Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 174 - Leading Light - Suhrawardi.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, Leading Light, Suhrvadi. The years right around 1190 were busy ones for Saladin, the famous Kurdish sultan of Egypt and Syria, whose real name in Arabic was Salah ad-Din. In an assault culminating at the Battle of Hattin in the year 1187, Saladin shocked European Christendom by taking almost all of the Holy Land back from the Christian rulers who had held it for nearly a century, ever since the First Crusade. Saladin's recapture of Jerusalem and its surroundings provoked the Third Crusade, which succeeded in taking back much of the territory for the Christians, albeit that Jerusalem itself remained in Muslim hands. Given how much he had on his plate at the time, the last thing Saladin needed was a charismatic and brilliant, but religiously unsound, philosopher exerting influence over his son. So he had the philosopher killed, probably in the year 1191. The philosopher's name was Shihab ad-Din al-Suhrvadi, sometimes called al-Maqtul, meaning the Murdered One. This dramatic story is an unusual one in that philosophers seem to have faced remarkably little threat of persecution or political harassment in the Islamic world. For most of Islamic history, political conditions seem to have encouraged, or at least allowed, intellectual and scientific experimentation. The early unorthodox thinker Ar-Azi was deemed a heretic by some, and al-Ghazali pronounced Avicenna's ideas to constitute a departure from Islam so grave that it would merit a death sentence. But neither of these thinkers actually faced persecution for their ideas. To the contrary, both had high-ranking patrons. If anything, Avicenna's problem was that powerful men were competing to claim him for their courts. Even Suhrvadi, who was an unusually provocative philosopher, ran afoul of Saladin only because of his position as the pet philosopher of Saladin's young son. Why do I say that he was provocative? Well, here's a story that may give you an idea. As his name implies, Suhrvadi probably came from the small town of Suhrvad in northwestern Iran. He studied elsewhere in Iran and then traveled in Syria, winding up in the city of Aleppo in 1183. It had just fallen to Saladin's forces, who captured the city from the rival Muslim force known as the Zengids. What happened next is summarized so well by Suhrvadi scholar John Walbridge that I won't try to improve on it. Quote, He entered the city in clothes so shabby that he was mistaken for a donkey driver. He took up residence at a madrasa where the director quickly realized that he was a man of learning and tactfully sent his young son with a gift of decent clothes. Suhrvadi brought out a large gem and told the boy to go to the market and have it priced. The boy came back and reported that the prince-governor, a teenage son of Saladin, had bid thirty thousand dirhams for it. Suhrvadi then smashed the gem with a rock, telling the boy that he could have had better clothes had he wished. It was this teenage son of Saladin who took Suhrvadi into his court with the aforementioned fatal consequences. The story suggests that Suhrvadi was more a traveling magician than philosopher, but he was good for more than precious stones. Indeed, he was among the most multifaceted thinkers in the history of philosophy in the Islamic world, able to provide cutting-edge logical analysis alongside gems of mystical wisdom. Along with Fakhradin Arazi, the philosophical theologian we examined last time, Suhrvadi was the most influential thinker of the Muslim East in the 12th century. He is credited with founding a whole philosophical tradition known as the Isharaki, or Illuminationist, school, one of the most important strands within the tapestry of later Islamic philosophy. Yet, it is somewhat misleading to think of him as the founder of a school. His ideas were taken up in the following generations, not by immediate followers or students, but by those who read his writings. His books inspired a posthumous legacy, inviting commentary and further expansion of his innovative ideas. Innovative though those ideas were, Suhrvadi looked back to his predecessors even as he indulged in the rhetoric of new beginnings. Like Fakhradin, he responded especially to Avicenna. In his works, Suhrvadi speaks frequently of the peripatetics, defining his own position in opposition to theirs. Here, peripatetic no longer means Aristotelian, it means Avicennan. In his greatest work of philosophy, the Hekmat al-Ishraq, or Philosophy of Illumination, Suhrvadi admits to having been in the thrall of Avicenna's philosophical system when he wrote his earliest treatises. Now though, says Suhrvadi, he is offering a different set of ideas. He is basing himself on figures from the ancient Greek tradition, he names Hermes and Empedocles, the Stoics and above all Plato, and from the Eastern traditions of Persia and even India. We should take this with a grain of salt though. Already in his earlier so-called peripatetic works, Suhrvadi began to sketch some of his more distinctive doctrines. As for the magisterial Philosophy of Illumination, it does embrace at least one authentically platonic theory, the theory of forms. And Suhrvadi does distance himself from the peripatetics more than