Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 187 - Return to Sender - Mulla Sadra on Motion and Knowledge.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... Return to Sender. Mula Sadra on Motion and Knowledge. I think it must be pretty stressful being a shark. For one thing, all those teeth and no dental insurance. And then there's this business about having to keep moving at all times just to keep breathing. If sharks do find this constant motion vexing, then they have something in common with philosophers. One of the more troubling proposals made in early Greek philosophy was Heraclitus's idea that all things are in never-ending flux. When I looked at Heraclitus in one of the earliest podcast episodes, I claimed that this isn't really what he was trying to say, but it's how Plato and Aristotle understood him. They worried that if the flux doctrine is true, then nothing could ever be known. For knowledge to be possible, there must be stable objects with stable natures. Plato thought this could be guaranteed by postulating his forms, while Aristotle said that there is not just change, but something that undergoes change while remaining the same, as when one and the same shark survives even as it swims from one place to another or loses one of its many teeth. These responses to the flux doctrine were reasserted in subsequent centuries. Most thinkers agreed with Plato and Aristotle that reality is like a homeless horse, it needs something stable. But as Heraclitus observed, things change. Mula Sadra revived the notion of constant change, motion, or flux as part of his innovative theory of existence, which we started to look at last time. Let's get our teeth into Sadra's proposal by thinking again about that shark. For Aristotle, the shark is a substance, which among other things means that it is the sort of thing that can go from having one property to having another, contrary property. In fact, our word substance comes from a Latin translation of the Greek term osea. The translation was chosen to highlight the fact that substances stand under accidental properties. Everyone in the Aristotelian tradition agreed that things are changing pretty much constantly with respect to their accidents, for instance our shark who is gliding through the water off the coast of Florida and so changing its location. Underlying such accidental changes are substances, which provide stability. Admittedly, they too are generated and eventually destroyed, but as long as a substance exists it remains one and the same thing. Sadra, though, argued that everything we see is also changing constantly in respect of its substance. Like sharks, we are always on the move, and not just those of us who live in Finland. Sadra can point to some persuasive examples in his attempt to convince us that there is substantial motion, and not just accidental motion. Think of boiling water, he says. What we have here is an item that is gradually being transformed from water into steam. There is no sudden shift from one kind of substance to another. Even more compelling, consider the most central example of an Aristotelian substance, a living organism like a human being. If we think of a fetus developing in the womb, we have a case where the seed is transformed into an embryo and slowly takes on the form of a baby. Now, an Aristotelian might give some ground here and admit that the generation of a substance like a baby, or the transformation of water into steam, isn't instantaneous. There is no clear first moment where seed becomes infant, but the Aristotelian will stand firm by insisting that, once the baby has been produced, we have a stable substance. Sadra could reply by pointing to the constant change undergone by humans as they mature from infant to adult. That does seem to be a transformation at least as radical as the one undergone by a swimming shark or boiling water. It's just that we easily overlook most cases of substantial change because the changes are so gradual. Sadra thus has a reasonably good case for his idea that things can move, or change, in their substances. That won't be enough for him though. He actually wants to insist that everything is changing in its substance all the time. It is really this that makes him an heir of Heraclitus, and such a striking exception to the metaphysical obsession with stability handed down since classical times. Many things around us may seem to endure without alteration, but in fact nothing stands still. It's a message Sadra finds in the Quran, which states, When you see the mountains, you think they are stable, but they are fleeting, just like the clouds. Yet philosophical concerns, more than exegetical ones, drive him to insist on the universality of change. As we saw last time, Sadra believes that existence cascades forth from God like gradually diminishing light. There are no firm boundaries between things. Rather, things differ in terms of their intensity of existence. It is we who impose well-defined boundaries on this