Sense, Sensibility and the Sensorial: Ibn Gabirol, Arama, and al Harizi’s Musar as a Technology for Creative & Sensorial Burgeoning

Abstract

This chapter explores manners in which the history of Sephardi Jewish thought has been foundational for the development of Jewish artists, looking more closely at the manners in which post-expulsion mystical philosophies and the mussar texts they were often published with, demonstrate manners in which philosophical frameworks provide the systematic contours through which unbridled creativity, passion and the sensorial can travel. Systems of mussar that were providing frameworks for personal development in Jewish diasporic communities, also presented opportunities for emic manners of sensorial systematization that could serve as contours for exploratory experimentation, while engaging with the majority culture, but retaining a sense of cultural and epistemological selfhood. Jewish texts have proposed systems to harness the undisciplined inner self, using rationalist systems of classification of what could be perceived as the unclassifiable – the humors, the passions, the emotions, perceptions and the like. Mussar presents a sort of system of personal ontological construction which balances between the two and allows systematizations of the inner world, self-knowledge, and personal development. Using mussar systems as a springboard for artistic creation, as the MusArt project has done, allows for expression and acknowledgement of the creative thrust that the instinctive and the emotional carry towards a fuller self-expression, within the structures of structured intellectual scaffolding. Liturgical poems then became manners of constructing the self, through thought, voice, letter, and even manuscript image.