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| Mulla Sadra |
Sadr al-Din Shirazi (Mulla Sadra) (b. 1571-1640)
One of the most
important figures of post-Avicennan Islamic philosophy, and certainly the most
eminent philosopher of the Safavid era in Iran. Known more commonly as Mulla
Sadra, he was born in Shiraz where he received his early education.
He went to Isfahan to complete his
studies in transmitted and intellectual sciences. In Isfahan, which was then a
major center of learning, Sadra studied such transmitted sciences (al-‘ulum
al-naqliyyah) as Qur’anic exegesis (tafsir) and jurisprudence (fiqh)
with Baha' al-Din Muhammad al-Amili (d. 1031/1622). Amili, also known as
Shaykh-i Baha'i, was the great theologian of the Safavid era and at once a
philosopher, theologian, jurist, mathematician, architect, and poet.
In the field of intellectual sciences
(al-‘ulum al-‘aqliyyah), Sadra studied with Sayyid Baqir Muhammad
Astarabadi, known as Mir Damad (d. 1040/1631). Mir Damad’s al-Qabasat haqq al-yaqin fi huduth al-‘alam, known shortly as Qabasat,
is a tour de force philosophical work combining the principles of
Avicennan philosophy with the doctrines of the school of Illumination (ishraq),
founded by Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi. Sadra had a close relationship with Mir
Damad, and it was through him that he became a master of traditional
philosophical schools. Some sources mention, among Sadra’s teachers, Mir
Abu'l-Qasim Findiriski (d. circa 1050/1640-1), who was both a Peripatetic
philosopher and an ascetic Sufi, and had traveled to India several times. It
was under the intellectual patronage of these figures that Sadra developed his
ideas and gave one of the most important examples of the unity of the
transmitted and intellectual sciences in Islam.
After completing his formal education
in Isfahan, Sadra was faced with the fierce opposition of some of the akhbaris
in Isfahan, known for their strict literalism. In tandem with his predilection
for spiritual discipline, Sadra refrained from the public life by withdrawing
to a small village called Kahak, near Qom where he completed the groundwork for
the composition of his major works. After a period of both physical and
spiritual retreat, Sadra returned to Shiraz to teach in the Khan madrasah whose
building is still extant today. In his personal life, Sadra lived the life of
an ascetic, and died in Basra on the way back from his seventh pilgrimage to
Mecca on foot. In addition to producing ground-breaking works in traditional
philosophy, Sadra also trained a number of notable students, among whom 'Abd
al-Razzaq ibn al-Husayn al-Lahiji (d. 1662) and Mulla Muhsin Fayd Kashani (d.
1680) are the most important.
Sadra composed works both in the
field of transmitted and intellectual sciences, and they span through the
entire spectrum of traditional philosophy from cosmology and psychology to
metaphysics and Qur’anic commentaries. His monumental 4-part, 9-volume al-Hikmat al-muta'aliyah fi'l-asfar
al-'aqliyyah al-arba'ah (“The Transcendent Wisdom in the Four Intellectual
Journeys”), known simply as Asfar, can be read as a classical encyclopedia
of philosophy minus the section on logic. His al-Shawahid al-rububiyyah
is a rigorous treatment of some of the most difficult questions of traditional
philosophy. Kitab al-Masha’ir, a work completed towards the end of his
life, is Sadra’s own summary of his philosophical system, which he calls
‘transcendent wisdom’ (al-hikmat al-muta’aliyah). al-Hikmat
al-‘arshiyyah is Sadra’s most important work on eschatology. Sadra was
particularly interested in eschatology and wrote a number of treatises on the
subject, among which Risalat al-hashr is to be noted. Sadra’s Qur’anic
commentaries have been edited and published by Muhammad Khwajawi in 7 volumes.
Without doubt, the Asfar is
the most important work of the Sadrean corpus in which every single problem of traditional
philosophy is addressed from the point of view of Sadra’s transcendent wisdom.
