Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 186 - To Be, Continued - Mulla Sadra on Existence.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, To Be Continued, Mula Sadra on Existence It may seem obvious that the greatest philosophers are the ones who break completely with the ideas of their predecessors. We might call this the Descartes syndrome, in honor of Descartes' claim to be starting from scratch, throwing aside the accumulated arguments of scholastic philosophy. But that's not what I think. I think that the great philosophers are, often as not, those who bring together and rethink the ideas they find in the previous tradition. Their originality consists in creative engagement, not creative destruction. They realize that synthesis is not a sin, that taking the historical long view is no shortcoming. It takes a great mind to weave together the loose strands of numerous intellectual traditions. We can observe this with Plato, who drew on all the currents of Greek science, literature, and philosophy up to his day, with Plotinus, whose so-called neo-Platonism was in large part new because of its novel combination of themes from middle Platonism, Stoicism, and Aristotelianism, in Latin Christendom with that great synthesist Thomas Aquinas, and by the way with Descartes, who owes far more to the scholastic tradition than he would like you to believe. In the later Islamic world, there is one figure who stands undisputed as master of the metaphysical medli, Mulla Sadr, whose lifespan actually overlapped with that of Descartes. Like the other thinkers I've just mentioned, Sadr was a thinker powerful enough to reshape earlier philosophical currents retrospectively. Before him, illuminationism, Sufism, and later Avicennian philosophy did frequently cross paths, but usually remained distinct streams. Once these streams flowed together in the oceanic mind of Mulla Sadr, they suddenly could seem to be mere tributaries, finding at last the single destination that had been intended all along. This isn't to say that Sadr's contemporaries or immediate successors recognized him as a kind of new Avicenna, an indispensable thinker to whom they would all be forced to respond, but he was certainly influential in subsequent generations, and no philosopher of the Islamic world lives on in the modern day as vividly as Sadr, especially in Iran, where his works continue to be the subject of intense study. Scholars beyond Iran too have made him the most well-researched philosopher of the later Eastern traditions. Admittedly, this isn't saying much given how little attention this whole period of philosophy has received. Sadr's actual name was Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Shirazi. The phrase Sadr al-Din, which is the basis of his usual sobriquet, Mulla Sadr, is an honorific title meaning master of religion. As the last bit of his proper name, Ashirazi, indicates, he hailed from our new favorite philosophical city Shiraz, where he was born in the year 1571 or 1572. That's the year 979 in the Islamic calendar if you're keeping score at home. It's said that he was born after his father prayed to God to send him a pious child in return for which the father would donate a large amount to charity. He definitely got his money's worth. Despite the connection to Shiraz, Sadr was not a student in the direct line of al-Dawani or the Dashtakis. In fact, it seems that the study of philosophy at Shiraz had died down a bit by the time of Sadr. He certainly knew the works of the earlier Shirazi thinkers, whom he mentions often in his writings. But after a period of self-teaching, he decided to leave the city in search of a master. He wound up in the city of Kazwin, which hosted the court of the great Safavid Shah Abbas. This gave him access to the two leading intellectuals of the day, both of whom I mentioned last time, Shaykh Bahai and Mir Damaad. With Shaykh Bahai, the young Sadr studied the traditional Islamic sciences, that is, law, Quran commentary, and prophetic reports or hadith. Mir Damaad instructed him in philosophy, and may also have been one of his teachers in Sufism. Soon enough, Sadr the student became Sadr the teacher. He went back to his home city, but found Shiraz to be unfriendly. He complained bitterly about the criticisms he faced here. This episode has often been exaggerated by historians, in keeping with what we might call the Socrates Syndrome, our deep-seated and rather perverse desire to believe that great philosophers must face persecution and repression. As usual, at least in the Islamic world, there isn't much reason to suspect a Socrates Syndrome in Sadr's case. Still, he was stung by the hostility he faced there and left before long. Thereafter, he moved around quite a bit, not least in the direction of Mecca. He made the Hajj no fewer than seven times, dying in the midst of his final pilgrimage in the mid-1630s or possibly in 1640. Before then, he was made head of a madrasa back in Shiraz. Here he taught the same range of subjects he had learned from his own teachers, Shaykh Bahayi and Mir Damaad. It was also here that he finished writing his philosophical