he had done before. Yet, he continues to draw heavily on Avicenna. Suhrvadi's philosophy, and by extension illuminationism more generally, is above all a reimagining of Avicennism, even if its inventor packaged it as an anti-Avicennan revival of ancient ideas. A fundamental and typical example is Suhrvadi's very conception of philosophy. He recognizes two approaches, which he calls the paths of inquiry and intuition. The path of inquiry is that of the peripatetics, in other words Avicenna. The reader who is interested only in the peripatetics approach is advised to stop reading the philosophy of illumination and turn to their works instead. But this is far from a dismissal of the path of inquiry. Rather, inquiry represents one half of Suhrvadi's philosophical method. He insists that the perfect philosopher will have mastered both inquiry and intuition. In a remark that may remind us of the political ideas of Al-Farabi, he adds that such a perfect philosopher would be the rightful caliph. As for intuition, this involves not the discursive argumentation of Avicenna and like-minded thinkers, but direct apprehension of God and other principles. It's especially in this context that Suhrvadi praises earlier thinkers, including Sufis and the sages of Greece, India, and Persia. Plato in particular is credited with having enjoyed an unmediated vision of what Suhrvadi calls the lights of the immaterial world, culminating in the light of lights, in other words God. Before we get overly excited about this, however, we should note that in one passage, where Plato's authority is cited, the words put in this illustrious predecessor's mouth are actually a quote from the theology of Aristotle, which is to say a part of the Arabic translation of Plotinus. Plotinus might not mind. He might even recognize something of himself, as Suhrvadi zealously corrects peripatetic thought, even while stealing the best of the Aristotelian's ideas. The critical part begins already in the first section of the philosophy of illumination, which is devoted to topics in logic and epistemology. Suhrvadi makes some proposals for simplifying Avicenna's logical system, as I'll explain in a later episode. But his most striking innovations here concern knowledge. For one thing, Suhrvadi makes some skeptical remarks about definitions, which are of course crucial to the whole enterprise of Aristotelian science. From the peripatetic's point of view, giving a definition involves stating the essential features of the thing defined, and thus establishing both the wider class, to which something belongs, and the specific aspects that belong to it, but not the other things in that class. For instance, emeralds belong to the wider class of gemstones, and are specified by being green. Thus, it is essential to emeralds to be gemstones and to be green. We can define them, at least in part, as green gemstones. Sounds good as gold, right? But Suhrvadi thinks it is more like fool's gold. He reminds us that Aristotle himself laid down the rule that you can only know something on the basis of something else you already know. So if I already know about the essential features that enter into the definition, then presumably I know the defined thing already. In our example, if I know all about gemstones and the color green, then surely I already know about emeralds. What further knowledge could be gained by actually formulating the definition? To this updated version of Minos Paradox, Suhrvadi adds the worry that the search for essential features is open-ended. How can I be sure that there aren't more as yet undiscovered essential features that distinguish emeralds from everything else? For instance, there are no doubt other kinds of green gemstones, so our definition is so far incomplete, and in principle we'll never know for sure that it is complete, no matter how many more features we may add. This may make Suhrvadi sound like a thoroughgoing skeptic. If I can't ever define anything, how will I know what anything is? But that's not the case. Instead, he wants to say that the process of seeking definitions is pointless, because we already know what things are. If I know that emeralds are green gemstones, that knowledge ultimately rests not on my knowing a definition of emeralds or the color green, but rather on direct apprehension of emeralds and the color green. Actually, this seems plausible, at least for some cases. As Suhrvadi points out, no one thinks they need to define a color to know what it is. He generalizes the point, arguing that direct apprehension is the basis of all our knowledge. Definition is therefore pointless, at best a concatenation of things we already knew directly. What exactly is happening when we directly apprehend something like the color green? This is where Suhrvadi polishes off the Aristotelians with a new epistemology that he thinks is rock solid, the theory of knowledge by presence. His paradigm case is eyesight. Suhrvadi mentions and rejects the various theories of vision that we surveyed back in episode 132, and replaces them with a breathtakingly simple, not to say naive, account. Seeing is just the presence to the eye of something visible and illuminated. Similarly, you know something when it is present to your mind, and presence is defined negatively as the absence of an obstacle that