by tension — thesis, antithesis, synthesis — until, in the grand sweep, all is gathered into Absolute Spirit.

And in a strange way, I often find myself moving like this. My life has not been a straight line. Rather, it has been a dialectic:

• From Russian Orthodoxy, through its discipline and grand beauty, into Islam with its geometry and clarity.
• From Guénon’s traditionalist rigidity into a more generous openness and pluralism.
• From the cloistered Apollonian stillness of monasticism into the restless plain of a more Dionysian nomadic becoming.

Each stage negates what came before — but never erases it. The old is preserved, carried upward, sublated into something higher. I rarely leave anything behind. My path has been one long Aufhebung. (This is something that my detractors have overlooked.)

Yet if my method leans Hegelian, my mood is entirely Deleuzian. Deleuze resists the totalizing system. He delights in flows, multiplicities, rhizomes, lines of flight. He teaches us to celebrate openness, to avoid final closure, to remain nomadic in thought and being. (And I say this not from a position of aqidah, but more in method.)

That is where I live. I am restless with completion. (Is this a flaw? I am not sure.) I prefer paradox to resolution. Where Hegel seeks the great edifice, I prefer the wide plain, the ever-shifting horizon, the chance encounter.

And yet these two — Hegel and Deleuze — do not cancel one another. They circle, like Eliot’s fire and rose — opposites that belong together. The dialectical movement gives form and structure to the chaos of my becoming, while the Deleuzian mood keeps that structure from ossifying into a tomb.

This is what I mean when I quote one of my favorite poets: “the fire and the rose are One.” Fire is Hegel’s method: burning through contradiction, consuming, transforming. The rose is Deleuze’s mood: blossoming in multiplicity, delicate, open, irreducible. Fire without the rose becomes sterile violence; the rose without the fire wilts into sentiment, nostalgia. Together they make something living, something whole.

My life is not a straight road, but neither is it a meaningless drift. It is a dialectic that refuses to close, a spiral that never quite resolves into a final circle. It is Hegel and Deleuze in uneasy marriage, reconciled in the deeper unity of the fire and the rose.

Again, this is not a modern, liberal “all things are the same” kumbaya sort of sentimental relativism. It is a struggling. Like David wrestling with the angel.

He said, “Release me, for dawn is broken!” He said, “I will not release you, except if you bless me!”
He said to him, “What is your name?” He said, “Jacob.”
He said, “Jacob will not be said as your name anymore, but Israel, for you struggled with God and with men, and you are capable!”
Jacob asked, and said, “Now, reveal your name!” He said, “Why is it that you ask for my name?” He blessed him there.
Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, “for I have seen God face-to-face, and my soul survives.” (Genesis 32:27–31)

Like Jacob, I have wrestled greatly (often through the night) with God and with men. My name has changed more than once (Hilarion, Said…), the blessing is given, but yet the limp remains. That limp is the mark of the dialectic — the struggle that does not end but rather deepens. It is the fire that consumes and the rose that blossoms, the paradox of structure and openness, of contradiction and flow.

My fiqh and my aqidah are set. These are things that anchor me. Yet all the same, the spiritual life is is never truly resolved into a final circle in this dunya but spirals outward, ever further, ever higher. And in the stillness between two waves of the sea, I glimpse it: the fire and the rose are One.

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Thank you, and may God reward you! Glory to God for all things!