Henry Corbin, 1903-1978: Between Philosophy and Orientalism.

• Author: LANDOLT, HERMANN

Henry Corbin was a French engage "Orientalist" inspired by German philosophical phenomenology and existential theology. His scholarly work on Islamic philosophy and Iranian culture implies a fundamental critique of "Orientalism," which reflects his philosophical background and differs in nature from Edward Said's, although the reactions to both were sometimes similar. The article attempts to highlight the connection between Corbin's philosophical thought and his prodigious scholarly work, and to assess the impact of the latter in light of the former.

The conventional way to study the Islamic philosophical tradition, in so far as one was recognized to exist, has been decidedly eurocentric. By and large, it was assumed that the only reason why so-called "Arabic philosophy" should be taken into consideration at all was a historical one: the fact that it was thanks to the Arabs that the Greek philosophical tradition had survived through the Middle Ages; and it was taken for granted that this tradition had found its last major exponent in twelfth-century Spain with Dante's "great Commentator," Averroes, i.e., Ibn Rushd. Once these "Arabs" (meaning Christian and Muslim Arabs, Turks like al-Farabi and Iranians like Avicenna [Ibn Sina] all living under Islamic rule and writing mainly in Arabic) had done their due, as it were, by transmitting this tradition to the Jews and Latin Christendom, they were no longer interesting. This eurocentric attitude among students of philosophy was, moreover, reinforced by Orientalism which, for reasons of its own, had appropriat ed al-Ghazali as "the most original thinker that Islam has produced and its greatest theologian." [1] Accordingly, the verdict passed by al-Ghazali upon the Islamic philosophical tradition was accepted as final. Whatever philosophy the Muslim East continued to produce after Ghazali was generally either ignored, or dismissed as "Oriental syncretism," or confused with some sort of degenerate Sufism.

It is partly as a reaction to this typically Western and "Orientalist" perception of things that the work of Henry Corbin and his life-long concern to give "Oriental" philosophy its due place must be understood. As Muhsin Mahdi has noted, "Corbin distinguished himself from most of his contemporaries by the effort to think both historically and philosophically when dealing with Islamic philosophy"--a distinction which has opened him, Professor Mahdi added, to "one of the strangest criticisms" from "some of the representatives of the older, historical and philological tradition of Islamic studies in the West." [2] Now, in the case of Henry Corbin, "to think philosophically" about Islamic philosophers clearly meant something more than a simple methodological device. It meant, to put it in a nutshell, that the Muslim philosophical tradition, and specifically the post-Ghazalian variety, had something interesting to offer to the West precisely because it was different, because, having preserved vital elements of t he Gnostic tradition, it did not go along with the radical separation between reason and revelation" that had informed mainstream Western thought at least since the Renaissance. Not unlike the Presocratics in the case of Martin Heidegger (whom Corbin greatly admired, especially in his student days), the oriental Gnostics offered Corbin a way leading directly to the very sources of true philosophical thinking. By the same token, Corbin's scholarly work was to imply nothing less than a fundamental critique of the Western academic tradition. Indeed, one might say that the critique of "Orientalism" which we now owe to Edward Said's eloquence was in a sense already voiced much earlier by Corbin; and although the reasons and motivations for such challenging of habitual ways of thinking about Islamic thought and culture were of course quite different in the two cases, if not opposite in some respects, the reactions to both, coming as they did from the same academic profession, whose ethos was thereby being called in to question, were sometimes strikingly similar. To be sure, Corbin was himself an "Orientalist" in the sense that his scholarly work deals for the greater part with things "oriental." Like other "Orientalists," too, he evidently was what Edward Said would probably call an "essentialist" since the "Orient"--though not necessarily the geographic "East"--meant something different to him than the "West." Yet he was clearly an outsider to the profession and made no secret of the fact. He preferred to see himself as a "born Platonist," a philosopher at heart and a theologian in his own way, a "desperate believer" fighting his lonely battle for the unity of philosophy and theology and against agnosticism, historicism, positivism, psychologism, and sociologism--all being forms of reductionism deeply rooted in the Western academic tradition. An excellent bibliography covering more than three hundred titles as well as much pertinent information on Corbin's biography and personality can be found in the volume Henry Corb in of the series Les Cahiers de l'Herne, edited by Christian Jambet, published in Paris, in 1981. [3]

II

It was as a student of medieval philosophy under Etienne Gilson in the early twenties that Corbin first became interested in learning oriental languages. While subsequently pursuing Islamic Studies under Louis Massignon, he remained essentially a philosopher--soon to become a noted avant-garde intellectual who introduced such names as Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger to the French scene. His translation of a collection of essays by Martin Heidegger, published in 1938, titled Quest-ce que la metaphysique? is still a classic. [4] Yet there was another philosopher whose originality and depth of thought had really touched Corbin before, and who was to remain his true philosophical hero to the end of his life. That philosopher was the Iranian contemporary of Averroes, Shihabuddin Yahya al-Suhrawardi, whose "Oriental-illuminative" (ishraqi) interpretation of Avicenna's philosophy Corbin found so much more refreshing than Averroes' "Western-dualistic" reductionism. [5] This Suhrawardi (not to be confused with the Su fi of the same name) is generally referred to by Orientalists as almaqtul, the "one killed," because he was indeed executed in 1191 for having claimed allegedly that God can create prophets at any time. Corbin adopted him, on the contrary, as the one whose ontology of the "rising Light" (ishraq) was intended to bring the wisdom of the ancient Sages of Persia to new life in the "present." According to Corbin's own account, it was actually Heidegger's phenomenology, the search for the logos of the phainomenon that "shows itself," that gave him the hermeneutic key to his new understanding of Suhrawardi's "Orient of Light." [6] He also acknowledges that his discovery of this spiritual Orient was greatly helped by his long experience of the geographic East, his personal encounter with many scholars and philosophers, first in Turkey and then, for a period of more than thirty years, in Iran, where scholars such as Mohammad Mo[CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]in and Seyyed Hossein Nasr and eminent representatives of the hikmat-tradition such as [CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]A llamah Tabataba[CHARACTERS NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]i and Jalaluddin Ashtiyani offered him their precious friendship and collaboration until the end in 1978.

To begin with, Corbin was commissioned in 1939 by the Bibliotheque nationale to catalogue and photograph manuscripts in Istanbul for a period of three months starting in September of...