masterpiece, whose complexity and brilliance is only enhanced by the fact that its title could easily have been the name of a Motown singing group—The Four Journeys. Sadr's choice of title connects the work to the Sufi tradition. Ibn Arabi II had spoken of four journeys, naming God as the guide for those who travel from Him, to Him, in Him, and through Him. And more recently, the language of four journeys had been used by the elder Dashtaki. The metaphor of a journey is appropriate to Sadr's philosophy, which as we will see centers on the dynamism and motion of all things. The first of the four journeys is the one that was already undertaken by Aristotle. We begin with what is familiar to us and work our way up towards divine first principles. But Sadr's journeys unfold along a two-way street. Created things come forth from God like rays from a shining light so that the path back to the divine is not just a scientific enterprise but a return home. The talk of shining lights may put us in mind of the illuminationist tradition inaugurated by Suhrvādī and this is not misleading. Mūla Sadr takes over many ideas from Suhrvādī, though he has a fundamental disagreement with him on the issue of existence, as we'll see shortly. Of course philosophers had long found it enlightening to use the metaphor of illumination. We can cast our gaze back as far as the metaphor of the sun in Plato's Republic and its use by later ancient Platonists. These Platonists were another main source of inspiration for Sadr, who like other intellectuals of the Safavid period was fascinated by texts like The Theology of Aristotle, which he cites frequently. As we know, the theology is in fact an Arabic version of the writings of Plotinus, the founder of Neoplatonism, but he is happy to cite from it as evidence for the views of Aristotle. Sadr's conviction that all things proceed from a divine first principle and return to it is one example of his deep debt to Neoplatonism. His fascination with such antique sources didn't prevent him from responding to more recent thinkers though. In the four journeys, he often gives us a context for his own ideas by going through and refuting the positions of other philosophers in the Avicenna tradition. Avicenna himself is a nearly constant presence, and Sadr takes time to explain and critique the ideas of authors like Fakhradin Arazi, Atuzzi, and Aldawani. In fact, along the way, the four journeys offers a summary and commentary for the philosophical movements we've been considering in recent episodes, much as Aristotle surveyed the Presocratics in Plato. But if Sadr has plenty of guides for his philosophical journey, he is also exploring new territory. His originality centers above all on one fundamental issue, existence. As we've seen, especially in episode 177, arguments over existence had been raging for centuries before Sadr came along. Sadr himself draws a contrast between two basic positions. On the one hand, there are those thinkers who accept what he calls the primacy of essence. These are people who think that existence is a judgment of the mind. Out in the world, we find only things, like a giraffe, without finding the existence of the giraffe as a further item that itself must exist. As we know, this was the position of Suhrvādī, among others. It's a bit misleading for Sadr to use the phrase primacy of essence, since in fact Suhrvādī thought that essences too are mental constructs. But what Sadr means is clear enough. Suhrvādī and like-minded philosophers hold that there are real things outside the mind, but no real existence that would belong to those things. This was also the view adopted by Sadr's own teacher, Meer-dāmād, and accepted by Sadr himself early in his career. But you don't have to be as tall as a giraffe to grow out of things, and Sadr, in due course, left behind the primacy of essence to embrace the primacy of existence. He associates this position especially with mystical authors like Ibn Arabi and Al-Kunawī. Primacy of existence means that existence, or being, does have reality outside the mind. In fact, following the lead of the philosophical Sufis, Sadr is happy to say that there is nothing real apart from existence. Despite adopting a diametrically opposed view to Suhrvādī on the primacy of essence, or existence, Sadr makes enthusiastic use of illuminationist language to express this idea. Existence, he says, just is light, and we can envision all of reality as rays spreading forth from a divine source. God is pure existence and pure light, whereas other things are always limited in their existence or elimination. So, like Suhrvādī, Sadr describes created things as suffering from darkness. Like the Sufis, he says that such things are compromised by non-being and privation. They fail to attain the perfect existence that belongs to God alone. And, like Avasana, he says that this is in part because these things are contingent, whereas God is necessary. The primacy of existence is developed at great length in the four journeys, but also in other works by Sadr, for instance a handy little text called the Wisdom of the Throne, which you'll be glad to know has been translated