blocks apprehension. As Suhrvadi puts it at one point, presence is simply the non-existence of absence. This sounds rather mystifying, so it's appropriate that the idea was enthusiastically taken up by later mystically inclined thinkers. Yet Suhrvadi was already developing his idea of knowledge by presence in his so-called peripatetic works, and he sees the basic idea as part and parcel of the peripatetic tradition. In fact, Suhrvadi tells us of a dream he had, in which none other than Aristotle explained to him the idea of knowledge by presence. I suspect that when Suhrvadi had this dream, he'd fallen asleep reading Avicenna in bed. I say this because the dream Aristotle seems to be acquainted with Avicenna's famous flying man argument and the attendant idea that we are all permanently aware of ourselves. Suhrvadi agrees with Avicenna on this point. When you are aware of yourself, you are not grasping yourself through some kind of representation, like an imaginary image, or by thinking of yourself as falling under some sort of universal description or definition. Rather, you just immediately grasp yourself. Suhrvadi's dream and his theory of knowledge by presence apply this Avicenna insight more widely. If you can directly apprehend yourself, then you can also apprehend other things directly, such as the color green, or any particular object you might see or hear. This expansion of direct self-awareness to direct awareness of other things is a real epistemological breakthrough. It enables Suhrvadi to present individual acts of sense perception as the foundation of all our knowledge. This is in sharp contrast to the Aristotelians, who since Aristotle himself had supposed that genuine knowledge is always universal in character, and who had thus had difficulty explaining how knowledge can be grounded in encounters with particular things in the sensible world around us. In Suhrvadi's theory, there is no need to worry about getting from my experience of Hiawatha or Harold to a universal understanding of giraffes. My visual encounter with Hiawatha or Harold already counts as fully-blown knowledge, knowledge that simply consists in a particular giraffe being present to my awareness. Even better, we can apply the point to God's knowledge. Avicenna's most notorious claim that God knows about particular things only universally can now be rejected. Instead, we can say that God has the same kind of knowledge that his creatures do concerning particular giraffes, particular gemstones, and all other particulars. They are present to his all-seeing eye. Suhrvadi, too, has a most notorious claim, and we've now arrived at it. He thinks that God, and a whole range of other immaterial things, are lights. Hence his decision to call his own philosophy illuminationist. His metaphysics describes the emanation of all things from God, who is the light of lights. This highest divine light produces a large number of further lights, which include the angelic beings that govern the heavenly spheres, the platonic forms, and the souls that command the bodies of humans and animals. Bodies themselves are described as dark or shadowy things which form a barrier or obstruction to the light shed by these higher luminous beings. When he presents this scheme, Suhrvadi insists that he is not using the word light metaphorically, as the Neoplatonists had done. Certainly, he is drawing on the metaphors of emanation found in authors like Plotinus as well as Islamic sources, for instance the Quranic verse stating that God is the light of heaven and earth. But when he talks about light, he really means it. This is not to say that God is a light in the same sense as a physical light source like a lamp. Rather, Suhrvadi distinguishes between two kinds of light, which he calls accidental and separated or pure. Accidental light is the light we see in the physical world. Pure lights are things like souls, platonic forms, and God himself. But both are kinds of light, which Suhrvadi understands as that which is immediately manifest to whatever beholds it. Avicenna had said that souls, separate intellects, and God are all capable of permanent self-awareness. In fact, Avicenna argued, and Suhrvadi agrees, that to be aware of anything else, something must first be aware of itself. Again, this makes a certain amount of sense. Anyone who can think, oh look, it's a giraffe, must also be able to think, oh, here I am, looking at a giraffe, and so must be self-aware. Suhrvadi infers that all these self-aware things, from souls to God, must be lights that are manifest to themselves, because light is simply that which is immediately evident. Suhrvadi's illuminationist revolution is starting to look less revolutionary than it pretends. This suspicion seems at first to be confirmed when we look more closely at the details of Suhrvadi's metaphysics. He again agrees with Avicenna that God, the light of lights, is a necessary existent that gives rise to just one cause, which is of course a further light. There are then further lights emanating forth in a necessary chain reaction, like the chain of intellects recognized by Avicenna, followed by eternally moving celestial bodies and our world below the heavens, called by Suhrvadi, dark barriers. All of this may seem to suggest that what Suhrvadi is calling light is just what Avicenna