gradual and continuous reality, when we grasp things as having certain essences. This thing here is a hammer, that one over there, a hammerhead shark. This doctrine of tashqiq, the modulation or gradation of being, goes hand in hand with the doctrine of universal, substantial motion. After all, someone might object to Sadra that even if existence has a continuous range of intensity, each existent thing might still have a fixed and discrete nature, in other words a real essence. Think of Sadra's own example of colors. If you point at a given spot on a gradually shaded wheel, perhaps a nice sharkskin grey, you'll be pointing at a determinate color. The fact that there are very similar colors just to either side of it, slightly more blue in one direction, slightly less blue in the other, doesn't stop this grey color from being the color it is. And if you're waiting for me to make a 50 shades of grey joke, forget it. This is a family podcast. In the case of existence, the same objection would say that this thing here is a mature hammerhead shark. Admittedly, there are other very similar existence, like immature hammerhead sharks, but that doesn't prevent the shark from having a fixed nature or essence. Now though, with his doctrine of substantial motion in hand, Sadra can respond that the shark is not just infinitely close to very similar things in the intensity of its existence, it is also becoming one of those very similar things, for instance a very slightly more mature shark. Even if Damien Hirst comes along with a chainsaw and some formaldehyde, the shark will always be changing in its very substance. Again, we are not usually able to discern the changes because, like the differences in the intensity of existence at any one time, the transformation is typically very gradual. That is why it is so easy, indeed inevitable, for us to undertake an even more conceptual version of what Damien Hirst did with his shark, imposing cuts upon a continuous thing and suspending it in mental formaldehyde by considering it in terms of a sharply defined essence. In reality though, things are continuous in every way, blurry at all possible edges, at any given time because of the gradation of existence, and across time because of constant change. What inspired Mula Sadra to devise this radical new metaphysical picture? The answer lies at least partially with his debt to Neoplatonism. Plotinus and his heirs had envisioned the universe in terms of precession and reversion, a pouring forth of all things from a divine source, and then a return to sender as these things strive to reunite with their principle. In fact, the idea of change within substance was already pioneered by some later Neoplatonists to understand the fundamental transformation undergone by soul as it inclines towards the body. Sadra reinvents this idea and puts it to a more optimistic use to describe the way all existing things strive to return to God. But among these existing things it is of course humans that interest Sadra most. So how exactly do we change in order to, as the Quran puts it, return to our Lord? The answer is knowledge. Perhaps no other kind of change interests Sadra so much as the transformation involved in coming to know something. This may surprise you, given that I keep saying that for Sadra we think about things by imposing falsely determinate essences on an indeterminate reality. But it's a rare philosopher who has nothing nice to say about knowledge, and Sadra is no exception. In fact, his two signature doctrines, the gradation of being and substantial change, converge again in his theory of knowledge. For Sadra, real knowledge is not a mere relation to something outside as might happen in sense perception. Rather, my coming to know a thing means that I myself must change in order actually to become that thing. Here, Sadra is reviving a proposal made by the Greek Neoplatonist Porphyry. In a work that is lost to us, but was known in Arabic, Porphyry has suggested that when we have knowledge our minds literally become identical to the things that they know. This was mocked by Avicenna, who pointed out the absurdity of saying that two distinct things could ever become identical. With his penchant for retrieving the ideas of late antiquity, Sadra comes to Porphyry's defense. Not only are things changing all the time, but sometimes they change to become identical with other things. How can this happen? Not obviously because we receive a representation or impression from the thing we know, as when the eye or memory registers an image of a shark swimming in its tank. Nor by abstracting a universal essence from that image, which would apply to all sharks. These ideas had been suggested by various of Sadra's predecessors. But he prefers an idea pioneered by Suhrvādī, according to which I know something when it is intimately present to me. Knowing a shark doesn't mean that the shark is physically present to me. If it did, I'd suggest we stick to knowing giraffes, much less dangerous. Rather, knowledge