Читать книгу Zwischen Orient und Europa - Группа авторов - Страница 7

Chiara Adorisio

Ce qu’il (l’homme) doit surtout chercher a connaître c’est lui même,

afin d’arriver par là à connaître les autres choses qui ne sont pas lui même […]

(Salomon Ibn Gabirol, The Source of Life, Book 1, transl. in french by Salomon Munk)

In a recent study in which she examines the history of the reception of medieval philosophy in the modern era, Catherine König-Pralong observes that the emergence of the idea of a common European philosophical culture between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries engendered the view of Arabic and Jewish medieval philosophy as the ‘other’ – i.e., as a foreign element external to this European philosophical tradition.1 This idea can be better grasped in terms of the eighteenth and nineteenth-century concept of the history of philosophy as a history of the genesis and development of modern reason. The rational, and therefore universalistic, component of modern European culture was identified with philosophical reason, whose birthplace was ancient Greece. As König-Pralong writes: “There is no philosophy other than Greek philosophy, [and philosophy belongs to Europe]. In the nineteenth century, this conception imposes itself on the imagination of the European nations. In the twentieth century, it is still an unquestioned premise of philosophical historiography.”2

This view, which had been adopted already before Hegel – by Herder, who had acknowledged the role of the Arabs in the development of European science and culture while at the same time denying the existence of an original Arabic philosophical tradition – was first challenged at the beginning of the nineteenth century by the German-Jewish scholars of the Science of Judaism who had engaged in the rediscovery and comparative study of the Arabic language manuscripts containing the works of the most important Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophers.

Among this group of scholars, the most outstanding was Salomon Munk, a German Jewish Arabist and historian of philosophy, who emigrated from Germany to Paris in 1828 and who, exactly two decades later, published the first complete edition and french translation of Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed, in addition to other pioneering studies on medieval Arabic and Jewish philosophy. In the following article I will examine Munk’s critique to the German Orientalists, on the one hand, and historians of philosophy, on the other, in order to show to what extent Munk’s work was seminal for the recognition of the existence and importance of Arabic and Jewish medieval philosophy. German historians of philosophy, such as Heinrich Ritter, who were not able to recognize the importance and originality of Islamic and Jewish medieval philosophy and their influence on Christian thought, changed their mind, and acknowledged the existence of a whole new field of studies.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Paris was the capital of Arabic and Oriental Studies. German Orientalists in particular flocked to study with renowned scholars like Sylvestre de Sacy, whom they saw as having emancipated philology from theology. The German scholars brought with them their tradition of Altertumswissenschaft and the fruits of their research at their respective theological faculties in Germany or at the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, founded in Leipzig in 1845. They published their studies in French academic journals: the Journal Asiatique, for example. In this journals Salomon Munk published also several of his own studies, thereby initiating a debate with prominent German Orientalists and historians of philosophy such as the German Orientalist and philologist Franz August Schmölders [and the French historian and Orientalist Amable Jourdain, whose 1843 work, Recherches critiques sur l’âge et l’origine des traductions latines d’Aristote, was considered seminal for the study of the Latin translations of Aristotle]. Munk’s critique of Schmölders – which appears in his discussions of the Islamic philosophical currents in the preface to his Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe3 and in the first chapter of his essay on Salomon Ibn Gabirol4, deserves special attention. Schmölders, a student of Silvestre de Sacy and later professor in Breslau, known for his editions of Al-Farabi and Avicenna, had provoked Munk’s indignation with statements he made in an essay on the schools of Arabic philosophy, which Munk quotes as proof of his ignorance of the philosophical doctrines of these thinkers. Schmölders maintained that Arabic philosophers were devoid of originality – Arabic philosophy being, in his view, merely a repetition of Aristotle’s philosophy. Munk, in response, deplored what he saw as Schmölders’s ignorance of the very sources on which he had based his “exaggerated” judgments:

La vérité est que M. Schmölders n’a point abordé la lecture des principeaux philosophes arabes, dont les écrits originaux sont excessivement rares, mais dont nous possédons des versions Hébraïques très fidèles. Quant à Ibn-Roschd, cet nom même lui est peu familier, et il écrit constamment Abou-Roschd. Par ce qu’il dit sur le Téhâfot, ou la Desctruction des philosophes, d’Al-Gazali, on reconnait qu’il n’a jamais vu cet ouvrage, comme nous le montrerons encore plus loin. Il n’a pas toujours jugé à propos de nous faire connaître les autorités sur lesquelles il base ses assertions et ses raisonnements, et par là il n’inspire pas toujours la confiance nécessaire.5

