Chairperson:
Marco Lauri
L’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle
Dante, Paradiso, XXXIII 135
Le comparatisme ne devrait être qu’un point d’aboutissement car s’il est conçu comme un point de départ théorique, il est condamné à construire des objets, des artefacts.
Anne Cheng
Many [medieval] philosophers supposed that every act of cognition was preceded by a kind of ‘love’ or ‘natural appetition’ of the knower for the object.
M.-L. Von Franz, Aurora Consurgens
Introduction
Religions do travel. Philosophies, sciences, crops and styles do travel as well. More critically, stories and frames of references do travel, do expand, do interoperate. As these elements travelled across the Mediterranean, the Arabic Sea, and along the Silk Road, they contributed to a web of interrelated intellectual concerns nourished, to a point, by the same sources. In this perspective, traditional cultural borderlines along religious or linguistic divides may prove arbitrary if the larger space within which they occur is not considered.
The panel calls for a discussion of comparative methodology of analysis of this space in the “Medieval” period. It is proposed to test whether a cross-cultural ‘epistemic space’ may be a useful framework for “comparative” analysis of cultural products in Pre-Modern Eurasia. The panel aims at a discussion of the viability of the concept and the methods of study it calls.
This space would be outlined by shared features of the cultural production of Eurasian (including a large part of Northern and Eastern Africa) societies for approximately a millennium, roughly from Late Antiquity to the Scientific Revolution. Shared forms of thought are proposed to characterise this intellectual environment across traditionally recognized civilizational boundaries.
The notion of basic unity of being, knowledge, and sensibility is suggested to represent the most significant shared feature, as expressed in a significant part of “Medieval” philosophical, religious, literary and artistic output. These expressions do bear a societal and pedagogical significance at once. Love and intellect are supposed to proceed together, and are allowed to express themselves both through philosophical reflection and literary metaphor. The relevance of ontological unity to epistemic understanding and ethical agency alike seems to be reflected on the social dimension of intellectual endeavour. On this basis, this call offers to scrutiny the notion of education of desire (as defined by Ruth Levitas) as an underlying basic feature.
This framework could offer a way to give the very ill-defined chronological label of “Medieval” an actual content in intellectual history. In other words, this may be considered an attempt to discuss what makes a cultural product “Medieval”.
This frame of reference would cross both traditional disciplinary and cultural boundaries, covering the history of philosophy, science, theology, literature, and art produced in a variety of Old World societies. It would furthermore challenge entrenched assumptions about areas of civilization as discrete entities and stress their interconnection, calling for a reflection on the methods to study them.
Limits and contexts
The temporal and spatial frames of the proposed “Medieval Epistemic Space” covers the second half of the so-called “post-Axial” period (roughly 500 BC-1500 AD). The notion of “Axiality” has been used to describe a large section of Old World sedentary societies characterized by “new models of order, based on the contrast and the connection between transcendental foundations and mundane life-worlds.” (Eisenstadt 2010. See also Assmann 2005, Bellah 2005).
While this concept has not unanimous acceptance in humanities, it offers a useful albeit rough perspective in long-ranging analysis of intellectual history.
The rise of the Islamic Empire should be seen as a critical tipping point, that gives a convenient location for a major point of “discontinuity” within the Axial phase. Western Eurasian cultures appear at first to show a high level of interchange and integration that may be attributed the emergence of the courtly and scholarly milieu of the Islamic Empire and its successor states.
The Medieval Epistemic Space finds nourishment in clusters of ideas and stories that had been circulating throughout the Late Antique world, from India to Spain and China. Its elements seem to dominate, in different forms, the high culture of the Islamicate world, and circulated through it into other cultural “spheres”, that, however, had been in continued contact and cross-fertilization for centuries.
The space of circulation and elaboration of knowledge proposed would thus see the Islamicate world at its centre, but it is by no means limited to it. Its geographical and social limits should be seen not as sharply drawn borderlines but as fading peripheral extensions of a Western Eurasian, Indian and Mediterranean core, and possibly a Chinese one.
The historical spaces of contact and the sharing of features are, to the knowledge of the convener, more apparent in western Eurasia; the question is open whether Eastern Eurasia (namely the Sinosphere) should be considered part of this space. The call is warmly open to Sinologists or other scholars able to bring an East Asian perspective. (see also Cheng 2005).
