Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century (review)

Tenso ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 72-75
Author(s):  
Peter T. Ricketts
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Self

Utopia’s Moorish Inspiration: Thomas More’s Reading of Ibn Ṭufayl

2018 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Regnier
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Latin Translation ◽  
Thomas More ◽  
Philosophical Novel ◽  
Ibn Tufayl

A promising but neglected precedent for Thomas More’s Utopia is to be found in Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ibn Ḥayy Yaqẓān. This twelfth-century Andalusian philosophical novel describing the self-education and enlightenment of a feral child on an island, while certainly a precedent for the European Bildungsroman, also arguably qualifies as a utopian text. It is possible that More had access to Pico de la Mirandola’s Latin translation of Ibn Ḥayy Yaqẓān. This study consists of a review of historical and philological evidence that More may have read Ibn Ḥayy Yaqẓān and a comparative reading of More’s and Ṭufayl’s two famous works. I argue that there are good reasons to see in Ibn Ḥayy Yaqẓān a source for More’s Utopia and that in certain respects we can read More’s Utopia as a response to Ṭufayl’s novel. L’Ibn Ḥayy Yaqẓān d’Ibn Ṭufayl consiste en un précédent incontournable mais négligé à l’Utopie de More. Ce récit philosophique andalou du douzième siècle décrivant l’auto-formation et l’éveil d’un enfant sauvage sur une île peut être considéré comme un texte utopique, bien qu’il soit certainement un précédent pour le Bildungsroman européen. Thomas More pourrait avoir lu l’Ibn Ḥayy Yaqẓān, puisqu’il a pu avoir accès à la traduction latine qu’en a fait Pic de la Miradolle. Cette étude examine les données historiques et philologiques permettant de poser que More a probablement lu cet ouvrage, et propose une lecture comparée de l’Ibn Ḥayy Yaqẓān et de l’Utopie de More. On y avance qu’il y a non seulement de bonnes raisons de considérer l’Ibn Ḥayy Yaqẓān d’Ibn Ṭufayl comme une source de l’Utopie de More, mais qu’il est aussi possible à certains égards de lire l’Utopie comme une réponse à l’Ibn Ḥayy Yaqẓān.

The Art itself is Nature

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Morton
Keyword(s):  
Human Activity ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Literary Production ◽  
Broad Category

The chapter outlines different models of nature in medieval Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy in order to show how the Rose plays them against each other to articulate its own model of the complex relationship between art and nature. For the Rose there is no getting at nature except by means of art, as suggested by the self-conscious artificiality of the figure of Nature, taken from the allegories of twelfth-century Neoplatonism. Art, a broad category that encompasses all human activity, is insufficient in describing nature’s truths and is potentially sophistic in its lies. However, questions of nature are always questions of art on whose help humans depend to understand and to represent to themselves a nature that can never be fully known. Finally, the model of reproductive nature is used to legitimate the reproduction of texts and the continuation of arts that is literary production.

Honoring the Form: Zen Moves in Charles Johnson’s Oxherding Tale

2010 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 59-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Collins
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
The Self ◽  
Slave Narrative ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Eastern Philosophy ◽  
Charles Johnson ◽  
Graphic Narrative ◽  
Picaresque Novel ◽  
The World

AbstractIn Being and Race Charles Johnson compares a writer working with traditional forms to a martial artist who “honors the form” of his predecessors. In his 1982 novel Oxherding Tale Johnson honors the form of a number of traditional fictional genres, including the slave narrative, the picaresque novel, the philosophical novel of ideas, and Zen texts such as koans, sutras, and the twelfth-century graphic narrative, the “Oxherding Pictures.” Calling his novel a “slave narrative that serves as the vehicle for exploring Eastern philosophy,” Johnson alludes to Hindu, Taoist and Buddhist texts, as well as to Western literary and philosophical works, to dissolve the dualistic thinking at the heart of what he calls “the samsara of racial politics.” To be free of the illusory nature of “ontological dualism,” however, one must journey through stages of increasing awareness, admirably depicted in the ten illustrations of the “Oxherding Pictures.” From seeking a self (ox) that one thinks one has lost, to glimpsing the self that is first elusive and finally illusory, the seeker comes to realize that all identities are constructed and therefore temporary, including such notions as “race” and “self.” Like some biracial Everyman, Johnson’s narrator may not complete the journey by the end of the novel but he discovers much about the insubstantiality and inter-connectedness of himself in the world along the way.

