گفتگوی نادیا مفتونی و پروفسور دیمیتری گوتاس دربارۀ کلیت فلسفه و عرفان اسلامی

به گزارش خبرنگار ردنا (ادیان نیوز)، پروفسور دیمیتری گوتاس نیز از شرق شناسان، اسلام شناسان و عرب شناسان معروف و شناخته شده زنده جهان غرب است که در دانشگاه معروف و معتبر ییل (Yale) در ایالات متحده آمریکا، کرسی استادی زبان و ادبیات عرب را داراست.

وی مطالعات و پژوهش های گسترده ای به ویژه در زمینه تاثیر ادبیات یونان باستان بر زبان و ادبیات عرب و فرهنگ اسلامی دارد و آثاری معتبر در این زمینه از او انتشار یافته است.

خبرنگار: خانم دکتر می خواهیم در این مصاحبه از نشست ها و گفتگوهای خود با پروفسور دیمیتری گوتاس برای ما صحبت کنید و از آنجا که این جلسات هنوز به فارسی ترجمه نشده، خوانندگان ما را درباره محتوای آن قدری بهره مند سازید. لطفا اول بگویید آیا پیدا کردن پروفسور گوتاس و وقت گرفتن از او دشوار بود؟!

مفتونی: هرگز! هنوز هم هر وقت ایده و برنامه ای داشته باشم و از وی تقاضا کنم، او با روی گشاده وقت می گذارد. نیکولاس رشر و همه بزرگان دیگری که گفتگو داشته ایم نیز با همین خوش اخلاقی و تواضع برای مباحثات علمی خود را در اختیار می گذارند. البته ما تا این لحظه دو گفتگو با جناب دیمیتری گوتاس داشته ایم که اگر یک جلسه تست را هم اضافه کنیم، که آن هم جلسه صمیمی و جالب و پرمطلبی بود، به عبارت دقیق تر باید بگویم که سه جلسه با ایشان داشته ایم.

خبرنگار: موضوع یا حوزه کلی گفتگوهای شما و گوتاس پیرامون چیست؟

مفتونی: محتوای بحث های ما عمدتا درباره کلیت فلسفه و عرفان اسلامی و روش شناسی مطالعات و تحقیقات آن بوده است. وقتی وارد مصادیق شدیم بیشتر درباره شیخ الرئیس بوعلی سینا و شیخ اشراق شهاب الدین سهروردی صحبت کردیم. البته مقداری هم درباره هنر و سینما، مشخصا آثاری که از زندگی ابن سینا در کشورهای مختلف ساخته شده تبادل نظر داشته ایم. خلاصه حرفهای زیادی زدیم که ورود به هر کدام مجالی وسیع را طلب می کند.

خبرنگار: خودتان فکر می کنید مهمترین بخش این جلسات یا مهمترین دستاوردش چیست؟

مفتونی: قبل از پاسخ به این سوال، فراموش نکنم که از زحمات همکارانم در دانشکده الهیات دانشگاه تهران در برگزاری این جلسات تشکر کنم. هم جلسات گوتاس، هم نشست های متعدد دیگری با بزرگان جهان مانند نیکولاس رشر و دادلی اندرو به همت معاونت پژوهشی دانشکده برگزار شده است.

دستاوردهای این برنامه ها واقعا زیاد است. یک دستاورد مهم این نشست ها، حضور و درخشش و قدرت نمایی علوم انسانی و اجتماعی ما در مهمترین مراکز علمی جهان است. در هر نشستی، برای آنها سخنی تازه و مطلب و اتفاقی تازه مطرح شده است. یعنی علاوه بر اینکه ما استفاده می کنیم و بهره مند می شویم، طرف های گفتگو نیز کشور ما را در علوم انسانی زنده و فعال می یابند.

خبرنگار: اگر امکان دارد درباره گوتاس مشخصا توضیح بدهید.