Sadra structures the entire Asfar according to the four journeys of the
soul in the path of spiritual realization. The first journey is from the world
of creation to the Truth and/or Creator (min
al-khalq ila’l-haqq) where Sadra addresses the questions of metaphysics and
ontology known also under the rubric of ‘general principles’ (al-umur al-‘ammah) or ‘divine science in
its general sense’ (al-’ilm al-ilahi
bi’l-ma’na al-a‘am). It is in this part of the Asfar that Sadra deals with the ontological foundations of his
system including such issues as the meaning of philosophy, being (wujud) and its primacy (asalah) over quiddity (mahiyyah), gradation of being (tashkik al-wujud), mental existence (al-wujud al-dhihni), Platonic Forms (al-muthul al-aflatuniyyah), causality,
substantial movement, time, temporal origination of the world, the intellect,
and the unification of the intellect with the intelligible. The second journey
is from the Truth to the Truth by the Truth (min al-haqq ila’l-haqq bi’l-haqq).
In the second journey, we find a full
account of Sadra’s natural philosophy and his critique of the ten Aristotelian
categories. Among the issues discussed extensively are the categories,
substance and accidents, how physical entities come to exist, hylé and its philosophical significance,
matter and form (hylomorphism), natural forms, and the roots of the hierarchy
of the physical order.
The third journey is from the Truth
to the world of creation with the Truth (min
al-haqq ila’l-khalq bi’l-haqq) where Sadra goes into his reconstruction of
theology, which is discussed under the name of ‘metaphysics’ or ‘divine science
in its particular sense’ (al-‘ilm
al-ilahi bi’l-ma’na’l-akhass). It is in this section of the Asfar that the theological dimension of
Sadra’s thought and his relentless attacks on the theologians (mutakallimun) come to the fore. Among
the issues Sadra addresses are the unity and existence of God and the previous kalam proofs given of it, the
ontological simplicity of the Necessary Being, the Names and Qualities of God,
God’s knowledge of the world, His power, Divine providence, speech (kalam) as a Divine quality, good and
evil (theodicy), procession of the world of multiplicity from the One, and the
unity of philosophy (‘wisdom’, hikmah)
and the Divine law (shari’ah).
The fourth and final journey is from
the world of creation to the world of creation with the Truth (min al-khalq ila’l-khalq bi’l-haqq)
where the great chain of being is completed with psychology, resurrection, and
eschatology.
The concept of “journey” (safar)
has two closely related meanings in Sadra’s thought. First, the intellectual
journey of the traveler (salik) comes
to an end in the present and posthumous state of human beings. Second, the
material and spiritual journey of the order of existence, which begins with the
creation of the world and the reality of being, is brought to full completion
in its ultimate return to God. This part of the Asfar provides a thorough investigation of traditional psychology
with material culled from the Peripatetic psychology of Ibn Sina and the
gnostic views of Ibn al-‘Arabi. As in the other parts of the Asfar, Sadra presents a critical history
of the ideas and theories on the human soul from the Greeks to the Muslim
philosophers and theologians. Among the issues discussed are the soul and its
states, various powers of the soul in its interaction with the physical and
intelligible world, sense perception, imagination (takhayyul) and the imaginal world (‘alam al-khayal), his celebrated doctrine that the soul is bodily
or material in its origination and spiritual in its subsistence’ (jismaniyyat al-huduth ruhaniyyat al-baqa’),
impossibility of the transmigration of souls (tanasukh), spiritual and bodily resurrection, and the reality of
heaven and hell.
Mulla Sadra stands at the crossroads
of four major intellectual perspectives in Islam, which are the Illuminationist
school (ishraq) established by Surawardi, Peripatetic school (mashsha’i)
represented chiefly by Ibn Sina and Nasir al-Din Tusi, and the gnostic (‘irfan)
school of Ibn Arabi with such prominent members as Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi and
Dawud al-Qaysari, and Islamic theology (kalam). In many ways, the Sadrean
corpus is an attempt to synthesize these major philosophical perspectives
within the context of Sadra’s ontology. This was a natural result of Sadra’s
concern to reconcile theoretical/discursive thinking with realized knowledge.
