Liberal Arts

Far from being a politician with no vision or plan, Benjamin Netanyahu is in dialogue with history. His ideology was inherited from his father, but it harkens back to 15th-century messianic writings.   

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Sometime in the thirteen century Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān was translated into Hebrew. The translation was engrained in the process of the circulation of Arabic philosophical texts from Spain, through Catalonia across the Pyrenees Mountains to France and Provence.  The circulation produced a wave of translations of Arabic philosophy, particularly Averroeist writings, into Hebrew and Latin. These translations, in turn, sparked local controversies between philosophers and theologians among Christians in the University of Paris, and among Sephardic Jews in the Sephardic communities of Provence-Catalonia. More than a century after this stirred reception of philosophy, Moses Narbonni was restlessly wondering through Provence and Catalonia. When he arrived in 1348 at Barcelona he set to write down a commentary on the anonymous Hebrew translation of Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān. He titled his commentary Yehiel Ben-‘Uriel and presented the story of Ḥayy in a form of a dialogue between Ibn-Tufayl and a student. Narbonni’s commentary set off an increasing interest in autodidactisism and was the vehicle through which Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān was presented to Hebrew and Latin readers.  But, what intrigued Narbonni in Barcelona of the mid fourteenth century to pick up a manuscript translation of Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān, to write down his commentary and set off this autodidactic tradition?

Scientific exchanges between Christian and Islamic civilizations passed through several phases from the Middle Ages onwards, each characterized in its own way. In medieval times, intellectually prosperous Islamic civilization passed works on natural philosophy in Arabic to Western Europe, giving the first impetus to the rise of a new form of intellectual inquiry in Europe. The result was not only a transformation in the structure of European universities but also the establishment of a new form of doctrine, based on incorporating Arabic Aristotelian works into the new Thomist theology. For over two centuries, up to the 15th century, Latin translations of the Arab philosophical corpus played a key role in the curricula of European intellectual institutions. But later, with the fall of Constantinople in 1453, ancient Roman and Greek texts surfaced and were circulated, generating a new urge to read Aristotle directly, no longer through the mediation of the Arabs, thus opening the way in art, literature, and natural philosophy to the rise of the Renaissance.

This paper aims at excavating the circulation of the Picatrix, an Andalusian grimoire, as it traveled across the Mediterranean in early modern Europe, stirring up natural magic not only as an alternative program for science, but also identifying it as an alternative scientific culture located in the East. In following the readings of Ficino, Agrippa and Campanella of the Picatrix, it unfolds a latent cultural process, beginning with Ficino who attempted to philosophize the concept of magic, through Agrippa who sought to legitimate the practice of magic and the persona of the magician, and up to Campanella who ventured to transform natural magic not only into the prime program for natural sciences, but into a political science as well.  By stressing their reliance on a source that not only encouraged a competing program (natural magic), but was also written in a competing cultural space, our protagonists stressed that natural magic originated in the deep past, in the ancient space of the east. Thus, they further established its legitimacy by arguing that in its essence, natural magic, builds upon cross-cultural exchanges and on breaking disciplinary fences, fusing bodies of knowledge from different disciplines and from different cultures into each other, so to establish a new philosophy of science. The east, accordingly, was not only a space from which the philosophy of natural magic originated, but more particularly, the fictional cultural space where practice of natural magic acted as building an inductive bottom-top society.

This theoretical introduction promotes the explortion of cultural margins as shedding new light on the “Scientific Revolution,” showing that early modern science owed its formation not exclusively to “monadic” cultures in the traditional intellectual centers, but also to vibrant, everyday cross-cultural exchanges on the margins of cultural fields. Various cross-cultural exchanges transpired in the “mutually embraced zone” of the Eastern Mediterranean, where the margins of one culture overlapped the margins of the other,  extending post-Copernican cosmologies eastward, where they were negotiated, shaped, and
resolved.

What would you do if you were stranded on a desert island?
This dilemma and its derivatives somewhat epitomize the almost
obsessive modern pursuit for the “true inner self.” In our shared cultural imagination, the desert island and the life of solitude allow one to actively explore himself and his surroundings, to experience life firsthand rather than mediated by culture, and to perfectly situate himself in his proper natural place. Self- discovery becomes essential to the purpose of modern life—to the pursuit of happiness. Without social and historical constraints, without the burden of tradition, and without false needs imprinted on our minds by cultural hegemony, the individual can trust firsthand experience to bring natural, and so complete, happiness.

In the 1630s, while in Aleppo, Edward Pococke picked up a manuscript of Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān. He used it for his Latin translation Philosophus autodidacticus, and later gave it to the Bodleian Library where it is now kept.  Interestingly, Pococke bound the manuscript together with a work of the mystic-philosopher Abū Ḥāmid Muhammad al-Ghazzālī (known in Latin as Algazel).  The connection between Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān and al-Ghazzālī was not accidental. Between the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries, manuscripts of Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān circulated in the Near East, as a text showing how the study of nature leads to mysticism. In subordinating mystical practices to philosophical procedures, the text gives preferentiality to firsthand practical experience over the traditional textual authority of contemplated philosophy. However, autodidacticism was not a pure philosophical choice.  The contours of Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān includes emblematic features that point out at the stimulating context to which Ibn-Tufayl responded - a wondrous Eastern island called Wāqwāq on which the story takes place; spontaneous generation; a wild prodigy nursed by a gazelle; an elusive “Oriental Philosophy” that the secrets of which the text claims to deliver, and finally mystical practices that brings the protagonist, Hayy, to spiritual climax in a cave.
These emblematic features corresponded with previous controversies regarding authoritative knowledge between mystics and judges, logicians and practitioners, literati and illiterati and finally far eastern traders and court politicians that swirled Ibn-Tufayl in the Almohad court in Marrakesh where he was employed as the court philosopher. In attempting to resolve such tensions, he recast their arguments into a coherent philosophical program in which autodidacticism seems as an accidental by-product rather than its principle feature.