involves a two-fold transformation, in which both the thing known and the thing that knows change to become one and the same. This means that the knowing soul has to take the shark presented to it in sense experience, preferably from a safe distance, and conceive an intelligible version of the shark within itself. Thus, knowledge is not a passive process, like receiving an image, or a negative process, like abstraction. Rather, it's an active process of achieving unity with something else, at a higher, more intense level of existence, namely the level of existence appropriate to intelligible things. The reason it is more intense is that the so-called dark, material aspects of the things we know have been left behind. When I know the shark, the shark's body is not in my mind, only the idea of the shark. Even though this is not a theory about abstraction, it may still sound rather abstract. Perhaps it will help if we recall the close connection that Sukhravādī already drew between, on the one hand, my knowing something else by its presence to me, and on the other hand, my knowledge of my own self. For Śādra, there is really no distinction between these two things at all. For me to know the shark is for me to make myself into the idea of the shark, and thus to engage in a particularly shark-flavored form of self-knowledge. This solves a troubling anomaly in Avicenna's theory of knowledge. For all his creativity and independence of mind, Avicenna thought more or less along Aristotelian lines when he tried to understand human knowledge. He talked of abstracting forms from the images we encounter through sense experience. But then, he noticed that there was this special case of self-knowledge. Even the flying man in Avicenna's famous thought experiment, only just created in mid-air and without any access to his senses, can know that he exists. Avicenna seems to have cherished the notion that self-knowledge is a very different kind of thing from other kinds of knowledge, but it's actually rather perplexing. How can it be that one and the same mind is capable of two such different kinds of knowing, and what do the two have to do with one another? For Sadr, these problems vanish, as all knowledge is revealed to be self-knowledge. And, appropriately given his metaphysics, it gets even better. Sadr can solve another vexed issue in Avicenna by applying his analysis of knowledge to God himself. As we've seen numerous times, one of Avicenna's most notorious philosophical claims was that God does not know particular things as such, but only universally. Sadr can now say quite easily that God knows everything, because all existence is immediately present to him, and knowledge is nothing other than presence. Why is all existence immediately present to him? Good question, but Sadr has a good answer. As we know from last time, God just is unrestricted existence. So, everything, insofar as it exists, is a manifestation of God, and God is to that extent identical to each thing. Whereas we must give things intelligible existence within our souls, God already has all things within himself at an even higher level of existence, indeed at the highest, most pure level of existence possible. Again sounding like a Neoplatonist, Sadr remarks that a simple reality is all things, and that the higher a principle is, the more things it will contain within itself. To put the point in illuminationist terms, God is the light within all things, and a light that is fully present to itself. Though there is indeed plenty of Neoplatonism and illuminationism here, we shouldn't overlook the relevance of another ism for Sadr's theory, Sufism. As I've said, on his theory, each thing is just a manifestation of God, since God is the existence within that thing. For this reason, in a sense we are, usually unwittingly, knowing God every time we know anything. For we are getting a glimmer of the blinding light that is his existence. Thus, Sadr describes the things around us as veils for the divine, since they distract us from God, and he uses the traditional Sufi word kashf, or unveiling, to describe the process of knowledge. In knowing those things, we are, after all, bringing them to a higher level of existence that is closer to God by making them intelligible for and in ourselves. Ultimately, of course, this process could culminate in the knowledge of pure existence itself, which is to say knowledge of God himself. That is the sort of experience afforded to the mystic, for whom nothing remains veiled. Like some of the other philosophical Sufis and Sufi-influenced philosophers we've talked about, such as Al-Kunawi and Ibn Tufail, Sadr sees no opposition between philosophical demonstration and mystical union. Again, appropriately given his metaphysics, the two are instead continuous. The mystic enjoys the purest, most exalted form of knowledge, but this isn't the only kind of knowledge there is. The philosophical understanding of things, too, involves unveiling, even if the philosopher is