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Aesthetics in Arabic Thought pdf download

AESTHETICS IN ARABIC THOUGHT
Book Title Aesthetics In Arabic Though
Book AuthorJosé Miguel
Total Pages955
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Aesthetics in Arabic Thought – From Pre-Islamic Arabia through al-Andalus

By José Miguel Puerta Vílchez Translated from Spanish by Consuelo López-Morillas

AESTHETICS IN ARABIC THOUGHT

Book Introduction

Until recently scholars doubted whether a Western aesthetics existed at all in the Middle Ages, or else considered it a distant precursor of the true, coherent aesthetics founded by Baumgarten.1

But they questioned, even more, the existence of anesthetics written in Arabic during the same period, which corresponds to the Classical era in the Islamic world.

 To define the scope and purpose of the present study we must explore the reasons for this questioning of, or lack of interest in, aesthetic concepts generated by Arab-Islamic culture.

First, we must realize that the discipline of Aesthetics as a method and form of knowledge arose from eighteenth-century European Classicism:

 it is based not only on a specific concept of beauty and the arts but also on a view of the world and humankind that ignores the artistic practices of “primitive,” medieval, or Oriental art. It holds these to be opposed to Classicism, or to be mere attempts, more or less unsuccessful, to reach the “true” order of knowledge represented by European rationalism and humanism.

Therefore there are both aesthetic and philosophical reasons why the Aesthetics born in the West did not traditionally include an “aesthetics in the Arabic language.”

On the one hand, Islamic art was often seen as second-rate, mere artisanship meant to serve dominant religious principles or to produce decorative or exotic objects.

 On the other hand European consciousness generally relegated Islamic thought – with its many variants manifested in social unrest, and with the internal development peculiar to Islamic peoples – to an inferior level:

it was viewed as no more than an adulterated reiteration of Greek philosophy, or a conglomerate of half-baked ideas that lacked the “rationality” typical of Western thought, which had been developing since the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.2

Islamic art and thinking lay, irremediably, outside the conditions that had given birth to Aesthetic science in Europe. It was an art apparently authorless, uncreative, artisanal, medieval, lacking humanistic ideals, theological, and therefore incompatible with the secularism that was then developing in Europe.

 Later defenses of Arab-Islamic culture, like that of Delacroix, were based on a supposed survival of the spirit of Greco-Roman Antiquity on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, rather than on any intrinsic or historic value of its aesthetics.3

This attitude toward Arab-Islamic art and aesthetics crystallized into a particularly clear and influential theory in the Hegelian vision of art, born of the encounter between the German Idealist aesthetic and the dialectical theory of History.4

Kantian aesthetics was concerned with human cognitive faculties; Hegel redirected it toward art as an expression of the Spirit of a people, and of the Absolute throughout History.

In Hegel’s view, Islamic art becomes one of those that makeup what he calls the “symbolism of the sublime” as a moment which may be superior in Eastern art, but which is inferior to both Classical and Romantic art.5

For Hegel, Islamic art is limited because the formal richness with which it expresses its idea of the Absolute is abstract, and lacks the artistic consciousness of a personal creative subject.

It is a pre-art. It establishes a relationship between form and content that does not rise to the level of consciousness, unlike Classical and above all Romantic art, which is a conscious expression of the Spirit of a people and an era.

The symbolism of the sublime depends upon religion, in which the Absolute One is ungraspable by means of natural forms, resulting in an artistic expression that cannot blend content with form.

This art does not succeed in representing the idea and is therefore dead or irrational, whereas Christian art does manage to represent God in a conscious and positive way.

Hegel believes that because for these peoples the Spirit contrasts with the human being and Truth cannot be represented figuratively, plastic arts in the true meaning of the term cannot exist among them. Hegel accepts Kant’s distinction between the sublime and the beautiful in art, and Kant’s suggestion that sublime art does not allow physical representation, but he believes that sublime art is inspired by the pure idea that it seeks to represent.

Therefore in the symbolism of the sublime the mere attempt to express content – that is, the inexpressible Absolute – leads to the impossibility and annihilation of expression. The greatest achievement of this aesthetics is what Hegel decides to call the “pantheism of art,” which is born in Hindu poetry, continues in Jewish poetry, and culminates in Islam, specifically in the person of Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī; it lived on, but in attenuated form, in Christian mysticism.

This “pantheist” poetry is able to express, in a conscious fashion, the simultaneous unity and diversity of all things in the One, transforming the fear of God normally found in those cultures into the idea of love, and opening the way for the conscious expression of harmony and serene pleasure that the poet feels on contemplating the presence of God in all things.

Even then, Hegel continues to think of Islamic art as artistic because it supposedly lacks the dramatic, which requires a unity in which the Absolute and the particular can recognize each other as separate entities. Moreover, Islam’s supposed ban on figurative representation reduces its arts to those of the word – poetry above all – and architecture.

The latter, in spite of its impact in Hegel’s times and on the philosopher himself, he considers incomplete, because it does not achieve full representation and abstracts the natural and the human in a less-than-conscious manner. He acknowledges a certain consciousness and creative freedom in Islamic architecture insofar as – necessarily in this

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