نشریه خردنامه صدرا
پیاپی 49 (پاییز 1386)

The issue of man is a difficult one existing in most scientific and philosophical fields. If we do not say that it is the most important philosophical issue, we should admit that it is one of the most important ones and deserves to be studied and discussed meticulously.The importance of this issue is due to the key role the knowledge of man plays in gaining knowledge of God, the world, and the ways of life. Its difficulty is also due to man’s having various dimensions. The complexities of the human soul or spirit, the multiplicity and amazing nature of his inner and mental faculties, and even the astonishing phenomena associated with his body have turned him into an unknown existent. Following the Almighty Necessary, we should say about human beings, “we have not learned about you as we should”. In addition to human beings’ inner complexities, every one has his own specific situation concerning his relations with God, nature, and the macrocosmos. This by itself adds to the intricacy of man’s essence and act. Such specificities and uniqueness of each human individual’s interior and situation makes them so different from each other that even no two human beings can be considered similar to each other.

The reality of the soul, its levels and acts, and its relation to the body have always been such important philosophical issues that the related proof and evidence can be found even in the earliest philosophical deliberations of the Greeks and other nations. There have also been some extensive efforts in the world of Islamic philosophy to present a philosophical psychology in conformity with the spirit of Islamic philosophical teachings. However, the philosophical psychology presented in the Transcendent Philosophy both justifies the concrete realm of the “disengaged-matter relation” and explains the infinite domain of the “development and entelechy of the soul”. Moreover, it reveals its complete conformity and consistency with not only the components but also the overall structure of the Transcendent Philosophy. In fact, based on the theories of “the principiality of existence”, “motion in substance”, and “the corporeal createdness and the spiritual subsistence of the soul”, Mulla Sadra presents an image of the human soul and its status which is free from the common difficulties and conflicts of philosophical traditions in this regard. Moreover, it opens the window to a new horizon of human existence on the basis of the Book and Sunna which views man’s ontological dimensions in harmony with the whole world. In doing so, Mulla Sadra has greatly benefited from Peripatetic and Ishraqi traditions; however, his innovations in this regard are unprecedented and unique and can hardly be matched in terms of perfection.

There are various opinions concerning the epistemological entity and methodology of the Transcendent Philosophy. Recently, a group of thinkers, while trying to acquit Mulla Sadra’s works from the charges of contradiction and incoherence, have aimed at studying and clarifying his philosophical methodology. Ha’iri Yazdi believes that the Transcendent Philosophy employs the superior language of the principiality or existence, which inquires into the topical languages of previous philosophical systems. He claims that if we assume that the Transcendent Philosophy is ultra-language, we can acquit it from the charges of eclecticism and infirmity and explain its innovative aspects.Ultra-language and topical language, which are among the key concepts in Tarski’s semantics, have also been employed concerning formalized languages. In the particular sense of the word, ultra-language cannot be matched with the Transcendent Philosophy, however, the existence of ultra-language in the sense of a kind of proceeding beyond something is acceptable in certain parts of the Transcendent Philosophy. However, this theory does not seem enough in clarifying the nature and methodology of the Transcendent Philosophy, and, in order to fill the existing blanks in this regard, we require more complete theories.

What has so far been posited in scientific debates or centers concerning the Transcendent Philosophy’s critique of ontological issues in Illuminationist Philosophy has mainly consisted of judgmental discussions and criticisms of Suhrawardi’s arguments from the viewpoint of Mulla Sadra and his followers. In fact, not much has been said concerning the conceptual aspects of this issue. Nevertheless, one can expect Suhrawardi, who is considered to be one of the first semantic analysts of Islamic philosophy, to have dealt greatly with a conceptual analysis of existence and quiddity and the relation between them. However, Mulla Sadra has a different view in this regard, and in his critiques of this issue, even before entering judgmental and demonstrative discussions, he maintains that there are some scientific defects in the accurate understanding of the concepts of existence, light, and quiddity. Points of conflict between Peripatetic philosophy, that is, those who believe in the objectivity of existence, on the one hand, and the principiality of quiddity in Illuminationist Philosophy, on the other, have arisen as a result. He believes that such defects led Suhrawardi towards the principiality of quiddity.The present paper, while comparing the concepts of quiddity, existence, and light in Illuminationist Philosophy and the Transcendent Philosophy, explains the differences between the principiality of quiddity, principiality of light, and the principiality of existence. Finally, it provides a critique of the ideas of the advocates of Suhrawardi’s principiality of light and Mulla Sadra’s principiality of existence, as well as an analysis of some of Suhrawardi’s words which have created some ambiguity concerning the above issue.

