Transcendent theosophy
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Transcendent theosophy or al-hikmat al-muta’liyah (حكمت متعاليه), the doctrine and philosophy that has been developed and perfected by the Persian Islamic philosopher, Mulla Sadra, is one of two main disciplines of Islamic Philosophy which is very live & active even today.
The expression al-hikmat al-muta’liyah comprises two terms al-hikmat (meaning theosiphia) and muta’liyah (meaning exalted or Transcendent). This school of Mulla Sadra in Islamic philosophy is usually called al-hikmat al-muta’liyah. It is a most appropriate name for his school, not only for historical reasons, but also because the doctrines of Mulla Sadra are veritably both hikmah or theosophy in its original sense and an intellectual vision of the transcendent which leads to the Transcendent Itself. So Mulla Sadra’s school is transcendent for both historical and metaphysical reasons.
When Mulla Sarda talked about hikmah or theosophy in his words, he usually meant the transcendent philosophy. He gave many definitions to the term hikmah, the most famous one is: hikmah is a vehicle through which “man becomes an intelligible world resembling the objective world and similar to the order of universal existence”.
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[edit] Existentialism
A concept that lies at the heart of Mulla Sadra's philosophy is the idea of "existence precedes essence", a key foundational concept of existentialism which was not known in the West until Jean-Paul Sartre in the 20th century. This was also the opposite of the idea of "essence precedes existence" previously supported by Avicenna and his school of Avicennism as well as Shahab al-Din Suhrawardi and his school of Illuminationism. Sayyid Jalal Ashtiyani later summarizes Mulla Sadra's concept as follows:[1]
"The existent being that has an essence must then be caused and existence that is pure existence ... is therefore a Necessary Being."
For Mulla Sadra, "existence precedes the essence and is thus principle since something has to exist first and then have an essence." This is primarily the argument that lies at the heart of Mulla Sadra's philosophy.[2]
[edit] Substantial motion
Another central concept of Mulla Sadra's philosophy is the theory of "substantial motion" (al-harakat al-jawhariyyah), which is "based on the premise that everything in the order of nature, including celestial spheres, undergoes substantial change and transformation as a result of the self-flow (fayd) and penetration of being (sarayan al-wujud) which gives every concrete individual entity its share of being. In contrast to Aristotle and Ibn Sina who had accepted change only in four categories, i.e., quantity (kamm), quality (kayf), position (wad’) and place (‘ayn), Sadra defines change as an all-pervasive reality running through the entire cosmos including the category of substance (jawhar)."[3] Gottfried Leibniz later described a similar concept a century later.[4]
[edit] Notes
- ^ (Razavi 1997, pp. 129-30)
- ^ (Razavi 1997, p. 130)
- ^ Kalin, Ibrahim (March 2001), “Sadr al-Din Shirazi (Mulla Sadra) (b. 1571-1640)”, in Iqbal, Muzaffar & Kalin, Ibrahim, Resources on Islam & Science, <http://www.cis-ca.org/voices/s/sadra.htm>. Retrieved on 4 February 2008
- ^ Brown, Keven & Von Kitzing, Eberhard, Evolution and Bahá'í Belief: ʻAbduʼl-Bahá's Response to Nineteenth-century Darwinism, Kalimat Press, pp. 222-3, ISBN 1890688088
[edit] References
- Razavi, Mehdi Amin (1997), Suhrawardi and the School of Illumination, Routledge, ISBN 0700704124
- Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Sadr al-Din Shirazi and Transcendent Theosophy