Ibn Ṭufayl’s (d. 1185)

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Taneli Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
Arabic Philosophy ◽  
Great Chain Of Being ◽  
Ibn Tufayl ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Classical Arabic ◽  
The Brain

Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān is one of the most abidingly popular works in all of Arabic literature. At once inviting and expansive, accessible and surprisingly deep, the book offers an excellent introduction to the themes of classical Arabic philosophy. What often goes unnoticed is how deliberately Ibn Ṭufayl spins his story of Ḥayy, the self-taught philosopher who grows up alone on an equatorial island. Ḥayy in fact takes the reader on a tour of the Arabic Aristotelian curriculum, with ethical and political themes following upon a comprehensive exploration of the great chain of being. Ḥayy furthermore contributes to numerous sixth-/twelfth-century debates, ranging from the role that the heart and the brain play in the organism’s life, through the weighting of immanent and transcendent factors in the process of coming-to-be, to the relationship of philosophy to revealed religion.

How could Paul remember his rapture?

2018 ◽  
pp. 59-80
Author(s):  
Ayelet Even-Ezra
Keyword(s):  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
The Other ◽  
The One

Traditionally, Paul was thought to have seen God without any mediating images. Yet, if no images had been involved, no images could have remained following his rapture, and therefore, there would have been no imprint in his mind by which he could have recalled and shared with the audience what he had seen. The chapter describes the various solutions that were suggested to explain what possible residues enabled this memory, among them, that all Paul had when he returned from ecstasy were mere words and definitions; or, in opposition, that he still possessed part of the light in which he had been illuminated, thus arguing for a continuity between the experiencing subject and later processing. These opposing solutions are then examined considering the perception of transformation and the continuity of the self they imply; then in the context of the role of experience and experiment on the one hand, and words on the other, in the medieval university. Theologians of the time, it is argued, attempted to define the relation between experience and words in their own profession, drawing inspiration from both the image of science in Aristotle’s Analytics and Physics and twelfth-century mysticism.

Why was Paul ignorant of his own state, and how do various modes of cognizing God differ?

2018 ◽  
pp. 23-58
Author(s):  
Ayelet Even-Ezra
Keyword(s):  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
The Self ◽  
Beatific Vision

The chapter revolves around two problems that intrigued medieval masters the most concerning Paul's rapture: how to define his mode of cognition during rapture, while he himself confessed not to have known whether his soul was in or out of his body, and how does his mode of knowing God then differ from others. It examines the attempts of our group of theologians to classify the ecstatic mode of vision, while being aware of the tension between the rational theologian-observer and the experiencing subject. It discusses Augustine’s position as to Paul's self-ignorance, his threefold division of visions into corporeal, imaginative, and intellectual, then twelfth-century further developments, in which Paul's vision was framed between earthly faith and the heavenly, beatific vision. It then shows that in the early-thirteenth century, more cognitions joined the taxonomic parade: the visions of prophets, contemplators, Christ, Moses, scriptural exegetes, angels, and even God's knowledge of himself. This intense preoccupation with taxonomy, together with the perception of the self as both experiencing and observing, it is argued, served this community of theologians to map the field in which they operate and negotiate their position in it.

In and Out, Then and Now

2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 378-403
Author(s):  
Franz-Josef Arlinghaus
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Twelfth Century ◽  
Sociological Theory ◽  
The Self ◽  
Single Person ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
The One ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Ways Of Being

This article explores how the relationship of a single person and society is depicted in the twelfth century and the fifteenth/sixteenth centuries in French and German autobiographical writings. Shifting away from looking at the ‘group–single person’ relationship, which is so prominent in the debate on medieval individuality, and turning to ‘society’, the article suggests that this wider scope can offer new ways of identifying parallels and differences between modern and pre-modern concepts of the self. Drawing on sociological theory (Simmel, Luhmann) on conceptualising the self, the article argues that, with respect to self-esteem, self-consciousness and (if at all) ‘autonomy’ there are more similarities than differences between medieval and modern ways of being ‘individual’. Besides the similarities, the fundamental differences can be found in the overall perspectives and the general frameworks against which concepts of the self are developed. On the one hand, people conceptualise themselves as being part of, or rather, exponents of society. On the other hand, they describe themselves as being counterparts of, or rather, external to society. Whether this approach helps to yield a different view of how pre-modern autobiographical texts can be read, with side glances to the merchant Lucas Rem and the professor Johan vam Hirtze (both fifteenth century), the study concentrates on Guibert of Nogent, a twelfth-century abbot, and Katharina Schütz-Zell, a sixteenth-century widow of a Protestant priest.

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