into English. The first section of this treatise provides a nice introduction to his metaphysics, beginning with the difference between God and other things. God is existence itself, whereas other things have various kinds of lack or limitation mingled with their existence. As Al-khūna we had put it, using more terminology that will be borrowed by Sadr, things other than God are in some way specified, whereas God is the existence that is simple, infinite, and unrestricted. This idea in hand, Sadr is able to provide what must be one of the quickest ever proofs of God's existence. It is simply obvious, he says, that there is existence. As Avasana too had observed, existence is immediately obvious to the mind. And God is nothing but pure existence, so there is a God. Q as Euclid might say, ED. If that went a bit too quickly for your taste, Sadr has a further point to add, which is that anything with limited or restricted existence needs some further thing that restricts it. So, if we imagine that all things are marked by some form of non-being or darkness, then we would wind up with an infinite regress. Only simple existence can stop the chain of limited things and limiting factors. All this may sound rather sketchy. It will make a bit more sense though once we see how Sadr wants to fill it out. Like the ancient Neoplatonists, he understands the first principle to be completely simple and an infinite source of all being. Sadr envisions a chain of beings at increasing distance from God, who is the source of their illumination and existence. The lowest entities are mere physical bodies, followed by more perfect bodies like those of animals and humans, then souls, and between the souls and God, an intelligible world. A note of agreement with Sukhravadi is struck when Sadr explains the nature of this intelligible realm. Like his illustrious illuminationist predecessor, Sadr thinks that Avasana and other followers of Aristotle were wrong to reject the existence of Platonic forms. The familiar bodily things we see around us are nothing but images of these higher forms or paradigms. With his distinctive flair of refusing ideas from different sources, Sadr goes on to say that these forms are residing in God's very essence. They thus have the same status as the divine names mentioned in the Qur'an, and so celebrated by Ibn Arabi. Sadr agrees with his illustrious Sufi predecessor that God's essence remains completely simple and without qualification, so that the divine names are relations. God's initial manifestation to the created world. In an effort to capture the way that the paradigms begin the process of God's unfolding his divinity out into a universe, Sadr uses the phrase nafas ar-ahman, or breath of the merciful, yet another borrowing from Ibn Arabi. With all this borrowing going on, devotees of the Descartes syndrome may be downright disappointed. Is this all just a patchwork of old ideas? A bit of Neoplatonic precession and reversion, a few of Suhraradi's Platonic forms, alongside motifs from Avicenna and philosophical Sufism? We might think it's like a polyester suit, impressively synthetic but not exactly trend setting. But reserve judgment for a moment, because we're finally in a position to appreciate Sadr's most characteristic and significant philosophical move in the long-running debate about existence. He uses an old word to express his new idea, tashqiq. The term is already found in Avicenna and was deployed more emphatically by At-Huzi. Scholars writing about Mullah Sadr have translated tashqiq in various ways, systematic ambiguity, modulation, gradation, and intensification. The basic idea is that existence comes in various degrees. Here, Sadr is once again responding, this time critically, to Suhraradi. Suhraradi had imagined degrees of intensity within a certain essence, giving the example of black. All black things are black, but some are blacker than others. At the one end, you have your beloved but badly faded Iron Maiden t-shirt, bought in the 1970s. At the other end, the sense of humor expressed in a particularly morbid joke about ravens told by a goth whose favorite song is Paint It Black by the Rolling Stones. Sadr proposes that we can likewise think of the descent of all things from God as occurring along a decreasing scale of intensity. But this time, the variation in intensity will concern existence rather than blackness or any other essence. This makes Suhraradi's imagery of light and darkness particularly apt for expressing Sadr's metaphysics. Things fade in their degree of illumination as they go forth and away from God. Or if you prefer a moister analogy, think of the river imagery with which I began this episode. Existence pours forth from God, and in a metaphysical version of the trickle-down effect, what is at first a single gushing torrent divides into many smaller rivulets. Whichever metaphor you prefer, lamp or damp, it will nicely capture Sadr's conviction that all of creation is continuous, an unbroken flow that goes forth from its divine source. In holding that all of existence remains connected to God, that to be is continued, if you will, Sadr again signals