 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, Bright Ideas, Illuminationism. What do you expect to happen to you after you die? Perhaps you do not believe in an afterlife and think there will be nothing at all. Or maybe you adhere to the traditional Christian options of hell, purgatory, and heaven, destinations that received the ultimate travel guides in Dante's Divine Comedy. I myself am hoping to be reincarnated. If I get to be a human again, I'd like to host another podcast, but without tackling such an enormous topic. I could do a series on dentistry, called The History of Gaps, without any philosophy. If I return as an animal, of course you know what I'd like to be, just in case I'm leaving behind a very long scarf for my future self. This idea that the soul will live on but pass into a different body is sometimes called transmigration, or metempsychosis, and it features now and again in the history of philosophy. We probably associate it especially with the Indian tradition, but also with the ancient Pythagoreans. It is usually taken as a sign of their influence that, in the Phaedo and other dialogues, Plato has Socrates speak of human souls being reborn into non-human animal bodies. In the Islamic world, the doctrine of transmigration was itself reborn among the illuminationists. Very few philosophers or theologians had embraced it before Sukhravadi, the founder of illuminationism, and even he was tentative on the subject. Invoking not only the sages of India and Greece, but also his own Persian forefathers, in his most important work The Philosophy of Illumination, Sukhravadi declared it at least possible that humans are reborn as animals. He did not, however, think that souls can go the other way, from animal into human bodies. As I mentioned in passing last time, he reproduced an argument against this possibility taken from Avicenna. The argument is that a suitably prepared human body automatically receives an emanated soul. If it received a transmigrating soul also, then it would wind up with two souls. And when it comes to souls, one is company for the body, but two is most definitely a crowd. In The Philosophy of Illumination, Sukhravadi seems sympathetic but unsure about transmigration of human souls into animal bodies, while in other works he argued against it. Yet he is consistent in rejecting the idea that the souls of humans existed before coming into human bodies. Despite or perhaps because of Sukhravadi's uncertainty about transmigration, the theme becomes a distinctive feature of the Isharaki, or illuminationist, tradition in philosophy. It takes its place alongside other Sukhravadian ideas, such as his doctrine of knowledge by presence, his rejection of Avicenna's essence-existence distinction as applying to things in reality outside the mind, and his critique of peripatetic logic on such topics as definition. Actually, though, later authors in the Islamic world, and for that matter historians of philosophy nowadays, are oversimplifying when they speak of an illuminationist school initiated by Sukhravadi. We can certainly point to several philosophers who were inspired by Sukhravadi in the generations after his death, and who wrote favorable commentaries on his works. We're going to look at three of them in this episode. But they are not direct successors or students of Sukhravadi, nor do they agree with him about everything. They actually draw on a wide range of sources, sometimes showing more sympathy to Avicenna than Sukhravadi had, and taking over arguments and positions from other critics of Avicenna, like Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi. This is especially true of our first so-called illuminationist Ibn Qamuna, who died in 1284. Ibn Qamuna was no straightforward follower of Sukhravadi, in fact not even a member of the same religion. We looked recently at the Jewish-Muslim convert Abul Barakat al-Baghdadi, and now we see again with Ibn Qamuna that Jews contributed to philosophy in the East, not only in Andalusia. Some sources allege that, like Abul Barakat, Ibn Qamuna converted to Islam. But it seems more likely that he remained a Jew to the end of his life. In works on Jewish religious topics, such as a treatise on the difference between Karaite and rabbinical Judaism, he draws on Andalusian thinkers like Judah Halevi and Maimonides. His philosophical works though are situated within the Eastern tradition of reflecting on Avicenna. Along with Fakhradin Ahrazi and other thinkers we'll be looking at in the coming episodes, he nicely represents what I have been calling Avicennan scholasticism. Ibn Qamuna carefully dissected and tested philosophical arguments for their demonstrative value and usually found them wanting. Though he is usually thought of as an illuminationist, he does not shy away from applying this rigorous strategy to Sukhravadi himself. An excellent example is this whole question of the soul. He dismisses all the arguments for and against transmigration as inadequate, suggesting that philosophy is incapable of resolving the issue. But he's more confident regarding the question of whether our souls existed before we were born. Against Sukhravadi, Ibn