The tension between the purely
theoretical, discursive and analytical thinking and metaphysical/intuitive
knowledge, which is a ubiquitous fact across the world civilizations, had
already been noted and described by Suhrawardi as an impediment on the way to
realized knowledge. To overcome this dichotomous relationship, Suhrawardi
proposed the unification of discursive mode of thinking (bahth),
represented primarily by the Peripatetics, and realized or tasted knowledge (dhawq)
exemplified by the metaphysician Sufis (‘urafa’). For Suhrawardi, the
ideal philosopher or sage is the one who combines analytical thinking and
intuitive knowledge, through which one reaches illumination (ishraq).
In his grand synthesis, Sadra
incorporates Suhrawardi’s model and takes it even a step further by
articulating the unity of revelation (qur’an), demonstration (burhan)
and metaphysical or realized knowledge (‘irfan). He subjects nearly all
of the major problems of traditional philosophy to the triple scrutiny of
Qur’anic teachings, logical analysis and intuitive knowledge. In culling
material from the four major intellectual perspectives, Sadra does not create a
syncretic synthesis but rather integrates them into a coherent whole under the
rubric of his transcendent wisdom. This is where Sadra becomes particularly
important in the history of Islamic thought as the tradition of integrating the
revealed and human knowledge reaches a remarkable peak in his system.
Sadra’s synthetic perspective leads him to the unity of what is called
the transmitted and intellectual sciences. The transmitted sciences (al-‘ulum
al-naqliyyah) comprise such disciplines as Qur’anic commentary (tafsir),
hadith, and grammar (nahw), and their methodology is based on the
literal transmission and analysis of the text under investigation. In contrast
to the intellectual sciences, the study of transmitted sciences does not
require rational analysis because the subject matter is not constructed like a
philosophical or logical problem even though one can certainly develop a
systematic discourse about it.
The study of Arabic grammar, for
instance, is based on the simple fact that we learn it from others, and there
is no logical reason, or lack thereof, for the use of Arabic verbs at the
beginning rather than at the end of a sentence. The only source to which we can
turn for an explanation is those who have used the Arabic language in this way,
and the justification for this is to be found nowhere other than in the
subject-matter itself.
By contrast, the intellectual
sciences (al-‘ulum al-naqliyyah) are based not on imitation (taqlid)
or mere transmission but on rational and intellectual analysis, which includes
metaphysical intuition. The justification of a philosophical argument derives
not from the received authority of a text or person but from its cogency and
rationality. In this sense, the intellectual sciences require an intellectual
effort or exertion (ijtihad) on the part of the philosopher or simply
the seeker of knowledge. It would be absurd, for instance, to cite the
authority of one’s teacher or a text to prove that two plus two is four or that
A cannot be both A and non-A at the same time. In a broad sense, the aim of
this methodological distinction between the transmitted and intellectual
sciences, whose earliest formulation goes back to Muslim philosophers before
Sadra, is to show the complementary nature of the two kinds and sources of
knowledge, viz., the knowledge sent by God through His books and messengers and
the knowledge acquired by the unaided human intellect. Sadra insists on this
point throughout his writings both in the field of transmitted and intellectual
sciences. In fact, it would not be a stretch to say that Sadra is the most
notable Muslim philosopher to have devoted a large number of works to the study
of the Qur’an. This is especially true when we consider his Qur’anic
commentaries that take up a conspicuous space in his corpus, and his
hermeneutics of Qur’anic exegesis, which presents an interesting blend of
purely Qur’anic terminology with a strictly philosophical vocabulary.
Sadra’s unifying perspective runs
through his entire corpus, and it is against this background that we should
understand Sadra’s insistence on maintaining the close relationship that
traditional thought had established between philosophy and sciences of nature.