It is not suggested that all the chronologically “Medieval” culture in the temporal and geographical areas considered displays necessarily the features discussed here. These emerge more clearly in the socially higher forms of written culture commonly tied to courtly and cultivated religious milieus: the space of this discursive systems is socially connoted, largely in the court or a religious counterpart to it (for instance, the monastery or the madrasa). The court and the school offered an ideal model. Other strata of population may have had different cultural concerns.
Education of desire
In the environment described, philosophy, including political philosophy, had an essentially pedagogical significance, which was steeped in an open-ended vision of (individual) human progress through self-perfectioning and education. This is not to be confused, however, with the modern Western view of progress as a historical process, which, to the present knowledge of the convener, did not exist in the Middle Ages in any explicitly conceptualized form. This pedagogical vision and its ethical and cognitive contents usually imply a hierarchic conception of world and society, as they normally express the world views of cultivated elites.
The nexus between ontological search for unity, the epistemic and ethical levels, and the social and pedagogical dimension, could justify the characterization of the intellectual life in the Medieval Epistemic Space as centred on education of desire.
The expression has been used by Ruth Levitas (The Concept of Utopia, 1990) to define the concept of utopia, a concept that very often, until recently, has been posited to pertain almost exclusively to the modern Western Christianity.
Recognizing education of desire and transcendental unity as characterizing elements of the Medieval Epistemic Space (although not necessarily exclusive to it) supports a reconsideration of utopia as a methodological tool in broader terms.
The “Medieval” “utopian” pedagogy proposed here is suggested to lie at the core of the world view that prevailed in the socially higher forms of culture. “Medieval Epistemic Space” is thus both a cloud of interrelated world-views, and an ideal place where they could interact, elaborating the sophisticatedly expressed feeling of some kind of openness and width in a discursive space where self-perfection as a human, understanding of the world and closeness to God are pursued and debated in relative (theoretical) harmony.
This is the cultural web of Medieval culture, filtering from the courts and academies into more widespread discourses that affect philosophy, literature (or at least a very large part of it), many forms of religious life, sciences, and political thought. The core of this form of “Mature Axial” high culture was then steeped into “utopian” instances and features, based on education of desire. However, these instances did not coalesce into utopia as a specific literary form until very late in this era, by the work of St. Thomas More; this process may be seen as a part of how “Modernity” emerged out of “Axiality”.
Adab, Śāstra, Litterae
The Medieval concept of education of desire (that may not be what Ruth Levitas originally intended) is perhaps best caught by the web of early meanings expressed by the Arabic word adab, though the set of phenomena discussed here has a larger scope than what is covered by the traditional senses of this word. A key term of Islamicate high culture, adab is usually translated with a range of words that roughly runs from “literature” (its main meaning in Modern Arabic) to “etiquette”, more fitting to some of its earlier Medieval usage.
The Medieval meanings of adab may be, in several instances, more appropriately understood through Levitas’ expression. However, education of desire in the Middle Ages high culture is not ‘utopian’ in the modern sense; it only occasionally fosters the imagination of a societal alternative and the foundation of it on a ‘more perfect principle’ (Suvin 1985); rather, it was about perfecting themselves, individually and collectively, to adhere to an already given perfect principle, usually a transcendent one.
While adab is not identical to Sanskrit śāstra or the “Western” notion of humanae litterae, all these expressions ended up, in a modern context, to be associated with the notion of “literature”. In a “Late Axial” milieu, these had a rather broader significance, capturing the central nexus of Medieval intellectual world in the close interplay of knowledge and ethics. However, unlike adab and litterae, śāstra does specifically encompass speculative writing about what would we call “philosophy” (in the sense of Arabic ḥikma and ‘ilm; Rosenthal 2007).
The question is whether these culture-specific concepts can be understood comparatively, comparing them to each other as defined things, or, as a consequence of the discussion above, should be considered formal “dialects” that expressed a shared, wider discourse.
Modernity
Comparative studies of literature and philosophy have long assumed a “Modern Western” vantage point that develops after the breakdown of the Medieval space, and sets boundaries in a different way, privileging language and religion, defining a geographically smaller, but socially deeper, “post-courtly” intellectual society as the locus of its discursive practice.
Feeling and intellect, faith and reason, love and knowledge somewhat parted ways, the dominant centres of political and economic power shifted, and, in time, boundaries grew sharper. Axiality gives way to “Modernity”, the court (and the school) to the State. In this “Modern Western” frame of reference, utopia may be no longer a basic drive of the intellectual activity but a specialized genre of literature, one with a relatively precarious standing at that, but more radically oppositional to standing social order.