مفتونی: علاوه بر آن دستاورد کلی، آنچه در گفتگو با گوتاس کاربردی تر و مفیدتر به نظر می رسد، رویکرد ایشان در پژوهش است. این رویکرد می تواند برای محققان جوان عرصه علوم انسانی الهام بخش باشد. البته محققان پرشماری در کشور خودمان رویکرد مشابهی دارند. ولی بهره جستن از تجارب هر کدام از محققان، لطف خاص خودش را دارد و هر کدام، برای گروهی از مخاطبان جذابیت دارد.

گوتاس دقت در تحقیق و اجتناب از حرفهای بی سند و مدرک یا بی دلیل و برهان را مورد تاکید قرار می دهد و به قول خودش می گوید وقتی جوان بوده ابن سینا را عارف می شناسانده اند. در حالی که وی با دقت در متون ابن سینا چنین چیزی را نمی یابد و ابن سینا را کاملا عقلانی و البته تجربه گرا می یابد. در اینجا نمی خواهم به همه جزئیات حرفهایمان بپردازم. ولی این را می خواهم تاکید کنم که اگر دقت در تحقیق را مد نظر داشته باشیم، یعنی تلاش کنیم که سخن ما یا مستند باشد یا مستدل، کل بحسبه، با چنین مواجهه ای می توان در عرفان هم محقق بود. به دیگر سخن، گوتاس مشکلی با این ندارد که بوعلی سینا فرضا عارف باشد. وی با این مشکل دارد که افراد صرفا به شکل استحسانی و ذوقی نظر بدهند و نسبتی به بوعلی یا دیگران بدهند.

خبرنگار: اشاره داشتید که شیخ اشراق هم موضوع گفتگوهایتان بوده.

مفتونی: بله؛ شیخ اشراق را من به میان آوردم. یعنی دو حیثیت سینوی را در شیخ اشراق برجسته کردم: یکی سبک قصه پردازی و داستان گویی شیخ اشراق و دیگری مفاد و محتوای فلسفه سهروردی در داستان های رمزی. قبل از شیخ اشراق، بوعلی سیناست که داستان گویی می کند و حتی داستان رمزی می نویسد. وقتی شما به رمزهای شیخ اشراق توجه می کنید، می بینید در آنها از دیدگاه هایش در کتاب حکمه الاشراق حرف نمی زند، بلکه از آرای سینوی حرف می زند. مثلا قائل به پنج حس ظاهر و پنج حس باطن است در حالی که حواس پنجگانه باطنی را در حکمه الاشراق ابطال می کند. یا در داستان های رمزی سخن از عقول عشره می گوید در حالی که در حکمه الاشراق صراحتا عقول را بیش از ده تا می داند.

خبرنگار: این مساله و تسلط شما بر شیخ اشراق برای گوتاس خیلی جالب بود و تحقیقات شما را برای خودش آموزنده و روشنگر دانست.

مفتونی: من همیشه به دانشجویانم می گویم که کارهای زیادی برای ما و شما باقی مانده. معمولا دانشجویان عزیز برای هر موضوعی نگاهی به اینترنت می اندازند و تصور می کنند آنقدر کار شده که دیگر برای آنها مجالی نمانده است. من عرض می کنم اگر روشمند کار کنیم، هر جا که دست بگذاریم کارهای فراوانی را برای ما باقی گذاشته اند.

در ادامه گزیده ای از گفتگوی انگلیسی این جلسات می آید.

Maftouni: It’s a plain good sense, I mean it’s a rare opportunity to have a colloquium with you for the second time in 4 months. If I’m not wrong, it happens by dint of Covid19. Cause it has contributed to shifting to online events which weren’t at all easy at least here for my colleagues.

Gutas: It is great! Now that we cannot really travel and go to in-person conferences this is the best alternative, I guess. But even so, thank you very much for the opportunity.

Maftouni: I do get to underscore your approach to Ibn Sina, which I absolutely give a preference to. And I’m gonna read some of your words for our participants, especially new ones who missed your former speech. It’s worth, I believe, recapping over and over. You mentioned the dominant approach to Ibn Sina in the early 70s. That was that Ibn Sina is a philosopher, but primarily he is a sufi and ishraqi; his Hikmah Mashriqiah is the guiding of the real expression of his philosophy.

