Illuminationism (Ishraqism)
from 1180
Reality is graded light rather than substance and accident, and the deepest knowledge is presence rather than description.
- Active
- from 1180
- Where
- Aleppo and Persia
- Also
- حكمة الإشراق ḥikmat al-ishrāq
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Islamic
The claim
Being is light, differing only in intensity. And there is a kind of knowing — knowledge by presence — in which knower and known are not two things, which is how the self knows itself.
What it held
Suhrawardi's objection to the Peripatetics is that definition cannot work. To define is to give genus and differentia, but you can only recognise the differentia if you already know the thing — so definition presupposes the knowledge it claims to supply. Something more immediate must be available.
That something is knowledge by presence. When you are aware of yourself, there is no image standing between you and the object, because you are the object. Suhrawardi generalises this: the fundamental cognitive relation is presence, and representation is derivative.
The metaphysics follows the same intuition. Instead of substance and accident, there are lights of varying intensity, from the Light of Lights down through descending orders to the barriers, which are bodies — darkness being simply the absence of light rather than a thing.
He also insists that this is not new. He claims to be recovering a wisdom held by Plato, by Zoroaster and by the ancient Persian sages, and interrupted rather than invented. He was executed at thirty-six, on the orders of Saladin, at the request of jurists.
How it argued
Argument against Peripatetic definition, combined with an insistence that philosophical training requires practice as well as demonstration — the philosopher must have had the experience the arguments describe.
What it was arguing against
Peripatetic essentialism and its theory of definition, and the priority of quiddity over existence.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether light is a metaphor or a literal ontology. Whether the ancient Persian genealogy is history or a legitimising device.
Common misconceptions
That it is mysticism rather than philosophy. The critique of definition is a technical argument in logic and epistemology, and Suhrawardi wrote a full Peripatetic treatise before departing from it.
How it began
A young philosopher who had mastered the falsafa tradition and concluded it had a hole in it at the foundations.
What became of it
Living, in the Persian and Shi'i philosophical curriculum, where it remains one of the three principal schools alongside Peripateticism and Transcendent Theosophy.
Lasting influence
Mulla Sadra's Transcendent Theosophy is built on it. Persian philosophy since the thirteenth century is largely a conversation between Ibn Sina, Suhrawardi and Ibn Arabi.
Why it still matters
Knowledge by presence is a serious contribution to the debate about self-knowledge, and one that Western philosophy arrived at independently much later.
Put another way
A lamp, whose light needs no definition to be recognised.
Where to start
The critique of definition in Part One. It is the argument the whole system rests on.
The surprising bit
He was executed at thirty-six and is known as al-Maqtul, the Murdered One. He had already written the work that founded a school still taught eight centuries later.
In their own words
In the world of existence there is nothing but light.
If you wish to define, you must already know what you are defining.
Connections
- Answers
- Falsafa, Avicennism
The verdict
A philosophy of light written by someone who did not live to be forty, and which Persia has not stopped teaching.