Transcription
Very well. Uh, well, nothing, delighted to share this time with you. I have the honor of making a first general intervention on the topic of ethics and aesthetics in Islam. Uh, I am very interested in concretizing it, uh, in terms of thought. I am very interested in concretizing it in terms of what the medieval thought of Islam may have had to do with the contribution to what would later be the European Renaissance. For a simple reason, because we tend to think that Islamic medieval thought is, on the one hand, exclusively Muslim and, on the other hand, exclusively Arab. When I understand that the Islamic here encompasses the civilizational, the cultural, that precisely the main characteristic of that medieval thought is that it will be the main fertilization of early European Renaissance thought. And that is where I would like to emphasize a series of fundamental concepts. Firstly, one of the great characteristics in the interpretation of the Islamic is the typification of the Islamic as, uh, the medieval that somehow remained outside of the cultural. I am not talking about experts, I am talking about a general public that, if they have an approach to the Islamic medieval, will think of craftsmanship, will think of certain personal characteristics, a treatment of the religious in the public, a treatment of the family, a treatment, if you will, aesthetic to the extent that, uh, there is a certain attire contrasted with what would later be the aesthetics of the European. And I am very particularly interested, uh, in contradicting this natural stereotypical tendency of approaching the Islamic and focusing on four ideas that, from my point of view, are halfway between aesthetics and ethics. Uh, taking into account something that is very particularly interesting to me today for a reading from the contemporary, I believe that we live in times of aesthetic identification of personality, an aesthetic vindication. This would be something that, uh, would give much to talk about in the contemporary, but I believe that, uh, we must move towards an, uh, ethical revolution of behavior instead of an aesthetic vindication of personality. I mean, in contemporary societies, I tend to present myself in a way of dressing, in a way of identifying myself sexually, of eating in a certain way, if I am vegan, if I am carnivorous, if I am frugivorous, in a certain incorporation of what my group identification is in terms of religion. If I am Muslim, it will be noticeable aesthetically. If I am Jewish, it will be noticeable. If I am Christian, and I understand that what we should move towards is an ethics of behavior, that is, to eliminate collective characterizations of identification and to foster personal characteristics, to present myself as an individual in society, not as a representative of society. In that sense, what interests me most about medieval Arab-Islamic thought, understanding it as the cultural achievements that could have come from the East to the West in that enormous commercial system that is Dar al-Islam, let us never forget that Dar al-Islam is an enormous commercial system, it is not an empire, it is not a caliphate, it is not an imamate, it does not have the same sociopolitical structure as the Roman Empire would have, but it does inherit it in terms of exchange of goods, ideas, and people. And there, in that halfway point, I said, between the ethical and the aesthetic, there are four concepts that I understand to be completely essential. The foundation of medieval Arab-Islamic thought and the foundational basis of what will be, uh, hm, Renaissance thought in general European, Western terms, as a final inventory. The first concept is the concept, uh, of perspective. The perspective, monadir in Arabic, derived from the treatments in the optics books of Ibn al-Haytham. Ibn al-Haytham managed to isolate a dark room, managed, uh, to found what today we could understand as the seed of photographic lenses, managed in that dark room to transfer a light that interpreted, that transferred, uh, the images from the front, but it did so upside down. To the extent that by placing a lens, uh, that deviation could be corrected, and he understood that objects tended towards what in art is called today a vanishing point. That is, the closest objects appear larger, the smaller ones, it turns out, are further away. The idea of perspective, which through Ibn al-Haytham was established as a foundational element of modern optics and what would later be, in more technical terms, photography, turns out that in the book, I don't know if you know it, by Hans Belting, Florence and Baghdad, it is demonstrated that the treatises on perspectival optics, on perspective from the optical point of view of Ibn al-Haytham, had been read by the first Italian painters and sculptors, very specifically when the portal, what is known as the Gate of Paradise in the Florence Duomo, was built. The qualitative leap from an eminently aesthetic sense of perspective, it turns out that it is reflected in Italian art, but then perspective passes into the philosophical language from an ethical point of view, in such a way that things are not seen in only one way, but can be seen from different