Qamuna answers this question positively. In this respect he adheres more closely to the position of Plato than Sukhravadi had done, even though Plato was supposedly a key source for Sukhravadi's illuminationist philosophy. Ibn Qamuna sets out an ambitious and complex proof to show that the soul must be eternal in the past as well as the future. In fact, his primary motivation in asserting that the soul has eternally pre-existed the body seems to be that he wants to safeguard the future immortality of the soul. If your soul only came into existence with your body, reasons Ibn Qamuna, then it is liable to go out of existence when your body dies. Ibn Qamuna's argument for the soul's pre-eternity depends on a fundamental idea of avicennas, which Ibn Qamuna articulates especially clearly. He introduces the terminology of a complete cause. This is a cause that guarantees its resulting effect. Clearly many of the things we call causes are not complete causes in this sense. My mentioning a giraffe or Buster Keaton may cause a wry smile among long-time podcast listeners who have heard the example many times before, but it is not a complete cause of the wry smile since the effect may well not follow, as when a listener is annoyed rather than amused by my always using the same examples. Putting the idea into more technical language that will help reveal the connection to avicenna, we can say that a complete cause necessitates its effect. Avicenna thought that God, the necessary existent, necessitates contingent things to exist so that they become, as he puts it, necessary through another. On this view, God's existence is a complete cause for all other things. He is sufficient for and guarantees whatever He causes whenever He exists, which is always. An obvious consequence is that the universe is eternal. Like someone listening to disco music, you may be wondering what any of this has to do with soul. The answer is that for Ibn Kamuna, God is the complete cause of the soul. Thus the soul is guaranteed to exist whenever God exists, which is to say, eternally. Ibn Kamuna is exceedingly proud of this argument, repeating it in several works and emphasizing that it is original with him. To get the demonstration to go through, he of course needs to show that God is the cause of the soul, something he achieves with a complicated proof that the soul is simple and that anything simple must have a simple cause. Along the way, he also has to defeat Avicenna's rival view that each soul needs a body in order to exist. For Avicenna, this followed from the need for one soul to be individuated from another. Since all souls are of the same kind, they would be identical to one another if they were not differentiated by their relations to different bodies. In other words, according to Avicenna, your soul got to be different from my soul because it came into existence when your body, and not my body, was prepared to receive a soul. Since Ibn Kamuna thinks our souls existed before they were in our bodies, he clearly can't follow Avicenna here. He instead explains how one soul differs from another by reviving a proposal from Abu'l-Barakat al-Baghdadi, who had suggested that souls are not really all of the same kind. Rather, just as a human soul would differ in species from the soul of a giraffe, so my soul differs in species from yours. That means they are different by their very nature, regardless of which, if any, body they might belong to. Ibn Kamuna develops his proof without ever claiming that he can define the soul, whether it is your soul, my soul, or a giraffe's soul. Indeed, in other contexts where he talks about the logical ideas of Avicenna and other so-called peripatetics, he is skeptical that anything can be perfectly defined. He adds that we can't even make positive universal judgments based on experience, since we never know whether a counterexample might come along in the future. As we can see from this, Ibn Kamuna's disagreement with Suhrabadi over the pre-existence of soul didn't stop him from upholding the illuminationist position on other topics. And from a historical point of view, he was a pivotal figure in the history of illuminationism. Though he would not have known Suhrabadi personally, he seems to have been instrumental in carrying illuminationist ideas from Syria, where Suhrabadi wrote his major works and was executed, to the eastern regions of the Islamic world. Without Ibn Kamuna, there might have been no illuminationist tradition at all. We can see his illuminationist sympathies emerging again in an interesting exchange of ideas with his contemporary, the Shiite Avicennan philosopher and astronomer Nasir ad-Din At-Tuzi, who we'll be covering in depth next time. In the exchange, Ibn Kamuna respectfully poses a series of puzzles to At-Tuzi. At one point he explicitly refers to Suhrabadi, and in general he gives the impression of wanting to test At-Tuzi, a leading peripatetic, to see whether he can deal with illuminationist criticisms. The correspondence between Ibn Kamuna and At-Tuzi illustrates an awkward feature of 13th century philosophy in the Islamic East. All the significant thinkers seem to have known each other, so it's