To translate this into the language of contemporary philosophy of science, the
context of justification and the context of experiment were kept intimately
close to one another, and this has prevented the separation of metaphysical and
ethical considerations from the operation of physical sciences. This approach
enables Sadra to move easily between physics and metaphysics. In fact, his
natural philosophy is an application of his metaphysical principles to the
order of nature.
Sadra was certainly not a scientist
in the ordinary sense of the term. His writings on cosmology and nature,
however, present one of the most articulate examples of natural philosophy. But
it is extremely important to keep in mind the centrality of Sadra’s ontology
for his natural philosophy as he reformulates nearly all branches of knowledge
in the light of the all-inclusive reality of being (wujud). Sadra
defines wujud, which can be translated as both existence and being
depending on the context in which it is used, as the principal reality by which
everything exists. As opposed to the views of the Illuminationists and the
theologians, he defends the primacy or principiality of being (asalat
al-wujud) against quiddity (mahiyyah), and defines it as the source
of all existence and intelligibility. In contrast to the mental representation
of being (mafhum al-wujud) which is abstract, conceptual, and static,
the reality of being (haqiqat al-wujud) does not lend itself to mental
analysis (i’tibar ‘aqli) except as a second order concept. But once
formulated as an abstract concept, wujud no longer remains as a reality in
concreto which defies all conceptualization.
It is within the context of this
dynamic picture of being that Sadra introduces the most central concept of his
natural philosophy, viz., substantial motion (al-harakat al-jawhariyyah).
The doctrine of substantial motion is based on the premise that everything in
the order of nature, including celestial spheres, undergoes substantial change
and transformation as a result of the self-flow (fayd) and penetration
of being (sarayan al-wujud) which gives every concrete individual entity
its share of being. In contrast to Aristotle and Ibn Sina who had accepted
change only in four categories, i.e., quantity (kamm), quality (kayf),
position (wad’) and place (‘ayn), Sadra defines change as an
all-pervasive reality running through the entire cosmos including the category
of substance (jawhar).
His argument for introducing change
into substance, which was not possible to explain within the confines of
Aristotelian physics, is that change in the accidental qualities of physical
bodies has to come from their substance because accidents can not have
existence independent of the substance to which they belong. In fact, every
accidental change is the result of a deeper change/motion (istihala, harakah)
that takes place in the very substance and constitution of things. In both the
accidental and essential processes of change, physical bodies undergo a
substantial change. This holds true even for cases where we do not observe
essential transformation in the physical constitution of things such as in the
case of positional movement, i.e., when the object A moves from point B to
point C. Sadra calls this kind of motions accidental and describes it as
movement-in-movement (harakah fi harakah). In a nutshell, every
accidental change, which is immediately available to our five senses, can be
traced back to substantial motion. Seen under this light, substantial motion or
change is an intrinsic feature of things, and since every positional movement,
which we take to be the measure of time, is ultimately a modulation of
substantial movement, time should be redefined in tandem with the existential
transformation of physical substances. Once we take this step, we realize, as
Sadra and his commentators have noted, that time is a dimension of physical
bodies. Furthermore, since the celestial spheres, whose circular movement the
Peripatetics had taken to be the ultimate measure of time, are themselves
subject to substantial motion, we can no longer turn to them for the measure of
linear time.
Sadra applies this theory of
substantial motion to a number of metaphysical problems including the
generation of the soul and temporal origination of the world. He defines the
human soul as a being whose origination is bodily but whose subsistence is
spiritual. To use Sadra’s words, the soul is a bodily or material substance in
its origination and spiritual in its subsistence (jismaniyyat al-huduth
ruhaniyyah al-baqa’). Through substantial transformation and perfection,
the soul reaches a point where it leaves the domain of material existence and
enters into the abode of spiritual reality. The process of essential change
continues until the soul becomes completely separate from the limitations of
bodily existence. Substantial motion of the soul, however, continues even after
the soul has left its bodily home as the degrees of perfection for it are
potentially infinite until it becomes re-united with its Divine origin.
