A Comparative Approach to Sadrian Perfection of Soul and Jaspers's Existential Transcendence in the Light of Substantial Motion

For Mulla Sadra and Jaspers, man’s reality (essence) is flowing and always in motion and becoming. The question is why and on what basis they refuse to accept a stable and unchanging character for man. No doubt, this common view has particular principles and different reasons, that is, Mulla Sadra formulates this principle based on substantial motion and Jaspers on future possibility and man’s freedom. Furthermore, both Mulla Sadra and Jaspers regard soul as man’s reality. However, the soul which Mulla Sadra regards asidentical to illuminative attribution to God, as having existence genus, and asidentical to individuality is fundamentally different from Jaspers’s existence which lacks above-mentioned characteristics. Jaspers’s existence actualizes in connection and is known by something else. So, it can be said that soul’s substantial motion means achieving a stage of existence, i.e. objective spiritual reality and associations, given the fundamentality of existence as one of theunarguable preliminaries of substantial motion and the fact that motion and becoming are not contrary to being and existence; rather they are a kind of existence and being. This is the point where we can understand the importance of substantial motion and its indispensible role in man’s perfection and transcendence more completely through comparing and co-evaluating two traditions of Islamic philosophy in the field of transcendent philosophy and West’s philosophy in the field of existentialism.