View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Duquesne University: Digital Commons Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Summer 8-11-2018 The hiP losophical Heritage of Desire for God in Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān Bethany Somma Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Part of the History of Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Somma, B. (2018). The hiP losophical Heritage of Desire for God in Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1468 This One-year Embargo is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE PHILOSOPHIAL HERITAGE OF DESIRE FOR GOD IN IBN ṬUFAYL’S ḤAYY IBN YAQẒĀN A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and the Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Bethany Somma August 2018 Copyright by Bethany Somma 2018 1 THE PHILOSOPHIAL HERITAGE OF DESIRE FOR GOD IN IBN ṬUFAYL’S ḤAYY IBN YAQẒĀN By Bethany Somma Approved July 2, 2018 ___________________________ ____________________________ Dr. L. Michael Harrington Dr. Peter Adamson Associate Professor of Philosophy Professor of Late Antique and Arabic (Committee Chair) Philosophy, LMU Munich (Committee Co-chair) ____________________________ ____________________________ Dr. Thérèse Bonin Dr. Christof Rapp Associate Professor of Philosophy Professor of Ancient Philosophy (Committee Member) LMU Munich (Committee Member) ____________________________ ____________________________ Dr. James Swindal Dr. Ronald Polansky Dean, McAnulty College and Graduate Chair, Philosophy Department School of Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy Professor of Philosophy iii ABSTRACT THE PHILOSOPHIAL HERITAGE OF DESIRE FOR GOD IN IBN ṬUFAYL’S ḤAYY IBN YAQẒĀN By Bethany Somma August 2018 Dissertation supervised by Michael Harrington and Peter Adamson This dissertation investigates the role of desire in Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān through a philosophical investigation of desire from Plotinus to Ibn Ṭufayl. I examine Plotinus’s account of desire for the Good, and I argue that this desire forms the basis of his account of substance, such that this desire is non-rational, permanent, fundamental to all hypostases. I also examine the Arabic translations of Plotinus’s text, arguing that the role of desire for God is severely diminished. Indeed, the desire for God we find in these texts is rational and non-permanent—a modified version of the Plotinian model. As I consider Ibn Bāǧǧa’s corpus, I argue that on his account desire is decidedly rational and non-permanent. However, he uses a model I term the power-among-powers model, which he inherits and develops from al-Fārābī and the translations of Aristotle. These previous examinations form the backdrop for my main concern: my argument that desire is fundamental to Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān. I contend that Ibn Ṭufayl intends to intervene iv politically by inciting desire for the path toward Truth in his readers. I then argue that his account of desire is a blend of Avicenna’s and al-Ġazālī’s accounts, a combination of the Plotinian and power-among-powers models. On this account, desire for God is non-rational and permanent. Finally, I conclude that Ibn Ṭufayl presents a model for political intervention that places desire at the center of philosophical education and practice and that includes all members of society and the natural world. v For Noelle, always vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe much gratitude to many people for their various forms of assistance in writing this dissertation. As this dissertation has been completed under the auspices of a cotutelle, I have been fortunate enough to have benefitted from the guidance of two universities and two excellent departments. Foremost, I would like to thank my two directors. I want to express my most sincere gratitude to Peter Adamson, my most recent mentor and director, to whom I owe a lifetime of thanks. I would also like to thank most sincerely Michael Harrington, for his support and direction both throughout my time writing and before I left for Germany. I spent four years at the Philosophy Department at Duquesne University, where I was trained not only as a thinker but as a professional in the field of philosophy. Among my professors I want to thank in particular Ron Polansky, Patrick Lee Miller, Thérèse Bonin, and Kelly Arenson. I was lucky to be surrounded by some of the best colleagues one could ask for in graduate school, and among them I would like to thank in particular Kelsey Ward and Martin Krahn for their unwavering support and friendship across the world and at all hours of the night. I moved to the Munich School of Ancient Philosophy in 2015, where I was blessed with many new and outstanding colleagues in an