- Length
- 240 pagesWalbridge and Ziai, The Philosophy of Illumination, Brigham Young, 1999 - Arabic with facing translation
- Reading
- SpecialistWritten for a school and normally read with a commentary
- Availability
- Specialist pressIn print from an academic publisher, priced accordingly
The Philosophy of Illumination
The book that gave Persian philosophy its own direction after the Arabic Aristotelians, written by a man executed at about thirty-six for reasons that remain unclear. Its argument that definition cannot do what the Peripatetics claimed, and that knowledge is presence rather than representation, is a genuine alternative to the tradition it grew out of.
- Date
- 1186
- Author
- Suhrawardi
- Region
- Aleppo, Syria
- Language
- Arabic
- 1999 English, Walbridge and Ziai Arabic with facing translation; the only complete English version, in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 159 years
Almost unknown in the Arab world and in Europe, and one of the two or three most important philosophical works in the Persian-speaking tradition, where it has been continuously taught since the thirteenth century.
What the book says
A book in two halves that do not look like they belong together. The first is a technical critique of Aristotelian logic and metaphysics as the Arabic tradition had received it, and its main target is definition. A Peripatetic definition is supposed to capture a thing's essence by giving its genus and differentia - but to give the differentia you must already know what distinguishes the thing, which is what the definition was supposed to supply. Suhrawardi concludes that essential definition is impossible and that knowledge must rest on something else. The second half supplies it. What is ultimately real is light: not a metaphor, but the thing that needs no definition because it is self-evident, being that which manifests itself and makes other things manifest. Reality is a hierarchy of lights of varying intensity descending from a Light of Lights, with darkness as the absence rather than a rival. Knowledge is not the mind receiving a form from outside but a direct presence - a self-luminous thing knowing itself, and knowing other things by their being present to it and not obscured. The framework is illustrated throughout with the vocabulary of pre-Islamic Persian kingship, deliberately.
What it argues
That the Peripatetic account of knowledge fails at its foundation and must be replaced by something more direct. If defining a thing requires already knowing what marks it off, definitions cannot be the route to knowledge of essences; and if knowledge consisted in the mind acquiring a copy of a form, there would be a further question about how the copy is known. Suhrawardi's alternative is knowledge by presence: a self-aware thing does not know itself by acquiring a representation of itself, and that unmediated case is the model for knowledge generally. The metaphysics of light follows from it. Light is what is manifest by itself, needs no definition, admits of degrees without changing in kind, and so can order the whole of reality by intensity rather than by species.
What it answered
The Arabic Aristotelian tradition in its Avicennan form, from a position inside it. Suhrawardi is not a mystic reacting against philosophy; the first half of the book is as technical as anything in Ibn Sina and is aimed at the most defensible part of the system. What he adds is a claim about method that the tradition resisted: that a philosopher who has not had the direct experience the doctrine describes is in the position of a blind man discussing colour, and that argument and experience are both required.
How it argues
By demolition and then construction, with the two halves in different registers. The first is close technical argument in the Aristotelian idiom; the second is exposition of a hierarchy in a symbolic vocabulary drawn deliberately from ancient Persia, with the ranks of light given Persian royal names. Suhrawardi presents this as a recovery: philosophy, he claims, was one wisdom held by the Greek sages and the ancient Persians alike, and he is restoring a tradition rather than inventing one. Whether he believed the historical claim or was using it is a real question.
The moment
Twelfth-century Syria under Saladin, with Suhrawardi at the court of Saladin's son al-Zahir at Aleppo, dazzling and antagonising the local religious scholars. They pressed for his death and Saladin ordered it; he was killed in 1191, in his mid-thirties, and is known in the tradition as the murdered one. What exactly he was accused of is not established, and the political circumstances - a new regime with reason to appease the jurists - may matter more than the doctrine.
How it travelled
East, and stayed there. The Illuminationist school became one of the major streams of philosophy in Iran, and its commentaries are the medium in which it was studied; Mulla Sadra's seventeenth-century synthesis draws on it heavily and remains the framework of philosophical teaching in Iranian religious schools today. It reached Europe essentially not at all until the twentieth century, when Henry Corbin edited and translated it into French and made Suhrawardi known in the West. The first English translation appeared in 1999.
The strongest objection
That the light is doing the work a metaphor cannot do. Suhrawardi rejects definition and then builds a complete metaphysics on a term he says needs no definition because it is self-evident - which places the entire system beyond the kind of examination he applied so effectively to his opponents. Either light is being used literally, and the claim that reality consists of graded luminosity requires an argument he does not give, or it is being used analogically, and the analogy needs cashing out in terms that would themselves require definition. The requirement that a reader have had the relevant experience makes the difficulty worse rather than better, since it removes the one check available from outside.
Why read it
For the critique of definition, which is a first-rate piece of philosophical argument and is intelligible to anyone who knows what a genus and a differentia are; and for the fact of the thing - a complete philosophical system, built after the tradition was supposed to have ended, which almost nobody outside Iran has read. Walbridge and Ziai's edition is the only real option in English.
- First printed
- 1952
- First in English
- 1999
- Digitised
- Partial
Transmitted with a dense tradition of Persian and Arabic commentary, principally by Shahrazuri and Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi, without which the more compressed passages are not usable.
Corbin's French of the mid-twentieth century opened the field. Walbridge and Ziai's 1999 Arabic-English edition is the standard and is in copyright; there is no public-domain English.
Where it stands
Live where it always was and newly visible elsewhere. Knowledge by presence is discussed in current philosophy of mind and epistemology as a distinct position on self-knowledge, and the section's inclusion of it corrects an omission that all four source lists made - Islamic philosophy is often treated as ending with Ibn Rushd, and in Persian it did not end at all.
On quoting this book
The Arabic is public domain but the only English translation is recent and in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Why Suhrawardi was executed is unknown, and the accounts range from doctrinal heresy to political convenience to the resentment of the Aleppo jurists. Whether the Illuminationist philosophy is a break with Avicennism or a development of it is argued in both directions, and the answer changes what the book is. His claim to be recovering an ancient Persian wisdom has no historical support and is variously read as sincere belief, as literary framing, and as a bid for legitimacy. And how much the reader's own experience is required for the doctrine to be assessable is a question his followers and his critics answer very differently.