Grasping the idea

Tracing a concept from Aristotle to Persian and English poetry

In “Two Perspectives on Consciousness,” Timothy Harrison, associate professor in English Language and Literature, discusses his work on the concept of consciousness in early modern English literature. Here, he goes into his current book project—coauthored with Jane Mikkelson, AM’18, AM’18, PhD’19—on poetry, perception, and concepts of mind across the Persian and English traditions.

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I was working on Jane Mikkelson’s PhD committee, and she asked me one day what I was working on. I was like, “Oh, this guy [Thomas] Traherne. He’s really wild because he claims to remember being in the womb, and he says that’s the secret to living a good life.” 

She said the person she’s working on, ‘Abd al-Qadir Bedil, was doing the same thing. And he was writing in exactly the same decade, in Mughal India. 

So we started trying to explain that remarkable serendipity. Carlo Ginzburg calls such things “conjunctive anomalies.” You have two things that are highly anomalous in their own situation but nevertheless chime. 

Jane and I are now writing a book about the notion of psychic grasping. The mind is a power that grasps, that takes in the world. For the ancient Stoics, this is katalepsis, the mental power of grasping. Aristotle likewise metaphorizes the soul as a hand. And there’s a long tradition that comes out of that. Later Greek commentators develop a language for thinking about Aristotle’s understanding. That concept enters Arabic, and you get this word idrak, which can mean “perception” but literally means “reaching” or “grasping.” This word becomes a key philosophical term for many thinkers writing in Arabic—thinkers who are working with Aristotle, with the Stoics, and with the Aristotelian commentators. The Arabic term enters the Persian language, which keeps the word idrak; it is a term central to Bedil when he is writing in Mughal India. The Arabic idrak also passes through the Arabic–Latin–Hebrew translation movement in Sicily and Al-Andalus in the European Middle Ages. In Latin, Arabic philosophical uses of idrak become apprehensio. This becomes the English apprehension, a term with which Traherne is completely obsessed. 

Part of the project Jane and I are undertaking is to unpack the metaphors we use to think about mind and how those metaphors become concepts. In the traditions with which we are concerned, when I use my intellect, my mind grasps the form of the intelligible. But there’s also a passive element: The mind is stamped with the form of the intelligible, like a stamp in wax or in clay. Such metaphors go through a process of lexification, where a metaphor becomes a more stable word, like idrak, apprehesio, apprehension. But the implications of the metaphor still carry forward into the concept. 

Traherne is utterly smitten with apprehension. Bedil, Jane’s poet, is likewise obsessed with idrak. So we’ve got these two poets who are both really invested in psychic grasping and specifically the reflexive psychic grasping of yourself in an original moment when you wake up in the womb.

I wanted to have a chapter on apprehension in Traherne in my first book, but I couldn’t, because I didn’t understand it. It was only through collaborating with Jane that this piece of the conceptual puzzle came into focus for me. Weirdly, the best way to contextualize a 35-word poem on apprehension that I’ve been struggling with for years required a knowledge of the transmission history of this concept from ancient Greek into Arabic, into Latin, et cetera. There’s a question that emerges from this necessarily collaborative work: How broad is the contextual horizon requisite for explaining a given textual phenomenon? And it turns out it’s amazingly broad, far broader than I ever could have anticipated.