In criticizing Schmölders, Munk sided with one of Schmölders own former rivals, the historian of philosophy Heinrich Ritter. The debate between Ritter and Schmölders reflected a more general clash between two opposing camps of nineteenth-century German Oriental scholarship: that of the historians of philosophy, who professed a relative interest in Islamic and Jewish philosophy (especially the Arabic Aristotelian tradition) on the one hand, and that of the Orientalists, who refused to recognize the significance of the Islamic (not to mention the Jewish) philosophical tradition, on the other. Ritter, the author of a twelve-volume History of Philosophy, was aware of his insufficient knowledge of Arabic and Jewish sources, and was thus – as a disciple of Schleiermacher rather than of Hegel – relatively open to Munk’s criticism. Therefore the relationship between Munk and Ritter, as it emerges from Munk’s critique of Ritter’s History of Philosophy, constitutes a central chapter in the history of the nineteenth-century debate between German Orientalists and German-Jewish scholars.

The polemic between Schmölders, Munk and Ritter on Islamic philosophy took place in the context of a broader debate surrounding Schmölders’s theory of cultures – a debate in which Victor Cousin and Ernest Renan were also involved. Schmölders’s thesis regarding the lack of originality of Islamic philosophy and its role as a mere custodian of knowledge that had been “temporarily deposited” with the Arabs had its roots in the notion, common at the time, of the inferiority of Semitic culture with respect to that of the Indo-European or Aryan race, which Schmölders identified with the speakers of the ancient Greek and Indic languages.6

In Ritter, a prominent representative of the German historical school associated with Ranke and Schleiermacher, Munk saw a fellow adversary of Hegel potentially disposed to accept (even if only in part) his vision of Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and a potentially in fighting Schmölders’s theories. In fact, in 1843, a year after the publication of the Schmölders’s controversial book on the History of Philosophy among the Arabs, Ritter, instructed by Munk, would have publicly challenged the latter’s thesis before the Royal Society of Sciences in Göttingen.

Significantly, it was from Munk’s work and from their debate over the history of philosophy that Ritter drew inspiration for his response to Schmölders. The beginning of the debate between Munk and Ritter was sparked by the extensive review of Ritter’s History of Philosophy Munk published in the French (political, scientific and literary) daily Le Temps in 1837 – a decade after speaking out against Hegel’s position on Jewish and Islamic philosophy as a student in Berlin. Munk challenged Ritter to reconsider his approach to the history of philosophy and avoid forcing it into Hegelian categories, eventually convincing him to partially revise his work. Munk’s critique is essentially a reflection on the notion that the historian of philosophy – though as a philosopher he may value the progress of philosophy in his own epoch – should avoid forcing the results of his research into external philosophical categories. This reflected his own positivist approach, which held that if the historian of philosophy is as familiar with the philosophy of his own time as he is with that of past epochs (that is, if he acquires objective scientific knowledge of his own epoch as well), he will be able to incorporate his point of view into his historico-philosophical analysis without the risk of his argument becoming external or subjective.

In the the opening sentence of the review, which confronts the reader with an essential question: “What is the history of philosophy?” Munk claims that in order to answer this question, it is first necessary to define the object of the history of philosophy: philosophy itself. Munk admits that it is not so much an objective answer he is looking for, but rather a clear definition that may give an exact idea of the philosophical science to those who, as yet, have none. Yet precisely herein lies the difficulty; for the day such a definition can be given, the human spirit will have, if not completed its work, then at least found a solid base on which to build its oeuvre and to achieve an aim it believes to have grasped today, but which will elude it tomorrow; and philosophy will have attained a rank among the exact sciences which, at present, it is permissible to contest.7

According to Munk, it is precisely because no clear definition of philosophy exists that the task of deciding what pertains to the domain of philosophy falls to the historian of philosophy. Although Ritter did claim philosophy was a science, he stopped short of offering a clear definition of that science, outlining it only vaguely – in what Munk called a “negative way” – by distinguishing it from various heterogeneous elements, such as religion or poetry.