The otherness of existence from quiddity is one of the important issues that has been posed for the first time in Islamic philosophy and was unprecedented in Greek philosophy. It owes its importance to the fact that it finally led to the theory of the principiality of existence, which can be considered to represent the culmination of Islamic Philosophy. The main purpose of this paper is to study this issue and its impact upon the development of the theory of the principiality of existence.

The present paper deals with the idea that paying attention to the history of philosophy comes second to the appearance of historical thought in the modern period. In the light of the questions pertaining to the essence of nature in this period and the expansion of its laws and principles in the domain of human life, some questions were also posed regarding the nature of history. Therefore, history turned into one of the sources of knowledge. By inquiring into the nature of the history of philosophy, Hegel considered it to be the essence of the history of the world. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, he first talks about the nature of the history of philosophy and then, in line with the principles of his own historical thought, refers to the periods of the history of philosophy in its geographical development from the East to the West. The writer of this paper has treated this issue on the basis of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy.

The term “embodiment of deeds”, the content of which, unlike its verbal combination, has a long history, has been accepted by Islamic religious culture. By resorting to religious teachings and the works of some early Greek philosophers, while acknowledging the embodiment of deeds and beliefs in the Hereafter, Mulla Sadra grants a rational and philosophical flavor to this issue. As we can see, the principles of his Transcendent Philosophy also allow him to do so. The corporeal createdness and spiritual subsistence of the soul, along with the trans-substantial motion and the union of the intellect and the intelligible, are among such principles. Accordingly, the acts that human beings perform repeatedly turn into firm habits in the soul’s innermost interior and are inseparable from it. They are, in fact, among its essential concomitants. Noble and evil habits create appropriate and various forms for themselves in the afterlife and appear in those forms therein.

According to the renewal of essences and the trans-substantial motion, the world and its existents are continually in evolution and change and are at no moment in rest and motionlessness. Of course, the former pertains to the domain of disengaged entities and material things and the latter is limited to the world of matter. These two principles enjoy certain differences and similarities in their fundamental bases, arguments, etc. It is because of these very differences that gnostics are not capable of accounting for the unity of things at the level of their origination and corruption in themselves, while the unity of a flowing object, which is mobile due to the trans-substantial, is guaranteed in itself. Both the trans-substantial motion propounded in Mulla Sadra’s books and the gnostic principle of the renewal of essences in gnostics’ works suffer from certain ambiguities in terms of the limits and dimensions of the problems. Apparently, the issue of the trans-substantial motion is under the influence of the gnostic principle of the renewal of essences. That is why this paper deals with the characteristics of these two issues in terms of their definitions, fundamental bases, arguments, and their most important problems.

Ibn Arabi believes that man possesses a perceptive faculty other than the intellect whose domain of activity is the realm of “imagination”, where the gathering of opposites appears. The reason is that this gathering is impossible in the realms of the sense and the intellect. The world of imagination is the most evident proof of the Truth because He is the First and the Last, and the Exterior and the Interior. Therefore, a real gnostic is one who can bring two opposites together. According to Ibn Arabi, imagination is the abode of the all-embracing friendship between the Truth and creatures and the same form based on which man has been created. This is the most certain knowledge through which the gnostic can perceive the Oneness of the Truth in the multiplicity of creation.He also maintains that imagination merely preserves the things that have sensible forms or consist of sensible parts which are synthesized by the faculty of retention. In this way, it presents a form which does not exist in the sense but is sensible for the viewer. In his gnostic theory, he refers to the world of imagination as the path of the knowledge of God. This paper undertakes to present a systematic view of this world.