Читать книгу Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit - Bruce B. Lawrence - Страница 14

And that aspiration brings to the fore the second major impetus for this manifesto: what makes an Islamicate cosmopolitan spirit (rather than visible form or invisible substance) is fuzzy logic. Fuzzy logic as a category is itself recent. Devised little more than half a century ago by an Azeri scientist who had migrated to the United States, it has now branched into a broader linguistic strategy that helps to define cosmopolitan tensions generally and Islamicate cosmopolitan in particular. Fuzzy logic is often heralded as self-critical, even ironic, so it is a further, fitting irony that fuzzy logic becomes the pillar of Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit since the founder of fuzzy logic, Lotfi Zadeh, is himself an Islamicate cosmopolitan, even though he himself has yet to emerge in the larger universe of constructive rethinking of the key terms he helped to formulate. As early as a 1965 article he had introduced fuzzy sets but it was the subsequent 1975 article that makes the case for their implementation in cosmopolitan reflection. His language is dense but its appeal evocative. “The concept of a linguistic variable,” argues Lotfi Zadeh, “provides a means of approximate characterization of phenomena which are too complex or too ill-defined to be amenable to description in conventional quantitative terms. In particular, treating ZFuth as a linguistic variable with values such as true, very true, completely true, not very true, untrue, etc., leads to what is called fuzzy logic. By providing a basis for approximate reasoning, that is, a mode of reasoning which is not exact nor very inexact, such logic may offer a more realistic framework for human reasoning than the traditional two-valued logic.”¹⁹

Of course, ZFuth is itself a nonsensical term introduced to make the point that conventional language, like conventional numbers (“conventional quantitative terms”), has to be approached with a new kind of reasoning beyond Aristotelian bivalent logic (“traditional two-valued logic”).

If fuzzy sets are the exemplars of fuzzy logic, that is “collections of information whose boundaries were vague or imprecise,”²⁰ then all cosmopolitan theories are sets of information at once discrete in their common subject yet unbounded in their actual formation and historical emergence. They are always marked by their “spirit,” that is, by a commitment to explore the limits of what is possible, so that “spirit” does not merely connote the life force, but also the essential human trait manifest as consciousness, discernment, and, above all, moral motivation—to do not just what is right but what is best, not just for oneself but for all others, a combination of agonism and altruism.

The benefit of the fuzzy logic approach to Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit is what some theorists have labeled heterology: the other as a foundational principle of the self.²¹ In expanding Islamic to Islamicate, one must consider not just the Other, but multiple others, those others that preceded and informed Islam. One must revisit and revalue all the resources on which Muslim actors—from artists to traders to rulers to philosophers—drew in rethinking the nature of Islamic pursuits through the lens of those others. The very boundaries of Islamicate civilization, as also Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit, become fungible, extending back to 500 ce, in considering Byzantine and Sasanian but also Ethiopian antecedents.²² And the further teleological reach of Islamicate civilization, and so its cosmopolitan ethos, is not just the 18th century. Instead of ending with the advent of the Great Western Transmutation,²³ it lingers, projecting a flash point, or set of points across Africa and Asia, spaces that can still summon what one scholar calls islands of life/light in the midst of what seems to be a binary world of North/South replacing East/West.²⁴

And so, to answer my colleague from the University of Exeter, whose query spurred me to clarify my intent, let me close with a brief two-part summary of why I have pursued the Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit challenge and am now writing this manifesto.

First are the new forays and the several arguments for rethinking world history outside the West while also not ignoring the West. Let us label that tangent: the demands of world history.

Coupled with the demands of world history is the need for revisionist vocabulary and also attention to the rules of fuzzy logic. My central premise: not to accept binary divisions but to look for in-between spaces, alternative players, and dimly lit options that herald a new methodology. Let us call that methodology: the rules of fuzzy logic.

Let me pause and make a detour at the outset. For those to whom “fuzzy logic” is itself too fuzzy, there is an alternative: barzakh logic. Neither dualistic nor binary but triadic, barzakh logic both affirms and denies, while neither affirming nor denying. I call it barzakh logic because, like fuzzy logic, it requires its practitioners to be grounded in science, like Wittgenstein, a mathematician–engineer turned linguistic philosopher. To see the limits of science one must first know its protocols. A theorist does not eliminate science but rather tries to recover the ground preceding and undergirding all true science, as did Bacon but also Pascal and later Polanyi and Peirce. Barzakh logic, like fuzzy logic, does not destroy or deny reason, but instead probes its frontiers, which are internal and sentient as much as external and cognitive.

Barzakh itself is a Persian word found in the Qur’an (Q 23:99–100, Q 25:53, and Q 55:19–20). At its simplest, the barzakh evokes the division between this life and the next, between our present life in this world and a future life beyond knowing, but barzakh also refers to the divide between salt and fresh water, found in some oceans and rivers. And so barzakh is at once barrier and bridge. Like fuzzy logic, it moves beyond the binary dualism, either/or, but unlike fuzzy logic, it confirms a dyad, both/and as well as neither/nor. Barzakh might be defined as interactive, uninterrupted connection, linking two things—whether two cosmic realms or two bodies of water or two key terms—without reducing or diluting either. Nor can the barzakh itself be reduced: it cannot be triangulated to produce yet another form of abstractionism. If barzakh logic or its companion, fuzzy logic, is to apply, it requires constant vigilance against the reflex to rely on binary categories and the ontology they both presume and promote.²⁵

And so, we begin with these twin exigencies, at once declarations and guideposts, mandates and shibboleths, for all that follows: (a) world history must be revised, and (b) the rules of fuzzy or barzakh logic must apply. Together, a world history revised in tandem with fuzzy or barzakh logic forms the basis for an enduring Islamicate Cosmopolitan Spirit.