Transcendent Theosophy (Hikmat al-Muta’aliyah)
from 1630
Existence is prior to essence and comes in degrees, and substances are not stable things but processes intensifying toward what they can become.
- Active
- from 1630
- Where
- Shiraz and Isfahan
- Also
- الحكمة المتعالية
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Islamic
The claim
Existence is fundamental and essence is derivative — the reverse of Ibn Sina. Existence is one reality admitting of intensity, and substances undergo continuous motion in their very substance.
What it held
Mulla Sadra inverts the tradition he was trained in. For Ibn Sina, essences are real and existence is something added; Sadra argues that this gets it backwards, since essence is an abstraction from something already existing. What is real is existence, and essences are the shapes we read off it.
Existence then admits of degrees. A stone, a plant, an animal and an intellect are not different kinds of thing so much as different intensities of one reality — tashkik al-wujud, the gradation of being.
From that follows his most radical claim: substantial motion. Aristotle allowed change in a thing's qualities but not in its substance, since something must stay put for change to happen to. Sadra denies it. A thing is continuously becoming, in its very substance, and identity over time is the continuity of a process rather than the persistence of a core.
That gives him a striking account of the soul: bodily in origin and spiritual in survival, made by the body's own intensification rather than inserted into it.
How it argued
Synthesis carried out as argument — Peripatetic demonstration, illuminationist intuition and Ibn Arabi's unity of being deployed together, each doing work the others cannot.
What it was arguing against
The primacy of essence, which was Ibn Sina's position and Suhrawardi's; and the Aristotelian denial of substantial change.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether substantial motion is coherent — critics ask what undergoes the motion if the substance itself is changing. Whether the synthesis is a system or three vocabularies used in turn.
Common misconceptions
That it is theosophy in the modern occult sense. Hikmat means wisdom, and the work is dense technical metaphysics with proofs.
How it began
A student of Mir Damad who was driven out of Isfahan by hostile jurists, spent years in a village near Qom, and returned with the system.
What became of it
Living, and the dominant philosophy in the Iranian seminaries. Khomeini taught it, which gave it an unexpected twentieth-century political salience.
Lasting influence
Persian and Shi'i philosophy since. Twentieth-century Iranian thought, including figures on opposite political sides, argues in its terms.
Why it still matters
Substantial motion is a process metaphysics arrived at three centuries before Whitehead, and the comparison is genuinely instructive rather than decorative.
Put another way
A flame, which is not a thing that moves but a moving that looks like a thing.
Where to start
The Wisdom of the Throne in translation. The Four Journeys is not an entry point to anything.
The surprising bit
The years of exile that produced the system were not chosen. Jurists forced him out of the capital, and he later wrote that the solitude was what made the work possible.
In their own words
Existence is a single reality differing only in intensity and weakness.
The soul is bodily in origination and spiritual in subsistence.
Connections
- Parallel to
- Process Philosophy
The verdict
The last great system of Islamic philosophy, and one still taught as a living curriculum rather than as history.