Education of desire does no longer unite science and poetry, grammar and politics. Utopian discourse possesses still possesses a powerful appeal in the intellectual constellation of modernity and is a very important element of it. The approach outlined here, with his emphasis on “utopian” thinking, may shed light on the construction and emergence of Modernity, illustrating continuities and fractures.
Conclusion
Education of desire, in the sense sketched above, is steeped in analogies and homologies that affect form, content and function of texts, where analysis may be able to trace structures and variations through a the vast cultural web whose contours have been roughly proposed here. In this web, in this shared, diverse epistemic space, a common drive motivates the disciplines and cultures, offering the room for understanding and cross-influence, together with conflict and debate.
The questions that the panel would address can be summarized as follows:
Is the concept of “Medieval epistemic space” a valid instrument to understand cultural realities? Which, if any, are its possible areas of meaningful application?
Which tools and methods would be required to define it and study its manifestations, taking for granted that these are to be at least partly comparative in nature?
Is it correct to take the concept of “education of desire” as a central defining element, if not the central element, of this cultural field?
Is it possible to understand something about the emergence of Modernity through this approach?
Defining and refining conceptual tools is important to visualize and study this supposed “Medieval” epistemic space; tools where a different way to do “comparison” is a probably necessary early step.
Tools that may prove to be of understanding more than analysis. Possibly, it implies becoming a little more “medieval”; educating our own desires while studying the education of others’.
Love and knowledge parted their ways long ago, but like a Medieval poet, this call would like to be able to conclude, although in a different sense: Amor, che nella mente mi ragiona.
Practical information
Please send a brief proposal (about 300 words) to Marco Lauri (marco.f.lauri@gmail.com) by March 31, 2015. The language of the conference will be English.
The panel is conceived as place of open, collaborative discussion. Participants will be encouraged to discuss abstracts and drafts in advance, and they will be asked to send a more detailed abstract, if not a draft speech, before the conference to be circulated to foster discussion.
Indicative Bibliography and Referenced Works
J. Assmann, “‘Axial’ Breakthroughs and Semantic ‘Relocations’ in Ancient Egypt and Israel” in Religion and Politics, Cultural Perspectives Leiden, Brill 2005: 39-54.
R. Bellah, “What is Axial about the Axial Age?” European Journal of Sociology, 46.1, 2005: 69-89.
E. Benigni, “Encounters between Arabic and Western literatures: emic translations and the etic formation of literary canons” Rivista degli Studi Orientali, 84, 2011: 129-145.
A. Cheng (ed.), “Y a-t-il une philosophie chinoise? Un état de la question” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 27, 2005.
S. Eisenstadt, “The Axial conunundrum between transcendental visions and vicissitudes of their institutionalizations: constructive and destructive possibilities” Analyse Social, vol. XLVI (199), 2011: 201-217.
S. Eisenstadt, “The Axial Age. The emergence of transcendental visions and the rise of clerics” European Journal of Sociology, 23, 1982: 294-314.
E. Fackenheim, “A Treatise on Love by Ibn Sina” Medieval Studies 7, 1945: 208-228.
M.-L. Von Franz, Aurora Consurgens Bollingen Series, New York 1966.
J. Goody, Renaissances: The One or the Many? Cambridge University Press 2010.
J. Le Goff, La civilisation de l’Occident médiéval Arthaud, Paris 1964.
R. Levitas, The Concept of Utopia Philip Allan, Hemel Hempstead 1990.
R. Levitas, “The Imaginary Reconstruction of Society” in Utopia Method Vision, Peter Lang, Bern 2009: 47-68.
M. Liverani, Antico Oriente. Storia, Società, Economia Laterza, Roma-Bari 1985.
F. Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant Brill, Leiden 2007.
D. Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction Yale University Press 1979.
L. Tower-Sargent, “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited” Utopian Studies, 5.1, 1994:1-37.
L. Tower-Sargent, Utopianism. A Very Short Introduction Cambridge University Press 2010.
G. Zaganelli, “L’Utopia medievale. Note su paradisi e discorsi” in Per una definizione dell’utopia. Metodologie e discipline a confronto Ravenna, Longo 1992.
Asiatica 