Toward an Islamic Aesthetic Theory

Abstract

Introduction Science has become a very narrow and qualified study of the universe. Its descriptions of reality are restricted to objective, publicly extended and impersonal notions. This characterization of reality is, in the Goethean sense, an utterly oppressive impasse to the subjective human condition. Thus did Nietzsche exclaim, “the nihilistic consequences of our natural sciences from its pursuits . . . there follows ultimately a selfdecomposition, a turning against itself.” One sees a disunited system of thought, where objective designs are studied using objective methods and tools, thereby leaving out many of the subjective and private characteristics of reality. How then can science claim to be a study of reality and the universe, when it does not have the tools to study even the most fundamental component of reality, the self? The gap between the subject and object was partly created by the Empiricist tradition and by Kant with his discussions on the “noumena” and “phenomena.” This dualism within the western world-view has culminated in a very disunited and incoherent description of reality. In physics, efforts are being made to create a “theory of everything” (TOE), but it has been quite a task, because of the inherent dualism and lack of connection between ideas, both in the natural sciences and the social sciences. As far as western art, it claims to be of an “absolute” and “universal” nature, so general as to include the whole universe, and beyond, within a single preview. Art relates to the subjective and inner feelings of an individual or a society at a particular time. As posited by the German Idealists, it actually submerges the object and the subject into But this bridge between the objective and the subjective is only an illusion whose disastrous effects can be seen in the modem conception of aesthetic autonomy. The negative production of an autonomous art form is a direct and implicit result of Kantian dualisms$ which pervades the ...