Reality According to Muhammad Baqir Sadr and Mulla Sadra

According to Mulla Sadra and his Transcendental Wisdom which considers reality being equal to existence to be a self-evident matter, ontology means recognizing reality. However, Muhammad Baqir Sadr tries to show reality to be general and inclusive of existence by denying the self-evidence of this equality. Even though this claim has other advocates like the Muʿtazilites in Islamic thought; however, Sadr is distinguished from them in the purpose of declaring such a claim, its content, and in the arguments presented for it and has formed a well-established view in this regard. To recognize reality, Sadr designates an identifier and strives to discover instances of it based on that. The identifier of reality is that it is independent of the agent’s understanding and validation, and the mind is not active in perceiving it; rather, it is passive concerning the external world. Therefore, any true proposition that denotes the external for us and does not arise from the mind or validation shows us a part of reality. He concludes the actualization of another type of external reality by citing the truth of external theorems where either the subject or the predicate or both do not exist externally and suggests essential reality alongside reality actualized through existence. Although the matter of which theorems are true and essentially what is the criterion of the truth of theorems is an epistemological issue to which Islamic philosophers have responded with the “logical thing-in-itself” argument. However, Sadr pursues the discussion of philosophical thing-in-itself with an ontological approach. Based on the aforementioned identifier, the real world, according to Sadr, is formed of different and heterogeneous matters which are not necessarily present externally. The category of substance, quality, and quantity are realities externally existent; while the reality of connectives, philosophical intelligibles, the category of genitives, the requisites of quiddities, perceptible of the practical intellections and non-beings, are all realities that do not exist externally and are essential. In contrast, according to Mulla Sadra, reality is explained through the foundation of the principality of existence. Principal reality is the individual of existence and all else, like the ten categories of quiddity, philosophical intelligibles, and even … possess reality through existence. The present study strives to first explain reality’s relationship with the following three concepts: 1) existence; 2) quiddity and 3) secondary philosophical intelligibles and examine the way it is affirmed and its important instances. It then compares Sadr’s real world with Mulla Sadra’s ontology and after responding to some of the issues raised against Sadr’s view, concludes that despite the foundational differences in the self-evidence of some of the propositions, they have both utilized similar methods in recognizing reality and have paid attention to the difference between “lack of existence” and “the existence of non-being” in the conflict between argument and self-evidence and have advocated for argument by revising their view regarding an issue that manifests as self-evident. Mulla Sadra considers “the necessity of attribution of the existence of both sides in the context of attribution” to be an argument through which he shunts the self-evidence of the proposition that “non-being attributes do not exist externally” and does not see the inexistence of these attributes externally to be a proof that they do not exist. In contrast, Sadr rejects that “reality equals existence” by citing that “the truth of theorems which do not have a matching existence externally” and the lack of existence of a correspondent of such theorems externally Mulla Sadra,  does not mean that they are not real.