- Translation from Moroccan Arabic to English: Ben Tarki Moujahid
Pause Flow’s ‘Nihil’: Faith and Kantian Philosophy
Introduction: Music, Philosophy, and the Debate on Faith
The philosopher of the hammer, the eternal recurrence, and the will to power, the great German Friedrich Nietzsche, says that “Life without music is a mistake.” It’s not just incomplete, but a mistake in every sense of the word; it would have no meaning and would be empty of all spirituality and poetry.
Life without music is the killing of life, as I say. It’s not for nothing that Schopenhauer considered it the highest art form of all, saying that “Music tells a story that cannot be expressed, yet is felt by everyone who hears it.” This is because it is a lifestyle, if we want to put it that way, as we find people living, for example, the same style of music they listen to, whether it’s rap, metal, rock, or Al-Malhoun. You feel it’s a part of them, and perhaps that hit is what gives meaning to their life.
But since our context is rap, of course, it’s a great style of life, and we can consider it a means of rebellion against the difficulties of life and human suffering, whether against the state or anything else. And philosophy, of course, from its very beginning, has been an attempt to understand life and rebel against its absurdity, as the French philosopher Albert Camus says in “The Myth of Sisyphus.” Therefore, rap has a great connection with life, as it is a type of music.
Analyzing ‘Nihil’: Pause Flow’s Conflict Between Faith and Doubt
In this article, we have chosen one of the best rappers who writes in Morocco, a native of Imouzzer Kandar, Jawad Asradi, known as “Pause Flow,” and the track we are discussing is “NIHIL,” which means “nothing” in Greek. From this word is derived a philosophical movement that states that life has no meaning and that all our values are empty of meaning, which is nihilism.
In this track – and we will write multiple articles about it because there is much to say – Pause discusses the conflict between faith and doubt, and this is an important topic that we need to be aware of. And since philosophy discusses everything, it has also discussed these concepts of faith and doubt, especially in the Middle Ages after the emergence of Christianity and Islam, where philosophers tried to reconcile philosophy and religion.
Pause – Nihil (Official Audio)
Linking Philosophy, Faith, and Rap
Pause Flow tells us in one note that:
"The mistake you make is looking for answers in religion with your senses, a limited logic facing perfection—this is an incomplete view. The logic of religion surpasses the limits of reason and matter; God gave us a brain, but He also constrained us with barriers."
Here, Pause is speaking as a believer, as this is something believers say to atheists in the context of discussing the existence of God and the truth of religion. And since Pause, as he said in the track’s description, first played the role of a Muslim perspective on the topic and in the second part played as an atheist from an atheist perspective, this note comes in the context of the believer’s thesis.
First: “The mistake you make is looking for answers in religion with your senses.”
Explanation: The mistake many people make is that they want to understand religion only through their senses (sight, hearing, touch, etc.) like empirical sciences.
Meaning: Not everything in religion can be explained by our senses; there are unseen things that cannot be felt or seen.
Second: “The logic of religion surpasses the limits of reason and matter.”
Explanation: The logic of religion transcends the boundaries of reason and matter.
Meaning: Religion has metaphysical and spiritual dimensions, not just material ones, and we cannot limit our thinking about it solely within the intellectual and material framework we know.
Third: “God gave us a brain, but He also constrained us with barriers.”
Explanation: God gave us reason, but He limited its capabilities; it is not absolute.
Meaning: Even reason has its limits and cannot understand everything, and these limits mean that faith must come at some stage, not just logic.
So, as we have seen, Pause Flow here criticizes people who want to measure religion by the standards of science and logic alone, and he says that religion is a field that transcends this, and that the human mind is limited in front of divine perfection and will not reach everything on its own.
Religion and Reason: Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy
In this context, there is a philosophy of a German philosopher who lived in the eighteenth century and adopted this viewpoint regarding the existence of God, the reality of life after death, and anything that falls under the category of faith—and that is the great German Immanuel Kant. Kant, in his critical philosophy, especially in his book “Critique of Pure Reason,” whose fundamental question was whether metaphysics is possible.
By metaphysics, he means beyond nature, i.e., is it possible for humans to think and prove something we cannot see, feel, or smell, simply something that is not subject to the senses? In this work, he addressed these issues, seeing that these matters of God, the soul, the end of the world, and anything that religion claims cannot be approached with reason because they are simply beyond comprehension. You cannot prove the existence or non-existence of God with reason, because this is a matter of faith, not a matter of science.
The same applies to the immortality of the soul and life after death, because faith is believing in something without proof, i.e., believing in it without seeing or feeling it. This is the mechanism of religion, but science is the opposite; science demands proof and experiment for verification and does not rely on faith.
Pause – Abstrait (Official Audio)
Pause Flow’s Arguments: A Believer’s Perspective
Pause, here in the role of the Muslim, says the same thing to the atheist, meaning that the mistake you make is seeking answers in religion and God with your senses, i.e., you don’t want to believe until you see or feel, and this is limited logic because you cannot see God or the soul or jinn. these are matters of faith, not science. And he gives an argument: that God gave us reason but constrained us with barriers, meaning you cannot comprehend God with your mind or senses because your logic and His logic are completely different. Therefore, using reason or the senses in religion is just a waste of time in the view of Immanuel Kant, because no one will ever be able to prove the existence of supernatural powers or metaphysical beings like God, jinn, or the soul.
And in the same track, Pause continues with another note where he says, in the role of the Muslim, that “he will not disbelieve in himself to discuss a banal ability; as long as my soul goes up and down, I will believe in annihilation. If religion were illusions, how did the idea then appear? How did ethics and principles then appear? What happened?”
Here, Pause presents other arguments in favor of faith from the perspective of believers: that if religion were just an illusion, as Freud said, for example, how did the idea then appear? And perhaps here he means by “the idea” the idea of God or thought in general. That is, if religion were an illusion and a human invention, how did the idea of God appear without a religion to speak of it? And he continues by saying that if religion were an illusion, how did ethics and principles then appear? And this is a famous argument among believers, where they claim that religion is the source of human ethics, and without it, we would become immoral beings.
And this is a dangerous error, as it is very dangerous to link ethics to religion, because religion differs, and many religions exist, and each would have its own ethics. This means we would have someone belonging to a certain religion who believes that rape is good simply because their religion says so, and another who believes killing is good, and so on. Rather, we should link ethics to reason because it is what we share, and base ethics on reason and the principles of right and wrong.
Conclusion: Faith, Reason, and the Power of Rap
So, as we have seen with Kant and Pause in the role of the Muslim, it is impossible to prove the existence of God with reason or to use reason in religion, because you will fall into what Kant calls contradictions and fallacies, which are just confusing in this sense.
So, everything has its domain: religion relies on faith, and science relies on evidence and proof. And we will have another stop in this very track, in another note and in the context of this eternal debate between faith and doubt.