hard for me to avoid mentioning figures I haven't yet covered properly. At-Tuzi in particular had all the other interesting philosophers of the time in his address book. He also corresponded with Sa'd al-Din Akhunawi, a leading philosophical Sufi we'll be considering later, and one of his students was a major illuminationist. This was Qutb ad-Din al-Shirazi. Like At-Tuzi himself, but of course unlike the Jewish Ibn Kamuna, Qutb ad-Din was a Shiite Muslim. Also like At-Tuzi, he was a multi-faceted thinker who wrote not only on philosophy but also on the sciences, producing sophisticated works on astronomy, medicine, and optics. From a young age he was trained as a Sufi, so mystical themes also make themselves felt in his philosophy. If stories concerning Qutb ad-Din's personality may be believed, he was apparently quite a guy, with a penchant for chess, music, and magic tricks, and a rather sharp sense of humor. When he heard that a Jewish colleague was writing a commentary on the Qur'an, and had offered an interpretation of the line, we have no knowledge except what you have taught us, Qutb ad-Din remarked, he should have stopped at the first half of the verse. But he was open-minded enough to make use of the works of his Jewish colleague Ibn Kamuna, alongside another illuminationist by the name of Shahrazuri. Both Shahrazuri and Qutb ad-Din wrote commentaries on Suhrabadi's major work, The Philosophy of Illumination. It seems that Qutb ad-Din was making liberal use of Shahrazuri's ideas in carrying on the illuminationist tradition. Again, we have here something more complex than a faithful exposition of Suhrabadi's case. Where Shahrazuri enthusiastically adopts the characteristic symbolic language of illumination, Qutb ad-Din follows Ibn Kamuna in writing more like an Avicennan philosopher. He was, after all, a student of At-Tuzi, who is still known today for his staunch defense of Avicenna against his critics. So it's only to be expected that Qutb ad-Din sometimes departs from the illuminationist position and returns to orthodox Avicennism. He restores fire to its place alongside the other three elements, where Suhrabadi had proposed that fire is nothing but heated air. And though he accepts Suhrabadi's skeptical attack on the theory of definition, he suggests that we can make do with essential descriptions of things and proceed with our science much as the Aristotelians had intended. But what we really want to know is, what are our prospects of being reborn as giraffes? Whereas Qutb ad-Din emphasizes that the illuminationist founder, Suhrabadi, was rather tentative on the issue, Shahrazuri has no hesitations. He thinks Suhrabadi was convinced that human souls can definitely go into animal bodies, and Shahrazuri accepts this too. He admits Ibn Kamuna's point that there is no certain demonstration available on this score, but the truth of the theory is validated by the mystical experiences of great sages. Which great sages? The same ones name-checked by Suhrabadi, including the Buddha and Plato. Shahrazuri mentions here the arguments for the eternity of soul in Plato's Phaedo. As for how he would know anything about Indian beliefs in transmigration, we should remember that by this point, the Islamic world has had cultural exchange with India for centuries. The science of India played a role in the development of mathematics, astronomy, and astrology already during the early Abbasid era, and a contemporary of Avicenna's, the great scientist al-Biruni wrote a sprawling work called simply Al-Hind, meaning India. Al-Biruni had gathered information from Indian Brahmins taken as war captives. He even anticipated the illuminationists by finding agreement between some Indian ideas and the doctrines of the Greeks. The sages of India and Greece, as well as Persia, are also invoked by these illuminationists in defense of another distinctive theory, the so-called world of images. It may sound like a media superstore, but it is actually a metaphysical realm, first postulated by Suhrabadi and then further developed by his commentators Shahrazuri and Khutub ad-Din. We've been seeing that many of the illuminationists' innovations were put forward as criticisms of Avicenna. The world of images instead constitutes a major revision to the longer established hierarchy of Neoplatonism. Since Plotinus, Platonists and those influenced by them had recognized three realms or layers of existence below the first principle. A world of intellect is followed by that of the soul, with the natural or bodily realm below. The problem with this scheme from the illuminationists' point of view is that it has no place for such supernatural beings as the jinn of Islamic tradition, jinn relates to our word genii, or for the demonic beings known in Arabic as shayatin, this is related to our word satan, which comes from the same root in Hebrew. Furthermore, there are the objects seen in visions by prophets and in dreams. What are these things? Not mere illusions, that's for sure. We have the authority of the Quran itself for jinn, and visions have been enjoyed not only by the prophets but also by those Greek, Persian and Indian sages who were so venerated by the