Munk found that Ritter’s work, although apparently impartial and critical, actually reflected a Hegelian model in which the history of philosophy is understood as a progress of philosophical systems toward a final goal – the Hegelian system itself. In approaching the history of philosophy in this way, Ritter superimposed – as Hegel had – models constructed a priori on the critical study of history, at the cost of distorting the facts. The danger, Munk warned, is that the author of a system “is only too often led to believe that he has found the definitive solution to the metaphysical problems” and, convinced that his results are the natural conclusion of the previous systems, mistakenly equates “the operations performed by his individual reason [with] those of the universal reason of humanity.” He writes:

L’auteur d’un système n’est que trop souvent porté à croire qu’il a trouvé la solution définitive des problèmes methaphysiques: il mesure sur son propre système la valeur de ceux qui l’ont précédé; il les considère tous comme aboutissant nécessairment là où il est arrivé, et il lui semble que les opérations de sa raison individuelle sont celles de la raison universelle de l’humanité. 8

The second part of Munk’s review deals with Ritter’s reconstruction of the genesis of Western thought, from a discussion of the first philosophers’ search for the principle of all that exists in the first volume of the work, to the second and third volumes, which examine what Ritter defined as ‘Socratic philosophy’ – the efforts of Socrates and his followers to elevate moral consciousness to the level of scientific certitude. According to Ritter, every philosophical school of the Socratic period based its ideas on the Socratic conceptions of knowledge and scientific method: he considers Plato and Aristotle followers and disciples of Socrates, Aristotle having “merely” given a more systematic form to Socratic ideas. Munk underscores the centrality of the idea of a progress of philosophical systems in Ritter’s reconstruction, while at the same time denying the existence of a linear process in philosophy:

Les disciples de Platon se contentèrent de présenter les doctrines de leur maîtres sous une forme plus systématique et il n’y à la aucun progrès à signaler. La réalisation de l’idéal socratique sera continuéè par la plus digne disciple de Platon, Aristote. 9

In his review, Munk discusses Ritter’s work, treating in particular the period up to and including Aristotelian philosophy. Yet the essence of Munk’s criticism, which he would systematically formulate only twenty years later in the introduction to an 1855 essay, “Des principaux philosophes arabes et de leurs doctrines,”10 pertained to Ritter’s reconstruction and evaluation of the role of medieval Islamic and Jewish thought. In this later essay, Munk takes issue with the fact that Ritter, in his volumes on medieval philosophy, hardly even mentions the medieval Jewish scholars and philosophers, including Maimonides, who had been of such importance to Christian thought, and hence to European thought in general. Having failed to recognize the existence of even a single original Jewish philosopher, Ritter had omitted Jewish philosophy from his history altogether.

Munk’s criticism extended to Ritter’s treatment of medieval Arabic philosophy as well. According to Munk, Ritter, who lacked access to the original works of the medieval Arab philosophers and Aristotelians, had based his analysis of their doctrines essentially on available Latin translations of their works and on modern scholarship. In addition, he had overlooked the valuable insights available to him in the works of the medieval Christian theologians, and as a result had failed to appreciate the subtle distinctions between the doctrines of the Arab philosophers. Munk underscores his point by noting that, in his discussion of the doctrine of the Kalam, Ritter would have done better to quote Maimonides’s Guide rather than a modern scholar like Schmölders – who, after having read two or three relatively recent studies, had claimed “to know more about the Arab philosophical schools than a twelfth-century philosopher immersed in a wealth of contemporary sources pertaining to the philosophical currents of his day.”11

Despite these critique, Munk recognized the value of Ritter’s efforts, describing his book as a work of rigor and originality testifying to its author’s thorough knowledge of Islamic and Arabic philosophy. Munk particularly appreciated Ritter’s rigorous re-examination of the sources provided in Jacob Brucker’s Historia critica philosophiae of 1742 – a milestone in the development of modern philosophical historiography which had made documents essential for the reconstruction of the history of philosophy available to scholars for the first time, paving the way for much subsequent research.12 In Munk’s view, Ritter was the first scholar to have conducted a thorough re-examination of Brucker’s sources, in an effort to discover new facts potentially valuable for the history of philosophy. By the time he composed the Mélanges, Munk had already examined a variety of Judeo-Arabic texts (including works of Al-Farabi, Al-Ghazali, Al-Kindi, Avicenna and Averroes), published several articles in the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques and devoted much time to the study of Maimonides’s Guide of the Perplexed – thereby acquiring greater knowledge of the reciprocal influences between Jewish medieval philosophers than any other scholar, German or French, of his time. With this authority, Munk once again challenged Ritter to rethink his dismissive attitude toward Jewish philosophy, in light of the fact that he had unknowingly “singled out a Jew as the most original thinker of the Arab period, one who shows us a side of Aristotelian teachings which emerges nowhere else with such clarity” – the thinker in question being, of course, the “enigmatic Avicebron,” or Salomon Ibn Gabirol.13