points of view, that is, from a treatise on optics to an artistic treatment to a consideration that things are subject to interpretation, that multiperspectivism exists. That would be one of the four concepts that I would like to highlight today very specifically from contemporary Arab-Islamic thought halfway between that idea of ethics and aesthetics. The second aspect is the Andalusian Ibn Tufayl, in whose book Hayy ibn Yaqzan establishes a continuity with ancient Eastern Islamic thought, which in turn develops Syriac thought, which in turn reworks Greek hermetic thought from the Chaldean oracles of the earliest Egyptian wisdom writings, in the sense of the transmission of knowledge from teacher to student. That is, how there is a chain of thought, I insist, from the idea of Hermes, from the great book of Boy Mandres, from the Syriac book of Mand of Hayi, to the small treatise of Avicenna, Ibn Sina, already precisely called Hayy ibn Yaqzan, literally "Alive, Son of the Awake," but which I always propose to translate as "The Awakening of Life." Well, in those treatises in the East, there is always a teacher and a student. It is always the learning that today, from those treatises to what we could see in cinema with Karate Kid or Star Wars, we could establish exactly the same relationships of development of knowledge from the teacher to the student. But Ibn Tufayl, the Andalusian Ibn Tufayl, taking the same title, posing the same idea of what in German is the Bildungsroman, Bildungsroman as a coming-of-age novel, establishes a qualitative leap in the narrative and posits that an abandoned child or one born in the middle of a deserted island, by the mere knowledge of nature, by the mere development of his own reasoning, is capable of awakening sparks of intelligence, awakening the intellectual life of human beings without needing a teacher. The leap of contemporary Arab-Islamic thought in Al-Andalus in Hayy ibn Yaqzan through the novel of Ibn Tufayl, is that the human being is alone. The human being does not need a teacher, and that is the birth of one of the fundamental concepts, not only of the European Renaissance, but very specifically of what will be the Enlightenment, which is anthropocentrism. In a subtle way, in a story that we can already qualify as novelistic, Ibn Tufayl posits that God is no longer the center of the universe, but rather the human being is. It seems to me that this consideration of human behavior with respect to others, that is, of the ethical development of my relationship with others through a fully human introspection, without theological or didactic knowledge through wisdom, is an authentic intellectual achievement in medieval Arab, uh, Arab-Islamic thought of Dar al-Islam. We said, therefore, the perspective of Ibn al-Haytham, now the free thought of Hayy ibn Yaqzan. Hayy al-Haytham, by the way, we don't have time to dwell on it too much, but he will later be translated and retranslated into Hebrew, he will be translated and retranslated into, uh, English, he has been translated into Latin. And centuries later, the Jewish writer, the great thinker Baruch de Spinoza, commissioned his translation into Dutch. Let us keep in mind that Baruch de Spinoza is the father of what, from a pantheistic point of view, would be the elimination of the divine in the equation of the natural order. That Latin idea of "Deus sive Natura" presents us alone before an immeasurability of what we could determine as the natural order. It denies free will. We have no capacity to change things, but we can modify our environment through our behavior. Therefore, it will also be one of the keys to the ethical reflection of human behavior. I said, therefore, perspective, I said, therefore, the, the sense of anthropocentrism. The third of the four great concepts for me is also traceable from the Ikhwan al-Safa epistles, mistranslated as Brothers of Purity, because what they mean is pure brothers, brothers who are understood as, uh, inseparable. In the epistles of the Brothers of Purity, in the most ethical concepts of their considerations of communal life, something is posited that will be subtly picked up in the magnificent Persian-Indian book, translated into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa', which will be Kalila wa Dimna. Kalila wa Dimna, which will be translated in the 11th century into Castilian, already at the court of Alfonso X in Castile, posits in one of its great chapters the section called "Al-Hamama al-Mutawajja," that is, the collared dove, the dove with a collar, posits that we are not alone. And not only are we not alone, but in the face of any threat, it is precisely the Arab sense of "todamun," the Arab sense of solidarity, that will save us all together. It is a very simple story, apparently about some animals, specifically some doves that have been caught in a net, and when they are all able to fly together, they, uh, take flight and can escape the hunter and therefore prosper. What are they trying to tell us? That the sense of behavior in the community is the sense of pure brothers, of "I do for you what you will do for me." The sense of solidarity in European languages, French, English, or Spanish or Italian, is