So—Dimitri you said—I thought well, let me see what Ibn Sina has to say about Aristotle’s views on the soul, which is a highly philosophical work, and how much mysticism could be made out of it. I found nothing mystical about it but extremely interesting and philosophically acute analyses of Aristotle. And I was delighted; I said well wonderful this is. And of course, the more I read the more enchanted I was by the power of his thinking, by the power of his thought, by his arguments, by the whole system that he was putting together in there.

Another interesting part of your speech was about Mashriqyoon. Ibn Sina says if you want to find out more about this subject go and read what the Mashriqyoon have to say. Who are these Mashriqyoon? That’s always been a problem and again the available literature at the time said that the Mashriqyoon were the Eastern, the Oriental philosophers. And I said I have to look around and what Ibn Sina really means with Mashriqiah. Mashriq is simply Khurasan. And he was of course from Khurasan. So Hikmah Mashriqyah refers to his own brand of philosophy because in many other works of his, he speaks how the philosophers from Baghdad, the Aristotelian philosophers are not saying this properly and they’re making mistakes here and there. So nowhere in his works does he say that we can have knowledge that is not logically derived basically. There are some primary notions which we simply have the awaliat and then everything else depends on the information we get from the senses. So, he was an empiricist. That was my approach. Because I did not come with any, as a matter of fact, I did not come with any preconceived notions about what he should be saying rather I came against the preconceived notions that he was a mystic. I said let me put that aside and see what he is saying and this is what we all should do and we all do actually and I’m happy to say that the younger generation of scholars some of whom were my students and have been working on Ibn Sina are doing exactly this as they would do for any other philosopher.

Dimitri, in effect, I thought your words really deserve to reverberate.

Gutas: Thank you! I’m glad that these words are really being listened to.

Maftouni: Let me turn to my paper in honor of Dimitri Gutas: “Avicenna’s Influence on Suhrawardi in Form and Content.”

I’ll argue that Suhrawardi is crucially affected by Avicenna both in form and in content. As you’re all aware, people say Suhrawardi is the founder of the Illuminationist School. It doesn’t matter, believe or not believe in Illuminationist School, I’ve argued in my paper that in his nine or ten symbolic treatises, Suhrawardi fleshes out some philosophical issues of Avicenna by allegories.

The number of his treatises would be nine, if you exclude the Birds and consider the Birds a Persian rendering of Avicenna’s treatise. If you include the Birds and consider the Birds a dependent treatise, the number would be ten. For me, it’s just a Persian rendering of Avicenna’s. But Suhrawardi gives the bats’ heroic role to moths (shabpareh). Related to these treatises, I’m centering around two points:

First, you find Suhrawardi a storyteller like Avicenna in the Treatise of Birds. Second, his allegorical views are Avicennian through and through. In brief, you see in Suhrawardi a storyteller who tells the story of Avicenna, even in the Red Intellect, for example.

For now, I will not consider the Avicenna’s contentions, nor except in passing, those of Suhrawardi. I just hint at three issues of sense perception, emanation, and cosmology for which you see allegories as diverse as ten towers, ten graves, ten flyers, ten straps, ten wardens, five chambers versus five gates, ten old men, nine shells, eleven layers, eleven mountains, and so forth. All of these allegories allude to Avicenna’s views. That is, Suhrawardi encrypts Avicenna’s stance by allegory, in lieu of his own illumationist views.

The first issue I focus on is sense perception. Avicenna is the first major thinker holding five interior senses vis-à-vis five exterior senses. Suhrawardi criticizes Avicenna’s stance on five interior senses, however, he indicates the faculties of ten sense perceptions in allegory. The allegories of ten sense perceptions comprise five chambers and five gates in the Treatise on Love/On the Reality of Love, ten towers in the Treatise on Towers, ten straps, ten wide straps in The Language of the Ants, ten graves in A Tale of Occidental Exile, ten flyers in The Simurgh’s Shrill Cry, and ten wardens in The Red Intellect.