In a similar fashion, Sadra explains
the temporal origination of the world on the basis of substantial motion. If
everything in the cosmos is in constant change, that is, in a different mode of
being at every moment, then it is always different from what it was before and
will be different from what it would be at the next instance of its
existentiation. This suggests that every physical being is preceded by
non-existence (masbuq bi’l-‘adam), and such an order of being, taken as
a whole, can neither subsist by itself nor, in contrast to the Peripatetics,
could be eternal (qadim). Thus the world of physical existence is
temporally originated and renewed at every successive phase of its existential
transformation. For Sadra, what makes this existential transformation possible
is not an external agent that acts upon the world of nature antecedently but
what he calls nature (tabi’ah) in a particularly Sadrean sense. Nature
as defined by Sadra signifies the immediate cause of movement and
transformation in physical bodies. In this sense, nature is the principle of
change as an essential quality of things. Sadra, however, hastens to add that
nature is also the principle of continuity and permanence because the
preservation of natural forms, in spite of the ceaseless change of the natural
realm, is a constant phenomenon in nature. Thus, in contrast to the modern
image of nature as only the abode of change, Sadra construes nature as an order
of being that carries in itself both the principle of change and permanence.
This dynamic view of being and cosmos
leads Sadra to a world-picture that is thoroughly teleological, i.e., having a
purpose (telos, ghayah). Sadra states in the Asfar that
chance or accidental coincidences (ittifaqiyyat) are not constant in
nature. On the contrary, everything in nature is directed towards a ‘universal
purpose’ (aghrad kulliyah), and this is nothing but the existential
actualization and perfection of the cosmos. The ever-continuous
‘intensification’ (tashaddud) of the order of nature comes about as a
result of the self-effusion (fayd) of Being, which is, so to speak,
God’s Face turned to the world of relative existence. In this regard, it would
be fair to say that the world displays a dual nature: on one hand, it subsists
by and is utterly dependent upon the Command of God (kun, esto). On the
other hand, God has created the world in such a way that it possesses a
remarkable regularity and constancy. It is thus through the binary relationship
of these two ‘agencies’ that Sadra seeks to establish a harmonious relationship
between the vertical and horizontal lines of causation. The Islamic
occasionalists, especially the Ash’arites, had come to the radical conclusion
that they had to accept vertical causality at the expense of horizontal
causality in order to make space for miracles. Sadra, being acutely aware of
occasionalism’s intrinsic difficulties and inconsistencies, defines the two
lines of causality as in a perfect accord in that God sustains the world of
creation in such a way that it is bound to be causal and rule-governed in the
most concrete sense of the term. The great chain of being (da’irat al-wujud),
of which Sadra has given one of the most sophisticated expositions in the
history of philosophy, is thus construed as a unified structure that allows for
a self-regulating dynamism on the one hand, and the perpetual presence of the
creative act of God, on the other.
Selected Bibliography
Açıkgenç, Alparslan, Being
and Existence in Sadra and Heidegger, (Kuala Lumpur:
I.S.T.A.C., 1993).
‘Alawi, Hadi, Nazariyyat
al-Harakah al-Jawhariyyah ‘ind al-Shirazi, (Beirut: 1983).
Ashtiyani, Sayyid Jalal al-Din, Sharh-i
hal wa aray-i falsafi-i Mulla Sadra (Mashhad, 1382/1962).
Avens, Robert, “Theosophy of Mulla
Sadra”, Hamdard Islamicus 9:3
(1986), 3-30.
‘Awn, Faysal Badir, Fikrat
al-Tabi’ah fi’l-Falsafat
al-Islamiyyah,
(Syria: University of ‘Ayn al-Shams, 1980).
Badur, Salman, “al-Harakat al-jawhariyya
fi falsafati Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi”, Dirasat ‘ulum al-insaniyyah
wa’l-turath 11: 4
(1984), 29-40.
---------, “Mitafiziqa al-wujud fi
falsafati Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi”, Dirasat ‘ulum al-insaniyyah wa’l-turath 13: 4 (1986), 215-235.