Although Ritter, who felt his insufficient knowledge of Arabic was compensated by his genuine interest in Arabic and Islamic philosophy,14 could admit this and other blunders in his interpretation of Avicenna, Ibn Bajja and Averroes, he was not yet prepared to recognize the importance and originality of Jewish medieval philosophy. Munk drew Ritter’s attention to the fact that Maimonides, and perhaps other Jewish philosophers as well, had been an essential source for Christian scholars in their study of medieval Aristotelian Arabic philosophical texts. Commenting on Ritter’s lack of regard for Maimonides, Munk noted that “one might well expect more from such a thorough and conscientious researcher. It appears to us that at least Maimonides, whose Guide for the Perplexed is available in Buxdorf’s Latin translation, should have deserved some attention.”15

Ritter responded, in his own review of Munk’s translation of Sa’adia Gaon’s Book of Beliefs and Opinions, as follows:

Herr Munk macht mir den Vorwurf, dass ich in meiner Geschichte der Philosophie die Werke der jüdischen Philosophen nicht genug berücksichtigt hätte. Wenn er dies besonderes auf Moses Maimonides bezieht, so will ich zugestehen, dass ich auf ihn etwas genauer hätte eingehen können, weiss aber doch kaum zu sagen, welche neuen Einsichten daraus hervorgegangen sein würden… Meine Meinung über die jüdischen Philosophie ging von der allgemeinen Betrachtung aus, dass die Juden in der Zerstreuung ihre literarische Bildung überall an die Literatur der Völker, unter welchen sie lebten, angeschlossen haben, was sehr natürlich ist.16

In addition to rectifying Ritter’s errors and deepening the insights contained in his text, Munk’s essays were also meant to draw the attention of the German Orientalists to the importance and originality of Arabic philosophy which, as Munk had written in his entry in Adolphe Franck’s Dictionary of Philosophy, had passed through “more or less all the phases in which [philosophy] had appeared in the Christian world,” including “dogmatism, skepticism, the theory of emanation” and even “doctrines analogous to Spinozism and modern pantheism”:

En général, on peut dire que la philosophie chez les Arabes, loin de se borner au péripatetisme pur, a traversé à peu près toutes les phases dans lesquelles elle s’est montrée dans le monde chrétien. Nous y retrouvons le dogmatisme, le scepticisme, la théorie de l’émanation et même quelquefois des doctrines analogues au spinozisme et au panthéisme moderne. 17

This aspect of Munk’s work can be better appreciated when seen in the context of the collaboration that existed between German and Jewish scholars of Islamic and Jewish Studies around 1845 – a phenomenon described by Ismar Schorsch in his essay on the intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in nineteenth-century Germany. According to Schorsch, this collaboration was largely the result of the efforts of Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer, Germany’s most prominent Arabist and founder of the Deutschen-Morgenländischen-Gesellschaft, who was also a friend and admirer of Munk’s.18 Evidence of the high regard in which Fleischer held Munk is provided by a letter of 1857 in which Munk expresses his gratitude for his friend’s warm response to the first volume of his translation of the Guide:

Your heartfelt words stirred me deeply … If anything is able to strengthen my resolve to persevere in my arduous efforts, it is the encouragement offered by men like you. [Moreover], your favorable opinion of my work is of supreme importance to me. Given how much stock I put in your judgment, I have reason to hope that my edition and translation of the Guide will not be unworthy of the attention of Orientalists, theologians and philosophers.19

Another piece of evidence quoted by Schorsch are letters by Fleischer in which the latter, impressed by “Munk’s facility with Arabic and familiarity with Jewish philosophy” repeatedly mentions Munk to his friend, the philologist and Orientalist Konrad Dietrich Hassler.20

Munk’s work, which combined the techniques of Protestant biblical criticism with a deep knowledge of Hebrew and Arabic, attempted to challenge and undermine the hegemony of Christian theology vis-à-vis its position on Judaism, and to rewrite the history of the West from a distinctly Jewish perspective. As the debate with Ritter shows, Munk chose the study of the reciprocal relationship between Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought as the symbolic battleground for his debate with Christian scholars.