Emanation is the second issue. The Peripatetic philosophers believed in ten separate intellects emanate from the First Being. The tenth one, the Active Intellect, generates the sublunary realm. In traditional cosmology, the nine spheres and the sublunary realm are managed by ten intellects. But in the book of Hikmah al-Ishraq Suhrawardi holds that the intellects are more than ten, twenty, and two hundred. In Alvah Emadi, he also emphasizes that there are too many intellects, quoting Quran’s verse: “None knows the armies of your Lord save Himself”. Yet in his allegorical treatises, Suhrawardi symbolizes the theory of ten intellects and nine spheres in which Avicenna believes. He briefly hints at ten intellects by ten old men in the Treatise on Towers. In The Sound of Gabriel’s Wing, ten intellects are symbolized by ten old men again. In some cases, just the tenth intellect is mentioned. In A Tale of Occidental Exile the Active Intellect is allegorized by the father.

The luminous elder, the first child of creation, and the Red Intellect are other allegories of the tenth intellect brought in the treatise of The Red Intellect. And in On the Reality of Love the tenth intellect is a young old man called Eternal Wisdom.

Cosmology is the third issue. The idea of ten Separate Intellects results in that of the nine spheres. In A Day with a Group of Sufis, Suhrawardi himself has decoded his allegories about nine spheres. At first, he mentions the theory in allegorical form. Then he explains his own allegories, corresponding to the nine and eleven spheres.

When the wayfarer said to his master, “The engraver’s craft is amazing,” said his master, “There is a well-known tale in their craft, but no one tells it fully, and no one knows the meaning of it.” “What is this tale?” asked the wayfarer. His master went through the story: “Once, an engraver had a jewel. He wanted to display his skill on it. So, from it he made a round shell like a ball. Then, from the residue left in the middle of the shell he made another shell inside the first. Again, from the residue of the second he made a third, and so on until he had made nine shells.”

Sometimes Suhrawardi speaks of the eleven spheres, adding two spheres of zamharir and ether in A Day with a Group of Sufis and in The Sound of Gabriel’s Wing.

In The Sound of Gabriel’s Wing the eleven spheres are allegorized by the eleven layers of a basin which the wayfarer saw in the courtyard: a basin with eleven layers.

In “The Red Intellect”, there are eleven mountains surrounded by Mount Qaf hint at the eleven spheres. For the sake of economy, I don’t mention The Language of the Ants and On the State of Childhood.

In brief, Suhrawardi elaborates philosophical issues as a storyteller.

In the field of sense perception, ten interior and exterior senses are allegorized by ten towers, ten wide straps, ten graves, ten flyers, ten wardens, five chambers and five gates. In the theory of emanation, the ten Separate Intellects are allegorized by the ten old men, whereas the Active Intellect by the father, the master, and the Red Intellect. In cosmology, the spheres are symbolized by nine shells, eleven layers of a basin, eleven mountains, sons, and mills. Ten sense perceptions, ten intellects, and nine or eleven spheres are modules of Avicenna’s philosophy. And the form of storytelling at least in Muslim philosophers originated by Avicenna. And that’s it; sorry for bothering you Professor Gutas.

Gutas: No; thank you very much! I hadn’t put all these ten numbers together. Well, I have not read Suhrawardi as carefully as you have. But it is very illuminating to me as well to see that this is so. No, no, perfectly fine! And there’s always something to learn from everybody. So, thank you very much for that. This is really wonderful; especially the five internal senses which is real original innovation of Ibn Sina and a wonderful scientific advancement. I mean, this is after Aristotle that was the most major scientific advancement in psychology since Aristotle basically and then after that. I don’t know perhaps we’d go with Freud or whatever it is, it was a very big step forward, so to speak. So, it is interesting to see that he put together with the external senses of course to get the ten. That is wonderful. Thank you very much Nadia.