İbn Hazm Estetiği: Kant’ın Yargı Gucunun Eleştirisi’ndeki Soruşturma Çerçevesi İçinde Bir Yorum

In this article, I examine Ibn Hazm’s aesthetics within the framework of the central problems of the discipline, such as the quiddity of beauty, aesthetic pleasure, aesthetic judgment, and so on. I do this within the investigative framework employed by Kant in his Critique of Judgment, comparing Ibn Hazm’s views with Kant’s. I have observed that Ibn Hazm’s aesthetic views, influenced by the Zahirite school of thought, present a theoretical framework that bears a striking resemblance to that of modern thinkers. Ibn Hazm argues that the supernatural cannot have an aesthetics because it surpasses our capacity for comprehension. The focus of Ibn Hazm’s aesthetics is our senses and the human soul—that is, our subjectivity. Beauty is indefinable both because it is merely an experience of (divine) radiance and because it transcends this subjective experience. The fact that beauty has no specific name to express it and that it is something purely sensed in the soul suggests that Ibn Hazm, like Kant, sees it as something pleasing without a concept, and that characteristic of its pleasure is disinterested. The indefinability of beauty is not only due to it being something felt in our subjectivity but, even more than that, because it is divine —that is, it is the manifestation of God’s name Jamal; beauty is the experience of divine radiance. The seeming similarity between Kant’s and Ibn Hazm’s conceptions of aesthetic taste in terms of quality, quantity, relation and modality exist only at the level of conclusions rather than in their theoretical foundations. Kant’s transcendental philosophy, particularly his concept of a priori limits this similarity. Therefore, establishing a complete parallelism between Kant and Ibn Hazm is epistemologically and metaphysically impossible.