illuminationists. Demons and the objects of dream visions fit badly into the traditional Platonic metaphysical hierarchy. They seem to be neither bodies nor souls nor intellects. This was already recognized in antiquity, with Neoplatonists like Proclus treating demonic entities as mediating principles above the human soul but below the truly divine. Still, it was a new idea to establish a whole fourth realm to house these mediating entities as Suhravarti proposed. This world of images is populated with things that are immaterial and thus distinct from bodies. Humans can grasp more transcendent items, like platonic forms, using the intellectual aspect of the soul. But for these intermediary image entities, we must instead do what children had to do before the invention of television, use our imaginations. The imaginative faculty of a prophet is like a polished mirror that shows things from the world of images. This isn't far from an idea accepted by the peripatetic philosophers. Al-Farabi already made the influential claim that prophecy is realized by a particularly powerful human imagination. The illuminationists improve on a theory, or at least they think it's an improvement, by assigning a special metaphysical status to the images themselves. There's a connection here to the debates over the soul that I was discussing earlier in this episode. Both Shahr Azuri and Qutb Ad-Din think that after death some human souls manage to avoid transmigration into animal bodies. Instead, the souls arrive in the world of images, taking up residence there alongside the demons and so on. To be honest, I think I'd rather be a giraffe. But the illuminationists would disagree, since they see animal bodies as a punishment for evil behavior in a previous life. At the other end of the scale, the purest of souls can escape the bodily realm of death and go beyond even the world of images, enjoying a direct vision of the lights of the intelligible realm. If you think all of this sounds pretty odd, I'm inclined to agree with you. To my mind it illustrates an interesting tension within illuminationist philosophy. On the one hand, they are not just willing, but eager, to accept the direct visionary testimony of authoritative sages. Suhr Havadi invokes such direct vision in support of his fundamental idea that the higher principles are lights, and for such exotic teachings as reincarnation and the world of images. On the other hand, the illuminationists are unforgiving critics when it comes to the proofs of rationalist philosophy. This is so even when those proofs were put forward by Suhr Havadi. We find Ibn Kamuna complaining that Suhr Havadi's arguments against the pre-existence of soul in the philosophy of illumination fall below the standard of true demonstration, and even worse, they reach the wrong conclusion. More typically, the illuminationists hold the avicennine peripatetic thinkers to the highest standard envisioned by the peripatetics themselves, and the arguments are nearly always found wanting. Are the illuminationists being inconsistent then? Credulous in the face of intuitive visions but hypercritical when anyone attempts to put in the hard work of demonstrating something? I don't think so. Their epistemology is consistent with, indeed demands, both attitudes. Suhr Havadi dismissed the peripatetic's methods not just because they wouldn't work, but because they were superfluous. When you have the option of directly beholding the way things are, why go the long way around by using dubious syllogisms to prove these same truths? With their philosophical posture, the illuminationists reconcile two major currents in 12th and 13th century thought. The ideal of direct vision is of course borrowed from the Sufis, and illuminationism is accordingly seen sometimes as a part of the mystical tradition within Islam. Equally important though is the rigorous side of illuminationism where they contribute to avicennine scholasticism. Authors like Ibn Qamuna pick up on the more technical and critical aspects of Suhr Havadi and echo the careful argumentative techniques and relentless demand for certainty that we find in other 12th century philosophers, like Fakhradin Arazi. At one point, Qutb ad-Din comments that whereas avicenna thought that every distinction valid in the mind must reflect a distinction that is real out in the world, after Suhr Havadi this confidence that our concepts would match reality had been permanently shaken. The illuminationists are thus a part of a general trend towards philosophical skepticism in this period, but only a part. Avicenna was under fire from attackers who used his tools against him, for instance by invoking avicenna's own distinction between mental and concrete existence and suggesting that he and other philosophers move from the mental to the real all too easily. Peripatetic philosophy could use a hand, and is going to get it, in the shape of Qutb ad-Din's teacher. He was no illuminationist, but at one point or another in his career he was just about everything else. Next time we meet a man who didn't need to die to reinvent himself radically, Nasir ad-Din at-Tusi, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.