Towards a Phenomenological Approach to the Arabic Philosophical Language: Valuable Insights from Pierre Hadot and Eric Voegelin

The Maghreb Review, Vol. 43, 2, 2018 © The Maghreb Review 2018 This publication is printed on FSC Mix paper from responsible sources TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE ARABIC PHILOSOPHICAL LANGUAGE: VALUABLE INSIGHTS FROM PIERRE HADOT AND ERIC VOEGELIN MICHAEL NAFI* In his recently published textbook on Philosophy in the Islamic World1 , at the beginning of a chapter on Ibn Rushd, Peter Adamson, the distinguished historian of philosophy, recounts an interesting personal anecdote and opposes two approaches to reading ancient philosophical texts. Adamson tells us that as a young scholar he was given the advice to argue that one studies ancient philosophy in order to mine it “to discover arguments and positions that could speak to today’s concerns”. However, he adds that he “never really believed that this is the only, or even the best rationale for studying history of philosophy”. Against the advice he received, Peter Adamson tells us that he finds it fascinating that long-dead philosophers assumed certain things to be obviously true which now seem obviously false, and they built elaborate systems on these exotic foundations2 . To be useful, historical ideas do not always need to fit neatly into our ways of thinking. They can shake us out of those ways of thinking, helping us to see that our own assumptions are a product of a specific time and place. How and why does one read ancient philosophical texts? These are essential questions any scholar in this field must confront, one way or another, consciously or implicitly through specific methodological choices. On first analysis, the two approaches described by Adamson might appear as diametrically-opposed, and in a sense they are. However, they also do converge on a significant ground: they both focus on arguments, positions and systems of thought contained in these texts. One might add that any cursory survey of the current scholarship on Islamic Philosophy would show that such a focus is in fact the norm. Naturally, it is impossible to study philosophy in these sources without considering the arguments and positions developed in them. However, the accounts that are given of these positions and arguments often seem to assume that the philosophical language that sustains them is readily intelligible to us, when it rarely is. These accounts are also based on a number of * John Abbott College, Montréal, Canada 1 Adamson, Peter. “Single Minded – Averroes on The Intellect”, Philosophy in the Islamic World: A History of Philosophy without Any Gaps, p. 186, Volume 3. 1st edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 2 My emphasis on these terms. 118 MICHAEL NAFI assumptions regarding the philosophical language of long-dead philosophers, especially those who wrote in Arabic3 . In this paper, I would like to examine some of these assumptions. A central observation for the purposes of this paper might lead us to a set of inter-related questions inspired by the the last quote: how is such shaking up to occur if the assumptions of long-dead philosophers are deemed “as obviously false” to begin with? Granted, it is a problem to draw ideas out of a historical context to make them fit anachronistically into our ways of thinking, to the point where their originality might completely dissolve under the weight of the present. However, how are our ways to be shaken up if the only remedy we can offer against the pitfalls of anachronism is a radical form of historicism? Might such a shake up not have a better chance to occur if the contemporary reader were to adopt a reading ethos that is founded on the exact opposite stance? In other words, might ancient texts reveal more of their treasures if we were to not simply consider them as exotic for us, but rather force ourselves to remain open to the possibility that it is our own thoughts on the issues they tackled before us that might be odd or not obvious at all? In this paper, I would like to show that both Pierre Hadot (1922-2010) and Eric Voegelin (1901-1985) argued independently and differently for such a reading ethos regarding the thoughts of philosophers from a remote past. I would also like to suggest that their insights...

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