exciting and challenging environment. I have learned much and from many people at MUSAΦ, and I am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to study and write here. I want in particular to express my gratitude to Christof Rapp, Andreas Lammer, Matteo de Giovanni, and Rotraud Hansberger for their support and advice, and to thank Margaret Wardhaugh, Jonathan Greig, and Máté Herner for their support and friendship. And finally, I would like to thank my family: my siblings Charity and Dan for putting up with my nonsense and for always holding me up and pushing me forward, even when I didn’t want vii to go; my parents for supporting me in this strange endeavor; and above all, to my wonderful boys, my husband Tom and my dog Aias, without whom I would simply not be here. viii CONTENTS Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 1. Plotinus and the Formless Nature of the Desire for the One 11 2. The Plotiniana Arabica and the Enformation of Desire 66 3. Ibn Bāǧǧa and the Desire for Conceptualization 120 4. Ibn Ṭufayl’s Desire for Desire: Reading Ḥayy 176 5. Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān and the Desire for the Infinite 204 6. Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ethical Theory: Ḥayy as Instrument 256 Conclusion 281 Bibliography 285 ix Introduction The aim of this investigation is to identify and expound the role of desire for God in Ibn Ṭufayl’s Ḥayy Ibn Yaqẓān. One might call this desire one for Truth, the Real, the Good, or, in the Avicennian nomenclature taken over by Ibn Ṭufayl, the Necessary Existent. It might seem that such a specific topic in such a short text could not possibly warrant an entire dissertation, particularly since in general desire has not been regarded an especially important concept in the text. The story of young Ḥayy’s gradual ascent to ultimate truth has generally been read as a manifesto for the autodidactic potential latent in human beings’ rational nature, a reading solidified in the text’s European reception from Edward Pocock’s 1671 Latin translation, which carries the subtitle Philosophus Autodidactus. The undeniable yet somewhat “mystical,” or affective, or, in general, non-rational elements of the text are usually classified as non-philosophical in some way: Sufi, religious, literary. As Akhtar has rightly observed, it is the general trend in scholarship on this text to interpret “the mystical elements of the story [as constituting] a kind of veil over the story’s true philosophical or ‘rationalist’ intentions.”1 That Ibn Ṭufayl found rational inquiry valuable is not in itself a problematic claim. But the commitment to the position that this rational aspect was itself the primary aim of the text stands widely unquestioned, perhaps because of general assumptions either about what philosophy is, or about what could be philosophically valuable. Close attention to Ibn Ṭufayl’s claims in his prologue and epilogue are in tension with such readings, since in both he claims that he writes his text in the hope that he might address a political reality by inciting desire in his readers. Thus, it is a desideratum for our scholarly understanding of the text to understand and to account for the meaning and role of this claim. 1 Ali Humayun Akhtar, Philosophers, Sufis, and Caliphs: Politics and Authority from Cordoba to Cairo and Baghdad (Cambridge, 2018), 215. 1 Emphasis on the concept of desire need not overturn the work that has been done on the rational aspects of Ibn Ṭufayl’s thought, nor am I suggesting that this sort of scholarship on Ḥayy has altogether failed. Rather, it seems to me that our understanding of the text is simply incomplete, and I want to argue that consideration and incorporation of the role of desire might bind together loose ends of our interpretative tapestry. In addition to examining the role of desire as found in the text, a further step to explicate Ibn Ṭufayl’s understanding of desire is consideration of the philosophical models for understanding desire that were available to Ibn Ṭufayl. In addition to providing conceptual parallels, reflection on earlier available models provides the following benefits. First, it allows for the formation of a heuristic method for uncovering desire and its function within the text. Second, it provides a glimpse of different articulations of desire’s placement within philosophical systems. Third, it deepens our understanding of what models for understanding desire Ibn Ṭufayl had at his disposable and might have incorporated into his own account. This approach provided the basis for the investigation found in the following pages, which contain consideration of the notion of desire in general, as well as in its particular historical articulations that provide the possibilities for talking about desire available to Ibn Ṭufayl.