called existence. There is the ultimate source of existence, God, which is now the ultimate source of light. Then there are the dependent lights that are illuminated, in other words, given existence by that first light. Furthermore, Avicenna holds that existence is something that is immediately evident and primary to our minds, which is precisely what Suhrvadi thinks is so special about light. But it would be a mistake to see Suhrvadi's metaphysics as nothing more than Avicennan metaphysics with a higher electricity bill. Light is not just a different word for existence. For one thing, Suhrvadi doesn't think there is any such thing as existence. To say that something exists is just a mental judgment, a point Suhrvadi makes in his criticism of Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence, but we'll come back to this in a further episode. For another thing, Suhrvadi recognizes different degrees of purity or intensity in light. Your soul is a self-aware light and in that respect of the same nature as God, but God is a much purer, brighter light than any soul. In addition to this fundamental difference between a light-based metaphysics and a metaphysics of existence, Suhrvadi's system involves a number of smaller, but still significant, departures from Avicenna. Where the Peripatetics had recognized four elements, Suhrvadi has only three. He argues that physical fire is simply very hot air, perhaps because he doesn't want there to be any confusion between the source of illumination in things and a material element. Where the Peripatetics postulated one immaterial intellect to move each celestial sphere, Suhrvadi recognizes a vast multiplicity of lights whose complex interrelations give rise to the complicated motions of the heavenly bodies. Aristotle had admitted to being unsure whether there need to be 47 or 55 movers in total to explain the observed motions of the planets. Al-Farabi and Avicenna, as Suhrvadi says, reduce this to 10, one for each sphere. In what could almost be a parody of Aristotle's uncertainty, Suhrvadi remarks that the number must be more than 10 or 20 or 200 or 2,000 or 100,000. Anyway, we won't be running out of them anytime soon. More remarkably, Suhrvadi returns to a doctrine that had been universally rejected by the followers of Aristotle in the Islamic world, the Platonic Theory of Forms. Things in this world are mere images of incorporeal lights, perfect exemplars only imperfectly realized by the bodies we see. Characteristically, Suhrvadi devises his own terminology for the idea, calling the physical images talismans, while the forms are dominating lights, or archetypes. But his version of the theory is a true image of its Platonic archetype. What Suhrvadi adds is mostly a set of responses to peripatetic arguments against the existence of such forms. For instance, he corrects the widespread assumption that forms are like universal ideas existing outside of minds, something the peripatetics deemed absurd. No, says Suhrvadi, they are not like the universals in our minds, but universal only in the sense that they are a single cause that emanates form into many bodily individuals. For my money, this shows that Suhrvadi not only took over ideas from the Platonic tradition, but understood Plato's original intent very well, and this without being able to read a translation of any Platonic dialogues, since these were known in the Arabic-speaking world only in brief summaries. Still, Suhrvadi's philosophy draws more from Avicenna than from Plato, or any of the other sages he prides himself in following. A nice example is his treatment of reincarnation, something he considers at least possible, here signaling his agreement with, as he says, Buddha and the Eastern Sages. Yet in developing this topic, he uses an argument borrowed from Avicenna to the effect that in the case of humans, as opposed to animals, a new soul is provided to each person by the celestial giver of forms. There is no transmigration of souls into the human body, since if there were, the human would wind up with two souls. This is to take nothing away from Suhrvadi's originality, nor should we underestimate the power of his rhetoric in claiming the mantle of ancient traditions as he overthrows the system of Avicenna. This helped his ideas to become a viable alternative to Avicenna, which could be embraced by thinkers who sought to attach themselves to a rival tradition. These would be the thinkers who styled themselves, following Suhrvadi, as Ishraki, or Illuminationist. Ironically, the gesture of self-description is itself reminiscent of Avicenna. In one period of his career, he experimented with a new designation for his own philosophy, which as it happens comes from the same Arabic root, Mashriqi, or Eastern. Whereas Avicenna's flirtation with this label has been more confusing than anything else, Suhrvadi's exercise in branding would be a great success. Centuries later, we will find Iranian thinkers like the great Mullah Sadra still drawing heavily and explicitly on the Illuminationist tradition. But Suhrvadi's influence is already felt in the generations immediately after him, as we'll see next time. It would be unbearable if you didn't join me for more on the lightness of being with the Illuminationists here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.