Fictions of Human Nature in Early Modern Poetry and Philosophy

Abstract

P hilosophical fictions inhabit a space of reason removed from the world. This was, at least, the view implied by the Persian philosopher Abū ʿAlı ̄ al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbdallāh ibn Sın̄ā (c.970–1037), who imagined a man created fully mature and suspended in a void. Dubbed the “flying man,” the protagonist of this scenario represents a fusion of fiction and abstraction that isolates the nature of the human soul. This scenario is expounded in Kitab al-Sifa’ (c.1027), part of which was first translated into Latin as Avicenna’s Liber de anima, probably by Ibn Da’ūd and Dominicus Gundissalinus around 1150–1160.Although the flying man’s reception in medieval Arabic, Latin, and European vernaculars is relatively familiar, its importance for early modern English intellectual culture remains largely unexplored. In this essay, I argue that the poet and theologian Thomas Traherne (1636–1674) used Avicenna’s philosophical fiction to represent the birth of his own consciousness in utero, the moment when, as he puts it in “The Salutation,” “I in my mother’s womb was born.” Examining the philosophical reception of Avicenna’s scenario alongside the uses to which Traherne puts it in his poetry, I argue that mimesis—representation