his agreement with the tradition of philosophical Sufism inaugurated by Ibn Arabi and pursued by authors like al-Kunawi. But by emphasizing that existence varies in intensity, he avoids a problem that had always faced philosophical Sufis. When you read the treatises of Ibn Arabi and al-Kunawi, or for that matter the poetry of Arumi, you might easily get the impression that the difference between created things and God is a mere illusion. The mystic is someone who rises above this illusion to grasp what these thinkers called the unity of existence, in Arabic waḥtat al-ujūd. Critics of the philosophical Sufis, like Ibn Taymiyya, rather unfairly accuse them of equating created things, such as themselves, with the mighty God who should be recognized as being exalted above all things. Mulla Sadr wanted to embrace the mystical insight that God is intimately present to all He creates. As the Qur'an puts it, He is closer to man than His jugular vein. But he was also sensitive to the sort of objection pressed by Ibn Taymiyya, so he wanted to be absolutely clear that he was not lapsing into monism by asserting the absolute unity of everything with God. The problem is especially acute for Sadr because of a point he takes over from another of his major sources, Suhrvādī. Earlier in this episode, I recalled how Suhrvādī responded to Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence by denying that the distinction applies to real things out in the world. Rather, we distinguish essence and existence only at the level of our mental judgments. Obviously, Sadr disagrees with this when it comes to existence. For him, there is nothing more real than existence, in fact nothing real other than existence. But when it comes to essence, he thinks Suhrvādī is like a man with $10 hidden in his shoe, right on the money. Essences are nothing but concepts we use to differentiate one thing from another. There are good reasons to insist on this, such as the ones already given by Suhrvādī. If I say that essences are really out there in the world, like metaphysical light switches waiting to be turned on, as I put it in an earlier episode, then these essences must in some sense exist before they receive existence. The conceptualist understanding of essences Sadr finds in the illuminationist tradition helps him avoid that absurdity. But now, we risk falling into a different problem pointed out by Fakhra Dinarāzī. Without real essences, there will be no way to differentiate one existent thing from another, and all of existence will lapse into a single unity. It's here that the idea of tashkīk, gradation or modulation, really comes into its own. It shows us how existence could in a sense be one, but without eliminating all differentiation. For even if there is nothing but existence, things do differ in terms of the intensity of their existence. All beings other than God have some admixture of non-being or privation, which is why they are lesser in existence than he is. But the variation in intensity is always gradual. If you'll pardon the expression, this is a metaphysics without any gaps, like the metaphysics of classical neoflatanism. In fact, it goes beyond mere gaplessness by eliminating even the boundaries that separate one sort of existence from another. Sure, the world seems to us to be divided up neatly with some things qualifying as humans and others as giraffes, but the rigid dividing lines are figments of our minds, not features of things out in the world. Out in the world, there is real difference, because of variation in intensity. That difference is indeed what gives rise to our different concepts. But where the conceptual essences have firmly drawn boundaries, the intensity of existence out in the world is continuous, like the color spectrum rather than a palette of individual color samples. This may all sound a bit too good to be true. Sadr is having his cake and eating it, able to enjoy the sublime taste offered by the Sufi's unity of existence without giving up Avicenna's fundamental contrast between divine, necessary existence and created contingent existence. The whole thing turns on the continuity of modulated or gradational existence, so a skeptical response would probably focus on attacking him here. The skeptic could start by complaining that Sadr's acceptance of platonic forms commits him to clear divisions between types of things. After all, Plato introduced his forms, in part, to explain just this fact that different things in the world around us fall into different types. But Sadr has another move he can make here, and I choose the word move quite deliberately. Not only does he think that all existence is marked by continuous variation in intensity, he also thinks that all existence is in constant motion. When we divide it up into essences, we are mentally imposing an artificially static interpretation on existence, a kind of freeze-frame snapshot of something that is in fact constantly changing. We're going to need another episode to get our heads around this idea, so go with the flow and join me for Mula Sadra on Substantial Motion. Next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.