active, it is unidirectional. I am solidary, but the sense of "todamun" has a reciprocity. What you do for me, I do for you. Well, it seems to me that it is not a coincidence that the chapter of Kalila wa Dimna called "Al-Hamama al-Mutawajja," that is, the collared dove, has so much coincidence of title with the magnificent book of Ibn Hazm, "Tawq al-Hamama," the Dove's Neck Ring. That is, it gives me the impression that the ethical current of solidary behavior reaches the great book, which will be the essay, par excellence, on love and lovers, on the most, uh, uh, reciprocal behavior possible, uh, in post-Caliphal Cordoba, in the figure of Ibn Hazm. Therefore, we already have three. We have the idea of anthropocentrism, we have the idea of solidarity in the Ikhwan al-Safa, we have the initial idea of perspective from Ibn al-Haytham, and in, and in my interpretation of the Arab-Islamic fact, the fourth enormous element of the Andalusian tradition that will fertilize European thought will be the figure of Ibn Rushd, the figure of Averroes, with what is known as the via of the double truth, also mistranslated, because it is not that there are two ways to find truth, but rather that we can choose, as if on a painter's ladder, we can choose to arrive at the search for truth through faith or to arrive at the search for truth through reason. It is said of Ibn Rushd that in a medicine class, a cadaver was about to be dissected, and he was asked if we, as Muslims, could dissect cadavers. And he replied, "If you want to talk about religion, I have a good friend across the hall teaching religion in the mosque, but here we are talking about medicine." That idea of the separation of reason and faith will be prohibited in the 11th century in Paris by Bishop Tempier. The concept of "averroism" will be coined as equivalent to free thought, and it will be another of the great foundations of Enlightenment thought, very specifically, uh, proto-Renaissance in this case and initially French, but it will spread to all European languages. Let us not forget that Ibn Rushd, the Latin Averroes, will be the commentator of Aristotle par excellence for Saint Thomas Aquinas, therefore, he has been read, translated, and retranslated. Four elements, I said, therefore, of Arab-Islamic foundation between ethics and aesthetics, between human behavior in society and its interpretation of the world: perspective, free thought, anthropocentrism, and solidarity, which from my point of view are the great instruments that will equip European aesthetic thought. It must be taken into account that I am starting from an aesthetic consideration of what Immanuel Kant would call aesthetics. That is, I am not referring to the aesthetic in the exclusively plastic, in the exclusively artistic sense that generates a sensation in me, but rather the aesthetic in the sense of how I perceive the world. And Immanuel Kant, he posits that it will be the sense of the aesthetic, the sense of my response to the things that present themselves in the world. And that is where I believe that medieval Islam managed to forge a fundamental path. In this case, due to the time I have, it is exclusively in four concepts, but very specifically in what implies the continuity from East to West. And a final nuance. Next year marks 900 years since the birth of, excuse me, 800 years, 1126, since the birth of Ibn Rushd. We are going to organize a series of congresses, lectures, books, and we are going to emphasize very specifically what the great Moroccan polymath Mohammed Abid al-Jabiri called the lost opportunity of reason for Islam. He highlighted that Ibn Rushd had been translated, retranslated, and commented on in European languages, but had not been known or recognized as his own in post-medieval Islamic thought. And that is one of the great problems that Islamic thought had in what from contemporaneity is known as the "asr al-zulumat," the age of darkness in the Arab-Islamic world. Al-Jabiri, and I fully agree with him, understands that recovering the figure of Averroes, recovering the figure of thought, giving an opportunity to reason, would connect contemporary Arab thought with medieval thought, from my point of view, very specifically through these four elements that are cornerstones of the interpretation of the world from my behavior, from ethics in a world that presents itself to me aesthetically in a certain way. I always use these four concepts. I use the figure of Averroes, I use the recovery of medieval thought for the benefit of an inventory of contemporary Arab thought to vindicate that modernity in the Arab-Islamic world is not something alien, that modernity was built from the ethical, aesthetic, and medieval thought foundations, uh, in Arabic, that it was not what we think, an enormous mosque, that it was not what we think, an invasive empire, but rather it was an enormous commercial system in which goods, people, and ideas were exchanged and contributed to the fertilization of what would later be European modernity. I regret not being able to be with you in person at the time of the congress, but I will certainly be connected for any comments you wish to make online. Thank you very much and have a happy congress.