still, to some extent, in the dark. I'll finish off this look at Sadr, where he would, perhaps, have wanted me to begin—the Quranic revelation. Though I have mentioned the Qur'an a few times in this and the past episode, I haven't perhaps conveyed the density of Islamic imagery and language in his works. To add just one more example, he compares the way we face God's existence to the way that Muslims face the Ka'aba in Mecca as they pray. Sadr wrote extensive commentaries on the Holy Book, an enterprise intimately connected with his philosophy. As many earlier Muslim theologians had emphasized, the Qur'an is God's Word, and hence an attribute of the divine. For Sadr, this means that it makes manifest the ultimate reality that is God Himself. Like other modes of existence, the Qur'an shows itself in the world at many levels. The actual verses that get recited and written down are only one manifestation of the single reality that is the Qur'an. So, while Sadr admits the usefulness of the many commentators who have focused on the vocabulary and grammar of the Qur'an, he sees their project as rather superficial. The more insightful interpreter of the revelation goes beyond the husk of its linguistic garb to the true meaning within. As he makes good on his promise, Sadr shows us how his metaphysics of intensity and unity can be applied to the task of scriptural exegesis. For instance, we've seen how God's existence contains within it all the things that come after Him. In the same way, the first or opening chapter of the Qur'an contains within its brief compass the entirety of the Qur'an. Its praise of God introduces us to the divine attributes that give us our best access to the unknowable unity of God Himself. An even higher degree of unity is found in the name Allah itself, which the Sufi tradition had considered to be an all-gathering name. Following this tradition, Sadr considers Allah to be God's proper name. It contains all the other divine attributes, just as the opening chapter contains the whole of the Qur'an and the Qur'an the whole of creation. If we turn to specific topics that may seem more theological, we again find that Sadr's philosophy operates in tandem with his exposition of the Qur'an and the prophetic sayings or hadith. A good example is his treatment of the afterlife. For Sadr, there can be no doubting that we do live on after death and that our afterlife will be bodily, not the purely intellectual existence envisioned by philosophers from al-Kindi to Avicenna and Iverroes. But as usual, Sadr puts a distinctive twist on this teaching. He employs an idea that is familiar to us from the illuminationists, that humans possess a powerful imaginative capacity tied to a kind of third realm between the sensible and intellectual planes of existence. He's also thinking here of Ibn Arabi who likewise gave the imagination a central place in his theory of human understanding and existence. Sadr thinks that we retain our imaginative power after death, and that we use it to project for ourselves a new body. This is not a crass physical body, the kind of thing a shark could get its teeth into, but its imaginary nature, contrary to what we might suppose, makes it more, rather than less, real. The bodies we will imagine for ourselves will be appropriate to the way we lived in this life, with the more beastly among us coming to see themselves in animal bodies. This is Sadr's version of the reincarnation theory, which we saw earlier illuminationists variously flirting with, accepting, and rejecting. In his hands it becomes a distinctively Sadrian idea, related to the varied intensity of existence. The subtle, or imaginary, body of the afterlife being a step towards the intelligible has a higher degree of existence than the bodies we have in this life. His doctrine of universal motion is relevant here too, since our transformation from physically embodied beings to imaginally embodied beings is simply another case of change in substance. Sadr is at pains to emphasize the agreement between such theories and the teachings of Islam, more specifically the Shiite Islam, ascendant under the Safavids. His proposal about the imaginary body safeguards traditional belief about resurrection, albeit in an unexpected way. And when he follows earlier illuminationists by affirming that the soul already existed before coming into the body, he confirms the point with quotations from the Shiite Imams. Between his Shiite faith, his allegiance to the illuminationist and Sufi traditions, his critical engagement with Avicennan philosophy and kalam, and the innovative doctrines he devised himself, Sadr has a lot of balls to keep in the air, but he never seems to drop them. For a thinker of this complexity and importance, we ourselves would be dropping the ball if we didn't take the opportunity to talk to an expert in his thought. Next time I'll say to Sadr scholar Sajjad Rizvi what Germans say when they see a shark, hi, as I welcome him to the History of Philosophy without any gaps.