The conclusion of Munk’s review was that Ritter’s work, even when bolstered with the details on the Islamic authors furnished by Munk’s essays, was insufficient: sooner or later, a comprehensive history of Arabic philosophy would have to be written. At the same time, Munk took Ritter’s answer as a challenge to write his own history of Jewish philosophy, the Esquisse historique de la philosophie chez les Juifs, which he published two years later.

Despite a certain resentment, Ritter was willing to concede his mistake and give Munk credit for having proven to him the importance of Jewish philosophers in the philosophical development of the Middle Ages, placing them on equal footing with their Muslim and Christian contemporaries. In the second edition of his history, Ritter, using Munk’s articles as sources, added numerous important details on Al-Ghazali, Ibn Bajja and Averroes, as well as a new section on the history of medieval Jewish philosophy which relies principally on Munk’s edition of the Fons Vitae.

Ritter’s admission and recognition was an extraordinarily important achievement for Munk – a success that can be seen, in a more general sense, as a victory for the Science of Judaism as a whole. In discussing Munk’s central role in the growing influence of the movement on Christian scholarship, Leopold Löw emphasized:

Munk war einer der ersten jüdischen Adepten der arabischen Sprache und Literatur, deren Studium von den jüdischen Gelehrten gänzlich vernachlässigt worden war, wiewohl es seit dem siebzehnten Jahrhundert nicht an Anregung dazu fehlte. Da aber die Sprache der christlichen Orientalisten die von den allerwenigsten jüdischen Gelehrten verstandene lateinische war, so ging der Aufschwung, den die arabischen und syrischen Studien seit dem siebzehnten Jahrhundert allmählich nahmen, an den jüdischen Schulen ganz spurlos vorüber. Erst im dritten Jahrzehnt unseres Jahrhunderts stellen sich einige jüdische Jünglinge unter die Fahne eines umfassenden semitischen Sprachstudiums. Unter diesen befand sich Salomon Munk. 21

Although Munk, as we learn from his Esquisse historique, inherited this conception, which brought him to emphasize the role of the medieval Jewish philosophers as mediators of Greek thought to the West through the medium of Arabic and Islamic philosophy, he also challenged the predominant view of his time from a Jewish perspective, proposing a novel reconstruction of the general history of philosophy. Referring in particular to the medieval era – he argued for the existence of one philosophical tradition, written in (at least) three languages: Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, with Latin as a potential fourth language. Furthermore, Munk suggested that the efforts of thinkers like Maimonides to create a synthesis of philosophy and Judaism had also raised the possibility of an original Jewish philosophy in the Middle Ages. With this interpretation – which, one must note, was not devoid of clichés, including the view of the medieval Arab thinkers as mere mediators – Munk became an important voice in the debate on the role of the Arabs (and the Jews) in the transmission of Greek philosophy to European culture.

By raising awareness of the interconnectedness between Islamic and Jewish Studies Munk revolutionized the study of medieval Jewish and Arabic philosophy. Confronted with a history of philosophy articulated from a prevalently Christian perspective, Munk not only argued against the ideas of German and French Orientalists and historians, who used linguistic arguments to “prove” the inferiority or non-rationality of Semitic cultures, but challenged the very foundations – philosophical as well as anthropological – of this idea.22 In so doing, Munk rediscovered the complex process of the transmission of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy through the works of the medieval Arabic and Jewish philosophers – an entire world that had been practically off-limits for centuries.23

Munk’s achievements in this field, inspired by his universalistic interpretation of Judaism, were unique even compared to the significant contributions made by Munk’s fellow German-Jewish scholars to the critical study of Judaism in the nineteenth century.24 In addition to his achievements as a librarian, cataloguer and editor of Hebrew, Arabic and Judeo-Arabic texts,25 it was the widespread influence he exerted on the scholarship of his time – fostered and facilitated by the relatively open intellectual atmosphere in France – that distinguished Munk from his colleagues. Writing in French, Munk was in a position to capture the attention of (and engage in open discussion with) the leading French and German scholars of Oriental Studies, becoming a protagonist in the war of linguistic and philological competency that raged between Orientalists and historians of philosophy in the mid-nineteenth century in the context of the philological and critical study of the Arabic commentaries of Aristotle.