Corbin, Henry, “Le Thème de la
résurrection chez Mollâ Sadra Shirazi (1050/1640) commentateur de Suhrawardi
(586/1191)” in Studies in Mysticism and Religion Presented to Gershom G.
Scholem (Jerusalem, 1967), pp. 71-115.
--------, “Mollâ Sadra Shirazi” in En
Islam iranien, (Paris, 1972), Vol. IV, pp. 52-122.
Craig, William L, The Cosmological Argument from
Plato to Leibniz (London: Macmillan Press,1980).
Dhanani, Alnoor, The Physical Theory of Kalam
Atoms, Space, and Void in Basrian Mu’tazili Cosmology, (Leiden: E.
J. Brill, 1994).
Fakhry, Majid, Islamic Occasionalim and its
Critique by Averroes and Aquinas (London: George Allen & Unwin
Ltd., 1958).
Izutsu,
Toshihiko, The Concept and Reality of Existence (Tokyo: The Keio Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, 1971).
---------,‘The Concept of Perpetual
Creation in Islamic Mysticism and Zen Buddhism’ in Mélanges Offerts a Henry Corbin ed. S. H. Nasr, (Tehran: 1977).
Nasr, Seyyed Hossein, Mulla Sadra
and His Transcendent Philosophy (Tehran: 1997, 2nd edition).
--------, “Mulla Sadra: His
Teachings” in A History of Islamic Philosophy ed. by S. H. Nasr and O.
Leaman (London: Routledge, 1996), Vol. I, pp. 643-662.
--------, “Mulla Sadra as a Source
For the History of Islamic Philosophy” Islamic Studies, 3:3 (1964),
309-314.
--------, “Mulla Sadra” The
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards (Editor in chief), Vol.5 (New
York: The Macmillan Company and The Free Press, 1967), pp. 411-413.
--------, (ed.) Mulla Sadra
Commemoration Volume (Tehran, 1380/1960).
--------, “Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi
(Mulla Sadra)” in A History of Muslim Philosophy, ed. M. M. Sharif, (Wiesbaden:
1962).
Rahman, Fazlur, ‘Mulla Sadra’ Encyclopedia
of Religion, Vol. 10, (New
York: 1987), 149-153.
--------, ‘Mir Damad’s Concept of Huduth
Dahri: A Contribution to the Study of God-World Relationship Theories in
Safavid Iran’ Near Eastern Studies 39
(1980), 139-151.
---------, The
Philosophy of Mulla
Sadra, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1975).
--------, 'Essence and Existence in Avicenna'
Mediaeval
and Renaissance Studies, IV (1958), 1-16
Sadr al-Din al-Shirazi (Mulla Sadra), al-Hikmat al-muta'aliyah
fi'l- asfar al-'aqliyyah al-arba'ah,
ed. By Muhammad Rida al-Muzaffar (Beirut: Dar Ihya’ al-Turath al-’Arabi, 1981)
9 Vols.
---------, al-Shawahid
al-rububiyyah fi manahij al-sulukiyyah, ed. by Sayyid Jalal al-Din
Ashtiyani in 2 volumes together with Sabziwari’s commentary (Mashhad, 2nd
edition, 1981).
---------, Kitab al-Masha'ir, ed. by H. Corbin as Le
Livre des Penetrations métaphysiques (Tehran: 1982). This edition
includes the French and the Persian translation of the Masha'ir along
with Corbin's introduction and commentary.
---------, Rasa’il Falsafi, ed. S. J. Ashtiyani (Qom:
Markaz-i Intisharat Daftar-i Tablighat-i Islami, 1362).
---------, al-Hikmat al-‘arshiyyah
translated by James Winston Morris as The Wisdom of the Throne An Introduction to
the Philosophy of Mulla
Sadra (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1981).
---------, al-Mazahir al-ilahiyyah fi asrar al-‘ulum al-kamaliyyah, ed. by Sayyid Muhammad Khamanei (Tehran: Bunyad-i Hikmat-i Islami-yi Sadra, 1378).
