Khatami as an Illuminationist Philosopher of the Art

Journal of Culture & Art,

12

, No.3 (2011)

40

Khatami as an Illuminationist Philosopher of ArtSeyyedeh Maryam Mostafavi

1

Abstract.

Mahmoud Khatami addresses the main problems of the Illuminationist (

Ishraqi

)philosophy of art in a distinctive way. Considering modern concerns of thephilosophy of art, he sidesteps its subjective nature and such problem as theobjectivity of judgments of taste; and he concentrates instead on how certainundeniably important features of human being fulfill a central function of art. Thisbrings Khatami to metaphysics of art in which Khatami has broadly described anddefended the Illuminationist approach to the philosophical understanding of art.The aim of this paper is not to expose this metaphysics but to consider hisapproach to the function-oriented nature of art as a fundamental aspect of histheory.

Keywords: Mahmoud Khatami, Illuminationist Art, Illuminationism, Persian Art,

1

Former Assistant Professor of Al-Zahra University, Tehran, Iran

Journal of Culture & Art,

12

, No.3 (2011)

41

Mahmoud Khatami approaches the philosophy of art as a distinctly Illuminationist(

Ishraqi

) theorist of the arts. This is clear from his definition of art at the openingof

Prolegomena for A Philosophy of Persian Art

(2011).

His ‘descriptive analysis’ of the word ‘

honar

’

(art) in ancient Persian language offers that the Persians wereunderstanding by this word a very wise meaning of art which mostly indicates

‘virtue’ (not ‘technique’) and implies ‘fulfilment’

(not ‘mere skill’)

. On this basisKhatami defines art in terms of the ecstasic connection with the Illuminativemanifestations of the Beauty. (

Prolegomena

, Part I, pp.13ff) To make thismeaning clear, Khatami reconstruct the anthropology hidden behind thedefinition to show who may be an artist in its full meaning, and what are thecorrect means, procedure and mechanism of making a creative art-work.

The Function-Oriented Nature of Art

The major problems about art that Khatami treats are the familiar problems of the significance of art within Illuminationist culture. (

ibid

, Part I, 9-137) In contrastwith the successes of modern natural science in offering a person-independentrepresentation of the physical world as a system of material substancesundergoing changes according to laws, Khatami argues that art traffics in creativereconstruction of the often imaginal manifestations of Beauty, and inrepresentational embodiment of the imaginal forms so that aim at involving anaudience imaginatively and emotionally. In the modern world, art is also nolonger firmly embedded in cult, ritual, or religion. Modern artists working in any

Journal of Culture & Art,

12

, No.3 (2011)

42

medium are largely free to choose their subject matters and methods of artisticrendering, without subservience to the needs of religious representation. Khatamidistinguishes between true art (

honar

) and subservient art (

fann

) that serves aimsextrinsic to art, as in industrial, technological, or practical arts such as the designof tools or useful machines. Only the former is the proper subject matter of theIlluminationist philosophy of art.Once the making and the reception of works of art is significantly free from eitherreligious or practical purposes, and once it is clear that artworks represent subjectmatters for the sake of imaginative and emotional involvement, it is then naturalto ask what the point of the practices of making and responding to art is. Is art aserious business or not, in comparison with, say, either science or religion? Or is ita matter primarily of entertainment or idle pleasure, so that no failure to knowanything or to be committed to anything attaches to anyone who simply does notcare about art? It may be thought that one likes or does not like certain works asone pleases, and the place of works of architecture, painting, music, and literaturein a serious educational curriculum may come to seem questionable. And if worksof art have no serious, extrinsic importance, practical or cognitive, then how canwe tell which things are works of art at all? If we cannot regard certain centralworks as addressing an important problem of human life in an especiallysuccessful way, then how, if at all, can we speak of works of art as members of a

clear and identifiable kind? Perhaps the word `art’ is nothing more than an

honorific term that is empty of descriptive content. (

Axiology of Art,

pp.71ff)Though he involves in these central questions about the nature and value of art,Khatami's approach to them is strikingly different from that of many philosophersof art. To begin with, the problems of evaluation and of the justification of