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Laboratorio

Approaching the Other. Europe and the Orient

A cura di Mauro Bonazzi In collaborazione con l’Università di Utrecht

Paul Ziche (Università di Utrecht)

The rationality of mythology.
Eastern mythology, Western rationality, universale revelation

F.W.J. Schelling’s oeuvre is bracketed by discussions on mythology. His first and his last writings deal with the transition from a past that expresses itself in myths, and is localized in particular cultures, starting in the “orient”, towards a future that spans the entire world, towards a “world consciousness”. This results in a double movement in Schelling’s dealings with mythology: on the one hand, he follows the standard trajectory from origins in the East to Western rationality; on the other hand, he brackets his account of Western rationality between an understanding of mythology that is epistemically self-explanatory, and a philosophy of revelation that itself transcends classical notions of rationality.
This talk reconstructs the observations and arguments that let Schelling go beyond a linear narrative, i.e. a narrative that leads, as a success narrative, from mythology/the sensory/the allegorical/the oriental towards the rational/philosophical/Western, and shows how these observations and arguments can support an attitude that he himself called a “world consciousness”.

Christian Lange (Università di Utrecht)

Myth and sensibility in 19th-century Arab thought

At least since the 18th century and long into the 19^th and in fact, the 20^th century, European reading publics nurtured a fascination for texts from the Arab and Iranian worlds such as, most famously, the Arabian Nights (first tr. By Galland, 1704-17), but also the quatrains of Omar Khayyam (tr. Fitzgerald, 1859), or al-Nafzawi’s erotic manual, The Perfumed Garden (tr. Burton, 1886). The reception history of these works in the European sphere has often been discussed by critics and scholars, usually within the conceptual framework of European Orientalism and its distorted views of the allegedly “irrational”, “mythical”, and “sensual” Orient. The idea is to look for Arab and/or Persian responses to the European cliché of a sensual East mired in myth. Did Arab and Persian intellectuals of the 19th century accept the notion of the “sensual East”, and if yes, were they inclined to claim and defend it (by referring, e.g., to the sensualism of Islamic philosophical, mystical and theological traditions), or did they interpret it as a symptom of the “decline” of the Muslim world, as a problem to be overcome in the attempt to achieve a political and cultural “renaissance” (nahda)?

Mauro Bonazzi (Università di Utrecht)

Da Atene a Gerusalemme, o dell’Europa in esilio (Erich Auerbach e Theodor W. Adorno)

A partire dal diciottesimo secolo, e poi nei due secoli successivi, un numero crescente di intellettuali europei ha contribuito alla creazione del mito di un'Europa culla del razionalismo, opposta al mondo orientale, dominato dai sensi e dalle passioni. Nel corso di questo seminario analizzeremo questa presunta opposizione, mostrandone punti critici, elementi di tensione e momenti di resistenza, da diverse angolature, dall’interno e dall’esterno, non solo occupandoci di quei pensatori che hanno invece lavorato per gettare un ponte tra le due tradizioni, ma ricostruendo anche le reazioni che questa ricostruzione ha prodotto fuori dell’Europa, tra i pensatori arabi o tra intellettuali che si pensavano europei ma che l’avvento dei totalitarismi aveva costretto all’esilio, in cerca di una nuova identità.